Tag: cr1

“another character sees their hands shaking so they hide them” with perc’ildan? (Vax/Percy)

Oooooh. This is technically my first ever fic for this ship, I hope you like it!

Prompts from this Whump Fic Bingo post!

Another character sees their hands shaking so they hide them

Warnings: post Crimson Diplomacy, spoilers up to c. ep 45

You would think that after watching his family’s killers disappear into the night without so much as a by-your-leave, Percival Frederickstein Von Musel Klossowski de Rolo III would not be able to sleep. To his great frustration, however, the biological imperative was apparently even stronger than his desire not to succumb, even briefly, to unconsciousness. Thus, when Percy was not haunted by the waking nightmare that was his life, he was haunted instead by stranger and strangely vivid horrors in the intimacy of his mind. It was enough to drive even a great man insane, and Percy had never pretended to be a great man. 

So he falls out of a dream full of writhing shadows screaming his siblings’ names and hits his nose hard against his worktable, knocking his glasses up into his forehead as he does so and spitting a curse. His workshop is cool, the fire having long since gone out with no one to tend to it. Percy’s mouth tastes like hot metal, and his head hurts, and he cannot shake the feeling that something is standing just behind him, ready to eat him alive. 

Of course, it is at this exact moment that Vax decides to remove himself from the shadows in one corner of the room. Because he’s accommodating like that. 

Percy flinches, violently, one hand fumbling for his gun as the other tries and fails to catch the back of his chair. He starts to fall, swearing as he does so, and then a warm, strong hand wraps around his wrist and catches him. Percy’s grip loosens on his gun as he’s pulled upright, and he squints through the half a lens that’s still somewhere near his left eye. Vax fades into his vision like a ghost and Percy sighs, letting go of his gun and moving his free hand to adjust his glasses.

Vax narrows his eyes at him, hand still wrapped firmly around Percy’s wrist, as if he thinks that if he lets go Percy will fall all over again. “You ok, Freddie?”

Percy nods, tugging his hand back and away from Vax and trying not to think about the way the heat of his touch lingers long after he lets go. “I would be better if you had entered my workshop like a normal person. Have you ever tried knocking? I hear it does wonders for your health.”

Vax’s mouth curves at the corner into a lopsided smile. “People don’t tend to let me in when I give them a choice about it.”

Percy sighs. His nose and forehead are still stinging from his graceless awakening, and for all that he knows there is no real threat, his heart is still pounding as if he’s running for his life, not sitting in his home. “Yes, and obviously the natural conclusion to draw from that is to get good at breaking and entering.” He pinches the bridge of his nose, wincing. “Was there something you wanted, Vax?”

Helpful as he usually is, Vax just lifts one slender shoulder and leans back against Percy’s worktable with the casual, proprietary ease of a big cat, all shadow and lean muscle. “Just figured I’d check in. See how you were doing.”

Percy frowns. “I assure you, I’m quite well.” This is a bare-faced lie, but since the windows at the top of Percy’s workshop are showing him nothing but a dark sky and therefore an ungodly hour of the morning, he doesn’t see any reason to tell the truth. 

Vax scowls at him, folding his arms across his chest. “Percival.” His tone is warning, and a little like his sister’s, and Percy wonders – not for the first time – why exactly he had decided to choose these people, of all the people in the world, to make his new family. 

But it is touching that Vax has even bothered to be concerned, and Percy hopes he isn’t far gone enough to take that for granted. So he takes a deep breath, and he forces himself to meet Vax’s dark eyes. “I’m fine. I promise.” He tries to put a little warmth into the words, though he’s not sure if it comes through over the exasperation. 

He thinks it does, because Vax’s features soften. His eyes glance down, quicker than Percy can really follow, certainly not groggy as he is after days of half-rejected sleep. “Your hands are shaking.” Vax’s voice is quiet, and very kind. Percy looks down and sees that he’s right: his fingers, stained with oil and black powder, are trembling lightly on the table as if he were terribly cold. Percy stares at them for a moment, like they’re a puzzle he can solve, and then he swallows and sits back, tucking his hands into his coat pockets.

“I must be cold.” It’s a stiff lie, and Percy can tell from the unimpressed look on Vax’s face that he doesn’t believe a word of it. But he moves to the fire anyway, turning his back to Percy as he lights it.

“I don’t suppose there’s much point reminding you that you have a bedroom upstairs?” It’s Vax’s turn to sound exasperated now, and the corner of Percy’s mouth pulls him in the direction of a smile despite himself. For all that Vax seems to want people to see him as some dark, cold harbinger of cruel justice, he has trouble containing his inner mother hen. It was moments like these, more than any others, that told Percy he cared. And for all that Percy had given up on such things long ago, it was nice to be cared for.

Vax turns and raises one dark eyebrow at him, his sun-dark skin turned copper and bronze by the growing flames, waiting for a response. Percy thinks that he looks not unlike a flame himself, standing there, drawn in lines of charcoal and gold. But then his gaze falls to the still healing, neat puncture wounds on Vax’s neck, exposed as his hair slips over his back by the loose black shirt he’s wearing. Percy looks away.  “I’m afraid not. There is much to do before we leave. If we leave. I am still not entirely certain about – ”

Vax cuts him off with an impatient wave of his hand. “We’re coming with you, so you can stop that particular line of thought before you start it, if you don’t mind. I’m not in the mood to argue.”

Percy raises his eyebrows, and Vax scowls at him. “What?” 

Now he’s smiling, and Percy looks away to hide the expression in an attempt to avoid making things worse, squinting at the scribbles he’d left on a scrap of parchment on his desk before he’d fallen asleep. It’s hard to make heads or tails of it, and not for the first time Percy wishes he’d spend more than thirty seconds on making his handwriting legible, for his own sake if no-one else’s. Distracted, he replies to Vax, feeling his gaze on the back of his neck. “I’m just not used to you holding that position.”

Vax huffs, and crosses the room so silently he may as well not have moved at all. The effect is as eerie as it ever has been, and the hairs on the back of Percy’s neck lift despite himself. In the corners of his eyes, the shadows flicker and seem to move with a life of their own. “Yeah, well, calling me Mr Surprising. Listen, are you going to talk to me or what?”

Percy takes a deep breath, and looks up at Vax: now barely a foot away from him and frowning. “Vax, I have no idea what time it is…”

“3am.” Vax supplies, and Percy groans, pushing his hand up under his glasses as he passes his hand over his face. That would explain the headache, then.

“Right. Can’t we do this in the morning, or at least at a more godly hour? I need to sleep. I’m sure you do too.” As Percy looks at him, he becomes a little more certain of the truth in his own words. There are deep purple bags under Vax’s eyes, and his features are worn like old clothes, faintly creased with lines of stress and worry. Not for the first time, guilt at having thrown Vox Machina into this whole sorry situation comes biting at the back of Percy’s mind, chewing on what’s left of his nerves. “It’s been a long week, for all of us.” Percy says it as kindly as he can, and a little of the tension stretched taut across the line of Vax’s shoulders goes slack. 

He reaches up, and rubs theside of his neck, slipping his fingers under his hair and covering the place where Sylas had bitten him, looking away from Percy and towards the roof of the workshop and the various implements which hang from it. “Yeah, well.” Vax purses his lips for a moment as his frown returns. “I figured, if I’m having nightmares after like, half an hour with those assholes, then your life probably sucks right now.”

Percy laughs, loudly and despite himself, without much humour. “My life has sucked for a very long time, Vax. This doesn’t really change much as far as I’m concerned.”

Vax makes a soft sound of frustration. “Don’t lie to me Percy.” Beside them, the fire huffs and sighs, but the rest of the keep is quiet. It feels strangely intimate. Vax leans forward, bending to meet Percy’s eyes. Percy leans back against his chair and tries not to think about Vax’s breath and the way it falls hot over his lips. “Look me in the eyes and tell me that you’re fine. That nothing’s wrong, and you’re doing as well as you were a week ago, before that whole fucking mess at the palace. I dare you.” Vax’s eyes are dark, and fierce, and angry. Percy lets himself hang in his gaze for several heartbeats more before he breaks it, pulling his glasses away from his face and cleaning them with the hem of his shirt. His hands shake a little as he does so.

“You shouldn’t get into people’s space like that. It’ll give them all sorts of ideas about your intentions.” Percy thinks that this is a clumsy effort at best to change the subject, but since it’s 3am he’s willing to cut himself a little slack.

Vax clicks his tongue and reaches out to hold his shoulder firmly with one hand, squeezing hard. “Tempting as that implication may be, Freddie, it’s not an answer to the fucking question, and I am far too tired to beat around the bloody bush. Just talk to me. Please. I’m freaked out. You’re freaked out, whether you want to admit it or not. You’ve got to talk to someone about it. Besides anything else, you’re no good to us drunk on sleep deprivation and jumping at shadows.” A far larger part of Percy’s mind than really should be concerned with such things catches the start of Vax’s sentence and lingers there, caught by the idea of of tempting implications, and all the pleasant distractions it could provide.

The rest of him is willing to admit that Vax, as usual, makes a simple kind of sense with the blunt instrument that is his pragmatism. Percy sighs, and puts his glasses back on. Vax doesn’t let go of his shoulder. “I’m having bad dreams, but I can’t sleep. I want to kill these people, slowly, and have my bloody vengeance for everything they did to me and my family, but I don’t want any of you within a hundred miles of them. I’m terrified that i’m going to get you all killed. There. Are you happy now?”

When Vax kisses him, it’s so quick and so sudden that Percy has barely has a moment to register the lightning-touch of chapped lips and the bump of teeth and the sudden smell of leather and cotton before it’s gone. He blinks, owlishly, and barely notices the fact that his hands have stopped shaking. Vax, for his part, gives him a grin that is altogether far too self-satisfied and gently pats his cheek. “Very.” He says, smugly, ears pricked the way they normally are when he laughs. “Don’t stay up too late, alright? We’re going to need you in top shape tomorrow. We’ve got a city to liberate.” Then Vax leans forward again, still quicker than Percy can react, and presses another brief, warm kiss to his forehead. He pulls back, and before Percy can react, turns and walks away with half a cock-eyed wave. “Night, Percival.”

Percy stares after him, and wonders who exactly taught him that any of that was an appropriate way to behave. Then he thinks that it was Vex, probably, and that explains some of it. Despite himself, Percy smiles, lifting one hand in the direction of his lips. The fire, behind him, casts dancing shadows over the wall. But shadows they remain. (At least for now.)

Vex and Scanlan brotp for whump fic bingo?

Alrighty!!! So this a prompt from this post!!

You didn’t nominate a prompt, so I’m going to call writer’s choice and say:

Becoming giggly from blood loss or high fever

Warnings: Major Injury, Swearing, No Spoilers

“You know, you know darling, I get it now. What people say about those, those clever fingers of yours. They’re awfully…ticklish.” Vex doesn’t seem to be able to catch her breath, and Scanlan is hoping that that’s because of the laughter and not the possibility of a punctured lung. He’s out of spells and out of potions and the rest of Vox Machina are distracted at present with a small horde of wyverns. So instead he presses the wadded up ball of fabric he’d torn from his shirt to the nasty gash in Vex’s side and hopes that she won’t bleed out from under him. 

“Yes, well, any great lover aims to be remembered as ticklish by their partners, I’m sure.” He’s not sure whether he’s humouring Vex to distract her or himself from their current predicament. Probably a bit of both. He presses harder on the wound, and tries to ignore Vex’s hiccough of pain when he does so. (His hands won’t stop shaking.)

“I don’t know, some people are into that. You don’t want to…” Vex coughs, and a little blood comes up with it. Scanlan flinches as she finishes her sentence, “You shouldn’t judge people Scanlan. I’d have thought you’d know better than that.”

Scanlan shrugs, and glances up in time to see Vax sent flying back against the cave wall by a stray tail. Not long after he impacts, Grog roars and catches the offending lizard in a headlock. They’re not going to be fast enough, he thinks, with a dim kind of horror. Vex is going to bleed out underneath him, slowly, and there’s nothing he can do about it.

Vax is going to kill him. 

He needs to not be thinking about that. “What can I say? I’m a narrow minded gnome.” Vex’s eyes start to lose focus, and Scanlan lifts one bloody hand to her cheek, tapping her gently. “Hey, hey, eyes on me. You know I love the attention.” Vex is terribly pale now, whiter than a damn vampire, and there’s a sheen of sweat sticking to her skin that Scanlan has only seen on others in great sickness. He swallows, thickly, and taps her cheek again to get her to look at him. “So is that what does it for you? Vex’ahlia, if I knew taking a mortal wound would make you tell me about your sex life I’d have stood next to you in battle long ago.”

Vex laughs, still delirious – whether from the shock or the blood loss Scanlan doesn’t know, but he’s grateful for the way it seems to be distracting her from the pain. “You’re terrible.” She frowns, the distracted frown of a small child, eyes searching the air a few inches to the left of him. “And ridiculous. Darling you always stand next to me in battle. We fight together.” The corner of her mouth, red with blood despite the grey-white pallor or her lips, curves into a proud smile. “Scanlan Shorthalt. Formidable spellcaster, great bard and,” she pauses, dissolving into giggles, “shit-scryer extraordinaire.”

There’s a blast of holy light as bright as a thousand suns, and two long, agonised screeches as two of the wyverns disintegrate. Vex falls quiet, her breaths shallow and laboured. Scanlan lets go of her cheek to tap his earring. “Pike. Pike. Keyleth. Anyone, I need you here, now. Vex is hurt, bad, and I can’t do anything about it. So I need someone with spells or someone with a potion or someone with something.”

There’s a great roar as Keyleth, unrecognisable to anybody but her family as an earth elemental, bulldozes one of the wyverns. Which puts her out. Vax is struggling to his feet on the other side of the cave, limping badly and bleeding from a cut on his head. Half his cheek is crimson with the blood. Grog is tackling another wyvern. Scanlan doesn’t know where Pike is. He can’t see her. He hopes she’s coming. 

“Say, Scanlan.” Vex’s voice is quiet now, and some of the humour has left her. Scanlan looks down immediately, feeling his own panic rising as she takes in the gravity of her situation.

“Whatever you’re going to say, don’t. Your brother is miserable enough for the both of you and everything is going to be fine. You’ve got me. Scanlan Shorthalt, remember? Formidable spellcaster, great bard,” he smiles at her, a little desperate, “shit-scryer.” Vex snorts, and Scanlan’s smile widens into something more honest with his relief. “See? How can you take yourself seriously when you’re with me? It’s all just a bit of fun. It’s all going to be ok.”

Vex smile lingers like the aftertaste of expensive wine, but she keeps getting paler, and by now the rag Scanlan had pressed to her wound is heavy and dripping with her blood. Scanlan swallows again, and looks up. There’s one wyvern left. He tries to ignore the fact his fingers are numb. He tries not to think about how cold Vex is getting underneath his hands. It’s all going to be fine. They just need a few more minutes. It’ll be fine. 

“Scanlan. If I…” Vex’s voice is hoarse, and quiet, and weak. She sounds nothing like herself.

Scanlan is interrupting her almost as soon as she’s said his name. “No, no, none of that. What did I tell you? You can talk to me about something else. Anything else. Does tickling do it for you? You never gave me a straight answer to that question. It’s ok, you can tell me. We’re friends. I won’t tell anyone. Well, I probably won’t, but if I do it’ll be in the name of humour, and not of ruining your good name.” He’s rambling, and he’s talking too fast, and he sounds like he used to as a teenager, before he learned how powerful a well-placed word could be. He’s sweating now – he’d barely noticed it before. It drips into his eyes and stings. (It’s the sweat that’s stinging. It’s sweat that’s blurring his vision. Nothing else.)

Vex coughs on another laugh. More blood bubbles over her chin. Scanlan thinks that if he never sees her like this again it’ll be too soon. “Don’t talk over what might be my last words, you asshole.”

“They’re not going to be your last words. You’re tempting fate, and I am therefore invoking my divine right to interrupt you as one of the twins Vessar and stop you from doing what is apparently a hereditary condition that forces you to see the worst in every possible situation.” Scanlan’s voice is a little higher than it should be, and as he speaks his attention is divided between Vex – worryingly grey by now – and the fight. Most of the wyverns are a scaly heap of bodies on the floor, but he still can’t see Pike. Or Vax, for that matter, but then he can rarely see Vax. (He should be here by now. Why isn’t he here?)

Scanlan is so busy trying to see the rest of his family that when Vex’s cold fingers touch his cheek he jumps, startled into reluctantly looking back down at her and the sweat and blood streaked across her face. He makes a point of not looking further down at the wound in her stomach. His hand by now is cramping with the length of time he’s held it there, and it’s sticky with her blood. 

“Darling,” Vex’s dark eyes are, somehow, despite her delirium, infinitely kind, “it really is going to be ok. If I die – no, let me say it – if I die, my brother isn’t going to kill you.” She stops, and frowns, “Well, probably.” Despite himself Scanlan laughs, and Vex gives him a warm, honest, sober smile. “We make each other laugh, don’t we? I’m grateful for that. Truly.” 

“Yeah, well.” Scanlan shrugs, and swallows, and holds her hand where she’s still resting it against his cheek, ignoring his tears as they fall. “It’s what I do.”

Vex nods, just a tiny shift of her head against the rough cave floor. “You’re good at it. Don’t stop. Promise?”

Scanlan wants to check the cave: he wants Keyleth to drop her elemental form, and he wants Pike to reappear in a blaze of golden light exactly where she’s needed the way she always does. But he can’t look away from Vex. Because part of him knows that if he looks away now, he may never see her again. Not like she is. Not as herself. 

He takes a deep breath, and finds the part of him that can stand up to a dragon and laugh, and he gives her the smile she so richly deserves. “I promise. Shit-scrying all round.” Vex starts to laugh, and then she starts to cough, and she winces as she does so, dropping her arm. Scanlan moves to gently push her shoulder back against the cave floor. “Ok, alright, don’t move. Help is coming. You’re…you’re going to be alright.”

Vex looks at him, and there’s a knowing in her eyes that has been there since they day they met. It’s an understanding Scanlan recognises: the kind of deep, old wisdom that comes from meeting death young and never quite leaving it. The understanding that it will come when it needs to, and it will disregard even the most fervent of wishes. She takes a deep breath, and it rattles in her chest. “Tell my brother I love him.”

Scanlan shuts his eyes, face hot and wet with his own silent tears, and reaches out to touch her hair, gently pushing it back from her face. He answers her quietly, like a prayer, soft and certain. “He already knows.”

Vex shuts her eyes. Her breath leaves her body the way breath leaves all bodies: gracelessly and rattling. Scanlan chokes, and he curls forwards, and he drags at his own soul, searching for some reserve of power with which to pull her back. He barely hears the rest of them approaching. He barely notices their rising panic. He barely registers Vax pushing him back and pulling his sister into his lap, voice raised.

But he’s aware of enough when he does so to look up and take a deep breath and grab Vax’s shoulder and ignore the way he tries to shrug him off. “She said she loves you.”

And Vax, bewildered and angry and grief-stricken and panicking just stares at him, briefly confused. “I know that.”

Scanlan nods. Then he weeps. 

Three days later, Vex’ahlia Vessar is alive and well. Pike saved her, as Scanlan should have known she would. 

Still, she’d had far too many near misses recently, and he was fairly certain that as the self appointed Group Leader (and, apparently, with the exception of the intermittent Pike, the only responsible adult) that he would need to have a long, firm talk with her about avoiding situations she couldn’t handle. That, and he needed to take some tutelage from Pike. It was about time he got better at healing magic, predilections be damned. It’d be a hard sell, given the motives she’d assume he’d have in asking for private lessons, but Scanlan thinks he can do it. Then maybe he’ll help Keyleth with her potion making. She’ll probably be less willing than Pike to let him into her space whilst she’s working, but he’s pretty sure he can get her to agree with the right incentive.  He’ll make a trip to Gilmore’s, too. The man is sure to have something better than the skimpy stuff Vex calls armour. Her mobility is one thing, but it’s nothing if it gets her killed.

It’s at about this point in his train of thought that Scanlan is ready to admit to himself that he’s more shaken than he has been in a long time. It’s also at this point that he bumps into the half-elf in question. 

“Darling! I was looking for you, actually.” Vex doesn’t look a day older than whatever youthful age she’d once told him she was. She certainly doesn’t look like she’s on death’s door. She’s lean, and strong, and dark with the sun. There’s not a hint of grey anywhere. It suits her. It always has.

“Don’t tell me you’ve finally decided to take me up on my offer of a little afternoon delight.” Scanlan exaggerates his innuendo, because he can and it’s an easy laugh and it’s far more comfortable than emotional vulnerability. Vex snorts, and that’s enough to make it worth it in his book.

“Keep dreaming, gnome. No, I wanted to say thank you.” Vex’s voice is brisk, and business like, but there’s something more that she isn’t saying, and for the life of him Scanlan can’t figure out what it is.

He frowns, “Is that all? I mean no offence, but you hardly needed to seek me out for that. And anyway, you have nothing to thank me for. Any one of us would have done the same.”

Vex folds her arms, and glances up and down the corridor. Scanlan doesn’t bother to do the same, he knows from experience that if she’s missed something then he’s unlikely to see it. “Be that as it may.” Vex lifts her chin, but her eyes are gentle in a way they rarely are outside of life and death moments on the battlefield and the company of her brother. “I know how hard it is, to see a friend like that. To see a member of your family like that.”

This is rapidly accelerating towards and crossing into territory that Scanlan is not comfortable with, and he clears his throat, searching his mind desperately for any one of the excuses which are usually so readily available to him. His mind, traitor that it is, only throws up images of Vex’s grey and bloodstained face speaking what she thought were her last words to him. He says nothing.

Vex crouches down so that she’s at eye level with him, and glances again up and down the corridor. Scanlan really isn’t sure why she keeps doing it, because he knows for a fact that his mansion is Horrible Monster Free. He assumes that she’s checking for her brother, though he also expects that even she couldn’t spot Vax if he didn’t want to be found. 

Vex’s eyes are bright when she turns back to him, not with concern but with mischief. She looks not unlike her brother when he’s about to play a prank on someone, and now it’s Scanlan’s turn to be worried. “Do you remember what we talked about? When I passed out and sort of died of that stomach wound in your arms.”

Scanlan makes an effort to studiously maintain his composure. If he’s going to be pranked, then he might as well take it with grace, but the combination of a potential practical joke and one of the more horrifying moments in his recent memory is disconcerting, to say the least. “Yes. Vividly. I’ve been having nightmares about it, as a matter of fact.” (Let it never be said that Scanlan Shorthalt isn’t above guilt-tripping potential pranksters into backing off when he’s having a moment.)

For a moment, Vex looks sincerely sympathetic. “Wait, really?” 

A little exasperated, Scanlan gives her his best Look that says this is how normal people would react to our lives. “Yes, Vex, of course. I very much hope it doesn’t happen again. I didn’t enjoy watching you bleed out. Obviously?”

Recovering from her distraction, Vex tucks a lock of hair behind her ear and glances away from him, blushing a little. “Right, yes, sorry. Anyway. You asked a question, and I didn’t answer it. I was mostly distracted by the blood loss and the pain. But I figured it’d be as great a thanks as any.”

Scanlan frowns, now just outright confused, and Vex starts to smirk as she watches his expression change. “Wait, you can’t mean…”

“Tickling doesn’t do it for me. But roleplay does.” Vex drops him the cheekiest wink Scanlan has ever seen in his life as a travelling player, and then, before he has a chance to reply, she stands up and walks away from him, laughing.

For a moment, speechless, Scanlan watches her retreating back. Then he lifts a hand to his face, and shuts his eyes, and he starts to smile. It’s at this point that a shadow detaches itself from the wall, and a very flustered looking Vax scowls at the corridor, muttering something about things he never wanted to know about his sister. And Scanlan can’t help it. He laughs, and he laughs, and he laughs. 

They’re ok. They’re going to be ok.