Chapter Text
“Would you at least be angry with me? Fucking hells, Wyll, say something!” Astarion snarled, his hands shaking on the laces of his boots as he tried, once again, to get the damned fingers to make the movements they knew so well and tie a knot. His hands weren’t working right. If he couldn’t get the boots tied he was going to walk out into the snow barefoot.
He had to get out of that tent before he hurt Wyll worse than he already had.
“You don’t want me to be angry at you,” Wyll said, damnably reasonable even when he had that little pinch in his brow that said Astarion had cut him to the quick. “You want me to hurt you back. You feel guilty, and you want me to hurt you so you can feel offended instead.”
“Oh, fuck off!” Astarion yanked the boot off in frustration and threw it at the tent wall. Wyll flinched, and wasn’t that great. His partner thought Astarion was going to hit him. The knife dug a little deeper into that spot between his ribs.
Astarion was supposed to be good now. Being with Wyll was supposed to have fixed him, it was supposed to have contaminated him like some sort of soft-hearted mold and made him good. It shouldn’t be so easy to lash out at Wyll, not when he didn’t want anyone to hurt Wyll. His tongue was a snake and his words were venom and that sick look Wyll got on his face when the poison sank in made him want to rub all his skin off and crawl away on his belly.
Or bite someone. He really, really wanted to bite someone.
Astarion pulled the other boot off. He peeled off his socks. “I’m going for a walk,” he said.
“It’s cold out there,” Wyll warned him, like Astarion was a child and had somehow missed their arrival in Icewind Dale.
“I am aware,” Astarion hissed. “Don’t follow me this time.”
The snow was, indeed, fucking cold beneath his feet. The blustery wind was cold against his bare ears and fingers too. Astarion stomped off a few yards, far enough away that he’d hear Wyll coming and be able to bolt if the man tried to do something sweet and sensitive like offer him his cloak or his boots or a piggy-back ride back to their tent. There was a desperate savagery tearing at the inside of Astarion’s chest and if Wyll got close enough to him, he was either going to ruin everything forever or start sobbing. He’d rather die.
Wyll would never understand. Wyll clung to his horrible years because he did something good with them. Defying Mizora’s need to corrupt him had been proof of what sort of man Wyll was. So what did that make Astarion? Someone who would sell anyone, anything, in a flailing struggle to avoid pain that would find him inevitably anyway. His suffering had never saved anyone, just dragged them down with him. Suffering had taught him only that he could be broken and that there were men who’d enjoy doing it. Broken over and over, until every piece of him was sharp and jagged and useless.
Astarion didn’t remember who he’d been before Cazador and he was grateful. He’d probably been some sort of scum. Cazador always told him he’d been a magistrate; Astarion couldn’t pretend there were any of them with clean hands. Wyll acted like his slate was wiped clean from whatever he’d done before Cazador. He didn’t remember. It didn’t count. His life started at his death, gasping like a wet fish on the ground and looking up into Cazador’s red eyes.
If only he could wipe away everything before he’d met Wyll, too. He didn’t want to keep any of it. He didn’t want to be that person anymore – didn’t want all the jagged breaks his mind had healed into, all the instincts he had to lash out and bite back and the stupid, pathetic worm of his body. He hated it. He hated himself. If he could just wipe it all clean, maybe he could be half the person Wyll deserved. Maybe he wouldn’t ruin everything.
His feet pulsed with cold, that burning fire before the nerves at last went numb and dead. He heard the tent flap moving. He could imagine the look on Wyll’s face, how concerned he would be. He couldn’t take it.
He ran.
Astarion woke up, head pounding, wrapped in blankets and being carried by a stranger.
This wasn’t a completely unheard-of turn of events. He frequently found himself in the arms of strangers, and his head usually hurt, and there were often blankets involved. He didn’t often wake up, though. Especially not from some strange blackness, like he’d surfaced from some primordial abyss that made his skull hurt.
Astarion held himself completely still and waited for his captor to reveal any sort of clue as to where he was and what was happening. He couldn’t remember…he’d been mad at Leon, and he’d made the mistake of mentioning the kid when he was mouthing off. Leon had taken that way too far, and then Godey had punished them both. Astarion had been furious. It wasn’t like he would ever actually hurt Leon’s brat. Cazador would rain down hell on him if he so much as thought about spoiling the fun of that game.
But no, that had been earlier. He’d been told he would be responsible for collecting his and Leon’s offerings both, and booted out of the manor. It had been warm, a warm night, so why did Astarion’s skin feel frostbitten where it peeked out through the edges of the blanket? There was snow swirling in the air, forming shapes and spectres in the wind. His captor’s boots ground down the snow beneath them in dry crunching noises.
He had to focus. He’d been out in the city. It hadn’t been cold, but he’d worn his best gambeson anyway because he didn’t want to leave anything breakable of his in the manor when Leon was in such a snit. There’d been –
Oh, right. The tentacles. The mindflayer torture chamber and the pods that pressed around his shoulders like a tomb made of the inside of someone’s mouth, and the squirming parasite that had crawled in his eye socket. Right.
Strange that he could have forgotten that for even a moment.
After the bit with the thing crawling into his eye socket, things were a bit hazy. That was probably why his brain hurt so damned much, something had wriggled its way into his skull and was gnawing away on delicious cheese curds of Astarion-brain. Or whatever brains tasted like, he wasn’t a ghoul or something disgusting like that.
There had been devils on board the ship, he thought. Red-skinned devils with lashing tails and swords, fighting against the mindflayers. There had been…dragons? Something had ripped a hole through the side of the ship, leaving him with a dizzying view of lava pools and burnt wasteland as they soared over – oh. That was probably hell. And he remembered making impact, trying to brace himself against something and having nothing to hold onto except wet flesh that squelched and burst under his clinging fingers, and then the pain of being thrown against the glass and it shattering.
The pieces were all falling into place. He’d fallen out of a damned mindflayer torture ship into a frozen wasteland. Well, presumably that ship must have been able to travel between worlds if it went from the metaphorical hell of Baldur’s Gate to a literal one with lava rivers. So it must have shifted again before he actually fell out of the ship. And someone had found his broken body and was bringing it…somewhere.
There was another noise as they walked, a gentle swish-swish like someone rubbing their hands together. Was his captor dragging something behind them? He desperately wanted to open his mouth and ask, but he was going to be smart about this. He was going to keep quiet until he knew who this person was and what they wanted in exchange for their rescue.
Up ahead, there was a tent shining in the darkness, floating lights glinting blue around the perimeter. His captor waved a hand and the flap opened itself, as if by some invisible force. Inside, there were even more lights, yellow like candle-light or butter or a florist’s shop. Astarion was laid down on the bedroll, which was soft and somehow warm beneath him, like it was enchanted. He couldn’t see much through the gap in the blankets swaddling him, but his captor (rescuer?) stepped back outside to shake the snow off their cloak. Then they were back inside and towering over Astarion. They pushed back their hood.
It was a devil.
Cold fear made itself known in a sickening rush. The devil – black twisted horns, dark skin, one eye red-on-black and the other pure obsidian, looked at him expectantly. Gloves were peeled off, revealing long black claws. Behind him, a clubbed tail with bone spikes extending from each lobe twitched back and forth. It was wrapped up in some sort of leather armor, which must have been what was dragging on the ground while they were walking.
The devil had to kneel down and pluck at the laces to get the armor off his tail, which reduced the level of menace in the tent only the tiniest fraction.
The devil sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose with the heel of his hand like he also had a headache. Maybe the mindflayers had gotten him too? “I wish I could trust you to not break your promises, Astarion,” the devil said. “You know I don’t want to see you hurt.”
The cold fear in his blood dropped in temperature another hundred degrees to something that could have frozen magma. The devil knew his name.
The devil thought they had a bargain.
Astarion didn’t remember.
Astarion tore through his memory like a Flaming Fist raiding a smugglers den – slitting the mattress, upending the drawers – and found nothing after that sickening fall from the Mindflayer’s ship. There was nothing. Nothing.
But he’d forgotten things before. After the tomb he’d forgotten his name, had to be taught to talk again like some sort of overgrown toddler. Once, Cazador had made him jump off the roof of the manor and he’d broken his skull open on the pavement. Once, the rat he was given had been poisoned, such that Astarion’s hands and face stopped working and the whole world was dotted with black spots as he seized on the floor of the spawn dormitory. He’d been emptied out of more thoughts than this, left a feeble body cringing away from inescapable pain.
He’d forgotten things before, he knew the rules.
Never, ever, let anyone know the depths of your weakness.
What had he done that had upset the devil? He’d been outside the tent, the tent with one shared bedroll and two pillows and two packs and two pairs of boots and Astarion’s own smell, his perfume, clinging to the sheets. The devil’s scent hung thick as well, the stink of hellfire layered under sweet jasmine and the inevitable musk of men unable to bathe for the cold. This was the devil’s tent, but clearly Astarion had been living here with him for some time. Long enough that the smell of sex could embed itself into the fabric.
He could add this up. There was an ice hell, wasn’t there? There was definitely an ice hell, the one ruled by Mephistopheles. The mindflayers must have shifted deeper into the hells before the crash, and Astarion had been stranded out on the ice. This devil had found him. Either he’d been one of the ones attacking the ship, or a scavenger come to pick over the remains. He’d found Astarion and bound him with an oath in return for his life. His own personal whore. Astarion was kept close, close enough that they slept in a shared bedroll. It was sewn up in places, tiny stitches he recognized even if he could not remember, probably from where the devil’s horns or claws or his tail spikes had ripped the fabric.
Astarion had been meant to stay and the devil had found him, cold and hurting, out in the night. He must have run. And, almost being caught, he must have hurt himself in his attempt to avoid recapture.
How stupid. What an imbecile his future self must be. If he was bound to a devil, death would be no escape. It would be permanent damnation.
“Astarion?” The devil said, voice sounding almost soft with concern. His hands flexed – with the desire to tear Astarion asunder, or to reach for something more tender?
Had Astarion managed to seduce a devil?
“You have my apologies, darling,” Astarion said. Couldn’t he have at least remembered the devil’s name? “I don’t know what came over me. You know how I am – I’m an empty-headed creature at the best of times. Who can say what I’ll do at my worst; certainly not me. I’ll do better, though! I scared myself, back there, I don’t want to do that again.”
The devil, impossibly, softened further. “Astarion,” he said, laying one clawed hand against Astarion’s cheek. Astarion willed himself to total stillness, the stillness of a knife against his neck. “You don’t have to speak of yourself that way anymore, my Star. You aren’t His, and his mockeries no longer matter.”
He’d told the devil about Cazador, then, and the devil had asserted ownership even over his Sire. Stupid of him, to have traded one master for another, but this devil did seem to have a soft streak for his possessions that Cazador had rarely mustered. Astarion had run away and if there was any punishment imminent, the devil didn’t seem eager to proceed apace.
“I don’t want you to be angry,” Astarion admitted.
The devil sighed again. Strange, how soft that face could look with an eye shining with hellfire. “You make me dizzy sometimes, Star, how often you change your mind. I’m frustrated, yes. You’re always trying to make me hurt you, and then when I won’t do it, you hurt yourself. I hate it. I wish you wouldn’t be so cruel. I wish I could bundle you up in blankets forever and stop you from being so damnably cruel.”
“I don’t know how to stop,” Astarion said. He wanted to protest that he could be good, he would be good, the devil didn’t need to tie him up and keep him trapped in his tent. But he didn’t know if begging was allowed. He didn’t know what would happen if he begged.
“I know,” the devil said. “I know you don’t, and it breaks my heart. But let’s not talk of it any more tonight. I’m sure you must be hurting.”
“It’s not so bad,” Astarion said, though now that he’d warmed up slightly he could feel his hands and especially his feet throbbing inside his blanket cocoon. They still hurt less than his head. And his whole body hurt less than it had last he remembered – there had been an ache in his throat, a knife in his stomach, the persistent reminders of broken bones and half-healed flayings and never-ending starvation and all of that was just gone. The absence of full-body pain was revelation.
“Nonetheless. I don’t want my Star to feel any pain at all,” the devil said, unwrapping Astarion and inspecting his frost-blackened fingers with a critical eye. Beneath the blanket, Astarion was dressed in soft clothes, but not winter gear. Apparently he’d run off like a fool, half-dressed in his desperation to escape the strangest devil in all the Hells. “You said you weren’t hungry earlier, but I’m sure you’d rather have blood than a healing potion.”
Astarion’s mouth moved faster than his brain. “We have blood?” he asked, salivating at the thought. Surely he must have been feeding, to feel so much less hungry. But still. The last he could remember was that rat off the floor of the kennels, that morsel to make him presentable enough to hunt.
“Yes, I should think I have plenty of blood,” the devil said, frowning. “Do you not want to drink from me? I don’t think we have any of the butcher’s blood left.”
“No, no, darling, of course I’d love to drink from you,” Astarion said. “I was just – worried. That you’d be tired from carrying me.” Oh, fuck. Fuck. What had he promised this devil in exchange for blood straight from the tap? Did devils not count as creatures, did the pact he’d made break Cazador’s commandments? How was he supposed to drink blood from a thinking creature for the first time and playact it was nothing special, just another night drinking the lifeblood from his master, a devil?
“I’m not so tired as all that,” the devil promised. Then he hesitated, stroking Astarion’s arm with his clawed hand. “From my neck?”
He asked like it was a favor Astarion would be offering him, not something that Astarion should go down on his knees and beg for. “If you’d like,” Astarion said, trying to sound casual.
The devil laid down beside him, patting and fluffing the pillows into a pile that would work with the massive horns. He spread his arms for Astarion to crawl into, so Astarion did that, hoping that the awkwardness could be passed off as pain from his hands. The devil’s tail looped around his back, the tip of it slipping up beneath the back of his shirt to lay against Astarion’s spine. He shivered.
“It’s okay Star, you’re okay,” the devil soothed. “We’re going to be okay.”
Astarion hesitated, hunting for scars on the ridged skin of the devil’s neck that might tell him where to bite. The devil laid a hand on the back of his head and guided him towards his neck, and then Astarion was too close to see. He couldn’t just bite down at random and risk getting a mouthful of tendons, the devil could snap his neck in retaliation. And more importantly, if a devil knew that Astarion didn’t know what was in their pact, he could tell Astarion that anything was part of the pact. Astarion couldn’t slip.
He licked gently over the skin of the devil’s neck, hot like banked coals beneath his own half-dead flesh. The devil made a noise in his throat that might have been a laugh, but he didn’t pull Astarion away and shout demanding questions. Astarion licked again, the salt-sweat on his tongue tightening in his belly. His devil patron had trained him to get aroused at the taste of his sweat. Gross. But at least that would make it easier to pretend to be interested when Astarion had to pay him back for the blood.
Astarion wondered whether the him he’d forgotten was deluding himself into believing he was love with this devil. Was it a con? Or mind magic? What if the devil was the one who had erased Astarion’s memories in order to pretend they had a contract, and Astarion was damning himself by playing along? There were too many possibilities and his head hurt too much to guess what could be true.
His tongue found two raised marks, scarred-over bitemarks. Astarion’s fangs slid over those marks, mouth tingling from the venom pooling at the proximity to blood. He hoped, desperately, that he could keep his secret long enough to get his first taste of blood that wasn’t dead and rotting. (Were devils dead? They came from dead souls, did that make them dead?)
Blood flooded his mouth and he forgot to worry about anything for a moment.
It was so good. It was just – there were no words. It was so good.
Astarion had spent the last two centuries pretending to enjoy sex and practicing moaning with pretend-pleasure and this – this devil’s blood in his mouth – was the first thing to pull an actual erotic noise from his throat unintended. The devil twitched underneath him and Astarion remembered that he was supposed to be being normal about this.
How the hells was anyone supposed to be normal about blood this good?
It occurred to Astarion belatedly that the devil might be some sort of incubus and his blood might be as addictive as its spittle. Perhaps Astarion would never think of anything but this blood ever again. Perhaps the blood was making him mad with desire, and that’s why he could feel heat pooling in the tips of his ears and all across his face and building in his core. He should probably stop drinking, just in case the devil was poisoning him.
But how was he going to fight against a devil that wanted to poison him? He couldn’t fight a devil, that was absurd. And if he hurt his patron he’d probably – what happened to people who fought their devil patrons? Did they go free, or did the other devils swarm on them and tear them to tiny pieces?
Astarion tried to suck and swallow normally, without making any noises. It was the hardest thing he’d ever done, and Cazador had once made him put a stiletto knife down his pisshole. That had been easier than holding himself back from sobbing or moaning like a whore over the devil’s blood.
This was worth being enthralled by an incubus. The hells might be awful, but at least there were good parts. Cazador had been awful and there hadn’t even been any good parts. There’d never been anything to take away the pain like this. If he kept drinking, would he eventually forget the pain had ever existed?
The devil put his hands on the hinge of Astarion’s jaw and pressed gently until Astarion unlatched from his neck. And never mind drinking quietly, letting go when he was bid was the hardest thing any person had ever done. Astarion let himself have three little licks once his fangs were out.
“Delicious as ever, darling,” he said. He fluttered his eyelashes at the devil, who was looking a bit cross with him. He’d probably drank more than he was supposed to. “You’re so good for me. You make me feel so good. Would you like me to return the favor?” he asked, letting his hand drift down to tease at the waistband of the devil’s breeches.
The devil took a slow breath, staring at Astarion steadily, without blinking. Astarion licked his lips, chasing the taste of blood. If this was as far as he went, at least he’d gotten something good out of it.
But the devil didn’t denounce Astarion as a fraud, or pin him down and start asking questions. He let that breath out and shook his head. “Not tonight, love,” he said. “I’m tired.”
“Are you sure?” Astarion asked. Surely the devil would at least expect Astarion to suck him off in exchange for letting him gnaw on his neck. Or – maybe not, perhaps the fangs were a turn-off in intimate places. But surely he’d be expected to do something. “You could lay back and let me do all the work.”
“Not tonight,” the devil said. There was steel in his voice that time, and Astarion’s body jerked away like his skin would burn if he touched the devil a moment longer. He scrambled off the bedroll, waiting to be – to be –
Sometimes Cazador would want you to want him. Astarion was supposed to fawn and beg and profess that he would die if he wasn’t fucked, if he was kept from his master’s skin a moment longer he would die from longing. And sometimes, you were supposed to keep your mouth shut and your hands to yourself. It was impossible to know which situation you were in until you were on the floor with a boot to your throat being lectured for being “ungrateful” or an “overreaching harlot.” Astarion almost always chose wrong, even with the master whose mannerisms he had studied two hundred years. How could he possibly expect to earn mercy from a new one so soon?
“Astarion,” the devil said. Voice soft, placating. Astarion risked a glance up through the curtain of his hair, and saw the devil had half-risen from the bedroll, hands open, face pained. “You’re not in trouble, Astarion. I just want to sleep.”
“Right. Of course. Ha! I didn’t mean to overreact, darling, I’m just – it’s been a very long day. Night. Let’s sleep.”
Astarion didn’t intend on trancing, of course. If devils slept, he would have a very narrow window of opportunity to go through the contents of the packs and see if there was anything in writing that might tell him anything about where he was, and where they were going, and what was happening.
But the devil wrapped his arms around Astarion’s waist, holding him close like a child’s toy, and even when his breathing slowed and evened out in sleep, Astarion couldn’t work up the nerve to slip the iron grasp of those arms and be caught in the process. He lay awake and wondered how long he could keep going without the devil realizing something had gone wrong. That he wasn’t who he was supposed to be.
If he’d had any faith left in the gods, Astarion would have prayed to trance and awaken with the memories he was so obviously missing. But he’d run out of faith years ago.
And he wasn’t quite sure he wanted to be the kept pet of a devil in truth.