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"I hope you die screaming," he'd said to Tav.
It was a snarling tangle of words, a sick curdling of emotions that had barely enunciated themselves through bared teeth.
He ran.
And then he came back.
He never thought he would, but he did, haunted by the 7,000 souls, still trapped. Astarion didn't know what he was going to do, but he wanted to walk through those horrible living annals, in reality instead of his nightmares. He wanted to see them again.
Only to discover that they had all been killed. Mostly arrows, a few with throats slit. He'd later learn it was the Gur.
He tried not to look at Sebastian.
One might have expected him to feel like it was all such a waste.
Astarion had at once the crushing weight of 7,000 souls upon him - that it was his fault - and the whisper of absolution that it wasn't.
With the end of the spawn, Cazador's palace was finally empty. Gone. Nothing. Finally, in some imperfect, damnable, but real way...Cazador Szarr, and all the worse-than-death evils and tortures that had happened here...were no more.
In a surprising move, Astarion went to the city. He told those who would be responsible for clearing the bodies what happened, and offered to show the way. (Bringing a token of proof that this horror was real.)
He did this, on the one condition that he could go with them, and point out the body of Sebastian, and have it guaranteed that he would be properly interred.
I hope you die screaming.
Things would have been better if he had ascended. He could have avoided the guilt that sometimes took him by such force, it seized him bodily. That choked the breath from his sleep - if he could have either. Nothing mattered. He didn't matter.
You are a small, pathetic little boy who never amounted to anything.
There was no escape. No helping it. No helping.
Astarion visited Sebastian's grave. To "pay his respects"? Sometimes he felt guilty about even that, but his mind didn't identify that part of the whole of his guilt. He didn't know how it made him feel.
"Why Sebastian," maybe. (Both, why did Sebastian have to die, and why had Astarion picked the memory of him, out of thousands?)
He had fucking felt for Sebastian. That was why.
He couldn't help himself. He couldn't help thinking about the life Sebastian could have had. Should have had. He had fucking deserved that chance, gods damn it all – visions of Sebastian with a loving husband, a cottage outside Baldur's Gate, maybe kids, but most of all, the sun, flooded his mind. The sun. A simple thing, a placid thing.
For a while, Astarion was exactly the husk that Cazador predicted. It wasn't an evil or unfair thing to think that, it just...was.
On his nightly visits to the graveyard, he sometimes saw other people. The city didn't always keep the gates closed and locked at night, for whatever reason. Perhaps there was so much death and despair in Baldur's Gate, they didn't feel they could keep their people from the grave (in more ways than one).
Astarion expected vandals. Grave robbers. But every time he saw someone, it was just a normal mourner, who'd decided to come at night.
They always seemed to feel freer to cry, wail, sob, in the quietude.
There grew a strange sense of life, in all this. Of change and movement. Of life and death as a cycle.
Life moved on in Baldur's Gate.
No wonder Astarion was trapped here in the graveyard, if he was dead.
He visited his own grave, for the first time since he had clawed his way out of it.
Nearly 200 years, and I never came back.
And before he even knew what he was doing, Astarion unsheathed his dagger, and took it to his headstone. He scored lines through his death date, until it was clearly effaced, as well as he could. It didn't feel violent, or angry, not at all.
It just...wasn't true. He wasn't dead. He was alive, even if in some twisted sense, even if in a sense that was out of his control, that had never felt in his control. He was alive.
I hope you die screaming.
He remembered the words. He remembered saying them. He remembered feeling them. It seemed like a long time ago, though the threat of the nautiloid loomed larger and larger, the earthquakes still shaking Baldur's Gate. It actually hadn't been more than a tenday, since Cazador's death.
Astarion found himself – once more not fully understanding his own decisions, not knowing if there was anything for him there – wandering to the little camp outside Rivington. It was empty, of course. It was a full moon. He could still see tatters of cloths, small discarded leavings and litterings. They were signs that life had been here not that long ago, not unlike the traveling circus that had just left.
It was stupid. It was so, so stupid. Why had he come here? Why?
He debated trying to find something to eat, but he wasn't hungry. He had been staying in an abandoned shack somewhere in the Lower City, but who knew how long that would last? How long before the sun encroaching through the boarded-up windows in the day like a poison that he was for now safe from, became a danger? How long before the city, or a gang of thieves, claimed the place?
Before he went back home, he found himself in the graveyard, again. Perhaps there was no why. Perhaps, without being a thrall, without being told what to do...He simply did not know how to be free.
"Astarion..." There was a ghost of a voice behind him at Sebastian's grave.
Gods, now on top of everything else he was hearing things–
Tav.
Before Astarion could react, he was lunged for, and he reached for his dagger, but he froze for some reason. He couldn't think.
Tav was hugging him.
The embrace was hard, a vise of everything that had and hadn't happened over this passage of time.
"I'm sorry, Astarion. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry," Tav cried.
Astarion still couldn't think. He couldn't move. It was surreal, like 200 years had passed since he had seen this person.
"How did you find me?" he finally said.
He wasn't trying to be cold. For centuries he had been numb, and then he had felt, for some fleeting tendays, a warm thaw – and then he was numb, again.
To find the camp, their camp, gone. A ghost.
His chest seized. His mouth opened and shivered and groaned.
Tav didn't let go, in fact held him tighter, "I-I saw it in Baldur's Mouth. The...Cazador's palace. They wrote about you. How you're the hero who killed Cazador Szarr...a-a-and, how Sebastian was laid to rest...here...It said, lots of people have been coming here, who knew...not Sebastian, but others. Now they can grieve. Now they can...they can..."
Astarion was quiet.
"I t-tried to find you, you know. I was worried, but I knew you wouldn't want...to see me..."
The embrace loosened. They threatened to slip away. Astarion gripped Tav like a cliff's edge, and held them fast, as if clinging on for dear life.
"I am happy to see you," Astarion said, tears pricking at the corners of his eyes.
Finally, they let each other go.
It is unclear, in the grand free will of things — quite opposite of the Grand Design — whether Astarion decided to remain on his own that evening, or go to the Elfsong Tavern. There was, however, no question that a certain rogue would be there, on the day, in the almost-flying buttress in the sky, to help take down the Netherbrain. And would make an appearance, six months later, at a small, intimate little gathering, to find that things perhaps do not change much after all.
Even as free will has dominion...
Fate spins along as it should.