('It was the days when he praised me I loved the most.')
Just like before, everything rings true— though this time it's cast in the molten shape of that night together in dark halls he dearly misses (lack of funding for candlelight always making everything so sparse at night, though their eyes never needed anything to begin with); all the harsh edges digging hot into one another's skin, all the bruising scuffs of heavy palms that never knew quite where to settle (or ad velorem: where to stop.)]
Mmh. I suppose it did change us.
[It did. It had to have. Experience shapes life, after all, more than anything else. (A theory Astarion keeps only because he can't bear to imagine a younger reflection of himself prior to cuff and chain that was just as mad. Just as broken. Just as intolerably comprised of mismatched splinters with hardly any connective tissue to speak of.) Never mind that the one person who stands a chance at defying that notion is the one Astarion addresses from an overwhelming distance. Stone of farspeech left clutched painfully beneath curled fingers.]
Just not the way either of them imagined.
[Two creatures raised to love the hunt, and yet grown to revile the sound of their master's frigid voices dragging them back from it too soon. Oh, there's not a chance those old ghosts ever banked on that being the summation of their efforts.
Good.
Let them languish in their well-forged obsolescence.]
I don't miss him, Leto. [Astarion adds narrowly. Confession warranting a sudden repetition: I don't.]
And I miss the glory— albeit not the price they bled. [(Let me rest on my knees between your legs. Let me worship you by teaching you where you wear your bruises best— he loves the language of cruelty, and there, with Leto humming in his ear, it all makes perfect sense. Every truth that came bubbling up when they had no filter, shoved away from exhaustion and pain. They've come full circle now.)
It wasn't poison slipped under their skin; they don't chase its dosage in each other's care like a paltry substitute for what's no longer in reach.
no subject
('It was the days when he praised me I loved the most.')
Just like before, everything rings true— though this time it's cast in the molten shape of that night together in dark halls he dearly misses (lack of funding for candlelight always making everything so sparse at night, though their eyes never needed anything to begin with); all the harsh edges digging hot into one another's skin, all the bruising scuffs of heavy palms that never knew quite where to settle (or ad velorem: where to stop.)]
Mmh. I suppose it did change us.
[It did. It had to have. Experience shapes life, after all, more than anything else. (A theory Astarion keeps only because he can't bear to imagine a younger reflection of himself prior to cuff and chain that was just as mad. Just as broken. Just as intolerably comprised of mismatched splinters with hardly any connective tissue to speak of.) Never mind that the one person who stands a chance at defying that notion is the one Astarion addresses from an overwhelming distance. Stone of farspeech left clutched painfully beneath curled fingers.]
Just not the way either of them imagined.
[Two creatures raised to love the hunt, and yet grown to revile the sound of their master's frigid voices dragging them back from it too soon. Oh, there's not a chance those old ghosts ever banked on that being the summation of their efforts.
Good.
Let them languish in their well-forged obsolescence.]
I don't miss him, Leto. [Astarion adds narrowly. Confession warranting a sudden repetition: I don't.]
And I miss the glory— albeit not the price they bled. [(Let me rest on my knees between your legs. Let me worship you by teaching you where you wear your bruises best— he loves the language of cruelty, and there, with Leto humming in his ear, it all makes perfect sense. Every truth that came bubbling up when they had no filter, shoved away from exhaustion and pain. They've come full circle now.)
It wasn't poison slipped under their skin; they don't chase its dosage in each other's care like a paltry substitute for what's no longer in reach.
It's theirs, now. And they wield it better.]
I'm just relieved I wasn't—
....well. I'm just relieved.