Astarion’s gotten himself into a spot of bother. No big deal, just a little light kidnapping and impalement, it’s fine. But whoever took him really didn’t think things through, because his current paramour is the former Chosen of Bhaal—and pissing Rune off is what one might call a profoundly bad idea.
Written for febuwhump 2025, for the prompt ‘pinned down’.
this was meant to be serious whump but Astarion refused to oblige me
It was at times like this he missed being in a fully equipped adventuring party. Admittedly, when the small child they’d taken in to do the cooking and such had gotten kidnapped by Orin, it had taken a mumblety-excessive number of days to actually get around to rescuing her, so perhaps said party wasn’t actually as efficient as he remembered it being, but still; when one was being nailed to a wall with silver spikes, one’s recollections went a bit rose-tinted.
Then again, that might have been all the blood.
Astarion bit back a howl as the man who’d been hammering spikes into him for the past ten minutes brought the mallet down again. Six of the bastard things sizzled in his flesh, starting at his feet and working up. His wrists burned too, but that was from the silver-lined manacles that bound them above his head. Not to worry, though; he was sure they’d experience the same marvellous heights of torment as his lower half soon enough.
“Be careful,” the captor who wasn’t impaling him hissed. “He needs to be alive for it to count as a sacrifice.”
“You do realise I’ve been dead for centuries?” Astarion drawled, mostly because his tongue was a lead weight in his mouth and couldn’t form words any faster. The mallet swung, driving the spike the final inch through his shoulder into the wall, and he screamed. Darkness teased at the edges of his vision, but refused to drag him under. Too much Bhaalspawn in his system, he thought. Too much of Rune’s blood lingering in his veins, lending him strength and power and keeping him a-fucking-wake.
Rune. If he was feeling ungenerous, he could blame Rune for being in this mess in the first place. His lover provided an excellent source of sustenance, but Astarion needed more than he could get without hurting him—not that Rune minded being hurt, but what Rune minded and what was good for him were two vastly different things—and so he’d taken to supplementing his diet with sips from Baldur’s Gate’s less savoury specimens. He’d been feeding on one such this evening, a clumsy oaf who’d thought to pickpocket him, too busy thinking about getting home to Rune—because they had a home now, small as it was—to notice the less clumsy oafs sneaking up on him armed with silver and holy water and a honking great length of enchanted chain.
Then, bag on head, he’d been dragged into what he assumed was the sewers, judging by the stench, shoved and kicked a goodly way through them with holy water scorching his scalp, and left bound in a small, dank room for several hours before his current tormentors had shown up and started nailing him to the wall. Some ritual or other they were about. They’d been whispering about it since before they’d taken the bag off his head, apparently under the impression it would somehow keep him from hearing them when he was an elf and a vampire both.
If there was anything worse than being kidnapped and tortured, it was being kidnapped and tortured by idiots.
Mallet-man took another spike from his seemingly endless pile and set it over Astarion’s as-yet un-impaled shoulder. He fought to get away from it, but there must have been some stronger metal than silver in the core of the spikes, for they held him fast no matter what he did. Mallet-less sneered from beneath his cowl.
“Wriggle all you want, little fang-fish. You’re not going anywhere.”
Fang-fish? Was there some sort of finishing school for aspiring cultists that taught them how to come up with this nonsense alongside learning how to sew tediously unfashionable cloaks and chant hymns to irrelevant dark entities? They’d already subjected him to agonising mutilation, and now fang-fish? Really?
All his criticisms shattered apart as the mallet descended.
“Six to go,” Mallet-man said, once Astarion’s screams had died away. “Then we’ll be ready.”
Mallet-less stepped close and laid his hand on Astarion’s bare and bloodied chest. “You should be pleased, vampire. You’re to be put to a greater purpose tonight.”
“Somehow I doubt that,” Astarion rasped.
“Doubt all you like. It is the truth.”
He stepped away, leaving his companion to position the ninth spike. Silver burned against Astarion’s arm, and he tried once more to squirm away. He couldn’t die like this; he wouldn’t. He hadn’t escaped Cazador’s rite only for a more pathetic one to be how he met his end. The mallet rose, ready to strike.
There was a heavy splash from outside the room. Mallet-man paused.
“You hear that?”
“Probably just some kobolds,” Mallet-less said. “Deshi and the others can handle a kobold.”
Another splash, followed by a scream cut short and an echoing growl. Astarion grinned.
“Oh, you two are about to regret every decision you made tonight.”
“You’re not in any position to be making threats,” Mallet-less snapped.
“No,” Astarion said, “but he is.”
The door exploded in a shower of splinters as a hooded cultist came flying through, borne with a crunch to the cracked stone floor by a blood-splattered Rune. Before she could even consider begging for mercy, Rune brought his knife down into her throat, wrenching it sideways in a spray of gore. Crouched over her death throes, his eyes flicked from Mallet-man to Mallet-less, marked the one standing over Astarion with a weapon as the biggest source of irritation, and launched at him with a snarl.
Mallet and spike went clattering to the floor as their wielder was slammed into the wall alongside Astarion, who got a brief glimpse of the confused terror writ across the man’s face before Rune gutted him like a fish and bit a bloody chunk out of his cheek.
“In the dark name of—” Mallet-less started, hands moving in what Astarion assumed to be the beginnings of a spell. He didn’t get further than his initial dedication. A blast of eldritch force smashed into him, Rune hot on the heels of his own magic. There was a flash of metal, a high-pitched scream, and then the only one left standing was the half-elf in a spreading pool of blood and steaming innards.
He was in his night clothes—faded trousers and one of Astarion’s shirts, both now ruined—breathing hard, his mouth all red, pale skin splattered with viscera. No cloak, no armour; he hadn’t even bothered to put on boots.
“Gods, I love you,” Astarion said.
Rune glanced over his shoulder. His eyes were huge, which always looked strange: swollen black irises in a sea of white pupil, like midnight blood on snow. He blinked once, shook himself like a dog shaking off water, then hurried over. He reached for the spike in Astarion’s shoulder, then hesitated, seeming for the first time to realise how many of them there were.
“Just a few piercings,” Astarion said. Whispered, more like; blackness loomed, less of a tease and more of a certainty now, the burn of silver setting his stomach roiling and his head swimming. The clarity of pain called him back as Rune gripped one of the spikes. Astarion met his eyes.
“Do it.”
If he’d thought them being hammered in was bad, it was nothing compared to having them ripped out. Agony sang with every spike Rune wrenched free, louder and louder until he was a brutal chorus of suffering, shredded and sobbing, throat raw with screaming. When at last they were all gone, Rune finally broke the manacles apart and eased him to the floor. His heart slammed in all eight of the ragged holes simultaneously; the slightest movement set every bone grinding against its shattered self, like someone had shoved broken glass beneath his skin, and the only thing louder than the pain was Rune’s pulse.
Astarion licked his cracked lips. The twin scabs on that delectably scarred throat would break the way they always did; the lifeblood would flow and his ruined flesh would knit together and the pain would stop-stop-stop—
A throat was presented to him. Not Rune’s—one of the cultists, the one he’d gutted, clinging to the last vestiges of life. The one who’d put the spikes there in the first place. Astarion sank his teeth deep and drank and drank and drank until the blood went cold and dead and useless.
The corpse fell to the ground with a thump. Astarion wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. There hadn’t been enough to heal him all the way, but he thought he could stand now, maybe walk. “Sorry to drag you out of bed like this, love,” he said, and started to push himself upright.
Deep, stabbing pain shot through both of his legs and he cried out as he crumpled. At once, Rune was there, holding him up. He wore the adorable frown of concern he always got when Astarion was hurt, like he was trying to figure out how this could possibly have happened.
“You should drink from me,” he said.
Astarion put a hand to his blood-stained cheek, dark with the inert remnants of illithid veins. “I need more than you can give.”
Rune tilted his head, the slight curve of his lips reminding Astarion just how much his lover was willing to grant him in that respect. He pressed a kiss to Rune’s violent lips. “Drinking from you is something to savour when I’m not such a ruin. Let’s go wake our dear Mother Superior instead.”
Rune didn’t argue. He slung Astarion’s arm over his shoulders, and they made their way out into the sewer tunnel. There were two bodies in the main channel, already soaking up foul water; another slumped brokenly about ten feet down from the chamber Astarion had been held captive in, and yet another, this one lacking anything resembling a head, hung off the walkway about ten feet past that. A gruesome display of wanton violence, all in service of getting him free. Astarion’s heart warmed.
Their footfalls echoed off the walls, the squeal of rats and the vague dripping of some distant unpleasantness the only other sounds of life. Astarion grimaced at the smell that wafted up as Rune helped him over the narrow plank-bridge some enterprising soul had laid between the walkways. “If I wasn’t already dead, doing this would almost certainly kill me via some horrible piss-borne disease,” he grumbled.
A shrug and a low grunt formed Rune’s reply, which meant: well, you are already dead, so you and I both know your complaints are just for show. Fortunately, I find them both entertaining and endearing, so I’m not going to drop you in the sewage. Or something along those lines, anyway. Sans tadpole, exact translation was a trickier art than it used to be.
Rune was worth the effort.
“Not that I’m ungrateful for the rescue, though,” Astarion said. “So, after Shadowheart has had her pound of flesh for us getting into another midnight mess, how about I make it up to you?”
A short pause. Then, “Sex?”
“Yes, darling. Sex.”
Which for them meant a good deal of wrestling and biting, sometimes even an orgasm or two. The latter part was largely optional; the former as enjoyable as the more traditional forms of intimate relations Astarion was familiar with.
“Alright,” Rune said, and though he remained silent for the rest of their journey he did, Astarion noted with quiet amusement, get them to the House of Grief in record time.