#fsbe

His brothers and sisters weep on occasion. That’s usually at a distance—down the hall and behind an enchanted doorway, at the tender mercy of Godey or each other. Rarer still would come the pathetic sniffling sobs from the recesses of a bunk in the dormitories. They all pretended not to hear and not to see; an unspoken code rarely broken amongst them because while Cazador had his favorites, he did remember the others.

Astarion can joke about weeping. Can belittle it. Can scrape it off the bottom of his shoe like stepping in something foul.

Not this time. Not when Eleanor is doing it and breaking apart so utterly.

The days since the crash have been nothing if not a parade of novelties, most of them hilarious or boring or, occasionally, horrifying.

He has no script for this. No pretty words or memorized gestures. Can only sit on his knees as his first and only friend sobs against him.

His hands are on her shoulders. She curls tight into herself even as she leans against him, her hands fisted, tucked up close beneath her chin. She hesitates to touch him. Tries not to breathe on him, even after a kiss, when he’s had his fingers inside her.

He’s brushed against that in her mind, but can’t untangle the knot of reasons: shame, guilt, fear, longing. He’s not sure she could suss it out herself.

Even now, as she trembles, as her lungs hitch and stutter and her mouth gapes in silent agony, she does her best to contain herself from him. Part of her…wants contact. Wants comfort, he thinks. Though she won’t admit it.

Their dearest tiefling gave what he thought had been apocryphal advice. But perhaps…

Astarion shifts his grip. Slides his hands down and around. He’s held lovers closer than this. Much more intimately. Yet this is different, somehow. Stranger.

A great deal more awkward. He’s not used to being sobbed on. Well, he’s not used to be sobbed on and giving a damn. Yet her misery is a visceral thing. It…hurts him. Though he’s done nothing, he’s uninjured and tired and always starving, but the sounds she makes, the way she holds herself.

It hurts.

He pulls her to him. Gently. Gives her room to break away, but she doesn’t. Time to reconsider, but she doesn’t. The complicated knot work that keeps her physically distant from the others crumbles and she folds into him. Lets him tuck her against him, cradles her face into his neck, allows him to rest his chin upon her head.

He just, holds her.

She sobs, and Astarion holds her. No one mocks him. No one beats him. No one is going to take her away or chide him for being pathetic, a soft, foolish idiot. They’re alone up here (he keeps an ear out and a watchful gaze on the entrance), on the top of a blood-soaked tower as his friend, his Eleanor, seems intent on literally sobbing her physical heart out.

She was at the ledge. She was looking down. She would have…

He tightens his hold.

It takes time for her breathing to ease to gasping. For her mouth to close between those gasps—though her nose sounds completely stopped up, he hasn’t stashed a handkerchief somewhere, has he? Her wails quiet to hiccups and sniffles.

She doesn’t pull away. He finds he’s running his hand up and down her spine.

“There now,” he says. “That’s better, hmm?”

He read that in a copper novel somewhere, he thinks.

She doesn’t respond.

She didn’t below, either, and he had to make a mad dash through floor after floor. Found her up here literally on the edge and a new fear drove deep into his chest.

“It’s alright, darling,” he says. That seems the correct thing to say? Most people would that, yes?

“It’s not,” she says, nose plugged atrociously it sounds painful. So does her voice, usually warm even when quiet, but now comes out strangled and small and wretched. “S not okay. Ain’t gonna be okay.”

Hmm. This is probably guilt. She doesn’t enjoy killing the same way he does (or half of their group, to be honest). Even when it’s deserved. She’ll do it, of course, but then she ends up vomiting in some bushes after.

“It was battle, my sweet. People die. That’s how it is.”

Her lungs stutter again as she tries to draw in air. “I. I made it worse. So much worse.”

Well…technically yes. But. “Not on purpose.”

“But it was,” she says. And finally pulls away.

He finds himself trying to follow, keep her close, before he catches himself and lets his arms fall to his sides.

“I knew what I was doing. All of it. I split us up, more’n once. I told that fucker about the inn. Attacking it after we left, that came from me. And I…”

She’s looking at his chest. At the missing section of armor and the hole in his under tunic. The skin beneath is closed. He doesn’t scar unless someone makes a very special commitment to the deed.

Her lips stretch in a grimace and more tears well up. No, she doesn’t cry prettily, but she’s her, and it hurts, godsdamnit.

Astarion should be angry with her for staking him. He is, a little. But he hates this more.

He takes her hand, brings it up to press her fingers to the small gap in his armor. To his unblemished skin. “It’s healed. Nothing to fret about.”

She only shakes her head. Pulls her hand away. “Doesn’t matter. I did that. I knew it’d hurt you and that’s why I did it. I shot Lae’zel. I, Shadowheart…”

The torment comes over her again. Her fingers dig into her hair, hook into claws. He can’t have that.

He reaches for her again. Has to fold himself over her, this time. She doesn’t resist. He focuses intently, watching for any sign she wants loose.

“That beast took you,” he says. “You couldn’t have fought him any more than a kitten in the jaws of a tarrasque.”

“I didn’t even try!”

Ah. That. That digs deeply, doesn’t it. How strange, to hear that from someone else. To feel rancid shame crawling in his chest.

“You were enslaved,” he says.

“I should’a done something. Anything. If I wasn’t such a weak piece of shit…”

The shame crawls upwards. Lodges in his own throat.

“Y’all don’t need me,” she says. “Y’all don’t need nobody who can just, just be turned on or off like that.”

There’s an innuendo there. He notes it automatically, but places it aside.

“We’re in a merry band of murderers and freaks in case you hadn’t noticed,” he says.

“And in all that ain’t none of you slit anybody’s throat.”

“The cleric tried, don’t you remember? To our delightful gith that one evening? I thought we’d at least get a show out of it.”

“She didn’t actually go through with it—”

“You stopped her,” he says. A touch more harshly than he meant to. She’s his friend, and she’s wounded, but self-pity was always more likely to extend Godey’s accommodations, and he cannot help the snap to anger and disgust.

Far gentler, “You stopped her. And I stopped you. And she did stab me down there. But she’s all better now. A touch sour, but you know how she can be.”

Gods, he has no idea if he can pull Eleanor out of this. It never mattered, before. A blubbering mark delivered was still a mark delivered. And should any of his darling siblings behave this way (should he), well. Cazador had no patience for weakness.

She glances behind him. To the ledge. To the fall she was contemplating.

“You were not yourself,” he says. “You wouldn’t have done any of that on your own. And you’d be telling any of us the same were our positions reversed.”

Finally, an expression that isn’t misery flickers over her features. It’s something brittle. Amused, but in a way that borders breaking.

“I was, though,” she says. She won’t look at him. Stares down at her hands lying in her lap. “I was me. Those…those were all my ideas. He didn’t put them in there—”

“Darling—”

“He didn’t. Made me want to help Pawpaw, but the rest of it? Fucking with y’all? Hurting the others? Hurting you, any way I could?”

Iloveyou.

Her smile is too thin to be properly named as such. Then she lifts her gaze and she’s hurting.

“That was all me. My own initiative. Anything to get what I wanted.”

Astarion’s first years are lost in a haze of torture and humiliation. He must have been taught certain skills. And not willingly. But a spawn has no will of their own. And soon enough, he was released from the palace halls to put his body to use,

He knew—instinctively or taught, he’s not sure—what kind of marks to bring back, and which would draw too much attention. He does remember learning his master’s type. Which prey would earn him a rat, and which would earn him the kennels.

The rest. The rest, he taught himself. Where to go, what to say. How to drape himself. How to read potential and respond accordingly. How to fashion himself into the perfect bait for whoever he was luring.

Cazador never gave him lines. Never explicitly told him to get down on his knees in an alley stinking of low tide and piss. He never had to. Astarion knew what was expected and did what he had to.

“Do you think I, out of everyone in this miserable tower, don’t know what that’s like?” he says. Too harsh, too sharp, he must not spook the mark. But he doesn’t soften, this time. Can’t, perhaps. “I know exactly what it is to be commanded. For my body to belong to someone else.”

She pales, face going slack in shock.

“I understand more intimately than you or anyone else could possibly grasp. So believe me, darling, when I say it wasn’t your fault.”

She did what she had to.

He did what he had to.

“People’re dead,” she says.

“Oh please, a dozen or so.” Her gaze snaps to him, offense building on her brow. “You’ve gotten a few people killed today. I’ve lured in thousands. And Cazador killed them all. Shall I throw myself off with you? Would you ask that of me?”

He holds her stare. She wouldn’t, he knows. And he does know (how strange). Let her say something now. Let her try to disparage herself against the sum of all his wrongs. They can compare tally sheets until she’s blue in the face, and he’ll trounce her every time.

She blinks at him. Slowly.

“You’re really an asshole,” she says.

Does he detect the faintest tremor in her voice? Not of weeping, but of relief?

He does his best to preen. “One with the best hair in camp.”

She lets out a long, shuddering sigh. Slumps. Wipes at her face and he really does need to make sure she collects a handkerchief of her own.

“Sorry,” she says.

He starts to reach for her again. Instinctively stops. But then, then he does. Slides his palm over her cheek so she looks at him.

His friend. Eleanor. That’s her back in her eyes. Tired and hurting, but still her. Still here with him.

She turns her head to find the potato he dropped upon seeing her standing at the ledge.

“You gonna yell at me if I don’t feel like eating?” she says.

“I did carry it all this way for you. It seems a touch rude to waste it, don’t you think?”

She huffs so quietly at first he mistakes it for another settling sob. But her gaze, well, it isn’t bright by any means. But it’s less bleak. And that is a win, as far as he’s concerned.

“Rude, yeah,” she says. Sighs again. “We can’t have that, huh?”

He lets her ease herself into a more comfortable position for her poor, beleaguered knee while he retrieves the fallen supplies. That and he doesn’t quite trust her to stand just yet. Not up here, on the top of the tower.

He is, once again, the very epitome of kindness and brushes the bits of stone and grime off the skin of the potato. She doesn’t give him a silly bow when she takes it, but the corner of her mouth tries to hitch up.

He’ll take it.