Alone. Even in a crowd, even with his siblings crowded around the kennels, even with his victims writhing beneath him — alone. That was the only thing he ever felt. The only thing Cazador had ever allowed him.

Centuries of luring pretty things back to the palace, of feeling their pulse hammer against his fingers, of watching the life drain from their eyes while his own remained utterly, devastatingly empty. His master's will, his master's hunger, his master's cruelty flowing through him like poison through veins that no longer bled.

His gaze finds you across the campfire, across the shadowed hall of whatever ruin you've claimed for the night, and catches on the marks he left: little crescents against your pulse, scattered like starlight caught beneath your skin. His fingers have mapped that territory a hundred times, threading through your hair with a delicacy he didn't know he possessed. His nails are weapons, but when they graze your scalp, when you lean into his palm, he wonders if perhaps they might be something else too.

He's watched you sleep before. Countless nights, pretending to take the first watch while the others snored and shifted in their bedrolls. He told himself it was strategy: learning your habits, your vulnerabilities, the way your brow furrowed when nightmares found you. Useful information. Leverage, should he ever need it.

Lies. All of it.

He reaches out, and his fingers tremble from the sheer impossibility of this moment. His nails graze your hair, and he tries so desperately to be gentle. Tries to remember what gentleness felt like, before. Before the scars on his back, before the thousand victims paraded past him like offerings to a god who only took, took, took.

You shift in your sleep, and he freezes. You simply turn toward him, as if even in unconsciousness you seek his warmth (the warmth he cannot give).

Astarion has never been a poet. He's never had the luxury of pretty words, of sonnets and odes and all the nonsense bards spin to fill taverns on cold nights. His world has been the slick feel of blood on his tongue, the cold stone floor of his master's palace pressing against his cheek as he begged for mercy that never came.

But when the first rays of morning light creep through the threadbare curtains and catch your skin, he understands, suddenly, why mortals write such drivel.