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It wasn’t their regular haunt, but it was still one of the finer taverns in Baldur’s Gate. They’d had plans of finding a good table and drinking the night away with tales and merriment, until they saw the person up at the bar.
Or to be more precise, the way they reacted to Astarion.
They were dressed in fine black garb, shoulders glinting with a magistrate’s chain of office. They had been sipping at a glass of red wine, but when they turned and saw Astarion, they set the glass down on the bar and stared.
The magistrate slipped off the bar stool and walked straight across the room towards Astarion. They were fine-boned and not so tall as him, but their stare could have bored a hole through granite.
“You.” The single word was a condemnation.
Astarion, too, seemed to recognise them. Yet he said – or rather stammered, “I – I’m afraid I don’t recall.”
“Go to hell. I don’t care which one.”
They shoved past him and out of the tavern door.
“Friend of yours?” asked Gale.
Astarion’s shoulders hunched. His face twisted between anger, loss, and shame. “It’s complicated,” he said.
*
Karlach found Astarion on the tavern’s balcony. He’d closed the curtains after going out there, hiding him from the rest of the room, and it had taken a process of trial and error to track him down after he slipped away.
He was cradling a bottle of something which looked like gin.
Karlach squeezed herself through the balcony doors and settled down into the remaining space on the balcony, which wasn’t easy with the length of her legs.
“So,” said Karlach. “You and the hot magistrate?”
“I am not nearly drunk enough for this conversation.”
“You’ve had most of the bottle.” And it was far from characteristic for Astarion to drink anything other than blood or red wine. Blood to live, wine for fun… and apparently, gin when he wanted to get properly and thoroughly drunk.
Astarion took another swig. “I don’t remember, alright?”
“You seemed to recognise them.”
“But I don’t remember. I can’t – I can only remember patches, from before I was turned. I don’t know who they were to me, I can only guess. All I do know is that I was with one of my first marks – he was hanging off my arm – when they came up to me. They were furious. I couldn’t remember who they were or how I knew them, and I knew if it got back to Cazador that there was someone from my old life… someone who’d cared about me… he’d have them killed. So instead, I pretended not to know them. Which upset them a great deal. I told the mark that they were a desperate ex-partner, and the evening went on. I didn’t see them again until today.”
“You think, when they saw you with that man – you think they were jealous? That they were dating you when you were alive?”
“That’s what I think,” said Astarion bitterly, taking another long draught of gin. “But I have no way to know.”
“Y’know, you could always ask.”
“They would never speak to me. I left them with… quite the set-down. I strongly suspect I broke their heart.”
Astarion went to take another swig from the bottle, but Karlach took it away from him before he could.
“Nope. You’ve had way too much as it is, even for a dead man.”
“Karlach, I was drinking that.”
She took a swallow from the gin herself. “Yeah? And are you still sober enough to stand?”
Astarion’s response was simply to look away from her and down at the dark streets.
“Alright,” said Karlach, “Let’s get you to your room.”
She slung one of Astarion’s arms across her shoulders and stood, pulling him up with her. Yep, he was definitely too drunk to stand. Karlach found herself impressed that he’d been able to string a sentence together.
With one hand keeping his arm across her shoulders, the other at his waist, Karlach walked Astarion to his room.
*
The servant was human; she hadn’t even been born when Mara’s heart was broken, so the maid didn’t know what she was saying when she told Mara, “Astarion Ancunín here to see you, magistrix.”
Mara barely had time to bite back the urge to tell the maid to go fuck herself – it really wasn’t the maid’s fault – when Astarion entered the room.
Instead, Mara told the maid they did not want to be disturbed, and waited for the door of their study to be closed before they rose from their chair, walked around their desk to face Astarion and said, slowly and with venom, “You owe me one hell of an explanation.”
After all he’d done to them, there was something strangely delicate in his eyes. “I suppose I do.”
“‘Suppose’ has nothing to do with it. Two centuries, Astarion!” They had taken other lovers over the years. Not that it had lasted. Not that it caused the bitterness of Astarion’s betrayal to fade.
“I was –” he began, “I am…” He looked down, then back up at them. His face became serious and remote. “I was turned by the vampire Cazador Szarr. I can’t – I don’t remember much of what happened before I was turned, but when you approached me all those years ago… You were so angry. I couldn’t remember who you were, but I remembered some – feelings. And I knew if Cazador knew I’d made contact with you, he’d probably have you killed in front of me. So I was cold, and cruel, and I pretended not to know you. I know I must have hurt you.”
“You did.”
“What were we, Mara?”
He used their name as if it were unfamiliar. As if he’d only just learned it.
“You really don’t remember,” Mara stated. They sighed. “We went through training as magistrates together. We were acquaintances, nothing more. Halfway through our final year, you started sitting in front of me in every lecture. You’d run your fingers along my desk before you sat down, as if you weren’t even thinking about it. Later, you said it was because you wanted me to notice your hands.
“After we became magistrates, that very first day, you came to eat lunch with me in my office. You ate lunch with me every day for a tenday, and I realised you were courting me. You took me on a walk by the river. Admitted that you’d wanted me for a while, but you knew I’d never want a relationship while I was studying to be a magistrate, so you knew it had to wait until we qualified. But now that we were magistrates, we could do what we liked.
“Things… progressed from there. You proposed after we’d been together five years. I told you it was too soon for us to marry; you said it wasn’t about being married yet, we could wait decades for that. You said it was that you wanted us to be engaged. So I said yes. And then a few years later you were dead and I was burying you.”
Mara turned away from him, then looked back. “I buried you. I mourned. Then a decade later, I was watching you hang off the arm of some – some man, flirting at him. Alive.” They glanced at the scars on Astarion’s neck, his red eyes. “Or not alive, I suppose.”
“We were going to marry,” said Astarion, his eyes wide, breathless.
“Eventually.” Mara looked away, then back at him. “Cazador Szarr is dead. What did he do to you?”
“I…” Astarion sounded half-choked. “He made me…” Then Astarion swallowed and drew himself up. “He ordered me to seduce people. So that they’d come back with me. To him. Two centuries on my back. Punishment if I did not obey. Punishment even if I did obey.”
Astarion looked like he wanted to curl up in shame. Mara took two steps forward and hugged him.
For a moment, Astarion did not move, until he tentatively hugged them back, resting his head on their shoulder.
“So this is what I get?” he asked wretchedly, “No more anger, no more blame?”
“This is what you get.” He wasn’t the same man Mara had loved. But he was the closest they could get to holding the Astarion they had known in their arms.
“I am your lover’s corpse.”
“I know.” Mara rubbed circles on his back, felt the texture of unfamiliar scars through the fabric of his tunic. “You’re not him. You’re not him.”
*
Over the following tendays, Mara helped Astarion fill in the blanks.
They took him to the halls where they had studied to become magistrates, and showed him the rooms that used to be their offices before Astarion died and Mara was promoted. They took him on the walk by the river where he’d once taken them.
Astarion found he couldn’t remember. Sometimes he thought he might have caught at something – the scent of polished wood, the warmth of an embrace that he thought might have been Mara’s flesh against his. But nothing solid. Nothing to bring every memory back.
He supposed that his mind might not want to remember. It would mean remembering what he’d lost.
Somehow the meetings with Mara turned into sharing a glass of wine in the evenings after sundown, as they talked through everything the great and the good and the far-from-great and the definitely-not-good were doing in the city.
It made him wish he could remember more of Mara. Their attractions were obvious now – intelligence, accomplishment, steel, a handsome face. A warm embrace, not that there had been a repeat of that particular moment.
But what had made him want to be with Mara at first? When they were both just magistrates-in-training, trying their hardest to make the cut. Had there been a particular moment, or had desire crept up on him casually?
“What did I look like?” he asked Mara one evening, “When I was alive?”
Mara regarded him. “You were always pale, but not so pale as you are now. The eyes are different, obviously. And the teeth. But you’re not so different. It’s true what they say, that vampires are unchanging.”
“What colour were my eyes?” Astarion asked, trying to seem casual.
“Hazel. You really don’t remember?”
“Not at all. I try to remember my face, but it’s just this… vague shape in my past. Nothing sharp enough to discern.”
“Wait here,” Mara said.
They left the room, and Astarion heard them walk along one corridor and up the stairs.
Some minutes later, they returned, holding something in one hand.
Mara drew close to Astarion and showed him what they were holding.
It was a portrait miniature, which opened on hinges to depict a beautiful elven man with white curls and bright hazel eyes.
“Oh,” murmured Astarion, “Oh, gods. I…”
It was him, it had to be him. Yet there was a carefree happiness in the portrait’s eyes which Astarion knew he had lost a long time ago.
Mara pressed the miniature into Astarion’s hands. “Keep it. I’ve had a copy made, but this is the original. I thought you could use it more than I.” They let out a gentle breath of regret. “I used to have more of your things, but… I threw it all out when I saw you with that man. All your embroidery. I’m sorry… I just didn’t want to see anything which reminded me of you. And you were buried in your chain of office, so I don’t have that, either.”
“I know,” said Astarion, still cradling his portrait. “Cazador never gave us any money, so I sold it when my clothes wore out and I needed to buy more. One link at a time.”
“There’s nothing left of it?”
He gave a small shake of his head. “None at all.”
“I’m sorry for that too. I remember how proud you were when we graduated. Couldn’t stop grinning, but I think I was the same.”
Astarion snapped the miniature shut and stowed it in his pocket. “Thank you, for this.” Then he swallowed in the silence and said, “I’m not him, Mara. I know you know I’m not him. What do he and I even have in common, anyway? The same face? A penchant for embroidery? A knowledge of Baldurian law? There’s nothing much else, there can’t be. I’m… not him. No matter how much I’d like to be.”
For the barest moment, he could see what might have been. Himself and Mara, happily married. A day working in their offices, before they walked home arm in arm, chains clinking at their shoulders as they went. Dinner together, then he would take out his embroidery in the last of the evening light as Mara read a book. Then they’d go to bed. The picture of domestic happiness.
“I know,” agreed Mara. “You’re not him. I’m not foolish enough to think you are.”
“Quite right. You’re far too sensible to do that. Even if you’re associating with me, which – well. I may have saved Baldur’s Gate, but I’m far from reputable.”
“Yes,” replied Mara, not drawing away from him at all. “If I were in any way insecure in my position, I wouldn’t associate with you at all.”
For a moment they just stared at each other, Mara breathing, Astarion, not.
Then they drew together very carefully and kissed. The kiss was like an ache, like a gentle request, a question.
When they pulled back, Astarion admitted, “I don’t really know what I’m doing. The last person I was with – romantically, I mean – was you.”
“I think,” Mara said, with infinite tenderness, “It’s been more than enough time, for us to be able to call it a blank slate.”