Work Text:
They are in Zephrah. It is the middle of the night, and Keyleth cannot sleep. Maybe it’s because she is still reeling from the way Vax sounds when he’s coming undone. Or because of the fact she has yet to become the Voice of the Tempest, and really she should be by now.
“Hey, Vax,” she whispers against his bare chest. His heartbeat is steady, steady, steady—a much needed reminder that he is still here with her. She wonders ever so briefly what will happen when this blight takes him. If it takes him, she amends. And then she wonders if he is asleep.
She tries again. “Vax?”
“Yes, Kiki?” He replies this way every time, patient and calm. His voice is rough.
“I love you,” she says. She kisses the skin under her cheek, and feels his heartbeat stutter ever so slightly. This makes her smile, because she knows it’s from her. “I love you, too, Keyleth.”
His words have a calming effect on her, as they often do, and her thoughts slow to a normal, easy pace. She is still worried about a great many things, of course—and Vax’s fate is always on her mind—but tonight he is alive and she is tired.
/
Keyleth fixed him—his blight, his curse—and he is still gone. She hears the snapping of bone from the impact of a body falling to the ground. Hears herself scream, too. It might be Vex, though, and for a second the twin she liked first flashes through her mind. She hears the whimpers and sniffling as the rest of what’s left of Vox Machina realize what has happened to him.
But what she sees is worse. His eyes, the eyes she fell in love with, are blank and empty and staring straight at her. But before she can process this and what it means, his skin flakes away into ash. He is crumbling the same way she did whilst fighting Raishan, and she now understands what he meant when he said it was horrible to witness.
She still isn’t sure exactly how she came back. But she did.
Clutching at his cloak like it will bring him back to her, to Vex, to the friends they cherish so deeply, she screams again because she knows he will not. And despite this—despite the fact he is gone—she whispers against the feathers, as she did not even five minutes prior and has done so many times before.
“Hey, Vax.” Keyleth pauses. She swears she can hear a faint whisper in her ear like she always has, voice softening around the edges when he says “Yes, Kiki?”
She knows that Vax cannot hear her, will never hear her again. But she says it anyway.
“I love you.”