#listen i just really mostly wanted to write keyleth going to vex's door instead of vax's

[penandpaperfic]

watched episode 64 of campaign 1, had a lot of feelings, queued up the saddest songs on my writing playlist and wrote this in a rush. because who doesn’t want quiet, uncertain nights together in Whitestone?

ps - this is set during episode 64, so watch out for 1) spoilers if you’re still catching up like me and 2) mention of a certain dragonborn sorcerer. he’s not usually in the stuff i write, but i can’t really cut him out of this one

anyway. enjoy or ignore at your leisure:

-

She had thought, when the dragons took Emon and forced them all to flee, that it was by an immense stroke of luck Tiberius wasn’t with them.

She had thought, when he said his goodbyes and took a moment to wish her well, that they would see each other again.

She had thought, even when they heard three fourths of the Chroma Conclave had soared east, that he would be fighting back, wherever he was.

She had ignored the thought, deep in her heart, that he might not even be alive.

Percy asks a few of the Ravenites to take a body down, and he grabs her hand and whispers to all of them not to react. That in itself makes her want to react—and ask him what the hell is going on—but the look he gives her is more than stern: it’s desperate.

Keyleth shuts up, and watches.

He is frozen, and still, and lifeless. But he is undeniably Tiberius Stormwind from Draconia.

They do their best not to react. They really, really do. But a silence has fallen over their group, heavier than their uncertain glances at their uneasy allies so far. Keyleth looks around cautiously as they gather the body, and she knows that the Ravenites know. Tooma tilts her head toward her. There is no sympathy, but there’s a gravity to it. Keyleth lets her shoulders fall as she follows the others away.

Someone suggests the buried library, and really, there is no better place. Keyleth tries to channel her trembling into magic, into energy, as they clear away rock and ice and frozen, ruined books. They eventually make a suitable place for him—not good enough, but better than where he was. Where he had been slain, destroyed, made a symbol of—

Keyleth walks closer to the body and falls to her knees beside him. Why didn’t you tell us? she thinks. Why didn’t you talk about this part of your home?

Questions she’ll never know the answer to. There’s a part of her that’s angry. How was he supposed to be a leader when part of his people were slaves? But that thought hurts even more than the sight of him lying here, cold and still, so she shoves it away.

She reaches for his robes and tears a strip off. She winds it around her hand, tightening her fingers in the soft, fine, familiar fabric, and holds it to her chest. Beside her, Grog pours a glass of ale. Then, remembering something, he dumps it out to the side and fills the glass with water instead. He places it near Tiberius’s head.

Keyleth takes a shaky breath. She looks away from him, across the remnants of the library. There are some books still intact, still on shelves that are standing. There’s a little table with a fine leather chair and an unlit candle on its side. She imagines him sitting there, much younger, nose buried in a tome with the rest of the table covered in papers and ink. His flustered huff of a laugh when he caught on to something, or perhaps couldn’t quite find the answer he needed.

Keyleth shuts her eyes again and tucks the piece of robe away in her bag.

Vex places Lockheed on Tiberius’s still chest. The dragonling perks up with recognition, then mewls as Tiberius doesn’t react. He creeps up Tiberius’s chest to nibble on his chin. When there’s no other response, he deflates, curling slowly, sadly into a circle on his chest.

She can hear Vax’s quiet murmur of a prayer. Percy’s heavy sigh.

“Keyleth,” Percy says quietly. “Can you seal it?”

She sniffs. Nods. Pushes herself to her feet.

“Lockheed,” Vex whispers. The dragonling curls tighter on his chest. “Darling, please, you can’t stay here.”

He resists her. Vex kneels down and reaches out. She whispers something in Draconic. Lockheed raises his head and gives one last, long look at Tiberius’s face. Then he flutters to her shoulder. She runs a finger over his chest and walks out of the library.

When they’re all out, Keyleth raises her hands. She reaches out for the stone and pulls it down, sealing their makeshift tomb. As the stone falls, she falls with it. Snow seeps through the knees of her pants. She focuses on that, not the painful ache of her throat or the tears freezing on her cheeks.

A hand touches her shoulder. Vax, probably. Keyleth is about to shake him off, but the fingers flex, squeezing gently, and she realizes it’s smaller than she expected.

Vex.

She reaches up and covers Vex’s hand, welcoming the touch, clinging to her desperately. She feels Vex lower herself enough to speak softly beside her.

“He loved you well, Princess.” There’s a smile in her voice, as well as the tears. Keyleth feels her own lips curl. She sniffs and nods, holds it together for a moment before crumbling again. Vex’s hand tightens on her shoulder.

“He was so stupid,” she says back. Vex’s watery laugh sounds beside her. Keyleth wants to pull her down to hold her properly, but she resists the urge. Her head is starting to ache. She can feel the tight pull of her furrowed brow. “He should have never left our side.”

She doesn’t think it’s loud enough for anyone but Vex to hear, and Vex doesn’t respond. Keyleth swallows hard.

The party slowly picks themselves up. Vex helps Keyleth to her feet, but then drifts off. Percy is speaking to Tooma. Vax and Scanlan say their quiet, private goodbyes. Even Grog is subdued, standing with his head slightly bowed as he waits patiently for their next move.

They decide to plant their grove—their message, their means of returning—at the top of the ravine. Vex insists that Keyleth should save her spells and flies them all up instead, one by one. Keyleth climbs onto the broom behind her and wraps her arms tentatively around Vex’s waist.

Vex touches her forearm and presses it close. “Tighter, darling. Can’t have you slipping away.”

Keyleth lets herself hold Vex tighter. She presses her face to the space between Vex’s shoulder blades and breathes in, still shaky with tears. Vex squeezes her wrist once more, then pushes off the ground.

The tree grows easily, as does the portal. When they’re back in Whitestone, it’s as if nothing ever happened. Nothing has changed.

As they trudge quietly back up to the castle, Keyleth supposes that it hasn’t. Tiberius was dead when they left Whitestone, and he’s dead now. They already knew these dragons were ravaging the world. They just didn’t know it was this damn personal.

Percy leaves to go talk with Cassandra. Vax pats him on the shoulder before he goes, then murmurs something about a temple and drifts off. Grog declares he needs to find Pike and then get drunk. He offers his shoulder to Scanlan, who climbs up and goes with him.

Keyleth gazes after them. Maybe she should follow. Maybe she really, really shouldn’t get drunk tonight.

“Keyleth.”

She looks over at Vex, the only one still hovering. Lockheed is on her shoulder still, though he’s slumped so much he’s half-hidden in her hair.

Vex opens her mouth to say something, but no words come out. She closes her mouth again and simply stares at Keyleth.

Keyleth wipes at her eyes. “I…”

Vex nods. They both look away from each other, and Keyleth takes it as a cue to leave. Just get the fuck out of here, it doesn’t matter where to. She turns down the closest hallway and, by some stroke of luck, makes it to her room without running into anyone else.

/

Sleep doesn’t come easily. She supposes that makes sense, since they weren’t gone that long. But two teleportation spells and nearly becoming slaves and building a tomb for her once best friend is still draining.

Keyleth stares up at the ceiling above her bed, nearly in tears again just out of the desperation to go to sleep. She turns over and buries her face in the pillow. Let it stop. Let her rest.

They’ve lost so much. They’ve caused so much destruction, and they’ve witnessed so much more. How long was Tiberius up there, made a spectacle in front of the people his kin enslaved? What had he thought, in his last moments? Who was with him? Who fell before him?

Did he think of them? Did he wish he had stayed? Was he glad they weren’t with him? Was he hoping they were somewhere out there, fighting the same threat, coming to save—

Keyleth shoves herself up from the pillow, gasping. She scrambles up until she’s sitting and pulls the pillow to her chest, squeezing so hard it hurts. She wants to scream. She wants to sob. She can’t do this. She can’t.

She stands up before she can tell herself not to. She makes her way out of the room and down the hall, past Percy’s chambers, past Vax’s, to the last door in this wing. She knocks on the wood, soft but quick, before the nerves tell her to turn around and go right back to her own room.

The door opens just enough for Vex’s face to appear in the crack. She’s mostly shadowed, but Keyleth can see her features soften.

“Darling.”

“I—I don’t—I can’t—” Keyleth forces herself to take a breath. “I don’t want to be alone tonight.”

The door opens further. Keyleth steps in and out of the way so Vex can close it again. There’s no sign of Lockheed, except maybe the window Vex has left open. Keyleth sighs. Maybe he’ll like the mountains outside Whitestone. Hopefully he will.

Keyleth stays standing there, hanging in the dark room, not sure what to do or say now that she’s here. Her thoughts still won’t quiet. She brings her hands up and wrings them in front of her chest.

Vex steps away from the door and reaches for her. She takes Keyleth by the arms, then lets her hands slide down to Keyleth’s, parting them so she can hold them each.

“I’m sorry,” Keyleth whispers, not quite meeting her eye.

“For what, dear?”

“It’s late, I shouldn’t be—”

“If I didn’t want you here, I would’ve told you to leave.”

Keyleth nods. Swallows. Vex’s fingers tighten around hers.

“Come here, darling.”

And then she’s pulling Keyleth closer, into her arms, and leading them over to the bed. They sit, and Vex lets go of Keyleth so she can bring her hand up and tuck her hair back from her face. Her fingers run over her scalp freely, smoothing over the place where her circlet usually sits.

“Do you want to talk?” she asks Keyleth.

“I’m…not sure.”

Vex nods. She shifts so she can face Keyleth more fully. “He died protecting his people, Keyleth. I don’t think he would’ve wanted it any other way.”

“He would’ve wanted more time,” Keyleth whispers.

“We can’t always ask for that.”

She closes her eyes, but suddenly all she can see is Vex’s pale, pale face, deep in the tomb of the Raven Queen’s champion. She opens her eyes again and stares at Vex. She’s still pale, but her eyes are moving. Shining. Looking straight back at her.

“He should’ve stayed with us.”

“There’s no guarantee he would survive everything we’ve been through, either.”

“At least he wouldn’t have been slaughtered as a mockery to his country.” Keyleth clenches her jaw and looks away. “And those people. The Ravenites. He never told us…”

“I know.”

“How could he support that? How could he be okay with it?”

“We’re not sure that he was.” At Keyleth’s look, Vex sighs. “He was…he still had a lot to learn. Just like the rest of us. But that doesn’t change what was in his heart. He loved his people. And he loved us.”

“Does he know we feel the same way?” It’s out before she can stop it, and she flinches in Vex’s grasp.

But Vex just sighs and shifts closer. She rubs Keyleth’s arm and waits for some of the tension to ease away. “I think he did.”

“But he left.”

“I know. I know, and it hurts. But…I think he was right. Our paths were separating. It was the best thing to do, at least in his mind. And it takes courage to make that decision.”

“Or stupidity.”

“Or stupidity,” Vex agrees. She rests her head on Keyleth’s shoulder. “He had plenty of both.”

She can’t help it. A giggle escapes her lips. She feels Vex shaking against her arm, laughter or tears, she’s not sure. Both, probably. It doesn’t really matter at this point. She lifts her arm to wrap around Vex.

“Thank you,” she whispers.

“For what?”

“For not telling me to get lost at the door.”

Vex raises her head to stare. “Keyleth. I would never.”

Keyleth meets her gaze, but just as soon as she does, Vex looks away again. She bites her lip and frowns. Keyleth squeezes the hand she’s still holding.

“What is it?”

Nothing.” Vex shakes her head. “I guess I’m just wondering why you didn’t go to Vax’s room.”

Oh.

Keyleth ducks her head and ignores the heat in her cheeks.

“I—I’m sorry, Vex. I know you…well, no, I don’t actually know how you feel. But I know you want him to be happy. And I just…I can’t.”

She feels Vex’s gaze on her again. “Keyleth. Are you apologizing for not having feelings for my brother?”

“Um. Yes?”

Vex laughs—an actual laugh this time. The tears are still behind it, thick in her voice, but when Keyleth looks up her eyes are brighter.

“Darling, you don’t have to apologize for that.”

“But Vax—”

“Is an adult, and can handle his own feelings.” Vex sighs and tucks a bit of hair behind her ear. “I know I was…I didn’t like the idea of you with my brother, but I didn’t like the idea of him getting hurt. I took both out on you, and I shouldn’t have.”

“…Oh.” Keyleth lets out an awkward, quiet laugh. “I mean, I understand why.”

“That doesn’t make it okay.”

“No. But…the apology does.”

Vex glances up at her. “Okay.”

Keyleth drinks her in. Vex is here. She is here beside her, breathing and moving and talking and looking at Keyleth. She thinks about telling Vex why she came to her door. Not just because she didn’t want to go to Vax’s, but because…

But that’s a confession that can wait. She knows she’s good at ruining moments, and today has been ruined enough.

Still, she can’t help but ask, “Can…can I stay here tonight?”

Vex nods before she even finishes asking. “Of course you can.”

Keyleth nods back. The tears are rising again, tight in her throat, and she has to drop her gaze. Vex touches her cheek, then reaches for her shoulders and gently guides her down to the pillows.

They curl up close on the too-small bed. Keyleth is reminded of their early, early adventures, back when they could only afford so many rooms at the taverns they stayed in. She lets her arm wrap around Vex’s waist and shifts closer. Vex kisses her forehead, then the rise of her cheek beneath her eye.

“Try to sleep, darling,” she whispers. “You did a lot today, and we need you tomorrow.”

Keyleth nods, then ducks her head. She feels Vex’s hand at the base of her skull, guiding her until she can rest her face in the crook of her neck. She breathes in. Vex smells of leaves and bark, of Trinket’s fur, of the polish she uses on her bows. Keyleth breathes out, and she feels the tears start to fall again.

Vex scratches gently, soothingly, at her scalp.

“It’s okay,” she whispers, her own voice rough again. “I’m here. We’re here.”

Keyleth flattens her hand against Vex’s back. Here. They’re here.

They’re here, they’re here, they’re here. She repeats it to herself, again and again, until her mind is nothing but numbness, and quiet, and Vex.

She falls asleep.

#vexleth #cr fic #if you want the full experience listen to farewell summer by abby gundersen on loop as you read #or at least during the second part #vex'ahlia #keyleth #vox machina #listen i just really mostly wanted to write keyleth going to vex's door instead of vax's #and also what vex says to comfort her at the tomb #they don't really get to be soft with each other ever so like...self-indulgence for the win #gosh i haven't impulse-posted writing in....geez idek when #years? #this ship is dragging me kicking and screaming back into fic writing and i love it tbh #rip to my last nanowrimo project but a girl has priorities #and those priorities are apparently a druid and a ranger who never got to fall in love

[hufflepirate]

Current Vox Machina feelings: Still thinking about Grog and Ioun even though I’m several hours of content past the gang’s convo with her.

But seriously though. She explicitly says that she’s not picking Grog as her champion because he’s so uncomfortable in her realm. She apologizes for that. She says THAT’s why he’s not her champion. Which implies that unlike the others, who are for specific character reasons not appropriate champions, he could have been. Her criteria for keys is that they should be unexpected and look at the world differently than she does. Who’s to say her criteria for a champion couldn’t be related??

What I’m saying is Champion-of-Ioun Grog AU.

What I’m saying is sweet, wonderful, open Grog, who learned painstakingly to read, who constantly embraces new people, places, and situations, who so often listens well even when he pretends he isn’t or when he can’t make sense of what he hears, becoming the champion of the goddess of knowledge and going out into the world that way.

What I’m saying is I meant to write a couple short headcanons and then this ran well away from me, so now it’s under a cut.

Grog faces a different test within the library, tailored to him, and therefore with less singing and magic. His friends work too hard and too frantically, desperate to help him because he’s the dumb one and this is Ioun, only to have him finally, finally find the book when he blocks them out and trusts himself and his instincts. He hands a tiny book with no words in it to Ioun and his friends are screaming behind him as she asks if he’s sure it’s the right one, and he looks her in the eye and says, “Well, yeah! It’s supposed to be a secret, right? So of course it’s blank until you make it tell us.”

Grog doesn’t let Ioun see how much his friends’ reactions are hurting him, because it isn’t polite, and she’s a goddess, and he’s not supposed to be petty and little around her. The moment they step up to Sprigg’s house, his feelings burst out all at once and he won’t let anyone but Pike near him.

It’s not long before he feels something new. Something different. There’s a voice in his head and what feels like a soft touch in the middle of his forehead, where the third eye opened up in Ioun’s presence, and she tells him that there’s lots of ways to know things. The others will see, in time.

His voice is quiet and reverent and sad when he asks Pike about it, and she’s so happy for him that she leaps up to hug him and place a kiss into the center of his forehead, and he pulls her close and lets her calm joy settle him down and make him feel ok again.

His forgiveness comes slowly for some of the group members, but things build back, and in the mansion, he discovers that reading is a little bit easier now, though he’s no better at sitting still for it when the subject matter is boring. It’s lucky that they don’t have a lot of time for reading, just now. Not with Vecna ascended. He’s still much slower than most of the others, and he doesn’t bring up how much frustration still keeps him bored even when things are important.

Puzzles are easier to solve than they used to be, the things that used to come slowly coming faster, chasing his instincts with less of a delay. He says things and the others look surprised, but there’s a faint sense of something in his head that soothes the hurt when they look that way, and he thinks probably that’s Ioun, too. He says things he would have said before, but this time there’s a reason and he can explain it.

The first time he uses her blessing, reaching into his connection to her at the height of the rush that comes with getting his best hit in on an enemy, it’s beautiful and euphoric and the sense of what’s vulnerable to him makes his heart swell with the exultation of battle and he shouts it out to his companions with joy.

After the dust settles, he and Pike are sitting, exhausted, slumped at a table like they used to at Wilhand’s (only better because here the chairs fit him and he’s not on the floor), and he looks over at her, and she’s wearing the Dawnfather’s armor, but doesn’t belong to him, and he’s wearing Kord’s gauntlets, but has been claimed by another, and he wonders again if it was the right thing. He decides that maybe, like the twins, who were black-and-white negatives of each other, in the end, he and his own sister are meant to be different-and-the-same, and maybe it’s alright that the gods are complicated, and maybe it’s even alright that they share.

He doesn’t have the words to say to Vex. He’ll never have the words to say to Vex. He thinks that’s probably not what knowledge is for, or what it does, and the soft, pleasant, comfortable stirring in his head that always means Ioun is there doesn’t have to speak to tell him he’s right. He watches her cry and insist that there’s a way to get Vax back, and he waits for her to realize that there isn’t and come around to blinding, directionless anger. When she does, he takes her out to the forest outside of Vasselheim and they fight the biggest monster he could get a contract on and he gives her all the money from the contract even though it won’t make things better.

Ioun is mostly quiet about it, but he can feel her approval, and he begins to understand what she meant about lots of ways of knowing things. Nothing about his plan was anything like the way Percy or Scanlan knew things, but Vex looks a little better as she wipes tears out of her eyes that might be anger or sadness or pain but are probably all three. He doesn’t say anything as he pulls her into a hug, but her arms are strong around him and the fake smile she pastes on when he lets go is a little less fake than the one she left with, and that’s alright.

Tary is Tary and he’s never really known what to do with Tary, all the way, but he’s been thinking a lot about books lately, and what they’re good for and what they’re not and why so many of them are boring and turn out not to have what he wants to know in them, so he goes to see Tary anyway. He doesn’t want to write a book, but he does some thinking about Tary’s and suggests that maybe Tary’s book tell the truth instead of being like all the other adventures Tary read as a kid that made him keep saying dumb stuff and not know what to expect. He doesn’t know if Tary’s listening or not, but it feels good to say it.

Percy says they might as well set up a temple to Ioun in Whitestone for when Grog visits. And anyway, it’s about time Whitestone had a good temple to her, instead of a corrupted one. He wants to fill it with books. He wants to make it a library. Grog says they’ve got to be careful and the books should be true, and there should be people there to teach you about the things that are written about. Percy doesn’t understand what he means at first. Not until he says you learn blacksmithing by feeling it in your bones, and sometimes you learn the truth by seeing it.

The temple in Whitestone is an odd place. It has many books and many tables, which is only to be expected, but everything else is - different. Half of Percy’s books are about science, so there are machines to play with to make sense of the books, and once he’s gotten Percy thinking about it, there are lenses and prisms and magnifiers for looking at things. There’s an open porch, protected from the elements with a roof and some screening and shelves with doors that close when the rain comes with wind, but the nature books sit outside and Keyleth’s raised up a garden with as many things as she can think of in it, and he didn’t know it would be good for her to build, without Vax here, but it is. There are books about devils and demons and circles of hell, and he’s learning, slowly, how to draw well so that he can tuck better pictures into them, so people can know what they’re looking at. It’s important that books have pictures. It’s important that the pictures be true.

Percy always looks surprised at the people in Ioun’s temple. He always looks surprised when there are farmers there, and children, and housewives, but Grog isn’t, and he gets JB Trickfoot to work there, because she’s been lots of places and seen lots of things, and the next time he visits Whitestone, he’s happy to find that another librarian has shown up who’s terrible at organizing things and very good at baking and has installed a small wood-burning oven in a little alcove to explain cookbooks with, because it’s one thing to write about the details of bread and another to pick the dough up and stretch it and feel it and look at it.

Grog is getting older. Calmer. He goes into the woods and watches things. He draws them. He kills them. He draws them some more. He keeps his drawings in a tidy bundle in the bag of holding and does not call them a book.

The longer he draws, the better he is at seeing the details. The better he is at seeing them, the better he is at drawing. He still reads slowly, and his writing isn’t as steady as his drawing, but his drawings are good, and he remembers the things he drew better and better and when he goes to visit Pike and Scanlan, Pike takes careful, tidy notes about the things he tells her.

Grog and Pike don’t write a book until she gets so pregnant that she can’t leave the house as much and he’s hovering around the house waiting for his new niece or nephew to arrive and they consolidate all his drawings and all her notes, looking for something she can do indoors, and discover they already have.

Percy has to invent entirely new technology because there’s no way drawings as intricate as Grog’s could be reliably copied by hand more than once without losing the details, and the details are important because they’re the truth. Percy and Tary spend months together in Percy’s workshop, covered in ink and smoke and calling him in to forge all the large pieces of a machine he can’t quite picture until they start building it. It starts to take shape, and it takes even better shape once they add the small, delicate pieces they’ve worked on, and it makes sense when Percy calls it an Imprinting Press, but he doesn’t really understand what they’ve made, in its fullness, until a month and a half later when he’s finally allowed in the room again.

The machine stands dormant, piles and piles of plates stacked nearly up to the ceiling behind it, and Percy and Tary hand him a tidy medium-sized volume, bound in nicer leather than most of the books in the library. He opens it up to find words printed with consistent, uniform letters, even more consistent than the best scribes’ work, all the a’s looking exactly like a’s and the b’s looking exactly like b’s. The pictures are breathtaking, printed from engravings that must have taken his friends many, many hours, but they both have an eye for detail, and everything he drew is there.

His book gets its own stand in the center of Ioun’s temple, and as he places it in its spot, he gets the sense of something big happening. Something new.

Ioun’s voice in his head isn’t a voice at all. She’s been with him for years, and it doesn’t have to be a voice, hasn’t had to be a voice for a long time. It’s just a feeling. She’s proud of him. She loves him. Something is happening, and he is a champion of Ioun, and what he has built is going to stand for a long, long time.

There are children in the library and they want to know about fighting dragons again, and he lets them drag him away to the porch to tell the story for the thousandth time, roaring and stomping and acting out the fighting and all. For a moment, he sees a three-eyed figure in the doorway, out of the corner of his eye, who vanishes when he turns to look straight on. He touches her symbol, tattooed on his forearm, and smiles.

#critical role #grog #vox machina #spoilers episode 106 #grog strongjaw

[awkwardspiritanimals]

do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive (vax and the mountain goats)

i’m doing a set of meta pieces where i take a critical role character and pick five mountain goats songs that i think they would like and that i associate with them, and then writing meta posts of varying middle lengths about them in my college!au. you can read the longer explanation on the project and find links to the other completed pieces here, and here’s the mountain goats wikipedia page if you’re unfamiliar. this is also a decent quick primer on them. i’ll link my favorite version of each song i use so you can listen along.

this is the second part, which belongs to vax.

i. when you punish a person for dreaming his dream, don’t expect him to thank or forgive you

this is the first mountain goats song that vax loves, although before he really loves the song itself he loves the way that it annoys his father.

there are few things better, in those early days right after they’ve moved in with their father, than going up to his room after a lecture and playing the best ever death metal band in denton as loudly as he can, shouting hail satan! hail satan! over and over again. vex usually just rolls her eyes and makes him change the song after five or six repeats.

she’s always been more easily hurt by their father’s disapproval than him, one of the very few things he’s never completely been able to understand when it comes to his sister, the way her face would fall during his lectures, and vax hated all of it, the lecture and the not understanding and look on her face. sometimes, when their father would turn around to gaze forlornly out the window of his study or whatever other over-dramatic gesture he’d decided was appropriate for the situation, vax would lean over and whisper hail satan hail satan hailsatanhail until vex smiled, until he could construct that small and fragile and important shield for her.

he plays it, the night their father agrees to pay for school, as they’re driving home. it feels different than what it had been when he was younger and trapped in that house (when you punish a person for dreaming his dream, don’t expect him to thank or forgive you), because this feels like a victory somehow. maybe not total, maybe not permanent, but a victory, for vax and vex and the things they want to do and the people they want to be (will in time both outpace and outlive you).

ii. you must try to lead a good life

of all of them, vax likes the mountain goats’ early stuff the best. percy probably owns more of it, just because he owns more of their music in general, and scanlan’s the one with the encyclopedic knowledge, but it’s vax who really loves them the most.

there’s something about it, the tinny quality of darnielle’s voice and the static from the old boombox and all of it, the way it should sound far away but actually sounds very close somehow. he likes that they don’t show up on setlists very often except when someone shouts a request and jd is struck by a certain mood, likes the give and take and closeness of that.

it’s not at all that he dislikes the newer albums, with the horn parts and backing choirs and drums (what a thing it is, that drums can be considered more complicated than what came before it) but there is something, about jd’s voice, slightly distorted, and the guitar, twangy and overloud, and the static.

something close that vax appreciates.

iii. spread the word around, the boys are back in town

there was a day, that first summer in emon, before tiberius had left and pike had started spending most of her summers in other cities and they’d all gotten busier and busier, that is bright and golden in vax’s memory.

it had been in early july, a long way from both the end of the last school year and the beginning of the next, one of those days that was too nice to stay inside but absolutely too hot to do anything outside unless it was in the shade, and vex knew the city parks like the back of her hand, knew a corner of one where they could park beneath a couple of huge trees away from the crowds and enjoy the weather together.

this was before grog had bought his van, so they’d had to take two cars, the girls in keyleth’s little vw (poor cassandra, in the middle of her last growth spurt and taller now than all of them except for grog and her brother, automatically got shotgun because climbing into the back would have almost certainly required dislocating something) and the boys in percy’s truck (scanlan in the middle of the cab because he’s the only one short enough to sit there comfortably, grog and tiberius in the bed with slinger because they’re taller than vax, although grog probably would have volunteered anyway. vax isn’t sure anyone has ever loved having a friend with a truck like grog loves having a friend with a truck).

vax played the song very, very loudly (most people would say too loudly, but vax has always had trouble with that concept as a whole. this is not in any way a metaphor for anything, of course), and the girls played cyndi lauper back. (the boys are back in town/oh, girls just wanna have fun)

they’d ended up playing frisbee of all things, once they’d grown bored of just sitting in their cars with the doors open so the air could flow. keyleth had one in her trunk, vax suspected in the hope that somehow this exact situation would arise, and she’d been simply delighted by all of it, even when scanlan made a crack about how someone should be photographing them for a brochure. it had been so hot that percy had been wearing a t-shirt, long, twisted scars visible all up his right arm (car crash was all he’d told vax a few months before, when he’d caught a glimpse of them under percy’s sleeve, and something in his voice had made vax think that in this one thing, at least, he should be slow and cautious), but both he and his sister were smiling, cass throwing tennis balls from the passenger footwell of the truck for slinger and laughing when grog started to race the dog to retrieve them, vex and percy competing to hit various trees with the frisbee, pike picking their targets and judging their aim.

(tiberius stayed in the bed of the truck, reading. he was only back in emon for a week or so to do some research in the university’s library, didn’t have a lot of free time to spend doing anything else. he’d agreed to come that day, but he’d already been drifting away from them, caught up in his family’s wishes and his own work, and maybe they should have realized what was happening, maybe they shouldn’t have been so surprised when he sent an email instead of showing up for the first day of classes in the fall, but they were. you never really expect your family to leave, no matter how much experience you might have in the matter.

but he was there, that day. distant, yes, distracted, but present. that was important.)

vax was charmed by all of it, keyleth’s joy and scanlan’s teasing, the way grog threw himself full-body into chasing after the tennis balls with at least as much joy as slinger did, cass doubling over with laughter, all her usual dignity deserted. his sister in the sun, grinning each time the frisbee connected with a solid thunk against the chosen tree, sticking her tongue out at percy when he matched her and dancing with pike when he didn’t. percy was more patient though, more calculating, and when he hit one ten paces off over his shoulder just to show he could and then smirked, vex’s expression got caught halfway between wanting to kiss him and wanting to fight him; there was significantly less confusion and less violence in pike’s.

in the winter sometimes, when the air was so cold it stung on the walks between classes and it was sort of hard to remember what the heat of the sun actually felt like, he remembers that day a lot, because that’s when he needs it the most, needs the warmth and the light of it. they spend a lot of time at scanlan’s in the winter, because his heating is the best and most reliable, scanlan complaining while he and pike make dinner from whatever stuff vex had gotten on sale that day, the de rolos putting out formal place settings with mismatched silverware and plastic cups.

vax mostly just tries to stay of people’s way, puts himself in charge of taking advantage of scanlan’s excellent sound system. he doesn’t know if anyone else remembers that one day like he does, but he plays the song anyway.

(the nights are getting warmer, it won't be long, it won't be long till summer comes)

iv. do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive

vax is learning, as he gets older and grows into himself, that not everything can be solved by rushing in and doing your best. he is learning that there are some things that you can’t solve just by poking and prodding at them until they break wide open and you can face them. (percival’s scars almost always tucked away underneath long sleeves, the very specific way that cassandra’s spine goes rigid around certain authority figures. grog’s childhood before he met pike. scanlan’s mother, keyleth’s mother, pike’s parents. vex’ahlia’s fear that she is not good enough. there were lots of these things, and there always have been, and vax is trying his best to learn them, to tread carefully. he doesn’t always get it right.)

but he is still, by nature, impulsive and too fast and halfway into trouble before he even thinks about the consequences. there are things, he believes in his heart, that must be brought tumbling down before they can heal, and that they are just as important as the things that must be slowly and cautiously uncovered. there can be healing in all that tumbling, in disturbing the unstable base of something enough that it topples over and the pieces of it scatter.

some things have to fall apart before you can really fix anything. (do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive.) vax practically specializes in it, and he thinks it would be selfish to keep that to himself.

some days, he drags himself out of bed at ass o’clock in the morning to go running with grog, to spot him while he lifts. he picks the locks on the greenhouses on campus, nights keyleth gets a little drunk and is convinced only the plants will really understand. when percy takes a fourth straight overnight shift at victor’s, he’ll drag a chair in from the poorly lit lobby and drink coffee he thinks is part motor oil, or sit in the passenger seat of the tow truck and flip the radio stations. he listens to very, very loud music with scanlan and stays up nights helping pike study even though he doesn’t know what half the medical jargon in her books means and tries to cover the ends of cass’s shifts at kima’s whenever she looks dead on her feet.

he looks after vex’ahlia as best he can, pushes her when he thinks she needs it and protects her when he can (he gets it wrong, sometimes, still, after all these years, but the thing about his sister is that she never holds it against him, not for very long. vex never forgets a debt, but she has again and again forgiven his mistakes.)

vax is glad that he’s not alone in watching out for them. they all watch out for each other, and even then they miss things, but they’re trying their best. they’re family, after all.

he’s more than happy to do his part. (find limits past the limits and stay alive. just stay alive.)

v. but they came, and when they finally made it here, it was the least that we could do to make our welcome clear

their little family sort of stumbles together, and it wasn’t anything that he had expected when he and vex arrived in emon, but vax leans into it anyway. growing up it had just been him and vex and their mother, and after their father had taken an interest in them, it had really just been the two of them, so a big group like this, a big family, was new.

and it kept getting bigger, was the thing. there was the seven of them, and they were one thing, different and separate in ways he couldn’t quite articulate but that he knew existed. but the others, the branching network of people they’ve surrounded themselves with, were just as necessary to the whole of it, and just as unexpected. gilmore, kima and allura and drake, kash and zahra. even victor, who owns the mechanic’s shop that percy works at and never complains when six or seven of them crowd into his tiny waiting room to do homework while percy works, as long as they stay out of the way of any actual customers.

none of them were from emon, but they’d all ended up here and they’d all found each other, stumbling or not, and they’d made a home here, a family. unexpected as it may have been, vax wouldn’t have it any other way.

#vax #vax'ildan #critical role #vox machina #the machina goats #straight up this is mostly just so i could write that middle scene #like i think all of these are v good songs that vax would like and listen to #but like.... mostly it's just so i could write that park scene #also props to myself for that heavy handed jenga metaphor in the middle there i reallyworked for that one #jenga #disaster asshole family #lots of non-album versions for these songs because i know good non-album versions