Tactical. Practical. Sound body. Sound mind.
Atavya's credo was a drumbeat in her mind, anchoring her in this godsforsaken land of eternal twilight and mirk.
It was far easier to maintain said drumbeat from the abandoned balcony of the Last Light Inn than it was from the road, with the Moonlantern's constant reminder of the surrounding gloom and doom swish swish swishing ahead of her with the party's every step. From this vantage, she had to admit that the landscape of the Shadowlands was almost pacifying, what with the whirling clouds of eerie vapor and the occasional creak of a sinister vine. In and amidst it, it was simultaneously suffocating and desperately lonely.
Lonely.
She hitches at the word. Since the Nautiloid crash, she's refused to admit it to herself but, yes, she's lonely. The little misfit band she's gathered around herself has provided an unexpectedly comfortable alternative to her prior life. A prior life still shrouded in mystery given that her pre-tadpole memories are only barely returning to her, but still - the life of a ranger, of that she is confident. A life spent in the presence of almost always merely herself, and sometimes in the presence of Verres. Atavya doesn't think she had known loneliness before, not in her spirit. She'd only known freedom, and the companionship of animals or the occasional other outlander when base needs like food and shelter trumped their desires for solace.
But now, with the invasive thrum of the tadpole lurking between her eye and her ear every second of every minute of her day, she cannot escape the reality that she is and has ever been a living being incapable of survival without the sustenance provided by other living beings.
She's been spending too much time with Gale. Gale, the hypersocial and hyperlexic foil to her taciturn ranger-self. Gale, who taught her that in a dialect of an ancient language from the far east, her name is 'nearly autologous for herself'. "Atavya - Extensive and dreary; vast and frightful;-used of a forest or desert: wild and howling."
She doesn't remember who named her Atavya. She doesn't know whether her sires knew that they had so rightly prophesied how and where it was that she would live the first decades of her life. She realizes now that this definition of her name very aptly describes the Shadowlands.
Atavya. Lonely. These things are pairs.
The petite ranger huffs and turns from the balcony. There's a hot bath waiting for her that is likely no longer hot. As she strides across the noisy floorboards of the abandoned room the Harpers had assigned her to, she sheds her road-worn clothing. Jacket and jerkin, leggings and tall woolen socks. Each item a vestige of her prior life, with signs here and there of repairs and darning that her fingers have not forgotten even if her mind has. Little scars, like the one across her lips and temple, the memories of which she might one day pluck from the corners of her infested mind.
Atavya dons a light robe and exits her room, not bothering to fasten the ties around her waist. There's hardly anyone here on this top floor of the Inn besides her own traveling companions, whom she assumes are gorging themselves on proper food and ale. In her minds' eye, she senses Verres is curled up between the hearth and the bard Alfira, snoring softly. He's too hefty to make the stairs to the top floor of the Inn, and fortunately was content to make a nest for himself with the tattered remains of Atavya's cloak.
The ranger's hand meets the handle to the converted bathing room and she notes just how much grime has accumulated under her overgrown nails, and at that same moment the knob clatters counterclockwise. She stumbles forward into the doorway just as a pale and solid form strides forward.
"Ah! Darl-... I mean, 'Tavya. Apologies!"
Atavya has seen Astarion flustered before, but she's not sure she's seen him blush. In fact, she's so suddenly captivated by the light pink smattering across the Moon Elf's cheeks that she misses his fumbling attempts to keep his towel wrapped around his slender waist. She does register, however, that he corrected his use of his favorite generic pet name. She'd had him cut that shit out within hours after their waterside meeting.
"No bother," Atavya mumbles, righting herself and stepping backwards into the hall to let him pass. But Astarion doesn't. His eyes are traveling almost spastically between two places on her body - the nearly-healed puncture wounds below her right ear, and the tufts of hair at the apex of thighs, free as a fledgling bird now that her unsecured robe has parted down the middle.
She makes a startled noise awfully similar to something her boar companion might make. Astarion can't help but chortle back.
"Well fortunately for you, dear, I left the razor blade at the foot of the tub. No need to remain unkempt,"
Atavya sneers at him. His crimson eyes soften, and remain affixed to her neck. Atavya raises a hand to cover the twin wounds before she thinks to amend her nudity.
Like a moth transfixed, the Moon Elf steps closer to her - not enough to invade her personal space, given the boundary firmly planted between them, but still close enough to breed intimacy.
"I wasn't lying, you know. When I said you were my first,"
Atavya says nothing. She merely studies Astarion, noting the gray halfmoons beneath his eyes. She's not sure she can trust his claim, but she does believe that she was the last human he's fed from. Presumably, hearty animals have been hard to come by since they left Lathander's veil, leaving Astarion slim pickings among the starving ground mammals eeking out a living in the Shadowlands. "Not Verres," she had told him commandingly after he'd revealed the prior source of his sustenance to her following that fateful night. And to his credit, he'd never laid eyes on the boar again.
Atavya taps her forefinger against one of the puncture wounds once before snapping her gaze from his and retying her robe. "Yes, well, it seems I've been your last. Clumsy work against the Drider yesterday, Fangs,"
Astarion can't blanche, but the remainder of his blush sputters out.
"Dammon isn't undead, those oxen won't remain guarded forever,"
"Not the oxen," Atavya snaps, and then backtracks at the sight of Astarion's furrowed brow. "Not that I have a moral objection to your feeding on a stock animal. But one of those ox… there's something off about it." She makes a mental note to better observe the creature tomorrow.
"Well, if you're telling me the bull might be bull… I'll suffer in silence a little longer," Astarion quips. She would never admit it, but the vampire spawn's wry jokes do scratch an itch deep within her. And it pleases Atavya when her value as a Ranger is acknowledged by others. Her skills in healing are no match to Shadowheart's or even Halsin's, Astarion is as excellent an archer as she, and Gale knows as many herbs as she does from his books if not from lived experience. They've adopted her as their de facto leader… why? Likely only because Lae'zel's profound unlikability vastly outweighs her aptitude as a captain, and the two women are otherwise matched in their tracking ability. 'Lonely and inferior.'
For all his misanthropy and dramatism, Astarion is nothing if not perceptive. He makes to move around her and says "You're either lost in thought or near to blacking out, 'Tav. Take your bath while the water's still warm,"
Atavya's hand brushes Astarion's as he sidles by, but neither acknowledge it. They wouldn't dare. If they did, the dam between them might finally break.
—
On the surface, allowing Astarion to feed from her was the exact same sort of kindness she would have extended to any wounded animal she encountered in the bush. Rescuing the orphaned owlbear in the goblin camp had evoked the same maternal urge. And for weeks, she had conjured up that vision of the vampire spawn in her mind to justify the encounter - he was a pitiful, helpless creature and she was an empathetic ranger, sworn to aid and protect those elements of nature forgotten and feared by most of her human kin.
Only half an inch deeper, though, and Atavya's true feelings on the matter were far more sordid.
The experience of being literally consumed by another living being was undoubtedly the most visceral and erotic experience of her memorable life. In the throes, she'd tried very hard to focus her analytical mind on the properties of Astarion's venom that led to such bewildering physical manifestations. It was the same classification process she used to distinguish spiders or birds, or between skin rashes. She'd not been able to maintain that focus for more than three gasping breaths.
It was lust that was begotten by the vampire spawn's bite. Pure, consuming, unadulterated lust. Animalistic in the basest sense Atavya had ever known. And she had been so willing to be overcome by it.
She'd wrestled Astarion away in the nick of time, very near to acting on her impulse to stab the absolute shit out of him. She forced her eyes to convey 'You could have killed me!' when the truth (quite literally in her loins) was that he had very nearly brought her to orgasm. That was a loss of control she could not condone.
Sound body. Sound mind.
So why was it that she now allowed herself to lay in the tepid bathwater with one finger on Astarion's scar, and another twisted between her legs?
She was tempted - beyond tempted. She let her wrist rotate too and fro, providing just enough friction that the tips of her hip bones occasionally rose above the surface of the water. She couldn't remember the last time she had pleasured herself, couldn't quite grasp the memory of how to do it, and that brought on enough fear that she retreated completely.
There were tears in her eyes before she could blink. Loathing towards the tadpole and its masters was familiar to her by now, but grief was not a luxury she had afforded herself since she had awoken - bruised, burnt and head pounding - on that beach. It was only in the safety of the Inn, she realized, that she finally allowed herself the latitude to acknowledge the depths of her sadness at the complete molestation of her mind and body.
Then she sobbed. A convulsive, whole body sob that hammered in her ribs and clawed up her throat. There were no words to describe the depth of her sorrow, and so she did not name them. She only keened and hugged herself tightly, praying to no god in particular that neither her companions, nor the Harpers, nor the tieflings could hear her.
One did. And of course it was Astarion, returned to collect his misplaced dagger and certain Atavya would have completed her bathing by now.
Lapsing in perception, she did not immediately notice when the door opened, but she did notice Astarion's demure and very fake cough. Her mauve eyes flicked up to his at once, surely vicious and accusing, but Astarion did not retreat. Instead, in an extraordinarily uncharacteristic display from him, he averted his eyes from the ranger's naked form before stepping forward, lightly closing the door behind him. He rested against it, crossing his arms and propping one leather-clad foot behind him with outrageous nonchalance. His lips opened as if to speak, but to Atavya's great surprise, Astarion was silent.
The ranger shifted in the tub, covering her small pert breasts with one crossed arm. With her free hand, she scuttled away her fallen tears. She looked pointedly at the Sussur dagger propped in the corner of the small room - "it's right there,"
Astarion did not stop his study of his nails or the ruby ring on his finger. This succeeded in conjuring up the air of a pompous courtier. 'What was a magistrate if not an actor elevated far above his station?' Atavya thought.
"There's a type of torture I've… heard of," he started, eyes still cast down and away. "Where the victim is fed paralytics, hallucinogens and aphrodisiacs all at once. And then some wicked conjurer casts Detect Thoughts,"
Atavya blinks, confused. It's in a vampire's nature to be macabre, but this is particularly disturbed.
"A profoundly dehumanizing experience. All semblance of self and propriety stripped away. Thoughts and body alike overwhelmed by chaos and sadism. Utter humiliation. By itself, the elixirs themselves would be devastating. But the real crux is having your manufactured depravity broadcast by another to your torturer, perhaps even to a friend or family or a lover,"
It's quite clear that Astarion is speaking from some level of personal experience, and not merely hearsay or academic study. Atavya's bowels churn with this insight.
Finally, Astarion meets the ranger's eyes, and his face is soft and empathetic. "Every night when I go to sleep, I pray the tadpole won't connect us. Any of us. I pray for a dreamless sleep, and some magical cure, so that when I wake, I'm still," he gestures at himself, "free. But fully free. Free from the memory of that ship and its horrors or feeling tethered to strangers on some waltz towards a fate I can't comprehend,"
Atavya gulps, and she nods just once.
"Until just a few weeks ago, I felt I had been stripped away from myself for 200 hundred years. And I still feel it - the tadpole has only given me a taste of freedom. But mostly, I just feel… smothered? Yet alone. Connected but not in the way those weird little dancing mushrooms were in the Underdark. Invaded, not connected,"
Atavya nods again, and one side of her mouth flicks up of its own accord at the thought of the myconids and Astarion's profound dislike for their 'too squishy, too oozy' forms. The vampire can't help but grin back.
Astarion makes to step forward but then looks at Atavya questioningly. She holds up a hand and gestures to her towel, and the vampire obediently turns around. After she's extricated herself from the tub and gingerly wrapped herself (tightly this time), she stands before Astarion.
He has given her a truth, she owes him one back.
"When you fed from me, I felt many things. But not disgust. I felt…," She won't admit the particulars of what she felt, though she suspects that after 200 years he must know. Afterall, he was bitten at least once himself.
"I felt known. By you. By myself. By feelings and parts of myself I had forgotten, maybe because the tadpole took them or maybe because I had willingly shed them away after so many years in the wild,"
Astarion is maintaining that warm and enchanting gaze, seemingly without any effort at all. He is the troupe's charmer, after all, so she's not surprised when she keeps speaking despite herself. It's the most she's ever said to any of them at all.
"But then again, I can't remember. I suspect I could have coped with this profound sense of loneliness before - I had become accustomed to it. It was my lifestyle. But maybe I am wrong. Maybe I have been carrying this void around with me for years."
"And then you," she says, and she can't help it when her hands twitch towards his. "You b-bit me. Bit me,"
He smirks at her incredulity, and then he breaks her rule.
"Indeed I did, darling. And I loved every minute of it,"
The same is true for her. She loved it. A day hasn't gone by where she hasn't thought of it. Much like he said, she feared every night before she fell asleep that the lurid memory of his body on hers, the tenderness with which he'd cupped her neck, and then the shockingly pleasant sting of his fangs against her fragile human flesh would be broadcast to her slumbering companions loud as the alarm bells at the Counting House.
Blessedly, though, their tryst was kept secret. Would the tadpole hold out again?
Atavya's eyes linger on the hollows under Astarion's. 'He's starving,' that desperate, maternal voice sings out to her. 'Just help him. Give him comfort. No one else will.' And she steps forward, coaxed by her feeble heart against her better judgment.
Astarion is considering her, a little more wondrously than hungrily. Vampires are natural predators, of course, exceptionally well suited to the task of coaxing prey to their demise. But Atavya doesn't get the sense that Astarion has any more control over his luring right now than she does over her being lured. They want this, the both of them. They've laid it out in the open - they are both hauntingly lonely.
But Atavya won't cross the threshold without an invitation, and she doesn't think Astarion would either (it's a vampire metaphor, and it makes her chuckle to herself). "If I do this, if I let you feed again - it's because we both need it," she admits. And then she reaches out her hand to him, and, with a shuddering breath, watches as Astarion takes it.
The dam is going to break. They both know it. So be it.
But before it does.
"Do you want to be clothed?" Astarion asks. "Or go somewhere else? I can't bring myself to force more intimacy on you than you're comfortable with. Unless…,"
Atavya considers telling him then about her recent realization - that with the loss of her memories has come the loss of any connection she has to her womanhood. She can't remember what she liked, or who she had been attracted to. She can't even remember how to properly pleasure herself. It's all new again, and in the newness, she's not certain that the circumstances will make any difference to how her body will react. Maybe this time her body won't react at all.
Maybe he's cast Detect Thoughts and she's still too emotionally exhausted to notice, because he leans towards her a bit closer and says "Vampire venom is a natural aphrodisiac, I can't control that,"
"I gathered as much," Atavya responds with a dry laugh. And then she takes a steadying breath. "Can I ask a practical question?"
"Of course,"
"You say it's an aphrodisiac, but you've only fed from animals. Is this book knowledge for you, then? Or can vampire spawn bite each other?"
Astarion shakes his head and frowns, pale silver curls bobbing against his regal brow. "That wasn't allowed,"
Atavya files that away on the mental ledger titled 'Astarion's Cruel, Mysterious Past.'
"But I do remember when I was bitten. And I've seen… others feed,"
Again, filed.
He must sense her line of questioning. "I remember what it felt like, Atavya. I remember the pleasure. And I remember the terror, the helplessness. But I can imagine that, if willing, being under a vampire's thrall could feel quite endearing."
Atavya's hair is still very damp, and suddenly Astarion is toying at a strand that's fallen over her shoulder with one lean, elegant finger.
"I can assume that whatever you feel, however you react, is a product of the venom,"
She appreciates that he's reassuring her, giving her an out. But she's not sure that she wants that. So she entangles their hands tighter and walks backwards, towards the wardrobe and low bench beside it.
"And if it's only partly so? If some part of me… wants to be with you in that moment. You Astarion, not just the bloodthirsty craven vampire? Would you judge me for it?"
He's tracing her collarbone now, mere inches from where he had bitten her before. And his eyes are boring into hers with an intensity she thinks is actually genuine. She sits down on the bench, and he leans over her, his lean and chiseled figure blocking the entire view beyond. His mouth presses to the wet hair curtaining her ear. "I wouldn't dare judge you, Atavya, proud and fearsome huntress that you are,"
And so Atavya tugs him down, and Astarion kneels before her, and when he bends his head, for a moment she thinks it will be for a kiss and not the bite.
But then his head tilts, and he is breathing against her skin "I can feed from you?" She is grateful for his insistence on her consent.
"Yes," she breathes back, coiling both of her hands in his flaxen hair.
Astarion cradles her shoulder blades in his own hands, and before he releases his fangs, he does kiss her - lips as gentle as fairy wings - across the previous scar. The venom has yet to be delivered, and already the anticipation begins to build in Atavya's core.
And then it happens, two small pricks of lightning above her jugular, initially brutally painful but quickly followed by an icy anesthesia. And this is followed by the tidal wave - of heat, of lust, of need. She's ready for it this time, and so it doesn't have her reaching for her daggers. Instead, Atavya can only moan and clutch Astarion's hair harder. She can hear the utterly depraved noises she is making, but more so she hears the cataclysmic crescendo of her heart, no doubt a product of her adrenaline, but also an efficient byproduct of Astarion's venom to pump more of her blood more quickly into his maw.
She's never felt her pulse so high and despite the intoxicating physical need growing between her legs, she notices that she is beginning to panic. Her hands scrabble in Astarion's scalp until one breaks free and locks onto his shoulder, prepared to shove him off.
But then Astarion murmurs against her neck (she can't make out a single thing he's saying, can only feel her own hot blood dribble down towards her breasts each time he opens his mouth) and simultaneously moves his hands from her shoulders to her lower back, where his thumbs rub deep and soothing circles into the knots above her hips. She can't help it, she moans again - "Oh gods, gods!" - and notes that he was immediately successful in slowing the beat of her heart from a gallop to a canter.
Atavya buries her face in the crook of Astarion's neck and breathes deep, grounding herself in his scent - somehow cool peppermint soap and rich, warm nutmeg simultaneously. They settle like this for a moment, like two mated swans with necks wrapped tightly around one another in companionship. Except Atavya continues to whine and sigh with each wave of desire and warmth that courses through her. Yet, she notes, that while her desire continues to build higher and higher (high enough that she is tempted to shift her hips and settle Astarion's bent knee between hers, and if she ground her hips at a particular speed, ah, yes, that may have been how she had done it before…)... her energy is fading. Astarion, starved as he was, has taken too much much too quickly.
Fortunately, she needs not threaten to kill him this time to end the tryst. Astarion feels the flow of Atavya's blood ebb just slightly and has enough care for the ranger to force his lips from her neck. Before he pulls away completely, he drags the tip of an envenomed fang across the wound, and immediately it begins to seal with more care than his prior bite.
Atavya groans - slightly in disappointment - and sags forward. Astarion pulls her tight.
"My heart, if I still had one," he croons, "would be beating just as hard as yours,"
Although her vision is spinning slightly, she looks up at Astarion and grins back. The sight of her own blood on his mouth does not disturb her - if anything, it's a reminder that at the core of this insanity, Astarion had been satisfying a base instinctual need, rather than stoking the fires of her libido.
Their libido it appears. A very firm and very masculine mass is pressed between their abdomens.
Astarion helps the ranger up, slowly, and Atavya is reminded of how slight she is besides him. She is also utterly naked - the towel is actively pooling around her feet. The Moon Elf licks her blood from his lips and Atavya trembles.
"What, Atavya darling, can I give you in return?"
She wants to chastise him for his repeated use of the diminutive, which she has previously found condescending and loathsome. But the low purr of his voice is intoxicating.
She's on a precipice now, and the dam is already breached. Does she back away and into the comfort of her woods and wilderness, or does she leap and assume the incoming tidal waves will catch her?
Atavya bows her head. The thrum of her blood and deep ache in her core is gone.
"It's fine, Astarion. I need nothing,"
A thumb quickly presses beneath her chin and tilts her face back up. The crimson eyes are far brighter now, and somehow both reproachful and teasing.
"You are beautiful, you know. And deserving,"
She could say these same things to him. She senses he very desperately needs to hear them.
"Could I… stay with you? The Harpers gave me my own room, but it's… disturbingly bare. Ransacked by Mol and her ilk, I bet. After so many nights of sleeping around a fire with you lot and Verres, I'm not sure I can stand it,"
This is undoubtedly not the answer Astarion was expecting, but he acquiesces immediately.
"I didn't know rangers were capable of sleeping inside at all. But, yes, stay with me if you'd like,"
Atavya gives him a shy smile and collects her robe, donning it with efficiency and no grace. Astarion watches her all the while, apprising her like she may fall over or throw herself out the open window at any moment. Indeed, her head is still spinning with blood loss, and the absurdity of the night has her wondering if at any moment she might bolt. When she looks towards the door, Astarion reaches for her arm, and she realizes then that she is trembling.
"What frightens you, 'Tav?"
She looks up at him, earnest and open for the first time since they have met. "To remember, and at the same time to never get my memories back. To be free of the curse of this tadpole, and also to lose everything it has bestowed on me, all of this strength and these… friends. And not to be alone, but… to realize the depths of how truly lonely I have been."
Astarion shuts his eyes for a moment, and then he tilts his head down and leans his brow against the ranger's, breathing deeply for a moment. Atavya knows he needn't breathe - is he… smelling her?
"Not tonight, Atavya," he murmurs. "You will not be lonely tonight,"
It's not practical, and it's not sound, but… she believes him.