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Part 3 of Astarion Origin Party Nonsense
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Published:
2023-10-22
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3,061
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1/1
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Empty Recall

Summary:

Astarion doesn't dream, but his mental recursions have gotten so elaborate to avoid reliving horror every night that there's not much difference between the nightmares he makes for himself and the ones that wait in the dark. AKA: Origin Astarion early nights in Act 1 with his initial travel companion, who notices he doesn't rest easy.

Notes:

This is a non-con story. Astarion has a nightmare/trauma re-enactment trance about being prostituted and how it feels. Reader discretion advised! That said, there is some nice stuff at the end! I promise!

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

It’s always the Elfsong his memory falls back to.

Kind of.

The Elfsong Tavern fused with select sections of buildings he’s been sent to before – fine bedrooms, a closet full of cool silks, that hallway with red stained glass, a well-appointed study that smelled like tobacco and sugar, and many others. The parts rotate as he moves through them, but no matter the place, he’s familiar with every table, chair, and curtain. He knows which windowsills have enough surface to take his weight. He knows which booths have blind spots.

He knows the terrain.

Despite this, he always ends up seated at an empty bar-top in the middle of the tavern floor, the flat heel of his riding boots hooked into a crossbar of the stool, an ice-watered whiskey in his fingers.

The architecture is so solid, the decor so sharp in his mind, he could navigate this mind-palace blind.

But the patrons… the patrons in this chimeric space are gray blurs of diffusion. Like his eyes can’t draw them into focus, the crowd melts into a murmuring tide that shifts and eddies around the edges of him. They touch him to brush past. It’s a crowded night after all. The scent of a woman’s perfume, a man’s beard oil. Wine smeared together with the sweet iron aroma of blood through unbroken skin.

He’s so fucking hungry.

He’s always so gods-fucked, belly-clawing hungry he wants to scream of it, but he does not.

He sits pretty in his barstool, running his fingertips along the lip of the glass, his arm resting on the countertop, pretending to be lost in thought for long moments before picking the glass up and drinking a mouthful. He reminds himself to look wistful. Scan the gray wall of patrons as though looking for something. Turn it on – that slack in the shoulders and brow that makes them come looking.

Become available.

Invite what comes next.

He knows this scenario so well it’s a comfort blanket, a rough textured thing he can press into.

Astarion folds both arms on the bar top, smooth oak, polished to shine and he follows his instinct to drop his cheek into his arms. Close his eyes. Let the dread unfurl in his belly like unwanted arousal, until he’s shuddering and half-wild with it.

He knows, he knows what’s next.

He opens his eyes and out of shifting gray anonymity across the room, a section of color separates itself from the rest. It solidifies into a man, pale-skinned, dressed in good traveling clothes, a green cloak, a smile that’s three thousand iterations distilled into one knowing and proprietary cut of teeth. Fanged slightly, lips parting already. He has no face. Just that mouth. A thing with a thousand faces, but the same fucking mouth.

All at once Astarion lunges back from the bar, knocking his glass over.

It shatters on the floor, spraying ice and alcohol.  

No one reacts and the man in in good clothes starts to come toward him.

Astarion stumbles, spinning around grabbing at the nearest person – bourbon, pine, a strong wrist – saying, “Excuse me. I’m sorry, but I need help. I—”

But they pull away, the wrist melting like smoke, and he spins to see the man in the good clothes is just twenty meters away and closing through the crowd. He knows through the logic of the dream when the man gets hold of him, what will happen. That somehow, this time, it will change him.

He doesn’t want it to happen.

He doesn’t, not this time, please, please, please—

“Please!” He grabs at a blur seated at a nearby table – red wine, rosewater, and bread – knocking their glass over in his desperation. “Wait! Listen to me. Do you see that man? The one in the green cloak, he’s going to hurt me. I need—”

They’re gone, sliding away from him toward the bar, looking for a refill.

The man in the green cloak is just ten meters away.

He’s so hungry. He’s so fucking hungry it feels like a blade in the belly, and he staggers against the bar, patrons shifting around him. The dizzy spell now, his body going pins and needles cold. He curls over the table, his forehead on the cool wood as he tries to make his lungs burn the unnecessary energy to inhale and put breath behind words:

“Please help me.”

The bartender is a fog, ignoring him, the patron masses touch him politely to get past him and order at the end of the counter, unconcerned with his forearm on the bar as his knees go out from under him, his other arm wrapped around his stomach as the dread and starvation gnaw him raw with agony. In the corner of his eye, the man in the good clothes is just five meters away.

“HELP ME!”

It’s always like this.

“I’m right fucking here!”

He’s on the floor.

“I’m right here,” he says, closing his hands around his biceps, pressing his temple to the side of the bar, curling against it like this time somehow, he’ll be heard, seen, anything. It smells like sour wine and dust down here. The floorboards are syrupy with old sugar and that’s where he is when the pair of good boots comes to stand beside him. “Please. Someone…”

A hand closes on his arm, pulls him to his feet.

“Please?”

He’s shoved against the bar, spun around, slammed chest down to the countertop where he can drag his palms across the wood, clawing at the gleaming surface until the smiling man in good clothes crowds him against the bar. None of the patrons notice or react to the smiling man as he shreds Astarion’s clothes open like an animal, dumps a bottle of champagne over his head to wet his curls and grips them so tight he feels his scalp bleed.

Astarion screams the entire time.

Why not? It’s the only part of this fused-memory amalgam that’s a relief.  

He tries to claw over the counter to get away, shouting at the patrons who move through the beautiful bar room, under the twinkle of ever-burning lanterns. The flicker of expensive mood lighting and murmured conversation mixes with the tearing of fabric. The clatter of glassware and the thump of Astarion’s skull hitting the top of the bar.

“I’m right fucking here,” he begs, staring down the bar, every seat filled with some anonymous soul, a dozen pretty cocktails down the row and coin on the counter. He reaches for the nearest glass, trying to knock it over, to get their attention but he can’t quite reach – his fingers stretched flat against the dark wood. “I was right here. The whole time, just help m—”

The smiling man slides inside him from behind.

It hurts so much he wants to die. It makes him come so hard it strips all thought away except for the blind reflex to tell his temporary master that he’s grateful for it, but he’s too vein-dry and starved for the pleasure to be any release. Just nerve and sinew slaved to respond on command. He gets his weight up on his forearms, his head yanked back, his spine arched as the smiling man begins to fuck him against the bar with a savage abandon.

No one notices.

“Please, please, please…”

He tries to keep his eyes closed. He doesn’t want to see it.

His assailant fucks invisible bruises into his hipbones and knees. He doesn’t have enough blood in his flesh to mark it up. He doesn’t flush when the smiling man belts him across the back, the buckle cutting shallow stripes over his ribs, the strap across his thighs leaving invisible welts that he won’t be able to find later. A record of violence redacted against his skin because he’s too goddamn hungry to have any evidence, even to himself.

He knows it won’t stop until he says it.

He doesn’t want to.

In this recursive memory, he tries to hold out. Twenty strokes? Forty? He loses count. What does it matter? He’s writhing and crying for mercy all the same in the end. He orgasms and lets the agony crest into a drug-like blur of adoration. He tells the man fucking him that he loves him, loves his cock, loves how it feels, and won’t he do it some more? Just saying it makes him hard. Because he’s being good, being good makes him hard.

(He can’t remember a time that wasn’t the case. Not anymore.)

The smiling man kisses his neck. The smiling man grabs his jaw, fingers digging into the soft part of his face. He forces Astarion’s head up, re-coiling cruel fingers in his hair and tugging.

“Look,” he says, voice a chittering hum of a thousand dead.

Astarion opens his eyes.

He’s looking into the expensive mirror backsplash behind the bar.

Of course, he’s not reflected there.

There’s just the smiling man, his hands empty, his lips hung open and grinning at the space in the mirror where Astarion should be but is not. And as always, when Astarion start to scream in horror, the smiling man leans into his ear and says, “See? Nothing there, child. And what a pleasure to know it.”

Astarion stops screaming only because those words make him climax instantly.

“Nothing,” the man says.

He climaxes again, so exquisitely it leaves Astarion whimpering.

The smiling man purrs, “Say it.” The grip on his jaw tightens. “Say it"

“I’m nothing.” Astarion gags as he comes again, eyes rolling, rutting against the bar like an animal in heat and the cock inside him drives up once, so divine his extremities go numb and his thoughts stutter. He spreads his legs, hikes one knee up on the bar to lie there hung open. “I’m nothing.” His entire body coils, his gut heavy with hunger, slugged with arousal as the smiling man slides a hand behind his bent knee and start to thrust, lazily, over and over, driving words out of him like orgasm, “Fuck me. Fuck me, Master, please. Master, I’m nothing. Please, don’t leave me. Fuck me, fill me. So empty please, please, please—”

Something hits him.

Not hard, but a smart slap across the cheek, just enough to hurt, but only for a moment.

Astarion snaps out of trance to a body straddling his waist. He doesn’t shout. He grabs immediately for his dagger but it’s not under his pack where he usually keeps it. Then he starts yelling, panicking as they grab his wrists, their face a blur in the dark. They pin his arms into the dirt on either side of his head and that’s when he remembers and—

“Lae’zel!”

He is not alone out here.

“Lae’zel! There’s someone—!”

“Pa'vrylk! Cease your thrashing and see me!”

He stops. The pitch blackness resolves the blur of grayscales because, of course, that’s what dark vision does in the true black without urban light. Lae’zel of Creche K’llir glares down at him. The gith woman’s long hair has come undone from its usual braiding in a way that’s changed her face somehow, softens the still razor-sharp lines of her features but not in a way that does anything to lessen how bloody annoyed she looks.

“Get off of me!” Astarion tries to throw her off, but she’s very comfortably seated on his stomach, and he has no leverage so after a single embarrassing attempt to buck her off (she barely moves, lip curling in contempt) he lies still fighting down the retching reflex to scream. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

The gith woman is unmoved by his indignation. She’s only a little taller than him, but she’s hyper-dense muscle all that way to the bone and heavy. He’s known her all of forty-eight hours and if they hadn’t battled their way off an illithid nautaloid together and been infected by the same horrifying parasite she’s not his first choice in travel partner.

His opinion remains unchanged as she grinds his wrists into the dirt.

“You were making noise,” Lae’zel says flatly unimpressed.

“What?”

“In your trance. You spasmed and cried out until I woke you. Are you roused now?”

“I don’t talk while I’m trancing,” he snarls with more confidence than he feels. “I haven’t done that in—” decades, not with his siblings in the barracks, ready to latch onto any weakness and drink— “You’re wrong.”

“I am not,” she says flatly. “I know ir'zharn when I see it.”

“I’m awake,” he says tensely. Then, more sweetly, “Now, Lae’zel, darling, we need to have a talk about personal space again, I think. I know I’m lovely, but you really must keep your hands to yourself.”

She does not react to his needling. “Should I expect your rest to be this poor every night, pale one?”

“Astarion. My name. I think I’ve said.”

She clicks her tongue dismissively. “Answer me, Astarion.”

Actually, her using his name is worse.

“I don’t know,” he says exasperated and still, ridiculously, pinned to the fucking ground by his new travel partner. “What do you want from me? I made noise. You slapped me for it, you deranged little maniac. I’ll endeavor to not be struck for making noise in the bloody future.” Then, when she continues to sit on top of him, studying his face in a way the sets off every screaming nerve in his body, he just smiles and says, “If you want to fuck me, you can just ask you know.”

She is unfazed.

“How else but asking would I convey that I desire you carnally?” she says, like that’s a dumb thing for him to say and he’s getting off topic. “You cannot rest armed if you recall agonies in the night.” She lets go of his wrists and draws his own dagger from the back of her belt, showing it to him. “You tried to find this in your panic and would have stabbed me. You will rest with it separately while I am on watch. If you need waking, I will do it safely.”

Astarion blinks, then slowly scoots back, away from her to sit up and cross his legs to face her, tailor-style, on the ground. She does not try to follow or restrain him, just crouches there. Waiting for him to say his part.

He thinks.

Then, “You don’t have to wake me.”

“You. Were. Noisy.” She enunciates like he’s a particularly slow toddler.

“Fine! I don’t want to rest unarmed.”

She looks somewhat sympathetic to this and considers. “Fine. You may rest with it, but where I can access it and take it from you should I need to wake you again. Your trance is a single watch. It is no issue for me to rouse you from ir'zharn.”

“Ir-what?” Astarion demands.

She makes a little face.

“I do not know the word.” She considers, then hazards, “To ‘recall agonies’?”

He reviews their previous exchange, then, baffled: “A nightmare?”

“Perhaps. Is a nightmare when one experiences past pains in exaggerated form while they sleep?”

The mirror, empty. A bar full of the indifferent. The smell of champagne and his own arousal.

“Yes, dear. That’s a kind of nightmare.”

“What does it mean?” she says suspiciously. “That word: ’dear’?”

He blinks. “I— it’s a diminutive term of affection.”

She makes that scrunched little face, annoyed. “Do not call me that.”

“Fine.”

She hands him his dagger back and he, cautiously, takes it from her.

“You are holding that wrong,” she snaps, then gets up and stalks away from him.

Astarion rolls over, sets the blade on the ground slightly away from him and tries to get comfortable again. He can hear Lae’zel puttering around their camp in the dark. (She insisted on no fire tonight, still paranoid after being stuck in a cage by a bunch of frightened locals.) He’s cold, uncomfortable, and he’s still desperately hungry but… but not as hungry as he’s ever been. He caught and ate a rabbit right after the crash, clean and healthy and he’d nearly wept at having so much at once.

Unfortunately, it’s been so long since he whet his appetite, he’d forgotten how much having a little made you crave more. He’ll need get away at some point, feed again. He can make this work. There is nothing stopping him but his lone travel mate and she won’t find it suspicious if he goes to hunt supplies. He has time. He’s accustomed to starving. He can—

“Astarion.”

“Bloody fuck!” He spasms slightly, Lae’zel having appeared crouched directly behind him once more.

“I can travel with an istik,” she says, completely unbothered by his reaction. “I cannot travel with one so poorly trained in combat. We will wake early before travel and I will train you myself. What weapons do ‘magistrates’ train with as their citizen’s repertoire? I can refresh you upon the basics.”

“Magistrates don’t train with any weapons,” he says, too off kilter to make up a lie. “I suppose I trained with—” summer, a bright day, his hand around the hilt of a needle-thin blade, too big for him but with his name filigreed in the steel— “a rapier when I was young? I recall a few shortsword drills?”

She chuffs in displeasure.

“Very well,” she snaps. “People in Fay-Run are staggering weak and unready.”

“Faerûn,” he says dryly.

That annoyed little face scrunch again.

“Faerûn,” she amends. “You will teach me about this land and its customs. I will teach you how to be less useless in battle – you have good instincts; evident from your performance on the nautaloid. Together, we will reach the creche and be purged of our infection. This I promise you as gith ra'stil.”

“Stop sneaking up on me while I’m trancing,” he enunciates, ignoring all that.

“Very well.”

She stalks off again and Astarion closes his eyes. Strangely, he finds a restful mantra to slip into this time, unsnagged by any of the usual mental snares he’s so often drawn into. On the edge of his awareness, he can still hear Lae’zel muttering to herself, restlessly sharpening her blade with a small whetstone and the rhythm of it sets the rhythm of his own internal metronome. Conscious thought slips into reflex and he stops thinking of anything at all.

It's the best he’s rested in nearly a decade.

Notes:

Look. I've become obsessed with Lae'zel and Astarion being friends because Origin Astarion would have met her first and immediately latched to her (and her to him) as a travel partner. Lae'zel hates Shadowheart immediately so I love the idea she kind of just didn't look for Shadowheart and manages to keep Astarion to herself for a little bit so they got to bond a little before the group dynamics set in. As always, comments fuel the muse, I always answer questions, and I absolutely take recommendations into consideration. Chat me up!

Other things I love:

1: Astarion as a true level 1 character is delicious competency and dependence stuff
2: Lae'zel is fucking CUTE actually. Fight me.
3: Lae'zel being so goddamn blunt and literal she just wrecks all Astarion's manipulation game
4: Consider Lae'zel training scenes in camp with Astarion
5: Astarion saying he was a magistrate for his day job remains hilarious

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