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At this point, you think you must’ve been born with blood in your mouth. An extension of who you are—horns, tail, and gore. Your body must crave it, surely, with the way it burns and pleads for the sickly sweet near-nectar.
That has to be the answer, you’re sure, because it seems nothing will make the ooze of it, hot and slow, endless, ebb. It's growing infuriating. The torn cloth you hold, bunched up at where your hand has shifted into an aggravated fist, only stains further and further. Once white, now red, and later, it will be an ugly sort of yellow-brown. A shame, you really did like this shirt. Back when it was a shirt, anyway.
Your tail swishes, batting at the wood behind you with increasing vigor. It's the only part of you clearly disgruntled, the only part you cannot hide with practiced breaths. It's annoying. You want to cut it off.
It hits the wooden log behind you even fucking louder. Like it wants to spite you for that thought, that urge. Like it, in agreement with every other fiber of your being, is fighting against itself. You’re in control of your body, you are, but it barely feels like it. A rabid dog would have more sense, you’re sure. Foam doesn’t spill from your lips but you’ve tucked yourself away like you’re preparing for it. It’d be disingenuous to say you weren’t.
You've encased yourself in a corner, back against a fallen tree, items surrounding you like some sort of ceremony. The other's are about, chattering on, but you are alone, nursing a wound you want nothing more than to make worse.
It's a pungent sort of thing, the blood. Vile against your tongue in the same breath that it is divine. It clings to your senses in a desperate sort of fashion. It feels familiar—like the wisps of a family you cannot, still cannot, recall.
You hope your family is not only blood. That would be sad, you think. Sad and lonely, and you are enough of those two things anyway.
“We have healers, my dear,”
The words startle you, making you jolt and sputter—red-tinged saliva spreading across cloth and skin as your sharp inhale leads to a hacking fit. Astarion, because of course it's him, the bloodless circle the bloodless, after all—only watches you; close enough to be in your space, too far to touch. To claw.
No, you think sharply, still wheezing and heaving. No—not claw. Not maim. Not maul. Just touch. Just too far to touch.
“I know,” you say, once you find breathing to be your friend again, because you do, you are no fool. You had waved Shadowheart off purposefully. A waste, to heal something that could clot up in an hour, and that would be painstakingly reopened over the course of the night anyway. The urge— your urge, had tasted blood in your earlier spat, and blood it will continue to desire. Festering under the skin, not unlike a fever. You will give it yours. If nothing else, you will give it yours.
It may still desire someone else’s to spill. You still may want to drive a dagger into someone’s skin just to watch it split and tear. But it does not push for it as much when you lay yourself open like an offering. Take mine, you have thought, will think again, near nonsensically, peeling a cut or a wound back open. Making your own. Whatever it takes. Take me.
The silence thickens and sours. Astarion had not liked that answer, of this you are quite sure. A shame he wouldn’t find the full truth any comforting, either. “It felt silly,” you say, taking the cloth away from your mouth to scrub at where your spit had landed on your arm. Too harsh, too rough. It hurts, and you only press the scratchy fabric against your skin harder. “It’s only a split lip. A potion is too expensive; a spell is too valuable.”
Astarion hums a note, bordering on disbelieving. “Says the one shoving a potion down Wyll’s throat every time he’s slashed across the arm.”
It inches towards sounding fond. Not quite there, but a wisp away. It’s a more familiar tune these days, him watching you be something like good, something that appears like it, and vocalizing his disapproval in such a way it almost feels like teasing. He side-steps out of the sight of the gods, and mocks you for being spotted.
“The sacrifice of one for the many,” you say, nodding. You aren't sure how much you actually agree with the phrase, but they place a simple aura around your words, one that lets you go unquestioned, unargued. They see I am good, I am kind, I am loving. They see selflessness where you are anything but. It is a persona that will be ruined, by a misstep or a wrong word, but not now. Not tonight. You are kind, tonight. Despite the demand of carnage and viscera and a tail still battering against wood. You are kind tonight.
“You’re impossible,” Astarion says. Less fond, more annoyed, and you think that’s the usual give-and-take between the two of you. Endearment turning to astonishment turning to dislike, shifting from one to another in seconds. He isn’t complaining that you offer him healing, offer him restoration, but that you dare waste your effort on that. On him and the others, just to not do it for yourself.
It’s a selfish act in reality, but it looks selfless. So, of course he hates it.
“You’ve told me.” You say, because he has. He likely will again. Astarion rolls his eyes, stepping closer and crouching down, easing onto your level.
“Clearly not enough. Come here, come on,” Astarion says, gesturing you closer to him with his hand. You go, of course, shuffling near. He takes your once-a-shirt piece of cloth away, tossing it into a corner, and you have no time to ask why or even look before he’s steadying your chin with one hand, and tracing your lip with the other.
His fingers linger at your mouth. One curls around the cut, almost gentle. It's obvious how you both want blood when he swipes his thumb over the still bleeding wound. It's a light touch, barely there at all, but you feel it. The chill against the pulsing heat is nice. And then it's gone. You see the way you stain his finger—and he sees it, too. It lingers there, off of your lip but only barely.
You imagine snapping down and swallowing the finger whole. You would—could, spit it out, but that would be a waste of flesh and bone and blood and who would devour it then? The earth, the ground? The worms?
They don’t deserve it. Not like you do. You’ve earned the blood, you’ve fought for it. It needs to dissolve in you. Nowhere else. Because you think you and Astarion are close, and you want to tear him to shreds. Break bone and tear flesh, bury yourself in a body in-between decay and life. Too many things want him dead—you’re too low on a list you should be the only contender on.
You imagine how easy it would be to feel his bones snap underneath your teeth when you hear a rip. You blink, wildly, and think for too many seconds that you’ve hurt someone. That you’ve hurt Astarion—your friend, and suddenly there’s bile building its way up and a sting in your eyes. This is why you had been in the corner, why you had cared for your own stubborn wounds. Because when you don’t, it leads to this. A taut bow, always aimed at the one person you do not want to embed.
Astarion isn’t hurt, though. Not in any real way, beyond the classical scraps of the various fights from the day. He’s tearing a piece off the end of his shirt, you realize. You didn't even notice he had moved his hands from your face. You were too caught up in the concept of ripping them to shreds. Too caught up in hating yourself for it.
“That’s—you wear that—” You try to say, but the cloth is against your lip, and it is much more gentle of a touch than the rough push you had been doing to yourself earlier. You do not deserve nice, not with what you are and what you have been imagining, daydreaming of, but you are too much of a coward to push it away. Not that Astarion would let you, it seems, because his other hand steadies your head, deft fingers gently holding the base of your nape, tangling slightly in your hair.
“I’m not you,” Astarion says, “I have other clothing items, dear. I won’t even miss this one.” It’s accompanied by a sneer, as if he was offended at the mere notion of him doing something out of his way for you. Something he’d regret—for you. Someone he follows only for his own skin. You could commend it, honestly. The commitment to a sentiment the both of you know he no longer lives by.
You hold your tongue—and take it as an excuse to bite it until it bleeds. The pain, the heat, all of it, makes you lean further into his touch. Astarion has more clothes, yes. You have made sure of it. For him and everyone. Pocketing things is a simple enjoyment of yours, and it’s fun to make the others put on what you drag around to the campsite. Things that got taken are used with glee, and things that were not are used as extra cloth, or kindling for the fire in a pinch you haven’t needed quite yet. Still, his favorite thing to wear, and you know this, is what is on him right now. The stupid frilly top, now torn and smushed against your lip. Staining it. Ruining it.
You think you ruin a lot of things like this. Unintentionally. With blood. Irreversibly.
“You swear it?” You ask. The words stumble out without much thought behind them. They slur, slightly, and you realize just how hard you’ve bitten your tongue the same moment Astarion realizes you had at all.
Astarion raises an eyebrow. “Are we children? Stop talking, you dolt.”
You don’t. You decide you’re going to die on this hill, or in this hole, or whatever other phrases you could use here that end with you rotting in the ground over a fumble of words.
You move your head instead, wrapping your hand around his wrist and pushing it down. “You swear it?” You ask again. You need to hear it. You need to be able to take the words far beyond what they’re meant to be. Swear to me that I am worth this, that I am worth the pain of a torn and stained shirt. That I am worth the burden I carry. To you, if nobody else.
Astarion stares at you. He opens his mouth, slowly, and you watch his fangs peak out. You want to ask him to tear you open, tear you apart. Not in the way it sounds—not in the sense of desire he’d think of you to want. You’d like him to kill you. You’d like any of your friends to kill you, really, because you deserve it—but also because you think it would satisfy the urge within you, if they did. As if they were an extension of you, their kills are yours. Their blood is yours. Your blood is theirs. It’s all the same, blurred together.
You don’t care if it’s you or him who tears the other apart. You just hope it edges on. You hope the blood turns sticky between your fingers before it ends.
“I swear it.” Astarion says, like it’s something ridiculous. It might be. “Happy now?” He asks.
You blink.
“Joyous,” you say, and it is only a little bit of a lie, and Astarion huffs, so you go, “Was I not meant to be quiet?”
It’s to ruin things again, of course. In a fun way. In the way you are permitted to, expected to. You watch as his eye twitches, and you feel your lips quirk up into a smile. It pulls the cut open again.
“Do you want me to leave you to lick your wounds by yourself?” He asks, like it’s some sort of upper-hand. Some threat. Yes, you think, letting your tongue poke against the part of the cut inside your mouth, relishing in the sting of it from both sides, please.
But you do not say it, and Astarion does not leave, and you may want your own blood and gore on a platter so you do not harm anyone else, but this is okay, too. This can be okay, too.