A girl, a shore, a king (nolan!agamemnon x slave!reader fic)
Summary: You are taken to face king Agamemnon’s judgement for singing a treasonous song.
ao3 link
A/N: Obviously one cannot have consensual sex with an enslaved person. Use your judgement on whether you want to read this.
Warnings: 18+, smut, mdni, piv, noncon, slavery
Pairing: Nolan!Agamenon x slave!reader
A girl
Apollo’s touch weighs heavy on the city the day Agamemnon first sets his eyes upon you. The air is pregnant with the moisture of the Mediterranean sea, nary a breeze deigns to move the silks lining the long arching windows. Sweat dampens his brow, his oiled curls sticking to his temples beneath the heavy crown he wears.
Perhaps this is why he has sent his third man that day to face the executioner’s block. The doomed man’s screams of protest still echo off the scorching stones as the King’s men drag you into his hall.
They have been rough with you, as men like to be with tender, unprotected things. Blood drips down your chin and stains the front of your dress, drawing his gaze down to the swell of your bosom. The generous cut of your garment tells him you’ve been plucked from one of the numerous brothels lining the trading ports. Not the worst, but not the most opulent one, either. A few simple pieces of bronze jewelry fashioned after Aphrodite adorn you, no gems. Your hair pin, if there was one, has been lost in the scuffle, leaving your hair cascading wild and tangled around your lovely, terrified face.
“Zeus’ law: never leave a beautiful girl unfucked for she might be Aphrodite herself in disguise,” someone murmurs, drawing snickers from the crowd of onlookers.
“What is this, then?" Agamemnon bellows over the ruckus as his men wrangle you onto your knees beneath him. He stretches out on his seat, rolling his stiff shoulders back, casting a longing thought to his bathing chambers.
“This brothel slave stands accused of singing a blasphemous, treasonous song. There are several witnesses,” he is told.
“Oh?"
Your master pipes up from the crowd, full of denials and counteraccusations, keen to protect his investment - naturally. He has bought you off a trading ship and gone to the trouble of teaching you Greek. He has you singing and playing the lyre while the patrons wait for their turn in the atrium. He claims you don’t work the streets and your innocence remains intact.
If this is true, he must be taking bids, though. He'd be a fool not to, given how blessed you are by the love goddess. Even in your current state, on your hands and knees, eyes fixated to the floor tiles while the men argue over you, there is something about you. Something utterly captivating.
Agamemnon’s eyes find his advisor in the crowd, wondering. This is hardly a matter that rises to a level demanding the king’s attention. The pimp’s slave is his responsibility to deal with. Therefore, the girl has been brought before him for some other purpose. To distract him? To amuse him? To please him?
Clytemnestra, his queen wife, seems to come to the same conclusion. Without a word she stands up at his side, presses a stiff kiss to his knuckles and walks out of the hall, flanked by the servants carrying their children.
“Enough.” His voice cleaves through the argument as harshly as Achilles’ sword cleaves through the cities he sacks in Agamemnon’s name. “Let us hear it, then. "
“H-hear what, my king?" the pimp asks, suddenly gormless before his ruler’s cold stare.
“This blasphemous, treasonous song of hers.” Agamemnon’s lips twist with malicious amusement as he repeats the adjectives. “Must be quite a song, to be worth all of our time.”
This has you raising your head and meeting his stare.
“Sing for the king, girl,” his enforcer snaps, silencing your master’s protests.
Your tongue darts out, wetting your lips. “It would sound better accompanied with the lyre,” you say after a pause. A soft accent he cannot place curls around the vowels. The court seems to gasp collectively at the audacity of your statement.
“You may want to reconsider. Your tongue will be taken out if it sings treason towards your king,” a courtier explains. “If your hands play a treasonous melody, you will lose them as well.”
You tilt your head and there it is, unmistakable this time: guile in the corner of your lips, in the flash in your eyes. “Still, it would sound better."
A harsh bark of a laugh breaks free from Agamemnon’s mouth. He waves his hand at the servants and adjusts himself on the throne, a queer yet familiar pang of longing making itself known in his loins. It must be this absurd heat, as well as the threat of war at Troy’s gates looming over his head heavier than the crown he wears. He deserves a distraction. Aphrodite has taken pity on his weary soul and stirred his passions, brought this strange and beguiling girl to him.
You find a graceful position on the floor, carefully cradling the lyre the servants rush in, your fingers skimming over the strings as though you’re casting a spell on them, or getting to know them. The primness of your posture as you handle the instrument creates an amusing contrast with your disheveled appearance. The King has to school his features to stop himself from smiling.
Then you strum out a note, followed by a hum, then a verse. His smile falls.
A shore
The song you sing is indeed fit for a brothel’s atrium - in the beginning at least. It is written from the perspective of a man, singing to his missing lover. He recalls her in careful and sensual detail: the softness of her thighs, the slope of her neck, the scalding heat of her breasts. The longing the singer feels for this woman is palpable, his thirst hor her so acute that Agamemnon finds himself gesturing for his wine cup.
Then, with little subtlety, the topic shifts. The narrator of the song likens the yearning he has for his burning, red woman to the yearning he feels for the rich, red soil of his homeland, which is being ravaged by brutal invaders. He vows to find her, even as the ‘pigs oink into the King’s ear’ of his whereabouts (a mortified, performative gasp of horror ripples through the crowd at that line). During the final, haunting verse, the narrator vows that once they embrace once more, the fire of his love’s bosom shall engulf and annihilate their oppressors.
You set the pick down and meet the King’s eyes, resolute to meet your fate, while the last note still makes its way across the stunned hall.
A king
Whatever levity was there before you picked up the lyre has evaporated. The crowd looks on, silent, waiting. Will it be her tongue, her hands, or her head? Even your pimp has the good sense to hang his head in silence. Perhaps he thinks he will escape repercussions if his presence is forgotten about.
Agamemnon’s palms meet. The clap echoes off the walls so loudly that you are the only slave in the room that does not flinch. His hands meet again, then again, until his courtiers catch on and join him with an uncomfortable round of applause.
“Charming,” he says. “Did you come up with that yourself?”
“No, my King,” you respond. The guile in your gaze has been replaced with weariness. Good. “It is a rough translation of my own design, the song is one of my people. It is quite old.”
“Perhaps your people should learn to hold onto their women, then.”
“Or perhaps our women should be left alone by unwanted visitors from the sea,” comes your biting response without missing a beat.
The reactions of the court are dull background noise to Agamemnon at this point, as insignificant as the drone of the flies buzzing about the fruit baskets. He leans forward in his chair, completely fixated on you. “And if I keep you here, will someone come for you, do you recon? Will they cross Poseidon’s ocean and defy a King to win you back?”
He delights in the flash of doubt in your expression, even as your shoulders square in determination. “They might. Without that ornate armor of yours you’re not so intimidating, my King.”
Agamemnon feels his smile twist into a sneer. “Only one way to find out, I suppose.”
A man
The blisters on your fingers have - mercifully - turned into callouses. They know every dent and quirk of your new, royal lyre. Your voice is hoarse from the endless days of singing, but the other slaves bring you warm milk and honey to soothe it. This is one of the few privileges afforded to you for being the King’s new plaything. If one could call it that.
It has been some weeks now, of nothing but singing and playing the lyre and the King’s curious and amused eyes tracing your movements when the Queen is otherwise occupied. You expected summons to his bedchambers that first night - but nothing. Which is more unnerving than serving him would have been. It would have proved he was a man, after all. Men have weaknesses. Kings have armies and ships and halls upon halls of stolen women.
“The wind isn’t turning,” some slave boy whispers in your periphery as you pluck the strings of your lyre at a banquet. That sentence again. You keep hearing it, but have no idea what its significance is. A Greek idiom perhaps? Something to do with these insipid and fickle gods they worship?
As if the lyre had somehow impossibly carried these words into Agamemnon's year, he stands up so abruptly the dining crowd startles and goes quiet. Without a word or a sideward glance towards his wife, he stomps out of the dining hall.
The long-awaited summons come soon after, delivered by a surly-looking guard you recognise from his personal escort. It is not to his bedchambers, but into the royal armory.
You step into the unfamiliar room located in the pit of the castle cautiously, eyes downcast. Even the summer heat does not reach this place: a cool breeze tiptoes across your arms and raises your hairs on end. “My King?”
He stands before his war armor, facing away from you with his hands clasped behind his back. The ornate, intimidating platemail and the massive helmet are presently being carefully polished by two servants.
“Tell me something,” he says. You stare at the back of his head, at the bouncy and deceptively boyish curls, trying and failing to read his mood. “Would the man in that song of yours sacrifice anything the gods demand in order to achieve his goal?”
The man in my song does not rely on the gods, nor on an army. He fights for what he loves with his own bare hands. You have spent enough time in bondage to swallow this response.
“For his love?” You take cautious steps forward until you’re at an arm’s reach from him. “He would do anything.”
The King huffs and turns around. He takes a step towards you. You fix your gaze on his shaved chin as his knuckles brush against your skin, tracing your jaw. You needn’t see him up close to know that he is handsome, but it is harder to ignore this way. The cheekbones they emphasize on the portraits they strike into their coins are not as much of an exaggeration as you would like to think. Fairness cultivated by a life of leisure and comfort, you remind yourself.
His hand moves from your jaw to your hair. He carefully separates a strand of it and rolls it between his thumb and index finger, considering.
“I have a deal to present to for you.”
You frown sceptically. There are no deals to be struck with slaves, that is the main reason they are kept.
He continues after a pause: “I am going to war with Troy. Once I return victorious, you shall write a song for me. As payment, I shall free you.”
He tilts your chin and forces you to meet his gaze. Your heartbeat hammers in our ears louder than the drum the men of your village played as warning for the strange ships in the horizon. It beats: free me, free me, free me.
Your body makes the decision before your head catches up. You close the distance in a single stride and lay your palms on his chest, tilting your head back in invitation. The servants scamper out of the room as he claims your lips, groaning like a starved man biting into a succulent meal. You must give him something, a memory to keep him warm on the war front, so he remembers his promise.
He spins you around so that you face the intimidatingly tall figure of the armor, your back against the man it transforms into a god. As his hands roam your body and his lips explore the juncture of your jaw and shoulder, you know the truth of it: the man underneath has weaknesses that you can dig your fingers into and pry larger. The man underneath is not as perfect and impervious as the armor he wears.
The clasp of your tunic comes undone under his rough fingers and the article falls to the floor. You gasp as his palms press into your ribs, then the sensitive skin under your breasts. You watch your warped figures on the newly shined breast plate of his armor as he cups your breasts and rolls your nipples between his fingers. His nose is in your hair and he inhales deep, as if memorizing the scent for the long road ahead.
“I’ll bring you a new lyre,” me murmurs into your hair while you squirm under his ministrations. “The carpentry in Troy is of even higher quality than Ithaca, it will be a splendid instrument.” His palm skims the skin of your torso and he cups your sex. You cry out without even needing to pretend. He hums, pleased. “You will pluck melodies out of it almost as beautiful as the ones you are making for me now.”
You gasp for air, desperate to re-gain your wits. “You would steal this lyre, too?,” you pant. “Is there anything that my King is capable of creating with his own two hands?”
It is a gamble to provoke him like this, but he claimed you for his household after you openly defied him in court, so there must be something to this game that he enjoys.
Indeed, instead of rage you are met with a rough laugh. His fingers move, on your nipple and between your legs, with practiced skill that has your knees buckling. “We shall see about that, no?”
Instantly, you regret your wording.
His lips find your neck again while he works your body, his fingers between your legs working a relentless path against the slick strip of sensitive skin between your opening and the pearl of nerves on top, back and forth, back and forth. You squirm again as the pleasure builds up, but are enveloped by his strong arms, unable to escape it. Your knees threaten to give out under you again and you moan helplessly.
You feel the King’s hardness pressing into your back through his clothes and hear the heaviness of his breath. “I’ll give you anything,” he murmurs into your neck, where bruises must be blooming under his lips by now. “Anything you want.”
“Please,” you gasp. “Please, my King.”
He doesn’t need you to elaborate. He grabs you by the back of your neck and bends you forward. You grab his armor by the shoulders as your chest is harshly pushed against the cool metal of the breast plate. Thankfully it is secured carefully and supports your weight in your unsteady state.
You hear ruffling of fabric behind you, just enough for Agamemnon to unsheathe his cock from his trousers, and then he’s pushing inside you. He slides in with some resistance due to his size, clearly not caring about the lie your previous pimp had told about your virginal status. His hands find your hips and his thumbs skim your pelvis briefly in what could be seen as a soothing gesture.
“Perfect,” groans as he bottoms out, giving you a moment to adjust to his size.
Then he starts to rock his hips, keeping you in place. It seems like he tries to practice restraint at first, but the facade falls soon and he falls into a punishing rhythm that has your toes curling with the level of stimulation. The obscene sounds of his hips meeting yours echo in the sparsely decorated room along with his panting and your broken moans.
You don’t intend to climax. Not in this place, not with him. But your body responds to his attentions, his intensity, after such a long time of fending for yourself. You cry out and he gasps at the way your pussy clenches around him. He yanks you by the hair so that you’re fully pressed against him as he comes - seemingly not out of cruelty, but from a thoughtless need of feeling your skin against his. The feeling of his seed pumping into you makes you shiver with pleasure, even as you know you will need to dispose of it soon. The King is leaving, after all.
You remain as you are for a moment, your back to him, his arms wrapped possessively around your shoulders and waist, your laboured breaths in sync. Your hazy eyes take in the armor again, its sharp contours and statuesque lines. There are breath stains and drool on the breast plate now, it would need to be cleaned again.
Eventually he pulls out of you and smoothes down your hair in a gesture that feels almost amusingly gentle after everything that just transpired.
You keep your eyes downcast as you gather your clothes and turn around to face him.
His fingertips skim the line of your jaw as he re-pledges his promise: “Troy will be brought to heel. I will be back soon, my songbird, and then you shall become my freedwoman.”
You bite your tongue. You kneel and press a kiss to his thigh.
“I shall pray for favourable winds then, my King.”
