TLV: IC Contact

[sixfeetofdirt]

Careful; I bite.

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[handleyourshit]

She smiles, small but warm.

"Then see a healer." Since he's the one who suggested it. "And give yourself some grace before making any major decisions either way."

[sixfeetofdirt]

He nods.

"I will."

This is the decision he's made, for now. Passivity, obedience - swallow discomfort, stop arguing, stop learning over and over that he's wrong and stupid and bound for disappointment. Nobody's going to hurt him here. Not in the way he's used to.

[handleyourshit]

She nods, both grateful and approving, and lets that sit with them both while she peels sections out of the orange to eat. Acknowledging a loss doesn't mean it doesn't still fucking hurt. It doesn't mean it doesn't still fucking suck.

She is an expert at losing, in a different way but no less thorough than he is, she's always thought.

"D'you know why I liked you straight away, when I can't stand most of the people here, cariño?"

[sixfeetofdirt]

"I assumed it was the hair," he says, and quirks a smile. "But no, I don't know. Why?"

[handleyourshit]

"Well the hair helped," she teases.

"But you're not afraid to call out the hard truths, the negatives. So many people here - in the old world, too - were willing to just gloss over it, look the other way. But if you don't look at it, and know what it is, you'll never change it."

[sixfeetofdirt]

So maybe if he stops calling those things out, she'll stop liking him? Mm.

"Knowing the hard truths doesn't seem to have helped me," he says mildly.

[handleyourshit]

"You heard the part I said about changing them, yeah?" she answers, wry.

"I just mean... I'm glad you're not okay with just wanting more and more power."

[sixfeetofdirt]

"I'm not going to say it wouldn't be nice, but even gods can be killed," he concedes. "There's no end to it."

[handleyourshit]

"And it makes people assholes, every single time."

She is far too feral to mind licking the stickiness off her fingers, though she reaches for a napkin after.

"The wrong kind of asshole, anyway."

[sixfeetofdirt]

"Whereas I'm currently the right kind?" Astarion wonders, and finally takes a bite from the apple he's holding. It's crisp and sweet, and he closes his eyes for a moment to better enjoy it.

[handleyourshit]

"Well, we're certainly not pushovers, are we?"

She, too, is an asshole after all.

[sixfeetofdirt]

"We're not."

He's silent for a while.

"Did - anything happen to you in the breach I ought to know about?"

[handleyourshit]

"I -"

It would be so easy to just say no. She probably should, given the thorn patch they're already in.

"Nothing bad happened to me in the breach." She has a napkin in her hands now, and she folds it into smaller and smaller pieces.

[sixfeetofdirt]

Well, he's not that stupid.

"So what did happen?"

[handleyourshit]

She wasn't trying to hide it, necessarily. It's just difficult to explain, possibly moreso because of who she's trying to explain it to, not the least because of timing.

"I was married." A beat. "To Jacob."

[sixfeetofdirt]

"Ah."

Astarion chews on that for a few moments.

"I'm not sure if it would have been more or less awkward if it had been someone you weren't already involved with."

[handleyourshit]

"Awkward isn't really the right word for me, I don't think."

There's certainly some awkwardness that stems from it, to be fair, but overall her problem is always... a little more specific.

"We haven't talked a lot about what happened in my world. The virus, and how that... changed everything, forever."

[sixfeetofdirt]

"No, we haven't."

An element of that is pure selfishness on his part, combined with extremely superficial social skills. His friendships on the Barge are the longest relationships he's ever voluntarily had, at least that he can remember. But he's also not unaware that he'd be pressing on scar tissue.

"Would you like to talk about it? Or - perhaps like is the wrong word. Do you want me to know?"

[handleyourshit]

The truth is, Rosita isn't interested in being a social experiment, and she isn't interested in being poked at for some stranger's satisfaction. She would not have entertained this conversation for anything other than a defense mechanism when they first met.

But she and Astarion are closer now. They're more to each other, she hopes, now.

"Well - the relevant part of it... is that the virus itself was making things worse for weeks. For months. But the world I came from is kind of like the one we just left, just not as advanced: most people kind of never expected that anything too bad would happen. Most people didn't think there was much that could completely disrupt their way of life. And when we hit that tipping point, it went fast."

[sixfeetofdirt]

"They thought it would just blow over, and then it didn't," Astarion murmurs.

That doesn't feel enormously naive on her society's part. Even in Faerun, the greatest existential threats eventually give way to the status quo, even if day to day life has changed a little to adjust.

"Go on?"

[handleyourshit]

She nods. It feels naive now, but hindsight, all that.

"I... still don't really know what happened, you know? In the space of a few weeks, communication failed, government broke down, supply chains just... stopped. Supermarkets were empty and most of us had no idea how to make our own food. Those with weapons started taking from those who didn't, and law enforcement and the military had no orders so they were just doing whatever the highest ranking among them thought was best. Shooting rioters, disposing of entire wards of infected, hoarding supplies -"

She shrugs, sounding detached now, because she doesn't want to dig into it too deeply.

"In a last ditch effort to control the spread of the virus, military planes dropped bombs on... well I'm assuming a lot of major cities, but mostly I just know about mine, don't I?" It was chaos, with no clear direction, every person for themselves for the most part and she shivers faintly.

"But the hardest part now. The hardest part to keep living with. Was just suddenly everyone I ever knew being gone. I couldn't call my cousin in the next city over, or text my friends from work. There was no electricity, no internet. And that's just... if they weren't outright dead, which I'm sure they all are now, but I'll never know what happened. They're just gone." She looks up. "And every time we come back from a breach, it happens again. All at once, people I thought I'd grow old with. Just gone."

[sixfeetofdirt]

Astarion straightens up slightly. Aylin mews at him.

"I..."

It had never occurred to him, really. His own world is less connected - it's not unrealistic to make a friend for a week as they pass through your city and then never see or hear from them again - but written correspondence still exists. The infrastructure is there. Magic helps to some degree, though that kind of magic is costly and limited.

It's an additional cruelty of her world and its apocalypse that he hasn't thought on much. And the thought of having to face that at the end of every breach-

"I didn't think I'd have more reasons to want to push the Admiral into a furnace, and yet here we are," he says. "Hells."

[handleyourshit]

The corner of her mouth lifts and falls again, not quite a smile. She appreciates the violence on her behalf, though.

"It's harder when I was happy in them." She shrugs again, trying desperately to make it not matter.

"So no, nothing bad happened. But now I get to figure out what to do with all of this here, and now Jacob is tangled up in it."

[sixfeetofdirt]

"Well, we've established that I'm terrible at solving problems," Astarion says. "Is there - anything I can do?"

[handleyourshit]

"You're great at being you, though."

It sounds saccharine and useless, but in a place where sometimes people aren't themselves, she means it at its most basic. And she is someone who values her time to just be with her people.

"Would you mind if I stayed a while? If you're still tired, we don't have to do anything. I can carve or something."