Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Her whole life is a bit of a compromise. Keyleth has always felt pulled in too many directions. Half girl, half animal, half god. Less than the difference of her parts. 

In the other place, this dark plane between life and death, she’s pulled hard into all of them at the same time, so hard, she feels the tether snap a bit, the little knot in the center that was the most of her pulled too taut, so small it disappears. 

Stumbling back up to the castle in Whitestone, she tries to find it again, but can’t. 

It’s been weeks. She’s lost count of the number but not of the magnitude, longer than days, shorter than months. Weeks of being stretched thinner than air, weeks of running and hiding and fighting and worse sitting like a black pit in her soul. She can’t think about it. Not yet. 

The animal is hungry, parched and famished, always. The girl is shell-shocked, terrified of the familiarity of the world around her, less like it will disappear beneath her, more like it will warp and turn to eat her. The god is quiet, tired, exhausted, empty. 

She heaves her aching body through the halls of Whitestone Castle, not sure where in the world she’s even going. She doesn’t even know if the Briarwoods are really gone, if her friends are here, if she’s hopped out of hell and back into a frying pan. This was just the first place she could think to go, exactly where she left from like maybe no time will have passed, like maybe it will undo the weeks, like maybe she can erase the whole thing. 

The halls are quiet but warm. She doesn’t see anyone, familiar or otherwise, but the dark foreboding that permeated the air of Whitestone when she was last here is gone. It’s night, but the moonlight is soft, the stars seem hopeful. Or maybe she’s just grateful to see the stars again. There were many times in the past weeks that she thought she never would. 

After minutes of wandering the labyrinth of the first floor, she hears voices. Too muffled to identify, but the girl in her at least is desperate enough for help from anyone, is so starved of other people and things that won’t instantly try to kill her, she turns immediately. 

She doesn’t know how bad she looks, just feels the blood dried and flaking on her skin. That last attack, it had been one of the worst. She’d been shunted out of Minxie and pummeled into the ground by too many of those winged monsters to count. She thinks she’s still bleeding from the places where their talons had sliced into her back as she ran as hard and fast as she could. She had barely lost them, tucking herself into a corner of one of the empty dark houses closer to the tower in the center of the city and holding her breath to stay quiet even as her lungs burned. She scraped together every inch of her magic and reached and reached and reached like she had been for all the weeks. 

It worked this time, something in her power sparking and exploding as she felt herself spirited through the space between planes before being dropped to her knees in the center of Whitestone. 

Safe. Probably. 

She hadn’t thought about cleaning up or sending a message ahead or anything really. Those were Keyleth thoughts, center thoughts, human thoughts.

It’s been weeks of those being shaken out of her. All that’s left had moved on autopilot. 

Is still moving on autopilot as she turns the corner and heads towards the voices. 

The door of the room at the end of the hall is open, warm firelight spilling out, casting shadows in the hall. 

She sees Vax first, in the doorway, always on the edges and in the corners, and just the shape of his silhouette stops her heart. Weeks ago, he had said he loved her, he had kissed her, and then she had been sucked into another plane. She can’t bring herself to walk any faster, she can barely feel her feet as they push off the hardwood floors, but she feels herself pulled towards him, towards home.

He’s listening intently to the conversation in the room, the faint murmur of it is still so familiar to her, it tickles something in her brain, something starting to slowly wake up inside her. The conversation must be intense because he’s locked into it. She gets within feet of the door before he notices, his spine stiffening, his hand going for his belt as he turns, fast as ever. 

The animal wants to flinch and brace. The girl doesn’t know how to, not when it’s Vax. 

His eyes land on her and his jaw drops slack, a harsh wet gasp pulled through his parted lips. It almost surprises her that he recognizes her. She doesn’t know what she looks like, but she knows something inside feels different, different enough that everyone should be able to see. 

“Kiki?” he says. It’s the first word she’s heard in weeks. It takes a second to remember he’s referring to her. 

He jerks a step towards her, his hand reaching out for her immediately, instinctively. It quivers in the air like nothing she’s ever seen from him and stops, frozen in place like he can’t quite bring himself to touch her and shatter the illusion. 

She, on the other hand, can’t stop, knows the second that she stops walking forward she’ll probably die, held together and up at this point by her steady momentum alone. She keeps walking until she crashes into him, and sure enough, her knees are shaking so hard she almost collapses immediately. 

“Keyleth,” he breathes, his voice is a desperate gasp. His hands catch her, one at her waist, one at her bicep, holding so gently, like cupping water. It quiets all the dissonant voices in her head, a balm that spills through the places where his skin touches hers. It feels like safety, like home, like nothing hurts and she won’t fall ever again. He sways them further into the room and for a moment she can’t see anything, blinded by the fireplace at the back wall, brighter than anything she’s seen in weeks. 

It takes a few blinks before she can focus again, but his face is still there, so close to hers, eyes so wide, tears leaking out of the corners, curving along his cheeks. 

“Hi,” she says, because that’s what you’re supposed to say when you see people. Her voice feels and sounds like shards of glass in her throat. 

She’s so thirsty. 

The room behind Vax explodes with noise, and the animal wants to bear her teeth and the girl wants to run and hide and the god perks her head up and considers searching for some magic way to silence the whole world for a moment. 

Stop, stop, stop, she tries in her head, so quiet and tiny in the center of it, strained by the strength of each side as it pulls at her. 

Before she can do anything more, she’s pulled a few inches out of Vax’s hands and into a fierce hug. A shock of white. The smell of oil and gunpowder. It hurts a little to be squeezed so tight when her body still aches, but the pain is good, it sharpens the world to focus. It pushes her together more, towards the middle. 

“Hi,” she chokes out again, because that’s right. Her brain can’t really remember anything else she’s supposed to say or be just yet, let alone what to do with her hands and arms right now, but that’s one right step. 

“I knew it,” Percy whispers harshly. “I knew you’d….” He cuts himself off with a sharp laugh. 

The other voices are loud enough that they bleed in. 

“See, I told you holding a funeral would be tacky.”

“Well, we didn’t know, Scanlan.”

“I thought you said we would know for sure if she died.”

Suddenly, the voices are approaching, along with bodies and hands and more noise of movement and life that are alien to her. 

“What happened, Keyleth?”

“Yeah, where were you?”

“How did you get back?”

“Maybe back off a bit, Freddie, she looks like she can barely breathe,” Vax’s voice is the softest, still breaking over every other word, even as he continues on like he isn’t crying softly. He steps in closer behind her and it’s a lot of body heat and a lot of movement and it takes everything in her to keep the animal down. 

“Easy! Easy! All of you back up.” Vex. She easily cuts through the noise and starts shoving the others around, moving them not with any of her own bodily strength but just her own assurety and force of will. “She needs space, come on now.”

“Space?” Percy protests, even as he takes an obedient step back. “She looks like a stiff breeze will drop her. Pike, can’t you—?”

“Of course,” Pike says and comes forward. 

Keyleth’s brain is shorting, so much stimulation, positive for once, but still too much. She can’t believe she’s here. They’re all such a sight, such a comfort, she wants to be looking at all of them at the same time. Instead her eyes ricochet around the room and she can barely get them to focus. 

Pike reaches up, a small hand touching her cheek and keeping her head and gaze in place. 

“Hey, Keyleth,” she says brightly. Her other hand goes up to the symbol around her neck and the warm honey rush of her healing pours over and into her. “How are you doing?”

“Not too bad,” she croaks, because that’s what she usually says. 

Be Keyleth, she reminds herself. Be Keyleth right now or why did you even come back. 

Vax lets out a wet laugh behind her. She’s doing something right. 

“We were trying to get to you, you know,” Pike says. She takes her hand and guides her slowly deeper into the room. Vax trails behind her like a shadow, hand hovering by the center of her back, close, so close, but not touching.

Vex shifts pillows around on the couch by the fire so there’s a place for her to sit comfortably. Not that it matters. Anything would be comfortable to her at this point. 

“Oh, that’s okay,” she says, her voice is thready and high, the ghost of Keyleth breezing through her vocal chords. “I didn’t know how to get back until just now really.”

“How did you get back?” Grog asks. He stands further back in the room, out of the way and slumping slightly like he’s trying to seem smaller, unthreatening. She thinks that makes sense, Grog would know the most about dealing with wild animals. 

She shrugs weakly and then her knees give out and she drops to a seat. “Magic.”

“Ah,” Grog says with a nod. 

She slumps back against the couch and feels the energy drain out of every muscle in her body. 

“She's getting Shadowfell muck all over your inheritance pillows, De Rolo.”

“Scanlan,” someone hisses. She can’t make out who. 

Vax has dropped to his knees next to the couch. He’s still not touching her anymore, but he’s still so close, the line of his body inches parallel to her leg, his knuckles on the seat almost almost almost brushing against her thigh. 

He stares up at her like she’s a miracle. She’s not sure what’s worse, that it’s far from the first time he’s looked at her this way, or that she finally knows for certain that he really shouldn’t. 

“Hi,” she says, again, staring down at him. She doesn’t know how to get her mouth around the rest of what she’s thinking, what she should say. 

“Hi,” he says back, which is kind of him. 

He looks different. Maybe it’s just been a while, but also, no, she’s spent every night for all those weeks tracing each of their faces in her head over and over again, and Vax’s especially. He is different. His face is paler, the lines of his face seem heavier, something shifted in his eyes. He’s wearing new armor, dark black and feathered at the shoulders. It smells like mothballs. Her nose wrinkles slowly. 

“How are you?” she asks. An argument is happening in whispers over her head. They’re heads, really, a different world from whatever is happening here, as she grasps at the concept of herself again.  

“I don’t know,” he replies with a wet laugh. He barely blinks, his eyes locked onto hers like he’s drinking in every last detail and memorizing each inch of her face. 

Her mouth stretches weirdly. A smile. There might still be blood in her mouth. Some of it might not be hers.

It still feels good. 

“Me neither,” she says. 

His hand shifts, perching lightly like a bird on her knee. It feels heavier than that, feels grounding, like a weight keeping her from flying away, like a tether to this world, this plane, to keep her from disappearing again. 

She lets her hand rest on top of his, and allows herself to believe it. She’s home.

Chapter Text

“Here, kid,” Scanlan says, leaning over the back of the couch with a cup of water and a plate stacked high with food. “Welcome back to the land of the living.”

Her stomach rumbles and clenches at the smell of it. Her brain goes empty and she dives in with her bare fingers, all animal, tearing chicken and bread and potatoes and shoveling it into her mouth. 

“Easy, dear,” Vex says, sitting down on the couch next to her. Her hand lands gently on her wrist. “You’ll make yourself sick.”

Being sick seems like a fair trade for getting as much food in her stomach as possible right now. The only things she had to eat on the other side were the smaller creatures who didn’t manage to eat her first. They were alien, strange, tasted horrible, but gratefully Minxie was less distinguished in her taste. It was enough to stay alive and keep going. But it did mean that whenever she was beat back into her body, like today, she’d be wracked with hunger, stomach cramping around nothing for hours, sometimes so bad she could barely sleep. She feels wild and frail at the same time, and every desperate part of her wants to scarf down this food and kill anything that keeps her from it. 

But this is her family. They’re staring at her, she can feel the weight of their gazes and so she slows, slightly ashamed, but not so much so that she doesn’t eat every last crumb, even the ones that fall to the couch or her filthy lap. 

“We should get Allura,” Vex is saying, when she tunes back into the conversation happening around her. “I hate to wake her after everything we put her through today, but…”

“Well, what can she do now that she can’t in the morning?” Percy asks. “Do you think we’ll be able to get anything important done right now?”

“We need to message her father,” Vax says. He’s still staring up at her even as he addresses everyone else. 

“My dad?” she croaks, mouth still half full with food, sitting up slightly and meeting Vax’s eyes. 

He nods, his thumb running a circle on her knee. “We, uh, met your dad,” he says with a small smile. “Just yesterday, actually.”

“How?” she asks. It’d be near impossible for them to get to Zephrah, especially without her. 

Vax’s expression tightens. 

“You’ve missed… a lot, dear,” Vex says, petting at her hair for a second before noticing the knots and mats and pulling back with a wince. 

Vax’s face does a strange wobble, a series of complicated emotions she has nothing to connect to. She’s missed a lot. “He’s wonderful,” he says with a heavy weight, like it’s very important. She thinks she should be sad she missed it, or else feel strange that it happened without her. She’s thought many times about what it would be like to introduce Vox Machina to her dad, to show them Zephrah, to bring her worlds together. Not in the past weeks though, however many they were. Her deepest hopes and fantasies then were for this very moment, just being back. 

She nods slowly, before turning back up to the others. 

“The Briarwoods?” she asks, the question that’s been on the tip of her tongue for weeks. 

Percy barks out a laugh. “The Briarwoods,” he echoes. “Fuck.” He braces his hand on the couch back, leaning heavily. 

“Dead,” Vex assures her. 

Keyleth glances over at Percy and stares for a second, searching for differences like the ones she found in Vax. He looks the same, slightly more stubbled, dark circles under his eyes, but that’s nothing new. The exhaustion is evident, but in many ways, he looks better than she last saw him, less haunted, less like he was a second away from snapping and becoming something horrible, something lost to them. She’d worried about him most when she had the presence of mind to worry. 

He notices her staring and collects himself, looking almost embarrassed as he schools his face carefully. 

“I’ll go talk to Allura,” Pike says. “See if she can send a message.” She heads for the door, stopping to press a kiss to the top of Keyleth’s head and pump another much needed healing spell through her. 

“Make sure she gets to sleep afterwards,” Scanlan calls after her. “That is if we still need to use her as a taxi tomorrow. It seems like Kiki may have some new tricks.”

“What?” she asks before succumbing to a series of violent coughs that wrack her dry throat. Vax rises on his knees and helps guide the cup of water to her mouth. “Go where?”

“Westruun,” Grog answers as she sips. 

“Why?” 

There’s a beat of silence, a series of long looks that ping pong through the room, too human and complex for her to read with how she feels right now. 

“An ancient black dragon,” Scanlan says as the silence goes on. 

“Scanlan,” Vex hisses. 

“What?” he says, throwing his hands up. “She’s got a lot to catch up on, and we don’t have a lot of time.”

—

Keyleth is gone. 

The Briarwoods are dead. The thing that was in Percy is dead. But Keyleth is gone. 

Gone, not dead. Gods above, he doesn’t know what he would do if she was dead. It’s bad enough that Vex was barely standing after the fight. 

They search the ziggurat. They search the entire basement dungeon beneath the castle. They search as much as they can while the news spreads and the town begins to celebrate their freedom.  

She’s gone. 

The sun shines on Whitestone again, but nothing feels like a victory. 

He paces endlessly, when they retreat to the castle for the night. Everyone’s faces are grim, the tension is sharp. No one knows what to say, what to do. He doesn’t try. 

There’s nothing to say. 

He’s failed her, so completely. It leaves him sick to his stomach, nausea churning. Somehow, today, he could claim to love her and yet let this happen. He’s never had much in his life. Not people, not things, not love. Just Vex for the longest time. But it was enough to teach him exactly what he was willing to do for what he did have, who he did love. Absolutely anything. Yet for her, today, he did nothing and she was gone.

“You’re being an idiot, aren’t you?” Vex asks. 

It’s hours into the night, the first night they’ll all come to think of it later. He’s exhausted. More than exhausted, his body is already asleep. His soul can’t rest though, not when they don’t know where she is. He sits hunched on the floor in one of the rooms they’ve claimed in the castle, staring at the fire. 

“No more than usual,” he says. 

The flames lick up and crackle. He thinks of Keyleth. Not the loss of her, just her, the flames of her hair, the way she burns, sometimes just like this, warm and calm and steady, other times like a wildfire, fierce and roaring and spreading. A fire doesn’t just go out. Not without the sign of smoke, not without anyone noticing. It all feels so impossible. More impossible than vampires, more impossible than the demon in Percy. 

“I know you’re not stupid enough to be blaming yourself for this,” Vex says firmly as she sits next to him. She’s still in her armor, still half covered in her own blood from the battle. “So I won’t even say anything to that.”

He shrugs, smiles tightly. There’s nobody who knows him better, but even though she knows him and even though she’ll have the exact right things to say, it won’t change anything. He’s never felt so lost, so abandoned and far from a reality that he can understand. Keyleth has disappeared, and he somehow let that happen. 

“What I will say is,” Vex starts, tapping the toes of their boots together. “When you’re not busy making heart-eyes at her, Keyleth can be quite scary.”

He huffs out a laugh that’s almost real. “Oh, I know that, Stubby, trust me,” he says. “What do you think I’m staring at?” 

“Eugh,” she sighs, grimacing, but half-heartedly. He knows her too. That for all her snapping and glaring and protesting, the problem for her was never with Keyleth, but with him. This has shaken her just as bad, to have passed out in the fight and woken up to a member of their family gone. Guilt looks the same on her face as it does his. 

“I know,” he says, more solemnly, turning back to the fire. 

“All I’m saying is that she’s strong,” Vex says. “She can handle herself.” 

He’s not sure how much she believes that. He knows she doubts Keyleth sometimes, baffled by her choices that to the untrained eye seem careless or unthoughtful. Maybe she’s trying to convince him, but maybe she’s more trying to convince herself. 

He thinks about two years ago, seeing Keyleth for the first time, bright and fresh-faced and so sweetly naive it could give you a toothache. All long limbs and bright eyes, she had stumbled through Stillbend like a baby deer. For the longest time, she was more than baffling. She represented a type of life, of person, that felt like fantasy to them. He’s not sure what made that change, when the first time was that he looked at her and felt a pang of understanding, of clarity, of tenderness. Or when that pang became that more than understanding that has snowballed to where he is now. 

She is so powerful. There is a steel at her core that amazes him, something unshakable that you only see when you think for sure she’s been knocked over. She’s like fire. She’s like a tree whose roots go unfathomably deep. She’s like the sun at its highest point in the sky. He’s seen her scared and angry and happy. He’s seen her perform miracles, and he’s seen her make mistakes. 

She can handle herself. But he’s known for a while now what he would do if she ever couldn’t, if the world were just a little more cruel than she was powerful. 

And he can’t do that now. 

He loops his arms around his sister’s shoulders, half tugs her in, half leans against her, until they’re both supporting each other’s weight in the middle. 

“We’ll find her,” she says, fiercely squeezing his forearm, fingers digging in tight. “And then you can kiss her again and go off and have a million little druid babies. Alright?” 

He nearly laughs. “That is the last thing on my mind, trust me.”

“Really?” she asks, arching a brow. “Not worried you scared her into the ether with your big love confession?” She winces the second it’s out of her mouth, ducking her head and closing her eyes. 

The aloofness, the sharpness, sometimes it sits uncomfortably on her, like armor pinching. Someone else might misinterpret, might think she was being far too callous. He shares her soul, he knows his sister behind the snark, what she does to protect herself. He closes his eyes too and leans harder on her. 

“She’ll be alright,” he says, because he does believe it, and Vex must be really worried if she’s trying this hard to seem like she’s not. “She’ll be alright until we find her.”

Vex sniffs and he feels her arm shift subtly as she reaches up to wipe at her face. 

“She better be,” Vex mutters. “I’ll kill her if she dies and breaks your heart.”

He laughs, as much as he can given the circumstances. And then he lets himself cry a little, watching the flames jump. 

—

“It’s strange,” Allura says evenly. She’s trying to seem calm, but they’ve all noticed how tense she’s gotten in the minutes of the scry. Vax is gripping the back on a chair so hard, his nails are leaving marks in the wood. Percy’s teeth grinding is echoing like thunder in the room. For a second nobody breathes in. “I’m… not sure where she is.”

The tension snaps and they explode in overlapping questions. 

“What does that mean?”

“She’s alive?”

“How do we get there?”

Allura’s eyes widen as she takes it all in, and she swallows hard before responding. 

“It’s… dark there,” she says. “The scry only shows so much. She’s… hiding somewhere in this place. I can’t see much of the surroundings.”

“But you did see something,” Scanlan says. “So can’t you just teleport us there?” 

Vax nods eagerly and steps closer, anything to feel like he’s moving in the right direction again. It’s been days of traveling back to Emon. He’s itching to keep going. 

Allura’s eyes drop to her hands. “It’s not that simple, unfortunately,” she says. “She’s not on this plane. And while I can get us to other planes, I need something attuned to it to get there.” She presses her lips together tightly. “I don’t know where she is, and I don’t recognize it.” She pauses, looking up to scan her room, the bookshelves and covered walls, years of knowledge and adventures past, before she folds her hands together and closes her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

“What do you mean?” Vax asks. 

“What do we do?” Percy adds. 

“I don’t know,” Allura says slowly. “I—” She cuts herself off and shakes her head. “How— How did this happen?”

“We’re not sure,” Vex says. “There was a lot going on in the fight and then she was… missing.”

“But what do we do?” Percy asks again. “What’s next?”

Allura stands and moves towards one bookshelf in the corner of her room. “If you can figure out where she is, if you can find something attuned to that plane, I can get you there,” she says. “Us there.”

“You don’t sound optimistic,” Scanlan points out. 

She sighs, a world weary look in her eyes as she glances out her window at the streets of Emon. “I… I am not blind to my limits. I hold no illusions that there are many gaps in my knowledge,” she says. “But the fact that I don't recognize where she might be… it worries me. I didn’t get the best look, but there are usually indicators.” She shakes her head slowly. “It was just dark. Grey. Lifeless. Those signs… they don't bode well and… there are some places that are very well hidden, and for good reason. We can try again, look for more clues to try to see where she is, but… I just do worry that even if we know where she is, that might be where the trail runs dry.”

“Well,” Percy says, a tightly wound thread beginning to fray, his voice pitching up, the simmer before an explosion. “Then how did she even get there?”

“I think you may have a better chance of answering that question than me,” Allura says patiently. She searches the shelf while they avoid eye contact. The person who might have the answers they left behind days ago, a dissolved sludge that once was Delilah Briarwood swirling somewhere beneath Whitestone Castle. It’s a choice that’s hard to regret, even now. 

“Here,” she says, plucking a small blue stone off the shelf and carrying it back over to the group. “This is a scrying eye. It will let one person scry once a day, no spells or magic needed. If she’s moving, maybe you’ll get some better views of that place and with it, some clues as to where she is. That’s… a place to start.” Allura glances down at the stone in her hand. “The only place I can think to start. I can do some research as well, but we have very little to go on.” She holds the stone out. “I’m sorry. I wish I could be more help.”

“Thank you, Allura,” Vex says. She steps forward and takes the stone before anyone else thinks to move. “This is a great help, truly.” She turns and presses it into Vax’s hand with an air of casualty that falls flat. There’s nothing casual about anything right now, and all of their attention is snapped to this single thread of hope in the shape of this stone. 

The rest of the party falls back slightly, whispering heatedly about where to head next. Vax remains, holding tight to the stone, eyes tracing the random patterns in the stone floor in front of his feet. 

Allura steps forward, head tilted softly, patient as he finds the words. 

It takes a moment before he can stand straight, drop the stone in his pocket and face her. 

“How did she look?” he asks, because as much as the answer scares him, he does need to know. 

Allura nods knowingly and takes a moment to think. He’s glad for it, for a sign that she’ll tell him the truth, and for a sign that she’s being careful with it. 

“She looks like she has her wits about her,” she says. He leans back slightly on his heels and closes his eyes, trying to conjure that expression on Keyleth’s face, prepared, gathered, ready. He’s seen it before, so many times. It’s not hard to imagine. 

“Frankly,” Allura says, stepping forward to place her hand on his wrist. “She looks a lot less disheartened than you do.”

He huffs out a weak breath. “Sounds about right.”

He leaves it there. It would be too much to explain that for a while now, she has been his hope. In her sunshine alone, he has his few moments of clear optimism. She took that with her too. 

He reaches into his pocket to feel the weight of the scrying stone and rejoins the group as they head for the door with nowhere to go next.

Chapter Text

Sometimes, when Keyleth is thinking and all the voices in her head start to chime in, when the static of all potential consequences and considerations grinds into the inside of her skull, sometimes she can’t take it anymore and she just jumps. 

She’s no stranger to making mistakes. It doesn’t even surprise her anymore when the people around her expect her to screw up. 

It happens. 

Usually not as bad as this. 

The second she swings at the orb she realizes it’s a mistake. Maybe even the second before. 

Her gut sinks with a sudden certainty that she has done something very bad. But there’s no time for the voices or anyone else to grab hold again and turn their attention to yelling at her for being stupid. Because she tries to pull her hand back and realizes she can’t and then she’s being pulled.

It’s like nothing she’s ever felt before, like her body collapsing in on itself, like every molecule of her body crashing into each other, like she’s exploding across time. She wants to scream, but she is nothing to scream. 

And then when she is, she’s hitting the ground. 

For a moment she just wheezes, curling defensively in a ball on the ground as she shakes, feeling for all intents and purposes like a fall leaf that’s been crunched, a smear of dust on the ground. 

It’s quiet. She notices that first, that she’s alone. 

No sounds of the party’s debate of what to do, of straggling moments of the fight. The orb is still in front of her, and she almost touches it again immediately, desperate to find an undo button, as she frequently finds herself, hoping she can reverse course before anyone notices how collasally she’s fucked up. 

“Stop,” she says sharply, before she touches it. “What are you doing?”

Her whole body is still rippling with the aftershocks of her journey. Who knows if touching that thing will bring her back to where she was? Who knows if she’ll survive it?

She takes in the orb again, follows a stream of energy that trickles away from it and into the sky, out and across this strange landscape she’s found herself in and to the top of an impossible tower. She’s in a city. A dark, gray, lifeless city. The corners and edges seem harsh and everything from the sky to ground seems desolate. 

She notices last that she’s not alone. 

Above the city, she sees her first sign of other life, these flying creatures that for a second seem like they could be birds before they start towards her and grow and grow in her vision. 

“Shit,” she says. She glances around quick, but there aren’t a lot of places where she is on the outskirts of this city to hide quickly and thoroughly. She’s out of Wild Shape, still exhausted from their very long day. 

Later, she’ll think, this is where it starts. Not a mistake necessarily, not like touching the stupid orb in the first place, but where the change in her really begins.

She has a handful of Polymorphs left, and turns herself quickly into something small and fast, a gray rabbit. The gray rabbit knows what to do. It runs and runs and runs, so close to the barren craggy ground, and loses the big winged things and loses herself also in the maze of the unfamiliar empty streets of this place.

As an animal, there’s no overthinking. There’s barely thinking. There’s senses and instincts. Decisions happen in a second, consequences are responded to by dying or not dying. She keeps not dying, and she keeps making decisions quickly, and she keeps being a rabbit for as many Polymorphs she has left. The Keyleth starts to quiet. The rabbit doesn’t care that she screwed up and touched that orb. The rabbit doesn’t picture the faces of all of her friends rolling their eyes again at her impulsive mistakes. The rabbit doesn’t spin her wheels, panickingly scratching through her brain for ideas and solutions.

The rabbit survives. It waits for the night and when it realizes there is no night here, just a perpetual dim and this endless city, Keyleth drops back into herself and finds a tight alleyway with coverage from above and curls up into the smallest of small balls and tries to sleep away the ache in her bones and the pounding in her head. Sleep takes her before the wave of her human thoughts can remember to find her. 

—

Vex was right, Keyleth realizes her stomach roils horribly. She should have slowed down. 

She lunges forward off the couch, but there’s nowhere to go. She barfs the contents of her aching stomach right there on the edge of the carpet in front of the fire. 

“Fuck,” somebody says. 

Another somebody, Vax, is by her side quickly as she heaves on her hands and knees. He brushes her hair back away from her mouth, gathering it in his hands and pulling it away from her neck. It yanks some strands sharply free from where they’d dried to the wounds on her back. The pain is an unexpected whiteout and she flings herself away from him with a growl deep in her chest. In a split second, she reaches for anything, a wild shape, a polymorph, anything to become the small fast prey animal she suddenly feels like again, but she’s remains horribly herself, trapped, shaking and spitting up the last of the food in her stomach. 

She catches her breath and listens to the harsh silence overtake the room. The animal subsides, the pain and danger passes. The girl peeks out from around the edge of her filthy strands of hair and sees Vax there still on his knees on the rug, frozen in place, still turned towards her. 

Her stomach turns again. His hands are in the air, fingers spread wide, watching with a deep concern. She’s never felt so nauseous in her life. 

“I’m sorry,” she tries to say. Whatever force of voice she had is gone though, and she more mouths the words than anything else. 

He shakes his head and inches closer to her, that inscrutable look of wonder unchanged. “I’m sorry,” he breathes back, voice pitched high like he can see the small flighty creature she really is inside. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to….”

The sound has resumed above her head but it fuzzes in her ears. Vax is still locked onto her. He takes another slow inch forward, carefully projecting his movement towards her. She nods, and after that holds very still as he closes the distance. He finishes the job, pushing her hair away from her face and pressing a handkerchief into her shaky palm. She wipes at her mouth and then uses the back to wipe at the dirt and blood on her cheeks and forehead and avoids Vax’s eyes as they burn into her cheek. 

He said he loved you, the scared little girl in her hisses. Look at him. Look at how beautiful and charming and wonderful he is, and he said he loved you, you gross coward of a thing. How soon do you think he’ll take it back?

She can’t bring herself to look at him again, can’t bring herself to hand the cloth back to him, to reach for his hand where it hovers near hers like she so desperately wants to. There’s a tension between them that rises, one she’s felt before in the days before she disappeared, like he’s building the courage to say something. She holds her breath, knowing that she can’t run from this or anything, stuck horribly in her own body. 

And actually, just like she remembers, Vex interrupts before Vax says anything else. 

She drops to a crouch in front of them, fresh from whatever debate was happening above, and smiles winningly. 

“Keyleth,” she says brightly. “Can you stand up on your own?”

She has to take a brief moment to check. “Yeah,” she croaks. 

“Wonderful,” Vex says. “Then we’re gonna stand you up, get you into a hot fucking bath, and put you to bed. Alright, darling?”

“Yeah,” she repeats, and tries very hard not to cry. She forgot about this. She forgot about when the decisions aren’t all her own. She forgot about when the consequences of each step weren’t life or death. She forgot about when someone else steps up and takes care of you. 

Vex helps her to her feet. 

She takes a quick pass of the rest of her family in the room. They all look tired, but they watch her with something like relief in their eyes. 

“Glad to have you back,” Scanlan says. He shifts uncomfortably, not like he’s weirded out by her scattered actions, but the way he usually does when there’s a heavy solemnity in the room. 

“Yeah, uh, sweet dreams,” Grog offers still from closer to the back. He also looks uncomfortable, the way he does when they deal with things that require delicacy and not an axe to the face. 

As Vex starts leading her to the door, Percy stops her for a second with a hand on her shoulder, gripping tight like before, his expression all firm and repressed. It’s almost funny, how he’s almost the opposite of Vax, who’s been touching her so briefly and so lightly like he’s afraid she’ll disappear. Percy grabs hard like he’s daring her to. 

“We’ll talk in the morning,” he says, like a challenge. 

“Yeah,” she says again. She’d reach up and pat his hand but she is filthy. She nods at him instead.

She glances back at Vax, still watching her from where she left him. Next to her, Vex huffs and rolls her eyes. 

“Oy,” she says, snapping at her brother. “Come on.”

He blinks, eyes darting for a second towards her before shifting back to Keyleth. His face is an open question of permission, desperate, hopeful, pleading, but still a question. 

She’s spent weeks reacting to things, to making the biggest decisions in the briefest second to survive. That’s what animals do, fight or flight, no other choices mattered. The Keyleth of before used to think so much, used to search and reason and debate so much within herself, trying to find the best answer to a problem, trying to win everything, to do the most good as possible. The Keyleth of before would have a lot to think about here, about her own feelings, about his feelings, about how to least hurt him in the now but also trying to predict every single future and how she could hurt him or he could hurt her in any of them.

Maybe she should think it through. Maybe she should swear off jumping forever.

For now, though, she doesn’t think at all, just nods. 

–

It’s the next day that the winged things find her for the first time. 

She stayed as herself for the first few hours of the day, to have her brain again, to try to retrace her steps through the dark city to the orb she came in through, to try to rationally think through her options of escape, and to be able to hate herself just a little, just enough for this colossal fucking mistake. 

She wanders towards the orb, and then debates if she should head towards the tower instead, and then realizes she has no idea how to get to either, and then continues wandering aimlessly while breathing through a panic attack. 

That’s when they find her, when she’s already panicking. Her brain is too on fire to notice the sudden shadow that drops over her before something is taking a bite out of her, the pain exploding through her shoulder. 

There’s four of them. They’re ugly and vicious and desperately want to eat her. She throws spells at them, fire and ice exploding out of her fingers on instinct. She kills one, maybe two, before she realizes how many swipes they’re getting in, how quickly this is becoming a war of attrition she’ll absolutely lose. An animal would have noticed sooner. An animal would have chosen fight or flight and done it.

She goes Minxie and starts running. The winged creatures try to catch her, try to keep up. Unlike a rabbit, Minxie is not small, but she is fast and she is close enough to the ground to slip away from the monsters into the labyrinth of the city. 

Being Minxie is different. She’s still herself in her head as she runs. She’s still panicked, fully aware of how much more lost she’s getting, of how bad this can get for her if she’s already this hurt this early in the day, if those creatures keep coming, which they surely will. It’s all her when she has to decide if she should just keep running or find somewhere to hide. 

A little less her than when she’s human, she can smell more, faint signatures of enemies and this alien nature in the air. Her hunger is more keen, less a painful problem and more an increasingly urgent bloodlust. Minxie wants to hunt. Minxie wants to lick her wounds. Minxie finds another well-squared away corner that smells safe to hunker down and decide what to do next. 

When she does cram herself in the dark corner and turn back into herself, that straightforward thinking, that practical assessment of needs, that ease in the absence of her broken human brain fades away. 

And instead of food or her injuries or her next steps, she thinks about her mom. 

When Keyleth first left home, she thought about her mom every single day, every single step she took.

Did her mother see the same things she was seeing? Did she feel the same things she was feeling? Would she make the same choices? Did she make the same choices? 

Did she feel the same pressure? Did she waste as much time? Did she realize just how wrong she was about everything?

The questions still linger with her, constantly, but have gotten quieter the longer she goes without any hope for real answers. 

She presses her back against this stone wall until she can feel it scrape against the base of her skull. She holds her breath for a while, waiting to hear if there are any noises of threats approaching. Her brain still spins and thinks, not of where her mother might have been at this point of her journey, but where she might be right now. 

There’s never been an easy answer. If it’s better to believe that her mother is dead, or to believe that her mother decided to never come home. Maybe she was trapped somewhere, some horrifying circumstances keeping her gone for years and years. But what could she hope for more: that her mother was gone forever or had been hurting for years or that she was alive but found some reason to never come home?

A hot series of tears slip out of the corners of her eyes and down her cheeks, over a small scrape on her jaw from the earlier fight. 

“Get it together,” she hisses at herself, before holding her breath again. 

The tears don’t stop, but she stays silent and doesn’t sob.

Did her mother feel this, when she realized she might die? (Might. Was that hopeful? Was that foolish? Is she going to die?)

Did her mother have time to feel this, if, when, if she was dying? Was it fast? Was it painful? Was she alone? Did she think of Keyleth, if she had time to? Did she think of Zephrah, of the responsibility to their people that she handed down to Keyleth, that she has held and guarded and worn heavy on her shoulders for all the years since? Did she know that the responsibility would go to her in the second of her death? What did she think about that? 

What was it like, having a child and knowing that she would live hundreds of years after her death? Did she regret it? Did it scare her? Was there relief, freedom from that fate, in death?

Would Keyleth feel relief in hers?

She’s thought about it a lot, what it would be like to be wrong, to not outlive all of the people she’s come to love, to die young. She’d be willing to do it, to die for the right cause, to die for her friends, her family. 

She’s wondered how much of that impulse is selfish, born of the fear of being alone at the end of it all, searching for any way out of it.

The thing is, she probably couldn’t do it. Every time she’s tried, to be a martyr, she’s failed stupidly. There’s never been the need for her to die. Fate seems to laugh at her like that. And when it comes down to it, she does wonder if she actually could, if she could die young, while holding onto the weight of her responsibility to her people. 

Two failed Aramentes in so few years. Would that be an omen, a sign of something terrible befalling Zephrah? She’d never heard of such a thing in her studies. What would they possibly do? What would her dad do? Would he continue to lead, now that he was alone?

She claps her hand over her mouth before a broken laugh shakes itself out of her throat. Because it doesn’t matter.  

What an idiot, thinking that it was her choice in any way, thinking for a second she had any handle on her fate, that she could accept it or reject it. 

She’s going to die here. Her stomach aches, the cuts in her body burn, her hands are shaking. 

She’s going to die and she’s alone. 

It was always going to be like this, one way or another. She can sit and worry about what it means, about her mother, about her father, about her people, about what any of it ever meant. But she was always going to die alone.

Her breath is coming in too fast. She’s panicking again and she almost turns into Minxie, just to avoid it. But she doesn’t want to let go just yet, She slides down the wall, lays down on the hard cold ground. 

She thinks of Vox Machina. She thinks of Vex. She thinks of Percy. 

She thinks of Vax. 

She’s spent so long, bracing herself for what it would be like to lose them, knowing, knowing that one day she would lose them. Too many nights have passed with her playing it all out, pre-grieving them all, reconstructing a version of herself without them, like that could help, like she could prepare for it at all. A test that she had to study for, had to pass in order to survive. 

She never thought of what she would say to them in the event of her death. Her mother left nothing. One way or another, she thought she would come back. 

Keyleth almost thinks now, of what to say to them, of what she would want them to know. (All of them, all of them her family, and Vax , what she would want Vax to know now.) But what would be the point to even thinking it? There’s nothing she can say. 

She’s already gone. 

Chapter Text

“Percy has been telling us a lot of stories about the castle,” Vex says, a foot ahead of Keyleth as they walk through the empty halls. Her voice is hushed even though they’ve yet to see another person in the halls. “I’m sure he’ll be glad to have a new audience member. They’re actually interesting though you know Percy he gets excited over the strangest little things.”

The words are mostly a wash over Keyleth’s brain, but it’s nice to have noise, distraction from her aches, from her numb blistered feet, from the acid reflux sting in her throat. 

Vax is a foot behind her, her shadow still. 

“Here we are,” Vex says, pushing open a door to a room with a large tub. “Do you want us both in or should somebody—” She gestures with her thumb at Vax and makes a face. “—wait outside?”

She stares into the large bathroom, at how simple it looks, at how alien it feels. 

“I can,” she coughs out. “Do it.” Though that might be a lie. She doesn’t know if she’ll remember how to use all the things in there, how to be a real person again. 

“Keyleth,” Vex says. She tips her head to the side like she does when she’s bargaining. “You’ve been missing, alone, for the past five weeks. I think it might be best for everybody’s state of mind if you have someone with you right now.”

Five. Five weeks. 

The number sounds right. More than days, less than months. Longer than a month. 

Maybe she’ll ask how many days. That would be more exact, right?

But she knows like she knew on the other plane that exact didn’t really matter. A number is just a number. The only day that mattered was the one in front of her. 

“Doesn’t have to be us,” Vex is continuing. “I can go get Pike. Or—”

“Both of you,” she says, stepping over the threshold into the bathing room. There are so many things, little bottles and buckets and towels. She guessed right, she doesn’t know what to do with all of it. It’s been five weeks. “Please.”

“Of course,” Vax says immediately. 

The twins set about lighting the candles and the fireplace in the room. It’s something she can do easily, even as tapped as she is. It’s something she used to do all the time for everybody, almost on instinct. She wonders if they’ve gotten used to not having her around. 

Keyleth gets pulled away from those thoughts when the light reveals a tall mirror in the back of the room. Gods, she’s a horror right now. 

It’s nothing she didn’t necessarily know. Her clothes are in tatters, stained deep with gray dirt and dried blood. Her hair is a frizzed tangled matted collection of knot that hangs off her shoulders. It’s also stained, a mixed brown of muck and blood and ichor. There’s a slight chip on her right antler from a fall she took off one of the walls in the city. Up and down her arms, there are Ashari symbols she’d traced out in her own blood a few days, maybe a week ago, to feel more grounded in herself, to remind herself of home. It’s been slightly longer than that since she’s last cleaned herself, since she had enough magic leftover at the end of a day to create some water she could afford to wipe herself down with instead of just drink. 

But it’s been so long since she’s seen herself at all, let alone this version of her that looks like she’s been dragged behind a cart halfway across Exandria and back. It feels like meeting a stranger. A very dirty, very tired looking stranger. 

When Vax steps into view behind her, he looks more familiar than she does. 

She has a strange moment of perspective, of seeing herself this horrible and seeing him see her this horrible and seeing her see him see her and to infinity. 

Five weeks. It’s felt like a lifetime and like nothing at all because all she thought about through it was this, was getting back, was all of them, and yet it feels in this moment like everything else about her has been stripped away, all of it in sacrifice to land her here. With any luck, it is just buried under all of this dirt. But she feels foreign, the longing remains even though she can’t quite remember what she’s supposed to do next. 

“Do you—” Vax starts. “What do you need?”

Tell me I’m okay, she thinks. Tell me I’m the same. Lie, and tell me it never happened at all. 

She blinks, and remembers the bath. Vex is bustling about, putting together more candles and sweet smelling oils and soaps. She's always had such an eye for luxury. It’s one of those admirable features she traces over again and again, one of the things about Vex she was desperate to not forget. 

Keyleth turns from the stranger in the mirror, keeps her eyes on the bath. She knows what will be the hardest, but reaches up to try anyway, like she has to demonstrate her helplessness. The cuts on her back pull and sting as she tries to find the places where her antlers are settled against the crown of her head. 

“Um,” she says, tilting her head towards Vax. “Could you—?”

He’s already there, his fingers on hers, guiding them down and taking over.

“Shit,” Vex says, freezing in her movement, staring over at her as Vax makes quick and careful work of guiding her circlet off without pulling at the dirt and the blood. “You’ll need some new clothes, probably.”

Keyleth glances down at the shreds of her top. “Probably.”

“One second,” she says, sweeping out of the room without another word.

It’s just her and Vax in the quiet room. He crosses the mirror to place her circlet on a side stand, holding it with a ridiculous sort of reverence. 

He turns and stops and stares at her again. The flickering candlelight shakes the shadows that cast across his face, masking the subtler keys of his expression but not the fact that he just keeps looking at her. 

“Vax,” she says pleadingly. Her stomach turns some more, something in it rising. Please tell me what you see. Please tell me it’s not as bad as I think. 

He blinks hard. “I’m sorry,” he breathes. “I’m sorry, I’m staring.”

He shakes his head once, like he’s trying to get something loose, and his eyes drop to the floor. 

She’s deeply unsatisfied with that and her feet carry her over to him again without thought, that same feeling of being pulled, a sharp tug right beneath her sternum and in towards him. This time she doesn’t crash into his arms, stops a little further away, but close enough that he has to look at her again. 

“Vax,” she breathes. Fuck the mirror, fuck the stranger in it. She can trust that to show her how things are, but not as much as she can trust the reflection of her in his eyes to show her something more important. 

She watches his shaky inhale as his eyes sweep over her face again. And again and again. 

“I, um…” His eyelashes flutter, and he swallows hard. “I’m sorry. I just… I thought I was never going to see you again.” He says it hushed like it’s the worst kind of confession, like admitting a sin. 

She doesn’t know what to say. For all that she wondered what they were doing without her, how she would find them if she made it back, she didn’t know. She didn’t know if they were trying to find her, she didn’t know if they could, and she didn’t know what it would feel like for them, for her to disappear.

She thinks about every time Vax has run off ahead of them, has thrown himself into danger, has almost died right in front of her. She thinks about the last time that happened, about that sick worry that she had only started expressing to him when he had kissed it away, when he had dropped her out of that angry concern and into a dizzying confusion. 

She doesn’t know what to say. She just takes another step towards him, proof that she’s here, for better or worse. 

He reaches out, with that same terrified hesitancy. His hand brushes a bit of her hair out of her face and behind her ear. Some small clump of dirt rolls out of it and hits the clean stone floor. She winces and ducks her head. 

“How bad is it?” she asks. His hand doesn’t move, just continues a gentle stroke along the strand. 

He shakes his head. “It’s alright,” he says. His voice is so gentle and comforting. “I can fix it. I… if you… if that’s alright?”

She touches the back of his palm. His hand is colder than hers. 

“Okay,” she breathes. 

He leans forward and for a second she thinks of the study again, of his chapped lips gentle on hers, of the sound of her pulse in her ears. It had echoed in every molecule of her body that whole day, one corner of her brain spiraling with realizations, constructing a million responses and trying desperately to play them out amid her fears and anxieties. She thought she knew what was best, what she should do. And then everything in her was rewritten. 

He doesn’t kiss her now, just moves slowly forward to rest his forehead against hers. She closes her eyes and he lingers for a few perfect moments, close and warm. It’s been so long since someone has touched her, since contact hasn’t meant pain. His skin is warm against hers, his shaky breaths gust over her lips. 

She wants to kiss him again. She wants to feel it again, to remember what it was like, to have another chance to figure out what it means, what it feels like, what it could be now that she can be again.  

Just as she crystallizes around the urge though, he’s pulling away from her, and steps away to go about filling the tub. She stays, half frozen, in the middle of the room, wrapping her arms tight around her torso. 

When Vex comes back in, she raises an eyebrow sharply but doesn’t say anything. 

–

The water is so hot, it scalds her skin when she steps in. It’s a welcome pain as she sinks into it, feeling each of her muscles start to unlock, the layer of grime on her float up and away. 

She drowns in the steam, in the smell of the honeysuckle and lavender oils Vex added to the tub. 

It’s strange how at the same time a wave of sleepy peace crashes over her, a part of her wakes back up. She slumps all the way down into it and tips her head back against the edge of the tub, closing her eyes and barely keeping herself from moaning out loud.

She knows the twins are still there, can feel them watching her, but she still takes a few moments to just rest in the water. 

When Vex offers her a little plate of soaps, she takes it eagerly and starts scrubbing herself down. It stings in the number of still present cuts that litter her back, her arms, her sides. Pike’s healing did a lot, but there were many days where there was no healing left for her at the end of the day. The open cuts and scars become more clear and quantifiable as she wipes away the dirt.

“Let me grab you some bandages, darling,” Vex says. She hops to it, eager to keep busy. 

Vax stands where he is still, splitting the difference between looking at her and not, staring intently at the little soap plate like it’s the most important thing in the universe. 

She dunks herself beneath the waterline for a second to wash off her face and wet her hair and also escape for a second. 

She’s so tired and yet it all feels like a dream: the warmth of the bath, Vax, being safe for the moment. Five weeks and she dreamed of the idea of this. And now she’s here. All of the voices in her head go quiet, the girl, the animal, the god. The compromise of her in the middle. 

She comes up for air and wipes the water droplets out of her eyes before finding Vax again, still sentry in the middle of the room. 

“Vax?” she says. 

“Yes?” His eyes are on her immediately. She almost sinks under again. 

“Um, could you… help?” she asks, gesturing to her hair. 

He nods and it looks like it takes a second for him to remember to move. 

“Here,” he says, moving to sit at the end of the tub. He reaches in the water and gathers her hair together. “You can rest your head there on the side and I can… work.”

Their hands brush when she hands him the soap and she watches a slow shiver travel along his shoulders before she turns.

The edge of the tub is cool against her warm cheek. Her eyes trace the steady flicker of a small candle flame across from her and she listens to the sounds of the water moving as Vax’s hands dip in and out. 

It’s a hazy trickle of time as he works. His fingers are steady and sure, washing through her hair and carefully picking through clumps. He works slowly splitting her hair into smaller and smaller sections, tracing along the crown of her head and then down. He’ll gather a knot between a finger and a thumb and rub soft circles to loosen it until he can slowly pull more and more hair free. 

There’s an occasional slight tug at her scalp as he traces strands through to their frazzled split ends, pulling even the smallest of knots free with an intent focus and precision. It feels good though, and her blinks start to come in heavy as he steadily makes progress with each tangle, stroke, and knot. Sometimes his fingers flutter up to her forehead, along the edge of her hairline as he gathers another grouping of hair to tackle. Even not looking at him she can feel the concentrated heat of his attention, like there’s no more important task than this. She sighs and tries not to lean into his touch.

At some point, in her loose comfortable haze, Vax shifts, sitting slightly in front of her as he takes a small brush to the very ends of her hair and sorts them out. She studies him. The shadows dance harsh angles across him, but he looks warm and fuzzy in the soft light. The planes of his face are sharp, but she can still see the softness in him, the curved furrow between his brow, the slope of neck, the soft skin beneath his jaw. 

It tightens her chest. 

“Oh,” she exhales.

His hands slow to a stop. His eyes drop to hers. “Kiki?”

There was a time when she might have stopped and overthought. She’s too tired now to think. 

“I kinda forgot how beautiful you are,” she whispers. 

He flushes vibrantly, his gaze flitting between her and his lap, panicked and frantic. His eyes are wide and he blinks rapidly. He stammers half-starts to nothing sentences, and she watches in wonder as he falls apart a bit, just because of something she said. 

It’s strange. He looks shy. She didn’t expect that, that something that seems so simple and factual would have this kind of effect on him. He is beautiful, and he is charming, and he is deeply romantic and suave when he wants to be. She’s watched him before, in taverns and shops and bars as he’s effortlessly charmed people. She’s been impressed, witnessing the ease with which he can endear himself to others, knowing it was something special, something she could never replicate.

She’s never seen him like this before, frazzled, stuttering, blushing. Like their roles are reversed. Like she’s the suave smooth-talking charmer and not a bedraggled rat in a bathtub. It makes her wonder if this is how he’s felt, when he flirts with someone at a tavern, turns his dangerous eyes and smile and everything onto someone and watches them go soft for him. If this is how he felt for a second in Ander’s study as she blushed and stammered after he kissed her.

She doesn’t know what she’s feeling now though, just that she’s surprised to see him like this. 

“D-do you–?” he tries. “If you, um, if you sit up, I can finish?”

“Okay,” she says, and tears her eyes away from him, shifting up and wrapping her arms around her chest when the chill of the air pebbles her skin. 

Vax clears his throat and shifts again behind her, drawing the brush down just as carefully as before. Her hair feels dry and fine, but he’s able to pull the brush through. It feels like a miracle that he didn’t have to chop the whole thing off. 

He sets the brush down and starts pulling her wet hair into a loose braid. His knuckles brush against her back, sometimes twinging against a cut or bruise, sometimes leaving small tingling lines against her skin. She holds very still, ignoring every impulse to jerk away or lean in harder, just let it happen.

He tugs a leather band out of his own hair to tie hers off.

“Thank you,” she says, reaching up to trace along the plait. 

He doesn’t say anything, but does lean forward to press an almost comically quick kiss to the top of her head. 

“Anything,” he says like a vow. She believes him. 

Chapter Text

Keyleth barely sleeps. 

The bed is too soft. Every time she closes her eyes she feels like she’s falling, like the world is going to swallow her up. 

She’s wrapped in clean clothes and heavy blankets. All the lights in the room are out, but pale light from the moons and some blinking stars comes in through the window next to the bed. Wind whistles by outside, the twins breathing beats out in syncopation, every scratchy shift of blankets echoes like thunder. The stimulation fills her brain with loud static, gray fuzz buzzing on the inside of her eyelids.

Trinket is in the far corner snoring steadily, and it should be comforting, but her skin crawls, the animal inside prowling about, part predator, part prey, pulse-poundingly aware of another animal in the room and itching to do something about it. Run, fight, hide. 

She’s spent the past five weeks falling asleep while pinned in on every side by walls or other cover, straining her ears to make sure there was nothing nearby. Ever exhausted, she would dig her fingernails just slightly into the skin of her palm and sit on her hand, keeping just enough pressure and pain there to stay slightly awake, to not sleep through any approaching threats. There wasn’t a difference between day and night so she would sleep for however long she could whenever she could before moving again and hoping it would be enough to replenish her energy.

Honestly, that’s what her life has been for the past few weeks, hoping she had just enough to continue scraping by. Just enough food, just enough water, just enough sleep, just enough energy left to not die for another few hours and another few hours and another few hours. Everything of these past few hours back in Whitestone, back with Vox Machina, have been more than enough, have been almost too much. Definitely too much food. But also too much softness, too much comfort, too much care. Just like the food she feels it sit heavy in her stomach and make her insides twist and cramp in confusion. 

She’s still so tired. She feels the weight of it in her limbs, feels her head ache with just how much it wants to let go. Tension keeps rippling through her though, her body not sure how to relax, her muscles twitching with the need to prepare. It keeps her up, even as she aches.

There’s one moment where she almost slips, where she can feel it all get too heavy and tip over into much needed rest. But just as she starts to fall, Trinket lets out another little snort and her heart jolts and she jerks back again to this side of consciousness, holding every muscle in her body painfully still so she doesn’t go running or reaching for a spell to throw at the threat. 

She swallows around her dry throat, and slowly cracks her eyes open again. 

Vex is resting on Trinket in the corner, curled up into a tight ball, her fingers buried in his fur. Vax is on the floor between them and the bed where a small rug is, face smoothed out, mouth hanging slightly open in his sleep. 

She’s so tired. Her stomach twists, and she wants . 

She gathers the heaviest quilt and drags it with her as she slips out of bed. It takes a second for her legs to catch her weight, but that doesn’t matter, she’s on the way down anyway, taking a couple shaky steps across the cold stone floor before guiding herself slowly to land on top of him.

His body is sleep-warm and soft and squirmy. It’s better than the bed, she doesn’t feel like she’s sinking into him. Having all his little breathy sleepy noises louder in her ears is better than having them tickle at the edges of her senses, it washes fully over her and soothes her. 

He shifts beneath her as the blankets fall and settle over them. 

His hand comes up to the center of her back to balance her, and he groans like he’s waking up.

“Key?” he mumbles, sounding confused. 

Right. It hadn’t quite occurred to her that he would wake up. Her head feels soupy.

“Sorry,” she says, even though she’s not. Her muscles are untensing, her eyelids feel heavier and heavier. His breath coasts over the tip of her ear and his heart thumps swimmily beneath her head. 

“Are you alright?” he asks, voice hoarse and airy. 

She nods, the movement digging her face deeper into the crook of his neck. He smells like traces of that honeysuckle soap Vex picked out and sweet sleep sweat. She feels half tempted to lick his skin, to see what he tastes like. But that’s weird and she’s tired and her body is going slow.

His other hand comes up to gently cradle the back of her head. 

She doesn’t like the feeling of it, it itches at the animal, so she reaches up to take his wrist and pin it to the side of his pillow. He hums lightly, turning slightly until his nose presses into her temple. She slips her hand up, folding her fingers into his before her wrist goes limp and she blessedly passes out. 

–

Vax barely sleeps.

He hasn’t really slept much in the past three days, since his sister died. And when he’s tried, he’s mostly spent the time with his eyes closed and his fingers pressed into his neck, counting out the beats of his own pulse, waiting to see if it would stop at any point, the Matron finally claiming his payment. 

He thinks it may be tonight. It would be fitting in a strange way. It would almost be kind as well. To get to see Keyleth again, to know for certain that she’s safe, really safe, not just the ten minute glimpses he’s had for the past few weeks to assure him. To have a last moment as sweet as this. To be able to say goodbye. 

“I love you,” he whispers. She’s already asleep. 

It’s better this way probably. He’s a coward. He wouldn’t know how to say goodbye to her, to explain what he did, to finally answer for what he said in Ander’s study all those lifetimes ago. 

If it’s tonight, at least he’ll go like this, with her in his arms, her face in his neck, her hand in his. Her hair soaks a cold wet spot on his shoulder where the tip of her braid rests. Her fingertips are cool and twitch sometimes in her sleep. Her breathing becomes a concerted little sniffle every few minutes. 

She’s every bit a miracle to hold as he imagined. 

He can’t sleep. You can’t sleep in a dream and this is a dream. One he’s had before. Many he’s had before. Keyleth, safe and back with them. Keyleth, in his arms. Keyleth.

He’d be happy to do this every night forever. Just this one moment though could also carry him for as long as he has left. 

The weight of her on top of him makes it hard to breathe. 

She’s here. Alive. A dream. 

He wonders if this is the sort of thing he should thank the Matron for. That she would be gratuitous enough to let him have this moment, Keyleth alive and asleep on top of him, his sister alive again and snoring along with Trinket. Is it fate? Or is it a defiance of death, of the Raven Queen, that Keyleth is here right now? 

He watched her, every day for ten minutes, praying to the whole pantheon every time he took the scrying eye in his hand that he’d see anything, any sign that she was still alive. Sometimes sleeping, sometimes hiding, sometimes Minxie, sometimes some other creature that he’d still somehow recognize as her. Very very rarely, three total times, he’d seen her fighting and he’d watch, heart in his throat as she alone tore through alien beasts with claws or fire or ice. She fought her way through, fought her way back to them. How could he credit anyone else with it?

His sister died in seconds. In a single second, a single decision and a single breath. She was standing in the wrong place. He left her there for less than a minute. There was no fight about it. How could he blame her for that?

Keyleth snuffles again, kicking out slightly against his shin and snuggling in closer. 

“Ow,” he mouths to the ceiling. 

His thumb strokes small circles into the back of her shirt and closes his eyes. 

It’s okay , he thinks. If this is it. If it’s not my choice, if it’s not anyone’s, just Hers. This is okay. I can go like this. 

—

When she opens her eyes, everything is gold. 

It takes her a second to place it. 

Sunlight. 

Her heart stops in her chest and her eyes dart to the window. Sure enough, she can see the edge of the sun, bright and yellow and shining powerfully through at the angle of the window, spilling across the bed she abandoned and their little sliver of floor. 

It’s been weeks since she’s seen the sun.

She gasps, pushing herself off of Vax who is still asleep soundly. His arm flops to the rug and his head tips back against the floor but he sleeps on. He looks even more gorgeous in the daylight, the rays of the sun lighting his dark hair to a warm rich brown, like fertile soil. Her heart thumps, seeing him soft and hazy in the morning light. There’s the urge to dive back in and press herself against him again, feel his steady sleep-slow breaths against her ear, explore that sweet warm place beneath his jaw with her nose.

But she’s called away, by the burning sun. She staggers over to the bed and the window with a desperate determination to get closer. Kneeling on the bed, reaching out for the glass, it’s still not close enough. She pushes the window open and inhales deeply, breathing in what feels like the warmth of the sun and the very essence of life of the nature around the castle. It still doesn’t satiate the frantic nature addict awakening in her. She needs to be closer. She needs to be in it again, in a world that’s alive. So she turns herself into a bird and flings herself out into the sunrise. 

Birds can’t cry, but she feels a sob building in her chest, pure joy and wonder and awe. 

That’s the sun and it’s golden. The warmth of it sinks into her feathers, burns her eyes in the best way. And there are colors everywhere as the light returns. The sky in light blues and pinks. Puffy white clouds and thin silver linings. 

Beneath her as she soars, there are fields and cobbled roofs and other birds that are sweet and dumb and not interested in eating her. 

In the center of the town, the Sun Tree stands tall as she remembers. Once an omen, it looks softer now, like it’s slowly growing back to life. 

She takes a wide arc around the streets and buildings, taking in the waking city and the slow moving people before she lands at the base of the Sun Tree and turns back into herself, standing in the center square still in her pajamas. 

She can’t bring herself to care for a single second because this is her, this is her power: nature, trees, the sun and the air and the soft chattering animals. This is where she belongs, for one, a world with sunlight and color and fresh air. But this is also a part of her, she can feel the itch of the trees and the elements and the cold dirt beneath her bare feet at the edge of her soul. It’s part of her and it was taken from her, or she was taken from it and she didn’t even notice that it felt like a severed limb until this very moment. She closes her eyes, tips her head back and feels like her face is being set on fire by the warmth of the sunbeams, even though it’s early in the morning, even though it’s winter. 

She walks slowly forward, her legs still half asleep, and places her hand flat against the bark of the tree. 

“Hello,” she says softly. The scrape is gentle and blessed and she nearly falls over with how right it feels. She smiles and it still stretches weirdly at her face but she presses each pad of each finger in harder and reaches out with her soul to the tree. I’m so sorry. Accept me back, please. I’m still the same, I promise. She clears her throat and drops her forehead to the bark. “I’m Keyleth. I’ve been gone for a little while, but I’m back now.”

There’s a syrupy slow moment where she can feel the pure energy of the natural world sing into her body again, like coming home, like the best night sleep she’s ever had, like she’s being rewritten. 

And then the tree responds. “Hey, Keyleth.”

—

It’s a while later, after she has a baffling conversation with the Sun Tree and after she has a long deep cry about it, she hears some steps approach. Sitting at the base of the tree, she prepares to turn into a bird again to get away from a conversation with some poor townsfolk. She doesn’t feel ready for civilization yet. 

“Thought I’d find you here,” Percy calls out seconds before she does, like he can tell she’s about to become a literal flight risk. 

She settles back into her sit bones and turns back to look up at him. He’s dressed for the weather, wrapped in a thick looking coat, hands tucked deep in his pockets.

She’s freezing, but she’s used to it.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she says. “I’m very lost.”

“I figured that as well,” he says. He hovers for a moment, boots shifting in the dirt next to her before he realizes that she isn’t getting up. He sighs and sits down next to her, folding his gawkish legs beneath him. “I’m actually surprised by how much I do remember my way around this place after so long. And I never had the appetite for sneaking out to town like some of my siblings.”

She leans far to the right until her shoulder presses into his. The sun has been on her skin for long enough now that she feels itchy and hot. The warmth of the light is buried into her bones and it makes her feel tired like a summer afternoon, not like the brisk winter morning it is. 

“A lot of things here have surprised me the past few weeks,” Percy continues. “It’s been terrible. I’ve been feeling a lot of human emotions.”

“You’re human, Percy,” she says chidingly. “They’re just called emotions.”

It feels like the first normal thing she’s said since she got back. She smiles to herself. 

He doesn’t respond with another snark, even as she’s equally interested and nervous to see if she can slip back into one of their little dialogues. Instead he lets the back and forth volley slip away and wraps his arms around her shoulders, crushing her into a tight side hug. She can feel her shoulder blades grind together, and thinks about how fitting it is that affection with Percy always hurts just a little. He wouldn’t believe it otherwise. 

“I got very mad, actually,” he says. “After you…” She closes her eyes and rests her head against his. “I was never going to come back here. I don’t think I would have if we didn’t have to. I’m really tired of losing family members to this fucking place and to the fucking Briarwoods.”

A small warmth like another sun blooms inside her chest, and she wraps her arms around his waist, grinding the knuckle of her thumb against his side.

“Not to come to their defense because they suck,” she says. “But this one was probably more my fault than the Briarwoods.” 

He shakes his head, his glasses scraping back and forth against her temple. “Oh no, absolutely not. It’s completely all their fault.”

“Well, alright,” she concedes. “Fuck the Briarwoods.”

“For the record, though,” he says. “Do not do something like that ever again. I become very unbearable, it turns out, without you to keep me in check. It’s honestly a miracle the rest didn’t kill me.”

“You know, you can just say that you missed me,” she says, poking his side. 

“I missed you,” he says, quicker and fiercer than she expected. “I missed you a lot. I thought you were gone forever. We all did. And it wasn’t fucking fair because you’re the person that showed me that I could have a family again. So no, don’t ever do that again.”

He very kindly doesn’t react to her sniffling, to the little tears that slip out of the corner of her eyes. 

“I missed you, too,” she says. “I’ll try not to get sucked into a hell dimension in the future.”

He nods, spine straightening like he’s satisfied with his win. 

“Next time, at least take your boy with you,” he says. “He was miserably mopey. Worse than me.”

Her face flushes immediately and she feels the inside of her chest go fluttery and goopy. She can still smell leather and sweat and mothballs from where she had her nose pressed under his jaw all night. She can still feel his phantom fingers in her hair, delicate and intent in their untangling. 

She pushes away and elbows Percy in the ribs. “You, just… shut up.”

He barks out a laugh and shoves her back before escaping retribution by hopping to his feet. 

“Come on,” he says, sticking his hand down for her. “You’re due for a truly horrible conversation over breakfast.”

She waits a second for her face to stop flaming before letting him pull her up.

“How bad is it?” she asks as they start side by side through the streets of Whitestone. Some of the townsfolk start moving quickly, going about their business like they weren’t staring. 

“Oh, nothing fancy,” he says. “Just the end of the world.”

Chapter Text

Vax doesn’t feel any different. 

He feels like he should. He feels like there should be only so much he can be expected to take. Keyleth is gone. Dragons are burning the world to the ground. His sister was dead seconds ago and he’s agreed to take her place. 

Vex coughs and breathes and blinks her way back to life. 

He takes her in for a moment and then tears away from her and the group because he’s going to die and he doesn’t want to die in front of her, doesn’t want to do that to her. The rest will know what to do, he has to believe. They’ll keep her away, they’ll explain what he can’t, they’ll finish the job. Vox Machina, two down, can still save the world. That he has to believe more than anything if this is it for him. 

He hurries out of the chamber, down the hall where they came from and holds his sister’s face in his head and holds the scrying stone in his hand and braces. 

He’s blindingly grateful that he hasn’t used it yet today. He feels the urge to, overwhelming always, from the very second he wakes up in the morning and every second after. He usually tides himself over on the thought that there may be a better moment to look, but just ends up caving at some point during the day. 

He thinks there will never be a better time than right now, than seeing her just one last time. 

The scry pulls on him, a sensation all too familiar now, his sight leaving his body and traveling rapidly across a blur of landscape and planes. The gray and black of the Shadowfell, also too familiar, skids to a stop and he finds himself high above the city, trailing a single dark bird in the sky: a raven. 

His heart stops cold in his chest, or whatever the equivalent of that feeling is when he’s not properly in his body. 

Is he already dead? Was it that fast? Did he really drop without seeing her one last time?

He prays again that they’ll keep Vex away for a moment, that they’ll find a way to tell her what he did that won’t make her hate him forever. Not that he cares. There was no other choice. He’d do it again. But he’s a coward, too afraid to face the consequences of his actions, more afraid to live in a world without her. 

The moment continues. He watches the raven glide in the sky above Thar Amphala, and he doesn’t know what death is, but he doesn’t think it would look like this. 

The bird is familiar. He can always sort of tell, finding something in the eyes of Keyleth’s wild shapes that is all her, a spark of her soul that he thinks he could find in any dark. He’s seen her as many other animals as he’s watched her the past month, he’s seen her as a raven before too– small and dark, a good choice for the landscape– and it’s always been a relief to see her alive, always been a staunch and necessary reminder of her ability. She’s so powerful. He’s always admired the animal in her, that wild thing beneath her skin that inches to the surface sometimes, that sharp flash in her that was like nature distilled. 

He loves it like he loves every part of her, but he wants to see her so badly right now it feels like his heart is breaking. 

One last time. Just one. It wasn’t the deal he made at all. He wouldn’t change his deal at all. 

But just one glimpse, one second, one step further than the assurance that she’s still alive. One last look at the woman he loves, at one of the best things that had happened to him, at his biggest and favorite almost, someday, maybe.  

“Please,” he breathes into the ether, into the universe. “Come on, please.”

The raven flies lower to the ground, scoping out a next place to hide, a safe place to land. 

Let her be safe. Let her survive this. Let her make it home. 

He watches as the raven tips her head and seemingly changes her mind, spreading her wings and shooting up into the air, speeding like a bullet through the sky, up and up towards the tall ominous tower in the center of the city. 

She’s heading right for the top of it, the place where the strange line of energy in the sky gathers. Just as she makes it, and lands on the edge of the roof, the scry ends. He drops back into his body, his heart in his throat but still beating, holding his breath but still having his breath to hold. 

His body is thrumming. 

What is she doing? She’s never gone near the tower before. At least not ever when he was watching, which he knows has only ever been the smallest little fraction of her time there. There’s nothing he can do. There never has been. 

She’s been alone for so long. She’s stayed alive for so long. He aches for her like he always does. But this time he also aches for himself, with the desperate desire to see her before he goes. 

This is all he gets though. 

A half sign, an omen. A raven, apparently, in the place of his love. 

Maybe it means something. He doesn’t care to parse it. He breathes for another second and another and doesn’t drop dead. But he’s not fooled. Everything feels like it did minutes ago, but he knows better, knows that nothing will ever be the same again. 

–

He makes it to the night. 

It feels like he’s walking on a razor’s edge. He’s not sure what to believe, what to do with himself, so he does nothing, just holds taut and waits. He’s been doing his best to avoid everybody, and has only failed once. 

There’s nothing he can say. 

But there is something he has to say. And when he can’t write it out, his hand shaking too hard when he tries to put ink to paper, he makes his way to Scanlan’s room and knocks on the door. 

“You need to get her back,” he says, eyes darting from wall to wall as he paces a hole in the floor. 

He can’t bring himself to sit, even as Scanlan makes less than obvious gestures to the open seat in the room. If he stops moving, he thinks he’ll die for sure, like maybe if he’s just fast enough the Matron won’t find him. 

It’s ridiculous. He’s spiraling. 

“I saw her,” he explains. “Through the stone, earlier and she… she was doing something risky, I don’t know… I don’t know what she was trying to do.” 

“Keyleth?” Scanlan asks, giving up and taking the seat himself. 

“Yes,” he breathes. “I know that there are fucking priorities, I know that. But every day that passes is another day that she spends over there and you haven’t seen it, man. It’s… it’s so dark over there. It’s empty and dangerous, and she’s just alone.”

Scanlan nods. “Vax, buddy, I think we’re all in agreement here. We’re gonna get her back.”

He shakes his head. “I know,” he says. “I know that we all want her back, but… I need someone to promise me that you won’t wait too long.” He digs the scrying stone out of his pocket and holds it out. “You haven’t seen it. You haven’t…” He chokes on the words, on the weeks of watching her slowly fade, getting paler, sleeping more, the light in her eyes shifting. He’s held the stone, he’s carried the weight of it devoutly. The only other person who’s used it was Percy. Honestly, he thinks when he’s gone the stone should probably go to Percy, but he can’t bring himself to look at Percy right now. “You have to get her out of there. She’s strong and she’s-she’s doing her best, but it’s not… She’s stuck there and if I could tack it onto this goddamn deal to take her place there, I would… But I’m… If I’m not going to make it… If I can’t…” 

He can’t.

He can’t save her now. 

It stops him in his tracks, literally and figuratively, he stops walking and he stops thinking. He’s lived a life with so few regrets. He doesn’t regret dying. He’d die for Vex a million times over. He’d do what he has done for his sister and for their family over and over and over again. But here he is at the end, with this glaring sin left on the table. 

He’s abandoning her. 

It sinks into his chest like a knife. 

“Wow,” Scanlan says. “You’re, like, in love with her then?”

It startles a noise out of him. Maybe in a different life it’s a laugh. “Yeah.” He manages to stagger over and sit on the edge of the bed.

Scanlan lets out a slow whistle.

“Just,” he says, closing his eyes and dropping his head to his hands. “When you get her back, tell her that I’m sorry.”

“For?” 

He shrugs. “All of it.” 

“All of what, man?” Scanlan asks incredulously. 

“I didn’t mean to fall in love with her,” he says. And when he realized he had, he made promises to himself about what it meant. A promise he broke once when he told her, again when he let her disappear, and now again dying when he knows she isn’t safe. “It just happened. I mean, how could I not? She’s…”

He trails off, smiling helpless into his hands. 

“She’s?” Scanlan echoes. 

He feels like he’s making deathbed confessions, some strange final purging of his soul in this quiet room with Scanlan Shorthalt of all people. This is it, his brain rationalizes. There are things that if he doesn’t say them now, he never gets to say them. He may as well trust a bard with this, may as well let someone better with words than him have this and maybe make something beautiful with it, maybe bring that to Keyleth someday for whatever it's worth to her.

“I’ve tried to explain it to myself a million times,” he says. “She’s wonderful, you know. I’ve never met anyone like her before, someone who cares no matter how much it hurts, who tries as hard as she does.” He shakes his head. “I don’t know. I think, if I could list the reasons, it wouldn’t be as much as it is. Because then maybe I could refute it, you know? If I thought my way into it, I could think my way out and what kind of love is that.”

“And if you could choose, you would choose not to?” Scanlan asks.

“No, I–” he starts. To say that would feel like a betrayal in some ways. “At the beginning, maybe. I know it makes things complicated. For everybody.” He holds her face in his mind, in that breathless moment after he kissed her, the shell shock, her parted lips and wide eyes. He’ll never know if it was a mistake now, never know what she thought, what she feels or thinks she could feel for him. “It’s not complicated for me. It wouldn’t be… I’m grateful for every moment I’ve had with her, just as we are. I’ve never needed anything more.”

“Well,” Scanlan says. “That’s very noble.”

Vax glances up, watches something solemn shifting in his face. 

“It doesn’t feel noble,” he offers. “I just… I want her to be happy. I don’t want to cause her any distress. She’s just so incredible. Knowing her as I do is one of the greatest things that have happened to me in this life. I couldn’t have asked for more.” Though that’s not entirely true. “I only want her to be okay again.”

Scanlan nods and seems to snap back to himself. He stands and walks over, slapping a hand on his shoulder. 

“She’s going to be,” he says. Vax holds out the scrying eye, but Scanlan ignores it. “You’re gonna be, too, man. We got some fucking dragons to kill. Nobody’s getting out easy.”

“If I don’t?” 

Scanlan sighs, shaking his head. “If, for some crazy reason, you don’t get to tell her yourself, I’ll let our Kiki know… exactly what she needs to know. But really, being in love.” He scoffs in disbelief. “Buddy, I don’t think you get out of that one easy either.”

—

He makes it to the morning.

His whole back hurts, he spent the night propped up against his sister’s door desperately trying to stay awake and failing occasionally. 

He wakes, the sun angling down from a window way down the hall. 

Somehow he is alive. Somehow he can hear his sister breathing on the other side of the door.

He doesn’t even bother considering waiting, just pulls the scrying eye from his pocket again.

The spell connects and he exhales. He flies through the universe and lands in an alleyway between two tall buildings. It’s dark, the shadows of the walls overlapping and creating a black hole of empty space. 

That’s where the scry finds her. 

She’s herself again, curled up into a tight tight ball. 

His eyes take her in desperately, tracing over the sprawl of her hair against the ground, the sharp bend of her arms, her white knuckles balled up and pressed hard to her chest. She’s asleep, but still shivering, shoulders drawn up to her ears. 

It’s a relief to see her. 

It’s also a familiar torture. She’s alright. He watches her chest rise and fall. But as close as she seems, there’s nothing else he can do, no comfort he can offer, no help he can provide, no way to just grab her and drag her back to them. The desire to try never ever goes away. 

Instead all he can do for ten minutes is stare, tracing over every inch of her face smoothed out in sleep. He counts her breaths, tries to match his every inhale and exhale to hers. 

The scry ends and he pulls back into himself, sitting in an empty hallway, holding an inert rock. 

He crumples forward and for the first time after everything, he lets himself sob. 

—

He jerks awake. 

It’s becoming less and less surprising when he makes it to the morning. He doesn’t know what it means yet, what anything means. 

He’s on the floor and arms are empty. 

She was there. He knows she was there, there’s a strand of red hair on his shoulder and he can still smell the sweet floral shampoo that his hands smell like as well. 

He sits up quickly and looks around. 

“Breathe,” Vex says. She’s in the corner with Trinket, scratching him under the chin. “She’s fine.”

“She…?” he croaks, voice dry, throat a wreck from being so close to the dusty floor. 

“Woke up about an hour ago,” his sister finishes. “Went out the window without even saying goodbye, mind you, but looking much better.”

She was really here? is what he wanted to ask. She was real?

That does answer his question though, and while he stares at Vex like he’s searching for a crack, somehow, unbelievably, it’s true. 

“You two looked pretty cozy,” Vex points out, raising an eyebrow. 

He looks away, down at his empty hands in his lap. “It’s not like that.”

Vex’s sigh is loud in the quiet morning. She crosses the room on socked feet and drops to her knees to drag him into a seemingly annoyed hug. “You know that all I want is for you to be happy, right?” she says firmly. 

He closes his eyes and wraps his arms around her waist properly. 

“I know,” he says. “It’s still not like that.”

She scoffs. “Everything about last night begs to differ.”

He shakes his head. 

“You love her,” she says, poking the back of his shoulder hard. “And she was certainly making some eyes at you.”

“I can’t,” he says. “I… She doesn’t need that right now. To deal with something like that right now. I mean, we never even talked about… even before all of this happened to her, not to mention before I—”

“Vax,” she says slowly. 

“We have to tell her so much today,” he says, opening his eyes and turning to stare out at the open window, letting cold cold air in. She didn’t take a cloak. She’s probably cold out there. Though she hasn’t had a cloak in weeks and she’s survived. She survived again and again and again. It’s so strange, to want to devote himself so completely to her safety and knowing that she doesn’t need him to at all. “We have to tell her about Emon. We have to tell her about Pyrah.” He has to tell her about the tomb. “She doesn’t need that from me, from anyone, right now.”

“You don’t know,” Vex says, voice pitching down playfully. “Maybe she does. She seemed to need something like that last night.”

He swallows hard and pulls away from his sister, standing up and moving over to close the window. 

“I can’t do this to her,” he says. He scans the horizon and sees nothing, so he flips the latch. His heart is in his throat with her out of sight, but he trusts that she’ll find her way back to them. She already did against the most impossible odds. 

“Do what?” Vex challenges, turning on the floor still to frown up at him. “Love her?”

He’s tried to fight against optimism with every step of this thing, but she inspires it in him every time. He can let himself picture it, picture the miracle of her feeling the same way, of her loving him, of them being together, of the world being a place that is kind and would allow that without complication. 

It exists there in his core. It has the whole time he’s tried to talk himself out of the hope for it. 

“She’s back,” he says. “She’s here. That’s more than enough for me, Stubby, truly.” 

It almost sounds convincing. It’s far from a lie. 

“Time is precious,” Vex says, and in her eyes he sees miserable years of waiting to run away, he sees the ashes of Byroden, he sees her take her second first breath on the floor of that tomb. “I don’t care what you do. Just don’t waste it. Be happy.”

He thinks about last night, about Keyleth in his arms, about a dream he got to live. 

“I am happy,” he says. 

She frowns at him, unimpressed, her head tipping to the side. He’s not lying. Not completely. He has no regrets. He’s been granted more than he thought. 

If his sister is alive, he’s happy. If Keyleth is happy, he’s happy. 

They’re simple rules to live by. The challenge is in making sure those things remain true. 

“You know what would make me really happy though?” he says. “Some Whitestone goulash. Breakfast?”

She shares an exasperated look with Trinket, but lets him drag her to her feet and follows him down the hall, towards a conversation that’s going to suck, that’s going to test that second rule of his horribly. 

It’s a conversation they’re lucky to have though. 

He holds tight to that, to small kindnesses, and marches on. 

Chapter Text

When Percy and Keyleth walk into the dinning room in Whitestone, something slots into place. For a moment, everything feels normal, if there ever was such a thing. This is the first time they’ve all gathered in this room, but the ease of it is like routine, like this is home. 

Vax isn’t sure what he’s supposed to believe in these days, but when it comes down to faith, he’s always been able to put it in this, in the thing that comes to life in any room with all of them together. 

He watches Keyleth from where he’s leaned up against the wall in the back of the room, he’s helpless not to. He counts each rise of her chest, traces the exact shadow the daylight casts from her nose, studies the dance of her freckles as her nose wrinkles. He notes the exact moment relief hits her face when she walks in and the conversations around the table continue on. 

Percy moves across the room like he owns the place, which of course he does. Keyleth slows and stops closer to the door frame. 

When her eyes drift to his, it sends a little jolt through him. He’s gotten oddly used to looking at her and knowing she won’t be able to look back. 

In a moment, he feels his face heating up, suddenly back in the bathroom, her eyes intent on his face in between the wisps of steam from the bath. She’d called him beautiful last night, and it felt like the word hadn’t existed before she said it like that. He may never be able to look at her again without hearing that word in her voice.

Pike cajoles Keyleth into a seat at the table, between her and Grog as they debate about what ale pairs best with breakfast. Keyleth sits and at first, her eyes just ping around the table from noise to noise, blinking and twitching and emoting in complicated, squirrely ways. 

She’s still in her pajamas, her shoulders bared and her hair in a still-damp braid. There’s small wet spots on the back of her thin nightshirt and goosebumps along her arms. She looks cold.

He’s been powerless to do anything for the past month when he’s seen her cold. And now he’s not.

There’s no way to be casual about it, but he tries, shifting slowly around the table and grabbing a scone from a plate in front of her with one hand, tugging his cloak off with the other. He holds the scone in his mouth and ghosts his hands over her shoulders as he drops it onto her. Vex is watching them from her corner, he knows, but he’s not looking at her. He doesn’t look at Keyleth, even as he feels her attention snap up to him. He just moves back to his space at the wall and focuses on the scone like it’s the most important thing in the world.

“Good morning all,” Allura says, when she sweeps in the room. She’s still looking worse for wear. Between holding down the illusions protecting Whitestone and shepherding them across Exandria, Allura may be the only person spread thinner than them. She does stop when she spots Keyleth, but quickly schools her double take into a smile. “Keyleth, it’s wonderful to have you back with us again.”

The attention of the room shifts over and he watches her squirm beneath it. 

She opens her mouth, but doesn’t say anything, just nods and ducks her head. But as Allura takes a seat, the side conversations fade. They still have work to do. And Keyleth knows nothing of any of it. 

Keyleth is the one to clear her throat though, flickering a glance in his direction before she sits up. 

“So,” she croaks. “When we were fighting the Briarwoods, I tried to… I touched the orb. Which was bad. We should not touch the orb. I don’t know what it looked like on this side, but it shunted me to a different plane, I think, and it hurt a lot. I’m not sure what plane it was. It was dark there, gray and almost lifeless. There was a city there, abandoned.”

It’s nothing he doesn’t know, but he’s distracted by the look on her face, the stillness in her as she tells it from her perspective. Everything about her is held tightly, her expression, her voice, her words slip out one and a time, precisely. It’s strange to see. Keyleth has always worn her heart on her sleeve, has always spoken with the fullness of her emotions, has let her hands take over in searching for the right words when her brain fails her. 

“It’s called the Shadowfell,” Allura interrupts. Keyleth seems far from done, but in the space between sentences, Allura slips in, setting her cup of tea down and leaning in, attention solely on Keyleth. “The plane is host to a city called Thar Amphala.” Her explanation continues with Allura’s calm authority over information that has become a great comfort to all of them.

Keyleth blinks. She doesn’t look comforted. He has a front row seat to something shuttering in her, her eyes dropping to the empty plate in front of her, like she’s embarrassed. 

“Oh,” she says, when Allura is done with the whole of what they had found out. 

“It was closed off after Vecna was killed,” Vex adds. “We were trying to find something attuned to it, but…”

“Right,” Keyleth says. Her throat bobs and she leans back into her seat. “That’s… good to know.”

“Well, we wouldn’t have known any of that without you,” Pike offers brightly, chewing through half a bite of bacon. “From scrying on you,” she continues when Keyleth continues to look confused. 

Despite how hard she’s trying to look interested, Keyleth remains shrinking, his cloak swamping her shoulders as she hunches forward. 

“Um,” she says. “So, we should… do we know how to banish the orb?” She speaks slow again, but with none of the precise decisiveness from before, now like she’s waiting with every word for someone to correct her again. 

“There were plans…” Percy says slowly, glance around the room, avoiding looking at Keyleth as they reach the moment of truth. “A lot of plans. But things became… complicated.”

Keyleth fidgets. He watches each little tremble of her hand as she pushes her hair behind her ears. She’s unbalanced, wobbling, and he feels his own concern ripple around everyone else as well. He’s in a room of people who have been carrying the weight of the world for the past week, and now they all have to take that crushing weight and put it on Keyleth too, after everything she’s been through. 

“You, um, said…” she starts when no one can bring themselves to start. “Last night…” She’s fishing. Somebody has to say something, but the guilt and grief is strangling. Keyleth can feel it, he watches her clock the heaviness in the room, sees her process the hit coming her way. And she turns to him, shooting him a pleading scared look that shatters something inside him. He’d give anything to protect her from this, to wrap around her like a shield and absorb the blow. But it’s not a real blow, it’s not something he can take from her. 

Nobody says anything. The silence is suffocating.

Keyleth, braver than all of them, stronger than he can conceive, braces herself and asks the question. “Complicated how?”

“There was an attack on Emon,” he breathes. Something in the room snaps. The attention suddenly on him is heavy but he stays locked onto Keyleth, not looking away, not abandoning her with the information, all the while desperate to gentle it. “Dragons. Four of them.”

She twitches in surprise. “Four?” she mouths. He nods. 

“It was a coordinated attack,” Percy continues and her attention snaps over to him. 

The rest of it comes out like that, each of them picking it up for bits and pieces. 

It’s strange. He’s seen Keyleth in grief before, he’s seen her horror at the Sun Tree, he’s seen her fear in the Underdark, he remembers that child’s body hitting the ground and what it was like to watch something deep deep inside her break. 

She doesn’t react like any of that. She doesn’t… react. Her face barely moves, her hands stay flat on the table in front of her. The only movement is an occasional clench in her jaw. She sits and listens. Sometimes her eyes go somewhere else, some middle distance he wishes he could follow her to. 

He wants to cross the room to her again, to take her hand, to offer her something to lean on, to just be there for anything she needs right now, all the reactions he can see her denying herself. But he has to settle for his cloak around her shoulders, one little thing that can keep her a little bit warmer. 

He’s worried about her, he’s worried about her chilling non-reaction, the lack of her in the way she’s responding to all this information pouring out: the dragons and Pyrah and the vestiges. Or maybe that’s the lie he’s telling himself. Maybe that’s the excuse he’ll use this time for why he’s such a coward. Maybe he would have searched for any reason at all.

Because when the floaty trail of the story makes its way over to the Deathwalker’s Ward, the tomb, all of it, when it comes time for him to explain the rest, to say ‘Vex died, and I begged to take her place and we don’t know what the hell that means,’ he trips on the lost look in her eyes and does something so stupid, so terrible.

He says nothing at all. 

—

At some point, she expects to lose track of what they’re saying with the way her pulse swims in her ears, but she never does.

Her brain is awash with different voices as everyone explains on and on and on about their very busy five weeks, and her own as she tries on emotions she thinks she should be feeling right now. 

It feels like… 

Like when her fingers are frozen from being out in the cold for too long and she sticks them in front of a fire, the feeling coming back fast, pins and needles, a painful heat, numbness and awareness at the same time, overlapping in an uncomfortable static.

That, but everywhere, but in her soul. The feeling of being herself comes rushing back in, all those edges that she pulled in when all she had to do was survive light up, nerve endings crackling back to life. It hurts. It feels like everything and nothing at the same time. 

She doesn’t remember how she’s supposed to do this. 

The past 12 hours have been a blur of worry that she won’t fit in this world the way she’s supposed to, that something in her has been pulled apart too far to be put back. She hadn’t considered that the world could be pulled apart too.

Gratefully, when they catch up to the information about Umbrassyl in Westruun, disagreements about the plan for the day start to take over. The attention of the table falls away from her finally and falls into that familiar rhythm of planning.

She counts to 100 before standing. Her chair scrapes against the floor. 

“I have to use the bathroom,” she says.

She doubts any of them believe her, but she doesn’t look to see, she doesn’t wait, she just walks until she’s out of the room and then once she’s out of the room, she runs. 

They’re gonna follow her, she knows. They’re gonna start asking her what she’s feeling and what she thinks they should do and all the other things that she would have had opinions on five weeks ago, but now have her misfiring like Percy’s guns, gears grinding, smoking out of every crack. 

She can’t do it, she can’t do it, she can’t do it.

She’s got nothing, she’s empty, she’s not herself any more, she’s these disparate parts that only know how to keep her alive, can’t process anything more than pain, can’t do anything besides figure out how to run away and find a place to hide. She can’t help them.

Maybe they won’t ask her. Likely they’ve never needed her opinions at all. More often than not her pitches and plans and untimely moral stands are ignored. That’s for the better now.

It has to be for the better.

—

Keyleth’s departure sits like a hole in the middle of the room though as they finish planning out the day. 

Vax can barely pay attention, his mind is out wherever Keyleth is, is spinning around and around over where she could be or what he should say to her or why in the world he lied to her. The conversation tangles itself up, any plans coming up short without any idea of what Keyleth will be doing. He takes it as permission, and heads off to look for her. 

There are places around the castle that he’s thought she’d like: the courtyard, the library on the third floor. She wouldn’t know where any of them are. So he starts with the places she does know. 

It doesn’t take long. 

Minxie is curled up small beneath the bed in her room. Her ears twitch when he closes the door behind him. Oddly, he feels relief. He knows how to approach Minxie, dropping to his haunches and reaching his hand out slowly towards her. 

“Hey, Minx,” he coos, tipping his head to the side, baring his neck, making himself seem small. 

Minxie sniffs the air, stretching towards him skeptically and slowly. He waits, calmly, and doesn’t flinch when she makes an abrupt jerk towards him. Her ears relax when he stays still, her tail swishes out from under the bed, uncurling from under her. 

“Can I come sit?” he asks. She blinks slowly and he blinks back before inching forward and turning his back to her, sitting on the ground leaned up against the leg of the bed. 

She wiggles out from her corner and drops her heavy head on his knee. He smiles down at her. “Scritches?”

Her tail lashes again as she wiggles in closer to him. He lets his hand settle behind her ears and scratches there. Her purrs start up, deep and resonant, vibrating along the length of his thigh. For a while it’s just that, quiet and peace and purrs. He’s never spent this much time with Minxie like this. He’s rarely seen her outside of the heat of battle. It’s nice, her soft fur and her deep heavy breaths gusting over his knee. 

When she drops form, there is a moment where it’s just Keyleth with her head against his thigh, nose pressed into his pant leg, his hand caressing the back of her neck before she sits up. 

“Hi,” she says. She tucks herself into a little ball next to him. He desperately wants to keep petting at her, expressing comfort with his hands since he’s pretty sure his words will fail. It’s harder now, looking at Keyleth. She’s infinitely more complicated than Minxie. Purrs can’t solve all of this. 

“Hey,” he says. And stops there. She stares out at the far wall and says nothing. This is all so delicate, he feels his fingers twitch. He sits with the silence and waits for her, all the focus and deliberation of disarming a trap. 

“Are we leaving soon?” she asks, dropping her chin to her knees. 

“We might,” he says. “Are… are you?”

She shrugs. “We need to get to Westruun.”

“Kiki,” he says, turning so he’s facing her more fully. “You don’t have to. It’s your choice.”

She shakes her head as best she can. “There isn’t a choice,” she says with a dark certainty. “There’s never a choice with these things. I haven’t had a choice…” She cuts herself off, pressing her lips together and shrugging her shoulders aimlessly. 

“There is,” he says. He can’t help himself from resting his hand on her knee and her shoulder, leaned into her. “Look, we… we need you. We always need you, but we didn’t think we were going to have you for this. That’s what we’ve planned for. And I don’t know what will happen, but I know that you… you fought your way back here, against all odds. It’s incredible. And it doesn’t have to change anything. You’ve been through so much. If you want to go home, you can go home.” She blinks hard, and he watches her jaw work again. “Keyleth, nobody would judge you. It is your choice.”

She grins tightly, and he knows she doesn’t believe him but he doesn’t know what else to say. 

“I don’t have any choices, Vax,” she says flatly. “I never… I had a lot of time to think, you know, on the other side. And I realized that, I’ve tried so hard to do the right thing, I’ve agonized over so many decisions, and it never mattered. Because I know how it ends for me, no matter what I do.”

He’s never really seen her like this, this… resigned, hopeless. He wishes for anything else, for her panic or sorrow or fear, something he can try to soothe. He doesn’t know what to do in the face of this lack of her light.

“When my mom left home, I…” She closes her eyes and lets out a little derisive laugh. He wants to wipe the line between her brows away so badly he almost does it. But that’s not what she needs from him right now. “I kept asking everybody if she would be back for my birthday. And I got so angry because nobody would give me an answer. Nobody knew really, because it had been… it had been a thousand years since the last time somebody from Zephrah went on an Aramente. Nobody remembered and nobody knew how long it would take my mom and I was so annoyed by not knowing.”

She glances down at her hands, her fingers twisting in circles. 

“And then she never came back,” she punctuates the thought with a small hitch of her shoulders. 

“Kiki,” he says softly. He wants to hold her. He wants to beg.  Come here. I’m so sorry. I know I’ve failed you but please trust me again, I’ll catch you right now I promise.  

“Everybody loved her,” she presses on, before jerking back slightly. “No… no, everybody respected her. That's-that's more important. She was going to be a great leader and everybody knew it. It’s what she was meant to do.”

Her voice is still steady. She always finds it, her voice. He knows how the others can doubt her words, how too many people only hear the stutters and squeaks when she tries to give speeches, but he listens close, he trusts the life beneath her words.

He keeps his gaze rapt on her and nods along. 

“I realized a couple days ago,” she says. “That I’ve been taking so long on my Aramente. I mean, I’ve had years now and I have one step left and I still can’t fucking finish it.” 

He’s ready to jump to her defense but she waves him away. Her focus goes a little distant and she rolls her shoulders forward. 

“I think a part of me knew that I wasn’t out here to finish it,” she says. “I’m out here looking for my mom. Because I miss her and because if—when—if I find her, then… then she goes back to being the leader my people deserve. And I go back to… to being what I’m really supposed to be, I guess. Whatever that is. Because it’s not this. I wasn’t meant for this.”

He feels the urge to jump in, to assure her that he knows she’ll make a great leader, that she’s doing amazing, that her doubts are just a cruel poison in her mind. He wants so badly to fiddle gently at the door of her, work his way through the lock and slip inside to drag out all those horrible things that just want to hurt her and fill her head with all of the wonderful things he knows she is. 

But that’s selfish. It’s not what she’s asking for. It’s likely not what she needs. 

He doesn’t know what she needs. But he does know that he can unlock himself for her, invite her out of her head and into his for a moment of respite. 

He adjusts his cloak on her shoulders, drawing it more fully around her, before he leans back against the edge of the bed again. 

“We don’t remember much from when we were taken from our mother and brought to Syngorn,” he offers. “We were young and it was a… stressful time.” He’s tried, too many times to count, to remember the exact last time he saw his mother. He reaches but there’s nothing there. “There’s… we never talk about it really, but sometimes… sometimes I would wonder about how she could let us go, you know, why she—” The words are already too much, coming around wrong, carrying an implication that should only ever exist in the darkest corners of his mind, never brought this far into the light. “She had to. She had to let us go with him.” 

Keyleth seems to sense his frenzy. She picks her head up from the cradle of her knees and nods. “She had to,” she echoes, which is exactly what he needed to hear, a reassurance that she understands what he’s saying. “She didn’t have a choice.”

This was the wrong road to start down. He tries again. 

“When we left Syngorn, we didn’t even think of it as running away,” he says. “Because we weren’t, we were just going home. It was always going to happen. The only question was why it didn’t happen sooner.” Maybe he was too afraid of what they’d find if they returned, of being sent back and knowing something horrible. Maybe he knew how Vex always thought things would eventually get better and he would never have left without her. Maybe. “When we reached Byroden though, there wasn’t a Byroden left. It was… ash, barren land. All of it.” He swallows and draws his legs in slightly. “A red dragon.” Keyleth inhales sharply. “The red dragon, as it turns out.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he tracks her hand move. 

It comes up shakily to cover her mouth, hiding half of her face but not her shining eyes. 

And there it is, that expression of hers that he’s unfortunately all too familiar with: grief, now finally, for him somehow. She blinks rapidly and inhales shakily and there she is again. For him. 

This is still terrible, the little tears that stick to her eyelashes, her weak sniffles, her shaky hands. But it’s better than the emptiness from before. He can do something about this. 

“Really?” she asks him, not legitimately, just in vague horror and upset. 

He nods and reaches out to catch the few loose tears on her cheek with his fingertips. She unwinds, knees dropping away from her chest as she hauls him into a hug. It’s tight, her arms like wiry steel bands around his shoulders, more forceful than he’d expect from her. It takes him a moment to fit himself into her grasp, to bring his hands up to rest lightly on the center of her back. 

“I used to wish I’d gone back sooner,” he says. “That I had been with her at the end, even if it was the end.” He wraps his fingers around the coarse end of her braid, running his thumb over the leather tie he left there. “I don’t wish that anymore though. I haven’t in a long time.”

“I can’t go home,” Keyleth breathes. Her chest jerks with a little sob. He holds her tighter. “You guys are my home.”

He nods, knocking his temple into hers as gently as he can. “I know,” he says. “But we’ve got you, Kiki. We have you.”

Her shaky breaths echo in his ear. But she’s here with them again. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to believe in, but he knows what he’s for and that’s keeping his family safe. 

He failed her once, but god help him if he’s going to again. 

Chapter Text

Slowly the muscle memory comes back. She starts to remember how to be Keyleth of Vox Machina, day by day, finding her feet under her as they march on. 

At times, there’s the all too present knowledge of what they’re doing, what’s at stake, every wasted second another potential scar left on the world by the Conclave. But most of the time, it feels like exactly what she’s spent a month missing. 

She’s a bit different. Sometimes she wanders away from the group without thinking, more used to going where she feels like than following. Sometimes someone appearing too suddenly in her periphery makes her jump. Sometimes if someone leans towards her while she’s eating her fingers catch fire. Sometimes when everybody is talking over each other and getting nowhere and the noise becomes too much, scraping at the inside of her skull, she just turns into Minxie so everything will quiet. 

Nobody says anything about it. Trinket enjoys having somebody to wrestle. 

When she’s herself, she’s slightly embarrassed. She’s always been the weird one, the last thing she needed was more eccentricities. 

But truthfully, nothing sticks on her for too long these days. 

Mostly she can just be quiet and take it all in. She’s with her family again. She’s struggling at times to fit where she used to in their puzzle, but where she’s failing, nobody is saying anything yet. 

And there’s a new lightness in her. Vax’s words echo in her head, all of them, but especially when he said that they didn’t think they would have her for this upcoming fight. 

She could have died in the Shadowfell. She knew that the whole time she was there, she felt the exact moments where she outran fate by a second. And if she had died, as she likely should have, the world would have had to continue on without her. 

She has a very dangerous thought. 

Why not?

Maybe she died in the Shadowfell. Maybe the world will have to figure out what to do without her. Maybe she can be a ghost, something with no responsibilities, someone with choices for the first time since her mother left. 

She lets herself believe that she is a ghost. That she can do whatever she wants now. She wants to be with Vox Machina so she is. She wants to help them kill these dragons so she is. She wants to try being happy. So she will. 

It’s an addictive rush. It’s a freeing thought. 

She feels untethered by it. In good ways, like she’s rocketing up through the sky and never has to come back down. (In frightening ways too, like the ground keeps getting farther and farther away, like she’s losing track of where to land.)

She doesn’t feel like a compromise anymore, she feels like she’s expanding in all directions. 

Her power, which used to explode out of her and cause problems, feels more like her. Weeks of measuring out each ounce of magic in her, manifesting greater and greater miracles, now has the god in her feel in control. She bops them around the map, scries in on dragons, finds in her the exact kind of spell they need for most sticky situations they face down. 

The animal is well fed, but brimming at the surface. She knows she’s different in battles, more aggressive, more vicious. There’s an anger that boils and takes over, everything red and hazy in the heat of the moment. But it settles after, content to be firmly predator instead of constant prey. 

And the girl… the girl catches Vax’s eyes across their campfire and feels butterflies explode to life in her stomach. She brushes her hand across his sometimes when they walk and blushes all the way down to her chest. When everyone else is asleep, she uses his shoulder as a pillow and he runs his fingers through her hair and it makes her feel tipsy, that soft warm just-drunk she gets after drinking two glasses of wine. She feels like a real person in a way she never has before, she gives herself over to feeling, to being a girl with a crush who believes in happy endings. 

—

The night before Umbrassyl, her stomach warm and full from their Heroes’ Feast, she takes in the hum of everyone settling in for the night and feels the thrum of energy beneath her own skin. Without the weight of the world on her shoulders, without the wherewithal to spend every inch of her brain thinking about responsibilities and consequences, she can embrace it. She’s not worried about tomorrow. She can slim her mind down to one goal now: kill a dragon. 

She can make tonight about something else. 

She walks over to Vax where he lingers on the fringes, watching the group. He straightens slightly when he spots her coming. She can feel her every heartbeat. 

“Hi,” she says, stopping in front of him. 

“Hi.” He does this thing sometimes, pouring his entire undivided attention onto her like she’s the only person in the entire world. It’s overwhelming. She wants more of it. 

“How are you?” she asks. She sways on her feet, back and forth and back and forth, because if she tries to stand still with the full weight of this it’ll knock her on her ass. 

“Good,” he says. “The food was delicious. My compliments to the chef.” He tips his head towards her with a small grin. 

Good god, they’re flirting. She thinks they’re flirting. This is a good start. Fuck, she’s squandering it. 

“Thank you,” she says, with her best attempt at a demure smile. “Though, it’s a spell, so I’m pretty sure it has to be delicious.”

He smiles. 

She can hear the chatter behind her, the last dregs of the dinner transitioning smoothly into drinks and before bed conversations. 

“I heard,” she says, quickly, without stopping between words for a single breath because if she stops she might not get it out. “That it’s good after you eat a lot to walk it off, like walking it off can help with digestion. Do you want to take a walk with me?”

He blinks, brief flickers of surprise and curiosity and other things she misses because they go by so fast. “Sure.”

She guides them, away from the noise and the invading eyes, deeper into the woods. It’s colder, the farther they get from the camp and the fire. The wind weaves between trees and through her hair. Their shoulders brush at times, and with it her heart skips. There’s electricity in the air, small snapping sparks between them. She doesn’t look at him and feels him not looking at her, just matching step as they walk forward, into something new. Leaves and twigs crunch beneath their feet, mostly hers, and she waits until it’s the only sound between them. 

“So,” she says, drawing out the word until his attention drifts to her. “We never got a chance to talk. About what you said.”

“What I said?” he echoes. 

Right. It’s been a lifetime since. Just because all she can think about when she looks at him is that blood-tinged kiss doesn’t mean it’s also always on his mind. 

“Back in Anders’ study,” she says, barely stammering. Vax inhales sharply. Fuck. “You know, there wasn’t any time afterward and then I…” The words are drying up, her tongue feels heavy in her mouth. She’s never done this before, never thought she would, she’s not going to be any good at it. “Well, I just t-thought we, uh… I mean, we have a m-moment now and I—”

Vax reaches for her, his hand brushing her wrist. She stops talking, blessedly. 

“We don’t have to,” he says. He slows to a stop and she turns to him, letting her fingers rest on the back of his hand. He’s staring at her with that melty look in his eyes, the same one from the study that makes her go lightheaded and swirly. “We don’t have to talk about it, if you don’t want to. I only… I would never want you to feel uncomfortable. After everything you’ve been through, I just count myself grateful to have you here still. You don’t have to do anything, Kiki.”

Except she does have to kiss him right now. She’s never done that before, and she doesn’t know how anyone does, how she’s supposed to lean in and close her eyes but also figure out how to land her mouth on his without smashing their noses together.

There’s so much to think about that she can’t think about anything. She just throws herself forward, lets herself believe. 

There is a moment of nose smashing, and also chin and forehead bumping. There’s a lot to faces, she discovers. But she gets where she needs to be, tripping her mouth over to his and immediately forgetting what else she should do. 

She can feel his surprise for a second before he catches her. He tips his head and slots their lips together skillfully, brushing her hair out of her face and leading her chin up. Saving them from her clumsy guidance.

Kissing him is as soft as she remembers. It quiets all the extra, buzzy noise in her head like a miracle. She presses into him, closer and closer, slides her fingers up along the line of the inside of his forearm, brushes her nose against his cheek. It seems impossible that she spent so long being afraid of this, that she was going to run away from this, that she could have died without having had this for real. 

She reaches up, fiddling with the shoulders of his armor, itching to pull herself even closer. 

He breaks away and staggers back a step. 

“We, uh, we should talk,” he stammers. His eyes won’t meet hers and a little bolt of panic strikes her again. 

“Okay,” she squeaks. 

Her brave little wall against worry sprouts a crack.

Is she being too forward? Has it been too long? Did he not mean it, when he said he loved her? Did he not mean it like that? Is there another way to mean it? Was it a mistake, just a lingering side effect of his blood loss all those weeks ago? 

Or…

Maybe he can tell that she’s not the same. Maybe she’s too different, after everything. Maybe what he loved was the compromise. There’s a version of her she knows, that some people find cute. Cute naive Keyleth, bumbling and clumsy and quirky. She hasn’t been much of that lately. She’s trying, now, for him, to be sweet and girl-ish, but maybe he knows it’s a front, maybe he’s seen it through now, maybe he’s been soured on her entirely. 

She’s thinking too much. And being unkind to him. 

Vax would never hurt her. And this isn’t just about what she wants. 

There’s a heaviness in his eyes, a deep wrinkle across his forehead as he opens his mouth slowly like he’s going to say something that he doesn’t want to. 

“Keyleth, I love you,” he says. It burns in her chest, rewrites something in her blood. She knows she’s staring at him with her heart on her sleeve and her soul in her eyes, but she can’t help it with how close she feels to touching some beautiful and pure happiness for the first time in her adult life. “When I said that, back in Whitestone, I… I meant it. And I do.” He sighs, jaw working slightly. “So much has happened since then.” 

“I thought I knew what I was going to say,” she spits out before he can say anything else, take anything back. He’s so gorgeous and lovely, and he could have anyone he wants. He probably deserves much better than her. But she’s been feeling so selfish lately. She doesn’t want to lose this just yet, doesn’t want to hear the reasonable things he might have to say that will bring the heavy doubts back in. “After you kissed me, I thought I knew what I had to do. I was afraid, Vax. I… the leaders of the Ashari, they live for a long time, for a thousand years. I’ve known for so long that I would outlive everybody I ever loved. And it’s terrified me. I already care about all of you so much and the thought of losing any of you, I—”

She takes a second to catch her breath. His arm slips away from her hand as he reaches up, brushing a stray tear out of the corner of her eye. He waits, patiently, and she feels so safe. 

“I wanted to protect myself,” she continues, reaching up to grab hold of his hand again. “Because I think I love you, Vax.” His breath hitches, the concerned line of his mouth wobbles. “It terrified me to think about letting myself love you even more and still lose you. So I wasn’t going to. But then I was gone. And it all seemed so stupid because I was so worried about a hundred years from now and then I could have just died. So I’m not worrying about that anymore.”

She almost wants to tell him the rest, that she’s basically going to fake her death and become a ghost, that she’s going to run from the person that she used to be, that he’s half the reason she’s doing it, that she’ll let herself die in the Shadowfell for a chance at less than forever with him. But there’s still a deep worry that the part of her that she’s letting die is the part that he actually loves. This selfishness of hers is ugly, she knows, even though right now it just feels fluttery and excited and free. 

Vax looks so troubled, some scary deep conflict in a clash across his face. “I— that’s so wonderful, Keyleth,” he says. “I don’t want you to be afraid. But… I could die tomorrow. We-we could all die tomorrow.”

“No,” she says, shaking her head. Maybe it’s a mistake, maybe she’ll be punished for her hubris but the god beneath her skin is all energy and arrogance, creates solid ground beneath her feet for the first time and refuses to let go of it. “I think… I was supposed to die there, in the Shadowfell. I should have. So many times, I came close, but I didn’t.” She reaches for his hand, wrapping it in both of hers and holding tight. “I’m not scared of some fucking dragon. I’m not dying tomorrow and I’m not losing you tomorrow.” He stares at her, eyes wide with awe and something heavy, some fear. She feels a lump in her throat and a steel trap in her stomach. “I’m going to protect you. I’m not going to let anything happen to you, Vax. I promise.”

It’s too much. She realizes it as she says it, as she feels the emotion bubble up and over and strain her voice in that way that always makes people narrow their eyes at her. She’s always too much. It figures she would be in this too. But she can’t help how deeply she feels it, can’t hold back her too-much-ness when he makes her feel more than anything she’s ever experienced. 

She smiles shakily, to try and undercut it. 

Vax doesn’t narrow his eyes, doesn’t seem to shrink in the face of her too much, but he doesn’t look any less afraid. He seems to crumble slightly, and falls forward against her, his hands coming up to frame her cheeks, guiding her mouth to his again. 

He kisses her like he wants to devour her. It’s sweet and heavy and consuming. All she can think about is that he’s kissing her, and that he’s much much better at it than she is. 

Everything for the past month has burned her to the ground. She’s lost track of who she’s supposed to be, of what she is when she’s more than just keeping herself alive. But it all crystallizes in this moment, and she knows that she just wants to figure out how to be the version of her that deserves this.

Vax’s thumb scrapes softly across the line of her jaw, his other hand strokes over the dip of her waist, his mouth closes over her lower lip again and again and again. 

She can feel how frantic he is, can almost taste his desperation through the kiss. He doesn’t believe her. He’s worried about tomorrow. 

And maybe he’s right. Maybe she should be more worried. 

But she isn’t. She doesn’t want to be so she isn’t. 

She feels a different kind of frantic, feeds into his with her own excitement and giddiness. All of these sensations of being held and kissed and pressed tight against him are new and she wants more more more. She indulges for a moment, lets the energy between them build and build, ricocheting ever upward. 

But she slides her hand up to the back of his neck and strokes the space above his collar in steady circles. She slows, she focuses on every individual feeling and memorizes it, she lingers with him, eases them back down. 

When he pulls away and takes a deep deep breath, she stays close, nuzzling her nose against his, each of his gasping inhales brushing against her lips. 

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he breathes. “Keyleth, I—”

She doesn’t let him finish, presses a long slow kiss to his cheek. 

“I know,” she says. “And I know that what we’re doing is important, I know what we might have to do tomorrow to save a lot of people.” She leans back to meet his eyes and grin weakly. “I just… I love you. And I feel like I can finally do something about it.”

“I might die tomorrow,” he says again, emphatically. 

No, he’s not. She knows that. As long as she survives tomorrow, she’s not going to let him die tomorrow. But that’s a promise she’s making with herself, she doesn’t need to argue that with him. 

“You might die tomorrow,” she concedes slowly. Maybe, if she dies tomorrow, he’ll die tomorrow. But she’s not going to die tomorrow.

Might is a word that is doing a lot of heavy lifting. 

Hearing her say it though seems to calm something in him. He’s worried for her and it’s sweet. 

“I love you,” he says. “So much.”

She feels her smile turn into something real, widen and crack her face open. “I know.”

She leans in towards him again, but he stops her gently, catching her hand and dipping to scatter kisses across her knuckles. “We… we need to rest,” he says. “Let me take you to bed, love.”

She thinks she’d agree to anything if he said it like that. 

She holds his hand as they walk back to the camp, stays as close to his side as she dares without risking tripping over her own feet. They settle their bed rolls next to each other and far far away from everyone else. The whole time she feels her pulse pounding in her ears, feels her heart flapping and squirming happily. 

Laying down, Vax slips his arm beneath her neck and leans over her, kissing her sweet and dreamily. Unlike before they’re not deep, but they’re slow and heavy still. He kisses her again and again and again, at a steady and calming pace so she can always feel when he’s coming, what he’ll do next. It’s comfortable and warm against him. The girl in her is still glittering, while her heart rate slows and her eyes grow heavy and everything else in the world quiets down. 

She falls asleep to the sensation of him brushing their mouths together one last time. 

It’s a better sleep than she has in much longer than five weeks. 

Chapter Text

“So,” Keyleth says, sliding up next to him on their walk towards the Velvet Cabaret. “We’re married.”

“Um, yes?” he says. She sways as she walks, an almost serpentine path if snakes could be clumsy. It’s slightly ridiculous. He focuses on his own feet because he knows if he looks at her for more than a moment he’ll start smiling too much.

“Congratulations, right?” she tries wryly, attempting to elbow him and missing. She counterbalances a little too far away from him and shoulder checks some poor bastard heading the other way, knocking his basket of vegetables to the ground. “Oh god!” 

She stops right there in the middle of the thoroughfare, bending over and helping the guy collect his things and apologizing in a endless pouring stream of words. He should help, but he’s frozen, staring at her with that familiar wave of bewilderment that gets softer and softer each time it crashes. Gods, but she’s the sun incarnate, and sometimes she flares, a solar explosion, life and chaos. 

She grows the man a little sunflower and drops it in the basket with another apology and sends him off. 

And all he can do is stare. 

She flushed when she notices, eyes dropping down sheepishly. 

“Here,” he says, reaching out and folding her hand into the crook of his elbow. “Let’s start with this.” They’re a few paces behind the others now and for the first time, he’s a bit grateful that his sister isn’t here. 

“Sorry,” she says. “I guess I’m just a little bit nervous. I mean, I don’t really have the best track record with lying.” She smiles tightly and he knows exactly what she means, that she thinks this one little failing carries more weight than the million miracles he’s seen her perform. “I just… how are we married? I think that would help, right? To keep the story straight? What was the wedding like? Do we want kids? Do we have any fun hobbies? Where do we live? Do we like each other? How did you propose? Did I propose? How did I propose?”

She glances over at him expectantly, like he should start rattling off answers. 

“Um,” he starts. “Well, I don’t think most of those things will come up in conversation.” Gratefully. He doubts she’d want to hear his answers to those questions. Well, Keyleth, I always imagine we get married in late spring, and you let me braid flowers in your hair, and my bear nephew brings us the rings. We have a small cottage on the outskirts of some town and you plant herbs in the backyard and I take up woodworking to make all our furniture by hand because we wanted the place to fit our vision of it just so.

The worst part is that it’s not really a joke, even though it sounds so much like one.

Keyleth doesn’t seem to notice his crisis, still fidgeting with her hands. “But what if it should come up?” she asks. “I don’t know any married people. What if they talk a lot about being married?”

“I’m pretty sure they’re a lot like other people,” he offers soothingly. “Just two of them.”

Her nose wrinkles. “I’m being ridiculous.”

Yes, but it’s wonderful.

“No,” he says. “You’re right. We need a plan.” She tips her head like she knows he’s indulging her. “Here, we’ll make it easy. If any questions come up, I’ll go with whatever you answer.”

“But what should I answer?” 

He shrugs. “Whatever you want,” he says. Gods, that’s probably the truth anyway. “Dream wedding, dream proposal. We’re rich, so sky’s the limit, dear.”

Her brow furrows, like she’s troubled by something. 

It makes him nervous, and he needs to focus on the task at hand. That might be hard if he’s about to hear a ‘but you’re really not my type.’

“I can do it,” he says. “If you’re worried about it, if it comes up, I can make something up.”

She nods, but still seems slightly deflated. 

“I wish I was better at this,” she says. It sounds like an apology.

He shakes his head. “This can be good practice,” he offers. “Just follow my lead.”

“Okay,” she says, taking a steeling breath. “Just make us good married, okay? I don’t want us to hate each other.”

He grins wryly, bumps his side into hers. “Now that’s a lie even I couldn’t sell.”

She brightens, a slight skip returning to her step as they close in on the theater.

–

She should leave him alone. 

They’re a day into waiting for the other group to get back from their trial and Vax has spent most of it down at the bar of the tavern, drinking morosely. He’s worried about Vex, she knows. She’s also worried, and also struck by the strangeness of the twins separated. She can’t imagine what it’s like for him, what it’s like to be half of a whole like that. 

Mostly she just misses the others It’s been quiet and she feels wired, which is half the reason she’s wandering towards Vax anyway. 

She sits down at the empty seat next to him. It’s getting later and the bar is getting fuller, noiser. She leans in towards him so that she’s more insulated from it, even though she wanted to be unobtrusive. 

She wishes she could be cool, easy company. She wishes she could just be good company really.

Vax looks her over and nods, but doesn’t say anything. 

She tries, she really does, but makes it maybe ten seconds.
“Hi,” she says. 

“You want something to drink?” he asks, his long thin fingers tracing the base of his tankard. His cheeks are slightly ruddy. She’s not sure how long he’s been sitting here or how many drinks he’s had since she passed through in the afternoon, but he looks a couple sheets to the wind. No worse than her worst, not even close really, but she’s worried about him. He looks sad.

“Okay,” she says. 

He waves at the bartender and a moment later she has her own cup. Red wine. She wonders if that’s what he’s having too, or if he knows that it’s just what she’d like.  

She sips slowly, traces swirls onto the wood top of the bar with an errant drop of wine. When she sneaks a peek, Vax is watching her hand move. 

“I guess you were right,” she offers. He raises an eyebrow. “It didn’t really come up. Us being married.”

A small grin flashes across his face. She almost believes it. “Yeah,” he says. “See, no need to worry.”

She flashes a grin back. That worry has long passed. A drop in the ocean of her otherwise constant state of worry. They’re near Pyrah. She knows she should go soon, knows her Aramente awaits, as it always does. 

“Do you think about it?” she asks. “Getting married?”

He jerks, turns to her more fully. “I’m sorry?”

“Well, I mean, you said that I could’ve just used my dream wedding if people asked questions,” she scrambles to elaborate, to figure out what she’s asking. “Do you have a dream wedding? Do you think about things like that?”

He still looks uncomfortable, squirrelly. She’s definitely doing something wrong and desperately wishes that Vex was here because Vex would at least point out exactly how she’s being wrong. Vax is always too nice to her. 

“I think about it a normal amount,” he decides after a moment. He lifts his cup and takes a long drink from it. 

She slumps into her seat, letting her elbows drop to the bar. 

“I think about it a not normal amount,” she says with a sigh. She follows his lead and makes deep headway into her cup. “Like, I don’t think about it. I never really have.”

“Oh,” Vax says. His voice is warm, slowed and blurred around the edges from the alcohol. “That’s fine, you know. Some people don’t want to get married.”

“Want,” she echoes under her breath. It’s a word that she feels comes up so much, yet means so little. People want. She knows that. It’s up there with love and desire. Synonymous. Want. “I don’t know if I don’t want to. It just seems like something real people do. Not for me, you know?” 

“What does that mean?” he asks, brow wrinkling. 

She’s saying too much. The wine is hitting her empty stomach and her head and the way he’s more sloppy than she’s used to seeing him is leaving her with a contact buzz as well. 

“Nothing,” she says, quickly, brightly. “I just… I wouldn’t want to do that to someone else. Make them have to put up with me and my… everything.”

It doesn’t sound as funny outloud, even as she forces a little self-deprecating laugh. 

He blinks slowly at her, wine-stained mouth slightly parted. 

“You’re so…” he starts. 

Her heart stops momentarily in her chest, the bottom of her stomach drops. It’s easy to fill in the blanks: weird, difficult, dumb. He’s drunk and she’s terrified that she’s about to hear what he really thinks. 

Vax is always too nice to her. She can’t ever tell how he really feels.

He spots her panic and shakes his head, reaching out and touching her wrist.

“In my experience,” he says. “There are too many people who only care about what they want and don’t bother thinking of what it does to others.” His fingers tap against the side of her hand. “You’re one of very few people who I think need to be a lot more selfish.”

His gaze is heavy on her, head tipped sloppily to the side. 

Her stomach knots. She thinks about want again. 

There are very many selfish reasons that she doesn’t want to get married, never lets her think about it. Like most things she thinks she’d likely be a messy wife and a messy mother and doesn’t want to have to face how bad at it she’d truly be. She doesn’t trust herself to have those things, have love, have a family, and still be a good leader, make decisions that pull at the threads of the world that secure a good future for everyone. She knows inside her there’s something horrible and selfish, just as awful as the worst people Vax has met she’s sure. 

And most of all, she doesn’t want the grief. 

That seems disqualifying enough, that she’s far too selfish to love someone more than she fears her own experience of loss. 

She doesn’t deserve marriage.

She deserves a kiss from a pretty cool guy on his way out the door and that’s about it. 

Nothing more. 

“Hey,” Vax says, squeezing her wrist, pulling her back out of her own head. He shifts, chin tipping down so their eyes are lined up. “You are someone who deserves everything they want, Keyleth.”

He’s drunk. But he really sounds like he means it. 

“I don’t really know what I want,” she admits breathlessly. At this point, she doesn’t think she knows how to want. At least not safely. 

“Well, let me know when you do,” he says with a tight nod. “So we can make sure you get it, okay?”

She stares down at his hand on hers, his pale fingers, the delicate line of his wrist, the scars that litter the back of his hand. 

“Hey Vax,” she says, scooting her chair closer to his. Someone is starting up with a lute in the back of the room, the post work crowd is settling in. It’s a lot on the senses, but she doesn’t care. She finishes her wine and drops her chin in her palms and smiles up at him. “What’s your dream wedding?”

He laughs out shortly, closing his eyes for a second. “Really?”

She nods, elbows thumping lightly against the bar as she leans in. 

He leans back in his seat and flags the bartender for a refill. She watches the red creep up his cheeks and down his neck and she bites down on a smile.

“I think something outdoors to start,” he says, staring up at the ceiling like he’s lost in thought. “A temple would be far too stuffy.” 

“Of course.”

“Now I always leaned spring for the flowers, but Vex some years gets horrible allergies and if it threatened her eye makeup, I think she might not even show up for the damn thing.”

She swats at his shoulder. “Oh come on.”

He grins wryly. “Nevertheless, summer could be nice too. Better to time with the sunset actually.”

A part of her wants to tease. There’s something light to the conversation, something that feels halfway to a joke. He seems to have thought about this more than a normal amount and there’s something really funny and charming about it. 

But it’s also just lovely, talking about, thinking about. She can start to picture it in her head. A hot summer day, a sleeveless dress, Vex in pastel dabbing at her eyes and blaming the flowers. 

And even though they’re sort of joking, she can hear his want, and it’s almost like having her own. 

“What are the colors?” she asks. “Some weddings have color schemes, right?”

“Keyleth, I’m not an animal,” he huffs. “There will be a color scheme.”

—

Keyleth is tired. 

It’s been ten days. She thinks. There are no nights, no days in this other plane. It just feels like ten days. Double digits. 

She’s hungry. 

But she’s always hungry and always tired. She’s dying. 

She thinks. She’s not sure what else to make of this. She’s not dead yet, but she’s too tired, hungry, lost to see any way out. 

She wonders what she did to deserve a death in slow motion, ten maybe days in purgatory. She wonders if there’s a reason for any of this or if it’s just chaos and nature. She wonders if fate exists, if this was always waiting for her.

There’s not much to do but wonder, really. 

She’s hungry and tired and bored. 

She’s hiding, doesn’t have enough left in her today to seek out food or another fight with the creatures out there. There’s a small house she managed to creep into, eerily emptied out. She learned a few nights ago not to sleep in the houses. They hide her better, but they create a fatal funnel if some wildlife does come across her in her sleep. 

She watches the door and window of the house for now, and wonders.

She’s dying. Which sucks because she feels like she never really lived. She always thought that maybe a thousand years would be enough to figure out how to be a real person, how to not hate herself, how to be the person everyone she loved hoped she could be. 

But she won’t.

She wasted so much time, hours and days and years worrying about grief that she’ll never feel, thinking about a far off future world that she’ll never get to see. 

It’s hard not to hate herself for it. But she’s also a little too tired to hate herself.

She wants the time back, and maybe that’s what this is for, some time to finally do something besides worry now that there’s really nothing to worry about.

She gets up, moving to sit with her back against the door, leaning her head back and closing her eyes.

She daydreams. About Vax. About his fingers on her face, about the shape of his mouth, about the soft rumble of his voice. 

He loves her. She is someone who is loved, romantically, and she wasted all her time being terrified about it that she never even realized how wonderful it is. 

He kissed her like he would die if he didn’t. Granted he had been bleeding out. But it was still so different than Kash, her only other point of comparison. With Kash it had been fast and explosive and mostly breathtaking. 

Vax felt like an eternity in a second. It was just as surprising, but slower, almost inevitable. She didn’t realize that she’d been wondering what his lips tasted like until they were against hers. 

He tasted like blood, traces of something sweet beneath that she’d love a second chance at identifying.

She won't get another chance.

But she dreams she does. She dreams he kisses her again and tastes like red wine. She dreams again and he tastes like honey. Again, and like a mint leaf. She holds them up like swatches, waiting for one to feel right, knowing that none will, because she won’t ever really get to know.

She dreams of him loving her, of him saying it again, of saying it back. His delicate fingers folding between hers, his lips on her cheek, on her forehead, on her neck. Sides pressed together at a tavern booth, his arm hanging off her shoulder, dropping her head to his shoulder when the ale gets to her head, tucking her hand into the small of his back, wrapping her ankle over his. 

She dreams of taking him to Zephrah, of showing him her favorite trees, of taking him flying over the mountains, of introducing him to her dad, of showing him off to her people, this beautiful funny good person who loves her. 

There’s this happiness, this life that she convinced herself was always out of reach. Days and nights with Vax, learning to love and be loved, building a beautiful life to share. She knows it’s not something she needs. It’s not something she would want if she hadn’t met someone like Vax. But it was never something she couldn’t have, she knows now. It was never impossible, it was never as far as she thought, it was never something she had to turn away from the way she did. 

It is impossible now.

Maybe that’s why she can daydream about it now. Dream of good years unwritten beneath her here in purgatory. 

It turns out she’s not too tired to hate herself. 

Chapter Text

He needs to tell her.

He knows. Some moments it’s all he knows. He needs to tell her about the tomb, he needs to tell her about his deal, he needs to tell her.

“You need to tell her,” Vex hisses at him, off to the side, slapping his shoulder. 

“I know,” he responds, and knows that if anyone, she can hear the fear and helplessness beneath it, the ‘how?’ that keeps him up at night. 

“Someone should probably tell her,” Percy adds once, in that errant all-knowing sort of way. The very practical and correct thing to do would be to tell her of course.

But Vax still can’t quite bring himself to talk to Percy just yet. And he knows that Percy is maybe the only other person who understands why he hasn’t. He knows that Percy won’t tell her, not out of some sort of understanding that truly it’s his information to share, but out of his own… embarrassment over the whole event. 

“Why aren’t we telling her?” Scanlan asks the group once, one morning around a campfire before Keyleth wakes up. 

Because he needs to tell her. And he doesn’t know how. 

Every second feels like borrowed time, but every day with her back feels like a gift. 

He thought he wouldn’t get it. He didn’t prepare to be the one to tell her, to have to bear witness to the consequences of his actions. 

He thought he would die while she was still lost to them. He thought he would never see her again. 

But here she is. And she’s had to carry so much. He watches still as she struggles, probably sees more than anyone else. There’s something twitchy that lives beneath her skin, that jumps at slight noises and unexpected touches. She picks at the scabs that litter her skin. He feels her barely sleep at night, jerk awake every few hours with sharp rapid breaths. She eats a lot or not at all and half the time ends up sick either way. 

He does whatever he can to ease her. He tries to draw her back out when she gets twitchy, when the part that’s her squirrels away, asking an inane question about trees or making the first stupid joke he can think up under his breath just for her. He lets her curl into him at night, soothes her through every jerk and jolt. He holds her hair back when she’s sick, makes her tea, keeps a good stock of honey for her throat. He brushes her hair when she forgets, plies her with small snacks that go down easier than meals. 

He loves being a comfort however he can. That’s all he wants to be. He doesn’t want to add this to the weight on her with this. If he could just slip away, if he could spare her the grief. 

But she pushes in closer and closer. Everything he’s wanted, everything he’s barely let himself dreamed of with her, it’s all right in front of him suddenly. She’s right in front of him suddenly, and there’s nothing he wouldn’t give her, there’s no way he could make himself pull away, there’s just trying desperately to tell her without telling her, to give her what she deserves while knowing that he’s on borrowed time. 

It feels like a sin, kissing her and not telling her. 

But she wants to kiss him. And any of them can die. And maybe if it’s just one night, one small lie, one gift he can give her, just there enough so that she can have him, but not long enough that his leaving will hurt her, then maybe it’ll be okay.

But he doesn’t die. 

And he needs to tell her.

—

She ends up being right. They don’t die. Umbrassyl falls. 

She wants to revel in being right. She wants to celebrate their victory completely. She wants to continue to rush towards the kind of uncomplicated happiness that she can finally see in front of her for the first time. 

But cracks are beginning to form. 

She almost runs. In the second the battle starts, when she sees Umbrassyl get closer and closer and bigger and bigger. Her flight response claws at her throat at the size of an ancient dragon suddenly in front of her. Her brain, forcibly rewired for survival, recognizes an apex predator, screams at her that fighting is not an option. 

But that’s what she’s here to do. 

She’s slightly shaky in the fight, trying desperately to tap back into that viciousness that’s come out when fighting other monsters and enemies in recent weeks. By the time she finds the animal in her again, Umbrassyl is flying away. 

And taking Vax along with him. 

There is, at least, no choice or hesitation there. She clings to her gate stone and prays she can get to him in time. The animal in her is awake now, is vicious and snarling and possessive. She promised herself and him to keep him safe. She’ll keep that promise in blood, hers and anyone else’s she has to. 

It’s a crumbling sort of fear though. She was able to keep herself safe for so long. But it’s not nearly as easy when he can get so far from her. Especially not when being a normal not-insane person who lets him make his own choices and sometimes his choices are teleporting into a dragon’s asshole. 

It’s only a bit after the battle that she gets a message from Allura. 

“The rift at Pyrah is getting worse. Those that remain are struggling to hold off incursions from the Fire Plane,” she says, sounding exhausted. “How are you all?”

She reports back with their victory and their plans to return to Whitestone the next day. It doesn’t taste as exciting anymore. 

Not when she’s thinking about Pyrah, in ruins, a quarter of her people gone, the balance she’s spent her life training to fight for left in horrible disarray. 

She wants to be happy. 

A quarter of her people dead and she wants to be happy. A quarter of her people dead and she spent last night making out with Vax. A quarter of her people dead and she’s been smiling at the thought of not going home.

She tries desperately, as everyone else takes to their own methods of celebration, to remember that she could have died. If she had died in the Shadowfell, even if she had died today, they would have had to figure everything out without her. 

But you’re not dead, her brain reminds her. So you can help. Why aren’t you helping? How could you do this to them? How can you live with yourself?

It feels like the worst part of her brain coming to life again, sensation rushing back, hot and numbing as ever. She wants to pull away. She wants it to stay dead. Wouldn’t that be beautiful? If the Shadowfell just killed the bad parts of her, if horrible things made something beautiful, if five weeks in hell were secretly just what she needed? 

She’s covered in scars that magic hasn’t healed yet. 

There are places in the world that are barren and cruel. Things happen for no reason. She has no destiny, no fate, no future. She could die in a second. She could live for a thousand years and watch everything she loves be burned down around her.

But there are beautiful things. They still exist, goddamn it. She is alive, in a warm magical mansion with her family, who is alive despite it all. That’s beautiful. 

And Vax is beautiful. 

She’s losing it, crumbling and cracking, but she still has her nails digging into the cliff edge of happiness and she will pull herself back up. 

—

By the time Vex sits down next to her, she’s already been drinking for a while.

She’s not sure if anyone has noticed in the chaos of a cannonball contest and she’s not sure if she’s trying to hide it, but it’s making being happy and selfish a whole lot easier so she’s not planning on stopping. 

“So,” Vex says casually, leaning back to sink deeper into the water, not looking at her. “Someone had a fun night last night.”

Keyleth freezes in place, her slow brain just barely keeping her from choking on her own spit, too overwhelmed to do anything else.

She’s tired of compromise, she’s tired of worrying, but here it is again, another snag, another crack, too many wants and needs in competition. She wants to be with Vax. She doesn’t want Vex to hate her. Is there even a way to have those two things at the same time? Or does she have to choose one, compromise again, have another half-happiness tainted by another loss? 

Why does it all have to be so fucking hard? 

“Keyleth,” Vex says with mild exasperation. “Breathe, please.”

She inhales slowly, feels a knot in her chest relax slightly. She wants another drink. Her brain needs to be even quieter. 

“You two haven’t exactly been subtle,” Vex offers. “Just for the record.”

Fuck. They should have been. Probably. There was just this haze, this high of being around him, that she couldn’t bring herself to care or maybe she just forgot. 

There were reasons she used to know, reasons why she couldn’t just take what she wanted. The consequences are catching up. 

“Keyleth,” Vex says again, reaching out and placing her hand on her wrist. “I know, I have been a little… hostile to the idea, but in all honesty you were at most 15% of the root of my… concerns.” 

Keyleth considers sinking into the hot water and turning into a jellyfish. 

“Look,” she says instead, staring down at the rising bubbles as they rise and bob and pop. “I know that Vax can do better than me.” It’s easy to say. It’s a fact really. It should bother her more than it does actually.

Vex snorts. “Please. Without quantifying what exactly my dear brother deserves in the grand scheme of things, trust me when I say you are easily the best he has ever done.”

She turns to look at Vex, raising her eyebrows. “Really?” 

Vex doesn’t flinch, just nods solemnly, staring her down. “In the all the ways that matter? Yes.”

Keyleth folds first looking away. Her stomach twists at the idea that that’s true. Vax deserves better than a compromise, than someone who doesn’t know how to love, than a half person like her. 

But she can be better. She’s trying to be better.

“I lo– I think I love him,” she mumbles. She’s not sure why it’s so much harder to say to Vex, but it is, like bringing their little baby bird love out of the soft warm nest they’ve made, presenting it to the harsh light of day and praying it can fly. 

“I’m glad,” Vex says. Keyleth can feel her heavy gaze on the side of her face. “I was… Vax and I have always had each other. Sometimes, a lot of times, we’ve only had each other. So I was scared of sharing that.” She breathes in shakily, and Keyleth feels as her mind goes somewhere else, somewhere heavy. “I was wrong though. You don’t lose things to love. You lose things to–” Her voice hitches under the weight of everything. “There are too many ways to lose things. But love isn’t one of them.”

In the slight quiver of her voice, Keyleth can hear Emon burning, can see Pyrah decimated, can feel every close call she missed in the weeks she’s been gone. 

Loss for Keyleth in the past few weeks had been quiet and empty and boring and barren, absence of life, slow decay. For Vex, for all of them, it had been explosive. It had been fire. 

Familiar fire. A red dragon. 

She doesn’t know what else to do but to turn to Vex and throw her arms around her. The hot water sloshes up between them. The cool air raises goosebumps across her exposed skin, but she hooks her chin over Vex’s shoulder and squeezes her eyes shut. 

She’s a little surprised when Vex doesn’t hesitate to hug her back. 

“He needs you,” Vex says into her ear, her hands pressed flat against Keyleth’s back. “We all need you, but without you, he…” She exhales, some shaky bitter half-laugh. “We lost you. And I lost the parts of him that you bring out. The whole thing was terrible. Let’s not do it again.”

Tears trickle out of Keyleth’s eyes, mixing with all the other steam and water around and on them. 

“Let’s not,” she agrees weepily. 

Vex laughs, patting the back of her head. “We’re family, darling,” she says. “Whether or not you’re swapping spit with my brother. And I’m so glad you’re back with us.”

“I missed you.” Her voice is a wobbly squeak. Vex nods contently. She sniffles and swallows down a stupid little sob. “And he’s a really good kisser.”

“Okay,” Vex says, with another pat. “Let’s keep some things to ourselves.”

Chapter Text

With Vex’s words, she feels her resolve tighten, she feels the knot in her ease.

Instead of getting another drink, she goes to find Vax, padding through the empty halls of the mansion, leaving a breadcrumb trail of water drops. She reaches out absently and dries the floor behind her, clears the leftover droplets beading on her exposed skin.  For the first time since the Umbrasyl fight started, she feels calm again, feels the confidence build back up in her bones.

Everyone is alive. One dragon is dead. She kissed Vax last night and she’s going to do it again.

When he opens the door, something in her chest pulls, shifts. It feels like something in her opening, new stores of room in her chest being uncovered, every breath deeper, every filling feeling expanding, every single sensation more. The feelings rise like a strong wind, like a riptide. She used to hold her ground against it, expectation and responsibility and fear like roots tethering her in place. There’s something magic about giving in, letting go, being swept away into the bigger wider ocean of feeling.  

“Hi,” she says, swaying forward on her feet, pulled in towards his gravity well.

His hand reaches for her, seemingly on instinct, easing strings of her hair off her shoulder and letting his fingers trail down, ghosting along her skin and leaving tingles in his wake before his hand folds around hers. It all feels so natural. A part of her wonders how long he’s held back from touching her just like this, something deep in her knowing that he has the same way she knows she has. 

“Hi,” he echoes. There’s all this depth in his voice, in his eyes, a world of him open to her now that she’s looking. She finds what she always knew she would, that all too familiar expanse of feeling. 

She and Vax have always been similar in that way, in how they feel. Things are always heavy with them, emotions run deep, difficult moments stick to them, scars take longer to heal. He hides it better than she ever could, but she’s grateful to know him well enough to see the seams of his armors, to be allowed to see him take it off. 

She’s sometimes jealous of the others, of how they seem to carry everything easier or at least know how to successfully make things lighter, but with Vax right now she’s grateful for the weight of moments, for feeling the pressure of it against them. 

He guides her back into the room, closing the door. She never strays more than a few inches from him. Like this she can narrow the world to just them. If she stays close enough, she thinks she can do it forever. 

“We missed you downstairs,” she says. 

“Sorry,” he says softly. 

She shakes her head and steps up even closer until she’s deep in his space, her chest brushing his. “Everything okay?”

He nods quickly, tipping forward so their foreheads bump together. His free hand comes up, tracing the shape of her ear. 

“You were right,” he says. “Nobody died.”

She grins and shrugs. “Well, I wasn’t going to say it,” she says. “But yeah, I told you so.”

He huffs a light laugh.

There’s still a heaviness behind his eyes, same as last night, something scared. She doesn’t want him to be scared.

“Are you alright?” he asks, like it’s the far more important question, his fingers trailing down the side of her neck.

“Never better,” she says. She slips her arms up around his neck and presses a slow chaste kiss to his lips. 

He hums sweetly when she pulls away, and that giddy feeling returns. She watches the long flutter of his eyelashes as he opens his eyes and sinks into the fantasy of getting to see him like this for the rest of her life. 

He breathes out and smiles shakily. His thumb taps gently against the corner of her mouth, and he shakes his head slowly. “Thought I dreamed this up last night,” he breathes. 

Her heart lurches in her chest. “I know what you mean,” she croaks back. 

“Keyleth,” he sighs, leaning in to replace his thumb with his mouth. 

The way he kisses makes her knees weak, even as simply as he does it. She sways them back before she does something embarrassing like fall on her ass. They bump along the edge of the bed. Vax turns to sit, and she’s all too eager to follow, hop lightly into his lap. 

It’s maybe presumptuous. There may have to be a conversation sooner rather than later about her… particular limits. Weeks ago she’d let that conversation alone paralyze her, she’d convince herself that her general disinterest in sex would shatter whatever fantasy he had of her, ruin them forever. Maybe it will, but she can’t bring herself to worry, she can’t help but believe that the old her was simply wrong about everything and actually things will turn out okay. 

Vax’s arms loop lightly around her hips, ready to catch her if she falls. 

Her heart thunders along, her head swimming peacefully in that ocean of emotion. Vax leans back slightly to stare up at her, all awe and love going straight into her bloodstream like the most addictive kind of drug. 

This is what it’s all for. 

“I had a lot of time to think,” she confesses quickly. “On the other side, in the Shadowfell.” He swallows hard, shifting beneath her to hold her better. “I’ve never had that much time to think, really. And I realized that… I don’t know, I always thought that my fate was to be alone. To outlive everything I loved. To belong more to the world than I did to myself or anyone else.” Vax listens intently, brow wrinkling in concern all for her and her stupid little feelings, and that’s how she knows . “And I hate that.” 

Her hands shake as she brushes his hair behind his ear. She’s ruined so many things that she’s touched. But she won’t ruin this, and she won’t ruin him. 

“I don’t want that,” she says. “Maybe it’s selfish, maybe there’s something wrong with me, maybe I came back too broken to still even be me, but… I’ve spent so much of my life dedicated to something bigger than myself. And all it’s done is make me feel so small. I’m tired of it. I’m tired of feeling small and you- you make me feel big, Vax, bigger than the rest of it.” 

Her voice betrays her, her eyes water, blurring his features in front of her. 

“I want to be happy.” 

She doesn't know why it’s so hard to say, why it hurts to want, why it feels too much. “I know that means being with you. I don’t know how this thing is going to end, but I know that when it does I want to be with you, Vax. I want to go wherever you’re going. I want…” 

She should stop but it’s like a dam breaking. No, like a dam exploding. There’s no stopping it. 

“I think I want to get married, and I want to have a house, and I want to worry about normal things like a leaky roof and vegetable prices at the local market, and I want a pet rabbit and I want to argue with you about what we should name it.” 

She closes her eyes before she can see him react to all that. It feels like she desperately needs a divine act to stop her from embarrassing herself further, but it also feels good to let it out, to say it and hear it and in some way be real finally. 

“I’m sorry,” she breathes in half a laugh. “I… maybe I want too much, and I’m definitely getting way too far ahead of myself and everything, and you don’t have to… I’m not asking you to…”

“Yes,” Vax says, hushed reverence, steely determination. She hears his breath hitch, feels his hands dig into the back of her shirt. “Yes, I…”

Before she works up the courage to open her eyes, he pulls her in and kisses her fiercely. 

It’s exactly what she needed, the force of it, the heaviness, the determination in his lips. She clings to him, presses forward and forward, digs her fingers into his shoulders. 

When he leans back, she’s comforted by the wild look in his eyes, the matching intensity making her feel like she’s not crazy. 

“I love you,” he says. His voice shakes, his hands tremble as he cups her face. “I thought I would never see you again. I really thought I wouldn’t…” She nods, reaching up to rest her hand over his. His fingers are cool. She presses her into his, desperate to share her warmth. “I’m just… I am so grateful to have been able to see you again. It’s more than I ever could have asked for.”

She nods again. “Yeah,” she says, because she sees in his eyes the same feeling from night after night in the Shadowfell, that longing, that fear, that helplessness. “I–”

“Vex died,” he says. 

It’s with the same intensity and fervor. She understands the tone, the weight of it, the significance, even as the words feel alien, like a sharp turn into another language. She’s not quite sure what he’s saying.

“In the tomb,” he continues on. “There was a trap. Percy… he wasn’t looking, he didn’t wait and…” He looks distraught, and she wants to offer him something but she’s still struggling to follow, to place his words, to understand what’s being said. “She was dead, before she hit the ground. I didn’t see it, I was… I didn’t, I just came up and she was dead and…” He shakes his head. “Kash started a ritual, and I…” His hands turn, catching hers and dropping to the space between them. “I didn’t know what else to do, I didn’t have anything else to give, I just–” He stares down at their hands. “I told her to take me instead.”

Keyleth blinks, and blinks again. She tries to picture it, she tries to put it together. The tomb, the armor, the Raven Queen. 

“And it worked,” Vax breathes. “She came back.” He exhales shakily. “I thought I was going to die. I thought day after day that my time was running out. And then you came back.” He pulls her hands to his mouth, whispering the rest against her fingers. “It’s more than I dared to ask for. All of this, all of it is more than I could have asked for.”

She swallows slowly. “What are you saying?”

“I’m feeling better,” he says assuringly. “I think… I don’t feel like I’m going to just drop dead at any second anymore. But I still don’t know what it means, what this deal I made entails. I think I should go to Vasselheim, but that’s not important right now, really.”

She shakes her head. “No,” she says, the words barely slipping out. “Vax, what are you saying… here?”

His lips press together in a tight line as he meets her eyes, squeezes her fingers between his. “There is nothing that I have that I wouldn’t give you,” he breathes. “There’s nothing you want that I don’t want just as much. I want to be with you, I want to give you everything, Kiki, but… I don’t know what’s going to happen to me, not yet. I don’t know how much of me there is to give.”

It hits her in distinct phases. It starts with the realization that she could have come back to him dead, to him gone, which quickly becomes too horrifying to comprehend. It continues with that fear she felt earlier today, when he was out of her sight, when he was in danger, and grows and grows, swallowing this very moment whole. And then it doesn’t end.

She can’t feel her fingers anymore, tugs them weakly away from his and flexes to make sure she can still even move them. 

“I’m so sorry,” he breathes. And she wants to scream a bit because the last thing she wants is an apology for him selling his soul. He draws back, holding his hands out and away from her, which isn’t what she wants either. 

She doesn’t know what she wants. 

The part of her she’s been trying to abandon has been waiting for this moment, waiting for the other shoe to drop. And she can’t help the sudden certainty that this is her fault. 

She thought she could choose her fate, she thought she could decide to be happy. The world had to course correct, had to remind her that she’s a fucking idiot. 

“I should have told you earlier,” Vax says, but she can barely hear him over the rush of blood in her ears. “I was trying to spare you I guess, after everything you went through and after everything else we had to tell you about, but that’s no excuse. I’m sorry.”

She feels her whole body move with each deep breath she pulls in. 

That dream, that fantasy of a happy future, it starts graying, starts crumbling beneath her touch. The old her, the compromise, starts to grow in her chest, starts to chide her, for being so silly, for forgetting her destiny, for daring to think that she could be happy. 

No, it’s too much and she doesn’t want to let this thinking get a foothold again, knows that if she lets it, she’ll never be free of it. It’s too many thoughts, too many feelings, too much regression. 

She needs to stop it. 

Magic sparks chaotically at her fingers, as she reaches for Minxie before realizing she’s sitting in Vax’s lap, reaching for a small flighty bird before remembering fucking ravens, reaches for anything else before taking in the fact that the door is closed and the window in this room in the mansion isn’t real. 

She panics and turns into a mouse, sliding right off of Vax and landing on the cold stone floor. 

It helps. Her brain becomes smaller, literally, goes blessedly quiet, stops thinking about fate and hope and grief, starts thinking about being small, about finding a corner to hide in. 

“Shit,” Vax breathes, miles above her. 

She scurries under the bed, where it’s dark and cool and calm, presses herself back against the wall. 

“Key-Keyleth?” Vax calls after her shakily. She watches his calves as he slips off the bed and kneels next to it, bending over to look for her. He sighs when he spots her, bringing himself further down to lay on the ground next to the bed, hands beneath his shoulders, staying directly in her eye line. “Are you–?” He cuts himself off, shaking his head. “You’re not alright.” He lets his head rest against the floor. “What do you need, love? Should I go?”

Her brain is way too small to overthink all of that, to be overwhelmed in the search for what she needs or wants right now. 

She thinks the room would be so much scarier though if she was alone, so big it could swallow her up. She inches towards Vax, chittering mindlessly. 

He smiles weakly and turns onto his side against the floor, letting his arm reach slightly under the bed, but rest still and outstretched on the ground. She rests her front paws over his fingertips, snuffles a bit at his palm. She scoots over to lay down next to his thumb and wrap slightly around his finger. 

“Alright,” he says softly. “Whatever you need.”

And she’s a mouse, so she doesn’t have to say anything at all.

Chapter Text

She’s not sure how long she’s a mouse, just holding onto Vax’s thumb. 

It’s been a very long day, and she’s a very small mouse and she falls asleep for an indeterminate amount of time. When she wakes up, she’s still a mouse and Vax is still there, also asleep, splayed out on the cold stone. 

She inches closer, watching the mountain of his chest rise and fall, feeling the steady huffs of his exhales across her coat of fur. She scurries out from under the bed and turns back into herself. The existential weight of being her slams across her senses immediately. Her eyes tear up and her head starts to ache. She has to swallow around the hard ball of a sob suddenly clogging her throat. 

She pulls a blanket off the bed and spreads it out over Vax, bending down to tuck the edges around him and press a light kiss to his forehead. It feels so natural to do, to touch him, to be affectionate. Everything in her hurts, just a little, with her thoughts like knives and her feelings like acid, but she still can’t help but feel that gentleness deep in her core that she recognizes deep in his. He pulls it out of her, that soft wounded creature of a soul that they seem to share.

It’s that part that hurts the most, it’s that part that feels safest around him, but it’s that part of her that she can’t face right now. 

The door would make noise. So she turns back into a mouse and crawls under the gap beneath it. 

It’s nice being a mouse, it's nice feeling as small as she thinks she should be. It makes her problems seem smaller, despite the fact that the world expands around her and swallows up everything. 

It does take fucking forever to get halfway down the hall though, so once she’s far enough away from the door, she just turns into Minxie. 

Her bones and muscles and blood settle happily. She feels more comfortable being Minxie ever since coming back, more in control, more real. Her human body has changed since the Shadowfell, thinner than she should be, pale from weeks without the sun, littered with new scars that aren’t healing fast enough. She struggles sometimes even now to recognize herself in mirrors. She’s surprised sometimes that her friends can see her and see her.

Minxie at least feels the same. 

Minxie knows what she wants: to prowl, to hunt, to play. To move, which is a simpler want than anything human Keyleth can dream of. 

Minxie also realizes that she doesn’t feel good. She’s hungry and dirty and exhausted and carries a million other little discomforts that human Keyleth has been ignoring. Minxie takes care of her, heading down to the kitchen and growling until one of the invisible servants brings her some food. She licks herself clean and takes a cat nap by the fireplace in the sitting room.

Minxie does it right, takes care of herself thoroughly and correctly, in the right order, without being paralyzed by indecision or fear or uncertainty about what to do or how to make herself feel better. It’s simpler being an animal, no higher questions, no hang ups, no doubts, just action.  

After her nap, she prowls, tracing errant smells and sounds of her friends around the mansion, staying out of sight to avoid questioning. Eventually, she wanders back to Vax’s door. She can smell him from outside, leather and mothballs and traces of the lavender soap he and Vex wash their clothes with. She can hear his slow, even breathing, sense the subtle warmth rolling off his body. 

As Minxie she doesn’t have the enormity of feeling, of emotion and love, that he draws out of her. But there’s still something there, something warm, something also a little wild and fierce and possessive.

There’s also something scared, that remembers what he told her and doesn’t understand the complexity of it, but knows that it makes her sad. 

The solution is so much simpler for Minxie. She feels the wrinkle, that creeping darker feelings and draws back from it. 

Run, Minxie decides. And does, jogging back down the hall and away from her problems. 

Keep going, Minxie says and lopes all the way through the manor to the front door where she stops and stares and has a dangerous thought.

She could go. She could run. Leave it all behind. 

She feels herself losing control again. Instead of treading a new path towards something better, it’s starting to feel like this whole thing, the Shadowfell, Vax, the hope, the happiness, is just a detour. She’s veering back towards staring down her old fate and her old problems and her old self. 

She doesn’t want it. And if she needs to do something drastic to get away from it…

She could. She could go. It seems so simple to Minxie. The feelings behind her are bad. And if even here they feel bad, it means she needs to go farther. 

She knows she could do it now. Knows she could run off into the woods and survive most things, could become some wild mad druid lost in some backwoods in some corner of Exandria forgotten to time. Truly let whatever Keyleth was die in the Shadowfell, and whatever remains be a strange ghost, less than, just a spirit, an old echo that keeps far away from the people she would accidentally haunt. 

Would that be freedom finally? From the compromise she sees returning on the horizon? 

Maybe she was foolish to think she could have everything, keep her foot in this world, this old version of herself, and the other in a better future. Maybe it is that extreme of an option. Maybe it’s all or nothing. Maybe the only way out is to run. 

Minxie sits at the door, vaguely tracing her options. 

To get out she needs an opposable thumb. 

But it seems so simple now. If she turns back into Keyleth, all of the complexities that are smoothed out would come back. She’d talk herself out of it when right now everything feels so easy and clear. 

She could turn into a mouse again but then she’d be tapped for the day and it’d be so stupid to get eaten by a hawk minutes into her play for freedom. 

She huffs and stares harder at the door like there’s something she’s missing. 

“Shit!” 

She jumps to her paws as Scanlan comes around the corner and freezes. He’s in a fluffy red bathrobe, holding a heavy glass of wine, and stares her down with wide eyes. 

“What the fuck are you?” he asks. “How did you get in here?”

Her nose wrinkles in frustration. Emoting as a tiger is harder though. A growl doesn’t fully capture her indignation. 

It’s been years. Minxie has definitely saved his life before.  

The snarl conveys enough though, for Scanlan to put it together. 

“Kiki?” he asks. “What are you doing?” He glances between her and the door. “Oh. Do you need to make a caca?” 

She pushes a heavy breath out of her nose and longs for the ability to roll her eyes. 

“Well, alright,” he says, walking over. “Definitely don’t make caca in here. I mean, you could use the sand pit if you really wanted. See how long it takes for Grog to notice.” He pats her side absently before crossing and using his opposable thumb to grab the door handle and push it open. “Is there a reason you’re a tiger right now?” he asks calmly, like she can answer. 

But the door is open. 

The wild is in sight and it beckons. A choice. Escape. Freedom. 

Minxie wants to put distance between her and the hurt. She steps forward and out into the cool night air. 

Maybe she should run. Far and fast before she can be stopped. She could do it. She is fast and quiet. She’s a predator right now. She could stay a predator out here, instead of being everything else she is back inside. 

The ground is solid beneath her paws. She feels the nature all around, a soft cold wind brushes over her fur. She can smell small prey animals in it, can already feel the sharp tang of their blood on her tongue. 

“Fuck, it’s fucking cold.” 

She feels her muscles tense, and glances back over her shoulder. 

Scanlan looks miserable as he pads through the mansion’s intangible door in his ineffectual fuzzy slippers. He clasps the folds of his robe tight at his chest and shivers. 

“Alright,” he calls. “Can we hurry this up before my balls fall off, please?”

She feels oddly surprised that he’s here still, that he didn’t just open the door but that he followed her out to wait in the cold. Her other concerns stall out, as she continues to stare back at him and try to figure out what he’s doing. 

“Should I not watch?” he asks. “Is it weirder if I watch or if I don’t watch?” He shakes his head. “Why are you a tiger, again?”

It’s slightly exasperated. He’s still trying to hold onto his glass of wine, clearly with his own plans for the evening. Maybe it won’t be long until he gives up on waiting for her to shit in the woods, unable to handle the cold, or too frustrated that she won’t give any answers, that she’s being too weird. 

But he’s here right now. 

Would it change anything? If he’s there to watch her run away?

Minxie is agitated, but the echoes of her indecisiveness, by inaction. 

She sprints towards the edge of the woods before immediately overcome by a deep unspoken fear and turning back around. She dashed in wide errant loops, away and towards and away again. 

It feels good to run, blood pumping, muscles straining, feels like she’s working through something even as she gets nowhere. Metaphor on metaphor on metaphor. 

Her ears pick up a sudden sharp slice through the air and she looks up. There’s a blur of movement and it takes her a moment to recognize it. A small tree branch goes flying through the air above her. It spirals over itself until crashing against the cold packed earth.

She freezes, turning in quick circles to make sense of it. 

Scanlan has moved back into the mansion, but still stands there, leaning against the doorway and sipping his wine. In front of him by the door, Bigby’s hand shimmers, points helpfully behind her to where the branch landed. 

The itch builds up beneath her skin again, her tail lashing back and forth excitedly. If she could smile as Minxie she would, but instead she gets to half a playful growl before she turns and takes off. 

She grabs the branch and drags it back to the hand and goes tearing after it when it’s thrown back towards the edge of the tree line. There’s peace in the burn in her muscles, quiet in the cold heavy breathes she drags in, focus in the direction of fetching the branch again and again. 

The troubles in her are ground down until the errant traces of them can’t find any purchase in her brain anymore. There’s just nothing but the simplicity of the chase. 

Exhausted, she drags the branch back one last time and trudges back over to the doorway to the mansion breathing heavily. 

Scanlan has finished his glass of wine, and gives her an awkward berth of space as she comes in and wipes her paws on the rug right there in the foyer. 

“Good?” he asks, waving his hand to dismiss the hand and close the mansion door behind her. “Therapeutic?” He doesn’t seem to know what to do with her, reaching out to pat the top of her head slowly, like he’s not convinced she won’t try to bite him. 

She flops to her stomach on the floor, panting hard. 

She doesn’t make the conscious choice to drop her wild shape, it just sort of slips off of her, leaving her curled up on the floor, back in her slightly wrong human body with all of her slightly wrong human thoughts. Tears dampen her face, rolling down her cheeks silently. Something has thawed. She lets it go, too tired to try to hold onto anything. 

“Rough day?” Scanlan says with a low whistle. He moves to crouch next to her before realizing he’s still wearing a robe and thinking better of it. 

This is the part where she’s supposed to explain but there aren’t any words left. She’s just tired again. Her brain is already spinning in circles, it’s tread the same paths over and over. She’s lost. Again. 

“You were in a dragon’s ass five hours ago,” she rasps out. 

“Well, yes,” he says. “That’s how it goes some days.”

She sniffs and sits up slightly, closing her blurry eyes and trying to wipe her cheeks off. Scanlan pulls a handkerchief and holds it out at her. 

“You’re crying,” he notes. 

“Sorry,” she says, shaking her head. “I thought I was doing okay, I’m just… having a hard night.”

“You thought you were doing okay?” Scanlan asks incredulously. 

She pats her face dry even as the tears continue to trickle down. 

“I feel so different,” she says. “And I thought it was a good thing, but… I’m starting to think I haven’t changed as much as I’d like to.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Scanlan asks. “You’ve been a straight mess for like weeks. You know that right?”

She blinks over at him, twisting the handkerchief tightly between her fingers. 

“You’re barely eating, you’re barely sleeping, you look like a stiff breeze could send you flying up like a kite,” he lists. “You spend every third night as a tiger.”

“Oh,” she says, glancing down at her hands and feeling her face heat up at how it sounds, how it looks when it’s just out there like that. 

“I mean, you’re in good company,” he says, clapping her on the shoulder. “No one here is doing well.” He shrugs. “Personally, I think your problem is that you’re thinking too far ahead. Today was good. Let’s leave it at that. We might all die pretty soon. If we don’t die, we can deal with our other problems. If we do die, then we don’t have to. It’s really a win-win. Or a lose-lose depending on how you think about it.”

He sounds calm when he says it, sounds sure which makes her jealous. But it also sounds like another goddamn compromise. 

“I’m tired of half victories,” she mumbles because it always sounds selfish and childish out loud. “I’m tired of feeling sad every time I feel happy.”

“Yeah,” Scanlan says slowly. He lets out a slow sigh like he understands. Which startles her. She looks up at him and it’s weird seeing him from below.

She’s always thought of him as one of the people who knows how to be happy. Why wouldn’t he? He’s talented and funny and sharp. He’s someone who can figure out what he wants pretty quickly and more often than not pulls it off. He’s not like her. 

He’s not her, really. She thinks she would be happy if she was anyone but herself. And that’s the worst part of all of this. No matter how hard she tries, how close she thinks she’s getting to being better, she can’t be. Because she’s still herself and always will be. 

“Well, you can either take the days as they come, or you don’t,” Scanlan says. He glances down at her, something heavy flickering over his face that’s familiar, that she almost wants to ask about.

She’s not sure if it’s better or worse to know if everyone else feels the same way she does. There’s something comforting about thinking the problem is in her. It means she’s identified the problem. And if it’s not true, well… there’s even less of an escape then. 

Before she can get over her fear of it, Scanlan covers it up again, grinning wryly. “Come on. Let’s get you something to drink.”

—

She’s not too hot on the gods, especially not tonight, but she does thank some of them (not her)  for red wine.

It makes her brain quiet, which is just what she needs to drag herself back to Vax’s room. And the wine makes it seem like a not terrible decision. She could find her own room and just go to sleep, but she doesn’t want to be alone. It’s stupid, but the voice in her head that cares that she’s stupid is too busy being drowned out by red wine. 

The door creaks when she opens it. She trips slightly on the rug. 

Vax isn’t on the floor anymore and all the candles are out. She stumbles towards the bed. By the time she reaches the edge of the bed she can tell he’s awake.

“Key,” he croaks, blinking up at her. He moves like he’s going to get up, like they’re going to sit and talk. 

She shakes her head, pressing down at his shoulder before he can shift any further. 

He looks… tired. Not exhausted, not sleepy. Tired. It’s around the edges of his eyes, the deeper lines of his face. 

She’s been thinking a lot about herself, about her feelings, about what she’s going to do. 

Looking at him now, she thinks about what he’s been through, what this means for him, what he must be dealing with. He thought he was going to die.  

Her chest pangs and she bends over, head swimming, to press her mouth sloppily to his. 

There’s a surprising relief when he kisses her back immediately. She knows she’s being selfish, avoiding conversation still, drunk and messy and needy when they have more important things to do, but it’s something heady and sweet to know even now he won’t deny her. His fingers sift through her hair, drawing her closer to him. 

She falls up onto the bed, limbs moving sloppily as she climbs over him. 

Her head spins and spins, until she doesn’t know which way is up. She pulls away because she forgets how to breathe for a second, and opens her eyes before she goes zooming out into space. 

Vax trails his mouth along the lines of her face, not even kissing her anymore, just tracing along her skin and muttering sweet nothings so soft she can barely make them out. It takes a moment for the blood to stop pounding in her ears, for her breathing to ease. She melts down into him, tucking into his side.

“I love you,” he mumbles along the thin skin beneath her eye. 

“I love you, too,” she breathes back.

It’s all she can bring herself to say for now. Right now, drunk and tired and emptied, it’s all that remains and all that matters.

Chapter Text

Vex does manage to corner him on their way back from the tomb. He can tell she’s desperate for answers, that she’s panicking. 

He’d love to comfort her somehow, but he’s drowning himself.

“What happened?” she demands. “What did you do?”

He can’t bring himself to answer, can’t quite say it. It’s almost funny how action comes so naturally to him, but explaining it, answering for it, facing the consequences, somehow feels impossible.

He can see in her eyes that she knows. She’s so smart, always has been, and maybe he’s just weepy and morose and dying, but he could cry with how proud he is, of what a wonder it is that he was granted the blessing of sharing his life with such an incredible person. 

Her eyes are glassy, mouth twitching as she tries to hold onto anger and frustration in the face of her deep deep fear. 

“Why would you–?” she chokes out, before her expression tightens again. “Is it because of her ? Because–” He barely has time to process the question, to push past the shock before she shakes her head. “No, don’t answer that, it doesn’t matter. Either way, you’re– you’re an idiot.” 

Her voice wobbles and it breaks his heart like it does every single time. 

But his heart has never felt so fragile in his chest. He feels like he can count each beat down to his last. 

“I’ve always been an idiot, Stubby,” he says, and pulls away from her, and heads off on his own where he hopes she won’t follow.

—

Keyleth gets them to Vasselheim without saying a single word.

Since breakfast, they’ve all been looking at her. They know she knows, because they knew when she didn’t. Something starts burning in her chest with every moment she has to longer contemplate the situation, work through the past few weeks and see them in a new light. 

Despite it all, the twisting and churning of her emotions and her slight hangover, they are in Vasselheim.

(Close to Pyrah, her heart beats like a mantra. Close to her father, close to her responsibilities, close to the old her.)

They’re planning and prepping, but there’s blood rushing in her ears, her heartbeat repeating, repeating, repeating. Her eyes skirt the horizon like maybe she’ll see it, flames or smoke or some giant accusatory finger in the sky pointing directly at her. 

“Keyleth,” Vax says, stepping slightly into her sight line. It sounds like it’s not the first time he’s tried to get her attention. She swallows hard and nods. “Um… would you come with me? To the temple?” 

She’s going to throw up. 

Shaking her head is more instinct than anything. Looking too directly at all of this right now is overwhelming. If she gets too close to it, she’s going to do something she’ll regret. 

Something shutters in Vax’s eyes, not surprise, which is maybe the worst part. Her vision stops swimming, stops dividing itself between the streets and the sky and her mind’s eye’s worst-case scenario of Pyrah, and focuses on him. 

It’s terrible. He looks like his heart is breaking, but like he doesn’t even expect anything better, taking it like a blow that he deserves, and it hurts her heart. 

It feels natural to say no. She doesn’t want to go. She’s scared of it and overwhelmed, and Pyrah, and the Raven Queen, and her fucking hangover. 

But she’s face to face with the immediate consequences of that choice, with Vax and his big hurt eyes and his fragile heart that she’s being way too careless with. The exact thing she’s never wanted to do. 

“A-alright,” he says straightly, buttoning up his hurt, hiding it, burying it. 

“I–” she starts, reaching for his wrist, desperate to pull him back out, to be able to soothe him herself, to not do this wrong. 

“No, it’s alright,” he says, quickly. “You don’t have to. I understand.”

“But I–” she stalls out for a moment, can’t quite bring herself to say that she wants to come because she really really doesn’t. “I’ll come. I will.”

“Key,” he says, so softly. 

He’s too good to her. She’s always known that, but that doesn’t mean she can’t try. 

“No,” she says, fingers tightening on his wrist, to prove intent, to stake her support. “I’m going to come, okay?”

His eyes bear into hers, wide, slightly wet, moved. 

She feels vaguely ill about everything today will entail, but this feels like she’s fixed something. And even though she’s still hurt, this is more important. If he needs her, she’ll be there. She has to be, otherwise what is the point of any of this.

Her knees shake slightly as they start up the steps of the Raven Queen’s temple, but Vax turns back to her with a small grateful smile. 

In this at least, she’s made the right choice.

—

That night, she sits by the door again, not as Minxie this time, but still thinking about walking through it and never coming back. She probably won’t do it. But she’s mad at herself, for wanting to, for not actually doing it, for everything else. 

In her angst, she has a front row seat to Percy as he tries to slip out. He puts up a good show, nods at her before he continues towards the door all so casually. She rolls her eyes.

“Where are you going?” she asks, shifting up. 

He pauses, shoulders tensing. “Out.”

They both wait for a moment, feeling out how they’re going to play this. 

“Can I come?” 

“Um,” he says slowly. “No.”

She gets up and follows him out the door. He doesn’t say anything as they go strolling down the cobblestone streets of the Quad Roads. 

They end up on the steps leading up to the Matron’s temple. She doesn’t feel particularly surprised, but does shoot Percy a look, brows raising. He half-shrugs back, only slightly rankled and defensive, before starting up to the door. 

She takes a slight lead when they enter the halls, guiding the way by vague memory back towards the inner sanctum they were in earlier. The temple is near silent and a strange feeling creeps up her spine, like they’re being watched but not by any of the priestesses. 

It’s almost laughable, her and Percy, the apathetic heretics, creeping through such a sacred space. 

It’s almost disrespectful, after earlier, witnessing Vax as he connected to something divine, as he took a first step down some spiritual path she doesn’t understand. 

They come to the large pool of blood and stop. 

Percy takes a deep breath in, pinches the bridge of his nose before exhaling. 

“Are you going to do something stupid?” she asks. Even her whisper seems to echo endlessly in the cold silence. “Because I’ll be really really pissed if you do something stupid.”

“No,” he says, toeing his shoes off and stepping forward. “I just have some questions. Maybe a comment or two.”

She shakes her head, but watches him, silent again, as he steps forward into the pool, a mirror of earlier in the day. 

Unlike with Vax, she isn’t twisted up in turmoil. Her brain actually empties for a moment while she waits for him, the hard angles and smooth surfaces that make up the temple don’t seem to leave a lot of space for her wandering anxious snagging thoughts. It's strangely peaceful. 

When Percy comes gasping up out from the blood, she barely startles. He trudges out of the pool, dripping red along the ground. It doesn't pool, instead seeming to roll right back into the larger body of liquid. She wonders if it’s by design or if something magic is at play. 

Even as he gets closer, the blood obfuscates most of Percy’s expression, but there’s a new tension in his shoulder. 

“Your turn,” he says tersely, before she can ask. 

“My–?” she starts. It surprises her, but she’s not sure why. It seems pretty obvious now, why she’s gone along with him this whole way, why she hasn’t asked any questions about what he’s doing, why she hasn’t at least made an attempt to slow him down. “Oh.”

She nods and makes a neat pile of her overclothes before walking towards the edge. The air is just the wrong side of too cold, goosebumps rising on her skin. 

Her toes dip into the blood first. She’s not sure what temperature would be worse, but it oddly feels like nothing, like it’s the same temperature as her skin, exactly, no difference at all, like it’s her blood. 

She’s seen this twice now. She knows just what to do. And she feels oddly calm, when her head goes under the surface, and she breathes in blood. Out of the dark, she finds herself in a liminal place in front of a large blank mask. 

“Keyleth of the Air Ashari,” the Raven Queen says. Her voice comes from everywhere and nowhere. It fills the entire vacuous space she finds herself in, but also sounds like it’s been whispered just into her ear. “Should I tell you what I told you friend before you? I have no interest in you.” 

Keyleth exhales, blinks up at the empty face of a god. Emotions flare and bubble up in her before fading and settling. She passes her tongue over her lips and oddly, finds her voice, strong and even.

“Well,” she starts with a tight smile. “I don’t think that’s entirely true, seeing as you seem very interested in someone who is partly mine. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about actually.” 

“Oh?” It’s odd to hear a slight inflection of feeling and not see any expression to go with it. The Matron doesn’t sound surprised, but slightly intrigued. 

“You’re all about fate, right?” Keyleth says. “What’s mine?” 

The space fills with a sourceless laugh, airy and empty, more of a movement of air than an emotion. “That’s your question for me?” 

“Yeah,” she says with a small nod. “I’m sick of trying to guess. What is my fate? Or was my fate? What’s the point of me?” 

There’s a slight pause, and the space glows for a moment as a weave of golden strings appear and stretch in the space between her and the mask. 

“What would it change for you to know?” the Matron asks. Which isn’t an answer. Keyleth feels frustration bubble up before she breathes in and settles it again. She doesn’t want the bullshit and the mysticism. She also doesn’t want to scream and cry and push to get her way like a toddler. She just wants an even answer for once.

“I don’t know,” she says, crossing her arms over her chest. “Because I’m close right now, without even knowing my fate, to just running away from it, running away from everything, going so very far away that none of this can reach me ever again.” It doesn’t prompt a reaction. The mask is blank as ever. She wonders what would. She wants so badly to understand who the fuck this entity thinks she is. “I could have died, you know. In the Shadowfell.” 

“I know more than any other being in this universe how close you came.” 

“Great,” she says. “Was that my fate? To die there? Because I can set that right, I can run away and pretend that’s exactly what happened. I kinda want to. Thought I’d just check and see if maybe I’m wrong, if maybe I should have some faith in fate.” 

There are no tells. The golden strings seem to slacken in the space around them, seem to glow a little dimmer.

“What is it you fear the most, young Keyleth?” 

Still not an answer. 

“You,” she admits anyway. “You, eventually, naturally, taking everything I love. And I gotta say I have not been encouraged by coming back to find you’ve started the process.” 

“So you would take yourself away instead? You would do it all yourself? What difference does that make when or who is responsible? Are you that desperate for control?”

Keyleth blinks, something in her brain shifting, seeing everything from a slightly different angle for the first time and not liking how it fits together. She tries to school her face but even though the porcelain mask is immovable she can feel a sort of smugness radiating down at her and it sparks against her anger. 

“Maybe,” she says. “Maybe I am, and maybe I will.”

The Raven Queen seems to retreat, mask shifting in the vague pantomime of a nod. 

“You're very young. You won't be for most of your life, but you are now," she says. "Youth is like a forest fire that burns inside you. I do wonder how long you’ll be able to keep it burning, how much it'll destroy.”

She feels the ground beneath her shift, feeling the space around her go slightly transparent. 

“Goodbye, Keyleth of the Air Ashari,” she says, serenely, knowingly. 

It makes her skin crawl, and she tries to hold onto the space as tight as she can for a moment longer, but it all starts to slip away. 

“If you hurt him,” she chokes out, but doesn’t know how to finish the threat before her hold slips.

And with that she’s shunted out of the space, suddenly finding herself in her real body again, kicking up towards the surface of the liquid. 

She gasps in a deep breath when she breaks the surface and blows blood of out her nose. 

“Yeah, well,” she calls up towards the ceiling. “Good talk. See you in a thousand years, I guess.”

Percy, slightly wiped down, grins wryly at her, holding out a blood-spotted towel as she drags herself out of the basin. She holds it to her face longer than she should, breathing in and out deeply. 

She clears the corners of her eyes, behind her ears, in the crease of her nose, before coming up again. Percy pats her soundly on the back. 

“What a bitch, right?” he asks. 

And, shivering in the middle of the room, still dripping blood, she laughs.

Chapter Text

She takes a big gulp of the night air as they step out of the temple, oddly cognizant of how light and freeing it feels in comparison to breathing in blood. 

Conceptually, the day catches up to her and she feels so thoroughly exhausted, staggers slightly forward before dropping to sit on the steps. She exhales slowly and leans back on her hands, sinking her weight into her shoulders. Percy joins her, sweeping out his coat and settling it flatly on his lap.

He knocks his elbow into hers and she drops her head onto his shoulder, and they sit there, traces of thick blood still drying in the creases of their skin, shivering in the cool air. 

It’s strange how when she spends time with Percy, even like this, she feels like a little kid. It’s like her brain making up for lost time, knowing that he fits into her life like the sibling she never had, that there are memories that belong to them of being young and less burdened and less broken that are impossible but shouldn’t be. 

She feels it in this moment, like she’s ten years old and he’s thirteen and they’ve snuck away from a formal function in scratchy fancy clothes that don’t fit right on them to get some fresh air away from the adults and the noise and every other boring oppressive thing. 

It’s so visceral, she can almost see it when she closes her eyes. 

“Did you get what you needed out of that?” he asks after a moment, worded in that particular lawyer-y Percy way to try to get the exact answer he’s curious about. 

For some reason it doesn’t disconnect her from that fantasy, that false memory. 

“I don’t know,” she says. “How am I supposed to know what I need right now?”

“Did you get what you want then?” he asks, unimpressed. 

She cracks her eyes open to send him a tight glare. “What do you think?”

He shrugs. “She told me I was broken,” he offers, evenly. “So, I’m trying to use a point of comparison to see what that was supposed to mean.”

It’s so scientific and practical. She snorts almost without meaning to, and he laughs right back. 

“I think I lied to her,” she admits. 

“Good on you.”

She rolls her eyes. “She asked what I was afraid of, and I said that it was her, you know, death, taking everyone that I love. But I don’t know. I’m afraid of that, but I think I’m more afraid of becoming her.” Percy gives her a scrutinizing look, curious. It’s hard to surprise Percy. She feels slightly pleased. “She was a person once. She had… people she loved, people who loved her, right? And now she’s… more. And they’re all dead.” She shrugs. “I mean, not to be self-aggrandizing, but… it’s all a little familiar. And she’s just so… cold. With the mask and that quiet temple and all the marble.”

“I don’t think marble would suit you,” Percy offers discerningly. “Much more of a mahogany aesthetic for you, I think.”

“I prefer birch, really,” she says and he smirks. “But it makes sense, doesn’t it? Wood rots. Eventually. Skin wrinkles, hair grays. Marble, porcelain, they’re sturdy, they’re lasting. But they’re cold and empty.” Percy nods slowly, eyes flashing with something like concern. “At some point she had to make a choice, right? Between the two, between cold things that last and warm things you have to watch decay. Either one is a compromise.”

“You’ve been talking to your boy too much,” Percy says, tapping her temple. “Letting all his mopey brooding seep in.”

She shrugs. “It’s not his fault I got sucked to a shadow dimension,” she says, only half-defensive. “There’s not a lot to do there but brood.” 

“I suppose that’s true,” he says. He lets his hand drop to rest on top of hers on the step. “You won’t become like her.”

“I’m afraid that I’ll have to,” she says. “It all hurts, Percy. All my options… there’s no right answer.”

He breathes in deep and lets her words sit in the air for a moment. They sound deeply concerning when they leave her head. Though if anyone could judge her for sounding moderately concerning and slightly insane, it’s definitely not Percy. 

“You know most of the time I hate having to go back to Whitestone,” he says. “And not for the reasons that make sense. Not because of… the memories that place holds. Not entirely, anyway.” He shakes his head. “No, I… when I lost everything, I didn’t realize how liberating it was to not have anything. No responsibilities. Nothing to be beholden to.” A terse smile creeps across his face. “I have a sister. I am… not the last living DeRolo in this world. I have a castle and a city and all of you idiots as well. I am beholden again. To so many different things. And yet I keep running away from it.”

It’s not an answer. The way it started felt like he was trying, like he was heading towards something profound that would be the perfect neat little solution to her problems and fears. She was hopeful. Percy is good at neat solutions. But instead, she watches as he tangles himself up and now, they’re both all tied up in their angst on the steps, staring down at people passing quickly by on the street below. 

It figures. They’re just kids after all. 

“I want to run away,” she admits, half breathless. If he knows, he’ll try to stop her, her brain warns. He can’t, her animal reminds her. Not really. But that’s not the problem. “But I can’t make myself do it. I don’t know how to stop caring about all of these stupid responsibilities. I-I feel like I’m beholden to this whole goddamn world and I can’t let go of it, I can’t just make myself stop holding onto it.” 

“I don’t think you should,” Percy says. His calloused, stained hand closes around hers, grips tightly. Their fingertips match, flaking red lines beneath their nails. “Caring, I’ve long thought, is one of your best qualities, as inconvenient as it is for us at times.”

She shakes her head, tries to dig her elbow into his side but he skillfully dodges. 

“It’s inconvenient for me, too,” she mutters. 

“I know,” he says.

“I’m–” she starts, before cutting the thought off. I’m inconvenient. It’s inconvenient to be me. The problem is more than just caring, it’s my body, it’s my brain, it’s me. 

“You know the worst part about being alone?” she asks.

“Yes,” he says, that edge in his voice. She believes him. “Yes, I do.” 

“You’re not really alone,” she says anyway, to have it be said.

“Not ever,” he agrees.  

“Five weeks. And to be honest it only took me five days to realize how much I really truly hate myself.” 

Percy doesn’t say anything, but he nods. He knows. She thinks maybe he’s always known that that’s what’s deep in her core, the most inside part of her. She thinks maybe that’s why he’s her very best friend, because he knows this about her, and she sees it in him. 

She tries so hard to hide it from everyone else, tries to project some modicum of confidence, of being right at the very least. Because if she lets it slip, if they know that she hates herself, they might realize that she’s right, that they should hate her too. And she’s too selfish, too scared to let that happen. 

She can tell Percy, though, for the worst reasons, because he understands, he hates himself too, and because he can’t hate her more than he hates himself. 

“And I…” She’s crying. It only gets caught in her throat once though. “I need to be anyone else. I need to, Percy. But it’s not working. I keep coming back to me.” 

“I know,” he says. She hears it in his voice, the strain, the edge, the hatred. He sits up straighter and clings a little tighter to her hand. “If it’s any consolation– which it isn’t, I know– but we don’t want anyone else. When you were gone… all any of us wanted was you back. And if you came back changed, that would be fine. And if you came back the same, that would be better. But we were under no illusions. We know exactly who we want.” She sniffs and scrubs at her eyes. The protests are all there already. They don’t know what they want. They want the compromise, the Keyleth that’s easy, that she tries and fails to be again and again. She’s something worse. She can’t hide it anymore. “And that’s not particularly fair, is it? To ask you to come back to all of this.” 

She shakes her head. “I wanted to come back,” she says. “I needed to… I missed you all and it was… bad over there.” For a moment, she’s looking at it straight on again, those five weeks, the pain or the fear or the hunger or the cold. “I feel like everything has changed. Like maybe I can’t even remember who I was before this. And yet, it’s like deep down nothing is different. The way I feel, the way I… it’s fate, I guess. No matter what happens, no matter what I do, I die alone, here or there, now or a thousand years from now. I lose you all, if I stay or if I go. I can’t escape it.” 

“Fuck fate,” Percy says haughtily. She can feel his attention shift back towards the closed doors of the temple behind them. She wonders what he was looking for in his conversation. 

“I’m trying,” she mumbles, dropping her head forward, letting her hair fall over her face, disappearing into her cloud of curls. “But no matter where I turn, it still…” She shrugs. 

“The thing is…” he starts, pausing to clear his throat and fix his glasses. If he makes it sound practical and sensible, then they can both pretend it’s not deeply personal. “When you lose everyone, your whole family, your entire life, believe it or not, you keep going. You just do. The time goes on. And so do you.” She nods slowly, glances up towards the horizon again, her eyes finding the direction of Pyrah too easily. The world can end, and still go on. “When you were gone, I didn’t doubt for a second you’d be back, or that you’d be alive when we found you at the very least. I saw all of their doubt, on occasion, their fear, which was justified, but I would’ve placed any bet on you. If any one of us could have survived all that, it would be you. You’re resilient, Keyleth. You survive things you probably shouldn’t. And that’s not always a blessing.” 

She gives up on trying not to cry, lets the tears just roll down her cheek and feels the perpetual knot in her throat begin to unravel. 

She’s not ten and he’s not thirteen and their problems are so big they’re swallowing the world. But it doesn’t matter, because he is her best friend, and he understands her. It feels as simple as being a kid, it feels like home. 

“No, it’s not,” she says, voice cracking. “I’m really tired, Percy.” 

“I know, dear,” he says, patting her hand, leaning over and pressing a brusque kiss to the side of her head. “And yet, miles to go before we sleep.” 

—

Vax is trying. 

He’s trying to give Keyleth space, since that seems to be what she needs. He’s trying to accept not talking about them. He’s trying to understand his deal with the Raven Queen. He’s trying to not crumble under the weight of everything. He’s trying to be okay. 

He can’t remember the last time he felt okay, or like things were going to be okay. 

That’s a lie. There was a moment, knees aching on the stone floor next to the bath in Whitestone, using his fingers to carefully untangle Keyleth’s wet hair. The sound of her steady breathing, the smells of the soaps and the shampoo. The wonder of her being in front of him again, alive and whole. The soft lines of her face relaxing in a space between wakefulness and sleep. She looked peaceful and warm and safe. He had a simple task in front of him, a way to say again and again “I love you” and know from her even breathing and the trusting slope of her neck that she heard him. 

It felt too natural to him, to be in that intimate space with her, to be proving his devotion, to be with her again after so long. 

Everything before and after was complicated and messy. But he holds onto that moment, to the rightness. 

He doesn’t mean to go looking for her now, but it’s instinct in his bones. She’s not in her room and not in his room. So he makes himself stop and sits himself in front of the fireplace in the common room and stares into the repetitive motion of the crackling flame. 

His brain quiets. He thinks of fate, of threads, of lives. 

He closes his eyes, can still make out the shape of the fire behind his eyelids, can still feel the heat of it across the front of his face. 

He tries giving into the idea of fate, resigning himself to the flow of it, believing that things will happen as they should. He tries having faith. 

“Oy,” Vex calls, the only warning he gets before a pillow bounces off the center of his forehead. 

His eyes snap open, adjusting harshly to the light of the room. His sister is an all too casual silhouette in the doorway, arms crossed over her chest. 

“What?” he asks, nose wrinkling. 

“Where’s your girlfriend?” she asks, sticking her tongue out. “Trinket wants to play.”

“I don’t know,” he huffs back, rubbing at his forehead. 

“Oh, please, it was a pillow,” Vex protests.

“And, it’s not… like that,” he corrects quickly. It seems important to clarify, for himself and for anyone else. 

“Are you serious?” she asks, raising an eyebrow. 

“I… yes,” he stammers back. 

“You’ve been all over each other for days now,” she reminds him. “You haven’t stopped making out long enough to ask her to be your girlfriend?”

He rolls his eyes, feels a burning in his chest and isn’t sure what it is or where it’s directed just that… he’s frustrated because he wishes it was that simple. 

“It’s not like that because I…” ruined it, he thinks, but that’s not right. He should have told her sooner probably, should have been more upfront, maybe could have even found a way to explain it better, perfectly, to minimize hurt. But the end result would be the same, would be this. There was no different choice to make, no mistakes just… inevitability. “It’s complicated.”

“Doesn’t seem complicated to me,” Vex says with a small shrug.

He sighs, throws his hands out helplessly. “Fine,” he says. “It isn’t complicated. Some things just aren’t meant to work out.”

Vex blinks quickly, brow furrowing. She steps further into the room, scrutinizes his face, searching deeply for something. 

“What do you mean?”

He itches to leave and hide. He doesn’t want to have this conversation, not with her, not about this. 

“I mean…” He lets his eyes fall close for a second. “I mean, I don’t think there’s a solution to this. I… I don’t think it’s going to work out.”

Vex closes the distance and lands a weak punch on his shoulder. 

“Ow,” he gripes anyway.

“All that, everything we’ve been through, and you’re just giving up?” she demands.

“I’m not giving anything up,” he says. “I’m just trying to…”

“You’re self-sabotaging is what you’re doing,” she says tightly. “I thought you were in love with her.”

“I am,” he protests. “That’s why I… Don’t you think she’s been through enough?”

“Sure,” Vex says. “Which is why I think maybe she deserves something good.”

He smiles tightly. “Exactly.”

Vex rocks back onto her heels, the anger on her face melting away. 

“You think you won’t make her happy?” 

He tips his head down slightly, gestures vaguely to the whole of himself before meeting her eyes again. Please don’t make me say it.

“Vax,” she breathes. She steps forward and crouches next to him, studying his face closer. “Do you really believe that?”

He shrugs. “I don’t want to be another thing that hurts her.” After everything, after what she’s lost, after all her fears. He won’t. He won’t add to that.

“That’s not your choice.”

He nods. “It’s not,” he says. “It’s something bigger.”

“Or maybe it’s Keyleth’s choice,” she says, pushing at his shoulder again. 

He thinks Keyleth’s smarter than that. He thinks she probably sees it too, the larger forces at play, the impossibility of making things work, the irony in their fate. 

“And,” Vex says, poking him harder. “Maybe you deserve something good. She makes you happy? You love her? You like being gross and sappy with her? You want to get married and have a whole bushel of little Ashari babies?”

He pushes feebly at her finger. 

“I know you do,” she insists. “And that’s not nothing. That matters, too.”

“Maybe it does,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean it’s not in complete contradiction with what’s ahead.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“I’m trying to–”

“You don’t know that,” Vex protests, voice raising. “Unless your new illustrious patron told you some shit that you haven’t shared, you don’t know any more than the rest of us that that’s not the exact future waiting for you.” She punches his shoulder one more time for good measure before standing. “All I know is that it definitely won’t be if you just give up now. And if Keyleth is being as stupid as you are then you should tell her the same or I’ll do it myself.”

With that, she marches out of the room. Trinket huffs at him too knowingly before following her down the hall. 

—

She and Percy do a decent job cleaning off and sneaking back to the group. 

But Vax is waiting outside her bedroom door. She finds that she’s not surprised. She also feels no urge to turn into an animal and run off. 

He climbs to his feet as she approaches and doesn’t ask where she was and doesn’t start to talk and doesn’t take any additional steps towards her. He just watches her approach like watching is enough. 

“Hi,” she says, stopping in front of him. 

“You look cold,” he says softly.

She exhales a small laugh. “I think I am. I don’t really notice it these days.”

He smoothly pulls his cloak off and holds it out towards her, eyes locked on hers, not moving any closer. She swallows hard and lets their fingers brush as she takes it from him. 

It swamps her shoulders and smells like him. She pulls it tight around her. 

“We should talk.”

Chapter Text

In the Shadowfell, it’s impossible to tell the difference between day and night.

Keyleth sleeps when she can, always briefly, rarely dreams.

It’s been weeks, at minimum. Maybe a year. Maybe forever. She’s exhausted, and barely hidden from the last flock of beasts that still have her blood in their mouths, but a brief rest to regroup turns into a deep sleep, pressed deep into a hard corner. 

In the dream, she’s home. Not a place but an impossible idea of home, her living room in Zephrah and a door behind her that opens to her bedroom in Greyskull Keep. She’s tending to the plants in the windows. Percy is next to her, looking slightly bored as she explains to him how to tell how much water each plant needs. 

“You can just use magic,” he points out obstinately, pushing his glasses up his nose. 

“That’s cheating,” she explains. He rolls his eyes. Vex taps her shoulder.

“Take a break, dears,” she says. 

Pike is in the Keep’s kitchen, hands her a warm cookie the size of her face. Grog is at the small table from her home shoveling food into his mouth, her mother across from him, slowly explaining some Zephran tradition to little success. 

A hand brushes her back, and Vax slides up next to her at the counter. The golden light from the kitchen window shines off his hair, lighting it up, making it look deep brown, like the richest soil. 

Time warps strangely. She must stare at him forever, feeling a strange deep pang of longing for something unspeakable, but she blinks and it feels normal again. 

She splits the cookie down the middle and hands him half. 

“Thank you, love,” he says, pressing a lingering kiss to her cheek. 

Then they’re sitting on the couch she’d fallen asleep on a million times throughout her childhood but it’s in the Keep’s garden, her trees sprouted around them, the ceiling open and the golden Zephran sun beaming down on them. She leans her head on Vax’s shoulder and somewhere nearby Scanlan is playing a song, a lullaby, and her dad is singing along. 

She tries to stay awake, even with Vax’s hand in her hair, smoothing slowly down her back. 

“It’s alright,” he says and she sinks into him and the couch, tired even in her dreams.

When she wakes up, for a second it’s so dark she can’t tell if she’s opened her eyes or not. She should be in a sunny room, in Zephrah, in Emon, anywhere. Her waist feels cold where Vax’s arm used to be. 

Except it wasn’t Vax. Except it was a dream, and she’s been sitting up against this wall, surrounded by shadows that want to eat her. 

Bile claws up her throat with the realization, a panic and sorrow closing like a fist in the center of her chest. 

She squeezes her eyes shut and tries to drop back down into the dream, reaching for the last traces of it in the corners of her mind. But half awake, she can feel the edges of the dream, the unreality of it. There wasn’t any sun on her face, there was no arm around her, there was no music. The memory of it is half empty, the way that dreams are, all of the details fuzzy, all of the sensations fluff compared to the reality of this moment.

Her chest seizes slightly with a sob she doesn’t have time or energy for. 

“Stop it,” she snarls under her breath. 

It’s harder and harder not to speak to herself, if just to say something, if just to hear something. 

“You’re so stupid,” she mutters darkly and sits up more. 

Her body still hurts. She can’t tell how much magic she’s regained. And her chest aches and aches and aches keenly, as she tries to remember the taste of the cookie on her tongue and finds nothing. 

The shadows move around her and she can’t tell if it’s actual danger or all in her head or if the shadows themselves are becoming sentient. It wouldn’t surprise her.

She feels a scream build in her chest, and just barely stops herself. It would be stupid. It would be so stupid. 

She’s survived this long, longer than she thought she would, longer than she should have, even if she doesn’t know how long it’s actually been. Dying because of a preventable misstep at this point would be so embarrassing, a final testament to her own uselessness. And that alone fuels her. 

“Move,” she orders herself. 

She’s awake, and she’s still alive. She needs to find food and somewhere new to hide. 

But she wants to sink back into the dream, wants to wish herself home again, that fake home, where everything is perfect and beautiful and warm. Real home, with all the details correct and not dependent on her shaky memory.

She stands on shaky legs and stares up at the dark sky. She’s on the side of the town that’s beneath that gossamer string of energy and light, coming from the stupid fucking orb that sent her here in the first place.  

“Fuck it,” she breathes, and turns into a raven. 

As a bird, she feels safer. She can move faster than the flying beasts, and as a raven, she blends into the darkness. But despite the safety, it usually makes her feel worse to soar above it all like this, to take in the expanse of this dark barren landscape, to see the full scope of her isolation, to try to comprehend the size of the hostile world she’s stuck in. 

She’s done, though, she’s so fucking tired. She looks at it head on for the first time. 

She flies directly for the tower in the center, dodges the packs of animals that tend to circle closer to the peak and lands on the edge of the roof. The energy beam collects into another orb in the air between the three prongs of the tower. Her gut, even as a bird, knows that it’s bad news. 

She doesn’t care. 

The roof is empty. She drops to it and drops her wild shape. 

Her legs are still shaky. She needs to find food soon. 

She stares up into the glow of the orb. It feels nothing like the sun, doesn’t warm her skin at all. She forgets a little, what warm feels like, that sinking pit of the shortest day of winter but without any guarantee of spring. 

“Hello!” she shouts up at it. Her voice wheezes and cracks. She hasn’t spoken in anything above a whisper in so long. 

She tries again, no words, just a scream, waving her hands above her head. 

“I know you’re out there,” she yells up at the orb, at the universe, at the fucking gods. “What the fuck am I supposed to do?”

There’s no answer. There’s never an answer. 

Why is she here? What is here? How does she get out of this? 

It doesn’t matter. They know. They don’t care. They never have. 

It’s just her. It always is, always was going to be, always will be. 

And she’s not a god. 

She could fly up to that orb in the sky, or follow the line back to the one she came from and touch it and see what happens, just like she stupidly, stupidly did at the beginning of this. Maybe it’ll send her home. Maybe it’ll send her somewhere better. 

Maybe it’ll kill her. 

For some reason, she can’t bring herself to risk it. She remembers that feeling from the first time, like she was being torn apart, like she was being erased from existence, like she was going to die. 

She falls to her knees on the roof, watching numbly as the flying monsters flock towards her noise, claws and fangs extended, ready to tear her apart. 

The orb thrums with energy and she wishes so badly to just let it take her, to trust that maybe the Raven Queen will let her land in some afterlife as peaceful and beautiful as that dream. But she can’t let herself, can’t bring herself to let it end, can’t stop fighting. 

She doesn’t want to die. Or she isn’t allowed to die. 

They feel the same in her head, as she turns back into a bird and takes off, straight up, faster and faster into the sky until she escapes once again from the claws of the things that want to kill her. 

She keeps surviving. 

—

Keyleth busies herself with the room, lighting the fireplace and straightening the sheets, but there’s only so much she can do to stall. 

Vax, on the other hand, stands frozen in the middle of the room with the most serious look on his face, eyes scanning the space nervously like he’s not sure where to go. She lets out a laugh, nerves and fear and exhaustion bubbling up at how ridiculous the tension feels. 

His eyes snap to her and something softens. He grins back, and she feels safer just knowing that he’s there. 

“Can we just—?” she starts, reaching for his hand and tugging him to sit next to her on the bed. 

He reaches out to smooth the fabric of his cloak along her shoulders. It’s so absentminded, but her chest swells. He loves her so much, so effortlessly, and she doesn’t know what to do about it, doesn’t know how she’s supposed to sit here and lay out all of her fears and flaws in front of him. 

“Kiki,” he stage whispers, brushing her hair off her shoulders. “Breathe.”

“Oh,” she says, half a laugh again, ducking her head and taking in a slow deep breath. 

“We’re okay,” he says. His hand falls back to his side and she wishes it wouldn’t. “You know that, right?”

She nods, meeting his eyes and getting lost for a second. It feels strange to be able to stare at him, after all those weeks when all she had was the loose shape of memories of him. He’s real, this is real, and that is scary, but everything’s scary these days. 

“Here,” Vax says. “I can go first. If that helps?”

She scoots towards him, until her knees are pressing into the side of his thigh. She brings his hand between hers and holds tight. “Okay.”

He smiles and leans towards her, head tipping as he stares at her. 

“I…” he starts slowly, voice cracking slightly. He clears his throat, closes his eyes for a second before trying again. “I understand.” He shifts uncertainly, and she starts to see that for all he’s trying to comfort her, he’s just as scared. But he’s here too. He’s pushing through. “No matter what you decide, nothing will make me love you less.” His brow twitches. “That’s just to say that I don’t need anything, I don’t want anything, I’m just here and I love you. And I understand that this is a lot, that you said things before a-about me and about us without knowing everything. Because I didn’t tell you everything.” He frowns, glances down at their hands. “It changes things. But it doesn’t change that we’re family, no matter how you feel now, no matter what you do. I love you, and I’ll continue to love you however you want, whatever that looks like.”

His entire body is braced, ready for rejection, an all too familiar and relatable sight.

She could do it, she could simply say “I can’t do this.” and back away from the fire and stuff all her big feelings away and shield herself from hurt and still somehow miraculously keep Vax close, but just out of reach. 

Maybe she should. Maybe she shouldn’t. 

Her head hurts. She leans forward and buries her face in his neck.

“I’m not doing very well,” she admits quietly. 

She feels him inhale shakily. His hand comes up to run gently through her hair. He hums softly and the soft vibration tickles her cheek. 

“I’ve got you,” he breathes. 

“I know,” she says, squirming in closer, pressing more firmly against him. He frees his hand from between hers and wraps around her, cradling her against his chest. “I-I have these fantasies of running away. It’s terrible.”

“It’s not,” he says fiercely. “You’ve been through so much. You can go home, Kiki. We’ll get you home if that’s what you want.”

“Not home,” she says. “Just away. From everything. From me.” She digs her fingers into the hem of his shirt. “I… I kinda really hate myself, Vax.”

“Oh.”

She squeezes her eyes shut. “I’ve hated myself for so long,” she says, a truth dredged from her very core, tugging something free deep within her. “I’ve hated myself for not being the person everyone expects me– needs me– to be, I’ve hated the person I’m supposed to become. I’ve hated myself for trying to do the right thing, I’ve hated myself for not knowing what the right thing was. And I hate that I’m going to be stuck with me forever. You all are going to die, and it’s just going to be me.”

Vax’s arms tighten around her, press her close to his chest. She tries to believe it, to just sink into him and forget these eternal truths that have weighed on her for years. 

“I was all alone over there,” she says. “I had nothing to lose and no consequences for my actions. It was just me and all the time I’d wasted, all the things I told myself I couldn’t have, all the grief I’d pointlessly prepared for.” She shakes her head. “I survived all of that, and I thought maybe it was a lesson, maybe it was a sign that I could be someone else, I could let go and not care and deny that future where I’m all alone. I thought I could be better.” She lets out a sharp laugh. “I don’t know why. I can’t eat, I barely sleep, my nerves are so fried I almost bit Grog at breakfast yesterday because he moved too close to my plate. It has to have been for something, but I’m worse than before, I’m selfish and I’m angry, and you’re gonna die anyway.” 

She’s crying, gross and snotty, soaking the collar of his shirt, making a mess all over him. And all he does is press his mouth to her forehead, hug her closer. 

“Sorry,” she says, weepy and wet. “Sorry, I… this isn’t what I wanted to say… you said that…” 

“Shh,” Vax interrupts gently. His hand strokes from the base of her skull to the dip of her spine. “Just breathe, alright?” His chest rises beneath hers, a slow pull of air, a longer exhale. 

She tries to match her breathing to his, to the slow movement of his hand on her back, and fails horribly, each inhale catching in her throat.

“Go ahead,” he mutters against her forehead. “Get it out. I’ve got you, love.”

It makes her cry harder. 

These feelings aren’t new, they’re always in her, they’ve risen to the surface so many times, over and over when she was in the Shadowfell, no matter how tired or hurt she was, she always somehow had the energy to just implode. And every time she would try to stuff it back in, shut it down, cry less, shut up. She hates herself for hating herself. She was so stupid and weak and childish that she was going to get herself killed because she couldn’t help but have a meltdown. 

(At home, when she would start panicking over nothing, she would bury her face in a pile of pillows, terrified she wasn’t quiet enough, that her dad would hear her and she’d have to explain to him what a failure she was, how she was crumbling from the pressure that her mother shined under.)

This is new. Being held through it. Feeling safe in it. Having her anger and fury gentled by kind touches before it doubles down on her. 

She slows her breathing as best she can, counts his heartbeats, feels the warmth of his skin, loosens her grip on his shirt. 

Vax mutters softly to her: “There we go.” and “You’re alright.” and “I’ve got you.” and more and more. 

He’s rock steady, like he could do this forever if that’s what she needs, like there’s nothing more important. She shakily brings a hand up and wipes at her face, wincing at the damp material of his shirt beneath her. He hums softly and she feels instantly forgiven, endlessly seen. 

“Sorry,” she sniffles, shifting up slightly and taking a clear and even breath in. “I shouldn’t have said… you’re not going to die.” She closes her fist slightly tighter on the hem of his shirt. “I’m not going to let you die.”

He exhales a soft chuckle. “I know,” he says. 

She steels herself and unburies herself from his chest and faces him. She must be a mess, puff-eyed and tear-stained, but he smiles at her anyway, smoothes loose strands of hair off her wet cheeks. 

“Thank you,” she mutters, feeling heat rise to her face. “I, uh, I think I needed that.”

He nods, smile fading, something solemn and sorrowful settling over him. 

“I’m so sorry,” he says. “That you’re feeling this way, that you…” She watches him struggle, taking great care to search for the right words. “I’m sorry that you feel like you need to escape yourself, that you're afraid of being stuck with yourself. That… It breaks my heart. For one, because…” He lets out a weak laugh, leaning closer to her, pressing his forehead to hers. “The thought of being stuck with you for a lifetime, Keyleth, it sounds like my deepest fantasies.” 

She grins despite herself. “You say that now.”

He shakes his head fiercely, cupping her cheek in his hand. “I know what I’m signing up for,” he says. “You are incredible. You’re so strong and so smart and beautiful and kind and funny.”

“Vax,” she protests weakly, dropping her gaze from his, feeling that overwhelming wave rise in her chest, a desperate hope. 

“I see this light in you, always,” he continues. “And… It doesn’t blind me to everything else. I don’t see it in spite of the rest of it, the mistakes and the hard times and the struggles. I see it because even if it dims, it never goes out. Never. I always see you get up again, and try again, and smile again. I know what you’ve seen of this world, I know what you’ve lost and you still try to be bright, try to believe in something better. Keyleth, you just went through something unfathomably difficult. You spent weeks in the dark, hurting and alone and fighting to survive. I saw it. I saw it every day. And you came back and tried to turn it into something beautiful, into a way for you to be happy.”

“I tried to turn it into a way to be selfish,” she mutters.

“I don’t care,” he says with a light huff. “I’ve always thought you should be more selfish.”

She could explain that she shouldn’t be, she doesn’t deserve what she wants, she can’t be trusted to not ruin that too. But a part of her just desperately wants to believe what he’s saying, wants to pull herself out of this spiral, wants to believe that it’s true, that she deserves to be happy. That she deserves this, him.

“Well, so far, all I really want is you,” she breathes, blushing red hot, trying and failing to seem light and jokey. It’s so far from a joke. It’s all she has. 

He makes a choked noise, maybe a laugh, maybe a gasp, maybe both and neither. 

“You have me,” he says. “For as long as I can. For… as long as you’ll have me.” He pulls back slightly, meeting her eyes intently. “I want to be around for as long as it takes to be louder than the voice in your head that tells you you’re not every wonderful thing you are.”

“Even if it takes forever?”

“As long as it takes, and as long as you’ll want me after.”

“I want forever,” she says, sure as she’s been about anything. “But we can’t promise that.” 

He smiles wistfully. “We can’t,” he says. “But I can say that, when you were gone, there wasn’t a single day that I didn’t think of you. It’s not the same, but it was like a part of you was with us still.” He takes her hand in his. “So maybe if I’m ever not here.” He brings her palm to rest against the center of his chest. “I can still be here.” He leans in again to brush a feather light kiss against her forehead. 

She doesn’t want that. She’s had her fill of dream Vax, of imagination and fantasy. She wants him, real, a life with him, not a ghost. 

But that’s out of their control. 

Somewhat. If anything happens to him now, she knows who to go talk to. 

She won’t let him die. 

She hasn’t let herself die, despite everything. She won’t let him go. 

“And,” he says, brushing her hair behind her ear in short steady strokes. “Until then.” He tips his head, kissing her temple. She closes her eyes and smiles, leaning her head back slightly to open for him. “I’ll just tell you.” He scatters kisses along her cheek. “And show you.” Over the bridge of her nose. “Exactly how much I love you.” Along the shell of her ear. “Over and over. Until you can hear it all the time.” She shivers. He ghosts his mouth across hers. “I want you to see yourself the way I see you, the way everyone here sees you. How anyone should be so lucky as to spend forever stuck with you.”

“I think I want that, too,” she says. “To love myself as much as I love you.”

His nose wrinkles joyfully and she feels it deep in her chest, a release, a relief. He rests his forehead against hers, bumps their noses together, and kisses her soundly and deeply. 

Whatever happens next, she’s not alone. Not like before. Whatever she does next, whoever she becomes, when the world throws them another curveball, she knows he’ll be here, that he’ll catch her again, that he’ll somehow still love her. 

She could ask him right now, to run away with her, and she knows he’ll say yes. 

But she won’t, because he knows just as well that she wouldn’t make him leave everything here behind for her. 

She lets go of that fantasy, of escaping all her problems, of miraculously transforming into someone. This is who she is, and even if she’s working on being okay with that, when Vax looks at her, it feels more than okay. 

Chapter Text

“I want to go to Pyrah,” she announces at breakfast. 

It’s unattached to the rest of the conversation that’s happening, planning slowly narrowed to a few options between hunting for more vestiges or searching for allies. 

She thinks. She hasn’t been paying attention. Really she hasn’t participated fully in any plans since she got back. There was so much to catch up on, every sentence was altogether indecipherable without stopping to give her mountains of context. Even now, having a bigger view of the situation, her brain doesn’t fit into the discussions the way she used to. She doesn’t have any suggestions, is usually too tired to think further than making it through the day. 

She’s had no opinions either, no drive to head any which way, willing to keep following them wherever they’re going. 

Different parts of her heart have cried to start heading for Greyskull Keep, the last time things make sense, the last time she felt like somewhere was worthy of being called home. But anytime the longing became so strong that she couldn’t swallow the suggestion, she’d just get sad knowing looks just this side of condescending.

Unlike those moments, she doesn’t know where this declaration comes from. She’s felt in every heartbeat the handful of miles between them here in Vasselheim and Pyrah, and with it the pull of responsibility, the crushing weight of a grief she can’t see the shape of yet, the guilt of being blissfully intentionally ignorant. She’s been trying to block it out and yet here it is, bubbling up from deep inside. 

As soon as she’s said it, she knows that she means it, that it’s time to go.

Attention turns to her. It makes her skin crawl, the way it usually does, but with a new sharpness. 

I’m going to Pyrah, she wants to say. You can’t stop me, and you can’t leave here without me, so this is what we’re doing today. 

She knows she has that power, and that feels good after so long of having no control at all. But this isn’t an argument. This is her family, and she isn’t unsafe with them. Sometimes it’s harder to remember and she feels raw from last night still, even as well as her conversation with Vax ended. 

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Vex asks, pressing her lips together. Concern, Keyleth reminds herself. Not condescension. “It’s… not pretty.”

“Oh, well in that case,” she mumbles dryly. It doesn’t actually help to release the tension in her chest. She squeezes her eyes shut for a second, tries to remind herself who she is, who she’s with. “Sorry, I… I just… I’m used to not pretty.”

A look passes around the room. She can’t tell if it’s pitying or encouraging, but it makes that fire burn, makes that god in her want to flex her power, makes the animal want to bear her teeth and prove her dominance, makes the girl want to crawl under the covers and sob for a few hours. 

A hand brushes over hers. Each of Vax’s calloused fingers is an articulated point of electric contact. He still has a strip of half-eaten bacon in his mouth, a neat picture of normalcy he’s constructing for her.

Like nothing’s changed. 

She’s the same as she’s ever been. Going to Pyrah, going to her people, going back to the way things were.

“If you’re sure,” he says, eyes on her, just the two of them for a moment, the rest of the world dropping away. 

“I need to see,” she mouths, too uncertain to put any more power behind it. 

Nothing is the same. She doesn’t know if this is a good idea, if she can take more evidence of how completely broken everything is, face how much she’s failed, walk into her responsibilities while still harboring the deepest urge to run as far as she can from people who depend on her. 

But she has to see.  

He nods, fingers folding over hers. 

They go to Pyrah.

—

The world is on fire. 

Oddly, it’s very familiar, barren and lifeless ground, abandoned structures and the distant sounds of angry flying creatures. Her body shakes a little, not fear, not nerves, just pure adrenaline. Her senses sharpen, her shoulders tense. 

They saw the smoke from miles away, rising and diffusing into the sky, darker than rainclouds. Her stomach has been churning ever since, bile creeping up her throat as they continued forward. The smell came soon after, acrid and sharp. Then the heat, so sudden that they started sweating before they felt it. Every breath is slightly heavier, a slight burning sensation in their noses with each inhale. 

She’s almost grateful for the heat, for the light, for the color of the fire. Any difference between this apocalypse and the Shadowfell keeps her just a little more in her brain. Just a little. 

“Hey, Keyleth,” Percy says, after a few moments of wandering through the edges of what used to be Pyrah. 

Her whole body flinches as she remembers that there are people here, beings that don’t want to hurt her, that she shouldn’t run from. 

Her blood rushes loud in her ears, her vision shaking. 

“Where do you want to go?” someone asks. She digs nails into her palms until she can feel the skin break. 

Wake up, she tells herself. One nightmare to the next. Wake up.

Something screeches high above, a flash of bright red wings and a streak of smoke. 

(Talons in her back, blood in her mouth, she sets one on fire, a sudden shock of light in the dark, a signal to others surely but a brief cleansing warmth, as another sinks teeth deep into her arm, pain points burning through her muscles as she tears away and runs again.)

She drops, only stopped from shifting into an animal that’s faster and disappearing forever by a familiar figure in her periphery. Vex notches her bow and easily snipes the thing from the sky. A hand lands on her back and she flinches again, squeezing her eyes shut and holding herself in her body by the skin of her teeth, fighting against every instinct to flee and worse, to lash out at everything in the vicinity and destroy until she’s all that’s left. 

Behind her eyes, the vision of the Shadowfell is stronger: empty, barren, hostile. Dark. Cold.

She knows it’s not real, she can feel the heat on her face, see the faint glow of a city burning apart behind her eyes, hear a wash of sounds, fire crackling and concerned whispers. But the walls are closing in, no breath is enough to fill her lungs, sweat pours off her, her heart thunders in her ears. 

She’s going to die. 

“Kiki,” Vax says. 

Vax, she reminds herself. Here and real. 

“I’m fine,” she says. She wonders if he heard her, her voice is so hoarse and thin and everything else is so loud. 

His hand is still on her back, and she wishes he’d move away before she hurts him, and she wishes he’d pull her closer so her body could remember that she’s safe. 

“See, she’s fine,” Scanlan says flatly, so maybe the roar of white noise is only in her head.

“Maybe this was a bad idea,” someone else says, quieter. She’s probably not supposed to hear but she does, because she’s still here, she knows where she is, she just needs her body to get the message. 

“I’m fine,” she says again, and claws her way back to her feet. A look starts to pass around the group again, and she has to walk away from that, continuing down what remains of this street, past abandoned burned-out half-structures that used to be homes. 

She remembers only months ago, how excited she was to show off this place to her friends, a new little corner of the world that felt exactly like home. This part has never ever been complicated, she loves her people, loves Zephrah with everything in her, and fell in love with Terrah and Pyrah for all the same reasons. Being an Ashari has always been the best parts of her. 

And now this place is gone. 

She wonders what she was doing when it happened. Sleeping? Fighting? Running? Probably starving, probably tired, probably angry. She was always angry. A million worlds away while her people burned. 

You should have been here, her brain bites. You should have…

What, though? What could she have done? 

It’s pure instinct to blame herself, but she fought every second to get back here, nobody knew this was coming, what could she have done? What could anyone have done?

That helplessness sinks like a pit in her stomach again. 

Run, her brain says again. This was a mistake. She’s staring into it again, like that orb of energy, these things outside of her control, the forces at play that will destroy everything she cares about that she can’t stop and never could. 

She’s spent so long thinking so carefully about every choice, stressed herself to tears about her responsibilities, cut herself off from so much in the face of her intended role guiding the world towards a brighter future. And it means nothing. There’s nothing she can do in the face of things like this, charred ruins where her culture once lived. 

“Keyleth!” someone shouts, jerking her out of her slow sink. 

She looks back towards the clump of them awkwardly trailing her, but the next sound comes from ahead, another impish scream and a rush of wind as it cuts through the air towards her. Her attention is pulled in too many directions at once and she struggles to pull it all back into herself and the threat. She won’t be fast enough, she knows, and braces to take a hit. 

The imp doesn’t reach her though, is batted out of the sky by a sharp invisible force, hitting the ground with an inhuman whimper before picking itself up and skittering off. 

Her response spell sparks at her fingertips for a moment before it fizzles out. She glances back at the group as they close the distance, the imp flying off and away. 

“Keyleth?” another voice calls, a figure dropping out of the sky to land on the street in front of them, a man with slightly graying hair and a familiar staff. 

She feels dizzy, her head spinning in all directions, lost in her darkest thoughts while her body burns with feral fear. But in a second, it all shrinks—her thoughts, her feelings, her body— into a size that’s manageable for the first time since she touched that stupid orb. 

“Dad?” she says, ten years old again, unburdened and untroubled and innocent, content to guide flowers out of the dirt in their backyard until the sun goes down. She goes stumbling towards him like she would after a nightmare because that’s what this whole thing has been right? A horrible nightmare. 

He closes the distance and pulls her into a crushing hug, and she knows it’s different, feels the way she doesn’t fit the way she did when she was ten, the way she did when she was left Zephrah, but it’s enough. He smells like everything else here, smoke and ash and burning, but she can close her eyes and pretend she smells home on him: cherry blossoms and sunshine. 

Just a bad dream, she thinks. Let’s light a candle and wait for the sun to rise again. 

The spell breaks soon after. They pull back and he holds her by the shoulders and takes her in, as she is now, after everything. Her skin crawls, hangs wrong over her body. It’s been two years since she’s seen him, and she knows how much she’d changed even before the Shadowfell. Now, she suspects she looks like a ghost of herself, pale and thin, covered in new scars that won’t heal for all she picks at them, her hair a mess of stringy brittle frizz even under a week of Vax’s thorough care. Her hands are shaking, her shoulders hunched high, her whole body something off, more monster and animal and wild thing, less her, less the girl who left Zephrah with her head high. 

“Your friends, they said…,” Korrin starts. “I’m so glad you’re alright.”

She believes him, because it’s conditioned into her, but she doesn’t know how it can be true. She’s not alright. It feels impossible that anyone could look at her and not see it. 

“I was… I touched this, um, orb…” she stammers, trying to explain even though she knows he knows. Everybody knows. She hasn’t had to explain it, but she feels the need to now more than ever, to justify the mess of her. “It was dark and there was this… It was another plane. But I’m back now.”

He nods, glancing over her shoulder at her friends. “It’s… good that you’ve all returned,” he says. “The rift is getting much worse.”

—

The portal to the Fire Plane has torn itself larger across the landscape. The air around it as they approach is so hot that flames spark and dissipate like fireflies. 

There’s something oddly comforting about it, the sweat pouring in lines along her skin, the oppressive heat beating down on her chest, the warmth digging deep into her bones like she’ll never be cold again. She can sense each trace spark in the air, like a sixth sense, little motes of potential and power. 

The space between her and the portal shimmers with waves of heat, blurring the flames that dance along the ground. As she closes the distance, she can make out the distinct shapes of more imps and elementals towering over the space. In the haze, there’s too many to count, gathered along the path ahead.  

Her heart begins to pump even faster. 

Run, her brain urges. She knows what to do in situations like this, how to survive in inhospitable landscapes more than she knows how to be herself these days. There are too many threats in this direction and they’re bigger than her and if she walks towards them, towards the portal, she’s probably going to die. She needs to run. 

But she can’t. She knows that. Same as the last time she was here, she has to take a leap of faith. 

Only this doesn’t feel like that, like faith, like trusting. This feels like fighting against her instincts, against her body. She’s been reshaped into such a coward. (Maybe if she’d been more of a coward, she never would have touched the orb to begin with. Maybe this is a just punishment.)

Her steps slow as she becomes aware of each one, questions each one, regrets each one. 

Her breaths are heavy and fast, a combination that leads to very little air getting into her lungs, leaving her lightheaded. 

How is she supposed to do this? How can she possibly be the person to help Pyrah, lead her people someday, do anything but barely keep herself alive? 

She fully stops as more hulking flaming figures spill out of the rift, too daunted to continue forward, too ashamed to turn back and have to face her dad and Cerkonos, watch them realize the shell she is. 

“It’s hot as balls,” Scanlan gripes, striding up next to her and flopping onto the ground. 

“I thought you say ‘cold as balls,’” Grog says. “How can balls be hot and cold?”

She blinks a couple times, her brain struggling to process the conversation, the levity, the presence of her friends when all of her nerves are electrified with old animal instincts. 

“So, what’s the plan?” Vex asks, stepping slightly ahead and staring down the creatures ahead. 

“One moment,” Percy says, wiping his brow with the back of his forearm. “I need to decide if I’m going to die of heatstroke or not.”

“Oh,” she says, something inside her snapping back into place as she stretches her fingers out and casts a few gusts of wind across the group. A chorus of sighs ring out and she throws a couple spritzes of water out for good measure. 

She’s not alone, she remembers, can’t believe she forgot.

“Thank you, love,” Vax says, touching her shoulder gently. He swipes at his own forehead and reaches up to tie his hair up in a messy knot. It’s enough to clear her mind of literally everything else for a second, a different kind of heat burning her face. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but black was a mistake.”

“I wonder if a distraction would help,” Vex says, pointing out at a clump of imps to the far left of the rift. “If some of us can pull attention over there, the rest could head straight for the portal.”

“Splitting the party, always a great idea,” Scanlan says from the floor. Percy upturns a canteen of water over him, leaving him spluttering for a second.

She’s not alone. 

The world is on fire, burning and barren, a harsh wasteland full of enemies and they are heading for the center of it. But the old rules don’t apply.

She’s not alone. She doesn’t have to run. She doesn’t have to face this alone. 

They fought a dragon a week ago. And she didn’t run, didn’t want to run, leaned into every inch of anger and dug her feet in, determined to kill that fucking dragon, refusing once again to die or let any of her friends die. 

They’re going to kill three more. 

And first, they’re going to save Pyrah. 

“A distraction is a good idea,” she says. “The faster we get to the rift the better. Closing it means they can’t call for reinforcements.”

The plan is flimsy but it’s far from their worst. 

The small prey animal that’s built a home in her chest squirms uncomfortably, but it’s quieted by her family around her, behind her, prepping their tools to help her. 

She marches forward into the fire. 

—

For a moment she’s on fire. 

No, for a moment, she is fire. Her body, which has shaped itself into a million things for her, isn’t a shape. Her blood is magma, and her bones are coal, and her hair is flames licking towards the sky.

She is fire, of the same stuff as the world around her, her soul a fuel that doesn’t burn out, her mind a light beaming out.

Ash and flame and death and birth and power. 

There is no dark, no cold, no emptiness. There’s just fire and as easily as she joined it, she pulls the stuff that’s her out of the flame and lets everything else burn out.

—

“I know you and your friends have to leave soon,” her father says, pulling her aside and squeezing her hands between his. “But I’m… I’m so glad you’re alright. And I’m so proud of you and this journey you’re on.”

Her eyes start watering immediately. Something in her thawing out, remembering that this is all she ever wanted, to make her dad proud, to be the person Zephrah needs her to be. 

And yet, her stomach still twists. It doesn’t feel earned. 

“I…” she says, sniffing sharply. “Dad, look at this place, how…?”

“You’ve brought them hope,” he says, lending towards her and meeting her eyes intently. “That’s the most important thing.”

She glances past him, at a town in ruins, at a small gathering of people carrying an amount of grief even she can’t imagine.

“Hope for what?” she says. “They’ve lost everything.”

Her dad shakes his head. “Not everything,” he says. “Because of you, and your friends.”

“But… it’s all gone,” she says. “Pyrah, all of those people. Just because there’s something left, just because they survived…”

Her voice thickens. Korrin’s head tips and she knows that he knows she’s not just talking about Pyrah. She wishes she was, that her worries were external, that she cared more about the world than herself. Something in her shrivels, desperate to cling to that moment of pride from him, to not lose it as he sees how ill-prepared she was for this, how shaken she is, how much she’s changed. 

“They survived,” he says, moving to stand next to her and take in the rest of the group, what remains of the people of Pyrah as they start to celebrate. “And now they can rebuild. You can always rebuild.”

She wants it to be true. But the ground is ash. How long will it take before something can grow here again? 

“What if they rebuild it wrong?” she asks, all but abandoning pretense. Smarter minds are here at work in Pyrah. She’s another case entirely. 

“Rebuilding takes time,” he offers. “And you don’t have to rebuild things the same. You can make things better than before, keep at it until you get it right.”

It feels like there is no time. They’ve been moving so fast, from city to city, fight to fight. The world doesn’t have time for her to go on some spiritual retreat and heal and learn and rebuild herself from the ground up the right way. 

Every choice she makes feels weighted with consequence, just like they always have, and she’s never been able to see the stakes so clearly. 

But her dad is telling her that everything is going to be alright. So she tries to imagine it, that she has time, that she can rebuild, that she can get it right. 

“Are you going home?” she asks. 

“Not just yet, I think,” he says. He smiles knowingly. “Sometimes rebuilding takes help.” She follows his line of sight to the group, to Vax, showing off his flametongue dagger to some of the younger fighters.

Her cheeks burn slightly, and she opens her mouth to explain, though she’s not sure what to say. She can’t really tell her dad that Vax has been the one port she’s had in a hellish storm these past weeks, that in the moments she felt death on her tail, she dreamed of him, that he feels like Zephrah, like home when she needs it the most. 

It'd be too weird, it's her dad. 

But saying anything less feels ridiculous. What the fuck is a 'boyfriend' to what Vax has done for her?

Korrin pats her hand and turns to smile at her as she debates literally sinking into the ground.

“Hope is always important,” he says. “Wherever you find it.”

She stammers around a couple dozen starts to terrible sentences before giving up. “He’s really nice,” she says feebly. 

Her dad nods and takes a deep breath. “You know," he says, staring off at the horizon, at the last of the smoke diffusing for good. " She would be so proud of you, too.”

And that’s about as much as she can take before crying for real.

—

In the room they share that night, Vax holds her in his lap like she’s made of fresh spun glass. She really likes it, feeling fragile with him, like she’s allowed to be, like he’ll let her. He kisses across her shoulder, a deliberate pattern to his movement, but she can’t tell if he’s counting her freckles or her scars.

She doesn’t want to ask. 

Nothing has ever felt like this before. She’s never had this much touch, gentle and ardent and intimate. It settles her in her skin, reminds her of where she stops and the world begins, and then blends the line. 

“You’re so incredible,” he mutters. There’s a heat in his voice that creeps down her spine. “You’re so powerful and strong.” He nips lightly at her bicep, and it sends a little excited jolt through her, Minxie wiggling and eager to play. “What you did today…”

She shakes her head, ducks slightly, so her hair falls in between them. 

“It was amazing,” he insists, mouth tracing closer, pressing sweetly into the curve of her neck. “Key, it was…”

“Nothing,” she says. 

“Kiki,” he says, unimpressed. 

“Sorry,” she sighs, closing her eyes and dipping forward, leaning hard into him.

“You were great,” he insists, brushing his nose under her jaw. “I knew you could do it.”

“It felt like the old me,” she admits.

“It’s all you.” His fingers traipse along her spine, intentional but so light still. 

It’s good, really good. She should sink into it and not spend the night angsting until she’s too tired to enjoy just being with him.

“No, I…” she starts anyway, sitting up slightly and hating herself for it. “It felt like I was saying something, that I'm still that person, that I’m still on my Aramente and I don't know how to feel about that. It felt like a backslide, like setting something back on course.”

Vax nods, tipping back to stare up at her. “You did something incredible today and it can be as simple as that. It doesn’t mean anything more than you helped these people.” He dips in, pressing a sweet kiss to her shoulder again.

“I really wanted to,” she admits. “Help them. They’ve lost so much, and I-I haven't been able to do anything.”

“Yes, you did,” he says. “You kept yourself alive.” 

“That was easy,” she protests. That was selfish, she thinks just to herself. “There was no other choice.”

“Keyleth,” he says, the playfulness dropping fully out of his voice. “There was a choice. There’s always a choice.” She could have given up. She could have stopped fighting. She knows that. A part of her always knew that. “It wasn’t easy.”

“It felt good to help,” she mutters, because she can’t say anything to that. 

“Of course it did,” he says. “That’s what you do. You always help. No matter what happens, that’s who you are.”

She doesn’t cry this time. By the skin of her fucking teeth. She’s been crying too much the past few days. She wants to stop for a second and just enjoy this, the way that Vax understands her. 

Hope, her dad called it. That’s what it feels like. Hope that she’ll be okay, that if nothing else he sees her like this, strong and incredible and good. 

“My dad really likes you,” she blurts out. “I don’t know if he knows that we’re dating. If we’re dating? I mean, we’re dating, probably, right? I’m not sure what to call it really, which is why I didn’t exactly tell him. That and he seems to know enough, maybe more than I do in all honesty. But even knowing what he does know, he thinks you’re… cool. Which is good. And true, you are cool. I think you’re cool. Also, you look really hot with your hair up.”

Just complete nonsense. Honestly not much better than her morose ramblings, but at least those make her feel less like she’s having a stroke.

“Oh?” Vax says slowly, blinking up at her. A small, delighted smile twitches its way across his face, and she’d be more embarrassed if it wasn’t so fond, and he wasn’t so beautiful. “That’s… cool.” 

“Shut me up, please?” she begs.

The smile explodes, brightening his entire face. “Yes, ma’am.”

Chapter Text

Keyleth is not a compromise. 

She stops thinking of herself as a halfway point between things, a forever ‘less than’ negotiating the space between everything she’s been through. These days she feels more the simultaneous home of contradictory things.

Someone trying to save the world. Someone waking up every other night from nightmares of a dark wasteland. Someone who spends not an insignificant amount of most days as an animal just to feel safe. Someone falling horribly and irrevocably in love. 

A girl, holding Vax’s hand under the table in Syngorn, feeling slightly helpless for what to do when faced with something so delicate yet obviously dangerous for him, bolstered only by the way he grips her like a lifeline. 

A god, pulling Percy out of some hell, certain, precise, unclumsy in the way she so rarely is as she draws magic from the pit of her soul to unweave his from the darkness. 

An animal, sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively, sometimes predator, sometimes prey, staying alive by any means necessary, and lashing out when threatened. 

She’s all of the above and none of the above and something entirely else, a new her emerging from the ashes, powerful and unshakeable but also erratic and uncontrollable. 

Vax has to keep himself bodily between her and Kynan when the fight on Glintshore is over, some bonedeep bloodlust in her fueled by grief, not satisfied by the way they’ve torn Ripley apart and hungry for more, hungry to sink her teeth, Minxie or not, into his fucking neck.

Grog has to carry her out of the room after she lunges at Raishan. He sits outside the room with her and struggles to count out a breathing exercise until her teeth stop feeling so big in her mouth and her blood stops burning like flowing magma. 

She has to grind her fingernails into her palms to keep herself in her body when the anger burns hotter and hotter, remind herself again and again of her dad’s words about rebuilding, about healing, about making things better. 

She feels inches from a slide into something as dark and cold as the Shadowfell, can feel it like a stamp on her soul she’s running out of time to scrub out.

—

“Maybe I’m a liability,” she breathes later that night, in the dark where it can still feel like she’s alone and far away and nothing is real. It’s almost startling when Vax responds, not a reconstruction in her head. 

“Have you met the rest of us?” he asks softly, his fingers brushing soft circles across her shoulders. 

She shakes her head. “I don’t feel like myself,” she admits. “I feel dangerous. Or… maybe I just am dangerous.”

“You’re not the problem,” he says, catching her fingers as she starts to scratch at a thin scab on her forearm, folding their hands together. “Everything is dangerous right now. We just… need to be careful about what danger we flirt with.”

Her nails dig into his skin. He doesn’t so much as flinch, but the guilt in her grows and grows. 

“What if I can’t be careful? What if there’s something wrong with me and I’m going to get us all killed?” The worry feels so familiar, that she’ll screw everything up, that she won’t be enough, that she’ll fail everybody. It’s never felt so unstoppable before, so out of her control. It won’t be a choice that she makes that will ruin everything, it’ll be some violent rage-fuelled instinct triggered that will burn everything she cares about to the ground. 

It’s a relief to know that she can still care, that the safety of Whitestone matters to her as deeply as it once did. It’s a torture to know that it doesn’t matter, that it seemingly won’t be able to stop her.

Vax takes a while to respond, holding onto her in the dark and sighing heavily.

“I don’t… I don’t know,” he says. “But we’ve tried doing this without you. Whatever… whatever danger you think you are, it’s worth it. It’s better this way, and they’d all say the same.”

She presses her forehead harder into his collarbone, struggling to take even breaths. “I don’t want to hurt you.” Percy’s body on the ground, bloodied and broken, flashes through her mind again. 

(It had been her fault. She’d been right next to him towards the end, after spending half the battle as Minxie, impotently out of range and useless. She’d forgotten to heal anyone until it was already too late, until they were both hanging on by a thread.)

“You won’t,” he says, full confidence. She hasn’t earned it, his trust, and more than breaking it, she’s afraid that he won’t let her, will follow her down any path, no matter how dangerous. (When she’d lost control and everyone else had scrambled to stop her, he moved between her and Raishan like the rest, daggers in hand, but he hadn’t been facing her, had done nothing to hold her back. He’d stayed in the room while she was on time out, coldly hostile in the ‘alliance’ negotiations.)

“It’ll be okay.” He presses a kiss to her forehead like it’s any other night, like she’s not a spark away from exploding. She’s going to hurt him.

“Okay,” she mumbles. 

“We’ll kill her,” he says. “There’ll be a right time for it, when it’s not as dangerous.”

It won’t bring back Pyrah, she knows. It won’t absolve her, won’t fix anything. It won’t be worth it if someone gets hurt. 

But it’s easy to ignore those rational parts, to feed the fire in her gut, to imagine some cathartic solution to everything. 

“I love you,” she whispers, closing her eyes again. Don’t die for me. “I’m sorry about today.”

“You never need to apologize to me,” he says. “And I’m not afraid of you.”

“What if you should be?”

He shakes his head. “I wouldn’t know how to be,” he says. His lips brush along her hairline, words and kisses scattered along her skin. “It’s antithetical to everything I’m trying to accomplish here.” 

She huffs out lightly, but leans into him, feeling his breath gust through her curls. 

“I trust you,” he says, fingers dancing up along her back, smoothing down the center of her back until she lets her shoulders untighten. “They all trust you too. Because you’ve earned that.”

“The old me,” she mutters. “The old me earned it and the new me is going to get us killed.”

“It’s all you, love,” he says. “I know that with all that’s changed it feels like… it has to be separate. I… trust me, I know it’s hard to believe that anything can be the same after everything that’s happened. But I still see you, same as ever. The parts I trust, the parts I love. It’s all the same.”

“I don’t know if that’s better or worse,” she says, but tries very hard to believe him.

He laughs and kisses the top of her head, the places where her antlers usually sit. “Well, that’s a different question.”

—

“You’ll stop me, right?” she asks Percy, a rare quiet moment in his new workshop in the castle, on standby if he needs some firepower, a familiar and comforting afternoon in the middle of the chaos. “If I… Before I do something stupid.”

He does actually pause his tinkering, looking over at her and raising an eyebrow. “Do you really have to ask?”

She rolls her eyes. “Alright.”

He bumps his shoulder roughly against hers. “Don’t make me though.”

She closes her eyes for a second, pressing her fingers to the bridge of her nose. “I’m sorry.”

“Please,” he says. The soft sounds of metal on metal start up again as he gets back to work. “We all get our turn being a problem. Just don’t hog it.”

—

“Something’s different with you,” Grog says. 

She’d wandered off slightly as the group rests after a skirmish with some of the wild creatures in the forest. She wasn’t expecting anyone to follow her, especially not Grog. She releases her legs where she’d been hugging them to her chest, stretches them out in front of her. 

“Yeah,” she says, tracing a brightly colored bird as it launches off a nearby tree and takes to the sky. 

“You get angry now,” he says. “Like me.”

She used to think it was just fear. And the fear is still there, still makes her feel small and vulnerable, still urges her to run as fast as she can. It’s good kindling for the anger, for the forest fire alight in her, the rage that paints the world red sometimes. 

“Yeah,” she says again. 

He nods slowly. “That’s pretty cool.”

A small smile pulls at her face. “Yeah,” she says. “It is kinda cool.”

“Makes you harder to knock down,” he says contemplatively. As contemplative as Grog can get. “That’s a good thing.”

She’s always been pretty hard to knock down. But she nods. It is good, with all that’s ahead. It has been good, everything behind her. It seems the one thing she knows how to do is survive, like a cockroach.

Like life, Vax’s voice whispers in her head. Like a plant moving towards the sun. 

It’s a nicer thought. She tries to believe it.

“We might be the last ones standing then,” she mutters. “If it goes really bad.”

He nods, his brow furrowing, seeming almost solemn. “They’re all so squishy,” he says. 

She lets out a small half-laugh, more exhale than anything. 

“But that’s okay,” he continues. “Because I have some potions and you have those healy spells. We’ll get them back up.”

It sounds so simple and easy. Grog is good at that, at untangling things, repainting the world in few and simple strokes. 

Her chest tightens, eyes burning slightly. She can lie and say it’s the wind. 

“What if…” she starts, taking in a shaky breath. “What if I’m so angry I forget about them?”

He laughs, a sudden bark that she almost flinches at. “That’s silly,” he says. “It’s like… what if I get so angry I forget how to punch something?”

She tips her head, peeks at him from the side as he sits next to her with his legs crossed, indelicately but systematically plucking strands of grass from the dirt. 

“I shouldn’t have to think about it?” she tries. 

He shakes his head. “It’s just the same thing,” he says, oddly knowingly. He lifts his finger and draws a rough circle in the air. “Being angry, punching, protecting them. It’s not one or the other, it’s all the same.”

—

Her blood pumps in her ears. Her vision burns red. Her body aches with all too familiar pains, cuts and bruises from claws that want her dead. 

She has claws of her own, can feel them just below her surface, the animal beneath her skin.

She remembers too well what it’s like to tear into something, to give into that primal destructive force, to have blood in her mouth, beneath her nails, letting power surge through her and reach out to hurt something that’s hurting her. 

It would be so satisfying. To reach out and destroy, for Emon, for Pyrah, for all of Exandra. 

For things Raishan had nothing to with. For herself, the old her, the new her, the in between her that struggled through the dark and the pain and other lesser beasts to stand her right now with the power to do something good.

She wants to get her hands dirty and bloody and feel it viscerally so that it will be real. 

But her family is battered and this dragon is ancient and she’s not just a wild animal backed into a corner. 

She takes a deep breath and grounds herself in who she is, who she can be, better than that scared creature in the Shadowfell, maybe even better than the more naive girl who swung at that orb. 

She draws magic to her fingertips, powerful, mind-altering, unviolent magic, and aims a Feeblemind spell at a dragon. 

—

“I’m not ready,” she admits one morning. The air coming in through the castle window is slightly warm, spring around the corner. It’s been barely months since the Briarwoods were cast out of Whitestone, and the world is coming back to life.

Vax, trying to seem more awake than he actually is, nods solemnly, hums forcefully before his head dips again. 

She smiles and lets her fingers idly play though his hair. 

God, she’s so comfortable in this moment, just the two of them in bed, safely bundled between sheets with the sun softly filling the room, little errant motes of dust lit up and dancing. It’s been a tense couple days in the aftermath of everything, but also deeply relieving, to finally have most things settled, loose ends tied off. 

Except for hers. 

“Not ready?” he echoes after a few seconds, sniffing and shifting and slightly more present. 

“For Vesrah,” she admits. “Or Zephrah, or… anything really. I’m just… not there yet.”

He sits up slightly, rolls off where he was curled into her side and leans up against the wall next to her. 

“Alright,” he says evenly, taking her hand in his, tracing over the lines on her palm before sliding their fingers together. 

“I don’t think I want to just stay here either,” she says. “I think… I have to figure some things out.”

He nods, like it’s expected. 

Her throat burns with all the other things she wants to say, but listens to bird calls out the window until the pressure builds too much and spills out.

“I know you liked Zephrah and I know that Vex is probably staying here and I don’t even know where I’m going yet, but–”

He kisses her quiet, his thumb gently coasting along her cheekbone as his mouth makes a million promises against hers. 

She feels unraveled, all the knots and weights and mess inside her released, complete silence in her head, the closest approximation she’s gotten to peace in years. 

“You have all of me there is to give,” he says, like a sacred vow, but with a smile like it’s an inside joke. Her face goes hot and probably horrifically pink. “Wherever you feel like going, I’ll be there.”

—

So they go. 

It’s hard, saying goodbye. But they all stock up on Sending Stones and they’re back in Whitestone often and Vex calls the times they’re not there their ‘trips.’ 

She and Vax skip across Exandria. 

They spend time in Emon, in Westruun, even in Pyrah, helping, rebuilding, being useful in a way that soothes some guilty ache in her and makes her believe again in a brighter future. 

They split that with long stretches in corners of the world that the Conclave didn’t touch. A day or two in Port Damali, a week or two in Uthodurn, a month or two in Ank Harel, and scattered weeks and weekends camping in the heart of wild lands, nothing but the two of them and any trees willing to talk to her and any animals willing to not try to kill them. 

She falls in love with the world again quickly, with the colors and the sounds and the life of it that she missed so much. She falls in love with Vax, every morning in his arms, when he’s still there, not a dream or grief-tinged longing.

Learning, she thinks. Everyday something new. Rebuilding something inside herself, taking time to do it right. 

Vax catches her hands every time she goes to absently pick at scars, or else she puts them to good work, weaving or hammering or tending to crops, and unsurprisingly her skin starts to truly heal. He restocks the nice shampoos and oils they’ve been using on her hair and one dusk by some river in the south of Wildemount he uses Whisper to cut the last of her damaged ends, leaving healthy curls brushing the tops of her shoulders. 

They head back to Whitestone for a visit and she watches from the base of the ziggurat as Allura leads some other wizards in rituals to dispel the siphon there, to close the connection to the Shadowfell and seal it away a while longer. There are whispers of other necromancers still loyal to some long dead lich, but Vox Machina listens closely, and prepares. 

—

It’s a quiet morning. She watches the sunrise from the backyard of the small cabin they’re staying in on the far outskirts of Byroden. The town is small, still healing a decade and change on from Thordak’s attack, but the people are overwhelmingly warm and welcoming. 

She’d spent the night tossing and turning, in and out of some odd nightmare or another, until the sky seemed light enough that she could give up on getting any more sleep. It was surprisingly easy to slip out of bed and let Vax rest on. She sits in the grass with a cup of tea and faces the east, watching sharp rays of light start to carve through the treeline. 

She reaches a hand out and absently starts druidcrafting small flowers, watching them push their way confidently from the dirt and open towards the orange sky. 

The sun has just lifted off the horizon when Vax comes to sit next to her. She passes him her cup of tea and he takes a slow sip before moving to rest his head against her shoulder. 

“You haven’t done that in a while,” he says.

She hums questioningly. He points down at her hand, the growing collection of assorted plants in the nearby circle around her. 

“Oh,” she says, staring at them, the pattern of colors and the shapes of the petals like a mosaic. “I… I used it a little, over there, when I was really starving.” Sometimes having only a couple small fruits would feel worse, would almost remind her body what it was like to eat, but never enough to sustain herself. 

“They’re beautiful,” he says, reaching down to run his fingers along a lone purple orchid. 

She smiles and continues covering their laps in more sprouts, until the sky is fully blue, and the sun starts to poke up above the trees. 

“I still don’t think I’m ready,” she says. It feels almost wrong to break the silence, ethereally peaceful. She tries to trust that there will be another one soon. “I feel… better, I think, but I don’t know, I’m not quite there yet.”

He rolls his head to the side, drops a kiss to the side of her neck. 

“That’s alright,” he says. “We still have time.”

Time, she thinks. And takes a deep breath in. 

“I mean, I could have died,” she says. “And they would have had to pick someone else, and that person would probably still be training, and probably take a few years before they were ready for their Aramente, so really I’m still saving them time.”

He exhales a soft laugh. “All very true,” he agrees. “I love the way your mind works.”

She shrugs her shoulder slightly to jostle him. 

“And when you’re ready, you’ll be ready,” he continues, resettling against her. 

“Just a matter of time,” she agrees and grows a small strand of ivy, wraps it around his wrist.

She’s not ready for Vesrah yet. But tomorrow she could wake up and feel the call. 

Or maybe they’ll go back to Whitestone. Or maybe they’ll go somewhere else entirely. Or maybe something else horrible will happen and they’ll have to go be heroes again. 

She’s survived so far, and she trusts that she’ll survive again. She’s less afraid of the future, trying every day to enjoy what she has instead of counting all that she can lose. 

And if anything ever happens to her family, to Vax, she’ll walk her way into the darkest coldest corners of hell for him and walk back out. 

She’s done it before.