Chapter Text
“But—” Vorra began, voice small and frantic as she stared at Gale. “I haven’t had a chance to bite someone yet. That’s a pretty key part of the experience. It’s the whole reason I asked to be turned.”
Muffin’s grin widened until the tiny lines at the corners of her eyes deepened. She clicked her fingers once. A man at the bar acknowledged the sound and slid away from his stool to stand beside Vorra.
“Henry,” Muffin said, voice honeyed. “My new friend would like a bite. Accommodate.”
Henry stepped forward and offered his wrist with an odd, almost blank smile; the veins there showed dark and bright beneath the skin. Vorra’s nostrils flared. Days without fresh blood had left her raw; the blood bank vials had been a poor substitute—flat and stale, nothing like this.
Before Gale could object, Vorra seized the offered limb. Her fangs slid out and found skin. The first taste hit her like a flare of heat and light—rich, iron-sweet, threaded with spice and life. She drank too fast, greedy, as if trying to swallow whole the sensation and tattoo it into memory. Henry didn’t so much as flinch; his arm hung like a willingly offered loaf. It was only when Gale grabbed her by the shoulder and hauled her back that she finally released him.
She was panting, cheeks flushed, eyes raw with hunger. “I don’t remember it tasting so good,” she breathed, wonder in every syllable. “It didn’t taste like this when I was mortal, did it?”
Muffin’s smile shuddered in amusement. With a single, crisp motion she snapped her fingers again. Two tieflings moved in and held Vorra’s arms. Another of Muffin’s attendants approached from the side carrying a tool that looked as though it had been forged to pry a stubborn lid from a casket—two curved, flattened jaws meeting at a heavy hinge, the handles wrapped in leather for purchase. When the jaws closed they pinched with a brutal, surgical precision; the whole instrument gleamed with a cold, unkind light.
Vorra’s eyes widened to saucers when she saw it. “Gale? Sir?” she begged.
Gale’s face went hard as stone. He didn’t meet her gaze; he kept his eyes fixed on Muffin instead, as if looking at her would make him too complicit. The chatter of the tavern dimmed; colours bled and folded at the edges. A purple haze seeped across Gale’s vision, a narrowing that muffled the room until only he and Muffin seemed to exist. The air grew viscous, as if time itself had thickened.
“You are desperate for these scrolls,” Muffin said, voice close and soft through the haze. She leaned in, “Is your master really worth it?”
“He is not my master—” Gale began, a reflexive correction.
“Not anymore?” Muffin’s eyebrow lifted like. “Then why do you still submit to him?”
Gale’s jaw clenched. He could feel the heat of the tavern on the periphery, but the purple haze swallowed it, and Muffin’s eyes drove the thought inward. “I was biding my time,” he said at last, “For this.”
Muffin’s expression dove into a slow, predator’s amusement. “But you like it, don’t you?” she purred, tilting her head, every word a little prod. “You like the power he has over you.”
“Excuse me?” Gale took an involuntary step back, as if her words had a physical weight.
“You like being submissive,” Muffin went on, playful and merciless. “Even when you don’t need to be.” Her nails tapped the table in a neat, hypnotic rhythm. “You can’t handle being in control — even now. Controlling your spawn is eating you up inside. It’s… a little pathetic.”
Gale felt the accusation like a hand to his throat. He forced a breath, feeling the old, familiar flare of rage sharpen in his belly. But Muffin only rolled her eyes with exaggerated disdain, tiny and terrible. “You are a True Vampire,” she mocked, “and yet you act like the mere spawn you were for less than an hour.”
Gale ground his teeth.
"Grow up, Gale Dekarios."
✦ . ⁺ . ✦ . ⁺ . ✦
Gale found her in the windowseat of the library, curled into the cushions like some small, wary animal. Dust-sunlight fell in long, lazy bars across her forearms and the scattered pages at her feet. Vorra’s hands were folded in her lap; she hadn’t spoken since they left the tavern. She hadn’t eaten—not properly—since the extraction. Her mouth moved now in the smallest of motions, tongue flicking at the smooth, healed ridges where fangs should have been.
Gale stood in the doorway for a moment, watching: the rounded line of her jaw, the stubborn set of her shoulders, the way her breath came steady but shallow. He closed the door behind him, then moved to stand before her. The silence between them was unsettling.
“Vorra,” he asked, his voice coming out with an unfamiliar softness and a slight lisp—the absence of his own fangs lending his consonants a cut. “Vorra, can you at least say something?”
She looked up slowly and when her mouth opened, it was to speak with the kind of blunt economy she’d shown since the turn.
“You owe me,” she said, cold and certain.
“I turned you,” Gale began, fingers reflexively brushing his robe as if to reassure himself. “That’s what you wanted—”
“You know that’s not nearly as much weight on you as this is on me,” Vorra hissed. “You traded my teeth away. You didn’t ask. If you had—if you had asked—I might have considered it. But you didn’t ask. From what I can tell, you and Astarion have that in common.”
“Excuse me,” Gale said, the new lisp making it sound thinner than he intended.
“You owe me.” Her repetition had the cadence of a judgment delivered from which there would be no appeal. “You will make it up to me.”
Gale let the silence lengthen around that. He sat opposite her, hands splayed over his knees, trying to measure the shape of this new debt. Vorra, small though she was, looked enormous in that chair: anger sharpening the soft angles of her face, the way her knuckles whitened around the hem of her sleeve. She was someone he could have subjugated with a word, a motion, a flaring of power—yet the thought of it tasted entirely wrong.
“I’ll work on that,” he said finally, voice careful. “But first I—”
“Just go play with your silly scrolls.” The dismissal was a spit more than an order.
For a moment the instinctive hunger to remind her of the order of things flickered at the edge of him: the creator who commands, the maker who takes what he has given. He felt it like a warm, pressure in his chest. He felt the physics of dominance in his bones.
And then, with the same small, inexorable force that had kept him from biting anyone for years, he swallowed it down.
He rose without another word and crossed to his desk, the distance small and pitiful. Vorra’s gaze followed him a moment, wary and triumphant both; when he paused with his hand on a drawer, she made no move to call him back.
✦ . ⁺ . ✦ . ⁺ . ✦
《1 Week Later》
Gale watched him sleep—so still, so impossibly ordinary after the violence and hunger and the long, braided years of manipulation that had wound them together. Astarion’s lashes lay like whispers against his cheekbones; the rise and fall of his chest was soft, almost childlike. For a moment Gale could have believed the past years away.
Then the floorboard sighed beneath Gale’s step and Astarion’s lashes fluttered. He opened his eyes with a small, private panic, the kind that belonged to someone waking from a bad dream.
“Sorry,” Astarion murmured, voice raw with sleep. “I can— I can sleep somewhere else, if you’d prefer.” He pushed himself up on one elbow, the sheet falling away to show the pale curve of his shoulder. The look he turned on Gale was wary and small.
Gale didn’t answer. He walked slowly and tossed the small scroll onto the bed. It landed on the blankets and rolled once before coming to rest with the gold-embossed word catching the lamplight.
Astarion blinked as if the script meant nothing, then as if it meant too much. He reached to catch it, fumbling with the ribbon and the brittle seal.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“A wish,” Gale said.
“A wish?” Astarion’s laugh was thin, incredulous. He unsealed the scroll with fingers that betrayed both curiosity and a sudden, private dread. The parchment unfolded with a scuffed whisper.
“You said you wished you could take it back,” Gale continued, voice low. He kept his distance, hands folded behind his back. “If you’re going to use it, be precise. There’s one thing I won’t bargain away.” His eyes met Astarion’s. “We have a son. I will not give him up for any do-over.”
Astarion’s face shifted—astonishment, then something softer, almost pleading. “That’s how you made me mortal again?”
“Yes,” Gale said.
“What if—” Astarion swallowed, searching Gale’s face for some fissure to wedge his hope into. “What if I wished for you to be mortal, too? For us to start over. To grow old together.”
Gale’s mouth tightened. He folded his hands a moment, feeling the familiar ache. He could almost picture it: years unwinding into a life of ordinary days, the monstrous softened into something domesticated.
“Astarion,” he said finally, quiet and absolute, “we were never going to grow old together.”
Astarion’s shoulders slumped as if someone had taken the air from the room. He let out a breath that was half a laugh and half a sob and folded the scroll back into its ribbon, hands suddenly small and clumsy.