Work Text:
She sees him before he does her: a tall figure shadowy against the bright courtyard light, squinting in the sudden dimness. Then he dips his head to cross the lintel, and Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa stands in her weaving room.
“Agrippa,” Livia smiles, standing to give him the kiss of greeting. He’d been chewing mint with his midday meal; she can smell it on his breath when his lips graze her cheek.
“Country life suits you,” he announces. “You look as though you’d never left.”
“Oh, do I? And here I was hoping I looked good.”
He laughs aloud and drops onto a low stool by her loom. She claps her hands for the slaves attending her. “Wine for the two of us, the Pulcino vintage from last year. Sweetmeats for the girls - I assume you brought the girls?”
“Aye. They were with Julia when I left Gaius. Shall we move - ?”
“No, I like it in here, it’s cool and I don’t want to go out in the heat. But bring the sweetmeats and set up a table under the shade by the pool; I want to see your girls.”
They speak Greek together, as he almost always prefers to do when he can. His Greek is unaccented and as good as her own, but in Latin he still bears the faint traces of the estate in northern Italy where he’d been born. She wonders sometimes what that says about Agrippa: be it pride or stubbornness or a kind of love for that obscure, unillustrious little Etrurian clan.
Livia is not a person who wonders. She either obtains an answer or puts it from her mind. But for Agrippa, old friend and older ally, she can allow herself an indulgence. It is a rare luxury in this Rome to permit uncertainty: the unknown too often proves deadly. But not with him.
Alone now with the slave-women gone, she begins tidying up her spools of thread herself. Agrippa draws his feet under the stool and rests his elbows on his knees as he watches her. He and Gaius are the same height now, but even when they were boys she’d soon noticed how he always seems to round his shoulders to stand just a little shorter than Gaius. It took her a while to realize he does that with her too.
“Is that for Gaius?” he asks, pointing at the half-woven cloth.
“Oh, yes. Prepare to divorce a man one day, come back the next and start weaving his underthings again; that’s the Roman way.” Livia crinkles her nose at him so he knows she’s joking; Agrippa grins obediently. “Shockingly, no one did the weaving while I was in the country,” she continues. “Antigone might have seen to it, but,” she dimples sweetly, “Antigone was with me.”
“Huh. So that’s why it felt like I was stepping into a camp that’s lost its general every time I came here. You’d raided the stores and stopped up the damn toilets before you left.”
Livia accepts that as the compliment it’s meant to be and bows gravely in his direction. If only he knew. Then, as coolly as when she’d ordered the wine, she says, “I hear you picked a fight with Gaius while I was away.”
Do her eyes deceive her, or do his ears turn a little pink? “Oh, that,” Agrippa says. “All Rome knows about that.”
“Maecenas says it was over me,” says Livia, and cocks an eyebrow at him.
His ears are definitely turning red now. “It’s not like that. We…” He coughs, looking a little hangdog at the mere idea Livia might think he had been impugning her honor. “I told Gaius he doesn’t appreciate you enough.”
She waves a bobbin of thread at him in mock reproach. “And you do, I suppose.”
“Of course,” he says simply.
Livia smiles at him again, too experienced to cover up her surprise with chatter or exclamations. She had wanted him to be angry at Gaius as part of her campaign to “clog the toilets” before she left; she had not expected him to be angry for her. It’s absurd in its way. She can read all the plots and petty intrigues of the Senate as though they were an unfurled scroll, and yet it’s plodding Agrippa who still surprises her.
An instant before her smiling silence would stretch too long and change from gracious to awkward, the slave women return with the wine, sweetmeats, low table, and chairs. Around them in a flash of dark hair and bright laughter piles a crowd of young girls so vivacious Livia and Agrippa both turn to look: four Vipsanias, two Antonias, a Marcella, a Cleopatra, and Julia. Livia is amused to see that for all his jealous hurt on learning of Julia’s betrothal, Agrippa is less interested in watching the young girl than in making sure his youngest doesn’t choke on her candied apricots. It had never been Julia’s love he wanted.
With five growing girls in the house, Livia has never craved any daughters of her own: useful for knitting alliances through marriage, certainly, but not as useful as sons. Even so, and even if little Vipsania Secunda were not engaged to Tiberius, she would still enjoy visits from Agrippa and his family. It does her good to see him, father to four daughters and delighted in them all: the only man she has met since her own father who loves having girls so unabashedly. She wonders - there it is again - if in their men’s spaces alone together Gaius and Agrippa ever commiserate over their mutual lack of sons. Probably they do: every Roman man wants a houseful of sons. And yet Agrippa has never threatened to divorce either of his wives over that.
Agrippa is not princeps. Nothing more need be said. To steer her mind from dangerous waters, Livia studies little Vipsania Secunda more closely. She’s pleased to see the girl focuses on caring for her younger sisters and smoothing over any arguments that start to flare. Tiberius is full of moods: a chattering wife would overshadow him, a sullen one would encourage his own sulks. Nor does Secunda show any signs of future beauty the way Julia or even her younger sister Tertia do. Acceptably pretty, no more. All to the good. Beautiful women married to ugly men soon grow discontent, unless they are unbearably stupid. A stupid wife will never do for Tiberius. Stupid women are always convinced they’re clever. Tiberius needs a wife clever enough to read his moods before they form and cleverer yet to hide that knowledge. Secunda looks like a better choice by the day.
Livia hasn’t changed her expression or stance, but Agrippa, who had been watching her watch his daughters, perceptibly lightens his expression just as she reaches this conclusion. To hide her discomfort at being so easily understood, even by him, Livia smiles.
“They do you proud,” she says. “Good daughters are always a credit to their fathers.”
If he notices the barb at Marcella the Elder, weak and willful daughter of a weak and willful mother, he ignores it. “Maybe, but a strong mother can raise a daughter true as oak.” He seems to hesitate a moment, then adds, “If you had borne a daughter, I would have liked to marry her.”
“Nero’s daughter?” she asks with light, deliberate acidity. “Tiberius would have made a good girl. Those curls and dark lashes are really too pretty - quite wasted on a boy. Obviously a daughter with Gaius would be the first choice, but, well, that’s hardly likely to happen anymore.” She catches the instinctive motion to flatten her hand over her belly and quells it at once.
Agrippa says steadily, “Yours.”
Livia sets the last bobbin into a perfect row with the others. Her mouth twists wryly. “You’re sweet.”
Her work done, she reaches for the light, sweet wine and sips at it, coolness radiating down her throat. Agrippa is still looking at her. Her lips twitch. She sets her cup down and tweaks his ear lightly.
She and Gaius love each other, but they are neither able to make that love an unalloyed one. She loves the Republic and him in spite of each other, the two opposing poles ringing off each other like steel off steel and striking sparks to make her blood flow faster; he loves himself. Not arrogantly, as a lesser man might, but naturally, as one who deserves it. Truth be told, she loves herself too.
Agrippa though. Agrippa loves them both purely, there is no other word for it. One love like this most people might beg and struggle to attain all their lives. Agrippa carries two such loves as easily as he breathes.
You tell this man to serve as aedile for a year, he builds three new aqueducts, a sewer system clean enough to sail through, and two hundred miles of new road; he feeds all Rome out of his own pocket on olive oil and salt. You tell him to build you a fleet, he wins you Actium. What do you do with a man like that? What do you do with a love like that?
“You’re very sweet,” she repeats. “Thank you for looking after my boys while I was away.”
She rests her hand on his hair. A moment later, in an indulgence as much for herself as it is for him, she lets her fingers card through. Agrippa’s hair is thicker, coarser than Gaius’s, and he shivers all over at her touch.
“Always,” he says hoarsely.
Livia has never once regretted the choice she made between them, even before she knew there was a choice. Agrippa has been content to be second; Gaius would never. That alone had swayed the balance. She had chosen the great man, and as a reward the gods let her keep both the great man and the good one.
Agrippa is a vindictive, hot-tempered, passionately jealous man. Agrippa is a good man.
Cheers; shrieks; a little hiccuping sob of despair as one of the smaller girls drops her treat in the dirt from dismay. Livia and Agrippa both look up. She keeps her hand on his hair. It’s only Gaius stepping through into the courtyard.
Julia, gangly as a fawn, is first to elbow her way through the mob and embrace her father. The others all bob and chorus their greetings more sedately, from Marcella the Younger with a cheek all swollen with sweetmeats to Cleopatra Selene’s soft, punctiliously respectful hello. Gaius moves through them all as attentively as though he were in the Senate and they the nominal masters of Rome, rather than the adolescent and pre-adolescent girls they are: nieces, daughters of friends, daughters of enemies long dead. And then he’s through, still absently wiping the ink off his forefinger and smiling as he comes.
He kisses Livia on the forehead, grins at Agrippa, and drops into another low stool next to him. “I swear I don’t know how you do it. You look as cool as that bottle of Pulcino exuding dew next to you. Doesn’t she look cool?” he asks of Agrippa, who nods. “She always looks so cool. Damn marble automation of a woman.”
“In the countryside,” observes Livia pensively, “it gets so cool in the evening one could almost need a second comforter, if one is sleeping alone.”
Agrippa snickers; Gaius sneers. In courtesy to him, they’ve switched to Latin. “What were you two old war-horses talking about, anyway?”
“Marriage,” says Livia. “Marriage and grandchildren. Gaius, don’t you think it will be nice when we have grandchildren with Agrippa?”
“Indubitably,” says Gaius, clasping a hand on Agrippa’s knee. His tone is as warm as the gesture; his fond smile warmer yet. Livia, still combing her fingers through Agrippa’s curls, feels him tremble like a butterfly caught between their two touches, knows that in him their empire stands on unshakeable rock.
Certain. She is certain. She draws a quiet breath. Safe. She is safe.