Title: Healing
Fandom: Critical Role (Campaign 1)
Rating: G
Length: ~400
Author notes: Written for the prompt Medicine.
Summary: Percy wakes after he got injured badly during a fight. Vex is there.

The darkness surrounding him is heavy and dreamless and yet Percy can feel the smoke surrounding him. He can taste it. The need for revenge, the thirst for blood. Orthax whispers encouragement in his ear until he can smell the metallic tinge of smoke in his nostrils as thick and sweet as the blood he’s going to spill…

Vex calls his name softly: “Percy!”

Then Pike whispers something. It’s like warmth and light and love and he takes a deep breath. The air is clear of the smells of smoke and blood. Pike – had he even known what holiness before Pike?

Had he known friendship before Vox Machina?

Had he understood love before Vex?

His eyes open and he knows he’s on his back, staring up at an unfamiliar ceiling, and arms are wrapped around him. Vex’s hair tickles his nose and he wraps one – aching – arm around her waist to pull her closer.

“Did we lose?” he asks.

“You’re awake,” Vex says and tries to sit up and look at him. He tightens his hold around her waist. He wants to feel her head against his shoulder, her breath against his neck – know he’s alive, and she’s alive…

“Did we lose?” he repeats.

She chuckles. “No,” she says softly. “Grog finished that demon thing a moment after it got to you – and I got a final arrow in that chained abomination he had with him and that was that.”

“My lovely wife,” he says with all the satisfied appreciation he feels just imagining Vex standing tall above him, protecting him while he’s down. It makes him smile.

“Don’t scare me like that,” she says way too seriously, showing how worried she had been for him. “Pike healed you a bit but… I’ll get you a potion. We still have a Greater or at least…”

She tries to sit up again. He holds her back again.

“Stay,” he whispers into her hair. “You’re the only thing I need to get better. Rest here with me.”

She kisses his cheek and settles in; her arms tighten around his waist in turn - her silent way of saying: “Whatever you need, darling.”

As long as she’s there, as long as he has something to protect, someone who will protect him in turn, the shadows will never take hold of him again.

His body needs some rest, that’s all. The rest of him is healed, broken pieces patched together and made better every day by the love he has found.