nibbling | open post pt. 2.

"'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.

It's not actually that bad, but Astarion has committed to it, so he says dismissively, "Of course you would think so, but some of us have more discerning taste."

He sits criss-cross beside Bull, sort of uncertain how this whole thing is supposed to go. He'd been very decisive about doing it, but now that he's actually in it, he feels ungainly and out of his depth. Maybe he should have offered Bull a casual handjob; at least he knows how those work.

Experimentally, Astarion reaches out and just sort of touches Bull's shoulder, nothing massagelike about it. He's forgotten the liniment, and his hands are ice cold.

Bull pulls in a sharp breath. "Shit, your hands are freezing," he explains, laughter low in his voice to try and ease the sting of the flinch, the tension in his shoulders. His own hands flex, that camphor warmth having worked right into the joints.

It occurs to him, way later than it should have given he's already prone with the whole room in his blindspot, that maybe Astarion was bluffing with that determined confidence, so he has about five seconds to do something before Bull's going to start trying to be nice again.

"Save your feedback for the end," Astarion says, pinching Bull's shoulder. He does withdraw his hand after that, though, and Bull can probably hear him coating them in liniment, which feels sort of weird and slippery on his fingers, and aggressively rubbing his palms together to warm them to something resembling 'living person temperature'.

When he places his hand back on Bull's traps, it's still on the cold side, but significantly less shocking. He tries to remember the sort of things Bull did with his hands, although it's all kind of a blur of warm palms and minty-smelling ointment. Testing, he presses a thumb into a tighter area.

"Some people would pay good money for this, you know," he adds, like he isn't just winging every part of this. "I have very deft fingers."

Bull makes a noise at the dig of the thumb that's hard to categorize. Pleasure? Pain? A secret third thing?

"You've got good hands," he agrees easily, at least, even if that is kind of perpendicular to what Astarion just said. It's definitely weird to be touched by them, cool and uncertain, instead of the other way around.

He allows experimentation for less than a minute, and then instructs: "Bit up and to the left. If you use your palms you can put some weight on it, really get in there. You won't break me." Unfortunately he's built like a slab of concrete covered by thick rhino hide, though the liniment softens him up some. Brings out the metallic sheen to his skin.

"—You're rather bossy," says the pot to the kettle.

Maybe he was getting there!!! He wasn't, though. Astarion has to readjust his positioning, sitting up on his knees so that he can lean over and put his weight into his palms, both of them placed where Bull indicated. Although he'd been a little intimidated, this is actually quite a bit less fraught than having it done to him. He gets to choose where he's touching, how hard he presses. It's nice, even, having the freedom to touch somebody without being touched back.

He presses the heel of his hand into Bull's muscle, leaning down into it. "It's like massaging an armadillo," he notes with a scoff. "This counts for two." And therefore makes up for both times, and he owes nothing!

In addition to bossy, Bull is embarrassingly and unabashedly loud, groaning all pleased when Astarion does as suggested and the result is good warm pressure on a muscle that's always a little tight.

"Mm. You're the one keeping score," he agrees. The only one. "Thanks though. You can keep pressing right up to the top of the shoulder." He'd compare it to kneading dough but he's not certain Astarion has any more experience with how bread is made than shoulder massage.

Listening to Bull make those noises makes Astarion feel funny, impulsively pressing down again to see if he'll do it again. It's— vampiric predatory instinct, probably. Some inborn desire to have a helpless person groaning in pain under him. He's very, deeply uncomfortable with the thought that it could be anything else, so he refuses to even entertain that thought.

Instead, he follows the suggestion, pressing up Bull's shoulder muscles even as he says, "Obviously, I was planning on doing that anyway."

Astarion gets the noise he wants, another one as he follows instructions. "Obviously," Bull echoes, ribbing him, but his voice has dropped all gravelly. He's spent months far from anyone he would have trusted near his neck and spine; he's not coping with two centuries of touch-starvation but it's attention he hasn't had in a while. That it's attention from someone he's kind of nursing a low simmer for isn't helping, and the weight and intention carry the rest. "Hrrmmm," he murmurs, low in his lungs. "You know, if we're really going tit for tat, shouldn't you be talking more?"

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