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Auri’s always loved Eleint; it’s her favorite month of the year. The leaves turning every brilliant shade of yellow, orange, and red – that’s poetry defined. And when they start to fall, she loves that too.
Not today, though. Today, every leaf on the ground feels like a metaphor for the way she’s barely hanging on.
Auri sits cross-legged in front of her tent. The ripped collar of her tunic taunts her. Camp bustles, and her crisis is low-priority for obvious reasons. Auri’s eyes well up with tears. It’s a dramatic reaction, but it comes unbidden. She has so little left to call her own, and the torn tunic in her hands is one of her few remaining worldly possessions.
It’s not unfixable. Auri forces herself to take a deep breath; she has everything she needs if only her hands will cooperate.
She’s successfully threaded the needle; now all that’s left to do is a passable job at patching it up. The problem is that Auri’s hands twitch and tremble as they always do, and maybe worse for how focused she is on willing them steady.
Instead, she succeeds in pricking herself several times, though never enough to draw blood. After what feels like an eternity of labor, she holds the tunic in front of her.
She’s finished the shoddiest mending job that Faerûn has perhaps ever seen and tosses the tunic into the dirt next to her.
Auri’s only tried once. This shouldn’t be so disheartening, but everything’s so much these days and she’s never been the calmest person anyway. The tears again threaten an appearance, and she’s having trouble breathing, and why is her heart pounding like this it’s a tunic this doesn’t matter–
“Darling, I know we always joke about you taking the weight of the world on your shoulders, but there’s no need for you to look the part.”
She likes Astarion, but this is an unexpectedly vulnerable moment, and she’d like to suffer through it in peace.
“Hi,” she says, almost-but-not-quite curtly, hoping that he’s only addressing her in passing.
Such is not her destiny, though. Behind her, Astarion says, “What did your horrid clothing do to garner such treatment? It didn’t choose such an ugly, ill-fitting visage for itself, you know.”
Despite her frustration, Auri snorts. “I ripped the collar earlier and I was trying to fix it, but–”
Auri holds up her quivering hands and they’re answer enough. Astarion makes a noise that seems to signify recognition.
And he holds out a hand, unflinching, steady.
“You don’t have to,” Auri says.
Astarion scoffs. “You’re about to cry, which I’m sure you don’t want to do, and I most certainly don’t want to deal with. Give it to me.”
He doesn’t give her another chance to protest. He snatches the tunic from her trembling grasp, and to him, it’s trivial. Auri can see it in the confidence of his movements. “Everything’s changed so much lately,” Auri says quietly, tucking her knees into her chest as he works. “This is one of the only things I have left from the time before the tadpole.”
Astarion doesn’t answer right away. With needle and thread, he sews Auri’s mistake back together, and when he’s done, he says, “Nothing lasts forever, but the tunic will live to see another day, I think.”
He says it casually, as if Auri hadn’t been seconds from spiraling into oblivion about it only moments before. She wants to kiss him. She could kiss him.
Astarion offers her the shirt, his delicate, precise handiwork underlined with Auri’s jagged bastardization of the craft.
“Or you could always go without. I certainly wouldn’t complain.” The rakish, too-long time he takes eyeing her up and down is what Astarion affords her – it’s a different man than the one she’s been talking with as he mended her shirt.
So Auri doesn’t rise to it. She reaches out to take the tunic from him and says, “Thank you.”
Astarion’s lips part. He expected her to roll her eyes or flirt back, to punch him on the shoulder coquettishly, but he never knows what to do when she’s grateful. Auri’s learned that much. And she doesn’t kiss him because he loses himself whenever so much as the thought of affection is on the table.
The closeness of their fingers when she takes the shirt is as intimate as any press of her lips on his. Astarion swallows hard, and he tears his hand away. “Anything to spare us the annoyance of your tears.”
Leaves are still falling. One drops into Astarion’s hair, crisp orange bright in his ivory curls.
And Auri doesn’t think. She leans forward and plucks it away, and the closeness of their faces is only incidental, but Auri holds her breath anyway, and her heart gives her away.
“The offer still stands.” Astarion’s voice drops low, mask firmly replaced, and heat pools in Auri’s stomach despite their position in the middle of camp. “A night of passion, depraved, carnal lust–”
“Kiss me, then,” Auri says, a challenge. “Kiss me with all the tenderness you put into fixing that collar.”
And again, the facade flickers, the red leaves of his irises quivering as Auri gets the tiniest glimpse through at the man beneath the myth he’s constructed.
“I’ll ruin you,” he says, equal parts smoke and sincerity. Auri runs her thumb over his handiwork on the collar.
“I look good ruined,” Auri says, “as long as it’s you doing the ruining and not whatever game your instinct toward self-preservation wants to play with me.” Astarion freezes, and Auri stands. “Thank you again. It means more than you know.”
Astarion’s eyes linger on her back as she goes, and leaves crunch under her boots.