Work Text:
The crackle of the fire drove off the chill from the lake, and Tav settled herself on the fallen log next to it and stretched out her legs towards the heat. Walking all day wasn’t a new thing, and her body remembered how to do it well enough, but her ankles ached and her hips were muttering about mutiny. It would be well by morning; just about anything could be better with a night’s sleep. The thought had her fingers brushing the side of her neck where Astarion had fed the night before, even though the bite left no mark behind. The sharp piercing snap, the wash of pain-to-pleasure, the delicate shiver of his mouth on her throat.
Tav sighed, and behind her right eye, the worm wriggled. She grimaced and pushed her palm against her eye-socket. Behind her, a splash and Karlach’s low voice marked where the rest of camp was trying to get the blood out of their clothes and wash up from the day. Astarion’s voice, edged and annoyed, followed. Karlach had tried to throw him in again.
Tav’s mouth twitched, but she almost missed him passing by her with his hair wet and a scowl on his unfortunately pretty mouth. The thing she appreciated about Astarion, other than the fact the sex was good, was that he didn’t pretend in any way that mattered. She knew his deal; their arrangement was a matter of convenience, he never meant anything, and he got something physically satisfying out of it. It meant Tav could be selfish back without guilt.
“Astarion,” she said, and he flinched, whirling on her.
“Woah,” she added, her mouth curling at the edge. “What did they do?”
“They are being children,” he snapped, peevish. “You have ears. Aren’t there more interesting things to ask about than my suffering, or are you just enjoying yourself?”
Enjoying herself, indeed.
“Come here,” she said impulsively.
It was a risk. Astarion in a mood liked being bossed around even less than usual. He gave her a narrow eyed look. The wet of the lake made his hair flatten and coil, and his white undershirt stuck to his shoulders. It was appealing, but also made him look like an irritated cat stuck in the rain.Tav tried not to look too amused about it.
Astarion humphed as he carded his wet hair out of his face, with a stressed pinch by his eyes.
“I am not a cat to be called. If you want that, you have a dog,” he drawled.
“You’re not a cat or a dog, you’re a pain in the ass,” she agreed lightly. “Come or not, that’s up to you.”
She shrugged, like it was nothing, and did the other thing Astarion hated - acted as if she was going to ignore him by humming and fishing into the pack by her feet. Time to lay the bait.
Astarion looked at her with a suspicious wrinkle between his brows, the kind when he was trying to tease out just how much of an interaction was at his expense and how much of a drama queen to be about it. Tav didn’t say a single thing more as she pulled out her violin. She ran her calloused fingertips over the board, checking for warping, and over the strings, checking for frays. Relieved when she found neither, she leaned her ear close to the soundboard and began plucking strings and twisting the pegs to put it back in tune. Travel always pulled it out again. She hummed to find the pitch.
Tav ignored the way Astarion huffed, fingertips pressed to his forehead. He looked away from her, and then back, and then away to his part of camp. It was too far away for the heat of the fire to reach it, and the shadows were wet and cold. She could feel him doing mental math. She kept her fingers busy plucking at her strings, holding her breath.
Astarion threw up his hands and turned back to her to gingerly pick his way over. Tav let loose the tension of her exhale and hid the touch of triumph from her mouth.
“Well? What do you want?” he asked, still sounding irritated but curious now. Wary. “If you push me into the fire, I’m leaving.”
“No,” she said, letting a laugh seep into her voice. She reached up and snagged the bend of his elbow to tug him down next to her. He resisted for the first pull, rocking back away from her. She rolled her eyes and tugged again. He sank to sit next to her with a token mutter, attention tracking to her throat. Hm. That wouldn’t work.
She put her hand in the middle of his back and shoved him.
Astarion thumped to the ground by her feet with a pleasantly satisfying startle.
“Excuse me?” he said, incredulous.
“It’s better than my elbow jabbing into your shoulder,” she said with an air of mystery that had him twisting to squint at her.
“First you command me like an animal. Now you’re making me sit on the ground?” he demanded of her. She shook her hair back behind her shoulder, ignoring his sputtering, and lifted her violin to her shoulder. Only when the warmed wood was tucked under her chin did she flick her attention back to him, and as their eyes met, she made an exaggerated bowing motion to show how her elbow and the neck of the violin cut sharply into the air on either side of her where he’d been sitting. The violin sighed out a ‘c’.
Astarion opened his mouth, shut it, and licked his lips.
“This is an awful lot of annoyance just to listen to you murder that instrument,” he muttered.
Tav gave him a wry snort. She tried out nudging his shoulder with her knee to test the waters. He leaned back and away from it, so she set her leg a few inches away from him with a swallowed sigh. It was like coaxing a fucking feral cat into accepting a piece of fish from your hand, but she was nothing if not tenacious.
She let her thoughts wander, as well as the bow, and played snatches of common melodies from the most popular requests from her time tavern crawling for coin. The longer Tav ignored him and played, the more Astarion lost the pinched look in his face. He sprawled. His legs stretched out until his heels nearly met the edge of the fire pit and his shoulders met the log behind him. The way he scrubbed his hands over his face read as tired. They fell into a silence that nearly managed to be companionable outside of her humming and the plucking of violin strings.
The others filtered back from the lake in dribs and drags. Karlach first, talking loudly to Lae’zel about the virtues of heavy axes versus mauls as a weapon choice. Karlach threw Tav a smile, and lingered a minute to hum along while Lae’zel scoffed and stalked to her bedroll. Karlach walked away still humming the melody, and Tav felt her eyes crinkle.
Wyll and Gale walked back talking about mostly nothing important, just the texture of their voices against the hum of frogs, and Gale stopped to talk to her around the bowing about the half-drowned treatise on healing spells as necromantic magic in the pre-Mystra era that they’d fished out of an old barrel. It was an old argument and Tav was inclined to believe Gale that this had, in fact, been the case. Wyll hovered nearby and his weight kept shifting, and Tav played him a snatch of waltz and winked and got him to laugh.
Shadowheart came back last skirting the edge of the light from the main camp fire. They met gazes, and Shadowheart’s mouth tipped towards a smile. Tav dipped briefly into a delicate snatch of a nocturne popular up by Neverwinter, and Shadowheart stood there and listened for a little bit before lifting a hand and heading for her tent.
Astarion stared into the flames, for once with his mouth shut, and a pensive expression flitted over his features when the others weren’t nearby and he thought she was too occupied with her instrument to tell. It had been a long day, she thought. They’d pushed into the mountain pass after Lae’zel’s lead on the creche and hadn’t been able to get the cable car working. It meant hiking down, and down, and then up, and up, and Karlach had been like an excited dog leaping from spire to spire while Tav reminded herself that she’d traveled for a living. That was a thing she did. Her body wasn’t terribly enthused and claimed she’d made it all up.
Tav nudged his shoulder with her knee again. This time he just made a noise and drew up a knee to his chest instead of flinching away, which was progress, and she wasn’t going to mention to him the way the point of contact stayed warm under her skin. She let her current melody fade off with a calculated musical shrug. She took the violin from her shoulder and stretched out the locking muscles in her shoulders.
“Astarion, give me a song to play,” Tav told him, putting all her idle charm into it. Try too hard and he’d make it difficult. “I can’t settle on something. I bet I’ll know whatever you ask.”
“Anything?” he returned, brow arching. “Hah, unlikely. You can’t be a day past forty with ears like that.”
“Yeah, yeah. Half-an-ear, lives for half a year,” she replied while refusing to sink to his bait. “Try me. Give me a challenge.”
That brought out the spark in Astarion’s eyes and the sly pull of his mouth. He leaned his head back against the log, looking terribly pleased with himself. She hid the way the angle made her linger over the long and tempting line of his throat. Clearly he was trying to think of the strangest thing he could manage.
“Hm. There was this bard who’d play on the street corner, one of those penny-in-a-hat affairs that popped up as soon as the previous performer gets fined for playing without a permit,” Astarion said, expression gone distant as he rummaged through his memory. He gestured with a flutter of his fingers in a circle. “You know the kind. I had to walk past him to get to my office all the time.”
“Office?” Tav asked, incredulous. “You had an office. A vampire office.”
“Before that,” he snapped. “I was a magistrate. I told you this.”
That was right. Tav took a moment to try to picture Astarion presiding over petty scuffles of the law and sentencing people to prison for a week for not following the guild guidelines on bread weight. She snorted.
“Are you taking this seriously or am I wasting my time?” he asked.
“No, no, I want to hear about your penny-hat bard,” she said, but she was grinning.
Astarion clearly considered getting up as he eyed his tent across the way, but didn’t. His inertia and the warm fire made it too much effort and his attention dropped to the coals.
“Fine. Well, they kept on singing this one thing over and over again. I don’t think they knew anything else, it was terribly annoying.”
Tav hummed. A two hundred year old song? She plucked a common folk rhythm out of her lowest voiced string, mulling it over. “Do you remember what it’s called?”
“Hells no.” He made a face, nose wrinkling. “But I can’t get the awful lyrics out of my head.”
“Hum a few bars?” she suggested.
Astarion stilled under her question. He swallowed and ran his tongue over his upper lip.
“Come now, Tav. You’re the college-trained Bard here, don’t you just need the lyrics?” He threw her own words back at her, strangely evasive. Tav felt her eyebrows twitch up her forehead. Oh?
“Alright then. Give me the lines you remember,” she replied airily.
“They’re ridiculous,” he warned her. “The bard was a hack.”
“Mhm, I’m sure. You’re the one who said they’re stuck in your head,” she said.
“Well then.” And he paused for a long minute. His eyes half--shut, his lashes leaving shadows against his cheeks. “It was this tawdry song about two lovers who meet by the sea. The boy finds a pretty girl and begs her to marry him, standard drivel. Started with, ‘as I was walking down by the sea-shore, where the wind and the waves and the billows do roar’... ”
He trailed off just as the lilt of the lyrical rhythm started to pull his tenor into music. Tav almost pushed him over for being such a damn tease, and for once, not on purpose. His voice was so good. It had to sound good singing.
“Go on,” she told him, mastering her patience.
He grimaced. “The chorus was typical. ‘Oh my love has gone, he’s a youth I adore, he’s gone and I never shall see him no more’.”
Tav went quiet. She leaned back and murmured the lyrics to herself to find the rhythm. Something about it felt familiar, like an itch just in the back of her mind. A book just out of her grasp, a pen an inch beyond her fingers.
“Well?” he asked sharply, drawing both legs in and straightening his shoulders. “You’re the one who said she knew nearly everything.”
“Give me a minute.” Tav thoughtlessly put her hand on Astarion’s shoulder and felt him stiffen. Refusing to back off, she just spread her fingers over his shoulder and drummed them against his collarbone as she was thinking. “It’s familiar. Hum me a bar. Hum me a bit of it.”
Astarion brushed her hand off. “Sounds like you’re stalling, sweetheart.”
“Songs change and the lyrics shift. I’ve almost got it, I need the music.” She flicked his ear and he shoved at her leg in response with a snarl. “I don’t care how bad it is or if you carry a tune in a leaky bucket.”
“I’ll have you know I can find a tune at least as well as a blind man can find a cliff,” he snapped tartly.
“Then do it,” she said, looking down at him with a challenge in her mouth and the gleam of her eyes.
Astarion looked vaguely like he was thinking about biting her and not in the fun way. He made a challenging sound in his throat and slowly coiled back up against the log next to her, his fingers drumming on his knees while his gaze darted around camp. It was a familiar pattern that accounted for every sound and living heartbeat that should have been nearby, and it should have struck her as predatory. Instead, it felt reversed. Not the hunter; the prey.
Everyone else had already retired for the night, either to their own activities or sleep. No one was really close enough to hear much unless she or Astarion really tried to raise their voice.
He cleared his throat and definitely avoided looking at her in the face. His hum started out in a thin, uneasy thread of sound; a soft open ‘f’, a brief rise to an ‘a’, a sweep back down and then up again, held, then down in a dip and a quick climb back upwards to ‘d’ before falling into a more energetic tune. Tav found herself entranced.
Astarion was correct. He could carry a tune in a bucket. He could probably sing, too, as long as she kept it simple. Trying not to overplan and also ascribing the flutter under her breast bone to simple performer’s eagerness, she lifted her violin to her shoulder. As she didn’t comment and Astarion’s hum grew stronger, she started to find the wheel of the chorus and introduced a light echo when he got back to the ‘f’.
The soft breath of the violin startled him to silence.
“No, keep going,” she told him. “I’ve almost got it. I’ve heard this round before.”
“If you know what it is, you don’t need me singing it,” he told her, short.
Tav hummed. She closed her eyes and ran the music through her head, refocusing. She tentatively started to play. An F, then a light sweep upwards, then dip--hold--down and run up again, a playful high ‘c’, a run of music up and over again--
“Oh!” Tav genuinely felt stupid. She stopped playing. She laughed, the sound coiling in her chest and falling helplessly back out again. Astarion was giving her a look like he wasn’t sure if the tadpole hadn’t hit something essential and half shoved out of his seated position, ready to bolt.
“No, I--” Tav could see the coiling tension and the offense bubbling underneath the skin. She grabbed his arm before he could actually storm off. “Its not--I’m not laughing at you. Its the melody. I know the melody. It’s not especially popular but it’s been well used. I just didn’t recognize the lyrics. I learned it when I first started being mentored.”
Memory snuck up on her, bright and snapping. Sitting with the old tutor for the newly admitted minstrels who thought they could make a good living collecting songs for wealthy patrons, she had been full of brimstone and vigor and the vicious need to prove herself better than the drow blood in her. He’d put her at learning every common ballad and awful love song and folk variation he could scrounge up.
Astarion, offended instead that she’d assumed that she’d embarrassed him because that would indicate he gave a single fuck about her opinion, shoved her hand off his shoulder. He flopped back into place with a huff and really, he claimed he wasn’t a cat, but he clearly went through the motions of smoothing his shirt and trying to work his hair into a semblance of order just like a cat abruptly cleaning itself after running into a wall. His sprawl was calculated disinterest and dismissal.
“As if I’d care. Well then, sing it if you want. You know what it is,” he said, dripping noble disdain.
“It’s called ‘I Never Will Marry’, these days,” Tav said, eyeing him. “I bet it wasn’t when you heard it. I don’t know your lyrics, Astarion. You’ll have to give them to me while I play.”
“Seriously,” he said.
“I bet you’ve noticed that song lyrics change but the melodies won’t,” she told him, mouth quirking at the edge. “Maybe not. The song isn’t actually that bad, you might like the modern song… Tunes get stolen all the time. Come on. Listen to a bit of it and then tell me the way it goes.”
Tav didn’t give him a choice this time; she set the violin under her chin and exhaled, and it was nice to do something just about music for a minute. She felt her way into the old reel of the song, a slow start that worked its way into an addictive and playful repeat. A low clear beginning, the bright jump upwards, and the playful ramble after. As she played she felt a weight against her leg, and only sheer professionalism and spite kept her from missing a note and giving in to looking down. She could feel the weight of Astarion all along her calf and knee and a bit of her thigh.
She swallowed and found the end of the chorus; she started up again.
It was on the third round that Astarion started talking along with her.
“‘As I was a-walking down by the sea shore, where the wind and the waves and the billows do roar, there I heard a strange voice make a terrible sound’…”
He almost lost the thread. Tav drew him along as subtle and careful as she knew, matching the pace of his voice with her playing. Not rushing him. His carefully arranged tenor settled beautifully with the music, and Tav found herself smiling. The weight of him would never be warm, but she finally had the contact she’d been after, and when he’d gone through the first round of the chorus, and they entered the second lyric, he’d relaxed. He slowed, wary, as if expecting something strange out of her as he entered the next verse.
“‘She’d a voice like a nightingale, skin like a dove, and the song that she sung it was all about love’,” he said, strangely muted. His cold fingertips surprised her as they slid along her bare ankle. He rallied; he put a syrup sweetness back into it. “‘I asked her to marry me, marry me, please, but the answer she gave, my love’s drowned in the sea’.”
Tav glanced down at him. The firelight glittered in his gaze and on the ironic twist of his mouth. He was looking into the fire but now his body language had eased fully into flirting.
Tav huffed and dove back into the chorus, and let him get the head start in it until she matched her voice with his. She did it carefully and gently, pulling the vocal line out of the implication of the melody, and their voices met. His fingers jolted against the bone of her ankle as she did a simple harmony to his spoken word, and met rhythm to rhythm.
“‘Crying, oh, oh, oh, my love is gone; he’s the youth I adore, he’s gone and I never shall see him no more’,” she sang with him, leaving his voice the stronger thread.
He paused, and his hand fully closed around her ankle. His nails drew a ticklish line, back and forth, over the delicate bones of her foot as he picked up the third verse. But she’d done it; he couldn’t resist the pull of the melody. Spoken word softened into song. His tenor grew stronger, but never loud enough to travel beyond the firelight. Tav smiled and it warmed her harmony, and the basic mortal urge to sing together--as people, as chorus, to hear and to echo - got him at last. She swept back in at the chorus again, and she caught him tucking a sly twist into the corner of his mouth as they sang about loves gone and youths adore’d together.
His forehead rested against her knee and Tav could have cried.
It meant nothing. It meant nothing, but Astarion sang a lovely tenor, and she had made him do it. The song might not have been sung for at least a century, but right now, it lived in the air between them; it grew stronger as he turned it more and more into his usual false attempts at seduction and perfect lines, and Tav made it into a game for them as to who could croon it better.
She was aware they were getting louder, but not so loud that they disturbed the night. Scratch had padded over and thrown himself down on the ground on her other side, chin on her unclaimed foot. Her throat grew tight but she kept playing. There was just something about the weight of Astarion’s cheek against her knee on one side and Scratch on the other that unexpectedly tugged at all the strained places in her.
Tav and Astarion found the end of the song together. He finished the last verse slowly, falling out of his pretenses to a startlingly thoughtful rendition of, “‘The two constant lovers with all their young charms, rolling over and over in each other’s arms’.”
His eyes flicked up to her, and he ran his tongue over the point of a fang.
Tav picked up his last two lines and sung them back to him, refusing to look away.
The song drew to a natural resolution as she slid the last few notes into a smooth legato slide, allowing the last note to hum in the air for a breath before she let it die. Her lungs felt open and clear and all the aches were distant. She had to catch her breath and her pulse raced. She shut her eyes to claim some composure as she took the violin off her shoulder.
Astarion had fully settled into leaning on her. His palm pushed up the hem of her pants leg to thoughtfully sweep a line up along her calf and back down again. Tav let her bowing hand drop to Astarion’s damp hair and ran her fingertips through it and found it soft. She scratched her nails pleasantly against his scalp, stroking through. His hand paused on her leg, but resumed after a terse held breath. The tension in him eased.
Astarion wasn’t here for feelings. He was here for fun, for a good time, for a hedonist turned deeply and profoundly hungry with the heady flavor of freedom. This trespassed right into that place of cuddling that he claimed he had little interest in, and Tav knew she was playing herself with this bit of selfishness. She was only hurting herself. She liked cuddling. She craved positive touch desperately to ward off the despair, and if it turned out to be empty, at least she was going into it knowing it already.
But it felt nice. It felt nice in a way almost nothing did right now, so Tav decided she didn’t care. Again, if he was being selfish, that meant it was only fair if she was too.
“The Forsaken Mermaid,” Astarion said, breaking the breathless tension. He sounded surprised to have remembered. It took her a minute - it was the title.
“I’ll have to write it down,” Tav replied softly. “And sing you the newer version. The rhythm’s a little more natural in the verses.”
Astarion made a huff of sound, amused by this or perhaps her insistence, but his eyelids were heavy despite the fact he was both a vampire and an elf and he barely slept anyway. He listed against her more than he leaned. Tav took advantage of their mutual exhaustion to let her fingertips explore; trace along the edge of his ear, smooth along his shoulder, come back again to thread into his hair in a gesture more soothing for herself than attempting to be soothing for him. As they reached equilibrium, the weight on her shoulders slipped off and that knot in the middle of her back released and she swallowed down her sigh of comfort.
He hummed and the sound thrummed against her thigh. His wandering touch brushed the inside of her leg with a certain amount of implication, but neither of them were up to it now, and he knew it.
“You really are impeccably single-minded when you put your mind to it,” he told her. “Here I thought you were just another hack.”
“I explicitly cast weird spells I learned from weird books by singing the Weave,” Tav said, amused.
“Yes, that’s different,” he scoffed. “That doesn’t take actual artistic talent.”
Tav paused. She tugged on a lock of his hair.
“I thought I butchered music. Did you just slip up and compliment my singing?” she wondered aloud.
“I am alarmingly close to your biggest artery in your body,” Astarion said.
“And you are alarmingly close to saying I’m not a hack,” she said, unable to keep the laughter out of her voice. She needed to be careful; he often thought it was directed at him.
“Perhaps you’re the nightingale instead,” he said, sly. His breath warmed her skin where his mouth was pressed against the fold of her pants next to him. “Singing very, very sweetly for me.”
Tav snorted a laugh. Nightingales were a classic metaphor for sex, and she hadn’t expected him to know it.
“Now you’re trying out your lines again,” she told him slyly, fighting not to be actually complimented. It was so transparent. She refused to let it work. “Your metaphors belong in classic ballad poems that make people fall asleep.”
“Is it working?” he purred and she did laugh this time, and tangled her fingers in the soft hair at the nape of his neck.
“I’m too tired, and so are you.”
“Spoilsport,” he complained, and she shook her head. They lapsed back into a quiet that should have felt good, but the longer it went on the closer she knew she got to Astarion breaking away with his usual abruptness. They weren’t a thing. They were fuck buddies at best, and he was manipulating her at worst.
Tav only realized she’d tightened her grip on him to the point of discomfort when he smacked her calf with an offended and drawn out, “Ow. Gentle, please, I’m not here for you to manhandle.”
She soothed the spot with the rub of her thumb in apology, but it was over. Astarion shook her off and uncoiled, and his hand whispered away from her leg. He rubbed the spot she’d yanked and gave her a narrow look over his shoulder, and all she could do was hold up the violin and its bow in a gesture of surrender and manufacture a light expression of mischief. It covered the sharp, cold stab of disappointment.
Astarion plastered on that manufactured smirk and put a hand on his hip, bending at the waist. He was abruptly very close to her face, and Tav held very still. He could have kissed her had he wanted to do it. Tav flicked her eyebrows upward.
“Next time, I’ll ask for an elven ballad,” he told her. “One of those stupid ones that are fifty stanzas long. What then?”
Next time. It beat in her chest, an unexpected rush. Next time.
“Then if you find a song I don’t know, I’ll make you sing it,” she told him, mouth betraying her by peeling into a pleased grin. “Your tenor isn’t bad, and you know it.”
He scoffed, which was quite a thing to witness a few inches from her nose. She could watch the way his gaze flicked down to the left, the wry and bitter twist of his generous mouth, and not miss this time the faint flicker of something real. Was that real insecurity there?
“It's passable,” she said, warm at least with teasing.
“As if I’d ever care,” he said, but it was a thin excuse. His attention lingered on her mouth for a moment, before he swung back away again. Damn. She wouldn’t have minded if he’d followed through. “I’ll see you in the morning, darling.”
“Good night, Astarion,” she said, her mouth tilting up at the corner. She watched him go. Scratch took the opportunity to shove his whole head into her lap, whining for attention.
She scratched him behind the ears, and reached for her pack to write the song down.