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“I have an idea for it,” he tells Cassandra, as dawn breaks over Whitestone and an acolyte of the Dawnfather pokes concerningly at his hand.
Percy doesn’t look down; Vax gave him something for the pain, so he’s only getting a dull prickling sensation, but he has to keep very still and let the healer work as quickly as possible. Once it wears off, he can’t have any more—it was poison, after all—and if he looks down he might move without thinking.
His sister is quiet for a long moment, before she says, “I’ve had enough of ideas.”
Her rapier sits across her lap, the bare blade catching the weak sunlight, and as Percy considers her he can only think of Delilah Briarwood’s throat torn wide and the chilly way his sister passed him. Cassandra is inscrutable now. There are years and tragedies between them, the twisting influence of more than one sort of demon, and even before all of that they were never the sort of family that spoke to each other deeply. They are strangers again—but there was never a time when they stopped being so.
And Cassandra was bent and bruised and manipulated into being a compliant hostage, but the truth sits heavy in the air between them: he left her in the snow to die. He did.
Would you rather I’d died? Percy doesn’t ask, though the childish part of him wants to. He’s afraid of the answer. He can still taste the freezing air of that night on his tongue sometimes.
“What are you doing?” Cassandra demands, and when he looks up her eyes are on the healer. He knows just how fast she can be with a sword in her hands, and the casual, easy grip on her blade is entirely misleading.
The acolyte stutters his terrified way through an explanation and she settles back in the chair again, eyes sharp and clear and her presence an obvious threat. At her posturing, something in Percy’s chest aches. Cass, despite being the youngest, always wanted to be the stalwart protector of the family.
“Still the knight,” he says, and she looks away abruptly. He watches her hands flex in her lap.
The healer finishes his work in a silent room.
---
It’s always hot in his Emon workshop—the forge allows for nothing else, and he likes to keep it lit and admire the system of runes embedded in the ceiling that whisk the fumes away. Without it, the basement room grows dim and damp no matter how many torches he lights.
There’s an anatomy text open on the worktable and Pike is present today, watching him with a serious gaze. The prosthesis is his own work, but she’d insisted on being present for the initial attachment. She knows tests for hands that he doesn’t, and if the pain is too great she knows how to put him under. Plus, the book is hers and she wouldn’t let him borrow it without demanding this favor in return.
“I didn’t think you’d need a book like this,” he mentions, arranging his tools. “It’s all a matter of faith with you, isn’t it?”
“It helps to know what you’re working with. The Everlight listens, you know, but it helps to know the right questions to ask. And Grog was always hurting his fingers,” she continues, eyes getting distant. “There was always something to get into when we were kids, I got a lot of practice healing hands.”
Percy takes a breath, looking at the inked veins and the scribbled notes in the margins, thinking of blood flow. “Oliver liked to climb trees.”
Just saying it leaves him breathless. He can summon up the image clearly now, untainted by the dark cloud he now thinks was the demon, and it somehow hurts all the more to picture Ollie and Whitney running across the castle grounds, play-fighting in the spring air. There is no rage to catch him and put him back into motion; only a deep, aching emptiness remains.
He drags in air, but he’s drowning.
Pike isn’t in armor today. She moves carefully into his space—she does everything carefully—and catches his good hand in hers. Her skin is warm. When did he get so cold?
“Thank you for telling me,” is all she says, and then she starts a long story about Grog, her great-great-grandfather, and a herd of perilously stubborn goats. By the time she reaches the punchline, he’s well enough to laugh.
“We can do this today,” he says, looking at the parts and looking at her, a wild rush buoying him. “It’ll work, I know it.”
And Pike, probably realizing that he’ll do it alone if she refuses, says yes.
He comes to on the floor of the workshop with the soft golden veil of the Everlight’s power over his mind, dulling the memory—the length of soiled bandages peeled back, Pike holding his wrist down with furious strength as he tried to fit everything together, nothing to numb him and it was so, so bad, he’d shouted—it’s all fading quickly, and he doesn’t want to drag it back up. He can leave this pain here in this room.
His throat aches and Pike is inspecting his left hand, bending the fingers one by one to touch the smooth metal that sits where his palm used to be. There’s an empty socket there, but she doesn’t ask what he’s going to put in it.
Percy smiles, a bright flash of teeth.
---
The tomb—he wishes he could leave what happened there behind as well.
---
The metaphor feels indulgent, but Percy often thinks of himself as a drowning man. He has experience with it, after all, and was once quite literally pulled from the sea. In a truer, more vulnerable way, he has been hauled as close to shore as he can get by Vox Machina. He has a line wrapped around him, and whenever he drifts back out there’s someone there to reel him in—he can’t get out of the water, but some days are sunny and the sea around him is calm. It’s a poetic, hopeful notion. Someday there might be sand beneath his feet.
And now Vax is in his own deep water, and he won’t accept any of the offered hands.
Percy sees himself in Vax—and there were times when the despair had felt... not good, but like something that belonged to him. Something to carry when he had nothing else to hold on to, even when it cut his hands. He doesn’t want to see the same shadow in Vax’s eyes, doesn’t want to recognize the way his shoulders curl inward, the way he shifts to always be at the fringes of the group. This armor, gift from the gods it may claim to be—it’s not good for him. It puts him too much apart, lets him think he’s alone.
So Percy chases after him, in the topsy-turvy Fey Realm, even though Vax doesn’t want his help. Percy follows, quick and clever, and when he sees the river in the sky he knows. The green stone machine crackles in his hand—he would’ve explained it to Pike, if she wanted to know. Of course he gave himself an extra weapon. It’s who he is.
And it is a victory, for a moment, to send the electricity hurtling through the river. He is fierce and proud and brilliant until he returns to himself, realizing where he stands with Vax.
And Percy’s great sin used to be surviving his family, and then it was abandoning his sister, and now it is killing Vex. He will never be able to put it down, no matter how many clever devices and audacious experiments. Percy could forge the weapons of the gods, entirely new vestiges, and it would not be nearly enough to redeem him to Vax.
And to himself—entirely impossible.
When they return to the others, Vex and Keyleth are emerging from their haze. With bags under her eyes and what must be a killer headache, Vex gives him one of her looks, rich and layered with amusement, and he sees her dull eyes growing cold in her corpse. No, there is no making up for what he’s done.
Still, selfish, he wants her to keep looking.