#Yes I know what the new epilogie says FUCK IT SCRATCH LIVES WITH THEM

[strawbattyshortcake]

Growing Season

Words: 3685

Triel’dra sighs, contented, she and Astarion curled up on the soft, springy mat of tough toadstool caps carpeting the rocky alcove she’d deemed a safe place to... Well, to let their guards down.

She’s a contented kind of exhausted: a day of travel and fighting, the lightheaded numbness of his feeding, the afterglow of their intimacy. The gentle luminescence of the underdark below is a welcome reminder of home, and she could so easily drift off here in his arms like she did in the forest— but, the underdark is the underdark. If they don’t return to camp soon, someone’s bound to come looking. 

Reluctantly, Triel’dra stretches and forces herself up, sets to retrieving the clothing they’d scattered about the clearing in their haste. She finds her trousers, a sock… Astarion’s briefs are draped over a rock, impossible to miss. They’re a bright blue that had seemed funny to her at first, as a choice for him, but blue suits him, and it’s the colour of the sky he loves so dearly. He must miss it down here. 

She’s trying to be helpful when she grabs the briefs but stops before handing them over. She turns them over in her hands, looking for the inexplicable ridges she’d felt. Text. Elegant, embroidered Thorass script in gold thread, beneath the waistband and scrolled across his backside. 

“Astarion?” She was already grinning and has to stifle an outright laugh at the look of mortified panic on his face when he looks up to find her reading his pants. “What is this?” 

“Oh, that’s just… nevermind that. Just give those here, would you?” 

She should. She thinks about it. But the flustered expression isn’t actual distress, and instead she turns her attention back to the unfamiliar script. Astarion tosses his shirt aside and tries to snatch the underpants from her hands. He’s quick, but so is she, even a bit woozy. 

“If you… you’re, that’s… if you are, yes?“ She manages to duck out of the way and dances just out of his reach. “If you are reading this—” 

She takes another hop back but now he has her cornered against the rocky cliffside of the ledge and she has to stifle a giddy shriek when he grabs her around the waist. She’s not sure she’s ever made a noise like that in her life, and gods, there’s no time for this. He makes her like a besotted adolescent. She wasn’t even like this as an adolescent, Elistraee help her. Triel can’t stop laughing as he pulls her close against him, the cool press of his bare skin against her own, and she tries to keep reading. “You’ve managed to bed or b… be ha….” 

She feels a rumble of laughter through his chest, exhaled against the crook of her neck. “Behead,” he prompts, then repeats the word in Elvish for her. “Bed or behead me. Either way, you got lucky.” 

“You put that there?” She feels him nod, feels the sweep of silver curls against her cheek. She knows already that he’s talented with a needle and thread. Everyone in camp trades favours to get him to do their mending, but this is new. “Why?” She’s still laughing, her heart fond and full, as his lips tickle against the column of her neck, up along the edge of her pointed ear. 

“It’s a play on words. You’d have to be lucky to get the better of me in a fight—”

“—of course.”

“—and in Common, idiomatically, ‘to get lucky��  means…. Well, why don’t I demonstrate again?” 

“You are silly.” She lets the stolen underwear fall to the ground as she turns in Astarion’s embrace, draping her arms over his neck and kissing him, her hunt for her scattered clothing abandoned. 

It seems it will be a while longer before she needs them. 

***** 

The Last Light Inn is a welcome respite after the slow, eerie trek through the Shadow-Curse. A safe place to regroup, to rest and eat, to bathe. Triel and Astarion have both decided to capitalise on this opportunity to clean the blood and sweat and dirt from their clothes, wearing outfits scraped together from bits abandoned around the inn.  

She searches for a good place to secure a clothesline as Astarion fills a basin from whichever body of water it is they’re on. Triel has no idea where on the surface they actually are. 

It’s safe within the barrier, but it seems better to be safe than sorry this close to the hungry shadows and everything lurking within them. 

That’s what she’d said, anyway. If she’s being honest, she just looks for reasons to spend time with him. 

Astarion sighs theatrically, looking up at her from the soapy basin with his best puppy-dog pout. “I don’t suppose I could convince you to do this for me, could I? I’ll steal you something very nice in return; you had your eye on something at the Quartermaster’s, I think?” 

“We are not stealing from the Harpers.” 

Astarion bats pale eyelashes. “What if I’m also very beautiful and good in bed, though?” 

“Both are true.” Triel smiles, pressing a kiss to his temple as she kneels to join him at the washbasin. She does it casually, without thinking, and he seems startled by the gesture. He doesn’t stop her though, doesn’t seem displeased, just… surprised. They’ve got their socks in the same load of laundry, somehow that seems more intimate to her than a peck on the cheek. “If you are certain you would like to entrust your washing to someone accustomed to drow spidersilk… it is so very, very resilient. I cannot guarantee that surface clothing will survive my handling…”

A weariness lurks beneath the banter as they attack their heap of bloodied garments in tandem. There’s still a buzz of disquiet from the Harpers and tiefling refugees milling about, even if Isobel is safe and sound and the intruders repelled. Triel’s stomach drops whenever she thinks of the little tiefling girl, of her heartbroken friends left inside. 

For now, rest, recover. Bath and wash and sharpen weapons and fix fletching, and in the morning— or whatever time it will be, this land’s perpetual grey dusk makes it immaterial— they set out on the hunt. 

Triel throws her grey tunic over the line as Astarion, beside her, carefully arranges that linen shirt with the frills she finds so endearing, and something catches her eye. More script. 

It’s in a deep purple, scrawled upside down so it’s visible to the wearer, but far beneath where it would be tucked, in the same graceful hand. She pauses, stops between handfuls of wrung-out clothes, tilts her head farther and farther until she’s nearly upside down as she tries to read it. She hears a breathy chuckle above her (little bat, he says under his breath), but Astarion doesn’t try to stop her as she studies the hem of his shirt. 

“Lamentable is the autumn picker content with plums.” 

“Your Common’s improving, darling.” 

She’s not sure that it has. She’s been able to make sense of the letters, shape them into sounds, into words, but the words don’t make sense. “What does it mean?” 

Astarion laughs again. It’s a lovely sound, rare and genuine. “It’s poetry, my sweet. I can’t just tell you.” He looks at her sidelong, sly. A fox eyeing a rabbit hutch. “What do you think it means?” 

She has absolutely no idea, just the certainty, in the careful stitching, and the intensity in his eyes, that it absolutely means something to him. She can’t put it into words, but it feels… wistful. A yearning. Plums taste like the warmest nights of  summer…. Is it his longing for the sun? There’s something there, but it slips through her fingers. 

“It is hidden,” she says instead. “Your embroidery is so lovely; why is it only where no one can see it?” 

He reminds her of the gold filigree on his padded armour. He’s been repairing that himself for over a century. All of his things are old and held together with careful care and dedication. “Cazador didn’t let me have much.” He always spits that name, like the sound itself is bitter. “It made me want to…. Make what I did have my own. So some things I would decorate, and sometimes I’d stitch these little secrets, jokes…. Just for me. And now,” he pauses, this seems to have just occurred to him, “you.”  

“Have I ruined them for you? These little secrets.” 

He considers this. 

Astarion studies her, those dangerous red eyes so intent on her own, the wry curl of his mouth when he smiles. “No,” he says finally, amused, the impish little crinkles at the corner of his eyes making her stomach flip. “I think I quite like it this way.” 

Triel’dra is so glad he does. She’s not sure when they’ll have time for another wash day— or even if they’ll live long enough to need one— but she makes a note to herself to be on the lookout for more hidden gems when they do. 

*** 

As it happens, the surprises find her. 

She doesn’t think much of it when her tunic goes missing. There’s a pang of loss— it’s the one she was wearing when the illithids took her, one of the last things she has from home, made from her brother’s prized spidersilk in her standard stealthy grey— but in the end, it is just a shirt. She’s found others. 

It must have slipped out of her pack somewhere in Reithwin, or the gods only know what else. She asks the owlbear cub just in case he’d taken it to nest in, but no such luck. 

And then it’s back. When Triel awakes the following morning, her tunic is right there, neatly folded on top of everything else in her pack like it had never left and for a moment she thinks she must be losing her mind. Is the tadpole eating a hole in her brain? Just this drow tunic shaped blindspot? Some bizarre manifestation of the shadow curse that’s taking bits of home? 

She finds Astarion’s handiwork when she goes to put it on. There, between the buttons where they’ll be hidden, are rows of paw prints. Cat’s paws, dog’s, a row of crow prints, and even a stretch of thick owlbear tracks. A little secret, just for her, over her heart. 

He’s already up when she peeks out of her tent, pouring over a book they’d taken from the House of Healing. Seldarine save her, she suppresses a shudder just remembering the day before.

Astarion looks up from his reading and gives her a conspiratorial wink, hidden from the others, before putting on a more suggestive tone for their benefit. 

“Oh, it’s turned up, has it? Such a shame. I was so enjoying that corset top you found.” 

All through breakfast Triel finds her hands straying to the clasps of her tunic, and even once she’s dressed, beneath her armour she thinks of those rows of careful stitches. He keeps catching the furtive glances she sends in his direction, and he smiles at her, clearly pleased with himself. 

A pair of her underwear goes missing next. They return the next morning, little black bats hanging along the waistband, a few in flight towards her hip. She struggles to keep a straight face when she joins her companions at the campfire, especially given Astarion watching gleefully from his pile of pillows as she tries to stifle a laugh into her porridge. “Silly,” is all she says to him under his breath as they set off to look for the Sharran temple. 

Baldur’s gate is visible on the horizon when he next strikes, and Triel has to go back to bed, half-dressed, face buried in her pillow, because she can’t imagine how she would explain the high pitched noises she’s making. She finally calms herself, wrangling her breathing under control with an immense exertion of will, her eyes running and sides aching. It’s been a bleak few days, the stench of death and gore and the Shadowfell still fresh in her mind, and it’s a welcome feeling, laughing again. To forget the weight of everything, if only for a moment.

Triel sighs, swallows another hiccup, and goes back to put on her newly-vandalised bra: Twinkle in immaculate elvish script across the right cup, Icingdeath across the left. That he got the sides right is the thing that nearly does her in. 

Astarion says nothing, but he can tell that it got her, and he’s visibly pleased with himself. 

Around the campfire one evening she catches him carefully embroidering purple beebalm flowers into the corner of a handkerchief, and her heart catches in her throat, the fruits of her misguided courtship gifts laid out in thread and delicate knots. 

“Oh, these? I seem to have developed a sudden fondness for them.” 

He says it so casually, but his smile reaches his eyes and her heart. 

He’s just showing off the morning she wakes to find her trousers draped over the edge of her bed at the Elfsong, vines of familiar round, white blossoms sweeping from the  hem up the calves, where they would be hidden beneath her boots. 

He seems to know why when she greets him that morning by wrapping her arms around his waist and burying her face in the cool fabric of his shirt, 

“Funny thing about the surface, Moonflower,” he says, and she can feel his smile pressed against the crown of her head. “Traditionally, it would be me courting you, up here. Gifts to prove my devotion and means, et cetera, et cetera. Now, either one of us assimilates— or, and I like this better— we both just keep acting as the suitor and spoiling each other forever, hm?” 

Triel has surprises of her own. Astarion collapses beside her on the couch in the inn room’s little foyer, bruised and exhausted after a vicious fight, desperate for a rest and a meal. But for now, he contents himself by the fire, the rest of the weary travelling party following suit. Shadowheart is sprawled on the floor, Scratch’s head in her lap and his tail thumping against the ground, and Halsin has squeezed himself into an armchair, trying to focus on the wooden duck taking shape beneath his knife. 

“Asta?” He hums in response. There’s something about the scene, the ache in her bones, the warm glow of the fire and the friends around her. Somewhere out there in the city, Cazador is waiting, and there’s such a fierceness in her heart for the man resting against her that she can scarcely breathe.

Killing a vampire lord doesn’t scare her half as much as what may come after. 

 “Uodss valm zhah alurlssrin.”  The words come easily, despite their weight. She means it as she says it. It feels right. 

“Hmm,” Astarion mumbles against her shoulder. Her sweet, witty Astarion whose future is so uncertain. “That’s nice, dear.” 

He doesn’t speak drow… but Halsin does. 

He stops mid stroke, his knife paused mid curl of soft yielding wood, and his surprise quickly gives way to a wide, approving grin. 

Triel can only smile back, silently hold a finger to her lips. Shh. 

A secret. For Astarion to share in, but not yet. Triel knows what she feels, has never been so certain of this love she’d only ever guessed at before. And it feels good, to say it, to speak the words and hear them out loud, but Astarion’s heart is scarred and fragile, and she doesn’t want to rush anything.

He has asked her for time. For patience. 

For now, she’s content to stroke his hair and bask in the firelight and whisper words of love he can’t understand, sweet nothings that mean so much. 

*** 

She hasn’t been seeing as much of Astarion as she would like, but it’s frantic, trying to get everything in place. Their haven is well-defended, well-organised, but the thought of leaving it unattended still terrifies her, even if only for a few days. 

Despite her trepidation, she was determined to go. Even if she weren’t longing to see her friends, which she is, declining an invitation from “Withers” seems… unwise. 

So, to help prepare for their absence, Triel had a handful of her most trusted…. She’s never really sure what to call them. They’ve vampire spawn, certainly, but that feels demeaning and possessive. Her citizens? Her charges. A handful of her most disciplined charges had helped her roll the carcass of a Bulette she’d hunted onto a wheeled trolley and together they’d hauled it back to their stronghold. 

Now, with the help of a chain and pulley system they’d managed to hang it upside down for bleeding. Drow had been keeping deep bats since time immemorial, and she’d tested the methods their keepers used for feeding on smaller prey. It seemed to have worked— the taste was stale, Astarion had told her, but it seemed to keep him going just the same. 

She stands back and watches with some satisfaction as one of her helpers tries to get through the tough skin between the thick plates covering the creature’s throat, to get at the veins beneath. The bulette will provide ample blood to keep their stores full while they’re away and the hide will be extremely durable. She’s sure she’ll find some use for it. 

Triel tries to suppress a sigh. As one of the only people in their haven who eats, she and Scratch are going to be  having smoked bulette for a very, very long time. But if her people can make do, so can she. 

Astarion hasn’t fed on her in a while. It’s strange to miss it, how intimate it was— but he’s trying to lead by example, and that means animal blood with the rest of them. Gods, but she’s proud of him, her heart swells to bursting at how far he’s come. 

No one was there for him in his darkest hours, and here he is, making sure that the vampire spawn they’ve managed to track down have a place where they’re safe, where they’re understood. A community all struggling along together. 

She thinks of the early days of her enclave, the ragged huddle of escaped slaves who followed the first Moonreader to the surface. What an honour it is to attempt the same by his side. 

“Darling?” 

Triel startles. She’s not usually one to be caught unawares, but she’d been so lost in thought, and if anyone can sneak up on her it’s her love. 

She turns to find Astarion watching the bulette with an eyebrow raised. “Stocking up, my sweet? Perhaps a little excessive?” but he’s smiling at her. “I know, I know. Safe and fed, that’s your mandate. Can I borrow you for a moment?” 

Triel looks to her team of helpers, who assure her they have things under control and encourage her off, so she happily follows Astarion inside. He leads her towards their bedroom, and though she’s probably too busy for a diversion she does find herself rather hoping he may have the same in mind. It’s no doubt something logistical. He’s been trying to lay out a set of… bylaws? Something? (Which seems silly for such a small community, but if they manage to track down all seven-thousand…. Well, that’s a city.) 

He’s taught with nervous excitement by the time their bedroom door closes behind them, which does nothing to quell Triel’s amorous fancies. 

Astarion spins on his heel, grin wide, eyes creased mischievously. “In anticipation of this reunion, I’ve been working on something,” he confesses and instead of producing some papers or schedules or ledgers, she notices he’s physically putting himself between her and the bed, blocking her view. “Close your eyes, darling.” She’s confused, but does as he asks. 

His feet are quiet across the floor. She hears a soft swish of fabric, a gentle rustling of their bedclothes. 

A moment later, Astarion takes her hand, and guides it to fine, draped spidersilk. Her fingers trace the smooth fabric —Rhyl’fein’s work, no doubt—  and find shapes. His work. Embroidery, forms she can’t quite make out though she feels the flow of it along the collar and hem. Her eyes flutter open in surprise and she takes in what he has held out for her. 

“I thought, perhaps, you might want something new to wear.” 

It’s breathtaking. 

Triel’dra is a ranger. She knows leather and dust and scuffed boots, and he holds the garment up to her before she can protest— she’ll ruin this, she’s sure. It’s too beautiful to wear, she’s not graceful like he is, rough and calloused and scarred— but those ruby eyes are soft, his expression that naked adoration that always makes her heart skip. 

He’s picked up enough Drow to know what alurlssrin means. Enough to use it. 

It’s a tunic, a perfect marriage of surface and drowish influence. The silk is dyed a deep, warm purple, and it’s trimmed with gorgeous embroidery. It’s a harvest, small enough not to be loud, laid out along the edges of the garment like the last bushels brought in before the frost. Small pumpkins and their vines lay out the path and between them is a bounty of produce and flowers. Apples, green and red and gold; scattered cranberries; parsnips; pears; a pomegranate spilling seeds along the trail of loving stitches. Asters, and chrysanthemums, and violets. 

“Astarion, this is…” There’s something else, something she can’t quite grasp about it. Something beyond just bringing the season to the standstill of the underdark. “No plums.” She says after studying his work for a long moment, as the thought finally clicks into place. 

“No. No plums. Not the dregs left over from summer,” Astarion confirms, careful to lift the garment out of the way before she can crush it in her haste to throw her arms around him. He sets it aside carefully before pulling her in close, her head tucked so perfectly under his chin. “The things worth waiting for. ”