#insomnia ayastar hoursssss (and hours and hours and hours)

[ghostwise]

sparks when skin brushes skin

Aya’s heart is racing unpleasantly beneath her sternum. She's a bundle of nerves tonight—most nights, really, as Jaheira had so wryly put it: for all the gifts Bhaal’s children inherit, a peaceful night’s sleep is not among them.

But tonight the din is loud enough to rouse Astarion from his trance state. He rolls over to face her, brow furrowed, preternaturally alert already.

“Whatever is the matter?” he asks.

What a question.

Aya gives him a tired look in response; a do you really want to get into it? look, or maybe a don’t ask stupid questions look, or perhaps, if they opted to be very liberal with interpretation, a sorry for waking you with more unfixable problems look.

After a moment, he reaches over to carefully unwind her fists from the rumpled sheets, coaxing the fabric from her grip. He eases her hands into his own and massages her fingers lightly.

“Feeling violent, darling?”

The question is posed with an innocent touch of his leg against hers.

Ever since that night she’d bested her urge to kill him he seems convinced she can do it over and over again. She’s not sure whether to be flattered or concerned at how highly he thinks of her. More to the point, she’s not sure she can live up to the ideal.

Fortunately she does not feel the Urge now.

No, tonight all she feels is good old-fashioned Dread.

“My body’s not doing a good job at being a body,” she says.

“More so than usual, you mean?”

Aya rolls her eyes. She takes his hand and holds it to her chest.

“Yes, now that you mention it,” Astarion muses, “It is going rather fast, isn’t it?”

He shifts closer upon the mattress and presses an ear against her chest, listening to her misbehaved heart.

Aya bites her lip and shivers. Astarion, very generously, does not comment on this, nor on the way her heartbeat quickens.

When did this happen? When did either of them get so stupidly, recklessly, foolishly comfortable?

“You poor thing. Come here,” Astarion says simply after a moment, holding out his arms.

Aya leans into him with a sigh. He's just a few degrees cooler than a body should be. She likes feeling his own heartbeat, slow and phlegmatic, lulled by undeath; a counterpoint to hers. But she doesn’t feel better.

She feels like dry kindling. She feels like an abandoned bomb, ticking away.

Astarion’s hands dance along her back, leaving a trail of sparks.