the past is a choke chain

His skin remembers midnight in Baldur’s Gate. The kiss of dark, salt-stung wind, scented with fish and filth and fear. He ran the rooftops as a man and as a monster, and who’s to say which it is that flits over them tonight? Wyrm’s Rock is a fortress, but he is swifter than shadow, and it takes only the whim of his worm-addled thoughts to put him high, high up the unforgiving walls until he’s crouched like a grotesque on the stone ledge of a stained-glass window looking into Gortash’s office.

A part of him had hoped just seeing the place, even through glass, would be enough. They worked together, he must have been here before, yet nothing stirs in the rotten cave of his skull. All within is shadow, a few flickering candles melting their last, the depths of the room absent all colour in his elf-given darkvision. His human-given flesh resents the lack of sleep these past few days; his need for answers ignores it.

Rune isn’t as deft with the roll of lockpicks and glass-cutters and other such unniceties as Astarion is, and when he drops one—clattering loud in the night to the rocks below—he grits his teeth and resists the desire to blast the glass to shards. That would bring the patrolling Steel Watch to bind him, bring guards to spit on and chain him, and then he’d have to rip them all to pieces and whatever alliance he and Gortash have—had—the man won’t bend over backwards for him. Won’t bend at all. He’s Bane’s Chosen, bending is far outside the job description.

Finally he cuts enough glass to slither inside and drops lightly to the cold flagstones. His well-worn boots make no sound, his own breath louder than his movements. He catches it in the back of his throat and takes stock of his surroundings.

Large open space, more hall than office, lined with red carpet down the centre and columned at one end. A high set of doors stands firmly closed at the other, and to the right of them there’s a raised wooden area, fenced off fancy, with desk and shelves and a rich-man’s globe. In the centre, there’s a table spread with a mass of papers, which seems as good a place to start as any. Rune drops into the chair at its head—waiting for a flash, getting nothing—and starts rifling through everything he can reach.

“I assume you aren’t here to kill me, given you’re molesting my paperwork.”

Rune’s head snaps up. Gortash leans against one of the columns, clawed gauntlet glinting in the moonlight, fully dressed despite the late hour. Rune refuses to move, sitting back in the chair with his hands on the arms as if he owns it. He wore no armour tonight for silence’s sake, and beneath Gortash’s gaze feels like some soft-bellied Underdark thing stripped from its protective carapace. He hooks a foot over his knee and angles his chin up, defiant as much of his own fear as of his unremembered former ally.

Something flickers across Gortash's face, quickly masked with a sardonic smile, and he shakes his head. “You really don’t remember anything, do you? Drink?”

“Sure.”

The rich-man’s globe opens to Gortash’s clever touch, and he extracts crystal goblets and no-doubt disgustingly expensive wine from within its hollow core. He pours two generous red measures and scoffs when Rune does nothing but eye his glass suspiciously.

“Really? You think I’d go to all this effort to get you on-side and then poison you?” Gortash plucks up Rune's glass and takes a large swallow. “There. Satisfied?”

Rune gnaws his tongue for a moment, then nods. As he takes the wine, the tips of his fingers brush Gortash’s hand, and memory cramps his brain—hot, wet memory of that hand wrapped around his cock while that mouth pants against his.

He recoils. The wineglass shatters on the floor, and Gortash curses. Rune stares at the foreign object sewn to the end of his arm.

“What did you do?” He’s on his feet. His knife is in his hand. It’s at Gortash’s throat. “What did you do?”

Gortash doesn’t so much as blink. Between Rune and Orin, he’s clearly grown accustomed to Bhaalspawn temper tantrums. The idea is amusing, in some deep place Rune will look at later, when he’s not vibrating with the fury of yet another piece of his past he doesn’t understand. Gortash sips his wine.

“Do you want the list in chronological order, or alphabetical? Just today’s efforts, or everything since I found out you were allegedly dead?”

Rune steps closer, not lowering the blade, but the want of answers is stronger than the urge to split skin and spill blood. He grabs Gortash’s hand, and this time there’s no flash of memory—instead a flicker of heat beneath his skin, a rush of veinous fire that makes the monster folded into his muscles snarl.

“Orin tried to kill me,” he says. “You did something to me before that. You did something else.”

“Yes,” Gortash says, and something about the tone makes Rune think no, that’s Enver.

The knife returns to his belt. He doesn’t step away. The only time he’s this close to someone is if it’s Astarion, or he’s about to kill them.

Enver’s eyes flicker, just for a second; down-up, quick-sharp. Looking at Rune’s mouth. The motion doubles on itself, triples—a hundred repeats of that same action imposing themselves over Rune’s vision. He’s seen it before. They’ve done this before. There’s something in Gortash’s face—not softness, Bane’s Chosen would never weaken in such a way, but it might be relief. Or despair.

“You said we agreed to keep out of each other’s business,” Rune says.

“We did.”

“Then why did we fuck?”

“I always did enjoy your bluntness. Orin thinks herself some poet of gore, but you—you simply speak your mind. There’s very little artifice to you. It’s rather refreshing.”

“Answer the fucking question.”

Enver just looks at him and says, “Because you’ve always needed someone to hold your leash.”

Memories gush from the severed artery in his mind as he slams his mouth against Gortash’s. Dark corners, hidden alleys, the frozen halls of Mephistopheles’ palace—in all of them, this mouth on his, these hands on his skin, wrapped around wrists and hips and throat. There is no why in the remembering, only the sweat-slick fact that he’s opened himself to this man again and again and again, and none of it involved gutting him.

Enver pulls him close, a firm hand at waist and neck. Rune bites his lip and remembers biting his lip, and the memory of the moan slots into place over the present-day moan, and he breaks away, gasping.

This is how Bhaal’s beloved son was put to work for Bane’s fist then, is it? This is how the dog was chained—by the cock. A growl builds low in his throat.

“You were the one who started it,” Gortash says, reading Rune’s thoughts too clearly for his liking. “A night very much like this one, only that one ended in my bed, since you were somewhat persuadable with creature comforts back then.”

“Why would I do that?”

“I’m afraid I don’t have the answer to that particular question, my friend. And you never explained yourself.”

Oblivion. He must have found oblivion in this, though Gortash has no fangs with which to drain the bloodlust from him. Did he need that, even when he knew exactly what he was? Has he always been fighting Father’s will?

Enver cups a large, warm palm to his cheek. “I thought you were dead.”

“You had Orin.”

“Orin isn’t you.”

This kiss is more controlled—because Gortash is leading it. His lips are firm, demanding; the tongue in Rune’s mouth tells his teeth to surrender, and the urge to bite dies. The fingers around his wrist say no and his hand stops craving the hilt of his knife. This isn’t what happens when Astarion kisses him. This isn’t what happens when Astarion bites him. This is some new—old—submission forced over him, and it’s just as effective now as it must have been then, because he lets Enver press him to the table, legs wide, throat bared.

A breath. His arms are, for some reason, above his head. His face is hot, his skin tight like he’s caught a fever. His illithid veins throb. His head pounds.

Enver puts a hand between his legs, and he realises he’s also hard.

They undress enough for Rune to wrap his legs around Enver’s waist as memory and present press into him with little preparation and a sting of need. Another commanding kiss pins him down, one hand holding his wrists together, tight enough to grind the bones. Rune gives as good as he gets, hard and hungry, and wonders how many tables they broke between them over the years.

With every rock of hips, more holes fill themselves in. Bloody fingerprints on Enver’s bare chest as the broadsheets drown in the gore Rune leaves in the streets. His body rippling, tearing, twisting back into itself when Gortash snaps heel. A belt around his throat, a cock in his mouth, a bed that isn’t his, someone’s knife in his gut and you’re supposed to be my unstoppable assassin, what do you think you’re playing at, getting yourself stabbed by some common street rat? A kiss too soft to think about, one very, very late night, when the only other thing he can taste is wine. Tearing at his hair, his skin, body trying to change with anger, with pain, with violent need; a ragged whisper of I can’t control it, Enver, I’m so scared, I can’t—

Rune snaps free of the hold with a twist that leaves his wrists stinging. Grabs Gortash’s hand, puts it to his neck. Thick fingers curve into place. There’s a dark light in Enver's eyes, a knowing. Of course. They’ve done this before.

Bane’s fist around Bhaal’s throat, that’s some kind of blasphemy, isn’t it? Rune wraps both hands around Enver’s powerful forearm, and says, “Tighter.”

Golden claws bite into his skin. They don’t pierce as deep as fangs—he’ll have to explain this later, only no; no, he won’t, he answers to nothing and no-one but the call of blood and Father’s will and—

“Tighter.”

He no longer cares about the sex. The body on top of him, the cock inside him—all that matters is the rolling black devouring his vision and the perfect silence it brings. Breath thin, mind blank; it’s void-wrought bliss until Enver does the unthinkable.

He lets go.

Rune sucks unwanted air back into his lungs. Heartbeat-quick his knife is pressed to Enver’s ribs. “Put it back.”

“This—” Gortash taps the knife, “—is why I won’t. You may not remember, but I do. You don’t get your way. Not here.”

The knife breaks skin. That’s a mistake; now all he can think about is driving it deeper, carving out the Lordling’s heart, fresh and ripe and bleeding. All that’s holding him back is the fact that Orin wants him to do it, and anything dear sister wants, he will rail against.

With two slow fingers, Enver pushes the knife aside. It scrapes a thin line across his chest, and another memory surfaces, of similar scratches beneath Rune’s hungry tongue. A hand wraps once more around his wrist, and Rune’s grip turns to water, the blade clattering to the floor. He whimpers, not like a man bedding a man, but like a beaten dog.

“Oh, my sweet knife,” Enver murmurs. He traces the web of black veins distorting the left side of Rune’s face. “What has she done to you?”

He sets his teeth over Rune’s pulse and they fuck like that, short and sharp, each needing for the pleasure to be done, for this to be over. The idea of stopping never crosses Rune’s mind, and he knows with amnesiac certainty that it never crosses Gortash’s either.

Neither of them know how to lose.

Rune’s head throbs. He’s possessed of an urgent desire to turn his knife inward, to carve out what he’s just done like some errant organ. Guilt is not an emotion he’s intimately familiar with, though of late it’s become more and more a part of his limited palette.

“What does your vampire do?”

Gortash has reclaimed his chair, drumming idle fingers on the arm. Rune’s shared that chair with him before, sees it in the afterimages floating, ghostlike, at the corner of his eye. He’s knelt before that chair.

“What?”

“Your vampire,” Gortash repeats. “By all reports, you’re…fond of him. What does he do to keep you in line?”

There’s bitterness beneath the nonchalance. In the flickering remains of the candlelight, the shadows beneath his eyes turn to bruises.

“Bites me,” Rune tells him. “Drinks until it’s…quiet.”

“That must weaken you.”

Rune tugs the laces of his boots tight. “Not that much.”

“We re-made our alliance,” Gortash says. “You could stay here if you wanted. You’ll be far safer from Orin’s machinations behind these walls.” Then, as an afterthought, a tagged-on obligation; “All of you would be.”

“A prison with nice beds is still a prison.”

A laugh, muffled behind closed lips. Gortash pours himself another glass of wine—this time he doesn’t offer Rune any.

Rune is not a man of many words, yet this silence wraps like garotte wire around his throat, begging for the scrabbling fingers of speech to relieve it. He found answers tonight, just like he wanted. Filled in some of the gaps with fresh memories.

None of them were what he’d hoped for.

He still has no idea who he was. He’s starting to think it doesn’t matter, when who he is now is the one who’s survived. Old Rune let Orin smash his skull in and leave him in a pit. New Rune might be a wreck, but he’s a wreck with strength enough to rip her spine out through her stomach and beat her to death with it.

“Do you want an escort out, or are you leaving the way you broke in?” Gortash asks.

“No escort.”

“Wouldn’t want to cause a scene, I suppose.” Gortash throws back the last of his wine. “Should I expect a repeat tomorrow night?”

Rune climbs up into the broken window, crouching in the chill hissing through the empty panes. “No.”

He leaps off of Wyrm’s Rock and falls. Falls until maybe he wants to hit the rocks and the river, at the last second wrenching flight from his mind. The illithid veins infesting him pulse painfully—it never gets any easier. There’s no going back, though. There is no cure for what he is.

Leaps and worm-flight carry him away from the fortress. He can’t help glancing back, to where the faint glow in that high, broken window is blocked by the silhouette of what can only be a man. Rune puts a hand to his neck, ringed with scabbed scratches and a fistful of bruises. He doesn’t have to explain himself to anyone.

He’s going to anyway.