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Something Wicked This Way Comes

Fandom: Baldur's Gate 3

Rating: General audiences

Length: 3.7k (oneshot)

Relationships: Halsin & Minthara (platonic)

Summary:

"There was a particular turn of phrase that came to him, considering her. He would wake with it on the tip of his tongue, although he dared not utter it in her presence. To speak it aloud would have been to acknowledge the silence between them, and what had beget it. But he thought it. Alone in the night with the hum of her, her cyclone-eye stilled fury and the ring of her blade in the dark, he thought it: Bad blood." ------ Halsin doesn't like Minthara. But he thinks maybe he understands her, which is arguably worse. (Character study for Halsin & Minthara's odd, combative relationship and the ways in which they are far more alike than different. To the constant annoyance of them both.)

Read below, or on AO3

When she believed no one to be listening, when the world was deep in dreaming silence and the fathomless darkness was absolute, Minthara hummed.

Halsin knew she did not realize her audience. In truth, she barely had one. It only half-occurred to him to listen, and not every night: in trance, he more often wandered deeper into the chambers of his own mind, away from the conscious world. But some nights, he found his attention held captive. Keening the edge of her sword against the whetstone or scrubbing the day’s mud and blood from her plate as she held watch by the fireside, a rumble would arise from the depths of her chest. It thrummed, and ebbed, waxed and waned, kept tidal time with the rhythm of her hands.

The sound was not loud, nor particularly melodic. It always died before traveling far, lost itself in the forest and the crackle of the flame. It put him in mind of the Underdark’s gluttonous caverns. Sounds died rapidly there, too, born already one foot in the grave of their own echoing destruction. He wondered if this was why she did it: to be reminded of the growling of the hungry earth. Reminded of her home.

If she had known he listened, she would have pricked his eardrums with that blade, pierced into him to steal back the sound.

There was a particular turn of phrase that came to him, considering her. He would wake with it on the tip of his tongue, although he dared not utter it in her presence. To speak it aloud would have been to acknowledge the silence between them, and what had beget it. But he thought it. Alone in the night with the hum of her, her cyclone-eye stilled fury and the ring of her blade in the dark, he thought it:

Bad blood.

———————

Whatever Sura Tav had seen in the drow’s mind as she bled out onto the temple’s grimy floor was not something Halsin was capable of sharing, or comprehending.

He understood something of spite, and much more of rage. Both had pushed out through his skin in furred bursts, lengthening his teeth, sharpening his fingers into fine and merciless claws. Both had burned in his belly along with the blood of the goblin raiders. He did not drink it—not really, not exactly—but he tore through throat and tendon with his great teeth, and that part of him that was beast took secret pleasure in the mouthful.

His rampage through the temple ruins had been all but complete. His new allies had fallen reassuringly into step at his flanks. The dance-step formation they kept with each other reshaped itself to accommodate him. His desires and their desires were, if not identical, then certainly consonant. To fight with them felt right—felt natural.

And yet when the ground had been fed with the blood of all but one of their enemies, the differences between him and them were made stark. Sura had entered the final chamber, her githyanki and tiefling companions a half-pace to her rear, swords raised and ready. The others were arrayed behind them. The human warlock and wizard kept back at his own heels, the pale elf vanished into the shadows near the far wall. They had all been progressing steadily forward, when he witnessed them freeze in their tracks as one.

Eyes flashed in the dark at the opposite end of the room. The woman who had stepped into the light was not especially imposing, for her kind, her physical presence not noteworthy… but her eyes. Gods, her eyes. The last eyes he’d seen like that had yielded the crawling nightmare that had drawn him there. A nightmare that likewise nestled deep inside the minds of those he had taken as allies.

The magic of the aberrations was alien to him, as was the experience of those infected. Still, he could not help but feel as though his skin crawled with more than revulsion when the drow’s attention turned to Sura. The strange woman’s eyes were alive with desire. Her open palms had flexed, her body turned toward their group. She wanted to take—was taking—and he had seen tremors quake through Sura’s shoulders, though she held her ground in silence. Her breath came quicker and sweat beaded on her brow, but she stood steadfast, and did not blink.

With a crackle like heat lightning it was over. The drow had gone for her blade, and the three women before him fell on her as a whirlwind. For a moment he watched, dazed at what had transpired, then with a start he made to follow. A hand at his side brought him up short. In a display of either exceptional loyalty or suicidal bravery, the warlock had sunk a hand deep into the fur of his right flank, and urged him to stillness. His eyes locked on the four engaged in close combat. “Wait,” he had said, and to his left Halsin felt more than heard the wizard echo the sentiment.

Then the drow was on the floor. Sura loomed over her, slicked in gore: her own, the drow’s, that of the goblins who had served this woman with such zeal. The drow spat blood and met her gaze in unblinking challenge. Even crumpled in the dirt like a bird downed midflight, her eyes burned with barely-concealed fervor. Broken. Doomed. And yet she was still afire inside.

What had Sura seen in her, in that moment? The question would nag Halsin through all that came after. Perhaps, in the righteous inferno of Minthara’s mind, Sura Tav had seen herself as she might have been. Perhaps it was only that Minthara reminded her of someone else, someone long ago and far away, and she could not be complicit in murdering that memory.

They had left her there, bleeding onto the flagstone. Halsin could not pretend to feel easy about it. His instincts thrashed at leaving a wolf at his back, no matter how hamstrung and defeated. But Sura had shaken her head, and sheathed her dagger, and that had been that. The drow was left to the elements and the turning of the wheel of fate, cradled in the ruined embrace of her dead army.

He had not expected her to rise from the death he left her to, and haunt him.

———————

All the land had been eaten by shadow. What small pockets of light they had carved out for themselves were cramped, close huddles. To give one another space would have been to spread themselves too thin, to flirt too close with the ravenous dark.

He might almost have preferred to take the chance. He was, by all estimations, a patient, practical man. But Minthara’s nearness inspired a desire in him to do impatient, impractical things. Like fight. Or flee. Or willfully forget.

A childish notion. If he closed his eyes so that he could not see the spider, that would not render the spider unable to see him.

Caged in the dungeons beneath Moonrise, she’d seemed to him a revenant, an angry spectre of the past returned to life. For a moment he’d imagined himself back in Menzoberranzan—half a lifetime away, memories buried deep. He’d seen her face and remembered the matron who’d kept him like an exotic pet; he’d seen her shackles, and felt them, ghostly, around his own wrists.

But this drow was not that drow, this woman was not that woman. Her eyes had rolled wildly in her head while her own captors stood, mocking, at either side. They had gloated as they shredded her mind, erasing her as though her past was as meaningless to them as her present.

As before, he had watched his companions reach out to her, mind to mind. It was Lae’zel who stepped forward that time. Her fingers wound tight around the hilt of her greatsword. The very air held its breath. She pushed her will down into the woman at her feet, magic roiling out around them both. He found it impossible to look away.

Then Minthara had swayed upright. Her face was a blank mask, a well without a bottom. Lae’zel had barked a command at her jailers. Though Halsin boggled even now to remember it, they had walked away free.

And then she’d begun to travel with them. He could not see into her mind, as the others could. He could only hear her words, and leave the judgement of her convictions to his allies. He trusted them. He did not trust her. For her part she seemed indifferent to him, in a way he suspected was deliberate affectation.

What she seemed to trust most was the darkness itself. She moved through the shadows with graceful steps, wielded them as cover with as much surety as she wielded her sword.

One morning—though the word held little meaning there—not long into their new-forged alliance, he’d caught her staring at him. He had almost finished his breakfast, and looked up from his bread to find her eyes fixed on him.

“Do you need something?” he asked.

“I overheard you and the ranger speaking last night.”

He’d startled, taken aback. He had shared with Sura a little of what he remembered of drow, from his time as a captive. It had not occurred to him that he might be overheard. He was unsure if it bothered him that he had been.

“What is it to you?”

“Are you afraid of me?”

The question took him by surprise. “I’d be a fool not to be,” he replied. “You’ve only recently ceased to see me as a target for murder.”

She had waved a hand, dismissive. “I’m not referring to that, although—you speak truly. But no. Laying my time with the cult aside, if such a thing is even possible. Do you fear me because of what I am?”

“No.” Her mind was full of holes, but certain aspects of her character were unquestionable. He had not known her for long, but about this he was confident he was right. “You would not attempt to lock me away in such a manner.”

“I might have,” she said. “Once, I might have. But not now, you’re quite correct.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Then even you are capable of change.”

She grinned, an unlovely thing. “All we do is change, druid. You and I, our companions—we fight, kill, claim victory, carry forward. We are neither of us today who we were yesterday, nor who we will be tomorrow.”

“Is that an apology, or an attempt at ingratiation?”

“Neither. I only wish to grant you a more precise measure of who you fight alongside.”

“I still don’t trust you,” he said, after a moment.

“Good. You shouldn’t.”

———————

On the whole, theirs was a company of early risers. Often they stirred to life well before the darkness vanished completely into the underbrush.

Halsin cherished those hours when the day was still new. The Absolute’s armies swarmed thicker the closer they drew to Baldur’s Gate, and avoiding skirmishes with them became more difficult by the hour. Moments of calm were fast becoming precious. So when time allowed for it, he took deliberate care with his morning prayers. Sura, too, met the dawn with a ranger’s rites. Together their voices commingled in ritual: his entreaties and thanks to Silvanus, her recitation of Mielikki’s rites of tracking and beast communion.

This morning, Jaheira saw fit to join them. She knelt next to him on the cold earth. She offered only silence, her eyes closed in contemplation, but her presence was a comfortable weight at his side. The others greeted the day in their own fashion. Lae’zel and Shadowheart broke camp with a ruthless efficiency, stowing gear with practiced hands. Gale and Wyll had vanished into the treeline in the direction of the day’s travel, scouting ahead. They would return soon enough.

In the stillness between one prayer and the next, Minthara spoke. Freshly returned from the river, her fingers combed her still-wet hair into place. “Ranger. Druids. Do you not have plans to bathe before we depart?”

“Soon enough,” Halsin replied. “Why?”

“You reek.” Her hair tied back to her satisfaction, she took to lacing her boots. “We cannot expect to surprise our enemies when they can smell you coming.”

“I doubt their surprise will matter for long regardless,” said Sura. She stretched her arms over her head and rose to her feet. “You plan to bleed them either way, surely?”

“I will. Provided we ever get underway.” Her words came out in a growl.

“More haste, less speed,” Halsin said. He reached for his pack, and then stood as well, with a nod to Sura. Surrounded on every side by enemies and wilderness alike, none of them save Minthara were in the habit of bathing alone. More little rituals he held dear: the cleansing, the washing of clothes, the companionable intimacy of water.

Minthara looked from one of them to the other. Her eyes narrowed. “Another day begun with a waste of breath. Let the rest of us know when you’ve finished idling.”

“Prayer is not idling.”

“Prayer is nothing else.” She turned her back on them. “Even now, you spend minutes as though we were rich with them. But we will be very poor indeed if we do not move forward. The city waits.”

Her words were not untrue. Another four days, at most, and Baldur’s Gate would be upon them. In the time he had known her, Minthara had never shied from bloodshed. Indeed, she gloried in it. Yet as they neared their destination Halsin had watched that enthusiasm twist into something more desperate. The flex of her muscles no longer sang only joy with the cleave of her sword. She scythed through the adherents of her former religion like holy retribution made flesh and bone. He thought this reaping, this self-contained maelstrom of destruction, might be the closest thing to prayer that remained to her. An offering made to the only god she had left—the god of her own desires.

———————

Once, Minthara had asked him: “Why did you help to free me?”

It had taken him a long time to answer. They had put another hour’s wear onto the soles of their boots before he responded. “Because you didn’t deserve what was done to you.”

“I doubt that. Not that I deserved it—no one would. But that wasn’t your reason.”

He had thought about his path, to Moonrise and beyond it. The lives of those for whom he was responsible. He thought about the shadow-soaked bones of justiciars, Harpers, his own fellows, rotting under the stars these past hundred years.

He had thought about Ketheric and his pride, his grief like a sinking ship that had dragged him down, that had dragged so much that Halsin loved down with it.

He had thought about wrath. He had thought about it, and thought about it. And then he had swallowed it down.

“You’re right,” he said. “It was not.”

She had not asked again.

———————

“Not a lover of wine, druid?”

Even in the city, polluted as it was by the runoff of civilization, the Chionthar under the moonlight was a sight to behold. He had sought the riverside for its solitude. The rest of their companions were somewhere behind and above him, celebrating their return to Baldur’s Gate with bottles of wine of dubious acquisition.

But Halsin did not share their festive mood. Walking the city’s cobbles left his feet feeling thick and unwieldy. Houses were too close here, plants too sparse, and everywhere the rabble of desperate souls and the pall of hunger. While they had set up for the night in an out-of-the-way alley abutting the riverfront, he had slipped away down a set of steps that led to a stubby dock. Where he sat, and watched the waves.

After several minutes, Minthara had strode out from the darkness and taken a seat near him. He did not delude himself that she sought his company in particular, but he thought he might have understood what it was that she did want. His discomfort at being in the city had been so great that it had taken him far too long to recognize a similar emotion in her.

He shook his head, but did not look at her. “Just the opposite, I’m afraid. Rather over-fond of it when I allow myself to be. These are poor circumstances for such indulgences.”

“No wonder you skulk here alone. Such a lack of mastery of the self is understandably troubling.” Her voice was cold as a mountain stream, a turbulent rush over gravel. It echoed strangely on the walls around them. Lost itself among the waves. “Though I can’t say I disagree. To lower our guard within the very seat of our enemies’ power is a mistake.”

Halsin shuddered. They had encountered Orin again that very day, in the guise of a mercenary of the Flaming Fist. He could still hear her flesh warping, her bones snapping, as her body reshaped itself before his eyes.

Yet the obscenity of the performance was not half so enthralling as Minthara’s reaction to it. Her muscles had drawn taut, her knuckles had whitened around the grip of her sword. She had held herself coiled like a snake. It lasted no longer than a blink.

Then it had passed, and she had once more worn a mask of iron.

“Why did you come to speak to me?”

Minthara shrugged. “I wished to see if you’d been swallowed by the river. Or scuttled off with the best of the wine. I imagined for a moment that you’d be doing something interesting. A lapse in judgement I won’t repeat.”

He did not take her needling to heart. It was one of the first lessons he had learned about her, and it had served him well. “A shame I’ve disappointed you,” he said. “Perhaps once this is done, we can both relax our control for a time, and discover which of us has the better taste in wine.”

She turned to him. Her eyes caught a glimmer of reflection off the river. “A fine spectacle that would be. I wonder what you’re like in your cups? Do you ever forget yourself? Unleash your rage and let it run, teeth bared?”

“That would be interesting, wouldn’t it? Yet I distinctly recall some claim to the contrary. Odd. Can’t imagine where I’d have heard such a thing.”

She barked out a laugh, and rose to her feet. “I would like to see it, I think.”

Then she was gone again. Long after she had vanished back the way she had come, long after he was once again alone with the darkness, he answered her:

“No. I don’t think you would.”

———————

They’d set Orin’s bones ablaze before they left. None among them had looked back to see if they were being followed. To walk out of the temple to murder alive was a brazen enough affront. Those few of Bhaal’s petitioners still remaining clung to the shadows, whispering among themselves, and chancing eye contact seemed unwise.

For much of his time in that place, Halsin had been kept drugged and unaware. He felt grateful for this, in a sickly sort of way. He could not bear to dwell upon the alternatives.

He thought that Minthara might have liked to linger. Might have liked to stand vigil there long enough to watch Orin’s bones char clean down to ash. But Astarion had put a hand on her shoulder, which became a hand around her waist when her knees buckled under her. Though they were all sticky with gore, she’d taken the worst of Orin’s claws, and most of the blood soaking her clothes was her own. Under a layer of sweat and grime, her face was a pallid purple-grey. Ordinarily she would have snapped at Astarion for touching her. But she’d said nothing at all, only pressed her lips together in a thin tight line and leaned into him.

Now she sat in a heap next to the fire. Someone had pulled a spare blanket out of their pack and bundled her onto it; someone else had brought her a bowl of clean water and a rag. There had been offers of further help. She snarled them off. And so everyone else had crawled into their tents to tend their wounds in private, in sets of two or three. None of them had escaped unscathed, and none of them wanted to be alone.

Jaheira had offered to keep him company, as had Sura. They were reluctant to let him out of their sight again. But he could not force himself into a tent, not yet, nor could he settle enough to rest. He needed to breathe clean air, to be under the open sky.

The flames had long died down to a smolder of coals before Minthara spoke. “Druid. Halsin. You are well?”

He studied her for a time before he answered. “I am. Thanks in great part to you.”

“I did not do what I did for thanks.”

“I understand,” he said. Her left forearm was bleeding. She struggled to bind it with a length of clean cloth, cursing under her breath. Abruptly he stood and moved around the fire. He sat down next to her, and took her arm into his hands, and wiped the blood from the gash. Then he finished tying the bandage in place.

She glared at her arm where he held it.

“You freed me,” he said quietly. “You did not need to, but you did.”

“If you think I did not need to,” she said, “then you do not know me at all.”

“I would’ve thought you might have left me to die.”

“I might have killed you. I may yet. But to leave you with Orin?” Exhaustion crept in at the edges of her words. “No.”

She slumped forward, resting her weight on her knee with her good elbow. Breath hissed out between her teeth. Halsin reached for her. He pulled her toward him, bracing her weight against his side. She looked down at his hands, still wet with her blood.

“Aren’t you afraid of me?” she mumbled, her eyes drifting closed.

“Terrified,” he whispered.

Into the stillness of the night, Halsin began to hum.

#today i remembered making this and smiled #the audience for this was so niche but it was good actually. it was good.

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