there’s something delightfully angsty thinking about rolan, trying and failing to cope with his (seemingly) unrequited feelings for tav.
there’s this person, this hero, who has a magnetic attraction or second sense for whenever rolan is experiencing despair. they swoop in and play a first-hand witness to every godawful moment in his life. from keeping them from leaving the grove and perishing on the road, to finding him drunk off his ass at last light, to walking into sorceries sundries and blatantly questioning the bruises on his face.
worst off, they do everything in their power to fix it: they keep him and his siblings together, they save his only family from the depths of moonlight towers and his own ass from the shadowlands, and then beat up his abusive master and hand him an Archmage’s title on a silver platter.
by act 3 of baldur’s gate he owes all his success to this person he can only mentally rectify as his personal guardian angel. he has his life, his family, and he’s living his lifelong dream thanks to them. they’ve seen him at his worse and they did everything in their power to help him anyways, and what does he get?
an ego that died a quiet death somewhere in the shadowlands, that got buried under Lorroakan’s boot heel. a tower and a magic canon that, gods help him, may help him find a way to repay a single iota of the multiple life debts he owes his hero. memories of his mistreatment of them along the road to baldur’s gate.
and these feelings, these godsawful feelings he can’t bring himself to put a name to. a longing so great it hurts, admiration so deep it he hasn’t found the depths of it, a love so great it scares him, so desperate it has him making awkward, stilted jokes about being friends, pledging his help to fight a literal netherbrain, jokingly (not jokingly) referring to himself as the dashing master - trying and failing to endear himself to his seemingly-insane savior while they prance about in a party full of insanely attractive bachelors, all gunning for their attention.
he knows he can’t compare, after how he treated them. he just doesn’t measure up. they’ve seen him at his worst and he can’t be loved by someone like them, after that, but-
his grumpy little jokes always earn him that weird little sideways smile, and it sends his heart a-fluttering.
he’s always been good at embracing hopelessness, anyways
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