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“This is a bad idea,” Wyll says far, far too late.
Astarion snorts at him. It’s an undignified sound, one that’s getting more common as Astarion gets comfortable with the rest of the party and a measure of what Wyll calls ‘Dramatic Astarion’ ratchets down rather into what Wyll suspects is ‘Actual Astarion’… who is still plenty dramatic, but less charmingly so. It, unfortunately, means he’s done away with a lot of fawning in favor of saying things like…
“Don’t be a sodding toddler about it, Ravengard. It’s just a bit of wordplay.”
Wyll, ever ready to meet Astarion where he is, says, cheerfully, “Fuck you kindly,” and takes his wine flask back from the grinning vampire. Knocking back a swallow, he hands the flask back, and says, “I’ve tried this so many times, it hardly bares recounting. And it’s dangerous, beside.”
Astarion eyes the flask before taking it again. “How is talking dangerous?”
“Talking about my terms with Mizora is bound under the terms of my contract. It’s not just that I will be punished for trying, it’s that I will be physically prevented from speaking of the contract to avoid exactly this kind of—” He gestures vaguely to indicate Astarion as whole—“lawyer nonsense.”
“Magistrate,” Astarion corrects archly.
“As you like.”
Astarion sips from the flask. “How is it dangerous?”
“Usually, the first couple of tries, I’ll just lose use of my tongue and go silent.” Wyll shrugs, picking up a stone to skip it across the surface of the slow-moving river, every impact setting off a pulse of light from phosphorescent algae. “If I keep trying in defiance of that, I’ll start taking preventative measures against myself and those listening to me.”
That gives Astarion pause. “Like…?”
“I’ll start doing embarrassing or frightening shit that makes people think I’m insane.”
Astarion stares at him like a kid presented with candy.
“No.”
“Oh, we must try now.”
Wyll isn’t exactly sure when Astarion got this bug to assist him with his contract to Mizora, but away from the light of the overworld, strangely at home in the predator-ridden shade of the Underdark, Astarion’s been prodding him about the details of his pact. Wyll won’t hazard a guess, but he suspects Astarion is hoping for some tit-for-tat aid somewhere down the line. Wyll should ward him off. He’s done this song and dance so many times with so many would-be allies, all lost now, that the thought of Astarion being counted among them is skin crawling.
“No,” Wyll reiterates firmly.
“Just some ‘yes or no’ questions, Wyll. You’re not allowed to talk of the thing, but around it, perhaps?”
Wyll rubs his forehead at the base of his horns. “Astarion,” he says, warningly.
“I’ll bet you made your pact for some stupid heroic reason,” Astarion quips, sipping another mouthful of wine. “You said you only ever used your powers to help. I imagine seventeen-year-old Wyll was the same level of moronic.”
“Alright, are you helping or just making fun?”
A shrug. “I can do both.” Another swig of wine. “Let’s speak hypothetically, Wyll. You can do that right? Let’s say I was thinking like you at seventeen. Would I be that dumb? Yes or no?”
Wyll sighs. “Yes.”
“Excellent. Would I make a deal to—” he gestures with the flask— “save my family from a dreadful fate?”
Wyll frowns. “Yes?”
He opens his mouth to add, ‘not just family’, but his tongue works the words like they’re a foreign language and he realizes he’s up against the parameters of his contract and shakes his head, pointing mutely to his mouth. Astarion sits forward, shifting to sit tailor-style facing him, avid suddenly in this interrogation.
The light from the bio-luminous mushrooms and the river-born algae put such strange colors into Astarion’s perfect complexion, lighting him in such a way he looks younger, somehow. The angle of the poisonous light sources smoothing away laugh-lines and putting iridescent shimmer into his eyes. Elves are distantly fey-blooded things, Wyll is aware, but he’s never felt that fact mores than here under the fairy-light glow of the Underdark.
It’s a little hard to not get distracted and Wyll wishes Astarion was less keen on activities that make Wyll’s tether to Mizora go tight. He’d like to lie around, wine-drunk, and admire his teammate’s profile in a day-dreamy peace, thank you. The sensation of Mizora’s binding, like a hand winding itself into a slack of a leash, makes a frantic teenage part of himself want to scream.
“Alright,” Astarion says gamely, “would I do something dumb to save my father?”
“Yes.”
“I wouldn’t do it only to save my father though, would I?”
Wyll feels a tension like wire around his vocal cords but manages: “You might…”
Astarion’s lip curls, baring a pearl-white fang. “But would I really?”
Wyll tries to say, ‘no’ but the grip around his voice box tightens and, in the end, he shakes his head just once before the muscles in his neck seize like he’s been scruffed by a much larger creature. One that doesn’t care much for the pinch it’s putting on his spine. He’s starting to sweat with the effort of enduring. Astarion for his part, monitors his responses with interest.
He tilts his perfectly coiffed head, drumming his slender fingers against one knee. “Would I do something stupid to… save a city, say, the size of Baldur’s Gate?”
Wyll’s face feels hot, his entire body suddenly electric with a fever-like heat he knows all too well. He doesn’t bother to try speaking or shaking his head or moving at all. He just closes his eyes and abides under the swarm of a vile body high. His nerves shivering until his skin feels like its inches off its place moored to muscle, like there is room under his flesh for something else to slide inside it…
Astarion watches him, waiting.
“Would you like to nod to that last question I asked about, you know, myself and not you?”
Fuck, Wyll can feels on some level that technically he’s not talking directly about the contract under all Astarion’s indirect hypotheticals, but some of the contract is still rooted in some measure to intent and Wyll can feel the hooks of the spell trying to catch his tongue on the grounds he is cheating. But two degrees removed from talking directly about the contract itself…
“Would you like to nod right now?” Astarion asks, innocent as arson.
“Yes,” Wyll says, startled as the hooks of his binding miss and— “Fuck! Ah!” – dig in like a dozen delayed fishing barbs snagging his lips and tongue. It hurts. Fuck him blind, but it hurts. Wyll can taste the copper flood in his mouth from what must be needles opening holes through the meat of his lips and tongue. It’s so alien and intimate he can’t focus on anything but his own panic and pain and creeping paralysis of the throat and face that’s making it impossible to move or do anything but sit here in agony and—
“Wyll?” Astarion’s concerned voice floats through the haze: “Wyll? Darling, you’re drooling.” A hand waves in front of his face. “Gods, she didn’t lobotomize you, did she? Shit. Wyll, look at me. Some sign of life. You better not have bloody—"
There’s yank on Wyll’s palm, like a hook in the bones of his metacarpals and all at once Wyll’s right hand snaps like snake striking, grabbing Astarion at the wrist. In the exact same moment, Wyll’s left hand hooks up and snags the nape of Astarion neck and the vampire, honest to the gods, yelps.
The sound is cut short by Wyll’s lips smashing rather painfully into Astarion’s.
Wyll tastes blood, real blood this time, as Astarion’s fangs slice his lip open as the punitive possession compels him to shut Astarion up. To bite at his teammate’s lip, lick the words off his tongue, grab him by the back of his skull and hold him still even as Astarion starts to thrash and claw at him and—
Oh fuck, fuck, fuck.
It’s not stopping.
“The hells!” Astarion snarls, jamming an elbow against Wyll’s throat to lever him off. “Wyll!” A note of panic enters his voice, his other fist ramming against Wyll’s sternum as they go to the ground with Wyll on top of him. Wyll kisses him again in so much as ramming his mouth over Astarion’s is ‘kissing’ and Wyll goes cold as Astarion’s voice gets, suddenly, ragged with uncertainty. “Wyll?”
The compulsion stops. Easy as a puppet string cut.
Wyll lunges back with such force, the sand on the shore sprays the water as he scrambles to his feet. He backs away, hands up and empty.
“Gods! I’m so sorry! I—!”
“It’s fine,” Astarion snaps, furtively licking the blood from his mouth then scrubbing the back of his hand across his lips. “You did warn me. That’s, uh… I can see why you might give up the question-and-answer game if the backlash looks like that.”
Wyll, shaking, turns back toward camp.
“This was a bad idea. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have entertained this. I knew, I knew this would happen.” His nails have dug shallow cuts into his palms, his jaw aching with his teeth clenched. “Forgive me. I’ll take my leave for the evening and—"
“It worked though,” Astarion calls.
Wyll stops. He turns on his heel and stares at Astarion, sat in the sand, head tilted, studying Wyll like puzzle.
“Your contract with Mizora,” Astarion says, grinning despite his bloodied, kiss-bruised lips starting to color. “You made a deal with her, I hazard, for enough power to do something to save your hometown. Which I thank you for, by the way, since I was one of the hapless citizens living there at the time.”
Wyll stares.
Astarion, dusting himself off, crosses the space between them to grin. “See? It’s just knowing you long enough to realize you’re the perfect combination of noble and numbskull to do this sort of thing.”
“You’re the first person in seven years to figure that out,” Wyll says quietly, suddenly afraid.
“Well, I can’t take all the credit, Karlach and Shadowheart had some excellent theories.” Astarion sounds smug nevertheless. “Also, the telepathic brain thing is an edge.” There’s a silence where Astarion is expectant of a reaction – anger, praise, gratitude something, but when the silence goes on his grin falters. “Wyll? Hello? Wyll? You still with m—?”
He never finishes the sentence.
Wyll’s right hand, without any input or indication of forethought in his face or eyes, casually draws his rapier and he whips it with a crack into the side of Astarion’s skull. He does it so hard, hits the vampire so exactly that Astarion goes down without a sound, collapsing unconscious and bloodied in the sand by the river. Silence then. Only the terrified shudder of Wyll’s own breathing, the scream of horror strangled in his throat to a whine.
Like a struck dog under a switch.
He gets down on one knee, then the other. He tosses the rapier. He swings one leg over Astarion’s body, straddling him, pinning his arms into the sand beneath his knees. There’s a pause, long enough for dread and desperation to flower into a full hysteria on Wyll’s part. (Please, please wait! I’m sorry. I take it back. I won’t do it again. Don’t. Please don’t! Please, not this!)
Then his hands move of their own accord to Astarion’s unguarded neck.
The others back at camp don’t hear, the two of them having come out the shore, away from the lot of them, the sound of laughter and camp-fire chatter drowns out the muffled struggle as Wyll bites his own tongue bloody while his body – no longer his, having broken the terms of his agreement – is rented out to something else for a while. And the thing wearing his skin begins to throttle Astarion until his trachea crushes in. A dull crunch of cartilage.
Wyll Ravengard feels a section of his sanity start to fray.
He’s pretty sure he loses something permanently when Astarion wakes up halfway through.
The thing wearing Wyll’s face is seated on top of him, is so much stronger than Wyll usually is because it doesn’t care that it’s hurting Wyll to hurt Astarion. It laughs, like it’s cute when Astarion bucks and tries to scream, pressing thumbs into his already collapsed windpipe. It bends down so close Wyll can see and memorize the agonized terror on his face and the certainty that Wyll is going to snap his neck and—
Then it stops.
Wyll hears himself say, in an accent that isn’t his own, “Dead whores with delusions of grandeur should stop trying to out-lawyer their betters. Stop it. Or she’ll make him do worse next time.”
And Wyll is allowed to throw himself off Astarion and into the shallows where he vomits uncontrollably for the next fifteen seconds as every nerve in his body lights up with the sensation of something sliding out from under his skin. Like he is a glove they’ve peeled off and discarded. He sits in the river, gasping and sobbing as the current carries the bile from his belly away from him. The plants in the water pulse and shimmer at his touch, reacting to the vibrations. Pulsing with his panic.
“Wyll!”
A hand closes on his arm, hauling him out of the water.
“Sh’kaketh!” Lae’zel drags Wyll to the shore, fisting his jacket. “What happened?! Were you attacked?”
There’s commotion. Shouting. Beyond Lae’zel, Shadowheart is bowed over Astarion, her palms sheathed in green light as she soothes her palms over his crushed throat. The vampire is clutching at her, fisting her sleeves in pain but she just keeps working saying, “I’ve got it. I’ve got it, just relax.” She redacts the black and red mottle of broken blood vessels from his skin until Wyll hears the cartilage in Astarion’s throat crack back into place.
Lae’zel shakes Wyll. “Answer! Where is the enemy?!”
Wyll, dazed, croaks, “No. No it was just us.” Then: “I didn’t mean to—”
Lae’zel’s dragon-gold eyes widen. Then she clocks Wyll across the brow so hard he goes down in darkness for a moment. When he comes to, Lae’zel has rolled him to his belly, arm locking his elbow into the middle of his back as she pins him into the sand. There’s, understandably, a lot of yelling that follows as Karlach, Gale, and Halsin join the chaos.
“He attacked Astarion!” Lae’zel snarls, wrenching Wyll’s wrist up between his shoulder blades, her other fist closed around one of his horns to pin his head to the sand. “Find out if he’s traitor or victim lest I slit his throat this very instant—”
“DON’T YOU FUCKING DARE!” Karlach, blazing, suddenly stood over them both.
“Calm down! Both of you!” Gale, panicky, trying to gather information quickly. “No one is killing anyone! We don’t know what’s happened!”
“Wyll cracked his vertebra,” Shadowheart snaps. She’s bent over Astarion still, cupping the arch of his throat in one hand, her other palm at the nape, collaring his slender neck as she presses magic into his skin. Her eyes scan Astarion’s face – the vampire’s swollen lip, the fading cut across his temple. “Wyll choked him so hard it almost broke his bloody spine.”
Halsin, through the buzz and panic of the others, cuts in with an authority he’s never leveraged with the group before, barking, “Stoppit. Now!”
There’s a startled silence, just enough for Halsin to go on:
“Everyone is safe. Be calm. Karlach can you scout the perimeter and ensure there are no animals or enemies? Take note if you see any and their details. Lae’zel: your speed is commendable but be measured until we understand fully. Shadow, heal Astarion and get him talking. Gale, help me with Wyll. Can you do an enchantment check while I check for the rest?”
“Y-Yes, of course.”
“Good. No one is dead. Let’s be grateful for that at least.”
Wyll does nothing to stop any of this, offers zero explanation or defense. He just lies there in Lae’zel’s grip while the world tilts strangely and every nerve in his body hums with a post-panic afterglow so intense it feels almost euphoric. He hears himself start to laugh, frantic and uneven before he tamps it down and closes his eyes. He tries, childishly, to will it all away. To wake up.
He hears indistinct arguing, then the touch of magic ghosting over his skin – detection of magic, of evil, spells to remove a curse, to remove possession, to cure poisons – all ineffective against the root cause within him. Gale taps him occasionally, nervously, as his somatic components require. Halsin, has a hand on his head, one thumb running meditatively across one of the braids running from his temple and behind his ear.
I can hear Halsin talking to him directly now saying, “Wyll, are you with us?”
“Yes,” Wyll whispers.
“Good. Can you tell us what happened?”
“Whatever Astarion says happened.”
“I want your side, Wyll, but Astarion says Mizora made you do it. Is that correct?”
Wyll swallows. “Is he alright?”
“Yes. Shadowheart has him.” Halsin’s tone shifts to something gentler. “He says it wasn’t random. It was because he convinced you to talk about your pact, against the terms of your contract. Is that right?”
Wyll would be mortified that he’s crying, tears over-running his eyes and down his face into the sand, but he just nods against the sand beneath his cheek. Lae’zel is still gripping the base of one horn like he might snap at them all. Strangely, he’s grateful to her for it. The certainty that even if something did put his skin back on and attack them, Lae’zel would stop him. She’d kill him in an instant choosing between him and Astarion. The relief of that is palpable.
“Wyll, I’m going to have Shadowheart cast Zone of Truth. You need to allow it.”
Then, from the back: “I said I’m bloody fine! I don’t even need to breathe!”
“Astarion insists none of this is your fault,” Halsin adds, wryly, “but I’d like to have the measure of it before we go deeper into the underdark. Not all of us would survive having our windpipes crushed, I’m afraid.”
“I’m fine!” Astarion complains, but his voice sounds shredded. “I’ve had worse on my own recognizance. Mizora—” He coughs. “Fuck me. She—” He keeps coughing.
Wyll wonders if Astarion’s ever going to see him any other way than a former assailant, a grinning thing on top of him. The thought makes him want to pull his skin off, frankly. Shadowheart takes a knee beside him. Glancing up at her, the expression on her face is a color of disgust and uncertainty – deciding how much of this is going to irrevocably change her opinion of him.
She casts the spell and Wyll lets the magic take hold him, like a gentle hand about the throat.
“What is your name?”
“Wyll Ravengard.”
Shadowheart nods, like that question gave her his measure. “Why did you attack Astarion?”
“I allowed Astarion to question me indirectly about the details of my pact, against my better judgement and against a history of violence done against others for this exact thing. I attacked him once to shut him up, then we broke apart. We spoke a second time, and Astarion concluded some details correctly, like no one else has before, and the terms of my contract—”
Wyll swallows, gritting out: “It enacted some sub-clause. I lost control of myself and attacked him a second time. Choked him. I spoke with someone else’s voice.” He doesn’t manage to keep a single, panicked heave from his voice as he says, ragged, “That’s never happened before.”
There’s a long pause.
“All the injuries are from compulsion?” Shadowheart demands, that note of disgust coming to the front. The others might not have seen what the cleric saw: the split lip, the black eye – hallmarks of a simple assault or something worse…
“Of course they are!” Astarion snarls, but Karlach hushes him.
“Yes,” Wyll whispers. “All of them. I’m so sorry.”
“Right. Happy now?” Astarion snaps. “He was compelled. He’s not responsible for anything he does under a compulsion, now let him the hells up.”
Shadowheart ignores him, asking, “Wyll, do you know for certain whether or not you will attack again because you tried to breach the contract? Whether compulsions will take you once more?”
“I don’t… know.” Wyll just lies there, eyes closed, trying not to imagine the faces of his teammates – their failing trust, the withdrawal of respect, the pity. “I’ve attacked people before when I tried to talk about my contract. It never goes beyond the moment of breach. This… I don’t know. Astarion kept talking. I can’t tell what response to contract breach or something beyond. I don’t know if he’s a target now because he knows.”
“Oh,” Astarion mutters somewhere among the group. “Alright. That’s a little unnerving actually.”
Shadowheart snaps, “I’m trying to concentrate!” Then, having silenced Astarion, she says, “Wyll, do you in any way want to hurt Astarion or feel lingering compulsion to hurt him or any of us?”
“No. None.”
“Do you think you’d attack if Astarion told the rest of us the terms of your contract?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re certain you’re not possessed currently?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Are you hurt?”
“No.”
“Do you think you’ll hurt yourself?”
“No.”
“Do you think this is your fault?”
“Yes.” Oh. That last one sounded like a trick question. Whatever. “This is completely my fault. I should have told Astarion ‘no’.”
“Well,” Shadowheart says, exasperated, “that’s famously difficult to do.”
“I’m extremely persuasive,” Astarion calls, again, from what sounds like the back of the group where they are keeping him as far away from Wyll as physically possible.
There’s a bit of conferring amongst the group and after some protests and threats of violence, Lae’zel releases Wyll and steps back. He makes no sudden move to get up. Only after a beat does he slowly lever himself to his knees and looks up around the gathered array of anxious faces. He was correct – Karlach is blocking Astarion with her body and Lae’zel’s moved like a scowling bodyguard to his side.
“I apologize for this,” Wyll says quietly, still on his knees.
Halsin kneels to study him, eye-to-eye. “Come, Wyll. Let’s see you sorted.”
“This is very dramatic,” Astarion complains, but half-heartedly now, fully penned in by the team frontliners. There’s something uncertain in his expression now, like the fuss put up by everyone else is making him question how dramatic the response truly is. “You’re all being extremely ridiculous.”
“Hey, stupid,” Karlach says, not with ire but frustration, “maybe you don’t care – which I question – but you think that shit was fun for Wyll? Lay off.”
“But—”
Lae’zel whirls on him. “He would have killed you if the possession hadn’t ceased.”
“You’re being drama—”
“Kainyank! We only heard because Wyll was screaming after the fact. If the possession had continued you would be dead. Worse: he had the magic to render you beyond revival. Now, before you get anyone else in trouble: Be. Silent.”
Wyll doesn’t hear anymore because Halsin, currently guiding him with a hand on his shoulder says, “In your line of work, I’d expect you’ve run afoul of a possession or two in your time? You’re aware of what to expect?”
Wyll shifts uncomfortably. “Not… myself.”
“Ah.” Halsin drops his hand and folds his arms. “You should sit down and let Shadowheart attend you.”
Wyll rubs his face. “I’m fine.”
Halsin tilts his head, wisps of wheat-colored hair slipping loose from their place. “Then let me if you’d rather not have Shadowheart close. There can be after-effects.”
Wyll pauses. Does he not want Shadowheart to be near him? Wyll realizes, slowly, that he does indeed not want that. He can still see how her face contorted with distrust, with disgust, the suspicion and re-evaluation in her sharp green eyes as she momentarily re-sorted him into a different and more vile category of threat.
“I’d rather it was you, Halsin.”
Wyll ends up sat at the mouth of Halsin’s tent, a little distance from the others who are all sitting around the fire. Wyll tries not to look at the company. He doesn’t want to see Astarion talking to any of them. He doesn’t want to know if they’re discussing his pact, the attack, any of it. He just sits, cross-legged, across from the towering druid while the man taps his forehead with a bit of magic in the tips of his fingers.
“Any better?” Halsin rifles through a satchel.
Wyll shrugs. “Headache’s gone. I’m just tired now.”
“Any chills or numbness?”
“No.”
Halsin has him do a few exercises until he’s satisfied Wyll has full use of his reflexes and fine motor control. Wyll knew Halsin just a little bit from his time in the Grove, but he’s never sat near the man for an extended period of time while the druid handled him like a healer would. He’s brusque but gentle, his palms rough, warm, and dry. He smells like dust and the herbs he works with.
Wyll feels exhausted. Hollowed out and tired. Halsin hands him some kind of tincture to drink and he doesn’t even question it. He down the lot – a bitter, earthy, tea-like swallow – and hands the vial back to the man who busies himself putting the little glassware away in his medical kit.
“I know a little,” the druid says suddenly, “about what it’s like to lose control and harm someone you did not mean to harm. I’m sorry, Wyll. It’s a terrible thing.”
Wyll blinks. “I’m fine. Astarion is the one—”
“I didn’t say it was not terrible for Astarion,” Halsin cuts in gently, turning back round to face Wyll. “That Astarion was hurt does nothing to take away from the fact this was done to you as well. For that, I’m sorry.” Halsin studies him. “Do you need a moment?”
Wyll realizes he’d forgotten to mind his expression and quickly brings his face back under control.
“I’m alright.” He smiles. “Thank you.”
Halsin, not smiling back, says simply, “I would argue that not being alright is perfectly acceptable.”
Wyll feels a pang of anger at that, at being poked at for trying to minimize the damage already done here. Then again, what right does he have to anger? He nearly killed a teammate. He almost killed Astarion, for fuck’s sake. Wyll feels his throat burn and tighten. His head loops it over and over: The crunch of cartilage and the sound of scream choked off.
“Wyll?”
Fuck. Wyll comes back to himself, realizes he’s been staring into the middle distance and there are tears on his face again.
“Shit,” he says, too tired to recover this. “I guess… This is so fucked. I feel terrible for hurting Astarion, but what’s really getting me is that I didn’t know she could do that.” Wyll continues to stare into a random section of tent wall, feeling his breath quicken in his chest, the precursor to hyperventilation so he forces himself to slow. “It was so… arbitrary. I’ve never had something sit inside me and make me—”
Wyll wipes his eyes with the heel of one hand.
“I could have killed him, Halsin. I was joking around about it.”
“You didn’t though.”
“It knew,” Wyll grits. “It knew things. Whatever got inside me and throttled Astarion. It knew—” He breaks off.
Halsin waits until he’s sure Wyll isn’t going to go on. Then he says, “You and Astarion are more alike than I first thought.”
That’s so strange an observation that Wyll pauses in his burgeoning panic attack to blink. “What?”
Halsin shrugs.
“I didn’t see it until now, but you are. You both smile to hide.” He tilts his head. “You’re better at it by far than he is, but you’re both far afield. We all know how far in Astarion’s case. In your case… I’d hazard only Karlach and the team lawyer might understand how badly positioned you are, Wyll. I’m sorry Astarion got hurt trying to help you, but I’m rather not sorry that someone made an effort at it because I suspect no one else ever has.”
Wyll opens his mouth to refute this, but lying directly to Halsin’s face seems… wrong.
“I’ve had allies before,” he says a little testily.
“None, apparently, that asked enough questions to trigger a failsafe.”
“None of them were lawyers or keen to have me owe them one.”
“A self-serving lawyer might be good thing for you then, because if Astarion wasn’t selfishly hoping you’d look after his interests, he might not have looked after yours for what sounds like the first time in quite a while.”
Wyll stares. “Pardon?”
“You’re not alone out here, Wyll. It’s alright to ask your allies for help. Astarion was over-eager and reckless and probably not doing it out of the kindness of his heart, but he found out what the rest of us have been too distracted to ask.” Halsin maintains his eye contact, steady as sunlight, calm as a bay in summer. “Do you want help with your pact, Wyll?”
“I need this power. We’ve a task ahead that—”
“After all this then.”
“There are still people to save, even when the Absolute is cast down. There always will be.”
Halsin gives a slow blink, like a bored cougar. “You can’t help others without your powers?”
“You’re being obtuse for a point, Halsin.” Wyll rolls his eyes, but gamely goes on, “My powers make me more effective. There’s no arguing—”
“You’re young.” Halsin shrugs. “Learn other powers. Do you want help with your pact, Wyll?”
Wyll startles. “What?”
“Your pact. You don’t talk of it much, but you let Astarion try to help, despite knowing the risk, despite being so soft-hearted, so you must badly want for a chance out of it to entertain his attempt.”
“I— It was a mistake.”
“Maybe. Astarion’s approach strikes me as foolish, but then again, he’s the only soul in seven years to extract some truth from you.” He ignores the indignant noise Wyll makes. “Besides, that’s not the question I’m asking. Do you want out of your pact?”
“It doesn’t matter, Halsin.”
“It does, Wyll. Do you want out of your—?”
“Of course I want out of it!” Wyll snarls, lowering his voice to do it, fervent of the others listening. “But wanting doesn’t make a thing happen and it’s dangerous. Look what I did to Astarion. Look what was done to me when I refused Mizora just the once. I won’t put anyone else at risk and, since we are speaking selfishly, I won’t risk myself an early fate in the hells either.”
Halsin, unflappable as a hillside, says with a real sorrow, “Of course.”
Wyll gets up. Pauses. “I didn’t mean to be sharp.”
“Since I rather intentionally riled you up,” Halsin says, back to being wry, “I think sharpness is warranted.”
Wyll squints at Halsin. “You’re kind of a bastard when you want to be, aren’t you?”
“When I want to be,” Halsin says, friendly as he’s ever been. “Come back to me if the headache returns. That tea I gave you should ward off the worst of the nightmares and muscle aches, but I can never be sure with dosage.”
Wyll pauses again. “Thank you, Halsin.”
“Of course. Sleep well, my friend. We’ll be here when you wake.”
Wyll hates that, somehow, Halsin knew he needed to hear that and goes to finally collapse in his tent. The druid iss good on his promise: Despite it all, he doesn’t dream of anything terrible at all. Just a riverside, the glow of algae, an alternate world where he sat on the banks with Astarion and admired his drinking partner in profile. A lovely dream indeed.