Archive of Our Own ^beta

“Master,” Astarion says, and bows at the precipice marked by the doorway to one of Cazador’s reading rooms.

It is one that Cazador enjoys composing in. There is a foyer with plush crimson sofas, although he has only seen Cazador use them, and there is a desk with a collection of quills and crystal bottles of ink. There are several wooden boards leaned by the bookshelves, which he has not seen before. Stacks of books and piles of paper are strewn on the surface of the desk, although the center of the workspace is cleared out to lay a parchment out flat to dry. Astarion has knelt below that desk before, has kept company naked and shivering whilst Cazador marveled over dull and tastelessly macabre poetry, has serviced over that desk and has given himself with his back against the shelves. Whatever he is summoned for today, he will not enjoy it. But what choice does he have?

He walks in, and he is not yet close enough to read the contents on the parchment before Cazador rises, and Astarion has to lower his head in another half-bow as a greeting.

“I have had an evening of inspiration,” Cazador announces. “You will be my canvas.”

Phantom pain dances like a ghost along the mangled skin of Astarion’s back, a reminder of what those words had meant the last time he heard them uttered. His head snaps up in panic, his breaths suddenly too quick and shallow.

“Haven’t I been obedient?” he pleads.

Cazador smiles, and it makes Astarion want to drop to his knees, want to turn tail and run. There is nowhere to flee to. This palace is his home. Besides, the rules forbid him from leaving Cazador’s side unless he wills it.

“Not entirely, but it matters not.”

“What? When have I broken your inane wishes?” Cazador does not leave impertinences unpunished. “Somehow I seem to have forgotten any flayings happening lately.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Cazador says, a finger slipping through Astarion’s lips to trace the form of his pout. Astarion shudders and lets himself be silenced by the thumb pressing further in, against his tongue.

“Do you think I watch the rats skitter all day in my cupboards so that you are only fed those who have offended me? There is no body more beautiful to carry my vision than yours, and that is why you are here tonight. Already, you tremble so delicately, like a leaf in the last days of fall.”

His cold hand caresses Astarion’s cheek, trailing downwards and riding Astarion’s involuntary shaking. He presses at the scar he’d made, a ring of teeth marks, and Astarion bares his neck, resigned. His master’s touch shifts, almost seamlessly, from admiring Astarion’s body to undoing the laces at his collar and untucking his shirt. Astarion squirms, pleads as much as he can, but the hands on him are Cazador’s, who he does not dare pull back from.

“What are you going to do to me?”

Cazador’s eyes meet his in a glare.

“...master,” he adds quickly. “Apologies for the insolent tone, master, before my body is torn apart to your tastes.”

“Is it that you have not done enough wrong of late that which irritates you?” Cazador queries. “Should I have called this a punishment?”

“I’d appreciate your mercy far more than a change in design of the hilt of your whip.”

“Ha!” Cazador says, stripping away the last of Astarion’s underthings. Astarion numbly lifts his legs so that the clothes can be taken away. “I will do what I wish to my slaves. Now quit the whining and bring the wood over, boy.”

Cazador goes behind his writing desk and parts the thick drapes on the far wall with a flourish, revealing the floor-to-ceiling window behind. The waning crescent is just visible, some hours until dawn. Astarion hadn’t even known there was a window in this gods-forsaken palace that wasn’t boarded up. He supposes it adds legitimacy from the outside. He brings the hewn planks over.

Cazador makes him stand straight, facing the wall and with his arms outstretched, while two servants come in and measure and saw and build him some personalized structure of torture behind his back. He stares blankly at the empty wall, naked, and does not try to guess what it is for. It is easier to pretend this is another night where Cazador forces him to perform, and his mind has slipped away. Cazador drones nonsense by his side, comparing lizards to leaves, losses to sunlight and grief to sawed-off wings. Astarion does not listen. It is easier to dissociate than to participate, at least until the pain begins. Some of his siblings can dissociate during pain, he knows, but he has never been able to. His greatest weakness, and simultaneously Cazador’s favorite trait of his, alongside the supposedly melodious sound of his screams. He wishes they were situated higher in the palace, and the window was wide open, and no one would stop him from leaping from it. He wishes he had died decades ago.

“Dismissed,” Cazador says, behind him, after the noise of hammered-in nails fades.

Astarion turns around, and learns that it is a large wooden cross they have built and affixed to the window. His throat seizes, and he wonders how he will be bound to the structure.

“Stand with your back and arms flat against the wood.”

It is a command, so there is no conscious thought before Astarion’s body moves to fulfill it. He cannot move after he raises his arms to the ordered position, either. His head rests on the top of the vertical beam, his arms along the horizontal beam, and his feet on a small wooden step on the ground. He stares as Cazador hands all the detritus left from the construction apart for the box of nails to the retreating servants.

“This is a form of punishment I have read about from foreign lands,” Cazador says. “It is revered, for the child of their most beloved god died on it. It is so sacred that they have made it into the shape one must carve to stake through a vampyre. Do you think the punishment hurt less to a man blessed by the most righteous gods?”

“Either way, the gods would never bless me,” Astarion says, not entirely sure why he is trying to cut through Cazador’s prattle. His mouth runs faster than his mind when he is put in a position spread so vulnerable. “Is that what you’re reaching at?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. A vampire does not lose its soul until it has drank its master’s blood. There may still be innocence left in your soul.”

Astarion assumes he is making a joke.

“Will you wait until the sun forms a much-deserved pile of ash in front of me before you get on with it?” Astarion snaps.

“On the contrary, I intend to finish just as it rises,” Cazador says, and a whine of distress escapes Astarion before he can help it. His mind races to remember where the moon was right before he’d turned his back to the window—there is at least a quarter of the night left.

Then he is not able to think at all, as Cazador rests a nail at the crease between the bones of his forearm and begins to hammer it in. Pain erupts through him in waves, centered at his hand, every thunk of the hammer just like the blow of one of Godey’s bladed whips. Like when his fingernails were torn out for daring to scratch at his master, except instead of pieces of himself being taken away, it is an invasion bullying itself inside him by tearing through the nerves and tendons of his wrist. When the hammering stops, only the flat head of the nail rests past his skin and his hand is solidly affixed to the wood.

Through teary eyes, Astarion watches Cazador take out another nail, and they really are of a monstrously long length. He screams again as it is put in him. Two nails deep through each arm, and two more in his feet pin him to the pedestal. He is left pinned like a living display against a wall, slowly bleeding out.

“One last,” Cazador says, and Astarion almost feels relief, until he feels a sharp pressure against his cock, lifted up to his pelvis.

“No,” he pleads, his voice strangled.

“Please don’t,” but Cazador continues anyways.

He screams, and tries to thrash, but his body is as still as a statue, utterly unable to escape the pain as his fragile flesh is pierced through and through, and nailed in place above his groin.

“Why,” he whispers, when it is done. “What have I done to you?” Ao, Azuth, Bane, Ilmater, Lathander, he recites, slowly praying through the list. Mystra. Selune. Shar. It drones on.

No divine signs appear. None ever have.

Cazador retrieves several clear bottles of liquor, last drops of wine swirling in circles around the bottom of each bottle. It’s not the liquid Astarion wants. What little of his blood trickle sluggishly down the nail wounds, trailing down his naked form and staining the wood red.

Cazador takes his accursed hammer and begins to smash at each bottle. Astarion tries not to flinch with every explosion of glass shards. At least the bottles aren’t shattered against his skull, he supposes. Or elsewhere. He has been acquainted too familiarly, a few times, with the incisions caused by sharp glass shoved deep inside his rectal area. A raucous, drunk audience, their pleasure unsatisfied when he does not ride the bottles they shove in him with proper desperation, when it is late in the evening and his tired thighs are not energetic enough, not eager enough.

“I will make you beautiful,” Cazador says. The floor is littered in shattered glass. His voice is intense, hungry for Astarion’s pain.

Cazador takes out a knife, a familiar instrument. It wrenches more miserable whines from Astarion, as deep cuts are made along his arms.

“Please,” he repeats, mumbling, between every blinding streak of agony. “Please,” and “don’t,” and “please,” again.

Nothing stops the pain. Nothing he can do ever does.

Astarion drops his gaze, blinking past the tears, to see that Cazador has begun to embed the bits of glass in the incisions along his muscles. There’s nothing left in the world, Astarion thinks, but the incessant pulses of agony, increasing and increasing still, while dawn takes its sweet time to arrive.

Glass is stuffed in his arms, his legs, his stomach, and between his ribs. Wherever the glass fits, Astarion suffers.

His master seems satisfied with the result. When Astarion lifts pained eyes to meet his master’s gaze, he is smiling and satisfied. Nothing Astarion ever does leaves Cazador satisfied.

How could Cazador call this beautiful?

Astarion feels the compulsion to stand drop. The nails dig in and shred at his flesh as he suddenly hangs, listless, supported only by them. Sobbing, he forces his tortured legs to bear his weight again, to reduce the agonizing strain along his arms.

Barely able to stand in place, he hears Cazador speak again.

“I wish I could witness you shine. But this will have to do.”

Cazador’s fingers slip between his legs, and there is nothing Astarion can do except struggle to keep from collapsing. How long until dawn?

There is not a lot of space between his thighs, and the position is not likely to be comfortable, but when Cazador frees himself he is hard, and Astarion is here to provide. He whimpers as Cazador bullies inside him, every thrust making him lurch against the fixture, agony like another lash of the whip. Cazador drags his cock inside Astarion, once, twice at his spot of pleasure, and Astarion’s dick stirs, followed by searing agony as it rubs against the nail. Astarion screams, momentarily loses consciousness from the pain, and when he returns, Cazador is shuddering. His releases pulses inside Astarion and Cazador pulls away, letting a trail of come slide down Astarion’s thigh.

“It nears,” Cazador says, and pulls the curtain before Astarion can muster a reply.

A moment of panic, as darkness covers Astarion and it feels as if he is confined again, pressed against the drapes, before the first rays of the sun rise behind his back. They illuminate the fabric of the curtains and sting at his eyes. He is, just barely, protected in the shadow of the wooden cross nailed to the window behind him.

That is, until the sun rises further, and its warm rays reflect gleefully on the gleaming shards of glass stuck inside him. Exhausted, driven to the limits of agony, Astarion begins to scream again, as pinpricks of sunlight reach his body. They are like stinging needles that thread right through him.

He screams for Cazador. He screams for salvation, for the gods, any god, any hero. For death, as painless as one can make it.

~

When there is nothing but blissful darkness on the other side of his burnt-out eyelids, and the curtains are drawn out, Astarion does not think he is a body anymore. His legs do not really keep him upright, the nails torn through most of his flesh and stuck in place hung on his bones. His body was marred with holes. None of the reflected sunlight ever concentrated enough to burrow far, but so many of them tunneled some distance through his flesh and bone. Pain, everywhere. Whatever Cazador had inflicted to him, early in the previous night, was nothing compared to the pain that the radiance of the sun deities inflicted on him from sunup to sunset.

And Cazador raves on, admiring his work. “How you must have looked,” he says, reverent. “How must it have been.”

“It… burns,” Astarion tries to spit out, his throat hardly in working condition. Cazador hears it, though. “You monster.”

“Did it?” Cazador mocks. “I’ll show you what a real burning is.”

Some viscous liquid splashes all over Astarion, and he belatedly registers it as a spell of Grease, as Cazador incants “Ignis.”

The fire hits squarely on Astarion’s hand. No sound makes it out of him as the fire roars and crackles to life. Heat burns, melting and charring at what is left of his flesh. His lungs are filled with nothing but smoke, and he coughs with every inhale, eliciting more waves of agony. The glass inside him begins to soften.

He hears, eventually, a piercing crack and he is released, careening forwards onto the floor as the vertical support shatters. He writhes on the floor, smelling nothing but the stench of his own burnt flesh while the fire subsides.

Through the suffocating curtains of smoke, he stares up, teary-eyed and pitiful. He can just about make out Cazador’s form, and hear the scrawl of his pen against the parchment.