Painful Salvation

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"I know when it happened for me, but when did it happen for you?" he asked.

He was lying in bed with Artemis, and they had both quietly awakened together by the soft, golden light teasing its way through the closed curtains. It was one of the most glorious mornings of his life. Even the air smelled of sun. The room was thick with the smell of warmth, and living things, the smell of being alive. Mingled together were smells of earth and nutmeg, joined by a full, musky smell that had the sweetness of ginger in it.

His hand rested on the warm muscles of Artemis' chest. The man's light brown skin was firm and slightly rough, something that fascinated him in ways he couldn't describe, but it set off tingles inside his mind. They were together, and everything was still. Jarlaxle thought he might still be asleep. This seemed the idealized perfection of dreams.

Artemis considered the question. "If you're asking when my trust of you happened, it would have to be when we were inside the tent." He glanced at the drow's face, a lazy amusement dancing within his eyes, lightheartedly daring Jarlaxle to suggest that trust had to have come about somewhat sooner than that, or else Artemis would never have played a part in what happened at the Basadoni Guild.

But Artemis' casual reference didn't bring any memories to the surface. Jarlaxle looked back at him curiously. "Tent?"

Artemis' smile turned wicked. He kissed Jarlaxle on the lips teasingly, savoring their contact and then gently biting the drow's upper lip. "You had succumbed to the crystal shard, and so I had to come to rescue you. When we were running away from Dallabad, I took out a tent in the middle of the desert so that we could rest comfortably." He chuckled, and amended dryly, "That is, so I wouldn't die of heat exhaustion and blood loss."

He saw the light of comprehension enter Jarlaxle's eyes. Jarlaxle remembered now. He settled against his lover and emitted the smallest of sighs. "You healed me." He forestalled Jarlaxle's imminent protest and said, "You didn't have to. You thought of what happened as my treachery. Even when asking questions, you still healed me.

That is more than my father would have done. He would have watched me bleed, watching me slowly die, and would have used those magical daggers you favor so much to torture any information he wanted out of me. Then he would have disposed of me and taken the shard."

"Your father is a madman," Jarlaxle said. "They are incapable of reasoning. Only bringing pain." A slight downward twist of his mouth appeared. His manner seeped regret. "Like that evil crystal. I should never have –"

"You were too good," Artemis interrupted. He smiled, shaking his head in both fondness and exasperation. Jarlaxle looked at him incredulously. "The problem is that you were too good – even at its worst, when it destroyed people left and right, tempted you to kill me, asked you to betray the interests of your own people at Bregan D'aerthe, you still asked it if it would be your ally. And each time, it acquiesced, so it could use you further. You couldn't bring yourself to really control it. I dominated it at the time only because I refused partners. Because I shunned the sort of cooperation you were offering it, if it would only behave accordingly."

He nuzzled Jarlaxle's dark cheek. "But alas, it was only a rock."

He grinned slyly as he wrapped his arms around Jarlaxle, squeezing him closer, and rested his head against the drow's shoulder, eyelids drooping as if he were about to fall back asleep. Despite the fact that as an assassin, Artemis would never have done that. He had very strict directives that he invented for himself, rigid rules to keep himself disciplined.

"I won't make that mistake," the man purred in Jarlaxle's ear. "I'm no rock."

Jarlaxle cleared his throat. He was becoming embarrassed. "Back to the subject at hand," he said. "So, me graciously healing you with the orb is the reason you began trusting me."

"Indeed," Artemis said. He blinked, seeming to become more awake again. "And in addition, may I remind you," he said, holding up an index finger and gesturing, almost poking Jarlaxle's nose, "you could have killed me any time you wanted and taken the crystal shard from me while it was still calling you, but you didn't. You took the time to listen to me, and you even watched me sleep without making any inappropriate actions against me."

He smiled mysteriously. "But then, I knew you wouldn't." He snuggled closer to Jarlaxle, if that was even possible, the drow thought, and rested his head on Jarlaxle's chest, something that the drow mercenary noted he was beginning to be fond of.

Jarlaxle felt that there was much he didn't understand. He could feel himself blushing with embarrassment to be in such an uncertain situation. "And I, my friend, began to trust you when you had several chances to leave me behind in the escape from Dallabad, and yet every time, though I was certainly not in the best shape after being robbed of the source of my addiction, you yanked me along like a lost child until I regained my bearings and was able to escape for myself."

"I couldn't leave you behind," Artemis said, nearly falling asleep again to the sound of Jarlaxle's steady heartbeat. "I liked you too much. It's not often that I like people. Why, the only other one is back at Calimport doing wicked business with spirits and spying at a fine establishment of her own making."

The drow mercenary's eyes narrowed in concentration, shifting through his memories. "Dwahvel," he guessed suddenly, a decisive thrust of his voice.

Artemis was silent for a few moments. Jarlaxle was beginning to fear that he'd somehow given his friend a bout of homesickness, or had hurt his feelings. "Yes," Artemis said. He looked straight ahead, his eyes far away and thoughtful. "Dwahvel." He paused again. Jarlaxle thought he looked almost wistful. "Well, she's better off without me," he said finally. He made a resigned shrug and a sigh.

"Truly," Jarlaxle said, a question in his voice. He looked at his friend, eyes gently probing. "Why don't you come back and visit her. It's not as if we've walked off the face of the earth, you know. We have nothing better to do. Enjoy Life. Isn't that our motto?"

Artemis stirred uncertainly. He'd been gone from Calimport so long that most of what had happened there faded back into fuzzy memories gratefully, dead things at last put to rest in his head. It would be like digging up a graveyard to go back. Too many things that went wrong, too much pain, too many things that reminded him of who he was. Had been. And no longer wished to remain.

He was getting better, the further he traveled away from Calimport. The whole world was not an extension of that one city. Cities and places were all different. Not the same. That was the reasoning that he once thought so limited when he found it in Rai-guy and Kimmuriel. The logic of it would apply just as well to himself.

No, Kimmuriel and Bregan D'aerthe retreated back into the shadows underneath Faerun because they couldn't survive up here. They were too much like fish trying to breathe air. So specialized to Menzoberranzan that they couldn't survive, couldn't hope, when they left their comfortable environment.

Artemis had been down that road himself. How much longer before he would have been stuck to Calimport just as surely as fruit candies too hot in the sun melted into one irregular, gooey shape.

That image brought back fleeting memories of having some of the famous little candies, only to have them spilled in the sand by an older boy who cared nothing for a small, quiet child searching for a place to enjoy respite. He'd been left alone, then, sitting on the street corner with his hands clasped in front of his knees, watching the bright red and orange candies grow glistening warm, and then begin to expand, melting into each other and picking up more sand on the ground.

"You look sad, my friend," Jarlaxle said, his expression poignantly concerned.

"I had thought," Artemis said, "that I could escape my past as a child on the streets." Seemingly, he changed the subject, for he said, his tone lightening into that of near fascination, "For an animal, life is hard, but simple. When one's mother dies before her time, it means doom for the child that she can't protect any longer. Either the animal dies, or it is picked to death by a sibling or a friend, or it is preyed upon by other animals, scavengers, who take and break the weakest because it is the minimal amount of trouble."

His expression changed, hardening. Now he looked Jarlaxle in the eyes. "I did not want to be a baby animal."

"You saw this," Jarlaxle said. "You watched the animals in the streets of Calimport."

"Many times," Artemis said, his demeanor that of assurance.

"It must have been quite shocking for you," Jarlaxle said, and he frowned, looking hard at one of his own memories and gently stroking a lock of Artemis' hair.

"It wasn't really after the rites my father put me through," Artemis said. "It was instructive. I knew my place as an outcast, knew that I was different, parentless, and that as such, no one would accept me. I lived on the edge of society, stealing and hiding in old buildings, too old to be worth the trouble of fixing them.

And I knew I wasn't safe. I saw animals around me, outcasts themselves, who had to fight each other for scraps, sometimes killing each other in the harsh existence that was trying to find a way to live. I was a feral animal, and I fought others keeping that in mind, that it was struggle, a struggle of absolutes that had some fairness to it. He or she would try their best, and I would try my best, and the winner lived for the remainder of the day. Sometimes, if we were unlucky, the next half hour or so. Sometimes, the next week. We could never tell.

I had a certain fondness for other waifs like myself, but I knew that I couldn't let it get in the way. They would kill me as surely as I had to kill them."

Artemis shrugged. "So it was no surprise when I became an assassin. A man merely said that if I wanted to work for it, I could take on stronger challenges, defeat older and more cunning animals. And I did."

The assassin glanced at Jarlaxle. "Until I met you," he said, and his expression was mild. As if he still didn't know what to make of that. "I no longer saw myself as an animal, when you took me underground, and I saw the teeming masses of black skinned bodies inhabiting Menzoberranzan. I came to understand that those were animals, and I was not. They could not think outside of their animal barriers. I could. That meant, increasingly, that I should." He looked down at Jarlaxle's thin body contemplatively, not really seeing it.

Jarlaxle's expression clouded. "Oh. Menzoberranzan." He looked rather as though a beautiful woman had trod on his foot. He didn't want to say anything ungallant, but he was definitely in pain. He couldn't hide it, because Artemis brought down his defenses – to the degree where he couldn't even keep his emotions at a safe distance anymore. He felt as though he were parading them around. It made him feel more nude than walking around without clothing ever had.

"Yes," Artemis said. The assassin looked at him curiously. "What is it?"

"I have something to tell you," Jarlaxle said.

Artemis gave him silent attention.

Jarlaxle knew there was a proper way to start it, but he didn't want to. Nonetheless, it was what he had to do anyway. Nightmares would just come back. Even though he felt fine now, he'd feel worse again later. "You know about my wife," he said.

Artemis raised an eyebrow. His voice was rich with amusement as he said, "You're having an affair?"

"I'm referring to Zulameza. Who killed herself. Because of me."

That silenced Artemis' tongue. Something clicked into place. "You think that you cause people around you to commit suicide."

"Why not?" the drow mercenary said with a bitter laugh. "It's a talent. A blessing from the gods. I surround myself with people who are destined to die."

"Everyone dies," Artemis said. He unconsciously tightened his hand around the hilt of his sword. "It's a constant. One of the first rules to becoming an assassin is remembering that people die anyway, and delivering their sentence prematurely isn't so bad."

Jarlaxle felt near tears. His laugh reflected this. He clutched possessively at Artemis, letting out a shudder with an uncontrollable noise halfway between a sniff and a whimper. "But I need them," he said. He shut his eyes against the sudden assault of all these things he'd been carrying around on his back for so long. His voice became rough with anger. "It's not fair. I need you. I needed them. And they died. All of them. They're not supposed to die before I stop needing them!" Burning assaulted his eyes, and he had to actually will the tears threatening to slither out around his defenses to go away. "And I'm just a selfish old man."

It galled him to hear himself say nonsense about people not being supposed to leave until he didn't need their support. One of the constants of his homeland was people pulling the supports out from under you on cue to do the most damage. Well, this is a lot of damage, alright, one of the many versions of himself said to him in his head. You're going to cry like a baby and then put stock in someone else like a child. Mature drow don't need comforting, especially not by a human who has, as yet, no idea what you're talking about.

"You speak of 'everyone', but in my book, you are hardly qualified to use the word to describe a paltry two people," Artemis said. He saw Jarlaxle tense, and his hands ball into fists, as if he were going to strike at Artemis. The assassin held Jarlaxle down by his black wrists and pinned him to the bed, refusing to be deterred.

Jarlaxle's first response was to think of Zaknafein. The Reverie had stirred up long forgotten memories. Rough, callused hands against his wrists. He struggled madly, panicking, knowing that Artemis wouldn't understand why he was trying to escape, but he had to. If only he hadn't stripped down to the point where he'd taken off his cape of dislocation. He could have slipped away.

"What are you doing?" he hissed.

"Restraining you," Artemis said. He was as calm as if they were having breakfast together and he'd been asked to pass the jam. Jarlaxle suddenly thought, infuriated, that Artemis was always this calm. Always this calm when it came to things that made emotions boil under Jarlaxle's skin, trying to sear their way out and erupt.

Something in Jarlaxle cracked. He felt tears running down his cheeks. It couldn't be real. "Zaknafein," his own voice said. "It's Zaknafein." He couldn't feel his own body. He sobbed helplessly, pathetically, and tears formed and rolled down his face with a force of their own. I couldn't, he thought. I couldn't do such a thing. He felt only emptiness, like he'd been shucked out of his body, confusion, and horror.

Artemis froze, his grip loosening. Zaknafein. The friend that Jarlaxle had mentioned once. The one who'd trained Drizzt Do'Urden. "What about Zaknafein?" he said. His expression was tense as his eyes were fixed on Jarlaxle's.

Jarlaxle didn't try to escape. "I can't tell you," the drow mercenary said, turning away from him and shutting his eyes in agony. A hot poker was tracing its way up his body. His body shook with sobs that he couldn't hear anymore. Guilt felt worse than the two things combined. "I can't, I tell you," he cried. "I don't even know what I'm saying! How can I tell you about anything right now?"

Artemis just stared at him. Then the assassin kissed him on the mouth. They grappled with each other, tossing and turning, churning up the sheets on the bed, hands interlocking. Jarlaxle was half sitting up. Artemis didn't push him back down. He just kept kissing the dark elven mercenary. Artemis felt Jarlaxle slow, the strength in the elf's body receding. The fight seeped out of the dangerous mercenary. The next thing Artemis knew, they were both lying down again, entwined in each other's limbs.

The memory still had a hold on Jarlaxle, invading his senses. He could smell the sharpness of the mold in his sinuses, the bitterness of the extract on his tongue. "I hadn't any choice," the drow mercenary burst out. The feeling of unreality pulled him back under.

Artemis said, "About what? What are you talking about?"

"You wouldn't understand," Jarlaxle said, "you didn't have any childhood friends." His demeanor became anguished. The tears still drying on his face had relieved some of the awful, breaking pressure, but it only gave way to the original feeling that had stripped him down to despair with its razor teeth. "It's the worst thing that could possibly happen. There's nothing worse than someone who you built your entire life on going away."

Then Artemis remembered Jarlaxle's previous comment a few weeks ago about being abandoned by his friend. His gray eyes looked at Jarlaxle searchingly. "He left?"

"He never loved me. How could he?" Jarlaxle turned away, ashamed. "I was only a friend to him. If it came between me and his son, no matter who was the more loyal or deserving –" What am I saying? He felt like throwing up. A moan rose in him. No…Not this again…Not this…Anything but this…

Artemis reached out with gentle hands and caressed Jarlaxle's bare waist. He tried to turn Jarlaxle back towards him. "You were caught between him and his son…" He gathered as much of Jarlaxle's body into his arms as he could. The life Jarlaxle had led when he was a younger captain of his mercenaries had been isolated, and very possibly heartbreakingly lonely, Artemis thought. That sort of isolation could break a person. It had very nearly broken him. In the end, he'd had to turn to someone. He just considered himself lucky that it had been Dwahvel. The kind of suffocation there was in the lives of everyone around you being a game of intrigue was enormous.

He tried to imagine how he could have felt if his relationship with Dwahvel had continued, and he found himself being drawn into a trap where there developed competition between himself and one of Dwahvel's own children for time and affection. An isolated person like him, a person so far beyond the reach of anyone else's comfort, a person like Jarlaxle had been, weaving threads of dependency only to have them cut off on the other side by the only person he considered a friend. Once given a place in their life after everyone else had discarded him, being discarded by the only person left, hurt by the only person that had the power over him to hurt. Simply not being loved.

"I felt for him what I had no right to feel for a man with three children and a Matron Mother as his mistress." Jarlaxle stared numbly at the blank white expanse of a pillow and couldn't remember for the life of him what the object was. When he blinked, more tears welled up and fell, disappearing into the pale fabric. "I was sorry." A tremor passed through him. "It was my fault."

"For…"

The drow curled up, crumpling in humiliation. "I should never have felt anything at all. He did not promise me anything, and if he had, we were drow, he would have been lying. He owed me nothing, and I owed him much. Yet I persisted to borrow from him what I had no right to borrow until the day he died."

Artemis waited for him to say more. He realized that his interruptions weren't helping his companion; they were slowing Jarlaxle and making his progress more painful.

"I borrowed life from him. Whenever I had rightfully deserved to be killed, it was him that spared me and allowed me another chance to live. Scraping back to my feet at his expense. It was wrong."

"You only feel so because you are drow and your people don't have anyone to rely on," Artemis said. He stroked the back of Jarlaxle's head. "But you must have known that the philosophy of your people was wrong, for you built your entire organization on using the combined strength of people to help each other instead of hindering."

"It wasn't practical," Jarlaxle corrected. "The reason I did it was because the common philosophy of my people isn't practical. What I did was wrong."

"Don't you think that killing people without regard for what they could be capable of if you helped them is wrong?" Artemis said.

Jarlaxle shook his head. "The reason it's wrong is that I wanted something in return. Is that not what your people think? Doing things for reward is not altruism, it is pragmatism, or something worse? Selfishness? That to want, and want something no one is willing to give, to want it more than anything else you crave, even food or water –"

His voice broke. He let out a long, tortured sob, as if someone was trying to pull his intestines out with a hook. He was trying in vain to hide from himself. He was cowering before this thing inside of him, the thing he considered his undoing, the trait that unraveled him and left him at everyone's mercy.

"Please," he said, grasping Artemis' wrist. "Please, my friend, tell me it is wrong, it is a twisted desire." He sobbed helplessly, unable to go on for a moment. Then he pulled himself together enough to cry, "Is it – is it – Wrong, wrong to be adored and desired –" Jarlaxle felt hot and cold at the same time. "It's wrong to need to be needed the way I need to – to matter to someone –"

He writhed in Artemis' arms. "There is nothing I can do to deserve that kind of respect! It is masochistic! It can only hurt me! I cannot make someone desire my company, cannot make them enjoy my presence…" His voice dropped to a whisper. "Cannot make someone assign me importance. I have tried so long and so hard to do so that I feel as though I burst into flames from the sheer friction. To be hated is something I ought to expect, hating myself comes so easily that it must be an emotion attained without thought for those around me."

He closed his eyes. "Oh, deeper and deeper I go into the cavern of the soul, and it is bottomless with a black stain that even I cannot control. What horrors live in this cave." Jarlaxle smiled weakly. "Truly, the further I go, the more deep bat guano I step in, and the worse it smells."

"It's not as bad as all that," Artemis said, looking at him to try and perceive whether or not he truly meant it. The assassin gently laid a hand on his friend's shoulder, and tried again to make Jarlaxle face him. "You exaggerate."

The mercenary said, "Truly, it cannot be an exaggeration, for between a son whose recklessness is a sure sign that he will go down, and drag anyone near down with him, and a friend who has never endangered the man in his entire life, who would never dream of hurting his friend that way, it is quickly that he turns and throws his life away for a boy who will soon die, a lamb in the wilderness of the Underdark."

Artemis tried to sort that one out. Jarlaxle's sentence was hard to follow. However, he believed he knew the gist of it. "You mean that he deserted you."

"I deceived myself," Jarlaxle whispered. He sagged. "I am very good at that. Look at how he laughs and smiles. How much fun he must have, being a survivor, but feeling a dagger twisting inside his guts. How about this next adventure? Maybe he will find a worthy treasure to replace his best friend, make it worthwhile to have lost him –"

He cut himself off and snapped, suddenly changing the subject on Artemis, "- piece of shit best friend." He now seemed angry. "If I were really capable of being anyone's friend, I would have sacrificed my life for Zaknafein's so that he could run off to the Surface with his beautiful baby boy and start life anew. A happy ending! So absurd for a drow's bedtime story! The loose ends tied up! The reclusive, defective character takes his last bow, doing something noble! The audience applauds! Look how they cheer?"

Jarlaxle doubled over, never feeling closer to spewing the contents of his guts all over himself without actually doing it than he felt right now. He felt as though his mind was a spool of thread and someone was slowly unwinding it and pulling it out of his left ear. "Everyone loves a happy ending."

"I don't," Artemis said. He held Jarlaxle closer, kissing him on the temple. "He couldn't have been your friend if he made you feel like this."

"Oh, but he was," Jarlaxle said, with a leer like a court jester. "But I was no friend of his."

"Yes, you were," Artemis said. "You gave him everything you had. That was why you were devastated when he died."

The tears that came welling up from his eyes next felt hot, unhealthy, as if they were searing their way out. Jarlaxle tried to keep his food down. I hate this, he thought inadvertently. Everything gets out of hand. How do I do it? Why do I always do this? You never mourned properly, the voice of reason said. "I couldn't go on," Jarlaxle said. His throat was dry. His voice crackled. "No one…understood. I had to…die." He sagged forward, bowing his head so low that he knew Artemis wouldn't be able to see his face very well.

Then he reverted to his angry state. "I extracted the venom of carnivorous moss. I ate it. It should have killed me, dissolving me from the inside out. Instead, it caused me to throw up, and undid the work I went through to get it from the cave outside the city. And while I was lying there on the cavern floor, and I thought, I was waiting to die. I thought it might still have delayed effect. No one ever lived through ingesting carnivorous moss."

Jarlaxle pounded his fists on the bed. "That was my mistake! I should have eaten the damned glowing things, not extracted their poison! I should have duplicated the same death that comes to commoners every day when they confuse it for benign luminous moss, not emulated it. I lay there, and I recovered. And I couldn't do it again." Hot tears surged forth and raced down his cheeks in twin streaks. "Do you know what it feels like not to die? Do you?" His fists trembled.

Artemis turned him around gently so that they were face to face. Jarlaxle looked into his companion's eyes, and something there silenced him, and turned his tangled emotions to awe. "Yes," Artemis said. "Because you saved me."