[ The answer snaps him to attention, eyes startled wide. It’s — teasing, surely, the way Armand is with mortal playthings. Gale makes for an easy mark in this, he knows, easily flustered, touched by the smallest kindnesses, reactive where others hold to nonchalance. To wit: Armand wounds him with the effortless skill of a hand cutting through water. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say he slips his fingers inside old injuries, prying scarred over skin open anew and widening the gash. ]
I didn’t call to her. [ a mild correction, resisting at first. ] She found me.
[ She sent Elminster, he recalls. Peering from around his mother’s skirts, blinking shyly up at the stranger that Morena hesitated to allow inside. Slinging a fireball into the frostroses that afternoon, intent to impress, and crying over their loss. Plucked from obscurity by her perfect hand and then cast out for his follies, the slap still ringing in his cheek. The orb is merely the physical manifestation of a long-gestating flaw, ruinous and ever-advancing on his person. ]
[ plaintive, ] You’ve no idea what you’re offering.
[ Because Armand isn’t himself, webbed fingers cool on his skin, palm wetting his beard. His eyes flit lower, Armand’s nakedness and strangeness equally affecting. Gale once posited that all the magic in play has had an influencing effect, from the mistletoe that tempted Armand to the ReSculpt that changed Astarion. And it’s impossible not to think of Astarion, his pale hand in place of Armand’s, on the reverb of the prettiest lie. Not I waited forever on his mind, but I waited two hundred years for you.
Clarity follows. He carries the flowers with him in his haste, a pang at the thought of having plucked and killed them like the roses, stems caught between his fingers and Armand’s slick wrist. ]
I won’t deny what you’ve glimpsed. [ In his actions, the embers of attraction when they spoke at the faire, or the labyrinthine halls of his mind, open to Armand’s roving hands despite his initial protestation. It’s felt less invasive since, when he’s told Armand much and more of himself in the intervening months. ] But there is only one path that leads beyond the anguish of living [ Dying. ] and it carries all who traverse it over a jagged ledge.
cw refs to grooming, suicidal ideation
I didn’t call to her. [ a mild correction, resisting at first. ] She found me.
[ She sent Elminster, he recalls. Peering from around his mother’s skirts, blinking shyly up at the stranger that Morena hesitated to allow inside. Slinging a fireball into the frostroses that afternoon, intent to impress, and crying over their loss. Plucked from obscurity by her perfect hand and then cast out for his follies, the slap still ringing in his cheek. The orb is merely the physical manifestation of a long-gestating flaw, ruinous and ever-advancing on his person. ]
[ plaintive, ] You’ve no idea what you’re offering.
[ Because Armand isn’t himself, webbed fingers cool on his skin, palm wetting his beard. His eyes flit lower, Armand’s nakedness and strangeness equally affecting. Gale once posited that all the magic in play has had an influencing effect, from the mistletoe that tempted Armand to the ReSculpt that changed Astarion. And it’s impossible not to think of Astarion, his pale hand in place of Armand’s, on the reverb of the prettiest lie. Not I waited forever on his mind, but I waited two hundred years for you.
Clarity follows. He carries the flowers with him in his haste, a pang at the thought of having plucked and killed them like the roses, stems caught between his fingers and Armand’s slick wrist. ]
I won’t deny what you’ve glimpsed. [ In his actions, the embers of attraction when they spoke at the faire, or the labyrinthine halls of his mind, open to Armand’s roving hands despite his initial protestation. It’s felt less invasive since, when he’s told Armand much and more of himself in the intervening months. ] But there is only one path that leads beyond the anguish of living [ Dying. ] and it carries all who traverse it over a jagged ledge.