Chapter Text
Every muscle and every tendon of Geta’s body was frozen into eternal tension, a sprint which had halted in time. His body, cold but sticky with sweat, sat silently and utterly without motion on the bed, one arm stretched over the shape of his twin beside him, sleeping against all odds. Geta did not understand it, but he was grateful; by the time night had began to lean toward morning, he’d worried that if the soldiers would not let them be, Caracalla might have collapsed. He’d not fared much better himself, eyes so wide the sockets still hurt, throat and jaw locked with fright, fingers icy and feet unsteady, but where Caracalla had become as if he was not truly there at all, Geta’s own senses had primed him to be nowhere else but in the very moment he was living, waiting for the commanders to order blades and death. He would have stepped in front of his brother to spare him then, if only for seconds. He wouldn’t have hesitated. Even now, the pounding in his head reminded him of this, but all was finally silent in the room they were in.
Outside the door, commotion still reigned, restless footsteps filled with destination and determination, busied though hushed voices, clatterings of plates, scrapes of blades. Inside was dark: through windows, a moonlit blue light cascaded in like fresh spring water, and air was cool and rejuvenating, but Geta felt in it only the invisible chains which bound them to the room. Waiting for the command to be called. It would come - of course it would come - but he did not understand what the traitors were waiting for. Morning? A public execution? What would wait them there, beyond the silence of this night?
All they’d been told, all they’d been let in on, was that the army was there: 7 000 men in total whose loyalties had been traded in the dark, and the Praetorian command had stood aside. The generals, their men, their guards, Geta’s own guards, had simply walked in after dark and told them it was over, that they should comply for their own good, and afterwards there had been much standing, evaluating glances, and none of his questions had been answered, many of them silenced outright. Beside him, his brother managing only to shake from head to toe, eyes glassy and distant, hands like clasps over Geta’s arm and his body so close that movement would have been difficult even if the soldiers hadn’t had spears and swords drawn to face them at all times to keep them still.
Geta hadn’t had any intentions to run. He’d considered it of course - evaluated every option while others discussed his fate around him - but even if he was still a fox, his brother was a frantic rabbit with a bitten leg, and Caracalla would never have gotten far. Geta might have. He could have been out of the city by now on horseback, riding somewhere else where no one knew him, or where some distant relative might wish to put his claim to power to better use, but that didn’t matter. He would never betray his brother, his only true flesh and blood, and leave him helpless with these hyenas, to be torn to pieces as a bloody sign of change.
Dawn would come. With dawn, answers. For now, Caracalla’s breath kept Geta sane: if these were the last of his moments alive, then at least he could spend them where he felt most himself, between that door, those blades, and his twin. Nothing else made sense.
His breath hiccuped when he heard firm steps stopping in front of the door. Two departed, one stayed; hushed voices spoke, and then a soft knock sounded upon the wood. Geta wasn’t sure which had stirred Caracalla more, the knock or his own flinching, but despite tensing up for just a moment, he was already lying silent again when the door opened. A warm scattering of light flowed in, and in stepped General Marcus Acacius - one of the two snakes who’d headed this betrayal.
Geta faced him through the gap in the canopy, eyes sharp as blades, but he knew his pale skin and the occasional shake of his body gave away his fear. He couldn’t even hide his tears as they built up, but he refused to acknowledge them. He’d not cry like a child in front of a traitor, even if he wanted to. Even if it was all he wanted to do. Cry. Beg. Plead. Bargain.
But he was an emperor still. And more importantly: he was a brother.
Acacius walked to the middle of the room, his sandals becoming soft upon the rug, and stopped. To Geta’s shock, he bowed formally, the same as he’d always do, then lifted the lamp he’d carried, and set it by the bedside. It illuminated enough for them to see one another clearly, but within the canopy of the bed, night still reigned supreme.
“Emperor Geta,” Acacius greeted him.
Geta’s jaw trembled with rage (or at least he hoped it was rage), but he bowed his head, feeling the weight of the water in his eyes shuddering as he acknowledged Acacius in turn.
“General Acacius.”
“Your brother?”
Geta’s body shifted, becoming more of a shield in front of Caracalla on his other side. He’d do anything to keep him safe.
“Sleeping.”
Acacius nodded to himself.
“A blessed state under such circumstances,” he admitted, “Let us speak quietly, then. May I take a seat?”
Eyes darting between the chair which Acacius had gestured toward and the man himself, Geta managed to nod. Though heavy in its ebony frame, the chair made little sound as Acacius lifted it and moved it toward the centre of the room, blocking the path from the bed to the door.
They watched each other that way for a long time in silence: a wild bird in a cage, and a dog patiently taking note of its every fluttering spasm of life. Finally, Acacius spoke again.
“You must have seen this coming,” he said then, but his voice was not mocking.
Rather, it bore a tone of weariness, showing how long he must have been awake too. If they’d entered the palace after sundown, moving the armies into position unseen and without raising alarm must have taken the better part of the afternoon: plotting the whole sequence, even longer.
“You confess to having the nature of a beast, then?” Geta spat at him, though his voice was barely audible despite its anger. “If you find it so obvious that your betrayal should have been written upon your features.”
Acacius shook his head.
“No. But because I do not have the nature of a beast, I have a hard time understanding how someone else could. How you and your brother have treated so many so cruelly, yet anticipated no move to be made against you in retaliation. You have no allies left in this palace, if you ever had them at all. You have no friends beyond its walls. And you never imagined that it might end this way? How could you be that blind to your own flaws?”
Geta’s breath shuddered when he inhaled, but he had no words to throw back. He felt so fragile here, his eyes briefly stopping upon the sheathed shape of Acacius’s blade by his hip. The General noticed his gaze, turned his own to the sword, and, with firm and steady hands, undid the belt and laid the blade on the floor.
“I’m merely here to speak,” he promised, and something in Geta’s chest gave way.
He could almost breathe again.
“Speak, then,” he used that air to hiss again. “What is it you want of me? Why waste your time speaking? How long will I have to wait to die?”
His invisible wings were fluttering, his beak and fangs biting at the iron bars of his cage. Though the butcher’s blade was lowered for now, blood lingered thick and heavy in the air.
“That,” Acacius spoke slowly, “depends almost entirely on you, I believe. I cannot cut a deal for you; this is not my decision to make. I am not here to take your place, Emperor, or your brother’s. I do not want your throne. And therein lies the… reason, as to my intrusion into your chambers.”
“Prison.”
Thoughtfully, Acacius nodded.
“Prison,” he agreed, taking a look at the room. “Much like the one you made for Lucilla in my absence. A gilded cage is still a cage. It is not a place for negotiations, nor conversation. Such can only be held on even ground, but we have no room for those luxuries. There was never even ground to be had between us. This is the only platform you have allowed me to speak from.”
He readjusted, brought his elbows down to his thighs and rested his fingertips together, his body leaning forwards, eyes on Geta. He was not wearing his whites and golds, but his armour to war: polished leather framed by red and modestly decorated. Geta, for his part, was wearing what felt like nothing - a red and gold tunic with a black and gold drape, which he’d turned into something of a blanket over his body as the night had grown colder. Stiffly and without noticing it for himself, he was running his hand over Caracalla’s side and back, grounding himself with the feel of his body beside him. He wasn’t alone. Even if it felt like it, they were still two.
“Now, I will not waste words further. The night has grown long and we are both very tired, I can see that much. You ask me what I want of you; I want nothing of you, Emperor Geta. Nothing.”
The tears, which had abated for some time in Geta’s eyes, now blurred the whole of his vision. When he blinked, they rolled heavy over his cheeks, hot, then cold, and as he continued to ignore them, they crossed down the sharp angle of his jaw and crawled down his neck. All of this Acacius was taking in, and his brows were knitting, his eyes showing no sign of cruelty, but pity, which was worse. Struggling to swallow, Geta did the only thing he could: he continued to stare at him, eyes fierce, but fierce with desperation, not purpose.
“What I want,” Acacius continued, his voice again quieter and softer than it had been, with sharpness fading from his tone back into weariness, “is peace. I want Rome without chaos, without insecurity, without fear; I want a proud home like you do, yes, but I am tired of war, and I am tired of senseless violence, hunger, orphaned children, mourning wives, fathers without their sons. You must have asked yourself why we have done as we did - walked into your home taking no lives and setting no fires. Not only was none of it necessary, but beyond that reason, we have avoided doing so because sending an army to drag two boys out of their beds for execution is not the kind of a message with which we can bring about the Rome that we long for. And, as you have by now seen, this message has the support of Rome. It has the support of her armies, her people, and her Senate.”
More tears. Not only that, but Geta’s jaw was trembling, and regardless of how much he tried to hold back from it, he was afraid that the sob would break through eventually - and he was glad, if bitterly, that the only person to witness it would be Marcus Acacius. The way the man regarded him still did not help the matters, however. He had an unbearable softness in his gaze. He’d called Geta a boy, and he’d not objected. That was what he felt like, through and through. He had no argument to make, and something in him wanted to lean into that; wanted to let go of the man he was pretending to be, let the tears come, and maybe hide under the bed until things would be better again.
“What will you do with us?” he asked, voiceless and shaky. “What is our fate in your new Rome?”
He watched Acacius’s expression flicker, his brows knit tighter and then release, and finally how he straightened up once more and crossed his hands over his chest in his seat. Geta’s own hand, now frantic in its own right, had dug someplace between the covers over Caracalla and his clothes, in a soft and warm place, where he could feel his heart beating through the veins of his body. His other hand was gripping the front of his own clothes, smooth fabric like grasses in his fist.
“I cannot do much with you,” Acacius told him, “You are not tools to do things with. But your fates are one subject which we have not yet reached a general consensus upon. Many would like to see you face trial; I’ve leaned this way myself.”
“Trial? For what?”
Acacius’s expression loosened again, turned to momentary wonder, then exasperation, and then settled somewhere not so far away from pain. For a moment, he’d looked like he would have liked to raise his voice, but had thought better of it. Geta’s fist grew firm in the clothes which he wore and those which he clutched behind him.
“Others,” Acacius continued, his mouth as dry wine, “would simply like to see you executed, and consider that a fair enough trial has already been held in the public view.”
Heart like a drum. Each beat of it a visible distortion, a wave of dizziness, a cry for air.
“But Rome does not need such excitement. Rome does not need another display of violence. Showing the people your deaths would certainly educate them on the change of power, but it would destabilise the Empire more than it could ever hope to stabilise it. Another dead emperor. Another regime ruling through fear. I have an alternate proposal: one which is so unpopular that no party here or outside will prefer it.”
“So why propose it?”
“Because I’ve come to believe that it may be the best way to give Rome what it needs, and, as I am speaking frankly - I have endured you and your brother for long enough to know what you are made of. I have pitied you and I have despised you, but I do not have it in me to hate you. I knew enough of your father to understand how such a man could raise such sons, and you, despite all your faults, are little more than children to me. I’ve reached my limit serving such children, but I’ve not come to fall so low yet as to wish to see you die.
There’s more; I may have been blinded in my frustrations so as to not see it before, but tonight, you’ve shown me something else which has made me hesitate on making the call which would certainly end your lives here. I may be a fool, and if so, do not hesitate now to prove me so. I would rather have certainty. But these past hours - I can only assume you have not had such a bad night before, and yet, your response to your circumstances has surprised me.”
Geta shivered. That was the best he could muster.
“I expected you to make this difficult. Your brother, I was sure, would certainly do so.”
That brought him back his voice.
“My brother is ill,” he snarled.
Acacius nodded.
“Yet, I have not seen the behaviour of two vain, feral animals wrestling to regain lost control. I have seen a brother stand firm as shelter to a brother; a man whose every movement has been only to protect his kin, not himself. I have seen love in you, which I did not think you capable of. I truly did not think you had it in you. Why? Because you have never shown me one reason to believe that you were human at all. But I cannot see past your humanity now, nor your brother’s. I came here to take control from monsters, and what I found were two frightened boys. So I offer you an alternative: return the power to the Senate and the people willingly, and you will have my voice in favour of your lives in exchange.”
He smiled, an odd, crooked smile that was inwards-turned and private, and which made Geta feel like he was not in the company it was shown in.
“As I said, I don’t think I will be quite so lauded for it,” Acacius finished, his gaze turning back to him from this brief lapse away. “But it might be your only hope.”
Geta’s hands had now loosened once more, the one which was stuck in an unknown crook of his brother’s body unmoving and slack, fingers resting someplace warm which still pulsed. He was the one now to give up eye contact. He was too tired. His body had lost form, his muscles sore, and his chest felt both hollow and full of fluid at once, like his insides had began to melt.
“Return the power to the Senate,” he repeated in a dull voice, then raised his eyes to Acacius. “What of our position, then?”
“I don’t suppose it would have to change so much,” Acacius said with a tilt of his head, observant, eyes squinting. “Nominally, you could remain emperors. In practice, you would step aside from the centre of power. The people need not know how or why this happens behind the scenes, but they would surely praise you for such a wise choice.”
“A wise choice.”
Geta let out a mirthless laugh. He turned his head away from Acacius, to the shapes and forms under the covers beside him. His heart ached, if it still existed. A fist was tearing it out of his chest. Once more, he pulled his hand out from the bundle of cloth, and brought his palm over Caracalla’s shoulder before speaking out again.
“I am not the Emperor, General. I am one half, one of two. It is as much treason to approach me with these ideas alone as it is to speak them behind our backs.”
“I believe that I am addressing both the Emperors, or at the least that you might deliver the message, should one’s ears not be available. I do not expect you to choose now - though it would make tomorrow easier.”
“Easier?” Geta scoffed. He was remembering how to spark fire, even if he knew those embers were for nothing. “You offer me nothing - you threaten me; you threaten my brother, and you demand that for the smallest chance that we might live, we should legitimise your coup. But you tell me yourself that no one else would agree. All I would do is sign away our lives while granting you all you ever could have asked for! Your mouth is poison, General, and by speaking you shame yourself.”
Acacius raised his brows. That was the most reaction Geta’s words had from him before he leaned back in his chair and tightened the curl of his crossed arms. But he’d spoken loudly, and beside him, Caracalla stirred; Geta’s attention split, and though he did not want to take his eyes away from the General now that he’d made it very clear that he would not simply cooperate with his plans, he had to spare his brother a look.
Caracalla’s eyes were puffy, but the way he looked at Geta told him he’d not been asleep for some time now. That knowledge made his nerves ease a little: once more, he felt just that much less alone. His brother’s hand made its way out of the cocoon of the sheets and onto Geta’s lap as he leaned past him, taking Acacius into his view. His hair was a mess, but no amount of grooming would have made him look any more alive in that moment. Geta wondered if he’d been crying, and he’d not noticed it somehow.
“Apologies for waking you, Emperor,” Acacius spoke placidly, with another small bow of his head where he sat.
Geta’s fingers wrapped around the hand resting on his lap: he didn’t know what else to hold there now, and it made sense to him and his cold fingertips. Caracalla barely acknowledged it, but his balance swayed some, and his weight shifted closer to Geta’s shoulder.
“What guarantee… do… we get?” he spoked, slurring the words.
They both regarded Acacius now.
“None,” the General said, spreading his hands. “Like I said, this is not a popular proposition. I might be playing myself even speaking it out loud. I can only offer you my personal guarantee, that I will not betray my word to you. This is something I am offering of my own volition, and it does not fight against my better judgement. I could be wrong to offer it in the first place, but I do it more for Rome than I do it for you or my own conscience, which, I’m afraid, would be easily quieted by any one reminder of the acts that you have ordered, or the lives that you have ended for nothing.”
“Not for nothing,” Geta said, his voice like a whip. “Rome is an empire; empires expand, subjugate, conquer. The history of everything you claim to stand for is written in blood, and you accuse us of marring her name?”
“The history of empires is written in blood, yes. But what greatness have you achieved? What has your endless war brought Rome’s people, beyond loss and suffering and starvation? I have carried your sword across the sea to fight battles which you can only dream of, and dream you do, grandly, in your games at the Colosseum. You think this all a game - the lives that end nothing but entertainment for you, conquest nothing but new lines drawn on a map, losses but numbers. Do you consider them your problem at all? Or is that someone else’s duty, to count the men who die, and find replacements? You worry for your lives; do you understand how many others you’ve ended, callously, without ever considering what the price paid truly was?”
Caracalla leaned onto their joined hands, pressing their knuckles into Geta’s thigh.
“Then tell us, General, what is war to you if it is not a game?” he asked.
Geta lifted his free hand to steady him by his shoulder, afraid of the pain that was brewing in his own flesh as much as his unsteadiness.
“Look at you,” Acacius muttered, “Has there ever been a moment you were not together?”
As a clear non-answer to Caracalla’s question, the one posed in return took him aback. He withdrew an inch or two, seeming to run in his head the conversation backwards to see how, or if at all, this related to what had been said before.
“How much would it take for either of you to stop and consider what it is like to not be yourselves?” Acacius continued after giving him some pause to process.
“For just one moment: a brother sent to war, dies at war. Twins, like yourselves. They have never known anything else. The remaining one carries his body to the pyre, where he burns with a thousand other men, alongside fathers and sons, their bones dust upon foreign soil an ocean away from home. Never again will he have the man who used to call him brother to rely on. No one to remind him where he came from. Do you not understand? Every life wasted could have been yours. Even now, surrounded by men who could show you - show you what it means to lose this game that you play - you don’t, for one moment, consider the cost of it all. What you have made others pay for you all along.”
Geta tried to ignore the look Caracalla gave him, because he was afraid it’d expose something which he could not cover afterwards, but it became impossible. In the lamp’s shivering light, Caracalla’s gaze was wet and though hazy as it had been the whole night, he could see the dark depth of fright beneath it. He allowed his hand hold his brother’s more tightly for one beat to reassure him, before turning to Acacius, who, just as he’d expected, was holding them in the frame of his view like a fine study.
“I asked you once,” he spoke then, voice as calm and collected as he could manage, “what good does it do us to sign away our lives, when you cannot provide anything in return, no promise beyond that you would speak for us - to ears which will not listen, and hearts that have turned from us, and want us dead. You paint a picture where all other doors are shut for us. That it is a matter of days at most before we will face execution at the hands of your government of peace. Can you not do better?”
He swallowed, his body jumping oddly in response to the motion, as if trying to reject his saliva or his movement in all.
“Telling us stories of dead men will not make our position any more secure. If you’re looking for repentance, you’ve come to the wrong place.”
Caracalla’s hand twitched. He couldn’t free it from Geta’s grip, which had without his guard grown steely around his twin’s, but he could move them both, and used that mobility to tug at his tunic. The gesture shattered something in Geta which he’d so carefully attempted to keep standing, and in rapid succession, he had to blink himself stable and found the tip of his tongue wetting his lips before his head then mechanically turned down to Caracalla.
“Is it wise to anger him more?” Caracalla asked, his voice a hushed whisper, which nevertheless would carry to Acacius clear as day.
He didn’t seem to be aware of this matter, and Geta’s heart ached. That cocky act from him just now - nothing but an act. He was still just as afraid as before, and his edge was as dull and fragile as children wielding sticks for swords. The way in which he couldn’t seem to understand that though he whispered, the voice was still audible to others than just his brother, that they did not speak within their own bubble where no other people could overhear them; when he managed to pull his head up again, there was a pained tone in the way Acacius was regarding him as well. Pity again, Geta recognised. He almost wanted to receive it this time. Accept it. Have someone understand how this all felt to him.
Together, they pretended that Acacius had not heard a word being spoken, but whatever had given way in Geta had left him at the mercy of the General. He might not know it yet, but he’d won; at least if he could give Geta one more excuse to believe him. Just one more, so he could sleep through the night.
“I am just one man,” Acacius spoke after a while, his words drawn and uncertain but not insincere, “but I am married to the daughter of Marcus Aurelius, whose word carries more weight than mine, especially with the Senate. I will speak with her and then, should she agree to join me, make my proposal again on a later date.”
“I doubt you’ve gone behind her back on this,” Geta noted dryly, though he, too, was merely holding up facades.
Acacius chuckled under his breath and shook his head.
“No, I wouldn’t dare to. She is my greatest advisor and I respect her opinion, which for this subject has been that I may do as I find right for myself, but her stance is her own. If you’d find this compromise more favourable to you however, then I would share with her what we have spoken, and ask her what she thinks of it. Lucilla’s mind is her own too, as you very well know, but she is not cruel, and I’m sure she would find your agreement to peacefully further our goals preferable to any bloodshed much like I do.”
“I don’t want to die,” Caracalla whispered.
Geta’s thumb ran a short course over the side of his palm in frail reassurance.
“When should I expect you again?” he asked, voice trembling but remaining otherwise neutral.
“We,” Caracalla quickly put in after him, this time loud and clear. “When should we expect you again.”
With a hint of a grimace, Geta cocked his head in submission.
“That’s what I meant.”
“That’s not what you said, brother.”
Acacius let out a breath: it might have been a suffocated laugh, but Geta was glad he hadn’t outright allowed it through.
“We have much to do,” the General spoke then, rubbing the corners of his mouth with his fingers, “and I’d expect the two of you are in want of good rest. Shall we say tomorrow evening? And until then, even though I cannot guarantee you any pact or agreement - what I can guarantee you is safety, for the time it will take for us and the Senate to settle the matters. No one will touch you before decisions on that end have been finalised, and they will not be so tonight, or the coming morning. Beyond that point I cannot give you promises.”
One more journey by the sun across the sky, Geta thought. One more. He would live at least that long. Beside him, Caracalla was shaking, and though he was holding himself upright for now, Geta could tell it was his arm to which he was leaning that was giving way. He wet his lips again and straightened on the bed, then looked the General in the eye with an expression he was himself uncertain of. He’d wanted something to come of it - but he could not begin to plead. He could not bargain, he could not cry, he could not beg, so all he did was stare, and hope that Acacius would understand him, somehow.
Then, at the slightest nod of Geta’s head toward him, General Acacius stood from his seat and replaced the chair by the wall where he’d taken it from. The room returned to order and his sword tightly strapped to his side again, he backed a few steps before giving them a half-hearted bow; his mind was elsewhere, and they did not hold his loyalty. They meant nothing to him. Prisoners of war, Geta thought.
“Brother,” Caracalla muttered to him, eyes clear - too clear - as Geta turned to him. “Turn off the light. It hurts my eyes.”
A small sound escaped Geta as he followed the order, his gaze stuck on the back of General Acacius leaving the room. Outside, the Praetorian guardsmen stood aside for his passing, and then one of them closed the door, a heavy sound which echoed in Geta’s ears even as he suffocated the flame. The smell of burnt oil lingered after, but he’d already withdrawn back behind the canopy, and he brought the curtains down on the front, leaving no direct view from the door to them. As if on cue, his body was met with the heavy weight of all of his brother at once: not only falling, but half-crawling up his body, until they were both down, Geta unwillingly but allowing it happen. Caracalla had to fight to get his hand underneath the drape, which had become stuck between them, but in the end he managed to bring his arm over Geta’s chest and nuzzled his face into his shoulder, where he settled down, quieted, and became a shivering, shallow-breathing attachment to Geta’s own body. He was hot, all too hot for the night’s cool, and Geta wondered if he’d struck another fever; it would explain away some of his behaviour, some of ways in which his mind was lapsing.
Carefully, he brought his arm around Caracalla’s body in turn, his shoulder under his head and lower arm bending over his back to let his hand rest on his twin’s arm on the side. He wouldn’t need the covers, but with his free hand, he pulled them over their bodies anyway, and to his small relief, some of the way Caracalla was shaking let up when he was covered from the air, as heavy as it felt to Geta, and as warm as he was quickly becoming himself between his clothes and his brother’s heat.
“They’re going to kill us,” Caracalla said in an indistinctive voice.
It felt like now, that voice was the only sound left in the world. The sounds of walking, shifting, conversation and orders given both distant and close had at some point during Acacius’s visited ceased on the other side of the door, and the world was quiet now.
“I don’t want to die.”
Geta wanted to tell him that he wouldn’t, but it would have required him to lie, and he simply could not: the words got stuck in his throat like hard bits, the way half-digested food did when an overindulgence of wine accompanied it back up from the stomach at dawn. There was nothing that he could say at all which was not either a lie or a confession to his own fears, which he could not afford for them, so he stayed silent, only his arm growing bolder over his brother’s shape. With no reassurance or response from him in the end, Caracalla’s leg climbed over his to bring him as close as was possible to him, and that was the way he eventually drifted off despite Geta’s muteness, which in itself was an admittance of fear and loss of control.
No, he did not want to die, either. He tried hard not to think of how short one day was: how short it would be when it ended, if the men behind that guarded door would decide that their fate would be to die at its close. This thought, however, cycled in his mind in a half-dreaming state with everything which Acacius had said - his offer, the disappointment in his voice, somehow reminiscent of the disappointment in his father’s voice, though the two couldn’t have been more different. His stories of dead twins, dead fathers, dead sons; ashes on foreign soil, orphans on the street. The way he’d spoken of Lucilla, the way he’d regarded Caracalla, and the way in some small moments, he had seemed to care for them.
And Geta had never felt so alone. He’d never allowed himself that full awareness before, of his own smallness, of his powerlessness, and how little he could do to protect either of them where it truly mattered. He’d never allowed himself to think that no matter how they would end, death itself was something they’d each have to face on their own. That frightened him more than anything, and accompanied him into his dreams.