Work Text:
kind thoughts for those
born in lonely water.
"I saved the world," Astarion says to Aurelia.
He saved the world yesterday, technically, but she can be forgiven for not knowing that, considering she's in the sewers. He is also in the sewers. The rest of the city can't decide if it wants to be fully destroyed or mostly destroyed, but the sewers are a relic from two days ago instead of yesterday, and there isn't much damage down here. She probably missed the whole thing. That's why he's telling her. It feels like the sort of thing that people should know, particularly when it is him and particularly when it is her, those who never learned to let hope tangle up in their throats. Hope isn't necessary anymore. He saved the world.
The almost-goddess dies. Died. When he killed her, he was thinking about Cazador. He was thinking that he'd gotten the order all wrong because killing Cazador felt like salvation and killing the Absolute feels blurry. He was thinking that it had happened too quickly and he should have stabbed Cazador more. He was thinking about a lot of things but he wasn't thinking about saving the world. It just happened.
Now it's over. Now he's in the sewers beneath the city with all his friends gone and he is telling his sister: ha-ha, I saved the world. I am better than you. I did what none of you could.
She watches him, a little wary, the way both of them have settled on over the years. "I'm glad," she says, perfectly polite. Her hair is matted to her head and there are bags under her eyes. Does she know the world was going to end? Does she know how close it got?
He has the sudden urge to shake her. He has the sudden urge to run away and never see her again. "I saved the world," Astarion repeats. They're in the dark and the sewers are quiet, because all the Bhaalists are gone, because the world is saved.
Her face stays blank, since she's waiting for him to say what emotions he wants her to have. She did it to Cazador and she does it to him, plays at being a mirror because she might get hurt less. It's like getting punched with nostalgia. Remember when they were both so weak? She still is. He killed their master. He is past weakness.
He is in the sewers and he doesn't know where you're supposed to go after saving the world.
Presumably you go into the world that has been saved. Presumably a dais awaits for the heroes to sit on and bask. Presumably there is a standard procedure by now, considering how frequently Faerûn tries to shit the bed.
The others go looking for more worlds to save. Wyll and Karlach go to the hells. Gale goes to Waterdeep. Lae'zel goes to the Astral Plane. Shadowheart goes to her parents.
Astarion goes to the sewers and finds his sister. She still has the same pants from the ascension ritual but she found a shirt to wear, one that billows around her wrists and makes her seem smaller than she is. Her eyes are bright in the dark. He tells her he saved the world. He asks, after, what the hells she's doing here, and why she isn't gone like the others.
Her answer is silence. Her answer is his answer, because there isn't anywhere to go. He didn't think that far ahead when he marched to Baldur's Gate and fistfought a goddess. There wasn't a lot of time for thinking, even after they made it past the seven day deadline. They didn't transform, and therefore they kept marching. He turned enemies into friends and other enemies into corpses. It was a very efficient system and it worked and now the Absolute is dead. He's out of the water. But there isn't an illithid parasite or a party or a goddess to keep herding him forward; there's just land. There's just the sewers, and none of his friends, and he saved the world yesterday, shouldn't there be a palace? Shouldn't he have earned a room?
Aurelia is still looking at him. Her face is pinched. It's half-hidden by her hair, by the horns that stick out like knives in a field of grass. He really thought she would have done something by now. He really thought she would weep or scream or praise him and then he would know what comes next.
His knees want to give out. He is not certain whether the stone floor will catch him or if he will fall through it, too. He is thinking that things are less real now than they were when his master was still alive. He is thinking that he at least knew what to do when he had commands instead of choices.
Also, he saved the world.
-
Once, Astarion was out in the Lower City, entrapping some well-dressed molly home, only a great big ship had shown up instead, and that meant he had to save the world.
No one tells him this. He's supposed to figure it out himself. All of the party has to, this motley lot of infected, incongruous strangers with the same target instead of the same banner to unite beneath. It's a very large target, though it takes a few days to ramp up from mindflayers to war generals to goddesses. And unlike the other times the world threatens to end like it does every now and then, this time, he is the one expected to do something about it. The price of walking under sunlight. He sprouted legs and grew lungs and skipped all the other bits of progression and now he has to save the world. A problem for everyone becomes a problem for him. This should, in theory, make him a hero.
He is not a hero, nor is he particularly heroic. He drags his way into saving the world mostly because he is one of the bastards that would die first, rather than lingering unpleasantly in the aftermath. He thinks this is a more realistic manner of things. There is no one born to shove their hand in the shit. There is no one that comes into existence to be a hero; if there were, then they would be the one doing this. Not him.
Did you know that the world is going to end?
Astarion does. He hadn't before. Now he does. And now it doesn't matter anymore.
-
A few weeks after it all, he takes up wandering. Sometimes it serves a purpose, in the hunt or the scavenging, but just as often it doesn't. He spends a lot of time thinking, which is odd, because he's had two centuries without any form of palatable distraction and he should, logically, be wanting for things to do rather than things to think about. He was never going to be like the rest of the party, with a fire under his ass that seeks out danger and villains and other worlds to save, but he did rather think he would do something.
So he does. So he wanders. Tonight he's on the stretch of the road through Duskhawk Hill where everything is desolate. Walking the central valley where the army had walked—an ecological disaster. The people here will remember the Absolute long after the city forgets. They have no choice. It is a reminder in the way each hovel casts two shadows and soot stains the path and also everything is dead.
He's used to things being dead. It's easy to get used to things after two centuries. They stop being strange and start being familiar. When he'd gone to kill Cazador, he had been very mad, but he had also been paying attention to the architecture because it was new. There had been nothing new in the Crimson Palace for two centuries and then he went down one flight of stairs and there were things he'd never seen before. Somewhere between the sixth and seventh stab of Cazador's chest, he'd wondered why the Tourmaline Depths were designed in shades of green when the Szarr family has always been about red. If he had been allowed down there before, he could have gotten used to the green, probably. He could have gotten used to the cages and the bars and the thousands of trapped spawn. He had two centuries to adjust.
He is quite adjusted to being in the water. But a bunch of squid-faced assholes made it so he isn't in the water anymore. And that had been his goal all along, because the water is awful, but he had gotten very good at being in the water, and he is not very good at being on land.
So he's wandering. So he's putting his feet forward one-by-one and he's doing it at night and he's being rather frustrated that the world won't throw him a bone even though he saved it. His current frustration: alongside him in the dark, a mockingbird is singing, tee-tee-tee. It returned to the ruins faster than the people that once lived there. It already knows how to fly. It built a nest in a stoop that had been a peasant's house and stakes its territory by singing and it didn't save the world but it seems to be living in it just fine.
It hadn't occurred to him, when he'd been killing Cazador and saving the world, that things would keep going on afterward. Performances wrap up after the final bow but then all those actors have to clamber off the stage and shuck their fineries and go home and make bread and sow wheat to make the bread and sell bread to buy the land to sow the wheat to make more bread. They keep making bread until they die, but they don't die when the performance ends, so long as they do it right. And he did it right. He killed the goddess and he killed his master and he doesn't know how to make bread. Instead, he went to the sewers and then he went to the ruins on the edge of the city and he wandered and he glared at birds and he never asked the world what he's supposed to do after saving it. Not that he would believe whatever answer it gave. Because it would say: make bread, and he would say: I can't even eat bread, and it would say: this is a metaphor, and he would say: I should have let you be destroyed, and then they would get nowhere, and he would still be in the ruins of a city where he had lived in the water for two centuries, and he still wouldn't know how to breathe. It is a good thing, then, that he doesn't ask. It is a good thing he doesn't do any of that.
-
He stays with Shadowheart for a while. She walks him through rows of leafy things under cloud cover and evening, pointing out those she is most fond of growing. Later, she hunts and gathers him blood, processes the body like a skill she was born with. The innards are tossed to her pack of stray dogs who seem delighted, in their own nervous way.
Afterward, she's doing something with a knife and cooking pot, a complicated process that seems to require more than two hands. She doesn't remember her childhood and she built a farm. She has a milk cow named Daphne who might have an infection in her hoof. She's worried about that. She's talking about bringing Jaheira or Halsin in to check before she tries healing her with Selûne's powers.
"I think I could bring him back," Shadowheart says. She pinches a stem between her teeth and contemplates it. "So you can kill him again."
He twitches. He cannot help it. "What?" It's his least clever response in two centuries.
"Your master. Would that help?"
Astarion looks at her. Then he looks at his hands. He starts a sentence he doesn't know how to finish.
He thinks he should have an answer to this. He thinks he shouldn't risk Cazador coming back to life. He thinks that no one told him what comes after killing your master. No one told him that you can be a slave and then you get freedom and still you only know how to be a slave. No one told him he should really try to plan step two before doing step one of saving the world.
"That does sound rather enjoyable," he says. He is testing her. He is weighing his hand on the scale but he's using his other hand to hide the numbers from himself. "I should, shouldn't I?"
"Hm." She slides her knife along the board, leaves a hand-shaped imprint.
He pushes. "Do you think I should do it?"
"I think you already killed him," Shadowheart says. She is cooking something with ingredients from her farm. She cannot remember her childhood. She seasons it with thyme and oregano. "I think he's already dead."
-
So the master is dead. He spent two centuries preparing for ascension and then he got mauled by five strangers. He probably thought things would go differently.
So Astarion wakes up on the day after he saved the world and he finds his sister in the sewers and all his friends are gone and he can't go in the sun. He stops being infected and he stops being a hero. He gets out of the water and then he remembers he is dead.
Dead things don't get better. Dead things rot. Dead things have to be dead because their dead bodies will feed plants and those plants will go on to feed living things that then become dead things. It's a cycle. It's how the bread gets made. He is not supposed to get out of the water and start breathing. He is supposed to be dead.
-
"I'm going to save the world," he had said once, low, in the crystalline light that came in this half-hour before the moon dipped and the sun rose and the sky was just the tattered cloak of dusk overhead. No one else was awake and his words were very lonely and very cold without anyone to hear.
There was no echo. He tried again. "I'm going to save the world," Astarion Ancunín, monster, vampire, hero, said. He said it like a shirt to put on, or a sword to wield. Something that could be picked up and set back down once finished. He needed that distance.
All around, the wind was heavy and the shadows were deep and the world very much seemed like a place that needed saving. They were about to go into the shadowlands and there he would not have sunlight. He would not have animals to hunt. It would be like he was back in the water, only the world was going to end.
He used to think about the world ending. He did it mostly in the way other people do, with an offhand hope it didn't happen. Then he woke up in the water, and he had a master, and he started wanting it to happen. He wanted it to happen very violently and with great intent.
It didn't. The world continued to trek stubbornly on. At some point, surviving became routine. He stopped thinking about swimming up to the surface and just thought about swimming. The water was made of commands and the commands had to be followed, but also the water could not kill him. It explicitly did not want to kill him. And he passed four months and two centuries and he learned that you can survive a great deal when you don't have the opportunity to die, even if you maybe wouldn't mind it very much.
But now he was in the forest outside of the shadowlands and there was a parasite in his brain and he had to save the world. The city was dying and the goddess was coming and his master was waiting and he had to do something about it.
At the start of this he had been standing, but now he was tired. He sat down. He stared at the flames and the smoke rising over them. He wanted, very suddenly, to go back to the water—not to his master, but to water where he could keep swimming and ducking his head and not having to learn how to be someone who had died two hundred years ago.
"You didn't save me," he told the fire, because it was now his stand-in for the world. "Why should I save you?"
The fire, or the world, did not apologize. It continued to end. It continued to need saving. The wind continued to roar, and it started blowing out the campfire, and he had to get up again but this time to grab firewood. He nursed it from embers that leapt at his fingers and bit back the darkness. The world waited faithlessly for him to save it and for him to save the fire. He laid down and thought about throwing himself in the river, only he had a parasite in his head that meant he wouldn't die, so there wasn't a point. So he didn't.
-
Enough time has passed that the refugees aren't called refugees anymore, because the war is over. The world is saved. Coppers tossed in pots by temples stop being alms for the wartorn and start being alms for the poor again.
The city itself is still being cleaned. He hears of new markets and new constructions. It is odd, seeing things rebuilt. Two centuries means he is no stranger to cartographic adjustments but this is the first time he is a proponent instead of a bystander. Today, tonight, he wanders through the areas once devastated and sees where they are putting in fresh stone. He thinks about this, though he cannot put the thoughts to words. He hates the city far more than he appreciates it, but you cannot walk a place for this long without developing something for it, even if that something is complicated.
Then he sees where the stone is not fresh and the ruin is still present. The Crimson Palace has remained a carcass, not enough fuss to clean it up since no one is footing the bill. It had bled like a wound and then hardened like a scab and then purpled like a bruise. There wasn't enough living in it to rot so it skipped all the way to skeleton, a protruding bone in a city trying to heal around it, a splinter that hasn't been dug out. He can't actually remember when it had been destroyed. Was it the Absolute? Was it him?
He picks his way forward. He can't help himself. He walks over wood flooring that sticks up like snaggleteeth and patches of carpet that are little more than the memory of fabric after all these months. He goes deeper.
He makes two lefts and then stops, because there used to be a wall here, and it isn't. There used to be a false wall hiding a door that had claw marks all over the inside because it was the kennels and it was all he had ever known, and it was made up of walls, but the walls aren't there. There is a lot of rubble and the rough outline of the foundation. The only remaining part is a few scattered bricks, corners softened by wind and exposure—oh gods, he was torn to pieces in that room and now it's gone.
The stone is indifferent. Go away, it says. I'm done with you. There is no more water.
Astarion stares at the rubble. There used to be smoke from the fight—from before he saved the world, from after he saved himself—and now there isn't. The clouds are heavy and grey and look like they're thinking about rain.
Go away, the stone says again. You cannot breathe in here anymore.
-
Once upon a time, a magistrate died and woke up in the water. He did not enjoy this process. He enjoyed what came next even less, because it was a great many things all at his expense, and he did not know how to deal with all the expectations that came with being in the water yet.
The rest of the world remained sweetly indifferent. The rest of the world didn't need a hero yet, so it left him in the water to swim for as long as he could, and he could swim forever, because he wasn't allowed to stop swimming. He could not leave the water and he could not change and he could not breathe. So, he swam. He got very good at swimming. And the best part about swimming is that you can do it for eternity and there's just more eternity waiting for you afterward.
He thought about the alley sometimes. He thought about before the alley even less. But no matter how good you are at swimming, it still requires some thought, and all those thoughts have to go somewhere. They took up all the room that before the alley did. Then the alley. Then pretty much everything. And soon all he could think about was swimming, so he thought about swimming, and he thought about the water, and he thought about the hypothetical nature of failure. None of these were happy thoughts.
Once upon a time, it took two centuries to survive the world, and it takes three months to save it.
-
The house is on the edge of Rivington. It is on the opposite side of the Chionthar as the Crimson Palace. He haggles like a bastard since the man selling it also haggles like a bastard even though there can't be any competition. Who else in the hells is trying to buy a dilapidated house in a warzone?
Anyway. He wins. This is mostly because the house is horrible, but he is also horrible, so it isn't that bad. He secures the door and stuffs fabric in any gaps and puts up heavy velvet curtains. He busies about trying to make something comfortable with his only frame of reference being the spawn room. He builds one bed and then catches himself, three days later, wondering if he should put in a second. He wonders who would sleep there.
He has this realization, later than he should, somewhere between rubbing his hands raw and the preparatory grave for an almost-goddess-besieged world, that everyone he's ever known for long enough to remember is dead.
Some are dead in the manner he is, waiting on the precipice. Others are dead in the manner the world keeps trying to be; gone for real and for ever. What remains is scar tissue and imprints on paper after the words are erased. He doesn't know which is better.
He builds the second bed. He throws himself onto it and shoves his head into the pillow so he doesn't have to see the ghosts. He has dreams. He dreams that he is back in the Crimson Palace, back in the room of green crystal. He doesn't have well-formed memories because he's only seen it once; it's all blurry in the corners. He can tell it's a dream. He wanders through the rooms full of cages and bars and grinning skulls.
There is a ritual circle in the last room. There are words around the edges, ones that mirror his back and mirror his siblings. There is a distant, frenzied chanting in a language he doesn't know, so he leaves, intending to see if this dream will let him see the sun again. But he goes upstairs and he finds that the rest of the palace is gone and there is just the door to the kennels. It is open. He goes inside.
Though it is just a room within a building and a pile of rubble and nothing at all, he gets the feeling that the kennel stone is yawning. It is tired of this line of questioning. Go away, says the stone. There is no water to come back to.
I would never go back, he argues. I hate it. I hate you.
The stone does not care. Then go away, it says. You cannot return to the water. You are on land. You have grown lungs.
He falls through the floor. He falls very fast and very hard and only has a moment to see more of the green crystal before he's in the grey far below. The stone closes in. End scene.
This is the way he loves himself: when he wakes in the hours after dawn, he does not open the curtains. He leans his head against the wall and listens to birds and waits for the water to sweep back in like the tide.
-
Aurelia looks at him out of the corner of her eyes. She's leaning into the wind—not like she's throwing herself off the edge, it isn't tall enough to matter, but like she knows it will toss her hair about and make it stand on end. Her face is open. She's smiling. She looks better than him.
He doesn't know how. He doesn't know how she can do it when she's had so much less time than him; he had three months and a parasite and she had two days and the sewers. She should be just as bad or worse. The water dried up and left them all in the riverbed.
There used to be seven thousand; there aren't, anymore. They've all gotten off at one stop or another. He hears that Gale met with Yousen for some kind of research. Dalyria has made a name for herself in the Underdark. And Aurelia is standing on the roof of a building a little past midnight with her hair blown all around her head and the edge of the universe between her fingers.
He thinks she figured out long ago that any time spent thinking about who she used to be is a lost investment. It would never be realized, because the distance between it and all the other fastenings is wrong, in the only ways that matter. She raised her head and shed her skin and looked forward instead of back. She's out of the water. She breathes.
Aurelia is staring at him. Her eyes aren't glowing, but they're red, because they were remade by the same master. The only difference is that she's older than him. One day or one century older? What was it like, being first? Does she know how to make bread?
"You won't like what I'm going to tell you," his dead sister says.
Astarion looks over the distant city. "I know."
"Do you still want to hear it?"
His voice is hoarse. "Yes."
-
Once, when there was no sun and time was measured in exhaustion, he'd stared at the Chionthar and waited to see if anything showed in the brackish water. Even in early spring where ice still lingered, it ran too fast. It would kill him. He would tumble between the rocks of the rapids and be very sore and bruised and dead.
The river kept running and the evening slunk on and eventually he drifted from his perch until he was right above the rushing current, hand parallel to the surface, and the commands had told him to stop. So he stopped. And he stood up and went back to the kennels and jumped in the water that did not want to kill him.
-
He tells Aurelia about the adventure.
He spares no sordid detail. She is the last person he need censor himself for when detailing the fused corpse of a man drinking himself to death. She is an attentive listener; she nods when appropriate and makes little noises where she should.
He realizes midway through the telling that he has spent most of those three months learning many things in a very short amount of time and processing none of them. He knows how to hold and throw and sharpen daggers and sometimes he catches the fact there are sheaths on his hips and remembers: these are his. He tells her about how he killed a githyanki scout and realizes he has not put embellishment on the tale because the truth is dramatic enough. He starts his story with a character afraid of goblin booyahgs then talks about killing the avatar of a god. The character changes. He changes.
Nothing changed in the water. The water was not made to change and thus it didn't. There were four commands and there was the master and there was him, squirming around in the current, and two centuries went by like that. He got very good at being in the water because being in the water always meant the same thing.
The story doesn't have that. The story has a lot of things that go one way and then go violently the other. A little into the shadowlands, there had been an ambush in the dead of night, only it wasn't really the dead of night because it was always night and it was always dead. Point being, it had been dark and cold and miserable and shadows had come out of other shadows and multiplied and then Astarion had been on the ground with a blade-claw-talon in his gut. The shadow had politely removed it, including most of his organs in the process. And that had been a really unfortunate way to end his participation in the fight.
It hadn't ended there, though. His friends had picked him up and dusted him off and clapped him on the back. He'd been in a terrible amount of pain, but that part was familiar. The darkness, too. Even the hunger. He was comically acquainted. He'd thought: oh well. I'll get faster.
Then he stood up and kept walking, because he was going to save the world.
What next, Aurelia says, because he'd been telling a story and then he'd stopped because he was thinking about that night in the shadowlands and he can't figure out when it started to mean something other than just being attacked. What happened next?
He's supposed to say that he saved the world. And she'll say she can't believe it, not him, not the vampire spawn, not the footnote of an illustrious career as the shitheap kennel runt. He'll say he knows. And she'll say it wasn't supposed to go like this. He'll say he knows.
-
He says: sorry I killed Cazador without you. He says: my friend said she could bring him back to life if you want to kill him. He says: well not that he was alive to begin with. He says: do you think he had a soul?
She says: what does it take to kill a soul?
He says: more than two centuries. He says: but not a lot more. He says: getting out of the water.
She says:
-
Picture this: you wake up, and you can't breathe. You wake up, and the air all around you isn't air anymore, and you're choking on it. You wake up, and everyone tells you that this new thing has actually been air all along, and it was always supposed to be this way. Picture this: you live in the water for two centuries, and then you're on land.
Did you know that the world is going to end?
-
"You're terrible at this," Shadowheart says.
She isn't lying. He elects to make offense anyway. "I'm taking pity on you, dear," he says, and moves his queen three spaces to the right in what he's pretty sure is a bad play but he can't figure out a better one. Why are they playing lanceboard? He didn't think that Gale sending over a complete set was supposed to be anything but a joke, and yet Shadowheart cracked a bottle of wine and here they are. Autumn is coming late and bringing with it the buzz of insects. She just captured his queen and she has a lantern set on the edge of the patio. There are moths playing around the flames.
"Take less pity and take more pieces."
"Maybe I didn't want that piece. Maybe I'm planning something."
The cicadas are bickering with each other in the trees. She is laughing. "You haven't planned a day in your life."
"That doesn't sound right," Astarion says with distraction. He is mostly focused on how Daphne the milk cow is stomping all over the yard and making a mess of the clover, because she has decided it is better trampled than eaten. There is a puck on the bottom of her hoof to keep her weight off the infection. It is supposed to heal within a fortnight.
He looks back. Shadowheart has turned away from the board to refill her glass and her hair is the colour of Selûne, which is grey, which means she could be terribly old and he wouldn't know. How long do half-elves live? Surely it's forever. Surely he will always be able to come to her farm to talk and drink wine and watch her milk cow wander through the clover.
Things do not change in the water. She had been in her own water, when her hair was dark and black and she hated more than she loved. Then she got out of the water and she started laughing instead.
He wonders if he was actually supposed to live in the water forever—he wonders, a little hysterically, if this is what ascension was supposed to mean, being invincible and immaterial and like it was never about him at all.
Shadowheart peers at the board. "Checkmate, you little shit," she says. She slides her bishop forward. It pins his king.
"You're cheating," he says. He is feeling very faint. He is thinking: I do not want to go back in the water. He is thinking: please, please, let me change like you have changed.
She grins at him. She puts her tongue between her teeth like the sun between clouds. This is their third game; she has won all of them.
He sneezes. There is pollen in his lungs.
-
"You don't want to go back," Aurelia says, resting her arms on the building's edge. Her hair blows up and up and up. She says it lightly; she says it like she's reading off the names of the dead of the Absolute, only not like that at all. "Which is good, because you can't, brother. You're already out."
"What does it mean to be out?" He asks.
She looks at him through shared red eyes. "It means you can change."
-
Once, Astarion was in the Lower City, only he was in the water, and he wasn't changing, and then he had a parasite stuck behind his eye, and that meant he had to save the world. He takes to this role with dignity and grace and does not spend three months thinking that life was easier in the water. Also, he doesn't know what to do with people that are not trying to kill or fuck or betray him. Also, the world is ending.
In order to stop that, he had to be pulled out of the water and dumped on land. This is a good thing, because the water was not good. The water was very far from good. But maybe if it didn't have the master, the water itself wouldn't be so bad. You have to tell yourself that, because if you decide you should give that land thing a try only to start flopping about and choking to death, thinking that the water isn't so bad means you can go back in. You could breathe it before. You can do it again. That way, you don't have to change. And who wants to be unmade?
Once, there were seven thousand and one spawn laid in the water. All of them hatched. They were supposed to spend four months wriggling around and being useless and then they were supposed to climb out of the water and grow lungs. None of them did. The world had to end first, which it did with gusto. Then it un-ended and all the lot of them started breathing.
You can live a long time in the water. Astarion lived a tremendously long time in the water. And then he got out and he saved the world and he learned how to breathe. It was quite difficult and he complained the whole while and he did it. He's still doing it. The first step is always the hardest.
Anyway: the world is ending. It's time to get up.