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faderift2022-03-08 10:59 pm
illithidnapped) wrote in faderift2022-03-08 10:59 pm
Entry tags:
[CLOSED] AND YOU'LL KNOW THE NEXT TIME I WAKE UP SCREAMING
WHO: Astarion, Fenris, Bastien, Emet-Selch, Mobius, Ellie, Dante, Loki
WHAT: fear spirits are no joke when you're a bag of broken glass
WHEN: backdated to Crossroads plot hours
WHERE: the Crossroads
NOTES: so many content warnings: mind control, slavery, torture, blood, mutilation and abuse of every conceivable/literal shade, possibly more warnings to be added later, not joking this is a very horrible space. There's a reason why I'm divorcing this from the main log; Astarion's canon is, in short, unkind.
WHAT: fear spirits are no joke when you're a bag of broken glass
WHEN: backdated to Crossroads plot hours
WHERE: the Crossroads
NOTES: so many content warnings: mind control, slavery, torture, blood, mutilation and abuse of every conceivable/literal shade, possibly more warnings to be added later, not joking this is a very horrible space. There's a reason why I'm divorcing this from the main log; Astarion's canon is, in short, unkind.
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[The concept of them being wrong for the world, rather than the world itself, sticks with her for a moment, but she's too tired to ruminate on the impression it makes. Her fingers absently find his hair, and between one breath and the next, she's dozing.
It's hard, keeping watch, even if it's second nature. But she's going on so little sleep, and with the constant assault on her senses, her body's dulling them to protect her.
She comes nearly awake at Astarion stirring, tensing next to her. She doesn't immediately hear the sound of whatever's setting him off. His ears are far more acute than hers. What really snaps her awake is him dropping the endearments. He so rarely calls her by name.
In an instant, Ellie is awake, tense against him, listening -- and she hears it too. Shifting to free them both of her cloak, she reaches for her bow, and one of her arrows, getting her feet underneath her.
Running might be just as deadly as whatever's found them.]
Stay close.
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[But he loses that edge of brittle humor in the very next beat: there is, not far away, a hunching shadow lurching in the dark. Humanoid, thin as a rail. Thin as bones. Astarion can see it clearly— Ellie, on the other hand, might need to squint to make out the outline of hunched shoulders, head sunken down between them, footsteps almost twitching as it shuffles forward on some aimless path—
And then it twists, long neck swiveling towards them.
Not to be mistaken for a bitten creature from Ellie’s own world, hollow red eyes (reflective like an animal’s) gleam in the utter absence of light. A voiceless rumbling in a throat that sounds like wind rattling through broken bits of glass, hoarse from decay— from a lack of use.
Astarion’s hand is quick when it falls to the near-center of Ellie’s chest, pressing her behind him by unyielding degrees....and then, in the image of a scurrying rodent, their harrowing visitor disappears down yet another diverging tunnel. Gone.
And Astarion breathes in stiffened silence. Not a word. Not a sound.
Before he pulls away from her side and moves after it.]
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From the way he's stiff against her, she can tell that this thing means something to Astarion. Something personal. He pushes her back and away, falling into his protectiveness. He's always protective to some degree, but moreso when things strike close to him.
Honed by years and years of deferring to greater experience, Ellie goes silent and still -- and when Astarion pulls away to pursue the thing, she doesn't hesitate.
Ellie tears after him.
He can't be upset. He's the one who told her to stay close.]
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It’s a rushing pace he's set, hurried and thoughtless, stony tunnels giving way to polished flooring and blood red carpet with every passing stride, and though it’s strange, his mind doesn’t give it even the slightest thought: he’s too focused on the shade from his past— the gaunt, enfeebled husk of a spawn scurrying just out of view (though it can’t be, it can’t be) down into—
Into...
He stops once he reaches the bottom of a grand stairwell (for that’s what the narrow path he’d traversed has become), boot to the plush weave of thick carpeting that sprawls almost from wall to wall, gilded and incomparably made. High ceilings, stale air— a startlingly grand entryway gone dark aside from the flickering burn of countless candles interspersed throughout, their orange glow barely carving out blots of light in deeper patches of darkness. It smells of spilled wine. It smells of iron.
No, it reeks of it.
And he knows— he would always know— without looking, exactly where he is.
Home.
His heart stops. A sickening, nauseating lurch beneath his ribs. Frozen in terrified shock, he half leans back on his own heel— no, he does, turning around so abruptly he grabs hold of Ellie, a hurried press of one hand to her arm, the fingers of the other fit across his lips in a shushing gesture, air hissed faintly between his teeth.
Don’t speak. Don’t say a word.
If they’re quick enough, if they hurry...]
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She's seeing the room as he's seen it, smelling it as he smelled it.
Ellie doesn't have to be tapped into Astarion's emotions to see the shuddering lurch of deeper shadows that is his shoulder, the way he stiffens and stops, turns and grabs her. She knows she'll bruise, but doesn't feel it. She's silent as he claps a hand over her mouth.
Her eyes go dark, hard, glittering. Slowly, she nods. His terror, more than anything, is what convinces her.
This isn't real. It's definitely not real.
She hopes.
Ellie reaches up, wraps her fingers securely around his wrist, and gives him a soft squeeze. Blue light crawls up and through her eyes, and between one breath and the absence of Ellie's next, they disappear.
She's there, though. By her warmth, if not her breath. Her hands on him. Stay close, she said. She squeezes his hand, gently.
It won't last.]
no subject
He can feel her warmth, his hand slipping from her mouth to settle just across her shoulder instead, grip looser and lighter in trusting ease: they’ll be all right, so long as they're at one another's side. Whatever this nightmare is (not real, it can’t be real— not with her held tangibly between his fingertips) it’ll pass. And they’ll leave. They’ll find their way out.
They’ve done it before.
(But oh, before wasn’t in the Crossroads, was it? Connected to the Fade. Connected to the very thing that brought them to this world.
Just how tight is that hold?)
His fingers twitch. A passing pang of fear.
It comes and goes before he moves to urge her back up the stairwell as behind them, the softer pad of disjointed footsteps resumes again: that shuffling shadow of a vampire spawn continuing its own aimless pathing, oblivious as it roams in the gaps between grand tables set with wine. With glistening, pristine food. An offered paradise for no one and nothing, laid out in a space too empty. Too quiet.
Astarion remembers it all perfectly.
Back. Back. Slow steps, ushering her along at his side, and—
'Astarion.'
Shattering, the sound of that voice. Commanding in a way that seems to echo off towering walls, amplified in digging underneath their skin. Like nails. Like knives. Cutting the instinct to run as easily as twine— and Astarion falls prey to it completely.
Easily.
Because somewhere in the pitch dark shadows that line this grand backdrop stands the hateful body of his master, tangibly seething even without any amount of visibility. Without an expression to mark or a body to note. Just a voice, and that’s all it takes.
He fears him more than any amount of trust might subdue.]
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She touches him back, her hands steady because they can't see each other, but she can feel how tense he is, hear the catch in his breath. They can go back. They can get out. She will follow his lead and take his orders-
And then it all comes tumbling down.
It's an unfamiliar voice, with the cadence of a nightmare. It scrapes inside her, a dull strange pain she doesn't know how to make heads or tails of. But for Astarion, it's familiar. She can feel it in the way he stills, freezing like a rabbit hoping desperately that the predator won't see it.
It makes her angry. Makes her protective. And she keeps hold of his arm, reaches out to wrap her other arm around him, using the movement of her body to urge him. She holds her breath, lungs screaming.
Move.
What she doesn't know, is if he can.]
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Nothing. Nothing.
She’s not for you.
But his body is leaden. His heart pounding in his ears, in the back of his throat, sick with dread right down to the marrow of his bones. After nothing but a breath of freedom, after only a glimpse of fleeting relief, he can feel his clawed fingers grasping yet again: that horrid, constant weight around his neck (around both of their necks, now, shared as this nightmare is), ringing sharply in his ears, locking down his body in every conceivable sense. He can’t let go of her, no matter how he tries. He—
How. How did Cazador know.
The air is choking. Thin. She tries to pull the both of them towards freedom and he— in turn stays painfully still: dragging back against her hold. No. No, don’t move, Ellie. If you stay where you are, there’s a chance he might not notice you.
It’s a fleeting hope.
Because when he twists his attention towards the sound of that voice, there he is, stepping out of the very shadows as though they were his flesh, his skin and sinew— tall and inhumanly cast, pale as death with eyes of hateful crimson, glittering as keenly as his fangs: Cazador himself, just as Astarion remembers him.
(And in memory, he is a harrowing thing. Larger, grander, commanding in the surest sense.)
'So long from my side, have you forgotten your place, boy. Bring her to me— now.'
And to that tune, Astarion’s hold turns in to a vice grip. Into iron. Adamantine. Unbreakable. He doesn’t want this— but he never has. It isn’t a matter of choice when he moves down towards the base of the stairwell rather than back the way they’d come.
When he starts to drag her with him.]
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Astarion's fear infects her, and her lungs burn with the way her pulse throbs in his grip, rabbit quick and life-hot.
She keeps it together, though. Until he starts to drag her.]
No-
[It's a gasp, and it shatters the hold the magic has on them, the invisibility cutting to ruined ribbons and leaving them vulnerable. Ellie digs in her heels, twists, fights.]
No- Nonono, don't. Astarion. Astarion!
[Her voice breaks with very real fear, without the anger that would be there to protect her from it. Because she can't be angry with him. Not with him.]
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Like the haze of functioning purely on instinct alone— on habit and routine, the seizing of his mind as it severs cleanly from the world around him— some part of him shuts down. Pulls away from the reality of his own actions, magic ebbing in the air. Scattering like dust.
After all, what choice does he have? None. None at all.
He never has.
It was all a dream. A dream of a dream, that blissful little flicker of a blink where he'd felt soft hands resting light against his temples, coasting through his curls. Warmth by way of a settled lap in dark places, and words so low-spoken he can hardly remember what it all sounded like, now. His master's voice gone. A fantasy in which someone had meant something to him, dear as she was.
(Don’t, he begs, his eyes filled with tears, I love you, don’t, while Astarion watches on with an impassive stare; Astarion please, and her voice is a knife beneath his skin as it breaks; Don’t, don’t, don’t—)
He has done this so many times before.
The air is filled with miasmic fear. The floor feels like nausea. Like dread itself. A yawning pit that once reached, there’s no coming back from. A black hole ready to swallow Ellie whole if only by way of damning gravity. A feeling, rather than anything truly looming beyond the cloaked figure of Astarion's own sire. The distant sound of screaming, hoarse-throated and likely bloody. Three steps away. Two. One. Cazador’s stare like seething embers, narrowed and unspeakably hungry. Expectant in the way that he always was.
But he knows Ellie's voice too well to let old memories eclipse her completely. She sounds, in her panic, so different compared to all the prey he'd ever snared before in countless years, and there, with his hold across her still as shackling as iron (with cruel claws only a few inches away) Astarion yanks her back into his arms, overlong fangs bared at the only law he'd ever known.
At Cazador himself.
No. No— this isn’t real.
It can’t be. If it was, he wouldn’t be able to fight back.]
Quickly—
[He shoves her ahead of him, up towards the top of the stairwell, away from the now outraged figure doubtlessly seething at his back.]
Back the way we came— run!! [He doesn't care if this is a nightmare or reality itself; their only chance is to flee, to get away from the heart of this hell— or to make sure that if nothing else, she can.]
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Ellie struggles in her panic, in her hurt, and in her hope, and for a moment, just a moment, she thinks the hold might be total. That he might feed her to the beast. That there is no hope to break free. She remembers the reaction when Ellie brought up killing Cazador. Casually, cruelly, like it was something easy, and how his spitting reply had been out of fear for her.
She still remembers, word for word. I'll be the one to kill you.
And it's the only reason she can bear to do as he says now.
Still, she stumbles, eyes wide in pain and anger and disbelief, breaking on the idea of leaving him behind and at the mercy of this nightmare. Only the knowledge that her presence will make it worse is what breaks the spell.
When he tells her to run, she does. She runs like hell itself is on her heels, pounding up the stairs -- and as she does, Gold takes her. The light shines through her eyes, winds itself around her limbs, pressing her to inhuman speed.
And at the top of the stairs, she holds her breath, disappearing into the pale green light of the Fade.
Invisible, she turns.
She knows, she knows. And she knows she won't miss. The magic won't let her. The bow is in her hand, the hatred carving itself across her face like a thing alive, for all that she's unseen.
The magic will ensure she hits exactly what she wants to hit, no matter what orders Cazador gives. She fires, and in the dream, it sounds like a gun.]
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If he’s slower, if he’s trapped, if he’s lost to this nightmare, it won’t matter half as much as her escape in this very moment (he’ll find his own way, in time— in one year or a thousand, in anguish or endless determination, he’ll rip free via tooth and claw alike, without a shadow of a doubt).
And then something cuts past him.
A blaze of golden light, searing as it passes, displacing gravity itself (faint tinkling like the sound of broken glass ringing in his ears, the surreal feeling of his curls twisting in its wake, lighter than the air that surrounds them) and then a pop-snap as it collides brutally with the ruinous shadow at his back (he turns too slowly to see the exact moment of impact, only by the time he’s whirled around on his heel does he catch sight of a fear spirit— still partially cloaked in the skin of his master— thrashing wildly in howling anguish), a prelude to the pooling spread of reality: that nightmarish backdrop surrounding them splintering in breaking fragments, giving way to the stony tunnels from before.
Astarion perched along a steep slope, and at its rise, Ellie.]
Ellie—
[How?
No, it doesn’t matter. He’s at her side in an instant, a few long-legged strides before he yanks her back into his arms, clutching her to his chest in brittle relief.
Gods.
Gods, he’d thought he lost her.]
Of course it was a damned spirit.
[Of course.]
How could I have been so bloody stupid to think...
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And still, he'd fought it.
Ellie loses her breath as they collide, and she squeezes him just as hard, her bow still in her hand across his back.
There's an inkling, just a flicker of surprise that he isn't angry with her, before she realizes that instead, he's angry with himself.]
Don't start that shit.
[Her voice is a little muffled by his shoulder, and she hugs him harder. There's a fine trembling in her hands, all relief and lingering protective rage.]
You thought it was real. You fought it anyway.
[Ellie pulls back enough to see his face, to show that she means it.]
We're alive.
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To the one thing he'll never stop fearing, not in a thousand years.]
Cazador’s control wouldn’t have allowed me the chance to do anything but hand you to him on a silver platter. [Understand that, Ellie. Recognize it, please.
His hands across her cheeks, lifting her eyeline by force for a single moment.]
If that ever happens again, you don’t beg me for help, understand?
[No, not clear enough. Try again.]
You don’t shoot him.
You shoot me.
[The edge of his thumb scuffing just for a moment with such weighted determination in his stare— and then it breaks. Just a bit. Just as it always does, with him, softening the blow of all sincerity.]
....preferably not fatally. Or somewhere that can’t be healed. Think above the belt.
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That Astarion is so very reasonable about it is just salt in the wound.]
You don't know that.
[It comes out almost petulant, angry as the rest of her. Like she's groping for some possible, stupid way to be right. She knows that he's trying to protect her, but leaving him to it, escaping herself- it's impossible. So is turning her attacks on him, even if it's just to wound. She knows he's trying to soften the blow, to protect her.
All the more, it makes her show her teeth.]
What if you could resist him? Like you just did?
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[Sharp. Keyed up, yet so far from livid, just— not of a mind to entertain hypotheticals that feel so much like pure fantasy to his overtaxed mind, grip on her that much steadier for it.] But that isn’t how it works. And you wouldn’t say anything different if our places were swapped, so don’t bother lying to me now.
You’re not a child. This isn’t a game.
[Each word forced through the edges of his fangs.]
So don’t.
Don’t make me do to you what I’ve done to thousands of other fools. I—
[his voice cuts off there, a half-step away from splintering.]
Please.
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[Ellie falls silent, all the words she could say, all the arguments she could make, dying on her tongue as he cups her face, as she realizes where he is, just how scared he is. Her breathing stutters, the corner of her mouth twitching, before the fight goes out of her, and she lifts both her hands to put them over the back of his, bowing her head until their foreheads touch.]
I can't leave you there.
[It's very quiet, hardly more than a whisper. What's the other option? What option can she make?]
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[What else can he say? 'Yes, you can', pretty and bolstering and oh-so-selfless— no, that’s not for him. It never has been.
Her hands wrapped around his, foreheads pressed together still, there’s nothing in this midpoint between reality and the hypothetical that truly matters. Nothing to plan for the way they might want to in some vain attempt to soothe themselves. It’s foolish. Pointless.
(He doesn’t want to be left behind; he doesn’t want to kill her; hoping for a third option is a waste of everything they have left in them to give, now.)]
We’d better hope he never actually turns up here, then.
[Bitter as bile, that joke. Black and bleak— and also the truth, too.
It comes before the lightest huff. The smallest laugh.
An equally diminutive kiss to her forehead as he draws back.]
Come on. I want out of this place. Sooner, rather than later— before yet another spirit gets any miserable ideas.
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[Nothing about this is pretty or easy or clean. They aren't those people. She gives him a twitch of a smile, though, at the kiss on her forehead -- he, who touches her so easily when she's spent a lifetime at arm's length, she who tousles his curls when he's used to far more painful things -- and takes a second to drop his hand, to let him go from her.
She wishes she could agree, if only to set his mind at ease. She wishes that she could promise, could swear to him that she'll do as he says. But someone lied to her once, trying to spare her the pain. And the echoes still crash around her like waves, howling like wolfsong.
So instead Ellie clings to his hand for a moment before she lets him drop her hand. The dream may have faded, but the bruises ache, and she's one arrow lighter.]