Row stumbles out of the gash torn in the hideous fleshy wall with their instrument clutched in one fist and the other wet with blood, and the world outside smacks them full in the face.
“Fuck,” they say out loud; their throat is raw and tastes of bile; wind whips their hair into frantic motion all around their head, sets their good silk shirt fluttering. They can barely bloody hear themself over the roaring in their ears, air howling past like a hurricane, like freefall — it’s a bit of luck (a quick, perfunctory thanks, Tymora) that the ship bulges and juts so sharply ahead of them, because without that windbreak they would have been knocked off entirely, they’re certain, and it is a long fucking way down.
Hells, it’s a long fucking way down — and hells is right, because —
What happened? What happened? Row was sat comfortable as anything on their own bloody roof, listening to the blustering noise of the public house next door, some drunken bickering slowly leaning towards a full-out shouting match, one of the girls who works down the street crooning a song to someone, a bit off-key. They’d been tuning their instrument, twisting the pegs, picking up the plectrum from where it lay against the velvet of their case. They’d been watching the sky, the choked-out stars that shone so determinedly through streets and streets of city lights. And then —
— and then —
The next bit is blurry and nonsensical, and then Row was here, is here, standing on this disgusting little platform and staring out at the world racing by, a flat red plane so far below, with peaks and valleys and flashes of buildings, winding red rivers and sharp cliff-face juts, and the sky is roiling black with fire flashing in it like lightning, and everywhere is the acrid stink of foul brimstone and bitter ash. It’s all so far below it looks more like a map than anything else; it’s the ceiling of clouds that looks real, bearing down low, threatening to swallow the ship whole. Row would be very pleased for this revolting thing to be subsumed by hellish skies, only they’re still on it. Fuck. Fuck.
They wet their lips, dry and cracked as they are; they look up at the clouds, watch them spit flame — watches it careen down to earth at enormous speed — there’s a flash of something red, could be fire, could be something else, and Row remembers dragons, and then Row reaches a singularity point of ineffective stunned confusion and they shut it all down.
They are on a mind flayer ship in the hells. They need to get off the mind flayer ship and out of the hells. To accomplish this, they have their citole, a hand drenched with blood and cerebrospinal fluid, and — they dip their fingers into their pocket — about two half-bit coins and an old comb. The ship must have a mechanism for plane-shifting, but they’ve not the foggiest idea what that would be or how they might use it — the brain-thing might know, if they can find where it’s wandered off to. Or they could hope they could pluck a spell that would cushion them enough to make jumping off viable. But they’d still be wandering around in wherever-this-is, then, with no real way of getting out, and given that wherever-this-is is in a sour and red-tinged layer of hell it probably wouldn’t even be an improvement, just a new fresh peril to face when it feels like ten minutes ago they were cutting strawberries to add to their porridge, because they had been expensive and Row felt like something nice. They don’t even remember if they got around to eating it.
They don’t know how long it’s been since — whatever happened that got them here. They don’t suppose it really matters.
Row steps out further onto this horrendously meaty walkway, sulphuric wind sending their hair into their eyes, burning dry against their mouth and their ears; they peer down the way, to see if it goes anywhere, if there’s maybe some helpful signage, like planeshift machine this way! or circle that teleports you safely home ten metres ahead! or you are having a stupid and elaborate dream! but all they can see is more of this strange alien ship, more dark and turbulent sky, more red flame-lit air, the flash of silver in the corner of their eye —
The flash of silver —
Row reacts almost before they understand what’s happening — isn’t that a joke, the idea that they understand anything that is happening here — fist tight around the neck of their citole and feet barely catching them as they stumble back, as a woman in shining silver plate arcs through the sky like a fucking circus acrobat and lands, clanking, in front of them, a long whip-thin sword pointed directly at their head. Dark hair falls in wisps around her face, which is — gaunt, and greenish like the bellies of the frogs Row used to collect during their childhood year in that tangled spit of coastal forest, streaked and speckled with old kohl, teeth bared and bright.
“Abomination,” she says, and she says it rough and raspy, with a guttural edge to the consonants and about as much full-bodied intention could possibly be impressed on one word, like she’s never believed anything as much as she believes what she’s saying right now. “This is your end!”
“Like hell!” Row says, which may be a poor choice of words, considering, and then the world doubles, folds over itself like gathered cloth.
There is a strange echoing resonance, between their eyes and inside of their hollowed-out skull — a blurred blistering light and a vicious little pinching, pressure building like something is swelling there, and then it bursts —
Colour goes lurid and daytime-bright; the world remains the same in front of their eyes, the woman shifting, one hand fumbling off the grip of her sword to press automatically to her temple, but somewhere — past their vision, or behind it, or through only one eye, the right one, which feels tender and aching and soft as the sun —something else flickers and flares. A red dragon, the clean leather of its wing, the fire in that first room sucked up into its mouth, overlays the strange woman’s motion; a blade, clean and sharp, and then embossed metal gleaming in a soft starrish light, though there is no soft light here, nothing that isn’t hot and heavy and oppressive, the red of the roiling sky becoming the red of a stone set into a pommel, polished to a shine; a stranger, so startling and nearly-there that Row is perplexed, small and dishevelled with out-of-place hair and stained sleeves, face warm and blank and unlike any other they’ve known before, only there’s an instrument in the person’s hand — a citole — rosewood and painted with wreaths of little designs, carved elaborately at the deep-set neck, with a slightly lopsided trefoil, and Row realises that it’s them — fresh — unfamiliar — seen through this woman’s alien eyes.
Row stumbles a step back; blinks hard, until the images begin to flake away. There is a strange little thrill, a tamped-down flicker of violent fear, and a sense of a doorway, unblocked — Row does not know which of these feelings, if any, are their own. The woman has bent over a little with her knuckles pressed hard against her temple; her eyes flash open, wide and honey-gold, and Row — who has just been, it seems, at least a little bit inside of her head, blurts, “I remember you! We were — neighbours, so to speak,” and then, with a little outrage, “You left me there! I saw you get free, and you looked at me, and you left me for the mind flayers!”
They recognise her eyes, remember them white-rimmed and terrified as that little worm had inched its way up her cheek, pinned her eyelids open — she’d bellowed when it went through, in pain or rage Row hadn’t been able to tell. Could be either. That thing hurt like a bitch. Still aches, now — their eye is as swollen as if they’d been punched, which is a pretty minor reaction, all told. Feels like they should be crying blood or something. Feels like they should be throwing up. The worm in their head spoke to the worm in hers; this feels like it should be existentially horrifying, but she’s looking at them, and they’re looking at her.
“If you wish to run around releasing the thralls and letting them gut you, then by all means,” says the woman sharply; and then — she does not smile, not exactly, but her eyes brighten, black-streaked skin creasing, and she says, “But you are no thrall. Vlaakith blesses me this day!”
It hasn’t gone away, that resonance, that strange doubling up of the vision, though it’s eased; Row looks at her and feels her both at once, would know where she was in relation to themself with their eyes closed; they see her armour, grimy in the dim red light, and her skin, her hair fanning over her neck, slick with oil and sweat, but at the same time they see something different, something more. She unfolds under their gaze, all ready-charted topography, peaks and valleys and red wings and square-cut stone walls, strange spikes of emotion and response, the glistering of eye and of steel. Their hand is white-knuckled around the neck of their citole, fingers crooked through the thumb hole, their callused pads pressed hard against the catgut strings.
“Together, we might yet survive,” says the woman, all sharpnesses, keen edges and clear terrain; “You will aid me.” Row hears her determination. Row feels it in their teeth and sees it in the ripplings of her — her mind, unfurled, smooth and clean and coiling, before their eyes. Colours that they’ve never quite seen before; new shades of red and yellow, of silver and bronze. New textures brushing at their hands.
Row lets their face slot into place, mouth settling into a resolute line and eyelids lowering, just a mite; “What do we need to do?” they ask, pinpoint-focused, and they can feel the prickling of her settle, brief, barely-there approbation like water shivering down their spine.
“There is a transponder in the helm,” says the woman. “It can take us back to the Prime Material. If we take control of that, we have control of the whole ship.”
It's a better plan than spelling themself weightless and hoping for the best — not least because they've no guarantee they'd get the chords right without a pick and no way to test it until they're on their way down — and the woman is already starting to turn away, like their answer is a given, like their course is already set. Row nods, sharply (she's not looking anymore but they'd bet money — two half-bit coins, specifically — that she can see it anyway). "Better idea than any of mine," they say. Right away, they have to lengthen their stride almost comically to keep up with her. "Ah — do we know where the helm is?"
She doesn't answer. They keep following anyway; of course they do.
“ I will NOT abandon them. ” he vehemently stated, his cool silver hues ignited by some inner flame that threatened to break loose. It was no surprise that word of grisha captives soon meet them in this frosty land of the Drüskelle. And even though the reason they came to this forsaken land was for RAVKA, Aleksander’s allegiance lay first with the grisha. He cared not if those captives were Ravkan, Suli, Kerch or Zemeni. He once made a vow to protect his people, and he would rather perish than break that promise. “ I am not asking for your help, nor your permission, BOY KING. I will free those grisha even if it’s the last thing I am going to do. ”
Confusion, Row learns, makes Lae’zel look faintly murderous. They could laugh at the look on her face, but she wouldn’t appreciate it, so they don’t.
Instead, they both stare at the blade on the tarp on the ground, the clouded metal too filthy to shine in the sunlight. The scabbard rests against Row’s knee. “Huh,” they say, and glance up at Lae’zel’s slitted eyes and incredulously raised eyebrows, back down again. “Mortifying.”
Lae’zel – of course – agrees more fervently than they’ve ever seen from her. “It is,” she says emphatically. “You should be embarrassed.”
Row didn’t even plan it this way, which is perhaps the most ridiculous part. They’d approached Lae’zel’s tent – rapidly growing from their scrounged poles and lengths of fabric into some elaborate set-up that borders on ostentatious – with their sword-scabbard hanging from their hand by its straps, and they’d asked a favour. (Sword, is, perhaps, a misnomer. They found it – honestly can’t even remember where, the ship and the first few hours out of it are a blur – and stuck it onto their belt at some stage, the dull-metal blade with its thick handle and blunt edges. It’s not long, but it’s no hand knife, either. A longer sort of dagger, maybe. It doesn’t seem like it’s made for smallfolk, so the distinctions aren’t perhaps of much note. It’s something that can be used for stabbing, under the right circumstances and when few other options are available, and they’d been under those circumstances today, when their citole had been knocked out of their grasp – thank fuck it hadn’t been really damaged – hence the inept stabbing. And hence the blood.)
(Lae’zel is interesting, in that she’s stubbornly difficult and also profoundly, logically easy. The thing coiled watchful behind their right eye helps, of course, but of their quick-growing and motley crew here Row honestly finds her the most straightforward; all harsh-cut stone and if, then. But the magnitude of the threat as she perceives it is quite different, and the unfamiliarity of everything around her puts her on her guard, if she’s ever known how to be off it in the first place. Mapping her out is simple – laughably so, with the tadpole there to chart the topography at a glance – but finding a hollow to mould themself into is extremely hard. She’s too scared shitless to want anything, which is odd, seeing as how some of the others’ wanting is made entirely out of fear. Row is unconvinced she knows what a friend is, so any quest to puzzle out how to become one might be entirely doomed from the get-go.)
(But she is fun to poke at; and the gambit Row’s taken, much as it seems to vex her, is not without its merits. The earth’s been so thoroughly knocked out from under her that any steady footing brings relief, and to that end she seems to like the pattern of Row’s raillery and her own answering irritation almost as much as they do. She likes things that have become familiar. And she visibly hates to be idle.)
Row had asked for help with their more-or-less sword, seeing as martial weaponry is their last resort but it’s still better than nothing; they needed it today, they could need it again, and it won’t do them much good if it’s rusted or dulled or otherwise damaged. Lae’zel had glanced up at the orange-washed sky and magnanimously agreed. The blade hadn’t come out of its scratched leather sheath on the first pull, which was, in retrospect, the first clue – but they’d pulled, and pulled, until finally it came loose and clattered on the tarp-covered ground, smelling quite bad and tacky with hours-old blood.
The inside of the sheath must be filthy, too. Row wrinkles their nose. Lae’zel continues to stare at the weapon as if it’s a personal insult – as if the blade had killed all her family, or, worse, had tried to and failed.
“You didn’t clean it,” she says.
“I didn’t,” Row agrees gravely. “Evidently, I need the help.”
There is a lengthy pause. Lae’zel reaches out to touch the dried-out grime, pinches still-viscid gore between finger and thumb. The makeup around her eyes has smudged something fierce. She asks, “Why?”
Row pokes at it, too, still watching her carefully out of their right eye. It feels unpleasant. “I didn’t think about it,” they say smoothly, and Lae’zel looks, still, like she is considering taking up the sort-of-sword and plunging it directly into their gut, which Row is beginning to think is just the expression her face makes when she isn’t sure what else to do. (It’s very strange to her, perhaps more so than literally everything else. She was practically born – hatched? – with a weapon in hand; Row’s ineptitude is not just an embarrassment, it’s incomprehensible. It affronts what it is to be alive.) (Behind their eye, the tadpole writhes.)
Honestly, Row isn’t sure how they forgot to wipe it clean. They remember they’d gotten within reach of their instrument very suddenly – they must have just stuffed it away so they could grab the citole out of the mud. And promptly forgotten about it. They’d all been in danger of dying – there’d been other things on their mind.
Lae’zel’s lip curls. “Get the soap,” she says, and Row does.
(It’s the one bar of soap they have, residing in its pouch in the supply pack. It smells a little of lemongrass. It’s used sparingly, shared between the whole camp – except Shadowheart, who had her own with her and seems ill-inclined to share, and Wyll, who found a sliver of lye soap in the pack he was given before he left the Grove. It’s a shame Row didn’t anticipate getting snatched up by a flesh-ship on a quiet mid-week night; they’d have prepared better.)
Lae’zel takes the soap; she scrapes off just a corner with her short-clipped nails and mixes it in with enough water to make something like a lather. She doesn’t speak while she does it, but she moves slowly, careful to let Row see what she’s doing, the way she spreads the mixture down the flat of the blade, bubbly and sweet-smelling. When she takes up a ragged scrap of cloth, she tosses them one, too – they fail to catch it and pick it up from the dirt. They watch as she starts scrubbing the blade – fiercely, in long lengthwise motions, even the particularly stubborn gore yielding eventually under her hands.
“Should I clean it like this every time?” Row asks, fixing her motions with rapt attention.
“After every use,” Lae’zel says. She turns the blade over. “It shouldn’t take this long.” A pause; she glances up from her work, eyes rimmed with black. “This is a shoddy weapon. The metal is weak. I’ve never seen its like.”
Row shrugs. “It’s a backup.”
Taking care of a sword-thing, they learn, is not difficult. It’s essentially the same process they go through with any bladed tools, and that’s something they’re no stranger to. The only difference is preparing for and attempting to negate the corrosive influence of blood. Lae’zel offers to show them how to sharpen it, although she seems unconvinced that its edges won’t crumble at the slightest pressure. They agree, and discover they don’t enjoy the sound of a whetstone.
She looks at them – straight-backed and stern, hand resting by the oiled whetstone – and scoffs. “You’re worse than a child,” she says; her voice is very muffled by the fingers Row’s stuck in their ears.
They remove them. “Than a Gith child,” they reply, because they’re quite confident they’re better at weapon maintenance – or usage, when it comes to that – than any child not hatched with a sword in hand. Lae’zel glances at the blood-smeared rags, thoughtful, and Row doesn’t even need the tadpole to see her remembering the tiefling children and their wooden weaponry, their grips uncertain, their feet slow and arms ill-weighted. She’d looked very perplexed, upon seeing them.
She nods, now, sharp and expressive. “Yes,” she says, “You’re right. Faerûn’s children are much worse at combat.”
It sounds so unfamiliar in her mouth; Row quirks a brow. “Did you mean Fay-run?”
“I said –” Lae’zel starts, and then she scowls, eyes slitted, looking down her nose. She sits so steel-straight that she’s got double height on them, even when they’re both on the ground. (Row thinks they might need to start dragging around crates to stand on; craning their head to look everyone in the eye is starting to give them a horrendous crick in the neck.) “I said it correctly,” Lae’zel insists, icy. “I don’t make the same mistake twice.”
The hollow space behind Row’s right eye shifts, cold and running as river-water. “Sorry,” they say lightly. “I was joking.”
Lae’zel looks at them. In the faint orange light of the sun beginning to set, her eyes look molten golden.
She takes up the apparently abysmal-quality blade. “Don’t,” she says, with steely finality, and she holds it out to them, hilt-first.
“Disgusting,” Wyll repeats – the point as accurate as it is unnecessary – and Row, staring up through dappled leaves, gestures lazily at him. They blink, careful. It doesn’t feel tender; their eyelid doesn’t stick. They kind of thought they’d be able to feel it more, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference.
“Your feedback is noted,” Row tells him, and lets their arm drop back into the dirt.
They’re lying on their back in the scrubby grass, the stuff lurid-green and itchy against whatever of their bare skin it can reach – hands, neck, lower back where their jack is riding up. The tree branches rustle up above, sending leaves drifting down around their head. Past that, the sky gleams, blue as cobalt pigment and utterly cloudless. It’s hot. They’re sweating something horrendous in their one dear shirt. Even the jack is probably beginning to smell.
Wyll is pacing around somewhere to their left. He’s got ridiculous amounts of energy – comes of spending years on the road, maybe, but it just makes him seem like a farmland dog. He seems like the sort of man that would need to be walked daily before he could get anything done. But he’s staying with them, kindly enough, because the others went ahead – nominally to scout a path, and actually because they looked justifiably disgusted almost to the point of illness, and Lae’zel in particular looked like she wanted to enact violence on something. Row suspected the thing would be them. They can’t even really blame her. But Wyll stayed, when the rest went off to do something else down the little dirt track, to make sure that Row doesn’t drop suddenly, startlingly dead or explode into a mass of tentacles. It’s very sweet of him.
(Nothing is happening. It doesn’t feel different. They might be able to see a little more, or a little clearer, but it’s hard to really tell; they aren’t dying, though, and their number of limbs remains steady. They’ve got the very barest edge of a headache, but that’s as much from staring into the sun for ten minutes as anything else.)
“Ugh,” Wyll says again – his revulsion is beginning to feel a tad performative – and he skims the edge of their field of view as he turns around, they think, to look at them. “How are you feeling?”
“Two eyes, all my hair, no beak,” Row reports. “I think we’re good.”
There’s a pause; Wyll’s horns come properly into their vision, followed by a vague peripheral smudge of his face. “Yes,” he says, “but how are you feeling? Did it – do anything?”
Row squints up at the quivering leaves.
“It didn’t kill me, or anything,” they say, because that had been their main concern – and not a very big one, seeing as they still did it. “Didn’t really hurt. It doesn’t feel any more crowded, back there – I’m not sure how that works. It doesn’t feel that different, yet.” (It doesn’t; it all feels a little sharper, the things the first tadpole gave them taken a little closer to the bone, but it isn’t as changed as it feels like it could be. Should be.) “But it will. I’m certain of it.”
Wyll thinks about this, if the slow tipping of the horns is any indication; “All right,” he says, and then he appears much more distinctly in view, face silhouetted against green leaves and blue sky. “Disgusting. Why?”
“You don’t need to keep saying that,” Row says, squinting at him.
Wyll twists his lips, wry. “You said you didn’t trust our nighttime caller,” he says. “So why in Balduran’s name would you put that in your eye?”
Row scrunches up their face. “Don’t sound judgemental,” they complain, largely facetious; “What, you’ve never gotten curious?”
Wind rustles its merry way through the leaves, sending one dried-out brown one fluttering down between Wyll’s horns. He raises a brow. “I’ve done many stupid things out of curiosity, but voluntarily housing an illithid parasite? That would be a first.”
Barely even a headache, and two tadpoles swimming around their orbital nerve; Row presses a finger to the hard-curved bone of their eye socket. Wyll’s brow furrows. He says, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to call you stupid.”
That makes them snort. “You can,” they say, and shove themself up to sitting. “It was.”
After a moment, Wyll sits down in the dirt next to them. “Then why?” he asks – and why, indeed?
(Why would Row do such a thing? What reason would be consistent?)
(They know why they did it, of course – for the sixth sense the worm bestowed upon them the first time, garishly colourful and bitter-sweet on the tongue, the spider’s web of links between them all and the easy paths to follow down. Wyll’s body sits next to them, blood-warm and sticky with sweat, and Wyll sits next to them, and they can feel him there, all open spaces and effort. And disgust, right now, which is still fair enough. It feels tangible and present in a way that people so often aren’t; like his mind is a plum in their hands, the skin thin and smooth and yielding under the callused pads of their fingers. He would notice if they dug their nails in to reach the flesh, which is why they don’t, right now, but they could. It’s there. And the surface is mapped out, simple as anything, in the space behind their right eye.)
(It’s been, what, a week since the crash, and with all these new colours to watch – new cartography with every new face, charting what they want, what they don’t, how it all pins together – Row hasn’t slipped up once. Not with any significance, anyway. They’re a social person, but it’s never been this easy.)
(They look at Wyll, and they could crack him open like a walnut shell and make a home in the feast of his organs, and if they play it right then he would want them to.)
But no-one likes it when they say it like that, so they shrug, carefree, and say, “Honestly, I don’t know. I saw it crawling out and – I don’t know, Wyll, it just seemed friendly.”
“The tadpole,” Wyll says. “The parasite.”
“Yes!” It was friendly – very excited to see them, and quite desperate to make itself at home somewhere less exposed than the open air and a cooling corpse. It was mapped out, clear as their companions. “I’m not saying I thought it through. But I got curious, and it would be dangerous to just let it roam free, and surely two tadpoles isn’t much worse than one as far as removal is concerned.” It had been a snap second decision; perhaps they should have thought about it more, but Row’s never been good at worrying about consequences – never been able to fear anything other than imminent death, and that didn’t seem likely. They might be doomed for all eternity, but eternity comes later. “If it’s bad, at least now we know. And if it can help, we need all the help we can get. It’s like they say, you know – a tadpole in the head is worth two in the jar, or whatever.”
“Perhaps,” Wyll says drily, “that’s a newer Baldurian idiom that I’ve missed in my time away.”
There is a pause; some sparrows twitter in the distance.
“I understand some of that impulse,” Wyll starts, and Row tips their head to look at him. “But unknowable powers come with unknowable consequences. We would be rash, to take anything we’re offered until we know what it will cost.”
There’s hair in Row’s face, its curl dragged-down and greasy. Wyll is a better sport about himself than some of the others, they’ve learned; there’s a line they don’t want to cross, but he takes jibes easier than most, and he likes banter. “That’s good advice,” they say, considering, and they crane their neck, flicking their gaze just above his eyes. “Do you follow it?”
He smiles, lips droll, and leans over to jostle their shoulder with his elbow. “As I say,” he says, “not as I do. Do you think we can catch up, now, or should we give Lae’zel more time to cool off?”
When Astarion stumbles back into camp, pale and golden and practically reflecting the light of the campfire, Row’s pick twangs an off note and they say, immediately, “Wash your face.”
They’re sitting cross-legged on a stone by the fire, their sweat-stained silk shirt loose and untied, instrument in hand and plectrum held between their fingers. They’ve been whittling away at it with their unwieldy found blade for ages, and it’s now finally close enough to shape to use – their good pick, the one made of horn, was left at home somewhere in the blur before they woke up on the nautiloid, and they’ve been playing with the handle-end of a comb found in their pocket. It actually works surprisingly well, but the teeth keep biting into the webbing between their fingers, and they like having something to work on with their hands besides. Their new plectrum, carved out of a tough-feeling stick they found (they are not, they have discovered, particularly good at identifying wood types when they’re in their raw forms) is much easier to hold, though it’s rough against their catgut strings and comes uncomfortably close at times to giving them splinters. They’ll need some wood varnish to smooth it out – perhaps there’s some available to buy at the Grove.
They’re sitting on the rock, playing, testing the pick and providing some nice background noise to everyone else’s dreams besides, and Astarion is standing at the very edge of the fire’s light, blinking, the entire lower half of his face smeared with blood. It’s streaked across his cheek, down his chin – a little on his nose and perhaps even in his hair, though it’s hard to see from this far away. The ruffle of his shirt collar seems to have escaped, by some miracle. He blinks again, looking a little dazed, and Row digs a ragged slip of cloth – they all carry them with them, by now, they’re really quite useful for things like bandages or to wipe down weapons or to fidget with when sitting still – and throws it at him, balled-up. It sails through the air and lands in the dirt by the fire, full metres from its intended target.
“Wash your face,” they repeat, in case he hasn’t gotten the message. “It’s not cute. I don’t walk around with soup all down my chin.” It really is a lot of blood. “What in the hells did you kill, a bear?”
Astarion blinks again, garnet-eyed in the firelight; then he smiles, bright and rakish, in a manner that might be more effective if his teeth weren’t dark with blood, too. “It lived in a cave barely ten minutes from camp,” he says, gleeful. “Would have come foraging out this way sooner or later. You’re welcome.”
“I’m impressed,” Row allows. They pick a high, hollow note, fingers pressed tight against the frets. “Wash it off.”
Astarion makes his little exasperated scoffing noise – Row has heard it so much by now that they could probably play its pitch shifts on the citole if they wanted – but he marches forward, scooping up the bit of cloth with careless fingers as he moves past and collapsing in a long-limbed huddle in the grass by their rock.
“You would have soup all over your chin,” he says after a moment; he takes the canteen leaning against their feet and dribbles a bit of water over the fabric rag. “I’ve seen you eat, Row.”
They nudge his knee with their foot. “We barely have cutlery, of course it’s messy,” they say; another strum of the strings, and then they’re playing out the same smooth, lazy-handed lullaby they’ve been fiddling with all the time they’ve been on watch. (It’s a bit of a pointless exercise, really, the watch schedules; the only thing that’s so far tried to hurt them under cover of night and sleep is currently sitting on the ground next to them, grimacing like a cat as he rubs sticky-dark blood off his cheek, and keeping watch did fuck all to help them then since he was the one who was supposed to be doing it. Still. Better to be cautious, they suppose. Can’t hurt.) They watch Astarion scrub at some sticky spot by his lip, nose wrinkled up in distaste; they ask, “Did it taste good, at least?”
“Not –” he starts, immediately, then bites it back; he looks over at them, raising a careful brow. “Well. I’ve had better. But I certainly shan’t complain.”
There really isn’t any blood on the ruffles of his shirt, even though it’s streaked, clotted, along his jaw. None in his hair, either, by the looks of things, which is a narrow escape. “Ass,” Row says, flatly, and he grins again, fangs showing. Then he licks his teeth.
“I think it ate a lot of fruit,” he says ponderously. “And honey. Very storybook. It tastes sugary.”
Row flattens their fingers against the strings; their pick flashes, pale wood-gold, in the firelight. “You can tell that?”
“I don’t know,” Astarion complains, “I’ve never drank a bear before.” There’s blood on his ear. Row isn’t even sure, logistically, how it would have gotten there. He scrubs at his jaw diligently; it all comes away easy enough without use of soap, which is a relief, because they really don’t have much to spare, least of all for Astarion; vampirism, it seems, is a double-bladed sword in regards to cleanliness, because while it seems to make all those afflicted with it want to look like they’ve just buried their face in a fatal wound, Row has never seen him sweat. They don’t think he can. After spending days in dirty clothes, skin crusted with salt, it’s almost enough to make the prospect of being undead seem appealing.
(It might just be Astarion who doesn’t know how to eat without resembling a toddler. Row hasn’t really met any other vampires to compare him with.)
(From what he’s said, he’s new to getting his fill. Perhaps that’s where the trouble comes in.)
The fire flickers; Row looks at him, right-eyed, their fingers dancing easily over the pattern of the strings, thumb held fast against the citole’s rosewood neck. “What did I taste like?” they ask, because he likes it when they talk about his delicately termed condition so easily – if they’ll readily accept that, then he has little else to worry about – and because they’re curious. “Any observations about my diet? Does the tadpole affect flavour, at all?”
Astarion looks at them, brows slanting further; in the firelight, the shadows creasing themselves around his smile are particularly dark. “Alive,” he says, promptly, “which is the main thing – animals are too stupid to know they’re alive, so it isn’t half so succulent.” (“I hate that word,” Row complains; he ignores them.) He looks at the fire, burning low and quiet, and tips his head. “Like plated gold,” he adds, “and bitter citrus.”
“Huh,” Row says. If their hands weren’t occupied they’d reach up to tap the stern bone socket of their eye. The tune they play has slowed to something cool and sluggish. “When we met, and they – you know, the parasites – you looked like alleys I recognised, all at new angles, and sunlight.” They strum a smooth chord. “Really fucking bright. Gave me a headache.”
(There’d been terror, too – overpowering, so thick they could taste it – but he absolutely wouldn’t want to hear that. So they don’t tell him.)
Astarion hums, swiping the probably-ruined cloth over his jaw. He turns to face them, straight on. “Clean enough for you?” he asks; he’s preening, but he also very much isn’t. His face is alabaster smooth.
“Spotless,” Row says, and watches him crumple up the cloth and stuff it, after a moment of deliberation, under a torn bedroll. They ask, “Are you full?”
The strings they pick at are high and keening. Somewhere off to the side, a cricket mimics the sounds. “Not quite,” Astarion says. His voice is level. He looks again at the fire, mouth tipped a little, almost wry. “Never quite.”
Row’s hands still a moment; something squirms, in the space behind their right eye. “I know the feeling,” they say, subdued enough that he won’t take it as a comparison, and then they pick up the tune again, double-time.
a practice in gnome proportions and my most earnest efforts to give row some kind of protective gear (which they immediately ruined by leaving the quilted doublet open for the Look). I don't know how they manage to be so dripped out in the middle of nowhere I just know in my heart that they are. details under the cut because tumblr makes my shit blurry
