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Karlach rarely bothered to examine her reflection in the mirror.
Not for any real reason. It’s not a self confidence thing, she knew she was hot, thankfully not too hot anymore (Which, as always, thanks the gods for that or well, Dammon) but nor was she vain enough to stare at herself over it. Even before her time in the hells, she’d never spent much time in front of a mirror like some others she knew- besides the rare sudden onset of nerves because of some crush or another.
Today, when she catches sight of herself, she freezes in place, startled by the reflection.
The morning had been going normally as the day before, in this weird limbo after everything that had happened. Just a lazy morning in their room, or Karlach’s room that now Shadowheart spent almost every night in, at the inn before Shadowheart left to do …something in the city.
(It involved a book, but she wasn’t clear on if she was buying one, reading it or stealing it. Probably not the latter as her lover had stopped doing such things, but you never know.)
Karlach had laid in bed for a while longer, but that ever present restless energy had her jumping out of bed with half-baked ideas on how to spend her day until Shadowheart got back.
She hadn’t meant to stop in front of the mirror for more than a few seconds. She just needed to see the state of her hair or if her lover had bruised her neck up enough to warrant a potion. But her eyes caught on the small infernal words that Zariel had burned into her horns years ago. The script had once been mirrored on both horns before the right had been broken, but her left still had the complete decree made by Zariel years ago.
‘My Champion the Demonsbane - My blood is her strength ‘
Compared to everything else, they were nothing. Just some words burned on her horns by magic so everyone would know that Karlach had become Zariel’s favorite pet. Her heart, and all the scars she’d gotten before they calmed it enough that she could control it, had been much worse and had a much bigger impact on her body. The words themselves hadn’t even hurt.
But it hits her suddenly that she’s been walking around with Zariel’s fucking brand on her head for months, even though she’d finally escaped.
The anger almost sneaks up on her. One moment she’s staring at those gods be damned words and next the growl in her throat sounds uncomfortably close to the growl of a rage and the walls of their room glow red as her engine fires up.
“Shit,” she says-growls really as the sound is much too similar to a wolf snarl for comfort. Karlach takes a deep breath. “Calm thoughts,” she mutters, ripping her eyes away from the mirror. “Can’t burn down the inn.”
Her engine dims, making her sigh in relief. Dammon had stabilized her engine enough to keep her in Faerûn, thank the gods, but he warned her about overdoing it.
She was lucky to be alive … or worse. Shadowheart had been willing, heartbreakingly willing, to come to Avernus with her if that meant Karlach would actually go in order to live and had pushed for that if it had come down to it. Dammon’s tweaks to her engine thankfully meant that it didn’t need to happen, but only if she kept her engine from overworking itself.
She glares at the mirror, wondering the best way to go about fixing this problem she’s suddenly noticed. She doesn’t want to just break off her remaining horn because not only does she like it, as does Shadowheart judging by the way she tries to tug Karlach by it so often, but the words are close enough to her skull that some of them are still visible on her broken horn.
Plus, the idea of breaking her horn off because of Zariel pisses her off. Fuck her. She didn’t get to take anything from Karlach. Ever. Again.
But she wants the words gone.
Now.
There are tieflings that get decorations for their horns. Everything from ribbons to rings of metal or little loops where dangling pendants could hang. She’d once seen a man with gold dipped horns with rubies placed along the curves of his horns like a complete ass. Karlach quickly decides that she never wants to see Zariel's words again, so something like a ribbon just won't be enough.
Metal it is.
Dammon, the sweetheart that he is, is happy to see her. He is also immediately worried. It makes her feel a bit like an ass that he thinks something must be wrong for her to visit his workshop in the lower city.
(The city looks at her so differently now. Once she’d dreamed of this, of people looking up to her in adoration because she kept them safe. A piece of her is happy with it, like when kids smile at her behind their mother’s knees.
Another part is too busy remembering all that’s led up to this. The friends, the family, that she’d built with her own burning hands that have scattered to the winds. The pain, the horror and the blood she’s spilled to get here have crashed into her so suddenly that she can barely stand it without Wyll’s calm voice at her side or Astarion’s snide remarks.
The city is louder without them all. Too loud.)
“My engine is running fine,” she said as she waved him off. “But I was wondering if you could do something else for me? Less mechanic and more blacksmithing like.” She points to her horn. “I want this covered.”
Dammon’s relief that she wasn’t here for her engine was tempered with confusion for only a moment before his eyes flicker up to her horns. “I see,” he muttered in understanding.
And of course he did. No doubt he could read the words there and understand what they meant. She was only thankful he hadn’t ever asked her about them because she might have gone into a rage at a rather inconvenient time like the Druid grove or the Last Light if she’d given the words any thought.
“Can you do it?” She asks, just to be sure.
“Of course,” he gestures for her to lower her head,tilting her head gently as he studies her horn. “Getting you a metal plate will be a lot easier than working on your engine - though it might take longer depending on what you want.”
She hadn’t really thought that far ahead. “I don’t want to look like a rich asshole,” she said to the ground as Dammon carefully turned her head to look at the back. There were words burned there as well. “I just want the words covered up. For good.”
He stepped back and gave her space to un-slump. “They’re pretty deep. A whole cover would be easiest, but you could also carve them out and get something inlaid instead. A band of gold, maybe?”
“Yellow isn’t really my color,” but she did like the idea of keeping most of her horn uncovered. She thought for a moment before she smiled, “Sliver. Let’s go with silver. Oh, and can you etch something on it? How good are you with flowers?”
Shadowheart had once been a person so nosy that she’d pulled Karlach aside the very first day they met so she could demand to know what Karlach and their new wizard friend were talking about around the fire. Karlach, well used to backstabbers, had found her strange fumbling warnings about not trusting people rather cute, considering Shadowheart had earlier reacted to a simple conversion like Karlach was demanding to know her deepest secrets.
That Shadowheart was also just very cute might have been what persuaded her into thinking that instead of the perhaps more normal reaction of being annoyed with the hypocrisy. What could she say? Karlach was a simple woman at heart.
But that Shadowheart was long gone now, having been left behind in the ruins of the Sharran temple when Shadowheart refused to kill the Nightsong. This Shadowheart, her Shadowheart, found amusement in her antics and allowed her to have her fun while Dammon completed his work. Karlach playfully dropped hints for an entire week, trying to imply that she had something planned.
And the night before she was due back at Dammon was a good night.
They didn’t get to bathe together anymore because of too many complaints about taking too long in the inn’s bathhouse, but Karlach rushed through her own so she could do one of her favorite parts of their nightly routine; helping braid Shadowheart’s hair.
Shadowheart’s hair is important to her, even if she herself isn’t completely sure why. The act of brushing it out and braiding it brings her comfort and calms her mind in the way only deep prayer or a whole lot of sex can otherwise achieve. Hair Braiding Time, with all the importance that the capitals imply, is not to be mixed with sex or deep conversion unless Shadowheart starts it first. Karlach isn’t sure her lover is aware of this rule, but it has served her well up to this point.
It’s still a little strange (a nice strange!) to be allowed to do this. It has always surprised her how quickly Shadowheart had lowered her emotional walls for her back when they were first traveling together. She’d been so icy one moment then confessing things she barely remembered about herself the next. This kind of thing, though, where Karlach gets to take care of her in ways completely unrelated to sex, had taken longer. Not that Karlach is complaining by any means.
So she waits till afterwards but Shadowheart pulls out a book (the one she bought, not stolen a week ago) and gives her that really cute big and shiny eyed look she gets where she wants Karlach to come and lay on her for a bit while she reads. And Karlach can’t say no to that either, not that she really wanted to.
Normally Karlach can’t stay still. Her fingers twitch or her legs bounce endlessly and she’s unable to just sit or stand without moving some piece of her body. Rest had been hard fought for in Avernus and there was always some sense that it wasn’t safe. The whole adventure after her return had helped little. These past few days, calm with no tadpoles or evil squids or dragons, hadn’t seen that restless energy dissipated at all.
The one exception was this. Karlach’s much larger body resting half on top of Shadowheart, her head resting on her hips with her arms and legs wrapped around her. She has to be careful not to dig the sharp points of her broken horn into her lover’s stomach whenever she turns to nuzzle against her and sometimes even this isn’t enough to calm her body down, but tonight it is.
Shadowheart keeps a hand in her hair while carefully balancing a book on Karlach’s other horn. She’s laughed about it before because she finds the many uses that Shadowheart finds for her horn to be hilarious and using her as a book table is up there in her favorites (Shadowheart using it as a handlebar during sex is both their top favorite she’s pretty sure.) When she flips a page, her fingers slip down to run around the edge of her horn.
She barely feels it. There are no nerves in her horn and Shadowheart’s fingers are light, but laying like this makes everything feel like so much more. She spent ten whole years with no touch at all and now that she’s had it back sometimes everything just feels… so much deeper.
But as much as she wants to lay there, she knows she’s put off the conversation enough. Any longer and she’d have to do it herself.
So she rises but doesn’t move far. Shadowheart glances at her and once she judges she isn’t getting out of bed and just moving positions, lays her book on the nightstand.
Karlach has no reason to be nervous, but she can’t help the bit of nerves that build up in her gut. She isn’t sure what’s causing them. She trusts Shadowheart more than anyone else in her life and she knows her lover will not judge her for wanting this. If anything, she should understand her desire completely.
She was silent too long apparently as Shadowheart’s slightly raised eyebrow went from ‘Are you getting up because you want sex?’ To ‘what’s going on?’
The amount that she could imply with just her eyebrows and little head tilts is truly impressive.
“You remember how I saved your life from that pod?” She begins with one of her favorite joke’s between the two of them. “Well, I finally figured out what you could do to pay me back.”
With a dry voice, Shadowheart raises an eyebrow, “I find that hard to believe since that’s what you said when you asked me to take over cooking for the night or pet Scratch for you. Multiple times.”
“He needed pets,” she said sternly. “Because he is a good boy, and I didn’t want to burn him.”
“Hmm,” there was a twitch of a smile and Karlach could see her amusement in her green eyes. “Well, I suppose I am duty bound to be of assistance.”
“That’s the spirit love,” she reaches over and pats Shadowheart on the knee, kissing her cheek as she fondly eye rolls at her antics.
She rolls out of their bed and towards the chest of their equipment that they still have. It’s not much as they once had, as they had sold some to help all their wayward friends. The nerves hit her a little when she grabs one of their better knives. It’s a good one and if she remembers right, it’s the one she’s pulled from a hunk of meat outside of Moonhaven. Should be sharp and durable for what she needs it to do.
Shadowheart notices her nerves immediately, of course. Her amusement lessens at the sight of the knife. “And what favor are you going to ask of me that involves a knife?”
“I want you to use it on me.”
The color drains from her lover's face, and her lips become tightly pressed together.
Karlach’s eyes widen and her nerves increase ten fold. “Not like that!” She sits across from her on the bed again and places a hand on her knee. “I would never ask that of you, baby.”
Shadowheart is no stranger to pain or mixing pain and pleasure. Karlach still remembers how the cleric had teased her in the goblin camp. She hadn’t even been able to see her face because she’d been so focused on facing the wall, but her words had lingered in her ears for days.
Maybe if Karlach had been able to touch her then their sex lives would have been different. That Shadowheart hadn’t known that she’d taken part in the torture of her parents or been ordered to kill them. As it stands, Shadowheart can’t bring herself to cause pain or be the subject of it during sex without shutting down.
This isn’t something that they’ve truly talked about. Karlach doesn’t mind pain’s absence from that part of her life as, even if she enjoys a rough tumble as much as the next person, it wasn’t something she craved. It doesn’t bother her but it does seem to bother Shadowheart, though she hasn’t put why into words.
She sits the knife by Shadowheart’s hand and words tumble out. “Remember when you changed your hair, which I still love, by the way? That’s kind of what I’m going for here.” She runs her clawed fingers through the mess that is her hair.
The discomfort slides off Shadowheart almost immediately, but her lover doesn’t quite get all of her amusement back.
“I had success with my hair, but I’m surprised you would trust me with yours,” Shadowheart picked up the knife and gave Karlach’s hair a look.
“Ah, well, I didn’t really mean my hair.” Karlach shuffled closer and gripped Shadowheart’s other hand. “But I’m getting… a new look and I want you to be a part of it.”
“Of course.”
She loved every part of Shadowheart, but the first thing that drew her to her had been those eyes. Mostly how dark Shadowheart could make her hazel eyes and how warm they looked at her when they sat on that cliff. And Karlach falls in love with her all over again, looking into those eyes.
“Gods I love you,” she blurted out. Shadowheart laughed at her, well used to her doing this. Karlach tilted her head down and brought Shadowheart’s hand to the etched words. “I want these gone and I want you to do it.”
The soft amusement that so often lingers around her lover when Karlach was being Karlach fades again. Shadowheart removes her hand from hers and runs her fingers along the words like she’s done a hundred times before.
“I never asked what they meant,” she said.
“Probably a good thing,” she admitted. “I pushed them to the back of my mind when I got them since there wasn’t much I could do about it, you know what I mean? Short of ripping my horns off. But I can get rid of them now.”
“And you want me to do it?” There’s a bit of confusion in her voice.
Karlach clears her dry throat. “Yeah. Getting tossed into the hells was the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, so I figured that if I’m going to get rid of some of those reminders, I should have the best thing that’s ever happened to me help me do it. You know what I mean?”
Shadowheart didn’t reply with words, but Karlach could feel it in the deep kiss they shared when she pulled Karlach to her by her horn.
Dammon has her done horns by early afternoon.
The uneven weight feels strange, but that hasn’t taken that long to get used to the last time. The shine of sliver out of the corner of her eye is weird too.
But damn, does she look good.
When she nervously asks about a set of rings (Only for when she was ready!) Dammon gives her a set that matches her new horns perfectly with a smile that looks suspiciously like a smirk.
She ends up sending way too much gold on the Night Orchids.
( It reminds Karlach of her mother complaining about the cost of the flowers that her father had always brought her as she tried to hide her smile behind them.
Gods they would’ve loved Shadowheart.)
Karlach has just time to set the flowers down, catch sight of herself in the mirror and start worrying.
Her horns aren’t suddenly different from her walk from Dammon’s workshop, the flower place to the inn. The broken horn is now shining silver and matches the shape and curl of her left damn near perfectly, including the bands that Shadowheart scraped out on her left. Her left is now sporting two stripes of silver where Zariel’s decrees had been etched in.
Her head is now tilting to the right because the weight difference is suddenly flipped, but Dammon did a fantastic job. She looks bad ass.
The thing that now worries her, though, is the Night Orchids that he itched into the bands. It seemed like a good idea. She’d wanted something good to replace that fucking horrible shit, and what better thing than Shadowheart’s favorite flower?
But perhaps that was too much? Her parents had always warned her about getting tattoos for or about her partners (She’d been a very… dramatic teenager and there’d been some close calls there.) and suddenly she’s afraid that maybe this was a bit much. She’s feeling double afraid that Shadowheart will find the set of rings.
(Karlach knows she’s overreacting. Shadowheart had tried to join her in the hells - commitment clearly wasn’t an issue. That didn’t make the fear really go away though)
Karlach was so busy looking at herself that she didn’t hear the door open. She was at least aware of her surroundings that she heard Shadowheart’s soft gasp.
Karlach snapped her head around to see her lover staring at her horns with wide-eyed surprise.
“Well?,” she said with a smirk that felt weak. “Do you like it?”
Shadowheart laughed and walked over to inspect them closer. “Of course I do. Though when you said you were doing the same thing I did, I wasn’t expecting the same… color…”
She’d gotten close enough to see Night Orchids etchings. Karlach felt her engine jump, the equivalent of a flesh heart suddenly beating faster.
“Sorry,” she muttered. “Is it a bit much?”
Shadowheart reached up (and Karlach tiled her head down) to run her fingers along one band on her left horn.
“Absolutely,” she said. Her eyes did that thing again where Karlach swore they’d grow three times the size and were softer than marshmallows. “But I love it.”
Karlach had about two seconds to feel relieved before Shadowheart used her shiny new handlebars to pull Karlach’s mouth to her own.
Very little talking was done after that.
Karlach felt exhausted and extremely comfortable as Shadowheart pressed her back against her front, with her arm around Karlach's middle and currently playing with her fingers. She was sore in the best of ways and was seconds away from falling asleep when a thought entered her mind. If Shadowheart hadn’t been holding her hand, she’d have smacked herself right in the forehead.
“Oh man,” she grumbled into Shadowheart’s bare shoulder. “I fucked up.”
“Oh?,” Shadowheart sounded incredibly amused. She was no stranger to the things Karlach suddenly remembered at bed time. “And what did you do?”
“I should’ve gotten white gold or something instead of silver. Fuck, I’m gonna have to get Dammon to redo it.”
Shadowheart twisted around in her arms and raised an eyebrow at Karlach’s pout. “Whatever for?”
Karlach frowned back. “Because I can’t have all this silver on my horns?”
Her concern was met with pure confusion.
“Werewolves can get hurt with silver, right?” Karlach asked. She was pretty sure that was right, but she’d never really met one. “What if I hurt our kid or something?”
Shadowheart’s face went through an entire journey that Karlach was completely unable to follow. In the end, she leaned over and kissed Karlach on the forehead.
“You’ll be fine. Regular contact with silver doesn’t hurt lycanthropes.”
“Oh, good!” Karlach sighed in relief. She settled back down and closed her eyes. “I’d hate to ask Dammon to redo them after he already made matching rings.”
Her eyes snapped up and met Shadowheart’s shocked ones. “I mean… Fuck.”