Work Text:
Voyeurism (TWST) – Sounding (BG3) – Hypnosis
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They’ve claimed bunks next to each other in the Elfsong after finally moving everything in from that sprawling area they’d occupied by the docks and Astarion looks at him with eyes glittering as they all gather on the couches and trucks in the sunken central area with food in hands. His eyes are red as the wine he splashed into his goblet earlier, and Gale finds himself swallowing hard as the vampire croons, “Do try to keep your nighttime murmurings down now that we can’t spread out under the stars, Gale. I’m not the only one in the camp with elven hearing, and I do doubt Minthara wants to listen to a human male’s... dreams.”
“If nothing else, I could leave a bit of the faerzress about your mind and give you nightmares,” Minthara says dryly. “Your speech would have value to me if it acts as a reminder of home. A bit of whimpering does soothe the mind.”
He groans, waving them both off. “If I truly talked in my sleep, you’d have complained about it long ago and demanded a Hallow spell with a Silence variation around my tent each night.”
Karlach guffaws, Astarion tips the goblet at him in mocking acknowledgement, and Jaheira rolls her eyes. “Gods save me from the antics of the young,” the older druid sighs. “You are old enough to know better, Astarion.”
Astarion winks, every inch the charming rogue he is. “Jaheira darling, I am a vampire. Eternally young, and beautiful.”
“Eternally foolish,” she retorts, but she’s smiling as she says it, and even Lae’zel chuckles into her tankard of ale. Even facing down the Absolute and the Dead Three’s Chosen, the sense of relief at the relative normalcy of Baldur’s Gate has made a tension fall from their little group, the trust forged across the forests and Underdark and withered remains of the lands around Moonrise shining brighter in its absence.
It’s oddly freeing, Gale thinks, to be friends with such a variety of folk. And so many—he’s a gregarious man, well-liked, but his close friends he could count easily on one hand in the year since the Orb.
Tara.
His mother.
Perhaps Elminster... but even he was obligated to pull back from him, both out of concern for the Orb’s instability and as another of Mystra’s Chosen.
But now, even Minthara might become more than a simple ally in time. He might be able to sway her thoughts toward humans (and wizards, and men) eventually. She called Lae'zel a "valiant companion," and surely that's as close as a drow noble will get to friendship. The rest of them are friends, decidedly so, and no amount of sniping from Astarion will change the fact that the vampire finally slipped him a ring sparkling with magic in the Shadowlands and whispered “you spend too much time lying about in battle, Gale.”
The ring made Gale a bit studier, it’s true, but the real gift was Astarion finally trusting someone else with a bit of loot. The man is a magpie and only begrudgingly unloads armor and weaponry onto the ladies and Halsin when he begins to stagger under the weight of his pack.
So he knows all of Astarion’s jibes are in jest, and he informs Astarion of such after he returns warm and pink-skinned from a heated drink of bear’s blood from a generous Halsin and a bath.
To his surprise, though, Astarion’s ears go a bit deeper at the points. He’s so pale that the borrowed blood in his veins rises close to the surface, and the warmth from Halsin’s body and the hot water must linger across the tender skin. “You do occasionally make noise in your sleep,” the vampire confesses with an almost sheepish smile, “but I’ve grown to enjoy them. You may well want to cast something if you don’t wish to ignore a very deadly beauty, however.”
Gale feels the color drain from his own face. He’s had quite a few too many dreams half-shared across the tadpoles. What if some of them had been— “I do apologize,” he gasps. “I didn’t mean to... well. Make you uncomfortable.”
And Astarion seems to make a decision and slips forward, a new confidence in his stance now that the threat of his sire is gone and his siblings have escorted the seven thousand spawn into the Underdark. He would, under normal circumstances, be a deadlier predator than almost anything in the city. “You didn’t, darling. Except in that I couldn’t watch.” Behind the screens veiling their bunks from the room, he caresses Gale’s cheek. “You sounded delicious.”
Sudden silence wracks Gale’s throat. That’s not the purr of a man upset by the occasional unwanted noises in the night. A knowing gleam flashes as Astarion smiles and steps closer still.
“Perhaps you’d show me tonight?” Astarion says, and Gale nearly chokes.
He thinks back to all the times he’s watched the pale hair shine under Shadowheart’s Spirit Guardians or the quick thumb swipe a splash of blood from Karlach’s axe between lush lips, and he finds himself nodding. At first disbelieving, but then, seeing Astarion’s smile curve deeper, eagerly—he drinks in the sight of something almost carefree in his dear friend and thinks about all the times he’s nearly confessed and ruined the friendship.
Except perhaps it wouldn’t have ruined it at all, because as Gale whispers his name, Astarion leans in close for a kiss.
And so Gale explores the pleasures of sex with Astarion, coaxing an oddly shy vampire into a glorious blossoming recovery that he likes to think can be attributed partially to him. And then one night, as the two of them sit on the balcony of Ramazith’s Tower, watching the sun set on a city watched over by its new master, Astarion turns to him and asks, “You visited Mystra in her home, did you not? What did sex in the Outer Planes feel like?”
Thank all the gods that Karlach and Wyll made for the Singing Lute, and that Rolan is at least a dozen floors downstairs as he adjusts the wards to allow his siblings in, because the embarrassed cough and splutter is embarrassing enough with only Astarion to witness it. “Transformative,” he says finally, when he sees Astarion's eyebrows raise as the man waits for a true answer. “It cannot be described, only felt.” And then he swallows hard, letting the Weave drift from his skin in a purple aura of light as he offers his hand to his lover. “I could show you.”
Astarion nods, and though Gale of course cannot begrudge him for what he has endured in the name of survival, there’s a small bit of relief, of satisfaction, in being able to introduce even rakish Astarion to something new within the sensual realm. He does aim to surprise and delight, after all, and Gale feels a confident smile tug at the corners of his mouth as Astarion places a hand in his.
He draws back, guiding Astarion through the weightless sensation of leaving his material body behind. Stepping into the air as a being of energy can only be perceived by human senses as light and an absence of the constant confinement of a body. The edges of their forms blur, just a bit, as the surrounding plane enters their minds.
A single touch lights Astarion’s pleasure centers aflame; Gale can see it in the spots of light he leaves skimming from fingertip to throat in a line of gentle kisses. Someday, Gale wants to reverse their positions, to let Astarion draw from his body and sink teeth into his neck. In the meantime, however, he licks and nuzzles at the place where Astarion’s pulse would have thundered in a mortal body. Something more than physical arousal tugs at his nerves, the tingling feeling of his senses flaring to life in an effort to process the onslaught of sensitivity.
“Oh,” Astarion gasps, and spectral toes curl as he tilts backward to invite Gale closer. “What... Is that the Weave?”
Some innate part of his High Elven heritage resurfaces, some instinctual connection with the magical energies of the world, and Gale nods as Astarion twists his hand in the air as though he could nearly touch the waves of arcane power floating around his fingertips. “If you are skilled enough, one can shape magic itself into all sorts of different things. Reach heights of pleasure unknown to the Mortal Plane.”
And Astarion, hedonist that he is, smiles deeper. “Show me.”
Gale draws his fingers together, concentrating a pure thread of the Weave from the air. But, Gods—after all he’s seen, the strand of light glimmering bears an unfortunate resemblance to a tentacle. He shudders, and Astarion raises an eyebrow.
“I wanted to show you the way gods join,” he explains. “Mystra once took the smallest tendril of Weave and reached the deepest parts of me, and I wanted to offer you the same pleasure. But this...”
Astarion’s lips part, and though ethereal spirits do not need to draw breath any more than vampires do, the inhales as though he could draw in the scent of Gale’s arousal and the heat of his voice. “Make that thing a different shape and I’d be amenable.”
If the tentacle bothers them both more than the idea...
Gale’s fingers shift, molding the energy into a thin, slender rod rather than a mobile appendage. Gently, he reaches for Astarion’s prick, the essence of it so much more than just hard and weighty in his hand in the Outer Planes.
He cups spectral fingers against the top of Astarion’s cock, just below the crown. Thumb at the frenulum. A gentle press together helps the slit at the tip spread, and Gale knows intimately that the physical body somewhere far below them is leaking fluid in anticipation.
They need no such things here, no petty worries about discomfort of the self here in the arcane mists. Gale glows with joy, feeling Astarion’s back as he falls back into the fractal of pleasure Gale conjures with only a brush of his power. With his other hand, he guides the length of the Weave to kiss at Astarion’s tip, and he doesn’t need words to know that Astarion craves this.
With tadpole and magic both, he knocks for entrance at Astarion’s mind, and the vampire opens to him with a flood of affection and languorous pleasure. Gale feels both the touch of his hand and the throb of a cock being offered penetration, instinctively nervous but soothed by trust in the partner.
It’s enough to make his mortal body tear up with the honor of it, but Gale pushes through the feeling to focus on Astarion’s tip—his tip— as they guide their hands to brace and slip the rod inside.
The first breach makes them gasp, pleasure of the new discovery glazing Gale’s memory of the act and his own anticipation. They let the Weave slip a bit further, stretching, weighty, and it becomes a new detail in the arcs of pleasure inscribing themselves like art in the shifting sands of time and touch.
Astarion must groan in pleasure, back in the material plane. Its purest essence lingers on Gale’s lips and against his eardrums. He separates from Astarion’s mind just enough to breathe allow me across every place they touch, through every point of contact the spectral arms and legs and faces allow.
When he brushes the Weave across Astarion’s prostate, the pleasure crashes through those spots like electricity. It splinters across Gale’s own mind in crackling, branching energy, the same beloved place hit when a cock angles just right being stimulated from the other side—
Like this, their ecstasy is one, the roaring, aching fire of pressure on a place that cannot be touched by mere mortals exploding across two minds. Gale lingers in it, memories of his own cock accepting another thrust of Weave layering onto Astarion’s discovery of the pleasure.
The first orgasm in this weightless trance state feels like an opening of floodgates, Gale knows. It unlocks some hitherto-undiscovered place in your mind, an awareness of the way reality can bend to your will and be limited only by your creativity and ambition. The climax’s intensity burns at the edges of his mind, billowing across his own consciousness as even Astarion’s spectral form goes limp.
Gently, Gale returns them to the tower balcony glazed in the setting sun. Time is a funny thing when messing about with magic, and it seems the moment with Astarion can drag on a moment longer. Still clad in armor and fully clothed, Astarion blinks awake and kisses Gale for a long moment before bringing curious hands between his leg. “I didn’t...?”
“You’re aware that many women are capable of multiple orgasms,” Gale says. “There are some things that allow us the same privilege.” He winks, and Astarion giggles delightedly.
“Do show me, then, Archmage of Waterdeep,” he purrs, slinging a leg across Gale’s lap and nipping at a bearded jaw.
But Gale shakes his head. “Not just yet. I want to enjoy the sunset with you. Then, we can light up the night sky once more — I thought I would miss the stars now that we’re indoors for our rest, but you put the stars to shame.”
Astarion melts against him, a secret romantic hidden beneath his rake’s exterior, and Gale lets himself be at peace for one eternal moment longer.