for @infernalapparatus cont. from here
THERE WAS DISPLEASURE IN THAT FLICKING TAIL.
It was a bit of body language that was easy for him to read. Not only because he had been forced to become the expert in such things, but because he'd seen it for untold years. It was something he saw in Aurelia often. Even when her face was carefully trained to hide all other emotion, her tail often gave her away - both with her siblings and Cazador. Here Astarion could tell that Karlach didn't like his assumption just as much as he hadn't liked hers.
There was satisfaction in that, just as much as roiling discomfort.
The fact was that Karlach was kind. She was kind and she was powerful and she'd been capable of escaping all on her own, even if it had led her to being infected by a mindflayer tadpole. Knowledge of this aroused complicated emotions in him. Admiration feuded with visceral jealousy. He choked down resentment like boiling acid, stripping his throat raw and rendering his mouth dry.
Of course she'd meant well by it. She hadn't meant it the way he'd taken it at all, and even still he felt nauseated by the implications. Could he overcome the indignity of the comparison to take her at her word and accept her comfort and kindness?
Astarion's body twisted where it stood, his hands carefully folding the very dangerous book he'd been holding closed to stow it in his pack at his feet. Disarmed of any and all distraction, he allowed himself to lower tentatively onto the log positioned opposite Karlach and looked at her with scathing skepticism glowing in his ruby gaze through the fire.
"Is that what I'd see in the mirror?" He mused, tone nowhere near as venomous as it had once been. "You're lucky to see anything at all."
He took in a deep breath and held it. His body frozen with the lack of need to either inhale or exhale as he stared somewhere off in middle distance. As much as he wanted to bite back at her, he did his best to process what she'd said. They'd been traveling together for at least a month now. Lashing out was a distinct loss of progress. For himself, and for everyone. So he sat. Unmoving. Unbreathing. It might be unsettling to look at for most people.
Crimson irises roved over her seated form even as the rest of him continued to sink into utter stillness. How long was it for her in Avernus? Surely it couldn't have been the hundreds of years he'd lived. Though sometimes his time felt longer. The moments chained to a wall and hung desperately and entirely alone, stripped of his flesh and shivering in the dark - those had felt like centuries unto themselves.
She'd lost her heart and was forced to fight a war. He'd lost his life and was forced to exist in a waking nightmare from which not even trance was a reprieve.
... These things were both allowed to be painful.
When Astarion finally cleared his lungs of the air he'd kept trapped in them, it came out in a great whooshing sigh. His body deflated along with his lungs, folding him forward until his elbows rested on his thighs and his face was buried in his hands. He had to hide his vulnerability somewhere, and his own icy palms were safest.
"Thank you," Astarion began, fingertips digging into his eyes to dispel the burning behind them, "I don't know where I'd even begin."
She'd called him pretty. It didn't feel necessarily sexual, or even flirtatious, and therefore made the ghost of something absolutely terrifying swoop through his stomach and chest. Rather than admit to that, he admitted to something else.
"I wish that I could love this world. I hate it. Everything about it. Everyone in it." His voice broke. A dam holding back emotion that even the hands over his face couldn't hide. He felt utterly exhausted. "There is nothing in it for me that's worth saving. Destroying? Yes. Taking power over? Of course. Saving? There's nothing, darling, it's all worthless to me."
I am worthless. I am not worth saving.
When his hands finally dropped away from his eyes, they were glassy. His tone, however, was iced over. Guarded once more. "You would do well to learn to care only about yourself again, even here. Men like whoever sent you to the Hells exist everywhere. There are more of them than there aren't."
