Chapter Text
Astarion stays back on the road as he sees the party approach – he’d seen them passing on the strange vessel, still trapped in that awful tank and unable to break himself free, unable even to move. From one state of paralysis to another – is that to be his life forevermore?
No.
He feels the sun on his cheeks, feels the warmth of it kissing the top of his hair. He’s known he missed it, known the whole while, for centuries, and yet it’s been so agonisingly long – he had forgotten entirely what it felt like, had recalled it only in the abstract. It’s so… gentle.
He had forgotten what gentleness felt like, and he doesn’t know that he’d like it, could trust it, coming from another person – Cazador’s gentleness had only ever been a ploy, a feint to make his muscles relax that the knife would sink in all the deeper, and he could never truly appreciate the gentleness from the hands that touched him in one seduction or another.
This is different.
It’s so mild that he doesn’t even know that he would have the words in him to describe it, the ghost of a real touch, and yet… how marvellous it is. He doesn’t know what was done to him on that awful ship, what happened to him in that tank in which he was stuck, in stasis, but for it to give him this, freedom…?
The leader of the party is an older man, another High Elf – he has thick curls of steel grey hair that are tied in a tail at the nape of his neck, and the style is curiously familiar to him. He remembers other men styling their hair like that, when he was still his own man, distantly – he remembers clerks in the legal offices, secretaries, some of the judicial assistants and magistrates’ seconds. He hasn’t thought about that in decades, he doesn’t think, the everyday minutiae of the work, of the ordinary people milling back and forth.
He’s handsome, for an older man. He has a strong jaw and while his nose is perhaps a little over strong, he has well-carved, defined lips, has a few sparrows tattooed in ink across one of his cheekbones, and while there’s a rough scar through his mouth, cutting diagonally from the left corner of his upper lip down through the plumper, right corner of his lower lip, it only adds to his appeal rather than taking away from it.
He's decently dressed, Astarion supposes – he’s in light armour, and it belongs to some order Astarion isn’t familiar with. It’s dyed black and grey with small trimmings of gold on the hems and around the symbol on the breast – the symbol that Astarion can’t read or recognise, because the strap of a satchel is settled over the middle of it.
The women with him, he only recognises one – the green and impressively muscular girl, she’d been walking alongside him on the vessel, and the other, a pretty little thing with dark hair and a rather moody style to her, she must have joined him later on.
Who in the Hells are these people?
“Here,” Astarion says, gesturing off the path, into the grass, “I’ve got one of those brain things cornered.”
The party come to a stop, and the other elf looks at him impassively from his place in the middle of the path, the young women standing at each of his shoulders – he’s of a height with Astarion, perhaps slightly taller, although that might just be the puff of his hair.
“You’ve killed others, I’ve seen you,” Astarion says. “You can kill this one too.”
After a few moments of the two of them staring at each other – and these young women either must not know this man very well, or simply haven’t worked with him before, because they’re both peering up at his face as though to study him as Astarion is doing – Astarion prompts, somewhat impatiently, “Well? Aren’t you going to help me?”
“You seem to be an impressive young man,” says the other elf, and he has a cool, collected voice, speaks a little on the quieter side. “You mean to tell me you can’t help yourself?”
It makes him abruptly angry, and he loses his composure, drawing his dagger – he wishes he had another weapon on him, something more threatening, something with a less intimate range, something other than his teeth, which he doesn’t exactly want to go about advertising.
The other elf doesn’t even react, barely even glances down at the blade, and keeps his blank gaze on Astarion’s face instead. His eyes don’t even widen slightly.
“I saw you on that ship,” Astarion says, “scuttling about. What, you work for those tentacled things? What—” He cuts himself off with a grunt of pain as it feels like his brain is suddenly cleaved in two, and he feels himself looking out of someone else’s eyes – standing in a temple library and feeling overwhelmed with the cosmic awe of it, the weight of knowledge spreading out in all directions, the rows and rows and rows of books—
Astarion blinks a few times, trying to force out the foreign images, and when he looks up, he sees the other man is touching his own temple, wincing slightly – the women, too, have their eyes screwed shut, and Astarion feels a painful sense of connection between the four of them, a sort of invisible, psychic link.
“What is this?” he demands.
“The ship we were imprisoned on, the nautiloid, was a mindflayer vessel,” the man says, rubbing at his temples with very neatly painted nails, black. “We were each of us kidnapped by those mindflayers, and they inserted these tadpoles into our heads – into our brains. It’s created a bond of sorts between us.”
“I see,” Astarion says lowly. “And what, the lot of you are now banding together?”
“These tadpoles, they don’t just create a connection between us,” the other elf says. “Our gith companion informs us – and we observed on the vessel proper – that they are the beginning of a mindflayer transformation. They will grow inside us, better insinuate themselves in our brains, before the transformation takes us over.”
“Takes us over?” Astarion repeats faintly, and he feels his stomach give a painful lurch – he remembers his first transformation, remembers the pain as his body died and came back just a little less alive than before, remembers the pain in his teeth as they were forced out of place by his new incisors growing in, remembers the gnawing, agonising hunger inside him, so much worse than anything he’d experienced before.
He thinks of the tentacled things on the vessel, these mindflayers – their tentacles, their huge, bulging heads fattened with enlarged brains, their clawed hands, their sunken, glowing eyes.
“You mean to say,” he says, thinking of the warmth on his skin from the sun, wondering how it will feel when his flesh is slick with snot-like mucous, wet and swarming with tentacles, “that if we keep these things inside us, we’ll become like them?”
“We don’t know,” the man says, glancing back to the gith. “We should feel symptoms already – should be impacted in some way other than this, at least. You’re welcome to journey with us, if you’d like.”
“He just pulled a knife on us,” says the pale girl, her dark eyes almost cartoonishly wide.
“He is right not to trust too freely,” retorts the green one. “Would you have had him welcome us with open arms, that we might strike with our blades, and catch him unawares?”
“What, so we should trust him?”
“He needn’t trust us, or us him,” says the elf, and he seems approving as Astarion sheaths his dagger. “He can come with us, and learn what we learn, or go alone – and have no forewarning if and when the tadpole consumes him. What would you two choose – what did you?”
Astarion stares at the other man, at his unchanging gaze, at his overwhelming, genuinely frighteningly calm – stepping closer, he sees that the other elf’s eyes aren’t as dark as he had first thought. Where the sun hits them, the dark brown of them show flecks of green within them, glittering flecks, much like ore or gems do shine amongst dark rock.
“My name is Lillen Anmactíre,” says the older man. “My companions are Lae’zel,” he gestures to the gith, “and Shadowheart.”
“Shadowheart?” Astarion repeats, not bothering to keep the mocking tone out of his voice, and Shadowheart gives him a somewhat vicious, equally sarcastic smile. “You can call me Astarion, if it suits you,” he says. “Forgive me for pointing it out, but you seem to conduct yourself with a particular authority. What makes you the daddy of this little party, with you leading the way?”
Is he doomed to go from one madman and a crew of constructed siblings to another so-called family forever more, pending the next transformation? Will it go on forever?
He doesn’t feel ill, doesn’t feel any sickness or any looming evolution burning under his skin – surely, if these tadpoles haven’t begun their work yet, they might be staved off further. Surely, he might retain the benefit of this thing in his head, this new power, this ability to walk in the sun and tread over running water, and not become one of those… things?
“By all means, Astarion,” says Lillen, bowing in a mocking way that makes him feel as though he’s standing in the legal halls once again, “feel free to lead us. I don’t carry the fore by patria potestas – take my stead, if it suits you better.”
“I’m not really meant for the spotlight, thank you,” Astarion says, and takes a sliding step behind the three of them. Patria potestas. Is this man a magistrate, or was he? Is that what makes him so…? “I don’t mind standing at the back.”
“Better placed for the backstab, I bet,” says Shadowheart, and Astarion looks at her mock-offended, resting his hand on his chest.
“Darling, please. With that pretty face, those big wet eyes? I’d never want to stab you from behind.”
Shadowheart’s tut barely disguises her almost-snigger – Lae’zel’s huff of approving laughter is a low growl.
Lillen doesn’t laugh, but he does smile faintly. It makes the scars across his mouth shine as they shift in the light.
“Where are we headed?” asks Astarion.
“Good question,” says Lillen, and starts walking forward again. “Let’s find out, shall we?”