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Summary
When he wakes, he is on a beach, gold, looking up at the sun.
Ah, he thinks, distant. I'm dreaming.
Astarion is never quite sure, until the moment Cazador lies dead before him, whether this entire adventure is anything more than an extremely vivid hallucination.
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Excerpt:
Astarion hesitates. This… isn't what he does. The position of comforter falls to those who are comfortable, that inspire comfort; he is bony and jagged and acrimonious with a flair he's worked hard to perfect. He is not the choice people make.
But there's no one else here.
Astarion licks his lips. Adjusts his stance. Pulls back the teeth, just for a moment, to be what he perhaps wished for on every shattered evening, and no one would provide.
"He's not dead," he says, soft and unused to it. "You've done the impossible before; you can rescue him."
Wyll's laugh bubbles up his throat like venom. "If he's alive, it's for a reason," he spits. "They'll– torture him, or force his signature, or shove one of these bloody parasites in his skull. I can't save him from that."
The words sound wrong, coming from Wyll's perfectly heroic lips—like he's a ventriloquist's puppet with someone else behind the strings. The dream, speaking through its pawn.
Another crack. A break in the picturebook hero, paper cut away for flesh beneath; it's trying to make him a man, no longer just a myth. Trying to make him a person.
It is an odd thing, this dream. To bring a hunter as low as what he kills.
"Maybe," Astarion says, noncommittal, because Wyll's a logical man—he wouldn't appreciate empty platitudes about finding his father skipping in daisy fields. "But we're alive, aren't we? No fate is inescapable."
...
...and he's drifting further than ever before; whoever is saying that, it isn't Wyll. The difference is subtle, stitched together from old habits and well-formed patterns. But like recognizes like, and Astarion knows that the man he's talking to now is not the one he has sat across the campfire and laughed at foolish stories with.
...
It is an old, pained strategy.
A familiar one.
Astarion's nails bite into his palms.
"Am I speaking to the Blade of Frontiers?"
Wyll's brows knit together. He blinks, tugged back to his body, enough he can glance over with a frown. "Yes?"
"You've quite an amount of titles," Astarion says, delicately. Spawn. Whore. Pet. Dog. "The Blade of Frontiers, son of Duke Ravengard, hero of the Grove. I don't suppose Wyll is anywhere still in there, is he?"
The man looks at him, furrowed. There's a set to his jaw that wasn't there before, in face of a new target, any form of distraction. Of something he gets to batter his fists against that isn't himself.
"What kind of question is that?" Wyll asks, incredulous.
Defensive.
True, then.
"Just a curiosity," Astarion says. "Because the Blade doesn't have any ties to your father. No reason to save him."
Wyll's eyes narrow to slits. "Are you suggesting I abandon him?"
Astarion swallows. Faces him like he would a beast, palms open in his lap, poise unthreatening. "No," he says, because unfortunately, he isn't. Wyll is far too much a hero to ever let a life slip past when he has even the faintest motion he could save them, and certainly not for his own flesh and blood. "I'm just asking why you want to save him."
"I'm his son," Wyll snaps, the first time he has ever sounded angry—or, he would sound angry, and he would look it, with fists clenched and brows tight.
But Astarion has had years to piece through his own fragile anger, and it never hides the fear underneath.
"You are yourself," Astarion says, and turns away. Looks over their surroundings, to the rubble they've made camp in, the sprawled slump of buildings hallowed and emptied by time. "Surely that means something."
Wyll slumps. Goes boneless, eyes fluttering closed. The ridges on his cheeks are stark in the evening light, horns dragging his head down until his chin presses to his chest. Tension bleeds away for a flood of resignation.
"My father wouldn't abandon me," Wyll murmurs, which is a fragile covering over the truth that he did. "I have to save him."
"You want to save him," Astarion corrects.
Wyll frowns. Tilts his head to the side. Puzzles at the difference.
"You do not owe anyone pride," he says, and it comes out painfully honest. "Go save him, if you will; but save him because you want to save him. Not because the hero of the Sword Cost thinks he has to, not because the son of a duke thinks he should. But because Wyll has decided it."
The man next to him goes very still.
"It must be a choice," Astarion murmurs. There is something aching and hollow in his chest. "It must be your choice. And I think you've been keeping yourself from making choices for a long time, now."
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Bookmark Notes:
wow. (positive)
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