All o' Ao's Things

It's a world of your own creation, stitched together from stolen blankets, moonlight, old blood, and the soft, scandalous shape of his mouth… A world where the grass beneath you becomes the finest silk sheets, where the night air turns sweet as plum wine, where every kiss feels like a confession dragged willingly from your throat.

His whispers aren't prayers, Gods, no.

But when he lowers his mouth to your pulse and murmurs, “There you are, darling,” it feels too much like absolution to be entirely mortal. His bed isn't a chapel, his kisses no holy rites, and yet you learn devotion beneath him all the same.

He says, “Hold still for me,” and you do, trembling beneath the velvet command of it, your hands fisting in the blanket as his lips trace the column of your throat. Not biting yet. Never without making you wait for it, yearn for it, crane your neck for it... Never without making you feel the terrible privilege of being wanted by something that has spent two centuries being starved.

Astarion doesn't worship easily. He doesn't kneel unless he means to make a performance of it, but when his body presses to yours, when his pale hair falls loose around his face and his eyes flicker crimson in the dark, hungry and beautiful and unbearably alive, you think perhaps this is the only kind of worship he still trusts. The kind made with hands.

With teeth.

With breath.

With choice.

And his body—

Marble made wicked. Moonlight given teeth. A palace so beautifully carved it feels almost cruel to touch him, dirty him, bleed on him. Your fingers move over pale skin and old scars, reading him like scripture written in wounds. White ridged marks whisper their history under your palms, and they tell you the story of- “Careful,” he murmurs. “Keep looking at me like that and I’ll start expecting offerings.”

You would give them. Your body, your blood, your breath, your soul.

Your condemned ruin of a corpse, if he so desired.

His voice slides through you like smoke, sweet and poisonous, curling behind your ribs until your thoughts feel less like yours and more like something he has coaxed from the dark. His thumb strokes over your pulse. His fangs graze your skin. Your breath catches.

“Astarion.”

He stills.

For all his hunger, he stills.

Beneath the velvet cruelty, beneath the performance and the facade, he's there: the man under the monster. The wound beneath the smile. The fear of wanting anything freely given. The fear of loss.

You touch his cheek.

“Yes,” you whisper.

Something in him breaks open.

Then he bites.

Pain blooms first, bright and clean. Pleasure follows, dark as wine. His hand tightens at your waist. Yours tangles in his hair. He drinks like a starving saint, like a sinner at last allowed communion. Then he kisses you, and you taste yourself on his tongue.

It should frighten you.

Beneath him, in the ruin of blankets and blood, you understand the only sacrament Astarion offers.

Not holiness.

Not damnation.