faderift | [CLOSED] You hate my bad behavior

A shallow noise, akin to a feigned laugh at that correction.

“It’d be a tragedy, of course, but— ”

He pauses as those heavy hooves carefully plunk across the last scattering of stone before the path gives way into a steep, winding slope. Less cluttered with rockslide debris from the sharp shift in seasons.

At the end of the path lies a clear view of the valley below, encircling the fringe edges of Cumberland proper.

They only need to make it to the outskirts to pinpoint their agent.

“With a little luck there might be a clue or two left behind as to the identity of the assailants that lured him into the trap in the first place.” The way he says it, it’s as though it’s a done deal. As though the man they’re after is already dead.

Even as the path clears, Astarion doesn’t spur his horse to speed just yet.

Loki frowns at Astarion and then at the path ahead. He doesn't like how this is sounding— as if it's already too late for them to do the work of even trying. What does Astarion know that Loki doesn't?

With this question in mind, he turns his horse until he's at Astarion's immediate side, within reach.

"I don't know what has you in this hollow mood," he starts and then... takes a breath. Whatever it is, he doubts he's going to get very far accusing Astarion of sabotage right out the gate. Something is up. Astarion is acting strange, he's certain of it; too many days in close quarters with the other man means he feels he has a baseline of behavior with which to compare the current situation to.

"But I have every intention of ensuring this task is as successful as possible, so unless you've got a very good reason for me to stay behind with you daydreaming about finding clues and a dead body, I'm going to the rendezvous."

Picking up the reigns, Loki tilts his head in Astarion's direction. "I know this war feels neverending." He isn't sure if that's why, but. "And if you want to tell me why you're feeling as if our failure at this is inevitable, I'll listen. But I'm doing this first." He pulls at the reigns and prepares to set the horse to galloping. "You don't have to come with me if you don't want to."

Damn the man for being so perceptive. Or maybe damn Wycome for ensuring they’d spent so much time together that it made Astarion all the more transparent in his own resentful reluctance.

Or maybe, slightly above the rest, it’s just impossible to wholly deceive the former God of Lies.

Regardless, Astarion scowls when he’s called out for it, nearly choking his horse on its own bit as he pulls away from Loki’s attempt to draw near. Petulant. Defiant. All it ends with is the sight of Loki driving his horse away as Astarion stays stock still. All it culminates in is the hurried scatter of catching metal in combat as that lone agent— injured but upright— fends off figurative wolves by way of attacking assasins, too many for himself to handle.

With Loki at his side, his odds are better.

Still, one slips nearer through a gap in the fray. A matter of timing where the air goes thin, assailant drawn close—

—and jerks sideways as an arrow cuts deep into his throat. Dark shaft and fletching, black as night itself.

Astarion’s preferred set.

After the agent's been seen to and safely sent off, Astarion reappears at last, slinking from the treeline to retrieve his fired arrows. A grim task, given the remants of any battle, but Astarion's never been the sort to shy away from matters of death or violence. Given what he is, he's always imagined it suits him, whether he truly likes it or not.

For a while there Loki was worried. Not about the fight so much as about Astarion; worried he'd leave before the situation was handled, cutting off Loki's ability to ask him questions about the whole thing afterward.

Because he has questions. He and Astarion are very similar in a lot of ways, but something must have happened or changed for him to trigger the sort of response he'd seen in the other man earlier. Loki wants to know what that is because he's nosy. Because Astarion is something like a friend.

Once Astarion comes down to collect his arrows Loki begins doing the same, starting with the man who'd almost gotten through the fray and struck him from behind. A few others, and then it's just the two of them surrounded by a variety of dead bodies. He holds out the arrows as an offering to Astarion, hand loose around the shafts.

"What's going on?"

An offering taken, albeit with a look of lowering reluctance, gloved fingers closing around the offered arrows before tucking them away.

It’s admittedly hard to meet his stare. Someone he enjoys being near. Someone he appreciates, and not just for their pretty face or penchant for trouble. Someone who was, when he didn’t have to be, kind.

He thought this would be easier. That stalling them by way of a winding path would do all the necessary work for them. That Loki— of all people, so fond of mischief— would understand.

Maybe he understands too well.

“You needed help, and I gave it. Must you continue digging?”

Loki makes a humming noise as if considering Astarion's question.

"Yes, actually, I'm afraid I must. See, I enjoy your company my dear Astarion and I am tempted to call us friends; friends don't allow friends to get themselves in the kind of trouble you're courting. At least not without asking why first." He gives a little shrug and averts his gaze. "Granted, I am new to this friendship business so perhaps I've got it all wrong. Maybe I should have let you get that man killed and waited to see what happened."

The problem is Loki imagines it'd be nothing good; selfishly, he'd rather not risk his slowly building reputation on what feels like a temper tantrum, and he's not sure how Astarion would have spun their 'entirely too late arrival' as a story, but here they are.

"I imagine you're angry. Or tired. Or both. I imagine that's why you took this on even if you didn't care." He raises an eyebrow and attempts to look Astarion in the eye again. "But I'm tempted to call us friends and I've had very few of those, especially here, so I'd like to know what is going on with you."

He steps over yet another fallen Venatori to reach where he’d left his borrowed horse only half-tethered to a nearby tree, pulling the bow from his back and fitting it against the animal’s pack to tie it off. She in return, snorts. Suffice it to say, she doesn’t much care for Astarion.

He feels the same way in turn.

But distance makes a conversation like this easier. Or at least somewhat easier in theory if not in practice, letting Astarion feel less like something cornered and more—

Well, he doesn’t know. Friendship is all new territory, after all. All terrible, besides, and for fear of wounding the more he maintains something like guarded perspective, the safer he imagines he is.

“Friends,” he starts, his tone practically laced with bile. A hallmark of disbelief in the most general sense, and most likely unrelated to Loki. The straps are soft beneath his fingertips, he works at them with care. “If you really think that’s true, then let me offer you a little advice: in this world there’s no such thing. You’re a rifter, just like me. You fit the role Thedas gifts you, the one people want for you, and then when you’ve served that purpose, well.”

They leave.

“Even if someone here cares for you, she only sees what she lost. Someone else’s face.” There’s no need to specify who. They both know what Astarion means.

“If he came back tomorrow, you’d be done. Dropped like a scalding rock. Forgotten just as quickly.”

Edited 2021-12-05 00:49 (UTC)

Loki sighs a little, nostrils flaring; he knows this already. He does. Even though Alexandrie has promised him that it wouldn't just end that way, he knows that there's a risk it might still, that the return of her husband will inexorably change the direction of their relationship.

He's not so blind as to the ways he can be hurt by a thing. Especially a thing, a person, he's given his heart to.

"Most of my friends are rifters," he counters instead, "I suppose because we have the connected fate of not knowing where we stand with these people, politically, or perhaps we have just enough of an idea to dislike it greatly. Hard to say." He crosses over to his own borrowed horse, a brown Ferelden Forder, rubbing its neck as he digs water out of his pack. "As for the rest of it: I know. How could I not?" Loki shakes his head a little bit. "People are like that everywhere. You have to decide if knowing them is worth it."

“How could it ever be?”

Quick as the arrow he’d fired earlier, that question; sincere, rather than sharp. Even in the chilling press of winter the air here is thick with the scent of greenery, cloying when Astarion inhales a touch too quickly. Irritating, just like the rest of this— and nothing he can bite back against.

His attention twists, expression gone hard, and cold, and entirely unblinking when he meets Loki’s stare. Searching for an answer somewhere within its span.

Ah. Loki thinks he understands, now, in a way. Someone has gone. Someone has left, and Astarion remains unhappily behind.

"You have to decide it's worth it," Loki states, tone even, gaze also unflinching in Astarion's direction. "You have to decide that the pain of loss doesn't overwhelm whatever good you gathered and acquired from having them in your life in the first place. Not that loss isn't strong on its own, but. It's a decision, just like anything else."

He finishes with the water container in his hand and crosses the space between them, offering the canteen to Astarion with a slight tilt of his head. "Much like creating those bonds in the first place, we have to decide what we do with the memories they leave behind. If they're too tarnished by the ways in which we are left afterward or if it is worth it."

"What an easy choice to make, then." He scoffs balefully in return, twisting the last of the straps back in place before turning to accept that canteen without hesitation, sipping from it at an angle: almost guarded, his posture, the way an animal refuses to show its spine when a threat might be lurking nearby. He's been playing saccharine sweet for so long now. Ever since Satinalia, in fact.

That facade is dropped, now. Gone entirely.

"But who knows?" The container's tipped in hand as though raising a glass. "Maybe you'll be the lucky one to actually find blissful contentment before the end."

After a beat, he passes it back.

"Gods know I never was."

"You're not dead and gone yet, you know."

He rolls his eyes a little as he takes the canteen from Astarion's outstretched hand, fingertips brushing against the back of his knuckles in the exchange.

"But I am sorry, for what it's worth." He wants to say something about people being predictably terrible and terribly predictable in the ways they hurt others thoughtlessly, but decides against it. Probably wouldn't do much to improve Astarion's mood.

"I doubt I'll be lucky. I haven't done anything to deserve that kind of cosmic shift in my favor."

“There are worse things than being dead.” He snaps, eyeing the way Loki’s eyes have turned skyward, interpreting it as a dismissal. “I’ve known them. For a very long time without end for the stupidity of trust. So if I lament being made a fool of yet again, after daring to think someone might— for once— be telling the damned truth, you’ll forgive me.”

His teeth click at the tail end of those thorny consonants, grip gone exceedingly tight across the kit strapped to the horse at his side.

...but the apology helps.

And in the seconds that chase that unintended, aimless vitriol (the moments when he remembers Loki doesn’t know the truth, that he’s said far too much besides) that look of resentment sinks as deep and slow as fallen silt. Hangdog, might be the word for it. Sullen another. He doesn’t know how to suffer without lashing out.

Without trying to make someone else hurt just as much.

“...it’s not worthiness that defines fortune anyway, you know. The ones who so often succeed, their hearts might as well be rotted wood.”

In other words: there might be hope for you yet, Loki.

Loki blinks as Astarion snaps at him. For a very long time and for the stupidity of trust stands out amongst all of that; they've talked about their lives and pasts before once or twice but not in a way that has confirmed or denied anything for Loki in this moment.

He knows Astarion has lived a long life. Had suffered for it. Alone, perhaps; isolated, definitely. He recognizes it, even without knowing the details.

"But I've been trying very hard to have a heart that's not rotten through the core." Loki flutters his eyelashes, smiles; there's sincerity in it but also poking fun, mostly at himself. "Look. If you want to tell me, I'll listen. If you want me to fuck off, I might." Head tilt. "Though probably not. I do like you, after all."

I'll listen, he says, and for the first time Astarion's lips twist into the bleakest shape of a grin only half-formed. Skeptical, but not resentful.

Not inherently unkind.

"I don't think you know quite what you're asking for with that."

All of it, in fact.

"My past isn't pretty."

"I don't think I'd like you as much if I believed your past to be a thing of carefree opulence and little else," he points out gently. "Besides, I'm not easily turned away from those I've decided are my friends. Something about not having very many of them, perhaps."

Loki's smile gentles a bit, and he reaches out to squeeze Astarion's shoulder softly.

"Come on. We can ride and talk, and perhaps obtain ourselves something to drink that's stronger than water back in Kirkwall."

"You say that like you somehow suspected I was lying to you right from the start." Astarion snorts softly, hand shifting to fit itself somewhere along the soft-worn leather of his horse's reins— pausing only in the second that precedes him stepping up into the saddle.

His pace is slow. Meandering.

It's not that he loathes the idea of finding something to drink so much as chatting about this where turned ears might opt to listen in.

"But if you did. You'd be right."

They can always ride the horses very slowly back to Kirkwall; Loki won't mind. "If I found it to be to be a little...light on certain details, well." Loki shrugs. "I'm the last one to mind if someone lies, especially in order to tell a better tale."

So. No hurt feelings or bruised expectations. He knows that honesty is a difficult matter for creatures like themselves.

A better story.

“Sweet of you.” Astarion teases. Or— tries to, at least, given the way it falls off into nothingness a few beats later once he’s back in the saddle, gaunt features gone sullen at the seams.

“I wasn’t completely lying, of course. I really was a magistrate for a time. How long I can’t rightly say, given that the memories have all been erased in near totality— I don’t know if I was fair. Or cruel. I don’t even know if I succeeded in what I did. But what I do know is that one night a band of humans took it upon themselves to beat me to death in the street for sport. And being a simple magistrate, I doubt it comes as much surprise to say I didn’t stand a chance on my own.” His amendment is quick. Thoughtful.

“Well— I didn’t stand a chance regardless, actually. I was on death’s door, quite literally, when out of nowhere this unspeakably beautiful creature came cutting in and scattered the lot of them as if they were nothing more than dust beneath his heel.” It lingers in his memory when so much else has faded into nothing: the sight of Cazador bathed in moonlight, dark as night itself and equally as alluring. Reddened stare cutting. So blinding to meet directly, suffused with unnatural authority. “When he offered to save my life by transforming me into a vampire like him, I took it. And not just because I was dying.”

A point Astarion stresses because in this, it matters: Cazador wasn’t just offering up salvation. He was offering something more.

“It would’ve been uniquely romantic if not for the fact that he wasn’t telling me the full truth: You see, in order to become a vampire, the creature that sires you bites you— and then you, theoretically, bite them in return. It’s drinking their blood that seals in the eternal pact for precisely what it is. Immortality, beauty, power unimaginable.”

Astarion, a dexterous rogue with keen blades and sharp eyes, doesn't exactly walk with the unspeakable gravity of a fallen star. Or a divine beast, for that matter.

Maybe that's enough for Loki to begin to understand where the dream had first begun cracking at its edges.

Loki splits his visual attention between the terrain and Astarion, though the latter gets the bulk of it; the horse knows what it is doing and Astarion's story is of much more interest than rocks on the road, honestly.

He turns these new pieces of the story over in his mind along with the things he knows about Astarion. The ways he behaves, the ways they two of them are similar and sometimes different. It's power, he thinks; Loki knows about power firsthand, and has abused it in a variety of ways over the centuries. Glorious purpose, or whatever. Mentally, he sighs at himself.

Astarion knows power. Is familiar with the ways it can be turned against him.

The idea this leaves him with, combined with Astarion's story, doesn't sit very well in Loki's stomach. Did the vampire set Astarion up? Was it a ruse from beginning to end?

"What happens," he asks calmly, "to a vampire who doesn't drink the blood of the vampire that inducted them into this...particular life setting?"

Nothing good, he presumes. A thrall, perhaps? Some form of indentured half-life?

Clever, Loki.

"They fall so very short of the mark, my darling."

Astarion should have known he'd fit the pieces into place just one step ahead of its reveal. And in response the noise he makes is so very thin. A note short of a laugh that never quite clears. “Cazador was more than happy to bite me. It was indeed only the latter part he decided not to uphold. And without that, what I became instead was a vampire spawn. Immortal still, yes. Driven to feed on blood just like any true vampire....only I belonged to him completely. Eternally. Without question."

After all, why make competition in power when you could have a pawn. A puppet. Adoring to its very last breath.

"He became my master, and I— bound by unbreakable, binding compulsion— did whatever he asked, the moment he demanded it. A prisoner in my own skin. A slave, condemned to his side." A cardinal rule, leashing as chain. Though, of course, there were those too. A bleakly amusing fact that Astarion keeps to himself when his grin twitches in widening. "And he was so uniquely cruel in his thirst for amusement without end."

But he digresses.

"All this to say I wasn’t ever freed from him. Not technically speaking. For two hundred years I suffered under Cazador’s heel until this world ripped me from his side without warning. It was luck, you see. Stupid, unintentional luck." Not a hero. Not a merciful hand or a god weeping with pity.

Just dumb luck.

"And like everyone that comes through the Fade, I was in danger right from the start. It would’ve been a reprise of all prior disaster, useless as I was, had someone else not leapt to my rescue." He isn't digging his grip into the reins. He isn't tugging at them, or frowning, or snapping his teeth at the sound of his own words. In fact, confessing it somehow feels...freeing, in a way. Strange as it is to admit. "He wasn’t like Cazador. In fact, given the shape of his past— native to this world, and an elf besides— he knew all too well what it was I’d been through. He called me kin, even. Which was a damned foolish thing to do. Given that your wife here was very much right about me: I’m a liar, and a cheat— I take what I want regardless of how it might hurt those involved."

He's left enough shrapnel here as proof.

"But he never stopped. And when he asked me to wait for him should the worst of this war come to Thedas so that we could flee together, well." There, at least, the sting finds him. Just beneath the hollow of his chest. "It took a long time for me to truly agree. To believe him for one. To trust in it, another. And to let myself want it, last."

Those hoofbeats are slow. Heavy. They grate in the back of his mind, stare gone hollow.

"And then he left, without a damned word."

There's an apology on Loki's lips before it dies in a soft exhale that he breathes out. Where does he start apologizing? Cazador and his enthralling Astarion? This... friend, suitor, savior, more than that likely, clearly, who managed to extract a promise from Astarion and then... left, without a word?

"Shit," he curses, quietly.

For a moment that's all he says. He listens to the lack of noise in the area around them, broken by the cry of some bird not too far off. The sound of the hoofbeats on the earth. The horses snorting. His own breathing.

"I'm... I'm sorry that happened." All of it. Cazador, this person Astarion has been reluctant to name —and Loki refuses to pry it out of him, though he's sure there's a record, somewhere, of who rescued Astarion from the rift he fell out of in the first place.

It doesn't matter.

It does, actually, but not right now. Not when Loki isn't sure what Astarion would want, or even need, from this unknown-to-him man.

Closure, possibly.

Probably not the violent sort though. Definitely not by Loki's hand. So. Onto the backburner that idea goes until it can be properly workshopped into something useful.

"People are... they're predictable, in that way. They do what suits themselves best, at the worst times for others, but you know this." No one lives as long as they have and doesn't, that's for certain. "But I am sorry."

Astarion’s protecting him still by choosing not to name him. Peripheral awareness of that instinct beating against his senses by the second. Stupid. Pointless, but—

But what?

He'd broken relics and trash alike in his fury. Sought to wound every last creature in his vicinity. By all logic— by all rights— he should want the man to pay dearly for daring to walk away.

For leaving him here.

Astarion’s downturned features twitch in a wincing show of inward thought, irritated as though he's actively being bitten by gnawing insects just along the base of his neck. His knuckles. When he glances up, fitting Loki with the whole of his stare, it’s almost as if he hopes to find answers buried somewhere between them.

The road is silent. There’s nothing really to be said.

I'm sorry.

“Well,” he starts, voice withered against the flat of his tongue, sinking through the jagged lines of his fangs when he fits a faded smile fully into place. “You wanted the truth. Now you have it."

Every last ugly little piece that Astarion can remember, laid bare. Technically, it could ruin Astarion if Loki opted to tell Riftwatch's higher echelons. That he'd tried to sabotage a mission. That he'd done it out of spite, and just as much personal motivation as Gideon himself. A problem. A nuisance. A concern.

If there's any trust to be had, it sits squarely in that knowledge. Like passing a open blade, hilt tucked in, to someone else.

“So tell me there’s good in this world that needs to be protected if you want, or that there’s something worth fighting for in all this. I won’t bite you for being wrong, cross my wretched, withered heart. But you can’t expect me to see eye-to-eye with you.”

Not anymore.

“This world and all its precious memories can rot. I’ll look after myself first.”

Meeting Astarion's gaze, Loki shakes his head a little bit.

"I wouldn't tell you that. Truth be told, I don't know if there's good in this world that needs to be protected; I just know that I don't want to fall under the heel of Corypheus and his plans towards godhood."

He has no plans on ratting his friend out. It wouldn't improve anything, by his measure; it wouldn't get Astarion the help he might need to make new connections here or feel that his time and energy are worth it. If anything it would likely ostracize and isolate him. And while it might be a slight boon to Loki's reputation amongst certain parties, he wouldn't feel great about it.

That might be more important, actually, than whether or not it would gain him anything.

"This world is too big, honestly; too fractured by politics and dislike between elves and humans and dwarves and qunari. By the same measure, it is also too small. Too disconnected from other worlds and realities and technologies. And of the supernatural elements involved, at least half of them are actively trying to kill Thedas."

He takes a breath, lets it out loudly. Slumps his shoulders a little.

"It's the people that matter. Individually moreso than in a group." In a group they're frustrating, terrified, dangerous. "Natives and Rifters alike. I'm not saying don't hurt, or be angry, or watch your own back." A shrug. "I don't even know if I'm making much sense right now."

It earns something cautious, that uncombative acknowledgment. Tames Astarion as surely as an offered hand, the tighter line of his brow slacking by almost imperceptible degrees, shoulders rounding. When he blinks, it's slow. Trusting.

Wary, but trusting.

There's something to be said for how it's all too new to Astarion. Seven months fresh into agency— into Thedas itself— and the world itself might as well be fallen snow for how little of a trail he's left within its broad, otherwise unexplored expanse. And with the shadow of his own past looming, the footprints he's tried to follow are...

Well.

"...it makes sense."

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the longest tag known to mankind in 3...2....whydoyouevenrpwithme

I LIKE your longass tags, so there! nyah~

well I like ALL your tags so there back!!

we're in good company with one another clearly

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