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It was never supposed to have gone this far.
Vax’ildan stood still as the grave, nestled deep in the folds of his cloak, buried under heavy wool dyed the colour of midnight. In the cracked mirror, the first he’s dared look into for almost a full year, the early evening sunlight had cast shadows across his features in sharp relief. He’d been going off the presumption that his face still matched his sister’s for so long that he felt a stranger to himself, perplexed by the deep hollows that had taken up residence where a pleasant fullness defined his sister’s cheeks. They still shared sharp jawlines, but on Vax, it seemed as though the slightest touch to them could draw blood.
This explained the looks he would sometimes catch Vex giving him, he supposed, and the fragile way she stepped around certain topics. He wondered vaguely how long ago she stopped being able to see herself in him and shuddered, drawing the cloak tighter around his shoulders before turning away. He couldn’t stand it.
When they had fled Syngorn, the twins had still been mistaken for each other at every turn. They both had a slight childish pudge and on flat feet came to the same height, identical smirks on their identical faces. It felt like eons, or perhaps seconds, since they had taken to the woods, or found Byroden.
It had started like this:
Their packs held some coin and some food, pantry items like jams and hard cheeses, and they had plucked skins of wine from their father’s stores to amuse themselves with and eventually refill at streams they crossed. They were by no means living well , but it hadn’t been difficult to get by, especially with the longbow Vex had lifted helping provide them with a reasonably steady supply of fresh meat. She would have hard days tracking, though, especially when she stalked large quarry for hours at a time so they would have enough to trade with and pay a butcher to clean it for them proper. They would keep the cheaper cuts, usually, because they were hardly going to be choosy when they could turn a profit instead, and sometimes Vex shrugged and sold a carcass whole for a better price, because then she could buy small game or get some vegetables or fruits that Vax couldn’t steal easily enough to be worthwhile.
It hardly felt fair that Vex put so much effort into feeding them both, but Vax still took half. Especially when he needed it less--all he needed was short bursts of energy, mostly adrenaline, because the strange majority of his sneak-thievery revolved entirely around his ability to simply remain still. The choice was perhaps too uncomfortably easy, made in the dim light of dawn while he listened to Vex’s soft snores and prodded at the softness of his belly where it covered muscle. He had wiggle room. Not that Vex didn’t have the same, of course, but… well, his wiggle room was less valuable than hers. She needed it more; between the two, her ability to feed them ran circles around Vax’s.
He came to their camp from the city one day firm in his decision, cradling several apples in one arm while he held a browned core in his hand. If she knew that he’d gotten the core from the dirt, she’d be furious, and it was never an easy thing to lie to her, but Vax had grown into a competent actor in his time. He didn’t have to say he’d already eaten his share of the spoils--he just had to come up pretending to chew, and have something in hand to toss aside like he was finished. It wouldn’t be a lie, exactly, if Vex’ahlia inferred the wrong information.
He usually tried to make his entrance to camp relatively obvious, but this time he snuck the whole way in, eyes sharp to find her sister before she could find him. He wound up doubling back, seeking out twigs to step on as he did, and began miming eating the core a good five seconds before she had any hope of spotting him. It would be more natural, this way, because she could see him at any point in the motion, rather than feigning a full bite.
Loud as he was being, Vex was already turned to face him when he broke the edge of their small campsite, chewing carefully at empty air as though savouring the last bit of his fruit before he chucked it hard into the dense wood.
“Brought presents,” he announced as the core sailed away, gesturing to the apples he still held. “All yours, sister mine.”
Later that night, lying awake to watch fireflies glitter and dance midair, Vax regarded his empty stomach. It wasn’t bothering him like he’d worried it might. The hollowness felt… oddly pleasant, in a way, like a minor victory. Maybe it was his inherent masochism, but Vax still rejoiced nevertheless when his stomach gurgled pitifully in the morning.
He kept the ruse up for two more days before partaking in a meal with his sister, carefully roasted rabbit Vex had snared and less carefully roasted turnips stolen from a market stall. She had been giving him suspicious glances all morning, so he tucked into their dinner with fervor and did his best to ignore the guilt clawing at his mind.
You didn’t need this , a voice not unlike his own growled. You’re taking what you shouldn’t from someone who needs this more. Quit being so weak .
For the next three days, Vax ignored the voice, for the most part. He divided their meals into uneven parts, pushed the larger towards Vex before she could size them up, and dutifully (if slowly) ate his portions under Vex’s watchful eye. And if he forgot to keep nibbling here and there, or ignored the gnaw in his gut so long as Vex wasn’t there to notice him do so? Well, all the better, really.
The guilt grew exponentially, though--especially on days that Vex collapsed into her bedroll tired and frustrated, not able to catch a single thing. They had bought dried and cured meats from their last trip to a butcher, of course, because they could hardly do anything with the majority of what Vex brought to be cut and cleaned, but Vax had grown more and more careful of when their supplies were getting low. And since Vex had adopted her cub, supplies got low rather often.
Vax snuck out while she slept, after giving Trinket a firm command to keep her safe, and crept around the city in a newly-stolen cloak. It was a bit short on him, not coming nearly as close to dragging as he was used to, so he could crouch pretty easily without worrying about snagging himself but while also having something reliable to hide his face in if needed. He’d remembered his sister’s longing expression when they’d passed by the bakery the previous morning--this shop sold cakes and pies and all sorts of other things, things that Vax balked at the thought of lifting during the day because he had no way of carrying it, but things he and his sister had adored when they’d had the coin to buy something so frivolous.
Getting into the bakery was rather simple, all things considered. He supposed that he shouldn’t be surprised--his hands didn’t start to shake until he was into his third day without food, usually, and he’d gathered far more practice than even he realised over the months. He’d walked the store earlier in the day, inhaling the memories of early mornings in Byroden, but even if he hadn’t those memories to call upon, locating that morning’s unsold bakes was only too easy. If not for the threat of alerting the baker, who probably lived either upstairs or in the back rooms, Vax would have hummed happily to himself as he made selections, but it would hardly be a fitting surprise for his sister to have to come and rescue him from the stockade. He held off, only picking up the tune when he was well into the safety of the forest, and couldn’t help but break into a grin as he approached the sounds of a snoring bear.
“Oi! Stubby!”
Vax picked at one of the spiced sweet rolls he’d seen Vex eyeing, buzzing with pride as she scolded and praised him with the same sentences. It was foolish to do, such a simple thing to waste his efforts on, but gods above , they were both glad he’d done it. Sometimes it would do them well to waste time and efforts on something simple and foolish--it let them prove their skill, and gave them treats like this.
Vax didn’t eat again for days. It was a vicious cycle. Feeling warm and content after Vex had delighted in the baked goods, Vax reasoned that the sweet roll would sustain him for a good amount of time, and as he curled against Trinket’s side, he could feel the swell of his own belly under his palm. Surely he could last longer this time than he had before, with few enough ill effects? Spurred by morbid curiosity, Vax poked and prodded at himself, pinching skin at his hips and thighs, wrapping his long fingers around his wrist, measuring and thinking. He couldn’t know, of course, how long it would be before they could start building up reserves again, and for all his trouble, Vax loved Trinket too much already to not feel immeasurably guilty for turning in at night without having anything to offer.
So he shrugged off Vex’s offers to split snacks and pretended to have picked at dinner while he prepared it, because he knew with every fibre of his being that it would be better served fueling his sister than him. Their packs were still far too light, and Vax felt fine.
She called him on it when she was skinning a freshly caught-and-killed rabbit, concern plain in her voice despite how she tried to act casual when she mentioned that she hadn’t actually seen him eat anything since he’d returned from the bakery, when she thought about it. Vax brushed her off as calmly as he could, never openly lying, because he wasn’t hungry, not really, not like before he’d learned to ration his energy, when the both of them suffered long stretches without more than a handful of nuts or berries, when he ran through the city like a boy possessed trying to find good marks to relieve of their coin and came up empty as often as not, and most of his stolen purses held nothing but a few coppers. He’d learned, since then, and he genuinely didn’t feel hungry.
Hunger faded into white noise after the second day, for Vax.
He thought maybe that this was going on five. His brain felt fuzzy at the edges; it was a little hard to count. Despite himself, and despite the guilt of knowing that he was helping to deplete their feeble supplies before he really needed any of them, he let Vex watch him eat a reasonable amount of meat before he started feeding his portion to Trinket. At the very least, he knew that Vex wouldn’t be angry for caring about her bear enough to see the cub well-fed, and feeding Trinket from his own leftovers meant he could ensure that Vex had that much more food for herself.
He didn’t start feeling concerned until panic clawed up his throat one day, when he’d gently but firmly declined breakfast and so been forced to eat what Vex prepared for dinner and then been given far too much to eat. It sat heavy and wrong in his stomach, and he felt like he’d eaten rocks, and he could already hear the inevitability of his own loud footsteps when he next tried to break into a rich snob’s house to relieve them of something pretty and useless.
Going hungry, Vax’ildan was used to. Scaring himself into sicking up twenty paces from their camp? Not so much.
He tried valiantly not to cry as he retched, shaking hard at the elbows and knees, weak and dizzy and useless , so useless, he had just one thing he was really good at, being sneaky, unseen and unheard, a leaf on the wind, and he needed to keep that, needed, needed, needed--
A sob tore from his aching throat as Vex’s arms wrapped around his chest. She held him close, swaying gently side to side, and covered up her worry with the gentle tune their mother used to hum when they’d taken ill as young children. He let her cradle him, finally, letting tears flow freely as Vex wiped at his now-sweaty brow. He tried to explain, tried to tell her that it was too much, tried to make her understand, but every time he opened his mouth, he found himself gagging. His stomach had nothing left to give, but it still clenched and twisted, and what would have been words became instead whimpers and groans.
Vex believed him to have caught a fever, when he shivered and trembled still come morning, and he let her believe so because he wasn’t sure how else to explain away the sudden emptying of his stomach the night before. She held him, leaving his side periodically to fetch fresh water from the stream, either to help him drink or to wipe down his sweating limbs, and eventually started to boil bones into a broth. Truthfully, Vax did feel terrible--the summer air was hot and sticky, and he couldn’t seem to collect himself long enough to get out of the dirt, and fresh guilt gnashed through him whenever his eyes drifted across the mound of earth that had been kicked over his sick. What a waste he was being.
Vex left Trinket to watch over him when she went into the city in hope of finding some herbs from a trader, and came back not only with the herbs but a concerned-looking healer and the knowledge of a hobbled elk not far away. She kissed Vax’s cheek and smoothed his damp hair, promising to return as soon as she could, and talked quietly with the healer for several minutes more before she disappeared into the trees on her hunt. She was getting impressively good at it, now, as good with her bow as Vax was with his daggers, and he had no doubt that she’d come back with that elk.
“How are you faring, boy?”
He flinched, not expecting the wizened healer to have been that near to his side, and shrank back a bit. “I, ah, um, I…”
“You’ve a fever, the girl says?”
He closed his mouth with a sharp-sounding click and nodded, mute. The healer regarded him somewhat skeptically, inspecting first his eyes and then his gums before she sat back and started grinding the herbs into a pulp, adding a foul-smelling fluid to it until she’d made a tar-like paste. He flinched away from her again when she reached for him, but forced himself still when she slapped at his fingertips, begrudgingly allowing her to smear the stuff across the bones of his upper chest.
He had to admit… it did feel better, whatever this mixture was. It cooled his skin, but not unpleasantly, and though he still shivered, it was not nearly so harsh as it had first been when Vex had been too scared to break physical contact with him. After several minutes of breathing deeply, at the healer’s instruction, Vax allowed himself to be maneuvered into a more upright position, and said nothing as he watched her spoon a portion of the still-simmering broth into one of their cups. He frowned at it when she offered, but did not protest, because she seemed the same sort of healer as the ones in Syngorn who were fine blocking off your nose until you were forced to gasp for breath and pouring medicines down your gullet themselves.
They stared each other down as Vax slowly, carefully, oh-so-warily sipped at the broth. It was, he had to admit, quite a relief to have it wash across his tongue, washing away the fuzzy feeling. He obligingly drank a third of what he’d been given before it felt like he was testing a boundary with himself, like he was pushing at something he’d be better off not touching at all, and he set the cup down before he dropped it.
“You are frail, boy,” the wizened woman told him. “Regain your strength now, or this fever will be only the first of many.” She took the cup and held it to his lips, tipping just enough that he needed to move with it lest broth spill all down his front. “You are yet young, and elsewise healthy. Prove it, and beat this fever now.”
There was something comforting in the coldness of the healer’s words, in the knowledge that whatever he’d contracted was a simple thing, that he was plenty strong enough to come out of this even when he quaked and trembled and felt sick after some mere broth.
The healer stayed with him a while, at first seeming like she would remain until Vex returned, but instead just seeing that he managed to drink all the broth in his cup and keep it in his stomach a while. She painted him with more of the poultice before she left, and accepted the coin he procured for her (because even in such a sorry state, he was adept at sleight-of-hand, and he’d understood when Vex slipped it against his palm earlier).
If she saw the deeper sickness in him, the one that had made him panic so fiercely, she did not mention it.
Vex’ahlia was back a little after dawn, dragging a lame elk’s carcass behind her, and looked far too relieved to see Vax awake and alert. He’d tended to the broth as best he could and, feeling suitably shamed for having been so utterly unable to eat what Vex had been producing for them both, was on his second cup of the morning by time he’d seen her.
Her relief cut him like a blade, sharp and fast and unexpected, and she was oddly careful of the poultice when she hugged him.
For several days, Vax worked himself into a shade of normal, something such that they both felt comfortable moving on to their next city. It felt dangerous to stay when they’d needed to hire help from the cityfolk. It always felt dangerous to stay somewhere that had beaten them into such submission.
The first thing Vax did when they found their next city was scout the nobility. In a single night he wound his way through four houses, taking mostly coin and gemstones and other things that would be difficult for any one person to claim. He’d found an impressive-looking belt, though, and grabbed it for himself at a whim, unbothered by how loosely it sat against his hips. It wouldn’t be worth much, and looked rather plain, but he fit his daggers into it nevertheless between that house and the next. (He would startle, in a few days, when he was taking target practice and threw wide, missing his target sapling by an inch and a half. He would groan impatiently at the thought of having to trek and search for the blade, and wondered if maybe he was better served just continuing with the one dagger, when suddenly it popped back to where it usually sat on his belt. Vax’ildan loved magic.) One of the baubles he’d taken for Vex was a pair of bracers, simple leather with false-silver banding to replace the worn and flimsy ones she wore, and he walked on air the next day for how lucrative he had been.
Moons waxed and waned, and with them the cycle of Vax’s meal schedule. Now that Vex was more used to Vax eating more at irregular intervals--in truth, eating actual meals only rarely, with her--she seemed less concerned about him, as though she’d come to her own understanding that he was taking his meals privately more often than not.
Vax couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten on his own, aside from the broth Vex had made. He kept checking himself though, belly and hips and thighs, and each time determined confidently that he could last a little longer.
Each time, he pushed himself harder, running lightly across rooftops at night and ghosting through mansions. He made them coin and spent very little of it, comfortable in the knowledge that he was helping secure for them a safety net should food become frightfully scarce like it had been in the early days. He stretched broader and broader expanses between meals, revelling in the way he could get light-headed and still remain fully functional, in how he trained his hands to steady when he needed them to.
He first collapsed not long after they found Byroden.
He’d been delirious with grief--they both had, in truth--and neither of them had bothered for some time to stop and cook properly. While Vex remembered her hunger and snacked on jerky and cheese and the like, and while Trinket wandered off while they camped to fish for himself, Vax simply… forgot.
He came to with Vex crowding into his vision, shrill in his ears as she shook him awake. Everything felt distant and foggy, and his head refused to clear no matter how he tried.
Vex fretted over him again, despite his insisting that even if he wasn’t fine yet, that he would be soon, and his condition slowly improved as she began cooking once more. The muggy feeling edged away, though his vision still swam dangerously if he stood too quickly, and the persistent tremors calmed slightly. The air was cold and getting colder; he could hardly expect to be at peak performance when it was all he could do to keep warm around their small fire.
He’d collapsed a dozen times more by the time winter broke and faded into spring, mostly away from Vex and so mostly without her discovering it. He wore his cloaks heavier and heavier, sometimes several layered over each other, to combat the bone-deep cold he suffered, and to some degree understood that he was pushing too far when he struggled to find a place to pinch at his stomach and wrapped his hand easily around his upper arm. He felt strong, though, despite the collapses, and though he mostly refrained from pushing harder , he still pushed.
He went two weeks at a single stretch when he’d gone back to camp on light feet--they’d been challenging each other’s skills in this sense, one-upping the other with being quick enough to spot the other sneaking and being sneaky enough to creep past defences--and found Vex crying into Trinket’s fur. Terrified, and aching in a way he could ache only because Vex was hurting, he ducked behind a bush and tried to get a read on the situation. If it was something he could fix, he would do it, and if it wasn’t… well, he’d fix it anyway.
“I’m so scared,” she sobbed. “I don’t know how to help him.”
Vax’s gut twisted, sharp and sudden, and he fled silently back toward the city. He was purposefully loud when he came back, arms laden with things he’d only barely realised he had stolen. The bread, he may have bought, but it was a blur of panic. He sat by their fire and cooked with great purpose, trying to let Vex have a bit of breathing room while she tried to pretend she hadn’t spent most of the day in tears.
He ate with her until he felt sick, then ate some more, and managed to walk calmly down the winding path Trinket had taken to go fish when he needed to throw it all back up again.
If nothing else, he could pretend to be normal for her sake.
He made himself choke down a few bites of jerky, here and there, always within her line of sight. He ate less at meals, but ate more of them, and some of the tension drained away from his twin’s shoulders.
Vax was disgusted with himself.
He should be stronger than this.
There was no reason for him to be collapsing like he was.
He pushed in other ways, in different ways. He crept away from their camps at night, into the cities to scale walls and practice picking locks until he was so weary that he could barely see. He would go to the farmlands and sprint until he made himself sick with exertion, because if he was going to use a resource he was damn well going to put it to use. He trained with his daggers until he could hit a copper-sized target at fifteen paces, until his muscles burned and screamed. He pushed harder.
And then, eventually, he’d stumbled across a broken mirror, and saw the gaunt stranger staring at him in shock. His face--his sister’s face, one he knew oh so well--was almost unrecognisable. It curled, hot and angry, in his belly, and he couldn’t stand to look at it for a second longer.
He snuck back to the mirror in the early morning, terrified, and carefully stripped off his cloak and then his tunic, horrified as the stranger in the broken mirror did the same. He was not strong, or lean--he could count bones in the mirror, and probably use the dip against his collarbones as a bowl if needed; his hips protruded sharply beneath his skin and for the first time he noticed the gap where even at its tightest, his belt could not quite hold his trousers flush to his skin.
How long had this skeleton been walking around with his sister in secret?
He felt vile, when he finally began to recognise his own hollowed features in the mirror, when it became too plain to ignore that he looked this sickly. Of course wandering with this creature would bring his sister to tears. He was grotesque; he was a monster.
He didn’t know how to stop, though.
It had been too long since he kept a regular schedule with his meals for him to remember how to be hungry properly. It had been too long to remember that he wasn’t hungry properly and so he needed to rely on Vex’s hunger to substitute for his own.
Three weeks after finding the mirror, Vax’ildan awoke with one arm and leg in the river and Vex sobbing and screaming on the other side. He couldn’t remember getting there, or what he’d been doing. Everything was a blur these days. It was too much to hang onto any one piece of information, and so he made it simple, and let go of everything, and let his sister remember for him.
He’d had a fit, she told him. A seizure, when he’d gone across the river to retrieve a dagger he’d refused to take a break in throwing, even after his stomach had emptied acid into the dirt. He couldn’t remember it, but his whole body hurt and ached, and a distant part of him was mortified to realise that he’d wet himself at some point midway through, and the terror that she exuded was too much for him to bear.
After she helped him clean off and recross the river, she draped his frail body across Trinket’s back and walked him into town in search of whatever healer made themselves known. Exhausted, Vax drifted in and out of consciousness the whole time. He had a flash of being lifted from Trinket’s back, nestled in Vex’s strong arms, and felt safe there. A second later, he was trembling on a sleeping pallet, gasping for a breath he could not quite catch. Immediately after, he was suddenly bare down to his smallclothes, with a blanket tangled around his knees. He could hear Vex screaming for him, but did not understand why a meaty palm pushed him back down when he tried to go to her.
Eventually, he would learn that he’d been in such a state for five days, nursed around the clock through the worst of it. He would never remember what had happened in that time, but the smell of burnt sage stuck to his skin for weeks. He’d been coaxed into eating, somehow, first thin broths and then hardier soups, and somehow when he next saw himself, he looked sturdier.
Vex refused to leave his side for more than a few minutes once he’d grown coherent enough for company, which the healers had initially protested on the grounds that Vax needed as much rest as was possible for him to get, but they quickly tired of restraining him when he kept trying to get to his feet. The twins tangled around each other on the pallet, Vax too exhausted to do more than hold her, and Vex bursting into tears at the barest provocation.
Apparently they had managed to squirrel away more coin than Vax had realised--he hardly cared, so long as they had something for tough times--because Vex procured a frankly startling amount of gold for the healers to divide between themselves and kept paying a steady circuit of street urchins to bring them meals.
Mass slowly began to stick to Vax’s bones, in a way that initially caused him a great deal of panic. It was strength, of course, but a far greater deal of it than he could remember having, and it wasn’t until Vex screamed through her tears at him that he understood how warped his perception of things had been.
A mirror was procured, fetched by the same confused child who had brought them a lunch that Vax could not bring himself to eat, and the sunken skeleton Vax had seen stared back at him, eyes a little brighter, cheeks a little fuller, but still so frail-looking that it he felt he was choking on the horror of it.
He couldn’t eat much of their meals, too unaccustomed to eating so much as to get by comfortably, but he could eat enough of it so that Vex did not cry nearly as much, and eventually the healers permitted him to take short walks down the road and back so long as he went with Vex and Trinket both to steady him. (His heart clenched when he saw Trinket again; the bear had been snuffling mournfully at least one room away for so long that he’d almost been flattened by Trinket’s relieved attempt at a true bear hug.)
As substitute for quantity, Vex kept requesting different things, dense foods that swelled his stomach as he drank (they gave him watered wine, as often as not, because elsewise he made himself sick by drinking water until he no longer recognised hunger, and he was far more careful with the wine) and light soft things that he could eat plenty of until he could finally clear a plate without being sick after.
It was two months before he was well enough that he could go on his own, strong and steady legs taking him along the edge of the woods that had until so recently been their home. They kept the mirror in place, and Vax watched it every day until he was no longer frightened of it. He poked at his leg and flank, watching the mirror intently because his eyes lied when it was firmly his own body. This stranger was a flimsy thing, but growing less so by the day, and he didn’t want to be afraid when he finally matched himself with the thing in the mirror.
Two weeks after that, they disappeared into the countryside, never to be seen again by this city that had almost claimed itself as Vax’ildan’s final stop.