Chapter Text
Tav wasn’t the only one that experienced the sickness that night. Astarion reeled through fevers and chills, a tightness in his chest as if his heart and lungs and stomach were all alive again and breaking down. A pounding in his skull as if it would explode. But he had seen how Lae’zel reacted to these symptoms in Tav, holding a dagger to his throat and telling him how she would lie to everyone else about how he was changing, not knowing that Astarion was listening from the shadows. Tav had talked her down – he was good at that, despite being the least charming person alive – and had drifted off to sleep by the fire. Astarion had faked good health and huddled in his tent, tossing and turning and unable to trance. If he was turning into a mindflayer, perhaps he should have asked Lae’zel for the small mercy she wanted so badly to give them all.
A hand fell on his forehead, warm and pulsing with magic. Soothing and calming and familiar. When he opened his eyes, he was in a strange place filled with ruins and stars. But the eyes gazing down at him were known to him, brown with those flecks of gold, the orbs nestled deep in the shadows that always lay over the man’s lined face and slim figure.
“Hello you,” Astarion spoke, his voice breaking on the words as his eyes blurred with tears. “I should have known you’d show up to save me again.”
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He had endured thirty days and nights in the tomb. Plenty of time to regret the escape attempt. Plenty of time to lament all the lives he had led to perish at the feet of his master. Plenty of time to contemplate and come to hate every lovely little quality about that sweet boy who had been his destruction. He cursed the boy. He begged each god for help, and cursed them each in turn before begging them again. His nails had ripped and torn in the lid of the coffin, raining his own blood onto his face until there was no blood left to fall. He screamed until his voice abandoned him. He cracked his knees trying to bend his legs but there was no relief from his position in the box. He starved and writhed in pain and no god answered and neither did his master, who had tossed him away and buried him, perhaps for forever.
He wailed in the quiet language of dust, for that was all that filled his throat now. Wailed that he would do anything for anyone if only they would set him free. He had been locked away for thirty days before someone answered.
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“What is this place?”
His surroundings were beautiful, but wrong. Floating among the twinkling stars above were chunks of rock and even entire islands, as if the ground Astarion stood on was crumbling alongside the ruins due to some toxic magic. The deep sapphire sky draped a blue veil over the landscape, but it was nothing like twilight in Baldur’s Gate. It was more like being underwater – calm, but unsettling. The strange colors and what remained of the architecture seemed to promise safety, but Astarion didn’t trust that promise. He wanted to run, to escape. But not seeing any exit, he stepped closer to his second-time savior: Raphael.
“We are in your dream,” the devil answered.
“My dream?” Astarion frowned at him. Raphael knew better than that.
“Or I should say… a dream the tadpole is sharing with you.”
Astarion shrank into himself, as if it would get him away from the hideous worm he had been infected with. His voice shook as he asked, “You’re speaking to me through the tadpole?”
Raphael smiled at him with a kindness the elf had nearly forgotten. So much so that it looked out of place on him. “It’s difficult to explain. Let’s say–”
“I don’t want you to explain it!” Astarion dug his fingers into the silk doublet, his claws cutting through the fine embroidery but he didn’t care. He had been hiding behind a façade with so many people over so many miles for days: he was a magistrate, he was useful and desirable, he was unbothered by current circumstances. He certainly wasn’t a vampire spawn and a slave. He didn’t have to keep this up in front of Raphael – he let the mask fall as despair flooded his voice. “I want you to– Can’t you take me to your House, like before? Can’t you tear this worm out of my head? You…”
He had a second mask, it seemed. That one fell now, dragging tears along with it.
“You left me for nearly two hundred years,” he sobbed, his nails ripping small gashes in the silk they clutched. “I called for you so many times. I know you told me not to but–”
There was so much he wanted to say – so much that he would need another two hundred years to say it all.
He looked back up into those haunting brown eyes he had ached for so long to see again, if only for a moment. “If you hadn’t written to me, I would have thought I had gone mad and hallucinated you.”
“Hush. Calm yourself, little vampling.” Raphael wrapped his arms around Astarion. It was again so strange for him to show this much kindness. Was it because Astarion’s situation was truly so dire? Was he not overreacting for once? The thought unnerved him further, and – desperate for comfort – he sank into the embrace as Raphael’s warm voice rumbled in his chest. “Always so impatient. Always so many wishes you want me to grant as soon as they leave your tongue.”
Astarion mumbled into the satin shoulder. “This one is a bit time-sensitive, sweetheart.”
“I won’t let anything happen to you. I won’t allow you to transform – that much I can promise. You can trust me.”
The words were simple. Diplomatic. Astarion breathed in. Raphael smelled wrong. Vanilla. And… garlic. How disappointing. Perhaps because this was a dream. Astarion had never had a dream before.
That must be why everything seemed so wrong.
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When light flooded the coffin, he couldn’t shut his eyes. His eyelids were shrunken open, dry and unmoving. He tried to move his arms to block the brightness, but his muscles had wasted away and his now brittle bones cracked and scraped against each other. He heard a horrific keening sound rise, and he couldn’t cover his ears to keep out its assault.
His thoughts untangled and floated away from him until one remained and overtook his mind: Master. Master has come to free me.
Strong, powerful arms that hadn’t had cause to waste away reached in to grind his bones together, to wrangle his limbs and spine into new twisted shapes they were refusing to form, and that keening increased and filled his head and the light burned his eyes like the sun. His eyes were melting, his bones splitting, the whole of him crumbling to dust.
A voice shushed him, the sound soft, dark, and unknown. The wild keen lessened and faded, and he realized that he himself had been the one making it, his throat scraped raw by its force. And then…
Blood. He smelled it before it struck his desiccated lips and tongue. And then it was filling his entire mouth and cascading down his raw throat and coating his insides. So much. He had never had so much blood. His throat bobbed, trying to swallow to bring it in to him quicker, but he only choked.
“Easy,” the dark voice spoke, as delicious as the blood. How long had it been since he had heard any voice that wasn’t his own screams? “Easy now. No need to be greedy – no one will take it from you.”
LIES, his mind screamed. He had never been allowed so much blood. His master would take it away.
But this wasn’t his master. His master had abandoned him. And someone else had answered his cries.
His vision returned slowly, the blood healing his shrunken and dried eyes. Vague light gave way to milky shapes until he could see the figure that cradled him and spoke to him of nothing consequential because he wasn’t ready to understand anything yet. It was, of course, a celestial. Snow-white feathered wings surrounded its body and a glowing halo sat atop its head. Astarion gazed up from its lap, entranced by its beauty, not quite caring about the poetry it was reciting but thrilled to his core just to hear a voice give him anything at all to hear. He wanted more blood – craved it – desired it – needed it – but didn’t dare ask for it. Surely he had been given more than he would ever have again. For the first time, he was as Cazador had always demanded that he be: grateful. Even as the milky cloud fell from his vision and the figure grew more solid and much darker, even as the halo solidified into great branching horns and the feathers smoothed into wings of leathery skin… even as he realized it was no celestial that held him but a devil, he was grateful. Perhaps he had died, and there was blood to drink in Hell.
“You can trance,” the red devil said to him at the end of one of his nonsense sonnets. “I can sing you a lullaby if you’d find that more appropriate.”
Astarion shook his head in a sudden panic, stiff and rotted muscles in his neck tearing with the motion. He tried to speak, to object, but his tongue was rotted too, his entire throat cracked and warped. He only produced a low screech, and the devil had to shush him once again.
“I know, little vampling. I know. The only memories you have to sort through are of that tomb. I will give you a gift, then, as a token of my goodwill. I’m sure you’d appreciate such a token, as you can see what your benefactor is.”
Astarion already had tokens of goodwill from this devil – the blood, the voice, the contact, the very rescue itself. Any more would seem suspicious if Astarion didn’t catch the hint nestled within: compensation was expected for those tokens already given.
He didn’t mind. He would choose anything over the tomb and the coffin. He would do anything for this devil, so long as he wasn’t abandoned to the silent dark again to rot and starve and scream for no one to hear.
A bottle was put to his lips. He knew it couldn’t possibly be more blood, and it wasn’t. It was some other liquid that tasted like dust and mud.
“If you do dream,” he heard as he choked down the last of it, “dream only of me.”
But when the potion wafted him off to sleep, it was deep and dark and silent. If he had any dreams of the devil, Astarion forgot them.