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.