The Breaking Point
The air in the training ground the next morning was still, the dust yet to be disturbed by the day's brutality. I found Brasidas in the far corner, cleaning his spear, his massive back to me, every line of muscle defined in the morning light. It was a body built for one purpose: to be an unyielding instrument of war. There was a terrible, brutal beauty to it that I couldn’t help but appreciate as I moved towards him.
"You wished to see me?" I said, my voice steady, remembering my father’s servant’s words so early this morning, just after Theron had slipped away undetected.
He did not turn. "You saw the confrontation."
I swallowed, the taste of Theron still lingering in my throat, remembering Brasidas’ clever public attack the previous day on Theron. "You know I did. But I am not your asset to break Brasidas."
He gave me a wicked smile, curling his lips upwards, his thick eyebrows arching in humourous surprise at my suggestion. “No. You are my asset that will become a weapon for Sparta. That is my goal as your erastes. I have claimed you as mine, and I will not stop until you surrender yourself to your duty to me, and to me alone. And if I have to break you to achieve this result, I will.”
"You waste your time, Brasidas," I said, my voice calm, cutting through the silence. "And you waste mine."
His eyes, those small, dark stones, flicked up to me from his spear and narrowed. The smile was gone. No one spoke to him like this. Ever.
"You think you are forging a weapon for Sparta," I continued, stepping forward, my own slender toned frame a stark contrast to his mass of muscle on top of muscle. "You mistake my true asset. My body is not the tool: my mind is. You see Theron's care for me as a crack in his armor. But you are blind. He is reinforcing my brain and together we are becoming unbreakable."
"You speak in pretty metaphors, boy," he grunted, a flicker of contempt in his voice. "Strength is simple: it is the push of the phalanx, and the will to stand and kill."
"Is it?" I fired back, my intellect sharpening into a spear. "Then why did we lose at Sphacteria? Our strongest, most 'simple' men, captured by Athenian cleverness? Your kind of strength is a monument, Brasidas: impressive, but static. It can be outmaneuvered. My kind of strength is a river - it flows, it adapts, it finds the weak point in the foundation of your monument and washes it away. That is what a mind can do over brute power!"
I took another step, close enough now to see the pores in his leathery skin. "Hammer away at my walls. You are trying to forge me into a simple dagger. But Sparta does not need another dagger. It needs a strategist. It needs a mind that can see the battlefield from the mountaintop, not just the dirt at its feet. By trying to break me, you are not strengthening Sparta. You are blunting its finest potential instrument."
His jaw tightened. I had struck a nerve. “Is this where he hides then? That secret spring inside you is your mind? Is that where you go when I attack your walls? You close your eyes and go to him there as I unload myself into you? Then I will ensure it is ME that permeates your mind when I am inside you!”
I pressed on, my voice dropping, becoming more personal, more lethal. “Why are you doing this to me? To Theron? WHY?” I felt my resolve weaken momentarily, but regained my composure. Brasidas’ jaw only tightened further and I feared he would lash out. He was not going to give in so easily, especially to the whinings of his student.
"You see my connection to Theron as a liability.” I whispered out.
He glared at me suddenly and spoke in a harsh whisper. “You are not his. You are mine!”
I took a small breath in, steadying my own gaze at him. “My connection to him is not a liability.” I continued, ignoring the claim. “Like you he is a warrior, but he sees our union as an advantage to Sparta. His strength protects my mind. My mind directs his strength. Together, we are more than the sum of our parts. I was supposed to be his. He should be mine.” I whispered back before straightening to my full height. “But now, with your claim and me belonging to you, I am a broken scribe and he is a commander distracted by grief. Is that your service to Sparta: to cripple two of its assets to satisfy your own bruised ego?"
For the first time, he did not have a ready answer. The sheer logic of my argument questioned what he believed was right. I watched his thick lips disappear beneath his beard as his eyes narrowed even more.
"You look at me and see a tool. A thing to be used," I said before he could speak, my final, quiet blow. "But I am a man, Brasidas. A Spartan. And I will serve my city with my mind, or I will serve no one. The choice is not whether you will break me. The choice is whether you will be the man who broke Sparta's future for the sake of his own pride."
I fell silent. The only sound was our breathing. The colossal man before me seemed to shrink, not in size, but in stature. The absolute certainty that was his foundation was cracking. He stared at me, and for a fleeting moment, I was not an object in his possession.
“You think highly of yourself, if you believe you are this important to Sparta.” His voice was steady, calm, almost quiet. “Your brother believed he was different too.”
There was an eerie silence as we both stilled at the mention of our shared connection.
He finally set his spear down and turned. His gaze was not the fiery rage of the agora, but something colder. He simply stared at me for a moment, this brute who had claimed me as his. I tried my hardest to match his stare, not letting him break me.
He looked at me, truly looked, and it allowed me to look at him in return equally. I saw not the monster I always believed him to be, but the veteran soldier, the man who had lived a dozen of my lifetimes, with a sudden intellectual experience I had yet to discover in my own short 18 years.
"You think I am a brute," he stated. "That this is about power."
I felt my cheeks flush, a momentary lapse in my confidence. "Isn't it?"
He took a step closer, but I held my ground. He was close enough that I could see the fine lines around his eyes, the old scar that bisected his eyebrow.
"And you think Theron is the one with grief.” He huffed at me, and spit onto the ground at my feet. “Your brother, Alexandrios…," he said, hearing my brother’s name spoken aloud seemed to hit me harder than I expected, "…had a fire that could have lit up all of Greece." His voice, usually a gravelly command, softened into something I did not recognize coming from him. "I did not just mentor him.” He paused and his eyes looked to the ground. “I loved him more than an erastes should.”
My breath caught in my throat, and I willed myself not to move in fear that this was a trap for me to confess my own feelings for Theron.
But then Brasidas’ eyes flicked up to me with a seriousness and his gaze locked with mine. I watched him slowly lick his lips with his thick tongue before he continued in that soft tone. “Not as Sparta allows, but as a man loves his reason for breathing."
The confession was his to give, and it hung between us. I held my breath and dared not move in fear I was not hearing truthfully what he just spoke.
He held my gaze, his eyes narrowed further and his thick lips disappeared into his beard. And those eyes that I had viewed as full of raw brutality now appeared to hold a pain so old and deep it had been mistaken by me as something different.
"And I got him killed." The words were flat and final. His eyes widened a bit as he straightened himself into something seemingly larger before my eyes. "A moment of distraction. A spear meant for me.” Brasidas’ chest suddenly puffed out as he struggled for words. He took a moment, and looked sideways, away from me, his voice barely a whisper against the Grecian wind. “He died because of me. Because I was not focused on being a soldier. I was focused on him."
Then he turned, his face suddenly fierce and he gestured to my body, to the marks of his training. "I look at you, and I see his fire. I see that same flame in Theron, the way he looks at you. It was the way I looked at Alexandrios. And neither one of you sees that it will consume you both!"
His hand rose and gripped my shoulder, not to strike or attack, but to grasp me with a tenderness that I had only known from Theron. "This... this harshness... it is not cruelty. It is the only language I know to save you. I am trying to harden you, to teach you to be cold, so that when Theron falls – and he will because LOVE always makes a man fall—you will not shatter. You will not spend the rest of your life as a walking tomb, like I have. Do you understand? I am doing this for Alexandrios! FOR YOU!"
This unexpected truth from my erastes was a physical blow. He wasn't trying to break me out of spite. He was trying to armor me against a future he was certain would bring me ruin. In his own twisted, brutal way, he was trying to save me.
I waited until his eyes met mine. "You see it now," he said, his voice low and intense. "This... infatuation with Theron. It is a boy's passion and not uncommon. It will pass. Tell me it is passing."
He saw the understanding in me, but mistook it for surrender.
But I was naïve. Young and stupid, my love for Theron beyond my own intelligence, believing that we would not be destined for a similar fate as Brasidas and my brother. We were smarter than that. We could learn from their mistake. This was the moment then: I could lie, to convince Brasidas that I was a foolish boy and my love for Theron could be guarded to have him ease up on us. I could protect Theron from future confrontations and from the laws of Sparta.
I met his gaze, pouring every ounce of false conviction I possessed into my voice. "You are right. And I feel it is passing," I lied. But as I said it I felt the words betraying my own soul and suddenly feared this would get back to Theron quickly, before I had the chance to explain. With a steady breath, I continued. "He is a distraction. A familiar comfort. I understand. I see it as a weakness. And I must be aware of the potential during a battle."
I saw a flicker of something in his eyes— triumph perhaps. More like a satisfaction that he had finally conquered me.
"Good," he grunted. He looked at me for a moment, and I could feel this was no longer just a student and his mentor. We were just two Spartans, with a shared love for a dead boy, both of us trapped by that love that Sparta could neither understand nor allow. There was a strange, grudging admiration in his gaze—for my physique, which was hardening under his hand, and now for my mind, which he believed was finally yielding to his logic.
He gave a single, slow nod. "Then we will continue, and you will prove you are mine."
He turned back to his spear, the moment of vulnerability gone, the fortress walls slamming back into place. I stood there, my heart hammering, the lie still floating around inside my head. I had just denied the one thing that gave my life meaning, to the one man who, in his own broken way, might have understood its power. I had done it to survive. But as I stood there in front of my erastes, a wall of muscle and brutish strength, with his massive arms crossed, I felt a pang of sorrow, not for myself, but for him. For Brasidas, the mighty warrior, now suddenly seemed to me to be the most tortured man of all.
"Now go home," he muttered, the words devoid of their usual force. “I am not myself to be training you today. I have other matters to attend.”
What those other matters were I would soon discover for that evening, I was summoned to a dinner at the house of Pallas, my Theron’s former erastes. But I was not to be the only man called to this feast.
Pallas’ house was large, as a man of his rank, and filled with servants. The minute I entered, it smelled of roasted meat, sour wine, and simmering tension. Brasidas sat across from me at the dining area, his posture perfect, but from the way he was avoiding me I could tell when I did look in his eyes that he was still struggling with his confession to me. At least, that’s what I thought.
Theron had also been summoned, and was seated at the end of the table, far away from myself and Brasidas. Pallas sat at the head of the table to Theron’s left, along with Damian for some reason. Pallas had said little, only observing, his eyes like cobras, darting between everyone at the table, missing nothing.
“Your mind is not on your food, Theron,” Pallas’s voice cut through the quiet, low and deliberate. “It is on Brasidas’ boy. The one with the clever mind and the defiant eyes.”
Theron’s jaw tightened as other heads turned directly towards me. “He shows potential, Pallas. A different kind of strength that cannot be honed in the gymnasium, and Brasidas won’t acknowledge or appreciate it so it would seem.” Theron risked a glance down at me, a slight grin as my eyes met his.
“A dangerous kind,” Damian sneered from further down the table near Theron. “The kind that questions. The kind that weakens.”
Pallas held up a hand, silencing him, his eyes never leaving mine. “As your erastes Theron, I have taught you to see strength. I have taught you to lead men. But I have not taught you to be led by your pity.” He leaned forward to Theron, breaking my glare, his voice dropping to an intimate, threatening register, but I heard every word. “You are becoming soft. Your judgment is clouded. A Spartan’s loyalty is to the law, not to a single flawed soul.”
I felt the words like a blow. Brasidas twisted my words and went to Pallas.
Theron tried desperately to avoid my gaze, and replied directly to Pallas. “My loyalty is not in question.”
“It is!” Pallas’s fist hit the table, making the cups jump and my own body it seemed. The hall fell silent. “Every glance you give him, every word you speak in his defense, questions it! You are my creation, Theron. I will not stand by and watch you unravel for a pretty face. You need to remember who you are. And since you have yet to choose an eromenos, you need to remember to whom you still belong.”
The threat was not in the words, but in the searing, possessive fire in his eyes. This was not a lesson. It was a reclamation. Pallas was reminding me, and every man present, of the chain of command that bound men in Sparta—the chain that ran from him, to Theron. And the chain that now bound me to Brasidas. But it was obvious that Pallas knew something. He knew there was an unspoken bond between Theron and I. And since I belonged to Brasidas, it was forbidden to be mentored by someone other than your erastes. If it was discovered that Theron and I were enjoying pleasures that went beyond our natural duty as mentor and student, the consequences would be fatal.
I had been too obvious it seems, in my public meetings with him, and Theron himself had been too defensive of me, too passionate as he observed our training. And even worse perhaps, Theron had been seen in his travels to my father’s house. My admission to Brasidas about Theron supporting my mind was not the function of creating weapons for Sparta. Despite Brasidas’ softness, he went to Pallas for support.
Now I understood the reason why we were all here.
My eyes darted to Brasidas who was already watching me. But there was no smile, no recognition of a victory. He just looked at me with the seriousness of control, that he was telling me without a single gesture or look that I belonged to him. And he was reinforcing this notion here tonight that I was his, in front of everyone. Including Theron.
Pallas stood, the mountain of a man now weathered in his 50 years but still formidable, the sound of his chair scraping back the final command. “We are finished here. You will accompany me. Now.”
The command was absolute. It was the voice of a commander, his mentor, the man who held his future in his hands. To refuse was unthinkable. To obey was a betrayal of everything he felt for me. But I knew what he had to do.
Theron’s eyes met mine for a fleeting second across the room, a silent, desperate apology. Then he stood, his body moving with a discipline I knew his heart did not feel and followed Pallas from the hall into the cooling night, toward the armory wall, where he would reassert his claim and try to scour the memory of me from his skin.
I waited a few minutes before I could casually remove myself from the table without drawing too much attention. But try as I might, Brasidas’ eyes still glared at me, attempting to stop me from doing what he knew I would do: follow Theron to eavesdrop.
As guests in Pallas’ home, it was easy to wander the expansive stone floors, and lose yourself in the shadows of the firelight. I moved quietly towards the armory wall, pretending I was going to relieve myself outside, but instead, slipped towards the wide entrance to the war room, hearing the fire in the andron crackle, casting long, dancing shadows that seemed to mock the stillness between the two men standing in front of it. Pallas did not look at Theron. He stared into the flames, his gnarled hands resting on his knees, his silence a heavier accusation than any shout as I listened on the other side of the wall, hidden in shadows from both Theron and Pallas, and from the dining area down the hall.
“You have been distant,” Pallas began, his voice the low rumble of distant thunder. “Your mind is not on your duties. It is with the Inferior.”
Theron, standing at attention before his mentor, did not flinch. “He is not an Inferior. He is not his brother.” Theron sharply addressed his mentor, before continuing with a more cautious tone. “Lysander’s insights have been valuable. His mind is a resource Sparta foolishly cast aside.”
“Do not speak to me of resources!” Pallas’s head snapped up, his cold eyes pinning Theron where he stood. “I am still your erastes. I shaped you. I know the look in a man’s eyes when he is assessing a tool, and I know the look when he is gazing upon his heart’s desire. You look at that boy as if he were water and you a man dying of thirst.”
Theron’s jaw tightened, but he held the older man’s gaze.
“You would throw away everything,” Pallas continued, his voice dropping to a venomous whisper. “Your rank. Your honor. The respect of every man in this city. For what? A moment of passion? A pretty face?”
“No.” Theron’s single word cut through the air, sharp and final. “Not for a moment.” There was a pause as I saw Theron’s chest rise in a deep inhalation. “For a lifetime.”
Theron took a step forward, his own resolve hardening like Spartan steel.
Theron gazed into his former erastes’ eyes. “You taught me to be strong. You taught me to be loyal. You taught me that a Spartan’s duty is to his city above all else.” Theron’s voice was low, but it vibrated with a conviction that made Pallas lean back. “What is the city, Pallas, if not its people? What is duty without love to give it meaning? My love for him does not make me weak. It is the source of my greatest strength. It is the reason I fight. It is the only thing that makes this relentless, unforgiving life worth enduring.”
Pallas stared, his face a mask of stunned betrayal. The foundation of his world—the absolute primacy of the state—was being challenged not by a coward, but by his finest creation.
“You would break the law of Lycurgus for this… this feeling?”
“I would rewrite the law for it,” Theron said, his voice quiet but absolute. “He was to be my eromenos! But he is not. Instead, he is my partner. My equal. I have heard of an army that believes in such a union! And if Sparta cannot make a place for that truth, then it is Sparta that is flawed, not I.”
Pallas stood stock still for a moment, before his older hand suddenly clasped the wide neck of my newly announced partner, and Theron’s body bent forward in a look of shock and submission. Pallas then steered him rather violently towards the far opening, towards the side of the armory wall. I pulled back in fear, unsure of what I would witness, suddenly frightened and scared at what Pallas would do to his former eromenos. A confession like this not only spoke of treason to Sparta, but would bring on utter shame and death to anyone who would even admit it.
When Brasidas confronted me, I lied and said it was passing. Theron stood his ground and admitted his love for me. I felt like the coward suddenly, fearful that Theron’s bold stance would be the end of us, of him.
I waited in the shadows, catching my breath, hearing noises I could not quite decipher, before I dared move, slipping back the way I came, but instead of returning to the dining area, I simply walked straight out into the night, to pull an olive branch from a tree on Pallas’ property, and left our signal for Theron.
I had to see him. I had to know he survived this admission. I had to tell him that I was the weak one.
I waited only an hour but it seemed longer in the quiet of the storage room. When the door finally creaked open, and the scent of him—olive oil, dust, and the faint, cloying trace of Pallas’s sweat—hit me like a physical blow and shamed me into tears for what I had done.
He stood there, silhouetted in the dim light, his shoulders slumped as if he was the one who should be shamed, his entire being radiating a guilt so profound it seemed to lessen my own. “Lysander,” he began, his voice a ragged ruin.
I didn’t let him finish. I crossed the space and pulled him into the darkness, my hands finding his face. He flinched, a tremor running through his powerful frame. “Don’t,” I whispered, my thumbs stroking his cheeks. “I know. I saw. You don’t have to explain.”
“I do ,” he choked out, his body trembling against mine. “He… he said I was his. That I was forgetting my place. That I was soft because of you.” The words poured out of him, each one a confession of a violation I had already witnessed. “He wanted to wash your touch from my skin.”
A white-hot rage flashed through me, not at Theron, but at the world that had forced this upon him. “It is I who should be speaking!” I said, my voice low and fierce. “I told Brasidas that my infatuation for you was passing, so he would stop! But instead he went to Pallas and informed him about your admiration for my mind. But you, you stood up for us, you faced your erastes properly for our love. I am the coward and don’t deserve you!”
I brought my lips to his in a fierce kiss. For a moment, he was stiff, trapped in his own shame and I feared my words had broken our bond. But then his hands grabbed my own face and a broken sob escaped him. His mouth opened, desperate and hungry as mine was, and he moaned into me before breaking apart.
“You did what you needed to. I know where your heart lies, there is never a need for explanation.”
This time, there was no hesitation. Our hands tore at clothing with a single-minded purpose. I pushed him back against the sacks of grain, my body covering his, my mouth tracing the line of his jaw, his throat, the powerful column of his neck—wanting to taste every inch of his flesh as a signal that I would never deny him again.
“Look at me,” I commanded to him this time, my voice rough with passion.
His eyes, dark with pain and need, found mine.
I wanted him to know I was his, and that he was mine. I wasn’t going to let anyone break us.
“I am yours.” He lifted me off the ground to place me on my back on the piles of feed bags.
With a moment of tenderness, he aimed himself into me, his legs spreading mine wide open, before he inserted himself into me. Our eyes locked in the darkness of the room.
“Now I show you.” He whispered, leaning over me, locking his body around mine in one complete union. He worked himself to a steady, quick pace, focused on finishing the task quickly as I remained under his massive body. I watched every muscle in his upper torso contract, tighten, and his face clenched, that granite like body bucking wildly into me, unleashing his own love directly into my soul. His voice was free, loud, letting his own cries out as a litany of release and redemption.
We lay tangled in the dark, his face buried in my neck, his body finally still. The scent of Pallas was gone, replaced by the salt of our sweat, the truth of our joining. He remained locked in me, his body shielding mine as we lay on the grain, entangled in one another without a worry in the world now.
“He owns your oath,” I whispered into his hair, holding him as the tremors subsided. “But your soul… your soul is mine.”
And in the quiet of his breathing, I felt his answer, even though he whispered “And your soul is mine” before we drifted off still entangled in each other’s bodies, right there in the darkened storage room on top of the feed bags.
A shift in the darkness, a change in the rhythm of his breath, and I was pulled from sleep. Not to fear, but to a deep, humming awareness. Theron was awake. His massive frame was suddenly tense.
Then, his hands found me.
They were not the hands of the desperate, furious lover from earlier. They were the hands of a worshipper. They began at my crown, fingers threading through my hair with a tenderness that made my throat tighten. They moved down, a slow, deliberate journey over the landscape of my body. I felt his calloused palms, so capable of violence, trace the line of my trapezius, the curve of my deltoid, with a reverence that was almost heartbreaking. He mapped the smooth, unmarred skin of my shoulders, the defined ridges of my back, the dramatic taper of my waist that his hands could nearly span.
I feigned sleep, letting him have this silent exploration. His touch was light, soft, barely touching me, sending me into a breathless state of stillness. When his lips, soft and warm, pressed against the base of my neck, a shiver ran the entire length of my spine.
I could pretend no longer. "Theron?" I murmured, my voice thick with a sleep I no longer felt.
He didn't answer with words. He moved me with an infinite care onto my stomach, his body, a heavy, warm blanket of solid muscle, settling over me. I was engulfed by him. The sheer, breathtaking power of his physique—the broad, dense chest, the hard ridges of his abdomen pressed against my back. I felt the hard, hot length of him press against my backside, running up and down me as he moved behind me, as if he was asking silently to claim me once again.
"Look at me," he whispered, echoing my own words from earlier that evening, his voice raw with emotion.
I turned my head, my cheek against the pelt, and met his eyes. Then he entered me in a slow, inevitable joining, a homecoming that filled me so completely it stole my breath. He buried himself to the hilt and went perfectly, tremblingly still. His arms wrapped around my chest, clutching me to him as if I were the only solid thing in his universe. His forehead rested between my shoulder blades, his breath hot and ragged on my skin.
"My soul," he breathed, the words a vibration that went straight to my core. "It has always been yours."
The truth of it, the sheer, devastating beauty of his surrender, shattered me. I reached back, my hand finding the strong column of his neck, tangling in the damp hair at his nape, holding him to me.
"And mine is yours," I whispered back, my voice breaking. "Only yours."
And then, he began to move. A slow, deep, rolling rhythm that was not about passion, but about presence. It was erotic, beyond words any poet could ever write. In that moon-drenched room, surrounded by the evidence of our world's harsh demands, we were not Spartan and Inferior, not erastes and eromenos. We were two souls, speaking the only language that mattered, in the only expression we would ever need.
A shuddering groan escaped my mouth. I reached a hand back, tangling my fingers in his hair, holding him. "And mine is yours," I whispered again. "I am yours."
And in the middle of the night that was soon to be morning, we began to move faster—a deep, perfect tempo that was not about passion, but about presence. It was a silent language of belonging, a physical promise that here, in this space we had carved from a world of lies, we were whole, we were free, we were forever.
I erupted underneath him without touching myself, the friction of the pelt and the depth of his manhood punching my inner walls bringing me to a shuddering conclusion as Theron’s hot breath filled my ear. His strong arms clasped me tighter and he panted that he was ready. I felt him explode in me, my body welcoming the intrusion, my insides savouring the warmth of his fluid as he clutched me against him.
He didn’t remove himself, just collapsed on me, his body a warm comfort against my skin.
We regained our breath, joined still together, our skin cooling in the early morning air. When he finally spoke, he didn't whisper words of love. He spoke of war.
"I will make Pallas listen," he murmured, his lips against my hair. "I know he will question Brasidas' focus. I have already encouraged those doubts."
I turned my head to look at him. "How?"
"A word in the right ear to some. A suggestion that a man so obsessed with breaking one boy may have lost sight of the entire army. Before I left Pallas, I said the same thing to him."
It was the logical next move on the board. A fragile hope for us, but a hope nonetheless.
I smiled, a real one this time, feeling the strategist within me stir back to life. "Then we will have our first opening at breaking Brasidas."
He pulled me closer, his body a wall of protection like a shield around me. "We hold the line here, my love," he whispered. "And we wait for our moment."
In the darkness, surrounded by the scent of him and the quiet certainty of his plan, the mask I wore for Brasidas felt a little lighter. For a few stolen moments, I was not his to break. I was Theron's to fortify. And that made all the difference.
Theron was himself again. After two rounds of burying himself in me, he was a new man: the man I loved, the warrior Pallas fortified him into, and the admired commander who knew how to plan a war and fight a battle.
He wasn’t going to let Brasidas win this one. My Theron had a plan.
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