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"Well, Antonia wouldn't come - been cultivating her new hobby of knucklebones. So you are stuck with me." Antonius announced cheerfully. "And Issa."
Curio stared down at the crook of his arm. "Did you just...are you honestly bringing a lion cub into my theatre?"
"Nice to see you too after all these years, my dear Scribonius, and yes, I am. The people love her!" Antonius picked up one of the cub's paws with two fingers, mimicking a waving gesture.
"Here, Issa, good girl, greetings to our noble friend and ally - "
The creature yawned and observed him with innocent, glassy eyes. Curio sighed.
"If you're happy for little Issa to see multiple grown versions of herself getting violently murdered, I'm not complaining," he turned around and started to make his way into the audience, biting down a resigned smile.
“Come on, there's still the comedy -” Antonius protested weakly after him, picking up his steps to follow Curio's. “Right? What's on today?”
“Lysistrata and the games? You are the worst, Caius.”
The crowd cheered him as they took their seats. “From vulgarity," Curio tilted his head, conveniently closing up the bare distance between them. ''Thrusts the thrysos of power.”
“'Ugh,” Antonius made a face, and as if to distract them both snapped his fingers at an attending slave to call for wine.
“Wine at the sixth hour of the day?” Curio raised an eyebrow.
“Wine at the sixth hour of the day,” Antonius wore his customary grin as he offered him one of the silver cups. “For the one who's hosting such impeccable bloodshed under broad daylight. Oh, what would the old Curio think of such extravagance?” He teased.
“Doubt he'd still be able to think much.” Curio huffed, reclined into his seat and drank up compliantly. “How was Gaul?”
“Dismal and barren. A nice little break from Rome, more or less.” Antonius replied with a just-on-point mindlessness as if he hadn't been chopping off Gallic heads for the past four years. He snatched a pomegranate from the side table and started peeling it.
“Good. Bring it up more in conversations. Avoid Caesar as much as you can, though. Focus on the trophies, glory to Rome. Whatever you like.”
“This will be easy. As long as they’re turned on, they’re not going to try to kill each other.” On the stage, Calonice exclaimed.
“Do you really have to plan your next manoeuvre.” Antonius drawled, resting his chin in his hand. “When half of them on stage had a six-inch phalluses tied to their waists?”
“Really helps putting things into perspective, don’t you think?”
Antonius chuckled. “The resemblance is uncanny. I’ll try to keep this in mind next time I see Marcellus on the street.”
“Besides, public image. Exposure.” Curio picked up the wine decanter to fill his cup. “I’d prefer sequestering in my own study, but if the goons kept muddling the water and blocking every proposal of mine in the Senate, I’ll need to come up with a way out of this whole stasis through the populace, starting with your augury position.”
“Aw, and here I thought you sent that invitation because you missed me. I’m undone.”
“That too. Now focus.”
Then they did not speak for a long moment.
“May I introduce you all to Peace!” There again was Lysistrata. A pretty one despite the hideous thalia. “I may be just a woman, but I have common sense, brains, judgment, and good schooling. And I blame you both for what has been happening. We are of the same Greek blood. We worship at the same altars and share a common history.”
“Three months into the tribunate and someone’s getting grumpy.” Antonius observed his friend, eyes glinting. “You are still on good terms with Caesar, no? I can help weigh in with the bridging.”
“Can you now?” Curio blurted out.
Lysistrata cantillated: “Yet all we’ve been done is kill each other, while the barbarians outside of Greece wait to attack us!”
“What was that? ” Antonius turned his head in a trice, body tensed, apparently startled Issa, who jumped off his knee hastily and jumbled towards the attendant in the corner.
The play was coming to an end. Antonius decided that if he was actively searching for random excuse to snap, he’d be fully justified. Another minute of idle pleasantries and discussion of public matters, he swear -
“It almost sounds like you don’t trust me.” He said, smile waning.
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“Then what are you - ”
“You're drunk.”
“Am I?”
As if to prove a point, he set his eyes upon the table left to Curio's seat and stretched out for the half-empty wine decanter on it, reaching across his companion, as good as hovering over him on the way. Not exactly a dignified move for a public office aspirant, but Antonius had never been one to play by the rules.
All the chatterings and laughters, all the uproarious noises as the seats pivoting around - Antonius could be sitting astride him right here and now and he could be carding his hand through his hair and not a single soul in the crowd would notice as the frenzy fell upon them. For two good citizens of their celebrated city, they were sitting too close. He could see that the four years in Gaul had left marks on Antonius’ physique - not too much but enough for him to take notice.
On his triumphant way back with the decanter, Antonius did not refrain from closing up the bare distance between them.
The crowd raised another tide of exhilarated sounds. Maybe it was the games commencing. Maybe it was some gladiator already dying a creative way. Neither of them spared any attention to it, all-too-well acquainted with blood and conflicts, in battlefield or not.
As brief as the kiss was, Antonius did not intend to keep it chaste. He tasted like honey and wine, richly wanton, must be the pomegranate seeds he’d been snacking on -
Before Curio said anything in the aftermath of their encounter, Antonius had splashed wine all over him.
“Oh no.” He spoke flatly, yet there was a calculated layer of smugness to his tone - that of a cat pushing things off table without breaking eye contact. “What should we do now?”
Their entrance into the noble house of Scribonia wasn’t much short of a disaster: Curio hurriedly shoved Issa into the arms of one very bewildered house slave at the door before he did away with his sopped toga. Antonius wouldn’t stop grinning, as though appreciating the current chaos as his personal triumph.
“Hi Fulvia.” He waved across the atrium at the matron as they strode down the corridor, beaming. “Still lookin’ glamorous.”
Behind them, Fulvia sighed and raised her voice, attention barely diverted from the scrolls at hand: “By fucking Jupiter, brace yourselves, there are still fucking children in this house!”
They’ve barely made it into Curio’s bedchamber, which for the most part was blameable on Antonius as he couldn’t keep his hands in their rightful places. The door swung close behind them, igniting a sonorous sound.
“You were three steps away from knocking us both over into the impluvium and possibly waking up the whole house.”
“I was bored!” complained Antonius. “Been stuck with cow entrails and whatever they were burning in the braziers for the past five days. And it’s not like you didn’t catch me in time.”
“Remind me. How on earth are you still alive at the age of twenty-one?” Curio couldn’t help but emitting a frustrated sigh. What can you do when you find a visibly drunk Marcus Antonius on your rooftop, gathering every single piece of gut left in this city to jump right down into the atrium -
He could smell frankincense soaking through the hem of Antonius’ ceremonial tunic as well as his warm skin. The line of drawn-on blood for Lupercalia was still intact on his forehead. The way he presented himself - what kept fuelling these brazen acts of his, Curio thought, he’d not be able to fathom in quite some time.
But after all, he needed not to worry; for they were young, and they did have time.
“The debauchery of a Luperci on the last night of our holy festival,” trapped between the chamber door and his dear friend, Antonius chortled. “Didn’t know you were the type to decline such a flagitious offer.”
And that was the cue.
Enough carelessly consumed wine and your perception of time lapsed. The next second his lover was tugging by the collar of his tunic, pinning him down onto the writing desk with equally rough avarice and ill-tempered kisses that would surely bruise in all the right places the next day. He gladly conceded, arms thrown around Curio’s neck for an extra bit of attachment, left knee nudging at his side impatiently.
The fervent heat of one’s body; the pulsing of his own against it - what Antonius has been pursuing after in those countless welcoming beds. The fullness, the forceful passion, the sheer amount of bone-shattering attention directed at him every single time, all the way till the verge of breaking. After all those years, it remained unchanged.
He added, whispering, almost as a dreamy afterthought.
“Put your mind off of it, Caius... all of it, for now, will you?”
“Have I told you about this?”
Later that night they were sprawling together on their favourite couch, both bored and exhausted and drunk enough to forget about proper etiquettes, so much as to let their tongues slip.
“...What?” Fulvia uttered.
“I used to have'em serve salema porgies at dinner just to have nightmares three days in a row,” Antonius unknotted his fingers from his wife's rich hazelnut curls that he's been drowsily playing with, freeing his hand to make an empty gesture. “Well, after…”
A banquet with Publius Cornelius Dolabella, as it turned out, was harder work than it first seemed. To keep the conversations alive, for one - at some point he might have zoned out and left the hard work to Fulvia, and both of them needed more wine afterwards to dissipate the hanging exasperation.
“You revisit his death over and over again, for what? To make up for what you didn't get the chance to do anything about?” She chuckled softly against his chest, entertaining the thought. “We sure did mourn very differently.”
The humming of her voice and the heat of her body radiated an infectiously calming sensation against his own, one that Antonius had got to give into. He grimaced before bursting out in laughter.
“How did you mourn then?” He tried to sound playful.
“Drinking, burning letters, feeding slaves to his damn panthers. Normal widow stuff.” Fulvia replied dismissingly.
“Oh, okay.”
“Stop munchin’ those fish, would’ya? I refuse to let my third husband die from food-poisoning,” Fulvia reached out her palm to land small gentle pats on his cheek, head still buried in the silky layers of his tunic. “Poppy juice's always an option, y' know. Knock you out before you even know. Much safer.”
Perhaps it was the wine (Fulvia knowingly ordered theirs to be unwatered for these particular nights), or the irking humidity of Ianuarius, or just his overall annoyance towards the rapidly developing circumstances of recent - Antonius continued to speak, not exactly in his best state for oratory, heart palpitating: “How did those old prudes put it? Libidum...or what was it, what we had between us?”
(“I assure you they’ve used words worse than that.” Fulvia cut in on his soliloquy.)
Part of him screamed and shouted and threatened for his gods-be-damned mouth and mind to take a richly deserved break. Not now, not when he's practically been exhausted into groggy inebriation. But there was something else -
“I don't think that's what it was. It's not...I did - not as a friend, not out of... for a while. For a little bit.”
“Mmh, eloquent.” Fulvia murmured. “You're drivelin'. Go to sleep.”
The crooked back lanes of Rome. The scorching sun. Lysistrata. The idle kisses branded on his inner wris t when they coupled. The larvated pleasantries and comebacks.Wriggling thoughts capered back and forth over Janus' doorstep in fanatic rhythms like a group of alacritous performers.
“One day - someday - I’ m steal ing a fucking chariot and flee this miserable swamp of a city.” Presently, they both got carried away with the grand imaginary escapade.
“ Are you now? ” Fingertips trailing down his right shoulder blade. Every inch of tactility made to scald. “ Straight out of Porta Capena? ”
“ You bet. All the struggling behind me. Not even going to pay my last tribute. ”
“ What if someone ends up obstructing? ”
“ A full swing on the head then. With a club. ”
“ Like what you did to that poor Pompeian when I first met you? ”
“ Was that so, our first encounter? Thought t ’ was at some dinner party I was forced to attend. ”
...
As it turned out, Rome was either a jealous bitch or a difficult mother.
Antonius' eyes snapped open from the nasty taste the recollection left lingering, only to be greeted by the vividness of their ceiling mosaic. A tesseral she-wolf returned his gaze emotionlessly. Whoever made the decision on this bit of decoration in the house did not consult him. Perhaps he never struck as the type for trivialities until they came back haunting.
Not as a friend, not out of - all those rumours they've been spreading of him, they might have been true after all. Damn you. Damn you for prying him from us - he felt an abrupt nausea as the room seemed to whirl down, lost in his own mentation.
The she-wolf was still gawping at him.
"But then we were young - I was young - and took everything for granted."
The rest of the wine they've had later into the night started kicking in, and any plod beyond the current empty drunkenness would only maim; so he shunned cautiously. Somnus generously extended his embrace to his battered subject, and Antonius' voice started to simmer down.
The night blossomed in its full ripeness; Misty moonlight glazed the brim of the impluvium. In six hours the sun rise again and the city would resume in its usual business of bickering and blood-shedding. They’d just have to deal with that when they woke up again. He and Fulvia.
Their dear mother-city could never be sated.
In the resumed silence between them, Fulvia let out a plangent sigh. It tickled.
“We all did, Marcus," she said. "We all did.”