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It is not a battle from birth so much as a battle from conception: a twisting, turning, tearing within their mother's womb, leaving her so thoroughly battered that when they emerge one after another into the world she looks upon them, for the few brief moments that she is able, with such disdain that even the midwives flinch.
Geta comes first, comes easily, wailing with clenched tiny fists; Caracalla has to be cut free, silent and blue with the birthing cord wrapped thrice around his little neck.
Their mother screams herself hoarse and chokes on her own blood; Caracalla draws breath into the red heat of his throat, and lives.
/
Geta has no recollection of this, of course — though in the blackest parts of the night, sometimes, he swears he does. He tells nobody. There is nobody to tell. Not their father, whose lip curls at the sight of the two of them all twined together day in and day out. Certainly not Caracalla — tucked into his side after an evening spent muttering of the poison in the pipes, in the water and the wine, warm in sleep and far too old for these kinds of games.
When Geta dreams, he dreams of the jagged tear in their mother's womb, of holding his breath and waiting, waiting, waiting for his brother to emerge from that dark pit inside of her.
/
Caracalla cranes his neck so that Geta may get a closer look at the fat, angry red line that encircles his pale throat. Geta shoves him. Not hard, but enough that he loses his balance.
“Do you see it?” Caracalla bristles, relentless, brushing himself off and jabbing his fingers against the mark. “That’s what you did to me.” The before goes unspoken, but resounds clearly all the same. They are seven years-old now — nearly eight — and have been having this argument since Caracalla finally began to speak.
(It took him longer than Geta, so much so that they had begun to worry he would simply never would. It takes him longer to do most things. Geta is patient, mostly, and has never minded, but knows even now that he is alone in his restraint. Knows that this restraint is a sign of weakness, not power. It enrages their father, who Geta suspects would want nothing more than to sic them on one another like wild dogs in a ring if Caracalla were not so sickly. It is, in a sense, a battle that was over before it had ever truly begun.)
Geta rolls his eyes. “Impossible. You’ve done it to yourself.”
“Have not!”
“Have too!”
They both startle and scurry at the sound of footsteps in the hall. Crouched in the shadows with his chin to his knees, Geta dares to imagine his brother there in another dark corner of his own, two little hands wrapped around his throat.
What it stirs in him is something he has no name for. Not yet. The closest word he knows is hunger. The closest word he knows is love.
/
Geta is perceptive. Perhaps not unusually so, but he notices — hears the way they speak of his brother when they think nobody is around. It does not surprise him. Their father has a list of names for Caracalla that Geta is loathe to repeat.
Nothing will be done about these whispers while their father lives, but Geta tries to remember the faces all the same. One day, he swears, he should like to see their innards spill out across the floor, as dark and wet as wine.
/
They are nine the first time Caracalla comes to him, sniffling, with a welt under his eye. He does not say which of his little beasts it is from, which means it is not from one of them at all. He needn’t say who. Their father’s shadow lingers always, even when he is not around, and the twins shiver in the shade of it. Caracalla hiccups and tucks his face against Geta’s chest, dripping mucus and tears onto his tunic. Geta supposes he should be put off by it. Like a long-suffering mother.
But they have no mother, and Caracalla only has him. If he wanted a maidservant, he’d have gone to her.
“Hush. Hush now,” Geta says. He feels strange and twisted-up inside. “Let me take you out of your head a while. It’s all right.”
Caracalla lets another sob shudder out of him, then nods. Geta presses a gentle, fleeting kiss to the welt and puts a hand around his brother’s throat.
Doesn’t press down. Not today, not yet. Just holds him there, like that, until the last of his tears dry on his cheeks.
/
Geta cannot say of what for certain, but he knows it is some kind of beginning.
/
Geta also knows, somehow, deep in his marrow, that even if their mother had lived he would not have been loved by her.
But Caracalla might.
He is grateful, then, that it is only he who remains for his brother to reach for.
/
They are fourteen when they are granted lovers, as many as they wish. Geta likes the women well enough, likes the slick heat of their cunts and their mouths, their long hair that smells of lavender as it falls around their faces, the way that they hold his head to their chests while he mouths at their breasts, seeking — something. Still, he watches the seemingly-endless line of boys his brother brings to his own bed with piqued interest.
Caracalla does not take to lovers as quickly. He is more easily riled these days; the boys all exit his bedchambers looking half-brutalized, rings of bruises around their throats and eyes downcast.
Geta watches and says nothing. He is patient. He can wait.
That is not to say he isn't giddy to send the girl fellating him away when his brother stumbles into his own rooms one night, cock hard and red and leaking against his soft belly. His hair is mussed, rouge smeared across his face. Wild-eyed and aching. Geta knows that his brother is aching because he is aching, too. It feels as if he's been waiting for him his entire life.
"Brother," Caracalla mumbles into the side of his neck, pressing himself there where he belongs. They are nearly men now, or so they say, but his face is still round and boyish, so warm when Geta reaches to cup his cheek. "Brother. Geta." His voice cracks on his name.
And Geta, he kisses his brother's temple and says, "Shhh, I know, I know, poor thing, I know what you need, come on." He can feel his composure starting to unspool as he babbles, which is decidedly not how this was supposed to go. "Sweet boy, I'll give you what you need, come here, just — closer, here, take my hand and place it wherever you wish — yes, there, yes, your heart like a rabbit's, I can feel it, I know, I know, brother, I have you, always, always; I swear it, brother. Here, you're here now, I've got you...I've been waiting, I’ve waited for you my whole life long —"
/
Sixteen, and Geta remembers blood. Their father’s many rings and how they’d felt when they first struck him. He remembers his head in his brother’s lap. Pain, of course, so much of it that it seemed to be both everywhere and nowhere at all. The sound of Caracalla’s cries. Fingers on his cheeks and twin anguish in their throats.
It’s warm once he lets himself slip into the quiet dark for a little while. Warm like before.
/
It is not Geta who drives the blade into their father's heart — though he wished for it, prayed for it, dreamt of it, of laying his head at Caracalla’s feet like a trophy of war — but it is him who kills him all the same. At least that's what he likes to imagine.
Their father is dead. Geta feels his brother’s exhale in his own chest.
The two of them, ruined. The two of them, heirs. Two heads of red hair with two circlets of golden leaves atop them. The echo of fingerprints on Caracalla's throat and the smug satisfaction that comes with it.
The empire spills into their greedy, waiting palms.
/
“We are rulers. We should take pleasure as we see fit — in any way, from anyone.” It is the most difficulty he’s ever had saying I want to fuck you. Gods, he can't even look at him. They have done many things together, but never that. It had seemed...unwise, while their father still lived. Though of course he had known regardless. Must have. Must have known long, long before Geta had ever even touched him.
Caracalla’s lip curls, the faintest hint of a snarl. “And if one emperor aims to take from another what the other does not wish to give up?”
Geta regards him with an arched brow. “Is that so?”
“It is so.” But Geta knows that it is not.
“Then you need not think of me as Caesar at all,” Geta says. He touches his fingers to his brother’s throat. Threads their fingers together and touches them to the dark scar on his bicep, an ugly memory nearly lost to childhood. Their father's cruel hand, and so much blood it seemed it would stain his skin and Caracalla's hands and the stone beneath their feet for the rest of time. “Think of me only as your brother. You would never deny me.”
"I would," Caracalla insists, challenging, but he lies, lies, lies — Geta isn't the only one who does — so Geta pushes his thumb past the plush of his brother’s lips and into the heat of his mouth, lets it rest heavy on his tongue, and watches him open, little by little. A flower in the sun.
All of Rome lay at their feet. It is his brother who undoes him.
/
“You tried to kill me once,” Caracalla says once Geta is sheathed fully inside of him. Geta, lying back on the bed, has no idea how he can even find the air to speak. There is a furrow between his brother’s brows, as if the sensation is neither painful nor particularly pleasurable. As if it simply is — as if they were always fated to wind up tangled amongst the linens like this.
“You did,” Caracalla continues, shifting his hips curiously. Not enough. “I remember, brother. But you bled for me many times, too, after. So I suppose it’s all fair and balanced in the end, isn’t it?”
Then he leans over him, looming like a shadow, and kisses him, chaste.
“Gods,” Geta cries. He does not wish to think of any of this now. There is no room left inside his head for anything but the feeling of his brother’s body squeezing around him. He cannot reach his throat from here; he digs his fingernails into his hips. “Gods, just…fucking — shut up and move.”
/
"You’ve made an animal of me, you know," he groans between kisses. "It’s unbecoming."
That makes his brother laugh. A real laugh, the kind few and far between these days. He's lovely. The sort of soft, beautiful thing that makes Geta want to sink his teeth in and tear.
"I’ve done no such thing," Caracalla insists, "only exposed what you’ve always been, my beast of a brother." He lunges, worries Geta's bottom lip between his teeth. He's very good at this. Has always been very good at this, even before he made his way into his brother's bed. A little too rough and a little too messy, the way Geta likes it.
Geta means to take offense to this comparison, then finds that he cannot. He laughs and snaps playfully at his brother’s fingers when he goes to remove the wreath of leaves from his head. He thinks of Romulus and Remus and their twin mouths latched to the wolf's teat.
Their mother was no wolf. She was hardly even a woman. Geta thinks of her even now with a clenched jaw and no shortage of disgust. His mood sours. Caracalla notices that, too, knows what he's thinking before he's ever said it aloud. He traces over Geta’s belly in the same spot he imagines they must have slit her open to get to him. "We hurt her," he says, mouth a grim line.
"You did," Geta corrects, mind clouded with arousal. He drinks in the sight of Caracalla's crumpled face with no little satisfaction and takes his brother’s fingers in his own. Kisses his soft palm — gentle with his pets and cruel with the boys he takes to bed. "You hurt. You do."
/
Geta does not startle anymore when he wakes to the cool edge of a blade pressed against his throat.
But he had, once. The first time.
In a sense he had known it was coming. Or rather it was that he had known something was coming — his brother's fits had been worsening, mood swinging violently from one extreme to the other, the aches that kept him awake at night now more easily soothed with opium than with his brother's hands.
And so it was, in a way, no surprise at all to wake and find Caracalla, naked and straddling his hips, eyes and flesh burning like wildfire, holding the knife against the hot expanse of his throat.
"Caracalla," he had said, very calmly, though his voice shook and when he swallowed he felt the sharp sting of the razor’s edge bite into his flesh, just a little; the startling warmth of blood running down the side of his neck as he held his brother’s gaze. "Brother, it’s me. Geta. What is the meaning of this?"
"In our mother’s womb, you tried to kill me. Don’t you remember? Tried to make it so I couldn't breathe, and even now you seek to kill m—"
Geta had chanced a hand on his brother's flank, rubbed him soothingly like a spooked animal until that goose-pimpled flesh grew sweaty under his palm. Caracalla stiffened, but did not press the blade further.
"A false recollection," Geta promised, hushing him again when he started. "I mean no offense, brother, only that it would be impossible to remember. You know that."
"Lie," Caracalla clucked, though his fingers had trembled around the knife’s handle. "You always lie. I remember it. I do."
"When our father’s hand came down, wasn’t it I who bore the brunt of it for your sake?" Geta felt his own eyes burn and blur with tears. His brother's skin was properly wet beneath his own clammy palms now, but he kept stroking him soundly. "You were so small, brother. I took the blows so that you would not have to."
It choked the fever right out of Caracalla's eyes. At some point the blade slipped from his fingers; neither of them flinched at the sound of it clattering against the stone. He pressed his forehead to Geta’s sternum and wept. Mouthed a wet, shuddering kiss right over his heart. Brother, forgive me. Geta had hushed him, had held him while he shook; blood on his skin and the taste of copper between his teeth.
In the dead of night, long after Caracalla had fallen heavily into sleep, Geta laid a hand over the ivory column of his brother’s throat. Thought about squeezing. Didn’t, but considered the pulse of it in his fingertips just the same.
He so oft hated sharing with his brother in their youth — silly, small things like toys or space in the cot they tucked into together until they were far too old to do so anymore — but he had, until then, never once minded sharing Rome with him. It was theirs and theirs alone to possess, to consume down to the rind, its juices dripping in twin streams down their chins.
Just us, he’d sworn to him just that evening, before the fever and the knife, words nearly lost to the cries he pulled from Caracalla’s mouth with his hands, his cock, his own mouth. You and I only, brother, for as long as we shall live. (It is still the closest he has come to saying I love you.)
Now, he felt Caracalla swallow in sleep under his palm and imagined pressing down until the breath stuttered and died in his lungs. Until his chest had gone very still, his lovely mouth slack, wine-dark eyes dull.
Ruined, in their father's deep, bellowing voice, the kind of voice that could slip inside and make a home in one's chest whether they wished it to or not.
/
Perhaps it would be mercy. His brother is sicker and sicker each day. It would be easy. It would be merciful. Perhaps, perhaps —
The gods do not speak through him this time. Geta looks to them, pleading, but the gods say nothing at all.
/
The daughter of Marcus Aurelius is beautiful. Golden hair down to her waist like a lion's mane. Sharp eyes and a sharper tongue. Geta so loves a challenge. To be her son would be the greatest privilege Geta can imagine. He often imagines the before of it all — that time in the dark Caracalla swears he remembers, the time Geta thinks he can recall, too — trapped there together in the warmth of her, and shudders.
She rebuffs him, but he will have her regardless. In time. They both will.
The two of them born anew. Born better. Born together still — always, always together.
Macrinus' gladiator is beautiful, too. Geta watches the graceful arc of his blade, the ripple of muscles in his back beneath his bruised and bloodied flesh. Beautiful because of, not in spite of, his depravity. They say this one tore apart a monkey with only his teeth in Ostia, one of the concubines whispers at their feet. Caracalla bristles, fingers curling around Dondus' little body perched on his shoulder; Geta laughs, delighted. By the time blood is spraying the stone near their feet, his arousal is apparent beneath his tunic.
A barbarian. A poet. Even Caracalla is on his feet, enraptured. Geta feels his want as a second heartbeat in his own chest.
Beautiful, he says later that evening, rapturous, with the gladiator in his mind's eye. Beautiful, he murmurs again, looking upon his brother's own wet face. He reaches out to touch. It feels as if Caracalla may very well shake apart beneath his hands some days. Geta wonders if the gladiator would be the same.
Beautiful, Caracalla echoes, looking far-away, and Geta wonders if his brother is thinking of them, too.
/
Whenever Caracalla needs to be brought to heel, it is Geta who is summoned.
His brother is often difficult, but some nights he is more difficult than others. Once, Geta has to scruff him like a kitten to wrestle him away from where he's perched himself in an open window. Another night, Caracalla whirls on him, spitting and seething, something like I know how much you hate to have to pull out of some whore's wet cunt, wishing it were our mother’s, and Geta hits him so hard he cracks a tooth on one of his rings.
This afternoon is easy. Or easier.
The arrow that lodged itself into the post near their heads in the Colosseum has shaken something loose in Caracalla. In both of them, really. Geta thinks this would be the case even if his brother's mind was not long-frayed. It's all right. It's nothing he cannot fix. He settles next to his brother on the brightly-carpeted floor of the coach, and Caracalla folds for him. Broad-shouldered now, both of them, they do not fit as comfortably here as they might have in their youth. Far too large, far too old for these kinds of games. Dondus chitters and scampers around their feet.
"Leave us," Geta instructs the Praetorians sharply. They hesitate, understandably so. "At once." He knows the tension leaves his brother’s body once he feels it leave his own. "That's right. Settle," he murmurs, velvet-soft, a tone reserved only ever for Caracalla — and then, only ever when he's like this. "Come, now." He reaches down to touch his cheek, tapping gently at the warm, ruddy flesh his fingers find.
Caracalla leans into it like one of his beloved beasts. It’s too hot in the coach, and sweat is making his hair cling limply to his forehead. Still, he shivers. "Come where?"
Geta grins. He sinks a hand into his brother's hair and tips his head back so he may look him in the eye. Tenderness comes without fuss when he's being this sweet. He loves him so thoroughly he could kill him. Would rather it be by his hand than any other, than by the illness ravaging him from the inside out. "To my rooms, of course. I'll look after you tonight."
"Mm," Caracalla agrees. He sounds fond and very much like himself when he peers up through his lashes. "You do tend to do that, don't you." He puts his fingers to Geta’s neck, to the faint scar left behind by his knife that first evening he scrambled atop him and threatened to cut his throat. Many moons ago, now.
"You are my brother," Geta says by way of an explanation. It is. It's a duty he will never scoff at, one he will never shirk. Back in his bedchambers, he puts his mouth to Caracalla's skin — sun-warmed and sweat-slick — and smiles when his brother, white throat bared, unravels for him like silk.