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talesofthedm · 7 months

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House of Healing

Play through #2, I'm 100% taking notes for fanfic writing purposes (the NOTES are 10k words. I love this game), and I just got to the House of Healing in Act 2 again. Love that area, demented as hell. Anyway, here's that section with some minor artistic liberties (I have to make my Tav a MC somehow, plus we need more soft Astarion).

Tav is Freya (she/her), Gloomstalker Ranger/Assassin Rogue who's traumatized as hell. There isnt any physical description for her in this section.

Goes without saying major spoiler warning for Act 2.

Excerpt:

The leathers of his gloves were soft and warm—thrumming gently with magic—as it cupped either side of her face. “Darling, look at me. Can you look at me?” He pressed his forehead to hers, making sure she had no place to look but his eyes. “Love.” Something about that name startled her, broke her out of whatever trance she was bound to just long enough to focus. He dragged his thumbs across her cheeks, smoothing away tears. “We’re going to get you out of here, alright? We’re going to get you out of here. We’re going to get you someplace safe and we’re going to get you cleaned up, alright? Can you say something, do something, anything so I know you can understand me?”

TW: Violence, body horror, PTSD, mentions of self-harm, death

“The objective of the scalpel, sisters, is to soothe. For the scalpel, indeed, is an extension of Shar.” The dull light glinted off his mirror and lenses, the purple sheen of them not dissimilar to the mirrors they found in the Sharran temple. A means of reflecting Shar’s radiance—of allowing her to watch such a blessed performance in her name. He was the priest. He was the clergy. He was the prayer and the offering itself. Malus was the altar, the operating room the church.

“See how the patient reacts when I but stroke the right nerve. Hear its comfort. Hear the very melody of mercy.” He raised a clawed hand—a contraption of bloodstained bronze or rusted metal. Repurposed forceps that had been turned and ruined and bastardized from a tool of healing to a cause for pain. Even to him—his hands sawed clean off below the wrist and metal rods forcibly drilled through the bone and into both his radius and ulna. Without medication, if the surgeon’s logs Freya had found previously were anything to go by. “Pray, sister, show us the extent of your beneficence.”

The man—it, as the surgeon had called them—gritted their teeth but could do nothing to stop the pain. Wrists bound in metal and legs held firm in stirrups. Bound and useless and forced to endure such pain as a dull blade ripping across blood spattered skin from hip to naval without so much as a splash of ale.

“Stop. Stay your hand,” Malus corrected with all the gentle, loving kindness of a grandfather. “For it slaps where it should stroke. We can hardly hear the patient’s sighs of solace.”

Freya should have punctured her ears when she had the chance.

A joke—a horrible horrible joke by a handful of bastards who had seen her fall apart once upon a time that now left her laughing and sobbing all at once. The bastards had seen her freeze. They had seen her crumple to the ground. Useless. She was then as she was now.

What they hadn’t seen was Thomas cart her off, all the patience in the world as she shuffled away with frozen limbs on uneven cobblestones. They hadn’t seen the way he nestled her into a corner where she would be safe and protected at his back while he took the time to rip through whatever made that noise that sent her spiraling in the first place… she couldn’t even remember. The bastards had only seen the she was helpless, stuck back in a distant moment as her partner did the job they were both to do.

And she was back there again, stuck in the furthest recesses of her mind. Frozen and cold and crying. The smell of burning oil. The sickening, glowing heat of the oven at her back. The screams—gods the screams. Incoherent and mindless and and—deafening— and— trapped.

Within her own body.

She was trapped within her own body in the worst way. Not there, not present, but stuck watching and suffering as her mind split in two and forced itself to watch two separate scenes unfold. One of past, one of present.

And Thomas wasn’t even there to console her.

“Perhaps it is our unexpected audience that makes you quiver.”

The pieces of her that remained in the present, stuck watching the scene unfold, could feel the others at her back. Waiting. She was a leader and one that should charge forward and command the room and stop this madness—either by blade or equally sharp tongue.

“Come. Step forward. You are no sister, but that matters none. Every student is welcome.”

She could hear Astarion’s voice, a long off echo drowned out by the ringing of her ears. There was anger. Disgust. A familiar voice that parts of her fleeting sanity hung on to for comfort despite every primal part of her whispering of the danger. She could feel the way the darkness shifted—the way her partner’s body shifted. Shoulders hunched as if to lunge forward with claws and teeth like some sort of wild, desperate animal. “He’s just as mad as Cazador,” he whispered.

The warm leather of his glove wrapped around her arm, forcing his way forward. She was staring at his back, blocking the image from view. His broad shoulders tensed—but not the way she would associate with a desperate animal. The side of his boot slid into hers, forcing her to take a step backwards and away from the scene. Protective.

“In my experience,” he spoke in careful, even tones. “Torture is usually more pain and less proselytizing.”

“Behold, sisters, the very face of ignorance—one who mistakes tenderness for torture.”

She could hear him swallow—his pride or his fear, she did not know.

“Go on. Acquaint the face of ignorance with the true object of our studies.”

The sisters stepped forward, one foot stomping along the broken tiles of the operating room as if it was more dead than the rest. “Absence,” she drawled, as if deep within a trance. Broken and lost—something Freya understood too well in the moment.

“Absence,” Malus praised. “No other word captures the heart of Shar so very perfectly.” He bent down, low over the operating table and out of Freya’s view. “It is the scalpel-led journey that leads from pain—” A single bronze finger crested over the top of Astarion’s head, the dull light of the operating lamp providing an exaggerated, eye-catching gleam. The tip of it drove down, sharp as any scalpel. “—to peace.” Again, the curved tip of what could only be called a finger raised up only to be brought down.

It wasn’t Astarion’s fault—he didn’t know. It wasn’t the sight, or the blood, or the horror, or anything that was within his control to stop. It was the sound. The sound of screams. Of blade delicately slicing through skin. Of talon-like claws teaching in and popping out the eyes of a hapless victim. If he had known, perhaps he would have commanded Shadowheart to curse her with deafness. Or punctured her eardrums himself.

“See?” Malus called. “What is the light of eyes but the cancer that causes one to witness the laceration of being.

“If light is the symptom, then darkness is the cure. For in light there is presence, but in darkness there is absence.”

“In light is presence; in darkness, absence,” the sisters echoed.

“But you: look how the succor of Shar eludes you. See how painfully present you remain… We do not wish to see you suffer so. Let us cure you. As the very presence of Shar has cured your friend.”

Astarion was slow, careful. Another press of his boot, another hobbled step back. Freya felt her back warm as she was pressed into Karlach. What would have otherwise been a comfort from the gentle giant only made it worse.

She was warm. Burning. Stuck listening and melting behind the stove while echoing screams filled the room and cooking oil filled her nose. Stuck behind a burning over in the dusty corner of a kitchen trying to hide.

There was a long silence, the rogue weighing his options. How many could he take? How many could he slaughter before they even blinked? How long until they went after Freya and deemed her in need of a cure that only they could administer? To be down one was one thing… but for her to be helpless was another. “The sisters aren’t ready.” A hint of desperation. A hint of fear. He couldn’t hide behind flippant remarks or alluring charm—that wouldn’t work here. “They’ll make me sick instead of curing me.”

“Their incisions are, as yet, still streaked with imprecision—that much I must concede.” Malus’ words were laced with sorrow—disappointment. Not in the sisters, but himself. His own teachings had yet to fail, but had not yet succeeded. “How to steady their hands, I wonder…”

“They need a better subject to practice on first.” There was a calmness to him, Astarion. One she hadn’t heard, not in this way. A sickening, stomach curling, fantasy that had yet to come to life but he would take it where he could get it. “Not a student, but a master.”

“Yes… Yes. I see now. By example I must edify and quell the light that blinds us.” There was no malice in his actions, only name. Not even as his claws reached once more over his head and tore down into the man’s chest. A single incision, a single strike that pierced the heart and left it spurting in a final attempt to save its own body’s life.

Freya saw the body roll from the operating table, dull and lifeless and still in the most unnatural of ways.

“Come, sisters,” he commanded. “Soothe me.”

Her only saving grace was that there were no screams. A cure where there was no ailment, only the driving grunts and tearing of skin with dull blades that she could pretend was not there. Only a fountain of blood, spraying and spurting and decorating her hair in a delicate veil.

And then it was quiet.

She wasn’t sure exactly when she had crumpled to the floor, or when Astarion had taken a knee at her side, or when Karlach had lovingly rested her hand against her shoulder.

“Freya,” he whispered. “Freya, darling. It’s over now.” She was stuck staring into empty space—his shoulder, she thinks. Not that she could tell, the world was shifting sideways and upside down and right side up and mocking her with its summersaults and backflips—it could move, but she could not.

It was an eternity in and of itself, fighting herself. In the end, all she could manage was a few stray tears and rapid blinking of her eyes and a hard swallow.

He pressed his lips to her forehead in something that couldn’t quite be called a kiss, more of an acknowledgement. “Alright, I’ll accept that.”

Astarion stood, slowly and carefully as if any sudden movement would startle her and send her reeling back into whatever distant thoughts had her trapped there. He looked down, offering both his outstretched hands. “We’re going to stand and we’re going to walk out of here, alright? All of us.”

Freya’s arms felt limp and swollen and useless, as if they were replaced in some hack surgery by a pair of sausages. Still, she managed to raise them, to put her hands in his. She managed to stand, albeit with all the grace of a drunken fawn. She managed to take a few, shaky steps on her own, too, even if she was leaning all her weight on her new hunting partner.

#bg3 #baldur's gate 3 #bg3 spoilers #karlach #astarion #im going to tag this as #soft astarion #as if he doesnt murder someone #shadowheart is here too but i dont think shes really mentioned #fanfic #astarion x tav

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