illithidnapped

“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.

Breath twisted in high in his throat, eyes still settled shut, jawline taut— it’s beautiful. Her music. That song. The slow rise and fall of her voice washing over the absent rhythm of simple strumming. Those lyrics that dig like a blade between his ribs. Sharp and sweet, and oh so tempting to fall into.

A promise.

Or at least it feels like one, for as long as the music carries on. As long as he rests at her side, muttering fainter praise on occasion when it won't make itself into an interruption, wholly devoid of mendacity. His own guarded nature lost to the plucking of tight-wound strings and faded memory. The audible process of her finding her own footing in a world that was never really intended to house her.

But even so, she won't concede to it. Stubborn right down to the marrow in her bones.

And maybe it's that, that sets in motion a nominal return to normalcy in isolation. The way Thedas itself feels divided now, divorced from them beyond the walls of this narrow little space where Astarion eventually rises and begins sorting (by way of toeing aside most of the fractured mess to start with) through the wreckage of his own belongings in search of something more specific.

"You must be starving." He comments offhandedly, not feeling the sting of hunger in his own gut, but knowing she's been here long enough to need something to sustain her. A chair's set upright beside the table (if she opts to stay where she is, fiddling with unfamiliar strings, he won't be the one to complain), one unbroken bottle of wine scrounged up, and it's with a wan little pull at the edge of his mouth that he glances back towards her from over his shoulder.

"Cheese? Pastries? Meat? Petit fours? What's your preference, darling. I have them all here....somewhere."

Astarion is softer, more subdued than she's ever seen him, even when he was crumpled at the bottom of a ravine, wrapped in blankets and suffering with blood on his glib tongue.

It's not pity she has for him, but the ache hurts. Seeing him like this feels wrong.

He leaves a warm spot when he gets up, and Ellie keeps playing, lapsing into silence otherwise, providing a soft background to the pulse of they way Astarion extracts purpose from the wreckage in order to care for her. She's not hungry, but the look on his face says he needs to do something, and she won't deny him.

"Cheese," she says, putting the instrument aside, but not without one final, marveling look. She runs her fingertips over the marks that match her tattoo so perfectly, a small smile on her face. Few things have meant more to her.

"What's this called?"

“A dulcimer. Uncommon, from what I hear, but I’ve been lucky enough to have more than one in-depth lesson on instruments of just about every stripe: knowing which would work well as a substitute for everything you’d been missing was easy.”

Something like a guitar. Something she could play without straining herself to adapt to. Lightweight, easily packed for the idleness of a long mission when the nights grow both exceedingly dull and cold. They’re heading into winter, now. It’s only going to get more miserable— unless they press high into the dangers of the warmer north.

He finds thick waxen-paper wrappings eventually, buried beneath a heavy measure of cologne-soaked silk and a couple broken strands of jewelry, easily pushed aside. Stacking them along the edge of the table, he works up a decent assortment.

“The engravings were the tricky part, of course.”

Matching her markings without her noticing. The waxing and waning moons, symbolic of something else entirely.

"Of course," she says, still unable to hide that smile as she runs her fingertips over the carvings, the moon phases. So many little things she loves, so many pieces of herself.

... she thinks of Joel, of that old guitar he found and fixed up for her, of the moth on the fretboard, and rubs slowly over the wood, feeling the divots there. Letting her touch drink them in.

Her tattoos are warped from scarring. Burns and cuts and a horribly broken arm, once. He had to have paid special attention in order to get them this perfect.

"Fuck. It's beautiful."

He doesn’t tell her what else it stands for. That those moons aren’t just representative of the memory she’d shared. That it’s for him, too, creature of the night that he’s always been by default.

But some secrets between friends never hurt.

“I did warn you. That it was the perfect gift.”

His ears are sharp. Literally, figuratively. He can hear the duller scuff of her fingertips as they slide across wood that's as light and hollow as a bird's bones, interrupted when they snarl against the edges of those etchings. A sign of affection.

The fire's lit from his half-seated perch of roughened floorboards; it has to be freezing in his apartment. He can't feel it, but there's a kind of stiffness in his joints that tips him off to it, and when he briefly suspends his own efforts it's only to reach back and half-foist a thicker section of duvet up across her shoulders, roughly butting it against her cheek more than he is carefully fitting it in place.

Suffer in warmth, little nerd.

Edited (I forgot a word) 2021-11-08 21:37 (UTC)

"Yeah, well- you actually weren't exaggerating."

She's still looking at the dulcimer when the duvet falls across her thin shoulders, and she gives a soft oof of surprise, reaching up to tug it out of her face and lean her cheek against it instead. She's still got her cloak on, having never undressed last night, but she's chilly without his body heat and pulls it in anyway.

"Didn't realize you were such a mother hen," she teases him gently, giving him a grin through the messy hair that's fallen across her face. For all that she's teasing, she's testing, too. Whether he's too tender for it, or needs the distraction.

Tenderness will come and go. Weathervane as he is at the best of times, it’s not hard to imagine how he might laugh one minute and wallow in the next.

Right now, though, it’s the former that makes its way to the wearied edge of his half-upturned mouth, mimicking his usual confidence.

“I like to think it makes up for the poison.”

Said, of course, as he takes up the topmost waxen packet of finely aged cheese and presses it firmly into her hands.

"I'll make sure I puke directly on your bed," Ellie says blithely as she breaks open the wax to take a bite, giving him a genuine smile, the humor edging back into her eyes.

"Happy Satinalia."

He’d had a joke already spring-loaded, aimed to fire by the time his grip on paper and unspooled twine is gone. Something about not being able to leave him if she isn’t well enough to run.

Instead, his mouth twists higher in reflexive response.

“The gift I never asked for.”

He hates this holiday, he’s firmly decided. Resents it for the brighter notions of joy and friendship and everything in between.

That doesn’t mean he’s not sincere when he echoes back in the driest voice possible, “Happy Satinalia, darling.”

"A bonus gift," Ellie insists cheerfully, studying Astarion's eyes. She pauses in her chewing, then resumes, letting the duvet fall from her shoulders so she can get up, then roll up onto her tiptoes and wrap her arms around his shoulders, pulling him in close for a proper hug.

She lets it linger, firm, and sighs into his shoulder.

It may not be the happiest holiday, but at least... at least they have this, and each other.

She’s so warm. Always so bloody warm. The arms encircling his shoulders— small enough that he has to slacken his posture to comfortably accommodate it so that her grip won’t wind up slipping away unintended. Because he doesn’t want it to, is the thing.

Because he’s so damned lonely, even if he’ll never bring himself to admit it out loud.

“...that cheese smells awful, you know.”

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