nibbling | open post pt. 2.

The stretch of his leg feels good, actually, and Astarion is just thinking about how surprisingly nice it feels to be touched in this wholly nonthreatening way. It's like seeing a displacer beast in a cage, exposure to something scary that can't actually hurt him. At least, that's what he's thinking until Bull's fingers dig into that incredibly tender knot, and suddenly his eyes are widening and he's squirming in place to try to tolerate it, letting out a strangled and surprised, "I thought you were just exaggerating."

He doesn't tap out, though, determined to tough it out. Then Bull moves on to the next spot, and it's even more sensitive than the last, and he can't help it. It's been a long, long time since he's said this word—no point in saying it when no one's listening—but he squeezes his eyes shut, heated embarrassment already crawling up his neck as he says, "Stop."

It's a sharp brake, Bull taking his hand away completely and immediately; the other one loosens his grip on Astarion's calf, less holding him than letting him keep resting his leg there — but aware of Astarion's body language, ready to stop touching him entirely if that's the vibe.

"No problem. Take a breath," he suggests, voice gone low, eyes on Astarion's face.

Even though it runs counter to everything Bull has ever done since the first moment they met, Astarion still somehow expects him to ridicule, to deride, to ignore the request completely. It's just how this works. He's tensed up all over waiting for it, like someone bracing for a punch, and when it doesn't come, he cracks open one eye and then another, muscles slowly slackening again.

"Oh." This is really, really weird. Weirder than any interaction he's had with Bull so far, which is saying something. It feels good, though, just like that displacer beast in a cage again.

"No, it's fine. I was just surprised. You can keep going." The moment Bull makes a move to do just that, he says, under less distress now, "—Actually, I changed my mind. Stop." This time, his eyes are open and watching Bull, hypervigilant for any signs that he's put out by this, testing how much power he actually has in this situation.

Bull stops again, unfazed. "You got it."

Astarion doesn't know it, but this is a test not just limited to traumatized elves getting massages. There have been plenty of new submissives who kink on the dangerous, brutal qunari thing that play similar games: if I say the watchword even when I clearly don't need the watchword, will you keep going, hee hee? He won't. Self-control is too important to him.

Still, this feels a shade different to Astarion being entitled; he's all fear and surprise by turns. It only makes Bull more determined to give him whatever he wants, even if it takes a few rounds of stop/go for him to decide what that is.

Oh, again. It's that easy? Astarion's still learning to put names to these novel sensations, but the feeling that rushes through him is something like pleasure or satisfaction or happiness. The corner of his mouth even twitches up, the point of a fang peeking out. He feels uncharacteristically powerful in this moment, and it gives him the urge to play Red Light, Green Light with Bull for hours, just to keep getting that rush of having someone obey when he tells them to stop.

Even he knows that would be pushing it, though. Making Bull a participant in some strange pseudo-therapy is probably the limit on things Bull would say 'yes' to, if he had to guess.

Instead, he basks for a long moment in the strange new feeling of having control over what happens to him for the first time before relenting. "All right." A deep breath in. There is still a mild amount of trepidation over how fucking tender these knots are, but it feels immensely easier to tolerate it when he knows he doesn't actually have to. In a tone that suggests he's enjoying the opportunity to be lordly: "Continue."

The limit does not exist. Bull is actually kinda ready to be stopped again, especially with how delighted Astarion seems, but he does return to what he was doing, placid as his namesake, putting his hands back on Astarion's thigh like he's finding his place in a book.

"If I could turn it down slow for you, I would, but it's all or nothing." With the pressure points, anyway, it needs to be slightly torturous to feel better after. He can spend more time getting ready, at least, warming up the muscle with a gentler, broader pressure. Reluctant to knock that rare pleased expression off Astarion's face. "Want another story? I can tell you about the time I got paid in rice." Or more accurately the time he lived out the plot of Seven Samurai, for some reason. "Or you can talk." Finally digging his thumb in somewhere white-hot that precludes an answer for long moments. "Or we can just be quiet, sometimes pain's easier if you lean into it."

"Motherfucker," Astarion says to that, because it's pretty much the massage equivalent of the dentist asking you questions with their fingers in your mouth. He clenches his fists but doesn't otherwise tense up, the knowledge that the pain will end in a few seconds keeping him from reacting more strongly. It does feel significantly better afterwards, which sort of pisses him off a little. What do you mean relief can only be gained by directly confronting where it hurts? That's such bullshit, and definitely not applicable to anything other than knotted muscles.

After a moment of recovery: "I don't think I'll be leaning into it, no." That's not really his thing. "Tell me your ridiculous rice story."

He finds he actually likes listening to Bull talk, which is quite out of the ordinary considering that most of the time he can't even bear the sound of another person breathing near him. Bull's tone is always low and steady, though, and he's never raised his voice at Astarion even though he's definitely deserved it a few times. He wonders if the demeanor is something inborn for Bull, or if it's a consequence of growing up with all of those rules. Hard to ever really tell, he supposes, what's the real you and what's just a product of what's happened to you.

"Okay, okay, so back when it was just me and Krem and like, five other guys, we crawl up out of these shitty Darkspawn infested caves and find ourselves in this village..."

It's a story of Bull and his Chargers agreeing to protect an impoverished and isolated village from a nearby bandit clan in exchange for sacks of treasure. Too late, they realized they were outnumbered nearly ten to one, with the only way out either back through the caves, or through the pass occupied by the bandits. Instead the Chargers spent the days leading up to the next raid training the villagers themselves in basic fighting manoeuvres, and building confusing fortifications to transform the village into an advantageous battle ground.

After a difficult victory, the villagers revealed their sacks of "treasure" were nothing but rice: "So that's why now? We always make sure to get paid upfront."

He slowly lowers Astarion's leg, pats him lightly on the knee, trying not to look too pleased with himself — hopefully it can just be taken as due to the tale of an unlikely win, a challenge surmounted.

Astarion closes his eyes as he listens to the story, focusing on the sound of Bull's ever-enthusiastic storytelling to distract himself from the pain. He's had to sit and listen to plenty of boring tavern stories before, but he's never actually enjoyed them before. Bull is good at this, though, evocative; makes him almost feel like he's there, like he's spent his life freewheeling member of a band of mercenaries instead of skulking around a dark, musty vampire lair.

"Mm," Astarion says, shaking out his leg and feeling the new looseness to it. "I bet you didn't even demand recompense." Astarion would have. He would have threatened to burn the whole village down if he didn't get paid, and then he'd think about how much work that would be, and then he'd give up.

"I thought maybe you just liked me"—because he's so very likable and charming—"but you really are too nice for your own good."

"Gotta stop fucking saying that," Bull gripes, lightly, about more of this nice shit. He wants to be feared, admired, and paid well. Not 'nice'. Flicks Astarion's knee. "You don't know, I mighta killed all those guys for cheating us. You're just my special exception. Give me your other leg." As in, turn around on the bed completely because he's not crawling over to the other side this time.

Astarion stares for a long, expectant moment, obviously waiting for Bull to move. When it becomes clear he isn't going to, Astarion groans, making it obvious that this is such an imposition for him. He tosses the pillow under his head to the foot of the bed and reverses position, daintily lifting his leg and raising an eyebrow at Bull. Chop, chop.

"Well, did you kill all of them?" He sounds highly dubious.

"I did not," Bull has to admit, mouth slanting into an annoyed smile as he puts his hands back on Astarion. "Not after how hard we worked to protect them. It's not like killing them would have gotten us anything except more bodies. I talked the chief's heir into joining our crew, which sort of made up for the man we lost. Then we ate rice with everything for weeks. Blech." All that and he doesn't even like rice.

Astarion smiles smugly. Of course Bull didn't kill them. He can talk as big a game as he wants about being tough and scary, but he's a better person than Astarion ever has been or will be.

"I'm a bit disappointed that I'm not your special exception, but..." Bull presses against a tender spot again, and "I'mgoingtokillyou" slips out. The threat is obviously toothless, though, because after a deep breath, he returns to his unfinished sentence as if nothing ever happened. "...But I suppose you do make 'doing good' look better than most."

Maybe just because the majority of the good Astarion has witnessed him doing has been to his benefit.

Bull can't help it, the contradiction of the compliment bracketing the death threat tickles him. "No, no," he laughs, charmed, "Go back to how you're going to kill me." He'll even provide further incentive in the form of whatever he's doing with his hands.

Bull is such a weirdo for preferring the threat to the compliment. "I didn't—" Astarion says, fully about to gaslight him about it, when Bull provides incentive again. "Fuck," he hisses, "I take it all back. You're as evil as they come."

He breathes out slowly as the pain subsides. "If you prefer death threats to flattery, you should have said so earlier. It would have saved me some effort." What has he been trying to be nice for this whole time!!

"If I didn't like it when you give me a hard time," Bull points out, "We'd have had problems way before now." A glance up from his hands, to Astarion's face, though he doesn't stop the warm circles he's doing. "Besides, you're too good of a liar. At least when you're an asshole I know you mean it."

Yet another weird thing about Bull: that he'd ever prefer genuine assholery to false flattery. Astarion has got to meet the rest of these qunari, figure out if this is a cultural quality or if Bull was just born strange. "I am a good liar, aren't I?" is not entirely flippant. He's pleased at being complimented, even if it's... nontraditional.

"You can do my back now," he announces, decisive. A moment of hesitation, and then he adds, "I'll allow you to keep your eye open, but I must warn you that the sight of my comely torso may haunt you."

He's kidding.

Bull's brows lift, much more startled by the fact that Astarion's gonna let him see the scars this time than his comely torso. "Yeah yeah, if I dreamed they'd all be of your pretty face." Deadpan, playing along, probably also true. Astarion is a problem, and not one solved by his usual methods.

But he puts a hand lightly on Astarion's bicep to pause him from just whipping his shirt off. "Take five. If we're doing this, I wanna go find some liniment." Hopping up from the bed, "Probably shouldn't have told Charter to piss off," he reflects ruefully, but whatever, he knows where he's going and it's not far. A glance back at Astarion, and he winks - which is actually a blink since he has one eye: "Five minutes. Don't pine too hard."

The supplies he wants are right around the corner, so he's out the door and then pretty quick coming back in it again, ducking so his horns don't catch on the sides.

Five minutes is long enough to second- and third-guess whether he actually wants to let Bull look at the scars. It's very personal, bordering on vulnerable. It's one thing to let him work out a few knots and quite another to show him the physical representation of Astarion's shame.

But he wants to know what they look like, so when Bull returns, he's sat on the edge of the mattress, legs dangling over the side while he undoes the laces of his shirt. "Those horns seem impractical," he comments, casual, as he tugs the fabric over his head. It's all very nonchalant, like it doesn't matter to him at all, like he didn't recently demand Bull keep his eye closed so he couldn't see it.

"Only when the doors are built for humans," Bull points out, though it isn't really a refutation when that's most of Southern Thedas — what's aboveground, anyway.

If Astarion wants to play this as no big deal, that's basically Bull's entire modus operandi so he'll happily play along. Except that lasts about as long as it takes him to come over and sit beside him on the bed; the mattress dips and Bull gives a soft hiss between his teeth. Even a sidelong look at it is enough to see the precision and the cruelty — it's not lashmarks, but a worse kind of torture.

"You were wrong," he says, making himself get over it because what the fuck can anyone do about it now. "I'm gonna be haunted by your shoulders. You staying there or lying down?"

Bull hisses, and Astarion immediately wants to whip around and demand he describe what it looks like.

He resists the urge with every ounce of minuscule willpower he has. It would be revealing too much too quickly, putting too much power in Bull's hands. So, he shrugs, running a palm over the covers beside him as he contemplates the question. He imagines lying face-down on the mattress, and suddenly he feels as if all of that nug blood is about to come back up.

"...Here is fine, I think."

Bull's gonna take off his shoes so he can really get right up on the bed then, broad thighs planted wide behind Astarion. He unscrews the jar he went and got — it's pungent, a deep-woods cyprus scent with some warm spice like an expensive aftershave, but with the lung-clearing afterburn of something mentholic.

"Lean forward for me," he suggests, pairing it with the first touch, barely anything at all, just an indicative palm to the back of the shoulder. Testing the waters. When Astarion doesn't get up and leave, the second touch is oily with liniment as he starts to work it into the skin above the shoulderblades, at the outer edge of the scarring. "Wish I know more about what the herbalists put in this stuff so I could bore you to sleep talking about the local flora, but I just know it's good."

"I don't sleep," Astarion reminds him, although it's a little distant and distracted, mind too consumed with what Bull might be thinking right now. He wishes he could see through that eye. "I trance."

He's silent for a moment, picking at the skin of his thumb. "Aren't you going to say I'm still pretty?"

"'Still'? Like these could change that?" Bull thumbs liniment into a long ray of the scarring, and then the skin around it. "If you lied and told me you got this done on purpose, like a tattoo, I'd say they look badass. But you hate them."

He can't help the light flinch at having the scar touched; he always expects it to hurt, like it's an open wound literally instead of just metaphorically. It doesn't, though, and he relaxes after a moment. Bull was right—the liniment does feel good. Medicinal.

"Mm," is almost agreement. "I'll lie the next time I show them off, then." Sarcasm. He already hates that he's shown them to Bull. With any luck, no one else will ever see them. As casually as he can muster: "What do they look like?"

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