INBOX II

[illithidnapped]

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[doggish]

[His eyes widen for a half-second as Astarion slips that confession about the Maker, there and then gone so fast that he might have imagined it. Except he didn't imagine it, and that's . . . he doesn't know what he thinks. Perhaps nothing. Certainly it needn't be lingered upon. But it's odd to know that your husband has the same nebulous belief in the Maker that you do— especially when he isn't of your world. Someday, he thinks, he'll ask again. Either Astarion will answer or he won't, but he wants to know.

For now: his larger point is more important. Demonized or canonized rather than treated as simple studywork— and it's such an objectively true fact that it almost takes Leto by surprise. And yet: that is the difference, isn't it? Religion and magic have been interwoven for centuries in Thedas; that was part of the reason for all those Exalted Marches, after all, save Andraste's own original one. First to attack the elves and their wild magic, and then, later, to return to Tevinter to declare war on the empire again and again for their magical heresy.

He hadn't realized . . . all these months he's marveled at the fact that Baldur's Gate isn't another Minrathous, but it's that, isn't it? Magic simply is here, neither elevated nor reviled. It isn't an automatic trait for power, nor is it reason to single a person out. It almost seems too simple, except that it makes so much sense that Leto wonders at the fact he'd never thought of it before.

All those thoughts are pushed to the side as Astarion crisply adds that last sentence. Leto's eyes flick up, going from internal thought to focusing back on his husband.]

You make me happy simply by being near me.

[Like so many of the things he says, he says it simply and steadfastly: as much a fact as it is a compliment. Inching in closer, he bumps his nose gently against Astarion's cheek, unable to resist the extra bit of affection.]

And you know a great deal more than you ever get credit for— from myself or otherwise. Clever thing, don't think you can fool me.

[It's a compliment and quiet teasing all at once, making way for what he says next.]

I miss being connected to you. I will never miss the pain of my lyrium, nor all the years of agony it caused me, but . . . it was a comforting thing to feel your shard pulling on it. To watch you in the glow of it, and feel the way you took so much care never to touch it unexpectedly.

[It was so soothing, too, those nights when one of them would wake up screaming. How many times had Leto woken up with a jolt, iron still searing around his neck and his mind in Minrathous, only to know instinctively that he was safe.]

You are not wrong. Perhaps it was religion that made all the difference . . . making magic into something to be fear or reviled or cherished, but always something different. Add that to the centuries of blood magic, genocide, and all the ways in which that thinned the veil . . . I doubt they will ever be able to go back. Here . . . it still baffles me each time it is treated so mundanely. Like furniture, or rain . . . it defies comprehension some days, though the longer I spend here, the more I grow used to it.

The way gods are treated around here still defies my comprehension.

[A few seconds pass, and then, quietly:]

You think the Maker real?

[illithidnapped]

I think him atelically real, yes. [Stands as close as Astarion will get to the matter for now, at least until the Maker or Andraste herself descends from on high to make a definitive claim to the City— never mind the world— that they abandoned.] More logically speaking I think it likely he died or disintegrated ages ago. Possibly even before dear Andraste's selectively touted time.

As you said in a way, you've seen the way gods are here; they're not shy about their presence— only selective about who's on the receiving end.

[The word 'selective' has a sneer to it. Not a day goes by when he can't recite how many days his voice went hoarse from prayer. His knees bruised by more than just his duty.]

....but then he gave me you.

[Or someone did.

Something that plucked him from the worst of his already rock-bottom nightmares, and set him not just smack dab in the middle of a place both void and free of Cazador Szarr, but directly in the hands of his dear wolf. His beating, vibrant heart.

Twice.

(More, perhaps, if those attuned visions his young lover sports are indicative of anything direct.) And so the silence is expansive. Takes the boundless shape of what one might call divinity in variable forms, tethered deeply to them both.

He knocks back against that gentle contact, feeling the transmuted measure of his anchor shard straining towards his lover's lyrium.]

How can I not believe in him after all that....?

[doggish]

[How can Leto not believe in Him after all that?

Perhaps he'll never know. Perhaps it is a flaw in his own personality, that he wants so badly to believe and yet feels far too much doubt to ever fully commit. It makes sense to think that the Maker has died long ago; it makes more sense still to think that He is nothing but a figment of imagination, born out of a desperate longing for order in a world built upon chaos. But then again . . . what are the chances? Two elven slaves born centuries apart in worlds apart, destined to find one another not just once, but twice, thrice, endlessly, over and over again . . .

For those dreams of other lives eternally linger in Leto's mind. He does not speak of them often, for they're overwhelming to consider and take a long time to process— but they linger. He dreams of them often, and writes them down in the aftermath: trying to match each dream to a different lifetime, desperately scribbling down clues and observational details as he recalls them. There's no pattern to them, no meaningful denotation as to where or why or how they find each other; the only consistency is that they do. Always, they do.]

I do not disagree. I cannot say I do not believe in him, not when I look at all that has happened between us, but nor do I think him such an active presence as others might. A dead echo, perhaps, feels most right.

[Cold skin is impossibly soft beneath the stroke of his thumb. It never fails to awe him a little— how something so strong has the capacity to be so soft all at once.]

. . . but there are times, Astarion, when I find it easier to believe in you than the Maker. For it was you who survived all those years. You who found me, and I who found you, over and over, no matter what tore us apart. In every world, in every iteration my dreams show me . . . it is no mere coincidence.

And I am loathe to attribute that to anyone else beyond our wills.

[illithidnapped]

Mmn, perhaps I am the Maker, then. [He muses with a sudden flare of smugness, not to be misconstrued as anything but the accessory to his marrow-deep infatuation— something that tips him forward (aching sweetly like a pulsebeat flared to life beneath his ribs), burying his face in Leto's neck. Rolling his weight to carry their outlines into one another, where lust embodies only the desire to be close. Namely closer than the gaps between their clothes and contours will ever allow; closer than even sex might make them, driven by a blazing passion for entanglement without a name. Without an ideal behind it, rather than a concept.

I want to be so near to you that nothing might ever tear us apart.

(Ergo yes, he's misbehaving on a technicality— but only just. Only in the sense he doesn't know how to keep his hands off of his husband, and doesn't care to muck about with pretense anymore.) Just let him have this. Let him lie here, tangled and fully clothed, his fangs tucked safely away and his base desires transmuted into gold for however long it lasts.

Let him be an idiot, he doesn't mind the cost.]

Reincarnated in the form your Chantry might fear most. Taken yet another beautiful Tevene slave to whisk away as my bride.

[doggish]

[He scoffs out a laugh, disbelieving and yet not at all upset.]

You're ridiculous.

[And what that means, coupled alongside the soft look Leto throws his way, is: thank you. For teasing so foolishly; for startling him out of what could have been the start of a grim, dour mood. He wraps his arms around his husband and tucks his face against the crook of his neck, closing his eyes as he inhales the sweet scent of him. Lilac and rosemary and brandy (so much more floral than it was in Thedas, but Leto finds it refreshing).

Drawing back, he nips at Astarion's bottom lip, the action gently adoring.]

Before you get carried away with thoughts of me virginal in bridal lace and delicate gold vestment—

[Oh, never doubts he knows you, sir, or your kinks.]

— we were discussing my hypnotizing you— and my dominating you.

[It's not that he's suddenly so very comfortable with the idea of using such magic on Astarion, but avoiding the topic will do neither of them any good either. Better now to lean in and focus on the enjoyable parts of it, and deal with whatever worse emotions surface whenever they do.]

Tell me what you imagine, when you imagine such things.

[A command, though to be fair, that isn't such an unusual thing. It's often Leto will state things as a command rather than a request, and nearly all of it innocuous: get your cloak on, we're going to the market and the like. Whether or not Astarion obeys is his own business; if he's truly annoyed, he's always pushed back or firmly put Leto in his place.

So here and now, it's a gentle way for him to push without doing something so foolish as outright challenging Astarion.]

You are always such an inventive thing when it comes to me spreading my legs . . . tell me what you imagine when it's you.

[illithidnapped]

[Gods, everything peripheral melts into the languid pressure of those arms wrapped loosely around him in a blur of relief so rare as to be considered impossible for a creature of his own befanged persuasion, threaded now through his senses like the listless drag of a finely rolled cigarette. Lighter than the wedged-in angle of one leg against his own, and the spot where Leto's knee digs an inch or two higher than where his comfortably rests.

A description which might imply to some that the act is so close as to be uncomfortable.

It isn't.]

Rude. [Astarion mouths out against the abstract weight of bliss, for all its dispersive sluggishness.] I wasn't ever meant to be so predictable as this.

[He was, as it so happens, dreaming of exactly that— though the word dominating cuts through in a way that leaves his nerves alight. Little pinpricks of focus blooming underneath his skin.

He answers it by tightening his knuckles in a squeeze with claws, and they snag here or there with only the most docile catches against cloth.]

Mm.... [His telltale hum, brought about whenever he's actually thinking rather than relying on old quips or thin deflection. Trying as it can be to pour over the shape of what subjugation still translates to after years of freedom (now more than ever, he supposes), there's that tether laced between himself and Leto, anchored tight and sweet and safe amongst a world that isn't, and so he tasks himself to more than what once was. Rather, what he must've thrilled for, as he hungers for it still in the night. The cold.

Darkness.

Not of crypt or coffin. The sort that quiets endless racing thought— ] A blindfold.

That's where I'd start.

[And he has to scoff for how middlingly basal it sounds. Tell me your heart's desire meeting well I don't know, how about something everyone with two functional brain cells and an absence of creativity goes for and calls it kinky— but it's more than that, he counters silently to the no one and nothing else involved in his own chafing argument. A segue that twists along his grin.]

You might be in control, but I know enough about this game to understand that I'll still be myself in here when all the lights are off— and I want to hear your voice without knowing where you are, even as that magic of yours binds us. To feel you, hear you in the vastness of my thoughts, and yet have no idea where this might take us.

[It's about the places where Leto's fingers pinch when he bears down across Astarion's wrists. About the scrape of his teeth against cold skin and the way his permeating commands yet pierce a world still bound by tenents he can't otherwise deny. Like scars, like trinkets and tied-off favors, it defies more than just the concept of the end.

So much more.]

I want to be yours, if we're to do this. On my knees in an intoxicating brothel that smells of incense and too much wine, worshipping you with my tongue for hours until temptation takes you to the floor— keen to watch yourself rut nothing in the mirror as if it were a dream— more eager to toy with magic that divides sensation into something shared, or drink the sort of potions Thedas could never offer you, so that I might plunge deep into your cunt with just a kiss and the bound edges of my fingers. Turn my own prick against me. Drink from me and let me taste myself across your lips. Fill us both with toys too obscene to speak of and try not to squirm from across the room as you insist that we stay still beyond suckling at an imitation of what we truly want. Make me your student, your whore, your mutual desire if you long to muddle your own senses till the world itself abates. Challenge me to leave you screaming as I pleasure you and rut against your leg, your hand, your lips, unable to use the measure of my hands.

Anything, so long as I'm not your vampire. Only yours.

[doggish]

[It would be the easiest thing in the world to get lost in that litany of filth— and for a long few moments, Leto is. How can he not be? When Astarion's voice sounds so deliciously sinful as he wraps his lips around words like your cunt and your student, your whore, and each and every proposal flashes through his mind in pornographic detail. It's a breathtaking snapshot of what could be— what will be, if he so desires it . . . for that's the other half of it, isn't it? The control. The ability to taunt and tease and torment in the sweetest way, watching Astarion shatter into a million pieces beneath his guiding hand, and knowing all the while that there's nothing he can do to reverse that course . . .

(The implications could be disturbing if he let himself linger on them, so he doesn't— at least, not right now. They have all the time in the world to discuss such things, and his own nauseating unease isn't what it once was. This is a game, nothing more— just as it was when Astarion was hypnotizing him).

But his own distraction can't last, for they both of them are more than just petty instinct. And he would be a fool to ignore the significance of what Astarion asks. ]

My Astarion.

[He shifts to sit more thoroughly atop the other man, his knees braced around his hips and his mouth hot against his throat. He mouths the words against the jagged scars there, his tongue flicking with every word and his voice a low rumble.]

I will do all of that and more, I promise you. I'll blindfold you and lay you out, watching you writhe as I fuck your throat and take advantage of your lack of need for air . . . or perhaps tie you down and watch you whine to be so helpless, so overwrought with need I artificially imbue in you that you all but come from the barest touch of my fingertips. I'll make you feel as though you are in heat, that you cannot stand another second without suckling at my cock— whining and whimpering as I worship every inch of you with my mouth, so desperate to taste me that you'll outright thank me when I finally deign to give it to you.

[He tips his head back just far enough to catch Astarion's eye. He's flushed, he knows, but there's more love than lust in his eyes.]

But the one thing I will not do is watch you from across the room. I have spent too long chasing after you to want to play at vouyerism . . . even if you make a mouthwatering sight.

I want to touch you. Taste you. Feel you shivering beneath me as I slowly ride you into your third orgasm and feel you fighting not to fuck up into me— knowing all the while that you can't, for I have you bound. I want to watch you suckle at my prick until you're drooling my come. I want to watch you strip for me, dance for me— put on the most alluring show before you climb into my lap and bounce on my prick without ever once touching yourself. I want to watch you melt as I keep you still with nothing more than my, than my magic, fingering you until you finally spill over yourself like a needy little slut, whimpering my name and whining for my touch. I want to fit you with bit and bridle, keeping those fangs sated with something to chew on as you fuck me open . . .

And all the while, Astarion, you'll be mine.

Not my vampire. Not my master. Not anything save mine . . .

[He threads their left hands together, letting the cool metal of their rings clink softly in the darkness.]

. . . just as you always have been, and always will be.

Simply tell me when, and we will do it.