A New War Within
The scent of wild thyme within the olive grove made me feel ill now. It used to mean freedom, a secret world that belonged only to us. Now, I could no longer look upon it with the same eyes. Instead it filled my mind with shame as I glanced up to the window of Brasidas’ bedroom from where I stood in the olive grove. This was a place that witnessed my submission of duty instead of a place of love. Now, it was just a place to deliver a report.
I stood in our grove, waiting for him, feeling the guilt consume me. My body now belonged to another, and this was my life. Every muscle ached with a deep pain. Every movement was a reminder of who I officially belonged to. Every flex was a tension of a reaction I could no longer control.
I had ignored the olive branch signal that night after I had submitted to Brasidas. I simply couldn’t go to him. When I didn’t appear he sought me out at my home. It was dangerous, we both knew, but he became worried when I didn’t show up to the storage room. He sent a message with my father, a scroll sealed for me. He took a risk, so I had to obey his request to meet me at this spot, our spot he still believed, early the next morning.
Even though I was exhausted from the day’s activities, and the subsequent duty to Brasidas, I needed to see him. He needed to know.
When I heard his step approach behind, my heart did not leap in its usual manner. I never thought it would feel like this. I kept my back to him, staring at the gnarled trunk of the old olive tree, afraid that meeting his eyes would give away all my inner battles.
"Lysander." His voice was raw in just the way he said my name. He came to my side, his hand reaching to turn me toward him. "By the gods, are you—"
I turned before he could touch me, to try to keep him from touching me. I saw the love in his eyes, the fire that we knew, the readiness to burn the world down for me. And I knew for his sake I had to extinguish it.
"I have submitted to Brasidas."
His hand that had moved to touch me froze in the air, then dropped to his side. The hope in his eyes shattered, replaced by a confusion so profound it looked like physical pain.
"What?" He breathed out in a sound that echoed my own feelings.
I stood as tall as I could and lifted my chin upward. "I knelt to him. I gave him my oath. I am his eromenos now, in truth." I kept my voice even. "The training… it is not what you think. It is an agreement. And I have chosen to obey."
He stared at me as if I were a stranger, someone else standing before him. "Chosen? Lysander, he is breaking you! This is not a choice, it is a surrender."
"An inevitable surrender! This is a different kind of war, Theron!" The words snapped out of me, shattering my calm. I gestured to my own battered body. "You fight with a spear and shield. I no longer have that luxury. My defiance was a weapon he needed to break. But my submission is a weapon he does not understand.” I caught my breath for a moment, the pleading in my eyes to his a desperate attempt to win his forgiveness. “We both knew I would have to submit to him eventually." I added so quietly I was unsure if he heard my words.
But I saw the pain in Theron’s eyes, mirroring my own, before the recognition of my predicament. We both knew this day was coming; we both knew it had to happen eventually.
I took a step closer, my voice dropping to a fierce, desperate whisper. "He can have my obedience. He can have my body in his training yard. He can think he owns me. But every moment I endure, I am learning him. I am memorizing his weaknesses, his pride, his blind spots! I am a spy in his own house, Theron. And a spy cannot afford the luxury of open rebellion."
The confusion in his eyes began to clear, replaced by a dawning, horrified understanding. He saw the strategy. He saw the cold, brutal calculus of it, and what I was doing. I was finding a way to win, to release myself from this predicament.
"And us?" he asked, his voice barely audible.
The question I knew was coming now sounded in my ears, feeling like a knife in my chest, twisting into a knot in my stomach. I had my answer prepared, a speech about patience, about the long game. But looking at him, at the beautiful face of this soldier, of the man who was my soul, the words faded from my lips.
I reached out, my fingers gently brushing his. It was the first time I had dared to touch him, afraid how I would react, afraid that he might recoil.
"He cannot have this," I whispered, my voice breaking at last as I slid my hand into his. He did not resist. I looked into his eyes and brought our hands now locked together in a tight grip up to my chest, on top of my heart. "He can have everything else, but he will never, ever touch this. What we are… is the one thing I am not surrendering. It is the reason I can kneel. To protect it. To protect you. To win this war for us."
I saw the agony in his face, the understanding that my submission was a deeper, more terrible form of sacrifice than any defiant stand. He was a warrior, and he knew how to fight. But this? This was a torture he did not know how to endure. And I did not know if I could endure this alone.
“Please.” I simply said, staring into his eyes. “Trust me.”
He leaned forward until his forehead rested against mine, his eyes squeezed shut. We stood there in the fading light, two men sharing a terrible secret that would bring shame to our houses in Sparta, waiting for one of us to speak.
"Then I will be your ally in the shadows," he vowed at last, his breath barely a whisper on my lips so dangerously close to his. "And I will wait for the day your war is won."
So we did. We waited: without embracing, without any form of touch; without any more secret meetings; and without him inside me.
As the days went on, it became a secondary war I was not sure I could win.
After four days of torture, both mentally and physically, and four days of submission in my duty to my erastes, the olive branch appeared and my heart soared once again. His resolve had shattered! Forget this war. I wanted Theron, and he wanted me too.
The abandoned storage room was dim when I arrived, the silence a stilted reminder of our need for secret. I inhaled, smelling old grains and the distant memory of his scent on me. When the door shut behind me, he was there, sealing us in darkness. But the world outside—Brasidas, Sparta, my duty—did not vanish as I had hoped.
Theron did not hold out his arms to embrace me as I moved to him, so I too stopped short. He simply stood there, before his hands moved up slowly to frame my face, his thumbs stroking my temples as if he could smooth away the tension. I held my breath, shivering before him, afraid of what he would ask.
"Show me," he whispered, his voice raw. "Show me where he has been."
It was not shattered resolve, or a request for passion as I had hoped. He wanted to see my suffering. A sob caught in my throat before I swallowed it down. Reluctantly I took his hand and guided it to my right shoulder, where a deep, purple bruise was blooming from a training shield.
His touch was feather-light, a stark contrast to the memory of the impact from Brasidas’ shield. He bent his head and pressed his lips to the center of the bruise, a light kiss of apology, which made me shudder.
I guided his hand lower, to the small of my back, lifting my tunic to show him where the muscles were knotted and tight. His palm, large and warm, pressed against it, and for the first time all day, the knot began to loosen under a touch that sought to heal.
This was our new language it seemed. Not of seduction, but of recovery.
The physical scars he could see. The blemishes on the outside he could touch. But there were other wounds I could not begin to explain. He didn’t ask how many more times I submitted to Brasidas this week. I didn’t tell him.
Instead he simply asked, “May I?” as his hands moved around the upper curve of my smooth buttocks.
He undressed me in the sliver of moonlight peering in from a high window. His eyes traced the new landscape of my body—the abrasions on my knees, the fatigue in the way I held myself. There was no lust in his gaze, only a fierce, aching tenderness.
When he had finished his exploration he stood back and slowly undressed himself, keeping his eyes on me, watching me watching him, before he stepped closer to me at last. When his skin finally met mine, I trembled. He simply held me, not tighter, but more securely, letting the feeling of relief pass through me. He was not Brasidas. He was my Theron, once again, here to show me love instead of a lustful need and ownership. Maybe he could heal the unseen damage within me?
He laid me down on our clothing, bringing my body against his, my back to his front, holding me. My head rested on his upper arm, his on his own shoulder above me. My fingers danced along his strong forearm, playing with the thin hairs as his hardness behind me pressed up against me, reminding me of our vow to maintain control and not give in.
I turned my face to his, "Your mind," I breathed against his neck as I tried to relax and not think about his manhood on my backside, my voice cracking. "I need to hear your mind. Tell me something... something only we would know. A strategy. A poem. Anything.”
He understood. For my sake, he agreed not to enter me, and I was fighting every breath to not give in. He wrapped his arms and legs around me tighter, his body a warm, solid shelter over mine.
"Do you remember," he began, his lips tracing the shell of my ear, "the stratagem you proposed for the mountain pass? The one Pallas dismissed as reckless?" He spoke not of love, but of us—of the meeting of our minds that had first ignited this fire. As he spoke of feints and counter-marches, his hands were rediscovering the territory of my body, moving along my arms and down my sides. I had relaxed completely, feeling the sensations of his touch not as a conqueror, but as a returning king reclaiming a land that used to be his, examining the scarred battlefield left in his wake. But my body was responding even though my mind was trying to resist. My head had turned, my mouth had opened. My hand had found his erection behind me, and his had somehow found mine. And as the panting increased, our tongues had begun a search of their own into our mouths until the panting turned into moaning. Our lips parted only briefly, enough for him to apply his own saliva to his throbbing member behind me, and my legs found themselves opening for him again at last.
We tried to resist. We both hesitated momentarily.
“Please.” I heard my own voice echo in the darkness of the storage room as I felt him positioned to invade me once again at last. “Please.” I begged a second time.
He pushed forward and entered me, slowly, like our last union, with such control it was almost unbearable. A tear escaped my eye and traced a wet path down my cheek to the floor. It was not from the pain of his penetration. It was from the sheer, overwhelming relief of having him again. Because with every inch of his insertion, he was not just loving me; he was erasing away the touch of Brasidas.
Our rhythm was a slow, steady union, of our two bodies moving in memory, his arms and legs holding me into his strong body, keeping me safe. We didn’t speak; our movements became the conversation between us. His body asked, Are you still here? with every thrust upward, each one more desperate than the last. And mine answered with every groan, I am. I am. I am.
He didn’t last long, gripping me tight, holding me still as I felt the flood of him erupt inside me. I grabbed my own swollen cock and coaxed out my own climax easily while still beside him, my body pressing backwards into his as if it would fuse with his. I let my seed run down my shaft, spilling down my thumb, down over his still lodged within me, mixing with his own escaped fluids as we regained our breaths.
We did not part. He remained inside me as a reminder that he was with me, still throbbing and beating within as a part of me. He shifted only slightly, to adjust and pulled me even tighter against his chest, his arms embracing my torso completely, holding me against him. My back was still to him, and he curled his entire figure around me, his forehead pressed between my shoulder blades, as if he could shield me from every blow that ever happened, and was still yet to come.
In the silence, listening to the sounds of our breathing slowing, we both knew the truth. This was not an escape. The world still existed outside that door: a world with Brasidas, and Pallas and all of Sparta. But this was a necessary meeting, a secret mission behind enemy lines to gather our strength and remind each other of who we were, and why we were doing this. So we could return to the war we were fighting with renewed power.
He pressed one last, soft kiss to the base of my spine.
"I am here in the shadows for you my love," he whispered into my skin.
I placed my hand over his, where it rested on my heart.
"And I will fight this war for us until we have won," I replied.
We lay there until the moon moved, afraid to untangle to face the battles ahead.
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