Little more than a child. Barely a blink of a thing, snared between two covetous grips (and he knows about the differences in ages between worlds, but that hardly changes the fact that Leto was so young— add to it having all of his memories wiped clean, and oh, it's savagery fit for Cazador's table:) taking a pretty young thing and seeing just what happens when you unmake it in your name. Taunt and tease it. Rile it and watch it smolder unaware.
And if it fails in one way or another, you simply try again.
And again.
And again.
He fills his throat fill with heat that stings like blackened bile. Impotent and outdated, but thick within the hollow of his throat.]
They tortured you. [It wasn't about sex; Astarion's fucked enough shortsighted sycophants in his time to pinpoint the outline of those aimless footprints. If it had been about sensation alone in utter control, the rutting would've been the point: punctuation played out in penetration or gulping adoration— less than none care spared for the thing they used to that end. A thing to be used and put away, not crooning about his responses or lack thereof when he's been set up just to fail. The fall the thing that brings them glee; the glory that he can't say no.
They tore him to ribbons just to lie and call it fucking.]
Both of them.
[Did Isabela know about this?
When she took him to bed, that is.
On some level, Astarion thinks she must've. But intuition is still a different beast than insight: watching a beaten thing flinch at the first sign of an outstretched hand isn't the same thing as knowing what happened. If she was perceptive enough to know how to dance with him when he scarcely knew how to suck in breath without being told, or the shape of his body beneath the surface of his skin, then she wouldn't need words or truths; he'd be an open book comprised of a slim scattering of bent pages.
And in a way Astarion supposes it doesn't matter. What she taught Leto was enough to bring him back from that nightmare through the gentle rules of her splayed fingertips. There'd be no now if not for then— her then, that is.
Still, though, it's all a mess. Still, he can't stop himself from wading through the past when he asks:]
He never thought of it like that. Torment, perhaps, and blatant abuse, oh, yes. He has never thought fondly of it. But to frame it as torture adds a heavier connotation to it, sharper and more blatant than his own half-formed thoughts. Torture to take a captive thing and render him into little more than a toy; torture to gleefully watch his reactions, and it doesn't matter whether it was jealous or twisted desire that prompted it, for it was hellish all the same.
Torture, I was tortured, and he tries it on silently, knowing even as he does that it won't stick. Not right now. Later, but not now. And maybe some part of him knows that from the start, for his next thought is so much needier.
I wish you were here.
It springs to the forefront of his mind without warning, lonely and soft. I wish you were here, I wish I was home, curled up tightly together in their coffin as Leto whispers these things in the dark. It isn't more manageable there, not really— but it feels as though it is. As if they might leave Hadriana and Danarius and all their horrors there in the shadows, with searing daylight acting as deterrent for the ghosts of the past.
But he isn't. And he's not. And he is too old to say such things aloud, no matter that he's sure Astarion feels them too. The walls creep up regardless, claustrophobic and nauseating, and his knuckles go white as he grips that rock—
And then Astarion speaks again.]
Ten years.
[More or less. And it helps, you know, to have that prompt. Better a question than bleating shows of dismay or pity (and Astarion would never, but still).]
I suspect I was eighteen when I competed in that tournament. And it was ten years of that before the Qunari attacked. [Twenty-eight. And then:] A few years on the run, and then seven in Kirkwall. Three or four more before I returned . . .
[So he was nearly forty when he and Astarion met. Or maybe he was older, or younger— he'll never know, and he's long since tormenting himself over it. At least it matters less here, when soon enough he'll count his age with three digits instead of two.
Ah. But he's deflecting.]
Ten years of enslavement. Of that . . . of torture. I grew better at evading Hadriana's grasp, and returning her torments in such a way that she could not prove it was me.
[But it was so petty. So pathetic. So pointless. He'd get her to humiliate herself in front of a group of Danarius' friends— and then wait with nauseating dread for the next torment she'd enact.]
She stopped bedding me after the first few years. Her hatred had solidified by then, as time passed and Danarius refused to allow her to graduate. But it was always a risk.
That's all he hears, though there's endless more within the margins. And no, it's never been a competition (how could it be? Astarion feels the muscle and marrow beneath his skin sting with phantom slights from memories he's never had, only heard transcribed); the captive sound of Leto muttering softly that two hundred years is worse— unfathomably worse (and true, it is always remarkable to survive what seems impossible, noting it as just another horror surpassed now that the worst of it is done: 'heading out to the store this afternoon'; I was flayed alive so many times I've lost count. 'Come to bed, it's too damned cold'; I spent ages shut away like unwanted silver for daring to smile at the wrong time)— still lodged firmly in his mind. Refusing to go away no matter how he tries or what he urges.
But that isn't how it works.
Just as it was before: there's nothing to compare.
Astarion's gut won't settle in its agonized thrashing just because he swallows down a number cut from two digits rather than three. It knows as well as he does what ten years for a whelp with no memories and no freedom had to look like— fretting in a cage cut from heavy collars, merciless punishments, and the counterbalance of honeyed words and slower touches meant to make even hell seem bearable when he swears he can't take more. You lose track of time, like that. You lose track of yourself, too. Ten years of agony is more than half a waking lifetime given the age Leto guessed at. More, with so many memories stolen, no— strewth, no: there's nothing to compare except that they had lives of their own, once. Ripped from them like so much else.
Reduce it all, and pain is pain.
And everything else is just a drop against its leverage.]
I stand corrected. [About a lot of things— but about her most of all.]
You got your fangs into her long before she took her last. [He's proud of that one note. Cold breath slipping light across his lips underneath each ceding exhale, one conversational foot figuratively planted before the next. Small as a sliver of glass, it cuts its way throughout his tone regardless— even if it'd be easier to show that sense of predatory praise through a bumping push of his nose against a narrow jaw or risen cheekbone. Through the slide of his claws in moonlit hair, swearing that he's safe. And that he did well.
(Truth be told, Astarion wishes he was there.
In daylight, that is. Nestled just at Leto's side. Two months into elevated change and his sharper teeth still feel so wrong against each other, and the emptiness of his coffin's starting to feel like imprisonment all over again— or maybe that's just the fault of current conversation.
Blood is intoxicating. Power: exhilarating.
He needs both to survive. To keep them safe where all else could so easily fail and take them right back to said years of bloodsoaked pleas drooled out over folded knees. But sometimes underneath all that secured glory, he feels so much less himself. The weaknesses. The drawbacks. The endless, unslaked urges blotting out the edges of his mien. Call him weak (he'd be the first in line to lever it against himself), but he misses sunlight at his lover's side. He misses grabbing hold of vulnerable flesh without forcing an eternity's worth of delicacy into his own touch, roughly imitating trying to grasp ancient parchment without puncture. That as the weeks roll on, more and more and more he misses—
Ah.
Well.
That's not the conversation, is it?)
Funny how everything compounds when so much scar tissue bears down.]
I won't say that I'm glad it was only your master's touch that you had to endure right to the end, but....
[His lips thin; it comes across as the smallest sigh.]
[It does. It does. Danarius' touch was loathsome, despised and repulsive— but it was a constant. The magister had a taste for sadism when it suited him, but more often than not he preferred routine: for Leto to tend to him the same way he always had, mouth or hands or slickened cinch bouncing atop his prick, and oh, how his master had doted on him. False affection, to be sure— and even now, sometimes he'll shiver beneath Astarion's hands in the aftermath, a little overwhelmed in the best way by what something real feels like. You were so good, come here, amatus, his hands endlessly gentle, fussing over cleaning Leto instead of ordering him away, come here, affection so genuine it hurts).
But at least that false affection was better than Hadriana's seething torment.
But oh, that sigh. That barest exhale, and his heart is already thundering for the sliver of praise he'd heard before. The phantom push of a cool nose against his cheek, nuzzling in praise as he gathers him close . . . it will be a few days more before he's home, and oh, Leto prays the time passes swiftly, for he misses him so. He knows what expression Astarion wears as that little sigh slips out, and he can no more help chasing after it than he could breathe.]
What was it like, with Cazador?
[For he knows the vampire was— is, Leto realizes, his stomach dropping— of a far crueler breed than Danarius. Having the magister's focus was not an inherently bad thing, but with Cazador . . . ah, who can say if it's better to be sent out or ignored?]
The devil that you know, am I right? [Astarion vainly teases, but it's brittle in his mouth. Sharp enough to cut his tongue— sharp enough to warrant dropping it completely, his tailing exhale softened through his nose.
The dryness on his lips almost clicking when he parts them.]
Mm. It was. [Easier, he means. Point clarified voluntarily only one swaying beat later while vertigo sits thick within his mind (funny that he doesn't know which is more discomforting to focus on: the past or nauseating present).] He was fickle though, and I suspect....well. I suspect that's how our masters differed, for the most part.
You were Danarius' crown jewel. [He'll never claim it was a wonder or a triumph. Unlike Hadriana, Astarion sees the ugliness in that raised pedestal. The landmarks of its scars. But the truth is the truth: Leto was his favored pet.] Cazador had an empire all his own.
[Correction: Cazador has an empire all his own. Who needs Tevinter's fawning praise if the whole rotten imperium might as well sit underneath your heel? He has no one to appeal to. No one's admiration to inspire.] Filled to tipping with servants more powerful or more beguiling than you could ever begin to imagine— and there weren't limits to his reach: mortal, immortal, enslaved. [He could have anything he liked however he liked. And the only testament to his glory? Oh. Himself.
Bewitching in its own right, that pantherine power undefined; the way he dwelled within it. Mastery over everything, worn like a birthright and shown off in ways that made others want nothing more than to bend— even against their own will. Their own sanity. If he said he wanted you, gods above, you wanted him back.] I was only foolish enough to think I was his favorite at the very start.
Right after he saved my life.
[By killing him, as it so happened. A barbed little confession that stings— though not half so much as the inevitable third act.]
I learned.
But I never stopped wanting that preference, all the same.
It's been alluded to. Mentioned. Little snatches of breathed out half-jokes, or vague references keenly understood with a single glance and a trailed-off sentence. That first night in Rialto, when Leto had confessed that he had been fooled by Danarius' attentions at first. They'd danced around it then, hadn't they? Talking about how it was always better to be favored than forgotten . . . I imagine you must have been lonely, Astarion had said, his skin warm beneath Leto's questing fingertips. I was, too.
And then the conversation had veered. Who had it worse, it must have been you, and they'd gotten so lost in their mutual assurance that they hadn't touched upon the rest.
Here and now, Leto thinks, is the second half of that conversation. Not a revelation, not really— but there's such a difference between suspecting something in your heart and hearing it spoken aloud. Oh, Astarion . . .]
It was the days that he praised me I loved the most.
[Soft. Gentle. I know, I understand, for he does. Oh, he does. There were only a handful, but oh . . . when the wind blew in the right direction and Danarius' mood was just right; when he would say sit, my lad, come join me, and offer him a glass of wine, asking his opinion on this or that . . . and it wasn't to be cruel, but to be kind. Some jagged impulse somewhere deep in the rot of his soul, a twisted impulse to be sweet that never lasted. Like offering a prized hound an extra treat or two when you've had a good day, it only makes the fall worse.
And Cazador was more cruel still. Leto will not say that Danarius never had manipulation and dependency on his mind during those days, but oh, Fenris was already his. Jaggedly loyal and barely a person at all, so fanatically loyal to his master that there was little need for reinforcement, save for the occasional reminder. But Cazador . . . oh, no. That was a far nastier game, with the most nauseating consequences imaginable, stretched out over years and years and years . . .
How many times, Leto wonders, did they go back and forth? You're nothing, you're everything; my little consort, my stupid fledgling . . .]
It is . . . difficult, not to want that.
[Soft. Roughened, but all the more honest for it.]
Difficult, too, not to revel in it when it happens— no matter how you might wish you had known better in the aftermath.
Difficult not to think that you are in love, when it happens.
[A savior swooping out of the night sky, rescuing you and changing you, prioritizing you, adoring you . . . oh, how could anyone resist?]
Tell me.
[Those first few weeks, or months, or years. When he was Cazador's prize instead of his puppet. Or afterwards, maybe: that fall from grace when he was left among his seething, sneering cohorts, the very same one he'd jeered at before falling from his ivory tower.]
What was it, to be his favorite? To have that preference?
[Oh yes, they both know what it's like, don't they?]
I knew what he did to me. [First: enslavement. First: the magic trick of making someone beg for their own death with open arms— the word please on their lips. Dying in abused indignity on muddy streets at the hands of humans that Astarion still wonders over on occasion (dread like a knot in his gut when he'd first seen his new master talking to his Gur contacts, the matter forever damned to be a question mark). Too struck by salvation to feel it closing shut around his throat; too enamored to question the rules once he'd been taken home. Can't remember his own name. His old home. His old life or the ones he might've loved, but he remembers that first night so clearly.
Less so the ensuing fall.]
He made it hurt. [So much that so he feels it in his jaw. His throat. Both turned brittle with tension that won't stop, caught in the echo of old places; dry from centuries of thirst unslaked.] There was nothing so cold as the look of disappointment in his eyes when you fell short of whatever it was he wanted, just before he had you taken apart however it pleased him— and that changed, I should note, faster than the weather in midwinter. [And there, a break for weary amusement in recounting:] Someone's set the table wrong, even if he'd never told us his guestlist had shifted. Another spawn— not you— stored his research incorrectly. Dared to drop something while he's speaking, reading, fucking, dining— and those, my love, were the easy ones. At least when something like that happened, you'd see it coming. [On the other hand: smile at the wrong joke? Fail to read between the lines when he went silent and utterly still? Oh, you were done for.]
Maybe that's why the rest felt so damned good.
[For once, he's glad Leto isn't there with him. At least that way he won't have to see Astarion hunching through his shoulders like a coward. Like a thing beaten and called home, too stupid not to wag its own tail while slinking closer on its belly— near enough to freedom to walk away all the while, and yet:] Fresh off the heels of being stripped bare and endlessly humiliated just for existing or sabotaged by your peers in retribution, and there were nights when admittedly I hated how it felt to lie with him. Just one more violation. One more joke at his expense.
[Cazador had so many, after all.]
More often, I wanted nothing but that perfect calm. When all the commands fit just right, and someone else was the fool. The mark. The disappointment. And I knew everything I did pleased him. [It's Leto that he quotes at the very end, his own voice dropped into the bottom of his lungs; kept sheltered by a ribcage that's only ever felt about as resilient as cracked glass. He doesn't expect the elf will remember— that night in Rialto had been long, and gods trust that they drank deep from the well of wine and one another's injured company in the aftermath of sedate conversation, keeping the fire lit well past dawn— but Astarion hasn't forgotten. It stood so far out from the rest:] I drank it in like water offered to a man dying of thirst.
[He could've stayed forever in that praise. But you don't get to keep that part of Cazador Szarr.
He can't bring himself to say it. Not when he'll hate himself for it— not when the shame's too overwhelming: he could never live it down.
( ....but all those nights he's lied awake and restless, wondering. Dreading. Fearing without end the thought that there's a poison in his skull he can't escape no matter how far he runs. Not the tadpole— not some alien curse hellbent on changing him to its whims— just. Him. Just Astarion. Just the truth he's shut away alongside memories lost to torture and pitiful whines for mercy that gave him none. Maybe maybe maybe.
Just Cazador's voice, always there. Telling him he's never really been free.)
One year is such a small flicker of a second.
He has to know if it's just him. If he's well and truly broken beyond repair.]
[It's the hesitation that catches Leto's ear the most.
The rest he listens to diligently. None of it is a total shock, for of course they both of them have danced around such topics before. The little traumas (little such a relative term), the horrors that do not immediately spring to mind, but that haunt them both nonetheless. Some of them have already slipped out, snuck gently between moments of idle conversation (the two of them in the kitchen making dinner, Cazador once had a spawn slice her fingers to the knuckle after she served one of his guests a sloppily made dish, always delivered wryly, always dropped off at Leto's feet and then danced away from before they could linger. And he never minded, for he would do the same: little humiliations that still hurt him on dark nights; horrors so nauseating and so pointless he had long since tried to forget them.
But the rage still rises in him. The useless grief and protective anger that always, always flares at times like these; the sort he has to bite back nowadays for fear of terrifying Astarion further. I'll kill him, I'll torture him, I'll hurt him for every grief, every indignity, every trauma . . . And he would. Oh, he would. Leto will not go back on his promise, but trust that someday, he will see Cazador dead.
For it's different than it was with Danarius. His former master was no paragon of virtue, but gods, he was never so cruelly volatile. Slaves were property, and just as you don't smash a lamp for the crime of burning down to the wick, so too would Danarius keep his temper (to a point). His wealth was finite, after all, and there was no sense in wasting thousands of gold pieces on a corpse when you could torture them into correctness. But Cazador . . .
They weren't even property, Leto realizes. He had been Danarius' prized hound, but Astarion wasn't even a dog. Just a living, breathing object, ready to be indulged or toyed with or tortured as his master saw fit. It made the lows worse than Leto can imagine (and he knows, he knows he can't, in the same way Isabela could never truly imagine the hells of his own enslavement), but the highs . . .
Oh, it must have been bliss.
But that hesitation. That half-formed sentence and the silence that follows speak volumes, for it has been so long since they've hesitated like this. And when the question comes . . .
Ah.]
Sometimes.
[It comes after a long pause. There is not another soul in any world he would admit this to.]
Parts of it . . . yes. I miss it. The simplicity of it . . . to know my purpose and my function, to have orders and fulfill them, and earn praise for it . . .
Or when he was pleased with me. When he would spoil me for it, or confide in me, or plan with me for some event within the magisterium, and I felt as though it was the two of us against the world . . .
[He hates himself a little for saying it. No: he hates himself so much for saying it. So much so that nausea roils in his belly; the blunt edge of that rock digs against his palm, leaving a marked indent where it presses.]
Yes.
[He stares out at the jagged outline of Baldur's Gate. And then, softly:]
But I miss it less now than I did when I was first freed.
I do not know if it ever goes away. Perhaps not. But the first few years it was strongest.
When I lived with the Fog Warriors . . . I told you I begged them for orders. It was not just because I did not know how to function. And later, when I was on the run . . . on the hardest days, I would miss it. The, the simplicity. The ease of having one road to walk.
[Another pause. A hesitation, for he has never thought about this when it comes to himself— but oh, Astarion is so different.]
. . . and it— it is different than missing him. Or being beneath his heel.
[So many times, he'd wondered how true that was. When you're the only person leveraged between affirmation and denial, nothing ever feels concrete.
And nothing ever will.
Leto changes that in half a single breath.
Start to finish (Fog warriors— how Astarion remembers that soft-spoken story, imekari still the first word to come flitting in by association; the simplicity of service more tempting than dignity at times) it resonates in the smallest ways. The most unseen ways, in fact, for he's never been one to let anyone see the rootwork of these particular scars. Like a blemish hidden under expensive silk. Like half-picked skin; he'd only had himself to blame for its unsightliness (or so he thought), and here, blinding as bloody daylight while he's shut away safely in the dark, Leto absolves him of it so quickly that he almost forgets this is a conversation. Stop-start buffets of emotion taking the place of every last civilized instinct.
A relief, not a burden.
I miss it less now (not I missed it), ergo: it is better. Ergo: it gets better. Over ten years to Astarion's pitiful one, and maybe there's something to be said yet for a restless, deadened heap of muscle that doesn't know how to stop oscilating between longing and fear and resentment turned ever deeper inwards.
(He's not alone. He's not to blame. He's not some cowed inchworm of a thing like the spawn he'd known here or the slaves he saw in Thedas, all simpering over crumbs like bleating, thoughtless livestock. Every bit the epitome of all mockery thrown their way: unaware of the hunches in their submissive spines or how they shook endlessly in their own skin. Repulsively unable to exist without someone else's hand coaxing them along. They need it, you see. They're compelled to it even without magic or shackles. 'Oh yes, of course,' he remembers one young apprentice in the Free Marches commenting at a melting pot of a gambling affair, 'the way Mabari must be loyal or a gamehound has to chase— it's inescapable.' Bred deep into their blood. And they'll always, always crave it.)
But they won't.
Not Astarion. Not Leto-once-Fenris. Not in the way Cazador had promised time and time again. Not like Danarius' insistence, either— or the Orlesians or Tevinters or Kirkwall-bound drunks whose own guttersnipe whores sometimes leapt at the chance to bare their teeth and hound someone lower on the rung than themselves.
If Leto believes, that's enough.]
....is it?
[The words don't feel right. He tries again:] No I—
I know.
[And he means that in ways maybe only they two can understand: I know. Whatever it is said or unsaid right now— it's mine just as much as it is yours. It's what I feel just as much as you do.
You're right.] I wouldn't dare go back.
[Correction:]
I won't ever go back.
....but.... [But, and this is the moment that sticks. This is when his tongue runs sour in its dryness, clinging to the back of his throat until it hurts against all rising pressure. Spit it out, Astarion.] The worst part is there was a sickening comfort to that collar that I sometimes catch myself straining for, even when I realize it's your touch.
[There, he's said it. The worst part of all this. The ugliest, most unsightly little facet to this long-lived pain, buried in the outline of their coffin— and the fact that he doesn't have to see the disappointed look on Leto's face when he finally admits it.
Which might be why he darts away again, as always.]
It's only been a year. [Like you said, Leto. It lessens. It'll wither. It's fine.] I'll outrun it, eventually. I swear.
[It's quick. Too quick, maybe— but he isn't lying, and he isn't just saying it to assure Astarion. It's just that he can feel the pale elf pushing it away, shoving past it, and if Leto doesn't act quickly, they will. Astarion will sweep them along and that will be that, and he cannot let that thought linger untouched in both their memories, stark and bloody and raw.
So: you do not need to swear, honest and stark, and only in the aftermath does Leto try to understand what he means.]
You will not ever go back, Astarion. Do not undermine it. Not when there are countless slaves who justify their existence over the thought that things would be worse in freedom.
[When so much of enslavement relies upon the enslaved buying into the myth that they're better off beneath someone's heel . . . Orana's voice drifts through his mind. Hadraina's pet maid, her father's throat slit not an hour before and still, still, she'd insisted: everything was fine until today! Confusion and anguish in her voice, her eyes wet as she'd stared uncomprehending up at them, and Fenris had not known how to comfort her then. All he could say helplessly in reply was that it wasn't. You just didn't know better.
He understands more now.
But ah . . . the rest, now. The biggest part of this, ugly and jagged, ill-fitting in any kind of story. Varric, Leto finds himself thinking, wouldn't write about this. It doesn't fit. The heroic slave, a year into freedom, longing for the comfort of his master's control . . . people don't like to hear about such things. They'd rather buy into the illusion that one always strides forward, for it's so much easier than hearing the ugly, discomfiting truth that sometimes, instincts and desires and emotions all tangle together so messily, dragging a person down into the depths of the past no matter how they gasp and strain for the present.
There was a sickening comfort, and that does not surprise him. But . . . even when I realize it's your touch, and oh that, that shocks him. Leto swallows thickly, then rubs his face. He cannot say this information pleases him, but . . . this is not about him. More than ever, this is not about him.]
. . . tell me.
A specific incident, or in general . . . tell me what you mean when you say that.
[Not because he doesn't understand, but because there's too many ways it could be taken.]
I am not angry. I am not upset. I simply . . .
[His mouth is dry.]
I know what it is to long for a master's touch. To— to miss certain things, or feel the, the way he made you feel.
[Ah, don't stutter now.]
Tell me what it is you mean by that.
Are there . . . do you expect it to be him sometimes when we wake?
No, that'd be— Gods, no. [No, he's at least certain he could never want that enough to vie for that mistake. Outside of the occasional hellish dream involving old nightmares and temptations made sweet until he wakes, even Astarion's own subconscious mind rejects the idea right at the bitter root.
This time it isn't raw dread. That quickness in his voice exudes a sense of knifing revulsion felt right to the bone, pressure on his spine spurring him to hiss rather than simper— though trust it's broadly aimed in all its focus: there's nothing at all akin to a needlepoint pinned to Leto's throat for suggesting it. He isn't angry or spitting in disgust, only jolting back the way a horse startles when it notices something secondhand. Peripheral blur inciting a rapid collapse in well-paced hoofbeats—
And then just like that, it's done. Darkened blur just a twig or a rock or a garden hose left out, existing innocuously in its own function.
Leto asked because he needed to. Because— strewth, they're up to their necks already, aren't they? Unable to make out branches, let alone forests for trees. Too far from one another to make this easy; too close to one another to let a single subject lie once it starts to freely bleed. He asks because he doesn't know what to think, not because he does think it (and even then, there's no sign of frantic fear for that possibility. Hesitation isn't cold, leveled horror. 'I am not angry. I am not upset.'
And after his head's back on as straight as it could ever possibly get at a time like this, he trusts in that assurance).
He trusts Leto.]
The sensation of it only.
[Nothing deeper. Nothing so tethered to the past that it cuts right through the meridian of what they have.]
It's you that I want. [Oh, right from the reckless start, that's all.] Your touch, your presence. Just you.
[And if he stops, he'll falter. Choke on his own words or swallow down his tongue, being immortal won't save you from the depths of shame or the need to tuck your tail against your belly and never lift your stare again. He has to keep going, which means he has to ramble, now— dragging Leto down into whatever mire it leads to.]
....but that includes your cruelty, too. The way your gemstone eyes shine with contempt when you aren't getting your way. The sharpness of your teeth when you tire of my harrassments. The look you sometimes get as if you can't tell whether or not you want to stop— [Keep going. Keep going. Think specifics. That's what he'd asked for.] Moments of ordered obedience, like when we fought back in Kirkwall. My chin to your knee, my legs wrapped tight around your shin—
[They've gone over this before a hundred times: played out in assurances from Astarion via his lips or voice or roaming fingers that it's not him in exchanges like that. Oh, darling, it's not Danarius' touch still levered against you. It's not his reach or his hold; you're not his still, even when he's gone— there's no disgrace to be had in lust so long as we're both happy.
But that's just it.
All those times, he'd aimed his sights on Leto and deliberately forgotten his own fear. His own worry. His own neophyte newness in freedom, stuck without permanence in any direction he looked.
He can let his guard drop, now.]
Perhaps it is that. Longing for the way it felt [and he emphasizes that word because] beyond the mindlessness of purpose on its own. Something I can't seem to dig out, no matter how vividly I try.
Taking his curse and relieving it with your fingers
[Tell him, Leto.] Please. [It sounds like lips licked quickly so they don't dry. Like the way wet eyelids stick to each other thanks to the anchor of tangled lashes that hold fast at the midpoint of each blink. Please.] Tell me—
[And there is not a shred of doubt in his mind as he says it.
Now he understands. What was murky and unsure suddenly comes in abrupt focus, and oh, if his heart doesn't ache for understanding. The terror of knowing you are echoing what your master did to you; the fear that you are little more than a broken thing incapable of cherishing anything but that abuse. Remembering all the revulsion and hatred and grief you felt, and here you are now, reenacting it— oh, gods, yes, he does know that feeling.
Inhale, exhale. He will not fumble this in his haste to assure Astarion.]
Astarion, you wish for— for a reflection, not a recreation. You do not beg me to torment you, or use you, or whore you out. But there is a thrill to, to reenacting what we have gone through. I—
[No, this isn't right. He's circling it, and it's not that he's wrong— but this isn't what he means. Leto hesitates, trying to think of his own experiences before Astarion. Not the first night, no, but . . . those nights with Isabela when she would push him to submit. When she would have him worship her, whimpering and begging for her cunt, servicing her and getting nothing in return. Or worse: when they would fight. When she would push him into things, faux-force meeting good-natured rivalry, the two of them eagerly rutting as they tried to assert their respective will. And he got off on it, oh, yes, but . . .
There was always that drop. That fear.
He had never told Isabela. That wasn't the kind of friendship they'd had. She would have been sympathetic, maybe, in her own way— but then again, her way was always to brush past it, ignoring the past in favor of focusing on the future, and he knows he would have lashed out if she had done that to him. So he wrestled with it on his own, and gods help him, for it had taken years to understand. Even now he does not think of it very often if he can help it, an uneasy question in the back of his mind— but everything is so different when it comes to Astarion.]
. . . . I feared the same when I wore a collar the first time.
[Oh, how cautiously they'd approached that, and yet how easily it had come that night. It helped that Astarion had worn it first, of course; it helped that Leto knew that the other man did not think of it as anything save a kinky addition to their evenings. But he'd fretted that night, nonetheless. He'd dreamed of Tevinter and iron locks, a heavy weight around his throat and pressing down on his shoulders, and woken nauseated by his own inclinations.
And yet they'd played with it again. And again. So many times that it became something ordinary, easily added or removed.]
Perhaps our enslavement changed us in some way. I do not know if we would be inclined to the same things if we had been born and grown into freedom. But I know this: I do not long for Danarius when you set a collar around my throat. I do not miss him when you call me catulus, or praise me, or push me into serving you. There are echoes, maybe, but . . .
You do not miss Cazador when we fuck angrily. You do not force me to become him when I turn cold and cruel, and put you in your place. And . . . there is something to be said, I think, for doing something with someone you love.
You put a collar on me, when I swore I would never allow it in all my days. We have spoken of you controlling me like a puppet, when I spent my life freeing myself from that. But I allowed those things because some part of me thrilled in them— and in knowing that this time, I did have the power to make it end.
('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.
Thank you. For trusting me with— everything. Hadriana. What she did. How terribly you suffered. Words are always pitiful rewards for so much anguish. Promises, cheap.
People lie. People leave. And if they don't take from you, the world takes them.
[It's easy to forget, at times, how intimately Astarion knows loss. How cynical it makes him. How gentle. He's already lost the thread of what he'd meant to say, but something tan springs to mind in its place.
All the air runs out of him. Deflating softly.]
You know. [Soft, across the line. Decompression such a gradual process. He needs time, and he takes that in the toothless habit of play that isn't wholly play. Emotion masked as something else.] You always used to say you were afraid you'd run if we played rough.
Now look at you. Chasing handsome elves with their fangs and their complex-but-intensely-attractive problems across entire Realms without a second thought.
[I don't miss him, and Leto hums softly in response: I know. He does, just as he knows that assurance isn't really for his sake. But it helps to hear agreement. It helps to have someone else nod their head and affirm that assertion, so that late at night, when all the wild thoughts run through your mind, you can fall back on that surety. Leto agreed, and gods know Leto does not mind being the rock upon which Astarion builds this particular foundation.
And maybe they'll go back to this topic— no, almost certainly they will. For now the poison is out, the unspoken given words, and yet the issue will not go away just because they've given it form. The next time Astarion slips a collar around his throat, they'll speak of it. Or perhaps next time they fuck angrily, biting and snarling and seething, Astarion's cock fucking cruelly into his throat before the vampire ends up mewling and panting as he begs on his knees for forgiveness . . . in the aftermath, when they're spent and sweating, they'll speak of it. But it will be easier, then.
Just as speaking of Hadriana will be easier. This is not the last time he will bring her up, Leto knows. He doesn't want to talk of her, but he must— just as he must speak of Danarius. Of Cazador. All the pain, all the trauma, all the grief— this is how they manage to deal with it. By slowly but surely speaking of it, one topic at a time.
People lie. People leave.
But not them.
Still: he chuckles softly as Astarion nips gently at him like that, recognizing toothless play for what it is.]
Ah, well. You gave me your token in the aftermath. How could I do anything but chase after you?
[Oh, he misses that bloody cloth, just as he misses his sword. Ataashi. Most of the rest of it was incidental, little things that can be replaced, but ah . . . some of it still smarts. Leto stares out at nothing— and then, more sincerely:]
I am glad you brought this up. And I am glad, too, we could speak of it. All of it. And I will tell you as many times as you wish that your desires are not akin to wanting him back.
Know that there is nothing I don't trust you with. The past. Hadriana. All of it.
And there is nowhere in all the worlds that you could be stolen that I would not find you again, kadan.
A little beat across the line that could easily contain entire oceans full of thought: relief, hope, reluctance, comfort, warmth— more reciprocally bound gratitude, even. The only briefer sound within its bounds that of Astarion's restless fingers twisting nominally as they shift around the stone, and the rest of him following soon enough, judging by the soft rustling of cloth-against-cloth within his coffin. Possibly upright. Possibly rolling onto his side. Audio cues sparse in a space that both feels claustrophobic and too large without Leto there to warm it— and simultaneously too full of his own mind to keep it to himself. Whatever comes next, it'll have weight. Meaning. The whole of his heart on display behind barbed defenses that almost never quit, offered up to the fleeting thing that owns him.
And always will.]
Good.
[ —or it's that.
(Good, he chirps out as if measuring weather patterns, and though there's a bubble of molten adoration wreathing it in his mouth, he's an exceptional master of veering footwork. They could talk about his feelings. How glad he is, too, to be part of their ouroborosian thread of trust. How there isn't anything he'd hoard or anything beyond the concept of sharing. How he longs to see that splash of bloody red drawn tight across Leto's wrist even when the man is naked and sleeping in a heap of what should be shared pillows: his neck craned awkwardly at an angle, his arm dangling loosely from the corner of the bed— having already shoved Astarion with his bare feet once or twice already, not including the efforts of one overgrown wolf. He could tell him that he hates Thedas and longs for it with all his heart— and loves it, in his own embittered way.
He could tell him again, for the thousandth time, that he'll never leave his side come death or age or desolation.
But unless he wants to see Leto's work extended by another day, ensuring that he's kept away from him for longer, there'll be time to talk about all that later, as it comes.)]
Because I'd hate to have to be the one to track you down instead. My legs are tired enough already as it is, trying to keep up with you on all that noble, heroic— irritating mercenary work of yours.
[Says the literal vampire, who could rut him from sunrise to sunset and back again, provided he's well fed.]
[It's a faint chuckle, accompanied by the sound of rustling as Leto gets back to his feet.
He can picture Astarion right now, you know. The way he lays in the coffin, clad in Leto's shirt and lying atop a heap of pillows that by all rights ought to be shared with someone else. How he twists and turns, reaching for a body that isn't there, feeling the lack of warmth in a space that's meant to be theirs. Lonely and a little heartsick over it— and yet what good will giving into it do either of them? Better to chirp out an answer now and save the affectionate longing for a time when they can indulge in it. Whispering adoration and loyalty to one another in wake of the past looming in the shadows; nuzzling as they tangle their limbs together, hands clasped as they murmur words of affirmation and adoration . . .
Soon, Leto thinks. Soon he'll be back in his lover's arms once more. Soon they'll have another version of this conversation, touching back on all the grief and pain of this conversation with all the comfort of protective arms and nuzzling adoration.]
I walk for miles unending to hunt down a vicious murderer all so I can keep a roof over your head, and all you can do is tell me how irritating it would be to follow in my footsteps.
[Footsteps, steady and even. And you know, he thinks about flirting: coyly offering some little remark about stamina and all the ways which Astarion might prove it. But suddenly his thoughts veer in another direction, softer and more sentimental, and he instead murmurs:]
Do you think you can sleep, kadan? Or do you wish to hear me tell you some tale of the past as you settle in?
For the record? I'd much rather have you over my head.
The roof isn't much for conversation. Or seduction.
[He is a lazy thing, thank you very much. One with terrible priorities and possibly even worse opinions when it comes to ideal architecture, considering his preference for strong shelter when sunlight's still his bane.
And as it so happens, the most important rule of thumb for the foundation of his far-off world remains firmly locked in place:]
....but until I can actually hook my claws into those devourable little hips of yours once more, I suppose I could settle for a story instead.
[In other words, beloved heart of hearts: he still can't sleep.
Or more accurately, he can sleep— but he's still struck through with peripheral restlessness in a shirt that smells of life and warm amber, feeling it pinch against his side where it wrinkles between him and the covers with every prolonged shift. Coffin stuffed with a thicker blanket in pursuit of artificial comfort that might satisfy them both in different ways (something to combat the emptiness of the coffin when Leto needs to feel more swaddled than surrounded; an offering of meager warmth when there's no pulse for Astarion's overactive senses to follow— ) and yet somehow all he feels is stuck-in and weighed down in all the wrong places when he leaves himself even a second of silent thought, fussing around while he pacifies his instinct through that precious little stone and its low, incessant noises.
Noises he's not ready to let go of just yet.
It's one last childishly gripping bid at stay with me. And one that makes it easier not to sink into mulling over what-ifs while his amatus chases after prey.]
I want something long. And thrilling. And full of more than just your weekly misadventures in strip Wicked Grace at the Hanged Man.
Lazy and picky. By all rights, Astarion, you ought to tell me a story. One of us is out here working, and it is not you.
[He's smiling. Faintly, admittedly, but all the more irrepressible because of it. His heart still aches from all that they just spoke of; loneliness still gnaws at him, and he knows he'll miss Astarion when night falls and he has only his sleep roll to keep him company. But to have the ability to communicate with his beloved even when they're apart— oh, how can he not be pleased by that?]
I would tell you how I killed a god, but in truth, the actual tale was not so very interesting. Hm . . .
[A beat, and he chuckles.]
I will tell you a story of before I settled in Kirkwall. When I was still on the run . . . I was in the Free Marches at the time. And there was a particularly persistent bounty hunter who thought she was terribly clever, for she aimed to seduce me. Unfortunately, she assumed my memory for face was poor— or that I would be fooled by her tinting her hair. She became an annoyance after the fourth occurrence— but she was very good with knives, and weaponry and fighting were far more her forte than subtlety . . .
[And she had friends, as it turns out. The story goes on, and he does not mind telling it: how gleefully reckless he could get in those early years, paradoxically paranoid and yet giddy with freedom all at once. His glee at toying with his prey; his prey's easy reversal of the dynamic, and how she had tried to revel in his misfortune when her gang attacked en masse. It goes on, on and on and on, and they end up getting side-tracked over and over: one memory sparks another, and another . . .
Until day turns to dusk. Until Astarion's voice has gone sweetly drowsy as he insists he's still awake. Until Leto finally shoos him to sleep, laughing softly as he prepares his supper, knowing that his hunt is soon coming to a close— and that he will be able to head home, ready to settle in his vampire's arms once more.]
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Little more than a child. Barely a blink of a thing, snared between two covetous grips (and he knows about the differences in ages between worlds, but that hardly changes the fact that Leto was so young— add to it having all of his memories wiped clean, and oh, it's savagery fit for Cazador's table:) taking a pretty young thing and seeing just what happens when you unmake it in your name. Taunt and tease it. Rile it and watch it smolder unaware.
And if it fails in one way or another, you simply try again.
And again.
And again.
He fills his throat fill with heat that stings like blackened bile. Impotent and outdated, but thick within the hollow of his throat.]
They tortured you. [It wasn't about sex; Astarion's fucked enough shortsighted sycophants in his time to pinpoint the outline of those aimless footprints. If it had been about sensation alone in utter control, the rutting would've been the point: punctuation played out in penetration or gulping adoration— less than none care spared for the thing they used to that end. A thing to be used and put away, not crooning about his responses or lack thereof when he's been set up just to fail. The fall the thing that brings them glee; the glory that he can't say no.
They tore him to ribbons just to lie and call it fucking.]
Both of them.
[Did Isabela know about this?
When she took him to bed, that is.
On some level, Astarion thinks she must've. But intuition is still a different beast than insight: watching a beaten thing flinch at the first sign of an outstretched hand isn't the same thing as knowing what happened. If she was perceptive enough to know how to dance with him when he scarcely knew how to suck in breath without being told, or the shape of his body beneath the surface of his skin, then she wouldn't need words or truths; he'd be an open book comprised of a slim scattering of bent pages.
And in a way Astarion supposes it doesn't matter. What she taught Leto was enough to bring him back from that nightmare through the gentle rules of her splayed fingertips. There'd be no now if not for then— her then, that is.
Still, though, it's all a mess. Still, he can't stop himself from wading through the past when he asks:]
How long was it like that? Your captivity, not—
[Hells, Astarion.]
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He never thought of it like that. Torment, perhaps, and blatant abuse, oh, yes. He has never thought fondly of it. But to frame it as torture adds a heavier connotation to it, sharper and more blatant than his own half-formed thoughts. Torture to take a captive thing and render him into little more than a toy; torture to gleefully watch his reactions, and it doesn't matter whether it was jealous or twisted desire that prompted it, for it was hellish all the same.
Torture, I was tortured, and he tries it on silently, knowing even as he does that it won't stick. Not right now. Later, but not now. And maybe some part of him knows that from the start, for his next thought is so much needier.
I wish you were here.
It springs to the forefront of his mind without warning, lonely and soft. I wish you were here, I wish I was home, curled up tightly together in their coffin as Leto whispers these things in the dark. It isn't more manageable there, not really— but it feels as though it is. As if they might leave Hadriana and Danarius and all their horrors there in the shadows, with searing daylight acting as deterrent for the ghosts of the past.
But he isn't. And he's not. And he is too old to say such things aloud, no matter that he's sure Astarion feels them too. The walls creep up regardless, claustrophobic and nauseating, and his knuckles go white as he grips that rock—
And then Astarion speaks again.]
Ten years.
[More or less. And it helps, you know, to have that prompt. Better a question than bleating shows of dismay or pity (and Astarion would never, but still).]
I suspect I was eighteen when I competed in that tournament. And it was ten years of that before the Qunari attacked. [Twenty-eight. And then:] A few years on the run, and then seven in Kirkwall. Three or four more before I returned . . .
[So he was nearly forty when he and Astarion met. Or maybe he was older, or younger— he'll never know, and he's long since tormenting himself over it. At least it matters less here, when soon enough he'll count his age with three digits instead of two.
Ah. But he's deflecting.]
Ten years of enslavement. Of that . . . of torture. I grew better at evading Hadriana's grasp, and returning her torments in such a way that she could not prove it was me.
[But it was so petty. So pathetic. So pointless. He'd get her to humiliate herself in front of a group of Danarius' friends— and then wait with nauseating dread for the next torment she'd enact.]
She stopped bedding me after the first few years. Her hatred had solidified by then, as time passed and Danarius refused to allow her to graduate. But it was always a risk.
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That's all he hears, though there's endless more within the margins. And no, it's never been a competition (how could it be? Astarion feels the muscle and marrow beneath his skin sting with phantom slights from memories he's never had, only heard transcribed); the captive sound of Leto muttering softly that two hundred years is worse— unfathomably worse (and true, it is always remarkable to survive what seems impossible, noting it as just another horror surpassed now that the worst of it is done: 'heading out to the store this afternoon'; I was flayed alive so many times I've lost count. 'Come to bed, it's too damned cold'; I spent ages shut away like unwanted silver for daring to smile at the wrong time)— still lodged firmly in his mind. Refusing to go away no matter how he tries or what he urges.
But that isn't how it works.
Just as it was before: there's nothing to compare.
Astarion's gut won't settle in its agonized thrashing just because he swallows down a number cut from two digits rather than three. It knows as well as he does what ten years for a whelp with no memories and no freedom had to look like— fretting in a cage cut from heavy collars, merciless punishments, and the counterbalance of honeyed words and slower touches meant to make even hell seem bearable when he swears he can't take more. You lose track of time, like that. You lose track of yourself, too. Ten years of agony is more than half a waking lifetime given the age Leto guessed at. More, with so many memories stolen, no— strewth, no: there's nothing to compare except that they had lives of their own, once. Ripped from them like so much else.
Reduce it all, and pain is pain.
And everything else is just a drop against its leverage.]
I stand corrected. [About a lot of things— but about her most of all.]
You got your fangs into her long before she took her last. [He's proud of that one note. Cold breath slipping light across his lips underneath each ceding exhale, one conversational foot figuratively planted before the next. Small as a sliver of glass, it cuts its way throughout his tone regardless— even if it'd be easier to show that sense of predatory praise through a bumping push of his nose against a narrow jaw or risen cheekbone. Through the slide of his claws in moonlit hair, swearing that he's safe. And that he did well.
(Truth be told, Astarion wishes he was there.
In daylight, that is. Nestled just at Leto's side. Two months into elevated change and his sharper teeth still feel so wrong against each other, and the emptiness of his coffin's starting to feel like imprisonment all over again— or maybe that's just the fault of current conversation.
Blood is intoxicating. Power: exhilarating.
He needs both to survive. To keep them safe where all else could so easily fail and take them right back to said years of bloodsoaked pleas drooled out over folded knees. But sometimes underneath all that secured glory, he feels so much less himself. The weaknesses. The drawbacks. The endless, unslaked urges blotting out the edges of his mien. Call him weak (he'd be the first in line to lever it against himself), but he misses sunlight at his lover's side. He misses grabbing hold of vulnerable flesh without forcing an eternity's worth of delicacy into his own touch, roughly imitating trying to grasp ancient parchment without puncture. That as the weeks roll on, more and more and more he misses—
Ah.
Well.
That's not the conversation, is it?)
Funny how everything compounds when so much scar tissue bears down.]
I won't say that I'm glad it was only your master's touch that you had to endure right to the end, but....
[His lips thin; it comes across as the smallest sigh.]
I know what a difference it makes.
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[It does. It does. Danarius' touch was loathsome, despised and repulsive— but it was a constant. The magister had a taste for sadism when it suited him, but more often than not he preferred routine: for Leto to tend to him the same way he always had, mouth or hands or slickened cinch bouncing atop his prick, and oh, how his master had doted on him. False affection, to be sure— and even now, sometimes he'll shiver beneath Astarion's hands in the aftermath, a little overwhelmed in the best way by what something real feels like. You were so good, come here, amatus, his hands endlessly gentle, fussing over cleaning Leto instead of ordering him away, come here, affection so genuine it hurts).
But at least that false affection was better than Hadriana's seething torment.
But oh, that sigh. That barest exhale, and his heart is already thundering for the sliver of praise he'd heard before. The phantom push of a cool nose against his cheek, nuzzling in praise as he gathers him close . . . it will be a few days more before he's home, and oh, Leto prays the time passes swiftly, for he misses him so. He knows what expression Astarion wears as that little sigh slips out, and he can no more help chasing after it than he could breathe.]
What was it like, with Cazador?
[For he knows the vampire was— is, Leto realizes, his stomach dropping— of a far crueler breed than Danarius. Having the magister's focus was not an inherently bad thing, but with Cazador . . . ah, who can say if it's better to be sent out or ignored?]
Was it easier when it was only his touch?
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The dryness on his lips almost clicking when he parts them.]
Mm. It was. [Easier, he means. Point clarified voluntarily only one swaying beat later while vertigo sits thick within his mind (funny that he doesn't know which is more discomforting to focus on: the past or nauseating present).] He was fickle though, and I suspect....well. I suspect that's how our masters differed, for the most part.
You were Danarius' crown jewel. [He'll never claim it was a wonder or a triumph. Unlike Hadriana, Astarion sees the ugliness in that raised pedestal. The landmarks of its scars. But the truth is the truth: Leto was his favored pet.] Cazador had an empire all his own.
[Correction: Cazador has an empire all his own. Who needs Tevinter's fawning praise if the whole rotten imperium might as well sit underneath your heel? He has no one to appeal to. No one's admiration to inspire.] Filled to tipping with servants more powerful or more beguiling than you could ever begin to imagine— and there weren't limits to his reach: mortal, immortal, enslaved. [He could have anything he liked however he liked. And the only testament to his glory? Oh. Himself.
Bewitching in its own right, that pantherine power undefined; the way he dwelled within it. Mastery over everything, worn like a birthright and shown off in ways that made others want nothing more than to bend— even against their own will. Their own sanity. If he said he wanted you, gods above, you wanted him back.] I was only foolish enough to think I was his favorite at the very start.
Right after he saved my life.
[By killing him, as it so happened. A barbed little confession that stings— though not half so much as the inevitable third act.]
I learned.
But I never stopped wanting that preference, all the same.
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It's been alluded to. Mentioned. Little snatches of breathed out half-jokes, or vague references keenly understood with a single glance and a trailed-off sentence. That first night in Rialto, when Leto had confessed that he had been fooled by Danarius' attentions at first. They'd danced around it then, hadn't they? Talking about how it was always better to be favored than forgotten . . . I imagine you must have been lonely, Astarion had said, his skin warm beneath Leto's questing fingertips. I was, too.
And then the conversation had veered. Who had it worse, it must have been you, and they'd gotten so lost in their mutual assurance that they hadn't touched upon the rest.
Here and now, Leto thinks, is the second half of that conversation. Not a revelation, not really— but there's such a difference between suspecting something in your heart and hearing it spoken aloud. Oh, Astarion . . .]
It was the days that he praised me I loved the most.
[Soft. Gentle. I know, I understand, for he does. Oh, he does. There were only a handful, but oh . . . when the wind blew in the right direction and Danarius' mood was just right; when he would say sit, my lad, come join me, and offer him a glass of wine, asking his opinion on this or that . . . and it wasn't to be cruel, but to be kind. Some jagged impulse somewhere deep in the rot of his soul, a twisted impulse to be sweet that never lasted. Like offering a prized hound an extra treat or two when you've had a good day, it only makes the fall worse.
And Cazador was more cruel still. Leto will not say that Danarius never had manipulation and dependency on his mind during those days, but oh, Fenris was already his. Jaggedly loyal and barely a person at all, so fanatically loyal to his master that there was little need for reinforcement, save for the occasional reminder. But Cazador . . . oh, no. That was a far nastier game, with the most nauseating consequences imaginable, stretched out over years and years and years . . .
How many times, Leto wonders, did they go back and forth? You're nothing, you're everything; my little consort, my stupid fledgling . . .]
It is . . . difficult, not to want that.
[Soft. Roughened, but all the more honest for it.]
Difficult, too, not to revel in it when it happens— no matter how you might wish you had known better in the aftermath.
Difficult not to think that you are in love, when it happens.
[A savior swooping out of the night sky, rescuing you and changing you, prioritizing you, adoring you . . . oh, how could anyone resist?]
Tell me.
[Those first few weeks, or months, or years. When he was Cazador's prize instead of his puppet. Or afterwards, maybe: that fall from grace when he was left among his seething, sneering cohorts, the very same one he'd jeered at before falling from his ivory tower.]
What was it, to be his favorite? To have that preference?
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[Oh yes, they both know what it's like, don't they?]
I knew what he did to me. [First: enslavement. First: the magic trick of making someone beg for their own death with open arms— the word please on their lips. Dying in abused indignity on muddy streets at the hands of humans that Astarion still wonders over on occasion (dread like a knot in his gut when he'd first seen his new master talking to his Gur contacts, the matter forever damned to be a question mark). Too struck by salvation to feel it closing shut around his throat; too enamored to question the rules once he'd been taken home. Can't remember his own name. His old home. His old life or the ones he might've loved, but he remembers that first night so clearly.
Less so the ensuing fall.]
He made it hurt. [So much that so he feels it in his jaw. His throat. Both turned brittle with tension that won't stop, caught in the echo of old places; dry from centuries of thirst unslaked.] There was nothing so cold as the look of disappointment in his eyes when you fell short of whatever it was he wanted, just before he had you taken apart however it pleased him— and that changed, I should note, faster than the weather in midwinter. [And there, a break for weary amusement in recounting:] Someone's set the table wrong, even if he'd never told us his guestlist had shifted. Another spawn— not you— stored his research incorrectly. Dared to drop something while he's speaking, reading, fucking, dining— and those, my love, were the easy ones. At least when something like that happened, you'd see it coming. [On the other hand: smile at the wrong joke? Fail to read between the lines when he went silent and utterly still? Oh, you were done for.]
Maybe that's why the rest felt so damned good.
[For once, he's glad Leto isn't there with him. At least that way he won't have to see Astarion hunching through his shoulders like a coward. Like a thing beaten and called home, too stupid not to wag its own tail while slinking closer on its belly— near enough to freedom to walk away all the while, and yet:] Fresh off the heels of being stripped bare and endlessly humiliated just for existing or sabotaged by your peers in retribution, and there were nights when admittedly I hated how it felt to lie with him. Just one more violation. One more joke at his expense.
[Cazador had so many, after all.]
More often, I wanted nothing but that perfect calm. When all the commands fit just right, and someone else was the fool. The mark. The disappointment. And I knew everything I did pleased him. [It's Leto that he quotes at the very end, his own voice dropped into the bottom of his lungs; kept sheltered by a ribcage that's only ever felt about as resilient as cracked glass. He doesn't expect the elf will remember— that night in Rialto had been long, and gods trust that they drank deep from the well of wine and one another's injured company in the aftermath of sedate conversation, keeping the fire lit well past dawn— but Astarion hasn't forgotten. It stood so far out from the rest:] I drank it in like water offered to a man dying of thirst.
[He could've stayed forever in that praise. But you don't get to keep that part of Cazador Szarr.
No one does.]
Everything was simpler like that.
It felt....
[Good.]
Do you—
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He can't bring himself to say it. Not when he'll hate himself for it— not when the shame's too overwhelming: he could never live it down.
( ....but all those nights he's lied awake and restless, wondering. Dreading. Fearing without end the thought that there's a poison in his skull he can't escape no matter how far he runs. Not the tadpole— not some alien curse hellbent on changing him to its whims— just. Him. Just Astarion. Just the truth he's shut away alongside memories lost to torture and pitiful whines for mercy that gave him none. Maybe maybe maybe.
Just Cazador's voice, always there. Telling him he's never really been free.)
One year is such a small flicker of a second.
He has to know if it's just him. If he's well and truly broken beyond repair.]
....Do you miss it?
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The rest he listens to diligently. None of it is a total shock, for of course they both of them have danced around such topics before. The little traumas (little such a relative term), the horrors that do not immediately spring to mind, but that haunt them both nonetheless. Some of them have already slipped out, snuck gently between moments of idle conversation (the two of them in the kitchen making dinner, Cazador once had a spawn slice her fingers to the knuckle after she served one of his guests a sloppily made dish, always delivered wryly, always dropped off at Leto's feet and then danced away from before they could linger. And he never minded, for he would do the same: little humiliations that still hurt him on dark nights; horrors so nauseating and so pointless he had long since tried to forget them.
But the rage still rises in him. The useless grief and protective anger that always, always flares at times like these; the sort he has to bite back nowadays for fear of terrifying Astarion further. I'll kill him, I'll torture him, I'll hurt him for every grief, every indignity, every trauma . . . And he would. Oh, he would. Leto will not go back on his promise, but trust that someday, he will see Cazador dead.
For it's different than it was with Danarius. His former master was no paragon of virtue, but gods, he was never so cruelly volatile. Slaves were property, and just as you don't smash a lamp for the crime of burning down to the wick, so too would Danarius keep his temper (to a point). His wealth was finite, after all, and there was no sense in wasting thousands of gold pieces on a corpse when you could torture them into correctness. But Cazador . . .
They weren't even property, Leto realizes. He had been Danarius' prized hound, but Astarion wasn't even a dog. Just a living, breathing object, ready to be indulged or toyed with or tortured as his master saw fit. It made the lows worse than Leto can imagine (and he knows, he knows he can't, in the same way Isabela could never truly imagine the hells of his own enslavement), but the highs . . .
Oh, it must have been bliss.
But that hesitation. That half-formed sentence and the silence that follows speak volumes, for it has been so long since they've hesitated like this. And when the question comes . . .
Ah.]
Sometimes.
[It comes after a long pause. There is not another soul in any world he would admit this to.]
Parts of it . . . yes. I miss it. The simplicity of it . . . to know my purpose and my function, to have orders and fulfill them, and earn praise for it . . .
Or when he was pleased with me. When he would spoil me for it, or confide in me, or plan with me for some event within the magisterium, and I felt as though it was the two of us against the world . . .
[He hates himself a little for saying it. No: he hates himself so much for saying it. So much so that nausea roils in his belly; the blunt edge of that rock digs against his palm, leaving a marked indent where it presses.]
Yes.
[He stares out at the jagged outline of Baldur's Gate. And then, softly:]
But I miss it less now than I did when I was first freed.
I do not know if it ever goes away. Perhaps not. But the first few years it was strongest.
When I lived with the Fog Warriors . . . I told you I begged them for orders. It was not just because I did not know how to function. And later, when I was on the run . . . on the hardest days, I would miss it. The, the simplicity. The ease of having one road to walk.
[Another pause. A hesitation, for he has never thought about this when it comes to himself— but oh, Astarion is so different.]
. . . and it— it is different than missing him. Or being beneath his heel.
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And nothing ever will.
Leto changes that in half a single breath.
Start to finish (Fog warriors— how Astarion remembers that soft-spoken story, imekari still the first word to come flitting in by association; the simplicity of service more tempting than dignity at times) it resonates in the smallest ways. The most unseen ways, in fact, for he's never been one to let anyone see the rootwork of these particular scars. Like a blemish hidden under expensive silk. Like half-picked skin; he'd only had himself to blame for its unsightliness (or so he thought), and here, blinding as bloody daylight while he's shut away safely in the dark, Leto absolves him of it so quickly that he almost forgets this is a conversation. Stop-start buffets of emotion taking the place of every last civilized instinct.
A relief, not a burden.
I miss it less now (not I missed it), ergo: it is better. Ergo: it gets better. Over ten years to Astarion's pitiful one, and maybe there's something to be said yet for a restless, deadened heap of muscle that doesn't know how to stop oscilating between longing and fear and resentment turned ever deeper inwards.
(He's not alone. He's not to blame. He's not some cowed inchworm of a thing like the spawn he'd known here or the slaves he saw in Thedas, all simpering over crumbs like bleating, thoughtless livestock. Every bit the epitome of all mockery thrown their way: unaware of the hunches in their submissive spines or how they shook endlessly in their own skin. Repulsively unable to exist without someone else's hand coaxing them along. They need it, you see. They're compelled to it even without magic or shackles. 'Oh yes, of course,' he remembers one young apprentice in the Free Marches commenting at a melting pot of a gambling affair, 'the way Mabari must be loyal or a gamehound has to chase— it's inescapable.' Bred deep into their blood. And they'll always, always crave it.)
But they won't.
Not Astarion. Not Leto-once-Fenris. Not in the way Cazador had promised time and time again. Not like Danarius' insistence, either— or the Orlesians or Tevinters or Kirkwall-bound drunks whose own guttersnipe whores sometimes leapt at the chance to bare their teeth and hound someone lower on the rung than themselves.
If Leto believes, that's enough.]
....is it?
[The words don't feel right. He tries again:] No I—
I know.
[And he means that in ways maybe only they two can understand: I know. Whatever it is said or unsaid right now— it's mine just as much as it is yours. It's what I feel just as much as you do.
You're right.] I wouldn't dare go back.
[Correction:]
I won't ever go back.
....but.... [But, and this is the moment that sticks. This is when his tongue runs sour in its dryness, clinging to the back of his throat until it hurts against all rising pressure. Spit it out, Astarion.] The worst part is there was a sickening comfort to that collar that I sometimes catch myself straining for, even when I realize it's your touch.
[There, he's said it. The worst part of all this. The ugliest, most unsightly little facet to this long-lived pain, buried in the outline of their coffin— and the fact that he doesn't have to see the disappointed look on Leto's face when he finally admits it.
Which might be why he darts away again, as always.]
It's only been a year. [Like you said, Leto. It lessens. It'll wither. It's fine.] I'll outrun it, eventually. I swear.
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[It's quick. Too quick, maybe— but he isn't lying, and he isn't just saying it to assure Astarion. It's just that he can feel the pale elf pushing it away, shoving past it, and if Leto doesn't act quickly, they will. Astarion will sweep them along and that will be that, and he cannot let that thought linger untouched in both their memories, stark and bloody and raw.
So: you do not need to swear, honest and stark, and only in the aftermath does Leto try to understand what he means.]
You will not ever go back, Astarion. Do not undermine it. Not when there are countless slaves who justify their existence over the thought that things would be worse in freedom.
[When so much of enslavement relies upon the enslaved buying into the myth that they're better off beneath someone's heel . . . Orana's voice drifts through his mind. Hadraina's pet maid, her father's throat slit not an hour before and still, still, she'd insisted: everything was fine until today! Confusion and anguish in her voice, her eyes wet as she'd stared uncomprehending up at them, and Fenris had not known how to comfort her then. All he could say helplessly in reply was that it wasn't. You just didn't know better.
He understands more now.
But ah . . . the rest, now. The biggest part of this, ugly and jagged, ill-fitting in any kind of story. Varric, Leto finds himself thinking, wouldn't write about this. It doesn't fit. The heroic slave, a year into freedom, longing for the comfort of his master's control . . . people don't like to hear about such things. They'd rather buy into the illusion that one always strides forward, for it's so much easier than hearing the ugly, discomfiting truth that sometimes, instincts and desires and emotions all tangle together so messily, dragging a person down into the depths of the past no matter how they gasp and strain for the present.
There was a sickening comfort, and that does not surprise him. But . . . even when I realize it's your touch, and oh that, that shocks him. Leto swallows thickly, then rubs his face. He cannot say this information pleases him, but . . . this is not about him. More than ever, this is not about him.]
. . . tell me.
A specific incident, or in general . . . tell me what you mean when you say that.
[Not because he doesn't understand, but because there's too many ways it could be taken.]
I am not angry. I am not upset. I simply . . .
[His mouth is dry.]
I know what it is to long for a master's touch. To— to miss certain things, or feel the, the way he made you feel.
[Ah, don't stutter now.]
Tell me what it is you mean by that.
Are there . . . do you expect it to be him sometimes when we wake?
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No, that'd be— Gods, no. [No, he's at least certain he could never want that enough to vie for that mistake. Outside of the occasional hellish dream involving old nightmares and temptations made sweet until he wakes, even Astarion's own subconscious mind rejects the idea right at the bitter root.
This time it isn't raw dread. That quickness in his voice exudes a sense of knifing revulsion felt right to the bone, pressure on his spine spurring him to hiss rather than simper— though trust it's broadly aimed in all its focus: there's nothing at all akin to a needlepoint pinned to Leto's throat for suggesting it. He isn't angry or spitting in disgust, only jolting back the way a horse startles when it notices something secondhand. Peripheral blur inciting a rapid collapse in well-paced hoofbeats—
And then just like that, it's done. Darkened blur just a twig or a rock or a garden hose left out, existing innocuously in its own function.
Leto asked because he needed to. Because— strewth, they're up to their necks already, aren't they? Unable to make out branches, let alone forests for trees. Too far from one another to make this easy; too close to one another to let a single subject lie once it starts to freely bleed. He asks because he doesn't know what to think, not because he does think it (and even then, there's no sign of frantic fear for that possibility. Hesitation isn't cold, leveled horror. 'I am not angry. I am not upset.'
And after his head's back on as straight as it could ever possibly get at a time like this, he trusts in that assurance).
He trusts Leto.]
The sensation of it only.
[Nothing deeper. Nothing so tethered to the past that it cuts right through the meridian of what they have.]
It's you that I want. [Oh, right from the reckless start, that's all.] Your touch, your presence. Just you.
[And if he stops, he'll falter. Choke on his own words or swallow down his tongue, being immortal won't save you from the depths of shame or the need to tuck your tail against your belly and never lift your stare again. He has to keep going, which means he has to ramble, now— dragging Leto down into whatever mire it leads to.]
....but that includes your cruelty, too. The way your gemstone eyes shine with contempt when you aren't getting your way. The sharpness of your teeth when you tire of my harrassments. The look you sometimes get as if you can't tell whether or not you want to stop— [Keep going. Keep going. Think specifics. That's what he'd asked for.] Moments of ordered obedience, like when we fought back in Kirkwall. My chin to your knee, my legs wrapped tight around your shin—
[They've gone over this before a hundred times: played out in assurances from Astarion via his lips or voice or roaming fingers that it's not him in exchanges like that. Oh, darling, it's not Danarius' touch still levered against you. It's not his reach or his hold; you're not his still, even when he's gone— there's no disgrace to be had in lust so long as we're both happy.
But that's just it.
All those times, he'd aimed his sights on Leto and deliberately forgotten his own fear. His own worry. His own neophyte newness in freedom, stuck without permanence in any direction he looked.
He can let his guard drop, now.]
Perhaps it is that. Longing for the way it felt [and he emphasizes that word because] beyond the mindlessness of purpose on its own. Something I can't seem to dig out, no matter how vividly I try.
Taking his curse and relieving it with your fingers
2/2
Is that different than missing him, too?
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[And there is not a shred of doubt in his mind as he says it.
Now he understands. What was murky and unsure suddenly comes in abrupt focus, and oh, if his heart doesn't ache for understanding. The terror of knowing you are echoing what your master did to you; the fear that you are little more than a broken thing incapable of cherishing anything but that abuse. Remembering all the revulsion and hatred and grief you felt, and here you are now, reenacting it— oh, gods, yes, he does know that feeling.
Inhale, exhale. He will not fumble this in his haste to assure Astarion.]
Astarion, you wish for— for a reflection, not a recreation. You do not beg me to torment you, or use you, or whore you out. But there is a thrill to, to reenacting what we have gone through. I—
[No, this isn't right. He's circling it, and it's not that he's wrong— but this isn't what he means. Leto hesitates, trying to think of his own experiences before Astarion. Not the first night, no, but . . . those nights with Isabela when she would push him to submit. When she would have him worship her, whimpering and begging for her cunt, servicing her and getting nothing in return. Or worse: when they would fight. When she would push him into things, faux-force meeting good-natured rivalry, the two of them eagerly rutting as they tried to assert their respective will. And he got off on it, oh, yes, but . . .
There was always that drop. That fear.
He had never told Isabela. That wasn't the kind of friendship they'd had. She would have been sympathetic, maybe, in her own way— but then again, her way was always to brush past it, ignoring the past in favor of focusing on the future, and he knows he would have lashed out if she had done that to him. So he wrestled with it on his own, and gods help him, for it had taken years to understand. Even now he does not think of it very often if he can help it, an uneasy question in the back of his mind— but everything is so different when it comes to Astarion.]
. . . . I feared the same when I wore a collar the first time.
[Oh, how cautiously they'd approached that, and yet how easily it had come that night. It helped that Astarion had worn it first, of course; it helped that Leto knew that the other man did not think of it as anything save a kinky addition to their evenings. But he'd fretted that night, nonetheless. He'd dreamed of Tevinter and iron locks, a heavy weight around his throat and pressing down on his shoulders, and woken nauseated by his own inclinations.
And yet they'd played with it again. And again. So many times that it became something ordinary, easily added or removed.]
Perhaps our enslavement changed us in some way. I do not know if we would be inclined to the same things if we had been born and grown into freedom. But I know this: I do not long for Danarius when you set a collar around my throat. I do not miss him when you call me catulus, or praise me, or push me into serving you. There are echoes, maybe, but . . .
You do not miss Cazador when we fuck angrily. You do not force me to become him when I turn cold and cruel, and put you in your place. And . . . there is something to be said, I think, for doing something with someone you love.
You put a collar on me, when I swore I would never allow it in all my days. We have spoken of you controlling me like a puppet, when I spent my life freeing myself from that. But I allowed those things because some part of me thrilled in them— and in knowing that this time, I did have the power to make it end.
It is different. I promise you, it is.
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('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.
2/2
People lie. People leave. And if they don't take from you, the world takes them.
[It's easy to forget, at times, how intimately Astarion knows loss. How cynical it makes him. How gentle. He's already lost the thread of what he'd meant to say, but something tan springs to mind in its place.
All the air runs out of him. Deflating softly.]
You know. [Soft, across the line. Decompression such a gradual process. He needs time, and he takes that in the toothless habit of play that isn't wholly play. Emotion masked as something else.] You always used to say you were afraid you'd run if we played rough.
Now look at you. Chasing handsome elves with their fangs and their complex-but-intensely-attractive problems across entire Realms without a second thought.
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And maybe they'll go back to this topic— no, almost certainly they will. For now the poison is out, the unspoken given words, and yet the issue will not go away just because they've given it form. The next time Astarion slips a collar around his throat, they'll speak of it. Or perhaps next time they fuck angrily, biting and snarling and seething, Astarion's cock fucking cruelly into his throat before the vampire ends up mewling and panting as he begs on his knees for forgiveness . . . in the aftermath, when they're spent and sweating, they'll speak of it. But it will be easier, then.
Just as speaking of Hadriana will be easier. This is not the last time he will bring her up, Leto knows. He doesn't want to talk of her, but he must— just as he must speak of Danarius. Of Cazador. All the pain, all the trauma, all the grief— this is how they manage to deal with it. By slowly but surely speaking of it, one topic at a time.
People lie. People leave.
But not them.
Still: he chuckles softly as Astarion nips gently at him like that, recognizing toothless play for what it is.]
Ah, well. You gave me your token in the aftermath. How could I do anything but chase after you?
[Oh, he misses that bloody cloth, just as he misses his sword. Ataashi. Most of the rest of it was incidental, little things that can be replaced, but ah . . . some of it still smarts. Leto stares out at nothing— and then, more sincerely:]
I am glad you brought this up. And I am glad, too, we could speak of it. All of it. And I will tell you as many times as you wish that your desires are not akin to wanting him back.
Know that there is nothing I don't trust you with. The past. Hadriana. All of it.
And there is nowhere in all the worlds that you could be stolen that I would not find you again, kadan.
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A little beat across the line that could easily contain entire oceans full of thought: relief, hope, reluctance, comfort, warmth— more reciprocally bound gratitude, even. The only briefer sound within its bounds that of Astarion's restless fingers twisting nominally as they shift around the stone, and the rest of him following soon enough, judging by the soft rustling of cloth-against-cloth within his coffin. Possibly upright. Possibly rolling onto his side. Audio cues sparse in a space that both feels claustrophobic and too large without Leto there to warm it— and simultaneously too full of his own mind to keep it to himself. Whatever comes next, it'll have weight. Meaning. The whole of his heart on display behind barbed defenses that almost never quit, offered up to the fleeting thing that owns him.
And always will.]
Good.
[ —or it's that.
(Good, he chirps out as if measuring weather patterns, and though there's a bubble of molten adoration wreathing it in his mouth, he's an exceptional master of veering footwork. They could talk about his feelings. How glad he is, too, to be part of their ouroborosian thread of trust. How there isn't anything he'd hoard or anything beyond the concept of sharing. How he longs to see that splash of bloody red drawn tight across Leto's wrist even when the man is naked and sleeping in a heap of what should be shared pillows: his neck craned awkwardly at an angle, his arm dangling loosely from the corner of the bed— having already shoved Astarion with his bare feet once or twice already, not including the efforts of one overgrown wolf. He could tell him that he hates Thedas and longs for it with all his heart— and loves it, in his own embittered way.
He could tell him again, for the thousandth time, that he'll never leave his side come death or age or desolation.
But unless he wants to see Leto's work extended by another day, ensuring that he's kept away from him for longer, there'll be time to talk about all that later, as it comes.)]
Because I'd hate to have to be the one to track you down instead. My legs are tired enough already as it is, trying to keep up with you on all that noble, heroic— irritating mercenary work of yours.
[Says the literal vampire, who could rut him from sunrise to sunset and back again, provided he's well fed.]
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[It's a faint chuckle, accompanied by the sound of rustling as Leto gets back to his feet.
He can picture Astarion right now, you know. The way he lays in the coffin, clad in Leto's shirt and lying atop a heap of pillows that by all rights ought to be shared with someone else. How he twists and turns, reaching for a body that isn't there, feeling the lack of warmth in a space that's meant to be theirs. Lonely and a little heartsick over it— and yet what good will giving into it do either of them? Better to chirp out an answer now and save the affectionate longing for a time when they can indulge in it. Whispering adoration and loyalty to one another in wake of the past looming in the shadows; nuzzling as they tangle their limbs together, hands clasped as they murmur words of affirmation and adoration . . .
Soon, Leto thinks. Soon he'll be back in his lover's arms once more. Soon they'll have another version of this conversation, touching back on all the grief and pain of this conversation with all the comfort of protective arms and nuzzling adoration.]
I walk for miles unending to hunt down a vicious murderer all so I can keep a roof over your head, and all you can do is tell me how irritating it would be to follow in my footsteps.
[Footsteps, steady and even. And you know, he thinks about flirting: coyly offering some little remark about stamina and all the ways which Astarion might prove it. But suddenly his thoughts veer in another direction, softer and more sentimental, and he instead murmurs:]
Do you think you can sleep, kadan? Or do you wish to hear me tell you some tale of the past as you settle in?
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The roof isn't much for conversation. Or seduction.
[He is a lazy thing, thank you very much. One with terrible priorities and possibly even worse opinions when it comes to ideal architecture, considering his preference for strong shelter when sunlight's still his bane.
And as it so happens, the most important rule of thumb for the foundation of his far-off world remains firmly locked in place:]
....but until I can actually hook my claws into those devourable little hips of yours once more, I suppose I could settle for a story instead.
[In other words, beloved heart of hearts: he still can't sleep.
Or more accurately, he can sleep— but he's still struck through with peripheral restlessness in a shirt that smells of life and warm amber, feeling it pinch against his side where it wrinkles between him and the covers with every prolonged shift. Coffin stuffed with a thicker blanket in pursuit of artificial comfort that might satisfy them both in different ways (something to combat the emptiness of the coffin when Leto needs to feel more swaddled than surrounded; an offering of meager warmth when there's no pulse for Astarion's overactive senses to follow— ) and yet somehow all he feels is stuck-in and weighed down in all the wrong places when he leaves himself even a second of silent thought, fussing around while he pacifies his instinct through that precious little stone and its low, incessant noises.
Noises he's not ready to let go of just yet.
It's one last childishly gripping bid at stay with me. And one that makes it easier not to sink into mulling over what-ifs while his amatus chases after prey.]
I want something long. And thrilling. And full of more than just your weekly misadventures in strip Wicked Grace at the Hanged Man.
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[He's smiling. Faintly, admittedly, but all the more irrepressible because of it. His heart still aches from all that they just spoke of; loneliness still gnaws at him, and he knows he'll miss Astarion when night falls and he has only his sleep roll to keep him company. But to have the ability to communicate with his beloved even when they're apart— oh, how can he not be pleased by that?]
I would tell you how I killed a god, but in truth, the actual tale was not so very interesting. Hm . . .
[A beat, and he chuckles.]
I will tell you a story of before I settled in Kirkwall. When I was still on the run . . . I was in the Free Marches at the time. And there was a particularly persistent bounty hunter who thought she was terribly clever, for she aimed to seduce me. Unfortunately, she assumed my memory for face was poor— or that I would be fooled by her tinting her hair. She became an annoyance after the fourth occurrence— but she was very good with knives, and weaponry and fighting were far more her forte than subtlety . . .
[And she had friends, as it turns out. The story goes on, and he does not mind telling it: how gleefully reckless he could get in those early years, paradoxically paranoid and yet giddy with freedom all at once. His glee at toying with his prey; his prey's easy reversal of the dynamic, and how she had tried to revel in his misfortune when her gang attacked en masse. It goes on, on and on and on, and they end up getting side-tracked over and over: one memory sparks another, and another . . .
Until day turns to dusk. Until Astarion's voice has gone sweetly drowsy as he insists he's still awake. Until Leto finally shoos him to sleep, laughing softly as he prepares his supper, knowing that his hunt is soon coming to a close— and that he will be able to head home, ready to settle in his vampire's arms once more.]