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“Hey. Psst. Astarion-- hey, hey!”
Astarion hears Karlach’s voice as if at a great distance. He is at the bottom of a deep black pool of reverie, trapped, drowning while still breathing. The world is far away, and the memories infinitely close, crawling across his skin.
Images flash through him with agonizing clarity. Some nights they are more indistinct, the accumulated recollections of years upon years of varying torments - but tonight it is almost as immediate as it was in life. The humming power holds him helpless on the edge of Cazador’s ritual circle, stripped of armor and weapons and friends and hope, feeling his master’s ascension starting to boil his blood with agonizing heat…
“No. No-- please--” he whimpers, his head thrashing side to side. “Let me go--”
“Hey!”
The grip on his wrist enters the reverie and pulls. Another force trapping him, another surge of blazing heat. He jerks, lashes out blindly with his free hand, and his knuckles connect with a hard, solid jawline, sending a stab of pain through his wrist and up his arm.
“Ow! Fuck!” Karlach yelps.
Her voice finally breaks through the reverie, shattering it apart around him. His eyes snap open and he finds himself half-sitting up in his bedroll, looking at Karlach crouched in the tent flap. She's holding her cheek with one hand and looks distinctly startled.
“What…?” Astarion mumbles, shaking his head to try and clear the lingering fog in his thoughts. “What happened?”
“Well, you punched me, for one thing,” Karlach says. Her usual grin, never far away, is already sliding back onto her face now that she sees him awake. “Didn’t know you had that kind of right hook, Fangs.”
“You never asked,” Astarion says, with a painfully transparent attempt at his usual cocky disdain. He sits up fully, rubbing absently at his stinging wrist. “What’s the idea, grabbing me like that?”
She shrugs, letting her hand fall. There’s a visible bruise already darkening along her jaw; he really did catch her perfectly square-on. “You were, uh, having a nightmare, I think,” she says cautiously. “Or whatever you call it when you’re an elf, doing your elf thing.”
“Elves don’t have nightmares,” he says curtly. It’s not entirely a lie - reverie is not sleep. It serves the same function, at least theoretically, but an elf in reverie is not unconscious and does not dream. He remembers, locked in meditative trance, everything that has ever happened to him, often in brilliant, visceral clarity. If only that truly meant there were no nightmares…
She shakes her head. “Well, whatever it was, you were - I dunno. You were… sort of whimpering, crying out. Sure didn’t seem like you were enjoying it.”
No. No, he most certainly wasn’t. It’s only been a few days since Cazador’s blood splattered over his knife and his hands and his face; those memories are still crisp and fresh, not yet melded in with the rest. “I’m fine.” He smiles thinly. “But thanks ever so much for your concern.”
“Uh huh.” She hunches forward, crouched on the balls of her feet, and rests her elbows across her knees. “You know that’s not at all convincing, right?”
He clicks his tongue and makes a show of rolling his eyes. “Oh, all right, fine, you’ve dragged it out of me,” he says. “It was a sex dream. Very intense, lots of… you know. Positions. Orgiastic debauchery. People hanging naked upside down from chandeliers. Good cause for whimpering, is what I'm trying to say. So unless you’d like to hear all the nasty details, maybe you could just see yourself out of--”
“Astarion.” She’s still smiling, but there's no humor in it suddenly, just a sort of rueful sadness. “I’m pretty dumb sometimes, but I’m not stupid.”
His shoulders slump and he looks away from her, rubbing the heels of his hands to his temples. “Right. Of course.”
She settles forward into a more comfortable kneeling position. She’s so tall that her head still brushes the ceiling of the tent, her intact horn giving a gentle clink against the upper pole. “You wanna talk about it?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
She doesn’t make any move to leave the tent, and he doesn’t make any move to force her. They both just sit there, listening to the muted bustle of the city outside their alleyway camp.
After a while he speaks, low, almost inaudible. “I couldn’t possibly explain it,” he says, “in a way that would make you understand.”
“Try me.” She rolls her head to one side, then the other, stretching out the muscles in her neck. “Maybe I’d surprise you.”
“You’re young,” he says bitterly. “How could you possibly comprehend torments that operated on a scale of decades?”
She juts out her jaw thoughtfully. “I had one decade in the Hells. Feels like maybe that counts for something.” When he doesn’t respond, she goes on quietly, “I get nightmares too, y’know. Ten years in the Hells is no two hundred years in Caza-fuck’s dirty basement, but you still rack up a lot of bad memories. And Zariel was just as much of a cruel fucking prick…”
It’s pathetically obvious what she’s doing, of course. Talking first to get him to talk after. He’s not fooled. Sort of endearing, though, he supposes; how many people would actually bother to try?
“Woke up just last night absolutely convinced I was beating the shit out of a hezrou,” she goes on. “You ever see one of them? Nasty little brutes. Only I kept killing it and it kept coming back, and coming back, and coming back…” She stops abruptly, pulls her knees up to her chest and rests her chin on them. “Fucked up my pillow something good.”
He grunts noncommittally. Another long silence stretches between them.
“How’d it feel, killing him?” she asks abruptly. And this time her voice is quieter; it’s lost some of the note of friendly assurance.
He stiffens. “Surely you don’t need me to tell you what it’s like to kill someone,” he says sardonically. “I think we could both give a lecture on the subject that would put Gale to shame.”
“That’s not what I mean.” She frowns. “How’d it feel killing him?” The emphasis is clearer this time.
“Mm.” He gives her a keen look sidelong. “Rather the way it felt for you to kill Gortash, I imagine,” he says. “Though I think I managed it with more artistic flair. Really spattered the canvas, if you will.”
“Yeah.” She huffs out a breath, rattling her lips dramatically. “Watching you tear him up - it felt good. Wish I'd gone all-out like that, with Gortash. All I did was sink one good one right in his chest, but you left Cazzy just a piece of fucking meat. Shredded him. That’s the way it should be - for him, for Gortash, for Zariel, for all the fuckers who use people like that. Just a piece of fucking meat for some dog to chew on.”
Her voice has dropped lower, and he can feel the way the temperature in the tent has ticked up a notch or two as her engine starts to rev with agitation. “And even so…” she mutters sourly, “it still doesn’t fucking fix anything, in the end. Their final little laugh at our expense.”
He wants to object, to snarl out, like the wounded animal that he is, that of course it fixed things. He won. He’s alive (in a manner of speaking) and Cazador’s gone. He will never have to follow that bastard’s direction ever again, never again let his body be used, or be compelled to press a hot poker into his own flesh, or sit in solitary confinement while hunger gnaws in his belly like a furious beast. That is all over now, it’s done. It’s gone.
Except it isn’t, not really.
He is still a vampire. He will still never see his own face in a mirror again, or taste food as anything more than ash on his tongue. The scars on his back are still deep and harsh, spelling out an infernal message of ascension that has lost its only purpose. All the memories of two hundred years of abuse still linger in his mind, ready to be recalled in such clarity as if they happened yesterday.
And the hunger will never, ever, ever stop.
Nothing he did to Cazador changed that in the slightest, just the way nothing Karlach did to Gortash changed the inferno burning in her chest.
He shudders, his shoulders hunching up involuntarily as if recoiling from a blow. “No,” he mutters. “It doesn’t fix a damned thing.”
“Yeah.” She lets out a heavy sigh. “Shoulda seen the way I screamed in Hector’s face when I figured that one out. Still, at least they're dead. And we're free.”
“Free. Yes.” He laughs sharply. “Two broken little puppets with their strings cut.”
She grins - with no humor but with a sort of savage intensity. “And still managing to put on a pretty good show.”
“Are we?” For a moment the sardonic mask slips and he lifts his head to look at her. “I'm not putting on a good show - I'm lost. All of Cazador's power was at my fingertips, and instead I'm sitting in a dirty alleyway listening to Minsc snoring from the other end of the camp. This is no good show. It's a farce.”
She says nothing, just waits, and eventually he adds grudgingly, “But it's my farce.”
“Damn right it is.” Humor flashes back into Karlach's face suddenly. “Besides, who doesn't love a good farce? Mistaken identities, slapstick, dick jokes… the height of entertainment, if you ask me.”
Astarion can't help a slight, crooked grin in return. Karlach's indomitable energy is always infectious, even in the deepest depths of his brooding. “Darling, let me be the first to condemn you as incurably lowbrow,” he says airily, giving a dismissive wave with one hand.
“Listen, vampy, I don't have the kind of time you do to worry about appearances.” She uncurls her legs slowly from her chest to a cross-legged position instead. “Funny thing, y'know. You're gonna go on and on forever, and I've got a year left in me, tops. But we're both fighting the same fight when it comes down to it. Staring down all that freedom, trying to force it into a shape that makes sense. Make something worthwhile out of it before it’s too late.”
Astarion draws his head back and looks at her suddenly as if seeing her clearly for the first time. His fingers fidget absently with the edge of his bedroll. “Well,” he finally says quietly, “I won't give up the fight if you don't, hm?”
Her eyes brighten and she laughs. “Got yourself a deal, Fangs.”