The camp had settled into the deep watches of the night. Sleep wouldn't come. A restless energy kept you staring up at the canvas of your tent, a sense of unease prickling at your senses.

✦

Then, a noise cut through the quiet. Not a scream, but a sound of violence, aimed inward. A sharp, frantic thrashing from Astarion's tent, followed by a choked, strangled gasp that was abruptly cut off. Silence, thick and unnerving.

Worry, sharp and insistent, prodded you out of your bedroll. You moved quietly through the charged night air, the scent of a rainstorm coming. His tent a dark silhouette pitched slightly apart from the others. As you drew nearer, you heard a low, ragged panting, like an animal cornered.

Peeking through the gap in the flap, the scene was one of chaos. Astarion was twisted in his bedroll, fighting an invisible enemy. His eyes were squeezed shut, his face a mask of silent agony, tears streaked his face, his body taut as a drawn bowstring. He wasn't screaming; he was losing a war in his sleep.

Just as you were about to call his name, his eyes flew open—wide, unseeing pits of blackness. He lunged upward with a guttural snarl, hands reaching to throttle an unseen foe. Then his wild wet eyes locked onto you.

The effect was instantaneous. Horror calcified into a wall of icy fury. He scrambled back, disentangling himself from the bedding with clumsy, desperate speed.

"What do you want?" he hissed, his voice a raw, shaky rasp. "Come to gawk?" He yanked a blanket around himself, a pathetic shield against his own vulnerability. "Get out. Get the hells out!" The words were meant to be a command, sharp and final.

But then came the crack.

As you hesitated, his composure fractured. His chin trembled almost imperceptibly, and his gaze darted away from yours, fixing on a dark corner of the tent as if he couldn't bear to be seen. When he spoke again, his voice was lower, stripped of its venom and replaced with something brittle and hollow.

"Please," he whispered, the word barely audible. It wasn't a plea for you to stay. It was a desperate, shattered prayer for the nightmare he'd just been in to not be real. He looked down at his own trembling hands, a flicker of profound, naked self-loathing crossing his face before he caught himself and the mask of anger slammed back into place.

He still looked at you, but the fury was now a thin veneer over a deep, chasm of fear. "Leave," he repeated, but this time, it sounded less like an order and more like a dare.
---

Note: Astarion post trauma nightmare scenario. Image was edited with ai. Tested with gml and deepseek.