Little Love
Love Bites, Chapter 3 // Love Bites {Masterlist}
Ship: Astarion Ancunin x fem!vampire spawn!elf!Tav/reader
Summary: Appearances can be deceiving, but they can also tell you everything you need to know. A second look at the elf you once called a friend is all you need to fill in the two-hundred year gap.
Word Count: 4,631 words
Warnings: flashback within a flashback (your perspective), alcohol, Astarion's parents (I gave them my own names), grave desecration, grief
☟ Continue below the fold ☟
Astarion never went back to the same tavern twice. Not for many years, at least. But, against his better judgment, he went back to yours, three nights later.
He wasn’t sure what was drawing him back, not really. It wasn’t as if this particular tavern seemed very promising. Its patrons were, well, regular people. Nothing about them seemed particularly special. In fact, it was probably more dangerous to be going back so soon—for all Astarion knew, Rahul’s friends were still loitering there and would kill him the moment they saw the man Rahul had left the tavern with. The last man who ever saw Rahul alive.
His other victims from the past two nights were inconsequential. They hadn’t insisted on telling him their names, the male druid and female elf who had each been a little more than an hour’s worth of his time combined. They had been easy targets, lonely people who were all too easy to seduce. He almost felt bad for them. But not as bad as he felt about Rahul. Both nights, Astarion had jolted out of his trances with a shout upon hearing Rahul’s screams in his dreams again. Both times, he’d been rewarded by Godey with a whipping.
Even as he walked into the tavern, Astarion wasn’t sure what he was doing. It was only after the door had swung shut behind him, hitting a little bell as it did, and you looked over from the bar and raised a hand in greeting did he realize why he’d come back.
He locked eyes with you as he made his way toward a small table in the corner. He paused, watching you. There was something in your eyes that made the tension in his shoulders disappear.
You’d done your hair differently today. It was braided back, a couple strands of it loose around your face, clearly having escaped during your work. Your beautiful face had morphed into an expression of surprise, like you were shocked to see him here again.
But there was something else in it—the slightest bit of repressed hope, an expression Astarion had seen all too often on the faces of his victims just before they died, when they still thought he might save them from his master.
On your face, though, hope was comforting. You looked almost…relieved to see him.
Before he realized what he was doing, Astarion turned toward the bar and sat directly in front of you. He heard your breath catch in your throat and your pulse speed up and for a moment he felt a twinge of regret. You, too, would make an easy target.
You recovered quickly, however. You finished wiping down the bartop and dropped the rag into the sink. You leaned on the bartop. “What can I get you tonight, sir?”
“A glass of your finest red wine,” he says after a moment of thought.
Something minute in your face changed. You blinked too fast and hid the look in your eyes, but for a moment the façade of a bartender serving a patron disappeared. It was only a second, but was enough for the gears in Astarion’s head to start turning.
You laughed with a smile on your face. “You’re going to have to be more specific, hun. The ‘finest red wine’ changes from person to person. What kind of flavor are you going for?”
Hun. The moniker stood out in Astarion’s mind, dominating every other word you’d said. Hun, short for honey, and for some reason, he could hear the complete word in your voice: softer, gentler, loving. Not at all the way a bartender speaks to her patrons.
Only after you raised your brow did Astarion remember you’d asked him a question. He shook himself out of his head. “Oh, something full-bodied,” he said.
“Now that I can work with,” you said. You turned to search your shelves and Astarion watched you release a long breath very slowly. You wiped your palms on your pants before reaching up and sliding a bottle from its place. You presented the bottle to him. “How about this?”
Astarion studied the label and vintage. “I’ll admit, I’ve never heard of it,” he said, shrugging idly. “But if you think I’ll like it, I’m inclined to trust you.”
He watched you cut off the wax seal and uncork the bottle. You poured enough for a tasting into the glass and slid it across the bartop to him.
“How does that taste?”
Astarion sniffed the wine before swallowing it down. Pleasantly, it didn’t taste like vinegar, like most wines he’d had the bad luck to drink in tavern after tavern. He could taste the alcohol and the grapes and the blackberry undertones easily, all melding together wonderfully.
“This,” he said, passing back the glass, “is absolutely what I am looking for.”
You grinned and filled up the glass. “I thought it might be.”
Astarion swirled his glass while you re-corked the bottle and set it in ice. He watched as you helped another patron sitting at the bar, a middle-aged woman complaining about her husband being out of work and asking if there was perhaps a job for him at the tavern.
You calmed her as you made her cocktail, talking soothingly and nodding in sympathy as she complained about trying to feed their infant. It was your sympathy that made Astarion feel pity for the woman.
Something about you was achingly familiar. There were times when you spoke, certain words that you said, that struck a chord in him, simply because they sounded familiar. The way you moved behind the bar, so graceful in a space that was unbearably small, seemed comfortable to Astarion, as if he would be able to anticipate your movements and react accordingly if he were to join you behind the bar.
It was almost painful, this feeling of familiarity and alienation combining in one person. It was like the nights when Astarion first realized he was forgetting his life before being a vampire where he would sit in the dark and grasp at straws for pieces of his life, only for his mother’s face to fade into nothingness and his father’s voice to be lost in the shadows forever and—
A twinge of pain split through Astarion. It was nothing compared to the pain Cazador or Godey regularly inflicted on him, but it was enough to make him flinch anyway. He rubbed his temple as if he could will the building migraine away.
Your eyes flicked over to him, watching the motion with concern, but it just confused Astarion further. You reacted to him so readily, so easily. If it hadn’t been for how innately close and familiar you felt, Astarion would simply have chalked it up to your attraction for him. It wasn’t unlike his prey to keep a close eye on him. But he hadn’t even picked you as his victim for the night, he hadn’t even attempted to seduce you yet. This was entirely of your own accord.
You gave the woman her drink and pulled your braid over your shoulder as you helped the female tiefling Astarion had seen and considered taking back to Cazador the other day. Suddenly he was very glad he hadn’t; the disappearance of a regular might have been enough to force him out of this part of town for several months at least.
Astarion glanced over his shoulder at the rest of the tavern. He didn’t see the group Rahul had been with anywhere; perhaps they had already moved on, without a care in the world for their lost friend or comrade or what have you.
Perhaps they thought Rahul had settled into a happy life with a nice young man and would be staying here to live out his days, enjoying nights of passion and drinks at a nice tavern and playing the protector of the pretty boy elf he’d left with.
Astarion wasn’t sure if it was for his own sake or Rahul’s that he wished that such a fantasy was what they believed.
As you gave the tiefling a glass of champagne, your eyes strayed back to Astarion. He caught your glance and grinned.
“Surprised to see me still sitting here?” he teased.
You shrugged. “You were here three days ago and vanished without a trace. Forgive me if I feel like you might blow away in the wind.”
“Sometimes it feels like I might.” The words slipped out without any thought behind them. For a moment, Astarion wondered what the hell was wrong with him to dare say such a thing, but your sympathetic smile soothed him.
The talent of a well-practiced bartender, he thought. Get your patrons to loosen up, ply them for more liquor, take home more money—all by smiling and charming and flirting. From one actor to another, I must hand it to her. She’s quite good at this kind of thing.
“Wanna talk about it?” you asked, propping your head up on your hand. The movement exposed more of your cleavage, but judging from the look in your eyes, Astarion guessed that wasn’t your purpose in the movement. You genuinely wanted him to open up.
Your gaze stopped him from speaking. Your eyes were clear and focused entirely on him. You weren’t like the other bartenders he’d chatted up in the past, with their shifting eyes betraying how they were never really focused on him but instead on their tavern and the other patrons they could squeeze more coin out of.
And, what’s more, your lips formed a soft smile. Joy and love and the sun itself seemed to radiate from you and your expressive face. You looked at him the way a young woman ought to look at her betrothed, with the purity of young love, much more genuine than the pseudo-love and lust he so often saw in his victims.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” Astarion whispered, unable to stop himself from asking.
You realized yourself quite suddenly. Your face dropped and Astarion wanted to beg you to look at him like that again, to apologize and say he never wanted you to stop looking at him like that—he just wanted to know why? Why had you chosen him to be the object of your affections?
Your eyes dipped to the bartop, where his fingers still held the stem of his glass. “I’m sorry,” you said softly. “You— You remind me of someone I know. Someone I miss.”
“A lover?” Astarion guessed, attempting to make it into a tease.
“More than that,” you said, your voice impossibly soft and serious. You fiddled with the strings on your corset. “He was my best friend.”
Astarion’s heart sank in his chest. “Was?”
You nodded slowly. “He died. A long, long time ago.” You shake yourself out of the sorrow that settled on you like a blanket. “You just so happen to look a lot like him. Hells, you even sound like him, just a little bit. I’m sorry if that made…this…strange. You just…sort of brought him back to me, for a moment.”
“Not at all,” Astarion said quietly. “I’m…happy to have brought you that.”
You nodded, lost in your thoughts, your eyes fixated on his. Your lower lip trembled. You sought words, but came up empty handed. All you said was, again, “You remind me of him.”
~❊~
It’s him. By the gods, it’s really him.
You kept busy for the rest of the night, watching Astarion out of the corner of your eye. For he was Astarion, you were certain of that now. Hearing his voice, smooth and suave and the same as you remembered had confirmed it for you. The moment he’d requested your finest red wine, you could hear him calling you darling, could hear your name rolling off his tongue.
He didn’t remember you, that much was obvious. Some part of you was glad he didn’t, because you weren’t sure what you would have done if he had remembered who you were. You had to focus on that gladness, or else you were going to focus on the disappointment, which made you want to sit on the floor and cry like you had when you’d first received word that he was dead—the kind of crying that left you shaking and never seemed to stop and sounded more like screams than anything else.
You were also quite certain he would not be flirting with the young elf sitting next to him if he remembered you, his best friend since birth and lover of nearly two decades.
Perhaps even more obvious than his lack of memory was how he was alive—or rather, undead, for it was quite clear he was a vampire. He was careful to hide his fangs, but the red eyes were enough for you to know, combined with the paleness of his skin and the color of the skin around his eyes. It might have been two hundred years, but you knew your lover well-enough to know he had not been quite so pale in his life.
The realization of what he was answered a question that had lingered in your mind for years, ever since you’d paid a visit to his desecrated grave. The city had explained the dug-up earth to be the vandalism of the gang that had first attacked and killed him and had assured you and the Ancunins that Astarion’s coffin had not been touched; his body remained inside.
Clearly, they had been wrong.
You glanced at Astarion. The smug, seductive, confident look on his face was that of a practiced lover, nothing like the goofy and slightly shy boy you had made love to. You wondered what happened, but knew a lot could happen in the two hundred years between now and that terrible night.
~❊~
The Ancunins walked hand-in-hand. You were just ahead of them, leading the way to their son’s grave, a plot you had chosen to keep their beautiful boy in the sun at high noon. It was far from high noon now; they had chosen to visit the grave in the night, certain they would be attacked by the Gur who had killed their boy if they were seen mourning.
It was a beautiful night, the kind of night you and Astarion would have loved. He would have held your hand and helped you to climb up to the roof, and you would have sat there for hours, cuddling and talking and admiring the stars he’d been named after. He would have told you about his day at work and played with your bracelets and rings when talking about the difficult rulings he’d made that day made him anxious all over again. He would have wrapped his cloak around your shoulders when you got cold. He would have kissed your nose when you asked to go back to the safety of the bed you shared. He would have helped you climb down and would have put you to bed, only to go stand on the balcony to stare up at the sky for a few moments more.
He loved the night, and this was the kind of night he would have wanted to have lasted forever: not so cold that you shivered instantly, but cold enough to have a chill bite in the air. Bats danced in the air and wisps of clouds moved across the moon and stars. Pale light illuminated the world in a hauntingly beautiful way. It seemed particularly cruel.
His mother trembled terribly. Already, silver tear tracks stained her cheeks. You had never seen Selwynn so frail, so scared. Even when she’d found out her son had been murdered, she hadn’t been the skeleton she was now. No, then she had been a fire, screaming and raging and demanding answers until the tears started coming. Now she was a ghost, silent and pale, her veins stark against her skin. All the life and color had drained from her in the past few days.
His father fared better, but not by much. Thesan’s eyes were sunken, his hair matted and limp, the whites of his eyes bloodshot, though he had not cried at all since he heard the news, unlike his wife. He hadn’t been resting, but then again, none of you had. More than once, your mother had stumbled across you in the night to find you in the kitchen, staring sightlessly into the dark, a glass of water held limply in your hand.
You were glad you hadn’t let them see the body. Looking at them now, you were certain it would have broken them to see their golden boy without life. It had been enough to break you; let them, at least, live out their long lives with their last memories of their son being of him alive and smiling and kissing them goodbye as he left for work.
Somewhere in the graveyard, an owl called. Another answered. Mice squeaked and scattered nearby, scurrying for shelter amongst the fallen leaves and in the shadows of tall graves.
“Where is he?” Astarion’s mother asked. Her voice was little more than a faint whisper, lost easily in the slightest breeze. Gone was the strong, operatic voice that had once sung her son to sleep when he was little. “Where’s my son?”
“Patience, darling,” Thesan said, sounding just as—if not more—tired as she.
“He’s just ahead,” you promised. You looked forward to where you knew his grave to be. Through the grey dark, you read his name on the stone and it felt wrong, like it went against the grain of your life to see him like this—a stone instead of a young man.
The three of you came to a rest before the headstone. You took a step back and let them crouch before their son. Silence fell heavily over them and the cemetery. Tears pricked at the corners of your eyes; you looked down so they couldn’t see you cry. They’d seen enough of your tears.
“Astarion,” Selwynn whispered, her voice wavering. She reached out to touch the stone, tracing her son’s name carved into it with care. For a moment, she seemed to be at peace, looking at his name. It didn’t last. In moments, she crumbled with a cry that was a cross between a sob and a scream.
She keeled forward, grabbing the stone and pressing her forehead to it. She inhaled sharply and coughed on her own tears. When she finally cleared her throat, helped by her husband rubbing her back, her cries became wails that shook her entire body. The freshly turned dirt beneath her began to stain her pale grey dress.
Thesan puts an arm around his wife’s back, comforting her the only way he could, and he put his palm on the top of the stone. He began murmuring in Elvish, too low for you to hear clearly, but you caught a few words and understood he was whispering for his son to find safety in the afterlife, until he was reborn. After a moment, his broad shoulders began to shake and your heart cracked in half as you realized he was crying for the first time. His tears interrupted his speech every so often.
You wiped your tears from your eyelashes and sat on the ground. You hugged your legs to your chest, biting your lip so hard you drew blood to keep yourself from crying again.
His father looked up at the starry sky, a fist raised in anger. “He’s still a child!” he shouted. “A child! And he’s in the godsdamned ground!”
A sharp cry came from Astarion’s mother and she got to her feet so quickly she knocked her husband to the ground. She looked at you and you rose from where you sat.
“I can’t stay here,” she gasped through tears. “He’s beneath me. I can’t— He— He shouldn’t be… He should be in my arms! In your arms! But he’s beneath me!”
She looked at the ground like she might start digging it up to see her little boy again. You took her hands in hers, holding her tightly.
“It’s okay, you don’t have to stay. You can go. It’s okay. He’ll understand. He knows, I promise you he knows,” you whispered. A tear rolled down your cheek.
Selwynn squeezed her eyes shut. “I just want him to be okay…”
“He is okay,” you promised. “He is with the gods. They’ll send him back to us, one day, in a new body.”
Her lower lip trembled. “But he won’t be my son anymore.”
“There can always be more children,” Thesan started, speaking hesitantly.
“No!” she snapped, almost screamed, at him. She drew in a deep breath and shook her head. Calmer, she repeated, “No.”
He nodded. “I thought not.” He wrapped her in his arms and she cried into his chest. He opened his arm to you and you joined them in their hug. “You are still our daughter, even if you are not marrying our son. You are…the only family we have left.”
A small sob escaped you. Your body trembled as you looked up at him; you had always thought Astarion resembled his mother more, but now all you could see was the man Astarion would never get to be in his father’s face. “Thank you.”
He kissed his wife’s hair. “Come, darling. We should get home. You need to rest.”
You led them out of the cemetery. It was only after you were closing the gate leading into it that Selwynn stopped short, gasping loudly.
“Flowers! I— I forgot to put flowers on his grave,” she moaned, folding her hands above her heart. She glanced at the flowers outside the gate door. “I have to go back—”
“I’ll do it,” you said. “Get some rest. You need it. You deserve it, after all of this.”
“He deserves flowers from his mother,” she said weakly.
“In the morning,” Thesan said. “When all of this has died down, we can come back and pay him our respects.”
You shared a look of understanding with him; even if it took weeks, months, years for Baldur’s Gate to stop reeling from this crime and for the Gur to calm down from the ruling—which was being reversed later in the week, much to the relief of everyone else who the Gur had believed complicit in Astarion’s actions and who had feared for their own lives—the Ancunins would visit their son again to say farewell when they could finally do so in peace.
You watched them go. Several long, silent minutes passed, but you waited until they were out of your sight and you were alone before you bent to pick flowers for your lover. You chose them carefully, plucking only the most vibrant and tallest and fullest for him. Once you had a sizable bouquet of wildflowers in your hand, you headed back through the cemetery and search out Astarion’s headstone again. You found it easily, but your heart stopped beating when you saw it.
Something was wrong. You knew it instantly. The already chill air seemed to turn frigid as you looked at the plot. It was too dark, too big, spilling into the spaces next to it. It looked nothing like it did only minutes ago.
An iron tang filled your nose, distinct and wrong and laced with something you could only describe as evil.
You ran, dodging around headstones to get to the grave—to get to Astarion—as fast as possible.
I couldn’t protect him that night. I have to protect him now!
Mud squelched beneath your feet, smelling strongly of blood and death. You looked at it in horror; it was a mix of dirt and gravel and clay from deep in the earth, all of it soaked in blood. All of it in piles, coming from the center of Astarion’s grave.
The smell was worse than the sight: chemicals of entombment, the body’s natural gasses, blood, vomit, sweat, urine. Something about it seemed alcoholic and heady, making you sway on your feet, though you knew that could easily just be from your disgust.
But worst of all, his stone was splattered with the terrible mixture.
Your stomach dropped to your feet and then rose to your throat. You cupped a hand over your mouth to keep back your bile. Tears streamed down your face.
A moment. You had been gone only a moment. And in that time, someone—or multiple someones—had come and desecrated your lover’s grave, as if killing him had been enough.
You fell to your knees with a gut-wrenching scream. You bent in half, clutching the flowers to your chest, clenching your teeth tightly. You bit down on your hand to keep from screaming again.
Muffled sobs ripped themselves from your chest. “Astarion,” you gasped. “Astarion, I’m sorry! I’m so fucking sorry! I— I— I’ll fix this! I promise! I’ll…I’ll speak to the town’s jury, I’ll get them to punish whoever did it— Gods, your grave. Your beautiful stone…”
Mindlessly, you put the flowers aside. You stepped around the muddy mess of chopped up dirt and pulled out your handkerchief. You cleaned the stone with it as best as you could, using your fingers and spit when the cloth was too dirty to do anything else but push the gunk around.
“There,” you said when it was as clean as you could get it. “Clean. Clean like you.”
You looked at the turned grave dirt. “I have to fix this, too. Your parents—I can’t let them see you like this, can I? They’ll be devastated.”
You got back on your knees and began shoving the dirt back over the grave, patting it back down and drenching your hands and arms with bloody dirt. As you worked, you spoke to him: “I’ll get this all sorted out in the morning, love, I promise. I’ll get you justice. I won’t stand for this, Astarion. I’ll talk to someone first thing tomorrow morning. They’ve already killed you, can’t they just leave you be? Is dying not enough for—for a simple ruling? Yes, I admit, it wasn’t the best decision you could have made, but there had to be a better solution than…than mugging you in a godsdamned alleyway and then desecrating your grave! At the very least, if they can’t respect you, can’t they have some respect for your parents? For me? Your mother doesn’t deserve this endless pain!” You sighed, leaning back and wiping your forehead. Some part of you, the rational part, was aware that you had streaked blood and dirt all over yourself, but the part of you working didn’t care very much. “Of course, I can’t make you too pretty yet, Astarion. I’m sorry, but no one will believe me if I fix you up perfectly. But I can at least make it look like you haven’t been graverobbed.”
You worked for several more minutes. At last, you staggered to your feet, a wave of exhaustion passing through you.
“You know what?” you said to the headstone. “I’m not waiting until morning. I’m going to go talk to someone right now. I can’t let you stay like this all night. Not when your stars are shining down on you.” Dimly, you were aware that you looked like a graverobber and that you looked insane—but that would probably help your case. “I’ll be back soon, Astarion. I promise I won’t leave you alone like this.”
You began to walk away from his stone. Only a few paces away, you paused and turned around. You stared up at the sky and pointed up at it as if you could command it to watch over your dead lover while you were gone.
Once more, you knelt to kiss his name.
☞ ❊ ☜
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Baldur's Gate 3 // Astarion Ancunin
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