Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

"Astarion tells me,” Jaheira says, “that you proposed to him.”

They're seated across from one another in the Ravengard manor’s second-best tea parlor, playing lanceboard. To Jaheira’s back, the fire blazes in its wrought-iron hearth. Cut-velvet hangings and varnished portraits smother the walls, crowding out the roseate wallpaper that Wyll has always hated. The shelves are packed with storybooks Wyll has read a thousand times; a glass display case contains an ornamental sword no man shall ever swing, set with precious stones and engraved with his father’s name. Fresh violets, sliced at the neck, fill the room with a faint waft of living sweetness. An attempt at beauty.

“I did,” Wyll agrees pleasantly, because it’s the truth. In fact, if one were to split hairs, he’s technically proposed to Astarion about nine or ten times in total. It's become a part of their daily ritual, something coy and casual: Good morning, lovely weather we're having, will you marry me, pass the salt?

Jaheira harrumphs, moves her rook up the board. She knows this game, and she plays it well: deft, sly, present in the play and alert to the byzantine ruleset that guides it. She does not cheat, unlike Astarion — a voracious and unrepentant cheater who delights in moving the pieces around while Wyll's attention is otherwise occupied. (Wyll has learned not to stake money on their games. Or his clothing.)

“So it’s true," she says. "I thought the elf might be spinning tales, hoping to scandalize an old woman.”

“He probably was hoping to scandalize,” Wyll says, nudging his pawn forwards. “But the content of the scandal is, in fact, genuine. What did he have to say about it?"

“About your proposal? He said that you were mad, and an idiot, and an insufferable naïf."

"That does sound like him,” Wyll muses affectionately, dropping his chin into the palm of his hand. “I don't suppose you're here to tell me that this is all a terrible idea?”

“I am here,” Jaheira says staidly, “to congratulate you on your recent 25th birthday, and to give you a good thrashing on the gameboard. As for your planned nuptials… bah, far be it for me to judge.” The High Harper runs a hand over her jaw, the severe angulation of her browline softening into something contemplative. “I’m sure you get quite enough of that from your little friends — not to mention your esteemed father.”

Wyll’s smile tightens.

“Ha. You don’t know the half of it. The man’s too proud to beg, but he takes every opportunity he can to impress upon me the importance of caution. He keeps warning me that I have only known Astarion a few short months, that I don’t yet grasp the full measure of what marriage to a vampire spawn might entail.”

“Are the two not on good terms?”

“Astarion and my father? They’ve scarcely had the chance to interact, but there seems to be a mutual antipathy. Believe me, I’ve tried to have them both at dinner together — there is really nothing I’d love more than to see the two most precious people in my life on good terms — ”

“And yet, they resist,” Jaheira hums. Her eyes flick down to the gameboard, studying the fall of the pieces, the lay of her position. After a moment’s deliberation, she moves. She is the better player out of the two of them, which Wyll attributes to a gap in experience. He assures himself he's at least holding his own, making her inevitable victory as hard-fought as possible; it might even be true.

“I have forgiven my father for the rift between us,” Wyll says. “Astarion has not. He is — viciously protective, in that way. As for my father... well. He doesn’t truly know Astarion. So he sees only the vampire spawn, only a monster; a threat to his city, to his people.”

“And to his son.”

“I — I suppose,” Wyll concedes reluctantly. “That too.”

“A squabbling father and fiancé. A tale as old as time. You would not believe how viciously my mother-in-law fought — poor Khalid was similarly aghast. What a luxury it is, that we may turn our attention to such petty trifles once more.”

“As opposed to the potential destruction of Faerûn as we know it by illithid design?”

“Precisely,” Jaheira says. Then, with a gesture to the board, “I believe it’s your move, Lord Ravengard.”

Wyll resists the urge to roll his eyes, and hazards a risky gambit with his knight.

“What do you make of all this, High Harper? Do you think my proposal rash?”

“I do, yes. But what’s so terrible about being rash?” Jaheira takes Wyll’s rook with ease, then leans back in her seat, rolling out her shoulder. “The world does not wait around for us, I have found. Take your moment while you can, and damn what the old man thinks. Nothing is guaranteed in this life, save for death; forever could be tomorrow. You must act as your heart compels you while you still have the chance. Besides, even if Ulder’s exhortations turn out to be warranted, and this marriage does ultimately blow up in your face — you will, at the very least, learn something valuable about yourself. Something you never could have learned sitting around with one thumb up your nethers, playing the cautious young lord.”

“Er — I don’t think this will blow up in my face,” Wyll says, “but thank you for the vote of confidence, High Harper.”

They go at it for a couple more turns; soon enough, Wyll is well and truly on the backfoot, his defeat all but inevitable.

At last, Jaheira says, “You know, for all his bloviating, Astarion never once mentioned whether he accepted or refused your proposal.”

“That only seems right, seeing as he hasn’t done either."

“Really?”

Wyll shrugs, leaning back in his seat.

“Well, he seems to rather like being asked,” he reflects idly, thinking of how Astarion all but convulsed with pleasure when the question was raised in bed. “But he keeps telling me to ask again next year.”

“Ah,” Jaheira says, an air of knowing about her.

“I’d marry him tomorrow if I could,” Wyll says, his eyes flickering to the window, a cold moon rising over the Gate, “but if he wants some kind of proof my feelings aren’t at risk of fading to dust overnight, I’m more than happy to provide it.”

Jaheira puts him in check — and the game is over.

“You will make a good husband, I think,” she says, running a weathered finger over the carved ebon surface of Wyll’s queen.  “And once he is ready — I think Astarion will make a keen bride.”

“You think?”

“He will, at the very least, enjoy dipping his fingers into the Ravengard family’s coinpurse.”

“Oh, gods,” Wyll covers his face with one hand, a laugh surprising itself from his body, warm and sudden and real. “You should see the drapes he had me order for the dining room. They’re obscenely gaudy — true Esmelter velvet, apparently — and cost a small fortune.”

“Does your paramour have any family to speak of? I was wondering if you might pay a bride price.”

“Er,” Wyll lowers his hand, his smile evaporating. “Cazador had other spawn, but they aren’t exactly on speaking terms —”

“I was not referring to his vampiric clan,” Jaheira says, shaking her head. Something in her bearings changes, then — her expression somber, her stance squared. “I was wondering about his prior family, actually. His mortal family.”

“He — doesn’t have one,” Wyll says instinctively, but as he speaks the words, a queasy feeling of doubt creeps in, uneasy and unbidden. He clears his throat, “At least, I don’t think he has one. He’s never raised the topic, so... I suppose I assumed.”

“Your assumption may very well be correct, but who knows? The man is of elven heritage. Even if has not seen them in two centuries, who is to say his parents do not yet live?”

“It’s possible,” Wyll agrees reluctantly, shifting restlessly in his seat. “But even if that were the case, there’s a good chance Astarion does not remember them. His memory of the years before his enslavement, it’s…”

In ruins? In tatters? Splintered beyond repair? Cazador made a fine mess of his sweet star’s mind, a painful reality uncovered by even the lightest of questioning; the man cannot recall his original eye colour. Couldn’t tell you how he lost his first kiss, couldn’t describe the shape of his own nose. Wouldn't recognize the house he was raised in even if he passed it on the street.

“... It’s somewhat piecemeal,” Wyll eventually finishes, pressing his knuckles against his lips.

Astarion, finding his family. He cannot help but consider the idea more thoroughly, making a scene of it in his mind: Astarion on the doorstep of some long-forgotten ancestral home — the prodigal son returned. He imagines a father with Astarion’s severe features. A mother with his aristocratic poise. A sister, perhaps. Little nieces and nephews, scurrying about Astarion’s knees. Would they embrace him tenderly, or spurn him as an undead abomination? You are not my son.

Get out, and don't you dare come back.

— Of course, all this depended on the assumption that Cazador had not sought them out and murdered them long ago, determined to deprive his nascent spawn of even that most basic of safety nets.

Wyll’s stomach lurches with grim speculation. The scars on his face twinge.

“Even if we did reach out to his old family,” he says, lifting his eyes to meet Jaheira’s own, “they have believed him dead for two centuries now. Do you think it worth disturbing their peace?”

Jaheira shrugs lopsidedly, feigning at indifference — but the intensity in her gaze tells another story.

“If he were a child of mine,” she says, “I would weep with joy to find him whole, hale, and in love. I would praise the gods above for the sublime gift of having my peace disturbed.”

There’s a pleasure in power. Perhaps it’s crass to admit it, but it’s true. Wyll considers it from where he’s seated in a high-backed chair, legs spread wide to accommodate for Astarion, who kneels on the floor before him.

They’re in Wyll’s bedroom — or, more accurately, their bedroom, although sunlight-related chicanery has recently conspired to prevent them for sleeping similar hours. (Wyll retires before midnight and rises at dawn; Astarion prefers to trance from morning to early afternoon, when there’s little else for him to do. Wyll hopes this arrangement will soon be subject to change, and has been corresponding with several experts on arcane interference in search of a solution; the two of them have an expedition to Neverwinter tentatively scheduled for next season, where a certain enchanted ring has been floated as a potential candidate.)

Down on the carpet, Astarion nuzzles against the hard musculature of Wyll’s thigh; a tender, earnest gesture, almost catlike. Wyll rewards him for his sweetness by carding a gentle hand through Astarion’s hair; Astarion seems to appreciate this touch, pushing his head up against Wyll’s palm.

This precious creature, Wyll thinks. Then, with a stab of proprietary hunger, Mine to protect.

There’s a — game they like to play. Well. Astarion calls it a game; Wyll suspects it might be something deeper than that, something more concrete; still, he doesn’t have the word for whatever that might be. A ritual, perhaps. A service. An exercise in mutual desire.

The game goes a little something like this: in the privacy of their bedchambers, Astarion places himself under Wyll’s thumb entirely. In return, Wyll honors his trust with gentleness.

Unlike lanceboard, this game comes with no fixed and definitive rules; the operations are malleable, the playbook fluid. They make it up as they go, feeling their way through — the blind leading the blind.

“Sweet thing, aren’t you?” Wyll murmurs.

Astarion nods silently, forehead pressed to Wyll’s thigh.

“Always knew it, didn’t I?” Wyll sighs, his hand sliding down to cup the nape of Astarion’s neck. His skin is pale as milk quartz, cool as quarried stone. Wyll, who has always run hot himself, marvels silently at the sensation. The contrast. “Always knew you’d be sweet for me, when it came down to it. Once I had you alone.”

His hand comes around to cradle Astarion’s cheek.

“When we leave this room,” Wyll continues steadily as Astarion lifts his chin to meet his gaze, “you will once more be the man I consider first among equals. A friend. A partner. A fighter. A survivor — with a keen sword arm, a quicksilver tongue, and sharp wits to match.” He brushes a thumb over Astarion’s lower lip, lush and lax. “But right here, right now? So perfect and so sweet, on your knees for me? You’re my good boy.”

Astarion shudders, says, “Say — that again.”

“Which part?”

“That — that I’m —”

“A good boy?” Wyll says, deceptively light. “You’re my good boy, Astarion. All mine.”

And he thinks it again, with all the hot, twisting powers of longing: Mine to protect.

A sharp intake of breath — then, Astarion buries his head back against Wyll’s thigh, concealing his expression. His shoulders quake. His hands ball up into fists at his sides. Wyll can see the tension in his body, the struggle — shame warring against joy, trepidation against pleasure, the fear of the bite against the delectation of the kiss. Wyll waits it out. This is just the way it goes, sometimes. The game is not without agon. It is not easy for Astarion to shed his armor; nor is it easy for him to admit what he likes.

(It isn’t easy for Wyll either.)

When Astarion at last lifts his head, Wyll goes to meet him with his hand, cupping his chin between his forefinger and thumb. Wyll studies him closely, finds pleasure has won out over shame — this time. For now. Astarion’s breaths come out nice and slow. His look is hazy, glassy; his pupils are blown-out black.

“You alright?” Wyll presses him, quiet.

Astarion nods indistinctly. Wyll tuts, says, “Use your words, star.”

“I’m alright,” Astarion says very softly.

“What do you want?”

“To get you off."

Wyll’s cock stirs at that. “Yeah?”

“Yes,” Astarion breathes. Then, bowing his head, he says, “Sir.”

Wyll runs the pad of his thumb over Astarion’s jaw, considers that. Sir is different. Sir is new. They haven’t discussed Sir. 

He likes it. He isn’t sure if he should like it — but he does, as evidenced by an abrupt, nearly painful twitch of his cock. Suddenly, without the participation of his full faculties, Wyll finds himself releasing Astarion and saying, in a tone of effortless command, “That’s my lord Ravengard to you, little one.”

“My lord,” Astarion says desperately, half-frantic, chasing after Wyll’s hand. “My lord. Please. Let me suck you off. I’ll be good — I promise. I promise.”

Wyll flicks open the buttons securing the front of his breaches. Slowly, deliberately, he draws out his hot, heavy cock — Astarion’s eyes go wide at the sight of it, entranced. Wyll wraps his fingers around himself, giving his cock a long, idle stroke. Astarion follows the motion with his gaze.

“Open up,” Wyll says.

He guides the head of his cock to the swell of Astarion’s lower lip, smearing it with the first, slick hints of pre. Moaning softly, Astarion obeys. So good, his star. So darling. So — submissive , it aches. His lips part, his tongue outstretched. It’s a filthy invitation, and one Wyll accepts all but instantaneously. He presses the crown of his cock against the wet flat of Astarion’s tongue, rubs it there, letting Astarion just taste him. Astarion’s eyes flutter shut. His breath skates against the thin, sensitive flesh of Wyll’s erection; shallow, cool, needy —  always needy, this man. Wyll loves it, revels in it. It’s me, he thinks, half-mad with it. He needs me.

“Go on then, star,” Wyll murmurs. “Please your lord.”

Astarion pushes himself forwards, taking Wyll into his mouth properly. Gods, but he’s wickedly hot like this, his mouth welcoming and wet and eager; he slides up and down the shaft in a smooth, practiced glide. Wyll groans softly. He fists Astarion’s curls with one hand.

“Good boy,” he says. “Good. Like that. Yeah. Use your tongue —”

And Astarion does, ever so eager to please. He sucks a hot, sloppy path up the side of Wyll’s cock, laving the vein running across the shaft with his tongue. Wyll closes his eyes, lets the sensation fill him up entirely, his cock, his chest, his head. Fuck. He feels — powerful, like this. Feels strong. It’s a heady, heady feeling; strong like brandywine.

A thought floats through his mind, sweetly pernicious: How many have had Astarion on their knees, just like this? Hundreds? Thousands, even? Ah — but how many of them have possessed him so thoroughly, so utterly, so completely?

Just one other, he realizes.

The notion punctures through him like a needle through a balloon, bringing with it a bright spasm of guilt. But guilt does not abate Wyll’s pleasure — horrifyingly, it only seems to stoke it. He grips Astarion by the roots of his hair, rock-hard between his legs, Astarion suckling noisily on the ground before him — and he burns up with shame, feeling sick for delighting in this domination when Astarion has already been so utterly misabused by selfish masters — he has promised himself a thousand times already, Cazador’s death was not a transfer of ownership — I am a good man — 

(The game is never, ever without agon.)

Astarion presses his nose against the side of Wyll’s shaft, cupping his balls in one cool hand; he breathes Wyll in, the sweat and the musk of him. He seems to savor the scent.

Gods, but he loves this.

As Astarion slides back down to throat him, Wyll’s belly tightens with the anticipation of climax; his fingers tighten in Astarion’s hair, grasping him by the roots. Astarion moans in response, long and broken and beautiful.

“You like this?” Wyll cants his hips forwards, chasing after the soft, slick friction of Astarion’s lips.

Astarion attempts to nod, humming with pathetic assent in between the obscene, sloppy sounds of sucking — and Wyll could come like this, he really could, wet and messy all over his precious star’s face.

Another night, perhaps.

“Get up,” Wyll says hoarse with desire, releasing Astarion’s hair. “Up, on the bed. Clothes off.”

Astarion pulls off Wyll’s dick, looks up at him through long lashes.

“As you like, my lord,” he says, sounding a little more like himself — amused, perhaps, by the flush trawling up Wyll’s chest, or the ragged desperation in his voice.

Astarion rises to his feet and idles towards the bed, loosening laces, popping buttons, trailing clothing as he goes. Wyll follows him, pulling his own shirt off over his head — he must be careful now to avoid catching on the fabric of his horns; shirts with wide, loose collars have very much become his friend. He doesn’t feel half as elegant as Astarion as he sheds his boots and his trousers — but once his body joins Astarion’s on the four-poster bed, the mattress giving beautifully beneath their combined weight, the feeling of power returns.

Astarion lies supine, his hair mussed, his cock pinking between his perfect thighs. He licks his reddened lips invitingly, says, “I love the way you look above me, my lord.”

"Funny you should say that," Wyll says, running a reverent hand over Astarion's pale, skinny hip. "I was just thinking about how perfect you look beneath me."

Astarion reaches up, bold, and caresses the side of Wyll's cheek. “Perfect?”

Fishing for compliments, this one. Wyll indulges him nonetheless, says, “So perfect, star.”

Astarion’s eyes cloud over once more.

“And — I’m being good?”

“So good,” Wyll praises him freely. “So gorgeous, so sweet, doing so well.”

Wyll covers Astarion’s body with his own, his spit-slick cocking rocking up against Astarion’s erect member. He grinds against him, aimless, slow. Unhurried. It’s a simple sensation — just friction, motion and heat — and yet, it inspires the most fantastic of whines from Astarion. Simple things, Wyll has learned, can cut to the quick with this man.

Taking the both of them in hand, Wyll exalts quietly in the size difference; he is bigger, broader, stronger than Astarion — larger, in more ways than one. If this face troubles Astarion’s ego, he has never mentioned it. Quite the opposite, really — Wyll thinks he must revel in it too, finding an opposite but selfsame pleasure in being fragile and small in Wyll’s arms, in his bed.

Astarion spreads his legs, says, “Please.”

“Please what,” Wyll says, lifting himself by inches to take in the pinched look of pleasure on Astarion’s face, the sheen of sweat on his belly. “Good boys use their words, remember?”

Astarion’s long limbs twitch. “Please,” he says, wetting his cock-bruised lips. “Please fuck me.”

Wyll laughs soundlessly, reaches down, offers Astarion’s rigid cock a firm stroke as a reward. “Hands up above your head, little one.”

Stretching out across the silken bedsheets, Astarion complies. He clasps his hands together and lifts them up against the mattress, above his head, so that his arms create a nice, lax loop. Wyll likes this arrangement better than ropes, better than irons. It satisfies him to know Astarion that could free himself instantaneously, if he so wished to — could push Wyll away, or scramble free from his embrace, or even simply select wickedness over obedience and make to touch himself. The only thing keeping Astarion bound is his own self-restraint, his own willingness to please — and to be pleased.

“That’s right,” Wyll hums, moving to kiss Astarion’s jaw, his throat, his collarbone. “That’s right, star. Hold your hands right there, just like that. Gods, you’re being so good for me tonight . So perfect. Makes me feel so proud to be your man.” His hands slide up Astarion’s flank, thumbs stroking over the sensitive buds of Astarion’s nipples, teasing them to stiff peaks. “I am going to take my sweet time with you tonight, Astarion. Going to worship your body with my own until you know nothing but pleasure, nothing but ecstasy, nothing but love. And you’ll let me, won’t you? You’ll let me adore you?”

Astarion pushes his face up against the crook of arm, half-slurring as he speaks, “When — when you say such words, darling, I — I can’t —”

“Can’t what?”

“Can’t think.”

“Then don’t think, my love,” Wyll says, pressing a hot, open kiss to the corner of Astarion’s mouth. “Just feel this.”

There’s a great deal of oil involved — more than necessary, perhaps, but Wyll had committed himself to being thorough. He starts with just one finger, pumping slowly and steadily, only slipping in a second once he’s absolutely positive he will cause Astarion no discomfort. 

Once his middle finger joins his index, he curls them in and out of Astarion’s body — fingerfucking him in long, fluid strokes, seeking out the spot deep inside that makes Astarion thrash against the sheets. Even after Astarion starts begging, starts pleading for his cock, he keeps going, until two fingers become three, and three becomes four. 

Astarion’s thighs tremble. The slate of his stomach quivers. His cock twitches and jerks, leaking hot, salty pre all over his belly. He’s suspended on the shattered edge of climax, a state of pleasure so intense it nearly borders on true suffering — and yet, he keeps his hands held above his head, just as Wyll asked. Just as Wyll commanded.

Good little angel, good little star.

“Love you,” Wyll says, sitting upright between Astarion’s open legs, lining himself up against the wet, loose clutch of his hole. “Love you to death, star. My good boy.”

Astarion spasms violently as he pushes inside, his eyes screwing up tight with pleasure as he lets out a sharp, ecstatic keen, “Master.” 

Wyll’s mind goes totally blank.

Better not to process it, better not to acknowledge it — that would only make it even more terribly real. Wyll holds Astarion down by the hips and fucks him with blind, ardent, zealous need. The guilt and the desire and the power and the pleasure; there is no saying where one begins and the other ends — it’s seamless. It’s totalizing. It’s absolute. He lifts Astarion’s hips with coarse, scar-spun hands; Astarion wraps his legs around his waist, fucks his hips up, crashing, violent, demanding. They always lose themselves, when it comes down to it — always forget themselves, always.

Astarion’s moaning his head off, begging, cursing — but he holds his hands in place, right over his head, right where Wyll asked him to keep them. In a burst of jagged clarity, Wyll almost wishes that he wouldn’t, wishes he would disobey, wishes he would demonstrate his understanding that it would be safe to do so . Astarion is hot inside. He is so, so hot — a small wonder, for his skin is cold as ice — hot and tight, impossibly tight, the friction delicious, the pleasure undeniable . Wyll fucks him hard and deep — and imagines, in some darkened, untrod corner of his mind, what it might be like to wrap both hands around his lover’s throat. To spit on him.

How dare you call me that, he thinks.

Say it again, he thinks.

Astarion arcs upwards, comes with a loud cry — and Wyll follows moments after, releasing deep inside Astarion, his orgasm washing everything into a soft, sketchy wash of white.

He pulls out, drops himself down next to Astarion. The room is filled with the sounds of harsh, labored panting — the two of them fighting to catch their breath. Beyond that, there’s a palpable atmosphere of overwhelmed shock.

For a long while, they don’t speak. Don’t even look at one another. Wyll runs a hand over his jaw, struggling to school in his thoughts. Next to him, Astarion quietly lowers his arms, wrapping them around himself.

Wyll — has no fucking idea what he’s feeling, if he’s being honest. His thoughts are a vicious tangle, love and shame and worry and doubt — and worst among them, satisfaction — all competing for his full attention . Easier to focus on Astarion, he decides. Because Astarion needs him right now, always needs him after a scene of some intensity. 

So Wyll pushes himself semi-upright, lays a hand on Astarion’s hip, and kisses his hair.

“Star,” he says.

Astarion presses his knuckles against his mouth. His expression is — dazed, in a word. Hazy.

Wyll licks his lips, ventures, “Still with me?”

Astarion nods.

Wyll asks him, “Doing alright?”

Astarion visibly hesitates, then nods once more.

It occurs to Wyll, then, that Astarion might not be answering truthfully — that perhaps he never answers truthfully. But there’s nothing he can do with this revelation; not now, at any rate.

“Can I hold you?” he asks instead, and Astarion nods for a third time.

Wyll slides down against Astarion’s back, holding him against his chest; at this angle, his horns poke into the mattress — tomorrow, he may find holes in his sheets. But none of that matters right now. In fact, nothing matters right now. Just Astarion, sweet and spent, drenched in both their pleasure.

“I love you,” Wyll says, pressing a dry, chaste kiss to Astarion’s scapula. “No matter what, I love you — every part of you.”

Astarion shivers, says nothing at all.

Later, in the bath — when the two of them are somewhat more cogent, Wyll says, “We should probably talk about what happened.”

Astarion tenses slightly, a micro-gesture Wyll likely would have missed if he hadn’t been sharing a bed with the man for nigh on five months now.

“Is that so,” Astarion says, dark and shallow as enamel. He curls up —  defensively, Wyll thinks — against the lip of the tub, his red eyes flashing dangerously. “Little Lord Ravengard wants to talk about what happened.”

Wyll pushes himself upright, unsettling the water pooled around his waist.

“If you’d rather we did this later, then —”

“No, by all means!” Astarion says, waving a hand about in the air; his tone is bitter and black as overbrewed coffee. “Let’s get it all out in the open, shall we? Clear the air, as it were. I called you master in bed. Is that so terribly scandalizing, given half the games we get up to?”

“It’s not the same,” Wyll says softly.

“No, I suppose it isn’t,” Astarion agrees, sinking further into the bath. “What with my sordid history in the way — two hundred years as a writhing, wretched, vampiric slave. Hard to put aside, isn't it?"

Wyll lets out a slow, fortifying breath.

“Astarion, I just want you to know you have nothing to be ashamed of —”

“Ha! Nothing to be ashamed of, he says. How quaint.”

“ — and if there’s something you’d like to tell me, or a concern you'd like to broach with me, I’d be more than happy to listen. Because I’m your partner, and I care for you.”

Silence. Astarion slides further down into the tub, warm water rushing around his shoulders, then around chin — and  then, he's underwater, making himself small, compact. His hair suspended all about him in a silvery cloud.

Wyll leans back, closes his eyes, and waits.

Astarion could theoretically go under as long as he pleases. Although he is in the habit of breathing, seems to enjoy the rote, mechanical process of it, mere oxygen is no longer something he depends on for survival. (Only fresh blood holds that ignominious honor.) Wyll prepares himself to wait several long minutes.

As it turns out, he needn't bother. After a few short moments, Astarion breaks the surface and emerges, dripping and glorious. He pushes his wet fringe out of his face, opens his eyes; his expression has cleared up considerably.

“Maybe we should stop,” Wyll says quietly.

Astarion blinks.

“Excuse me?”

“Stop playing these games,” Wyll elaborates. He stands up, steps out of the tub, and reaches for a towel to wrap around his waist. “If they arouse — bad memories, or create uncomfortable parallels —”

Astarion laughs, disbelieving.

“What, you want to have boring, quiet, vanilla sex in the missionary position once a month? You want me to bend you over too, in the name of keeping things strictly equal?”

Not especially, but what else could be done? Wyll groans, pinches the bridge of his nose, “Star —”

“You enjoyed it,” Astarion says, and there it is — a raw, open wound of disbelief. He rises in the tub, rivulets of hot, streamy water pouring off his perfect body, completely unashamed of his nakedness. “The way you fucked me after I called you — that. You enjoyed it.”

“I —” Wyll shakes his head, bites his lip. “I don’t want any part of these games if they cause you suffering.”

Astarion rolls his eyes, “You say that, and yet —”

“They cause me suffering too.” The words explode from Wyll without his consent; he forces his eyes away, aghast at his own selfishness. “I can’t, I can’t stand the guilt of being compared to him, Astarion. I can’t endure it. So — please. Don’t ask me to.”

A beat. Wyll’s eyes slide to the tiles beneath his feet. Feigning interest in the pearly beads of condensation gathering along the patterned ceramic, he reaches for a hand towel, and begins to scrub his face dry.

Without a word, Astarion steps out of the tub. He snatches his robe — a soft, slinky slip of a thing, wraps it around himself securely, and pads off into the bedroom proper. 

Alone, Wyll sits down by the bathroom vanity, takes some time to breathe. Looks in the mirror. Sees himself, twenty-five and hell-touched. Sees the horns which curl like tusks, the mismatched eyes. The deep notches of his scars. Today wasn’t a washday for his hair, and he’s pleased to have kept it dry — still, he takes the time to moisturize his scalp and horns.

He’s just finished up with the left horn when Astarion comes back into the bathroom. Wyll lifts his head wearily to greet him, ready for the argument to recommence. Only, it doesn’t. Astarion looks thoughtful, pliant; he’s holding two glasses of wine. One for Wyll, one for himself. He sets one down on the vanity, and makes to stand behind Wyll.

“You haven’t anything to be ashamed of either, you know,” he says. Wyll looks straight into the mirror, where he remains utterly and completely alone, despite the cool, tentative hand Astarion places on his shoulder.

“How could I not be ashamed?” Wyll rubs a hand over his eyes, wearied. “You were right. I did enjoy it. Gods forgive me, it was — arousing.”

“You haven’t done a thing to me I haven’t asked for,” Astarion continues, undaunted. He stalls for a moment, swirling the wine in his goblet. “I enjoyed it too, you know. The fantasy of it, I suppose — having you for a master, and not he. How… safe I might feel, under your care. How treasured.”

“Then —”

“It is not a comparison,” Astarion says firmly. “Believe me, my dear. You are nothing like Cazador. Cazador gave me nothing but pain — pain and fear and bitterness. But you? You have honoured me, time and time again, with the gift of yourself — freely, generously, tenderly… even when I have not been worthy of it.”

“You have always been worthy,” Wyll says, turning in his seat to catch Astarion’s free hand in his own.

Astarion’s face lifts, though he does not quite smile.

“Only you would say so,” he says. “Only you would believe so. Fool man that you are.”

Helpless, Wyll says, “I’m the fool man that loves you.”

Astarion raises Wyll’s hand to his lips, kisses the palm.

“Hm,” he says, catching the scent of Wyll's fingernails. “You smell like coconut oil, Grand Duke Ravengard.”

“Not a Grand Duke. Not yet. The accession isn't for another two months.”

“Gods, fine. Future Grand Duke Ravengard, then. Grand Duke Ravengard presumptive.”

Wyll presses the pad of his thumb against Astarion’s lower lip, says, “You know, there’s a tasty rabbit waiting for you down in the kitchen.”

“Really?” Astarion’s eyes light up.

"Really."

“Still live?”

“Probably frightened half to death — but yes, alive,” Wyll says. “If you’re still hungry afterwards, you’re free to seek me out for dessert.” 

He gestures meaningfully towards his own neck. Delighted, Astarion swoops down and kisses him on the cheek.

“I do love you, you know,” he says.

Wyll feels a warmth open up inside him, like something tangible transmitted through the air.

“I know, star.” 

“I love you,” Astarion says again, steady, “and I love our games."

“I..." Wyll smiles with bruised, uncertain relief. “I love them too. Even if —”

“They bring troublesome thoughts to the fore?”

“Exactly so, yes,” Wyll says. He turns back to the vanity, reaching for the glass of wine Astarion was generous enough to pour him. “But perhaps that’s what makes them thrilling — what makes them desirable — what makes them productive — that they take us to troublesome places.”

“I want to do more,” Astarion admits. “Go further. Try all sorts of filthy, wicked things that would no doubt shock and alarm you — sweet prince that you are.” He pauses, folds his arms over his chest, and glances away. “Foolish of me, perhaps, to want to play in this arena when it already takes to little to send me back. And yet, when I lie beneath you, I can’t help but wonder…” Astarion shakes his head. “Perhaps we could discuss it another time.”

“I — would like that,” Wyll's face heats up. Hastily, he adds, “A discussion. I would very much like to have a discussion.”

Astarion lets out a sudden, itchy laugh.

“No whips and chains is all I’m asking for.”

Wyll, who had no interest at all in introducing such cruel implements into their bedroom, says, “No whips and chains. Right. Got it.”

“Beyond that, feel free to write up a shopping list of your most salacious fantasies. Perhaps we can barter.”

The thought of haggling with Astarion over sex acts, some potentially shocking or extreme, makes him a little queasy.

“My most salacious fantasy,” Wyll says softly, pinning Astarion with a glance, halfway to tender and halfway to stricken, “is making you feel good. Pleasing your body with my own.”

“I —” Astarion covers his face with one hand, lets out a soft exhalation that doubles as both laugh and sigh. “I believe that’s my cue to leave, darling. You see, I can only take so much earnest, drippy affection in one sitting before I’m all maxed-out — and believe me, we have already gone well over quota.”

“You love it,” Wyll says, and he thinks he’s right.

Astarion rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling. That’s good. Wyll likes it when Astarion smiles. It’s always better when Astarion smiles.

He watches, lovesick, as Astarion pads out of the room — perhaps in search of clean clothes, perhaps in search of his promised rabbit. Alone, Wyll brings his goblet to his lips and drinks. He can feel the invisible hand of Astarion’s scrupulous curation, what with the wine’s crisp, mineral texture and complex finish. He himself would’ve been happy with a cheap brown ale — but Astarion had higher standards for himself, after all he had endured. Higher standards for Wyll, too.

Soon, Wyll will have to call the servants to drain the tub — to strip the sheets, change the linens, bring up his dinner. How strange, to have cooks and maids at his beck and call once more. How strange to wear silk brocade, to sleep on satin. How strange that he is master of his father's house, inheritor of his duty.

You are not my son.

Get out, and don't you dare come back.

Astarion tells him he has done no wrong. His father tells him he has erred, not Wyll. And yet, the guilt still smothers him sometimes. He knows — he has failed expectations, many times now. He knows he is not worthy, in so many ways, has woefully underperformed against hopes placed in him; knows he has not yet given enough.

Perhaps that is why Astarion won’t just say yes.

Wyll polishes up his second horn. The mirror is streaky, in need of a wash. The cool air prickles on his exposed skin. He touches his neck, massaging the pound of his carotid pulse with two fingers, and thinks of the blood fee he has promised to pay; a gift to be given, a meal to be made.

The morning, when it comes, is cool and dour. There's a hard look of rain in the foothills, a pressure in the air. The bay lurches and writhes in its basin, deep and hungry and dark.

A tray arrives on Wyll’s bedside table: black tea with cream and sugar, buttered toast, fried eggs, spiced sausage — everything prepared exactly how Wyll likes it, though he doesn’t recall circulating his preferences amongst his household staff. (Astarion’s doing, perhaps? Wyll is half-flattered, half-wary. He doesn’t know for certain, but rather suspects that Astarion is in the habit of terrorizing the maids when Wyll’s back is turned.)

He eats, washes up, limbers up a little with a few stretches. At some point in the process, Astarion waltzes into the room, ready to get some rest himself now that the sun has risen. Wyll kisses him on the forehead, says pleasant trancing, my star, and sends him off to the bed he’d only just deserted.

When he’d first moved back into the Ravengard manor, his father had attempted to appoint him a valet. Wyll had declined, of course; he has not yet become so pampered that he requires a servant’s assistance in lacing up his breeches. He dresses himself in a linen shirt and trousers; his garments simple but well-made, tailored to the exact specifications of his body.

Downstairs, the servants bustle about, fetching kindling, beating carpets, pounding linens, kneading dough. Just as Wyll is reviewing his correspondence — invitations to fashionable soirées, cheerful admail from a local apothecary, a promising-looking note from Gale that smells faintly of lilac wine — a messenger boy arrives wearing the Flaming Fist insignia. Apparently, Grand Duke Ulder Ravengard cordially requests his presence at the Baldur’s Gate city cemetery.

This call surprises Wyll, but not very much. 

It’s a ten-minute walk to the cemetery; a walk he knows well. They used to come here every single year without fail — sometimes more, when his father was in one of his mood of pique. He remembers being a little boy and squirming restlessly in his good shoes, not fully comprehending why he ought to be still and solemn and grateful. As he got older, his father started asking him to write letters he could leave on the headstone; he never knew what to say, or how to say it.

The woman in the ground was a stranger.

His is father is already there when he arrives, kneeling with a churchboy’s piety before his mother’s grave. His head is bowed; his armor glosses and glints in the faint, tepid sunshine. His expression is — almost unbearably haunted. Shifting from foot to foot, Wyll feels himself unmoored.

He has always hated this place. Gods forgive him — but it’s true, he does; he hates seeing his insurmountable, unconquerable father made so weak, hates himself for not knowing what to say, how to behave, how to feel like a good son.

Francesca Ballantyne Ravengard

1439 DR - 1468 DR

Beloved partner, mother, and friend.

Rest easy in the arms of Lathander.

Her headstone is tidy, well-tended. The adjacent grass has been clipped. A pale parcel of baby’s breath has been draped carefully, devotedly over the earth; her favorite flower, he knows.

Wyll lowers himself down next to his father. The soil is soft beneath his knees, softer than he’d anticipated. The scent of cut flowers overpowers everything.

“You’re more like her than you’ll ever know,” his father says without lifting his eyes.

Wyll lets out a long, slow breath. “You think?”

“She was — a romantic. A dreamer. The idealist to my pragmatist.” 

“Sounds like I would’ve liked her.”

They stay like that awhile: father, mother, son. Wind up in the poplars. Sky low and gray and crowded with stratus clouds, threatening rain.

At last, his father begins to speak again, his voice rusty and hoarse, a failing engine running on fumes: “You were born in the early morning, mere minutes before sunrise. I will never forget that day — the frost on the windowpane, the chill in the air. The strong, herbal scent of the doctor’s decoctions. The whispering of passing nurses — first nervy, then frantic. Over the slow course of hours, I felt my hope turn to anticipation. Then dread. Then exhaustion. Gods, I don’t think I’ve ever been so exhausted in all my life. The labour lasted a full day, well longer than it should have. But then, at last — when Francesca had hardly enough strength left in her to scream —” A muscles slides in Ulder Ravengard’s proud jaw; he closes his eyes. “There you were, Wyll.”

Here I am, Wyll thinks, and there is no comfort in it. No joy.

Ulder continues, “The healer wrapped you in a felt blanket and handed you over to me — this tiny, wrinkly little creature. Hard to express how awkward I felt, trying to balance you against the crook of my elbow, how ill-equipped; I had no idea how to hold you without hurting you. Helpless, I looked to your mother for guidance, and she could only smile.” Abruptly, his expression shifts to one of bewilderment, almost wonder — absorbed in a mystery that resisted all decryption. “And then, she was gone. And you began to cry. A life for a life.”

“A life for a life,” Wyll repeats numbly. He shoves his hands in his pockets, gloved fingers flexing into fists. “You think I killed her.”

A replete pause.

“You are here,” Ulder says. “And she is not.”

Guilt ignites in Wyll, roils like a lit furnace. He clamps his mouth shut. Closes his eyes.

The silence ticks on for ten, twenty seconds. At last, Ulder Ravengard sighs, shaking his head, “She’d have been so proud to trade her life for yours. She loved you, Wyll. Loved you so much, even before you were born. She would not have regretted a thing.”

“Do you?”

Ulder visibly hesitates, then says, “No. I do not regret your birth, Wyll — of course I do not — but…”

“But?”

“But I wish you could have both lived,” Ulder says, a painful burst of honesty. “She would have done better by you. She would have done it all right.”

Wyll’s attention slides back the headstone. For so, so many years, he’d longed to be in his father’s confidence, to dwell in the warm thick of it. Now that he is there — kneeling at his side, two men alike in honor — he’s not so sure he likes it.

Staring down his mother’s grave, it occurs to him — for the first time in his life — that his father has not been worthy of him. But then Ulder reaches out to clasp his shoulder, his hand strong and thick and weathered with callouses, and the thought melts away, receding as rapidly as it had formed.

“I suppose your Astarion has his grave here,” Ulder says, glancing around the graveyard.

“He does,” Wyll says.

His father nods, slowly, then says, “It’s a terrible thing, what was done to him.”

All of a sudden, Wyll feels enraged for Astarion; a futile, choking anger, like the dry grinding of gears. You don’t know a fucking thing about what was done to him.

Do you even know what you have done to me? Seven years. I was a child — 

Wyll pushes his hands up into his eyes, says, “Yeah.”

“I may not be the man’s biggest fan — nor is he mine — but if he truly makes you happy, Wyll —”

“He does.”

“— then I shall issue no ultimatum.”

Wyll laughs, says with real sincerity, “As if I would entertain such an ultimatum for even half a second.”

A smile wan, tired smile sputters to life on Ulder Ravengard’s cracked and weathered face.

“No, I suppose you wouldn't,” he says. Then, with conspiratorial fondness, “Neither would I.”

Wyll waits until his father has left before visiting Astarion’s grave. The headstone is ostensibly public — something anyone could go out and find, provided they had the patience, time, and motivation. Nevertheless, Wyll feels he should keep it secret, should safeguard its existence from prying eyes. Astarion trusted Wyll with this place; that trust was not won easily. 

Astarion Ancunín

1229 DR - 1268 DR

1492 DR -

Wyll kneels down, brushes the dirt and debris off the headstone with his gloved hands. His fingers slow over the deep, mottled grooves of the inscription — Astarion Ancunín. He wonders, sometimes, what he would’ve made of Astarion if he’d met him as a mortal. What if they’d been introduced at a society ball, or in the vaunted halls of Wyrm’s Rock Fortress? A young ducal heir and an elven magistrate of lofty (if unscrupulous) ambitions.

It probably would’ve gone quite poorly, if he’s being honest with himself. He’s met such magistrates before. He’s never liked a single one.

Wyll buys a white carnation from the gravetender and leaves it on Astarion’s headstone. He reminds himself that there is no body here; nothing is buried; Astarion does not sleep beneath the earth. He's at home, in Wyll's bed, no doubt saturating Wyll’s pillowcase with the sickly-sweet scent of his pomade.

Once, he was a living boy, somebody’s son, a cudgel of the law; then a slave, a wretch, a starveling. Now he spends Wyll’s money. Now he evades Wyll’s proposals with playful tenderness. Now he taps his dinner from the fount of Wyll’s throat. Now he temporizes. Now he prevaricates. Now he touches Wyll on the cheek and says, my love, this is everything. And Wyll touches him back. And agrees, readily: this is everything. Right here, right now, in the palm of my very hand.

Wyll stands. He shakes the dust, clears the ache from his knees, and begins to make his way home.

Way above, in the cradle of heaven, a cold, hard rain shudders loose. It spits, slithers, patters, and — at long last — pours.

“My star,” Wyll says softly. “I’d like to get your thoughts on something.”

“Something wild and salacious?”

Wyll shakes his head, “Something serious, I’m afraid.”

“Something serious, my,” Astarion hums, doing the fastenings of his shirt up with fine and nimble fingers. “Look at you, using your big-man Lord Ravengard voice. This should be entertaining.”

Wyll’s lying semi-upright on the bed, a book propped up in his lap. Across the room, Astarion dresses himself for an evening out. His is an elaborate, convoluted process, at once joyful and chaotic; it involves a great deal of tossing silk scarves about, pulling pieces on and removing them, running loving hands over bolts of taffeta lamé and cursing their existence: Too kitschy, too austere, too glitzy, too bland — dear gods, darling, why did I even buy this? I should hang myself in shame, really. Now, what do you think about black velvet? Do I look sufficiently effortless? You know, there’s really nothing worse than looking like you’re trying too hard — 

Ever since he first appeared on Wyll’s arm at court, Astarion has been something of a sensation among the Upper City gentry. It isn’t hard to see why: his particular brand of brutal wit is considered irresistibly fashionable in certain company. Combine that with his good looks, his heroic reputation, and the swirling rumors of his engagement — and suddenly, you have the talk of the season, a succès de scandale, pure aristocratic catnip. Day in and day out, he is deluged with invitations to cocktail parties and debutante balls. An ailing old dowager even wrote in to ask for his hand in marriage. (Wyll might have taken offense, had the woman not been 93 and quite blind.)

Now, Wyll likes parties quite a bit, but more as a sometimes thing than an every night thing. Astarion, on the other hand, seems to delight in his new role as the Gate’s most sought-after young courtier, and has taken to moonlighting at various high-end socials on his own.

Wyll thinks this might be good for him — getting out on his own, meeting new people, trying new things. He only hopes Astarion doesn’t lose his temper and stab the wrong baronet with a dinner fork.

Wyll shuts his book, setting it down on his knee. Sounding each syllable out with utmost care, he says, “Ancunín. That’s your surname, right?”

There’s a pause. Astarion pulls his doublet over his shoulder, laces himself in. He is either genuinely unaffected or doing a truly admirable job of feigning at it; Wyll cannot quite tell.

“It’s the one written on my gravestone, isn’t it?”

“I am aware, yes,” Wyll says. He purses his lips, broaching his next question with a trapper’s caution, “Astarion, do you — do you remember your family? The one you had before you turned.”

“Vividly, yes. A wife and two half-pint brats,” Astarion drawls. Then, when Wyll visibly short-circuits, he rolls his eyes, “I’m joking, gods. Don’t be so credulous.”

Wyll holds his hands up and sighs, a mea culpa.

“Look, if you don’t want to discuss this, I can drop it.”

“What? No, I —” Astarion reaches across the dressing table for his cufflinks, his expression indecipherable. “It isn’t a bad question, nor an inappropriate one — you simply caught me off guard, that’s all.” Eyes downcast, he pins the links to his shirtsleeves; the process is almost hypnotically fussy. “Sometimes, I… I think I might recall my father.”

“What do you remember?”

“Nothing terribly concrete. Just bits and pieces, really. His face. His manner of speaking, his gait. I think he taught me how to fire a bow.” Astarion uncaps a small tin of pomade, working it through his hair with hs fingers. “I remember… talking with him over dinner, asking his advice. I suppose he advised me in my ill-fated magisterial career.”

Wyll thinks of nights spent stargazing by the Chionthar, long evenings in the yard imitating his father's sword stance. He thinks of wooden rocking-horses, thinks of button-eyed rabbits, thinks of chocolates in foil wrappers, thinks of the shiny new shoes his child-sized fingers fumbled to buckle. He thinks of baby's breath. Of white buds that gather like snow. He kicks aside the flounced edge of the bedcover, says, “It sounds like you two were close.”

“It certainly seems that way, doesn’t it?” Astarion agrees. He reaches for a hand towel, wiping the greasy residue of his pomade with a brisk scrubbing motion.

“Astarion,” Wyll says, gentle, swinging one leg off of the mattress. “You’re — well. You’re an elf.”

“Truly, nothing escapes your keen powers of observation.”

Wyll resists the urge to lob a pillow at Astarion, but it’s a near thing.

“I mean, it’s possible your father yet lives,” he elaborates, bracing one hand against the bedspread. “Failing that, it’s possible other members of your family might’ve remained in the city — grandparents, siblings, cousins…”

Astarion snorts, says, “I’ve no doubt they’d go running for a priest of Kelemvor at the very sight of me. Last they saw me, I would’ve been gathering flies in a handsome casket: here lies dear, sweet Astarion, gone too soon, may he rest in peace forevermore.”

“It’s true that ordinary folk don’t take too lightly to the undead,” Wyll says. “But you are no ordinary undead, are you?”

“Most shambling corpses lack my sparkling wit, it’s true.”

“I am not demanding that you exhume the past, Astarion. What I am offering you is a choice,” Wyll says. “As a patriar, I’m authorized to requisition documents from the Office of Civic Records. I could make inquiries regarding other Ancuníns still living in the region, if you like.”

Astarion smooths his hands down his doublet, his back to Wyll. His poise is total, his gait ramrod; he seems elegant, controlled, coolly immaculate. But something simmers beneath the affect; there is a reason he does not turn to show his face, Wyll thinks.

At last, he says, “No.”

“No?”

He fiddles with a tintack bottle of perfume, says, “No. No thank you.”

Wyll slumps back against the sheets, lets out a deep and slumbery sigh.

“Alright,” he concedes, reaching up to pluck at the laces of his bedshirt. “If it’s a no, it’s a no. I won’t bring this up again. But if you do change your mind, let it be known that the offer stands.”

“It’s a no,” Astarion says, twisting the atomizer in his fingers, wringing the bottle’s glassine throat. “But... but I thank you nonetheless. You’re very…”

“Very what?”

“Very gallant.” Astarion sets the perfume aside, then picks it up again, indecisive. “You know. In your way.”

“In my way,” Wyll echoes, and he closes his eyes.

He feels, rather than sees, Astarion approach the bed. A knee joins him on the mattress, Astarion bending over and towards him. Cool as a salve, he presses his thumb to the base of Wyll’s left horn. His touch is pleasant, chaste; he carries with him the rich scent of his cosmetics. Slowly, skitteringly, he tracks his way down over scar tissue and raised ridges to the ardent swell of Wyll’s lower lip.

“How very like you,” Astarion says, silky and strange, “to be so — fixated on the idea of family. So preoccupied.”

“Can’t help it, sorry.”

“I suppose you can’t, no,” Astarion agrees. “I’ll send Lady Cadrienne your warmest regards. We’ll miss you terribly at tonight’s salon.”

“Go have some fun, star — and please don’t murder anyone.”

“Not even a little? What if a servant spills brandy on my lovely new shoes?”

“No murder.”

"What if Lady Cadrienne makes an exceptionally catty joke at my expense, and everyone laughs?"

"No murder."

“What if the party is overrun by a pack of fanatical cultists?”

“Then come home and get me,” Wyll says, “and we’ll murder them together.”

"Hm, I do like the sound of that," Astarion muses, cupping his chin in one hand.

"I'm sure you do."

“I miss seeing you elbow-deep in gore, you know. That was a good look on you.”

“Well, we do have that expedition to Waterdeep on the horizon. With any luck, you should soon see me spattered in lich drippings, clutching a sunwalker's ring.”

"You know just how to sweet talk me, my dear," Astarion says, and he bends down to kiss Wyll on the forehead. Wyll smiles in response, covers his face with one hand; he cannot recall the last time someone thought to kiss him so, like a child being sent to bed. Possibly never.

As Astarion draws away from the bed, Wyll shifts his weight against the bedding, murmurs with idle tenderness, "Marry me."

Astarion pauses. His hand rises up to wrap around the lockstyle of their bedroom door. His shoulders lift; his head tilts.

Then, with a charge of sweet, silent laughter about him, he says this: "Maybe later."

Chapter Text

It’s Astarion, actually, who suggests the introduction of restraints.

“Iron cuffs,” he says, lifting his pale, bony hands in the air as if to illustrate. “Cold, heavy, forbidding. Severe.”

Wyll says, "I thought you said no whips and chains."

They’re in the Ravengard Manor’s sitting room. Wyll is seated by the fire, picking at a tray of green grapes and cheese. A goblet of wine sits within arm’s reach. A few paces away, Astarion lazes on the divan — posed with the insouciant indolence of a well-loved, well-fed, well-groomed cat. He’s wearing the lovely violet housecoat Wyll bought him for Midwinter. 

He’s not wearing anything else.

"Well, my position is evolving," Astarion says, his voice taking on a cloudy quality. "Admittedly, I don't think I've warmed up to whips quite yet — but the cuffs? The cuffs, I've given a great deal of thought. They're shiny, rattle loudly when shaken, and they come with a precious little key the size of my pinky finger. We buy them together from a vendor who specializes in such sordid products. The vendor makes raunchy jokes that make you squirm; I laugh at your expense. We head home together, flirting relentlessly all throughout the carriage ride, I imagine. After we arrive, I tell you I want to try using them right away. You take me to the bedroom. You kiss me hard, undress me, manacle me to the bedpost. I’m patient throughout the whole process, perfectly relaxed, not suspecting a thing. Probably giving you some sass.”

“Definitely giving me some sass, I’d say.”

“Hush. Now, where was I? Ah, right. Chained to your bed, completely naked. I’m not worried in the slightest about how you plan on wielding your power over me — more than anything, I’m probably impatient, eager to get to the good part, the part where you’re inside me. It’s only when you leave me to cross over to the other side of the room that I begin to get a little nervous. All of a sudden, you open the window — sending a shock of cool air racing through the room, rashing my body with gooseflesh —  and you pitch the key out the window, sending it sailing off into the dark. It’s only then that I understand how thoroughly trapped I am. How completely and utterly at your mercy.”

“There are two things wrong with that fantasy.”

“Just two?”

“Two main ones,” Wyll laughs, reaching for his wine. “The first: there isn’t a conventional lock in this world that can hold you, key or no key.”

“That’s true,” Astarion admits. “What’s the second?”

“The second is that I’d never do that to you. Even as a joke, or as a bit of play.”

“Oh, I’m sure you wouldn’t,” Astarion says mildly. “What was it that you told me, the very first night you fucked me — all I’ve ever wanted was to set you free?”

“I meant it,” Wyll says, setting his goblet aside. “I still mean it. You will never be a prisoner in this house, so long as I am its master.” A pause. “But — if you wish to explore the sensation of restraint in healthy, non-judgmental environment —”

“When you put it that way, darling, it sounds so terrifically unsexy.”

“— then that is, of course, something that can be arranged. But no cuffs. They’ll bite into your skin, pinch your ulnar and radial nerves. Perhaps ribbons instead?”

“You mean to giftwrap me?”

“After a fashion.”

“How very quaint, but I’ll pass,” Astarion says, rolling his eyes. “The cuffs might actually be capable of restraining me. I could free myself from the ribbons with a single good yank.”

“So? Isn’t that the point?” Wyll parries. He leans up on one knee, tosses an extra log on the fire. “The illusion of restraint, rather than the reality?”

“A good illusion requires plausibility. Suspension of disbelief, as it were. How can I truly believe I am about to be ravished by a virile, lecherous ne’er-do-well when my wrists threaten to slip free at any moment?”

“A virile, lecherous ne’er-do-well?” Wyll frowns, settling back down on the thick, fibrous carpet. “Is that what you want me to be?”

“Sometimes.”

“So, I should slap you in fetters.”

“You could slap me in fetters,” Astarion supplies helpfully.

“Like I said, the cuffs might hurt you — and that’s the one thing I don’t ever want to do.”

“Maybe I want to be hurt,” Astarion says. “Have you ever considered that?”

Wyll takes that in. He had not, in fact, considered this. He’d rather assumed that Astarion was sick to death of pain, having endured enough of it to fill several lifetimes.

“Do you?”

A lengthy pause. Astarions rolls onto his belly, kicks his feet up in the air. His ankles are astoundingly bony and slender; lunar-pale, so white they’re nearly blue. Wyll secretly loves them — finds them strangely, irrationally adorable — and often daydreams about pressing chaste kisses to Astarion’s fibula, though he knows Astarion would find such an unconventional expression of affection to be bizarre, ridiculous, and possibly even fetishistic.

“Honestly? I haven’t decided,” Astarion says, his voice deceptively light. “But pain is typically a component part of these games, yes? A smack on the rear, a slap on the hand, ten minutes of poor circulation in one’s wrist —”

“Ten minutes? You wound my honor.”

Astarion half-shrugs, “Oh, I figured you’d get bored and free me around the ten minute mark, if only to change positions. I know your foolish heart, Wyll Ravengard. No matter how salacious the roleplay, you always end up wrangling us back into the missionary position.” He seems to have a new thought, focuses his features into a foxy leer, “Wait, is that the only way you can finish?”

“I just like seeing your face as you reach your peak,” Wyll says simply. “You’re so beautiful when you allow pleasure to engulf you.”

Astarion preens.

“I am beautiful, aren’t I?”

“You are unspeakably gorgeous,” Wyll says for perhaps the thousandth time. Astarion never tires of hearing it, after all — and it never ceases to be true.

He leans back, pressing his palms against the thick, woolen weave of the carpet. Behind its heavy metal grate, the fire spits. Pops. Hisses. Sighs. 

As a child, he’d spent many winter evenings in this exact same spot: sprawled across the carpet, heat gathering on his skin, utterly captivated by the flames. Fire has always appealed to him. Always fascinated him. It was the magic Wyll commanded most intuitively, back when he still had magic to command. He sees a chaotic logic to fire —  like passion itself, it consumes madly, hungrily, and without reservation; when there is nothing left for it to devour, it dies.

Wyll closes his eyes, breathing in deep. The scent of burning cedar is an immensely comforting one — woodsy, flinty, warm. It reminds him of the prelapsarian years of his childhood. Drowsy, cozy nights spent reading stories. Hot tea and buttered biscuits. His father’s hands, stripped of their greaves. Big hands. Tough hands. Uncertain hands. Funny — they used to hold hands as they crossed the Wide, because Wyll was frightened of the horses. He thought they might trample him.

From behind him, Astarion says, “Go on. Take a moment to picture it.”

“You, naked, cuffed to my bed?”

“Precisely that, yes.”

So Wyll pictures it. Astarion’s fine and nimble hands, shackled to the bedpost. The long, pale flat of his body. The tuck of his knees. Pale feet flexing faintly against the mattress. Astarion always looked so shockingly natural when naked — poised, unruffled, ingenuous. You could tell at a glance that he was utterly at ease with this level of display, utterly acclimated, and thus had very little in the way of squeamishness or shame.

“Handcuffs are for prisoners,” Wyll says at last. “Like I said, you’re not my prisoner.”

Astarion clucks his tongue, dissatisfied.

“What am I, then? Your servant? Your housepet? Your personal whore?”

“No,” Wyll answers automatically, though the sheer starkness of word whore flips something nasty in his belly. The sensation is dangerously close to a thrill. “Not that, no, never.”

“Not your whore, fine,” Astarion says. “How do you see me, then? When you’re — mastering me in the bedroom, so to speak.”

“That’s actually a difficult question,” Wyll says. He closes his eyes, thinks of Astarion’s tousled head pillowed in his lap. The pride that swells in his heart when Astarion nuzzles closer, his cheek dragging against Wyll’s thigh. “I don’t know the word for it, but — I suppose I see you as something very, very precious which I have been tasked with protecting.”

“Like a child?”

“Definitely not like a child, no.”

“I could try calling you daddy, if you like.”

That shocks a laugh out of Wyll, “What? Gods, no. Need I remind you that I’m younger than you? By quite a lot?”

“Age is immaterial,” Astarion sniffs. “I’m an immortal vampire, forever young.”

“I’m visibly younger than you.”

“Are you saying that I look old?” Astarion affects a light, breathy gasp. “How very dare you.”

“I said no such thing! But I don’t think I’m being particularly radical or uncharitable when I say that you could not pass for my child.”

“Give it a few years,” Astarion says darkly. “Then we’ll see.”

Wyll shrugs, then fishes for a grape. He pops one into his mouth, chewing slowly as he considers the discussion.

Slowly, trepidatiously, he ventures, “How do you feel about collars?”

Astarion worries at his lower lip with his teeth. “I’m — interested.”

“Leashes?”

“Nowhere public, but — yes,” Astarion says. There’s a pause; Astarion repositions himself on the divan, canting his weight against his hip. “How do you feel about slapping me across the face?”

Oh, gods.

“That depends,” Wyll hedges carefully, repressing his excitement. “How do you feel about being slapped across the face?”

“Unclear. You’ll have to try it out on me.”

“And if you hate it?”

“Then I’ll let you know, I imagine, in no uncertain terms. And likely slap you back.”

“Risky business,” Wyll grimaces.

“In love — as in life — nothing is safe,” Astarion says knowingly. “Not really. Now, what about roleplay? You can be the stern, imposing Grand Duke, and I can be the fetching little serving boy you corner like a mouse. You demand that I bend over your desk and submit to a rough fucking, or else I’ll be sacked without references.”

“You’ve a fantastic imagination, Astarion. Have you ever considered a career as an erotic novelist?”

“Mm, I’ve contemplated the possibility — my latent talent is undeniable — but ultimately, I think I’d be a criminally sadistic author. All my characters would wind up dying terrible deaths. I’d attract no end of furious reviews.”

“No reader would be more furious than I,” Wyll says, taking another pull of his wine. “I’m a romantic at heart. I cannot stand unhappy endings.”

He pulls his leg up towards himself; distantly, in some untrod, quiet corner of his mind, he’s still stuck on the visual of Astarion bent over his desk. Legs spread, hair a wreck, trembling all over. My lord, please! Have mercy!

The jaws of longing close around Wyll. He thinks he’d make Astarion suck on his fingers. Wouldn’t that be very lovely.

“You know,” Astarion says, pushing himself semi-upright, “I used to think life was little more than a cruel procession of unhappy endings, one after the other.”

“And now?”

“Now?” Astarion lets out a breath, looks faintly bewildered. “I — I don’t know. I seem to have found myself in a — pleasant interlude, of sorts.”

“You’ve stumbled into a happy ending.”

Astarion shrugs, as if in jaded agreement. “Well, let’s not jinx it.”

“As you like.”

Astarion lowers himself back down onto his side, pressing his cheek against the cushions. Softly, he sighs. The fire crackles softly. Rain patters against the windowpane.

Wyll stares into the flames. For a long while, they’re quiet — and the moment seems to drift.

A memory: the long, terrible night they spent down in the recesses of the Szarr Palace. Hard to forget the way Astarion had waltzed from room to room, offering them the dazed approximation of a house tour. Foyer, dining room, bedroom. Opulent drapery. Garish wallpaper. Vast reserves of undrunk wine. A squalid little barrack for the spawn, devoid of personal touches. They’d lived like kitchen servants.

The kennel was the worst of all — a grotty little cell covered in scratches, dried blood, stale puke. Implements everywhere. Cudgels and thumbscrews and bonesaws. Iron shackles.

Cold, heavy, forbidding. Severe.

A memory: the prey-wildness in Astarion’s eyes. The skitter of his breath. His blade, cleaving through Cazador’s fine doublet, again, and again, and againagainagain, sticky, slick, sick.

Watching Astarion kill Cazador had been satisfying, in its own way — but also uniquely, immensely painful. Wyll had never felt so terrified for someone, save for maybe his father. And that terror went right back around and became its own kind of devotion, its own kind of infatuation. He’d sworn there and then, knee-deep in carnage, that he would protect and honor Astarion for the rest of his life.

His foul-mouthed starling. His broken bone.

A memory: himself, on top of Astarion. Inside of Astarion. The helter-skelter of his heartbeat. The pulse pounding in his cock. The undilute pleasure of power — the power to give, and the power to take. To please and to punish.

A memory: hips thumping, Astarion’s legs wrapped around him —  they’d been making love, and Wyll had been gripped by the abrupt, demoniacal urge to wrap his hands around Astarion’s throat. To run his thumbs over Astarion’s juddering windpipe. To bear down. To squeeze.

In the aftermath, Wyll had felt so, so ashamed. More than ashamed — he’d felt evil. Genuinely, ontologically evil. He was a fraud of the worse kind. A traitor. An oathbreaker. A craven. He’d sworn to protect Astarion, and yet, there he was — a hot-mouthed pervert at the edge of violence, inches from becoming the very thing Astarion most needed protection from.

A memory: I love you.

A memory: Master, I’m sorry.

Ever since that night, Wyll’s been obsessed with the following question: Is there something wrong with me?

The answer to that question is obviously yes, of course , because there’s something wrong with everyone, and that’s life.

As for his more unsavory impulses — well. He’s working on it. He’s been trying to familiarize himself with this other side of his, this — this dominance. He’s been learning to control it, to manage it, to express it in a way that serves Astarion’s pleasure. Because Astarion does seem to enjoy it, to an extent. The word master slips its way into the bedroom regularly now, and never fails to make Wyll feel absolutely fucked up — because no matter what Astarion says, this can’t be okay, it can’t, he really shouldn’t encourage this, why does it get him so hard?

(There’s something wrong with him.)

The shame still comes, sometimes — along with the edgy terror of never being satisfied. It can be — upsetting, to put it lightly. Some nights, it’s inexplicably devastating. But after an intense scene, there’s little time for angst or self-pity. Astarion simply needs him more.

“Alright, alright,” Astarion says at last. “I’ve shared my fantasies. Surely you have one or two knocking loose in that marvelous brain of yours?”

Wyll’s face heats up.

“I —” he hesitates, clears his throat. “I find it difficult to discuss these things, to be honest.”

“That’s because you’re repressed, dear,” Astarion says. He props himself up onto his elbow, turns his mordant eyes on Wyll. His features are focused, hawk, but not humorless.

“A fantasy,” Wyll repeats, testing the words upon his tongue. 

His mind turns to Astarion’s suggestion, half-made in jest: How do you feel about slapping me in the face? He pictures himself backhanding Astarion: a humiliating, emasculating blow, of the type typically reserved for low-rent prostitutes or battered spouses. Did Cazador ever strike him so? Or was it just Astarion’s gentleman callers — his victims, patrons, and clients?

(There’s something extremely wrong with him.)

“You’re overthinking this,” Astarion says from the divan. “I can tell. Your eyebrows are doing that thing.”

“What thing?”

“This,” Astarion says, and he scrunches his face up into a deep, furrowed frown.

“Oh?” Wyll forces a laugh, schools his features into an approximation of untroubled charm. “I’ll try not to do that, then.”

“Look, I’m just saying — it doesn’t have to be so serious,” Astarion says, wrapping his housecoat around himself a little more securely. “It can just be a silly little thing, really. Some idle fancy that once popped into your head while you were washing up.”

“Alright, alright.” Wyll takes a breath, combing his mind for something he might actually deign to share. “I suppose I do have one. A fantasy, of sorts. If — if you care to hear it.”

“You know I do, darling.”

“Well then,” Wyll says. “Here goes. I take you out to a tailor, and I buy you a beautiful new suit — cut to your measurements, but designed according to my own preferences and specifications. It'd be deep red, I think, with a plunging neckline. Slightly scandalous, but still appropriate for eveningwear.”

Astarion hums appreciatively, “I’m liking this so far.”

“I take you out to the opera. You’re there on my arm, witty, dazzling, wearing the garments I had made for you. You’re even wearing my signet ring, emblazoned with the Ravengard family crest. Everyone in the theater watches us and whispers — my word, who is that beautiful man on Lord Ravengard’s arm? During the performance, I keep one hand on your knee: proprietary, but relaxed. It never escalates past that touch — the occasion is far too public, after all. Still, everyone in that theater knows that you’re mine, and that later that night, at some unspecified time, you will be in my bed.”

Hot and willing, he thinks to add, but the words seem too crass, somehow — too vulgar, too revealing.

Astarion leans up, eyes on Wyll. Expression inscrutable.

“And? After the show ends?”

“I place my hand on your lower back, and gently steer you through the foyer. We make polite conversation with a few patriars — the ones I can’t get away with ignoring, politically speaking. We make small-talk about the weather, the leading tenor, an upcoming ball — and then, at last, we make our excuses. I take you down the stairs and out to where our carriage is parked. I offer you a hand, help you inside, as a gentleman should. We ride back home together.”

“And if I offer to pleasure you on the carriage ride, down between your legs?”

“Then I’d chastise you, and say you must wait until I decide to avail myself of you.”

“Spoilsport,” Astarion sighs. “You know, your sexual fantasies are frustratingly elaborate.”

“I think they’re just elaborate enough,” Wyll says decisively. “We arrive home. I send you upstairs, tell you to undress yourself, fold your clothes neatly, and wait for me on your knees, naked.” Wyll pauses, leaning up to take the fire iron in hand. Lightly, as he presses the poker past the grate to readjust the position of the coals, he says, “There might be a collar waiting for you on the dressing table. Would you put it on?”

Astarion’s eyes are large and black, pupils dilated. Your pupils dilate when you see something beautiful. Wyll read that in a book, once. Maybe his pupils are dilated too. 

Astarion licks his lips. Nods.

“How — how long do you make me wait?”

“Ten, maybe fifteen minutes. But it probably feels longer, doesn’t it?”

“It feels like forever,” Astarion says, his voice coming out faintly strangled. “I’ve already been waiting all night. Since your hand first slid over my knee. And the collar —”

“Yes?”

Astarion reaches up, placing a pale hand over the column of his bare neck.

“It’s hard to think of anything but you when I wear the collar,” he says.

Wyll’s cock rouses.

“I enter the room,” he says, “but I don’t go to touch you, not straightaway. I get comfortable in my chair, and I pour myself a drink. A good brandy, perhaps.” Wyll’s never had a brandy in his life, and certainly wouldn’t know a good one from a poor one — but his father was always a brandy-drinker. “Two fingers over ice. I enjoy it, sipping slowly, watching you struggle to master your own emotions.”

“Desire. Impatience. Humiliation. I can’t stop thinking about how you paraded me around the theater — like some sort of pretty bauble — ”

“You like that?”

“I hate it,” Astarion seethes, rising to his knees on the divan. “I hate it, and — and I love it. Gods. It drives me utterly insane, you don’t understand. I would’ve gotten down on my knees and sucked you off during the show, had you asked.”

“Are you disappointed I didn’t?”

“I don’t know.”

“When I’m halfway down the glass, I invite you to crawl to my side.”

“On hands and knees?”

“How else?” Wyll says. “Once you’re pressed against my leg, I offer you a taste of my blood. You had a rabbit or two before we left for the opera, so you aren’t starved by any means — but you’ve behaved yourself so nicely, obeyed me so sweetly, and I decide that’s well worth a treat. A little dessert. I let you drink just enough to get you feeling all warmed up; three swallows, I think, directly from my wrist.”

“It makes everything brighter,” Astarion says, fiddling with the hem of his housecoat. “More intense.”

“I know, love.”

Wyll abruptly remembers his wine. He reaches for it, draining the rest in a single go. It isn’t brandy, but it still settles nicely in the pit of his belly.

“No more of this,” Astarion all but begs, his back bending into a beautiful arch. “Tell me you take me to the bed.”

“I take you to the bed,” Wyll confirms. “Put you up on all fours — ”

“And —”

“And I fuck you.” Wyll smiles, setting his empty goblet down upon his tray. “We finish in missionary, of course.

Astarion pushes his face into his hands, letting out a soft groan.

“Gods,” he says. “I hate you.”

“I love you too,” Wyll says, amused. Pushing himself up onto one knee, he asks, “Are you hard?”

A beat. Then, Astarion gives a small, jerky nod, like a guilty child.

In a tone of assumed command that comes to him surprisingly easily, Wyll says, “Show me.”

Astarion hesitates for only a moment, then unwinds his housecoat and shucks it from his shoulders, leaving him gloriously naked. Wyll drinks him in. He’s beautiful. Terminally, pulverizing, undeniably beautiful. The fact of his arousal only enhances the effect. The blue of Astarion’s capillaries stand out against the white of his skin, like the striation of calcite in marble. The lean slate of his belly twitches. His nipples are tight and pink and stiff. His cock bobs between his legs, half-mast, flush.

Even without a stitch of clothing, he somehow looks expensive . Wyll thinks he must be the richest man in Baldur’s Gate.

“You liked that, then?” Wyll teases, a slow smile spreading across his face. “I’m curious. Which part of that, exactly, did it for you?”

“The bespoke suit,” Astarion rasps, eyes flashing, “clearly.”

“I should’ve known. Ever the dandy, you.”

He feels something shift as he appraises Astarion’s naked body, something clicks into place. Doubt and shame deliquesce, replaced by a warm, soft-stoking feeling of desire. He’s suddenly extremely conscious of the fact that he’s fully-clothed, while Astarion is entirely bare. There’s something gratifying in the contrast; it renders Astarion’s nudity all the more piquant.

Astarion slides a hand down over his chest, over his belly — before pausing over his lower belly. He tilts his head, licks his lips.

“Waiting for permission, eh?” Wyll asks, his voice suffused with real approval. “Good boy.”

Astarion shudders minutely, says, “Let me.”

“Let you what.”

“Touch myself,” Astarion says. “Please.”

Please. What a lovely, lovely word.

“I’ll allow it,” Wyll grins. He leans back, planting his elbows against the carpet as he admires the view above. “Go on, star. Touch yourself for me.”

Astarion reaches down between his legs, grips his cock, and gives it a long, firm stroke.

“It’s cute,” Wyll says, awestruck with affection. “Watching you get all turned on to the point you need to touch yourself — it’s really, really cute.”

“Don’t — don’t call me cute.”

“Why not? You call me cute all the time.”

“Yes, but only when I’m being a condescending bastard.”

“Well, I’m being completely sincere,” Wyll says. He reaches up, releasing the first two buttons of his shirt. “You look so precious right now.” He has a new thought, an exciting one. “Maybe I’ll get you a collar with a bell. Or a little pink bow.”

“That’s ghastly,” Astarion grinds out, but his cock fills out to full hardness, his hand speeding up.

“You’d look sweet as a kitten,” Wyll muses fondly.

“You’ll find I bite like a mutt.”

“Then I suppose I should invest in a muzzle,” Wyll says, and Astarion moans. It isn’t a very pretty moan; the sound is somewhere between a choke and a hiss, as though Astarion had been punched in the gut. Still, Wyll enjoys these sorts of moans most of all, because he knows they’re wholly involuntary. The moans Astarion makes for Wyll’s benefit sound more like music. 

“You like that?” Wyll asks, watching Astarion fist his cock. “Yes, I suppose you would. Nothing is ever simple with you. You want the whole production. You like implements — props. Muzzles, collars, leashes, handcuffs. Gags?”

“Fuck me,” Astarion blurts out.

“No,” Wyll says.

“Fuck me, please.”

“Not tonight,” Wyll says evenhandedly, undoing the clasp of his trousers with one hand. “I’ll fuck you when I feel like it, and right now, I don’t feel like it. Think of this as an education in patience.” He slides his palm down into his drawers, curls his hand around his own erection absentmindedly. “Be grateful I’m not sending you off to wait on your knees.”

Astarion swears loudly, jacking himself off in earnest now.

“Th— that sounds like torture, right now,” he says, screwing his eyes shut. “Don’t, don’ make me.”

“I won’t,” Wyll says, giving himself a light, idle stroke. “Unless you make me very, very cross. Then I absolutely will —  and rest assured, it won’t be ten or fifteen minutes of waiting.”

“I’ll be good,” Astarion gasps. “I’ll be good, master.”

Gods, but that word never loses its wretched power.

“Play with your chest a little more,” Wyll says. “I know you’re sensitive there.”

Astarion reaches up obediently, palms his flat little tit with one hand — groping himself shamelessly before focusing on the nipple, pinching it, rolling the bud between his fingers.

“Feels better when you do it, master.”

“You’ll manage.”

“Fuck. I. I — I don’t understand, how you do this to me , every time —”

“Do what?”

“Get me,” Astarion swallows loudly, a look of glassy wonder in his eyes, “like this. Feeling this way. Like my mind is totally blank — ‘cept for you. Feels good.”

“You’re dripping wet, you know,” Wyll says, his eyes trained on Astarion’s cock, flushed a deep, furious red. The head was, in fact, pearled with pre, glossy and semitranslucent, the moisture slicking up Astarion’s strokes. “Like a girl.”

“Fuck. Fuck.”

“It’s very charming.”

Astarion’s pace intensifies. His belly quivers, taut. His bare feet dig into the divan, toes curling up in pleasure — or, more precisely, the nervy, gnashing tension of pre-pleasure.

“Keep talking,” Astarion gasps. “Please.”

“What about?”

“Tell me again — about the opera —”

“Haven’t I painted you enough of a picture?”

Astarion shakes his head violently, no. Wyll grins.

“My hand on your knee,” he says, pulling his cock free. He gives himself a long, firm stroke. “My voice in your ear. The crushing warmth of the theater. My hand slides up your upper thigh — teasing you, just a little. I press my lips against the shell of your ear. I ask if you’re enjoying the show —”

“I tell you — fuck — I tell you the truth, which is that I can’t hear a single note,” Astarion says, biting his lower lip. “All I can think about is — hahhh — is your cock. I wish you’d just bend me over the balcony, slide into me, pull my hair, fuck me hard, right in the middle of the show, in front of all of the Gate’s best and brightest — ”

A frisson of pleasure jitters up Wyll’s spine.

“You want everyone to know you’re my fucktoy?”

“Yes,” Astarion breathes, grip twisting around the hot shaft of his dick, “yes, fuck —”

“Then I really shouldn’t have bothered with the bespoke suit,” he says. “I should’ve just had you sit in my lap, naked. Wearing nothing but my signet ring.”

“Master — m’gonna — hahh —”

“Look at me,” Wyll says, and his voice is strange even in his own ears — rough, rapacious. “Look at me while you come.”

Astarion opens his eyes. They’re wild with desire, irises eclipsed by twin discs of pure black. Hot black. Deep black. Coal-seam black. Coal-seam fires can burn for years. For generations, even.

He looks at Wyll — and there’s something in his expression that makes Wyll feel so needed. So indispensable, so requisite for survival, like water or shelter, or — in Astarion’s case — blood. There’s a plenitude in that, one that almost has nothing to do with sex.

Astarion’s back seizes. His lips part. His breath hitches, his expression freezes into a look of dazed, imperiled surprise — as though he’d unexpectedly sprung a trap — and he comes. Soundlessly. In a long, hot pulse. He milks himself right through it, seed spurting from the tip of his cock in jets. It sticks to his fingers. It sticks to his belly. It drips down to the carpet below, sticks there too.

What a mess, Wyll thinks. But the mess inspires tenderness in him. Love, even. Moving on autopilot, he rises to his feet, stroking himself as he moves towards the divan.

Astarion knows what’s about to happen even before Wyll does. He tips his head back, closes his eyes, and stretches out his tongue — his expression one of perfect and immaculate bliss as Wyll jerks off onto his face.

Mine, Wyll thinks with a proprietary satisfaction that matches the horns on his head. All mine.

Pleasure hammers through him. It demands to be felt. Demands to be shared. So he does. Eagerly. Zealously. Wyll fists his cock, releases a long, low groan, and he paints Astarion white: hot, sloppy ropes of come sliding down his cheek, sticking to his lashes, pooling on his tongue.

It feels like a desecration — but a glorious one.

Wyll tucks himself back into his trousers, refastening the tie with trembling hands. Up on his knees, Astarion looks utterly dazed, punch-drunk. There are tears in his eyes. He’s panting, his skinny chest rising and falling with the intake of oxygen he doesn’t truly need.

Gods above, but he looks like such a whore. The Grand Duke’s personal plaything.

“Now thank me,” Wyll says, his voice rising like smoke from some deep, dark place. “For the honor.”

Astarion shudders. His voice small and remote, he says, “Thank you, master.”

“Did you have fun, star?”

“Ye-es.” Astarion’s teeth chatters as he answers. “So m-much fun, master.”

Wyll sits down on the divan and lets Astarion crush his face against his shoulder. Wyll holds him, ignoring the stickiness between them; he feels golden and powerful, suffused with a faint, tingling warmth — is that why they call it an afterglow? Astarion seems to feel it too, because as soon as he has control over his body once again, he kisses Wyll. It’s a slow, sliding sort of kiss, and Wyll tastes himself there, musky and strange.

The shame and the guilt and the uncertainty will come knocking on his door soon enough, leaving behind all manner of unwanted gifts. But for now — in this moment — he feels good. Strong, satisfied. In love.

And again — needed.

Wyll has always liked to be needed. Even as a little boy, he liked it. He used to beg to run errands for his father, to peel potatoes for the cook, to fold socks and shirts for the housekeepers. It was these words he most treasured, these words he most yearned to hear: What would I do without you, Wyll?

His new work on the council offers a similar thrill, though the stakes are much higher, the victories harder-won. He argues tirelessly for the average Baldurian, fights tooth and nail against patrician interests to rebuild homes destroyed by the Absolutist threat. It’s exhausting work. Maddening, at times — he often finds himself pining for a problem he can solve with his rapier. Still, his father often tells him the city needs him, and the thought never fails to make him glow with pride. The city needs a leader with a strong heart, Wyll. What would they do without you?

At night, when he regales Astarion with tales of political infighting — and his own crusade to bring the patriars into check, Astarion gives him a pat on the cheek and laughs. What a sorry mess. What would they do without you, darling?

What indeed.

Wyll reaches for Astarion’s housecoat. It’s cashmere wool, soft and slinky to the touch. A fine and fussy sort of thing — much like Astarion himself, he supposes. But he has always loved Astarion’s fussiness. Even during their camp days, when such fastidiousness had been completely and utterly at odds with their surroundings, he’d found it hopelessly endearing — Astarion’s dandylike dress sense, his toffee-nosed asides, his frothy giggle, his absurd despair when confronted with such indignities as horseflies, latrines, and tallow soap.

Wyll wraps the dressing gown around Astarion’s shoulders lightly; Astarion hums, lifts his arms, and slips them back inside. He’s lovely in violet. Resplendent, in a word. He looks as though he should be blooming on a bough. Wyll fastens the belt around Astarion’s waist, watching — with a tender eye — as the hem of the garment ruches and relaxes against Astarion’s thigh.

“What do you think?” he asks. “Should I invest in opera tickets?”

“Invest in the suit,” Astarion replies drowsily. “And the collar. And handcuffs. And a new chandelier for the front foyer, while we’re on the subject of necessary expenses. That crystal monstrosity is a crime against good taste.”

“That’s an antique, I’ll have you know.”

“Yes, I figured. Doesn’t make it any less hideous.”

“It’s a Ravengard family heirloom.”

“It’s a Ravengard family curse.”

“My great aunt will be incandescent if we toss it.”

“Gods, Eurinda can fuck right off. We’re the ones who have to look at it every day, aren’t we?”

“We can move it into one of the lounges, perhaps.” Wyll runs the pad of his thumb up over Astarion’s ear, stroking lightly at the pointed tip. “I’ll have the steward send you a catalogue. Pick whatever chandelier you like. You could even order new carpets and drapings to match.”

“Oh,” Astarion says, closing his eyes. “That sounds — nice. Perhaps…”

“Perhaps what?”

Astarion wipes at his sticky face with the sleeve of his housecoat.

“Perhaps we could reupholster the settees.”

“Sure, if you like. I trust that you’ll come up with something beautiful.”

“Wyll?”

“Yes?”

“I,” Astarion’s throat bobs, and he sighs, “I love you.”

Speaking the words commands a visible effort. It always does. Wyll never takes it personally. For many, many years, love was an unbelievably dangerous emotion for Astarion — to foster it willingly, even in the privacy of his own mind, had been unthinkable.

“I know,” Wyll says. “I love you too.”

Astarion wipes at his face again, then presses close, knocking into the crook of Wyll’s neck. He smells of sweat, spend, rosemary and bergamot. He feels small in Wyll’s arms. Small and breakable, like a teacup. Like a little lamb.

But then Wyll feels the bladed pressure of fangs against his jugular, inquisitive, and he wonders: when is a lamb not a lamb? Is the lamb still a lamb if its teeth are sharp? Is the lamb still a lamb when it devours the lion? 

The pressure increases; Wyll’s heartbeat stumbles. He closes his eyes, tips his head back, and he says, “Just a taste.”

“I just realized something,” Astarion says later that night, just as they’re crawling into bed. “Why you always want to finish in missionary. It doesn’t come from some misplaced sense of romantic propriety — and it isn’t because you like to see my face as I reach my peak . That was a lie. A pretty lie, yes, but a lie all the same.” 

He tilts his head, examining Wyll anew. There’s no trace of rancor in his expression — nor any of the usual ruttishness. A new look has taken up residence in his face: one of faintly anthropological interest, curious yet aloof.

“You want me to see your face,” he continues. “You want me to know who’s fucking me. You want me to know that it’s you.”

“Maybe,” Wyll admits nervously, sitting down at the edge of the bed. “I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it before, but — that sounds right. Is that bad?”

“I suppose it isn’t. But it is clarifying.”

“Clarifying?”

“Oh, yes,” Astarion says. “You’re possessive. Territorial, really. I mean, that whole opera fantasy — that was all about you marking your territory. Publicly.”

“Like a dog pissing on a lamppost?”

Astarion pauses. “I wouldn’t have put it that way. But you’re not wrong.” He jams his feet into a pair of thick, woolen socks. “You can’t stand to think I’m picturing some other man, can you?”

Wyll winces.

“Well, I — it’s more that,” he tries, his cheeks growing hot. “I don’t want anything we do to overlap with bad memories. So, I get to thinking, maybe if you look at me, and you remember who you’re with — if you remember that you’re doing this someone who loves you — ”

“I won’t buck you off like a spooked horse?”

“You’ll know that you’re safe, star.”

“Ah,” Astarion says, climbing underneath the bedcovers. “I. I see.”

“I want you to feel safe with me, always,” Wyll says. Then, with a pulse of guilt: “I’m sorry. I know you hate being handled delicately.”

“Don’t be sorry.”

“But —”

Astarion rolls towards Wyll. Without warning, he shoves his ice cold fingers underneath Wyll’s shirt. Wyll hisses in surprise, squirming against Astarion’s hands.

“Don’t be sorry,” Astarion says again. Then, his tone of voice tilting with an idle touch of mirth, “You know, I’m rather possessive myself.”

That shocks a laugh out of Wyll. “Is that so?”

“The other day, I heard a certain lovely young heiress — who shall henceforth remain nameless, of course — swooning over your dashing countenance and generosity of spirit. I wanted to bite her fucking head off.”

“Oh, gods.”

“Naturally, I resisted the temptation,” Astarion says lightly, splaying his hands over Wyll’s flank, “because I am a reformed man, good and true and penitent, and murder is frowned upon in this household. But it was a near thing, you know. She really was good-looking.”

“She could be Lady Sune herself, goddess of beauty, and you would still have nothing to fear. My heart is yours.”

“I know.” Astarion looks away. “Still — you know how it is. Dogs and their lampposts.”

He drags Wyll down against the bed, wraps all his limbs around him like an octopus. 

“Astarion,” he says, speaking directly into Astarion’s wonderful mop of curls. “Say I chain you to my bed, muzzle you, cane you — whatever it is you’ve got cooked up in your head —”

“I don’t recall mentioning a cane.”

“— can I trust you to tell me if things get a little too real? Because if you ever want to stop, we can stop, no questions asked.” There’s a long pause, which does nothing to alleviate Wyll’s anxiety. He presses again, “Astarion?”

“Yes,” Astarion says at last. “Yes, of course. I’m through having unenjoyable sex. Everything we do — I shall do for my own pleasure. And yours, naturally.”

“Okay,” Wyll sighs, reaching up to massage the bridge of his nose. “Okay. Good.”

“You’re shaking, you know.”

“Am I?” Wyll blinks in the darkness. “That’s strange.”

Astarion’s fingers stroke his torso very lightly, catching over the rasp of his chest hair. “Just a touch. Are you cold, darling?”

“Must be."

“Could be blood loss,” Astarion murmurs, and there’s a soft rustling sound as he adjusts the blankets around them. “That’d be my doing.”

“It’s not so bad.”

A beat.

“I  — wish I could warm you up.”

Ah, right, Wyll thinks blearily. Astarion is dead. A corpse.

“Don’t worry about it,” he says, reaching around to cradle the back of Astarion’s head. “Just sleep, star.”

“Trance, you mean.”

“Trance, star.”

Wyll closes his eyes. He makes a conscious effort — not for the first time — to imagine Astarion alive, imagine him whole. A flush in his face. Some meat on his bones, a softness around the ribs. What would he eat? Tins of salty black licorice, perhaps, like somebody’s grandmother. As for his eyes, would they be silver? Marble-blue? Gold? He imagines them glistening in Astarion’s face like two brass coins; the image is decidedly unmooring.

If Astarion would only take his advice and investigate his family background, they might know. There could very well be someone left to tell him. A father, a mother. A brother.

(Gods, Wyll would have killed for a brother.)

The thought is a deeply frustrating one — that Astarion could potentially have a family if only he went looking for it. Wyll is often tempted to do it himself, to take the plunge for him. It would only take a discreet letter to the Office of Civic Records, and he could have information on every Ancunín who’d ever resided in Baldur’s Gate. Hells, he could have the dossier on his desk tomorrow morning. Perhaps they could even read it together. Astarion might be… taken-aback, having already refused Wyll’s initial offer, but… wouldn’t he ultimately be grateful? Wouldn’t he be glad to know?

Look, here’s the ugly truth: you can’t always trust Astarion’s no to be a no. Nor can you trust his yes to be a yes. That’s what makes this whole business of handcuffs such a steep and dreadful terror.

Wyll turns over in bed, mindful of his horns. Astarion slips against him: a bolt of silk in the shape of a man.

How do you feel about slapping me across the face?

A memory: the one and only time his father ever struck him.

The incident was an anomaly, rest assured: Ulder Ravengard was not at all a temperamental man. Nor did he think particularly highly of corporal punishment as an effective child-rearing strategy; when Wyll erred, he was typically sent to his room with a stern talking-to. At worst, he’d be made to write lines, or run laps. Still, Wyll eventually found out the hard way that his father had one highly specific temper trigger: wasted food.

It happened the summer he turned seven. It was hot out; the sky was wild-blue, the air was newly-dandelioned. Wyll asked one of his nannies for a tall glass of milk, which he promptly received. He took a sip, maybe two, then decided — for whatever reason — that he didn’t want it anymore. So, Wyll picked himself up, took his little glass to the back garden, sat himself down in a flowerbed, and slowly poured it out into the dirt.

His father had seen this all, somehow, and lit up with a terrible fury. He called Wyll wasteful, ungrateful, in-this-house-we-don’t-squander-what’s-ours, especially-not-food, boy-use-your-head, did-I-raise-you-to-be-this-spoiled, no-I-did-not — and, at last, punctuated his ire with a swift, decisive smack to the face.

It wasn’t a very hard smack. In fact, it left no visible marks of any kind. But it was a very loud smack, and the mere reality of being struck — once unthinkable — was completely and utterly shattering. Wyll’s eyes welled up with tears on impact. His father jerked back, clutching his hand as though stung; his eyes had been wide, very wide. He seemed to have surprised even himself.

In the end, Wyll was still sent up to his room — but over the course of the following week, his father bought him brand new storybooks, a kite, and pineapple cakes (a special-occasions-only treat in the Ravengard household).

At the time, Wyll couldn't connect the dots between the slap and the cakes. But he can connect them now.

His father had been embarrassed.

Wyll’s embarrassed, too, by the suddenness with which the urge to hurt sometimes emerges. Of course, he's never lost control, not once. But that could change. One of these days, he might very find himself crawling back to Astarion with cakes and kites, too.

When he wakes, Astarion is long gone; only natural, he supposes, when the man needs comparatively little in the way of rest. Wyll rises and washes himself. One by one, servants trickle in, silent as mourners. They rekindle his fire. They bring him his tea, hand him his correspondence. They change his linens. Astarion’s scent echoes through the room like laughter at a party. Rosemary and bergamot.

Wyll dresses himself in his father’s colors. Wyll slips on his father’s ring. Wyll opens up the window, lets the breeze blow through. The air is cool, ozonic. It tastes faintly of lightning.

Staring down into the gnarled and bloomless flowerbed, Wyll discovers something mildly astonishing: there is no solution to the problem of desire.

Chapter Text

In the mornings, Wyll trains.

Strictly speaking, he doesn’t need to. There’s no formal mandate stipulating that the aristocracy of Baldur’s Gate be battle-ready; as a duke, he has access to house soldiers, bodyguards, assassins, civil militia — people ready and willing to do his fighting for him. If he so wished, he could settle into a purely administrative existence. He could let his body soften, spend his days absorbed in advisory committees and budget reviews, perhaps even pick up some kind of entirely unthreatening hobby. Breeding pigeons, maybe. Or painting watercolor landscapes.

But his own father had always been willing to raise a shield for the sake of the Gate. He had not learned the four pillars by idly twiddling his thumbs behind his desk, but in the course of duty, fighting for his city, for his kin. At present, Ulder Ravengard remains Grand Marshall of the The Flaming Fist — but someday, they too would be Wyll’s to command. To steer. To helm.

The brave men and women of the Flaming Fist, he thinks, deserve a champion worthy worthy of that post. They deserve a Ravengard son strong enough to bear his father’s banner, capable and willing to lead them into battle. Wyll is young, able-bodied, and unafraid of hard work: why shouldn't he be such a champion?

And so — he trains.

True to their agreement, Mizora’s infernal gifts disappeared shortly after the defeat of the Netherbrain; as such, Wyll can no longer fight as he once did. It matters little. Wyll is more than a she-devil’s magic. He has a warrior’s intuition, sound reflexes, and an experienced sword arm. For lack of hexes and cantrips, he focuses on the martial components of his skillset: foot drills, manoeuvers, duels with hired trainers. It’s almost nostalgic, really — the kind of no-frills training regimen his father put him on as soon as he was old enough to hold a blade. 

After his pact’s dissolution, Wyll had been worried about feeling helpless. Powerless, both literally and figuratively — reduced to an ineffectual figurehead, incapable of protecting the people he most loves.

The training helps.

As the months go on, he feels good. He feels strong. Proper, regular meals — with none of the instability or unpredictability of forest forage — adds to a pleasant, faintly glowy sense of overall health. He stretches in the morning. He goes for early runs. He does sit-ups, sometimes, while Astarion reads the paper to him. (They enjoy arguing over the crossword puzzles.)

Astarion seems to find his determination amusing, but ultimately approves. Every so often, the two of them will spar. Wyll is the more experienced duellist by some distance, but Astarion hasn’t suffered the setbacks of gaining and losing pactbound magic. As a result, they’re roughly equal in the ring. Wyll usually wins, but not on account of his own merits; after a few bouts, Astarion often bores of bloodless grappling and decides it would be much, much more interesting to allow himself to be pinned down against the training room floor.

Time and time again, he yields — beautifully, cunningly, artfully — and to the victor goes the spoils.

After a long, invigorating session with his trainers, Wyll calls for the servants to pour him a bath.

When he makes his way there, the bath is steamy-hot and fragrant, filling the room with the fresh scent of hibiscus and lemongrass. Wyll peels off his sweaty clothes and steps into the tub. The water is almost scalding to the touch, but that’s precisely how he likes it.

He sinks down to his shoulders, groaning out loud as the heat works its way into his overtaxed muscles. Helm’s fucking tears. To think, there was once a time he relied on ice-cold river baths — scrubbing his skin raw with a bit of rag and a stub of homebrewed soap.

Wyll closes his eyes, resting his head on the lip of the tub. With a feeling of enormous weariness, he turns his thoughts towards his upcoming accession ceremony. A complete and utter formality, considering the fact he’s already been inducted onto the city council and named a duke — but his father insists such a public celebration will give the city a much-needed occasion for cheer. He’s already ordering barrels of spiced wine, asking Wyll to pick out napkins, nudging him to finalize seating arrangements for the banquet. It’s like planning a wedding, really.

Funny, that.

Wyll reaches up and washes between his braids by hand, stripping the sweat from his scalp. What kind of wedding would his and Astarion’s be, he wonders? Of course, Wyll would be thrilled to elope at some backwoods temple, accompanied only by friends and family —  but Astarion’s tastes run lavish. He’ll want champagne fountains, no doubt. Gold filigree. Ice sculptures. A city in attendance. He’ll want to rub his marriage in the nose of every upper-city patriar in extravagant fashion; he already delights in flaunting his intimate association with the city’s youngest Grand Duke, feeding the rumor mill all kinds of scandalous, quasi-fictional tales about their impassioned love affair.

Wyll hears movement at the door. Unconcerned, he lifts his eyes. Astarion pushes into the bathroom without so much as a knock. Twisting the lock shut, his eyes flicker dispassionately over the scene before him: Wyll’s sweat-soaked, dirt-scuffed clothes abandoned in a heap, downy white towels piled up on the vanity table — Wyll himself, naked, soaking in the tub, semi-opaque water hitting at his flank.

“Hello, lover,” Astarion drawls.

Wyll smiles dazedly. Astarion looks wonderful, but that’s a given. His hair is in perfect order, his gait is imperial, and he’s been tightly laced into a pale blue jacket of fine make. Wyll can make out a sliver of the soft white shirt beneath the collar, like a hint of warmth hiding beneath ice.

“Hello,” Wyll says tiredly, agreeably. He tilts his head against his arm. “I was —  training. Out in the yard.”

“I know. I was spying on you from inside,” Astarion says, crossing the room towards Wyll. “You put on quite a show, you know. All that parrying and thrusting and rolling about. You’re inexhaustible.”

“Oh, gods, no,” Wyll laughs, the sound shocking itself out of his body with a faint ache. “Trust me, I’m exhaustible. Thoroughly, utterly, entirely exhaustible. I don’t think I could lift a finger right now.”

“Poor thing,” Astarion says, though his tone is wryly unsympathetic. Up close now, he scrutinizes Wyll properly. His look is one of flat, effete detachment, as though he were a critic and Wyll’s body were a statue on display at one of his avantgarde art salons.

Resisting the urge to sink further down into the water, Wyll says, “I didn’t see you before bed last night.”

“That’s true. You didn’t.”

“Did you slip out for a social call?”

“Not quite,” Astarion says. A beat. He pulls a stool up next to the tub, settling down to sit by Wyll’s side. “I was… wandering.”

“Just wandering?”

“Yes. It’s been — rather nice to explore the city on my own terms, truth be told. You know. Without fear of reprisal, or the lingering awareness that I’m to return to the Szarr Palace before sunrise.”

“I wish I had more time for such wanderings,” Wyll sighs, tilting his head against the side of the bath. “No matter how many years I spend in this city, I find there’s always some new discovery to be made. A delightful new bakery, a hidden altar, a wizard’s menagerie, a cabinet of curiosities — a dragon’s lair — ”

“I don’t think we’ll be stumbling upon another one of those anytime soon, dear.”

“You never know,” Wyll says. “Still, you should’ve sent word you wouldn’t be home until late.”

Astarion tilts his head, unamused. “Are you my keeper?”

“No, I am not,” Wyll says steadily, seeing the bait laid before him. “Just the man who loves you. I stayed up waiting, you know.”

Astarion purses his lips; Wyll can see the tension in his shoulders beneath the fine make of his jacket.

“Not too long, I hope.”

“Not too long, no,” Wyll says, his voice carefully metered. He studies Astarion’s profile, the minute quivering of his throat. “But I missed you.”

Astarion hums. He dips his fingers into the tub, swirling the sudsy water in a slow, circular motion.

“The new training regimen is working,” he says at last. “You look a bit stronger. Broader around the shoulders, perhaps.”

Doubtful, Wyll lifts a brow. “Do I?”

“Let me get a feel.” Astarion reaches for Wyll’s arm, squeezing appreciatively around his bicep; Astarion’s hand is a shock of cold against his overheated skin. Wyll rolls his eyes, but allowing himself to be handled. “Oh, yes. Very nice. Very firm.”

“Now you’re just stroking my ego.”

“Would you prefer I stroked something else?” Astarion dips his hand back beneath the water, his pale fingers intimating a certain lasciviousness as they tread lightly between Wyll’s thighs. Wyll bats him away with a half-hearted gesture.

“Leave it. I’m too tired to reciprocate.”

“Who said anything about reciprocating?”

“I did,” Wyll says. He could elaborate his argument further, if he so wished, but it doesn’t seem to be necessary — Astarion retracts his hand without complaint, shaking off the water with a flick of his wrist before returning it to his lap. He doesn’t look disappointed in the least.

“You really did look good,” Astarion says. “Training out under the sun, I mean. It made me envious.”

“Envious of me?”

“Envious of the sun. It caresses your skin so exquisitely.”

“Now you’re really just stroking my ego. I know when I’m being fed a line, star.”

“How very rude. I was being perfectly sincere, I’ll have you know.”

“Right, of course. Silly me.” Wyll releases a soft huff of breath, his eyes sliding shut. “You know, my father wants to commission me a full set of plate mail. To encourage my martial training, he says.”

“I suppose you must be thrilled,” Astarion says, resting an elbow against the lip of the bath.

“I’m thrilled by his generosity. Less so by the thought of clunking around in a big, heavy tin suit.”

“Why, Wyll. I’m shocked, truly shocked. You very much give off the impression of a man who was raised on stories of knights in shining armor; I thought you’d have positively delighted at the chance to become one yourself.”

“Many of my boyhood idols were, in fact, rangers and rogues,” Wyll half-shrugs, repositioning himself in the tub; the water unsettles around him with a soft, liquidy sort of susurration. “Drizz Do’Urden, Minsc of Rashemen — those were the heroes I saw myself in. The heroes I most admired. They didn’t heave about in great suits of armor, but darted across the battlefield with celerity and grace, garbed in simple leathers and wielding light blades. I found it all terrifically dashing. 

“Wait, hold on.” Astarion lifts his hands palms-up, eyes glinting with mirth. “You looked up to Minsc? Our Minsc? Two-sandwiches-shy-of-a-picnic Minsc?”

“I still look up to him, present tense.”

Astarion boggles at that. “Darling, you can’t be serious. He’s positively addled.”

“He’s utterly dauntless!” Wyll insists. “Not to mention the songs of his exploits —”

“I’ve said this a thousand times, my sweet: you put too much stock in bardsong. More often than not, those tales are utterly fabricated.”

“They’re not all fabricated.”

“Oh, please,” Astarion says, dropping his chin into the palm of his hand. “Have you heard the bawdy little numbers they’re singing about you in the local alehouses? The way the bards tell it, you’d think the Blade of Frontiers spent the last seven years fucking and sucking his way across the Sword Coast. There’s a popular one that involves you bedding a lamia noble.”

“Ah, yes. I’ve heard it,” Wyll says fondly. “Such ribald tales are, of course, pure fiction — designed only to titillate and to scandalize. That said, I do admire the craft that goes into composing such fictions. The rhyming of erotic and zoonotic was especially inspired, don’t you agree?”

Astarion’s smile tilts into something faintly droll.

“I suppose so. But the descriptions of your stamina were a bit… generous, weren’t they? Don’t get me wrong, you’ve vigor enough to spare, but five times in one a night? Hours upon hours of uninterrupted lovemaking? I’ve never known it to happen — but then again, I’m not a lamia noble. Oh, and the bards make no mention of your insatiable need for post-coital cuddling — ” 

Wyll dashes a hand across the surface of the water, splashing Astarion. Astarion shields himself with his hands, grinning madly.

“These sleeves are silk, you brute,” Astarion says. “You’re not meant to get silk wet, or else the fabric could shrink.”

“Damn the fabric,” Wyll says, faux-scandalized. “What of my honor? You patronize me with sycophantry in one breath, then mock me with the next.”

Astarion laughs, frothy and bright. “Oh? Do you demand satisfaction, sir?”

“I demand justice.”

“Whatever shall you do?” Astarion presses himself against the side of the tub, leering. “Chain me to you bed, strike me, torment, make me pay?”

“I think I just might,” Wyll says, running a hand over his jaw. “Or maybe I’ll just marry you.”

“Oh.” Astarion surprises at that, but it’s a soft sort of surprise, as though Wyll had come up behind him and unexpectedly draped a fleece blanket around his shoulders. He clears his throat, licking his lips as he struggles to access his usual hauteur, “Well. Well.”

“I know, I know. Ask me next year, right?”

“I — precisely, yes.”

There’s a lapse in the conversation as Wyll washes himself, running a soapy washcloth across his body. He swipes across his belly, his arms, his legs; as he takes his time cleaning beneath his fingernails, Astarion leans over the tub and observes him. His look is half-tender. The other half is magisterial, difficult, evaluatory.

“If I married you,” he says, watching Wyll polish around his horns, “would I be a Ravengard?”

A heady thought.

“If you wanted to be one, yes, absolutely,” Wyll says. “But it’s hardly compulsory. You could keep your own name, if you so wished.”

Astarion shakes his head, says, “No, I would take your name. There’s no future in being an Ancunín.”

“No?” Wyll sets his cloth aside, turning to examine Astarion.

Astarion closes his eyes. The skin around his eyelids is dark and faintly mottled, like the skin of black muscat grapes. With a sense of deep, determined finality, he says, “No.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m quite sure.”

“Alright then,” Wyll says. He pauses, pursing his lips. It pleases him, on some level, that Astarion would take this piece of him and wear it as his own — like the signet ring, or the bespoke suit. A mark of clear belonginging. He can’t help the slightly acquisitive sound to his voice when he speaks next, his voice low, “Astarion Ravengard. I like the sound of that.”

A slow, rueful smile spreads across Astarion’s face.

“I suppose you would, wouldn’t you?”

“Dogs and their lampposts,” Wyll says quietly, an admission.

“Dogs and their lampposts,” Astarion agrees. He shifts, thoughtful; the steaminess of the room has given his cheeks a faint flush. “We’d be a family.”

Wyll reaches over and takes Astarion’s hand in his own. He turns it over and presses a kiss into the slender, bluish curve of Astarion’s wrist; the pulse point that never pounds.

“You know that’s what I want,” he says, helpless with it, the ardent truth of it. “More than anything.”

“I —” Astarion starts, then stops abruptly. He looks at Wyll, his expression tender yet fragile. Wyll watches him press through the gnarl of some complex inner objection, eventually pushing out the words,  “I know.”

By 9 o'clock sharp, Wyll’s been wrangled into his finest brocade and seated at his desk, listening with a sort of stony determination as his lieutenant rattles off his schedule for the day.

“You’ve a meeting with Lord Portyr at ten o’clock, milord,” Manip Tash says. She looks clean-cut and alert, despite the early hour. Her jackboots are shiny, newly-polished. Her uniform is spotlessly neat. “If I recall, he wanted his concerns addressed on the topic of recently-proposed patrician tax levies.”

“I’m sure he does,” Wyll says grimly.

“Luncheon with Lady Andricar at noon, who I believe was contemplating adding her support to the refugee housing project —”

“Yes, yes, I’m aware. I don’t think much additional persuasion will be necessary on my part. Near as I can tell, she’s already committed. She just wants to hear the Grand Duke grovel at her feet and praise her for her generosity.”

All of which he would absolutely do, provided it paid for bricks, timber, skilled stonemasons and their laborers. He did not suffer from an excess of ego; if a little well-placed sycophantry served the interests of his city, so be it. 

Tash continues, “After that, Florrick wishes to consult with you on the topic of the Lower City reconstruction project — at your earliest convenience. Something to do with new ramparts?”

“On the Western side of Wyrm’s Rock Fortress. I’m familiar with the matter. Anything else?”

“One last item, milord, if a very small one. Two nights ago, there was a break-in at the Office of Civic Records.”

“A break-in?” Wyll frowns.

“Indeed. When staff arrived in the morning, the door was found unlocked, with signs of a forced entry.”

“That’s highly irregular. Was anything taken?”

“Some of the archives show signs of tamper, but I’ve been informed that nothing particularly valuable appears to be missing,” Tash says. “The vault containing sealed state documents, notably, was left untouched. But the Office's archives are extensive — over three hundred years of Baldurian history are preserved within their walls. I’m told it might be genuinely impossible to determine which documents may have been altered, mishandled or removed.”

A break-in at The Office of Civil Records. Not a bank vault, not a shop, not a well-to-do household — but a small government registry office, storing marriage records, legal documents, commercial licenses, and death certificates. A government building so mundane, so unimportant in its contents, they didn’t even bother to secure the premises with a night guard.

Wyll’s stomach turns with the slow stirrings of unpleasant speculation.

“I assume my father has been made aware?”

“Yes; he passed the case down to one of his lieutenants and ordered a Fist to guard the Office of Civil Records overnight until further notice. I’m only keeping you informed.”

“I see. Thank you,” he says, forcing his eyes down. “If nothing valuable went missing, I can only presume this is a low priority. It was probably just — some local lout, getting up to a bit of mischief.”

Tash coughs loudly. Wyll looks up, and sees that she’s suppressing a smile..

“What?”

“Nothing, milord,” Tash says, smoothing her hands over her uniform. “Your father said much the same, that’s all. You two are more alike than you realize.”

Wyll isn’t sure whether to be delighted or unsettled. The paradox is, by now, a familiar one.

When Wyll returns home, it’s perhaps thirty minutes past sundown, and Astarion is nowhere to be found. 

At his absence, Wyll feels a hollow rush of disappointment — and then, a prickle of anxiety. He tamps both feelings down immediately and aggressively, mortified by his own neediness. What did he even expect? Should Astarion have been waiting by the door for him like a faithful little dog? Should he have been fluffing Wyll’s pillows, readying his slippers, mixing him a drink? Astarion is a free man with a life of his own, a mind of his own, not — not Wyll’s little housewife.

They’re not married. They’re not even technically engaged, though Wyll has already drafted his ideas for a custom ring.

Wyll hands his overcoat off to a servant, then heads upstairs to their shared bedroom. The maids have come and gone already, and the impeccability of their invisible work temporarily astounds him. The floors have been swept, the fire is lit, and the clutter covering Astarion’s dandyish vanity has been painstakingly reordered. A bottle of port has been left to stand near Wyll’s chair, a touch so exacting in its hospitality that Wyll has the feeling of a guest suite at a lavish inn.

Wyll uncorks the wine, pouring himself a glass. Astarion is most likely engaged at some Upper City social — boozing, gossiping, cardsharking, sowing intrigues. Perhaps he’s even covertly working to convert the landed gentry to Wyll’s new housing agenda. He does enjoy being helpful to Wyll, in his way. Wyll settles into his chaise, cracks open a book.

An hour passes; Astarion fails to materialize. Wyll drinks another glass of wine. Another hour passes. Then another. Unease swirls in his belly — or is that just the liquour?

There’s a knock at the bedroom door. Wyll nearly leaps to his feet in relief, book clattering to the floor — but it’s only a servant, timid and mousy, come to inform him that dinner will be served in the dining room. So he makes his way down, alone.

Wyll’s father isn’t home. He rarely is. He all but lives in Wyrm’s Rock Fortress, utterly and unrepentantly immersed in the life of a soldier. (It’s the life he’s built for, Wyll thinks.) Sometimes, Wyll is grateful for the privacy. Tonight, he isn’t. The Ravengard manor feels drafty, cavernous, suspect, strange. The masonry is cold. The halls are foreboding. The servants only pretend to laugh at his jokes; they scutter from his sight at the first opportunity, frantic footsteps fleeing into darkness. Is it his station that unsettles them, or the horns on his head? Or is it something else — his reputation as a killer? He has tried, earnestly, ardently, to kill only the unjust, but the distinction can be difficult to convey. The blood of bad men runs just as red.

He eats alone, slinks back to his room. He watches the clock. He drinks a third glass of wine. He pages restlessly through his book, gives up, and at last resigns himself to reviewing a legislative proposal forwarded to him by Florrick — an overhaul to the appeals system for municipal tax disputes. Riveting.

He’s not drunk, but he’s not sober. He’s tired, but too stubborn to give up and dress for bed. He’s twenty-five, but he feels much older; he feels his youth writhing on its deathbed, sweating and moaning through its final, pathetic paroxysms.

He used to fight monsters. Now, he memorizes tax codes. Now, his libido lurches between bouts of hot-mouthed mania and crippling shame. Now, he hopes and he prays that his lover isn’t going behind his back to break into government buildings.

Wyll lurches at the sound of the door opening. His back twinges. His joints creak. His neck aches. Wakefulness fizzles through him abruptly; he’d fallen asleep sitting upright in his chair. How ridiculous of him.

 Leaning upright against the doorframe is Astarion, his mathematical features softened into a look of faint puzzlement. Wyll pushes his hands into his eyes, cracking his jaw with a huge, open-mouthed yawn. 

“Oh,” he says. “There you are.”

He casts his bleary eyes towards the clock; it’s sometime past two in the morning. The sky beyond his window is a deep, oily, intense black. 

“Here I am,” Astarion agrees, shrugging off his coat. He tosses it onto the vanity table, then toes out of his shoes. Beautiful shoes. Bespoke, hand-crafted, buttery leather cut and measured to Astarion’s specifications. I bought him those shoes, Wyll thinks blearily.

“I was waiting up for you.”

“Yes, I can see that,” Astarion says, striding up to Wyll. “Poor dear. You really don’t have to do that, you know.”

He leans down and presses a kiss to Wyll’s cheek, bringing himself into Wyll’s airspace; he smells deliciously of bergamot bitters. I bought him that perfume too. But it’s not fair to think that way, is it? That mercenary calculus extends to every item in the room: every piece of furniture, every stitch of clothing, every idle fancy. Astarion came here with nothing of his own; Wyll paid for everything he owns.

“Where were you?”

“Out,” Astarion says abstractly.

“Out where?”

“Out,” Astarion says again, more firmly now. He cups Wyll’s cheek in his hand, thumbing fondly over his stubbled chin. “You should dress for bed, dear. That can’t be comfortable.”

Wyll glances down at himself, remembers he’s still dressed in his dayclothes.

“It’s not,” he admits reluctantly. He’s rumpled and overhot and sweaty, the stiff fabric of his collar chafing uncomfortably against his throat. “Have you eaten?”

“If you’re asking me if I pushed some stranger down in an alley and drained him dry, the answer is no. But I stopped by the butcher’s earlier; I’m not starved,” Astarion says, fiddling with the topmost button of Wyll’s shirt. “You know, one of these days, that man is going to start getting suspicious about the sheer quantity of blood being purchased by this household. I keep telling him it’s for blood sausage, that we make it in-house. A Ravengard speciality, you know. Do you think that’s plausible?”

“Why not? Blood sausage is delicious.”

“Is it really?”

“Oh, absolutely.”

“How are you meant to eat it?”

“Fried on both sides, with a little apple sauce or hot mustard —” Wyll closes his eyes, mouth twisting. “You’re very good at distracting me.”

“I’m just making conversation with the man I love,” Astarion says, releasing Wyll. “Now, go wash up. I’ll fetch you something nice to wear.”

Hard to argue with that. Wyll rises from his chair. One of his legs has fallen asleep, so he hobbles rather than walks towards the bathroom. Once inside, he scrubs his face, brushes his teeth, and shucks the shirt from his shoulder.

Bunching the fabric in his hands, he catches his own reflection in the mirror: hell in his eyepits, a scab on his throat, a face in need of a shave. A bruise on his waist from a tumble taken during training. The big scar on his belly where a wyrmling nearly disemboweled him. Tossing his shirt aside, he runs a thumb across the seam of it. The pale, fibrous tissue warms beneath his touch.

He’d been twenty-one, alone, hunting out on the open snow. The wyrm’s wicked-sharp talons had shredded through his gambeson, through his flesh, through the gut and the gore of him. He’d been forced to crawl thirty feet across the open plain, holding his intestines in with a single clammy hand, just to get back to the healing potions in his pack. There’d been so much blood: hot, rich, slippery against his skin, a red trail snaking its way across the newly-banked snow.

He’d been so tempted to lie down, to close his eyes, to rest. How peaceful it seemed. How pleasant. Later, when the wound were cauterized and he was safely in his tent, he he would recognize that only death lay that way — and how close he’d come to welcoming it.

Astarion had been so angry when he’d heard that story. Angry at the risks Wyll had taken. Angry at the foolish villagers who’d sent him wyrm-hunting with a little more than a cheery wave and a pat on the back. Angry that Wyll had ever been put in such a position in the first place. Angry that he, himself, had apparently come so close to never meeting Wyll at all.

Strangely enough, it was that mulish, protective anger that had first jolted Wyll into the awareness that Astarion might genuinely love him back. No one else had ever thought to be angry for him — least of all himself.

When he returns to their bedroom, Astarion’s blown out all the low-burning candles, and there’s a set of soft linen pajamas waiting for him to slip into. So he does.

“That’s better, isn’t it?” Astarion braces a hand against Wyll’s chest, ducking in to kiss the corner of his lips. Iron on his breath.

“Yeah.”

“Thought so. Come here, darling.”

Wyll allows himself to be herded into bed. Soon, he’s lying on his back with a vampire nuzzling happily against him.

Sometimes, he thinks with equal parts affection and reservation, I really don’t get you.

Out loud, he says, “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

Astarion’s hand, which had been stroking Wyll’s chest rather affectionately, stops.

“That depends on the question.”

“Admittedly, it’s a strange one,” Wyll says. He takes a fortifying breath. “I promise you that I won’t be angry either way, no matter what you say. And — well. I want you to know that I’m trusting you to be honest with me.”

“Don’t prevaricate,” Astarion says. “You know I hate prevarication.”

Prevarication is, of course, Astarion’s personal word for what Wyll calls politeness.

“Very well.” Wyll releases a sigh, shifting against the sheets. “Astarion. Did you break into the Office of Civil Records?”

A pause.

“What?”

“The Office of Civil Records. One of my lieutenants informed me there was a recent break-in, and I thought — well, I considered, perhaps —”

Astarion rolls over, allowing Wyll to look directly into his shadowy face. “Wyll, my dear, that question is well beyond strange. It’s demented.”

Wyll sucks his teeth, “So you’re saying that you didn’t.”

“Of course I didn’t,” Astarion says, with such immediacy and such vehemence that Wyll feels like a fool for even asking.

“Right,” Wyll says, releasing a breath. “I’m being ridiculous, aren’t I? I apologize, I — I’ve had a long day.”

“Evidently,” Astarion says a little tartly, but he presses himself all the tighter against Wyll’s side.

Wyll closes his eyes, splaying his hand over Astarion’s narrow waist. It would be so easy to leave it there. So easy to take Astarion’s word for it, to trust in him, to respect the mystery of another person. But as he lies there, chasing sleep, the thought continues to gnaw at him.

Into the darkness, he says “So, it wouldn’t be a problem if I asked the Fist to launch a full investigation into the matter? You would be fine with that?”

Another pause, so long this time that Wyll could almost believe that Astarion had fallen asleep — were it not for the tension in his body.

“Astarion?”

Astarion leans up abruptly, disentangling himself from Wyll.

“Fucking Hells,” he grits out, throwing an arm up over his face. “I didn’t break into — you know, I cannot believe you are leveling this accusation at me. Do you understand how ridiculous you sound right now?”

“Is it ridiculous?” Wyll parries. “I told you that you could find information about your family stored there.”

“And I told you I wasn’t interested!”

“Look, if it wasn’t you, it wasn’t you,” Wyll says. “We don’t have to argue about this. But if I do have my men investigate this —”

“Don’t.”

A beat. Wyll presses his hands into his eye sockets, and groans quietly.

“So. It was you,” he says. Then, when Astarion fails to respond, he sits up and says, “Shit, Astarion. If there’s something you wanted to see, I told you I have the authority to requisition documents —”

“Maybe this is really none of your business,” Astarion says, placing his words with cold, glittering hostility. “Have you considered that?”

Wyll rears back, hurt, “None of my business? Is that really what you think?”

“Yes,” Astarion says, twisting away from Wyll. “I do.”

Pushing himself upright, Wyll say, “Well. Whatever you may have intended, it’s certainly my business now, given the fact that you’ve elected to sneak around my back and — and commit felony burglary —”

“Felony burglary? Gods, Wyll, don’t be so —”

“So what?”

“So tedious.”

“Tedious?” Wyll lets out the unsteady breath of a laugh, swinging to face Astarion. “I’m sorry if you find my shock and disappointment to be unfashionable, Astarion. I really am. But if I’m tedious, as you say, it’s only because I have to be. I’m the Grand Duke of Baldur’s Gate. Did you seriously think this wouldn’t get back to me?”

Switching tacks, Astarion suddenly says, “You promised you wouldn’t be angry, one way or another.”

“That was before you tried to lie about it!”

“You promised,” Astarion says again, petulant as a child — and gods, Wyll hates that this works on him. He hates how easy it is to defuse him, to dismantle him. Astarion must know he has a direct hotline to his guilt — must know, surely, how little it take to wake it — 

“Okay. Okay,” Wyll says, taking deep, slow breaths. “I’m not angry.”

He glances over at Astarion. He’s sitting up on his knees, deeply absorbed in examining the patterns quilted into their bedcovers; his posture is almost shockingly ungainly, shockingly unsure. A vertical slice of moonlight spears through the billowy curtains, giving his skin a cold, white sheen.

“Astarion,” Wyll says, his voice softening by several measures. “I’ve only ever wanted to support you in this. Finding your family, I mean. I — you really don’t want me involved at all?”

“No,” Astarion says. “I don’t.”

“That’s — that’s fine,” Wyll says, fighting to keep the hurt off his face. He forces himself to lay back down, staring resolutely up at the draped ceiling of their four-poster bed. “Can I ask why?”

He hears the soft rustling of sheets; Astarion swinging his feet over the edge of the mattress.

“When I went looking, I didn’t know what I would find,” he says, “or how I would feel about it. I didn’t want you trying to influence me, or pressure me, or make my decisions for me.”

“Astarion, I would never —”

“But you would,” Astarion says. “You absolutely would. You have very strong opinions on these things. Don’t pretend otherwise.”

Wyll shuts his eyes, feels the truth of Astarion’s worth register with him. His advice, irrespective of whatever Astarion found, would be to go and see about it. To reach out, to make contact. How could he suggest anything but? For seven years on the frontiers, Wyll had ached to recover what once was his. The simplicity, the safety, the unreserved certainty. The sun-warmed boardwalk against his back. The love.

“Maybe so,” Wyll concedes, swallowing thickly. “The way you spoke about your father… I thought that could be a very positive thing, if perhaps —”

“Perhaps what.”

“If you two could see one another again,” Wyll says. “If you could be a family again.”

Astarion lifts his eyes, turning his mordant gaze on Wyll.

“Wyll,” he says. “I’m very sorry your reunion with your father didn’t go as you’d hoped. But I’m not here to live out your fantasies for you.”

Wyll opens his mouth, but finds the air has completely left his lungs.

“Wait,” Astarion says, turning towards him. The lowlight catches the whites of his eyes, blown wide. “I didn’t mean that. It’s just..." 

“No, you meant it,” Wyll says. He drapes his arm over his eyes, his head buzzing.

“Wyll —”

“It is what it is,” Wyll says, a phrase he has repeated to himself many, many times over the last seven years. “It’s fine. I’ll stay out of it. I hope you found whatever it is you were looking for.”

Black, yawning silence fills the room. He feels Astarion step off the mattress, hears him step across the carpet and leave the room. Wyll closes his eyes again. Sleep is impossible, but he feels an obligation to at least pretend at it. So he lies perfectly still, supine, in their huge stupid bed, in their huge stupid room.

The guilt thrives in his body like a parasite. It burrows through him like a maggot through flesh. He wishes it would either die of exposure or hurry up and kill him. He’s sick of sharing scarce real estate with it.

Somewhere between thirty seconds and an hour passes — hard to say for sure. Eventually, Wyll hears the familiar patter of Astarion reentering the room, his bare feet padding softly across the carpet. To Wyll’s left, the mattress dips. Astarions crawls back under the covers, burrowing quietly against his side. Wyll temporarily considers pushing him away, but the impulse fades as Astarion’s ice-cold ankle knocks hopefully against his own.

“That wasn’t — that wasn’t right of me,” Astarion says. Like a cat, he pushes his head up against Wyll’s chest; almost by reflex, Wyll reaches around to cradle the nape of his neck. “I should’ve trusted you. I know that. And I know I have no right to be giving you shit, no right at all.”

“It’s fine, star.”

“No, don’t tell me it’s fine,” Astarion says abruptly. “You take shit from everyone. You know that, don’t you? Absolutely everyone — your friends, your constituents, your colleagues, your father — and always with that same expression of benign, beatific resignation. You’re making it right now, actually.”

“I’m not,” Wyll says immediately.

“Yes, you are. It’s all in the eyebrows, darling.”

Wyll struggles to master his expression. Astarion makes a soft, helpless little sound that’s about thirty percent laughter by volume.

His fingers finding Wyll’s beneath the bedcovers, he says, “Wyll, I think I have a brother.” 

Wyll startles. “A brother? In the city?”

“Well,” Astarion temporizes. “Maybe a cousin, or a nephew, or — some other relation, I’m not entirely clear on the details. But there is an Ancunín in the city, just as you hypothesized. Victrios Ancunín. I don’t recognize the name at all, to be quite honest, but there’s a shop in the Upper City registered to his person.”

“What kind of shop?”

“A dress shop. I stopped by earlier, actually.”

“Really? Did you speak with him?”

“No, I loitered outside for about an hour and half, then fled in shame.”

“Ah.”

“It was a mortifying ordeal — I was deathly afraid he might recognize me on sight. I mean, how could I possibly explain myself? What could I possibly say? But then, when I imagined he might not recognize me, that we might be genuine strangers —”

“It was equally unbearable?” Wyll surmises.

Astarion buries his face directly within the crook of Wyll’s arm.

“Whatever you do, please don’t tell me what I want or what I need.”

“I won’t,” Wyll says, though he’s already privately made up his mind about exactly that. Astarion sighs.

“A cozy little shop,” he says with aching wonderment, “in a corner of the city I so rarely had reason to visit. It’s silly, but I was mesmerized by the gowns in the front window. Chiffon, organza, point d’esprit — trumpet-hemmed, backless, even some hoop skirts in the old style. The kind of gowns that makes one long to be a lady debutante at her first cotillion.”

The silence stands between them for a moment, Wyll slowly carding his hand through the thicket of Astarion’s curls.

Rushing to fill it, Astarion says, “Cazador never liked us hanging around the Upper City. Poor hunting ground for potential marks. You know.”

“I know, yes.”

“Standing there on the corner outside the dress shop, I felt this bizarre, tingling sense of taboo — as though Cazador would appear at my elbow any moment and drag me back to the kennels for punishment. It made me, ah — ”

Astarion stymies as though embarrassed; Wyll’s hand pauses.

“Made you what?” he presses.

Astarion rears back slightly to take in Wyll’s whole face.

He say, “It made me long for your hand on the small of my back. Anchoring me.”

He couldn’t have provided clearer instructions.

Wyll spreads the palm of his hand over the base of Astarion’s spine, and applies a slight pressure. Astarion sinks down into the mattress, crushed against Wyll’s body, and sighs. Wyll’s heart itches at the sound of it.

“Yes,” he says. “Yes, just so.”

“If you ever want to stand outside an Upper City dress shop for an hour and a half,” Wyll says, sotto, “you can take me with you. We don’t even have to go inside.”

"You're the Grand fucking Duke, Wyll. You'll make a scene."

"'I'll go incognito."

"You have one of the most recognizable faces in the city. You have bloody horns."

"I'll disguise myself," Wyll says. "As a cat."

Astarion throws a leg over Wyll, snuffles quietly.

"If you ever need someone to drub some sense into your esteemed father," he says, "just let me know."

"I don't think that'll be necessary."

"You don't think that now," Astarion says. "But someday, one of these days, I'm hoping you'll wake up and change your mind."

And, well, what can Wyll say about that? What can he promise, what can he guarantee? Nothing at all, really. Assiduously, he kisses Astarion's brow, his forehead, the crown of his head; he closes his eyes, releases a breath, and sinks, at long last, into a deep sleep of total exhaustion.

Chapter Text

It’s about an hour-and-change past sundown when Wyll returns home from the High Hall.

Eyes demurely averted, a servant informs Wyll that Astarion is waiting for him on the back veranda, if he'd so care to join him. Wyll would, in fact, care to. Still wearing his boots and his surcoat, he navigates through the house — past the foyer, past the drawing rooms, past the dining hall, past the kitchens — until he steps out the back door and onto the patio, fresh air filling his lungs once more.

When his father bought the house some fifteen years ago, it came with a beautiful, highly manicured yard. For a period of several years, they’d even bothered to maintain it. Wyll remembers boxes of fresh-blooming flowers lining the railing, heraldic tapestries draping off of the marble colonnade, and flickering lanterns — some magical, others mundane flame — hanging from the pergola.

In those years where his ambition outweighed his innate dislike of pomp, his father would host officers and dignitaries for grand summer dinners. Sent to bed early, Wyll would spy on these outdoor dinners from his window. The sound of distant laughter had enthralled him. Enraged him. Tormented him. With a painful, smothering intensity, he’d yearned to grow up as quickly as possible — to join the world of adults, so that he might meet his father there. Two men alike in honour.

He’d gotten his wish, eventually. In his way.

The veranda clearly hasn’t seen such splendor in years. The tapestries are gone; the decking is in need of a sweep. The trellis is dry and bare, a skeleton picked clean by vultures. The planters are either empty or filled with pale, sooty debris, and the large, green yard is sparse and untended. Crows scud between the untrimmed alders, yelping out faint, reproachful caws just to keep one another in check.

“There you are,” Astarion says. He’s seated at the patio table with his legs crossed, his fist wrapped around the neck of a bottle of wine. “You’re later than I thought you’d be.”

Astarion’s expression is a puzzle; his eyes are difficult, guarded. Impossible to tell what sort of a mood he’s currently worked himself into — combative, or conciliatory?

“Council meeting ran longer than expected,” Wyll says carefully, pulling a seat free and settling in. The evening air is cool as a salve on his skin. The air is damp and sweet with the suggestion of future rain, and the sky is hematoma blue.

Sitting across from Astarion, Wyll feels a faint frisson of danger, of ongoing agon. In many ways, it’s similar to the tension he feels before a scheduled oration before the Parliament of Peers. What is this but another negotiating table, another arena for arbitration? Not for the first time, he pictures Astarion in a magistrate’s robes. It’s a strange visual — on the one hand, deeply annoying and unlikable, and on the other hand, bizarrely arousing.

Wyll unclips his sword belt, setting his scabbard down on the patio table. Someone, presumably a kitchen maid, has left a small platter of food out for the both of them: a soft cut of brie, a bowl of pistachios, a jug of water, a pail of ice. Alongside this still life, there’s a small oil lamp, a pair of drinking glasses, and a furniture catalogue. Wyll’s eye lingers over this last article, noticing that the pages are dog-eared with study. Oh. Right. He’d asked Astarion to pick out a new chandelier.

“A council meeting. I see,” Astarion says, shifting the bottle from hand to hand. “Which council was it today? Hard to keep track of them all.”

“Intercity trade tribunal.”

“Riveting, I’m sure.”

“You jest, but it was an entertaining meeting,” Wyll says, rubbing a hand over his jaw. “Local dairy farmers are up in arms over a proposed relaxation in sanctions on imported food goods. You’d think the situation would lead to a very dreary series of hearings, but the ensuing debate has been shockingly lively. Perhaps too lively, in fact. Raised voices, personal insults, resurfaced grudges, unexpected declarations of passions… nearly a duel, at one point.” Realizing the ice on the table has mostly thawed, Wyll pauses. “Were you waiting for me?”

“I—” Astarion’s eyes flicker across the table. “I was, yes.”

“Ah,” Wyll says.

“Ah,” Astarion agrees, his voice thin and brittle — frustrated, Wyll realizes, but not with him.

“Well? How was that?”

“Oh, it was very novel,” Astarion says. “I can see why you hate doing this. Sitting here, posed and ready, I found myself growing increasingly irate — or perhaps I should say paranoid. More than once, I found myself imagining you lost in the arms of a beautiful blonde.”

That startles a short laugh out of Wyll. “A beautiful blonde? Really?”

“I know, I know,” Astarion says, and the mirth in his tone is so overwhelmingly forced that Wyll sits up a little straighter. “You know what, Wyll? I’ve become the very thing I once hated: a grasping succubus of a lover, clinging and hissing and pouting. And yet, when I picture you with another, my head explodes.”

“Does it really?”

“Oh, yes. Blood and guts everywhere. Nasty business.”

“That sounds quite unpleasant, but I won’t lie: it’s also a little flattering.”

“Of course. You would think that, wouldn’t you,” Astarion says heatlessly.

Wyll smiles bleakly. “I get jealous too,” he says, simple, “and my imagination runs wild with terrible speculation. It’s nice to not be alone in this feeling, if nothing else.”

Astarion reaches across the table for a paring knife. Holding it in his hand, he begins methodically peeling the foil seal off their bottle of wine. 

“Absence is a dangerous thing, isn’t it? In absence, you seem capable of anything. I find myself hatching revenge plots against entirely confabulated slights. I rehearse, with great vehemence, elaborate defenses against accusations you haven’t yet made — and most likely never will. I prepare my contingencies for hypothetical disasters. What would I do, for instance, if I found you entangled with some beautiful blonde?”

“Leave me, I hope.”

This time, it’s Astarion’s turn to laugh. He shoots Wyll a questing glance. “Really?”

“I’d deserve it, and worse.”

“I — well.” Astarion looks scandalized, but not displeased. “Wine?”

“Yes, please.”

Astarion’s unscrews the bottle in his fist, then pours out two glasses. He pushes one towards Wyll, who accepts it gratefully. The wine is blackberry-dark, the scent of it mouth-puckeringly acid in Wyll’s nose.

“Absence is dangerous,” Wyll agrees guardedly, lifting his cup. “Gods know I go to my worst places when you’re not around. But we can’t live inside one another, either. We have to learn how to be alone.”

He takes a sip of the wine. It’s rich and bold and delicious — Astarion knows his tastes in this regard. (Astarion knows his tastes in every regard, it seems.) 

“That’s right,” Astarion says. A pause; he swirls his wine in his glass. “You know, when I think of you passed out in your chair, waiting up or me with all the lights on, I think: that’s the man I fell in love with. Even if part of me balks at being accountable to someone.”

Wyll warms with pleasure — then hesitates, reconsiders his pleasure, and frowns. “No. No, you’re not... accountable to me, and you shouldn’t have to be. I know you have no want of a keeper — and I should not attempt to be one. You’re free, Astarion. You’re free to come. Free to go. And…” Wyll blinks down into his wine. “You’re free to leave me.”

A beat.

“I know,” Astarion says softly.

Like a trainee waiter at an Upper City banquet, Wyll’s heart stumbles. In a pathetic attempt to rally, he knocks back a large draft of his wine, hardly tasting it.

“If you wanted to leave me,” he forges on, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, “I — I would help you do it. Financially, I mean. I would see that it was viable for you.”

“I see.”

“I’d help you get set up wherever you wanted to go. If. If you wanted that from me. Not that you need my assistance — you’re highly resourceful. I know that. Am I digging myself a hole?”

“Just a touch,” Astarion says, not unkindly. There’s a small pause during which he seems to be mustering himself, after which he says, “You’re free to leave me too, Wyll. If that’s what you want.”

They wait a beat, challenging one another, daring them to say it — to speak the words that will, at long last, bring an end to their affair. His posture ramrod, his disposition imperious, Astarion raps his fingernails against the table. His nails are well-kept, shell-shaped, glossed with just a hint of polish. Nail polish? That’s new.

“My love,” Wyll says at last, quite gingerly. “I am not leaving you. Not over one small spat.”

“Oh.” Astarion’s shoulders sag visibly, abruptly, like a marionette whose strings have been cut. “Oh, that’s — that’s rather good to hear. Because I’m not leaving you either, darling.”

A silence of profound, mutual relief. Then, struck by the absurdity of the conversation, they laugh.

“This,” Wyll gestures between the two of them with one hand, helpless, “is hard, isn't it?”

“It is,” Astarion agrees, looking joyfully puzzled. He pushes his hair out of his face with one hand, exposing a forehead that is astonishingly white and not entirely smooth. “It’s ridiculously hard. Oh, but I suppose I shouldn’t act so surprised. My expertise is in picking locks and spreading legs, not, you know, building a life with someone. It seems the acquisition of new skills may be required.”

“Communication-based skills, I’d wager.”

“How dreadful.”

“But how marvelous as well,” Wyll insists. “We’ll get better at this, at talking to one another. We’ll learn. Just you wait.”

A slow, secret smile spreads across Astarion’s face.

“A toast, then,” he says, lifting his glass. “To us, yes?”

“To us,” Wyll agrees, mirroring the gesture. “To saving Baldur’s Gate together.”

Astarion rolls his eyes affectionately, says, “To saving ourselves, you hopeless fool.” 

“Alright, alright,” Wyll relents pleasantly. “To saving ourselves.” Then, with a mischievous grin, he adds, “To nights by the fire, playing with your hair.”

Astarion lifts an immaculate brow. “To slow-dancing with you at Lady Shattershield’s thrice-damned fundraiser ball.”

“To lying buried under woolen blankets, weak with fever, half-asleep, watching you mend my torn shirtsleeve.”

“To making out in the broom cupboard like a pair of sappy little schoolboys.”

“To grappling on the training room floor.”

“Mm.” Astarion’s eyes darken, speculative. “To whips and chains and other strange pleasures.”

“To opera dreams.”

“To dogs and their lampposts.”

“To the good times,” Wyll says.

“And to the bad times, my dear.”

And they both drink.

Wyll drains his cup. The wine fills his belly with a faint, tingling warmth. He slumps back in his seat, the tension seeping out of his body. For the first time in several nights, he feels good. Relaxed. Secure, in the way one feels secure after double-checking the lock.

“This house is too big,” Wyll says, craning his neck to glance back at the Ravengard manor. “Too big for just us two, at any rate. I’ve been thinking of getting a cat, maybe some rabbits. Thoughts?”

With the attentiveness of a servant, Astarion reaches for Wyll’s glass and refills it. 

“Go for the cat, not the rabbits.”

“Not fond of rabbits?”

“I wouldn’t be as tempted to eat a cat.”

Wyll considers it, intrigued, “Are rabbits that much more delicious than cats, from the perspective of a vampire?”

“As a rule of thumb, yes,” Astarion says, sliding Wyll’s glass across the table. “I haven’t sampled very many cats, mind you. But in my limited experience, the flavor and mouthful of feline blood is markedly oily. Rabbits, on the other hand, are quite fragrant and rich. But it rather depends on the cat — and the rabbit, of course. I’d much prefer a well-fed, reasonably healthy tortoiseshell over a sickly, injured hare. And even beyond such cold-blooded considerations…”

“Yes?”

“Well, I suppose I just like cats.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Wyll says. He occupies his hands by prising open the shell of a pistachio, exposing the bright green seed beneath. He crunches on it absent-mindedly, then goes to split another. “You’re somewhat catlike yourself. Proud, beautiful, indolent, mercurial. An inveterate wanderer.”

“And you’re the kindly master who feeds me bluefin tuna and cream, yes,” Astarion says. “You’ve even threatened me with a collar. A pretty one, if I recall correctly, with a little pink bow.”

Wyll flushes. “I didn’t mean —”

“Yes, I know,” Astarion says. He reaches into the bowl of pistachios and begins to shell a few himself, lining up the exposed pips on the table. “I’m only teasing, darling.”

There’s a contemplative silence, punctuated by the occasion soft crack of a pistachio hull being split in two. As Wyll eats a few more, he allots a few moments to puzzling out Astarion’s exact feelings on the collar — whether he finds it eroticizing or repellent, flattering or contemptuous. The answer is probably yes either which way. Things with Astarion are rarely so straightforward.

“It’s not a bad idea,” Astarion says at last. “Adopting an animal. You need something you can coddle, and I’m afraid it can’t be me.”

Wyll’s lips twitch. 

“A cat, then,” he says staidly. “To keep me sane.”

“Make it a handsome one — and don’t give it a stupid name. Nothing too obvious. I don’t want a white cat named Snowball, or a gray cat named Shadow.”

“What about an orange cat named Ginger?”

“No orange cats, period,” Astarion says firmly. “Orange cats lack dignity.”

“A bold stance.”

In the studiously offhand manner of someone who has painstakingly rehearsed his words, Astarion says, “You know, I’m surprised you didn’t suggest adopting children.”

“Even I know that’d be much too hasty,” Wyll says, popping another pistachio into his mouth. He deliberates as he chews, then asks, “Is that something you’d be interested in someday? Having children?”

Astarion’s eyes slide across the table. “You’re much too young to be a father.”

“That’s not what I asked you.”

“And yet, it’s the answer that sprang to mind,” Astarion says, lifting his shoulders into a slight shrug.

They go on shelling pistachios peaceably.

“You know, I’m not that much younger than my father was when he had me.”

“He was also too young to be a father,” Astarion says, rolling his eyes. “And it shows.”

More curious than accusatory, Wyll says, “You really despise him, don’t you?”

“The more I love you, the more intensely I dislike him,” he says, looking Wyll fiercely in the eye. “The two forces are in proportion.”

Wyll bites his inner cheek, considering this. Of course, he feels the habitual urge to defend his father — but also, a weird, paradoxical happiness stemming from Astarion’s protectiveness. It makes him feel vaguely disloyal. To both of them.

“He’s a good man,” he demurs at last. “He’s doing an admirable job of rebuilding the Fist, you know — routing out bad actors. He’s good for this city.”

“I don’t care about the city. Damn the city. Is he good for you, Wyll?”

“Does he have to be?”

Astarion looks at him as though he's grown two heads.

“Of course he should be good for you. The man's your father. Do you even hear yourself right now?”

“I’m an adult now. I don’t need him doing anything for me at this point.”

“But he hasn’t done anything for you, Wyll,” Astarion says. “At any point.”

Wyll takes another long drink of his wine to avoid speaking. He thinks of his father's hand on his shoulder, the deep lines incised into his face. The hard, dark eyes he used to call his own.

He searches himself for some flicker of indignation, some faint wisp of fury that might match Astarion’s own — but come up empty. In truth, he feels that he and his father have reached something of an accord, an understanding between men. The deal is simple, and Wyll considers it quite equitable: Wyll never asks his father to do something that he is not capable of, and in return, he gets to go on calling himself someone's son.

“I love my father,” he says at last, handling his glass awkwardly. “Do I wish he were gentler? Do I wish that he expected a little less of me? Do I wish that he’d, I don’t know… played catch with me, taken me fishing, attended my piano recitals? I do, actually. But that’s not the sort of father he is, and he isn’t going to change. If I want him in my life — and I do, for the record, more than I can say — I just have to meet him on his own terms.”

Astarion looks mildly outraged by that.

“After what he did,” he says, palisading his words with every inch of cold, steely hauteur he could muster, “he should be meeting you on your terms. Why are you the one who has to bend?”

Wyll scrubs a hand down over his face.

“In many ways, my father is the bravest and the strongest man I know,” he says, “but also the most — cowardly, I suppose. There are things he can’t face. He can’t admit just how little he knows me.” He flushes at the admission, his eyes tripping guiltily towards the bottle. “This is strong wine.”

“It is,” Astarion admits.

“Were you planning on getting me drunk?” Wyll asks, not with judgment, but with real interest.

A pause.

“I don’t know,” Astarion says. “Maybe?”

“I suppose I should know better than to ask,” Wyll reflects, crossing his ankles. “You don’t plan much of anything. You just sort of… act.”

“Fuck you,” Astarion says, but he relaxes visibly. “You can slow down, have a glass of water. Actually, have you already eaten dinner, love? Perhaps we should get a meal into you.”

“It’s fine, I know my limits.”

“Do you?”

Wyll shrugs, chases down another sip of wine. The evening’s shading into the night, and all the stars are crawling out. He lifts his chin, tilts his face towards the heavens. Gods, but he loves this view. He always has. As a boy, the constellations set his imagination on fire: Jassa’s Dagger, Correlian, the Far Traveler. He’d been especially taken with tales of heroes being memorialized in the night sky by the gods. Outer space seemed like an exceptionally nice place to be — or, at least, no lonelier than the Ravengard manor.

“Whenever I look at your father,” Astarion says quietly, “I inevitably find myself searching for some trace of you. Some glimmer of your warmth. But there’s nothing there, is there?”

“My mother’s death changed him,” Wyll says. “Everyone says so. They tell me he used to be so open, reckless, funny. I mean, can you imagine that? Ulder Ravengard, Marshal of the Flaming Fist, funny? The man who raised me was like a stone fortress. He was indomitable, inscrutable. He’d never admit to it, of course, but I honestly think he was very… depressed, I guess, throughout most of my childhood.” Wyll blinks, hard, then shakes his head. “I’ve never talked about this with anyone.”

“I’m finding it rather illuminating,” Astarion says. “Go on.”

Wyll hesitates, then says, “My mother left him alone with a child — a child he couldn’t figure out how to connect with. He was grieving, and I was the living embodiment of that grief. At times, I could tell it was hard for me to even look at me. He could be affectionate with me too, of course,” he puts in hastily, catching Astarion’s expression. “But I knew from a young age that his own internal gravity pulled him away from me. There was some kind of — repulsion.”

“A repulsion,” Astarion repeats softly, disbelievingly. Wyll rubs at his cheek with the palm of his hand, self-conscious.

“I don’t want to sound ungrateful,” he says. “He really did the best he could to raise me, to make me strong. And when I think of all the times I made things harder for him, all the times I asked too much, I — I feel —” 

“Ashamed,” Astarion finishes. “You feel ashamed.”

Wyll angles his face away. The night air is cool on his face, on his neck, his scalp. The alder branches slouch beneath the weight of the wind. The crows watch, speculate, eavesdrop. His horns ache.

“I just have so much to repay,” he says, a clot forming in his throat.

“For your mother?”

“Well, I’ll never stop repaying that.”

“There’s nothing to repay,” Astarion says. “It’s not your fault she died. You had nothing to do with it. You didn’t ask to be born.”

Wyll blinks, and realizes that his eyes are filling, stinging.

“Shit,” he says. He pinches the bridge of his nose, hard, and lets out a jagged breath. “I hate crying.”

“I imagine he taught you that, yes.”

Wyll closes his eyes. He hears the sound of Astarion standing out of his seat, and for a moment, he thinks Astarion might be heading back inside. It makes a perverse kind of sense; Astarion has never seemed comfortable watching others weep. But then he feels the weight of Astarion sliding into his lap, arms winding lightly around Wyll’s shoulders. He’s shockingly light. Moving instinctively, Wyll cups the curve of his waist, holding him steady, and is reliably stunned by the slightness of his body.

“Last night, I asked you not to tell me what’s best for me,” Astarion murmurs, leaning in to kiss Wyll’s forehead. “So I will attempt to hold my tongue and do the same. But you deserved better from him, Wyll. And for that — well. For that, I am truly sorry.”

Wyll buries his face into the crook of Astarion’s neck. He feels the sting of embarrassment, then frustration, then molten self-loathing — then, at last, a kind of bruised exhaustion. His throat burns. His head pounds. The tears swim in his vision, but don’t fall. He feels like a stoppered bottle. Pressure builds inside the bottle, threatening to splinter the glass, but the cork holds. He would hate crying less if he could at least do it properly.

Astarion is not warm, nor is he soft. He does, however, smell very sweetly of bergamot, and his long, clever fingers are gentle against the nape of Wyll’s neck. They remain like that a while, maybe a minute or two, until Wyll manages to control his breathing.

Finally, Astarion asks, “Did you really have piano recitals?”

“Oh,” Wyll says. He wipes at his face with his sleeve. “For a season or two, yes. I didn’t really take to it.”

“No, you took to dancing.”

“That I did.”

“Dancing,” Astarion says, following the curve of Wyll’s scars with his fingertips, “and swordplay, and reading silly adventure stories.”

“They all seemed so important, at the time,” Wyll says, his voice full of wonder. “I suppose I was a very foolish child.”

“All children are fools,” Astarion says, and he brings his lips to Wyll’s, trading words for something wine-sweet and sacred.

Later, in their bedroom, Astarion allows Wyll to undress him.

Wyll applies himself to the task with workmanlike efficiency. He pulls off each boot one by one, then both socks. He pushes Astarion’s jacket off his shoulder, shakes it out, and hangs it where it won’t rumple. He takes hold of Astarion’s chin, lifts it. He unbuttons Astarion’s shirt. Guides it off of his body. He feels a little like a valet, a little like he’s playing with a doll. Service, ownership. Subject, object.

 He unlaces Astarion’s trousers. He pulls Astarion’s underwear down past his hips.

Naked, Astarion regards him with muzzy interest. Wyll touches his thigh and examines him at length, a lord surveying his territory. His gaze flicks across the hollow of Astarion’s throat, the line of his jaw, the twitch of his belly. The jutting of Astarion’s ribcage calls to him, so he touches that too. The harsh protrusion of bone against flesh strikes Wyll as somehow violent — knifelike, as though he might prick his finger against the shape of him It must be painful, Wyll thinks, to live in this body.

Wyll brings his hand up over Astarion’s chest, over his clavicle, until the pad of his thumb makes it way up the column of Astarion’s neck.

“Having fun?” Astarion asks, but there’s no real judgment in it. He looks sleepily pleased, and his cock twitches with a slow, climbing curiosity.

“I am,” Wyll says, though that’s an oversimplification. Touching Astarion like this is certainly enjoyable, but it’s a meditative kind of enjoyment.

“Hm,” Astarion says, and then no more.

With his fingers, Wyll feels out Astarion’s scars: two jagged little puncture wounds, raised against the skin of his jugular. Astarion tilts his head back, his eyes glassed.

In this state, there is so little Astarion would refuse him. So little that he would withhold. Standing there in his jacket, boots, and breeches, hand flush against the source of Astarion’s agony, Wyll feels overwhelmed by the immensity of his power.

Acting on instinct, he leans in slowly and grazes his teeth over Astarion’s scars, aligning his blunt, human canines against the wound. He feels Astarion shudder against him; Wyll shudders too. The past seems to rush through them like water. As Wyll’s premolars overlap the scar, so too does he feel himself overlapping — temporarily, dangerously, intoxicatingly — with another man who once thought himself a master.

In order to have trust, there must be opportunity for betrayal. To love someone is to show your belly, to offer yourself up to the knife. Wyll applies the slight pressure of his teeth, his breath pervert-hot on Astarion’s cold skin.

If he so wished, he could bite down, reopen Astarion’s scars, set them to weeping. It’s an idea that speaks to the devil in him. For once, he allows himself to contemplate it. It would feel good for a moment, much in the way smashing a serving plate on the ground feels good in a moment of anger. Not that he’s one to smash plates — he'd learned very young that tantrums amounted to very little.

He lets the urge pass through his body, then releases it. He will not hurt Astarion, save for the ways Astarion has asked to be hurt. Because what they do in this room is good.

Wyll kisses Astarion’s throat, feather-light, and Astarion sighs, “Hold me.”

A clear, actionable instruction. Wyll wraps his arms around Astarion, who immediately buries his face against Wyll’s shoulder. Wyll smiles, reaching up to stroke Astarion’s hair. He can feel Astarion’s erection poking him in the thigh. It’s cute, somehow.

“You can be deadly when you want to be,” Wyll says warmly. “You have the teeth of a wolf, the mind of a fox. But when you’re in my arms like this, star, you’re sweet as a lamb.”

Astarion laughs brokenly. “This a privilege,” he says. “Reserved only for you. No others.”

“It’s an honour I take seriously,” Wyll says, and he means it. Really. He leans in, presses a kiss to the corner of Astarion’s lips. “Tell me of your pleasure.”

Astarion closes his eyes. The skin around his eyelids is thin and mottled.

“It — it meant a lot to me,” he says haltingly, “when you told me I was free to leave you. I appreciated it. Really. But, tonight —”

“Yes?”

Astarion rears back, puts his hands on Wyll’s chest. His eyes search Wyll’s face. 

“Tonight, I want to feel as though you’ll never let me go.”

The Bluemoon Atelier is tucked away at the end of an Upper City market street. Wyll wouldn’t exactly describe the building as luxe, but it’s certainly handsome. The front facade is constructed of old-fashioned masonry, cool and solid. Ruffled curtains pipe the windows. A blackboard sign has been set up near the entrance. In a neat, steady hand, it says:

BESPOKE SUITS AND GOWNS — ALTERATIONS, COMMISSIONS, ADAPTIVE CLOTHING — WEDDINGS, FUNERALS, COTILLIONS. Resident Couturier: Victrios Ancunín.

“We’re not going inside,” Astarion says, shoving his hands into his pocket.

“Alright,” Wyll agrees, mild. “We’re not going inside.”

They stand in the street, perhaps ten paces from the Atelier’s cheerful front entrance. Astarion is frozen in place, tense as a board. His gaze is riveted to the display window.

Wyll peers over Astarion’s shoulder, attempting to follow his line of sight. Behind a thin pane of glass, an upright mannequin models a pale blue gown with a long, bell-shaped skirt. Where womenswear is concerned, Wyll is hardly an expert; there are pretty dresses and there are ugly dresses, he knows, but he couldn’t articulate the elements the separates the former from the latter. That said, he’s fairly confident the dress in the window is a pretty one. He could easily imagine it being worn by a fashionable young debutante, flushed with triumph at her first unchaperoned social.

“We’re not going inside,” Astarion says again, more faintly.

“I know,” Wyll said. He scratches at the back of his neck, glancing up and down the street. “But perhaps we should find a bench?”

“A bench,” Astarion repeats tonelessly.

“It would look a great deal more natural,” Wyll says. When Astarion remains firmly rooted in place, he adds, “If we just stand here, the proprietor might come out to chastise us for loitering.”

Astarion’s eyes widen with alarm.

“Yes,” he says, his long limbs twitching into motion. “Yes, of course. We wouldn’t want that, would we?”

Would we? Wyll isn’t entirely certain.

Still, he places a hand on the small of Astarion’s lower back, steering him gently down the street. They find a nice little bench not too far down the market road, pleasantly nestled beneath a large, shady oak. It’s near enough that they could still watch the front entrance, but not so near as to make their lingering obvious.

Crossing his legs in a deliberate affectation of nonchalance, Wyll is distantly reminded of the stakeouts he once performed in his capacity a hunter and a tracker. It’s almost nostalgic, really. Of course, dawdling outside a dress shop is considerably less exciting than keeping watch over a basilisk’s den, and most certainly less glamorous. Still, if forced to choose, Wyll would pick the dress shop every time. He takes Astarion’s cold hand in his, smiling softly when Astarion squeezes on to it.

The sky is purplish, ripe. A bright sliver of moon, half-obscured by grayish clouds, peers down at them. With his free hand, Wyll consults his pocketwatch. It’s quarter past eight. On weeknights, like tonight, the Atelier closes at nine o’clock. If Astarion wants to go inside, he’ll need to muster up his nerves within the next forty-odd minutes.

“It would be a horror to be recognized,” Astarion reasons. “I mean, I’ve been dead, what, two centuries? My reappearance would be a terrible upset, I imagine. And how could I possibly explain myself? Surprise, I've been a vampiric slave the whole time! Not to mention the fact I can’t remember a bloody thing — perhaps he’d believe me to be an imposter, or a doppelganger. He might even draw his weapon. Wouldn’t that be an awful mess?”

“It would,” Wyll says.

“Though it’s very possible that he won’t recognize me at all,” Astarion goes on. “Suppose this Victrios Ancunín is a very distant relation. A cousin of a cousin of a cousin, that sort of thing.”

“That’s possible.”

“Suppose he isn’t a relation of mine at all. Have we considered that? We really ought to consider that.”

“I — suppose we ought to,“ Wyll agrees guardedly. “Although Ancunín isn’t an especially common name.”

“You know something? It isn’t,” Astarion says. His knee bounces as he speaks. “It really isn’t. Have you ever met another Ancunín?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Neither have I.”

Recognizing the Grand Duke by his horns, a passing lord stops to greet Wyll. They trade the usual pleasantries: how is your wife, how is your father’s health, congratulations on your new grandchild, what fair weather we’re having. During the entirety of the exchange, Astarion sits quietly by Wyll’s side — content, for perhaps the first time, to be ignored.

“I just had a thought,” Astarion says as the lord hobbles off on his jeweled cane. “Perhaps I was on terrible terms with my family when I died. Perhaps they were all irredeemable, contemptible ogres. Perhaps they never deserved me at all. Perhaps I am, in fact, quite lucky to have forgotten them.”

“I — hm.” Wyll frowns. “I’m not going to tell you that can’t possibly be true, because I don’t know. But if we take all that to be feasible, I think we also need to consider the inverse scenario.”

“What?”

“That they loved you very much.”

Astarion pulls his hand away, rubbing his palms against his upper thighs. Sweat prickles at the back of his neck; he looks agitated, harried, strung-out. Wyll can almost taste the bitter flux of his thoughts: fear, hope, humiliation, jaded resignation.

"How facile," he says.

"I prefer the term optimistic, but I suppose facile will have to do."

Astarion shakes his head.

“Love can be its own kind of curse,” he says. “Love can be an albatross. A millstone. A snare. Love is the damnable tether that binds you to your father, after all.”

Unquestionably true. Wyll half-shrugs, says, “Love is also the tether that binds you to me.”

Astarion gives him a sidelong look. “That’s just as unfortunate, you know. For you.”

“I don’t believe it is.”

Astarion shakes his head again, snorts, “Right.”

He hunches forwards, staring down between his knees. Wyll doesn’t like to see him suffering — in fact, the curve of Astarion’s spine fills him with something like a swell of pity. But if Astarion must suffer, as all living things must suffer, at least he’s suffering in a productive, generative fashion: working through a labyrinth, clawing for the exit. 

“You're not a millstone or an albatross,” Wyll says very firmly. With his bright red eyes and his long legs, Astarion’s more like a plover, really.

He runs a silent hand over Astarion’s scapula, the wedge-like, trapezoidal bones that lift against his thin back like wings. Astarion releases a soft, involuntary sound, halfway to a scoff, halfway to a whimper.

They sit like that for a couple minutes. Then, all of a sudden, Astarion jerks upright. Wyll blinks in surprise, opens his mouth to ask Astarion if he’d like to leave — but then Astarion starts striding down the street towards the Atelier, and there’s nothing to do but follow.

Astarion wrenches the front door open. A bell chimes, friendly and sweet. Wyll ducks in behind him.

The Bluemoon Atelier is tidy and well-ordered. The hardwood floor is spotless, gleaming with the telltale gloss of a recent varnish. Racks of gowns, pushed to the periphery of the room, are organized by occasion, colour, and cut. The copper-lined bay windows are cluttered with labeled jars of brightly-coloured buttons, notions, clasps, and pins. 

There’s an elf sitting behind a counter, patiently working on a bit of embroidery on a free-standing hoop. He lifts his eyes at the bell. His hair is long and thick and pale as dandelion seed, and he wears it gathered over his shoulder with a large claw clip.

Victrios Ancunín, Wyll presumes, and his heart pangs.

“Good evening,” Victrios says. He looks at the two of them — or in their general direction. His large, dark eyes are oddly unfocused. In fact, he’s slightly cross-eyed.

“Er — good evening,” Wyll returns politely. He glances over at Astarion, who is, once again, completely frozen in place, his expression a rictus of the purest anxiety.

“Can I help you?” Victrios asks. If Astarion’s presence provokes any particular emotion in him, it’s not at all apparent.

“Just browsing,” Wyll says very quickly. “We have a formal event coming up. I was wondering if you had a menswear section?”

“There are samples upstairs,” Victrios says. He makes a vague gesture towards a small wooden staircase banked around the edge of the house — then pauses, as though savoring something. “Your voice is familiar. Have we met, sir?”

That gives Wyll serious pause. There isn’t an Upper City grandee in Baldur’s Gate who wouldn’t recognize him by his horns. He looks into Victrios’ calm, blank face, the dark irises swiveling vacantly over the both of them. Through the both of them.

He’s blind.

Immediately, Wyll fixes Astarion with a look, and watches as the same realization registers on his face.

“Wyll Ravengard, sir,” he says.

“Ah,” Victrios says. His voice is rich and dry, like an aged Malbec. “Lord Ravengard the Younger. Yes, that does track. I heard your funeral oration after the attack on the city. You spoke quite elegantly. My wife was moved to tears, in fact.”

“I'm deeply honoured to hear so.”

Victrios nods slowly. “Her little cousin died in the fighting, protecting his neighbors from a mindflayer — he was a Blaze, you know. It meant a lot for her to hear the Fist honoured publicly, even after they had been so sorely misled by the former Archduke.”

“The Flaming Fist, in my mind, is like a well-forged blade,” Wyll says abstractly. “When an innocent is found butchered, do we put the sword on trial? Or the man who has wielded it in service of evil?”

“My thoughts exactly, lad,” Victrios agrees, straightening slightly. “It is a relief, I must say, to know the proverbial sword is in capable hands once more.”

Gods, but it’s impossible to look at Victrios without comparing him to Astarion. The shade of his hair is a perfect match, but Victrios’ doesn’t curl quite as artfully as Astarion’s: it’s thick, wolfish, frizzy at the edges. The dark, loamy brown of his eyes is also startlingly different. But they share the same imperious nose, the same diamond-shaped face, the same downwards-tilting mouth. The family resemblance is undeniable.

“Do you have a particularly good memory for voices?” Wyll asks carefully.

“I would say my memory is above average,” Victrios says, which could honestly mean anything. “I heard a second pair of footsteps when you entered. Come with a friend?”

“Er — my partner, yes,” Wyll says. He glances over at Astarion, who remains petrified. Afraid to speak, he realizes. If Victrios could recognize Wyll’s voice based off the contents of a single speech, what might he recognize should Astarion open his mouth?

Victrios hums in consideration.

“It would be quite a coup for our humble establishment, milord, if the Grand Duke or his paramour were seen about in our garments,” he muses. “Should anything catch your eye, I would happily apply a handsome discount and rush any necessary alterations to completion.”

“Oh, thank you. That’s a very generous offer,” Wyll says. He pauses, then ventures, “If I'm being rude, please let me know, and I'd be happy to drop it. But… it's somewhat unusual to see a blind tailor.”

Victrios’ mouth twitches.

“What a brilliant observation, milord,” he says. “It is.”

Sarcasm must run in the family.

“Was there an accident?” Wyll asks. Victrios shakes his head.

“No, a genetic fault. I lost my vision progressively over a period of about twenty years, like my mother before me. This was my profession when I was sighted, much as it is now. When I began to lose my vision, I of course considered taking up another occupation. My father urged me to go into politics — he always saw my work as rather middle-class, and therefore contemptible. He was a landlord from a long line of landlords, you see; nothing confounded him so much as the idea of a man working with his own hands for his bread. But politics was my brother’s domain, not mine, and I loathed the idea of closing or selling the shop.”

“It’s a charming shop,” Wyll offers. He looks over at Astarion, who seems largely overwhelmed with the volume of information being unearthed.

“It is, isn’t it?” Victrios says, visibly brimming with pride. He adjusts his embroidery hoop with one hand. “Blindness is an inconvenience. This is an incontrovertible reality. But it has also allowed me to expand my métier in ways I feel are rather innovative. Sewing is a visual craft, certainly, but a tactile one as well. I take pride in creating true haptic delights — marvels which please the entirety of one's senses, not only the eye. Come, feel.”

With a flick of his wrist, he beckons Wyll nearer. Wyll approaches the counter, bending down to inspect Victrios’ embroidery hoop.

If there exists a name for the design Victrios is embroidering, Wyll doesn’t know it; it looks abstract, geometric, like a runic component of a complex spell. As he traces the outline of the pattern with his finger, his skin meets with faience beadwork, lubricious silk, dense wool, and coarse flax — Victrios has stitched this piece with at least five or six different types of thread. It’s expert work, and Wyll is duly impressed.

Astarion takes a ginger step forwards, peering over Wyll’s shoulder. Victrios smiles, as if sensing their awe. This close, Wyll can just barely catch the scent of him; clean, cold, and antiseptic, like a surgeon’s hands right before performing an appendectomy.

“Many of my clients are blind themselves,” Victrios says. “I pride myself on serving their needs more practically than any sighted modiste possibly could.” Then, tapping his forefinger against his chin, he adds, “I'm told you’re missing an eye yourself, your grace.

“Ah, yes,” Wyll says, withdrawing his hand. “That’s true.”

“I've also heard it said that you are a human man with horns like a devil.”

“That's also true.”

Victrios pauses, as if imagining it.

“How very exotic. I imagine all your hats are custom-tailored?”

“I don’t actually own any hats.”

“No hats?” Victrios frowns deeply. “This can be amended.”

“Do you run the shop on your own?” Astarion asks suddenly.

There’s a pause. Victrios’ eyes flick to the space where Astarion is standing. Something strange rushes over his face — a kind of wounded bewilderment — which he immediately attempts to paper over with a smile.

“I — I’m sorry?” he manages.

“I said, do you run the shop on your own?”

Another pause.

“No,” Victrios answers slowly, carefully. “No. Usually, my son is here in the shop to assist me. A seeing eye is useful for many things, as… as you might imagine.”

“Where is he now?” Astarion asks. “It seems rather unfilial of him to leave you in the lurch like this. What if Lord Ravengard wanted a sketch drawn up for a commission?”

Victrios massages a hand over the back of his neck.

“Well, he’s at the age — he’s at the age where things don’t hold his attention the way they once did. And…” Victrios blinks. “You sound very familiar, sir.”

“I get that all the time,” Astarion says, his sulky mouth twisting. Victrios’ expression sharpens.

“I’m afraid I didn’t catch your name.”

“That’s right,” Astarion agrees, shifting his weight from foot to foot. “You didn’t.”

“An oversight on my part, clearly. Please, sir — introduce yourself.”

Astarion’s eyes flicker towards Wyll, seeking instruction. Wyll cracks a small, somewhat apologetic smile, but offers nothing more. This is not his decision to make.

At last, Astarion says in a slow, halting voice, “My name is Astarion.”

Victrios says, “No.”

“No?”

“Absolutely not.” Victrios’ voice is harsh; his dark, sightless eyes roil with fury. “Is this some kind of a joke? A scam?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Astarion hedges. His tone is high, reedy, nervous; he seems simultaneously elated and terrified by the force in Victrios’ voice. He edges away from the counter. “We’re just here looking for formalwear. In fact, we should really see about those samples, darling —”

“Don’t darling me, darling,” Victrios hisses. “You’re dead.”

“I know,” Astarion says suddenly. “I know. I’m supposed to be.”

Silence. Astarion retreats a half-step, a prey animal on the cusp of bolting. Victrios’ hot, dark eyes ping towards Wyll.

“Lord Ravengard?" Victrios places each word carefully, crisply, as though laying down tiles. "Is there any particular reason you’ve dragged a ghost into my shop?”

He’s clearly making an effort to sound frosty, indignant, coldly righteous — and he might've even managed it, were he not visibly trembling. In fact, both Ancuníns are. Their mouths quiver; their limbs judder. They look like two terrified kittens from the same litter. The kind separated from their mother too early.

“Maybe we should sit down somewhere and put a kettle on, sir,” Wyll says, as gentle as he knows how. “There’s a very long story involved, and I think you’ll want to hear it.”

Chapter Text

Victrios keeps placing biscuits on Astarion’s plate.

“Victrios,” Astarion says after the third time. “I can’t eat these.”

“What? Oh, right,” Victrios says. His face is slightly blotchy from crying. “Foolish of me.”

Astarion brings the biscuit to his nose, gives it a cautious sniff. “Did I used to enjoy these?”

“Yes, of course,” Victrios says. “Black tea and brown butter biscuits. Grandmother used to have us over for tea all the time when we were little — do you remember that? You took your tea with so much milk, it was hardly tea at all.”

“I don’t recall, no,” Astarion says. He hands the biscuit off to Wyll, who eats it soberly.

They’re sitting in a little alcove on the second floor of the Bluemoon Atelier. The table has been made up with a simple repast: a kettle, sugarcubes, milk, butter, bread, a tin of sweets. Victrios sits with his back to the casement window, his eyes bloodshot, steam rising from his mug. Behind him, the sky is black as a swatch of velvet.

“What do you recall?” Victrios asks, twisting his fingers in his lap.

Astarion folds his arms over his chest, leaning back in his seat. He’s rolled his shirtsleeves up to the elbow, exposing two pale, attenuated forearms. He’s no longer trembling — an improvement — but he doesn’t look entirely composed either. He looks spooked. Coltish. Poised to flee. His knee bounces at an irregular, juddering rhythm.

“A room with blue wallpaper, patterned with magnolias,” Astarion says, slow. “An orange grove. Silk gloves. Law books. One of those terrible little white dogs.”

“The room you’re thinking of was your office,” Victrios says, dabbing at his eyes with a handkerchief. “I remember that wallpaper. Very fashionable for its era. And the dog was our mother’s. Fruitcake, I think his name was, or something similarly treacly. He was a fickle and unpleasable howler — we both hated him.”

“I remember our father,” Astarion says. He searches Victrios with cold, trenchant eyes. “You take after him, don’t you? Physically, I mean.”

Victrios hesitates, then dips his chin into a jerky little nod.

“I hear that often, yes,” he says. “Though it’s been quite some time since I last looked in the mirror.”

“Believe it or not, dear, I can relate.”

The brothers share an uneasy laugh. Astarion’s is high, frothy, transparently ersatz; Victrios has a softer, earthier tone, like something lifted out of the soil.

“If Victrios takes after your father, then so do you,” Wyll puts in. “The both of you look alike.”

“Do we?” Astarion asks abstractly.

“I wouldn’t exactly mistake you two for twins, but the resemblance is unmistakable.”

“Intriguing,” Astarion says. He considers Victrios anew, scrutinizing his face as though scrutinizing his own. “But surely I look quite a bit younger than this, yes? And prettier?”

“Gods, you’re just as I remember you. An insufferable narcissist,” Victrios says, but he sounds strangely moved nonetheless. He folds his soiled handkerchief into quarters and tucks it into the breast pocket of his coat. “What do you remember of our father?”

Astarion thinks on it for a moment.

“I remember his face,” he says at last. “His voice. The scent of peppermint oil.” 

Victrios startles at that, at the rightness of it. “For his joints, yes.”

“I remember sitting at the table with him. Heeding his counsel, or something to that effect,” Astarion says. “Were we very close?”

“You were the favorite son. Unquestionably.”

This seems to intrigue Astarion, who draws himself up a little straighter. “Really?”

“Oh, yes. He poured all of his ambition into you, and you bore the mantle effortlessly. A proud son for a proud father.”

“That does sound like me,” Astarion says, pleased, and for a few brief moments, he seems to genuinely savor his triumph. “Did you resent me for it? My primacy in his esteem?”

“No,” Victrios says, massaging the bridge of his nose. “Actually, in some ways, it was actually quite a relief to me. He had his heir, his golden child — a son who would social-climb on his behalf.  So long as I didn’t rock the boat overmuch, I was mostly permitted to do as I pleased. This all changed after you… after you left us. He became far more judgmental, more overbearing. Less tolerant of my more artistic inclinations.”

The satisfaction fades from Astarion’s face. “Judging by the way you speak of him,” he says primly, “I assume he’s dead?”

“I assumed you dead,” Victrios parries. “But yes. He passed on many years ago. Mother as well. I suppose you could call us orphans, though I don’t much like that word. Feels like stolen valor, somehow.”

Astarion lets out a strange breath. “I see.”

“There are a smattering of Ancuníns living out in the countryside. Cousins, uncles, aunts, you know.” Victrios reaches for his teacup, sipping delicately at his tea. He has a fragrant, epicene way of moving, like a dancer. “In Baldur’s Gate, only I remain — well. Myself, my wife, and my son. He was born long after your death, but of course he knows about you. His Uncle Astarion.”

“What does he know about me? Specifically?”

“That you were my younger brother. That we were close. That you used to stand with your arms up in the air and play the mannequin while I cut my first suits.” Victrios sets his tea down, lashes flickering. “That you died young.”

“How old is he?” Wyll asks. “Your son.”

“Vanthien? He just turned twenty-eight,” Victrios says. He opens up the biscuit tin and places two more onto Wyll’s plate.

“We're close in age, then.”

“Only superficially,” Victrios says. “You are human. Vanthien is an elf. And for an elf, twenty-eight is nothing at all. He’s only a sapling, really.” A sudden, searing look of hope takes up residence in his face. Angling himself toward Astarion, he ventures, “Perhaps you’d like to meet him?”

The suggestion seems to genuinely throw Astarion.

“I — perhaps?” Astarion says. Troubled, perhaps, and drawn to that trouble. He wets his lips, leaning over the table. “So, just to be clear, you really don’t mind? The whole vampire thing?”

“Do I mind?” Victrios drapes his elbow over his face and laughs, plaintive and soft. “Oh, Balduran’s bones. I suppose I ought to mind. In fact, I suppose I ought to be quite frightened. That would be a reasonable reaction, yes?”

“It would be the usual reaction, if nothing else.”

“No doubt. Vampire spawn are known for their bloodthirst, aren’t they?”

“Well, we’re hardly known for our cuddliness,” Astarion says, his tone clipped.

Perhaps they should be, Wyll does not say. He puts another biscuit in his mouth, chewing mechanically.

Victrios only shakes his head. “I am not frightened, Astarion,” he says, his voice a faint tremolo. “How could I possibly be frightened? My baby brother, returned from the dead! I feel only joy — profound, wild joy — and sorrow, too, for your tale is surely one of unimaginable suffering. I mean, to reduce a man to such a state that he can scarcely recollect his past — his own family —”

Astarion looks away. Wyll’s throat tightens as he swallows, a familiar horror rising beneath his breastbone. His mind returns to Cazador’s kennels. The low, filthy table littered with pliers, thumbscrews, tacks, paring knives. The shackles bolted to the floor. The bare mattress. How often does Astarion’s mind return there, he wonders? Every day? Every hour? Whenever Wyll slides into him?

Victrios lowers his hands from his face. Though sightless, his dark eyes are alert, intelligent. Though he cannot see their faces, some intangible quality of their silence must give them away — he knows he is correct in his grief.

“Towards the end of her life,” he says, “mother often spoke of finding you on the plains of Arvanaith, in the realm of Corellon Larethian. I really, truly believed you were waiting for her there. Waiting for me, even. It gave me comfort to imagine it — you, lazing about in some pristine place, easy and unburdened, a quip at the ready. You’d say, What took you so long, Vic? And I’d say, Oh, I had a few things to take care of at the shop. And you’d say, Always with that blasted shop! A rather reassuring fantasy, as you might imagine.”

“A fantasy nonetheless, I'm afraid,” Astarion says.

Victrios’ lips twist into a tight, bitter approximation of a smile.

“I slept well at night, believing that you were at rest. At peace. But all along, you were shackled to a vampire lord.” He shakes his head. “I know little of spawn and their sires, but I know enough. I cannot imagine what you must have endured over the last two centuries.”

“No,” Astarion says, cold, taut. “You cannot imagine it.”

A long, terrible pause.

“Astarion,” Victrios says slowly, pushing his tea aside. “In the days before your death, we quarreled terribly.”

Astarion lifts his eyes. “Is that so?”

“We did, yes.” Victrios inclines his head. “I’d invited you over for a garden party. Lemonade, hors d’oeuvres, lots of blowy muslin gowns. Parasols were very in fashion at the time, and yours was the most splendid of them all. I remember that quite distinctly.”

“A white parasol,” Astarion says suddenly. Eyes bright enough to read by. “Piped with rosettes.”

 Victrios buckles against that as though receiving a blow. “Yes. Yes. We were playing croquet out on the lawn and — and I suppose I picked a fight. Back then, we were always picking fights with one another, and our father was all too eager to egg us on.” 

“A loving and tender-hearted patriarch, clearly.”

The breath of a laugh. “He was complicated,” Victrios says.

“Figures. Complicated men raise complicated sons,” Astarion says, shooting Wyll a sidelong glance. Wyll allows it to pass without comment. “So, why did we quarrel?”

“The precise details escape me. It was something to do with your work in the judiciary, some verdict you handed down that I took umbrage with. I called you a craven, a spoiled fool, gleefully corrupt — those were my exact words."

Astarion fidgets in his seat. “How censorious.”

“I was furious,” Victrios says. “Furious with our father, and furious with you for taking his advice over mine, as you always did. I tossed you out on the street, told you that you would be welcomed back the day you developed a conscience. I never saw you again.” Victrios runs a hand through his hair. “How could I have foreseen that those words would be the last I ever spoke to you? How could I have known?”

“You couldn’t have known,” Astarion says haltingly, “I suppose.”

“And yet, I spoke them. And there’s no undoing that.”

Victrios’ see-nothing, see-everything eyes rivet themselves to the space where Astarion is seated.

(Wyll wrings his hands in his lap. He feels like an interloper among them. An intruder. And yet, simultaneously, strangely, he's unswervingly certain that his presence in this room is somehow necessary — that something would crush in Astarion’s face if he stood to leave.)

“The words I love you were seldom spoken in our household,” Victrios says. “We never lowered ourselves to utter them. Even when you won your seat as a magistrate, I did not tell you I was proud of you. I only rolled my eyes.” He lowers his lashes. “If — if I had known you were a gift I could not keep, I would have said it every day. I would’ve spoiled you silly with butter tarts and brandy snaps. I would’ve never once complained when you rifled through my closet. And I would’ve fought much harder to protect you from our father’s influence.”

Victrios smiles — the bleak, beautiful, intensely ingenuous smile of a man who has lost everything and won the world.

Simple, unselfconscious, he says, “I love you, Astarion.”

Something in Astarion seems to split open, like kindling.

“I don’t — remember loving you,” he says.

“That’s alright.”

“I’m not the same man I once was. Really. And I can’t imagine I ever will be.”

Victrios just shakes his head. Still smiling, still crying, spiderweb wrinkles pulling around his eyes, his lambswool hair all askew. “That doesn’t matter at all. Either way, I will always be your brother.”

Astarion wipes furiously at his face, mortified, aghast — he hates crying almost as much as Wyll does. On the other side of the table, Victrios sits very, very still, calm and placid and wondersome, and he allows his tears to fall freely. He is not ashamed of them. The source of his shame is deeper, darker — buried beneath two centuries of rubble.

How many men, Wyll wonders, are given the opportunity to atone for two hundred years of guilt? Perhaps only two, here in this room.

Later, as Wyll escorts Victrios home, Victrios tells him, “You know, only Astarion could’ve come out of this nightmare a Grand Duke’s lover. He was always an opportunist.”

“I was not a Grand Duke when I met him,” Wyll points out. “I was an exile, a monster hunter.”

“Really?” Victrios hums. His walking stick beats against the newly-paved roads at a regular clip. “A monster and a monster hunter.”

“Astarion is no monster.”

Victrios pauses, contemplates this.

“You’re right,” he agrees at last. “He is not.”

They walk on in silence a while longer, gravel crunching underfoot, Victrios’ cane striking the grit.

It’s a beautiful night for walking. The oaks and the alders of the Upper City shudder and sigh against a pale, feeble breeze. Small, star-shaped wildflowers explode from neat hedges. Way up on their balconies, the ladies of the Gate pull their nightgowns off of their clotheslines, half-drowsing already.

Eventually, Victrios asks, “Do you think that he’ll visit again?”

Wyll gives him a sidelong glance. “I reckon he will. But it isn’t for me to say.”

“I hope that he does,” Victrios says, with feeling. “But even if he does not, I would be content just knowing that he is being looked after. You will look after him, won’t you?”

“I will.”

“You swear it?”

“On my life, I swear it,” Wyll says. 

It’s just about the easiest oath he’s ever had to swear. He makes it to himself all the time — when Astarion lazes about with toothpaste crusted to the corner of his mouth, for instance, or when he flounces through the house half-dressed in a suit of mulberry silk. So many opportunities to renew his fealty, to the restate his devotion, to pledge his allegiance. Astarion lifting his brow in askance. Astarion seeing Wyll off the door with valedictory wryness. Astarion’s pupils dilating with willing surrender on the training room floor.

My, darling, but I do love you.

“I can see why he likes you,” Victrios says with a sly knowingness. “Something in the way you speak — like a romantic hero in a pulp novel. Is he good to you?”

“He looks after me, just as I look after him.”

“Is that so?” Victrios swerves blithely into an alleyway. He knows these streets exceptionally well; Wyll’s escort is beyond redundant. “The Astarion I knew was never very good at caring for others. He was always parading around some new boyfriend, but they never lasted long.”

“Well,” Wyll temporizes, shoving his hands in his pockets. “With all due respect, I plan on lasting long.”

That surprises a laugh out of Victrios.

“Goodness. You certainly don’t lack for audacity,” he says. He places his hand on the stone wall to his left, following the mortar with his fingertips. “Whatever happens, Lord Ravengard, please don’t be a stranger. We are family now, after all.”

“Are we?”

“Oh, yes.”

Wyll’s lips twitch with the shy beginnings of a smile. “I’ll take it up with Astarion. But, I — I’d very much like to be a part of your family, sir.”

“Anyone would,” Victrios says, staid yet indulgent, as though they’d reached a favorable business agreement.

They walk a while longer. Victrios hums, swings his cane a little. Wyll watches him. The sole of his left shoe is coming away, and will need to be repaired soon. The chain of a gold pocketwatch bangs against his upper thigh. He favors his right leg ever slightly, suggesting a past injury.

Despite his titles and his deeds, Wyll feels very young in Victrios’ presence. He feels timid, boyish, halting. He can’t seem to help but trail behind by a half-step. Strange. He never feels quite so green around Astarion — or even Halsin, who is a good deal older than the both of them. It takes him a moment to locate the source of his diffidence: this man is someone’s father. It’s visible in his bearings, in the way he conducts himself. Wyll could easily imagine Victrios holding some little boy’s hand as they cross the street, or pushing him on the swings, or fussing him into a dinner suit.

Out of nowhere, Wyll thinks of his mother. Specifically, he thinks of her grave. The yellowy sheath of baby’s breath laid over her headstone. The newly-trimmed grass. The muscle sliding in his father’s jaw as he reasserted his mastery over his emotions. 

Unlike Victrios, Wyll had never once fantasized about encountering his mother in the afterworld. The idea had never even occurred to him. Would they even recognize one another by sight? What could they possibly say to one another?

Hello, I’m your son. It’s so nice to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you.

It feels ridiculous to consider. Delusional, even. Still, Wyll’s heart crackles like footsteps on a frozen lake. His father had sworn to him that his mother had loved him, loved him even before he was born. How would it feel to hear it from her?

He thinks of the tears on Astarion’s face, the fine tremor in his wrists. The pain, the wonder. The strange, sublime suicidality of allowing oneself hope.

It would probably feel a little like that.

“Humour me,” Victrios says, lifting his chin towards the night sky. “What does the moon look like tonight, young man?”

Wyll looks up. The moon is a pale puncture on the horizon, a silvery stud threaded through a slip of silk. Cold, blue-rimmed. The size of a thumbnail.

With a soft, capsized feeling — water rushing over ice — he gives Victrios a closed-mouth smile and he says, “It’s beautiful.”

Life goes on.

Wyll adopts a calico and names her Nemesia. She’s talkative, troublesome, supercilious; she bullrushes the bathroom door whenever she feels Wyll is taking too long. She has a crafty way of getting into the butter dish. She occasionally wakes Wyll up in the middle of the night by gently gnawing at his foot.

Wyll loves her.

On the very first day the cat enters the house, Astarion swears his indifference to her. This indifference lasts maybe two weeks. Soon enough, he’s sneaking her fresh fish, commissioning her a pointlessly lavish collar, and referring to her solely by an affectionate nickname: Mimi . Wyll’s lap is her absolute favorite place in the world — she enjoys dozing off there almost as much as Astarion does — but in those rare instances when Wyll is not available, Nemesia is perfectly content to lend her easy, burring warmth to Astarion, who strokes her absentmindedly while fussing with a bit of needlepoint.

Twice or thrice a week, Astarion slips out of the house to assist Victrios at the Atelier. When he returns home, he talks animatedly about the evening’s sartorial emergencies: a bride in meltdown mode, an unexpected split seam, etcetera. The brothers Ancunín make a charmingly dysfunctional team. Victrios muddles dates and appointments; Astarion habitually insults their clientele. They squabble viciously, make up, squabble again, then turn out an impressive new wedding gown for Lord Dillard Portyr’s niece.

It’s nice to see Astarion so busy. Adorable, actually.

Every now and then, Astarion will bring a bit of his work back home for Wyll to peruse: sketches of gowns with huge crinoline skirts, swatches of cambric linen, a pattern for a double-breasted jacket. Astarion demands that Wyll submit himself to having his measurements taken for a new suit and cape, which he is to wear at his ducal accession ceremony. Wyll acquiesces gladly.

Life goes on and on and on.

The accession ceremony comes and goes with all the pomp and grandeur you might expect. Wyll recites his lines, the gentry clap; wine, speeches, and dancing soon follow. Ulder Ravengard attends in full military dress, his posture ramrod, arms folded behind his back. His outsized presence seems to suck all of the oxygen out of the room.

“The Pride of the Gate,” he says, pressing a glass of brandy into Wyll’s hand. Wyll’s heart rears up like a spooked horse. “My son. How does it feel, to wear the mantle of high command? To stand precisely where you deserve to be?”

Terrifying , Wyll thinks, sweating hard in his brocade jacket. Exhausting.

Out loud, he says, “Humbling.”

He knocks back a polite draft of his brandy. It tastes potently of furniture polish.

Ulder smiles, tight, brief. His eyes, dark as pine tar, rove the ballroom distractedly. Every so often, his gaze lands somewhere in the vicinity of Wyll’s face — then swerves away, as if in pain. A hand jerking away from an open flame.

“You — will do well as Grand Duke,” he says, his tone brittle. “You are a more political creature than you realize.”

Wyll can’t help but laugh at that. “With all due respect, father, I’m not entirely sure if I should take that as a compliment.”

“I intended it as one,” Ulder says, but he has the good sense to at least look embarrassed. “Perhaps my words were ill-chosen.”

“I was only making light. I know you don’t mean ill.”

Ulder sips his brandy. If he finds the taste at all objectionable, it does not show.

“I built my career on action,” he says, “not words. Not — politicking, a passtime I only engaged in with ultimate disdain. I prided myself on my ability to cut to the heart of things, to dispense with the double-talk and do what needed to be done.” His lips thin. “I see a kernel of that same nature in you. You have no love of intrigues, and you do not rejoice in deception. And yet, you keenly know the power of words, and you do not shy from that power. I first saw it before we encountered the Netherbrain — how you addressed the soldiers gathered in your name. How you lent them your courage. When you speak, you inspire men to do better. To be better.”

“I —” Wyll feels himself flush, surprised. “Is that so?”

“It is,” Ulder says, studying his glass.

Silence, for a spell. Wyll looks out over the crowd. The band playing, the flowers hanging from the rafters. Waiters weaving from table to table with the elegiac grace of trained dancers.

“For too long, this city has been shepherded by strongmen,” Ulder says at last, awkward, as though handing over a gift and unsure of how well it will be received. “I place Gortash in this category, of course… but myself, as well. You will be a Duke of another make entirely.”

“More naive, you mean.”

“More patient. More compassionate.”

Wyll’s lips twitch, sheepish. “Astarion says my soft-heartedness will be the death of me.”

“It very well may be,” Ulder admits helplessly. His eyes flicker towards Wyll, then away again. Eyes which seem to contain a kingdom. “Still, I think we both know full well that soft-heartedness is something worth protecting.”

At home, they hang drapes. They lay down carpets. Their closet fills up with beautiful, beautiful suits.

Astarion prevents an assassination or two, which is lovely of him. Wyll, for his part, signs off on the demolition of the Szarr Palace.

“I was hoping the city might build a university there in the next five to ten years,” Wyll says carefully, bedsheets ruffling against his calves, cat gnawing faintly at his heel. “What do you think?”

Shoving his feet into his slippers, Astarion says, “Why should I care?”

“I —” Wyll worries at his lower lip with his teeth, considering his words carefully. “No reason at all, I suppose.”

“Precisely,” Astarion says. Then, turning his eyes upon Nemesia, he says, “Mimi. Would you please cease chewing on my lover.”

“It doesn’t hurt,” Wyll offers, flexing his ankle.

“That’s not the point.”

“Isn’t it?”

Life goes on and on and on, spinning out towards impossible outcomes.

They fight. They fuck. They reconcile. Astarion picks out a chandelier; Wyll plans a garden. They cry together. They discuss the weather. The sun. The sleet.

There are nights where Wyll wakes drenched in his own sweat, his pulse pounding, a devil’s laughter swimming in his mind. Panic grips him, oily and hot — the last traces of a dream, clinging stubbornly, like dabs of a strong perfume — but then he feels Astarion’s hands moving over his face, careful and cool, tracing the ligature of his scars. Feels Astarion’s breath tickling the shell of his ear.

“Only dreams,” he says. “Only dreams, my darling.”

The seasons change. They do dinner with Victrios. Karlach writes. Gale drops by with a bottle of wine. So does Halsin, telling stories of a healing Reithwin — and offering unsubtle, unsolicited advice on the topic of lovemaking. Shadowheart visits several times, albeit less out of affection for Wyll and more for Nemesia, who loves her immediately and uncomplicatedly.

Scritching the underside of Nemesia’s chin, Shadowheart says, “How are you lovebirds getting on? Still have wedding bells ringing in your head?”

“Ask me next year,” Wyll laughs, ducking his head.

They buy ribbons.

They buy handcuffs.

They repel ghosts.

The bedroom is lit by the soft glow of the oil lamp, the flame flickering faintly. Astarion leans against the windowsill, body hunched over the spread of his hands. 

“When we first met,” he says, “I thought you a bleeding-heart fool. A handsome fool, certainly — but a fool nonetheless. Doltish, weak-minded, easily manipulated.”

Seated across the room in his chair, Wyll says, “Implying you no longer think of me as such?”

“Well, I definitely still think you handsome,” Astarion says. “And you are most certainly a bleeding-heart — that part was never in question. Beyond that, I’m quite pleased to report I was proven wrong.”

Wyll kicks his feet up, studying the slope of Astarion’s back.

“When we first met,” he says, “I thought you cruel caprice incarnate.”

“Cruel caprice incarnate?” Astarion turns to face Wyll, wryly pleased. “Well, that sounds very attractive.”

“It was attractive,” Wyll agrees ruefully. “I was very attracted to you.”

“In spite of my cruelty, or because of it?

“You know, I’m not entirely sure,” Wyll says, thoughtful. “On the one hand, I have never been charmed by bloodthirstiness. On the other… I think that even back then, I was harbouring inchoate fantasies of bringing you to heel.”

“You liked the thought of disciplining me,” Astarion grins, rocking back on the heels of his hands. “Punishing me for my wicked, wicked ways.”

“Something to that effect,” Wyll says, wan. “I’ve always been a vanquisher of the unrighteous. Perhaps I should’ve anticipated that the impulse would inevitably invade my sex life.”

Astarion laughs with genuine delight.

“I activate your mean streak,” he says, relishing each word. “It’s true, isn’t it?”

“You activate a lot of things in me,” Wyll hedges.

“I could say the same.”

“I… suppose you could, yes.”

Astarion slips across the room, taking the chair across from Wyll’s. His eyes contain a stunning quantity of light; his long, straight legs are posed with an intentionally droll affect. Wyll surveys him with tender curiosity.

“I like your mean streak quite a bit,” Astarion says. “On select occasions. Gods. Do you remember that night you pinned me to your desk —?”

A flush crawls up Wyll’s neck. Equal parts aroused and aghast, he lifts a hand to cover his face. How could he possibly forget? He'd have to be dead to forget.

“I went too far that night,” he says very quickly. “The bruises —”

“Do you think me some helpless, battered victim? How quickly the mind acts to confabulate,” Astarion says, rolling his eyes. “I asked for it. I insisted upon it. I liked it. Bruises included.”

“I — I liked it too,” Wyll admits. He scrubs his hand over his face, hard. “In the moment, it always feels so right, so natural — I get completely carried away. It’s only in the aftermath that I truly feel the weight of my actions, the shock of it all. All at once, I can’t help but wonder if there’s something terribly, terribly wrong with me. I want to be a good man, and a good partner. Not some — some sadist —”

“Wyll, my dear,” Astarion says, his voice level, “I am something of an expert in sadism. I have been subjected to all types, all strains, all varieties; I have had many, many year to taxonomize their relative nuances, from the psychopathic to the benign. So, I hope you will trust my verdict.” He leans forwards in his seat, intent. “You are not a true sadist.”

An involuntary breath of laughter escapes Wyll. “No?”

“No,” Astarion says firmly. “For one, a true sadist doesn’t worry that he is a sadist. He is completely and utterly without shame, and he makes no effort to compromise between his perverse desires and his victim’s comfort.”

It’s not at all difficult to deduce which sadist, exactly, Astarion is referring to — Cazador — and yet it's Mizora's face that instantaneously springs to mind. Her cold, laughing eyes. The keen shred of her claws. The fall of her hair. Wyll shifts in his seat, disquieted.

Astarion knows what Mizora took from him. But he's not sure Astarion knows how she took it: expertly, assiduously, mercilessly. At the thought, his fills his mouth with the filthy tang of brimstone ash.

“Your comfort is important to me,” Wyll says at last, willing himself into the present.

“I know.”

“And your pleasure,” Wyll hastens to add, face growing ever hotter, “is everything.”

“I know,” Astarion says again, with a touch of wry fondness. “You’re a good man, and a good partner. In fact, if I had to provide an exact estimate, I’d say your love for me is ninety-eight percent pure and wholesome.”

“That remaining two percent has, erm, sent some pretty alarming shockwaves through my libido,” Wyll says, self-conscious. “Back when we first met, I never imagined I would, you know… find myself trussing you up and calling you names.”

“And I never once imagined that we might venture into mutual domesticity,” Astarion says. “How far we’ve come.”

A short, spectacular silence.

“I love it when you kneel before me,” Wyll confesses in a heady rush. Not quite able to help the acquisitive sound in his voice. Astarion cocks his head.

“How does it make you feel?”

“Strong,” Wyll says. “Adored. Worthy.”

Astarion smiles, ludic and oblique. “No man is worthier.”

Hard to breathe around those words. Wyll casts his gaze aside. “You flatter me.”

“Not at all. I can't imagine another man in this world I would gladly yield to.”

If such a man existed, Wyll thinks with a stab of proprietary hunger, I don’t know what I’d do. I would not be myself.

“What about you?” he asks, jerking his chin towards Astarion. “How does it feel? When you kneel for me?”

Astarion drums his fingers against the arms of his chair.

“Safe,” he says at last. “I feel safe.”

Astarion looks to Wyll, a question in his eyes. The gravity between them seems to intensify, an invisible thread pulling taut. Wordlessly, Wyll nods.

Astarion slips out of his seat, takes two paces towards Wyll. Slowly, inexorably, he sinks down to the ground. His knees hit the woolen carpet. He bows his head, upsetting the tumble of his curls.

At times like these, it truly staggers Wyll to think that men and women once paid this, this level of access. Astarion’s body seems almost infinitely dear — how could any amount of money make it available? Surely, no price would ever be sufficient. Surely, he was worth a kingdom.

“My star,” Wyll says. Heat curls through his voice, like smoke. “Sweet as can be.”

Astarion presses his cheek to Wyll’s knee. He sighs — a sound of profound relief, as though a heavy burden has been lifted from his shoulders.

“This,” Astarion says, “always calms me down.”

“Does it?”

“Mm.”

Smiling, Wyll cards a hand through his hair.

“Do you want your collar?”

Astarion nods, mute.

“Stay put just one moment,” Wyll says.

He stands, steps around Astarion, and heads for the bedside table.

The collar is of simple make. No bells, no bows — just buttery black leather and a cold metal clasp. Wyll retrieves it from the drawer, then pads back to his chair. Still down on his knees, Astarion holds himself very still, his eyes downturned. Trying to be good.

“Chin up, star,” he says, returning to his seat. Astarion complies instantaneously. Wyll winds the collar around the back of Astarion’s neck, then secures the clasp. It locks snugly against his throat.

Wyll runs the pad of his thumb over Astarion’s trachea, intoxicated by the dividing line between thin, delicate flesh and tough, unyielding leather. How fine, how fair. How perfect. The apple of Astarion’s throat bobs and jumps, the collar shifting minutely with each breath and each swallow. Mine all mine all mine.

“Gorgeous,” Wyll says, releasing the collar and sitting back.

Bereft, Astarion whines. His eyes are huge and black, almost entirely pupil.

“My lord,” he says softly, beseechingly. Wyll’s smile widens.

“I believe that this is the part where you take off all your clothes, pet,” he says, light. “Go on.”

Without hesitation, Astarion’s fingers jump to the collar of his shirt. He unsnaps each button, peels the garment from his shoulders. Trousers follow. Underthings. Garters. Socks. His movements are economical, brisk; he does not make a show of himself. He knows what his master likes.

“Be sure to fold your things nicely,” Wyll says. He stretches towards the carafe and pours himself a glass of water. “I paid good money for all those pretty clothes. I expect you to take good care of them.”

“Yes, sir.” 

Astarion moves to comply. Sipping slowly, Wyll surveys his naked body.

“I should keep you like this all the time,” he muses.

“Naked and collared?” Astarion laughs breathlessly, folding his shirt over his bare thighs.

“Precisely that.”

“I think the servants might be scandalized.”

“They’d adjust,” Wyll shrugs. “It’d be a pleasure to come home from a long day at work to find you ready for me, bent and bridled. Plugged up, I think, to keep you nice and loose.”

Astarion shudders visibly.

“You know —” he says, halting, sliding the neat stack of clothing aside. “You know already that I’m your personal whore.”

Wyll grins.

“I know it,” he says, simple. “Though I don’t imagine I’ll ever tire of hearing you say it.”

Astarion tilts his head. Blinks at Wyll through coal-coloured lashes.

With a voice like cut velvet, he says, “I’m your whore.” 

Wyll’s cock throbs.

“Again.”

“I’m your whore,” Astarion says, pressing forwards, nuzzling adoringly against the musculature of Wyll’s inner thigh. “I’m your whore.”

Wordlessly, Wyll extends his leg towards Astarion. The gesture requires no interpretation. Without any hesitation, Astarion immediately spreads his palms out over the carpet and lowers himself to kiss the toe of Wyll’s boot. Then the ankle, then the calf, his lips trailing up the length of Wyll’s leg with a reverence that teeters towards religiosity. “I’m your whore,” he says, blurried, lost. He mouths adoringly at the leather. “I’m yours, all yours.”

“Get up,” Wyll says, his heel making contact with Astarion’s shoulder, shoving him back into an inelegant sprawl. “Hands up on the wall, right now.”

Wide-eyed, wild, Astarion pushes himself to his feet. His cock hangs flushed between his legs, pinked and precious, half-mast; his hair rumpled, his eyes glassed. He takes three steady paces towards the wall, then lifts his hands to rest on the plaster. Still seated, Wyll takes another sip of water.

The view is an excellent one, so he takes his time in admiring it: the pert swell of Astarion’s ass, his long, rangy limbs, the bow of his spine. Inevitably, Wyll’s eyes land on Astarion’s scars — that complexity of precise, surgical incisions, raised red against pale flesh.

Wyll supposes he should hate them. He certainly hates the cruelty that produced them. And yet, those scars form part of the man he loves; they’re proof positive of his survivorship. He wants to touch them, trace them, caress them, cover them. A contradiction, surely, but their love lives inside contradictions. Tenderness and viciousness, nearness and absence. Pleasure and pain.

“Are you —” Astarion shivers, fingers flexing. “Are you just going to leave me waiting here?”

“Maybe,” Wyll says, setting his glass aside.

“Please,” Astarion says. “My lord, please. Come here and touch me.”

“Eventually,” Wyll says, tilting his chin against his fist.

Astarion squirms, tries again, “I want you.”

“Tough luck,” Wyll says. “Whores don’t get to decide. Be grateful I don’t have you standing up against the window for all to see.”

Wyll shrugs off his jacket, tosses it aside. He undoes the topmost buttons of his shirt, his trousers. Ahead, Astarion’s bare legs tremble faintly. His toes curl into the thick weave of the carpet.

Every time he looks at the black band of Astarion’s collar, a maw seems to widen in his chest. He wants to decimate Astarion. He wants to plant his flag upon the smoking ruins of him. He wants Astarion to ache in the shape of his name: four brisk letters, neat-as-you-like.

Furtive, Astarion pulls one hand off of the wall and brings it between his legs. Wyll frowns.

“I don’t recall giving you permission to touch yourself,” he says.

Instantaneously, the hand jumps back up to rejoin the other. Unappeased, Wyll rises to his feet. He advances on Astarion, moving with deliberate slowness, knowing Astarion will be counting each footfall as Wyll charts his course towards him.

“I suppose you meant it,” Wyll says, level, spreading the palm of his hand over the curve of Astarion’s bare hip, “when you said you liked my mean streak. You’re a glutton for punishment, aren’t you?”

Astarion angles his face towards Wyll, and for a long, glittering moment, they lock eyes. Then Astarion dips his chin into a nod.

Wyll yanks his hand back, then cracks it across Astarion’s backside in a barehanded slap. It’s a superficial blow, of the type typically used in the punishment of juveniles. Still, Astarion gasps at the moment of impact, more out of surprise than any genuine pain.

“Master!”

There’s something inexplicably delicious in that cry. It’s — nourishing, somehow. A meal on an empty stomach. Hard sleep after a day’s exhaustion. Wyll strikes him again. And again. Astarion sucks in jagged breaths. On the fourth strike, he buckles against the wall, resting heavily on his forearms. He might be crying. Wyll hopes that he is.

High and pathetic, obedient, senseless, he calls out: “Master, please, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”

Seven strikes does it; the specter is sated. Wyll pulls back, smoothes his left hand over Astarion’s ass, now visibly pinked and slightly warm to the touch. With his right, he hooks two fingers beneath Astarion’s collar, pulling it tight against Astarion’s larynx, so Astarion that will be reminded of its presence — its power — its promise.

Rough with desire, Wyll asks him, “Are you going to behave?”

“Yes,” Astarion says thickly. “Yes, master, I promise, I promise I’ll be good. I’ll be such a good boy.”

“Spread your legs.”

Astarion obeys.

Wyll releases the collar, crosses the room to fetch a vial of oil.

He’s always liked this part, the anticipation that precedes the act. He likes slicking his fingers, likes watching Astarion tense at the sound. He likes teasing at the entrance of Astarion’s body. He likes sliding his thumb in to the first knuckle, and then retreating — softing over the fine, sensitive flesh of Astarion’s perineum. He likes watching Astarion, enjoys qualifying his reactions; the twitching of his cock, the tightening of his nipples, the pull of his brows, his strained look of pleasure. Wyll’s index and middle finger sink deep inside Astarion, sucked into the clutch of his body. As they bottom out, Astarion scratches at the wall. He moans, small and hiccuping and precious, when Wyll twists up towards his prostate.

“I’m your whore,” he says, a mantra, an orison. Then, with a wild, glitzing greed no true bedservant would ever dare, he says, “Make me scream.”

Wyll takes himself in hand, presses the blunt head of his cock to Astarion's opening. He thrusts in. 

Truth be told, there’s no elegance in this — what they’re doing, in what they are: a crush of bodies, all hungry mouths and gnashing teeth, grappling, rutting, writhing. But there’s a beauty in it all the same, somehow. In the tang of their sweat, in the hot stick of slick thighs, in the totality of their trust. Wyll could close his eyes and know Astarion entirely, faultlessly. (But he does not.)

Wyll bites Astarion’s shoulder, layers himself over his scarred back, fucks him hard into the wall; Astarion reaches back, grabs him by the horn, twists it in his grip. It hurts. It’s good. Astarion’s freezing. Wyll’s blood is boiling. He slams his cock deep inside Astarion, fucking him to the hilt, to the base. It’s too much. It’s not enough. It’s everything. It shunts him from himself.

To Wyll’s eternal credit, he does make Astarion scream. It’s a fascinating thing — not a scream of pain, or overwhelm, or even outright pleasure — but triumph. A scream that lives in the same airspace as laughter.

It takes Wyll a moment, but he recognizes it: it’s the sound of getting exactly what you want, the way you want it, when you want it.

In the aftermath, they lie heaped on the floor, limbs all in tangles. Their bed is only a few paces away — but the floor is simply a nice place to be. They’re like felled trees. They're coiled like kudzu. Who can say where the one ends and the other begins? 

Not Wyll.

“I ache all over,” Astarion complains. Then, At Wyll’s expression of faint alarm, he lifts a hand. “Don’t you dare apologize.”

Wyll swallows a smile. “That obvious?”

“Painfully so,” Astarion says, his eyes sliding shut. His bare legs twitch against Wyll’s.

“I am what I am."

Careful, he reaches around and unlatches the collar. Astarion pulls it off of his throat in a single motion, tossing it aside as one might toss a soiled shirt. It clatters across the room, forgotten.

“Wyll Ravengard,” Astarion says. His tone is sly, conspiratorial.

“Mm?”

"Wyll Ravengard," Astarion says again. When he opens his eyes, they're shockingly lucid. "Wyll Ravengard, Wyll Ravengard. Lovely Wyll Ravengard."

Boyish, Wyll grins. "Can I help you?"

With an animal insistence, Astarion presses against Wyll, knocking their foreheads together. 

"I’d hate to live without you."

"Ah. Is that so?"

“Yes,” Astarion says. “It’s rather dire.” A muscle in his cheek seems to twitch. “So. Marry me?”

For a long pulse, ambery and immortal, Wyll can do nothing but stare. Astarion breathes slowly, in syncopation with Wyll. Nostrils flaring slowly, placidly, with the inhalation of entirely unrequisite oxygen.

The amber fissures, splinters. Wyll he rolls over. He pushes his face into the carpet, and he dissolves into helpless, easy laughter.

Chapter Text

| one year later |

There is no mystery about this creature — he is a man. He sleeps on his back, one arm thrown up above his head. His large, dark horns press into the mattress. His eyelids twitch. His nightshirt rides up over his belly, exposing a band of jagged scar tissue.

His name is Wyll-with-a-Y, and he’s Astarion’s do-gooder husband.

From the other side of the mattress, Astarion studies him. His gaze is covetous, expert; a jeweler gazing through a loupe. 

Wyll must be dreaming, he thinks. As an elf, he himself has never once experienced a dream in the true sense, but Wyll has taken the time to explain them to him: a hallucinogenic collage of memories, hopes, humiliations, and left-field erotic nonsense. The whole business sounds quite outlandish, really, and Astarion does not count himself even slightly jealous.

It’s the utter unpredictability of dreaming that astonishes Astarion most of all. Sometimes, Wyll wakes roused and restless; sometimes, he wakes smiling. Occasionally, he wakes up weeping — a terrible sight which never fails to wrench Astarion from himself. (Wyll hardly ever cries.)

For now, at any rate, Wyll seems peaceful. His face is unlined. His breathing is regular. If he is dreaming, as Astarion suspects, he hopes it is a good dream.

Hours before dawn. The strangeness of moonlight. Their bedroom, a study in chiaroscuro. Astarion presses his head against Wyll’s chest, listens to the tireless thump-thump-thump of his heart. One beat, then another. Then another. How many left in the whole of his life? Too few, undoubtedly.

Beneath the scarspun casing of his skin, Wyll’s blood circulates. The warmth of his body lifts the scent into the air; blackberry liqueur, blackberry wine, a sweetness that defies belief.

Every so often, Wyll shifts in his sleep, and Astarion thinks him waking. But then he nestles back down, hooks his ankle against Astarion’s, and falls still once more. His soft, slumbery breaths seem to possess the quality of pleasurable sighs — or is that just wishful thinking?

Would that Astarion could rid the world of everything — anything — with the power to hurt this man, this blameless creature. Would that he could burn it all down.

(But he’d have to burn Wyll himself. And then himself, last of all. A witch on a self-made pyre.)

So soft as to be nearly inaudible, Astarion presses a his lips against Wyll’s skin, and he speaks: “I owe you a debt that can never be repaid, you know. I’m vexed, Wyll. Properly vexed. You could stand to be a little less lovely, don’t you think?”

Beyond their bedroom window, a crow whimpers. Poplars bend beneath the breeze. A dog slavers. A dog gnashes. A dog whines. Hunger is his teacher, his master, his priest.

 Wyll sleeps and sleeps and sleeps, and dreams.

Morning comes. The blinds are drawn, the fire is lit; Astarion drapes himself across Wyll’s back and kisses his cheek. He can feel the sandpaper rasp of Wyll’s stubble where his beard is coming in, can taste the salty tang of his sweat. Does sleep has a scent? If it does, then that’s what he smells of. Stale, malty, honest sleep.

Wyll hums, drags a hand across his face. His expression is heavy, faraway. Dreaming, waking — where does one end and the other begin? Astarion would like to know.

Soon, there will be coffee. Soon, there will be clean socks. Soon, there will be sausage, and fried eggs, and seeded toast spattered with butter. Soon, Wyll will rise to wash and dress himself and put his wedding band on — and somewhere in the process, he will transform himself into the Grand Duke of Baldur’s Gate, the Pride of the Coast. He’ll read his correspondence at the kitchen table, cat lovingly twined around his calf. He’ll laugh when Astarion makes a vulgar joke at an old viscountess’ expense. He’ll excuse himself at the sound of the carriage pulling up. He’ll entomb himself in his office. There, nobles will line up to kiss his ring — or slit his throat. Depends on the day, really.

But before all that, before Wyll can do anything so tedious as say good morning — or worse, I love you — Astarion grasps his prey, and he says, “Buy me silks. Buy me diamonds. Buy me castles.”

Wyll snuffles, wipes the grit from his eyes.

 Dopey with sleep, he asks, “How many?”

Jump, Astarion imagines saying. And in the privacy of his mind, Wyll’s doe-eyed reply: How high?

Ever the obedient son.

Ever the mark.

They throw a party for their one-year anniversary. It’s a fine soiree, one worthy of the Duke’s household: fine wine, smartly-dressed waiters, a full band. Ulder attends, kicked-dog tentative, and offers Astarion a cold and pitiful genuflection at kindness. Gale drinks far too much and attempts to kidnap the cat. Lae’zel feigns at being above at all. (Astarion knows that particular song and dance all too well.)

After two hours of dazzling upon the dance floor, Wyll makes his excuses and disappears out onto the balcony.

Astarion follows.

He finds Wyll leaned up against the railing, smoking a cigar. He’s ditched his cravat, ditched his surcoat; the topmost buttons of his shirt are undone, exposing the firm angulation of the collarbone beneath. His gaze trawls across the city he all but own.

“There’s a rare sight,” Astarion comments idly, kicking the door shut. 

Wyll likes to smoke, but — surprise, surprise — isn’t particularly generous with himself. He reserves this indulgence for special occasions only. Astarion is of two minds about this. On the one hand, he would absolutely hate it if their home reeked of secondhand smoke, the way low-dollars brothels so often do. On the other hand, the sight is admittedly attractive. Wyll exhales a whistlestream of smoke, and the effect is undeniably dashing.

“Karlach brought me a sleeve of cigars. An anniversary gift,” Wyll elaborates. “I’d hate for them to go to waste. In Avernus, these things are worth their weight in souls.” 

“Smoking’s a dirty habit, darling.”

“Oh, unquestionably,” Wyll agrees freely, bringing his cigar to his lips for a drag. “But everyone needs a vice.”

“Even the Blade of Frontiers?”

“Aye,” Wyll says, and he smiles, all boyish daring-do. “Think I might have a few, in fact.”

Astarion moves a half-pace closer, his steps mincing. Even now, there is a thrill and a danger in approaching him, as though anything could happen.

“You look like quite the rake, you know,” he says. “Jacket abandoned, shirt all askew, cigar hanging off your lips…”

“Well, you look tricksterish,” Wyll says, conspiratorial, tapping the ash off his cigar. “Like a coyote. Have you ever heard a coyote laugh?”

“I have not.”

“You look like the physical incarnation of that laugh,” Wyll says. He brings his cigar to his lush mouth, hollows his cheeks, regards Astarion with a look of deep relish.

“I’ll take that as a compliment, I think,” Astarion says.

“You can take it,” Wyll tells him, “however you like.”

Exhale. Wyll turns against the railing, one calf crossed over the other. His expression is plaintive, now. Curious. 

“A year already,” he says. “Seems like only yesterday I stood across from you on the altar, promises of forever lodged in my throat. Gods, I thought my heart would burst in my chest.”

He extends the cigar in Astarion’s direction, an invitation. Astarion hums lightly, and plucks it from Wyll’s fingers.

“I remember it well,” he says, a touch of a tease in it. “There were tears in your eyes, you great big sap.”

“Ah, how could I be anything but overcome?” Wyll grins. “It was the the culmination of all my boyhood dreams.”

Astarion chances at a lungful of smoke. It blows inside of him in a hot, dark, gust. The taste is strange upon his tongue, almost acrid. He doesn’t hate it, but he doesn’t much like it, either. Smoke trailing from his nostrils, he returns the cigar to Wyll, who seems glad to have it.

“The culmination of all mine too, if Victrios can be believed,” Astarion says, taking his place at Wyll’s side. Their shoulders knock together. “He insists that I ran about — all of eleven, mind you, and bandy-legged as a fawn — announcing to all that I would someday marry a prince.”

“A prince, huh?” Wyll’s smile turns sly. “I’m afraid to say I don’t quite fit the bill. I should hope a Grand Duke suffices?”

“Hm,” Astarion says. He renews the intensity of his gaze, feigns at an imperious criticality. “Admittedly, you don’t exactly have a crown, or a golden palace, or even a white horse. That said, you have something even better.”

“What’s that?”

“A tongue like honey,” Astarion says. Then, edging in close, he drops his voice and says, “And a great big cock.”

At that, Wyll startles into a scandalized laugh.

“Careful, star. Anyone could hear us out here.”

“Let them. This is our party.”

Wyll leans in nearer, presses two fingers to the high neck of Astarion’s jacket. The world tilts; Astarion freezes.

Low and delicious, Wyll asks, “Did you wear it tonight? Like I asked?”

It’s a cruel question — and an unnecessary one, at that. Wyll can feel the collar, Astarion is sure of it. Even as he speaks, Wyll’s deft, patient fingers locates the metal buckle at its center, hiding beneath the silken armor of Astarion’s bespoke suit. Astarion swallows. He nods, tight.

“Good boy,” Wyll says, bringing his cigar to his lips. Gods, it’s — stupid, really, how hard those words hit with Astarion. A spike of base, ugly yearning lances through him. “How do you feel?”

“I —” Astarion wet his lips with his tongue. “I have to make an effort to keep myself from floating away, you know, each time I feel it tugging at my throat. It’s absolutely maddening.”

Wyll’s smile changes, takes on the quality of a leer.

“That’s exactly what I was hoping for.”

“You are a demon, sometimes,” Astarion says, wrenching himself away. He readjusts the neck of his jacket, paranoid that the collar might somehow show through the fabric. “A prince, and a rake, and a demon. I have married a walking contradiction.”

“As have I,” Wyll says. He takes his cigar back up, smokes thoughtfully. “As soon as the last of our guests leave, meet me upstairs. I’ll see you rewarded for your obedience. Doesn’t that sound nice?”

Instant headrush. Astarion thins his lips, nods dizzily.

“It — does,” he admits, haltingly. Stupidly.

“We’ll have a lovely time, just you wait,” Wyll says, somehow ominous, even though his tone remains impeccably affable. He stubs his cigar out on the rail, pushes himself upright. “Speaking of our guests, I should really see to them. Make sure Halsin isn’t gnawing on the carpets in bear form, you know. These things do tend to happen once he gets into the brandy.” He flicks the cigar butt aside, turns his eye on Astarion. “But I before I go, one last thing?”

“What?”

“Kiss my boot.”

“But —” Astarion sucks at his teeth, stomach flipping.

Wyll takes a half-step forward, extending the line of his leg in Astarion’s direction. Astarion’s gaze drops. Wyll’s boots are, it should be said, of exceedingly handsome make: buckskin leather, smooth as butter, glossy with a recent polish.

“Go on,” Wyll says. Hands in his pockets. Smile playing across his face. Easy as Sunday morning. “It’s bad form to keep a Grand Duke waiting, you know.”

Astarion wants to punch him in the mouth.

Astarion wants to swear fealty eternal.

“Motherfucker,” he manages to say, his mouth filling with saliva.

“You love it.”

“You love the sound of your own voice,” Astarion seethes. Slowly, mulishly, he gets down on his hands and his knees. “You love getting your own way.”

All glittering malice, Astarion crawls towards his master. Wyll’s good eye goes dark as he watches.

Quiet, he says, “I don’t think I’m the one getting his way."

A salient point, really. Incisive. Direct. Truthful. Astarion elects to ignore it all the same.

“Wicked man,” he says instead, nuzzling up against the curve of Wyll’s calf. “I hate you.” He presses a kiss to the hollow of Wyll’s knee. “You confound me.” A kiss at the slope of his femur. A kiss upon a shining buckle. As Astarion dips his head, the leather collar flexes against the flesh of his throat. It’s too tight. It hurts. “I love you.” A kiss at the ankle, at the tip of the toe. “I love you. I love you. I need you terribly. I — ”

Astarion’s voice breaks off, breath fanning coolly against the sacred ground of Wyll’s heel. 

Maybe it’s ridiculous, and maybe it’s wretched, and maybe it’s madness, but — gods, each and every time he gets down on his knees for this man, it feels like coming home.

Lips parted in willing surrender, he says, “You are my everything.”

“And you,” Wyll says, “are mine.”

He steps around his husband, pushes through the door, and rejoins the party. From down on his hands and knees, Astarion watches him go. Alone, bereft. Collared, kept. Halfway to madness.

Astarion runs his tongue over his teeth. He tastes himself: leather, iron, smoke, spit.

If he loved Wyll any harder, he might die of it.

Jump, Astarion imagines Wyll saying.

In the privacy of his own mind, Astarion replies: How high?

Astarion peels off his jacket, sits on their bed. He massages his throat, groping at the shape of the leather collar. It’ll leave a mark when it comes off.

He supposes he could take it off now, before Wyll even steps in the room, but that would feel faintly criminal. So he leaves it be. 

The clock ticks. A crow scuds in the yard. Astarion drops his hands into his lap, stares at them. They’re cold, attenuated, stark white. His nails — which he massages nightly with cuticle oil — are clean, strong and well-kept. His wedding band glistens.

Once, Cazador broke his fingers one by one, metacarpal by metacarpal, and then had him play the harp. But that was a thousand lifetimes ago. Or was it only yesterday? Difficult to say, really.

Astarion takes his wedding band off, then twists it back on. Takes it off, twists it on. He lies back against the satiny bedspread, stares up at the ceiling. 

He thinks of all the wicked ways his prince has taken him. He’s been mounted atop the Grand Duke’s desk, left to stumble back home with Wyll’s seed still dripping down his thigh. He’s been eaten out for hours. He’s been edged to the point of incoherency. He’s been fingerfucked at high-society functions, made to suck cock while bound and blindfolded, squeezed into corsets, drugged, choked, shoved, spat on, railed so hard his stomach churned. He’s been a hooker, a pet, a servant, a housewife, a one-night stand. A virgin.

A lover.

He thinks of Wyll’s cock inside him, the first, frictive burn of the stretch, the pressure in his pelvis. Wyll’s hand on Astarion’s lower belly, mapping out the faint distention. Something like awe in his voice: I can feel myself inside you. Shit.

I feel like I could really get you pregnant.

Astarion’s cock twitches in his trousers, but he won’t touch himself. Not yet.

He waited two centuries for Wyll. He can stand to wait a little longer.

He lies there, getting all wet, and fiddles with his wedding ring. It’s no less obscene than the collar, really — a shockingly public statement of ownership, of propriety. I am the Grand Duke’s kept thing. That must be why it chafes. Incidentally, it may also be why he loves it so.

The party is over, and the guests have long since piled out. Still, Astarion can hear the muffled sounds of activity from the floor below: the servants, working overtime to sweep away all proof of the night’s festivities. Wyll himself is surely somewhere amongst them, flailing to make himself helpful. Probably helping the kitchen boys wash the dishes. That silly, silly man.

Astarion closes his eyes and smiles.

Minutes pass. He hears Wyll before he sees him; footfalls waltzing through the hallway, humming a tune to himself. A sonata.

Astarion cracks an eye open, watches Wyll pad into the room, moving towards their bed. There’s warmth in his gaze, in his bearings. Warmth in everything he does, really. Such is his nature.

“You’re late,” Astarion drawls.

“The maids needed help moving the dining room table,” Wyll says sheepishly, as though that’s a remotely appropriate explanation for a Grand Duke. Astarion harrumphs, scoots towards the edge of the bed.

“Damn the maids,” he sniffs. “I want my reward. You said there would be a reward.” 

Wyll pretends to think about it. “I suppose I did say that, didn’t I?”

“You most certainly did,” Astarion insists haughtily. “I wore the collar all night, just like you asked. I didn’t take it off for a single moment. I think Halsin noticed, you know.”

Wyll cups Astarion’s knee in the palm of his hand. “I don’t think anyone noticed.”

“He did! I’m certain he did. He —” Astarion gropes eagerly, lamely, for evidence. “He winked at me.”

Wyll laughs a bit at that. 

“I don’t think anyone noticed,” he says again. A pause. “Why, do you wish that they had?”

“I...” Astarion opens his mouth, then closes it again. “I am not entirely certain, truth be told.” But he spreads his legs wider, pointedly, redirecting Wyll’s attention to the growing tent in his trousers. “I often think that if the world knew how utterly I am yours, they’d think me mad.”

“They’d think us both mad,” Wyll returns. His fingers move to unlace Astarion’s trousers. “I am yours, just as surely as you are mine.”

“Oh?”

“You’re my husband,” Wyll says, simple. “And even beyond that, you have immense power over me. Surely, you must know that.”

“Yes, well — that’s a different kind of power. It’s not the same.”

“Isn’t it?”

“You walk me on a leash, darling.”

“A leash can be pulled from both ends.”

Astarion rolls his eyes, shucking the shirt from his shoulders. “You say that, but only one of us seems to wind up bruised.”

“Not true,” Wyll says, hazy now, cuntstruck. “I have bruises in the shape of you on the very surface of my soul.”

“That’s a bit melodramatic, don’t you think?”

"You bring it out in me."

"I bring out quite a lot in you, I think."

"That's true," Wyll says as he continues to divest Astarion of his clothing. "There are... sides of me, I suppose, only you seem capable of accessing. I certainly didn't have access to them before I met you."

"That's because you fear them," Astarion murmurs. "And I don't."

There is quite enough to fear in this world, he thinks, without fearing one another. Or themselves.

Wyll's large, hot palms slide over the naked length of Astarion’s body. His flank, his chest, his thighs, his ass. His cock. Astarion bites his lips as Wyll's hand closes around his length. When Wyll touches him like this, he feels strangely small, strangely delicate — yet infinitely dear. He feels expensive.

"Wanna get you off," Wyll is saying, a calloused thumb rubbing at the underside of Astarion's tip, spreading the moisture there. “You were so good for me tonight. So, so good. Tell me what you need.”

“What I need?” Astarion tilts himself into Wyll’s arms, fucks his hips into his hand. “I get to choose?”

“It’s your reward, isn't it?”

With tender interest, Astarion reaches up and touches two fingers to his throat. The polished gold of his wedding band meets with his collar's steely buckle.

Furtive, sly, recklessly free, he says, “Kneel for me, Master.”

(Later, at the Atelier, when Astarion sighs, Victrios will click his tongue knowingly, pin up a bright swatch of velvet, and he will say, “That man of yours is quite the wolf."

 Astarion will laugh his coyote's laugh, grin a coyote's grin. Bare a coyote's teeth. He will lean in close, touch a hand to his chest. Toggle his brows.

He will say, “Darling, you don't know the half of it.")