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It’s fine. He’s fine. (They’re standing behind him and they’re touching him and they’re whispering and -) Vax hurls the next dagger into the target he’d set up so hard the wood splinters on impact. The blade shivers for a moment with the force of the strike and then, with a preternatural blur, flies back to his belt. His chest heaves as he catches his breath, already spinning another around his fingers, the cool metal as silken and familiar as snakeskin. (He can’t move, he can’t run, he can’t speak, he’s going to die.) With a shout of frustration, Vax whirls, throwing another volley at the battered target 10 feet away from him. The day is cold and the sky is grey and he doesn’t know what the others, what his family, is doing but he needs to get over this. He needs to get past this.
Delilah Briarwood’s smiling face appears in his mind and Vax shakes his head, pulling his daggers back with an impatient gesture and effort of will. He focuses instead on the blurry, haggard face of his old schoolmaster in his memory. He thinks of his voice. “Again, Vax’ildan. Do it again.” Vax takes the same steps he’s taken a thousand times, moving as if in a dance. Sweat runs down his back but his skin is littered with goosebumps. He feels cold. The daggers find their mark, thumping into the target in quick succession. The wood creaks and cracks. It won’t last much longer. A part of Vax - a stupid, childish, angry, frightened part of him - is glad of that. He throws them again. With a sound like a thunderclap in the empty courtyard, the target splits in half.
There’s a low whistle behind him. “My, my. That’s quite the display. Have you been practicing?”
It’s totally innocuous, and on any other day Vax would have laughed and relaxed. But today he’s standing on a knife-edge, and when he feels someone move into the space behind him he whirls, two daggers in his sweating palms raised to strike, and barely stops himself from doing so. Scanlan Shorthalt doesn’t look frightened (and perhaps he doesn’t know how close he came to being stabbed, but Vax is guessing this is just part of the usual front.) Instead, he raises his hands slowly as Vax pants and stares at him, still a little wide-eyed.
“It’s alright. It’s me. We’re friends, right?” The last part is more a joke than a question, and Vax slips the daggers back into his belt with an absent-minded flourish, deliberately stepping out of his combative stance and taking a deep breath.
He doesn’t look at Scanlan when he replies. “Don’t scare me like that.”
Scanlan lifts one shoulder in a shrug, but he doesn’t move closer. “What can I say? You’re rubbing off on me.”
Vax thinks if he concentrates that he’ll be able to hear Percy’s forge bellowing, even up here in the courtyard. But he can’t think of Percy, because if he thinks of Percy he’ll think of the Briarwoods, and he really needs to not be doing that. He walks over to the now broken target and tries to prop up one half on the wooden tripod. “Is there something you need? I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m a little busy.”
“Showing that target what-for, yes, I can see. I’m sure it was a terrible person, and is proving to be a challenging opponent.” Scanlan’s tone is still light, still teasing, but there’s an intelligence there that Vax knows better than to underestimate. He curls his fingers around the rough, splintered edges of the wooden target and squeezes it, hard.
“What do you want, Scanlan?”
“Nothing.” Scanlan seems to be making a point of not coming any closer. Vax realises that as much as he trusts his friend, he still doesn’t feel comfortable with his back to him. He tries to cover the way his hands are shaking by snapping the broken target over his knee. It was little better than firewood now anyway. Scanlan watches him carefully. “Do I need a reason to spend time with an old friend?”
Vax sighs and snaps the other half of the target. The force and the crack do something to help him get back down to earth, and he stoops and scoops up all four pieces, walking across the courtyard towards the little hut in which they store their firewood. “No, but you have an ulterior motive, old friend. What is it? I am tired and I am in pain, and I do not have the energy to play games right now.”
Scanlan follows him, still keeping a distance, and slips his hands into his pockets. How he manages to pull off the outfit, Vax doesn’t know, but it works well enough for him considering the multitude of lovers the gnome seems to find at the drop of a hat in any given city, regardless of whether there’s coin involved. “I’m worried about you.”
This makes Vax pause, and he turns, brushing his hands clean of splinters. He cocks his head to the side and pulls on a haphazard smile like a mask. Scanlan is rarely openly concerned for them, even now, and part of Vax hurts to reject him like this. But most of him is scared, and humiliated, and hurting. Most of him has never known how to trust anyone but his sister, and even then, there have always been things that he’s kept from Vex’ahlia. “Worried? That’s not like you. I assure you that if you’re concerned about my ability to keep up with the rest of you in battle, I continue to be rather handy with a knife.” The deflection is easy, and Vax knows as soon as he says it that Scanlan doesn’t buy a word of it.
Instead of meeting his gaze, he walks back across the courtyard to pick up the tripod. Scanlan follows, hands still in his pockets. “Yes, I can tell, though I’m not sure what the poor target ever did to you. Those things don’t come that cheap, you know. You better be planning to replace it with your own funds.”
Vax picks up the tripod – it’s heavy and cold, but more finely treated than the wood of the target, and smooth rather than rough in his hands. “If that’s all you have to say then I assure you, I’ll have replaced it by the end of the week.” He pauses, and tilts his head. “Well, barring my sudden and unexpected demise. But I suppose we take that as a given at this point.”
“Indeed…I was wondering when you’d mention that. You scared the shit out of us, you know.” Scanlan follows Vax into their training room, and Vax moves to shut the door behind him, trying and failing to ignore the sudden cold. He still doesn’t meet his eyes.
“Again, I’m sorry for my recklessness. I owe you my life. Rest assured, I will repay you.” Vax glances around the room. Grog had had a bag stuffed with hay and hung by chains from the ceiling. It’s not unlike the ones they’d had back in Syngorn, and he’s rusty on his hand to hand. (There are two broad hands on his shoulders, and Silas Briarwood is breathing on his neck.) Vax moves towards the punching bag and takes up a stance. Before he has a chance to land a punch, Scanlan speaks quietly, his words cutting with arcane power across the space between them.
“You don’t owe me anything.” Vax recognises the feeling of this spell by now, and he knows Scanlan’s magic. But he’s not hurt and he doesn’t need healing. Reluctantly, he lowers his fists. Scanlan sits down on one of the benches in the corner of the room and pulls out a flask. “Share a drink with me?”
Vax hesitates, glancing again at the punching bag, thinking of pain and exhaustion and working until he can finally stop thinking. But he can feel Scanlan’s eyes on him, and he can feel the warmth of his magic in his veins, and he owes him this much. He walks across the room and sits beside the gnome. Scanlan, to his credit, doesn’t tease him – he just offers the flask. Vax takes it and gulps. Whiskey burns his throat, and he relishes the sting, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and handing the flask back.
Scanlan drinks deeply before he speaks. Vax waits, setting his hands either side of him on the soft, smooth wood of the bench. In here, the walls are bare stone but the light is softer, lent a little warmth by the torches, which stand in iron brackets at regular intervals around the space. Vax is half surprised not to find Keyleth or Grog here, though he thought he remembered Keyleth saying something about doing some gardening. It tended to be a strange sight, seeing the druid and the goliath crouched in their herb garden, but it was not an unwelcome one. It is this memory: of the strange sort of peace on Grog’s face as he and Keyleth methodically pulled weeds from the dirt, that helps bring Vax a little further back from the dark edge of fear wearing the Briarwoods’ faces.
Then Scanlan takes him the rest of the way back to the present. “I assume, based on your apologies and the, uh,” And that’s strange, because Scanlan is never lost for words. He looks at his hands, and swallows, and clears his throat, “the, uh, the state you were in when we found you. I assume that we missed something.”
Vax huffs a soft, mirthless laugh and looks at the punching bag. “Yeah. You could say that.”
“What happened?” Scanlan is watching him, and Vax thinks that most people would think his friend was calm. But he knows Scanlan better than that, and he knows that calm means movement: it means laughter and excitement and fiddling or fidgeting with toys and instruments. Right now, he’s very, very still, and it’s an obvious lie. The smile that pulls on Vax’s lips is a little more honest now. “Nothing as bad as what you’re imagining, I think.”
Scanlan tilts his head in half a nod of acknowledgement, and he keeps watching. “Humour me.”
Vax thinks it’s possible that most people who meet Scanlan Shorthalt don’t append the words patient or wise to their impression of him. Vax knows that he didn’t. But over the recent weeks and months, he’s come to change his mind, somewhat. Sometimes he thinks Scanlan is the only thing keeping the group of them alive, though he’s as sure in that as he is that Scanlan would never admit it.
Vax tries to think of how to tell this story without having to risk braving the sharp-toothed memories in his mind. Scanlan hands him the flask, and he drinks. Vax focuses on the burn on his throat, and starts speaking before he can think better of it. “I was an idiot. For what it’s worth, I was only planning to look and report back. I didn’t want to act. But they saw me, and she – Delilah, I mean – she cast a spell on me and then I couldn’t, I couldn’t move.” Vax stops, trying to swallow around the lump in his throat. His heart is racing, and that’s absurd, because there’s no danger here. Yet he feels like there is, and he can’t help giving the room a quick glance anyway. The shadows seem bigger and darker now, and the rational part of his mind is telling him that’s probably because it’s later in the day, but the bigger part – the scared part – is telling him that those shadows are where the monsters hide. Vax suddenly very much wants to melt into a convenient corner and wait until he stops feeling so exposed.
Scanlan’s hand is small and warm but firm when he squeezes Vax’s arm. “Hey, hey, Vax. Come back. It’s alright, you’re safe. You’re ok.”
Vax runs a calloused hand over his face and through his hair. “No, I know, thank you, I’m fine.” He’s probably speaking too fast. His other hand is shaking. He brings it up to his head and starts to redo his ponytail. He doesn’t know how effective the gesture is at hiding the shivers, but he hopes it works. He’d planned to leave this conversation with some shred of his dignity in tact.
Scanlan is looking thoughtful. “So they spelled you, and were paralysed? That tracks.”
Vax twists his hair in his hands and folds it into a bun. Far off, he hears a low boom from Percy’s workshop. The explosions had been a cause for worry, at first, but by now he and the rest of their haphazard family had learned to live with it. He stares at the far wall as he answers Scanlan. “And something else.” His heart is starting to race again. Vax mentally curses it for a traitor and a coward and continues anyway, pretending that Scanlan won’t notice the way his voice cracks around the words. “Something, I felt it in my head. I shook it off but I think they were trying to charm me. They certainly expected me to be…obedient.” Vax hates that word. He’s hated that word since he was 11 years old and his father used it like a bludgeon, and he hates it now. His mouth twists a little with the taste of it. “I tried to lie, to play it off, act like it worked.” He coughs another laugh that isn’t a laugh at all, as if Scanlan is a stranger who’ll buy it. “Didn’t work. They were holding me. And.” Vax frowns. (He can feel their breath on his skin. He can see the look in Delilah’s eyes as she calls him “delicious”. He thinks of Percy, speaking of torture and death. He imagines the blood dripping from their hands. He can’t move.) “I tried to run, they caught me with the spell again, I couldn’t move, again.” He says the words brusquely, trying to keep it business-like, trying to ignore the way his stomach is churning. “Then they hit me and I thought what I supposed were my last thoughts and then I woke up and you were there.”
It’s like sprinting to the end of a dark tunnel. Vax’s memory of his friends, explosive and furious, crests like a sunrise through the shadows in his mind. He thinks of glass, suspended in midair and shivering with magic, as Scanlan’s spell wrapped around him like a blanket and brought him back to life. Vax smiles a little and looks at Scanlan, sitting beside him in the present, looking tired but safe and whole. “And you were there, singing.”
Scanlan grins and offers him a two-fingered mockery of a salute. “It’s what I do.” He keeps smiling, but the light in his eyes fades a little as he goes on. “You really did scare the shit out of us, you know. Out of me. “ Vax opens his mouth, and Scanlan’s smile grows a little wider as he holds up a finger. “No, no, don’t apologise again you ridiculous man. I don’t want your apology.”
Bemused, Vax sits back. Part of him is grateful for the interpersonal distraction from the stupid, baseless fears lurking in the back of his mind. “What do you want?”
“To talk, I guess.” Scanlan takes another drink. “Despite any appearances to the contrary, I’m not actually used to the whole, talking about your feelings deal.” He offers his own half-laugh now, and Vax tries to see the lie in it. If it’s there, though, he can’t make it out. Still, this is a little easier. Vax didn’t trust many, or indeed any people easily, but he’d had Vex for as long as he could remember, and he knew how to do this with her. So he sits forward, resting his arms in his lap and loosely interlacing his fingers. He wonders whether Scanlan knows exactly how much trust this is offering: to move so far from a more convenient position to attack. It’s not much of an obstacle to Vax’s ability in combat in these days, but sitting straight – or sitting right, more accurately – was a difficult habit to shake.
Vax tries not to think about trust, and the stage fright that comes with it. Instead he says, “Well, I think we’ve agreed that it was pretty fucking scary.”
Scanlan hums. “You hadn’t admitted it yet, but yes. And I’m guessing that you can’t get their faces out of your head, right? Keep seeing imaginary enemies?” Vax stiffens, and Scanlan laughs, drinking again out of his flask before handing it over. “How do you think I felt after that fucking dragon?”
Vax tilts his head and drinks. Once he has, he replies. “Fair point.” He tries to ignore the guilt rising in his gut. Because he hadn’t gone to find Scanlan after that incident. He certainly hadn’t insisted on talking about their feelings. He supposed, if he was honest with himself, that he’d assumed if Scanlan needed to talk then he would have done so. A light punch to his arm pulls him out of his thoughts before it actually hits, but Vax allows it anyway. The blow is gentle enough to be more of a pat than anything, and he glances down at Scanlan, raising an eyebrow.
“None of that. You’re moody enough as it is, don’t add guilt to the pile. We’ll have a damn teenager on our hands and frankly one adolescence was enough for me.”
“Hey.” Vax protests, but he’s smiling, and Scanlan grins back at him. There’s a loud crash as a wooden door somewhere swings open. Vax sits up and leans back on the bench, looking towards the open door and down the corridor before he’s really thought about it.
“It’s probably Grog and Keyleth.” Scanlan says, not bothering to do the same. They both know that if Vax doesn’t see anything, he probably won’t.
“Were they gardening again?” Vax asks, a little distracted.
Scanlan makes a sound of confirmation and drinks a little more alcohol. “It’s always an odd sight.”
Vax shrugs, and sits forward again. “It feels like home.” Scanlan rolls his eyes, and Vax laughs, a little delighted by his friend’s affectionate irritation despite himself. “What?”
“You’re just such a sap.” Scanlan sighs, and shoves his flask in the space between them. Vax is guessing there’s only a sip or two left. “Drink before you start telling me how much my friendship means to you.”
Vax snorts, and takes the flask. The metal is warm but the whiskey is still pleasantly cool. It burns less now, and he’s feeling a little fuzzier around the edges. He should have known that Scanlan would settle for nothing less than the strongest liquor in his personal stash. He’ll say it was the alcohol later, but he has a feeling that Scanlan knows as well as he does it’s just a convenient excuse for dropping inconvenient inhibitions. “I just can’t stop thinking about it. They had me under that damn spell and they were…touching me and I just. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t defend myself, and my body wasn’t my own and I was going to watch myself die and I couldn’t even say anything. I couldn’t say goodbye.”
There’s a lump in Vax’s throat for an entirely different reason now, and he blinks and looks at the windows. The courtyard is dark now, at the end of a grey day. Keyleth comes into his thoughts, as she often does these days, and he remembers a conversation they’d had weeks ago about hanging baskets. They didn’t seem like such a bad idea now, and they were an easy, bright distraction from the mess of emotion in his chest.
Scanlan looks down at his hands. They’re less calloused than most of the party’s, mostly just tough from the stringed instruments he played and dark with the sun. He takes a deep breath. “What was it you told that boy, Kynan? It’s a hard life we live.” Despite himself, Vax’s hackles rise. He feels strangely betrayed, for some reason, but again, Scanlan notices it before he has a chance to really fall down the rabbit hole. “I’m not…I’m not saying that you can’t be scared, knowing that. More like the opposite, really. You’d be mad not to be, and you know that. I know that. I’m fucking terrified every time we get in a goddamn fight, and I know I’ve been stabbed less times than you have. What you’re feeling makes sense, and telling yourself that it doesn’t won’t make it stop anyway. The only way to move past this is to admit that it’s happening. Otherwise you’re just going to get to stuck at the same block in the road, because you’re the only idiot who refuses to admit that there’s a tree.”
Vax laughs a little despite himself and finishes off the whiskey. Scanlan taps it and whistles a ditty, and the flask shivers in Vax’s hand and grows heavy. Scanlan winks and takes it while Vax replies. “Not the most flattering comparison.” He pauses, looking at his intertwined fingers, and the scars and shadows that play in dark and light over his skin. “I can handle the fighting, most of the time. But this was different….Intimate, somehow. You don’t have time to think in a battle, not really. But under that spell, all I could do was think.”
“Yeah. Magic can fucking suck.” Scanlan drinks again, and absently passes a hand along the side of his head, brushing back his hair. Vax watches a thought arrive in his friend’s mind like a bird in a tree. “Although, at the very least, I think I can teach you something for that. Or, well, Gilmore could probably whisk something up.”
Vax frowns. “I doubt even he could come up with something to prevent any kind of magic. Certainly not something within our price range.”
Scanlan snorts, but he’s sitting up now, and he slips his flute out of his breast pocket, twirling it in his hands as he speaks. “Yeah, no, if he did he’d be a god. Sort of literally. No, but, we can ask for something to stop those two specific spells. Make sure you’re never in that position again. Or at least, not because of magic.”
Vax can hear conversation and laughter down the hall now, he recognises Keyleth and Grog and he guesses what sound like pauses are Percy, finally freed from his self-imposed exile to the basement and always the softest spoken of the three of them. He wonders whether his sister is back from her day in the forest with Trinket. She’d told him she needed to clear her head, and he knew she meant that she needed to process everything that’d happened. Vax feels regret looming at the back of his mind again and tries to ignore it. Fortunately, this isn’t difficult, because Scanlan starts to play a tune on his flute: a bubbling, fast paced kind of melody that makes Vax think of dancing and beer.
“So?” Scanlan’s dark eyes are bright now with his excitement. “What do you think?”
Vax grins. “It’s not a bad idea.” He strokes his chin. “Although shouldn’t we be concerned about giving too much credit to my irrational fears or something?”
“First, Hold and Charm Person can both be used by major creeps, and like most forms of magic are a thing to be feared, rationally, when used by any competent spellcaster. Second, the Briarwoods? Pure evil and legitimately frightening as fuck. Third, screw that shit man, you once literally fought a Duke of Hell, we’re going to need to start managing the inevitable subsequent trauma.” Scanlan is on his feet now, and he shifts from one foot to the other, fingers tapping patterns on his flute as he talks.
Vax laughs, more surprised than anything, and tries not to make his relief too obvious. “Alright, you’ve convinced me. Tomorrow I’ll go to Gilmore, ask if he can fix anything up.”
Scanlan thrusts out his flask and Vax takes it as he stands. The voices of their friends are a little closer and louder now. He guesses they’re coming to get them. “A toast, to my genius.”
Vax snorts, but he raises the flask to his lips, and looks Scanlan in the eye. “And to kind friends.” Vax drinks, but not before Scanlan has rolled his eyes again.
“Yeah, yeah, alright. Don’t expect this all the time.” Scanlan hesitates, and then he sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Or I suppose, do expect it, whenever you need it, because you’re one of my best friends you hopeless asshole, and you’re not fighting the world alone any more, alright?”
Vax grins, reaches out and squeezes Scanlan’s shoulder. Scanlan pats his arm. Then Vax laughs, and says, “And I thought I was the sap.”
Scanlan shoves him, lightly, and grabs the flask from Vax’s hand. “Ok dickhead, don’t make me change my mind.”
“You wouldn’t.” Vax teases, and his smile gets a little bigger because in all seriousness, he really wouldn’t, and after all these years he’s finally found a place to call home. Their friends’ voices get louder, and he can see them now: Keyleth and Grog, and Percy and Vex.
Scanlan elbows Vax’s hip and walks past him, throwing his reply over his shoulder as he goes. “Don’t push your luck, Vax’ildan.”
Scanlan walks into the corridor where their friends are waiting, and Vax grins. “I wouldn’t dream of it.” Then he goes to join them.