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The direct sun burned through his eyelids, hot and unbelievably bright even with his eyes closed. The sand around him sneaked into his clothes and tickled him in an unpleasant way. He couldn’t remember how he got there, not where, exactly, was him — a consequence, no doubt, of the incredible amount of bottles of wine he had endorsed himself with, enough to make even a vampire falter — yet, why would it matter? Why should he care?
Things, any kind of thing really, even the ones which brought him joy before, had stopped being relevant and important. The city, for which they had done so much, lost so much, quickly forgetting the heroes that so readily fought to protect it. Life had taken a turn for the worst, a plunge into the unending darkness, from the moment the woman who had completely changed his life — the person who gave him the strength and confidence to break his chains and kill his merciless master, the one who taught him what it meant to have a friend, who made him learnt about the delights of love and the devastating pain of heartbreak — took her own life not so long ago, the victory against their enemies unsavoury and underserved, a thought shared by most members of their old group.
Things should have never gone as they did.
And he couldn’t help but put the blame on but one person.
Blame and guilt were easy to throw, to accuse, when the person in question wasn't there to defend themselves… easier still to focus on when it would fix nothing. When there was no turning back. He had exclusively a resolution in his mind, a goal. Perhaps two, if he was allowed to believe in anything.
He wanted, first and foremost, to stop hurting. The pain of grief had been unknown to him until the last couple of months. He had never cared enough for the death of someone to affect him as theirs had done, and the one before them that honestly mattered to him, he enjoyed. The grief he felt for Cazador wasn't exactly for him, but for all the people he tricked because of him, for all the spawns that were lost, for himself and the centuries of freedom he had taken from him. It had been pleasant. It still was, in a manner.
The grief of losing both of them, months apart from each other, was not.
He did not understand, even after her passing, what he was feeling. It was similar to other emotions — sadness, despair, hurt, guilt. It was all of them and none, each less important, less meaningful, than the sum that had accumulated inside of him.
At first he rejected the feelings. He hadn’t had a need for such strong emotions in centuries so why keep them? Why entertain them if they were useless? If they made him clumsy and inattentive and only pushed him further into the darkness.
He tried to embrace himself again, to explore intimacy with different people now that he didn’t have to, now that he was actively choosing to do it. Yet a choice made to hide from healthier ones was not truly a choice, not truly something he decided. He hid, again, behind the comfort of the familiar realizing only later that it didn’t help. Nothing he did helped, they never left his mind.
The best he found, before she abandoned him like she did, had been trying to work on the sadness that had been presented to him while he made her company, trying to help her as best he could, to pull her upwards and steal a smile or two with a new joke, with a stupid conclusion, with an unnecessarily flirty line.
She had loved them, before.
The memory of her laughter invaded his dead heart, enveloping it in warmth. She hadn’t been the same person after defeating the Absolute. Even if he had been lucky enough to enjoy her company a couple of months more, the real her had died that same night, along with the brain. Along with the wizard.
And he was just about to follow them, if he remembered correctly. If the alcohol wasn’t playing him a trick and he had finally gathered the guts to do it.
Life as a spawn — sunless once more after becoming addicted to its embrace, alone, hiding in the cold sewers with the only sunny side of his short visits to the woman that had become his entire world, finding work and food when and how he could and doing his best not to let her fall, their titles as heroes of Baldur’s Gate unwelcomed and despised despite how much he had wanted to revel in them, to be praised, to be seen and admired — had been harder than he could ever have imagined. Harder than had been worth it after, without her.
Luckily, nothing compared to his life with Cazador, as much as he complained at the time, yet it hadn’t been an easy walk with flowers at the side and decorated with colorful lights either. It had been fulfilling, being truly free for once, visiting his friends in the city, doing little adventures, killing horrible people for a price, getting to know himself as the elf and vampire he became once his master was no more — trying without success to forget his feelings, to hide them in a small box at the edge of his heart and lock them away, for the woman who taught him the meaning of the previously foreign concept of ‘love’, the one he had spent months admiring and daydreaming about, wasn't meant for him.
And when such a woman couldn't take it anymore, when she finally became overwhelmed by the sacrifice of the man she had given herself to, his life lost the little meaning it had. He had been a survivor up until that point and he had never before regretted allowing her to influence him to give the Ascension up, to be better.
Yet what worth had been ‘being better’, what worth had been saving the remains of his soul if he couldn’t even save his friends? Save her?
He felt the sun burning his skin, his eyes closed in defeat. Sooner or later it would take him to a better place. If he was lucky enough, to a place in which he was no longer. After more than two centuries of pure survival and the promise of something better being crushed before he could even taste it, he just wanted to rest. He was tired. Exhausted.
The saviors of Baldur’s Gate… but at what cost? Their sanity? Their friends? The only person Astarion had ever loved. And the one he lost because he had chosen to stay quiet about it, because he had been unable to acknowledge it as it was, because he had failed to give it a name.
And by the time he had grown enough as a person to see it the light of her eyes brightened for him no longer, not in the same way.
It still hurts up to this precise day. But he had contented himself with seeing her smile, with watching her rush about camp doing all kinds of things and almost… floating in her happiness, with the red that appeared in her pale cheeks and in the tip of her pointy little ears when she had drunk or laughed too much.
She always was sunny and optimistic, innocent yet not naïve, fun and incredibly playful. She brightened the place with her sole presence, nevermind her songs. She never allowed anything to bring her down and she made it her problem to cheer everyone around her, dissipating the clouds each of them had been hiding, changing their views and the course of their fates completely without effort. She was the embodiment of life.
Up until the day Gale sacrificed himself.
The wizard had not said a word to anyone until the last moment, had lived his last days as if he had an eternity remaining. He boasted about the future, made plans as to how to tackle a well-organized group to help, clean and reconstruct and even spoke about his intentions with her once everything was over. He should have noticed the change in his voice then. He should have realized when his friend asked for his support, confiding in him that he trusted him to care for her if something ever happened to him. He should have noticed his words had been more of a desperate plea than an anxious, passing worry. He already knew what he would have to do if everything failed, he had already decided. And he knew if he shared it with any of them they would do everything in their hands to stop him.
So he remained silent until the shadow of the Nether Brain darkened the city and they prepared to attack.
Astarion liked to think, as obvious it had seemed afterwards, that he still had other plans before the Netherstones failed them, that he had wanted to live beside her and not forego her and ruin her life too, before all their plans crumbled. Before he took upon himself to be the savior.
Before he failed to trust them to do a good job by themselves, as if they wouldn’t have been able to win. He thought he trusted them, that they were friends. It felt wrong to realize otherwise.
No one had been in favour of the choice, no one believed, like him, that it was the only choice, yet, at the time, it had been difficult to oppose it. Difficult to choose better instead of easier.
It hadn’t been easier in the long term.
The wizard had kissed the leader of their group with tears in his eyes, desperate, gripping to life, to her, the emotion of the gesture not going unnoticed for any of them who were looking, who even gazed their way. Afterwards, without any further words besides the ones he could have left with her, he moved forward and blocked the rest from following him. Everyone realized immediately there was something happening too important for any of them to grasp, at the time.
They had seen themselves forced to drag a kicking and punching tiefling, screaming and crying, back to safety. A poor tiefling who a moment before had been about to join the final fight of their journey followed by the man she loved, the one who had promised her a love more beautiful than the Outer Planes, eternal and unquenchable. Gale had been, to her, the answer to each internal conflict, each complex, each doubt and sadness… and, at that precise instant, he became the entire opposite.
They were lucky Halsin and Karlach had been with them, lending a helping hand and a couple calming words that did little, or he had no doubt she would have followed the wizard to the end of the world.
Of course, he couldn’t have imagined she would do so anyway.
It had been a couple of months, perhaps more. She seemed… okay when he visited, which, to be fair, had been almost every day since then. Not the definition of happiness, by any means, but… more herself, especially lately. She helped with the rebuilding of the city to keep herself busy, took over herself to find a home for different orphans and pets that had nowhere else to go, donated her share of goods to different shops and locals around who needed a hand. In the last days of her life she had even seemed… relieved, her smile bigger and warmer, as if after all the darkness she could finally see a glimmer of light. It had given him hope that she could overcome this with the help of the friends close to her, like Jaheira, Shadowheart or himself.
He had never hated being wrong so much.
And so, in the days after her departure, knowing that carnal pleasure and physical work wouldn’t work to keep his mind busy, knowing that they would do nothing but made him ask why she wasn’t there with him, why had any of it been worth it in the end — his freedom a far too small a prize for everything he had gained and lost in between, he had thought about releasing himself into the sun more than once. Following their steps.
No one needed him, no one would miss him. The friends he made had their own lives and wouldn’t worry about him. No one could understand the void that occupied him now, no one could see how nothing was important anymore, how nothing mattered. He had lost the will to do anything — to feed, to clean himself, to interact with other people, to watch the moon and the stars.
What good were they if he was the only one remaining to see them?
What good was he if he didn’t even want to be ?
Yet the sun was taking too long. It should be painful. He should have been resisting the urge to hide. Instead, the sun over his skin was more like a caress, a punishment for wanting to rest, to destroy these feelings, than the excruciating release he had been hoping for. Astarion felt cheated.
He was done. He had experienced the life of a hero and it had been nothing like the tales promised. He had learnt love and how unbearable the feeling of losing it, of renouncing it, could be. He had known a regret deeper than the seas and wider than the sky, a despair colder than an ice storm.
He had gained much, so much that, between his regrets, he didn’t regret the journey at their side nor the things he had experienced. He would be eternally grateful for their help with Cazador, for how she, specially, helped him to understand that he was the master of his own body and if he didn’t want to do something, he shouldn’t, simply as that. There were so many good things he had embraced at her side, so many beautiful feelings he hadn’t even found a name for back then but that brought a stupid, irritating smile to his face that he couldn’t wash away if she was close. So many peaceful moments of discovery.
Yet he had lost a lot more with their absence. With the emptiness she had left that never could be filled by anyone else. It wasn’t worth it, the alcohol in his veins had proclaimed, and he had believed it.
However, despite his very clear intentions to die and his absolute no resistance to it, he was still alive while under the sun, his eyes closed to help with his dizziness, confused as to why he could still think and feel the air, an extremely familiar feeling inside his head.
“Hey, pale guy! Are you alright?”
That voice.
Even a million years from now, in a thousand different realities, he would recognize her voice.
He smiled to himself.
The second thing he had wanted from this desperate suicide attempt had been to see her again.
Perhaps, being optimistic, he had somehow succeeded in his endeavors and the dreams of his death, the embrace of whichever god it was the one who took care of these things, had carried him to her. He would be lucky if that was to be the case. He would do anything to save her, to change the curse of fate.
If only Gale had been in his place he would have been able to cheer her up, to find the words. After all, those were his specialties. He would have known how to care for her, what to do each time her smile faded, what to say to never allow her to reach that point. The stupid, selfish wizard, making himself a name in the history books at the expense of the most precious thing of all. He should be ashamed. And it had been Astarion who had been accused of making ‘poor choices’.
“It is possible he is in need of some kind of refreshment. Who knows how much time he has been there, lying in this heat. I should have something…”
He rose up, suddenly, adding to his discomfort. He sat in place and opened his eyes, immediately closing them again. There was far too much light for his unaccustomed eyes to be comfortable opening. The sun felt strangely real, the situation weirdly nostalgic, the voices loud and palpable, not a simple echo of the past nor a ghost of his memories.
With a hand shadowing his face he opened his eyes again, allowing them to get used to the colors of the beach he was in, the silhouettes of the people who looked worriedly in his direction.
This time he could see them, colorful and full of life, right in front of him.
Shadowheart had her arms closed over her chest, an uneasy, disapproving look on her face and the same Shar uniform she wore when they met, thinking her belief hadn’t been as obvious as they had for everyone else.
Gale — purple robe, quarterstaff on his back, unkempt cute beard on his face, the whole packet he had grown to know and care for — stopped the search of his bag to look at him and raised a brow, as if instilling him to speak.
But at his side, almost white skin and long hair black as coal, was Laihya, the woman he had lost barely days ago. Better than that, she was the real one, the one he had not seen since they became heroes of the city. The kindness and curiosity of her gaze remained and her tail bounced around playfully, excited, while she approached him. Her pale gray eyes pierced him, as if she had recognized him that same instant. He felt entranced and she stopped her steps and opened her mouth just to close it again, as if thinking harder, as if something was wrong. Shortly after, sooner than he had enough time to paint her smiling expression again into his brain, the clash of their minds interrupted the moment, showing him pieces of her past he knew far too well while flashes of his life at Szarr’s Palace mixed in between.
He had been here before.
The people gathered, the landscape and sights, the unease of his body and the damn worm occupying a place not for him, a place from which he had tore it up before.
“Well? I’d love to say there’s no rush but if we don’t get these things out soon we will become part of that tentacle army and I would really like to stay as is.”
He pinched his nose, gathering strength to rise and stand, the situation too overwhelming.
He had just done this. He had just saved the city. He could not believe he was back at the beginning, this must be a joke. He hoped it would be a joke, at least. He had known of magic, some of his friends were well versed in magic, but he had never heard of something as ‘undoing what was done’. Or… traveling back in time. He wasn’t even sure this was something proper for a god, why would he be…? He must have been mistaken. He must be hallucinating. If he’d known enough alcohol could do something similar he would have started drinking a lot more.
Laihya’s hand came to his arm and squeezed it slightly, grabbing his attention. She inspected him worriedly, her eyes examining each little part of his face, stopping briefly over the scar of his neck before rushing away from it, as if she didn’t want to insult him by staring. Instead, her gray shades focused on his red ones and he could feel the world melting, the words fumbling in his mouth without pronouncing anything coherent.
“You didn’t answer me. You just fell here like the rest of us but you seem worse for wear. Do you want to come with us? We were thinking of making a camp around these parts to think about where to go next.”
“Go ahead, tell him everything, I’m sure is perfectly saf-”
“Oh, shush. The man clearly needs a moment. We can’t leave him here to become bait for the hyenas, it is common knowledge there are plenty around these parts.”
“Look here wizard, I have no clue where ‘these parts’ are and-”
The conversation that had originated a couple steps away seemed to disappear completely when he heard her chuckle, a dismissing shake of her head while her attention returned to him, the intensity of her gaze capable of even seeing the remains of his soul, if there was still any. He looked away for a moment, overwhelmed, his hand reaching for his shoulder to relieve some of the tension while he searched for the words.
“Don’t worry about them for now. What’s your name?”
She smiled at him and everything else went out of focus, nothing else seemed to have color, not like her.
Should he tell him that he knew her? Would she believe him? He wouldn’t believe himself, not easily. Not yet. He might trust her completely but she didn’t even know his name. She trusted him as far as she could throw him and she did well. Despite the excruciating pain he felt at knowing her better than himself while being a complete stranger to her, to the woman he loved. The unfamiliarity of his person in her gaze. The warmth it carried either way.
He could not believe he had her again at this range, could not believe she was touching him.
He could not believe he was back at the beginning and he prayed to all the gods and goddesses who had ignored him before that it wasn’t a joke.
Because even if he had to remake his entire journey, even if he was back under Cazador’s service, even if nothing he had done before had left any scar in this world for him to see, it was worth it.
Now he had another chance to change the course of everything.
At least she was alive. At his side.
And now that he could he would do anything to ensure she remained that way.
Anything.