Healing the Wounds
The sun was not yet a hand's breadth above Taygetus when he came for me on that seventh day. There was no summons. No word. Only the looming shadow of him in the doorway of my father's house, blocking out the dawn. Brasidas. His silence was a command more terrifying than any shout.
"Come," he said.
It was not a training ground he took me to. It was a barren, rocky patch of earth at the mountain's base, a place of jagged stones and dust. A place for breaking things.
"The Spartans you admire," he began, his voice flat, "the ones who whisper pretty lies in your ear, they believe strength is a skill. A thing to be practiced. They are wrong."
He picked up two heavy, rough-hewn logs, the kind used to fortify a palisade. With his biceps bulging out larger than ever, he tossed one log at my feet as if it weighed nothing. The impact sent a jolt through the ground.
"Strength is a truth. It is the absence of weakness. And weakness," he said, his eyes locking on mine, holding the other log in one terrifying muscled arm, "is a rot. It must be cut out."
What followed was not training. It was an autopsy.
He drilled me with the log until my shoulders screamed and my palms were raw and bloody. When I faltered, his corrections were not with words, but with a shorter, heavier stick, striking the back of my legs, my arms, my ribs with a sharp, biting pain that left bruises blooming deep in the muscle.
"Your brother," he grunted, as I struggled to lift the log again, "did not complain."
The words were a different kind of blow, more precise than the stick. Every exercise had a double meaning. Every breath I failed to control was a failure to live up to a memory.
"Your form is flawed. You think too much. Your body betrays your mind's hesitation." His rough voice only added insult to my injuries.
He pushed me to the edge of the rocky outcrop. "Climb."
The rock face was sheer, the holds small and cruel. I fell, scraping my chest and knees on the stone. The taste of blood filled my mouth.
"Again." He said, enjoyment creeping into his gravelly baritone sound.
I fell again, harder.
"If your Theron was your erastes," he said, the name a vile thing in his mouth, "he would let you rest. He would tell you your mind is your strength. On a battlefield, that lie would be your epitaph."
On the third attempt, my fingers, slick with blood and sweat, found a purchase. I hauled myself over the top, my body trembling with exhaustion.
Brasidas was there, waiting, his build one of sheer, brutal mass, a man of few words, a force to be reckoned. He did not offer a hand. He simply looked down at me, panting in the dust.
"You fight for a feeling. A secret. A warmth in the dark." He leaned down, his face close to mine, his thick dark beard almost touching my smooth chin, his voice a low, venomous whisper. "I will burn it out of you. I will make you so hard, so cold, that when you look at him, you will feel nothing but contempt for the weakness he represents. You will become your brother's legacy, not his ghost."
He straightened up, a colossus against the rising sun.
"Again."
And I pushed myself up. My body was a single, screaming nerve of pain. But as I turned to face the cliff once more, a single, clear thought cut through the agony, a spark he could not hammer out.
You are wrong. I thought in my head.
I fought for a feeling. For the memory of Theron's mouth on mine, his hands in my hair, the look in his eyes that saw me, and not the ghost of a better son. And that feeling, that secret warmth, was the only reason my trembling legs still held me up. It was not my weakness.
It was the only strength I had left.
Brasidas must have seen something then, because as I reached the top again there was no hand offered, there was no rhetoric left to spit. Just his massive arms folded across the huge plains of his solid chest, a sneer in his lips and something else in his eye. Admiration? Surprise? I wasn’t sure.
Instead he simply gave a gruff snort and turned to walk away. “Enough for today.”
I achingly found my way to the river, and carefully cleaned my wounds like a hurt animal in shame. There was only one place I wanted to go from here.
The world had become a thing of sharpened edges. Every sound was a potential alarm, every shadow a spy. My body no longer felt like my own; it was a tool Brasidas was honing, a narrative he was writing in bruises and calluses. For seven long days, I had worn the mask of the penitent, my soul screaming in silence. But Theron and I found we could survive; we found an escape.
The signal was a broken olive branch, left on a specific stone. It meant the storeroom. It meant him.
Seeing it on my way back from the river ignited my soul. When I slipped inside, the darkness surrounded me. He was already there, a deeper shadow against the wall. He didn't speak. He simply opened his arms, and I walked into them, my forehead falling against his chest with a sound that was half-sigh, half-sob. His muscled arms closed around me, and for one endless minute, we just stood there. He was the only solid thing in my crumbling world.
"I am becoming a stranger to myself," I whispered into the wool of his chiton. "I speak the words he wants to hear. I move as he commands. I fear the man I see in the reflection of his eyes."
Theron’s hand came up, his strong fingers threading through my hair, cradling my skull. "Look at me."
I lifted my head. His eyes, fierce in the gloom, held mine. "The man he sees is a phantom. A weapon he is trying to forge. The man I see is the one who outmaneuvered him with his mind. The man I see is right here."
He led me to the corner where our cloaks were piled. This time, there was no need for desperate union, but rather a slow unveiling, a need for confirmation of what Brasidas was doing to me.
"Show me," he said simply, standing back, his tone different. It was a challenge. A command to reclaim.
I pulled my tunic over my head. In the faint light, the new bruises were darker, a constellation of pain. I took his hand and placed it over a harsh, yellowing mark on my ribs. "This was for a flawed pivot."
His jaw tightened, but his touch remained gentle. He leaned in and pressed his lips to the spot, his breath warm against my skin. Then he looked up, his gaze burning. "And what was your mind doing when he did this?"
"Calculating the angle of his shield," I answered, the hint of a smile touching my lips. "Noting the imbalance in his stance."
A fierce pride lit his face. "Good."
He kissed a scrape on my collarbone. "And this?"
"I was thinking of a line from a poem you once recited to me."
He moved to the deep ache in my shoulder. "And this?"
"I was planning how I would one day use his own arrogance to trip him."
With every mark he acknowledged, he did not flinch in pity. He met it with a question about my mind, my strategy, my unbroken spirit. He was not kissing the bruises away; he was anointing them as battle standards in our private war.
It transformed the memory of each blow from one of victimhood to one of secret defiance.
His hands moved around me, uncovering my cloth, and gently caressing the roundness of my buttocks. His eyes glanced up to me as he gave one cheek a soft kiss that made me shiver, as his warrior hands, so thick and strong, gently slid in between the crevice of my body.
“And this?” He asked me so quietly.
I shook my head. “He has not asked me for this duty yet.”
I saw Theron’s brow furrow, before he gently kissed the other cheek, letting out a soft sigh that spoke the words we were both feeling. Yet. He rose slowly, his arousal now apparent.
When his mouth finally found mine, it was not soft, but hungry and affirming.
I stepped out of the fabric of my cloth at my feet, standing naked before the man I loved as he observed me. His hands continued to roam, moving my body to fit into his as my own hands began to fumble with his clothing pieces. Our tongues continued to battle as I undressed my soldier, feeling the difference in his body compared to mine, the size doubling next to mine, the heat radiating from his to mine, his hardness pressed against mine.
“This,” I whispered, reaching between us to grasp our members with one hand, “I do not for duty.”
Our mouths opened at the touch, our breaths becoming one as I pulled on our tools together, his harder and wider, longer than my own. His eyes bore into mine as he stood there, vulnerable in his state, succumbing to the pleasures of my hand, unable to move from his stance.
Like the soldier he is, he took charge. His mouth clamped down on mine, his large hands grabbed my shoulders as our breathing increased. Spinning me slowly, he laid me down gently against the cloaks and our tunics, hidden in the corner, his body covering me from the entire world.
He moved between my legs easily, using his own to spread me open, never breaking our eye contact. I felt him, tentatively pressing, his lips parted, his eyes glazed over at the feeling of heat radiating from me.
His eyes drifted as his slowly pushed forward, studying my reaction, watching my body take in his invasion. He moved my leg upwards, holding it close to his bristly chest as his velvet-sheathed steel pierced deep into me. Hip to hip we remained still as he pulsed inside me, matching the own rhythm of my beating heart.
My hands glided over his powerful thighs as the stubble from his square jaw brushed against my foot by his face.
I nodded: one simple gesture to a soldier waiting for his command.
Our bodies came together in a powerful, driving confluence. It was the physical manifestation of our pact—a defiant, living truth in the face of a world of lies. He leaned over me, my leg a forgotten discard as his body surrounded my own. Our mouths rejoined, our tongues becoming one. Every thrust was a vow: I am here. I am yours. This is real.
THIS is the Sparta I wanted to live in. As my fingers dug into his thick black hair, and his mouth gaped open next to mine, I felt his love explode within me, sending my own out of my body in a gasping eruption between us.
The heat of his breath on my neck, the stickiness of our love clung to our sweat soaked bodies, and the smell of the dark corner of the supply room etched into my memory. This is what I would take with me when the calloused hands of Brasidas touched my flesh. This is what I would remember when it came time to submit to my erastes.
Nothing could take away the memory of my Theron. Whether or not I was his eromenos, I was his.
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