No That ISN'T Normal

[wrecking_yard]

I've found a place in the hallway overlooking the courtyard - more of a glorified covered balcony with doors along part of it than a hallway, really - as the meeting on our return winds down. We were prepared to go back up the others immediately in whatever they've gotten into (and it's inevitable they've gotten into SOMETHING) - battered, bruised, and and all - but basically everyone else at the table told us we were resting for the night in no uncertain terms.

I can hear muffled other conversation still meandering when Vex wanders out to rest on the banister, checking on Trinket sleeping in the courtyard. She does seem to have half noticed me, but hasn't said anything yet, making things incredibly awkward after what happened in the Feywild.

It's funny; neither of us have said much solid directly to the other. Just me to her father, and her to the corrupted Archfey.

"I wasn't sure how you would take that - to be honest, I hadn't even thought it through very much until after I'd said it... but I would've made good on it one way or another, even if it had turned out I overstepped."

She quietly snorts. "Oh believe me, I know. I don't think Father realizes that you don't bluff on things like that." She gives me a sidelong look. "But really, darling - have you mentioned getting ahead of yourself about a wedding to your sister yet?" I blanche, and her sly smirk widens. "I may not know which fork goes where, but I know my way around laws and what titles mean what."

I try to recover, adjusting my glasses. "I should have known." She's just watching, fondly smug, while I fix my coat collar. "I had to do something. I'd caught that your relationship with your father was ...." Dogshit? "Strained, but I hadn't fathomed how bad he was. Just - the way he talked to you, to his own children, next to how fast he changed his tone to me when he realized I was nobility.... it was horrifying."

She's quiet and - confused? - for a couple long moments. "You don't have to exaggerate like that, Percy dear."

"I'm not exaggerating," I hiss through my teeth.

She raises an eyebrow; there's an uncomfortable ear twitch, then she looks away, and there's a familiar faint sound of metal mechanisms. "This truly is amazing work."

So we're postponing that subject for now - it's not one that can be avoided forever. "It's a prototype. Given time and materials, I can make more; I have draft schematics for variations that can carry different alchemic payloads for targeting weaknesses or giving the impact more kick. I'm still working on a convenient means of retrieval, though..."

She smiles. "I like pretty jewelry as much as anyone, but this is so much better than a ring." She triggers the mechanism again, the extra blades flicking out, and shifts her weight to sidle a little closer.

"Percy! When were you going to tell me you were engaged!"

I startle back into the stone pillar, and Vex wheels around brandishing the mechanical arrowhead. Cassandra is standing about a foot out of Vex's reach, grinning wickedly.

"When did you learn to sneak like that?!"

She tilts her head at me, and the subject is Thoroughly Dropped. "So how long has there been a betrothal?"

"About a day and a half, for us." Vex is slowly relaxing from the startle, and the mechanical arrowhead has disappeared. Feywild time is a mess; three days for us, three weeks for everyone else.

"And you never told me what you were planning?" Cassandra glances between us, and I can see the wheels turning weighing who would've initiated.

I raise both hands, open and empty. "I didn't have a plan, it just sort of - happened."

Cassandra's laughing to herself. I can hear Keyleth talking quietly in the conference room, which means Vax is still in that room and occupied.

I think.

Hopefully.

"Anyway, if you two want to continue your heart to heart, you may want to take it out of the main hallway between the conference room and everyone's chambers?"

"Yes. An excellent idea."

I can hear her still laughing to herself as she passes through the other door out of sight.

Vex is snickering all the way to my chambers, with nothing more said until the door is solidly shut and she's settled at the table.

"... You know you really didn't need to exaggerate like that." It's faster than I'd expected her to be willing to reopen that conversation.

"And as I said before, I wasn't exaggerating."

"Percy. Horrifying." She's got an eyebrow raised, the last word repeated as if it were ridiculous.

I nod grimly, arms folded.

"You've been tortured by a vampire and possessed by a demon, and you say calling my father horrifying isn't an exaggeration?"

"The way he treated you and blew off his own children, only making a token effort to make nice with me and me alone because I had a rank and title? With every sign that kind of behavior is -" I pause, taking a deep breath and trying to focus my composure again, rubbing the bridge of my nose under my glasses. "Let me make sure I have this straight. He knocked up a human woman, did fuck all to support her while she was struggling, barely acknowledged your existence for years, then treated you like shit where nothing you could do would ever be right once you were brought into his care? And neither paid attention nor told you when she died horribly?"

She opens her mouth a couple times, closes it, then rests her chin on her palm, elbow propped on the table. "Well, yes, if you put it that way." She waves it off with a half-shrug. "He's a noble, what can I say."

"He's the sort of noble I was warned about as a child and given pointers on dealing with, the way one gives pointers on how to survive encounters with a venomous serpent."

That just seems to baffle her. "Like you weren't held to high expectations?"

"What I saw there wasn't 'high expectations'!" I gesture at her. "My father spoke more warmly and kindly to random beggars than yours did to you!" It's also an incredibly low bar to be above, enough that the degree of difference left unsaid feels insulting to their memory. "I was supposed to learn swordplay and got a pass when they realized I was incompetent at it! Our father used to go out riding and bring back wildflowers for our mother, and always brought extras for Cass, Mother had running deals with the booksellers for me even if almost nobody there understood what I was doing, Archie was practically treated like a fourth sibling after a while!" I stalk over to the bookshelf - Cass managed to sift out the books that had been mine and not part of the main library. "Dwarven engineering treatises, travelogues, studies on the Feywild -" All books they'd requested from traveling merchants on my behalf.

"...You weren't a half-elf raised outside the city," she states, distant and distracted.

"And that matters why? It was his indiscretion, not yours! Besides, you met Archie, he was a dwarf whose parents were servants and they just accepted that we were close friends and spoke to him no less kindly than to me!" Cass with wildflowers in her hair, confused but polite nods at my rambling about the latest thing I was studying and assurances that my inventions and research would help the people one day... so much that hadn't come up in years, draining the energy out of my anger. "I wish you could've met them... they would've loved you."

Sitting in a tree, a wooden sword forgotten on the far side of the courtyard; the guard captain who'd been tutoring is sitting on the side with his head in his hands while Cass is prowling around the base of the tree like a shark, her practice sword still in hand. Our parents just entering and surveying the scene, Mother struggling to not laugh, Father just shaking his head - "Percy, make sure you marry someone who can hold their own in a fight. You can't always rely on guards, and Pelor knows you'll need all the help you can get if something goes wrong."

Then Vex is nudging my shoulder, tugging for me to follow her to sit on the edge of the bed. She shifts the hand to an arm around my shoulders as soon as I'm sitting. "They sound lovely - I would have liked to meet them myself." Her voice has dropped quiet, soft and gentle.

Everything feels disjointed, I'm leaning on her, and I end up with a cloth in one hand going through the motions of cleaning the hardware on my hand. "Sorry." It's only half enunciated. "I wanted to help you, and ..."

"Hush. You are helping."

All I manage is a quiet noise of confusion.

"If you weren't you and like this... I'd tell myself you were making things up to make a point." Well...it's something. "Do you want to tell me more about noble families that don't treat most of the people around them like shit?"

It... really has been years since I've thought about how things were before the Briarwoods.

--------
I wake up with my throat raw, my eyes sore, disheveled, with Vex asleep still curled around me with enough determination that I'm not going anywhere. My coat is draped over the chair, my glasses and the prosthetic hardware are on the side table on the other side of her. The first dim light of dawn is coming through the window, and among the birdsong there's a muffled voice outside on the roof - Keyleth is talking to the birds.

Well, that's part of our morning intel handled that might take her a while; no need to be in a hurry to move.

I've half dozed off again when there's the faint echo of a knock on a door just down the hallway.

Two doors down or so.

The door to Vex's room.

There's footsteps, and then a voice in the hallway outside the door. "Vex? Are you up already?"

She starts awake with an unintelligible mumble, and I have growing dread that he didn't accidentally stop in front of my door. Vex sits up, detangling from me, and there's no sign of Vax moving from where he is in the hallway; he COULD cover his footsteps, sure, but I doubt he's moved and am increasingly sure this whole thing is intentional.

Vex stretches. "Good morning." She seems unconcerned with the wake up call as she glances around the room. "Hm. Usually I'm picking my clothes up off the floor when I wake up in someone else's room."

I bury my face in the blanket and mumble; that's what it's going to look like anyway.

She squeezes my shoulder as she gets up. "Well, we should get back to everyone - find out what those three have gotten themselves into in the last three weeks."

Grog, Pike, and Scanlan, completely unsupervised - that's going to be spectacular.

By the time I drag myself upright, she's fixed her clothes and retrieved her new feather from the side table. She passes my glasses and prosthetic over, and while I'm checking the scarred hole in my hand and adjusting that, she's taking a minute to fix her hair more solidly out of the way.

She's through the door barely ahead of me, and I'm still pulling my coat on as it closes behind me. Vax is leaning on the far wall with a slight raised eyebrow, but he doesn't say anything as we make our way to the small side-kitchen at the end of the hallway.

Keyleth must have started the coffee on her way outside; I get a mug and sit down, hoping it will help with my head feeling full of overly dry cotton balls. Vax sits down with a plate, a roll, and a mug already set out; he must've gotten his own breakfast and then gone to see what was taking us so long. He stays quiet until Vex is partly through getting her own coffee.

"{So. Thorns, sister?}"

Elvish, which means it's sibling bickering - Keyleth and Scanlan are out of the room, so they're avoiding being understood as far as they know.

Her answer is an apple bouncing off his head while he takes a sip from his mug; there's a muffled squawk but he manages to avoid choking on or spitting out his coffee, catching the apple with one hand before it hits the floor and setting it on the table.

I pull it over to stare at; I should eat something.

"{Look, after what happened back there, I'm not complaining about you two, I'm just wondering how long this's been more than some occasional hookup for you - like if it was around when you started using pet names.}" Which... was back on the way to face the Briarwoods, I think? She throws another apple at him, but he catches this one on one his knives without looking, calmly eating it off the blade.

"{So I get attached to sad (not translatable) with no one else left. It's not the first time it's happened, and for all your half-hearted complaints at the time, Trinket's saved our lives many times.}"

He shoots her a very unimpressed look over the apple while she's picking through the things left out on the counter for us - she's making an actual attempt at breakfast, unlike Vax with one roll and my possible apple. "{And you were trying to prod at me about not watching my feelings?}"

She makes a frustrated noise and turns with her food, setting it on the table heavily. "{There was a good bit you missed and-}" She freezes with a half-glance in my direction; I'm just watching them and sipping my coffee. She shifts her jaw, visibly turning pieces over.

"{And what?}" Vax glances between her and me, not following what just happened.

She turns to look straight at me. "{Whatever you're thinking, you may as well say it.}"

Vax's expression as the implication clicks into place is priceless.

"{You were trying to warn him away from Keyleth on the way to face the Briarwoods?}"

Vax facepalms, muttering a few curses into his hand.

Vex sighs, slumping down into her chair. "{Look, he's made some spectacular bad decisions in the past. It was a tense time.}"

After meeting Zahra, I'm a little afraid to hear what would count as a 'worse' bad decision than that enough for her to feel like she needs to herd him.

"{I am bewildered and flattered - I hadn't known what to make of the flirting at the time, but - I was acting erratic with visible signs of something seriously wrong and a demon hijacking me periodically, and you thought he needed warned about Keyleth?}" Vax is wheeze-laughing into his coffee, and she's poking her breakfast in sullen resignation.

"So." He's switched to common. "How long have you been able to speak Elvish?"

"Since he started reading records of the Feywild written in Elvish," Vex grumbles. "I don't know if you noticed, but Father wrote that writ of passage in Elvish, too."

Vax blinks. "I didn't get a good look at it."

I sift through the coat pockets for the extradimensional storage, and slide it across the table to him; he unrolls it. At first there's a resigned sigh - it is, indeed, entirely in Elvish - then he looks down again to read it closer with his eyes narrowed. "You forged those titles onto it?!" He passes it to her, laughing. "Gods, he'd have you barred from the city if he knew!"

"That's his problem." I sip my coffee and carve a piece off the apple.

Vex is blinking at the paper in disbelief; I've almost never seen her thrown off guard like that. "He would be livid if he knew - why did you bother?"

"Because one way or another, I wasn't bluffing." I'll need to make sure Cassandra knows the exact wording, but I know she'll back me up on it. "Also petty spite. A great deal of petty spite."

Vax is smiling over his coffee.

Vex is still trying to process it. "If you make it fully official, do you think he'll acknowledge it?"

I roll my eyes and shrug. "I suspect he won't until there's formal ceremony, and even then he'll only use it in public, chewing ground glass the whole time. That's the beauty of spite; it doesn't matter if he accepts it or not, we still win."

She half-laughs, still staring at the paper.

"I couldn't stand by and watch him treat you like that," I re-iterate firmly; I'll keep going back to it as a reminder until she fully accepts what a bitch her father is.