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The last crackling offshoots of the campfire drift overhead, little red lights borne on the curling smoke, floating towards the distant stars and continuing to spin. It makes the sky look like it’s dancing.
Molly watches with a crooked smile, and jabs the point of his sword into the embers, stirring up another shower of sparks. The smell of the smoke is thick and acrid in his nose for a moment, a flare of heat on his face and arm, and then it dies down again.
He wonders, sometimes, if he simply has an eye for beauty, or if the universe just hasn’t had the time to dull the sheer experience of things to his senses yet. It’s a dismal notion, that one day he might watch the planets dance and whirl overhead and see nothing more than the same old sky. But if he puts forth the effort, keeps the loose collection of memories to his name safely at arms length, perhaps he can always look at the stars with fresh eyes.
Or, failing that, he could always put his feet to use. Wander a bit farther, see if the sky starts to look any different from a new angle.
It feels like the kind of night for singing, the kind of atmosphere that can only be completed with a little music to stir the high, waving grass until it joins the dance. A pity that the only songs Molly has really ever heard are Toya’s. His own rough tenor can never bend the notes to resonate in quite the same way.
And besides, somewhere over his right shoulder, Beauregard is snoring loud enough to wake the dead. Molly stirs up the embers again and drops the blade to the packed dirt at his feet, shrugging off his coat and laying it down like a patchwork rug.
The stars dance. The moons glow. The wind plays through the grass like a lover running fingers through a partner’s hair. As watches go, it’s been entirely uneventful, but to Molly the world is so overwhelmingly bright and beautiful and full of silent music that he can barely stand to take it all in. He lounges on his makeshift blanket, pulls his cards from a pouch at his belt, and tucks a sprig of heather into the ties of his jerkin.
He’s purposeful with his choices at first, shuffling and counting and making a few attempts to pull the right card as he calls it to mind, with mixed success. But explained in the right way there are a very few messages that cannot be gleaned, in one way or another, from the faded illustrations of cups and swords and stars and moons and fine women and gentlemen and other lovely figures of neither persuasion. Molly pauses on the high priestess, the symbol of the Knowing Mistress resting in her lap, the moon lying upside-down at her feet. He traces a painted finger over the varnished paper, then reshuffles the deck and pulls again, letting fate guide his hand.
Molly turns the card over, looks down at it and can’t find it in him to summon a modicum of surprise. He taps his index finger over the inky figure of the porcelain-faced woman in the dark feathered robe and grins. “You again, hm?”
The death mask stares blankly back up at him, cold and white and familiar. “Yes, alright,” Molly sighs. “I remember that much. I’m more interested in the here and now, if you please.”
His thumb pulls at another card, sliding it down onto the lining of the coat to join the first, and he’s already reaching to flip it when he feels the sudden shift in the air around him. The back of Molly’s neck prickles, and he turns to survey the camp, free hand reaching for the sword lying in the dirt beside him.
There’s nothing amiss on the surface, only Yasha lying with her back against a log and the pommel of her greatsword resting against her cheek. Beau’s head burrowed under her blanket while her feet are exposed to the night air. Fjord stirring in his sleep every so often, Jester’s tail twitching against the packed earth while she dreams, Caleb curled in on himself like a cat, a sleeping goblin wrapped around his leg. No looming threat catches Mollymauk’s roaming eye.
An uneventful watch.
He turns back to his cards, hears a low, muffled cry, and stops. The blade is in his hand in an instant, for all the good it will do him if some maniac bursts out of the tall grass with a crossbow. He stands and turns fully in one fluid motion, alert, scanning the horizon for the source of the sound, when it comes again. Much closer than he had been accounting for.
Caleb’s shoulders shake, and the sliver of his face visible to Molly from this angle shows a pale, terrified grimace as he moans again, a half-smothered cry of distress and fear and pain. After a moment more of shifting and groaning he gasps like all the air is being ripped from his lungs and goes still and quiet.
Molly sinks back down to his knees as surreptitiously as he can, turning away from a moment it was almost certainly not his place to witness. There’s a telling silence from behind him, a terrible lingering uncertainty that sours his mood even under the calm glow of the moonlight. He closes his eyes, turning back to the cards at his feet and whistling the first tune that comes to mind, stilted and painfully off-key.
It’s a very unhelpful card he sees before him, a cartoonish figure of a mage cloaked in red and white, directing a prismatic beam up into the sky. Mollymauk glares at it, sullenly, before tucking the offender back in with the rest of the deck.
Then comes a quiet, purposeful shifting behind him, which Molly resolutely ignores for as long as he can, shuffling the cards with an elaborate flourish he learned once from a halfling in a dive bar somewhere in the Menagerie Coast. More shifting, and the soft pad of feet in his direction. “Lovely night, isn’t it?” he says, because it feels like something ought to be said.
“Mollymauk.” Caleb says, in that soft, clipped, quiet voice of his. Maybe it’s an especially beautiful sound, his name in Caleb’s mouth, or maybe Molly simply has yet to grow used to it.
He cuts the deck, flips down a few cards without really looking at them--the page of cups, the jester, the sun, five stars connected with a crisscrossing beam of white light, an ambiguous figure standing at the shore of a red lake with a sword at his back and one in each hand. Not looking at them, but not watching Caleb either, while he sinks down into the grass at Molly’s left side and looks on.
“Anything interesting hidden in that deck of yours?” Caleb asks, a little dryly. “Any ill omens the rest of us ought to know about?”
“Nothing that can’t wait ‘til morning,” Molly says, pulling one last card and staring down at the familiar face of the Matron of Ravens. It’s strange how she always seems to find her way to the top of the stack. Or maybe not very strange at all. “Truth be told, I think I ought to put them away for the night.” He turns Death over again and folds it back into the deck, tucking the whole lot away in his pouch. “Can’t seem to get them to tell me anything I don’t know already, and I don’t know much so that’s saying something.”
He catches Caleb’s quick nod out of the corner of his eye, drops his gaze lower to watch his hands tremble as he pulls up blades of grass one by one.
“You know,” he says, before he can consider stopping himself, “There’s more than one way to divine a fortune, dear. I read palms as well. If you like.”
Caleb’s eyes find his a brighter blue than usual in the soft glow of the moonlight. He looks...wary, but then Caleb is always wary. Pensive, is the word Molly would put to his expression, if he had to choose a word. Though perhaps that’s wishful thinking. Molly’s prone to that folly in particular.
“Better safe than sorry,” he amends, with a raise of his eyebrow and an tentative smile. He holds out his hand to Caleb, who pauses with his fingertips still digging into the soil.
Something flickers across his face, and he rests his hand in Molly’s. Unsteady, but not unwilling.
Molly’s smile broadens to a full grin. “Not to worry, I promise to only tell you what you want to hear.” Caleb is not the sort of man who would laugh at a showman’s practiced line just to appease his ego, but he does offer Mollymauk a subtle quirk of his lips, a little hint of the careful smile Mollymauk hopes he can one day coax out in full.
Caleb’s palm is pale compared to his dusky, freckled face, the tips of his fingers brushed dark with ash and mud and the strange char his favored spells burn into the surface of his skin. There’s a pen callus on the side of one finger, near the last knuckle.
“Are you going to tell me what you think you see on my hand,” Caleb asks, “Or should I be reading your mind?”
“I was just getting to it, don’t rush me,” he chides, running his thumb across the head line and relishing the way Caleb’s breath hitches almost imperceptibly. “Long and even, all the way across the palm. That’s steadiness. Careful, analytical thinking. Very appropriate, don’t you think?”
Caleb stares down at his own palm, watching Mollymauk retrace the line with his brows drawn together. “Is that all?”
It takes some effort to keep from sighing aloud, but Molly is a patient sort and he manages quite well. “Hardly. Your life line--Well, nevermind that, I suppose telling you that you must lead an uncommonly dangerous life wouldn’t come as much of a surprise, hmm?”
“Not so much, nein,” Caleb agrees, with a guarded look.
“Well, it’s written all over here,” Molly tells him, tracing the subtle breaks in the line, the faint scar running over the inside of the thumb that divides it neatly. Tracing over the fate line, too, heavy, split into two before it connects with the head line. “But i’m sure you won’t mind if we move on quickly to your heart line--”
“Is it easier?” Caleb’s voice cuts through his, steadier now than it was before. From the flash-bang intensity of it, the words had been burning a hole in Caleb’s tongue for some time. Though he suspects he knows the rest of the question, Molly waits to hear it out, his eyes tracing over the ball of Caleb’s thumb. “Not...not remembering, who you were. If you were. Not someone you wanted to be?”
Molly clicks his tongue, lets go the hand to rub at the back of his neck, just beneath the collar of his jerkin. His heart pounds a moment in terror, to find all the careful layers of himself peeled away to expose the vulnerable core, and the utter emptiness beyond that. But he trusts Caleb. He can’t help but trust Caleb. What other choice does he have? “Couldn’t say,” he admits. “It’s all I know. But I like it.” He meets Caleb’s eyes again, finds a quiet understanding there that shakes him to the marrow of his bones. “I like it. Deciding who I am right now. Nothing...nothing to get in the way of that decision, or weigh me down.”
“I remember,” Caleb says, slowly, playing with the worn hem of his cuff. “I remember...a little of that. When I was younger. Choosing my name. Casting off the one that did not fit me so well.” Molly pays him the same courteous silence, nodding in understanding. “It was a good feeling. Ja. I remember. I have not had so much luck with that, these days. Seeing the person I want to be, and. And following through.”
Molly kicks his legs out in front of him, settling back, and very carefully does not let his eyes linger on the play of silver moonlight through Caleb’s red hair, or the band of freckles over the apple of his cheek. Time for that later, he thinks. “I don’t think any of us are really the same person from one day to another, in some ways. We’re like rivers, we are. The shape of the thing doesn’t change, not all at once, but you’re facing upstream. You’re not standing in the same water for more than five seconds together. It all flows right by you too fast to take it in.”
For a moment, Caleb watches him in silence. “You were right,” he admits. “You are weird.”
“The weirdest,” Molly tells him, with a bawdy wink. “And it helps,” he adds, as the thought crosses his mind. “That I like it. The changing. Being hard to pin down.”
“Impossible to pin down, I’d call it,” Caleb agrees, the little smile on his face just that little bit nearer to a full-fledged grin. Progress. “Yes, I think I see what you mean.”
They lapse into quiet. It’s an uneventful watch. The breeze is starting to cool the longer it tickles the nape of Mollymauk’s neck, and sooner or later he’ll have to shrug his coat back on and settle in, or build the fire back up. Caleb is watching the last embers fade from dull orange to white ash with a dismal look.
He’s not the type to pry, ordinarily, prides himself on his ability to live and let live, but while he’s sat here with his heart wide open and bloody and raw painted on his sleeve Molly can’t help but feel there’s no time like the present. “What’s it like?” he asks, eyes searching the horizon. “Ah. Dreaming, I mean.”
“You don’t--?” Caleb must recognize the way surprise makes his voice catch harsh and low, because he stops. “Apologies. I...did not realize.”
“I didn’t want you to,” Molly dismisses. “It’s nothing. I just close my eyes, and open them again, and in between nothing much happens. Just an idle curiosity, I suppose.”
Caleb shifts, pulling up more grass and twisting the blades between the pads of his fingers. “I cannot speak for anyone but myself,” he says, tugs the collar of his tunic higher. “It often feels like. Living something all over again, while knowing exactly what happens next. But less and less, the more often I dream it. Everything gets more muddled, until I can’t remember if i’m recalling the thing itself, or a poor imitation of it. But I still can’t change it. Only watch, and know that...I know.”
Molly tries to think about it, the too-bright half unreal way he remembers the taste of the dirt, the way his nails stung when he scraped them raw pushing earth away from his face, the way he ached from the inside out, hungry and hollow and sweating, how his ankles twisted every time he tried to take a step like they had never held his weight before. The sudden cold shock of realizing that there was no before, that there should have been a before--
“Sometimes, though, it can be nice. Something nice to live all over again.” Caleb’s mouth twists in a wry half-smile. “A good moment, exactly how I remember it, or better.”
Molly remembers abruptly that his heart is hanging out of his ribcage, tonight, exposed, when it shudders with fierce longing at the thought. He grimaces, and glances up at the spinning stars again. He doesn’t need it, he doesn’t need any of it, and here he is wasting time on wanting things he doesn’t need, just to see what it’s like to have it.
“But that is. The rarer of the two, in my experience.” Caleb amends. “I don’t know. It seems that every man wants what he does not have. I do not know whether I would change it, if I could. I wish I knew.”
“There’s that head line of yours,” Molly chimes in, with a flourish. “Ah, but you’re right, probably. We decide what’s left to us to decide, and take the rest as it comes. What else can we do?”
“I suppose we will find out.” Caleb says, and there, that’s the genuine smile. Maybe one day Molly can dream that smile, close his eyes and watch it spread over Caleb’s moonlit face over and over again. Or maybe he can spend his waking hours looking forward to the next one.
“Must be getting near the end of my watch,” he admits, after a moment too long spent considering the clear blue shine of Caleb’s eyes and the soft curve of his lower lip. “Are you taking the second, or shall we wake Jester?”
“Give it five more minutes.” Caleb reaches down and plucks another sprig of heather, twirling it between finger and thumb. “I’ll get Jester for the third watch. She likes to spend it drawing in that book of hers, I think.”
There’s a bit more idle back-and-forth, and then a companionable silence, and Molly weaves the long grass into a braided plait that wraps around his wrist and ties, the way Toya once showed him. Overhead, the stars continue their dance.
“There it is,” Caleb announces, after a few minutes have passed by. “One uneventful watch ended.”
“To many more!” Molly cheers, stretching and gathering his coat from the ground as he stands. “I guess this is goodnight, Caleb Widogast.”
“Gute Nacht, Mollymauk,” Caleb agrees. He turns and wraps the coat around his shoulders like a blanket, stops when Caleb clears his throat and continues, quieter. “I hope--I hope you find what you are looking for.”
Molly furrows his brow, doesn’t glance over his shoulder but does offer a nod before he continues in the direction of his bedroll. “You too.”
He sleeps. He does not dream.
Tomorrow, he knows, is a new day.