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danse--macabre · 5 months

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At First Sight

Read on AO3

In which Tirazel di Fiore met Astarion twenty years before the Nautiloid crash. Neither of them remember the occasion. Or: meet-cute where you watch him devour a rat in a kitchen storeroom and don't say a single word. Yummy.

Astarion/f!Tav. Second Person POV. Character Study. 1.5k words.

Trigger warnings:

voluntary starvation, vomiting, disordered eating

fantasies of self-harm/suicide

emotionally abusive and controlling family

violence/gore expected of an organised crime syndicate

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“Cazador Szarr,” Astarion had told you.

You knew that name. You had met Cazador Szarr before, of course. It was at your father’s newly purchased country estate, where it was rumoured that the vineyards flourished for all the blood he let run through the soil (half-right: it was actually your half-brother Iaxes who used it as his favoured dumping ground). In its seclusion, your father preferred to conduct particularly sensitive and murderous matters of business. The sort that would make a delicate stomach turn.

Of Cazador, you remember little. Certainly not what the matter of business was – that would have been far too useful for your pretty little pointy ears. Better that you attend to your frighteningly busy social calendar, pretending you didn’t want to know the slightest thing about forbidden spellbooks, or corpse preparation, or how to most effectively manage a cohort of undead thralls. No, what you recalled were only clutches: dark velvet, watchful eyes, your father’s fingertips pressed lightly into your shoulder. You, a girl of darling nineteen, were expected to let the Lord Szarr kiss your hand.

(Cold enough to draw a shiver.)

But Astarion?

You could picture him in the milieu well enough. Strung along as quite the dashing attendant in matching attire, no less than one hundred and sixty years behind the times. Would he have been wearing his telltale smirk? Or would it be a mask of blank misery? A piece of pretty window dressing? You couldn’t possibly say. You have no idea if he had actually been there.

Your recollection of that whole time was haze. You were a darling nineteen. Circling from candlelit soirées in the Upper City to back alley black markets and lurid corners of the Blushing Mermaid like a Neverwinter waltz – but you’d been born in the better half, you wouldn’t know a thing about those pits of vice and despair, would you? Oh, it wasn’t as if you hadn’t tried to behave. You had followed your father’s teachings oh so very well, why, weren’t you just the most vicious little thing? You still kept the severed hand of the first unworthy boy who had asked to take yours, scented in rosemary, still fresh from the day your uncle Andus had sliced it off him in front of you, in a rosewood box. Was it so strange, really, that you tore out the heart of every noble suitor your father lined up your way as well? Your watchful tutors ceased their lessons on magic, politics, or history in favour of the etiquette and dancing you were sorely lacking, and had already begun to compose elegies about your ‘great potential’ and ‘corrupting bloodline’ that had led to your illicit after-class cavorting; your father had neatly torn up their reports and cradled your cheek, and told you he would never reject you for who you were. He would simply have to take care of you until you could learn to control your urges. You were to remain at home until you married.

Little, you remembered so little, that year. Stuck in your father’s house, in your father’s carnival of never-ending canapés and finest selection of patriars’ third-sons and third-cousins, circling you like meat wrapped in satin. You danced so well. Didn’t the Bloomridge gossips like to say you ate each chamber of Edmund Jannath's heart like a four-course dinner? Why were they looking at you like they were the ones who could split you open?

(You had wanted to idly fantasise about sticking your hand down your throat and emptying your insides out onto the polished marble. A feast.)

No, you remember almost nothing of that time. You don't recall the hunger. You don't recall the gnawing that ripped through your body. You don't even recall the shape of his eyes, nor the colour.

(Blood red, of course. Like a rose garden.)

Wouldn’t it have been simply perfect for a creature like him to lead you astray? To bring you from brilliant ballroom to the depths of night with a handsome smile that tore into your flesh until all you could do was bleed?

But this was not how you first encountered Astarion. No, when your eyes first met his, you were delirious, sick, and had not eaten in three days.

The circumstances were as such, though you could not remember the particulars: you were on a self-proclaimed hunger strike on the week of the di Fiore summer ball. Not for some devilishly clever reason – oh no, you had long run out of those, would that your mother's infernally cursed heritage be so useful. You had exhausted every scheme to avoid the inevitable betrothal: you had bribed your father's syndicate thugs who had been ordered to 'watch' you, had pressed half-brothers Iaxes and Thelikos for every bloody family favour you could bear, had asked your brother Dharrimos to have the Zhentarim smuggle you out, had stolen your tutor's address book and written to Blackstaff in hope of late tuition – you had even drafted a plea, in infernal, to your wretched mother, in Avernus. You had blackmailed patriars and sold their messy business to the press under a pseudonym your father scolded for being 'too obvious'. Your plans got more desperate. Debutante days had already begun to fade, four seasons of being sick to your stomach from gilded oysters and too much dancing, and at this juncture, you were six months away from running off with a common-born warlock with a liar’s smile – so much for the precocious child. You did not starve yourself for any intelligent reason. No, you did it because you wanted to spite your father. So you had announced at dinner your intentions to waste it, tipped your plate on the floor like the child you were, and then refused to leave your room for three days. You hadn’t even wanted to go to this damned ball, and it had taken three servants and one half-brother to drag you screaming into a ball gown: your very first, still pristine from when you were fifteen, as you had torn the rest of your wardrobe apart with your own claws.

Three days of starving passed. This left you, this ball’s former belle, in near-delirium, but beautiful, in your baby blue bustle dress with most of your cleavage threatening to spill out. Your whole body broke into sweats, your feet ached, your calves trembled after just three dances and your stomach. Your stomach. Oh, it wanted to just carve its way out of your body. Rake up your flesh, lash through your skin and swallow you all in. You were hungry, you were starving, you were ravenous in a way you, the upper city born sibling, had never known. Your legs were about to collapse beneath you when your brother Dharri sidled up and told you, tipped you off with his warning smile, that your father had composed a list of taverns you had been seen frequenting and a list of the disreputable boys and girls that you had been seen accompanying, in such establishments.

Your father did not make idle threats.

Your heart almost stopped. And then, you tore yourself away in such a rage that you did not care whether you ended up in a dark alley or a ditch. As it happened, you did not get as far as either of those highly questionable locales, and instead only ended up as far as the back kitchen storeroom, where you had once caught your chambermaid Charlotte feeling up the gardener. You threw the door behind you, bolted it shut, balled up your fists as you slunk down amongst the sacks of lumpy potatoes, and prepared to howl –

And it was here, at this point in time, you realised you were not alone.

You don’t remember him. Hunched over, on his knees. You don’t remember his pale skin nor his handsome curls nor his bloodied fingers, gripping tightly around a live, quivering rat he had snatched off the floor. How he tore straight through its flesh with his bare teeth. Gnawed through its fur until the bones crunched. How he began to shudder. Like it was riveting. Like it was nauseating. Like–

Your breath hitched–

And your eyes met–

Twenty years later, when you know that his name is Astarion and that he is lying about being a magistrate from Baldur’s Gate, he will stumble over to you in a rather pathetic attempt to suck your blood dry while camping on the Chionthar and you will see his heart stop again. That look of blank shock. The way he completely froze. As still as he had been twenty years ago: then, on his knees, in the dirt, in your father’s kitchen storeroom, as he held a fat, dripping rat carcass in his mouth.

Blood had trickled down his lips. He wasn’t even breathing.

It would strike you only after you begin to recall this memory, at least three weeks of highly ill-advised and rather heavy-handed flirtation into a charade that would probably end in heartbreak, exactly how terrified he looked in that moment. He had been so frightened of you. You: a miserable nineteen year old girl in an ill-fitting gown who was tired of dancing and wanted nothing more than to devour herself. He had looked at you with wide, trembling eyes, like you could snap him in half.

(Could you? You weren’t sure.)

He gave the rat one last squeeze. A bit of extra juice.

“I–” you had begun to vocalise.

– but he had already disappeared. Returned to the shadows before you could even warn him that your father would find you both here and nail his corpse to the wall while you had to watch. At least, that is what you would have told him, were you a sensible girl. You knew how to be a sensible girl, didn’t you?

(Why didn’t he take you? Why couldn’t he take you?)

But your questions were unspoken in an empty room. You were left alone, in the dirt, with a bloodied rat corpse on the floor in front of you. And you were still hungry.

You leaned forward over the desiccated carcass, and reached out with the with the tip of your tongue –

(What would it taste like? This forbidden fruit?)

A shudder quaked down your spine.

Revolting.

How revolting.

You would recollect snatches of this moment, in time: the blood smeared on a hungry face, the fingers clawed in the flesh, the first sight of a quivering thing being devoured. They would come back as you danced around each other. But you would forget this feeling. The hunger. The sheer revulsion. It would gradually crumble to dust.

You were still mortal, after all.

#bg3 #astarion #tav #astarion/oc #please be nice i haven't written f/m in about 5 years. lol.#anyway. hunger as a mode of dysfunctional desire and suicidal ideation. the fic.

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