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hellcatchvalley · 7 years

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before we lost our fairy tales

day 1: non-romantic pairing: kashaw vesh & vex’ahlia de rolo words: 3.5k+ summary: what starts off as small talk turns into something more and vex and kash realize they’re not so different from each other. notes: i had this random urge to write something awhile ago and then it aligned with @critrolerarepair week AND the first prompt!! so i gave a whack at it and hope u enjoy it <3

[ao3]

When Zahra had asked Kashaw to go to Whitestone with her, he almost told her to 'fuck off.' Almost.

"No offense, Zee, but it's not like that place holds a lot of good memories for me," he'd said on the way to the sky port. Zahra had rolled her eyes and patted his shoulder.

"Then it's a good thing we're not going for you then, isn't it darling?" She'd hummed, smiling innocently at his glare. "If it helps, you can just stare at me and avoid contact with everything else like you normally do."

He'd scoffed, and looked away, a small smirk on his face. "Business as usual then."

"Business as usual indeed," she'd replied.

So they'd flown over to the godforsaken cold country (courtesy of a few connections since the city's functioning sky port was still under construction) and within minutes of touching down Kash insisted on renting his room at an inn.

("I'm sure Vex'ahlia would allow us a guest room in the castle," Zahra had tried but he shook his head.

"Nope, a man needs his own place, Zee."

She'd shrugged a shoulder and headed for the castle herself. "Suit yourself, Mr. Man. Oh, and don't let the bedbugs bite your ass, dear."

"I'll give them your regards.")

Her words had made him paranoid, and in the end he rented a small house not too far from the city's beloved Sun Tree. He had no idea how long Zahra was planning to stay, but he wasn't about to be uncomfortable for that amount of time either.

For about three days, Kashaw hadn't seen even a glimpse of Zahra. He was sticking to his guns about not wanting to see any more members of Vox Machina, but after exploring the local market and now having a burlap sack's worth of souvenirs and fresh food, he knew he was getting bored.

Just as he's packing away some of the things he'd want to take back to Vasselheim into a burlap sack on his bed, he hears a knock on his door. There's only one room in the entire place for the kitchen, wooden dining table and a bed up against the wall, so he calls out, "Who is it?"

The sing-song voice that responds makes his eye twitch. "Housekeeping!"

Before he can tell her to go away, the door swings open to reveal the city's Lady and consistent thorn in his side called Vex'ahlia. Kash takes a deep breath before turning halfway around to look at his intruder. Despite her lavish quarters and series of titles, she's wearing hunting gear today, a bit of sweat on her brow and pieces of hair sticking out of her braid. There's a big smile on her face as she leans casually against the door frame and he stares at her.

"No, please, come in," He deadpans, turning back to what he was doing. She clicks her tongue and strolls in, and he doesn't bother teasing the idea that her boots aren't tracking dirt into his humble temporary home.

"Cashew, if I didn't know any better I'd say you were avoiding us," she says, her voice coming up close behind him. "Zahra's been studying for days and we've still not seen a sign of you."

"You lose your eyesight in the weeks we've been gone? Because I'm pretty sure you're looking right at me," he says, still keeping his back facing her.

"Oh, my apologies, I didn't realize how hairy you'd gotten after all this time! Such a shame, your eyes were such a pretty color."

Kash rolls the aforementioned eyes, and finally gives her his full attention, crossing his arms.

Vex mock gasps in surprise, "It's a miracle! You've changed back!"

As his frown gets deeper her smile only grows. She always was his least favorite twin. "How much would I have to pay to get you to change into your brother?" He asks, and she snorts, propping herself up onto the counter.

Vex leans back on her hands, crossing her feet at the ankles as if the place is hers (hell, it probably is. Vox Machina doesn't go ruining people's days for free, and Kash is still convinced the white haired guy gave her a city block already.)

"If that's something within your power, you go first," she snaps back in easy banter.

He ignores the comment. "To what do I owe this... Luxurious company? Did Zee send you?"

Vex's smile finally dims and she raises an eyebrow. "You can't really dislike us so much, Kashaw."

Kash nods in mock understanding. "You're right, I'm sorry-- I forgot the big heroes aren't used to that sentiment anymore."

Vex chuckles and he smirks when he hears a bit of impatience in it. "You're such a dick."

He shrugs. "It's in my job description, baby."

"Never call me that again."

"Then stop calling me Cashew."

"There isn't enough gold in the world."

"Wow, that’s a first."

He dodges the bread roll she throws at his forehead and turns around to continue his packing.

"Not for nothing, but you look like you fought an owlbear and won," he continues, for -gasp- lack of conversation. Zahra would be so proud.

"Just got back from one of my hunts," Vex explains, the wood of the table creaking as she swings her legs. "I'm the protector of this city, remember?"

"I try to block anything involving any of you out of my daily life, if that's alright with you," he mutters. and the bread roll hits its mark this time. "Stop wasting my bread - so what, you decide to visit me on the way back from your errands?"

"Yup," she says. "Because I'm just that nice."

He pauses to stare at the ceiling for a moment, begging for some god to give him strength and her giggles behind him don't help.

"Toss me the bread roll back, would you?" She asks, and he lunges it back without a glance, sucking his teeth when he hears her catch it perfectly. "Cheers, Cashew."

The only sound in the room for awhile is the rustle of fabric as Kash continues to stuff things into his burlap sack, but for once in his life the silence isn't awkward. The small talk is unfamiliar, but he's almost okay with it. Despite only knowing her a short time, Kash felt that Vex was one of the few people in his life that knew when to shut up (most of the time anyway), and knew when silence would be better than the taste of foot in your mouth. Not that those who didn't know were so bad. They were just appreciated a little less. Sometimes.

He quashes the warm feeling spreading in his chest by clearing his throat, causing his guest to sit up straight and cross her arms. He pretends to ignore the way she's boring holes into the back of his shirt until he hears her inhale to speak.

"Cashew--"

He grumbles under his breath, "That's not my name--"

"Do you... Ever hear her sometimes?"

The protest dies on his lips and his shoulders tense. Oh great, a subject he's obviously not gonna wanna talk about. Now, this, this is familiar.

He wonders how long she's been sitting on that question and pauses his packing. Unconsciously, he twists to his left to look at her through the corner of his eye. Or, well, Her eye. The glance is brief and he grunts and turns back to the bag, shrugging one shoulder.

He tries to play it off. "Who, Keyleth? All the time, she never shuts up-"

"Cut the bullshit, Kashaw," Vex snaps, holding her crossed arms closer to herself and her gaze away from him. The sudden tone shift makes him drop any attempt at deflecting he was going to pull out. She continues in a quieter voice, so much that he's glad for the silence outside otherwise he'd have to ask her to repeat it, "You know who I mean."

Kash exhales sharply through his nose. He likes her idea of no eye contact and stares at the sack instead, gripping it tight in his hands. "I know exactly who you mean. I'm just wondering where the hell that question came from."

She doesn't answer him for awhile, and he starts to really see the resemblance with her brother until-

"Did you... Have a choice? With her," Vex asks, the words leaving her lips kicking and screaming if her hesitation is anything to go by. "Did she give you one?"

Kash finally decides to man up and face her, grumbling all the way until he's perched on the bedside, mimicking her posture and crossing his arms.

"You're gonna have to be more specific than that," He says, rubbing one palm against his forehead to ease the space between his eyebrows. Zahra said he'd look eighty by the time he turned half that if he didn't stop frowning. He'd flipped her off then but with the oncoming headache he was getting he was starting to see her point.

Vex rolls her eyes, already impatient with the pace of the conversation she started.

"Your wife," she spits out, and he appreciates the contempt, "that creepy bitch that lives in your eye or some other weird godly shit. Do you ever hear her? In your head, I mean."

Kash puts his hand down and looks at her. She's biting the inside of her cheek, and her fingers pinch the edge of her sleeves, seemingly feeling the texture but he's been this fidgety before and knows that her hands have gone numb.

"What's this about, Vex?" He asks with an exasperated exhale, tone just as low as hers. He isn't good with emotions, but Vox Machina travel together too much not to pick up each other's habits. When they want to discuss something serious, they all start talking like rabbits who've lived for a thousand years -- solemn and small but get too close and you could spook them away from the entire conversation. He can relate to the feeling.

Vex lets out a soft laugh, lifting and dropping her shoulders in a helpless shrug. "I don't know," she says, shaking her head and waving a hand. "You know what? Forget I ever said anything--"

"I do," Kash says before thinking. She goes still and turns her head to finally look at him, eyes wider and almost shimmering. He straightens his shoulders out and holds her gaze. "Hear her. When you've only got one follower, I guess you like to remind him you're there."

She purses her lips and looks down at his feet, taking a deep breath. She nods and starts to twist her unkempt braid. "You remember when we went to the Feywild, right?"

"When you all went to the Feywild, you mean?" He rubs at his forearm with an unsettled frown. "Yeah, I was still getting blood out of my hair and had to sleep in the library."

She has the decency to wince. "Sorry about that."

"Yeah, whatever."

"Anyway," she continues, "when I got my bow, we had to fight this Feywarden, and he... He could see in my head."

Kash raises an eyebrow. "And... how did he-

"I don't know how!" She explains, waving her hands and letting them land on her thighs. Bringing them back up to to rub at her face, she sighs and it reaches her bones. "Old magic or some other mythical shit - Fact is, he just. He knew things about me that I didn't want anyone to know. Things that I would've rather had been buried forever if I could help it."

The hands come down and she moves back towards the wall the table was up against behind her to lean against it herself. "And the things that he'd said to me..." She trails off and looks more tired than he's ever seen her - and he's seen her dead. The line of her shoulders slump and he thinks that she'd lie on the floor if her pride allowed it.

Still, he has to ask. Shifting his weight on the bed, he says, "Not that I try to understand anything any of you do, ever, but why are you telling me this?"

The corner of Vex's mouth twitches up in a half hearted smile and she shrugs. "Maybe you just have one of those faces, Cashew."

"I have a lot of faces and they all scream, 'don't talk to me,'" he says, and her smile breaks wide for only a moment before leaving just as soon. "Try again."

Vex looks like she's debating something in her mind and she says, "Keyleth told me what happened to you."

Kash frowns and kicks a little at the ground. "You mean she told you what I told her, anyway."

"Of course," Vex says quickly, sitting up a little straighter. She tilts her head, fixing her cunning half-elven gaze on his own and he has to look away. "I just thought that since you had lived with this... Darkness for so long, that you'd... I don't know, have some idea of how to get it to shut the fuck up."

Now he really has to snort. "If I knew how to get rid of voices I didn't want to hear," he says, "we wouldn't be having this conversation, trust me."

"I'll drink to that," Vex agrees, patting the counter around for an invisible mug.

He sighs again, and he wonders if there's a being out there that counts the amount of times he gets tired of talking in an hour. He hopes they're busy.

He really doesn't want to talk about Her. He never has, and never will, and the room has felt ten times smaller ever since the pointy eared menace in front of him began talking, and the welts and scars on his arm burn under his skin and there's a migraine in his left eye and every hour he's ever spent training feels like nothing because he can barely hold himself up at even the thought of his betrothed and--

"Kashaw?"

Vex's voice cuts through the monologue in his head and he opens his eyes, blinking frantically and scowling.

"What, what, what do you want from me?" He snaps back because it's the only way he knows how, rubbing his temples. His hands are sweaty but his breath is dangerously calm, almost as if he hadn't bothered using it in the past couple minutes. Kash swallows the lump in his throat and only gets more irritated. Even after all this time he still can't shake the fear of her.

Vex, still quiet in wake of all this, doesn't say anything and hops off the counter, wiping her hands on pants.

"I shouldn't have bothered you with this, I'm sorry-"

"Shut up and sit down, Vex, I'm getting there, okay?" Kash interjects, pushing the heel of his palms into his eyes. He doesn't need to see her to feel the cold stare fixated on him from his words but he hasn't cared about people's looks before and he sure won't now - not when she came to him.

"Vesh isn't a voice in my head," he starts, crossing his arms yet again. He's a man of few gestures. He's not avoiding Vex's eyes but chooses to look out the window instead anyway. "She's my wife. She gave me my scars, I gave me my scars, and now I'm stuck with her till I get the pleasure of dying and hopefully sealing her evil ass to a dimension even Bird Boy's lady can't reach."

"She's not just a voice, she's everywhere, and part of her is me," he says as plain fact. "Sure, she's all locked away now, but..." He shakes his head and squeezes his left forearm riddled in his wedding vows.

"She doesn't always need to whisper in my head. There's shit she's done to me that I won't ever get back, things that were worse than-- And I wish-" His words break off and it takes him a minute to fight the urge to stop talking altogether, to swallow the bile building his throat, to quell the burn in his stomach that makes every inch of him sick. He bites the inside of his cheek nearly hard enough to draw blood and glares at the floor. "Part of me wishes she'd only killed my family, because, you know, that's what she gives me to wish for."

The room is so silent he thinks his guest has left and he tears his eyes away from the floor. At this point Vex is across the table from him, and there's a recognition in her eyes that makes him pause. Her hands subtly clutch at her sides and it's there, that fight-or-flight Vox Machina guarantee. Her shoulders are raised, she has a foot stepped back and he can tell she's holding her breath from the way her eyes stare not at him but past him, a little further than the surface.

Kash takes a deep breath and stands up to his full height, closing his eyes. He tries to calm his nerves, which he's never been good at but has never failed to try, and rubs the back of his neck. When he opens them again, her hands are tucked to her chest, and she's looking at the ground again.

"Something tells me... You already know about something like that," he says, so low and quiet that he isn't sure she heard. Vex shifts a little and moves her head slightly enough to recognize as a nod and he sighs.

"This world fucking sucks," he mutters for good measure, and there's a little exhale from Vex's nose that sounds enough like she agrees. They stand without saying anything, each reevaluating whoever they see across from them.

Vex opens her mouth to speak first, "I--"

"Look," Kash interrupts, holding a hand up, "I know you came to me for... Some kind of help, and I'm not going to lie - that was pretty dumb because, like I keep telling you people, I don't know what the hell I'm doing either but..." There's a small smile on her face again and Kash figures he's doing something right so far. He takes a step towards her and uncrosses his arms.

"There are memories in my head that I don't even know who's are whose, or which ones actually happened, but I do know one thing about the bastards that won't leave us alone." He leans forward, and as he does, he lifts his hand and lets it hover, ignoring the way his fingers tense and tremble. Vex chews her bottom lip and, hands still close to her heart, squeezes her fingers twice before exhaling a shaky breath and reaching out to take his hand. Kash lets both of them rest on the table between them, and moves his head until he's sure that they're eye to eye.

"The voice in my head, and the voice that stays in yours? They lost a long damn time ago, because their first mistake was sticking around," he says, and Vex's are eyes strong and forward. "Life, remember? The dead don't grow. We do."

Vex looks away from his face down at their hands and he pretends not to notice how quickly she wipes at her eyes. She shakes her head solemnly and there's a small smile on her face.

"You know, I'm starting to understand where Keyleth was coming from," she says softly.

"Gross," he says at full volume, and she breaks into a laugh so infectious he can't help but join her. When they finally calm down she lets go of his hand and moves some of her hair out of her face, standing up tall and just as confident as she walked in. He does the same and they have a brief battle of the eyebrow raise before he breaks.

"Well," he starts, exhaling and feeling like he's run a mile. "You get everything you wanted?"

Vex clears her throat and pats his cheek, very reminiscent of their tiefling friend.

"I did! A very nice talk we had here, Kashaw," she hums, taking a step back. There's still some dirt on her face and Kash stares at it before grabbing the top of her head with one hand and rubbing the other on her cheek. She protests at the rough treatment but he eventually gets it off and lets her go, leaving her huffing with one cheek redder than the other.

"What the hell was that?!" She complained, holding the side of her face. He only offers her a shrug in response and she rolls her eyes, stomping to the front door.

"Gods, I'm never letting you hang out with my brother ever again," she mumbles, opening the door and looking back at him.

He stares at her in question and she gestures for him with her head.

"You're coming with me," she says, her tone not accepting any refusals.

"Says who?" He scoffs.

"The Lady of this motherfucking city, that's who," she declares, puffing out her chest and holding an arm out for him. She even sticks her nose in the air and he thinks she's having way too much fun. "Now get the hell out of this property and join us for dinner."

Kash groans and huffs and grumbles all the way out the door, protesting when she kicks him in the butt for good measure, but the laugh she lets out when he reaches for her makes him feel a little less reluctant. Definitely his least favorite twin.

#kashaw vesh #vex'ahlia #vex'ahlia de rolo #critical role #kashaw #fic #critrolerarepair

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