#tadpolycule

Pairing: Polyam!Camp (is there a proper name for this?). Tadpolycule. Everyone's dating everybody else. Because I said so.

Summary: A bunch of headcanons/thoughts on bathing at camp, because I care about the mundane stuff going on when these guys aren't fighting all day long.

A/N: Tav/Reader is gender neutral and is left racially ambiguous, but has curly hair, because as a curly girlTM I am biased and thought this would be really cute.

My weird clowder of cats

(catstarion is based heavily on pangur of @pangur-and-grim fame. i dont know if this counts as pangur fanart)

I read a lot of fanfics that characterize Astarion as being unwilling to talk about his past or get too close to the other companions, but when you play the game he’s the character with the most to say about himself and his trauma. He overshares, even.

I think Astarion has no idea how to be normal around people. He’ll tell you all about his trauma like it’s nothing because he’s used to that trauma being shared among everyone he knows. His true vulnerabilities are much harder to put into words anyway.

Astarion hasn’t ever been alone, as far as he can remember. He wasn’t Cazador’s first spawn, so even in the earliest days of his life (as he knows it), there was always someone there who shared his circumstances. He spent 200 years living in a dormitory with six other spawn who were also being tortured. They didn’t all like each other, but that didn’t matter.

Their continued association wasn’t dependent on any kind of social contract. They didn’t need to be nice, they could even be openly cruel, but they weren’t always openly hostile, either. That would be exhausting, and some degree of cooperation is required for six people to share a single bath, after all. They might backstab or torture each other, but after a particularly brutal day they could still take their rest in a dogpile of bodies, just for the comfort of gravity. Moments of kindness or cooperation aren’t more or less meaningful than moments of cruelty. They’re all just raw and naked around each other all the time.

Concepts like forgiveness were irrelevant. No one had the option of storming off or walking away. Nothing they did or said to each other would change the fact that they were the only people they knew—the only people who would ever be around long enough to feel real.

So when Astarion finds himself bound by circumstance to another group of people… that feels normal. What isn’t normal is the way they all hold themselves apart from each other. He needs to be careful about offending them, which is new to him. They’re all so precious, treating every transgression against their sensibilities like a wound. There’s a score being kept. Conflicts require resolutions because hurt feelings create permanent injuries to the relationship if left to fester. Needing to be near the prism means one person might not have the option of walking away, but the group has the option of leaving someone behind.

Until now, the only creatures in Astarion’s world who required such careful handling were either predators (Cazador and whoever he delegated authority to) or prey (the hapless victims being lured back to the palace every night). That makes being touched unexpectedly feel like a threat. These people feel like littermates and enemies and victims all at the same time and it’s confusing.

Astarion is too sharp with his companions, too callous, but he’s also open with them in a way that cultivates closeness. He’s used to being crowded in among other beings so closely that the edges overlap. He’s never had privacy, he’s never had anything that belongs to only him, so it makes him seem too familiar with the others (even if he hisses at anyone who gets too close). He flirts and fights and overshares with them and eventually it helps them all get closer.

This flows into another bit of headcanon that I have—namely the tadpoles and how it puts them all in each other’s heads all the time. There are no private conversations, there are no private moments (except for Gale, whose mind is a fortress). A psychic conversation might require conscious effort but raw emotions flow between them unbidden. Anxiety, anger, desire—they share it all.

How lonely it must be, then, when the tadpoles dissolve and they are left alone with their thoughts again. The silence must be devastating.

Edit: I was still thinking about this so I made a meme about it