Chapter Text
It takes a tenday. Or maybe it was two. Maybe it was four. Astarion has no idea. Time has lost all meaning. Regardless, it takes him time to remember Tav had left him an open invitation to his room forever, and the thought ignites a desperation in him. If he can only reclaim something- anything- of his lost love’s… Something substantial enough that he can look at it and remember. Remember his lover, remember Tav’s smile, his scent, his kindness.
Remember the guilt.
He’s lost so many memories to time and torture. It never bothered him, not really, that he could no longer remember his father’s voice or his mother’s face. If he has siblings. It’s all meaningless to him now. They wouldn’t want him back anyway. Not now that he’s a monster. The memory of Tav, though, he needs. If he’s forever lost that gentle drow to his own godsdamn hubris he’s at least going to have something to remind him of what he cost himself. He won’t let Tav fade away. He won’t let time sand the memory down. He can’t let the unending passage of time take away the only happiness he can recall ever knowing.
He did this. His fault.
And he can never forget it.
It’s the first time he looks forward to dragging himself out of the manor in a long while.
He flits through the city’s streets at a quick pace. He has nothing to look for. Not anymore. There’s no hope he’ll find that sweet-hearted drow with his calming eyes. Astarion killed him. He’s gone.
But his belongings remain.
Astarion hopes, anyway. He makes his way to the Dancing Cat in silence. He eyes the little building from the front, then the side, then the back. The side is his best bet. When no one's around he scales the wall. Slips open the window to Tav’s room. He hesitates there, unsure if the invitation includes sneaking in from the window, and tests it by putting his hand through the open portal. No resistance. No innate inability to enter. Astarion sighs, his shoulders slumping with relief, and slips inside.
The room is in a strange sort of… orderly disarray. Drawers are open and clothes have been pulled from them. The bedside table drawer too, something shiny inside. The bedclothes have been turned down. It looks less like Tav lived here and more like an air elemental did. Astarion tiptoes into the room carefully. He wonders what- or who- did this. Did Cazador send someone out to Tav’s residence after all? What else could Tav have told him, under that truth serum’s influence? He’d never willingly put the proprietors at risk. Will hardly mattered against that serum though.
He sniffs the air and finds a multitude of scents, Tav’s a pang of heartache under so many unfamiliar ones. The formerly-pregnant lady he smells, as well as the stink of the infant, and possibly the husband. But there are so many more besides. More than Cazador would have sent for some lowly victim of his.
Gods above had the lady called on the Fist to look for the drow? Begged them to find him? Astarion looks around the room and he wonders. He wonders if she cared that much.
Will you be missed?
No. Just another bard. Nothing important.
The lady loved him though, didn’t she? Not like Astarion did but like a mother might. She sent for the Fist to track down her missing tenant.
Astarion doubts they had any success. He also doubts they even tried. A single missing person is a drop in the ocean and an everyday occurrence in Baldur’s Gate.
Especially with six vampire spawn roaming the night looking to steal away another life.
He crosses over to the dresser. The searchers certainly took the poor thing apart. Astarion knows he can’t leave evidence of his trespass tonight, so he leaves the drawer that’s been pulled out on the floor where it lies, but he itches to return the room to a semblance of normalcy. To put it back together and see it as Tav must have, every morning, every noon, every night, as he has, that one and only time he’d come into this room prior. To pretend that even for a little while he could have lived this life with Tav.
He doesn’t.
He does lift a shirt from one of the askew drawers and bring it to his nose.
The scent hits him like a punch to the solar plexus and he drops to his knees. Spice. Roses. Sweat. All of Tav’s smells in one potent inhale. His chest aches. He clutches the shirt to his nose and inhales again. Again.
Suddenly he realizes he’s crying. His inhales hitch and burn. His throat’s tight. He can’t do anything but breathe in Tav’s scent and weep.
“Tav,” he murmurs into the fabric. “Tathlyn.”
It hurts impossibly worse to say the real name he’d been entrusted with. Astarion curls around the shirt, around the memory, and thinks of his doomed love.
His fault.
He did this.
His fault.
He killed Tav.
He killed the only thing that he ever cared about, the only person who’d ever really looked at him and still smiled, and he’s regretted every one of his mistakes ever since that terrible night. He’s relived every encounter in excruciating detail, some in trance, some in a haze of dispassionate existence. Each of them ends with a death knell of guilt: he should’ve left this time, or that time, at this moment, at that second. Each of them ends the same: Tav’s alive in his memories, and dead in his present.
His fault. He killed Tav.
He took from the world the one kind thing it had ever given him. The first person he’d truly cared for. He had led that single infinitely precious person he loved to death by the hand.
His fault.
Astarion couldn’t rightfully say how long he was curled in anguish around the single shirt. Long enough that when he goes to stand his legs wobble and refuse to cooperate. He stumbles into the bed. A puff of dust rises off the undisturbed comforter along with a fresh wave of spice and rose. Astarion remembers Tav curled up in all his bedclothes. A ball in this bed. Tucked into himself to fit properly. He’d woken Tav on accident that day but, until that night, had never understood the idea of happy accidents. That accident had ended delightfully. Kissing passionately on the bed, Tav warm and solid and hard against him, Tav moaning so many things but nothing so sweet as his name.
Gods, he misses Tav.
He misses Tav more than words. It’s a deep, pressing ache. Deeper down than his useless heart. A rent in his black worthless soul. It pulses within him like he stole the heartbeat from his drow for himself. And he did, didn’t he? Oh, but he’d give it back instantly if he only could. The world is better off with a man like Tav than a wretch like him.
Astarion stands. Uses the bed as a crutch to get around it. He has to leave, he’s made too much noise, he’s spent too long mourning his own victim, he-
He spots the open bedside table.
Something’s in it. He can still see the faint moonshine glint of whatever it is. He wobbles his way over to it, the shirt still clutched in one hand, and reaches into the drawer with the other. His fingers close around something cylindrical. Wooden. When he pulls it out his world stops turning one more time.
Tav’s flute.
The one he saw on Tav’s belt nearly a year ago. The one a halfling at one of the communes had made for him, Tav had explained with a small smile. The first time he’d realized Tav was a bard. The first time he’d ever wanted to see the man perform. The beginning of the end, the death knell, he did this he did this he did this-
Astarion wraps the old wooden flute in Tav’s shirt. He wanted one tangible reminder that Tav existed, that he loved a man he killed, and now he has the perfect one. It’ll fit in the false bottom of his personal dresser drawer back in the dormitory, the one he made when the fourth of his siblings was added, for his own scant few precious belongings. He can keep the flute, this memory of his drow, safe.
Until the world falls down.