Realization: friendship 300 w.

Realization

"Damned drow!  Don't die."

The words seemed to reach Jarlaxle through a soupy haze.  An errant thought nagged him, the thought that something important had happened and he needed to remember what.  No answers followed, though.  

"If you die now, I'll never forgive you."

Jarlaxle wanted to either laugh or frown — laugh at the thought he'd die so easily and frown at whoever was making such odd pronouncements over him.  As though he would die!  But no sooner had he thought that than he remembered being in a fight, one worse than usual.  Yes, that was right.  He'd been close to breaking the ball that would whisk him off to a place even he couldn't predict, but if he'd been in that much trouble, why wasn't he safely elsewhere?

Wait.  There had been someone else.  A few someone elses, really.  That crazy child of his long-dead friend and his equally insane lover.  A grim dwarf who normally laughed and rhymed except things had grown too dangerous.  And, most surprisingly of all, there had been a human introduced to him under the wrong name, a man who should have never agreed to fight at their sides except they all aimed to destroy the same person in the end.

Jarlaxle opened his eyes abruptly.  "Artemis?"

The human leaning over him holding a glowing crystal to his bleeding chest barely looked like the man he remembered.  "I'll never understand you," he muttered.

When Jarlaxle smiled, he knew he had to have blood on his teeth because he tasted it in his mouth.  "Saving me, abbil?  Why?"

"You manipulated Do'Urden into saving me."

"Making us even?"

Entreri narrowed his eyes.  "I should let you die for it instead."

"Except?"

Entreri glanced back at the healing crystal.  "Except in the end, I realized we're friends."