Tag: perc’ahlia

Chapter 2: The Bathtub

Length: About 4k words
Rating: E

Happy birthday, @notaficwriter! Have some porn. Also a happy birthday month to @pagerunner-j and @out-there-on-the-maroon. Yay for arbitrary deadlines! And a happy birthday to myself tomorrow. My present to myself is positive attention. I hope. Or just the satisfaction of having finished a chapter, I guess.

“Oh, hello there, darling,” Vex greets him as she approaches the
giant-ass tub he has all to himself, filled to the brim with steaming hot water
that smells faintly like strawberries. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“Who’d have thought,” he agrees, trying to sound nonchalant, probably,
but his tone has a slight tinge of both trepidation and reverence to it – both
things she heard in his voice the night before, though something tells her the
trepidation is entirely unrelated to her naked body this time, mostly due to
the fact that she hasn’t even revealed it yet.

Well. It might be somewhat related to the burns and bruises scattered
over her body from where the meteors had hit her, the large patch of dry and
cracked skin on her side, and angry red marks burned into her skin from where
the poison breath had hit her before killing her. She’s not sure, but
considering how she still has an impact scar tinged with green at the center of
her chest, maybe healing magic doesn’t quite get rid of the marks of fatal
attacks. Nine hells, she still has bite and claw marks from the pit fiend that
haven’t quite healed over yet.

And Percy still has every single scar caused by Ripley’s bullets on his
chest.

“Yeah, you know…” She drawls out as she drops her bathrobe, still a few
feet away from the tub. “I could have gotten my own tub, but that just felt
incredibly lonely somehow.”

“Understandable,” Percy says, his eyes following her robe down her body,
but catching on the new scars and bruises courtesy of both Thordak and Raishan,
but mostly Raishan. “It’s also just more efficient to share. Saves water. And
time.”

[Read more on AO3]

Indefinitely Postponed

Rating: E
Pairing: Perc’ahlia
Wordcount: 5995
A tale of two idiots who’d rather get naked than talk about their feelings. Until they do.
A smutty character study. Please be nice to a first time smut writer, and by nice I mean tell me how to do better. Politely.

Arbitrarily finished in time for @returnofismasm’s birthday. Go wish her a happy birthday, you nerds. Also special thanks to my editors @everknowing, @actualinspectorkemp and  @yashas-strong-arms. Love you all.

Part 1: The Door

 He’s shaking as he’s closing the door, even though she is the
one standing there without any clothes on. It’s almost enough to make
her feel bad. Almost. If he hadn’t come here to talk, the least they
could do is get something
out of the way.

 “Are you alright, dear?” She asks, inching closer, head cocked
in concern, and almost but not quite dropping the mocking tone to her
voice.

 “Yes,” he answers, as quickly as his eyes dart up and down her
naked form again. “Yes, quite.” Then he uncorks the bottle of what he’d
referred to as Courage and takes a long swig.

 Vex raises her eyebrows at him and crosses her arms, careful to
do it in a way that pushes up her tits for some totally accidental
cleavage.

 “Do you honestly need to be drunk for this?” Now her tone swings
back to sardonic and mocking. “I mean, by all means, do go on, this is
only the second least flattering thing that happened to me in the
bedroom. But once you accidentally call me by my brother’s name, I’ll
have to throw you out.”

 Making him choke on it was indeed an excellent way to get Percy
to put down the bottle, though it’s probably a shame about the
undoubtedly fancy liquor he’s coughing up. She graciously steps closer
and slaps his back to help with the process anyhow.

 “Great,” he manages to say between coughs, eyes transfixed on her collarbone for some reason. “Now that’s something for me to worry about.”

 She laughs at that. “I think you’ll do fine, dear,” Vex assures
him, cupping his cheek with the hand that had been slapping his back.
“And if all else fails, try using my full title, that should clear
things up. I mean, assuming you are… Uh… On board?”

 Now it’s his turn to laugh. Or at least chuckle under his
breath, while still avoiding looking at her eyes or anything beneath her
collarbone.

 “I came to your door, on the eve of battle, with a bag full of
alcohol,” Percy dryly sums up the evening’s proceedings so far. “I
thought we’d just sample some local spirits, and maybe after that we
could braid each other’s hair or play a round of chess. That is
absolutely all my plan entailed.”

 “Well then,” she snorts. “I’d say I’m so sorry for derailing
that, but, really, I’m not.” She pulls him closer by the collar of his
shirt (Percy wisely forwent putting on that coat for his, thank the
gods) and begins to press kisses up his jaw line. “Also,” she whispers
as she gets closer to his ear, and admires the goosebumps her tickling
breath sends down his neck. “I’ve grown rather tired of being all proper
and waiting for your move, really. You can’t just leave me hanging for
ages.” And she nibbles on his earlobe for good measure, making sure to
press her entire naked form against him as much as she can.

 “Four days,” he groans weakly, now finally touching her as well.
It’s just his hands on her waist, and probably only to steady himself
as her ministrations make his shivers return, but it’s a start. “It’s
only been four days since the woods.”

 Vex pulls away just enough to look at him, eyebrows raised mockingly.

 “Darling, if you seriously mean to tell me this thing here has
only been going on for four days, I actually might throw you out,” she
chides him. He laughs nervously.

 “Didn’t you give me the option of talking after?” Even his voice shakes at this point, his entire body taut with tension. “I choose that.”

 “Very well,” she says, putting on the lowest voice she can muster. “Then you better hope that Courage kicks in soon and start touching me.”

[Continue reading on AO3]

And let’s be real, this is how the Perc’ahlia break up went.

  • Someone panicked in the morning, argument ensued, emotionally constipated people decide to split up, maybe
  • Percy moodily moves back into the castle, Cassandra is very concerned
  • He mopes off into his workshop
  • Vex goes hunting to blow off some steam
  • Vex comes back to blow off some more steam in the form of break up sex
  • They traumatize a few choice members of the castle staff by leaving the door open
  • They also realize they’re being dumb and stop
  • Percy moves back into Vex’s house by sunset. Cassandra is mildly annoyed.

pagerunner-j:

(Fair warning: it’s been a day and I am tired, so I am not guaranteeing spotlessly outlined and supported discourse here, but have some thoughts anyway .:)

Today I saw a post going around in explanation & support of the prevalence of slash writing/reading amongst women in fandom, and I understood a lot of what it was getting at. I’ve written more than enough of it myself to spend half of the essay kind of wryly nodding along. Tangentially, though, it also made me marvel again at how in Critical Role circles, so many people jumped right on board with the Percy/Vex relationship even if slash was usually their thing. It pretty clearly made a difference that this show had a vibrant, interesting, engaging female character involved, whose ownership of her own sexuality (often kind of a loaded phrase, especially when it’s getting thrown around by male writers) was not only confident and take-charge but downright playful. She was evidently enjoying herself, and so was Percy, and it’s amazing how much such a simple thing helps. But what I think is also interesting, and somewhat unique to the circumstances of the show, is that this came out of a collaborative creative exercise. This wasn’t the result of a single author’s idea or fantasy; this wasn’t something you could say was an exclusive product of either the male or female gaze. This was the work of two people who both brought things to the story and supported each other’s arcs in general along with the relationship specifically. And it showed. I think some of that mutual effort even sneaked into the characterization despite themselves, which is to say “despite Taliesin’s tendency to shit-talk Percy every chance he gets.” 😉 (Compare any of those comments to how Percy acted with Vex when it really mattered. Specifically, when it really mattered to her.) To borrow a quote, they really did fill in each other’s gaps in a lot of ways. 

And then in the face of all that you got fans saying things aloud like “omg, I actually care about a het relationship, what the hell” and I’m still sitting here thinking, “It’s funny how that actually can work when the character dynamics aren’t completely fucked up, isn’t it…”

(There’s probably a related conversation to be had about Vaxleth, how that developed, and the amount of attention it got, especially in relation to how attached – in a much more typical way – fandom got to the idea of Vax and Gilmore, but again I say “I am tired” and will save that one for later. 🙂

What was the rule again? The amount of slash produced for any given fandom is inversely proportional to the percentage of engaging and complex female characters? Hence why most anime fandoms are full of slash, and critical role kind of isn’t….

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, too. Like, every now and then someone new wanders into the tag, probably coming from a slash-writing or -reading background themselves, looks around, and is like, “wait a second, why are all the most popular pairings het? Why is no one shipping Percy and Vax? This fandom is weird.”

Which really, really just goes to illustrate, like you pointed out, how rare it is to have a complex, playful, and sexy dynamic with a female character who has actual agency in it. Suddenly the het-ness doesn’t even matter, the ship is just so much fun.

(Also Percy will forever exist in the conflict between Taliesin convincing himself Percy’s a bad person, while also doing everything in his power to make sure Vex gets the focus and attention she deserves. People in general and Taliesin in particular seem to think we’re all just liking Percy because we’re conditioned to like fucked up, tragic, revenge-obsessed assholes and overlook their every flaw. Fuck that noise. We like Percy because of the way he got over his shit and the way he treated Vex.)

Coming into the fandom only after things were somewhat settled after episode 69, looking at the comments of earlier episodes is odd. People seem to have actual strong feelings about other people just imagining Perc’ahlia moments. I mean, I have long-since accepted that watching comprehension is not among the youtube comment section’s best skills, but still… How could people ever call anyone delusional for shipping Perc’ahlia after darling take the mask off? And insisting on it on the episode featuring they’re definitely not worth you?

…then again, I too have seen the collage of posts after My Heart Is Someone Else’s. Which is definitely something you say about your brother/bear/everyone/WON’T SOMEBODY THINK ABOUT PIKE after a fuckboy in a tree propositions you.