Chapter Text
It had started so well.
All told, perhaps a vacation in Aeor was inviting trouble. When considering a location to bring them all together again, the Nein usually picked places that were safe and, you know, relaxing, especially to accommodate Caduceus and Veth, who had all but retired from adventuring. However, the problem with adventuring is once you’ve done it enough… you eventually want to do it again.
Saving the world from any remaining loose ends seemed a daunting task. Challenging Uko’toa was out, and even the suggestion was laughed at. (Maybe later, though, they’d begrudgingly agreed.) Eventually, Caleb and Essek expressed their desire to return to Aeor and how they would prefer to have the Nein with them, if at all possible. So Aeor was the agreement. And a week into an intended extended adventure, traversing the wreckage and uncovering secrets that hadn’t had the time for previously, the worst that had happened was that Fjord had gone bald again (for a day) and Essek had spent an embarrassing amount of time as an orchid.
They might have been due for something unfortunate when shit finally escalated into true madness.
Six people suddenly filed into the lead-lined chamber housing the mysterious time travel equipment the wizards had just had to poke, all of them following the sounds of animal screaming and flesh tearing and desperate battle shouting, weapons drawn and gearing for a fight. What they found instead was a ripped apart sex creature (the name stuck), the familiar crackling in the air that followed a massive Dunamancy spell, two deeply horrified wizards, and Molly on the ground, pinning something that had to be his exact duplicate, while it tried to claw at his throat.
No… not quite an exact duplicate. The clothes were different and peeking out of every visible tattoo were very familiar red eyes. A horrified silence followed.
“What the fuck did you two do?” Beau snapped.
“It was… an accident,” Caleb said, still clearly shaken by this turn of events.
“Explain!” Yasha snapped, moving forward to rescue her best friend from the writhing, cursing body underneath him, a body that was everyone’s worst nightmare in a slightly more palatable form than the last time they’d seen him in, but still a nightmare.
Molly held up his hand. “I got it, I got it.” And he did, certainly, seem to. Lucien was well and truly pinned underneath him and his attempts to get free seemed to be entirely based on putting his hands near Molly’s throat and making frustrated noises when Molly ducked out of the way.
“Oh,” Caduceus said, observing this. “He’s trying to do that one thing.” His hand went to his throat where the fur had gone shock white in places in the shape of fingers- one of the few actually unpleasant lingering reminders of Lucien’s existence that hadn’t faded from the world.
“Okay, but seriously,” Yasha said, tearing her eyes away from Molly and Lucien attempting to slap fight each other into submission to focus on the sheepish wizards. “Explain.”
“Molly was watching the door for us…” Caleb started.
“-and then Veth screamed, so I went to look,” Molly cut in, still ducking Lucien's hands.
“- which was a terrible idea, because I scream about literally everything, and not all of it is actually dangerous,” Veth deadpanned.
“And one of those… creatures must have come up from behind us, and Caleb and I reacted quickly thinking no one would be close enough to help us besides Mollymauk, and-” Essek shared a look with Caleb.
“Ja, we panicked and both used Reality Break simultaneously and that is the result,” he pointed to the dead sex creature, “and that was also the result.” He pointed to Lucien.
“I imagine the combination of powerful dunamantic magic within this chamber on top of the strange effect these lands have on the arcane led to… Perhaps something being brought here from an alternate timeline.”
“Uh-huh,” Beau snapped. “Something would be, like a chair, Essek. You brought a whole-ass person here from an alternate timeline!”
“Which is quite impressive, actually,” Essek admitted, much to the chagrin of everyone but Caleb.
“You brought the worst person, though!” Beau threw her hands up.
Molly rolled his eyes. “Can we maybe argue a little faster? I’m straddling my evil twin here, and let me tell you that is not a fantasy I’ve ever had.”
Lucien, who had somehow managed this whole time to drop his eloquent bullshit act in favor of panicked growling and cursing, suddenly formed his first coherent sentence, “How are you fuckers still alive?”
All eyes went to the fuming tiefling. “I killed you already,” he snapped, eyes going to literally everyone but Molly. He lingered on Essek for a moment. “Not him. He’s new. But the rest of you.” And then he zeroed in on Molly. “And you. Who the fuck do you think you are?”
Molly just grinned in a way that wasn’t meant to be pleasant. “I’m Molly. I never wanted to meet you and I hate that I’m meeting you now.”
Lucien jerked suddenly and managed to actually get Molly by the throat. In an instant, eight people were on guard, ready to immediately leap in, but Molly just held up a hand and let it happen. All Lucien could do with one hand on his throat was squeeze a little and maybe draw blood, which was par for the course in Molly's life. He could take a little bloodletting.
The flash of screaming psychic energy never came and the realization hit Lucien like a sack of bricks. “I...Ira?” For a brief moment, he actually sounded more like a panicked, frightened child than the belligerent, nightmarish godking they’d fought in the astral sea. It was easy to forget after everything they saw and experienced and suffered that Lucien had also previously just been a guy. A guy who got lost in snowstorms, even.
This seemed to be what Molly had been waiting for- that sudden, stark moment of horrified clarity, and, in an act of desperation before Lucien realized his gods were gone and began fighting with everything else he had, he grabbed both of Lucien’s wrists and met his eyes, swallowing down the bile of realizing the dark mirror he was looking into. “You need to calm down.”
He hadn’t meant to flavor it with devil’s tongue, and if he had, he certainly hadn’t expected it to work, but all of a sudden, Lucien just went limp.
Molly froze.
“Oh my god, I think I broke him.”
Jester stepped a little closer, her apprehension clear and her hackles up, but as she paced a semicircle around Molly and Lucien, she recognized that look of trusting bliss, and instantly relaxed.
“Molly,” she gasped. “You charmed him.”
Beau gaped like a fish and then slapped her hands together. “Family meeting!”
Carefully, Molly began the process of unpinning Lucien. “You stay right here, and don’t do anything weird. ‘Kay?”
Lucien’s grin was vapid, his eyes glassy like someone in the throes of a really good drug. “Whatever you say, you handsome devil.”
Molly blew out a breath. “I won’t be unpacking that ever.”
Lucien remained flat on his back, staring at the ceiling as the Nein gathered around each other in a huddle.
“So Lucien couldn’t be charmed,” Beau explained.
“He also had that, ah… Necklift attack,” Caleb noted.
“Yeah, I got that thing twice.” Beau rubbed her own throat where she had two layers of pale finger marks to match Caduceus’s.
Jester frowned. “Well, the Somnovem are gone, right? Maybe because he’s in a reality where they don’t exist anymore, he doesn’t have his powers.”
“So wait if you went to a reality where the Traveler didn’t exist, would you not have magic either?” Yasha asked, despite that not being in any way close to the point.
The fact that it had nothing to do with anything didn’t seem to faze Jester, who just scoffed gently. “That wouldn’t happen, because Artie probably exists in every reality.”
“Regardless,” Fjord cut in, “what are we going to do with him?”
“Well, if he doesn’t have his nine wizard sugar daddies, as Beauregard would say,” Caleb explained, “he is practically useless.”
“I’m going to pretend you didn’t just say that someone with almost my exact skillset is practically useless,” Molly protested.
“Ja, but the only time that bastard used his whirling blades was on a dragon, and he wasn’t nearly as impressive as you are.”
Molly beamed. “You’re just blowing smoke up my ass now, and I like it.”
Essek cleared his throat. “So do we simply… be rid of him?”
“I don’t know if I feel good about killing him when he’s just a guy, yanno?” Jester shook her head. “Like he’s the worst, but he can’t do anything to us or Exandria the way he is.”
“He can still annoy us,” Beau protested.
Fjord shrugged. “I am absolutely all for killing him. No moral qualms about it.”
Caduceus broke in gently. “Before we talk about the moral ramifications of killing someone who isn’t really an actual threat, I feel like the person whose opinion matters the most on the subject is Molly.”
All eyes went to Molly. “That’s a fair point,” Veth said. “He is kinda… a horrible reminder of everything.”
Molly pursed his lips as he mulled it over for a length of time that surprised the rest of his compatriots. Each of them had expected his reaction to be vehement in favor of ending Lucien's existence, but apparently it was worth considering.
And then he smiled. It was not a pleasant one. It promised something crazy. “I think we should keep him alive. I’ve got a plan.”
“I absolutely hate it when he says those words,” Essek murmured, having been around Molly enough by now to know “plan” in his mind was usually unbridled chaos. And when it operated in tandem with Lucien's continued existence, it seemed nearly unbearable as a concept.
“Everyone does,” Caleb nodded, sagely. “But maybe there won’t be any egg dicks this time.”
“Okay…” Beau eyed Molly warily, but shrugged it off. Caduceus was right- Molly had more of a say over what to do with the bastard than most. Everyone else had gotten their pound of flesh from Lucien when they murdered him and got Molly back. With a belligerent sigh, she clapped her hands together again. “Break.”
The Nein stepped out of the huddle and turned back to Lucien, still staring at the ceiling as if he had never seen a ceiling before in his life.
“Are we going to keep him charmed?” Jester looked at Molly.
“He’s either gonna be pissed now or pissed in an hour when we’re eating dinner, so…” Molly shrugged, blew out a breath, and walked over to Lucien, who pushed himself onto his elbows, his tail thumping in the dirt like he was Molly’s faithful hound.
(Molly wasn’t going to unpack that later either.)
“Can I see your swords?” He asked politely, and without hesitation, Lucien slid the obsidian blades from their sheathes and passed them over.
“They’re nice, right?”
They actually were, which kind of pissed Molly off. He treated any similarity he had with Lucien as an anomaly despite there being more of them than there were actual differences. The differences were just so vast it colored everything else.
He wasn’t prepared to deal with the new information that Lucien actually had good taste.
Huffing, he passed the blades to Fjord who tucked them into the bag of holding, and then snapped his fingers to drop the charm. Lucien immediately leapt to his feet and began cursing so fluently in Infernal that Molly learned a few words he didn’t know. Somewhere in all that cursing, he heard the phrase “Gaudius, you USELESS BASTARD” before Lucien, panting and fuming, slowly shifted his gaze to every one of the Nein in kind.
“I’ve never had the pleasure of killing anyone twice.”
Beau must have moved closer when Molly dropped the charm, because out of nowhere, she hauled off and punched him, and then watched as, for a brief moment, he just wobbled, dazed, on his feet.
She glanced back at the rest. “He’s not immune to stun anymore either.”
——
Lucien did, eventually, calm down.
Which was unfortunate, because somehow the feral, screaming tiefling was a lot less irritating than the alternative, but a dialogue needed to be had and the only way that could happen was if Lucien chilled the fuck out and went back on his erudite cult leader bullshit. At least he was willing to listen to the explanation, if only so he could have a full picture before he started working his spin.
“You killed the Somnovem?” He asked, incredulously.
“Well, you subjugated them and we started killing you and everything that attacked us,” Fjord said, his gold eyes drilling right into the core of Lucien’s being.
Lucien dug his fingers into his pant leg, a discordant chuckle bubbling out of him. “So I got that far, did I?”
“And we killed you,” Jester threw in. “You failed.”
“And where I was standing,” Lucien hissed, “I’d killed all of you and was right at the precipice of success.”
“Where were you standing exactly?” Caleb broke in, shifting Lucien’s gaze from Jester to him.
“The Immensus Gate.”
Beau blew out a whistle. “You guys-” she gestured to Essek and Caleb, “- might have just saved Exandria twice. Dunamanacy is rad.”
“It is,” Essek said, awkwardly. “It is indeed…. Rad.”
Lucien balked. “So this is just how it’s going to be, is it? You lot accidentally rip me from my own timeline, and now you’re just going to… what? Leave me here? Kill me? I knew you were a bunch of dicks, but I didn’t think you were soulless.”
“You seriously wanted to turn the entire world into a horrible chunky soup flesh orgy!” Beau shot back, prodding him in the chest with a finger. “You don’t get to call anyone soulless.”
He slapped her hand away and his scarlet eyes shifted to Molly, sitting with his arms crossed and regarding the whole conversation with a strangely contemplative air. It wasn’t like him to spend any time thinking, but the second he felt Lucien’s gaze, he snapped back to reality to glare.
“Speaking of soulless,” Lucien drawled. Molly stiffened. “What about you, sliver? What do you think about all of this? There’s got to be enough of me clingin’ to that body of yours to-”
Molly uncurled himself like a spring released, and stepped across the seated circle the Nein and their belligerent plus one had created on the ground. He had never been known for his strength, but he knew how wispy and lithe his own body was and he knew how little effort it would take to just jerk Lucien off the ground and onto his feet.
Which was what he did, nimble fingers fisted into his shirt. He couldn’t lift him any higher than eye level since they were the exact same height and it got awkward, but he made up for it in proximity. Their noses touched, their identical red eyes bored into each other, and then Molly, calmly, conversationally, just said, “There’s never gonna be enough of you in me that’s worth talking about. Don’t try anything.”
Lucien didn’t push back or try to get away, his tail cracking in the air like a dying snake. He canted his head slightly and pressed inwards, until he and Molly were seconds away from inhaling and exhaling each other’s breath.
(“Are they gonna make out?” Jester whispered, horrified.)
“What are you gettin’ out of this, exactly? Is it a control thing? ‘Cause that’s all me. You’ve got a nice, comfortable hold on that body of mine now and anything that threatens it has got to be put in its place. Isn’t that right?”
Molly just grinned. “You’re not as smart as you think you are.”
He released him, giving him a little shove that caused him to overcorrect and nearly fall backwards. Only reflexes saved him. “So what is it, then?” He demanded, but Molly waved him off.
“Can we get the mansion, Caleb? I’m starving.”
Caleb nodded and pulled out his wand. “Let’s hope I don’t turn into an orchid,” he muttered, and Essek blushed a bit at the reminder when he glanced his way.
“You were a really pretty orchid, Essek,” Jester offered.
And just like that the Nein settled back into their usual party pattern all around Lucien who just stood, dumbfounded in their midst. He took a step back, like he was contemplating running, but before the urge could fully manifest, Molly strolled back up to him, flexed his fingers, and then slapped him on the chest.
“Titty slaps,” Fjord murmured, wincing at the sound as it distracted him from discussing his dinner options with Yasha. “So much better when they don’t happen to you.”
Lucien hissed out a curse. “What are you-“
Molly smirked as Lucien recognized the sudden bloody, burning mark that flared up on his skin, his anger giving way to shock, his words dying on his forked tongue. “Did you just-?”
“Anything you can do, I can do without being a dick about it,” Molly beamed, shaking out his hand. “It’s nice that I don’t have to explain what that does. If you hurt any of us, you get a headache. If you run, we’ll find you. and that’s assuming Gelidon doesn’t find you first.”
Lucien went a shade paler. He clearly remembered her.
“She has your scent,” Jester added, threateningly.
“So don’t try to fuck us.” Caleb didn’t even look up from his tower-summoning ritual. “And here… we… go.”
The tower door shimmered into existence. Molly steered a deeply conflicted Lucien by the shoulders directly inside while everyone else followed, Veth and Fjord bringing up the rear along with Caleb.
Veth paused and then slapped Fjord on the chest, causing him to squawk. “Veth! What the fuck?”
“Sorry, sorry! I heard you say titty slaps and I just got the itch.”
“You can’t use that as an excuse for everything, you know.”
The two of them walked inside, still bickering, and Caleb waited a moment, humming to himself, “Just like old times~” he sing-songed, slipping inside behind them.