He thinks it's a cruel trick. A game. A lie. (He knows it isn't.)
But it's the too-bright quality of it all that doesn't make sense to the language he's spent his whole life learning (like the cold offering of a rat— a wrist— between starving creatures in the dark) when it is, undoubtedly, the simple doctrine of every last man for himself that endlessly defines the world that surrounds them no matter what it is they want. A man can pay to hang a family. A business built on trust will burn for hired thugs. Palms only weigh scales in favor of the faces that they like, and everything else is struck, and there's no outrunning that reality— not in a paradise built on fallow rot from its center out. Astarion is smart. Astarion's perceptive. That's the curse that caught him early. So he asks himself why as many times as the question comes to him in different shapes (why show a patriar something this exploitable, doesn't he know better; is that the angle— a long con, a better gambit; is he stupid? Reckless? In lust?) Coming up short every time while his eyes and throat turn to sandpaper: rough and itching whenever he blinks. Swallows.
He's lost his voice.
His nerve.
He's lost everything— and he hates the way it breaks against his frame, threatening to wash him away and leave nothing behind. Not even footprints. Around a soft tongue the won't work and the backdraft of agonies he can't even voice (let alone name), what's left to him that isn't brittle glass already shattered underfoot?
Forty five years old, and he's been ruins as far back as he remembers.
And ruins aren't warm.
They're not nice places.
They don't say pretty things, they don't make you want to stay. So when he pulls his hand away and steps back twice ( —left foot, right foot— ) there's anger on his face. Redness in the pool of silver eyes. He'd wanted a hero for ages in his dreams, but the sight of it churns in his stomach; too rich for his mouth after handfuls of salt water.
He can't remember what he says.
Maybe nothing.
Maybe it was just that look and the click of a pistol being cleared as he set it back down on the table. Maybe— like the night they'd met (Astarion having pushed too hard against a fighter's frame)— they walk back home in silence and neither of them says a word.
His cheek is healed by the time he returns to his own mirror to check. Dinner's uneventful (and if that doesn't warrant praise from Lord Ancunín, Astarion would be shocked to hear it), to the point that everyone eats in that same, pervasive silence and departs with hardly a word. And Fenris goes to wash. And Astarion goes to bed. And he can't sleep in that cold room— hating the noise from his phone and the nothingness from the corner where the one person he wants to talk to— ]
no subject
He thinks it's a cruel trick. A game. A lie. (He knows it isn't.)
But it's the too-bright quality of it all that doesn't make sense to the language he's spent his whole life learning (like the cold offering of a rat— a wrist— between starving creatures in the dark) when it is, undoubtedly, the simple doctrine of every last man for himself that endlessly defines the world that surrounds them no matter what it is they want. A man can pay to hang a family. A business built on trust will burn for hired thugs. Palms only weigh scales in favor of the faces that they like, and everything else is struck, and there's no outrunning that reality— not in a paradise built on fallow rot from its center out. Astarion is smart. Astarion's perceptive. That's the curse that caught him early. So he asks himself why as many times as the question comes to him in different shapes (why show a patriar something this exploitable, doesn't he know better; is that the angle— a long con, a better gambit; is he stupid? Reckless? In lust?) Coming up short every time while his eyes and throat turn to sandpaper: rough and itching whenever he blinks. Swallows.
He's lost his voice.
His nerve.
He's lost everything— and he hates the way it breaks against his frame, threatening to wash him away and leave nothing behind. Not even footprints. Around a soft tongue the won't work and the backdraft of agonies he can't even voice (let alone name), what's left to him that isn't brittle glass already shattered underfoot?
Forty five years old, and he's been ruins as far back as he remembers.
And ruins aren't warm.
They're not nice places.
They don't say pretty things, they don't make you want to stay. So when he pulls his hand away and steps back twice ( —left foot, right foot— ) there's anger on his face. Redness in the pool of silver eyes. He'd wanted a hero for ages in his dreams, but the sight of it churns in his stomach; too rich for his mouth after handfuls of salt water.
He can't remember what he says.
Maybe nothing.
Maybe it was just that look and the click of a pistol being cleared as he set it back down on the table. Maybe— like the night they'd met (Astarion having pushed too hard against a fighter's frame)— they walk back home in silence and neither of them says a word.
His cheek is healed by the time he returns to his own mirror to check. Dinner's uneventful (and if that doesn't warrant praise from Lord Ancunín, Astarion would be shocked to hear it), to the point that everyone eats in that same, pervasive silence and departs with hardly a word. And Fenris goes to wash. And Astarion goes to bed. And he can't sleep in that cold room— hating the noise from his phone and the nothingness from the corner where the one person he wants to talk to— ]