Chapter Text
There’s something wrong with Percy when they return to Whitestone.
Thordak is dead, but Raishan escaped - it’s that which puts Percy on edge, and for good reason. Raishan knows the inner workings of Whitestone and has infiltrated the city once before; she could easily do so again, and that means Vex is willing to give him a certain amount of leeway in regards to his behaviour, given the danger Raishan poses to his home and the stress that puts him under.
But the shift in behaviour troubles her. He’s become reclusive, moody, downright snappish - locking himself into his workshop more often than not, speaking in clipped-off sentences when he has to speak at all, refusing to meet the eyes of those he speaks to.
More worrying than that is this: he’s avoiding her. She knows he’s doing it on purpose because three times in two days he gets up and leaves the moment she enters the room, and the knowledge stings . He’d claimed not to regret their night spent together - is it catching up with him, now? Has she done something wrong? Is he ashamed of her now?
Or is this a sign of Percy sliding back into his old habits? Vex still remembers how Percy was before his death, before Vox Machina helped liberate Whitestone; he’d had a tendency to suffer in silence out of the misplaced belief that he was deserving of it, and even now, he rarely reaches out for help even when he needs it.
Vex had hoped, between their talk in the woods and all that had happened after, that he’d know he could reach out to her, even if he couldn’t reach out to any of the others. But plainly not. Fine , then. If Percy is avoiding her, then she’ll just have to go to him instead.
She might even be fully dressed when she does it.
A little over a week after the fall of the Cinder King, Vex finds herself stood outside of Percy’s door. She is indeed fully dressed, having decided against a repeat of the ‘open the door entirely naked’ strategy that had worked once before - she’s got enough sense to know when that would be a particularly bad idea. There’s little noise from beyond the door, though she knows he’s in there; she’d checked his workshop beforehand and found it empty, and there’s nowhere else in the castle he would haunt these days.
Taking a deep breath to steady herself, Vex knocks. Then she knocks again, louder, irritation beginning to build. “Percy, dear. It’s me, Vex,” she says, leaning in close to the door both to make sure he hears her and to try and keep her voice carrying too far down the hall. “ Percival de Rolo ,” she hisses when there is still no answer, “open the door.”
The door, quite predictably, is not opened, and Vex growls a string of Undercommon curses under her breath. Just as she’s about to cast subtlety to the wind and start beating at the door with her fist, however, she hears Percy’s quick reply: “come in,” he calls, speaking with all the warmth of Vorugal’s frozen heart.
The door barely creaks when she steps inside, pulling it shut behind her before she strides across the room. With the way the room is laid out, Percy’s desk sits on the opposite wall to the door, and that means he has his back turned to her as she enters. He neither looks up nor turns around, his attention squarely focused on the table and whatever’s on it, so Vex strides right up to him and leans a hip against the desk, folding her arms.
She doesn’t say anything right away. Instead, Vex watches him work: he’s got Bad News stripped down for cleaning, Animus and Retort both set off to one side awaiting the same treatment, and Vex has always enjoyed watching Percy’s nimble fingers at work. He cleans and repairs the guns like it’s second nature to him, now, even taking a small rag to oil the wood that forms the majority of Bad News’ stock.
Not once does he look up or speak. He barely even acknowledges that she’s stepped closer; the sole allowance he makes is to nod briefly at her, but no more. The entirety of his attention remains fixed on the disassembled firing mechanism for Bad News, cleaning black powder from the nooks and crannies with a small brush.
Finally, though, the tension is too much to take, and Vex sighs. “Darling, I’m worried about you.” She unfolds her arms to brace them against the desk, chewing at her lower lip as she looks at him. Percy’s hands stop and he carefully lowers the gun part in his hands to the table. He sets it down with precision and care, and turns in his seat to face her.
When he looks up, Vex can read the weariness in his eyes. “I’m fine,” he says quietly, his voice roughened by a lack of sleep. The tone of it makes Vex remember black smoke curling from behind a beaked mask, bruise-dark shadows beneath the eyes that have always been there and will never fully go away, forgiveness pushed aside in pursuit of vengeance.
He had told her the exact same thing then as he is telling her now; she remembers the feel of his coat under her palms as she’d pressed him to the wall and demanded answers. You’ll know when I’m not , he’d said, and ever since then, she has known. He hadn’t been ‘fine’ then and he’s not ‘fine’ now; she will not let the man she loves slide into the darkness as he had so narrowly risked doing in Whitestone.
“ Please , Percy. I’m trying to help,” she says, her voice going soft. She reaches out to touch his shoulder - and he recoils from her, physically pushing himself away with a loud noise as his chair scrapes across the floor. Immediately Vex snatches her hand back with a wounded expression. “Don’t push me away like this,” she whispers.
What happened to the man who kissed her in the woods? Who shared his thoughts with her so easily, when he spoke of them to nobody else? Who gave her so much, simply because she asked for it, to the point where they’d given each other their hearts?
Or at least, she’d thought they had.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” Vex says.
“I said I’m fine! ”
Percy’s voice pitches into a shout, his tone ragged and raw as he slams the palm of one hand against the table. The whole thing rattles, every gun part shaking, one even falling from the table entirely to clatter across the stone floor; the lantern providing light to Percy’s work flickers. The sound of the table-slam echoes through the room like a gunshot, and Vex flinches away, moving off of the table and staring wide-eyed at Percy like he’d struck her and not the table.
For several long seconds, the only sound in the room is Percy’s breathing, laboured and gasping and catching in his throat like he might choke on it. He stares up at her, his own eyes similarly wide; they’re bright, brighter than normal, the pupils constricted into tight dots by fear or anger - Vex cannot tell which. He closes them and looks away from her, hand trembling where it’s still pressed palm-down against the table. The fingers close slowly into fists, and silence reigns.
“I’m sorry, I - I don’t know what came over me.” When he speaks Percy’s voice is quiet, like he’s making up for the outburst. He sighs, long and low, and lifts his hand from the table to cover his face. “Thank you for your concern, Vex,” he says from behind his hand. “But really. I’m okay. I’m just… stressed.”
He lowers his hand from his face and turns to scoop up the fallen gun part, setting it back in its rightful place and picking up the brush once more. His hands are shaking so badly that Vex knows he’ll make little headway with the remainder of the cleaning, and yet she can recognise the unspoken dismissal hanging heavy in the air.
For a moment, she had seen something in his eyes, something soft and scared - but she shakes her head. If Percy doesn’t want her help, she’ll go. “Goodnight, Percival,” she says coolly, taking a deep breath to keep her voice from trembling.
He does not reply, and the door slams behind her with more force than Vex had intended. Alone in the hallway, Vex presses a hand to her mouth and leans against the wall beside his door, shoulders quaking and her eyes beginning to prick with the onset of tears.
To the surprise of nobody at all, Percy does not come downstairs for dinner. Vex picks uncomfortably at her plate, hunger chewing at her belly but her appetite unwilling to co-operate. Vax and Cassandra both notice her distress and make their own attempts to draw her into the table’s conversation, but Vex simply shakes her head and stays quiet. Vax - sitting on her right as he always does - rubs comfortingly at her shoulder and leaves her to eat in peace.
Vex excuses herself from the table early and visits the kitchens, collecting a plate of food and taking it up to Percy’s room. This time the door is locked, and Vex sighs as she knocks again. As expected, there is no response; instead, she sets the plate down beside the door and tells him it is there, and leaves him to his solitude.
The evening wears on, the sun - having sunk behind the mountains relatively early, given that it is still the early days of spring - setting and plunging the sky overhead into inky blackness. Vex spends some time up on the castle walls, admiring the stars; she has always loved the night sky, so vivid and vibrant, painted with swirls of colour and studded with the light of far-off stars. Tonight the sky is cloudless, exposing a spectrum of pinks and purples countered by the gleam of aurora lights over the peaks of the Alabaster Sierras. The moon shines down, heavy and round, raising slowly into the sky as it escapes the clutches of the mountain range.
Eventually Vex returns inside and retires to bed, noting with concern - though not surprise - that the plate of food beside Percy’s door has gone untouched. Her room is further down the hall, and Vex slips inside already shedding her layers of clothing and the thick padding of her leathers. She considers, briefly, sleeping in the nude as she prefers to, but the vague flurries of snowfall she glimpses outside her window make her reach for her nightgown.
Trinket is already asleep, lying at the foot of her bed with his head pillowed upon his paws. While he doesn’t quite snore, his slow, even breaths are loud in Vex’s quiet room and she gives him a fond look and a gentle rub behind the ears before climbing into bed herself. He does not wake, ears flicking slightly at the pressure; before long, the familiar white noise of Trinket’s heavy, huffed breathing lulls her to sleep.
Vex’s dreams are troubled but indistinct; she wakes several times over the course of the night, but each time cannot remember what had awakened her. She can make educated guesses, at least. For all that she had told Percy that she was coming to terms with what Saundor had said to her in the heart of the Shademurk, his voice still haunts her dreams, and she suspects it may take many months yet before it fades. But she’s getting better, slowly, and while she wakes frequently, Vex finds little issue in returning to sleep.
Somewhere close to midnight, Vex is pulled roughly to consciousness not by her own dreams but by a muffled crash from his room down the hall. Her immediate reaction is one of fear, so sudden and strong that her heart practically stills in her chest - immediately she remembers the rakshasa, the Clasp assassins that had stormed in, and she drags herself upright to look about the room in wide-eyed horror.
Nothing. No assassins with poisoned knives, no tiger-men with backwards hands. Her room is empty of anyone besides herself and Trinket - still asleep, exactly where he had been when she’d retired hours ago, but having rolled onto his back with all four paws sticking into the air and snoring loud enough it’s a miracle she heard anything at all from Percy’s room. She would smile fondly at the sight, were she not still straining her ears for any further noise.
But she hears nothing besides Trinket’s snoring. Vex scolds herself for a moment for having overreacted. All of Vox Machina are twitchier than normal, these days, and Vex has never been a particularly heavy sleeper to begin with. And yet… there is something electric in the air, like the moment after a lightning strike, something that makes Vex step out of bed and begin to pull on enough clothes to make herself at least a little decent. She leaves the nightgown on, tucking it into her pants as best she can and shrugging on her coat over the top to ward away the castle’s chill, keeping her ears strained for any hint of noise outside of her room.
Just as she’s beginning to dismiss the whole thing as nothing, there’s a series of muffled thuds from the hallway, followed by the slam of a flung-open door bouncing off of the wall. Vex abandons her boots in favour of yanking open her own door, fumbling with the doorknob for a moment in her haste before leaning out into the hall.
She immediately recognises Percy, staggering down the hall. He’s got one hand braced against the wall, using it to support most of his weight with each lurching, uneven step; the other clenches and unclenches at his side in quick spasms. Even from this distance, Vex can easily hear the rasp of his breathing, loud and ragged like he’s run a mile, and every so often it hitches and he coughs, the noise harsh and grating to her ears.
“Percy?” she calls, her voice carrying down the hall. He pauses, pushing away from the wall to stare at her. Now that he’s turned to face her Vex takes a moment to look at him properly: he’s dressed, barely, clad only in a shirt, pants and boots, all of it rumpled like he’d pulled it on in a hurry, the shirt buttons mismatched and making the whole garment hang strangely on him.
“What’s going on?” Vex continues, stepping out into the hall. Percy takes one stumbling step back, hand still pressed to the wall, practically tripping over his own feet. His eyes practically shine in the dark, luminous and blue and so wide that if she was closer, Vex is certain she would be able to see the white all the way around them.
He shakes his head, still stepping back. There’s an expression on his face that Vex rarely sees on it, and it takes her a moment, even in the dark, to properly identify it for what it is - fear .
He runs.
Vex follows.