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Ashur Vesperian had always been driven by hunger, yet he never let it rule him. Indeed, his basest hungers often remained denied, while he tempered the hungers that went by names such as justice, devotion or hope into weapons wielded in the name of ambition. These hungers could be honed into results. This made them worth indulging, even if it didn’t sate his hunger wholly. He could sustain himself on these sips of satisfaction and ignore the snarls in his belly for something altogether different. Something darker than he wanted to be; something violent and unnatural.
It was not that he flinched from the part of himself that he starved, for that would be foolish. Pretending that the hunger did not exist would make him blind to his own nature and such ignorance could only be exploited, shaped into a blade to be turned against him. No— most days, he held this brutal hunger in his hands and allowed himself to feel the pangs and snarls, but denied himself any indulgence. In doing so, he kept himself whole; in doing so, he kept himself controlled.
But it was not always easy.
Blood pooled on the stone floor, dripping slowly from Tarquin’s extended arm as he waited for another Shadow Dragon to return with bandages for him. Moments felt like hours as Ashur watched the blood well up from the wound to follow a painted path shaped by musculature and dark hair, guided by natural forces to drip down to the floor below. He could very nearly hear the soft sound of the droplet joining the cooled blood on the stone.
“You’re staring. It’s not that awful, is it?” Tarquin’s voice felt jarring, despite his teasing tone.
Ashur blinked, the world coming back into focus as he shifted his gaze to meet Tarquin’s. Tarquin watched him closely, something unreadable in his eyes that made Ashur feel stripped bare. That gaze uniquely ignored the defenses offered by the veil he wore, seeming to cut beyond the fall of it and witness the hunger that burned in his throat. Ashur swallowed hard around that hunger before he spoke.
“No. But it should not have happened. I should have—”
“Nah, none of that, Ashur. You were across the room.”
“I should not have been across the room, then.”
Tarquin, expression reading as disbelief without ire, laughed and shook his head almost ruefully. Ashur watched the way Tarquin’s hair settled on his shoulders, then his gaze dropped further to look at the wound once more. Blood continued to well from the split in Tarquin’s skin, as was typical with wounds delivered from Venatori blades. Unbidden, Ashur could taste coins on his tongue, like a price unpaid.
“All right, all right, stop fixating,” Tarquin groused with an edge of discomfort, his fingers curling then relaxing again. The muscles of his arm flexed briefly, and any further protest from Ashur was forgotten as another Shadow pressed a roll of fabric into Ashur’s hands and said, “Bandages, here you are,” before promptly vanishing again.
“Wait,” Ashur breathed, but they were alone again, as quickly as they had been interrupted. Tarquin watched him in that way, with weighted expectancy. A test, then. A test in more ways than Tarquin may realize, Ashur thought, fingers squeezing the rolled bandages to ground himself before he came closer. He sidestepped the puddle of blood on the floor, the thought of his boot disrupting its edges feeling akin to defilement, and reached for Tarquin’s extended arm. He rolled the end of the bandage into a bundle to pack against the wound, letting his magic subtly flow across the material to purify it.
The two of them sat in a silence that had no appropriate name, neither tense nor comfortable. Charged, Ashur thought, with the unsatisfying taste of ozone on his tongue. Magic could not satiate him, but it always tried. His hungers roused, he found himself stroking his palm over the length of the bandage after it was tied, only distantly aware of the way Tarquin seemed to shudder at the touch. Their eyes met unexpectedly, gazes locked on one another, and Ashur felt rooted in place, trapped between the pulse beneath his palm and the depths of Tarquin’s eyes.
“I should get back to…” Tarquin trailed off, but his voice was enough to shatter the strangeness of the moment. Ashur let go of him with a certain automatic motion that made him think of candlehops and their chiming ballet movements. Except, he had no message to deliver here. Tarquin seemed to take his silence as agreement, sparing him a pat on the shoulder as he stepped out of the room, the door coming to rest in its frame with a soft sigh.
In the new quiet, set apart from the bustle of the Shadow Dragons in their recovery, Ashur breathed. The wall nearest to him became a refuge, body leaning so he could press his cheek to the cold stone, perhaps seeking some salvation from the hunger he fought to control. He closed his eyes and, behind his lids, only saw that unwavering and untouchable rich red he had come to associate with peace.
Peace. Peace.
What was peace if not satisfaction?
His eyes opened again and he turned his head just enough to slant his gaze to the puddle of cooling blood on the floor.
Unthinking, or perhaps electing to not think, he kneeled. It is not silent, nor graceful. He was an animal; he was a man. His fingertips hovered over the blood on the stone and he felt some second heartbeat in him begin to quicken, tumbling over into a thrilling race. With reverence, he touched his fingers to the blood, just enough to disrupt the surface. He felt it, or he could swear he could, even through the leather of his gloves and the steel of his armor, adhering to him like a lover pressed close in damp sheets, and his mouth watered.
(Would it be so bad? Would it be such a sin? Insidious voice, wretched self, begging for that which he continued to deny himself…)
His hand turned and he admired how the blood looked on his fingers. How simple. How kind. His throat worked at just the thought of how it might—
Ashur bowed his head, the fabric of his mask swinging forward to grant him the scant space he needed to bring his hand to his own mouth. His jaw ached horribly with imminence of satisfaction, and he wondered at the horror of what might happen should that small taste be… insufficient. And then he touched his finger to his tongue and his hunger feasted.
A morsel; a drop. The contained creature in his chest railed for more, all while he chased every trace of blood from the edges of a claw and sucked at the fingertip of his glove. Salt and iron and copper and something that settled in his bones like a claim… The taste lingered in his mouth with an addictive sweetness. Too often, he had imagined a kiss from Tarquin would taste much the same— a bruising kiss, one that left his lips swollen. Ashur closed his eyes, feeling like a man feasting at a table from the most succulent of dishes, savoring a single drop of blood the way another would with a cut of the finest meat. It lingered there, the taste of—
The door hinges squeaked. Tarquin returned to the room. “Ashur—”
Tarquin.