Chapter Text
Amusingly, ironically, incidentally, frustratingly—it’s rather hard to stop thinking about Wyll.
You might assume that, now that Astarion is a (conditionally) free man, he would take this tadpole-induced vacation as the answer to all his fucking prayers. Specifically, he ought to be down on his knees (ha) rejoicing that for once in his gods-forsaken unlife no one is going to touch him for the foreseeable future.
And lest any eavesdropping celestial bastards think him ungrateful, know that he is rejoicing—sweet hells, but he is. For days the only physical contact he’s had with anyone has been Shadowheart’s perfunctory touch while she stitches together his wounds and the occasional jostle from one of his companions. No wandering hands; scarcely even a wandering eye. He almost wonders if he’s been made part of a group of celibate monks. And not even the repressed kind of celibate, either.
But here is the difficult part. Astarion is not a celibate monk.
He is quite happy to never touch anyone again for the rest of his corporeal existence.
He also—in a very private, loathsome kind of way—would very much like to suck a cock.
He briefly entertains the thought of being the one sucked off for once, just for the novelty, but discards it. There are limits even to the imagination, after all.
No, even in the privacy of his mind—his deepest thoughts, the singular spot where even a vampire spawn can maintain the thinnest shred of dignity—Astarion is unable to picture himself as anything other than the apparatus by which someone else receives their pleasure.
What a uniquely pathetic state of being.
As much as his stomach churns at the thought of touching someone else, being touched is infinitely worse. At best, it prolongs the inevitable. At worst, it—
It is much worse.
So.
At night, alone in his bedroll, Astarion’s mind wanders. Away from himself, his body, his own recursive and increasingly irritating patterns of thought—it wanders and it wanders until it, eventually, ends up back where it started. Astarion on his knees, entertaining someone else.
He has spent two hundred years fantasizing about freedom—ludicrous dreams, where he is fed, where he is warm, where he parts Cazador’s head from his neck with his fangs—the stupidest, most basic, crudest ideas of what he might do if only he had the power to control himself. And now that he has that control, he fantasizes about someone taking it away again.
Specifically, he fantasizes about Wyll.
Astarion blames his unfortunate fixation on the scarcity of suitable, fantasize-able targets out here in the middle of nowhere. Beyond his be-tadpoled traveling companions, he’s had almost no contact with anyone save goblins, gnolls, terrified refugees, self-righteous druids, and the occasional smelly mercenary—none of whom are terribly appealing. In Baldur’s Gate, it was always easy to pick a face out from the crowd and put a story to it, to imagine a voice or a personality to go along with a pretty face. Not that Astarion did a whole lot of fantasizing back in Baldur’s Gate, but when he did, it was easy. Now, the only remotely attractive—not even attractive, let’s say not actively disgusting—personas are the ones he shares a campsite with.
And so, it’s Wyll.
Gods, but it’s always Wyll.
It’s Astarion’s own fault. Wyll was the one he bit, when he was half out of his head from a dream and starvation and the desperation to give the biggest middle finger he could to the ghost of Cazador in his head. Wyll was the one whose blood he tasted—such sweet blood, too, such a heady taste, rich with life not even a devil could taint—and Wyll was the one who had threatened to stake him for the impudence afterward.
And Astarion was the one who listened to the threat, thought, “ah,” and went back to his tent to fuck his own fist until he came so hard he thought his heart might have restarted.
It’s not that Astarion wants to die. He has wanted to die before and probably will again at some point—but so long as he has the tadpole and is not yet a mindflayer, he is quite content to keep his skin whole and un-staked while this bizarre mess unfolds. He can at least put that concern to rest—he doesn’t get off on the thought of someone murdering him. He just gets off on the thought of someone humiliating him.
He gets off on Wyll humiliating him, specifically.
Why Wyll? Astarion wonders, the first, second, third time he finds himself alone with his drying sweat and spend and the fading fantasy of Wyll retreating out of his tent like the most considerate of lovers. Why not, say, Karlach—an excellent choice for a fantasy, being that it’s physically impossible to touch her anyway. Or Lae’zel, if he truly wants to have the threat of being beheaded by his bed-partner on the table. Why bite Wyll in the first place, when he could’ve sampled Shadowheart’s delectable neck? Or—no, there’s really no reason he would’ve gone after Gale.
There’s a reason, of course. A simple one, once Astarion forces himself to admit it—an embarrassing reason, but simple nonetheless. Astarion can follow the logic from the first time he saw that blasted man throw himself into the path of a goblin’s blade right up to the present moment, each step as unexpected as it is miserably inevitable.
You see, Wyll is a monster hunter.
Astarion isn’t exactly an expert on monster hunters, but he knows the type. There have been a handful over the centuries: the few who tried to best Cazador or one of the other spawn; the few who came for Astarion himself; the few who Astarion seduced, unbeknownst to them, because he thought Cazador might go easier on him if he brought home a potential threat as a meal. The few he seduced just because he found the irony funny.
Usually, a monster hunter has something to prove. Usually, they aren’t much more than a mercenary with a high horse and a chip on their shoulder. At first, Astarion had assumed Wyll was more of the same. The man even gave himself a title, for pity’s sake—and an embarrassingly childish one, at that. But Wyll—while he is self-righteous—is not the usual kind of man.
Is he a hypocrite? Yes, quite squarely. He nearly killed Karlach for being the puppet of a devil despite being a puppet himself. He is naive, and a bleeding heart, and an insufferable bore. Gods above and below, he seems to think puns are the height of humor. Astarion really ought to kill him on principle for that alone.
But Astarion really can’t afford to make enemies out of uneasy allies, no matter how irritating their senses of humor. In some ways, the social contracts necessary for survival are as binding as Cazador’s compulsions. There is only so much Astarion can do, weak as he is, when at the mercy of a group of seasoned warriors and softhearted pragmatists. The group voted not to stake Astarion in the chest; the group is never going to vote to remove Wyll from their ranks; therefore Astarion beds down with a monster hunter and tries to make the most of it.
And the more time he spends in loose proximity to their resident warlock, the more Astarion begins to come to a deeply concerning realization. Wyll is a hypocrite and a bore and a monster hunter, but he is also—gentle.
Wyll smiles easily. He tells tales around the campfire. He teaches children how to hold their wooden swords and pets mangy mutts between the ears and throws scraps of his dinner for the owlbear cub to chase. He walks through the world like some benevolent benefactor and he never demands gratitude because everyone gives it up to him so willingly.
And when Mizora came to him, he was no co-conspirator gleeful to enact bloody vengeance at a devil’s behest, but a terrified pet kept on a short leash. And he did spare Karlach, even when it benefited him not at all and got him all be-deviled for his trouble.
He didn’t even beg for Karlach to take his place.
Astarion was forced to rewrite his impressions of the man, then. Wyll is not the usual sort of hunter, training his vicious appetites towards socially-acceptable prey under the guise of heroics. It was, Astarion thought, possible that Wyll was too much of a child to have any viciousness in him at all.
But. When Astarion made the mistake of assuming that sweet, harmless, darling Wyll would be the obvious choice for a quick bite—
Well. Astarion was proven wrong, in short.
Astarion knows there is no such thing as mercy. A reprieve is only ever granted at benefit to the giver, even if the only benefit received is a hit of self-righteous gratification. But for someone—a hero with his own stupid title—to have such mercy to spare even for a loathsome little creature that tries to make a snack of him in the middle of the night—
Either Wyll is a fool who cares not at all for the consequences, or he is powerful enough that he doesn’t fear them.
He’s definitely a fool. His horns and his devil-pact are proof enough of that.
But the alternative—that there is some unyielding core of strength maintained in Wyll that even a devil and a mindflayer tadpole are unable to subjugate—that Wyll could’ve had Astarion beg on his knees for mercy and chose not to, because Wyll needs no reminders of his own strength at the expense of someone else’s—that Wyll can threaten with only a word and humiliate with only a look—
Cazador only wishes he had that kind of power.
What if… Astarion could secure a little of that security for himself? What if he could get it the only way he’s ever gotten anything—on his knees, on his back, however, wherever, whenever Wyll wants him. What if Astarion got to be the plaything of a merciful man for once. What if—so long as he's indulging in the fantasy—Wyll wanted him only when Astarion wanted to be wanted.
What if he and Wyll were… lovers?
Yes, that’s the word. What if they used each other in the mundane way that real lovers do.
Astarion’s mind has never much been in the habit of staying in his body when some more palatable version of reality is available for him to peruse. Perhaps it’s ironic that these days of stolen freedom—some of the best left in his shitty memory—are spent so much in the grip of those what ifs.
At least now most of his wanderings happen when he’s trancing. Or alone. Or bored.
And oh, how he wanders.
Astarion’s daily reveries have not been truly restful since his first century. Things are no different out under the sun than they were in the kennel. As always, his mind picks through memories like a shopper at the marketplace searching for the sharpest razor. The old memories return to him over and over and over and over—but where once he used to pray for mercy, for his own mind not to make himself relive the torments of his life during the one time of the day when he was all but guaranteed to be alone—now, he does not have to pray.
He plasters Wyll’s face over Cazador’s.
“Know your place,” Cazador would often say. Astarion learned to fear and hate and loath those words—a primal response, bypassing his mind entirely. His limbs would snap into position without Cazador having to compel him. He would beg, he would grovel, he would debase himself a thousand times in a thousand ways if only to avoid being put in his place.
“You need me to put you in your place?” Wyll’s phantom whispers in Astarion’s ear, and Astarion nods and whimpers and makes a mess of his bedroll again.
His place would be—yes, it would be on his knees, his arms behind his back. Wyll would fuck his face and Astarion wouldn’t mind, wouldn’t hate it, because Wyll’s hand would be gentle in his hair, wouldn’t pull except when Astarion really asked for it, and Wyll would say—
He would say—
And oh, this is the most difficult part. Because Astarion knows the shape of the things that lovers say, but how much has he ever really heard? He has been called beautiful by slurring drunks and skittish fools, he has been called slut and whore and every other darling little epithet, and none of it has ever done a damn thing for him. He has been on his knees for Cazador for centuries and never earned a word of praise that did not come with a promise of pain—he would be still and silent as a corpse and Cazador would beat him until he screamed, he would beg and cry and Cazador would order—order, but not compel, because it was crueler to give Astarion the chance to fail at the task—him to contain himself and make no noise while he—
But what would Wyll say?
“Good,” Wyll would say; but that isn’t enough.
“So good for me—” that’s better “—good boy, so good, I love how you get on your knees for me, such a pretty mouth—”
And Astarion—who has never once been good—moans. He actually moans. He has to bite his own lip to keep the sound from escaping his mouth.
Has that ever happened, genuinely, in his entire existence? Pleasure, voiced for its own sake—pleasure that is entirely his own, that is not laced with pain or fear of punishment or as part of a performance and oh Gods, oh Gods, Astarion doesn’t know which part of this is more humiliating, that he gets off so hard to the thought of trading one master for another, or that this might be the first time in two hundred years that he’s understood what sex is supposed to feel like. And it isn’t even real sex!
Which is for the best, frankly. The Wyll of his imagination is surely nothing like the real thing. And a phantom can be banished much easier than a man of flesh and blood and appetites of his own. He can even contradict himself—dart in and out of real memories where the real Wyll would make no sense. It is Wyll in Cazador’s bedchamber; it is Wyll on the streets of Baldur’s Gate; it is Wyll with him on the floor of the kennel. Sometimes it is even Wyll and Cazador in the same room—when Cazador refuses to be banished or replaced Astarion puts Wyll beside him, which is not particularly satisfying, in a sexual sense, but is… soothing, somehow. Wyll wipes away his tears. Wyll tells him that he is good. It is pathetic, and it is shriveling, and it is almost a reprieve.
But those are not his favorite fantasies—the ones he chooses, rather than the ones his idiot mind forces himself to relive. His favorite fantasies are him and Wyll, alone. There is no particular setting; no particular logic to them. Only him, and Wyll, and the things Wyll does to him.
You might think that the amount of bickering he and the actual Wyll get up to during the day would put a damper on the things he and his phantom get up to at night.
You might think that.
“We can’t just leave them to fend for themselves,” Wyll says, reproachful, when Astarion suggests abandoning the poor doomed refugees to their fate as goblin stew.
“If there’s something we can do to help, then I fail to see why we should not,” Wyll scolds, almost raising his voice, perish the thought, when Astarion fails to see why they should intervene on behalf of a girl who was stupid enough to sell her unborn child to a hag.
“For goodness’ sake, Astarion!” Wyll hisses, when he catches Astarion reasonably telling a number of tiefling children that if the goblins manage to break through the walls of the Grove they are all going to die. “Are you incapable of holding your tongue?”
“Yes,” Astarion thinks, madly, even as Wyll turns away from him in disgust. “Yes, I’m incapable, so hold it for me, won’t you? Keep me busy, give me something better to do with it—I don’t know how to shut up without someone to make me—”
“Will you be good now?” his Wyll says that night, putting him back on his knees where he belongs. “Will you be good for me?”
Yes. Yes. He will be so good for the amount of time it takes to rut into the sheets until he comes.
It’s a game in his head—a game he plays with his fake lover, where Wyll tries to fuck some morals into him the way Cazador tried to fuck obedience. It’s a game and it’s a fake game at that, but where Cazador never once succeeded in fucking Astarion into the perfect slave, he thinks Wyll could probably fuck him into being a better person. Astarion has never been good, but he would be a fucking saint for Wyll Ravengard.
A few minutes alone with his hand becomes hours in his mind. He keeps Wyll’s cock warm while Wyll strokes his hair and tells him exactly how good he looks naked on all fours until Astarion is shivering and chokes just from the praise. Later Wyll fucks him up against a wall, hard and furious and bruising, and Wyll tells him that he can be as loud or as quiet as he wants and Wyll will still fuck him and he’ll savor every sound Astarion makes, even the strangled, wheezing, pathetic noises that punch out of Astarion’s throat with no plan or practice or attempt to make them sound enticing. Wyll says that Astarion gets to come if he is good enough and Wyll always, always, always decides that Astarion has been good enough.
Wyll is the perfect lover, so considerate. Astarion is never left wanting except when he opens his eyes.
Days become tendays. A tenday becomes a month becomes a second, and Astarion’s abruptly-developed fetish for incorruptible, unobtainable heroes shows no sign of abating. If anything, the longer this little unintended dry spell continues, the less inclined Astarion is to return to the world of real lovers with their real, insatiable hungers.
He tries, once. He spends the entirety of the dismal little party they throw in celebration of their victory over goblinkind telling everyone who will listen that he plans to find the only other halfway sober person there and passionately ravish them until sunrise.
And he means it. He does!
Right until he finds out where Wyll has gotten off to.
On the shore of a freezing river, Astarion spills half a bottle of shitty red on Wyll’s shirt, insults him for spending the night brooding when he could be having a wonderful time as Astarion is so obviously going to just as soon as he finds a suitable paramour, and when Wyll doesn’t answer Astarion stumbles back to his tent, alone, to imagine how his fake Wyll would punish him for the pathetic display. Astarion wrings his cock dry and doesn’t so much “fall into trance” as collapse into the puddle made by the other half of his bottle of wine, spilled and abandoned on the ground.
It is… not Astarion’s finest moment.
But the wonderful thing about an imaginary lover is that Astarion can be truly, deeply, unabashedly pathetic, and it never makes Wyll see him any differently—either the real Wyll or the Wyll who visits him at night. His Wyll never fails to indulge him—even when it is, theoretically, Astarion who is indulging Wyll.
Take one particular common occurrence. Astarion on his knees for Wyll, naked but for a collar at his throat—because for all Cazador enjoyed marking his spawn and dressing them and debasing them and banishing them to a kennel, for fuck’s sake, Cazador had never seemed to particularly care for collars. So Astarion pictures one now, a little strip of glove-soft leather that he worked himself, an enclosure for the ugly scars that Cazador so dearly loved to lavish with attention and that have no place here, in this respite, with Wyll.
And in the afterglow—and what a funny word that is! Astarion has never thought of the moment after sex as a glow; it is a sunburn, a blistered thing, a wretched ache that leaves him vacant and stinging and hateful when it leaves him with anything at all—in that moment after sex that teeters on the precipice between the blinding violent too-much and the swallowing black pit of nothing, in the time of slow settling loathing that Astarion cannot fully escape even when it is only him in his tent with his own touch—
He thinks of Wyll.
He thinks of Wyll kissing him, regardless of where Astarion’s mouth had been a moment before. Thinks of Wyll cleaning him up instead of ordering him to make himself presentable. Thinks Wyll might pose him, pliable and unable to protest, until his head is resting on Wyll’s chest over the tantalizing, steadying, unfamiliar pound of a living heart. They would lay together in the dark, legs entwined, and Wyll would—yes, Astarion would let Wyll touch him. And Wyll would touch him so gently, almost reverently. He would tug on the collar—not so that Astarion couldn’t breathe, but so that Astarion would know that he was at Wyll’s mercy and that Wyll’s mercy was a reliable thing. Wyll’s warm, broad hands would move lower still, and—Astarion shudders, in the dream and in reality, when Wyll’s sharp nails make the most delicious tickling trails up and down the scarred ruin of Astarion’s back.
“Why?” Astarion wants to ask, but of course his fake Wyll doesn’t have an answer. Astarion can only ask himself.
Where is that idea even coming from? Astarion has certainly never experienced anything like such—soft, sentimental drivel before.
Even the few of his—lovers? Victims? Rapists? Let’s call them conquests, that sounds so much less sordid than calling them prey—those who were gentler, less indifferent, more likely to at least attempt to reciprocate no matter how Astarion wished they wouldn’t—no one ever touched him there. Not on purpose. Astarion had never wanted anyone to.
He wants Wyll to.
At least in his mind, he does.
Of all the unrealistic—and occasionally outright impossible—places that Astarion’s fantasies take him, this is perhaps the furthest from reality. That Wyll would choose him, use him, ruin him thoroughly and athletically and still, after he’s sated and there’s nothing more for Astarion to give him in the moment, Wyll might hold him. And Astarion would let him.
Merciful gods. He might as well start imagining their wedding and the six sniveling brats they’ll adopt if his fantasies are going to start getting so maudlin.
Meanwhile, in reality, handsome, heartfelt, horrid little hero Wyll Ravengard remains oblivious to Astarion’s fixation, as he should be. In fact, he likely thinks Astarion hates him—which suits Astarion just fine. He does hate Wyll, quite sincerely. Sometimes hatred includes earth-shattering orgasms at your own expense. It happens.
All told, it’s a friendly sort of hatred. Wyll has kept his promise not to stake him, and Astarion has kept his fangs to himself and the darling little beasts of the woods. Frequent disagreements aside, they are capable of being in the same room without coming to blows or even anything so banal as an exchange of sharp words. Astarion flirts with Wyll the way he flirts with everyone, and Wyll shakes his head and smiles and laughs and sometimes even seems to flirt back. Wyll tells him jokes in an undertone, sometimes, the ones that Astarion suspects he thinks are too mean to share with the rest of group, and Astarion is careful to be the worst influence he possibly can on Wyll’s burgeoning sense of humor.
And if, when Wyll is talking to someone else, Astarion sometimes decides to interrupt so Wyll can pay attention to him instead—well, what does it matter? Astarion’s mind is his own, and no one can compel him to expel its contents anymore. He can stand in conversation with the man, scarce distance between their bodies, his eyes glazed over and his ears no longer listening to the words Wyll says, instead trying to guess the way his velvet voice would hitch when Astarion wrapped his lips around his cock. No matter how many times Astarion pictures it he can never be quite certain he’s gotten it right. He needs to hear Wyll’s voice again, again, again. One more time, and then he’ll be sure. Perhaps just once more after that.
Only once, in over a month of companionship, do he and Wyll have a real argument: something Astarion can’t override with a more pleasant fantasy when he loses interest; something almost akin to the dragged-out fights Astarion would have with his siblings, once upon a time, though without the threat of Cazador to moderate the aftermath. Even so, Astarion manages to resist the temptation to stab Wyll in the throat. Wyll really ought to be more grateful for that.
It isn’t about the blood drinking, or the tadpoles, or even that necromancy book in the abandoned cellar. Hilariously—infuriatingly—it’s about that damned Gur.
Wyll refused to let Astarion kill him, even after they’d killed all those fake paladins for Karlach. It wasn’t that Astarion was jealous that Karlach’s safety clearly overrode his own in the group’s complex hierarchy, but really, was it so much to ask that Astarion be allowed to kill one hunter to ensure his own survival? Karlach got to kill three!
“We don’t know that he’s working for Cazador,” had been Wyll’s primary argument, which was both one: naive, and two: utterly beside the point. What did it matter if the man worked for Cazador (which he did) when he wanted to capture Astarion either way?
The argument had gone back and forth for hours, shaking sick-looking birds from the trees of the swamp with the sound of their voices until, finally, Wyll had said, “By the hells, Astarion, if the man actually comes for you in the night I will kill him myself!”
Which was how Astarion had learned that the only aphrodisiac more potent than Wyll Ravengard threatening to murder him was Wyll Ravengard threatening to murder someone on his behalf.
In the moment, Astarion was so surprised that all he said was, “Really?”
And Wyll had looked at him, furious and somehow gutted, and said, “Did you suppose I would sit back and watch you fend for yourself?”
As if that was not, in fact, the reasonable conclusion to draw from the circumstances of their argument. As if they’d been having some other argument entirely, and Astarion was the idiot for not realizing it until just now.
“I won’t let you murder a man over what he might do, but I’m not about to see you come to harm, either.” Wyll’s expression turned bitter. “Do you truly think so little of me? Or that I think so little of you?”
Those words… rattled around in Astarion’s skull for a while.
He doesn’t think little of Wyll, you see. He thinks rather a lot of him.
He thinks so much of Wyll Ravengard that it should probably scare him.
If there is anything more damnably reliable in the world than pain, it is this: dead things do not stay buried, the hidden can only stay unnoticed for so long, and a secret is only as good as its keeper.
Astarion—who has never been good—knows exactly what his word is worth, even to himself. Especially to himself.
Life under Cazador was a complex tapestry of things unsaid: layer upon layer of things avoided and evaded, of the meanest privacy clung to by the bloodless clench of knuckles and the very skin of his teeth. The struggle never won him much—struggle never did, with Cazador—but if Astarion ever stops biting the hand that feeds he thinks whatever cosmic clerical error that left him awake and aware might finally cease and he would, at last, drop to the ground as an empty corpse.
All this to say: Astarion should be better at keeping secrets than he is. He can manage, for a few days or even some scant decades, but it always comes out in the end.
This time, the end comes in The Last Light Inn, and it is because of a devil.
Of the two devils that Astarion has somehow managed to make the acquaintance of, he finds he prefers Raphael to Mizora. Mizora has a cold edge, a kind of careless, unpredictable cruelty—or at least, she does when talking to Wyll—that makes her harder to stomach. Raphael is almost… affable.
It’s a front, obviously, Astarion isn’t stupid. But it’s a front he can smile at and pretend like it doesn’t bother him when he finds himself suddenly naked in the middle of a battered taproom, surrounded by mingled looks of horror (Karlach) and clinical concern (Shadowheart) and embarrassment (Gale.)
And anger.
Lae’zel draws her sword, Wyll a half-second behind her. It’s… almost cute, the way they think it matters. Raphael’s expression says it all.
“Leave, now,” Wyll says, sword at Raphael’s throat, and—yes, that is his “Blade of Frontiers” voice he’s using, all booming confidence fit to shake the rafters.
“Now, now, lets not be hasty,” Astarion says, stepping into the path of Wyll’s rapier (he’s not stupid enough to stand between Lae’zel and her prey.) “If you want to embarrass me, devil, you’ll have to try a little harder than that.”
Raphael smirks. “Oh, don’t I know it.”
Astarion decides he doesn’t like him very much, after all.
But his private feelings are beside the point. The point is that Raphael has answers. And while what he wants in return is to be determined at a later date, the fact that he didn’t immediately ask for Astarion’s immortal soul—or whatever is left of it—seems rather promising.
Also promising: Karlach tells him as he shuffles back into his clothes—her brow furrowed and thumb worrying at the grip of her ax—that his scars are written in Infernal. Whatever Cazador carved into him is more than mere chicken-scratch, which makes it somewhat less likely that Raphael will have him jump through a dozen hoops only to tell him that the fabled poem is but a madman’s gibberish after all.
This all ought to have improved Astarion’s mood significantly.
It doesn’t, because Wyll’s decided to be a massive hypocrite about it.
Everyone else, at least, has the manners to keep their opinions restrained. Shadowheart clearly thinks he’s lost his mind, and Karlach is adorably worried on his behalf, but they’re polite about it. Not like Wyll, who has that very stiff, jaw-set expression that Astarion has learned, through careful observation, means that he is positively thunderous beneath the surface.
He has a slow temper, does their Blade of Frontiers. Hard to trigger, but just as hard to avoid once he’s been set off. There will be consequences for this, Astarion knows, and not the pleasant sort.
Then the inn gets attacked by a bunch of nasty winged corpses. The ensuing battle and subsequent tidying up after takes long enough that Astarion stupidly allows himself to hope that Wyll is distracted, his anger diffused by greater concerns of the heroic rescue mission or whatever it is that everyone else has been plotting for the past who-gives-a-damn how long. Astarion stopped paying attention hours ago; he made himself scarce when his betters starting talking about Grand Duke Ravengard.
He’s just poured himself his third drink at the still-smoldering bar when Wyll finds him.
“We should talk,” Wyll says, as grave and unavoidable as—well, the grave. It’s not the sort of tone one argues with.
Astarion tosses back his wine as he would whiskey and follows Wyll into the courtyard.
Even blood-splattered and seething—no, especially blood-splattered and seething—Wyll is unfairly handsome. The perpetual ash-gray of the Shadow Curse does no one’s complexion any favors, but Wyll manages to still look sun-warmed and bronze-bright despite the days of slogging through darkness. His horns adorn him like an infernal crown, his posture perfect as the dutiful son of a Grand Duke should be, princelike. His scars give his face texture—a weighty world-weariness that makes him seem much wiser than his four-and-twenty years.
He is so very young to be so certain of himself.
He is younger now than Astarion was when he died.
Not for the first time, Astarion wonders what must it be like to have such a short life—not only a mortal lifespan, but such a pitifully brief one.
Humans lead such little lives. What is it like, to feel each year pull you one step closer to the grave? To die when you’re scarcely out of childhood? To look for wrinkles in the mirror each morning—to look in mirrors at all, in fact.
Does it feel like this? Astarion wonders. Like Wyll Ravengard backing him into a corner—like dread and anticipation, like wine melting on the back of the tongue, sweet until it isn’t. Does it feel like a fire is kindled somewhere out of sight but spraying you with sparks—your heels hounded, driven forward, pitched between the certain past and the black unknown? Tempted by it, shying from it, kissing the edge of something unfathomable. They say the short-lived accomplish so much so quickly because of the fear of death that drives them—and not just because they breed like rabbits.
What a charmed life it must be, for death to be the greatest thing that scares you.
Wyll is young, and human, and he acts like a child’s idea of a prince—and there is no doubt in Astarion’s mind that he can imagine worse fates than death.
Which is what makes his insistence on self-righteous petty heroism so deeply irritating.
“You can’t trust a devil, Astarion,” Wyll begins with all the same knight-in-shining-leathers naivete that he had about the damned Gur. “I… understand the temptation you face, but whatever Raphael tells you, you won’t be able to trust him.”
Astarion thinks about beating Wyll’s pretty skull in with the bottle he left on the bar.
Since when has trust been on the table? Astarion doesn’t trust anyone. He’s allergic to the concept, actually, a natural consequence of two centuries of ceaseless fucking torture.
There is precisely one thing that Astarion trusts and it is the lengths to which he’ll go to ensure that he never bows to anyone again. One deal with some smarmy devil is nothing compared to what Cazador has done—can do—will do when he finds Astarion again.
And he will find Astarion again. Sure as the sun still burns somewhere beyond the boundaries of the Shadow-curse, Cazador is going to find him. And he will demand recompense for every freedom Astarion has wrenched from the tadpole’s grasp.
All Astarion can do is arm himself before it happens. With knowledge. With knives. With… allies.
Allies like Wyll.
So Astarion does not cave Wyll’s skull in with a wine bottle. He does not call Wyll a condescending prick. He keeps his smile neat and tidy when he says, with patient diplomacy, “I don’t see how it’s any of your business who I trust.”
That’s not a good enough answer for Wyll, of course.
Nothing is ever good enough for Wyll Ravengard.
“I don’t mean to pry into your personal affairs,” Wyll says like he means it. Cheeky little liar. “But surely you can understand why I’m concerned. You’re a part of this group, Astarion. What you do affects us all.”
I’m a vampire with no powers and a whore nobody wants to fuck, Astarion doesn’t say. I think the group would manage to limp along without me.
But he should be diplomatic, still.
“Careful with the hypocrisy, darling,” Astarion says, lightly picking at Wyll’s collar. “It doesn’t suit you.”
Wyll flushes. His skin doesn’t betray him, and neither does his grim expression—but Astarion can taste the pulse of blood to his cheeks.
He rallies well. “I don’t see where the hypocrisy is in offering advice—”
“You might not.” Astarion’s not much in the mood for a monologue, thank you. “But what about your patron, hm? I don’t suppose Mizora would care to hear you speak so ill of her kind.”
Wyll’s said worse about her before, of course. Astarion honestly has no idea what the limits of her perception are either. But the reminder—the threat of her—that's enough to keep Wyll from finding his footing.
“That—” Wyll’s mouth opens, shuts. His jaw sets into a grimace, a hot puff of breath escaping his lips. “I—”
“Devil got your tongue?” Astarion purrs.
Astarion has seen Wyll angry, before.
He’s not sure he’s ever seen him wear an expression like this.
“Godsdammit,” Wyll says, almost a growl. For the briefest of moments, Astarion almost wants to flinch from him. “Astarion, please. If you pact with a devil—”
“Who said anything about a pact? I’m no warlock, dear. A simple exchange—that’s all I need.”
“It won’t be simple,” Wyll says, automatic. “Once he has you on the line—” Wyll breaks away, grinding his teeth. “He will find some way to keep you there, Astarion, I swear it. I’ve seen it happen—”
“Just because you don’t know to read a contract before signing doesn’t mean I’ll make the same mistake,” Astarion snaps.
Wyll flinches from him.
It’s only a small step back—only enough to highlight how close they’ve gotten. How close they still are.
Astarion presses forward. It’s Wyll’s turn, now, to be driven into a corner.
The tadpole squirms in Astarion’s head. It likes when there’s conflict—tensions high, minds pushing against each other like butting rams. Or maybe it’s Astarion that wakes it, that knows how easy it would be to seize that sweet authority.
Gods, he wants to crack Wyll’s head open and push the memory inside—if Wyll knew what it was like to feel his own flesh be flayed beneath Cazador’s knife, maybe then he’d understand just how seriously Astarion is taking this and stop being so precious about Astarion’s nonexistent soul.
What stupid things, bodies are. Wyll is infuriating—Astarion is furious, really, and still he finds his attention drawn to Wyll’s body. His hot blood-scent. His lips.
It’s the venue’s fault, probably. Astarion has spent so much of his life in alleys just like this. He’s fucked and been fucked up against so many buildings on the streets of Baldur’s Gate that peeling plaster and weathered cobblestones might as well be pornographic to him.
But it’s not fucking that he’s thinking about now. It’s just mouths—just kissing, just Wyll shutting him up with his mouth. Gods, Astarion never thought about kissing before Wyll Ravengard.
Maybe it’s not the venue. Maybe it’s just Wyll.
Wyll, who could push him to his knees right now. Wyll, who could grab him by the neck and kiss him until neither of them can breathe and Astarion recoils from the thought of it and he craves it all the same, to be shut up, to be held down, to be made good.
What will it take to get this man to break? To snap his composure like a chain and wrap Astarion up in the ends of it? Surely Wyll’s patience isn’t limitless—surely he will push Astarion down into the dirt someday and it will feel like relief, maybe, to finally be back at the foot of someone, where he belongs.
This time he might even deserve it.
Wyll’s expression hardens. “This isn’t about me,” he says. Even the words sound flushed, engorged with blood.
“No, it isn’t,” Astarion agrees. “It’s about me. I make my own choices, darling. Consider it a courtesy that you even know what I’m considering—”
“I do,” Wyll says, though he says it hard, and the fire is still in his Hells-red eye. “And you’re right. This is your choice, Astarion—” damn him, damn him for knowing exactly what will make Astarion’s anger soften, for speaking the empty words that will console his rage into a more pliable shape— “but you needn’t make your choices hastily. That’s all I mean to say. Think it through, and you can find a better way.”
It would be so easy to believe him. To let those pretty words soothe and corrode him, to sway under the artless earnestness of those mismatched eyes. To obey.
But Astarion knows what it is to be offered simple choices by handsome men in dark alleys.
“Oh, so that's how you became Mizora’s favorite bitch!” he says, bright and overloud, false cheer dripping off the words like bile. “You just forgot to think. How lucky am I to have your example to provide a cautionary tale.”
There's a moment—an instant of ear-ringing, audible silence—in which Astarion is certain that Wyll is going to kill him.
(It’s what Astarion would've done. What he had tried to do, more than once, when the other spawn turned their churlish attempts at wit against him—is that why you’re Master's favorite bitch, Astarion?—the only thing that saved Petras's life being that he'd already lost it, and Cazador personally peeling Astarion's claws out of his brother’s protesting corpse—)
But Wyll is not Astarion.
And his anger runs cold.
“I’m not going to fight you about this,” Wyll says, low-voiced, restrained, deep as a fucking bulette underfoot. The fact that Astarion can hear the anger in him and Wyll still isn’t doing anything about it is more unsettling than it would be if he wrapped his fist around Astarion’s throat. “I'm only trying to help you."
Astarion forces himself to laugh.
“Help me?” he repeats, scathing. “Then tell me this, if you want to be helpful. Devils are bound by their contracts, aren’t they?”
“Well—" Wyll’s steel-hard expression wavers. "They are, but—”
“So Raphael would have to tell me the truth.” The tadpole writhes at the feast of the fatted thoughts spilling out between them, the anger and the lust and the things unspoken, gnawing at the soft matter in Astarion’s skull like a worm in an apple. The sting makes the words come faster. “Wouldn’t he?”
Wyll looks away. “You don’t understand. The truth can be—”
“What, a tool? A weapon?” Astarion scoffs. “It’s a weapon I’ve been wielding since before you were a twinkle in your grandfather’s eye, darling. I know when I’m being manipulated.”
Astarion, almost, reaches into the scant distance between them to touch Wyll’s shoulder—to soothe him or to rile him he doesn’t know, only that Wyll is so near and he smells so sweet and Astarion is certain he’ll be reflecting on this moment later, alone. The memory of the way Wyll’s pupil went wide at the sight of him. How his breath came tight and high in his chest, so close Astarion could feel each hot pass of it on his face.
It’s… excruciating, the thrill of testing Wyll’s patience. Like standing on a ledge in a windstorm. One hand in a wolf’s mouth. Death and its edge.
“He’d have to tell me the truth,” Astarion says, almost a coo. “The rest is immaterial.”
He turns away, fully intending to leave the conversation there—except in his head, where he can spin it out into a much more satisfactory conclusion—
“Astarion, wait—”
Wyll grabs his wrist.
A firm grip. A hot, tight, powerful grip—the most Wyll has ever touched him, the most violence Astarion has ever experienced from Wyll’s touch and oh, oh.
Astarion has thought about those hands. He’s dreamed about them in all manner of places and positions and all he can picture now is Wyll using the leverage to wrench his arm behind his back. Wyll driving him to his knees, Wyll grinding his cheek into the dirt and Wyll yanking Astarion’s hips back with a grip that bruises so sweetly and Wyll shoves him down and fucks him and fucks him until it hurts and Astarion screams and begs and—
A lurch. A sick mucus-taste in Astarion’s mouth and a pain behind his eye. Before Astarion can process what it means there is a wave, a fucking rush of pure untempered revulsion that swamps him all at once.
Wyll drops his hand. Astarion barely notices. The disgust horror shame hatred is still in his head—and it isn’t his.
It’s Wyll’s.
Wyll, who is staring at him with wide, shocked eyes that perfectly match the horror in his—in their—minds.
Astarion recoils first.
The connection snaps. Astarion doesn’t know if it’s he or Wyll who breaks it or if their tadpoles have simply decided they’ve tortured each other enough. They stare at each other, mouths mutually agape. Neither of them speak.
Astarion needs to say something. Needs to—to salvage this situation before Wyll comes to any conclusion but the obvious truth that, yes, Astarion is exactly as hard-up and desperate for a good fuck as that momentary lapse in control made him seem. But what could he say? What could he possibly say?
However much Wyll saw, he clearly saw enough. He saw, and he hated it.
“Astarion,” Wyll says, almost a whisper. “You… w-what—”
For the first time in Astarion’s memory, Wyll’s voice sounds small. He sounds as young as his tender human years—like a sheltered virgin getting his first taste of any desire more depraved than missionary with the lights out. Astarion has probably never been more mortified and less turned-on in his life.
Abruptly, Astarion realizes that he’s had enough of this.
“Oh—fuck this!” he croaks, and does what he does best—
He cuts and runs.