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You know even before you get to the party that Lae'zel won't be there.
How you know is a mystery to you. The knowledge comes from the same hollow place your Urge used to whisper from, that you used to direct with such fervor and faith your blood sang with it, that your magic pulls from even now. It isn't your Father, because he is dead or dying or curled up in some forgotten plane, licking his wounds for the next several centuries. Withers, who was death first, has assured you of such.
Sometimes his presence, heavy and quiet as death itself, is comforting. Most of the time, you remember your blood being ripped from your body every time he looks at you.
Your friends talk around it. Lae'zel's absence, you mean. They don't ask you where she is, they ask if you are alright. If you are happy. If you are lonely. You find it hard to answer, which only makes the questions get sharper, or fizzle out entirely. When you do have an answer, it's honest, but you don't think it's enough for them. They talk to each other about checking up on you. Perhaps Astarion, who she'd talked out of killing his own blood-kin, hypocrite though it makes her, could take her into the Underdark, help her find a purpose. Perhaps Shadowheart, quietly settled with her parents, could take in the stray that had led her to them. Or Halsin and all his caretaking energy, Jaheira and her unceasing faith in you, Wyll and Karlach in the Hells to let her holy magic have a point again.
If they ask, you will follow. You have always followed. Even when you forgot who you were, you followed the path you thought had been set for you. You were wrong.
No one asks the question you think is the most important, which is whether you would do it again. Any of it. Because they have no reason to; they think you are a hero. You are a hero. You cast aside your dread Father and all the power he would have given you for the people of the Sword Coast, so sayeth the bards, casting aside a crown of blood and bone for a legend worth telling.
This is the truth, in a way. But you are so empty now, of Urge and tadpole and the one who always made you feel alive. You think you would have done anything differently to change that. Being a mindflayer would have been better. Letting Orin strip you of skin and sinew until you are entirely sublimated in the pain of it would have been better.
And yes, being your Father's daughter. If you had known, remembered, from the beginning, you never would have been a hero. Would have held down the people you call friends now with your bloody hands and let your magic do the rest, would watch as the radiance burns them skin-and-muscle-and-bone until they were nothing but ashes. Slow. Agonizingly painful. A little nauseating, without your Urge there to cast aside the guilt for you.
You would not have made it back to the Gate. The thought of it doesn't bother you. You are already a failure, in your Father's eyes. You are currently a failure in your own. How could you be anything else, with her gone?
The night ends on a happy, hopeful note. You do your best to believe it before you retreat into the unwelcoming darkness. If any want to follow, they can. You won't stop them.
There were many nights you wished you could dream of anything other than your guardian, all glowing eyes and horns and calculation, but you miss even that now. You see nothing when you trance. You have no lives you lived before this, excepting the one you had already cast aside. It's another reminder of all she's lost, of how you used to hold so tightly onto whatever traces of yourself you could find and let it be ripped from your grasp entirely.
This time, there is something. This time, she's there.
It isn't Lae'zel. Not really. Lae'zel is dead at her Queen's hands, digested in her Queen's endless quest for godhood. (You would tell Vlaakith, if she were here, that there are better things to aim for than divinity. And then you would kill her, or she would kill you, and either way, the quiet may be easier to bear, then.)
But it looks like her. Decomposed, withered, and monstrous, but her. She looks like the reanimated corpses that had attacked them throughout the Shadow-Cursed Lands, but it isn't Shar's shadows clinging to her. It's just rot, sweet on the back of your tongue. Your Urge would want to taste it; part of whatever you are now still does, just to know her as you once did.
You resist, as you so often do. There is nothing around you, no environment to push off of, but you somehow go from sitting to standing anyway. It feels wrong, that you are taller than her, even though you have always been taller than her. She feels smaller without her life and ambition and determination bleeding from her every pore.
"Lae'zel," you say, and it feels like the first word you've spoken in months, though you know that isn't true.
There is no answer. Not even a glimmer of reaction from the cadaver in front of you. Its eyes are blank-white but not in the way Orin's had been. Orin's were blank like a canvas, ready to be shifted, emotion there if you knew how to read her, and you had always known how to read her, even if you were fool enough not to care to. These are blank like a burn scar, or a long-dead bone, or the statue they'd made of you in the Wide that you fled rather than look at twice.
"I miss you," you say, and it is true, but it feels too-sparse. "I should have kept you from this. I should have done anything to keep you from this." It wasn't your decision. It feels like it's your fault, anyway. You think maybe this is love, or maybe it's the weight of expectation you've never stopped shouldering. You can't tell the difference.
No response.
"I wish I'd fought you, right at the start," you confess. "Either I would have lost, and I'd die at a blade worthy of it, or I'd have won and never have known what I could have had. This would be so much easier if I never had you, Lae'zel. I'd say it makes me terrible if we didn't both know I've always been terrible. I wish I'd accepted my Father's task and killed you first. You would have died in service to something, and I would have sent everything after you. All you wanted."
This is love, to you. Not the lack of violence, but the intention of it. The care. If you could not have her living and whole, you would take her blood on your hands. You would take your blood on her hands. Vlaakith's blood on both your hands. Your Father's blood drowning you and her and the world besides.
Anything but this, haunted by the husk of her, only a shade better yourself.
"My love," you say, words dripping with an affection you have not earned.
No response.
"Source of my bruises," you try, knowing it's undeserved.
No response.
"A worthy blade," you try, one last time.
An infinitesimal shift, from one blank expression to another. A silver sword lodged in your chest quicker than you can follow with your eyes. You could kiss her for it, even as she is now; to die at her hands is all you deserve, all you want.
Your trance ends, and you are alone. There is an ache in your chest that is unfamiliar, which means it's not a blade. You could weep before the pain dulls into the same monotony as defines your existence. Day after day after day, for centuries yet. The passage of time used to thrill you, all the death that would await you; the inevitability of your survival, roach that you are, doesn't bring any comfort.
Perhaps Lae'zel will come to you in trance again, by whatever vestiges of your power still linger with her. Perhaps some trace of her remains, impossible though it may be. Perhaps Vlaakith taunts her. Perhaps perhaps perhaps.
You try to care what the reason is, but don't quite manage it. As long as you see her again, you have a reason to persist beyond the sake of it. That can be enough. That has to be enough.