Chapter Text
“hello, essek.”
“ah— i— hello, mollymauk.” it’s late summer— hot, almost muggy. essek isn’t used to the weather in the empire, even now, doesn’t like the idea of being seen. jester knows, he thinks, that he comes here; she’d gotten him the cloak he’sd wearing now, a thin, gauzy thing that’s still opaque and lets in the rare breeze.
more of molly’s body seems to be fungi, now— he has the urge to compliment caduceus on his work. their time together has exposed the body to the air, and now patches of pale pink lichen crawl over the ribs, the curl of one horn. the jewelry, now cleaned, is bright in the sun.
“if you’re surprised i know it’s you, well, i don’t know anyone else who’s in line to dig up my corpse and talk to it.”
essek winces. “i suppose that is fair.”
“why are you here?”
“i, um,” and he crosses and uncrosses his legs, feeling strangely hot— even more so, were that possible.
(it’s funny, how much he’d pinned his hopes back then. he’s trying to learn to laugh at himself, in retrospect— lonely and simultaneously so afraid to get close, so desperate for it. gods, he’d thought so much of caleb, had dreamed up this person who understood treason, who understood the way solitude feels when it’s been so long you forget the alternative— or, perhaps, never had one at all.
and well, maybe caleb did know it better than him, and thus chose it in the end. over— over things he doesn’t think it does much good to imagine, anymore. and laughing at who he was, he thinks, only hurts them both, the person he was and the one he is now. foolishness is worth laughing at, but pain, not so much.
jester still calls, at least once a week, or answers so happily when he calls her that it shakes loose the cold, cloying thing still at the center of his chest, just a little. he’d helped her augment the spell that one winter’s crest so she could lend it to someone else, and sometimes she puts beau on, or yasha, or even her mother and it still startles him, every time, how they seem happy to speak to him.)
“i don’t quite know.”
mollymauk— he feels more present now, essek thinks. closer to the earth. or perhaps he wishes it were so— says nothing to this.
“would you want to come back?”
essek does not tend to speak suddenly— it was trained out of him so young, startling the umavi— but the question seems to simply pour from him, his mouth, like a sudden flow of water. like an upheaval of something from deep down.
the body of mollymauk, knitted over with the tissue of caduceus’s strange plants, laughs.
“oh— i’m sorry, shadowhand. if you had asked me when i was alive, i would have told you that i was what was brought back, already.”
“and now?”
“i wonder, you know, if it would even be possible for you to know what death is like, now. you’re consecuted, no? i imagine it’s more like a waiting room.”
“what is it for you?”
and mollymauk laughs, again, quieter. “it’s a lot like sleeping, honestly.”
“oh.”
and essek is young, you know, by the dynasty’s standards, infinitely young— not even two centuries, still on his first life— he has so much living, left. but gods, if that doesn’t get at something inside of him, some part of him so tired that sleep can’t even reach it. something that longs, maybe, just a little, for the undemanding weight of the earth, around him. dark, and warmth, and quiet. freedom, maybe, from that funny ache that never seems to leave him, that both intensifies and abates when jester calls, or bowls him over in an embrace when he comes to visit the Xhorhaus while they’re there on business, or vacation, or gods only know what.
“are you going to answer?” he says, quietly, and shoves the thought down again.
“hmm?”
“what i asked earlier. if you would come back.”
“oh.”
there’s a long silence— essek starts to fear if he’s miscounted his questions, and then—
“you know, i don’t know. i would like to see the sun again, i think.”
and essek has his parasol, today— jester’s paints, long-gone as her first set is, are so reliable, it’s survived so many rough seasons beyond rosohna, so many showers of debris and worse— and the sun, he can hardly see when it’s out, but the way mollymauk says it— the body of mollymauk, he has to remember— hits him oddly. suddenly, he longs for its warmth; or, rather, he longs to be in a body that wants to feel it.
“why, shadowhand, are you offering?”
“i— that is—“
and the body of mollymauk laughs and laughs and laughs.
“mollymauk,” he says, suddenly, and the laughter stops. he must be very careful, now.
“yes?” the head tilts, watches him eyelessly.
“if i were to not ask you my last question,” essek says, choosing his words, the lack of tilt to them, “your soul would remain. for a time.”
“for a time,” mollymauk says, and then, more cheerfully, “but all things return to the earth.”
he goes quiet for a long moment. “oh—” as if remembering something he could have learned anywhere else than from essek himself, from jester’s messages she doesn’t know get through, “—but you are very powerful, shadowhand, aren’t you?”
“yes.” essek says it with certainty. it it the one thing he knows he has.
“then,” mollymauk says, “i suppose it depends on how strongly you cast the spell, how long i can stay.”
“i suppose it does.”
mollymauk is quiet again, for even longer.
“you don’t know me, you know. everyone called me molly. you don’t know that.” there’s a note of uncertainty, to the voice, that essek has not heard before. “would you keep me around, then? to have someone to talk to? to abet the loneliness?”
“maybe,” he says. “or.”
“or?”
essek closes his eyes for a long moment, heart fluttering like the wings of some strange, fragile bird, and reaches for mollymauk’s skeletal hand, fits his fingers between the bones. the sun burns where it touches his skin, and he does not flinch away.
“to give you some time to make up your mind.”