Pietros said, How could you not believe in the gods if you are sitting right here and you look exactly like the moon, and drew his fingers down Barca's spine, sighed into the curve of his body and felt the thickness of the space between them inside his bones. Barca said, Let me tell you about godlessness, and kissed the corner of Pietros' mouth with his finger brushing against the space between Pietros' eyebrows.
When he is seventeen, Pietros is learning to adapt again and how to fit people into his life who he hadn't planned for. He has been taken to many men's beds before now, but being with Barca, he is finding, is an affirmation of existence he had never expected. If he can let Barca hold him the same way the gladiator can pick up a broad sword in gentle caress of purpose, then he can let himself believe that there is power in the way the human brain absorbs a thousand different beams of spinning kaleidoscopic light every second and still wonders if there isn't something more he can do for the birds.
Barca said, I love you and I want to know you. Come here and we can make weather together, I can be a cyclone and you can be a rainstorm and we can collide and stick into one big beautiful destroyer of worlds. And Pietros touched his ribs one by one and said, I want you under my skin, I want you to buzz inside me like a locust on summer's last breath.
Barca had people in Hispania once. A sister, a fierce warrior in her own right, run off with a nomad, what was left of Carthage's history on the peninsula. Where or if he will find her is another matter, but it is as good a place to go as any. He speaks the languages, and he wants to put as much distance as possible between them and Capua. They are wanted men now, since Batiatus had made it clear that Barca's freedom was a subject not to be broached again after the Ashur incident, but it is more than a concern for safety. Pietros has lived his life a slave in body and in mind to Rome, and Barca wants him to know that there are other ways. He wants him to know that many years before, as a young man of Carthage, his conquests were only called so in jest. He wants Pietros to know that his changing body means little to him. Though it pains him, he wants Pietros to know that he is free to leave him and pursue true desire, if what lies between them is not as Barca believes.
You look like scripture, said Barca, and Pietros drew circles in the space between his chest and stomach with careful questing fingernails.