Work Text:
feeling helpless i look for distraction
i go searching for you
wandering through our city to find some
solace at your door
(i can’t stop thinking about it.)
The Frostweald is colder than she remembers.
Moonglow shimmers through the snow-covered boughs of pine trees, branches reflecting silver and flickering orange in the dim glow of the night sky and the firelight, late hour pressing down on their campsite like deep velvet and darkening the edges of the tree line with charcoal weight. Smoke drifts up through the canopy to smear itself across the stars; the air is sharp and thick with the scent of it. The fire hasn’t died – she can hear the crackling lick of flames as wood pops and burns, but the warmth of it doesn’t reach her, and her fingers clench tighter in the thin woven blanket around her shoulders as she presses deeper into Trinket’s comforting bulk at her spine. The rise and fall of his chest is soothing. She tries to match its rhythm with her own, ignoring the way her breath escapes her mouth and nose in clouds of vapor. He’s built for this, her sweet son, fur thick beneath the layers of armor she’s entrusted to protect him – she’s no stranger to stealing his body heat and he’s always been happy to let her, but tonight it seems his warmth isn’t enough to pierce the cold that clings to this place. She closes her eyes, forcing her thoughts to drift even as they catch on the snarls of her own subconscious, but as time ticks by and sleep refuses to find her, she finally gives in and admits defeat, bracing herself against Trinket’s flank as she sits up. The fire’s low, but it’s still burning, and she knows she’s slept in worse conditions than these before, scrubbing a hand across her face as she settles and stares blearily into the embers.
The Frostweald is colder than she remembers, but Vex hasn’t been warm since the tomb. She wonders if some remnant of death itself has seeped in to make its home in her marrow.
(Her mother had gone in a blaze of dragon’s breath, bones blackened and charred and splintered. This is the first time Vex has recognized death as anything but flame.)
She rises, slowly, numb feet picking a cautious path towards the center of the camp, careful not to wake the others as she feeds the fire, breathing the scent of woodsmoke as warmth reaches feebly for her skin. They’re all exhausted, she knows. Her gaze sweeps the area, finds Pike blanketed by one of Grog’s arms, Scanlan wedged up against his back despite the fact that he’s snoring loud enough to rumble the earth beneath them. Keyleth isn’t immediately visible, but a cursory glance over one shoulder finds her occupying Trinket’s other side, cocooned so tight in her blankets she’s only identifiable by her shock of red hair. Vax, as always, has positioned himself by his sister’s bedroll, fur-lined cloak shielding him from the worst of the elements, his blanket apparently having gone to Keyleth like the love-struck bastard he is – Vex smirks despite herself before she takes in the creases of his brow and the smile fades away.
(She doesn’t remember much of death, doesn’t remember much between the moment of impact and darkness and cold that bled into her bones, but she does remember her brother’s face, devastation written into every fiber of his being, and it’s his saline-damp eyes she’ll see in her nightmares when she closes her eyes and dreams of the end.)
Vax hasn’t let himself go more than a few feet from her side since it happened. None of them have, really – she realizes that now as she stokes the fire and watches the others sleep deeply for the first time in days. None of them seems to know how to handle it, least of all Vex, who has adopted the “bury this somewhere and examine it a week from never” approach – she doesn’t remember enough about the experience to feel anything more than uncomfortable, in all honesty, and at least for the moment that suits her just fine. But the others are a different story – she may have been the one to die, but in many ways, they’re the ones who bear the scars of it, each with memories and fears and emotions that Vex can’t share – and she can see it when she looks at them, chafing under the weight of her own guilt (and, ashamedly, gratitude).
Pike’s been quiet, since it happened, fingers only straying from the symbol of Sarenrae around her neck to study the spellbook Kashaw left her, lip tugged between her teeth as she commits the relevant rites to her memory. Scanlan’s been a little louder, crass jokes and half-formed melodies pitched haphazard into the silence as if he cannot stand to leave it unfilled. Keyleth’s reached out a lot more, slender arms winding tightly around Vex when she thought the contact would be accepted, hands brushing against her shoulders or elbows or wrists when she thought it wouldn’t. Grog hasn’t said much since he broke the news of her death, but she has caught him staring out of the corner of her eye, his expression looking for all the world like he has questions but no idea how to ask them. Vax has been the most visibly affected, she knows, alternating between hovering over her like a mother hen and brooding, the Deathwalker’s Ward and its implications weighing on him as heavily as his residual fear and grief and anger, at least where Percy’s concerned. And Percy –
She stops, gaze darting over the blanket-shrouded lumps surrounding the fire, and realizes with a sinking feeling deep in her chest that she wasn’t wrong in her initial headcount. His bedroll is there, just as it was when she’d lain down to sleep, but his coat is missing, and his glasses. And his bag. And both of his firearms. And him.
Well…shit.
The fatigue burns off like morning dew. Vex clasps her blanket around her shoulders and rises, slipping cat-footed across the frozen ground to kneel by Percy’s makeshift bedding and press a palm to the well-worn fabric. No warmth meets her fingertips. As cold as it is out, he might not have been gone long, but his missing gear makes that possibility unlikely. She knows him by now – she’s spent enough nights wandering the halls of their keep and hearing the sound of metal striking metal, steam hissing like a living thing, citrus-shaded forge-light seeping from the space beneath his workshop door to know Percy’s no stranger to sleepless nights, even when things are good. The last two days have been…tense, to say the least – it’s no wonder he’s probably off somewhere now finding some way to clear his mind.
At least, she hopes that’s what he’s doing. If the idiot’s pissed off a basilisk and gotten himself petrified, she’ll wait until after they’ve freed him to kick his ass.
A soft clicking sound interrupts her train of thought, jolting her into full awareness as she tilts her head in its direction. She knows that sound. Whatever tension had crept into her body releases, a long breath dragging its way out of her lungs. Not petrified, she thinks, lips curling up at the edges. He may not be in her immediate line of sight, but Vex doesn’t need to see him to know where he is. She follows the tracks, soft impressions of his leather boots in the snow, stepping into the darkness beyond the firelight until the dim glow of a lantern marks her destination.
If the world does not provide him a place to work, Percival de Rolo will carve one from the bones of nature itself.
Fool man. She really should have known.
Vex finds him with his back pressed against the bark of the largest tree within hearing distance of the campsite, sitting on a tangle of roots with his tools and a mess of bits and bobs spread out on a folded blanket in front of him. Retort is cradled in pieces in his hands, thumb dragging across its hammer as he studies some mechanism or other. He jabs a tiny tool into the gap, spins the barrels, listens for something she can’t identify, runs his thumb along the hammer again almost like a touchstone before snapping the barrels back into place. The revolver clicks when he tests the trigger; she hears him let out a long, slow breath at the sound.
(There’s something in the way he looks at the weapon that sets an ache deep in her chest. But Vex is no artificer, and though her fingers itch with an impulse she cannot identify, she does not reach for broken things.
Perhaps she holds too many already.)
“Drawn the short straw for watch again, darling?”
It is a credit to Percy’s physical control that he does not startle outwardly with a weapon in his hands. Instead she watches tension seize the line of his shoulders, bleeding out again moments after identifying the familiarity of her voice. She sees his gaze flick in her direction from behind the shield of his glasses; something in his expression goes gentler around the edges, though she couldn’t say what.
His voice is a quiet rasp against the stillness when he speaks. “Something like that.” The words sound a little graveled, catching rough against the ever-present aristocratic cadences of his voice. Vex finds herself wondering how long it’s been since he last spoke, realizes a little too late she can’t remember him saying much of anything once they left the tomb.
(His hands shook as they pulled her off the floor. She wonders why she remembers that touch more than what he’d said in its aftermath.)
Percy’s face tips ever so slightly toward her, now, sharp lines of his jaw casting shadow across his throat. His eyes are focused on the revolver in his hands. She shakes off the memory before he has a chance to see and peers over at Retort along with him in case he happens to catch her looking.
“Vigilance will only accomplish so much, though,” he says, still fiddling with some component she doesn’t pretend to understand. The revolver is smaller than his pepperbox but apparently no less finicky. After a moment he hums low in his throat. “Not sure how much use I’d be in a pinch with a misfire on my hands.”
Oh, the setup for the joke is just too good. Vex smirks, sauntering closer to him. “Chin up, dear, it happens to all men eventually,” she drawls. The amused glare he shoots at her over the rims of his glasses is almost worth freezing her ass off this far from the campfire. She perches on the jut of a gnarled root next to him, gazing out over the frozen tundra beyond. “Besides, I doubt even basilisks are much good in this kind of cold. You’ve got time for some shut-eye if you like – I’m sure they’ll wait until morning to kill us.”
Percy exhales what may or may not be the ghost of a laugh at her playful flippancy. “With the way this group finds trouble? Doubtful it’ll take that long.” He spins the barrel of the gun again, watching light play off the gleaming silver as delicate filigree catches tendrils of dull yellow glow in its rotation. He’s quiet for a long moment, but when he speaks again, she’s not sure if it’s more for her or to himself.
“Better to be prepared. Just in case,” he says.
Vex doesn’t have to ask him what he means by that.
(His left hand tremors slightly in the wake of the Briarwoods and Orthax, his right stone steady as it curls around the trigger. It’s only when his hands sit idle that he seems to remember what’s staining them.
The wavered flex of his fingers tells her all she needs to know.)
She watches him, now, painted in shades of silver and gold from moon and lantern-light, those same dexterous hands catching on chinks in the metal, stumbling in ways she has not witnessed since the wound in his palm healed. It’s strange seeing him search for the same practiced ease that always seems to be at his disposal. Percy is a man of action – so little of his energy is wasted in looking back, committing to forward motion. He’s rarely out of sorts, and when he is, it’s usually from something on his mind.
She leans in, waiting for the moment his hands still and the air seeps from his lungs in a long, controlled whoosh.
“Copper for your thoughts?”
Percy blinks, half-startled by her voice, but he doesn’t flinch away from her as he gets his bearings. His eyes are hidden behind the rims of his glasses; she still feels them land on her as he pins her with his gaze. One eyebrow quirks up and brings the corner of his mouth with it. “Copper?” he asks. “Are the inner workings of my mind really going for such a low rate?”
Vex feels herself smiling. “No.” She tilts her head and leans a little further back against the tree trunk they’re both braced against. “This is just the part where you try to negotiate me up to gold before we both agree to settle for silver. Bid low, aim high.” She lets the edges of her grin go a little wicked, and she knows the quip will land even before it leaves her tongue. “It’s beginner-level haggling, darling, do try to keep up.”
And he laughs. He laughs, the sound of it low, full of warmth but weak. She hardly remembers the last time he laughed enough for the rest of them to hear it; she takes small, private pleasure in being able to coax it out of him, knowing the value of mirth in the face of something dark.
(None of them have laughed in days. Perhaps it would do them all a little good to start now.)
Percy exhales, a cloud of vapor escaping his lungs into the night air, his gaze tipping up until it rests somewhere in the expanse of the night sky. She’s not sure what he’s searching for, but she doesn’t think he finds it.
“I’m afraid my thoughts at the moment aren’t worth the price of silver,” he says. She watches his thumb find the hammer again, that same touchstone movement. “Surely you could find some better use for your coin.”
And she knows he’s demurring, a gentle redirect if she’s ever heard one, but Vex has spent too much of her life wringing information out of brooding men to be deterred by it. She crosses her arms as best she can beneath the blanket, eyes narrowing. “I spend my coin how I like, and you know it,” she says, reaching out with the toe of her boot to kick at the side of his ankle. He’s quiet still, lenses reflecting white and turning his irises into quicksilver, but she watches the corner of his mouth twitch at her gentle prodding, and she knows she has him when her voice softens and his posture eases beneath its weight. “Come on, Percy,” she murmurs, unsure what impulse strikes her to reach out towards him, letting her fingertips brush the fabric of his coat sleeve (and not thinking about the way he stills beneath her touch). “What’s bothering you this late?”
Percy’s one for deliberate speech; he turns the words over and over in his mind before he offers anything for the world’s perusal. Now is no different. She knows he’s not ignoring her despite the reigning silence, so she waits, watching his gaze drink in the black-blue velvet of the sky above them as he gathers his thoughts.
“The universe is… both chaos, and order,” he says, after a long while. Vex wonders if he’s always been like this, if he learned to choose his words carefully in childhood, or if the years of silence and isolation before they’d found him left their mark. “There are many things that… even with a lifetime of study, we cannot be made to understand. Gods, men, choice versus fate, divine intervention or free will – all of it is subjective, and the idea that every outcome is preordained is as… convenient as it is wildly illogical.”
Vex waits, sensing there’s more he’s reluctant to say. “But?”
His smile is a rueful thing. “But.” His eyes search the heavens, looking anywhere but at her. She watches the fingers of his good hand press and knead into the flesh of his bad one. “Nights like this, I find myself wondering if… if we are capable of learning from our mistakes, or if we are merely doomed to repeat them.”
Vex goes still, gaze drawn to every line and shadow of his face. “Percy,” she murmurs, after a breath, low and gentle so as not to spook him. “Does this have something to do with the tomb?”
And it’s faint, it is oh so faint in the darkness, but she catches the tightness around his eyes, the soft tremor that takes his left hand before it is stilled by his right. “It has something to do with a lot of things,” he says. It isn’t an answer, but somehow she doesn’t need one.
(It’s funny, in retrospect, how much she’s come to know this man when a year ago he was little more than a stranger. But right now, as she pretends not to see his hands shaking where they clench around his gun, she wonders when she became able to read him so well.)
Comfort has never been Vex’s purview. Not since her mother. Not since Syldor ripped them from the only place they’d ever known love, tried to carve pieces off his own children until they resembled something he could be proud of. Vax is different – he is a part of her, the only person who truly understands her, two halves of one soul – it is nothing to reach out for him because she knows it’s what he needs; it is nothing to accept the warmth of his arms because she knows it doesn’t come at a price. Reassurance is a language she speaks (and accepts) infrequently – she prefers the shield feigned indifference gives her, and she’s spent long enough telling herself she doesn’t need tenderness even she almost believes the bluff.
Percy is a little like her, she thinks, a little too jaded by the world to trust it, to accept anything presented to him without a dose of suspicion to temper it. He values logic and reason over platitudes, fact over the comfort of fiction. She doesn’t know all his demons but she’s fought three of them alongside him – she knows the way his eyes look when he’s haunted, but the weight of that burden is his; he’s never once asked for help in shouldering it. He tinkers, instead – takes things into his own hands and dismantles them, remakes them into something new, armed with intellect as weaponized as the firearms he carries and burdened with the weight of his own choices.
There’s nothing she can say to him that he hasn’t already thought himself, she knows. Not about this. He has a tactician’s mind – he will see every decision gone wrong, every place an error was made. There is little she can do to assuage him, and any effort to minimize the situation will only result in a rebuttal (no matter how much she wishes she could just gloss over the entire incident and move on).
Vex sits silently, chewing the inside of her lip as cold works its way deeper into her bones, and decides that if she can’t reassure him, the least she can do is throw him off balance.
“You know darling, I think now is a perfectly good time to remind you that hindsight is always a bitch.”
The blunt statement has exactly the effect she thought it would. Percy blinks, tearing his gaze from the heavens to stare at her with the confusion of someone expecting a vastly different outcome. The momentary absence of his usual poker face is almost amusing before he covers it with a furrowed brow. “Beg pardon?”
“Hindsight,” she says, as if that’s the part of her statement he’s confused by. She tugs the blanket a little closer around her shoulders and resettles on her perch, one leg tucked up underneath her for warmth. “Things are always much clearer with the addition of total understanding. It’s much easier to judge the outcome of a situation with all the pertinent information, not a mere percentage of it.”
Percy says nothing. A cursory glance at him reveals he’s averted his gaze, face tilted away from her in thought or a desire to hide his expression, she’s not sure which.
The half-feigned casual delivery fades at that, leaving her gentler, a little more honest with her next words. “You said yourself it was an accident,” she says, almost hesitant in the offering. Her fingers knot in the blanket around her shoulders; she leans ever so slightly toward him, seeking his gaze. “You couldn’t have known the armor would react the way it did.”
Something hardens in Percy’s expression, words intended for reassurance seeming to elicit the opposite response. “No, I should have,” he says. His thumb digs in to the palm of his left hand, working the muscle beneath his glove. “It was obviously dangerous. We knew the place was rigged with traps from the start. Vax warned me, and I didn’t listen.”
“Neither did I, darling, and he’s my brother. He’s paranoid and an impulsive shit and he thinks he knows best too often and sometimes he’s right about things.” Vex sighs, shrugging her shoulders despite the fact that she’s reasonably sure he can’t see it. “Mistakes were made. You fucked up, but we’ve all learned from it. The only thing to do now is move past it.”
Percy shakes his head. “You don’t understand.”
She leans forward, pinning him with her gaze. “Then explain it to me.”
And she waits, she waits for him to put together something coherent from the maelstrom in his head, though she’s expecting something a lot more verbose than the three words he delivers bowstring-taught at the spine with his face turned just far enough toward her to see the tension in his jaw.
“You died, Vex’ahlia.”
Despite herself, she flinches, cold reaching phantom fingers through her chest again. She can hear the stiffness in her voice. “Thank you, I am aware.”
“No, that’s not…” Percy sighs, long and hard, frustration or helplessness or some amalgamation of the two coloring the exhalation, and long leather-clad fingers come up beneath his glasses to press at the bridge of his nose. It’s the first time his hands have abandoned Retort since she found him, weapon shadowed by the curve of his body as he braces his forearm across his knees.
(“You can put it down,” she’d told him, back in that refinery beneath Whitestone, smoke wreathing him like something unholy despite the tears in his eyes. She remembers the weight of his weapon where her palm steadied it.
“It won’t let me,” he’d warned through gritted teeth – it’s only now she realizes the flash of expression on his face as he’d pressed the barrel beneath his chin is the same one in his eyes as he looks at his gun.
It isn’t fear.
It is disgust.)
Percy exhales a measured breath through his nose, replacing his glasses. His eyes stare straight forward into the flickering lantern light.
“I am not unused to death,” he says, slowly. As if the explanation wrings something from him, requires more than oxygen for him to give. “None of us are. We fight, and we kill, and we do what we have to in order to survive, and sometimes more beyond that. These weapons I’ve built – I know their intended purpose. I designed them with murder in my heart, and I knew where that path would lead me, and I have followed it because if I am damned it is what I chose.”
Her focus does not waver from its study. The resignation in his tone bleeds from some deeper wound, some hole carved through the center of him. He’s building to something; she can see it in the way his throat works against the words trapped in it, the way the shadows pool in faint purple bruises beneath his eyes.
It is costing him something to make this admission, she realizes, a price she thinks she understands far too well, and dread begins to creep in fractured tendrils up her spine.
“You… you fell in that tomb, Vex’ahlia,” Percy grits out, as if the words are wrenched from him. The dam erodes, tangled threads escaping unwanted, fingers clenched around nothing, left ones curled into the hollow of a shaking palm. “You fell by my hand. There was no weapon other than myself that caused it, only my impatience, and my hands, and regardless of intent I cannot lose sight of that. You died, and even without pulling the trigger, I am the one who killed you –”
And it rattles against her ribs and tears at her throat and she cannot let him finish and what rips itself free from her is raw and too honest and she just needs it to stop –
“I know I died, godsdamn it, because none of you fuckers will let me forget!”
(i touched the armor and you were you fuckin’ died you were laying there stone cold it was an accident you were like dead-dead i lost you –)
“You’re cold.”
The quiet observation is what brings her back from memories of a damp stone floor, silence stretched out thin and brittle between them like ice across the water’s edge. She’s shivering, she realizes. She’s not sure how long she’s been shivering, how long she’s been silent. The loss of control is unnerving. Vex feels shame crawl up her throat like bile.
She’s gone a little too far somehow, let someone see a little too much. It’s almost funny that after telling him to remove his mask, he’s the one to see what’s hiding beneath hers.
Vex keeps her gaze focused on the snow-laden tree line because it’s easier to appear unaffected when she can’t see him looking at her. “Yes, that does tend to happen in a land cursed with eternal winter,” she says, reaching for customary biting wit. It falls a little flat even to her own ears. She clenches her jaw against the threat of chattering teeth, refuses to let any further chinks in her armor show through.
Fuck. She should have just left him to his solitary gunsmithing. She should have just stayed by the fire. At least then she could have spared them both the embarrassment of –
A warm weight settles against her shoulders. Whatever self-recrimination she’d been unspooling in her head is lost to a measure of bewilderment, the pressure of whatever it is somehow both strange and familiar in the same breath. Vex turns her head and her gaze is met with folds of rich blue fabric; out of the corner of her eye, she catches Percy, a noble bastard even in the middle of fucking nowhere, draping the wool over her with care, those same hands he’d damned mere minutes before gentle where they brush against her frame.
There’s something in the gesture she can’t identify, some modicum of tenderness that slots into a place in her she doesn’t understand despite its being filled. But Vex is nothing if not pragmatic, even in the face of her own discomfort, so instead of a “thank you” what finds its way out of her mouth is, “No, Percy, don’t – you’ll freeze.”
There is no hesitation in his response. Percy is the litigator of their merry band of misfits – she should have known he would have a counterargument prepared, even for something as spur of the moment as this.
“Whitestone winters aren’t much better than the temperature now,” he says, focusing on the task at hand. She tries to catch his gaze but he doesn’t look up, and she’s still watching him as he tucks up the collar at the back of her neck and returns to his seat, picking up some shiny bits of brass and steel from the stand-in blanket workbench as he goes. He holds the metal in his hands, examining them by dim lantern light as he begins to check each piece for fit. He’s only in his shirtsleeves and waistcoat now, cravat forgotten; she tries to meet his eyes again but the effort still goes unrewarded.
“I’m used to the chill. I’ll be fine,” he says, not quite stiffly but removed. It strikes her then that she wasn’t the only one to reveal more than she’d intended over the last few minutes and understanding softens the edges of her attention where he’s concerned.
She knows better than to reach out with words, now, because she would have rebuffed them herself. Instead she reaches up beneath the coat and tugs the blanket free from her shoulders, holding it in her hands for just a moment. “Percy?”
He doesn’t look up, not at first, but when she softens her entreaty with a quieter “Darling?” he’s finally able to meet her gaze. She holds up the woven fabric between them, the best peace offering she knows how to give.
“If you’re going to insist on being noble, at least take this in return. It’s cold as balls out here and Keyleth will never forgive me if I leave you an ice block.”
And it’s not quite gentle or compassionate and it falls just on this side of teasing, but given the way his tension eases and the corners of his mouth turn up in the outline of a smile, she thinks it was the right thing to say. He takes the proffered blanket with a muted “Thank you;” in the lantern light, she could almost swear there’s a hint of flush creeping across his face. She watches him wind the fabric around his shoulders, as fussy and fastidious as he ever does anything – somehow the sight of it loosens something tight in her chest.
Fool man. She leans back against the tree trunk, tugging his coat closer by its lapels, and lets her chin tilt up toward the upper reaches of the canopy, breathing in the scent of black powder and parchwood and something unidentifiable and warm.
It smells like him, she realizes, and feels the tips of her ears go pink. She’s not sure when that scent became comforting.
She holds the coat a little closer anyway.
Vex stares up into the heavens, tracing lines across the constellations with her gaze. Percy works on some piece of gadgetry only he can understand. Time slips away, pulled honey-thick and slow, the seconds fading into what might have become hours under another circumstance.
(A year ago, she might never have sought him out; six months ago, she might never have stayed. But she knows him now, and even though she’s under no obligation to say anything further, she doesn’t want to leave him to his demons without some ammunition of her own.)
“I think you’re wrong, you know.”
She’s not sure what prompts her to say it, but once the words are out of her mouth she realizes they’re true. The sound of his tinkering quiets after a moment. His reply is slow in coming; she wonders if it’s because she’d startled him or because he’s trying to remember what he said that she might disagree with, but whatever conclusion he comes to, he somehow sounds both curious and resigned, as if preparing to receive judgment or condemnation. “About what?”
“Fate. Whether it exists or doesn’t. Whether one bad decision makes someone irredeemable, or traps them in one way of being for the rest of their lives.” She still doesn’t look at him, though the way he goes still and silent is answer enough that he understands her. Vex tilts her head a little in his direction, letting the corner of her lip quirk up in a weak smile. “For what it’s worth, darling, I think you’re asking the wrong questions.”
A low hum issues from the space beside her. Vex waits for him to process the implications of that statement, parsing through the quandaries and variables. She sees him turn to face her out of the corner of her eye, his expression a little less guarded than it was before.
“What are the right ones?” he asks.
“The ones that let you choose.” Her eyes seek out his, because it’s important that he understand this. “Fate…doesn’t matter. It exists or doesn’t, but the point isn’t whether or not we’re bound to it. What matters is the choices we make now, the things we want to be now, and we are not without hope for change because we still have the freedom to choose.”
Percy nods, looking down at his hands for a long moment. She’s not sure what he sees in them. Leather hides his skin from view; beneath it there are burns and scars, calluses and marks left in the pursuit of knowledge and freedom, his past etched on him like a brand. She’s seen him lay waste to his enemies with those hands, seen him create things the rest of them can’t even imagine. Seen him hold back Keyleth’s hair when she’s too drunk to keep herself upright, press Cassandra’s forehead to his own with unpracticed tenderness, felt him slide his palm across her spine when she’d been dead then alive then trying to leave it all behind in the stillness of a forgotten tomb.
Percy is a good man, she thinks, despite his darkness. Despite his belief that the sins he’s committed in the past are beyond atonement. Bad men don’t lie awake at night wondering if they’ll ever be forgiven, if they’re condemned only to wound and never heal. Percy is no saint, but there are far worse men with far fewer flaws, and far more blood staining their hands.
She watches him flex his fingers around the shards of copper and steel and brass he’d been holding, watches him slide them into his pocket for safekeeping, realizes that not even his left hand shows the faint trace of a tremor now. When he returns his gaze to hers, there’s something less shadowed in his countenance, the faintest hint of mirth crinkling the corners of his eyes.
“I… take it your rather brilliant philosophizing is a reminder that my ‘freedom of choice’ should not include touching armor that does not belong to me in the future?”
And she can’t help it – she laughs. She laughs because this is so close to normal after so long in the dark and the cold, and Percy’s smiling too, and somehow that’s almost better than the smartass remark, halting and unsteady as it may be. “No, you dick,” she snorts, grateful for the release of tension, impulsively reaching out with one hand to shove at him, laughing all over again when he nearly goes ass over teakettle off the root on which he’s perched. “I’m saying, regardless of the mistakes we made yesterday, we all wake up every morning with a thousand different options for change on the table, and the only question that fucking matters is what we choose to do with that. Nothing is predetermined that can’t be remade. Not even people.”
The laughter fades, fragile smile she’d watched bloom across his face wilting slowly through the last of her pronouncement, and he looks up at her, then, sobering, shoulders hunched against some invisible weight beneath her blanket. It takes him a moment to speak. “Do you really believe that?”
She hears what he’s not asking. She hears Osysa’s judgments and his own half-admitted fears echo somewhere in the space between what he said and what he’d meant. She thinks she understands why he’s really keeping vigil here in the cold, beyond the safety of their circle of friends; why he’s so hesitant to touch others, despite the consideration and courtesy he’s always shown when he does.
She could sidestep the question, if she really wanted to. She could tell him that it’s something she’s reminded herself, though she doesn’t want to be that vulnerable, not yet. Saying “yes” would be so easy, would give him some reassurance and end the conversation here, but it sticks in her throat because on the nights she lies awake questioning herself, it’s not wholly true.
But it’s true enough, she thinks, and she decides that for once, it won’t cost her to be honest.
“No one is irredeemable, Percy,” she says, and when her gaze catches his, she smiles. “Not even you.”
(“Darling, take off the mask,” she’d told him once. But Vex of all people knows there are many types of masks, and she wonders, as she watches the ghost of something deeper flicker across his face and disappear, just how many more of them he wears.)
The moon shines down on them from its place in the astral sea, caught at some point beyond its zenith. Somewhere behind them the others still sleep; the fire, well tended, still crackles and burns. In the morning the sun will rise, and they’ll pack up camp, and Rimecleft will still beckon like a candle in the darkness, and they’ll shoulder their burdens and answer the call, and maybe something about the future will seem a little clearer. Maybe it won’t.
The world will still be broken. Cities laid to waste by flame and poison and ice and acid will still crumble and smolder and fall. Dragons will still rule the skies, loom over the horizon like a storm that’s about to break, sit their thrones in a mockery of mad kings and demand life itself bend the knee.
But that is tomorrow. For tonight, she thinks they’ve found some measure of peace. All she can do is hope it will be enough.
She rises, stretches out chilled muscles long gone stiff, and decides that if tomorrow is another day, it’s time she takes her own advice.
“It’s late – or early, I’m afraid to know which,” Vex says, the first one to break the companionable silence that’s fallen over them. She peers out over the horizon line and imagines, with a sinking feeling in her stomach, that she can hear the beginnings of birdsong, see the first faint signs of deep navy fading into a lighter blue where the earth meets the sky. Fatigue weighs heavy in her limbs; she takes a deep breath of cold clear air to dispel it. “We’d best try to sleep before dawn or we’ll never make it to Rimecleft.”
She glances down at Percy, noticing after a moment’s time that he’s made no move to collect his things. Vex tilts her chin in his direction. “You coming, darling?”
He shakes his head, white mop of hair reflecting silver moonlight with the movement, just starting to go a bit unkempt. Percy scrubs a hand through it absently. “You go on ahead,” he says, either guarded or distracted by something, she’s not quite sure which. “I’ve still got a few things to finish up here. I’ll be along shortly.” His attention is once again focused on the little scraps of metal in his hand, pieces laid out like a jigsaw puzzle on the plane of his palm. Vex feels something like fond exasperation well up within her at the sight.
She really, really shouldn’t be surprised. It’s not the first time he’s followed some wild hare of an idea into the wee hours. If he’s going to be an idiot, though, she figures he should at least be a warm idiot, so she should probably give him back his coat.
(There is a part of her, a very tiny part she refuses to acknowledge, that laments the notion of giving it up. Vex buries that nonsense deep and decides she doesn’t need to revisit it, either. She’s cold. The coat is warm. Causality is perfectly logical in this situation.
Damn Percy and his excellent taste in outerwear.)
Of course, she forgot to account for the contrary stubbornness of the man who owns this particular coat, so her decision to return it doesn’t pay off quite the way she thought it would. She’s just beginning to shrug the heavy fabric off her shoulders when Percy happens to look up and catch her in the action, his brow furrowing just before he holds up a hand to stop her.
“No, keep it,” he says, and this time she’s sure his cheeks have gone a little pink, the full weight of his attention on her. “You need it more than I do at the moment. I’ve got your blanket, I’ll be quite all right.”
And far be it from Vex to call him a liar, but she’s spent many a night beneath that particular blanket and she’s tempted to call bullshit. Percy may be tall, and judging by the way his coat hangs on her frame he’s fairly broad-shouldered, but he’s also lanky. Northern ancestry or no, the thin scrap of fabric won’t do him much good this far from the fire. She frowns despite herself.
“Are you sure?” Vex asks with a more than a hint of skepticism, punctuating her question with a not-entirely-voluntary shiver. “It’s fucking freezing out here. Blue blood is one thing darling, but blue lips are another. I don’t think you particularly need both.”
The quip draws a chuckle out of him, low and rumbling in his throat. (Vex can’t quite bring herself to pretend she isn’t pleased by that.) “Let me worry about my blood,” he says, arching a brow at her. “You keep the coat. Use it in good health. If you still want to give it back in the morning, I suppose I can accept.”
It would probably be polite to argue. Vex has little experience with the trappings of nobility, but what she remembers of her youth in Syngorn seemed to involve gestures made out of propriety rather than actual intent to follow through, offers of various comforts extended simply so they could be demurred. With Percy, though, she knows the gesture is genuine; the expression on his face is neutral, but she recognizes the particular unimpressed set of his eyebrows when he’s calling up his ‘I am fully prepared to argue this point and win’ look, and she’s about one more objection away from having that look turned on her full force, and she thinks she’s too tired to argue the point.
If he wants to hang on to a threadbare blanket in order to be a gentleman, she supposes she may as well let him, so she sighs, responds with “Suit yourself,” and on impulse slides her arms into the coat’s sleeves, feeling the smooth silk of the lining against her skin. The heavy wool cuffs hang down well over her palm to brush against her fingertips, but she finds she doesn’t mind the impediment of movement right now. The coat doesn’t fit – far from it – but somehow she thinks it’s more comfortable that way.
She resettles the fabric a little more firmly across her shoulders, adjusting the collar one final time, and Percy, who notices more than is good for him sometimes, smirks weakly at her over the rims of his glasses. “There, now,” he says, head tilted at an angle that somehow screams ‘I told you so.’ “See? Was that so hard?”
And she decides right then and there that is her cue to make her exit, torn somewhere between amusement and irritation and punch-drunk exhaustion, a smirk of her own tugging at the edges of her lips. She looks him dead in the eye, extending her middle fingers with all the grace she might pull her bow, and turns on her heel beneath the moonlight, sauntering away from him with more sway in her hips than is strictly necessary, borrowed coat brushing feather-light at her heels the whole way. “Goodnight, Percival,” she says, biting back a laugh, and she can’t see his face, but she imagines he might be smiling when he responds.
“Good night,” he says, his voice quiet. She hugs his coat a little closer around her as she walks away.
They’re going to be all right, she thinks, digging her hands deep in Percy’s jacket pockets. There’s so much that’s coming, so much to be done even now that they have an idea of where to start. The future presses down on all of them like a lead weight and she knows there are just as many chances for them to get it wrong as there are right, but the first traces of warmth are beginning to creep back into her fingers, and in the morning the sun will rise, and Vex feels the stirrings of hope mixed in with the bone-weary exhaustion, illuminating the edges of shadow hidden at the back of her mind. Vox Machina might be a little rattled, but that’s never stopped them before.
They’re going to be all right, she thinks.
She makes it as far as the edge of the clearing when she hears his voice call out.
“Vex’ahlia?”
She pauses. There’s something in the way he says her name that stops her, tightening her throat against some emotion she can’t identify. Her footsteps falter, coming to a halt before she crosses the tree line. “Yes?”
It is silent for a long, long while. She counts the heartbeats between breaths and waits, fingers clenching in the pockets of his coat. He says nothing else; she turns, finding the shape of him in the dark, lines of his body cast heavily in shadow.
When he looks up at her, she realizes that for the first time, she is seeing him with no walls, no mask – only raw, jagged honesty and viridian eyes sharp with regret.
“I’m sorry,” he rasps, gaze seeking hers across the gulf between them, and she knows, she knows he means for more than just the tomb. “Vex’ahlia, I am…so, so sorry.”
And her chest aches, and her eyes burn, but even through the tightness in her throat, it’s one of the easiest things she’s ever said.
“You fucking idiot,” she murmurs, and when he looks up at her, she smiles. “You were already forgiven.”
(In the morning, Vex will wake by the fire, shrouded in rich blue wool that smells of black powder and woodsmoke, and she will run her fingers along delicate gold buttons, feeling the mark of his family crest press deep into her skin.
In the morning, Percy will appear from his stand-in workshop, eyes shadowed and expression slightly manic, and he will present her with a siege arrow made of copper and brass and steel that gleams in the sunlight, the smile on his face small but no less genuine than her own.
In the morning, Vex will cradle his gift close, and kiss his cheek in thanks, and she will pretend that she didn’t sleep with her nose buried in his collar all night, and he will pretend that he slept at all.
But it’s only when she returns his coat and brushes his fingers in the trade that she will realize: It’s the first time in days she’s been warm.)
hold me in this wild, wild world
‘cause in your warmth i forget how cold it can be
and in your heat i feel how cold it can get
(so draw me close.)