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atsadi-shenanigans · 8 months ago

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What Shall We Become 28 - Possibilities

The rogue rolls an insight check. And passes!

On AO3.

Two days later, her scent returns to normal. She’s moving better—faster—than before. Doesn’t stop to puff air. It hurts her, the moon blood. He knows it’s uncomfortable from dormitory gossip and two hundred years of prowling about for marks. But his leader is a stoic sort, and for it to effect her so tells him it hurts her a great deal.

Yet she didn’t complain (aside from breaking into random swearing now and again). Did her best not to slow them down.

Let him feed on her.

He thought he had her figured out. Truly, this time. Then she goes and confounds him.

Which only gets worse when she stops on the second day and says, in Chondathan (because he thought it prudent after the drow incident to teach her), “Body.”

He smells no blood or bowels or decay. Must be an ancient thing. A notch to her growing fortitude that she only hesitates a moment before shuffling over to search for a pack or bags to loot.

He’s rather proud.

More so—mixed in with that wretched confusion—when she hums in interest and then comes over. Finds his sleeve to tug (signal to lift his hand), and plonks two scrolls into his grasp.

He’s at a bit of a loss at first. With no sight, he can’t exactly read, and he’s never asked her for any books when he could. And then his moth-eaten memory catches up.

He’d told her he could learn magic through scrolls. She’d agreed to it. Said if they found anything, she would gift them to him. So here she is, doing just that.

She could have said nothing and stashed them away and he’d be none the wiser. Could give them to companions more appreciative, more valuable. Could even sell them—she needs coin, after all. Scrolls tend to fetch a fair price. But here she is, making good on what he thought was a throwaway, empty promise, even though he can’t even utilize them at the moment.

Because they are spellwork scrolls. He can sense it thrumming softly through the parchment.

“I…” he starts. Catches himself and paints on a practiced smile. “Thank you.”

“Yee-awp,” she drawls, which he’s learned by now is a word of consent.

Then she goes back to rummaging through whatever else the dead traveler left for them in a half-rotted rucksack. No thought at all. No hesitation. She doesn’t even force him to acknowledge her generosity or play it up.

Because…because it might not be an act.

And then he has to stand there in the realization that he did, in fact, just think that. And he does, in fact, possibly believe it might be true.

Not an act. Perhaps…perhaps none of it. Not feeding him. Not arming him. Not protecting him or giving him valuables or entertaining him or…

Astarion carefully breathes in, and then out.

It still does nothing to calm him, but it is a distraction to his racing mind.

Not an act. What even else could it be?

In the far, far off distance, something rumbles.

***

They make a cold, quiet camp once more. His…she chews sadly on the last of her dried fish. She still has some form of preserved ones (pickled, he thinks, and doesn’t that just sound disgusting). But she’s been understandably reluctant to crack that ration open.

Astarion ran out of his own piscean vintage a day ago. He’s used to (had been used to) going far longer without. This is (should be) nothing.

Yet he’s grown accustomed to bounty. Bunnies and boar, deer and bear and squirrels, in a pinch. Bandits and goblins and even the occasional githyanki (so sour). And her. But it’s far too soon to tap that cask. Not without their cleric to make sure a few sips wouldn’t send her face-first into the ground.

So he sits and fiddles with a shoddy mend on a pair of trousers he’s been carrying around (shoddy because his normally small, neat stitches have turned sloppy without functioning eyes). And he tries not to think.

He fails terribly in that regard.

His leader only has two bottles of her language potion left. They’ve both agreed she ought to save them for something important. Or, much more likely, something dire.

She falls asleep as humans do. Leaves him to his fiddling. So he cleans his knives, checks his long-healed wounds (it was growing inside his flesh) and finds nothing but his own cool, firm skin and muscle. No knobs. No ridges. So he checks twice more just to be certain.

He has to focus on breathing for a time after that.

And ends up listening to her.

She’s a fairly calm sleeper. The wizard mutters now and then, the tiefling rolls about in her bedding like a roast on a spit, and the Blade bloody hums. In his sleep.

She moves about now and then—unlike both the cleric and the gith, who lie as if they’re the ones without a pulse. But nothing loud or dramatic. Quiet even in her unsupervised hours.

Except…there. A tiny snore. Not all the time, and not obvious to anyone except him. It’s soft. Especially when she sleeps with her mouth open. An act of rebellion, perhaps? A subconscious challenge to her usual grim silence?

He likes it. It gives him something to listen for, in the dark and the cold. He’s not alone. Not locked away.

Eventually, he pulls the scrolls out. Runs his fingers along the length of them to get a feel for the magic inked onto their surface. It’s a rather tedious process, creating scrolls such as these. It requires the right words, certainly. But the parchment itself is infused with magic from the beginning. The most powerful of them are cut from the hides of magical creatures: displacers, basilisks, even dragons, if one can manage it.

Even the wood is preferably sourced from magical or spellwork-friendly material: kirin trees, phandar, or rowan. Not to mention kraken ink and the work that goes into enchanting that.

But none of that means anything to a man whose eyes don’t work thanks to some desiccated harpy of a mad, dead wizard. He has heard of enchanters creating scrolls with raised script for those with no or limited sight—sadly, these are not among that number.

She gave them to him, though. And should they find the cleric or the wizard or that damned druid—who probably landed in a bottomless crevasse and that’s why none of them have encountered the freakishly giant elf—he’ll get them to fix his problem and these shall be worthwhile again. Unless they can’t. Unless he’s stuck like this and that thought has been lurking all along but he’s never allowed it to the forefront and—

His companion snorts, grunts. He listens to her shift and resettle on the bedroll she plundered.

She gave these to him. And she let him have that necklace, too.

He retrieves it. Feels the cool links sift through his fingers like water, until the weight of the thing rests on his palm. He thinks there are words written on the cascading pendants holding jewels. Ones he can’t read with his fingers. And he can sense the edges of the spell, reminding him of a cool, spring morning just before dawn. He tries to lean into it. Can almost smell the streets of the lower city in the gray hours just before the sun rises. A stolen moment, lurking in the shadows, glancing up to the mansion where that bastard waits, wishing he could be somewhere else, anywhere else, turning and walking into the morning m—

It slips through his mind. He’s once again in the dark, imprisoned within his own body again.

He curls his fingers around the necklace so hard his finger bones ache.

He’s a stupid boy. Ill-mannered and ill-used. He’d told her elves have a proclivity for magic, and he used to be an elf, but he’s never had need for such a skill. Not at the beginning, and certainly not recently. He’s a pretty face whose only talent is in the bedroom. He’s a thing to be used and cast aside.

Yet. He remembers the sharp edge of her certainty when she slapped down the idea of carving the fungi out of him. Her absolute conviction that they would not hurt him, he would not hurt him, that he didn’t deserve that. She was so sure.

She believed him. Continues to believe the light twist on the truth he’d told her about being able to learn. That he can be valuable to her. To himself, even.

He has to hold very, very still after that thought.

And then comes another: to make himself more valuable, he’d be making himself more dangerous.

What had she said about the people she’d grown up with? They’d made it their job to control people? Cazador adored that. It was, all of the spawn were certain, the only thing he adored.

That bastard kept them hungry. Literally starving.

It wasn’t just about punishment, was it.

None of them used magic, save for Leon. But Leon had been brought in very recently, and he was strongly encouraged not to use his previous life’s talents. And Leon was often the favorite. Had to be the favorite, to win the private room for the child he’d been foolish enough to bring with him. To be the favorite, he often watched the other spawn. He watched Astarion. He reported back.

She’d said something about that, too, hadn’t she? Favorites?

More thoughts flit to the surface and hum about like tiny birds. That’s been occurring more now he’s free from the mental chains (thou shalt not leave my side, thou shall obey me in all things). Especially with a belly full of blood (thou shalt not drink from a thinking creature) (but how he’s done just that).

That bastard made them weak. Kept them weak. On purpose. Kept them terrified and pathetic. Deliberately. Kept them at each others’ throats (only somewhat metaphorically).

And if he can drink the blood of a living creature, perhaps he could learn as well?

The woman snoring softly next to him—trusting him at her most vulnerable—thinks him capable of being more than he actually is. Her plans work often enough. She’d not a dullard, not even a yokel, he has to admit (sometimes). She’s clever and insightful (sometimes), if wildly strange. And if she can talk down an ogre, shape shift a nascent god, and stage a coup on a gaggle of fishbeasts?

He slips the necklace back on. Tucks it safely into his tunic to rest against his chest.

Perhaps she’s right in her belief? Perhaps what she sees when she looks at him and hands him valuable scrolls and an enchanted necklace could be true. He needn’t be a severed puppet or a witless whore. He could be something else.

Something more.

#ruh roh #man's been fed for the first time in 200 years #he's got brain juices again #what shall we become #these two shitheads #astarion #tavstarion #lost in a cave #the burn part of slow burn #he's finding out #and it ain't all bad?#what?

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