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The world was not fair.
It was full of pain, sorrow and unjust. It did not have favourites and did not pity any particular individual. It was simply made up of fate, already decided, ready for everyone to live the life the world wanted them to live.
For Percival De Rolo, he simply lived each day as if it could be his last. Or, perhaps, that was how he used to live it. Then he had found a place, found community. He was certainly not a perfect man, shrouded in secrets and bound to sins he never wanted to confront. Though, these people, his family, had looked at him as if he were no different to any other person. Had welcomed him in and hadn’t judged. But he supposed that none of them were perfect. All with tales of the past. Some they would gladly retell and others they had attempted to bury.
He supposed eventually his time would come, as everyone’s did. Maybe it was some twisted karmic justice, to be taken out of the world with something he had brought into it.
Anna Ripley was pure energy. She was perfect like no other. She was made like no other. Her mind was a twisted maze of traps and dead-ends, forcing you to get stuck in her vision of a perfect life. She was amazing. She was terrifying. She was an unstoppable force and Percival was not an immovable object.
He didn't even get a chance to look at his own weapon or look her in the eye before he died. He was already unconscious, unaware of the carnage around him. He wished, selfishly, that he could have looked down the barrel of the gun, grin manic, and prayed to a God he did not believe in and hoped he ended up somewhere survivable after it all.
(Knowing himself and the life he had lived, he wouldn't be given the luxury of rest after dying. Knowing the true nature of the world, he was bound to be tormented until all that was left was a husk of who he used to be.)
Anna Ripley had leant down and whispered to his prone form. “All mine now, dear, sweet, Percival. All mine.”
Then she fired the gun.
It had felt exhilarating. Finally having the upper hand in the game of cat and mouse she had been playing for what felt like eons now. She recalled the feeling of betrayal and hopelessness as Percival (who she had only ever treated with kindness) spat in her direction and threatened to end her life there and then when they were back in Whitestone. Her Percival (who she had given everything to. The whole world and then some. Had shaped him up like clay to make him who he was) had an odd way of thanking her for all she had done. With pointed insults and bitter words that tasted like poison against her lips.
(If only– if only– she could taste his sourness one last time. Could relish in his cool skin against her warmth one more time. To feel him squirm underneath her, powerless and eyes wild like rabid vermin caught in a trap. The look would set her alight. It would illuminate the dark cell he lay in and highlight his shaking form. If only she could hear his screams, his begging, his cries one more time, then maybe she would die a fulfilled death.)
He was once hers and she was once his. Weeds amongst plants where both of them were the solid, healthy soil and yet they were both the uprooted stems that dirtied the farmland and killed all the crops too. She once had him in the palm of her hand, a marionette for her to play with. With porcelain skin that was practically begging to be cracked. Shiny eyes needing to get wet, to cry.
She belonged to him, fully and completely. This was how the world wanted their story to go. With her towering over his prone form, metallic ice against her palm as her finger hovered over the trigger. The screaming from friends (though, were those scoundrels really his friends? He was a class above them all combined. A star hidden within the mud) and the coppery twang of blood had all been forgotten by her. Everything was a numb background as she stared down at the pale, marred skin. Above his collarbone, peeking out from underneath his shirt was an angry red scar. Never fully healed and painfully present against the rest of his form.
She had given him that scar. Oh, how she wished she could have given him more.
Finally, she pulled the trigger.
Perhaps escape was never possible. The world had already written her story, after all. Her fate was decided as soon as she grabbed that gun all those months ago. A blueprint that had never belonged to her but she took anyway. Back then, clouded by a misty voice and the desire to hurt, she believed back then was when her fate was decided.
To be murdered by Vox Machina, her lips quirked up into a smirk as she thought, no matter what, I have won.
Percival felt it when she died.
At least he thought he did or maybe he had already gone mad. Surrounded by his past mistakes, face to face with the devil himself. But he felt something. An overwhelming relief mixed with joy. To know he had been heard and seen, even after he had taken his last breath. To know that he still pulled her down with him. No guilt could be sensed but there was a nauseating feeling of sadness. Not wholly there but still, the minuscule slither that made itself known, was present.
Sadness– perhaps for what could have been. Of great minds, untouchable by most, ready to create things the world had never seen. Perhaps it was the thought of being noticed by someone of the same calibre. To feel acknowledged for something more this time only to find out, in the passion of the moment (with limbs intertwined, heat exchanged, too much, too much, too much and he had never wanted any of it ) that he was just being used. He was a subject to be picked apart and examined. They would cut open his brain and see the dirtied mind that controlled him. One that held a lustful anger that demanded to be satiated. Or, maybe it was sadness for the loss of a friend. One he knew he had lost long ago but now, in the present, everything was gone.
He simply was no more.
Death was everything all at once and at the same time, it was nothing at all. He would never be able to explain it because there was simply nothing to explain. It was incomprehensible to his feeble mind and yet too simple for his complex brain. It was expansive and boundless and suffocating and claustrophobic.
It erased him. The days, weeks, months, he spent wandering removed him from the mortal world. Picked him apart in a way that left him struggling for air for he had no lungs. No mouth to scream with. No eyes to see with. Simply a nameless, weightless, forgotten thing.
He was nothing and he was everything. He was real and yet he didn't exist at all.
Then, he was awake.
Percival De Rolo was awake, stuttering breaths forcing their way back into him. Familiar figures crowding him. Faces of relief gaped back at him, some tear-stained, others on the verge. It was real. The past, the present, the future, were all tangible and he had lived through a lot. Had died through a lot. Had survived a lot.
He took in a deep breath, ribs shaking. (Alive, alive, he was alive and could remember his own name. Could walk and talk and see.)
He exhaled. (Dead, dead, she was dead and cursed to be forgotten as no one would utter her story.)
Percy had died and yet there he was, lying on a cool flat stone, his friends (family) looking at him. For them (and as fate had suddenly decided) he would live.