[What a jarring shift that must have been, going from contented musing to the wreckage of their shared unlife. Progenitor and resentful creation that still— in all its misery— doesn't dare to yank so hard that the figurative leash comes free, no matter how it thrashes: tantrumming like the child he must seem to a creature that outstrips him in both years and utter restraint. Knowledge that twists against his ribs, shame hot in stinging tangent around the corners of his vision, making Astarion as standoffish as he is avoidant, really— bristling along his spine without fur or feather (and yet it comes across so clearly anyway:) hunched over his own shadow, head sunken between his shoulders while his neck stretches long— glaring at his keeper's intrusion (the one Astarion left markers for; the one he invited with his trail of breadcrumbs, knowing— hoping— it'd end up like this) for only a handful of seconds before his lip twists and his stare is yanked away. The art of irascibility performatively volatile in his claws.
It buns in him. It seethes inside his gut, that anger.
(But it'd hurt worse if he never showed.)
His sire loves literature. Even in old, forgotten stretches of his estate, books still line the walls, waiting beneath blanketed dust to be used again. Made whole. So it's deliberate, the way Astarion's sagging grip lifts to drag one encyclopedic volume from its bed just to crack the ancient binding and plunge his talons into its puncturable heart— the sound of paper shredding loud in that small space.]
You smell like him.
[They both do, actually. His clothes still half-drawn loosely about his frame, wearing the memory of crude entanglement.
Maybe that's why he says it, then. Punctuation for how intensity is misaligned to lifeless senses: one of them smells a little more like stale air and weathered dust; the other frozen in time, by all accounts. As if he might've spent the last who-knows-how-long still nestled in that bed. That body.]
no subject
It buns in him. It seethes inside his gut, that anger.
(But it'd hurt worse if he never showed.)
His sire loves literature. Even in old, forgotten stretches of his estate, books still line the walls, waiting beneath blanketed dust to be used again. Made whole. So it's deliberate, the way Astarion's sagging grip lifts to drag one encyclopedic volume from its bed just to crack the ancient binding and plunge his talons into its puncturable heart— the sound of paper shredding loud in that small space.]
You smell like him.
[They both do, actually. His clothes still half-drawn loosely about his frame, wearing the memory of crude entanglement.
Maybe that's why he says it, then. Punctuation for how intensity is misaligned to lifeless senses: one of them smells a little more like stale air and weathered dust; the other frozen in time, by all accounts. As if he might've spent the last who-knows-how-long still nestled in that bed. That body.]