geta and caracalla did nothing wrong @inseparabiles - Tumblr Blog

Jun 3

Foregone

Relationships: Fem!Reader/Emperor Geta Rating: T Words: 8 161 Warnings: Patriarchy. Tags: Pining, Reader is married to somebody else, benign!verse

Challenge: Once more for @jqficexchange!

Summary: Two years ago you met Geta in the palace gardens, and for a very short while in time you almost thought that you'd come to know him. Then he rode to war, and you to a marriage with a man who does not love you. Now Geta returns, but does he still think of you the way that you've thought of him all along?

A/N: For @dubiousmetamorphosis! Sorry you've had to wait for this - I really tried to get a palace mouser to show up for the story, but no matter what we arranged they were very always busy for the occasion so we had to cancel on that. :( Lots of mice in Rome to catch, it seems. Maybe next time!

———

BEFORE

The sky above Rome was spotless, deep blue and seemingly endless. Light beamed down upon the procession in a show of favour from the gods and gold and sharp metal glinted everywhere, on the horses, on the weapons, in the armour of the soldiers, their generals, and the masses of the audience. You had eyes only for one, however - or two, as they always came. They were impossible to miss even from further away, atop steeds which like the riches and shows of power around them glinted in the light like metal or precious stone: these two men shrouded in gold as if the sun from the sky had embraced them.

Geta, you bitterly tasted his name in your closed mouth. Straight-backed and expressionless upon a white horse, hands too tight on the reins. And Caracalla beside him on a black horse, whose skin was as pale as his brother’s mare and whom you knew was sickly and fragile, but who today nevertheless seemed more lucid and set to his task than you were used to seeing him. And you were used to seeing him, at least more so than most around you here. You, who were not unaccustomed to the palaces, or the company of certain emperors.

The bitterness grew, masking a sense of grief, and you lowered your gaze as they passed. You rather thought that you’d prefer to be missed, as if you weren’t there; you had to be, of course, but that did not mean that you wanted to give them the satisfaction of seeing you.

Them. Him. Caracalla had done nothing to you and held no interest in you. A small miracle, that, some people might have sniggered. No, it was Geta who had earned your scorn, though perhaps he’d not deserved it. Of course you understood, even if such an admission hurt your core. Deep, very deep inside your soul you knew this was how it was always going to end: his class and yours were not compatible, you were not a favourable match. But he had courted you regardless, and you had loved him, you thought. You had wanted to be more than a fleeting springtime entertainment. It wasn’t the position: you would have wanted him even if he’d been a farmer’s son, and not the gilded heir of ascended gods. But then if he had been a farmer’s son, maybe he would have held you now, instead of riding to war. You could have raised chickens together, you thought with a laugh bubbling inside you that had not one thing to do with joy or happiness. It was irony, and more grief: you would have raised chickens with him. You would have skinned rabbits. But of course he had to be the emperor, and your father a first-generation senator in a line descending freshly from freedmen. You were nothing. You were no one.

A plaything, you thought, and then discarded that thought. That felt unfair, more to him than to yourself. At least he’d left you with your honour, so that your disgrace was a passing memory between only the two of you, and left no complications for your future where it now lay. He’d never touched you, but his smiles hurt worse than a fling would have - flings like you knew your friends had had with pretty men, some even from quite notable places in the Roman hierarchy at that. What you’d shared had meant something, but now, under the scorch of summer’s sun, you thought that maybe that only made it worse.

And worse: now your father had found you a match, and your mother was in the process of sewing you a wedding dress. You did not love the man they had chosen, and he did not love you, but so these things went. Geta would return one day and you would be then the honourable wife of a young senator, perhaps the mother of his children already - and what of him? What of Geta? One day he would be the imperial betrothed of somebody worthy of his status, his standing too. You would not speak again with him, if not to exchange empty pleasantries and forced formalities. So much for love and loving, for all that curiosity, the sense of danger and excitement. There would be no poems written about you and him, or the stolen moments you’d had together: those long walks after dark where you’d all but hidden in the gardens, suppressing smiles, suppressing laughs, testing waters with daring words and hints towards vulnerabilities. Who did that with the emperor? Silly girl. Stupid, stupid girl. Your father was right to marry you away from these fanciful, childish dreams.

And still, it hurt so bad to watch him go, side by side with that strange brother of his. He, too, was strange - but maybe one day soon you would learn to forget how that very strangeness had made your breath still in your chest and left you craving for more.

———

PRESENT

For two years, you make for a very dutiful, and very bored, wife. You’re young but your husband’s eyes do not linger on you, and he seems not to care: instead, he cares much for the affections of his friends, and for one of his male servants in particular, whom you first suspect and then know that he has come to love. Love unlike he has ever loved you, but you can’t really be bitter about this, since you’ve never loved him in that way either. And like him, you’ve looked elsewhere - at least in your daydreams. You’ve hardly ceased entertaining the thoughts. Worse now, that is, of course, because you are married and it is your duty to be faithful, and you have no right as he does to stray from that. Men have that funny privilege in society; he is not chained to you like you are to him.

But he is kind, and you are not mistreated, and this is a kind of happiness that you do agree to feel. He is your friend, and where most men would live up to that right which they have to stray, he hasn’t. He might love somebody else, but he is also conscientious, and he doesn’t purposefully hurt you, and though you suspect it might be hard for him he doesn’t indulge the love that he feels. Not physically, anyway: he does spend quite a lot of time in the gardens with his servant, and they laugh a lot, and joke, and hold hands, recite poetry and… probably many other things of the sort that should be reserved for wives or lovers only, but this is not your concern. You’re grateful, and guilty; maybe does this for his own status, his reputation, but you feel like you get in the way of his happiness. And he, for certain, gets in the way of yours, no matter how much love you hold for him as a companion only.

No children for you either. You’ve never so much as tried for them, though there is a consensus between you, unspoken as it is, that you tell others that you have, and do. This is bitter for you also because the blame is then put on you for the failure; it is now you who cannot conceive, but you try not to think of it. You’re both still young - maybe things will change. Maybe people will stop caring. Maybe you will.

But it isn’t the life you wanted. This isn’t the man you wanted. With another, you would put up with most of it, anything except being the less loved, the burden, the baggage. But with… him, you never were any of those things. You were always wanted: a relief, like an oasis in the sands. You remember how it felt, that thrill and excitement.

It’s been two years since the emperors rode to war. You’ve been thinking of Geta more because it’s finally time for their return, though you’ve not made plans to attend the triumph. Your husband’s leg ails, you’ve joked together. Reality is, neither of you wants to attend, and the pain in his hip socket is as good an excuse as any. Woe is the two of you, having to retire from such an occasion.

Of course you want to see him. But you don’t want to see him as he comes home. Something about it makes you fearful. Your emotions, perhaps - or the worry that he might not be the young man who left for war, that young Caesar who did not yet know how to be a real emperor. You miss that boyish Geta whom you got to know for a few short meetings over the span of a few short months: how could he be the same now? War makes men, your father says. The empire has been hopeful that it has made men of its rulers now, that it has shed their irresponsible and flighty natures, their youth.

You dread this. Dread the kind of a stranger who will ride back. Dread that seeing him again might bring to contrast the real misery and drudgery of your life and all the suppressed grief you’ve felt over your marriage, this thing that traps you, despite its comforts and security. You still want the adventure of him, but you worry that it is gone for good now.

At least there has been no talk of marriage for either of them, not that it would change your situation. But it would hurt your feelings more, if people stopped their disapproving mumblings for the time and began instead to debate the match, the future offspring, the suitability of Emperor Geta for someone else, someone you might even know. That would mark the death of a dream - your best escape from the dullness of the everyday, of waking up in the morning to endure your disappointments. This… other life you’ve lived as the empress of Rome for a while now. The sweetness of forbidden what-ifs, the idea, this fancy, that perhaps one day he will come for you, and take you away from all of this. That all this time he has missed you, and missed what was, and could have been, as much as you have.

You are no more a silly, stupid girl; you are now a silly, stupid woman. You cannot cease hoping that he is a man of your own kind also: that he, too, tells himself that these thoughts are ridiculous, and tries to suppress them. But you also hope that he is weaker than you are, because only he holds the power to make these thoughts… real.

You’re hanging laundry when you hear the celebrations, and this bites at your core somehow. Your husband puts his head in through the the doorway, grinning:

“Are you hearing that? It starts,” he says, and you nod and try to grin back at him.

He is your friend. But your heart is hurting, and he doesn’t know that. He knows nothing about Geta, or that you were once - close? Would that be the right word? No, you barely knew him. But you felt like you knew him. Better than most, if any. You felt like you knew the real him, which he never seemed to show to anybody else. Maybe not even his brother - though of them you knew not much at all then, and now even less. Geta would speak carefully of his twin, like saying too many words, or speaking them too raw, might have harmed Caracalla somehow.

You find yourself thinking suddenly that it is surprising that Caracalla is returning with him. You aren’t the only one who’d expected that maybe… only one man would return from this journey. But no accounts had been shared that suggested Caracalla was anything but alive and, if not healthy, then at least no worse than he’d been upon leaving. In fact, you’ve heard precious little word of him at all, so he has slipped your mind: Geta would not have appreciated that, you realise with a hint of a smile. When you look, your husband has disappeared, but you can hear him speaking excitedly indoors, entertaining two other young senators, his friends, as your guests. It isn’t exactly a secret that the senators do not approve of the emperors; they are not so shy about showing it among themselves, either. Nothing outright treasonous, simple disgruntlement - you’ve paid attention, you’ve made sure your house does not end up in the middle of any conspiracies, but you’ve heard of no such things brewing and that, too, has perhaps added to the tediousness of your everyday life. It is the kind of tediousness you’ve been grateful for, but the constant lingering vigilance has not done you any favours. You could go back inside now and join them, and pretend impartiality, or feminine silence. Or…

Later, you might think it must have been a kind of madness that comes over you here. Between the laundry, your own reflections, the laughter of the senators inside, and the thoughts about your past and your conversations with Geta and Geta’s thoughts about the world and his worries and - it is a madness. You know it even as you spin into the room, pull on your palla, wrap it around your head in the fashion of a married woman and march past the crowd in the atrium, where festive food is served in the name of the emperors returning, but in reality mostly for the show of it. You flash your husband a smile and tell him that you will go to the markets; the procession is on, so few will be mulling about making purchases. You will get there while the crowds are gone, and return again when they flow back; it’s the best time to strike a bargain, he knows as much.

And he nods, and you are out, though with no intentions of going to the markets despite heading that way at first. You head that way furiously.

It isn’t fair that only the man gets to decide, is it? In life, in love, in everything. Geta will never come for you, and nothing else of note will ever happen for the rest of your life either if you do not take charge of it. That is a given, a guarantee. You won’t go see him in the procession, that man who returns from war victorious. You won’t wait for him to start missing you either. None of these things will happen.

Instead, you head for the Palatine Hill, and you set to wait where you so often met with him before: in the gardens, with your heart beating, still repeating in your mind the excuses that you’ve given the Praetorians who’ve granted you access inside the complex. You are nobility; you have many good reasons to be there. Still, all of them now echo in your ears as lies. There is no hope that you might catch him here tonight but you are determined to stay anyway: stay until nightfall, when you will hire an escort to get you back home safely, and perhaps the madness will fade or it will resume again as furious the day after, but you will sleep in your bed after dark as every day, and do your tasks when the dawn breaks.

Or.

Or, as it happens, you will meet him here again. He comes at dusk, wrapped in silks that you’ve never seen him wear before: a mixture of rich imperial purple and gold, with embroideries of flowers, vines like fire climbing from the hem of his mantle to his shoulders where ruby-studded brooches hold the whole together. He stills in shock when he sees you, unaccustomed as ever to find that someone else might be there, this place where he has always thought of as his own, as secluded. It’s how you first got to talking: you had found this place away from a banquet to escape the noise, and he had come to you, just as he does now, because he was escaping also. Is he escaping now, or simply weary? You can tell he doesn’t immediately recognise you, that his body goes tense and he tries to reach for the appropriate reaction to being caught so off-guard. You smile, involuntarily, because this is exactly as he was before, when you first met - and this is when he seems to remember you also, as his body softens and his eyes widen ever so slightly.

For a moment you wonder what he will do: join you, as he did before? Turn and leave, because he has felt some other way about you than you have about him, or because he never was very good with confrontation? Or maybe, and this possibility worries you somewhat, he will call for his guards to make you leave. But why would he do that? These gardens are not off limits, and you’ve not parted in anger. You did not part, per se, at all. He just left, and you were married off.

The first option seems to win over, though his body language is hesitant. He walks closer, one hand crossing his body to the elbow of the other, and stops within a distance.

“I wasn’t expecting to see you here again,” he says carefully, as if expecting there to be some plot to this meeting, something nefarious waiting under the surface.

You nod slightly.

“I wasn’t expecting to be here again,” you tell him, and this is sincere though your voice is unreadable. “But it has been a long time since you were in the city, and we were friends once, I thought. So I came to greet you, away from all that noise and…”

Your words fade. You don’t quite know how to continue from here. You didn’t really manage to plot this far, though you’ve supposedly had all the time in the world to do so while sitting here: you couldn’t imagine this conversation, couldn’t imagine how he would react to you, or how you might react to him either. He nods back to you, and takes a couple steps closer, like some kind of a frightened animal you’re trying to coax into trusting you.

“You’ve grown,” he tells you, which is a funny thing to say to someone who has been fully grown for quite a while now.

“They told me war would do the same to you,” you tell him, and realise this might be too bold. You don’t take it back and how could you, anyway? Instead, you hope it’ll spark conversation. Ask the questions you don’t know how to ask otherwise.

As if he’d tell you if he has changed. Maybe he wouldn’t even know. Instead, he takes more steps to you and finally sits by your side on the fountain’s edge, looks over into the water, and touches it. His eyes are on you then: he is not looking at the disturbed surface or the cascading waters. It’s you. He’s searching, and you let him search, but you’re holding your breath. You shouldn’t be here, you realise suddenly. It is madness. You’ve gone mad.

“Did it?” you finally coax him into speaking again when he hasn’t for a while. “I’ve only heard rumours. How does your brother fare?”

Now he shifts, seemingly uncomfortable.

“Let’s say that I am happy to return to Rome,” he says calculatively, “while my brother is not so much.”

You dare to smile a little, though it is a nervous smile. You’re not sure what to make of this answer. You’re not sure what you should say to it, either.

“Is it the creature comforts, or simply being home again?” you finally ask.

He manages a small, fleeting smile in return for you, which is reassuring at least.

“I prefer predictability,” he tells you, though you knew this of him once so it doesn’t surprise you. He did always wish that things were predictable. Stable.

“And your brother the excitement?”

Slowly, he nods.

“As always,” he confirms, and your smile grows.

Something loosens up in your chest, like being relieved of something tied too tight around your ribs. You can breathe again. You want to ask more, hear more. He seems the same as he was then, somehow. Not so very much changed that he might be unrecognisable. And you feel wildly for him now, all of a sudden: like this is exactly what you feared would happen if you went to his triumph and saw him again. You are so angry that tears are crawling into your eyes, not at him but at where your life has taken you instead, away from him: the dullness of routine, the loveless marriage, the two long years that you’ve wasted pretending to be someone you’re not. He wanted you the way that you were: witty, creative, fanciful, at times ambitious, at times profoundly lazy. You wanted him because these things echoed from him also. There was of course his vanity, his incurably anxious nature, his desire to become someone worth remembering which combined so unflatteringly with his resistance to doing anything at all which would have challenged him to grow. Beyond that, there was the particular softness which he tried so hard to repress underneath the rest, that boyish curiosity, the funny way he laughs when excited or nervous. With you, he was ready to crawl out of his shell - do things that he normally did not do, see the world in ways that he otherwise would not. Feel things that he so often otherwise locked away, or pretended not to feel. You were an adventure for him as much as he was one for you: a possibility, an open world that he did not yet know, and which seemed, you thought, unreachable. A fantasy.

Curse be upon the gods that made women subservient to the whims of their fathers. You wanted to ride with him into that unknown and see him when he was at his least comfortable, at his most challenged, at his most anxious - so that you could be a haven for him to take there, and you might be lazy together over long afternoons, and maybe cry when you needed to, which you doubted he’d done a lot after you’d parted. Did soldiers cry, anyway? Was there room for tears in war?

“And… you?” he asks you then, unexpectedly. “Has your life been predictable in my absence? I remember that I left in you in… some haste.”

Now it’s your turn not to answer: you’re not sure how to tell him. You don’t want to tell him. There’s so much to say: so much to explain away, to excuse. Yes, you married, but that is besides the point, your marriage is - unfulfilled, it is not real, but even if it had been you do not want it, you never did, but your father - but what is any of that to him? Would he even hear you on it at all? You are another man’s wife now. Old news. Would he care about that? You don’t want him to care about that, but you still can’t make the words come out.

You can see that this unnerves him. His expression darkens, his brows knit closer, and he pulls his hand back out from the water.

“Speak,” he tells you, and this is not a request.

He is your emperor.

“My father had me married,” you confess, and it is a hollow confession, and a heavy one. “Soon after you left.”

There’s no delay: he stands up, jumps up, like you’ve burned him. His hands fist and he steps away and looks half as if he’s going to run, and half as if he wants to strike you, but you realise this is not true. Instead his whole body is tense like he’s prepared to defend himself, but he is not making the first strike, nor planning it.

This… delights you, even though your heart is racing and aching. It’s an odd sensation, like the world is suddenly very slow. And what you’re thinking is two things at once: one, that you have to explain, you need to get the chance, and all the words are rushing through your mind as you’re trying to pick the right ones to make him understand. Two, maybe you always feared - the twins have a cruel reputation, after all. That maybe he might strike you. Maybe he would be that kind of a man to a woman. But he has not, and you do not fear that now. The thought doesn’t seem to have occurred to him at all, though of course he could. You’ve offended. You’ve wounded him, even if that has been with heartache only.

That, too, you’re realising half-consciously at once. It is heartache that he feels, and that is a relief to you. A hope.

You don’t get any words out before he barks out some of his own, however.

“Wedded? You’ve wedded. And here you are, in our gardens - where is your man? Are you trying to trick me? Dishonour me?”

Dishonour him? You almost laugh: what dishonour is there in this for him? He is the emperor. If he wanted another man’s wife he could have her and no one could say a word against it. Your honour is on the line here. You are to be faithful and never stray. He is an unmarried man, the ruler of the world, he has no such obligations.

But you don’t say this to him, though it confuses you. Instead you say: “It is a sham, Emperor. It has never been put to fruition. I’ve no intent to dishonour you! Nor to trick you - I’ve…”

You want to say that you’ve missed him, but you don’t quite get the words out. His eyes are so clear, you know that there are tears in them, but he’s still backing away from you with his hand between the two of you as if to keep you apart. And where is his guard? Are they watching? Listening?

“I’d never want to hurt you,” you finally conclude, your voice shivering strangely as you confess this.

You don’t. You don’t want to hurt him. But you are hurting, and you don’t know how to tell him this. Or how to tell it to anyone, in truth, because who would listen to you? How miserable it is to watch your life pass you by, when you have nothing that you wished for from it and cannot even hope to reach for anything more? You don’t even have the right to complain: all is well for you, you are not abused, you are not mistrusted, you can love your husband and he loves you in return even if it is never the way that you would need it to be. You do not have a cruel man - in fact, you do not have a man at all, or so it feels like, you only have a friend whom you are chained to. Only in the eyes of others are you wedded, and you do not wish to be. You want something real, and - how unfair is it really that the only real thing you have ever had came from this man whom you cannot have? You do not have the status, and now you are somebody else’s by obligation alone. Of course he should wish for a woman who is fresh and new and beautiful and unclaimed, and of a higher breeding than you are. There is grief to these thoughts so painful that it threatens to double you over, and now you have tears in your eyes too, just as he does.

But he hasn’t fled yet, and so you hope that you are wrong, with your heart scarcely even beating, or your breath passing from your lungs.

“You should be ashamed,” he says, his voice so strained you think that he might cry, the way that children cry, which is pure and sincere to a point that you might not be able to endure it without breaking down yourself. “Coming here - wedded - another man’s wife. To me. For what purpose? To what end.”

He wipes his face angrily to the back of his hand and twitches to turn but stops.

“Do you not see that my day has been long?” he asks in a whimper trying to become a snarl. “Or do you simply not care?”

These last words are childlike also, vibrating with the sobs stuck in his throat.

You make a move to approach, and he makes a move as if you’ve turned to strike him. You wonder briefly if this is something he fears too: if you share that worry, when others are upset.

“I’m sorry,” you say, your voice softened, quiet, but somewhat frightened still. “I wanted to see you. It’s been - these past two years - like the summer season without a drop of rain. I can’t survive it. I try but I don’t have the strength. And you coming back, I… I only wanted to feel alive again. The way you made me feel alive when - before. Before you left. It…”

Was so much, but you don’t know how to summarise that in any few words. It would need a full night to recount, or more; how alive you felt. How much like a bonfire lighting up the night, consuming with endless hunger. How unsated you felt after it was over. And how dreadful, dreadful his absence has been.

“Don’t go?” you finally manage to choke out.

He twitches again, and then, at last, his fists unravel, white fingers turning bright red with blush though now that the sun is setting the colours are fading also.

“Why?” he asks, his voice both defeated and pleading for a reason. A good one, you fear.

“Because I’ve missed you so much,” you finally let it out.

It’s not a good reason. It never was. For being here, or for him staying: but it is the truth. And for that, he finally relaxes. His gaze falls and so do the tears in it, two drops into the grass beneath. Moments pass, and in that stillness you see behind him his guards - he is not alone, he did not come here without any protection. The men stand close enough to have seen all of this, to have heard, and now one of them is resting his weight ever so subtly to his right leg, making himself visible to you as he shifts. You try not to acknowledge him or the other, pretend again that you never saw them, or that they were never there. This is shameful. For you both, perhaps.

“A - sham,” Geta repeats after a long time. Hesitant. Disbelieving.

“Yes,” you say but your word is just a hoarse exhale; “It is not… he does not love me. He cannot. He has never touched me. I would swear this upon the gods.”

“Then why have you stayed? You have the right to divorce.”

You want to laugh. You do, a little, a small snicker turning into a snort because you tried so hard to suppress it, and then you cover your mouth and nose with the back of your hand and look away. It’s not a happy laugh.

“To what end?” you ask, and the desperation you’ve felt this whole time breaks through your voice, cracking it. “Who will be better for me? He is not a cruel man. I do not love him and he does not love me and he will not make a true wife of me, but I am treated well, and there is no one else who would have me. No one else who would…”

You swallow abruptly, shake your head. You can’t tell Geta this. You shouldn’t. But it begins to trickle out anyway, and then comes as a burst: “No one who has ever made me feel the way that you did, and it is you I cannot have. So why run from what is not misery? But I am miserable. I am unloved and bored and I - I cannot breathe. It is so dull. My life is… I am already dead, the way that I’ve lived these two years. Dead. And for that I’ve come to you, because I needed to breathe again, and taste cold water in this dry heat, and… if only just to remember what it was like, when we shared these gardens, and some secrets besides.”

Something gives way in your chest again and you breathe out heavily when he steps towards you, even if it is not a complete motion, and you do not meet for it. Tears are coming now, pouring onto your face but at least you hold onto your dignity: you’re not sobbing, and you feel a little better when he wipes another tear from his own face also. It reminds you of how you felt when you first fell for him, and you’d laugh about how easy it was to become tearful with one another, when nowhere else it felt safe to do so.

He’s hesitating and you wish he wasn’t. You need him to need relief and release as much as you do: you need him to have felt at least a little the same as you did. But he’s been busy; he’s been free. Something you’ve never been, trapped in the city and its men’s politics. You never had other freedom but here, in these gardens, when at night everything felt more… real. When you felt more real, and he was just a young man, and not an emperor. How much you hoped you’d get to know him then.

“And you left,” you finally manage to speak again. “What was I supposed to do? You never said - you never said that I should wait. One word would have done. My father would have never… if he had thought - that there was any reason…”

Suddenly, he’s clasped your wrist in his hand. He lifts yours and holds it in the space between your bodies and you notice your breath hitched audibly to this only from the echo of it in your ears. His fingers crawl along your hand and end up holding yours together, and your thumb twitches to return that hold, but never quite manages it.

You realise what you’ve done. It’s voiced now, and even if you never outright spoke the words your meaning was clear. You’ve said it: if he had married you instead. If he had gone to your father and asked for you. If he hadn’t left you, then none of this misery would be happening. And he would not be hurt. Gods, is he hurt? For you? Or maybe he really is tired, and this is a complication he never asked for, and you are stupid - but - no. He has a hurt look on his face, and not one of annoyance or irritation, or even one that would imply that he’s simply angry that one of his entertainments has been taken from him. The tears are still there, lining his dark eyes.

“I… did not have time to think of it,” he says then, quietly, so quietly that the words cannot carry to his guards. “I knew that I was leaving the whole time that we… but I could not give your father any word, nor you, and I - I had to leave. I had to. Do you understand that?”

You want to shake your head, but instead you nod. He is the emperor. His life is not simple, or boring, or confined. Not like yours is.

“More so, I…”

He hesitates here, lowers his gaze. His mouth tenses into a white line until he runs the tip of his tongue over his lips and looks away, and braziers from further away reflect from his gaze as it avoids yours.

“I could not make any such decisions with haste. It would not have served… you, any more than it served me. I was leaving. I had to leave, and… what then?”

There are unspoken things there, you can hear them still rattling about, trying to break free. But he’s holding onto them firmly and in the end you have to raise your hand to cover the one he’s holding yours with, because his grip is too firm and it hurts your fingers. He jumps a little to your touch, lifts his gaze, examines you before making a sound as he realises this: his grip loosens, but you don’t let him withdraw.

“What then?” you ask as quietly as he spoke before, and he shakes his head. “Speak to me; tell me of the things that worried you.”

He lets out a small laugh: bitter, like you’ve been for these past years.

“Maybe I would change my mind,” he says first, and then shakes his head again, this time with more vigour. “No. What if you would change yours? I knew I might be gone for years, and the only thing I might have done is send you letters. I did not, because I barely knew your name, or your house’s name, and - I did not want, one day, to receive word that you had met someone new. Someone who had married you first. Do you - do you know at all… to find you here, waiting, only to hear that…”

Now, though you have no such permission and no such privilege, you press your hand to his face when he tries to look away and he grasps that wrist also as you do so, but does not pull your hand away. Instead he leans his head into it and closes his eyes: his brows knit, his face looks pained for a while.

“The months have been very long. The years… The journey of it all,” he finishes, and you nod.

“I would have waited for you,” you promise him, though you fear it’s taken too long. “I would have waited for you for years and years. To feel what I felt here again, by your side. Is it too late now? If I was mistaken, and you did wish to take me as your own, and… I could have told this to my father, though he might have thought it a girl’s folly to speak such things, had your own word not backed mine.”

“I was afraid.”

“Of what?”

He shakes his head for the third time and steps away from you, his hand still holding yours as he retreats. He squeezes it and lets both down, though your fingers linger locked in the middle.

“There are so many things,” he says then, and pulls at your hand. “Walk with me. As we used to then.”

———

You learn of his worries: that despite his man’s age, he did not think himself then so mature as to take a wife. The pressures of the court were making it worse - the expectations, the demands, the offers from notable families which he kept declining without being able to even consider them through, because they frightened him. And though when he did think of the matter and only one woman came to his mind, he was still worried that his brother might see you as something like competition, a threat to his position on the throne or between the two of them as brothers, or if not you directly, then any child you might conceive together with Geta like an usurper to his place. He also feared that you would not want to be his empress at all, and that he would either face humiliation when you would reject him, or else that your marriage would grow cold and the thrill of the nights you’d shared together would turn to ash and dust when tamed and brought inside from underneath the stars.

As you walk together again he remembers how to smile, and to laugh, and you smile and laugh with him, and then you are both very serious, and you speak of it: what you wanted then, and how in your unvoiced dreams you thought this reunion might go, or hoped, even if you didn’t dare to name the feeling that with how impossible it seemed that these dreams would ever come true. You even tell him how much you wanted to hate him, for leaving and for not wanting you, and how you ended up there in the gardens again, desperately hoping that he might appear despite professing such hatred. He seems appalled at first, and then laughs.

“It’s not proper,” he says softly when you reach the open doors back inside the palace complex, “for a woman to be out so late, and with a man no less. I shall call you a carriage, and - I should write to your father, and then, should all go well, to your husband as well. He need not be humiliated, but your marriage is void unless he consummates it. Do not invite such an act now, and wait for my word. Will you do this for me?”

You promise him this, and not much later, you sit in the carriage he promised you, on the paved road down from the imperial hill down toward the forum, and through that beating heart of the city, toward home. When you reach the villa, your husband waits for you at the door, and you don’t know what to say to him - until inside, you tell him everything. You don’t want to lie. It’s too big of a secret to keep, and too dangerous. And he is your friend. You hope that he is still, even now.

So you lay it out plainly: how you feel, and how you’ve felt, and what you know about him, his feelings and the lack thereof which concern yourself, and how these are all things that you cannot endure. Not anymore. He listens, and you cry together, but the only anger he musters is not for you but for the man you’ve come to favour instead. Like most senators, he finds Emperor Geta utterly lacking in the qualities that should make for a strong leader and a man, though he admits that your affections do not surprise him entirely. You promise that if the gods are to favour your union to the emperor, then you will try to make him better, but both of you know that you can’t really make that promise. You promise him also with more conviction that you’ll keep all of his secrets, and that you’ll never forget what you’ve learned while being his companion, even if you never really became his wife: that you have loyalty to him, and your shared ideals, and even if you part ways that will not mean that you wish to throw those things away. He seems content with that, and you hope that maybe this means that you will not lose him as a friend, because you have loved him, and laughed with him, and shared good times with him. It feels that neither of you has ever truly found any shred of happiness beyond convenience in this union, and so the freedom to abandon the pretenses should only strengthen you both.

Though the conversation is not so painful as you feared you both cry anyway, and the night is unhappy, and quiet, and full of trepidation. You do not share your bed, and when morning breaks, you take a carriage back to your father’s house.

He seems confused to receive you, and so does your mother. You’ve not seen them so much since you left their house, perhaps out of shame, or because you’ve always felt as if you were lying to them, or maybe feared that being back with them might break you out of your silence and you would fall apart somehow, pleading them that you might get to stay. You wouldn’t have known then how to explain it: why you wanted to escape, when nothing was so direly wrong. Now you tell them only to expect a letter from the emperor, and that you should not speak more of it before then, and for a while they both probably think that your husband will be tried of treason or some other terrible thing, but you trust Geta to make haste with his letters.

He doesn’t. You stay a week before the messenger reaches you, despite your father’s house standing not too far from the city’s centre. But then, what do you know of imperial messaging? Perhaps this is hurried for him, and for what it’s worth, he is thorough, though to the point also. Your father sits in silence with the message while the messenger, a young Praetorian soldier, stands waiting for what seems to be a mandatory immediate response to be delivered back to the palaces. Your body grows cold and you find your stomach rebelling, but you stand in silence also, by the wall, your hands crossed to your front, while your mother lays her hand on your shoulder.

Then, finally, your father budges: he folds the message and tells the messenger only one thing.

“We are the emperor’s faithful servants,” he says, and seems to shake as he continues: “You may tell him this union has our blessing.”

———

So this is how you become the empress to one of the two emperors of Rome, and for a full month, the world celebrates you. It is dizzying, and you worry - but you don’t feel a weight upon you like you did before, not once, though the fear of stepping into your new role is familiarly terrifying still. Somehow in the midst of it, Geta makes you feel as if your duty is already done, like you have, by simply receiving these blessings with him, fulfilled the expectations that he had for you. More may await, and you know this, but you await this with elation for a change, and you receive the blessings of the gods by his side trying to hold onto the moment: everything feels so unreal, the change from the dreariness of your life just two months ago to now, where suddenly all is filled to the brim with colour and anticipation and excitement. Your wedding is a contrast to the end of summer, an extension of it in all of its brilliance.

This union is not left unconsummated either, though you’d not make more of a mention of that in public. It feels a good secret to keep between the two of you alone, and you hold the memory close to your heart, where it warms and thrills and embarrasses you in equal measure. Life afterwards remains as odd and vivid and on the skin: you learn, bit by bit, to be the empress, to navigate the palaces, and, finally, to know the strange twin of your husband also. On the night of his return Geta had told you that he had worried of how Caracalla might receive you, but he had not brought it up since. Now that you settle into their everyday, Caracalla is at best fleetingly curious, and then already moving onto the next thing. He drags Geta along himself and then doesn’t, and then does again, and at night when Geta settles beside you, you can both laugh about it. With Geta, Caracalla will be your family too, in one way or another - but getting out of Rome and on the road for a while seems to have made him less fidgety, and much less unpredictable. The addition of you into his life hasn’t seemed to upset him much. You find him most often in the presence of his generals, seated on some map table debating impossible campaigns and claiming glories surely soon to manifest. He does not bother you, and you don’t seem to bother him, but in Geta you sense a sort of a relief that comes from having someone beyond his brother to confide in. Someone he gets to keep to himself, at least for the main part; it feels as if this is new to him, and you’re happy to indulge it.

One morning, no more than three months after your wedding, you wake up into the hazy blue moment just before dawn’s break, a few solitary moments left to yourself and your beloved before the servants come to stir you from sleep. And there, in that silence and calm, watching the curtains flow in a soft breeze of air, you think of the girl you once were, the girl who dreamed about love and worried about her future, about the man she might have to marry one day. Looking at Geta still sleeping beside you, his face for once void of stress and looking so young again, you tell that girl not to worry: one day she will love the ruler of the world, and have her love returned in kind.

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