Fray is vain. He knows this. He loves his own reflection. He loves being familiar with his own body, knowing the best ways for it to be moved and handled. It gives him a sense of control he has in few other places in his life. It is a sin, to be so proud of his appearance, or so he was taught. Maybe that’s part of the punishment.
There is a mirror in his tent. Was, rather; when he finally returned to camp after his flight, he tolerated its presence beneath a sheet for two days before a fit saw him smash the thing to pieces. A dozen orange tieflings looked back at him from the remains, each one with a different facet of pain on their faces. He does not recognize the thing that moves with him in the mirror. It is not his reflection.
Moonrise Towers is on the horizon. He has gotten a new sword and most of his balance back, and a few sparse spells. He feels hobbled in every sense of the word, from strength to speech. Yet the people around him still look to him for instruction. Fray doesn’t know how they can stand to look at him at all.
New horrors every day. Shadowheart’s god proves herself as distasteful as Fray’s. They free the Gauntlet’s captive, and witness the rise of an angel. It’s nothing short of a miracle. Fray wants to crawl into a hole and never come out.
Fray remembers little of the fight beneath Moonrise. Little but the stench of old death, the psionic crackle in his teeth, how Gale had to be put under guard to be prevented from detonating himself. Thorm had fallen. There was a flurry of activity, Harpers fighting Absolutists. Fray plunged his sword into anyone who looked like they needed it.
Now the way is clear, and Baldur’s Gate is only three days’ trek away.
DAY ONE
“Wish we didn’t all look beat to shit,” Karlach muses, stabbing expertly at something red and gold hissing away in the frying pan. She spears a filet of meat with her knife and bites into it, heedless of the searing oil. “Wants more salt, I think.”
“Got no salt,” says Right. “Haven’t for a while.”
“I know,” sighs Karlach. She absently throws an arm around Fray’s shoulders, gathering him in further where he sits listlessly beside her. “Anyway. I reckon we’re not going to want to stand out much, when we get there. So maybe it’s good we all look like a mud mephit got at us.”
“Hard to stand out in the Gate either way,” Right murmurs. “Best not to try.”
Karlach shrugs. “I only meant it’d be nice to have a bath with soap sometime before I die, you know?”
“Warm water,” Fray says. Everything is so much colder to the touch to him since the transformation. Bathing has become a miserable experience. Where he once would treasure the time alone, the time he could use as an excuse to preen and groom himself, he now gets on with it as fast as possible, with his eyes closed. It’s not just the temperature; it’s the brilliant orange reminder that his own body has been seized from him.
But he has told no one this. It’s not a surprise when Karlach, ever trying to make up for lost time, squeezes his shoulder playfully. “I could warm your bathwater up, soldier,” she says with lidded eyes, grinning wolfishly. “I can turn a pond into a sauna. Hey, we could give you a real spa treatment, eh, Right?” (Right blinks their stark yellow eyes at her. This does not slow her.) “Yeah! Wash your hair, paint your nails. Right gives a good massage. Clever fingers.”
At this Right sputters, dragging said fingers down their face. It takes Fray a moment to realize this is some inside joke between them, which does not aid in dispelling the deep isolation he feels buried in. “Whatever,” they say, flicking their claws at her and pulling the food off the fire.
“I could wash your back while Right does your front,” Karlach goes on, in a tone that suggests washing would not be the only thing to happen.
A few short weeks ago this idea would have sent Fray into a tailspin of hungry, eager thoughts. Now the waters remain still. He has been able to bring himself to touch Right exactly once since his punishment, and that mostly in an attempt to put off Right’s stilted, uncomfortable inquiries into his state of mind. That tryst had left him with none of the sparks and joy the first had, so rife was he with paranoia that the Revealer might appear in the midst of it and strike Right down in front of him. The worst part of him, the part he can feel panicking whenever he has more than a moment of his own company, wailed: did I imagine it? Was what I felt real? Did I throw my life away for a single night? It quieted only after Right returned from washing up and tucked him against them, his face in their neck.
And Karlach. Karlach, who has been making passes at him ever since she decided he might have some decency after all. She had kissed him exactly once before his turning, clearly teasing some future idea. He never found out what that was. Not three days ago she had kissed him again, when a late-night talk closed out with her kissing tears from his eyes, and carried on to kiss most of the rest of his body, too. It had been sweet and intimate, the longing palpable between them, and Fray came close to further weeping with the gentleness. He could not bear it long: so great was the shadow that his fear cast over him that he stopped her at his belt. She’d been kind about that, too. She’s always kind. They both are.
It’s this, and only this, that drives him to muster as much a smile as he can summon for the pair. “Flirt,” he manages, and says nothing else for the rest of the evening.
DAY TWO
“This is why you want shoes,” Karlach says, and nudges the pliers delicately against head of the nail again. The nail, being embedded a good half-inch into the sole of Fray’s left foot—the … frog of his hoof … the nail does little but make Fray give a bark of pain. His leg jerks instinctively. The only reason Karlach does not receive a kick to the face is because she has her other hand pinning his—fetlock, or pastern, or something—something that used to be his foot—firmly to the inside of her knee. He’s not moving until she allows it.
Right’s voice, above him. “It’s not rusty, is it?” they ask, and their muscles tighten ever so little where their fingers rest on Fray’s upper arms. His lies halfway in their lap, the least awkward position he could manage to let Karlach at his foot. Hoof. It’s a valorant attempt to keep him comfortable. He doesn’t know why Right’s bothering.
Karlach hums. “Hard to tell,” she says. “But, nothing a little magic won’t fix. Don’t fret. He won’t go lame.”
“Too b, bad,” Fray says through mostly-grit teeth. They rub against each other in the wrong places, too sharp, too long. It makes talking worse than ever. His entire body rewritten, his sainthood revoked, and still his voice remains in the Revealer’s hands. “Could just kna—acker me and be d-done with it.”
An unpleasant silence follows. Fray can’t bring himself to be sorry. He’s stepped on a fucking nail because he can’t wear his fucking boots because he has fucking hooves, and Karlach’s been trying to get it out for the last ten minutes. His whole leg feels like the nerves are being peeled off. He’s tired. He’s in pain. He keeps thinking of what Right said to him at the eve of the refugees’ party: Sometimes I think I’d rather this worm just take me!
At least then his body wouldn’t be a punishment. At least then he could communicate without pain. And he wouldn’t have to worry about any of this anymore.
“Well, but what would we do with you then?” Right says. Their voice is thoughtful. “Couldn’t stuff a sofa with your hair. It’s too nice for that.”
Karlach does an extremely poor job of disguising a laugh. It takes Fray a moment to catch up, and he peers up in disbelief at Right. Their face is as straight as ever, but he would swear to a glint of mischief in their eyes. “I don’t think you’d make very good glue, either,” they go on conversationally.
“Aw, give him a chance, scout,” Karlach says. Fray doesn’t need to look at her to hear the smile on her face. “He’s good enough glue as it is. Got the rest of us stuck to him, hasn’t he? You and me worst of all.”
“Yeah,” Right agrees. Their hands slip up Fray’s shoulders to sink into his hair, which Fray knows is greasy and gnarled from his neglect of it. Their fingertips seek out his ears, stroking the edges in that way he likes. “No point boiling him down, then.”
Fray wants to bristle. He wants to be hurt, wants to be upset they’re not taken aback by his bitter comment. “Dog meat,” he suggests dourly, and feels childish about it at once. Guilt claws at him. The tieflings have done nothing but look after him since it all happened, and here he is, lashing out. But rather than chide him, like he deserves, Right just clucks their tongue, and Karlach snorts.
“A pretty thoroughbred like you?” she says, all mock-aghast. “Nah, no way. We’d have you stuffed. And mounted.”
Fray doesn’t miss the way her eyebrows quirk, the way she’s fishing for a reaction to her suggestiveness. She gets one, though not from him: Right snorting themselves, breaking into a laugh. “Let the stallion heal up first,” they say, and ghost their fingers against Fray’s jaw. “We can ride him after, if he’s willing. Yeah?”
Right smiles down at him, warm palms cupping his cheeks. Fray stares back, feeling raw and exposed by the way his pain has been so gently turned aside. Something in his stomach flutters. It’s a good distraction, and he doesn’t realize Karlach’s gripped the nail with her claws and started to yank until the nail is already out. He shrieks a little, but Karlach has already pulled the cork from a healing potion out with her teeth and poured it over the wound. As the pain fades, as he goes limp in Right’s arms, Karlach examines the iron brad with a certain ruefulness. “First time I get to see him nailed and my only part is to clean up the aftermath,” she remarks, and even Fray laughs this time.
DAY THREE
They’ve made good time. The city looms in the distance. All Fray can think about is how close home is. A two-day journey on the opposite side of the Gate is the only thing that separates him from the only home he has ever known. That, and—
Fray gives another irate snarl as he once again tangles his horns against the low-hanging branches above their path. It’s the third time in five minutes. How does anyone do anything with bone sticking four inches out of their skull?
“I told you you should wear a hood,” remarks Astarion as he passes, to which Fray spits a mangled impression of a curse. The last thing he needs is a vampire giving him advice. To add to the point Fray feints at him, sharp teeth bared. It feels sort of good, until Astarion flashes back his own canines, sharper and considerably more deadly. “And not just because you’re such a malevolent shade of orange now,” he says. “Though that’s most of it. Ugh. To think you used to be handsome.”
The barb is so unexpected that it leaves him reeling. For a long few seconds he only stands there, trying to find a name for the emotion bubbling up in his chest. He doesn’t realize Karlach is gently unwinding willow fronds from his horns until her hand brushes the keratin and a zap of pleasure down his spine grounds him again. “What’d that prissy lout say this time?” she asks, though not in a way that Fray feels he’s expected to answer. “Never mind. The man thinks kids should wear collars, none of his opinions count for anything. There.” She tucks a strand of hair behind one of his ears and smiles down at him.
As he’s trying to regain his composure enough to smile back, her face turns thoughtful. “Awful lot of these trees, huh?” she says, tapping her lips with a finger. “Have you got a hood?”
His composure never does come back.
Seven foot- (hoof-) achingly long hours later, they stop to make camp. Tomorrow they will reach Wyrm’s Crossing and the Basilisk Gate. Tonight, Gale and Wyll work enthusiastically at a fancy (comparably) dinner; Shadowheart and Lae’zel are engaged in some sort of complicated game of lanceboard and glowering at each other; Astarion, Halsin, and Jahira discuss matters of interest to elves. Karlach and Right, whose tents have a bit haphazardly become a single unit over the past month, work with scrimshaw knives at etching bones. It’s something Karlach is excellent at and something Right has accidentally stabbed themselves while attempting twice now. It might be a third, by the way Right hisses and spits out a collection of harsh Infernalic syllables as their hand slips again. Fray, having wandered over from his own, isolated tent, watches them from ten feet away until Karlach gets annoyed. “Oi! No hovering, I hate that. C’mon, sit down here. I’ll teach you.”
She pats the place adjacent to her and Right. Weary, tense, and still trying to contain the thing in his chest that Astarion had set loose, Fray obeys. It’s easier to obey, especially when making his own choices seems to end so badly for him. He allows Karlach to put an oval of bone and a knife in his hands, showing him how to etch dots into the surface. Right settles in close to him, thighs touching and their long tail curled around behind him. It’s surprising, the comfort the pair of them bring, and it’s in gratitude that he does his best to etch the bone with something. It’s more engaging than he would have anticipated, or it would have been until he realizes he’s etched most of a hexagon into his piece. He stares first at it, and then down at his wrists, where the six-sided scars that cut into the skin are no longer scars but pale pigment. Despite the fact the marks are no longer puckered, discolored scar tissue, he cannot see the lines as anything other than ugly.
Vaguely, it occurs to him that he mutilated himself for a god he no longer trusts.
Hot pressure threatens the backs of his eyes. Unwilling to cause another scene, he clamps down on his thoughts, letting his face empty into the blank stare so many people find unnerving. He turns the bone over and begins a more purposeful design of the wild hyacinths that flourish around his home. He loves those flowers. They bloom all over the compound in early spring, flooding the hills with their fragrance and washes of color. And such colors! Sunset pink, jay blue, fleece white, lush orange—
Malevolent shade of orange.
Carefully, Fray puts down the bone and tool. If he does not do so, he is going to throw them into the fire.
“Another?” Karlach asks, watching him. Karlach can read people better than anyone, save Right. What does he think he’s doing trying to hide anything from the two of them?
Fine, he thinks. Fine. It’s not like he has any pride left to spare. He shakes his head, and clears his throat. He suspects quite strongly he will only have it in him to say this once, and so it had best be heard. The tieflings’ undivided attention is on him as soon as he does, and his nerve nearly fails. The bubbles in his chest have begun to boil with anxiety.
“Be honest,” he says, rough and sounding pathetic to his own ear. A reluctant glimpse toward the two shows him cautious nodding. Fray steels himself and asks: “Am I—am I still—still pretty?”
It takes a long time for anyone to respond. Fray feels his face heat with embarrassment. He’s a fool. He’s low as a worm. Karlach’s iron heart has a measurable amount of beats left to it, Right may have nothing to go back to, and the Revealer could appear from nowhere without warning to further torture all three of them. An Elder Brain could enslave the whole city of Baldur’s Gate tomorrow.
And he wants to know if he’s pretty.
Then Right says, blandly, “More than before. Is what I think, anyway.” They do not look up from the rib bone they are etching a vague city skyline on, but a minute movement of their tail results in it hugging closer to Fray’s hips. “Which is baffling,” they add. “You were already gorgeous.”
He can’t tell if they’re teasing, or mocking, for that matter. It’s Right, who is not exactly known for their jokes. It makes things feel all the more bewildering when Karlach joins in. “Yeah, weird question, huh?” she asks, nudging Fray’s hoof with a boot. “Prettiest guy in camp gets prettier. Astarion’s got to be eaten up by that one, you just know he’s never been outmatched before.”
Something about these answers exhausts him. He feels patronized. He sags, hands sinking into his hair. “Sorry. Stupid.”
“Could put my money where my mouth is,” Karlach suggests, and then shakes herself. “Gods, I need to reel myself in. Right, smack me next time. Throw some of those keys at my head.” Right gives her a blank stare Fray can only read as bewilderment through long exposure. “Oh, not really, just—sorry,” she says sheepishly. “I’d show you just how pretty I think you are, but now’s not the time, is it? Not when you’re feeling low.”
In truth, Fray does not know. He’s in as bad a war with himself as ever over Karlach and her unending innuendos. He wants her, yes, badly, yes, and all the same he’s paralyzed by the thought of not finding that spark. Of finding himself cheated in the trade he’s made. “Tomorrow, maybe,” he offers, and feels stupid across each syllable. There’s no reason he should feel any better tomorrow.
Karlach, though, cups his jaw in her hand and bends over him. The kiss she presses to his mouth is not quite chaste, not quite hungry. It’s that of someone who wants and is willing to be patient to get it. Her tongue licks once between his lips and she lingers only for a second. “I’d like that,” she says, and her heat feels more like a hearth than an engine. Her gaze flicks up to Right, who watches with their signature wide eyes. “Bet Right would, too. If you wanted.” Right’s eyes widen further before snapping shut entirely.
“Maybe,” Fray says again, and does not mean it.
BALDUR’S GATE - MORNING
It’s at least something that another dozen issues arise the moment they set foot into Rivington. It keeps Fray’s thoughts occupied. There are dismembered clowns to find and doppelgangers to slay. There are Flaming Fist members to avoid after an extremely unfortunate incident with Scratch. But it doesn’t hide all of Fray’s worries.
Right seems more distracted than usual. Almost maudlin. Fray keeps wanting to ask Karlach if she can clock them, but she’s got her own preoccupations this close to her home. Part of him wants to avoid them, certain it’s him that’s caused their low mood, and by the same token he feels compelled to go to them. He’s still chewing on what to do when all of them step into the boarding-house across the way from that brothel they’re meant to meet Voss at. His ears flick toward Astarion, an instinctive reaction he is still unused to, as the man makes a sound somewhere between disdain and discomfort. “I found so many victims for Cazador here,” he says in a low voice, like he’s speaking more to himself than anyone else. When he realizes the eyes of three tieflings are upon him, he makes a hurried, dismissive gesture. “The sorts of people no one would ever miss,” he adds hastily. “You know. Low-lifes, thieves, wicked step-sisters.”
Karlach, ever expressive, does not disguise the look of dislike that passes over her face. Fray doesn’t much care for the admission himself, but at least, he thinks, Astarion showed some level of discrimination—
And then Right, who has been staring blank-faced at Astarion from the moment he opened his mouth, takes a great handful of his hair and uses it to drive him face-first into a table full of used dishes.
The resulting crash is terrific, sending Astarion sprawling to the floor with the table pulled down nearly on top of him. Dregs of ale splatter his spotless coat, the remnants of something with gravy smearing down his flawless face. The boarding-house’s other patrons look up with alarm, and one seems almost about to say something, until she catches sight of Karlach.
It’s so wildly out-of-character for Right to lash out that Fray is frozen in shock. Considering the damage they are capable of, it’s a miracle Astarion isn’t hurt past bruises and scratches, and his wounded pride. He sputters, flabbergasted, staring up at a Right whose shoulders tense and whose hands knot themselves into fists. “What?” Astarion gets out, apparently unable to find his tongue.
“Shut up,” Right hisses, too low for the boarders to hear. “I don’t want to hear it. I’m not interested in hearing about your—your criteria for who’s worthless enough to kill.”
Astarion picks himself up, fast growing red-faced. He wipes a smear of butter from his cheek and snaps his hand free of it. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he sneers, just as quietly. “Should I have picked at random instead? Not make a modicum of effort to ensure that if I had to lead someone to their exsanguination, they might at least deserve it?”
“Maybe,” Right says, “you shouldn’t have led anyone anywhere. Maybe you should have just walked yourself out into the sunlight.” Their ears are pinned back, their teeth flashing. They’ve dropped into the low, easy stance they adopt in a fight, sinuous and shifting from foot to foot. “Two hundred years? How many people is that, Astarion? How much effort am I supposed to believe you kept putting in after the first decade?”
Something nudges Fray; he flinches. It’s only Karlach, speaking to him from the corner of her mouth. “Think we need to get in the middle, here?”
“If it gets worse,” Fray murmurs back.
Astarion has stalked closer to Right, making a great show of how unintimidated he is by them. He makes a hand gesture and the stains on his clothes begin to dissolve away, tended to by magic. “More than my siblings,” he says, and his voice is low and black in a way Fray has never heard before. “I’ve taken two serial killers to their ends. I’ve made abusive fathers mysteriously disappear. Do you know how much easier it would have made my miserable life, taking beggars and lost children?”
“Say it to me, then,” Right returns. They look like nothing so much as an enraged cat, back arched and claws ready. “Tell me you never once did that, if you think you can. If you’ve no reason to lie.”
Fray would swear he sees fire flash in Astarion’s eyes. He grits his teeth, lips parted in a snarl; Right matches it, their glowing eyes lending them an air of the feral that Astarion has no hope of projecting. “This is an utter waste of my time,” he declares after too long a silence. He turns on his heel, and with another gesture of his hands the table flips itself back upright, all its used silverware and plates hurrying after it. “Aren’t we investigating a murder, or something? Let’s go. I understand time to be of the essence for these things.”
With this he vanishes up the stairs. Fray has half a mind to go after him, though not the slightest what he’d do upon catching up. Right, meanwhile, has slackened. They’re—shivering. Shivering, even as Karlach hooks her arm around their shoulders and steers them back out onto the street. Fray hurries after. “—all the good it’ll do,” Karlach is saying. “He’s not worth the wasted air.”
“I just,” says Right, and several similar iterations of it, like they’re having a hard time piecing the words together. It’s the most tongue-tied Fray’s ever seen them. They manage it eventually, though. “Of all the people to be choosing life or death for—and someone like him—”
“Can’t say I’m a fan either,” Karlach says. But then, a little more gently, she goes on, “A rock and a hard place can make you do a lot of things you would’ve never thought you could do, though. Ask me how I know.”
Right still looks like they’ve lost a week’s worth of sleep. Fray wants to go to them, offer what little comfort he can provide, yet he cannot move. He cannot stop looking at Karlach’s stump of a horn, remembering a beach where a nautiloid had crashed, and the blood of a refugee dripping from his blade.
BALDUR’S GATE - AFTERNOON
“Tried this?”
Right, stowed in the corner of the alley they are currently awaiting the others in, pours a sullen look over Fray. It’s more emotion than he’s seen on their face in weeks, a sure sign they’re nearing the end of their rope. Fray keeps his smile affixed to his face, and drops down to sit beside them. Right’s wedged behind a forgotten crate, with just barely enough room for Fray to add himself. It makes him press close against them to fit. He shakes the greasy paper bag at them again. “Sweet,” he says, sing-song. “Your favorite, yeah?”
When Right still does not move, Fray shrugs and fishes inside the bag to clumsily spear one of the miniature doughnuts within on his claw. They’re fresh and hot, still a touch oily, dusted with powdered sugar. It’s the best thing he’s eaten in weeks, if not months. He lets his face get a little orgasmic about it. “Favorite thing about here,” he says over a slight burn on the roof of his mouth, “the food. Nothing l, like these, at home.”
Right continues to eye him from the side of their face. After a moment, though, their long fingers dart snakelike into the bag of sweetmeats, retrieving two. They take a bite from both at once as if doing so might avenge something of theirs.
For a minute or two, the pair of them eat in silence, save for the regular rustle of the bag as one of them goes back for more. Fray is nowhere near satisfied by the time the bag is emptied, but he hands the sack with its remaining doughnuts to his … friend? Companion, lover? Not partner, he’s sure. They’re together by circumstance, he forces himself to acknowledge. While he can’t fathom his life apart from the tieflings now, that’s his problem. They have lives of their own to resume, and he doubts he has figured into their plans.
But now is not the time for self-pity. He marshals himself. “About killed Astarion earlier,” he observes. Right snorts, eyes fixed firmly on the cobbles. “Surprised me,” he goes on, fishing, fishing. “Out of sorts?”
“Am I that obvious?” Right says dryly. They crumple the bag in their palm, dragging their thumb-claw over the surface. “I don’t know. Being here again … so close to home …” They slump. “If it’s still home. It’s just distracting.”
His throat already complaining, Fray first waits for Right to continue, and then nudges them when nothing follows. “Home?”
“My mentor’s house,” they say, dull-voiced. “They’re … they’re a good person. I think. I don’t know how much it matters to them I’ve been gone, though. It’s been months, and I’m just the apprentice. Wouldn’t surprise me if they got another.”
Ah. That would bring anyone down. Fray would know, and does; he simply has not allowed himself to think about it. He can’t afford the distraction. “A good mentor wouldn’t write you off,” he answers in handcant. “They might have taken another apprentice, but I’m sure they wouldn’t turn you out onto the street.”
“Easy for you to say,” Right returns. Their voice is bland and inargumentative. “Golden child. Some of us didn’t have the luxury of blind devotion to endear ourselves to people.”
The comment stings, but it’s not undeserved. Uncommonly vicious for the non-confrontational Right, though. Fray picks at a hole in his trousers. “What will you do, then?” he asks, trying to slip past the jab. “If you’re back on your own?”
“Go back to what I was doing,” Right says with a kind of finality that suggests they have no control over the answer. “Risking my neck for a hell of a lot less. One of Astarion’s low-lifes. I didn’t miss it, Fray. I thought I might, but I didn’t. This whole stupid adventure has shown me that much.”
“Couldn’t you find another master?”
“Not like them,” says Right, dull and dim. “Gunsmithing is too rare, anyhow.”
Fray turns this over in his head, making absolutely certain not to acknowledge the wound in his heart, the one that’s realized he will probably never be permitted home again. Right does not need more of his burdens. “Well,” he signs, “I bet your master won’t have given up. And if they did, to hell with them.” And before he can stop himself: “You can always come find me.”
“Can I?” Right wonders aloud. Their eyes trail over Fray from horns to hooves. “So sure?”
This does make Fray falter. “What else would I do?”
“Get your body back.”
The silence that follows feels very loud indeed. Right jams their hands into their armpits. “Why wouldn’t you?” they continue. “That god of yours has you by the throat. I’d go back if it were me. That—that pain …”
They break off, shuddering. Fray feels it tremor through them. He searches his memory, alternatingly crystal clear and fuzz. Right, doubled over, screaming. Yes. “I don’t fear pain,” Fray signs, which is true enough. The trials of swordplay, the requirements of sainthood, and an unusually high pain tolerance allows it less power over him than most. He means it persuasively, to assuage them that he won’t be bowed by something so unrefined; instead Right’s claws dig deeper into the paper bag. Fray’s stomach drops. He’s just called them a coward, inadvertently. He’s fumbling for how to fix it when Right bites back.
“No, you wouldn’t, I suppose,” they say. Every word is a shard of ice as it leaves their tongue. “But look where that got you. Stuck as one of us.” Disdain drips from the final word. “I’m sure your kink doesn’t go so far as permanent transformation.”
It’s like Right’s slapped him. Fray sits in a rigid, hurt silence, his memory scattering the disgusted words of his god before him like casting bones. Fetish. He wants to return fire, feeling undeserving of such vitriol. Hasn’t he been trying? Hasn’t he been doing all he can to put a brave face on it? He’s not been depressed because he’s a tiefling, he’s depressed because of all the other shit conspiring to undermine him. Because his very worldview has split apart at th seams. Doesn’t Right know, can’t they see?
A small, angry voice in his head says to him: they wouldn’t care, anyway. They’re only a tiefling.
The self-righteous fury that has been welling up in him is drowned by the wave of revulsion at his own thoughts. Fray closes his eyes and takes a slow breath. He is a saint no more, but that does not necessitate that he be cruel. Much gray spans the way between righteousness and wickedness.
As he does this, Right hiccups. It’s with a shock that Fray realizes they are suppressing tears. “I hope you’re decent enough to tell me when you change your mind and recant, or whatever,” they’re saying, still bitter and still looking to wound. “So I have some warning before that monster of yours comes to kill me.”
Fray says, “I’m not going to recant.” He feels about on the edge of something; he has for a while now, just here and there, whenever it’s only him and Right. There’s some kind of magic that twists between them. At first Fray had feared it was the Revealer, ensuring they knew where Right was at all times; but the magic isn’t the bright, cold thing he once took from his patron. This is a warm magic, a young magic. It’s almost shy. He feels it again now, all in a warm rush, like stepping into a sauna. “I’m not g. G—going back to them.”
He only realizes it’s true as he says it. It tastes strange in his mouth, and he says it again, just to make sure it was real. “I’m not going back to them.” It was real. Not only was it real, but he meant it. It frightens him, and that fear makes him want to say it a third time. “Right, I’m not—”
“I heard you,” Right says, quietly. At some point in his litany they had turned to stare at him. Some of the sharpness has left their face, but they still regard him with suspicion. “Why,” they say, more demand than question. “Tell me why.”
Fray stares back, not sure if he’s looking at them or beyond them. His voice breaks and cracks violently as he attempts to speak, but this feels too important to leave to their pidgin sign language. “Can’t,” he says, desperately trying to find the balance between the words he needs and the ones that will least aggravate his throat. “I want … truth. To do good th-things, help people. If I go back …” He clamps his sharpened canines down on his lip for a moment, struck again by the overwhelming reality that his life has been, largely, a lie. “No truth,” he finishes, helplessly.
Right’s tail-tip flicks pensively, like an annoyed cat. Fray has only the dimmest understanding of the body language of tails, mostly from being corrected by one of the tieflings for some embarrassing thing he’s done with his or another. He does not know what the tail twitch means. But Right speaks soon enough. “Even if it means you stay a tiefling?”
Fray rolls the question around in his head. It feels charged with magic, too, like Right can just speak and cause that arcane connection between them to flare. He wonders if they feel it like he does. “Small price for truth,” he says eventually. “Anyway. I like the tail.”
“You like the—” Right splutters. They sit bolt upright, violently, their glowing eyes piercing straight through him. Both their ears point fully at him. Fray freezes, uncertain if his gentle, honest joke was somehow offensive. But then Right relaxes again, slouching against the wall. They pinch the bridge of their nose and shut their eyes. “You like the tail,” they repeat, bland. “Of course. Of course you like the tail. You would.”
Meekly, Fray asks, “Is that bad?”
“No,” says Right, sounding exhausted but perhaps a little less miserable. “No, it’s not bad. Gods, Fray. I can’t stand you.” The trace of warmth in their voice belies the words themselves. “I want more of those doughnuts. Help me up and then show me where you got them.”
BALDUR’S GATE - EVENING
The little gaggle of them pay a pretty penny to buy out the rooms above Elfsong Tavern, but, as Gale informs them, they’re going to need good-quality sleep and good-quality food if they’re to face off against Orin and Gortash. Fray’s in no shape to argue. His mood slid backwards after his exchange with Right, though he’s done his best to conceal it. His own words cling to him like ticks. He meant them, yes. That does not mean he is not afraid of what they mean for him. He has been, fully, the Revealer’s champion since the age of seventeen. He has known no other life. He is wholly unequipped to make it on his own, and all of this assumes he’s even going to live through the horror of the Elder Brain. That has a very high chance of not happening, as the Emperor is fond of reminding him. The Emperor does it to try and get him to make use of that special tadpole, of course. Fray rates his odds as about the same either way, and if he’s going to die, he’d rather die pretty. Mind flayers are not, in his opinion, pretty.
Pretty. There’s that vanity again. He flinches from it instinctively, only to pause and examine the impulse. Where does it come from? Home. The decree of the Revealer: thou shalt be apart from petty vanity.
But he’s not one of the Revealer’s faithful anymore, is he?
There in the close, quiet room at the tavern he’s allocated for himself, Karlach, and Right—he doesn’t much like sleeping on his own these days—Fray tentatively peers at the full-length mirror that stands claw-footed near the window. The orange tiefling he is still adjusting to calling his reflection peers back, looking nervous. It had been a difficult thing, trying to believe Karlach and Right when they insisted he was more attractive than ever. It had felt like he was being patronized, being told what he wanted to hear. But, he reminds himself, he trusts them. Besides, he’s fairly sure Right has never told a lie in their life.
Carefully, mindfully, he steps in front of it. He more or less expects what he sees: a tired-looking tiefling with greasy, flyaway hair and an unknowable amount of road dust in his clothes. Acne is scattered over his forehead. He looks and feels disgusting. Fray stares the mirror down, as if daring it to show him something else. When it does not he scoffs at himself and pulls off his shirt.
Now the tiefling in the mirror is topless. Fray examines its chest, where—oddly—only the scars under his pectorals remain. The rest of his scarring exists now just as a complex set of angular markings, pale yellow against his skin. He hasn’t really tried to see the whole effect before. He steps back from the mirror, fusses for a moment with his hair, and looks again.
The man that returns his cautious, evaluating gaze isn’t ugly, he decides. The tiefling has white-gold hair that tumbles down his shoulders and catches the light thrown by the driftglobe sconces. It contrasts gently with the autumn-leaf color of his skin, and more starkly with the chalkboard black of his horns. The horns themselves arch back close to his skull, terminating in gentle chalk-colored hooks. His ears, while not the constantly-moving satellites that Right’s are, twitch and flick at distant noises.
The way the tiefling stands is strange, Fray notes wryly: more upright, like Karlach, despite the sharp angles of the legs suggesting he would be more comfortable if he adopted a lower stance like Right’s. His tail is whippy and narrow, ending in a heart-shaped spade. His feet are delicate and deer-like, ending in sharp, cloven hooves. They’re narrower than Right’s, a bit wickeder-looking. They’re the same black as his horns, muted some by the dirt from their travels.
Somewhere, in his breast, some pride stirs. Some buried pleasure rooted in his appearance stretches and yawns. Fray falters, trying to examine it, hold it up to the light. He loses hold of it. With a sound halfway between dismay and annoyance, he kicks off his pants. After a moment’s thought, his smallclothes follow.
There. The tiefling in the mirror shows no embarrassment as it casts its gaze through the glass and over each inch of him. It’s the first real look at himself, all of himself, he’s gotten since it occured.
The scar-markings flow elegantly over his body, the lines of power matching up expertly. He squeezes one bony hip, trying to remember if it had always protruded that far or if that was a new development. Fat and muscle sit on him the way they always have, or mostly; from the waist down the difference in the skeletal structure required some adjustments. He examines his thighs, which seem shorter and more compact, denser with muscle than before; he turns halfway to peek at the way his tail connects to the rest of him. Somewhere in this he’s started combing his fingers through his hair, working out the tangles. It’s a compulsion he developed around three weeks into this mess and has not been able to shake, even through it makes his fingers unpleasantly oily.
Half-heartedly he investigates the situation between his legs. Things there look mostly intact, and his body informs him everything is operating as they ought to be when he experimentally grinds the heel of his hand down. Fine. Good. He pulls his hand away, and good thing, too. He’s caught in a slightly less compromising position when the door swings open.
In hindsight, Fray will never know how he didn’t hear them coming. Or, well, hear Karlach, at least. She’s always talking at a volume slightly louder than necessary, and the floorboards groan under her weight and confident stride. Alas, as it stands, the first he hears of her is as she trots inside. In the mirror he can see her looking back over her shoulder, at a calmer-looking Right whose eyes are presently on her, but not for long.
Fray locks up, half-turning. He scrambles to grab his discarded shirt or a blanket or something to spare his dignity. Instead, his hoof snags on the rug. He falls with a yelp, and of course this summons the two’s attention at once. His heart suddenly pounding, Fray does the best job he can with clamping his thighs together and stares up meekly at the tieflings.
They stare back. Karlach looks well and truly nonplussed; Right has a puzzled, amused cast to their otherwise ironclad expression. He catches Karlach run her tongue over her lips. So does Right. Right shuts the door, and after a moment’s consideration, locks it.
“Hey, soldier,” Karlach says, bending down enough to offer him a hand. Fray takes it before he quite knows what he’s doing. She heaves him back upright, effortlessly, and keeps hold of him as she guides him to the chair most of his clothes have collected in. “Guess we should’ve knocked, huh? What, uh …” Her eyes are darting everywhere except him, now, except when they flick across him by accident and linger. It’s a noble effort on her part, at least. “We miss the strip tease?”
Fray snorts. His shyness is fast evaporating; he’s never minded being naked around others. He picks up the shirt, but it just gets twisted in his hands. It does, at least, fall far enough to recover some of his modesty, which seems to be a great relief for Karlach. And Right—? There. Leaned against the door with their arms folded over their chest, watching. That amusement is still there, but it’s gentler. It makes heat dart through Fray’s blood; he can’t stand it long. Instead he gestures in the direction of the mirror. “Hadn’t seen, um. Everything, yet. At once, I m, mean.”
Karlach’s face lights up. “Yeah? Were we right, or what?” Now that his hips are obscured, she seems to have no problem with trying to undress him again with her eyes. The heat in him doubles—no, triples, as Karlach rests a preternaturally hot hand on his bare shoulder. “I like the stripes,” she says admiringly, rubbing a thumb against the marks that criss-cross his skin. “Hey, these used to be your scars, didn’t they?” Fray nods, mute again. Being this undressed next to Karlach has sent something haywire in his brain. He feels his tail-tip shiver violently, a motion that sends pleasant shocks up and down his spine. The movement catches Karlach’s eye, and suddenly she’s biting the knuckles of her other hand, a grin just visible behind them. “Oh, cute,” she says, and then laughs self-consciously. “I mean! Sorry! I forget you don’t know tail signals!”
Fray’s mouth is dry. He can’t suss out the words he needs. Cute? He’d like “pretty” over “cute,” but surely she must mean the shiver. Helplessly, he looks over to Right and signs: “What?”
Right’s graduated to a smile that would look very calm and gentle on anyone else. You had to know Right to realize that meant they were having the time of their life. Smoothly, they sign back: “Tail T-I-C-K-I-N-G. Most people grow out of it after the horny teenager phase. Or at least, learn to control it.”
Dumbfounded, Fray is caught completely off-guard when his tail shivers again. Karlach makes another noise that suggests she’s charmed; Right outright grins. “What’re they telling you?” Karlach says after a few seconds of watching Fray gape at Right. “About the tail? That ain’t anything to be embarrassed over. Just means you like what you see.”
“Whatever,” he says weakly. He tries to settle his brain, like it’s a spooked horse he needs to coax back into its stall. “You, you maybe were r. Right,” Fray admits. “Still hard. Different.”
“Yeah,” Karlach says, sympathetic. There’s a beat; once it passes, she leans down enough to pluck his discarded trousers from the chair and tentatively offer them to him. “Listen, sorry we barged in like that. You want us to leave? Or me, anyway? I don’t want to, you know. Make you feel pressured? Any more than I have?”
“No,” Fray says at once. Instead of taking his pants he takes her wrist, running his thumb along the inside of it. “Can stay. If you want. Both,” he adds, giving Right a pleading sort of look. He’s not actually sure what he’s gunning for, here. A threesome? Does he just want the positive reinforcement for his slowly changing mind? Maybe all it is is a desire to fall asleep sandwiched between the two of them. Maybe it’s all three. He tries to swallow through his pained throat. “Please.”
“I don’t need invited twice,” Karlach says, beaming. She ruffles his hair, being quite mindful of his horns. She only brushes them once, and he cannot help but think it was intentional, the way the contact sends sparks flying through his nerves. When she pulls it back, she looks at her fingers thoughtfully.
“Right,” she says, “why don’t we give our boy here that spa day?”
Now Fray is in the washtub, feeling somehow more exposed than he did when his pair of paramours first walked in. It probably has something to do with the fact Right is awkwardly washing his hair, and Karlach going at his claws with a pocket knife. “They’ll overgrow if you don’t file ’em,” she explains cheerily. Fray is having an exceedingly hard time paying attention as she chatters on about claw care. This would be due to the fact that Karlach has stripped down to her underwear and nothing else. Fray is afraid of moving his hand, lest he brush her bared breast unintentionally.
Right seems to have no such qualms. Their claws dig slightly into his skin as they ladle water over his sudsy head. “Cold,” Fray whines (and it is a whine). “Ka—rlach. Do—d’you—”
His voice breaks painfully, dissolving into coughs. “Easy there,” she says, rubbing her thumb into the back of his hand. “What, need me to warm you up after all?”
He’s so tired. All Fray had meant to ask was how she dealt with the difference in temperature between herself and everything else, but—well, it’s probably a relief for her, isn’t it? So he just nods. Yes. He would like that.
The tub is absolutely not big enough for two grown tieflings, especially not when one of them is Karlach. This fails to stop her. “We’ll all get clean together, hey?” she says, bright as ever, and without further fuss shucks her last article of clothing. Fray seizes up, balanced on the knife’s edge between fear and desire, staring like an idiot. He’s saved having to figure out what he’s allowed to look at by Right, as it happens, who unceremoniously dumps another ladle of water over his head. By the time he pulls his wet hair from his eyes, Karlach has squeezed herself into the tub. Their legs are touching. It makes him light-headed.
“That beats river water,” Karlach says with a satisfied sigh. “No worrying about little fish swimming up somewhere they don’t belong. Where’s that damn soap?”
Fray, fully disabled by the fish comment, is unable to help find it. Instead Right supplies it over his shoulder, and soon he is quietly letting Karlach scrub whatever she can reach. He tries to focus only on that. It feels … it’s wonderful, actually. Her hands are rough, calloused things, weapons themselves, soothingly hot. He can’t help but lean into her touch, and as he does her touch becomes all the more gentle.
At his ear, Right sighs softly. They shift behind him and reach out one hand toward Karlach. The other curls under Fray’s arm, the fingers slipping down until they find his own. “Clean enough, I think,” they say. Their breath tickles Fray’s neck. “Now what?”
“We-e-ell,” Karlach says, catching their proffered hand and knocking her knees against Fray’s, “suppose we could get dry and dressed.” Her eyes flit to Fray. She says nothing more, but the question that hangs over them is palpable.
Fray bites his lip and tries to look like he isn’t. He’s tired, even though today was nothing but easy walking as they surreptitiously looked for signs of Orin. No—no, not tired. It’s more like he’s empty.
He makes his decision at once, after that.
The next few minutes sees all three of them sprawled on the mattress. It’s an impressive suite, all things considered. The bed is soft but supporting. Sunlight pools in through the window. There’s a pleasant smell of distant fried food and ocean air.
By happenstance or intention, Fray finds himself wedged in the middle, on his side. This has resulted in Karlach rubbing circles into his shoulder and Right kneading idly at the spade on his tail. He hasn’t bothered dressing, nor has Karlach. Right remains decent, though they’ve stripped down to an undershirt.
While Fray lets his hair and tail be toyed with, Right and Karlach have fallen into a debate about tail-ticking. Right seems to think it’s a deeply juvenile thing, indicative of someone unable to play it cool; Karlach repeats that she thinks it’s cute, even flattering, an autonomous declaration of interest. Flattered, she says, and gives Fray a look with lidded eyes. He smiles back, too nervous to make any first moves but watching intently to see if he might give either of them an opening.
The debate ends inconclusively, and as the sun sinks down and the shadows deepen, so too follows silence. Fray is starting to feel sleep creeping up on him when Karlach asks, softly, “I’d like to get a better look at you, if you wouldn’t mind too much.”
He blinks. He buries half his face in his arm and hair, eyeing her, and finally summons the nerve to nod. Karlach smiles. “C’mon then. Sit up.”
He lets himself be hauled upright, and Karlach doesn’t release her grip. Her palm is hot, comforting, and the rough skin of her thumb rubs firm circles into the heel of his hand. “There,” she says, soothingly. Her eyes sweep down Fray’s body, lingering on his hips and thighs. “You couldn’t have asked for a nicer outcome, is what I think,” she says fondly. “The orange and gold, wow. And the hooves! I always wished I had hooves.” (“We know,” Right cuts in wryly, and she flaps a hand at them dismissively.) Now she catches one of said hooves in her hand and simply holds it, marveling at the matte black surface. “I love how delicate yours are. They make me feel all … guardian-y. Like a sheepdog,” she adds excitedly. “Not that you need protecting, I mean, just it—uh—you know?”
Fray scoffs and smiles, well and truly out of words for the night. He answers her murmuring best he can with his expressions and hands—Karlach did not go far in learning handcant. So he stretches his leg further into her grip, allowing his other hoof to nudge her shin. She leaps on the invitation to touch him. She cups his cheek, and he leans into it with closed eyes; she traces her claws over the arc of scar tissue beneath his breast and he arches his spine until the tips prick against his skin. She slips a hand into his hair, and with a pretty good idea of what doing this will result in, he moves her rough fingers up to his horns. Some strange, foreign sensation snakes down the one she touches, wrapping him in a cotton haze of faint pleasure. Fray thinks this must be what it’s like to be a cat getting its ears scratched, but better. “Slow down, soldier,” she laughs, but rubs her fingertips along his horn a few seconds longer. “Show me what else you like.”
He has to think about it. Or rather, think about how to tell her. He has to strain a bit to press two fingers gently against her lips, just enough to feel them divot under his touch, and then brings the same fingers back to his neck, which he arches to expose his throat. Karlach, who seems stuck on the few seconds where his fingertips had been on her mouth, blinks uncomprehendingly at him.
Fortunately, there is a translator present. “Put your mouth there,” Right murmurs.
Fray had almost, but not quite, forgotten about them. He aims what he hopes is a grateful, affirming smile at them as Karlach makes a sound of understanding. Right returns his gaze, unblinking, and then—sticks their tongue out at him, just a flash of that mottled pink-black with no other change in expression. Fray barely has time to grin back before Karlach shifts herself to kneel before him, blocking his view. She drags her fingertips along his jaw, tipping his head back for her to kiss his throat.