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The door is oak. Solid, cool, unyielding. Vax leans his forehead against it for a second before knocking quietly. Even so, the sound booms in the corridor.
He’d stealthed his way here, hiding in the shadows, the folds of his cloak. No one had seen him, but he looks around anyway as the sound of his knuckles on wood echoes.
There is no answer, not at first. Vax listens for movement inside for a couple of heartbeats, eyes closed. His hair is falling out of its braids over his forehead, and he sweeps it back when he stands up, flipping his hood down for a second.
He’s about to turn away when the door opens.
‘Vax?’
Percy looks small out of his armour, answering in just his shirt sleeves. It’s buttoned wrong, Vax notices, looking at his chest. When he looks up to look him in the eye, there’s a smudge of-- something on his cheekbone. His hair is wild-- wilder than normal, and he’s not wearing his glasses, propped up on top of his head as they are. He squints at Vax, and Vax thinks for one ridiculous moment about flipping his hood back up and disappearing into the gloom. Pretending he was never there.
Instead, he opens his mouth.
‘Hello, Percival,’ he says, awkward, small. He drops his gaze again.
‘--Hello,’ Percy says. He puts his glasses on, as if he’s just trying to make sure that he’s really seeing what he thinks he is. He blinks at Vax through the lenses.
‘I don’t want to be alone tonight,’ Vax says.
Percy’s mouth opens in an O of surprise. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘I-- oh. I see.’
‘Do you?’ Vax asks. ‘Want to be alone?’
He doesn’t think either of them are breathing. Vax’s hand is resting on the doorframe. Percy’s is wrapped around the edge of the door. They’re inches apart.
For an awful, awful moment, Vax thinks he’s going to say yes. He’s going to shut the door, and Vax is going to have to slink back to his room and somehow, somehow, look him in the eye at breakfast tomorrow. He counts his pulse; he can feel it in his throat, in the hand resting oh so casually against the doorframe.
‘No,’ Percy whispers. ‘I-- no, I don’t.’
Vax nods. Starts breathing again.
‘Can I come in?’ he asks.
Percy steps aside, and lets the door swing open just enough for Vax to slide in. He takes one last glance from side to side, before letting the door shut behind him. Percy lets the wooden latch drop with a soft thunk, effectively locking it.
The room is-- Vax doesn’t know how one man with so few possessions manages to spread them so far. The entire contents of his pack seems to be strewn across the desk and chair, his guns are in pieces on the bed, his armour is piled in a heap in one corner.
‘I was cleaning them,’ Percy says, when Vax looks at the guns. ‘They keep jamming, and this is-- the first night to relax we’ve had in a while. I didn’t know I’d be-- having company.’
‘I didn’t know I was going to be company,’ Vax admits. There’s nowhere to sit, so he hovers. Percy sits back on the bed, starts putting the Pepperbox back together. He looks at Vax while his hands move in increasingly complicated ways. Vax has never quite realised how clever Percy’s hands are until now. The smear on his cheek is gun oil, Vax realises. He doesn’t think Percy knows it’s there.
‘Why are you here, Vax?’ Percy asks, easily. It should sound accusing, but it doesn’t. Percy finishes reassembling his gun and finally looks down at it, loads it carefully, and tucks it back into the leather pouch he keeps it in.
‘I--’ Vax stops. He doesn’t think he knows. He started walking and just-- ended up here. ‘I was going to Keyleth’s room,’ he says, eventually.
‘But you ended up here.’ Percy still isn’t looking at him, is looking down at Bad News while he thumbs at a scuffmark on the metal.
‘I suppose so,’ he says. ‘This just seemed like a more important place to be.’
Percy hums, and puts Bad News aside. ‘Do you want to sit down?’
Vax sits on the edge of the bed. He feels off balance. Like he would topple off the side of the world if he was pushed hard enough.
‘You’ve been watching me,’ Percy says, and Vax’s face flushes with heat.
‘I didn’t think you’d noticed,’ he says. ‘I thought-- I don’t know what I thought.’
Another hum from Percy. ‘Why?’
Vax frowns. ‘Why what?’
Percy gives him a look. ‘Why have you been watching me?’ he asks, speaking a little more slowly, like Vax is a particularly stupid child.
Vax supposes that’s fair.
‘You’re distracting,’ Vax says, after thinking about it for a minute. ‘I don’t mean to.’
‘But you do.’
‘But I do.’
Percy sighs, wraps his tools up in the cloth he keeps them in, and shuffles to the edge of the bed to sit next to him, shoulder pressed against shoulder, hip against hip, knee against knee. He’s cold. Vax knows that humans are a little cooler than elves, but it’s still a shock when Percy’s bare hand touches his forearm.
‘You’re allowed to look, you know,’ Percy says. ‘It’s not-- I don’t mind you looking, but it’s-- more than that.’
Vax chews his lower lip. He watches Percy’s gaze slide down to it and get caught there. ‘Do you want me to look at you?’ he asks, and for the first time, something other than carefully blank amusement crosses Percy’s face.
‘You spend so much time looking at me when you think I’m not looking back, you miss all the times I almost get caught looking at you,’ Percy says, softly. Vax’s breath hitches.
Percy’s lips are as cool as his hands. Vax opens for them easily, hand on Percy’s cheek. When he pulls back, he’s smeared the gun oil even further across his cheekbone, practically to the shell of his ear. Vax’s thumb is sticky with it.
Percy sees the dark smear, raises a hand to his face. When it comes away with oil on it, he laughs.
‘Occupational hazard,’ he says. ‘Sorry.’
‘It’s okay,’ Vax says. Percy wipes his hand on his shirt and leans in again.
They end up sprawled out on the bed. Percy isn’t big, but he’s heavy on Vax’s chest as their legs tangle together.
He’s a surprisingly proficient kisser. Vax doesn’t know what Percy did before he was with them, what kind of company he kept, but. He feels like he has more of an idea now.
-
‘Vex knows,’ Percy says, after. ‘I don’t know how she couldn’t. I didn’t know how you couldn’t.’
Vax laughs, a little self deprecating. Percy is lying on his bare chest, tapping a fingertip on his sternum in time with his heartbeat. ‘Apparently I’ve missed a lot.’
Percy shrugs a shoulder up and down. ‘That’s okay,’ he says. ‘You got there in the end.’
They fall asleep like that, curled up together like errant commas. Vax falls asleep last, and listens to Percy’s breathing, slow and even and calming, as he drifts off, hand snug in the small of Percy’s back, cheek buried in the tangle of hair on his head.
Tomorrow, they face a dragon, but right now, Vax is counting heartbeats and memorising the smooth lines of Percy’s back with his fingertips.