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Lest any man doubt the gods are cruel, tell them this: Astarion had the sun again—had its warm kiss on the back of his neck—and then it went away.
The Shadow-Cursed Lands make him heartsick. The night hides terrors: sharp-fingered shades collect his fears like candies. Pools of oily darker-than-dark slide down his throat to coat him in places he can’t see. Animal carcasses whimper when he isn’t looking; they hiss and hoot through rigor-mortis mouths.
He’s a dead thing surrounded by dead things, and he is very hungry.
“Care to sit out by the fire tonight?” Wyll asks, extending a gallant hand to help Astarion clamber over a bit of broken road. Normally he would bristle—of all their companions, his own footwork is perhaps the least likely to be flummoxed by uneven terrain—but he finds himself putting weight on Wyll’s arm after all.
He’s tired. He’s hungry. He knows this song very well.
“Astarion?” Wyll says, his brow rumpled—a perfect picture of courtly concern. His gray eye gleams in the half-light.
Astarion shakes himself. “The fire—that sounds lovely, darling. We left off halfway through a chapter last time.”
“I’m shocked you were paying enough attention to the story to notice. Here I figured you just liked the sound of my voice.”
“Cheeky.” The curve of his smile is a reflex: a method of reinforcing Wyll’s behavior. His thoughts are a million miles away.
What good are Wyll’s chaste affections if Astarion starves before getting Cazador in stabbing range? What’s the use, if the party’s told him not to open anyone’s veins at camp? All Wyll can provide, here in this godsforsaken wasteland designed to spite Astarion personally, is a bit of combat cover and a hideous feeling in his chest: a useless dangling glass ornament, slowly turning. Glutting itself on light.
Help is not coming. Help has never been coming. The warmth of Wyll’s hand doesn’t change that.
That evening—or what passes for evening—Gale chops shriveled potatoes and Karlach builds the fire. Astarion slips off to find dinner, because stubbornness might just be his only remaining asset.
A mile out from camp, he finds a dying crow halfway down a scramble. Its wings twitch helplessly in his grip.
Its body is still warm: not a dead thing yet. It’s undoubtedly tainted—everything is, here—but perhaps the curse won’t have had time to settle in properly: to dissolve its viscera and wrap smoke around its ribcage.
He’s eaten worse, surely. What’s a half-cursed crow compared to a rat carrying a fragrant bouquet of sewer plagues? What’s a bit of discomfort—a bit of nausea to force himself through, maybe some stomach pain—compared to nights spent trying to vomit his own organs out on the cold kennel floor?
The crow’s blood is thick and slow on his tongue: almost a jelly. He gets it down in two swallows. He thinks to himself, mildly, that he’s made a mistake. Then he climbs back up the scramble and finds camp again.
***
“And lo, Ser Shadivere did thrust his great trident into the heart of the beast. The wyrm thrashed ferociously, letting loose a dying cry fit to rend the planes asunder. Fair Vannifelda cried out in shock and wonderment, for her enchanted chains had fallen—she ran to her love, and joined with him, and never more were they parted.”
The fire leaves flaws in his vision: afterimages halfway to daylight coloring. He can almost pretend he’s looking at the sun.
Wyll’s arm is pressed to his, a constant warmth. Halsin carves an elk on the other side of the firepit. Gale sits crossed-legged beside Lae’zel’s tent, listening as she lectures on githyanki runes.
“Seems like we’re done for the night,” Wyll says, closing the book.
“Hmm? No, go on, darling—surely there’s an epilogue.”
He doesn’t know why he tortures himself this way, pretending to enjoy reading adventure stories with Wyll. There are other cloying little courtship rituals Wyll could fall back on; surely Astarion could encourage his attentions without suffering through an overabundance of los and forsooths.
Wyll makes a low, amused sound. “Forgive me if I’ve misjudged your interest, but I’ve just read the word thrust about fifteen times in two pages. You didn’t comment once.”
“Mm. Even I tire of low-hanging fruit eventually.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
Astarion clucks his tongue, elbowing Wyll before he can quite stop himself. Wyll laughs, a bit breathless. It’s a lovely sound: a spring day in a meadow somewhere, birds all a-fucking-twitter. Lately it’s made Astarion want to stab something.
He shifts his weight to put more space between them. “Perhaps I’ve been holding back because you never seem to appreciate my unparalleled wit. Too busy imagining what Ser Shadivere’s cock would taste like, I suppose.”
Wyll makes a confused sound: a bit like laughing, a bit like Astarion’s elbowed his stomach again. The look he gives is strange—too perceptive by half.
Shit. Astarion softens himself carefully and deliberately. He presses a delicate kiss to Wyll’s cheek and murmurs against his skin: “Sorry, my sweet. Perhaps I am tired.”
His stomach is starting to pain him anyway. Right on schedule.
Wyll regards him a moment longer. Then he relents. “I’ll have you know that Shadivere is happily committed to Vannifelda. Unless you count Bingar’s revisionist ballads, which we obviously do not.”
“Oh, obviously. I’m given to understand that we hate Bingar. We would poison Bingar’s soup.”
“We…would not move as quickly as we might have otherwise done to prevent his soup from being poisoned,” Wyll allows.
Astarion cackles. The useless little ornament someone’s hung from his ribcage twists on its string.
Wyll takes his hand. The fire plays on his horns and lends depth to his red eye. He’s better to look at than the whole of the Shadowlands put together.
“Let me see you to your tent,” he says, so fucking gently, and Astarion wants to scream.
The funny thing is, he likes adventure stories. He’d hidden Drizzt books beneath the floorboards; memorized his favorite passages. This whole little fireside tradition had been his idea, for the gods’ sakes: he’d been imagining Wyll throwing out dashing heroic lines in his smooth baritone, and he’d thought—
Well. It hadn’t mattered what he’d thought.
At any rate, Wyll makes the stories worse. He reads them so earnestly: like Ser Shadivere could really be out there somewhere, blustering from town to town, shooing everyone’s dragons away. Like Drizzt would be just as kind in person, rather than a crushing disappointment.
Like heroes exist to take your pain away, if only you wait for them. If only you’re good and kind and grateful.
Astarion’s never gained a fucking thing by waiting, so he looks up at Wyll through his lashes and purrs a sweet goodnight.
***
Nausea twists his meditation into a hellish parade of parallel memories. He’s curled up in the kennel, retching: no more diseased blood left to lose. He’s gasping on the floor of the goblin camp as Shadowheart purges toxin from his wound. He’s laid out in a tavern basement, dizzy and sick from whatever his would-be mark had put in his drink, and how could he be so stupid—
He jolts out of his bedroll and stumbles to the camp’s edge just in time to vomit. Clings to a barren branch, his eyes watering with the sting.
Shit. The crow’s blood is a congealed mess in the dirt, wasted.
His stomach clenches. He vomits again, doubled over: a spatter of blood and spit. Then, when there’s nothing left to bring up, he dry-heaves until he’s dizzy.
That’s around the time he begins to worry.
Waves of nausea root him in place, clutching onto his pathetic dead tree like a dryad in hospice. He keeps quiet—years of long practice. He swallows, and swallows, until his mouth is desert-dry and rank. Time passes, indeterminate. Then he gathers himself up and stumbles back to his tent.
Things do not improve from there. His stomach judders every ten minutes, disgorging nothing. Sweat coats his skin.
He’s had worse before. He knows he has. Rat’s blood; sewer plague.
Eventually he slips into a sort of half-reverie, the hands of memory pressing down until he bruises. Rather than overtaking him, granting him true rest, the images mix and muddle: his tent is the same color as Cazador’s ballroom ceiling. His rebelling stomach almost feels like the gut wound he’d sustained in the goblin camp, the gift of a poisoned blade.
He’s had worse. He’s had worse. And in the grip of a broken meditation he has it worse all over again: he sees the bars of the kennel before him, his blanket soaked in gore.
***
He wakes to knuckles against his forehead: the back of an open hand.
His arm shoots out on instinct. His nails break skin.
Wyll hisses in pain, jerking away. “Dammit—come on, it’s me.”
Astarion opens his eyes. Tries to fathom the shapes of the world into sense.
His blankets are a tangled mess at his feet, kicked off in the night, and Wyll is in his tent. Two great rarities. He’d contemplate further if his head weren’t pounding: if his body weren’t weighed down by invisible trolls sitting on his chest.
“You’re shivering,” Wyll says faintly, sliding out of his crouch to sit beside his head. “You look terrible.”
“Thanks for that,” he manages to snap, voice hoarse. He immediately regrets it—last night’s nausea surges back, and he curls over on his side.
Time unspools. His body floats. Or…no, it’s just the drunken brute, the would-be mark, lifting his prone body—pressing him against the tavern wall. His knee settles between Astarion’s thighs.
No. That’s not right either.
“A curse isn’t a disease,” Shadowheart is saying sternly, sitting where Wyll had been just a second ago. “Even in small doses. He should’ve come to me hours ago. I can’t clear this up with a couple of restorations and a dash of goodwill.”
“But you can break curses,” Wyll says urgently. From Astarion’s other side. When had he moved?
Shadowheart lets out a strained and bitter laugh. “Wyll, it’s the shadow curse. If I could break it with a snap of my fingers, we wouldn’t be here.”
“At least ease the symptoms.” Wyll’s voice carries a strange tenor. His hand is moving through Astarion’s hair.
He squirms in shame: sweat cakes the strands to his skull.
And really, the whole thing is terribly pathetic. He’ll have to break things off with Wyll and everything, if the sight of him with vomit crusted to his chin doesn’t handle the matter on its own.
“You can both sod off,” he manages, hating the croaking sound that passes for his voice. Then, because the words have been pounding through his skull all night like an insipid tavern song: “I’ve had worse.”
For some reason, this makes Shadowheart’s face pinch like she’s bitten into a lemon. He’d look to see what’s happening on Wyll’s face, but a wave of nausea passes through him, and he becomes rather preoccupied with curling tighter onto his side—as though he might find the magical angle to ease the pain.
Shadowheart grabs his arm. She maneuvers it brusquely, and a blessed numbness trickles through his body.
“Check for shrapnel,” he tells her hoarsely. “The—”
The goblins use knives that crumble, he was going to say. To contaminate the wound.
He forces his mouth shut.
Shadowheart’s brow furrows dubiously. “Shrapnel.”
Wyll’s hand moves to Astarion’s collarbone with some urgency. “Were you injured? When—”
“Forget it,” he snaps. “I’m just—distracted. Leave it alone.”
That wound was nigh on a month ago, in the goblin camp. Shadowheart had tended to him then. Just now, the way she’d grabbed his arm—she’d doubled. Overlapped.
Elven reverie is a walk through memory. Or a gauntlet.
“He needs rest,” Shadowheart says stiffly. Motion happens somewhere over his head: she grips Wyll’s shoulder in comfort, or—more likely—to force him to stand. “All we can do is wait.”
Astarion’s never gained a fucking thing by waiting, but no help is coming, so he doesn’t have much choice. He presses his face into his pillow. Ignores Wyll’s gentle voice until it’s gone.
***
“And Ser Shadivere did join Vannifelda in her ancestral home. He carried with him bridal gifts in abundance: gold, that she may never hunger. Wine, that she may never thirst. A team of great oxen, that her land should ever flourish. Pearls, that she may dream always of their first meeting upon the Trackless Sea.”
Astarion opens his eyes to the blazing sun. He startles violently, thinking to flee—he’ll burn, he’ll burn—
“Hey, hey,” Wyll says, soft and low. His palm is cool against Astarion’s wrist.
His tent is candle-lit. The sun is gone.
Astarion swallows on a noise he hadn’t meant to make. His muscles go slack.
“Are you…with me?” Wyll asks carefully. Astarion’s head seems to be pillowed on his thigh.
He flings an arm over his eyes, groaning spectacularly.
“Sounds like you’re with me,” Wyll says wryly. “For the moment.”
Wyll keeps talking, but Astarion finds that the words slip out of his head as soon as he hears them. Something about feeding, but he’s got no energy to hunt.
His head pounds. His face is clean of sweat and vomit; he’s wearing Wyll’s shirt.
He’s wearing Wyll’s shirt: rough-spun and soft with age. Smelling of campfire smoke and Wyll and stories.
His stomach performs a qualitatively different sort of lurch as the little glass ornament tangles up in his ribcage. It pulls and pulls, liable to snap the bones. Bright enough to hurt.
“Can’t you leave me alone?” His voice cracks on the words. “And take your blasted heroes with you.”
Wyll’s face swims above him. He can’t make out the expression. Disappointment? Anger?
“—leave for now, if that’s what you want. But Astarion, you have to eat.”
Aurelia maneuvers his head off her lap, setting it back on the kennel floor with something close to gentleness. She creeps toward the door. “I’ve got nothing for you, of course, but you just have to try harder next time. Finish your hunt quickly, and he’s less likely to hand you something tainted.”
“Oh, fine advice. What good are you to me?” he snarls at her retreating back.
Wyll pauses at the tent flap as though to answer. Then he goes.
***
He’s shivering violently the next time he surfaces. His stomach seizes again, again—what’s the point of this? He’s no use this way; why should Cazador hurt him? Is Astarion’s pain more entrancing to him than the promise of a full belly?
“—won’t stay long,” Wyll is saying, pulling Astarion up against his chest. “I promise I’ll go soon, but I brought lunch.”
Ah.
Astarion curls into the heat of him. That’s right: he’s free now, or the closest that a creature like him can get. The kennel is a memory, best kept to nighttime wanderings.
Cold metal presses to his lips: a cup. It smells rancid, of course—one of Cazador’s games.
His master sneers. “Drink it down, boy. You’ll hardly find better.”
He sips obediently. But gods, the taste—it’s sweet and heady and not like a rat at all. He grasps at the cup desperately, his hands over Wyll’s. Trying to drain every drop.
No, that’s not—it’s all mixed up. He wrenches back. Pushes the cup away to tell Wyll all of this. To explain.
“I’m not here,” he mumbles thickly. “The way we dream…”
His head spins, and he loses the words.
“Halsin told me,” Wyll says. He doesn’t say anything else for a long time, instead pressing the cup back to Astarion’s lips with some urgency. Astarion drinks it down greedily, uncertain why he hadn’t finished in the first place.
When the cup is truly empty, Wyll sets it down beside him with a gentle clink. He wraps his arms around Astarion’s chest; sets his chin on his head.
“That’s alright,” he says softly. “I suppose I’ll just wait around for you to come back.”
“What in the hells are you talking about,” Astarion grumbles. Wyll’s chest shakes with quiet laughter, like he can’t quite help it: like he feels a bit guilty for finding humor in his disorientation. But not guilty enough, apparently.
“Do you want me to go?” he asks, lips pressed to white hair. Like a kiss—chivalric. Chaste.
“Not—not yet. I just—I can’t quite…”
“You don’t have to explain,” the sweet barmaid says, crouching down to pick up the tray Astarion had knocked from her arms, flooding terrible beer all over the hardwood. “It looks like you’ve had a rough night.”
“All the same,” he says, his tongue thick and muzzy. “I’m not—I don’t usually—”
“Is there someone who can come and get you?” She eases him back into a chair, and just that small motion sends bile up his throat.
His head pounds. His body hurts. Whatever was in that drink—
“Where was I?” he asks the woman before he can think better of it. “An hour ago? Did—did you see me with anyone?”
“You were right here,” Wyll says with a frown. “No one’s touched you; I wouldn’t let them. Astarion, I know it’s…unsettling, to be unable to defend yourself. But nobody’s going to come for you.”
Astarion lurches forward. Wyll lets him go without hesitation.
He doubles over. Rather than vomit, bitter laughter pours out of him like bile. “Nobody’s going to come for me,” he giggles. “Too right you are, little lordling. Little hero.”
Wyll says something else, drowned out by the buzzing in his ears. Gentle hands ease Astarion down to his bedroll.
“—don’t think you should be alone right now,” Dalyria says, distaste curling her lip. “Maybe Violet can—”
“Stay,” he gasps, nearly a sob. The world is spinning. He won"t keep the blood down for long. “Gods, stay.”
The tent is the kennel. The tent is a night full of stars, Wyll reading stories.
“And Shadivere did stay with her there: in the manor on the hilltop, her lands spread all around them like a quilt of many colors. A house of boundless light and an affection to rival Sune’s chosen. He was a helpmeet to her, and she returned his gifts a thousandfold.”
***
If only there was some way to fucking end it.
He’s had worse. He knows this, intellectually: tainted blood doesn’t hold a candle to being flayed alive. But right now, in the thick of it—as he sweats and shivers on the kennel floor, as the last of his siblings have left him, as nausea keeps his jaw clenched and his cheek pressed to the ground and he shakes hard enough to knock his skull against the stone—
Can’t it end? Can’t it just end?
It’s not going to get better—he knows this. He’s learned it. Century by century; year by grinding year. No help is coming.
Time bends back on itself; turns useless little circles. He hallucinates things: Water. Blankets. Drizzt.
Tomorrow he’ll be halfway better, and he’ll be shoveled off the floor half-delirious and sent out to fuck strangers in dark rooms, and there will be hands and hands on him and everything will start all over again. An epilogue so hideous it wraps around to tedium.
There are hands on him now: rough. Warm. He shies away; chokes on a sob.
“Sorry,” Wyll murmurs. “I’m sorry, it’s just me. I thought—”
Astarion’s breath catches in his throat.
The world lurches on an undiscovered axis. The stars rearrange themselves, out there beyond the palace. An ornament twists in his chest.
“Wyll,” Astarion says faintly—scarcely daring to believe it.
“Yes? What’s wrong?” Wyll hesitates. “Apart from the obvious.”
His hands are rubbing gently up and down Astarion’s arms, keeping him upright. He’s here, he’s here, dirtying his trousers on the filthy kennel floor, smoothing a thumb over Astarion’s skin.
The words come out strangled: “You’re here.”
“I am,” he says, and his voice is stupidly tender through his confusion. He talks to Astarion like a lover—like a precious thing. “Where else would I be?”
Astarion makes a wordless noise and lets himself fall forward—leans into Wyll’s chest and sobs. Grabs hold of him and clings tight. Tight.
Wyll makes soft, anxious noises in his ear: worry and comfort combined. He wraps his arms around Astarion and holds him tighter than he’d thought possible—but not tight enough by half. Astarion scrabbles on the flagstones, trying to press closer still.
It’s Wyll.
After interminable centuries, kept locked up down here in the dark, hurting and being hurt in a sick fucking carousel of cruelty—
Someone came. Like he used to pray for at night, before he’d scorned the gods. Help came.
And it was Wyll. Of bloody course it was Wyll.
Wyll’s sweet scent envelopes him, and he’s sick, and dizzy, and soaked in sweat and tears, but that hardly fucking matters with Wyll’s hand on his hair.
He’s rather lost control—babbling something; blubbering. He wants to tell Wyll to hurry—to get them out of here before Cazador returns. But all the thoughts have gone quite out of his head, replaced by a relief so heady it hurts. All he can do is make horrid, hideous little noises, trying to piece himself together.
Wyll’s voice comes out jagged—overwhelmed. “I… wish it had happened that way. I wish I had known.”
He runs a hand down Astarion’s back: soothing patterns. A touch that doesn’t burn. “But I swear to you, if I had known—I would’ve come for you. I swear it on my honor: I would’ve torn Cazador apart with my bare hands if I could.” He pauses. “Or gored him to death, I suppose. With the horns.”
Wyll holds him. The world dissolves until all that’s left is a tent and a bedroll. A night around the campfire. Reading stupid stories.
***
“And Ser Shadivere’s wound did sometimes pain him, a black boiling poison rising forth where the wyrm had sunk its fang. But Vannifelda treated him, and sang him stories when sleep would not come easy. And they lived many years together. And always, until old age took them, Shadivere gave her pearls.”
It takes a moment for Astarion to realize Wyll’s stopped reading. He blinks muzzily, reaching up to touch his wrist.
Wyll sets the book aside. He settles down next to Astarion on his bedroll, breath ghosting warm across his neck. Wind batters the little tent: a mournful sound. It’s night again—or what passes for it.
“It is a better epilogue than Bingar’s,” Astarion allows sleepily, his voice still quite hoarse.
Wyll makes an indignant noise in the back of his throat, just as Astarion knew he would. “Bingar didn’t understand Vannifelda from first principles. No fruit from that poisoned tree.”
“One of his many sins.”
“Surely.” Wyll tosses an arm across Astarion’s stomach. He hooks their ankles together. “Is this alright?”
“No need to handle me as though I’ll break,” Astarion sniffs. “All assorted hysterics are behind me.”
He’s feeling…if not well, then better. The nausea only flits around the edges, now, and the headache has eased off. Shadowheart’s come and gone diligently, Halsin at her side.
The others, too. They’d stayed in camp, all this time—waiting for him.
Wyll grins against his neck. “I more meant whether it was comfortable. I’ve been told I’m an octopus of a bedmate.”
“Oh.” He’s still half-floating. Still occasionally struck by an untethering sense of disbelief. “I—it’s comfortable. Yes.”
He’d meant to address the utter humiliation of what Wyll had seen—Astarion vomit-encrusted, as weak as he’d been under Cazador, suffering from a breathtakingly stupid mistake—by breaking things off at the first opportunity.
He’d meant to.
His breath is starting to come in strange rhythms again, so he blinks hard and says, “With your vaunted sense of honor, how in the realms do you know whether you grow tentacles in bed?”
“Is—I don’t know whether to take that as a warlock comment, or—”
“You do cling,” Astarion says softly, burying his nose in Wyll’s chest. “It’s intolerable.”
They’re quiet for a time. He’s almost warm, pressed up against Wyll’s skin.
“If I had known,” Wyll says, low.
“You would have gone back to tormenting your tutors, because you were seventeen years old. Or did you mean after your father banished you from the city, never to return?”
“Still—” he says weakly.
“Still nothing,” Astarion growls into his chest. “Don’t—ugh. Don’t sound that way about it. And anyway, I don’t want to talk about this ever again, so it doesn’t much matter.”
He feels the stormcloud energy of Wyll’s frown above him. It’s enough to make him want to hurl again.
“You’re not some horrid little storybook hero,” Astarion tells him. “Don’t you dare apologize for that.”
He traces lines up Wyll’s wrist: runs a nail along the tendons. Makes him shiver.
“Someone ought to have helped you anyway,” Wyll says, wounded, and the ornament in Astarion’s chest refracts light. Stupid thing. Breakable.
“I could say the same about you," he says stiffly.
Wyll hums, considering the idea. Knowing him, he’ll deny it: insist that he’d made a choice he doesn’t regret at seventeen fucking years old, a devil whispering in his ear. That saving Astarion—saving people like him—is more bloody important than saving himself.
Heedless idiot. A man who should be impossible in this world, where stories end and help doesn’t come. Astarion expects he"ll insist his own soul was never owed any rescue in return.
Instead Wyll says: “He was a helpmeet to her, and she returned his gifts a thousandfold.”