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When Percy screams, Vex'ahlia is the first to wake up.
She sees him next to her still asleep, sweat-soaked and tense, thrashing under the heavy winter blankets. On instinct she reaches for his arm. "Percy?"
His eyes fly open at her touch, wide and terrified but unfocused: he's still asleep. He jerks his arm away like she's burned him. "Don't touch me!" he screams, voice shrill and shot through with panic. "Get away from me!"
The sound of his terror is visceral, stomach-turning, and sends a shot of adrenalin spiking through Vex. She fights the instinct to shrink away. "Percy, wake up," she calls to him. "It's Vex'ahlia. You're safe, darling. I need you to wake up."
His eyes catch on her and he recoils in surprise, drawing away toward the edge of the bed as he scrambles to push himself upright. Vex is grateful for the clear skies and the window they've left open that lets bright moonlight spill into the room, giving Percy's poor night vision the best chance at understanding where he is and who he's with.
"Vex?" Percy asks, his voice uncertain. He's on the verge of hyperventilating, but Vex sees him fighting to regain control over his runaway body. "Vex'ahlia?"
"Yes, darling." Vex reaches tentatively for his hand, hopefully more neutral territory than his arm was, but Percy jerks away from that touch too. Her stomach churns at the rejection even as she steels herself against her own reaction. He's just woken up from a nightmare, give him a minute.
Percy frowns, eyes darting down to where she's withdrawn her hand. "I— sorry, dear. Sorry for— for waking you. Go back to sleep."
The lump Vex swallows is jagged and catches half way down her throat. It feels wrong to pretend nothing's happened while he's dripping with sweat, still winded and wide-eyed. On the mantle the clock chimes and Percy flinches at the sudden sound, his shoulders caving around him tight and protective.
If he won't accept comfort she'll find another way to help.
"Let me get you some water."
"I'm fine," Percy tries, but Vex is already out of the bed and pulling on her robe, driven to be useful.
Beyond the bed's foot Trinket raises his head and wuffs inquisitively, his eyes nearly as wide as Percy's. "Easy now, Trinket. Good boy." Vex pauses long enough to give him a soft word and a reassuring scratch behind the ear. Trinket grunts, his eyes and ears still turned toward Percy uneasily; he's still getting used to the new sleeping arrangements, still getting used to Percy's night patterns. "Everyone's all right, Trinket. I'm all right. Go back to sleep."
When Vex turns back to the bed, water in hand, Percy has thrown off the blankets. He's sitting on the edge of the bed, leaned forward with his elbows wedged against his knees, staring at the floor. Not wanting to take him by surprise, Vex makes her footfall heavier and disturbs every squeaking floor board; it's a relief when Percy lifts his head and meets her eyes briefly, a signal her reapproach won't trigger the same reaction her attempt to touch him did.
"Here, darling," Vex says, holding out the cup.
Percy stares blankly at it. A fist constricts around Vex's heart, painfully tight around it when it's still beating too fast, still churning through the excess of adrenaline created by his screams.
He's not going to take it. The only thing she could think to do for him, and it's not right.
"Thanks," Percy says quietly, and takes the cup. Vex swallows nervously as he stares into it, his jaw still tightly closed and tense. Water seems the farthest thing from his mind right now.
Is she hovering? She's hovering.
"Is it all right if I sit?"
Her question is tentative, her anxiety too obvious. If he says no, then what?
Percy sighs. "Yeah."
Vex sits. Delicately, on the edge of the bed. Near enough to touch him, but far enough to leave him space.
The silence is unbearable. Vex doesn't know how to break it, doesn't know what to do next, doesn't know what to say. She feels the strain of distance and press of claustrophobia. She doesn't know what to do with her hands.
"This is going to happen from time to time, I'm afraid," Percy says eventually. The half-hearted smile that doesn't reach his eyes is a poor mask. "I'm sorry, I should have warned you."
"It's fine." The words push up through Vex's throat and slip out of her mouth before she's had time to consider them. They're as poor a mask over the moment as Percy's helplessly grim smile. "Really, it's fine."
"It's not," Percy says flatly. "It is what it is."
The jagged lump is in Vex's throat again, misshapen and sharp. She twists her fingers into the bed sheets to stop herself from reaching for him and fights to repress every unhelpfully trite reassurance that's trying to climb past the blockage.
Trinket shifts and the floor creaks under him as he resettles. Vex doesn't know where to look. Her eyes bounce uncertainly between the floor and Percy and her own hand mangling the linens.
The silence becomes too much. Vex feels Percy pulling it even more tightly around himself. Neither of them have moved but he feels farther away now than when she sat down.
"Orthax?" Vex tries cautiously.
Percy turns his head to look at her properly for the first time since she sat down. His brow is drawn low over his eyes and his cheek hollows like he's chewing hard on the inside of it. The naked doubt and apprehension on his face is worse than the silence.
"You don't have to tell me," Vex counters quickly, looking away. Her voice sounds small, childish. This isn't about you, she scolds herself, digging harder into the blankets. If he's not ready, don't push him. "You said it was awful when you died. I don't need to know any more."
Another long silence pulls at the seams between them, feels like it's close to snapping threads. Percy's stare is heavy but Vex can't meet it.
"Not Orthax," Percy says after a while. Not quite reluctantly, but not quite willingly. When Vex dares to look at him again, he's gone back to staring through the bottom of the cup at the floor beyond it. "Not yet, anyway. The nightmares are about Ripley."
"Oh."
Her eyes dart down to the small, crater-shaped scar on Percy's chest, and Vex finds it too easy to remember what it looked like raw and bleeding. His blood oozed out of it too slowly, made sluggish without the pressure of a beating heart to drive it.
Vex frowns, clenching her teeth behind a face that's hard to hold stoic. Ripley is a different kind of ghost, one Vex has too much of her own baggage wrapped up in. She has distance from Orthax, but Ripley... Ripley is a monster Vex knows too well in some ways, and not at all in others.
I was not equipped for torture, Percy told them. I don't remember much.
Even then it was clear to her I don't remember much was a deflection, a way to draw the line between what Percy was willing to say and what he wasn't.
The moonlight through the window paints the scars on Percy's arms and legs bright white, making them easy for Vex's eyes to find in the dark. She has her own scars of course, it's impossible to do the things they've done and not amass a large collection of them. Some of the ones on Percy she knows the origin of, was there with a healing spell and a bandage to mop up the mess.
Some of them.
But not all of them. Not nearly all of them.
There are more scars on his back, dozens of unknown origin. Criss-crossing and thin, silvery-white and stubbornly matte where the rest of him is damp with sweat. Vex has felt the texture of them under her hands a dozen times now, knows they spread down the length of Percy's back and continue down his waist, down the sides of his hips and thighs. His chest too, and his stomach, before Raishan's claws buried them under new layers of scar tissue. They'd only just begun to learn each other's bodies then, but Vex remembers the feel of them under her palm that first night. When his stomach flexed hard under the strain of her teasing she smiled and traced the groove of one with the nail of her thumb.
I was not equipped for torture.
Percy doesn't talk about Ripley, not since Glintshore. Vex doesn't either.
And now, in the middle of the night, Vex is forced to wonder just how many of Percy's scars are from Ripley.
A red hot column of anger twists up a chest tight with guilt and burns at the tenderness swelling in Vex's throat. She twists the sheets tighter, harder, frowning at the scars on Percy's back as her mind tries to fill in their gaps with the implications of I was not equipped for torture.
"Vex."
The brittleness in Percy's voice catches her by surprise, and Vex feels her face flush fast and dark at being caught staring.
"Sorry," she stutters, swallowing as she averts her eyes away. Vex catches the look on his face only briefly, furrowed and frowning, the thin line of his mouth starker than his scars. "I didn't mean to— Sorry."
Another silence, deeper and more excruciating than the last. She should have guessed it was Ripley, should have known. Vex is frozen and sinking, caught between things she doesn't know how to reconcile and things she doesn't want to risk losing. Ripley's scars are barbed wire Vex doesn't know how to cross.
And then Percy's hand is there, resting softly over the one Vex has clutched around a fistful of bed sheets. She has to look at him then, she has to. How could she not?
"I don't want you to be afraid to touch me," Percy says quietly. He's staring at their hands like there's something there he needs but is afraid to grab for. "If I'm afraid, and you're afraid, then she wins. I don't want a cruel dead woman to win."
The plea in his voice doesn't melt the blockage in her throat, but it gives Vex a reason to start digging through it. It's a relief to let go of the blankets and turn her palm, to spread her fingers through his and feel them curl close around her hand in response.
The door between them opens, just a crack.
"You've never spoken about what happened all those years ago, with Ripley. Not really." Vex bites her lip and watches his face carefully. If she pushes too fast he might bolt. "Do you want to?"
Percy swallows hard and keeps staring at their hands. Slowly, cautiously, his thumb starts skimming across the back of hers. Vex stays still, anchoring herself to the methodical pacing of his touch, waiting for him to decide what to do with her question. She doesn't know what to hope his answer will be.
"There was an heirloom we kept on the mantle in the sitting room, a clockwork timer commissioned for the family long ago." Percy's still watching their hands and his voice is quiet, almost hushed. The pace of his words is slow, as if he's having to think carefully about the shape of each one. "It was garish, an overly complicated thing. I was fascinated by it as a boy. I liked to watch the gears and the escapement."
His voice cracks a little, then, and the silence returns. Heavy and unfinished, something important balanced precariously on the edge of abandonment. The movement of Percy's thumb stumbles to a halt and his fingers tighten around hers. His face becomes fragile, and the thing haunting him starts to seep through the cracks.
On instinct Vex shifts her hold on his hand and takes over the motion that seemed to soothe him before, tries to find the pace of gentle strokes over the tremble of his thumb that reaches him. Come back to me. Please come back to me.
Slowly, so slowly, the tension in Percy's hand eases. Not completely, but maybe enough.
"The timer would run for ten minutes, and it rang a small bell attached to one of the gears every minute. The only thing we used it for was a game called Bell Story. One of us would start telling a story, and when the chime rang someone else would have to take up where that person left off. We only played it on the coldest nights of winter, when there was nothing else to do but stoke the fire and pile under blankets with tea and hot cider."
Vex smiles at the thought of all those children bundled under blankets, entertaining each other with stories. "It sounds lovely. Cosy."
"It was silly, but it kept the cold away," Percy says. Something that might be a smile lightens the shadows hung across his face. "No matter what ridiculous state it was in, the person to take that last minute had to find a way to finish it at the bell. Vesper was best at it. She was so clever. Her endings always left us roaring with laughter, spilling cider everywhere. Mother would scold us all for being clumsy, but her blanket was often just as damp as anyone's."
Percy stops again for a time, long enough Vex wonders if he'll leave it there. She tries to keep herself still and steady for him, keeps sliding the pad of her thumb across his over and over. Something in the thickness of the silence tells Vex it's important he's the one to decide when and how to break the silence he's drawn so close around himself.
The clock on the mantle ticks. The fire under it crackles, and spits an ember up into the flue. Crisp winter air drifts through the window.
Vex wonders what it would have been like, to sit with the de Rolos downstairs. To wrap her hands around a steaming cup and lean her weight into Percy's side under a shared blanket. How lovely it would have been, to watch him and his siblings spin a silly little story between the ticks and the chimes of a timing clock made just for them, just for this little game the de Rolos liked to play on cold winter nights.
It makes her heart ache, makes the lump in her throat throb. It feels like losing her mother again, like holding Vax's hand and staring at the cold, charred remains of the house they laughed in.
How strange it is, to grieve people she never met.
When Percy decides to continue, his voice is harder. "Ripley was just as charmed by the timer as I was. She brought it down to the dungeons, along with the sharpest kitchen knife she could find. She strung me up by my wrists, until my feet just barely touched the floor. Then she wound the timer and started asking her questions. Every time the bell rang, she would cut me with the knife."
Anger like dragon fire erupts through Vex's chest. She holds the sound of it in and bites her lip hard, knowing her anger could smash apart the brittle thing Percy's trying to hold at arms length and send the shards of it cutting back into him.
"Ten minutes. Ten cuts. Then she wound it up again and kept going. More questions, more chimes, more cuts of her knife. There were so many questions I didn't know the answers to. I tried screaming. I tried begging. I even tried lying. I would have done anything to stop that knife, to stop her from winding that timer up again. She wound it six times. Sixty cuts. I've never even seen half of them, the ones on my back. But I know she wound the timer six times. I hate that I know there's sixty of them. I shouldn't know there's exactly sixty of them."
It has never been more difficult for Vex'ahlia to be gentle, and never more important. The anger she feels is for Ripley, and she has to keep it as far from Percy as she can right now. Later she can figure out what to do with it, how to manage it, but right now Vex's anger isn't what Percy needs.
Vex holds his hand and strokes his thumb and tries not to think about what he must have sounded like screaming between the bells that used to ring alongside his dead family's laughter.
"The interrogation was the first day. Her experiments came later." The raw, scraped-open sound of his voice is almost more than Vex can bear. "I think she was just trying to keep herself entertained, after it was clear I didn't have anything the Briarwoods wanted."
"How long?" asks Vex quietly, carefully. "How long were you down there, with her, before you and Cassandra escaped?"
"Five days," Percy says, and the number is a hammer that strikes hard into Vex's stomach and steals her breath. She sees his left hand tighten around the cup of water, sees him glance at a line of too-tidy burn scars on the inside of his thigh near his knee. Sees his left shoulder twitch sharply and uncomfortably backward. "The rest of them, I can't—" He inhales a shaking breath and squeezes her hand so hard Vex can't tell the difference between his pulse and her own. "Not yet. Not tonight."
"Okay," she tells him. "Okay."
"I thought— I thought her death might be the end of it. I searched for the timer today, in the rooms she used."
"Did you find it?"
Percy shakes his head. The breath he exhales then is exhausted, a sound Vex feels in her chest. It's a dry, empty fatigue, the kind she's only felt after hours of crying. The ticking of the clock is newly ominous now, the impending chime a snare set to trap him.
"I think she took it with her." Percy frowns into the cup darkly, bitterly. But he's too threadbare to hold the anger for long and wilts again. "I don't know if it's for the best that it's gone, or if it makes it worse."
Vex traces the shape of his knuckle a moment. "If it is found one day, do you... want it back?"
Percy's jaw shifts and his brow furrows. "I... don't know. Maybe. Maybe just to smash it."
"I could have Trinket sit on it for you, if you like."
He doesn't laugh, but the harsh line of his brow softens. "It would be the first de Rolo heirloom to be destroyed by the arse of a bear. It would be quite a way to go." Percy's lip twitches upward at the corner, smiling just a little at the thought of it. Then he drinks some of the water she brought him, and it loosens the knot in Vex's throat to see it.
Another silence settles over them, still heavy but less suffocating. Nothing's been resolved, but the cracks feel less urgent now, the danger of breaking less imminent. "Do you want to sleep?" Vex asks after a while. "It's all right if the answer is no. I'll stay awake with you. I don't want you to be alone, not tonight."
Percy considers, glancing sidelong at the disheveled blankets he tossed aside. "I want to try to sleep," he decides. "I might not be able to. But I want to try."
They slide back under the blankets together. Percy lays on his back and Vex tucks herself alongside him, gentle against the length of his body so he doesn't feel trapped, with her hand on his chest so he knows she'll stay close. Her thumb inevitably finds the line of a scar, the cut of it thin and straight across the right side of his chest. And there's another one slicing under her palm, its slightly feathered edges shifting as he breathes.
Are they some of the sixty? Or are they from a different day? One of the experiments Percy can't bring himself to talk about yet?
Vex feels herself start to freeze again, starts to second-guess the placement of her hand. Is it wrong, to touch him there? Will the slide of her thumb over it remind Percy too much of the cut of a blade? How can she know what will help him and what will hurt him? Vex stares at Percy's face, searching for a tremor in the stillness of it, waiting with increasing anxiety to find the evidence her touch is unwelcome.
"Is this all right?" she asks.
"Yes," Percy replies. Vex feels his hand move over hers, feels his thumb start to guide her thumb over the length of the scar reassuringly. He opens his eyes and stares up at the ceiling. "When I pulled away before—" he pauses at the way his own words catch in his throat. "Ah. My left hand is, um. Particularly skittish? In those moments when things are... closest."
It was his left hand Vex reached for, when he first woke up. Something in Vex eases a little at knowing, at being able to start creating a map of what to do and not do, what part of him to reach for and what part of him to protect. "Okay. Anywhere else I should be mindful of, in the middle of the night?"
"My left shoulder can be... a bit of a minefield. My right knee. And the, ah— the first of the— the sixty. It's on the inside of my right bicep." He sighs. "The rest is enough of a muddle, I think."
Left hand, left shoulder. Right knee, right arm. Vex adds the information to her little hoard of it, and the tightness in her chest loosens a bit more. It will be easier to help him well, next time Percy needs her. "Thank you for telling me. For trusting me."
"I should have told you sooner," Percy says quietly. He turns his head toward her, and his frown is apologetic, preoccupied. "I should have told you."
"It's all right," Vex tells him. It is, it will be. "I understand why you didn't."
Instead of softening the furrow of his brow deepens. "No, I meant—" Percy halts, searching her for the words he's looking for. Vex feels his hand pull hers across his chest and press her palm over the one scar Ripley left on him that Vex knows better than she knows any scar on her own body: the shot that went through his heart. The shot that killed him.
The look on his face is urgent, confusing. Vex doesn't understand what he needs from her. "Percy?"
"I love you, Vex'ahlia."
The words come as a shock and Vex's mouth drops open. A new and different kind of adrenalin surges through her, pumped into her by a heart that's straining her chest's ability to hold it inside her.
"I wasn't raised to say such things easily, even and especially when it's true," Percy says quietly. The way he looks at her, the way he sees right through her— it's terrible and wonderful and Vex has never felt as vulnerable as she does right now. How did he know? How did he see it? "I'm sorry for making you wait so long to hear it, for making you doubt. I heard you, it was the only thing I heard in the dark, and the reason I'm here is because this is yours, Vex'ahlia."
He presses her palm into his heart, spreads their fingers wide over it like he intends for her to reach into his chest and lift it out of him. "It was yours already, long before I died. I should have told you."
"Percy—" His name catches, caught in her throat that isn't working because it's too full of something she didn't know was missing.
He loves me. He said he loves me. He said it. He means it.
Vex has lived too long managing the gaping hole in her own heart she doesn't know what to do when someone else is holding it this tightly, this closely and with so much certainty. The safety of it is overwhelming, brighter and stronger than any amount of gold could ever be.
Percy leaves her hand over his heart and reaches up to touch her cheek. He whisks aside a tear Vex didn't know was there. "You deserve something better than to be told here, in the middle of the night after I woke up screaming in your bed. I should have told you, dear. I'm sorry, I should have told you."
Vex closes her eyes and swallows. Her throat is full but swallowing doesn't hurt like it did before. "It means more to hear it like this," she admits in a whisper. "It means it's true."
Percy waits for Vex to be brave enough to open her eyes. When she does, he's still there. She knew he would be, and that's the part she needed. The certainty.
"It is true, Vex'ahlia," he tells her, wiping another tear away. "I love you."
She laughs because she can. Because her heart is eight sizes too big to fit behind her ribs and her head feels like it's floating on a thread of light and Vex isn't afraid Percy will misunderstand because he loves her. She knows he loves her.
And maybe she knew it before. But Vex needed to hear it, to give herself permission to believe it.
Percy kisses her lightly, his lips smiling around the breath of her laughter. "Crying and laughing, I've definitely done something worthwhile, then."
Joy hums in her chest and the vibration of it warms her down to her toes. "You're starting to sound like my brother. All earnest and sappy."
"That's very hurtful, Vex dear," Percy scolds. The terribly emphatic, terribly serious look is quite undercut by the flush on his cheeks and the warm smile in his eyes. "You've been very kind and very understanding about the screaming business, and then you go and say a hurtful thing like that."
Vex kisses him back, light and soft and smiling. "Try to sleep, darling. There's plenty of time to be earnest and sappy at me in the morning."
"Yes, dear."
Percy's left hand — the skittish one, the vulnerable one — slips underneath Vex's hand on his chest, nestling under the weight of her palm. Vex doesn't know if he's done it on purpose or done it unconsciously, but it doesn't matter which it is because what it means is the same either way.
The winter air is cold, but the fire and the heavy blankets and their pocket of shared body heat keeps them warm. Vex traces the shape of Percy's hand with her fingers, and waits for him to fall asleep.
It takes a while, and the first hour is fitful. But eventually his breathing deepens and his body relaxes fully into the bed. And as the clock on the mantle chimes, Vex falls asleep too.