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Astarion knew hunger.
Hunger was an old friend. Hunger once kept him company for an entire year of darkness and deprivation. He could survive hunger. What he couldn’t survive was literally everything else: the blighted villages, the roadside ambushes, the harpies and the gnolls and the giant spiders — gods, the spiders — that had somehow become his daily existence.
At least, not while hungry. Not while starving. Not while subsisting entirely on rats and squirrels and the occasional wild boar.
He needed something real.
And, more than that, he needed to know.
Did Cazador’s prohibition still stand? Was he still bound by the old rules, the old compulsions?
Thou shalt not drink the blood of thinking creatures.
It was the only one he could reasonably test, so it was the only one he allowed himself to dwell on. And he did. Dwell. To the point of obsession. He heard it over and over again in his head, always in the master’s— in Cazador’s voice. Over time, the words had become more shape than meaning. And for some reason he didn’t want to examine too closely, he never heard them more clearly than he did in those moments Lyric drifted into his orbit and the mantra stretched into the silent spaces between her heartbeats.
He’d been watching her for long enough to suspect she had more than a passing acquaintance with hunger, too. Hers took a different form, but it was no less real. It had just shaped itself to fit a different container.
He didn’t judge her hunger. He didn’t think she would judge his, either. But he wasn’t certain — couldn’t be certain — and so he bit back the confession, every time.
What it came down to was this:
She might understand.
She might even… offer? Probably not. But, maybe. There were times when he wondered if her casual flirtation with death was as one-sided as it appeared.
But if she didn’t understand — if she recoiled in anger or disgust, or exposed him for the monster he well and truly was? Well. He had something to lose now. It wasn’t just the sun, although it was that. It wasn’t just freedom, although it was that too. It was possibility. Hope. The chance for something real with someone who saw him exactly as he was and didn’t flinch. But if he asked and she said no, then the possibility would die, as surely as a stake through the heart.
So he watched, and he waited, and every now and then — when her masks slipped and he caught a glimpse of a hunger that eclipsed his — he hoped.