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Astarion forgets that little conversation entirely - he’s wondered what he looks like now so many times in two centuries that one more occasion, albeit one where he was rather less solitary in his vanity, hardly stands out.
He forgets it until he ducks out of his tent into the morning light, and… Interesting. There’s a sheet of paper tucked under his jar of - ugh - slightly congealed blood. He can’t help the dread rising at the back of his throat. Some note left to toy with him? (He can almost see it: that hideously neat, tight little handwriting. I know where you are, boy. He focuses on the sun’s warmth on his skin, and takes a breath he doesn’t need. No. It’ll at least be a damn sight harder for the bastard now.)
Shaking off his paralysis, he unfolds it, and finds… a portrait. Hm. He squints, smoothing it and trying not to smear charcoal all over his fingers.
A handsome fellow, certainly - straddling the line between that and pretty. High cheekbones and long eyelashes and an elegant, straight nose. A bit of a wry glint in the eyes. (Impressive, capturing that. For all his talents with a dagger or a body, he’s never been that kind of artist.) Crow’s-feet around them, too, and lines around the mouth; a man, not a boy. Delicately pointed ears. A head of soft, pale curls.
The realisation drops onto him something like a very large rock.
…Ah.
He touches his own hair, absentmindedly, feeling a texture he’d know like the back of his hand but hasn’t seen from that angle in two hundred years. If his hand is shaking a little, no-one else has to know.
He stares at cheekbones he must have traced over a thousand times, trying to rebuild a faint, shadowed picture that was fading in his head by the year. At the bow of this strange, handsome elf’s lips. He maps it on his own face, finger tracing over another familiar shape that he could never quite envision. Besides, he’d been preoccupied with the newer, unwelcome shape of fangs.
But it doesn’t feel wrong. The picture in his head was more of a featureless shadow with fantastic hair than anything else, but this… this has the ring of familiarity. They’ve even bothered to capture his moles; he puts a fingertip to his cheek, where one had been forgotten, not raised enough for him to know.
Someone who sees him often, then, who knows his face. Someone -
I’ll be your mirror. Those hazel eyes tracing carefully over his face, when a night or two ago she caught him craning for a reflection that would never come.
Lora.
He’s seen her scribbling away enough times; he just assumed she kept a journal. He saw the odd drawing - plants, mainly, things she’d bring to the tree-hugging bores at the Grove and ask about, or discuss with Gale…
Like she’s doing now. They’re off in the woods with Gale trying to teach her some spell, and the worst thing? That’s not even a euphemism. Even now, they’re probably deep in debate. Ugh.
But it does mean that the little journal she keeps is sitting on a log, temptingly unoccupied. He puts the drawing carefully aside, and then it’s a matter of moments to wander over and close his hands on the book. If she didn’t want anyone to look, she shouldn’t have put it with the communal supplies.
Making himself at home on the log, he flicks through it. Gods, she hasn’t even used a cipher. To-do lists that seem to involve far too much saving helpless idiots, half-scribbled song lyrics and roughly dotted notes - even he can’t somehow make those his business, and swiftly moves on - and… there.
He recognises those roughly-drawn lines, the way they soften out to the curves of the cheeks. Gale, sketching out some mnemonic absentmindedly with three fingers, a faint swirl of magic drawn in a couple of lines. Karlach, beaming and dimpling quite becomingly. Wyll, practising his forms with a rapier. Shadowheart, deep in meditation while Lae'zel scowls at her.
And on the other page… Ah. Hello.
If he’d wondered, truly wondered, whether the other portrait was him, this one confirms it: he’s caught in laughter, a wineglass in hand, and… He stares at his own fangs. She hasn’t shied away from drawing them, but there’s been more attention paid in rendering the firelight on his hair, the crinkling around his eyes. Neither fear nor fetishism. He… honestly, he has no idea what to do with that. Another, in profile view, and something must have rather pissed him off, from the look of it. Little notes cluster around the drawings on what herbs she needs to find, on infernal iron for Karlach, on drow poison for Astarion.
He turns the page, and is greeted by a drawing of the day they were caught in an impressive downpour and took shelter in a cave. Well, they were all caught, but the subject is him, specifically. He looks at half-flattened, sopping hair and his truly unimpressed expression. Is that what it looks like when he glares? He catches his brows pulling tight, in mimicry. This should be mocking, but it feels more… It’s not as unflattering as it should be. Almost fond, which is odd, considering the sheer amount of time he and Lora spend arguing.
Perhaps… hmm. One doesn’t draw a face that much without being a little enamoured of it, surely. That’s probably all she wants, the look of him. She still grimaces at his goblin jokes, still stops to help every fool going and sighs when he complains. He’d thought perhaps they’d had a little breakthrough when she let him bite her, when she speculated on the taste of their companions - she has a streak of dark humour that he rather enjoys, when she’s not too uptight to let it out. But then she put them all at risk and wasted time they didn’t have to rescue that idiot bard from the goblins, and when Astarion glared at her, she glared back even more fiercely. Sometimes a glimpse of the sunrise is just a lantern, or some other foolish metaphor she’d use. So, seeing as his sparkling personality certainly isn’t the draw here, it must be his looks. He can work with that. Hardly the first time. He thought he’d have to try his luck again with the terrifying gith or gods forbid, the wizard, but perhaps all isn’t lost with the leader of their merry little band.
There’s another drawing that makes him pause: him caught examining his own hand, in the sun. The look on his face - he’s smiling, just slightly. He looks… happy. He doesn’t look that soft, does he? The kind of soft that he can’t afford to be. It’s dangerous, it’s stupidly complacent, it's… Annoyed, wary embarrassment prickles up his spine - has he been that obvious? When did she see that? How did he not catch her staring?
He flips back to the more general (safer) drawings. “Karlach,” he says to his erstwhile red companion, who’s currently keeping watch.
“Yeah?” She heads over to his makeshift seat, axe still slung over her shoulder. Her eyebrows raise. “Huh, those are good. Look at me!” She reaches out a finger - Astarion draws back the book protectively, and she remembers, face falling. The sight shouldn’t bother him as much as it does.
“Yes, yes, but are they… accurate?”
She sits next to him, axe resting by her knee, and her eyes widen. She squints at him. “Oh shit, mirrors. How much do you remember?”
He shrugs, and if she looks any more pitying he may have to bite her, so he focuses on the book instead.
“These are… yeah, these are definitely you. Ha, look, this one’s got the way your hair goes all curly round your ears! Aww, look at your little fangs!”
“‘Little’?” he says, offended. He peers at her.
She grins at him, pointedly, with a mouth full of many.
“Hmph. Not all of us can be a hellspawn.”
She’s nudging the page carefully with a nail before he can protest. Her eyes widen. “Wow, these are really sweet…” Pausing, she looks up at him. “Astarion, where did you get this?”
“It was… communal,” he tries, vaguely.
“Please tell me this isn’t Lora’s.”
“She checks it around us all the time! She showed me her list of herbs just yesterday! It’s not as if I’m reading her diary.” But there’s a reason he didn’t just ask. They both know it.
“Astarion, sometimes you can be a real shit.”
He knows. He stares at the drawings and reassembles his usual lack of care. “Hm? Sorry, I was busy being distracted by how pretty I am.”
“I swear -”
He hears the steady footsteps and a creak of leather even under Karlach’s words - he’s always been a hard man to sneak up on - and looking up, resigns himself.
Lora says, “How come no-one invited me to this party?” Her footsteps stop abruptly when she sees what he’s holding. There’s the faintest flicker in her eyes, and then she pastes on a resigned, tired sort of smile. “I guess this is what I get for giving you gifts.”
That… itches. He’s had far worse said to him - had knives under his ribs - so it’s not as if it really hurts, but she so clearly means it. She’s not trying to posture, or hurt him. Her disappointment simply is.
Karlach and Gale seem to be having some kind of mouthed conversation, with hand gestures. Astarion distinctly catches the words Not getting involved on Gale’s side. “Tell me if you need his arse kicking, mate,” Karlach says, and stands, ushering Gale away with a hand on his elbow.
“I was looking for soup recipes?” he tries, not even aiming to be convincing.
“Sure.” Lora takes her lyre from her back and leans it against the log, then sits to untie her boots. She doesn’t look at him once. It’s almost impressive.
It should be a relief: a break from her incessant brightness that felt too much like unwelcome sun, back in the pre-tadpole days. Finally not having to listen to how there are kind people, you’ll see, now rescue that bunny from under a cart. Gods, somehow even her hair is wilting. It’s pitiful. He’d be angry at the manipulation, but this seems too exhausted to be a manipulation. It's… real, he thinks.
Leaning on pity should work - and besides, it’s the truth. “Can you blame me, after two hundred years? I just wanted to see if you had any more.” He smooths a hand over the corner of the page. “I asked you what you saw when you looked at me. This is it, isn’t it?"
She nods, and that’s all. A silent bard - somehow almost as ominous as a loud crypt.
He takes one last look, drinking in the familiar unfamiliarity of his face, and then carefully puts the book onto her lap. "Here. I think this is yours.” His voice is quieting before he can help it - too damn soft, he thinks again, though perhaps softness will get her to let down her defences where simple seduction won’t. “I can promise you, there won’t be any repeats of my little endeavour today.” Her eyes slowly raise to his, and he says, “It answered my question.” He clears his throat, crosses one leg over another, and tries to look elegant rather than self-pitying. “You've… given me back my face. It was always just one more thing Cazador stole from me. Thank you.” The words are far, far too real. He didn’t quite mean to say it that bluntly.
She blinks, seeming taken aback by his little display - and then she nods. The beginnings of forgiveness are in her slackening shoulders, the way she takes the briefest glimpse at him before it’s gone again. It won’t be a problem, travelling together today, even if she’ll be quietly licking her wounds. Good.
The broken mirror is still lying in his tent when he returns. He sighs at the sight of it. And then he shifts old wine bottles and blood jars out of the way. It doesn’t need much room, a small charcoal drawing - it certainly doesn’t need him to clear a whole corner of his tent. Even so, he does, propping it up and looking at the life in his eyes for longer than he’d want to admit.