Chapter Text
Astarion is halfway to the Pasadena Avenue Starbucks when yet another rejection email comes through.
Love is Blind has staffed our camera crew for the current season, but we hope you’ll consider applying again next time! It’s not just a show – it’s an experiment. And there’s always more love to discover.
Fuck. He’d really thought he could count on that one. If reality television is too good for him, then really, all hope is lost. Maybe Violet’s right, maybe it’s time to give up and just film weddings for cash.
He turns on his heel, back up the sidewalk, back toward the shitty, cramped apartment he shares with the six others.
If it’s really this dire, what would be the point of sitting amongst the screeching milk steamers, sipping a bad Americano and trawling Craigslist? Out of the last twenty or so applications, only Discovery had had anything for him at all, but they want to send him to the fucking Arctic. And he probably shouldn’t waste the money on coffee, anyway.
The LA sun beats down on his neck, even on this brisk 68-degree day. Sunshine has never really been his vibe. A few years of seasonless California warmth have laid the groundwork to make the Arctic enticing… but he’s still hesitant to commit. It’s a lot of travel and he’d be way out of his element, for something the network would be buying on spec and maybe not even airing.
When HBO had bought his first piece, they’d said yes sight unseen. It felt too good to be true, and about a month later it proved to be. They took it down, citing controversy, but Astarion knew the truth. His work was toothless, insipid, uninteresting. He’d done it that way on purpose.
It was a bitch to edit, given everything he was afraid to expose. By the time he recorded the final version of his closing voiceover, his hoarse voice sounded nothing like it had at the beginning. But at least he’d managed to cut Sebastian out almost entirely.
Just inside, Astarion locks the door behind himself – first the deadbolt, then the handle. The door is hard and cool against his back where he leans on it. He closes his eyes.
There’s bickering and video game sounds coming from the living room. Petras and Leon, no doubt. Astarion steadies himself, shrugs his shoulders up high, casts his eyes toward the floor.
Even as he makes himself as invisible as possible, gives off as many cues as he can to leave him alone, Petras stops him with an outstretched hand.
“Hey, do you want pizza if we order?” he asks, eyes still trained intently on the game. He quickly and awkwardly removes his hand from where it landed on Astarion’s waist, back to his controller.
For as annoying as Petras can be, it’s considerate.
“Sure,” Astarion concedes.
“Do you care what kind?” Petras dies in the game, so he turns to Astarion with a slack-browed look. His big, dumb eyes carry something like pity.
“Whatever’s good,” Astarion says. Even if he cared, he’d have chosen the path of least resistance.
Before Petras can start a proper conversation, Astarion heads down the hallway. He’s loath to keep relying on Petras, or on any of his – he never knows what to call them. Roommates feels too shallow, after everything. It’s a three-bedroom apartment, with seven of them crammed in. For most of them, their money is still tied up with Cazador. They don’t have much, and there’s something like understanding there, or less generously, codependency. So they’ve stuck together. While it’s the only thing that they could manage, it’s far from convenient.
If he had it, he’d pay an unfathomable amount for privacy, for a place of his own. To rely on nobody. But he only has to share this room with Dalyria, so that’s something – she’s out of the apartment way more than the others.
And thankfully, now is one of those times. He closes the door behind himself and takes a slow breath.
He slides down into his bed, drops his bag on the floor, and fishes his laptop out of it. He’s lost count of the number of times he’s reread this email – one more’s probably harmless.
It’s buried in his inbox, beneath more rejections and the most recent marketing email from Rhapsody.
He can’t seem to unsubscribe, Rhapsody follows him everywhere, even with a legal injunction against sales of supplements, self-help books, all of it. Even in death, the machine has kept spinning, churning out false promises of self improvement.
Mr. Ancunin,
I hope this message finds you well.
I understand you followed and documented the proceedings of Rhapsody Corporation for quite some time. My team has been made aware of your documentary, Rhapsody In Red, which we understand is no longer available on HBO Max.
Any material pertaining to Mr. Szarr, or Rhapsody, would support our cause and the cause of the Burton family. I cannot promise any particular outcome from this trial, but I can assure you the courts would look more favorably upon you — and I would greatly appreciate it — if you cooperated.
Could you please provide the full-length film, and any additional material you recorded and retained?
Click here to upload files >
Thank you,
Raphael Diavolo
Raphael is slimy. An ambulance chaser for true crime podcasts, ready for anything shiny that catches their macabre, monolithic eye. He’s not the only one – it’s LA – but he’s one of the worst.
He’s also not the only one demanding control of Astarion’s footage.
A short scroll further is an email from Cazador. Begging, in his own stuck-up, head-gamey way.
My star student –
When you promised your collateral to me, I was suspicious. The right to film our organization felt paltry in comparison to what the others entrusted me with.
And yet I find myself proven wrong, now. You’ve captured highs and lows. And I do mean captured – their release is in your hands alone. Our frequencies have always resonated, and so I can only hope that we agree on the definition of “release.”
To be clear: destroy the footage.
- The Ascendant
It feels manipulative, desperate. Still, he’s used to being on his back foot with Cazador. It’s not difficult to imagine disobedience here going poorly.
He pulls the external hard drive – his digital telltale heart – from its shoebox under his bed. It chunks to life and he clicks through the files. The version he sent to HBO is on the top level, labeled Rhapsody in Red FINAL FINAL 2.0.
There’s an intricate network of other folders, where he’d categorized footage. While he was filming, with no real sense of the story that was building yet, he cast a wide net. Seminars, with rows and rows of faces that he’d had to blur. Interview upon interview with the other seven.
His heart thumps in his chest when his cursor lands on a folder called Ascension. He filmed the entirety of the ceremony, during which – most notably – Cazador rejected Sebastian.
Rhapsody was all Sebastian had ever known. He dedicated himself to learning Cazador’s methods at just seventeen years old. He’d never been kissed. He learned the structure of an Inquiry before he ever held hands with anyone.
It was clear the moment they met that Sebastian was more successful at every aspect of Rhapsody, more dedicated, more bought-in than Astarion. And irony of ironies – or maybe just in the way of the world – Astarion earned his Ascension. And with it, another loss to grieve.
When Astarion closes his eyes, he still sees Sebastian’s mother’s face. Wracked, almost convulsing with loss. And intermingled with the memory, he feels Sebastian's soft lips against his own. Long, soft hair knotted in his fingers. A sense of freshness, eagerness, unassailable hope. It makes his stomach lurch to think about it.
There’s so much of Sebastian in here. More than Astarion should’ve ever captured, more than any respectable documentarian would’ve done with a subject, let alone filmed.
At least he'd had the common sense to turn the camera off when they'd kissed, at least he can’t watch that back.
Whether it’s the guilt or the shame, the memory of Sebastian’s smirk or of his bereaved mother’s hand on his casket, Astarion doesn’t know. But he finds himself back at Raphael’s email.
Words swimming before him, he clicks the link. Selects everything. Clicks upload.
Christ, his roommates – classmates – whatever the fuck they are, they'll never forgive him if some of this becomes public.
Even compressed, it takes ages to send. Alternately, he paces the room and sits down to check the progress. His heart thumps harder and harder in his chest, until he starts to feel lightheaded.
Panting, he plants himself pin-straight on the edge of his bed, feet flat on the floor, and closes his eyes. Counting deep breaths, knowing it won't work, has never worked, he tries his Ascension exercises anyway. Feeling for the vibrational frequency of the Earth's core — through the floor beneath him, the floors beneath that, the foundation. Down through dirt and rock and deep, trapped water. He tries to feel the frequency filling him, but he gets stuck where he always has.
There's nothing there. For all the visualization, all the deep breathing, trying trying trying to feel it. Nothing. It's always been pretend for him, no matter how much hope he's held out. Without an audience, though, or a reason, he can at least stop pretending.
Interrupting his fruitless exercise, Petras knocks and cracks the door. He’s still smiling that full-of-pity smile, tense creases on either side of his mouth. He holds out a paper plate of Hawaiian pizza.
Astarion gets up to take it, not meeting Petras’s eye. Any other time, he’d bitch at him about the choice of toppings, but he’s starving. It smells good. And Petras knows better than to linger – he closes the door quietly behind himself.
Finally, as Astarion sits down and takes a limp bite of cheese, salty ham, watery tart pineapple, his screen flashes a green checkmark. "Thank you, your documentation has been submitted! We'll be in touch should we need anything more."
Lord help you if you need more, he thinks.
He closes the tab, back to his email, and replies: "Done."
His heart races and bile creeps up the back of his throat. That's it, no going back. He's cooperating.
Even with all their money tied up in the legal proceedings, even with the collateral, none of the others had wanted him to get involved. Petras and Dalyria mostly just want to move on with their lives. Aurelia is just petrified, period. Anytime Violet or Yousen or Leon are in a room for too long, they argue about it. Day or night, mealtime, in passing in the hall.
They aren’t necessarily wrong to worry – there’s bound to be footage in there that makes them all look bad.
He’s just thankful Dalyria didn’t come home while things were uploading. Even though all seven of them are linked by all of this, her opinion is the only one he truly cares about.
She was the one to tip him off about Rhapsody – to suggest he could turn it into something sellable. They’d known each other beforehand, shared a cynical streak. The whole time, she’d been the only one of their class who, to Astarion’s eye, didn’t buy in completely. They never talked about it outright, Astarion was too afraid, but he’d caught her eye during one of Petras’s Inquiries and gotten the distinct sense she thought it was bullshit.
Astarion refuses to get attached to anyone, but Dalyria has come the closest.
Since everything fell apart, she’s been quiet, reserved, but obviously apprehensive. Between her cryptic time outside the apartment and her (admittedly shrinking) hours of sleep each night, Astarion almost misses her hollow, sad eyes.
He’d never tell her, but it reminds him of her expression after Sebastian died. It’s sickly satisfying because it’s proof she also feels the sidelong guilt that wears on him, still. At least, as they share cynicism, they also share that guilt. She’s never said it outright, but Astarion doesn’t need to hear it to know. It haunts her that she called him first, rather than an ambulance.
So this is it. He's free of his collateral, and he never has to face Cazador again. Cazador was right to question how effective it was to give Astarion filming rights as collateral. It was clear he'd expected a glowing portrayal. But now, the raw footage is with Raphael and Astarion's hands are as clean as they ever were going to be.
He tears off a large piece of the mediocre pizza with his teeth. He's too sick to his stomach, but he knows he should eat something.
Cazador could – probably will – countersue him for sharing the footage. Astarion could be blackballed, go hungry, probably, go back to waiting tables and eating scraps in the back. But he won't have to face down the rest of his life knowing he’d laid himself bare to Cazador. Won't have to fight to convince the world, and himself, that he never got attached.
The others won’t be so lucky. From what Astarion knows, they handed over financial accounts, written confessions, sexual materials. Much more compelling ties, all the more likely to bind hands, keep mouths shut, ruin lives.
He closes his eyes, unable to tune out the lurching static in his mind. Love Is Blind would’ve been a natural, if temporary, escape. The rejection more than stings, on that account. Even if it’s reality garbage, he could at least have pretended to buy into the experiment and get away for a few weeks.
He’ll have to run, he realizes. If the idea of facing Dalyria is so terrifying, how could he possibly stay here with the other five?
So it looks like the only option is Discovery.
He brings up their email. “Various locations globally for Shark Week” – though further down, it says more specifically “Off the coast of Norway.” And no great whites or tiger sharks, nothing titillating. Just a lone biologist, a research station, a single sleeper shark.
In a time before this one, he and Dal would’ve sat up all night joking about how insane this job is. They’d have workshopped a scathing response, asking who in their right mind would freeze their ass off, on spec and non-union, so not even for scale pay.
But insane or not, it seems that what he deserves is a frigid, lonely exile.
He taps out a response, and then starts looking at maps and plane tickets – it’s goddamn expensive and fucking holy-shit remote.
Eventually, he lands on the Baldur’s Gate Wikipedia page. Licking his fingers to keep the grease off his keyboard, he starts to study up.
Baldur’s Gate Island is so named for the explorer Balduran who discovered it and the way it stands as a tacit guard between the North and Norwegian seas.
The Sword Coast is on the North side of the island, and is home to the Nautiloid, a multipurpose research station. The south side of the island is much less hospitable, covered in steep, rocky, largely unexplored cliffs…
In the time he wastes learning the geography of his exile, Discovery gets back to him. They’ll reimburse his travel expenses, and a ship will meet him in Bergen in a few days. He’ll need standard camera equipment – some may be available onsite, but no guarantees. Depending on his cell carrier, they say, service is unlikely during the 24-36 hour journey. When they make landfall on Baldur’s Gate, service may still be spotty, and is not guaranteed.
Perfect. He doesn’t want to hear from anybody, anyway. He shoves the last of the pizza crust in his mouth all at once, wipes his fingers on the paper plate, and tosses it toward the trashcan across the room.
Surprisingly, there's a one-way, one-person trip to Bergen that leaves first thing in the morning. He buys a ticket on his emergency-emergency credit card, the one he hasn’t told the others about. Hands shaking, he stows his laptop under his bed and lays back. He can’t sleep, but neither can he bring himself to go watch Petras and Leon play Elden Ring.
For a while, he scrolls on his phone, following the Baldur's Gate Wikipedia rabbit hole to the page on sleeper sharks, but the only thing he really absorbs is that their flesh is toxic and probably tastes like piss.
Eventually, he rolls onto his side, holding his phone inches from his face and numbing out on TikTok. His feed hasn’t caught wind of the legal proceedings against Rhapsody yet, but as usual, it’s mostly true crime slop.
When the door creaks open, announcing Dalyria's back, he shoves his phone under his pillow. Better to pretend he's asleep than face her, even if he has to pretend to sleep all night.
Lying there in the dark and the silence, listening to her change and slip under her covers, he can't stop imagining her betrayed face when she finds out what he's done. He's glad he won't have to see it.
In what fitful, minimal sleep he gets, he dreams of water. Pitch-black and deep, so dark he can't see what's underneath, despite overwhelming dread of something. Big shapes, somehow darker even than their pitch-black backdrop, cross paths beneath the surface. The dread sits heavy in his stomach, and he vomits into the yawning dark of the water.
It's early when he wakes up, short of breath, in darkness that still drenches the bedroom. Dalyria's quiet, slow breaths reassure him she's still asleep.
Moving carefully, he tries to pack a bag without waking her. He doesn't have much in the way of warm clothes. A hoodie, a pair of flannel-lined jeans. Lord, please let there be a parka store in Bergen. And somewhere to get boots.
Video equipment, at least, he has. He'd made sure to grab all of it, along with all of his tapes, on the day Rhapsody fell apart. Despite how badly he wanted to sink through the floor, into the dirt, when Godey tried to stop him in the hall.
As he zips shut his beaten-up old camera bag, he steals one last glance at Dal. The morning has crept in to illuminate her face, and he finds her soft grey eyes no longer closed. Now they’re fixed on him. She sits up, not saying anything, just examining him in the dim light.
When he goes to the kitchen, she follows. She sits at the rickety table, watching while he makes coffee. Upon reflection, it's almost nice that he gets to spend these last moments with his two closest allies in the apartment — Dal and the plasticky Mr. Coffee percolator.
She sits at the kitchen table with one foot planted on the chair, bringing her knee up close to her face where she can rest her chin on it. She scrolls on her phone, as if it's any other morning, running a hand nervously through her long blonde hair and gently untangling the occasional snag.
"Want some?" he asks quietly. He tips out a spoonful of pre-ground Maxwell House slowly, like sand through an hourglass. She nods.
But Astarion can sense something more than nerves in the furrow of her brow and her hunched posture. Can she tell what he's done already? Or just that he's running far this time? Or maybe it's just more of the same, more of the guilt and emptiness they share.
They drink in silence, still. When he finishes the last bitter sip of coffee, he clears his throat gently. She looks up at him.
"Be safe," she says, her eyes intense, brows arched in concern.
"You know I will." He can tell she sees through the lie.
Before she can say anything else, he sweeps up the straps of his bags and he's out the front door.