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The most infuriating thing about Tav is not his inclination to be pleasant in the morning, even after his everyday routine of rigorous morning exercises and stretches, done with a peaceful expression and without a shirt, no matter the drinking or cursing or fighting the night before. Sometimes he wrestles Lae’zel while Karlach coaches both from the sidelines, hollering for the gods. After, Tav will accept coffee from Gale with a quiet thank you, his warm, brown skin covered in sweat, and let Wyll use him as a ballast as he tugs on his boots with new tiefling claws. All this—quarter of an hour after sunrise. Astarion doesn’t even sleep and it inspires a particular nausea.
It’s not even his propensity for lending a hand. Now, a month or so of running around the wilderness, trying to find the archdruid and scrabbling with goblins, Tav will let Astarion or Shadowheart insist they get half payment upfront, or to accept the few gold coins palmed into his hand. There are six of them to feed, after all. Besides, watching Tav easily lift an entire horse cart so some tieflings could repair its axle had made his mouth go so dry he needed to cough into his elbow.
It’s Tav’s expertise at extracting information. Some secret, sagely art taught to him at whatever wretched arsehole of Faerun his monastery is tucked inside. He barely asks questions. He barely shows interest, if Astarion is honest. One could hypothesize there’s something about Tav that makes one want to unburden themselves. Firm muscles, competent shoulders. Hazel eyes, wide and dreaming. His fondness for pranks, as though raised a petulant street urchin. A slow, honey-sweet smile and a quiet laugh that comes easy. The freckles all over his face, his neck, his arms. The thick, sunburst-shaped scar ebbing out in soft, dark ripples behind his ear. The way he will stop and stare at a beautiful thing—sea glass, valerian flowers, a gorgeous still life of a butterfly resting on bone they found rotting in a wet cave—as though inscribing each detail to memory.
Maybe it’s because he’s a little short for a half-elf. Astarion, a lithe and draping beauty, is almost a hand taller.
No. It’s much worse. Tav has the patience of a fucking boulder.
After the day they’ve had, any normal person would demand answers, or an apology, from Astarion immediately. Even someone inclined to politeness or subtlety would insist on a conversation after most of the others had gone to bed.
Instead, Tav tortures him by proximity. When it’s late, he pads over to the fire, folds his legs under himself a foot away from Astarion, and starts threading the eye of a needle.
Astarion says, “I’m not going to talk about it.”
“I’m mending,” says Tav. There’s a sizable rip in the back of his vest—a washed out, dull forest green when it's not near black with sweat or mud-brown from the road. Astarion glances down at his nails. Could he have—no. One of those vile goblin scimitars, surely.
Tav pinches the ragged edges of fabric together and manages a half inch of running stitches before Astarion physically cannot stay quiet. Torture can be borne, but not butchery. “Backstitch,” he grits out. Tav’s hands pause, listening. Some part of Tav always stills when Astarion talks. “You need a patch and a backstitch unless you want to burst out of it reaching for gruel in the morning.”
“Burst?” Tav’s brow rises.
“Give it here,” snaps Astarion. He holds out a hand when Tav doesn’t respond. “Now. I don’t have all night.”
Tav wordlessly holds the garment out to him, and Astarion snatches it out of his hand. He digs through his pack until he finds a thick scrap of canvas he’d been saving for when his pockets inevitably give out. He secures the edge with a fang and rips elegantly until he has a passable patch. It won’t match, or be pretty. It will rub coarsely against Tav’s skin in the sun and perhaps chafe him in the rain. Good.
Astarion hems the edges before Tav says, “I was doing the same stitch,” not far from his ear. Astarion manages not to jump six feet in the air.
“Yes,” he mutters, through gritted teeth. “It’s just for the hem.” He should be backstitching the hem too, but he can smell Tav now—dry, warm, a little sweat, wine from dinner, alive—and he needs to kill something immediately.
Tav just nods, propping his chin on a fist and watching Astarion’s fingers pull the needle through the fabric.
“I’m not going to teach you,” Astarion says.
A shrug. “I learn best by watching.”
A quarter of an hour passes in silence. Astarion is livid. Tav hadn’t even been this silent when he had caught Astarion with his fangs in his neck. To be frank, Tav had only seemed curious. Maybe even a little amused. I’d been thinking, he said, about your sharp teeth.
Astarion sews rows of backstitches of alternating length across the vest and patch with undyed thread. Secure but with a little give to accommodate the movement of flesh and sinew.
Tav makes a little noise once Astarion starts the fourth row. He pauses, daring Tav to argue.
“This way you’re—sort of stitching it twice,” is all Tav says. He shifts his head to his other hand.
Astarion is practiced enough at this to steal a glance down at Tav. There are no marks on his head. No scratches on his brow, scalp, or neck from wicked nails. Tav keeps his hair shorn to the quick. There would be no hiding a mark. Astarion had thought about it through all of dinner—as though Tav doesn’t have scars by the pound, as though a few from Astarion wouldn’t be the smallest number among them.
“Shadowheart healed them,” Tav says. Astarion wonders for a horrible moment if he had voiced his thoughts aloud instead of thinking them. Cazador had done similar magic to them all once—a strange spell where every thought was compelled to be spoken. It had only lasted a handful of hours. The repetitive mundanity of existence, especially for thralls and spawn, was intolerable to Cazador in a great chorus. I’m hungry. I’m hungry. There’s a stone. He’s upstairs. I’m hungry.
He schools his expression into a scowl. Tav is looking at him now. “I know,” he lies.
Tav nods, and drops his gaze to Astarion’s fingers, watching their arch and push. There is the thinnest outline of a scratch across the bridge of Tav’s nose. A crack in the glass.
“Missed a spot,” he says. Tav shrugs. It’s all he knows how to do, apparently.
They’d been ambushed rather stupidly by goblins on their way to the swamp. Tired, sloppy work after a long day of walking and two scuffles in the afternoon. Astarion had wedged himself between a stone and a tree, out of sight with his clever bow. He remembered Lae’zel bisecting one with her greatsword at an elegant diagonal. Gale, whirling around with lightning crackling in one hand. Tav, snatching an arrow from midair just before it buried itself in his eye.
There had been some goblin witching woman, a sorceress with a ruby drop hanging from her ear. He admired its glint in the sun. Then the world went dark, and silent, and he had forgotten who he was, where he was. The acrid, copper taste of panic in his mouth. Madly scrabbling for whatever he could touch. Not again. Let me out. Let me out—
When he felt arms around him, he fought them like mad, skin puncturing and bleeding underneath the cut of his nails. His feet and knees beat at soft spots; even his fangs snagged some sorry flesh. He had scraped over a thick scar—and his hand had slowed, and felt its strange, rippling ridge, and the pointed ear below, and realized he was fighting Tav. He wasn’t sure what happened next. Being turned, not too fast. His back against something solid and fingers wrapped gently around his wrists. Tav speaking lowly in his ear. He could only feel the shape of his breath, a low vibration from his chest.
“What were you saying to me?” he asks briskly, much as he might inquire what slop has Gale conjured up for you all to eat this evening?
Tav cocks his head. “When—?”
Astarion flutters his fingers off-handedly. Earlier. He hears Tav clicks his tongue. He angles his stitches at a diagonal, making new vertical rows at a slant to form a diamond. It’s quick work, and if he doesn’t work the needle, he might jab it into Tav’s eye.
“You don’t remember?” asks Astarion after a long moment passes. Disappointing. Of course not.
Then Tav says something he does not expect. “I was a little panicked,” he admits.
Astarion stares. “Why?” Tav has the mettle of a pile of rocks. He could piss off the sea for stillness.
And Tav’s soft, warm laugh makes Astarion realize he has said the last bit out loud. “What?” he scoffs. “It’s certainly not untrue. I’d bet your tadpole has already perished because there’s nothing to feed on up there but granite.”
Tav is trying to hide his smile behind his fist. “You make me sound like one of those old horses they teach children to ride on because they won’t spook.”
“Well.” Astarion pulls thread through cloth with elegant punctuation, thinking of the tieflings and their broken axle. “We know firsthand you can pull a cart, don’t we?”
Tav rocks back a little on his haunches, chin pressed to his chest, body humming with laughter. “Retirement.”
Astarion snorts, and angles the patch for another row of stitches, pointing towards the top. It’s quiet again, but he can hear Tav thinking. He opens his mouth to divert whatever line of thought might come from this, and then Tav says, “Your name. Astarion, Astarion. And—it’s Tav, it’s just me, it’s me.” Another pause. “I won’t hurt you. I said that a lot. I promise I won’t hurt you.”
The needle in Astarion’s hand stills mid-stitch. It’s a lie, he knows, no matter how it’s intended. Not even a god can promise such things. But he examines the thought in the light, a delicately tossed knife caught over and over again by the handle. Not stop fighting me. Not roughly shoving him into the stone or wrenching his arms behind his back. Not even when Astarion was tearing chunks out of Tav’s scalp.
He remembers the blood running into Tav’s eyes. It was beautiful, even after he realized what he’d done. One drop trailed all the way to the corner of his mouth. It moved in soft, endless shapes: you still with me, Astarion?
“So you just knew to find me,” he says dully, not bothering to make it a question. “Like one of those drab little pigeons.”
“You made a—noise,” Tav says, “and then went so quiet. I thought you went down.”
Astarion wants to ask, but doesn’t want to ask. Tav tells him anyway. “Like half a scream,” he continues, “but it was—” He raises a hand to his throat in a sudden gesture. “Choked out.”
He completes the stitch with violence in his heart. “It was a Silence spell,” he mutters furiously. “I couldn’t hear you or myself.”
“Astarion,” says Tav, “you don’t need to—I’m mending my shirt.”
“I’m mending your shirt,” Astarion corrects him. “My old master, Cazador. He—”
Mentioning his name is sloshing water over the open fire. It’s a name with more inevitability or promise than anything Tav could do or say. It means vengeance and misery, and crawling with your belly against the ground as a rat does.
Nothing in Tav’s breathing changes. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale. Just as hunters slow their pulses and steady their arms before firing the arrow. It’s so careful. Whatever hand was around Astarion’s heart loosens its grip. Tav knows when someone feels like prey.
He shakes his head. The point of the needle pushes through canvas and cloth. “He locked me in a tomb for a year after I disobeyed him. Just me. It was lightless and silent. I could barely move. A whole year. I went mad.” Then he shuts his mouth with a click.
Inhale, exhale. Astarion matches the soft lock of the thread in his stitches to Tav’s breathing.
“She did cast Silence,” says Tav. “You were the only one caught up in it. They leveled some smokepowder but Gale’s looking at the dredges. It was half oil and pitch. The smoke was black as night.” He shakes his head, lips set in a hard line.
Astarion wonders what he’s supposed to say. It won’t happen again? It might, of course, happen again, on this bitch of a plane? That, having been freed from Cazador’s thrall for all of a month or two, he has no idea what other waking nightmares lay tripwired across his brain? But Tav is shifting in his seat, fumbling in his pockets.
He stretches out a hand. In his palm sits a modest bronze locket. “Sorry,” says Tav. “It’s a bit ugly.”
“Tav,” Astarion says, “why are you giving me Gale’s dinner?”
“Gale had my boots instead. Here.”
The locket is warm from Tav’s pocket. Astarion sniffs, prodding it with the tip of his finger. He undoes the catch. Bright motes of light whistle out, circling them until they float lazily above their heads. The light beams warmly for a minute, maybe two, and then shivers away.
“Solution’s easier for Darkness than Silence,” Tav is saying, picking at a thread in his pants. “It’s enough light to flee, if it happens again. I know you can see in the dark, but magical darkness is…” He trails off a little helplessly.
His fingers still tug at an errant thread. Astarion squints at him. “What else does it do?”
“Nothing.”
“Are you sure?” He purses his lips. “You’re fidgeting like you’ve stolen sweets.” It’s rather unbecoming. He wonders how flushed Tav’s cheeks might feel under the back of his fingers.
Tav clears his throat. “It’s only…” He loses the will to finish. Astarion realizes it just as he opens his mouth to try again: Tav is embarrassed. “I’m half stupid, giving you that,” he mutters, “after what you just told me.”
Astarion laughs. “Half? Don’t sell yourself short.” Tav’s fingers twitch. Before he can try to take it back, Astarion loops the chain around his neck. “It’s woefully inadequate. But you can make it up to me if you help me kill him.”
He meant it only as a joke to pinch at Tav’s softness. If Cazador appeared right now, they’d be dead in their beds, if he didn’t smash them together like dolls first, and Tav’s known this as long as he’s known Astarion’s a vampire.
(He discovers an engraving on the back of the locket—never dark again. A perfectly sugared sentiment for such a shitty little amulet. Ugh. But Astarion can’t remember a gift past Cazador’s last hundred rats. No one will be able to see it under his collar, and it may yet come in handy. The little weight of locket batters back and forth against his chest.)
Tav makes no reply. Astarion adjusts the fastening, delighted he’s found a touch of ego to bruise. But a glance at Tav’s face stops him short. He’s looking at Astarion with such certainty. His stomach drops.
Reading faces is Astarion’s knife, his cutting art. People lie as often as they breathe, but their bodies betray their confidence. A little stiffness in the jaw, the tremble of lips on a shaky exhale, the exact length of a glance tells Astarion whatever he needs to know. Easy as paging through a book, really. When Cazador examined his nails, his anger pointed itself into talons. Flayed flesh. A lavish dinner—a noble family, perhaps—killed fresh and then left to rot for the rats while all looked on, starving. Astarion’s forehead pressed against the stone floor, a knee between his legs. Kennels, tongs.
A particular muscle in Cazador’s left cheek would jump, and his rage bloomed and fanned over them like fog. Humid. Sticking. Luminous. Someone young, too young, bled slow over the course of an evening, the spawn bringing palmfuls of blood to Cazador’s mouth to sip. Ceaseless demands. The corners of Astarion’s mouth chafed raw. Kennels, hammer. Threats of sunlight. Promises, too.
There were other tells, too, catalogued as careful facts. The weight of his footfalls. The length of a blink when his gaze turned on you. Astarion could estimate the days before his voice would return by the depth of Cazador’s pale, displeased smile. He still can. He’s reminded of it every time he looks up at the moon. Waning crescent, two days. Waxing gibbous, four.
When luring victims, it was like power. In Cazador’s court, an abacus. His rage was fluid, creative, chaotic. Mad with genius and feeding itself like a snake devouring its own tail. And Tav’s anger is—a new shape. The whump of solid ground with all the wind knocked out of you. Steady and hard and a little frigid. And even in this dead, cold body, Astarion’s every hair should stand on end. He should dart like a cat and scamper somewhere low and quiet.
But he doesn’t feel its touch at all. It soars over him. A shadow. No. A shelter. A roof.
It’s the sensation of kicking a rock, he supposes, and learning it’s the foot of a miles-high cliff, curving over rough waves. Discovering the first, knobby vertebrae crowning the Spine of the World. Tav shapes his temper with care. An intimate expertise of knowing whatever leaves the body has force, momentum, power, and what it touches might break.
Tav’s jaw is set, but not tense. His hands are peacefully folded in his lap. One soft wrinkle knits between his brows. A new flintiness in his eyes. The metronomic rise and fall of breath. He can practically smell the effort. Waiting for Astarion to meet his gaze. Waiting, Astarion realizes, to be seen. To be read.
“Say the word,” Tav says, and it’s true. But what can Astarion do with truth? Sentence the man to death? If only Tav would boast and lie. A lie can be tied in bows like a ribbon. The truth is inexorable. A temptation. A blade Astarion wants to press his tongue against.
(One of Tav’s few questions when Astarion admitted he was spawn: can I kill him? Astarion had laughed, and laughed, and then snarled a quick litany of all the ways Cazador could wiggle his little finger and murder them all. It hadn’t occurred to him this was not about their safety while harboring Astarion. It was also a request for permission. Stupid, stupid.)
“Goody.” Astarion fluffs the back of his hair. “Perhaps you can best him in a bout of arm wrestling.”
Tav’s laugh is a sharp, quiet bark. It stings the ear. Astarion would like to hear it again. Instead, he finishes the last diagonal of the diamond. It’s only a few more stitches. He ties the knot, examines his work. The frogs in the marsh belch their nightly songs.
“Feed on me tonight,” Tav says, “if you want.” He’s wise enough not to say, you need it, after today.
“I thought,” Astarion pulls the garment right-side out, “you’d rather I didn’t, seeing as you didn’t offer.”
Tav scratches the back of his neck. “Silly of me to assume you’d ask.”
“Perhaps because I was so polite the first time.” His grin shows all his teeth.
“You did apologize,” Tav points out. “I think. But you can.”
“I can do it without waking you.”
“No. Wake me first.”
“Why?” His nostrils flare. “So you can pull me off before I drain you dry?”
“I want to feel when things happen to me,” says Tav.
The quick, sharp yank of those words in Astarion is buried as quickly as it comes. He rolls his eyes. “Even when they hurt?”
“Always.” Such sincerity, before a little shrug. “And it barely hurts.”
“What a brave little glass of wine you are.” Astarion practically flings Tav’s vest back at him. “It’s done.”
The little, perplexed search Tav does of Astarion’s face before examining the vest is deeply unnecessary. “It’s lovely,” he says. He traces the diamond shape Astarion’s sewn with a calloused thumb. “Thank you. I didn’t expect embroidery. Should have, maybe, with your fine shirt.”
“Yes, yes, I’m very talented. See how it feels,” says Astarion. Tav follows instructions and strips off his shirt. He has muscles Astarion couldn’t name if you gave him a hundred gold for the trouble. Ridges of sinew under his arms bunch like gills or scales, marked by the ends of long scars over his chest. Then the vest is on, Tav tugging at it tidily and rolling his shoulders, feeling the give and pull of the fabric.
“How do I look?” he says, doing a little turn.
“Mmm. Destitute.” Astarion clicks his tongue.
He’s rewarded with a boyish grin. “Like a monk, then.”
“If the shoe fits.” He glances at Tav’s bare toes in the dirt. “I can’t believe you let Gale eat your boots. Weren’t your old ones caked in gnoll blood?”
“The world is full of boots,” Tav says, like he’s said it before—like he said to Gale an hour ago when they had a similar argument. Agreeing with Gale, even hypothetically, is nose-wrinkling stuff.
It must show on his face, because Tav changes the subject. “Should we do it now?” he asks, giving the slightest arch of his neck.
Astarion can’t tell why, but it makes his stomach sour. Leaves a bitter taste in his mouth. “I suppose not even I can afford to turn down such a charitable offer,” he groans, but Tav raises a hand.
“It doesn’t have to be,” he offers.
Astarion peers at him. “Go on.”
“You could hunt me,” Tav says, rolling a shoulder. “I’m good quarry.”
“I could hunt you,” Astarion repeats, stupidly. “What, through the swamp? The woods?”
Tav’s smiling now. “Maybe not tonight. But sure.”
“Why?” Astarion grits out, harsher than he means to—but he’s in no mood to have anything dangled in front of his nose he can’t actually have. “Why in the nine hells would you want to do that?”
Tav doesn’t say, I’m not much for charity either. He doesn’t say, might be good practice for us both, as an excuse, or offer some platitude about Astarion getting to have a little more choice in the matter. They both know. Whether Astarion’s stomach turns in anxiety or relief is impossible to say.
Instead, the corner of Tav’s mouth pokes up, and he says, “Dunno. I think it might be fun.”
They end up standing across from each other, Tav measuring the space between their chests with two hands. He’s proposing an exercise he played growing up with other novitiates. The monks called it listening training and the little ones called it pincushion.
“I close my eyes,” he says. “Get me before I stop you, and you win.” He hands Astarion the needle eye first, like the hilt of a sword.
“Take this off.” Astarion gestures with it like a scepter. “Don’t ruin my fine work.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” Tav loves to follow directions. He folds the vest twice before delicately leaving it on a rock. “Ready?” he asks, catching Astarion eyeing the dusting of dark curls across his chest.
“This’ll be quick,” Astarion grumbles, and Tav smiles as though he can’t stop himself before closing his eyes.
The first attempt is a test to see how fast and soft Tav moves. He swiftly jabs the needle to the left of Tav’s navel—and a steady fingertip on his knuckles stops him before the point makes contact with flesh. Astarion huffs a breath. He tries the ribs. Forearm. The inside of his wrist—all stopped by a finger or the side of a hand.
“Come on,” Tav peeks out at him. “You’ve wanted to poke a needle into me all night.”
Astarion responds by jabbing its point directly into the pad of Tav’s fingertip the next time he stops him, and earns a soft laugh.
He can imagine how this looked when Tav was a boy—with slaps, cheap shots to the knees or the groin, a circle of mouth-breathing, giggling onlookers hiding footsteps and attempts. He abandons the foolish, forward approach, and silently toes off his shoes. He moves in a slow circle around Tav on the quietest of cat feet, eyes noting every stir of muscle, every miniscule twitch. An opening—he moves—
A fingertip catches the bend of Astarion’s elbow just as the needle pokes the molten scar on Tav’s head. His best attempt so far.
“Smart,” Tav says. “Close.”
“Is this an adornment?” It’s an honest question. Astarion doesn’t know the first thing about monks. Maybe he should ask Gale. Maybe he should kill himself.
Tav shakes his head and mutters. Astarion’s face puckers. The words oil lamp have never sounded so gristly. “Isn’t the whole point of all this—” Astarion waggles his fingers, “—to catch things before they hit you?”
Tav snorts. “Tough when you’re jug-bit.” Astarion is already grinning around a barb about the dark beer monks brew when Tav continues, “Well, jug-bit for the better part of the month, and you won’t leave the room you can’t pay for without a fight.”
Jug-bit. Some strange word for drunk to the high heavens Astarion’s only heard once or twice in the last couple centuries. The ring finger on Tav’s left hand twitches. Then his thumb. Inhale, exhale. Did he mean to reveal a secret, Astarion wonders, or is it a test? He eyes the dark, thick ripples of the scalp-scar again. They’re not new.
“It’s been a while since you’ve been a monk, hasn’t it.” Astarion doesn’t give it the grace of a question. Tav doesn’t say anything. His mouth turns up in a lopsided little smile. Then he closes freckled eyelids, gestures with a finger. Again.
Astarion watches Tav’s chest rise and fall. He lets his shoulder go loose, his arm swaying a little in time. But he’s the hunter. Fuck Tav’s pace. Sure, he’s quick, but Astarion has a hundred and fifty years of practice on him. He’s prey. And—Astarion hasn’t thought about Cazador for twenty minutes. A thrill rushes from the nape of his neck to his toes. He didn’t even realize he wasn’t thinking about him. Cazador’s shadow doesn’t have to linger here in the bloodsport and the hunt. Astarion surges forward on pure, bloody giddiness, his needle moving in a blur of attempts. None take, but a drop of sweat runs down Tav’s temple.
“Gods, you’re fast.” Is Tav a little out of breath?
“Don’t sound so surprised.”
“Only you’d make me work for the privilege of bleeding.”
Astarion preens. “It was your idea. I didn’t have anything to do with it.” Then he tries for a number of jabs so swiftly it's almost like they’re sparring.
When they break, Astarion slows, minding his every sound, looking for a weak spot. There are little holes in Tav’s ears—those tiny patches of scar tissue along the shell must be piercings, healed over years. Neat openings still sit in his earlobes. Tav’s scars might not be adornments, but these were, once. Little baubles he chose, and then stopped choosing. It’s strange. What—lapsed? Latent?—monk strives to be even more plain out in the world?
He can easily imagine rings, hoops, a modest, dangling jewel. There is so much odd, abandoned treasure in this place. Even the sorceress today looked like a queen. He’s certain to find an acceptable offering. Tav’s always game for something stupid. It was only yesterday he scaled an old tree for chestnuts at Karlach’s behest because she wanted to see if they would roast between her tits. Tav had pretended to lose his balance and fell out of the tree, prompting an undignified shriek from Shadowheart. He’d landed solidly on his feet without dropping a single nut. This prompted two cuffs across the head from Wyll—one for him, one for Karlach—before Tav’s little, shit-eating grin proved too contagious for any real anger. (The chestnuts were quickly incinerated.)
He could convince Tav to try an earring.
“I can hear you thinking.” Speak of the devil.
“Can’t say the same,” Astarion sniffs. “More’s the pity.”
“Our tadpoles might disagree.”
“Mine’s like one of those exotic insects in Gale’s encyclopedia of fauna.” Astarion rolls the needle between his fingers. He’s close. All the instincts in his body vibrate with it. “It bites off the head of any challenger.”
It earns him a little shake of Tav’s shoulders. He grins and moves in the distraction, almost floating on the balls of his feet, fast, fast, fast—in a burst of inspiration, he angles the needle towards Tav’s cheek, sliding under his arm in a feint when he goes to block him. The tip of the needle pierces Tav side instead. An old instinct buried deep in Astarion roars deliciously.
The moment he hears Tav’s surprised little gasp (a concession of victory if there ever was one), Astarion’s at his neck—a hand over Tav’s mouth, an arm wrapped around his middle. Tav inhales again, sharp and hot against Astarion’s palm, and he feels luminescent with triumph. He is bright, alive, and starry with victory.
He almost pauses—is this—no. Hunted was Tav’s word, after all. I’m good quarry. Well, let him prove it. Astarion’s sure he could stop him if he wanted. But as he lowers them to the ground, Tav’s knees fold too, in delicious acquiescence.
“Shh, shh, shh,” Astarion murmurs, lips a hair from Tav’s ear. “Not a sound.” Then his fangs are on Tav’s neck. His bite’s not so deep—suckling desperately at a vein is so mortifying, and he wants this to last longer than ten seconds. When the first rush hits his tongue, hot and mineral and singing, he stifles his own gasp. It is—deliriously good, as opposed to sneaking around and nibbling on sleepers in the dark. The thrill of the taking and the earning sweetens each drop. Astarion lets Tav slip his mouth free of his hand—he supposes the living need to breathe. A thin rivulet of blood escapes the puncture and runs down Tav’s shoulder in a lovely, meandering line. Tav’s monkish, practiced breaths resume in silence. It almost looks like he’s trying to meditate.
But he knows better. Because the body—and now Astarion’s thoughts turn wicked, gleeful and half drunk on it all—the only thing the body can do is betray. The soothing rush and pull of Tav’s breathing stirs his ear, moving a few wisps of his hair. His fingers gently curl around Astarion’s forearm. All this calm determination, noble and useless, because Astarion’s hand pins Tav in place on his chest, right over his heart.
And oh, that heart. It isn’t still, or patient, or solid. Astarion can hear its beat in his ears and its pulse on his tongue. It’s no skittish rabbit’s sprint, all prey-flight and fear, or the steady march of a warrior’s instincts readying for battle. Tav’s heart flutters under his hand. A spring, warm and bubbling up from somewhere far and deep and cold. Something breaking free at long last, just beneath his palm. Galloping, reckless, delighted. If he closes his eyes, he can taste it. Drink enough, and it can make him new.