The courtyard of St. Damasus still echoed with applause and the muted hum of ceremonial trumpets when Drill Sergeant Alois Meier finally let out a long breath. The recruits had sworn their oaths—each hand resting on the flag, each voice pledging to defend the Pope even unto death. The moment had its familiar gravity, yet it always stirred something in him. He had stood there seven times before, and still the words made his spine straighten.
By midmorning, the ceremony had dissolved into photographs, families, and laughter that belonged more to a village wedding than a military rite. Alois moved quietly among the visitors, shaking hands with parents who looked equally proud and alarmed. He reminded one young man’s mother, in careful Italian, that her son would have a leave in three weeks. She nodded, eyes shining. He didn’t tell her that her boy would likely spend those weeks scrubbing armor and learning how to stand without fidgeting.
After the crowd thinned, Alois led his new platoon through the bronze gates toward the barracks. The cobblestones underfoot were slick from the morning’s drizzle. Inside, the air smelled faintly of leather, polish, and starch. He ordered the recruits to remove their ceremonial halberds and hang their doublets. Their bright Renaissance uniforms—those famous bands of blue, yellow, and red—looked less majestic drooping from pegs. One recruit sneezed; another’s collar had left a red mark on his neck. Alois allowed himself a hint of a smile. The glamour always wore off before lunch.
The rest of the morning was given to drills. The men learned to pivot in unison, to bow with precision, to keep their halberds upright when the Swiss sun hit their helmets like a furnace. Alois corrected posture, adjusted fingers, barked commands in German, then switched to Italian for the Vatican clerks passing nearby. The recruits’ boots clapped the stone rhythmically, and now and then the sergeant’s low, measured voice broke the beat.
At noon, they marched to the small mess hall. The lunch was unremarkable—bread, soup, some veal stew—but the men ate as if it were the feast of saints. Alois sat at the end of the table, a cup of strong coffee cooling beside him. Across the room, a young guard named Reto was trying to tell a joke about tourists, and the others were laughing too loud. Alois let it pass. After weeks of training, a day of ceremony deserved a little release.
The afternoon brought paperwork—endless forms confirming oath signatures, uniform inspections, security rosters. He worked in his small office, where a single window looked toward the dome of St. Peter’s. Every half hour, the sound of distant bells drifted in. From time to time, he took off his cap and rubbed the mark it left on his forehead.
Toward evening, he did his final round of the Apostolic Palace corridors. The marble floors shone; Swiss Guards in half-armor stood at attention at the intersections, silent as statues. Alois nodded to each of them, checking stances, sword angles, the polish on the cuirass. A few tourists still lingered beyond the cordons, whispering, cameras clicking.
By nightfall, the day’s ceremony had turned into a memory of polished boots and proud faces. The new guards had gone to their quarters; laughter and the hum of low voices filtered through the courtyard windows. Alois stood for a while under the archway leading to the small chapel. The candles flickered, reflecting in the bronze of a halberd leaning against the wall. He didn’t pray aloud, just bowed his head briefly.
Back in his room, he hung his uniform with the same precision he demanded of others. From the desk drawer, he took out a folded letter from home—his brother’s handwriting, rough and steady. He read a few lines, then folded it again. Outside, the Vatican quieted, and the last guard on rotation took his post by the bronze door.
There was one thing left to do.
***
The new recruit, Franz was brought in for questioning because that morning the guys in the shower beat him up for having an erection. Now he lay on the stone floor, motionless except for the faint tremor rippling through his calves. His back was a pale, unmarked plane dusted with summer freckles that stopped just above the waistline; his shoulder-blades seemed sharp like small wings, twitching each time Alois’s boots clicked against the stone tiles the new recruit was lying on. His arms stretched forward bent at the elbows, his fingers curled loosely as if he were still holding an invisible rifle.
Franz’s legs were long, runner-lean, with tight and quivering hamstrings. Between them, the swell of his backside rose smooth and firm, two perfect halves tensed just enough to dimple at the outer edges; the cleft beneath caught stray light, and the shadow felt deep and inviting. Close-cropped blond hair shone like copper, his nape was exposed and reddening with every quick, shallow breath that puffed against the floor. Each inhale lifted his ribs; each exhale pressed hips a fraction closer to cold stone, excitement and gooseflesh warring across every inch of him.
“So,” Alois said. “What was that in the shower this morning? Why do I have others complaining you were… excited?”
“Sir, sorry, sir,” was the muffled answer.
“Do you know that it is a grave sin to get excited like that?”
“Sir, yes, sir.”
“And you still were.”
“Sir, sorry, sir. It won’t happen again.”
“Ten belt lashes.”
“Sir, yes, sir.”
Alois stopped pacing, boots halting inches from Franz’s butt cheek. Fantasies flooded his brain. In the first one he saw Franz bent over the prie-dieu, his white uniform blouse rucked to his ribs, his uniform pants at his ankles, candlelight licking the small of his back while Alois drove into him to the echo of Latin psalms somewhere in the distance. Franz whimpered, his ass felt tight and hot... Then the picture changed and Franz was pinned against a rack of halberds, his wrists tied with a braided cord, legs wrapped around Alois’s waist while steel clinked a rhythm to his hungry thrusts. Franz had a ridiculously small dick in that dream; no more than three centimeters of crooked little shape lying on tiny balls, with a few tufts of pubic hair. Then it was midnight, both of them naked beneath crimson cloaks, Franz riding him on the narrow stair, bells tolling above their heads each time hips slammed upward. In that dream his dick was large and glided smoothly, and Alois could feel every little ridge, the sharp pang of the mushroom head, the uneven hardness of cavernous bodies, the slap of the large balls. It was no surprise at all for Alois that the dream shifted; this happened to him each time he allowed himself such a transgression.
Heat surged beneath the sergeant’s broad leather belt; his cock thickened, trapped diagonally by tight navy blue wool of his pants. Alois shifted weight, thumb hooking inside the waistband, giving one casual tug that seated the shaft upright against his lower belly. The fabric bulged—and his big man was now harder than any halberd. He cleared his throat, stepped behind Franz, and unbuckled.
Crack.
The belt landed wide, leather kissing both cheeks at once; a pale twin stripe flared crimson, skin dimpling as Franz sucked air through clenched teeth. Alois watched the welt rise like a brushstroke on fresh canvas and, behind his eyes, he saw it glow gold—imagining the same mark blooming under cathedral candlelight while organ music shook dust from rafters.
Crack.
Lower this time, the tip of the belt snapping the tender sit-spot; Franz’s hips jerked, thighs parting just enough to reveal the tight purse of his sac drawn high. In the fantasy cloister Alois tasted incense, felt that same jump translated into a gasp swallowed by stone walls while cassock silk pooled at his feet.
Crack.
A diagonal cut crossing the first two, the leather’s end flicking the top cleft; the pink cheeks quivered, parted a breath, the pink inner skin flashing before closing again. In the phantom bell-tower of Alois’s imagination the cool wind now whipped around bare skin, and Alois pictured the mark as a brand—his personal sigil carved into moonlit flesh while bells clanged overhead and the city slept far below.
It isn’t a dream, he reminded himself. I am doing my duty.
He paused, feeling his pulse hammering behind his uniform fly—three lashes down, seven to go, every stripe already etched twice: once on Franz, once inside his own hungry head.
Crack—the fourth lash snapped across the fullest curve, leather biting the pale skin and then releasing; a fresh glossy welt rose. Behind the brass buttons of Alois’s fly his cock surged, crown grinding the harsh seam of the navy blue wool with each heartbeat, a sweet burn that made him suck air through his teeth.
Crack—the fifth lash striped lower, the belt tip licking the tender join of thigh and cheek; Franz’s knees slid wider on instinct, offering the faint gleam of tight skin between. Alois rolled hips once, uniform seam sawing along his underside, pre-cum darkening the fabric as friction sparked down the shaft of his cock.
“I am not touching myself,” he said to himself in his mind. “I can’t do anything about it… Relax, relax, Disziplin, ruhig, ruhig. Eins, zwei, drei, atmen, atmen…”
Crack—the sixth crossed them all, diagonal fire hit the ass cheeks that clenched, quivered, relaxed. Alois hissed, feeling the seam rub the sensitive frenulum of his dick, pleasure and pain coiling tight—four to go, each lash echoing straight to the trapped throb of his cock straining against disciplined cloth.
Crack-crack-crack—three in a blur, leather whistling then biting like a single triplet of gunfire. Stripes overlapped, skin blooming crimson; Franz yelped into the tile, hips bucking upward as if begging for the next sting.
Alois snarled, fury flashing hot because those helpless jerks were mirrors—every welt on Franz flared identical heat against his own trapped dick.
“This is for discipline, this is for the good, and I. Am. Not. Touching. Myse-e-e-e-e-e-e-elf!!!!”
The seam of his pants sawed him furiously now, friction climbing from itch to spark to inevitable fuse; he felt the swell crest, his balls drew up tight, and his orgasm coiled at the base while the belt hovered mid-air.
One lash left—and he knew, with perfect clarity, that the moment the leather kissed the flesh again the seam would win, its itchy pleasure would detonate inside the uniform wool, and the roar in his throat would betray every forbidden image he’d painted across the recruit’s skin.
Crack—ten.
The belt kissed the burning lattice one final time, and the sound was as sharp as a snapped violin string. Franz’s whole body jolted, cheeks clenching on the sting, and that tiny jerk flipped the switch inside Alois.
Heat surged up his shaft in one unstoppable wave; he ground against the uniform seam, hips snapping forward as if driving into invisible flesh. Pulse after pulse erupted—thick, hot spurts soaking the inner lining of the navy blue wool, spreading sticky warmth across his lower belly and the crest on his belt. His breath froze in his throat for a second, then burst out as a guttural growl that rattled the locked door, and his knees threatened to buckle beneath the weight of sudden, secret release…
***
His whole body convulsed, and Alois woke up. Moonlight sliced through half-closed shutters, striping the narrow bed like the bars of a cell. He blinked awake to the sticky clutch of cooling cotton clinging to his skin—his stomach was glazed, his briefs plastered to his now half-hard cock, sheets rumpled into damp ropes around his thighs. The dream still pulsed behind his ribs: phantom cracks of leather, phantom heat of welts across a tiny butt, phantom growls echoing in his throat. He exhaled a shaky laugh, thumb brushing the crusted mess across his belly—evidence of a punishment that never happened, a recruit who never knelt, a sergeant who’d sentenced himself to ten lashes of pure imagination…
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