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“You’re asking me to…?”
“Put on the mask, yes.”
“…Yes. I’ll do that.”
Murray hears the tail end of Bolaire and Azune’s conversation as people are wrapping things up and beginning to leave. A lot has happened tonight, and a lot more is going to happen in the coming minutes, hours, and days. But before all that can happen, she knows there’s something important that she has to take care of before the pair of them leave this cave.
She marches straight for Azune. Fortunately, the people all around her are for the most part taller humans and orcs, and she can navigate her way through the small groupings and pairs saying goodbyes and making plans without anyone interrupting her or noticing her movements. She reaches Azune just as Hal is leading a confused but smiling elder orc away from the scene. She tracks the trajectory of their departure, but doesn’t watch them go.
Before he can say or do anything, she gets right in Azune’s face. “We need to talk.”
Azune blinks reverie from his eyes. Is he exhausted like she is? Or is this something emotional, the gravity of Bolaire’s request sitting heavy in his thoughts? His eyes flick down to the mask resting in his hands. Bolaire is lifeless now, silent, a mere inanimate thing—yet Azune is holding him with the reverence of one holding a newborn infant in their first seconds of life. “Oh. But I was about to… We need to go to his…”
“We need to talk,” she repeats, emphasizing the we with a gesture towards Bolaire. Though Azune is holding him gently, reverently, she can’t help the image flashing back into her mind of Hal shattering a stage mask against a wall, fury in his eyes. She shakes it from her head; now is not the time for that. “I need to talk to Bolaire before y’all go. Are you okay with me talkin’ to him while he’s on your face?”
Murray sees Azune’s resolve harden, sees the deliberate choice to acquiesce to a request fold immediately into his stance. She’s already talked to Azune about his pathological need to always be useful, and she knows she’ll have to do it again real soon. Now is not the time for that, either. “Okay. I’ll put him on. Do you want me to not listen to what you say, or…?”
“Honestly, you should probably hear this, too. But I guess it’s up to Bolaire if he lets you.”
Azune nods as if that is a perfectly normal thing to accept. As if it is totally normal to expect to be possessed by an ally and maybe not have any further agency over his own body after that. She would call him an idiot and a fool for agreeing to it, if only she hadn’t seen and heard the same things that he had over the last few hours—and those things are what she needs to talk to Bolaire about.
Azune puts on the mask. She’s watching like a hawk, and she catches the exact moment the inert clay stirs to life. Tiny little twitches in the cheeks and brow, like the muscles of a real face. A subtle shifting along his edges as Bolaire settles against Azune’s face and secures his grip. Blue stars flicker to life in his eye sockets and track downwards to meet her gaze.
“Murray,” Bolaire says, and she knows it’s him right away because it’s his voice. He’s quiet and defeated and devoid of any ostentation in a way that is so unlike the Bolaire she knows. “We were just about to leave for my apartment. We don’t have a lot of time. If you’re concerned about me wearing Azune-”
“I’m not,” she cuts off his diffidence before it spirals. “But I need to talk to you before you go.”
Bolaire blinks at her in surprise. The expression on his face does not match the posture of the body under him, which is standing exactly the same as Azune had left it before putting Bolaire on: a soldier’s steady poise. Murray takes an educated guess: “You’re not in control of Azune, are you? You’re just sitting on his face?”
“Yes,” Bolaire admits. “I am not possessing our young friend. I can be awake and aware without taking full dominance of the body I rest upon. Captain Nayar is still here and is free to speak and move about as he wishes.”
“Hello, Murray.” Bolaire’s face moves to form the words, but the voice that comes out is indeed Azune’s. As he speaks, the expressions shift oh so slightly; she knows Azune so well that she can recognize the brushstrokes of his expressions in the foreign landscape of Bolaire’s facial features. “I’m here. I told Bolaire that you wanted to talk and that you didn’t mind if I listened. So he let me stay.”
“Not let, dear boy,” Bolaire corrects, his voice switching over flawlessly. “I had no intention of taking command of you for this errand at all. You shall remain in control of your own body for the duration. I am content to merely give direction from offstage, and allow you to perform the act.”
There’s another flash of Azune’s expression that ripples through Bolaire’s face, where it becomes clear to Murray that Azune had not been expecting that to be the arrangement. He truly had been okay with letting Bolaire possess him after all. Internally, she sighs with fond annoyance. Her Azune is ever the champion of self-sacrifice without self-preservation.
“Anyway,” Bolaire steers the conversation back, “what is it you wish to discuss? I felt like everything that mattered was covered in the last several hours, and we lack for time.”
“Not everything that mattered,” she contests.
“Like what?”
“Like this.” Murray gestures up and down their combined Azune-Bolaire body. “Like you.”
“Me?” Bolaire’s eyes flicker to darkness, and he scoffs. “Well. That is patently false, then. Because I don’t-”
“Quiet, you idiot.” She isn’t going to let him say that he doesn’t matter. She can’t let him say it. Because she knows that he already believes it, and there isn’t enough time right now to convince him otherwise. That, and if she lets him say it where Azune can hear, then he’ll get involved in convincing Bolaire otherwise, too, and they really don’t have enough time for that.
So much has already happened tonight. Murray feels spent even though she barely did anything at all to contribute to the ritual at the Round. She’s drunk on yahrgraz and beer and planar energies and all the information that Mara person regurgitated that’s now swimming in her head. It’s four in the morning and she needs sleep that she knows she won’t get. But she has one thing left to her: her ability to nudge fate ever so slightly to the side. She doesn’t have enough left in her to change reality completely, to work a proper miracle—not like what’s already happened tonight—but she has something. All she has to do is find the right moment for that nudge to be enough.
Bolaire has bitten back his words, and is waiting patiently for her to proceed. She licks her gem teeth and presses forward. “You idiot,” she says again. “Why the fuck didn’t you tell us how you worked?”
Bolaire clearly wasn’t expecting that conversational track. “What?”
“You know what!” Her words are intense, but not loud. She doesn’t want the others who are still mingling in the cave to overhear and interrupt. She has to work fast. “You can be worn without harming your host!”
“Yes?” Bolaire looks confused that she is confused. “I thought that part was made implicitly clear when I described how I was used in the wars. What soldier would ever use a weapon that harmed themselves like that? They certainly wouldn’t, not without insane levels of desperation on their part.”
“You fuckin’ exact words bastard.” Murray resists the urge to strangle Bolaire, especially given that he’s currently using Azune’s neck. “Yeah, you implied it. But you never actually came out and said, ‘You can wear me and I can come off just fine and no one has to get hurt to use me.’”
“You didn’t mention this part, either,” Azune chooses to add, and moves his hand up to gesture at Bolaire from beside his cheek. “That you can let the person whose body it is remain in charge while you stay awake. Can you participate in combat like this? By casting spells and such while the body fights normally?”
Bolaire’s eyes go downcast. “… Yes. I can be worn like this and serve as merely an effective piece of magical equipment for my owner.”
Murray doesn’t like that he used that word. Owner. But she doesn’t call it out for now in order to keep the conversation moving. She has to get the conversation to a specific place in order to take care of what she needs.
“So why didn’t you tell us?” Azune's voice is gentle as he lets the back of one knuckle stroke down Bolaire’s temple. Murray is glad for whatever rapport the two of them have built when she wasn’t looking, because she’s looking at it now and seeing that it’s working just like it did earlier tonight: Azune’s gentle kindness soothing even sentient clay. “Were you afraid to? Did you think we would want to use you like a thing?”
The moment hangs. Murray is watching it. Fate is gathering up threads, but the knot is still too tangled for the outcome to be made clear. She can’t pull on any of them, not yet. It’s not time. But she’s watching, and she has her tongue tucked just behind her gem teeth, ready.
Finally, in a voice too small for him, Bolaire speaks. “I figured you would ask for yourselves if you cared to know. And that any information I offered proactively would not be believed as truth.”
She gapes at him. “Why wouldn’t we have trusted your explanations?”
“Did you trust my first one? That night, at the Archanade?”
“I mean, yeah? Of course we-”
“All of you?”
And there’s the rub. She knew it was coming—it’s the thing that inspired her to have this conversation at all, actually. The thing that they still haven’t gotten to yet. But she has to assume that if it’s at the forefront of her mind, then it’s at the forefront of Bolaire’s, too. And she still has to take care of it. There’s no time to waste.
“What happened that night notwithstanding—”she cannot get into that right now, “—you could have told us more about yourself, Bolaire. We would have listened to you.”
“You two, maybe,” Bolaire allows with a wave between them.“But you and I both know that Halandil wouldn’t have listened. Never has that been more abundantly clear than after tonight.”
“Bolaire…!”
“I thought he wanted space." Azune must have ceded full control of his body over as the conversation got more intense, because Bolaire’s moving and gesturing more like himself now. He’s throwing his hands up in the air and pacing around in frustration. “I thought he needed time to process things before he was ready to hear more. In all the time I’ve known him, Halandil has always been keen to seek the truth. When he gets ideas for a play, he does research in libraries, he interviews firsthand witnesses… he even comes to the museum for a historical perspective, if it’s necessary. I thought that he would come to me once he was ready.”
“And I think he probably would have,” Murray encourages, even though she doesn’t know for sure whether Hal would or wouldn’t have; right now, getting through this conversation matters more than the details themselves. “But I think that moment scared him. And it must have put him off approaching you for more information.”
“Regardless,” Bolaire stops in his tracks, and his face sags, “all of that is much too late now. Hal is gone, and whatever friendship existed between us is destroyed. He thinks I’m a monster, that I’m a thing. I held my tongue about Thjazi because I knew he was in mourning… I did it for his sake. And now, when I finally can’t take it anymore and try to tell him the truth, he just—he just ignores it! Says I have to let go of his brother and start dealing with him, as if letting go was just some simple task and not the unburdening of years and years of torment to someone I thought I could trust! And I… I…”
Something in him breaks, and Bolaire lets out a cry of anguish so forceful that it rattles Murray’s gem teeth. It’s a display of emotion the likes of which she’s never seen from Bolaire, usually so comported and refined in bearing. She sees him buckling just in time to catch him against her shoulder; she feels the familiarity of Azune’s arms wrapping around her, and the unfamiliarity of cool porcelain burying itself into her neck. He takes a shuddering inhale in her grip, and though what follows is precisely what she was expecting to happen, Murray is nonetheless left dazed by the reality that arrives:
Bolaire Lathalia, mask of the Panto, is weeping.
Murray wraps her arms around him firmly and holds. Silently, she curses herself even though she knows there’s no point. She knows this needed to happen, for Bolaire’s sake as much as for her own—there was no way she could get at what she needs to without getting through this part here. But that doesn’t change the fact that Bolaire is broken and weeping in her arms, that he’s finally been given release for all of the terrible emotions that no one has allowed him to freely express all night. There were snippets here and there that came through, but every time they started, someone in their group would speak up and silence him.
Okay, so maybe Murray can curse herself a little bit. She curses herself for not speaking up in Bolaire’s defense even once tonight. She knows it was unacceptable, and tells herself that what she’s doing now will make up for it.
Or, well. What she’s going to do. They haven’t gotten to that part, yet.
She doesn’t know how much time passes before Bolaire finally speaks again. “I didn’t want to hurt him,” he confides. “Or you, Murray. Or our beloved Arcane Marshal. I don’t want to hurt any of you. I never have. I just want to exist. I just want to be.”
“I know, sweetie,” she soothes. She’s rubbing circles between his shoulder blades. “I know.”
As Bolaire sobs into her shoulder, no wetness ever lands on her blouse. She wonders whether Bolaire can even cry at all, or if he was made with tear tracks on his face to represent the one emotion he can’t express naturally on his own. A mockery of tears carved onto a being that cannot truly cry—yet another cruelty left to him by his creators. As she holds him in the embrace, she makes sure to raise a hand to cup his cheek, to hug him instead of just his borrowed body.
Bolaire apparently recognizes the gesture for what it is. “Thank you, Murray,” he gasps out between sobs.
“Of course, Bolaire.”
“This is—” he sniffs wetly, “—surprisingly kind of you.”
She risks a tiny, playful barb in the hopes that it will help more than it stings. “You sayin’ I can’t be kind? What the hell, Bolaire!”
“That you can be kind is not the surprising part,” Bolaire counters, the tiniest whiff of his asshole pedantry surfacing for a brief moment. “The surprising part is that I am the intended target of your kindness.”
Murray swallows. This is where she wanted the conversation to go. Now that it’s here, she has to press on, even though she knows it’s going to hurt. It’s the only way to get through to the end. “You? Why wouldn’t I be kind to you, Bolaire?”
He doesn’t give her an answer. Murray feels Azune’s body stiffen under her hug and hears another sob catch in his throat. She can hear the creak of porcelain as Bolaire presses his lips together tightly. There’s so much tension in him, so much knotted pain not yet released. Her own eyes start to water as she confirms her own fears—it really was as bad as she feared when she first set out to do this.
She runs her fingers along the side of the mask, and quietly asks him: “Bolaire… did you think that neither of us cared about you?”
He lets out a constrained noise, not quite a whimper but equally as wounded. Are Bolaire’s emotions making Azune’s throat clench with despair, or is Azune just as upset to hear all this as she is? “It’s as I said before—I figured you would ask if any of you cared. And neither of you have ever asked.”
“Oh, honey,” Murray whispers. “No. No.”
Bolaire pushes back from her embrace, straightens Azune’s body. Murray can see the performance of it all, how he uses posture and physical distance from her to communicate the emotional distance he’s trying to impart. But she can still hear the quiver in his voice, and thus his attempted ruse doesn’t work. “You do not have to defend yourselves to me. There are any number of excuses to be offered in defense of the truth. ‘We were so busy, there wasn’t time to have a discussion, we wanted you to bring it up first,’ et cetera, et cetera. You don’t have to force yourselves to say something that isn’t true just for my sake. I despise lying, regardless.”
“It’s not a lie,” Azune protests immediately. Apparently he is still present in the conversation, and yes—his voice is wet, too. “I care about you, Bolaire.”
“We care,” Murray insists. “I care, Bolaire. That’s the whole reason I came to talk to you before you left. To let you know that I’ll miss you, and that you’re my friend.”
And here it is: the moment.
She watches Bolaire’s eyes flick to her, watches his expression as he studies hers. He’s searching her words and face for proof that what she’s saying is true: that she actually does care about him.
She knows who’s really meant to be here. Who Bolaire really needs to hear it from.
She also knows who didn’t say it. Who isn’t going to say it.
But Bolaire needs to hear that he isn’t alone. He needs something to hold onto as he heads out on this insane quest of artifacts and planar rituals and afterlives. She doesn’t need her divinatory powers to see it happening right in front of her—she knows that if Bolaire leaves Dol-Makjar while he truly believes himself to be without friends, then he isn’t going to be coming back from this trip at all.
And here, right here, she pulls a thread. Fate, reality itself, moves a barely a smidgen off course. No one else in this cave or in Dol-Makjar or in the world at large will ever know she’s done it, because what’s she’s done is so small a change that on a universal scale, it truly doesn’t matter at all. This tiny nudge may as well have not happened at all, as far as the world is concerned.
But what she’s changed is this: when Bolaire looks at her, and listens to her profess that she truly cares about him as a friend, he believes her.
The tension in Bolaire’s porcelain brow softens. The glow of his eyelights flickers and changes from the cold burn of distant stars to the gentle warmth of a hearthfire. His lips curl slightly upwards, halfway between fondness and relief, but nonetheless a smile.
Murray returns his smile with a grin wide enough to show her gem teeth, which still faintly buzz with the magic of reality rewritten.
She’s given him the tiniest glimmer of light to take forward onto his journey. It’s all she can do to help him. And hopefully, hopefully, it will be enough.