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atsadi-shenanigans · 6 months

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Feeding Alligators 11: Murder Buddies

You and Astarion have a chat.

On AO3.

You fumble with your stolen tent for a good thirty minutes until Gale takes pity on you. Though he assembled his with a wave of his hand, and since you’re incapable of the ~mystic cosmic powers~ he possesses, he tries to show you how to rig the thing up by hand. Which means it’s Shadowheart, ultimately, who takes pity on you both and shows y’all how to drive in the stake into the ground to secure the canvas.

“As, yes,” Gale says, totally not wiping sweat from his brow. “I’d forgotten how refreshing manual labor can be. Quite invigorating to get the blood pumping again.”

He’s quick to take a seat next to the fire Lae’zel got going. From being invigorated and all.

You’re not far behind.

Your feet are about to fall off. Your legs shake so bad you don’t sit so much as keel over to land on your ass. The pounding in your skull goes atrocious for a hot second, spiking into nausea, before clearing enough for you to make out Gale telling some story about a “magical misadventure” during his youth.

Shadowheart doesn’t join you. Too busy glaring at Lizard Lady—named Lae’zel. They’ve been making snipes at each other. From what you gather, Shadowheart is real indisposed to Lae’zel, and Lae’zel is generally indisposed to everyone.

Y’all didn’t talk much as y’all got her out of that cage. Everyone boot-scooted out of the area before the demons—called tieflings—came back with friends.

Lae’zel has an accent none of the others share. And Gale said something about “astral raiders” under his breath as she marched to the front of your group (before Shadowheart stopped, declared she wasn’t “following a githyanki”, and the two almost got into a fistfight right then and there).

“Astral” sounds a lot like “inter-dimensional” to you. So you extricate yourself from Gale’s story—sorry, gotta check on the new guy!—and trudge over. Lae’zel has probably the nicest tent here, with a hide rug inside and a comfy looking bedroll set up. It’s also scattered with stuffed heads.

“Hi,” you say.

She regards you with her narrow eyes as she pulls an entire training dummy out of her bag. It’s got tentacles sewn onto its face.

“We, uh, we met on the ship?”

“The useless istik, I am aware,” she says. “So you survived the crash. Perhaps you are not as pathetic as you first appeared.”

Wow, okay. Accurate, but damn.

She keeps on hammering that one. “It would have been more efficient to kill those horned teethlings. Though I suppose one as weak as you would not be capable of such a task. In githyanki culture, you would have been culled from the creche. Your people must be soft. Or perhaps you are not as you seem.”

“Well,” you say. “I’m trying, thank you?”

Her eyes narrow. This close and actually talking to her, and she’s not so much a lizard as a crocodile. There’s the same coldness in her, the same predator shine to her eyes. Best to divert the conversation.

“The way the others are talking, you ain’t from here, right? This world?” you say.

Her spine straightens. Her face is pretty, in a sharp, harsh kind of way. “We githyanki are not bound to the physical realms. We sail the astral seas in pursuit of our ghaik quarry.”

There’s a lot to unpack there, and you legitimately would like the time to sort it out and pick through the details. Buuut…

“Your people have been to other, uh, realms, then? Worlds? Not this one?”

“My people guard and conquer all the realms connected to the astral plane, yes. The noisy ones said you were taken from one such plane. I assume that’s why you came to me with your meaningless chatter.”

“Yeah, sorry. I don’t wanna take up your time, setting up the heads and all. Very aesthetic.” She pulls out a stuffed Squidward face. “Is there a way to get back? Like, at all?”

She pauses. Her expression is still sharp enough to slice, but you think you might, maybe, just a little bit detect the faintest baby softening around her eyes.

“You wish to return to your people,” she says.

“Yes. Very much.”

“I do not know,” she says and curb-stomps your burgeoning hope. “You would have to know the path the nautiloid took, and perhaps find your world alongside it.”

Fuck. Fuck shit fuck no.

Does a nautiloid have some kind of flight data recorder? Can you even access the damned thing if you find it (if you even recognize it)?

You think of the tadpole. Amongst Gale’s ramblings had been something about a hive mind. If you give that nasty thing a nudge, learn how to use it, maybe…

Assuming it doesn’t rip your face a new asshole.

And maybe it’s the wormy bastards and their bullshit psychic powers, or maybe Lae’zel is just really good at reading people. She stops her set up. Gives you what you can only call a scathing glare.

“The only way to save ourselves is to find a githyanki creche. All this prattle will be futile should the ghaik parasite twist our bones and melt our organs and turn us into ghaik ourselves. We have been lucky, far too lucky, that the process has not yet started. But we cannot trust to luck.”

That’s that. You’re maybe three days out from being stolen and brainwormed. According to the others, you should basically be shitting blood right now. But aside from the occasional, crippling headache—and looming mental breakdown; you know that bitch has penciled herself an appointment in your mental calendar—everyone seems to be good?

You turn to watch Gale rake coals out onto cleared dirt to nestle beneath what looks like a cast iron skillet. More sausages. Jesus.

You would literally commit murder (again) for a bottle of ibuprofen and a pepperoni pizza.

***

Speaking of murder.

Almost everyone has tucked in for the night. Or made a show of doing that—you’re pretty sure Shadowheart is going to literally sleep with one eye on Lae’zel, while Lae’zel dismisses sleep entirely as a weakness and seems determined to spend her night sitting crisscross-applesauce and glaring into the night.

Maybe she’s on watch. No one asked you. No one even brought it up to you. That’s probably a bad sign.

You’re sitting next to the fire, poking at the coals with a stick and trying to rub the burning from your eyes. Then Astarion is kneeling right next to you out of fucking nowhere and you startle so bad your stick goes flying.

He watches it arc away into the night with a raised eyebrow. “You throw things a lot, I’m noticing.”

“Jesus fuck,” you whisper shout. “You scared the piss outta me!”

“Apologies,” he says in such a smooth, blatant lie like he wants you to know it. “I forgot human senses aren’t as perceptive. I wasn’t trying to be stealthy.”

Bullshit. This guy is such a fucking weirdo.

“Uh huh,” you say, aiming at amiable and probably failing.

The two of you sit there a moment. A piece of wood collapses into the fire and sends up a cascade of sparks into the sky. They look like a swarm of orange fireflies. The homesickness crashes into you so hard you have to fight the urge to curl in on yourself. Nights with Uncle Randy on his porch, his lanky frame sprawled out over a lawn chair, cigarette flaring red as he took a draw. He’d offer you a beer, which you’d decline (“It takes like piss.” “Well suit yourself and more for me, sug’.”)

He wasn’t close to your dad once they’d gotten older. Had some sort of nasty fight Uncle Randy never talked about (you’ve developed a strong suspicion it had something to do with your mother). But he told you stories he knew about your dad—hunting squirrels, illicit fishing trips, that one time they got chased and bit by a raccoon and the rabies shots they’d needed (“Your gramma was so pissed off. We came back all cryin’ from them first shots and she made us go collect us a switch for our own ass-whoopin’”).

Your family wasn’t traditional. But Uncle Randy still had the stereotypical eagle feather tattoo on his bicep. He didn’t talk about it, much.

“Wa’n’t sump’n t’be proud of,” he’d said one time. “Things’re changin’ now, I guess.”

But you’d caught him mouthing Cherokee words on the porch in the dark, scrolling along a language lesson from the Nation on his ipad.

“So,” Astarion drawls.

Fuck. You’re in another dimension. You blink a couple of times, make sure no water spills down your cheeks.

“I couldn’t help but notice how easily those tieflings left earlier,” he says. He gives you a slow, deliberate once over. “Yet you’re not drenched in blood, so I assume there was no stabbing this time?”

“I don’t know about all that,” you say. “Like I told y’all. I said y’all were monsters coming up after them and they hightailed it outta there.”

“How lucky.”

“I generally am.”

“And the gnome the other day? That was luck?”

You blink. Turn to look at him. “Gnome?”

You hear that word and you think of that old cartoon of those pixie people with beards and pointy, red hats. The guy rode a fox, you think?

“Yes. The gnome you butchered,” he says.

“I thought he was a hobbit?!”

“A what?”

This fucking place. This absolute clusterfuck of a place. The fuck else is there over here? Fucking werewolves?? Do you need to watch for fucking werewolves now???

“I’ll be honest with you,” you say. “I ain’t never hurt somebody like that before and I am in way over my head here. I don’t even know what all happened that day.”

Aside from the murder. Self-defense, absolutely. But you freaked the fuck out and a man—gnome—is dead.

He nods in what a casual glance would label as sympathetic. “I see. Your first time?”

You stare. He’s still wearing that face. But the edges—maybe it’s your hyped-up paranoia here, but it shifts into something…smarmy.

“Yeah, actually,” you say because damned if you’re gonna let some bastard man make fun of you over that. He wants some kind of easy target? Come get some.

You choose: stoic Indian face!

“It happened so quick,” you say. “All the adrenaline, you know.”

You scrutinize him. Try to catch a hint of maliciousness.

But his grin widens and the corner of his eyes crinkle. “It got the best of you, eh? Happens to us all, from time to time. The first one, especially. All that rushing and one tends to fumble. You’ll want to practice your technique for your next round.”

Stoic Indian face is super ineffective!

He pats your arm in a half-hearted “you’re too gross to actually touch” gesture.

Is he…joking with you? Not mean-teasing, but like, murder-buddies-teasing?

“Since we’re talking about that, I got a question for you,” you say. “What’s up with chucking that body at me?”

The shithead actually places a hand on his chest like some kind of southern belle-of-the-ball. “Oh darling, I had to make sure he was dead. You were in such a state.”

You’ve been told you’ve got an intimidating stare. You don’t try to look mean, you just keep everything still and blank and stare at people, and it tends to make them squirm. But that just slides right off this bastard.

“It looked kinda calculated to me,” you say. Because it was.

“I do apologize for that,” smarmy bastard says in smarmy bastard tone. “It happened so quickly. You know how the adrenaline is.”

This bitch!

You almost call him a liar to his face. But sense wrestles back control. You don’t know these people and you have no backup, no safety net. This smarmy-ass, fancy pants fucking albino elf is absolutely messing with you, but he hasn’t pulled a knife (this time). And while he’s hinting at stuff, he’s not actually accusing you of anything (yet).

A test? An introduction? Both?

Maybe you’re as weird to them as they are to you. You’re an unknown entity; unable to communicate until yesterday, unable to use their most basic magic, and no training with weapons. But you did stab a gnome to death, and you freed Lae’zel.

He chose to interrogate you—none of the others have asked, was this an agreed upon plan?—by, what, teasing it out of you?

“Well,” he says. Stands and brushes the dirt off his pants. “It’s been a delight properly making your acquaintance, my dear. Do sleep well.”

You watch him saunter back to his tent. Duck inside. His shadow moves against the candlelight as he settles down.

He doesn’t blow the candle out.

Between him, Lae’zel, the girl named Shadowheart, and Mr. Chatterbox wizard, you’ve collected quite a company of oddballs.

Your headache remembers itself and sinks in to kick at the back of your eyeballs.

Fuckin’ A.

#bg3 #baldur's gate 3 #baldur's gate iii #fanfic #astarion #astarion x tav #it's a goddamn isekai #i'm not sorry #no betas we die like men #demisexual tav #plus size tav #feeding alligators #slow burn

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