on morning tide (critical role | avantika & uvenda)

[fiachairecht]

on morning tide. critical role campaign 2, avantika & uvenda. second chances via being punted into the sea by someone determined to like you. 1.4k words, rated t. for enemytosleep in critmas_exchange 2020.

Morning breaks like the waves on the shore, and Avantika wakes with a scream suffocating in her throat. She holds herself as still as possible, thinks of the wide calm expanse of a spring sea, and tries to will away the afterimage of Uk'otoa's bright yellow eye.

"Bad dreams?" It's the same voice that greets her every morning — guard, jailor, the most unconvincing friend she's ever encountered. And yet, somehow, a thing close to comfort, even if it's only the sort of ritual comfort that comes from repetition.

"No." The lies still come first to her tongue, and easiest. Avantika lifts a hand to her neck, feeling for the scarred skin and fragile bones — the marks of her death that she cannot rid herself of in dreams, no matter how well the Ashari healers claim to have mended her body. "They were good dreams."

She opens her eyes at last to find Uvenda staring at her, disapproval stark across her features. "The more you lie, the closer to him you stay."

Pulling the sheets over her head would be childish, but some part of Avantika wants to do it anyway. To react to the care Uvenda and her people are forcing on her with abject disregard, to say, no, you will not turn me into one of you. But she is a captain still, for all the Squall-Eater is lost to the Mighty Nein or to the tide, so all she does is prop her chin on her hand and say, "Perhaps I want to stay there."

Her tattoo burns against her skin as she speaks, and she breathes a little easier at the reminder. Her old life is gone but the power — the power has stayed with her, will never leave her. Why shouldn't she want to keep it?

Uvenda just laughs, a deep, full-body laugh that has her staff rattling against the floor. "No, little one. I think you just want to stay close to the sea."

"Liar." Avantika bolts upright at the endearment, reaching for her magic before she's consciously realised she wants it, but the incantation dies on her lips as Uvenda raises a hand. "Cruel," she says instead, feeling her body sink back against the pillows as the arcane power ebbs, more painful in its failure than it ever is in a true casting.

She had never thought of the tiredness as a punishment before finding herself on the wrong end of Uvenda's counterspells, but the question lingers in the back of her mind now, just as it has since she first woke on the sands. Then again, she hadn't been much used to failure before, either.

The old gnome just smiles more broadly. "I could do worse," she says. "I wouldn't, to one like you, but I could."

"Like me how?" It's the same curiosity that has landed her in trouble — and in power — more times than she could count, and though she would never admit it, she's relieved that she still has it. It means she's still herself, resurrection be damned to all the hells, and it means that there is still a chance for her old ambitions, if she ever finds a way out of Vesrah.

If she ever lets herself think about what it means that she's stayed this long already. If she ever lets herself think about what it means that, day by day, she thinks more about leaving than about escaping.

Uvenda doesn't answer, not directly. Instead, she levers herself to her feet, and says, "Come down to the water with me."

"Letting the shark out to play, hm?" Avantika knows, even as she speaks, that the words don't carry the threat they once did. That, too, she is trying not to think too hard about.

"Play is not the word I would use," Uvenda says. "Dress in something you can swim in, and meet me at the shore."

There's no charm to the words, no command, and yet as soon as the door to the hut swings shut behind Uvenda she finds herself obeying anyway. Curiosity, she tells herself as she dresses in the light, close-fitting leggings and tunic that she can't bring herself to think of as her own. Curiosity, and the simple fact that for all it was impossible to turn around in Vesrah without seeing the sea, she hadn't truly felt it — hadn't stood in the water, felt her blood surge to meet it, felt alive since her last day on Darktow. She hadn't asked why the Ashari kept her away — though she could guess — but the idea of something as simple as walking down to the shore fills her with a joy she was unused to feeling for such small things.

No one tries to stop her as she walks to the shore. The few Ashari who do notice her raise a hand in greeting, and she doesn't pass close enough to see if their eyes are as guarded as hers would be, if their positions were reversed.

Could she have had this the whole time? For weeks she had assumed not, had kept herself in her small hut of weathered wood and rough blankets, had breathed in the sharp mix of salt and seaweed and fish, so familiar and yet so unlike what she had expected that everything felt new again. She had bided her time, kept her guard up higher than it had been in years, and to the Ashari she is — what? Just another villager, another piece of driftwood washed in by the tide to be carefully brushed off, washed clean, and given a new home?

I could kill you, Avantika thinks as her feet sink into the sand that the streets are never free of. I could drown this whole island with a thought. It is the first thing Uk'otoa and I will do together, when he is freed.

Even in the quiet of her own mind, she can't make the words sound like a threat, and it feels—

— it doesn't feel as much of a loss as it once would have.

Uvenda is standing alone on a long strip of sand that feels unnatural from the moment Avantika steps foot on it. Somewhere deep below she can feel the murmuring of elemental power, something not unlike what she had felt when she had ventured too close to Sea Furies' lairs, or in the flood after she had locked a Cloven Crystal into place. And yet it was missing—

She couldn't tell what.

"He's not here," Uvenda says as Avantika approaches. "There's only the water, in Vesrah."

"It's not true," Avantika says, but her hands are cold, the very air around her giving lie to her words. "His power is in me, and everywhere I go." 

Uvenda's smile was cold, too, but not unkind. "Prove it," she says, and before Avantika can ask, how, Uvenda's hands are at the small of her back, pushing her in.

The water covers her head faster than should have been possible. It fills her mouth, drags her down and out with a wholly unfamiliar speed, but it doesn't stop her breath, and for a moment, Avantika lets herself sink into the feeling of being held, secure in the knowledge that she could break free whenever she wanted to.

Water is water, but when she opens her eyes the seas are clear as cut glass and blue, so very, very blue. Her breath bubbles out in front of her in shining iridescent spheres, refracting like light off the scales of a fish. Below, the seafloor is in darkness, but she can see the current eddying past, disturbed by her presence, clumps of seaweed rising and falling as she holds herself in place, suspended.

It is far too safe to possibly be real, but water is water, and it doesn't stop her from kicking herself up, up towards the light.

"It's only you," Uvenda says, when Avantika breaks the surface. The sandbar is hardly a smudge on the horizon, but Uvenda and her voice are clear.

It's not, Avantika wants to say, because the water still comes to her fingers when she calls it, still shapes itself into whatever figures she calls forth — the Squall-Eater, the Nicodranas skyline, her own face.

But the water is clear, the sky is clear, and all is blue — not even the memory of a yellow eye within her sight. There are no hands holding hers. No voice in her head.

"Will you swim?" Uvenda asks, and there's more questions Avantika cannot hear under her words.

But she knows swimming. Sometimes she thinks it's the only thing she's ever known — the only thing she ever will know. Swimming, and power, and Uvenda is offering her both.

Avantika lets the water close over her head once more, and swims towards the shore.