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- Face
There is something about his reflection that looks a little odd, a little off, and Percy, despite his best efforts, cannot figure out what exactly it is.
—
He later finds the smoke, the burning eyes, the burning body, and he concludes that it’s because of either one of these two reasons.
One: over the course of five horrible years, the demon had crawled so deeply into him, nestled its way into the core of his cores, wounded so tightly around him that no one could have ripped it out without shattering both the demon and the man, tore away parts of Percy and left behind pieces of Not-Percy — and whatever he is now, whoever is left standing in the aftermath, Percy-but-not, is but a mangled, rotting shade of two halves that barely made a whole.
Two: he was broken from the very start, and all the demon had to do was push around a few pieces until he willingly splintered and twisted and remade himself into something with razor teeth and jagged claws.
He isn’t sure which possibility scares him more.
—
In his first dream, he kills Delilah Briarwood when his friends fail to stop him in time, and he breaks just enough for the smoke to rush in and take all of his pieces, dying in a cacophony of fire and laughter.
In his second dream, he kills his sister the moment he gets the chance to, down in the ziggurat, and numbness burns away the grief. He dies in agony, turns into the husk of a husk, and darkness revels in the space left behind.
In his third dream, he is wearing his mask, and Vex’ahlia is there — brave, beautiful Vex with the honey words and the gentle fingers, reaching out to try and hold him as he fractures, fades, burns away into smoke in the wind.
There is so much hatred inside him — hatred that spawned within him the moment he watched the Briarwoods take Julius as their first victim, his father their second, and then the twins, Ludwig, Vesper, his mother; hatred that festered and grew and ate away a hole within him until he let a demon in just to keep himself from collapsing; hatred that steadies his gun for him as he points it at Vex. He feels numb, detached, separate from the rest of the world with his mask shielding his pride and the smoke in his ears deafening everything but the demon whispering, muttering: pull the trigger, Percival, let us finish the List together.
But Vex sees through him. Vex hears the slightest tremble in his voice and she sees through the lens of his mask something that he himself isn’t sure exists anymore. Vex tells him, “I know you’re in there,” and tells him, “Darling, take off the mask,” and her words are enough to crack through the shield, send him clawing through his smoke-adled mind back to the present where his gun hand starts shaking uncontrollably.
She presses a hand to his mask, over his cheek, and miraculously, he lets her.
“Percy,” she mutters, all that love within her fending off the darkness and the rot in his soul like a lighthouse, a beacon, “come back to us.”
In reality, she pries the walls he’s slammed up around him and she bears witness to his brokenness, out in full display. Her touch is grounding, cold against his burning body, and just as the tears come to his eyes he remembers, abruptly, that he doesn’t want this.
He doesn’t want to finish the List. He doesn’t want to kill his sister. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone anymore.
He wants to go home.
(The demon laughs in his ears and suffuses through him, twisting, bending, corrupting him until he isn’t sure whether there still exists a line between PercyandnotPercy.
You made a deal, it hisses, we will finish our List, Percival, and we will revel as we consume their souls, one by one.
In reality, Percy is still of his own — even though most of him wants to say yes, has already said yes, has already given up, through all the fire and the smoke and the heat he finds that there is still this strange part of him, tiny and trembling and terrified, a soul tattered and torn, flickering like a candle in the face of an inferno — and what little soul he has left is young and in pain.
He opens his eyes, finds his family amidst the wreckage, and he screams against the demon.)
In his dream, the mask does not come off.
The shock permeates through him as much as it shows on Vex’s face, freezes something crucial and human within him until he burns from the absolute zero of it all. It’s like the mask is welded onto his face, leather and metal bound to skin, and he feels her fingers on the mask as if she is touching his naked cheek, as if this is any other beautiful fantasy.
His hand does not shake, and his index finger grazes the trigger of the gun lightly, mockingly, knowing that he’s already lost, knowing that he’s already won.
He tries to say something, warn her, yell at her.
His mouth does not move.
Instead, he watches as the beak of the mask parts open like a maw, full of razor teeth and oil drips, and a voice that is both his and not his claws free.
“We won’t let you,” he snarls, and he fires.
—
Percy wakes up.
He is in his room in the keep, and he is alone with nothing and no one but the glow of the moonlight streaming in through his window. His heart hammers in his chest, thrumming like the beat of a butterfly’s wings, and his breath stutters as he reaches up to make sure he still has a face of skin and not smoke.
One night, he pleads, to whatever is listening, be it god or devil or anything in between, just one night, I beg of you.
It is futile, he knows, but there will forever be a part of him on his knees, praying to deities he no longer respects. It is pointless, he knows, because what care can the gods spare something as broken as he is?
He thinks- wishes, feels that maybe, perhaps, he’d do anything to have one good night among a sea of countless nightmares. He thinks it, and he wishes, and he feels, but he does not believe — he has quite learned his lesson in believing, surely, and there are no higher powers that will bring him solace no matter how much he pleads.
And yet.
And yet.
—
The issue with surviving a demonic possession is that the aftermath looks a little something like this:
Is it truly you talking to us?
Yes, quite, thank you.
Were you aware? Were you in control?
Yes, I was, and no, I was not, thank you.
Can you still feel the demon’s influence?
No, not at all, thank you.
And the quintessential question to end all questions:
Are you alright?
It’s a tricky question, see, because some part of Percy is tempted to say no, I’m not, because that is what he is supposed to say if he needs help. And he does need help, he supposes, as much as any survivor of a demonic possession might, but not quite as much, or as direly, because any lingering influences have indeed been burnt out of him, first by Scanlan throwing the pepperbox through a baptism of acid and next by Pike rending his soul through a baptism of fire.
The cold spot at the back of his mind is gone, and the pure joy he felt upon seeing the Sun Tree finally bloom is a testament to the fact that the demon has been banished, defeated, and that he is free.
Free… enough, that is.
Because while there exists the part of him that wants to say no, stoke the fires, tempt the floodgates, see what happens - there is still this other part of him, petulant as it is, that wants to tell the truth: we don’t know.
(We don’t know, we’re not sure — sometimes I close my eyes and I can still see your names burning on metal against the back of my eyelids, sometimes I feel like I’m all alone in my head and sometimes I feel like my head is too full, I’ve spent years harbouring another within me that towards the end it had felt natural to operate as one, as us, because we were better for it, we were cruel but we were strong and we had the strength to exact vengeance on those that deserved it, on those that took away what was ours, on any who dared oppose us-)
But he can’t say any of that.
He can’t say that sometimes he thinks in plural, as easily as breathing, and it takes real, conscious effort to say ‘I’ instead of ‘we’ out loud. And Keyleth is still standing there, hands clasped awkwardly behind her back as she waits for his brain to stop its rhetoric and spout an answer.
(Keyleth took our kill.)
He shrugs and fixes his glasses on his nose, giving her a small smile as he tells her exactly what she wants to hear:
Yes, I’m quite fine, just a little tired, thank you.
- Chest
There is something about his reflection that seems a little odd, a little off, as if someone had taken a hammer to his mirror and then reassembled the pieces nigh-perfectly.
The part of him that obsesses over flaws knows that there are cracks where there weren’t cracks before, as surely as a prey animal knows its predator looms ever closer, but no matter how long he stares into the mirror, he can’t seem to find the anomaly.
It’s like his reflection has been twisted in a million minuscule ways, insignificant on their own, but altogether they make up a creature he isn’t sure he recognises anymore.
The face staring back at him from within the mirror looks as perplexed as he feels. But something about it looks wrong and he’s less afraid of the anomaly itself than the fact that he can’t quite put his finger on what exactly it is. Something about it itches the back of his neck, and he half-expects to wake up and find himself on the other side of the glass.
It sickens him. He can’t stomach the thought of that face being his at all.
—
His hands shake, nowadays.
And he supposes that it is to be expected, since in order to expel the demon out of him he had shot himself in the palm — see, he figured he had to play the thing’s game against itself, it used him to consume souls, and if he shot himself then it served to reason that it would’ve consumed itself, right, he should honestly be praised for his genius and not be shot looks of pity for having a crippled hand — and logically, he can’t just grow his palm back the way it used to be.
It isn’t realistic. A hole in the human body just can’t… stitch itself back together and not heal completely wrong with jagged pieces of shattered bones stuck inside. Not to mention all the ruined nerves, gods, it’s a miracle that he still has some function over his left hand.
The shaking bothers him, though. He can’t tinker without getting annoyed that his left hand acts as little more than deadweight most of the time. He can’t hold heavy objects without the stitches tearing open and Pike rushing halfway across the Keep to tend to him for the nth time in a week. He can’t lift his gun without-
-feeling like there is something else there with him slithering through his muscles digging its claws between his fingers bending his joints until he feels like they’re about to break-
-having his fingers spasm strangely.
Little annoyances, debilitatingly so. He’ll sooner than later figure out how to live with it, he swears, though he can’t stop himself from wishing that the healing process looks a little different, perhaps, because scars are more than just little, debilitating annoyances.
Gods.
He’s a little tired of dealing with scars.
—
Percy is back to normal.
Normal as he can be, that is, given the circumstances.
Normal, as if he can describe his definition of the word at all; usual, ordinary, typical, yes, but what exactly does usual-ordinary-typical-normal mean to him anymore?
First it was Whitestone, but Whitestone was taken away from him — then it was months of agonising, aimless wandering, until the demon taught him to create the pepperbox — then it was nothing but a mindless hunger for revenge, before he met Vox Machina. He supposes that normal means Vox Machina now, and if he is to go by that definition, then yes: he’s at least 70% sure that he’s back to normal.
Nevermind the odd glances that Vax shoots his way when he thinks Percy isn’t looking, or the way that Keyleth seems to switch back and forth between avoiding him at all costs and mother-henning every one of his basic human needs, or that he hasn’t seen Cassandra in weeks and he isn’t sure whether to feel skittish or relieved about it, or that he’s caught Vex doing double takes when she’s looking at his face, or-
The point is, the point is: he’s back to normal.
(His face, still skin, no smoke, no leather and metal and cold, unfeeling glass lenses.)
Normal as he can be, as he said, because logically, nothing has quite changed about him. He’s still Percy, just Percy, Vox Machina’s favourite human gunslinger — a gunslinger made of bad decisions and immense, soul-crushing trauma, that is, which he should one day inspect and perhaps ruminate on, but that day will come when it comes — and if he looks past the nightmares and the paranoia and the existential dread of knowing exactly what kind of creature has a warrant on his soul, then he can safely say that nothing has changed about him whatsoever.
He’s still himself.
(Our face, still skin, no smoke, no leather and metal and-)
He’s Percy with the long name and the white hair and the haunted eyes.
He’s got all mental faculties in check, all bodily autonomy uncontested, a sense of free will still perfectly intact, to anyone wondering; he won’t burden his friends with any more than that.
He doesn’t check himself obsessively to make sure there isn’t smoke wafting out from underneath his collar and cuffs.
He doesn’t mull his words over in his head for longer than is necessary, just in case something else is trying to speak them, and he doesn’t worry that his voice will come out sounding like nails against a chalkboard.
He doesn’t look in the mirror and think that if he cocks his head this way in just the wrong light and quirks the corner of his lips like this, it almost, almost looks like his green eyes are burning the colour of charcoal and he can almost, almost believe that there is a beaked shadow lurking, watching over his shoulder.
These are things that he doesn’t do, thank you very much, and he doesn’t need Vex asking him ‘are you sure?’ or Vax narrowing his eyes and sniffing at him or Pike giving him sad smiles or Scanlan teasing him about the possession or Grog- well, Grog doesn’t seem to care, and Percy is grateful for Grog as he is.
He’s completely fine, absolutely peachy, and the only thing he needs help with is figuring out how to pick up a pencil with his left hand without immediately dropping it, and figuring out how to tell Keyleth that no, Keyleth, he won’t try it again, blowing a hole in himself is a one-time thing, he promises, he isn’t a fan of shooting himself either, yes he knows that you’re worried, he’s also sorry, but he doesn’t really want to talk about why exactly it is that twice in one night his first instinct upon breaking free of the demon’s hold was to point the barrel of his gun at himself, thank you, yes, he’ll see her at dinner later, don’t worry about him.
See?
He’s fine.
Now if only he can actually speed up the process of deluding himself enough to believe it…
—
He’s back in the room with the acid trap, and he’s got his pepperbox back in his hand, its grip as familiar as it always has been, heavy and steady and deadly, and when he looks up he finds himself facing down Vox Machina once more.
Smoke blurs the edges of his vision, and something within him tears apart and burns away — ash falling away in the howling wind, Whitestone winters in the coldest night of the coldest year, a wildfire that rages and hungers for aeons past its epicentre. He can’t breathe, not without feeling like his lungs are catching on fire, as is the rest of his organs burning up perpetually.
A hooked beak peers over his shoulder, and the monster’s maw opens into a cruel grin as a clawed hand tightens its grip around his shoulder. Fire the gun, Percival, it whispers, voice like coarse gravel, this is the only way.
He chokes as his lips twist into a smirk. He blinks and his tears turn into smoke. His gun is pointed at his friends; he isn’t sure when exactly he raised it, and he isn’t sure he cares.
He fires seven bullets — six for his friends, one for his sister, and he sees them begging and reaching out to him but he can’t hear what they’re saying, can’t really discern their faces from the smoke in his eyes, can’t even hear their screams or the sound of their bodies hitting the floor. His hands shake as he points, fires, reloads, moving automatically as if the act of hurting the people he loves is so deeply ingrained into him that it’s instinctual.
He laughs. He cries. The corners of his lips split open and there is blood on his hands, blood on his face, blood pooling around his feet. The demon laughs with him, at him, and through the haze he can hear its voice clear as day: Well done, Percival. Now, who’s next on our List?
He watches distantly, hungrily, as the barrel of his gun begins to spin, begins to glow, old names burning away into smooth metal as new ones take their place. The List grows ever infinite, Not-Percy curls its claws around his neck, and Percy burns alive.
He moves forward, striding with purpose as the faces of his new targets flash in his head.
Vengeance, croons the demon. Make them pay for what has been done to us.
Vengeance, Percy’s mind agrees, on those that deserve it, on those that took away what was ours, on any who dare oppose us.
He steps over the still-warm bodies of Vox Machina, of Cassandra, and with the demon in his ears and the smoke in his eyes and the claws around his neck he pays them next to no mind at all. He feels his past attachments peeling off him like a snake shedding its last layer of skin, feels the dead weight finally lift off his shoulders as smoke and fire takes its place instead, feels something cementing itself in his head — the affirmation that yes, we are alone, but we are strong, we do not need them and we have never needed them in the first place-
“Percy…”
Percy halts. His fingers twitch around the grip of his pepperbox, playing loose and easy on the trigger.
“Please… Percy…”
He looks down at the barrel of his gun and feels his face twisting into a displeased snarl as he finds that indeed, the job is not done, and though the List has yet expanded, he was too careless to make sure the last old name is well and truly gone.
Keyleth of the Air Ashari stares up at him.
Keyleth reaches out, and Percy feels the tips of her fingers graze his ankle. She’s shaking, he notes dully, shaking in pain and in fear and in apprehension for what she surely must know will happen next. What catches him off guard is that he’s shaking too — once cold and self-assured, now that he’s confronted with her soft touch, something within him that has yet to flake into ash is cracking, shivering, trembling with so much of his own naked fear that it spills out of him in painfully-human tears.
He turns his head and he looks down at her. Her face is unrecognisable. Here she is, trying to appeal to the last dregs of his humanity, and here he is, trying to figure out why he still cares at all — here they are, frozen in time, and every one of his senses fall quiet, all at once.
There is no demon. There is no smoke.
Percy lifts the gun and fires.
“Percy!”
And then he jolts awake, covered in cold sweat as he throws his covers off himself and jerks off his bed, falling to the floor on all fours.
He feels a hand tentatively touch the small of his back, and he flinches away as if burnt, whipping his head around to fix his eyes on his assailant, ready to fight, ready to flee, ready to pull the gun out of the holster at his waist and finish the job.
But his adrenaline fades quickly when he blinks away the images of blood and bodies and actually takes a good look at the person who woke him up. At the same time, he remembers that his pepperbox is gone, and he has yet to finish the next one, which lies in a drawer in his workshop, nowhere near his bedroom at all.
Keyleth grimaces down at him, eyebrows furrowed and worry fuelled by the force of a thousand suns.
“Percy?” she asks. She looks terrified, he notes.
‘Of us?’ whispers a stray, traitorous thought.
Surely. He deserves it, he surmises, he deserves her fear and hatred and disgust for what he has done to her, to her friends, for breaking her trust in him in his weakest, darkest moment, for pointing that damned pepperbox at her and then firing-
But- wait, she is here, we have not killed her, she’s still alive, and there isn’t blood on his hands. One glance at the doorway to his room reveals the silhouettes of two half-elves, two gnomes, and one goliath hovering and peering worriedly at him. He hasn’t killed Vox Machina, after all, and it was nothing, nothing but a dream.
Still, as much as he could collapse right then and there from the relief coursing through his veins, some part of him still thinks he ought to feel disappointed, somehow.
“Keyleth,” he mutters, “I think I might lose my dinner in a moment,” before he doubles over and retches.
—
It takes a lot of willpower and social shamelessness, but in the end, he manages to shake off his friends and convince them that he’s fine, it’s just a nightmare, he might’ve eaten something old and bad out of the food cabinet, he is definitely not still shaking and being haunted by the memory- no, the nightmare of his friends’ faces shattered and mangled by his own creations, by his own hands.
He joins them for breakfast, ignores the weird stares they send his way and fixes his stare on his hands instead, trying very hard to think about equations and elements instead of seeing blood where blood should not be. Keyleth avoids his gaze, because Keyleth hasn’t yet decided whether she’s worried or terrified of him, and Pike makes a point to engage Vax and Scanlan in conversation, but Vex… the way she’s looking at him, it’s almost like she can see through his bullshit and see what it is that’s broken underneath — see through the façade of the man and find the darkness within.
Like she can take one look at Percy and find the shade of Not-Percy just barely hidden under the surface.
Vex scares him more than he’s willing to admit — his wonderful, perceptive, clever Vex — and when he meets her eyes to smile nervously at her, he finds that she’s looking at him like she’s got a dagger already palmed.
That’s good, he thinks. She doesn’t trust him. She shouldn’t - he doesn’t deserve her trust, he doesn’t deserve any bit of Vox Machina’s trust.
He has hurt them once, and he suspects he will do it again, some day, somehow, when they least expect it.
By the gods.
He’s too broken for them, and they are far, far too good for him.
He doesn’t know what he’ll do if he lets them get hurt by his own hands again.
- Skin
There is something about his reflection that feels a little odd, a little off, and Percy thinks it might not be smoke rising from his skin or burning irises in a pool of darkness — it might not be all that obvious, and this unnerves him more than he dares to admit.
It might be something about the way the light hits his skin, pale and sallow and hollow, stretched a little too tightly over his bones.
It might be something to do with his hands, because the longer he stares at them the less sure he is that his fingers have always been that long and gnarled, covered in calluses of stone and steel.
It might be something with how he holds himself, nowadays, his posture a strange mix of lordly assurance, hunched anxiety, fighter’s grace, and a newfound lopsidedness, as if somewhere along the way, he’s forgotten how to stand with two feet.
Maybe it’s the way he can all-too-easily imagine his reflection smiling back at him, utterly wrong in some intrinsic way he can’t quite define, a shroud of malevolent shadow curling imperceptibly around its neck, twisting, turning, features melting into one another until it is no longer him, no longer Percy, as it reaches forward, rips through the surface and takes his place in this plane.
Some part of him is sure, even now, that maybe it would belong here better than him — it would at least know what to do and how to live, where he is uncertain of himself, unwilling to change, inhuman, inhuman, inhuman.
—
For a while afterwards, nothing happens. Percy retreats to his workshop and his forge and he works day in, day out, very vehemently avoiding his friends and only coming out when someone forces him out for mealtimes.
He can almost pretend like things are well and truly back to normal — definition of normal; the new, new normal, in which the Briarwoods are dead, Percy is haunted, and he is living the simple routine of fearing his own evil everyday — because no matter how… far from ideal it is, normal is familiar, in every context of the word, and familiar means predictable.
Percy can do predictable. Percy is fine with being not quite so fine at all.
What he isn’t fine with, however, are his friends. In particular, two very particular female half-elves are grating the edges of his thoughts, day in, day out.
Keyleth, who puts him on edge, because he can’t predict when Keyleth switches between deciding that he needs to be protected and deciding that he needs to be protected from — and Vex, because she won’t stop looking at him like she’s ready to kill him, and really, he rather dislikes the apprehension and would please like her to finish the job sooner rather than later.
But yes: nothing happens. Nothing out of the ordinary, which, he has already covered and defined. Truth be told, it would scare him more if the paranoia and the plural thoughts suddenly went away.
Everything is fine, and pretending has never been so easy.
That is, until the line he’d been dancing so nimbly on snaps, and everything falls apart because when it comes to himself, he supposes that the universe just refuses to give him a break.
It starts like this: he is in his workshop, casting molten metal into bullets. Strewn about on his worktable are scribbled notes and sketches for designs of explosive arrows, explosive daggers, explosive axes and staffs and lutes and maces — (“Surely if you can create some exploding arrows for Vex you can spare some love for the rest of us, eh?”) — when he pulls the wrong nerve at the wrong angle and his left hand spasms unexpectedly, making him fumble the red-hot metal he’s working with and singe his arm.
He hisses as he stands up and backs away from the forge, his hand trembling from the pain. He looks around, and with a streak of panic through his silly little hindbrain, realises just a little too late that he’s forgotten to bring along a bucket of water specifically used to quell incidents such as these.
Cursing his carelessness, disregard for his own wellbeing, as well as the multitudes of neurotic thoughts that absolutely refuse to leave him alone, he grits his teeth to keep himself from crying out as he unbuttons his shirt with trembling fingers. The act of peeling his shirt sleeve off the burn site is fucking painful, but thankfully Percy is used to fucking painful, and he is rather experienced with treating burn wounds.
Just another one of his many, many gifts from Anna Ripley, he thinks grimly, as he tosses his ruined shirt onto a chair.
Taking in a deep breath, he steels himself and takes a look at the damage, and he-
And he-
Well.
What he sees has him doing a double-take immediately: there is smoke where there should be skin — the burn wound melting into shadow, melting into a jet black slick, melting into ash and soot and toxic fumes, before knitting back into bone and muscle and sinew and skin.
And what is remade in its wake is perfectly even, perfectly smooth, perfectly… perfect, as if nothing had happened at all.
He blinks, freezing in place, because for a solid second he is sure he’s seeing things, even as his brain is already whirring to life and supplying him with horrible thought after horrible thought.
He finds himself holding his breath instinctually as his vision doubles up and his legs give way under him, as a laugh bubbles its way up his throat, horror and vindication and dread and delight fighting a vicious war within him like never before; the thought that he is a fool for ever daring to think that he is saved, he is free, he is more than simply damned, and he is as human as the day he was born.
Because what he saw is impossible. Has to be impossible, has to be little more than the conjurations of a hysterical, paranoid mind. He isn’t sure he can handle bearing the alternative.
And yet…
He turns his arm around, tries not to shake too badly, holds his hand up to his face and stares at it blankly for a long moment. Stray plumes of smoke circle his forearm and graze against his skin, teasing, mocking, daring him to wave it off as another trick of the light.
The burn wound has disappeared so completely — no blood, no scar, no mark, uncannily so — that even the old scars that ran along the length of his arm have been healed over.
Percy lowers his hand. He looks up, mind turning over a thousand times a minute, and with his heart sinking into a dark abyss, he finds that the forge has long since died.
His hearing clears. Someone is knocking at his door, asking him about dinnertime when it was breakfast just a moment ago.
How long has he been down in his workshop…?
—
He follows Keyleth to the dining room, listens to her chitter nervously about planting a small orchard in their yard, and greets his friends cordially before sitting down at his seat. Scanlan teases him about his aversion to sunlight as he serves them all dinner, and Percy eats his share of food with a straight face, as quietly as he possibly can.
It’s… tasteless. He doesn’t mean to undermine Scanlan’s cooking, of course — the rest of his friends seem to be enjoying themselves, complimenting the chef, cracking jokes over their plates and, gods, shooting him glances out the corner of their eyes, waiting, prying, invading — but it’s quite as if his taste receptors have all died. He’s shovelling food into his mouth mechanically, like gears made of more rust than metal turning a broken clock, deriving no pleasure or joy from the act whatsoever, as he tries very hard not to think about smoke and burn wounds.
At some point while he’s waiting for everyone else to finish theirs, Pike bounds over from the kitchen and serves everyone tea, saying something or other about special occasions and expensive tea leaves. To his chagrin, she gives him another one of her sad, pitying smiles as she pours him a cup.
Percy accepts this as gratefully as he can with a strained smile and a pang of vexation that flashes across his chest. He tries very, very hard to keep himself from overthinking it — surely she means nothing by it, surely she’s merely displaying an act of empathy, surely she’s expressing kindness the only way she knows how, by healing, by fixing, by mending, and he’s the perfect little specimen for her to- he tries very hard not to overthink, and he ignores the way it irks him.
He downs the entirety of the cup in one go, and he stares dejectedly at the bits of tea leaves stuck to the bottom of his cup. This can’t be the end for him; he can’t forever regard his friends with caution and mistrust, it just isn’t viable, and he would much prefer to be comfortable in the confines of his own home, thank you very much.
It isn’t until he tears his gaze away from the table that he looks up and realises that his friends have gone very silent.
They’re all looking at him. A terrible chill sets itself upon his back, like claws of ice running down the length of his spine.
“What?” he asks, looking at each of his friends in turn.
Vex and Vax are looking at him with matching expressions of puzzlement, Keyleth has shock in her eyes, Scanlan looks at him like he’s a specimen, and Pike still has that godforsaken sad smile on her face. Grog is minding his own business, and not for the first time in his life, Percy is grateful for Grog’s existence and demeanour.
“What?” he presses. “What are you all looking at?”
“Percy…” Vex starts, hesitantly, at the same time Vax audibly gulps and says, “Freddie…”
“Why are you looking at- at me?” Percy asks, getting defensive in record time. “Did I say something? Did I… do something wrong? Do I have- is there a spot of food on my face that I missed?”
He reaches for the napkin, growing skittish, self-conscious from all the weird staring his friends are doing, from the wariness in Keyleth’s face to the suspicion on the twins’ faces and the scrutiny on Scanlan’s and the pity on Pike’s and the-
Pike stops him at his tracks, laying a hand on top of his. “Percy,” she says, eyes wide as she looks up at him, “you just drank scalding hot tea.”
“What?” Percy frowns, sliding his hand away from underneath hers as politely as possible. “No, that was- that was quite normal temperature, I didn’t feel it, I mean, I would’ve noticed…”
He trails off as he looks around once again, clenching and unclenching his fists as the expressions on his friends’ faces slowly shift and melt into what he can only describe as fear. It’s only then that he notices their own cups still full of tea, steaming.
“Percy,” Keyleth says, and he notes the fact that her voice trembles minutely, “are you… okay…?”
Wordlessly, he reaches out and wraps his fingers around her cup, and he watches in morbid awe as his palm turns an angry red shade, and the realisation descends dully upon him that he is quite unable to feel the heat.
He stands abruptly.
“I’m sorry,” he says, “I think I need to go.”
He shoulders his way to the door as his brain wakes and starts churning out thought after thought, each one more terrible than the last.
“Percy, wait-“
“I’m sorry,” he says, unsure of what exactly he’s apologising for, “I’m sorry- have a great rest of your day,“ and then he’s out the door, leaving it ajar behind him as he breaks into a run towards his workshop.
That was not a trick of the mind, surely, his friends had seen it happen before their very eyes, they’d called attention to it, can now infer that something is so deeply, horribly wrong with him that it shows upon his body, like a sickness, an infection, rotting him from the inside out even as he tries his absolute best to pretend otherwise. That wasn’t a trick, and Percy fears that his time masquerading as a functional person, masquerading as a person at all, might be coming to an end soon enough — he fears for what his friends might do, how they might react to having seen the true shade of the man that haunts their halls, now that there is proof to justify their wariness towards him.
It is not a trick, and Percy can’t seem to calm his own panic, fearing irrationally for a million different scenarios unfurling in his mind, even as he slams his workshop door shut behind him and buries his head in his hands.
—
Percy is not harming himself.
He is a man of logic, science, and he is indeed quite sure that acts of self-flagellation is reserved for people who let their hearts lead their lives. He thrives on hypotheses, on theory and practicality, he’s cynical, he’s clinical, he’s a man of meticulous methods, by the gods, he does not do emotions well, or at all, and he intends to keep it that way.
So no, he is not harming himself.
He’s conducting an experiment, is what he is.
The incident with the tea had left him shaken, yes, but it is also valuable data. If his body cannot perceive extreme heat, can it perceive extreme cold? Can it perceive changes in temperature at all? He does a quick round of introspection, and he finds that he isn’t quite sure himself, and when he isn’t sure himself then there is only one way to find out.
He starts the forge and he waits impatiently for the coals to start burning and he stands dangerously close to the open fire. Safety be damned, he is trying to gather data.
He notes that while his body has begun to sweat, he does not feel uncomfortable, and more alarmingly, does not feel as though the temperature in the room has risen at all. He moves closer towards it, stares down the coals with only a breadth of gap between its surface and his skin, notes that he feels no change whatsoever, and he wonders.
Percy does not wonder very long, however, because in a moment of uncharacteristic spontaneity, he presses his hand to the charcoal.
First, he notes that he still does not feel the heat. It’s like touching an unlit block of charcoal, even though said block is glowing red and on fire.
Second, he still experiences pain and still acquires burn wounds, because his skin very quickly chars and splits open and he pulls his hand back immediately, hissing from the pain.
Third, as he expected, smoke rises from within the wound, spilling out and melting into muscle and skin, stitching his palm back together within seconds until there is nothing but uncannily perfect skin to remind him of this experiment.
He flexes his fingers for good measure and finds that he retains perfect movement. A dull phantom ache persists, however, and he feels a little out of breath afterwards, but these side effects hold not a single candle to the pain of the initial burn.
This… smoke healing, whatever it is, it can be quite useful to him, notwithstanding the quite horror that settles into him as he forces himself to accept it as his new reality. He does not want it, truthfully, he does not want any part of it and he does not want any gift the demon left as a parting exchange for his soul, but he is still a man of logic, and logic dictates that what he wants matters not in the grand scheme of things. As a tinkerer, it might save him quite a few trips upstairs to find Pike to heal broken fingers or cuts, and as a part of Vox Machina, it might save him, period.
And like it or not, he needs to test out the bounds of this newfound ability.
So far, both instances of the smoke stitching his body together has been instances of burn wounds. He wonders whether fire has anything to do with it, whether it can be activated, so to speak, and whether the severity of the wound is a factor in its ability to heal.
And, as always, there is only one way to find out.
He finds the knife in a drawer next to scraps of metal and old tools, and he goes to work.
—
Percy is familiar with pain.
He spent the better part of three weeks confined under his own home, subject to Anna Ripley’s whims, and the ordeal has gotten him intensely well acquainted with pain.
He knows what it’s like to beg the gods for death and have nothing but more pain answer his pleas, and he knows what it’s like to refrain from killing himself to avoid the weight of the nightmares and the phantom pains, in the months afterwards.
But this, here, this is something else. He feels almost… entranced by it.
It intrigues him to watch his own hands take the reins of his suffering, where his agony is of his own volition and control.
It’s almost mesmerising — watching the blade gliding over too-perfect skin; watching smoke rise out from the cuts and melt his skin back together; watching the destroying and remaking of this body, this body that he occupies, this body that is wrong and inhuman and bloodless, made of smoke, all too big and all too small for him to fit into.
It feels like a homecoming, of some sort, like he’s dancing nimbly along a jagged border, testing out the limits of his gift, figuring out which vein will finally yield blood and not smoke; watching his unholy skin split open beneath the knife, watching darkness pour out of his wounds and onto the floor, watching the uncanny stillness of his fingers as he works, and cuts, and studies the smooth, perfect skin left behind.
There is no memory of the pain he endured, when he is done. Nothing but phantom pains that cede way to numbness, everything dead, everywhere.
All that is left is this body, one that is both too hollow and too full at once, a body that rejects him as much as he rejects it, that repulses him as much as he repulses it, and the knife clattered on the floor, seeping with shadows, clean as the moment he picked it up.
He wonders, passively, whether he feels any better, now that he is more porcelain than pain. Perhaps on his deathbed, all the scars will reveal themselves upon his autopsy, hidden right underneath the smoke masquerading as skin.
Either way, he is satisfied. Horror and disgust lie muffled by detached curiosity in his chest, but he has done what needed to be done.
He has gathered enough data.
He is satisfied.
- Mind
There is something about his reflection that might be a little odd, a little off, and Percy might have spent a little too long staring into his own eyes and trying to figure out whether his brain is hallucinating or whether his facial features are swimming around the flesh of his head.
He thinks: this cannot be what a human being looks like.
He thinks: this cannot be what I am.
He fears: we don’t look human anymore — and he wonders what that means, what being human at all means anymore, who he is once all the smoke has dissipated, once the flesh is stripped, what it is that makes up Percy the man the identity the name the person the idea-
Here is a genuine thought experiment: at which point in time does a human stop being human?
If ‘Percy’ believes he is human, has human memories and a human identity, but exists in an inhuman vessel, is he any less human?
If ‘Percy’ does not think he is human, has forgotten his family and lost his humanity, but exists in a human body, is he any less human?
If there exists two ‘Percy’s out there that were split, were copied, were two shattered pieces remade into two hollow wholes — the Percy that fears and the Percy that hates — which would be the human one? Which one would be the real Percy, and would the real Percy even know he is real at all?
Which idea of ‘Percy’ is more human: the one that’s dead or the one that isn’t? Which idea is more real? Which one is he?
Can an idea be human at all?
Can he?
—
He’s standing in the halls of Whitestone Castle, and he’s wearing his old clothes, clutching books close to his chest, listening to the echoes of his family’s laughter from behind him. Strands of brown hair fall in front of his eyes, and when he looks down, his bare hands are clean of scars.
He ought to join his family, he thinks detachedly, as he turns on his heels and starts walking down the carpeted hallways.
His footsteps are quiet, distant, as if the sound can’t quite reach his ears. Something is wrong, but he can’t quite bring himself to feel it at the moment.
The hallway blurs all around him: paintings mounted on the walls indiscernable from one another, daylight streaming in from the windows shifting and flickering like the sun isn’t sure what to do with itself, walls and floors mixing together into a confusing haze of colours that his feet, inexplicably, know how to navigate.
He turns corners and passes doors and he fixates solely on the sound of his family’s voices as the rest of the world melts into filler memories, just out of focus, out of mind.
Something within him murmurs that this isn’t real, that it’s just a dream, but he knows that it’s a dream as elusive as any other dream — the kind in which he is doomed to roam the empty halls of his childhood home, forever following the echoing sound of ghosts that slip through his fingers like water. He knows it, and he revels in it, because these dreams of a grief limbo is much, much favourable to dreams of blood and torture and fire. He is content to exist like this, young and unburdened, floating aimlessly in the void of his own mind.
But in this particular dream, the world shifts a little to the left, and he stops as the hallway finally ends at a pair of double doors.
Dread sinks deep within him, and he hears his family right behind the door, laughing at a joke that started long before the dream did. They are right there, right within his reach, at last, and he needs to see them like never before, even as that dread turns into hesitance turns into fear, urging him to stay on the other side, urging him to stay ignorant right where the haze of this limbo will never let his pain get the better of him again.
But he needs to see his family, he thinks, a little frantically, it has been forever since he last saw them, and he is not the kind of child that can go without his family.
He shoulders the door open gently, despite his instincts nudging him back, and he steps into the room.
The world snaps into focus and Percy’s mind clicks alive.
The dining hall is as grand as he remembers it. His family is seated at the table, his father working at its head, his mother reading a book beside him, his siblings bickering with one another over absolutely nothing at all. These few seconds of pause are divine, and Percy feels the tears in his eyes before he has the chance to stop them.
He isn’t sure he wants to. It has been far, far too long since he was allowed the joy of watching such naïve domesticity unravel before him.
Something within him snaps, comes undone, unfurls, and he feels a little like crying, a little like shaking — he is young again, young and unscarred and unmarred by the Briarwoods, and it has been so, so long since he felt like he is well and truly home.
A smile breaks out at his lips. A part of him tries to gently usher him back out the door, because this is a memory he’s no longer privvy to, no longer allowed to witness in more than just panicked realisations of we can’t remember what they sound like. This is the kind of old grief he isn’t sure how left to deal with: part of him has found contentment, has found peace, but a part of him will forever be alone and missing his mother.
By the gods. He misses his family so incredibly much, but can’t quite bring himself to take a step forward.
He thinks he’s afraid of waking up. He thinks he’s afraid of running away. He thinks he’s afraid of being happy. So there he stands, frozen in the liminals in between, and he waits for the dream to collapse in on itself.
It does not take long for that to happen.
His youngest sister looks up and calls his name.
(Cassandra has betrayed us. Cassandra has renounced us. We do not forgive — we do not forget.)
Immediately, he drops his books and he staggers back, eyes growing wide as the sound of a familiar, vicious laughter springs forth from the cold spots of his mind. An eerie hissing fills his ears. Black rage rises within him, consuming his mind, consuming his insides, and he wants this, more than anything, as his hand drops to his side to curl around the familiar shape of his pepperbox and his face twists and he chokes on an ugly laughter.
He draws the gun. He fires the gun. In the span of half a second, Cassandra is dead in her seat.
His mother shrieks just as his family spring into action — the twins scrambling to get away from the table, Ludwig freezing in his seat, Vesper moving and cradling Cassandra’s body in her arms, his father and Julius standing to turn towards him. He keeps his gun extended, and he watches as Cassandra’s name on the barrel glows white-hot before disappearing entirely.
“Percival!” his father yells, both hands held out as if to placate a wild animal. “What are you doing?”
“Finishing what we started,” he hisses, and gods, he’s smiling so hard, so wide that it hurts.
Julius takes a step forward, his face a mask of shock and terror, but Percy doesn’t miss the way his hand ever-so-slowly inches towards the dagger by his side. “This isn’t you,” he says, his voice deceptively steady, “Percy, put that weapon down, this isn’t you.”
Percy laughs breathlessly. “It is now,” he says, as he clicks the hammer, and the barrel spins.
Julius de Rolo.
He grins. He knows what he has to do. Julius leaps towards him, but he fires way before his brother has any chance to slash at him.
He clicks the hammer. His father’s name appears on the next chamber. He points the gun at his father next and fires.
He moves forward. Steps over the bodies of the two men.
He clicks the hammer. Oliver de Rolo. Whitney de Rolo. The twins fall with matching screams and bullets.
He reloads. His smile twitches. Plumes of black smoke pour out from between his teeth, down from his eyes, wrapping around his throat like claws.
He clicks the hammer. Ludwig dies where he sits, frozen forever in time and death.
He clicks the hammer. Vesper dies on top of Cassandra’s body.
He clicks the hammer.
His mother…
His, his mother-
She’s… crying.
She’s crying and she’s fallen on the floor, holding herself up by her elbows. She’s shaking horribly as Percy blinks down at her. He blinks and he blinks and he blinks and he realises that she’s talking, mouth moving frantically with words he cannot hear from all the hissing and all the ringing in his ears. She’s shaking her head and she’s trying to reach towards him and he’s got a smoking gun pointed square at her forehead.
The sight of it stirs something within him, something comes alive; the flesh shrouded within layers of smoke and shadow; the greyed, rotten pieces of the boy that she once held dear to her chest; the child, frantic and fearful for his mother, begging, begging for him not to pull the trigger.
He starts shaking. A memory pushes its way to the forefront of his mind.
He’s a kid again — the youngest and lankiest and palest of the de Rolo children — and he’s curled up with his mother in the library, reading a book on theoretical physics. She’s nodding along as he chitters on about the topic and he hasn’t quite learned how to stop being his mother’s boy; little Percival, the booksmart sensitive de Rolo kid with the big heart and the big head, quick to anger, quick to tears, quick to love. He remembers her kissing his forehead and clasping his hands in hers and telling him, ‘You will create the most wonderful things someday,’ and he remembers being moved to tears about it.
The memory fades.
The truth, here and now, is simple and bitter. He can’t remember the sound of his mother’s voice, can’t remember the way she walks, the way she talks, the way she hugs him when he gets upset over the most menial things.
For all intents and purposes: he has forgotten his mother.
Here, now, she is about to die by his bloodied hands, and she looks… resigned. He wavers on his feet and his gun arm falters. He feels-
…
He feels…
Smoke floods his vision, and the ringing subsides just enough for him to make out what his mother has been saying. Her voice is a raspy whisper that he does not recognise, like nails on a chalkboard.
“-the Briarwoods would be proud-“
Darkness subsumes him.
He laughs, the demon laughs, Percy, Not-Percy, fuck, he isn’t sure anymore, he doesn’t know, he doesn’t know-
He fires.
—
Percy wakes up with a jolt.
A primal fear snarls alive within him, and he springs out of his bed at its beck and call. He needs to get out of there, now, or else he might claw his way out his too-tight too-smooth too-perfectly-human skin, and leave behind a body that he still remembers dissolving into smoke — meat and blood and bone flayed and remade and flayed again and remade again as Not-Percy dragged him around and pulled at his nerves like string — this body that he isn’t sure is his anymore, let alone a body at all, let alone human-
He feels sick to the core.
He feels like he’s all rotten inside and there are dry branches where there used to be lush forest, winters up North where the ground itself freezes to slates of ice.
He feels- gods, he feels empty, hollow, like something has torn out some vital, beating, bleeding part of him and replaced it only to burn away, fuck — he feels like someone could take a dagger and carve him out and there would be nothing but smoke and shadow in his chest cavity.
He scrambles away from his bed and towards the mirror he keeps in his room for this very occasion. He yanks off the cloth draped over it with the fury of a goliath as he stares hungrily at his own reflection, and his gaze immediately fixates on his eyes as if by blinking hard enough, he could make out traces of demonic black and orange.
His features look grey in the dark of night, ashen, like his body has finally given up trying to put colour to his cheeks and there isn’t blood running through his veins but smoke and- fuck, he doesn’t want to think about what that means, doesn’t want to know.
His reflection looks normal otherwise, almost insultingly so. Despite his obsession with it, there is absolutely nothing wrong with him as far as the eye can see, and all that he is left with is the sight of his own face, exhausted and haunted, and it terrifies him that the ordeal of being possessed has, at first glance, seemingly changed nothing about his person.
There are no charcoal eyes.
There is no twisted grin.
There is no smoke pouring out from his mouth and eyes and nose.
(There is only the deep-seated feeling that what he is looking at is dangerous, wrong, unnatural, and there is no way left to go but to destroy it.)
Despite everything, it’s still him; Percy with the shaking hands and the relentless nightmares and the mind that does not remember his own family.
And somehow, that feels even worse.
—
He runs.
He doesn’t get very far, but he runs.
His room feels too oppressive, too small, too suffocating, and the moment he steps out into the hallway he feels like the walls are pressing in and he can’t breathe so he books it all the way down to the foyer and throws open the doors outside with a desperate heave.
The precious few seconds between the first breath of sweet, night air and his sudden halt by the outer gate are… bliss.
In the span of that fleeting moment, there exists nothing in the world but him, the open air, and the moons above hanging from the sky like an omen. There are no nightmares, no shadows, no demons, no crushing fear of the thought that he might dissolve into a mindless haze of evil at any moment — out here it’s only him; Percy with the trembling longing for release and the restlessness that curdles like rotten milk in his lungs.
He stops by the gate, though, because he does not have the key, and he tries very hard to control his erratic, terrified breathing as his chest bursts with the release, as if an animal has snarled itself free from his ribcage and is tearing away at his skin, so close, so close. He thunders with it, drowns with the longing for something to give, because he has been pulled so immensely taut for weeks now and he’s waiting, dreading the moment something gives and something snaps and he is consumed by the malevolence that burns ever-ferocious inside him. He is so, so tired of it; this terrible state of being, whatever it is, and he so badly wants it to stop.
The demon is gone.
The gun, destroyed.
And Percy, in the aftermath, cannot live without either.
What is he, then, this thing of smoke and ruin? Not entirely man, not entirely demon, too harrowed to be Percy, too afraid to be Not-Percy, the shattered identity of someone who once was, and never will be again; where the memory of Percy is one of moonlit libraries and motherly embraces, this creature hisses at touch and comfort; where the idea of Not-Percy is that of congealing blood and rusted blades, this man is trembling and tired and wants nothing more than to go home.
What is he now, then? Someone who long ago had a family, and then no longer — someone who was so open, so ready, so easy to love, and now isn’t sure still has the capacity to — someone who used to be unquestionably human, and now…
And now…
What are we…?
It hits him at once.
It hits him that what he is, is trapped.
Trapped, well and truly trapped — in here, this body, this life, forever.
He doesn’t want it — the knowledge that he asked for this, asked for vengeance, asked for a weapon and asked to be a weapon; this eternity of half-beings and shrieking nightmares, shaking hands and veins of smoke and the horrible, undispellable fear that stalks him everywhere day in, day out; he seethes with so much hatred for this fate of his that it seeps out of him and marks the world around, dark stains and scars marring the ground he walks on — and he rejects it with every fibre of his being, bucks against it, wants it off his skin-
He hunches over, hands digging into his scalp and pulling at his hair, eyes wide and dry as he stares at the locked gate and wishes for it to open - wishes for freedom - wishes that he can tear at himself, rip apart the flesh holding his chest together, crawl out of this body that binds him up with the demon that thrived off his weaknesses.
He wants to scream, because there is so much raw noise in his head (let us out let us out let us out), so much pressure that he feels like exploding, so much all the time, too much most of the time, and he needs to let some of it out before, before he-
“…Percy?”
Percy whirls around, wildfires burning in his eye sockets, as his lips twist into an ugly snarl, hackles raised, heart beating a mile a minute in his ears, fingers itching to curl around the trigger of a gun.
His mind is slower to the draw, however, and he does not recognise the backlit figure before him — moonlight shimmering off strands of long dark hair, keen eyes made to track and to trail, a huntress that wields the night in all its silver beauty against him and his rotting shadows — at least, not until it’s far too late, not until he recognises the glint of an arrow nocked in a familiar bow, its arrowhead pointed straight at his skull.
He does not recognise Vex — deadly, wary Vex’ahlia with the silent footsteps and the quick fingers always so thankfully ready to draw and shoot an arrow — until her face morphs rapidly from confusion to shock to fear, and she releases the bowstring in a moment of careless surprise.
The arrow hits, but it does not shatter his skull, and it does not kill him on the spot.
It strikes him through the shoulder, and he gasps in pain, stumbling backwards from the force and the sudden, piercing pain. His back collides against the gate and his hand flies up instinctively to press against the wound, sending spikes of pain shooting through his chest as he hisses and his knees give way to his weight.
Before he hits the ground, a pair of hands catch his chest and jostle the wound, which only serves to make him cry out and squeeze his eyes shut.
The hands fumble as they help lower him slowly to the ground. “Gods, oh gods, Percy, I didn’t realise- shit, I’m sorry,” says Vex’ahlia’s voice, strings of frantic apologies that filter into one ear and out the other without quite registering.
“Vex?” Percy mutters through gritted teeth as he squints at her.
“Percy- Percy? Don’t move- I, don’t move, you’re alright, I thought you- I didn’t, fuck-“
“Vex,” Percy groans, “help me take out the arrow.”
“No- no, don’t, no- we should- I’ll go get Pike-“
Percy shakes his head with a bit of effort, hands shooting out to grab Vex’s wrists. “No Pike,” he grits out, “don’t- don’t get Pike. Just… help me pull it out.”
“But we have to stem the bleeding, what are you talking about-?”
He gives her a meaningful look, smiling softly against the waves of pain coursing through his body. “Trust me,” he mutters. “Please just trust me. Help me- help me pull it out, and whatever it is that happens next, just, just trust me.”
Vex’s expression wavers as she looks at him, eyebrows furrowed and lips set in a frown. She hesitates, he can tell, and she must think that he is out of his mind and probably has been for the past month or so, but something flashes in her dark eyes and she nods.
“Okay,” she tells him, “okay, alright,” licking her lips in anticipation as she eyes the wound and the arrow lodged into his shoulders.
“Okay,” he replies, keeping his voice and breathing as even as possible. “How will I- how will we do this? You- this is out of my field, you know better than I.”
Vex closes her eyes for a second. “It- it seems like I have to get the arrow out the other side. Percy, this- this will hurt a lot.”
“It’s alright,” he breathes, “just do it. Vex, just- I can handle the pain.” He squeezes her wrists gently. “Trust me.”
“I trust you,” she mutters, and then she pushes the arrowhead through his shoulder.
The shock shudders through him before the pain can register, but Vex makes quick work of the arrow, snapping the shaft and yanking the arrowhead out his back with quick, dexterous fingers before he can so much as flinch.
His back arches with agony. His face jerks towards the sky. He grits his teeth against the scream that threatens to tear out his throat, and his vision flickers with dark spots that he clenches his fists against if only at an attempt to dispel.
The part of him with jagged edges and claws snaps its teeth, while the part of him made of icicles and steely glass sneers — and the snarl that escapes his mouth instead is decidedly not human, decidedly not his, but is wounded all the same.
He falls forward, head swimming, world blurring, and before he blacks out, he feels something catching him before he hits the ground.
—
Percy opens his eyes to the night sky, and to Vex’s face over his, mouth moving with words his ears can’t seem to catch.
He stares at her shifting silhouette for a few long moments as he waits for his ears to stop ringing, for his eyes to stop doubling every object he sees, for the world to stop spinning all around him. His mind kicks into gear slowly and he takes note of the fact that he can feel something soft under his head, that he and Vex are still alone and still out in the courtyard, that he seemed to not have blacked out for too long.
“Vex,” he tries to say, but his lips are still quite heavy, so what comes out might sound more like ‘beck’ and less like ‘Vex’. He waits a few more seconds, blinking slowly and trying to urge feeling back into his body, before he tries again; “Vex,” and his mouth tastes of iron, “are we alive?”
Vex’s eyes widen as the world stops spinning enough for him to discern her features. “Percy,” she says, and though her voice still sounds quite distant, he can infer her words well enough. “Percy, oh gods, I thought- you’re awake, thank the gods.”
She squeezes his hand — she has been holding his hand with one hand and his face in the other, he notes, and fights back the silly blush creeping up his neck — and her lips break into a little smile, terrified, trembling, but a smile nevertheless. He almost does not recognise her like this; Vex does not get terrified, Vex does not tremble — Vex bares her teeth in a fatal grin and Vex wears a straight back and a tipped chin and Vex never misses an arrow to the head.
Perhaps this is a fluke or a one-time thing. Or perhaps the past month has proven to her that he is not quite so infallibly good, not quite so infallibly alright, and Vex is the kind of person that takes pity on animals neither infallibly good nor alright.
He mulls the thought over in his head. Him, in need and in pain, with his face in her hand and his head on her lap. He isn’t sure what to feel about it.
“Help us sit,” he grunts, and she takes his hand and supports his back as he sits up, gritting his teeth against the pain of being jostled.
Her hands linger on him, as if hesitant, as if terrified, and his skin pulses and aches at the places she touched when she lets go.
“Is our shoulder bleeding?” he rasps, instead of further pursuing the thought.
Vex shakes her head. “No, no, it isn’t- it…”
She trails off, her breath catching at her throat, and Percy sighs, letting his head droop against her shoulder. He doesn’t need to- doesn’t want to see the look of disgust, disappointment, rejection upon her face. This close to her, where she is sharing the air he breathes, he isn’t quite so sure he can take seeing her realise just what kind of monster she’s been holding, been allowing into her home, been letting near her family.
“It’s- it’s… it’s smoking…” Vex whispers, horror and realisation in her voice.
“We know,” he mutters, eyes half-lidded. “We’re sorry.”
A beat passes. Percy listens to the sound of her breathing, quick and harsh, against his slow, deep breaths.
“Percy…” Vex says, her voice soft and wary, “who is ‘we’?”
He stills.
“Slip of the tongue,” he says, too quickly, pulling back, back and out and away from her touch, “it was a- it wasn’t, I- I meant-“
His breath hitches up high in his throat and his words immediately fail. The look of fear and betrayal upon her face terrifies him like little else, and he thinks: this is where the other shoe finally drops, here at this moment where it has become so insurmountably difficult to look her in the eyes.
She should not be here — Vex’ahlia, his wonderful Vex’ahlia, with the big heart and the big soul — because she is a creature of light, and the family she walks with are infallibly good, but he does not belong to the light, and he is not a good person. She should hate him, because one day he will lead her on a road to ruin, lead them all to ruin with the darkness within that shrouds and rots everything around him, everything he touches.
“Percy…”
“I swear- I swear on my mother’s grave,” he blurts out, “I won’t- I am not- the demon is gone, I won’t hurt anyone anymore, this- this isn’t what you think it is-“
Her finger brushes against his cheek.
He shuts his mouth, shuts his eyes, flinches hard, despite himself, and Vex sighs.
“Oh, darling…”
He doesn’t deserve this… this gentleness, this tenderness that she so willingly extends. He isn’t allowed it, not then, not now, not ever. He can’t possibly accept this love meant for someone he no longer is.
He isn’t the Percy of long ago, the one that would’ve taken her hand and pulled her into a dance, the one with the sweet words and the sly smirks.
He isn’t the Percy that sought nothing but vengeance, the one who craved violence at his hands like a high, the one who was meant to die at the end of his vendetta, the one who knew only to use what darkness he was capable of to destroy everything around him.
He isn’t even the Percy of Vox Machina, the one she saved with her words and her love thricefold as he struggled to resurface back to humanity that horrid day.
He’s… a Percy, of sorts. One of the many iterations of the same fractured idea.
Somewhere along the way, when he wasn’t looking, he missed the moment the name broke off from the identity broke off from the idea broke off from the memory broke off from the-
A Percy, yes.
But perhaps not theirs, and definitely not hers. She might not like things that aren’t hers.
“Darling,” she repeats, and at once he is back in the room with the acid trap, and at once he is wearing his mask and exhaling smoke with every word, and at once he is lost, shades of hatred tainting his heart, reaching towards a kind of salvation he does not deserve, and Vex was there, Vex is there, Vex is always there whenever he dies: “Open your eyes.”
Percy obeys. He opens his eyes and meets hers, gods, he feels sick from all the terror freezing him up inside.
“This isn’t what you think it is,” he breathes. “I am not- I am not possessed. I am not going to hurt our friends — I don’t want to hurt our friends. I won’t, I- I swear…”
Vex brushes her hand against the smoking wound, and he suppresses the urge to yank himself away from her. The smoke dances between her fingers like it reveres her more than it hates him, and when the wound eventually closes, when the smoke eventually clears, she touches the smooth-perfect-porcelain skin of his shoulder gingerly.
Something in her expression shifts.
“You told me to trust you,” she says, and he is only barely keeping himself from melting under her gaze. “You told me, whatever happens now, that I should trust you.”
“I- ah, I did.”
“Indulge me, dear, if I were to trust you, could you spare me a little trust too?”
“Surely,” he mutters. “Could I trust you not to assume the worst of myself?”
Her lips twist and she shifts to face him completely, legs folded underneath her. “Well, Percival, would you trust me with the worst of you?”
“Well, Vex’ahlia-“ he perks the corners of his lips up in what he hopes looks like a smile, “you have dealt with the worst of me, and I think- I think it’s quite safe to assume that we can’t possibly come back from that,” he tells her, as he thumbs over her hand that ghosts over the plumes of smoke still lingering about his shoulder. “But yes. Of course. Ask away. Anything you would like to know.”
“And you’ll answer honestly, as always?” she asks him, raising an eyebrow.
He gives her a wry look. “Naturally.”
“Alright.” She turns her gaze back to his shoulder and the tear on his shirt. “Does it hurt?”
“No. Well- not anymore, that is.”
“Did you know about this?”
“Not for long, but yes. I’ve known since… ah, earlier today, but I suppose I might’ve suspected for longer.”
“Mm. How did it happen?”
“I don’t know,” Percy says. He ducks his head and looks away, shame creeping up the back of his neck. “I don’t know.”
She lays a gentle hand on his cheek and tilts his head to face her. Her eyes are almost glowing under the moonlight, and her intensity is almost too suffocating, almost too much, but there is strength that yet persists within her — strength that makes him believe he might possess it too, somewhere underneath all the misery.
She asks of him, “Are you alright, darling?” and there is still this part of him — a shade of what once was, but a shade nevertheless; he realises the part of him which defies yet lives within.
‘No,’ he thinks, and gods, there is so much wrong with him, because he thinks it should not take as much effort as it does to think the word, to admit it to himself, to allow himself to feel all that failure and disappointment finaly, truly sink in. He has lost, it seems, lost in too many ways to count, and he is tired of feeling this way all the fucking time; because this, this is exhausting, and he is tired of feeling exhausted for the mere crime of existing.
‘No,’ his body cries, as its bones grind together like boulders upon boulders. Its muscles feel like rubber as it moves — a mesh of tendons and veins that rub and pulsate against each other — lungs that can’t expand without sliding against its heart; a heart of mash that melts through the bars of its ribcage; a ribcage that shudders and stutters with every bend of the spine; a spine that arches and twists and cannot hold the body up.
This body, it does not belong to him, and he does not belong to it.
(This body, it belongs to him, and he belongs inside it.)
His skin feels fake.
What is he, then, if he is not his body?
“No,” he chokes out, through a throat that does not want him to speak, through a body that shakes with tremours unbounded, through a mouth that twists and lips that crack and a tongue of acid, acrid.
And Vex, inexplicably, begins to smile.
Her eyebrows crease and she strokes little circles on his cheek, and there is so much sadness in her eyes that it almost hurts him to watch.
“Oh, Percy…”
He does not want to hurt his friends. And herein lies the conundrum of the ages; if he tells them everything, they will be disgusted and they will be betrayed, but if he does not, then they will worry for him, despite his best efforts. Not for the first time in his life, he wishes that these people do not care for him as much as they do — but not for the first time in his life, either, he feels it envelope him like an embrace and he yearns for it.
“No,” he repeats, and if it comes easier to say it the second time, then he is grateful. He brushes a hand over his cheek just to let out a bit more tension, just to make sure that his face is made of skin and not leather. “I… I keep having these dreams where the mask won’t come off.”
Vex does not reply to that, but she hums and nods encouragingly, urging him to keep talking.
“It has been persistent for a few weeks now,” he continues, because he doesn’t know what to do with the silence, “I keep having these dreams where the demon has returned, or has never left, or has been there from the very beginning, simply watching and waiting and festering all my life — and I keep having these- these dreams where I’ve got the pepperbox once more and I’ve killed and hurt the people I never meant to; hurting our friends, hurting Cassandra, becoming the monster that killed my family, and… and the worst part is that I can never seem to stop myself from committing these acts.”
Vex clasps his hand in hers and squeezes. “But is it you in these dreams?” she asks, her voice soft and full of fear. Fear that he isn’t sure he wants to place. “Or is it the demon? You can’t fault yourself for what your mind makes up, darling, you aren’t being fair to yourself.”
“Maybe,” he says. He squeezes her hand in return. “But I can’t always tell. That’s what scares me the most, I suppose; that I can’t quite tell whether it was man or demon in my dreams.”
“Then was it you or the demon, back there in the chamber?” Vex asks.
Percy swallows. “I don’t know. I don’t think there was a clear line between it and me, back there. If the demon made me want to hurt my friends, hurt my sister, then who is at fault, really? I was already full of hate and my heart was filled with murder, you see, I had already wanted to be a monster, and all it did was give me the means and the strength to truly become one.”
“You’re not a monster, darling,” she says, her lips turned down into a frown. “Perish the thought right now. You aren’t a monster for the way they broke you.”
He can’t help the fond smile that breaks through his lips at that moment, looking at Vex and the righteous determination in her eyes, all that hope and stubbornness in the lines of her face.
“That’s the catch,” he says. “I can’t tell, when I’m asleep. I can’t tell, looking back on my memories.”
“And you can’t tell, even now?”
“No.” He shakes his head. “I can’t.”
Vex hasn’t wavered, hasn’t flinched, hasn’t yanked herself away from him, and so he takes this as a cue to continue.
“It feels like there exists some part of myself too far corrupted to be human,” Percy says, his voice barely louder than a whisper. “Like the demon had crawled so far in — too far in — that I couldn’t have ripped it out without ruining every other bit of myself. I can’t always tell whether my thoughts are my own; but the demon is surely gone, and if, in its absence, I am still, well… like this, then what does that say about me?
“I don’t know which possibility is worse,” he admits. “Whether I am no longer whole, or whether I was never whole in the first place. It feels like I am living both realities at once, and for the longest time I thought it had only been my mind playing tricks on me but this-“
He nods towards his shoulder, and the faint wisps of smoke still slipping out of his pores. His shadow twists under the moonlight, an amorphous shape that shifts and wanes and cannot be human, cannot be monster, cannot be anything but darkness perpetually stuck in a state of confusion.
“-this is proof. This- this, it is proof that I… that my body-“ he clutches a hand to the fabric of his chest, “this body isn’t made of a body. I don’t think this body is real anymore.”
He pauses.
“Vex,” he says. “I don’t think I am real anymore.”
- Fingers
(And this is where it begins: a cold bedroom in Whitestone Castle where moonlight hangs motionless from the window, where he is laying in bed with his mother sat next to him, reading a bedtime story.
Her voice is a comforting drone as she reads, and she flips the page of the book, and the clock ticks on with both mother and son unwilling to finish the story, unwilling to fall asleep, unwilling to go. He reaches out with a small hand, smaller than it should be, smaller than he should be, and when his fingers curl around her sleeve she pauses to press a kiss to his forehead.
She tells him: It’s time to go to sleep, Percival.
“But mother, the story isn’t done,” he mutters, shuffling underneath his covers. His voice is high, too high, too much of a child’s. “How does it end?”
From where he’s laying on the bed, he can’t entirely make out her expression. But her voice is loud and clear, if a little exasperated: I have to go to bed as well, dear, we can continue this tomorrow.
He grumbles into his pillow. “But I want to hear it now.”
She laughs. The sound feels hollow, distant, like she has already left: You can’t hear it now. Your story isn’t done yet.
Percy frowns. “What?” he asks. “What do you mean?“
He sits up to look at her.
He sits up to an empty room, where the castle beyond the door creaks with empty halls and ghosts of his family.
He sits up, and the walls are tearing with blood.)
—
(And this is where it ends: his bedroom at the keep, moonlight streaming in through the open window, a light breeze crawling in through the cracks. Vex lying on his bed, looking into his eyes, one hand under her pillow and the other stroking his head.
This is the kind of beautiful dream he won’t mind never waking up from.
He smiles at her and the blurry visage of her beautiful face, and there is little he can do to stop himself from wanting to reach back and hold her. So he does. His fingers find purchase around her cheek, and she runs warm against his clammy skin as she leans into his touch the same way he’s leaning into hers.
Darling, she says, and her voice is soft, everything soft, you are going to kill me one day.
“What?” he breathes, frozen in place, his next breath stuttered dead in his chest.
I will die one fateful day, and it will be at your hands, she says, and she is still smiling serenely, as if it doesn’t bother her.
“I don’t- I won’t do it,” he chokes, because she is solid under his palm, and he can’t afford to lose that, lose her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’d never hurt you like that.”
Don’t be afraid, she whispers. It will not break you to kill me.
“Vex, I-“
He blinks, and she is gone.
He blinks, and the second he opens his eyes again, he is alone in his room, bed empty, covers tussed, freezing in his own skin as he gapes at the emptiness left behind.
He blinks, and all at once, he is afraid.)
—
(And as the smoke buries deeper, burns his insides like molten lightning poured into his veins, rewrites his very being into half-boy, half-thing, he lies still and choking against the thought — that with the scars wiped clean and the foreign reflections of his face, his mother has never held this iteration of him.)
—
“Don’t be silly,” Vex says, and his mind resharpens itself. He falls back onto the earth, into this body-but-not, grounded once again by someone who has grounded him countless times before, when he was lost to his own mad thoughts. “Of course you’re real,” she tells him as she smiles, “why wouldn’t you be? You are solid, material, and you’re talking to me — though a little light on the presence of the mind — how could you not be anything but real?”
Percy blinks away the flashes that threaten to steal him away from the present. Vex’s hand is a steady constant around his, and as he takes a moment to re-centre the mind that longs to flee, he finds that here, in the quiet, next to her, the world looks, sounds, feels, smells, tastes like it always has.
“Is that how you would define being real?” he asks, taking note of all his senses, choosing to try and believe that the horrors his mind conjures are not those of reality. “Then maybe.” He shrugs. “But I don’t think I am real the way you want me to be.”
“Let me have a guess,” she says, a light note of playful teasing tingeing her voice, “you don’t quite feel like yourself anymore?”
Percy shakes his head and grimaces. “I don’t feel like any iteration of myself anymore.”
“Because you have been ruined?”
“Because I’ve failed to recover. Because it’s only ever gotten worse for me. Because I can’t go another night henceforth without being haunted, feeling inhuman, being wrong, and I- I can’t be someone unmarred, even now that the storm has passed.”
Percy pauses.
“I don’t think I am who you think I am,” he says. He feels warmth collecting at his eyes. He swallows down the salt at the back of his throat. “I don’t think I’m me, because I died in a cell in Whitestone Castle. And- and whatever lives on after that… he- I… we are made of both man and demon.”
Vex hums, noncommittal.
She is stroking the back of his hand.
She is a reminder of Percy the human, the one that loves and aches and longs — and she is a reminder of Percy the ruined, the one that stands there alone, at the edge of the world.
She is here, she is real, and she is touching him so incredibly delicately, eyes flitting to the ghost of a scar at his shoulder.
She is there, in all of his senses, all five of them thrumming, humming together.
She is opening her mouth, laughing softly the way she always does when she is talking to her brother and her bear: “Oh, darling,” she tells him. “Oh, Percy, you fool man. You absolute fool of a man.”
She pinches his cheek.
“Serves me right, I suppose,” he mutters.
“Quiet,” she says, putting a finger to his lips, but she is still teasing. “For all your wits and your smarts, sometimes I forget that you are still a foolish little man. A little idiot man. Have you perhaps considered the idea that we never knew Percival of Whitestone? We have only ever known you, darling, broken as you think you are, and we love you. Do you know what that means?”
He blinks at her, uncomprehending, and his pause must have spoken volumes because there is this flash in her eyes, something akin to sadness, something akin to pity, and he is suddenly scrambling, breathlessly desperate to get rid of that sad flash.
“Despite my flaws and shortcomings, I am still loved?” he blurts out, mouth moving on its own.
She beams at him. He would do anything to keep that beam in place.
“You’re getting it,” she says.
“And despite my capacity for violence and cruelty, and the path of vengeance I walked, I still have friends?”
There is a lilt of hope in his voice, one that surprises even him, because he does not do hopeful, and he does not do meek, but here, now, in the presence of someone whom his heart so foolishly, easily, lowers its walls for, he feels as though there is yet the sliver of Percy the child, however hazy the memory is — melting into his mother’s embrace, melting into Vex’s touch, trembling at the bit of affection offered palms out towards him.
“I don’t know how you can be friends with us and still think yourself horrible,” Vex tells him. “Look at Grog. There is no way- you can’t possibly be worse than Grog.”
Her joke shocks a bark of laughter out his chest, one that shoots dead the ‘but I hurt all of you’ threatening to tumble out of his mouth.
He can’t possibly believe this- this impossibility, the thought that his friends are still his friends, his family, and they have forgiven him; that they forgave him the second he pointed the pepperbox in their direction, and they forgave him as his eyes burned like charcoals and he burned with a hatred that nearly drowned out their love, because there is nothing, nothing he can do that would really, truly hurt them, nothing that would create a rift so great it will be impossible to mend.
Or, at least, he shall try.
It feels strange, having it all out in the open, all his words fled into the night sky, the open air, carried away by wind and moonlight. The noise and the static in his head yet recedes, and he thinks, not without some level of dismay: how much have we carried on our own?
But as his thoughts slip so naturally into plural, he thinks as though he ought to feel a little more disturbed, as he always is when he thinks for the mind of two, but there is only silence. Nobody is here to judge him, certainly not Vex, because Vex is merely smiling at him with a twinkle in her eyes, and she did not flinch once when he spoke in duality.
And so he wonders, with apprehension and with fear, but not without a sliver of hope that dares breach the surface, whether the rest of his friends would mind.
Perhaps not.
Perhaps it was all in his head.
“Vex,” he whispers, when the haze clears away. “What colour are my eyes?”
“Does it matter?” she says, and he really ought to believe the things that she says in the middle of the night when she is looking at him with all that love, unbridled.
- Self
There is something about his reflection that is a little odd, a little off, and Percy did not understand, for the longest time — did not get it, did not want it, did not see it for what it is — did not accept it, until he has no choice but to look it in the eyes.
This body, it repulses him; this body that lies; this body that twists; this body that hates him. This body that he has been dealt, it does not want him inside it, and he does not want to be inside it — he is human and it is not, it is human and he is not, not enough, both will never be human enough again.
But there is something else. Something he has been missing, after all this time, and it has taken him far too long to form the thoughts, connect the dots, realise the truth for what it should be, what it could be, what it will be, now and forever. The pieces click together in his mind, one after the other, and he finally understands what it is that is so wrong about his reflection.
He thinks about smoke, he thinks about charcoal, and he thinks about the darkness that haunts his dreams, that wraps its claws around his trigger finger and whispers for him to fire.
He thinks about his friends, and the way he had stepped over them for the names on his List. He thinks about his family, and the guilt, the resentment, that ate him up like a wildfire from within. He thinks about the mask, and he is ashamed, yes, always, and it is because of shame that he had hidden his face using the visage of a demon, but he also remembers the way Vex had touched him and told him, “Darling, take off the mask,” and told him, “Percy, come back to us,” and told him, “Does it matter?”
He thinks about the shadow, at the heart of every man — a man, as he is, possessed by his shadow, his own shortcomings and his own cowardice and his own violence, repressed and now revealed — and he wonders which side of the mirror is true, and whether it matters that a mirror has sides at all.
(If he stops and he listens for a moment, there among the deafening silence he can almost make out the low beat of a second heart, feel the pulse of a second set of blood vessels with no blood in them, hear the air expanding a second pair of lungs that all fit nowhere and everywhere all at once inside his skin.)
Pressing his palm flat against the mirror’s surface, Percy looks at his reflection and whispers, “You are just as trapped as I am.”
Under his palm, the mirror feels almost like flesh, forever changing, forever perfecting.
(And how wonderful it feels to own a body.)
The sun shifts across the room, illuminating the silhouette made into the shape of a man, and it only takes the slight tilt of their head for Not-Percy to begin smiling, moonlight in its eyes.