[He's feigned this more times than he can count. A drink nudged against his fingertips or a compliment to his ears, and there— just so— comes bashful gratitude, flattered and hopeless to the last. Those practiced lines that ever cloyed, tasting sweet as rot after a time. Oh, darling. Thank you. You flatter me. You've changed me. I want to stay with you until you tire of me, trust in that. The world outside those flytrap bars comes differently.
His shoulders align perfectly with his succinctly rounded-out expression— not a ruddy, directed cant like that of a schoolchild in portrayed stagelight, but something quieter. Narrower. Tender things are so unbelievably small in their own nature, that for that moment, it is easy to see just why they slip through the cracks in the world— all of them— any of them. They make no grand statements outside the change that they enact. They fan no flames, spark no shattering burst of electricity.
How could Astarion have seen them before now?]
Oh. [He sounds absurd in that lead in. A fawn learning how to walk would have more grace, fumbling headlong into his own breathlessness and only grasping a glimpse of it in hindsight.] Same. [Same, he says, and it's so paper thin he trips in that return to normalcy:] Ahahah, very much the same indeed. And not solely for the fact that I'd most likely be dead as a doornail rotting in a fallow field otherwise— although I'm certain that's obvious by now.
[Which, much like the rest of this, is true.
He pauses, then. Flexes his freshly cleaned fingertips before slowly glancing up towards that firelight. The man perched still beside it.]
Thus in the spirit of cooperation and naked honesty....a request.
no subject
His shoulders align perfectly with his succinctly rounded-out expression— not a ruddy, directed cant like that of a schoolchild in portrayed stagelight, but something quieter. Narrower. Tender things are so unbelievably small in their own nature, that for that moment, it is easy to see just why they slip through the cracks in the world— all of them— any of them. They make no grand statements outside the change that they enact. They fan no flames, spark no shattering burst of electricity.
How could Astarion have seen them before now?]
Oh. [He sounds absurd in that lead in. A fawn learning how to walk would have more grace, fumbling headlong into his own breathlessness and only grasping a glimpse of it in hindsight.] Same. [Same, he says, and it's so paper thin he trips in that return to normalcy:] Ahahah, very much the same indeed. And not solely for the fact that I'd most likely be dead as a doornail rotting in a fallow field otherwise— although I'm certain that's obvious by now.
[Which, much like the rest of this, is true.
He pauses, then. Flexes his freshly cleaned fingertips before slowly glancing up towards that firelight. The man perched still beside it.]
Thus in the spirit of cooperation and naked honesty....a request.