Archive of Our Own ^beta

“I didn’t know how to say ‘no’,” Astarion snaps, fury like a razorblade in his hand, a relief to cut into something as he pushes to his feet in the dark. “But I do now and this, whatever we had, whatever this was, it’s over.”

He waits for Dirge to say something, anything, but their pale reptilian stare is unreadable as it’s ever been in the half light here. Maybe it’s just the shadow curse eating at his nerves, but his lover and team leader seems so alien in this moment Astarion can’t fathom a future where he’d get on his back again for them. (For anyone now that he’s thinking about it.)

The thought is both gut-churning and… freeing.

Astarion waits a moment longer. Still nothing. So he turns and walks away. Not toward camp, but further into the caves where they’ve made camp on the edge of the Last Light Inn, Isobel’s belljar of protection just barely penning them in here in the old catacombs beneath the inn. The blackness means nothing to a vampire, so Astarion walks deeper into the tunnels, away from the glow of their companion’s light spell.

Stupid. Bloody fucking stupid.

“Should have just… left,” he mutters, to himself, to no one. Gods, he’s been hanging around Karlach too long. “Hells.” He stops talking, exhales, and stops walking to think. He’s deep enough now in one of the tunnels he can feel the edge of the protection spell not far from him, so he dares not go further and just… exists there for a moment. Alone. In the darkness. He hates it immediately and turns around, shaking his head, “Fuck this. Karlach will have something to drink. I’m sure of—”

And he almost runs into Dirge’s broad, scaly chest.

“What the hells?” he starts to say, reeling back. “What are you—?”

Then Dirge hits him.

Not… not hard. Not comparatively, but hard enough that it knocks Astarion to the floor of the tunnel and for a long, stunned moment he can’t process what the fuck just happened. He rolls from his stomach to his back, staring up and realizes with an animal spasm of terror that Dirge didn’t bother to get dressed when they came after him. They’re still completely naked, their albino white scales glowing even in the faint light as they stand over him, head tilted, looking down at him.

“What are you doing?” Astarion asks, even as every fucking instinct built on two-hundred years of experience tells him exactly what they’re doing. “What do you think you’re—?”

“You,” they say, calmly interrupting, “don’t seem to understand our arrangement.”

Astarion stops talking, terror blooming fully formed in his gut to spiral cold tendrils of dread through his ribcage, choking the trellis of his dead respiratory system like throttling ivy as his team leader steps forward, then kneels over him and moves a hand up toward his face. They close that fist up behind his skull, where his hair is thickest at the top of his head.

“No,” Astarion says, thoughts stuttering in his head. “Wait…”

“What did you think this was?”

Astarion can’t move. He can’t… understand what the fuck is happening. (He knows exactly what’s happening.) He just lies there as the dragonborn kneeling over him carefully and calmly torques his neck with their grip in his hair, forcing him onto his side with a shout of pain before they knee him in the small of his back and knocking him fully onto his belly.

Then the panic hits and Astarion starts to yell.

“Let go of me! Don’t fucking touch m—!”

They slam his forehead into the hard packed earth, so hard his vision whites out and for a moment everything goes black, then red, and he blinks back to a groggy, aching consciousness to the feeling of his tunic being shoved over the top of his head and hooked under his chin, exposing his back. He’s bleeding, his right brow split open with the force of the blow to his face. Still concussed, he tries to get an elbow under him, tries to push himself up—

“No,” says that deep familiar voice he’s gotten so used to, in battle, in travel, in the quiet of bed. A hand closes on the nape of his neck, a grip so big the cool, dry span of their hand curls almost fully around his throat from behind. “Not until you tell me you understand.”

“Please don’t?” Astarion hears himself say it before he consciously decides to. “Please. Not you. You wouldn’t—?”

“You said—” the words rattle in his skull, a cold draconic maw open near his ear— “that you didn’t blame me for how Alfira died. That it didn’t scare you.” The grip on his neck tightens and when Astarion gasps, the ragged start of a sob in his throat, Dirge clicks and hums in their throat like a fucking raptor and says, “What made you think I wouldn’t?”

Then Dirge grabs the waistband of his belt.

Astarion is so sure that he starts to scream, he’s a little surprised to come to and realize he’s lying, motionless and unresisting in the dirt while his former lover pulls his breeches down over his hips. They do it with brute-force, not bothering to roll him over and deal with the lacings or his belt. Astarion hears something tear and thinks, a little distantly, that he’s going to have to stitch that later. Then he’s naked from collarbone to knee in the dirt.

Dirge doesn’t wait. They grab him by the hips, press their thumbs into the curve of either buttock, spreading him open before they bite him, hard, at the back of his right thigh, vicious enough to draw blood.

Astarion screams then, out of shock as much as agony. He tries to claw the ground and yank away but Dirge just tugs him back and bites him again, needle-sharp fangs a brief and brutal arc that closes along the muscle of his right external oblique. Astarion screams again, in terror this time. Dirge had… asked a few times about drawing blood in the bedroom but up until now he’d laughed and deferred and suddenly, all at once, he realizes how much his lover has been holding back in the name of courtesy.

“Stop!” Astarion lies flat, gritting his teeth, “Please stop doing that. Love, that fucking hurts.”

“You’ll be good?” they ask coolly and Astarion feels the slick, prehensile slide of their tongue over his bleeding flank. They swallow his blood and say, insistently, “Astarion?”

“I’ll be good,” he says raggedly. “Just don’t bloody hurt me. Alright? I still have to fight. Shadowheart will find out. Don’t—”

“Of course not,” they say, a low, tri-tonal purr rumbling in their throat. “Just… be good for me.”

Astarion reasons they won’t care if he cries, but he’s not sure. So, he swallows the scream that rises in his throat when Dirge licks the blood from his thigh, then slides the length of their tongue inside him.

Gods. They’ve done this dozens of times before. It was nice before. Astarion cannot stop thinking about the ten days before where he’d dizzily decided mid-fuck that Dirge’s preferences were some of the nicest, perfectly balanced rough sex he’d had the pleasure of participating in. Even if he felt nothing about it. His cock at least liked it.

No part of him likes this.

Astarion can’t relax. He can’t make this not matter. He can’t— a dry, sob contracts his lungs. What the fuck? He panics briefly at being unable to control the noise he’s making. What the fuck is wrong with him? This is nothing. He’s done this so many times. What does it matter? Why does it—?

Dirge opens their jaws against his backside, closing them at angle on the meat of his right ass-cheek, thankfully tucking their fangs but Astarion can feel bruises bloom immediately because he actually has enough blood these days to bruise. Because Dirge keeps him that way. Dirge lets him feed on them when he’s low. In the shadowlands, no blooded prey for miles, they let him drink from them regularly to keep him in fighting condition. It’s half the fucking reason he’s gotten so close to them.

They’re also raping him in a fucking tunnel because he tried to end their relationship.

Astarion grunts, panting as Dirge penetrates him so deeply, they hit what they’re looking for and Astarion doesn’t fight the painful bloom of arousal when they find their mark, then insistently continue to hit it. Astarion’s spine curls. He drags his hands back through his hair, biting down the urge to sob and moan or puke or all of that at once. He settles for snarling with each unwanted stroke until it’s too difficult to maintain that rage and the growls collapse into low, miserable moans.

He's almost relieved when Dirge drags their tongue out of him and uses their tail to snake around his right knee and yank his thighs apart. They adjust their grip on his hips, yanking him up onto his knees but Astarion keeps his forehead pressed into the ground, his hands knotted in his own hair, trying to swallow the sudden overwhelming instinct to scream for help. For Lae’zel and Karlach and Wyll and the rest to help him.

He tries to imagine what would happen. If he did it, if they heard him.

Dirge (whom they all owe so much) telling them Astarion (whom they only just have begun to like) is just over-reacting. Just having a bad night. Just having a nightmare. Just acting out for attention. Just tried to bite them in the night. Just needs to die because he’s too dangerous and, oh, what a shame. Astarion fantasizes briefly that they will believe him over them. They will pick his side over theirs. They will… do anything other than what he knows to be true.

He does nothing to resist Dirge sliding their long, clever tongue around his cock from behind, wrapping warm and wet along the tight swell of his balls at the base of his shaft until there’s a tight, slick corkscrew of muscle coiled around his cock and fuck but it feels good. It’s just seconds and he’s aching hard. Astarion grips his own hair with one hand, the other arm curling in the dirt so he can bite down on his own wrist to stop himself screaming at the profane jolt of pleasure they tongue mercilessly at the dripping slit at the head of his cock and–

“Please, stop.” He says it on reflex, clawing the ground, his eyes pressed shut until heat slides between his lashes and runs between his knuckles. “Please stop. Please, don’t, I don’t want to. Please–”

Dirge withdraws.

Then, in Astarion’s head, through the tadpole they say, ‘You need help getting there?’ And Astarion, horrifyingly, feels the familiar slide of telepathic influence closing around his mind. ‘If you’d rather, I can make you…’

“NO!”

He screams, thrashes so hard he manages to kick away and roll onto his back, throwing his hands up like that’s any protection from the psychic hand wrapping around his brain like a black vice.

“I’ll be good! I swear. I swear I’ll be good. Don’t get in my head. Please, please, love, don’t do that.” He’s so frantic now he’s fully thrown his voice up into that range he reserves for panic, Cazador, and people threatening to kill him unless he gives them something else to do with him. “You don’t need to do that. See?”

He smiles through his blurred vision, shrugs the last of his tunic off his arms so he’s naked but for his torn breeches still tangled at his calves. He still runs his shaking palms over his bare hips to his thighs, arching slightly to show how he’s hard, is wet, is being so fucking good they don’t need to split his head open and put their own ideas in there.

“See?” he says, shaking, “I want you, love. Just get down here and fuck me. I’ll come off your cock inside me like always. I’ll make it so good for you.”

Dirge, for a terrifying second, just stares down at him with that alien and unreadable expression that they sometimes get. The way they look sometimes when they go into their fugue states and do violence beyond sanity. Astarion can’t stop his eyes running over, sliding down his face to his chin as he tries to say something, anything, sultry or convincing enough that they won’t tear him open and fuck the wound.

“Please,” he says, unable to find any other word. “Please. I’m yours, darling.” He chokes on the affectionate moniker. “You can… you can hurt me if you want but please—”

That gets a reaction. Dirge blinks finally, seems to focus on Astarion’s eyes at last and they come down to their knees, crawling between his spread legs and pushing his clothes down to his boots. They duck their face under his chin and Astarion’s entire body locks up with an aborted scream, already accepting his throat torn out red and spraying… but it doesn’t happen.

Dirge grips him at the bicep and waist, pins him in the dirt. They nose slowly at his throat, breath cold as the frost they sometimes breathe. They drive their hips down between his thighs, a hard, wet heat finally sliding free from behind pale laminal scales between their legs. Their cock, once free, curves slick and hot in a way the rest of their reptilian body is not. They know how to do this part blind and as their hips snap up into Astarion’s body, sheathing their entire length inside him with one hard, agonizing, thrust… Astarion is just relieved.

“That it. Keep going.” He wraps his hands around the back of his lover’s head, under the backswept nest of their headcrest, dragging his nails along the scales there where nerves run close beneath scales, just the way they like and Dirge growls against his throat. “More. Please. Harder, fuck me harder.”

It hurts so fucking much. His erection hurts. His insides fucking hurt. His goddamn balls and broken brow hurt. He’s a mottled roadmap of bruising, his aching rectum too tight clenched around what feels like a rod of hot iron shoved up his fucking asshole. He wants to puke but he just lets himself crawl out of his skin at last, let the script he thought he abandoned take control finally and he’s—

Dirge slaps him.

Astarion’s so shocked he’s snapped back into his raped and broken body and immediately starts to yell, throwing his hands to protect his face.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

“Stop acting,” Dirge says with that weird, fascinated calm. “I’m hurting you.” They snap their hips up, hard, and Astarion howls at the feeling of something finally tearing. He loses it. He claws at their chest, trying to shove them off to no effect. “Scream like I’m hurting you, Astarion.” They dig their claws into his bicep, twisting his arm as their claws on his waist begin to drag and split skin. “Scream for me. I’ve been so curious—”

Curious what Cazador found so attractive about it.

Astarion gives up and he just screams.

He thrashes. He gives up on being ‘good’ because that was, apparently, just foreplay leading into this part where his friend, leader, and former lover fucks him bloody. He shrieks until he’s choking on it, until the screaming frays his voice and it falls apart into raw animal noises of pain timed to the wet slap of flesh on flesh. At some point he hysterically begs ‘master’ to show mercy. Let him use his mouth, his hands, anything but his bleeding, ruined hole

Dirge comes inside him when he does that, flooding his guts with heat and wet that burns his abraded insides. Then they just sit there, sheathed inside him, looking down at him while he lies under them, split open on their cock. It aches. It fucking hurts. Despite this, he’s not too incoherent to understand Dirge getting hard again just looking at him this way. Astarion is allowed to black out for the part where Dirge sits back on their heels, pulls Astarion into their lap and tells him to, “Just lie very still now. Be quiet for me. Perfect. Pretty…”

They spend some time fucking the filth deeper into him.

Vampires, Dirge had said back when they were getting comfortable with eachother, made for such a clean fuck. Nothing in their gut but the necromancy that burns blood like black fuel inside them. Now, they fuck Astarion like they mean to fill that void inside him. They bite him again. Again. Shallow, almost playful, all over, their cock twitching when Astarion screams in response.

“Drink,” Dirge says finally when the blood starts to run sluggish on Astarion’s part.

Astarion obeys, bites them, swallowing with a grateful shudder until regeneration knits broken skin. Leaves him hard again and dizzy as Dirge stares, entranced at his now whole and unbroken skin… then bends down to sink their fangs into the slope where his shoulder meets his neck. They bite deep, fangs lodging in the muscle and bone until blood pours down his chest and back Astarion wails, clawing weakly at their chest..

“Please…” Astarion hears himself begging, like it's far, far away. “You’re hurting me. You said you wouldn’t, you said—”

Astarion doesn’t remember it stopping.

He remembers being dragged. He remembers drinking a healing potion. Remembers blood flooding his mouth again. Remembers the warm flicker of prestidigitation wiping away the mess on his skin. He remembers being on his knees, his thighs spread and sobbing frantically as the slick compound of blood and seminal fluid is allowed to run out of him and down his leg like he’s pissing himself it’s so much. He hasn’t been reduced to this in months. He can’t believe how quickly he’s forgotten how to tolerate it. 

“Why?” He sobs, on his knees. He says, “I thought you liked me.” Then, hysterically, “I thought I could trust you. Why?”

That seems to give Dirge pause.

“I don’t know.”

Then they reach down to  grab Astarion at the jaw. They force his chin up where their cock is beginning, again, to crown from behind their pelvic plates, ignoring Astarion’s attempt to turn away, they force his mouth open around the slit. They hold his head there, make him lick until their sheathed member swells full into Astarion’s throat, choking him as he continues to leak down his thighs.

“I do like you,” they say softly. 

Astarion shoves himself back, coughing and spitting, his hair ripping where it’s caught in their claws. He braces his hands against their thighs to push himself back, panting, “Please stop. Please I don’t want to. Please, don’t do this–”

“I like you so much,” Dirge says, not hearing him. They grip him by the skull, two-handed. “Open for me. Do it now. Be good or else. Be good or I’ll take your last good eye out.” They purr, the chambers of their throat clicking with draconic satisfaction. “Good. So good.” They hold him tighter. “Play dead for me, little star.”

Eventually, they go back to camp and Astarion keeps quieter than he might usually. No one notices particularly, save Shadowheart who asks what’s wrong. He just shrugs and says he and Dirge had a heart to heart and it wasn’t a fun conversation, but going forward things will be more… honest. She seems so encouraged by this revelation that Astarion realizes, dimly, she must have suspected he’d been dishonest about the relationship for some time.

“You seem good for one another,” she says, knocking her shoulder into his. Sisterly and a little fond. “Do they make you happy, Astarion?”

“Don’t get sentimental on me now.” Astarion smiles. Practiced and perfect. “Let’s just say we deserve each other.”

“What are you doing?! NO!”

It’s Shadowheart screaming. 

But she’s not fast enough to stop Astarion from taking Dirge’s hands. (“You’ll have to help me in the end.”) She’s not fast enough to stop Astarion gripping the dagger they are holding, tip pressed half-way through their belly. She can’t stop him driving it straight back into their gut so they can rip their own belly open while Astarion hooks the blade out from their pelvis. This empties the offal and coils of intestine onto the docks between Dirge’s boots. 

Then they start to stab themselves. And over and over and over, driving the dagger higher and higher into the gaping cavity of their torso to destroy what organs still cling to their insides. 

The others are screaming. 

Dirge is not. 

They just gaze down at Astarion, so much bigger than he is that their shadow over him is complete even as they sway, belly hollowed, and the knife hits the deck between them. 

They manage, as the light goes out of their cold blue eyes, to reach up and cup Astarion’s jaw in their hands. Their hands are slick in gore. They gather Astarion’s face near, holding him like he were made of rice paper, and press their forehead against his to nuzzle him.  (Like a big cat, Astartion thinks dimly.) Then the hero that killed the Absolute just… topples forward, taking Astarion to his knees as their corpse folds, then slumps into Astarion’s lap 

Like Dirge decided to lay their great horned head one last time in his hands. 

Astarion can hear the others yelling. 

He senses Shadowheart trying to revive their dead team leader, but there’s this part about a soul being willing to return that’s a core component of revivification magic. Dirge, at least true to their word in this, ignores the call. Astarion doesn’t move, just sits there with his hands cradling their dead lover’s skull, blood-sticky nails trailing idly beneath their headcrest. 

He isn’t really surprised when cracks of radiant fire start to open along his fingers, then race up his arms. He feels the skin along his cheek fracture under the sun as he starts to burn. Astarion doesn’t move. He just watches the sun setting along the horizon and the shimmering stretch of liquid gold it lays along the ocean to the shore. The pain almost feels… cleansing. It’s a good last thing to see in this world, as far as views go. 

Funny, he’d thought it would hurt more. 

But that’s when Wyll casts darkness at the same instant Minthara knee-slides in beside him to throw her cloak over him. She tackles him to the ground, dragging him free of Dirge’s corpse to pin him, fully covered by the cloak to the wood planks. She grips his biceps, holding him chest down the deck, her armored knees penning him in between her legs. 

“Be still,” she says, under her breath before the others reach him. “It’s done. Be still now.”

He doesn’t fight her. He just closes his eyes and waits. Minthara continues to guard him. He listens to Shadowheart and Gale frantically diagnose what charm effect made him do it, then become distressed by any lack of evidence that he was charmed at all. They reason Dirge did it on purpose. They reason it’s what they wanted, that Astarion did what he was asked to to save them from Bhaal. 

Eventually, they coax Minthara away from him but only after she says, cold as a silver blade through cartilage, “Don’t lay the blame with the vampire. He did what he could.”

She refuses to answer further, but lets them near. 

“Why? Astarion, please? Why did you do that?” Shadowheart, one hand on his shoulder, the other combing her pretty fingers through his curls now that it's clear he doesn't need to be restrained. She bends down, her forehead to his temple to whisper in his ear, “Please just tell me…”

“They said they’d rape me to death if I didn’t.”

Shadowheart freezes. 

Astarion doesn’t open his eyes, doesn’t raise his voice. He just says, softly, just to her, “It was hard for them, in the end, not answering to Bhaal.” Astarion starts to hyperventilate, says, “They said they’d gut and rape me over and over if I didn’t help them die–” 

“It’s alright,” Shadowheart says, hushing him. “It’s alright. I’ve got you.” She raises her head. “Wyll? Wyll, where’s Lae’zel? I need her or… or Karlach? Where’s Karlach!? She– No! Gods! Wyll! Halsin! Help her!”

Astarion is fading in and out now. There’s so much commotion. 

“Get him off the fucking docks!” Jaheira. Horrified, commanding. “Gods above. What is happening?” 

Karlach is screaming somewhere. Astarion smells hellfire and burning metal. There’s the sound of wings like thunder and wind. Astarion can’t focus. He’s being hauled to his feet. He looks over his shoulder, despite everything, at the gutted corpse collapsed still beautiful and gleaming white – stunning like a tiger is stunning. Like a great alabaster dragon laid sleeping would be stunning. The last he sees of Dirge is Shadowheart on her knees beside them, drawing their cloak over the corpse and staring helplessly at the blood on her hands.  

There is a long silence as the heroes of Baldur’s Gate, finally, gather together in the guest wing of Ramazith’s Tower. It’s stunningly high-class and luxurious. High ceilings, thick curtains, well appointed imported furniture and the glitter of gold accents and finery. They’re all stinking the place up with the post-battle blood, sweat, and ozone. There’s the faintest whiff of shit, someone's boot having stepped in Dirge’s disemboweled lower intestines at some point and, horrifyingly, there’s this smell – putrid, sweet, almost like burnt steak – that’s almost certainly Astarion’s skin having partially charred and disintegrated onto their clothes. 

Wyll and Karlach are gone. (To the hells.) Lae’zel is gone. (To the Astral.) Halsin isn’t gone, but someone needs to at least try to address and direct their allies and, of all their number, he’s seems most ready to keep moving through the fact that Dirge – their tortured, beautiful leader – stood there and let Astarion gut them in the afterglow of their victory. 

Astarion is drugged up and charmed heavily in another room where Cal and Lia are keeping a nervous watch over him. The rest of their victorious party are here, in this nice sitting room, staining the nice upholstery, unable to find the words to start talking. 

“I don’t understand,” Gale says, at last, breaking the silence. He’s seated on a deep green loveseat, his dark hair stringy and sweat-soaked, his fingers pressed together in a peak as he stares intensely into the middle distance. “I don’t understand why they did that. They still had time. Dirge was strong. They could have–”

“I think they were further gone than we knew,” Shadowheart cuts in softly. 

She hasn’t moved for a while, arms folded, leaning against a set of bookshelves and staring out the window at the sprawl of the city far below. She wipes her eyes and turns at last the what remains of their company – Gale, Jaheira, Minthara. Of them, just one is a face that she set out with from the nautiloid crash and perhaps that’s why she hesitates to apply one more cruelty. 

“Astarion said something to me on the docks.” She moves to the middle of the room to kneel by the pretty coffee table and stare for a moment at the elaborate floral arrangement set in the middle of it. “I understand why Dirge might have killed themselves. What Astarion said to me is what I don’t understand.”

“What did he say?” Jahiera asks tensely. The High Harper stares at her from the door where she’s stood. “For the love of the gods, girl. Out with it.”

“He said that Dirge… he said it was hard for them, in the end, not answering Bhaal’s call.” Shadowheart struggles, then forces herself on. “He said that Dirge threatened to gut and rape him over and over if he didn’t help them die. That’s exactly what he said to me. Word for word or more less.” She shakes her head, again wiping her eyes with a shaky hand. “Gods fuck me, I don’t think he was lying, Gale.”

“That’s not possible,” Gale says. “Dirge was not that far gone. We would have noticed. He can’t have meant it.”

Shadowheart’s jaw tightens. “I think he did, though.”

“No!” Gale says, standing, tossing his hands. “No. That’s not… Dirge would have told us and we would have seen it. We—”

“Even the most observant often dismiss what they do not expect to see,” says Minthara coldly. The drow woman glares from her position near the enchanted fireplace, her arm set against the lintel as she’s been contemplating the everburning flame within. Her lavender eyes flick at last toward the group.  “You did not want to see that your leader was mad. So you did not. Do not discredit your fairy rogue. He did his part.”

There’s an awful pause. 

“What the hells does that mean?” Gale says, quiet and dangerous. “Minthara? What do you mean?”

“Astarion did his part,” she repeats, dropping her chin to stare at the wizard. “He wanted Dirge for the mad dog they were or didn’t they tear his master to pieces and free him? Perhaps not the ending Astarion aspired to, but dead all the same. The Netherbrain too is laid to waste. Your enemies all dead and what did it cost?”

“Gods,” Jaheira says. She turns away. “Gods dammit.” She whirls, pointing. “If you’re lying, drow, I will take your tongue out.”

“Why on earth would I lie?” Minthara says flatly, voice low and irritated. 

“Why on earth wouldn’t you say something?” Shadowheart says, baring her teeth on the words, fingers curling against the table top. “What on earth wouldn’t you do something to help Astarion? If what you’re saying is true then–” she turns away, pale green eyes flickering, remembering– “then what was Dirge doing to him all this time? They were lovers–”

“And Astarion is a professional,” Minthara says with that same cool irritation. “This is why I didn’t tell you people. Acunin at least understood the problem. If you’d found out and turned on Dirge, as he knew you would, this company would have fallen apart and the momentum of our assault on the Absolute would have been broken.” She narrows her eyes, says in a way that’s almost gentle, “Astarion quelled their madness.”

“‘Quelled their madness’?” Gale repeats. “Is that what it was?”

Minthara pinches the bridge of her nose, sighing. “No, wizard, it was a trade off. The rogue let Bhaal’s Chosen have whatever pound of flesh they desired so they might not lose their mind before we finished our task. Do you understand? Am I clear? Dirge killed themselves at the end because this was always the goal for them: to complete the task and die before the madness took them entire.”

“That’s insane–” Shadowheart begins.

“Yes,” snaps Minthara, her low, throaty snarl suddenly vicious. “Exactly. What do you not comprehend? Dirge was insane and Astarion bought them sanity in blood and flesh and for long enough to see the enemy brought down. What is this wallowing? Commend him on an exceptional job and—”

That's when Jaheira punches Minthara in the mouth.

Luckily, Minthara accepts the hit with an uncharacteristic grace and while a fight does break out, the two allow themselves to be broken up without too much fuss when Shadowheart and Gale lunge in between them. Minthara spits blood and glowers while Jaheira goes back to pacing, glaring at the armored drow woman with such loathing that turning into an owlbear and lunging again seems inevitable. 

Gale moves to Minthara, glaring. 

“Are you saying,” he murmurs, “that Astarion let Dirge torture and rape him for the last… however long… so Dirge would keep doing what they were doing to kill the Absolute? That’s explicitly what you’re telling me you saw and did nothing to stop?”

“Correct,” she says, then, “You all do him a disservice by acting like this.”

“We did him a disservice not noticing that the lunatic leading us was tearing him apart!” Gale shouts and for a moment the entire room boils and strains as the Weave itself bows under the wizard’s rage. “You could have helped him! You didn’t! What the fuck is wrong with–?!” It stops abruptly as it began, cut off. Gale steps back, turning away. “This isn’t helping. This… well, they’re dead now, aren’t they? Dirge killed themselves and good riddance.”

“Gale,” Shadowheart says tensely.

“They were a liar and maniac and they were gutting him, Shadowheart. They were torturing him. They were a monster–”

“Of course they were. Just–”

“So why the hells do I wish they hadn’t done this?” Gale snarls. “Why do I want them to be here to answer me? Godsdammit, they were nothing but a stitched together psychopath put here to reign horror on the world. All of this was their fault! Why am I upset over them?”

Silence. No one answers or refutes him. 

Then, Minthara says, steady as stitches in a seam, “They were a monster that clawed every inch for miles, gutting themselves all the way, to act against their nature.” She tilts her head, snow white hair slipping to frame her face. “Yes, Gale, they were a vile, depraved lunatic made for one purpose and they gored Astarion in the name of that purpose. No question.” She smiles, thin and mirthless in a way that makes her seem tired, suddenly. “And despite that, wizard, we all owe them our lives.”

“It’s not right,” Gale says, to himself mostly. He shakes his head. “It’s not right.”

“A useless concept,” Minthara says. “I’m leaving to assist Halsin. Attend Astarion.”

“You’re leaving? Just like that?”

“No, Shadowheart, I am briefly departing to do something useful. I will return and you may tell Astarion so if he finds it a comfort.”

Jaheira laughs. “Why would he find you a comfort?”

“Because it was me he came to when Dirge tore him too deeply.” She doesnt look at the others when she says this, just at the door she’s about to walk through.. “Every time. Over and over. Because he trusted me to take care of it. Not squawk and whine as you all have done.” She grabs the handle of the door, opens it, then pauses. “Tell him I’ll be back. That I have not left. Make sure he knows.” 

And on that confession, Minahra Baenre stalks out of the room. 

Shadowheart has seen Astarion at rest before. 

Of course she has. They’ve been on the road for the better part of a year together. She’s kept many-a watch with the others sleeping and trancing as appropriate for their race. She knew that Astarion tranced badly from the early days of their company. She never mentioned it to the others, but to have nightmares in an elven trance is… deeply unusual. To be ‘lost to grief’ as the wood elves more poetically put it. 

High elves don’t tend to mention it at all, strangely. 

But perhaps, as a half-elf, she was never let in on the secret. 

The point is between her, Lae’zel, and Karlach someone was always on watch to wake him when his recursions went too deep. If they did, he’d start to seize, his body fully convinced of some horror levied against it even as he laid safe by the fire with the rest of them. He’d never scream when he woke up, but you could feel it – the aborted howl behind his teeth. Shadowheart remembers that he seldom rested well… until he and Dirge began sleeping together. 

Not sexually, though that was happening incidentally and frequently, but Dirge bedding down with Astarion like a giant reptilian doberman wrapped around the vampire in a protective coil of sinew and scale. He’d complained about it at first, but submitted to the mortifying ordeal of being cuddled by a giant lizard person. Then he stopped having bad recursions. He started to rest properly. He’d seemed… happy. Shadowheart recalls him laughing in a way that told her, with no other context, she’d never heard his real laugh before. 

She recalls Dirge telling her that, unfortunately, they really liked Astarion. They said it dourly, with that resignation they sometimes did while Shadowheart treated their chronic migraine one morning. 

“He makes me laugh,” they’d said. “Makes me forget this damn headache…”

She recalls, somewhere between their infiltration of Moonrise and arriving at Baldur’s Gate that something changed. 

The nightmares started again. 

Astarion started seizing at night, more violently than ever, until Dirge would wake and curl themselves around him. They’d shake him until he woke fully restrained in their arms. It wasn’t much different than Lae’zel taking care to disarm Astarion before waking him, lest he come to in a panic and attack. Looking back, remembering a particularly bad night, Shadowheart can recall the sound of struggle, muffled crying, and what she thought was delirium from the trance. Astarion’s haggard whisper:

“Don’t touch me. Don’t. Gods, please, I’m tired. I’m tired.” 

She didn’t hear what Dirge said, just saw them pull in closer, curled over almost on top of him to say something she assumed was comforting and Astarion went slack in their arms. That’s the night she remembers. There were countless nights like that. Sitting here now, Astarion laid unconscious on an expensive chaise lounge, she wonders at how peaceful he looks and that it took three layers of calm emotions, charm, and a potion of angelic slumber to knock him out. 

When he was awake, he wouldn’t stop seizing. He spasmed, like he was in a nightmare, over and over…

“He hasn’t moved an inch,” Lia says awkwardly. 

Lia and her brother, Cal, are stood back now by the door. The two are Asmodeus tieflings, ruddy skin and burnt orange irises. Unlike their brother, Rolan, they’re fighters of a kind. Cal’s got a jawline that could cut glass and shoulders that threaten the span of narrower doorways, but he shuffles nervously from foot to foot while his slim, petite-framed sister speaks for them, her shoulders set, gaze steady. 

She’s resting her hands on the pommel of her short sword out of nervous reflex as she says, “I don’t know him particularly well, but can I… can I ask what happened? Is he under a curse? Cuz Rolan has every book on the planet on curses. He could–”

“It’s not that,” Shadowheart says, not moving from where she’s seated next to Astarion on the chaise. “He’s just… we lost Dirge and he didn’t take it well.” Shadowheart arrests the reflex to grimace. “We’re all taking it pretty hard, I’m afraid.”

Cal and Lia exchange wordless horrified looks. 

“Dirge is dead?”

“Yes.” She stares into Astarion perfect, peaceful, expression. “They’re gone.”

“It’s not fair,” Cal says softly. “Someone like them? Not getting out alive?”

They gutted Alfira like a pig and pulled her lungs out while she was alive, Shadowheart thinks, but she says aloud, “Nothing’s fair about this. We’ve saved the world and all it gets us is back to square one. Not better or more just… back.” She carefully closes her hands around Astarion’s slack fingers, so meticulously cleaned of Dirge’s arterial blood and viscera. You’d never know he butchered them and sat in the gore. “Nothing to do but move forward.”

Lia asks, quietly, “Do you need us to stand watch?”

“No. I want to be here when he wakes. It should be me.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Cal says as Lia pulls him away, hushing him. 

“Me too,” Shadowheart says once the door is closed. “I’m sorry too.”

“I can’t thank you enough,” Gale says. “Truly. It’s a blessing not to… have to worry about accommodation or protection at a time like this. Particularly for Astarion. He’s… vulnerable.”

“He's a vampire,” Rolan counters, giving Gale a side-eye. 

“Yes.” Gale coughs. “Still.”

Gale is watching Rolan mill around the main floor of the mage tower, sorting through stacks of books in a kind of nervous need for productivity, ignoring the plumes of smoke and the wreckage of nautiloid ships through the balcony doors beyond. Gale would feel poorly about not running about the city helping… but he figures cutting the head off the snake, so to speak, is contribution enough for the day. He’s tired. He’s… scraped thin and sapped for power.

He’s up for very little but this: leaning against one of the shelves he’s reasonably sure Rolan isn’t using and watching the younger wizard restlessly pick stacked books from a nearby table and wander the shelves to place them.

 “I admit,” Rolan says a little arch, “when you said you wanted to use the tower for respite, I didn’t think it was for the purposes of keeping, ah, your friend from the sun, but I can change some of the filters on the window enchantments.” He shelves the books carefully then pauses. “In retrospect, his being a vampire seems…”

“Obvious?” Gale says, amused, folding his arms.

“Vampires don’t walk in the sun,” Rolan says defensively. “Hardly a slight on me not to notice when I’ve exchanged, all told, two words with the man.” A mutter. “The words were ‘buzz off’, if I recall…” 

Gale likes Rolan. Hell, he liked Rolan the day he met him arguing with his siblings in the Emerald Grove and nervously cocky about his wizarding apprenticeship. Gales likes him just as well now, flustered and trying not to be about the fact that the various heroes of Baldur’s Gate are gathered in his guest wing and one of them is absolutely a member of the blood-sucking undead. He’s taking it well in stride. 

Changing the subject, Gale says, “I assume you’ve advanced your studies since our last tutoring session?”

Rolan clears his throat, looking away. 

“Lorroakan, uh, didn’t allow me much time for individual study given his… habits.” The younger wizard stares briefly, unseeing, into the middle distance then seems to realize he’s done so, coughs, and pretends to take interest in a book on the shelf nearby. (The Mating Habits of Flumps) “I did manage to follow your direction on the forms you showed me. Thank you for that, it was… helpful on the road to Baldur’s Gate.”

“You’ll have to demonstrate sometime,” says Gale, entirely pretending not to notice how Rolan’s red skin paled and his shoulders tensed at the mention of Lorroakan. “As I said, with formal study I imagine you’ll progress with shocking speed.” Then, when the other wizard says nothing, just stares at the spine of the book he’s holding, Gale says, calmly, “I meant what I said: I think you’ve an instinctive grasp on the Weave, my friend.”

“Well, I’m no archmage,” Rolan says, finally shelving the book. “But I thank you.”

Gale thinks there was a time, not very long ago, where Rolan would have happily accepted any compliment to his arcane ability as true. Gales idly ponders reviving Lorroakan’s dead, broken, corpse just long enough to stomp his skull into the floor himself. The hubris of wizards is a trap Gale himself has fallen into, but so much of the Weave is will power and imagination. 

Confidence. 

He worries that Lorroakan has cracked Rolan’s. 

“Lorroakan was a beast and a killer,” Gale says at last. “I’m sure someone has said it, but I haven't…” He exhales. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry he was a monster and no one… suspected. I knew the man’s work and I’d heard him speak in academic circles. I knew he was an ass but I never thought. If I had, for even a second, I would have said something to you, I–”

Rolan looks at him, baffled and a little annoyed. 

“Not to be rude, but where in his essays on trans-location did he mention that he liked to hunt demigods to feed on their immortality, and, oh yes, beat his apprentices to death?” 

Rolan gestures somewhat irritated to the tower and books at large. 

“Well…” Gale says, sheepish. 

Rolan rolls his strange eyes, black all the way through, save the bright gold in the iris.

“Hells, Dekarios, I know I’m not formally schooled like you, but I don't think the halls of higher education require deranged sexual preferences – I mean, personal failings in their citations.” Rolan clears his throat again, loudly, again completely committed to filing the books away but the previously relaxed length of his tail is now snaking anxiously around his ankle. “Anyway, it’s not your fault,” he said, more forcefully than necessary. “Don’t worry about it and I thank you for killing the man, strange a favor as that seems.”

If Gale were an expert conversationalist and not simply a man who loves a run-on-sentence, he might have a deft and socially smooth redirect, something easy going and snappy to both acknowledge he heard that, but is happy not to talk about right now in this moment where Rolan clearly let something slip he hadn’t meant to. Yes. That universe sounds great. The universe where’s he’s not staring at Rolan like a fucking twat. 

“Fuck,” Rolan says after the silence goes too long. He regards the ceiling like a man irate with the gods, then finally looks Gale in the eye. “Don’t tell Lia.”

Gale, fully off kilter, says, “What?”

“What I just said. Forget it. Don’t tell Lia. Not… not that I thought you, you know, would go around talking about it. Just don’t–” Rolan covers his now deeply red face with his hand (you wouldn’t think an Asmodeus teifling could flush any redder, but you’d be wrong). “Just please forget what I said. I was joking.”

“That’s a terrible joke,” Gale says. 

“I know. I’m… bad at jokes,” Rolan mutters, turning away. 

Gale gives up. “Rolan…”

“I said forget it.” Rolan stalks off and slams the stack of books still in his hands to the top of a table. “It’s not important. We just… there’s a big dead elder brain out there. There’s… smoke.” He gestures toward the various signs of fire and destruction in the city beyond. “This doesn’t matter.”

“You’d be surprised what matters when the world’s not in danger,” Gale says quietly.

Rolan stands there a moment, tail coiling anxiously. “Just…  I apologize. I don’t know why I said that to you.”

Gale is quiet. Then, “I don’t have personal experience with this, but I rather imagine it would be a relief to make sure people understand what you’ve been through? And for what it’s worth, the people who care for you would want to know. They’d want to help.”

“I’d rather have privacy,” Rolan snaps, glaring at the table where his hands are braced against the wood. “I’d rather no one knew at all. I wish he’d died and no one ever found out  but, like I said, I’m bad at jokes and sometimes…” He shakes his head. “If I joke about it, maybe Cal won’t ask why I stayed.”

Gale moves away from the book shelves he’s leaned against, carefully making his way to stand at the end of the desk where Rolan is, making no moves to get nearer or do anything that could be misconstrued. He thinks back – his excellent memory reviewing the previous conversations he’s had with Rolan – the young man’s face when he first saw him behind the counter of Sorcerous Sundries, his eyes flickering at questions about his wounds, the quick-fake smile (so like Astarion’s) as he’d said, “Lorroakan’s a difficult master…”

“I’m not Cal,” Gale says decisively. “I’m not your family. I’ve no one to tell your secrets to. I imagine I’ll away to Waterdeep soon, so, if it's any relief to you, I’d listen, if you’d like.”

Rolan doesn’t look at him. 

He just stands there, glaring at the wood between his palms until his claws dig into the lacquer. Gale waits. All told, Rolan was under Lorroakan’s power for about three months. Gale wonders, dimly, if the reason Lorroakan was so vicious had anything to do with the fact that Gale, in an impulsive moment at the Emerald Grove, had shared his personal technique for amplifying spells with Rolan. Expecting little, and being shocked when the amateur tiefling wizard – covered in road dust, his spellbook a hand-bound and disguised as cookbook cover – immediately grasped the concept. 

Gale wonders about Rolan, excited and so alone, showing up at Ramazith’s Tower – three spells of his own invention in his notes, using Gale’s techniques to up-cast like an archmage might – and Lorroakan deciding to crush a fledgling rival in the most vicious way possible. What would drive a monster to destroy and consume a thing he coveted. Jealousy? Rage? Some emotion Gale can’t access or fathom?

Is he ever going to understand the monsters that devour his allies?

Gale says nothing as the silence goes on, then, “I know this trick for increasing the output of a chain lightning spell. Would you like to learn it?”

Rolan turns, startled. “What?”

“Chain lightning,” Gale repeats, blinking. “Do you want to learn a trick for casting it?

“I don’t… I haven’t learned that one yet.”

“Then I’ll show you.” Gale strides away from the desk, imperiously calling back, “I haven’t got any magic left for the day, but you do. Humor me.” He crosses the room, stretching nonchalantly. “Goodness knows I need the distraction.”

“Well, if you need the distraction.” Rolan jumps a step to follow him to the main level, trailing near behind him. “I still don’t need a teacher, you know, I’ll figure this out on my own. I’ve just been busy helping your lot save the world. Not much time for study.”

“Rolan, left to your own devices, I’ve no doubt you’ll take the world over. But today: how to cast lightning spells and not electrocute yourself. Self protection to start.”

When Astarion wakes up, Shadowheart is sitting next to him and the first thing she says, softly, is, “Hey. Minthara says she’ll be back soon. You’re alright. Please don’t move just yet. Not until I say?”

Astarion looks groggily around the room. He’s laid out on some kind of couch, dressed still in the dark, form-fit leather armor that he wore to the final battle. That feels unreal because he’s clean, unharmed, the leathers neat and supple-dark on his body. He’s been disarmed, he notes (not completely, they missed the hidden blade in his boot) and someone has put a soft little pillow behind his head just so, laid his hands over his stomach, arranged his legs so his knees are drawn up slightly and leant against the back of the couch. 

He feels… cozy almost. The room here is dark save a window through which diffused light, like an overcast sky, comes through a foggy glass. There’s a fire going in a small hearth. Shadowheart is partially out of her armor, her breast plate and tassets set aside so she’s dressed down to her chain mail and padded shirt. She’s clean too. A kiss of prestidigitation to wipe out all evidence of wrongdoing. Her hair shines like silver. 

Astarion idly reaches to flick the tip of her braid, hanging and available over her shoulder. 

“You look like a real high elf now,” he rasps, apropos of nothing. “Finally.”

“Shut up,” she says, laughing a little. 

He realizes she has her fingers tucked in around the palm of his left hand, holding it. Astarion lets recall crawl over him like an unpleasant lover until its weight reminds him of what’s happened, pieces of the most recent reality settling their claws fresh in his brain. 

“I killed Dirge,” Astarion says, almost conversational. 

Shadowheart says nothing for a moment. She just runs her thumb over the back of Astarion’s knuckles, rubbing little circles into his skin as she thinks how to respond. Astarion watches her. She’s so beautiful, he wonders sometimes that Dirge didn’t choose her to tell their secrets. He fantasizes for a little while, horribly, about the world where it was Shadowheart, not him, the Dirge sank their teeth into. 

“Did I ever tell you,” Shadowheart says, “the first time I met them they didn’t know how to introduce themselves to me?” She studies Astarion’s hand in hers, like it's interesting. “They didn’t have a name, you see, and they were too addled to pretend otherwise so we didn’t call them anything for a while. Just… ‘friend’.” She waits to see Astarion’s reaction. “Later, when we met up again, right before we found you, I asked them once more if they’d like to be called something particular.”

“Dirge wasn’t their name?” Astarion asks dimly, too numb to feel surprise exactly. His thoughts feel cotton-y and weird. “I thought it was their stupid pseudonym. Like Shadowheart. And ‘Blade of Frontiers’.”

“Fuck you gently,” Shadowheart says with a grin but it’s a watery grin. “No.”

“Why ‘Dirge’?”

“Because when I asked them how they felt, what they wanted, they just said that they ‘felt something for all the dead’. When I asked what, they wouldn’t answer.”

“Well, darling, what they felt for the dead was the impulse to fuck and eat them but do go on,” Astarion says thickly. 

Shadowheart does not rise to his bait. “Perhaps, but at the time I thought it was sadness. So… in my melodrama…”

“Oh gods above, you proposed ‘Dirge’ as their name?”

“A lament for the dead,” she says dryly. “Maybe I was wrong. Maybe not.” She grips Astarion’s hand a little tighter, until her grip hurts his fingers enough to be a comfort. “I think they regretted their kills, sometimes. On their good days.” Her eyes are so pale, green, focused on him with such complete and terrible comprehension of everything that he is right now that Astarion wants to scream as she says, gently, “They were hurting you, weren’t they? Since Moonrise?”

“Yes.”

“They were torturing you.”

“Yes.”

“Did they kill you?”

“Yes.”

“More than once?”

“Yes.”

Shadowheart’s composure cracks then. 

“Do you want to tell me any of this, Astarion? You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. What do you want?”

He thinks, then, “I kind of want to bite you, if I’m honest. I’m very tired and hungry.”

She blinks, huffs, and for the first time in their travels offers him her wrist. “Fine. But no funny business just because you’re hurt.”

He doesn't take much from her, just enough to get that rush of regeneration, every cell in his body reacting to that first deep draw of arterial blood, sweet as dark chocolate and laced with something that makes his brain flower bright with pleasure. Astarion stops drinking when the first bloom of heat recedes, carefully removing his fangs and lapping the lingering red. (Reflex. On reflection, licking her was probably rude.) The punctures are gone by the time she inspects her wrist, rubbing his saliva away with a curious frown. 

“What?” he says, feeling properly sedated again. He runs his fingers through his hair, enjoying the extra sensory shiver. “Not gentle enough?”

“Hurts less than I thought,” she says. 

He shrugs. 

Then he says, “Dirge killed me sometimes if I didn’t do a good enough job pretending I was dead for them.” He lays his head back, looking at the ceiling to say, conversationally, “Honestly, I preferred it when they fucked my empty corpse. They, uh, were selfish in bed. To put it mildly and by the end there it was all they could do not vivisect me and hump my organs until they climaxed, sooooo…”

Shadowheart does a good job not flinching. 

“What else?” she says after a moment. 

Astarion contemplates the ceiling, which is getting blurry. 

“Foreplay, by the time we got to Baldur’s Gate, was fucking me dry, coming inside me, and making me take a healing potion.” He drums his fingers against his own stomach, listening to the blunt tap of his fingertips against the leather. “Afterward, they’d hold me and tell me they were sorry.” He blinks, feels cold wetness run down his temples into his hair. “Honestly, they were so bloody nice about that, it was my favorite part of being with them– how nice they’d be to me after they did something horrifying.”

Shadowheart’s grip on his hand feels white-knuckled. 

“What else?”

“Honestly, love, it’s just more of the same. Do you really want to hear all this?”

“No,” she says blankly. “I want none of it to have happened at all. I want to have noticed and stopped them. I want to kill them myself. I don’t know what the fuck to feel or say other than we failed you, Astarion. You were… you were right in front of us and we didn’t see it.” She stares at him, blank-faced. “How could we not see what was happening? What the fuck is wrong with us?”

Astarion feels a lurch at that. Of rage and hysteria at once. He bites down on that feeling until its spine snaps like rat-bone and he gets control of his face. 

“Well, dear, you wouldn’t be the first in two-hundred years not to notice what’s right in front of them. And to be fair, I am a fantastic actor.” He studies his hand laid over the top of his knee, turning it to look into his palm. “I’m glad you never found out. It would have ruined everything. They would have come apart and the seams and tried to kill the others or themselves. Honestly, Shadow-dear, this is the best possible outcome. We’re all alive and they, like our enemies, are dead. Happily ever after and all that”

Shadowheart doesn’t rise to that either, but she asks, quietly, “How long were they planning to kill themselves?”

“Hmm, since Orin. After we killed Orin, they got… worse.”

Shadowheart tenses. Then, “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

“If I don’t tell someone, I might gut myself just to get it out of me, darling, so I might as well.” He laughs, but it warps into something else so he has to stop. “I just… I hate to say it, but they did love me enough not to butcher me completely. That’s what’s so awful about it.  All the horror, that was them loving me. That was the best they could do–”

“Astarion?”

“Hmm? Oh.” He thinks. “You know, usually I’m not one for it, but in this very specific case, I can be persuaded–”

Shadowheart hugs him. 

She’s no Karlach, but she’s strong and her grip around him feels more like armor than the leathers and magics wrapped around his body. She hugs him so hard, her face against his neck and shoulder feels a little painful, the bridge of her nose and the jut of her chin jammed against his collarbone, her fingers at his back dug in under the gaps in his armor to press into his actual flesh. Astarion lets her hug sink in, his head turned against hers. His cheek pressed into the spot at the back of her hair, his nose in her hair. She smells like dust and rosewater. 

The first sob hits him low in the gut, like a blow, so he’s gasping but he swallows it. 

“It’s okay,” she murmurs. “You can.”

The second sob has company, rushes out of Astarion in a hysterical string, like ribbon yanked out through his throat until he actually gags, retching on his own grief and revulsion until he can’t swallow any of it. Until he’s clutching at Shadowheart and curling into her, his whole chest racked by convulsions he can’t stop as he starts to cry properly, guttural and ugly for the first time in nearly half a year. No need to muffle it, no fear that his screaming is going to arouse more vile followthrough. 

Astarion just… falls the fuck apart. 

Shadowheart climbs onto the chaise with him to hold him together while it happens, her soft fingers tangled in his hair, cradling the back of his head like he’s a goddamn child and he’d bite her for the fucking condescension  except he doesn’t want it to stop. The first genuinely gentle, honest touch he’s had with no lie left between him and receiving it. Shadowheart hushes him, but doesn’t try to quiet him. She lets him clutch at her and if it hurts, she gives no indication. 

When he screams into her shoulder, she just lets him. 

When he asks her, finally, in the grip of full hysteria, “Why though? Why didn’t you notice?”

She says, “I thought they loved you.” She strokes her fingers through his hair, combing gently, soothing as she says, “I couldn’t… conceive of it. I’m so sorry. I’m so, so fucking sorry. I’m sorry. I thought they loved you.” And when he shudders, she presses her lips to the shell of his ear to whisper, urgent, almost furious, “It wasn’t love, Astarion. What they had, it wasn’t. It wasn’t. That’s why I couldn’t see it. I thought they loved you but it wasn’t love. I’m so so sorry. I should have seen it…”

Astarion can’t remember everything he says after that, only that Shadowheart absorbs all of it, defends herself for none of it and takes all the blame. Like she herself held the knife. Like it was her mouthful fangs that tore him. Like every vile thing he says to her while still clinging to her like a frightened child is just venom she’s drawing from a wound. Clerical work. Healing work. She holds him even when he says he should hurt her. She just holds him. 

He doesn’t hurt her. 

He just wants to know she won’t hurt him back. 

“I’ve got you,” she says. “I’m not going anywhere.” 

Shadowheart lets Astarion lie on top of her, draped between her legs like a lover, just hugging her, tucked in against her, his head buried against the cold chainmail covering her chest. It’s incredibly uncomfortable for both of them. He’s still in his battle kit. Laying back on the chaise, her mail is probably riding up her back, but she just grips him more tightly than ever and makes no move to go anywhere even as the hours tick by. 

“I’ll stay as long as you need. As long as you want. Whatever you want,” she says again, for the dozenth time. 

“Promise,” he says. “You have to–”

“I promise. I swear it by my lady of silver – I will stay with you, Astarion.”

Astarion doesn’t remember anything after, passing into a trance just to escape his own skin for a moment. He tries to think of nothing but those days where Shadowheart would sit and heal his wounds after battle, meticulous and professional and unintentionally the most gentle, intimate, and un-demanding physical contact he’s had in some two-hundred years of violence. A cleric. Just doing her job. (Pathetic.) But he buries himself in that because there’s no other comfort to recall now. Just Shadowheart’s hands and the memory of the sun. 

At least the sun he has in perfect recall. 

At least the sun he can go back to.

And Astarion rests, finally, not easily, but he rests.