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the-french-belphegor · 8 months ago

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Every room in Scanlan’s mansion existed for a reason, as a conscious choice. He often changed the setup, and sometimes forgot to make a room, but a random chamber just popping up into existence for no reason was unheard of. (A few decades after Vecna, Kaylie comes across a room that doesn’t make sense in her father’s magical mansion.)

(Shout-out to @mythtaker, whose post last March about Scanlan probably keeping Vax's room in his Magnificent Mansion nudged my brain until I could finally do something with it 💜)

Still Life

Scanlan had changed addresses again since last time.

Kaylie let herself into the house after disarming the few traps he had told her about in his last letter. Just like he’d said, they were nothing fancy: just small precautions to avoid disgruntled former customers (or worse, the local competition) barging in unannounced.

The new house was small, but looked cosy, with high windows and whitewashed walls painted a light blue. The Marquesian sun flooded the coloured cement tiles of the study with a golden late afternoon sunlight. Her father, sitting with his feet on his desk and browsing through papers, didn’t appear to notice either the beautiful light or his unexpected visitor.

Kaylie shrugged off her backpack and let it drop to the floor. The thump made Scanlan look up; the next second, he hopped down from his chair and ran to her, smiling from ear to ear.

“Kaylie Shorthalt, apple of my eye, light of my days, vegan cream in my coffee –”

“Hey, Dad.” Tiredness kept Kaylie’s voice somewhat short, but the first thing she did after carefully putting down her violin case was give him a hug he happily returned. It had been a while since they’d seen each other. “How’s tricks?”

Even after all those years, the nugget of warmth curling in her chest when she met her father’s grin still caught her off-guard. She’d missed him, she could acknowledge that at least, but just how much she had still surprised her every time it hit her.

“Tricks are going swimmingly, thank you for asking. Did you get Juni’s letter?”

“I did, yeah, just before I left.”

“Oh, good. Well, it means Wax lost the bet, but she was worried.”

“Wait,” Kaylie asked with the start of a grin she couldn’t quite hold back, “which bet?”

Juniper and Wilhand’ildan Shorthalt, even after leaving home for places of higher learning, still made a point of staying in almost constant contact with each other, their big sister, their Grog, and their parents, by means of letters, second-hand messages, or Sending Stones. Their correspondence included a lot of teasing, bets, and dares, some of which bafflingly silly sometimes. It had dumbfounded both Kaylie and Scanlan somewhat until Pike and Grog had assured them that it wasn’t that unusual between siblings.

Scanlan waved a hand, drawing the suspense, of course.

“You know the kids. I think this time a… goat was involved? I’ll tell you all about it at dinner. In the meantime, shall I fire up the mansion? For old time’s sake?”

“‘Old times’, yeah. Sure.” Kaylie rolled her eyes, but her smile stayed. It had barely been six months since the last time they’d treated themselves to a nice stay in the Magnificent Mansion. Okay, it felt longer, but still. “I could do with a day at the spa anyway after all this heat.”

“Then it’s settled. Give me a minute.”

Scanlan rummaged in his pocket for the components, closed his eyes, and started to hum a tune Kaylie recognised as one she’d been working on the last time they’d seen each other. As always, the air around him went shimmery and warm, citrus and coriander with a dash of purple, and the door winked into existence.

Gnome-sized, of course. And flamboyant and magnificent and ridiculous in an endearing way, just like him.

He opened it for her with a bow and a flourish.

“Ladies first.”

“Show-off,” snorted Kaylie, and walked in with her violin case, trusting Scanlan to bring her bag inside. Which he did, after a double take.

It was always easy to tell, from the look of the mansion, if Scanlan had spent time in Tal’Dorei recently. The layout was different, the ceiling a little lower, the hues a little softer. Some of Wax’s drawings he’d made while inside the mansion hung on the walls in frames; there were touches here and there in the decorations of Pike’s blues and Juni’s golds amongst the pinks and purples. In the foyer, a sheet of paper covered in awkward letters bigger than Kaylie’s whole hand held pride of place on a sideboard along with a plate of cookies. She immediately pilfered a couple on her way inside.

“Where’d you put my room this time?” she asked, rolling her head on her neck. Gods, it had been a long day. Make that a long week. Or a long fucking month, to be honest.

“Ground floor, west wing, couple of doors to the hot springs. I’ll make the servants get started on dinner. Give me a yell if you need anything?”

“Sure thing, thanks.”

Kaylie recognised her bedroom immediately: the door was open, welcoming her in. Scanlan had styled it the way she liked, cool and cosy but not stifling, light on the frills, with plenty of space to put her things away and all the tools she needed to take care of her violin.

The bed looked way too comfy. It was tempting to just faceplant in it and crash. But then, she reasoned, it would still be there after a long soak and a nice dinner.

She threw her bag over her shoulder, padded barefoot out of her room, and opened the second door to the left.

And paused, puzzled.

That… wasn’t the hot springs. It was a bedroom, by the look of it, but a bedroom that didn’t make sense.

“Hey, Scanlan?” Kaylie called out, frowning. “What’s this room for?”

She didn’t wait for an answer and stepped in slowly, taking in the dark furniture, the elegant carpet, the plants in large pots scattered across the room. The circular bed was unmade, like its owner had just stepped out. She ran her palm over the quilt, a light, fuzzy fabric meant to look like it was made from black feathers. Or maybe stylised leaves.

Something tugged at her memory.

“What room, Kay—”

The footsteps behind her came to such an abrupt stop Kaylie thought Scanlan had Dimension Doored away elsewhere. But when she looked over her shoulder, there he was, framed in the doorway like a painting and about as motionless.

He looked nothing less than stricken.

And that… was all the explanation she needed.

After the dust settled, after that last big fight, as she was recuperating in Whitestone in a bed too big for her –

(from her wounds, from dying, from coming back to life in her father’s arms with his tears in her hair and her blood on his chest)

– he had come back, bone-tired and too quiet, the smell of booze on him stronger than some of her best and worst benders, but alive. They had talked a bit about what she wanted to do, now that the world wasn’t ending any more. She had pulled him into a hug, the only way she’d found to say everything she’d wanted to say without having words pulled out of her mouth like teeth.

It was only when she had come back from a much-needed nightly stroll and found him passed out at the foot of his own bed that she had realised he hadn’t said a single word about how the fight had gone down except We won.

What they had lost – who – had come up later.

Kaylie didn’t have many clear memories of Vax’ildan. The other members of Vox Machina she’d mostly learned to know after they disbanded. With the exception of her father – and a memorable conversation with Vex’ahlia, still vivid despite the fog of alcohol (But there’s a chance we can bring him back, if you’re willing to help) – the shape they had in her mind was a product of time in a new world, one that no longer involved escaping from dragons or being kidnapped and brainwashed by an asshole god. Vax would forever belong to that former world. The only remnants she had of him were a vague silhouette in dark clothing, a sharp grin, a surprisingly soft voice.

And the taste of blood in her mouth.

The last and strongest memory Kaylie had of Vax was his scrunched up face, contorted by guilt with tear tracks on his cheeks, open hand thrust forwards as Gilmore whisked her and Cassandra de Rolo away to safety. To this day she still viciously hoped some of that guilt was for her, too.

After all, she was the one he’d killed.

And then he had died (or perhaps before and it just took a while to really take, she had never been clear on the timing), and in the process had somehow gained the power to crack Scanlan’s heart right open.

So maybe Kaylie had ambivalent feelings about the guy.

But she was also very aware that saying fuck ‘im would not help at all in this situation.

“Oh, Dad.” She shook her head, but purposely kept her voice gentle, filing down some of her sharp edges for once. “Still, huh?”

Shock rippled on his face at the sound of her voice. It made him look a little less like someone had just punched him in the stomach.

“…I meant a couple of doors on the right,” he said in a small voice.

He’d sounded worse before – hell, he’d looked worse before, she had once seen his lifeless body laid out on an altar after getting ripped apart by a dragon – but something still tugged at her heart at that.

“Yeah, well. The spa can wait. What’s up with that?” She stepped towards him, telegraphing her movements, like he was a horse who might bolt if spooked. “Why did you make that room? You know that’s… that’s not a good idea, right?”

“I didn’t make it make it,” Scanlan protested with a little more life. “I just… didn’t not make it.”

“Okay, but why now?”

Silence.

Kaylie stared at Scanlan.

“You mean you don’t make it on purpose? It just pops up every time?”

“No! …Yes. Kinda? Look, the mansion’s a complicated spell, okay? It’s not even proper bardic magic in the first place. I’ve been casting it for years and I’m still not a hundred percent sure how it works.”

His eyes stayed mostly on her, but every now and then they strayed to the left, to the coverings, the bed, the plants. However his body still seemed rooted to the spot, and Kaylie was suddenly struck by a flash of insight.

“Dad, did you – have you ever actually stepped foot in there? You know, since he died?”

Scanlan went very still.

(How the hell did he manage to fool anybody, Kaylie wondered as her heart sank in her chest. How good a liar did that make him, really, that she managed to see right through him every time?)

She shook her head again.

“You haven’t, have you. Decades of making this room without even thinking about it and you never… Godsdammit, Dad.”

“I can’t, Kaylie,” he said, barely audible. “It’s not… I wouldn’t…”

Scanlan Shorthalt at a loss for words was a unique phenomenon that could be two things: downright hilarious or powerfully awkward. A very rare third kind of outcome, the instances of which Kaylie could count on the fingers of one hand and a half, was snapping your heart clean in two. And for someone like her, who prided herself on always keeping that soft, vulnerable part of herself safe from all hurt… Well, it sucked. To put it mildly.

Kaylie sighed.

Then she took her father’s hand.

“You’re a fuckin’ idiot,” she said gently, and pulled him into the room.

She didn’t have to tug very hard. Scanlan stumbled after her easily. The next moment he absent-mindedly straightened his vest and looked around at the room as though he was seeing it for the first time.

The room, not the contents. It was obvious, from the way his gaze lingered on this and that, how he snorted at the sight of an armchair pillow embroidered with two tiny figures inside a giant black dragon, or smiled at a painting that depicted a bunch of cows and a giant bird, of all things, that the objects that populated the space were familiar, or at least brought up memories.

Kaylie gave him a moment, then climbed onto the human-sized (or rather half-elf-sized) bed, letting her feet dangle over the edge. The movement must have caught Scanlan’s eye; he turned, and after a while shucked off his shoes and clambered up, too.

The silence between them lasted long enough that Kaylie started to wonder whether she should summon one of the mansion’s creepy ghost servants to get herself a drink. But she had cut down on daytime drinking a lot these past few decades, particularly since Juni’s birth. Putting the kibosh on Scanlan’s meat consumption had been a gag at first – plus chicken for breakfast, lunch, and dinner got old fast – but the excuse of eating healthy to live longer had had some truth behind it. Behind the sarcasm she’d actually wanted her father to stick around, and you kinda had to stay alive for that. It had taken her a few years after that to realise that getting too fucked up too often would make her less inclined to stay alive, too.

Scanlan had stuck by the vegan diet, and Kaylie had cut down her drinking rather dramatically.

But damn if her fingers didn’t still itch for a pint, sometimes.

“So,” she said, if only to hear something. Dammit. She had counted on Scanlan being the first to open his mouth – he usually was. “That’s a nice bedroom. This bed’s comfy.”

“I should hope so,” said Scanlan, his voice almost normal by now. Almost. “Nothing but quality in my Magnificent Mansion.”

“No mirror on the ceiling in this one?”

“Nah, not this time. But I think everybody had one at some point? Gods, it’s been ages. Anyway, I made up for it. Look in the… I think it’s in the bedside table on the left.”

Against her better judgement, Kaylie shuffled to the bedside table. Inside it was a book with a title in Marquesian which in Common translated to The Lotus and the Butterfly.

She raised an eyebrow.

“Isn’t that the one with—?”

“—with beautiful traditional Marquesian illustrations going back two hundred years from the best artists in Yios, yes.”

“I was gonna say ‘the sex positions guidebook’, but sure, let’s go with that.” She shook her head. “I thought you couldn’t leave anything from the Material Plane in the mansion?”

“You can’t. I had the servants make it special from a copy I picked up once at a casino.”

“The one you got scammed in?” Kaylie asked with a grin, making Scanlan roll his eyes. She leafed through the book idly, gaze quickly flitting over text and pictures, neither really registering. “And you just. Left that in your friend’s bedside table. Like that’s not fucking weird at all.” Her head snapped back up as a thought hit her. “Wait, did you… Did you ever hook up with him, back in the day?”

In the two seconds it took for Scanlan to open his mouth, eyes wide, she decided she didn’t need to know the answer. Those two had been good friends and clearly loved each other a lot; whether sex had been involved or not was irrelevant.

She steered clear of sentiment, though, out of habit.

“Wait, don’t answer that. Sorry. Gross, shut up. Still, what the hell? Was it supposed to be some kind of prank?”

“Well, no, I… Okay, maybe just a little. Once I finally got that he and Keyleth were actually, like, A Thing, I put the book in there whenever I made the mansion. Mostly I figured they might need, uh… not exactly something to help them get it on, but just… ideas, you know? It took them long enough to realise they both wanted to boink, just thought I might aid a little in that department.”

Kaylie stared at her father, not knowing whether she might facepalm or laugh herself sick.

“Seriously.”

“Hey,” Scanlan pointed out, “it was them or Vex and Percy, and once they figured out their own shit they didn’t need any incentive to jump each other’s bones! Man, I’m still surprised they stopped at five kids and didn’t go for the full baker’s dozen.”

Once upon a time, this would’ve been a golden opportunity for her to say something scathing about accidental children. The Kaylie from three decades ago would have verbally eviscerated present-day Kaylie for letting that opportunity pass by. But then again, being her three decades ago had been fucking exhausting. Sure, she sometimes missed the viciousness she had let go of over the years, but she’d also lost some fears and gained a little peace of mind. Overall, not a bad bargain.

She settled for a snort and put the book back in the bedside table. Then she made herself comfortable on the bed, leaning back and kicking her feet a little.

Surprisingly, Scanlan didn’t add anything. He rested his elbows on his knees and his chin on his arms and gazed vaguely ahead with an odd expression, for him.

“Hey, Dad.”

“Hm?”

Godsdammit. Pike would be much better suited for this.

Kaylie resolutely kept her own gaze in front of her and didn’t look at him.

“You do realise it’s… okay if you don’t make this room? Maybe not next time, but like… the time after that. I don’t think he’ll mind, I mean… It’s not… It wouldn’t be betraying him is what I’m sayin’.”

Out of the corner of her eye she saw him turn his head towards her a little, but he remained uncharacteristically silent and still.

“It’s nice that you kept his stuff. No, I know, it’s not really his stuff, but you know what I mean – it’s, uh… it’s a thoughtful gesture. Wherever he is I’m sure he’d appreciate it. But…”

How did people do this? Say words that weren’t even spells and fixed things somehow? Her music could break and heal alike, but that last part felt closer to tying a tourniquet on a bleeding limb: a tiny thing that might keep you from dying just now, but a far cry from magic that knitted bones back together or breathed life back into corpses. She had sung away the hurt from Juni’s scraped knees or Wax’s scratched elbows a few times when her little siblings were kids. She might as well be trying to do the same now on a decades-old wound that somehow still found a way to bleed every now and then.

“But… But there’s better ways to remember him by. This is like… frozen in time. Like a museum, almost. Somehow I doubt that’s what he was about.”

“It’s not,” Scanlan muttered. Then he cleared his throat and added, without the crack in his voice this time, “I mean, yeah, he was… He was, uh.”

She pretended not to see him wipe his nose on his sleeve.

“He had… a lot going on, once he got into his thing with the Raven Queen. That messed him up for some time. But even with all that, even when he went full emo goth chicken with one foot in the grave talking about death all the frickin’ time, he was… he was alive.”

Pause; a small snort of a laugh. When he spoke again he was smiling, but his voice was less than steady again. “Never seen a dead guy so alive, when I think about it.”

Kaylie waited for him to continue. When it became obvious that nothing more was coming, she bit back a sigh, then shuffled closer.

And closer. Just close enough to lay her head on her father’s shoulder if she slumped a little.

(Ever since she’d first laid eyes on him she’d always been a little taller. That he’d never been there while she was still small enough to hold and carry was one of the things she still was angry at him about occasionally – and angry at herself for it. She was tough and strong and a grown-ass adult, godsdammit, not a bloody child.)

After a while, Scanlan laid his head against hers, giving her time to slip away if she wanted, like he usually did.

“Didn’t you want to go to the spa?” he asked quietly.

Kaylie gave a one-shoulder shrug, careful not to jostle their skulls against each other’s.

“I will. In a while.”

“I included the steam room again.”

“Good. It’s nice. Also pretty.”

“Well, you deserve the best.”

“Damn right I do,” she murmured.

Maybe he wasn’t the best father. But he certainly wasn’t the worst she’d thought he was for the first two thirds of her life. Sure, the space between their souls had its share of broken things, but in time they had built trust, and affection, and unspoken words that warmed rather than hurt.

She shifted, just enough that she could kiss his temple just above his ear – a little smaller than her own, one of the few physical traits he didn’t pass on to her – and give his hand a squeeze for good measure, lightning-quick.

Then she settled against him again before he could say anything.

The room was not haunted. In two dozen hours it would disappear, along with the rest of the house; one day it might cease to exist altogether. And maybe, between the two of them (beating hearts, warm bodies, lungs drawing breaths in tandem with one another), they could lay some old ghosts to rest.

#critical role #vox machina #tlovm spoilers #cr1 spoilers #kaylie shorthalt #scanlan shorthalt #fanfiction

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