Fiction short. A retired mercenary visits a brothel.
2.6k, rated M, M/M. A retired mercenary seeks out another Spartan — the man, in fact, responsible for the deaths of his family. Featuring massage, guilt, banter, back-and-forth.
The sex worker in this case is intersex and the mercenary describes his breasts, his cunt, and the size of his cock, but his body isn’t the object of sexual focus. Note content warnings for violence, discussions of disability and chronic pain, as well as erectile dysfunction caused by injury.
Kimon’s body ached, and every step he took up the hill, trudging up the stone road laid into the slope, he cursed whoever had decided to build the brothel on the top of it, whatever cunt they were. The cheese seller had laughed and said that Icarion, the place’s proprietor, had opened it there so that any lout already drunk would struggle to ascend to bother anybody.
They didn’t account for tired, crippled old men who just wanted a bit of pleasure in their fucking day, but then, most cities never did.
When he crossed the threshold, he was met with a comfortable stone hall, heat radiating from three fireplaces, two at each end, and one in the centre, against the back wall. It was a two-storey building, and apart from a few doorways that led off the main hall banding around the central chimney, no doubt to get a share of its warmth, he could see that more cell-like bedrooms were upstairs, the doors lining the wooden balcony above his head.
“Good afternoon, sir,” said a soft, seductive voice to his right, and he turned to look at her, at her glossy cascades of shining auburn hair, at her brightly blue eyes. Her breasts, pink-nippled and heavy, with a birthmark shaped like a heart between their twin swells, were unbound and uncovered, and they swayed as she approached him, hips tipping from one side to the other.
“No,” he told her. “I want a man — older than you.”
The seductive lilt dropped from her lips, but she didn’t stop smiling: she put one hand on her hip, cocking it and looking at him with her eyebrows raised. “We don’t invest much in stocks of old men around here.”
“He needn’t be as old as me,” said Kimon, and she laughed.
“There,” she said, and pointed up to one of the doors on the balcony, the second in the row. “Daetor is free.”
Of course he’d be up the stairs.
Kimon’s aching thighs ache even more as he climbs them, feeling every step through the whole of his body, sending throbbing pains around his waist, through the core of him, and he heaves in a breath as he crests the landing, leaning for a moment on the banister to allow himself to regain himself.
“Did I hear my name being called?”
The man in the doorway is taller than Kimon, muscular, with broad shoulders, a narrower waist, and a jaw that looks to have been cleaved from stone: he’s clean-shaven, his lips plump and well-defined, a natural furrow between his dark brows. His eyes, deep set, are naturally shadowed by his brows, which makes their brown colour seem closer to black. There is a plumpness around his chest, small tits there in the way of some men, breasts forming there rather than the pectoral muscles seeming flatter.
He doesn’t wear a skirt or a cloth around his loins, which are as hairless as his face, and Kimon can see his cock, not much bigger soft than his thumb; behind it, beneath it, he can see the plump lips of a cunt, too.
“You’re Daetor,” Kimon says.
“Correct,” says Daetor. “Want for a prize, do you?”
“I wanted a man.”
“You have one,” says Daetor. “If you want a bigger cock than mine, you can wait twenty minutes and I’m sure Alysia will be free. There’s only one other man working here today, and he’s currently busy juggling a pair of merchants down the hall.”
He is the man Kimon has been tracking, Kimon is sure just from this conversation, but he is given confirmation when Daetor turns his back to Kimon and Kimon sees the scarred wound in his lower back, a ragged cut across in parallel to the line of his ribs on the right-hand side.
Kimon follows him inside, aware of how stiff his body is, how tightly wound his muscles are beneath his travelling cloak, and as Daetor pushes the cell door closed, he drops heavily down onto a cushioned bench, wishing it was more yielding than it is under his body.
Daetor’s bed, at least, layered with furs, looks very soft.
“Do you want me to fuck you?” asks Daetor.
“No,” says Kimon.
“Very well,” Daetor replies, and Kimon doesn’t raise objection as he slicks his fingers with oil and slides them underneath his cock, daubing the golden glisten around the opening of his cunt. It’s a beautiful colour, pink — it looks quite tight, and Kimon feels a distant hunger gnaw inside him.
“What brings a Spartan this way?” asks the young man as he pours wine. Naked and facing away from Kimon, he has a full view of the muscles in his shoulders, the fat swell of his muscular backside, his thighs. He’s hairless all over, except for his head.
“You tell me,” says Kimon.
Daetor’s shoulders tighten, his backside clenching, his whole body stiffening. He turns his head to the side, glancing back at Kimon. “Do I sound like a Spartan to you?” he asks.
“No,” says Kimon. “You’ve put effort into your accent, sounds like. Been here long?”
Daetor presses his lips together. From behind, Kimon almost can’t see the movement of his shoulders, his arms; in the polished mirror that’s resting near the window, he sees Daetor’s hand move, sees his palm come to rest on the hilt of a dagger and his fingers curl around it.
“I heard tell of a young man, a deserter,” Kimon says as Daetor turns around — one hand, the one with the dagger in it, is behind his back as he approaches. “He was a member of the kryptai, able, terrifying, moved like Death’s own shadow. One night he simply disappeared, and made off into the night.”
Daetor’s face remains a blank mask. “What else did you hear of that young man?” His voice is toneless.
“He slaughtered countless of Sparta’s helots, when came the time to cull their numbers. He’d never heard of mercy — he knew only the glint of the light on the blade, and the shine of blood there, too.”
“And then?”
“And then… He was gone. Some say he died. Some say he went south. Got on a boat. Came to this island. Became a whore.”
Daetor is as still as though he were cast in bronze. He doesn’t blink, even.
“And?” he prompts again. His lips barely move, and his voice is a whisper.
“I wanted to meet that man,” says Kimon quietly. “It’s been fifteen years since he left Sparta. He was the son of a very rich man, a full citizen — he had a life of luxury ahead of him, and great acclaim, great renown. Why would such a man change his name and take coin for his body?”
“What do you think?” asks Daetor, and he moves forward so smoothly, so stealthily, that it’s almost as if he floats over the ground instead of treading on it. “That you might blackmail such a man, and receive his services for free?”
It happens in a blink. One moment, Daetor is standing in front of him, still several feet away: the next, he is straddling Kimon’s lap, one hand gripping his hair and forcing his head back, the blade held to his throat.
Kimon swallows, and feels his throat bobbing, feels it catch on the very edge of the sharpened blade.
“I was a helot,” says Kimon, trying not to move his throat or swallow again. “I was offered military service in exchange for my freedom — I served. Was cut down. Was a mercenary, for a time. My father and mother were killed in front of me by a member of the kryptai. He was some years my junior, still but a young man — I was saved the cut of his blade only by my brother, who caught him from behind with the sharp edge of a shovel.”
“I killed your brother,” Daetor says. “While you fled.”
Kimon closes his eyes. “Yes,” he says.
The dagger comes away from his throat, and when Kimon opens his eyes, Daetor is looking down at him, the dagger now dangling loosely from his hand against one of his beautifully sculpted thighs.
“Thanaton, they called me,” Daetor says quietly. His body is a warm weight in Kimon’s lap, heavy, the sort of thing that Kimon might have craved once upon a time. There’s a dullness to his voice, a sort of exhausted grief. Kimon is well-familiar with that particular tone of voice, by now — he hears its echo in his own words, at times, as he does in those of other veterans. Men like him, used up and done with; men like Daetor, who turned away before they could end up that way, except they already were, really. “What do you want from me? Apologies? You want me to tell you I regret the way I slew your family, the way I bathed the ground and you in their blood?”
“I don’t think I need to hear you say you regret it,” says Kimon. He doesn’t know what he wanted, really. Daetor’s face is more handsome than he remembered it — more lined, around the mouth, around the eyes, and yet at the same time, it seems to him that he’s younger now than he was when looming over him. When Kimon was shaking on the ground, drenched in sweat and piss and tears, scrambling back in the dirt to get away from him. “It’s written in the planes of your face, in the sound of your voice. You say it without lending words to the sentiment.”
“It wasn’t worth it,” says Daetor. “I don’t resent paying my taxes, giving up a little of my coin for the conveniences of the city I live in, for the services that make easy my life; I don’t resent paying rent, or exchanging coin for wine and cheese, for what which will sustain me. Coin is just coin — it’s easy enough to come by, and easy to part with. When you pay for your life with other men’s blood, it stains your hands. A man comes to resent such things. To ache with them. Choke on them.”
His hands are on Kimon’s body, unbuckling his pauldron and the side of his tunic, too, opening it up and bearing Kimon’s body to Daetor’s view. The dagger has been dropped aside, and Kimon sits still as Daetor unbuckles his skirt, too.
Kimon is thick and thatched with curling dark hair all over, except for where the scars are — cutting across his chest, his sides, his thighs, are the marks of his life as serf as warrior alike. Whip marks and burns mingle with ragged cuts and cleaves, cutting valleys through his chest hair, the hair about his groin.
“Perhaps you wanted to fuck me,” muses Daetor out loud — his voice still has an element of that toneless quality, but there’s something else in it too, now, a fear, or perhaps a savagery. Kimon has learned by now that they’re twin sides of a vicious coin. “Is that what you wanted, helot? You wanted to fuck the man that killed your family? Lay devastation to him with your cock, make him bleed, as he laid waste to you?”
Daetor’s hand wraps around Kimon’s soft cock, and Kimon grunts, squeezing his eyes tightly shut at the uncomfortable sensation — Daetor’s hand grips tightly, and once upon a time, the pressure might have been satisfying, that edge, that promise of pain. He used to enjoy a rough hand on him.
He opens his eyes again, sees that Daetor’s face has changed: his brows are knitted together, his lips pursed and twisted in thought. There’s a delicacy to his movement as his fingers come away from Kimon’s cock and slides to the thickest twist of corded scar tissue on the whole of Kimon’s body, the one that finally removed him from the field.
The tip of Daetor’s thumb traces the slick, shiny, raised tissue, presses delicately on it.
“Now,” says Daetor softly, so seductively that Kimon feels a thrill run through his tired body, a thrill that has no final destination. “I didn’t do this to you.”
“No,” says Kimon. “A different blade did.”
“Does it work?”
“I can still piss out of it,” murmurs Kimon, turning his face away.
“No wonder you want fucking instead of to fuck.”
“I don’t.”
Daetor stares down at him. “Don’t you?”
“I want…” Kimon exhales, and he lets his body loosen, lets his forehead fall forward: Daetor’s body is warm, his soft chest a welcome pillow under Kimon’s forehead. He should recoil at this, be revolted at this many-times-a-murderer, a slayer of Kimon’s own kin, settled atop him. And yet, Daetor’s body softer than he expected, this is what he wanted, isn’t it, before? This is what he wanted all along. The raw comfort of another man’s flesh, even dangerous, even honed from the fight, fed on blood and cutting blades. “To walk ails me. To climb a hill ails me more. You have the strong hands of a Spartan warrior — put them to use.”
Daetor’s expression is quizzical, and his hand moves slowly back to Kimon’s cock; Kimon catches his wrist.
“No,” he says. “No, I meant — My back. My, my thighs. Any part of me, but massage, not that. Not that.”
“And if I finish the work I did not complete that fateful day?” asks Daetor: his hands are undoing the lacing at Kimon’s throat, pushing back his travelling cloak. “If I kill you now, as I failed to do that day?”
“It would no more be in my power to stop you now as it was then,” Kimon says, although his lips quiver as he says it. He doesn’t know if it’s fear or something else — relief, maybe.
“Your brother was the last man I ever killed,” Daetor tells him, his eyes downcast for a moment as he touches Kimon’s chest, tracing a burn over his left nipple. “I was bleeding, cut from behind, dizzied and vulnerable — I awaited his killing blow. It didn’t come. The stories were right, you know. I did not know the name of mercy — I had never conceived of it until your brother showed me its practice, taught me its name. I felt great regret at having killed him. Until his death, it had never occurred to me that I could live without killing: his death was pointless, as every death before had been.”
“What a worthy sacrifice,” says Kimon: sarcasm drips from his voice, from every syllable he pronounces.
“No,” says Daetor, entirely serious, and then extricates himself from Kimon’s lap. “Lay on my bed, please. On your back or your belly, whichever is most comfortable. I will ease what pain of yours I can.”
Kimon steps across the room, lies down slowly on his belly, folding one of the furs beneath his head to support it. Daetor puts oil over his fingers, his palms, rubbing them back and forth to warm them, Kimon supposes.
“You’ve come a long way to face me,” says Daetor. “Are you sure all you want is a massage?”
“You could make that hill outside a gentler slope,” mumbles Kimon.
Daetor’s hands land on Kimon’s back, and he groans into his arms at the sudden pain, followed by warm relief. Every thought leaves him, abandons him: his body is flooded with heat and pleasure. Some of it gathers in the base of his gut, a memory of arousal without reaching the truth of the sensation.
Closing his eyes, he gives himself over to it — to the promised relief, to the lost sensations, to the pain, to it all.
It’s the most merciless massage he’s ever received.
Funny, that.
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