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"Vampire spawn," says the woman—tan weathered skin like old leather, silver hair in thick ropes down her back.
"Yes, I do believe we've found the last," comes the response, unseen—cultured, almost professorial in its certainty. "The reports were accurate after all. Seven, not six."
The thing in the corner doesn't lift its head. Doesn't acknowledge the voices. There is only the absence, vast and howling, where Master should be. Freefall with no ground rushing up, untethered in a void that shouldn't exist.
Hands reach—gentle, careful—and it wails.
Tearing up, from some strange animal place. The hands don't stop. They surge forth anyway, touching and lifting, bearing weight. The world tilts, slides sideways, turns inside-out. No notion at all of where it ends. It cannot remember what shape it's supposed to hold. Everything is wrong.
#
"Shh, shh, I've got you, baby, it's okay. You're safe, baby, I got you, you're safe."
The voice is warm like forge-fire, and there are arms around him, and he's crying again. He's been crying in his sleep. Again.
Karlach's hand moves in long strokes down his spine, her engine heart thrumming underneath his ear. He's draped across her like he's trying to disappear into her ribs, crawl back into some place before time, before this. She doesn't complain. Doesn't shift him off.
"That's it. Let it out, love. I'm right here."
The pieces won't cohere. Dog-thoughts and him-thoughts and nameless, something-else thoughts, fragments that refuse any order or sense. Some days it's harder than others to hold onto the shape of personhood, to remember that he is allowed perimeter and substance and the word I.
Cazador is dead.
The mere thought threatens to crack something inside him wide open, spill his insides out across the floor. Tear his throat open, howl till nothing remains. The others have tried—they keep trying, over and over—to make him understand what that means. Freedom. Safety. It was wrong to treat you that way.
But what's done was done. Had been done for two hundred years. That was how the world worked. That was just the way things were.
He can't think about it. Thinking about it makes the walls turn to blood.
Seventeen months between those voices and this moment. Seventeen months since they killed the vampire lord. Seventeen months of not understanding, of fracturing, of trying to hold pieces together that just don't fit.
Not grief—he doesn't think it's grief, though he has no other word for it. More like someone has removed the sun from the sky. This is fine, this is good. Look how much better. Look how free you are now. But all he knows is darkness and cold and no fixed point to orient himself by.
So instead: Karlach. The furnace heat of her. The way she lets him sleep bare against her skin, all that impossible warmth seeping into his cold dead flesh. The way she doesn't flinch when he gets hard against her thigh. Sometimes his hands wander, sometimes his body does things, and she treats it like a wandering breeze—interesting, maybe pleasant, nothing to fuss over.
"You're doing good," she murmurs, fingers combing through his curls. "You're doing real good, baby."
Baby. Not Dog. Not Astarion.
Baby. He thinks maybe he can be that.
Long strokes down his spine, nails scratching lightly at his scalp. His hand slides down between them: tentative, querying.
"Yeah?" Karlach's grin is audible in her voice. "Yeah, all right. C'mere, gorgeous."
One hand wraps around his cock, her palm callused and sure, while the other slides lower, working into him. She's so patient, so very easy about it, and he whimpers, rocks against her, graceless in his need, his desperation. His knee wedges between her thighs, his groin grinding against her mound, and she laughs, arches, encourages him with her hips.
"That's it, that's it, baby. Take what you need."
This he understands; this makes sense. Bodies, sensation, the give and take of touch. Within, and without, the dual stimulation grounds: he's here, and he's real. Flesh, nerve, and response. He comes apart in her hands, and comes back together in her arms.
Lies gutted and quiet, afterwards, emptied out. The crying has stopped, his mind gone mercifully blank at last. Karlach holds him close, still petting, still stroking, and her palm settles against his, open, waiting—a question asked without words.
He draws a slow circle on her skin. Yes. Good. Safe.
"Hungry? Thirsty? Want anything?" She spaces each question out, pauses between offerings.
He scratches lightly at her palm. No. Not yet.
"Want more?" A beat, her voice playful but sincere. "I can get you there again if you want."
Another scratch, gentler this time. Then his finger traces a line down her palm and back up—stay—before going still.
"Yeah, all right. Just gonna hold you then." She adjusts them both, finds a more comfortable angle. "Let me tell you about Avernus. About the War."
She talks about skies that bled like open wounds, the gallows humor of her squad. Once, how they held a bridge for three days, without sleep, without relief. She tells it with such gusto, such vicious joy in her voice, and he absorbs it like a starving thing. There are a thousand questions in his mind. Whether she misses it. If she'd go back. What the smell of burning sulfur does to memory.
He doesn't ask. Doesn't say anything. Talking is hard, still, words agonies in his mouth. But he listens, and she seems to understand through only that.
At last she cups his face in her palms, plants a kiss squarely to his forehead. "You're doing good, baby. You're doing so good."
"Sleep now," she says eventually. "I got you."
And he does. He wants to believe her.
#
The collar is gone now. He doesn't remember when they removed it. The months between discovery and now are a blur. Faces and voices and hands trying to help.
Someone had used magic. Healing magic. Restorative charms. Spells that slowly, painstakingly undid what had been sewn. He'd cried, and he'd screamed: he remembers that part, and little else.
The skin of his neck is scarred, a thick band of silvered tissue all the way around. Sometimes he touches it—compulsively, obsessively—checking that it's still there, still him. Sometimes he wakes up convinced the collar has reappeared, that everything since has been a dream. A trick, a test he's failing somehow.
Those are not very good nights.
#
Stability is a double-edged blade.
As sleep returns to him, so do dreams. And they come with bite.
Karlach's heat lulls him under, her heartbeat a metronome. He sinks into dark water, and his mind kicks into action. Restored to itself now, it can process, metabolize—attempt to sort through centuries of experiences no mind was built to hold.
Sometimes it's the parties. Grand halls full of cold faces. All of them eager, all of them permitted. Taken in every hole, at once. There's a hand, Karlach's, moving in soothing circles on his back, and he cannot tell if these happened once, twice, or ten thousand times.
He dreams of lying on bare earth while plants—roots, vines—grow and thrust, pushing their way into and through him. The pressure of them expanding inside his body, the wet sounds of stem breaking from skin, and he wakes clawing at his own chest, convinced there are flowers blooming from his ribs.
Nothing growing. Just scars and dead flesh.
His chest cavity pried open like a reliquary, ribs spread wide like cathedral doors, and dogs—actual dogs—feasting on his flesh. He can feel their muzzles rooting inside him, hot breaths against his heart. Gorging on his organs, teeth scraping his vertebrae from within. The dream has weight, and texture, and smell, the burning cold of viscera exposed to air.
Did that happen? Could that possibly have occurred? Vampires can survive almost anything, and Cazador commanded such formidable skill. The memory sits in his body with such certainty—tongues lapping, laving, the crunch of a jaw—but surely. Surely that's too much, even for—
But then he remembers other things that seemed impossible, and he can't be sure anymore.
He dreams—remembers?—being bred by dogs. Their weight on his back, their claws in his sides. The stretch and tear, and the sick heat of their animal seed. How the echoing laughter made it infinitely worse, and the master's voice, amused and glacial: How fitting.
And after, the swelling, swelling of his belly. The movement within, the pressure of growing things. He remembers crawling on hands and knees in a bare stone room, alone, laboring for days without end.
The birthing. His legs straining apart, body splitting to expel. The agony of it, the impossible litter, wave after wave—each pup tearing its way out. The wetness, the obscene squelching sounds. The exhaustion so complete it transcended physical sensation and became a sort of quasi-cosmic despair. He remembers—thinks he remembers—lying in the aftermath, too destroyed to move, while wet things squirmed and mewled at his thighs and his chest.
And then: the master, gathering them up. One by one, the pups he'd grown inside his own body, and then the splash of water, again and again. Cazador drowned each one in a basin while he watched, unable to rise, still leaking fluid onto the floor.
"Baby? Baby, what—"
He can't explain. Can't find words.
Rising, he stumbles to the corner, and vomits. Nothing comes up, just waves of dry heaves. There's nothing in him to expel except horror. His stomach is empty, his whole body hollowed out—and yet, somehow, still full of this.
#
He remembers—definitely remembers, this one has weight the others lack—lying fevered from some infection. Shaking with heat despite his undead flesh, his body attempting and failing to fight something off. He is both cold and burning up at once, skin slick with sweat that shouldn't exist on a vampire's body.
Cazador's hand, a cool weight on his head. A soft cloth wiping the rancid slick from his neck.
"Poor thing," Master murmurs. "You're doing so well."
The hand is mercy against his blistering skin, and the voice is almost kind. He wants to lean into it. Wants it—wants something, for once—more badly than he's ever wanted death.
"Rest now," Master says, and there's something in his tone that sounds like permission. Like sanctuary, like care.
He wakes up weeping.
That one might be the worst. The memory of comfort, of tenderness. The worst is how much he wanted—still wants—that gentle hand.
"He hurt you," Karlach says, when he tries to explain. Her palm is open against his, and he's making jagged patterns of distress—not quite scratching, not quite circles. Trying to communicate something that has no name. "He also made you depend on him. That's what abusers do, baby. It's not love."
He knows this. The wizard has explained it in academic frameworks, theories of conditioning and psychological imprisonment. The silver-haired druid has told him stories of soldiers who grew to love their captors, who couldn't imagine life without the structure of their torture.
It doesn't help.
He still dreams of Master's hand. Still wakes up aching for it.
#
Lying on a table while Cazador opens him with a spell. Forced to stay conscious while hands reach inside him, rearranging things. Starved for weeks, then force-fed tainted blood. Cazador observing with clinical detachment, documenting which combinations produced the most distress.
Two seconds of gentleness before the screaming resumed. Cazador's fingers trailing affectionately down his spine before the blade went in. That microscopic moment of reprieve that made the subsequent agony worse.
The dreams where he's buried alive. Where he's burned, drowned, raped. They bleed into each other. They fuse and separate and fuse again, become more fantastical, and no less real.
#
He finds the cleric at breakfast. She's making tea, the ritual of it precise and meditative. He stands in the doorway for a long moment, just watching her move through the familiar motions.
She looks up when she notices him. Smiles, slanted and real. "Morning. Want some?"
He doesn't respond. Doesn't move. Just looks at her.
Something in his stillness must communicate itself, because she sets down the kettle carefully and gives him her full attention. "What is it?"
The words are there, somewhere. Buried under seventeen months of silence, under two hundred years of erasure. He has to dig for them, an excavation attempt, haul them up through layers of resistance and forgetting.
"Could they tell me?" His voice is rusty, strange, unpracticed. The sound of it startles him.
Shadowheart's eyes widen fractionally—surprised to hear him speak. "Could who? Tell you what?"
"The wizard. You. Magic." Each word costs him. He has to pause between them, gathering strength. "Could you—could magic tell me. What actually happened. To me."
Her hands still as she studies his face. "There are spells," she says. "Divination magic. But—" She hesitates. "They're not exact. Memory isn't really an exact thing."
He stands there. Absorbing this. There's something happening inside him—a pressure, a question forming—but it keeps slipping. Like trying to hold water in cupped hands.
"Would you want to know?" Shadowheart asks gently. "If we could tell you."
The question hangs between them.
Yes. The answer rises immediate and certain. He thinks about the dream with the dogs, the birthing, the impossible horror of it. Yes, I need to know if that was real.
Then the certainty dissolves. No. Clear and absolute. He thinks about having it confirmed, cataloged, made real through verification. Thinks about the tenderness too—Cazador's hand on his brow—and what it would mean to know for sure whether that kindness was genuine or another form of cruelty.
Then: yes again, but different now, coming from somewhere else inside him. A part that needs the structure of facts, that can't bear this formless weight.
Then: no, from yet another place. A part that knows ignorance is the only mercy left.
The answers keep morphing. He can feel them moving through him like weather phenomena, each one true when it arrives, replaced instantly by its opposite. He reaches for one to speak aloud and it's already gone, transformed into something else.
Blankness settles over him like fog, like blanketing snow. He's aware of her waiting, aware of the question, aware that some response is expected soon. But the competing answers have canceled each other out, leaving behind only empty space. There are no thoughts he can grasp. No reaction he can provide. Just a strange nothingness pulling in two different directions at once.
He blinks at her. One time. Twice.
Shadowheart waits another moment, then nods. "Okay," she says, soft. "That's okay. You don't have to answer now."
He doesn't move. Doesn't signal whether this is acceptable or not. The moment stretches, becomes something else. Eventually he turns and drifts away, leaving the question suspended and unanswered in the space behind him.
But he carries it anyway, doesn't he? The weight: shapeless, ungraspable, impossible to set down.
#
That evening, he sits with Karlach while she sharpens her axe. The rhythmic scrape of whetstone on steel is soothing, repetitive, predictable. He leans against her side, his hand resting palm-up on her thigh.
She works in silence for a while, then her free hand comes to rest against his. Waiting.
He taps twice. Question. Attention.
"Yeah, baby? What is it?"
He traces a long line down her palm. Then pulls his finger back and traces it again. Away. Gone. Direction.
"You want me to go somewhere?" She sounds confused.
He scratches lightly. No. Then taps again—question—and repeats the line. Away.
"Oh." Her voice softens. "You're asking about something that's gone. Something that went away."
Circle. Yes.
She thinks for a moment. "The collar?"
Circle. Yes. Then he traces another pattern, more complex, trying to communicate something about knowing, about certainty. But it's too abstract: the language doesn't have enough words.
He gives up, frustrated. Scratches once, then lets his hand go still.
"It's okay," Karlach says. "I think I get it. You're wondering if it really happened the way you remember. If the things you dream about are real."
Slow circle. Yes. Comfort in being understood, if not in the answer.
"I don't know, baby," she admits. "I don't think anybody knows for sure. But you're here now. You're real now. That's what matters."
He wants to believe her. He traces a small, uncertain circle. Maybe yes. Maybe comfort. Maybe.
#
That night, Karlach tells him about the time her squad tried to make alcohol out of demon blood and the fermentation process went spectacularly wrong.
"I'm talking explosions," she says, gesturing wildly. "I'm talking the commander finding us all passed out in a crater. Latrine duty assigned for a solid—ha—month."
He listens to the timbre of her voice, the warmth and vitality in it. Lets it fill up the spaces where the dreams usually live.
He sleeps, and dreams of the collar again.
But this time, when he wakes scrabbling at his neck, when Karlach catches his hands and says "Not real, baby, not real"—
This time, his fingers find in the darkness not her palm, but her cheek. This time he manages to trace a small, shaking circle.
Yes. I believe you. Yes.