Chapter Text
My love,
I know you have tried to be content with our life in Waterdeep, but I feel as though the number of my years are growing smaller. Though I may be considered some silly dalliance of yours, a tale to speak in your future, I hope to be a tale you remember fondly.
Thus, I have left on a journey. We have so very little time together, and I know the sunsets and sunrises were always your favourite; I want you to bask in them every day of your life. I want you to know the comfort of the warmth that you give to me, and the closest power that could offer that is the sun in the sky above.
Loving you has been as easy as breathing, Astarion, and if you are able to watch a sunrise even one more time, then loving you would be worth my last breath.
Yours always,
Gale Dekarios.
♡
Oh, and how Astarion decides on a sunny Thursday morning that he despises Gale. He decides this in a spur of the moment as he scrubs a shirt in a wash bin, and has to yank the curtain closed when his hand sizzles. A heavy, dark cloak isn’t even enough to save him from the sun that glares down on Waterdeep, and he curses every godly power he can think of that he is trapped.
Yours always, his letter said, so why did it sound like he was willing to forfeit it? Astarion is not Mystra, and he would never ask Gale to bring himself harm for anything in the world, not these days — and perhaps that is why the wizard had been so eager to do so.
Astarion would never ask him to.
He fumes the entire day, even snapping at poor Tara, who had been lounging on a bookcase. He paces and swears and accuses everything he can think of for taking the one thing he cared for away from him. He will never have anything, and it feels as though bile rises in his throat, but perhaps that is the lump forming as unshed tears well.
The door opens just as the sunset has begun, and Astarion readies a dagger in his hand as he glares at the door. Ready to curse Gale out, ready to swear and scream bloody murder about his ominous fucking message, you asshole, when he watches silvery-white hair and green eyes peek in.
“Shadowheart.” The name feels foreign on his tongue after so long, and he struggles to replace the mask he’d dropped in all of his preparation, but she has already seen past his charade. “What in the hells are you doing here?”
A heavy sigh has her shoulders dropping as she glances out the door, and then back at him as she presses it shut. “Gale sent a letter to Baldur's Gate,” she explains, setting a bottle of wine on the counter, “I had my hands full, and couldn’t very well drop everything at the first contact. I sent him a reply asking what the matter was, but he never responded.”
They stand in the same room, tensions high, for the first time in years.
He knows Gale has exchanged letters with all of their past party members, but he’d only listened to them, nursing a glass of wine, sprawled out on their shared bed. He’d acquiesced to his name being signed on a few, even, but he had never written them. He had never written her.
“Astarion,” she begins, and then pauses for a long moment, “where is Gale?”
“Gods if I know.” The laugh that leaves his mouth is bitter and unhumourous. “He seems to think his death will bring me happiness or something. All he left for me was a letter, and he was gone in the early morning.”
He sinks down to sit against one of their many bookshelves near the bottom of the tower — some of their more mundane reading topics. Fiction, and all of the easy starters to magic and gods that Gale allows the local children to borrow. The tears sting at his eyes without permission.
“What did the letter say exactly?”
“Something about the fucking sun.” He mutters the words as he tucks himself further in, as small as possible.
Shadowheart pauses. She presses her hands together, and then links her fingers, and takes a deep breath. It looks like she’s fighting impatience, and he doesn’t care. “Astarion, how long have you been dead?”
He considers it. A little mental math, and then he offers up, “One-hundred and ninety-six years.”
“Two hundred. You always said two centuries. Why didn’t you…”
“Yes, well, I have my preference for the dramatics as well as any other. Rounding up felt like the easier feat than explaining I was one-hundred and ninety,” he pushes himself back up to his feet the minute he spots the moon outside, “and if you’ll excuse me, I have a wizard to kill myself.”
She slams a hand on the door to halt him.
“He’s trying to resurrect you.”
“How darling. Move aside,” he waves a hand dismissively, “and as you and I both know, that would be impossible.”
Shadowheart shakes her head firmly. “He asked me if I would be capable of performing True Resurrection,” she tells him quietly, “if he gathered all of the materials. It works on anyone who has been dead less than two-hundred years. Astarion, he’s trying to…”
“Cure me,” he sounds dumbfounded, “We were perfectly content. Why does he want to do that?”
Astarion knows the answer. He remembers talking to Gale, he remembers that he’d taken on that Netherese Orb trying to impress Mystra, always loving too fiercely, too ambitiously, too much — and Astarion loves him that way, really, it took a lot of time to admit. He just never imagined that someone could, or rather would, love him like that.
Gods, someone save him, he fell in love with an idiot.
“I have to go find him,” Astarion says finally, yanking a cloak off the hook, “and since you’re involved, darling cleric, it looks like we’re going to be traveling together once more.”
She seems reluctant, but he hears no arguments as they set out on foot.