Keyleth bids Percival goodbye with a smile, and he returns it. From her perch on an empty torch sconce, Vasilissa watches, unsure whether the unsnaring warmth in her chest is his or her own. Either way, she can’t find it in herself to mind. Keyleth turns to leave, and Rasvan trots after her until, falling behind, the daemon’s fox from ripples from rust to liquid gold, and he glides from the stone tile to perch on Keyleth’s shoulder. His wide amber eyes are on Vasilissa for only a flash paper second before they vanish around the corner.
She feels Percy flinch, and snaps her head toward him.
He seems, almost, not to notice her gaze on him, but even if the rigid set to his shoulders didn’t betray him, she knows he can feel it. It starts like that, like it always does, with a fine, almost invisible, spidering crack. Whatever they’ve built back up between them, it’s fragile. Prone to shattering. Her next words already have it, that sharpness of broken residuum;
“They remind you.” It isn’t a question, and he knows it, but-
“I haven’t-” He says, hoarsely. “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”
Don’t lie. She wants to hiss. Why do you always insist on lying to us- She flexes her talons, lowers her head as if to dive forward, and he turns to her, and for a moment they both think she’ll do it- swoop down and dash a bloody scrape across his cheek, but she doesn’t move.
“Our unsettling.” She says, and he opens his mouth, probably to growl at her to shut up, not to call it that, not to speak of it at all in the halls of Whitestone or anywhere else- “You see it. Every time you look at them.”
Everyone is so proud.
“It’s because you stay up all night in that workshop of yours.” Julius jokes when he finds out, and regardless, Percival can’t seem to stop beaming. Vasilissa thinks there might be some truth to it- they grew up hearing those voices carried on the breeze from the snowy wood, after all, only to fall into bed at dawn when their eerie song at last quieted.
The creature she settles into is tall, regal, with a tufted crown; all majestic feathers and glistering talons. People casting their gaze down the line of De Rolo siblings, seeing her perched on his leather gauntlet, holding so still as to be statuesque, whisper that he must be so clever, their eyes lingering on her hooked beak and- when they are in the mood to show off- her mighty wingspan.
They belong, next to Vesper’s elk with his great wreath of antlers, next to Julius’ lioness, her fur as white as the castle walls, next to his mother’s golden eyed eagle, and even next to his father’s winter wolf, frosty breath forever curling from her mouth.
Vasilissa is living, breathing, soaring proof that Percival has the soul of a De Rolo.
“We shouldn’t get too full of ourselves.” Percival says, with amusement, half-sarcastic. He’s looking up from a book, with a charcoal stylus pressed to paper, mid-scrawl. The play of flame from the forge illuminates his face- Percival in his natural habitat. “Owls’ reputation for intelligence precedes them, you know as well as I do.”
“Mhm. Maybe so.” She trills, ruffling her feathers luxuriously, such a close shade of brown to his hair in the flicker of firelight. She looks right at him, and he grins, helplessly, as he always does at just one look into her clever eyes, the darks of them shining like blackpowder. “But I think our reputation is justly deserved.”
He laughs, the sound echoing off the walls of the workshop, and they aren’t afraid of anything.
Until they are.
It haunts her, that they don’t know whether She did it intentionally. Surely, one should be able to tell- if someone means to reach in, find a hold, and twist a soul to breaking. If someone contrived him into this sickening chorus of splintering bone, of tearing skin, of stifled screams and blood spattering against stone. Or if it was merely her own skeleton collapsing in on itself, an ancient castle crumbling to ruin, a sun tree felled, the ley lines flickering and going dark.
They will never know.
What they know- what they will never forget- is how much it hurt.
(“Where is she-?” Vasilissa hears Cassandra’s voice break, and weakly raises her heavy head to follow the sound. She tries and fails to open her eyes.
“Here.” Percival croaks. He lifts her gently, and she lets herself slump again in his trembling hands.
“Alive, but she-” His voices hitches.
“That’s-” Cassie’s voice is thick with unshed tears- and she sounds so young. If only she had the strength- “Percy, she’s-”
“Vasilissa!” Dismas mewls, and there is the sound of paws scrabbling at the iron bars, and Cassandra hushes him. She would crawl to them if only she could-
“We’re going to get you out.” Cassandra says, with forced calm, and Vasilissa drifts away, and she has forgotten it all as soon as unconsciousness blankets her.)
Vasilissa doesn’t remember the river, but she remembers being pulled from the current anew; a baptism in ice and dark river water as slick as blood, currents awhirl about them. She emerges shivering under her soaked pelt, hissing at anything that casts a shadow over them, over him, the only thing she has left in the world-
The next years are insubstantial as smoke, and so, they discover, is she.
She stalks through the fisherman’s cottage as a boney black cat, swiping at shapes she glimpses out of the corner of her eye.
She wheels silently amongst the billowing white sails of a ship as an albatross, as Percy shakes the Captain’s hand without meeting her gaze.
The more she tries to confine herself to one skeleton, the more quickly it becomes a cage. Their changes are not the effortless interswirl of feather and fur from their early childhood. They learn, when the shrill cries she lets out in their sleep distort into rumbling snarls, and her talons gnarl and lengthen into claws, a stab of recognition in the tales of werefolk, of pit fiends, of monstrous transformation. Everytime, the crumble of marrow, the shrivel and swell of organs, the unravelling of vein and sinew and self all screams mutation, and not metamorphosis. They come undone, like a poorly seamed wound ripped apart and excruciatingly restitched, and torn apart again, and sewn together again, until time becomes a needle drawn through their flesh.
Until inevitably, they are caught. Again. Asked, or made, to leave. Again.
She’s not sure when, precisely, they start to hate each other, when the cold, unfeeling silence that has stretched between them since the unsettling turns to the black ache of frostbite.
“This was your fault-” She’s shivering all over, tripping over herself as she stumbles after him, dragging one tiny wing. “You made me change- If you want so badly to play dead I can’t help it if everyone is going to see-” Hunger is gnawing at her belly, and the frigid breeze is searing, tearing through her feathers like they’re nothing at all, but every trudging footfall is a step further away from the cries; (“Witch,” “Monster,”-) a step he drags her, by the very heart, further from food and from warmth.
A stand-off, over something meaningless, something she’ll forget sooner that she’ll admit. She’s right up in the face of a deckhand's frilled lizard daemon, her hackles raised, lip curled back in a low growl.
“Leave it, Lissa.”
She barely hears him, and when his fingers graze her collar, she turns on him, snapping, lashing her tail.
“Gods-!” The deckhand exclaims, and even then she barely realises what she’s done.
Percival is staring at her, holding his hand in his wrist, thin tributaries of scarlet carving pathways down his fingers, and she doesn’t care, doesn’t even feel it- not over the piercing of the icy shards of her own anger, that have her rounding back on the daemon, only to find her backing away, frill lain flat again. The deckhand has his hands up in surrender.
“You two are so fucked up-” He says, without taking his eyes off her. “That’s twisted.”
The blood on her tongue doesn’t taste too far from brine.
“You’re supposed to look after us-” She barks, and he says nothing, just looks right through her. The ship lists. The waves sigh.
Startled, she opens her eyes when he shoves her roughly away from him so that they are no longer barely touching. He turns to sleep with his back to her. She curls up nose to tail, fur fluffed up against the chill.
Derision swells in her throat at the sight of the shake in his fingers, at the tapering of scars at the mouth of his sleeves, as he fumbles again and again with the rigging, and finally, she lashes her claws across his forearm. He winces and lowers his head, to bite back the pain. He returns to the ropes.
“It hurts to look at you.” The words are whispered, barely audible, but the hatred in them is undisguised; they seep with it, Stygian and black. “The damage is done. Stop hurting us, by changing now because you weren’t enough then.”
She can’t see his face in the dark, but it hardly matters.
“We weren’t enough.” She hisses, forked tongue flickering, and twists herself away from him, mangling scale, crumpling vertebrae if only to spite him, just to revel in that clench-teethed gasp, to know he feels it too. She’s out of the porthole as soon as the claws splinter her new skin, and the bite of the icy wind sets itself into her emerging fangs even as they puncture her gums. She wants to hurt him almost as much as she never wants to see him again, so she hauls herself up the mast until the bond is a noose about her neck, and every cold and airless gasp, every lightning-jagged fissure of agony as the ship pitches and rolls, is only bearable because it is his as much as it is hers.
“Lissa.” He breathes, on another night, and in the colourlessness of the dark, with his glasses off, he could almost be Julius- if not for the paleness of his hair. In his arms, she roils like the dark ocean, heaving- crests into one shape and falls away again undone, like crumbling seafoam. He presses his hands against cold chitin, against writhing scale, as if it were possible to find a hold on water.
She can’t remember the last time he touched her.
“I’m here.” The words come airlessly, like both of them are drowning. “I’m here. She didn’t sever us.” He chokes, like he doesn’t know how not to be grateful for that. For not being rent in two, for one threat of hundreds mercifully unfulfilled.
“Sometimes-” Vasilissa cuts herself off with a gasp as Percy stifles his own cry of pain, burying his face into her fur, and she doesn’t have the strength to finish. Her throat is thick with the sting of saltwater.
Sometimes, I think She did.
He comes to them in their sleep, cloaked in the smoke that’s a better reflection of them than any mirror would provide, these days, and maybe that’s why they reach out, as if blind, as if their vision is ever changing, as if only trying to find something against which to steady themselves.
(She is so angry with him.)
“She so badly wants to be given away, she’s barely even a soul at all...” She feels the words in her own throat, like her voice is a stolen instrument, feels the almost-familiar unfolding of wings at her back, the parting of a beak as the voice goes on;
“Seems a small price to pay...” Percy says, she says, the voice says, and they are stepping toward one another in perfect unison, a soul indistinguishable from its own dark reflections, as it turns itself to black.