Part 5: Aftermath
Chapter 13: Life Goes On
catherine
Fuck me! I managed to experience what I wanted, and lived to tell about it. I never thought that would happen. Just the same, I died on that cross. I remember the hours I spent in agony, slowly strangling to death, before I knew that the end had come. To think that thousands of men and women actually did die that way!
A few days after my crucifixion, when I was better, my Master took me downstairs to the fallout shelter where my cross was still standing. He said everything else had been cleaned up already except that.
Well, most of it had, but not all of the smell.
As soon as he opened the heavy steel door it hit me, the smell of the place of execution. The place where I’d died nailed naked on a Roman cross. The agony and panic slammed me like a thunderbolt. I screamed and would have collapsed if my Master hadn’t caught me in his arms.
“cat! Are you all right?” He asked me several times, anxious, scared himself, not knowing what to do to help me.
Hell, I didn’t know what he needed to do either!
“Just hold me for a minute,” I finally managed to gasp, shaking, “The smell… it brought it all back, I mean… I was… I felt like I was back on that cross again! I… I think… maybe I’ll be ok.”
The flashback slowly faded away and became a memory again. But it did leave something behind. I felt an urgent tingling between my legs and realized that I was wet down there.
“Yes, I’m ok now,” I said, “just horny as hell, that’s all!”
My Master laughed at that. “Maybe I should get some of Jim’s stinky stuff to use as after shave if it does that to a girl!”
I narrowed my eyes at him and said, “Fuck you!”
“I love it when you talk dirty to me!” He laughed. “And I’ll be glad to take care of your problem, but cat, you’ve got to be sore as hell still!”
“We’ll figure it out!” I said. He laughed and hugged me to him. I felt the hardness of his erection against my abdomen and almost told him that we needed to figure it out right now. But I needed to do this, too.
I stepped through the door, still a little unsteady. It took some effort to hold on to reality and keep the power of the smells in there from snatching me away again, but I was handling it.
And then I was standing before my cross. I had never seen it.
It still had the headless blood-crusted nails sticking out of it, the remains of the ropes that had held me.
My God, I thought, that’s my blood! My hands, my feet were on those nails!
The wood of the cross was blood-soaked around the nails, as was the edge of the sedile, the stains already darkened to a grey-black color. My Master asked me if I wanted him to take it down and get rid of it, but I told him not yet.
I want to be able to go back and re-visit it and remember what it was like to be really crucified and to actually die on the cross.
Would I ever go through that again? Endure that delicious agony for days, slowly dying, believing I was dying, wishing I could die but unable to escape the agony?
Today, I’d say hell no!
But my needs are deep and strong. Even when Licinus was cracking that whip against my pussy, I wanted it, needed that searing pain. I can’t say what I might want a few months from now, or what I might be able to talk my Master into.
And after all, that was only one scenario. Who else might I become? There are thousands of variations, all kinds of stories I could enter into, become a Christian martyr, a rebel, a thief, or just a slave who displeased her master. I could be crucified on different kinds of crosses.
There’s no limit. And there’s no way to know where it will go. Doc and my Master had said that what I saw had to come from my own imagination. After all, where else could it come from?
But neither they nor I think that any more.
There were so many things I never imagined, and things I didn’t know, couldn’t possibly have known!
My dream was to be crucified on a Roman cross, but Amara, Licinus, the others, they weren’t part of that dream! They didn’t come from me.
And there were so many more details that I never imagined!
For example, I had never heard of posca, but now I know that’s real. Yes, my Master made a version of posca for me to drink while I was on the cross, but he told me that no one today really knows exactly how they made it, and when I tasted some of the stuff he made later, it didn’t taste like what I remember from when I was crucified in Rome.
Well, of course my Master’s wasn’t flavored with shit, either, but still, I’d never heard of it before!
How could my mind have made that up?
And then there were things about crucifixion that I didn’t know, but now make sense.
I thought death on the cross would happen when I got too exhausted to raise myself; there’d be that final struggle for breath, I’d faint, and it would be over in a few minutes. But that’s not the way it was.
No, not at all.
It was much, much worse than I ever imagined!
It was so very slow and agonizing! Even after I was too weak to raise myself, I felt like I was strangling, struggled, fainted, and woke up, did it all again, over and over until I finally got too weak to struggle any more. And then I hung there trying to get one more breath, fainting, waking up to the same misery, fainting again, waking up and finally, after what must have been hours, I just didn’t wake up again.
I thought that a victim would become delirious, wouldn’t know what was happening any more, but I was wrong. I knew what was happening to me right up until I took that last tiny gasping breath and I knew there wouldn’t be another. And no matter how long I’d suffered, no matter how bad that had been, it was horrible, terrifying when I knew I was about to die.
The way Amara and I were tied when Licinus whipped us; that was complicated! I don’t know how that could have come from my mind!
And that whipping! Hanging there by those nails in my wrists and feet, naked, unable to move while he spent hours whipping my breasts and pussy! It was worse than anything I ever thought of.
And something else happens when you get into that altered state.
It felt like I entered a different world. And that world felt as real as this one. My memories of my life there – Maia’s life there – are as real now as my own. I believe that Maia was real, and I somehow connected with her, suffered and died on the cross along with her.
And somehow, our connection lasted until after she died. I saw Maia, talked with her, after she was dead!
But it wasn’t just her crucifixion; I remember her life before.
I was Maia, and on some level I still am.
Her memories are still with me right now, sometimes hard to separate from my own, like a vivid dream.
When I was there on the cross, her body felt like my own. But when I looked at my breasts, my arms, what I could see of my body, there were differences. The little mole on my left breast was missing. There was a tiny scar on my right forearm that hadn’t been there before.
But then there was the piercing in my clit; I couldn’t see that, but Licinus said it was there, and I felt him pull on it. I have that piercing in my own body! What are the chances that a Roman slave would have had one of those?
And yet I remember when I - no, it was Maia - was fourteen years old and got that piercing done! How I – she - cried and bit down on the leather between my – her - teeth because it hurt like hell when old Brida – how can I remember her by name? - stuck the shiny copper needle through my clit, swollen and hard from the attention it was getting, with only the barest bit of numbing from the poultice of fresh inner bark of willow she’d carefully pressed against it for a few heartbeats.
She blew on it to ease the pain, said the words to bless it, and yes, it felt a little better then. A few heartbeats later, she pushed the little gold ring through and bent it closed. Even before the throbbing faded, with my tears still wet on my face, I was so proud of it!
I showed it to all of the girls when we were bathing down in the edge of the river, I remember it was early summer, the younger ones looking at it with big eyes, fascinated. Some of the older ones nodded their heads sagely and told me, yes, just wait till the right boy’s fingers are guided by that ring to your special place, and he finds out what a touch there does to you!
And my cheeks grew warm because I’d already learned on my own what a gentle touch there would do to me!
And of course there were boys watching us from up in the woods who thought we didn’t know they were there. How were they supposed to learn about girls if we didn’t let them see us from time to time? So it was sooner rather than later that a special boy discovered my golden ring!
How could I know all that? And yet, I can see it like it was yesterday!
And where on earth did I come up with the name of her tribe, the Catuvellauni? I can’t even spell that! But I don’t just remember the name, I remember my – no, Maia’s – mother and father, younger brothers and a sister.
I want to cry when I feel her horror and grief for her parents, crucified by the Romans right in front of her. Gods, the pain, the loss, the emptiness!
How I cried when they dragged all of us children away, split us up, sent us off into lives of slavery in different places. I was hardly a child by then, sixteen years old, but I felt like I was a lost child with my whole world gone. We never saw each other again.
And I know why Maia wanted to die on the cross. It was the guilt she carried with her, feeling that she should have been crucified along with her parents. Why had they had to suffer that way while she lived on?
She tried to keep that memory locked away, out of sight, kept her focus on her day-to-day life. But it was always there, ready to be triggered by a sight, a smell, a sound. And most of all it would creep into her dreams and turn them into nightmares that she awoke from screaming, in a cold sweat.
For Maia, the cross was the only way to end her guilt.
And although it’s beginning to fade some, I was speaking Latin! Where the fuck did that come from? I tried reading some Latin and couldn’t; the written words didn’t fit with what I knew how to say. I remembered that Maia never learned to read more than a few words. She could speak enough Latin to get by, but not much beyond that.
If that wasn’t enough, I can remember Maia’s native language. I spoke some simple phrases into Google Translator, and it came back saying that I was speaking a Celtic language that wasn’t in its database!
And I was there, with her, sharing her suffering all the way up to her last breath on the cross.
My Master told me about the time after they took me down, the way I looked like I was caught in a dream, and how scary that was for them. Maybe I was, or maybe I was caught in the place between life and death, I don’t know.
But I saw Maia there, after she… No! After we had died on the cross! We spoke to each other, and she told me I had to go back. It was so real!
And as I told her when we parted, I’ll never forget her. She will always be a part of me, and I suppose I’m just as much a part of her. Although I do wonder what she must make of some of my memories!
And one more thing she left me: I wake every morning before sunrise when it’s still dark. I crawl out of my warm bed and go out naked into the cool morning air. I face the brightening sky and glowing pink clouds in the east, and softly sing the song to welcome the rising sun. And as I do, I remember all of the voices that joined with mine two thousand years ago on mornings just like this one.
So many questions that I can’t answer! And so many more things that Maia, or her memories, are telling me.
Well, fuck it, that was a month ago. Now Liz, that fucking useless piece of shit airhead bimbo slut, thinks she wants to be crucified, “just like cat!” She’s been on the cross before, but always with a safe word, and she never lasted more than a half-hour before she was shouting it, begging them to get her down now.
But after seeing me on the cross a few times, crucified without any safe word, she wants to experience that feeling of being under someone else’s control, of being powerless to stop, even when the pain gets beyond bearing.
And fuck me, I really, really want to watch her suffer on a cross! I want to stand there jeering, just out of spitting distance, and watch the surprise and horror on her face when she finds out what it’s really like! When she realizes that she can’t escape, that it’s not up to her.
I don’t know if she can persuade them to let her, but I’m sure going to try to get my Master on board with it, and he knows why. When it comes to revenge, this will be delicious!
Liz doesn’t truly understand that when it comes to being crucified, truly giving yourself up to the cross, there's no going back.
But she will!
Now one thing I can thank Liz for:
Oh. My. God! My Master loves me!!
When he told me what she did, he also told me why he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, accept her offer. I was so angry at her, but then, just like that, I was happier than I could have ever imagined. He loves me!
Well, fuck me! Getting back to the present, I’m just slipping out of my panties now, and then I’m going downstairs to kneel before my Master and offer him the whip for the first time since my crucifixion.
And then I’m going to fuck his brains out!
Joe
It took catherine a full month to fully return from that cross in ancient Rome and root herself in the present. No wonder about that, in her altered state of consciousness, she was nailed to a Roman cross, crucified and tortured for three days, dying slowly. She went as far as anyone could possibly go and come back.
The nail wounds were healed in about a week, along with the other wounds in various places that Doc patched up, just like he said. All that’s left of those are some pinkish areas of new skin, and those should fade within days. I don’t think cat wants them to.
She continued to lapse into the Maia personality briefly from time to time, speaking Latin or else the language she tells me was Maia’s own Celtic before catching herself. Those times grew farther apart as the days passed and she became more rooted into reality.
There are still surprises, and not at all bad ones.
About two weeks after her crucifixion I awoke just before dawn with my cock so hard that my eyes wouldn’t stay shut. I lay there for a minute considering my options, of which sleep wasn’t one, then reached over and felt tentatively for cat.
She wasn’t there.
When she didn’t return after a few minutes, I decided she probably hadn’t just gone to the bathroom and quietly slipped out of bed to check on her.
I found her out on the upstairs deck off of our bedroom, naked, her nipples swelling in the cool morning air. I was off to her side and a little behind her, so she didn’t notice me watching from just inside the bedroom.
She was facing the east, where the sun was just peeking over the treetops, smiling and singing softly and clearly in what I guessed was Maia’s own language. The words came out smoothly and lovingly, with feeling and emphasis like she really meant them, like she was joyfully welcoming an old friend that she was glad to see again.
This is real! I thought, she couldn’t possibly just make this up.
She went on for several verses, the tune repeating, but with different words, as the sun rose and the sky brightened. I listened silently, admiring the curves of her naked body and the warm glow of her skin in the ruddy light of the rising sun, the rise and fall of her breasts.
My God, I thought, I can easily imagine her as some blonde-haired Celtic princess, singing with the rest of her village.
My early-morning erection began to throb. She held the final note, then stopped, smiling, remembering.
She was surprised when she turned and saw me watching.
“Oh! Fuck me! Sorry, I was trying not to wake you!” She said, looking a little guilty, as if she’d been caught doing something she shouldn’t have.
“It’s ok,” I said, laughing. She was certainly still cat! A beautiful blonde standing there naked and saying “fuck me!” That was exactly the invitation I wanted.
“I was just worried about you!” I said, “You’re still healing, even if you are moving ok now. You need to come back to bed!”
“Yes, I can see that!” She laughed, walking slowly and purposefully toward me, her hips swaying. When she got close, I pulled her in to me, then gasped and moaned as she wrapped her fingers around my swollen cock. She pressed her sinuous body against me, never losing her grip on my throbbing cock, massaging it hard.
I had to strain to contain myself, try to think about baseball, don’t let go yet!
My hands found the impossibly round, firm cheeks of her ass, squeezed them, picked her up as she wrapped those muscular legs around me tightly and we were face to face. I kissed her and felt her glutes flex under my hands as she lifted herself a little higher, guided the tip of my cock where she wanted it, then let herself slide slowly and blissfully down onto it.
A bit later, lying in bed relaxed with her sweaty body cuddled against my side and her head on my shoulder, I asked, “What was that song?”
“It’s… well, it’s one of Maia’s memories…”
“I recognized the sounds of her language,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s right, I guess I was singing it in her language!” She seemed genuinely surprised. “It just seems so natural! It’s what they called the Song of the Dawn, the song Maia’s tribe sang to greet the rising sun every morning. She learned it when she was just a toddler.”
“You looked like it really meant something to you,” I said.
“I told her I’d never forget her,” cat said. “And when I do this, get up early and greet the sun with her song, it brings back years of mornings, of the suns she saw, that it feels like I saw. It honors her memory. And I… I love to do it! It feels right.”
“Teach me that song and I’ll sing it with you tomorrow,” I said.
Damn sure was easier said than done, just learning to say all those words with a rolling “R” and sounds like you’re clearing your throat. I didn’t do so well the first couple of days, but now we start our days early. And doing it makes her open up and talk more about Maia’s memories and what happened to her.
And she’s convinced me beyond all doubt. However, she did it, she actually connected across time and space with Maia, a Celtic girl who lived about two thousand years ago and died on a Roman cross.
Does she still have nightmares? Yes, sometimes she dreams that she’s right back on that cross, wakes up screaming thinking Licinus is whipping her. But those are getting better as her mind orients itself back into this reality.
What seemed to help was that I had her tell me everything that happened. It was a hell of a story; I would never have believed that such a thing could have happened, so I wrote it down.
You just read it.
And I’ll need to wrap this up now. cat just came downstairs naked, and now, well…
She’s kneeling on the floor in front of me, spreading her knees out wide. She’s placed the whip on the floor between us, and now she’s straightened up, shoulders back, those wonderful breasts with their perky pink nipples thrust out toward me.
Even with her eyes respectfully downcast, she’s positively radiating desire and anticipation. Any doubts I might have had before are gone.
Wherever she was, whoever’s memories she now shares, cat is here with me now, all of her!
Confusing for us and for her.
And I finished that final sex scene with cat and Joe right before I posted the final chapter. 
Anyway, a lot of people, particularly those for whom English is a challenge, would have been intimidated by the size and wouldn't have read all that. 
