Chapter Text
Sometimes it was obvious from a distance when something was wrong with prey. There was a rank smell. You could see that a creature's eyes were too wide and too bright. Or it walked in a stumbling way. But other times, you didn't know that there was something sickly about blood until after you'd drunk a deer-ful of it.
The heavy sensation of nausea was a familiar feeling. Astarion's old diet had never been what one might call hygienic. The rats of Baldur's Gate suffered from many blood born maladies. Repeated exposure had made him resistant to those, but the beasts of the wilds had exciting new diseases. One of which had him curled up in the corner of his tent, too dizzy to stand and wracked with cramps every hour or so.
He wanted to retch, but he didn't want to lose the blood and he was afraid of being ill too loudly. The others might hear and Lae'zel might make good on her promise. Was this bad blood or ceremorphosis? Can't be too careful and he wasn't in a position to object. You needed to be able to stand and see clearly to argue with a gith and a greatsword. Snicker-snack and then the party would just use magic to open locked chests.
That's how the world worked. Bad things happened when people saw that you were weak.
The pain waxed and waned. When it waned he dipped into fitful periods of meditation. Which was good. Unconsciousness passed the time. But it also meant that morning came as a surprise. He startled awake because someone was knocking on a tent pole.
"Rise and shine, Ancunin. Time to be the only vampire in the realms who's a morning person."
He twitched awake and up into a crouch, but then his catlike reflexes slammed into vertigo and made that into a graceless scrabble to half sitting up. All the movement woke his head to the fact that it was apparently supposed to be aching terribly. He groaned.
The person at the tent flap crouched down and peered inside. "Are you okay?"
It was Tav. That was workable. He had pull with Tav. He tried to compose a response. It needed to be casual, minimize this, and give an explanation that had nothing to do with mindflayers. It took far too long, but he came up with:
"I'm afraid I'm not up for adventure, darling. I ate something that disagreed with me. About more than just being eaten."
The cavalier words felt heavy on his tongue. He couldn't roll them off with the careless lilt they were supposed to come with. But he got it all out without mumbling at least.
"Got it," Tav said, peering in at him. "I don't know what spells she has today, but I could get Shadowheart to come over and..."
"No," Astarion snapped much more harshly than he meant to. "No, that's...that wouldn't work on this."
He actually wasn't sure, he'd never had access to someone with Restoration before, but he absolutely could not stand the idea of the imperious cleric looking down her nose at him huddled on the ground.
"Okay," Tav said immediately.
He couldn't see her clearly. The dizziness was still with him and made blurry multiples of anything he tried to focus on. Tav was a violet blotch rimmed in sunlight at the entrance to his tent. She wasn't immediately leaving, which made him nervous.
"What do you..." She started to ask something, but trailed off and turned it into a different question: "How does this work?"
Ah. She wanted to know when she'd have a functional rogue back. That was reasonable.
"It won't last more than a day," he assured her. Which wasn't necessarily true, but the pain wasn't acute anymore and after a day he'd be able to conceal whatever was left.
"Got it," Tav said again, a little more slowly this time.
And then she left. She'd gotten what she needed from him. That was good. He could rest again.
Astarion shifted slowly so that his back was to the back of the tent, flush with the rock wall it was pitched against. The acute pain was gone, thank the Gods, but he still felt nauseated in a way that made him want to crawl out of his skin. He closed his eyes and listened to people moving around the camp. He didn't want to lie down again until everyone else had settled. The clatter and banter of a group leaving for the day was easy to track because Karlach was among them and she was excited about something. After they were gone everything was quieter. He started to relax.
And then he wasn't relaxed anymore because there were footsteps next to his tent and a shape at the entrance.
"Hey. Can I come in?"
It wasn't Lae'zel. It was Tav again. And he was so relieved he told her "Yes." immediately without really thinking about it.
She ducked inside and sat down opposite him. Her arms were full of random things. It was like when she went around compulsively looting everything in a room, only she'd done it to the camp. Which was strange on multiple levels.
"You're still here?" Astarion asked, a little muddled. Tav never stayed at camp.
"Sure," she said easily, as if this were in any way normal. "Wyll and the girls are going looking for buried treasure. They don't need me for that."
That meant Lae'zel was gone, which was exceptionally good news for Astarion's ability to unclench his shoulders. Tav shifted her armful of nonsense to her lap and fished out a bottle. She uncorked it and held it out towards him.
"We don't have any antidotes left after that spider fight, but Gale thought an infusion of mugwort would help," she explained.
Astarion took the bottle carefully. It smelled like grass. He supposed it couldn't do him any more harm, so he drank some. It tasted like ashes, but so did everything that wasn't blood. It at least didn't make him feel worse, so he drank some more.
Tav deposited the rest of her burden, which wasof pillows and a blanket.
"When I'm sick all I want to do is be surrounded by soft things," she explained. "So I grabbed a bunch of soft things. Do you want them?"
Yes. Of course he wanted them. He had a general policy of wanting all of the things. It was just perplexing when he didn't have to steal them. The blanket was the very nice sheepskin one Tav had decided to go back into a burning building to rescue after she'd finished saving all the people.
(After the fourth time she'd ducked back inside to save sausages of all things Lae'zel started howling that the tadpole had eaten her brain. She and Shadowheart had joined forces to literally drag Tav away as the tiefling argued animatedly that there were still potato wedges in the kitchen. It had been very funny.)
Then an explanation sidled into his head, illuminating his confusion--this was about the sex. People in alleged relationships did all sorts of odd and particular things for each other. He'd forgotten.
She'd asked him a question, hadn't she? He hadn't answered. He'd been running his fingers over the very soft sheepskin. Now he'd been quiet for too long and now the silence stretched out strangely. He didn't quite know what to fill it with.
Tav broke it with another question: "Would you like me to stay?"
He really wasn't sure. He didn't want to perform. That was so tiring. But it felt safer to have a body between him and the outside world right now. When he wasn't sure he could stand and definitely couldn't stab anything worth a damn. He had pull with Tav. She didn't want him to die.
It was really such a nice thing, to have someone else care that you were alive.
"Do as you will," is how he managed to respond.
She stayed. She helped him lay out the extra mat so that it lay straight on his usual one. She cleared away a pile of blood bottles and didn't comment or even look at him when he swayed slightly, or somehow stumbled despite the fact he wasn't even standing.
She ended up sitting cross-legged next to the entrance, looking out and fiddling with a lyre. The one she'd stolen from that drow they'd killed. Astarion had shifted the sleeping mats so that he could lie down with his back to the comforting solidity of stone. He had two pillows and the sheepskin blanket. He thought the mugwort might be helping because the heavy feeling of illness had gentled from claw-skin-off-to-distract-yourself-bad to just deeply unpleasant.
He rested. It was easier now, though odd in a different way. He couldn't quite get used to how it felt lying on top of so much padding. Still, he was tired enough that he drifted off. He closed his eyes and when he opened them the sunlight was slanting in a different way and Tav had picked up one of his books.
"Hey," she said, noticing he was awake. "Can I touch your forehead?"
Random sort of a question. But fine. Astarion made an indifferent noise that could be interpreted as assent. Then he went very still because she was touching his forehead and that was...odd.
"You don't have a fever," Tav observed.
Astarion pursed his lips. Now that he didn't have to concentrate on sitting up, he could inject just the correct amount of condescending archness into saying: "That would require having a body temperature."
There was a pause.
"Right," Tav said, sounding duly chastened.
"Don't quit your day job, darling."
She laughed. "And here I had my heart set on becoming a vampire nursemaid."
He snorted at her. Her fingers hadn't left his forehead, and when they did they curled away slowly. Trailing through his hair in a lingering way that made him very aware when the touch was gone. She went back to reading his book.
He felt better. Almost normal, as long as he stayed still. And he didn't need to move, right now. The camp was quiet. The only things he could hear were birds and the scrape of paper as Tav turned pages.
This was...nice?
This was nice.