The things inside you that were dead are coming alive again. The past is a foreign country, Percival. The past is a dream that dissipated with the coming of the morning. The past is dead, just like all the good parts of you are dead. The parts of you that were a good son and a good brother and not the sort of man that ran away from his dying sister. The sort of man that you are is no sort of man at all—just the last ghost of the massacre too scared to haunt the scene of the crime. You’re running. You’re always running.
Most days you feel less a person and more a set of imperatives. Here is the gun held by the hand. Here is the feet walking forward and here is the arm stretched out and here is the mask over the face and here is the finger pulling the trigger and you can’t smell the blood through the mask but you know what it should smell like. You know the taste of it. The rich iron tang. Blood from cut lips, from broken teeth.
That’s the real thing, remember? The cold ground. The cold table. The manacles. The scalpel dragged across your skin. Some days it’s like you never left. Some nights you feel like this is the only real thing in the universe, and Vox Machina is a dream. A hallucination of a beautiful present. People to replace everyone you’ve lost.
And oh gods, you don’t think about what you have lost. No. There was the past and then there was the long lonely stretch of time where there was nothing inside you, and then there was the List, and then there was Vox Machina and you became a different sort of object in motion. They asked you no questions, you told them no lies. Personhood exists contextually. You could be a person because they saw you as a person, because the parts of you that were dead were never the parts of you that they ever knew existed.
But you wonder, sometimes. What your father would think of you. What your mother would think. Whether your siblings would recognize the white-haired man with the calluses on his hands not from a pen or a screwdriver but from the friction of the trigger. Whether they would recognize you with all your splattered burns from forging metal, with the hairline scars from Ripley’s scalpel, the strange pearly stretches from magical healing.
Some days, the man staring back at you in the mirror is a stranger to you, Percival. This makes him easier to inhabit. This makes him easier to play pretend. But the parts of you that cared are waking up. All your dreams are coming true, Percival. The dreams of smoke and hollowpoint bullets, the dreams of clean lines of sight and the understanding of the mechanism for mechanical death.
Listen, the smoke inside you says. Don’t you want revenge, Percy?
You think you do. You think you’re ready, now. Maybe. Or you’ll never be ready so this is as ready as you’ll ever be. Or you were ready months, years, ago, and you’ve been dragging your feet. With Vox Machina, there’s enough firepower for your revenge, and you know they’d follow you if you asked them. They asked you what you wanted. You don’t know why you never told them about your past. The place where your heart used to be hurts. Your past and your present. Everything colliding. Gunpowder and spark.
No sentimentality, Percival. Don’t think about Vex and the rest of them. Ever since you woke with the mechanisms tick-tick-ticking away in your mind, you’ve been ready. There is only one use for your invention. This is no decision at all, Percival. You’re still the windup boy. You’re still the object in motion. It can only go one way. Six chambers. Five names.
You know who the last bullet is for.