Jealousy Among Them • Cleitus/Cassander

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He knew him in the way that all Phillip's generals knew the boys of Alexander's generation. They all watched the young prince grow tall and strong and golden, heaped with all the favors of the gods thrown at him like such trifles. They hovered, for none of them had any right to even express a breath of claim on young Alexander, to take him under their wing in all the ways of men.

They knew, more surely than their own names, that the only one Phillip could possibly allow to touch his son would be the one he'd taught those touches to.

So they watched, and they hovered, and they fought like dogs over the boys closest to Alexander with the sure knowledge that Cleitus would take the king's son in hand, as he had been so surely taken.

Cleitus wanted nothing to do with him.

Oh, to be sure, the boy was beautiful, but he was beautiful like the sun or a painting or a woman, flawless and all the more painful because of it. He didn't like flawless men any more than he liked reading blank books. There was no passion, no challenge, no conquest in it. Lying with Alexander, to teach him the ways of pleasure - what could he teach a creature like that?

No, he did not look for perfection.

He shied away from the desperate battles for Alexander's closest friends, for all the same reason. He was a good, true lad and as such, he attracted other bright stars to his burning light - Hephaistion, Ptolemy, Nearchus, all dear and sweet and utterly uninteresting.

Cleitus had the distinct feeling he was being watched.

Years of military service had his hand on the hilt of his sword before he'd even turned around, though there could be no threat here. He found, instead, a boy - no, a young man, his chin tipped up proudly to make him seem older and wiser and above all the petty games of his contemporaries. But Cleitus knew him, as he knew all of Alexander's boys. Cassander, son of Antipater, and just about the farthest thing from a friend of the young prince.

Cleitus felt a smirk curl onto his lips. Cassander's green eyes - beautiful, yes, but the more so because they were so sharp and vicious and haughty - flicked down, then back up, then narrowed, and the most endearing mix of bitter affront and surprised pleasure passed over his angular face. Did the boy really never receive compliments? To be fair, he wasn't in Alexander's good graces, nor was he the kind of handsome that the young prince embodied - robust, muscular, bronzed. But surely, someone would have noticed the lad's fey beauty and knife-sharp eyes before this.

He realized, slowly, that that someone was right here, right now, and he couldn't just pass this up. He took Cassander to boy that night, and the night after that, in a long effort to convince him that he was, if not loved, then at least deeply and truly appreciated.

Ω
He discovered, over the weeks that turned into months, that Cassander's jealousy burned bright like a hot sharp spike in his chest. He hated Alexander; he loved him. He wanted to be respected, but denied everything the prince did to earn it. It was frustrating and endearing in equal measure and what Cleitus loved more than anything was getting to fuck it out of him.

Because afterwards, with the moonlight spilling over his bed and catching on the lovely brown waves of his boy's hair - then, he became something utterly different. He was a man of kitten-soft sighs and silvery smiles, he stretched and teased and traced the many scars on his lover's skin with something approaching the reverence he had never shown any king or prince. He was quiet, relaxed, and above all he was happy, which Cleitus could never quite manage himself. But he came very close to it, in the dead of the night with Cassander's pale skin flushed and damp with sweat and their mixed seed.

I did this, Cleitus thought, as he rubbed his rough palm down the sticky mess on Cassander's belly and he laughed of all things. He was a laughing, rumpled, utterly imperfect mess, and he had done this. The boy that never smiled unless it was mocking, who held grudges until they festered, who never bared his soul to anyone in the world - that was the boy who laughed in Cleitus's bedchamber. It was heady and thrilling and entirely, completely unexpected.

I wonder if Phillip ever thought about keeping me, and the second he thought it he shoved it away, hard. Phillip had been a king already when Cleitus was his erômenos, he would never have entertained such fanciful thoughts. And of course, Cleitus would never have agreed. His education at Phillip's hands had been a means to an end, a very pleasurable means, but a means nonetheless. Realistically, he told himself, he's going to grow up and make his own way and he won't need you any longer. He told himself, but it didn't stop the way it made his chest ache like an old wound, like something had already taken root and refused to let him go.

Ω
By the time Alexander's army reached Gaugamela, it had been five years. Five years since Phillip's death, five years since the last time he'd taken Cassander's sharp face in his hands and kissed him until neither of them could breathe. He was a man, now, to be sure, and that point had been driven all too plainly home that night as Cleitus broke down in his own lover's arms. He had been sad, but many had been sad. Many had mourned. But what Phillip had given Cleitus was unfathomable, unable to quantify, and what Cassander had done that night -

It had been five years and Cleitus could still feel it, the hand clenched tight in his hair, his face and torso pressed into the pillows, the hot hard line of another man behind him and the kind of pleasure that leaves one feeling empty afterwards, broken, fully embodying the meaning of the word 'spent'.

But if it had just been a hard fuck that Cleitus needed, there were others who could have obliged. Some might even have understood. But Cassander was the only one who would have stayed after, carding his fingers through the thick black hair so recently abused, letting the greatest general in Macedon be vulnerable. He didn't trust anyone. Not after this. Not after his greatest failure.

They did not see one another again afterwards, on some mutual agreement. Something had transpired on that night, something they could not go back from. Something that was better off ending, rather than even beginning to understand.

It had been five years and Cassander was still just as horribly handsome, seethingly jealous, and alarmingly sharp-witted. Cleitus saw the way he stared at Alexander's lips, the slavish and arrogant devotion there and the smooth, silky twine of his voice as he made the very cunning suggestion of attacking before dawn. Cleitus felt that place in his chest ache - he'd said as much to Phillip, once upon a time, for he had always been Phillip's greatest polemicist when it came to battle tactics.

And just like his father, Alexander chose honor over cleverness. Unlike his father, his honor was going to get them all killed.

"Tomorrow we shall dine in Hades," he told them all with an uncaring grin, but it was Cassander he looked at, eyes black as night and fiercer in their recklessness. Alexander was an idealistic fool, but he was still Phillip's son, and still their king. He would follow him, there was no question about it. But if he was going to die tomorrow, he didn't want to spend the night alone.

"We should be out on the plains, taking them unexpected," Cassander complained as he wriggled under Cleitus's strangely small hands.

"Well, we're not," Cleitus said shortly, trying to get a damn hand over his - little minx - traitorous, attractive mouth. Cassander bit him, which he'd never done before, and Cleitus had all of half a breath to be shocked before he was smoothing it over with pink swipes of his tongue.

"I won't just let you hold me down and have your way with me any longer," he purred, and Cleitus had to swallow the way it made every drop of blood on his body race.

"What do you mean, let you?" he growled.

Cassander laughed and that, that was what he'd been missing, and they hadn't even fucked yet. That breathless, happy, unrestrained sound. "You'll have to fight me for it, General," he teased, and Cleitus could only shake his head, marveling at how completely, utterly hopeless he was. How readily he would cede to any request of those lips, just to hear that laugh again.

"Come on," Cassander purred, winding his legs around his lover's waist. "Take me. Show me what I've been missing all these years."

And he felt his heart clench tight in his throat, stunned by the sudden knowledge that he wasn't quite so alone in that sentiment as he'd thought.

Ω
And so it was that they began - whatever it was that they had, now. They wouldn't see each other for weeks, taking women in Babylon, marching in the mountains with no thought of anything between sleep and saddle - but then they would fall into bed, clutch at each other, spend hours learning each other's bodies all over again and laughing into the night.

The further away they got from Macedon, the more Cleitus worried.

Back home, he had thought Cassander's irrational hatred of the young prince to be inconsequential at best, foolish and mad at the worst. But he was a grown man now, and with some surprise, Cleitus began to listen to him, to truly understand. His anger was not baseless, or couched in petty grievances. He loved Macedon as fiercely as he had hated as a child, and with every step further with no end in sight, he seethed. What good were these barbaric lands? What glory was there to be had? And in the night he cried, not with anger or self-hatred, but with sadness, pure and simple. He missed home. He missed his bed and his wife and his favorite courtyard and all the things he'd left to go to war.

"I miss you," he said, with a wet laugh that sounded nothing like humor and everything like helplessness. "I know that doesn't make sense, but I - "

"I understand," Cleitus said, his voice low and smooth to match the gentle strokes his callused fingertips over Cassander's thin white scars. "It isn't the same, and you don't want what we have to be part of the journey only. You want our nights together to mean the same thing as home."

"They already do," Cassander murmured with a frank little twist of his lips that sent the old soldier's heart leaping into his throat. "When I'm with you, I know where I belong. That's more precious to me than all the treasure in Asia."

"Considering I've heard you call Persian gold a stinking pile of horseshit, I'm not sure that's a compliment..."

Cassander shoved against his broad chest, not hard enough to move him, and they both chuckled into each other's mouths as they came together for a slow, sweet kiss. "When we get home," the younger man murmured (though it had been quite a long time since Cleitus had thought of him as such), "I'm going to take you up on that hill where we first met."

Cleitus's eyes popped open. "You remember that?"

"Of course," Cassander scoffed, and he should have known better, really. His beautiful lover hoarded moments more precious than gems, and had surprised him more than once with his uncanny recollection of some inconsequential thing that Cleitus had said or done. He should have known that their first meeting was unforgettable.

"As I recall, I was giving you eyes and you looked as if you wanted to murder me."

"It was the other way around," Cassander insisted. "I wanted to murder you and then you gave me eyes, like that was endearing."

"It was," he said truthfully, and Cassander sighed like he was being completely impossible.

Then he sobered, beautiful face drawn and serious. "You keep me a better man," he whispered. "I don't know what I'd do without you."

Cleitus felt his throat tighten, and he buried his hands in his lover's hair. "Survive, I suppose," he rumbled, but Cassander wouldn't let it slide.

"No. That's the thing, I wouldn't. You see what I'm like when you're not around. I'm bitter, and empty, and so full of hatred I can't stand it. When I was a boy, Aristotle told us all that when men lie together in lust, they degrade one another. That jealousy and passion are two sides of a coin, and he looked at me when he said it. I wasn't even old enough to grow a beard and already, I was a target of suspicion and mistrust, marked to only ever be struggling. The message was clear enough. I would never lie with a man and have honor and goodness pass between us. I was too filthy, too - "

Unable to bear much more of this, Cleitus tried to clutch him to his chest, growling, that ache growing sharp with the knowledge of such things said to one he loved so dearly.

He felt the cool touch of tears upon his skin, though Cassander did not shudder and shake, simply let them flow. "...I thought I was irreparably broken when I met you," he murmured, and Cleitus felt his heart fracture under the strain. "And you changed me, you saved me from being mired forever in that feeling. Without you - " and his voice cracked a bit at the edges, "I'm lost, again. It's not enough, it's never enough. Were the world different, I'd - "

Breath catching, the shattered pieces of his heart pounding, Cleitus fought to find his voice. "...You'd what?"

And his boy, no, his man, his lover, his - Cassander, looked up at him with eyes that were no longer sharp but vibrant and warm and green, not with envy, but with the fresh-faced novelty of spring. "I would stand by you as Hephaistion stands by Alexander. I would wear your rings on all my fingers. I would kiss you in the banquet halls, trading sips of wine, and I would never hesitate to number all the ways I love you, no matter who was listening. I would stay with you this night, the night after, and every night after that. I would love you in sunlight, in the rain, I would laugh where anyone could hear me and let you keep me safe. I would never," and his voice broke once more, "never let you go."

Speechless, Cleitus held Cassander to his aching chest, trying and failing to find the words to say. There were none, none at all, he could never hope to match a declaration like that. His hands clutched at his lover's skin - he hoped, prayed to all the gods he knew the names of, that Cassander understood just how strongly his sentiment was returned.

I'm happy, he realized, with a suddenness and clarity that felt acutely, wonderfully painful. I have wondered for so long what that felt like. I am happy.

Tomorrow, Alexander would drive them all mad once more, send them deeper and deeper into territories unknown and unwanted. But with this, here, he knew that he would always have a piece of home to come back to, and whatever the Fates had in store for them, this would never change.