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“I’m not sure that I like being discussed all that much.”
In the semi-dark of his bedchamber, Percy nearly jumps out of his skin. He’s on his feet, hand snatching Retort from the night table and aiming without thinking in a second and a half flat. It is sheer luck he hasn’t taken a shot yet as Vex steps out of the darkness in the corner of the room, the shadows drifting from her as she lets her stealth spell fall away.
He lowers the gun, shaking all over with almost, almost again, gods-dammit. “Vex. I’m- not sure I like being snuck up on.”
The moonlight filtering through the thick castle windows is just enough for him to make out her face. Her mouth pulls a little as her eyes flicker to the barrel of the weapon that seconds ago had been aimed at her chest. She steps closer,close enough to tug the gun from his unresistant grip. She sets it back on the night table, patting his cheek.It feels a bit numb.
“I trust you not to shoot me, darling.” She steps back. The gun is still so close. His fingers crawl with the residue of oil and black powder, but he willfully ignores it. “But really. I am glad you and my brother are back on speaking terms of course, but I’m not sure how I feel about being the subject, you know?”
It takes a moment for Percy’s panicking brain to catch up, but once it does he doesn’t waste any time wondering if this might be some kind of trickery. He assumes she used her scrying stone - or maybe she convinced Keyleth to polymorph her - either way, it’s not a stab in the dark. It’s clear she overhead at least some of his conversation with Vax in the newly constructed temple of the Raven Queen. It is clear she is not pleased.
“We really didn’t mean to-” he begins. It’s all he manages before he realizes he’s not going to survive this conversation standing. He sits shakily on the edge of his bed, fussing a bit with his pajamas. Vex, who is still dresses, continues standing, arms crossed expectantly. “You got to the conversation late, I suspect. We - I - didn’t begin talking about you. Your brother was having some trouble accepting the shrine as a genuine gift from me because of our...difficulties, concerning you. I didn’t intend to discuss you behind your back.”
“But you did.”
“We- I did. Yes. May I ask-” His words come out in an embarrassed mutter as he scrubs his hands over his face, trying to get his brain to focus. His fingers reek of metal and oil. “May I ask what, exactly, you heard?”
He doesn’t raise his head as he waits for her answer, and he imagines it helps the both of them.
“One day,” she quotes, with precise, slow diction, and his stomach sinks like a stone, “your sister will learn that money will not make her happy. Until then, this was the quickest, easiest way to fix it.”
Percy DeRolo has said a lot of things in his life. He’s even meant most of them. It isn’t often he’s stuck around long enough to hear them spat back at him. It’s strange, and it stings more than he’d thought it might, coming from her.
“I know my brother loves me, even if he doesn’t always understand me. But you-” she continues before he can gather himself enough to get a word in. There’s a heated tremble to her voice now, and that makes him raise his head from his hands. She’s still fully armored like she came for a fight, even her bow at her back, and there’s is a forced hardness to her features that makes her difficult to look at, beautiful as she is. “I didn’t think you thought so little of me.”
Scratch all that; this feels much, much worse than he’d thought it would.
He reaches out for her, trying to pull her down to the edge of the bed. She shakes her head mutely, her lips pressed tightly together, her eyes staring straight over his head. She does, almost begrudgingly allow him to taker her hands.
For a moment, the part of him raised on the outskirts of a noble family tells is already preparing to offer a hundred different artful apologies, call her a thousand beautiful names to make up for whatever hurt is within her. For a moment, the secret he holds against hope and heart rises up and trips hard against his tongue, but it won’t make this better. This is Vex. She deserves better than that.
He says, “Explain, then. Please.”
She nods. Her fingers squeeze his, and he squeezes back, hoping it is reassurance rather than the opposite. It’s strange - she’s taken his hands enough times before. To draw him out of a panic, to pull him to his feet when he hadn’t even realized he’d fallen. For some reason, it feels so much different the other way around, her fingers rough but delicate, and slightly cold in his. He waits for her to speak.
“I’m not going to pretend I don’t like gold. And fine things. But I know what it means to have them because I know what it means to lose them. I already suffered that once. So did you! And just when we finally had a home - seats on the council, approval to go wherever we liked in the city without question, our beautiful keep - these dragons came and fucking destroyed it, and we were just nothing! Nothing, all over again.”
His eyes land on the pack still slung over her shoulder: the same one she brought from Whitestone when they fled. It’s an old thing, one he hadn’t seen in a year or two. But it was fully packed with tin cups, spare gold, and fresh arrows, like she’d been keeping it stocked all this time, just in case. He thinks about her haggling potions down by twenty gold when they had tens of thousands to spare, and wonders if she’d always suspected the worst was still to come.
She wipes at her face, peering down at him with those eyes that have always seem right through him.
“Do you know why I was so happy when you gave me that title?”
He thinks about patches of woods and abandoned buildings she once slept in, watching over her brother and a baby bear, of all things. He remembers the night they were welcomed onto the Council, the most radiant of all of them in a silver dress she’d somehow gotten for half-price, how she’d kept it carefully wrapped in the bag of holding ever since. He thinks about her scrubbing her face raw the night before meeting with her father, yet never flinching before the offers of Saundor.
“I think so,” he says carefully. “But- forgive me, dear. I’ve just barely gotten my foot out of my own mouth this evening-”
“-maybe not even.”
“...Indeed. I’d rather not go sticking it right back in if I can help it.” He takes a deep breath. “Could you tell me?”
She considers it for a moment, her head cocked to one side. There’s barely enough light to make out her expression, and it’s both unnerving and oddly comforting to know she can see him so much more clearly. “Tell me this, Percival DeRolo. Who would you be without your name?”
The change in subject throws him for a minute, but the answer isn’t difficult. “Nothing. Nothing good, or of use, I imagine.”
She shakes her head a little. “I want to agree with you because I’m angry, but you’re wrong. You would still have a brilliant brain. You would still be a good man in a tight spot-” he winces a little at the reminder of how much she overheard, but she’s pushing through before the thorn can dig too deeply. “You’d still be very dear to me. Perhaps you still need to learn some of your own lessons.”
“Oh, I don’t think there’s any doubt about that.”
She hiccups a single hard, wet sound that might have been a laugh, if her voice wasn't getting choked. “Perhaps not. The point is, even though it was lost to you for so long, you have always had Whitestone. When you returned, they welcomed you with open arms. Their prodigal son.” At some point she’s started crying in earnest, shaking with suppressed grief and rage. Percy can hardly breathe to behold her like this. He fights against the panic rising in his own chest and holds tighter to her hands.
“That’s what made me so happy about that title. Not gold or property. Belonging, Percival. The kind of belonging that no one will take back. And I suppose I thought- I thought you knew that. That you thought I deserved that, you know? And to hear you say you did it just- just because it as easy. Like placating a child, I-”
Her voice chokes off. There are tears glinting on her cheeks, but her spine is straight as one of her arrows. Her hands are trembling in his, and he shakes them a bit to get her to look down at him again. The secret burns in his throat, and he swallows it down once more. Not now, certainly not now.
“Can I be very honest with you?” he asks.
She sniffs, wiping her face on a shoulder. “You’d better be. You’re very charming Percival, but I’ve seen through better liars than you.”
“I know you have.” He pulls at her hands again, more gently this time. “Will you sit?”
A tiny hint of a smile tugs at her mouth, though she’s still not quite meeting his eyes. “Am I making you nervous, darling?”
“Always,” he says honestly, and this time when she laughs it sounds a little more real.
“Alright,” she says, and sits gingerly on the bed half a foot away from him. Their hands are still linked.
He takes just a moment, once they’re settled, to feel a touch ridiculous about their comparative states of dress. But maybe it’s just right, somehow.
“When I did what I did, I- look. I didn’t lie to your brother. But when I gave you that title, it wasn’t because I thought you needed an easy way out, or needed to be placated.”
“Why then?” she asks sharply. Percy shifts in his seat, searching for something more than honeyed court phrases. For the honesty he promised her.
“Your father was being an asshole, and when I gave you that title, it was the quickest way to put him in his place. The quickest way to show him that no matter what he thinks, we think nothing but highly of you. And-” he takes a breath, half-afraid to look at her but trying to anyway. “-if I’m being very honest, it was the quickest way to see you smile.”
The look on her face says she doesn’t quite believe him yet, but now that he’s started he finds he has more to say after all.
“So. That’s why I did it then. But I offer it to you again now-” her brows pinch, her expression going confused and wary. “-for all the reasons you said. I mean that, Vex. I offer it because you deserve belonging somewhere. Because you’ve earned it. And, frankly...because I would very much like it to be yours. If you’ll have it.”
Something in her face shifts then, and she finally meets his eyes. As she peers at him, the confusion shifts to something softer, less definable. She ducks in unexpectedly, resting the side of her cheek on his shoulder. It's still damp, and hot even through the heavy fabric of his pajamas.
“Promise?” It’s an uncharacteristically quiet whisper.
It’s the easiest answer Percy has given all night. “I promise.”
He feels her relax a bit more into him, and his heart squeezes in his chest. “Lady Vex’halia,” she says, like she’s still considering it. “Baroness of the Third House of Whitestone.” She twists her hands so that hers are wrapped around his now. “I mean, I suppose a woman could get used to it.”
“Don’t forget Grandmistress of the Gray Hunt,” he adds, at a loss for anything else to say. She's found something in the castle to put in her hair, some flowery oil. With her this close, he can hardly remember the smell of black powder at all.
“You still haven’t told me what that’s all about,” she points out.
“No, I suppose I haven’t, have I?” There’s a loose lock of hair stuck to her visible cheek, and he’s helpless to keep from reaching out and tucking it behind one perfectly pointed ear. “Would you like to hear about it?”
She pulls away from him, straightening her skirts as she stands. It’s a loss until he can see her face again, and she’s smiling. “Not tonight,” she says. “I think we need as much rest as we can get.”
“Of course.”
She hesitates at the door. “But Percy, darling?”
“Yes?”
“Soon.”
She’s gone in swirl of skirts and shadows, between one blink in the next. By the time Percy murmurs “soon,” to himself, he’s speaking to empty air.