then ominous skies materialise (critical role | cassandra~jb)

[fiachairecht]

then ominous skies materialise. critical role, cassandra~jb trickfoot. two fey creatures at the end of the world. 846w, rated t.

Cassandra is used to seeing the dead walk.

For many years it was a comfort; first her ancestors' ghosts whispering the castle's secrets to her as she slipped through the crypts more silent than a shadow, then her brothers and sisters in blood patrolling the city streets as Sylas and Delilah whispered that now they would keep her safe.

Cassandra knows the dead walk because she too is dead, bloodless under moonlit skies.

(She has not yet had the heart to tell Percival. Not while she can still be his sister. Not when it means reminding him of what he failed to do for her years ago when their city fell. Not when the stones of Whitestone Castle still bend to her will.

Nothing changed when Delilah dug her from the ground. Everything changed when Delilah died the first time.)

But the dead in Vecna's clouds are nothing like what she knows. They promise only a death more final, a future more dark, and part of Cassandra — the part of her blood Delilah took before Sylas raised her, the part of her blood scattered across the stones of Vecna's rebirth and seeded in the nightmares of his clouds — wants nothing more than for them to truly rise.

The rest of Cassandra, the closest thing to real she ever feels these days, can summon only a tired fury. Even on the worst days of her captivity, Delilah's charms hung around her neck and wrists heavier than anything physical, she was never stretched so thin. But, she thinks, looking down at JB's small dark head resting against her collarbone, there are still more things better now than before.

"I wonder if we could capture them," JB muses from her position curled in Cassandra's lap. Under these clouds Cassandra can see the truly unnatural angles of her cheekbones, her teeth glinting a shade of white that should never exist on this plane.

Strange loves strange, JB had said the day they met, the very first thing either of them had said to each other, and Cassandra's too-still heart had flipped in a memory of human desire. Trust took longer, but now Cassandra cannot imagine another day waking without the fey woman in her bed.

If either of them live to see the next dawn.

"I'm not sure they're real," she says, rather than see that thought to its conclusion.

JB presses a kiss to the top of her chest. "I'm not sure it matters."

Cassandra sighs, tightens her arm around JB's waist. "The nightmares are real enough to hold, I suppose."

"Not when I'm holding you instead," JB sing-songs, light enough that Cassandra laughs even knowing what it means to be held by someone like JB. Better always to be held than to be promised, she knows, with the memory of Delilah's willingness to give her over to the Undying King still sharp in her chest.

She bows her head, nestles her cheek against JB's silky hair. "And if I hold you?"

"Your stones won't last forever. Not even with the residuum."

It's harder to see in the light of the end of the world, no true light to spark the green-gold of everlasting autumn from the shards scattered across the tops of the battlements. Cassandra is not sure what they're meant to do, only that JB remembered them from Mithrendain, and Cassandra's people needed any hope they had.

(Vox Machina, she thinks, Vox Machina is to be the world's hope. But her brother and his friends are very far away, and JB and her residuum shards are here.)

Cassandra is cold always, and the nights colder still.

"I would take you home to my city," JB says, when the silence has begun to be lost to the screams of the dead. "You and Pike and me, in a land where winter never takes over from autumn's life."

It's not the first time she's offered, and Cassandra knows it won't be the last. But she has a city to think of, even after all that she has changed. "You know why you can't," she says, even as she thinks safety, safety, safety, a whisper of something she hasn't touched since she was a girl clearer than light under the grey skies.

"Then let me capture the dead for you," JB says fiercely, turning in Cassandra's lap to press small hands into her cheeks, the shock of her nails against skin a reminder of everything that is still unbearably present. "Let me bind them, let us fight, let me..." She trails off, lost for ideas.

Cassandra gently takes JB's hands in her own. "I think, my love," she says quietly, as dusk begins to deepen the shadows behind the tortured faces in the sky, "that there will be time enough for all of us to fight, the living and the dead."

Cassandra has seen the dead walk but she has seen the shadows rage, and with a city buried in time and a lover too odd to be lost and her own bloody hands, she thinks they may yet endure.