i think i just topped the mickey/minnie, oh god.

[toujours_nigel]

For minne wif, dearlyderanged, who needs fannish trauma to be distracted from academic trauma,

*** *** ***

The boy has a look about him—slight and blonde, and plain pretty, though his ears do stick out—that smacks far more of Athens than Rome. Which is where Sulla found him. And has apparently tired enough of to gift.

 

It never pays to disobey Sulla—as the little matter of elephants has served to teach him. So Pompey swallows his protests, grits his teeth, and discovers—as many of his friends do—that Sulla always knows better. The boy—whose name is some unpronounceable Greek farrago—is unobtrusive, neat-handed, and refuses to flinch from his tantrums.

 

And if he is too sharp-eyed to miss that Pompey looks at him long and hungry—impossible to get women in Spain without risking spies—he is also intelligent enough to lower his eyes in a swoop of lashes, and foolhardy enough to crawl into his commander’s bed at night, pliant and supple as his bowstring. Most relieving of all, he is discrete enough to put on no airs, and to always slip away before morning; disposing of him would be a wrench, he’s become accustomed to a neat tent.

 

But he does wonder whether Sulla’s sense of the ridiculous foresaw this.