If I wanted company, I would ask for your bodyguard to visit alone, so we might actually get to speak for once.
[It's a whipcrack swift response, just as toothless and fond as Astarion's own statement. Thank you, he says without saying, his eyes fluttering closed and his voice fond, and she replies: for you, always.
Not just because she has a soft heart beneath her resolve of steel. She does, which is why she so often plays mediator, but her fondness of him has nothing to do with that. Always for Astarion for a thousand other reasons: because he can, despite what Petras might say, retract his claws when need be. Because he shows his love so subtly, but so earnestly.
There was a party once, a long time ago (as she says to Fenris far later, when Astarion has wandered off to find the bathroom and they're left picking at leftovers). She hadn't known Astarion long— half a year, maybe, if that. But she'd finally earned enough of a place in their group to be invited to a party: something Aurelia threw for Highharvestide, an ironic spectacle full of deliberately bad fashion and overpriced alcohol as they'd celebrated—
'The fact that none of you were farmers and didn't have to worry about next year's crop?' Fenris drawls, and she laughs softly as she nods.
She had ended up buying a garishly pink, rumpled halter dress: something so outrageously expensive that it came around and looked ironically cheap. It wasn't her style at all, nor her color if it came to that, but it would have served the intended purpose.
Astarion was the one who picked her up that night. He'd climbed out of his car and took one look at her before forcing her back inside. They were late by about two hours (as she kept reminding him) and Astarion couldn't care less, for, he said, he wasn't about to walk into that party with someone looking so distressingly bad. And the entire time he'd clucked about bad taste and poor impressions, sighing heavily over the state of her closet and digging without a care for propriety through her jewelry, until at last he'd proclaimed her improved. 'There's a difference between being badly dressed and ironically so, my dear,' he'd said on the drive there, his voice light and airy as it always is when he's being snobbish.
And it wasn't until she arrived that Dalyria realized the intended joke. Most of the guests were dressed so finely, sporting silks and furs; it was only a chosen few targets who'd been given the wrong information. And of course no one would care if they said they'd been tricked; all anyone would remember was the fact they looked so hideously underdressed that it was funny.
And poor Leon had suffered that night, as had a chosen few others. But not her. And though Astarion had swiftly flitted off to socialize among this person and that, it mattered that he'd saved her. That he'd known the joke and steered her clear from being the victim, and oh, it didn't matter and it mattered so very much all at once.]
That's why.
[She says it simply.]
Because he is kinder and sweeter than he ever wants to admit— and when he receives it, he returns it. That party was just one example, but there's been other times . . . little things, hm? Little favors or idle tips that he'll bluster are nothing, but aren't.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
doggish) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
albinomilksnake2023-07-11 12:43 am
no subject
[It's a whipcrack swift response, just as toothless and fond as Astarion's own statement. Thank you, he says without saying, his eyes fluttering closed and his voice fond, and she replies: for you, always.
Not just because she has a soft heart beneath her resolve of steel. She does, which is why she so often plays mediator, but her fondness of him has nothing to do with that. Always for Astarion for a thousand other reasons: because he can, despite what Petras might say, retract his claws when need be. Because he shows his love so subtly, but so earnestly.
There was a party once, a long time ago (as she says to Fenris far later, when Astarion has wandered off to find the bathroom and they're left picking at leftovers). She hadn't known Astarion long— half a year, maybe, if that. But she'd finally earned enough of a place in their group to be invited to a party: something Aurelia threw for Highharvestide, an ironic spectacle full of deliberately bad fashion and overpriced alcohol as they'd celebrated—
'The fact that none of you were farmers and didn't have to worry about next year's crop?' Fenris drawls, and she laughs softly as she nods.
She had ended up buying a garishly pink, rumpled halter dress: something so outrageously expensive that it came around and looked ironically cheap. It wasn't her style at all, nor her color if it came to that, but it would have served the intended purpose.
Astarion was the one who picked her up that night. He'd climbed out of his car and took one look at her before forcing her back inside. They were late by about two hours (as she kept reminding him) and Astarion couldn't care less, for, he said, he wasn't about to walk into that party with someone looking so distressingly bad. And the entire time he'd clucked about bad taste and poor impressions, sighing heavily over the state of her closet and digging without a care for propriety through her jewelry, until at last he'd proclaimed her improved. 'There's a difference between being badly dressed and ironically so, my dear,' he'd said on the drive there, his voice light and airy as it always is when he's being snobbish.
And it wasn't until she arrived that Dalyria realized the intended joke. Most of the guests were dressed so finely, sporting silks and furs; it was only a chosen few targets who'd been given the wrong information. And of course no one would care if they said they'd been tricked; all anyone would remember was the fact they looked so hideously underdressed that it was funny.
And poor Leon had suffered that night, as had a chosen few others. But not her. And though Astarion had swiftly flitted off to socialize among this person and that, it mattered that he'd saved her. That he'd known the joke and steered her clear from being the victim, and oh, it didn't matter and it mattered so very much all at once.]
That's why.
[She says it simply.]
Because he is kinder and sweeter than he ever wants to admit— and when he receives it, he returns it. That party was just one example, but there's been other times . . . little things, hm? Little favors or idle tips that he'll bluster are nothing, but aren't.