Work Text:
Helaena spent the first half a tenday or so elbowdeep in the recovery effort, clearing rubble, cleaning and bandaging injuries not severe enough to warrant a healer’s spell, burning mindflayer remains and preparing final rites for the untentacled dead.
She barely slept, so she didn’t have to go to their room. She didn’t have to look at the bed he’d held her in just the morning before, his eyes clenched shut so they didn’t have to acknowledge the coming dawn.
He’d been terrified. Perhaps more so than her, which made sense in hindsight. Had he been planning it? Planning on removing her choice, her agency, insisting on making himself and just himself the fucking hero and going and bloody well blowing himself up in the process-
She didn’t go to their room. The only time she closed her eyes was when her weary body failed to keep going, even aided by copious restorative potions and an unhealthy amount of coffee. Who cared? There was no real point now anyway, was there?
Shadowheart tried. She’d been there too, when Gale had teleported them away, when he’d climbed to the top of the brainstem to face his death and take the Absolute with him. She’d been the one to hold Helaena as she collapsed, in horror, in grief, in anger.
“You need to eat something. You need to sleep,” Shadowheart insisted, perhaps three, perhaps four days after.
Helaena was resigned to the fact it would always be days after, now. And then months, and then years, all without Gale, without the man she loved, the man she’d hoped to build a life with, a future, one chosen by them and not the capricious whims of distant gods.
“I can’t,” Helaena gritted out, cradling her third? She thought it was the third mug of coffee. She’d stopped putting sugar in them. It wasn’t like she drank it for the taste, anyway. “If I sleep, I might…”
Helaena swallowed heavily, the tears threatening to spill over once again. She’d cried so much, it was a wonder there was any moisture left in her body at all. Perhaps she’d turn into a dried-out husk like Withers, a dead woman walking. It sounded nicer than having to face yet another dawn in a world with no Gale in it.
“I can’t go back to that room, Shadowheart. It’s… It’ll still smell like him, have all his things, like he just stepped out on an errand or…”
“You could borrow my room, if you’d like. Or take Jaheira’s, she’s gone back home.”
Home. For months now, Gale had been home, nevermind if they were in Reithwin or Rivington, his arms a refuge from the forces of evil hounding their every step. Helaena had dreamed of a home just for them, perhaps in Waterdeep, perhaps in the Gate, of lazy mornings spent in bed or evenings reading by the fire.
“What if I dream? I can’t… Even if he stood here right now, I wouldn’t be able to decide between punching him and kissing him. I’m not- Not yet. Please.”
Helaena downed the rest of her coffee, too exhausted to manage even a wince at the acrid flavor, and stumbled out of the Elfsong, looking for the next person to help, the next person to save since she couldn’t save the love of her life.
It took two days more before she broke down. The cleanup had turned to rebuilding, to housing the homeless and feeding those who’d lost their livelihoods. There was still plenty for her to do, but the urgency had reduced, and left her more time to think.
She really, really didn’t like thinking. For only the second time since before, she entered the suite upstairs, intent on oblivion. Shadowheart always had a nice stash of both medication and self-medication.
Helaena dug out a particularly awful-looking bottle of wine, some overly-tannic swill from Beregost, then a second, and then a third, retreating with her spoils to the lounge, avoiding the couch they’d used for a patch of the floor, facing away from everything that might remind her of, well, anything.
She was one and a half bottles in, the effects delightfully enhanced by her empty stomach, the world beginning to blur around the edges even when she didn’t move. This was nice, wasn’t it, no thoughts, no complexity, no memories, just… haziness.
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Shadowheart swore, the half-elf suddenly right in front of her.
When did Shadowheart come back? Wasn’t she supposed to be… somewhere? Helaena couldn’t remember, and didn’t care, so it couldn’t be that important.
“How much of this have you had?” Shadowheart demanded, waving the empty bottle in her face. “Laena? Did you drink anything else?”
“Just wine,” she croaked, saluting her friend with the now mostly empty second bottle. “I’m not suicidal, I just don’t want to think.”
Shadowheart sagged in relief, but did take away Helaena’s third bottle.
“Hey, that’s mine!” she protested.
“I think you’ll find it’s mine, actually,” Shadowheart countered, narrowing her eyes. “Hells, Laena, I know you’re hurting, but-”
“Do you know? Do you really? Everyone else got their happily ever after. You’ve got your parents back, Halsin’s off to rebuilt Reithwin, Lae’zel got to scamper off to join the resistance fight…”
“And Karlach’s stuck in Avernus and Astarion's forced back into the shadows. What’s your point? That it sucks? We all know, none of us wanted him to do this, to-” Shadowheart pinched the bridge of her nose. “It’s not the same, Laena, but we all miss him, too. Shutting us down every time we try to talk to you won’t make this any easier.”
“Nothing will make this any easier,” Helaena declared, chugging down the rest of her bottle of swill. “He’s gone, and even if he wasn’t I’d want to kill him and that’s not… that’s not going away just because I play nice and talk about it!”
“Gods be good, Laena, of course it won’t, but you drinking yourself half to death won’t either!”
“Don’t you dare talk to me about gods! The gods can get fucked, and that bloody cunt Mystra in particular, for allowing this, for making him think…”
Helaena choked back a sob. If she couldn’t quite bring herself to hate Gale, she loved him too much for that, she could absolutely hate Mystra. Quite easily. Almost automatically, even.
And the worst part was, he probably did it for Her forgiveness, Her grace, for the gift of an afterlife spent as Her precious treasured little lapdog. Had he cared about her at all? Or had it always been Mystra?
“The gods can kiss my ass,” Helaena declared, throwing the empty bottle at the wall where it shattered in a rather satisfying shower of glass.
Helaena picked up one shard, no longer than her pinky nail. Shards of glass. An apt metaphor. It seemed she was nothing but the shattered fragments of a person who’d thought she was loved, thought she was trusted, only to have the person she loved throw it all back in her face for the sake of his divine ex.
“He didn’t do it for Mystra, you know.”
“Why else would be do something so fucking stupid and leave me?”
“Because he did it for you, you bloody idiot! He loved you, and he’d rather die than risk you getting hurt!”
“No. No, he- he wouldn’t, he’d talk to me, he… Why would he do something like that?!”
“Because he was a bloody idiot, and so are you.”
Was. Gale would always be a was, now. Withers had calmly, almost gently, explained that Gale’s soul had already passed through the Fugue Plane, claimed by Mystra, that there was nothing to revive even if there had been a body and not just a cloud of Netherese vapor.
“I hate him,” Helaena sobbed. “How dare he, how could he-?”
“I don’t know, Laena. I wish I did.”
Shadowheart pulled her into a hug, her friend there to hold together the pieces of her broken heart as it shattered like so many cheap, shitty bottles of tavern swill.
When Helaena woke, she was in a bed. Thankfully not their bed, it was a lot smaller, a quick glance around the room showing it was one of the single bedrooms in the suite, this one emptied of personal effects.
“He wouldn’t have wanted this, you know,” Tara informed her from her perch on the windowsill.
Helaena hadn’t talked to the tressym since before, hadn’t considered much beyond ways to occupy herself so she didn’t have to think about the fact that Gale was gone, he wasn’t coming back, and he hadn’t even-
“I don’t particularly care what he’d want,” Helaena fired back. “He gave up the right to an opinion when he blew himself up.”
“True. But are you really going to squander his sacrifice by acting like a child throwing a tantrum?”
“I beg your pardon?” Tara might be Gale’s beloved familiar, his dearest, oldest friend, but Helaena wasn’t above Banishing her furry little backside back to the Feywild.
“Helaena, he’s dead. You can spend a year drunk, or in bed, or burying yourself in other people’s problems, and he’ll still be dead. But are you truly going to waste the life he gave his own for like that?”
Helaena didn’t answer.
“I went to see his mother, you know. She’s as heartbroken as you are. She’s talking about having a funeral.”
Helaena chuckled, a bitter, broken sound.
“What’s the point? There’s nothing to bury. Not even a pile of ashes to scatter.”
“The point would be closure, and reminiscence.”
“How much does she know about me? About what he did, and why?”
“Not enough,” Tara admitted. “Gale always did tend to keep things from her, to stop her worrying, or possibly from dragging him back home to Waterdeep by his ear.”
“She would have been right to.”
Helaena had been half dreading, half anticipating the day she’d meet Morena Dekarios. Gale’s mother was a formidable figure in many a story of his childhood and youth. Now, it just… didn’t matter. Few things did.
“He wrote letters, you know. I brought Morena hers, but I think it’s time you read yours, too.” Tara produced a small bundle of letters with the flash of a spell, wrapped in a sea green ribbon.
“Who cares what that bloody bastard has to say?”
“You don’t mean that, Helaena. He loved you. Much more than he ever loved his goddess.”
“If he loved me, why would he do this?”
“Gale was simultaneously the smartest and the stupidest human I’ve ever met.”
Helaena snorted through her fresh tears, rubbing her sore eyes on the threadbare sleeves of a tunic that had needed a wash several days ago.
“Read them,” Tara urged her.
But first, Helaena slept. She slept, and kept sleeping, and then slept some more, picking at the food and water someone (probably Shadowheart) left on her bedside table.
In the beginning, she was fortunate enough to rest without dreams, her body too exhausted to manage any proper horrors.
Then, there were the nightmares. Before, those had been fears, worries, the worst parts of their journeys spliced together in new, awful ways. Now, it was just memories. Well, one memory, of Gale, of the heartbroken determination in his eyes as he teleported her and the others almost a mile away, without saying as much as a word.
Why hadn’t he talked to her? Why, why, why. It had been going reasonably well, they’d all been battered but whole, more than ready to take on the Netherbrain, with perfectly reasonable odds of success sans sacrifice. What had made him decide to make the choice, without her or anyone else’s input?
The nightmares she woke from screaming, sometimes alone, sometimes with Tara or Shadowheart there, crying out for Gale, begging him not to, that there was always another way.
Then, once her mind had turned over each and every aspect of the worst day of her life in excruciating detail, the dreams began. Just dreams. Some were even pleasant. But Gale was in every single one, smiling, talking, holding her, kissing her, living.
Those hurt more than the nightmares. They made her hope, even for a moment, that reality was the nightmare, and she could wake up to find he’d simply woken up earlier than her, the sheets still warm on his side of the bed.
Gods, she missed him. That hurt more than the betrayal, the anger, the frustration. The sheer, impenetrable grief of the undeniable fact that Gale Dekarios, the love of her life, was dead. Gone. Blown up. A cloud of vapor dancing in the breeze. Nothing.
Helaena woke up, tears streaming down her face. It had been such a simple dream, just the sensation of Gale’s arms around her as he slept, his light snores muffled in her hair. The feeling of comfort, of being loved, of him being there.
She reached for the bundle of letters, summoning a mage light to help her read in the gloom of the night. Any part of him would be better than nothing, even words on paper superior to the emptiness.
She broke the seal on the topmost letter, her eyes blurry with tears before she managed to read a single word.
Laena, my heart,
I thought nights could never get darker than the ones we saw in the Shadow-Cursed Lands, where darkness wasn’t just an absence of light, but an evil of its own. But now, with two of three Chosen breathing down our necks, the nights seem darker than any in Reithwin.
I try to stay hopeful. I look at you, and I see why I’m still fighting. You are everything.
You’re asleep, after yet another day pushing yourself to your limits and well past them. I wish I could take more of your burdens, love. You are a wonder, but even wonders need rest. I do what I can, but it never feels like enough.
I feel like I’ve already told you everything, and yet nothing at all. I’d almost be happy if you read these last words of a sad, broken man, given a last breath of glorious life, because it would mean you lived.
It is and remains my most cherished task to keep you safe, love. If I succeeded in this task, I hope you will forgive me for weighing your life above my own. It’s a bargain I’ll make in a heartbeat, a million times over.
Be happy. Live. But if you’ll allow a dead man to be selfish for a moment, remember me. Remember what we had. I have never been happier than I was with you, darling. You made everything worth it, a hundred times over.
I suppose the only thing left to say is this. I love you. I am so incredibly sorry. You made me want to live again, to build a life with you. I am so sorry I broke my promise.
I never wanted anything as much as to be yours.
Forgive me,
Gale
Forgive him. Forgive him? How could he? How DARE he? Helaena threw the letter away, the thin parchment floating gently to the floor. So she threw a pillow instead, and then one of her boots, abandoned in front of the bed, and then the wooden plate holding her meager supper, screaming in frustration.
“How COULD you?!”
“Laena!” Shadowheart exclaimed, wide-eyed in the doorway, dressed down to an undershirt and thin shorts.
“WHY?!” she demanded. “WHY would he- WHY?!”
“I don’t know, Laena. I don’t know.”
“He wrote me letters, he planned this, why would he-”
Helaena collapsed into her friend’s arms, sobbing.
The next morning, she read the other two letters, took a long, hot bath, her tears hidden in the steam, changed into fresh clothes, and managed a whole five bites of a meal that wasn’t plain bread and mild cheese.
“I think it’s time to go see Morena,” Helaena told Shadowheart between slow, careful bites of her eggs. “She should… she deserves to hear as much as I can tell her.”
“Alright. Would you like me to come with you?”
“I’ll go with her, Ms. Hallowleaf,” Tara promised. “Don’t worry, I’ll look out for her. It’s the least I could do.”
Helaena felt a pang of guilt. Tara must miss Gale as much as she did, mourn him as deeply. And instead of grieving together, Helaena had forced Tara to look after her wizard’s lover like, well, like a child throwing a tantrum.
“Shall we go, then?” Helaena asked the tressym, teleportation chalk in hand, consulting a list of publicly available sigils in Waterdeep. According to Tara, Morena Dekarios lived in the Sea Ward, rather near a cluster of temples, most hosting permanent teleportation circles.
Since Helaena categorically refused to set foot in Mystra’s domain at the House of Wonder, it would have to be a slightly longer walk from the Gondian temple nearby.
“Are you certain you don’t want to go in your room, first?” Tara asked, her feline head tilted slightly to one side. “Collect a few of his things, perhaps?”
Helaena hadn’t even managed to go in there for a change of clothes, pleading with Shadowheart to do it instead.
“I fear if I do I’ll fall to pieces again, and I’m no good to anyone like that.”
“It’s perfectly alright if you’re not ready yet, Helaena. Would you mind if I looked?”
“No, no, go right ahead,” Helaena consented, frowning as she looked at the leftovers from breakfast.
She knew she ought to eat more, to get her strength up after roughly a tenday going to pieces, but even the thought of another bite made her slightly nauseous. She’d try again later.
Waterdeep was… a lot. Even with Tara guiding her, Helaena felt raw, exposed, like a nerve laid bare, every sudden noise or stranger moving too close leaving her gritting her teeth.
For Morena, she reminded herself. She deserves to know.
Normally, she would have felt self-conscious about the state of herself, a worn jacket thrown over her simple tunic and breeches, her unbrushed hair in a messy bundle at the nape of her neck, especially when she realized how nice Gale’s mother’s house was, but right now? It just didn’t matter.
An aging manservant, his eyes sad, answered the door, obviously recognizing Tara at a glance.
“You’re Helaena, then?” he asked. Tara rubbed her face on his pristine trousers in greeting before flapping up a stairwell, presumably to seek out Morena.
“That’s me,” Helaena sighed, some of the purpose draining out of her now she’d made it to the door.
“I’m so sorry for your loss. Gale was… Well, he was dear to us all.”
“Thank you,” Helaena managed, blinking back tears.
The manservant gave her a sympathetic look, squeezing her arm.
“I’m Edric, but don’t worry about remembering it for now. I’ll take you to Morena.”
Tara was already curled up in the lap of Gale’s mother, just like she always did with Gale when he was feeling unacceptably self-deprecating or sad, Morena idly scratching the tressym’s chin as she stared off into nothing.
Morena looked as awful as Helaena felt, still dressed in a housecoat even past noon, her steel-gray hair left loose and slightly limp. Her skin had a grayish cast, her eyes red and swollen, a handkerchief clutched in her free hand.
“Helaena?” she asked, some of the fog lifting from her eyes.
Helaena noticed with a start that she had Gale’s eyes, that exact shade of warm, kind brown. It was enough to set off the tears she’d mostly managed to contain for the morning, a hideous sob tearing through her chest.
“Oh, darling, come here.” Morena was even shorter than Helaena, but her embrace was warm and gentle. It was the embrace of a mother. “I’m so sorry this is how we met, my dear. I know Gale hoped to…”
“Mrs. Dekarios, I’m-”
“Call me Morena, dear, it’s hardly the time for formality.”
“Gale, he… I thought you deserved to talk to someone who was at his side in the last few months.”
“Helaena, if he’d been standing here with us, I have every expectation I’d be introduced to you as my future daughter in law, whether formally so or not. Shall we dispense with the pretenses?”
Helaena chuckled wetly, wiping her eyes with her thankfully clean sleeve.
“Gods, girl, let me give you a handkerchief, you’ll ruin your skin like that,” Morena fussed, digging out a fresh square of soft snowy linen. “There. Now, would you like some tea? It’s important to stay hydrated when you’re crying buckets.”
Morena was wonderful. Kind, funny, sharp as a whip and rather no-nonsense. She was also similar enough to her son in both appearance and personality it was almost painful to even look at her.
They drank two pots of tea over the course of the afternoon, Helaena managing to eat two scones and a few tiny tea sandwiches after Morena fixed her with a stern look. They talked, and reminisced, about memories good and bad, as many smiles as there were tears.
Gale was so incredibly present in his mother’s house, his childhood home, in the stories they told, that Helaena occasionally had to blink and remind herself that no, he wasn’t sitting on the couch next to her, protesting good-naturedly as his mother recounted the story of him first summoning Tara.
“I miss him,” Helaena admitted, as afternoon had turned to evening, and a housekeeper, Susanne, had brought a tray of Amnian onion soup with stern orders from the cook, Tess, that both of them must finish at least one bowl. “I know I only knew him for less than half a year, but-”
“Duration is no measure for depth of feeling, my dear. Sometimes you just know, almost from the second you meet someone. Gale loved you. I knew that much even if his letters never said so explicitly.”
“He wrote about me?”
“Of course he did. You were there in almost every story he told, sanitized so I wouldn’t worry, in every amusing anecdote or little aside. You were everything to him. He told me to look out for you, you know.”
“In his…”
“Yes, in his postmortem letter. He wrote, oh, how did he put it, that I should treat you as a daughter in heart if not blood.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Because he had every intention of marrying you, you silly goose.”
Helaena chewed on that for a while, looking down at the soup bowl that had somehow managed to become mostly empty. She reached absently for another piece of bread to sop up the last few spoonfuls.
“I would have said yes,” she quietly admitted to her empty bowl.
“I know, love. I know.”
Helaena ended up staying a few days with Morena, and thought they were both the better for it. She didn’t particularly want to go back to Baldur’s Gate, but she still didn’t particularly want to do much of anything, so that hardly signified.
“Are you sure, Helaena?” Tara asked, her green eyes wide in concern.
“It’s getting ridiculous,” she argued, squeezing her eyes shut in determination as her hand rested on the door handle. “It’s just a room, I can’t ask someone else every time I need a change of clothes.”
“We don’t mind,” Shadowheart insisted. “You’re our friend, and you just lost-”
“If I can’t go into a bloody room, how am I supposed to ever get anywhere?”
Helaena opened the door, holding her breath as she braced for a wave of the smell of Gale, a blend of lavender soap, fresh ink, parchment, old books and a hint of pure Weave. Instead, it was just… slightly stale, a bit dusty. Nothing.
Oh. That. That was worse. A lot worse. Was there really nothing left of him? Would she never get to bury her face in the scent of home again? Tears began to well up as an ugly sob wracked her body.
Shadowheart caught her in a hug, her arms warm and soft and not Gale, it’d never be Gale again, he was-
“He’s dead,” she hiccuped between sobs. “He’s gone, and he’s never coming back, and our room doesn’t even smell like him anymore.”
“Oh Laena,” Shadowheart soothed her. “I’m so sorry.”
“I miss him so much. How can he just be gone?”
“I know, Laena. I know.”
When she slept that night, she slept in one of Gale’s tunics, her arms wrapped around his pillow, searching for every lingering trace of him, already fading so fast.
There were good days and bad days, days where she could barely leave bed, and days where she felt almost normal. Shadowheart eventually left the Gate, headed for Reithwin with her parents, after helping Helaena clear out the Elfsong suite.
Helaena went to her family first, but even her childhood home felt empty, cold. She kept looking around, expecting to see Gale, hear his chuckle when she cracked a joke, his thoughtful hum when she raised an interesting point, but the space at her side was just… empty.
When Morena wrote to her, about a month after, she took a portal to Waterdeep two days later.
“I hate to bother you with practicalities, love, but you didn’t happen to find an updated will in his things?”
“Nothing that I saw,” Helaena answered honestly. “But I didn’t check all his journals or books, I just boxed them up to send to you.”
“I’ve started going through his tower, but the one I found, well, it’s more than a year old.”
“Okay.”
“Helaena, it’s from before he met you.”
“That makes sense, he didn’t come back to Waterdeep after the tadpoles.”
Morena pinched her eyes shut for a moment. “Darling, he willed everything to me, because he was unwed, had no children, and had no plans at the time for either.”
“Yes, and…?”
“Hells below, Helaena, he would have wanted you to have anything you wanted. Tara told me he’d already ordered a ring, for gods’ sake.”
“She told me, too.” Helaena hadn’t been to pick it up. She didn’t hate herself that much.
“You sent me everything. Is there truly nothing you’d want to keep?”
“I did keep a few of his shirts,” she admitted. “You're his mother. I figured it had to be up to you.”
“Helaena, darling, let me put this as simply as I can. The only reason you’re not my son’s widow is because he died before he could make you his wife. As far as I’m concerned you have every right a widow would.”
“Oh,” Helaena managed, suddenly quite glad she was sitting down. “That’s not- Morena, I couldn’t possibly-”
“Of course you can,” Morena scoffed. “Besides, I’m a barrister, what use do I have for a wizard’s tower?”
“You’d want me to take his tower?!” Helaena squeaked. “No, I couldn’t, that’s-”
“Sell it if you’d rather. Renovate it from the cellar to the rafters, if you’d like. It’s a rather nice little townhouse, even before he started adding to it.”
“Morena…”
“Helaena, if you don’t take it, I’ll sic Tara on you. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll simply drag you there by your ear.”
Helaena swallowed around the lump in her throat. “Thank you, Morena.”
“You’re most welcome, my dear. And if I rather selfishly hope you might decide to stay in Waterdeep, do try not to hold it against me.”
“You know, Morena, I think I just might. Amazingly enough, Waterdeep actually has less memories to escape than Baldur’s Gate does,” she huffed, chuckling humorlessly. “Even in my childhood home, all I can see in the kitchen is how intimidated he was by my sweet old grandmother.”
“He always did have a healthy respect for a powerful matriarch, my Gale.”
“That he did. That he did.”
And one day, maybe remembering him wouldn’t even hurt. Not today, but one day.