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“Is it really you?”
That was all Caleb could think to say, the words choking out of him, breaking in the air between them. He had to know, before anything else. He’d had so many dreams where this had happened (albeit not in a wooded graveyard in the middle of nowhere), so many desperate wishes given form as torturously sweet dreams that had quickly turned into nightmares as soon as his eyes opened and he remembered everything.
He couldn’t bear it again. He just wasn’t strong enough to hope, to believe he was really here and then have it be a lie, a mistake. Not again. It was agony enough every single morning. He had to be sure before he went even a single step further.
“Is it really you, Mollymauk?”
The tiefling in front of him shifted awkwardly in the doorway of the tiny cottage, suddenly aware of several sets of stunned eyes on him after he’d followed the strange pink firbolg out into the afternoon sunlight and changed everything. He was thinner, somehow younger looking in his blank, wide eyed confusion and underneath the white linen shirt he wore, there was the unmistakable raised, puckered, painful skin of a halfway healed scar lancing across his chest. The coat was gone, the jewels on his horns, the huge, wickedly curved swords and wickedly curved smile. But it was unmistakably him. Mollymauk Tealeaf. The piece of Caleb’s heart that had been torn away.
His mouth had to work a while before any sound came out, it was as if he’d forgotten how. Caleb could remember how it had felt to kiss that mouth, have it open parts of him that he’d thought he’d simply hadn’t been made with. It had been weeks but he still remembered.
“Em…empty?”
The words broke his heart into pieces but the voice kept him tumbling to his knees. It was him. Not a dream, not a hallucination in the midst of a wild fit of grief, not an apparition brought on by a bard in a tavern playing a song Molly had always used to hum on the road.
He didn’t care that the others were watching, he didn’t care that they were still technically a secret, Caleb closed the gap between him and the man he’d loved and lost within a few strides and threw his arms around him.
There was a heartbeat where the tiefling stayed tense and wooden but it was gone quickly and soon he was clinging to Caleb with equal strength, equal relief. His tail moved and wrapped around Caleb’s leg, the way it always used to and his fingers fastened tightly in the tangled thicket of rust red hair, the way they always used to.
And Caleb felt like he could breathe again.
“He just turned up one day covered in soil,” the firbolg was telling the rest of them, sounding far away and distant, “All he can say is that one word but it seemed like he was waiting for something…”
Us, Caleb thought, tears burning behind his eyelids, he was waiting for us.
“Empty…e-empty…” Mollymauk rasped. It really did seem to be all he could say but the cadence was never the same, the words he wanted to say pushing through slightly like the lines of mountains on a well faded map but enough for Caleb to understand. He’d always been able to understand what Molly hid just below the surface.
I know you…
Caleb drew back and cupped Molly’s face between his hands, managing a smile. He hadn’t smiled in a long time, the muscles pulled in shock at being asked to move that way. Almost like when he’d first met Mollymauk.
“I’m Caleb, Molly,” he murmured, keeping his voice low simply because it seemed only appropriate in the muffled quiet of the grove with its hanging fronds of lichen and whispering stream, not because he was trying to hide his words from the rest of the still stunned Nein. They had gone far past that.
“You and I…I know how strange this sounds but we were…we are…I love you. I never got the chance to say it before but it’s true, I promise it’s true, I love you. I was so broken when I met you, Molly, but you helped me heal and you showed me what loving someone could be like. You made me feel things no one ever had before, you held me when I cried, you…you made me feel like I was worth something.”
Molly blinked slowly, absorbing all of that, “Empty…”
The same cadence again. I know you…
Caleb’s face split into a wider grin, “That’s right. You know me and I know you. I don’t know who decided I deserved to have you back in my life, Molly, but thank the gods for them. I’m not making the same mistake twice. I love you. I love you so much.”
The ghost of a smile flickered across Mollymauk’s face, light as a firefly, until it died away. His voice lowered, his tone became apologetic, fearful, “Empty…”
“It’s okay, Molly,” Caleb soothed, stroking a hand through his hair, “It’s okay. Whatever this is, I’m here for you, we’ll get through it. Gods know you stuck with me through a hell of a lot.”
The concern eased a little, those red eyes filled with relief and the arms around his neck grew more secure. Caleb brought his forehead to rest on Mollymauk’s, though he didn’t let his eyes close. He didn’t want to miss a second of this.
What better place for their lives to start again, for their love to bud and grow again, than the Blooming Grove where tea plants grew through the eyes of skulls and death was never the end?