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Your fingers were freezing and something in your blood urged you to grind your teeth. No matter which tune you decided to hum, no matter which subject you decided to sketch next. You bit your cheeks on the inside and cursed your nature.
Maybe you should drop the charcoal and take a walk in the forest. Maybe you should put your smudged hands around someone’s throat and squeeze until you were clean.
With lingering feeling of violence and no small amount of difficulty, you stand up shakily, snap the charcoal stick and walk in the direction of the forest line.
“Darling?”
A bad time. A really bad time.
In this moment you hang onto your last remaining shreds of self-control, still present enough to understand basic social cues, even if the emotions crawling under your skin demanded to rip and tear and squeeze and shred, stab, gauge-
“Astarion. Not-“
“I can see. I saw.”
Weirdly enough, shame doesn’t join the cacophony. A relief comes. You don’t need to pretend, standing spectacle of tragicomedy.
“Right…”
You half absently observe as he looks at the sketchbook left in the dirt, charcoal crumbled on top.
“Walk with me, why dont you?”
You follow. It takes a little bit off of your mind when you don’t have to dedicate the part of your brain that keeps itself intact to navigating through the foliage lest you trip to your death.
When Astarion turns his head around to assure himself you haven’t strayed to savage some squirrel or an unfortunate badger or whatnot, he sees the exhaustion, the misplaced sadness. It’s all kinds of pathetic, if only it weren’t like staring into a mirror.
Or so he imagines.
“Here.”
Here, in fact, is the middle of nowhere.
Nowhere you can recognize at least. There are trees, leaves and the dirt. You could plunge your fist into his chest in this blissful silence and noone would hear.
Then you could do the same to yourself, get rid of these unnatural thoughts, absolve your flesh of guilt and regret that seems to follow these days.
“Can I come close, darling? I’d very much like to.”
He steps forward, panther like. It’s charming.
You nod. Afterall, If there are fantasies and fragments of regret, there’s more consciousness to your body than you give it credit for.
With his every other step, water begins to gather at the edge of your vision, threatening to fall.
“Little pup is overwhelmed, aren’t they?” the man with silver white hair hums sympathetically, enveloping your shaking frame with heavy limbs, like chiseled marble.
And then, he speaks softly.