octavicn

[octavicn]

ANTONY.

Huh. He punctuates it with a swill of air, like mouthing a comma.

Must be said, it’s nothing short of hysterical to see Octavian bite. He really clamps down his jaw, tries to repay him in kind. He must recognise the futility of it. He must’ve seen Dolabella. Bloody piss-poor excuse for a budding Media Analyst he’d be—or whatever the fuck Julius is enrolling the hired help in these days—if he hadn’t seen Dolabella; whole Commonwealth saw it. Even Channel Five gave it a whirl, got in on the fun, spent the afternoon acting like they knew a fig about politics.

(If the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland didn’t know the name Marcus Antony before, they do now. Marcus Antony had enacted wholesale slaughter on the House floor, made polemic his backsword.)

Octavian must have seen the way he flays words until they’re bruised, then. Scalped until only belly and blood remains. He might be good at snide remarks, swashing the vitriol—

But Antony is better.

He waits, angled forward. They’re close enough to trade whispers, but the gesture is nothing more than static, skin sloughed into place. Antony lowers himself back into the leather.

“Oh?” He raises a brow and wipes the sweat from his forehead, trying to seem gentlemanly about it. In a way, he does—seem gentlemanly. Marcus Antony has never seemed anything less. The moisture catches in the light, shimmers. His curls stick to it. “And what does a normal person sound like?” He points the words back at Octavian, but he doesn’t actually look at him.

(It’s inference enough.)

He never tires of this: playing the butcher, paying somebody back in their own coin.

Antony crosses his arms over his chest. He gives the handiwork a once-over, like there’s a scalpel in his mouth. He watches Octavian scour at his shame with a steel-wool sponge, skinned and stripped, rubbing at the membrane until it’s worn down—until looks like diplomacy, like dignity. (It reminds him of Caesar. He’ll never admit it, but it reminds him of Caesar. Subtlety in the Commons, sleight of hand in the Cabinet Room—shine and fucking shellac, smothering innards with a topcoat. Taught from labour’s first throes how to survive the blood sport.)

He has no patience for it. And tonight, patience is like pinching pennies.

(He can feel himself crashing: from the pills, from the upchuck and chunder of adrenaline, from the 36-hour days an ailing Cinna has him pulling, green about the gills in Switzerland. Bloke owes him eight personal favours for tonight alone. Here’s one: drop dead, mate. He’s not greedy, doesn’t ask for much. He’s good with just the one.)

He might go on, really chew him out, but the supplication genuinely knocks him sideways. It reads desperate, like an ace in the hole, the ingénue’s last expedient, which is—good, really. In any case, all he can think about it how every venule is throbbing away at his throat, like a fucking Stradivarius of arterial strings plucked by the most snockered hand at the orchestra. The metre operates on instinct alone. With Antony, that’s downright dangerous.

Occupational Health and Safety Division, lobbed off the highest point of the Royal Albert Hall.

Antony forces his thumb into the vein, all ceremony. Like this is all just standard procedure: the red-tape, a slivering of the cord. He stops the circulation. Waits, tapping his forefinger at the other side of his throat. He keeps his eye on Octavian all the while.

He releases the vein, restarts the flow.

“Alright—” he concedes, flapping a hand about. “Alright, fine. Christ, Augustus, don’t have an aneurysm. I’m not spending the rest of my morning checking you into the fucking St. Thomas just because you couldn’t hack it. Just stay upright, for—” he sweeps the paper into his hands, “Like, five minutes. Then, go where you want. Home, if you like.”

He starts to read. Takes his pen in hand and taps to the right of his chin with it, metrical.

It starts by paying homage, as all eulogies do—even political ones. Runs through all the boons he’s given the people: shortening of the deficit, the Asylum Seekers Bill, swelling the living-wage. He makes things personal, too—scores for the angle of a leader lost, rather than a father. Someone will need to fill the space Cinna left behind. Caesar all but implies it’ll be him.

Antony drags the nub of his pen over it, because he can.

He hums in agreement.

Antony looks up from the pages, catches Octavian’s eye and clarifies: “It’s good. Hits all the points: ergonomic, unassuming. Intention is clear, too, and it’ll go right over Middle England’s head.” He doesn’t smile, exactly, but he plays nice. Nice enough, at least, because he really can’t help himself—

“Needs a bit of the nip and tuck, of course. Home repairs and what have you. I’ll do those.” He pauses, scanning his eyes down the margin one last time. “Still, solid stuff.”

He rustles the papers in hand, fan-like, collecting them at his knee.

And then, tangentially: “Cicero’ll fucking hate it.”

He says it more to himself than Octavian. He doesn’t bother to stifle the laugh. There’s no love lost between them: the ideological slanging match between Antony and Cicero is just about the worst kept party-political secret in Westminster. Antony is all verve and veal, the hulled skin of it. Cicero is—a glorified lapdog, basically. Licks up the spittle. They couldn’t be more at odds with each other; at each other’s throats, wrangling like cat and dog.

(He has an insufferable habit of materialising, by inexplicable means, at Caesar’s elbow; petitioning him, imploring him. Begging him, even, because the sod’s by no means above it. Antony always makes a point to catch his eye. Cicero swallows; thick, mucoid. Steps away. But I default to you, Caesar, of course. You know best.)

Cicero skulks away, with his tail between his legs.

“Course, if you want to be anything in politics, you won’t care about that.” He addresses Octavian directly this time. “Fucker’s been trying to mollycoddle his way into a prime Cabinet spot for years, thinks the way to go about it is to throw fucking bouquets at the dead. Shame, really. All that elbow grease he put in with Cinna just for Julius to take the helm.” He flings the pen from between his fingers, and it lands with a smack on the laminate. Grinds into the silence, like a serrated edge. “So—as good a benchmark as any, eh? If Cicero hates it, you know you’re acting in good conscience. That’s the yardstick.”

He balances his right ankle on his left thigh. It takes up a large stretch of the sofa. On any other night, it’d be a study in surfeit; the debris of waste, made real. Instead, he looks like he might actually clonk out—there, on the sofa, with red marks still to make. “You must have heard him talk, right?”

He scoffs; because, where Cicero’s concerned, Antony can’t do any different. It seems to wake him up a bit. “Can’t get through a speech without laying it on with a trowel. Loves to get on his knees and grovel, that one.”

Antony looks up. A beat goes by, not put into words.

“Anyway.” He loosens his shirt collar, absolving the noose. “You can go now, if you want.” The fabric opens up at the bottom of his throat. When he talks, the skin bobs up and down. “I’ll have Julius’ driver take you.”

He should thank him. He might, if this had anything to do with praise.

Antony chops the paper in fine strips of red. He garnishes it with some comments, and they pass entirely through Octavian; not audible, but tactile. He catches them in the pit of his chest. Antony sends him a look. Sly, benevolent. The man blinks too late. Like everything is swirled with water and slathered in oil, and the proportions slew when you bring them closer.

It’s hard to focus on angles and language.

Octavian doesn’t have to hear him to understand: it’s not praise.

The pen drops with the usual dramatism. It rolls center-stage, away from the space they share, and only stops when the parquet flattens. When it’s as far from them as they are from each other. Octavian stares at it and tries to remember what he’s doing here.

Which is to say, what he’s doing here, still.

Gratitude, then. Gratitude must be the next step in whatever motions they’re enacting; vulnerability peep show, master and apprentice. Octavian listens to him, all Bond and Moneypenny. He thinks: good Lord, this is the advice hour, isn’t it? Here come the would-be secrets of the trade. He might as well plink them down the chimney.

Antony must be in a state, to impart any know-how at all. Perhaps he’s only doing it because he believes it’s wasted candy, ether way; that Octavian will not go far enough to remember it.

Kid’s already cracking, isn’t he? Broken down before he’s broken in. Sign of the times.

It’s funny, how he gleaned better intel for less.

He has a feeling he should capitalize on it. Wring the moment for what it’s worth. People wager pounds of flesh, these days, just to get Marcus on a couch. They hope for a perch not unlike this one; a pristine room, evangelizing wisdom. Swiping his hand over their work, the last word and last deed of it, and rendering it worthy. Plucking them from ignominy. Polishing the brass. Then, at last: showing them the cake. The edge of it, mind; not the slice.

People still believe it’s about them.

“No,” Octavian says, not really thinking before the pause. This is the first time he dared to utter that in Antony’s presence—to Antony’s face. The word jumps oddly between them; like spilled paper clips, like a lunge for equal standing. He backpedals. God forbid he sets a precedent for denial. Marcus Antony is bad enough when he’s being indulged.

“No, I mean– the driver can’t do it. He brought me here, then Julius sent him off. Fitzrovia is to be cordoned for the night.” He gives a flourish; his hand draws an imaginary rope in the air. “No one in or out. You’re stuck with me. And, well, them.” A snap of his head. The side office is still whirring with voices. He hoped they would’ve clammed up by now, drowned in monosodium glutamate and Raya matches. Octavian sneers. It lacks the usual sharpness. He doesn’t have it in him to exaggerate something as obvious as contempt. Prioritizing his energy, on weeks like these, is a top-down affair. Antony should try it.

“I think Julius expected this to take more time. He always does, somehow.”

He pulls at the knot in his collar. His fingers work the hitch wider, pad snagging on a loose button, and tug it off. He’s nearly thankful for that second of darkness. Until the shirt rolls over his head, he doesn’t have to think about this room. He doesn’t have to be in it. The proximity, the lethargy in here. Like anything is permissible, and nothing is.

“We’d do well not to fall asleep. Last time we caught a shut-eye on an election year, Cinna’s son got his face in the cookie jar. Seizure all the way in sunny Germany. The Chancellor was beaming. I never thought I’d see Julius eat so much shit as he did to put that in the post.”

Octavian wonders, briefly, with a spike of awareness like setting your foot wrong, whether Antony knew Lucius Cinna Jr. Whether they split the same lines of Charlie, or hid their own number of sordid stories in local news. Whether they fucked. There’s an image, he thinks.

It isn’t a thought he expected to have. Or even knew he could.

It’s to do with this room; this night, that magnifies and magnetizes everything, like chemistry hacked in close quarters. The heat, the stilted creaks they made across leather, Antony’s eyes: it was endurable. He’s weathered worse. The intensity turned down a degree or two while Octavian was still writing. Now, he senses all these details gathering at his ankle, warming up the bone. Ready to spring in full force.

Without the shirt and the sweater, he’s only in a gray tee. It might not even be his own; Horace left a bunch hanging around. His parents bought them by the pound each Christmas. It should feel vulnerable, if vulnerability wasn’t half the point of being here. Of lingering and lounging.

“Did you lay eyes on Cicero today? Or Julius, for that matter? Are they still upstairs?”

He gives a small, inquiring hum. It makes something in his jaw hurt. His neck finds the back of the couch and pushes against it until it stills.

“If you let them keep on, you know, they’ll just spin in circles. Cicero brings out something oddly accommodating in him. I think he reminds Julius of the reason he got in politics; not the who, so much as the why. Cicero is the cutout of what he despises. So when he’s around him, he goes... the opposite way.” Octavian shrugs, weakly. He can’t bear to sense his own spine. “Because this is Julius we’re talking about, you understand, so he recognizes that in himself. He wants to curb the prejudcie before it starts, bipartisan bloody Messiah that he is. So he stubs his own toe tripping to hear Cicero out. More than he would for any of the other ones.” Quietly, these last words. His voice drops and darkens over them. “The ones that matter, I mean. Scipio. Livius. Not that he’ll listen to me say it.” 

And then he waves his hand, because the air is getting unbreathable again. His vision thins at the edges. Octavian distracts himself from the dizziness and the nausea, and the disembodied feeling of a pressure bearing down from above, by imagining what Antony might say if he asked for a glass of water. It depends, he supposes, on what breakable objects are near.

His wrists settle on his chest. They form a cross, of sorts. The cotton makes the skin catch static. He looks at Antony. Then away.

“It’s just, oh, you know, such a stark lesson in what to avoid. He dislikes Cicero and dislikes himself for it. He hates this country and hates himself for it. So he overcompensates by listening twice as hard. He bends over to work with all of them, but doesn’t, of course, let any at the table. It’s smart and it isn’t. It leaves too much room for mistakes.” Octavian closes his eyes. Turns his cheek just so. “Call that the final supper for the decadent west.”

He laughs, hardly loud enough for the sound to slide past his lips. His head nudges upstairs. “And call that team stasis for beginners. Where synergy ends and being played for a dupe begins. It’s ridiculous, the way Tullius goes at it. Like a man doing a bit for a New Year’s gaff. Walking us all through the same sketch of himself. When we were at the lake together last year, Cornelia kept calling him Inspector Morse. He didn’t have the faintest what she was about. And this is Cornelia we’re dealing with, here. Hardly the litmus test on keeping up with the masses.”

He pushes up on his elbows. It brings him closer to Antony, but at a strange point of contact: sides, not heads. He opens his mouth. Closes it, just slow enough.

“The lake. Have you ever been?”

[octavicn]

ANTONY​.

Octavian sits. Takes the seat next to him, does as he’s bid.

Because Antony does not ask. Antony does not petition, or implore, or pop the question. Antony does not lay on the sodding line. Antony commands. There’s nothing else to it.

Octavian does well to recognise that, here, there are only two options. That there will only ever be two options, here or otherwise, as far as Marcus Antony is concerned. Throw in the sponge, wave the white flag, lay down your arms and eat fucking crow, or die—politically speaking. Julius will have sown it in him, replanted it like a seed between his ribs until it caught, opened up and bore fruit—that talent for identifying your betters. By all odds, this must be a lesson he’s learned a hundred times over. Law of the land, the nuts and bolts of British democracy. A politico’s prescript.

(It’s not a lesson Antony’s ever had to learn, but he knows it exists. Whip hands always know where their licence and leverage lie.)

When Octavian asks him why—why him, specifically—he looks like a deer caught in headlights. Antony turns his head to the side, diminutive. Gives him a sideways glance, up and down. He answers him with a look, which is enough.

Why, Augustus? Because I hold the purse strings, and I call the shots. Commissioners for oaths, regs and bills—the whole fucking codex. Republic doesn’t suck in air without my say-so, has to flow through me first. Speaker Denison’s rule, isn’t it? I cast the last vote. I’m the rubber stamp.

You don’t say no to men like Antony, because saying no to men like Antony gets you the chop, the boot, the fucking walking papers. Extradited, flung out, like something mutinous. Worse, something extraneous, like knickers hung to dry. All this, before your foot’s over the threshold. 

Antony makes it so.

(Still, Octavian Augustus is a touch more familiar with the oral laws of the parliamentary elite than the Wendy House of fucking Lords over there, playing with plastic sporks in the next room. So, no need for a performance piece. The boy knows.)

“Because—” he decides on instead, stretching his arms along the back of the sofa, “Keynotes and chalk talks, they’re your piece de resistance, no? A postgrad’s metier? Measure of the man?” 

What Antony means, which is always a knife’s cut away from what he actually says, is disrobed between the words. Divested. Octavian Augustus knows his way around a speech. He whittles brass tacks with a carving knife, cuts them down until they look like Caesar, until they look like Antony. (The same visage, as a general rule.)

Antony laughs, unshorn, and it sounds like fire crackling. It’s almost an invitation; for Octavian to laugh with him. He has a habit of that. Making other people the joke and persuading them to join in—laugh at themselves, as he laughs at them. Sometimes, he forgets about the distance between them. Sweeps and scales, spectra, whole worlds.

But now, a hand waits behind Octavian’s head, supine. Close enough to touch. 

He stretches his fingers out, yawning.

“Cinna, right, was a proper upstanding bloke. We know that, sure. That’s the hot topic. But I want to, ah—suggest something else. Julius wants to give it the old college try, make a bid for Number Ten without the Financial Times cottoning on. So, I need someone to scoop up the watchwords, strip-mine them. Make them digestible.”

(Antony is all embellishment. Gored velvet: proper gussied up, all glamorous. Precision, pushed from the jugular vein. Each phrase gets a personal gilding, an ornament. Every subterfuge is dressed up in fine frills. Which is to say, he needs foundations, meat and potatoes, bones. Which is to say, he needs Octavian—or another thing like him.)

Antony flexes the hand waiting behind Octavian’s neck, wringing it in a whorl. The leather makes a creaking sound. “Reckon you can handle that?” There’s a bite to it, but it reads like a genuine question.“When you’re done, I can doll them up. Give them a facelift. You know—” he gestures with his free hand, “Make them pretty.”

Antony’s sat close enough that he can feel the thrum of Octavian’s throat—what’s more, he can fucking see it, calls it for the onslaught it is, blood begging to be freed of the flesh. Bad-dum, pat. Ba-dum, pat. He turns the percussion of it over in his mind.

It rolls, up and down. Fucking elliptical.

He smiles, smug, sputtering out the cough of a laugh. Wonders whether Octavian is really such a rookie, unconversant in the rituals and rites of political succession, riposted and bowled over at the mere suggestion of the ebb and fucking flow—or if he’d slipped a pill between PowerPoint playlets. Really thinks on it. 

Nah, not a fucking chance. Kid’s just about the most abstinent bit of flint he’s ever run to ground. Severe and straitlaced, ascetic as a sodding anchorite.

In an exercise of biblical fucking patience, Antony waits. Slouches into the greenhide and kicks his feet up onto a nearby coffee table, crossing one ankle over the other. He flits in and out of the chatter next door, strangled out in the background. Someone is rattling on about transforming ancient antiquity into an extended political metaphor—right, Jesus fucking Christ. Some inglorious offshoot of Casca’s, he has no doubt. Abject stupidity has to be genetic.

He lacks the energy to feign surprise.

(He’d been doling out orders to Julius’ vassals this time last night; which was to say, he’d argued with Cicero for verging on two full hours over the point of sympathy cords and soft skills. Allegedly, the prospective death of a much-admired leader called for a smidge more tact. Antony had made short work of him, called him the most insufferable arselicker since Henry fucking Kissinger, then called it a day. He hasn’t slept a wink since. It’s beginning to show.)

After a few beats, he plays up impatience. That is, he checks a watch that isn’t there, and grows genuinely impatient with his charge. When he casts a sigh, one wonders why Marcus Antony never took to the stage.

“If you’re done with tonight’s hysterics, that is. Gone through the motions, all sorted?” He lurches forward, a tad more aggressively than he intends to. “Because—if you’re not up to the task, the Cabinet’s nearest and dearest are in the next room over, eating Chinese takeout off of biodegradable plates. Might have a seat spare for you.”

Marcus Antony is unendurable.

That is not, at the worst of it, for reasons Octavian already accepted.

(Like his shell game of contempt and civility. Like fanning the flames around other people’s vitriol, a muckraking by proxy. Like the defensive prowl he fell into the moment Octavian was brought behind the gates; childish, coltish. Those he had made his peace with. Of all the things he’s short on, the many precepts he cannot yet grant, peace is still on his say-so).

The man is simply impossible to work with.

Instead of outlining his tasks, oh, in time-sensitive, human terms, since this night is only a career-breaker and all, he finds it appropriate to air out his best aphorisms.

By now, Octavian had transcended the finer print of Antony’s psychoanalysis. He could not care less about why he does it. (He had also transcended the awe. The fascination he’d felt when first he heard him talk—on the cuff, extemporaneous as nothing else had been in Whitehall, not since the first light bulb sputtered on—with that voracity he bled into language, as if words were meat, tannic and heated on the tongue. Which is to say; he no longer cares about the how, either).

He just really wants him to come off it. 

It makes him dizzy; the ribbing, the stretch on the couch, the sentences endlessly connected, joined at a wounded hip. All of it without purpose. (All of it without merit, too).

Watching Antony pontificate—or eviscerate; depends on where you’re standing—devolves into a voyeuristic exploit. Octavian feels less clean for doing it. He waits him out. A perverse, singular cabaret. Listens, with his eyes off the target. He busies himself with tracing the grains on the coffee table, the fiber of wood and lacquer.

When he’s finished, he arranges the papers and sets to work.

He runs Antony’s ten-minute commandment in his mind, paring it down to its bones (jutting, stilted, uneven). There’s no wonder Cicero hates him—he’s beating him at his own arcade score.

He shuffles forward on the couch. Shifts his weight, so that it rests on the edge of the seat. He has to prop his shoe for balance, and it’ll leave a dent in the leather, and it’ll leave his legs aching for the rest of the night, but it doesn’t matter. It’s what keeps him off Antony’s reach.

He’d be too obvious to grab him from this distance. Of course, he still might.

At first, Octavian has to gather his actual task from all that cock-tugging. Antony insulted him twice as much as he instructed, so there’s a lot to kick to the curb.

He plops a pen in his mouth and bites the end. It sets the pace for the hungry way in which he scribbles. Before he starts, he compares the words with the data the suits have piled up. Then with his own. He aligns in his mind: red tack, red spit of print.

Antony is right; if they hit that angle, all else will be secondary. It’s Number 10, primed for the door-swinging. Temple Island fucking head start. He stabs at it. Fine-tunes phrase to column.

For a while, there’s only the clatter pouring in from the study. Their droning swells up, dithers off. There’s still his pulse, ramming over and under every other sound, like a quilt patching itself up. There’s still his hands trembling on the table, and the crick of his wrist when it cramps (such an odd side effect, he thinks, distantly, for pills that are supposed to make writing inevitable).

There’s the silence of Fitzrovia; lording and looming. There’s Octavian, matching the figurative with the practical. (Even the press starts feeling like Antony’s voice. Even his own does).

A few seconds before he can clear the draft, the man drawls some snarky shit again.

Octavian’s jaw comes down on the pen cap. He wants to reel around, leveled fucking field, and ask him, Good God, man, do you never shut the fuck up? It’s graceless, but then again; no move he made would ever read as anything else. Above all, it’s only as brutish as Antony deserves. As brutish as he would understand. There’s no other manner, is there, to consort with beasts; it’s all a tussle, a race of tusks and bristles. Antony made it too clear: it’s his hippodrome.

Octavian cannot afford the game. His only way to win is not playing it.

He lays the pen down. Careful; bleak. The look he slides towards him is every ounce the same.

“Hysterics,” he repeats. His back goes flat against the couch.

“There’s no one else in the room. You realize that, right? There’s no eyes on us; not even wired ones. Nobody will trumpet to the masses whatever you’re saying to me.”

He shakes the paper so that the ink will not smudge. Pushes the draft his way.

“You can talk like a normal person.” He unbuttons his shirt; lower, looser. He wonders whether someone amped up the thermostat, along with everything else. A flaring of spirits made literal. The thick air forces him to pause for a breath.

I could always, he reasons, go up to Julius. Knock at the door.

The thought is some comfort. Despite knowing he never could. No; because of it.

Octavian rubs at the knots in his temples. He has to part his hair to do it, has to lean a cheek against his palm. For his other wrist, he presses down to a pinch and holds. And holds. Until the pounding ripples away. The admirable thing about pain is that it’s never localized. Nameless tension, one supposes, is as good a zeitgeist as any. 

From that angle, pushed in profile, he turns to Antony. Neck half-stretched in preparation.

He blinks the thought aside.

“Listen, Marcus. We need this done by first crow; because Julius expects it of us, for one. And because I have roughly an hour left before I keel over. In case your friend’s show wasn’t illuminating enough, I’m not good with drugs. Now, this urgency may not matter to you—and trust me, I know it’d be a good lark—but it should. You can have your bouncy castle party at my expense another time. Read the draft, tell me what needs scrapping. Then you can swoop in for the credit, and I can just go home. I need—I really need to just go home.”

If not pride, then appeal to pity. Not much of an aphorism for you, but there you have it. It always snags the stalemate. Cuts the losses.

It’s always the thing conquerors turn for.

Less Julius’ book; more so one of Atia’s. The wide eyes, the feverish glare; the lips, chapped and bitten through and, of course, open. Fawny—like running your hand down a flank. Harmless.

The funny thing is, Octavian does harmless better than he does anything else. He just never expected that Antony’s guard, beneath the shade and steel of it, is where he’d finally use it.

[octavicn]

Luke Eisner photographed for Polo Ralph Lauren, Spring 2019

[octavicn]

ANTONY​.

Octavian angles around him, and it riles him. He thinks it doesn’t show, Antony always thinks it doesn’t show, but—

His jaw tightens, and he bites at the inside of his cheek. He finds flesh there. His eyes start to curdle, but then—then, they leap back. 

Octavian skirts around him, like some fly in the ointment, like he’s not batting for the big leagues, here, at Julius’ estate, by his sanction. Like Marcus Antony didn’t sign and seal the permission slip himself. As if Octavian Augustus, graduating with laurels in keyboard fucking combat, would ever make it past the gilt gates without his might and main. Without the providence of his approval.

(Truth is, Julius had suggested he bring him in. Julius always chooses his words carefully. Always knows how to make Antony feel like his decisions are entirely his own.)

Antony spins on his heel, but says nothing. If this was a sweepstake, if this was a consular, parliamentary, civic management prizefight—which, frankly, with four pairs of junior ministerial eyes upon him, greener than all fuck, it is—he reckons that would score him the point. Because, for Antony, words are everything. More than that, Antony’s words are in everything. Paraphrases and parentheses, papers and blogs, Twitter hyperlinks tweeted by the sodding Economist, rehashed and metaphrased into a scholium.

His words are in people’s mouths, too. He practically shoves them in there with his thumb.

(There’s a joke in the Commons, passed between backbenchers like a used lollipop. He practically haemorrhages words, you know, enacts bloody massacre on the House floor. So good with them he sets the political agenda for six weeks, minimum. Fuck the Speaker, eh, fuck Lucius Cinna—the bloke eats due order for breakfast, then digs his teeth into the social trellis for lunch. There’s a joke in the Commons, which is so grounded in reality, it’s not really a joke anymore. Passes only as a politico’s bon mot.)

Marcus Antony speaks, and he sweeps the board. But when he throws the dice, gives the wheel a spin, he also shows his hand. It got him a bollocking before, just once.

Antony folds his arms, watching Octavian. Watches him smooth his hands over his scarf—like a child that’s learned not to kick up a fuss, or an unruly pet, taunted and trained into tidying up after itself. He audibly snorts. You couldn’t look more wide of the mark if you tried, Augustus. 

Anticipating his scorn, maybe, or operating purely on a brown-noser’s instinct, a suit appears at Antony’s elbow. Offers a wisecrack of his own. “Right prim and proper, ain’t he, Marcus?” 

Another one: “I bet his mum taught him that, Marcus. How to smooth creases out of old togs he’s found at the back of the closet.”

Antony blows air out his nose.

But it bothers him, how familiar Octavian is with Julius’ place. Antony wonders how often he’s been here, and in what contexts. He wonders how familiar he is with other things, too. Whether Octavian feels ergonomic here, all lavish luxury and costly elegance; the velvet, the voile. He suspects not, but regardless—

Resentment stretches over his face. Like a yawn.

He doesn’t follow Octavian when he moves to set up shop, but the quartet of suits spill out from behind him like a legion, concealed by fog. They settle themselves in the plush of Julius’ furniture; the leather swallows them. They look like miniature Marcus Antony’s.

Smaller ones.

One of them settles in Octavian’s armchair. When he plops down, it messes up his obsessive-compulsive arrangement. That scratches the ire from Antony’s face. 

He moves to stand behind the Chesterfield, behind one of the suits. Leans forward, balances his weight on two hands splayed at opposite ends of the backrest. Like a consul, poised at the helm. 

(He’d sat in the same chair, years ago. He and Julius had been smoking cigars together; which was to say, Antony was smoking a cigar, while Julius shifted from the seat opposite, reached for the decanter. That night, Julius told him about Octavian for the first time. He was going to put him through Oxford. His mother was an old friend, and he owed her a favour. Octavian Augustus was a sound investment, too—clever and careful, meticulous, like Caesar himself. Something they could both use, for their Great Work. Julius always chose his words carefully: we, us, you and I.)

Octavian fires up the screen. Antony digs his fingers into the levelled pleats of Octavian’s scarf. As soon as he starts talking terminology and demographics, turns the tide towards changes in leadership, paying homage to the dead and departed, one of the junior ministers at his elbow starts crushing Ritalin with a mortar and pestle.

Antony eyeballs him. He gets his meaning, stops grinding the dust.

The joke about the Winter Olympics gets a chuckle here and there. It’s difficult to underscore whether it’s amusement at the joke or Octavian. Antony sees it for what it is. Curses and pop culture slathered over the facts, to mask the stench of desperation beneath. To fit in, to impress—

Which is the stunt of it, obviously. Antony can practically feel the fever on him, rolling like fucking waves. So, he runs with that.

Let it never be said that Marcus Antony isn’t a gentleman, because Marcus Antony, right, fucking applauds. It spurs the suits around him to action, too, who move from languishing to lampooning. Because what Antony does, they do too.

It’s in their programming, to do his work for him.

It’s plain to see the joke in his mouth, the indignity locked under his tongue, but there’s a weight in his eyes. Ordinarily, he’d have a fucking field day with this, start doing an elaborate bit. That, right—that, was a class act. What did we all thing, chaps? Top marks? Hit all the main talking points, I’d say. Population tally, chain of command, rat races. The whole shebang. Old Thatcher even got an honourable mention, Iron Cunt.

But he doesn’t. 

By now, Antony’s already been up for two days straight, making the grade on an unconscionable mix of caffeine and uppers—rations of the éminence grise—supplied in a midnight run by Curio. He’d extolled his virtues, then. Placed a smacker on his lips, by way of sheer fucking gratitude.

Instead, he whistles, taps the bloke on the Chesterfield on the side of his throat with two fingers. He pulls himself from the leather, like he’s automated to do so. Antony slips into the seat.

He stares at Octavian for a moment. Then, he puts his head in his hands, cards his fingers through his hair. There’s a sort of longanimity in his expression; a surrender. God, he thinks. I could do with a kip, or—fuck, I don’t know, slipping into a persistent fucking vegetative state. His fingers wait at the base of his neck, stitching there.

Antony sighs, turns his head to face Octavian. “Fine. Right, then—” 

With the suits, he musters strategy. 

“In other words, boys, Cinna’s clocking out early.” Antony stands, irons his hands over the creases in his shirt. “And Caesar’s dealt with flotsam enough with Switzerland. I don’t want him paying the penalty for the sins of a sodding dead man. So—” he claps his hands together, “Golden Age, sure, but Old Age. Run through all the boons he’s given the party, people’s fucking bounties, but. We want to create a space. Let Caesar step into it. Lucius Cinna is all but dead, even if he’s sitting upright in a hospital bed in Geneva.” 

He pauses. Decides to rewrite Octavian’s closing remarks, make them his, because his ministers take orders from him, not the intern. “Get the roller out, have a crack at it. Then we can all get some fucking shut-eye, eh, lads?” They disperse, like shrapnel scattering. 

Antony sits down on the sofa, catches Octavian’s eye. He invites him to sit—which is to say, he commands him to sit.

Then he says it. “Sit.”

His tone is more sombre than the last. “Alright, listen. Julius says Cinna’s not likely to last the week. Hanging on by a thread, knocking at heaven’s gates, critical fucking list. So, this speech is gonna have to double up. Julius’ll want a political eulogy on bank. And—”

He leans back into the slough. “You’re gonna write it. With me.”

There is always an intermission, a pocket of air under the capsized boat, where he forgets Marcus Antony is dangerous. Which is to say—where he forgets Marcus Antony.

Octavian sits.

In the two minutes since the projector stopped, Antony’s expression turned handsprings. His moue of contempt slides into a despot’s mask, and when he speaks, the directives file out in military trajectory. Octavian has to grip for balance. It’s as if he tuned out to Vanity Fair and came back to Apocalypse fucking Now.

Within seconds, the secretaries belly up to their trenches. He’s given them no scant promise of reward; no medal waved and whisked away. But they can all hear the grapeshot peter out overhead, daylight burning as unconditional reverse. Antony’s command is motive enough. This, Octavian thinks, is why people start wars.

It’s probably just why they carry them out.

He no longer pities the suits for following.

They took the good page, here, in this book of bodies.

It’s Octavian who missed the memo. Because, see unlike all the other wheels within wheels Julius had thrown his way, a pat on the back and a hand on the blindfold, he was warned about this. Antony does not pull rank. He brings the whole world down around it. Octavian would be wise to take the overhang, the shelter of ignominy, or else scoop his credentials from the debris.

Octavian Augustus is nothing if not wise.

It doesn’t change the fact, does it bloody ever, that he hates himself for it.

He lets Antony talk. Once the wind is gone from his sails—which, knowing the personage, here, is likely just a gale before the tempest—he crosses his arms. Tucks them up his sides, like the pressure could temper out the shaking.

“Why?” It’s not exactly a whisper. In line with Antony’s eyes, he doesn’t know what else it could be. “What do you need me for? I was told to usher in the field research. The grist and the grit. Mitigation and—oh, I don’t know, factory supply chain.”

He really should’ve gone for that water. He had his chance, while the room was in the ticks of power transference, and the rest nodded themselves hard to Antony’s voice. Threshold Model live feed. The joke is notched for no one’s benefit. It turns his mind away from the danger of slipping, the wobble on his foothold.

Officially, he thinks, and this time it’s not gallows�� humour so much as a gallows’ vow, I’ll never take Murena up on faith. Or Horace. He wonders whether Julius Caesar will hear about it: Octavian, white-nosed, fingers in the proverbial till. Whether the suits will drop the dime on him—whether they have enough of a direct line for that—or if Antony himself will.

“Give me a second,” he says, voice tight. His gaze sweeps around, poised and perfunctory and all the while vying for focus. It latches, frantic, anywhere but on him.

Octavian hooks a thumb under his collar. Lays it over the hollow, where his pulse hammers double-time. It’s wild enough to break through flesh. It’s wild enough that it must show from so close up. (He did not have the presence of mind, when Antony went all tribal warlord, to sit further away. The couch is hard, like linen and bone. The couch is very narrow).  

His heart bumps under his finger pads. It gets mocking; like a drum. With each second he’s not talking, not moving, it stretches the skin between his clavicles in even bursts.

Not his brightest call, playing this meeting in full force (and buzzing, and clearly speeding fifty over what they can follow) instead of unassuming. He’s seen the gestures during his presentation. Touch more creative than he gave them credit for: a whole mummery of Hippocrates, served up with Etonian mess. He was tempted to call, oh, that’s true to life, actually. Do they still put you through pharmaceutics?

Goes without saying, that they’re all jam-packed with nootropics. Probably speed, too, if you can find a flat surface in Fitzrovia. That’s not the crux; that’s not the cog that stutters into matter. People like Octavian cannot afford the fast-track. Anything they get done has to be on blood and scorch alone. (So that, of course, the baronage can sniffle at the offal and burnt hairs).

Still—it was a stupid risk. Did he actually expect there’ll be cheers and praise doled out?

His hands fly up to his hair. He tugs off the elastic, which snaps his wrist with a pain just shy of grounding, and then rifles the curls over his soulders. (He’d been in the shower, when Julius’ call came through. There’s a few damp strands, somehow left untouched by the car AC and the nippy march evening and the fucking circles he’s been spinning in since he got here). His knuckles are slightly wet. He pushes them into his eye sockets, rubs them over.

“Okay.” An exhale, clipped. It’s just long enough to make the room stop spinning. Air and grace and silence: these are indulgences, with the likes of Antony. He can only take one at a time.

“If this came form Julius, sure—crack on with it. Battle plans in the barn. Do we take up from slide four, buffer it with the usual, and then wrap on your rewrite?”

[octavicn]

ANTONY.

Julius sets Marcus Antony above Octavian Augustus with a phone call. Fruit in his hands, halved, bisected by his knife. Due order, Antony calls it. Chain of command.

Are you still with him? Julius had asked. Antony had insisted he was finished. Finished with ruminating on the sociology of scandal, committing the outgrowth to words (which, on his lip, was a chronic thing, and as irreversible as writing in ink) and he swore he felt the elasticity of Julius’ smile stretch over his mouth at the other end of the line, synthetic as wax.

I want you up at Richmond, crunching chapter and verse on this.

Julius had run through the next phase like something isochronal. He’d arranged for regular check-ins with Sertorius, their man over in Switzerland, keeping them abreast of the minutiae. Insisted he dialled him up every time Cinna rolled himself over in fucking bed. 

Then, he’d wanted Antony by his side. Made some tongue-in-cheek remark about kings, weapons of war. Centurions without a speak in their hands, or Generals at the helm of an army, denied artillery and accoutrements. Julius needed his teeth; the quick, whetted point of them.

Antony went. Less like a dog on a leash, more like an equaliser.

Because Antony is his man.

He doesn’t say it in words, of course, because for Julius—

For Julius, words are something more than sinew, vittles, broken bones. Julius conceals his real words between other words, masks them behind less important ones, like an endoskeleton he’s willing to turn loose. Words that other people are always combing through; griddling the dirt through the water, fossicking for gold.

Nobody waves the white flag, knuckles under, splays on their knees.

But they exist.

(Julius says so.)

As for Octavian, Julius had left him exactly as Antony had left him. Hands tightly drawn over his knees, bolted, like he’s got an iron nail pinned through his spine. Sat upright, contemplating the… what, fucking, subcultures of the fourth estate? Science for socialists?

(He’d taken no small amount of pleasure in turning that fact over in his mind. Once, the world had flipped a coin, and it had landed on Antony’s knuckle, in his favour. By virtue of the hands that flipped it. It’s been the same ever since.)

Antony had stepped out into Great Smith Street, slalomed around tourists and New Age travellers, sweeping the tail of his coat behind him. He’d stepped into the car, a gratuitous tableau. By the time the door was closed behind him, Julius was rattling on about public perception and press conferences, and Antony’s lunch with Octavian Augustus was just a footnote. A souvenir, theatrically churned out at parties.

He’d forgotten about Octavian entirely, until the kid emailed him.

If he’s being honest, he was sorely disappointed. Antony was expecting line after line of unbaked sophomore bullshit, but actually, it read like solid stuff. Good, even. Would’ve been a right laugh to lace into him on that point, ask him if that’s what they scrub you folks up on in the Liberal Arts, then hand the assignment over to Claudius instead. God knows the fucker would’ve appreciated it.

Antony, though, is a man of ancestral fucking principle. Insisted on making his own embellishments; wrote over it with red ink, like it was his. He’d pooled it with civil language and pretty intentions, staples of his sonorous political career, inflected it with promissory notes, codes of honour. Made them a pledge of people’s unity, too, because Antony can make promises.

It’s Julius who can’t.

Promised the Nation a community of esprit de corps, because if Cinna carks it and Parliament pops its clogs, well—we’re all friends here, aren’t we, fellas?

He’d delivered it a few days later. Performance of his career, Claudius had insisted, which was convenient, actually, because if he hadn’t, Antony might’ve suggested it himself. Incredible, mate. Podium always fits you like a glove. And, God, that line—oh, you know the one—all “grief stricken civ, grief-stricken nation”? Fucking spectacular, that was.

(Fulvia had been of the same mind, but she was more politic about it. Pulled him between her legs instead. Later that night, she’d asked him what the worst case scenario was. Wanted to know whether giving up the ghost was really in the cards for dear, old Cinna. Antony had indulged her well enough, mumbled something of the right shade, with more important things on his mind. Made his way along her jawline, down her chest. At her stomach, Fulvia caught his chin in her hand. And Caesar? He’s been Cinna’s point man for years now. She turned her head to the side, considering. Must be one of the dead and wounded by now, no? Antony looked at her. Then, he slid down her waist, pressed a kiss at her inner thigh. No. Not Caesar.)

The pace had quickened, after that. Sertorius started checking in with hourly reports, something more than the tossing and turning of bedsheets. Julius had Antony relocate from Richmond Terrace to Fitzrovia, assemble a team of the finest minds in British politics. Crunching chapter and verse, to use Caesar’s phrase. 

Playfully, Antony had suggested they cut Cicero out of the loop. Julius didn’t laugh. You’ll need him. Use him.

That was two days ago. On the outside, investigative journalism has kindly pressed pause on the contentious point of Switzerland, or the Cornelia Question, which is what they were all calling it. Now, the facts are a moot point. Now, the facts are holy oils for the sick, consignments to the grave. Lucius Cinna, KCB, and the administering of his last rites. His whole convoy are out there right now, turning the Swiss antechamber into Piccadilly fucking Circus.

For Antony, though, it’s all fodder. Swept somewhere in with freelance photographers, snapping sullen pictures of every dog-tired sod who passes over Number Ten’s sad threshold, or the hum of people in the London streets, clamouring for transparency. Somewhere in Geneva, he can hear the intestinal purr of Cinna’s heart flatlining.

Something turfed out into the background.

The suits swarm him now, like flies to carrion meat. They know it too. Point of the matter isn’t Cinna’s death: let the man hop the twig, pass on into the next life, be fucking done with it. Point of the matter is what comes next. A nation’s grief, a funeral in Switzerland. Latitudes and likelihoods, substitutes and stand-ins; next steps, and the next-next steps, and the next-next-next steps, until Julius can seize the reins of command.

That’s what Antony’s for. Barked commands, blitzkrieg.

When Octavian plods his way through the lobby, practically twitching at the neck, he sticks out to Antony like a sore thumb. His mouth curls upward, but his eyes harden, growing cold. When Antony speaks, his voice is almost thunderous, filling the room. 

Everyone stops to listen.

“Ah, there he fucking is! Fresh off the first defence, England’s brand new centre-back, aye? Called up from the youth team, long fucking last. Julius got you a bed at St George’s Park with your name on it, then, sent you up international to play with the wingers?” 

Antony pushes one of the suits to the side, rolls his sleeves up his forearms as he paces forward. He cards a hand through his hair. “Deserves a slap on the back, doesn’t he, chaps?”

He looks different to the last time they met. There are wrinkles in his shirt that weren’t there before. “Heard about old Cinna?”

His jaw locks; clicks shut. For a second, he cannot see straight.

No, Antony, not a whit. Who’s the bloke, again? Advertises O2′s prepay?

Yes, I heard about Cinna, as luck would have it. Was just walking through the bushes here when I thought I should pop in, give the privy council a hand. Christ’s sake. Do you always carry on like this? Ten sentences where one would do? It’s a leg up until it isn’t. You are so versed in rhetoric, you know, you no longer see what it gives away. It’ll be a liability, one of these days.

Were tonight not a career-maker, a point where the chips not only fall, but flit off the firing table and into your lap, he might tell Antony all that. God knows someone should.

But then the affront and the anger peel off, diced as thin as wax-paper. Octavian slides him a glance. Curious, and orderly, and betraying his own hand. It must rile you, doesn’t it, that I was called on. Tweeting weasel words is one thing—but this, this is the spin room.  

He keeps his tongue. Keeps count, too: of suits, and ranks, and mercies.

Four. When he strolled in, they were already pushing the pen and licking up the spittle. 

Foot-marchers, nothing more. Aides de camp he cannot recognize from Caesar’s previous watershed moments. Which means they were not present—which means, in politico doublespeak, that Antony was either entrusted with the reins or relegated to the kiddie table.

He meets his eyes. He has to turn his shoulder for that. Gives it a wide, seeking tilt, as though he could read the truth on the slew of angles. 

If Antony is half the Commons cricketer they hail him to be, he’ll spot the question.

Where’s Cicero? Where’s the command line?

As far as mercies go, he can only find one. That Caesar’s brute does not follow through on his threat, or his promise, or whatever the cock and bull was, putting money to papier mache mouth. There’s no clap between them; no contact.

Before the odds can turn, he shuffles past him. It’s a neat diagonal, just off his shoulder and into his left field. World’s shortest game of chess—Kasparov and Mad George.

He takes the free armchair. A Chesterfield, and a cut newer than it looks. Like everything else in Julius’ house, it was curated as a lip service to history, not as a bow and scrape.

(Once he set off, he cannot stop observing the world. It’s usually this way, but tonight is more keyed up. It could be the pills. It could be, probably is, the buzzing pride at being at the crash site. Now, when the black-box is still smoking, not twelve hours after to eyewash it for WATO).

There are no servants to take away his clothes. The maid who let him in had scurried off before the front gates even bolted, which means Julius must’ve given the whole household the slip. Smart, in the way Julius tends to be. It’s what ensures Octavian is here, in his periphery from three floors above, echolocation fucking strategy, rather than anywhere else. Past midnight, too, and not one peek at the man of the hour. God’s sake, even the stock closes at 6. Even the law courts hitch up shop. But working for Julius is legality and profit thrown in the crockpot; the slush fund, the scales, the polishing of either. He knew this, when he took the call.

(He knew it when he took the money, too, all those years and promises and leashes ago).

He drapes his coat—Burberry, from ghosts of Christmases past—over the backrest. Folds his scarf over it. When he turns around, the suits are watching him smooth the pleats. He does not give himself a chance to make out their expressions.

(If he did, he’d never start talking).

“Funeral speech, then.” His voice is leveled. That, at least, carries no wrinkles. “Or, more correctly, pre-funeral speech. The first squeak out of the ketchup bottle. As First Secretary and Party Leader, Julius will carry the torch.” 

A break, where he assesses the room. Cicero and his distaste for swear words; Pompey and his distaste for technicalities—none of it poses a problem. These junior secretaries dish their comms over fish and chips.

“And what a shit torch to carry. At best, it’s bumbling, ham-fisted drivel. No consequences, but no way to capitalize on it, either. At worst, it’s a freebie for the hacks. Fifth estate dividend. They swarm on it because it gives them something to eviscerate, and they cannot very well harry a corpse, so—”

He picks up the TV remote. Changes it in device mode. With a jump of his throat, leg bumping on the table’s trestle, he taps his phone until AirDrop connects. (He’s done this in Fitzrovia so many times, it’s practically all his screen displays. The only other option is Horace’s bluetooth). 

“No one wants their guy to be the ketchup guy. We sure don’t want our guy to be the ketchup guy. This table shows how specific terminology polled with a few key demographics. We’ll pay homage, while blasting messages about necessary changes in leadership. New generations, new blood. So that the last we’ll hear of Switzerland is when the Winter Olympics are on, and we beat their ass.” A smile, wan. Proverbially.

“We want them to see this opportunity for what it is, without forcing them to admit it. Mournful dog whistling. Whoever listens to Julius’ speeches in the next few weeks must get the simultaneous feeling that the nation lost, oh, you know, the brightest bald spot in the Order, but also, well, maybe there’s a thought to that. Maybe the House is due some airing. We took gran down to Dignitas, didn’t we? So then why are we letting the Speaker waddle on?” 

He switches the screens. Flicks his eyes through them, scanning for mistakes even as he powers up to speak. Any moment now, Antony will cut him off. He supposes the only reason it didn’t happen yet is because he’s palming for his cigars.

“This one shows what the opposition will go for. With reasonable plausibility, of course. Their discourse analysis is like wading through the Yes, Minister reject bin. The Opposition—and here’s Cato, right, our mummified Thatcher bell boy—won’t bother to make it a fighting point.”

He runs them through the next slides. When he’s finished, he has to force his tone to scrape above the whirring devices. God, but he needs some water. His heart pulses in his teeth. It’d be just jolly, having a panic attack in front of Marcus Antony and his Chelsea Chorus.

The problem with your emotions, Atia had cooed, is that you never know where they are until it’s too late. Octavian bristled without really bristling; which is to say, he looked over her head and huffed. This isn’t Inside Out, mom. I’m not going to center on my core and scoop out the swirling light, or whatever. Atia, predictably, blew up at being called mother—It makes me so old, Octavian, if I told you once I told you—and the conversation changed tack.

Now, privately, he reevaluates. Takes a shaky breath.

“Going off on RAT—”, a look pointed Antony’s way, the smallest ankle-bite he can afford, “which is to say, Rhetorical Arena Theory, for those of us who aren’t switched on to new developments—we should be fine so long as we dominate the field. We’ll deal with quantity later. If I had to estimate, Julius will go through Cicero and on to Livia. But the first statement is the most important. So pick any of these terms and mix them up in the swivel. We can send the draft upstairs by three, four at the latest. That way, you can still fit in a kip before office hours.”  

[octavicn]

Holcroft Court, 10 Carburton St, Fitzrovia W1W 5AL, London

There’ll be a point in his life, Octavian promises, where his time won’t be measured in Julius Caesar’s calls. For now, that’s only a calcified threshold. A barometer of rust and grassroots, campaigns and fossilized ideals. Between him and it stands a world of interference.

He sets to scrubbing it like polishing your inheritance—which is to say, like earning it back.

It’s to do with semantics, after all: steel-capped pen, steel-wool sponge. The lunch comes and goes. Octavian is ready to rinse it off with hot water. A part of him wants to render Antony’s indifference sterile. As if antiseptic ever meant harmless; as if he hasn’t had his share of lessons of contagion, textbooks of public policy on containing and deterring. As if it didn’t plant something in his skin. Like all grand memorandums of disaster, Octavian turns his face away from it. Prepares his odds for better days.

Julius will have him cut the same cards for other people. He’ll get the in on this, won’t he? He was good. He can be. Cinna is far from stable—the balance is the rabble’s for the tipping. He’ll get other rooms. Which means... Jesus Christ, it means there is no need to recall the oil and gloom of that one. The Gallery, the table, the thick rumble of Antony’s speech.

People like Marcus Antony, much like tadpoles, he’s found, move in a dark and treacly lake. Everything is slower; everything is magnified. Its joys, if there’s fuck-all to it, are inscrutable to the likes of him. He leaves Westminster feeling not just dirty, but drowned under.

(How was it? Did he bite off your head? Forced-fed you those charts? Horace, from the kitchen. The quizzing pelted him like horseflies diving home. Octavian swerved by, shifting out of reach. Water. Cheap wood creaked where he moved. Good God, he thought. The man just begets these metaphors, does he not? Devotion and devouring. They should put him up at Toussaud.)

A few days after that lunch, his phone rings again. Octavian slathers a smile over the tone. Julius likes his congeniality to be just room temperature; obedient enough, but not febrile. Not saccharine. Nothing to tint the enamel on his teeth, when they sink into it.

A car is up front, Julius says. His voice is tired; scrubbed to a pallor of a different sort. If this was another moment, if the barometer tipped a tad closer, Octavian might ask him how he’s coping.

It’s a moot concern. No, worse; a weak one. It disgusts him, to feel it slop and spill. He asks how many days he needs him for.

He packs a clean shirt, double chargers, a blister foil of Advil.

Nothing stronger? Can you face up to Father Caesar in this wretched state? Horace; the common area, this time. Octavian wonders if it’s a skill you learn at public school, pissing all over people’s business. Murena left some Ritalin over. 

The hell of it is... he considers that. His tongue runs over his lips; chapped and cold. He’s betraying all the gaping scars of late deadlines. Except he’s never late. Except they’re not his deadlines. (He’d dare say he fares better, when it’s his skin on the bloody rack).

He wrote Antony’s draft over night. That left him two more days to brush up to snuff with Switzerland’s medical industry, then with the pitfalls of their own (snakes and fucking ladders). Then it was on with Cornelia’s past. Her ancestral squabbles, particularly aimed at her brother Lucius, and Lucius’ ex, and just about everyone in London who isn’t a Harrods attendant.

That left him one more day to send in the essays for Pompey’s youngest. A tiny illegality, as far as upstreet favours went. The twat was just an undergrad house plant, as fatalistic during mid-terms as he was trigger-happy to paypal him after each close shave.

How had Horace put it? Oxbridge boot, right primed for the dining.

It was a stupid use of his time. He knew it, back then. He knows it all the more now. It splatters with all the velocity of delayed realizations. Do I not give you enough? Julius would ask him.

That answer, of all, is the easiest in his mouth. Maybe even the truest.

No. Never.

The thing with money is—

The thing with money is that there’s people who say sentences like that and believe it, people who dig for the hidden crick, the doorstop, the pulley—and people who never do.

Octavian takes two pills. Cheating. Wasn’t this your scene? 

It no longer sounds like Horace’s voice.

He knows too well whose voice it is.

In the car, he allows himself the hope that Antony isn’t there. He walks in through the lobby, coat draped over. He tries to come up less tenderfoot, less led by the throat, but light doesn’t hold its own, in Fitzrovia. He can practically feel his head peering round like a terrier’s.

A pulse rings in his soft tissue, each inch and ply of it. It should be grounding, but instead it sets a gong. A sense of urgency is cooking from the ground up. The house knows it.

A flock of suits he can’t recognize tells him two things—soundlessly, as all real lessons carry. The first is that Cinna will have about a few days before he goes the way of the political dodo. If not in flesh, then in the party. The other thing matters slightly less, and slightly more.

They’re all surrounding Antony.

[octavicn]

ANTONY.

OCTAVIAN.

Good, Antony says, as if that’s all it’d take.

(It is). 

The praise lands with the fling of a bruise, stiff and short. He registers the heat faster than the sting of it. He’s lucky he’s not a blusher. Atia’s remarks rain down from far away, something about his perfect complexion. As with anything else, Atia framed his prospects like this was a Regency novel, like beauty must always translate as betrayal.

The warmth dips to his chest. It forces him straighter in the chair. 

Oh, come on. Really? From a distant perch of reason, Octavian looks at himself and grimaces. He scolds his body the way he would an animal, untended and not yet broken in. Or maybe a child. Beasts have their own code of dignity. What lurches in him at Antony’s words is nothing but human—the husked, flayed core of it. 

He used to think Julius is skint with praise. Now he’s starting to realize the man must’ve read this need on him, in him, a book rifling at the brutish middle, and has only taken mercy.

There’s nothing Octavian wouldn’t do to hear it again. Even from Antony, who is nothing to him. Even from Antony, who could no more mean it than he could look Octavian in the eyes.

He takes a sip of water. Presses his glass to his wrist, and his wrist to his jaw. Drains it.

“I can do sweet.” He waits for the cold to wash his voice clean. “I’ll email it to you in time for the news cycle.” Octavian gathers the files with a steady hand. There’s the flap and flurry of leather, while he packs the paraphernalia. Éminence Grise stationery. It sounds like skin molting.

“If he dies, if it all goes tits up—”, he presses his lips, runs his tongue over the bow, “—can you talk Julius out of going there?” A beat, and his hand shoots in the air. “Listen to me a sec. Could you… could you put the glass down, please?”

He draws his breath. There’s a painting on the other end of the room which didn’t crop in until now, when a ray of sun sliced through the velvet drapery and cut the air open. He thinks it’s Abraham and Isaac: the hand, the knife, the cypresses. He watches Isaac’s bucking chest, the wet bulge of his eyes. He thinks of Julius. (He thinks of Julius a lot, these days. It soaks up thought and plan and downtime, free hours, small hours, hours of bile and blood. One might say this is the ink blotter, the draft where it all resides. Correction and amendment.)

(He thinks of Atia, too, on and off benzo’s and detox cures. Of Nora, four years older than him, backpacking somewhere in Indonesia. There was never an Abraham, with them. There was never an order. Sometimes a knife means just that. Sometimes a knife is a chance.)

He thinks of Julius, then. Julius sending him here, pawing him off to Antony like the most chipper doorstop. Julius, ordering him only in those places he did not bother finessing. Those cracks and crannies he did not care for patching.

As far as sons go, he tells Isaac, you had the easy way out.

Another inhale, sharper. Then he starts to speak.

“I know, alright, realistically, I know this is against every media training, 101 Tearjerker Intro we’ve ever taken. But the door prize here is not grief. Mourning openly is not going to earn him any log marks. The door prize is intangibility. We need Julius to remain in the shadows so that he can step out of them at last. Decisively and on his own. There’s a reason they shucked the monarchy like a banana peel, like… I don’t know, the world’s most expensive comedic relief. They’ve had enough of kings. That’s not a buzzword Cicero keeps reheating. They’ve revered and reviled their share of lineages by now. At least… ah, at least those who go at it in plain sight.”

A break, and his gaze skips over Antony’s shoulder. God forbid the man should feel targeted by this. God forbid the man should feel anything at all, at this moment. Emotions stick to him like lighting to weathercocks. Should they ricochet, Octavian would have no way of steering off. It’d lose him the floor.

“I think—no, I know that Julius should not be associated with Cinna. We can show him dry-eyed at the funeral, but that’s about it. Cornelia won’t help him further than she already has. If Cinna is gone, and Julius is next in the box… God, we can’t risk it looking inherited.”

Maybe he is a blusher, at that. There’s something inching up his face, a faint and swirling current. Maybe he’s coming down with a fever.

He reaches for the bottle and finds it empty. Steeples his hands instead. “Do you follow?”

Octavian’s words catch Antony’s wrist with the same efficacy as would a hand. It reads like supplication, and the twist of his mouth deepens. In appealing to him directly, Octavian stokes something instinctive in him. He indulges him.

It’s persuasive, whether he means it to be or not.

Antony drains the glass, as if to labour the point. He lifts it from his mouth, rests it at the table. His hand waits there, like something hanging fire. He doesn’t quite lean in, doesn’t quite close the gap between them, but the way he leers at Octavian from across the table certainly makes it seem like he does. Like all this is an invitation extended, an overture. It’s almost vulgar, and—

Well. Antony knows all about that.

He rolls his eyes, as if to say, hats off to you, kid—first feather in your cap for pointing out the fucking obvious. Antony pulls his hand back from the glass, taps at the tablecloth with his forefinger. “Yes, Octavian, I follow.”

(Granted, Julius is fond enough of his little pet project. Sees some sort of plus point in securing the services of an Oxford ingénue, wants him on their payroll. Fine. Have at it. Julius always did like a charity drive, bit of pro bono gratuities on the side, like he’s the world’s most austere philanthropist. But there’s a hierarchy to these things. Octavian knows it. Antony knows it too, in a different light.)

Still, it’s not all proud flesh. It’s something more than falling hook, line and sinker for a bit of apple polish. Antony hears him, loud and clear—and he’s not wrong. Nation’s always been a pinch too into its history annals, bit of auld lang fucking syne, but these days, the Crown is only nominal. It hasn’t wielded any real power since the masses learned they outnumbered the pick of the litter tenfold.

(They thought they were onto something, too, stealing power from the empire to give it to the state. They still have kings, they just call themselves something else now.)

Octavian straightens in his seat, and Antony basks in his. Looks the very picture of excess, a king’s counterfeit. “Won’t matter what he does, the media will have a field day anyhow. They’ll cycle through the usual buzzwords. The Mail might even throw dictator out there, see how that lands. Bloke’s leaving behind a whole ancestral fucking line, and Julius is next. He knows that.”

The window of opportunity for binning Cornelia off is dead, gone, fucking buried. To throw her on the scrapheap now—bloody hell, it would be catastrophic. How would they even go about it, anyway? Sorry for your loss, love, prayers are with you and all, but could you do us all a massive solid and just fuck off? Mint, yeah. That would be great.

Somehow, he doesn’t think that’d do them any favours.

The truth is, Julius has been the face of the party for years now. Cornelia or no Cornelia, he was always going to be next. Old Cinna kicking the bucket is a touch more morbid than what they’d had in mind, but they certainly hadn’t expected the fella to hack another term. Inwardly, Antony shrugs. God moves in mysterious ways, eh?

“Julius wouldn’t even consider it. It’ll play better if he just takes over Cinna’s duties behind the curtain, then pops up during prime time and takes over as PM. As if he always was.”

Antony’s phone begins to vibrate in his jacket pocket, like a high sign.

He slips it out, flicks across the screen with his thumb. “Julius.” He rises from his seat with a nickel and dime of urgency. “No, we were just wrapping up—” Antony puts his hand over the receiver and leans over the table.

To Octavian: “Send me that draft.”

And then Antony leaves.

end entry.

[octavicn]

ANTONY.

Antony isn’t quite sure which pisses him off more: Octavian waving off Christophe Pichon for water like a sodding fresher yet to be shown the full particulars of the hog, or the fact that the kid has done his homework. Histograms, vectors, all.

Works well with the facts, he hazards. The honest, naked, unvarnished truth—whatever that is. Bit of an expatriate in Westminster, then.

On the first point, Antony doesn’t let himself act surprised. It doesn’t exactly knock him for six to learn that Octavian Augustus, about as boring as he is, as a general rule, completely fucking invisible to him, wouldn’t know a good vintage if he was trapped in a vat. Had to drink himself legless to get out. Free with the meal, too, so—

He’s by no means lost for words.

But that’s not the reason for his silence. 

Octavian runs through his battle strategy like he’s practiced it eight times already in the mirror, and for a moment Antony wonders if he did, in fact, run through this little performance beforehand. Made sure he knew his lines.

Antony smiles uppishly.

The kid is properly genned up, he’ll concede that. Knows exactly how to tackle this thing: stratum by stratum, like chipping at a mineral vein. He’ll concede it, but he’s not admitting it.

(He won’t admit that Octavian is right, either. That, before they iron out the who, what and where of the future, they need to get a handle on the now. It’s not even about Switzerland—well, it is, because they can’t say that Lucius Cinna, man of the people, has gone and fucked off to Switzerland because he’s actually minted, and he wasn’t much feeling up to betting his odds of survival on the NHS like he’s part of the common herd. It’s about getting something out there. A story, or the simulacrum of one. Something that gives the public something to chew on.)

“Good.” He crosses one leg over the other, taps the lip of his glass with his forefinger. 

It’s punctuated with a dignified sort of laziness—so much so, that he might as well have been filing his nails down at the table, only half hanging onto the carefully collared words of Julius’ moppet. Like plucking a grape from a vine, popping it indulgently into his mouth. Like he has more important places to be, more pressing matters to tend to. 

He doesn’t, of course, because this is all the country will be talking about for weeks on end, but still. It feels like it.

There’s no addendum. No we’re agreed, or we’re of the same mind, then, so let’s talk next steps. There is no we. There is only Marcus Antony. Sui generis: singular and standalone. This isn’t a fucking rave review, let Octavian not forget that.

“Julius will want to go with the doctor. And, well, I mean—it’s Switzerland. Oldest policy of military neutrality in the world, grand dukes of nonintervention and conscientious fucking objection. Shouldn’t have to put too much elbow grease in there.” He speaks as if Octavian should be writing all this down. “If the fella carks it, Opposition won’t say a word. Can’t, really, unless they wanna be strung up, given the blue ribbon for most pitiless fuckers in the Commonwealth since, I don’t know, Marius and his eat the poor, shit them out, tuck in again for seconds legislation. Imagine how that would read. Yeah, R.I.P. and all, but did you hear the sod went private?”

He clears his throat. “If he doesn’t, well. That’s about a week they’ll leave him before the country forgets and goes back to, what, strong-arming Number Ten into talking deficits and the poverty line? Business as usual?”

Antony pokes fun at the whole thing, and it’s easy enough to forget that his homily is all business, but there’s no warmth to it. Cold and cynical, like international IOU’s or the national employment rate aren’t, in fact, perfectly valid affairs that ought to be tended to.

He sips from the wine, really quite pleased with himself. “The press will want details. What the fuck’s actually wrong with him, his condition, what happens in the event of, you know, Cinna kicking the bucket.” It’s all very matter of fact. “They’ve got Sertorius out there already.” He flips his phone face-up, types out a message.

Antony raises a brow, as if suddenly remembering the kid in front of him is a thorn in his side. “God. Are you really drinking fucking water?” he needles, pocketing his phone. He huffs, shrugging. “We’ll need a statement, then. Nothing to relay for now, we ask you respect the family’s privacy, we wish the PM a speedy recovery—all the usual bullshit soundbites. Short and sweet.” 

His mouth twists. “Reckon you can hack sweet, Octavian?”

Good, Antony says, as if that’s all it’d take.

(It is). 

The praise lands with the fling of a bruise, stiff and short. He registers the heat faster than the sting of it. He’s lucky he’s not a blusher. Atia’s remarks rain down from far away, something about his perfect complexion. As with anything else, Atia framed his prospects like this was a Regency novel, like beauty must always translate as betrayal.

The warmth dips to his chest. It forces him straighter in the chair. 

Oh, come on. Really? From a distant perch of reason, Octavian looks at himself and grimaces. He scolds his body the way he would an animal, untended and not yet broken in. Or maybe a child. Beasts have their own code of dignity. What lurches in him at Antony’s words is nothing but human—the husked, flayed core of it. 

He used to think Julius is skint with praise. Now he’s starting to realize the man must’ve read this need on him, in him, a book rifling at the brutish middle, and has only taken mercy.

There’s nothing Octavian wouldn’t do to hear it again. Even from Antony, who is nothing to him. Even from Antony, who could no more mean it than he could look Octavian in the eyes.

He takes a sip of water. Presses his glass to his wrist, and his wrist to his jaw. Drains it.

“I can do sweet.” He waits for the cold to wash his voice clean. “I’ll email it to you in time for the news cycle.” Octavian gathers the files with a steady hand. There’s the flap and flurry of leather, while he packs the paraphernalia. Éminence Grise stationery. It sounds like skin molting.

“If he dies, if it all goes tits up—”, he presses his lips, runs his tongue over the bow, “—can you talk Julius out of going there?” A beat, and his hand shoots in the air. “Listen to me a sec. Could you... could you put the glass down, please?”

He draws his breath. There’s a painting on the other end of the room which didn’t crop in until now, when a ray of sun sliced through the velvet drapery and cut the air open. He thinks it’s Abraham and Isaac: the hand, the knife, the cypresses. He watches Isaac’s bucking chest, the wet bulge of his eyes. He thinks of Julius. (He thinks of Julius a lot, these days. It soaks up thought and plan and downtime, free hours, small hours, hours of bile and blood. One might say this is the ink blotter, the draft where it all resides. Correction and amendment.)

(He thinks of Atia, too, on and off benzo’s and detox cures. Of Nora, four years older than him, backpacking somewhere in Indonesia. There was never an Abraham, with them. There was never an order. Sometimes a knife means just that. Sometimes a knife is a chance.)

He thinks of Julius, then. Julius sending him here, pawing him off to Antony like the most chipper doorstop. Julius, ordering him only in those places he did not bother finessing. Those cracks and crannies he did not care for patching.

As far as sons go, he tells Isaac, you had the easy way out.

Another inhale, sharper. Then he starts to speak.

“I know, alright, realistically, I know this is against every media training, 101 Tearjerker Intro we’ve ever taken. But the door prize here is not grief. Mourning openly is not going to earn him any log marks. The door prize is intangibility. We need Julius to remain in the shadows so that he can step out of them at last. Decisively and on his own. There’s a reason they shucked the monarchy like a banana peel, like... I don’t know, the world’s most expensive comedic relief. They’ve had enough of kings. That’s not a buzzword Cicero keeps reheating. They’ve revered and reviled their share of lineages by now. At least... ah, at least those who go at it in plain sight.”

A break, and his gaze skips over Antony’s shoulder. God forbid the man should feel targeted by this. God forbid the man should feel anything at all, at this moment. Emotions stick to him like lighting to weathercocks. Should they ricochet, Octavian would have no way of steering off. It’d lose him the floor.

“I think—no, I know that Julius should not be associated with Cinna. We can show him dry-eyed at the funeral, but that’s about it. Cornelia won’t help him further than she already has. If Cinna is gone, and Julius is next in the box... God, we can’t risk it looking inherited.”

Maybe he is a blusher, at that. There’s something inching up his face, a faint and swirling current. Maybe he’s coming down with a fever.

He reaches for the bottle and finds it empty. Steeples his hands instead. “Do you follow?”

[octavicn]

ANTONY​.

He nods. The familiarity is scandalous, feels something slimy, and Antony decides it’s also downright sycophantic. His jaw clenches, his tongue waits behind his teeth, and he forces a smile: if a man could make his mouth into a fist, this is what it would look like.

It’s not like they went to the same Oxford. His Oxford is splashing your face with last night’s Comtes de Champagne. His Oxford is crushed velvet and the law room. It’s knocking back a few at a Bullers club dinner before showing up, still slaughtered, at the Henley Regatta come morning.

Nobody ever called him on it, because he’s Marcus Antony, and—

And nothing. He’s Marcus Antony.

Octavian’s Oxford, though, is the Russell Group of the rag, tag and bobtail. Wheeling between faded graduate chambers and phoney performances of, what, fucking, he doesn’t know, Bolshie activism? They did not attend, by any stretch of the imagination, even a remotely similar Oxford.

Antony hums. Content knowing this, he repeats Octavian’s words back to him. “Mhm. Oxford time.”

He slackens in his seat. Somehow, Antony manages to pass it off as elegance. He has a curious knack for that: for making languid and slap-happy idleness seem the picture of poise.

“They can be like that.” It’s only a smidge cavalier.

Antony’s face reads something neutral, reads like nothing. But if Octavian were to peer closer, comb through the marrow and muscle, he’d find the contempt there waiting for him, waiting to cut him. It’s a poorly hidden thing.

The smile that unfurls isn’t a smile at all. It’s a Gordian knot: knows exactly what it is to be shooed from the door, but then, it doesn’t have a clue, really. These things are things that exists, he knows, but they’re things that happen to other people; not him. “If they can’t place your face—” Antony whistles, flicking a thumb behind him. 

He gives Octavian a considered look that seems to say, with no small amount of snark, chin up, kid, or something to that effect.

Antony ignores his comment on the wine, because it’s a lazy shot. A pointed remark without an arrowhead, barely scratching the skin, let alone puncturing it. He doesn’t even gratify it with a quick eye roll, because he’s not an enfant terrible for drinking Condrieu with his lunch.

He’s not the forsworn beatnik here.

He folds his arms across his chest, in case it’s not point-blank, as a crow flies fucking obvious that he’s a flyspeck less than delighted to be here, lunching with Octavian Augustus: Julius’ big idea, his pet project, his favourite bankrolled Oxford palliard.

(It’s not the first time that the First Secretary has played favourites. But it’s the first time that Marcus Antony, stinking rich and practically lithographed for office, hasn’t made a clean sweep, coming in first. It’s all that Dolabella poppy-wash, he says, nothing more. Once he gets and handle on this, once he pulls Julius out from the fire and prevents the Commons passing, oh, fuck knows, a bill that lets the common herd lynch their Prime Minister for his poorly reeled, bullshit rhetoric, then—)

Antony scoffs.

“That how you start all your important business meetings, Augustus? Bit of tabloid gossip and casual fucking natter?” The waiter arrives with the wine, as oily and arse-kissing as his welcome, and it’s a good thing, too. Cuts Antony off from teeing off some insufferable spiel about scholarship boons and busybodies, eyes fossicking for the scandal sheets, because that’s their way in—eh?

“That what you’re for? Sent my way for the canards, find out my lay of the month?” Though the bad blood is plainly fucking evident, the level of professionalism is, unfortunately for every sad bastard with the misfortune of having worked with him, standard. Systematic; an ordered procedure.

He licks his thumb, as if carding through imaginary files. “So—” he says, drinking from his wine flute instead. “I assume Julius tipped the wink on what we’re dealing with here. All tipped off and filled in? Or am I gonna have to double back, add flesh to the basics?”

This time, the silence is not strategy—it’s necessity.

Octavian shifts, leather creaking. Alright. You’re rabid, then.

His hands splay on his knees. He arranges his body as one would a dinner table; limbs all ready to adapt to the options. Exit, apology, counterpunch. He arranges his face, too. Allows the surprise to slot in inch by inch, until it looks less like staggering back and more like dealing with an unpleasant excess.

(And the Parliament’s knave, as the world knows, is nothing if not excess made man).

That, Marcus Antony, was too many words at once.

His blow landed, then.

He might taste the flecks of triumph, had Antony’s reaction not numbed his jaw.

It’s impressive, seeing him riled up. Even just the faintest stir of it, even just the bucking of odds, carries something of an open fire. Octavian makes a note to watch Dolabella closely. Any man who didn’t run for the door as soon as Antony even approached a lather... well, he showed some mettle. Julius might need it, in the weeks to come.

Until now, he’s never been the object of the man’s... anything, save perhaps disdain. (And even that for show, appetizers-appropriate). Antony’s scorn had always felt secondary; complicit in the wider play of crowd and crown. He knew, rationally, that the bloke’s statements had more to do with himself than Julius, or the hoi polloi, or Octavian Augustus—

—because Octavian Augustus did not exist, to Antony. Should not exist.

Octavian Augustus pushes his wine aside.

“Water, please.” Julius hadn’t trained the please out of him, just yet.

(He might keep it, at that. No one will remember his words at this stage, as Antony was so charitable to point out. No one will look close enough to trace the homo novus on him, but it doesn’t matter. Personalities are built on these bells and whistles).

“God forbid”, Octavian deadpans, “that you should add flesh to anything, Mr. Antony.” The rest of it goes unsaid: look where that got you. 

The waiter leaves without bowing.

He picks a dossier from his bag, files it out on the table. The charts are standardized: just enough for Antony to peer at, but illegible from a greater distance. He’s glad of it; he wants this man closer less than he wants the whole kitchen to get a scoop on Cinna’s case.

“The way I see it, we have three sets of declarations to smoke out. The first hurdle is: what can we pretend to have happened. The second is what’s the current state; it’s not stable, and we can’t risk claiming it. The third—”, he makes an exasperated noise, waving hair out of his face, “—is why the hell it had to be Switzerland. We can work our story from the ground up.”

He turns a page. His wrist is reaching too far over the table. “We can’t say family matters. Obviously. We shouldn’t even breathe in Cornelia’s direction, because the fallout will stick to Caesar. And, anyway, she’s flown out. If we do have to throw them a face, we’ll heap it on Lucius Jr. That thing in Berghain? Prodigal son twice removed, twice renowned.”

He slips a little smile, satisfied, before he remembers who he’s talking to. He forces his eyes back down. “We can’t say exhaustion, because if he snuffs it, it’ll make the whole party look like twats. Running a seventy year old ragged. We could go with a previous illness—only that takes time to fabricate. And this was... well, this was as sudden as it gets. I might almost think Scipio popped from behind the door and booed him into a myocardial. Therefore. My pitch is, we coax his doctor into saying there were concerns earlier this winter, but the prime minister wanted to wait until the budget passed. Paints him the hero at no one’s expense.“

The waiter returns and hedges about them. Octavian cuts him off, because God help him if Antony starts with the caviar. “That will be all.” A pause, contrived. He leans his chin on one hand. “How long have you been working here?” The waiter is thrown off. He stammers something like two years, sound drowned by the slosh of his water.

Octavian’s smile is closed, and very cold. “Old enough”, he says.

Once the room is cleared, his gaze slides back to Antony. The non sequitur goes easy.

“That is what I’m for.”

[octavicn]

ANTONY​.

Sunday morning: Julius’ name flashes up on his screen and Antony thinks he’s in for another bollocking. He has something else in mind.

When the line clicks, Antony rubs lazily at the corner of his mouth, carding through his predictions. He’s not checked his feed yet. Getting chewed out for the Dolabella tosh on the ten o’clock last night is as solid an estimate, he thinks, as any.

(His heart’s only half in that one. When have his spins ever missed the mark?)

Instead, Julius tells him that Lucius Cinna has been hospitalised in Switzerland, yes, fucking Switzerland, because the NHS ran itself into a shadow long before Cinna had to chew over what to do with it. Switzerland? Antony repeats, knocked for six. You sure it’s his heart that’s flatlined, Julius, and it wasn’t his, I don’t know, fucking brain that’s snuffed it?

Julius sighs. Antony knows it: a sort of proxy in blank, like he’s had this conversation seven or eight times already, and he’s not up for having it again. They both know what Cinna, pinioned in Switzerland, means for him.

Julius tells him he wants the universal cure-all. A panacea. Antony can provide that. What’s more, Antony owes him that. Julius doesn’t need to say it. 

Octavian, Julius does say. Antony frowns, pulls the phone an inch from his cheek, as if Julius can hear the muscle clenching on the other end of the line. He wants the kid on media, airbrushing this whole thing tight. Spinning it, before it spirals.

(Marcus Antony doesn’t work with grassroots parading as chips off the old block, too concerned with their fucking Philosophy homework to make head or tail of party politics. He thinks he would’ve preferred the bollocking.)

He books for two in The Gallery at The Cinnamon Club.

—

When Octavian careers into his chest, Antony is on the phone. He looks down, barely stirred. “We’ll talk later.” His stare doesn’t release Octavian, even as he ends the call. His expression doesn’t falter either—well, maybe a little bit. The frown deepens.

He forces a smile, cruel and not a bit kind; his eyes mimeograph it. He slides the phone into his overcoat’s inside chest pocket and says nothing, only skirts around the flustered Octavian in a careless sweep that beckons him to follow, like a dog and a leash.

He’s greeted by the same maître d’ who had greeted Octavian, but it’s certainly not the same man. There’s no need for Antony to announce himself. The waiter smiles obsequiously, practically hares to collect the��wine lists from the front of house, then shows him to his table. 

“Right this way, Mister Antony.”

Antony orders a bottle of Condrieu—Christophe Pichon, because the specificity of it is all a performance—and then he inspects Octavian. Like a butcher ogling a cut of meat. 

(If there’s one thing he can’t bear about these faux humanitarian, ascetic fucking kid-syndicalists, it’s the fact that they won’t admit what it is they really want. What they want isn’t social reform or, what, bloody guerrilla activity—what they want is a seat at the table. What they want is teeth. The sooner they let go of all the sodding green virtue, the better.)

Antony removes his phone from his pocket, places it face-down on the table. He clears his throat. “Waiting long?” He knows the answer, of course, but he wants to hear it. Antony’s voice carries in such a way that it makes you think he’s never been on the receiving end of a similar such handling. 

He hasn’t.

Antony is dressed to the teeth. Julius might consider dangling his MP from the House Floor, a feathered boa to appease the masses. No one would think twice on Cinna.

“Not at all”, Octavian replies. He keeps his phone out of sight. “Oxford time, hm?”

He tilts his head congenially, as if their last meeting was in Tom Quad. Proverbially, symbolically, it could’ve been. Symbols is where his capital is at. In reality, there was never any elbow-rubbing between Caesar’s hedged bets. Their five-odd difference spared them the indignity.

The only thing that did reach him at Oxford was Antony’s legend, the coat-tail and comet of it.

(”Seven hours? Oh, do come off it, that’s factually impossible—”, a roll of his eyes, a jump of Vergil’s, affront washing out the liquor, “No, mate, I’m telling you, Curio swore by it. Seven hours on the dot. Mad fucker.”)

The last time they actually ran into one another was a party in Covent Garden. Clifford Maecenas was celebrating his book deal, and Octavian sat in as chaperone for their host’s questionable fixations. Aw, Gus, you’re a real one. The only bloke I trust around these slags. Clifford seemed to believe that was a compliment for everyone involved.

He remembers the whole affair being a sordid drag, and he was thumbing through Banerjee’s Poor Economics on his phone for half the night. But Antony had been there. When Octavian went to get a glass, he waved at him, a wide, velvet row of his arm, and for a second—

He would rather die before admitting it, but for a second, a burst of intent in his chest, he thought he was calling him over. And then Marcus Antony, freshly-minted MP, Britain’s tightest victory, snapped two fingers. “There he is”, he drawled, slurring his punchline just a little, “the ward of the state. Did you class fellas here know Julius got into restorations? Bit of arts and crafts? Gavroche felt puppet, gentlemen and whores. Let’s give him a round!”

And the group, the fellas, right, applauded. Octavian tailed back into the kitchen.

Of course, that was before Dolabella.

(Which is to say, that was before Dolabella was caught with Annelise Hyde-Barker, Antony’s current shag of the month, and Antony nearly tore into him on national television. Octavian was analysing the PMQs with Horace, who was not so much watching as peering from behind his hands. “He’s gonna murder him, he’s actually gonna murder the poor sod.” For the first time, he did not think Horace was blowing it out of proportions. The BSL guy stopped translating one minute into the feed. Octavian saw the veins stand out in Antony’s neck, the vicious, springing web of it, like horse reins tangled up. He turned the volume higher.)

That debate, and all its reruns, must be what Julius Caesar brought to bear.

He supposes it’s comforting, then, that the boot print on Antony’s neck is the same as his.

The Gallery is hewn from another mountain than the club; older, darker. He steals a glance while Antony fumbles with the menu. Split-grain leather, green taffeta; a false depth to suck in the light. This, he thinks, must cut close to the look of a Bullingdon dinner. The feeling of one, too; chiaroscuro and polish. Indistinct shadows held over your head.

Octavian curls his hand. The golden threads are roughly hatched in the fabric. The carpet stitch seems even coarser. Barbed enough to scratch you bloody, if someone shoved you across.

He imagines there’s quite a lot of that, with the Bullers.

Antony orders wine.

Octavian makes a show of checking his watch.

(Chopard, a graduation gift from Julius. When he slid it across the table, he patted Octavian’s cheek. He tried not to flinch at the touch. It worked a little too well, because he ended up leaning into it instead, brushing up like a fucking spaniel. Julius didn’t seem to mind. “It’s not very impressive”, he quipped, voice low, “but a Patek Philippe has to be earned. You’ll like it better that way. Maybe a present at thirty, hm?” Octavian didn’t say it, but Julius needn’t bother. If he’s still waiting on scraps when he’s pushing thirty, he’ll just throw himself off the EXO tower.)

“Bit early, isn’t it?” He tugs his sleeve cuff down. “Hair of the dog?”

Octavian is good at poignant silences. Brilliant, in fact. Antony is better.

By way of small talk, they have: murder, the collapse of the west, and weather.

“How’s...”, he starts, and then breaks on a hum. It’s not a stage trick, really. He actually has to pause for the name, because he can’t say Annelise, can he, since this room is chock-full with sharp hazards, and he can’t remember any other, because not even the most diligent, Modafinil-fueled media intern can keep up with Marcus Antony, “—Fulvia? Claudia?” 

[octavicn]

Underbelly, Nicole Homer

[ID: I have hurt and hungered before: flesh / against flesh. I won’t make a dull promise.]

[octavicn]

Great Smith Street, Westminster, SW1P 3BU.

Lucius Cinna is hospitalized on a Saturday. His pacemaker fails, or he barrels down the stairs, or he chokes on a fucking oyster—it doesn’t matter what the truth is, because the truth is still immaterial.

On Sunday morning, Octavian is called to create it.

(Spurious fact. Julius doesn’t call. Julius rings him up like the click of a heel, like the leather flap on a falconer’s wrist. Octavian goes).

The first question is not why me?, because that’s a rookie error. Caesar needs his neutral onlooker. He wants the impartial hand of Empire to sink in the mire, the muddy media water, and stir it about. On that hand, Octavian is the best knuckle.

He has no dogs in the fight; low birth, high morals. A Procrustes bed of a thing. That makes truth his prerogative. That makes him the nation’s blind spot. An unofficial account, a pal at The Times (Vergil, Oxford fraternity), a debt over a Twitter journalist (Horace, cashed out of a scandal) and so the story forms. So are the blinkers saddled on the consortium gentium.

The first question, the right question he has to ask, is what hospital? The NHS has come a cropper, which everybody knows; which nobody concedes to. If they went private, if they went abroad—God, unless Cinna croaks, the opposition will maim them on it.

(It’s Switzerland. It’s very bad).

The second question must be: who’s inside on this? He expects Brutus; or Pulcher, maybe, if they’re soft-soaping it. Then Julius says Antony, and Octavian’s body seizes up in the chair. He’ll never sit down with me. Sir, he won’t... why not—why not send him to Cicero?

A frown. Displeased, or perhaps disappointed; he can’t tell what’s worse. He has no grip on Julius’ hierarchy of human folly. Octavian looks away.

(He should’ve known better than to ask that. The last time Cicero and Antony were in a room together, the NASDAQ for free speech dropped five percent).

Antony does agree to sit down. Or maybe Caesar forces him into it, which... oh, he can’t tell what’s worse here, either. The pity or the penance of it.

The business club he chooses was practically named in Cinna’s honour, so privacy is supposed to be a given. (It’s never a given. He wishes someone told Julius that).

At the door, the maître d' won’t let him in.

It’s not the first time this happens. Of course, the fact that it’s not the first time this happened doesn’t make it easier. It makes it so, so much worse.

Octavian forces a smile, and forces it too fast. It catches his tongue between his teeth. “I have a reservation for The Gallery. Please, will you do me the favour of checking again?” A breath, clipped. “It’s on the tab of Julius Caesar. Or Marcus—”, he thinks he’s gonna spit the name with blood on it, and so he swallows, “Or Marcus Antony.”

The waiter doesn’t even open the book. “Sir, if you will be so kind as to step out. Our seats are at full capacity today. You can contact us through—”

“Sure, yes, I understand”, Octavian cuts in, because he has to be quicker than him, because if that weasel-eyed fuck finishes his sentence—yes, it’s a matter of diffusing. It’s a matter of getting the drop on your own murderous impulse. He can spot ten empty seats right in the sight-line. That’s fine. That’s how these things go. He’ll just dip outside and message Julius.

He faces about, ears burning, and crashes into Antony’s chest.

[octavicn]

Anne Carson, from “Plainwater: Essays and Poetry.”

[octavicn]

Luke Eisner photographed by Joel Griffith for Ralph Lauren, Spring 2019

[octavicn]

[octavicn]

each from different heights - stephen dunn