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[illithidnapped]

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pre-sibling break-in

[doggish]

Did you hypnotize me this afternoon?

[illithidnapped]

Without telling you? My love, tempting as it is to have my way all the time, I'd never bypass your assent.

Now, having a little fun with subtle, wholly subconscious suggestion on the other hand is another thing entirely.

....why? Did you dream of me?

NEVER GOMEN, it is PERFECT

[doggish]

Yes.

But not in the way you're imagining— though there was that, too. I dozed off and I dreamt as I do not normally dream: coherently, to a degree. I saw us not as we are, but as we might have been. In different roles, and different lives . . . but always the theme persisted, unlike in normal dreams, where everything melds or blurs. Always it was us, and yet the worlds themselves . . . I recognized some aspects of some of them; others were strange and bizarre. You were younger in some, and in some I was; you were changed, or I was, less broken or unchanged, enslaved or free, dressed up or dressed down . . . in some I was your bodyguard, or your beloved kept in secret. In others you and I were rivals, or strangers.

And there were times I dreamt of a world I have never seen before, filled with elves and wondrous things . . . like Evereska, but grander.

It was vivid unlike any dream has ever been before, and it felt like forever. And yet only a few hours passed.

Perhaps it was the wine. Or having the pups

[No, he doesn't believe that.]

I know what it feels like when you nudge me into getting worked up, but not when it happens when I'm asleep. But I do not know what that was, if not that. Perhaps it was the wine after all.

[illithidnapped]

I

[It can't be.

Like an echo of times before, an old, familiar thought pricks once again in the back of Astarion's mind: how the hollow byways of the Crossroads nauseated him to the bitter end, offsetting his attempts to navigate its rhythms as any native thing would. There was no bond there to speak of, no matter how he looked the part. No matter how much disdain humanity afforded or what sharp ears invoked outside of Leto's gentler touch, he found himself a marked outsider in every world set foot in. Deeper than the scars across his back.

And yet—

—his death-stilled heart is in his throat. A frenzied blur of half-tallied truths grasped tight within his bloodless fingers, taut around his quill. Ink doesn't pool beneath it, but that hesitation stilts the first slant of his next word, misaligning its arrangement on the page.]

How real was that reality we're discussing? Did you feel it, those lives that you described— the sensations, or

[Or.

....he doesn't know. He's no idea what to ask. What he's searching for. Only that his jaw is tight, his tongue against his teeth.]

[doggish]

[Oh, something whispers in his heart. A five-second foreshadowing of something he has no knowledge of just yet, and everything in him suddenly gone hushed and still.]

Yes.

[It comes more easily now that he knows what to remember. For yes, there had been that . . . the warmth of skin on skin. A chilly exhale against his lips, puffed out by an older man with dark hair and kind eyes. The chill of diamonds against his skin; the taste of brandy offset by saccharine sugar. Astarion's voice shouting in his ear to be heard over the rhythmic thump-thump-thump of a rapid bass or sneering down at him with cold cruelty— snatches of words. Echoes of scents. Nothing he can stitch together fully, not yet, but . . .]

What is it?

guess who passed out sitting upright in the middle of typing this

[illithidnapped]

Elves, especially young ones— those that've yet to reach their first hundred years— are supposedly blessed by the elven gods [though he lived in Evereska's boughs, he can't bring himself to say our gods. He'd felt almost mortal again before they returned to Baldur's Gate; he's never felt so far removed from it now] and granted visions of their lost lives, however many of them that might've existed before their prior death and reincarnation— for Corellon and his ilk don't strive to keep the souls they sired in the afterlife the way that other divinities do. [Including the Maker and his bride Andraste and their shining, golden city.] Meaning that barring some disastrous, brutal schism that might sever the bond between patron and progeny, each elf that exhales his last passes though the Feywild in spirit before eventually being reborn in a new body. The same soul, same beating heart, same intrinsic memory that'll come flooding in through his dreams to remind him exactly who he is.

It is an impossibly precious thing. Sacred like little else could be.

NOOOO oh god and yet it's still a KILLER TAG

[doggish]

what

2/2

[doggish]

[No. No, that's not enough, not nearly enough, but he can't . . . it's so much to comprehend. It's almost too much: the concept of reincarnation suddenly offered not just as guesswork, but blunt fact; the realization that those were not dreams, but memories, but above all else . . . the fact that across universes, across lifetimes, they found one another. Over and over again, ten, twelve, twenty times, for even now, his thoughts scattered like marbles across a desk, he knows that. It wasn't one mere life.]

are you

did you

[Gods, he doesn't know what he wants to say. He keeps stammering over it, stumbling, his mind going in endless rerouting loops as he tries to understand that which rewrites his entire belief system. And what does it mean that he's lived through so much only to suffer in this lifetime? What does it mean to accumulate that much pain and grief and suffering? What does it mean that he feels no wiser, cleverer, better than he did, and what is the point of living and reliving— gods, what's the point of making him aware of it? Why here, why now? Why would Corellon care enough to give this to him, bastard child that he is?

It's too much. It's so overwhelming that he can't possibly parse it all right now. He doesn't know how long he pauses before adding in a haphazard scrawl:]

you were there in each and every one

you were with me. you were the only constant.

[For even as his mind races, it's that which he keeps coming back to. Those flashes of images and snatches of sound, oh, he wants to go over each and every one, scouring them hungrily for details.]

you were the only fixed point i had. the only thing that mattered, throughout every life.