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Jade awoke to the strangest thing she’d ever felt in her life: Astarion’s hair tickling her nose. Her eyes opened, and for a moment, she forgot who she was. There was no blood on her hands. No voice in her head. No altar awaiting the next sacrifice. Just a pale elf draped over her like a particularly clingy cat, his arm thrown across her stomach, his face tucked into the curve of her neck. He had been in her tent the night before when she had fallen asleep, promising to watch over her in case she had one of her sleep paralysis episodes or a nightmare.
Though sharing her tent was a new normal, Astarion had always desired his own space and she had respected that. This, she decided, had to be some kind of cosmic mistake. She lay frozen, eyes on the tent canvas above her, afraid that if she moved, the world would remember what she was and rip this away. The thought came with a familiar bitterness: something this gentle wasn’t meant for her.
“Stop thinking so loudly,” Astarion muttered, his voice muffled. “You’re interrupting my trance.”
Jade flinched, realizing she'd been trembling, and tried to pull away with a whispered, “Sorry.”
His arm tightened reflexively. “Did I say I was ready to get up?” He pulled back just far enough to look at her. His crimson eyes were still hazy, hair a wild mess instead of its carefully curated chaos. He still looked utterly beautiful. “Don’t apologize, darling,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “It encourages guilt, and we both know you already excel at that.”
Jade tried to laugh, but it stuck in her throat as a memory rose, unbidden: cold stone, chanting, the creak of leather restraints, the taste of iron. Her own screams echoed back at her, much too loud. Pain layered over pain until everything blurred into a single truth: disobey and be broken. She realized her hands were clenched in the blanket and forced them to loosen.
Astarion watched her, his brows knitted together in concern. “Jade,” he said softly. “Where did you go just now?”
“Nowhere,” she lied.
He scoffed. “Darling, if you’re going to lie to me, at least put some effort into it. That was embarrassing.”
She studied his face. Two hundred years under someone else's control, using seduction like armor, and sharp as a knife. They were both forged by monsters, shaped by someone else’s hunger. Affection had always been a tool, a test, or a trap. Never…whatever was happening between them now.
“I was remembering,” she admitted. “The temple. How they…punished me every time I said no.”
Astarion went very still. She expected him to mock it away, to turn it into something light and distant. That was how he'd survived Cazador, ironizing everything. Instead, his jaw clenched. “Cazador employed similar methods,” he said quietly. “And the message was very much the same.”
Silence settled over them and they simply lay there for a while. Outside, the camp stirred faintly—the crackle of embers, the sound of Gale preparing breakfast, the thump of Karlach’s footsteps as she did her morning “light jog,” which sounded like a small earthquake.
Inside the tent, Jade fought the urge to pull away before something went wrong, before she hurt him, before the whispering thing in her blood awakened once more and remembered this was not what she was made for. “I’m not good at this,” she blurted.
Astarion arched a perfect eyebrow. “At what? Lying? Darling, I'm aware.”
“Affection.”
He actually seemed taken aback, which was rare for him. “Affection,” he echoed. “You say that like it’s a skill.”
“Isn’t it?”
“It…shouldn’t be,” he said. “It should be…” He waved a hand vaguely. “Instinctive. Natural. Like breathing.”
“I don’t have instincts like that,” she said. “I have instincts like ‘slit that throat’ and ‘paint that altar’ and ‘you’ll only be loved if you're useful’.”
He stared at her for a long moment before speaking again. “All of that feels like truth because someone carved it into you,” he said, sharper now. “Repeated it until you mistook the echo for your own voice.” His lips curled in bitterness. “Take it from someone with two centuries of experience.” He spoke lightly, but his eyes were not light at all.
She swallowed. “So what, we just…decide it’s wrong?”
“We test it,” he replied. “Like any other hypothesis.”
There it was—his favorite trick. Turning horror into an intellectual puzzle, something he could toy with instead of being consumed by it.
“Test it how?” she asked.
He pursed his lips, considering. “Well. Step one: do something utterly useless for me. Something that benefits no one, especially not the Dark Lord skulking in your head.” The name “Bhaal” rarely passed his lips. He preferred to mock it through euphemism.
“Such as?” she asked.
He thought for a moment, then said, with grave seriousness, “Fix my hair.”
She blinked. “What?”
“It’s a disaster,” he said, gesturing at his head. “You know it, I know it, the gods know it. Help me.”
“You want…grooming,” she said slowly, as if translating from a dead language.
“Yes. I’m fairly certain it won’t advance your father’s apocalyptic agenda. Unless he’s branched out into personal care, which would be a fascinating development.”
She huffed out a rare laugh. “You’re ridiculous.”
“True.” He rolled onto his back, head in her lap, and looked up at her. It was a vulnerable position, and he had chosen it deliberately. Trust—real trust. “Go on, then. Useless act of tenderness. Let's have it.”
Her hands hovered over his hair, uncertain. She had used these hands to break bones, slit throats, carve symbols into flesh. They knew violence and ritual and obedience. They did not know this. He watched her, patient in a way that was quite strange coming from him.
“It’s just hair, darling,” he said softly. “It won’t explode.”
“That you know of,” she muttered, but let her fingers sink into the white curls.
They were softer than she expected. He inhaled sharply, so faintly she might have missed it, but didn’t pull away. She gently untangled a knot, then another, smoothing his hair back from his forehead. It felt strange–not unpleasant, just strange.
“See?” he said softly. “Useless.”
“For you perhaps,” she retorted. “I’m sweating.”
He laughed, a real laugh. “You’re worrying about doing it wrong.”
“I always do things wrong,” Jade said.
“Wrong according to whom?” he asked, eyes sliding shut as her fingers kept moving. “Your dear murderous daddy and his merry cult? Not my preferred metrics.”
She didn’t answer. Her chest felt tight and hot, her mind flickering with memories she didn’t want: blood-soaked compliments, praise for precise cuts, the hungry pride in a priest’s eyes when she killed exactly as instructed. Affection had always been conditional. Perform, or be punished. Obey, or be broken. With Astarion, there was no script like that and it terrified her.
He must have felt her tension, because he reached up and took her free hand awkwardly, fingers folding around hers like he was trying to remember how hand-holding worked. His thumb stroked one of the faint scars on her knuckles. “You know,” he said nonchalantly, “I’m not good at this either, in case that somehow escaped your notice.”
“You’re better at pretending than I am,” she murmured.
“That is not the same thing,” he said, with an edge she rarely heard. “Cazador taught me a great many things. How to seduce. How to manipulate. How to be whatever someone wants, so long as it keeps me alive and gets him what he wants.” His fingers tightened around hers. “He did not teach me how to be wanted for myself. That part, I’m improvising.”
She met his eyes. Raw honesty didn’t sit easily on him; it looked like a borrowed coat. But he kept it on.
“So,” he continued, a little stilted, “if you’re afraid you’ll…do affection wrong, congratulations. We’re equally unqualified. But no one’s grading us except us.”
Jade swallowed. “There’s always someone grading,” she said quietly. “A god. A master. An audience. There’s always a test.”
“Then let’s make our own,” he said. “New rules. New examiner. And I have very low standards. In fact, the bar is on the ground, darling.”
She snorted. “That explains me.”
“Nonsense,” he chided softly. “How about this: if neither of us runs screaming, stabs the other, or offers the Dark Lord a blood sacrifice in the next…five minutes, I declare this experiment a roaring success.”
“Low bar,” she said.
“Accessible goals,” he corrected, that smirk returning to his face, only somehow different now, softer.
The minutes passed. She stroked his hair. He held her other hand. No one screamed. No one bled. No divine voice thundered in her skull, demanding she stop this nonsense and get back to killing for killing’s sake.
The silence that settled over them was unfamiliar, but it wasn’t empty. It was the kind of quiet that came after you finally laid down a weapon. Her chest hurt in a new way. Not the familiar ache of regret. This was…dangerous. Soft and sharp all at once, like pressing on a bruise and finding it healing instead of worse.
“Does it ever feel like stealing?” she asked suddenly.
His eyes, half-lidded, opened and met hers. “What?”
“This,” she answered, gesturing vaguely with her chin to his hand in hers, their small attempts at comfort. “Like we’re taking something that isn’t meant for us.”
His eyes searched her face for a long, long moment. “Yes,” he said eventually. “Constantly.”
Jade swallowed. “And you…keep doing it anyway.”
“Oh, darling.” His smile turned fierce. “After everything they took from us? Stealing a little happiness is practically a moral obligation.”
The words landed somewhere deep in her, where the cult’s teachings had rooted like knives. A different kind of doctrine, spoken in a low, steady voice under canvas instead of over an altar. “What if I break it?” she asked, hating how small she sounded. “What if I hurt you?”
“You will,” he said simply.
She flinched. “That’s comforting.”
“You will,” he repeated, “and I will hurt you. Not because we want to, not because some rotten master is pulling our strings, but because that’s what people do when they’re scared and learning.” He squeezed her hand. “The question is: when it happens, do we choose to be better than the monsters who made us?”
Her eyes stung. “I don’t know how.”
“Neither do I,” he said. “We’ll improvise. We’re already very good at pretending. We just…point that talent inward, for once.”
Jade bent forward, hesitated, then pressed a clumsy kiss to his forehead. She had seen other couples do this—happy couples. Astarion froze.
For a second, she panicked. “Was that—was that wrong?”
His eyes were wide, startled in a way she’d never seen. No smirk. No mask. Just pure, unguarded surprise. “I—no,” he said quickly. “No, that was…that was…” He searched for the right word. “Nice.”
“Nice,” she repeated flatly.
“Yes, well, forgive the lack of poetry.” Color had somehow risen in his cheeks, faint but unmistakable. “My vocabulary in this area is somewhat underdeveloped.”
Her fingers slid, almost of their own accord, from his hair to his cheek. His skin was cool under her touch.
“Do it again,” he said quietly.
Jade’s heart stumbled. “The kiss?”
“Yes. For science.”
She huffed another laugh, then leaned down and kissed his forehead again. This time she lingered a little longer, letting herself notice the texture of his skin, the faint, almost imperceptible tension as he fought old habits that told him to turn this into seduction, transaction, performance. He didn’t. He just…let it happen. When she pulled back, he exhaled, a tiny shudder of breath.
“How was that—for science?” she asked.
“A rousing success,” he declared. “The subject appears…unaccountably pleased. Though, he wouldn't say no to more tests.”
They lay like that for a while, tangled up in each other, in their fear, in the fragile, defiant thing growing quietly between them. Not worship, not obligation, not command. Choice. At last, Astarion sighed and sat up, disentangling himself with theatrical reluctance.
“Come along, then,” he said, offering her a hand. “We can’t stay in here all day. The world won’t stab itself, you know.”
“Sadly,” she said, taking his hand and letting him pull her to her feet.
He leaned in, lips close to her ear. “But tonight,” he murmured, “after the gods and monsters are done shouting, we’ll conduct more experiments. Perhaps even advance to such daring trials as…kissing on the lips.”
“Scandalous,” she said, but her voice was lighter now. “You’ll ruin your reputation.”
“I can only hope,” he replied.
They stepped out of the tent together, into the bustle and chaos and danger of the day—two people shaped by cruelty, walking side by side. Memories of blood still throbbed quietly in Jade’s mind. Memories of chains still lingered in Astarion’s. Neither of those things vanished in the morning light. But as his fingers brushed hers, briefly, deliberately, and for no purpose at all except that they both chose it, Jade realized something small and astonishing: For the first time, she did not need a script. Whatever this was, she would fight for it. And that, in its own tiny, stubborn way, felt like the most blasphemous prayer she’d ever said.