Chapter Text
Astarion doesn’t trust any of them one bit.
He’d joined their motley crew out of confused delirium more than anything; what else was he supposed to do after waking up starving in the middle of a crashing ship and crawling his way out of the rubble and onto the beach?
Even now, delirium. Hunger gnaws at Astarion like sickness, dwelling always in the back of his mind and in the sickly sweat sticking to his skin. They’ve been in the Emerald Grove for a few days now, but the conflict between the goblins, tieflings, and druids has scared away most of the glade’s critter inhabitants. So, hunger.
Of course, he muses, he could simply attack one of them at night, drink them dry, and leave them to die. But then he might never figure out what’s going on with the tadpole in his head (their heads) and he’d really like to know if it has something to do with the fact that sunlight doesn’t scorch him like it used to. If he could perhaps harness this power—
“Astarion, watch out!” someone yells from what sounds like somewhere far away, and then Astarion doesn’t hear anything at all except for a loud ringing in his ears as he’s pushed to the ground ungracefully. A few feet away, where he was just standing, a loaded arrow strikes the ground and explodes in a burst of spark and flame, catching Tav in the back. Tav, who just pushed Astarion out of harm’s way and took the brunt of the damage meant for Astarion herself.
The glade descends into chaos as goblins stream in from the surrounding woods, giving Astarion the perfect excuse to slip away from the situation and not have to deal with what happened. It’s easy to lose himself in the familiar movements: sidestep, swing, dodge, stab. It’s easy to focus on fighting rather than… what just happened.
Astarion lets the rhythm of combat pull him under.
The fight draws on surprisingly long. Goblins aren’t difficult to defeat individually, so that’s why they always travel in packs. Together, goblins are tricky, digging networks of tunnels, distracting enemies’ attention, attacking you from all sides, and this group of goblins seems to last forever. Whenever Astarion strikes down one short, wrinkly green goblin, two more materialize out of nowhere to take its place like some sort of a goblin-mob hydra.
Orange spreads out across the horizon by the time the last few goblins have scampered away to relay their defeat to whatever forces are backing them. They should probably try to stop them in case they’re calling in more reinforcements, but honestly, Astarion could care less at this point. He’s covered in grime and caked in blood and for a being that’s no longer even alive, somehow everything aches.
“Astarion!” the voice of a familiar wizard calls out. A vein jumps to life in the vampire’s forehead; he should just kill them, he should just kill them all, except Gale might explode and take them all with him if Astarion stabbed him in the chest and Astarion is not willing to take that risk for the wizard. Instead, Astarion takes a few deep breaths and unclenches his fists.
“Yes, Gale? What is it now.” As soon as Astarion’s gaze lands on the figure slouched against Gale’s shoulder, his breath hitches. Her brown hair is matted with blood (in fact, she’s bathed in blood. Astarion wonders how much is her own, and how much is blood shed by her hands), and even from this angle, Astarion can see the raw, red burns stretching over her shoulders.
“Could you dress Tav’s wounds? I need to go help Karlach, a goblin got a nasty shot at her chest.”
“Ah. Well, it’s been a while since I’ve had to, how do you say it, dress a wound. Couldn’t Wyll or Shadowheart or someone else more capable do it?” Gale levels an unamused stare at his white-haired companion.
“Seeing as Tav sustained the worst of her injuries saving your inattentive ass, I feel like it’s only appropriate that you make it up to her. And it’s not too hard to clean a wound and dress it. Actually, given what I know about your intelligence…”
“Fine, I’ll do it!” If Astarion could blush, he’d be blushing right now. Gale raises an eyebrow and gestures towards Tav. Gingerly, Astarion pries Gale’s arm from Tav’s waist and replaces it with his own. Tav hums softly against Astarion’s cool skin, and Astarion, for all the hundreds of years he’s been a spawn, has never been more conscious of his unnatural coldness.
Tav must be truly, completely exhausted, since it’s not until Astarion dabs alcohol on her wounds that she comes to life with a sharp gasp. Her body tenses, as if still caught in combat.
“I–Astarion? What’s happening?”
“Shush, darling, you’re safe,” Astarion responds readily, easily, as if it’s safe to be around a starving vampire spawn, safe to be around him. Safe. The word feels strange even in the confines of his mind. Tav relaxes infinitesimally and lets Astarion clean the angry, red sores. Astarion wonders if Tav would stop him if she saw him lift a bloodied rag to his mouth and lick off her blood. Astarion wonders if Tav would stop him if he leaned down and—
“Thank you,” Tav interrupts Astarion’s thoughts.
“For what?” Now Astarion is genuinely confused. They’ve only known each other for a week at most, and while Astarion hasn’t been the coldest member of the party by far (that award definitely goes to Lae’zel), he’s definitely not as gregarious as Karlach. Definitely not someone worth… Astarion replays the moment, the shout, the push, Tav’s determined expression and wince as the arrow erupted behind her. The ringing in his ears.
“I mean, you didn’t have to help patch me up. If you weren’t comfortable.” Tav picks at the grass around her. The fire flickers and sways gently in the breeze, and Tav’s silhouette flickers with it, mirage-like.
“Ah. Are you referring to the…?”
“Earlier when you were talking with Gale.”
“I—apologize. I wasn’t aware that you were awake.”
“I wasn’t, really. But snippets are coming back.” Astarion doesn’t know what to say to that, and his hesitation means that the conversation dies down again. They stay that way for a moment, quiet, their shadows dancing in the firelight as Astarion presses aloe-slathered bandages over Tav’s burns.
“If you don’t mind me asking,” Astarion begins, clearing his throat, “why did you push me out of the way?”
What Astarion expects: it was some kind of sick, manipulative tactic to make Astarion feel indebted to Tav. Tav’s going to lord this over Astarion’s head for the rest of eternity, turn his guilt into a weapon and hold the blade against his neck. Tav hasn’t exactly done anything that would make Astarion explicitly attribute her to being that kind of person, but what Astarion has learned from his years with Cazador is that you can’t trust the performance, and you can’t tell what’s a performance until it’s too late and you’re bleeding dry on the ground, signing your life away to some psychopath.
What Astarion gets: a blank stare.
“What do you mean why I pushed you out of the way? I saw the arrow coming and you didn’t. I couldn’t just let you take the brunt of that, you could’ve gotten seriously injured.” Astarion eases a little; it’s as he thought.
“So you pushed me out of the way because, if I were injured, I wouldn’t have been able to continue fighting? Or was it because I would’ve just burdened the rest of you all?” Tav’s brow furrows.
“Neither? Kind of more like I just didn’t want you to die?”
“But why?” Astarion pushes forward. He’s sure there’s some ulterior motive, and if he can keep probing, he’ll be able to get under Tav’s mask, he’s sure of it. He knew he couldn’t trust anyone here.
“Is it so hard to believe that I just wanted to protect a friend?”
“Friend?”
How many years has it been since Astarion has truly had a friend? His fellow spawn at Cazador’s castle weren’t really friends, he would say, just strangers forced together under mutually dire circumstances. But how is that different from his current circumstances, banding together with this odd group to get to the bottom of the illithid tadpole?
Astarion supposes the difference is that they didn’t look out for each other. Each day under Cazador’s control was a battle of survival; there was no space to worry about others.
Friends. The word summons hazy memories of his childhood before Baldur’s Gate: faceless, laughing children, wildflowers… Astarion had died before he’d even come of age. The vast majority of his life he’d spent under Cazador’s control, looking in on friendship from the outside, wondering what it might be to have something like that. Long years of quiet observation to lure victims for his master meant that Astarion knew what people who made the fastest friends were like. They had open, bright faces, honest eyes…
As for Astarion, Astarion had only ever known how to attract with the secret promise of carnal pleasure, because Cazador didn’t need Astarion to have friends.
Who would want to be friends with a vampiric murderer, anyways?
Tav squints at Astarion’s prolonged silence, completely oblivious to the internal chaos that her words have just triggered.
“Yeah,” Tav treads carefully, “I think of you as a friend. Unless you’re not cool with that?” Astarion blinks rapidly. Tav must be lying, acting, or pretending because things like this don’t happen to beings like Astarion,
“Oh, I’m alright with anything, darling. Anything that works for you.”
“But I want to know if you want to be friends with me.”
A choice, now. Astarion wonders if Tav knows how many times she’s shifted his world today. It’s as if she’s held a prism to his eyes, the iron rules on which he once thought the world was built twisting and bending into nothing but light. Weightless light.
“I would be delighted to be friends with you,” Astarion breathes. It’s only because he should keep his enemies close, he tells himself. Tav brightens and then squints, her gaze caught on something on Astarion’s face.
“Are those—do you have fangs?” Astarion stiffens. He’d forgotten that his fangs would be more apparent up close, and the conversation had eased down his defenses. Awkwardly, he retracts his hands, and his silence is confessional.
Astarion prepares for the worst. Tav will probably scream, or punch him, or both. At the very least, she’ll definitely retract her earlier statement about wanting to be friends after realizing that he’s a monster.
"I’m sorry,” is all he can offer, throat dry. How must Tav be feeling, realizing she risked her life for him only for him to not even really be alive in the first place at all and a vampire at that. This is probably the part where he flees into the night, but something keeps him rooted here by the fire. It might be terror. It might be something else. Astarion has—lived?—two hundred years, yet he has never quite felt this way before.
“Sorry for what? If anything, I should be the one apologizing. I mean, we’ve been traveling together for a week and I couldn’t even tell you were an undead? I noticed you tended to be colder than the others, but I thought that was maybe just an elf thing.” Tav sighs and tries to run an exasperated hand through her hair but winces when the motion pulls at her bandages. “Shit. And you’re sitting here patching me up with blood all around.”
“If I were planning to take advantage of you, I probably would have done so before patching you up.” And it would’ve been so simple, no? Astarion had been toying with the idea for days now, but the idea suddenly makes shame course through his body.
Tav’s eyes widen comically. “No! No, oh god, that’s not what I was trying to imply. I just haven’t seen you eating much since the crash, I’m not even sure when you would have had the opportunity to replenish, I guess? Feed? Whatever you call it. And then here I am, just wasting my blood all over the place.”
Astarion can’t stop the guffaw of laughter that bursts out of him. Astarion has met people who tremble in terror before him at the prospect of losing their blood and others who readily offer it in exchange for his services, but Tav is the first who has appeared sympathetic to his plight and even disappointed that she can’t assist him. The past two hundred years of Astarion’s life have depended on his ability to read people; from what he can tell, there’s genuine concern in Tav’s eyes. Concern not for herself, but that somehow her bleeding is causing Astarion pain. It’s absurd. This is absurd.
“Well, luckily for you, I do have quite immaculate self-control, so it’s not necessarily hurting me to not feed. And we undead don’t function the same way as you living folk do: we don’t have to eat anything. Hunger takes a different form for us.”
“How so?”
Like you are constantly missing a puzzle piece, but not just any puzzle piece; the lynchpin of your being. Like reaching out expecting to grab hold of something but only finding emptiness. Vampiric hunger broaches more than the physical weakening; it strips away the essence of vampirism. Hunger transforms Astarion’s darkness into a moonless night.
“I suppose it makes us not quite feel like ourselves.”
“If you wanted to, I mean, if it would make you feel better,” Astarion watches in fascination as, despite all the blood loss, Tav still has enough blood in circulation for red to crawl up her neck, then her ears, “it wouldn’t bother me if you wanted to feed on me. Or needed to!”
Astarion blinks.
“I could snap your neck with my bare hands.” There are a hundred ways Astarion can imagine Tav under his hands, gleaming crimson in the firelight, eyes dull and glazed over like Astarion’s hundreds of other unfortunate victims. Astarion’s not nice, not kind, not trustworthy at all.
“Would you?” What does Tav see in Astarion that makes her ask that question with such earnesty in her gaze, challenging the implicit threat behind his words with the steadfast set of her shoulders. Tav asks would you like she doesn’t believe that Astarion would, which just. What is Astarion supposed to do with that information?
(They end up a tangled mess of limbs on the ground because Astarion is hopeless like that. It’s just the hunger, Astarion vows as his teeth skim hot, thrumming flesh. This doesn’t mean anything, the fact that Tav’s blood is the sweetest he’s ever had does not mean anything, and trust is still out of reach for Astarion.
If good things happen to good people, it only means Astarion will never have luck on his side. Tav’s smiling, open eyes and the ghostly clench of a pulse in Astarion’s heart as he pierces Tav’s neck: these, too, will pass.
Astarion does not sleep that night, yet dreams of brown-haired warriors with easy smiles. The past smells faintly of smoke.)