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avocado-writing · 9 months ago

Text

notes: full version of this. contains mild brat taming, spanking, holy imagery. reader is genderless. special love to @dhampling who read over the start for me, and M for being my beta 💕

pairing: astarion x LG!Paladin!Reader

rating: E

words: 3k

Astarion looks at you, and he wonders.

He wonders, back when he was a spawn stalking through the streets of Baldur’s Gate, if his sheer proximity to you might have burnt the alabaster skin from his bleached, undead bones. That is the force of your radiance.

Every part of you is a perfect fragment of your god. Sunshine-brilliant and drenched equally in his glory and wrath, there could be no doubt that you are a child of Pelor. You carry his emblem on your armour and his love in your heart. Your skin has a dreamy pearlescent lustre, soft and hearty, and you seem to glow from the innate light within you.

It makes Astarion sick.

You are so nauseatingly good. When he met you on the road near the crash site it was your first instinct to help. Not to second guess his nature, not to wheedle any masked truth from him, but to draw your sword and offer protection to a stranger.

He got the jump on you, of course - but he recalls how easily you laid him out on his back in return. When he was staring up at you, forcibly unarmed, and the sun framed your face like your god had in that moment blessed you with a halo just to spite him.

And still you had reached out a hand to him in friendship.

You hadn’t withdrawn when the truth of his condition came to light. He figured someone of your vocation would try to run him through without a second thought. But instead of offering him the point of your blade, you offered him your neck.

“If my blood will strengthen you then I will gladly share it,” had been your words. He wanted to prove you wrong for your kindness, to drain you dry just to spite you - and your taste had been ambrosia. Sweetly blossoming on his tongue he had almost lost himself in the taste of you, until once again your firm hands pushed him away.

No. He would not get to end you that night.

Every day the two of you bickered. You, the stalwart immovable paladin; him, the nefarious rogue always up to something. The two of you were total opposites. It seemed almost cruel that fate had forced you into being travelling companions. And yet…

And yet.

Whenever you finished swapping barbs (well, the threw barbs at you, and you remained unbothered in the face of them, deflecting his venom with the pavise of your cool-headedness) he would see you smile as you turned away. He’d be well aware there was one on his own face, too.

Stupid. Weak.

How he managed to get you into bed after that party at the Grove, he’ll never know. It was a gamble and the dice were not in his favour. But he gave it a go anyway, drolly mentioning the quality of the wine and the overwhelmingly oppressive atmosphere. When he suggested meeting you later that night he braced himself to be staked.

But that hadn't happened.

You’d been surprised, definitely. Eyebrows raised and smile sudden, but you’d said yes. You’d even giggled at the idea, dizzy like a schoolchild.

And, admittedly, he felt an erotic thrill as he sauntered to meet you in that clearing. One he thought himself incapable of experiencing any longer. He was never excited about sex any more. He’d tried to convince himself it was due to his stygian soul, that a creature like him lying with someone as pure as you would be a defilement, would be sullying your holiness - something to bring you down a peg or two. Make you not so out of everyone’s reach.

Out of his reach.

Perhaps, though, in the corner of his mind he tried to wall up, he just relished the idea of being close to you.

And close to you he was. Your grip on his cock was warm and sweet as he slid inside you. You bared your neck and he found the bite marks that were becoming a permanent fixture on your skin, the softest place on you - every other inch was hard muscle. A reminder of that shield you carried, the righteous sword you swung. He made love to you in the most passionate way he knew possible.

He hadn’t realised he’d wanted to hear the sound his name made from your lips as you came around him. It burned into his soul.

He expected you to fall asleep quickly, after, but no. You’d actually held him. As if he weren’t some creature of the abyss but…

Well, your equal.

You hand had caressed his back in a way he’d never known before, soft and sweet, reading his scars like braille but not asking for their origin. Instead you’d opened up yourself a little and let him hear some of the chapters of your life.

He wasn’t surprised when you told him you swore your oath as a teenager. You grew up in the church, devoted from youth, and he could picture you: pocked-faced and wide-smiled, knowing exactly how you wanted to live the rest of your life.

So sure-footed. He was jealous. He was smitten.

“Do you ever regret it?” he’d asked, burying himself into the warmth of your body. You’d shaken your head and looked him dead in the eyes, so utterly sincere that it moved him.

“I rarely regret anything. Not my oath, not the nautiloid… not you,” you’d whispered before kissing him.

And, true to your word, you never did.

Nowadays? You make him feel safe. Protected. Watched over both in and out of battle - whenever anyone tries to take advantage of his vampirism, when they act like he is a thing rather than a person, you are the first one to his side to defend him.

It forces him reevaluate how he feels about himself; question if he is, in fact, a being worthy of love.

He hates it.

He is looking at his reflection in the mirror of you. Yes. You do see something worthy in him, something worthwhile and deserving of your nurture. It makes him so damned scared. Because if that’s true, it means maybe there’s more to him than the vicious little cretin he portrays himself as. Maybe he is worthy of it all. Of kindness. Of love.

Of you.

His soul begins to itch. He needs to do something to realign his universe, put things back into the way they’re meant to be. He needs to be a rogue, damn it!

Your adventure has called you back out to the Emerald Grove. With Isobel safe after the attack at the Last Light Inn you were comfortable leaving the Shadowlands for a while under the knowledge that before you fought Kethetic things were unlikely to get better, but also unlikely to immediately get worse. Astarion erects his tent on soft grass, relieved to not be surrounded by magical darkness, and waits for you to be distracted.

It does not take long. You are swept up in good-natured conversation with Wyll, discussing some sort of swordfighting technique he neither knows nor cares about. When he is certain that no eyes are on him he simply melts into the gloom of evening.

Where he belongs. Pathetic creature.

As far as he can tell, nobody notices him. The shadows cling to him like a second skin, like his body was made to have them mould around him, and he heads into the Grove. It is easy enough. The druids are all busy, guards down ever since the tieflings left, he just needs to not make too much noise and they are easy to pilfer from. Nothing too big or obvious. Nothing they really need. A healing tincture here, a handful of rare herbs there, a couple of silver pieces left loose on a stone desk. But the more he takes, the less it thrills him.

It occurs to him that none of this has the same impact that it used to. Once, the idea of robbing good people blind filled him with glee. Now, he can only picture your face every time his hand flits out to snatch something up. How disappointed you’d be with him. He is trying to fill a hole in himself and it is one that you have made. It sounds violent, but truth be told it’s anything but - he has been split open by your kindness, as if you were simply trying to carve away the rot and allow him to properly heal. That healing has barely started, and he's trying to patch over the necessary work with old bad habits which used to bring him joy. Not any longer, though.

No. His soul isn’t in it today.

He returns to camp with his heart and pockets heavy. He wonders what he should do with his ill-gotten gains. Return them? Perhaps, as quietly as he took them in the first place, making sure no attention is paid to him. Gloss all of this over like an artist sealing a painting, finish this nasty piece of work.

He’s so lost in his own thoughts that, when he pulls back the fabric door of his tent, your presence there makes him actually jump.

You’re sitting on an old wooden chair, dragged over from your own quarters, legs crossed with one of your pauldrons in your lap. A cloth is grasped in your hand and you’re taking your time shining the metal. He catches you doing this a lot. You like to make sure your armour is in tip-top condition, every day. You once told him cleaning your plate mail is an act of worship for you, and he found that quietly ridiculous; Pelor forbid you get any blood on the thing saving your life every battle.

He freezes when you look up at him. The door falls closed, trapping the two of you in the canvas together.

“You’re up late,” he says, trying to affect nonchalance. He does not think you’d be here if this was a social call, at least not with such a serious countenance.

He’s been rumbled.

“Mm. I was in bed when I received a missive.” You hold the pauldron up and breathe a stream of warmth onto it, watching it fog before polishing the same spot.

“What sort of missive?”

“Nettie said she saw you skulking around the grove.”

Shit. Shit, shit, shit. Bloody druids and their bloody perception. He’s going to torch that bloody Grove and all of those green-fingered bastards in it.

Except no, he’s not. He’d never. Not now. But he still finds himself going on the offensive, crossing his arms and scowling.

“Oh! ‘Skulking’, was it? Was that the actual word she used?”

“Yes, Astarion.”

He doesn’t have a response to that, so he just harrumphs.

“You know that I do not lie,” you add on, as if his silence threatens to be damnation of your oath.

“Mmm, I’m aware of that, and it is incredibly vexing!”

Finally you put the pauldron aside, all attention on him now. Hands clasped in your lap. Serious.

“Turn out your pockets for me please, Astarion.”

Fuck. Fuck.

“No. You don’t get to tell me what to do.”

You sigh.

“Is that because you’re denying you went and robbed our druid friends, or you just don’t want me to see what you took?”

His face burns. He doesn’t answer.

“Please, Astarion. Be a good boy.”

Oh. Oh. His body has an… involuntary response to that, one he wasn’t expecting at all. He feels himself throb as those words settle about him.

“You’re not in charge of me,” he protests, but there’s little oomph behind it, because slowly his defences are beginning to fall. You need do so little and he is laid bare at your feet. He would lay himself bare at your feet.

He wonders if he can push you further. He wonders if this is all working for you as much as it’s working for him.

“I know I am not, my heart. But when you act like a brat I have little choice but to treat you like one.”

His mouth falls open at your brazenness, a perfect pink ‘o’.

His lips say, “I’m not acting like a brat!”

His cock says, I am and it’s on purpose.

“Pockets,” you say one more time, and he feels the full force of your gaze upon him. Half-hard and flaming-cheeked, he gives in. Slowly he divests himself of all of the grove’s trinkets and treasures, laying them out on the floor at his feet in a slow display of shame. You remain absolutely neutral through it, face hardly moving an inch. When he unhands the final bunch of herbs you finally speak.

“Come here.”

If his heart needed to beat, it would be racing. He feels himself twitch in his underwear.

He comes to you.

You reach out, wrapping a strong but sure hand around his wrist, fingers encircling its width perfectly… and then with a single tug, you topple him over into your lap.

He squeaks. Well, really, it is more of a moan, as he lands across your knees, your palm running across the swell of his arse. He’s never been so humiliated. He’s never been so aroused.

“Do you want me to stop?” you ask, voice feather-light, as solemnly as if you were swearing a vow.

Ever since he escaped Cazador, he never lets anyone do anything he doesn’t want to his body. He won’t let them have control over him ever again. But this? You? That is different. He knows if he said a single word to the contrary, you would cease. You would not exploit him or take him for granted. He knows that he is precious to you, a thing to be treasured.

And for that, he trusts you to the ends of the world with him. To take care of him.

To give him what he needs.

So when you ask him if he wants you to stop, even though he knows what’s coming, he whispers, ‘no.’

The first smack steals the air from his lungs, a breath he did not need but must have taken on his way over to you. It is a firm sting, and his cock goes from half-mast to full embarrassingly quickly.

Your hand goes back.

On the second smack, he finds himself mewling, a desperate little noise beckoned from the back of his throat from your ‘punishment’. It is one of rapture. He begins to try and rut into your thigh for some sort of relief, but you open your legs wider in order to remove his purchase on you.

He whines. It isn’t fair. You keep going.

On the third, his arse has begun to smart. If he had blood his cheeks would be rosy, he’s sure. And yet each strike is like lightning up his spine. He has begun to leak into his britches just from this, and he feels pathetic and small, but so thoroughly safe and looked after in your embrace.

You ask him if he wants to continue. He nods so violently his neck threatens to break.

If this is the penance Pelor would have you deliver, perhaps he can find it in himself to be a religious man after all.

His head empties as you keep striking, but he hears the way you pause after every slap to listen: take notice of if he wants you to stop. When the only sounds you hear are moans of satisfaction, you keep going. He lies there, bonelessly aroused and limp-bodied, his whole universe centred entirely onto your hand and his cock.

“Do you want to come, Astarion?” you ask, eventually, voice heavy with desire. He nods, and for the first time he realises he has tears of overstimulation trickling down his face, so desperate is he to find release.

“Yes, yes, yes, fuck…” he groans.

“And you’ll be a good boy if you do?”

Fuck. Anything you want.

“Yes…”

Your hand snakes round to cup him through his trousers. It only takes a couple of strokes over the fabric, and your touch is enough to finish him off. He comes in his underwear like a teenager who cannot control themselves, mewling and sobbing in desperation. It is like a blinding light across his eyelids, he swears for a second he sees your god in the white-hot intensity of his orgasm. The best one he’s ever had.

You’re an angel, a fucking angel sent to be his salvation.

As he rides out his climax against the meat of your palm, he feels the other one rubbing across his sore backside. It occurs to him you’re using your Lay on Hands to soothe some of the sting for him, which, if he were more lucid, he’d find utterly ridiculous; however as it is the ache in his arse is still pleasant but now less demanding of his attention.

You manoeuvre him to sit up, letting his whole body collapse into yours. He is aware, through the cotton-clouds of his thoughts, that you are whispering his praises. Telling him how well he did. Reassuring him how much you care for him. Letting him know how proud you are. He’s never been so pleased in his life, and rubs his face into your neck, like a pampered cat seeking attention.

“Are you alright?” is what you ask eventually, after you’re sure he’s returned to himself properly.

“To be honest, I don’t remember the last time I was better,” he manages, and you laugh in a gravelly little chuckle.

“Good. Your happiness matters to me.”

He can’t think of anyone who that’s ever been true for. He’s humbled that you have the sincerity to voice it. You are so… you’re so…

Wonderful.

Even now, you care. He’s never had that before.

“Astarion…”

“Mmm?”

“Tomorrow, you’re returning those things to the Grove.”

He groans and you laugh again.

“Come on, now. You said you’d be good.”

“Fine! Fine. Just… don’t make me think about those nature-loving freaks while I’m bathing in the afterglow, hmm? I just had an orgasm that sent me into the astral plane. I’d like to enjoy it there a little longer.”

You do not argue. He feels your lips curl into a smile against the soft skin of his neck.

Later, you’ll carry him to the nearest stream and wash him, your hands dancing across his skin like worship. You’ll treat him as if he is a holy relic. Precious.

It will be then, in the water and softness of your touch, he will realise that he loves you.

The next day he gives back what is stolen. He can’t look at your thighs without his cheeks burning.

taglist & those who seemed interested: @ghosti02art @sadandanxiouswtf @clairetheflower @foxiecelery @yeethaw13 @trappedinlimbo15 @infinitely-kate @dhampling @wereallbrokenangels @tilldeathdonugget @useless-contributions @beardedladyqueen @hopeful-n-sad

#Astarion x reader #astarion x you #astarion x y/n #astarion ancunin #astarion ancunin x reader #astarion fic #bg3 fic #astarion x tav #Astarion smut #Also it says your skin has a pearlescent lustre. That isn’t meant to reflect skin colour - rather how matte it is

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