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Vex and Vax come of age in a dark, cold forest somewhere outside Kymal, and when they wake up there is a little smudge of black high on Vex’s neck and a tiny, tiny teal handprint on Vex’s left ankle.
The story goes that the colors appear in the first place you touch your soulmate with your hand, and the deeper the color the deeper the bond runs. Vex almost cries when she sees how deep the color is on Vax’s ankle, and they fall back asleep curled together in a way they haven’t done since they were children.
(Vax had emerged from their mother with a tiny hand closed around his ankle; Vex had not followed far behind, unable to bear being separated from her twin for even a second. Neither child had stopped crying until they were both allowed to lie on their mother’s chest, and she had often told them how she had watched them fall asleep side by side, Vax’s hand brushing Vex’s neck as though checking to be sure she was alive.)
In the weak morning light, Vax is almost disappointed, sure his color was going to be something other just a plain black. But as the sun rises and they slip into pools of light between the shadows cast by trees, Vax catches brilliant colors dancing under the surface of the inky black on Vex’s neck and smiles despite himself.
(In the tomb of the Raven Queen’s champion, Vax presses his hand to that black smudge and wills the pulse to begin throbbing under his fingertips. “Take me instead, you raven bitch,” he snarls to nothingness, and when Vex’s eyes open and she draws air into her lungs, he finally begins to understand.)
In all the years between coming of age and meeting the twins, Scanlan has met and bedded many women, men, people who identify as neither— basically, a lot of people. None of them have left a swatch of color anywhere on his skin. He usually pretends it doesn’t bother him. (It does.)
It’s almost reached the point where he’s ready to shy away from any and all touch when he meets the twins in a tavern. They’re about ready to get into a fight, Vex all up in the face of a dwarf who’s not known for being particularly amiable when he gets drunk, and Scanlan steps in to intercede before they get pounded into dust.
He doesn’t even think when he takes them both by the elbow and drags them away, and he doesn’t bother to check if he’s left any color on them.
He takes them on their first pub crawl, through Westruun, and when he tells them he’s got the rounds covered Vex smiles so widely it’s blinding and Vax immediately orders three more rounds of brightly colored shots, which, okay, isn’t what Scanlan meant. But it’s worth it when he wakes up in the morning with a teal band around his wrist and a dark gray, almost black blob on his shoulder.
(He finds the twins down eating breakfast in the inn, matching bands of purple around opposite elbows. Vax’s is a shade darker, but Scanlan stares in wonder. He’d always thought his color would be purple, but he’d never known for sure. Vax just grins at him and beckons him over, and that’s that.)
Scanlan’s favorite stories growing up were always those his mother told of her friends meeting the person who left the deepest, most vibrant color on them, and how they knew deep in their hearts that this was the person they were meant to spend the rest of their life with. Usually, the stories end with just one person, but Scanlan’s mother had had multiple lines running up her arms, a rainbow of color from those she’s loved
He’s seen Vax’s black, vivid and somehow vibrantly colorful, on Vex’s neck— she never tries to hide it, proud of the bond between her and her twin— and he thinks maybe there’s something to those stories, but maybe it has something more to do with family than just the person who holds the other half of your soul in their hands. And after all, why do anything in halves when you can have two whole people grinning at you with affection in their eyes when they see you perform?
(Of course, then he meets Pike and that idea gets squashed down, just for a moment, by strong infatuation and the most vivid purple mark he’s ever left.)
The SHITS assemble for the first time in a tavern for a job. Vex and Vax are already a mess of color— lines of burnt orange wrapped on the backs of each of their hands from a firm handshake with Tiberius Stormwind, dark red on their upper backs from hearty claps from Grog, dark purple from Scanlan around their opposite elbows— but Vax has a bright green line on his wrist from an excited Keyleth, whose black mark somehow ripples with even more colors than the one he left on Vex. Scanlan sings teasing love ballads and Keyleth turns a brilliant shade of red, so Vax holds her hand under the table and whispers “Don’t worry, we have plenty of time to figure it out.”
Grog has a smudge of bright gold on his cheek which he won’t elaborate on any further than “A healing spell from my buddy!” Tiberius has the matching colors from his handshakes with the twins, the only colors immediately visible to anyone meeting him, as he insists on keeping the remainder private. It’s a fair point— most color ends up on hands, making it obvious who someone’s soulmates are, but many dragonborn only leave color on one other dragonborn, if at all, and chromatic dragons don’t usually leave chromatic colors.
“It’s something about race,” Tiberius explains to a fascinated Keyleth, whose color stands out a bright shade of ivy green on his shoulder, underneath his robes. “One day I hope to investigate exactly what it is about one’s race that affects the color of soulmarks so strongly.”
They meet Pike, who has dark red smeared down the side of her face like she’s bleeding. It's from an overenthusiastic Grog who didn’t know vivid colors were possible, she reassures them. Pike loves these mercenaries immediately, loves how they worry for Grog the same way she does, and when she brushes them all with her gold she feels like she’s marking them as hers, a physical prayer to Sarenrae to protect them.
(Tiberius hesitates a little, the gold ringing a little closer to what’s natural for chromatic dragonborn, but he finally relents, and her touch comes away yellow, not gold, against his scales. He doesn’t say anything for a long while, but he does touch it reverently, so she guesses it’s probably fine.)
They meet Pike and suddenly everything seems like it’s slotting into place. It still feels incomplete, like they’re not quite fitting together right, but there was a gap left in their party without her sweet smile and huge mace. Scanlan cracks jokes and swears undying love to her, and Pike laughs and rolls her eyes and climbs up on Grog’s shoulder, and Vax thinks, she makes us so much better. Grog especially— not that Grog wasn’t already a fair fighter and a better friend, but he smiles more and seems happier and more settled when she’s around.
“He’s my brother,” Pike explains, when Vex asks her. “It’s like when you and Vax are separated— nothing feels right without him.”
“Vax and I have never been separated in our lives,” Vex claims, but she holds onto Trinket’s fur a little bit tighter and her eyes look glassy, so Pike doesn’t ask the question on the tip of her tongue.
When they find Percy in the cell, he shies away from touch, and wears gloves almost constantly. He won’t explain to them why, and they usually let him alone about it. He’s quiet, yes, but he has funny guns that explode and do damage the same as Vex’s bow, which makes him a good ally, and he inexplicably stays with them longer than he has to, so most everyone allows him this tiny idiosyncrasy.
(He’ll explain it to them, finally, one night in Whitestone, after they’ve destroyed the Briarwoods and while Vex is recovering from her near-death in the Ziggurat. Vax is also nowhere to be found, avoiding Keyleth and staying at his sister’s side. Percy will explain the pain of losing a color to violent means and Keyleth shivers and holds herself, thinking of the dark orange at the small of her back and the member of their party who’s on another continent, and sends a silent prayer to a god she doesn’t believe in that he’ll be all right.)
When Percy finally realizes that he’s allowed to touch, that his friends welcome it, even (that their colors are from each other for this makeshift family of sorts they’ve formed by crawling through dungeons and fighting monsters), well, he still doesn’t remove his gloves, but he slings an arm around Keyleth’s waist when they’re walking together, deep in conversation; he ruffles Scanlan’s hair as he passes by, presses close to Tiberius as they pore over old tomes together, punches Vax and sometimes Grog in the arm when he’s feeling particularly playful, and relearns how to braid hair by helping Vex and Pike do theirs. At night, he burrows deep in his bedroll and tries to not wake the others with the shaking and the nightmares, but more often than not he jerks awake to find Vex and Vax curled on either side of him, just far enough away that they don’t touch him but close enough that he can feel their body heat, and he falls back into a more restful slumber until morning.
(One morning in a real inn he finds a startlingly vibrant streak of teal across his collarbone, just opposite where the deep olive Cassandra left when he held her as a child once was (now scarred and twisted beyond recognition from multiple sessions with Ripley), and he tries not to let himself think of Vex’s sparkling eyes and her merry laugh, but that only makes him think of a wry smirk twisting a nearly identical face and he bangs his head into a wall, he’s so fucked.)
Grog may not know much about goliaths, having not lived with them for the majority of his life, but he does know that the idea of goliath having brightly colored soulmarks is very, very, very unusual. He’s never seen any of his kin have as brightly colored marks as he does.
Grog is proud of his colors. He’s proud of his family and all they’ve done together. He knows now that family comes with pain and sadness and goodbyes (so many goodbyes— he hopes someday Pike will be able to stop leaving him behind to work on her temples) and laughter (so much laughter— Scanlan is funny and loud and sings bawdy songs and Grog has never laughed harder during a battle as he has with Scanlan fighting at his side.)
So Grog loves his colors. He loves the gold on his face, even when it turned so icy half his face went numb when his Pike lay cold and still in her temple, He loves the dark green and black handprints on his chest, which are warped somewhat from the incident with the pho… phle… the thing that had scrolls and death magic in it, which somehow makes them look even more badass and intimidating, according to Scanlan.
Grog doesn’t know what soulmate means, isn’t even sure what a soul is, but he knows what his colors mean to him. They’re a reminder to put his rage away until he absolutely needs it, until he needs to protect these people who have allowed him into “the fold of their lives,” as Pike once said.
(Keyleth, hurting, shaking, having watched half their family die in front of her, asks Grog how he does it, how he’s able to keep a handle on his rage, and Grog reaches out and traces down the red lines he left on her shoulder and says, “It all comes down to one word really.” He pats the green mark she left on him when they first met and grins. “Family.”)
Vax feels a yank in his chest that sends him sprinting for Gilmore’s Glorious Goods in the wake of the dragon’s devastation. Nothing, nothing, nothing could prepare him for the sight of the destroyed storefront, the shattered glass around the front stoop, the friendly sign down, the beaded curtain scattered across the floor, and the hand closing tight around his chest and stopping his breath.
His only reassurance is that the purple of his mark, left not the first time he met Gilmore but on his third visit by a hand clapped to the side of his neck, hasn’t faded, hasn’t scarred, is still as vivid as ever. Keyleth holds his hand all the way to the keep even while his heart threatens to break into pieces in his chest.
(When he finds Gilmore, he smooths back his hair and cradles his face in gloved hands and holds his broken body in his lap, afraid to touch, afraid that his hands will come away with a black mark and he’ll be forced to make a choice he can’t make twice.)
(When Keyleth reaches out to assist Pike, her hand comes away leaving a streak of green on Gilmore’s arm deeper than she’s ever seen it, but not as vivid as Vax’s, and she holds that close to her chest and keeps herself awake that night deep in thought.)
Percy wakes up one morning, after the fall of Emon, with an unnatural feeling of dread in the pit of his stomach and goes to see Keyleth, asking her to scry on Draconia. Keyleth scries on Tiberius in time to watch him fall, and when she comes back to she’s already sobbing and clutching at her arms, and Percy has one hand on the back of her neck and his forehead pressed against hers, whispering broken Celestial in an attempt to soothe her.
In the madness of the Vestige hunt, they keep what they saw and what they lost a secret, but there is no keeping secret the midnight blue smudged across the back of Keyleth’s neck, the first time Percy has left visible color on any of Vox Machina.
(Weeks later they find Tiberius’ body in Draconia and Keyleth holds herself together long enough to bury him properly. Percy bends down to fix what remains of his robes and his hands don’t leave behind marks. The stone closes over his face and Keyleth breaks down in tears and Percy just feels so, so helpless.)
Scanlan proposes to Pike in the comfort of her grandfather’s home and Pike is so confused. She looks at Percy, who looks just as startled as her, and she looks at Vex, who is looking at where Vax has disappeared into the shadows underneath the stairs, and she looks at her hands, stained purple and dark, dark blue, and she doesn’t know what to say.
(He’s already left her a letter, asking her to take care of the daughter he didn’t know he had, begging her to let him stay dead if he dies, and she’s already determined that she’s never going to lose a family member— that’s why she became a cleric, after all— but she doesn’t want to go back on Scanlan’s trust. This is probably why she blurts out that she read his letter, as a reassurance that he can trust her. She’s still not sure why she did that.)
Pike has thought about soulmates a lot, ever since the first time Grog died and she felt the color on the side of her face hurt worse than the time she died, ever since she staggered from the force of the phantom blow that hit her in Sarenrae’s temple and she had to sit down because she knew, she just knew that Vex had fallen, and she wasn’t there to help her.
Soulmates aren’t by default romantic, Pike is sure of that. The only mark that she… well, she doesn’t like thinking of that much. She could grow to love Scanlan, and she has, she knows she has, but he calls her his soulmate all the time, and she wants to grab him by the arms and shake him, because has he forgotten about their family, whose color coats his arms and shoulder blades? Has he forgotten about Kaylie, who refused to let him touch her in fear of bearing his color on her skin?
(Scanlan lays cold and still, too still, on the Raven Queen’s altar, and Pike pushes his shirt off his shoulder to bear his colors to Kaylie’s sight. Kaylie stares at them for a long moment before pulling her gloves off and lifting her fiddle to her chin, and when a smile slides across his face she leans down to brush her hand down it before backhanding him again. No one but Pike can look away from the fuchsia running down the side of Scanlan’s face as she stumbles back out in search of more alcohol.)
Gilmore shoves Vax off a cliff and for the first time since Vax begged the Raven Queen for his sister’s life back he feels free.
He’s had the conversation with Keyleth, in a back room of the mansion lit only by candlelight, about the purple on his neck and the stripe of green on his wrist. “I love you,” he’s told her, “but I love him, too, just as much, and I thought—,”
Keyleth shakes her head. “I would never make you choose,” she whispers.
“I already have,” Vax says, eyes widening. “Do you think it’s too late?”
“There’s only one way to find out,” Keyleth says in reply.
Vax just has so much love in his heart; Keyleth knows that better than anyone else. No one else she’s ever met has consistently left such dark, vivid color, not even Vex, who has just as much love for everyone she meets. How could she ever ask them— either of them— to choose who to love?
So she watches Vax shoot into the air with Gilmore in his arms and she feels nothing but delight (and a little bit of envy— she wants to go flying with him, maybe he’ll take her soon) and the knowledge that maybe, finally, Vax will get everything he wants.
(The next morning, when they’re making their final preparations for the the Feywild, Gilmore opens his arms to her. He hugs her tightly and whispers, “Thank you,” in her ear, and when he draws back his eyes focus on a spot on her shoulder, turned a deep violet from his touch. Keyleth just grins at him, and he winks and turns to Vax, standing there staring at the two of them in awe. When he leans forwards to brush a kiss against the corner of Vax’s mouth, Vax whispers something Keyleth can’t make out but which makes Gilmore light up. “Fly high, my bird,” Gilmore tells him gently, and reaches up to touch the black mark on his neck that shimmers as he turns under the lights, and Keyleth knows without a doubt that she made the right decision.)
Vex kisses Percy outside the gates of Syngorn and it’s not the first time she’s touched him. But it’s the first time that means something, the first time that the bright teal she sometimes sees peek from under Percy’s collar doesn’t mean a separation from her brother and means the potential for a future she’s always dreamed of.
She doesn’t know— how can she not know, but she doesn’t know— until after Glintshore, the meaning of the midnight blue left right above her heart, shining with starlight late at night, smudged black around the edges, and Vax shows her the midnight blue left over his heart, after that night in the tomb—
(this is a world where Vax, unable to face his sister, afraid of what he’s done, goes to Keyleth and finds Percy there, in a rare moment of weakness, and Percy grabs Vax by the front of his shirt with an ungloved hand. “I’m sorry,” Percy repeats, over and over until he’s hoarse, eyes wild, and Vax doesn’t forgive him for weeks but he does believe him and he does believe the smudge of starlight he spies in the mirror.)
“We match,” he tells her softly, and Vex is all out of tears to cry but she does curl up between her brother and Trinket and fall into a restless sleep.
Percy breathes back to consciousness and Vex turns away so he won’t see her cry. Vax lays down on Percy’s chest and whispers, “Hey handsome,” into his neck, and when he pulls away his ungloved fingers have left four black circles just under Percy’s jaw, and everyone knows what that means.
(Vax goes to Percy that night, just after Vex returns the letter to his pocket, and he curls in a corner and he watches and waits. When Percy comes to, groaning, Vax stealths out of the room as quietly as he can.)
(Vax goes to Percy again, three nights later, just after Vorugal, and takes Percy’s face between his hands and kisses him, full on the mouth. “Well, I broke my promise,” he says, when he’s let go. “I do trust you. And I love you. So tell my sister you’re in love with her, and make her happy, okay?” Percy just stands there, staring, before leaning forwards to kiss Vax back, long and lingering, and then gently pulls away and heads off in search of Vex. Vax watches him go and smiles. Anything can happen in the woods, he thinks, and heads back in search of Keyleth, to give them some privacy.)
The thing about Vex, Trinket thinks, sniffing at her hands which smell like the apples she’s withholding from him, is that she just has so much love in her heart that of course she’s going to have multiple mates.
This is true of all of Vox Machina, of course; Trinket’s been traveling and fighting alongside all of them for long enough to know that. He’s watched them carry each other, laughing, and he’s watched them carry dolls that look like each other with somber expressions on their faces and in their scents. Trinket has, in the last few sunrises or so, watched Grog carry something that looked very much like Percy-Freddie but smelled all wrong into Pickle’s temple. Vex had been very sad that day, and nothing Trinket had done had gotten the tears to stop until Percy had started smelling like himself again, and even then she’d been so quiet, holding her chest where her skin was all weird until Trinket went to lick her to make her face stop looking so sad.
Trinket doesn’t spend much time fighting with his family these days. But Vex usually lets him out of her necklace when they’re just walking around, or at breakfast, and he sees them all then. Sometimes they look worried and drawn, Vax constantly circling the group in case someone catches them from behind. Trinket usually joins him on those days, nudging Vax where his skin is stained a faint orange so that he knows that Trinket has his back. Sometimes they’re quiet, occasionally broken by a burst of song from Scanlan where he sits on Grog’s shoulders. Those are the good days, because Kiki scratches him behind his ears and slips him treats when she thinks Vex isn’t looking. They’re also the good days because Vex holds onto the colors on her arms and smiles, looking at their family.
Trinket understands family. He understands that the colors on everyone’s arms means family, means that they all have each other’s back. Even Scanlan, who claims to want to leave Trinket behind every other week (does he not know Trinket can hear him?) has his back in fights. It’s just how it is. It’s how it always will be, even when they go their separate ways (for Trinket knows Vex dreams of her manor in Whitestone, and her estate and her title, and he’s heard Vax discuss his plan to follow Kiki wherever she goes, and Trinket himself is starting to get old and creaky in places he wasn’t creaky before.) They look after each other, and Trinket looks after them.
It’s just how it’s supposed to be— Vox Machina, a rainbow of color, versus the world. Trinket wouldn’t want it any other way.