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Astarion’s parents are, most likely, still alive.
It’s not particularly shocking information, per se, when one takes a moment to remind themselves of his elven heritage, yet you’re quick to notice just how remarkably easy it is to overlook when your vampiric companion makes seemingly little effort to acknowledge it.
You’ve attempted to ask him about it, on occasion. Goaded him near relentlessly in an attempt to squeeze out any additional details, pestered him during late-night conversations around a dying campfire, somehow too drained from the day’s events to drift off to sleep. And Astarion, being Astarion, has always given you the same response:
He can’t search for people he hardly remembers.
It’s simple enough. Curt. Sobering, even, so much so that his manufactured levity fails to soften its blow. But it makes sense — at least if you only allow yourself a moment to mull it over — and it’s enough to push the members of your rag-tag group to rack their parasite-infested brains for another, lighter conversational topic.
A moment of additional analysis, however…
Astarion.
Astarion Ancunín.
It’s a name. His name: a fact he can testify to, having had to dig himself out of his own grave. It looked quite nice, as he recalls, with fine details etched into his tombstone, beautiful flowers that’d been crushed beneath his dirt-stained palms. It’d been cared for, most importantly, by someone who obviously cared for him, and he was at least self-aware enough to understand that there weren’t many who fit that description.
He could use his name to search for them, if only he wanted to, now that he’s free. Especially since he’s free, with the opportunity to kill Cazador and sever his chains in their entirety laid out so perfectly before him. And he’d be entirely unable to deny that fact, were you to bring it before him, if only because his newfound freedom has quickly become his most prized possession, if only because he’d found that lying to you has felt like nothing short of a Herculean task as of late.
Because you’d be right. Astarion could seek out his parents. He simply doesn’t want to.
Because he’s too scared to.
Because he’s unsure of what’d he say or do if he found them, or what they’d say once they realize that their son — their beloved son, who they’d thought to be dead for two hundred years, who’d died so young, who they’d never gotten to give a proper goodbye to — had never really been dead after all.
Because he doesn’t know if they’d rather him have died once they realize what’s become of him. Because, for all of the so-called “confidence” he claims to boast…
Astarion isn’t sure he’d be able to handle the answer.