"whispering in the cold"
Title: whispering in the cold
Fandom: The Eagle.
Characters: ensemble, with focus on Marcus.
Word Count: 3715
Rating: PG
Summary: "They're Roman; hurt goes unexpressed." "Esca smells wild. Maybe he always has." Marcus/Esca.
Warnings: pass.
Notes: A hopefully not-too-confusing mix of film and book canon.
whispering in the cold
It’s only a handful of days after the Saturnalia, with frost still forcing the grass into silver sharpness, when Marcus wakes to an empty bed.
It’s not a shock. Esca is neither slave nor pet, not anymore - he comes and goes as he pleases; leaving with nothing more than a dagger and returning with mud-caked boots and a boar slung over his shoulder. Sometimes, when he appears emptyhanded in the doorway with starlight shading through the open window and, catlike, slips into bed (hands touching and warming chill skin), Marcus wakes with blood on his chest that belongs to neither of them. That he hopes doesn’t belong to either of them - but he won’t ask. There are some things that he’ll never know, that he doesn’t need to know, but he’s used to it, by now - so this morning, Marcus just rubs a hand across his face and through his hair, and gets up.
He greets Stephanos in the courtyard, the old man bundled up against the Britannic cold, and pads through to his uncle’s study - empty, this early in the morning (Esca’s absence always does wake him earlier than usual). He absently straightens the chair and scratches wax off the desk-the mark of a long night’s work, as always: Aquila doesn’t seem to know how not to burn his candles from every conceivable angle-and then leaves, slipping out to the gardens and the lakeside.
The fabric of his tunic is rough against his skin, and the rough-and-cold of his world, this crystalline morning, makes his breathing low, quick.
Marcus sits, and watches little red-breasted birds pick berries out of the trees.
After a while, he feels a touch on his shoulder, and Sassticca hands him a bowl of porridge, her cheeks rosy. “Esca left before sunrise,” she says, voice muffled by padding and warmth. “He took bread, cheese. Wine.”
The porridge bowl is warm against his fingers - almost hot, in the cold.
Sassticca folds her hands into her sleeves. “Money, too. Heard it in his pockets.”
Marcus smiles, at that. Nothing escapes her notice - and Esca knows that, too. “I’m sure he’ll be back by nightfall,” he answers.
“I suppose,” Sassticca acquiesces. Marcus can hear the doubt in her voice, but he doesn’t listen, doesn’t let it bother him. He eats efficiently, and the bowl is almost too hot against his fingertips. Porridge and milk sit in his stomach, warm and heavy. Sassticca takes the bowl from him, and pats his head, almost motherly. “Don’t stay out too long,” she says, tucks her chin behind the barrier of wool and warmth, and retreats to the villa.
Absently, fingers still warm, Marcus rubs at the scar in his thigh.
The day passes. It’s what days always seem to do, nowadays - just slip by, but it’s not like Marcus can do much about it. Surgeons and Sassticca’s mothering rest did manage to get his leg to the brink of recovery - but that was before Caledonia, and the eagle. (Racing through the wilderness; shuddering in the cold of the river as Esca’s retreating footsteps vanished in the water’s rush. Waiting to die, in the end, but to die with his father’s standard at his back.) Now, he’s back to mending - and back to waiting, and he waits for his leg to mend as much as for Claudius’ words to become more than empty promises.
Once, in the coolness of their nights, Esca rubbed his palm over Marcus’ scarred thigh, breath heavy on skin, and said (in a voice so soft it wasn’t even a whisper), it doesn’t make you less than what you were.
In the evening, Marcus sits back in the courtyard, armed with cloth, water, and Aquila’s finest crockery, ripe for cleaning. He can hear his uncle’s quiet conversation inside, and Stephanos’ muted replies - but he doesn’t listen in, doesn’t eavesdrop. He cleans bowls, plates, cups, rubs the dirt away and leaves the silver shining. If he doesn’t think about what he’s doing, either, if he just concentrates on the act of cleaning, he can almost forget that the gleam he uncovers in the metal is for show, not slaughter.
He breathes, levelly, and listens to the nightbirds whistling to each other in the trees.
The door to the kitchen bursts open in a flurry of light, and Aquila is momentarily framed in the doorway before stepping out into the courtyard. He calls goodnight to Stephanos, and swings the door shut behind him. “Marcus,” he says, warmly, the smell of wine on his breath, and shuffles crockery out of the way so he can take a seat beside his nephew. “Esca’s off on one of his trips, I hear?”
“So it seems,” Marcus answers, and traces a deer’s silver leap with the damp cloth.
Aquila leans back against the villa’s wall, and closes his eyes. “I’ll prepare myself for a feast, then.”
They do this, sometimes - sit together in the villa’s courtyard, in the twilight, in companionable silence. There’s plenty for them to talk about, plenty of conversations to be had, but this is their quiet time - so, for tonight, Aquila sits and not-quite-dozes, and Marcus cleans a platter, scrubbing scraps of congealed meat away from the hunt, caught in silver. They’re Roman; hurt goes unexpressed.
The moon rises in the sky, glimmering.
Marcus piles shining cup on shining platter, and carries the heap inside. He returns to Aquila’s side, though, just in case the old man really has fallen asleep (Stephanos is in bed, now, curled up on his side and eyelashes long against his wrinkled cheeks), but he’s awake and alert, looking up at the stars. He wears a heavy winter coat, hands pulled back into the sleeves, and when Marcus sits at his side he says, “Aren’t you cold?”
Marcus (bare-armed, light-booted) just shrugs. “It could be worse.”
Aquila considers him for a moment, expression unreadable. His brother may have been the legionary, but he’s hardly blind to the world around him. “No Caledonia,” he says, quietly.
Marcus looks away, looks out to the shadows of the courtyard. “Something like that.”
Aquila sits for a moment longer, then stands. He squeezes Marcus’ shoulder, his touch warm and firm, and goes inside. Marcus watches as the light goes on in his uncle’s window, and then dims, goes out.
In the dead of night, there’s a rustle in the corridor: footsteps on the stonework.
Marcus isn’t asleep. He props himself up on his elbows, waiting for Esca to slip through the doorway smelling of wildness and the open air - but all he sees is Marcipor’s silhouette, shuffling past in his nightclothes.
Now that he thinks about it, Esca never makes a sound when he returns.
Come morning, the cold hasn’t lessened.
Marcus wraps himself up, more than yesterday, and goes to the stables. The horses are huddled together in the straw, ears pricked down against the chill, but his dappled stallion stands with his head held high, snorting and stamping. Marcus’ lips quirk half a smile, and he offers a handful of torn hay. “Sorry I didn’t come sooner,” he says, and, after a moment, Caius offers him a nudge at his shoulder as acceptance. The hay seals the peace.
They ride, and Marcus’ thigh might throb, just a little, but he ignores it in favour of the wind in his hair. He avoids Calleva, taking the path that, once, took him all the way to the wilds of the north. Caius’ strides eat up the road, eat up the miles, and, abruptly, Marcus finds his breathing tight, muscles tense. He pulls the reins tight, tugging Caius to a jerky halt - because if he just kept going, he could just leave, just get away, go back to those misty glens and lose himself in the rivers and the forests.
Has Esca?
Caius tosses his head, stamps a hoof. Marcus dismounts, and runs his fingers through his mane, petting him, calming him - and, reins in hand, he takes half a step forward. The road stretches on before him, hugging the sweep of the frosty landscape before vanishing into mist-shrouded distance - and it’s nothing but dirt, close-packed by the tramp of Roman feet.
Marcus’ breaths are loud inside his own head.
Caius whinnies, softly, and noses at his shoulder.
Marcus looks away from the mist, away from the north. He swings himself back into the saddle, and turns Caius back towards Calleva, towards home. They don’t gallop, don’t race forwards with the earth slipping by beneath them; it’s a walk, all the way, with Marcus’ thigh aching and his cheeks blushed ruddy by the chill. He steadies his breathing, and just looks ahead, watching the shape of the horizon.
If he doesn’t think, he could almost be heading back to his fort, fresh soldiers at his back, crimson-crested helmet strapped tight to his cheeks.
He spends a lot of that journey back trying not to think.
Marcus brushes Caius down, when they get back, and guides him back to his stall. A final fond hand, swept across his flank, and Marcus is about to turn and leave when the horse snorts, sharply - almost like one of Aquila’s throatily attention-grabbing coughs. A-hem. Marcus turns back and Caius pushes his nose into his neck, hooves stamping at the straw-strewn ground. It catches Marcus unawares, and he clutches at Caius’ neck, head, ears, just feeling the rub of horse-skin against his palms. It’s affection. It’s an animal without a voice just trying to say it will be alright.
Breath shudders in his throat.
In the afternoon, it rains.
Aquila sits at his desk, scratching ink across paper, and Marcus wordlessly sits with him, taking his usual seat in the corner, beside the window. He watches rain sluice across the skies and listens to his uncle mumble to himself under his breath, and, for the first time, he wonders where Esca is: if he’s watching the same rain; if he’s caught in the same rain, crouched under the low-hanging branches of the forest, raindrops running down his cheeks and glittering on the blue swirls of his tattoos, tracing the ink’s path across his weather-roughened skin.
Marcus never thought he’d be jealous of the weather.
He shifts, leans back. His feet are flat on the floor.
Rain makes him think of Caledonia, sometimes, of half-remembered fever-dreams in waist-deep water, of rain drumming on his cheeks as he lay flat, dying. Of the eagle’s gold, silent and watching. Of Esca, running for the hills.
Outside, the sky is grey and troubled. The lake’s surface is broken, pockmarked.
Not looking up from his own cramped handwriting, Aquila says, “Storm’s coming.”
Marcus stirs. “How do you know?” he asks, voice muffled by the rain - and there’s a flash of light outside, blue and bright, splitting the sword-grey skies into jagged fragments. Close on its heels comes the rumble of thunder, shuddering Marcus’ bones, growling the world’s anger.
Aquila glances up, a soft twinkle in his eyes. “Can’t you feel it?” he says, softly - and now that Marcus stops thinking about himself, he can. There’s a thickness to the air, like drowning.
That night, he dreams of a man with painted skin and Esca’s tattoos, lightning-blue and inked in rain.
Sassticca’s voice, seeping through the corridors from the courtyard, has a peculiarly conspiratorial quality for this early in the morning. Weak sunlight filters through last night’s rainclouds, bathing the villa in dappled shade - and Marcus hugs that shade, now, lingering just out of sight. He runs his thumb over the creases of a wrinkled old apple, one of the last ones from the autumn’s harvest, and listens.
“But Manlius, down in the market, the butcher - he says it’s true, too,” she’s saying, in that same secretive tone. “That he was asking after his people. Saying that there were always tribes that settled here for the winter, to pass the cold day. Asking if anyone knew anything.”
“And did he get an answer?” Aquila asks - and Marcus frowns, at that, because his uncle doesn’t have his usual amused tone to Sassticca’s gossip: his voice is serious, worried.
“One of the tribesmen was lurking, selling leather and straps. They spoke for a few minutes in their own tongue, then parted with a smile.”
Aquila is quiet for a moment, and then he says, with that same heavy-worried tone, “This may be nothing. Esca is no slave; he can lead his own life. But nonetheless-” A pause, and what might almost be a sigh. “Don’t let him know.”
The courtyard is quiet, again, and the sunlight strengthens. It’s still cold.
Marcus goes to the stables, and pretends that he never overheard that whispered courtyard conference. He mucks out the horses, suffers Caius’ version of fretting (nosing at his hair, nudging at his shoulder, knocking at his hands with an upraised hoof), and then, when everything’s clean except him, he goes to the lakeside, strips his filthy clothes into nothing more than a pile on the shore, and swims.
He swims across the lake and back again, from corner to corner, from curve to curve. He swims until his muscles ache and thighs throb - but throb with exertion, not injury, and that difference is delicious. Water splashes in his mouth and blurs his vision, and between strokes he pants, heaving air into his lungs in rasping gulps.
Aquila watches, from the villa, just for a moment.
The water’s cold, frighteningly so. It catches at his limbs, at his teeth, at his heart. When he hauls himself out of the water, naked and so cold he can’t feel his fingers, he can barely breathe - and his face is wet, but that’s just lakewater.
His clothes have gone, replaced by a clean tunic-he probably ought to have noticed that, someone coming out to help him, unbidden, but he’s not a soldier, not anymore-but he doesn’t put it on, not yet. He stands, looking out at the lake, looking out at the world, and the wind dries him.
He doesn’t know how long he stands there, frown creasing his forehead and eyes narrowed against the bite of the wind, but finally he stirs, tugs his tunic over his head, and returns to the villa.
He sits on his bed, and shivers, uncontrollably.
That evening, Marcus sits across the dinner table from his uncle, and watches the candle-shadows play across his face. Boiled fish and bread is on the table before him, but it sits untouched for the moment. He’s distracted.
Aquila watches him, too, and sets down his knife. “Cold day for a swim,” he observes lightly.
Marcus shrugs. “Relieving old times,” he answers, and smiles (with just a flick of darkness). He tears off a hunk of bread, takes a bite, and says, “You should try it some time. Bracing.”
“Maybe in another life,” Aquila laughs.
Marcus smiles in answer, and slices his fish. He’s calm, forehead unlined and unfurrowed. “You seemed to be having an interesting conversation this morning,” he says, not meeting Aquila’s gaze, “with Sassticca.” He takes a mouthful, chews, swallows.
“Market gossip,” Aquila answers, and returns to his meal. “Nothing more.”
If Marcus didn’t know any better, he’d think that nothing was wrong.
Moonlight slants in through the window.
It’s quiet outside, nothing like the thunder of the night before - but nonetheless, Marcus is awake. The rugs are shoved aside, down around his thighs, despite the cold, and he studies the shadows above his head. A candle gutters on the table beside his bed. Besides it, sits a thick bracelet, inscribed with words of empty praise.
“Shouldn’t you be asleep?” Esca says, amused. He leans in the doorway, hip cocked outward and arms folded, the faintest hint of a smile quirking his lips. The candle’s wavering flame dances shadows across his face. He looks tired.
Marcus props himself up on his elbows, gaze shuttered. He wants to ask where have you been? and where did you go?, but it’s not his business. He won’t ask. He doesn’t need to know. “Welcome back,” he says, simply, and almost smiles.
Esca’s eyes are cast in shadow, and he doesn’t move. He studies Marcus, studies how he lies and the mess of his hair - and Marcus can feel it all, all that attention, like ice on his skin, like the cold of the lake.
“Sorry,” Esca says, finally.
Marcus breathes, softly. “Don’t be,” he says.
There’s a quietness in the air between them.
Deliberately, Marcus reaches over, snuffs out the candle. He settles back into bed, back to the door, back to Esca, and feels the cold air play against his skin, focuses on that - not the soft pad of Esca’s footsteps, not the quiet whisper of his clothes hitting the floor, not the wisp of grassy air that colours the room.
Esca slips into the bed, touches his hand to Marcus’ side, fingerpads warm and dry. “I want to show you something,” he says, softly. “Turn over.” It’s a command, phrased in Esca’s subtle steel, and the times when Marcus can resist that tone are few and far between. He obeys. Of course, he does. Esca’s eyes are bright, now that the candle’s out. The moonlight picks up the angles in his features, picks out the colour in his wind-chilled cheeks - and he says, “I went to my people.” Marcus’ mouth is dry, and all he can focus on is the warmth of Esca’s palm, flat on his hip. “I needed something from them.”
“Something you couldn’t get here?” Marcus asks, voice rough, and what he means is something i couldn’t give you?
Esca smiles lopsidedly, and doesn’t speak. Instead, he stands, slips off the bed, bare skinned, proud in the moonlight. He smoothes his palm across his arm, circled with blue ink - except, now, the tattoos are different. Marcus knows Esca, knows every inch of his skin, and knows those tattoos in particular (the same way Esca has Marcus’ scars burned into his heart: marks of a life before) - and now, in the darkness and the light, they’re different. Marcus moves, slowly, sitting upright on the edge of the bed, but he doesn’t touch. Not yet.
“Ink is the mark of a man,” Esca says, “to my people. These-” He traces the old etchings, barely faded by wind and rain. “-tell others that I am a man, and a warrior.” And these-” He breaks off, and his touch moves down to another band, another inked swirl. Here, the colouring is darker, just slightly, and the lines thinner - the mark of a different hand, a different etcher. As always, it’s alien: he doesn’t understand.
Unbidden, he reaches up, out, traces the ink. “What would your people say to this?” he asks, soft. He almost doesn’t want to know.
Esca’s eyes burn. “Freedom,” he answers, simply.
Marcus’ touch falters, and he thinks about ice (floating in the shallows) and mist (clouding the road ahead).
“It means freedom,” Esca repeats, and Marcus wonders if he’s trying to say goodbye.
Marcus doesn’t sleep.
Beside him, curled against him, Esca is dead to the world, the new blueness of that tattoo murmuring contention into the starlight - but Marcus doesn’t touch, doesn’t run fingers and tongue and lips over that new branding like he wants to. He just looks, remembers.
Esca smells wild. Maybe he always has.
There’s frost creeping round the edges of the window in the morning, and the straw-strewn floor is bitingly cold. Marcus dresses swiftly, leaving Esca alone, buried in a pile of furs, and pads away.
He passes the kitchens, greets a bundled Sassticca and shivering Stephanos with an amused smile, and crunches down the frosty path to the stables. Caius perks up the moment he catches his scent, drifting downwind in the cold morning, and Marcus is greeted by the horse’s excited whinny. He smiles (doesn’t laugh), catches his head, runs a palm down his nose. He mutters nonsense-all good boy and you shouldn’t be this observant-and finally gets out his tack, and saddles up.
Caius’ hooves sound sharply on the frozen ground as Marcus leads him out of his stall, slipping on the stones, and his breath snorts white on the air. Marcus heaves himself into the saddle, ignores the twang in his thigh. He wraps the reins around his hand, and breathes - and then Esca hooks his fingers into Caius’ bridle, offers him a handful of hay. His eyes are inscrutable. He says, “Usually I’m the one to leave you asleep.”
Marcus doesn’t answer. His fingers wind through Caius’ mane, even as he noses at Esca’s fingers.
Esca’s gaze is sharp. “Where are you going?” he asks.
“Calleva,” Marcus answers, finally, shortly.
“Can I join you?”
Marcus can’t remember the last time Esca asked his permission to do anything. Before Caledonia, most likely. Before he gave him his freedom. There’s a strange feeling curling in his gut. “Of course,” he says - and there’s a quiet quirk that touches Esca’s lips. He releases Caius’ head, and goes to saddle his own horse - and Marcus just watches, and doesn’t know what to think. He knows the quickness of Esca’s fingers on buckles and straps, the tightness of his tunic across his shoulders as he tugs affectionately at his horse’s mane. There’s grace in the litheness of his movements. Marcus has missed that, he’s realising, these past few days. It’s not a very Roman thought.
Esca settles lightly into his saddle.
For a moment, they sit, side by side, and then Esca says, “Freedom means choice, Marcus. Freedom to leave, or to stay. To come back.”
There’s a throb in his thigh from the cold and a keenness picking at his cheeks, but he can feel the heat from Esca and the horses, and that’s just enough to keep him warm. He feels so very alert, so very sharp. “Will you stay?” he asks.
Esca looks at him sideways, and there’s a crinkle at the corner of his eyes, a curve in the line of his lips. His neck is arched in the early morning cold - and he wheels his horse around so he’s facing Marcus head on, challenging. He doesn’t speak, just smiles.
In the end, Marcus doesn’t need an answer.
“Calleva,” Esca says.
“Calleva,” Marcus agrees.
finis
Fandom: The Eagle.
Characters: ensemble, with focus on Marcus.
Word Count: 3715
Rating: PG
Summary: "They're Roman; hurt goes unexpressed." "Esca smells wild. Maybe he always has." Marcus/Esca.
Warnings: pass.
Notes: A hopefully not-too-confusing mix of film and book canon.
whispering in the cold
It’s only a handful of days after the Saturnalia, with frost still forcing the grass into silver sharpness, when Marcus wakes to an empty bed.
It’s not a shock. Esca is neither slave nor pet, not anymore - he comes and goes as he pleases; leaving with nothing more than a dagger and returning with mud-caked boots and a boar slung over his shoulder. Sometimes, when he appears emptyhanded in the doorway with starlight shading through the open window and, catlike, slips into bed (hands touching and warming chill skin), Marcus wakes with blood on his chest that belongs to neither of them. That he hopes doesn’t belong to either of them - but he won’t ask. There are some things that he’ll never know, that he doesn’t need to know, but he’s used to it, by now - so this morning, Marcus just rubs a hand across his face and through his hair, and gets up.
He greets Stephanos in the courtyard, the old man bundled up against the Britannic cold, and pads through to his uncle’s study - empty, this early in the morning (Esca’s absence always does wake him earlier than usual). He absently straightens the chair and scratches wax off the desk-the mark of a long night’s work, as always: Aquila doesn’t seem to know how not to burn his candles from every conceivable angle-and then leaves, slipping out to the gardens and the lakeside.
The fabric of his tunic is rough against his skin, and the rough-and-cold of his world, this crystalline morning, makes his breathing low, quick.
Marcus sits, and watches little red-breasted birds pick berries out of the trees.
After a while, he feels a touch on his shoulder, and Sassticca hands him a bowl of porridge, her cheeks rosy. “Esca left before sunrise,” she says, voice muffled by padding and warmth. “He took bread, cheese. Wine.”
The porridge bowl is warm against his fingers - almost hot, in the cold.
Sassticca folds her hands into her sleeves. “Money, too. Heard it in his pockets.”
Marcus smiles, at that. Nothing escapes her notice - and Esca knows that, too. “I’m sure he’ll be back by nightfall,” he answers.
“I suppose,” Sassticca acquiesces. Marcus can hear the doubt in her voice, but he doesn’t listen, doesn’t let it bother him. He eats efficiently, and the bowl is almost too hot against his fingertips. Porridge and milk sit in his stomach, warm and heavy. Sassticca takes the bowl from him, and pats his head, almost motherly. “Don’t stay out too long,” she says, tucks her chin behind the barrier of wool and warmth, and retreats to the villa.
Absently, fingers still warm, Marcus rubs at the scar in his thigh.
The day passes. It’s what days always seem to do, nowadays - just slip by, but it’s not like Marcus can do much about it. Surgeons and Sassticca’s mothering rest did manage to get his leg to the brink of recovery - but that was before Caledonia, and the eagle. (Racing through the wilderness; shuddering in the cold of the river as Esca’s retreating footsteps vanished in the water’s rush. Waiting to die, in the end, but to die with his father’s standard at his back.) Now, he’s back to mending - and back to waiting, and he waits for his leg to mend as much as for Claudius’ words to become more than empty promises.
Once, in the coolness of their nights, Esca rubbed his palm over Marcus’ scarred thigh, breath heavy on skin, and said (in a voice so soft it wasn’t even a whisper), it doesn’t make you less than what you were.
In the evening, Marcus sits back in the courtyard, armed with cloth, water, and Aquila’s finest crockery, ripe for cleaning. He can hear his uncle’s quiet conversation inside, and Stephanos’ muted replies - but he doesn’t listen in, doesn’t eavesdrop. He cleans bowls, plates, cups, rubs the dirt away and leaves the silver shining. If he doesn’t think about what he’s doing, either, if he just concentrates on the act of cleaning, he can almost forget that the gleam he uncovers in the metal is for show, not slaughter.
He breathes, levelly, and listens to the nightbirds whistling to each other in the trees.
The door to the kitchen bursts open in a flurry of light, and Aquila is momentarily framed in the doorway before stepping out into the courtyard. He calls goodnight to Stephanos, and swings the door shut behind him. “Marcus,” he says, warmly, the smell of wine on his breath, and shuffles crockery out of the way so he can take a seat beside his nephew. “Esca’s off on one of his trips, I hear?”
“So it seems,” Marcus answers, and traces a deer’s silver leap with the damp cloth.
Aquila leans back against the villa’s wall, and closes his eyes. “I’ll prepare myself for a feast, then.”
They do this, sometimes - sit together in the villa’s courtyard, in the twilight, in companionable silence. There’s plenty for them to talk about, plenty of conversations to be had, but this is their quiet time - so, for tonight, Aquila sits and not-quite-dozes, and Marcus cleans a platter, scrubbing scraps of congealed meat away from the hunt, caught in silver. They’re Roman; hurt goes unexpressed.
The moon rises in the sky, glimmering.
Marcus piles shining cup on shining platter, and carries the heap inside. He returns to Aquila’s side, though, just in case the old man really has fallen asleep (Stephanos is in bed, now, curled up on his side and eyelashes long against his wrinkled cheeks), but he’s awake and alert, looking up at the stars. He wears a heavy winter coat, hands pulled back into the sleeves, and when Marcus sits at his side he says, “Aren’t you cold?”
Marcus (bare-armed, light-booted) just shrugs. “It could be worse.”
Aquila considers him for a moment, expression unreadable. His brother may have been the legionary, but he’s hardly blind to the world around him. “No Caledonia,” he says, quietly.
Marcus looks away, looks out to the shadows of the courtyard. “Something like that.”
Aquila sits for a moment longer, then stands. He squeezes Marcus’ shoulder, his touch warm and firm, and goes inside. Marcus watches as the light goes on in his uncle’s window, and then dims, goes out.
In the dead of night, there’s a rustle in the corridor: footsteps on the stonework.
Marcus isn’t asleep. He props himself up on his elbows, waiting for Esca to slip through the doorway smelling of wildness and the open air - but all he sees is Marcipor’s silhouette, shuffling past in his nightclothes.
Now that he thinks about it, Esca never makes a sound when he returns.
Come morning, the cold hasn’t lessened.
Marcus wraps himself up, more than yesterday, and goes to the stables. The horses are huddled together in the straw, ears pricked down against the chill, but his dappled stallion stands with his head held high, snorting and stamping. Marcus’ lips quirk half a smile, and he offers a handful of torn hay. “Sorry I didn’t come sooner,” he says, and, after a moment, Caius offers him a nudge at his shoulder as acceptance. The hay seals the peace.
They ride, and Marcus’ thigh might throb, just a little, but he ignores it in favour of the wind in his hair. He avoids Calleva, taking the path that, once, took him all the way to the wilds of the north. Caius’ strides eat up the road, eat up the miles, and, abruptly, Marcus finds his breathing tight, muscles tense. He pulls the reins tight, tugging Caius to a jerky halt - because if he just kept going, he could just leave, just get away, go back to those misty glens and lose himself in the rivers and the forests.
Has Esca?
Caius tosses his head, stamps a hoof. Marcus dismounts, and runs his fingers through his mane, petting him, calming him - and, reins in hand, he takes half a step forward. The road stretches on before him, hugging the sweep of the frosty landscape before vanishing into mist-shrouded distance - and it’s nothing but dirt, close-packed by the tramp of Roman feet.
Marcus’ breaths are loud inside his own head.
Caius whinnies, softly, and noses at his shoulder.
Marcus looks away from the mist, away from the north. He swings himself back into the saddle, and turns Caius back towards Calleva, towards home. They don’t gallop, don’t race forwards with the earth slipping by beneath them; it’s a walk, all the way, with Marcus’ thigh aching and his cheeks blushed ruddy by the chill. He steadies his breathing, and just looks ahead, watching the shape of the horizon.
If he doesn’t think, he could almost be heading back to his fort, fresh soldiers at his back, crimson-crested helmet strapped tight to his cheeks.
He spends a lot of that journey back trying not to think.
Marcus brushes Caius down, when they get back, and guides him back to his stall. A final fond hand, swept across his flank, and Marcus is about to turn and leave when the horse snorts, sharply - almost like one of Aquila’s throatily attention-grabbing coughs. A-hem. Marcus turns back and Caius pushes his nose into his neck, hooves stamping at the straw-strewn ground. It catches Marcus unawares, and he clutches at Caius’ neck, head, ears, just feeling the rub of horse-skin against his palms. It’s affection. It’s an animal without a voice just trying to say it will be alright.
Breath shudders in his throat.
In the afternoon, it rains.
Aquila sits at his desk, scratching ink across paper, and Marcus wordlessly sits with him, taking his usual seat in the corner, beside the window. He watches rain sluice across the skies and listens to his uncle mumble to himself under his breath, and, for the first time, he wonders where Esca is: if he’s watching the same rain; if he’s caught in the same rain, crouched under the low-hanging branches of the forest, raindrops running down his cheeks and glittering on the blue swirls of his tattoos, tracing the ink’s path across his weather-roughened skin.
Marcus never thought he’d be jealous of the weather.
He shifts, leans back. His feet are flat on the floor.
Rain makes him think of Caledonia, sometimes, of half-remembered fever-dreams in waist-deep water, of rain drumming on his cheeks as he lay flat, dying. Of the eagle’s gold, silent and watching. Of Esca, running for the hills.
Outside, the sky is grey and troubled. The lake’s surface is broken, pockmarked.
Not looking up from his own cramped handwriting, Aquila says, “Storm’s coming.”
Marcus stirs. “How do you know?” he asks, voice muffled by the rain - and there’s a flash of light outside, blue and bright, splitting the sword-grey skies into jagged fragments. Close on its heels comes the rumble of thunder, shuddering Marcus’ bones, growling the world’s anger.
Aquila glances up, a soft twinkle in his eyes. “Can’t you feel it?” he says, softly - and now that Marcus stops thinking about himself, he can. There’s a thickness to the air, like drowning.
That night, he dreams of a man with painted skin and Esca’s tattoos, lightning-blue and inked in rain.
Sassticca’s voice, seeping through the corridors from the courtyard, has a peculiarly conspiratorial quality for this early in the morning. Weak sunlight filters through last night’s rainclouds, bathing the villa in dappled shade - and Marcus hugs that shade, now, lingering just out of sight. He runs his thumb over the creases of a wrinkled old apple, one of the last ones from the autumn’s harvest, and listens.
“But Manlius, down in the market, the butcher - he says it’s true, too,” she’s saying, in that same secretive tone. “That he was asking after his people. Saying that there were always tribes that settled here for the winter, to pass the cold day. Asking if anyone knew anything.”
“And did he get an answer?” Aquila asks - and Marcus frowns, at that, because his uncle doesn’t have his usual amused tone to Sassticca’s gossip: his voice is serious, worried.
“One of the tribesmen was lurking, selling leather and straps. They spoke for a few minutes in their own tongue, then parted with a smile.”
Aquila is quiet for a moment, and then he says, with that same heavy-worried tone, “This may be nothing. Esca is no slave; he can lead his own life. But nonetheless-” A pause, and what might almost be a sigh. “Don’t let him know.”
The courtyard is quiet, again, and the sunlight strengthens. It’s still cold.
Marcus goes to the stables, and pretends that he never overheard that whispered courtyard conference. He mucks out the horses, suffers Caius’ version of fretting (nosing at his hair, nudging at his shoulder, knocking at his hands with an upraised hoof), and then, when everything’s clean except him, he goes to the lakeside, strips his filthy clothes into nothing more than a pile on the shore, and swims.
He swims across the lake and back again, from corner to corner, from curve to curve. He swims until his muscles ache and thighs throb - but throb with exertion, not injury, and that difference is delicious. Water splashes in his mouth and blurs his vision, and between strokes he pants, heaving air into his lungs in rasping gulps.
Aquila watches, from the villa, just for a moment.
The water’s cold, frighteningly so. It catches at his limbs, at his teeth, at his heart. When he hauls himself out of the water, naked and so cold he can’t feel his fingers, he can barely breathe - and his face is wet, but that’s just lakewater.
His clothes have gone, replaced by a clean tunic-he probably ought to have noticed that, someone coming out to help him, unbidden, but he’s not a soldier, not anymore-but he doesn’t put it on, not yet. He stands, looking out at the lake, looking out at the world, and the wind dries him.
He doesn’t know how long he stands there, frown creasing his forehead and eyes narrowed against the bite of the wind, but finally he stirs, tugs his tunic over his head, and returns to the villa.
He sits on his bed, and shivers, uncontrollably.
That evening, Marcus sits across the dinner table from his uncle, and watches the candle-shadows play across his face. Boiled fish and bread is on the table before him, but it sits untouched for the moment. He’s distracted.
Aquila watches him, too, and sets down his knife. “Cold day for a swim,” he observes lightly.
Marcus shrugs. “Relieving old times,” he answers, and smiles (with just a flick of darkness). He tears off a hunk of bread, takes a bite, and says, “You should try it some time. Bracing.”
“Maybe in another life,” Aquila laughs.
Marcus smiles in answer, and slices his fish. He’s calm, forehead unlined and unfurrowed. “You seemed to be having an interesting conversation this morning,” he says, not meeting Aquila’s gaze, “with Sassticca.” He takes a mouthful, chews, swallows.
“Market gossip,” Aquila answers, and returns to his meal. “Nothing more.”
If Marcus didn’t know any better, he’d think that nothing was wrong.
Moonlight slants in through the window.
It’s quiet outside, nothing like the thunder of the night before - but nonetheless, Marcus is awake. The rugs are shoved aside, down around his thighs, despite the cold, and he studies the shadows above his head. A candle gutters on the table beside his bed. Besides it, sits a thick bracelet, inscribed with words of empty praise.
“Shouldn’t you be asleep?” Esca says, amused. He leans in the doorway, hip cocked outward and arms folded, the faintest hint of a smile quirking his lips. The candle’s wavering flame dances shadows across his face. He looks tired.
Marcus props himself up on his elbows, gaze shuttered. He wants to ask where have you been? and where did you go?, but it’s not his business. He won’t ask. He doesn’t need to know. “Welcome back,” he says, simply, and almost smiles.
Esca’s eyes are cast in shadow, and he doesn’t move. He studies Marcus, studies how he lies and the mess of his hair - and Marcus can feel it all, all that attention, like ice on his skin, like the cold of the lake.
“Sorry,” Esca says, finally.
Marcus breathes, softly. “Don’t be,” he says.
There’s a quietness in the air between them.
Deliberately, Marcus reaches over, snuffs out the candle. He settles back into bed, back to the door, back to Esca, and feels the cold air play against his skin, focuses on that - not the soft pad of Esca’s footsteps, not the quiet whisper of his clothes hitting the floor, not the wisp of grassy air that colours the room.
Esca slips into the bed, touches his hand to Marcus’ side, fingerpads warm and dry. “I want to show you something,” he says, softly. “Turn over.” It’s a command, phrased in Esca’s subtle steel, and the times when Marcus can resist that tone are few and far between. He obeys. Of course, he does. Esca’s eyes are bright, now that the candle’s out. The moonlight picks up the angles in his features, picks out the colour in his wind-chilled cheeks - and he says, “I went to my people.” Marcus’ mouth is dry, and all he can focus on is the warmth of Esca’s palm, flat on his hip. “I needed something from them.”
“Something you couldn’t get here?” Marcus asks, voice rough, and what he means is something i couldn’t give you?
Esca smiles lopsidedly, and doesn’t speak. Instead, he stands, slips off the bed, bare skinned, proud in the moonlight. He smoothes his palm across his arm, circled with blue ink - except, now, the tattoos are different. Marcus knows Esca, knows every inch of his skin, and knows those tattoos in particular (the same way Esca has Marcus’ scars burned into his heart: marks of a life before) - and now, in the darkness and the light, they’re different. Marcus moves, slowly, sitting upright on the edge of the bed, but he doesn’t touch. Not yet.
“Ink is the mark of a man,” Esca says, “to my people. These-” He traces the old etchings, barely faded by wind and rain. “-tell others that I am a man, and a warrior.” And these-” He breaks off, and his touch moves down to another band, another inked swirl. Here, the colouring is darker, just slightly, and the lines thinner - the mark of a different hand, a different etcher. As always, it’s alien: he doesn’t understand.
Unbidden, he reaches up, out, traces the ink. “What would your people say to this?” he asks, soft. He almost doesn’t want to know.
Esca’s eyes burn. “Freedom,” he answers, simply.
Marcus’ touch falters, and he thinks about ice (floating in the shallows) and mist (clouding the road ahead).
“It means freedom,” Esca repeats, and Marcus wonders if he’s trying to say goodbye.
Marcus doesn’t sleep.
Beside him, curled against him, Esca is dead to the world, the new blueness of that tattoo murmuring contention into the starlight - but Marcus doesn’t touch, doesn’t run fingers and tongue and lips over that new branding like he wants to. He just looks, remembers.
Esca smells wild. Maybe he always has.
There’s frost creeping round the edges of the window in the morning, and the straw-strewn floor is bitingly cold. Marcus dresses swiftly, leaving Esca alone, buried in a pile of furs, and pads away.
He passes the kitchens, greets a bundled Sassticca and shivering Stephanos with an amused smile, and crunches down the frosty path to the stables. Caius perks up the moment he catches his scent, drifting downwind in the cold morning, and Marcus is greeted by the horse’s excited whinny. He smiles (doesn’t laugh), catches his head, runs a palm down his nose. He mutters nonsense-all good boy and you shouldn’t be this observant-and finally gets out his tack, and saddles up.
Caius’ hooves sound sharply on the frozen ground as Marcus leads him out of his stall, slipping on the stones, and his breath snorts white on the air. Marcus heaves himself into the saddle, ignores the twang in his thigh. He wraps the reins around his hand, and breathes - and then Esca hooks his fingers into Caius’ bridle, offers him a handful of hay. His eyes are inscrutable. He says, “Usually I’m the one to leave you asleep.”
Marcus doesn’t answer. His fingers wind through Caius’ mane, even as he noses at Esca’s fingers.
Esca’s gaze is sharp. “Where are you going?” he asks.
“Calleva,” Marcus answers, finally, shortly.
“Can I join you?”
Marcus can’t remember the last time Esca asked his permission to do anything. Before Caledonia, most likely. Before he gave him his freedom. There’s a strange feeling curling in his gut. “Of course,” he says - and there’s a quiet quirk that touches Esca’s lips. He releases Caius’ head, and goes to saddle his own horse - and Marcus just watches, and doesn’t know what to think. He knows the quickness of Esca’s fingers on buckles and straps, the tightness of his tunic across his shoulders as he tugs affectionately at his horse’s mane. There’s grace in the litheness of his movements. Marcus has missed that, he’s realising, these past few days. It’s not a very Roman thought.
Esca settles lightly into his saddle.
For a moment, they sit, side by side, and then Esca says, “Freedom means choice, Marcus. Freedom to leave, or to stay. To come back.”
There’s a throb in his thigh from the cold and a keenness picking at his cheeks, but he can feel the heat from Esca and the horses, and that’s just enough to keep him warm. He feels so very alert, so very sharp. “Will you stay?” he asks.
Esca looks at him sideways, and there’s a crinkle at the corner of his eyes, a curve in the line of his lips. His neck is arched in the early morning cold - and he wheels his horse around so he’s facing Marcus head on, challenging. He doesn’t speak, just smiles.
In the end, Marcus doesn’t need an answer.
“Calleva,” Esca says.
“Calleva,” Marcus agrees.
finis