Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

“Would you like us to dispose of the body, my lord?”

Vampire Ascendent Lord Astarion was unmoved, physically and emotionally, as he stared at Tav’s charred and lifeless body on the floor of their bedroom. 

His ears rang with the combinations of the fading gala downstairs, the beating hearts of the guests that kept their lives, and something altogether unfamiliar that seemed to drown his senses in white noise as his eyes were locked on the bed sheets tied around Tav’s ankles.

“My lord?”

“What?” Astarion snapped at one of his attending spawn that stood next to Tav.

No, he thought to himself. Not Tav. Tav’s body.

“T-the body, my lord,” the spawn bowed his head towards him, voice and body trembling in fear. “Shall we dispose of it for you?”

The other thralls in the room, both still human, had finished closing all of the heavy curtains in their room and were now working on untying the mess of knots that tied Tav’s ankles to their bedpost. 

He supposed he should say yes. He kept his eyes trained at her feet, unable to look even an inch higher. If his spawn took care of it, he wouldn’t have to see her face, marred and burned beyond recognition. His mind thought it silly that his body carried such an aversion to the sight, as if he hadn’t seen much more grotesque corpses in his years. Some of them were his own doing.

And yet.

He opened his mouth to command them to do so, but choked on his words once he imagined Tav being tossed in the crypt like roadkill. She would be nothing more than another addition to an ever-growing pile of bodies beneath the palace. He imagined her unrotting for eternity, stuck in the darkness underground that she was always so afraid of. 

Serves her right for leaving. That’s the burial she deserves for abandoning us. 

“No,” his voice sliced through the room before his mind allowed it. 

The servants froze in place and hovered their hands still over Tav.

Tav’s body.

He nearly rolled his eyes at the heavy silence that fell between his thralls, looking at each other frozen as if they didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t earn them his wrath.

“What would you have us-”

“Prepare her for a burial,” Astarion’s voice seemed to come from somewhere else, somewhere hard and steady that existed separate from his conscious mind. He kept his eyes trained on her ankles. “And have the carriage brought around in no more than ten minutes. Two mortal thralls will accompany me.”

His servants bowed and continued their tasks while Astarion turned on his heels and began to stalk out of their bedroom-no, his bedroom.

One of Tav’s maids intercepted him at the doorframe, a nervous thing who desperately wanted to be turned into a spawn. He thought Tav was fond of her.

“My lord, what shall I-”

Her trembling voice was cut short by Astarion’s hand on her throat, punctuated by a quick choking sound as he snapped her neck and her body collapsed on the hardwood.

“And have this room cleaned up.”

**

Tav’s body had been wrapped in silk blankets that covered every inch of her sloughing skin.

He held her body in his lap and stared ahead at the thralls digging into the earth where he had taken them outside the city to a clearing in the forest. 

Her body had not been warm and soft in a very long time, thanks to him. She had lived nearly a century now as a cold, hard, dead thing. As he wrapped his arms around her stiffly, he thought that she felt more rigid than usual. 

The sound of shovels striking dirt ceased, and Astarion refocused his eyes to see that his thralls had stopped digging to wipe at the sweat at their foreheads. It was always useful to have mortal staff around that accompany him in the sun, but he sneered at their fragility compared to even his most pathetic of spawn. 

“This should be adequate, my lord,” one of the men nodded towards him and glanced down at Tav. 

Astarion looked down at the mass of green fabric in his lap and imagined it being thrown into a hole in the ground. Something primal and unrecognizable seized the back of his throat. He ignored it.

As long as he couldn’t see her face, her skin, her hair, he could nearly convince himself that this wasn’t Tav. This was just a heavy pile of silk blankets, and it made him feel nothing to toss it into the ground forever. He had felt nothing for such a long while, after all.

“Shall we-”

“Leave us,” Astarion cut off the human that took a cautious step towards Tav’s body and froze in his tracks. 

After a beat of fear-drenched silence, the two men bowed in his direction and began making their way towards the carriage. One of the thralls stopped beside him for just a breath to look down at Tav’s body, a look of sorrow crossing his face before he steeled it again and disappeared into the treeline.

She was their lady of the house, after all. She was always disgustingly kind to the staff, a trait he had tried to pry out of her countless times to no avail.

She was weak, her heart too soft. It was better this way, she had done us a favor. She had done nothing to earn the honor of Dark Consort.

Astarion placed a hesitant hand over her body, running it slowly down the fabric as his fingers lightly traced the shape of her. He could tell the shape of her arm, a body he’d had a century to memorize. 

He was assaulted with a brief, fading memory of tracing her arm and it being warm, of fleeting brushes of skin on a dirt road in a faraway grove.

It didn’t take much effort for the memory to dissolve as they always did. 

This deep in the forest felt familiar. The only sounds around them were the chirping birds and insects, the wind in the leaves, and he thought he could hear a creek nearby. She would like that, he thought.

Who cares what she likes. She abandoned us. She was ungrateful of the gift given to her, spiteful of the power we hold. 

He flinched away from her body as though he were the burned one. He couldn’t touch her a second longer. 

He went to pick up one of the shovels left by his thralls and focused on clearing out the rest of her earthen grave, pushing down any thoughts of Tav and urging himself to forget. Forget and move on and never think about this ever again.

Finishing the last shovel full of dirt, Astarion turned to face Tav, still covered completely in the most expensive fabric.

See how generous I am, even now? Even after you betrayed me this way?

Before he could reach Tav, the air in the clearing became twinged with the smell of electricity and wet stone. The air pressure shifted as if rolling thunder were about to knock him over, and before he could think to react, a figure appeared in front of him with a force that struck him to the ground.

Astarion scoffed, and when he looked up to rip the throat from whoever dared to have the audacity, his eyes found a robed figure with stars for eyes and blue lightning shifting and glowing over his skin.

“Gale,” he greeted flatly as the wizard-no, god, seemed to pulse with an air of his own. “Fascinating how even divinity couldn’t make you look like less of a drip.”

Gale ignored him, only piling onto Astarion’s annoyance, and summoned purple and blue irises from thin air with a wave of his hand. He set the irises beside the grave Astarion had dug for Tav, and after a still moment he finally faced his old companion. 

“I’ll forgive that outburst as a symptom of grief, out of respect for an old friend,” Gale said in a cold, reverberated clone of his voice, his dimensionless eyes even colder. “And to be clear, I do mean Tav.”

Astarion could only curl his lip in frustration.

“I’m not grieving. I’m angry .”

The look Gale shot him could have electrocuted someone with only a thought, and for a moment Astarion internally flinched as if the attack were coming. 

“Then direct it towards the proper source,” Gale’s voice was like steel and stone and mist all at once. 

“If she was your friend, why couldn’t you have done something sooner to avoid this?” Astarion shot at him with all the venom he could muster, an easy and welcome distraction for his ire. “A god now, and you couldn’t do anything ? This is really all your fault, you know.”

“She would not have wanted me to do that,” Gale’s retort was sharp enough for Astarion to flinch, then he turned towards the silken corpse and frowned. “She’s been dead for quite a long time, besides. I at least know where to find her now.”

Astarion’s brows twitched and his chest twinged. 

“Find her where?” he asked, motivated by pure curiosity and nothing else.

“Arborea, I’d assume,” Gale stared at Tav’s body as he spoke. “But godhood has revealed much to me regarding the secrets beyond the veil, of life and death and the fabric of our universes. Beyond mortal understanding exists countless Tavs in infinite worlds, and in most of them, she lived far better than in this one. That is some consolation, anyway.” 

Astarion scoffed, deeply uninterested in the wizard’s existential ramblings of the mysteries beyond the Astral Plane in favor of focusing on the ridiculous statement. 

She lived better than being the lady of a palace, with all the riches and finery and servants she could ever want? The thought made the blurry rage in his stomach bubble up to the surface once more.

“There are countless Astarions, as well,” Gale’s uncanny and unfeeling eyes met Astarion’s.

“I pity them,” Astarion spat at the god, not giving into the bait and urging him to return to the Elysian palaces he appeared from. 

“Do you? Some of them might say the same about you,” Gale cocked his head in consideration.

“Please,” Astarion sneered. “You may-”

“I could show you, you know,” Gale interrupted, a disrespect Astarion hadn’t experienced in an entire century, and the audacity was such a shock it actually shut him up. “It might be good for you, I think.”

Astarion rolled his eyes and started to get up and tell the wizard that he may not be able to make him leave now, but he could certainly make his stay on the mortal plane wholly unbearable.

Before he could stand, Gale was right in front of him without ever moving. Astarion choked a gasp of shock when Gale’s hands came on each side of his temples, and before Astarion could muster out a threat he had the sudden sensation of the floor opening from under him and falling, falling, falling.

He couldn’t scream as he fell deeper and deeper into black nothingness, because for as long as he fell he had no body and no form. He was just a sensation and a detached consciousness, plummeting in an infinite freefall.

Suddenly, the blackness faded away like water on an inkdrop, and he was standing in a room he knew very well.

Surrounding him was the crypt beneath his manor, the sacred place where he had been reborn as the Vampire Ascendant a century before. The memory of his glory swelled in his chest as he regained his form and gathered his senses.

The vision before him materialized into the vividness of a dream, and he looked down at himself as if he was an invisible, corporeal blur.

Well, it wasn’t him, really, because the scene unraveling was entirely unfamiliar to him. 

A spawn that wore Astarion’s face was crumpled to his knees on the stone floors of the crypt, leaning over Cazador’s body. Cazador’s body that was clearly not marked for the Ascension ritual, and an Astarion that was clearly an unascended spawn.

A pair of tan, freckled arms came around his shoulders, and the spawn began to weep.

Astarion could have gagged. This pitiful, disgusting sight was supposed to make Astarion believe this spawn was better off? This pathetic, weak creature and his fragile mortal lover were supposed to make him envious ? He would have laughed if he weren’t so insulted. 

It did nothing but validate his decision. 

The gray waste of the crypt beneath his palace faded into the familiar walls of the rooms at the Elfsong. As the scene solidified, Astarion could make out himself and Tav lying in bed in the private bedchambers, cluing him in that this must have been the night after they defeated the Elder Brain.

Astarion recalled that this was the night he had turned Tav into his spawn. He could still feel her thundering heartbeat in her throat beneath his hands, could see the terror in her eyes just before he sank his teeth into her for the final time. He remembered how exhilarating her fear made him feel.

It was clear that none of that would occur in this alternate world Gale thrust him into. 

Tav was sprawled out on the spawn’s chest, her hair still dripping from a bath and drowning in one of the spawn’s undershirts. She was idly tracing her fingers over the spawn’s collarbone, a serene expression on his face that Astarion had never seen in the mirror.

Pathetic.

“Have you thought about where you’d like to go?” Tav broke the calm silence, slowly propping herself up on her elbow. “After all this?”

The spawn opened one red eye to look up at her, brushing back some of her soaking hair from her face.

“I haven’t given it the slightest thought, my sweet,” the spawn said lazily. “I for one was certain we’d all be in one of the Hells by now.”

Tav grinned. 

“Your faith in us is what keeps us going,” she gave the spawn’s shoulder a half-hearted pinch, and he winced in mock-pain before returning her smile.

Astarion could have puked if he still possessed the ability.

“Tell me your grand plans then, you must have them if you’re asking.”

Tav sat up straight then, a look of what seemed like embarrassment passing over her features. She began to fidget with her nails, a nervous tick of hers that Astarion realized he had forgotten.

“I’ve heard Silverymoon is beautiful,” she looked down at her toes, biting her bottom lip as a slow blush stained her cheeks.

It had been a century since Astarion had seen the traits of mortality, of weakness , on his lover’s face. The ghost of an odd feeling drifted through his chest at the reminders, and was quickly replaced by the familiar anger and disgust at her ingratitude. He had made her something so much stronger, so much better, an immortal in the grandest palace in the city with her every need catered to. After giving her that, she still had the audacity to take herself away from it? From him ?

“I can’t say I’ve had the pleasure of seeing it for myself,” the spawn’s voice dripped in amusement brought Astarion back to the vision before him. 

“Yes, well,” Tav continued, steadying as his other self took her hand. “Jaheira was telling me that she wants to travel there to aid the Harper’s headquarters. I thought that maybe… I might join her. Does that sound silly?”

Yes , Astarion thought to himself. It does sound silly. Spending your life running around with the most useless adventurers this side of the continent?  

His other self sat up to face her then, a smile on his face that seemed uncanny.

“It’s just that it’s been nice to have a purpose the last few months, as awful as some of it has been,” Tav continued to nervously ramble. “I didn’t want to just let that go, and it’s not as if I have anything to go back to-”

“It’s not silly,” the spawn said, lifting one of her hands to press a kiss on her knuckles. Her shoulders relaxed then. “I believe you’d make a great Harper, nosy as you are.”

Tav’s face lit up as she tried to stifle her smile. 

“I was also thinking…” she began, looking down at their hands again to avoid eye contact. “If you didn’t have any other plans, I mean, if you didn’t wanna stay in the Gate. I was wondering if you’d maybe be interested, possibly, if you wanted to-”

“Is this your charming way of asking me to move in with you?” the spawn teased, but he could hardly hide the wide smile and the light in his eyes when he looked at her. 

When was the last time I had light in my eyes?

Tav’s face drained red all the way down to her neck. 

“And after only a couple months?” the spawn tutted as he shook his head. “Quite the scandal. What will the monks say?”

“I mean,” Tav stammered, blushing as furiously as her heart was beating. “Only if you wanted to, I don’t want to-”

Tav was cut off by the spawn’s lips on hers, both of their bodies sinking into calm as the tension melted from her expression.

“I would love to,” the spawn whispered against her lips. “I would follow you anywhere.”

Tav smiled and threw her arms around his neck, their bodies falling into each other as his vision returned to inky black nothingness at Gale’s command.

Ugh, a lifetime full of playing at hero even after everything. Thank the gods he dodged that bullet. 

Astarion was thrown into the next vision right as Tav burst through the front doors of what looked like a country house. 

“I’m home!” she announced gleefully as she flung her bag across the room and threw her arms open.

The spawn was on his feet and spinning Tav around his arms before Astarion could blink, and the giggles that erupted from them both made him nauseous. 

“You are forbidden from being gone that long ever again,” the spawn murmured into her hair, her legs moving to wrap around his torso. “Tell Jaheira she will have to suffer along without you on the next mission. I have declared it so.”

Tav just laughed and began peppering kisses all over the spawn’s face, much to Astarion’s annoyance.

“If it’s any consolation, the Anauroch desert is a few shadar-kai safer thanks to me,” she grinned and held him to her like the spawn was water and she was dying of thirst. 

“It is not,” the spawn set her down on her feet and took her face in his hands, eyes looking over every inch of her face. 

“But you haven’t even seen the present I've brought you.”

“If giving it to me involves releasing you, I’m not interested.”

Tav smiled and took his hands from her face, rising on her tip-toes to give him a long, vomit-inducing kiss before running to fetch her bag that she had thrown across the room.

“Close your eyes!” she told him as she rummaged through her leather bag.

The spawn seemed miffed, but covered his eyes with his hands anyway. Pathetic, obedient creature. 

Tav grinned as she found what she was looking for, and with a quick glance to make sure the spawn wasn’t looking, she grabbed the gift and returned to him.

In her hands was a deep purple and gold velvet cloak that stirred a hint of recognition in Astarion, though he couldn’t place from where.

“Okay,” she said giddily, practically bouncing her feet. “Open them.”

The spawn uncovered his eyes to look down at the cloak, a momentary expression of confusion before he masterfully covered it with a mask of gratitude. 

“And it’s just my color,” he smiled at Tav, taking the cloak with a kiss. “Thank you, darling, I shall treasure it always.”

Tav grinned up at him, looking ready to burst with excitement. 

“We stole it from a vampire queen in the desert,” Tav explained as the spawn examined the stitching. “Astarion, it lets you walk in the sun.”

The spawn froze and blinked at the cloak, and Astarion realized why it had looked familiar. His lover had somehow gotten her hands on the Cloak of Dragomir, and now the spawn had a tiny portion of the immense power that Astarion gained during his Ascension. 

It was almost sad to see how much this meant to him, how excited the spawn was for something that Astarion had had for a century now, and he didn’t need a cloak to do it. If only this spawn had made the better choice, he may not be so pitiful.

“Tav,” the spawn’s voice cracked and Astarion thought he could see tears brimming his waterlines. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Say you love it,” Tav relinquished self control to bounce up-and-down excitedly. “Say that you’re so incandescently happy it makes you sick.”

“I love it,” the spawn assured her, putting the cloak over his shoulder to take Tav’s face in his hands once again. “I love you . More than you could ever fathom. And I am so truly, perfectly, incandescently happy that it makes me sick .”

“Good,” Tav kissed the spawn and Astarion stifled an eyeroll. “That’s all I want.”

“Though I hate to think about what you must have gone through to get this,” the spawn looked down at her in a half-hearted scold.

“Please,” Tav waved him off and rolled her eyes with a flourish. “I’m the hero of Baldur’s Gate. I can handle a few demons.”

“ Demons? ” the spawn’s eyes widened and then narrowed in concern.

“Sshhh,” Tav shushed him with a finger over his lips and a kiss on the nose. “I would do anything for you, you know. I know everything that you sacrificed when you didn’t undergo the ascension ritual. I don’t want you to regret it.”

That’s an understatement. 

“I don’t regret it,” the spawn promised with a complete and utter sincerity that shocked his other self. “Not when I have you. There is nothing in the world I would trade for this.”

All the power and influence in the world? Every decadence and desire? Control over anyone to do your bidding? Astarion tried to argue with the spawn in his mind, but his words fell flat even on his own ears when he saw how Tav looked up to his other self in a way that she had never looked at him.

The next scene was a surprise as he was suddenly met with Tav’s face mid-climax, her eyes squeezed shut and tiny pants coming from her parted lips.

The spawn had her sat upon a counter against a wall, drinking from her neck as one of his hands worked between her thighs to bring such pretty, desperate sounds from her.

“Astarion,” Tav sighed as her body shuddered and she clung to his shirt in helplessness.

His own name in Tav’s voice struck him as odd. Since he had turned her, he had insisted that she call him ‘My Lord.’ He had demanded the respect and reverence that he had been denied for centuries, and of course she obliged him. 

Hearing her moaning his name, he realized he couldn’t remember the last time he had heard his own name from the one he called his love. It stirred something within his ribcage as he tore through his own memories, trying to pinpoint the exact moment she had said his name for the last time. Despite his efforts, he couldn’t find it. For some reason, this revelation tangled in his stomach.

The spawn pulled away from the crook of her neck, planting soft kisses along the bitemarks before looking down at her. He went to wipe the blood from his chin when Tav caught his wrist, stretching up to lick it off of him herself with a grin around her teeth.

“Devil woman,” the spawn exhaled as Tav laughed and stretched up to kiss him.

“Oh? And how shall I be punished?”

“I can think of a few ways,” the spawn lifted her by her waist to effortlessly sling her over his shoulder, carrying her to another room as Tav shrieked and giggled.

Her joy was such a foreign sound to him that it made him uncomfortable. 

Luckily, he didn’t have to sit with it for long before he melted into a different vision.

As the realization of what the next vision was settled upon him, he wished to return to the previous one. 

Tav was standing barefoot in a creek in the forest, covered in white silk and blue and green jewels with the most radiant smile he had ever seen on anyone. Her hair was pinned up in elaborate braids and curls with silver and gold flower pins, green clay tattoos decorating her arms as the spawn stood before her and took her hands. 

They were getting married, he knew. In the traditional Elven fashion like she had wanted.

They had gotten married in his reality, of course. It was necessary to legitimize himself as a proper lord to the patriars, and the ceremony had been a formal and cold thing. She had worn a deep crimson dress and little else, and did not even look him in the eyes when they consummated their political union. 

Looking at her now, brilliant and smiling at the spawn with all the joy that could fit on her face, she looked like a true angel. She had always been a beauty, but in this moment she possessed a different air entirely about her that made her look otherworldly. As she looked at the spawn, Astarion felt an odd twinge in his cold, dead heart. 

He wondered if he had ever wished for this. Before his ascension, before he was made undead in the first place, when he was still just a mortal elven magistrate. Did he ever dream of his wedding, like so many mortals do? Did he lie awake and imagine sharing his future with someone? He wouldn’t think so, even before completing the ritual. He was never the sentimental type, even before he sold his soul.

But as he looked at the spawn’s face, how he gazed reverently at Tav like she was the one thing he could ever want, he believed he might have been a romantic in a time long forgotten.  

“I love you, Tav,” the spawn whispered against her forehead. 

Had Astarion ever told her that in sincerity? Surely he did, he must have. Yet he couldn’t recall when. The idea that she had died without knowing that made his throat swell.

Tav and the spawn began to dance to a slow, sweet violin in a clearing beneath dozens of lanterns, surrounded by all of their friends.

Astarion had danced with Tav plenty of times. They had performed cold, distant waltzes before at galas, if only to blend in with their elite company. They did not look at each other, they did not embrace, and her hands always felt a whisper away from retreating from his as they went through the motions of the dance. This had never bothered him before, and he suddenly had the urge to take her hands and pull her into him, as close as he could get her.

He began to think that perhaps when he returns home, he can try. But as soon as the thought appears, so does the sinking reminder that Tav would not be there when he returned home, and he could never take her hand again. The reminder settled heavy in his stomach with a bitter taste in his mouth as if he were just truly realizing that his lover was gone, and she was never coming back.

The spawn held Tav to his chest, petting her hair with his thumb and nuzzling the top of her head. Her soft arms wrapped around his middle in a tight embrace, her delicate fingers clinging onto his shirt.

It couldn’t even be called dancing, really. They were just holding each other and swaying so, so slightly. As Astarion stood and watched their bodies mold into the other’s throughout the night, he had the distinct and overwhelming feeling that she had been cut out of his.

He had little time to sit in the empty misery of Tav’s sudden absence as he fell into a different vision.

He was blown into a candlelit, humble bedroom with an open window that poured moonlight onto Tav and the spawn’s naked bodies.

Astarion lurched as he saw them making love, gazing at each other and giggling and sighing into one another. Astarion knows for a fact that he’s never giggled during sex. 

He hadn’t even smiled genuinely in the century since his Ascension, yet here was the spawn, a lowly and pathetic creature that somehow basked in all the happiness that Astarion had been denied. 

He watched as the spawn ran soft and harmless hands over her body in reverence, placing deep and thoughtful kisses in the hollow of her collarbone. Tav closed her eyes and stretched her head back for him, sighing in bliss.

Astarion was assaulted with memories of him and Tav having sex, a mechanical, cold and aggressive act that only involved Astarion taking. He would use her and leave her by herself to attend to other things. 

Why didn’t he stay to hold her, to kiss her fragile skin and whisper sweet words into her ears until she fell asleep? Why didn’t he want to? It seemed absurd in retrospect, after seeing the spawn relish in her affection so thoroughly. It was sacrilegious to dispose of such a precious thing when it was right there, and so freely given. 

A small, honest piece of him knew that he was scared of her freedom. He was terrified that she would leave him if he didn’t ensure otherwise. Why would she not? He had never been something worth staying for.

He had been sure that eventually she would tire of him, and leave him alone to go find whatever it was she was missing and forget him. If she wasn’t his spawn, he would lose her forever one day. If he hadn’t made her immortal, she would die young.

She did die young. I did lose her forever. 

In this world it was becoming painfully clear that Tav would never consider leaving the spawn she had chosen. He put his trust in her, the last thing Astarion was truly afraid of, and she had honored it. 

What did this spawn do to deserve that, and not me?

He didn’t ponder the question for long, because he already knew the answer.

The last vision was brief. Tav was by herself, sprawled and stretched out in a grassy field dissected by trickling creeks. The sunlight covered her in golden warmth, and her skin only soaked it up and basked in it. There were no splotches, there was no sizzling, there was no smoke. 

The sun lit up her smiling, serene expression as she just lay there, eyes closed and toes wiggling in the warmth. 

She had begged him countless times to make her an ascendent just like he was. She didn’t care about the power, she insisted. She only wanted to lie in the sun again. It was all she wanted, the only thing she had ever truly asked him for. 

He had scoffed. He had denied. He had threatened her not to mention it again.

For a moment he was left with only blank, swallowing nothingness, both in the blackness of his surroundings and in the gasping feeling in the pit of his stomach. He waded in it for a moment, desperate and gasping for the nothingness to swallow the rush of blinding pain that wrapped his chest in barbed wire.

He could no longer cry or breathe or feel the panic of his heartbeat, so the grief that struck him at the finality of Tav’s permanent absence had nowhere to go but to burst at his seams. 

The blackness began fading slowly at first, near only the edges of his vision, and then all at once dissolved into a different scene. For just a moment, Astarion felt a pinch of relief at the fact that he was not returning to the real world just yet, until the vision fully materialized. 

He saw himself, his actual self, dressed in the finest crimson velvet the Upper City could provide raging through the halls of his palace. 

He knew what he would see if he looked lower, and despite the iron claw that squeezed his throat in warning he looked anyway.

He had been dragging Tav by the bicep, causing deep bruises already where his fingers dug into her porcelain, undead skin. The ashy paleness was foreign compared to the sun-kissed gold her skin used to, that remained in another life, but not in the one he had stolen from her. 

He had been hosting a ball for the most influential patrons of the Gate, and Tav had accidentally spilled wine on one of the patriars. He hadn’t even minded, Astarion remembered. He had laughed it off and made some joke about heels, but Astarion had seen it fit to punish her for the embarrassment anyway. The idea seemed so utterly ridiculous to him now.

He watched himself throw the heavy wooden door to their bedchambers open, unbridled fury marking his face as he slung Tav on the floor of the room. He had thrown her to the ground like a feral dog.

“Don’t let me lay eyes on you for the rest of the night,” he spat at her, and his own voice sent barbs down his spine.

Had he really spoken to her like that? Looked at her with such a cold, resenting expression? If he knew it was the last time he’d ever look at her, how would he look at her instead?

“Yes, my lord,” Tav squeaked, her voice brittle and empty. She was all skin and bones, her collarbones and shoulders protruding from the neck of her gown like ridges on tieflings. Her undereyes were sunken and bruised, and her red eyes held so little they could have been a flat painting.

The visual proof of how he had degraded her in mind, body and spirit was a weight he could not carry.

The music and laughter and voices of the ball below thundered through the walls as he watched himself slam the door behind him. He heard the heavy clink of the lock and then his furious footsteps sounding farther and farther away until they disappeared. 

As if made of stone, Tav only stared ahead at the closed door. Her muscles did not twitch, her chest did not rise and fall with breath, her cheeks never bloomed a berry red. She only sat like the corpse he had made her for what seemed like hours.

Finally, she wrapped her bony arms around her shoulders and seemed to collapse into herself before she shakily stood to her feet. Every movement of hers belonged to a ghost.

Her feet made no sound as she kicked off the pinching heels he had wanted her to wear and slipped in front of her ornate walnut wardrobe he had commissioned just for her.  

Did that make up for it?

She carefully and silently opened the doors of the wardrobe and dug into the very back, past all the silk and velvet and pure golden embroidery, scowling at them as she ripped them off their hangers. 

Tav froze for a moment as she seemingly found what she was looking for, and her face returned to a neutral and lifeless thing as reached to pull out a wrinkled mess of fabric. 

She laid it flat on the bed, and Astarion recognized the light green linen tunic that she used to wear back at camp. He had no idea she still had it. It was filthy and faded and had holes ridden throughout, but laying eyes on the rags brought a mocking whisper of light back into her face.

She began to strip off her deep red gown, and her sudden nakedness made her ribcage and hipbones jut out at drastic angles with more bruising and bitemarks peppered her body. She slipped the tunic over her head and her expression was not happy, but it did seem calm. 

She then went to work removing all of her gold bracelets and hairpins, her ruby earrings and necklaces and rings, and let them clang and chatter onto the ground until there was nothing adorning her but her tunic. The old rags that belonged to someone that hadn’t existed in a long time. 

Her weak, bony fingers worked to remove the intricate braids that Astarion had insisted she wear until her hair was a wild and tangled mess. When she looked down at herself, she almost smiled. 

She moved like a wind-up toy, fluid and thoughtless and unstoppable, as she walked across the room to rip open the thick and heavy curtains blocking the window. The night outside was dark and inky and moonless, and Tav stared up at the stars for a moment as if making a silent wish.

Tav then returned back to their bed draped in decadence that they hardly shared and ripped the silk bedsheets off. She mechanically skinnied the sheet into a rope, and with a wave of horror Astarion watched her tie her own ankles to the bedpost with it.

She triple-knotted the sheets and then knotted them again and again until an expertly tight knot tethered her to the bed, perfectly in position under the open window. 

Astarion was aware of every glacial second that dragged on as Tav lied motionless on the floor, eyes closed in sleeplessness and a soft expression.

He wondered what she thought about in those last moments. He wondered if she thought of him, not the Ascended Lord he was now, but the spawn she had foolishly fallen in love with. He hadn’t existed for a long time as well. 

Inevitably, the black sky outside began turning into purple at the edges, then pink, then blue as the sun escaped the horizon like a bright harbinger of doom. 

The first soft, warm rays of morning began to speckle Tav’s skin, first branding her in red splotches and then intensifying to black burns. His brave girl bit the inside of her cheeks and squeezed her eyes shut and tried her hardest to hold back her screams, but eventually the searing, burning pain became too much for her. She yelped, and then groaned, and then shrieked as her skin started to smoke and slough off. 

The sound of her skin sizzling would haunt the background of his thoughts for the rest of his miserable, damned, eternal life.

She screamed and her body jerked and thrashed and flailed against the knots she had so desperately tied, her body’s instinct to survive taking over her misery for a moment. The bedsheets did not budge.

He should have heard her. 

At this point in the evening, he was busy entertaining two of the ladies of the court in the throne room, the music of the ball that raged until morning flooding his ears over anything else. If he had heard her at her very first scream, he would have had plenty of time to save her. He could have untied her and held her and peppered soft kisses along her hair until her crying ceased. 

He could have turned her into an Ascendent just as he was, just as he promised he would a century ago. If he had in the first place, the sun would have never been a threat to her. He could have set her free and dedicated the rest of his existence to trying to make up for the last century of misery he had inflicted upon her, even if that meant she left him. Even if that meant he never saw her again. He could have done everything in his power to devote himself to making her happy. If only he had heard her.

But he did not hear her, because his ears were busy being filled by the soft moans and sighs of court ladies, flatteries by advantageous patriars and music from the finest bards he could hire. 

He did not hear her, and as he watched her twitching body fade to a still, charred corpse, he never would again. 

Finally, Astarion blinked and he was back in the clearing. He felt the grass under his fingers, the breeze of the spring afternoon. Birds chirped and sang and the bustle of the city in the far distance touched his ears.

He had been dead for centuries, and he had never felt so empty.

He looked at Tav’s fresh grave, and then back up at Gale. The god was still right where Astarion left him, looking down at him with a blank expression.

“You should hate me,” Astarion managed, his voice seeming a detached part of him. “You should kill me right here.”

“I do. I should.”

A moment passed.

“Then why do you just stand there and look at me?”

Gale’s face twisted into a mockery of pity.

“That would be a kindness,” he assured him. “Besides, I will see her again, and she’ll never again have the displeasure of laying eyes upon you.”

There was nothing in all of Gale’s extensive vocabulary that could possibly hurt Astarion now. He doubted there was anything at all that could make him feel a thing at all.

Gale turned his back to Astarion and gave Tav’s body one last look, pressing his two fingers to his lips and then extending them towards her in a gesture of affection.

When the god raised his arms in what Astarion assumed to be a ritual calling himself back to the Astral Plane, his stomach fell in panic and his voice carried without his permission.

“Wait!” Astarion’s voice cracked, and when the god froze and turned back to face him, his words fell out of his mouth with a mind of their own. “Make a trade with me.”

“A trade?” Gale’s voice was flat and uninterested. “And just why would I do that?”

“You can have my soul,” Astarion’s voice came out in a shaky, panicked staccato before he could swallow it back. “It’s a shriveled, black thing, but an asset to a god regardless. And it would be yours to do with whatever you please.”

Gale stared blankly through him for a few torturous, silent moments. Astarion thought he should feel afraid, that he should regret his words and take them back immediately. 

He did not.

“And what do you suggest I trade you for it?” the god said finally, an aura of power and life-draining magic seeping around him.

Astarion swallowed and bowed his head. 

“Show me one more thing.”

**

Astarion stood under the pinky-blue of dusk just outside the forest, the stars just visible in the dimly lit sky and a roaring fire in front of him. He finds himself under his old tent, holding a silver wine goblet and leaning on a silk pillow. Scratch is barking in the distance at the excitement of their guests, and the fiddles and drums of the tieflings’ celebrations filled the air.

He brings his hands up his shirt, a worn white undershirt that he wouldn’t use as a rag these days. He hadn’t felt so comfortable in decades. 

Astarion forced himself to look up past the crowd of dancing tieflings, past the laughs of his fellow companions to find the only face he yearned for.

Tav is making her rounds around the camp, his Tav, in her green linen tunic and her hair pinned up for the occasion. She was smiling and laughing and rambling in the way that made her talk with her hands. He had forgotten she used to do that.

She greeted all of their guests and friends, making her way closer to his tent one by one. He noticed Wyll’s smile that is a touch too eager and Gale’s lingering nervous glances in her direction, and instead of burning jealousy he can only smile. 

He was content just to watch her, but when she finally locked eyes with him and skipped towards his tent he felt like a warm blanket had been wrapped around him.

She greets him with a smile, warm and bright that reaches her eyes. Her face is flushed with wine and tired joy, and her eyes reflect the fire in a way that seems to reflect every color. He had forgotten what the color of her eyes were before he had drained the life from them. He wanted to stare at them for eternity. 

“Hello, my sweet,” he tested the words in his mouth like he was breaking in a horse that hadn’t been ridden in years. They tasted funny in his mouth at first, but the grin Tav gave him after took away any and all bitterness.

“Hiding the good stuff from us?” she raised a playful eyebrow and snatched the wine bottle out of his hand, taking a sip from the top before flinching away from it with a grimace. 

Astarion’s head fell back and he let out a laugh, a genuine laugh, for the first time in a century. 

“If you had the manners to ask first, I would have warned you, darling,” he joked, but his words came out soft and warm with no bite. 

She blushed and handed him the bottle back, and he thought that in his past, he had used this moment to deceive and seduce her. He had buttered her up and manipulated her into his bed for his own safety and protection. He had used her softness and her naivete and twisted it to his gain.

He took her innocence in the woods like an animal and then snuffed out the fire of her life with each decision he made after that. 

This time would be different, if only it existed in a liminal space between memory and reality.

“Despite your wine thievery,” Astarion set the bottle down and took half of a step closer to her. “I’m glad you came by my tent, because I wanted to ask you something.”

“Oh?” Tav raised her eyebrows in a mix of curiosity and suspicion. “I’m nervous suddenly. Ask away.”

“A favor.”

“And what’s that?” she cocks her head and looks him up and down, clearly unsure of how to respond to this foreign softness. 

She looked a smidge confused, but she was still smiling at him. He’d forgotten what her smile looked like when it reached her eyes.

“I want you to dance with me.”

Her face crinkled in surprise, then amusement, then more suspicion. She looked between each of his eyes as if she’d find a trick there, and he knew she’d find nothing but devotion.

“What’s the catch?” her face is skeptical, but her eyes softened.

“The catch,” he reached out to gently tuck a stray curl behind her ear, earning wide eyes and a heat in her cheeks from his touch.”Is that you’ll make me the happiest man in Faerun.”

He reached out to give her his other hand, and she looked down at it for a moment before looking back up at him. She hesitantly, slowly placed her hand in his as if he would bite. When all he did was softly close his hand around her fingers, she returned his squeeze and gave him a shy smile. 

At the feeling of her hand in his, he felt his cold, unbeating heart thump for the first time in a century. 

“I should warn you, though,” her tone turned more serious as he led them to the clearing the tieflings had devoted to the dancefloor. “I’m a shit dancer.”

“Don’t worry, my love,” he smiled and pulled her close enough to gently press against him, lifting her up to stand on his feet as he guided them. “I’m good enough for the both of us.”

She rolled her eyes but her dazzling smile remained as she gingerly raised her arms around his neck.

She searched his face as if she wasn't sure what to say, and he was overcome with a hunger for her, and to know all the things he had never cared to ask before.

“Tell me what you want,” his voice was close to a whisper as he ran his fingers along her upper back, earning a shiver from them both. “After all this tadpole business is settled. Will you go home?”

“Hm,” she pursed her perfect lips and looked down to think. “I haven’t really thought about it to be honest. I haven’t had a home in a while.”

You and I both, my sweet.  

“If you could choose?” he urged. “Where would you go?”

She grinned at him and gave him a devious wink. 

“Have our daily near-death experiences made you sentimental, Astarion?”

Astarion. Astarion. Astarion. He was drunk on his name on her lips. Say it again. Say it until I’m sick of it.

“You could say that,” he swallowed the wave of desire, grief, horror and gut-wrenching pain that swelled in his throat. “Perhaps I just wanted to give you a break from asking all the invasive questions for once.”

“Ah, well in that case,” she smiled and focused her gaze above in consideration. “I’d want to live on the edge of the forest, in a little cottage with a yellow door and a tin roof, so I can listen to the rain.”

“You’ve put some thought into this.”

She ignored him and used his hand to spin herself, her eyes closed and a small smile on her lips. 

If he could freeze time in a single frame, he would choose that one. 

“I’ll have a little garden and grow vegetables and herbs, oh! And tea leaves, and I’l make my own tea by my brick fireplace with a fluffy little kitty cat in my lap.”

“A lucky kitty cat,” Astarion smiled, and though he meant for his voice to sound flirtatious and playful, it came out a melted puddle of reverence.

She blushed and her eyes flashed embarrassment, but her attempt to bite down her smile was unsuccessful. She was always such an easy mark.

“And it’ll be next to a creek, so I can look for pretty shells and rocks and play with all the frogs,” she thought for a moment. “I think frogs are my favorite.”

“Frogs?” 

She had been his for nearly a century, and he had no idea what her favorite animal was. He had never even thought to ask. 

Her excited nod chased away the bitter taste in his mouth, if only for a moment. 

“Yep. No one seems to think they’re cute, so I think they’re the cutest. Everyone overlooks the slimy scalies, but that’s why I like them the best, I think.”

He could live an eternity back under Cazador’s rule as his spawn, suffering and enduring torture every second of his never ending life, and he would never begin to atone for the sins he’d committed against this woman.

“Oh!” she held a finger in the air. “And I would have irises positively everywhere . They would cover the entire ground, in every color.”

He thought of Gale conjuring irises for her grave and took the dagger to his heart with grace.

“And I hope you get absolutely everything you want, my sweet,” he choked out through the gravel in his throat, petting her hair and pulling her to his chest with the other arm. 

She would not get everything she wanted. She would not even get close, and he was the parasite that took it all from her. 

But she didn’t know that now. In this moment, she had every hope for all the happiness in the world, and he wanted her to relish it as long as she could. At least another Tav, in some other lifetime, in another plane of existence, would know all the happiness in the world. Just not his. 

“Well,” her blush consumed the entirety of her cheeks and her rabbit heartbeat was fluttering in her chest, and gods, he had missed those hints of her humanity so badly. She looked up at him and softened. “You can always come visit me, you know.”

He pet her hair, and hugged her into his chest so she couldn’t see his face. He couldn’t bear to look at her.

“I would like that very much, Tav,” he whispered into her hair. 

Her heartbeat sped up, but she only sank into him deeper. Her arms wrapped around his middle and she clung to him like that, silent and heavy breathing for the rest of the night.

Even when the bards played upbeat and thrashing songs, they still only slow danced. He clung to her with the desperation of a starving man, memorizing after inch of her skin under his fingers and every strand of her hair that tickled his chin. He breathed her in as if he could draw her into his ribcage and somehow keep her safe there, as though if he just held her, they might stay like that forever.

Seconds and hours seemed to pass as she buried her face in his chest and he buried his in her hair. He held her and smelled her and loved her, and as he felt himself being pulled back toward reality, he wondered how he could live off of a memory he didn’t deserve for an eternity. 

***

Killing a Vampire Ascendent was difficult, but not impossible. Astarion had made sure of that. 

It had taken his thralls weeks to locate the primal-enchanted sword in his hands and bring it back, but they had succeeded. 

Here he was, in the crypt below the palace where they had killed Cazador all those years ago. The blood still stained the ornate floors, the stench of burning flesh and the sound of Tav’s screams still lingered in the air. Or maybe he imagined it. Maybe they haunted him.

It was exactly where someone as wretched as him deserved to be. If the gods were just at all, his corrupted soul would remain within these walls for his eternity.

He looked down at the sapphire-encrusted handle of the sword in his hands where he gripped it so tightly the frozen veins in his hands were bursting. There was still dirt under his fingernails. 

He pressed the tip of the blade to his chest, just before his heart. He had enough time in the last few months to consider his last thoughts. He was eager for it. His affairs were in order. He had left his estate and vast hoard of riches to the Harpers, a donation made in Tav’s name. His spawn would be free once the sword pierced him. There was nothing else to think about, really. 

He closed his eyes and felt no fear. He thought of Tav buried somewhere bright and sunny and beautiful, under a willow tree at the edge of the forest where the golden sun she had missed so dearly shone through the branches. Birds chirped and the breeze rustled leaves and wildflowers, and it was exactly the place she deserved to be.

He considered his own surroundings. The haunted, dank crypt full of centuries of misery and horror. His body would stay, unchanged and unburied, on the cold and blood-stained stone forever. It was exactly the place he deserved to be.

Without another thought, he held his hands steady and fell forward onto the sword. It pierced his body with an unnatural crackling, like glass shattering or stone crumbling. 

The pain was blinding and all-consuming, but he did not scream. He hadn’t earned the right. He collapsed to his side, gurgling and choking on his rotten, long-coagulated blood as the sword split his ribcage. 

As his vision blurred and his senses weakened, he was surprised at his very last thought. 

He had assumed it would be memories of Tav’s smile, the way she would blush so easily at the simplest of flatteries when she was still mortal. How her warmth would envelop him when they huddled together in his bedroll, her snores keeping him awake for longer than he liked. The gentle way she would kiss him in his tent, giving as much love to his nose, his cheeks, his neck, the tips of ears before even considering his lips. 

He assumed that maybe he would even live in another, better, Astarion’s memories in his last moments, replaying one of the scenes that Gale had shown him and pretending it was his life instead. 

But it wasn’t any of those things. He should have known that he did not deserve those comforts.

As Astarion at last lived his final moments, bleeding out and sputtering disgracefully in the darkness of Cazador’s crypt, his last thoughts were of a much more recent memory. One that had taken place earlier that day.

When his consciousness faded away to the void at last, the last image that passed before his eyes was Tav’s burial place. 

Her gravestone had been etched to declare: “Hero of Baldur's Gate, beloved friend and sister, lover of all slimy scalies.” 

It was positively covered in irises, everywhere, in all colors.