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Vax’ildan watches from the shadows just as he always has. He loses himself most of the time in the guise of the Raven Queen. He is her hand and her champion and he left himself behind the moment he followed her call. But tonight, he feels more like Vax’ildan than he has in more than a century.
She’s always had that effect on him.
Vex’ahlia de Rolo is surrounded by generations. Children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren gathered at her hearth for a Winter’s Crest just past. Even the chronic ache of two men, long missing from her side, has soothed just a little tonight. Percival found his rest when he was ready, but Vax… Even after so many years she doesn’t think about her brother. Not when the night stretches long and lonely in front of her.
It was harder once, when her hair was still dark and her face was still so much like his. It’s easier now. When she catches glimpses in the mirror there are hints of grey in her braid and crowsfeet around her eyes. Wherever her brother might be, in her mind he will always be 27 with none of the marks of time that show on her own face.
She doesn’t sleep much these days. The bed seems so much colder and the nights seem ever longer. Instead, she likes to read until her mind is too tired to call up the long distant past and the desperation of what might have been. Tonight though, when she settles into her chair by the fireplace, her weary eyes and tired heart leave her staring into fading flames instead.
They dance with memories of a red dragon and a dashing rogue, too fast to really be seen, too much in shadow to really make sense in the light. The flames flit in imagined movements as her mind’s eye focuses on the very people she had hoped to leave behind tonight.
Vax’ildan can see it too. Not in the flames his sister studies, but in her eyes, in the lines around her mouth and the fingertips pressed into the soft cushion of the armrests. They’ve never needed words to speak. It’s a language neither of them had to learn and both of them learned to hide. He’s always been able to read her and tonight is no different. He watches a tale of victory now colored by grief and loss. Too many who were there are gone and it’s been long enough that even the world they saved has started to forget.
Her pain pulls him from the shadows, as irresistible and visceral as it ever has been. For a moment he feels alive again, a reminder that there is only one person in the world who matters. Her and only her. He needs to comfort her. He needs to protect her. He needs to lift this burden from her shoulders no matter the cost. He crouches by her side and lays his hand atop hers for the first time in decades.
Vex flinches at his touch, drawn from her maudlin reverie into another painful memory it would seem. A black feathered figure, last seen at a wedding, squats before her. She doesn’t dream of him like this. This is the version that only appears in the nightmares when she cannot follow where he goes. Every imaginable variation of that nightmare has crossed her mind at some point over the years, and never once has he touched her. He’s always been a ghost, just the faintest whisper of a possibility against her skin. This time, something is different. Maybe, just maybe, he’s actually there.
For a long moment, the two just stare. She cannot seem to find her voice and he is utterly unused to using his.
Vex leans forward and whispers to the figure in front of her, “Vax, darling, do not go far from me.”
“I won’t, I swear.” The voice is barely her brother’s but he knew the words she had once said to him and the way his hand clutched at hers, full of strength and insistence, told her more than anything else could have. His desire to comfort her radiates off him in desperate waves and she can feel each and every one.
Vex leans forward, easing herself to kneel in front of the masked figure, and clings to his neck. She knows that wherever he goes now, she will follow. She cannot bear to watch him walk away again and he knows he will not ask her to. When they rise together, Vex does not feel the ache of worn out joints or the stiffness of a cold winter’s night. With him, everything is easy again. Vax does not feel the relentless pull of the Raven Queen or the urge to forget. With her, he is himself again.
For the first time in over a century, they are complete. Wherever they go now, they go together and the gods themselves couldn’t pull them apart.