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Jaheira doesn’t take a watch shift.
It takes you all a few days to notice, and it’s a few more before anyone feels brave enough to comment on it.
It’s not exactly like there are rules, is the thing. Everyone spends about twelve hours a day at camp, usually taking watch in pairs. It lets everyone sleep for eight hours and watch for four, although not everyone sleeps their whole allotted time. (Halsin had volunteered for extra shifts, with his quick elven meditation, but that had been shut down quickly by an irritated Lae’zel).
And true to form, it’s Lae’zel who remarks on this newest oddity first.
“The Harper has not yet taken a turn,” she remarks to you and Karlach one evening at the close of her shift, tilting her head at Jaheira’s tent. “She seems to be a fine warrior. Surely her age is not so advanced that she cannot stand watch.”
“Maybe it’s for the better,” Karlach said, quick as ever to her icon’s defense. “We only just got the schedule working.”
“We should all contribute,” Lae’zel insists, but for once her heart isn’t in the argument and she drops the subject quickly enough.
You do note that it seems out of character for Jaheira, who is perhaps the only person at camp more paranoid than you, and you wonder privately if she isn’t using that time for something else. But gods know you can’t cast aspersions at anyone else’s nighttime activities. Not when you have to tell each new person who joins your camp that you might kill them in your sleep, apparently, and would they mind stabbing you a bit if you show up at their tent insensible? So you drop the subject too.
Jaheira never does get added to the nighttime roster, though somehow she still always looks exhausted. Then you have to haul the whole camp out of the (formerly!) Shadow-Cursed Lands to Baldur’s Gate, and you almost forget the whole thing.
You wake from a dream you are enjoying, which is alarming in and of itself, and you try to bring your hands in front of you to examine them for blood.
You can’t, though, because a rope digs into your wrists. You gradually, blearily become aware that your arms are twisted uncomfortably behind your back.
There’s a surge of pain as the thing that’s buried inside of you realizes with sheer, bloody-minded fury that the kill you’d been dreaming of is not splayed in front of you.
You had tried tying yourself up at night, after Alfira. But it had only seemed to make you more active. Once you woke, fully unbound and clutching a dagger, near Lae’zel’s tent. You stopped the ropes then, and tried to convince yourself that Lae’zel could take you if she had to. It didn’t make you feel much better.
But now - now you are restrained in a way that you can’t get out of, even conscious. You pull experimentally against the pressure on your arms and unexpectedly drag your legs backward. It takes you a second, but you can feel it out: your wrists are bound together, your ankles bound together, and then those two sets of bonds are connected. It prevents you from getting either set of ropes into view, much less attacking them with your teeth or hands. It might be how you’d restrain an animal.
Belatedly, a second realisation hits you: this is not a set of knots you could have tied yourself.
“Please tell me you caught me before, not after,” you say into the quiet dark of your tent, your stomach lurching.
There’s a faint exhale, like the ghost of a laugh, and Jaheira steps into your view. If you crane your neck, you could see her face, but you let your gaze stay on her familiar, worn boots.
“I am almost insulted you have to ask,” she says, her voice level and calm. It’s a front, but not a bad one. “You did give me several weeks of warning. I would count myself a poor Harper had I not taken precautions.” Relief rolls over you like a wave, clashing with a foreign hatred. The thing that lives inside of you wants to rip out Jaheira’s throat for stopping you, then figure out how she did it so no one can ever do it again. (The rest of you kind of wants to hug her.)
Your mind flickers through possibilities instinctively: spying animals, tripwire spells, warding glyphs.
“Don’t tell me,” you say, a little too quickly.
“I have done this before,” Jaheira says, and this time some of the amusement in her voice is real. She leans over you, but you flinch away before she can cut the ropes.
“Who did I go after?” you ask. She sighs, and you risk a glance up, catching her running a hand across her face. She looks tired.
“A child,” she says. “Yenna. The one you gave some food to when we came into the city. She showed up late last night, looking for a place to sleep. She didn’t see you before I caught up to you.”
“Shit,” you say, which feels insufficient, so you add some more creative Elvish curses. Then you let you head thump back to the bedroll underneath you.
This isn’t where your bedroll normally goes, you realize. She must have dragged it over here once she’d gotten you restrained and rolled you onto it. It’s a strangely sentimental touch from the usually cynical woman, and you pretend like it doesn’t make tears well in your eyes. It’s hard to hide them, though, with no hands to wipe them away. You close your eyes instead.
You feel a hand ghost over your back, the barest touch as a warning that she’s there, and then the pressure on your arms eases with a tug as she cuts the first rope. When you don’t follow up this small taste of freedom with tackling her for the dagger (or biting at her throat, the way your brain whispers in suggestion), she hums thoughtfully and also cuts the rope binding your wrists together.
“I don’t suppose you could just do that every night?” you ask, your tone hovering somewhere between sheepish and horrified. The scope of the horror that was averted hovers over you, but so does a giddy relief as you rub feeling back into your fingers. Yenna’s still alive. You were stopped.
“Every night? Not if you want to keep being able to use your arms,” Jaheira says dryly.
You realize you can sit up now, so you do. She watches you, and there’s nothing in her expression that you haven’t seen before: calculation, caution, wry amusement, and a plausibly deniable amount of fondness. No new creeping dread, no distrust or horror or pity. She’d believed you the first time you warned her, and actually understood what you meant, which makes you wonder what precisely she means when she says she’s done this before.
Your arms are aching, and you roll your shoulders experimentally. You don’t let yourself wince, but your stiffness is obvious. You’ll be feeling it all day, which is anything but convenient with a showdown with Gortash looming on the horizon. But the kid is alive. The dark and twisted dreams were just that - dreams. No one had to die for them.
“Thank you,” you say, and the other part of you recoils so viscerally from the sincerity of the simple phrase that you nearly vomit. “I owe you for this.”
“Noted,” Jaheira says. She hands you the knife, glances meaningfully at the rope around your ankles. It’s a test, and not a subtle one, but it’s one you can pass. You cut the ropes, then toss the dagger in a flip to offer it back to her hilt first.
“Now you are simply showing off,” she says, her lips twitching. She tucks the dagger away, and you glance to the side so you don’t see where.
She stands to leave, and you instinctively catch her wrist in one hand. Your hand convulses and cramps as electricity snaps and arcs between her fingers, and then you have hold of only empty air: another reassurance, when all things are considered. You draw your still-twitching hand back to cradle it against your chest.
“Yes?” she asks, casual, like she hasn’t just cast Shocking Grasp to knock you off of her.
“If I get worse…” you start. Then you stop. She is holding herself with a martial grace, something between standing to attention and a loose battle readiness. The stance utterly fails to hide the flicker of pain across her face.
She would do it, you know. If she needed to. Turn on you, even kill you. Stand against whichever of your companions justified your growing, awful ambitions.
“Never mind,” you say. “I’ll ask Lae’zel.”
Jaheira, who has clearly deduced what you were going to ask, snorts.
“She will be a little too willing, I think,” she says lightly. Then her gaze softens. “But it is kind of you to try and spare my feelings, cub.”
“You know,” you say. “I was trying to remember if we’ve gone a day since this started without killing someone.” You’d been trying to figure out if not killing someone was what triggered the dreams, but you’d thought back with dawning horror.
“Adventuring is bloody work,” Jaheira says. “That any of us keep hold of our souls surprises me.” She gets a strange look, then, faraway and melancholy before unexpectedly… smiling.
“I do not think you need to worry yourself overmuch,” she said. “When you are awake, I trust in your sheer obstinate unwillingness to give in. And at night, well,” she shrugged. “You are much easier to ambush when you are asleep. I think I healed your nose back into the right place, though.” Your laugh is a little weak, but it’s real enough to startle even you.
“Thank you,” you say again, and don’t even have to fight the wave of nausea this time.
“Do not thank me so hastily,” Jaheira warned. “I will call in that favor you promised me.”
“I only offer favours I intend to honor,” you say, meaning I trust you. She shakes her head just slightly, as if in disbelief. “But you might have to use it to get out of the eleven night watch shifts you haven’t stood.”
“Because I was watching over your murderous other-self!” Jaheira snapped, clearly warming instantly to the new topic. “Have you seen your sleep schedule? It is lucky I am accustomed to odd hours, or I would have joined you in your insanity by now from sheer sleep deprivation.”
“I thought old people naturally slept less,” you suggest, and are rewarded with a bark of laughter and a gleam in her eye.
“Oh, I will get my revenge for that one,” she warned. “Do not forget, I know where - and when - you sleep.” The threat is more calming than it has any right to be, so you simply smile guilelessly at her and watch her pretend to fume.
Maybe, you let yourself think, ever so tentative. Maybe you can have this.
With help.