Chapter Text
There was a dead body in Astarion’s kitchen.
Well. That was something. Whoever they were, they took his entire basket of embroidered dish towels down with them. Tav was going to be heartbroken—the autumn crocus set was her favorite. He’d have to do them again, and the thread dye was so hard to come by this time of year.
Motherfucker.
He takes stock. A dozen towels, all flowers native to the fields around their winter home and a few only found in the crevices of their more full-time Underdark residence. All soaked in blood. Not even fresh blood, or blood that has the decency to have, say, fallen into a cup instead of turning to goopy gelatin all over his floors. And there’s the body. Perfectly normal except the middle of it missing. Just a big hole where their ribs, heart, and abdominal contents should be. Oh, and their head. That was missing too.
Another murder. And Tav not even back from investigating the last.
But why here? They were too maimed to identify but were likely another spawn. They didn’t smell of the duergar, or the myconids. Or anything way the fuck down here, actually. They smelled like the surface. Who would take a vampire spawn’s body from the surface to the depths of the Underdark and then finally here, their cottage in the middle of nowhere, jammed between unique identifying landmarks like ‘two really big rocks’ and ‘the cave with the mushrooms’? Only people who knew how to find this place could do such a thing.
So, did a member of his admittedly extensive family betray them, or was it someone else? And waiting until Tav was off in Waterdeep. Deliberate, or coincidence?
Either way, he had a lot to mop. She’d be home soon enough, and they would figure it out together.
‘Soon enough’ turned into another week, and Astarion found with a vicious twist in his gut that he could no longer tolerate sleeping alone, dining alone, being alone. It wasn’t just that Tav was both blood and warmth, home and hearth; she was fun. She was an artist with a knife and her feet were always too cold. He missed her.
He hated it. He hated feeling anything at all in this world that he didn’t want to. And he didn’t have to anymore, gods damn everything, that was the point of all she had promised him.
When he heard the sounds of her arrival another two days later, he tried not to wait at the door like a dog. She’d even sent a message along a sending stone so he’d know the right day. He’d spent enough of his life groveling for attention, and he didn’t intend to do it any longer for anyone except himself. Except there he was, lounging against the wainscoting of the foyer like he was ready to be painted. Love was dreadful.
There was a roast in the oven. A roast in his gods-forsaken, weave-controlled oven. That his kind did not eat. It wasn’t even dwarf, an evil that would make him at least feel a little better about himself right now.
It was lamb, with mint and tarragon. There was a peach and pepper pie cooling on the windowsill. The towels had almost all their stains out. There were keys rattling at the door.
She was home. She was home.
He angled the light toward the more attractive side of his face and got both his eyebrow and smirk ready for her. He was excited, yes, but he was entitled to his feelings, and he’d greet his lover with every dignity intact.
Except Tav tore through the door like a hurricane, dropping her bedroll and provisions and weapons and a painting and armor so fast Astarion didn’t know how she carried it all in the first place. And then she was on him, climbing him like a tree, every limb wrapped impossibly far around him. She was a needy octopus, and she was inhaling his scent and saying his name and he was needed. He was missed. Tav was just as desperate as he was, and so he indulged, dipped her down to the floor and dragged his tongue along her neck where he hoped she’d invite a taste.
He wanted to bite without asking, and his greatest pleasure was knowing he never had to. He never would. His choice.
He used to think Tav got just lucky when it seemed she knew him better than he did himself, that it was the fucking worm forcing their heads together. He used to underestimate her, is really the truth of it. But in the time since, he’d learned it was just her. She watched, and listened, and worked hard for what he needed. She assured him this was what you did for people you loved and enjoyed, but he’d have to take her word for it.
She knew what he needed here, too.
“Bite me,” she hissed, already clawing the laces of her tunic open. “Please, sweetheart. I need to feel you inside me. I need to feed you.”
Sweetheart. That one always did him in.
His fangs were wet with saliva, ready for her, and he pushed them into the sweet ripeness of her neck just as she arched her back and said, “Is that blood in the kitchen?”
“There was another murder,” he said, biting down and busying himself with her body. She moaned loud and long, unashamed in her enjoyment of him.
He sucked. And sucked.
“I’ve never been so eager to be lightheaded in my life,” she said, sliding her fingers through the fine curls of his hair. And then, “Wait, here? Astarion, here?”
“Mm.”
“This is our house!”
“Mmhmm.”
“Hng. Darling. We have to talk about this.”
But he was done with that. Past it. Too late.
The first time they had been apart since that fucking brain, and she tore the space between them to pieces and couldn’t stop touching him. She needed him, as he was, and that set him on fire.
Love. Dreadful. Astarion wasn’t going to waste a fucking second of it. From now on, they investigated together. Even on the surface. He pulled his teeth from her as politely as he was able, having managed what could generously be called a snack.
“We’ll talk about it later,” he assured her. “I’ll tell you everything. First, I need to pay tribute to this beautiful mouth,” and he slid his fingers between her lips and his cock got harder while she sucked him, “and then I’m going to watch you eat the food I made you, and we’re going to take a bath. We’re going to enjoy ourselves and put oil in the water and be people who fuck and read by the fire and sleep in. Tomorrow has nothing at all to do with today.”
Tav’s eyes rolled back in her head like she’d never heard better. “Yes. Fuck. Please.”
Her blood flowed through him in a river. Her currents carried him, cradled like a precious egg, into the heat of her body. When they had sex, he was there for every second of it. When she ate, she held the peaches, sweet and sticky, in her fingers. When she poured rosewater in their bath, he spanked her ass and startled her so badly she fell in; when he laughed, it suffused out to his fingertips, bathing him in golden light. Every day was better than the last. Every day was new.
He climbed in the bath. They read by the fire. They slept in past morning.