Work Text:
please don't go, I'll eat you whole
I love you so, I love you so
Astarion eats a bird.
It tries to land on him while he works, as he hauls back old stone with hands strong and skin unburned. His shoulders rise and fall with breath real instead of faked, and he makes for a fitting perch, and the bird attempts to flutter down and join him. It sings a song of great lament.
He grabs it. Holds its shaking body between his claws and stares at it, stares at the voice of a martyr and grey-brown feathers of a cadaver that doesn't know what it is yet. At the thing that has freedom because it has wings, and not because it gutted itself for centuries to earn it.
Astarion, ascended, free.
Ghosts didn't tell him what to do once he killed his master. So Astarion chooses—chooses, how lovely a word, how lovely a meaning—to tear down Szarr Palace, and in its corpse lay a garden.
He plants thistleweed so their eye-like flowers can watch the dying gods. He plants goldenrod so even the night has a sun to shelter beneath. He plants creeping thyme so his feet never touch bare soil again. He breeds life in a wasteland and grows green instead of grey. He walks over periwinkle and trails his hands on clustering grapevines and breathes with a chest that scarcely remembers how to do so.
A bird flies through the miasma and tries to partake. Tries to take it from him, to make him share, to gouge open the corner of protection he has built atop the desiccation of a monster and pretend it belongs.
It squawks at him, loud and dithering. It is a problem. You eat your problems. You eat what annoys you. And they are no longer problems.
He eats it. Pops its bones between his teeth and drains its blood—warm, rich, red. And, for the first time since ascending, since carving runes into a pale back and opening eyes washed in scarlet, since holding a dagger in his hand and marveling at the weight of the world encased in two pounds of steel, since leaving a burning building with smoke off his shoulders, Astarion feels alive.
-
Astarion eats a bird.
Not all the way. Just enough. He sinks his fangs into its neck to watch as it croaks and flutters, down, down, until it breathes in enormous, ragged gasps. He takes more, scarlet flowing down his throat, until it dies. Dead.
He waits. Days pass as its empty veins scrounge for anything, as the magic in its system hears the heed of a conductor far overhead and bucks past the carrion to answer.
And then it comes twitching back, and its eyes gleam red. It shrieks again, high and unending, thrashing in his grip. He did not bury it—did not make it dig itself out of its own shallow grave. He is kind. It shrieks regardless. Bird eyes do not make for remorse, nor sympathy, and he lets it batter itself down like the strange and sudden storm that builds on the horizon until the coast weathers it with nothing more than shuttered windows.
He shows it the paradise—the sanctuary, with camellia blooms and russet-petal hellebores. The land where little things are not made to matter and the ghosts that decided to devour what they could not defeat die and are buried beneath the knotting roots of a star magnolia and the carcasses only peek out through fist-sized flowers pale as the moon.
It is not appreciative. His fist tightens around its frail body until it shudders and screeches apology.
The bird came fluttering over his garden wall, using the trumpet vine that had just started to take root, scuttling inside as if in search of something. It had wide eyes, half-unaware, half-miracle, and he had tasted the blood under its feathers long before he had gotten his hand around it. Then it had screamed, and it was sweet as foods he now knows to compare, and he watched his skin heal as it thrashed with grasping talons and hollow bones before he bit its neck.
Now it is dead, and now it is awoken, and now it is caught in its own ineptitude as he allows it into a brighter life.
A thief it was, little more, little less. To pluck the seeds from his garden, to steal away ice-bright flowers on goat's beard clusters or serrated leaves from a river birch. He punishes it for the transgression, one bite, two fangs, click-click—and now he guides it from past failures into a new world. Through the garden, through the corpse buried beneath.
To its home, in the center of the garden.
The cage is tall and sprawling. Gold, not silver, with great faux leaves that twist to catch the sunlight before it can reach the bottom. No plants within, but right alongside, spotted mountain-laurels and trailing daylilies and forget-me-nots. A paradise, opposite grey stone and mausoleums.
He puts it within the cage and shuts the door. It surges from his hand and hurls itself against the metal, feathers and talons, useless against a weight immobile. It shrieks for mercy, sings a song of wretched fear. He is not moved.
It would defile this place, if it were free. His garden is for sunlight and fingers trailed over winter-flame dogwoods to marvel at the maroon curve of their branches. Rescued it has been, freed from its past shackles, but a thief is in the bones he will not scrape out—so to the cage will it go.
A kindness, to allow it to look upon a world it never knew, to give it something more than stone and misery. His garden is colours and warmth and air and roots and the deep, brown soil of something alive, something he was until he wasn't and then he was again, and there are seven thousand corpses far below that never got to see this beauty so he will give it to this bird instead.
This is freedom. Not all are deserving, because only he has earned it, has truly broken past servitude and danced upon the ruin of he who called himself master, and he has built a garden upon the misery—this freedom is for him and him alone. But the bird will be allowed its own piece. To witness, for all it must pay him back.
He looks at the cage. Slowly, shivering, the bird begins to sing.
-
Astarion eats a bird.
It attacks him as he wanders through his garden, pressing palms to sweet woodruff and honeylocust thorns. It shrieks and screams. Its voice warbles through its throat. It alights in the manner of a volcano that hasn't yet figured out it emerges beneath the water—it rages and froths and can cause no destruction, only creation, a new island crashing through the cold. It carves a single scratch across Astarion's shoulder as he closes his fingers around its neck.
A goblin, years ago, made the same mark. There is nothing there. There will be nothing as soon as he eats it, as soon as he takes in fresh blood to smooth away injuries that will never know the taste of scars.
He presses pain into its glassy eyes.
It picks a war with him. It finds him in his garden and wants to win.
For vampires, war is one of starvation and attrition. For birds, it is who gets hit and who gets hit less. It flutters at him with hollow bones. He cracks its neck between his teeth.
The scratch heals. The wound wipes away.
Astarion stands, brushes his hands free of feathers that cling between his fingers like they can scrape life from the contact. Another body, this one disposed of, its remnants swept away into the darkness where all things are lost.
In retrospect, he would have built a roof. In retrospect, he would have covered the entire world in plants so the birds couldn't get in, and only the sun could peak through the twist of emerald zelkova leaves.
-
Astarion eats a bird.
It isn't the bird's fault. But it has black feathers and red eyes and when it walks by his garden, when it dares dirty his paradise with macabre clicking talons, he springs from the moonlight and eats it.
It screams in his mouth, and he takes his time—cripples it first, mauls the silken tresses that covered its lovely wings, and savours the agony in its thrashing as he peels it apart like the seed of a horse chestnut.
The corpse, in his hands. He eats that, sinks his teeth into the skin of it, and then sits in the absence with scarlet splattered over his knees and wonders at when it got there. At when he woke up and saw the sunlight and still chose to exist at night and cover himself in silver and listen for the song from the cage.
The garden spreads before him, honeysuckle and winter holly and bush clover. Astarion plucks the flower from a shade-spotted azalea and watches the petals wither away.
Cazador was a ghost of his own unlife. He wallowed in mediocrity. He haunted cold stone and buried himself in velvet curtains, only tallow candles to light his way. He filled his palace with dripping oil paintings and bones beyond beauty. He sought to be a monster instead of a monarch.
Astarion is different. He has a garden and he fills it, digs his hands into dirt that has never been used for graves and instead supports seeds. He hosts soirees and laughs with those in rumpled collars and high-frock cloaks. He dines on calamari from the Elfsong Tavern and replaces memories that used to yearn for it.
The carcass of the palace lies beneath the dirt. Above it walks a living person, instead of a ghost and a half. The old world is dead, dying in the twilit prison far below, and Astarion grows a garden.
He is covered in the wounds of centuries past. They do not appear above his skin. His neck is free and unmarked.
The war is over and he should be free.
-
Astarion eats a bird.
It flies from him, or tries to—there is no strength in its mangled wings as it lurches to the air and cannot get off the ground. He takes his time in walking over, in watching its eyes go black and flat with fear, how it doesn't stop thrashing until he crouches to fit it within the grasp of his hand.
The others in the cage shrink and cower back.
He is kinder to them than the bird he was, centuries ago—when he did not have a gilded cage to live in but instead had to fly over the city, to catch lesser birds and bring them home to be drained down to the marrow. His birds do not have to demean themselves. They do not have to pretend to be something they're not.
He leaves them in the cage. They sit there and are free within it; they curl up to each other and sing when he looks at them. They do not have to do anything but exist. He does not drag them out and beat them. He does not force them onto their back. They stay in the cage and they are happy.
He is kind.
Astarion stares at the one who escaped and holds it, shrieking, in his hand. It is not singing. It used the gaunt bones of its wings to pick the lock and slip free. It is trying to run. To what? To a different master that will beat it, will break it, will make it entrap other bloodied things home?
He is kind. The bird does not see that. He eats it.
-
Astarion eats a bird.
It does not bother with fanceries or creeping down the wisteria—it blusters up to his front gate and batters it down until air spills through the gap, and then it does not flee from him but fly over instead, and it cries with its wings spread wide until his hand lashes it from the sky.
It is—familiar, in a way. He knows these feathers, these twisting talons. Picture a forest full of thorns and teeth. Picture six figures, walking through the darkness that lays at their feet and pants like an old dog. Picture laughter. Picture the sky, because it is always sunny in these scenes, even in the world apart. Picture the dream that is a memory that is the reason he lives in a garden and does not go beyond its walls. Picture how he has decided he is happy here.
If this bird was them—was one of the tall figures who laughs and walks beneath sunlight and stands by him—then Astarion would draw himself on misery and make for himself a death so memorable it eclipses the two hundred years without one, where he laid his head on stone with a body that yearned to turn to dust. If this bird was them—was the ones forgotten, the ones erased—then Astarion would not be here.
A good thing it isn't, then. Because it is not a figure but instead a bird, and it screeches at him with frantic fear as he holds it in his palm and ponders over its similarities. Red feathers, layered over in the memory of smoke. A house, a lifetime ago, burning down its shattered foundations.
It stares at him. He stares back.
To his garden did it fly, did it disturb the silence he cultivates as much as any frosted brunnera or cardinal flower, did it attempt to take him from the peace he has won over a legacy of carved infernal runes and the unmistakable truth that the world cannot hold him any more than the corpse he buried beneath a garden does.
Law of the predator. It comes to the house of a carnivore and thinks itself invulnerable.
He wins. Its feathers smother his throat.
The bird is not them. It is not because Astarion walks in a green sanctuary that was once the palace of his master, and he is alive, and they are only birds.
-
Astarion eats a bird.
It screams as he draws it from its cage, as blue feathers tumble down to coat the bottom in sickness. Now it makes noise, one he does not want.
It did not sing when he looked upon it. It is in the cage to sing, his only request, and he looked upon it. It shivered instead and did not sing. The others were louder, desperate, though their voices cracked and warbled, but this one did not sing, and it disobeyed him.
What use is a bird that does not sing?
Astarion looks at it. Runs a finger over its wings, warped and twisted without flight. He does not leave the gardens, not since the snowfalls some—months? years? more?—ago, wandering through his gardens, and they are there to sing for him. Not to hunt, not to hurt, not to pleasure; simply sing.
There is a star, high above the trees he has replaced thrice on the edge of his gardens, white-barked sycamores and coastal red cedars. It shines through the velvet night like an eye, burning yellow, and the bird looks at it—looks at it, away from him, high to the sky it once flew before he put it in the cage and told it to sing.
Why the feather on the ground? Why the eye in the fire?
His hand tightens. The bird screams again, this time through death throes, as he is above and below and crouched in the darkness of a prison filled with cursed stone that has not known sunlight more than it has known peace.
The bird is dying and there is no such place as the catacombs.
He dusts its skull between his fangs, makes a show of it, would shower himself in scarlet if it had any to give—long has he learned the way of who he was and there is no regeneration here, nothing but twisted agony as he removes it from singing ever again. Until it is a corpse and then it is not, as it disappears behind his teeth. Until those in the cage rise to a fever pitch, silent only when he looks at them.
No one else can see it. He is poised and silver and indomitable.
But despite his best efforts, the blood on his neck has never quite washed away.
-
Astarion eats a bird.
It doesn't fight back—it isn't alive to. What is left are brittle bones and feathers tossed over stone. This isn't one in the cage, for those are still there, and they cluck and twitter when he stares at them, and fall silent otherwise. This isn't one in the skies overhead, though it had been, before he snapped its neck, long ago.
There are no more birds that fly to his gardens. That perch in the swaying grey-willow trees or roost amongst the pale boughs; there are no more birds that lay soft-shelled eggs in a robin's blue and gather twigs for the keeping. They were loud and they flew and they tried to take his gardens as their own and he killed them, ate some, slaughtered others.
Now the gardens are silent. Astarion finds a body from years past and eats it. Tries to hold the song that is no more in his chest and stares at the cage until the birds sing well-worn ballads once again.
-
Astarion eats a bird.
He steps over half-rotten pachysandra and finds soil beneath. Finds something beneath that, scuffed under his bare feet, an etching of a ghost. Hidden alongside the fallen boughs of a sweet cherry is a section of carpet, strands torn and shredded by age, and it is brown and molded and he knows it.
Atop the corpse is another corpse. Wings spread, beak wrapped around, trying to pluck out the fabric for a nest so far away. The carpet was tainted. Poison, from vitriol or simply time. It died before it could escape.
Somewhere between the stars and the hand he dug into the soil to pull up seeds that have grown too old to bloom, its body made one last heave against the stark imbalance of power, and it died. It is sprawled here, a testament to nothing everlasting, because Astarion walked into the river without a tadpole to protect him and walked out the other side, and the bird is dead.
He is shackled here. He grows a garden atop a graveyard and does not leave its walls.
He eats the bird. The blood soothes his throat so he does not shatter into a thousand pieces when he opens his mouth.
-
Astarion eats a bird.
He pulls them from the cage one by one. They have no blood, no meat, to offer—the cage has made corpses of what once was. They shriek and croak in his hands as he removes them, the bottom of the cage dusted in feathers and flesh. Eating them does not spark anything. Their voices, once so pretty, are little more than gasps. They cannot sing. How long has it been since they sang?
He looks at the last one. At the first one, the one that climbed over his garden wall and screamed so sweetly when he grabbed it, that instead of taking its heart he took its neck instead, and put it in the cage to sing again. It shivers in his grip, staring up at him with glassy eyes. The only part unchanged. There is nothing but death between his hands.
Why did he have them? They were to be in the cage and they were to sing. He did not let them out. He did not need them defiling his gardens, scurrying about underfoot. He did not punish them. He did not make them get on their back. He did not make them hunt for him.
He did not want them, but he kept birds because lords keep birds.
Birds, flightless, caged.
He eats it. Cracks its skull between his teeth. Peels through marbled flesh and bones that splinter like a silver maple past its prime. It does not scream this time—does not do anything but close its eyes and allow him to take the victory of its second passing. It goes behind his fangs and does not return.
He is alone in a place that is empty. It is quiet here.
-
Astarion eats a bird.
It flew overhead, too high, and he climbed the twisting boughs of the dawn redwood to catch it as its body blotted out the sun. It tries to run but he is feral with it, lunging through the leaves, and his claws cripple its wings until it falls and he descends upon it. Eats it, hungry, and eats the feathers, the talons, the bones—eats it all until he is clutching air to his empty chest and feeling nothing despite what weight sits in his throat.
He spent so long with the abstract ideation of revenge that he forgot that, intrinsically, revenge is a person—revenge is black hair and red eyes and stone surfacing beneath rotten plants. Its shadow clings to the land that has long lost its corpse. It laughs in a language called mourning. Astarion grows a garden with only the knowledge he will prevent an eternity that already happened.
He wants to eat the birds. He wants to devour the memories until they settle in his chest and he can stoke their dying embers until they warm him like a house that burned, long ago, and a bird with familiar feathers flew through the smoke and crowed laughter at the sun.
Where is the smoke? Where is the devastation?
Where is the burning house, and where is the bird that burned it?
-
Astarion eats a bird.
He tries. He shoves fingers down his throat and retches up mud, maggots—retches up green-brown hyssop leaves coated in slime and hollyhock buds that never got a chance to bloom. Stays in the bile that covers clothing he once spent a lifetime stitching and embroidering and now wraps threadbare around in a pantomime of lavished wealth.
The bird does not come up. It is dead. He ate it.
Astarion grows sick on blood trickling through his fangs.
His master he is not. But he sits in the ground-mint that has not been maintained and now spreads wild and destitute, choking itself out until the balance of oak and hickory, of geranium and nettle, is all consumed. Devoured. He sits in the ground-mint that does not hide the stone beneath and digs his nails into his wrist and does not know what he is.
The problem is that he remembers. The problem is that he always remembers. And he ate the memories and buried what he couldn't choke down but the soil is turning and the thorns cannot hide the fangs, and he vomits up what should be nothing and finds that the memories have never been eaten.
The garden is freedom. It drowns Szarr Palace. It gives him sunlight and blood and warmth and breathing and seven thousand corpses that plants can never overgrow. There is just silence and the song that bones cannot keep in his chest any more than they can return the monster that sits at his heels and bays poison.
Astarion eats a bird.
There is nothing else to eat.
-
(How do you kill a vampire lord?)
-
The birds eat Astarion.
They fly in from a cerulean sky to land on his corpse, sprawled over the garden, hands wrapped around hoary mountain-grass and false violet. They settle on his shoulders, on the cloth ripped free to smear on rotten soil. They peck over the soft flesh of his face, pull out eyes hollow like marbles, tear at the pink tissue of lips.
Rend them back to reveal a heart, caught between his fangs, and perch on the gaping hole over his chest.
-
(You let him consume himself.)