Chapter Text
The familiar smell of earth and the cloying musty damp brings you no comfort during your descent. The walls are close enough to touch, and the ground both thuds and squelches subtly beneath your feet, so you don't know if you are sinking or stomping. Your pack is heavy with talismans and food and not with coin. Some bolts of fabric for Astarion. After all, he does get awfully bored these days.
A feeling of anxiety roots itself so deep it becomes a sinking feeling in your heart. Every step feels like a mile, and you pity Astarion.
Pity. In all of the things he’s told you, all the horrors you’ve witnessed about him, you’ve never felt pity. Yet it creeps in under the power of your own hand. You left him. Maybe he’s already gone. Never mind that he loves that little house with all his heart; he could be gone. 8 days is a long time. Long enough for doubt and fear and pain to creep in, the same way dread has crept into your own.
The path gets familiar slowly. The branch that was hacked away to form a new path. Footsteps from your own boots preserved in mud. The only sound is the rustling of beasts unseen and the hurried exhales to avoid panic. Travelling alone is dangerous, the adventurers from earlier having remained in the town you had travelled to, but you fear not the beholders or possible bandits. Only the damaged caused by your careless, silly fantasy that there was a life beyond the damp dark where sharp teeth cling to flesh and cloth.
An exit off the well-worn trail. The ribbon from your hair that you and Astarion had tied around the branch of a scraggly deeproot tree on the way to your first home. He had kissed you slow and sweet, and you hadn’t even realized he was untying your hair until it fell in front of your face with a cling to your eyes, and he was wrapping the snow-white ribbon around the branch.
The ribbon is no longer white. Beige, maybe. Grey or brown. No longer pristine. No longer a reminder of the pure and simple love held between you and your vampiric partner, rather a marker of failed chances at partnership and a physical symbol of how far you’ve fallen into despair.
A left up the road. It’s where you had planted a garden, hoping that the magic dead zone from the deeproot tree would allow plants to grow. It didn’t. The boxes lay unplanted, as there was no point in spending the energy gardening if the harvest was not going to happen. Months of building left to decay.
A right turn next. You can see the house from here. It’s intact. Still. It’s here he picked you up, sweeping you off your feet despite your protests. He wanted to do it "properly." You had wanted to pick him up, but he beat you to it, arms under your knees, one around your ribs. His nose next to your chin, where he had nipped at your jaw, only to be swatted away.
Is there such a thing as too still? The house seems flawless, utterly alone. Was it always that colour? Shouldn’t there be smoke from the chimney, or is it too hot? It feels like a painting. Pristine. Untouchable. And not yours. Never yours. Maybe not his either, but you have left him there.
The porch seems a far more forgivable spot than at the foot of the stairs leading up. At least here the imperfections are visible. The slight crack in the window. The door you painted yellow as a joke that ended up being a reason to keep going. A hand raised to knock. An exhaled prayer that you know will go unanswered. The sun cannot reach you here. There is only penance for things you do not regret in a court of feelings and fear.
And the door swings open.