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@ohdeerieme

in my bg3 era
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stars-and-clouds
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winterofherdiscontent

. 𝓣𝓱𝓮 𝓟𝓪𝓵𝓮 𝓔𝓵𝓯

'Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief' (Anne Carson)

[ a painting study of Astarion Ancunín ]

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lassieposting

Been thinking a lot lately about romanced Astarion post-spawn ending.

Because like. The Funnest™ thing about cptsd is how much of it gets delayed. When you're trapped in a lengthy, ongoing traumatic situation, you do not have the ability to process and start healing your mental wounds. Your brain and body go into survival mode, and all that matters in the moment is that you somehow cope with the horrors. He wouldn't have been able to even begin dealing with the physical, mental and emotional toll of two hundred years of torture, brutalization and dehumanization while he was under Cazador's control; he is in constant danger, surrounded by sharks in the water, and survival means not letting them smell blood. He can't afford to fall apart, to show weakness. He is shockingly functional and competent in-game, partly because he has to be to work as a game character, but also partly because...it do be like that, to some degree. When death, for whatever reason, is not an option, you just have to shut down and keep going. People adapt in order to survive, and when we learn that showing an "injury" (physical or psychological) only gets us punished, we learn to hide it.

Early-game Astarion is terrified - of Cazador, of Godey, of being hunted down by his siblings, of being staked or sold off at the first opportunity by Tav and the other companions, of turning into a mindflayer, of another painful transformation, of losing himself when he's only just regained his autonomy after two centuries, of what Cazador will do to him if he ever finds him - the man is overwhelmed by fear. He's on thin ice as a vampire, and he's not going to give them any more reason to want him gone. Survival instinct is still in control, and in this new situation, crafting some fragile safety for himself means not only selling his body for protection, but also being useful. Clear-headed. Good in a fight.

Endgame Astarion finds himself in a completely different situation. The time-sensitive overarching threats - Cazador and impending ceremorphosis - have been dealt with. He has a loving, supportive partner he's really starting to feel safe with - Tav/Durge has proved that they're on his side, that their affection is genuine, that they don't just want him for the one thing he's been told he's good for. They've told him they're going to help him find a workaround for his sun allergy. He's getting fed regularly. He has time to stop, and breathe, and just. Recuperate.

For the first time in 200 years, he is safe.

And it will probably take a while to catch up, during which time he will seem to be coping really well, but at some point, his brain is going to realise that he's safe, and it's going to finally start processing the sheer fucking horror he's been through. Since I haven't seen anyone talking about this particular fun aspect of cptsd, allow me to offer u some thoughts on issues Astarion and Tav might end up dealing with in the months/years postgame, during the

✨ Delayed Trauma Response ✨
  • Memory Gaps: Astarion realising, as he opens up to Tav, that there are entire years or decades of his life from which he has only a handful of memories. Great big blank stretches where he has no idea where he was, who he was with, what was happening to him. Some of the gaps cover years at a time where he was so dissociated and shut down that he just didn't retain any memories of what was going on around him. Some are shorter periods of particularly horrific torture that his brain has deliberately blocked out to protect him.
  • Recovered Memories: At some point, years into the future when he's done A Lot of healing, he might find that every now and then, a fragment of those lost memories will unexpectedly come back to him. He'll catch a particular scent on the breeze, or overhear a specific phrase in the street, or cross paths with someone whose face is oddly familiar, and he'll get a glimpse of an acute horror he'd filed neatly away where it couldn't hurt him anymore. He very rarely remembers all the context to those flashes of his past. He might recall that he was punished, but not what he was punished for, or he might remember words spoken by a greedy conquest, but be unable to recall the man's face.
  • Dissociation: Tav knows going into this relationship that Astarion has basically made an art out of dissociating during sex. They also know, from their shared encounter with the drow twins, that he's not great at enforcing his own boundaries - he'll always say he'll speak up and back out if he stops having fun, but in practice he rarely does; he's not used to having the option of saying no to his partner, and being punished if he tries. So they know there's going to be some practice and experimentation and negotiation necessary there, to figure out the rough limits of his comfort zone. But once he starts really processing, there may be days where he just checks out completely. Tav will touch his shoulder, and he'll startle and apologise - "Terribly sorry, darling, I was miles away for a moment there." And Tav will gently point out that he's been sat in the same spot vacantly staring into the middle distance for hours. They've been checking in on him occasionally and this is the first time he's responded. It's unsettling, to say the least.
  • Lost Time: Astarion was very young when he was turned, physically mature but emotionally juvenile. He was basically an overgrown teenager, in the phase of life where elves are just starting to learn who they are and what they want, and figure out their place in the world. But he never got to do that, because he spent his formative young adult years in a world where everyone became an abuser, where his only means of surviving was to smile and charm and obey while even his basic human dignity was stripped away. He learned that communication is based on manipulation. He learned that the powerful can do whatever they like to the weak. He learned an incredibly toxic, abusive way of life, and that was his family dynamic, his everyday life, for as long as he can remember. Now that he's free and safe, he's realising that the world doesn't actually work that way and that he's now far behind even shorter-lived races in social/emotional development. He's grieving for the person he could've been. He's grieving for the life he could've lived. He's grieving for all the years he already lost, and the ones he'll lose in the future as he flounders to catch up. A decent chunk of his life was stolen from him, and that's time he will never get back.
  • Flashbacks & Night Terrors: Specifically the kind where your brain convinces you that an injury you had a long time ago is actually an injury you have (or are receiving) right now. There are nights where he'll wake Tav in a panic, because his back feels like it's on fire, he can feel every freshly-carved wound dripping blood and he's in so much pain he doesn't know what else to do. If Tav looks, they see nothing out of the ordinary - old, long-healed scars, same as always. But the pain and the fear and the distress are all very real to him, and all they can do is try to comfort him, cover his back with cool damp cloths or healing salves, remind him he's safe now and they're not leaving him.
  • Boundary Shifting: Sometimes, Tav can come up and hug him from behind, and he'll melt into them a little bit and go all soft and happy. Other times, he might flinch away or go rigid at the same gesture. A lot of the time, it really depends on how he's feeling on the day, but at least a little bit of it is deliberate - he's pushing to find the limit of just how much autonomy Tav is willing to give him. He wants to know at what point they'll stop respecting his "no". Will they accept it if he doesn't want a hug? If he wants to sleep in his own room tonight? At what point will understanding turn to anger at being rejected? From the drow twins four/fivesome, we also know he's got a tendency to push his own boundaries, and jump into things he's actually not ready for, and Tav would be the one holding his hand through the fallout as he tries to figure out what his own boundaries even are.
  • Frustration! So, so much frustration. He wants to be Over It already. He wants to move past everything that ever happened to him and never think about it again. He hates that Cazador still has a grip on him, even in death - he doesn't want to give the bastard the satisfaction of dwelling on all his punishments, his cruelties. Sometimes, that frustration is going to explode outwards at Tav - he'll get angry at them for coddling him, or find something small to start a fight over, or he'll set an unreasonable boundary and try to defend it because he's still learning what healthy boundaries look like. Sometimes, it will implode inwards, and that won't be about Tav at all, but they'll get the brunt of it all the same - it might come out as self-loathing or self-punishment, and he'll react by doing something stupid, like trying to drive them away, because having a secure, relatively healthy relationship is terrifying and the instinct is to destroy it before Tav can. There will be yelling and angry tears and deeply unhealthy coping mechanisms, and they'd have to work through that. Trauma is ugly, and Astarion is right at the beginning of a very long journey towards healing.
  • Abandonment Issues: Astarion wants the relationship to be one between equals, but he's kind of got Tav on a pedestal all the same. They saved him. They helped him get rid of Cazador for good. They chose him and love him despite a wealth of better (in his eyes) options, and all his baggage. They stayed with him even when he has very little to offer them. We know his vanity and obnoxious self-absorption is a fragile attempt to obscure the fact that his self-esteem is in the dirt and he has virtually no self-worth, and there are a couple of occasions in-game where it becomes clear that he's afraid of losing the one person who somehow considers him lovable. After seeing Sebastian and all the other conquests, he begs Tav not to hate him, saying that he did what he had to. If he has a rival for Tav's affections, and Tav informs him that they broke up with the rival to be with Astarion, he's shocked and the first thing out of his mouth is, "You ended things with them for me? Why?" And if Durge tries to break up with him for his own safety, his facade drops and he immediately asks if he did something wrong. So while he's not afraid to argue with Tav, if something happens - like an angry outburst - that upsets or angers them, and he thinks he's at risk of losing that one steady, stable person in his life, he might well cling and overcompensate to try and repair what he thinks is a fracture in their relationship. He'll fawn or beg or crawl into Tav's bed to "apologise" and "make it up to them" because, well, very occasionally it worked on Cazador. With patience and good communication and lots of repeatedly driving the lesson home to overcome 200 years of education to the contrary, he will eventually start to believe that "I'm really pissed off at you right now," does not equate to, "You are the worst mistake I've ever made and I am leaving you."
  • Panic Attacks: I feel like honestly he'd get some symptoms of these on a fairly regular basis, but he's never been given any option other than just trying to power through them. He's used to realising he's shaking, he's used to feeling like he's watching himself from outside his body, or like he can't breathe even though he doesn't need to. He's very familiar with the sickening fear in his gut, so intense it makes his head spin. He's not used to being comforted or reassured about them - he thinks they're normal. Tav disagrees.

Anyway, cptsd is messy and complicated and often looks very different from person to person so these will not represent everyone's but these are just some ideas for what the ongoing recovery process might make them work through, based on the aspects I'm most familiar with.

Projecting? Who's projecting? I'm not projecting. Shut up.

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promtease

Astarion has an undying love for the innocent little kisses you give him.

They make him giddy almost, in a way he never thought he'd be able to feel again. He loves that you're drawn to him the second everyone's attention is directed elsewhere. Loves how you always- in that oh-so special way of yours- make sure he's okay with how close you're getting before you lean in and plant a soft little smooch to whatever part of him you're nearest at the time.

(He even loves the way you smile reassuringly when you see something in him that tells you he needs space- sometimes before he himself knows it- and you back away without so much as a sniff. Always patient, and never once disappointed. It's so sweet that it's almost sickening- makes his teeth hurt.)

His knees weaken at the feeling of your lashes against the soft skin of his cheek. Practically buckle whenever you mouth at the corner of his jaw before whispering softly into his ear. Sometimes it's just to tell him you love him, other times it's to make an offhand comment about someone neither of you particularly like. And, how you breathe a laugh so quiet that only he can hear when he responds to whatever you said with an equally hushed quip??

On occasion he'll find the courage to reach out and hold your hand when you're sat together by the fire, and you get this big, dumb smile on your pretty face. Your gratitude comes in the form of kisses- one to each of the knuckles on his offered hand. One. Two. Three. Four. By the fifth one, he can feel a warmth radiating from your flushing face, so hot it rivals the heat from the campfire.

He could go on forever.

When he's lent over a book and you bend down low enough to press your lips to the top of his head and not so subtly inhale the scent of his hair? The same kiss to his forehead that comes every night without fail before you're off to bed? The chaste press to the apple of his cheek as you're passing by, too busy with a particular task to stop and chat? The one between his brows that you let linger just long enough to rid him of the crease that comes with a bout of frustration?

Hells, sometimes you'll simply peck his shoulder in response when he teases you with a nudge mid-banter, and it nearly sends him to the ground. There's just something so… nice about it? The way you're kissing him as a way to express adoration, with nary an expectation to what comes after? Truly just to kiss him, and nothing more??

It'd be maddening,

if he didn't love it so godsdamned much.

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memeadonna

Astarion never felt more comfortable than in your arms. It was strange to him, a foreign thing after his enslavement. For centuries he’d had nobody. Now he had you, and you wanted to share these quiet moments with him. You didn’t look at him as the façade he showed the world, grinning and beautiful and confident. You also didn’t look at him as some broken thing to be pitied. He couldn’t stand being pitied.

That was why it was easy, he supposed. You didn’t hold him like he was breakable, yet you held the shattered pieces of him together in those tight, warm hugs. You let him rest his head on your chest and listen to your heart beating, warm beneath his freezing body. His corpse.

It shouldn’t have been this easy to love you. He didn’t think he was capable of such a thing anymore. But you were infuriatingly easy to love. You were terrifyingly close to his heart. If he lost you…

You let him sleep in your arms every night. On top of you, really, with his head on your chest and your hands in his hair. The fact that you let your guard down around a predator baffled him. He’d almost killed you the first time he claimed your neck, and yet you let him so close to it every night, draping a blanket over your bodies so he didn’t freeze you to death. He imagined you sharing a warm bed sometimes, curled up together on a cold winter’s day under a heavy duvet, entwined like strangling vines. And then he’d imagine what it would be like if he was alive, if he were the one warming you rather than the one stealing your heat. Rather than crushing you with his corpse. Would you want that more?

And then he stops thinking about it.

“Darling,” your voice shatters the silence, heavy with sleep as you gently card your fingers through his hair. “Mmmm… did you get too warm?” “Warm?” he repeats the word before he realizes he’s rolled off of you, and only his head remains on your chest. He wants to say something suave to explain it away, but nothing comes to mind. Your hands keep moving through his hair, and he stops himself from nuzzling into them. It’s so hard to be suave, to put up his façade when you break through it so easily. “Just worried I was too heavy,” he offers. It’s a half-truth, he supposes.

You pull him back on top of your body and wrap your arms around him again. “I sleep better with you in my arms,” your voice is still heavy with sleep, honest as you slur your tired words. “Helps my anxieties. Like a weighted blanket.” Your fingers explore their way up to the tips of his ears, gently massaging. Soothing him.

His eyes are wide despite your ministrations as he relaxes once more against you as you sink back into sleep. He wraps his arms around you and plays with your hair as a smile tugs at the corners of his lips. Oh.

Maybe he was broken. Maybe you were too. But your broken pieces fit so perfectly together that they almost formed one whole.

And maybe that was enough.

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bakuliwrites

It's the little things that Astarion comes to savor with his freedom.

Over the course of his journey with you and the others, he wakes every morning to the gilded light of the sun. He greets it as if greeting an old friend, basking in the warmth of reunion. He's not sure how much longer he'll have to enjoy it, so he relishes every moment he spends in its incandescent light.

Astarion savors the smell of freshly brewed tea. Bergamot, lemon, mint. Herbaceous, floral, earthy, bright. He breathes it all in, everything he can. Long gone are the fetid smells of rot and pungent bile that filled Cazador's palace. Every once in a while, a carcass on the road might hit him with that powerful, unpleasant scent memory. So he's taken to carrying a handkerchief he's spritzed with his signature scent in order to cover his mouth and nose when the memories come flooding back. Something to ground him in the present moment. Over time, when the scent of the handkerchief begins to fade and his bond with his companions grows closer, he starts to douse it in their various perfumes. To remind him of family. To remind him of his real home.

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stars-and-clouds

HE DIDN'T WANT TO LET GO HE DIDN'T WANT TO LET GO HE DIDN'T WANT TO LET GO!!! -screams-