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As the sun set, the cast iron skillet had been set to the fire with a thin layer of dough and sugar. For the others, it would prove a small taste of relief amidst the carnage to be taken with warm mugs of mulled wine and conversation. For the musician and the vampire at his side, however, it provided a perfume that set them both to a different kind of hunger. Shades of orange and pink dressed the men in warm hues as the cravings festered in stomachs and behind teeth, and yet they kept composure.
Astarion wove a needle and thread through one of his shirts, eyes focused and hands still as he worked with the fabric as the musician worked a similar but more grotesque craft to his left. Humming, the necromancer had taken the threads of gut that had been harvested from what remained of Ketheric Thorm’s punctured belly, long since dried, and began to fashion them into something that could be strung down the neck of his violin. The thin threads still smelled of faintly of wine lees and bone bleach as the man worked diligently at the spindles of the small twisting bench, twining the ribbons together in a delicate and morbid display.
The vampire looked over, a smile in his voice.
“How well do you think poor papa will sing for you?” He asked.
Verrot did not seem interested in answering at first, the melody at the back of his throat seemingly too important to be interrupted. Astarion realized with a life of brow that it was as important to the process as the fermentation and stripping, always learning something new in the presence of the strange man. And much he had learned since the fall of Myrkul’s chosen.
He willed the thoughts away, the ones of playing consort to something so dangerous and exciting, in fear that the panic and arousal would seize him too quickly and spoil the fun of the evening.
The musician finished the string, chest and throat going quiet as he did.
“Like a morose little songbird,” He mused with a smile, detaching the string from its rivets. He held it up to the sunset, twisting the thread one way and then the other, allowing the vampire to see how a dark black enchantment seemed to swirl along the sinew.
“There is a spare spindle of it,” Verrot continued, “it could be dyed and used the same as any other thread you embroider with.”
“Why,” Astarion tied off his line of thread before clipping the access, shifting the shirt’s cuff in his lap so that he could begin at another section, “you are quite the disturbing gentleman.”
Verrot feigned a theatrical bow, dipping his head.
“For you, my love, I would give the stars. What is a spool of thread?”
“A spool of thread from a corpse, mind you.” Astarion looked at the man more squarely, taking notice of how the eyepatch had left an indent in the man’s face from the long day of wear. He wished to touch it, to rub it out from the deep flesh.
Verrot smiled and tossed the spare spindle of sinew towards the other man, who made a shrill noise of disapproval as it hit his chest and fell downward into the pack he had sat between his feet filled with sewing supplies.
“You should say thank you,” The musician mused, turning to grab the neck of his instrument. For a moment he imagined it the neck of the vampire instead, his flesh reeled in close. He blinked the thought away as he brought the violin across his lap before setting to replacing the last string.
“I am beginning to wonder if good manners are some sort of fetish of yours,” Astarion said with a small, playful smirk. He began to restitch the loosening thread on the cuff’s button as the musician moved over the tailpiece and tuners with similar delicacy.
Verrot sighed theatrically.
“I simply like the sound of them on your mouth. They make a nice dessert to the meal of your usual bad behavior,” He canted his head as he worked, long fingers broken down by magic use surprisingly gentle with the body of his violin, “not that I have ever minded it, of course. You keep me well fed with all of your naughty.”
Astarion raised his brow and hummed, shifting the button between his fingers.
“And yet always wanting more. Not that I can blame you, being as irresistible as I am.”
“It is only fair,” Verrot murmured, “You want of my blood, I want of your heart.”
“Do not paint me so selfishly,” Astarion balked, “I have come to like your heart as much as your blood, as much as it pains me to admit.”
“Is that so,” He drawled, feigning surprise. It was a sordid arrangement for the both of them, having to navigate such a realization. To pine for someone’s company, to wish to lend them a wing to find umbrage under — it was a terrifying ordeal to be so desired and to desire in turn.
Astarion sat the shirt down in performed annoyance.
“Do I need to repeat myself so that it sinks in?” He said the words with an air of fabricated harshness.
Verrot mulled over the thought, setting the instrument down into its case. He would tune it later.
“Yes.” Verrot nodded jovially.
“What—” Astarion began with indigence before sighing, “I like your company. There,” he raised a hand, waving it about as he spoke, “is that plain enough for you to understand?”
“It was plain enough the first time,” The necromancer smiled before letting out a similar sigh. Exhaustion, desperation, the sort of things that usually hanged at the edges of his consciousness. Astarion quelled and aggravated them in equal measure. The words, admittedly, felt nice to hear.
“You are a sadist,” Astarion accused before shifting closer on the stone bench they had found themselves on. Like a moth to darkened flame, he gravitated towards the other elf.
“That makes two of us then,” Verrot looked at him more earnestly, his expression softening around the age of his eyes. Leaning closer, he found the vampire’s ear.
“You have been watching the pulse in my neck all night,” He whispered, “companion in sadism or no, lover mine, you need not hide your needs from me.”
Astarion breathed a sigh of what felt like relief and pain knotted into a confusing emotion. The joy of being seen so clearly and not judged for it and the horror being known so intimately dancing as perfect ballerinas. He missed the days of watching such dancers spin on the stage, the earnings from his time as a cruel magistrate footing the bill of the front row. A time when he could bed the front dancer and feel the strength of the man’s legs beneath his nylons for no one but himself. How he could watch dawn break over the man’s forehead and not risk turning into a pile of ash beneath him.
After Cazador, he had not laid beneath anyone else. Always taking the dominant position, the safer position, he had come to associate the act of receiving with weakness and the sun he was disallowed to see for two hundred long, empty years. That was, until the musician. The musician who had reached over and touched the length of his index nail beneath his chin. He was beneath him in more ways than one.
“Astarion,” He said quietly.
Red eyes matched the mismatched ones that looked down at him. How it was that the necromancer could pull him from his thoughts and still leave him feeling like he walked in a dream, he did not know.
“Want for nothing, just for tonight. We can go back to being rightfully displeased about all of this and whining about it come morning,” Verrot smiled with a wiggle of his fingers.
Astarion began to laugh, “I want many things, my love.”
“Then say please for as many as you want as quick as you can and then take the rest when you’ve run out of time,” the man teased, reaching up to tap his finger to Astarion’s nose.
The man scoffed before standing up quickly.
“You humiliate me,” He accused, setting a hand on one hip as he raised the other to look over his nails.
“I would never,” Verrot shook his head, playing the part of man scorned before standing, his full height looming formidably over the shorter elf.
“Is it so wrong to have a bit of fun with you, lest I get lost to the shadows,” He murmured, reaching out to take the other man’s hand in his own. Astarion’s fingers were nearly dwarfed by the long, skeletal nature of the musician’s. In those moments of embrace, when the other man’s gloves were off, the vampire saw clearly all that the other was. Something beyond his understanding, something that had been kept secret but whose secret was unraveling. An old god returned in the body of a wicked man whose skills were as intense as his idea of romance, whose romance was as dark as the magic that pulsed in his veins.
Whatever Gale carried in his veins paled in comparison to the vastness of the Verrot’s gift and burden.
“I thought you liked the shadows,” Astarion mused, moving his fingers against the other, watching as the digits twined together.
“Not the kind that chase me now,” Verrot said, his eyes growing distant for a moment. Astarion had learned, among other things, that the other man was not always theater and poetry. There was a gulf of anger and pain as deep as his own behind the stage curtains. He saw himself reflected there, at times, like two snarling dogs pretending to sniff and play. They both wanted for similar things, to claw to the top so that they might become untouchable and to shape the star in their palms so that it might reflect what they wished it to be. At first, Astarion doubted the other man’s prattling about breaking mankind of his knee so that he could glue it back together into something better, but as time went on, he began to hang off of every word. He began to see all that the man had already done, and what calculated violence he would use to tear through flesh and soul alike to achieve it. The power that resonated in those whispered confessions were unparalleled. A new world, one where he had no fears, given to him like a jewel wrapped pretty in a box. He would be a fool to ignore the lengths Verrot had already gone to achieve his goals. Beyond the desire that stirred in his breast, there was an inkling of genuine admiration.
Astarion reached forward with his opposite hand, setting it against the other man’s side. Verrot looked down, tilting his head.
“Let me chase you instead,” Astarion said, mirth in his voice.
Verrot smiled, a light finding his eyes that was as terrifying as it was endearing. When the necromancer’s eyes turned to play, it was enough to ignite something old in Astarion, shining a light in the corners of his soul that he had forced to die long ago.
“Then be swift, little hunter,” The man whispered, “come and snare me.”
And with that, the musician was gone in a plume of black smoke that smelled of amber and wine. It curled with a prehensile swirl around Astarion’s face before slipping past his lips, enough to make the man laugh. He let the shadow’s taste linger on his tongue before looking around, sensing that the other had disappeared without a trace. The thought excited him, yet excitement proved useless in terms of trailing after the other man. The vampire looked across the campsite, searching along tapestries and dying fires, until something at the core of his being stirred.
Like a finger beckoning him, he realized it was the tie between soul and blood he had forged with the necromancer. The thing that linked their mind beyond that of the tadpole, the thing that sated him beyond measure. He focused his attention on it, the hyperactivity of his mind forcing itself to still for long enough to finger across the mental thread. For a fleeting, singular flash, he was one with the man long enough to glean sound and scent. Fresh baked bread, a tanker of mead, the sound of dancers swirling on a hardwood floor, and the rich, opulent scent of perfume — all held at arm’s length by glass or perhaps a wall.
A balcony in the city, then.
Astarion smiled to himself with the smile of a man who knew what quarry laid at the end of the hunt. Cool flesh that would be offered to him at the neck, the wrist, the chest. He thought over what he wanted most as he set out in the direction most likely to be coveting the hiding the musician — what extent to his want was he allowed to indulge, and what did it mean that he had no real idea what it meant to have it? He knew the taste of blood, but the meaning of the ichor running down his throat, so freely offered, alluded him. Did love tend to bleed?
He wanted many things, from power to playfulness to petty desires, and knew that Verrot had been adept at delivering when he so much as let a thought cross his gaze. Yet what if he wanted to be the one to provide, to give until the other man was overtaken with laughter and lust, the sort of drunkenness only found in megalomaniacs and children whose mothers bought them new toys. That desire was new to him too, to want to give a man the feeling of satiation, something he mulled over as his fingers latched into a lattice outside of one of the city’s buildings and his feet began to work up their length. Night blooming jasmine crawled the same trellis he did, covering him in a scent not dissimilar to the man who hid from him — he wondered if when they collided, they would smell as one if only for a moment.
There was something to be said about the feeling of total consumption by another, though he cared not to find the words as he ascended the parapet and lowered himself down onto the roof slats. Astarion looked around the moon bleached rooftop, quietly making his footpath over the building’s height before he spotted a small balcony of stone and iron. Lingering overhead, he waited until he was able to mark the sensations that had been shared with him in that fleeting flash. Baked bread, the sound of laughter, dancers — looking across the thoroughfare and down towards the street, he spotted a bakery and a tavern hall, though took notice of their surprising lack of life. It had been a vision of perfect tense, of something that had already passed or was sure to soon.
As Astarion’s leather boots toed the edge of the roof, he at last heard the unmistakable sound of a piano coming from within the suite behind the balcony’s doors. By the sound of it, the swinging hinges had been left just slightly ajar to let the sound spill out into the encroaching night. It was a siren song unto itself, and one that the vampire was overjoyed to barrel headfirst into.
Lithely lowering himself from roof to balcony floor, the vampire paused before the glass and the rich, black curtains that had been drawn across them save for an intentional sliver. He peered within the room, it’s layout large and unbearably open. In one corner, there hosted a bed modest in size but opulent in dressing, and beside it was the piano he had heard call to him. It still twinkled along, as if the musician’s hands were against the keys of ebony and ivory, but no one sat at the bench.
Astarion smiled at the parlor trick, looking deeper in to the room until he saw the object of his hunt. Sat in a large clawfoot tub was the musician, stripped down to nothing but the braid he usually wore bearing the small trinkets woven into it and the stack of necklaces at his throat. The vampire’s breath hitched, watching as the man relaxed into curls of steam and the heady scent of bath oils, his face softening as he observed with quiet curiosity.
Long arms with prominent, darkened veins that had been made bone-laden with magic and stained pitch at the tips moved about the length of long legs, similarly stained at the feet and marked with infinite small, frenzied tattoos. The first time Astarion had seen the man naked, he realized them to be inscriptions of music driven in with quill, forever leaving passages of melodies engraved into his body. He had fallen into trance the second night they had laid together after humming along to one, a lullaby that still clung to the back of his skull like sugar to teeth. He licked his fangs then, as if he would be able to taste the song and the sweetness it brought him, and imagined the blood that awaited him instead.
The drow was beautiful, marked with ink and scars and an air of charisma so palpable he could practically read it in the room around him. It curled its finger towards him and he found no reason not to oblige.
Stepping into the inn room, Astarion smiled.
“I thought you would make a more interesting hunt.” The vampire teased.
Verrot looked to him, head falling back against the rim of the black porcelain tub. His clawed hand ran the ledge of it with a deliberate slowness.
“The most interesting part of the hunt is the dressing,” The drow said matter of factly, “Have you ever taken the skin off a hare?”
“No,” Astarion made a face, “I prefer my meals in one piece, actually.”
Verrot hummed before laughing at the other’s admission. He knew the vampire to be of spoiled upbringing, the sort that kept him from having to trap and peel back the flesh of quarry. Astarion would not know how to pull pelt from leg, nor muscle from bone, but he did not doubt his abilities to string something up and marvel at how the blood pooled beneath a beast’s mouth.
He curled his finger and Astarion stumbled forward like a puppet on a string. What once would have bothered him now made him smile, the other’s delicate control a refreshing take on freedom — the freedom to trust, the freedom to know a man’s intentions. The vampire moved to the side of the bath and breathed deep.
“Gods, you are beautiful,” Astarion said, looking down to the larger man who seemed alarmingly delicate amidst the bathwater and the flower petals that floated along its surface. Verrot seemed bemused by the elf’s words.
Shifting his legs, the drow showed how much room remained in the large bath. Surely it had been crafted with a giant in mind.
“I would only be more beautiful if I had you on my skin,” The man raised his hand slowly, reaching out to touch the skirting of the other man’s doublet. He felt long its embroidery, each line stitched by the vampire’s hand. The drow wondered how many dark and hungry nights filled with fear and loathing Astarion had spent sewing into his clothes while Cazador sewed into his flesh. Verrot dreamed of Astarion learning how to dress a kill for that man and that man alone and hoped to hang him from the lintel soon.
The vampire smiled until the points of his teeth caught the candlelight of the rented room, the walls adorned with rich tapestries that seemed to reflect their hues of jewel tones and gold across his pale skin.
“Say please, darling,” Astarion asserted himself, looking down at the naked man.
Something like a purr rose in the musician’s throat and the enchanted piano’s key shifted into a minor, causing the song crawling across Astarion’s shoulders like someone breathing on his neck.
At last, the man sighed, “Please.”
The way the drow languished in it was enough to make the vampire’s hunger rise. The heat of the bath and the smells that rose from it, sweat sloughed from skin to the oils in the water, was enough to make the ache nearly pulse in the roof of his mouth.
Astarion set to shifting out of his clothes, as if the feeling of buttons and laces would keep him from thinking of how primal the desire on his tongue was. He was, in that moment, the wolf that stalked the lamb far past the shepherd’s sight, intent on devouring it. Though he knew the man in the water to be no such feeble prey, his skin and eyes bearing the wear of a craft he was not sure he could understand even if each word was fed to him on a spoon. Some things were better enjoyed not knowing the ingredients, he thought to himself as the doublet was shucked to the floor an the breeches were quick to join. At last, Astarion stood in his underclothes, candlelight kissing across the scars on his back and across the dusting of hair that led to the line of his underwear from his navel.
“I am beginning to understand this fetish for good manners,” The vampire taunted as long, dark fingers reached out to gently smooth up his pale thigh. He sighed at the sight of it before he sighed at the feeling of it.
“It is less about manners and more seeing yourself be wanted,” Verrot smiled, relaxed amongst the steaming water, “the real kind of want, the want that you have been without.”
Verrot leaned up some.
“Now join me before the water goes tepid. I will be insufferable if I have to feel it go lukewarm before we are through.”
Astarion smiled and slipped his underwear down, feeling a slow crawl of warmth across his chest as Verrot’s own lips pulled back in a contented grin.
“Do you like what you see, my love?” He asked, tilting his weight into one hip, as if showing off.
The musician breathed out a small noise, reaching up to take the other man’s wrist. Carefully, he led him closer to the bath’s ledge.
“I could see every inch of you behind my lids from memory alone,” Verrot theatrically draped his hand over his face, breathing deep, “from the pink of your nipples to the soles of your feet, every inch in between.”
“Is it so hard for you to speak plainly? And my feet, really?” Astarion shook his head, raising a leg to step into the bath.
Verrot peered through his fingers, blinking innocently.
“If I tell you outright how every inch of your body delights me, how I would focus on every curl of your hair and every flick of your ear until the sun burnt out, it might frighten you,” The musician held onto the other’s wrist for gentled support as the pale elf lowered himself down into the water with a contented hiss.
“Then scare me,” Astarion urged.
“Oh, Astarion,” the man groaned, head lulling back, the length of his braid swaying with the action of it, “you would revel in my torment?”
“What a stupid question,” The vampire smiled, leaning closer, “Of course I would, darling.”
Looking to the ceiling, the drow heaved the width of his scarred chest and all of the hair upon it. The silver chains and their small medallions caught the dim light of the room as he focused his breathing and the words that formed on his tongue.
“I would be content to never see another man the way I have seen you for as long as I might live,” Verrot said at last with a slow exhale, raising his head again to look at the man who seemed to hang upon every word, “that is the measure of your beauty.”
“You would forsake every single man, even the ones that do not exist yet, for me?” Astarion asked with a cant of his head.
Verrot considered it with a sniff of amusement.
“I would not forsake beauty if it passed me by no more than I would cut my nose off as to never smell another flower besides a rose. Just know that if this all were to end tomorrow, I would go content knowing that I saw one of the most beautiful men in Faerun. I have been privileged to see the sun and all of its rises, but it was not until I saw you that morning drinking in the warmth of the sun that you had been banished from did I realize I had closed my eyes to it for so long. I have met a man whose beauty cured my blindness and made him my lover.”
Astarion swallowed, eyes widened slightly as he tried to fashion a respectable response to so many words. He reached to lay his hands on the other man’s chest, instead.
“I never grow tired of hearing it,” He remarked, slipping between the other man’s long legs, “lover.”
“It sounds so sweet on your lips,” Verrot raised his head, letting his lips part in an exhale that smelled of sweet water and honey. He slipped a hand up the length of the other man’s arm, feeling the smooth flesh beneath his palm. Astarion grabbed for it and brought it to his mouth, lips parting to taste over the curve of the musician’s thumb muscle. It smelled of the bath, it smelled of the man’s usual perfume, but it also smelled of the dark and arcane passages of blood that coursed through his veins.
“There are things even sweeter I could have on my lips, if you let me,” Astarion looked to the man with half-lidded eyes, steam having made the white lashes over the red jewels wet and glistening.
Verrot swept the claw of his thumb along the other man’s cheek bone and relaxed deeper into the water. With his opposite hand, he found Astarion’s thigh, smoothing along it’s alabaster length before tucking beneath the elf’s knee. With a shift that sent the fragrant water sloshing, Verrot raised the vampire to slip more comfortably into a straddled position over his and thighs. Astarion made a playful noise at the shift.
“I want to feel myself in your veins,” The musician whispered, looking into red eyes as the vampire had taken to kissing over his finger.
“Most men would not find joy in that,” Astarion smiled.
“Good, I have no intention of being most men,” Verrot responded. He shoved his palm into the other man’s mouth, controlled with the roughness of it before he slid his flesh against Astaron’s face.
The vampire gasped quietly when the veins of his wrist were ground into his lips, the softness of them squashed against the musician’s bones.
Astarion sighed and opened his mouth, kissing lazily at the skin and the pulse that beat in its strange, inhuman three-three time. A waltz for him to eat.
“I have missed the taste of you,” Astarion whispered, his tongue pressing out from his mouth to taste of the darkened flesh. His hips slanted forward on instinct, his abdomen curling inward with the sudden pains of hunger.
Verrot had not the heart to remind him it had only been two days since his last feeding, lesser still since the man had poured a small portion of his blood into a thimble for the vampire to drink as a boon. He would take being missed, no matter how desperate it seemed, for it boded well than the usual feeling of being so easily forgotten.
“Then deny yourself no longer,” The musician whispered, watching the other man as he kissed the skin of his inner arm, “drink. Unless you would prefer a glass to drink it from so that you could stick your pinky out.”
Astarion opened his smiling mouth and with one last glance towards the walking death, as if to ensure it was alright one final time, and sank into the skin. Verrot hummed low in the width of his chest as the puncture caused a sharp, searing pain to radiate through his arm, the feeling of it a subdued euphoria that tickled the edges of his mind. He felt the line of his being blur through blood into the other, the ichor of his heart pumping more quickly into the vampire’s mouth.
Astarion breathed heavy and hungry into the bite, pupils dilating and the edges of his vision dancing with colors no other taste of blood had brought him. Feeding on rats and enemies in fights, tasting the bloodspray even from the wounds of celestials and the chosen of Gods, nothing had compared to what trickled down his throat then. He felt every nerve ending liven, every chained memory in his mind rattle alive with ferocity. Like the man before him, Astarion became everything and nothing at once, the taste of oblivion sticking to every corner of his mouth.
Verrot sighed as he watched the other man, his free hand gently clawing up the man’s bare thigh.
Astarion made a quiet noise, the gentle touch enough to change course of his path towards overstimulation. His hips flexed, as if to rid himself of the tingling feeling that rose pleasantly through his skin. Detaching from the man’s wrist, he allowed his face and hands to fall forward, long fingers smoothing across the musician’s chest.
Blood, the color of black and crimson, dribbled down his chin as he approached the wet and scented skin.
“I want more,” Astarion articulated, tongue heavy in his mouth before he let his head to drop.
Verrot smiled, a rumble in his chest speaking to his contentment as his head fell back and his arms splayed on either side of the tub’s edge, letting the wound at his wrist to continue its trickling into the hot water of the bath. The smell of it rose like the scent of myrrh around them, washing Astarion’s senses in the overwhelming perfume of it.
Kissing at the necromancer’s chest, Astarion lost himself to the frivolity of it. He had no reason to stop between one bite and the next save for the fact he wished to. The body that relaxed and folded back beneath him was, in some sense, entirely his own to taste and explore as he saw fit. Verrot seemed to enjoy the daliance, one hand coming to rest at the back of the vampire’s head.
“How much more, my love,” Verrot asked, spinning one finger into a curl until it wound itself like white thread on a spool.
Astarion groaned with a smile, tonguing across the plains of chest hair until he reached the drow’s nipple.
“As much as I can take,” The vampire said, breathless.
“Then let your limits be my own,” He whispered, using the leverage on the man’s hair to pull Astarion’s head back gently. He regarded him seriously.
“I will make that heart of yours dance again.”
The words made Astarion shudder before his head pushed forward with force, jaw parting around the man’s nipple. He sank into the flesh there, jaw open and tongue splayed out against the pert bud as blood rushed into his mouth. Verrot gasped quietly, pain and approval swirling in the way his breathing changed. Letting his hand open to gently cradle the back of Astarion’s skull, the musician felt the vampire curve into him like softened clay.
Letting mismatched and half-blind eyes drift shut, the necromancer allowed the other his fill. Astarion sucked and drained him, his tongue working to offer pleasure where pain would have regularly reigned. It was a small yet considerate action, and one Astarion seemed to be enjoying himself by the way is throat constricted with contented noises and the way his hips rubbed closer and closer into Verrot’s abdomen until the drow felt the other’s erection slip against his own.
Verrot sighed, staring at the ceiling overhead. The tin had been painted with figures locked in various embraces, flesh rendered in oil and forever embroiled in scenes of romance. The musician thought himself not so different than some of the fingers caught on clavicles or cocks slid between thighs, then, his own ecstacy laid open and bare as the vampire drank from him. There was no weakness yet to be felt from the draining, only the soft noises of pleasure and satiation that fell from Astarion’s lips.
The vampire unlatched from the position around the other man’s overworked nipple and breathed hard, his red eyes wild in the dim light as his chin bore the evidence of his crime. Verrot leaned his head upward, looking to the pale man before him.
Taking Astarion at the side of the face, the necromancer swept a thumb through his white lashes.
“Where has my little comet shot off to?”
Astarion laughed at the question.
“Into some unexplainable, terrifying, beautiful, arousing darkness.” The pale elf moved closer, mouth covered in the mess from the other’s veins. The laughter had sent a spray of it across Verrot’s own chin.
The musician raised a brow as a pale hand moved to find the back of his head where the braid fell. Quietly, Astarion set to working the plait undone. Long digits nearly tremored with the action, the force supped from the man’s flesh enough to make every nerve quiver. He had seen the precipice of death itself, the final release any man might know, and knew its infinite, tantalizing power and peace. Contentment quieted him for a moment as he worked to set loose the wild black waves crested with the ones of grey. When he was finished, and the small silver trappings and the crow’s feather had fallen to the floor, Astarion ran his hands back through the drow’s hair.
The larger man closed his eyes and exhaled with contentment. The intimacy of it might as well have been a kiss or doting stroke across his length.
“You touch at me like you are meaning to apologize for something,” The drow said quietly, his hands moving to run down Astarion’s sides before shaping back towards his lower spine. There, they splayed out before fluttering up like butterfly’s wings, light and airy, over the scars left by Cazador.
“I do not like how well you know me, darling.” Astarion said with what seemed a pained smile.
“You are not hard to know,” The man responded, fingers tickling over the infernal keloids, “Not for those of us who are unafraid to go looking. Though,” he hummed, “I may be alone in that quest.”
“Curiosity killed the cat, you know,” Astarion began to kiss at the other man’s neck.
“And satisfaction brought it back, my love,” He murmured, relishing in the feelings afforded to him through the other man’s mouth.
“And,” Verrot craned his head to the side, allowing a new expanse of neck in the same breath he found purchase at the other elf’s ear. He kissed the tip of the sensitive skin lightly, feeling how Astarion pushed closer, giving more friction between their legs.
“I am more than satisfied. Apologize for nothing.”
The words, as the vampire felt them trickle into his ear, spoke to innumerable things. What apologies he might have had about the amount of blood he craved, or about how his body seemed aroused and wanting, or about how he could not yet form such wonderful words like love on his tongue — were forfeited into the sound of a pleased sigh. In the space of shared blood and the lingering tendrils of shared mind, Astarion knew that Verrot spoke the truth. That company and banter and bloodshed were all permissible by him, and a kiss was as pleasurable as the times he had taken the man’s cock to the hilt. It was overwhelming, to be desired at every inch in total equality. It was terrifying to know a man who could make love through words as well as flesh, leaving the vampire with the knew feeling of craving both. This too, he realized, was lovemaking.
“You are more a monster than a cat, anywho,” Astarion closed his eyes, kissing along the column of the man’s neck, seeking out the most tender vein.
Verrot flicked his forked tongue against the pale man’s ear with a quiet cat’s “meow,” sending both of their chests to shaking with quiet laughter.
When Astarion went back to his work on the man’s neck, he noticed that Verrot no longer stiffened when lips approached the skin there, having once guarded his neck from any touch or approach. The musician had guards of his own and they seemed to be frustratingly falling along with the stone walls of the vampire’s. They would unmake eachother, it seemed, before building something new out of the wreckage — one man’s brick would become the other’s, and together they would craft something impenetrable by anyone else but them. Or so Astarion hoped.
Parting his lips for the third time, Astarion settled in close before sending his sharp fangs into flesh. This time, the taller man groaned, the sound of it like smoke in the pale ear he still tended to. His lips parted and his tongue laved against the curves of it while his breathing hitched and exhaled down Astarion’s ear. Drinking, the pale vampire felt little more than a suckling babe latched onto something that set his veins and mind alight with feelings of desire and need without end.
He desired revenge, of blood so deep he could wade into it, and he desired to sink down into that pool so that he might close his eyes and float on its surface. Rest, relaxation, these things chained together by violence and acts of vengeance. 200 years of pain on his skin would be sloughed from the skin of others and he would stop at nothing until he could ensure that no one would ever hurt him again. Not unless he wanted it. Not unless it felt like the drow’s clawed hands did then, peeling down his back with delightfully sharp talons that cut along the flesh left unmarked by his master. How he had hoped those scratches would turn to scars, something that would alter the ritualistic poem left on his body.
And with those desires came the primal ones. Astarion had began to rock his hips instinctually, his flesh overwhelmed with the blood that coursed through it. Everything felt like a pleasurable needle against his pale skin from the magicked piano that kept its course in the corner to the hot water that lapped like a tide against his thighs with each rise and fall of his hips. He thought to be embarrassed by the hunger of his own body, how it felt safe enough to quest towards pleasure with a lopsided rhythm at his hips. But as the drow had said, there was nothing to apologize for, and so he believed his charlatan.
Astarion smiled as blood filled his stomach, hooking against the walls of his growing arousal with gentle talons. He drank and he rocked unbidden, the tendons in his legs snapping and relaxing in a strange tempo until he found an angle that allowed his cock to wedge against the other man’s more properly. Flush with the flesh, the vampire breathed out a cloud of steam against the other man’s neck, the bath giving enough heat to their bodies to feign being alive.
“Put down your fork,” Verrot said quietly, his voice a tantalizing garotte on Astarion’s neck.
The vampire whimpered in defiance and disobeyed, continuing to drink.
“Just a few more bites,” he said, lisping with blood that dripped down a strong tendon and into whorls of chest hair.
“You ought to save room for dessert,” Verrot said with an air of singsong, taking hold of the other man’s hair. With calculated force, he pulled the man back from the wound with a smile that persisted through Astarion’s desperate squirming. Tongue lashing for just one more drop, the older elf began to chuckle.
Astarion looked at him and whined, flagrant and open as he sat heaving in the man’s lap. Verrot smiled in the face of it, watching how the vampire relished in the feeling of the ichor that pumped through his veins.
“Does it please you,” The vampire began, setting his hands on Verrot’s wide shoulders as he continued to move his hips, “to always find a way inside of me? Your blood in my mouth, your music in my ears, your co—”
“It pleases me more that you want me there,” The drow responded, his thumb smearing blood up from the pale man’s chin, across his lips, and then in a delicate arc over his cheekbone.
Astarion scoffed.
“You are so very full of yourself.”
“And you are more full of me than I am.” Verrot grinned and the red-eyed man groaned, relinquishing his offense through a smile.
As they locked eyes, the musician lifted the other man’s chin to better hold the gaze. Whatever inhibitions the vampire held in regards to the way his hips still rode on, grinding out in search of release, would be given up in that stare. Taking a small, barely perceptible nod from the drow as assurance, Astarion began to grind his hips faster. It was a desperate feeling he needed relish in before exorcising it, knowing full well that if he pulled away now all he would have to look forward to was his hand and the pillows of his tent. He struggled to find it possible to even share the pilfered inn’s bed with the other man with the amount of heat that scorched through his stomach and down his thighs.
Astarion moaned and Verrot moaned back at him, a quiet call and response as the men began to tear at one another, hands pulling at skin until they were pulled tight together in a frenzied, gyrating embrace. A pale forehead met a tattooed one, noses brushing as breath was fought to be shared between two mouths.
“Thank you,” Astarion said through the heady pleasure that swam in his bloodrunk mind. He felt his cock jump as the tip of it slid against one of the prominent veins of his lover’s.
“What for?” The musician asked against parted, panting lips. He could feel Astarion’s smile.
“For letting me have what I want,” He whispered, gasping quietly into the kiss that found him.
Verrot pulled back from the soft and sudden kiss, tasting his own ichor on his tongue as his hand rose to caress the side of Astarion’s neck.
“I suppose,” He began, sighing heavy, “I ought to thank you for wanting me. Not many do.”
Astarion blinked at the man’s vulnerability and how it was so easily cloaked in his usual confidence. The admittance of being unwanted, spoken as simply as a comment on the weather. He had eons to get used to it, then. A long and lonely life marked only by one singular love he had lost, a fact that sank deep in Astarion’s core. It was not only special to be wanted by the man, but he was special for wanting him in turn. How marvelous it felt to be unique in that way.
Astarion breathed before wrapping his arms around the other man’s neck.
Pressing his hips forward again, the vampire began to laugh.
After blood and other bodily fluids had soiled what was once a clean bath, the men had taken to making faces and quipped remarks at one another’s expense all the way back to the inn room’s bed. Sitting naked on the satin of its sheets, Verrot chided Astarion for being messy with his meals while the vampire wagged his hand about, proclaiming that it had been his release that ruined the sanctity of the rose water and not the blood spilled. What shame Astarion had for so prematurely finishing, considering how little sex he had allowed the other man in earnest, was beaten back with the musician’s laughter.
Verrot took the insults and the flash of distance in the other man’s eyes in stride, smiling through them as he continued to file away at Astarion’s nails.
“You have very fine cuticles for an undead man,” He mused, a dribble of water falling from a curl of grey hair that had plastered itself to the drow’s forehead.
“I cannot say the same for you,” Astarion scoffed, watching as the skeletal digits worked over his own.
Verrot hummed, a flicker of offense at the corner of his eyes where the crow’s feet usually played when he smiled.
“I like them,” Astarion added quickly. “I know that you wear those gloves and that eyepatch of yours to keep all the strange bits of you covered, but I like that you wear the mark of your skill. There is no such thing as power without a little bit of sacrifice, hm?”
Verrot raised a shaped brow, flourishing the nail file to poke at a pressure point beneath Astarion’s elbow with it. The arm lurched on reflex and sent itself hurdling upward, causing the vampire to punch himself lightly.
The musician stifled a chuckle.
“And what are you prepared to sacrifice, Astarion?” Verrot asked, beckoning the other to give him back the hand. Astarion grumbled a profanity and obliged, setting it into the drow’s pitch black palm.
“I think that I have given enough already.” The vampire said as the file found the next nail.
“A correct answer,” The musician reached over, swirling his finger into a pot of ointment that sat on the bedside table. He began to rub the pale lotion into the back of Astarion’s hand, watching as the man seemed to delight in the scent of darkened amber and sweet wood bark.
“I myself have paid a price so full that I expect fate’s tab to be covered for quite some time. If asked, you will not give up anything or cede any ground that belongs to you. It is your’s and your’s alone,” Verrot looked at him.
Astarion breathed, “I have no intentions of it. I am quite selfish, after all.”
“The stars do not reward the meek or humble. All of our arms are bent the same, but is the arm of the giver that breaks. You have been forced to give for too long, now is the time that you rebuild your strength.”
“Are you prophesizing at me again, my love?” Astarion snickered, humming with contentment at the feeling of the man’s hand on his own.
“Perhaps,” The musician said with a smile, bringing the man’s hand up to his lips, “or perhaps I simply like the melody of my own voice. What say you of my voice?”
“Utterly enchanting and at times annoying in its charm,” Astarion answered simply, watching the other.
Verrot kissed Astarion’s finger with a smile, and then a knuckle. Setting the hand aside, he turned away for a moment before letting the weight of the day take him back towards the sheets.
Sighing, the drow laid in a fanned out halo of his own hair. He stared up towards the ceiling with a contented yet thoughtful eye.
Astarion moved to mirror the action, sinking down and back beside the longer man.
“I did not mean to make you go all quiet by saying so,” The vampire began, looking to the man at his side.
Verrot smiled.
“Afraid of the silent treatment, are you?” He raised a brow, “Worry not, I was merely thinking.”
“Now that is always a terrifying thing,” Astarion mused. “What about?”
“Mm,” Verrot took a moment to mull it over, “sacrifice.”
“You had already said you had nothing more you were willing to give. What more is there to think about?” Astarion asked, shifting closer. He busied his hand against the other man’s chest, playing with one of the necklaces and the deep purple gemstone fastened to it.
“You,” Verrot said quietly, “as so many stories go, the hero and villain alike will cut their very hearts from their chests to see their cause played through. That one might one day sit on the throne, but it will be atop the bones of all they have loved and the seat will be as cold as it is lonely. But it will be theirs.”
Astarion swallowed.
“I do not like this fairytale much.”
“I mean to say,” Verrot closed his eyes for a moment, “I had forged my lonely throne many years ago. It is strange now to have someone to stand by it, sit in it, or—”
He shifted onto his side, looking to Astarion with a wicked air of amusement.
“Perhaps sit in my lap while we both look down from our dais. It is strange to have cut my heart out only to feel it beat again. I would not see you lost because you have yet to pay that price nor do I particularly want to pay it again.”
“Pah,” Astarion waved his hand, “you pay those children’s stories too much attention. No one will come for my heart because I haven’t got one, darling.”
Verrot tilted his head, face falling.
“Is that so?”
“It,” Astarion began before realizing what it was he had just implied, “perhaps I was thinking too literally.”
The vampire watched as his companion settled in amongst the sheets. He regarded him with slow, red eyes, from the bare flesh of his scarred legs to the veins and stains that dragged across his arms. Astarion looked at the hands that had held him both gently and firmly, the ones that had been skilled in knocking a knife from his hands, the one that played music unlike any he had heard before. He looked to the length that laid flaccid between the man’s legs, and felt a surge of strange gratitude that he had gotten to know the unknowable man in such a basal way. Shifting closer, Astarion lowered himself down to the other man’s side. Pale fingers searched along the sheets until he found the musician’s finger.
“Would that I could find the words that explain what you are to me,” Astarion said, voice soft and guarded. It pained him to admit that no intellect or poetry could do the other man justice. It once angered him that he wanted it to, but now he thought it was the very least the other slave to fate deserved.
Verrot sighed, looking at him with a small and knowing smile. A large hand moved to lay across a pale chest, the fingers smoothing across the indents of the sternum.
Astarion smiled in turn, feeling a shiver run up his spine as he craned his face closer to the man’s mouth.
“I suppose I could begin with my heart.”