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“I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Percival.”
A knife, only a few inches long, flashes in the silvery moonlight flooding in through the window. Anna Ripley brandishes it with a steady hand, her body pressed warmly against his back as she slips the knife against the delicate skin of his throat. Percy flexes his hand around the grip of his gun, something slowly set aflame in the pit of his belly that tastes like spice and smoke. He doesn’t swallow.
“Congratulations,” Percy says softly. She has to lean in to hear him, pressing further against his broad back. Their shirts are the only layers between them. Her touch revolts him.“You’ve managed to bring me to knife point, whatever are you going to do?”
Anna Ripley doesn’t say anything for the longest time, and it has Percy’s fingers gripping tighter against his weapon, only because she can’t see the nervous reflex. He can hear her breathing, feel the press of her chest against his back. It feels like he’s got a great cat idly lying upon his back, for all that he had invited this.
“I sometimes miss the nervous you,” She murmurs, and something cold and metal slips around Percy’s waist. Her claw-like prosthetic hand, he knows; she splays the metal palm of it flat against his belly. He wonders if she can feel his heart thundering. “You were always so polite and needy, all that begging.”
“I was foolish,” He tells her, refusing to wince as the metal of her hand digs deeper into his belly; he wonders if it’ll scar, another relic from the Doctor that he’ll nurse with all the fury he’d only allowed himself to feel towards her and the Briarwoods. “I was a young boy thinking that I could inspire pity in you as you tortured me.”
Anna doesn’t make a sound when he turns, ripping her hand away from his vulnerable belly, something cold sitting on the tip of his tongue as he wraps a hand around her throat. It tastes like smoke, like his mothers blood that had splattered across his face when the turncoat craven guards had killed her, like Cassandra’s blood did when Anna herself had shot Cassandra down like she was nothing but cattle.
“I know better now.” He says distantly, listening as she struggles to breathe. Her metal hand claws at his wrist, but he’s beyond pain now, beyond emotion; he’s drifting on an ocean of nothingness that has his mind misting from his body. He is watching this from outside of his own eyes and yet he’s never felt more himself.
He’d come here when he’d heard rumours, following a long line of black powder bargains and mild threats that could only be one person, and the descriptions had only given heart to the rumours that he’d tracked down. He’d managed to bring Vox Machina to the small, crowded village just on the outskirts of Emon, lost in the ravages of time and hardships through a series of careful manipulations and straight up requests when most of them had proved too wily against too many manipulations. He’d slipped from the tavern that they’d been bunked in after dispatching of a group of kelpies, ale drunk and passed out for it.
He’d been lost to the coldness that had overtaken him, each breath and movement a labouring effort that only had him listing further into the emptiness that had filled him since he first knew that it was Dr. Ripley. It was so different from the smoke, the all consuming need that Orthax had fed him, called by his hate and his want for revenge for the de Rolo family.
But Anna, Dr. Ripley-
This is far more personal than even the systematic murder of his whole family.
Dr. Ripley had not only participated in the massacre of his family, having been welcomed with open arms as a doctor looking for employment, she’d been the main person to torture them. She’d been the one to strip him of any dignity, any self respect, to break him down only to build him up as hers.
She’d seen a fifteen year boy, bloodied and bruised, begging for his life because she wanted answers that she knew he didn’t have. She’d ripped him in twain, had cleaved a line from his heart to hers, had branded him with her initials. Even now, he belongs to her and something that roils beneath Percy’s skin that has been looking for family ever since he found Cassandra urges him to follow her , Anna Ripley, because hadn’t she been the first one to truly see him, to pry his mind open and find a companion where most only found something to deride?
He wants to rip himself in twain as well, to find that piece of him that says he is hers and give it back to her, ask her, demand her to take it back, to finally free himself; he dreams of skinning himself, stepping free from his body that she has marked as hers and finally being free . Most often, he dreams of her ; her hands upon him, hurting, touching, relentless, cruel, the way she’d-
Her foot hits his knee, and it is only the adrenaline thrumming through him, cold and expanseless, that allows him to keep standing, knee attempting to crumple beneath his own weight. He drops her anyway, reflexively opening his palm. She drops, coughing, spluttering, short hair swept away from her face as she staggers to her feet; bruises paint her throat already, and the horrid satisfaction he thought he’d feel never comes. Only coldness and emptiness.
His body is not his own, and has never been his own since she has dug herself in and Orthax dug in further. He is a piecemeal of all his violent wants and impulses, and he’s never felt so alive and yet so dead in the presence of one person.
Anna Ripley staggers to her feet, and her eyes are triumphant as she stares up at him, fondness tucked away in the folds of her grin.
“You can kill me,” She tells him softly; she’s close enough to feel the heat of. “You can do everything you want to get rid of me, but it’s only you in your head, Percival, aren’t you sick of the loneliness?”
Her hand, strong and flesh, touches at the curve of his clenched jaw, brushing the back of her knuckles against his flesh like a mockery of intimacy. He shuts down on his flinch, stomach twisting beneath her touch. She reaches ever closer, pressing against the front of his chest; he freezes; his heart the only sound he can hear.
“Why do you fight, Percival?” She asks him, voice a soft croon in his ear. “We could do everything, we could be great together; you’re the only one to ever match up to me, Percival, don’t you remember what it was like?”
“Don’t-” Rasped, Percy barely has control over his own voice. His eyes clenched shut. Nothing has gone to plan, and even the emptiness is receding, leaving nothing but a panic that he’s only ever felt when he’s shaken himself away from dreams of her touch. “Don’t-”
Anna Ripley’s hand grasps his chin, forcing his face towards her. Even with his eyes screwed shut, he can see her clearly; she’s imprinted into his memory all too detailed. Her fingers bite bruises into his jaw, digging into the flesh of his cheeks. A knife in her other hand touches against the tremble of his throat once more.
“Perhaps there’s a little of the old you,” She murmurs. She smells like black powder and cleaning oil and leather. “I just have to touch you and you beg.”
Her fingers leave scrape marks upon his face, and the knife scores a line his throat as he forces himself away from her, across the small room. The door shuts quietly behind him. Dr. Ripley was never fond of doors being slammed.
Blood pools into the hollow of his collarbone; it spills across the brands of her initials.