[Like the pulse he lacks. Like the false breath in his lungs that slips out before he has a chance to stop it, frostlike fingers still pinning hair out of the way as his opposite thumb takes to tracing out the line of those dark brows— stalled out entirely by the sight of what he feared (oh, he can finally admit that now) he might never see again. His amatus. His beating heart. The first real sense of warmth Astarion can ever remember clutching to his chest. The one precious, impossibly beautiful, painfully mortal wedge driven between an eternity of suffering and light finally kissing the gaps between his fingers at long last, washing away the urge to scream when he woke up fitful in the dead of night, and never asking for anything more. Clinging to him now as though it might shield. Gods— oh gods—
2/3
[Like the pulse he lacks. Like the false breath in his lungs that slips out before he has a chance to stop it, frostlike fingers still pinning hair out of the way as his opposite thumb takes to tracing out the line of those dark brows— stalled out entirely by the sight of what he feared (oh, he can finally admit that now) he might never see again. His amatus. His beating heart. The first real sense of warmth Astarion can ever remember clutching to his chest. The one precious, impossibly beautiful, painfully mortal wedge driven between an eternity of suffering and light finally kissing the gaps between his fingers at long last, washing away the urge to scream when he woke up fitful in the dead of night, and never asking for anything more. Clinging to him now as though it might shield. Gods— oh gods—
Oh, gods—]