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“I’m not actually upset,” Astarion says.
“Alright,” Wyll says agreeably, passing him another, cleaner handkerchief. “Are you ready to come out from under the desk?”
Astarion considers this.
“…in a minute,” he says at last, and puts the newest handkerchief to work removing the layer of unspeakable fluids from his face. Gods, it would be so nice to be covered in a little viscera for a change, instead of just… snot. “You don’t have to stand there,” he adds.
Wyll’s feet—the only part of him that Astarion can see from this position—shift. “Would you like me to leave?” he asks, like the sweet, stupid man that he is.
Somehow, the answer to this question is both “obviously yes” and “obviously no.” It is obvious in both directions. Astarion rips a hole in the handkerchief with his fangs.
“Sit down,” he mutters. “Stop—” he waves a hand. “Hovering.”
Wyll kneels down next to him, maybe a foot away from the lip of the desk. A respectful, if silly and unnecessary and slightly offensive, distance between them.
He’s put his robe on, Astarion notes with dismay. This is terrible news. The robe going on means that Wyll is no longer naked, which is a travesty at most times, but in this particular situation it means that he’s given up on doing anything fun for the rest of the evening.
Astarion has killed the evening.
This thought is not making it easy to stop… leaking.
He leans his head back, pushing against the hard, increasingly-familiar bulk of Wyll’s desk. In most circumstances, Astarion is—Wyll likes to call it claustrophobic, Astarion calls it rationally concerned about being buried alive. Regardless of semantics, Astarion dislikes small spaces on principle.
The desk is a very specific exception. More specifically, the space under it.
Astarion ended up here under the desk, once, after a particularly bad—Wyll calls them “episodes,” which sounds better than “waking terrors,” which, in turn, sounds better than “Ilmater preserve us, what’s wrong with him?” which was what dear old daddy Ravengard had called it the one time he’d witnessed Astarion fall into an insensible terror at the sight of, of all things, a bouquet of flowers.
That one, at least, Astarion is able to explain. The flowers—the shapes, the colors, the sickly-sweet scent of them; the color of the ribbon bound around their stems; the high neck of the vase—he remembered a bouquet just like them, probably commissioned from the same Upper City florist. They stood on the nightstand in a particular boudoir, in a particular house, owned by a particular person, who did a number of very particular things that Astarion had started to describe to Wyll and had stopped, abruptly, when it registered that Wyll was wearing the calm, brave, very blank look that meant he was trying not to hyperventilate.
There had been a lot of sniveling and shouting and apologizing that day. On both sides.
Ultimately, Astarion owes that bouquet a begrudging thanks. Indirectly, it was responsible for the establishment of two rules that have come in handy more than once.
The first: Wyll is not allowed to feel guilty about needing a break when Astarion starts “saying upsetting things,” which is the polite euphemism they’ve settled on for the moments when Astarion starts reciting things that were done to him, things that he did, things that Cazador did—any memories from the past two hundred years, really.
The second rule is that Astarion is allowed to tell Ulder Ravengard to shut up at any time with no warning, provided they aren’t in public, in which case he’s still allowed to tell Ulder to shut up but with more decorum. This is Astarion’s favorite rule.
Anyhow. The desk.
The desk has been a fixture in the room that now serves as his and Wyll’s bedchamber for nearly as long as Astarion has been dead. It’s expensive, antique, approximately the size of an ox, and Wyll likes to sit at it to do his paperwork. Astarion disapproves of paperwork, partly because Wyll works too hard for a city that cares too little, but mostly because Wyll looks unbearably domestic with a pen in one hand and the spectacles he’s recently taken to perching on the end of his nose, pouring over papers in the candlelight.
But the sad fact is that the desk is sturdy and familiar and it smells like Wyll, like the hair oil he keeps in the top drawer, like his slippers that live in the spot just under his chair, and for reasons that are best left unexamined some part of Astarion has decided that the safest place in the city is under the desk with his back up against the wall. More than once he’s found himself curled up here, head between his knees, rather like someone bracing for an earthquake.
There haven’t been any earthquakes in Baldur’s Gate since the defeat of the netherbrain. Evidently Astarion’s mind never got the memo.
The fact that Cazador has been thoroughly, properly dead for half a decade and Astarion still finds himself routinely reduced to a cowering, empty-headed thing that only wants to crawl under a desk and hide is not, actually, the most humiliating part of all of this.
The worst part is that being under the desk actually helps.
“Can I get you anything?” Wyll asks.
Wyll is the other miserably helpful part of this scenario.
Astarion weighs the pros and cons of opening his mouth. If he opens his mouth now, the truth is going to fall out of it.
He should stay quiet. Let Wyll fuss if he wants to fuss.
“You could get mad at me,” he says, instead.
Astarion doesn’t have to peek out to check—he can feel the way Wyll melts into that soft, sad, unbearably heartfelt expression that means Astarion has made his husband’s ever-bleeding heart break a little more. Gods, but it’s wretched, loving someone like this. Loving someone like him.
“You could,” Astarion insists—a preemptive strike against Wyll’s better nature. “You should. You’re allowed to be mad, darling. It’s healthy.”
“I could never be mad at you,” Wyll says, a blatant lie. “Not for this.”
Astarion huffs at the—ceiling? Is the underside of a desk a ceiling? He misses when he didn’t have to ask these questions.
“Frustrated, then.” He jabs in Wyll’s direction with his sodden, fraying handkerchief. “You can’t tell me you aren’t frustrated.”
“Not in any way that matters,” Wyll says.
Astarion puts his face in his hands.
“Don’t,” he says, because he can hear Wyll shifting. “Don’t touch me, I—I can’t—”
“It’s all right.”
Astarion shakes his head like a terrier with a rat.
“It isn’t,” he snarls. “It—I—” Gods, his voice is doing that horrible screeching thing again. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me—”
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Wyll says. Astarion shoots him a look, which is enough to get Wyll to rephrase. “It’s not about what’s wrong with you, Astarion. It’s about the wrong that was done to you. You’ve survived more than anyone should have to—”
“And now I’m paying the price for it.” Astarion stares down at his hands, the damp and shredded cloth wadded into his palm. “I’m always going to be like this, aren’t I? This—fragile, this pathetic—”
“Strong,” Wyll says, firm but soft. “Brave. The best shot and the sharpest wit I’ve ever known—oh, dear,” Wyll says, because Astarion has burst into tears.
True to his word, Wyll doesn’t touch him. But Astarion does crawl out from under the desk to put his head in Wyll’s lap.
The cruel contradiction of it all—that the second Wyll assures him he won’t be touched, touch is all Astarion craves—that the years of torture were spent with tears in short supply and yet now that he no longer he needs them he can’t be rid of the damn things—that Astarion has accomplished nothing of any note for two hundred years but attach himself like a barnacle to the one man in Baldur’s Gate who is, most assuredly and by all definitions of the term, too good for him—
It’s all rather a lot to bear.
But Wyll bears it with him. He weathers the storm with a hand in Astarion’s hair, grounding and warm, and Astarion is cradled in his touch and the velvet of his robe, the inexpressible safety of his scent. This is a man who touches Astarion with the same gentle hands that pat children on their heads and help kittens out of trees—how could Astarion ever be frightened of his touch?
How could he ever deserve it?
Something to that effect might be coming out of his mouth. Astarion can’t be entirely sure, the noises pouring out of him are hard for even himself to decipher. But Wyll presses a kiss to the top of his head, as if he understands.
“You’re not a burden to me, Astarion,” Wyll murmurs. “You are a gift.”
Astarion expels a great, messy sob into Wyll’s thigh.
“I am,” he chokes, grabbing the sleeve of Wyll’s robe to wipe his nose on it. “I am and you’re—you’re lucky to have me, you know.”
“I do,” Wyll says, solemn but smiling. “Having your love makes me the luckiest man who ever lived.”
And the strangest thing is, Astarion thinks he means it.