ANTONY.
Huh. He punctuates it with a swill of air, like mouthing a comma.
Must be said, it’s nothing short of hysterical to see Octavian bite. He really clamps down his jaw, tries to repay him in kind. He must recognise the futility of it. He must’ve seen Dolabella. Bloody piss-poor excuse for a budding Media Analyst he’d be—or whatever the fuck Julius is enrolling the hired help in these days—if he hadn’t seen Dolabella; whole Commonwealth saw it. Even Channel Five gave it a whirl, got in on the fun, spent the afternoon acting like they knew a fig about politics.
(If the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland didn’t know the name Marcus Antony before, they do now. Marcus Antony had enacted wholesale slaughter on the House floor, made polemic his backsword.)
Octavian must have seen the way he flays words until they’re bruised, then. Scalped until only belly and blood remains. He might be good at snide remarks, swashing the vitriol—
But Antony is better.
He waits, angled forward. They’re close enough to trade whispers, but the gesture is nothing more than static, skin sloughed into place. Antony lowers himself back into the leather.
“Oh?” He raises a brow and wipes the sweat from his forehead, trying to seem gentlemanly about it. In a way, he does—seem gentlemanly. Marcus Antony has never seemed anything less. The moisture catches in the light, shimmers. His curls stick to it. “And what does a normal person sound like?” He points the words back at Octavian, but he doesn’t actually look at him.
(It’s inference enough.)
He never tires of this: playing the butcher, paying somebody back in their own coin.
Antony crosses his arms over his chest. He gives the handiwork a once-over, like there’s a scalpel in his mouth. He watches Octavian scour at his shame with a steel-wool sponge, skinned and stripped, rubbing at the membrane until it’s worn down—until looks like diplomacy, like dignity. (It reminds him of Caesar. He’ll never admit it, but it reminds him of Caesar. Subtlety in the Commons, sleight of hand in the Cabinet Room—shine and fucking shellac, smothering innards with a topcoat. Taught from labour’s first throes how to survive the blood sport.)
He has no patience for it. And tonight, patience is like pinching pennies.
(He can feel himself crashing: from the pills, from the upchuck and chunder of adrenaline, from the 36-hour days an ailing Cinna has him pulling, green about the gills in Switzerland. Bloke owes him eight personal favours for tonight alone. Here’s one: drop dead, mate. He’s not greedy, doesn’t ask for much. He’s good with just the one.)
He might go on, really chew him out, but the supplication genuinely knocks him sideways. It reads desperate, like an ace in the hole, the ingénue’s last expedient, which is—good, really. In any case, all he can think about it how every venule is throbbing away at his throat, like a fucking Stradivarius of arterial strings plucked by the most snockered hand at the orchestra. The metre operates on instinct alone. With Antony, that’s downright dangerous.
Occupational Health and Safety Division, lobbed off the highest point of the Royal Albert Hall.
Antony forces his thumb into the vein, all ceremony. Like this is all just standard procedure: the red-tape, a slivering of the cord. He stops the circulation. Waits, tapping his forefinger at the other side of his throat. He keeps his eye on Octavian all the while.
He releases the vein, restarts the flow.
“Alright—” he concedes, flapping a hand about. “Alright, fine. Christ, Augustus, don’t have an aneurysm. I’m not spending the rest of my morning checking you into the fucking St. Thomas just because you couldn’t hack it. Just stay upright, for—” he sweeps the paper into his hands, “Like, five minutes. Then, go where you want. Home, if you like.”
He starts to read. Takes his pen in hand and taps to the right of his chin with it, metrical.
It starts by paying homage, as all eulogies do—even political ones. Runs through all the boons he’s given the people: shortening of the deficit, the Asylum Seekers Bill, swelling the living-wage. He makes things personal, too—scores for the angle of a leader lost, rather than a father. Someone will need to fill the space Cinna left behind. Caesar all but implies it’ll be him.
Antony drags the nub of his pen over it, because he can.
He hums in agreement.
Antony looks up from the pages, catches Octavian’s eye and clarifies: “It’s good. Hits all the points: ergonomic, unassuming. Intention is clear, too, and it’ll go right over Middle England’s head.” He doesn’t smile, exactly, but he plays nice. Nice enough, at least, because he really can’t help himself—
“Needs a bit of the nip and tuck, of course. Home repairs and what have you. I’ll do those.” He pauses, scanning his eyes down the margin one last time. “Still, solid stuff.”
He rustles the papers in hand, fan-like, collecting them at his knee.
And then, tangentially: “Cicero’ll fucking hate it.”
He says it more to himself than Octavian. He doesn’t bother to stifle the laugh. There’s no love lost between them: the ideological slanging match between Antony and Cicero is just about the worst kept party-political secret in Westminster. Antony is all verve and veal, the hulled skin of it. Cicero is—a glorified lapdog, basically. Licks up the spittle. They couldn’t be more at odds with each other; at each other’s throats, wrangling like cat and dog.
(He has an insufferable habit of materialising, by inexplicable means, at Caesar’s elbow; petitioning him, imploring him. Begging him, even, because the sod’s by no means above it. Antony always makes a point to catch his eye. Cicero swallows; thick, mucoid. Steps away. But I default to you, Caesar, of course. You know best.)
Cicero skulks away, with his tail between his legs.
“Course, if you want to be anything in politics, you won’t care about that.” He addresses Octavian directly this time. “Fucker’s been trying to mollycoddle his way into a prime Cabinet spot for years, thinks the way to go about it is to throw fucking bouquets at the dead. Shame, really. All that elbow grease he put in with Cinna just for Julius to take the helm.” He flings the pen from between his fingers, and it lands with a smack on the laminate. Grinds into the silence, like a serrated edge. “So—as good a benchmark as any, eh? If Cicero hates it, you know you’re acting in good conscience. That’s the yardstick.”
He balances his right ankle on his left thigh. It takes up a large stretch of the sofa. On any other night, it’d be a study in surfeit; the debris of waste, made real. Instead, he looks like he might actually clonk out—there, on the sofa, with red marks still to make. “You must have heard him talk, right?”
He scoffs; because, where Cicero’s concerned, Antony can’t do any different. It seems to wake him up a bit. “Can’t get through a speech without laying it on with a trowel. Loves to get on his knees and grovel, that one.”
Antony looks up. A beat goes by, not put into words.
“Anyway.” He loosens his shirt collar, absolving the noose. “You can go now, if you want.” The fabric opens up at the bottom of his throat. When he talks, the skin bobs up and down. “I’ll have Julius’ driver take you.”
He should thank him. He might, if this had anything to do with praise.
Antony chops the paper in fine strips of red. He garnishes it with some comments, and they pass entirely through Octavian; not audible, but tactile. He catches them in the pit of his chest. Antony sends him a look. Sly, benevolent. The man blinks too late. Like everything is swirled with water and slathered in oil, and the proportions slew when you bring them closer.
It’s hard to focus on angles and language.
Octavian doesn’t have to hear him to understand: it’s not praise.
The pen drops with the usual dramatism. It rolls center-stage, away from the space they share, and only stops when the parquet flattens. When it’s as far from them as they are from each other. Octavian stares at it and tries to remember what he’s doing here.
Which is to say, what he’s doing here, still.
Gratitude, then. Gratitude must be the next step in whatever motions they’re enacting; vulnerability peep show, master and apprentice. Octavian listens to him, all Bond and Moneypenny. He thinks: good Lord, this is the advice hour, isn’t it? Here come the would-be secrets of the trade. He might as well plink them down the chimney.
Antony must be in a state, to impart any know-how at all. Perhaps he’s only doing it because he believes it’s wasted candy, ether way; that Octavian will not go far enough to remember it.
Kid’s already cracking, isn’t he? Broken down before he’s broken in. Sign of the times.
It’s funny, how he gleaned better intel for less.
He has a feeling he should capitalize on it. Wring the moment for what it’s worth. People wager pounds of flesh, these days, just to get Marcus on a couch. They hope for a perch not unlike this one; a pristine room, evangelizing wisdom. Swiping his hand over their work, the last word and last deed of it, and rendering it worthy. Plucking them from ignominy. Polishing the brass. Then, at last: showing them the cake. The edge of it, mind; not the slice.
People still believe it’s about them.
“No,” Octavian says, not really thinking before the pause. This is the first time he dared to utter that in Antony’s presence—to Antony’s face. The word jumps oddly between them; like spilled paper clips, like a lunge for equal standing. He backpedals. God forbid he sets a precedent for denial. Marcus Antony is bad enough when he’s being indulged.
“No, I mean– the driver can’t do it. He brought me here, then Julius sent him off. Fitzrovia is to be cordoned for the night.” He gives a flourish; his hand draws an imaginary rope in the air. “No one in or out. You’re stuck with me. And, well, them.” A snap of his head. The side office is still whirring with voices. He hoped they would’ve clammed up by now, drowned in monosodium glutamate and Raya matches. Octavian sneers. It lacks the usual sharpness. He doesn’t have it in him to exaggerate something as obvious as contempt. Prioritizing his energy, on weeks like these, is a top-down affair. Antony should try it.
“I think Julius expected this to take more time. He always does, somehow.”
He pulls at the knot in his collar. His fingers work the hitch wider, pad snagging on a loose button, and tug it off. He’s nearly thankful for that second of darkness. Until the shirt rolls over his head, he doesn’t have to think about this room. He doesn’t have to be in it. The proximity, the lethargy in here. Like anything is permissible, and nothing is.
“We’d do well not to fall asleep. Last time we caught a shut-eye on an election year, Cinna’s son got his face in the cookie jar. Seizure all the way in sunny Germany. The Chancellor was beaming. I never thought I’d see Julius eat so much shit as he did to put that in the post.”
Octavian wonders, briefly, with a spike of awareness like setting your foot wrong, whether Antony knew Lucius Cinna Jr. Whether they split the same lines of Charlie, or hid their own number of sordid stories in local news. Whether they fucked. There’s an image, he thinks.
It isn’t a thought he expected to have. Or even knew he could.
It’s to do with this room; this night, that magnifies and magnetizes everything, like chemistry hacked in close quarters. The heat, the stilted creaks they made across leather, Antony’s eyes: it was endurable. He’s weathered worse. The intensity turned down a degree or two while Octavian was still writing. Now, he senses all these details gathering at his ankle, warming up the bone. Ready to spring in full force.
Without the shirt and the sweater, he’s only in a gray tee. It might not even be his own; Horace left a bunch hanging around. His parents bought them by the pound each Christmas. It should feel vulnerable, if vulnerability wasn’t half the point of being here. Of lingering and lounging.
“Did you lay eyes on Cicero today? Or Julius, for that matter? Are they still upstairs?”
He gives a small, inquiring hum. It makes something in his jaw hurt. His neck finds the back of the couch and pushes against it until it stills.
“If you let them keep on, you know, they’ll just spin in circles. Cicero brings out something oddly accommodating in him. I think he reminds Julius of the reason he got in politics; not the who, so much as the why. Cicero is the cutout of what he despises. So when he’s around him, he goes... the opposite way.” Octavian shrugs, weakly. He can’t bear to sense his own spine. “Because this is Julius we’re talking about, you understand, so he recognizes that in himself. He wants to curb the prejudcie before it starts, bipartisan bloody Messiah that he is. So he stubs his own toe tripping to hear Cicero out. More than he would for any of the other ones.” Quietly, these last words. His voice drops and darkens over them. “The ones that matter, I mean. Scipio. Livius. Not that he’ll listen to me say it.”Â
And then he waves his hand, because the air is getting unbreathable again. His vision thins at the edges. Octavian distracts himself from the dizziness and the nausea, and the disembodied feeling of a pressure bearing down from above, by imagining what Antony might say if he asked for a glass of water. It depends, he supposes, on what breakable objects are near.
His wrists settle on his chest. They form a cross, of sorts. The cotton makes the skin catch static. He looks at Antony. Then away.
“It’s just, oh, you know, such a stark lesson in what to avoid. He dislikes Cicero and dislikes himself for it. He hates this country and hates himself for it. So he overcompensates by listening twice as hard. He bends over to work with all of them, but doesn’t, of course, let any at the table. It’s smart and it isn’t. It leaves too much room for mistakes.” Octavian closes his eyes. Turns his cheek just so. “Call that the final supper for the decadent west.”
He laughs, hardly loud enough for the sound to slide past his lips. His head nudges upstairs. “And call that team stasis for beginners. Where synergy ends and being played for a dupe begins. It’s ridiculous, the way Tullius goes at it. Like a man doing a bit for a New Year’s gaff. Walking us all through the same sketch of himself. When we were at the lake together last year, Cornelia kept calling him Inspector Morse. He didn’t have the faintest what she was about. And this is Cornelia we’re dealing with, here. Hardly the litmus test on keeping up with the masses.”
He pushes up on his elbows. It brings him closer to Antony, but at a strange point of contact: sides, not heads. He opens his mouth. Closes it, just slow enough.
“The lake. Have you ever been?”
