Violets & Plums: Astarion/Tav, Part 4
A/N: Look at me updating and not completely abandoning a work! I literally have no plans for this chapter I'm just gonna freeball it and hope it gets where it should go. I read a really sad Ascended Astarion fic last night that I want to flush out of my brain by rambling on and on with fluff
Also Astarion and Shawdowheart are besties and helping each other work through some trauma
Masterlist Part 3
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Astarion emerged from trance sluggishly, feeling unusually well-rested. No nightmares clung to the backs of his eyes, and he was so warm.
He froze, suddenly alert.
He was never warm.
But she was.
His eyes snapped open and he took in the scene. The room looked stark in the morning light that cascaded through the skylight above; the previously flickering candles melted to stubs that dripped over the side of the bed table. And, of course, there was her. She took up most of the bed, her arms akimbo and hair splayed messily across the pillow. Her mouth hung open slightly, and she snored a little with each deep inhale. She was still shirtless; he took inventory of each scar and freckle dotted across the expanse of her skin. His limbs were tangled in hers, and he couldn't ignore the extra heat where his leg split hers open. Fuck.
They were so wound together that she stirred at even his slightest movement; he was trying to angle his morning excitement away from her hip.
"You better not be trying to get out of this bed."
Her voice was thick with sleep, eyes still closed as she yanked the blanket back up over their shoulders.
He chuckled awkwardly, unsure of what to do. He couldn't remember the last time he woke up in bed with someone. At once the warmth was both suffocating and intoxicating; he wanted to nestle back into her so badly, but he felt exposed and vulnerable in the sunlight. He tried to deflect.
"Darling, we have a very busy day today. There are so many goblins to kill! I should think you'd want plenty of time for your breakfast."
"I can have breakfast any day. I likely won't get to share a proper bed with you again until we reach Baldur's Gate, and I intend to enjoy it."
Astarion grinned in spite of himself. "Very bold of you to assume I'd jump into bed with you again. You must think you're quite the cuddle."
Smiling, she finally opened her eyes and looked into his. His stomach flipped at the expression they conveyed, all sweetness and sleepy desire.
"You wound me. And here I thought we had something special." She let out an overly dramatic sigh. "If you'd rather room with Gale in Baldur's Gate, I suppose I can understand. Just give me some time to get over it."
He was too weak to resist her. Her charming playfulness, her nudity, and her gentle hands on his shoulders were a heady mixture that his conscience simply couldn't contend with. He succumbed to the warmth, closing the distance between them with a hungry kiss that left them both a little breathless.
"If my only lodging option is Gale in the future," Astarion told her seriously, "I'm taking a page out of Lae'zel's book and swearing off beds altogether. I refuse to be the first person that dies in a Netherese orb explosion."
Giggling, she stroked his cheek and replied, "I swear to never make you bunk with Gale if you admit that I'm the best cuddle you've ever had."
Astarion rolled his eyes with exaggerated exasperation and she playfully slapped his cheek lightly, still giggling. "You bastard."
"Very well," he sighed, leaning forward and nuzzling his nose to hers in a way so a nauseatingly sweet he would certainly punish himself for it later, "you are the best cuddle I have ever had. And it's not even close." For once in his life, Astarion was telling the complete and entire truth.
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The saccharine mood from the morning cuddle hung over them both as they strapped into their armor, packed, and headed to the dining area to meet the others. Astarion felt he hid the giddiness better than she did by nodding stiffly to the table at large and heading to the corner to sharpen his daggers in solitude. Tav, on the other hand, greeted everyone with unbridled enthusiasm that had the entire table raising their eyebrows. Very subtle, Astarion mentally chastised her. But even he had trouble committing to the thought, warming at the idea that he might be the cause for her smile as she sat down and dug heartily into her breakfast. Mine.
It didn't surprise him when Shadowheart fell back to walk in step with him on the way to the goblin camp once they set out. She seemed determined to dig up gossip on whatever was going on between he and Tav.
"How was your evening?" she asked innocently. Astarion shot her a knowing look, and she chuckled.
"Lady Shar would be ashamed at my lack of subterfuge," she remarked. "Although I'm not nearly as bad as you and Tav."
"I'm sure I don't know what you mean." Astarion's tone aimed for dismissive, but even he couldn't hold back a smile when Shadowheart snorted in return.
They walked in companionable silence for a while, and Astarion found that he did not entirely dislike the cleric's company. He wondered if she considered him a sort of friend, the way Tav did.
"Can I ask you something?" he surprised himself by asking her quietly.
"Sure," she answered, sounding a little surprised as well.
"You surrendered your memories to serve Shar. Do you ever..." he wasn't sure how to ask the question that was on the tip of his tongue. "Are there times that you sort of.. clamp up? Like there's something you can't remember, but it... paralyzes you?"
Out of the corner of his eye, he felt Shadowheart regard him. After a beat, she answered, "yes."
He looked to her now. Her fingers were brushing the black spot on the back of her hand that she claimed was an "old injury that acted up from time to time". She continued, "it sort of feels like my brain is resetting. Like I should be able to remember something, but it's blocked. It makes me feel..." she searched for the right word. "Afraid. Outside of myself."
"Hmm," Astarion hummed in reply. He found that he wanted to confide in her further. "It happened to me last night, when Tav and I... I became afraid, quite suddenly." He frowned at the memory. "I feel... ashamed."
"Astarion, if there is anyone who would never judge you, it's Tav," Shadowheart reminded him gently. "But I'm sorry that happened to you. And I'm sorry for whatever memory caused it." He felt her hand touch his wrist, and she gave him a little squeeze. In response, he lightly bumped his shoulder against hers.
"What a mess we all are," he sighed. They were approaching the edge of the goblin encampment now, and the pair dropped to a crouch in unison.
"Well, luckily there are plenty of goblin skulls to crush as therapy."
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"What kind of a name is Priestess Gut, anyway?!" Astarion yanked Tav behind a pillar as a flurry of arrows launched their way.
"That's what we all call you behind your back." She was panting as she chugged a quick healing potion and wiggled her fingers, willing electricity to buzz between them. The grand hall of the old Selunite temple was a mess; the group had managed to schmooze their way in and take out two leaders, but a guard had caught Karlach cracking a scrying eye against the stone wall and alerted the whole camp to their trickery.
"No no, that's what I call you after you pig out on sweetrolls after supper," he shot back through gritted teeth as he yanked arrows out of a dead body nearby. She shot him a wicked grin as the sparks between her fingers began crackling even bigger.
"Hang on, I've just had a thought!" Astarion plucked up a carafe from the ground nearby and flung it around the pillar, covering the ground with water. "Alright, sweetness, light them up."
She happily obliged, sending a current of pure electricity through the line of goblins in a chain reaction. The pair whooped excitedly as they ran forward, trying to catch up with Wyll and Lae'zel ahead.
"Watch out!" Shadowheart's panicked scream hit them too late; an arrow whizzed past Astarion's face. Looking up, he saw they'd missed a guard in the rafters, which he took out with a rapid arrow from his own bow.
"Little shit," he cursed, "come on-" but Tav had dropped to the ground next to him, slipping through his fingers as he tried too late to catch her.
"No, gods damn it, NO!" the rogue arrow was poking out of her shoulder, just above her heart. Her eyes were blinking rapidly as blood soaked her jerkin. Panic seized his heart as he tried to drag her out of the center of the room; the fight between Karlach, Gale and the last leader, Minthara, was spilling dangerously close to where Tav had fallen. Shadowheart was on the other side of the room shooting off shield spells, and Wyll and Lae'zell were rushing forward to join the fray.
What the fuck do I do? Tav was losing consciousness, and he needed to get her out of the way.
Suddenly, he remembered the ring Gale had pressed into his hand a few days before and the conversation that had ensued:
"Gale, what in the hells am I going to do with a Misty Step Ring? I don't even use magic."
"You have fey magic in you, Astarion. You never know when it could come in handy. Just hang onto it."
Astarion threw his arms around Tav and tried with everything in him to channel the power of the ring.
"Come on, fucking faerie magic," he grunted. I have to save her. He let out a scream as a white hot feeling crashed through him - and then they were gone.
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What if she's dead?
The question wouldn't stop ringing in Astarion's ears as he paced outside the door to the room in the temple they had deemed as the hospital ward. He didn't quite know how to feel about the question. Only days ago he swore he wouldn't have cared if Tav had fallen off a cliff, but now... everything had changed. When was the last time he'd lost someone? Someone that mattered?
"It was quick thinking, mate," Wyll said for what must have been the third time. The warlock was cleaning a scrape on his leg on a bench along the wall. "You did everything you could."
Astarion picked up a piece of rubble from the ground and threw it as hard as he could down the hall. He hadn't done enough. She could be dead.
Belatedly, it occurred to him that he hadn't once been distracted by her blood as he tried to stopper the wound. It almost unnerved him that the frenzy of his thirst had been overpowered by his panic over losing her. He wanted to smack his skull against the wall. His confusion over his suddenly strong feelings for her flavored his fear of losing her with extra nausea.
Finally, Shadowheart appeared in the doorway, wiping her bloody hands on a rag. "She's alive," she assured him quickly, assessing the pure panic in his eyes. "She's lost a lot of blood and will need some time to recover, but she'll pull through."
Astarion thought his knees might give out. "Is she awake? Is she in pain?" he tried to peer over the cleric's head to get a look into the ward. "Will it be alright through the night?"
"I promise, Astarion, I've done everything I can." Shadowheart looked exhausted - depleted, even. He wanted to hound her further, but he knew she was telling the truth. He hadn't forgotten their tender conversation from earlier in the day, and he was grateful to her for that and for tending to Tav.
"Can I see her?" he asked in a small voice. Shadowheart nodded, stepping out into the hallway and holding the door open for him. Astarion understood - this was the changing of the guard for the rest of the night.
He moved into the dimly lit room to take up his post and nearly shuddered at the sight. Tav was laid stiffly out on a table in a way that reminded Astarion of a body at the morgue, covered by a loose piece of cloth. Her tangled hair was pushed back over her head, and her forehead and upper lip were glistening with sweat. He hesitated for a moment before stepping back in the hall, asking Wyll to keep an eye on her for a few moments.
He returned to the tableside with a bucket of warm water, his bergamot soap, a sponge, a comb, and a clean set of loose clothing. He spent the next hour gingerly scrubbing the crusted blood and dirt off of her pretty skin and gently working through the tangles in her hair. He sat at the head of the table and worked the strands into an intricate braid pattern that he hadn't realized he even knew how to do. Hair-braiding was an intimate act amongst elves; he briefly wondered whose hair he might have braided before to learn this design. He was glad that he didn't remember; he wanted it to be only hers.
When he had finished cleaning her, he sat and watched her for so long that he lost track of time. It felt as though he was trancing - thoughts seemed to come and go before he could catch them. They were tiny things, inconsequential. A vicious master, a putrid dungeon full of rats, a squirming parasite digging through his skull. An infernal tattoo. An army of cultists marching on the city. It didn't matter now, he knew. As he looked at her, he at last finally, calmly accepted the seismic shift in the cosmos. The center of his universe now lay on the table in front of him, dancing between life and death, the axis of the planet spinning unknowingly around the core of her being. He was but a tiny moon in her atmosphere, helpless to her gravitational pull. Perhaps it was time to stop resisting. With a sigh, he settled into orbit.
A dim light had begun to creep through the dusty windows when she finally stirred. A groan of pain, followed by a thick swallow. Astarion was at her side in an instant with a water skein, tipping it to her cracked lips. She swallowed and coughed lightly, blinking up at him.
"It smells like shit in here."
He chuckled, tucking a stray hair behind her ears. "My apologies, madam. I'm not sure I can wash away, what, months worth of goblin piss in one night? But I can certainly try if it should please you."
She huffed out a laugh that made her wince, tenderly bringing a hand to touch the wound area. "How bad is it?"
"Shadowheart says you'll live," he smiled at her crookedly, "though I had my doubts. You looked quite poorly."
"You must be disappointed she was right," she smirked up at him, although he thought he caught an unguarded flash of uncertainty. If she only knew what he now understood, she would never doubt his devotion to her. But how could he even begin to explain it?
"Not in the least," he all but whispered. Leaning down, he ghosted a kiss against her lips first, and then to her forehead. "Don't scare me like that again, please."
"Then don't forget to check the rafters next time." Tired as she was, her eyes were full of adoration as her hand clasped around his.