#in hindsight its incredibly obvious she was just trying to hurt me as viciously as she possibly could with words

[arrowpunk]

I think one of the funniest and sweetest things someone has said to and about me was how, upon learning that someone had insinuated that I was a danger to/would abuse my wife, my(very Catholic) friend loudly and angrily proclaimed "That's like saying Jesus Sinned"

[sparxwrites]

(for someone who asked to stay anonymous: a bit of vax whump and sibling comfort, with gratuitous amounts of playing fast and loose with dnd mechanics stats. massive shoutout to anon, though, for a) giving me an excuse to write something so enjoyable, and b) being incredibly patient, since rl got in the way of this being written for a while. you’re the best. c: )

warnings for severe (mostly non-graphic) injuries, blood, whump

[ao3]

If they’d known when they took the contract with the Slayer’s Take that Manticore by no means meant only one of the goddamn things, thought Vax, viciously, then they might have come a little better prepared. Healing potions, a full night’s sleep, all their spells – rather than no potions, a night out drinking, and half Pike’s heavenly light spent on easing all of their hangovers.

It was stupid of them, really, overconfident and symptomatic of how arrogant they’d gotten in their power, but things were always clearer with hindsight.

Which is how they’d ended up here – with Vex and Vax soaring high above the battlefield, engaging with the manticores on their own turf, and surveying the field. With Grog stuck through with so many manticore spines he was beginning to look like a porcupine, snarling and red-eyed with rage. With Percy stumbling, a chunk taken out of his side by a vicious swipe from a manticore’s paw. With Vex, too preoccupied by the hit her teammate and now-lover had just taken, by trying to alert the others that he needed healing, to notice her surroundings.

Distracted by calling down to Pike, Vex failed to see the danger she was in. Failed to take note of the manticore’s enraged snarl, its gaping maw, the spikes on its tail bristling as it raised a paw to swipe-

It wasn’t a conscious action, putting himself between his sister and the manticore, it just was. With a powerful beat of his wings, he hurled himself between the oblivious half-elf on the broom and the monster, his daggers raised – and he never got a chance to throw them.

The manticore’s tail, already curved high above its head, pulsed, and suddenly there was pain. Dull, and distant, the shocky kind he’d long since gotten used to and had come to know was bad news. When he looked down, mouth half-open around a noise of surprise that didn’t quite manage to make it past his throat, it was to the sight of a thick, purple-black spine stuck straight through the point where shoulder met collar bone.

He’d already begun dropping like a stone, wings skewered through in three separate places and gone cold and numb with the shock of it, when the swipe of the manticore’s foreleg caught him.

The paw slammed into his ribs with an audible thump that he felt through his chest, his stomach, his pelvis. He heard the way it rattled his teeth, even through the ringing in his ears, and the gods-awful crunch of bone beneath heavy muscle. After everything else, he thought, distant and pain-delirious, as the claws raked deep through his armour and dug four ragged, bloody furrows into his skin, it was almost insult to injury. He was already falling, was probably going to be dead the minute half-elf became intimately acquainted with dirt, there was really no need to-

The world went dark long before he hit the ground.

-

Consciousness came back in bits and pieces, patches. The pain came first, dull and throbbing – rising to a roar as he clawed his way towards alertness, his heart pounding in his ears and his breath wet and rasping in his lungs, soft dirt beneath his fingers. It was almost enough to make him let go again, sink back into the blissful, dark silence he’d been floating in before, but surrender had never been in his nature before. He wasn’t going to let a little pain win, not now, not when there was still a fight going on, not when his teammates might still be in danger. Not when his sister might-

His sister.

Sound came next – shouting in his ear, the roar and clash of battle, faintly tinny through the earring, and Vex’s voice, her voice, she was alive – and then sight, red and black pulsing against the insides of his eyelids. They were closed, and he was almost grateful, in an odd way. It meant he had an opportunity to prepare himself, before he opened them, for what he might see. Vax had had his share of injuries in his time, as any adventurer had, but this… this was bad. He could tell that much, even without opening his eyes, just from lying there on his side in the blood-damp dirt and existing.

He dragged in a slow, jagged breath, rattling in his chest, and nearly sobbed with the agony of it. Gods, everything hurt, from his head to his ribs all the way down to his knees and ankles, every inch of him a concerted scream of pain. “…Gods,” he managed, wheezing, the word little more than a copper-wet breath, the sound barely making it past the blood slicked thick and sickening over his tongue. “Oh, gods, that- that hurts-”

It helped, a little, to hear himself speak, the sound of words grounding enough to draw him a little further back into the realms of consciousness.

Or, rather, it helped until someone spoke back. Champion, whispered a voice in his ear, Her voice – and that was a little worrying, that She was talking to him, given… well.

Vax didn’t feel like he was dying, felt like he was probably in too much damn pain for that, but even so. His Goddess, the Mistress of the transitional space between life and death, whispering in his ear as he lay prone and bloodied, wasn’t exactly the most comforting thing right now.

“Fuck,” he rasped, into the dirt, moving his jaw tentatively and tasting iron on his tongue. He spat, trying to clear his mouth of the bitterness, and drew in another slow, careful breath. It hurt just to exist right now, every breath a fight with his body to not choke on it, but he forced himself to keep breathing – slow, measured inhales and exhales, trying to keep them shallow, trying to ease the awful grinding sensation right below the split-open leather of his armour. Definitely broken ribs, then. “Fuck, I’m- alive? Right? Definitely… defi- def- alive.”

Breathing was hard. Speaking was harder.

Yes, my Champion, you are, replied the Raven Queen, despite the fact Vax had aimed his question more at the universe in general – and his own body, specifically, given the fact it was currently, loudly protesting that death would have been the more comfortable option. Really, that should have been a good clue that he was still alive. Death, he was sure, couldn’t possibly hurt this much. It is not yet your time. There is more for you to do. You must live. Stay awake. Do not succumb.

“Trying,” said Vax, tightly, attempting to take stock of the pain. Ribs, back, the join between chest and shoulder… his legs, thankfully, didn’t hurt badly enough to make him think they were broken, so if he could get to his feet, he should be able to walk. Theoretically. He didn’t really want to try, didn’t even want to think about trying, but lying here bleeding into the dirt wasn’t helping anyone right now. “Glad I can- can still be useful. That’s- ah, ah- the- the priority here-”

Manners, the Raven Queen chided him, gentle but cold. Despite the pain, he felt a chill of disapproval run down his spine, and shivered where he lay. …Take care of yourself, my champion.

He grit his teeth, and did his best to ignore her, and focused on trying to get to his feet. Despite the lethargy and pain throughout his body, there didn’t seem to be any other option. If he kept laying here, he’d no doubt pass out again, and then he’d be lucky if the rest of Vox Machina even found his corpse, let alone him whilst he was still alive.

It seemed to take an hour to get himself even to hands and knees, a slow, agonising process where his legs shook and his arms screamed every time he tried to put weight on them. His broken ribs ground horrifically in his chest with every breath every movement. The wound in his side had begun to bleed again, slow and sluggish through its attempts to scab over. He could feel the blood seeping between the leather of his armour and his skin, slimy and unpleasantly lukewarm.

Despite the age it seemed to take, it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes before he was on all fours. He was half-blind with the pain and exertion of it, panting shallowly in a desperate attempt to keep his lungs from being punctured by the moving fragments of bone in his torso, but he was something approaching mobile.

It was obvious, though, from the effort it had taken him to get this far, that walking was entirely out of the question. Even being a foot or so off the ground was making his vision dim alarmingly, and one arm was hanging at his side, useless and oddly icy-numb for some reason he wasn’t sure he wanted to work out. The odds of actually managing to get upright, and then staying that way for any length of time, he suspected, were close to zero.

With no other option, and with the desperate urge to get back to his sister being the only thought managing to make it heard over the agony, Vax began to crawl.

He made it barely six feet before his knees and elbows threatened to give way, his head both swimming and pounding from an exciting combination of – he assumed – blood loss and concussion. Gasping, he leant his side against the trunk of the nearest tree to steady himself, careful not to put any more pressure on the gashes or his broken ribs, and took a moment to consider his situation.

Crawling wasn’t going so well – though, all things considered it could be going worse. But it wasn’t going to get him back to his team by any stretch, not without a miracle. And he suspected that flying, though he hadn’t dared try it yet, would be an even worse option.

His wings were… well, fucked was the first word that came to mind, as he took in the blood streaked through the dark, glossy feathers, adding glints of red to the usual oilstick blue-purple-green. He braced himself, and tried to pull them in, fold them against his spine neat and flat against his back like he usually held them, and-

The resulting starburst of pain down his spine and through his shoulders nearly dropped him to the ground again, and he couldn’t help but cry out at the pain of it – loud and sharp enough that several nearby birds took flight, scared out of their nests. “Shit,” he gasped, slumping even more heavily against the tree next to him. The bark was digging into his open wound, pressing painfully against the shift of his ribs, but he could barely notice it over the overwhelming, ringing agony. “Oh, fuck- that’s- okay, okay-”

Though several of the spines through his wings had snapped off or been dislodged when he hit the ground, it seemed that one had not. It also seemed as though that one had skewered straight through his shoulder to the elbow-joint of his right wing, pinning it open and leaving him light-headed with the breathtaking agony of it shifting.

One trembling, unsteady hand reached up to clutch the earring still hooked through one earlobe, blood-slick fingers slipping on the smooth metal-and-gem surface of it, smearing a bloody streak across one cheek. “Um, guys…?” he asked, when his breath had come back to him enough that his voice was only shaking, rather than barely more than a whimper. “Ah, aha, um. Jenga, I think.”

The brief clarity and sharpness of senses that the adrenaline of getting up had granted him was fading, fast, but he was aware enough to notice that the previous cries of the manticores had gone silent. He hoped that meant the battle had been won, rather than… any of the other things it could mean, each more unpleasant than the last.

For a long, horrifying moment, there was nothing but silence, and Vax ran through all the awful possibilities – they were all dead, they’d all abandoned him, they hadn’t noticed he was gone, they were out of range and he was going to die here, alone, in some shitty forest, stuck through with manticore spines like a porcupine and bleeding out against a tree-

“Vax?!” cried Keyleth, in his ear, and he’d never been so grateful to hear the sound of her voice before, the fluttering anxiety in it only amplified by her post-battle adrenaline. “Vax, oh my gosh, what happened- where are you- we only just noticed you were gone, you’re so stealthy most of the time, we thought you were just sneaking around, I’m so sorry- oh, oh, are you okay? Are you hurt? Do you need healing? I mean, we’re mostly out of healing, now, but-”

“Brother!” interrupted Vex and, despite everything, Vax felt a knot of tension in his chest uncurl. His sister was alive, and safe. She was alive. He’d done his job, and protected her. “What in gods name did you do this time, you idiot? Where are you? Please tell me you’re not hurt.”

He couldn’t help but laugh at that – and then regretted the action immediately when his chest seized up, the agony taking his breath away for a long heartbeat. “…I fucked up,” he admitted, voice strained and heavy with pain, smiling lopsidedly though he knew Vex couldn’t see him. “Manticore got me. Or- was gonna get you, but then I… well. Anyways. Had a bit of a crash-landing.” He heard Vex inhale, sharply. “So, ah, like I- like I said. Jenga?”

It was meant as a joke, but it came out small, and scared, and unsteady.

There was, abruptly, ground beneath him, and he wasn’t sure when he’d slid far enough down the tree for that to happen, but it was there all the same. It seemed incredibly appealing, right now, the idea of tipping sideways and curling up on the ground and just sleeping, for a while – despite the fact the ground underneath him was damp, soft under his twitching fingers, and he was fairly sure it was wet with his own blood. The wound on his side had left a bloody streak down the side of the tree as he’d slid, livid and gory, and pulled his eyes away from it with an effort of will to stare at the sky above him instead.

They’d done this often, he and Vex, when they were younger and on their own – slept outside in a forest, under the night sky, in a makeshift camp made of a fire, and a single bedroll, and the two of them squashed into it. They’d cuddled close in the darkness and stillness of the woods, Trinket a pile of warm, snuffling fur nearby, and the stars glittering through the branches overhead…

He pulled himself back to the present with an effort of will. It was getting harder to focus, his thoughts scattering before him like cats, impossible to corral.

“Hey, uh, sis?” he said, faintly, aware that Vex was talking in his ear, asking more questions about where he was, what his injuries were, but struggling to process the words through the slow pounding in his head, and the pain rising up like a wave to consume him once more. “I’m just gonna, um, pass out now, I think. Getting kinda, kinda… hard, to, um, to stay… awake. Just… gonna…”

Champion! whispered the Raven Queen in his ear, insistent and impossible to ignore, even as Vex’s voice rose to a panicked, desperate shout through the earring – but his pulse was drumming in his ears, now, louder than anything else. Vision pulsing red-black and the pain through every inch of him threatening to swallow him whole, Vax couldn’t help but let his eyes slip slowly, slowly closed.

-

For a while, there was nothing but darkness.

Darkness and silence, and the feel of feathers cold and silky against the naked skin of his back, of porcelain arms around the ephemeral vulnerability of his soul, holding him, keeping him, protecting him, from… something. He wasn’t sure what, but he could feel it tugging, trying to drag him away from the peace, deeper into the darkness. The arms and feathers held him tight, though, wrapped in a mother’s embrace like a small child, until-

“-won’t wake up!” The voice seemed a long, long way away, through the heartbeat in his ears and the red-smeared darkness against the inside of his eyelids. There was warmth, though, against his back and shoulder, and a hand pressed to his cheek, his wing, his chest in quick succession. “Vax? Vax, darling, brother, please, please, wake up- please-”

It took everything he had to pry his eyelids open, heavy beyond belief, and drag himself out of the sucking dark he’d gotten himself mired in. But he did, clawed his way out of unconsciousness, because that was his sister, that was his sister calling for him, and he’d never had the heart to deny her anything.

“Oh, thank gods,” breathed the blurry shape of Vex above him when his eyes finally fluttered open, her breath hitching in her chest – though he couldn’t think why that would be. Was she hurt? Had the manticore injured her, after all? He reached a hand up to touch her face, scared by the amount of blood smeared down the front of her chest, over her hands.

“You’re… bleeding,” he managed, the words soft and slurred, blinking a little to try and pull her into focus. “What’d you…” The ending to the sentence escaped him, too much effort, too many words for his tongue – heavy with exhaustion, slippery with blood – to manage where it sat swollen inside his mouth. Instead, he lifted an arm, slowly, with the paltry energy he had left, and let his worryingly numb fingers brush against her cheek. They left a streak of crimson behind, crumbling and drying and smeared across the high flush of her cheekbone.

Vex laughed, watery and scared, and he felt her fingers around his wrist, tugging his arm back down to his side. “No, no, darling, that’s not- I’m not hurt, don’t worry, don’t- don’t move, just stay still, now, stay still, it’s okay. It’s okay. We’ve got you.”

He wasn’t sure why she was trying so hard to reassure him, when she was the one bleeding, but he didn’t have the energy to ask, to pull his scattered thoughts into words. Instead, he just hummed quietly, low in his chest, and tried to sit up, so he could shift into a more comfortable position against her.

Tried being the operative word – he got barely an inch out of Vex’s lap before the pain reminded him of its existence, spiking sharp and blinding and overwhelming. He collapsed back against her with a quiet, wheezing sob, his breathing too choked to manage to scream building in his chest, and scrabbled for her hand with his good one in a desperate attempt to find comfort against the renewed onslaught of the agony.

“Pike?” he heard, over the roaring in his ears, as his vision turned an awful crimson, red bleeding in from the periphery until it had consumed his world. Vex’s voice seemed distant, tinny. “Pike, Pike, please- we need a healer- now- I managed to stop the bleeding, but it’s not enough, it’s not enough-”

She sounded so scared, his sister, so much fear in her shaking voice as she cried out for their cleric, and Vax’s heart ached with it. He wanted to reach out and reassure her, but that was beyond him, now – his limbs weren’t responding to his calls to action, and besides, he could barely see. The red behind his eyes was pulsing in time to his heartbeat, in time to the pain throbbing through every inch of him.

“I’m- Vex, I’m out of healing!” He hadn’t seen Pike, but she sounded so close, as if she were talking into his ear – and, despite everything, the sound of her voice comforted him, through the pain that was subsiding in slow, rolling waves. If Pike was here, everything would be okay. Pike always fixed everything. Always. “I burnt my last spell on Percy, before we realised Vax-”

“Keyleth?” Vex was asking, desperately, before Pike had even finished speaking. “Scanlan? Anyone? Do we have any healing potions left, anything, he’s- please, he’s bleeding out, I don’t know- I don’t know-”

Her breath was hitching in her chest, voice shaking, and Vax could tell she was crying. He wanted to comfort her, but there wasn’t anything of him left to provide comfort, past the chunks of him being stolen by the pain, the agony, the endless, breathless throbbing throughout his whole body. All he could do was lay there, listening to her cry, trying to ride out the starburst of pain until it settled back down into something approaching manageable.

He wasn’t sure how much time passed, lying there in his sister’s arms – probably only a minute or so, but the pain stretched everything out, turned every second into an agonising eternity. He let his eyes slip closed again as he focused on controlling his breathing, stopping the frantic heave of his chest, before finally opening them again at the touch of a new hand against his skin.

Pike was on her knees next to him, gently moving Vex’s hands out the way to get a look at the damage. Her face fell at the sight of him, which was less than reassuring, but Vax managed a faint smile, nonetheless. His mouth tasted of copper-salt, slimy down into his throat, when he gasped out a, “Hey, Pickle,” in response to her fingers pressing gently against the bloody line of his throat, checking for a pulse.

“He’s responsive, which is good,” said Pike, softly, offering him a brief, tight quirk of her lips in response to his words, before looking up at Vex. “But there’s… this. Vex, this is- a lot. Even with magic, I’m…” She sniffled, chewing on her lower lip, and Vax was horrified to see tears shiny and determinedly unshed in her eyes.

Vex sobbed, quietly, and Vax felt the arms around him tighten, almost painfully. “Pike,” she whispered, voice low and wet with tears. “Pike, please. We just- we just need to get him back to Vasselheim, that’s all, please, just- do something, anything. Please. He can’t- he can’t- I need him, I- I…”

Behind Pike, Vax could see the rest of them – Percy, Scanlan, Grog and Keyleth, in various states of mildly to moderately battered – watching with horror. He smiled a little, in what he hoped was a comforting manner, but was probably more terrifying than anything else with the amount of blood in filling his mouth, staining his teeth pink. Keyleth gasped, softly, hands flying up to cover her mouth, and Percy winced, looking away.

Scanlan, though, stepped forward. “I’ve got one healing spell left,” he said, slowly, uncharacteristically serious as he eyed Vax’s crumpled, battered form on the ground before him. “It’s… not much. But it might be enough to stabilize him, at least until we can get him to help.”

“That spike needs to come out,” added Percy, abruptly, his eyes now fixed on Vax, the slow, uneven rise and fall of his chest. He was unnaturally pale, a slightly grey tinge to the skin of his cheeks, and his hands were shaking – Vax hadn’t seen them do that in months. “The one through his shoulder, I mean. It’s- well, it’s stopping him bleeding out, so ideally it should stay where it is-” He looked at Pike for confirmation, who nodded, rubbing at her eyes to clear the unshed tears from them. “-but it also looks like it’s pinning the wing open. It’s going to be hard to move him, like that.”

Pike nodded again, taking a deep breath and pulling herself together – and, as Vex watched, transformed from their friend to their cleric, steady as a rock and in total control the situation. “Right,” she said, determinedly, petting Vax’s hair as his laboured breathing slowly turned wet with the constant grinding of ribs in his chest. “Right. Scanlan, I’m- come here. I’m going to pull the spine out, and then you need to close the hole, and then… then we’re going to need to get back to Vasselheim as fast as possible. Grog, you’re going to have to carry him.” She didn’t wait for a response, but instead turned back to Vax, looking down at him with regret in her eyes. “Hey, Vax. This… this is gonna hurt a bit, okay?”

“Hurts already,” mumbled Vax, the corner of his mouth quirking up as he held her gaze, eyes cloudy with pain. “…Trust you, Pickle. Do- do what you gotta…”

Her hand left his hair as Scanlan knelt down next to both of them, the faint prickle-whisper of his magic already curling around him like a warm, familiar cloak in preparation. “Okay, now, Vax,” she said, gently, her hand curled light and loose around the broader end of the spine where it stuck out the front of his shoulder. Even just that light touch was enough to jar it, shift the spines hooked into his flesh all the way through the wound, and he couldn’t quite manage to swallow the sob of pain and fear that slipped free of his throat. “We’ll go on three, okay? And then it’ll be all over, and we can get you back to somewhere safe, with healing. Okay. On three, now. One, two-” And, before he had a chance to brace, to tense up, she pulled.

Oh, gods, did it hurt.

Vax howled, arching in his sister’s lap, newly-unpinned wing beating helplessly against the dirt at the pain. There was someone screaming, an awful sound, animal with pain and terror. He thought it might be him, but he couldn’t tell – not through the agony of it that had consumed his entire world, narrowed it down to the single point of flame and horror that was his shoulder and wing-joint. Even if it was him, he wouldn’t be able to stop, his everything focused on keeping breathing, not blacking out, as the pain threatened to drag him back down into the darkness once more.

Then there were hands on his shoulder, covering the wound, and a familiar voice weaving a gentle melody as magic trickled into him, warm and comforting, and the pain eased, and-

Finally unpinned, and half-healed, he took as deep a breath as he could manage, and another, and pulled the wings back into him. It hurt, a sharp flash of broken bone and bruised, punctured tissue, but the relief of no longer having them corporeal more than outweighed the pain. “Fuck,” he whined, and he could feel now that he was shaking, fine tremors running through him from the adrenaline comedown and exhaustion and steadily-mounting shock. “Oh, oh, fuck- gods, that- ah-”

Arms slipped around him, broad and muscular and safe, and lifted him gently into the air. “Up we go,” rumbled Grog’s low, familiar voice – and, even through the heavy cloud of agony surrounding him, Vax felt comforted by it. “C’mon, shithead. Let’s get you back.”

His vision was dimming steadily, red-black fog stealing his sight from him slowly but surely, and the pain in his ribs had magnified to the point where he could barely draw breath. Still, despite the shallow, uneven gasps leaving him weak and breathless, and the pain throbbing out from his shoulder in heavy waves, he sighed, and let his lips twitch up into the faintest of smiles, before unconsciousness stole him once more.

-

Vax eventually woke, for the third time, to low light, and warm hands against his chest. “-done all I can,” said a voice, low and familiar and somewhere between annoyed and exhausted. “The idiot’s going to have some fancy new scars to add to his collection, but he’ll live. Unfortunately.”

After a moment of blinking, the blurs of warm colour resolved themselves into a low ceiling, brick walls, a flickering torch – and Kashaw, staring down at him with an expression of unbridled distaste that couldn’t quite hide the relief in his eyes, the stress-lines tight around them and the bruise-shadows of magical exhaustion dark beneath them. “Hey, fuckface. Welcome back to the land of the living.”

Vax managed a dry chuckle, which ended in a cough that wracked his chest and the join between collarbone and shoulder. There was pain there, still, enough to make him curl in on himself with a thin whine – but he could breathe again, no longer tasted blood on the back of his tongue with every exhale, and that in and of itself was a sweet relief.

“Woah, woah, settle down, kiddo.” There was faint alarm in Kashaw’s voice as he pressed warm hands against Vax’s sternum and uninjured shoulder, pinning him to the bed as he rode out the coughing and easing him flat again once it was done. “I’ve given you everything I’ve got, so if you tear yourself open again, that’s on you. Might want to lay still for a while, ‘til you can get a top-up in the morning. Because if you go and kill yourself after all the work I’ve put into keeping you alive, lemme tell you, I’m gonna be-”

He broke off as he was elbowed aside by Vex shoving past him, still a mess of bloodied leather armour and wild hair and fear – and then Vax’s entire world was taken up by his sister, as she threw her arms around his shoulders and dragged him close, curling over him as if she could protect him from the damage that had already been done.

“…Right,” said Kashaw, awkward beneath his gruffness, from somewhere beyond the curtain of Vex’s hair that was currently blinding Vax. “Well, I’m just, I’m gonna… leave you two to your weird twin stuff and pass out, then. If there’s a problem, don’t bother coming to find me, because I can’t do shit right now.”

Vax huffed out a quiet noise of amusement, which was the best he could manage, given laughing had felt like a dagger in his chest the last time he’d tried. “Thanks, Kash,” he managed, voice raw and whisper-quiet, and felt Vex murmur agreement where her face was still pressed against the side of his neck.

They got a quiet grunt by way of acknowledgement, and the sound of a door swinging open and then shut again, and then silence.

Rather than let him go, though, Vex just clung tighter. Without breaking contact, she managed to climb up onto the bed, tucking herself into Vax’s side – gently, so as not to knock him, not to cause him any more pain – until she was pressed as close to him as she could manage. “You idiot,” she whispered, and Vax could feel, now, how she was trembling, the soft hitches of her breathing as she cried. “You stupid, stupid idiot. If you ever do that again, I swear, I’ll kill you myself, you- you-”

She broke off, pressing her face further into his neck, breathing in shuddering gasps. The careful arm she draped over his ribs, so she could feel the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed, did not go unnoticed.

Vax sighed, softly, but didn’t comment, despite the dull pain in his ribs at the pressure. “…I’m sorry,” he rasped, eventually, into the sweat-musk warmth of his sister’s hair, where the top of her head pressed against his nose. “I didn’t mean to- it was about to hit you, and I didn’t think.”

Vex snorted, wetly, and when she shifted a little he could feel the warm trickle of tears against his neck. “You never do,” she complained, words muffled by his skin, and he couldn’t help but laugh – and then regretted it, when his barely-healed ribs sent an electric-sharp jolt through his chest and shoulder blade.

“No,” he agreed, voice slightly strained as he laboriously shifted one arm to press a hand to the back of Vex’s scalp. His fingers drew slow, gentle patterns against the skin beneath the hair there as she held him, a silent reassurance that he was still here, still alive. “I never do. That’s okay, though, right? You’re the smart one of the pair, we both know that. Gotta have you around to do my thinking for me, sis.” He smiled, a little sadly, and pressed a kiss against her hair, breathing slow and steady through the low ache in his chest. “Gotta… gotta have you around.”