illithidnapped

The room in Ansburg is hardly lavish, but the beds (there are two of them) are surprisingly comfortable and everything is clean. The linens smell like something faintly floral; the windowsill has been scrubbed in this lifetime; there are no cobwebs in the rafters. All in all, it's a far cry from the last room Fitcher shared with someone while following Riftwatch's bidding. Why, all four of the walls are even intact!

It's late in the evening when Fitcher returns from her outing with the retired Knight-Commander. She is dressed in a heavy brocade coat, cloaked from throat to mid calf, but there is something alluring isn't there? About an older woman with a sharply handsome face wreathed in fine fabric which reveals nothing at all. More than likely, Astarion has been in and out of the gentleman in question's apartments to rake up gossip long before this hour.

"Well," she announces, as the door is closed. With a flick, the edges of that great brocade cloak are parted and tossed back. The dress Fitcher is wearing beneath it is significantly less shapeless. "I hope your work was half as rewarding as mine was."

"Had fun, did you?" Astarion asks brightly, the edges of his overlong teeth flashed from where he rests sprawled across the farthest mattress, head tipped upside down across its edge.

He's picking at the underside of one of his fingernails with the edge of a dagger, all idle effort, and nothing bitter besides.

"Certainly took your time with the old bastard. I finished snooping around ages ago, you know."

"Every cat loves a mouse," is Fitcher's cheerfully broad reply as she moves to sit at the edge of her own bed. "Though I'm afraid he didn't reveal anything substantial about his work. The old man"—Fitcher, you're old too—"is canny enough for that."

Drawing up her hem, she bends to begin unlacing her boots. Fitcher look at him while she does it, fingers deftly picking loose lacing.

"I hope your excursion revealed something tangible?"

From his pocket he procures a folded slip of parchment, pressing it to his own lips where he lies upside down— tangle of pale curls clinging to his cheeks like barbed little thorns, wicked as the man himself.

Though with her seated beside him, some of the theatrics are admittedly a little muddied.

He doesn’t care.

“Our dear, noble isolationist is being blackmailed.”

"Ooh, you don't say," is appropriately gossipy in tenor—all quirking eyebrows and the shadow of a leer. Scandalous.

(Madame Fitcher makes for a fine audience to theatrics.)

Boots undone, she straightens to toe one off after the other. They're very fine boots, pretty in the way a courtly sort of woman with a taste for elegant things might choose if not for the soles done up with hatchwork to guarantee their traction.

"Is it the naughty sort of blackmail or the dreadful sort?"

“Mm. Both, I think. Depends on the perspective, and how much time you’d like to spend imagining the man’s— ”

He chuckles smoothly. Holds out the paper towards her, snared delicately between two fingers.

“Romantic tendencies.”

"Both? How disgraceful."

As a good sport must, Fitcher makes to take the paper from him.

Astarion's arms fall flat across his midsection the moment she takes it, eyes drifting shut as if preparing to doze right on the spot— though instead, he simply narrates the contents of that envelope as she does the work of reading it herself:

"As you can see, blackmailed, and by a mage of all things. One that's gone through the trouble of including an evocative little snippet of our noble templar's very lurid past professions. And not just any love letter, but one that'd been intended for our blackmailer herself."

He purses his lips, drumming his fingertips against his chest in alternating patterns.

"In other words: they rutted, she defected— and now suddenly he's changed his stance on Ansburg's involvement."

With both her boots removed, Fitcher pulls her legs up into the bed and settles on her side in the opposite direction as him, comfortable as two lounging cats might be. As Astarion narrates, she surveys the contents of the letter with a fixed in place placid smile and an unrelentingly sharp eye.

"Maker. The man's correspondence certainly doesn't leave much to the imagination, does it?" This, cheerfully as she separates the one excerpt from the blackmail note. Her tone belies none of the cold mental calculation currently being made behind it. Hendrik, you silly old bastard.

"He must have written her a great stack of letters if she feels so confident in her position. And he so effectively cowed."

She taps a long finger on the pages. Then, from her lounging position, Fitcher turns her face back toward Astarion.

"I suppose we have little choice but to surrender this evidence to the Margrave."

"You mean you're not going to keep it for yourself?" He scoffs lightly in tamed amusement, one eye cracking open for the sake of surveying her.

"Something to read whilst tucking in at night."

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