#bgficcing

“Better?” you intoned in a low voice. “Oh, excellent.” He shifted his hips, a minuscule bit of friction, staring up at you so soft and open and pleased. “Full to bursting with blood, reclining in a hoard of pillows, a handsome person in my lap with my cock warm and snug inside them? It’s almost as if we’re somewhere civilised.” You began to slowly rock your hips. Within a couple of repetitions, he caught and joined the rhythm, his knees pulling up behind you. “Your standards are in the gutter,” you told him affectionately, rubbing your nose against his. Before you could withdraw, he stole a kiss. “You, of all—ah—all people do not get to tell me that.” Both of your breathing was growing rougher, so loud in the dark, breath-warm little space between you. His eyelids were fluttery; a darling furrow had appeared between his brows, a sweetly pained twist to his mouth. He felt good. You were making him feel good. “Hmm,” you mused. “I ought to pamper you properly sometime, then. So we can both see what it is like.” A light sparked in Astarion’s eyes. Hands sliding up your sides, he purred, “You do.” Your heart was going to burst into your mouth and onto your tongue. You were going to spit it up onto him like a cat with a hairball, or a dead mouse. You pressed your forehead to his, increasing the pace of your hips. If only you could merge with him! Crack open your chest and bid him curl up within your wet heat, close your ribs around him like armour. You wanted to wrap yourself around him until both of you forgot there was anything else to the world. You had to settle for this: your blood on the inside, your body on the outside; your cunt around his cock, your arms around his neck, your legs around his hips. Double layers of you to keep him safe and shielded, warm and nurtured. He kissed you, you kissed him. Lips and tongue and teeth on the mouth, cheeks, ears—neck, collarbones, chest. Both of you were warm and flushed with your blood, damp with your sweat. You leaned your faces together and passed the same air back and forth in gasps and moans and filthy nothings. One of his hands dropped to your arse, kneading and caressing, ushering your movements. The other wandered up into your shaggy hair. Your hips rolled over his and his rolled under yours, an undulating, infinite wave. You were so full. On each stroke, your clit ground into the warm skin and soft fat of his pubic mound, warm little licks of pleasure. This wasn't going to make you come, but gods, you wanted to stay here forever.

Astarion found her on a rooftop, perched on the centre of the ridge, knees pulled up against her chest, where she wasn’t visible from the street. She hoped it was enough to shield even tadpole’d passers-by from her, though perhaps it wasn’t. Her mind buzzed—she had long since run out of coherent sequences of concrete events and instead, untethered feelings and sensations roiled inside her. It wouldn’t surprise her if they were spilling out.

The squirming velvet wetness of still-living viscera in her hands. The bubbling, rattling music of lungs drowning in their own blood. The bone-deep burn, one of the few things that trulyreached her,as her Lord Father had her flayed for her failures and she screamed.

Pain. Shame. Anger. A hideous, howling emptiness that yearned to spread and consume the whole world.

And the moments of perfect, glorious service, when she had pleased her Dread Father, when her works had honoured him and she had acted according to her purpose. The dissolution of her ego in the depths of her devotion.

She wanted it. Gods, she wanted it. She’d do anything to feel like that again. To feel and know nothing, but also somehow everything. Everything worth feeling, everything worth knowing. The world made so achingly simple.

As Astarion approached from behind, alerting her to his presence by scuffing his boots against the shingles, she sniffed and scrubbed the tears from her cheeks with her fist. They still tasted like vomit. But these days, the thought of cannibalism turned her stomach more than it whet her appetite.

“Hello, Astarion,” she said in a low voice, without turning around. His pale body towered in her peripheral vision.

“You’re not planning on flinging yourself off this roof, are you?” he said, leaning to theatrically look down at the ground.

She laughed, just a quiver on the exhale. “After storming off like that? I wouldn’t dare. Far too melodramatic.”

“Yes, it would be rather tasteless, wouldn’t it?”

Zanarai rested her chin atop her knees and stared at the sky above the city. Hovering just above the western horizon, the sun seemed to be almost melting into the earth as it descended. Every so often, a ribbon of birds danced across it.

Before, she had often pictured it red and dying, burning out over a featureless, ashen plain. Herself beneath it, atop a pile of bodies taller than a mountain, ready to plunge her dagger into her own heart. The final sacrifice. All the world destroyed by her hand, in her father’s name.

Astarion came to sit beside her.

Zanarai despised how much more steady she suddenly felt, with his presence at her shoulder. She didn’t deserve it and it was dangerous because if it continued, she might start to feel as if she did. That was the first step on the path to falling into the caustic pool of yellow bile she had instead of a soul. She knew so little, but she did know that. And oh, how tempting it was!

“It’s enough that I have to suffer through this,” she said bitterly. “You all have your own troubles.”

“Troubles you’ve very graciously assisted us with.”

She scoffed. “Don’t forget—I’m the reason you’re all in this mess to begin with. I’m the reason you have tadpoles in your skulls and will burst into mind-controlled tentacles if you’re ever separated from the Astral Prism.”

“Well, I can’t speak for the others,” Astarion said, leaning back on his hands to tilt his face up into the fading sunlight, “but personally—I’m rather grateful.”

Zanarai glanced at him. His expression was blisteringly peaceful, despite his flippant tone. She had to look away again.

After a moment, in a low voice, she said, “I am happy it’s worked out for you.” Him, and only him, out of thousands of people. A part of her thought it was worth it. “That’s not what I mean.”

“Darling, based on what was in that … mental blast of yours,” he said, “you seem to be under the impression that you’re somehow the epitome of evil. I’m trying to supply you with some of the myriad reasons that’s not the case.”

“I know that,” she snapped. She didn’t, but he’d never understand—never agree—and for that, she loved and hated him in equal measure. “I’m just not … there emotionally, yet. I’m working on it.”

“Then you won’t mind if I sit with you while you do, will you?”

When she’d been trying to kill him, like the mad dog she was at heart, he’d spoken kindly to that rabid, snarling beast, looked past it for a moment and told her, You’ve got this. And I’ve got you.

Zanarai swallowed, and permitted him to stay.

“It would be so easy,” she said, because some of it, the heart of it, he did understand, “to just say, it wasn’t me that did those things, it was … that other person. In a sense, it’s true. The Dark Urge is something else, but the line between it and me was a lot more fluid before the nautiloid, I think. I didn’t care about making a distinction.”

Without realising, she’d been scratching at her knee through her trousers in tight little swipes. She balled her hand into a fist, claws digging into her palm. All over her body, her skin crawled and itched and tingled.

“But that’s the thing—that’s the real difference.” She swallowed. “Whether I care or not. The Chosen of Bhaal, the High Primistress of Baldur’s Gate, that was still me. It was … me in my full context, I suppose. When I’m all of me, I’m a monster. So … it’s a good thing I got parts cut out. Hah.”

She sniffed and angrily wiped her eyes with the side of her hand.

“No one can control what their past self did,” she continued. “What’s done is done, even if you regret it now. But I don’t even always know why past me made the choices she did, because I can’t remember. Sometimes, she feels so alien I might as well have been possessed. Like something else wore my skin and used my name, before it was mine. And sometimes, I understand so intimately I have no idea what to do about it.”

Instead of angels in the marble, waiting to be freed, everywhere she looked she saw only beautiful corpses. How absolutely splendid most people would look, with their breaths stilled and parts cut away just so, dolled up in their own gore. How satisfying it would be to take them apart, examine and admire each piece. How true and right it would be to strip away the pretensions of life and lay them bare in death.

It wasn’t the wild and reckless abandon of the Dark Urge that told her that. It was her own, sober mind and heart. How many people had she killed and mutilated with a measured hand and exacting eye? Was that worse?

Her first murder had been her foster family, and nothing had ever lived up to it. Even still, she couldn’t summon up a flicker of dismay. Nevermind remorse. At the fact it hadn’t been her choice, certainly, but not at having done it. A small part of her even wished she’d been conscious for the act itself, and railed at Bhaal for taking that away from her. As if the whole sorry affair wasn’t thanks to him.

Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe she would’ve been like this even without his influence. Maybe, even if they found a way to tear Bhaal’s fetid blood out of her, she’d still be like this. Maybe she’d never be able to look at the people she loved without feeling sick with longing for violence.

Was that terrifying? Or exhilarating?

“What matters is that you’re making the right choices now,” Astarion said. “And, considering the merry little band of heroes you’ve gathered around yourself, it seems you are. Not that I’m an expert, but if it matters to you—and it does, clearly—then … trust their judgement, if not your own.”

And she did, didn’t she? Karlach and Wyll were her friends. Jaheira had been her bitter enemy once, but didn’t seem to be holding it against her. And Dame Aylin hadn’t smitten her to unholy cinders—yet, anyway.

“Present company excluded, of course,” she said warmly. If she looked at him, she wouldn’t be able to prevent picturing how she’d kill him.

“Obviously,” he agreed. “Though you ought to trust my judgement, too, darling.”

“About clothing and interior decorating? With my life.”

“About you,” he said. “We will find a way to free you. I’m sure of it.”

What was there to free her from, except this mortal coil? She wanted to laugh, and she wanted to cry, and she wanted to throw up. She wanted, just a little, to die.

She settled for closing her eyes and sighing. The mild breeze danced over the rooftops, forced to split around her unmoving body. Below, footsteps and chatter—laughter, sometimes—echoed between the buildings.

Contemptible. Hateful. She longed for screams and then silence. But it was an idle, wistful thing. The rest of her would never allow it. The familiar headache gnawed at her temples, as if her skull housed a horde of starving, restless vermin. But she couldn’t let them out, and there was no cat to set on them. All she could do was close the door and pray they ate only her.