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“You’ve been sending love-letters to other men in my absence, I see.”
Gortash doesn’t jump, but he does freeze for a split second. It’s surely enough to cause a blot on the letter he’s writing, which, knowing him, will cause him to have to rewrite the whole thing. It’s almost satisfying enough to make him have mercy on the pitiful Banite.
Almost.
He’s perched on a needlessly plush chair to Gortash’s left, folding and unfolding the offending piece of parchment restlessly. He’d done that enough times since finding the letter that it is becoming slightly tattered. Hopefully that’s not something Gortash will notice.
“Ha, Kazaran,” he says, the scratch of his quill resuming. It’s a farce at this point, if Kazaran were to go through his bin later he’s certain he’ll find this version of the letter there. But half of Gortash’s personality is farce and show anyway, so it’s not surprising. “You do know people typically start conversations with a ‘hello’, or a ‘good day’? Yes?”
“Hm,” Kazaran hums, frowning at the piece of parchment in his own hand. The prose isn’t romantic, per-se, the words ‘I love you’ appear sure enough, several times, but as always business is the primary focus when Gortash is involved. Still, this letter stirs no memory of receiving anything like this himself, and that alone leaves a bad taste in his mouth. “You do know that typically you wait until your previous lover is cold before you say you love another man? Yes?” He replies, and he finds he has to hold back a bitter note that tries to sneak in.
Gortash sets his quill down and turns in his chair. Kazaran is annoyed to find he has a half-smile on his face, and has to shake off his Urge when it calls to wipe it from his face. “I forgot you are the jealous type,” he says, lighthearted and far too familiar. It rubs his Urge the wrong way to be known in such a way, but as a man it makes his chest feel warm. It’s an odd series of emotions to attempt to understand about the same man, he wonders often if his old self had struggled the same way.
When Kazaran doesn’t reply Gortash takes it upon himself to continue, “The letter to Franc, yes? If I remember the reports correctly you are referring to a dead man, my sweet.”
“ I was a dead man up until recently.”
Gortash laughs. Kazaran grits his teeth and scowls harder at the tattered letter. “And I’m incredibly glad the situation was rectified,” he says as Kazaran re-reads the letter again. He’s read it two dozen times since they’d found it the day before, Astarion and Shadowheart have both teased him about it. Though he’s unsure if either of them know the exact extent of his and Gortash’s entanglement, he’s certainly never stated it to any of his comrades aloud, in recent days it’s become harder to pretend that what they had was strictly professional. He doubts he’s as subtle as he’d prefer when he sneaks out of camp to visit Gortash like this either. They’re smarter than they’re given credit for, for the most part anyway, he’d be surprised if they didn’t at least have their suspicions.
His past and now present relationship with Gortash reinforces his decision not to pursue anything more serious than sex with his travelling companions despite ample opportunities to do so. Perhaps it’s his own unknowing loyalty that makes it sting more, reading those words in Gortash’s hand.
He’d been dead for all intents and purposes, Gortash hadn’t owed him loyalty anymore. And yet, somehow it feels like Gortash should have known, just as he had.
He wrinkles his nose when he recognizes his spiral of self-flagellation, upsetting himself by thinking too much on things out of his control; it is a habit of his he knows he should attempt to kick. Their flame has barely rekindled and he’s already clutching at ashes, burning himself on any embers that caught in his absence. Judging by Gortash’s reaction, this is something that was fairly typical of him even before the worm. He wonders if his old self had wiped the city of Gortash’s old lovers the way he yearns to now.
“Do you really believe I moved on so quickly?” Gortash asks, and Kazaran frowns when he glances up to meet his lover’s eyes. They’re tired and bloodshot as always but there’s a soft sincerity to them that makes Kazaran feel sick and smitten in equal measure.
“I am merely working with the evidence I have been provided,” Kazaran snaps, turning his eyes back to the parchment and sparking a flame with his fingers against one corner.
Idly he pictures the fire catching elsewhere. He pictures it licking up the walls and eating all the finery, catching on Gortash’s gaudy robes and melting his flesh. He does like fire, the perfect agony it can bring, and the smell of burning flesh is just delicious. His mind returns to the goblin camp, how the whole place reeked of burnt flesh, how the prisoner had screamed as the poker had met his flesh. It is enough to make his mouth water.
Gortash sighs, and Kazaran pointedly doesn’t look up from the swiftly disappearing parchment as he hears him get up and approach. A hand trails his cheek as the last wisps of ash fall from his fingers and it takes more effort than it should not to physically lean into the touch. “My dear, I know you know the difference between my sincerity and my pandering,” he says, tone light but sincere.
And that’s just the thing, he does . He knows exactly when Gortash is simply pandering, he’s just as guilty of base manipulations, or regular manipulations for that matter. Gods know he’d seen through Astarion’s charms in seconds… And yet when faced with anything relating to Gortash’s romantic or sexual endeavours it doesn’t seem to matter, a red-hot ball of possessive bile builds inside him no matter how logical he tries to be about it.
“I didn’t even know you existed,” Kazaran says, strained through the bile in his throat. He gets the feeling his old self wouldn’t share this kind of information, not so freely anyway, he’d probably bottle it to weaponize at his convenience. But it isn’t only Orin that had changed him, and if his companions had taught him anything it is that the quicker you share your baggage the less of a burden it becomes. “I had so many chances to be with someone else but I always chose not to,” he continues, looking only at his soot-covered fingers, “You have seen the people I travel with, each of them are beautiful . Yet… my heart didn’t stir for a single one. At first, when I knew nothing of myself, I thought that I simply didn’t have those sorts of feelings, but then… I started finding traces of you.”
The fingers on his cheek stayed put, and Kazaran could feel Gortash’s gaze on him as he continued with more candour than he likely ever had with Gortash before, “The Absolute showed me a vision of the three of you, it was blurry and dull but it tangled my mind in knots for days. I was overcome with so many emotions I didn’t understand, hatred, betrayal, anger for the woman I didn’t know was Orin… and then there was yearning, love… grief for that love that I lost. I found a note written in your hand in Moonrise Towers and I stared at it so long my companions had to drag me from it. When I heard your voice in the illithid colony it sounded like homecoming…”
There’s a moment of silence between them and then the hand on Kazaran’s cheek pushes lightly to make him look up. Gortash is knelt at his side, their eyes level; it’s not often he is neither looking up or down at the man. He catches the tyrant’s eyes and sees an emotion he can’t place, something like longing but almost pained and confused. “You are so incredibly important to me,” Gortash says, quiet and reverent, and Kazaran is frankly appalled at how quickly his annoyance with the man evaporates, “I was… heartbroken when Orin came to us and announced your fall but I couldn’t show any of it. The plan goes on, the plan must go on. You know as well as I do that Bane would never tolerate a delay because of something as trivial as grief. Gods forbid Orin knew of how deeply I was effected. Gods, Kazaran I haven’t wept in decades , but I wept for you.”
Kazaran finds himself reaching up to cup both of Gortash’s cheeks, the stubble scratching against his palms feels familiar and pleasant. He kisses him, a gentle barely-there press of lips, just enough to hold them both together, “When you smiled at me in that coronation hall I felt more complete than when Bhaal showed Himself to me again.”
“I missed you ever so much,” Gortash all but whispers, “I never thought I’d come to appreciate any of Orin’s actions, but leaving you alive to return to me is perhaps the only decent thing she’s ever done.”
Kazaran can’t help the chuckle that causes, “When she is nothing but cooling offal on my father’s altar she will be forgotten more completely than my past. No one will know the name Orin the Red, but they will cry our names in reverence.”
Gortash kisses him again, harder this time and Kazaran can’t help but kiss him back. He knows Gortash loves him, feels it in his bones deep as his marrow, knows he loves Gortash back, knows he had loved him just as much before his disgrace. Two people such as them don’t deserve love, not by conventional wisdom, and yet here they are, loving each other anyway.
“I love you,” they both say when they part, and neither of them could stop the smiles it causes if they’d wanted to. It’s so sweet it makes his skin crawl, but not even his Urge could foul the moment, so desperately craved as it is.
“Do you believe me now, when I say that letter was nothing more than pretty words to manipulate a stupid man?” Gortash asks, bumping their noses together.
Kazaran huffs, frowning in reluctant acceptance, “Yes, my love,” he says, “It seems I needn’t gut you for daring to love another in my absence. Today at least.”
Gortash laughs, “I thank you, my darling assassin.” He pulls back, just enough so that they’re not breathing each other's air, “Wherever did you find that letter anyway? I sent that weeks ago.”
“By his rotting corpse,” Kazaran replies, tone only slightly bitter, “It seems my darling sister found him before I could. If she spent half as much time actually killing people as she does writing letters to dead men she might have had a chance to be Bhaal’s favourite.”
Gortash laughs again at that. Kazaran likes hearing him laugh. He wonders if his old self craved the sound the same way he does, wonders if the ruthless scion of Bhaal he had been had been this soft with Gortash before his disgrace.
He decides to ask. “Before, when I was whole still, did I love you like this? Softly? It makes me itch but I crave it, and… it brings me guilt but I can't tell if it is the old me or my current self that it comes from.”
Gortash hums in thought, “Yes and no,” he says, considering his next words before he speaks them, “You were… Zealous. Bhaal always came first, I understood that, but on quiet nights where we laid alone in darkness and not even our gods were listening you used to whisper nothings into my ear like prayers.”
Kazaran smiles, just a little, his thumbs petting back and forth over Gortash’s stubbled cheeks, “I’m certain they weren’t nothings, if I only dared whisper them when Father wouldn’t hear.”
Gortash shrugs, “That’s what I’d hoped, but I’m not naive enough to believe everything you said to me was truth.” There’s a flash of something in his eyes, something like regret or sadness, but it’s gone so fast Kazaran can’t be sure it was ever there at all. “We both played the game, we understood that our relationship couldn’t get in the way of our ambitions. It was nice to pretend sometimes, though.”
Kazaran grunts, just loud enough to make Gortash raise an eyebrow, and frowns at the gentle touch of his hands against Gortash’s cheeks, “Have I always hated politics this much, or did Orin gouge out my patience for such things along with my memory?”
“I believe it’s something that you’ve always despised, despite how good you’ve always been at playing the game,” Gortash responds fondly, “You once told me you would sooner slit your own throat and face the wrath of your father than have to play nice with a room of patriars for a single evening. That was after I invited you to one of my parties, I believe. I didn’t bother inviting you to any others.”
Kazaran chuckles, “Wise of you.”
“I’m always wise, I’ll thank you to say.”
A sceptical note rises from Kazaran’s throat and Gortash pinches him sharply on the side of his neck.
Kazaran responds to this by lurching forward to bite at Gortash’s nose.
This, naturally, devolves into play-wrestling fairly quickly. They spend several minutes pushing and tugging and snacking until they are both somehow breathless on the uncomfortable floor of Gortash’s gaudy office. Their next kiss is slightly bloody from a split lip and a bitten tongue, but they’re laughing like two men who aren’t hell-bent on world destruction so it tastes sweet anyway.