TW: Suicide mention, dubcon throughout.

I've caught the BG3 brainrot and it's centered around Ascended!Astarion and Dark Urge in any form. This one is Ascended!Astarion whose wounds festered without Tav around, & a Tav who had resisted the Urge when questioning the role of their own will in the equation.

If I slow down to edit I'll never post anything bc I'm critical. So I'm posting and coming back to edit later. Sorry. This one's been edited a bit now.


Who took my fucking boots?

Tav's thoughts ground out against slush, bare fists pressed to cold, unforgiving, unfinished stone. So far the enclosure had resisted all efforts to determine its purpose, and how to escape. On all other sides was a slippery fabric she'd already lost purchase against twice, slamming knees into the ceiling with a stream of curses. No lights, buttons, switches, levers, or sigils. Just heavy, dense rock.

Stop. Think. Try something else.

A spark from pale fingertips cast silk seams in weak, warm light. Desperation squeezed its fists and wrung the remaining power out from her core. Unstable telekinesis wedged the slab aloft in a stuttering, terrible grinding to leave just enough space for the half-elf to squeeze through.

The room swam in the light of unnatural sconces. Dank air, murals composed of shadows and dead-language carvings. A tomb? Something was off, but she knew at least one thing: tombs meant treasure.

Her legs held up for all of a half-second.

Tav closed her eyes, allowing a moment's intimacy with the cool floor. Echoes of the icy harbor churn she'd surrendered to mere moments ago still held fast, ghosts of undercurrents threatening to trick her limbs if she didn't touch them against something very real.

The Harbor?

Behind her lids the water was still on fire against a sulphuric yellow sky. Distant heat radiated black where brine from fallen illithid vessels coated the sea's surface. Slowly, evidence of their victory was sinking to the depths for good.

They'd survived. They'd won. Everyone who mattered went ahead to rest, to prepare, to celebrate their victory. The city would be rebuilt. Her friends had full futures in The Gate, or otherwise promises of changing the war tides in Avernus and to keep watch on the new lord promising a rapid ascent.

Tav was alone at last. The work was done. She'd done all she could, after all, and all she needed to.

The noose of her Father's ire above, and the water below. The weight of the dagger in her palm. The decision.

She should have been free. She thought she could escape her fate by taking it into her own hands. Yet, here she was, dry and worlds emptier than before. Foolish.

Air fought for passage past acid and the twisting in her gut. Breath raked ichor and old blood from her ribs. When she thought she finally had it under seal, she turned to the side and fully retched.

Finally, the room was still.

Wiping her mouth on her sleeve, she anchored herself using the side of the stone coffin. Still weak. It wasn't the dizziness alone. Maybe a bit of illness had something to do with it, but this was the kind of weakness you got from being sick for a long time. She'd atrophied.

The murals became a bit clearer, now that things had stopped moving so much. Its style was familiar yet far from the level of decay in any tomb she'd been in. A masive chest at one end of the room, and an empty basin at the other. This tomb emulated the grandiosity of ancients, but was too empty, too well maintained. And, it had no door or gate.

When she looked to where she'd escaped from, she jumped. From the lid emerged another body. The flicker of shadows from the braziers seemed to make it move, but she now saw it for what it was: a sarcophagus.

Rather than an entity at peace like in the graveyards they'd ventured through, the carving writhed from the marble, limbs tangled in its own gown. A marble ghost in agony—

No, not quite. The tilt of the chin skyward, parting of the mouth. Like some kind of divine ecstasy.

Discomfort at stumbling across something potentially private overshadowed the recognition needling the back of her mind. The figure's head wrenched to the side, features sanitized in the way that reverential statues were. The marks on the neck were freshly swollen. Tav reached to where her own puncture wounds had long healed over, attention turning to the forehead where impressions of gem-like scales had been carved into the figure's pleasure knitted brow.

"Oh."

Was this supposed to be..?

OCTAVIA

Like a switch, she soured from wonder into full criticism. Nipples tastefully peaked from beneath draping fabric, body twisted in a back-breaking nymph-fleeing-on-a-tapestry-like maneuver she'd never be dexterous enough to emulate in real life. Creative liberties were taken.

While she admired, the dark fissures at the corner of the room lengthened and warped from a fine mist. He'd really been looking forward to seeing her face. He knew the moment when she was awake, but given the arrangements needed and the stakes of the evening ahead, it was difficult even for him to shake from his obligations to rush to her side. Not that he should rush to anything.

"You don't approve?"

"Fuck no." Tav snarled, turning in the direction of the voice. Wrong way. The space behind was as empty as before. He was having his fun.

Now all the dramatic and twisted 'mourning' flair that went into arranging this place made sense.

"How heartless. Good masons put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears getting it to my exacting specifications." Astarion stood separated from her by the sarcophagus. Smug, beautiful, and a few thread count upgrades since the last time she saw him. His palm rest on the lid, reminding her of its immodesty. "Well, mostly blood." His mock concern with her opinion gave way to reminiscing fondly over a good meal.

Unbidden images came of a halfling artist turned slave cowering under a crimson gaze while being critiqued over something lethally trivial. Their hands trembling, fighting to not slip the chisel lest it find its way into them instead of their medium. Visuals that would delight her under different circumstances.

Control yourself.

Weird that he could still do that without anything connecting them like the tadpole. He'd pushed memories of her into them a bit differently than he had of the artist just now.

"Your memories are to do with as you wish, but if you were going to share mental images of my body as reference material," she punctuated with a sarcastic jacking-off motion, "You could have at least had them pay more attention to my face."

"Oh, come now. It looks just like you. Well, I suppose I could have let them have a peek at the real thing— your corpse was keeping rather well."

"Aw, thanks. And you don't look a day over two-hundred-fifty."

His face distorted with fury, but he swallowed it fast. Boy, it must have burned on the way down. He thought he was above her to let such jabs merit a reaction, now? Funny. He'd grown in that way, at least, or maybe it was immature to try to stuff it down. It was enough.

"The exit. Now. And I'll consider not experimenting with Fireball in an enclosed space. I'd hate your charred face to be the last thing I see."

"Ha! Now, darling— let's not fight. Really, I wanted to be here right when you woke up, but you've always been impatient. We'll leave in due time." He didn't even flinch, as if knowing she could hardly manage more than a box of matches.

"Due time, as in, now." Vampire lord or not, his neck was still perfectly wringable.

Tav started around one corner. Astarion leaned the other way. When she headed one direction, he went the opposite. Circling around the tomb like this was a game.

"What is this, Astarion? Why are you even messing with me right now? We were done."

If he wouldn't tell her the exit, she'd find it on her own. She looked everywhere but down- at something sculpted from memories from his own mind's eye. Another possession to see the end to.

"You were done, and then went and did something stupid. I just took what you were so eager to throw away. Be grateful I kept you somewhere comfortable."

He wasn't going to lose anything else.

"This was supposed to be comfortable?"

His lip curled.

If vampirism were even something she'd consider, it wasn't going to be on his terms as a slave. She wanted to keep what little freedom she had left. That was the end of it. Or supposed to be. Her life was hers, and he of all people should have understood that.

It was her fault in the first place for helping him. For wanting no fear for him. If power was what it took to make him free, then she'd help him grab it.

Things had ended badly, suffice to say.

"If it's really your heart's desire to throw away this second chance, Tav, who am I to deny you?"

He procured a sliver of iron, delicately held by the blade with the pommel to her. It was dulled, but she recognized the wear on the leather intended to protect the hand. The dagger from when she'd fallen.

Take it. Then, stab him.

No?

Stab yourself, then. At least that much. Again, again.

Astarion had promised she'd regret leaving him more than anything. That he should have turned her into a spawn, just to teach her how he could have anything he wanted. It seemed in turn he'd taken her last act of free will, at least.

She couldn't imagine the prick ever sullying his doublet with jumping into the water after her. He'd probably charmed some civilian to fish her up, just to have this bit of fun at her expense later. He turned her after all.

Her hands wavered, sparks of anger fading at the disconnect. The dagger had somehow found its way into her hands. Unable to find a good place for it, she tucked it into the band of her stained funeral gown.

He drank her in— uncertain, hair wilding about reaching to every corner of the room, and bent crooked over a double that was maybe as immortal as she. It was time. It'd been long enough. She was here. She'd forgive him for it eventually. If not, well, he could make her.

"I didn't think so. We'll blame all this on that sleepy head of yours, hm?" He extended a palm over the sarcophagus between them, shifting his tone. Did he mean for her to take it? "We have so much to catch up on. After a bath, of course. I'm afraid you're looking a bit feral for the company I keep nowadays. As much as I missed your bedhead."

He had only extended his hand to gesture at her puke sleeve and semi-transparent funeral gown. "There's another robe in the chest. Unless you'd prefer to walk around in that, but I do recall your preferences being a bit more modest."

"Modest?" Tav gestured to the suggestive stone lid.

"It's art, pet. Change." He looked up to a corner at the ceiling, disinterested, feigning a possibility privacy in these close quarters.

Tav fumbled the chest clasp to pull out a whispering dark cloth suggestive of abalone shells overlain by sheer black. There was some magic to it, and some other bits inside. Some of them maybe hers, some of them didn't look familiar at all. She'd only just fastened the gown's last tie when she realized she hadn't even thought about resisting or the exit again.

He'd ordered her to change, and she did.

Crimson eyes shone back at her from the other side of the room. The pale elf was pleased with himself. Every fiber of his being sung with it— he had everything he wanted.