Chapter Text
Victrios keeps placing biscuits on Astarion’s plate.
“Victrios,” Astarion says after the third time. “I can’t eat these.”
“What? Oh, right,” Victrios says. His face is slightly blotchy from crying. “Foolish of me.”
Astarion brings the biscuit to his nose, gives it a cautious sniff. “Did I used to enjoy these?”
“Yes, of course,” Victrios says. “Black tea and brown butter biscuits. Grandmother used to have us over for tea all the time when we were little — do you remember that? You took your tea with so much milk, it was hardly tea at all.”
“I don’t recall, no,” Astarion says. He hands the biscuit off to Wyll, who eats it soberly.
They’re sitting in a little alcove on the second floor of the Bluemoon Atelier. The table has been made up with a simple repast: a kettle, sugarcubes, milk, butter, bread, a tin of sweets. Victrios sits with his back to the casement window, his eyes bloodshot, steam rising from his mug. Behind him, the sky is black as a swatch of velvet.
“What do you recall?” Victrios asks, twisting his fingers in his lap.
Astarion folds his arms over his chest, leaning back in his seat. He’s rolled his shirtsleeves up to the elbow, exposing two pale, attenuated forearms. He’s no longer trembling — an improvement — but he doesn’t look entirely composed either. He looks spooked. Coltish. Poised to flee. He’s knee bounces at an irregular, juddering rhythm.
“A room with blue wallpaper, patterned with magnolias,” Astarion says, slow. “An orange grove. Silk gloves. Law books. One of those terrible little white dogs.”
“The room you’re thinking of was your office,” Victrios says, dabbing at his eyes with a handkerchief. “I remember that wallpaper. Very fashionable for its era. And the dog was our mother’s. Fruitcake, I think his name was, or something similarly treacly. He was a fickle and unpleasable howler — we both hated him.”
“I remember our father,” Astarion says. He searches Victrios with cold, trenchant eyes. “You take after him, don’t you? Physically, I mean.”
Victrios hesitates, then dips his chin into a jerky little nod.
“I hear that often, yes,” he says. “Though it’s been quite some time since I last looked in the mirror.”
“Believe it or not, dear, I can relate.”
The brothers share an uneasy laugh. Astarion’s is high, frothy, transparently ersatz; Victrios has a softer, earthier tone, like something lifted out of the soil.
“If Victrios takes after your father, then so do you,” Wyll puts in. “The both of you look alike.”
“Do we?” Astarion asks abstractly.
“I wouldn’t exactly mistake you two for twins, but the resemblance is unmistakable.”
“Intriguing,” Astarion says. He considers Victrios anew, scrutinizing his face as though scrutinizing his own. “But surely I look quite a bit younger than this, yes? And prettier?”
“Gods, you’re just as I remember you. An insufferable narcissist,” Victrios says, but he sounds strangely moved nonetheless. He folds his soiled handkerchief into quarters and tucks it into the breast pocket of his coat. “What do you remember of our father?”
Astarion thinks on it for a moment.
“I remember his face,” he says at last. “His voice. The scent of peppermint oil.”
Victrios startles at that, at the rightness of it. “For his joints, yes.”
“I remember sitting at the table with him. Heeding his counsel, or something to that effect,” Astarion says. “Were we very close?”
“You were the favorite son. Unquestionably.”
This seems to intrigue Astarion, who draws himself up a little straighter. “Really?”
“Oh, yes. He poured all of his ambition into you, and you bore the mantle effortlessly. A proud son for a proud father.”
“That does sound like me,” Astarion says, pleased, and for a few brief moments, he seems to genuinely savor his triumph. “Did you resent me for it? My primacy in his esteem?”
“No,” Victrios says, massaging the bridge of his nose. “Actually, in some ways, it was actually quite a relief to me. He had his heir, his golden child — a son who would social-climb on his behalf. So long as I didn’t rock the boat overmuch, I was mostly permitted to do as I pleased. This all changed after you… after you left us. He became far more judgmental, more overbearing. Less tolerant of my more artistic inclinations.”
The satisfaction fades from Astarion’s face. “Judging by the way you speak of him,” he says primly, “I assume he’s dead?”
“I assumed you dead,” Victrios parries. “But yes. He passed on many years ago. Mother as well. I suppose you could call us orphans, though I don’t much like that word. Feels like stolen valor, somehow.”
Astarion lets out a strange breath. “I see.”
“There are a smattering of Ancuníns living out in the countryside. Cousins, uncles, aunts, you know.” Victrios reaches for his teacup, sipping delicately at his tea. He has a fragrant, epicene way of moving, like a dancer. “In Baldur’s Gate, only I remain — well. Myself, my wife, and my son. He was born long after your death, but of course he knows about you. His Uncle Astarion.”
“What does he know about me? Specifically?”
“That you were my younger brother. That we were close. That you used to stand with your arms up in the air and play the mannequin while I cut my first suits.” Victrios sets his tea down, lashes flickering. “That you died young.”
“How old is he?” Wyll asks. “Your son.”
“Vanthien? He just turned twenty-eight,” Victrios says. He opens up the biscuit tin and places two more onto Wyll’s plate.
“We're close in age, then.”
“Only superficially,” Victrios says. “You are human. Vanthien is an elf. And for an elf, twenty-eight is nothing at all. He’s only a sapling, really.” A sudden, searing look of hope takes up residence in his face. Angling himself toward Astarion, he ventures, “Perhaps you’d like to meet him?”
The suggestion seems to genuinely throw Astarion.
“I — perhaps?” Astarion says. Troubled, perhaps, and drawn to that trouble. He wets his lips, leaning over the table. “So, just to be clear, you really don’t mind? The whole vampire thing?”
“Do I mind?” Victrios drapes his elbow over his face and laughs, plaintive and soft. “Oh, Balduran’s bones. I suppose I ought to mind. In fact, I suppose I ought to be quite frightened. That would be a reasonable reaction, yes?”
“It would be the usual reaction, if nothing else.”
“No doubt. Vampire spawn are known for their bloodthirst, aren’t they?”
“Well, we’re hardly known for our cuddliness,” Astarion says, his tone clipped.
Perhaps they should be, Wyll does not say. He puts another biscuit in his mouth, chewing mechanically.
Victrios only shakes his head. “I am not frightened, Astarion,” he says, his voice a faint tremolo. “How could I possibly be frightened? My baby brother, returned from the dead! I feel only joy — profound, wild joy — and sorrow, too, for your tale is surely one of unimaginable suffering. I mean, to reduce a man to such a state that he can scarcely recollect his past — his own family —”
Astarion looks away. Wyll’s throat tightens as he swallows, a familiar horror rising beneath his breastbone. His mind returns to Cazador’s kennels. The low, filthy table littered with pliers, thumbscrews, tacks, paring knives. The shackles bolted to the floor. The bare mattress. How often does Astarion’s mind return there, he wonders? Every day? Every hour? Whenever Wyll slides into him?
Victrios lowers his hands from his face. Though sightless, his dark eyes are alert, intelligent. Though he cannot see their faces, some intangible quality of their silence must give them away — he knows he is correct in his grief.
“Towards the end of her life,” he says, “mother often spoke of finding you on the plains of Arvanaith, in the realm of Corellon Larethian. I really, truly believed you were waiting for her there. Waiting for me, even. It gave me comfort to imagine it — you, lazing about in some pristine place, easy and unburdened, a quip at the ready. You’d say, What took you so long, Vic? And I’d say, Oh, I had a few things to take care of at the shop. And you’d say, Always with that blasted shop! A rather reassuring fantasy, as you might imagine.”
“A fantasy nonetheless, I'm afraid,” Astarion says.
Victrios’ lips twist into a tight, bitter approximation of a smile.
“I slept well at night, believing that you were at rest. At peace. But all along, you were shackled to a vampire lord.” He shakes his head. “I know little of spawn and their sires, but I know enough. I cannot imagine what you must have endured over the last two centuries.”
“No,” Astarion says, cold, taut. “You cannot imagine it.”
A long, terrible pause.
“Astarion,” Victrios says slowly, pushing his tea aside. “In the days before your death, we quarreled terribly.”
Astarion lifts his eyes. “Is that so?”
“We did, yes.” Victrios inclines his head. “I’d invited you over for a garden party. Lemonade, hors d’oeuvres, lots of blowy muslin gowns. Parasols were very in fashion at the time, and yours was the most splendid of them all. I remember that quite distinctly.”
“A white parasol,” Astarion says suddenly. Eyes bright enough to read by. “Piped with rosettes.”
Victrios buckles against that as though receiving a blow. “Yes. Yes. We were playing croquet out on the lawn and — and I suppose I picked a fight. Back then, we were always picking fights with one another, and our father was all too eager to egg us on.”
“A loving and tender-hearted patriarch, clearly.”
The breath of a laugh. “He was complicated,” Victrios says.
“Figures. Complicated men raise complicated sons,” Astarion says, shooting Wyll a sidelong glance. Wyll allows it to pass without comment. “So, why did we quarrel?”
“The precise details escape me. It was something to do with your work in the judiciary, some verdict you handed down that I took umbrage with. I called you a craven, a spoiled fool, gleefully corrupt — those were my exact words."
Astarion fidgets in his seat. “How censorious.”
“I was furious,” Victrios says. “Furious with our father, and furious with you for taking his advice over mine, as you always did. I tossed you out on the street, told you that you would be welcomed back the day you developed a conscience. I never saw you again.” Victrios runs a hand through his hair. “How could I have foreseen that those words would be the last I ever spoke to you? How could I have known?”
“You couldn’t have known,” Astarion says haltingly, “I suppose.”
“And yet, I spoke them. And there’s no undoing that.”
Victrios’ see-nothing, see-everything eyes rivet themselves to the space where Astarion is seated.
(Wyll wrings his hands in his lap. He feels like an interloper among them. An intruder. And yet, simultaneously, strangely, he's unswervingly certain that his presence in this room is somehow necessary — that something would crush in Astarion’s face if he stood to leave.)
“The words I love you were seldom spoken in our household,” Victrios says. “We never lowered ourselves to utter them. Even when you won your seat as a magistrate, I did not tell you I was proud of you. I only rolled my eyes.” He lowers his lashes. “If — if I had known you were a gift I could not keep, I would have said it every day. I would’ve spoiled you silly with butter tarts and brandy snaps. I would’ve never once complained when you rifled through my closet. And I would’ve fought much harder to protect you from our father’s influence.”
Victrios smiles — the bleak, beautiful, intensely ingenuous smile of a man who has lost everything and won the world.
Simple, unselfconscious, he says, “I love you, Astarion.”
Something in Astarion seems to split open, like kindling.
“I don’t — remember loving you,” he says.
“That’s alright.”
“I’m not the same man I once was. Really. And I can’t imagine I ever will be.”
Victrios just shakes his head. Still smiling, still crying, spiderweb wrinkles pulling around his eyes, his lambswool hair all askew. “That doesn’t matter at all. Either way, I will always be your brother.”
Astarion wipes furiously at his face, mortified, aghast — he hates crying almost as much as Wyll does. On the other side of the table, Victrios sits very, very still, calm and placid and wondersome, and he allows his tears to fall freely. He is not ashamed of them. The source of his shame is deeper, darker — buried beneath two centuries of rubble.
How many men, Wyll wonders, are given the opportunity to atone for two hundred years of guilt? Perhaps only two, here in this room.
Later, as Wyll escorts Victrios home, Victrios tells him, “You know, only Astarion could’ve come out of this nightmare a Grand Duke’s lover. He was always an opportunist.”
“I was not a Grand Duke when I met him,” Wyll points out. “I was an exile, a monster hunter.”
“Really?” Victrios hums. His walking stick beats against the newly-paved roads at a regular clip. “A monster and a monster hunter.”
“Astarion is no monster.”
Victrios pauses, contemplates this.
“You’re right,” he agrees at last. “He is not.”
They walk on in silence a while longer, gravel crunching underfoot, Victrios’ cane striking the grit.
It’s a beautiful night for walking. The oaks and the alders of the Upper City shudder and sigh against a pale, feeble breeze. Small, star-shaped wildflowers explode from neat hedges. Way up on their balconies, the ladies of the Gate pull their nightgowns off of their clotheslines, half-drowsing already.
Eventually, Victrios asks, “Do you think that he’ll visit again?”
Wyll gives him a sidelong glance. “I reckon he will. But it isn’t for me to say.”
“I hope that he does,” Victrios says, with feeling. “But even if he does not, I would be content just knowing that he is being looked after. You will look after him, won’t you?”
“I will.”
“You swear it?”
“On my life, I swear it,” Wyll says.
It’s just about the easiest oath he’s ever had to swear. He makes it to himself all the time — when Astarion lazes about with toothpaste crusted to the corner of his mouth, for instance, or when he flounces through the house half-dressed in a suit of mulberry silk. So many opportunities to renew his fealty, to the restate his devotion, to pledge his allegiance. Astarion lifting his brow in askance. Astarion seeing Wyll off the door with valedictory wryness. Astarion’s pupils dilating with willing surrender on the training room floor.
My, darling, but I do love you.
“I can see why he likes you,” Victrios says with a sly knowingness. “Something in the way you speak — like a romantic hero in a pulp novel. Is he good to you?”
“He looks after me, just as I look after him.”
“Is that so?” Victrios swerves blithely into an alleyway. He knows these streets exceptionally well; Wyll’s escort is beyond redundant. “The Astarion I knew was never very good at caring for others. He was always parading around some new boyfriend, but they never lasted long.”
“Well,” Wyll temporizes, shoving his hands in his pockets. “With all due respect, I plan on lasting long.”
That surprises a laugh out of Victrios.
“Goodness. You certainly don’t lack for audacity,” he says. He places his hand on the stone wall to his left, following the mortar with his fingertips. “Whatever happens, Lord Ravengard, please don’t be a stranger. We are family now, after all.”
“Are we?”
“Oh, yes.”
Wyll’s lips twitch with the shy beginnings of a smile. “I’ll take it up with Astarion. But, I — I’d very much like to be a part of your family, sir.”
“Anyone would,” Victrios says, staid yet indulgent, as though they’d reached a favorable business agreement.
They walk a while longer. Victrios hums, swings his cane a little. Wyll watches him. The sole of his left shoe is coming away, and will need to be repaired soon. The chain of a gold pocketwatch bangs against his upper thigh. He favors his right leg ever slightly, suggesting a past injury.
Despite his titles and his deeds, Wyll feels very young in Victrios’ presence. He feels timid, boyish, halting. He can’t seem to help but trail behind by a half-step. Strange. He never feels quite so green around Astarion — or even Halsin, who is a good deal older than the both of them. It takes him a moment to locate the source of his diffidence: this man is someone’s father. It’s visible in his bearings, in the way he conducts himself. Wyll could easily imagine Victrios holding some little boy’s hand as they cross the street, or pushing him on the swings, or fussing him into a dinner suit.
Out of nowhere, Wyll thinks of his mother. Specifically, he thinks of her grave. The yellowy sheath of baby’s breath laid over her headstone. The newly-trimmed grass. The muscle sliding in his father’s jaw as he reasserted his mastery over his emotions.
Unlike Victrios, Wyll had never once fantasized about encountering his mother in the afterworld. The idea had never even occurred to him. Would they even recognize one another by sight? What could they possibly say to one another?
Hello, I’m your son. It’s so nice to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you.
It feels ridiculous to consider. Delusional, even. Still, Wyll’s heart crackles like footsteps on a frozen lake. His father had sworn to him that his mother had loved him, loved him even before he was born. How would it feel to hear it from her?
He thinks of the tears on Astarion’s face, the fine tremor in his wrists. The pain, the wonder. The strange, sublime suicidality of allowing oneself hope.
It would probably feel a little like that.
“Humour me,” Victrios says, lifting his chin towards the night sky. “What does the moon look like tonight, young man?”
Wyll looks up. The moon is a pale puncture on the horizon, a silvery stud threaded through a slip of silk. Cold, blue-rimmed. The size of a thumbnail.
With a soft, capsized feeling — water rushing over ice — he gives Victrios a closed-mouth smile and he says, “It’s beautiful.”
Life goes on.
Wyll adopts a calico and names her Nemesia. She’s talkative, troublesome, supercilious; she bullrushes the bathroom door whenever she feels Wyll is taking too long. She has a crafty way of getting into the butter dish. She occasionally wakes Wyll up in the middle of the night by gently gnawing at his foot.
Wyll loves her.
On the very first day the cat enters the house, Astarion swears his indifference to her. This indifference lasts maybe two weeks. Soon enough, he’s sneaking her fresh fish, commissioning her a pointlessly lavish collar, and referring to her solely by an affectionate nickname: Mimi . Wyll’s lap is her absolute favorite place in the world — she enjoys dozing off there almost as much as Astarion does — but in those rare instances when Wyll is not available, Nemesia is perfectly content to lend her easy, burring warmth to Astarion, who strokes her absentmindedly while fussing with a bit of needlepoint.
Twice or thrice a week, Astarion slips out of the house to assist Victrios at the Atelier. When he returns home, he talks animatedly about the evening’s sartorial emergencies: a bride in meltdown mode, an unexpected split seam, etcetera. The brothers Ancunín make a charmingly dysfunctional team. Victrios muddles dates and appointments; Astarion habitually insults their clientele. They squabble viciously, make up, squabble again, then turn out an impressive new wedding gown for Lord Dillard Portyr’s niece.
It’s nice to see Astarion so busy. Adorable, actually.
Every now and then, Astarion will bring a bit of his work back home for Wyll to peruse: sketches of gowns with huge crinoline skirts, swatches of cambric linen, a pattern for a double-breasted jacket. Astarion demands that Wyll submit himself to having his measurements taken for a new suit and cape, which he is to wear at his ducal accession ceremony. Wyll acquiesces gladly.
Life goes on and on and on.
The accession ceremony comes and goes with all the pomp and grandeur you might expect. Wyll recites his lines, the gentry clap; wine, speeches, and dancing soon follow. Ulder Ravengard attends in full military dress, his posture ramrod, arms folded behind his back. His outsized presence seems to suck all of the oxygen out of the room.
“The Pride of the Gate,” he says, pressing a glass of brandy into Wyll’s hand. Wyll’s heart rears up like a spooked horse. “My son. How does it feel, to wear the mantle of high command? To stand precisely where you deserve to be?”
Terrifying , Wyll thinks, sweating hard in his brocade jacket. Exhausting.
Out loud, he says, “Humbling.”
He knocks back a polite draft of his brandy. It tastes potently of furniture polish.
Ulder smiles, tight, brief. His eyes, dark as pine tar, rove the ballroom distractedly. Every so often, his gaze lands somewhere in the vicinity of Wyll’s face — then swerves away, as if in pain. A hand jerking away from an open flame.
“You — will do well as Grand Duke,” he says, his tone brittle. “You are a more political creature than you realize.”
Wyll can’t help but laugh at that. “With all due respect, father, I’m not entirely sure if I should take that as a compliment.”
“I intended it as one,” Ulder says, but he has the good sense to at least look embarrassed. “Perhaps my words were ill-chosen.”
“I was only making light. I know you don’t mean ill.”
Ulder sips his brandy. If he finds the taste at all objectionable, it does not show.
“I built my career on action,” he says, “not words. Not — politicking, a passtime I only engaged in with ultimate disdain. I prided myself on my ability to cut to the heart of things, to dispense with the double-talk and do what needed to be done.” His lips thin. “I see a kernel of that same nature in you. You have no love of intrigues, and you do not rejoice in deception. And yet, you keenly know the power of words, and you do not shy from that power. I first saw it before we encountered the Netherbrain — how you addressed the soldiers gathered in your name. How you lent them your courage. When you speak, you inspire men to do better. To be better.”
“I —” Wyll feels himself flush, surprised. “Is that so?”
“It is,” Ulder says, studying his glass.
Silence, for a spell. Wyll looks out over the crowd. The band playing, the flowers hanging from the rafters. Waiters weaving from table to table with the elegiac grace of trained dancers.
“For too long, this city has been shepherded by strongmen,” Ulder says at last, awkward, as though handing over a gift and unsure of how well it will be received. “I place Gortash in this category, of course… but myself, as well. You will be a Duke of another make entirely.”
“More naive, you mean.”
“More patient. More compassionate.”
Wyll’s lips twitch, sheepish. “Astarion says my soft-heartedness will be the death of me.”
“It very well may be,” Ulder admits helplessly. His eyes flicker towards Wyll, then away again. Eyes which seem to contain a kingdom. “Still, I think we both know full well that soft-heartedness is something worth protecting.”
At home, they hang drapes. They lay down carpets. Their closet fills up with beautiful, beautiful suits.
Astarion prevents an assassination or two, which is lovely of him. Wyll, for his part, signs off on the demolition of the Szarr Palace.
“I was hoping the city might build a university there in the next five to ten years,” Wyll says carefully, bedsheets ruffling against his calves, cat gnawing faintly at his heel. “What do you think?”
Shoving his feet into his slippers, Astarion says, “Why should I care?”
“I —” Wyll worries at his lower lip with his teeth, considering his words carefully. “No reason at all, I suppose.”
“Precisely,” Astarion says. Then, turning his eyes upon Nemesia, he says, “Mimi. Would you please cease chewing on my lover.”
“It doesn’t hurt,” Wyll offers, flexing his ankle.
“That’s not the point.”
“Isn’t it?”
Life goes on and on and on, spinning out towards impossible outcomes.
They fight. They fuck. They reconcile. Astarion picks out a chandelier; Wyll plans a garden. They cry together. They discuss the weather. The sun. The sleet.
There are nights where Wyll wakes drenched in his own sweat, his pulse pounding, a devil’s laughter swimming in his mind. Panic grips him, oily and hot — the last traces of a dream, clinging stubbornly, like dabs of a strong perfume — but then he feels Astarion’s hands moving over his face, careful and cool, tracing the ligature of his scars. Feels Astarion’s breath tickling the shell of his ear.
“Only dreams,” he says. “Only dreams, my darling.”
The seasons change. They do dinner with Victrios. Karlach writes. Gale drops by with a bottle of wine. So does Halsin, telling stories of a healing Reithwin — and offering unsubtle, unsolicited advice on the topic of lovemaking. Shadowheart visits several times, albeit less out of affection for Wyll and more for Nemesia, who loves her immediately and uncomplicatedly.
Scritching the underside of Nemesia’s chin, Shadowheart says, “How are you lovebirds getting on? Still have wedding bells ringing in your head?”
“Ask me next year,” Wyll laughs, ducking his head.
They buy ribbons.
They buy handcuffs.
They repel ghosts.
The bedroom is lit by the soft glow of the oil lamp, the flame flickering faintly. Astarion leans against the windowsill, body hunched over the spread of his hands.
“When we first met,” he says, “I thought you a bleeding-heart fool. A handsome fool, certainly — but a fool nonetheless. Doltish, weak-minded, easily manipulated.”
Seated across the room in his chair, Wyll says, “Implying you no longer think of me as such?”
“Well, I definitely still think you handsome,” Astarion says. “And you are most certainly a bleeding-heart — that part was never in question. Beyond that, I’m quite pleased to report I was proven wrong.”
Wyll kicks his feet up, studying the slope of Astarion’s back.
“When we first met,” he says, “I thought you cruel caprice incarnate.”
“Cruel caprice incarnate?” Astarion turns to face Wyll, wryly pleased. “Well, that sounds very attractive.”
“It was attractive,” Wyll agrees ruefully. “I was very attracted to you.”
“In spite of my cruelty, or because of it?
“You know, I’m not entirely sure,” Wyll says, thoughtful. “On the one hand, I have never been charmed by bloodthirstiness. On the other… I think that even back then, I was harbouring inchoate fantasies of bringing you to heel.”
“You liked the thought of disciplining me,” Astarion grins, rocking back on the heels of his hands. “Punishing me for my wicked, wicked ways.”
“Something to that effect,” Wyll says, wan. “I’ve always been a vanquisher of the unrighteous. Perhaps I should’ve anticipated that the impulse would inevitably invade my sex life.”
Astarion laughs with genuine delight.
“I activate your mean streak,” he says, relishing each word. “It’s true, isn’t it?”
“You activate a lot of things in me,” Wyll hedges.
“I could say the same.”
“I… suppose you could, yes.”
Astarion slips across the room, taking the chair across from Wyll’s. His eyes contain a stunning quantity of light; his long, straight legs are posed with an intentionally droll affect. Wyll surveys him with tender curiosity.
“I like your mean streak quite a bit,” Astarion says. “On select occasions. Gods. Do you remember that night you pinned me to your desk —?”
A flush crawls up Wyll’s neck. Equal parts aroused and aghast, he lifts a hand to cover his face. How could he possibly forget? He'd have to be dead to forget.
“I went too far that night,” he says very quickly. “The bruises —”
“Do you think me some helpless, battered victim? How quickly the mind acts to confabulate,” Astarion says, rolling his eyes. “I asked for it. I insisted upon it. I liked it. Bruises included.”
“I — I liked it too,” Wyll admits. He scrubs his hand over his face, hard. “In the moment, it always feels so right, so natural — I get completely carried away. It’s only in the aftermath that I truly feel the weight of my actions, the shock of it all. All at once, I can’t help but wonder if there’s something terribly, terribly wrong with me. I want to be a good man, and a good partner. Not some — some sadist —”
“Wyll, my dear,” Astarion says, his voice level, “I am something of an expert in sadism. I have been subjected to all types, all strains, all varieties; I have had many, many year to taxonomize their relative nuances, from the psychopathic to the benign. So, I hope you will trust my verdict.” He leans forwards in his seat, intent. “You are not a true sadist.”
An involuntary breath of laughter escapes Wyll. “No?”
“No,” Astarion says firmly. “For one, a true sadist doesn’t worry that he is a sadist. He is completely and utterly without shame, and he makes no effort to compromise between his perverse desires and his victim’s comfort.”
It’s not at all difficult to deduce which sadist, exactly, Astarion is referring to — Cazador — and yet it's Mizora's face that instantaneously springs to mind. Her cold, laughing eyes. The keen shred of her claws. The fall of her hair. Wyll shifts in his seat, disquieted.
Astarion knows what Mizora took from him. But he's not sure Astarion knows how she took it: expertly, assiduously, mercilessly. At the thought, his fills his mouth with the filthy tang of brimstone ash.
“Your comfort is important to me,” Wyll says at last, willing himself into the present.
“I know.”
“And your pleasure,” Wyll hastens to add, face growing ever hotter, “is everything.”
“I know,” Astarion says again, with a touch of wry fondness. “You’re a good man, and a good partner. In fact, if I had to provide an exact estimate, I’d say your love for me is ninety-eight percent pure and wholesome.”
“That remaining two percent has, erm, sent some pretty alarming shockwaves through my libido,” Wyll says, self-conscious. “Back when we first met, I never imagined I would, you know… find myself trussing you up and calling you names.”
“And I never once imagined that we might venture into mutual domesticity,” Astarion says. “How far we’ve come.”
A short, spectacular silence.
“I love it when you kneel before me,” Wyll confesses in a heady rush. Not quite able to help the acquisitive sound in his voice. Astarion cocks his head.
“How does it make you feel?”
“Strong,” Wyll says. “Adored. Worthy.”
Astarion smiles, ludic and oblique. “No man is worthier.”
Hard to breathe around those words. Wyll casts his gaze aside. “You flatter me.”
“Not at all. I can't imagine another man in this world I would gladly yield to.”
If such a man existed, Wyll thinks with a stab of proprietary hunger, I don’t know what I’d do. I would not be myself.
“What about you?” he asks, jerking his chin towards Astarion. “How does it feel? When you kneel for me?”
Astarion drums his fingers against the arms of his chair.
“Safe,” he says at last. “I feel safe.”
Astarion looks to Wyll, a question in his eyes. The gravity between them seems to intensify, an invisible thread pulling taut. Wordlessly, Wyll nods.
Astarion slips out of his seat, takes two paces towards Wyll. Slowly, inexorably, he sinks down to the ground. His knees hit the woolen carpet. He bows his head, upsetting the tumble of his curls.
At times like these, it truly staggers Wyll to think that men and women once paid this, this level of access. Astarion’s body seems almost infinitely dear — how could any amount of money make it available? Surely, no price would ever be sufficient. Surely, he was worth a kingdom.
“My star,” Wyll says. Heat curls through his voice, like smoke. “Sweet as can be.”
Astarion presses his cheek to Wyll’s knee. He sighs — a sound of profound relief, as though a heavy burden has been lifted from his shoulders.
“This,” Astarion says, “always calms me down.”
“Does it?”
“Mm.”
Smiling, Wyll cards a hand through his hair.
“Do you want your collar?”
Astarion nods, mute.
“Stay put just one moment,” Wyll says.
He stands, steps around Astarion, and heads for the bedside table.
The collar is of simple make. No bells, no bows — just buttery black leather and a cold metal clasp. Wyll retrieves it from the drawer, then pads back to his chair. Still down on his knees, Astarion holds himself very still, his eyes downturned. Trying to be good.
“Chin up, star,” he says, returning to his seat. Astarion complies instantaneously. Wyll winds the collar around the back of Astarion’s neck, then secures the clasp. It locks snugly against his throat.
Wyll runs the pad of his thumb over Astarion’s trachea, intoxicated by the dividing line between thin, delicate flesh and tough, unyielding leather. How fine, how fair. How perfect. The apple of Astarion’s throat bobs and jumps, the collar shifting minutely with each breath and each swallow. Mine all mine all mine.
“Gorgeous,” Wyll says, releasing the collar and sitting back.
Bereft, Astarion whines. His eyes are huge and black, almost entirely pupil.
“My lord,” he says softly, beseechingly. Wyll’s smile widens.
“I believe that this is the part where you take off all your clothes, pet,” he says, light. “Go on.”
Without hesitation, Astarion’s fingers jump to the collar of his shirt. He unsnaps each button, peels the garment from his shoulders. Trousers follow. Underthings. Garters. Socks. His movements are economical, brisk; he does not make a show of himself. He knows what his master likes.
“Be sure to fold your things nicely,” Wyll says. He stretches towards the carafe and pours himself a glass of water. “I paid good money for all those pretty clothes. I expect you to take good care of them.”
“Yes, sir.”
Astarion moves to comply. Sipping slowly, Wyll surveys his naked body.
“I should keep you like this all the time,” he muses.
“Naked and collared?” Astarion laughs breathlessly, folding his shirt over his bare thighs.
“Precisely that.”
“I think the servants might be scandalized.”
“They’d adjust,” Wyll shrugs. “It’d be a pleasure to come home from a long day at work to find you ready for me, bent and bridled. Plugged up, I think, to keep you nice and loose.”
Astarion shudders visibly.
“You know —” he says, halting, sliding the neat stack of clothing aside. “You know already that I’m your personal whore.”
Wyll grins.
“I know it,” he says, simple. “Though I don’t imagine I’ll ever tire of hearing you say it.”
Astarion tilts his head. Blinks at Wyll through coal-coloured lashes.
With a voice like cut velvet, he says, “I’m your whore.”
Wyll’s cock throbs.
“Again.”
“I’m your whore,” Astarion says, pressing forwards, nuzzling adoringly against the musculature of Wyll’s inner thigh. “I’m your whore.”
Wordlessly, Wyll extends his leg towards Astarion. The gesture requires no interpretation. Without any hesitation, Astarion immediately spreads his palms out over the carpet and lowers himself to kiss the toe of Wyll’s boot. Then the ankle, then the calf, his lips trailing up the length of Wyll’s leg with a reverence that teeters towards religiosity. “I’m your whore,” he says, blurried, lost. He mouths adoringly at the leather. “I’m yours, all yours.”
“Get up,” Wyll says, his heel making contact with Astarion’s shoulder, shoving him back into an inelegant sprawl. “Hands up on the wall, right now.”
Wide-eyed, wild, Astarion pushes himself to his feet. His cock hangs flushed between his legs, pinked and precious, half-mast; his hair rumpled, his eyes glassed. He takes three steady paces towards the wall, then lifts his hands to rest on the plaster. Still seated, Wyll takes another sip of water.
The view is an excellent one, so he takes his time in admiring it: the pert swell of Astarion’s ass, his long, rangy limbs, the bow of his spine. Inevitably, Wyll’s eyes land on Astarion’s scars — that complexity of precise, surgical incisions, raised red against pale flesh.
Wyll supposes he should hate them. He certainly hates the cruelty that produced them. And yet, those scars form part of the man he loves; they’re proof positive of his survivorship. He wants to touch them, trace them, caress them, cover them. A contradiction, surely, but their love lives inside contradictions. Tenderness and viciousness, nearness and absence. Pleasure and pain.
“Are you —” Astarion shivers, fingers flexing. “Are you just going to leave me waiting here?”
“Maybe,” Wyll says, setting his glass aside.
“Please,” Astarion says. “My lord, please. Come here and touch me.”
“Eventually,” Wyll says, tilting his chin against his fist.
Astarion squirms, tries again, “I want you.”
“Tough luck,” Wyll says. “Whores don’t get to decide. Be grateful I don’t have you standing up against the window for all to see.”
Wyll shrugs off his jacket, tosses it aside. He undoes the topmost buttons of hs shirt, his trousers. Ahead, Astarion’s bare legs tremble faintly; his toes curl into the thick weave of the carpet.
Every time he looks at the black band of Astarion’s collar, a maw seems to widen in his chest. He wants to decimate Astarion. He wants to plant his flag upon the smoking ruins of him. He wants Astarion to ache in the shape of his name: four brisk letters, neat-as-you-like.
Furtive, Astarion pulls one hand off of the wall and brings it between his legs. Wyll frowns.
“I don’t recall giving you permission to touch yourself,” he says.
Instantaneously, the hand jumps back up to rejoin the other. Unappeased, Wyll rises to his feet. He advances on Astarion, moving with deliberate slowness, knowing Astarion will be counting each footfall as Wyll charts his course towards him.
“I suppose you meant it,” Wyll says, level, spreading the palm of his hand over the curve of Astarion’s bare hip, “when you said you liked my mean streak. You’re a glutton for punishment, aren’t you?”
Astarion angles his face towards Wyll, and for a long, glittering moment, they lock eyes. Then Astarion dips his chin into a nod.
Wyll yanks his hand back, then cracks it across Astarion’s backside in a barehanded slap. It’s a superficial blow, of the type typically used in the punishment of juveniles. Still, Astarion gasps at the moment of impact, more out of surprise than any genuine pain.
“Master!”
There’s something inexplicably delicious in that cry. It’s — nourishing, somehow. A meal on an empty stomach. Hard sleep after a day’s exhaustion. Wyll strikes him again. And again. Astarion sucks in jagged breaths. On the fourth strike, he buckles against the wall, resting heavily on his forearms. He might be crying. Wyll hopes that he is.
High and pathetic, obedient, senseless, he calls out: “Master, please, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”
Seven strikes does it; the specter is sated. Wyll pulls back, smoothes his left hand over Astarion’s ass, now visibly pinked and slightly warm to the touch. With his right, he hooks two fingers beneath Astarion’s collar, pulling it tight against Astarion’s larynx, so Astarion that will be reminded of its presence — its power — its promise.
Rough with desire, Wyll asks him, “Are you going to behave?”
“Yes,” Astarion says thickly. “Yes, master, I promise, I promise I’ll be good. I’ll be such a good boy.”
“Spread your legs.”
Astarion obeys.
Wyll releases the collar, crosses the room to fetch a vial of oil.
He’s always liked this part, the anticipation that precedes the act. He likes slicking his fingers, likes watching Astarion tense at the sound. He likes teasing at the entrance of Astarion’s body. He likes sliding his thumb in to the first knuckle, and then retreating — softing over the fine, sensitive flesh of Astarion’s perineum. He likes watching Astarion, enjoys qualifying his reactions; the twitching of his cock, the tightening of his nipples, the pull of his brows, his strained look of pleasure. Wyll’s index and middle finger sink deep inside Astarion, sucked into the clutch of his body. As they bottom out, Astarion scratches at the wall. He moans, small and hiccuping and precious, when Wyll twists up towards his prostate.
“I’m your whore,” he says, a mantra, an orison. Then, with a wild, glitzing greed no true bedservant would ever dare, he says, “Make me scream.”
Wyll takes himself in hand, presses the blunt head of his cock to Astarion's opening. He thrusts in.
Truth be told, there’s no elegance in this — what they’re doing, in what they are: a crush of bodies, all hungry mouths and gnashing teeth, grappling, rutting, writhing. But there’s a beauty in it all the same, somehow. In the tang of their sweat, in the hot stick of slick thighs, in the totality of their trust. Wyll could close his eyes and know Astarion entirely, faultlessly. (But he does not.)
Wyll bites Astarion’s shoulder, layers himself over his scarred back, fucks him hard into the wall; Astarion reaches back, grabs him by the horn, twists it in his grip. It hurts. It’s good. Astarion’s freezing. Wyll’s blood is boiling. He slams his cock deep inside Astarion, fucking him to the hilt, to the base. It’s too much. It’s not enough. It’s everything. It shunts him from himself.
To Wyll’s eternal credit, he does make Astarion scream. It’s a fascinating thing — not a scream of pain, or overwhelm, or even outright pleasure — but triumph. A scream that lives in the same airspace as laughter.
It takes Wyll a moment, but he recognizes it: it’s the sound of getting exactly what you want, the way you want it, when you want it.
In the aftermath, they lie heaped on the floor, limbs all in tangles. Their bed is only a few paces away — but the floor is simply a nice place to be. They’re like felled trees. They're coiled like kudzu. Who can say where the one ends and the other begins?
Not Wyll.
“I ache all over,” Astarion complains. Then, At Wyll’s expression of faint alarm, he lifts a hand. “Don’t you dare apologize.”
Wyll swallows a smile. “That obvious?”
“Painfully so,” Astarion says, his eyes sliding shut. His bare legs twitch against Wyll’s.
“I am what I am."
Careful, he reaches around and unlatches the collar. Astarion pulls it off of his throat in a single motion, tossing it aside as one might toss a soiled shirt. It clatters across the room, forgotten.
“Wyll Ravengard,” Astarion says. His tone is sly, conspiratorial.
“Mm?”
"Wyll Ravengard," Astarion says again. When he opens his eyes, they're shockingly lucid. "Wyll Ravengard, Wyll Ravengard. Lovely Wyll Ravengard."
Boyish, Wyll grins. "Can I help you?"
With an animal insistence, Astarion presses against Wyll, knocking their foreheads together.
"I’d hate to live without you."
"Ah. Is that so?"
“Yes,” Astarion says. “It’s rather dire.” A muscle in his cheek seems to twitch. “So. Marry me?”
For a long pulse, ambery and immortal, Wyll can do nothing but stare. Astarion breathes slowly, in syncopation with Wyll. Nostrils flaring slowly, placidly, with the inhalation of entirely unrequisite oxygen.
The amber fissures, splinters. Wyll he rolls over. He pushes his face into the carpet, and he dissolves into helpless, easy laughter.