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“Hey, Molly.”
“Hm?”
Beau points, off to the side of the road, at the large, black bird watching them with beady little eyes. Upon being spotted, the raven caws, preens its wings, and then takes off into the sky.
“Oh, that,” says Molly, craning his neck somewhat to see the bird better. “Just—a friend, you could say. Someone who’s taken an interest in our journey.”
“When did you make friends with a creepy-ass bird?” says Beau, frowning. They’re making their way down the road to a new town, and the two of them have volunteered to take point—everyone else is exhausted as hell, from either the days spent searching or the days spent being tortured, and anyway, Molly’s kind of sick of not being allowed to pull his own weight. Just ‘cause he died for a couple of days, now everyone’s sure he’ll fall over and break into a hundred colorful pieces.
To be fair, sometimes he kind of feels like he could. But he shoves that feeling down.
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” he says, lightly.
Beau makes a frustrated noise, and throws up a hand. Her horse neighs. “Fine!” she says. “Be that way, asshole.” She tapers off into grumbling as they go on, before she straightens up in her seat. “Hey, there’s a clearing over there,” she says.
Molly relays this to the rest, and gets a unanimous vote of please can we take a break and sleep. He kicks his horse a little to urge it to go faster, and they make it to the clearing just as the sky is starting to grow dark.
A raven caws, catching Molly’s attention. He looks, and sees a flash of black feathers, a smile like a dagger.
He smiles.
--
The thing about dying is that it sucks, and Molly never wants to do it again.
He would do it again, of course, if he had to. If it means his friends make it out of a fight alive, then he’ll gladly put himself between them and the sword.
But being willing to die for someone he loves is different from wanting to do it again. He’d much rather avoid it, in fact, there’s still so much to see, so much to do.
Although—
“Well, aren’t you a sight,” says Vax’ildan, that incredibly handsome half-elf, leaning over Molly again. He smiles a little, dark hair falling like a curtain over Molly’s face. “I’m surprised you’re here, I thought I’d see you again next time you fell.”
“I have an impeccable sense of timing,” says Molly, with a grin. He’s had worse dreams than this: a lovely man with dark hair and dark eyes and clever fingers, quick with his tongue and tender with his hands. “I believe we left something unfinished?”
Vax laughs, light as a feather. He kneels down, and somehow there’s a half-full bottle of wine in his lithe fingers where there wasn’t just a heartbeat before. “This bottle,” he confirms. “You’re lucky I’m fast. I caught it when you had to go.”
Molly takes the bottle from him as he sits up, fingers brushing against Vax’s for a moment. They’re strangely warm, for a dead man’s fingers. “And a bit more than that, if I remember correctly,” he says, with a tilt of his head. His favorite baubles and trinkets clink lightly, metal against metal, when he does so. “Come a little closer,” he says, voice low.
Vax grins, and moves closer, until he’s straddling Molly’s lap. “If I recall,” he says, “this was where we left off.”
“Mm, possibly,” says Molly. “Although it could’ve been a little further than that. I don’t remember very well.”
“I could refresh your memory,” says Vax, leaning in close enough that he’s nose to nose with Molly, close enough that Molly can count the faint freckles across his face.
Molly laughs, and buries his hand in Vax’s hair, and pulls him in for a kiss.
--
“What the hell is that?” says Beau, once they’ve started saddling the horses up the next day.
“What’s what?” says Molly.
She points at his neck, and Molly looks down. There’s a bruise at his collarbone where Vax worked to leave his mark, and come to think of it, there’s probably some bruises on Molly’s hips.
He grins at her, and says, “What do you think it is?”
“It looks like a hickey,” Beau says. “But you weren’t—I was on watch, and you were asleep the whole time, how could you have gotten a hickey—”
“I don’t kiss and tell,” says Molly, with a laugh, pulling himself up onto the saddle. “But if you must know, he was incredible with his mouth—”
“Oh my god, Molly,” says Beau, tossing one of his tarot cards at him. He laughs, catching it out of the air, relieved to be alive. “You asshole! I didn’t ask for details about your impossible sex life! God, I can’t believe I spent so much money to get you back if you’re just gonna do that.”
Molly sticks his tongue out and says, “You’re the one who cried over me.”
“I regret it so much,” Beau grumbles, and Molly laughs, drunk on life and love. Ahead of them, the rest of the Mighty Nein is already saddled up and on their way.
Molly snaps his heel against his horse’s flank, jolting the horse into a faster trot than Beau’s. She bellows out a curse behind him, and he flips her off with a grin.
Somewhere above them, a raven caws.