#sorry i've tried to keep most of my bg3 brainrot contained to my sideblog but writing goes here!

[blackestnight]

speaking in tongues

for fluffuary day 10, "secret language." minor spoilers for a side conversation with karlach in act 3 (in the lower city graveyard). tialha is a wood elf bard who loves her giant buff fire girlfriend very much.

“Taters,” Karlach murmured, almost lost under the clanking of her greaves as she rocked back to standing with a parting caress to her mother’s headstone. She couldn’t feel it when Tialha pressed a hand to her back, not through the armor and all the underlayers, but she could feel it, in that humming way she was always aware of where the rest of their merry band of infected bastards was.

“Taters?” she asked, voice equally hushed. Suddenly it occurred to Karlach—maybe Tia had someone buried here, too. She’d lived in the Gate for a while, apparently, and landed somewhere between Astarion and Halsin on the old as balls scale that elves measured their lives by. Plenty of time to have loved and lost. Maybe someday soon, she’d stand here over Karlach’s grave with her hands clasped in that famed elven stoicism.

The engine hitched and sputtered in her chest like a caught breath, or a muffled sob. Gods, it wasn’t fucking fair.

“Meant ‘I love you’ in the Cliffgate household,” Karlach said, instead of anything self-pitying. Plenty of time for being sorry when she croaked. “I can’t even remember how it started anymore. Lost family lore.”

Older than she was, probably. Mum had liked to nuzzle against Dad’s horn in the mornings, before they left for work, drop a kiss and a soft Taters on the ridge of his ear.

“There was a lot of silly nonsense in our house,” she added, and somewhere in the back of her mind—vivid, like a real echo instead of just a memory—she heard her own small voice squealing with delight, the way she always did when Dad picked her up and tossed her toward the ceiling. “My mates used to say we had our own personal language. I guess I’m the last remaining speaker.”

The leather of Tialha’s gloves made a little squeaking noise when it rubbed against the plate armor, just to the side of Karlach’s spine. Her circlet clinked when she rested her forehead gently on the ridges of Karlach’s pauldrons. “When I was very small,” she said, still quiet but not nearly as solemn—now there was a rich warmth in her voice, and the tone set a calming slither through Karlach’s stomach, like a swallow from a warm mug of tea. “My mother and father had to leave me on occasion—it wasn’t unusual, in our enclave. Wood elves tend towards communal child-rearing. But they always told me, when I heard a turtle dove, it was because they missed me, and they’d asked the birds to pass along the message.”

It wasn’t magic—her tadpole was blessedly still, and Tia’s voice lacked the echoing reverb it took on when she started to use her words in the bending-reality-to-her-whims way—but even so Karlach could see it like it was her own memory: teeny toddling Tialha, splayed out in a forest clearing, maybe rumpled and grass-stained from chasing a gaggle of other elven kids, looking to the trees every time she heard a dove call.

“That’s fuckin’ precious, babe,” she said, looping an arm around the dip of Tia’s waist. “Did they really? Y’know, ask the birds to talk to you and all.”

“I haven’t a clue,” Tia said, and tipped her head back to beam up at Karlach. The warm-tea feeling spread into her fingers. “I hadn’t learned to speak with animals back then. But I did learn—oh, goodness, it’s been a while…”

She brought her hands to her mouth, cupped like she was holding a marching horn, and with a little crinkle in her brow she whistled; when she fluttered her fingers it made a sweet vibrato, the sound swooping like diving birds—like a turtle dove.

(Through the tadpole she felt the sparks of flickering awareness from where Astarion and Wyll had wandered off further into the cemetery, pacing through the rows, and swore she heard a snide nonverbal weirdos as the boys went back to whatever they were doing.)

“So that’s Thildran for ‘I love you’?” Karlach asked.

“Mm-hmm.” Tialha always had to stand on her toes for this, and Karlach always had to stoop, which was exactly as comfortable as it didn’t sound in armor, but it was worth it; Tia brushed a gentle kiss over her mouth, her cheek, and then rested her temple against the bridge of Karlach’s nose. When she closed her eyes and breathed she could smell Tia’s perfume, even over the stink of hot metal.

“Taters,” Karlach whispered.

“I’m a quick learner,” Tia said, sunlight in the smile she pressed to Karlach’s jaw. “I’ll teach you mine if you teach me yours.”

—

Two days later and knee-deep in sewer sludge, Karlach looked up when a soft whistle echoed off the tunnel walls. Not birdsong, but she could see Tialha grin as she did it again—four low whistles.

Karlach beamed in return and blew a kiss, and giggled shamelessly when Tia caught it.