Chapter Text
Here is how it happens: when Vex is twenty two and a half (after so many years with long-lived elves the “half” becomes very important) something happens to her soulmate. In the past all she’s got from them has been a flurry of papercuts, a multitude of burns to the tips of her fingers and occasional scattered nicks to the face and jaw that suggest her soulmate is probably learning to shave. There was also, memorably, something that felt like a splash of highly painful acid up one forearm.
She was grateful, after that, that soulbonds only really emphasise the first burst of pain and not the myriad twinges of healing - oh it aches, but it’s not as debilitating as it would be if she’d been the one injured. She suspects she’d not have been able to shoot for several days after if that were the case and Vax already dislikes her soulmate for their “constant careless injuries” as he calls it, as though he gets any fewer from his.
When she is twenty two and a half, that changes. Intermittent random pains are something she’s used to and something she suspects that they’re used to as well. She also gets the sense that they take care of any injuries they get with a careful conscientiousness - whether that’s because they don’t want the injury to get infected or because they don’t want the aches their soulmate feels to be worse she doesn’t know, but she appreciates it all the same.
She is not used to sudden slicing pains: down her arms, her chest, her legs. She is not used to small persistent burns: to the neck, the sides, the palms of the hands. She’s not used to what feels like the snapping, slicing pain of a whip, down the length of her back to her buttocks, or the pressure to her neck for an hour on end like someone has her in a chokehold.
She is not used to these injuries being left, unbandaged, unsalved, open to air and further pain until it’s not the mild aches she’s become so used to, but something far more painful, something that leaves her feeling almost raw.
It takes her a while, around the unbalancing pain, to realise what must be happening.
Someone is torturing her soulmate.
She doesn’t tell Vax. To be fair, he’s in one of his moods again, swanning off on his own and getting into trouble. She only hopes he’ll return with more gold than when he left. When he’s fleetingly present he doesn’t seem to notice the way her hand shakes at her side, the momentary twinges of pain she lets slip. Then again, since getting Trinket, she’s got very good at hiding things that’ll upset her brother.
He does notice, though. He can’t not when he goes to hug her and she recoils from his touch like she’s made of nothing but raw, flayed open flesh.
“Vex?”
Trinket is beside her in a moment, his half-grown bulk pressed to her side in the gentle way he’s had to learn this past week. He mrawr s softly, licking the side of her face and she grimaces, laughs, and doesn’t let herself wince at the echoes of pain that riddle her body.
“It’s nothing, Vax.”
It’s a lie, and her brother knows it. He doesn’t push, though, for once. Instead he extends an arm in invitation, letting her settle herself beside him in a way she can cope with, and holds off on questions ‘til the morning.
“It’s them, isn’t it?”
Her brother’s words are soft from where he’s sat across the fire. He’d gone off for a quick patrol around their campsite when she’d woken and now he’s sat opposite her, a bowl of oatmeal - supplemented by a few late-in-the-season berries she’d foraged - in his hands.
“I don’t know what-”
“Your soulmate.” Her brother’s words are quick, without hesitation. Based on the bags under his eyes, she suspects he’s spent all night thinking about this. “Whoever they are. They’re hurting you.”
“They’re being hurt,” Vex says, because the distinction matters. Vax’s eyes flash up to her face at the admission, though, and his brow furrows in concern. “Not right now,” she adds. “They’re sleeping now, I think.”
It had taken her a few days to notice the pattern, but either whoever is hurting her soulmate likes long lie-ins and late nights, or they’re enough a distance away that the day starts later.
It doesn’t bode well for her finding them if it’s the latter, but the idea of the casual way in which they’re being hurt if it’s the former is almost as bad as the fact of the torture itself.
“Vex, if they’re hurting-”
She shakes her head and glances away to where Trinket dozes in a sprawled pile. His head lifts at her attention and he shuffles closer, leaning his muzzle against her leg. With one hand buried in his fur, scratching softly at his ears, it’s easier to ignore the myriad twinges coming from almost every inch of her body. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she says and her voice is steady enough that Vax subsides.
For a while they sit there in the quiet. The fire was only replenished a little when they woke - enough for oatmeal but not much more - and its crackles quiet as its flames die.
She doesn’t much like the whole situation - who would, knowing their soulmate was suffering, regardless of if they’d met them yet? - but she doesn’t want to talk about it. It’s bad enough feeling their pain and being unable to help them at all, she doesn’t want to discuss it with Vax, who she knows is as likely to blame them for her being hurt as care about them being a victim in all this.
Vax lingers in their camp. Only the day before he’d have already swanned off into town but today he lingers, watching her closely. She thinks he’s waiting for her to flinch, for her to show some sign of suffering so he can broach the topic again.
She’s not going to, if only because it’s several hours yet until her soulmate’s torture usually begins. While she may feel twinges and aches from them when they… sleep or rest or simply aren’t tortured, she’s become used to that. That had once been standard fare, since the bond first formed two years ago. She’s more than fine to stay in and around camp catching rabbits and foraging food until then.
“Go,” she says. “For gods’ sakes Vax. We hardly have the money for you to be able to just stay here and do nothing. I can at least forage and hunt out here.”
The furrow in his brow hasn’t smoothed out yet. Vex thinks that, but for their elven blood, he’d have frown lines as deep as chasms he worries so much.
“Go,” she says again. “I’ll be fine. I’ll go hunting, get us a nice rabbit.” She glances at Trinket and grins. “Maybe several.”
He lingers still, though, and doesn’t say a word as he paces around their small camp, checking everything for a third time, a fourth, a fifth. He’s finally turning to head off towards town when a sharp burning pain lances down her side and she can’t hold in her hiss at the shock of it. Another follows it, on her other side, and then something slight but similar at the hollow of her throat.
Sharp as a knife and burning like fire.
When the pain fades and her sight clears she’s half-collapsed in Vax’s arms, her brother holding her up as best he can.
“Stubby,” he says. “You can’t keep going like this.”
They argue. They rarely do, but when it happens it is always terrible and Vex knows Vax doesn’t mean to hurt her, truly, that he only wants to save her pain, but this is one of very few things that is hers and hers alone. She’s not about to give it up.
“There are ways,” Vax says. “You know there are. To break the bond, or to block it.”
“I’m not going to use them,” she says. “Leave them to endure that alone, thinking I’d abandoned them? Would you do that to yours? Would you do that if it were me?”
Vax is pacing and agitated. “What if they die, Vex?”
She lifts her chin, sets her shoulders. “Then at least they don’t die alone.”
Vax tries to bring it up again over the next day and a half and, over the next day and a half, Vex refuses to discuss it. Yes, there are potions to block the bond; yes, there are rituals to break it but she has no intention of using them. Her soulmate, whoever they are, is suffering. She’s not about to make them suffer more by severing the bond and she’s not about to risk never finding them by severing her ability to feel from them.
Besides. She doesn’t think fate would have tied them together if she was meant to drop them just because of something someone else inflicted on them. Fate bound her and Vax together as twins, and if she wouldn’t abandon Vax to this, she won’t abandon whoever her soulmate may be.
She clings to that, over the next day and a half, that certainty. She brings it out when Vax tries to push, and she shouts it at him the day he comes back to camp with a potion in hand and tries to offer it to her.
“It’s not a block!” he shouts when she refuses once more to cut her soulmate loose. “I swear to you. Vex. It’s not a block. Just something to help you sleep.”
He’s not lying. That much she knows: Vax will do many things to protect her, but he won’t lie to her - can’t lie to her. She refuses the potion anyway.
“No,” she says. “Nothing to muddy the bond. They’re hurting more than ever. I’m not going to just leave them to it.”
Indeed, young as her bond is, she’s been trying to reach down it, trying to send the emotions that a bond is said to be capable of sharing with time. She tries to send assurance, comfort, soothing soft things to try to ease the pain. She’s no idea if any of it is getting through.
“Vex-” Vax looks torn. Scared. She knows what he fears: people have gone mad from tortures inflicted on their soulmate before. She grips his hand in hers.
“Vax. Thank you. But not now.”
She’s woken in the wee hours. Trinket is a warm bulk at her back and Vax is curled a little distance away, a frown marring his forehead even in sleep. The fire, gone low, still crackles just a little, occasional small sparks flickering and floating up into the sky in the thin plume of smoke. She’s not sure what woke her until she feels it again.
Pain on the soles of her feet. Pain in even left-right-left-right patterns.
Her soulmate is walking somewhere and she can’t recall them ever being hurt this late at night, so late that, where she and Vax are, it’s almost early. It worries her. A change is never a good sign - a torturer getting bored, a torturer trying to throw their victim off, or, maybe, if her soulmate is walking now, their torturer is done with them. Maybe they’re due for death. At that thought alone she almost reaches for Vax but there’s a brief stabbing pain in her abdomen and even curled on the forest floor to sleep she doubles over from it. Then, a brief dull pain on her palm - she suspects they must have caught themselves on a wall.
That’s something, she supposes. If they were being led somewhere, then whomever was leading them would have caught them, even roughly. Hells, if they were being led somewhere to be hurt or be executed more likely they’d be hauled.
That they’re seemingly moving under their own strength is-
She doesn’t know if she should hope. She thinks that’s reckless. Still, she tries to send something down the bond, some kind of assurance or comfort. For a moment all the twinges of pain still.
When they resume there’s something gentle to them, something careful and Vex sends it again, assurance and comfort. I don’t know how to help you, she thinks. But damned if I’m not going to try.
She wakes to her brother’s hand on her shoulder, gently shaking. She’s bleary, tired, unsure when she dozed off. Trinket at her back nuzzles her shoulder but Vax’s face, though furrowed, isn’t as worried as it was. She reaches for the bond, but like last night it’s gone quiet; there had been a shock of cold, she remembers, painful in its intensity, and then nothing much at all except the occasional twinges she’s become used to.
“Still alive?” Vax’s tone is cursory, but the furrows in his brow, the tilt to his mouth give away his concern.
“For now,” Vex says. “I think they might’ve escaped.”
She doesn’t tell Vax of how bad a shape they seemed to be in, though. The stabbing pain to the abdomen, the pain in both hands and both feet like they were blistered and peeled raw. She suspects he can guess from her face, though.
The bond is almost concerningly quiet. But for the occasional twinges, Vex might almost think them gone entirely.
“They’re persistent,” Vax says. “Gotta give them that much.”
The bond is quiet. Vex doesn’t know what to make of it. At first, she had been hopeful: her soulmate, whomever they are, lived. They had survived the torture and it certainly seemed, from her end, that they might have escaped.
But she could barely feel them. There were still twinges, yes, she felt their wounds healing, but there was something numbed to it, as though the connection between them was fuzzed over and muffled. As though they themselves barely felt it.
“They’re alive,” Vax reminds her, when she brings it up. “That’s something at least, right?”
Maybe. But for how little she gets from them, even when their bond reaches its third full year, the year when it’s supposed to be easy and simple to pass emotions back and forth, there is nothing. She tries to send things - warmth, comfort, soft querying things and concern - but receives no response. She sends affection, too, because whoever this person is, fate has linked them together. She was born beside Vax by fate’s whim, and by fate’s whim she is bound to this person. Both, she knows, are meant to matter.
She sends: affection, kindness, warmth, comfort, concern and anxiety. She sends: fear and worry, nightmare-dread some evenings when she wakes with fears that they’ve vanished entirely because the bond has gone so weak. She sends, in the worst times: anger and frustration, something close to fury, because she’d known at least something of them, once - that they’d liked to work with their hands, clearly did things that led to all kinds of interesting accidents, that they took care of themselves when hurt but that it didn’t stop them from doing things that resulted in their getting hurt in similar ways again. They were persistent. They were practical. They likely had some interesting stories.
She knows nothing of them, now.
Sometimes, when she sends the worst, there is some vague inkling, almost dreamlike, that finds her in response. Something uncertain and lost, unsure why it’s being battered by such emotions. It’s like someone half asleep, like a very young child, like Trinket when Vax is in one of his moods. Unsure and uncertain, drowsy and dreamlike.
She has felt nothing from her bond in a year and a half. She knows they live. She suspects they may not have the will to live much longer if this is how they respond to even the worst of her emotions.
They’re fading, it feels like. The bond is at the lowest ebb it’s ever been; even new-made and slowly forming it had never been like this.
It has been four years since the bond formed. Almost two years since whatever horrible thing happened that put her soulmate through such pain.
There are days, sometimes, when she almost forgets it exists. There are other days when its strange empty blankness consumes her and she clings to it as tightly as she can, as though clinging to it, tugging on it, pulling it, will pull her soulmate’s attention away from whatever blankness they’re in and back to full life.
If she had not, she later thinks, if she had not clung to them, some days, and tried to pull them back from whatever brink they neared, she does not think she’d have felt them die.
Instead: she does. She feels something from the bond, even faded and weakened as it is, something awful and dark and choking, something like echo-memories of the echoes of pain she once got from them, something like grief and loss and anger and anguish and through it all pain, pain, pain. She clings to the bond now, not because she is trying to pull them back from it but because she has to. The pain consumes the bond but she welcomes it if only because it is something and because she has borne worse, that week-and-change two years ago.
She clings to the bond and it chokes her, like thick smoke, like ash, like tar. She clings to the bond and clings to her soulmate and tries to find the words and the right emotions to send but all she can find is something pleading, begging, praying, holding tight and wishing she had Trinket’s strength instead of her own.
She feels it start to fade, start to weaken, and maybe it is her imagination, refusing to fully face this all but she swears she feels that dreamlike presence reaching out, uncertain and unsure, some soft questioning tendril in amidst the pain and horror.
She knows, now. She cannot turn from the truth of it. Death has come for them and there is nothing she can do however much she might wish it.
The tendril reaches, unsure and uncertain and fading.
She reaches back. I’m here, she tries to send it. I’m right here, darling, I’ve got you. It’s all right.
It’s all right.