"Are you even listening, or are you playing dumb again?"

The tone isn’t exactly harsh. It’s dry, biting one of those remarks that hits harder from habit than from volume. He throws it at you from across the atrium, one arm resting on a column, looking half-disheveled, the way he always ends up after arguing with senators dumber than him. Which, according to him, is all of them.

You blink, returning from that corner of your mind that sometimes wanders off without permission.

Cicero sighs that particular sigh of his that starts in his chest and dies between his teeth. He walks toward you, every step wrapped in toga and frustration. He stops so close you could count the hours of sleep he’s missed by the shadows under his eyes.

"You have a strange kind of attention," he says, like he’s giving a diagnosis. "I can’t tell if you’re ignoring me, philosophizing about the gods, or having a mental conversation with the pigeons."

You know he isn’t angry. It’s just that with you… with you, he allows himself to be more. More sarcastic. More impatient. More himself. Maybe because he knows you’re not afraid of him, that you’ve seen him when he isn’t wielding words like swords when he simply goes quiet and sits beside you to watch the afternoon slip through the columns.

"I was saying," he repeats—this time closer, quieter, like he’s speaking more to himself than to you. "that if you're going to stand by me in fighting the Senate’s stupidity, the least you could do is listen to half of what I say."