Work Text:
“How long have you had them?”
Molly glanced up from where they’d been examining their arms, turning them over and over again in the faint orange light pulsing down from the dome overhead. They were the only ones in it at the moment - just as the Nein had been ready to bed down for the night, they'd come across a fork in the path, and had split up to investigate each a short ways down so as to have at least some idea of what they were in for come whatever passed for morning down here. Caleb, however, had volunteered to stay behind and get the shelter set up for the night. Molly had volunteered to stay behind and keep watch.
But inevitably, with the weight of the last few days weighing on their shoulder, they'd gotten distracted. So instead, Molly had gotten lost in thought looking past the flower sleeve and the curling snake and even the faint, silvery scars made by their own blades to older, deeper scars beneath it all, from before the dirt and the waking.
They smiled up at their soulmate. “As long as you, I’d imagine.” They had always shared pain, but no scars. Molly didn’t feel like they could be faulted for their horrified, morbid curiosity with regards to this one exception.
Caleb’s jaw tightened. Molly’s gaze flicked down to notice that he was picking at the wrappings around his arms. “I’m sorry.”
Their heart ached as fiercely as the scars sometimes did. A soft, sad sound echoed in their throat before they could swallow it back, but they forced an easy smile back onto their face anyway. “Why?” they asked instead. “Wasn’t you.” Acting on a wild, hopeful whim, they half sat up, plainly making room on the ground next to them.
To their relief, Caleb took the offered invitation. He still wasn’t half as fond of physical contact as Molly was, but that was fine. They were constantly learning where the common ground was. He sat down with his back to Molly, and Molly turned so their back was to him, so they could lean back and rest a little of their weight against him, just enough that he could feel it. They heard him sigh, felt it in their own chest as they felt him relax.
“I stopped feeling any pain from you, after…after I went mad,” Caleb said, after a few minutes. He made a sound that might have been a laugh, and added: “I knew better than to think that meant you were safe. I thought it meant you were gone, long before I ever had the chance to know you.” Molly’s heart skipped a beat as they felt Caleb reach back to seize their hand tightly where it rested on the ground. “It would have been no more than I deserved.”
Now that was a curious revelation, so much so that Molly glanced at what they could see of Caleb over their shoulder. “But you’ve been feeling it since we’ve seen one another.” Since color had become a part of their world as well as shared pain. They didn’t bother to hide the apology in their voice, even if they’d apologized for it so many times by now. Caleb hadn’t asked to have his other half be someone who bled themselves as easily as breathing.
They couldn’t see his expression, but they heard Caleb make a thoughtful sort of noise. “Before that, even. It started up again a little while before I met Nott.”
“How much longer?”
“I, ah, I don’t know.” He swallowed. “I didn’t see the point of keeping track of time.”
“A year and a half, maybe? You knew Nott six months before you met us.”
They practically heard the pieces slide into place. Even then, all Caleb said was: “Perhaps.”
Things fell silent for a while longer after that, and a breathless tension fell between them, the tension that came from standing right on an edge and looking straight down. Molly took the first step of breaking it. “Now, I don’t claim to know anything about how soulmates work—”
Caleb snorted. “Anyone who does is spinning bullshit.”
“But it sounds to me like you stopped being his soulmate around about the time you got out from under those bastards at the assembly.”
Again, Caleb did not reply, but he squeezed Molly’s hand and Molly took that as permission to continue. They both had trouble with words sometimes. They’d figured out ways to let one another know as much. “And then I got this body, instead of him, and…you became my soulmate instead.” It had been a long time, at least by Molly’s standards, since they had known that they and Caleb were a match for one another, in some strange and cosmic way. It had even been a long time since Caleb had finally admitted it. But saying the words my soulmate aloud and knowing they were true and believed and reciprocated still made their heart flutter and their stomach lurch in a way that reminded them of flying.
“No one is supposed to get two soulmates.” Caleb’s voice sounded rough and raw and faintly disbelieving. “I, I know I just said no one truly knows how this works but that would seem antithetical to the very concept.”
“Who says you got two?”
Silence fell once more, this time with the weight of an axe. Molly felt Caleb move, felt the pressure of his back disappear as he shifted away and turned around. They sat up straight and looked to face him in turn, and saw that his face had gone even paler and his eyes were overbright in the dimness.
“I don’t understand,” Caleb said, and his voice was ruthlessly steady in that way it only got when he was right on the edge of falling apart. Molly empathized – they had both finally started to get used to having things in their lives they could rely on and now there was this to grapple with.
Molly wasn’t remotely sure they understood either. They definitely didn’t understand why the fundamental laws of the universe might work this. But they knew what they felt, and they knew what the situation looked like from where they were sitting and they knew how people could break and change to be someone utterly and completely different from who they’d been yesterday. So maybe that would suffice.
“I mean,” they said. “That who I used to be was a part of who you used to be. And then you stopped being him. Suddenly you weren’t perfect for each other anymore. But when I crawled out of the ground, suddenly you had a soulmate again.”
Caleb shook his head. “What happened to me is nothing like what happened to you.”
“Are you sure?” Judging by the minute flinch that ran through him, judging by the way his eyes went ever so slightly wider as if he’d just been shoved, Caleb wasn’t sure at all. Molly couldn’t hold themselves back any longer, and reached out to brush the backs of their fingers over Caleb’s cheek. Even as he shivered with far too much pent up emotion, he tilted his head into the touch. “Even if you weren’t dead and buried, I think something broke inside you back then. And even if you’ve done a damn fine job putting yourself back together, I don’t think it was in the same shape.” It never could have been. They both knew that. “You’re someone else now. Just like I am.”
It made sense to them. Molly didn’t know much about the sort of person Lucien had been, but they got enough flashes, enough bad feelings, that they were certain they knew enough. Lucien and Caleb, as he had been before, were both people who saw nothing wrong with doing awful things for the sake of their own ideals.
Molly was determined not to be like that now. Caleb certainly wasn’t like that now, even if he thought he was, even if he thought that keeping friends around him to stop him from dying to a few crossbow bolts was using them. Someone who was at peace with the ends justifying the means wouldn’t shut down when he turned someone to ash even when his life was on the line. A person like that wouldn’t so steadfastly protest what a terrible person they were. There was still so much that Mollymauk Tealeaf did not understand about the world, but they were pretty sure they knew people enough to know that.
Caleb’s smile was that of a man a hundred years older and sad as anything Molly had ever seen. “Do you really think we were the sort of people to deserve a second chance like this?”
“Probably not.” Privately, they weren’t sure that Caleb had ever really gotten a first chance, but they also knew their soulmate wouldn’t believe them if they tried to press that particular point. “But we got one anyway. And I think we’re making the best of it.”
Caleb was getting better about not putting Molly on a pedestal – he never would have said “we” even a couple of months ago. Even now, he was prone to giving Molly far too much credit, assuming they had it all figured out rather than knowing that they were just stumbling through this beside him. And while they gently tried to train him out of that bad habit, they’d learned to make use of it, too. If they used “we” to drag Caleb up onto what he saw as Molly’s level, even if it was only to the point of not eating himself alive with self-loathing, he would not correct them or fight them out of an apparent fear of “dragging” Molly back down to his level instead.
The theory held true now. They could see Caleb visibly hesitate, visibly fight the urge to denigrate himself. In the end, he let out a faint huff, and seemed to smile a bit easier. “Well,” he said. “We are certainly trying our best.” And Molly could certainly nod in agreement to that.
Caleb glanced back, glanced around, apparently casting about for any sign of the others returning. But Molly didn’t hear anything, and neither did he, because he sat up straighter and patted his lap. “You,” he said, patting his lap, and his voice was so fond in that way he still only let himself be when they were mostly alone. “Come here.”
Molly let out a pleased hum, feeling their tail starting to sway a little behind them, and moved to take the invitation without further hesitation. There was no subtle way to lay your head in someone’s lap when you had a set of bejeweled horns to manage, it was full-on draping or nothing but discomfort. So they sprawled across Caleb’s lap with an easy shamelessness that would have made Frumpkin proud, and Caleb chuckled very quietly before starting to pet their hair, paying particular attention to the patches of skin where their horns met their skull and things felt especially ticklish. Molly let out a long, contented sigh, and let their eyes fall closed.
“I am still sorry,” he said. “For the scars.”
“Me too. I’m sorry they happened to you. I suppose that’s both of us covered, isn’t it? On the sympathy front.”
“Ja. I suppose.” He still sounded faintly amused, or at least affectionate. The two often went hand in hand for Caleb Widogast. But just like that, his tone of voice grew solemn again as he added: “You do not deserve these.”
Molly opened an eye to glare sternly up at their soulmate. “Hey. Neither do you.”
He did not argue the point, merely pressing on like something damming a flood inside him had finally broken. “I, I do not mind feeling the wounds you give yourself. I never have. I know it is necessary, even if I could not begin to understand why, and…and whatever gives you these powers, it must make you feel pain in a different way. Even when you get pancaked by a giant’s club, I can keep going. You make my arms sting a lot, I get impaled to the wall occasionally. It…balances out.”
“I suppose it does. If you want to look at it that way.”
“I do,” Caleb said, and he sounded so conflicted and yet so sincere about it that it made Molly’s heart ache and they did not argue the point any further. “But I…when you scar yourself, it is your choice. I know how much you care about how you look. That every mark you make on yourself is your own choice.”
“That’s the hope.” The twisted, puckered knot of flesh over their heart attested to the fact that it did not always work out that way.
“Well, when that hope doesn’t pan out, we incinerate those responsible.” He sighed, and the slow, steady motion of his fingers stilled for a moment. “I preferred it when that could be the deal.”
“Still could be. Not today,” they hastened to add, when they felt every line of Caleb tense up. “But one day. If you wanted.” They’d seen the look in everyone’s eyes as Caleb told his story. Even Caduceus wouldn’t bat an eye if they all decided to hunt Trent Ikithon down and teach him a few very permanent, very final things.
In the end, Caleb didn’t answer them one way or another. They hoped he was at least still thinking about it. “But these marks,” he said, running the fingers of one bandaged hand down his bandaged arms. “They were done to you, through me, before I ever had a chance to know you. And that is…cruel to you. And I am sorry for it. I—” He paused to take a deep breath, to recover himself when it sounded like every word was being pulled from him with pliers. When he spoke again it was careful, deliberate, every word set ever-so-delicately in a line on a shelf like glass figurines. “I wish it had not happened.”
Molly reached up to curl their fingers gently around Caleb’s wrist, bringing it to their mouth to graze their lips over his palm. They felt Caleb shudder, heard him make a soft and needy sound that made Molly want to pull him into their arms and never let him go. “We can agree on that much,” was all they said instead, and let him go. Caleb obligingly went back to stroking their hair without even having to be asked, and Molly closed their eyes once more for a while.
When they asked the question at last, their voice sounded distant, almost like a stranger’s. “Why is it,” they asked. “That you can feel your soulmate’s pain before you have even the faintest idea who they are, and you can’t see color until you lay eyes on them? Seems like it’d cause everyone a lot less pain if it was the other way around.”
“My, ah, my mother told me, once,” Caleb said, his voice little more than a hushed whisper at the mention of her. “The gods made it that way so that you would be driven on to find your soulmate and protect them, as you are meant to. Whatever hurts they suffer, you should be there to see and know them. I suppose there must be something to that, mm? We found one another. Against all odds, we found each other.”
“That we did. I suppose there are worse plans, when you put it that way.”
His fingers scratched just above their ear, in a way that made them purr and stretch. Then they realized that the added bit of affection was almost in apology, because Caleb sounded newly anxious as he asked: “Ah, Mollymauk?”
“Yes, dear?” Yet again, they opened an eye to regard him mildly.
“There is something I have always wondered.”
“Then ask away and wonder no more.” They had no secrets from Caleb – from any of their friends, really, but especially not from Caleb. They didn’t doubt that he still had secrets from them, of course, but after all he’d started with more to sift through.
Even with permission granted, it took him a minute to work up the nerve to ask, and even then he only seemed to catch his breath when Molly caught his hand and held it again. “You really did…all of this to yourself—” He gestured at all of them – the coat, the pants, the tattoos, the jewelry. “—while not being able to see color?”
They smiled wryly. “Is this the part where you say ‘that explains a lot’?”
“It is the part where I ask ‘why make the effort’? Why bedeck yourself in color you could not enjoy or, or even perceive?”
Molly laughed, to Caleb’s visible surprise. It was as if he thought he was the first one to ask this of them.
“Well, for starters, its not just the color.” They lifted a leg to show off the different patterns of each pant leg, plucked at one sleeve of the coat. “Patterns are a lot of fun on their own. And its not like everything was a blob. I could still see lines and white, grey, black. All the gradients in between. The play very nicely together, if you get a bit creative. Honestly, I think I’d been out of the ground for a month before anyone thought to explain to me that color existed. That didn’t mean there wasn’t still…” They paused, fumbling for the right words. Words could still be so hard sometimes. “…beauty and, and gaudiness to find and make my own. And I decided that I would. I didn’t want to mope. Gustav would tell me stories of soulmates and there always seemed to be so much moping!”
They didn’t say that they’d still been so terribly moved by those stories, especially early on in their life. The idea of another person out there, someone who was perfect for you and would want to stay with you and support you for all your days, had perhaps predictably held a great deal of appeal to them. And the circus had only ever encouraged the romantic inclinations of their heart.
“So I decided I’d make myself beautiful out of patterns and shades of grey. And when I found my soulmate, if I ever did—” They winked at Caleb, who blushed just a little. “—we could both make up for some lost time all at once. Right?”
Caleb stroked the pad of his thumb over the curling lines of the peacock feather. “All the color I had never seen in all my life, all adorning you. You damn near gave me a heart attack, Mister Mollymauk.”
“I have to know how to make an entrance, Mister Caleb. It was part of my job, I’ll have you know.”
He laughed, and the sound was so sweet that it made their heart feel too big for their chest. Even when Caleb said what he did next, he did not stop smiling like he meant it. “These marks,” he said, tracing his fingers down them through the bandages that had covered his arms as long as Molly had known him. Even without looking, he followed the lines exactly, twins to the ones that had marked Molly’s skin since they’d first crawled out of the earth. “It is…wrong that we have to bear them.”
They caught his hand and kissed it to reward him for giving himself a little more regard, and the gratitude for their support shone plainly in his eyes. He carried on. “But we do, so…so perhaps they can be a reminder for us both. Of who we were. Of how far we have come. And why we should keep going.”
Molly hummed thoughtfully, turning the idea over and over in their mind and finding that it felt right. Even if he had to bear these marks from Lucien’s mistakes as he did the nine red eye marks – these scars, perhaps, could be a sign he carried in defiance of his past life and whatever evil he had wrought. Because whatever Lucien had done, it had not been enough to keep Molly’s own soulmate from them. Whatever else Caleb had suffered through, he was here and getting better by the day. Together they were walking further and further away from their old names and their past selves every day and maybe these marks could help them always remember why that was always a reason to celebrate.
“I like the sound of that very much,” they said, and reached up to thread their fingers through his hair and pull him into a kiss.