faderift | [CLOSED] You hate my bad behavior

"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."

"People are, on the whole, terrible. Predictable in their terribleness, selfish, self-centered," Loki takes a breath and rolls his eyes, "but you can sometimes find individuals who aren't wholly terrible. And sometimes they go and surprise you, in either direction.

It's bullshit, I get that. This war is also bullshit." He shakes his head. "But I'm glad to know you, at least.

Take that how you will."

He thinks, but doesn't say, that it's harder for those who have found themselves in this place who aren't from this place. An uncertainty, an unknowing when it comes to what's available to them. It's easy for natives to run, to flee into the darkness or the night or whatever, but harder for Rifters who don't know where to go, what the languages or customs are, and are still struggling to figure out the lives they've been thrust into in the first place.

It's harder to trust in, that promise.

Not because it isn't pretty enough, or that Loki himself doesn't appeal— he does, he always has, and there was as much strain to be found in Wycome as their was comfort, for having him so perpetually near. For knowing how touching even the loveliest rose with well-entangled roots only leads to the worst sort of thorny bite, if one isn't prepared for it.

Maybe before the news of Lady Alexandrie's displeasure, things would've been different, but now...

Well.

He tightens his hold on the reins just so, leaving the animal to tug idly against its own bit.

"You won't tell the others about this, will you."

"I have absolutely no reason to."

Not entirely true, but. He has no reason to see it through, to put Astarion in that position, to involve others in his personal strife.

"And I don't want to, furthermore. So, no. I won't tell the others." Not even his 'wife', if Astarion is wondering. "Unless there's someone you want me to tell, I'm keeping all of this to myself."

He glances Astarion's way and then looks back at the path with a toss of his hair. "I may be new to friends but I am not new to betrayals."

"...thank you."

Low, when it comes. Barely audible over the steady hoofbeats thumping away as they press on, all too easily missed if Loki opts not to tip an ear towards the elf following along just at his side.

There's no excuse to be made, after all. And even if there was one, Astarion isn't inclined to fumble his way through using it as a shield: a troublemaker without an airtight alibi of any sort might as well lie down and roll over— suspicion will always run to them like a magnet regardless.

But in that vein, something tugs at him.

"Your betrayals? Or someone else's?"

He almost misses Astarion's thanks, and spends the next several seconds silently wondering if he'd imagined it up entirely before his companion speaks (again?) and Loki has to take a deep breath and consider just how honest he plans on being right now.

"Oh, mine." Does he sound proud of it? Not really. Is it complicated? Not really. "Rather often and seldomly from the front. Thus the whole...being new to friends includes being new to not stabbing people in the back."

Very honest? Apparently?

“In my experience it’s always been the opposite.”

Astarion had never chosen to turn on the people who entrusted their hearts to him, but that never truly absolved him of their downfalls, either.

“The ones who try to make themselves your allies are the ones who also then choose to bite.”

But Loki knows that by now, given the scope of their conversation thus far.

“What was it that changed your mind?”

"Everyone bites," he counters. People lash out, hurt others, act selfishly all the time. "It's just that the allies are closer and thus hurt more when they break the skin."

Loki gives Astarion a half-smile.

"I saw the end. The projected and expected turn of events for my entire life, and I decided I didn't want it."

“You...saw the end?” Brow knitting, head cocking to one side as though trying to grasp exactly what he’s being told.

“Is that a metaphor?”

Self reflection? A near-death experience? ...Or something else entirely.

"I told you about the people controlling their Sacred Timeline," Loki says with a shake of his head. It is not, unfortunately, a metaphor. "They had this... reel, I suppose, like a film or some other thing, that showed me my entire life as it had been dictated by them. Every failing, every betrayal, the death of my mother, my own death.

By that point, I had already been removed from the timeline but not erased, exactly, just... pushed aside. Had I wanted those things I'm not sure they would have been accessible to me anyway, but the point is. I didn't want those things. I wanted a different life. One where I was more than just a stepping stone to someone else's heroic stories."

“And you believed them. Those people that took everything from you.” It isn’t harsh, Astarion’s tone, though his expression runs painfully tight. Creased through his brow in obvious confusion. “The ones who supposedly erased you.”

He wants to think Loki’s too clever to fall for a trick so simple in design; there has to be something else, some other reason why he'd believe it to be true, but...

“They could’ve been playing you for a fool, given their grasp of time. Making you believe whatever suited their purpose.” His attention drifts, falling back towards the path ahead.

“My master thrived on it, you know. Watching minds bend to his coaxing logic. All false promises. Feigned need. It was in his power to simply take whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted it— but there was always entertainment to be found in twisting otherwise stalwart hearts piece by uniquely convincing piece.”

"I believed them. Because they were able to capture me, subdue me, knew things about me that I had never told anyone, shared with anyone. Because they possessed some of the strongest magics and artifacts that I knew of, at the time, and had rendered them all useless. Because they were vast, and many, and appeared to be the greatest power in the universe.

It wasn't just a handful of people, or just one man. I've fallen for the lies of one man before, and I wasn't tempted to do it again. There were tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people working for them."

Loki frowns a little, rolling his shoulders. "The scope of it is difficult to imagine, and even harder to describe. The place I saw was...larger than Val Royeaux. It was massive, and I saw people erased from time right in front of me for daring to argue. None of my magic worked there at all, at any point, and I could be trapped in the same five-second loop for as long as they desired.

There was no reason not to believe them." A sigh. "And then I met someone who wanted to destroy them, who had lost everything just the same as I had only much sooner, and I aligned with them."

He doesn’t really know what to make of it, everything Loki confesses. Not because it’s overwhelming, or that he doesn’t buy it, just—

When it comes to power beyond power, all Astarion knows is that deception seems all the more likely. Who better to promise truths unspoken than the one who holds your strings, hoping to steer you as they please?

Maybe that isn’t the case. Maybe what Loki hoped to avoid is as true as the air they breathe now, or the earth beneath their horses’ hooves. But whether it is or it isn’t, there really isn’t any way of knowing anymore, and Astarion isn’t daft enough to go putting his foot in someone else’s experiences.

Well— not for anything other than a decent laugh, and truth be told, he’s not in the mood at present.

Nothing’s really all that funny.

“But you’re free of all that now.”

Edited 2022-01-04 12:05 (UTC)

"Yes," Loki says, and there could be more conviction there. A firmer stance, a more solid affirmation that it's all behind him. But part of him is worried that it isn't; that something will happen and the TVA will come streaming into Thedas through timedoors and then...

And then what? He doesn't actually know. But his expression is hesitant, pensive, as he considers that.

"At the very least, I definitely hope so." He looks from the path to Astarion again. "I wouldn't wish them on anyone here."

There’s a lightness to Astarion’s tone when he meets that deep, pensive pain with a mild inquiry. Something soft as a nudge to the side— or what stands for it, given the fact that they’re not within reach of one another.

“Not even Corypheus?”

Loki snorts, breaking out into a smile. He appreciates what Astarion is doing, here.

"Okay, I would gladly sell Corypehus and his entire retinue to the TVA for a potato. A small one, even."

He shakes his head. It'd be nice, but terribly unlikely. "What will you do once we're back in Kirkwall?"

[CLOSED] You hate my bad behavior

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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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+100000 approval

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I am so sorry to drop this exposition on you while you're threading talking about the tva w/sylvie

it’s all good! <3

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