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Percy is a problem solver.
The first gifts he gives Vex’ahlia are arrows. One utility, several explosive, and all very, very deadly in her hands. When she brings him the broom, he gives it a seat and a name—”Death From Above.” This is what he does. He identifies problems and fixes them, christens them. Bad News. Diplomacy. Lady Vex’ahlia, Baroness of the Third House of Whitestone and Mistress of the Grey Hunt.
It becomes habit. He is a tinkerer by nature, and he’s content to fix the things that words can not.
He fixes Keyleth’s circlet when she drunkenly forgets to duck in a tavern’s door frame, carefully working around an enchantment he does not understand so as to not disturb its magic. Grog is often too prideful to admit that he has broken anything, except when he is certain that Vex will break him if he does not confess to his latest accident in the Keep. Scanlan is, all in all, rather dextrous with his hands when not a bull in a china shop of interpersonal relationships, but he doesn’t ask Percy for help with Kaylie, and for that Percy is grateful. He chooses instead to impose in his characteristically dramatic and deliberately burdensome way when Percy is in the middle of a complicated piece of tinkering—”No, I don’t need them to see , a pince-nez is a fashion statement ”—and Percy snaps the eyepiece into two, beautiful-but-worthless lenses. Accidentally.
To Vax, he offers the raven skull brooch: an olive branch and apology in one. It doesn’t fix what’s done, but it helps mask the smell.
Percy is a problem solver.
He’s not so naive to think that all demons can be conquered by sword, all monsters hammered into shape by a sweltering forge. But when he confesses at the Raven Queen’s temple (“I like to fix things”), he is responding not to platitudes (“All life is inherently broken from the start, Percival”) but to the challenge (“You were always broken”). He has darker intentions for the vial of blood he takes from her temple than another place of worship in Whitestone. It’s temporary, he promises himself, until they can discern the true nature of Vax’s deal. And when he does, he’ll do what he does best. Nail, meet hammer.
Over a year later, Percy makes good on the promise he made to Vax.
“I do not accept this.”
He has no tools for the tears of his wife or his best friend. He is helpless, much like he was many years ago. The difference is that this time, he is armed to the teeth, so laden with weaponry that he can literally feel the buzz of magic and the taste of gunpowder on his teeth. There is a dark, churning place deep where his relinquished soul smokes and hisses. He has saved the world now, fixed so much , and yet—
Percy cannot fix this.
Like a smothered flame, the rage cools. In its place is an ashy, white grief, raw and ready to burst into fire at the slightest breeze. Percy is certain he will crumble now. He will be scattered across Vasselheim and exist only in folklore and weapons of mass death, incorporeal and without purpose.
It’s her voice that brings him back.
“You’re not broken,” she says. “We’re filling each other’s gaps.”
Her hand finds his. Their fingers intertwine. Their gloves make it an imperfect fit, but they’ve done it so many times before that their grasp is sure.
“We’ll be the glue.”
She has just lost a part of her, and he is missing pieces, some taken from him and others given away freely. They are not broken, but they are not fixed. They are together.
And that’s enough.