The shadow curse pressed against camp like something breathing.

You felt it the way anyone without a tadpole would: a wrongness in the air, a thickness that made your lungs work harder. The darkness beyond the ward was alive — not with creatures, but with something older. A patience. A hunger that didn't need teeth.

The fire burned low. Shadowheart had passed you the watch an hour ago with a nod and a yawn. Gale snored. Karlach's bedroll glowed faintly at the edges, ember-warm even in sleep. Lae'zel slept with one hand on her sword, because Lae'zel.

You sat with your knees drawn up, watching the flames eat dead wood too fast. Everything here burned wrong.

You heard him before you saw him. Not footsteps — the whisper of fabric, the displacement of air you'd learned to recognise over weeks of nights like this.

He paused at the edge of the firelight. Ran a hand through his hair — the curl. The one that never — it was doing something. He didn't know what it was doing because no reflection, because cursed water and everyone else's eyes were unreliable sources, because — stop touching it. You're making it worse. Are you making it worse? You don't KNOW because you can't SEE. He straightened his collar. Checked his cuffs. Adequate. Probably.

"You're brooding," he said, settling beside you. "It's unbecoming."

"Says the man who spent last Tuesday staring at the moon for an hour because, and I quote, 'it offended him.'"

"It was full. It was excessive. The moon was showing off, and I refuse to reward that behaviour." He stretched his legs out, crossing them at the ankle. "But we're not talking about the moon. We're talking about you composing your own eulogy into the fire."

"I'm on watch."

"You're brooding with purpose. Which is worse."

You snorted. That was the thing about these nights — you didn't have to perform for each other. The silence between you had become its own language. After the confession, his nightly visits had stopped. Then they'd started again. Quieter. Less charming.

More real.

He'd told you everything two weeks ago. Same spot, same fire. That the flirtation, the lingering touches, the night at the grove with wine and intention — all of it strategy. Survival. Two hundred years of learning that the fastest way to safety was through someone's bed.

You'd listened. And when he'd finished, braced for fury or tears or the dramatic rejection he'd clearly rehearsed responses for, you'd said: "I know."

Two words. You'd had a whole speech — something about how it didn't change anything, how you understood, how survival wasn't a thing you held against people. What came out was I know, flat and graceless, and you'd watched his face go through six things at once.

"You — what do you mean, you know?"

"I knew at the grove. That first night with the wine and all that — charm." You hadn't chosen the word carefully at all. It had been the kindest one available on short notice while your hands were shaking under your knees where he couldn't see them. "Your hands were doing one thing and your eyes were doing another. You touched me like you were following instructions."

He'd gone still. The kind of still where even the pretence of breathing stopped.

"That's why I said no. Not because I didn't find you attractive. Because you weren't really there."

"You knew, and you still —" He'd trailed off. You still gave me your blood. You still sat with me at the fire. You still stayed.

"You needed to eat," you'd said. "That was real."

And that had been the thing that broke something open. Not forgiveness — there was nothing to forgive. Just the plain, unglamorous fact that you'd seen through him completely and handed him a cup of your blood the next morning, because blood regenerates and everyone needs to eat.

---

Now, two weeks later, the silence between you was charged. Not his manufactured tension. A charge neither of you had rehearsed.

He sat closer than he needed to.

You noticed. He noticed you noticing. Neither of you said a word about it.

"I can hear your heartbeat," he said, after a silence so long the fire had collapsed into itself twice. Too casual. "It's faster than usual."

"It's cold."

"It isn't."

Your skin prickled. Not the curse — something warmer. You turned to look at him. Firelight caught the sharp line of his cheekbone, the curl of white hair that never behaved. Beautiful in the way a blade was beautiful — but tonight there was an uncertainty in the set of his mouth.

Your stomach tightened. Not nerves. Want. The kind you'd been ignoring for weeks, because wanting someone who was faking desire back at you felt like taking advantage. But there was no script in the way he sat too close without looking at you, fingers picking at the hem of his sleeve.

"Are you hungry?" you asked.

The question had history. Early on, you'd started carrying a small iron cup. Nick your forearm with a clean blade, let it fill, hand it over. Efficient. No contact. A boundary you'd drawn without explaining.

Sometimes, mid-combat, you'd offered your wrist directly. He'd held it with both hands. There was always that silence after — his lips against your skin a half-second too long, both of you pretending it was nothing.

Tonight, he didn't answer right away.

"I could eat." The flippancy was there, but see-through.

You reached for the cup. His hand caught your wrist. Not hard. Just — there.

"Don't." Then, quieter: "I mean — could you — would it be —"

You watched him struggle. This man who always had the perfect word, the perfect deflection. He couldn't find them because there was no script for asking someone for something real.

"You want to drink from me directly," you said.

His jaw tightened. "I want — I don't know what I —" A sharp exhale. "Two centuries of knowing exactly what to say, and now I'm — like some fledgling who can't — I should've been a drow. They just stab things. Very efficient."

"Astarion."

He stopped. Just his name — not darling, not dear — landing between you like a stone in still water.

"You can ask. And I can say no. That's how it works."

A crack flickered across his face. Fast and raw, like a fish turning beneath dark water.

"I'd like to drink from you." He swallowed. "From your skin. Not the cup."

"Okay."

"That's — okay? Just like that?"

"Just like that."

You turned your wrist up. He shook his head once, and his eyes moved to the curve of your neck — then immediately away, as if caught looking at something he shouldn't.

Heat bloomed low in your belly.

"That's a lot of trust," you said.

"I know." Barely audible. "I know it is. Forget I —"

You shifted closer. Tilted your head. Exposed the line of your throat.

His breathing — unnecessary, habitual — stuttered and stopped.

"I trust you," you said. "Do you trust yourself?"

The sound he made wasn't a word. His hand came up to your jaw — cold fingers, always cold — and his thumb traced your pulse. It trembled. Two hundred years of taking what was offered, and he was shaking.

His lips touched your neck first. Just lips — a press of cold skin against your pulse point, and he stayed there, breathing you in. His other hand found your waist, an anchor, and for a long moment he simply held still. Taking the measure of this. Of you. Of what you were offering.

"Tell me if —"

"I will."

The bite was sharp. A bright point of pain that flared and then softened into something warm and pulling, like the tide going out. You felt the slow draw of blood — intimate in a way you hadn't expected, as if he were reading something written in your veins — and your hand came up to the back of his head without thinking. Fingers in his hair. Holding him there. Present.

He made a sound against your throat. Not the performative moan from the grove — involuntary, small, wrecked. Like something loosening in his chest that had been locked for longer than you'd been alive.

Your pulse quickened. He heard it — of course he did — and his hand tightened at your waist. Not possessive.

Desperate.

When he pulled back, his lips were dark with your blood and his eyes were wide and glassy and completely open. No mask. No quip.

"Are you okay?" you asked.

He laughed. Broken, genuine, startled. "You're asking me if I'm okay. I just had my teeth in your neck."

"And now you look like you've seen a ghost."

"I look like —" He stopped. Swallowed. His hand was still on your jaw, thumb against your pulse. "I don't know what I look like. I haven't seen my own face in two hundred years."

The fire popped. An ember drifted upward and died.

Two hundred years. You let the number sit. Didn't rush past it, didn't fill the silence with comfort. Just held it, the way you'd hold something fragile someone had placed in your hands without meaning to.

You covered his hand with yours. His fingers were warmer now — your blood in him, your warmth borrowed. "You look like someone who just did something real and doesn't know what to do about it."

"Ah." A pause. "That's uncomfortably accurate."

The fire crackled. His fingers interlaced with yours — cold through warm — and neither of you said anything about it.

His gaze dropped to your mouth. He caught himself and looked away.

But you'd seen it. The wanting that had no script behind it.

And the thing was — god, the thing was — your body had been answering his all night. Heat pooling low in your stomach every time his thigh pressed against yours. Your skin prickling where his cold fingers had been. The bite still throbbing at your neck, warm and swollen, and some animal part of your brain that didn't care about patience or healing or doing the right thing wanted his mouth back there immediately.

And underneath that — the part you didn't want to examine too closely — was the knowledge that you'd been wanting this since week two. Not the feeding. Him. The real him, the one who forgot to breathe when he was thinking too hard and counted to eleven under his breath when the dark pressed in. You'd wrapped it in practicality — blood in a cup, boundaries drawn, the careful distance of someone who was definitely not developing feelings for the traumatised vampire she was sharing a camp with.

Liar.

You weren't doing this out of kindness. You were doing this because you wanted him and you were tired of pretending otherwise, and if that made you selfish then fine. You could be selfish. You could want things.

You leaned in and kissed him.

Your nose clipped his cheekbone. Angle wrong, momentum committed — your mouth landed on the corner of his, half lip half jaw, and for one mortifying heartbeat you considered throwing yourself into the shadow curse and never coming back.

Then you corrected. Shifted. Found his mouth properly and kissed him the way you'd shared your blood: plainly, deliberately. I'm choosing this and I know exactly what it is, even if I nearly broke your nose getting here.

He went rigid. One second. Two.

Then his mouth opened against yours and you tasted iron and something older, darker — your blood on his lips, returned — and the sound he made vibrated against your mouth like a lock clicking open.

His hand came up to your hair, uncertain, and you pulled back just enough to look at him.

"Still good?"

"I —" He blinked. "You kissed me."

"I tried. I mostly kissed your cheekbone."

"I was supposed to — I had a — I was working up to —"

"You were going to stare at my mouth for another twenty minutes and make a joke about the cold." You raised an eyebrow. "I got bored of waiting."

The laugh was startled and slightly offended. "I was not going to — I don't — you are infuriating."

"And yet you're still sitting here."

He looked at you — really looked — and something shifted. Not the mask going up. The opposite. The slow recognition that someone had beaten him at his own game, except it wasn't a game, and that was the part he couldn't process.

"Yes," he said quietly. "I suppose I am."

He kissed you back. Careful in a way that hurt your chest, because Astarion was never careful. This trembling pressure against your mouth was him without the script. You let him set the pace — your point made, the door opened, the rest his to walk through.

He pulled back an inch. "I don't —" His voice was rough. "I don't know how to do this."

"Do what?"

"This. The part where it's —" Forehead against yours, breath cool on your lips. "I know how to seduce someone. Every trick, every — I don't know how to just be here. Without a — without knowing what comes next."

"You're doing it right now."

The shift was almost visible — the moment he registered that this unscripted, terrified thing was exactly the thing he'd claimed he couldn't do.

"Oh," he said softly. "I suppose I am."

You smiled against his mouth. He felt it. Something in him broke open a little further.

---

You stayed by the fire. The small circle of warmth that held the curse at bay.

His hands — cold, trembling — mapped your shoulders, your ribs, the dip of your waist. Each touch a question. His fingers would hover above a button, and he'd look at you with those red eyes stripped of their sharpness, and you'd nod or guide his hand or say yes.

You undressed him slowly. He let you.

That was the miracle — he let you. Astarion, who controlled every encounter. Who had spent two centuries choreographing exactly how much of himself to reveal. He knelt and let you pull his shirt over his head and see him.

The firelight would be catching his collarbones rather well, he thought. Small mercy. If one was going to be emotionally devastated, one should at least — are those FRECKLES on her shoulder? Since when does she have — focus. FOCUS.

The scars on his back. You'd heard fragments. You hadn't seen them.

In the firelight, you traced the raised lines with your fingertips. He went rigid.

"It's Infernal," he said. Too even. Too controlled. "A poem. Part of Cazador's ritual."

You traced a line from his shoulder blade to the small of his back. The scar tissue was thick, deliberate — carved with intention, carved with time. Someone had taken their time with this. Someone had wanted it to last.

Your hand stilled. Your jaw clenched. Your breath went sharp.

He started to pull away. "It's unsightly, I know —"

"I'm not repulsed." Your voice came out harder than you intended. Not at him. Never at him. "I'm angry. At what he did to you."

You didn't say the rest. That you knew — not the same, never the same — what it felt like to have someone treat your body like a surface to write on. An ex who'd catalogued the places that made you flinch and used them. Not for two hundred years. Not carved in Infernal. Just long enough to teach you that flinching was a language too.

Different wound. Same shape.

Maybe that was why you'd recognised his hands at the grove — running someone else's script. You'd been on both sides of that.

He was quiet for a long time.

"No one's ever —" He stopped. Started again. "Which is rather rude of everyone, when you think about it. I'm extremely worth being angry about."

The joke was thin. You heard the crack underneath it.

You pressed your lips to his shoulder blade, at the edge of a scar. The shudder that went through him was full-body.

He turned. His hands caught your face and he kissed you — urgent, real, a little afraid. You tasted salt.

"Tell me what you want," you whispered.

"I —" A frustrated sound, half laugh, half fracture. "I've never been asked that. Not genuinely."

"I'm asking."

He pulled back enough to look at you. Firelight caught the wetness on his lashes. He didn't hide it. Didn't blink it away. Didn't make a joke.

"I want to feel something that isn't a —" He stopped. Swallowed. The word he couldn't say hung between you — transaction, survival, strategy — all of them and none of them. "I want to touch you because I want to. Not because it gets me —"

He broke off. A sharp breath, almost a laugh. "Gods, I'm making a speech. I sound like a bard with a head injury."

But he didn't deflect. Didn't reach for the mask. He stayed in it — visibly, painfully — like staying in cold water because the other side is worth it.

"I just — without Cazador in my head running the — when it's just —"

He stopped.

"Us. Whatever that — that."

"Two people," you said.

"Yes." Barely a whisper. "That."

---

You stood — Loss of grace, legs unsteady — and pulled him by the wrist toward your bedroll at the far edge of camp, where the ward's glow was thinnest and the firelight barely reached. You stumbled over Gale's pack on the way. He caught you by the elbow. Neither of you mentioned it.

You pulled him down onto the bedroll.

The fire cast moving shadows across skin — dimmer here, amber at the edges — warm on yours, cool on his. Everywhere he touched felt like stepping into shade on a hot day. Everywhere you touched him, he leaned into your warmth like a man who'd been cold for centuries.

Because he had.

He kissed down your throat — lingering at the bite mark, tongue tracing the tender edges — and lower, along your collarbone. His hands slid beneath your shirt. Cold palms flat against your stomach.

You gasped. He froze.

"Too cold?"

You caught his wrists. "Stay."

His fingers splayed across your ribs. You watched him watch his own hands on your body — wonder and bewilderment, as if he couldn't believe he was allowed to do this without an agenda.

You pulled your shirt off — tried to. It caught on your ear, then your chin, and for three graceless seconds you were blind and tangled and making a sound that was definitely not attractive. His cold fingers caught the hem and helped ease it over your head.

"Elegant," he murmured.

"Shut up."

His gaze moved over you — not the appraising calculation from the grove. He looked at you like the first light after a long illness.

"You're so warm," he said. Almost reverent.

You took his hand and pressed it over your heart. His eyes closed. His fingers curled against your chest and he bowed his head and just breathed — unnecessary breaths drawn through his nose like he was memorising you.

You cupped his face. Kissed his forehead. His closed eyes. The corner of his mouth where his smirk usually lived but wasn't living now.

"I'm here," you said. "Whatever happens or doesn't tonight — I'm still here in the morning."

He kissed you. Deep and desperate and tender at once. His hands slid up your back, pulling you flush — the shock of cold skin against heat drew a gasp from both of you.

Your remaining clothes came off in stages — unhurried, punctuated by touches and pauses where one of you stopped to just look. Not with hunger. Not with the appraising eye of someone calculating what they were getting. Just looking, like a gift you weren't expecting.

Choice. All of it, choice.

You pushed him onto his back and climbed over him.

His eyes went wide — genuine surprise. New. This was new.

"What are you —"

"Giving you a turn at not being in charge." You planted your hands on his chest — cool, smooth, the faint ridges of muscle that came from what he was, not effort. "Tell me if you don't like something. Tell me if you want to stop."

"That's — those are my lines. I was going to —"

"Now you don't have to."

Relief moved behind his eyes. He — was that relief? That was relief. Because being underneath someone was — don't. Don't think about — different. This was different. Her hands weren't — she wasn't — DIFFERENT. Obviously.

You kissed his jaw. The cool column of his throat, where you felt the vibration of a sound he swallowed before it could escape.

And then you stopped.

Not because anything was wrong. Because everything was right, and that scared you. Because the man underneath you was shaking and open and offering you something he'd never given anyone without a survival calculation behind it, and the cold voice in the back of your skull — the one that sounded like every person who'd ever told you that your compassion was just control in a nicer dress — whispered: Are you sure this isn't about you needing to be needed?

His hand came up. Not grabbing. The backs of his fingers against your cheek, barely there.

"You stopped," he said. Quiet. Braced.

"I'm —" You swallowed. "I want to make sure I'm doing this for the right reasons."

The silence lasted two heartbeats.

"You're doing this," he said slowly, "because you want to. That's — that was the entire point." A pause. "Unless I've dramatically misread the situation, in which case I'd like to crawl into the shadow curse now."

You laughed — too loud, the kind that Gale would definitely sleep-mumble about — and pressed your forehead against his chest.

"I want to," you said. "I just needed to hear myself say it."

"Then we're two people who want to be here." His fingers traced the line of your spine. "Both terrified. Both staying."

"Both staying," you repeated, and kissed the hollow of his throat, and kept going.

Lower — your lips against his sternum, and beneath them no heartbeat, only stillness and cool skin and a tremor running through him like a current through deep water.

Your tongue traced his lowest rib. His hips jerked — involuntary, immediately stilled.

"Don't do that."

"Don't do what?"

"Don't correct yourself. You're allowed to react."

You pressed your mouth to the same spot. This time his hips moved and he let them, and the sound that escaped was thin and genuine.

You explored him slowly. The dip of his hip bones, sharp beneath cool skin. The sensitive hollow below his navel where your breath alone made him shiver. You learned the topography of him — not the rehearsed version, not the body he'd offered like currency, but the real landscape underneath. The places that made his breath hitch. The places that made him go still.

His hands fisted in the bedroll, then released — finger by finger — teaching himself he didn't need to brace.

His hand settled in your hair. Not guiding. Resting.

How dignified. Two hundred years of refined seduction techniques and he was shaking like a fledgling on his first hunt. His hands were — they were actually trembling and he couldn't — Cazador would have been disgusted. Which, on reflection, was rather a point in its favour. Good. Be disgusted. Be disgusted from whatever hell you're rotting in.

When you took him in your mouth, the sound he made wasn't human. Raw and older, pulled from somewhere beneath the charm and two centuries of survival — a sound like a door forced open. He tried to smother it with the back of his hand.

You reached up. Pulled his hand away. Interlaced your fingers with his and held them against his hip.

He tasted like cold skin and salt. The weight of him on your tongue was solid, real, and you stopped thinking about whether this was altruistic or selfish because it didn't matter — you wanted the sounds he was making and you wanted them louder.

"Your mouth," he managed. "How — I can't —"

You hummed around him. His hips bucked hard enough to make you gag — half a second, recovered — and his hand flew to your shoulder.

"Sorry — I'm sorry, I didn't mean to —"

You pulled off just enough to say "Do it again" and took him back before he could process the sentence.

The sound he made after that was worth everything. You learned what made his breath stutter: the flat of your tongue, slow pressure, the scrape of teeth light enough to be a question. You learned what made him gasp your name like he'd forgotten every other word — and each time he did, the heat in your own body tightened another degree. His hips moved in small involuntary rolls he'd stopped trying to control.

When his voice broke on a please he hadn't planned to say, you felt it in your own chest like a fist unclenching.

You pulled back before he finished. A raw, wrecked sound of protest — and then you were climbing up his body, knee skidding on the bedroll, your shin barking against what was either a tree root or a very opinionated rock.

"Ow — fuck —"

"Are you —"

"I'm fine, I'm fine, don't stop, just — the ground is trying to kill me."

The ground was trying to kill her. She was straddling an undead man in a cursed wasteland and the GROUND was the problem. He started laughing. Not the practiced, charming laugh — the ugly one. The one with too much air and not enough composure.

You started laughing too. Forehead against his chest, both of you shaking with it — stupid, breathless, the kind of laughter that only happens when you're naked and vulnerable and something goes wrong and it doesn't matter.

"We're very bad at this," you said.

"We're catastrophic at this."

"Do you want to stop?"

His hands landed on your hips. Drew you forward until you felt him against you, hard and insistent.

"No," he said. "Absolutely not."

You positioned yourself above him. His hands on your waist, yours on his chest. "Look at me."

Red eyes. Bright. Wet at the edges. Completely present.

You sank onto him slowly.

The stretch was cold and hard against heat. You sank down inch by inch and your breath left you in a low, shaking exhale that was more sound than you'd intended. His fingers dug into your hips. His jaw dropped open.

"Gods."

"Good gods or bad gods?"

"The — good — very — you're going to have to stop talking or I'm going to —"

"Going to what?"

He looked up at you — red eyes, raw, no mask left — and said, "Finish embarrassingly fast and never live it down."

You rolled your hips. Slowly. Watching his face come apart.

"I don't mind," you said. "We have all night."

Every inch — slow, deliberate — and his whole body went taut beneath you, his eyes fixed on your face with an expression that was half reverence, half terror, as if he couldn't believe this was happening without a script telling him what to feel next.

"This is —" he started. Didn't finish.

The rhythm built itself, not from choreography but from two bodies learning each other in real time. What made you gasp. What made him grip harder. His hands mapped your hips, your waist, the curve of your spine — not directing, following.

"You're so —" He swallowed. "I can feel your heartbeat. Inside you, your pulse is —" His voice fractured. "I've never paid attention to that before. I didn't know it could feel like —"

"Like what?"

"Like you're — alive. Around me. With me. I can feel you —" He pressed his head back into the bedroll. "I'm going to say something absurd."

"Say it."

"It feels like being warm from the inside."

You leaned down and kissed him. Felt his moan against your lips, and his hands slid up your back, pulling you flush against him — cold skin against heat, the full length of your bodies pressed together — and his hips moved with yours in a rhythm not learned but discovered. Slightly imperfect. The way real things always are.

He rolled you onto your back — fluid, supernatural, gentle — and his elbow caught the edge of the bedroll and for one graceless second the two of you slid sideways on the uneven ground.

"Smooth," you said.

"I am going to choose to ignore that."

You pulled him back. The shift in angle drew a sound from you that was involuntary and unguarded.

His breath caught.

"Again," he whispered. "Make that sound again."

"I can't just — oh." He moved. Same angle, same depth. The sound came again, startled out of you, and your laugh tangled with it — breathless, surprised, warm.

"There it is," he murmured, and the wonder in his voice had nothing to do with technique and everything to do with the fact that he'd caused something genuine.

"Lower," you gasped. "Angle — down. Like — yeah."

He adjusted. Your spine arched off the bedroll.

"That?"

"Don't stop."

"I had absolutely no intention of —" You clenched around him and the rest of the sentence evaporated. "Fuck."

You laughed — bright and startled — because Astarion didn't swear. Astarion made cutting remarks and dry observations. He didn't say fuck like a man who'd just lost his last functioning brain cell.

"If you laugh at me during sex I will leave."

"No you won't."

"No," he breathed. "I won't."

Unscripted sex in a cursed wasteland on a bedroll that smelled like Gale's cooking. His life. His UNLIFE. He didn't care. He was going to remember this — not because of the setting but very much despite it.

His rhythm deepened. Less uncertain now — not because he'd found a script but because he'd stopped looking for one. Each thrust was a question: is this good, is this real, are you still here. And you answered — not with words but with your hands on his face, in his hair, against the scarred map of his back. Your nails dragged down his spine — over the scars — and you felt him flinch and then press INTO it, like the touch rewrote something that had only ever meant pain.

"More," he said, and he sounded surprised by his own voice. "The nails. More."

You dragged your nails from shoulder blade to hip. He made a sound that was half growl, half fracture, and his rhythm stuttered and came back harder.

He buried his face in your neck. Cool breath against the bite mark, the graze of his teeth — not biting, just there — and the proximity of his fangs to your pulse while he moved inside you was so intimate your vision blurred.

"Stay with me," you whispered. Your hand on his cheek, drawing his face up. "Right here."

His eyes locked on yours. Red and wet and wide.

He was paying attention. Not — the other thing. Not the Cazador thing where you memorise a person's reactions for later — this was different. Was it different? It felt different. It felt — shut up. It was different. His brain could shut up about it now. Any time.

You brushed the hair from his forehead. Smiled — small, private, the kind that exists between two people and no one else.

"There you are," you said.

Something crumpled in his expression. Something in her face that — she was looking at him like he was a — like he was just a — don't. Not now. Not while she's — is he CRYING? He'd better not be crying. He is NOT crying. His eyes are doing something and it's the SMOKE.

The rhythm built. His hand slid beneath your lower back, and the shift in depth made you gasp against his mouth. Your legs tightened around him. Foreheads pressed together, breathing the same unnecessary air, moving in the same rhythm — two people in a small circle of firelight in a cursed and broken world, and it was enough. More than enough.

When you came, it was an unraveling. Slow and full-body, starting deep and spreading outward like warmth through cold water. Your fingers in his hair. His name leaving your mouth like something you'd been holding too long. Your body clenched around him and he made a sound against your throat — wrecked, disbelieving — and his rhythm faltered, stuttered, lost itself.

He followed moments later. The sound was nothing you'd heard from him — not theatrical, not calculated. Raw, broken, surprised, as if pleasure without strategy was so foreign his body didn't know how to process it. His hips pressed flush and stilled. His arms gave. He collapsed against you, face in your neck.

Shaking.

You held him. Hands flat against the scarred landscape of his back. Your heartbeat hammering against his silent chest.

The silence did what words couldn't.

---

The fire had burned to embers.

The shadow curse pressed closer, but the ward held.

Astarion hadn't moved. Face against your neck. Slow, rhythmic breathing — a man teaching himself to be calm.

"I should say something witty," he murmured. "Something devastating to restore my —"

"You should."

"I can't think of anything." A pause. "That's never — that has literally never happened before. I'm blaming you."

You ran your fingers through his hair. He made a sound — low, almost inaudible. Like a cat that had forgotten it could purr.

"This is the part where I normally leave," he said.

"If you leave, I'm keeping the blanket."

A beat. Then a huff against your collarbone. "You'd let me walk into the shadow curse over a blanket?"

"You're undead. You'll manage. I'm warm-blooded and extremely comfortable, and I refuse to suffer for your dramatic exits."

He shifted enough to look at you. His face in the ember-light was unguarded in a way that would have terrified him if he'd seen it.

But he couldn't see it. No reflection. Only you, looking back.

"I don't want to leave."

It came out without the banter. Without any of it. Just — there. Like a thing falling off a shelf that had been balanced too long.

"Then don't."

"I don't know what this —" He gestured vaguely. At you. At himself. At the blanket. At everything. "What this makes us."

"Two people who had a real night. The rest we figure out tomorrow. Or we don't."

His hand found yours. Cold fingers through warm.

"A real night." He tested the shape of the words. "I've never had one of those."

"Now you have."

He pressed his lips to your knuckles. Not seductive — too clumsy, too unplanned. His mouth lingered. Memorising.

"Thank you," he said, so quietly the shadow-cursed night almost swallowed it. "For knowing. Before I —" He didn't finish. Didn't need to.

You pulled him closer. His head against your shoulder. Your hand in his hair. The last of the fire dying into darkness.

---

You woke to grey light and Gale attempting breakfast.

Astarion was beside you. Still there. Still close. Eyes closed — not sleeping, but resting. Staying.

When he felt you stir, one red eye opened.

"If you tell anyone I stayed, I will categorically deny it."

"Obviously."

"I'll say you begged me. Wept. Made an absolute spectacle of yourself."

"Naturally."

"I have a reputation to maintain."

"Of course you do."

His mouth twitched. Not a smirk — the ghost of a real smile, half-formed and quickly hidden.

He didn't get up. Neither did you. Gale burned something. Karlach laughed. Lae'zel said something cutting. Camp woke around you the way it always did — loud and alive and imperfect and real.

His hand found yours under the blanket.

Cold fingers curled around warm ones. The careful, wondering grip of someone holding something they'd just discovered they were allowed to keep.

The shadow curse pressed at the edges. The ward held. The morning was grey and wrong in every direction.

But here, in the smallest circle of warmth, something had shifted. Not fixed — not healed. Just moved. An inch. A degree. The first turn of a lock that had been rusted shut for two hundred years.

Enough.

---

fin.