Chapter Text
It started at his fingertips. At first, he’d assumed it was soot. The black ash staining his nail beds and leaching out from there. It liked to accumulate in the cracks of his skin as it dried out from the heat of the forge.
Once he finished the pepperbox, he told himself it was just staining from the smoke that poured from his weapon, or perhaps a build-up of black powder from loading or cleaning it. But as it crept down his fingers, staining the skin as purely as paint, he finally began to worry. He even managed a whole day without the pepperbox in his hand just to prove that it was, in fact, the source.
He finished that little experiment with twitching hands and an encroaching panic attack, as well as fingertips just as stained as they’d been the day before. The next day he tore apart his skin scrubbing in the closest river. The cold water sent him spiraling back to another river, icy and still more forgiving than those who’d chased him into it. Memory dragged him under time and time again, giving him barely a second to gasp for air before he was plunged in again. Each time he wrenched himself to the present as best he could, and each time he withdrew his hands from the water, they remained stained and blackened from fingertip to knuckle.
He thought back to the dream he had had right before he made the pepperbox- the dream of smoke and promises of vengeance.
Maybe it hadn’t just been a dream after all.
In the following weeks, Percy took a handful of small jobs, burned too much coin chasing a lead that went nowhere, and tried to pretend that he couldn’t feel his nails thickening to claws. It hurt down to the bone, and it felt like every hour he was forced to relearn his grip on the pepperbox.
He hadn’t let himself think about whether or not that would be the last of it.
Of course it wasn’t.
When the headache began, it had the same smoldering, saccharine pain as his claws had. It burned out the residual ice in his fingers and mind, banishing what remained of the last bitter winter he’d spent in Whitestone.
He had an inkling as to what was happening this time, if his suspicions were correct. If the creature from his dream was connected to this, that is. The creature with burning eyes and jagged claws. A beak sharper than any creature born of nature could wear. And horns, spiraling back over a face he couldn’t make out but feared all the same.
There was a part of him--the part that existed in the space between when he woke up screaming and when he fell back to sleep curled around the pepperbox--that insisted he should speak with a cleric. The part that proved that not all of Percival Fredrickstein Von Musel Klossowski de Rolo III had died at the hands of the Briarwoods and Ripley. Whether or not that shred gave him hope varied from moment to moment. But it insisted that a cleric could fix this, fix him. Find an escape from whatever deal he had entangled himself in, protect him from whatever creature was slinking its way through his veins.
The cynical part of him, the part that remained after that plunge into icy water- He knew better. Knew that clerics took oaths to protect the world against fiends and their ilk. There was every chance that a holy person’s protection wouldn’t extend to the likes of him. Every chance their oath to rid the world of evil would extend to ridding the world of the damned.
Besides, if they were to purge him of this demon, how much would even be left? He couldn’t go back to the husk he had been on that fishing boat. That was two years he barely existed, barely a fragment of memory left of it now.
What was the saying? Damned if I do, damned if I don’t?
He waited longer than he probably should’ve to find a place to shelter. Even after the skin of his temples became stretched and sensitive to the touch, he continued to put it off. He wouldn’t have even put down the money for a room when woke up to his vision spotting with pain, and his every step felt like the onset of an avalanche.
When he did eventually stagger his way into an inn after several minutes of deliberation blocking the door, Percy didn’t do much more than slam his coin onto the counter and snatch the key the moment it was presented. He must’ve looked a sight; head bowed, white hair gray with dirt and ash, and black claws scrabbling at the table for coin. He didn’t dare say a word, lest it devolve into a groan, or worse, a growl of pain. When his mind was slightly clearer, he would hope beyond hope that they just thought he was drunk.
When he actually let himself imagine it, he pictured them cutting through in one clean swipe, over and done within the space of one slash of a sword. Painful, certainly, but quick.
After the first day, he’d bitten through his belt in two places.
It was all the stab of a knife blade with none of the mercy of its speed. His skin ripped slowly, making a show of stretching before giving way to bloodied bone. Flesh cracked and spider-webbed from there, parting more and more as the horns grew, inch by blinding hour. Percy was familiar with the sensation of his limbs splayed out, stretched to the four winds just to sensitize and expose the rest of him to a more exquisite agony. His skin flayed apart, every drag of bone along each new-exposed nerve a new jolt of suffering.
It was steady enough to be too tiring for him to hold a scream for the duration. But at the same time, it was recognizable enough a pain to have him curling his belt between his teeth each time he felt himself drifting off. At this point, it didn’t matter how many places the leather split between teeth sharper than he remembered.
Anything was better than waking up with his nightmares choking his throat with screams.