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Yasha never forgot Molly’s face.
She kept his smile, sincere, and his smirk, insolent, and the glint of golden baubles in winter light, and the easy free affection in his eyes. Purples and reds of vibrant shades, a little faded, but bright, like the petals of the flowers pressed between the pages of her book. A collection of features that still somehow held meaning, etched deep, deep, in the place where she could still feel Zuala’s smile despite the seasons, despite the distance, despite the gaps in her memory. In that place, they still smiled. All the joy she had ever known in the world: locked away, pristine.
She’d never really intended to stick around the ragtag band of misfits she and Molly had defaulted to once the circus was good and gone. They'd been, after all, his friends more than hers. She'd never needed them the way he did, the same way he’d needed their once-family of ill-assembled oddities: all jagged edges and cautious coexistence, guarded pasts and no future to speak of. Unlike him, she had known life outside the circus. Knew how to be alone. And when she needed to, she knew she left him where she could always find him, eventually, where he was happy and on the move. Surrounded.
Now that he was gone, well.
She figured, in that strange haze, that she’d wander after thunderstorms for however long He called her, however long He needed her, the broken champion of a forbidden god who still saw use to her existence. Until she would, perhaps, have served her purpose, and then quietly fade. But of course she’d been wrong. She found them—or they found her, she’s not too sure—where she was not looking, halfway across the continent, in the suspended moment between the blinding glare of sun and sea and the opaque shadows of some seedy dockside tavern. Her Stormlord was neither a trickster nor a riddle-prone god, yet he had led her there, right back to where she started, like a kind of frustrating puzzle or test meant to show her some truth she'd known all along. It was peeving.
Still she went where she was sent. She stayed where he was still present, painfully so. Not like the smiling, glittering picture of him that she kept for herself, but like a festered hole that hurt when it was touched. Beau shuffled a deck of cards, often, very late at night, when she thought she was alone. It always made the world lurch a little, when the cards flashed in her hands and would catch her eye, too-fast glints of filigree and gaudy golden tracery gleaming in low torchlight. It left her with an empty sort of pity; without Molly, the cards were all but useless. Incomplete as well, without the moon, the card that Jester plucked to lay atop his grave to weather alone the wind and snow. If there had been magic there once before, there was none anymore, just frozen imagery and gilded frames, sorrow and decay, whatever lies or truths they might have told now lost with he who told them. Beauregard had never cared for Molly's fortune-telling. Sleight of hand and superstition, bait for those fool enough to stake their coin on made-up dreams. And, perhaps, Molly had been a charlatan; he had never pretended otherwise. His was a realm of half-shadow and mischief, of veiled moon deities and whispered truths not meant to be decoded, but felt. For all of her scorn, when Molly had been alive, Beau studied that deck with a single-minded focus that she reserved for reading languages that she had never learnt to speak.
Jester would mention his name in the most random ways. She would say it, casually, and watch and observe and catalog every ripple that it caused, every wince, every pause, every down-cast gaze. They were all so frail, and every "Molly" uttered allowed was like a question Jester didn't know how else to ask. Yasha wanted to answer it for her. She wanted to say that his name was not a cloud, or a chain, or a weight to drag along behind her like the fear and guilt of the dungeons underneath the Sour Nest.
Fjord did very little, aside from throwing himself to the literal serpents by tracking down fell gods, infiltrating abyssal temples, bedding then betraying pirate queens and getting himself and the rest of them put on trial in a city of thieves. Molly would have loved every second of it.
Nott held onto him like family, in the way Molly would have perhaps least expected. Nott was terrified of water, yet she followed them out to sea. Her voice was thin and wavering, except when it was iron-willed, enthroned in the determination to keep them together, stronger, to descend to the ocean floor despite her own phobic nightmares, because Jester felt safer with her there, because Fjord needed them to make this journey and not get lost.
Caleb changed the least. Dour and shifty, as always, alternating between an oddly cemented partnership of trust with Beau, and the twitchy nervousness with which he was always looking over his shoulder. He made blood-pacts with Fjord out of misplaced curiosity to unlock ancient, undocumented, sacrificial rituals in the heart of an evil creature's lair. He nearly crawled out of his skin at the prospect of one decidedly civil conversation with a fellow mage in the middle of the city. He still looked to Nott like a person starved for affection after the world was wiped clean of everyone else. Somehow Caleb carried more guilt and anxiety than Yasha could fathom was possible for a single creature, and Molly had become yet another body to be stored in his closet, another tragedy to keep locked away, another nightmare to keep from bleeding into who knew how many others. He looked at all of them like that, sometimes — like he wasn't seeing them, now, but seeing something from a very long time ago, or something meant to occur, sooner or later, terrible and inescapable. He looked at them all like he'd buried them already, buried with Molly in that cold and lonely grave at the end of a cold and empty road to nowhere.
But Yasha kept him as she'd known him: alive and vibrant, contrary and unashamed. Molly had chosen these people, she knew, or had decided somewhere along the way that he had chosen them, rather than been thrown at them by whimsy and circumstance. He'd chosen them like he'd chosen her, like he had chosen each and every person that had walked beside him over the course of his spectacularly short life. Chose them despite their secrets and their idiosyncrasies, or, perhaps, because of them. Molly had always loved broken people, in the way that only broken people could. He loved them like something whole, not something fractured, held them together though they tried so hard to break apart. Their broken limbs, although healer he was not. Their scattered thoughts, a kiss to the head following the crack of a slap to break whatever spell — literal or figurative — held them in its sway. Their often rocky partnership, though he claimed it was he who needed them, who needed "this", whatever it was, to work. He said it loud and clear, he told them in so many words what the rest never said out loud. Because he could.
And Yasha. She'd never needed them the way he had. The way she'd needed him. Everything that she'd ever held dear had been torn from her violently, time and again, but she supposed that if it was for him, then. If the Stormlord wanted her there, if Heguided her way. She could, perhaps, follow his shadow. There was nowhere else for her to go.