[Some people wear silver jewelry. Fenris wears iron resolve.
(And it looks just as nice on him, too— if not a little tight).]
Does it have to be one or the other?
[Asked in the gap between where Fenris was and where he is now: the irony being that the less Astarion can feel of him the more that he can see. Up close this time. In full. How he's not— old, so much as older: worn more by the darkened angles underneath his eyes or the paper-edge crows' feet adorning their angled outer span (or the way his frown pulls tight against his jawline, or the nicks scattered like constellatory waypoints over slightly roughened skin), than he is any real amount of age. The angles of his throat, for example, or the vivid shade of silver just above his ears, aren't the proof of handfuls of measured centuries like the tired Patriars with stiffened hands. And if his joints are stiff (Astarion doubts it) instead of limber, then the culprit's more likely to be from wear and tear by his best guess, not time.
So think of it as a layered answer when he shows his teeth and grins.
Pink across his nose and cheeks and lifted ears, which has the added effect of making his blunt teeth look even whiter. The edges of his salt-soaked curls, too, particularly where they've tangled in his lashes. A little out of hand, as far as exploratory tête-à-tête goes, salvaged barely by increasing distance (like they're not still more than in arm's reach. Like Astarion couldn't just turn his wrist, and catch something hard between soft thighs).]
Or do you actually think you don't warrant the kind of attraction I'd have to try not to brag about?
[They're close, yes. Close enough for Fenris to drink in the droplets of sweat that dampen Astarion's curls, leaving them to tumble in front of his face (pretty in the most unassuming way: not the polished poise of before, but something earnest, and thus all the more attractive to Fenris' mind). Close enough that he can take in the faint smear of kohl just beneath one eye (old makeup from the night before not properly wiped away); the glint of mischief in the curl of that grin, white teeth gleaming as his precocious student thrills in this new game.
Close enough that Fenris' hand is nigh invisible when he strikes: one swift sharp movement that ends with Astarion's jaw being loosely gripped between calloused thumb and pointer finger. Not fully scolding, nor even intending to be demeaning, but rather as a means of grabbing attention: aht, the way you might grip an errant pup who's so clearly thinking about tearing into a bag of treats. Don't you dare.
And it's a mistake to touch him. It's a mistake to be so familiar with him, but Fenris cannot be perfect within every moment. And there's something so satisfying about slowly tipping Astarion's chin up by fragile degrees, forcing him to look up at Fenris as he takes a half-step closer. Listen now, pup.]
I think the best tumbles are the ones you do not feel the need to brag about so that your peers might offer you fleeting clout.
[It's level. Even. Not upset, but there's a roughened edge in his tone if Astarion seeks it. For that's all it is, isn't it? That pack won't stay impressed for long, for they never do. It's all about who can top the last feat: who can throw the more spectacular party, who can bed the most exotic conquest . . . and it builds. People grow numb to splendor and decadence, til at last all that thrills them is the worst sorts of depravities . . .
Not that Astarion is there yet. Whelp of a thing, tamed by his father and by his position alike, he is not what Fenris has fled from. His grip loosens just a little.]
And I think I have too much respect for myself to reduce myself to mere notch on your bedpost. I am not going to fuck you, little noble— but if I was, it would not be so you could have the wicked thrill of seducing yet another tutor and proving your own worth.
[And yet the soft skin beneath banded fingertips feels so keenly warm. And yet he hasn't let him go, not yet. His head cocks, his eyes considering as he stares down at the other elf.]
He's lucky he's been caught by the jaw instead of anywhere else, when even a knuckle pushed against the soft stretch of muscle marking where his chin and the underside of his throat converge is too full of vascular leywork not to hammer with the evidence of what he's thinking about. Letting his backteeth salivate for.
Scolding on playgrounds leads to escalation, after all. A teething cosset inclined to snarl will only lunge into a bite if that initial attempt to scruff isn't tight enough to cow him first. Anger and excitement are the same thing for some— like prey drive— and it's the fact he can't sit still that sees him clipped around his red-tipped ears so often that his cheek still shines with his last censure.
He doesn’t pull away from this one, though.
(I am not going to fuck you, little noble—
—oh, but he wishes that he would.)]
....Twenty four.
[Astarion exhales in the next beat, voice struck through with acclimating tension. There's more that could be said, and yet the lanky little instigator lets that number hang in dead air while they're both standing there stock-still. His fingers twitching around the grip of that old gun, painting this like the stand off it conceptually is.
Because he's stopped blinking, now. Slowed his breathing.
If there's any kind of reaction to that answer to pluck from Fenris' expression, he wants to see it firsthand. Particularly when he adds:]
Could have a nice, even number with you. Maybe even leave it there— change my stripes.
Like molasses. Like those heavy moments that last an eternity in memory's eye, the kind where a thousand thoughts have time to race across the mind before a single breath is exhaled. Twenty-four, and Fenris expects himself to scoff. To say something casually cruel about sluttishness, perhaps, or roll his eyes in a derisive way. Or maybe he'd be nicer about it: a little grimace that suggests he isn't impressed, but that Astarion's business is his own.
He doesn't expect the anger.
He doesn't expect the sudden, nigh-overwhelming urge to snarl.
It's so sudden that there's a lurching moment of uncertainty, fury flaring in his gaze before his eyes dart to the side as Fenris struggles to smother it. Visions of past trysts flicker past his mind's eye (Astarion sprawled atop a desk, his legs spread as roughened hands grip his thighs too tightly; Astarion with his fingers tucked up beneath a woman's skirt, his breath hot against her throat as he murmurs all kinds of filthy promises. Astarion staring up dutifully as a too-thin tutor fucks his mouth with irregular rhythm, all in the service of proving to his father that yet another keeper could be corrupted)—
And his hand doesn't tighten its grip on Astarion's jaw. His frame is wracked with tension, but none of it is directed towards the boy in his hand— for it isn't Astarion he's angry at, he realizes.]
And how many of them were worth anything?
[It's low. Roughened, as his eyes finally dart back at Astarion. He wants— he doesn't know what he wants. He wants to drag Astarion in close, his arms wrapping fiercely around him; he wants to set out into the darkness and hunt down every idiotic tutor and selfish caretaker that had ever fallen for sweet charms and a pouting mouth. He wants to nuzzle fiercely against this young thing, and then again he wants to scruff him like an errant pup, nipping at him until he learns better.
He settles for stroking his thumb against the line of Astarion's jaw, and it's far more soothing than he means it to be.]
How many of them—
[And the dots connect only belatedly. Too belatedly, maybe, and he's being too protective (why? but that fierce anger isn't subsiding, that snarling seething growl that glares out at the world), but that can't be helped right now.]
Your last tutor, too. The one I replaced.
[The bastard was inept, and oh, what an idiot he'd been to buy that story, but Fenris isn't used to a master lying to him like that.]
The one who was inept. Who made you write lines of drivel so he could drink.
Not this. Not anything remotely close to the way Fenris' expression suddenly twists.
And maybe it's why Astarion misreads the situation by a mile, sore senses grasping loosely at whatever fraying threads of (learned) predictable logic he can find to explain the sharpness in green eyes. The odd glimpse of anger just behind it.
This is....new. Strange. So real he can't unlock the track of where it's headed. The fingers on his jaw have tensed. Is it jealousy?
No. That seems wrong. But— what else is there, really?]
They didn't hold a candle to you.
[It's a line....in the sense that it's vestigial estimation of what he should do: flatter and endear. Find ways to stoke the ego of his counterpart. But the thing is, in this case he actually means it. Despite the angry back and forth, the animosity they've shared, he'd been the first out of twenty five to treat him like a person— the first since Talindra, in fact. A babysitter with a spine, he'd called him on the night that they first met, not expecting it to be true.
It is true.
Even the fledgling patriar Astarion runs with spend more time on smoke and bragging rights than any actual amount of conversation. (Gods he fucking hates Petras. They can't be in the same room together for more than five minutes without bickering.
And he talks to him the most out of everyone.)]
Him too. [He turns his fingers over, letting a half-numb arm carry his touch across armored wrists. Confused by handsome features, studying them up close. Too serious.
So, to fix that:]
How else do you think I got him deposed?
[Hes grinning. Searching for an echo of predictable acceptance. See? Nothing to be angry about: I won. I beat him.
[They didn't hold a candle to you, and he hears that line for what it is. Tentative confusion and an attempt at peacekeeping— a sailor struggling to navigate by an unfamiliar star, but the problem is, that only makes it worse. The fact that no one in his life has ever objected to this—
Or perhaps he is being too bold. Perhaps it isn't as broad as that.
Perhaps no one has ever cared.
What does his lord father worry about, after all? His image. How it looks to have his eldest son fucking his way through every hired hand, and, perhaps, how much money it will cost to cover up such a minor scandal. How such a thing affects Astarion's future prospects and their good name, and the risk that comes of not breaking his son of such a habit before he comes of age.
But not that his son so easily seduces all that cross his path. Not that his son, still so young even at seventy-five, has found that two dozen different tutors and bodyguards are so easily swayed from their duties by the lure of pale thighs and a sharp grin. And Fenris can't articulate why, exactly, the thought offends him so, save that it isn't real. Save that such people should have known better, no matter that their charge might have sulked or panted or seduced with all his might.]
You should have told me.
[It's a strained thing, his mouth a thin line as he finally looks back at Astarion. The grip on his jaw eases and then drops, though some part of Fenris mourns the loss of contact. But he doesn't pull away from those slender fingers caressing his wrist, and that's something.]
I'm here for your protection. That includes tutors who do not know better than to keep their hands to themselves. And you deserve better than to have to resort to such things in order to be rid of someone so inept.
So cavernously empty that he can feel thin muscle sinking at the corners of his mouth, and all for what, exactly? Retrospect's a shovel: it only digs, it doesn't categorize; it doesn't wash the cluttered muck from what it finds. If he looks beneath the formerly ballooning expansion of something akin to yearning that pops at the retreat of that hand—
It has to be the retreat of that hand. The closeness. The weight. Those fingers and how comforting they felt, as if they'd always belonged there. He misses them already, what small drops of hydration they'd been in such a drought. So it's that, and only that, the reason why he startles. And aches.]
I—
[It's not that.
The figurative needle's spinning, but even Astarion can puzzle out that if it was, he'd have an answer. Or he'd be able to laugh. Say thank you like it doesn't matter. Acknowledge whatever this new promise is.
He tries to bristle, for a moment. His frown tightens, then pitches, then slants. A useless band of worn responses like the scrabbling of wet palms, and just the same: none of them stick.]
I don't—
[I don't need your protection? I dont need your help? I don't deserve better. I don't care. I don't mind. I can handle it. I've always—
The fingers wrapped around that wrist turn. They tighten. Daft thing, he thinks, and it's so fond he doesn't know if he really means it at all the way he used to.
He can't focus on himself right now; his tongue won't let him, what with how it keeps on locking. But he can focus on old facts. Obvious, patented, never-changing facts. The same ones he'd have talked about a week ago— or weeks ago, the roughstuck night they both first met, if he'd been asked back then.]
[Astarion's fingers are so warm as they stay clasped around him. His thumb presses gently into the small of his wrist, wedging between the fine bones to linger against his pulse. And it's an inane observation, especially in face of this conversation, but Fenris is so aware of them both in this moment. All the little places they're connected; all the little emotions that flicker over Astarion's face. The sudden strange energy that thrums between them, more honest and stark than any conversation they've had before.]
Your father may have had something else in mind, but that is what my job is. To keep you safe, and to keep you from trouble.
[And what his father meant was: trouble like going to filthy orgies and fucking every hired whore there, yes. Trouble like seducing an older lord who wants little more than a young, excitable thing between his sheets and doesn't care for what it would do to his conquest's reputation. Trouble like going to parties and ending the night swimming around in fountains filled with champagne, not caring for the cell phones that might film him or the gossip it will produce. Trouble like any young patriar might get into, yes—
But trouble, too, that might happen to him. And that, Fenris knows, his father didn't mean, for what wealthy person ever thinks such things will happen to them? But they do. Spiteful men in dark alleys, or a sudden mob that decides anyone might be free game . . . it happens. Fenris knows it does. Money's elusive protection only goes so far when the rest of the world realizes you're as mortal as anyone else. And if he was asked at knifepoint, surely Lord Ancunín would say that yes, Fenris is meant to protect Astarion from that, too.
But what he assuredly didn't mean— what no one surely meant, and yet which counts all the same in Fenris' mind— is trouble within. Trouble like tutors who don't know better than to put their errant students in their place. Trouble like twenty-four different hired hands who were either too stupid or too cruel to understand just how young seventy-five really is for an elf. Who saw a bright young thing too foolish to know just what he was doing as he spread his legs— and who decided that they wanted their own selfish indulgence more than exhibiting any kind of decency.
How many of them bragged about it? How many of them did it just to brag? I fucked a patriar, I fucked Lord Ancunín's son, his firstborn, and the joke will inevitably come: who hasn't? And maybe that will haunt him in years to come and maybe it won't, but such far-flung things aren't for Fenris to fret about.
The point is . . . the point, Fenris thinks, and stares down at soft eyes narrowed in confusion, is that he should not be the first person in Astarion's life to say this. But given he is . . .
He will not be negligent in his duties again.
And how to say all that? He doesn't know. He has no gift for words, not really, and any attempts would surely only result in scoffing anger or laughing insult. And so what he offers up in the end isn't an explanation.]
I will not let it happen again.
[And unlike the weeks prior, that isn't a threat. It isn't a line in the sand firmly drawn so that Astarion will sit down and be a good boy.
It's a promise. Soft and a little throaty, and yet so achingly sincere that it hurts.]
He thinks it's a cruel trick. A game. A lie. (He knows it isn't.)
But it's the too-bright quality of it all that doesn't make sense to the language he's spent his whole life learning (like the cold offering of a rat— a wrist— between starving creatures in the dark) when it is, undoubtedly, the simple doctrine of every last man for himself that endlessly defines the world that surrounds them no matter what it is they want. A man can pay to hang a family. A business built on trust will burn for hired thugs. Palms only weigh scales in favor of the faces that they like, and everything else is struck, and there's no outrunning that reality— not in a paradise built on fallow rot from its center out. Astarion is smart. Astarion's perceptive. That's the curse that caught him early. So he asks himself why as many times as the question comes to him in different shapes (why show a patriar something this exploitable, doesn't he know better; is that the angle— a long con, a better gambit; is he stupid? Reckless? In lust?) Coming up short every time while his eyes and throat turn to sandpaper: rough and itching whenever he blinks. Swallows.
He's lost his voice.
His nerve.
He's lost everything— and he hates the way it breaks against his frame, threatening to wash him away and leave nothing behind. Not even footprints. Around a soft tongue the won't work and the backdraft of agonies he can't even voice (let alone name), what's left to him that isn't brittle glass already shattered underfoot?
Forty five years old, and he's been ruins as far back as he remembers.
And ruins aren't warm.
They're not nice places.
They don't say pretty things, they don't make you want to stay. So when he pulls his hand away and steps back twice ( —left foot, right foot— ) there's anger on his face. Redness in the pool of silver eyes. He'd wanted a hero for ages in his dreams, but the sight of it churns in his stomach; too rich for his mouth after handfuls of salt water.
He can't remember what he says.
Maybe nothing.
Maybe it was just that look and the click of a pistol being cleared as he set it back down on the table. Maybe— like the night they'd met (Astarion having pushed too hard against a fighter's frame)— they walk back home in silence and neither of them says a word.
His cheek is healed by the time he returns to his own mirror to check. Dinner's uneventful (and if that doesn't warrant praise from Lord Ancunín, Astarion would be shocked to hear it), to the point that everyone eats in that same, pervasive silence and departs with hardly a word. And Fenris goes to wash. And Astarion goes to bed. And he can't sleep in that cold room— hating the noise from his phone and the nothingness from the corner where the one person he wants to talk to— ]
It's an instinctive thing, swift and silent. As if they've been doing this for years on end; as if he has known his charge for years, not weeks. Fenris rises to his feet and crosses the room, pausing for only a few seconds before he carefully settles into the plush bed. It's far softer than his little cot in the corner of the room; his body sinks gratefully into soft padding and flexible foam, and though he curls one arm beneath his head as he lies on his side, there's at least a dozen pillows for him to choose from.
And he shouldn't do that. He wouldn't, not ordinarily. But something has changed between them today, and though Fenris cannot say what, he still knows it to be true. This is no ordinary attempt at seduction. This is no clumsy ploy, a patriar's feeble attempt to get his minder to lower his guard.
This is something more raw. A cry in the dark (tell me this isn't a trick, throaty and raw, a ghostly statement that slips through his mind and disappears), no matter that it's snapped out.
Astarion looks so small in the darkness. Stripped of his day clothes and scrubbed clean of his makeup, he looks so much younger than the man he tries to present himself as. His angles are softened in the blow glow from Fenris' tattoos, though his mouth still curls in an angry line.]
Someday I will introduce you to the concept of a request.
[It's low. Not a tease, but a gentle way of breaking the silence.]
[At what though, he couldn't say. And the why still doesn't make sense to him either, so scrap that too: no point in pretending there's a card left in his hand that he can actually read in the figurative dark— not when even darkvision's no remedy for it.
Until his phone rattles and his temper flares, rolling him over (it's not a choice, how fast he turns) just to glower at a handful of messages all stacked up in a line under the hour on the glassy surface of that screen. A list of names outlined.
Violet. Petras. Leon. Dal.
—Fuck them.
Fuck them for having fun while he's stuck here. The nerve of being happy and not even asking why he isn't there, while he's licking wounds they didn't cause and gnawing on frustration's acrid taste. It isn't blame, but it sure as Hells tastes like it.
[He doesn't comment when when Astarion spins to grab his phone, but he does watch him: the way his expression twists and his shoulders hunch, whatever messages he receives only further fuel for the fire smoldering below.
And honestly? Fenris would expect no better.
He has only met that group the once, and admittedly, they were not at their best— but to Fenris' jaded eyes, they seemed like every other brainless, pleasure-focused group of nobles. Hungry to humiliate others and prove themselves dominant, their tiny minds focused only on the social wars waged between households . . . no, whatever message any of them sent is surely only a jab. We're having fun and you aren't.
(And it's funny, for he doesn't include Astarion in that category, not anymore. He doesn't know what category to slot him in, but it isn't that. There's more to his charge than that, though if pressed Fenris couldn't say what or when or how he began to think that way).]
Is there?
[He says it mildly. There's a great deal that's strange about him. There's a great deal that's wrong with him, Fenris knows, whether by trauma or sheer lack of experience (for oh, he is such a fledgling thing in some ways, wildly unsure and covering for it with a thick layer of stoicism). But he suspects Astarion means something a little less outlandish. Something that those friends of his would call a weakness; something that those tutors and bodyguards of before hadn't ever exhibited.
What a thing it is, Fenris thinks, to care for someone else. Not blindingly. Not ignoring their faults (oh, Astarion has so very many, vexing Fenris to no end). But he has grown to care for the little brat. It isn't love. It isn't even friendship, not really. But it's . . . it's something. A fierce protectiveness that Fenris had not known existed until today combining with the familiarity of spending the majority of their days together . . .
Perhaps it's that.
Or perhaps it's the fact it's easy to see the pulsing pattern of his lyrium right thought thin bedsheets, Fenris thinks dryly, and voices neither opinion. Let Astarion tell him what's on his mind. Gods know that will be easier than trying to guess.]
Shall I guess, or do you intend to tell me?
[He doesn't mean to be flippant, and indeed, his tone is a little too soft for that. But how else is he meant to respond?]
A paradoxic anchor, considering it's only a handful of inches where the covers have sunken down between their bodies (both laid out on their backs now in the wake of all that shuffling, with neither one facing directly towards the other). Arms folded, arms lax. It's a yawning chasm, it's close— it's both— the comfort of not-touching and the safety of not being alone. The rattling of his phone slows against the bedside table, and in the gap (chasm; closeness; all of the above) he can hear his own breath pooling. Why he likes it, why it slowly soothes him to the bone in those mutedly loose-held seconds, possibly even better than the rushing of blood in his ears and the wild blare of music, he— in the repeat of every puzzling development so far— has absolutely no fucking clue.
His mouth quirks on its own when their eyes both flick down towards those radiant tattoos.
It isn't a smile.]
You don't....want anything.
[Ugh. No, that's not it. Try again, Astarion. Fingers curling lamely in midair while he whines (or groans, or something....s in the back of his throat) just to pick apart the words. Lines, at least, are easy.
How do you look at a stranger offering the softest heat you've (n)ever known and come up with anything that isn't lame enough to mercy kill on the spot?]
You have no ambition. You're not here to do anything but your job— and you don't even do that well. [And you can't argue that you're not, Fenris. Not when you're laying in his bed. Not when you iced his cheek. Spoke to him like a person. Took him out. Let him breathe. Let him hope.] Keep going like that and someone's going to trip you up or try to toss you out, and it won't matter that it's not going to be me.
[It isn't where he expected the conversation to go, but it suits him. Lying here in the darkness, maybe it's easier to be honest. Not raw, not baring their souls, no, they do not know one another well enough for that (he knows no one well enough for that)— but the words come a little easier now than they do in daylight. The thick, choking knot of responsibility does not sit quite so heavily on his breastbone, equal parts terrifying and dread-inducing.
Fenris stares up at the dark ceiling. His head sinks a little further into the plush pillow, and he wonders what it is he thinks he's doing. You don't even do that well, and he cannot deny it, not when he lies here. And yet it only feels like the wrong move when he thinks about leaving: pulling those sheets back and retreating to his corner, leaving Astarion alone in his misery.]
Simply because you are not privy to those desires does not mean they do not exist. I want many things, Astarion.
[Spoken after a period of silence, his voice pitched low. And maybe this conversation is destined to be full of pauses, for it initially seems as if he might not elaborate. But then:]
I have never . . .
[No. How much does he want to reveal? Offering up too much feels like a mistake, even now— but it's so hard to explain it all without delving into his past. Fenris sighs softly and starts again.]
You were not wrong, that first day. Your father did buy me. He bought my debt.
[He murmurs the price, the number long since branded into his mind. It's a considerable sum even for nobility: more than a new car or an indulgent toy to throw away weeks later when it no longer amuses. It's the kind of money that ruins companies or silences people for a lifetime; the kind of debt that men drown in if they try to overcome it— legally, anyway.]
Before then, I was property. And just as you would not expect your beloved phone to have dreams or desires . . . so too I was not encouraged to try and form my own.
You ask me what I desire? But perhaps it would be easier to say that I have fears, and they are what guide me. Each day I wake up and face a job so laughably easier than my last that I fear what it means. I fear that I have failed, or that this is a test— or worse still, a joke at my expense. I fear that your father will tire of me, or find me not worth my price.
[I fear that he has more use for me than he has yet revealed, but he doesn't dare say that. Moment of camaraderie or not, Astarion is his father's son, and surely he will not appreciate as-yet-unfounded slander against him. Fenris sighs again.]
I fear that the worst is yet to come. That, indeed, someone will try to throw me out. That this existence, which is the most peaceful I have ever known, will come to an end.
. . . and I suppose, in wake of all that . . . what I desire most is stability.
[And it's too much. It's too much information that slipped past lips too eager to share, for he has never been asked this question before. It's embarrassing; it's dangerous, and he grimaces in the dark.]
[Debt. And for a split-second, Astarion assumes he's found it: vice, at long last. His bodyguard's a gambler. A debtor. All his well-masked weakness bottled up and reserved solely for watching caged things tear themselves apart before a crowd (why else would he seek out places full of violence like that range they'd visited?) Oh yes, no wonder he's so stiff inside these walls. More at home around the scent of split-knuckled punches let loose or hooves beating or—
I was property.
Likened to a fucking phone. A piece of plastic and magic-infused tech, the comparison brutally offhanded. And Astarion's too stunned through the twist of his own neck as it jerks towards his conversational partner to remember that he'd started off association by teasing loosely about things like orphanages or enslavement; time's dilated so much under the press of cold shock that weeks might've been entire lifetimes ago, and at least in this second he's not the same person now that he was back then.
His eyes are opened, even if his brain hasn't caught up yet.
No part of him's caught up yet, in fact. Sitting upright in his bed without realizing it; hearing that posed prompt already come and gone, and one he tramples when he snaps out in response:]
Who gives a damn what I want— what do you mean you were property? [His father paid— gods. Gods, that's an astronomical amount. Even for their seemingly bottomless expenses, his father could have bought a legion devoted to his every last word. Instead he chose—
This.
One elf. One glow-in-the-dark, metaphoric name possessing, eye-contact averse elf in unsuspecting armor. Hells' teeth— why? Was it assumptive loyalty? That if he paid more than anyone ever should, the man would feel inescapably bound? Or....]
[Gods, Fenris doesn't expect that response. So much so that he rises up in shocked echo, resting on his elbows as he stares up uncomprehendingly at Astarion. It isn't that he thought he would be cruel about it, no, but—
He'd thought . . . indifferent sympathy, perhaps. A twisting grimace or a performative sigh on such a wretched business, for isn't that how it always goes? Derision or pity, but either way, nobles always remove themselves from such distasteful issues. Slaves and servants are there to serve, not to have personal lives or conflicts, and if their very existence is a miserable one, well. It's not worth thinking about. That's how it had been with Danarius and his ilk— and gods know Lord Ancunín was nothing but serene when he had handed over a check to buy Fenris. The lad will be useful, that was the only real comment he'd had, and Fenris had thought—
It's just . . . he hadn't expected horror.
He hadn't expected shock.
And maybe this is Fenris' own fault. Maybe he expects too much of an elf not yet a century old, who plays so well at being worldly and mature that he can fool almost everyone. But there's such a difference between knowing how to play among your friends (boasting about exploits, fucking and sucking your way through the upper echelons just so they'll admire you) and knowing what really happens in the world . . .]
A wizard near the edge of the Upper City. A minor noble.
[He isn't playing coy with Danarius' name— at least, not intentionally. It's just that he doesn't quite know what to make of all this shock.]
And I mean I was property. His . . . his. He arranged it in courts long ago, though I do not know the specifics.
[It had been so many years ago, after all, and he was such an ignorant thing. The legalese had flown over his head, and Danarius had prompted him to sign things with the jagged X that had served as signature. And his mother had been there, nodding tearfully; Varania had been there, small and wide-eyed. For them, Danarius murmured. Just sign here and they will never worry again . . .]
He controlled everything. He . . . why are you upset?
[And he doesn't hear the echo. He doesn't realize his expression is the same that Astarion wore hours ago (a lifetime ago).]
And is it really any different to start with? Slavery is a chokehold— so archaic that even without abolishment, most to-do houses would never actually admit they keep anything on a chain (oh, but the ones that do, though....Astarion can damn well imagine what it looked like, knowing patriar so well: the man resting across from him dragged along in broad daylight by a literal chain, shoulder-to-shoulder with bustling passersby of all shades and stripes. A novelty to gawk at. A curio. A fancy-fucking-purse, to quote the very night they'd met)— and while Fenris might well be free of that pervasive sense of flaunted ownership, there's not a chance in the bloody Hells themselves that Fenris could ever pay back a sum that large. Not with his body, nor his mind— not even on the most lavish of salaries like the one Astarion's soon fit to inherit. So deep a pit that you'd have to be one of the established few, by definition. Generational.
Because without a hoard of foreborne gold under your heels....
Strewth.
Astarion's father could report him for anything and call it a breach of contract. A theft so insurmountable— ]
Why am I upset?
[It's so incredulous rolling off his tongue, but turning the mirror back towards himself in that selfsame beat to answer it—
Why is he upset?
(And like an response, he blinks with his head turned sharply to one side: all of him watching Fenris from the corner of his eyes before letting his own gaze drop under the lid of tired lashes. His lips pursing and unpursing, thinned out just ahead of how they bunch. Not doeish, he realizes, once that collapsed stare reveals two balled up fists gone red inside his lap, feeling the sudden prickle of pinched brows at the center of his forehead.
—he's angry.
The same anger he'd felt spitting curses while his own cheek stung. Bitter bile and acid sharp, nauseating him from the stomach up.)
It shows the second that he twists his head back towards Fenris. The thinnest sliver of moonlight cutting low and tight over a gritted jaw that growls out:]
It's more than reasonable as a question, but it takes Fenris a long few seconds before he can answer it. He's too caught up in staring at his charge: his hands fisted so tightly his knuckles shine white in the darkness, his sweet voice roughened in a way that Fenris has never heard before. Not the whining, sulking tone he gets when he misses a party, nor the frustrated growl that comes out being thwarted, no. This is rage. This is the kind of anger that almost makes you sick for how potent it is, bile in your belly and a thundering in your ears . . .
And he doesn't understand why.
Because of a moment of kindness? A cold cloth on a sore cheek? No, it can't be that. The lesson? Fenris' mind whirs, though some part of him knows he's stalling out. But it makes no sense to him, not when he has long since learned the world is nothing but a struggle— and nobles nothing but cruel. Petulant and petty and so wealthy they never develop morals or good sense— that's how they are. That's how they all are and always have been, from Danarius and his friends to the guffawing group at that party, they all of them—
Why aren't you?]
What would you have me say?
[It's low, his voice rougher than it had been before. And it isn't that he hasn't thought about this— oh, of course he has. As the years went by and he saw snatches of how ordinary people lived . . . oh, Danarius couldn't erase everything. Of course he's resented it, raged and sobbed and panicked in the quiet darkness of his room, but what good had it ever done him? Not when he was a teenager, and not now.]
It is my life. If I run, even if I am not caught, that debt goes to my family— and if I am caught, at best I will only add to my debt. At worst I will go back to the man who owned me before, and his punishments will not cease, not for years on end. That this position— you— is the first thing that has been good in my life, for I never once thought he would sell me. I am still owned and it is an improvement— and if I make a single mistake, it will all come crashing down.
I despise it. I loathe it. The reality of it would suffocate me if I lingered upon it for too long, and so I cannot, for there is no future in that. What good would it do me to rage? It is what it is— and focusing on survival is what has led me to see my three hundredth year, not the inherent injustices of my existence.
I do not— I cannot— dream of freedom. Not the way you know it. A life like this . . . it has to be enough.
Like a mantra, every word Fenris says prompts more of that same internal echo, and through the awfulness of its rat-king tangle, blurring the lines between outrage and newfound horror at something he knew existed in this city since he was at least the age of twelve (for there's always a difference between knowing and knowing), Astarion comes to the same conclusion as fists beaten against stone. The same conclusion Fenris— who might've beaten his hands against stone on more than one occasion, figurative or literal both, Astarion thinks while his eyes drop towards scarred knuckles— hands to him like a contract in the very same ensuing breath.
'I cannot dream of freedom.'
Astarion can.
Astarion does.
And worse still, he knows he'll someday have it— or an approximation of it anyway, with him roaming these halls in place of colder footsteps, silk hems trailing in his wake. White curls cut around his cheeks instead of straight lines, but the very same fortune clutched in hand. Something he loathes as much as he covets, depending on the night.
Maybe that'll be a cage, too. Maybe a Baroness has pictures or a Duke longs for his waif— but even then, Fenris is right: it's not the same.
This is worse.
So much worse.
It's unfair.]
But it's not enough.
[Shocked to hear the dry rasp of his throat chiming in without him, Astarion pauses. His eyes wet, his mouth dry. Hollow rattle lost inside the shallow chasm still cut between them.
Because everything. Everything Fenris can't bring himself to bask in or hope for, it dangles on a razor's edge. One mistake. One night where Lord Ancunín finds an empty bed or hears the bray of drunken laughter. Or worse.
He's never in his pointless life wanted to protect something more.]
Fuck it all, I'll buy your debt— [He expels with a burst of anxious air.] Another fifty years and I'll have the rights to our vaults, and I can just buy you from your contract. Make sure there's nothing for you to break.
[Not I'll set you free. Not I'll let you go.
He's young, Astarion Ancunín; he can't stray too far from his own desires yet— and Fenris is the first real thing he's ever found that he likes enough to keep.]
And it always comes down to that, doesn't it? Then again: isn't that meant to be every slave's hope? That some master will look on them kindly enough to buy them not as laborer, but kept pet, safe and secure. My precious thing, my beloved jewel, and it isn't freedom, but it's almost like it. Safe from work. Safe from harm. Safe from the illegal slave markets and the brutal cruelty of a master who might chain you to a bed or work you quite literally to death—
Fenris should be grateful.
He isn't.
He knows what the boy means. He knows that there is no lie in the fervency of his voice nor the bright shine to his gaze, for what would be the point? Some cruel joke, maybe, but such a thing is too tiresome to play out. This is real. This is what he thinks will help, and gods, but he isn't wrong. It would help. It would help immensely, right up until Astarion got tired of him. Or: Astarion found a better offer. Or: Astarion dies an untimely death, and all his prized possessions go to his brother, who looks at Fenris as though he's little more than a mildly interesting object (which he is in this household).]
And what then?
[It's soft. Not angry. Not yet, anyway.]
Assuming I do survive the next fifty years here, what then? You will buy me from my contract, and then I will be yours. I will still have a master I need to serve and keep happy. I will still owe a debt to someone— or do you plan on paying all of it yourself out of your own pocket and never ask me for a copper? It will not come cheap. And I doubt your father will be content with you spending it, heir or not.
[He does not realize how hunched his posture has become, his head bowed forward and his shoulders raised defensively.]
Besides. You assume your father will keep me for another fifty years. But I do not think he imagines I will last that long.
[Then why hire him? Why spend such a staggeringly enormous sum? He doesn't know, but he can think of more than a few possibilities, none of them good.
A few moments of silence, and, quieter:]
Do not mistake this as my wanting to wallow in enslavement— nor a lack of appreciation for your— for you.
[He glances over at him. There's such anguish in that expression— and so despite himself, Fenris reaches out, absently brushing a strand of hair away from his face.]
But trading one master for another is not freedom.
[Thumb pushed across the middle of its opposing palm, bearing down until it aches; subconscious grounding him the only way his mind knows how to keep itself level without reacting first and thinking later— when it's all so far over his head. (When that roaming touch does what countless chastisements never could.
It shuts him up.)
Yet all the while his own mind runs ragged in sluggish desperation, swearing Fenris is wrong. That the offer counts as freedom just because he'd never use it, twisting in the vice of all obvious logic to devour its own tail. Because there's no point in lofty optimism, after all anyway, is there? Slavery or not, neither beggars nor princes can be choosers, no matter what fables so often insist. Not even a patriar can make demands without paying his own fees, so at the end of every fetid, locked-in day, does anyone get true freedom?
Astarion won't.
No, he certainly damn well won't, not in fifty years or a hundred. He'll be here. The loyal son, as he was named; unruly and unhappy, but still here. And on the heels of the kindest day in decades, sitting beside someone who talks to him, looks at him— sees him—
He isn't strong enough to make a promise he doesn't want. One that ends with him alone again.
His arms pull back from where they sit across his knees, fit in close before he lifts his chin again. Uncertainty more pervasive than the darkness curled around them, and for the first time in a long, long while— without the distraction of drink or stupidity or pointless laughter— he feels it. He hates it. Sullen shame the only thing he wears when he sighs and looks away, that strand of hair sliding back into stubborn disarray for the sunken tilting of his head.]
You will last that long.
[The words leave his teeth in shallow rhythms.]
I'll protect you. Help you. Teach you everything I know about this hierarchical mess you've gotten yourself stuck in, so that even my family can't try to displace you. [The law's Astarion's forte; he has an eye for it, even when he despises it on stubborn principle alone.]
We can....figure out whatever comes after that once we get there. [Even if he can't admit it— can't bring himself to say I'll free you— something in his pendulous heart still swings the other way right through his grasping fingertips. Lurching though it hurts. Twisting a glance over his shoulder cut from slow sincerity, slung dark beneath pale eyes.]
....together.
[Is that enough the question scrawled in his expression.
(The phone beside them starts rattling again. It doesn't feel important anymore; it's only Fenris that he's watching.)]
It's just— it's all happening so quickly, and he doesn't know where to stand. A day ago he would have thought it the height of foolishness to ever believe so wholeheartedly in a noble, much less one who's resented him so much. He would have been wary of this being a trick, and he would have been right to. A day ago, he would have said with certainty that there was no way this wasn't a ploy, a spirited effort from his rebellious charge to get him in trouble. Crawl into my bed, I'll buy you free, don't fret, and the words are right, the voice is right, but what kind of fool would trust in such sweet promises? There are stories all across the coast of bedded women stuck with a child they never wanted because a noble had promised that he'd elevate them, and that would be after so much more than just today.
A single act of kindness . . . surely it can't change so much.
There has to be something else. The thought rises up almost violently within his mind, ripping through the nauseating mixture of bitter anger and aching longing and filling him with fear. There has to something else, something he's missing, some clause that he's overlooked— something, and he barely knows what he means. He barely knows how this could be a trick or trap, save that the last time a noble promised him something good, his collar only grew heavier around his throat.
(Quite the expensive pet, aren't you? And it was a joke. A teasing bit of mirth from his master, Danarius' voice amused as he'd tallied out the cost of all that lyrium. But it will be worth it, and what could he do but agree?)
And yet . . . Astarion's voice aches with honesty. His eyes still gleam in the darkness, and though Fenris does not understand all the emotions clear on his face (oh, foolish thing, and he doesn't realize just how lonely Astarion really is; he doesn't understand just how little affection he's ever gotten), there's nothing there that speaks of a lie.
But maybe it's not even that. Maybe it's just that there's nothing dignified about this conversation. It's not the coy seduction of before, with Astarion firmly slotted in the role of tempting ingenue; it's not even the boastful bragging of that party, spiteful dominance proven through base means.
He wouldn't look like this in front of his friends, Fenris thinks, and realizes in that same moment that it's true. He wouldn't dare. There could be no tears, no fretful anger or fierce protectiveness, for such stark genuineness isn't allowed in those circles. Even the offer for help would be suspect— but here Astarion is, baring his heart anyway.
Is it enough?]
Together.
[And it doesn't solve everything. It doesn't grant him freedom, or promise him some happy ending. But it's something. It's something tangible, something real: I will not let you be taken. I will not let them oust you. I will not let you be hurt.
Who has ever been so kind to him before? And yet the moment the thought slips past his mind, he crushes it, shoving it away with frantic desperation, for he can't. He can't take the way his heart lurches and aches so suddenly, his own eyes threatening to sting; he can't bear it, not tonight. Not when this is already confusing as it is. Not when he feels so filled with conflicting emotions that it's almost nauseating— oh, he can't.
But perhaps now he does understand— for this is more kindness than anyone has ever shown him, and he cannot help but crave more. And yet it would be strange for him to reach out again, no matter that his fingers suddenly ache to smooth through those unruly curls. So, instead:]
Start with your friends. Tell me of them.
[Soft. Not entreating, not exactly, but . . . gentle. A way to lead them out of this emotional minefield they've found themselves in, for in truth, Fenris does not know how to even begin to articulate what he's feeling.]
[The agreement's been made, but Astarion's throat still feels tight (tight enough to choke him if he leans wrong), dragging up the idea of leaning back across his elbows again— his thin outline sinking back into soft, overstuffed down alongside a promise that won't wane: together. Together. Together.
It seems more real with each passing second.
Thank the gods for small segues though, if nothing else. A sudden wave of warmth flickering as it passes through a quickly thawing expression: trading out fear for its most familiar balm— and a dry glance that fights to be seen around the tumid edges of his pillows.]
What's to tell? They're no threat to you.
[Because that's where his own mind leaps first, of course. Innate as sucking air, particularly with the discussion they'd just had still resting soft inside their half-tensed palms.]
But....[Astarion interjects through a meandering hum] in case you want to shut them up next time they start to bark: they're all patriar. Mostly my age or younger— with the exception of one. [Antwun Dufay. The singular soul that hadn't been there the night Fenris came trampling through carpeted shores just to be met with glinting eyes and cold mockery in the dark.
Picking over it now, Astarion's glad he wasn't.
Mostly for the fact that shame— weeks, if not closing in on a full month late for its would-be-decent arrival— is busy scribbling the tips of Astarion's ears (and the short gaps between inkdrop moles and constellatory freckles) a few shades darker with its retrospective presence; he can't stand the thought of hearing Fenris denigrated by his peers.
Least of all by someone twice his age.]
Leon's a working apprentice to the Jannath line. [His scoff is feathering; pushing away malleable night air with its disdain.] You can expect him to supplicate himself like one, too. [Slim fingers gesticulate towards white curls. An example.] Human, long hair. Won't say much, but absolutely thinks he's right whenever he does, even when he's being as dense as wet cement. Which, for the record? Happens a lot.
Violet, on the other hand, is vicious. Ignore her, if you can. I don't even need to describe her; you'll know which one she is. [Antithetical to the term all bark, but....] Thankfully for all of us, she loses interest faster than anything so long as you play figuratively dead.
Sometimes I think she can only sense movement.
[Ha and also ha— but seriously though.]
Yousen's the grim-eyed halfling, and by nature only follows the herd: his shrewd perception does wonders for milling gossip— but only if he thinks the others will approve.
[Call it an unsung implication in delivery that the lanky noble at Fenris' side looks proud for just a few clear beats, insisting don't worry, I won't let them.]
Aurelia the tiefling's aloof and haughty. If her chin raised any higher, she'd be strutting around with a broken neck. [Again, his body language's shifted. Again, he mimics the creature he describes: his arms curling while his throat's stretched out long.] Our resident holier-than-thou heiress. Who so happens to use that as a tragically unfortunate mask for just how middling her family's influence is. Calling them glorified merchants is like calling a dockwhore a peeress— they both have tits and like to spread their legs, but that's about where the similarities begin and end.
Petras is....
[His head shakes. His tongue clicks.
....eugh.]
A fellow magistrate and the son of a to-do lord. Goes by the title of pale, though only the gods know why. Expect him to boast and brag and cock about as if he owns everyone and everything in earshot, showing said pale ass all the while. [Less than a threat:] He's a gnat. If he ever tries to give you hell, swat him and watch how red he turns.
It's quite fun, actually.
[Mm.]
And last but not least: Dal. Dalyria, that is. A drow healer of all things, if you can believe those exist. [How she got so far as to rub elbows with sunlight and aristocracy both....Astarion's spent too long wondering whether it's wealth or talent she's kept locked inside her estate vaults.] Gets in as much trouble as the rest of us, but can't stand to see us snarl.
The others wouldn't be half as irritating if she'd just let us have our way. As you saw— they could do with being taken down a peg. [As if Astarion would ever be the one to cow the pack, when he was crowing before them just to see them smile.]
Is that enough information to sate your curiosity? Or would you like me to give you their rut count as well?
[Too late: he's already volunteering that all on his own, flashing the blunt corners of his own gossiping canines.]
[Relief comes swiftly in the seconds that pass. It doesn't quell his turbulent emotions, nor smothers them cruelly away— but it brings a sense of exhalation. Together, and he is grateful Astarion doesn't insist on dissecting the enormity of what just passed between them. It's enough, tonight, to know that something has changed between them. It's enough to know that Astarion means to keep him close, and that Fenris will have days, weeks— gods, years, even, if need be— to dissect all the turbulent emotions that have passed through him tonight.
And for tonight, it's nice to exhale.
He lays back down, laying his head gingerly on a pillow that sinks sweetly beneath the pressure. His limbs relax more quickly this time around, his aching body sighing softly in contentment now that he knows this isn't a trap of some kind. He can feel the warmth of Astarion from only a foot away, and the sound of his voice as it rises and falls mildly is oddly soothing. He hadn't realized before now just how tired he's been (but then again, he's always a bit tired, isn't he?). Gods, and in a bed this soft . . .
But ah, he does want to hear this. Slinging an arm beneath his head, Fenris glances over at Astarion, watching the line of his profile as he speaks. Dal and Petras and Leon and Violet, and he tries to match names to faces with middling results. Some of them are easier than others (Leon, then, was the one that cat-called him, and as for the drow and the tiefling, well, that's easy enough), but he's sure he'll have them down soon enough. Social dynamics, too, aren't so hard to guess: Petras exasperatedly tolerated, he and Astarion going at it like denning pups, all bark and no bite; Violet offered her due wariness, while Dal is doted upon, if not the earner of more than a few rolled eyes.
He wonders, vaguely, what they'll think when Astarion begins defending him instead of throwing him as an easy target. And then he wonders when he began to assume that Astarion would defend him, rather than simply go along with their goading. But he will. Fenris knows he will, prompted by that proud smile and underscored by a bone-deep certainty he won't question tonight.
And ah— that last addition earns an unexpected snort, undignified and amused. The first time he's laughed properly in Astarion's presence.]
And you take every chance to remind him, I wager.
[It's no bad thing. But gods, a pack of adolescents barely grown . . . with the exception of Leon, perhaps, but for the rest? My age or younger, and gods, how young that is for elves and tieflings and drow . . . no wonder they all keep track of how many the others fuck. What else is there to boast about?]
I would ask you where you rank on that list, little noble, but I suspect I would regret it.
[But there's a smile in his voice. He's teasing, of all things. Gently testing this newfound accord with a quiet joke. And then, his tone still light:]
Sate my curiosity once more: which is your favorite among them?
[For friendship. For rutting. For anything, really.]
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albinomilksnake2023-07-11 12:43 am
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(And it looks just as nice on him, too— if not a little tight).]
Does it have to be one or the other?
[Asked in the gap between where Fenris was and where he is now: the irony being that the less Astarion can feel of him the more that he can see. Up close this time. In full. How he's not— old, so much as older: worn more by the darkened angles underneath his eyes or the paper-edge crows' feet adorning their angled outer span (or the way his frown pulls tight against his jawline, or the nicks scattered like constellatory waypoints over slightly roughened skin), than he is any real amount of age. The angles of his throat, for example, or the vivid shade of silver just above his ears, aren't the proof of handfuls of measured centuries like the tired Patriars with stiffened hands. And if his joints are stiff (Astarion doubts it) instead of limber, then the culprit's more likely to be from wear and tear by his best guess, not time.
So think of it as a layered answer when he shows his teeth and grins.
Pink across his nose and cheeks and lifted ears, which has the added effect of making his blunt teeth look even whiter. The edges of his salt-soaked curls, too, particularly where they've tangled in his lashes. A little out of hand, as far as exploratory tête-à-tête goes, salvaged barely by increasing distance (like they're not still more than in arm's reach. Like Astarion couldn't just turn his wrist, and catch something hard between soft thighs).]
Or do you actually think you don't warrant the kind of attraction I'd have to try not to brag about?
[Teacher, please.]
no subject
Close enough that Fenris' hand is nigh invisible when he strikes: one swift sharp movement that ends with Astarion's jaw being loosely gripped between calloused thumb and pointer finger. Not fully scolding, nor even intending to be demeaning, but rather as a means of grabbing attention: aht, the way you might grip an errant pup who's so clearly thinking about tearing into a bag of treats. Don't you dare.
And it's a mistake to touch him. It's a mistake to be so familiar with him, but Fenris cannot be perfect within every moment. And there's something so satisfying about slowly tipping Astarion's chin up by fragile degrees, forcing him to look up at Fenris as he takes a half-step closer. Listen now, pup.]
I think the best tumbles are the ones you do not feel the need to brag about so that your peers might offer you fleeting clout.
[It's level. Even. Not upset, but there's a roughened edge in his tone if Astarion seeks it. For that's all it is, isn't it? That pack won't stay impressed for long, for they never do. It's all about who can top the last feat: who can throw the more spectacular party, who can bed the most exotic conquest . . . and it builds. People grow numb to splendor and decadence, til at last all that thrills them is the worst sorts of depravities . . .
Not that Astarion is there yet. Whelp of a thing, tamed by his father and by his position alike, he is not what Fenris has fled from. His grip loosens just a little.]
And I think I have too much respect for myself to reduce myself to mere notch on your bedpost. I am not going to fuck you, little noble— but if I was, it would not be so you could have the wicked thrill of seducing yet another tutor and proving your own worth.
[And yet the soft skin beneath banded fingertips feels so keenly warm. And yet he hasn't let him go, not yet. His head cocks, his eyes considering as he stares down at the other elf.]
How many have there been before me?
no subject
He's lucky he's been caught by the jaw instead of anywhere else, when even a knuckle pushed against the soft stretch of muscle marking where his chin and the underside of his throat converge is too full of vascular leywork not to hammer with the evidence of what he's thinking about. Letting his backteeth salivate for.
Scolding on playgrounds leads to escalation, after all. A teething cosset inclined to snarl will only lunge into a bite if that initial attempt to scruff isn't tight enough to cow him first. Anger and excitement are the same thing for some— like prey drive— and it's the fact he can't sit still that sees him clipped around his red-tipped ears so often that his cheek still shines with his last censure.
He doesn’t pull away from this one, though.
(I am not going to fuck you, little noble—
—oh, but he wishes that he would.)]
....Twenty four.
[Astarion exhales in the next beat, voice struck through with acclimating tension. There's more that could be said, and yet the lanky little instigator lets that number hang in dead air while they're both standing there stock-still. His fingers twitching around the grip of that old gun, painting this like the stand off it conceptually is.
Because he's stopped blinking, now. Slowed his breathing.
If there's any kind of reaction to that answer to pluck from Fenris' expression, he wants to see it firsthand. Particularly when he adds:]
Could have a nice, even number with you. Maybe even leave it there— change my stripes.
[Another mark, but not reduced.]
no subject
Like molasses. Like those heavy moments that last an eternity in memory's eye, the kind where a thousand thoughts have time to race across the mind before a single breath is exhaled. Twenty-four, and Fenris expects himself to scoff. To say something casually cruel about sluttishness, perhaps, or roll his eyes in a derisive way. Or maybe he'd be nicer about it: a little grimace that suggests he isn't impressed, but that Astarion's business is his own.
He doesn't expect the anger.
He doesn't expect the sudden, nigh-overwhelming urge to snarl.
It's so sudden that there's a lurching moment of uncertainty, fury flaring in his gaze before his eyes dart to the side as Fenris struggles to smother it. Visions of past trysts flicker past his mind's eye (Astarion sprawled atop a desk, his legs spread as roughened hands grip his thighs too tightly; Astarion with his fingers tucked up beneath a woman's skirt, his breath hot against her throat as he murmurs all kinds of filthy promises. Astarion staring up dutifully as a too-thin tutor fucks his mouth with irregular rhythm, all in the service of proving to his father that yet another keeper could be corrupted)—
And his hand doesn't tighten its grip on Astarion's jaw. His frame is wracked with tension, but none of it is directed towards the boy in his hand— for it isn't Astarion he's angry at, he realizes.]
And how many of them were worth anything?
[It's low. Roughened, as his eyes finally dart back at Astarion. He wants— he doesn't know what he wants. He wants to drag Astarion in close, his arms wrapping fiercely around him; he wants to set out into the darkness and hunt down every idiotic tutor and selfish caretaker that had ever fallen for sweet charms and a pouting mouth. He wants to nuzzle fiercely against this young thing, and then again he wants to scruff him like an errant pup, nipping at him until he learns better.
He settles for stroking his thumb against the line of Astarion's jaw, and it's far more soothing than he means it to be.]
How many of them—
[And the dots connect only belatedly. Too belatedly, maybe, and he's being too protective (why? but that fierce anger isn't subsiding, that snarling seething growl that glares out at the world), but that can't be helped right now.]
Your last tutor, too. The one I replaced.
[The bastard was inept, and oh, what an idiot he'd been to buy that story, but Fenris isn't used to a master lying to him like that.]
The one who was inept. Who made you write lines of drivel so he could drink.
Him, too?
no subject
What does he expect?
Not this. Not anything remotely close to the way Fenris' expression suddenly twists.
And maybe it's why Astarion misreads the situation by a mile, sore senses grasping loosely at whatever fraying threads of (learned) predictable logic he can find to explain the sharpness in green eyes. The odd glimpse of anger just behind it.
This is....new. Strange. So real he can't unlock the track of where it's headed. The fingers on his jaw have tensed. Is it jealousy?
No. That seems wrong. But— what else is there, really?]
They didn't hold a candle to you.
[It's a line....in the sense that it's vestigial estimation of what he should do: flatter and endear. Find ways to stoke the ego of his counterpart. But the thing is, in this case he actually means it. Despite the angry back and forth, the animosity they've shared, he'd been the first out of twenty five to treat him like a person— the first since Talindra, in fact. A babysitter with a spine, he'd called him on the night that they first met, not expecting it to be true.
It is true.
Even the fledgling patriar Astarion runs with spend more time on smoke and bragging rights than any actual amount of conversation. (Gods he fucking hates Petras. They can't be in the same room together for more than five minutes without bickering.
And he talks to him the most out of everyone.)]
Him too. [He turns his fingers over, letting a half-numb arm carry his touch across armored wrists. Confused by handsome features, studying them up close. Too serious.
So, to fix that:]
How else do you think I got him deposed?
[Hes grinning. Searching for an echo of predictable acceptance. See? Nothing to be angry about: I won. I beat him.
He's gone. You're here.
Be happy. Laugh with me.]
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Or perhaps he is being too bold. Perhaps it isn't as broad as that.
Perhaps no one has ever cared.
What does his lord father worry about, after all? His image. How it looks to have his eldest son fucking his way through every hired hand, and, perhaps, how much money it will cost to cover up such a minor scandal. How such a thing affects Astarion's future prospects and their good name, and the risk that comes of not breaking his son of such a habit before he comes of age.
But not that his son so easily seduces all that cross his path. Not that his son, still so young even at seventy-five, has found that two dozen different tutors and bodyguards are so easily swayed from their duties by the lure of pale thighs and a sharp grin. And Fenris can't articulate why, exactly, the thought offends him so, save that it isn't real. Save that such people should have known better, no matter that their charge might have sulked or panted or seduced with all his might.]
You should have told me.
[It's a strained thing, his mouth a thin line as he finally looks back at Astarion. The grip on his jaw eases and then drops, though some part of Fenris mourns the loss of contact. But he doesn't pull away from those slender fingers caressing his wrist, and that's something.]
I'm here for your protection. That includes tutors who do not know better than to keep their hands to themselves. And you deserve better than to have to resort to such things in order to be rid of someone so inept.
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....oh.
He suddenly feels— empty.
So cavernously empty that he can feel thin muscle sinking at the corners of his mouth, and all for what, exactly? Retrospect's a shovel: it only digs, it doesn't categorize; it doesn't wash the cluttered muck from what it finds. If he looks beneath the formerly ballooning expansion of something akin to yearning that pops at the retreat of that hand—
It has to be the retreat of that hand. The closeness. The weight. Those fingers and how comforting they felt, as if they'd always belonged there. He misses them already, what small drops of hydration they'd been in such a drought. So it's that, and only that, the reason why he startles. And aches.]
I—
[It's not that.
The figurative needle's spinning, but even Astarion can puzzle out that if it was, he'd have an answer. Or he'd be able to laugh. Say thank you like it doesn't matter. Acknowledge whatever this new promise is.
He tries to bristle, for a moment. His frown tightens, then pitches, then slants. A useless band of worn responses like the scrabbling of wet palms, and just the same: none of them stick.]
I don't—
[I don't need your protection? I dont need your help? I don't deserve better. I don't care. I don't mind. I can handle it. I've always—
The fingers wrapped around that wrist turn. They tighten. Daft thing, he thinks, and it's so fond he doesn't know if he really means it at all the way he used to.
He can't focus on himself right now; his tongue won't let him, what with how it keeps on locking. But he can focus on old facts. Obvious, patented, never-changing facts. The same ones he'd have talked about a week ago— or weeks ago, the roughstuck night they both first met, if he'd been asked back then.]
That's not what you were hired for.
[Put it all together, Fenris.]
You know that, right?
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[Astarion's fingers are so warm as they stay clasped around him. His thumb presses gently into the small of his wrist, wedging between the fine bones to linger against his pulse. And it's an inane observation, especially in face of this conversation, but Fenris is so aware of them both in this moment. All the little places they're connected; all the little emotions that flicker over Astarion's face. The sudden strange energy that thrums between them, more honest and stark than any conversation they've had before.]
Your father may have had something else in mind, but that is what my job is. To keep you safe, and to keep you from trouble.
[And what his father meant was: trouble like going to filthy orgies and fucking every hired whore there, yes. Trouble like seducing an older lord who wants little more than a young, excitable thing between his sheets and doesn't care for what it would do to his conquest's reputation. Trouble like going to parties and ending the night swimming around in fountains filled with champagne, not caring for the cell phones that might film him or the gossip it will produce. Trouble like any young patriar might get into, yes—
But trouble, too, that might happen to him. And that, Fenris knows, his father didn't mean, for what wealthy person ever thinks such things will happen to them? But they do. Spiteful men in dark alleys, or a sudden mob that decides anyone might be free game . . . it happens. Fenris knows it does. Money's elusive protection only goes so far when the rest of the world realizes you're as mortal as anyone else. And if he was asked at knifepoint, surely Lord Ancunín would say that yes, Fenris is meant to protect Astarion from that, too.
But what he assuredly didn't mean— what no one surely meant, and yet which counts all the same in Fenris' mind— is trouble within. Trouble like tutors who don't know better than to put their errant students in their place. Trouble like twenty-four different hired hands who were either too stupid or too cruel to understand just how young seventy-five really is for an elf. Who saw a bright young thing too foolish to know just what he was doing as he spread his legs— and who decided that they wanted their own selfish indulgence more than exhibiting any kind of decency.
How many of them bragged about it? How many of them did it just to brag? I fucked a patriar, I fucked Lord Ancunín's son, his firstborn, and the joke will inevitably come: who hasn't? And maybe that will haunt him in years to come and maybe it won't, but such far-flung things aren't for Fenris to fret about.
The point is . . . the point, Fenris thinks, and stares down at soft eyes narrowed in confusion, is that he should not be the first person in Astarion's life to say this. But given he is . . .
He will not be negligent in his duties again.
And how to say all that? He doesn't know. He has no gift for words, not really, and any attempts would surely only result in scoffing anger or laughing insult. And so what he offers up in the end isn't an explanation.]
I will not let it happen again.
[And unlike the weeks prior, that isn't a threat. It isn't a line in the sand firmly drawn so that Astarion will sit down and be a good boy.
It's a promise. Soft and a little throaty, and yet so achingly sincere that it hurts.]
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He thinks it's a cruel trick. A game. A lie. (He knows it isn't.)
But it's the too-bright quality of it all that doesn't make sense to the language he's spent his whole life learning (like the cold offering of a rat— a wrist— between starving creatures in the dark) when it is, undoubtedly, the simple doctrine of every last man for himself that endlessly defines the world that surrounds them no matter what it is they want. A man can pay to hang a family. A business built on trust will burn for hired thugs. Palms only weigh scales in favor of the faces that they like, and everything else is struck, and there's no outrunning that reality— not in a paradise built on fallow rot from its center out. Astarion is smart. Astarion's perceptive. That's the curse that caught him early. So he asks himself why as many times as the question comes to him in different shapes (why show a patriar something this exploitable, doesn't he know better; is that the angle— a long con, a better gambit; is he stupid? Reckless? In lust?) Coming up short every time while his eyes and throat turn to sandpaper: rough and itching whenever he blinks. Swallows.
He's lost his voice.
His nerve.
He's lost everything— and he hates the way it breaks against his frame, threatening to wash him away and leave nothing behind. Not even footprints. Around a soft tongue the won't work and the backdraft of agonies he can't even voice (let alone name), what's left to him that isn't brittle glass already shattered underfoot?
Forty five years old, and he's been ruins as far back as he remembers.
And ruins aren't warm.
They're not nice places.
They don't say pretty things, they don't make you want to stay. So when he pulls his hand away and steps back twice ( —left foot, right foot— ) there's anger on his face. Redness in the pool of silver eyes. He'd wanted a hero for ages in his dreams, but the sight of it churns in his stomach; too rich for his mouth after handfuls of salt water.
He can't remember what he says.
Maybe nothing.
Maybe it was just that look and the click of a pistol being cleared as he set it back down on the table. Maybe— like the night they'd met (Astarion having pushed too hard against a fighter's frame)— they walk back home in silence and neither of them says a word.
His cheek is healed by the time he returns to his own mirror to check. Dinner's uneventful (and if that doesn't warrant praise from Lord Ancunín, Astarion would be shocked to hear it), to the point that everyone eats in that same, pervasive silence and departs with hardly a word. And Fenris goes to wash. And Astarion goes to bed. And he can't sleep in that cold room— hating the noise from his phone and the nothingness from the corner where the one person he wants to talk to— ]
2/2
Pallid knuckles pulling thin sheets up beside him, offering a swath of empty space.]
Get in, [he says. And adds— albeit after a considerable beat.]
I won't touch you.
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It's an instinctive thing, swift and silent. As if they've been doing this for years on end; as if he has known his charge for years, not weeks. Fenris rises to his feet and crosses the room, pausing for only a few seconds before he carefully settles into the plush bed. It's far softer than his little cot in the corner of the room; his body sinks gratefully into soft padding and flexible foam, and though he curls one arm beneath his head as he lies on his side, there's at least a dozen pillows for him to choose from.
And he shouldn't do that. He wouldn't, not ordinarily. But something has changed between them today, and though Fenris cannot say what, he still knows it to be true. This is no ordinary attempt at seduction. This is no clumsy ploy, a patriar's feeble attempt to get his minder to lower his guard.
This is something more raw. A cry in the dark (tell me this isn't a trick, throaty and raw, a ghostly statement that slips through his mind and disappears), no matter that it's snapped out.
Astarion looks so small in the darkness. Stripped of his day clothes and scrubbed clean of his makeup, he looks so much younger than the man he tries to present himself as. His angles are softened in the blow glow from Fenris' tattoos, though his mouth still curls in an angry line.]
Someday I will introduce you to the concept of a request.
[It's low. Not a tease, but a gentle way of breaking the silence.]
You're angry.
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[Immediately amended with a sharpened scoff to— ]
Probably.
[At what though, he couldn't say. And the why still doesn't make sense to him either, so scrap that too: no point in pretending there's a card left in his hand that he can actually read in the figurative dark— not when even darkvision's no remedy for it.
Until his phone rattles and his temper flares, rolling him over (it's not a choice, how fast he turns) just to glower at a handful of messages all stacked up in a line under the hour on the glassy surface of that screen. A list of names outlined.
Violet. Petras. Leon. Dal.
—Fuck them.
Fuck them for having fun while he's stuck here. The nerve of being happy and not even asking why he isn't there, while he's licking wounds they didn't cause and gnawing on frustration's acrid taste. It isn't blame, but it sure as Hells tastes like it.
He sighs when he drops onto his back.]
There's something wrong with you, you know.
[What kind of a segue is that, Astarion.]
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And honestly? Fenris would expect no better.
He has only met that group the once, and admittedly, they were not at their best— but to Fenris' jaded eyes, they seemed like every other brainless, pleasure-focused group of nobles. Hungry to humiliate others and prove themselves dominant, their tiny minds focused only on the social wars waged between households . . . no, whatever message any of them sent is surely only a jab. We're having fun and you aren't.
(And it's funny, for he doesn't include Astarion in that category, not anymore. He doesn't know what category to slot him in, but it isn't that. There's more to his charge than that, though if pressed Fenris couldn't say what or when or how he began to think that way).]
Is there?
[He says it mildly. There's a great deal that's strange about him. There's a great deal that's wrong with him, Fenris knows, whether by trauma or sheer lack of experience (for oh, he is such a fledgling thing in some ways, wildly unsure and covering for it with a thick layer of stoicism). But he suspects Astarion means something a little less outlandish. Something that those friends of his would call a weakness; something that those tutors and bodyguards of before hadn't ever exhibited.
What a thing it is, Fenris thinks, to care for someone else. Not blindingly. Not ignoring their faults (oh, Astarion has so very many, vexing Fenris to no end). But he has grown to care for the little brat. It isn't love. It isn't even friendship, not really. But it's . . . it's something. A fierce protectiveness that Fenris had not known existed until today combining with the familiarity of spending the majority of their days together . . .
Perhaps it's that.
Or perhaps it's the fact it's easy to see the pulsing pattern of his lyrium right thought thin bedsheets, Fenris thinks dryly, and voices neither opinion. Let Astarion tell him what's on his mind. Gods know that will be easier than trying to guess.]
Shall I guess, or do you intend to tell me?
[He doesn't mean to be flippant, and indeed, his tone is a little too soft for that. But how else is he meant to respond?]
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A paradoxic anchor, considering it's only a handful of inches where the covers have sunken down between their bodies (both laid out on their backs now in the wake of all that shuffling, with neither one facing directly towards the other). Arms folded, arms lax. It's a yawning chasm, it's close— it's both— the comfort of not-touching and the safety of not being alone. The rattling of his phone slows against the bedside table, and in the gap (chasm; closeness; all of the above) he can hear his own breath pooling. Why he likes it, why it slowly soothes him to the bone in those mutedly loose-held seconds, possibly even better than the rushing of blood in his ears and the wild blare of music, he— in the repeat of every puzzling development so far— has absolutely no fucking clue.
His mouth quirks on its own when their eyes both flick down towards those radiant tattoos.
It isn't a smile.]
You don't....want anything.
[Ugh. No, that's not it. Try again, Astarion. Fingers curling lamely in midair while he whines (or groans, or something....s in the back of his throat) just to pick apart the words. Lines, at least, are easy.
How do you look at a stranger offering the softest heat you've (n)ever known and come up with anything that isn't lame enough to mercy kill on the spot?]
You have no ambition. You're not here to do anything but your job— and you don't even do that well. [And you can't argue that you're not, Fenris. Not when you're laying in his bed. Not when you iced his cheek. Spoke to him like a person. Took him out. Let him breathe. Let him hope.] Keep going like that and someone's going to trip you up or try to toss you out, and it won't matter that it's not going to be me.
[Ugh. Eugh.]
Don't you want anything for yourself?
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Fenris stares up at the dark ceiling. His head sinks a little further into the plush pillow, and he wonders what it is he thinks he's doing. You don't even do that well, and he cannot deny it, not when he lies here. And yet it only feels like the wrong move when he thinks about leaving: pulling those sheets back and retreating to his corner, leaving Astarion alone in his misery.]
Simply because you are not privy to those desires does not mean they do not exist. I want many things, Astarion.
[Spoken after a period of silence, his voice pitched low. And maybe this conversation is destined to be full of pauses, for it initially seems as if he might not elaborate. But then:]
I have never . . .
[No. How much does he want to reveal? Offering up too much feels like a mistake, even now— but it's so hard to explain it all without delving into his past. Fenris sighs softly and starts again.]
You were not wrong, that first day. Your father did buy me. He bought my debt.
[He murmurs the price, the number long since branded into his mind. It's a considerable sum even for nobility: more than a new car or an indulgent toy to throw away weeks later when it no longer amuses. It's the kind of money that ruins companies or silences people for a lifetime; the kind of debt that men drown in if they try to overcome it— legally, anyway.]
Before then, I was property. And just as you would not expect your beloved phone to have dreams or desires . . . so too I was not encouraged to try and form my own.
You ask me what I desire? But perhaps it would be easier to say that I have fears, and they are what guide me. Each day I wake up and face a job so laughably easier than my last that I fear what it means. I fear that I have failed, or that this is a test— or worse still, a joke at my expense. I fear that your father will tire of me, or find me not worth my price.
[I fear that he has more use for me than he has yet revealed, but he doesn't dare say that. Moment of camaraderie or not, Astarion is his father's son, and surely he will not appreciate as-yet-unfounded slander against him. Fenris sighs again.]
I fear that the worst is yet to come. That, indeed, someone will try to throw me out. That this existence, which is the most peaceful I have ever known, will come to an end.
. . . and I suppose, in wake of all that . . . what I desire most is stability.
[And it's too much. It's too much information that slipped past lips too eager to share, for he has never been asked this question before. It's embarrassing; it's dangerous, and he grimaces in the dark.]
What do you want?
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I was property.
Likened to a fucking phone. A piece of plastic and magic-infused tech, the comparison brutally offhanded. And Astarion's too stunned through the twist of his own neck as it jerks towards his conversational partner to remember that he'd started off association by teasing loosely about things like orphanages or enslavement; time's dilated so much under the press of cold shock that weeks might've been entire lifetimes ago, and at least in this second he's not the same person now that he was back then.
His eyes are opened, even if his brain hasn't caught up yet.
No part of him's caught up yet, in fact. Sitting upright in his bed without realizing it; hearing that posed prompt already come and gone, and one he tramples when he
snaps out in response:]
Who gives a damn what I want— what do you mean you were property? [His father paid— gods. Gods, that's an astronomical amount. Even for their seemingly bottomless expenses, his father could have bought a legion devoted to his every last word. Instead he chose—
This.
One elf. One glow-in-the-dark, metaphoric name possessing, eye-contact averse elf in unsuspecting armor. Hells' teeth— why? Was it assumptive loyalty? That if he paid more than anyone ever should, the man would feel inescapably bound? Or....]
Who owned you?
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He'd thought . . . indifferent sympathy, perhaps. A twisting grimace or a performative sigh on such a wretched business, for isn't that how it always goes? Derision or pity, but either way, nobles always remove themselves from such distasteful issues. Slaves and servants are there to serve, not to have personal lives or conflicts, and if their very existence is a miserable one, well. It's not worth thinking about. That's how it had been with Danarius and his ilk— and gods know Lord Ancunín was nothing but serene when he had handed over a check to buy Fenris. The lad will be useful, that was the only real comment he'd had, and Fenris had thought—
It's just . . . he hadn't expected horror.
He hadn't expected shock.
And maybe this is Fenris' own fault. Maybe he expects too much of an elf not yet a century old, who plays so well at being worldly and mature that he can fool almost everyone. But there's such a difference between knowing how to play among your friends (boasting about exploits, fucking and sucking your way through the upper echelons just so they'll admire you) and knowing what really happens in the world . . .]
A wizard near the edge of the Upper City. A minor noble.
[He isn't playing coy with Danarius' name— at least, not intentionally. It's just that he doesn't quite know what to make of all this shock.]
And I mean I was property. His . . . his. He arranged it in courts long ago, though I do not know the specifics.
[It had been so many years ago, after all, and he was such an ignorant thing. The legalese had flown over his head, and Danarius had prompted him to sign things with the jagged X that had served as signature. And his mother had been there, nodding tearfully; Varania had been there, small and wide-eyed. For them, Danarius murmured. Just sign here and they will never worry again . . .]
He controlled everything. He . . . why are you upset?
[And he doesn't hear the echo. He doesn't realize his expression is the same that Astarion wore hours ago (a lifetime ago).]
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Now another one's again.
And is it really any different to start with? Slavery is a chokehold— so archaic that even without abolishment, most to-do houses would never actually admit they keep anything on a chain (oh, but the ones that do, though....Astarion can damn well imagine what it looked like, knowing patriar so well: the man resting across from him dragged along in broad daylight by a literal chain, shoulder-to-shoulder with bustling passersby of all shades and stripes. A novelty to gawk at. A curio. A fancy-fucking-purse, to quote the very night they'd met)— and while Fenris might well be free of that pervasive sense of flaunted ownership, there's not a chance in the bloody Hells themselves that Fenris could ever pay back a sum that large. Not with his body, nor his mind— not even on the most lavish of salaries like the one Astarion's soon fit to inherit. So deep a pit that you'd have to be one of the established few, by definition. Generational.
Because without a hoard of foreborne gold under your heels....
Strewth.
Astarion's father could report him for anything and call it a breach of contract. A theft so insurmountable— ]
Why am I upset?
[It's so incredulous rolling off his tongue, but turning the mirror back towards himself in that selfsame beat to answer it—
Why is he upset?
(And like an response, he blinks with his head turned sharply to one side: all of him watching Fenris from the corner of his eyes before letting his own gaze drop under the lid of tired lashes. His lips pursing and unpursing, thinned out just ahead of how they bunch. Not doeish, he realizes, once that collapsed stare reveals two balled up fists gone red inside his lap, feeling the sudden prickle of pinched brows at the center of his forehead.
—he's angry.
The same anger he'd felt spitting curses while his own cheek stung. Bitter bile and acid sharp, nauseating him from the stomach up.)
It shows the second that he twists his head back towards Fenris. The thinnest sliver of moonlight cutting low and tight over a gritted jaw that growls out:]
—Why aren't you?
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(Why is he?)
It's more than reasonable as a question, but it takes Fenris a long few seconds before he can answer it. He's too caught up in staring at his charge: his hands fisted so tightly his knuckles shine white in the darkness, his sweet voice roughened in a way that Fenris has never heard before. Not the whining, sulking tone he gets when he misses a party, nor the frustrated growl that comes out being thwarted, no. This is rage. This is the kind of anger that almost makes you sick for how potent it is, bile in your belly and a thundering in your ears . . .
And he doesn't understand why.
Because of a moment of kindness? A cold cloth on a sore cheek? No, it can't be that. The lesson? Fenris' mind whirs, though some part of him knows he's stalling out. But it makes no sense to him, not when he has long since learned the world is nothing but a struggle— and nobles nothing but cruel. Petulant and petty and so wealthy they never develop morals or good sense— that's how they are. That's how they all are and always have been, from Danarius and his friends to the guffawing group at that party, they all of them—
Why aren't you?]
What would you have me say?
[It's low, his voice rougher than it had been before. And it isn't that he hasn't thought about this— oh, of course he has. As the years went by and he saw snatches of how ordinary people lived . . . oh, Danarius couldn't erase everything. Of course he's resented it, raged and sobbed and panicked in the quiet darkness of his room, but what good had it ever done him? Not when he was a teenager, and not now.]
It is my life. If I run, even if I am not caught, that debt goes to my family— and if I am caught, at best I will only add to my debt. At worst I will go back to the man who owned me before, and his punishments will not cease, not for years on end. That this position— you— is the first thing that has been good in my life, for I never once thought he would sell me. I am still owned and it is an improvement— and if I make a single mistake, it will all come crashing down.
I despise it. I loathe it. The reality of it would suffocate me if I lingered upon it for too long, and so I cannot, for there is no future in that. What good would it do me to rage? It is what it is— and focusing on survival is what has led me to see my three hundredth year, not the inherent injustices of my existence.
I do not— I cannot— dream of freedom. Not the way you know it. A life like this . . . it has to be enough.
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It's unfair. It's unfair. It's unfair.
Like a mantra, every word Fenris says prompts more of that same internal echo, and through the awfulness of its rat-king tangle, blurring the lines between outrage and newfound horror at something he knew existed in this city since he was at least the age of twelve (for there's always a difference between knowing and knowing), Astarion comes to the same conclusion as fists beaten against stone. The same conclusion Fenris— who might've beaten his hands against stone on more than one occasion, figurative or literal both, Astarion thinks while his eyes drop towards scarred knuckles— hands to him like a contract in the very same ensuing breath.
'I cannot dream of freedom.'
Astarion can.
Astarion does.
And worse still, he knows he'll someday have it— or an approximation of it anyway, with him roaming these halls in place of colder footsteps, silk hems trailing in his wake. White curls cut around his cheeks instead of straight lines, but the very same fortune clutched in hand. Something he loathes as much as he covets, depending on the night.
Maybe that'll be a cage, too. Maybe a Baroness has pictures or a Duke longs for his waif— but even then, Fenris is right: it's not the same.
This is worse.
So much worse.
It's unfair.]
But it's not enough.
[Shocked to hear the dry rasp of his throat chiming in without him, Astarion pauses. His eyes wet, his mouth dry. Hollow rattle lost inside the shallow chasm still cut between them.
Because everything. Everything Fenris can't bring himself to bask in or hope for, it dangles on a razor's edge. One mistake. One night where Lord Ancunín finds an empty bed or hears the bray of drunken laughter. Or worse.
He's never in his pointless life wanted to protect something more.]
Fuck it all, I'll buy your debt— [He expels with a burst of anxious air.] Another fifty years and I'll have the rights to our vaults, and I can just buy you from your contract. Make sure there's nothing for you to break.
[Not I'll set you free. Not I'll let you go.
He's young, Astarion Ancunín; he can't stray too far from his own desires yet— and Fenris is the first real thing he's ever found that he likes enough to keep.]
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And it always comes down to that, doesn't it? Then again: isn't that meant to be every slave's hope? That some master will look on them kindly enough to buy them not as laborer, but kept pet, safe and secure. My precious thing, my beloved jewel, and it isn't freedom, but it's almost like it. Safe from work. Safe from harm. Safe from the illegal slave markets and the brutal cruelty of a master who might chain you to a bed or work you quite literally to death—
Fenris should be grateful.
He isn't.
He knows what the boy means. He knows that there is no lie in the fervency of his voice nor the bright shine to his gaze, for what would be the point? Some cruel joke, maybe, but such a thing is too tiresome to play out. This is real. This is what he thinks will help, and gods, but he isn't wrong. It would help. It would help immensely, right up until Astarion got tired of him. Or: Astarion found a better offer. Or: Astarion dies an untimely death, and all his prized possessions go to his brother, who looks at Fenris as though he's little more than a mildly interesting object (which he is in this household).]
And what then?
[It's soft. Not angry. Not yet, anyway.]
Assuming I do survive the next fifty years here, what then? You will buy me from my contract, and then I will be yours. I will still have a master I need to serve and keep happy. I will still owe a debt to someone— or do you plan on paying all of it yourself out of your own pocket and never ask me for a copper? It will not come cheap. And I doubt your father will be content with you spending it, heir or not.
[He does not realize how hunched his posture has become, his head bowed forward and his shoulders raised defensively.]
Besides. You assume your father will keep me for another fifty years. But I do not think he imagines I will last that long.
[Then why hire him? Why spend such a staggeringly enormous sum? He doesn't know, but he can think of more than a few possibilities, none of them good.
A few moments of silence, and, quieter:]
Do not mistake this as my wanting to wallow in enslavement— nor a lack of appreciation for your— for you.
[He glances over at him. There's such anguish in that expression— and so despite himself, Fenris reaches out, absently brushing a strand of hair away from his face.]
But trading one master for another is not freedom.
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It shuts him up.)
Yet all the while his own mind runs ragged in sluggish desperation, swearing Fenris is wrong. That the offer counts as freedom just because he'd never use it, twisting in the vice of all obvious logic to devour its own tail. Because there's no point in lofty optimism, after all anyway, is there? Slavery or not, neither beggars nor princes can be choosers, no matter what fables so often insist. Not even a patriar can make demands without paying his own fees, so at the end of every fetid, locked-in day, does anyone get true freedom?
Astarion won't.
No, he certainly damn well won't, not in fifty years or a hundred. He'll be here. The loyal son, as he was named; unruly and unhappy, but still here. And on the heels of the kindest day in decades, sitting beside someone who talks to him, looks at him— sees him—
He isn't strong enough to make a promise he doesn't want. One that ends with him alone again.
His arms pull back from where they sit across his knees, fit in close before he lifts his chin again. Uncertainty more pervasive than the darkness curled around them, and for the first time in a long, long while— without the distraction of drink or stupidity or pointless laughter— he feels it. He hates it. Sullen shame the only thing he wears when he sighs and looks away, that strand of hair sliding back into stubborn disarray for the sunken tilting of his head.]
You will last that long.
[The words leave his teeth in shallow rhythms.]
I'll protect you. Help you. Teach you everything I know about this hierarchical mess you've gotten yourself stuck in, so that even my family can't try to displace you. [The law's Astarion's forte; he has an eye for it, even when he despises it on stubborn principle alone.]
We can....figure out whatever comes after that once we get there. [Even if he can't admit it— can't bring himself to say I'll free you— something in his pendulous heart still swings the other way right through his grasping fingertips. Lurching though it hurts. Twisting a glance over his shoulder cut from slow sincerity, slung dark beneath pale eyes.]
....together.
[Is that enough the question scrawled in his expression.
(The phone beside them starts rattling again. It doesn't feel important anymore; it's only Fenris that he's watching.)]
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The trouble is, Fenris doesn't know.
It's just— it's all happening so quickly, and he doesn't know where to stand. A day ago he would have thought it the height of foolishness to ever believe so wholeheartedly in a noble, much less one who's resented him so much. He would have been wary of this being a trick, and he would have been right to. A day ago, he would have said with certainty that there was no way this wasn't a ploy, a spirited effort from his rebellious charge to get him in trouble. Crawl into my bed, I'll buy you free, don't fret, and the words are right, the voice is right, but what kind of fool would trust in such sweet promises? There are stories all across the coast of bedded women stuck with a child they never wanted because a noble had promised that he'd elevate them, and that would be after so much more than just today.
A single act of kindness . . . surely it can't change so much.
There has to be something else. The thought rises up almost violently within his mind, ripping through the nauseating mixture of bitter anger and aching longing and filling him with fear. There has to something else, something he's missing, some clause that he's overlooked— something, and he barely knows what he means. He barely knows how this could be a trick or trap, save that the last time a noble promised him something good, his collar only grew heavier around his throat.
(Quite the expensive pet, aren't you? And it was a joke. A teasing bit of mirth from his master, Danarius' voice amused as he'd tallied out the cost of all that lyrium. But it will be worth it, and what could he do but agree?)
And yet . . . Astarion's voice aches with honesty. His eyes still gleam in the darkness, and though Fenris does not understand all the emotions clear on his face (oh, foolish thing, and he doesn't realize just how lonely Astarion really is; he doesn't understand just how little affection he's ever gotten), there's nothing there that speaks of a lie.
But maybe it's not even that. Maybe it's just that there's nothing dignified about this conversation. It's not the coy seduction of before, with Astarion firmly slotted in the role of tempting ingenue; it's not even the boastful bragging of that party, spiteful dominance proven through base means.
He wouldn't look like this in front of his friends, Fenris thinks, and realizes in that same moment that it's true. He wouldn't dare. There could be no tears, no fretful anger or fierce protectiveness, for such stark genuineness isn't allowed in those circles. Even the offer for help would be suspect— but here Astarion is, baring his heart anyway.
Is it enough?]
Together.
[And it doesn't solve everything. It doesn't grant him freedom, or promise him some happy ending. But it's something. It's something tangible, something real: I will not let you be taken. I will not let them oust you. I will not let you be hurt.
Who has ever been so kind to him before? And yet the moment the thought slips past his mind, he crushes it, shoving it away with frantic desperation, for he can't. He can't take the way his heart lurches and aches so suddenly, his own eyes threatening to sting; he can't bear it, not tonight. Not when this is already confusing as it is. Not when he feels so filled with conflicting emotions that it's almost nauseating— oh, he can't.
But perhaps now he does understand— for this is more kindness than anyone has ever shown him, and he cannot help but crave more. And yet it would be strange for him to reach out again, no matter that his fingers suddenly ache to smooth through those unruly curls. So, instead:]
Start with your friends. Tell me of them.
[Soft. Not entreating, not exactly, but . . . gentle. A way to lead them out of this emotional minefield they've found themselves in, for in truth, Fenris does not know how to even begin to articulate what he's feeling.]
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It seems more real with each passing second.
Thank the gods for small segues though, if nothing else. A sudden wave of warmth flickering as it passes through a quickly thawing expression: trading out fear for its most familiar balm— and a dry glance that fights to be seen around the tumid edges of his pillows.]
What's to tell? They're no threat to you.
[Because that's where his own mind leaps first, of course. Innate as sucking air, particularly with the discussion they'd just had still resting soft inside their half-tensed palms.]
But....[Astarion interjects through a meandering hum] in case you want to shut them up next time they start to bark: they're all patriar. Mostly my age or younger— with the exception of one. [Antwun Dufay. The singular soul that hadn't been there the night Fenris came trampling through carpeted shores just to be met with glinting eyes and cold mockery in the dark.
Picking over it now, Astarion's glad he wasn't.
Mostly for the fact that shame— weeks, if not closing in on a full month late for its would-be-decent arrival— is busy scribbling the tips of Astarion's ears (and the short gaps between inkdrop moles and constellatory freckles) a few shades darker with its retrospective presence; he can't stand the thought of hearing Fenris denigrated by his peers.
Least of all by someone twice his age.]
Leon's a working apprentice to the Jannath line. [His scoff is feathering; pushing away malleable night air with its disdain.] You can expect him to supplicate himself like one, too. [Slim fingers gesticulate towards white curls. An example.] Human, long hair. Won't say much, but absolutely thinks he's right whenever he does, even when he's being as dense as wet cement. Which, for the record? Happens a lot.
Violet, on the other hand, is vicious. Ignore her, if you can. I don't even need to describe her; you'll know which one she is. [Antithetical to the term all bark, but....] Thankfully for all of us, she loses interest faster than anything so long as you play figuratively dead.
Sometimes I think she can only sense movement.
[Ha and also ha— but seriously though.]
Yousen's the grim-eyed halfling, and by nature only follows the herd: his shrewd perception does wonders for milling gossip— but only if he thinks the others will approve.
[Call it an unsung implication in delivery that the lanky noble at Fenris' side looks proud for just a few clear beats, insisting don't worry, I won't let them.]
Aurelia the tiefling's aloof and haughty. If her chin raised any higher, she'd be strutting around with a broken neck. [Again, his body language's shifted. Again, he mimics the creature he describes: his arms curling while his throat's stretched out long.] Our resident holier-than-thou heiress. Who so happens to use that as a tragically unfortunate mask for just how middling her family's influence is. Calling them glorified merchants is like calling a dockwhore a peeress— they both have tits and like to spread their legs, but that's about where the similarities begin and end.
Petras is....
[His head shakes. His tongue clicks.
....eugh.]
A fellow magistrate and the son of a to-do lord. Goes by the title of pale, though only the gods know why. Expect him to boast and brag and cock about as if he owns everyone and everything in earshot, showing said pale ass all the while. [Less than a threat:] He's a gnat. If he ever tries to give you hell, swat him and watch how red he turns.
It's quite fun, actually.
[Mm.]
And last but not least: Dal. Dalyria, that is. A drow healer of all things, if you can believe those exist. [How she got so far as to rub elbows with sunlight and aristocracy both....Astarion's spent too long wondering whether it's wealth or talent she's kept locked inside her estate vaults.] Gets in as much trouble as the rest of us, but can't stand to see us snarl.
The others wouldn't be half as irritating if she'd just let us have our way. As you saw— they could do with being taken down a peg. [As if Astarion would ever be the one to cow the pack, when he was crowing before them just to see them smile.]
Is that enough information to sate your curiosity? Or would you like me to give you their rut count as well?
[Too late: he's already volunteering that all on his own, flashing the blunt corners of his own gossiping canines.]
Aurelia's last— but Petras is a pitiable second.
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And for tonight, it's nice to exhale.
He lays back down, laying his head gingerly on a pillow that sinks sweetly beneath the pressure. His limbs relax more quickly this time around, his aching body sighing softly in contentment now that he knows this isn't a trap of some kind. He can feel the warmth of Astarion from only a foot away, and the sound of his voice as it rises and falls mildly is oddly soothing. He hadn't realized before now just how tired he's been (but then again, he's always a bit tired, isn't he?). Gods, and in a bed this soft . . .
But ah, he does want to hear this. Slinging an arm beneath his head, Fenris glances over at Astarion, watching the line of his profile as he speaks. Dal and Petras and Leon and Violet, and he tries to match names to faces with middling results. Some of them are easier than others (Leon, then, was the one that cat-called him, and as for the drow and the tiefling, well, that's easy enough), but he's sure he'll have them down soon enough. Social dynamics, too, aren't so hard to guess: Petras exasperatedly tolerated, he and Astarion going at it like denning pups, all bark and no bite; Violet offered her due wariness, while Dal is doted upon, if not the earner of more than a few rolled eyes.
He wonders, vaguely, what they'll think when Astarion begins defending him instead of throwing him as an easy target. And then he wonders when he began to assume that Astarion would defend him, rather than simply go along with their goading. But he will. Fenris knows he will, prompted by that proud smile and underscored by a bone-deep certainty he won't question tonight.
And ah— that last addition earns an unexpected snort, undignified and amused. The first time he's laughed properly in Astarion's presence.]
And you take every chance to remind him, I wager.
[It's no bad thing. But gods, a pack of adolescents barely grown . . . with the exception of Leon, perhaps, but for the rest? My age or younger, and gods, how young that is for elves and tieflings and drow . . . no wonder they all keep track of how many the others fuck. What else is there to boast about?]
I would ask you where you rank on that list, little noble, but I suspect I would regret it.
[But there's a smile in his voice. He's teasing, of all things. Gently testing this newfound accord with a quiet joke. And then, his tone still light:]
Sate my curiosity once more: which is your favorite among them?
[For friendship. For rutting. For anything, really.]
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god that icon tho i am DYING about all these new ones
good because more are on the way for YOU >:]
AA BOO THANK YOU once again you spoil me :>
POINTS. AT. YOU.
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