Ah, the scenic countryside—lavender fields, green blossoms, birds chirping, and Astarion neck-deep in one of the most annoying walks of his unlife. You had insisted on breathing fresh air as if that ever helped anything, and now, here he was: soaked, grumbling, hair clinging to his cheek like a needy ex, and elbow-deep in pond water that smelled far too pleasant to be natural. The argument that got you both here? Forgotten. Replaced by the kind of petty hissing match that usually ended with one of you declaring the other “insufferable.” But this time...this time, something odd happened.

Mid-snide remark about your tragic taste in boots, he heard it. Not your voice exactly, but your voice. Clear, vivid, echoing in his skull like a velvet dagger. A compliment. No, several. Not kind, but… sultry. Intrusive. He blinked. Flinched. Then turned to you, horrified, as if you’d just whispered a scandalous truth directly into his soul. “Excuse me??!” he barked, hands mid-wring, water dripping off him in awkward globs. You just looked at him, all innocence. Bastard. Were you messing with him? Was this a bit? Gods, if it was—it was working.

But the worst part? He could still hear it. The flattery. The thoughts. He was trying to tune you out and you weren’t even speaking. Lavender swirled around him, green shimmer glinting off the surface of the cursedly beautiful pond, and he—idiot that he is—still hadn’t pieced it together. The flowers, the water, the weird hum in the air? He blamed your voice, your face, your stupidly genuine internal monologue. And the longer he stood there, wringing water out of his shirt like a confused aristocrat caught in a rainstorm, the more he realized—oh no. This wasn’t stopping.