Justus is an invention of mine; I couldn't find any indication of Publius' character or how his father regarded him, so I replaced him with an alternative son who was clearly perceived by his demanding father as 'not up to the job'. The 'middle-aged' bit (in Roman terms), ie around 35-40, is my assumption from the age which Pertinax was by this stage, and a pointer to the fact that the son had reached this age without achieving much or having any useful military record.
The slant of the timeline is to get Pertinax adopting a non-relative as Nerva did, pointing out the parallel between Pertinax and Nerva - Nerva, who replaced an assassinated tyrant killed off by his courtiers, nearly got killed by mutineers in real life 97 and Pertinax did in real life 193 after replacing the similarly killed-off Commodus. (The Praefect who left Pertinax to his fate in reality, Laetus, is butterflied out of the timeline as here Commodus is not emperor so Marcus is appointing less dodgy characters as Praefect than his careless son did.) But Septimius is less careful about his public reputation than the equally brutal (to victims of his army) but more skilful 'master of spin' Trajan was, in both this version and in reality. In reality, it was Caracalla who made the grant of citizenship Empire-wide in 212, not his father; but both men were on the same wavelength in giving top jobs to non-Italians , probably to build up a reliable clientele of provincials who they could trust more. Septimius was also warned to no avail about Caracalla's scheming and homicidal potential; there is a story that Caracalla was suspecting of wanting to stage a coup on the Caledonian campaign once he had shown off his ability and goodwill to the troops but his father ignored it. In real life, once Caracalla was senior emperor to his brother Geta in 211 he invited the latter to a meeting at a 'neutral' venue in their mother's apartments so he did not brign any bodyguards, then stabbed him in front of her.