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In his dreams, he watches the dagger fall.
Not every night, and not every dream. But enough nights, and enough dreams, that he knows to expect it now – sooner or later the face of the enemy beneath him will be hers. And the sharp bright blade will cleave her throat with a spurt of sudden crimson, filling her lungs with a bloody gasp, or grate on the bone of her skull with the telltale tremor up through his knife-hand, and he will hear her choked whisper from beyond the edge of awareness, Vax, it’s me.
So he wakes again, just like the other nights, sobbing – lying sweaty in a tousle of dark hair and tangled blankets, alone beneath the peaked roof of his castle bedchamber, and the two rough dots of scar tissue on his neck throb with cold in time to his pulse. The rustle of his quick breaths are the only sound in the room, and the moon-shadows quiver on the walls as the wind stirs the trees outside, and he’s alone with his heart hammering behind his ribs.
One more night. He blinks into the familiar embrace of the dark, his vision settling into it, the outlines of his bed and his untidy desk and his half-drawn curtains coming into focus. He’s here, he’s safe, he didn’t kill his sister. That’s what he tells himself, just like all the other nights, in these weeks since they’ve returned from Whitestone.
Does Grog have these dreams now, too? Vax has to chuckle, dry-mouthed as he is, thinking of asking it. Do you dream about killing us, big guy? Who knows, maybe he does. It seems like the sort of thing Grog would dream about in any case, and think nothing of it.
He watches the moons-light through the windowpane, trying to force his breaths into calm again, to forget the sight of imagined blood and the memory in his hands of a blade jolting home. He flexes his fingers, knotting them in the covers, the heavy worn brocade chilly beneath his touch.
He is here, he is home, with Vox Machina sleeping in the rooms around him. The Briarwoods are gone, they are dead, and deader than dead; they will never slip their claws into the intertices of his mind again. But that’s a hollow reminder, and doesn’t reach down into the shaky rhythm of his breathing, the trembling of his hands in the blanket.
The sound in the hallway is barely a whisper, barely the brush of cloth against stone. Still Vax’s body moves before his mind catches up, darting for the dagger slipped beneath his mattress, muscles tensing, banishing all thoughts of sleep. The light in the room is moons-light, not firelight, but some part of himself is back again in Emon Castle, in an unfamiliar shadow-painted guest room with strange footsteps coming closer.
Then the door opens, and with the sight of the silhouette there the fear goes out of him in a rush like the receding tide, till he could almost weep again with relief.
“Vax? Vax, dear… you’re awake?”
“Hey, Stubby.” His voice is shaky even to his own ears, all tears and air. He can feel the tremors running down his arms, and he lets the dagger fall to the floor, a swift cold clatter of sound. “Yes. Unfortunately.”
He thinks, for an instant, of trying to hide it all. But that sort of thing has never worked on her, who knows him better perhaps than she knows herself; easy enough it is to know him, who’s never been as good as she is at the supercilious mask, the casual veneer of untouchability. And the more undone he comes, the less well he can hide anything; so he’d better save his masks for the daytime, and the others.
So when his sister pauses halfway into the room, nightshirt loose around her bony form, eyebrows knit close together, he reaches out his hand.
He can’t stop the flinch that hits him when her fingers touch his cheek, just like they do in the dreams. Although this time they won’t burn him, won’t leave bloody fingerprints painted across his murderer’s skin. He knows that. His waking mind knows that, anyway.
Vex’s expression doesn’t change at his startle. She moves her hand back slowly, then sits down on the edge of the bed and pulls her feet up, leaning against him just as they did in the old lonely days; he’s too tired to deny any solace now, so he puts an arm across her back and tucks his face into the hollow of her neck, to shut out the world.
“Can’t sleep?” Her voice is a tickle in his ear.
“The sleeping isn’t the problem.”
She sighs a little. He feels it more than he hears it.
“You can’t sleep either?” he tries, although he doubts that’s the case; her wakefulness feels more that of a mission than of purposeless anxiety.
Vex chuckles, short and low in the back of her throat. “I was evicting Percy from the workshop. He needs his rest more than he needs a new gun. And Scanlan’s still out on the town with Grog, but them I’m not waiting up for….”
Probably a wise plan. “Kiki’s gone to sleep at least?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” Keyleth doesn’t complain, of course, but he’s seen how weary she’s looked, these last days. Between the new powers she’d wielded and the ghastly brush with death through Delilah Briarwood’s spell, their recent adventures seem to have left Keyleth with a fragility and exhaustion that she hasn’t quite shaken off yet. And maybe she has her own dreams of the darkness below Whitestone, but if so, she hasn’t shared them with him.
He would listen, if she spoke, though he’s got little enough comfort to share.
Somewhere outside, an owl cries in the trees, and its mate answers back. The wind covers the silence of their wingbeats. Vex doesn’t move, only holds him, her arms wrapping around his shoulders until their breathing matches in slow time.
If he speaks, maybe it will break the spell, and the dreams will release him. Even for one night it would be worth it. And if he can speak of it anywhere, he can speak of it now, here with his sister next to him, her heartbeat echoing his own. Still it feels like lifting an immense stone to open his mouth, to shape the words.
“I didn’t want to hurt you,” he says, at last, through an aching throat. “Stubby, I would never hurt you. Never.”
And that’s a lie in itself, because he had walked away from her and from all of them that day, strangely detached from the motions of his own body as he watched the pale glass slide down into place and the acid begin to drip from the pipe. And his hands had gripped twin daggers above her tear-streaked face, there in the shadow of the ziggurat, as her voice echoed desperate in his ears and found no traction in the swirling mists of his mind.
Vex knows all that as well as he does. So Vax waits for her to speak, to contradict him, but she doesn’t say anything then, only tightens her arms around him – just like they’d clung to each other in far-off forests and alleyways for so many years, when they had been each other’s only lifelines in a strange uncaring world.
“I know,” she whispers at last. “I know you wouldn’t, silly.” And then, after a moment, “I always knew it and I always will.”
He doesn’t sleep for a while, still, even after Vex dries his tears and wipes his nose with the handkerchief she somehow has prepared in her nightshirt pocket. Even after she stifles an enormous yawn in his hair and shoves him back into his pillow, twitching the disarranged blankets back up over him. “And take your dagger, too, before you cut your toes off tripping over it in the morning.”
But for as long as Vax lies there, hovering on the dark rim of sleep, his sister is there next to him: a sentinel against the nightmares, her words a talisman to hold to his heart. And when he sleeps again, he sleeps without dreams until dawn.