A Complex Relationship

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Father and child. Watcher and ward. Teacher and student. Lovers. It's not messy, but it is complicated. But they're happy and living with room to adapt, grow, and change. Though he's got no desire to die early, Grim would tear down the world and throw himself on any sword, so long as it gave Avery the a chance to gain the choice they'd been born without.

First Impressions

In his late forties, Grim is convinced by his fellow retired adventuring buddies to step up and act where the city guards have failed, and to aid the group in investigating a series of arsons and gory murders taking place across their end of town. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to acts—no motive, no theft, no thread connecting the persons slain. When their collective search around known Bhaalist hotspots turned up empty-handed, the hunt ramped up in intensity. Eventually they found their murderer down in the sewers and discovered rather than a complicated machine with many contributing bodies, they found a solo act...

At the heart of their efforts, smeared in the blood of their latest kill, there was a young Tiefling teenager. Filthy and barely aware of their surroundings, they pawed through the dead man's pockets, testing each new item retrieved with a bite, testing for edibility. Initially, the band wondered: is this an act? Are they perhaps ill? Unable to sit back and do nothing, lest their quarry escape, the group converged on the Tiefling and captured them. After that came a flurry of skills and spells: Discern Lies, Sense Motive, Sense Enchantment... All brought them to the same rough conclusion that their murderer was ablebodied, but effectively mute, and while not stricken by a natural ailment, something dark had afflicted them to their core.

Unwilling to kill someone stricken with a magical compulsion, least of all a bloody child, and unwilling to hand their mystery Tiefling over to the guards who'd, at their kindest, kill them outright, driven by Grim (a justice-driven paladin of Tyr) and Krihani's (a mother with a child not much younger than the Tiefling) arguments, the collective voice agrees to spare the young killer. Unsure where to go from there, Grim volunteers himself as the child's guardian.

“Something's going on in their head and I aim to pick apart what's twisting them. What they 've done ain't right. It's downright grisly. But if something else pressed their hand, ain't hardly anything worse. This ain't fair to whoever's stuck inside that urge."

Well past midnight and covered in vulgar mixture of sewage slime and the blood of the dead, secondhand from its place spattered across the Tiefling's grimy body, Grim knelt and addressed them with enough sincerity to quiet the hissing and snarling that rattled up out of the youngling:

“No more living down here, alright? Gonna get you out of those ropes and they're never going back on. Gonna get you a hot meal, a soft bed, and see about putting you straight. That alright?"

At forty-eight, well and truly exhausted, but no less relieved as the unbound Tiefling chose to tentatively take his offered hand, Ghislain Grimwald became a father.

Core Tenets & Hopes for the Future

Grim's first peek into their mind was early on, within their first week of cohabiting, not long after pinning the Tiefling with a name: Avery, because he'd gotten sick of addressing the other with a spectrum of "hey you"s. Short on sleep, concerned less about himself and more for his neighbors, Grim dug through the stock of scrolls in his shop and eventually came up with one to Detect Thoughts. With Avery willing to make little outside of a variety sounds meant to portray their annoyance and displeasure, Grim noted that when prompted with speech, they still responded. Fairly sure they understood a decent amount of the common tongue, he made an offer:

“Hey, come here a tic. I know you're not one to talk, but I ain't want to cross bad lines with you. Instead of talking here—" He tapped his lips, “You think it would be alright to talk here...?" He tapped his temple, then gestured to Avery's with the same fingers, not yet touching the other. “Might tingle a little, but if you don't like it, we can stop right away. Can we try?"

There, he glimpsed into torrential swirl of violence that lunked behind their eyes. But rather than being driven off, Grim only doubled down harder. As someone well-acquainted with sensation of staring down literal evil, he knew without a doubt that Avery truly was touched with dark art. Where he could have ended his efforts in a mercy killing, he reached out to Tyr. The sooner he knew Avery's adversary, the better. Deities, even familiar ones, are rarely straightforward, especially in matters that concern others within the great pantheon. It took months of exhaustive prayer, of pleading, of rewording questions only to have no answer echo back—but finally, revealed a truth told in fragments, to better avoid interplanar eavesdroppers: Avery was a Bhaalspawn, and not merely a child of a mortal bearing His unholy blood, but a piece of His deadened flesh infused with life.

Grim needed a stiff drink after the revelation and time to explain the depth of the issue to his fellow co-conspirators. Luckily, every one of them was just as set as the night they'd sworn to do right by Avery. So knowing that, it was back to work curbing the reflexes of the gods's own little exterminator. Despite this, to Grim, Avery had been, and would always be a person first, with their compulsions so far down the list, they might as well not be on it at all. He recognized their urges as dangerous and cataclysmically so if left unchecked, but they weren't Avery.

Avery killed rats in the cellar and stood over Grim's bed with the proof of their triumph, and they foamed like a sick dog when excitement struck, mouth dripping with viscous green acid. But Avery liked pancakes and sweets, devouring anything the man made with eyes shocked wide with glee. After trying and failing to save Avery's filthy matted hair, they'd smiled, sharptoothed, as they noted its slow growth back out every morning they checked in the mirror. Eyes placidly shut, they hummed along, as Grim sang along with temple hymns he couldn't make it in time to join in with, filling the shop with sound. And as time went on, Avery began to speak. Little questions bubbled up—sometimes one at a time, sometimes in a flurry—and Grim did his damnest to keep up and keep honest.

“You want to help? Well, ain't giving you the knife yet, put can you help an old man shuck corn? While it's on the pot, I'll peel you something sweeter."

“You know...I don't know what it does that. I can ask someone what does. You want to come with while I run errands so we can ask, or do you want to guard the shop til I get back?"

“It's well and good you like my rings and bars so much, but we're going to wait another year or two til you can get some. You can pick some out and if you still like them later on, I'll let you get a couple, eh?"

It weas never his intention to keep Avery fettered up indoors, with only brief glimpses at the world beyond their door. It was simply the nature of safety as Grim learned the younger's stress-tells—of what triggers would turn a grumble into a full-fledged meltdown, or an annoyance into a threat of death. But with every lesson taught and every lesson learned, he broadened Avery's world a little more. They went out for longer trips around the city. One from Avery's sworn band—the group's Sorcerer, helped them hone and control their spellcraft. Krihani encouraged Avery to bother those who worked in her tavern, including the line cooks who wound up bonding quite firmly to teen, going so far as to teaching Avery their secret handshake—only to withhold it from Grim himself.

While always some flavor of unsettling, be it their flattened speech or dissecting stare (or the dead rats, gods, there was a lot of them), Grim held no issue with those things—it was the distance Avery put between themself and Bhaal's clawing grasp that had Grim over the moon with pride. He didn't Avery's betterment as a bold achievement made in the name of righteousness. He didn't want it to spite Bhaal Himself (though it was definitely a plus). He wanted fairness for the person shackled to compulsions they'd never asked for. There was and never would be a moment he dreamed of anything but goodness for and from the other, but no matter what Avery chose in their future, so long as they chose, regardless of the looming presence of the god of murder, Grim would accept it, and if Avery wanted it, would even let go. He just had to keep pushing til then.

So rather than for swift errands, he took Avery to temple more often, not for conversion, but to meet people and to grow their community—even if they only wanted to lurk in the back and listen. He sat next to them, trying not to laugh as he talked Avery down from growling at the piercer giving them their first set of holes. A long way to go or not, the person crawling out of the wreckage that Bhaal had forged was wonderful. Winding down at night, Grim basked happily in their sleepy grin as they hung onto another winding adventure recounted. Strange or not, it was fairly ideal.

Changing Tides

—and, a few years into their life together, then Avery found their libido and their desire pointed straight to one singular person.

Where once had been a tiny slip of a person, in the time between, Avery had shot up like bamboo and fillted out just as quickly, surpassing Grim in height and matching his bulks fairly evenly. Waking to his barely-dressed ward hovering at the foot of his bed, Grim had assumed it was time to get another broken rat, or perhaps Ave's head had simply been too noisy to sleep—either option wasn't uncommon. But instead of dead vermin, Avery crawled up and over him. Instead of a moment lent to quietly talk the other back to sleep, Grim got his ass jumped.

Well...afterward... Well, not unlike the first time Grim had been taken to bed with another in pursuit of pleasure, afterward—careful to tread a balance between not encouraging Avery, but neither turning them out—Grim, once again sleep deprived, bowed his head and called up his patron deity for some advice.

“I always tried to do right by them, my Lord. Never been an errant thought in my head about 'em. Been trying to make sure they keep meeting new folk—don't want them to feel stagnant. But here we are... I guess a little... I might be flattered the more I think about it? Wasn't bad. They didn't do no wrong by me at least. I'm just worried about Ave."

Though Grim's code of ethics may have had a wildly flexible exterior, its core was stone-set. So as with most of his stranger inquiries to the blind god of justice, boiled down, the resounding response came back as: "It's weird, but not a sin." With plenty to reflect on, Grim resolved to let things play out while remaining as honest as possible with Avery, trying to explain his reactions as things changed and grew. Change wasn't necessarily bad, it was just new. He just had to stay his overall course, and thus, he did.

Related Reading

Deals with Grim and Avery's relationship from the perspective of an outsider and how easily it can be misread.

Deals with Grim's devotion to both Avery and Wyll.