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Keyleth wakes with her eyes still shut.
It’s sudden, though not in an upsetting way.
She knows it’s before the sun by the skittering of the momma possum who’s taken up residence in one of the trees outside her window (notably, the one furthest from her ravens’ perch), climbing back up into the Y of its branches, her four babies scrambling up in her wake. Another half hour at least, until sunrise Keyleth thinks to herself distantly.
She keeps her eyes closed. Not quite ready to face what her bedroom will be. Of who will be there.
A glass of wine had turned into ‘fuck it, we’re drinking the whole bottle,’ some time around her third attempt to ask Vax anything and overthinking herself into just staring. Not that he’d fared any better. Stating the obvious, like, “You’re the love of my life,” was one thing but knowing where the fuck to go from there?
Innumerable moments in silence and looking passed until she’d managed a stilted, “How… are you?”
They’d both fallen into nervous laughter and leaned closer until their knees touched on her couch.
“I’m… adjusting. It’s different, for sure. How are you?” He’d cringed a little and she felt at least like she wasn’t alone in this awkwardness. Which set off a whole feeling in her chest that hadn’t existed in her body in more than three decades.
In her most honest, inner heart, Keyleth had no fucking idea what exactly she was feeling or if it was even just one thing. Putting words to her emotions has never been something she’d excelled at and when it came to something as complicated as this, she found herself stutter stepping around the basics; happy, sad, scared, mad but all at once and also, actually not any of those feelings. Numb. In love. Despaired. Cautious. So godsdamn tired.
In lieu of an answer, Keyleth upended the wine glass into her mouth and Vax, easily, followed suit. It dampened the feelings enough to let out another, uncomfortable chuckle and she wiped her lips with the back of her hand. Vax nodded and reached for her glass.
Things got a little less frayed from there. Keyleth filled him in on the aftermath of the battle of Ruidis from the Exandrian perspective while Vax refilled their glasses of wine. He asked after their family and friends and Keyleth told him as much as she could, even suggesting a return tour of all their old haunts. Vax had seemed a little overwhelmed by the idea, so she dropped it for now.
It was, of course, Scanlan that eased their tension, without even being present. Vax roared with laughter as Keyleth recounted the tale of finding Centaur Scanlan, and laughed even harder when he heard that Pike had polymorphed too once they’d returned. She was entranced, leaning closer to the sound she thought she’d never hear again like she can bottle the joy in the air.
“Is it terrible to say that it seems like divorce suits them?” He finally managed, wiping his eyes and picking up his glass again.
“No, it’s the only way they’re tolerable!” Keyleth was in her cups enough that her volume control was virtually nonexistent but Vax was smiling at her so gently, “When they’re married, the only way we find them is if they’re fighting or they’re fu- I mean. You know!”
Keyleth had been surprised Vax hadn’t snorted wine out his nose. As it was, he hacked out several coughs in lieu of laughter, Keyleth continued, “Well, we actually catch them doing both of those when they’re divorced too, but it seems like they’re having more fun.”
They couldn’t seem to stop talking after that, though if anyone asked Keyleth, she couldn’t have told them what about. She was quickly lost in the buzz of wine and the simple, inexorable pleasure of just hearing Vax’s voice again.
She was aware that she was the one asking them to begin again but the prospect of letting him out of her sight had filled her with such an intense sense of dread that when both their heads had started to droop against the back of the couch, she’d stood and offered him her hand. He hadn’t even gotten his full, “Are you sure?” out, before she was nodding and tugging him gently behind her to the bedroom that had been theirs a lifetime ago.
She watched him clock all the changes from the corner of her eye, self consciousness wrapping around the back of her jaw until she bit out, “I… Everything… hold on.”
She let go of his hand long enough to reach into the bottom drawer of her dresser and came out with a few pairs of his pants, some socks, his hair brush- thing’s he’d left here when he thought he’d get to come back. Home.
Keyleth wanted to speak, but what to say escaped her entirely so instead she set them on the bed and went about transferring things from half the drawers into the bottom one.
“We… We’ll go get you some more clothes tomorrow, and whatever you need. And we can change anything in the room. Or you can take the other bedroom,” she swallowed hard against the new swell of inextricable feelings enough to say, “We can find you your own place too if that’s what you want. I know you haven’t had any time or space to yourself in… a long time but. But I’d like you to… be here. If you want.”
She was rambling. She knew it but nothing she said felt right enough or clear enough or true enough and it was him and he always understood but what if he didn’t this time, “I know I said- It doesn’t have to be tomorrow but. I’m not attached to how anything is really or-”
Vax closed the space between them, cradling her face like it was porcelain, pressed his mouth to hers. Inside, her brain filled with white noise, like the whine after a concussion. He pulled back slowly, like the last time, like some kind of fucked up muscle of saying goodbye, and she pressed up to kiss him once more, fiercely, desperate to rewrite the memory. The whine died.
The night had wound down in a cautiously domestic way; he’d changed in the bathroom as she made tea, and then she changed while he prepared the mugs for them. They got in on their old sides, and Keyleth had summoned some little lightning bugs to drift lazily around the bedroom. She hadn’t even made it through half her tea before curling up on Vax’s chest and letting the steady beat of his heart under her ear lull her to sleep for the first time since before they’d lost him.
She can smell him now; leather and lavender and something coppery that she chooses to keep nameless. The bed dips in a way that she didn’t remember it could. On the next breath, she gets a wash of memories with the scent; some specific, some just impressionist washes, all of them igniting the heat behind her eyes. The same one she got when he was taken away, at Vex and Percy’s wedding, when he’d appeared before her, blades drawn, only to be snatched away from her.
She’s, again, cast back to the way it felt like she’d never understand the world around her because she could not accept this. They had stopped a god from ascending, basically saved the world, and still he was being taken away from her, from Vex, from all of them. The way she’d blinked, an infinitesimal moment between seeing and not seeing him and then he was gone and a pain had swelled in her so great she’d take tripping into lava, face first, again, every day to never feel it again.
But it never went away and she fell and the ground never came, there was no one to catch her -
Her eyes are opening before she registers it, chest heaving like she’s just run across a battlefield and Vax is just… there.
In front of her.
Breathing.
Warm.
The world steadies around her again as he breathes in the same, steady way that she could never quite remember exactly. His arm is heavy across her waist in a way she could never forget.
It’s moving toward winter in Zephrah and he’s wrapped in a deep green, long sleeved shirt that she made herself leave in the back of the closet for three decades. No real halo of light, no flash of divinity. Just a pair of her own knitted socks on his feet where they’re pressed up against her shins. Like he’d never been gone from her life.
Her breath catches. She was right about the sunrise, still too far away for any real slivers of light to come in through her window, but the conjured lightning bugs still hang in the headboard of the bed, blinking dreamily.
His eyelashes seemed even longer in the shadow of their glow. His face hasn’t changed structurally and she knows that, technically, neither has hers. There’s age there though. Mostly in his eyes, and she knows that’s mirrored in hers as well. The weight of duty, of sacrifice, of grief.
She’d told him she was a different person and it was true. The old version of Keyleth is still a part of her, though. Scattered into pieces across the floor, perhaps. But there are shards. And part of her wonders if that Vax is still there too.
“You’re staring.” He hasn’t moved or opened his eyes but Keyleth doesn’t flinch. Instead, she feels an easy smile tug at the corner of her lip as she nudges up closer, if that is even possible.
“Can you blame me?”
“No, I… don’t remember falling asleep last night because I was watching you.”
”Well I’m allowed my turn then, am I not? You always were the night owl.”
“I suppose that makes you the mourning dove.”
“Ugh, that was sappy even for you,” but she’s smiling through her groan.
Grey eyes open gently and she feels the air disappear from her chest. He’s still real. He’s still here. He’s still mine.
“I’ve got a lot of making up to do,” he breathes, reaching out to curl his long fingers up, over her chin, across her cheek to tangle gently into her hair.
She leans into it, cat-like and boneless. Watches him watch her as his hands smooth across her skin again, remembering long forgotten trails like a creature led back to ancestral lands by instinct alone. Tracing new patterns of constellations across her freckles, alongside the old ones. Grounding them both back in the knowledge that this is their reality.
“How’d you sleep?” She murmurs.
“As far as second first sleeps go, pretty fucking great.”
She sucks in a breath, near lightheaded and restarts her lungs. He turns his gaze to hers, smiles that slow, sleepy smile of the morning and suddenly she wants to sob. Momentary tears blur her vision and he wipes them away easily, not murmuring low like he would have once upon a time, but letting her feelings take up space.
So much has returned to her, so many things that have seemed impossible for decades, no respite from the grief in sight. But now…
The safety of her home. Her mother. Her love.
A realization strikes her as if she’d called the lighting upon herself. One of many wishes she’d cast off years ago that now, maybe, has an entirely possible, easily attainable opportunity.
“Vax,” her voice trembles, half a croak. She barely trusts herself, let alone the potential good fortune when she’s felt cursed for so long. He clearly doesn’t hear her, or register it an attempt at his name, busy sorting out her bangs after a night of sleep.
One more breath and-
“Vax.”
“Yes?” he hums, only half paying attention as he trails one hand slowly up her freckled forearm like he’s trying to feel each one deliberately and Keyleth forces herself to take a steadying breath, though whether it’s to ward off more crying or jumping his bones is anyone’s guess.
“I… we need to go see m- Before we go shopping, there’s someone I want you to meet today.”
That gets his attention. One arm props him up slowly as he brings his eyes up to her face. There’s something like… trepidation there. Or fear? Grief?
“Keyleth,” he blows out a breath, and immediately looks away from her face. There’s silence while he considers and Keyleth lets it hang, rubbing her thumb across his knuckles as he gets his head around what he wants to say.
“Keyleth, if we… If you were… I need to know if we have a… a child before I meet them. We didn’t have a lot of time at the end there but… there was that last night and-“
What?
Oh no. Oh Gods.
Her face flames with yet another emotion she can’t name but that feels much too complicated for this time of morning.
”I- No! No, it’s not a- a child. We didn’t. I would have told you before if-” And then she stops herself because a significant part of her thinks maybe she wouldn’t have. If he’d… If they’d…
If a child, their child had been a part of the equation, would she have told either of them? A child with her eyes and his hair and everything else wholly their own. A child the same age as Vesper, older than their own father now. A child with a ghost of that father haunting their life, talked about in hushed whispers behind their mother’s back because the well of her grief was so deep to speak it aloud was a cruelty? Would she have given them hope of knowing their father before having him so cruelly snatched away again?
And what of their father? Vax loved harder, kinder, closer than any being she’d ever met. The only thing he did better than it was beat himself up. Could she have lived with knowing that telling him of a little being, half him and half her, existed in the world and he didn’t get to know them, experience them. Would their memory only bring him pain in the half life where he served the Matron?
Or would it just have been easier to carry it alone, like so many other things?
A glance at him confirms that he read her abrupt silence just as well as he used to and more feelings pile up behind her ribs. A slow breath in.
“Okay… maybe I wouldn’t have. I… I don’t know, but,” She tries to expels some of the feeling in a too-wet huff of breath, “It’s… No, it’s not a … child.”
There’s a beat of tension as they both let go of that hypothetical and get clobbered by another series of emotions too complex to untangle. It’s exhausting to feel and not know and she closes her eyes for a moment.
“Well,” Vax clears his throat as well, “I…” She closes the distance she didn’t realize was between them, feeling some of the tension leach out of her shoulders at the sensation of his sleep-warm forearm under her palm, and she runs her hand up along it, across his bicep, over his shoulder to rest firmly just under his jaw. Sees him ease as she does.
“It’s not a child. But it is someone very important that I think I just need to… show you?”
“Alright?” He scrutinizes her for a moment then, “I’m sorry I jumped to the conclusion that… We never even talked about kids in a concrete way… Vex has a fucking army of them and I just-”
“No, I … you don’t need to apologize. It’s not a crazy jump. I just… I don’t know how honest you want me to be about… the last 30 years. I don’t want to ever make you feel guilty because it was beyond your control but I… I’m not sure how to pretend that it hasn’t changed me.”
“You don’t have to pretend anything or lie or… try to make this easier. We both agreed that we had to learn things again and… and I know I’ve changed, as well. But I… I want to know all the parts of you that you want to share. That will never change. I will simply count myself lucky to have it.”
The air hisses out of her chest and they don’t get up for an amount of time she doesn’t bother to track, losing themselves in the ability to hold one another close again.
The sun is in the process of rising as Keyleth surfaces out of a doze again and Vax is already watching her.
“Sorry to keep you waiting.”
“After all the time I made you wair, don’t you dare. I… I can’t believe…”
He doesn’t finish and she doesn’t need him to. With a kiss to his shoulder, she pushes herself further up right, “You didn’t make me do anything. Love of my life, remember?”
He whimpers, trying to disguise it as a laugh, but she knows him as he does her. She ducks in, resting their foreheads together until he takes a deep breath that doesn’t come out shakily. Nods and rubs his nose against hers.
“Come on,” she whispers, “we’ve gotta move early if we want to catch them.”
To his credit, Vax doesn’t put up any argument and soon enough they’re brushed (okay, so maybe she’d asked to brush his hair and maybe he’d cried a little bit and maybe she had too…), and dressed and stepping out into the crisp morning air.
Their walk across Zephrah isn’t hurried. The village is only barely waking up and Keyelth, having left her usual regalia at home, sneaks by most bleary eyed early risers with easy nods. She catches several second-takes as Vax follows just behind her, hand in hand and one of the adults who was a child during their blissful year looks like they’ve seen a ghost. But Vax sees none of this.
Vax had been in such a hurry to get to her when he’d strolled into town that he hadn’t taken his much had changed around the city he’d dreamed of calling home. A couple new streets branched off into what he assumes are neighborhoods, a large crisis orb at the middle of the square.
The leaves are still turning, brilliant golds and oranges against the watery blue sky and as he turns his eyes to the buildings, he finds new shops and old, dotting the center of town. The pie maker he’d loved next to a cobbler he’d never seen before. The building where there had been a staff maker once upon a time, he spots the sign for their business catty corner to their old spot, bigger now than it was, an alchemist in their old spot.
Bright banners of fall colors hang all through the square, each emblazoned with the Ashari crest. Strings of jars enchanted to glow sway gently in the breeze from the fronts of homes. Further into town, a new pub with its doors thrown wide, wafts the smells of breakfast across town, accompanied by a twinkling melody on a harp that he almost remembers
Three decades of changes flood his senses and he squeezes down on Keyleth’s hands because she’d been here. She’d done this. Maybe not the moving of the businesses or the building of the streets but her rays had coaxed growth out of every corner of Zephrah.
Keyleth squeezes his hand back, “Come on.”
He only realizes they’re on the way to her father’s house as they take the alley shortcut he’d found his first ever night in town. Korrin’s house comes into view in no time and if it weren’t on such a particular corner of town, Vax wouldn’t have recognized it.
Like most of the buildings in Zephrah, it’s built in harmony with its surroundings. Where Keyleth’s home is inside of a massive tree, Korrin’s had been a wide, squat home of interwoven shrubbery. By memory, the home was always orderly but a bit lacking in … personality. His duties clearly took the brunt of his focus (though his trellises had bloomed spectacularly in the spring) while other facts of life in Zephrah fell by the wayside. Such was the way for an interim leader.
Now though, long, heavy vines have woven themselves in with the highest branches of the shrubs, thick and lush even in the encroaching cold. Some wilting flowers dot along the climbing plants, tropical yellows, oranges, and pinks.
The vines themselves make up a new addition, a second story to Korrin’s home. It’s a beautiful marrying of two regions’ flora, even if the mash-up is a bit odd. Vax is so caught up in admiring it that he misses the door opening at first.
Korrin’s voice is what draws him down, a surprising lurch in his heart. Korrin had been kinder and more welcoming to Vax than his own father ever had been. They’d shared many meals, both with Keyleth and without; conspired on how to boost Keyleth’s budding confidence and keep Zephrah safe, eventually tuning into actual, in depth conversations about beliefs, adventures, and the future of Taldorai.
They’d shared drinks when Keyleth had been pulled into evening meetings or gotten caught up with the young druids of town. Once, Vax, whiskey-drunk and soppy, had watched Keyleth from out front of Fire and Windstone, a pub in the center of town, direct a small group of toddlers in their first tiny Gusts of wind, gently correcting hand placement and getting the giggles when one of the littles did a gust behind her back and shot her forward into Keyleth’s legs. The girl, looking terrified at first, laughed along with Keyleth, leaning into her legs and smiling up at her, a little bloom catching its first rays of sun.
“I’m going to marry her one day, if that’s what she wants.” He’d found himself sighing dreamily. And then sense caught up to him and embarrassment flamed to the tips of his ears. Mortification had him stammering but Korrin had only laughed, also a bit in his cups.
“Well, wedding or no, I’m still proud to call you my son.”
They’d never talked about it after that. But Vax had felt the sincerity every day.
Korrin is laughing now too, as he exits the house and though he’s got a few more greys and wrinkles, he looks almost no different from Vax’s memories. His heart does something funny in his chest, like it can’t remember this feeling exactly either. Keyleth runs her thumb down the line of his first finger.
They’re making their way up the walk as Korrin steps out, turning back to respond to whatever gave him the giggles. Keyleth is gripped by a momentary anxiety as her mother’s long, willowy arm proceeds her out of the house. She doesn’t even know why it strikes her, knows her mother and Vax will adore one another. Has known it for years and years. But that was the before Vax…
She shakes herself. This is ridiculous. You’re being ridiculous. Her mother and father had learned their way back together, grew like propagations of the same plant becoming one again. Vilya loves her grown, broken, grieving daughter with the same tenderness she’d shown each scraped knee and bloody nose Keyleth had gotten as a little girl. She will love him too.
Vax must see the arm too because when she checks on him over her shoulder, his brow is already furrowed in confusion. She urges him forward, though her hands are beginning to shake.
“Keyleth!” Korrin’s voice booms, still holding the mirth from Vilya’s last comment. He and her mother are standing just outside the door, smiles on their face, “Good morning, what a lovely-”
He stops. Freezes, eyes focused on her hand, traveling up the arm attached, scans over-
Korrin lets out a sharp breath, gaze jumping between his daughter and her shadow. He takes a few tottering steps away from Vilya and then stops again.
“Is it…” He trails off. Keyleth’s heart is in her throat and words can’t get around them. Vilya follows her husband, a hand coming to rest on his shoulder blade, and peers past their daughter.
There’s a scuffle behind Keyleth and she whips around to find Vax’s knees have folded. He stares up at Vilya with disbelief, flitting from her hair (closer to brown than Keyleth’s own, but with hints of her daughter’s vibrant red) to the leg of wound vines, to her nose, indistinguishable from Keyleth’s. Tears gather at the corners of his eyes. Keyleth drops to his side hurriedly and only then does he look away from her mother.
“You found her?” he croaks, raven hoarse and impossibly beautiful in the sunlight. Her heart dislodges from her throat as she hiccups out a sob, too many wishes and hopes and dreams converging into reality. He’s here and hers.
“She came home.”
Vax opens his mouth like he wants to say something. Introduce himself or offer her joy but nothing comes out except another quiet sob as he reaches to cup Keyleth’s cheeks gently in his palm. She leans into him easily, taking in the emotion as it washes over them both.
A hand settles on Keyleth’s shoulder and she looks up to find Vilya crouching next to them, studying Vax with open awe and curiosity.
“Mom, this is-” Keyleth starts tremulously, but her mother’s focus hasn’t left Vax and she shakes her head gently, reaching toward him with both hands.
Vax hadn’t felt the touch of a mother in an unknowable number of decades, save for the ghost of his own mother’s embrace when he transitioned into the Matron’s service. But real, warm hands on his face?
“Hello, Vax’ildan,” Villya’s voice wobbles as she gently turns his face in her palms, taking in his eyes, hair, scars, everything. The color of her eyes is the exact same as Keyleth, though their shape is a bit wider, more deep set.
He must make a face because Vilya laughs wetly, brushing away one of his tears with her thumb, “How-”
“Oh, I think I’d still know you even if you weren’t the spitting image of your sister.”
“You know my sister?” he’s breathless, shoulders shaking.
“I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know her and all your little nieces and nephews quite well over the last few years. But even without that, Keyleth… we talked.”
“Mostly when I was drunk,” Keyleth mutters, mopping at her face at their side and Vilya knocks her head against her daughter’s.
“Either way. I learned of your heart. Of your love for my girl and hers for you. Your bravery and your sacrifice. I consider it an honor to meet you.”
“Believe me,” Vax sobs, “The honor is all mine.”
He starts to wring his hands and Keyleth goes to take them but recognizes the way his fingers are moving, clumsy and unpracticed as it is. Slowly, a thin stem sprouts from between Vax’s palms, quickly followed by several blue-purple buds that slowly bloom. With a final huff of exertion, Vax moves his focus from the hyacinth in his fingers and holds it out to Vilya.
“You didn’t tell me about this,” Vilya murmurs to Keyleth, taking the offered bloom and holding it close to her chest.
White snow drops blooming across the ground, his first and only foray into the natural world that he’d learned to love so dearly in their year here, hearing Vex’s wailing, Pike’s sobs, Scanlan’s whimpers, Grog and Percy sniffling, her own-
Vax presses his palms to Keyleth’s wrists and she snaps out of the memory. His eyes are soft, understanding, and from between where their skin touches, small blue forget-me-nots start to climb up her arms.
“He… we didn’t get much time to practice together,” Keyleth responds to her mother wetly, pressing her own rush of blue flowers back against him.
“Seems like no better time than the present.”
They all turn to find Korrin standing above them, tears coursing down his cheeks.
“Good to see you,” Vax says meekly.
Korin responds by simply pulling Vax to his feet and firmly to his chest, cupping the back of his head with a warm hand, releasing a soft sob, “Oh, my boy, it’s been so long.”
Words have yet to return to Vax and he lets himself bury his face in Korin’s shoulder, holding him back with a verve his own father would have disdained. Vilya’s arm tightens around Keyleth’s waist as they both stand.
“I can’t believe any of this is happening,” Keyleth whispers, just loud enough for her mother’s ears, “You. Him. I don’t feel-”
“Don’t you dare finish that sentence,” Vilya interjects, “Don’t you dare.”
Keyleth lets herself be wrapped in her mother’s arms as they watch Korin check Vax over, the quiet awe on Vax’s face. He turns to her, eyes still wide as he takes in Vilya at her side, with her father still fretting over every little part of him.
“This is real, right?” He asks Keyleth quietly. His face is a mess of tears and hers isn’t far behind.
She hiccups a sob, unable to fight the magnetic pull to him, that pulls her around behind him, looping her long arms around his waist and squeezing as tightly as she dares. One of Vax’s hands comes to tangle with her finger and her head drops to rest on his shoulder.
“Not even my dreams are this good. So it has to be,” she whispers against his shirt.
Finally, finally, she recognizes one of the emotions. Stronger than it’s been more than 30 years.
Hope.