“Well shit.” Soft-spoken, blunt as the day is long.
In that sense, maybe they’ve both been taken by surprise.
He focuses instead on the game after a glum look briefly works its way across his sharp features, fanning the stolen card to study it with discretion, and betting the temporary depth of conversational field won’t prompt any card counting on Fenris’ part. At least then it’ll be worth it. He moves to the first branch, raising the height of its value. He can afford to play a little harder.
“I can’t promise to help. It’s hard enough finding my own footing here.” Between the anchor shard, the lack of allies, the war, his own selfish need to play everything safe and to his advantage. A laundry list of troubles, and all of them better than what he’d left behind. “But later, if there’s time. I could always impart a pearl or two of wisdom here or there. Something to get the ball rolling, so to speak.”
“You’re not half so grim as you look, after all. It’d be a pity to waste it.”
Fenris chooses to take this time to brood over it. Why was he so open? Why was he so caught off guard? And the truth of it is, he does not guard himself around Astarion. For all the flashing of teeth, the man is harmless to Fenris.
Still, he has to express skepticism at Astarion's offer. "I already know how to have casual sex and eat expensive food."
"And judging by your enthusiasm, I'd say those two things aren't exactly the height of motivational divinity for you." Also, wow, Fenris. Casual sex is somewhere in your figurative deck and here he is frozen out on the opposite side of the table, keeping his very deft fingers to himself. What an absolute hell he lives in.
No, absolute hell still would've been to remain with Cazador, but this is painful, even by Astarion's usually blithe standards.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he makes a note to visit the harbor tonight. Late tonight. At the hour when inhibitions are at their lowest, and tavern lighting at its dimmest. All this talk is far too much for him otherwise after an already trying week. "What suits one person isn't what suits another. Such is the way of the world, my dear. And much as it pains me to admit, there's far more to living than sex."
Fenris pauses, considering, surprised. He clearly hadn't expected that answer, and isn't that his fault? He'd assumed Astarion was cast in a more simple mold than anticipated.
He dips his head in deference, as close as he'll get to an apology. "Then what do you suggest?"
He hadn’t expected to do this now. In fact he’d expected to be brushed off completely, or snapped at or— anything else. But instead Fenris is staring up at him with those emerald-cast eyes through snowy bangs, and he finds himself weak to it all the same.
Not for lust, or the sharp point of preying instincts, but—
The set of his mouth thins slightly. He opts to fold his hand (just for a moment) in favor of more wine. A great deal more wine.
“I like to start with everything I was deprived. The sort of thing that would make my master’s toes curl with vitriol if only he knew: sunlight, a warm bed, my own space— it's all part of why I’ve been saving so diligently, you see. But I imagine with so much time having passed since jailbreak for you, unlike myself, you’ve already seen to simple creature comforts.”
Gods, he hopes so, otherwise he might actually be concerned about someone else for a change, and that seems like far too much trouble. “So next comes the indulgences. The arts. The matter of fun, in all its forms: drinking, socializing, public entertainment like an opera or some roaming band of mummers with flowers to spare. Maybe a festival or two.”
“And if that fails, consider what calms you, when you’re a disquieted mess.”
"I refuse to be an inverse print of Danarius' hand," Fenris says. He won't do things because Danarius liked them or wouldn't like them. He refuses to let that dead man have any more say over his life. It's part of why he's started, after over ten years, to try and properly taste the wine he hoards. Would Danarius approve or disapprove? It doesn't matter.
"I dislike indulgence. It..." He frowns. "I wish to master myself. That is what calms me."
He could disagree. Claim that lingering within old boundaries only keeps Fenris beholden to his past— but then, who is Astarion to argue? Reflection or no, shattered glass or a mirror left whole will always be shaped by its frame.
Pressing on unbound is all that matters, no matter the form.
For a moment, he isn’t looking at Fenris. For a moment he’s holding his cup of wine and his cards where they’re all laid flat and useless against the table, and he feels very much alone in a way that isn’t freeing. A sickly flicker, like a pulsebeat skipped. Insignificant.
And then he smiles.
“All right. So we start there.” Cup laid down and refilled, one more card placed on a nearby branch without care for its value. “Physical? Mental? Academic, perhaps? I know a great deal, despite what you might think of me.”
Fenris is struck by this... agreeable tone Astarion has taken. He realizes he was expecting mockery. Ten years in Kirkwall, his 'friends', and all was mockery. But that was a bitter time in a bitter city. If such a twisted thing as Kirkwall is capable of healing, it is.
Fenris nods at the word friend.
"Mental," he says, "I am angry; I cannot control my temper, even after all these years. It is why chasing slavers is more productive." It also, he realizes for the first time, hurts.
“Well, I’m no wisened sage, I’m afraid. I can’t work miracles, but— ”
He taps one finger across the edge of a gilded card, thinking.
He’s better suited to cracking through resilience than he is all actual, empathetic perceptions, but there are still patterns to be turned over within his own figurative grasp. Smaller fragments of a larger picture. He thinks on what it was like to see Fenris snapping to in the dark with blood across his blade— how he hadn’t even noticed who it was he’d been defending at first.
“Is it a constant agony, this anger of yours? Does nothing sate it?”
Wood curls beneath that claw, the sound of it vivid in silence, and Astarion wonders if Fenris hears it at all.
“Mm. More difficult, then, something like that.” As if it weren’t already obvious, but it bears stressing when he’s gone through the trouble of extending his hand, so to speak.
If he can help, if there’s even a way to temper that temper, it would likely take time.
He draws a few fingers high, scrubbing one hard across his lower lip— the others pressed against his chin. “I don’t know if I can help without...prying, in a sense. I’d need to know more about you, and I’m not certain that’s something you’ll want to give up lightly.”
A pause, before he adds, careful as thin-edged glass:
“I’m not even certain that you should, knowing what I am.”
Fenris draws the exact number of cards he is supposed to draw, and starts a new branch. "I do not mind questions. And I do trust you, even if you don't trust yourself."
That was the greatest gift Varic and Isabela and even Hawke had given him. Trust, to the feral beast, the slavering animal that he was. That, in many ways, he still is.
“I’m a monster, darling. Sure as any harpy or siren or— whatever you have in this world meant to dash good, decent souls to pieces on uniquely sharp rocks. I don’t think you realize what you’re just giving away here.”
The smile he wears as he lifts his chin and fans his fingers with pride is rueful. Resentful. If Fenris hasn’t grasped it all by now, perhaps it’s better if he gets it outright— and then Astarion’s dropped it entirely: the performance, the dramatics, gathering up his cards and slipping back easily into his seat. Languid. Waving off something dismissive with a spare hand as he eyes his collection of fanned cards.
“But far be it from me to argue, of course.”
With two glasses downed, and the pleasant heat of it coiled against the back of his throat, he’s not going to argue anything at the moment, in fact. He’d always made jokes about alcohol and impaired judgment, but one of the lovelier things about this world is how he can certainly remember what it feels like, now, having the edges of his own prickling borders go soft.
Or maybe that’s just the niceness of real conversation after such a long time away. Hm.
Hard to say.
“We’ll keep it simple to start with. Tell me what it is you think about. Dream about, even. Idle thoughts, passing fancies. Anything of the like.”
"You aren't a demon," Fenris provides. "I'd know on sight."
And then this entire conversation would be done with. But the discussion of dreams catches a cord, and how ironic is that? Fenris isn't one to dwell, however. He taps sharp gauntlet tips against the wood, damaging it further. It is old and dusty and unloved. Every touch is a harm to it.
"Killing them again," he says. He doesn't have to elaborate who them is. "Killing the one I let live. I know it will bring me no peace."
Selling out, as a rule, tends to signal the worst in everything, Astarion finds. But the bit about killing Danarius makes the timeline for that assumption all wrong— so no, it can’t have been the start of Fenris' enslavement, which means she’s not to blame for anything but a third act betrayal by the sound of it.
“She was a slave too, then? His?” That might explain the treachery, he supposes.
"Apparently..." He trails off, brow furrowed. His gauntleted thumb begins to worry a hole in the card he's holding. "I... freed her. I do not remember this. I don't remember anything before-"
He gestures to himself, his markings, and notices he is damaging the cards. He drops them and continues.
"She told me I volunteered for these markings, so she could be freed, along with our... mother." This woman he has never, will never meet, has no memory of. Did she hate him, too?
Ah, selfless sacrifice. The most damning of all sacrifices— and the least satisfying. He watches the card pinch, opens his mouth to say something, and thinks better of it. They’re Fenris’ now. To use or ruin or sell off. He won’t go whinging over seeing them wasted.
Mercifully, maybe, the card’s let go. And he relaxes. Just a touch.
“People are ungrateful.” He breathes it out easily, setting aside his own cards so as not to prompt any sense of obligation to play. Drinking instead suits him, just as fine as conversation. “Bleed for them and they’ll weep, cherish the memory— and then forget it the very next day.”
He wonders if Fenris had expected that before his memory was wiped clean. Perhaps if he’d kept some fragment of it tucked away, the damage wouldn’t run so deep.
“But I don’t understand. If she was free, why was she working for your dearly— sorry, thankfully departed master?”
Now that. That seems much more like a vetted betrayal. A true twisted arc, perfectly suited for any fairy tale or stage-lit drama.
But instead it’s Fenris’ life. And that makes it all the more unfortunate, doesn't it?
Surely there were other mages that could’ve trained her. Surely there were better ventures than allying oneself with the man that’d see your own blood kept locked up like a chained dog.
Astarion is heartless. Cold. But he doubts even he could be so harsh, not without something else bearing down against his neck. And he doesn’t know this woman well enough to picture whether her price was steep...or all too simple.
“Why did you let her go, then?”
This, he asks carefully. Passively. It can’t feel like an intrusion...or a demand.
Yet Fenris is ready to answer all the same. His past is written into his skin; what use is there hiding it? He has always been open about what he was, and why. Some foolish part of himself had always hoped someone would learn from it.
"A friend stopped me," he says. "I... it was the right choice."
The words curl across his tongue, cheshire soft in the sinking light of sunset, making him sound— or perhaps look— all the more like the sort of trickster one is warned away from trusting in storybooks. Even so, there’s no weight on the scales. He isn’t tipping them with bias, not even his own.
“You’re haunted by it all the same. It doesn’t leave you, and it certainly isn’t leaving you any room for peace.” He lets one arm rest across the edge of his chair, dangling listlessly, red eyes focused on Fenris alone.
“Who were they to make that choice for you, mm? What justified it, I wonder.”
Oh not in totality, no, but in the soundness of his own decisions. Too many times it’s far easier to rely on someone else’s logic. Someone else’s morality or reasoning or hope, woefully useless a concept as it is.
Fenris isn’t. It’s a strand of this tangled weave he can safely set aside for now, then.
“Your friend.” The one that had steered him away from the precipice— perhaps the same as the statued heroine? The pirate he speaks so fondly of, or...
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In that sense, maybe they’ve both been taken by surprise.
He focuses instead on the game after a glum look briefly works its way across his sharp features, fanning the stolen card to study it with discretion, and betting the temporary depth of conversational field won’t prompt any card counting on Fenris’ part. At least then it’ll be worth it. He moves to the first branch, raising the height of its value. He can afford to play a little harder.
“I can’t promise to help. It’s hard enough finding my own footing here.” Between the anchor shard, the lack of allies, the war, his own selfish need to play everything safe and to his advantage. A laundry list of troubles, and all of them better than what he’d left behind. “But later, if there’s time. I could always impart a pearl or two of wisdom here or there. Something to get the ball rolling, so to speak.”
“You’re not half so grim as you look, after all. It’d be a pity to waste it.”
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Still, he has to express skepticism at Astarion's offer. "I already know how to have casual sex and eat expensive food."
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No, absolute hell still would've been to remain with Cazador, but this is painful, even by Astarion's usually blithe standards.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he makes a note to visit the harbor tonight. Late tonight. At the hour when inhibitions are at their lowest, and tavern lighting at its dimmest. All this talk is far too much for him otherwise after an already trying week. "What suits one person isn't what suits another. Such is the way of the world, my dear. And much as it pains me to admit, there's far more to living than sex."
"...or food."
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He dips his head in deference, as close as he'll get to an apology. "Then what do you suggest?"
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He hadn’t expected to do this now. In fact he’d expected to be brushed off completely, or snapped at or— anything else. But instead Fenris is staring up at him with those emerald-cast eyes through snowy bangs, and he finds himself weak to it all the same.
Not for lust, or the sharp point of preying instincts, but—
The set of his mouth thins slightly. He opts to fold his hand (just for a moment) in favor of more wine. A great deal more wine.
“I like to start with everything I was deprived. The sort of thing that would make my master’s toes curl with vitriol if only he knew: sunlight, a warm bed, my own space— it's all part of why I’ve been saving so diligently, you see. But I imagine with so much time having passed since jailbreak for you, unlike myself, you’ve already seen to simple creature comforts.”
Gods, he hopes so, otherwise he might actually be concerned about someone else for a change, and that seems like far too much trouble. “So next comes the indulgences. The arts. The matter of fun, in all its forms: drinking, socializing, public entertainment like an opera or some roaming band of mummers with flowers to spare. Maybe a festival or two.”
“And if that fails, consider what calms you, when you’re a disquieted mess.”
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"I dislike indulgence. It..." He frowns. "I wish to master myself. That is what calms me."
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Pressing on unbound is all that matters, no matter the form.
For a moment, he isn’t looking at Fenris. For a moment he’s holding his cup of wine and his cards where they’re all laid flat and useless against the table, and he feels very much alone in a way that isn’t freeing. A sickly flicker, like a pulsebeat skipped. Insignificant.
And then he smiles.
“All right. So we start there.” Cup laid down and refilled, one more card placed on a nearby branch without care for its value. “Physical? Mental? Academic, perhaps? I know a great deal, despite what you might think of me.”
“I’d be willing to share with a friend.”
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Fenris nods at the word friend.
"Mental," he says, "I am angry; I cannot control my temper, even after all these years. It is why chasing slavers is more productive." It also, he realizes for the first time, hurts.
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He taps one finger across the edge of a gilded card, thinking.
He’s better suited to cracking through resilience than he is all actual, empathetic perceptions, but there are still patterns to be turned over within his own figurative grasp. Smaller fragments of a larger picture. He thinks on what it was like to see Fenris snapping to in the dark with blood across his blade— how he hadn’t even noticed who it was he’d been defending at first.
“Is it a constant agony, this anger of yours? Does nothing sate it?”
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"No." He deals a card. His voice is darker. "I can quiet it, at best."
Without meaning to, he thinks of Varania's face.
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“Mm. More difficult, then, something like that.” As if it weren’t already obvious, but it bears stressing when he’s gone through the trouble of extending his hand, so to speak.
If he can help, if there’s even a way to temper that temper, it would likely take time.
He draws a few fingers high, scrubbing one hard across his lower lip— the others pressed against his chin. “I don’t know if I can help without...prying, in a sense. I’d need to know more about you, and I’m not certain that’s something you’ll want to give up lightly.”
A pause, before he adds, careful as thin-edged glass:
“I’m not even certain that you should, knowing what I am.”
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That was the greatest gift Varic and Isabela and even Hawke had given him. Trust, to the feral beast, the slavering animal that he was. That, in many ways, he still is.
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The smile he wears as he lifts his chin and fans his fingers with pride is rueful. Resentful. If Fenris hasn’t grasped it all by now, perhaps it’s better if he gets it outright— and then Astarion’s dropped it entirely: the performance, the dramatics, gathering up his cards and slipping back easily into his seat. Languid. Waving off something dismissive with a spare hand as he eyes his collection of fanned cards.
“But far be it from me to argue, of course.”
With two glasses downed, and the pleasant heat of it coiled against the back of his throat, he’s not going to argue anything at the moment, in fact. He’d always made jokes about alcohol and impaired judgment, but one of the lovelier things about this world is how he can certainly remember what it feels like, now, having the edges of his own prickling borders go soft.
Or maybe that’s just the niceness of real conversation after such a long time away. Hm.
Hard to say.
“We’ll keep it simple to start with. Tell me what it is you think about. Dream about, even. Idle thoughts, passing fancies. Anything of the like.”
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And then this entire conversation would be done with. But the discussion of dreams catches a cord, and how ironic is that? Fenris isn't one to dwell, however. He taps sharp gauntlet tips against the wood, damaging it further. It is old and dusty and unloved. Every touch is a harm to it.
"Killing them again," he says. He doesn't have to elaborate who them is. "Killing the one I let live. I know it will bring me no peace."
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And thank goodness, too. Contracts, quotas, negotiations over mortal souls— no thank you, it all sounds Hellish. Pun entirely intended.
Still, he listens. Forms a branch of his own and lays down another addition, considering everything to the tune of those tapping talons, unbothered.
“Who was it?”
Did they even matter, or was it just the matter of regret?
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It still feels strange to say that. He has a sister. Leto, whoever that was, had a sister. A mage sister.
"She sold me out to Danarius the day I killed him. I almost killed her."
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“She was a slave too, then? His?” That might explain the treachery, he supposes.
Then again, it might not.
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He gestures to himself, his markings, and notices he is damaging the cards. He drops them and continues.
"She told me I volunteered for these markings, so she could be freed, along with our... mother." This woman he has never, will never meet, has no memory of. Did she hate him, too?
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Mercifully, maybe, the card’s let go. And he relaxes. Just a touch.
“People are ungrateful.” He breathes it out easily, setting aside his own cards so as not to prompt any sense of obligation to play. Drinking instead suits him, just as fine as conversation. “Bleed for them and they’ll weep, cherish the memory— and then forget it the very next day.”
He wonders if Fenris had expected that before his memory was wiped clean. Perhaps if he’d kept some fragment of it tucked away, the damage wouldn’t run so deep.
“But I don’t understand. If she was free, why was she working for your dearly— sorry, thankfully departed master?”
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A dire insult, to hear him say it so.
"Danarius had promised to train her."
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But instead it’s Fenris’ life. And that makes it all the more unfortunate, doesn't it?
Surely there were other mages that could’ve trained her. Surely there were better ventures than allying oneself with the man that’d see your own blood kept locked up like a chained dog.
Astarion is heartless. Cold. But he doubts even he could be so harsh, not without something else bearing down against his neck. And he doesn’t know this woman well enough to picture whether her price was steep...or all too simple.
“Why did you let her go, then?”
This, he asks carefully. Passively. It can’t feel like an intrusion...or a demand.
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"A friend stopped me," he says. "I... it was the right choice."
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The words curl across his tongue, cheshire soft in the sinking light of sunset, making him sound— or perhaps look— all the more like the sort of trickster one is warned away from trusting in storybooks. Even so, there’s no weight on the scales. He isn’t tipping them with bias, not even his own.
“You’re haunted by it all the same. It doesn’t leave you, and it certainly isn’t leaving you any room for peace.” He lets one arm rest across the edge of his chair, dangling listlessly, red eyes focused on Fenris alone.
“Who were they to make that choice for you, mm? What justified it, I wonder.”
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"If I ever wanted to know more about my forgotten past, I could seek her out. I like having the option." Even if he doubts he will ever, ever take it.
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Oh not in totality, no, but in the soundness of his own decisions. Too many times it’s far easier to rely on someone else’s logic. Someone else’s morality or reasoning or hope, woefully useless a concept as it is.
Fenris isn’t. It’s a strand of this tangled weave he can safely set aside for now, then.
“Your friend.” The one that had steered him away from the precipice— perhaps the same as the statued heroine? The pirate he speaks so fondly of, or...
“Do you dwell on them, too?”
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