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Night crawled across the camp with a darkness differing from the one they had grown accustomed to. Even in the shadows, the feeling of night cast a feeling of apprehension that could only belong to the rise of the moon. On a far off rock, the stone as black as pitch beneath the gnarled branches of a tree, the musician played quietly. A lute in favor of a violin, the song drifted like the shadows around the disparate group, its melody a morose dance that swirled about the fire and wove itself into the very fabric of each tent.
Astarion looked out towards the man for a long moment, his thoughts attempting to skirt the edges of the drow’s, before he disappeared into the dark warmth of his burgundy tapestries.
The vampire let free a long sigh of exasperation, the weight of the day and all fo the days before it falling out from behind his fangs with a hiss. In another exhale, he let free the weight of the last two hundred years before gravity could pull his spine backwards. Into the woven sheets he fell, his locks of curly white a wild mess around sharp features that had been nicked and bruised from the day’s wear. He was suddenly thankful that he had no chance to see his reflection, knowing he would disapprove of it so fervently he’d feel liable to rip the skin from his own bones. He would rather be fleshless than bear the marks of wear any more than he had to, the scar on his inner thigh from a night pulling burns left by Cadazor off of his skin. If anyone had to make him ugly, it would only be himself.
Yet the thoughts of disfigurement could only fester so long, thoughts of the musician quick to chase them off like a wolf after hens. The petty attachments to glamor and the insecurity of being undesirable shifted, taking the form of something heavier and more severe. The drow had grown distant, his skin more cold. Astarion knew the look in a man’s eye when his mind began to drift elsewhere, like a boat on the sea’s crest, and yet the waters the drow traversed were deeper and darker than he could imagine. Suddenly the whispered taunts of godhood when he drank of the ichor that set his veins to flame were not just whispers, the cruelty and unknowability of that power suddenly very real when the man had turned his back on him earlier that evening.
Astarion had always thought his attempts at affection a calculated minstrelry, an intricate showing of touch and banter to keep the other man’s attention — so why was it his very soul seemed to burn at the idea of being met with a half-smile and disinterested turn of shoulder. What could it have meant to feel a strange sense of longing in his chest when he sat amongst his blankets, anger rising in his throat at having been denied an evening at the musician’s side? Perhaps it was no more than the worry over his plan beginning to fray. Perhaps it was anger and distrust at his talons losing their hold on the tall elf whose past was as dark as the shadows they traversed. And yet, as a pale hand ran down over his features, rubbing at the way his own brows knit forward, he realized with mounting horror that it might have been something else.
It was a fool’s gambit to play a part to such perfection with the drow, whose knowledge of poetry and theater vastly outpaced his own — it was folly to think they could put on a show and walk away unscathed by the mastery of their craft. Where showmanship ended and the real Astarion began was as murky as his handle on all other morals, the greyness of it where he usually found reprieve. He did not have to be genuine, and in the last two hundred years, he found the mask pretty enough to lever slip from his features. But amongst the blood drinking, the bickering, the late evenings spent with the necromancer showing Astarion arcane magics and instructing him on how to do the same, it had started to slip. His harlequin’s guard was beginning to fissure, and something about what lied beneath terrified him.
Red eyes stared at the tent’s ceiling, his body overcome with the potential energy for violence. He wanted to lash his hands and gnash his teeth at something, he wanted to affix the mask back to his face, he needed the curtains to be drawn over the scene so that he could rest in intermission. The show had gone on for too long and he feared he was starting to forget his lines in the face of the overpowered, honey-worded, torment of a man who loomed over him. A snarl touched the vampire’s lip before the thought of the man’s hand against his waist, and then his face, willed it away.
So long had he chased the feeling of death and so long had he feared actually meeting it that to have danced with it, to have been felt by Him, was nearly too much. He could practically hear the drow’s words in his ear, chastising for his unbecoming expression. With a sigh, he could practically feel the strange hands, made thin and marred black by magick, sprawling across his chest. It was a weight that prevented him from fleeing and a feeling that grounded him in equal measure ; a man that was both a cage and the key to unlatch it, he found his mind tracing the contours of Verrot’s face in the dark of his mind.
He hated him for being the thing that caused the mask to shatter. How beautiful that face had been, painted and repainted through so many years. He had grown fond of it, of its full lips and half-lidded eyes that always looked for the nearest escape and the nearest bedroom. He hated the witty stranger, the one who spoke like he was crafting song with every word, for changing the script. And with such deft hands he penned a new story, one thrice more riveting and even more dangerous than the one Astarion had written for himself. The vampire thought himself a fool then, a mockery made out of him through little more than a warm feeling stirring in his undead chest. How he wanted to claw it out, to find a suitable branch to stake it through — it pulsed like the worm in his head, writhing and wriggling around the few remaining parts of his being he had sworn to never be touched.
Yet where that hatred burned, so too did something else. It was a cold breeze across the grave of his mind, a dark blanket thrown across a sleeping body. It was unknowable but touchable, something that he could take in his grasp if he just remembered how to use his fingers for something besides breaking. He imagined his hands then, pale and strong, the tendons taut. And then he imagined them digging into soft earth, feeling the freshly tilled soil near a headstone. He relished the feeling of it, the chill underneath his nails as the earth gave way to the worms that surrounded a body. In a blink of his mind, the soil was cake. Soft, chocolate cake that slipped like silk through his fingers. How heady the smell of it was as he kept digging, deeper into the frosting and the layers of jam. It was a lovely daydream, and one that left him smelling of vanilla and brown sugar. It had been a long time since he had known those smells. It had been a long time since he had hungered for something he could eat with a fork.
And then there was flesh. Cold, dark flesh as supple as the soil and the servings of cake. He moved his hands against it for no other reason than he thought he deserved to know what it was like to hold, to grab. He felt more powerful then than he had in a long time, doing something entirely for himself in a way that transcended tricks and lies that would hopefully guarantee his safety — something that gave him a leash to hold even though he stayed on the yoke of his own master. That mattered little now as he imagined the pleasure of it, streaking the frosting up strong, deft arms that knew how to play his body as well as the piano. Even in the farce of his love, that much rang true — Verrot touched him like a reliquary, like a violin’s neck, like treasure unearthed. This sort of selfishness could be his key to the irons on his ankles, if only he knew how to capture it.
Astarion groaned and shoved his hand into his breeches, shutting his eyes tighter.
“I want this,” He said aloud as nimble fingers grabbed at his cock. When the feeling left him unsatisfied, he reached back up to his mouth quickly.
Sticking his fingers past his lips, he sucked at them dutifully before they were acceptably wet. Astarion did not hesitate to find himself once more, fingers slick and rough with his own length. It was a ferocious, angry need that gripped him, a sort of burning heat he could not quell so easily. He wanted the other man the way he was supposed to ; he longed for his flesh for the sake of it, he longed for his blood for the sweet taste. He thought of the cake again, how good it would taste fed to him from a drow’s forked tongue.
Astarion pumped himself harder, voice lowering, “I want you, damn it.”
“It is a mutual feeling,” A voice reached the curve of his pale ear.
“This wanting to be wanted, this wanting to want,” it continued like a hand across the folds of the vampire’s brain, “oh, how it ails me.”
Astarion opened his red eyes to a curtain of black hair over him. It smelled of cedar and beeswax, of resin and fur. He stroked himself quicker, almost in time to the words that were spoken.
“Am I such a terrible thing to want, my love?” Astarion asked, a pained smile finding his lips, the edge shuddering as if it wanted to tick into a grimace.
“Yes,” the man above him breathed, the frame of his body pressing down against the vampire’s, “How could it not be a terrible thing, to want something that does not know how to want.”
Astarion shuddered at the accusation. He spread his legs further, slanting his hips to allow himself easier access.
“I want to learn,” He steeled, “Do not give up on me, not when I am so interested.”
In a second, the mouth at his ear was elsewhere. First, it was at his neck, kissing over the scars, and then it fell towards his shoulder. Astarion pushed up and out of his shirt, letting the fabric fall in a heap beside his head ; with a small lull of his skull, he could still smell the other man on the fabric from earlier that day, when Verrot had embraced him briefly in order to appraise a wound.
The mouth fell lower. It caught at a nipple and then at his sternum, feverish and hungry as it moved along his pale flesh. Astarion bucked into his hand until even that was ushered away, the mouth having moved down his stomach, over his navel, and through the thatching of white pubic hair.
“Tell me that you want it,” The voice said against the head of his cock. Astarion’s toes curled and the balls of his feet pushed against the linens beneath him.
“You know that I do,” Astarion responded, shutting his eyes tight to the world, the white lashes crimped around the lines of the expression.
“Tell it to me, then,” A flick of tongue against his cock made him groan.
“I want it,” He said, hips straining.
A small huff of breath and then a laugh unfurled against the underside of his length. A hand had replaced his own, stroking slowly.
“I require specificity, my love,” The drow’s low voice was a whisper, “Use that tongue of yours if you want me to use mine.”
Astarion shuddered before relenting.
“I want you to put your mouth on my cock.”
The vampire said what was obvious, finding a certain power in the words. He found them easier still when the other man did as he requested, the chill of his mouth parting over the head of his cock and lowering with perfect approach until his length touched the back of the musician’s throat.
“Good,” he rolled his hips, fucking the other man’s face. Astarion relished in the feeling of the man’s nose crushing into the whorls of white hair and the flesh beneath, his fangs and tongues observing his shaft carefully.
“No,” he said quietly, gripping locks of black hair. Verrot began to pull off, yet before he could, Astarion continued his thought, “I meant to say it is very good. I want more of it.”
Verrot hummed around the tip of Astarion’s cock with a lazy smile before Astarion felt the head lower again.
No one had given him the sort of attention the musician had. Even in their arrangement, with two puppeteers playing puppet’s strings, the necromancer had not left him feeling anything less than perceived. Known, observed, beholden. It nearly drove the vampire to madness during the first time they had laid together, how the hands appraised him and guided him as if he were carved from ancient, respectable marble. It ought to have been a simple pact, his body for temporary refuge, the other man’s pleasure for a truce. And yet it burned to be so known, like being chased through the forest in the dark. He had made the mistake of bedding a man whose ardor was like that of a hunter — following each track, each scent, it did not matter how far he ran, the other’s deft hands always on the perimeter to catch him.
The next morning, the drow had said he had been distant. Astarion wanted to say he had ran to the nearest crag and tricked himself into believing he knew how to fly before throwing himself off. He bit his tongue that morning in fear the other would say something witty and irritating about believing he was beautiful enough to have wings. That was what the drow was like, seeing feathers where there should have been nothing but a man splattered on the rocks.
He moaned, twisting his hand in the bedroll beneath him. Perhaps had died that night, perhaps he had thrown himself from the cliff, and now something else lived in his body. Something sentimental and needy, something with his heart but without his two hundred years of guarding it. It would have disgusted him if it did not excite him more. Was this what it meant to be free?
He was unmoored, his hips thrusting hard into the mouth that received him.
“I want to feel it again,” Astarion said, gritting through the words with urgency.
Verrot held his cock at the back of his throat, enveloping him in the sensation that the vampire could only grind against. He moved into the wet darkness until he felt a trail of spit run over the sensitive flesh of his balls.
“I want I feel you inside of me,” He said the words, his face contorted in need, “Can you believe that I squandered it the first time,” he hiccuped a breath, a sad amusement touching his face.
Astarion had thought the words before but had little need to utter them aloud. Not before then, at least. To admit it would be to admit the rouse, to admit that he had tried to play an upper hand on a man who seemed to have all of the cards. Perhaps it would have excited the musician, to see that he played a game of lanceboard with someone as skilled with the squares as he. Or perhaps it would have angered him, to become so aware that his body had been used as one of the black and white pawns. They looked not so different than the pieces, their skin and hair contrasting, the build of their bodies. Perhaps it was fine then, that their romance would be made a game until all the pieces were cleared from the board and they were left with nothing but their hands.
Hands. How he wanted to feel them.
If he couldn’t have them, he would cut them off. Was this freedom, too? To take what you want?
He flexed his own hands, feeling the power behind them before he opened his eyes, the sensation on the tip of his length nearly too much to bear. It drew him close to the precipice of some great understanding, yet right when he thought to look into the abyss of it, it faltered.
There was no musician. There was no man between his legs making love to the weight of his cock. There were no hands roaming up his sides, to his nipples, to his chest. No mouth to call him pretty or sing his praises when it wasn’t full. The tent was empty save for Astarion, folded forward with a hand full of release. He took a deep breath, his face alarmingly hot despite the empty nature of his stomach and his veins.
“My,” He said, holding his hand up in the candlelight, “what a mess you have made, Astarion.”
He sighed, reaching over to grab a soiled shirt to soil it further.
As he took care of the slick on his fingers, he noticed something else had made its residence in the quiet of the tent. The musician’s mournful song, carried across camp like a dirge. He wondered who it was he was supposed to mourn, if anyone at all. In that moment, the only thing he thought to grieve was the lucid daydream of the other man. Perhaps, if he had asked the necromancer for a few more of his lessons in the arcana, he could have fashioned an illusion to finish him off. To fill him, like he wanted.
Want, he thought.
He groaned, lacing his pants back up over his spent cock.
He wanted this, the sort of want people had for good weather and good food. An earnest, aching want for company, for physical contact, for whatever strange stories the musician had to prattle on about until nestled in the narrative came a suggestion they get up to something odd or nefarious. He wanted to be wanted. He wanted to have something that was his and no one else’s, something that could not be taken away or used against him.
Shifting towards the tent cover, he thumbed along the embroidery.
Astarion was going to jump from the crag and he was going to find arms at the bottom to fall into. Whether or not the impact would crush them both down to wet marrow would be left to fate alone.