illithidnapped

[discreetly tucking away starter space so this doesn't take up the entire inbox]

He’d told her to come.

If he’d had some sort of predictive foresight, he might’ve rescinded that well-aged invitation sooner. But the day ran long and bright, and even well past sunset he’d held out—

Hope.

Isn’t that a damned waste.

The door is locked, but when it cracks, it finds the place more in shambles than its usual disheveled state: broken antiquities, scattered clutter, overturned containers now bereft of their contents. Matching Astarion, in fact, who sits equally disarranged along the edge of his mattress, shoulders hunched forward, back to the door— not so much as lifting his head to look behind him at the sound of her entrance.

He knows it’s her.

And the only other person he’s been waiting for would’ve made a much different entrance. Which means...

His jaw grits, lip working its way into a bitter scowl where she can’t see. With two arched fingers he gestures towards the table where a wrapped bundle sits, undamaged compared to the scenery that frames it.

“Take it, and get out.”

Ellie hadn't knocked -- she hadn't thought she'd need to, given that he'd explicitly invited her. But she stops short in the doorway when she opens it. Slowly, she takes in the evidence of destruction. She's seen him throw dramatic fits, but those are verbal, tastefully arranged, theatrically executed. He is a creature of posturing and poise.

This is something else entirely.

Her mind runs a race through what it could be, and arrives at hurt. Emotional hurt, real hurt, hiding and wounded hurt.

Get out, he says, because for once, he doesn't want to be seen, even by her.

It's all the information she needs, at least for now. Carefully, Ellie places the large, but light parcel wrapped in cloth to the side of the door, and reaches out to grasp it. Pulls it shut, clicks the lock into place.

Of course, she's on the wrong side of it.

She doesn't go for the bundle. Ignores it. Instead, she goes for the bed. Puts a knee in the mattress, leans across it, and wraps her arms around his shoulders from behind. Pulls him back against her chest, and holds on tight.

He chokes at her touch, gutteral exhale made all the more sharp by how his head tips back against her shoulder.

Nothing scalds like tenderness. Nothing wounds like mercy. His fangs cinch together so viciously he feels as though they might crack, nausea bottled high in the back of his throat. It’s unbearable. Her warmth. Her closeness. The relief that comes from having her near— and how addicted he’s become to the simplicity of it.

The hand that locks around her wrist was meant to pull her from him, but instead his blunted nails bite furiously into her skin. A line of livid half-moons, clutching.

Two hundred years, and the only lesson he's learned is how to continuously play his own foil.

And the only way he knows how to cope with that is by making everyone else suffer just as much.

"I said leave." Rough-cut syllables spilling more from his gut than his teeth, “I changed my mind. I don’t want you here. Or is that too difficult for you to understand?”

Edited 2021-11-01 10:05 (UTC)

Ellie might have listened to him, if he'd been sincere. If he hadn't clutched at her like a drowning man, digging in like he was afraid she might do as he asked.

She doesn't wince at the little bite of pain; she's felt much worse. She's not afraid of him. And instead of pulling away, she wraps her other arm tightly around him and pulls him in harder against her chest. It's not a tender hold. It's a tight one, squeezing and firm and warm, like she's bracing him, holding the jagged edges of him together.

She knows that right now she is like the room to him, futile and eventually meaningless, no matter how much he wanted it to be otherwise. But Ellie's not so easily broken, or pushed away.

"Yeah, I heard you," she says, her voice gruff and quiet next to his ear.

Nursing along resentment like wine, poisoned by its potency, all he wants is to hurt. Everyone. Anyone.

Even in misery, he's self-indulgent.

But she doesn’t let go, and fool that he is— starved even still— he falls into it fully just like he's done every time before. Sags against her grip as reddened eyes lift towards the ceiling, slipping shut after a long-drawn beat of tension that pulls at the tangled knotwork lurking beneath his ribs. A mistake, he thinks. Knows.

Nothing lasts. No one stays.

But he doesn’t let go.

Silence pervades as the minutes stretch on. As he twists where he rests, dragging her down against the mattress and its upset bedding, face pressed harsh to the side of her neck. The muted dampness of his cheek set against her skin— the cruelty of his grip— only lasting as long as it takes for him to sink into sleep.

Ellie doesn't push Astarion to talk, doesn't ask what happened. Part of her can guess even if she doesn't have all the details.

She holds him as his heartbeat slows, as he drags her in close and hides his face against her, eases them both down to lay on the rumpled blankets. His face feels hot and damp against her skin, and she rests her cheek against his temple, stroking his hair until he falls asleep.

And then for some time after.

She doesn't think of leaving, or moving. But it's chilly, so she snags a threadbare blanket with the edge of her boot and pulls it up and over them, tucking it around his back.

Ellie's still there in the morning, only stirring when he does. She's warm from sleep.

He isn’t overly surprised to find her there come morning. His bones still ache like hollowed sockets, brittle as bark beneath his skin, eyes stinging from the memory of spent salt; his movements are stiff when he shifts to rising, shoulders first— and glancing around the wretched mess of his own handiwork, he realizes there’s no chance of finding where the kettle’s gone.

Or if it’s intact enough to be used.

With one thin sigh let out through his nose, narrow and withering, he reaches back to tug his shirt into place over the span of his old scars, clutching it rather than bothering with lacing.

“Open it.” He murmurs hoarsely, tipping his head towards the package she’d ignored. The only thing left untouched, save for a single longsword propped just beside the table: pitch dark blade tinged a distinctive blue at its edge.

“Or I’m going to start thinking you don’t want it.”

Ellie groans, rolling onto her back to rub at her face. She's spent much more uncomfortable nights by far, but it's been a while since she's slept so long in one go.

She pushes her hair out of her face, rubs at her neck as she sits up.

"Not even a good morning, huh?" she asks, muffling a yawn as she swings her feet over the side of the bed. She gives him a small nudge in the arm, gets up, glancing at the sword for a long moment before she heads over to the doorway, where she left the package.

"Okay. But you open mine, too."

She picks up the both of them, brings them back, sets it in Astarion's lap. It's probably obvious it's a painting, good-sized this time.

He clearly doesn't want to talk yet, so she'll let him hide. If only for a little bit. But she settles down next to him, resting her hands on top of the package.

"You first."

She's strangely nervous.

That question earns a low, glowering glance from over the rise of his shoulder (as though even the word good, or just the concept of it, is the most unwelcome affront to the desecrated space in which she stands), though that momentary snag is short-lived: gone the second she places her gift in his lap.

Silent, his stare flicks down to measure it, before darting back up and doing the same to her face. She looks tired, still. A little sunken around the eyes, a little stiff through her shoulders. But there’s no true point to his study, he won’t find an answer written in her expression, and he knows it.

Pointless apprehension lingers in the way he peels away wrapping, starting from the edges inward, picking at the corners and then—

And then.

He exhales. Sharp. Silent. Blinking a touch too rapidly, brows twisting into tightly pinched lines. He isn’t one for weeping; the only proof of its existence from the night before is her memory, but the delicacy of this moment is as frangible and thin as spun glass regardless. Evident when pale fingers, softer than air itself, press themselves cautiously against the canvas.

He’s always wondered. Without mirrors as an aid, without a reflection, without a voice at his side in the dark that wasn’t tainted by Cazador’s cruelty— what he looked like. Truly. And this is no common portrait. No streetside rendering. It’s fine as silk, or cut opal, or long-aged wine. It belongs someplace better than this.

She thinks he belongs someplace better than this.

Procer.

Something twists in him again— a sharper rise of pain— but it’s welcome this time, whatever it is. Miserable and merciful and hot as an open flame to bared skin, prompting a similar sound as if putting his hand to it now scalds as surely as daylight once did.

“...it’s beautiful.”

Ellie sits next to him, watching with careful eyes. Something about this feels like when she stopped Joel, to give him that photograph. That ache in her chest. It feels like too much, and also not enough.

His reaction, though, is so much more than she hoped for. He touches her brush strokes almost reverently, finding his own expression in the lines and swirls of silver and black and red, and pale pale rose. Despite the words, she knows it's not the physical beauty he's admiring.

It hurts her, too. A good hurt. Something twisting and aching and perfect, like the soreness of muscles after a long and fulfilling day.

Ellie briefly leans her cheek against Astarion's shoulder, mostly to hide the smile.

"It is of you," she teases, but the softness of her voice belies the real feeling behind it.

“Oh, stop.” He mutters toothlessly, spurning teasing and sentiment alike— though his touch remains splayed adoringly across spent brushstrokes, down turned gaze unwilling to part from anchored admiration for even a second. He could be so much worse at present. The temptation is there, the drive and the urge still coiled in the back of his mind, gnawing.

But like an animal pacified, he only grumbles his dissent. Muted huffing at most. Subtler signs, all eclipsed by appreciation.

Even if he doesn’t quite know how to express it.

It's more than enough for her. Unable to get a smile off her face, she lets him off the hook to turn her attention to the package in her lap. It feels lighter than it looks, though the shape's unfamiliar. It can't be a weapon, it's not anything she recognizes.

She sees wood, first, when she undoes the wrappings, and her fingers slow, caught with the sudden wave of feeling when she sees the marks on the grain. A familiar moth, familiar ferns. Her own tattoo, rendered in near perfect detail.

And slowly, as she opens it up, strings.

It's not a guitar. It's not any instrument she's ever seen before, but she recognizes the frets, the pegs, and her breath catches in her throat as the first inkling of what this really is starts to take root.

Lightly, she strums her fingers over the strings, and they reverberate, filling the air with a soft, muted, hauntingly familiar chord. Similar but different. Different enough to...

Ah.

Ellie draws in a slow breath as she hesitantly places her fingers on the fretboard, her left hand fitting over the strings.

This is an instrument that can be keyed with three fingers.

His gaze is a slinking thing, crawling first along the packaging as she begins unwrapping it, then her fingertips as she presses them against strings that faintly hum in response—

And lastly, her face.

Tipped downwards, she’s mostly unreadable like this. It’s only the stillness that carries, the slowness of her inhale and the way it seems to burrow into her chest, held fast.

He’d meant to offer up some stirring promise that nothing is ever lost completely to anguish. That they don’t have to make sacrifices to accommodate their suffering. Instead, pale as it all seems on his tongue, Astarion’s mouth only thins out into the most tired of lines,

“You’ll need lessons. Time to acclimate to it. Thankfully there’s no short supply of sovereignless bards to be found here, and— well. Nothing will hold you back, if you’re still worried about plucking strings.”

The impact of it comes in stages, in waves. Overwhelming until she feels a little breathless. Dry-drowning. Ellie presses her lips together so they won't tremble. Rests her hands on the strings until the wood blurs, and she hears the soft, hollow tap that she quickly wipes away from the wood, her fingertips running over the marks.

She wonders if Astarion knows what this means to her. If he can begin to guess. If he truly understands how important this was.

This is something she can play as she is, without needing to be fixed, repaired, compensated for. For this, she is not lacking. This is something familiar, but more.

In answer, she reaches out with her right hand, the one that's never lost the knack of plucking, and curves her fingers to strum a full chord, letting them both hear it. They pluck over the strings, and something in it sounds like open roads, and like coming home. Her left hand skims along the fretboard, searching.

... it's not a song, by any stretch of the imagination, but after a few experimental touches she manages the note she's looking for. It fades out, and Ellie looks up at Astarion's face.

"It's perfect."

“I take it back,” he starts lightly, some thinned-out, watered-down trickle of amusement pulling wearily at the corner of his mouth when she strikes her first chord, filling an otherwise empty space with something so different than stale decay.

“You’re not going to need any help at all.”

Clever, he’d said. Bragging over cards as always, recounting to Fenris all her efforts with a beaming sort of secondary pride. The memory feels old, now.

Her stare hurts to look at— and so he glances away from it before finally setting the painting aside, drifting back down across the mattress, head pillowed in the piled bedding beside her.

If she feels inclined to stay and stretch her wings, he won’t be the one to throw her out.

The edge of Astarion's humor in his voice is heartening, and Ellie manages a twitch of a smile at the praise, reaching up to scrub one hand across her face before re-aligning herself, settling the instrument across her lap and her back to the wall, letting her hand fall down to gently stroke Astarion's hair back from his ear.

She keeps her hand there for a few moments, knowing he's not ready to talk, before she goes back to plucking softly at the strings.

The sound of it is restful, sweet, and it hits almost all of the notes of a guitar. It's a bit quieter. While she slowly finds the chords that sound like home, she hums softly under her breath. Glimpses and edges of things, half-formed words that ultimately aren't anything meaningful. White noise, but with character.

The melodies that come out are not structured, but they're echoes of the things she knows, and what she'll learn to do again.

When he winces at her touch in its first brush, it’s only fear. Muted, instinctive— a flickering ghost of a pinch along his brow, quickly abandoned in the next beat as he slips back into mired calm.

He doesn’t imagine she’ll strike him, doesn’t entertain for a second the thought that her fingertips intend to harm. But the idea of warming to it and losing it...

“Haven’t you got somewhere else to be.”

He murmurs, in a bitter variation of the question he’d intended to ask, which is: how long will you stay.

Ellie's hands still at Astarion's question. The flinch seared into her mind, as it has been for the last several minutes. He's never flinched from her before, and it takes a few seconds to recognize the source of the fear. The realize the reality that follows -- that he believes she has the capacity to hurt him. That he's aware of it, and keenly so.

"No."

There's a lack of explanation. No making light of it. There's a time when they can brush things off, and well- this isn't it. Ellie picks at her fingers, leans her head back against the plaster, looks out across the broken mess of the room.

"... he left, didn't he?" she asks, very softly.

This time, Astarion manages a smile. At odds with the look in his tired eyes, that sweeter, warming flash of jagged teeth twisting just to one side.

“Oh darling, he was always going to leave.”

His exhale is deep, he shifts to bear himself nearer to her by degrees, fingertips threading loosely through the laces of his open shirt for the sake of idle tangling.

Yes, he’s gone. And more the fool, Astarion.

“Two months of absolute silence and even the most naive of imbeciles would know they’ve been stood up. I, on the other hand, didn’t think to get the memo until now.” No, not that. There had been signs. Even Byerly’s attestation regarding the crystals and their nonexistent potential for fallibility had been enough to send Astarion into stiffened silence. Defensiveness.

All this time, he knew better. He just didn't want to let it in.

“You can take his gift if you want. Though I suppose it might be a little unwieldy for you.”

As he creeps closer, Ellie's fingers naturally find their way to his hair, the curve of the back of his neck. It's a habit that's getting ingrained, one that she sometimes thinks on, but can't bring herself to break. They both need touch. No strings, no expectations, no promises -- just contact with someone else.

Ellie is gentle in her touch because words would not be. Everyone knew that Fenris had gone. She had known. She had been hoping he'd return, for Astarion's sake, but... Ellie can't hate him for it.

... she knows what it is, to be unable to stay. No matter how much one might want to.

"Nah. I'm not a sword girl," she says, rubbing with her thumb, pressing down on the muscles of the back of his neck. Where she keeps her own tension.

"It may come in handy, though, if you feel like holding onto it."

How he snakes against that pressure. Head tilting, eyes shut. There’s no thought that finds its way in in that moment, no nagging, sickening boil of embarrassment or shame.

He doesn’t imagine himself as something pitiable under her touch.

When he reaches back to snare her fingers— to press the back of her knuckles (missing digits and all) against his cold lips— it’s a chaste thing. Unlike him to be so unwanting. So incapable of using words in place of feeling. But appreciation lives in that simplicity of fleeting contact: words being clumsier things, he hasn’t any better way to say that he’s grateful.

“Play something for me.”

It’ll take hours no doubt, to find her way into plucking a tune.

He knows exactly what he asks for.

The kiss is soft, barely there, but it makes something catch in Ellie's throat, tight and hurting. It's been longer than she wants to say since someone's touched her like that. There's nothing she can say.

Instead she briefly touches his cheek with her fingertips, a gentle brush before she takes the instrument up in her arms, lays it across her lap, and gets very comfortable.

She plays for them both.

Chords first, imperfect, over and over as she finds the right ones. Experiments with placement of her fingers. Leans into the familiar sting of softened calluses building back up. She hungers for this, thinks of all the love left cold, preserved in these sounds.

None of the songs from home will do. But she's been to many places in her time, and it's one of those that she strums for, capturing the melody in her voice, rather than in the strings. It's soft, scratchy at the edges, a touch rusted from disuse.

But it warms up to something softer than the rest of her, and she sings for him.

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