A Matter of Survival
Brasidas’s hand, a heavy, calloused thing that looked capable of crushing rock, shot out and gripped my jaw. It wasn’t a caress. It was a physical inspection, turning my face side to side with impersonal force. His thumb, rough as pumice, pressed against my lips, a grotesque parody of intimacy.
“You will learn discipline,” he grunted, his breath smelling of metal and wine. “You will learn strength. You will learn that a mind is nothing without the will to enforce it.”
He released me, and I stumbled back a step, my skin burning where he had touched me. The approval in the eyes of the other men was the most terrifying part. They saw this not as a violation, but as a harsh, necessary education. Brasidas had not chosen an eromenos. He had selected a raw recruit for his own brutal version of the Agoge. As he turned and walked away, the implicit command hanging in the air, I felt not like a chosen beloved as I had hoped with Theron, but like prey that had been tagged by a predator. I watched him walk, his build one of sheer, brutal mass. There are no elegant lines or graceful tapers. His body is a collection of thick, heavy, and functional muscle groups stacked upon one another. He moves with a deliberate, rolling gait, each step a statement of immovable intent. The world of graceful mentorship and political alliance had vanished, replaced by the stark, terrifying reality of his force.
This was our first day of training, and as I stood with the others and their erastes, I watched Brasidas disappear up the high, shadowed path, my body still aching with the memory of Theron’s hands just two nights before. I rubbed my jaw, feeling the weight of Brasidas’ violation on my skin and in my mouth as I noticed the three men entering the gymnasium.
The sun was a brutal, honest eye over the parade ground, exposing every secret the night had held. I stood with the other youths, a line of polished potential, but my world had narrowed to a single, agonizing point: Theron. He was across the dusty field, deep in conversation with Pallas and Damian, the very picture of a Spartan officer—and to me, a vision of such visceral, untouchable beauty that it was a physical ache.
Theron is not the largest man in the phalanx, but he is the one others instinctively make space for. He carries himself with the unshakeable, economical grace of a predator. There is no wasted motion, no unnecessary tension—only a state of constant, ready potential. He is a man carved from sun-baked oak and Spartan iron, his body a testament to a life of relentless discipline and hardened by the forge of war.
The sun loved his body, gilding the powerful, seamless curve of his shoulders, the very shoulders my legs had locked around in the dark. It traced the deep, ridged lines of his stomach, a landscape my tongue had mapped with desperate reverence which was now a memory I had to swallow down, a fire I had to smother behind a mask of cool detachment.
My own body screamed with the memory of his. My skin felt too tight, humming with the memory of his touch. I wanted to cross the distance, to press my mouth to the pulse beating at the base of his throat, to mark him as mine before all of Sparta.
But here, in this glaring light, he was not mine. And I was not his.
He laughed at something Damian said, a short, sharp sound I knew was false. His gaze swept over our line, an impersonal, commanding inspection. For a fleeting, eternal second, his eyes met mine. There was no warmth there, no recognition of the soul he had unraveled just days before. There was only the flat, polished stone of a commander’s regard.
His indifference was a wound. I had to clench my jaw, to force my hands from trembling into fists, to pour every ounce of my will into keeping my expression a blank, empty slate. I was his secret, his sin, his greatest vulnerability. And in that moment, as he gave me the same impassive glance he gave every other youth, I understood the true, terrifying depth of our love. It was a fire we had to hide in plain sight, a desperate, silent scream behind two pairs of carefully disciplined eyes. To love him was to become a master of deception, to build a wall of lies so high that the truth of us could survive behind it, a sacred, hidden flame in a world of cold, hard stone. I now understood the desire to be his eromenos, to at least share our acceptable bond as mentor and student, as dominant and submissive, as man and boy in pubic. Our love could have hidden in plain sight.
Having been dismissed so obviously by Brasidas, I abandoned my lustful stares and moved into the interior of the gymnasium for refuge from the blazing sun. I stomped along, trying to rid my mind of the feel of Brasidas’ rough fingers, and remind myself of the climax of love with Theron, when I heard sandaled steps moving quickly behind me.
I turned to see Theron, walking fast towards the large door to a room that housed feed for the horses and tools for our games, motioning me suddenly to change directions. I obeyed without a second thought and moved quickly to the room, his muscular frame suddenly following inside behind me. The moment the heavy oak door of the storage room shut, plunging us into a world of fragrant grain and profound darkness, the careful masks we wore shattered. I was pinned against the rough-hewn wall, not by force, but by the overwhelming presence of him. My hands, desperate and seeking, found the familiar geography of his body—the massive, sculpted deltoids that strained the seams of his tunic, the deep, hard grooves between the slabs of his pectorals. I could feel the frantic, thunderous beat of his heart beneath my palm.
A low, guttural sound escaped him, a raw noise of possession I felt deep in my own bones. His hands, those calloused, commanding hands, were not gentle. They fisted in my curly hair, yanking my head back, while the other hand gripped the lean, defined muscle of my hip hard enough to bruise. "You," he growled, his breath hot against my ear, "standing there in the sun, your body on display for all of them... I nearly came undone."
His mouth crashed down on mine, not in a kiss, but in a devouring. I met his fury with my own, my tongue tangling with his, my fingers digging into the impossibly hard, dense muscle of his latissimus, clutching him to me as if he were the only solid thing in a spinning world. We tore at our clothes, the simple wool and linen a hated barrier. The air, cool on my heated skin, was a fleeting shock before the scorching heat of his bare torso met mine.
The feeling was electric. The crisp, coarse hair of his chest abraded my smooth skin. The hard, ridged plane of his stomach pressed against the trembling, defined muscles of my own. He was a wall of sun-warmed, living bronze, and I was the marble yielding to his form.
He spun me, pressing my front against the cool, gritty stone. His entire body covered me, his sheer mass and power both a prison and a sanctuary. I felt the rigid, throbbing length of him press against me, and a shudder of raw anticipation wracked my frame. When he entered me, it was with a single, searing, perfect thrust that filled the aching emptiness the day had carved in me. A ragged, broken cry was torn from my throat, lost in the muscled wall of his shoulder as he pulled my head sideways into him.
He stilled, buried deep, throbbing within me as his body trembled with the Herculean effort of his control. Every hard-won ridge of his abdomen was pressed against the small of my back. I could feel the powerful flex of his quadriceps against my thighs. "Lysander," he breathed out as he always did, my name sounding like a desperate plea in the air.
That single, shattered word broke me. "Don't stop," I begged, my voice a raw whisper. "I need to feel all of you. I need to know this is real."
A violent shudder racked his powerful frame. Then he began to move. It was not the slow, measured rhythm of two nights ago, as he claimed me twice, but the raw, driving, desperate pace of a lover in need. Each powerful thrust of his hips was a piston of muscle and lust, a physical scream against the silence we were forced to keep. My own body, slick with sweat, met his force for force, my back arching, my own muscles coiling and releasing in a building, blinding wave of pleasure, pushing back against him just as much as he was drilling into me. This was not about duty: no eromenos would ever show this much pleasure and passion to his erastes. This was a reclaiming, to confirm that our last coupling two nights ago was not a dream, but to confirm it was real, to confirm that WE were real. It was our bodies speaking the truth our lips could not.
When this climax took us, it was a cataclysm of simultaneous lust. His whole body locked, a statue of taut, straining muscle, a deep, guttural roar muffled against my skin. I grabbed my own rod, and immediately came, my own release a white-hot wire snapping, my vision blurring, my fingers scrambling for purchase on the stone as my body convulsed around his, milking every last shuddering pulse from him.
We collapsed together, a tangled, sweating, breathless heap against the wall. For a long time, there was only the sound of our ragged breath and the feel of his heavy, spent body leaning trustingly over mine. In the dark, surrounded by the food for our animals and tools of our city, we were not symbols of a state. We were simply two men, our bodies a testament to a dangerous and perfect love.
We could survive this couldn’t we?
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