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The fact that soulmates shared their pain had been a small, an ever-present detail in her early life. The occasional aches and even rarer sharp bursts of pain were just reminders of there being someone else in the world who would fit in her life, giving her feelings of fondness and annoyance in turns. Vax had felt the same, and sometimes as children they had laid next to each other in one bed and speculated over what their people were like.
This all ended when her minor aches and pains turned into agony. The first time she fell to her knees, screaming and holding her chest. Vax dropped his knife, nearly piercing his foot with it. And it would. Not. Stop. Vax had to tie her on top of a distressed Trinket, the pain making it impossible for Vex to walk.
It did fade. But it did not go away. It took some time, but while Vex could not say she had gotten used to the sudden bursts of terrible, lingering pain, she had learnt how to deal with them. But it still made her vulnerable, especially when she was fighting.
Now when Vex and Vax shared the bed, they no longer talked about their soulmates. When the pain rose into new levels, Vex waited for the wave of coldness that would tell her that her soulmate was dead. Sometimes she hoped for it so that her soulmate’s pain would end. Sometimes she hoped for it so that hers would.
Then one day, it did stop. She had been riddled with pain for months, and it ending left her reeling. Oh, it never fully went away, her arms and fingers being struck by sudden sharp pain, which often disappeared before she was truly bothered by them. While Vex was quite relieved over it, she could not stop wondering over what had caused it. But life never stopped around her, and in the end, she simply did not have enough time to wonder about different possibilities. She and Vax joined up with a few other adventurers, and after a few jobs with varying levels of success and payment, they decided to become a touch more official and named themselves Vox Machina.
They were all fucking shitheads. But when the push came to shove and it would be far simpler for her to grab her brother and run away, she couldn’t. She had gotten fucking attached.
Much later she wondered on how she had missed the first signs, but at the time she had gotten so used to the random bursts of pain that she did not connect them to Percy. Percival Fredrickstein von Musel Klossowski de Rolo III. A long, pretentious name for a tall, pretentious man, who would drink wine when others drank ale, and kept himself fastidiously clean, even in nature. And whose weapon occasionally backfired painfully.
Yeah, Vex wasn’t proud of her lack of detective skills. The memory of her own blindness made her want to bury her face in Trinket’s fur and scream.
She had gotten… inklings of them sharing a bond after they received their house in Emon, but it was not until they reached Whitestone that she was certain. But amongst the undead and a dangerous necromancer, there just wasn’t enough time to tell Percy of what she had found out. She had had a strong hunch that the pains she and her soulmate had shared were born from torture, and she would have loved to be proven wrong in that.
Then Silas was dead and Percy’s hidden passenger revealed themself. Vex counted herself lucky that the bond didn’t transmit mental or emotional pain, or she would have been completely out of the count. The physical pain Percy was in was not high enough to impede her, but she was not able to ignore it either.
The relief from the pain disappearing and Percy being freed from the demonic influence made her eyes cloud over for a second, but then she was snapped back into the focus. Things may have been much calmer, but there still wasn’t time to stop and have a chat alone with Percy.
It wasn’t until they had gotten back to their house and she had stopped trying to perk Vax up over his bruised heart, that she found time and space to talk to Percy.
He was in his room, making his new weapon, face drawn in concentration and not reacting when Vex walked in. She looked at what he was doing, but without knowing what every piece did, she was quickly lost. Yet she continued looking. Percy occasionally glanced at her, so Vex knew that he knew she was there, but otherwise they stayed silent.
After a while Percy started to put all the pieces away methodically, every part having its own place so he would know where he left off. When he was finished, he turned around and looked at Vex quizzically.
Vex did not know what to say, so she just sighed and rubbed her forehead, to which Percy said, “You aren’t in pain.”
Vex’s eyes flew open and she stared at Percy, and for a moment, all the possible things she could have said disappeared from her mind. The silence stretched on a moment too long until she was finally able to say, “When did you find out?”
“When we faced Brimscythe for the first time. My suspicions awoke when we were in the palace, but the second time I was certain.” Percy’s lips twisted into a thin, slightly wavering smile, “Your headaches are… bracing.”
Vex saw the tight way he held himself and to her surprise, she saw his hands shake lightly. He is nervous too, she realized and it made something in her ease. Neither of them knew how to proceed, but Vex wanted to. She needed to see where this would lead.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” curiosity made her ask, but she was surprised to realize that she didn’t feel angry or even annoyed.
The tip of Percy’s tongue licked his lips in a nervous gesture, and he hesitated slightly until he continued, clearly slightly embarrassed, “It didn’t seem like the right time, and you clearly didn’t know yet and…” His voice drifted off at the end, uncertain on how to continue.
Vex walked next to Percy and leaned against the table and considered how to continue. “I would like to see where this leads.” It was not like every soulmate pair ended up together and happy. “I want to take the chance.”
The smile that appeared on Percy’s face brightened him in a way that she had never truly seen, and Vex could not do anything else but to answer to it with her own grin.
“Come. We have that Sovereign Uriel’s thing to attend.”