Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/10403199.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Graphic_Depictions_Of_Violence, Underage
  Category:
      M/M
  Fandom:
      Batman_-_All_Media_Types, DCU_(Comics)
  Relationship:
      Dick_Grayson/Damian_Wayne
  Character:
      Dick_Grayson, Damian_Wayne, Talia_al_Ghul
  Additional Tags:
      Alternate_Universe_-_Ancient_Greece_&_Rome, Action, Humor, Sex
  Series:
      Part 1 of hollywood_ancient_world_au
  Stats:
      Published: 2017-03-22 Words: 4722
****** to tame; ******
by weird_bird_(2weird4)
Summary
     “This contortion requires a separation of what the mind believes its
     limits to be and what the body can truly do.” Deinarchos pushes down
     his thigh.
     Tight-jawed against the burn, Damianos tells him, “The only thing
     that will be separated is your head from your shoulders.”
      
     or: damian is sort of alexander the great, dick is not really
     hephaestion, but they're definitely in love.
Notes
     title is just the meaning of damian, "to tame."
     deinarchos is a greek name meaning approximately the same thing as
     richard ("ruler").
     basically this thing is just a self-indulgent, splashy, shameless
     mashup of ancient world fiction tropes born from my lifelong love of
     that shit and my obsession w alexander and hephaestion and achilles
     and patroclus, etc. there is no historical accuracy to be found here.
     i would apologize, but i had a great time.
     warnings: so here damian is like, boy conqueror. you can decide how
     young that is. dick is implied to be in his late teens. power
     dynamics are kind of wonky, but everything is consensual. there are
     references to slavery and prostitution. there is explicit sexual
     content, see end-notes for content of sex scenes if you need to. dick
     and damian spar and there are threats/thoughts of violence from
     damian to dick, but nothing too serious. the biggest warning is that
     one battle scene does get pretty bloody.
See the end of the work for more notes
“Him? Is he my instructor?” Damianos points to the broad-shouldered man running
the youth around the dirt track.
“Look more closely, Dami,” his mother chastises.
Damianos’s eyes flick without interest over the young men, whose sun-bronzed
bodies bundle together like a shoal of fish.
One darts ahead--at last an end to this tedious race is in sight.
Long of limb, the front-runner has a face with a balance between fullness and
angles that suggests he has a handful of years on Damianos. Laughingly, he laps
the rest and crosses the chalk line.
“Mother,” Damianos half-growls.
“Wait.”
He watches the older man and then looks fruitlessly for signs of any other. The
sun sears his black hair, and he can feel sweat drip down his spine under his
tunic.
Rolling his shoulders, crossing his arms, no shift in position brings him
relief.
Most of the runners have departed along with their instructor in protest of the
heat.
Damianos sympathizes.
The young man who won the race alone remains. He wipes a hand over his
forehead. Hand on his lean waist, he shifts back and forth on the balls of his
feet and rakes back his sweaty dark locks.
With nothing better to do, Damianos watches him watch the attendant girls with
more thoughtfulness than salaciousness.
And then the youth’s eyes find Damianos’s mother. They widen, a nakedness of
expression Damianos sees only on clueless fools deaf to their reputation--most
by now know better than to show their face so plainly around the Demon’s Head.
“Talia!”
Damianos bristles at such impudence, going for the hilt of his sword as the man
all but bounces forward to meet them.
His mother’s nails dig into his biceps, staying his hand.
“What brings you here?” The man’s golden face splits around a white smile.
“This is your son?”
One sculpted eyebrow goes up. Good. Perhaps his mother feels as oddly--
unsettled by him as Damianos does. “Deinarchos,” she says smoothly, then places
a hand on the top of Damianos’s head as though he is a child and not a
burgeoning conqueror. “My son, Damianos.”
Deinarchos drops to a knee before Damianos, he, too, treating him like a boy
now. “He resembles Brutus the most,” he remarks, “but his eyes are yours.”
“His spirit is mine.” His mother lifts her chin.
At that, Deinarchos laughs and squeezes Damianos’s shoulder. “In so small a
body? Is this the boy you dreamt of, then, whose stride will cross a
continent?”
“Tt.” To Damianos’s increasing agitation, his mother remains indulgent. “In
time.”
Deinarchos squeezes his shoulder one more time and then stands, brushing the
dust off of his knee. “What do you seek from me?”
A bloody death would be ideal.
“I want you to train him,” his mother murmurs, nudging Damianos forward.
“Mother! He cannot be twenty. What could he have to teach me?” Damianos has not
yet has an instructor with an absence of grey hair, and that is far better. He
does not wish to learn from children and amateurs.
“How long do I have?” Deinarchos asks, stepping in again as well.
Minutes, if Damianos has his way.
His mother gives him an edged smile Damianos cannot read. “A week.”
“A week! By the gods, Mother, how you want me to suffer--”
Unafraid, Deinarchos tugs his arm. “We should not waste another moment of it if
you want me to teach you anything, then.”
 
“A ruler,” Deinarchos takes his time telling him, “should be flexible.” When he
takes another bite of fruit, juice wends its way down his arm.
Which Damianos watches upside down. His back aches, and his tunic must be
exposing everything delicate. “I--I cannot--”
Deinarchos sighs. “Let go.”
Humiliatingly, Damianos drops to his face in the dirt.
Deinarchos tilts his head and laps the nectar off his own forearm like the
filth he is. “Will you try again?”
Gritting his teeth, Damianos nods and folds his body back gingerly back up
again.
Despite his braggadocio when they began, he has to admit that the tasks
Deinarchos has set for him are difficult. These stretches and bends of the
body, he finds, do require a significant amount of skill.
Of course, Deinarchos demonstrated them so easily that it was as though his
very bones were oiled.
“This contortion requires a separation of what the mind believes its limits to
be and what the body can truly do.” Deinarchos pushes down his thigh.
Tight-jawed against the burn, Damianos tells him, “The only thing that will be
separated is your head from your shoulders.”
 
“Does your mother always supervise your training?” Deinarchos asks with his
typical thoughtlessness.
Damianos leans against his wooden sword and glares at him, still struggling to
catch his breath. It’s not often that someone outmatches his agility, and under
normal circumstances, he can utilize his size to deadly advantage.
Deinarchos, however, has been spinning and flipping circles around him.
“Will you have to conquer a city and then wait for your mother to claim it in
your name?” The tip of his wooden sword edges under Damianos’s ribs.
Irritation shooting up like a projectile from a catapult, Damianos seizes the
sword and snaps it in half. He throws away the halves and wheels on his mother.
“Leave us.”
His mother, who until now has been watching with approval, allows a scowl to
mar her beautiful face for only a moment before she turns and sweeps away,
lifting her skirts above the scuffed earth.
With a shrug, Deinarchos twirls his sword and plants it in the ground. “Hand-
to-hand, then.”
Some of the tension in the air dissipates with his mother’s departure. She has
always overseen his training, yes, ground his failures deeper into his psyche
and blown away his victories like so much dust.
She herself is a fierce fighter who Damian has only vanquished once. Murderous
alchemy in keen eyes and quick hands. And yet she would rather recline back so
as to eat of victory without scrubbing blood from her palms first.
Damianos, for his part, does not mind burying himself to the elbows in the
fight.
“This dancing is of no use if you refuse to take a man’s life in battle,”
Damianos grumbles, rubbing his sore nose.
“Does victory mean death?” Deinarchos counters and pummels him again.
Warding off further blows with palms against his fists, he tries to twist his
momentum against him. “Vanquishing means death. Victory means life.”
He muses on that. “I see no difference.”
There--an opening. Deinarchos’s moment of philosophical stillness. Rushing in,
he strikes and suddenly the world whirls around on itself as Deinarchos trips
him with a leg swept under his feet.
Deinarchos does not let him stop until Damianos finally pins him.
Knees astride his shoulders, palms to the ground on either side of his head, he
pants, victorious. Looking down at the smiling face between his legs makes his
stomach uncomfortable, though, so Damianos dismounts.
He insists on sharing his meal with him, and he does not look from Deinarchos’s
open, interested face to his mother’s foreboding one more than once.
By moonlight, Damianos sketches battle plans in the sand.
Deinarchos leans over, intent, only backing off when Damianos complains about
the shadow he casts.
This sort of strategy is, surprisingly, something about which he has little
knowledge, though he seems to know at least a scrap of almost everything else.
Damianos can see how he devours the knowledge and admires that in him for the
way it reflects himself.
And then it unnerves him. In one swift sweep of the hand, he obliterates the
neat drawings. “Am I right to trust you?” he demands, hating how young he
sounds.
Wrapping an arm around his folded leg, chin on his knee, Deinarchos shakes his
head. “I cannot tell you that. What I can tell you is that the few years I have
on you have taught me this: it is only once you make your own mistakes that you
can make your own successes.”
With Damianos dumbstruck, Deinarchos busies himself with a childish rendition
of a floppy-winged bird, the silver of the moon catching on his curved lips.
 
Hanging upside down from a tree by the backs of his knees, Deinarchos trails
his fingers across Damianos’s shoulders, up the back of his nape.
Damianos fights a shiver. That should not have been his first reaction--he
should have planted his sword into Deinarchos at less provocation.
He resents him deeply.
First he crosses his arms, then he uncrosses them, remembering his teasing. “Is
this part of my training?”
“If I say yes, will you join me?” Flipping upright, Deinarchos extends a hand
down to Damianos, that second night.
Declining the hand, he nevertheless joins him, perching on the branch and
watching as the sun sinks down beyond rolling green meadows.
Only Damianos’s displeasure disrupts Deinarchos’s chatter. After a while,
however, even Deinarchos falls silent, leaning his head against the branch.
The stars open their eyes against the black. Something inside Damianos is
silenced, too.
Taking his hand, Deinarchos points their fingers to the sky, brown and gold
entwined. Of the stars’ alignments Damianos knows, but in his itinerant
childhood, Deinarchos heard different stories about their patterns than he did.
And he listens, and he shares his own.
In that tree they remain through dawn’s first pearls and pinks.
Cupping hands around his mouth, Deinarchos teaches him the calls of the
songbirds, then teaches him how to make his voice seem like a giant booming
across the hills. Eeriest of all, he imitates Damianos.
It embarrasses him terribly. Does he truly sound so much like an affected child
and so little like a man with cities felled by his sword and sandal already?
“I talked too much tonight,” Deinarchos rasps, irises still crisp above
drooping blues of fatigue. “You had better do the talking next time.”
Clearing his own throat, he touches the faint-stubbled column of Deinarchos’s
neck.
Swallowing against his hand and turning his face so slightly into his hand that
it could be a trick his tiredness plays, Deinarchos whispers, “I like your
voice.”
 
Knife to his throat in the black.
“You don’t have to do this.”
Damianos leans the blunt side of the blade harder against Deinarchos’s silk
skin. One movement of the wrist and he could slice him like the fruit on which
he feasts. “I cannot leave you here.”
They depart for the coast in the morning, the Demon’s Head seeking to swallow
new territory.
His throat bobs against the metal as he swallows. “Is it that you do not want
me to pass on my talents to anyone else?” he asks almost wearily.
Damianos straddles him so that he can look down at him, brow furrowing. “No.”
“No?” Deinarchos pushes up on his elbows, and Damianos lets him, though he
still clings to his knife. “What, then?”
With any luck, his expression will be invisible in the gloom. Regardless, he
turns his face. “I do not wish to leave without you.”
Deinarchos sucks in air, clearly thrown.
“I will take you with my camp,” Damianos declares, shifting over him and
lifting his knife again.
“As a slave?” His voice is quiet, thoughtful more than upset.
Damianos’s silence is his answer.
“If you take me as a slave,” he says measuredly, “you will regret it. I will
cause no end of trouble for you.”
He cannot help the snort. “How much more trouble could you be?”
Deinarchos seems to consider his words. “I’m not saying I will not come
willingly.”
Confused, he waits for him to explain.
“If you would allow it, I would accompany you. As--a trainer, an advisor.” He
grips Damianos’s arm. “A friend, if I could be so bold.”
Damianos’s smile spreads slow as honey. “Deinarchos, you are always bold.”
 
“Duck!”
Dropping just in time, Damianos cuts across the man’s thigh. He spits sour
blood and grimaces, swiping the back of his hand over his face. As he backs up,
he looks for Deinarchos. No sight of him.
He hacks his way through a dozen men, still looking for him. His ear finds his
cry, but his eyes do not find his form. Worry crowds his chest.
“Don’t let your guard down, Damianos,” a voice murmurs too close to his ear for
his comfort.
It’s pure luck that Deinarchos gets an elbow and not a dagger in the gut. “You
idiot!”
Deinarchos gives him a big crooked grin before he skids through the dust,
dodging a horse’s legs and hauling the rider down into the dirt with him.
Flurry of punches, not a lick of naked metal in sight.
Damianos does not have time to waste gaping at his--companion’s antics.
This campaign has been long, gory. At this point, victory would not be nectar
of the gods so much as water for a parched throat.
At some point, he becomes aware of Deinarchos behind him. Kicking, punching.
Tunic flying around brown legs, black waves matted by blood Damianos can only
pray is not his own, though there is no telling.
Together they cut and push through swathes of soldiers.
Deinarchos bears the brunt of the guards while Damianos forges on to the end.
At last. A lunge, a push of muscle and a roar. Feet planted in the ground as
though he could claim the whole globe for himself in a single moment.
His sword cleaves the chief’s neck.
Blood sprays their skin, and Deinarchos turns his head and winces.
Still, when Damianos hoists the head aloft with a trembling hand in matted
hair, Deinarchos has eyes only for him.
 
“Would you consider perhaps drawing your sword next time?” Damianos takes a
pull from the watered-down wine once his breathing slows enough to allow it. At
least it is cool within his tent.
There remains plenty to be planned with the battle finished.
For now, all there is to do is wait for the fire in their blood to burn down to
embers.
To drink, to eat. To tend their wounded.
He knows not where his mother is. No doubt she will have her criticisms to
offer later. She watches him now with a distance in her eyes. This is what she
has wanted since she brought him into the world, but these days it seems she
spends more time fearing that he will be taken out of it.
Damianos does not fear death.
That is not to say, to his misfortune, that he has no fears.
Deinarchos, nibbling at his damn fruit again, raises his eyebrows at him. “I
will take it under consideration.”
“No, you will not,” Damianos sighs.
He laughs with the hysterical undercurrent of battle-exhaustion. A laugh
becoming more familiar to Damianos as they hew an arduous path across the
earth, but not one so dear to him. “Did I not perform to your expectations?”
The fingers of his other hand pull at his bare toes.
Taking his hand, Damianos grabs it so hard he can feel the crust of scabs on
his knuckles crack. He shakes his head through the pain. “I expect,” he says
flatly, “you to fight to survive.”
“You expect me to kill or be killed,” Deinarchos corrects.
Damianos inclines his head to the side in agreement. To be plain about it, yes.
“When you agreed to allow me to join you freely, we made it clear that I would
not add to the dead.” Deinarchos frowns and pulls his hand away from him.
“Yes. So keep your head off the pile,” Damianos half-snarls.
Deinarchos lets out a long breath, his chest deflating and eyes rolling to the
tent ceiling.
Cuts criss-cross the skin bared where he has pulled his tunic down around his
waist. A bruise purples his cheek, the evidence of a badly-cut lip smudges
scarlet down his chin. Damianos is sure now that some of the blood in his hair
is his own.
Damianos never has been and never will be good at losing.
Some losses would be more difficult to bear than others.
Although he does not remember moving, both of them are staring now at his hand
laying over Deinarchos’s muscled abdomen. The touch makes it rise and fall,
rise and fall, rise and fall.
His fingers shiver against the coarse black hair. He feels powerful enough that
he could plunge his hand through him and pull out the puzzle of him. He has
never felt so weak.
Until Deinarchos nudges him with his knee, Damianos does not dare look at his
face.
“How many times must I tell you?” Taking his hand, Deinarchos does not push it
away. He pushes it down.
Damianos inhales fast through his nose. The shape of him, hard under his palm,
hot. Wanting. Eager.
“I am willing.” Deinarchos takes his mouth in a kiss that obliterates all his
better judgment.
Climbing over him for more of it, he clutches at his face and all but eats his
mouth.
And he laughs, in case Damianos were to forget who he was kissing, somewhere
between joy and the gentlest of mockery. And he pulls at his lip more softly,
tongue sliding soft, soft past his lips.
As they share kisses, each sparking down his spine more than the last, Damianos
rubs him through his tunic.
Deinarchos’s hips jerk. A ragged gasp against his mouth, and he spreads his
thighs around Damianos’s slimmer hips. Fingers fumbling the clasps, he strips
Damianos of his armor and then clasps the nape of his neck for another needy
kiss.
“What can I--”
“Here--”
A breeze strays a peek of afternoon light into the tent. The women and men of
the camp are meters away, but they could be over a mountain and across the sea
for all Damianos cares.
Oil, fragrant oil flooding down Deinarchos’s thighs. Smooth skin over hard
muscle glistens in the strip of sunlight. He sprawls back on his elbows, sinew
of his biceps and bright of his teeth warning and inviting at once.
Soldiers are an obscene people. Away from their wives, they gossip of round
asses and full breasts. Damianos dismissed their talk. Sex would only cloud his
mind, he’d been lectured time and time again, and what he sees of his men
stumbling out of brothels leads him to agree.
If this was mere sex, perhaps he could find the strength in him to deny
Deinarchos’s beckoning.
This is something more dangerous.
He all but tumbles between Deinarchos’s legs, and the bottle tips over with a
clink. He is more dangerous than he can say, and he sinks down onto him.
Deinarchos shows him this, too. Taking his hand, he presses it to himself as
Damianos thrusts between his thighs. So he cups his cock and pulls it in
whatever sense of rhythm he still has.
Hair hanging in his face, he slams against him. Excess energy from their fight
only stokes his desire. His precome slicks up the crease by his cock, their
balls press and shafts grind by each other, fierce friction.
Hands under his knees, Damianos pushes his thighs down--makes him strain this
time as he thrusts and thrusts, and that only makes Deinarchos’s eyes grow
blacker and glow harder.
Trapping him between hard muscles, Deinarchos digs his nails into his back and
bites his shoulder.
Deinarchos may be beneath him, but Damianos has no doubt about who it is that
is being claimed.
“Damianos,” he hisses in his ear. ”Damian, yes.”
 
“Your mother is Talia, the Demon’s Head, and you consider womanhood demeaning?”
It sounds ludicrous phrased as such. Nonetheless--”Crossing that line between
the sexes is the domain of…” Damianos cannot finish the thought.
Deinarchos’s eyebrow lifts, but mercifully, he says nothing to make Damianos’s
cheeks burn darker.
The sun has already climbed the blue too much in the time they have been
arguing, sequestered on the other side of the hill away from his other
advisors, whom he relies on with less and less frequency and faith these days.
Nearing noon on their fourth day of attempting to negotiate a peace agreement
with Bialyan forces much larger in number than their own.
They have been far more tentative than Damianos would normally prefer. Delicacy
is required, he knows.
Still, this is not what he had in mind.
“Waiting girls hear everything.” Deinarchos crosses muscled arms over his
chest. There’s something suggestive in his eyes.
Damianos will rarely get anything out of him about most of the lives he led
before their meeting, and there are more important matters at hand right now,
so for the moment, he leaves it at an itch of curiosity. “That is the very
reason why I am disguising several from my camp as his.”
“What is it that you told me before you took the spear from a charging horseman
and ran it through the princeps by your own hand? ‘If you want it done well, do
it yourself.’”
At that, Damianos just scoffs and turns his head, unwilling to be swayed by his
words turned against him. Damn Deinarchos.
“Whose ears can you trust better than your own?” he coaxes again. His arm
slides around his chest, a warm weight that could sway him to any mistake.
When he looks around furtively and determines they have privacy enough here, he
allows the affection with a little “hm” in the back of his throat. Pointedly
turning his head, he kisses the pink shell of Deinarchos’s ear.
And Deinarchos laughs in delight. It’s Damianos’s favorite of his many laughs
for the way it nestles down into his chest as fondly as it left his mouth. “You
are learning. Be that as it may, I am too tall and broad of shoulder to pass
well for a woman these days.”
These days. Yes, he will squeeze the story from him later.
“The less filtered your information, the better,” Deinarchos continues.
A fair point. “How do I know this is not some ploy to have me dressed as a
woman?” Still, he fumbles for his dignity.
“A mistake to assume I ever want you dressed,” Deinarchos teases, his eyes
dancing and his fingertips edging just under Damianos’s breastplate.
Damianos exhales hard. Defeat.
“Should I take that as a yes?"
“You may take that as a fine."
 
“How was it?” Deinarchos’s eyes snap open at Damianos’s first footfall inside
the tent despite his deceptively relaxed slumber a moment before.
His quick alertness comes as a relief to Damianos, who had to force him to
sleep inside his tent. Not because Deinarchos did not wish to share his bed,
no. Because Deinarchos resented anything separating him from the stars, even
thin canvas.
Setting down his lamp, Damianos kneels beside Deinarchos, wine-red fabric
spilling across the mussed bed-coverings.
Deinarchos reaches for him immediately. He seeks to dismantle all his own
careful handiwork, all he draped Damianos in, Damianos protesting every flick
of makeup, every glittering jewel. Half of it humiliation, the other half
hesitation at the unexpected intimacy of being dressed with so much care by
hands that knew him so well.
First the near-gaudy golden necklace, which Deinarchos unclasps with his arms
around Damianos. Mouth to his neck, he murmurs, “Have you learned anything so
urgent it cannot wait until morning?”
Unsure of the answer Deinarchos seeks, Damianos narrows his eyes at him when he
lifts his head. “There is only one thing I can think of that cannot wait until
morning.”
His eyes crinkle. Dipping his head to his throat again, he raises the edge of
the gossamer veil that shades Damianos’s vision crimson. He brushes hot lips
over his Adam’s apple. Then he smooths back the veil over his forehead and tips
his chin up. “Look at me.”
Damianos raises his eyes to his face, demure as a bride until his lips curl
like a concubine.
The look alone makes Deinarchos’s breath hitch audibly. His thumb smooths below
Damianos’s eyes, careful not to ruin the kohl he’d so painstakingly applied.
Damianos cannot wait for him to take his time. Drawing him close in the
flickering golden light, he crushes their mouths together. The dried-blood
color from Damianos’s lips stains all the way up his fine cheekbones.
“You play your part well,” Deinarchos breathes, nosing the dark waves of his
hair that have come loose from the dislodged veil.
Damianos sinks his teeth into his thumb. “Not so well, I hope, that you have
forgotten who I am.”
Deinarchos slides his thumb over his lips and tucks it inside his mouth. “Not
in this lifetime, Damianos.” Another kiss to his neck, and then he slips the
fabric from his shoulders and covers it in his mouth instead. Pulls the clasp
from it so it spills down to his chest.
Turning his face, Damianos gathers it as it pools down his ribs.
A suck just this side of too hard at his exposed nipple before Deinarchos
distracts himself elsewhere. His hands gather the skirts up and push them up
his thighs past the muscle along his hips and abdomen. He lowers his mouth
there and bites in a kiss no one will see. “I have not forgotten what you are.”
Voice a breeze against sensitive skin.
Damianos all but closes his thighs around his head. Shoving Deinarchos over, he
lets him grasp his backside and lift him over his face.
“Hold your skirt up for me.”
He bares his teeth, but he does, clenching handfuls of fine cloth and staring
down at the face between his thighs.
Wicked mouth on his entrance. Closing warm around his sac. Tongue flat on the
underside.
Because he can’t seem to decide, Damianos decides for him.
Grabbing Deinarchos’s face, he pushes his head back until he can push his cock
past his lips.
A gasp around the thick of him, and his nails curl into Damianos’s ass.
He finds purchase with his knees in the bedspread as he thrusts, guided by the
firm hands on him and the eager wet throat beneath him.
And even more than that, Deinarchos’s eyes beguile, whether shut with tear-
sticky eyelashes or open with brimming blue.
Pause to recover breath, and Deinarchos mumbles witch boy.
Yet Damianos knows he isn’t the only one caught under that most ancient of
spells.
When he finishes, he splatters thick and white over his face, dripping down
reddened lips to sweat-shining clavicles.
Deinarchos drags his fingers through the mess of his seed and sucks it away
like a delicacy he’ll never taste again.
Before Damianos’s mind has reformed, his head dives under his skirts again.
He cannot decide whether the devious mouth massaging his soft cock back to
fullness is reward or punishment.
Either way, he deems the entire enterprise well worth it.
 
“What is that?”
Damianos folds down the papyrus. “You can read.”
“Brat. I’m busy.” At an important task indeed. One of the little girls in the
village Damianos supplied with grain has put frustratingly tiny braids in his
hair. As a reward for his generosity, Deinarchos is picking them out like a
monkey, Damianos’s head pillowed in his lap. “Read to me.”
“It is a message from my enemies in the north. Intercepted by my troops.”
“Which enemies? I have more trouble naming your friends.” Cheekiness aside, he
hms a go on.
“It is about me.”
“Of course.”
“Of course.” Damianos shakes out the papyrus again and squints at the letters.
A tricky dialect that takes him a few moments more than usual to decipher. “I
have not actually read it yet.”
“Read it now, then,” Deinarchos prompts.
“And if it is a private matter?”
He yanks a clump of hair hard enough to sting. “I will leave you alone with
your shame.”
Shoulders settled down into his lap again after the disturbance, Damianos
shakes out the papyrus with intent this time. “‘Damianos has been defeated only
once.’” Scowling, he stops.
“Only once?” A peal of laughter from Deinarchos. “They must be too cold to
count properly up north.” Jostling up against his back, he snatches the papyrus
from him.
When he reads it, he laughs his way through it.
And when he hears it, even Damianos cannot clamp his lips tightly enough
against the huff of amusement that escapes his chest.
“‘Damianos has been defeated only once, and that was by Deinarchos’s thighs.’”
End Notes
     warnings, cont: sex scenes include intercrural, crossdressing, and
     oral as well as consensual roughness.
     the last line is from some dubiously historical letters dubiously
     attributed to diogenes of sinope re: alexander and hephaestion, and
     that's as close to historical as i got.
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