Rome fic: Sic Semper Tyrannis
Jan. 1st, 2009 03:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragojustineSic Semper Tyrannis
Antony/Brutus
NC-17
7k words
AN: Yuletide fic for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sophia_helix, who asked for Antony/Brutus hatesex. Yaay! She asked for post-assassination, too, but I couldn't make that work. Hopefully this is close enough to scratch the itch. Originally posted here.
Italics are from Cicero's letters to Atticus, various translations. However, given the differences between history and canon, and a hefty dose of artistic license, they are out of order and wildly out of context. The historian in me feels so naughty.
I had such bad stage fright about this one. I'd like to thankbdblack for handholding and hilarytamar for cheerleeading well and truly beyond the call, and whatifisaidno and sidlj for beta look-overs in various stages of completion. Wow was I needy.
But I have had quite blood-curdling reports of Caesar in Gaul...
The last time Brutus went up to visit Caesar in Gaul, Cicero asked him to carry a letter. Of course he did; all polite society ran on the elaborate exchanges of friendly courier favors, but Cicero was even more obsessed with sending letters than average. Cicero worked on that letter off and on for three days. Brutus visited and reclined on a couch in Cicero's study, eating stuffed quail and watching Cicero fussing with a wax tablet, scraping and re-writing, scraping and re-writing, until he was content to put ink to parchment.
"So, friend Cicero, has it achieved that perfect, casual, 'just-dashed-off-an-elegant-note' quality yet?"
"It is good to find you in such high spirits. You'll need them, slogging through the muddy, uncivilized Alps." Cicero handed him the letter to read.
"You do know that Caesar has spoken Latin all his life?" Brutus asked, reading. "I mean only that you probably won't be able to cow him into submission with your mastery of syntax alone, much as you enjoy trying."
"Oh, very droll."
"Is it not the purpose of language to communicate clearly?" Winding Cicero up was inexcusably entertaining. He prickled so easily, a blustery hedgehog of a man, delightful in his insecurity.
"Only sometimes."
"Only sometimes?"
"My dear Brutus, you can be abominably dense."
"My pedagogue did not think so," Brutus answered, aware as the words came out that he sounded slightly sulky. "He often praised me for concision."
Cicero snapped impatiently at Tiro to bring sealing wax and watched as he poured it. "You stand before Caesar carried on obscene wealth, cloaked in an impeccable name, and embraced as a member of his family. I have no way to hold myself an equal of that man save my words." The steward pressed seal to wax and handed the letter to Brutus, who tucked it into the sinus of his toga and bit back an annoyed reply.
The biting back did no good, of course. Cicero was petulant and waspish all through the rest of the quail and they parted on their usual exasperated terms.
The journey was, as Cicero predicted, muddy and uncivilized. Caesar was wintering in Agedincum, monstrously far North into Transalpine Gaul. Brutus delivered his letters (Senatorial business; Cicero's pompous well-wishes; sweet lover's words from Servillia; assorted notes of gossip and well-wishes for various legates and tribunes), exchanged polite, dutiful conversation, and waited for the replies.
All in all, the trip was nothing to take particular note of. He would never have remembered it at all, in the chaos that came after, except for one fact: that was when it all started with Antony.
The man was a horrible boor, loud and brash and tasteless. He got messy as he ate (straight upright in a chair in the way favored by soldiers; bad for the digestion, and how anyone ever endured a soldier's life was beyond Brutus) and took his wine without enough water. For some reason, Brutus would feel himself quieting to let Antony speak, watching him while he paced, orbiting around the pull of his personality.
In the field outside the command tent Antony wrestled with soldiers-- actually wrestled, stripped down and oiled, muscles flexing and bunching as he grappled. He raised his hands and roared in victory when he pinned his opponents, tossing his head to shake the thick black hair back from his eyes and strutting, all wiry frame and heavy hanging cock.
He was a beast, a lion of Africa, a glorious animal and gloriously bestial and Brutus desired him intensely.
Brutus tried to think of something to say, something about the dignity of command or soldiers losing respect for authority, but he couldn't come up with it.
A little later, Antony found him where he sat contemplating the churned-up mud that seemed to be the foundation of Gaul. Brutus rose to walk with him, and Antony slung an arm over his shoulders like the most over-familiar of friends. "Brutus, Brutus, Brutus. Caesar's little adopted son."
"I am honored if he thinks of me so," Brutus said, trying to divine the game they were playing, trying to concentrate below the heavy drape of Antony's arm.
"He most certainly does. Every man must have a son to cherish."
"And I wish him many sons natural born."
"It's only logical, given the way he's fucking your mother," Antony said, leaning in close and letting his lips brush Brutus' ear. Suddenly the arm around his shoulders felt less like over-familiarity and more like a threat. Brutus stopped.
"I could not speak to that."
Antony dropped his arm and began circling him slowly, letting his fingers trail first across Brutus' chest, then over his biceps and shoulder blades and spine. He walked like a cat stalking, and when he spoke it was low and close against Brutus' other ear. "Of course he is. He was fucking her back around the year you were born, too. Ever think about that?"
Before Brutus could form a reply, Antony pulled back. He seemed pleased with what he saw, and his face split in a wide grin, predatory and feral. "Well, well, well. What have we here?" He reached out to rub his thumb against Brutus' lower lip. "I'll see you tonight, nay?" he asked, and strutted off.
Antony fucked the way he wrestled, lithe and sinuous and utterly careless. He hauled Brutus back against him with all his deceptive strength and pounded into him, leaving Brutus entirely on his own to enjoy it or not, stroke himself or not. When he finished, he slapped Brutus' ass hard with that same bestial roar of triumph and self-satisfaction, and Brutus came sharply, collapsing face-first onto Antony's hard soldier's couch and shaking and gasping.
"So," Antony said, standing up and yanking down his tunic. "If you might as well be Caesar's son, and I'm his second in command, what does that make us?" He sounded like the intervening four hours and a fuck hadn't divided their conversation at all.
Ah. Right. That was the game. Brutus was brutally bored by this type of crass political maneuvering, but at least he knew what was expected of him now. "Allies, I presume?"
"Really?" Antony turned to him theatrically, re-knotting his belt. "I was thinking rivals."
"I'm sure that's not necessary. The man who helped Caesar subjugate Gaul hardly needs fear for his military reputation."
"And the ridiculously noble Marcus Junius Brutus hardly needs fear for anything else?" Antony asked, settling to lace his boots.
Brutus didn't answer that, but started trying to rearrange himself, since Antony was obviously not going to nap or bask or do any related thing.
"Oh, Brutus, you poor fool. There are far too many great men in Rome these days. In five years, there will be no one but Caesar. And," -- Antony leaned over him again, gave that feral smile, wielded his physicality like a club -- "He will have only one heir."
Brutus pulled his tunic back on over his head and hauled himself to his feet, wincing at the only half-pleasant aching in his muscles. "I should think a man soon to be charged with illegal warfare and stripped of his armies would want more friends, rather than fewer."
"Caesar is entirely too eager for friends. What's wanted are enemies." Antony paused, gave his words heavy, solemn weight. "Enemies can be fought." And then he reached out and patted Brutus' cheek, a gesture as heavy with blunt intimidation and threat as any brigand baring a sword.
The man was probably a terror on the battlefield, Brutus decided, but definitely a lout. So simple as to nearly be insipid, so stupid as to nearly be a joke. But very, very good for a fuck.
The political situation alarms me deeply, and so far I have found scarcely anybody who is not for giving Caesar what he wants rather than fighting... but in the Senate I shall echo Pompey.
Antony returned to the city to take up his tribune's office and be Caesar's mouthpiece and leader of his faction. Cicero met with him and the optimates in some ridiculous late night cloak-and-dagger meeting at Atia's house, drenched in political theatre and dramatic veiled threats. Brutus was invited. He did not attend.
"I don't understand it, Brutus," said Cicero as they walked the Forum the next day. "Every backbencher in the Senate house would have sold their favorite villas for that invitation."
"That kind of self-important horse trading bores me terribly," said Brutus.
"I think 'self-important horse trading' is a harsh description for attempting to avert civil war, broker alliance, and chart a course for peace and prosperity for this Republic."
"Him, for example," said Cicero, nodding to Marcellus Minor on the rostra, orating fiercely on Caesar's aggression. "Had Marcellus been invited, he would know what a dreadfully irrelevant fool he is making of himself at this moment. Though" -- Cicero winced -- "no amount of knowledge will improve his mushy diction."
"Let me guess," said Brutus. "Antony demanded immunity, Cato got spitting mad, Pompey blustered, everyone threatened and postured virtuously, and Antony made a ridiculously crude theatrical gesture, not in that order?"
"He offered to burn his soldier's cloak. It was better than Sophocles."
"As I said."
That should have been the end of it, but Cicero would not let it lie. He brought it up again over their latrunculi board, saying, "Politics is not only the duty but also the privilege of a man of your class, you know."
"Politics is a millstone about my neck."
"Our Republic is on the verge of complete disintegration. Civil war is the greatest of all horrors, and it will come inevitably as the turning of the seasons unless men of our office remain constantly vigilant against it. You might have put in an appearance."
"There will be no war," Brutus said, and slid one of his soldiers up the game board behind Cicero's line. "The Caesarians on the left do not want war. The Pompeians on the right do not want war. The moderates in the center do not want war. How then will there be war?"
"Civil war is not like deciding to throw a dinner party," Cicero said, and moved to fend off the intruder.
Brutus dodged Cicero's defender. "There will be no war because you will avert it. Antony's bluster and plebian-baiting are no match for your intelligence and political skill, and thank the Gods for that, as I do not have to go skulking about like a scheming Ptolemeian eunuch."
"We can't all afford to wash our hands of the business," Cicero said, and was grumpy and closed-mouthed for the rest of the game, despite the flattery.
When Brutus returned that afternoon, a messenger of Antony's arrived to invite him for dinner. It wasn't dinner; it was another quick, careless fuck, with Antony's sacred symbolic tribune's toga in a crumpled heap by their couch.
There wasn't going to be a war.
I really do not know what I am doing or going to do, so confounding is the rashness of this insane proceeding of ours.
She was insane to choose Caesar. She was blinded by female lust, irrational in the way of her gender, ill-attuned to the finer sentiments of politics and Roman virtue. She sullied their family and put their estates and fortunes at risk. She made him the son of a rebel's mistress. He would hate her for it, if only he could be sure he would ever see her again.
But perhaps that was not it at all.
Servillia could have said, "We will stay." She could have said, "I think we must remain loyal to Caesar."
He deferred to her; she could have claimed it as a matter of loyalty and friendship. More to the point, she could have claimed it as her choice to make. He had let her rule a household he should have mastered ten years ago; what harm to be willing to consult her on one more decision? Excessive love for one's mother was not a trait most desirable in a man, but it was not, in the end, the worst crime.
Instead she said, "You must choose." Perhaps that was what he hated her for.
She made it impossible for him to stay and still remain a man. She gave birth to him and saddled him with this-- with this name, this terrible significant weight of a name, and she made him choose, made him declare for Pompey out loud, made it impossible to remain with her now if he ever wanted to look at his face in the glass again.
"How dare you," he said to her as he sat astride his horse, ready to join Pompey. "How dare you ask me to throw my lot in with a traitor?"
"Did I ask you to stay with me?" she asked, her voice as calm as an autumn pool.
"No," he had to admit.
"I only asked one thing of you, Brutus; make a choice."
Servillia was made of cold steel, and he hated her for it.
Look at the way they are now going out to meet Caesar and currying his favor... They are delighted with his artful clemency.
Caesar wielded his mercy like a weapon, by turns a barbarian's club and a surgeon's knife. He doled out forgiveness like a god on high, brushing away past crimes and waving an entire war into irrelevancy. To beg for Caesar's mercy was to be prostrated, humiliated, but the instant and unstinting friendship offered made any resentment seem small and unworthy.
The clemency was better than any impenetrable shield, making it impossible to be his honest enemy. Everyone in Caesar's political circle wore a mask of gratitude and love. The insistence on friendship enmeshed them all in a web of skulking lies and false faces. Every conversation was a trial, inspecting the words for double meanings, staying keyed up like an actor on stage, selling the performance of loyalty, terrified to let the enthusiasm slip for even a moment.
At least Antony had no guile in him. He was back in his natural element now; he wore nothing but his armor and soldier's cloak, and carried the pounds of metal lighter than he had ever carried the tribune's toga. He ate every meal surrounded by soldiers. Their gestures were crude and their jokes cruder. They ate their rough food too quickly and too messily, and talked too loudly and slapped each other's backs and threw punches and drank cheap Thracian wine.
Antony moved among them like a dolphin in water. He swaggered and strutted and jeered and threatened and joked, and it was all for display but not one bit of it was false.
In Antony's tent Brutus reached out to pull him close and he felt Antony's cock respond, easy and immediate as always. They writhed and bucked against each other, and Brutus dropped olive oil on his palm and took them both in hand, pulling and twisting and gasping. Antony left deep, bruised bite-marks in Brutus' shoulder when he came.
Afterwards, Antony strode about the tent naked, looking at maps of temporary fortifications, scanning inventories and logistics information, cursing the supply slaves as illiterate sons of street-whores. He splashed his face and chest with icy water and shook himself, invigorated. When he walked naked his hips canted always to one side, his stride rolling and crooked without the weight of his sword.
Brutus lay and rested and wondered how it was that the brutes and the warriors always had so much vitality, so much energy and virility, while the forces of civilization and politics staggered about, weak and effete.
Fucking Antony was probably not going to gift him magically with that elusive quality. But at least Antony had no guile in him.
But Caesar seems to be imminent...
News trickled in every day, in dispatches nailed to the Senate door, speeches read by the criers in the public squares, letters sent to every man of consequence in Rome. Caesar besieged Alexandria. Caesar declared Cleopatra queen. There was no escaping it.
Antony was the same as he ever was, predictable above all. He was fucking Atia, when he was not fucking Atia's slave girls (when he was not fucking Atia's slave boys, or the soldiers in his encampment, or the more exotic high-priced whores of the city, or Senate backbencher's wives), and yet still had no problem finding time to fuck Brutus. Brutus wondered sometimes if Caesar had even the slightest idea the sort of animal he had entrusted the city to.
At least the man could not possibly have the time or energy to make actual trouble.
Brutus walked around now nearly every day with purple bite marks in the back of his neck, fading bruises around his biceps and hips, scratches down his back and chest, a deep soreness and burn in his muscles. He wasn't sure he had ever felt so good.
"You shouldn't be letting him hurt you, you know," Cicero said one day in the baths as they lay side-by-side being massaged. His tone was low and urgent and utterly devoid of the fussy eloquence he normally employed when trying to prove a point. Brutus wasn't sure what to make of it.
"You think I would give an animal like that power to hurt me?"
"You're the one bedding a sadist."
The slave's massage was deep and skilled, and sent deep waves of pleasure through his sore thighs and skittering sparks of pain across his bruises. "He's not a sadist," Brutus said.
"He looks a rare species of it to me." Cicero insisted on being worried about Antony, on giving the man credit for plans and manipulations, on trying to impede his schemes and trace his alliances. It would be better for them all to simply stand back and let the man drink and fuck his way into early senility, but Cicero was obsessed.
"The man is basically a dumb brute. Beasts of the field aren't concerned with anything so refined as sadism; they want to eat, fight, and fuck." Brutus shoved the slave away and stood.
But consigning Antony to the heading of 'brutal but unimportant' did nothing to stop the flow of news. Caesar was trapped in Egypt. King Juba of Numidia threw his lot in with Scipio and Cato. They utterly annihilated the forces of Caesar's general, Curio, on the banks of the Bagradas River.
"We are needed in Africa," Cicero said to him every time they met for a week. In three conversations in a row, some variation of, "You must go to Africa. They need the name of Brutus."
"It makes no matter," Brutus said. "They will not win. Caesar is a genius on the battlefield."
"They have Scipio." Cicero sounded like a religious fanatic, like a mystic, like a Jew preaching Messiah. "They have Scipio, to fight in Africa, there is some hope--"
"Right," said Brutus, laughing long and low and bitter. "Because that's not rank superstition at all."
"It is something."
"Poor Scipio. Only man in this mess with a worse name than mine. Dear Gods, can you imagine being the Scipio who loses in Africa?"
Somehow, at the fourth repetition of this conversation, Antony heard. His wrath was instant and terrifying and very, very quiet, and somehow, he knew every whisper that had passed their lips.
"I see," said Cicero, rubbing his bruised hands. The venom nearly dripped from his voice. "Just a harmless beast of the field. Like a cow, say, or perhaps a swaybacked horse? Or perhaps more of a swine; a hog, maybe, hunting for truffles in our fair city?"
"Sarcasm does not become you," Brutus answered, because he had no idea how Antony knew, and no idea how much he knew, and no idea whether or not to be frightened.
"You are fucking the man who has sworn to have my hands nailed to the Senate door. Be grateful sarcasm is what you get from me."
Urban warfare raged in the twisted streets of Alexandria. Caesar was victorious. The Library burned.
I cannot. It is not shame that deters me, though it most assuredly should -- this servility is shameful enough when to be alive at all is disgrace for me.
Caesar existed all around them, in whispers and rumors and frightened looks. Caesar stopped their disloyal throats with fear, even from across the middle sea.
The optimates drew much comfort from the prophecy that only a Scipio can win an African battle. Caesar promptly appointed the utter nonentity Scipio Sallustio to command one flank of his army. Caesar ruled the city from far Africa like an omnipresent ghost, and every time his name was spoken, Servillia became colder and quieter and harder.
"This is not about honor," he said to her when he could no longer stand the icy chill in the house. "At least admit that it's about the fact that Caesar rejected you."
"I set aside my honor for him, and he spit upon that gift. In what way is this not about honor?" She asked the question with calm sincerity, voice soft and easy. The steel at her core was so perfectly wrapped that some days he could almost believe it was not there.
"I threw myself on his mercy, mother. He kissed my cheek. I cannot turn against him."
She looked at him for a long, long time, and then spoke. "It is a great tragedy for a woman to realize she has raised no son to manhood."
"Said that, did she?" Antony asked.
Brutus couldn't remember what they were talking about, what might possibly have induced him to share that. For that matter, he couldn't particularly remember getting to Antony's villa, or the fuck that must have happened, from the sweaty state of the sheets. He must be going insane. No more than to be expected, with Cicero's constant exhortations in one ear and his mother's contempt in the other. Who could he possibly have gone to but Antony?
"Tongue of a harpy, that one," Antony continued, sprawling across the entire bed, the very picture of utter satiety. "You shouldn't stand for it. Though Caesar always did find that exciting."
"You'll not speak of her so," Brutus said, because he had no idea what else to say.
Antony rolled to his side and fixed him with a stare. His voice went honey-slow and sweet, his very most dangerous tone. "I'll speak how I like. There may be a man alive who can stop me, but you, Brutus, are not that man."
Brutus did not know what they expected him to do, all of them looking to him and his great name. Caesar could not be stopped. The Numidian cavalry was larger and better-horsed than Caesar's, and yet Caesar was in the perfect place at every moment. He won every battle, even those he should have lost, and seemed to move with inhuman speed.
Every province of Africa rolled to its belly for Caesar, and every noble family in Rome bared its throat for Antony. Somewhere along the way Antony became very, very dangerous, and Brutus could not understand when or how it had happened.
Brutus walked the Forum often these days, seeking refuge in some pretense of normalcy. The crier's news sounded dim and far away, dreadfully significant and yet lost under the weight of muted denial they all operated by, these days.
Caesar detoured on his way from Egypt to subdue the rebelling King of Pontus.
"Damned shades of Mithridates," said Brutus. "Maybe this is the one that finally stops him."
Of the battle, Caesar sent back to Rome only three words: Veni, vidi, vici.
"The arrogance," said Cicero, hands shaking in rage as he clutched the letter. "The arrogance. You must, Brutus, it is your duty, you must do something--"
On their next long walk through the Forum, Brutus paused by the carved lists of office holders and gazed at the tribune's plinth.
"Publius Clodius," he said, on a wild whim. "There was an incredible man."
Cicero blinked. "The one who exiled me for my service to Rome? The one who violated sacred rites and committed incest with his sister? The one who destroyed my favorite villa, stirred up a mob, led armed gangs through the streets, and bodily assaulted me? That Publius Clodius?"
"Yes," said Brutus, and regretted bringing it up.
"I am thinking of writing a treatise on ethics one day," said Cicero, falling into step with him as they left the Forum. "Might I invite you in advance to read it?"
Later, reclining for dinner and nibbling on rack of lamb crusted with herbs and wild nuts, Brutus felt the need to explain. "I meant nothing personal by it. Only that here is a man who decides that he wants a career as tribune of the plebs. A patrician Claudius, noble as the Alps are high, a name older than stone, and yet he decides one day that it would be convenient to be a plebian, and he just…" Brutus waved his lamb rib, trying to convey his sheer incredulity. "Makes it happen. And no one even talks about it any more."
"No," said Cicero. "He gave us too much else to talk about."
"I mean only that I don't have to carry this blasted name. I could find someone to adopt me."
"Caesar would do it."
"Dear Gods, not him," said Brutus. "I might as well stand on the steps of the Senate house and declare myself conceived a bastard. Besides, taking on the ancestry of Aeneas and Romulus is hardly distancing myself from noble obligation. No, I was thinking perhaps you."
Cicero froze, wine goblet held in front of him. "Me?"
"Yes. I know there's little love lost between you and your son, and you are in debt to your ears. I would make your line ridiculously rich. Also, you have such a wonderfully undemanding name. No one expects a thing of a Tullius."
Cicero put his goblet down very gently and carefully on the low table and rose. "I beg your pardon," he said. "I've just remembered I have a most urgent speech to polish," and strode from the room.
Great battles took place at Utica and Thapsus. Scipio's elephants ran rampant over his own men. Caesar left orders for Cato and Scipio to be left alive that he might pardon them, but both men fell on their swords.
Caesar's intentions are still a matter of conjecture, rather than knowledge...
Caesar was hardly less a godlike presence when he walked among them on mortal feet. The evidence of him was everywhere, the proof of his existence soaking down into the very paving-stones of Rome. Workers thronged the highways of the city, raising the Temple of Venus and leveling the new Forum of Caesar. Money flowed from the treasury like water. The back benches of the Senate filled with long-haired Gauls and backcountry Caesarian clients. The question echoed in every villa, along every street of the city: Would Caesar make himself king?
In his own house, Quintus and Cassius and Cimber schemed and plotted and would not be removed. Words of treason found their way to every noble house in Rome. The name Brutus was on every tongue.
At the center of it all sat Servillia, the spider in the web, the general on the field, the dagger in the back. She maneuvered him ever closer to the cliff, pitting his honor against his loyalties, the man he should be against the man he was, rendering his position ever more untenable. He woke from dreams with his face hot with shame. Being at home was intolerable.
Being with Antony was no less intolerable, yet somehow that is where he found himself, time after time. The sex grew longer, drawn out, slower; Brutus sometimes sucked Antony. He had no shame left to spare anymore, after all, and Antony's cock was thick and beautiful, salty and veined and responsive. The man made just as much noise being sucked as he did fucking, but sometimes he would reach down and stroke Brutus' hair with a gesture that carried no threat in it at all. Perhaps even a vague sort of affection, like one would give a favored hunting dog.
Right around then Brutus realized that his contempt for Antony had shifted to hate.
Antony's study was littered with logistics information, supply chain plans to every corner of the provinces, statistics on every legion under arms. Brutus said, "It's almost as if you want Caesar to go campaigning again."
Antony looked at him like he was singular fool. "I am a soldier," he said. "Of course I want Caesar to go campaigning. You think I'll stay and rot in Rome?"
"What is there left to conquer?" asked Brutus, realizing only after he said it that the question was genuine.
"Parthia."
Brutus started at him, mind whirling. "You cannot mean that."
"Caesar recovered his own Eagle from the Gauls; should he not recover Crassus' Eagles from the Parthians?"
"They say only a king can conquer Parthia. Will he be a king, then?"
Antony returned to the maps spread on his table. "I am a soldier. What do I care what they say? I care that he can lead me into battle and win."
Brutus reached out to place his hand over the map, blocking out the contours of the Syrian Desert. "The word in the Forum is that Caesar would make himself king. I gave it no credence. Is it true?"
The fingers closed around his wrist were strong, iron, bruising and immovable. "I told you," said Antony, his voice dropping back down to danger. "I do not care if you fine, politics-obsessed noblemen call him tyrant or dictator or king. I call him Caesar. I think that is all the title he needs."
"It matters," said Brutus, conscious of the tingling of blood in his hand below that iron grip. "It matters. Dictator is a Roman office, but Rome has no kings."
"Then obviously, he is not a king."
"If you think this is a matter of semantics," Brutus said, anger rising past the grip on his wrist, past the animal intimidation in Antony's strength, "If you think this is a distinction to be laughed off, then you are a traitor and a fool, not worthy of the office you hold, not fit to call yourself Roman, fit only to be used on the battlefield as the fucking beast you are--"
That at last seemed to pierce Antony's menacing mask. He dropped his grip, stared for a moment, and then tipped his head back and laughed, loud and theatrical. "Brutus! Was that a trace of spine? Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?"
"I do not kiss my mother at all, any more."
"That's probably for the best, isn't it?"
"I am gratified that my familial struggles amuse you." Just like that, just that fast, they were back to it: the sniping, the feint and parry, the undercurrent of aggravation below simmering sexual tension, as though nothing at all had happened. Antony was impervious. He could not be touched.
"Oh, now, don't be like that Brutus. It's for your own good."
"For my own good, he says? For my own good that my mother scorns me? I can't prevent you from finding my misfortune amusing, but I'll thank you not to talk about 'for my own good.'"
"But don't you see?" Antony asked, and reached out to cup Brutus' neck and drop a kiss on his cheek, light and flippant, heavy with promise. "If you turned traitor, I would have to kill you, Brutus. And we neither of us want that, nay?"
So the question remained, heavy in the air as Caesar reshaped Rome to his will. Caesar's creatures in the Senate moved to name him Dictator in perpetuity. Caesar took control of the very cycle of the year, named a month for himself, turned the calendar on its head. He celebrated the grandest triumph in all history, yet every moment of it was scrupulously traditional.
Would he make himself king?
"You cannot let it happen," said Cicero. "If you do not stand, who will? With the weight of your name, you could do so much. If you cannot oppose him, you at least must stop supporting him."
"I will not take Scipio and Cato's way out. I will not. It is not come to that yet."
"Of course not," Cicero replied, eyes flickering away. "No one has asked you to."
"She wants me to. She said as much."
"She does not want you to. Women love the fruit of their wombs more than they love duty. They rarely truly wish that of their sons. Women are soft." Cicero said it awkwardly, unconvincingly, reaching out his hand across the expanse of his writing desk in a strange aborted gesture as though he wanted to clasp Brutus' hand, or brush his arm, or perhaps just take back the scroll he was reading.
"Did you know that the jewelers of the Aventine use diamond to cut the other stones?"
"No," said Cicero, hand still held awkwardly in space. "I did not."
"My mother," said Brutus.
Ought a man to remain in his country under a despotism? Ought he to strive for the overthrow of despotism by any means, even if the existence of the state would be threatened? Ought he to join in the causes of his friends and benefactors even if he does not approve of their actions?
Antony ran in the Lupercalia that year, naked and fleet-footed and virile, adored by all, a spectacle and a vision. At the end of the footrace he strode up the dias to Caesar and offered him a diadem, held high above his head in the sight of the crowd.
Twice he offered, and twice Caesar refused, and when the crowds reached the Forum that evening, every statue of Caesar had been crowned in Eastern style.
It was over, all of it: His friendship with Caesar, his loyalty, his conflicted and convoluted entanglement with Antony, his wrenching guilt and shame. It was over, and yet he could not stay away.
"What are you doing?" Brutus asked when he came to Antony's villa that evening. "Did he put you up to it? That doesn't make any sense. To raise anxieties in such a public setting would be a grave miscalculation on his part."
"If he had put me up to it, don't you think he'd have taken the damn crown?" Antony asked, muscling Brutus back against a wall and pulling off his tunic.
"What could you possibly hope to accomplish? You rendered Caesar's position yet more precarious, you infuriated every noble in Rome, you raised a rabble. What could you possibly have hoped--"
Antony pressed their bodies full-length together and bit hard at the side of Brutus' neck.
"What are you doing?" Brutus asked again, baffled, angry at not understanding the processes of a mind he had thought so simple.
"Fucking you, I thought," said Antony, sounding annoyed. "If I'm not, then for God's sake leave me in peace, and send in a slave on your way out."
Brutus nodded and spread himself on the bed, burying his face in the lavish pillows. He wanted it, one more time-- wanted Antony's cock, the violence, the animalistic drive, the sounds, the exhilaration and muscle-deep soreness and satiety. He wanted to stay a little longer in this strange suspended limbo he had remained in since first accepting Caesar's clemency.
After, he rested where he was, Antony's heavy weight draped over his back, softening cock against his thigh. A few more minutes. And a few more.
"Caesar does not love me," he said. "Caesar does not love me, and he does not trust me."
"Come now, Brutus," Antony said, rolling off the bed and slapping his ass, casual and unconcerned. "Caesar loves you, as do I."
"Caesar loved my name; it looked better for him, to have Brutus as his friend. There has never been a man or woman who loved beyond that." Brutus was not sure what he why he spoke, what he was asking for, what he wanted. There was nothing Antony could say now. There was nothing Antony would ever have said. He wanted a way out of this trap, and that had never existed.
"Not true!" Antony leaned low to mouth at his ear. "I care not a whit for your name. I care about your hot mouth and sweet hole. Much better that way."
That was the last time they saw each other before the Ides.
If Brutus takes any step, be sure to let me know. I think he ought not to lose any time, especially if he has made up his mind...
He was going to do it.
He was going to do it because there was no way remaining not to do it; because his mother was pushing him off the cliff from one direction even as Caesar pushed him from the other, because there was no way remaining to preserve loyalty and self-respect, because he was endlessly dogged by his name, pursued by it, saddled by it, stifled by it, doomed by it. Because of his damn name. Because there was nothing left to him but the cold comfort of honor and the vindication of history.
Servillia would see that she had indeed raised a child to manhood, and Cicero would stop talking, for one blessed minute, about his name and his duty. Brutus would feel on his hands the hot blood of the man he called friend and he would know himself to be one of the great men of history, whether he desired it or no, and it would be glorious.
Brutus lay in his bed and played it through in his head, steeling himself for it, preparing himself so his hand would not waver. His mind flitted over the blood, the cries, the victorious speeches, the adoring cheers. Somehow his mind kept circling back, again and again, to the look on Antony's face.
Helpless. Small. Afraid.
He thought about killing Antony's master and making Antony frightened, stripping him, shrinking him back to human stature. He thought about kissing Antony's cheek as Antony did to him, heavy with threat and menace and promise. He thought about holding Antony's life in his hand, Antony asking for mercy. He thought about fucking Antony.
Brutus came with a low hiss, sharp and savage. He spurted over his own hand, liquid striping him to his wrists, hot like blood.
I reflected that Caesar was mortal to begin with and further that he might be eliminated, whereas our city and people should, as far as we are able, be preserved to eternity.
Without Caesar, Antony was nothing but a vulgar animal, a kept pet, a dumb brute. Without Caesar, tyranny was ended, Republic saved, dignity and honor restored, name defended, future secured. Without Caesar, Antony was nothing.
Caesar was a still-bleeding body when Antony appeared at the entrance to the Senate-house. Antony looked small, terrified, helpless; he turned and ran, and Brutus would have rejoiced if he hadn't felt even smaller.
Caesar was a carefully laid-out corpse when Antony came to the Junius villa, perhaps to plead for his life, perhaps to surrender to the new masters of the Roman Republic. But instead, Antony strode in with that same lethal grace, the violent threat of a lion under the honeyed voice of a siren, and made legal threats that turned Cicero pale.
That was how it became real -- because Cicero may have been a coward, may have been a sycophant, may have twittered and disclaimed and protected his own hide in the face of Antony's physicality, but in the face of a legal threat, his mind should have been spinning, reviewing the statutes, calling up the precedents, crafting the oratory. Cicero was a coward of the body and an unflinching hero of the mind, but Antony's legal threats turned his face pale, and Brutus could say nothing. So even though Brutus was the tyrannicide and Antony only a dead tyrant's pet, Brutus took his compromise and Antony strode away, somehow an equal. But it made no difference. They had the Senate.
Caesar was a blazing pyre when Antony strode back and forth on the rostra clutching the bloody toga. He kissed the bloodstains and waved his fist and cried words like "beloved leader" and "cold-hearted villainy" until the Forum was ablaze and Brutus had to flee and barricade his door.
Caesar was a pile of cooling ashes when Antony offered him the chance to leave the city with his life. The man who saved the Republic had to slink away by cover of nightfall, and be grateful for the opportunity. He could not understand how everything went so wrong. It was surreal, impossible, farcical; it was Plautus when it should have been Sophocles. Antony followed him to his private study and fucked him, not hard and brutal but slow and agonizingly smooth.
"I should have made you beg for your life," Antony said into the sweat and heat at the back of his neck. "That would have been amusing."
"We will fight this," said Brutus. "I will fight this. I will raise up an army and I will fight you and I will beat you."
Antony pulled out and gave a low, derisive laugh. "Someone may yet beat me," he said, "but it will not be you, Brutus."
Caesar was a memory (an idea, a legend, a God) when Brutus fled and left Rome in the hands of another tyrant.
But though every measure of wrath descend upon our heads, the Ides of March are our consolation.
Antony/Brutus
NC-17
7k words
AN: Yuletide fic for
sophia_helix, who asked for Antony/Brutus hatesex. Yaay! She asked for post-assassination, too, but I couldn't make that work. Hopefully this is close enough to scratch the itch. Originally posted here. Italics are from Cicero's letters to Atticus, various translations. However, given the differences between history and canon, and a hefty dose of artistic license, they are out of order and wildly out of context. The historian in me feels so naughty.
I had such bad stage fright about this one. I'd like to thank
bdblack for handholding and hilarytamar for cheerleeading well and truly beyond the call, and whatifisaidno and sidlj for beta look-overs in various stages of completion. Wow was I needy.But I have had quite blood-curdling reports of Caesar in Gaul...
The last time Brutus went up to visit Caesar in Gaul, Cicero asked him to carry a letter. Of course he did; all polite society ran on the elaborate exchanges of friendly courier favors, but Cicero was even more obsessed with sending letters than average. Cicero worked on that letter off and on for three days. Brutus visited and reclined on a couch in Cicero's study, eating stuffed quail and watching Cicero fussing with a wax tablet, scraping and re-writing, scraping and re-writing, until he was content to put ink to parchment.
"So, friend Cicero, has it achieved that perfect, casual, 'just-dashed-off-an-elegant-note' quality yet?"
"It is good to find you in such high spirits. You'll need them, slogging through the muddy, uncivilized Alps." Cicero handed him the letter to read.
"You do know that Caesar has spoken Latin all his life?" Brutus asked, reading. "I mean only that you probably won't be able to cow him into submission with your mastery of syntax alone, much as you enjoy trying."
"Oh, very droll."
"Is it not the purpose of language to communicate clearly?" Winding Cicero up was inexcusably entertaining. He prickled so easily, a blustery hedgehog of a man, delightful in his insecurity.
"Only sometimes."
"Only sometimes?"
"My dear Brutus, you can be abominably dense."
"My pedagogue did not think so," Brutus answered, aware as the words came out that he sounded slightly sulky. "He often praised me for concision."
Cicero snapped impatiently at Tiro to bring sealing wax and watched as he poured it. "You stand before Caesar carried on obscene wealth, cloaked in an impeccable name, and embraced as a member of his family. I have no way to hold myself an equal of that man save my words." The steward pressed seal to wax and handed the letter to Brutus, who tucked it into the sinus of his toga and bit back an annoyed reply.
The biting back did no good, of course. Cicero was petulant and waspish all through the rest of the quail and they parted on their usual exasperated terms.
The journey was, as Cicero predicted, muddy and uncivilized. Caesar was wintering in Agedincum, monstrously far North into Transalpine Gaul. Brutus delivered his letters (Senatorial business; Cicero's pompous well-wishes; sweet lover's words from Servillia; assorted notes of gossip and well-wishes for various legates and tribunes), exchanged polite, dutiful conversation, and waited for the replies.
All in all, the trip was nothing to take particular note of. He would never have remembered it at all, in the chaos that came after, except for one fact: that was when it all started with Antony.
The man was a horrible boor, loud and brash and tasteless. He got messy as he ate (straight upright in a chair in the way favored by soldiers; bad for the digestion, and how anyone ever endured a soldier's life was beyond Brutus) and took his wine without enough water. For some reason, Brutus would feel himself quieting to let Antony speak, watching him while he paced, orbiting around the pull of his personality.
In the field outside the command tent Antony wrestled with soldiers-- actually wrestled, stripped down and oiled, muscles flexing and bunching as he grappled. He raised his hands and roared in victory when he pinned his opponents, tossing his head to shake the thick black hair back from his eyes and strutting, all wiry frame and heavy hanging cock.
He was a beast, a lion of Africa, a glorious animal and gloriously bestial and Brutus desired him intensely.
Brutus tried to think of something to say, something about the dignity of command or soldiers losing respect for authority, but he couldn't come up with it.
A little later, Antony found him where he sat contemplating the churned-up mud that seemed to be the foundation of Gaul. Brutus rose to walk with him, and Antony slung an arm over his shoulders like the most over-familiar of friends. "Brutus, Brutus, Brutus. Caesar's little adopted son."
"I am honored if he thinks of me so," Brutus said, trying to divine the game they were playing, trying to concentrate below the heavy drape of Antony's arm.
"He most certainly does. Every man must have a son to cherish."
"And I wish him many sons natural born."
"It's only logical, given the way he's fucking your mother," Antony said, leaning in close and letting his lips brush Brutus' ear. Suddenly the arm around his shoulders felt less like over-familiarity and more like a threat. Brutus stopped.
"I could not speak to that."
Antony dropped his arm and began circling him slowly, letting his fingers trail first across Brutus' chest, then over his biceps and shoulder blades and spine. He walked like a cat stalking, and when he spoke it was low and close against Brutus' other ear. "Of course he is. He was fucking her back around the year you were born, too. Ever think about that?"
Before Brutus could form a reply, Antony pulled back. He seemed pleased with what he saw, and his face split in a wide grin, predatory and feral. "Well, well, well. What have we here?" He reached out to rub his thumb against Brutus' lower lip. "I'll see you tonight, nay?" he asked, and strutted off.
Antony fucked the way he wrestled, lithe and sinuous and utterly careless. He hauled Brutus back against him with all his deceptive strength and pounded into him, leaving Brutus entirely on his own to enjoy it or not, stroke himself or not. When he finished, he slapped Brutus' ass hard with that same bestial roar of triumph and self-satisfaction, and Brutus came sharply, collapsing face-first onto Antony's hard soldier's couch and shaking and gasping.
"So," Antony said, standing up and yanking down his tunic. "If you might as well be Caesar's son, and I'm his second in command, what does that make us?" He sounded like the intervening four hours and a fuck hadn't divided their conversation at all.
Ah. Right. That was the game. Brutus was brutally bored by this type of crass political maneuvering, but at least he knew what was expected of him now. "Allies, I presume?"
"Really?" Antony turned to him theatrically, re-knotting his belt. "I was thinking rivals."
"I'm sure that's not necessary. The man who helped Caesar subjugate Gaul hardly needs fear for his military reputation."
"And the ridiculously noble Marcus Junius Brutus hardly needs fear for anything else?" Antony asked, settling to lace his boots.
Brutus didn't answer that, but started trying to rearrange himself, since Antony was obviously not going to nap or bask or do any related thing.
"Oh, Brutus, you poor fool. There are far too many great men in Rome these days. In five years, there will be no one but Caesar. And," -- Antony leaned over him again, gave that feral smile, wielded his physicality like a club -- "He will have only one heir."
Brutus pulled his tunic back on over his head and hauled himself to his feet, wincing at the only half-pleasant aching in his muscles. "I should think a man soon to be charged with illegal warfare and stripped of his armies would want more friends, rather than fewer."
"Caesar is entirely too eager for friends. What's wanted are enemies." Antony paused, gave his words heavy, solemn weight. "Enemies can be fought." And then he reached out and patted Brutus' cheek, a gesture as heavy with blunt intimidation and threat as any brigand baring a sword.
The man was probably a terror on the battlefield, Brutus decided, but definitely a lout. So simple as to nearly be insipid, so stupid as to nearly be a joke. But very, very good for a fuck.
The political situation alarms me deeply, and so far I have found scarcely anybody who is not for giving Caesar what he wants rather than fighting... but in the Senate I shall echo Pompey.
Antony returned to the city to take up his tribune's office and be Caesar's mouthpiece and leader of his faction. Cicero met with him and the optimates in some ridiculous late night cloak-and-dagger meeting at Atia's house, drenched in political theatre and dramatic veiled threats. Brutus was invited. He did not attend.
"I don't understand it, Brutus," said Cicero as they walked the Forum the next day. "Every backbencher in the Senate house would have sold their favorite villas for that invitation."
"That kind of self-important horse trading bores me terribly," said Brutus.
"I think 'self-important horse trading' is a harsh description for attempting to avert civil war, broker alliance, and chart a course for peace and prosperity for this Republic."
"Him, for example," said Cicero, nodding to Marcellus Minor on the rostra, orating fiercely on Caesar's aggression. "Had Marcellus been invited, he would know what a dreadfully irrelevant fool he is making of himself at this moment. Though" -- Cicero winced -- "no amount of knowledge will improve his mushy diction."
"Let me guess," said Brutus. "Antony demanded immunity, Cato got spitting mad, Pompey blustered, everyone threatened and postured virtuously, and Antony made a ridiculously crude theatrical gesture, not in that order?"
"He offered to burn his soldier's cloak. It was better than Sophocles."
"As I said."
That should have been the end of it, but Cicero would not let it lie. He brought it up again over their latrunculi board, saying, "Politics is not only the duty but also the privilege of a man of your class, you know."
"Politics is a millstone about my neck."
"Our Republic is on the verge of complete disintegration. Civil war is the greatest of all horrors, and it will come inevitably as the turning of the seasons unless men of our office remain constantly vigilant against it. You might have put in an appearance."
"There will be no war," Brutus said, and slid one of his soldiers up the game board behind Cicero's line. "The Caesarians on the left do not want war. The Pompeians on the right do not want war. The moderates in the center do not want war. How then will there be war?"
"Civil war is not like deciding to throw a dinner party," Cicero said, and moved to fend off the intruder.
Brutus dodged Cicero's defender. "There will be no war because you will avert it. Antony's bluster and plebian-baiting are no match for your intelligence and political skill, and thank the Gods for that, as I do not have to go skulking about like a scheming Ptolemeian eunuch."
"We can't all afford to wash our hands of the business," Cicero said, and was grumpy and closed-mouthed for the rest of the game, despite the flattery.
When Brutus returned that afternoon, a messenger of Antony's arrived to invite him for dinner. It wasn't dinner; it was another quick, careless fuck, with Antony's sacred symbolic tribune's toga in a crumpled heap by their couch.
There wasn't going to be a war.
I really do not know what I am doing or going to do, so confounding is the rashness of this insane proceeding of ours.
She was insane to choose Caesar. She was blinded by female lust, irrational in the way of her gender, ill-attuned to the finer sentiments of politics and Roman virtue. She sullied their family and put their estates and fortunes at risk. She made him the son of a rebel's mistress. He would hate her for it, if only he could be sure he would ever see her again.
But perhaps that was not it at all.
Servillia could have said, "We will stay." She could have said, "I think we must remain loyal to Caesar."
He deferred to her; she could have claimed it as a matter of loyalty and friendship. More to the point, she could have claimed it as her choice to make. He had let her rule a household he should have mastered ten years ago; what harm to be willing to consult her on one more decision? Excessive love for one's mother was not a trait most desirable in a man, but it was not, in the end, the worst crime.
Instead she said, "You must choose." Perhaps that was what he hated her for.
She made it impossible for him to stay and still remain a man. She gave birth to him and saddled him with this-- with this name, this terrible significant weight of a name, and she made him choose, made him declare for Pompey out loud, made it impossible to remain with her now if he ever wanted to look at his face in the glass again.
"How dare you," he said to her as he sat astride his horse, ready to join Pompey. "How dare you ask me to throw my lot in with a traitor?"
"Did I ask you to stay with me?" she asked, her voice as calm as an autumn pool.
"No," he had to admit.
"I only asked one thing of you, Brutus; make a choice."
Servillia was made of cold steel, and he hated her for it.
Look at the way they are now going out to meet Caesar and currying his favor... They are delighted with his artful clemency.
Caesar wielded his mercy like a weapon, by turns a barbarian's club and a surgeon's knife. He doled out forgiveness like a god on high, brushing away past crimes and waving an entire war into irrelevancy. To beg for Caesar's mercy was to be prostrated, humiliated, but the instant and unstinting friendship offered made any resentment seem small and unworthy.
The clemency was better than any impenetrable shield, making it impossible to be his honest enemy. Everyone in Caesar's political circle wore a mask of gratitude and love. The insistence on friendship enmeshed them all in a web of skulking lies and false faces. Every conversation was a trial, inspecting the words for double meanings, staying keyed up like an actor on stage, selling the performance of loyalty, terrified to let the enthusiasm slip for even a moment.
At least Antony had no guile in him. He was back in his natural element now; he wore nothing but his armor and soldier's cloak, and carried the pounds of metal lighter than he had ever carried the tribune's toga. He ate every meal surrounded by soldiers. Their gestures were crude and their jokes cruder. They ate their rough food too quickly and too messily, and talked too loudly and slapped each other's backs and threw punches and drank cheap Thracian wine.
Antony moved among them like a dolphin in water. He swaggered and strutted and jeered and threatened and joked, and it was all for display but not one bit of it was false.
In Antony's tent Brutus reached out to pull him close and he felt Antony's cock respond, easy and immediate as always. They writhed and bucked against each other, and Brutus dropped olive oil on his palm and took them both in hand, pulling and twisting and gasping. Antony left deep, bruised bite-marks in Brutus' shoulder when he came.
Afterwards, Antony strode about the tent naked, looking at maps of temporary fortifications, scanning inventories and logistics information, cursing the supply slaves as illiterate sons of street-whores. He splashed his face and chest with icy water and shook himself, invigorated. When he walked naked his hips canted always to one side, his stride rolling and crooked without the weight of his sword.
Brutus lay and rested and wondered how it was that the brutes and the warriors always had so much vitality, so much energy and virility, while the forces of civilization and politics staggered about, weak and effete.
Fucking Antony was probably not going to gift him magically with that elusive quality. But at least Antony had no guile in him.
But Caesar seems to be imminent...
News trickled in every day, in dispatches nailed to the Senate door, speeches read by the criers in the public squares, letters sent to every man of consequence in Rome. Caesar besieged Alexandria. Caesar declared Cleopatra queen. There was no escaping it.
Antony was the same as he ever was, predictable above all. He was fucking Atia, when he was not fucking Atia's slave girls (when he was not fucking Atia's slave boys, or the soldiers in his encampment, or the more exotic high-priced whores of the city, or Senate backbencher's wives), and yet still had no problem finding time to fuck Brutus. Brutus wondered sometimes if Caesar had even the slightest idea the sort of animal he had entrusted the city to.
At least the man could not possibly have the time or energy to make actual trouble.
Brutus walked around now nearly every day with purple bite marks in the back of his neck, fading bruises around his biceps and hips, scratches down his back and chest, a deep soreness and burn in his muscles. He wasn't sure he had ever felt so good.
"You shouldn't be letting him hurt you, you know," Cicero said one day in the baths as they lay side-by-side being massaged. His tone was low and urgent and utterly devoid of the fussy eloquence he normally employed when trying to prove a point. Brutus wasn't sure what to make of it.
"You think I would give an animal like that power to hurt me?"
"You're the one bedding a sadist."
The slave's massage was deep and skilled, and sent deep waves of pleasure through his sore thighs and skittering sparks of pain across his bruises. "He's not a sadist," Brutus said.
"He looks a rare species of it to me." Cicero insisted on being worried about Antony, on giving the man credit for plans and manipulations, on trying to impede his schemes and trace his alliances. It would be better for them all to simply stand back and let the man drink and fuck his way into early senility, but Cicero was obsessed.
"The man is basically a dumb brute. Beasts of the field aren't concerned with anything so refined as sadism; they want to eat, fight, and fuck." Brutus shoved the slave away and stood.
But consigning Antony to the heading of 'brutal but unimportant' did nothing to stop the flow of news. Caesar was trapped in Egypt. King Juba of Numidia threw his lot in with Scipio and Cato. They utterly annihilated the forces of Caesar's general, Curio, on the banks of the Bagradas River.
"We are needed in Africa," Cicero said to him every time they met for a week. In three conversations in a row, some variation of, "You must go to Africa. They need the name of Brutus."
"It makes no matter," Brutus said. "They will not win. Caesar is a genius on the battlefield."
"They have Scipio." Cicero sounded like a religious fanatic, like a mystic, like a Jew preaching Messiah. "They have Scipio, to fight in Africa, there is some hope--"
"Right," said Brutus, laughing long and low and bitter. "Because that's not rank superstition at all."
"It is something."
"Poor Scipio. Only man in this mess with a worse name than mine. Dear Gods, can you imagine being the Scipio who loses in Africa?"
Somehow, at the fourth repetition of this conversation, Antony heard. His wrath was instant and terrifying and very, very quiet, and somehow, he knew every whisper that had passed their lips.
"I see," said Cicero, rubbing his bruised hands. The venom nearly dripped from his voice. "Just a harmless beast of the field. Like a cow, say, or perhaps a swaybacked horse? Or perhaps more of a swine; a hog, maybe, hunting for truffles in our fair city?"
"Sarcasm does not become you," Brutus answered, because he had no idea how Antony knew, and no idea how much he knew, and no idea whether or not to be frightened.
"You are fucking the man who has sworn to have my hands nailed to the Senate door. Be grateful sarcasm is what you get from me."
Urban warfare raged in the twisted streets of Alexandria. Caesar was victorious. The Library burned.
I cannot. It is not shame that deters me, though it most assuredly should -- this servility is shameful enough when to be alive at all is disgrace for me.
Caesar existed all around them, in whispers and rumors and frightened looks. Caesar stopped their disloyal throats with fear, even from across the middle sea.
The optimates drew much comfort from the prophecy that only a Scipio can win an African battle. Caesar promptly appointed the utter nonentity Scipio Sallustio to command one flank of his army. Caesar ruled the city from far Africa like an omnipresent ghost, and every time his name was spoken, Servillia became colder and quieter and harder.
"This is not about honor," he said to her when he could no longer stand the icy chill in the house. "At least admit that it's about the fact that Caesar rejected you."
"I set aside my honor for him, and he spit upon that gift. In what way is this not about honor?" She asked the question with calm sincerity, voice soft and easy. The steel at her core was so perfectly wrapped that some days he could almost believe it was not there.
"I threw myself on his mercy, mother. He kissed my cheek. I cannot turn against him."
She looked at him for a long, long time, and then spoke. "It is a great tragedy for a woman to realize she has raised no son to manhood."
"Said that, did she?" Antony asked.
Brutus couldn't remember what they were talking about, what might possibly have induced him to share that. For that matter, he couldn't particularly remember getting to Antony's villa, or the fuck that must have happened, from the sweaty state of the sheets. He must be going insane. No more than to be expected, with Cicero's constant exhortations in one ear and his mother's contempt in the other. Who could he possibly have gone to but Antony?
"Tongue of a harpy, that one," Antony continued, sprawling across the entire bed, the very picture of utter satiety. "You shouldn't stand for it. Though Caesar always did find that exciting."
"You'll not speak of her so," Brutus said, because he had no idea what else to say.
Antony rolled to his side and fixed him with a stare. His voice went honey-slow and sweet, his very most dangerous tone. "I'll speak how I like. There may be a man alive who can stop me, but you, Brutus, are not that man."
Brutus did not know what they expected him to do, all of them looking to him and his great name. Caesar could not be stopped. The Numidian cavalry was larger and better-horsed than Caesar's, and yet Caesar was in the perfect place at every moment. He won every battle, even those he should have lost, and seemed to move with inhuman speed.
Every province of Africa rolled to its belly for Caesar, and every noble family in Rome bared its throat for Antony. Somewhere along the way Antony became very, very dangerous, and Brutus could not understand when or how it had happened.
Brutus walked the Forum often these days, seeking refuge in some pretense of normalcy. The crier's news sounded dim and far away, dreadfully significant and yet lost under the weight of muted denial they all operated by, these days.
Caesar detoured on his way from Egypt to subdue the rebelling King of Pontus.
"Damned shades of Mithridates," said Brutus. "Maybe this is the one that finally stops him."
Of the battle, Caesar sent back to Rome only three words: Veni, vidi, vici.
"The arrogance," said Cicero, hands shaking in rage as he clutched the letter. "The arrogance. You must, Brutus, it is your duty, you must do something--"
On their next long walk through the Forum, Brutus paused by the carved lists of office holders and gazed at the tribune's plinth.
"Publius Clodius," he said, on a wild whim. "There was an incredible man."
Cicero blinked. "The one who exiled me for my service to Rome? The one who violated sacred rites and committed incest with his sister? The one who destroyed my favorite villa, stirred up a mob, led armed gangs through the streets, and bodily assaulted me? That Publius Clodius?"
"Yes," said Brutus, and regretted bringing it up.
"I am thinking of writing a treatise on ethics one day," said Cicero, falling into step with him as they left the Forum. "Might I invite you in advance to read it?"
Later, reclining for dinner and nibbling on rack of lamb crusted with herbs and wild nuts, Brutus felt the need to explain. "I meant nothing personal by it. Only that here is a man who decides that he wants a career as tribune of the plebs. A patrician Claudius, noble as the Alps are high, a name older than stone, and yet he decides one day that it would be convenient to be a plebian, and he just…" Brutus waved his lamb rib, trying to convey his sheer incredulity. "Makes it happen. And no one even talks about it any more."
"No," said Cicero. "He gave us too much else to talk about."
"I mean only that I don't have to carry this blasted name. I could find someone to adopt me."
"Caesar would do it."
"Dear Gods, not him," said Brutus. "I might as well stand on the steps of the Senate house and declare myself conceived a bastard. Besides, taking on the ancestry of Aeneas and Romulus is hardly distancing myself from noble obligation. No, I was thinking perhaps you."
Cicero froze, wine goblet held in front of him. "Me?"
"Yes. I know there's little love lost between you and your son, and you are in debt to your ears. I would make your line ridiculously rich. Also, you have such a wonderfully undemanding name. No one expects a thing of a Tullius."
Cicero put his goblet down very gently and carefully on the low table and rose. "I beg your pardon," he said. "I've just remembered I have a most urgent speech to polish," and strode from the room.
Great battles took place at Utica and Thapsus. Scipio's elephants ran rampant over his own men. Caesar left orders for Cato and Scipio to be left alive that he might pardon them, but both men fell on their swords.
Caesar's intentions are still a matter of conjecture, rather than knowledge...
Caesar was hardly less a godlike presence when he walked among them on mortal feet. The evidence of him was everywhere, the proof of his existence soaking down into the very paving-stones of Rome. Workers thronged the highways of the city, raising the Temple of Venus and leveling the new Forum of Caesar. Money flowed from the treasury like water. The back benches of the Senate filled with long-haired Gauls and backcountry Caesarian clients. The question echoed in every villa, along every street of the city: Would Caesar make himself king?
In his own house, Quintus and Cassius and Cimber schemed and plotted and would not be removed. Words of treason found their way to every noble house in Rome. The name Brutus was on every tongue.
At the center of it all sat Servillia, the spider in the web, the general on the field, the dagger in the back. She maneuvered him ever closer to the cliff, pitting his honor against his loyalties, the man he should be against the man he was, rendering his position ever more untenable. He woke from dreams with his face hot with shame. Being at home was intolerable.
Being with Antony was no less intolerable, yet somehow that is where he found himself, time after time. The sex grew longer, drawn out, slower; Brutus sometimes sucked Antony. He had no shame left to spare anymore, after all, and Antony's cock was thick and beautiful, salty and veined and responsive. The man made just as much noise being sucked as he did fucking, but sometimes he would reach down and stroke Brutus' hair with a gesture that carried no threat in it at all. Perhaps even a vague sort of affection, like one would give a favored hunting dog.
Right around then Brutus realized that his contempt for Antony had shifted to hate.
Antony's study was littered with logistics information, supply chain plans to every corner of the provinces, statistics on every legion under arms. Brutus said, "It's almost as if you want Caesar to go campaigning again."
Antony looked at him like he was singular fool. "I am a soldier," he said. "Of course I want Caesar to go campaigning. You think I'll stay and rot in Rome?"
"What is there left to conquer?" asked Brutus, realizing only after he said it that the question was genuine.
"Parthia."
Brutus started at him, mind whirling. "You cannot mean that."
"Caesar recovered his own Eagle from the Gauls; should he not recover Crassus' Eagles from the Parthians?"
"They say only a king can conquer Parthia. Will he be a king, then?"
Antony returned to the maps spread on his table. "I am a soldier. What do I care what they say? I care that he can lead me into battle and win."
Brutus reached out to place his hand over the map, blocking out the contours of the Syrian Desert. "The word in the Forum is that Caesar would make himself king. I gave it no credence. Is it true?"
The fingers closed around his wrist were strong, iron, bruising and immovable. "I told you," said Antony, his voice dropping back down to danger. "I do not care if you fine, politics-obsessed noblemen call him tyrant or dictator or king. I call him Caesar. I think that is all the title he needs."
"It matters," said Brutus, conscious of the tingling of blood in his hand below that iron grip. "It matters. Dictator is a Roman office, but Rome has no kings."
"Then obviously, he is not a king."
"If you think this is a matter of semantics," Brutus said, anger rising past the grip on his wrist, past the animal intimidation in Antony's strength, "If you think this is a distinction to be laughed off, then you are a traitor and a fool, not worthy of the office you hold, not fit to call yourself Roman, fit only to be used on the battlefield as the fucking beast you are--"
That at last seemed to pierce Antony's menacing mask. He dropped his grip, stared for a moment, and then tipped his head back and laughed, loud and theatrical. "Brutus! Was that a trace of spine? Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?"
"I do not kiss my mother at all, any more."
"That's probably for the best, isn't it?"
"I am gratified that my familial struggles amuse you." Just like that, just that fast, they were back to it: the sniping, the feint and parry, the undercurrent of aggravation below simmering sexual tension, as though nothing at all had happened. Antony was impervious. He could not be touched.
"Oh, now, don't be like that Brutus. It's for your own good."
"For my own good, he says? For my own good that my mother scorns me? I can't prevent you from finding my misfortune amusing, but I'll thank you not to talk about 'for my own good.'"
"But don't you see?" Antony asked, and reached out to cup Brutus' neck and drop a kiss on his cheek, light and flippant, heavy with promise. "If you turned traitor, I would have to kill you, Brutus. And we neither of us want that, nay?"
So the question remained, heavy in the air as Caesar reshaped Rome to his will. Caesar's creatures in the Senate moved to name him Dictator in perpetuity. Caesar took control of the very cycle of the year, named a month for himself, turned the calendar on its head. He celebrated the grandest triumph in all history, yet every moment of it was scrupulously traditional.
Would he make himself king?
"You cannot let it happen," said Cicero. "If you do not stand, who will? With the weight of your name, you could do so much. If you cannot oppose him, you at least must stop supporting him."
"I will not take Scipio and Cato's way out. I will not. It is not come to that yet."
"Of course not," Cicero replied, eyes flickering away. "No one has asked you to."
"She wants me to. She said as much."
"She does not want you to. Women love the fruit of their wombs more than they love duty. They rarely truly wish that of their sons. Women are soft." Cicero said it awkwardly, unconvincingly, reaching out his hand across the expanse of his writing desk in a strange aborted gesture as though he wanted to clasp Brutus' hand, or brush his arm, or perhaps just take back the scroll he was reading.
"Did you know that the jewelers of the Aventine use diamond to cut the other stones?"
"No," said Cicero, hand still held awkwardly in space. "I did not."
"My mother," said Brutus.
Ought a man to remain in his country under a despotism? Ought he to strive for the overthrow of despotism by any means, even if the existence of the state would be threatened? Ought he to join in the causes of his friends and benefactors even if he does not approve of their actions?
Antony ran in the Lupercalia that year, naked and fleet-footed and virile, adored by all, a spectacle and a vision. At the end of the footrace he strode up the dias to Caesar and offered him a diadem, held high above his head in the sight of the crowd.
Twice he offered, and twice Caesar refused, and when the crowds reached the Forum that evening, every statue of Caesar had been crowned in Eastern style.
It was over, all of it: His friendship with Caesar, his loyalty, his conflicted and convoluted entanglement with Antony, his wrenching guilt and shame. It was over, and yet he could not stay away.
"What are you doing?" Brutus asked when he came to Antony's villa that evening. "Did he put you up to it? That doesn't make any sense. To raise anxieties in such a public setting would be a grave miscalculation on his part."
"If he had put me up to it, don't you think he'd have taken the damn crown?" Antony asked, muscling Brutus back against a wall and pulling off his tunic.
"What could you possibly hope to accomplish? You rendered Caesar's position yet more precarious, you infuriated every noble in Rome, you raised a rabble. What could you possibly have hoped--"
Antony pressed their bodies full-length together and bit hard at the side of Brutus' neck.
"What are you doing?" Brutus asked again, baffled, angry at not understanding the processes of a mind he had thought so simple.
"Fucking you, I thought," said Antony, sounding annoyed. "If I'm not, then for God's sake leave me in peace, and send in a slave on your way out."
Brutus nodded and spread himself on the bed, burying his face in the lavish pillows. He wanted it, one more time-- wanted Antony's cock, the violence, the animalistic drive, the sounds, the exhilaration and muscle-deep soreness and satiety. He wanted to stay a little longer in this strange suspended limbo he had remained in since first accepting Caesar's clemency.
After, he rested where he was, Antony's heavy weight draped over his back, softening cock against his thigh. A few more minutes. And a few more.
"Caesar does not love me," he said. "Caesar does not love me, and he does not trust me."
"Come now, Brutus," Antony said, rolling off the bed and slapping his ass, casual and unconcerned. "Caesar loves you, as do I."
"Caesar loved my name; it looked better for him, to have Brutus as his friend. There has never been a man or woman who loved beyond that." Brutus was not sure what he why he spoke, what he was asking for, what he wanted. There was nothing Antony could say now. There was nothing Antony would ever have said. He wanted a way out of this trap, and that had never existed.
"Not true!" Antony leaned low to mouth at his ear. "I care not a whit for your name. I care about your hot mouth and sweet hole. Much better that way."
That was the last time they saw each other before the Ides.
If Brutus takes any step, be sure to let me know. I think he ought not to lose any time, especially if he has made up his mind...
He was going to do it.
He was going to do it because there was no way remaining not to do it; because his mother was pushing him off the cliff from one direction even as Caesar pushed him from the other, because there was no way remaining to preserve loyalty and self-respect, because he was endlessly dogged by his name, pursued by it, saddled by it, stifled by it, doomed by it. Because of his damn name. Because there was nothing left to him but the cold comfort of honor and the vindication of history.
Servillia would see that she had indeed raised a child to manhood, and Cicero would stop talking, for one blessed minute, about his name and his duty. Brutus would feel on his hands the hot blood of the man he called friend and he would know himself to be one of the great men of history, whether he desired it or no, and it would be glorious.
Brutus lay in his bed and played it through in his head, steeling himself for it, preparing himself so his hand would not waver. His mind flitted over the blood, the cries, the victorious speeches, the adoring cheers. Somehow his mind kept circling back, again and again, to the look on Antony's face.
Helpless. Small. Afraid.
He thought about killing Antony's master and making Antony frightened, stripping him, shrinking him back to human stature. He thought about kissing Antony's cheek as Antony did to him, heavy with threat and menace and promise. He thought about holding Antony's life in his hand, Antony asking for mercy. He thought about fucking Antony.
Brutus came with a low hiss, sharp and savage. He spurted over his own hand, liquid striping him to his wrists, hot like blood.
I reflected that Caesar was mortal to begin with and further that he might be eliminated, whereas our city and people should, as far as we are able, be preserved to eternity.
Without Caesar, Antony was nothing but a vulgar animal, a kept pet, a dumb brute. Without Caesar, tyranny was ended, Republic saved, dignity and honor restored, name defended, future secured. Without Caesar, Antony was nothing.
Caesar was a still-bleeding body when Antony appeared at the entrance to the Senate-house. Antony looked small, terrified, helpless; he turned and ran, and Brutus would have rejoiced if he hadn't felt even smaller.
Caesar was a carefully laid-out corpse when Antony came to the Junius villa, perhaps to plead for his life, perhaps to surrender to the new masters of the Roman Republic. But instead, Antony strode in with that same lethal grace, the violent threat of a lion under the honeyed voice of a siren, and made legal threats that turned Cicero pale.
That was how it became real -- because Cicero may have been a coward, may have been a sycophant, may have twittered and disclaimed and protected his own hide in the face of Antony's physicality, but in the face of a legal threat, his mind should have been spinning, reviewing the statutes, calling up the precedents, crafting the oratory. Cicero was a coward of the body and an unflinching hero of the mind, but Antony's legal threats turned his face pale, and Brutus could say nothing. So even though Brutus was the tyrannicide and Antony only a dead tyrant's pet, Brutus took his compromise and Antony strode away, somehow an equal. But it made no difference. They had the Senate.
Caesar was a blazing pyre when Antony strode back and forth on the rostra clutching the bloody toga. He kissed the bloodstains and waved his fist and cried words like "beloved leader" and "cold-hearted villainy" until the Forum was ablaze and Brutus had to flee and barricade his door.
Caesar was a pile of cooling ashes when Antony offered him the chance to leave the city with his life. The man who saved the Republic had to slink away by cover of nightfall, and be grateful for the opportunity. He could not understand how everything went so wrong. It was surreal, impossible, farcical; it was Plautus when it should have been Sophocles. Antony followed him to his private study and fucked him, not hard and brutal but slow and agonizingly smooth.
"I should have made you beg for your life," Antony said into the sweat and heat at the back of his neck. "That would have been amusing."
"We will fight this," said Brutus. "I will fight this. I will raise up an army and I will fight you and I will beat you."
Antony pulled out and gave a low, derisive laugh. "Someone may yet beat me," he said, "but it will not be you, Brutus."
Caesar was a memory (an idea, a legend, a God) when Brutus fled and left Rome in the hands of another tyrant.
But though every measure of wrath descend upon our heads, the Ides of March are our consolation.
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Date: 2009-01-01 10:13 pm (UTC)It's a HIT! :-)
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Date: 2009-01-01 11:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-02 02:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-02 01:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-02 01:28 am (UTC)You have NO IDEA how happy that makes me! I wasn't a classicist, but I was a history student with a focus in ancient history and one year of Latin and two years of Greek. And I wanted to be a classicist, but they were so smart and so intimidating and *boggles*
Anyway, I have no idea what gave me away (and I would love it if you told me, because I thought I kept my geekery in check), but I am so glad and thank you so much!
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Date: 2009-01-02 01:39 am (UTC)In any case - I think what gave you away was the level of detail. For me it was when you referred to the sinus of the toga, and then the level of detail with the battles and stuff just clinched it. In any case - you shouldn't want to keep that kind of geekery in check! It made the story just that much more awesome. Seriously.
What sort of ancient history did you do? Rome, Greece, other?