nibbling | open post pt. 2.

"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?"

Huh. "You've never looked?" Missing the context of Astarion's inability to see them in a mirror he mostly thinks this is more along the lines of refusing to let Bull look. Not wanting to think about them. Compartmentalization.

Still, he isn't sure how to describe what he's seeing. "There's a rune or something here," he says, tapping the center. "Then three circles around it interrupted by these lines. Kinda like a stylized sun. I can draw it out for you after." Unfortunately Bull isn't actually a tiefling so he has absolutely no concept of infernal, it just looks like cruel art — if he had to guess, maybe based on the star in Astarion, or his "drow" heritage's fear of the sun.

Astarion's grateful to be facing away from Bull, because he goes on quite a face journey, furrowing his brow and scrunching up his nose. Although he's tried to feel the scars several times, he's never been able to make out what they actually look like, save for something definitively circular. A rune, though? Gods, he rolls his eyes.

"I suppose that makes sense. He was rather fucking pretentious." Hatred seeps into his voice for a split second, then back out. "...Yes, I'd like it if you would show me."

It probably sounds really stupid of him not to have just looked in the mirror, so he appends, "Another little quirk of mine. No reflection." At this point, he might as well just tell Bull he's a vampire, but he's not really certain how to broach that conversation. Anyone around here who you wouldn't miss if I exsanguinated them? "Tragic, I know, given what I can only assume is a beautiful face."

"You can't see yourself?" Every day Astarion hits him with a new weird little revelation. This is almost freakier than the blood-drinking thing, if only because Astarion manages to look so put together. "So you're just blessed with perfect curls." He has greasy ointment all over his hands so he doesn't touch them to emphasize, but it's a close thing.

Unlike Bull, Astarion enjoys petty flattery that may or may not be genuine. He preens a little, pleased. "I've had a long time to practice styling them," he admits, "but yes, I'm also naturally blessed."

Another pause, thoughtful. "You've been... unexpectedly accepting of my—" He fumbles for a word, which coincides well with a thumb brushing a very sore knot. He grits his teeth. "Eccentricities. Is everyone here so tolerant?" Can he just bite into a nug in the courtyard, or are people going to be weird about it?

"No," Bull says, darkly definitive in a way that's different from his casual yep-or-nope answers to Astarion's questions. There's a reason he set Astarion up with his stupid Chantry Elf From Tevinter cover story. "I'm fine with it because I spent long enough in your world to realize there's some differences. Inquisition leadership will listen when I tell them to be fine with it." Probably. He really needs to write that report for the War Table.

He palms hard into the muscle of Astarion's shoulders. "But most people don't know about drow or dragonborn or the different kinds of dwarf. You're an elf to them. If you do too much weird shit, you'll be a demon elf, and ten guys in full plate will try to kill you."

"Ow," Astarion says, suddenly feeling the tension again. There's a lot of things he's realizing he should have asked about before flinging himself onto another plane. Then again, he can't say that the knowledge of 'ten guys in full plate' trying to kill him would have done much to change things. He'd been desperate; even if Bull had told him there'd be someone every ten feet trying to kill him, he might have gone anyway. At least it would have been something different.

Still. He loves to complain, so he does. "I thought you were supposed to be relaxing me. Discussing all the people who'll want to kill me isn't relaxing."

Bull gives an unhappy hum, feeling the muscles tightening under his palms even before Astarion complains about it. A firm squeeze at the base of Astarion's neck, like he's scruffing a kitten trying to get him to lower his hackles some. "I'm the one who'd have to fight ten Templars," he points out; it stresses him out to think about, he hates killing people he knows personally. Doesn't love thinking about Astarion under attack, either. He was trained to handle Southern Thedas politics with kid gloves, but he can't convey everything Astarion needs to know in just a couple of days.

"You'll be fine if you're not stupid," he says firmly. He isn't so pressure point focused while he's still rubbing the warming ointment over Astarion's back, working his hands over sheets of muscle rather than chasing all those tender knots. Barely paying attention to the scars by now. "Don't get eccentric in front of a bunch of superstitious Fereldan yokels, that's all I'm saying." He drops his hands to the span of Astarion's waist, has a minor internal crisis over it, moves on to thumbing up his lats.

It's quite a relief to have the scars ignored, honestly. Even aside from the shame, the scar tissue has damaged nerve endings, and the feeling of it being touched is strange and not wholly pleasant. It's much more satisfying to have Bull work his warm hands over the parts of him that got out unscathed. Astarion vastly prefers this more gentle touching to the firm knot-seeking, relaxing infinitely more under it, but he is absolutely not going to fucking say that, so—

"You'd fight ten Templars?" he asks, trying to sound scolding and not pleased. He still doesn't fully understand what a Templar is. Sort of like a cleric, or perhaps a paladin? One of those religious fruitcakes. "If you're going to get offended when I accuse you of heroism, you really shouldn't."

For things that aren't getting said, he'd fight kind of a lot of Templars. Warm: "Hey, hey, heroic is kinda bad-ass. You should absolutely tell everyone I'm your heroic protector." Grinning to himself. Way better than nice, the underlying attitude of which rhymes with weak.

Heroism is stupid and fake, as a rule. If it weren't, surely some hero would have come bursting in and whisked him away from that horrible place; he'd certainly fantasized about it enough, back in the earlier days when he hadn't been cynical enough to feel like an idiot for wanting that. Then again, he supposes Bull sort of did burst in and whisk him away, just like he'd always secretly wanted. It feels surprisingly good to feel like there's someone in the world who might actually give a shit if something bad happened to him, and his muscles slacken into a pleased putty at the thought.

Ugh. He hates this traitorous body. It's always doing things he doesn't want it to. Astarion scoffs, saying, "Perhaps if I didn't mind sounding like an adolescent."

Bull chuckles. "I won't tell anyone," he promises. If Astarion wants to indulge his adolescent verbiage. "Brace yourself." Physically, he means, since he's about to use the kind of pressure that's gonna bend Astarion forward otherwise. He runs his hands from the top of Astarion's ass to his shoulders in one long ripple of heat, then does it again. Everything smells like IcyHot now. And because he has zero tact, and he's pleased with himself: "Look at you all relaxed."

He is relaxed, surprisingly so. It turns out being touched soothingly is actually sort of nice. For some reason he can't quite name, it feels horrifically embarrassing and maybe even a little bit shameful to admit that he enjoyed it in any way that isn't purely practical, so he doesn't.

It's the second time now that this has happened, and it feels odd and somewhat uncomfortable for it not to be repaid. Astarion has no interest in fairness, but he does have an interest in not owing anyone anything, and the best way to ensure that is to make everything transactional. His typical form of repayment has already been rebuffed, and he's sure as the hells not going to put himself out there to have his overture rejected a second time in just a few days, so instead— "I'll do you now," he announces.

"Me," Bull echoes skeptically, still thumbing a little circle in the small of Astarion's back. "Sure. You don't have to. But I'm not about to say no." Even if he thinks it's going to be tough to keep his cool about it. Looks down at the covers to find where his little pot of liniment got to, though he's used more than half. Picks it up. "Technically this is qunari horn balm. Used to sooth all the muscles that hold 'em up, polish the keratin." But it works fine on softening scars and easing sore knots, as Astarion's learned firsthand.

"Well, it'll take more than a backrub to get me to fondle your horns," he says as he turns to snatch up the pot, feeling abruptly— intimidated. It isn't Bull, it's just that he can't even remember the last time he voluntarily touched a person. Ordering people around always helps him feel more confident, so he hikes his chin up and commands, "Go on. I don't have all day for you to get into position."

"Two backrubs," Bull needles. Flops himself down on the bed and wiggles around, borrowing one of Astarion's excessive number of pillows to tuck under his chest, figuring that's probably the best position for whatever Astarion wants to do with him.

It isn't exactly what he's used to, baring his broad grey back all muscle-bunched and peppered with scars, but god forbid he do anything with less than total physical confidence. He bounces in place experimentally. "Hey, it's not that bad. The bed." He doesn't mind a soft mattress, it feels decadent, which he secretly likes.

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