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Percy paused on one side of the jail’s door, searching for any sign of movement or sound of an approaching patrol, but the backwater town they'd found themselves in seemed barely busy enough to afford a guard during the day, let alone at night. Half of him wondered why they even bothered with the pretense of having lawkeepers here at all; the Clasp owned nearly every building in the city limits. As they were discovering, this place may have been tiny, but it was apparently the perfect meeting point between ports and there was a thriving underbelly despite how quiet it seemed on the surface.
That underbelly had been in all but open chaos for the past week now over a crate that had been brought over all the way from Wildemount and intended to change hands in exchange for a truly staggering amount of money. Before it had disappeared, that is. Vox Machina had taken the job to locate it, even though they had been given no hint as to what was inside.
There was still some debate within the team about what they would actually do when they found it – return it to the Clasp, return it to the local Battalion and hope for a bigger reward, keep it for themselves – options abound to every shade of morality. Luckily they had time to argue that out later. Step one was still to find it.
The best lead they had was talk of a suspected pickpocket whose whereabouts were unknown when the crate went missing, which seemed like barely a lead at all, but apparently it was enough to have the bandit tossed in a cell for safe keeping until all questions could be answered. That at least was convenient, because now they were in a nice, contained place for a polite conversation.
“Grog,” he whispered, nodding to the door briefly and the goliath grinned before raising up a leg and kicking it open with a CLANG.
When the sound faded and the dust settled, no one came running, so the rest of the team filed in quickly, all at the ready as they scanned cells. Most of them had nothing more than rotting clothes and rats inside, but the smell said there was something living here.
Well. Something once living, at least.
Percy walked down slowly, surveying as he went with his pepperbox ready in his hand. It didn't take long to reach the end of the short jail block and his eyes found the huddled shape of someone curled up against the corner of the— “Hm.” He blinked as the outline came into proper view, slowing a little with the others not far behind. “Well... that's interesting.”
It wasn't one, but two. Two half elves in cells side by side, pressed to the same back corners so they would have been leaning into each other if not for the bars between them. And identical, except that one was clearly covered in a healthy layer of injuries – blood stained across their mouth, bruises blooming like violets over one side of their face, one eye streaked through with blood.
“Let’s see,” Percy said slowly, lowering the gun to an easy rest, though his finger remained on the side of the trigger. “I'm going to guess that you're the pickpocket, and someone didn't appreciate your work,” he said, addressing the injured of the two. Now that he had a better view, this one was male while the other was female, but they shared the same long dark hair, the same lithe build, the same gently tanned skin.
“Who are you?” the man asked, voice a little raspy still, either from lack of water or from a throat punch, who knew.
“I'll ask the questions,” Percy said simply. “What do you know about this little problem going on in town?”
The man took a long breath and Percy could see the hitch in his shoulders at the pain it brought. Bruised ribs too, or cracked. “Not a thing,” he said quietly. “I am here because I was in the right place at the wrong time, and the Spireling has decided that makes me a decent whipping boy for his own mistakes. You sleep easier when you get to blame the outsider rather than one of your own, I’d suppose.”
Despite the unevenness of his words, the speech itself, the word choice… “I think I detect a bit of a highborn slant there,” Percy said, one brow quirking up as he took a step closer. It wasn’t a familiar accent like the noble families from up north, but there was a way that moneyed folk talked – always using a dozen when they could have used three. “Is there someone out there who would pay a ransom for your return? Perhaps a bonus for the double-up?” he finished, eyes flicking to the woman.
“Yes,” she said quickly, in the same moment her twin answered, “No.”
Percy leveled an unimpressed stare, eyes moving between the half elves. “Well one of you is lying to me right now. I wonder which.”
To his mild irritation, neither of them seemed to be paying attention in the moment, looking to each other through the thick bars that separated them before the woman let out a sound that might have been words, but it was too quiet to make out. He heard the man's reply though, a soft mutter in elvish that he was sure he wasn't meant to catch.
“There's no one alive to pay it, Vex…”
“That's what you might call 'negotiating against yourself' in your fancy circles,” Percy interjected in his own rougher elvish, brought back to him over hours practicing with Keyleth. He may not have gone to the most prestigious schools in Whitestone, but his parents had sent him when they could spare him away from the fields or the smithery. Admittedly, when the fields were burned by the monsters who took over the castle, and the smithery taken away piece by piece for the hellish doctor they employed, he might have had a little more time for language if he wasn’t fighting to keep himself from starving to death with the rest of his family and the rest of his people.
He shook away the memory of gaunt faces and the phantom feeling of rats crawling over him while he slept and forced his mind back to the cell just in time for the man’s reply.
“I'm a thief, not a liar,” the man said flatly, back to Common now.
“Do we need a thief?” Grog asked, brow screwing up as he looked down to Pike. “Didn’ you say we needed a thief, Pikey?”
“I— no?” she replied, looking up to him. “Well, I said Scanlan was really bad at thieving, there was that whole thing with the dragonborn.”
“I am a renowned thief, a thief of virtue,” Scanlan supplied with carefree brush through his hair. “And you can't be a very good one anyway, if you got caught,” he added, clicking his tongue as he looked over the strangers.
“He is,” the woman— Vex interjected again, and Percy wasn’t made entirely of stone. The desperation in her voice seemed… genuine, at least. “The Clasp set him up, he was trying to protect me, and it went—badly.”
“And you wound up here by…?” he asked, leading her on with a short urging wave of his hand.
She pressed her lips together for a moment, the line of her shoulders falling a little further even as she tightened her arms around herself. “... trying to break him out,” she admitted.
“So you’re both bad thieves,” Percy said with a quirk of a brow.
Anger and indignation flashed in the woman’s hazel eyes and here was the next reveal of a noble upbringing – locked in a cell for committing crimes that they clearly were guilty of, if not today then another – and still about to berate him for his behavior—
“Just let her out,” the man interrupted, his voice soft but even. “She can take you to where we were staying. There's... we don't have much. But you can have whatever you want,” he finished, his fatigue showing clearer on his face.
“Vax.”
‘Vex’ and ‘Vax’, there was clue number three, who else but a noble would make their children’s names a chore to remember.
“I'll stay here,” Vax continued, as if his sister hadn’t spoken. “You get something for your time, and after that, you let her go.”
“Vax, they could come back any time to finish the job, what are you doing?” Vex hissed, moving briefly to elbow him through the bars before her eyes flicked down to the state of him and she seemed to think better.
“Doesn't seem like there's much in that for us,” Percy said, keeping his voice disinterested even as he could feel Keyleth’s eyes on the back of his neck and he silently urged her to guard herself for once. Altruism sometimes had a cost, and they were still flat broke. “No offense, but if you had anything worth robbing, it looks like someone already robbed it from you.”
“I took the fucking lamp from the box, I'll tell you where it is,” Vax said, raising his head to match Percy’s eyes.
“... ‘the box’?” he echoed, working harder than ever before to keep his face emotionless.
“Shut up, idiot,” Vex said, her voice even tighter as she dug her fingers into her arms.
“So you are the ones who robbed the Clasp?” Keyleth asked, her brow screwed up.
“Who the hell goes to all this trouble for a lamp?” Pike exclaimed, almost loud enough for Percy to miss the next whispered words from the woman.
“We need that,” she said quietly, nearly a plea as she side-eyed her brother, though he had yet to drop his eyes from Percy’s.
“You get it,” Vax said simply. “She gets out. Do we have a deal?”
Silence stretched for a beat as Percy tried to ignore all the conflicting opinions he felt nearly beaming against the back of his skull as he stepped up to the bars. “I would have said you were a little too blueborn to be a decent thief, but I guess all the best ones are.”
Vax took a long breath in and out, and this one too looked like it hurt, but maybe that was from giving away their prize, if they really ‘needed’ it as much as Vex seemed to think. “I may be a thief, but I'm an honest one.”
“Well, one of those skills is testable now.” Percy dug a kit out of his pack and tossed it through, the lockpicking tools inside clinking quietly as they landed a few feet in front of Vax’s feet. “Prove it.” With that, he turned and walked back towards the front room, gesturing for the others to follow.
This was an entirely new situation. They needed time to talk.
He didn't even make past Grog when he heard the lock click open and he froze in place, the iron door creaking loudly as it swung on its hinge as the others stared.
“… holy shit,” Scanlan said, overloud in the sudden quiet of the space.
“She did tell you I was good,” Vax said, straightening up slowly from his place kneeling before the lock, even though one leg couldn’t seem to take his weight.
“She did,” Percy admitted, almost irritated at himself for feeling… impressed. But they hadn’t survived this long by ignoring the opportunities that came to them. “How would you like to have a job that doesn't end with the Clasp beating you to death in a jail cell?”
Vax’s brows raised as he stared back. “... Both?”
Percy gave a short nod. “Both,” he agreed, and he watched them let out almost simultaneous sighs of relief.
“We keep the lamp,” Vex said quickly as she climbed to her feet.
“We'll negotiate,” Percy said, stepping back as Vax moved over to her cell and made equally quick work of the lock.
~
Strangely, the arrangement worked. Days turned into weeks, weeks to months, and somehow the twins settled into Vox Machina, odd as they were right from minute one.
Vax had taken the time to steal back a belt from one of his attacker’s stash-houses before they left that ended up turning into a snake of all things, and as soon as they got out of town into the forest, Vex was greeted by a god’s damned bear that barreled out of the trees to lick her on the face like an overgrown lapdog.
Rich kids and their exotic pets.
The lamp… was a point of contention, but Vex had bargained and bartered with everything they had, some things they didn’t, and she got her way in the end, but not without sharing what it was.
“It’s a Beacon of Truesight,” she admitted tersely to the others, still holding the delicate looking silvery lantern tight to her chest as if they might try to rip it off her. “It shows through invisibility, illusions. Lies.”
“And you need it?” Keyleth asked, her voice measured as she looked between the twins like she was seeing something invisible of her own.
“We need it,” Vax agreed, his eyes moving over each member of the party as they drew just a fraction closer to each other, unapologetically tensed as if this might be their moment to run.
“Then you better stick with us,” Percy said, making a point of turning away to tend to their campfire and ease their paranoia. “You’re still working off the cost of what we could have gotten for it.”
Truth be told, the twins helped them earn back what they would have been paid for the job within the month, but… Keyleth liked them. Pike too, and Grog, Scanlan, so what was the harm if they wanted to stay? It certainly didn’t matter to Percy, it…
It wasn’t at all a relief to Percy, every time they had to split up for a mission and the twins came back to them.
He got slivers here and there of their story. They had no other family, they had been running together for two or three years now, and they were wildly uneasy about each new person they met, until suddenly both at once seemed to decide the person was trustworthy.
It took Percy a few weeks to see it happen. They were both so damned stealthy, but when they got back to Emon and met back up with Eskil Ryndarien, he watched Vex slip away and tracked her silent steps to the far side of the room before—
Percy barely managed to keep the conversation going as she covertly lifted the cover of the lantern and stared at Ryndarien for a moment before the tension in her body melted and both twins seemed to breathe for the first time since they’d arrived at his office.
After they’d left, he fell back to walk beside her, speaking low enough that Grog and Pike’s exuberance about their new job easily covered the conversation. “What is it you’re looking for?” he asked.
Vex glanced back to him and held the lantern closer to her hip, her hazel eyes cool as she gave her short reply, “A deceiver.”
She didn’t offer any more and he didn’t ask. Though there were certainly context clues that helped him track the story of their life.
Vex barely raised her head when they were in the merchant’s quarters of any town they passed through, but the one time he saw her eyes fall on a dress shop, there was a flash of near-childlike longing so intense that he looked away before she did. Vax kept a file in with his lockpicking kit that could be used for metalwork, but there was a side of it that was gentle enough for him to use on his own nails, and he kept them short, neat, and clean in every moment they weren’t bloodied or cracked. He watched them both quietly pack away their impulse to trust the crown’s guard. He watched them try to cover up their hope every time they caught sight of a noble, and it wasn’t difficult to put together the picture.
Vex used to be able to wear those fancy dresses made of white satin and blue silk, instead of her worn cotton tunic and battered armor.
Vax used to be able to keep himself warm and clean, and once his scarred and calloused hands had probably been pale and soft.
The guards used to be there to protect them.
The nobles they met used to be their friends.
And someone had arrived in the guise of somebody else and destroyed everything. Part of him wondered how the twins had been able to trust anybody at all before they’d found the beacon, but he knew the answer to that already.
They hadn’t.
Percy could have fed the ember of jealously at the life they must have lived before, or schadenfreude at the privileged being brought low, but…
“Here.”
Vax’s head twitched up from his seat in the furthest corner of the tavern they’d found themselves in. Vex had been drawn into a game of darts with the girls, and even though they were just on opposite sides of the building, it felt like it was the first time he’d really gotten to see the twins apart from each other.
Percy set down the same nondescript wooden goblet that everyone in the room was drinking from, but instead of the smell of watered-down whiskey, or slightly cloudy ale, honeysuckle and elderflower permeated from the air from the faintly golden liquid within.
“… what’s that?” Vax asked, looking to him.
“Don’t play dumb, you know what that is,” Percy said, pulling himself away from scanning the bar to meet Vax’s eyes. “Have a drink.”
The half elf’s eyes dropped again to the elvish honey wine – the most expensive thing in the house by far, two gold for a glass? “Can’t believe they have this here,” he said softly, pulling the mug a little closer and tracing his fingers around the rim.
“Hm,” Percy hummed flatly. “Lucky.” And not at all because he’d asked at the last five taverns and inns they’d stopped at. “I’ll be trying it too.”
“You’ve never had it?” Vax asked with a small curl to the corner of his lips.
Percy answered with a flat look and a raise of one brow, and Vax let out a soft laugh in return before he pushed the goblet back over towards Percy. “Split it with me.”
Percy shrugged and picked up the glass, taking a drink sip without any real expectations – how good could it possibly be?
The sweetness hit first, like biting into a ripe peach in the height of summer, and then honey. A gentle flavor of cinnamon and something just a touch spicier beneath that flowed over his tongue with a burst of tiny, sparkling bubbles, and for just a second, Percy was speechless. “… alright, that… that is good,” he managed, and Vax’s expression softened to something open and joyful.
Trusting, Percy’s mind supplied.
His tongue couldn’t possibly be numb after one drink, but it felt clumsy and heavy in his mouth so he hurriedly took another small sip before passing it back.
Vax was still smiling as he took the goblet and took a drink of his own, lowering the cup with a long sigh, and Percy could see the traces of wine clinging to his lips, sticky and sweet, before they were swept away with his tongue. “Yes. It is,” he said under his breath before his brow creased as he looked back to Percy again. “I got the impression you weren’t that fond of… frippery. Finery.”
Percy pulled his eyes away from the handsome face, dropped them down to the blade at Vax’s side – a perfectly serviceable weapon, but nothing truly suited to finesse. The hilt wasn’t balanced, the edge didn’t take well, it required near constant upkeep to stay up to standard. Perhaps… he could turn his mind to making something to replace it.
He took the goblet back when offered and pulled his eyes away, down to the honey wine below. “Well. Some of the finer things in life… it turns out, occasionally, they really are worth it.”