Work Text:
191 AD
The door was barely open by a crack when Geta’s world was knocked sideways by a heavy impact. It was a flur of golden hair, the thick smell of alcohol, and the sound of hard wood against marble frames.
“Hide me,” Caracalla’s voice hushed, urgently, as packed with fear as it could have possibly been.
Already, Geta’s limbs had lost feeling, if not for the creeping invasion of ice into his fingers and toes. He’d only half-turned to follow his brother, but his words changed his mind: instead, he needed to act as if no one had come in. He didn’t have long. With stiff knees and wandering hands he lowered himself onto the floor, placed his weight halfway on a pillow, and grabbed the nearest object he could reach for. A book, though he couldn’t tell which one as the covers were nothing but the uniform dark sheen of leather in the low light, and the text blurred upon the pages he opened.
It wasn’t long when the shout came. Like cold water trickling down his body, he was already covered in sweat, eyes wide, heart racing. His hands gripped the book tighter as he tried to lower his gaze. Time had slowed, become a heartbeat-by-heartbeat nightmare within his consciousness, and his throat was already constricted. Why did his idiot brother have to bring this on them again? He wanted to cry, go hide wherever it was that Caracalla had slipped, but the door had now been thrown open again.
The following words, if there were words in those sounds at all, came to him like through a dream. Hesitantly, he rose from his seat, as if he hadn’t just gotten down there. Bowed; lowered his gaze.
No, father. I have not seen him.
You lie, Geta. Where is he? Where is your brother?
I would not lie to you.
You lie to me. You always lie to me. Now tell me - or you will pay in his stead.
No, I promise. I swear. I’ve not seen him tonight.
Nothing he said or did mattered. It never mattered. His knee hit the floor with the weight of the strike upon his jaw, and his whole mouth was an echo of it, no feeling to it beyond the pins and needles and the sensation like a rush in his ears but felt in the flesh instead; one eye blind, for just a moment. When his breath hitched, he could feel a trickle of blood mixed with spittle spill down the side of his mouth. More was coming out of his nose, but this was all for tonight. He’d convinced the emperor, somehow, with his spineless untruths, or his unwavering refusal to look him in the eye, or just because he’d not pissed himself with fear this time.
It was a long time before anything in the room moved again, or outside. Once more, Geta wondered what the function of the guard was: they did not protect them, and would not have intervened had the emperor put both his sons against the wall and beaten them lifeless. At the same time, none of the ones in the corridor had volunteered Caracalla’s location, either. They’d had to have seen him running in mere moments before - stumbling drunk - but none of them had spoken a word, and the emperor had not asked.
Slowly, Geta turned on his one knee, looking about the room. That was all he had the courage for. Any other movement might have made a sound; anything more rash than that might have revealed to some force which still lingered with him that he’d kept a secret, and if he revealed it to anyone, it would bring their father back in to do so much worse than this.
The cloth covering his bed’s frame shifted, and slim, pale fingers pushed it up from the bottom. Caracalla’s eyes were just as wide as Geta’s, his expression wild, but not empty as it sometimes went when this happened. There was still life to him.
“What did you do?” Geta mouthed, pressing his knuckles to his mouth to stymie the blood from the corner of his lip.
It was just the lip, and some of the cheek, and some scrapes on his tongue where his teeth had bitten into it. The blood from his nose had ceased at a single drop, which was now sticky and thick around the curve of his mouth. His head ached worse than the jaw did. Caracalla took a long time before answering: he, too, seemed to be waiting for the return of the heavy steps in the corridor, but all was silent. Then, very carefully, he pulled himself out and crawled to Geta’s side. His whole body was shaking, but Geta’s wasn’t. All that tension in him was still holding his muscles taut and firm, his being a bastion of preparedness for more strikes, more pain, so as to not fall when they came. Instead, he had his brother’s drunken hands on him, his wine-stained breath upon his skin, and the heat of an embrace. His hand could barely follow orders when he brought it around Caracalla’s shape.
“Nothing,” his twin’s breathy voice told the bottom of his ear, every syllable a terrible itch against his neck.
“Tell me,” Geta hissed back, “Or I will go to him and tell him I found you.”
“You’d not do it. He will kill me. Geta, I think he will kill me.”
As if of its own volition, Geta’s hand brushed over Caracalla’s back, over and over again, along the spine and across every shivering inch that he could reach. His own tension was breaking: it was just the two of them now, again, as it had been meant to be. His twin was warm, alive, and terrified - this was something he knew how to manage. Carefully he brought his other arm around him, then his hands to his shoulders, and held him tight for a moment. This time he had nothing left for his own blood but to suck it in and swallow it; it tasted salty, somehow.
“What did you do, you idiot?” he asked again, fingers curling into the fabric beneath his grip.
“Nothing.”
“Stop telling me you did nothing. He only gets this way when you do something.”
“I left. I just left.”
“And went where?”
Caracalla swallowed.
“Away,” he said evasively.
Geta had had enough of it. His fingers fisted into his brother’s hair, the same burnished gold as his own, and he tugged his head back until a whimper escaped Caracalla and he was forced to retreat from where he’d latched onto Geta’s body. His blue eyes were so watery, though between the two of them, he’d barely felt any pain at all.
“Ow! Stop - I went out - to see the wolves,” Caracalla admitted, his hand searching for Geta’s and trying in vain to get a good grip.
“Can you not be sated with the slaves?” Geta asked, feeling a faint echo of their father’s rage brewing within him. “Do you have to sneak out for it? What is so different about -“
“I’m tired of the palace! I want to go out. I want to live, Geta, I want to feel alive, we’re almost men now and -“
“And what? You will never become a man,” Geta growled at him, still too afraid to speak out loud but growing less and less capable of holding his tone down, “if our father kills you because you’ve developed such a taste for the common whores.”
His hand twitched with anger, and the uncontrolled way in which it brought Caracalla’s head back again made his heart still in fright for a beat. He hadn’t intended to really hurt him - and so he released him immediately, and with a low groan, Caracalla slid off him and into a hunched pile on the floor, hand over the back of his neck and eyes dark with resentment when he looked at Geta from there.
“Why’d you do that?” he asked, slurring a little.
“Because,” Geta started, but he wasn’t sure. He’d just been too angry to keep his self-control. He’d pulled too hard because he’d needed to move. He was still scared, and his body wasn’t really listening to him. Any of those reasons would have done, but they were excuses. He reached for a lie instead: “Because you deserved it. Do you hear me? You need to stop - anything could happen to you out there.”
“No one knows who I am,” Caracalla snapped. “I change my clothes outside, dirty my hair, I look like anybody else.”
“That’s not what I mean,” Geta insisted. “I don’t care if they don’t know who you are, you’re still alone, you carry gold with you - if anybody saw you exchange those coins - where do you even go for your whores? Do the brothels know how much you have on you? Besides, you’re small, and - maybe someone in a place like that finds you to his liking. Have you thought about that?”
To his immense frustration, the idea made his brother grin and chuckle.
“If I can’t say no, it doesn’t really count, does it?”
“I’ve changed my mind,” Geta announced; “You should die. Go ahead, then. Go get yourself ruined, and let your nameless, desecrated body rot in the Tiber. I won’t save you there and maybe after you’re gone our father will think twice about striking me when I am the only thing he has left for his legacy.”
A pout; he already regretted saying it. The thought alone made his insides hurt horribly in ways that their father could rarely inflict upon him. Sighing, he reached out his hand again, left it hanging between them. With all the grace of his drunken coordination, Caracalla managed to grab it, and then pull him closer by it. He was smiling again, something coy about the way he looked.
“You don’t know what you’re missing out on,” he said quietly.
“Nothing worth dying for.”
“How would you know when you’ve never done it? But I’m back now, so I really don’t know what he’s that mad for, anyway. I'm a man, and men do what they must for pleasure.”
And then he yawned, tongue stained purple with the cheap wine he’d been having. The sweetness of it was on his breath when it hit Geta’s face, soured berries and thick, cheap syrup. Geta wanted to ask about it - had it been that good, or had he just drank to get sick? It was true that he’d never gone out there, with his twin or alone. The thought frightened him, and so did the thought of Caracalla’s insistence on repeatedly running off to do it. Geta had no idea how he was slipping out, and so far his twin had kept it one of his few secrets. He knew that if he’d told Geta, there was every chance that Geta would then ensure he’d never get out that way again - and he was right, Geta thought. If he’d known, he would have made it impossible for Caracalla to leave. It wasn’t because he didn’t want him to enjoy himself, but because out there, Geta ran every risk of losing him for good. The thought that one morning he wouldn’t be home, and no one would find him; he’d dreamed about it, what he’d told Caracalla to go and do. His white body floating in the water. He’d seen a body like that once, and he never wanted to again. The thought of it being his own brother made him feel more sick to his stomach than the sound of their father’s furious steps in the halls.
“You should go to your room,” Geta told him quietly.
It made his brother pale a little, and he shook his head vigorously.
“No,” Caracalla breathed, the fear from before instantly back to his voice in full force, “He’ll come look again later, and if he finds me -“
“So you’d rather he finds you in my bed?” Geta asked, exasperated. “He’ll kill us both.”
“He won’t. It’ll be dark and you’ll be sleeping. He won’t wake you from sleeping, will he?”
“How would I know? He’s dragged me out of bed before to ask after you.”
“But he doesn’t do it every time.”
Geta stared at him.
“How often are you sneaking out?” he asked then, voice a little hollow.
Caracalla’s shoulders lifted, his chin lowered; with some effort, he managed to swallow his laughter.
“Not as often as I could,” he said slyly.
Geta’s palm pressed into the middle of his chest, fisted, and brought him forwards by his tunic until their faces were nearly flush.
“Do you think this is funny?” he asked, and his breath did not stink of sweet drink but of blood. “Does it really not matter to you that when he can’t find you, he takes all of his anger out on me instead?”
Caracalla’s breath had quickened, but his smile hadn’t dissipated. His eyes, somehow hungry, rested a while on the blood that was slowly drying in the corner of his brother’s mouth. Geta wanted to shake him, but it wouldn’t do either of them any good. Maybe he just didn’t understand - understand how much it hurt, or that the pain was real to begin with. There was something odd about the way he took it all in after the beatings were done, the same hunger when he regarded Geta after their father had finished with him and when he watched slaves being punished for misdeeds or mistakes. Sometimes he seemed to enjoy Geta’s pain more than he enjoyed that of the servants. And it really was enjoyment, that Geta could tell for certain. He wished it had fed his anger, but instead, all he felt was exhaustion. He would have done anything for Caracalla, but most nights, he wasn’t sure if his brother even knew what that meant.
Suddenly weak, he let his fist loosen around Caracalla’s tunic and instead aimed a bitter look at him.
“Stay, then,” he said coolly, no longer holding his voice down.
With a swift and careless movement, he wiped the coagulating blood off of his mouth and nose. The impact of his own knuckles on his sore flesh hurt like a second strike, and the flinch of his body had Caracalla’s lips parting to let out a strained breath.
It twisted his stomach, and he worried he’d be sick. It didn’t matter. They’d have to be in bed soon or the light in the room alone would guide their father back in like a deadly moth.
“Get out of that,” Geta uttered, took a hold of his brother’s belt and undid it from around his body.
Then he stood: he dropped the jeweled thing behind the pillows by the bed and parted the canopy. Caracalla shifted behind him, then landed heavy on the bed’s side, fingers tangled up in his sandal straps. He had scrapes on his knees, which looked less like a rough night at the brothel and more like he’d fallen on them on the street. When Geta ran his fingertips over the scrapes, Caracalla threw him an amused glance.
“I’ve got more,” he stated proudly.
“If you’re not careful, you’ll end up with scars,” Geta noted.
“And what if I do?”
“Do you really want to look like you lived on the streets when you’re the one wearing laurels, brother? No one will respect you.”
“Everybody has scars,” Caracalla countered. “Soldiers have scars.”
“Everybody knows you’re not a soldier, Calla. Everybody. And they’ll look at your knees and make up their own minds about what you’ve been doing on them.”
He leaned his head down to allow Geta to undo the brooches on his shoulders, which had his tunic falling loose on his frame in their wake, one side at a time. If it hadn’t been for the sandals, he could have slithered out of the cloth like a newborn butterfly, but he was still trying to make sense of how to get them untied. Distantly, Geta thought about the Tiber again, and the body. It was a miracle Caracalla had made it back home in this condition. It was almost unbelievable that he’d done it more than once, too. They traded hands; Caracalla’s for the tunic, and Geta’s for the shoes. He lay down on his stomach on the bed to reach in, but it wasn’t a huge effort to undo the straps from there, not even for the shoe which Caracalla had to throw across his other leg for Geta to reach. Afterwards, he was quite bare - and Geta still in his tunic, but at least he could be certain he’d know how to undress himself.
He was going to reach for the lamp next, to suffocate the flames which burned in it, but he stopped. Caracalla hadn’t been lying: his body did bear marks, plenty of them, bruises and scratches as clear as day, down along his arms, bitemarks on his neck and shoulders, fingerprints on his chest and sides. But those weren't the things that stilled Geta where he’d been crawling up from his belly. His twin had a sore on him, in the one part that Geta had not intended to look at at all - only it was impossible to miss on his pale skin, as deep and dark red as it was in the way any open and infected wound would have been, the tight-stretched raised skin around its edges glistening in the light. He blinked and tried to look away, but his nausea was back with force and even though he’d turned, he could still see the lesion behind his closed lids.
“Where did you get that?” he asked hollowly with a quick gesture toward his brother’s lap, trying to remember where his own lower limbs were.
When he laid them on the floor, he could see from the corner of his view how his twin’s fingers wrapped around his soft cock and how he gave it a quick look before covering it altogether with a press of his palm.
“I don’t know,” Caracalla said defensively; “It’s been there for a while. But it looks worse than it is - it doesn’t really hurt at all. If it was infected, I’m sure I’d feel it.”
He sounded unconcerned, if decently embarrassed by the fact that he’d forgotten about it and now Geta had noticed. With another strange lurch of his stomach, Geta suffocated the lights. In their absence, he stood there for some time, ears primed to hear any movement from the outside but still nothing came. Beside him, Caracalla had managed to pull himself fully onto the bed, and was now trying to make sense of all the blankets and pillows that were in it - seemingly to no avail.
“Make sure father doesn’t see it,” Geta finally managed to say.
It was the only thing he could think of, but he felt terrible now, worse than he’d done when the bruise on his jaw had still been a blinding, stinging new pain, and somehow even when he’d stood in front of their father to begin with, still wondering how much he would need to hurt tonight for his brother’s actions. This was a different terrible, a nagging worry in the pit of his stomach that he couldn’t reason with. He wasn’t sure what it was, but something about that wound terrified him.
Swallowing thickly, he added: “And stop going to the brothels.”
With that, he climbed into bed - kneed his twin in the shin, making him yelp like an animal - and with much better success than Caracalla had managed, pulled off his tunic and replaced it with the embrace of the blankets in the bed. For a while after, everything was only shades of darkness and the quiet sounds of shifting cloth: the only thing that appeared to move was Caracalla’s hand, reaching up to try and close the parted curtains around the bed, which still took him several attempts before his fingers caught anything. Geta watched his silhouette against the faint light casting in through the windows, his attention split between the throbbing agony in his jaw and the cold and bottomless depth at the pit of his stomach.
Once the hand had fallen down once more, the absence of light and sound stretched further, expanded into shapeless shadows within the canopy and a rise and fall of breaths, nearly inaudible but present in both Geta’s chest and his ears, sometimes doubled and sometimes as one. His hand shook a little as he let it cross the distance between them: in all honesty the darkness now terrified him, and so did the silence and the unknown, and the thought of their father finding them like this. When his fingers touched his twin’s bare shoulder, he found Caracalla not yet asleep, and his fingers joined Geta’s with relative ease in comparison to everything else he’d done that night, leaving their fisted hands resting between their bodies on the mattress. Guided by them, Geta drew in a little closer, all the way until he could feel Caracalla’s heat on his skin and a sense of relief and calm returned to him. He wasn’t alone there. Even if they’d be found and killed, they’d take that beating together, at least.
It was much easier to fall asleep to the feel of that warmth and touch than Geta had anticipated.
200 AD
“Geta?”
A small, frightened voice came from the dark like a ghost calling for him. Geta’s eyes opened only hesitantly: they took in the shadows of the room with dull and heavy weariness, his mind a shade of reluctant grief over the sleep that was slipping from him again.
“What is it, brother?” he asked the cloth hanging loosely above him, up there somewhere where everything was too dark to see.
“I woke up someplace strange,” Caracalla’s faint voice told him, filled to the brim with the notes of held-back terror; “You weren’t there, and it scared me.”
“All is well; come sleep by my side.”
The mattress shifted. A huff of a breath, a sound as soft and quiet as a child’s escaped Caracalla as he strained himself to make it all the way up. Geta stretched his arm out to guide him, and soon enough his brother’s body fell into that space as heavy and hard as lead. His skin was burning hot, but he was shaking from head to toe with his fever. The day had been hard and Geta had anticipated this much: if anything, he was more surprised he’d managed to fall asleep at all before Caracalla had come in. With one well-practiced move he brought the blanket from around his body to cover his twin as well, then let his hand down upon his side until he had settled there comfortably. Only then did he bring that arm around him as well, locking them into a loose, impossibly warm embrace.
Some distant part of him still remembered how much he’d feared being found this way when they’d been younger. Now no one would - no one would ever know how they slept when Caracalla’s fevers got worse, or when he stopped recognising the rooms that he walked through. None of it mattered, anyway. If anyone had said a thing about it, one word from Geta in exchange would have had them silenced forever by the way of the cross, and Caracalla would have never even thought to question why. He didn’t need to worry what others thought of him, not anymore: he could simply enjoy the outcome, the bloody and public spectacle of a slow and humiliating death. All of the rest was Geta’s burden to bear. Just another burden, he thought.
He let his hand wander until his fingers brushed into Caracalla’s hair: it was all wet at the roots, and the rest stuck up every which way. It gave him comfort to pet it down again, and then carry on from there, separating waves between his fingertips as he waited for the shaking to stop. Eventually it did, and what was left behind was more of that silent breathing, each inhale and exhale a little longer than the one before until it settled to Geta’s own rhythm. They were never too different from each other, their bodies never too far from remembering that they’d always been meant to be just one thing, not two.
He allowed himself to press a lingering kiss among the hair somewhere, on top where the wetness was less evident and smelled less of sickness.
“What if father comes and finds us?” Caracalla asked him, but by his voice Geta knew that he was half-asleep already.
It only somewhat comforted the ache in his chest at the words, however. One more brush through his hair, and then he returned his hand down and held his twin closer for some time, until he could feel their hearts beating as one too.
“He’ll never hurt us again,” he promised. “We wear the laurels now.”