Work Text:
Now
This isn’t brunch; it’s an intervention.
Cassandra knows the moment she enters the breakfast room and finds Percival alone, the table set for two. His invitation four days prior pleading for ‘a De Rolo family gathering, Vesper has seen too little of you’ did swift work of guilting her into giving a promise to attend - yet the blessed child is absent, along with her lady mother.
Percival rises the moment Cassandra’s stepped over the threshold. He hurries to close the door behind her while she’s still processing the change in parameters, then pulls out her chair with a swift, beckoning motion.
“Please, take a seat,” Percival says, his gloved hands resting lightly on the backrest, ready to arrange her at the table just so. “We’ve needed to have a discussion for quite some time, now.”
*
Earlier
She wakes up with a start, bolting upright in bed, gasping for breath. Trish twitches to alertness in the chair beside her bed, immediately fully awake.
“Lady Cassandra? Everything alright?”
“Yes. Just a nightmare.”
Her heart pounds, the blood pulsing in her ears. This time it was the one with Percival dying. Where she cradles his corpse, wild with rage, and slaps his face, his lolling head. She yells at him for leaving her, until she wakes up.
Cassandra shivers. In her throat, she can still feel the screams.
*
Now
The breakfast room, gets sun in the morning. At ten thirty on a cloudless day in late spring the light makes the silverware shine, the crystal glasses sparkle, the gold trim on the stark white bone porcelain cups glimmer and gleam. The windows overlook the city and stretch from floor to ceiling, providing breakfasters with a splendid view, as well as making the room entirely uninhabitable during winter.
Cassandra sits. The chair slides in beneath her. Percival rounds the table - it’s the smaller, oval one, not the one that seats a family of nine - and takes his place opposite her. He folds his hands, elbows proper by his sides. The room is large and still around them.
He has dressed with decorum: starched cravat, velvet coat, lace trimmed cuffs spilling out of his sleeves. Cassandra’s dress has an inkstain by the trim from yesterday and she didn’t bother to pin on a finer collar, tie a sash around her waist or switch the woolen shawl she wears to ward of the chill that lingers in the castle walls for one of silk, or even muslin.
She squeezes the handle of her teapot hard as she pours herself a cup. She’d have come armored, too, had she known.
“I’m not entirely sure how to begin this,” Percival says, as if he hasn’t mapped out exactly what to say, as if he isn’t constantly planning out his interactions, mapping his conversation partners, pulling phrases from the vast library of retorts inside his head.
“Where is Vex’ahlia?” Cassandra counters, reaching for a slice of toast. “I expected to see her and Vesper here as well.”
“Yes. I may not have been very forthright with you on that.”
“You don’t say.”
Cassandra purses her lips, picks up her knife and slices a wingtip off the little sculpted butter swan sitting at the center of the table. She starts spreading it over her bread, the edge of the knife scraping against the crisp surface.
“I apologize for the deception.” Percival smiles. He lets out an exhale that’s half a chuckle, his eyebrows sloping abashedly. A little sheepish, not at all regretful. ”I didn’t happily resort to it, but you’ve made yourself increasingly difficult to reach.” Pause for effect. “Literally and figuratively. Your personal guards have been turning me away the last few times I’ve tried to go see you.” A frown has crept into his voice. “They refused to let me know in what manner you were ‘indisposed,’ so I had very little to tell the other members of the Chamber of Whitestone when they came asking for you. Apparently, they’ve had to go without your leadership for over two months.” He sighs. “Which is concerning enough on its own, without you closing yourself off in your rooms and barely leaving the castle. I feel… I’m quite certain, in fact, that you’ve been avoiding me. Along with your other...,” he searches briefly for the right word, “...contacts. Colleagues, and allies. Clearly, something is going on here, and I feel… I feel it’s time-” Another sigh, a hint of self-reproach, “In fact, it’s long overdue.” When he speaks next, his voice is firm. “I feel it’s important that you and I sit down and speak openly about a few things. That you and I have a frank conversation.”
He stops talking, waits for her to react. Seconds pass, one after the other.
Cassandra lifts her eyes from her plate to him.
Says, “Pass the marmalade, please.”
*
Earlier
Percival returns.
He defeats the Briarwoods and forgives her betrayal, drops the Chamber of Whitestone in her lap, and leaves.
Percival returns. He drops a number of refugees in her lap, and leaves.
Percival returns. He drops a war council in her lap, and leaves.
Percival returns. He drops a green dragon in her lap, and leaves.
Percival returns. He drops the plans for an extensive heating system in her lap, and leaves.
A mounting pile of papers on her desk, people waiting on her word. Percival leaves.
*
Now
Percival hands her the little silver bowl the only purpose of which is to hold the particular sour orange marmalade they both prefer, the kind that’s more bitter than sweet. The head of the marmalade spoon is shaped like a leaf, reminiscent of the sun tree. Cassandra scoops up a good dollop, gives Percival a nod and a “thank you”, and keeps tending to her toast.
“You’re welcome,” Percival says. He shifts in his seat, takes off his gloves before touching a hand to his face to run his fingers over his cheek.
He’s waiting for her to respond, still. Cassandra bites into her toast and lets him.
“I’m rather concerned about you.”
Percival motions a hand towards her, a slight tremble of impatience in the flick of his wrist.
“You can see why, I’m sure,” he says. “This… This self-imposed isolation. It’s not healthy. It’s not like you. I’ve asked the servants and they tell me you go days without so much as opening the curtains in your rooms.”
“Would you pass the eggs?”
He frowns, but meets her request. The eggs lie in a brass bowl cleverly crafted to resemble a straw basket, lined with a soft cotton cloth. There are little egg cozies for each individual egg to keep them warm, the padded fabric cocoons embroidered with the de Rolo crest in gold thread.
“Thank you,” Cassandra says, picking one out for herself, unwrapping it and placing it in the silver egg cup beside her plate. Its shape resembles a little sun tree, the egg resting in its crown.
“You’re welcome.”
Percival watches her decapitate the egg with a decisive cut with the edge of her egg spoon and dig into the creamy yolk. He opens and closes his mouth a few times, trying out and discarding words in his mind, no doubt. The frown remains.
“It worries me,” he says. “Your behavior, it worries me.”
“The salt, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“Here you go.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. You’ve apparently given the order to stop working on the heating system beneath Whitestone. Without consulting anyone else.”
“Juice. Would you be so kind?”
Percival moves the tall carafe within Cassandra’s reach, still speaking. “I’ve heard you’ve been saying some truly unkind things to some of the people close to you. Keeper Yennen, told me of what you've directed at him. Reluctantly, mind. The man wasn’t happy to go behind your back but he felt, as do I, that this had to be addressed.”
Cassandra pours with a steady hand. In meetings, where she sets the agenda for leaders of nations, she has learned to distance herself from her body, to keep any signs of nervousness or agitation at bay by severing most tethers of awareness to her physical self. She knows how to do it without thinking. It requires no effort at all.
She says, “If you could pass the black pudding, please.”
This time, Percival doesn’t move.
“Stop it,” he says.
“Stop what?”
“This… This thing you’re doing”
Cassandra raises a brow. “Eating?”
He glares at her. “You’re entirely transparent and not particularly amusing.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.” Cassandra holds up the tray next to her, tilts her head. “Lox, brother?”
*
Earlier
They have hung her family from the Sun Tree.
“Don’t look, sweetling,” Delilah said when they walked her past. “Don’t look,” but she looked, and she saw.
Cassandra stares at the scrap of portrait hidden at the back of her closet, at her mother’s dimples, at her father’s beard, at her little brothers’ little boy grins. In the picture, everyone is happy and whole, no skin is torn, all flesh and bone as it should be. Cassandra looks at the portrait. She looks and she looks.
*
Now
"You're being impossible."
Percival has expressive hands, as communicative as his extensive vocabulary. When he gestures at her the movements of his fingers are dismissive and the angle of his wrist is precise, aristocratic, boasts of the good breeding they’ve both been blessed and burdened with.
Cassandra sips her tea. She takes it black; Percival puts sugar in his.
"I'm so very sorry for not responding well to being ambushed,” she says. She’s tired already. Of the word sparring game, of the day. It’s still some time until noon. “At brunch, no less."
“Well, I’m sorry. I am. But we can't avoid this."
"Speak for yourself."
"Fine.”
Her brother, Cassandra has learned, is a man who fancies himself an individual of great composure, capable of maintaining his calm under pressure and making decisions with a cool head and unflappable demeanor.
The truth isn’t quite so perfect. He is, in fact, a man of deep emotion, a man who when he bristles, when the ropework of manners and resolve that ties this roiling mass of feelings together, snaps and some tendrils of them escape, is as much at the mercy of his mounting agitation as a snowball rolling downhill is at the mercy of gravity.
“Fine,” Percival repeats, with a drawn out f, the emphasis on consonants that signifies he’s entered the first stage of his anger. This might have been brewing for a while, if all it takes is a half-hearted display of reticence to set him off.
“I shall speak for myself then,” Percival says, “and say that what I’m seeing in you right now is something that scares me. Yes, scares me. It reminds me of some dark places, some very dark places. Some very dark and destructive paths I hope to god I won’t have to watch you walk down, because I know where they lead.
“Here’s what I see.” He holds up a hand, counts on his fingers. “One, you spending days in your room, not speaking to anyone. Staying indoors, curtains drawn, sending your food back.
“Two, you’re not attending the Chamber meetings, and I get to hear this because no one can make any decisions without you, and we need to make decisions. You have a responsibility and I know it’s a lot, I know it’s one we all have to share, but you’re especially needed. Your authority, your expertise… The Chamber is a chicken running around without its head without you. And you’re leaving it to stagger blindly, which isn’t like you. Not like you at all.”
He looks at her intently while he speaks. Quickly, unrehearsed, now, little drops of spittle landing on his empty plate.
“Three, you’re canceling projects already under way. On your own. Projects signed off and agreed upon are now suddenly at a standstill because Lady Cassandra de Rolo has determined it. Which I only find out when I go looking through work orders, by the way. I certainly don’t hear it from you.
“And four, and this most importantly, you’re behaving atrociously towards the rest of us. If it was only the silence and the- the utter disengagement from your own life that would be bad enough, but the comments? Send people away if you must, but do it with grace, at the very least.” His expression twists with hurt. “I don’t know if you thought you were being witty, but referring to my six month old child as ‘the timesuck’ isn’t funny. It’s cruel, and only one example of your snide asides, some of which I refuse to repeat. We’re all doing our best, we all want your best and all we ask of you is to meet us with respect and consideration.”
Monologue over, Percival takes a deep breath. His four extended fingers tremble slightly.
Cassandra meets his gaze. In her belly the sickly sweet urge to do something unforgivable coils like snakes in a pit.
She says, levelly, "If the way I run this city doesn't suit you, you're more than welcome to take your family and get out of my castle."
*
Earlier
Delilah strokes Cassandra’s neck, traces her collarbone through the fabric, the silk thread lace on the new fine gown.
“There we are,” she purrs. “Isn’t that all better? A pretty girl should wear something pretty.”
There’s magic in her touch, a spell waiting to release. Cassandra looks at herself in the mirror, her wretched face beside Delilah’s. Sylas in the background, watching, approving.
The spell probes at her mind. She lets it in, willingly, lets the sweetness of obedience wipe away the doubt and despair for a moment, loses herself to artificial certainty, pretend love, false affection.
In the mirror, for a moment, the three of them resemble family.
*
Now
Percy catches his face before it falls, but she has shook him, she can tell.
"I'm going to pretend you didn't say that."
The persistent, determined kindness, the patience upheld by willpower alone that mellows his voice and sands down the edge to his words make her want to scream. To throw her teacup at the windows, flip the table over, topple the precarious, painstakingly crafted construction of politeness and avoided topics on which her life balances and send it all crashing to the ground.
She puts her hands under the table. Balls her fists.
“I’ll say it again. If you can’t keep yourself from lecturing me on how I run things in the city-state you left me with then, sincerely: get out of my castle."
Her heart is pounding. She sits absolutely still.
"You know what?" Percival says. His mouth puckers, like a furious raisin. "You know what?"
"I do not know what, but I'm sure you'll elucidate."
Percival straightens his back, pulls himself up to his full height in the chair. His shoulders are stiff and his neck is rigid, his jaw set at a steely angle. Beneath his bushy eyebrows, his eyes are blazing.
There are times when Cassandra has some trouble reconciling the image of her lanky brother with his glasses and perpetual patchy stubble with that of Lord Percival Fredrickstein von Musel Klossowski de Rolo III, member of legendary Vox Machina and slayer of dragons and gods. This is not one of those times.
"You're a brat,” he spits. “You always were, and you still are. I have never, ever, met anyone as maddeningly annoying as you are, and I have met a whole lot of people. None like you. None like you. But you know what?” Percival leans forward, points a finger at her, jabs it into the air between them like he’s trying to skewer the space itself. “I don’t care. I don’t care how much of a terrible little shit of a brat you are, or how much you lash out at people who don’t deserve it. You’re still my sister, you’re still my family, and I won’t let you ruin the good you’ve built for yourself here. I’m going to drag you out of this dark spiral of self-sabotage you’ve decided to throw yourself into. I’ll do it with you kicking and screaming if I must. But I’m going to do it. You watch me.” He huffs, breath coming in bursts, pathos oozing out of every pore. “Just you watch me.”
He’s charismatic, her brother. He possesses that force of personality that makes certain people able to capture a room, to sway an ally or subdue an opponent. The way conviction burns in his eyes, now, the way anger makes his words soar with sentiment, the way he holds his body with the confidence of a man who knows he can follow through on any threat he makes. There are many who would find him intimidating, even fear him.
She might, too, if only she hadn’t stood before roundtables of archmages and royalty, calling them all to order. If only she hadn’t lived weeks with a dragon under her home. If only she hadn’t lived years in a city where undead giants walked the streets. If only she hadn’t stood beneath the boughs of a leafless tree, seven bodies hanging from the branches.
Cassandra picks up her knife and fork.
"I'm going to eat brunch."
*
Earlier
The impact of the arrow hitting her in the back punches the wind out her lungs and replaces it with nothing but pain of the sort a living person was never supposed to experience, the sort of pain that rips all thought from your head and strength from your limbs. The arrowhead scrapes against her ribs and she feels the vicious sharpness reverberate through her whole skeleton, feels nothing but pain from her toes to her teeth.
Another arrow hits her, then another still, and all that pain repeats and doubles, and triples. She slams down on the forest floor, her head bouncing off her own elbow. She can’t scream because she can’t breathe, she’s tasting the blood that bubbles in her throat and her nails dig through the moist cover of leaves underneath her and into the soil, claws at it as though she could find a handhold there, something to pull herself up and keep running.
She lifts her head. Percival looks behind him, and his wide, frantic eyes meet hers, takes in the sight of her felled, their pursuers closing in.
The second stretches, her terror and his.
Percival leaves her to die.
*
Now
"The weather is lovely, don't you think?"
"Cassandra."
"Unusually mild for the season."
"Really? This is what we’re doing?"
"How is Lady Vex'ahlia?"
"You know perfectly well how she is."
"And little Vesper?"
"She’s the light of my life," Percival says, at long last surrendering to decorum. He toys with the handle of a knife, despondently rolling the ornate silver, decorated with crowns entangled in flowering vines, between his fingertips.
"Wonderful." Cassandra cuts a sausage into eight neat pieces, moves them around on her plate. "And the clock? How is that project coming along?"
"It's fine."
The knife slips out of his grip and bounces hard against the table cloth, the linen fabric woven in geometric patterns. Percival stares at it for a few seconds. A grimace overtakes his features.
"No,” he says. “Actually, it's going to shit."
The matter-of-factness of his tone has a recalcitrance to it, an obstinate quality that’s oddly boyish, calls to mind the rebellious pouting of a child who knows he shouldn’t have gone splashing in the mud but did it anyway.
“The blueprints are all done, but as soon as I get to work on it I get tremors in my hands,” he says. “I can’t so much as hold a pair of tongs. So as you can imagine, the work is at a complete standstill, thank you so very much for asking.”
The flippant vulnerability suddenly on display stops her in her tracks, interrupts her brisk conversational pace. Like she’d caught her sleeve on the handle of a door and been jerked back mid-step.
“Oh.” Cassandra says, her mouth full. She swallows quickly, half-chewed pieces of egg traveling down her throat in an uncomfortable lump. “For how long?”
“A couple of months. Three at the most.”
“I... see. Have you been to a healer?”
“No.”
“No?” She puts down her knife and fork. “Why not?
Percival waves a hand, makes a disgruntled little noise in the back of his throat. He’s looking out through the windows. You can see nearly the whole city from here, the Sun Tree in its center a verdant burst of greenery.
“Percival. You need to see a healer.”
“This is where I could say something very unkind about how if you don’t like how I care for my own body-”
“That’s different.”
He raises his eyebrows. His lips curl in a smile that has nothing to do with happiness. “Is it?”
“Yes.” Her brother is being ridiculous. “Yes, Percival, health issues are something different when you’re the father of a young-”
“Oh, don’t-!”
“Well, pardon me! I forgot lecturing is a male-line privilege.”
The sun is nearing its zenith, the breakfast room at the mercy of the scrutinizing midday rays that illuminates the mended tears in the gobelins, the difference in hue between one chandelier and the one replacing its shattered twin, the faint contours of not-quite washed out bloodstains on the parquet.
Percival rubs his face with both hands. In the light his white hair is blindingly bright, catching the sun and shining with it. The brass frame of his glasses glitter, the lenses gleam. His skin, by contrast, is sallow.
“Why won’t you go see a healer?” Cassandra asks in honest bewilderment.
He lets his hands drop in his lap.
“Because I’m afraid something is wrong.”
*
Earlier
The guildmaster’s speech drags on for nearly half an hour, long enough that even his fellow representatives yawn surreptitiously behind his back. Cassandra filters most of it out, lack of sleep making her feel as though there is a pane of glass between her and the world around her. There are many enough opening ceremonies for her to attend in these times of peace, prosperity and, for her brother’s part, unbridled innovation, that they have begun blending together. Was this for the plumbing system or the illumination grid? It probably doesn’t matter. As long as she smiles and looks inspiring, she’s done her job well. Percival would be better, he would have interesting and poignant things to say about the technological advancements rolling out all over Whitestone, but with little Vesper just arrived, these things fall on Cassandra’s lot.
“And first and foremost,” the guildmaster finishes his speech, “we thank Lady Cassandra Johanna von Musel Klossowski de Rolo, Guardian of Woven Stone, our beacon in times of need and a symbol of hope for the future.”
Cassandra lifts her hand in acknowledgment, curtsies for the applause from the crowd. She accepts the scissors to cut the inaugural ribbon with. Sends one last smile out over the people gathered before the podium.
Her gaze snags, gets stuck on a man in the back of the adoring crowd.
Amidst the sea of adoring subjects Archibald’s unsmiling face stands out like a fresh bruise.
A tremor through her fingers. The scissors click and clack.
*
Now
“It would be ironic, wouldn’t it? If I was going to die now,” Percival says with a laugh that sounds like the tearing of parchment. “Not at the hands of the vampire that killed my family, or dragons, or a lunatic wannabe god, but from some sort of…” He shakes his head, smiling with a quiver in his upper lip. “It would be the perfect irony. Now, when everything is fine and good and the world is saved, and I have more than I ever thought I’d ever-” He swallows, hard. “It would be perfectly appropriate. Divine justice, if you cater to such a thing. And that’s why I haven’t seen a healer.”
Cassandra looks at him. At his elaborate cravat that takes ten minutes to tie correctly, at the impeccable fit of his spotless coat, at his neatly cut and filed nails. At the lines on his forehead, at the scar on his chin, at the deep shadows under his eyes.
“You’re being stupid,” she says.
Percival chuckles. “That’s fair.”
His voice sounds so normal, so much like his usual witty equanimity, that Cassandra is entirely unprepared when tears start running down his cheeks.
*
Later
A nightmare.
Cassandra is dying. There are arrows in her back, or maybe a knife, and her head is lolling, her body limp. Percival cradles her, slaps her face to wake her up, yells at her not to leave him behind.
She tries to tell her she loves him, but her throat is filled with blood.
*
Now
Cassandra scrambles to her feet, rooting through her skirt pockets.
“A handkerchief,” she offers, but by the time she’s fished it out, Percival is already dabbing at his eyes with one of his own.
Of course. Why would she ever think he wouldn’t have one on his person?
“I’m sorry. This is-” Percival clears his throat. “Terribly embarrassing.” A string of snot glistens under his nose. “I don’t know what’s come over me.”
“It’s all right. Can I…?”
“No, no, I’m fine, just… I’m fine. It’s fine.” He sniffles. “Vesper isn’t sleeping much, and so me and Vex aren’t either, and… Sorry about this. I didn’t anticipate that it would affect me this way. Exhaustion. It’s… tricky.”
Cassandra isn’t sure what to do, what to say. She doesn’t know him, this man who is her brother, so different from the little boy who was scared of loud noises and dogs, who would sit in the corner of mother’s drawing room with a pocket watch to his ear for hours, listening to the delicate tick of the mechanism inside.
Here they are, two strangers inhabiting these bodies, tending to the graves of the people they were supposed to become.
“Go see a healer,” she says, softly. Percival shakes his head, starts to speak, but she takes another step forward, interrupts him. “You know I get ill sometimes. With the nausea comes tremors. Not always, but occasionally. I take drops for it when it comes on.” She twists the handkerchief between her fingers. “I can’t know for certain, but what you describe sounds very similar. And mine… Well. It’s not a physical illness.
“Go see a healer,” Cassandra says, again. “I don’t think it’s anything serious, but if it is, then you’ll know. That will be better.”
Percival’s tears have stopped flowing. “You’re very wise, all of a sudden,” he says, not unkindly. He has taken off his glasses, and when he looks up at her his gaze is just slightly unfocused, doesn’t quite catch her eyes. “If I do this, then you, too, should… Should see someone. Talk to someone. Should-” He cuts himself off, wipes a lone straggler tear from his cheek with a rough swipe with the now soaked handkerchief. “Oh, I don’t know what you should do.”
“It’s fine, Percival.”
“Yes, good, it’s all fine, is it not? Except it isn’t, and I don’t know how to fix it.” He pulls snot into his nose to keep it from running over his mouth. “I want to help you,” he says. “I don’t want this for you. I want you to be happy, and I don’t know how to make that happen, or if I even can.”
If she hadn’t trained herself not to, Cassandra might cry, too.
“Blow your nose,” she says instead, nudging her clean, dry handkerchief at him.
Percival looks aghast. “At the table?”
“We’re the only ones here.”
“But at the table?”
“Get up if you must, but do blow your nose, please. You’re disgusting right now.”
*
Earlier
Percival has grease all the way up to his elbows, and a large smear across his forehead. The grime shows unfortunately well in his white hair. To be the Sophist of Ingenuity is often to stray very far from the image of the gentleman scholar, it turns out.
“It’s late,” he says. “You shouldn’t be up.”
It’s only the two of them and Cassandra’s shift guard in the hallway, everyone else in the castle sensibly asleep, aside from the patrols. Cassandra likes to wander the halls on nights when sleep escapes her, walk past the sites of unbearable memories and confirm them to be past. A silly notion that sometimes helps.
“Well,” Cassandra replies. “Neither should you.”
“That’s fair.” He hesitates. The door to his workshop is visible behind him. “...Would you like to come in and see what I’m working on?” A spark of excitement ignites in his eyes. “I think it’s turning out quite well.”
His smile is lopsided and sweet. The twinge of love that spikes through her at the sight of it is frighteningly strong, she balks at the loneliness of it, the unseemly desperation.
“I was going to try and get some work down,” she says. “Perhaps another time.”
The spark goes out, his expression flickering with disappointment.
“Of course. I shouldn’t disturb you.”
Regret seizes her, but it’s too late. He’s already walking away.
*
Now
With the look of a man about to defile something holy, Percival accepts the clean handkerchief and, without rising from his seat, blows his nose with a trumpeting sound. He folds the fabric carefully around the smear and tucks it, along with his own wet one, into a coat pocket.
Cassandra watches him do it, watches him pick his glasses back up and gingerly place them on his nose. He turns to her.
“Ah. That’s better,” he says.
She says, without meaning to, “You left me.”
“Yes.” Percival doesn’t miss a beat, he says it easily, in blunt acceptance of an irrefutable fact.
Her hands, white-knuckled around nothing now that the handkerchief is gone. “And I betrayed you.”
Tenderly, he reaches for her. Percival touches the back of her hand, carefully releases the knot of her fingers. He takes her right hand between the palms of both of his, the calloused skin hard and surprisingly smooth.
“I’m sorry,” he says. He is scarred all over, has a bump where a broken finger hasn’t healed quite right. “For all of it.”
If she tries to speak now, Cassandra doesn’t know what she’ll end up doing. She might say something profound, she might fall into his arms weeping, she might give in to the roiling darkness that occupies a hollow space deep inside her and say something impossible to forgive, something that crosses the line with such finality they’ll never recover from it.
So she says nothing. She rests her hand in Percival’s and lets the moment pass peacefully by.
*
Later
The woods are still. There’s no wind. Now and then, a rustling sound when a branch bends altogether under the burden and the snow that bent it falls to the ground, but other than that the forest is silent.
Cassandra pulls back the fur hood to wipe the sweat off her forehead. Her legs are aching and her breath wheezes. The cold is hard on her lungs, never fully recovered from the arrow wounds.
Vex comes up behind her. “Need a break?” she asks.
The spell she marked the wolf with pulls at Cassandra’s nerve endings. Part of her wants to sit down in the snow and give up, let the strain overpower her and admit failure. Another part knows that if she let’s the spell fade they’ll lose the track and never pick it back up.
“No,” she decides. “I can go further if I pace myself right.”
“Good girl.”
The pride in Vex’ smile does more to soothe Cassandra’s aches than any healing potion. She squeezes the bow in her hand, adjusts the quiver on her back.
Undaunted, she trudges on.
*
Now
Percival, unable to allow a silence to sit for very long, chuckles.
“Keyleth did tell me you wouldn’t take well to being confronted without warning,” he says.
“And you didn’t listen.”
“And I didn’t listen.”
“Perhaps your true curse is being surrounded by scores of intelligent, insightful people yet incapable of taking their advice.”
“That’s- Yes. That’s a fair assessment.” He smiles, lopsided and sweet. “I have an awful habit of not doing what intelligent, insightful people say is best for me.”
*
Later
The clocktower rings once a year. It’s an event, an occasion. The people of Whitestone take the day off to go see it, gather in the city square to eat and chat and whip up their excitement for the spectacle. Travelers are coming in increasing numbers, more and more each year, to watch the mechanic representations of Vox Machina, the Chroma Conclave and the Whispered One do their dance of battle, defeat and victory. The clock is a work of art, and in the thirty years since it’s construction completed, it has become a tourist attraction of note.
Cassandra watches the crowds from the roof terrace of Vex’ahlia’s mansion sardonically. She’s glad Percival’s work is being appreciated, but she’s not sure all the hubbub is good for his ego.
“Between you and Vex, my ego is getting more than adequate culling,” he says, when she tells him as much, “and all I see when I look at the contraption are the ways it could be improved, anyway,” though the pink on his cheeks is as much from the anticipation as the wine.
“I’m just making sure it won’t go to your head,” Cassandra replies. She takes a sip of her wine, savors it. The day is lovely, sunny and clear. It’s a good spot to watch the clock, Vex’s mansion, and its lady owner has thrown a modest soirée to go along with it. Vox Machina is there, and so is Allura and Kima, Gilmore, and a few other folk Cassandra is only familiar with on a surface level.
She and Percival stand side by side by the railing, their city sprawling around them. Behind them their friends and family mingle with each other, there’s music and singing, the thunderous boom of Grog’s laughter.
Cassandra tucks a few errant strands of hair that have escaped her braid behind her ear. It’s almost all white now; in another year or two she and Percival are going to match. They’ve said they’re going to celebrate when it happens, her catching up to him.
On the clocktower, the hands move closer and closer to noon. Cassandra turns to Trish in her guard uniform, always at her side. “Would you fetch me another glass of wine, dear? It’s about to start.”
“Oh, that reminds me.” Percival reaches into his pocket. “Here.”
As he’s done every year for nearly a decade now, he tries to hand her a pair of square shape glasses, the frames made of a silvery metal with the de Rolo crest engraved in thin lines at the temples.
As she does every year, Cassandra declines them with a snort.
“No, thank you.”
“Will you ever stop being ridiculous? You need them.”
“I can see perfectly well.”
“Not the clocktower. Not at a distance. Look at you, you’re already squinting.”
“And when I do I see perfectly well, even at a distance.”
“They would make your life so much easier if you would just-”
“Stop badgering me on my night off.”
Percival huffs, but there’s a smile on his face, deepening the crow’s feet around his eyes. He looks at her, fondly, as he says, “You’re too bloody stubborn for your own good.”
*
Now
Cassandra smiles, too.
She says, “It runs in the family.”