Chapter Text
At the end of the world, no one wants to be alone.
After the world doesn’t end, they still can’t take their eyes off each other for a long long time.
Once the initial celebration peters out and communities start accounting for everything that they’ve lost, Moonshine Cybin, Hardwon Surefoot, and Beverly Toegold, V go home to The Crick. Bev and Hardwon haven’t talked about it yet and no one will ask for a while, but an understanding passes between them that home is wherever Moonshine is.
The trouble starts as only small things. Moonshine catches herself performing headcounts obsessively, reaching 623 - the current number of residents of The Crick - and then starting again immediately. She loses whole days walking around accounting for everyone over and over again, masquerading her visits with hospitable containers of jambalaya and savory sweet buns. Hardwon hyperventilates the time MawMaw locks their war weapons away because she caught young’ uns playing at titans with the Queenshammer. Beverly has nightmares, wakes up in cold sweats calling for Balnor in the middle of the night. Eventually they find that he can be soothed back to sleep with Moonshine’s singing in his ear and Hardwon’s fingers running through his
hair. Technically, Hardwon and Beverly live two stumps down from Moonshine, but they haven’t slept apart in months.
It takes Lucanus six months to utter the phrase “post traumatic stress disorder”.
_______
Moonshine is in the Crick library when she senses a high level teleportation and goes to check it out. Turning the corner, she runs directly into Peepaw Luc, still adjusting his glasses.
“Hey there Peepaw. Wasn’t expecting you today!”
She greets as she brushes some of her spores off his robes and leans in to kiss him on the cheek.
“Hello, Daughter,” Lucanus beems. Several hundred years of life have filled Lucanus with plenty of regret. That the end of the world brought him a child like Moonshine Cybin is not one of them.
“Business or pleasure today, daddy?” she asks him, side eyeing him cheekily. “Jolene has a pot of gumbo on if you’re hungry.”
“No, no,” Lucanus clears his throat. “I was actually here to...well...why don’t we take a seat, Moonshine. I’ve been doing some reading and I think I’ve come across something to help.”
Moonshine looks at him with some confusion, then notices a staleness about her father that is startlingly out of place. His robes must be several days old, creased in odd places, and the creases in his face are stark against his usually smooth, elven skin. She leads him to a set of cozy reading armchairs, each big enough to pile several people into. She and Hardwon cuddle in on these when they read those graphic scrolls Bev keeps having Martha send him from Galaderon.
“I don’t want to presume anything, Moonshine, but Jolene and MawMaw write to me often at the University. They’ve...confided in me a concern that perhaps the three of you aren’t doing as well as you’d hoped, in these peacetimes.”
Moonshine tenses for half a second before letting all her muscles turn to jelly, slumping against the armchair, wondering briefly what it would take for it to turn into a monster and swallow her whole.
“I...Beverly doesn’t sleep well anymore,” she says lamely.
Lucanus nods and lets his heart swell. Hero of the Realm and favored by the gods, Moonshine has never willingly let another person worry about her.
“That’s certainly a concern. A boy, still growing, should be able to get his rest.”
“You found something that can help? A restful potion, or something like that?”
“Nothing quite so magical of a solution, I’m afraid. At least, not that can resolve the root of the problem. Have you ever heard of post traumatic stress disorder, Moonshine?”
Moonshine sits at attention. “Like a disease?”
“Not quite. Let’s call it a...a condition. It’s a fancy way to say that you - and Hardwon and Beverly - may be carrying the war with you still. But, if I may be so bold as to make an assumption based on pre-existing knowledge, not talking about your struggles is sure to be making it much more difficult to build your lives anew.”
“I’m a crick of action, PeePaw, not of whining.” Moonshine says it, but Lucanus notes a distinct lack of conviction and presses.
“Daughter of mine, pride and joy of my life, what I am telling you is that the action to take now is to encourage your suffering friends and yourself to share your troubles. I can’t say this will cure anyone. The things you saw, the things you did and had done to you, perhaps you will never lose the weight of them. But know that there are dozens who would bear the weight with you.”
They sit in silence for several long minutes, Lucanus with bated breath. Moonshine slumps so far down in her chair that he almost scolds her for her posture, but bites his tongue. And then she begins to speak.
Moonshine tells her father what it’s like to feel a druid connection to their ravaged continent. She knows her timeless body will live to see Bahumia rise again, but still, she hurts to see a past so completely obliterated. She tells him about the list of regrets and mistakes she runs through at least once a day. Choices she might have made to save more lives in battle, a different spell, a steadier swing of her sword, a more timely heal. She speaks well after the nannerflies have all stopped lighting up the night, sometimes trembling so hard that Lucanus collects her in his arms and cradles her, like the child he never knew, and Moonshine let’s him.
_______
When Moonshine starts to tell him about what Lucanus thinks, Hardwon braces himself. After listening for a few more minutes, his shoulders loosen again and his fists unclench. Hardwon’s known he’s in love with Moonshine for months, ever since the time she dove after him headfirst into the river in Lust. But he is still a man learning to be loved in return, so when Moonshine brings it up, he thinks she’s calling him out on how hard a time he’s been having. He fully doesn’t expect her to come to him with her soul bared, to tell him how her heart rate still kicks up too many notches when thunder rumbles overhead or how livid she is that Thiala couldn’t just love her friends, flawed and all, instead of trying to impose some bullshit fucked up code of ethics that literally split the sky apart. He should have known, he thinks, better by now that Moonshine never does the thing he expects her to do.
When she takes a breath and looks at him with eyes full of unshed tears, Hardwon takes his own deep breath. “Remember...remember how I used to make jokes about Beverly collecting dads?” he asks shakily.
Moonshine nods, confused, but forever onboard for wherever the Surefoot train is leading.
“I thought the other day how,” his voice cracks. “How, in the end, he didn’t get to keep any of them.” The tremor through his shoulders forces him to hang his head and then he sobs, sharp and reluctant. Moonshine wraps around him and lays them both down in the mud of the crick. She says nothing as Hardwon curls into her and shatters.
A long, long, long while later, when Hardwon has unfurled and they lay in the mud, staring at the stars but still holding hands, Moonshine finally speaks.
“I know that we survived, Hardwon, but sometimes…sometimes it still feels like we are still waiting to not.”
Hardwon breathes out noisily and hums. “We didn’t just survive, though, Moony. We carried the whole world on our backs. We just haven’t figured out how to set it back down, yet, I think.”
After a beat, she says, “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”
He huffs out a laugh, and in the dark, under a sky he remembers is no longer falling, he opens himself.
Hardwon tells Moonshine how he isn’t sure he’s suited for anything more than swinging a hammer, to batter and break. At this point he’s died so many times, he wonders out loud if that’s the point of him. Ashamed, but barreling forward, he tells her that he’s only ever loved three women, and he’s killed two of them. He squeezes her hand hard, then, and the understanding passes between them. They both know that Moonshine is the third, but they won’t talk about that now. Maybe not ever. The threads that connect them feel like spun sugar, sweet and fragile, like they might be the only things tethering each of them to the world still. He talks and talks more than Moonshine has ever heard, at least with this much sincerity. They fall asleep there, and when they wake in the morning their hands are still intertwined.
_____
Beverly Toegold, V spends most of his time running around the forest, chasing young’uns and trying to teach them the Cricketeer Canon, which is what he’s calling his adapted version of the Green Teen Handbook. They don’t listen particularly well, but they are eager and wild and endlessly interested in goofs. They ask him about his adventures plenty, but the shadows never creep in when Petri and Petri and Petri ask to hear the Mithral Dragon story again.
Beverly is sixteen and he knows puberty is a bitch, but lately, when he’s alone, he’s so angry it scares him. Melora’s words rattle in his head, what an honor, what an injustice. He thinks of Pelor’s husk in Elysium, when Thiala was still trying to explain herself even at the very end. Without an axe hanging above their heads, Beverly wonders what it means to be devoted to a god, given how fallible the gods have proven themselves. He wonders if gods ever pray to anyone.
He’s sitting outside Moonshine’s stump with a furrowed brow when Moonshine and Hardwon find him with careful looks on their faces.
“What’s happening,” he jumps up immediately.
Moonshine gentles reflexively and shushes him. “Nothing, young’un. We’ve just been talking and we wanted to run somethin’ by ya, that’s all.”
He sits on the stump porch again, barely soothes but making an effort.
“Oh, okay. You just look serious, is all.”
Moonshine smiles and Hardwon sits down hard beside him. “Well, it is kind of serious,” Hardwon begins.
Bev is young but he’s more than proven himself their equal. He’s killed and he’s been struck down and he took a piece of that heart just like them. And yet.
Beverly tells them, once they get around to asking what has been going on in his head, how being his mother’s son doesn’t feel the same anymore. How he can’t bear the look in her eyes when she thinks he can’t see. He says his home is gone and so is his father and he’s not sure he’d want either of them if they were here, but he’ll never get the chance to find out. He tells them about the nightmares he never wants to talk about when he wakes up in a pool of his own sweat. Burning feathers and Akarot’s coin branding his symbol into the palm of his hand. His own father’s eyes consumed by flames as he swings to kill.
Moonshine Cybin, Hardwon Surefoot, and Beverly Toegold the Fifth saved the world. Bit by bit and hand in hand, they try to relearn how to live in it.