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Vax had never planned on falling in love.
Love, as far as he could tell, was dangerous. At least the romantic kind, the stuff the bards sang about. Family was one thing — you were born with family — but to deliberately decide to take that dubious risk of loving someone else? It seemed a poor choice to him.
He was no stranger to love. He loved his sister fiercely — loved her, had loved her, would always love her — and that was frightening enough, in some ways. But he’d been born into that. There had been no choice about it, one way or another: she’d followed him out into the world, and he’d loved her better than he’d loved himself since they shared the same cradle.
Vex taught him what love was, not just the little parts of it but the grand sweeping parts as well. She taught him that love made him better than he thought he could be, that he could ignore an empty stomach if it meant hers was full, that he could stand to bear bruises if it meant her taunters had turned away from her to fight him instead. She taught him what it meant to fear for another more than he feared for himself, and sometimes his heart still freezes in his chest when she darts forward to do something too brave and too foolish.
She taught him that to love is to breathe. Love is not something that comes and goes, like wind or seasons or rain. Love is something that simply is, constant and real, as necessary to him as the air in his lungs.
Thanks to Vex, Vax knows what it is to love — the exasperation, the affection, the fear, the joy.
And he has quite enough of that already with a twin sister, thank you. There’s no need to make a mess out of things by complicating his life with romantic love. A second person to wonder and worry over, someone to inspire him to great heights of passion and glory and fear? Oh, he’s sure the bards are all singing about it for a good reason — he’s sure love is delightful, motivating and inspiring and all the other tropes that constantly drift through the air around campfires and in taverns and fest halls — but really, Vax always figured that Vex was enough for him. Love, he thought, should stay platonic and familial; romantic love, he decided, was asking for trouble.
And, for his younger years, there was no reason for him to doubt that decision. Vex was his reason to breathe, some days: to crawl out of his bedroll and attempt to steal enough trinkets to keep them both from starving. She was why he was cautious, what kept him from too-reckless behavior that saw so many young and hungry thieves hung as the criminals they were. She was the one bright spot in a dull cruel world, and the love he had for her overflowed his heart and made all the trials worth it so long as they were safe and together.
Still, he thought, Vex was enough. Vex was all he had and all he needed and it felt disloyal to even consider someday chasing after something more. So Vax told himself that romantic love was a fool’s game, when lust and friendship warmed his bed well enough without it, and he did his best to convince himself that he wasn’t really wondering about what he might be missing.
Panic came later: Gilmore’s confident voice, Keyleth’s wide sunny smile. Vax smiled at them both to mask his terror, because one would have been enough, and two options is two too many. He can’t, he thinks, knowing the dangerous world that surrounds them: he can’t stand to love because he can’t stand to fear for more than he already does. His heart is already too big, and too bruised.
He buries his feelings until they are too much to hide, and blurts out the truth to Keyleth at the worst possible moment. She’s awkward afterward, uncertain and flushing and clumsy, and Vax curses his blunt tongue and his aching heart and does his best to give her space.
This is love, for Vax: caring for someone so much that Vax himself becomes unimportant so long as his beloved is happy. Love is sacrifice, and suffering gladly; love is devotion, and unspoken support; love is dark, and terrifyingly complete. Love is a burden, shouldered gladly and completely. Love is simply given, without thought of gain or reward or fairness. Love is recognizing the utter fear of loss, and choosing to risk his heart anyway.
Is it any wonder the Raven Queen chose him?
-
Keyleth always dreamed of love.
Love is something beautiful, something grand and glorious that causes the skalds to write and recite impassioned poetry. Love is romance, and happiness, and the perfection of small children with their father’s eyes and their mother’s smile laughing as they play. Love is laughter on winter nights and winks on summer dawns. Love is a completion: a key in a lock, two halves of a whole.
Love is something she cannot attain, and it hurts to push aside a young girl’s dreams in favor of a young woman’s dedication.
She wanted to fall in love. She sat at the feet of the skalds as they recited the epic love-poems of the Ashari, and she hid her giggles behind her hands as she watched others pair off. She sighed over the courtships she witnessed — the gifts, the poems, the acts of devotion — and she dreamed with a young girl’s romantic heart of what her own lover might someday look like.
But it was all a young girl’s foolish wishing for something she could not have. If she completes her aramente — and she will complete it; she holds that truth hard and fast against her, because she thinks it will take death for her to fail and she refuses to die a failure — if she completes her aramente, then she will outlive everyone she knows. There can be no lover, with that future looming before her: no sweet courtship, no dreamy kisses, no romantic moments. There can be no family of sweet children, no growing old together when she won’t age.
Keyleth tells herself she cannot fall in love, but her heart aches and burns and yearns all the same for what she cannot have.
She wants to cry, when Vax first tells her, because it is everything she’s ever wanted. He’s handsome, and brave, and charming; he loves her, and watches her with fiery eyes. He is everything a younger Keyleth dreamed of, down to how he shares her half-elven heritage and how he respects her path in life and how he looks at her with wonder and pride when she calls her magic.
But she cannot love him, and so she avoids him and says nothing and tries not to let herself think about what she’s missing — about what she could have, if her life was different, if she were less fearful and he were less important.
But when she almost loses him — when he looks at her with understanding and sympathy and acceptance, knowing she can’t let herself love him and loving her despite it…
Keyleth’s heart overflows, and she goes to him, and lets her fear of her own future loneliness be chased away by the strength of his arms and the feel of his lips against hers.
And when, many mornings later, Vax looks at her with blatant affection as they dress, she stops reaching for her headdress and instead cuddles up against his side.
“Here,” he says softly, and he reaches up to tuck two raven feathers into her hair above her left ear. His smile is pleased, a little rueful but mostly satisfied. “There,” he tells her, and kisses her forehead. “So you can carry a bit of me with you wherever you go.”
It’s such a quiet gesture — a bit silly, a bit different, so utterly Vax that she’s swamped with affection for him. Keyleth reaches for his hand almost impulsively, and pulls it into her lap with both her hands.
“What—?” Vax begins.
She shushes him, and lifts her left hand. Magic stirs at her fingertips, eager and warm, and she smiles and twitches her hand: woody vines spring into being at her gesture. Vax doesn’t flinch, which she appreciates: he just looks at her with wonder and trust, and waits. She shapes the vines while they’re still young enough to be pliable, and they twist and braid themselves into a circlet wrapped around Vax’s right wrist.
“There,” she says, releasing her hold on her magic. The vines quiver, and then harden into branches as the magic seeps away. They’re smooth, twisted and entwined, inanimate and beautifully wrapped around Vax’s powerful arm, and Keyleth looks up at Vax with a small smile. “It’s only fair to give you something if you give me something.”
He looks at her as though she hung the moon in the sky. “I-” And then he looks down at his wrist and takes a tight breath. “I am the luckiest man in the world, you know,” he says after a moment.
At times like this, Keyleth wants to wrap her arms around him and hold him tight, until he accepts that he’s allowed to be happy. There’s no reason for her not to, she tells herself, and so she leans forward to do so: his form is lean and muscled, familiar under her hands, and she draws him to her with gentle insistence until they’re sitting in each other’s arms on the edge of the bed. “I love you,” she tells him, the words easier than ever to say, and she thinks of the feathers in her hair and allows herself a brief dream of small children with Vax’s dark eyes and her bright hair.
She doesn’t know what the future will hold, for either of them, but for now, this happiness is enough.
-
Until Keyleth, Vax had never known that love could be so bright.
She brims over with it when she’s happy, delighted and laughing, and her joy is infectious. Love is a relief for her and not a burden, and he feels almost guilty that she’s chosen to tie herself to someone who is so much more serious than she is.
She is the sun and happiness, laughter in the summer and hope in the spring time; she is the cleansing fury of fire and the sweet smell of the earth after a rain. He’s the darkness around the stars, the whisper of cold wind in autumn and the last breath of warmth in the winter; he serves the goddess of death, and Keyleth’s very being is tied so completely to life.
And yet she wears two raven feathers in her bright hair — and she wears them proudly, as if the inky black feathers are not wholly opposite to everything about her.
And yet there is a bracelet of woven vines resting loosely around his wrist, carefully and religiously worn as though that bit of remembered life can tether him to more than the death-goddess he’s sworn himself to.
Vax has always known the darker, desperate side of love. He’d been forced to do so to survive: he loved his sister fiercely, and he was too used to fearing for her to understand that love could be something lighter, something happy and strong. Now there is still that deeper current running through his heart, but Keyleth has taught him that there is room for more: for honest affection and laughter, for lighter moments just as important as the dire declarations.
Keyleth teaches him the difference, in her easy laughter and her sparkling eyes, and Vax looks at her in wonder for it. He recognizes now the little things that he hadn’t dared call love beforehand: the way his sister rolls her eyes when she doesn’t want to smile at his foolishness, the way he tweaks her braid when she walks past. This is love, too, he thinks in something near to awe: lighthearted and affectionate and not frightening at all. He’s always been capable of it, he learns, but now he can recognize it for what it is.
So he holds Keyleth’s hand when they travel, something simple and innocent, and marvels that he’s able to do so. She weaves the feathers he’d given her into her headdress, turning them from an awkward gift into a testimony of belief. The dark feathers don’t look out of place among the flowers and antlers and metal of her headdress: if anything, their stark presence only makes the rest of it all seem brighter.
Vax touches the bracelet of vines he wears around his wrist, and looks at Keyleth with gratitude and certainty. Keyleth is the sun, and he the shadow; but where would one be without the other?
So she wears raven feathers in her bright hair, and he has a woven wooden bracelet tucked under his dark bracers.
He’d never planned on falling in love, Vax thinks, and now he can’t imagine his life otherwise.