Work Text:
Gale has never considered himself any sort of expert on the complicated dance steps required for really understanding people. He’s never understood the intricacies of expressions and mannerisms and eye contact—and Gods forbid he ever does; he’d much rather busy himself with his books and his spells.
It doesn’t take some sort of social genius to understand that Astarion’s been acting particularly bizarrely since killing Cazador, though. He’s always been rather capricious at best, and now he swings like a pendulum between episodes of indulgent sulking and loud mercurial fits. Perhaps he simply doesn’t know how to handle his own freedom, now that he’s secure in it; or perhaps he mourns the lost possibilities of ascension.
(Gale knows he would, at least. He thinks of Astarion, immortal and impossibly powerful, the scent of foul magic still lingering on his skin, and he presses his thighs together. In his fantasies, the Vampire Ascendant forces him to his knees, unbuttons his trousers, and pushes his cock past Gale’s lips.)
(He dreams of it, sometimes. The what-if, the imagined sensation of thin, cold fingers in his hair. He can’t help himself, despite his rational brain’s screams: he wouldn’t. He shouldn’t.)
The threat of the Elder Brain, of the Absolute, grows ever closer. Gale itches with it. Despite its quieted state, he can feel the orb in his chest squirming, antsy and restless. He sleeps poorly, thanks to the ache in his chest and the nightmares and the ever-persistent stress.
Tonight, he busies himself with the scrolls. The inn has settled into relative quiet, though some bustle downstairs filters through the floor, and the sounds of the city’s streets are audible through the closed windows. Lord Gortash’s curfew has not yet subdued Baldur’s Gate entirely—past the walls of the Elfsong, a woman laughs loudly, a dog howls to the night, and in the distance, some indistinct music is playing.
He keeps a running inventory of the scrolls available, and now notes them by category and component. It feels almost as if he’s studying for midterm exams again. Here is the violet glow of Bestow Curse, and here is the familiar tingle of Charm Person. Once, he might have identified each spell by the sensation coursing through his hands alone. Once, he might have cast each one of these spells and more without the aid of some carefully magicked scrap of paper.
He taps his fingers on the desk in some stuttered, uneven tempo. It isn’t worth lingering on, despite the weight in his gut the thought leaves. He pushes away the weight of his exhaustion lingering in his bones, drags his attention back to the scrolls, and continues his inventory.
“You’re up late,” drawls a too-familiar voice. Gale jumps, snapping his head around quick enough to hurt, and finds Astarion studying him with an inscrutable half-lidded expression and a thin, lazy grin.
He really is upsettingly quiet when he wants to be.
Gale’s heart does something concerning in his chest—he would be worried about the orb, were it not for Elminster’s intervention—and he tamps it down. He scrubs his hand through his hair and attempts to reorient himself. “Er,” he says, uselessly. “Yes.”
“Studying, are we?” He raises a derisive brow.
“Not quite,” says Gale, flushing. “I’m—evaluating our assets.”
Astarion whistles an exhale through his teeth. (Gale is ninety percent sure his breathing is unnecessary, but he’s never asked. It’s always felt rude. Exactly how much of a walking corpse are you, anyway? Gale has flirted with death recently enough to be personally, morbidly curious.) He rests a forearm on Gale’s shoulder, leaning over him to appraise the scrolls spread out on the desk. “Fascinating.”
He is very close indeed. Gale can smell the oils and creams that he uses on his hair and the scent of copper on his breath. “Are you here only to mock me?” he says, more crossly than he means.
“Mocking you is one of the singular pleasures of my life, darling,” says Astarion. It’s clearly sarcasm, and yet Gale can’t help the shiver that runs through him. Astarion reaches down to poke around at the scrolls, cluttering Gale’s careful piles. “Are you hiding anything interesting in here?”
“Certainly,” says Gale. “Though I’d hardly describe it as hiding. ” It’s busy work, more than anything, but he doesn’t say that. He needed to do something with his hands—this was the obvious solution.
“ I think you’re hoarding all the magic for yourself,” teases Astarion.
“Not at all,” says Gale, primly. He fancies that he’d heard something hotly attentive in Astarion’s voice, although he’s certain it’s the same kind of delusion that’s been following him for weeks. “What kind of man do you take me for?”
Astarion doesn’t answer that; which Gale is suddenly quite glad for. He says, instead, “Show me something.”
“What?”
“Show me something interesting,” he insists. “Haven’t you got anything?”
The thing is that Gale has been dreaming about him for several nights in a row, and in his dreams, Astarion is resplendent and powerful and his teeth are very, very sharp, and his eyes are very, very red. The thing is that for longer than he’d like to admit, Gale’s been slipping his hand into his pants at night and thinking about Astarion’s face, his voice, and his teeth.
He’s—interested, to put it mildly, and it’s foolish, and impractical, and it isn’t going away. It isn’t going away and it’s killing him.
It isn’t as if Astarion’s tried to fuck him; things would be much simpler if he had. (Gale fools himself that he’d be able to get it out of his system.) It’s that he’s so frustratingly unreadable. He can’t tell if all those suggestive comments and brushing touches are genuine offers, and he can’t tell if Astarion’s potential interest is about Gale or about his own messy, complicated feelings.
Gale doesn’t want to be a warm body or a temporary distraction. He has always been a hopeless romantic, of a sort, a chronic disease contracted from an adolescence spent poring through romance novels. He wants Astarion to want him and mean it. And so he doesn’t say anything, and the tadpole squirms underneath his eyeball, and the ache in his chest reminds him that whatever remaining half-certainty he has in his continued existence is a rapidly depleting hourglass.
“All right,” he says, because his sense of self-preservation is shot and Astarion is looking at him with that unavoidable intensity. He scoops up a scroll—tells himself it’s at random, despite the undeniable pink glow of it, despite the lurch in his chest—and ushers Astarion to follow him. “If you wake Shadowheart,” he says, under his breath, “I think she’ll kill me.”
“I won’t let her,” Astarion assures. He flashes Gale a toothy smile, all fangs, and Gale looks away.
He closes the door behind them, closing them in the little unused bedroom together. His own heart is overwhelmingly loud in his ears, and he wonders if Astarion’s keenly perceptive senses have picked up on it, or the flush to his skin. “Er,” he says. “It’s dark in here, isn’t it?”
Astarion sits down on the cot and crosses one leg over the other. Even his silhouette is coy, teasing. He must be able to see well enough. “Is it?”
It is. Astarion’s sclerae glint in whatever faint light is filtering through the curtains. Gale spells a warm light with a wave of his hand, soft enough to avoid bothering the eyes; it’s a mistake, he realizes, because seeing Astarion batting his lashes at him from the bed is enough to swell heat in his abdomen.
“Is that all right?” asks Gale, digging his fingernails into his palms. It’s a silly question, but he needs to say something that isn’t ravish me, please. He cannot make a fool of himself.
“If you like,” Astarion says. He reminds Gale oddly of Tara watching her prey before she pounces, in the way he sits, and the way he holds his face. “I believe I was promised magic, darling.”
Gale holds out the scroll, holding it loosely between two fingers. “Yes. Er. This is—a fairly simple enchantment. You’ve seen it before—someone’s cast it on you, maybe—”
“Suggestion,” reads Astarion, plucking it from Gale’s grasp. “Aren’t you kinky?”
“What? No. I didn’t think—I only meant—”
Astarion meets his eyes, smirking; there is no respite or relief to be found in his expression. Gale squirms. Looking at him like this is overwhelming, almost intimate, aggressively weird—he looks away after a moment, freeing himself from the awful prison of casual eye contact.
He clears his throat. “You’re welcome to cast it on me,” he says. “I trust you.”
“Isn’t that fascinating, ” Astarion murmurs. He strokes his long fingers over the scroll idly, and Gale can’t help but stare at his gorgeous, bony knuckles, and his perfectly manicured nails. The image of him sliding them into his cunt springs to mind, unbidden; Gale pushes it away as quickly as he possibly can before the tadpole has the chance to expose him. “Hm.”
“I want you to,” says Gale, before he can stop himself. “I want to see you—” Resplendent. Powerful.
Astarion raises a pale eyebrow. “Do you, now.” He clicks his tongue. “What will I do with you? I suppose I could ask you for anything I like.”
That sort of open-ended question should have frightened Gale, considering Astarion’s proclivities. It makes his clit throb instead. “Anything,” he says eagerly, and attempts to sound friendly and professional and not at all suggestive.
“You seem shockingly confident that I won’t simply rob you blind,” Astarion says cheerfully.
“I doubt you need a spell for that.”
Astarion pinks a little in the warm light; he must be eating well. “You flatter me.” He looks at Gale sideways, as though he is uniquely interesting, and adds, “I could ask you to get on your knees for me.”
“Would you?” squeaks Gale. He is certain, in a distantly objective sense, that he has probably soaked through his underwear by now. He thinks about Astarion trailing a fingertip over his cunt through the fabric, commenting wryly on his damp overexcitement, and he thinks he is going to faint. “I wouldn’t—er, be opposed, if you—”
Astarion’s eyes go very wide, suddenly. He composes himself after a moment—settles his face into something familiar and controlled—but there is something new and different to the way he holds his body nonetheless, something exhilarant. His knee bounces. “I see,” he says. “You wouldn’t be opposed.”
“If you’re—interested,” manages Gale. He shifts his weight from one foot to the other; it’s been a long time since he’s discussed something like this, especially aloud with another mortal. He feels like a bumbling fool.
“Yes,” says Astarion, biting out the syllable. He does not, at least, seem like the sort of person to talk significantly before sex; Gale wonders, from his own distant and perhaps voyeuristic perspective, if he’s ever talked before fucking at all. “Well. In that case.”
He rolls open the scroll with those precise, clever hands. Gale steels himself, pressing his teeth together, his heart pounding away, his mouth dry with anticipation. He’s let his peers and roommates cast enchantments on him when he was an apprentice, simply for practice—and he’s been magicked recently, in the bloody heat of battle—but this makes him nervous anyway. Astarion feels different.
He casts the spell, and the scroll crumbles to ashes in his hand, leaving the magic’s distinct, honeyed scent in the air. Gale braces himself for another tense moment—and then it hits him all at once with a shock of dizziness. It leaves that same sweet taste lingering in his mouth, and a rather heady feeling floating in his limbs.
“Fuck,” mutters Astarion under his breath. His voice seems very, very far away, perhaps through water. It isn’t a command. Gale’s body is honed and ready for a command, every cell of it, and he doesn’t realize that he’s taken a stumbling step closer to the cot until he’s gazing down at Astarion and their knees bump together.
Gale takes a shuddering breath. “Please,” he says, plainly and desperately. “Please give me something to do.” He is teetering on the knife’s edge of the spell, tugged between rational thought and unsteady enchantment, and in the short handful of seconds since Astarion’s casting, it’s eaten away completely at the filter between his brain and his mouth. This would concern him more if his faculties were still intact.
“You’d do anything I told you to, wouldn’t you?” muses Astarion. There’s a hitch in his voice, a trembling thrill. “Tell me what you want.”
There it is: the command that Gale’s been waiting for. It settles in his core, heavy and unavoidable, and it fills his brain with lovely pink fog. The spell assures him that everything is lovely and safe and okay. His mouth falls open without a moment of deliberation, and he blurts, “You. Please.”
Astarion frowns. “I—yes, well, that’s very kind of you.”
Gale peers down at him through his lashes, noting the curve of his lips, barely parted to allow a tiny flash of teeth. He is a beautiful man with a beautiful mouth. “I want to kiss you,” he says aloud.
“All right,” Astarion allows. He hooks a finger in Gale’s collar and drags him down, pressing their lips together, and Gale moans into his mouth.
The sensation of kissing him is gorgeously perfect, even through the distant high of Suggestion. Astarion’s mouth is cold, which Gale had expected, and he’s insistent in a soft, sweet sort of way, which he hadn’t. The very tip of a sharp fang brushes against his lip before Astarion readjusts, and a breath catches in Gale’s throat.
“I want your tongue down my throat,” breathes Gale, before he can properly conceptualize the idea in his head.
Astarion cups his jaw, fingertips brushing against his skin, four cool points of contact. “You’re certainly enthusiastic.”
“I like the way you kiss me.” He says it without any particular magical urging, but the words spill out of him too easily anyway. It’s easier to tell Astarion all the sweet things he wants to say when his brain feels like candy floss. “You’re gorgeous,” he adds, simply, and then Suggestion gets its pink hooks in him again and he says, “I want you to kiss me again. Please. ”
“Let’s think a little bigger,” says Astarion, tapping Gale on the tip of his nose. His free hand presses against the small of Gale’s back, hard enough to nearly make him stumble forward; it’s a possessive sort of touch, of the sort that Gale had dreamt about. “Aren’t you wet? Tell me how wet you are, darling.”
It’s not a magical command, but it’s a command nonetheless, and Gale’s always been weak for the confident thrill that Astarion gets in his voice when he’s doing something like immensely violent murder or lockpicking or, apparently, telling Gale what to do in bed. “I’m really very wet,” he admits, squirming under Astarion’s inescapable touch. “Please. Please. ”
“Please what ?” says Astarion, an indulgent smile playing over his lips. “I believe I was very clear with you.”
The spell tugs inside him like fish hooks, but all he manages is a broken little noise. He doesn’t know what he wants, he just knows that he wants it; he’s dizzy and he can’t put words together in his brain, and he can’t quite get enough friction against his own thighs. He has the distant awareness that he’s probably embarrassing himself, but he can’t bring himself to mind one way or another.
“Shall I pick for you, then?”
“Please,” says Gale, in the most pathetic voice he’s heard from his own mouth in several years, which is something of an achievement.
Astarion does something that might be interpreted as a happy little wiggle, and then the corner of his mouth gets tight and he settles himself down again. Gale thinks, vaguely, that whatever he’s doing is something to think about later—but he can’t quite put all the pieces together in his head. “Lie down for me.”
“On the bed?” says Gale, cocking his head to the side.
“What—where else? Yes, you fool. On your back, please.”
Gale crawls onto the cot, retaining just enough presence of mind to attempt a bit of dignity in his motion. He fancies that he hears Astarion giggle, somewhere beside his shoulder. “I want you to kiss me again,” he says.
There is the sound of rustling, and then light footsteps; Gale suspects that he’s making noises on purpose, to indicate his location, but he can’t quite tell. After a moment, those cold, thin lips press against Gale’s again, and Gale kisses back as enthusiastically as he’s ever kissed anyone, probably. His chin ends up slick with saliva.
“You’re an eager little wizard,” says Astarion, the way one might praise a very obedient dog. That makes his head spin faster. “Stay there. I—need to decide what I’m going to do with you.”
“You don’t know?” asks Gale, frowning, or at least attempting to make his face into something he thinks resembles a person’s frown. The Suggestion request hadn’t been to emote properly about what you want, after all, and Gale has no innate skill in emoting. “You said you’d decide.”
“I am deciding, thank you very much,” says Astarion, and from his awkward downward angle, Gale sees his nose wrinkling. “I’m just—considering.”
Gale taps his fingers against his own palm, trying to keep himself from reaching between his legs and grinding against his hand. He needs the friction so, so badly, and Astarion is frankly cruel to keep it from him. He whines to communicate this.
Astarion pouts at him, and says, “You’re impatient,” and then clicks, “All right.” He snaps the band of Gale’s pajama pants against his plush hips with one of those beautiful hands, his beautiful fingers. “Be a dear and take care of these, please.”
“I want you to touch me more,” Gale pants.
“You’re not being much of a dear, are you?”
He takes off his pants and his underclothes, tossing them in a heap on the floor. It wasn’t a Suggestion command, and it wasn’t magical, but it feels similar in the way that it pulls at him. He feels shivering and exposed, but not necessarily in a bad way, per se. He likes being shivering and exposed in front of Astarion, and that single thought is too much to unpack tonight. “I want you to touch me.”
Astarion’s hand flexes. “Yes. I think—yes. Mm.”
He kisses Gale again, and when Gale tugs at his lapels, Astarion follows him down to the cot. It isn’t quite large enough to fit two adult men, but their bodies press together close enough to make up for it.
Gale squirms against him, his hips rutting against nothing, his clit begging for friction. He says, in a moan, “I want you to touch me now, please,” in case he hadn’t been clear enough a minute ago.
“Gods, you’re needy,” mutters Astarion. It’s the kind of thing that might have devastated him from Mystra’s mouth, and yet it curiously stirs up the heat in his belly when Astarion says it. Perhaps it’s that underlying almost-fond sound to his voice; perhaps it’s that everything he’s saying right now is getting Gale too wet to think; perhaps it’s some hidden third thing, some barely-explored proclivity lurking in Gale’s subconscious.
“Yes,” he gasps, “yes, I am, I need you…”
“Take these off for me, too,” says Astarion, after a moment of deliberation. He tugs at Gale’s underwear, popping it against his hipbone, and Gale jumps to follow his instructions. “Good. That’s good. I think—”
Gale blinks at him with round, damp eyes.
“Fuck. Grind on me, go on,” says Astarion, slotting his thigh between Gale’s legs, pressing up against his dripping cunt. The sudden sensation is a shock, but not an unwelcome one. “Soak my trousers.”
He hardly needs the encouragement at this point. He buries his face in the crook of Astarion’s neck, breathing in the scent of him—those hair creams, that copper—and grinds down on Astarion’s bony leg. Hands skim over Gale’s body: the soft curve of his thighs, the rolls of his back, the breadth of his shoulders.
The texture of his trousers is odd, but not unpleasant. It reminds Gale of shamefully stuffing a pillow between his legs during one or two of those long nights at camp to rut against until he cursed through his teeth. His muscles tense; his breath hitches.
Astarion’s hand settles on his back, pressing him forward, and that insistence is wildly attractive. Gale chokes out an “Oh, oh,” and then, “Pull it, please, I want you to pull it.” It nearly surprises him, that last request, until he hears it muttered in his own voice; but it’s true, so he can hardly fault himself.
“You want—all right, yes,” says Astarion. It takes him a quick moment, but he curls his fingers in Gale’s hair and yanks it. He does nothing in half-measures; it’s hard enough that a gasp escapes Gale’s throat.
His hips stutter. He is very warm, and his belly is very tight, and his mouth is open against the long line of Astarion’s neck and smearing saliva across his skin. He’s nearly there—he can feel it…
He comes with a sharp noise, rocking against Astarion’s body, weakly riding his orgasm out. Gale sits there for a moment, catching his breath, until the spell catches hold of him again and he says, “I want to touch you now.”
Astarion is silent for a second longer than he should be, all things considered. He certainly isn’t drooling and begging the way that Gale had been—he’s not enchanted, after all, although that’s a thought to consider at a later date. After a moment, he says, “Let me see your face, won’t you?”
“You’re dodging the question,” mumbles Gale, although he follows the direction unquestioningly. He peers at Astarion’s odd red eyes from his awkward, slightly too-close angle, their noses only an inch or two apart.
“I—” starts Astarion, and then he pauses. He wets his lips with the tip of his tongue. “Why don’t you watch me get myself off, darling? You were—good for me. You deserve to rest, don’t you?”
“I suppose,” says Gale. “I do want to touch you, though.”
Astarion pats his shoulder, and says, “You’re disgustingly sweet. No. I don’t—I’ll touch myself, and you’ll sit there like a good boy. You like being my good boy, don’t you?”
Several pieces slot together at once in Gale’s molasses-slow brain; he recalls the things Astarion has said about his time before the tadpole, with his lips turned up in a sneer. He only says, “I like being your good boy,” because pressing Astarion on anything right now, especially, seems like the plane’s most foolish idea, and also putting together a more complicated sentence is presently intimidating.
“I knew you would,” says Astarion, showing all of his teeth in his self-satisfied grin. “All right. Sit back and make yourself comfortable.”
Astarion pushes his trousers down around his knees, muttering a complaint about Gale’s mess that makes his clit throb, and closes his eyes as he wraps his hand around his cock. His hips roll and his eyes squeeze shut, the corner of his mouth twitching, and he mutters, “Gods—you’re so—you’re ridiculous—”
“You’re gorgeous,” says Gale; he can hardly manage anything other than sincerity right now, and nonetheless, this is the most sincere thing he’s said all night.
It takes Astarion only a couple of quick, grunting seconds before he comes on his hand, a high-pitched sound tumbling out of him as though he’s not quite expecting his own orgasm. “You’re—fuck,” he hisses, which doesn’t quite parse.
“Yeah,” says Gale.
“Hells. Get rid of the spell. Can you do that?”
It takes a moment to remember the hand motion and the words to accompany it, but Gale dispels the magic and the sweet aftertaste lingering in his mouth dissolves. He comes back to himself, bit by bit, to the fact that he’s just rutted against Astarion’s thigh while drooling like a dog. He blushes. “Well, hello,” he says.
“Hello, beautiful,” says Astarion. “How are you feeling?”
Gale blinks. “I believe I’ll have a headache in the morning,” he says, as casually as he can muster; he’s not sure what the accepted social script for I just came on my friend’s thigh could possibly be. “You?”
“Well enough,” he says. He kicks off his trousers properly, with a surprising disregard for their wellbeing, and settles a possessive leg over Gale’s thighs, which is everything. “You’re warm.”
“I’ve got a lot of blood in me,” Gale points out.
“Aren’t you special,” says Astarion, somewhere between wry and vague offense. He settles himself on top of Gale, resting his head against the soft pillow of his chest, a bit like Tara might. “Don’t move.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
He dreams of Astarion, instead, teeth glinting, carefully casting every spell in the camp’s scroll collection. Resplendent; powerful; deliciously domineering. It’s nice.