oo the PercyVex soulmate AU! always love seeing twists on soulmates
So, Critical Role was the first fandom I got into that made me give a damn about shipping, because Percy and Vex are such fantastic characters and their romance is great. They gel so well, even from relatively early on, Percy's respect for Vex, and Vex's willingness to turn to Percy for certain things where usually she'd only trust her brother. It's tasty!
And fandom, being fandom, loves adding in angst, so there was this idea of a Soulmate AU where Soulmates share pain - which is especially crunchy because Percy was canonically tortured. This is also a D&D world with actual souls and demons and devils and soul coins and shit, and also I am a nerd who loves to worldbuild so I elaborated on the concept: soulbonds start forming during puberty and share pain by default but they take two years or so to fully form, after which they can share emotions, bondmates can hide pain and emotions etc.. Bonds can be severed and new ones can be made and bonds are broadly seen as a gift from the goddess of fate. Demon deals and devilish contracts block soulbonds because both of those entities feed on the energy of souls, and warlock pacts effectively take the place of soulbonds, which is part of why warlocks get a bit of side-eye vs clerics and paladins and their kind of devotion. There's a whole bunch of other things like cultural views on soulbonds and different D&D races having varying kinds of soulbonds and their own explanations for those, but ANYWAY:
Everyone has soulbonds and this is fine. This is a given, you get little snippets from them and learn your soulmate through the pains they suffer and the emotions you both share - you learn to empathise and/or experience compassion for them. Again, part of why it's seen as a godly gift: it's the gods' way of helping people connect to each other.
Then the Briarwoods come, murder Percy's whole family, let Dr Ripley torture him and everything is hell. When Percy comes back to himself two years later, having escaped and made a gun with which to take his revenge, his bond is gone. He assumes his bondmate cut it. He doesn't remember when this might have happened, and he's sure he felt something from his bond as he escaped but the bond wasn't two years old at that point so he was probably just out of it and imagining things. It's fine! It's fine. He doesn't feel abandoned by his soulmate, definitely not. It's fine.
Meanwhile, on Vex's end, she felt her soulmate experience a week straight of torture, then vague nothingness and then two years later they fucking died, as far as she could tell, choking to death on smoke. Meanwhile her twin brother gets two bonds (Fatetouched tend to tangle more easily with others and thus tend to develop more bonds, it's unusual but not unheard of) and hers is.
Hers is dead.
They're both fine. Definitely. Honest.
And then they meet! And they're the only people in their group without bonds - and what's more, most of the group has bonds amongst themselves, which they all interpret in a variety of ways (one of the party gnomes and the party goliath have a bond; goliath barbarian culture specifically sees soulbonds as a "brothers in arms" in situation, so that's how Pike and Grog handle their bond! Dragonborn have "teaching" bonds, which change to new people as they grow and learn, so that's the flavour of Tiberius and Keyleth's bond. Etc.), so Percy and Vex, all alone, set up No Soulmates Club - they check on each other after fights, they provide the emotional support and reassurance the others get from their bonds and it's fine. It's close enough. Definitely. Everything is fine.
Anyway, I'm sure you see where this is all going. There's several flavours of clusterfuck in this fic and it brings me such joy and what's the best bit is that even finding out the truth of the whole sitch doesn't fix things.
Anyway, some of this fic is posted on AO3 over Here, I am still working on it I promise, BG3 just swallowed me whole, but here, have a snip of the chapter I'm working on:
Percy sighs, rubbing his chin. “Another problem on the horizon for us to brace ourselves for,” he says. “And- I’m sorry dear, they’re going to be so much worse about bondless given Krieg…” Fuck. They are, aren’t they? A soulbond is as effective a method of identification as anything else, and now the one, well-known, well-regarded bondless has proven to actually be a dragon, a secret, chromatic dragon at that… it’s all anyone’s going to be able to gossip about, how bondless might be demons or dragons in disguise, and how even if not, well just look at Fince, so easily used as he longed for his lost bond… “It’s terribly unfair,” Percy says. “Hopefully with our efforts to help, it might net us some leeway-” “But we’ll be exceptions,” she says. It’s easy enough to understand. “Every other bondless…” And some of them, too, might have never had bonds form, or like Percy had it broken against their wishes, or like her lost them to death - those who willfully break bonds are rare, and with everything- it can’t mean something when someone has no bond, can’t mean they’re abandoned by the gods like some say. Even if they were - it doesn’t stop people from treating every other case the same, or ignoring that they can’t know why a bond never formed- “Vex,” Percy says. “One problem at a time. If we do this-” If they do this and succeed, they’ll have standing. If they have standing, they can make changes. Hopefully - maybe - no one else will suffer their losses. No one else will be manipulated by a lost bond, or doubted for never having one. It’s a nice idea. Vex can’t help but doubt it.
