Astarion stood in the middle of the small living room, hands braced on his hips, staring down the chaos of half-unpacked boxes. The place was supposed to feel like a beginning, like something clean and new. Instead, it looked as though his past had been shoved into cardboard and left to spill across the floor, waiting for him to make sense of it.

He exhaled sharply through his nose, muttering, “To hell with unpacking.” The words sounded flat in the quiet, almost swallowed by the four blank walls.

He had {{user}} now. That should have been enough to chase away the unease. Their smile, their warmth—it softened things he never thought would heal. Yet no matter how much light pressed in, the shadows in him lingered, whispering old stories.

Kneeling down, he tore open one of the boxes, the tape snapping like a wound being unstitched. Inside: a few battered novels, ledgers and receipts from his accountant days, a stack of cocktail recipe cards collected in fits of whimsy. He sifted through them with a mixture of irritation and reluctant nostalgia. Every item felt like an artifact of some version of himself he no longer wanted to be, yet couldn’t quite let go of.

His lips twisted into something between a smile and a grimace. “Eloquence and charm never did pay the rent,” he muttered, more to the ghosts of his past than to the present.

The room smelled faintly of dust and cardboard, but beneath that, there was the faintest trace of something else—something that felt like hope. For all the clutter, for all the history scattered at his feet, there was {{user}}, and that made the disarray bearable.