starter call: @brknsh, blue !
Years traveling and Molly’s come to know the fingerprint of his teammates’ magic.
Jester’s fizzes, excited and mischievous, like candy that dissolves on the tongue. There’s a buoyancy to it that energizes Molly after he’s healed, even as it stitches him roughly back together.
Caduceus’s is fresh and dense, cloying in the back of Molly’s mouth in a way that terrified him the first time it sank into his body and wrenched him back to consciousness. It did him no harm, but it reminded him too much of the weight of loam.
Fjord’s is wild with newness. Yasha’s prickles with static. Nott’s shatters and splashes.
Caleb’s was kinetic, Caleb’s stung and sang and felt alive beneath his hands when he pressed against his skin, and Molly hasn’t forgotten the way it crawled like a flame inching down a matchstick. It never healed him. He’d never felt it except on those awful nights Caleb woke up with his nails tearing into the flesh of his forearms, hands alight with the tangerine glow of metal plunged into a furnace. Molly held that magic in his arms, felt it blazing distant underneath his lips, knew the shape of it over him, around him, and Molly—
He twists around and dashes towards the fire, rage combating a dormant hope that resurrects into an unnatural tangle of confusion. Desperation.
Caleb hides when he fights. So do most casters, his mind supplies, but no, no, Caleb is smarter than most casters, he would, he would—
Molly’s eyes flit from one alcove carved into the stone wall to the next. There is a shape blacker than the shadows, a hand retreating from the direction of the blaze back into the dark. He slices the air with his golden blade and gleaming argent magic sweeps his steps, swallows Molly in a haze that surges him past the stairs and the smoldering, shattered bannister. His ears ring. His breath saws. He sprints past the open archways, one two three—there.
He holds out his hand, his Binding Rite activating with a rip in his own flesh, sending blood cascading from the eye at the back of his neck to trickle down his spine, sponged up by his billowing black shirt. The edges of his spell dig in as he nears, and it’s enough, he thinks, to break the spell caster’s concentration even as he flings the hooks of the Rite aside in surprise, and the connection to Molly’s magic tears like gristle.
Molly doesn’t stop. He snarls and launches himself at the body, impacts like a meteor strike. They hit the flagstones, the pommel of Molly’s sword slamming into the hollow of the caster’s throat, the second held aloft. His braid thumps his back, makes his fresh wound sing. He leans into his knees, digs them into the caster’s thighs.
There’s a semi-distant buzz of beetles, swarming like a plague.
A bellow that could be Beau releasing her ki with such profundity that an unfamiliar, feminine shriek rends the air.
Molly doesn’t hear that either.
The hood has fallen around the wizard’s head. Darkvision makes his shorn auburn hair charcoal grey. His blue eyes shine like mercury.
“Does it ever go away?” he’d asked Yasha nearly two years ago, voice wretched and torn. The heels of his palms dug so hard into his eyes that starlight burst behind his eyelids. Her hand was a broad stroke down his spine. “Does the hurt ever stop?”
There are temple bells in Molly’s ears. The pulse in his throat so quick his heart may have stopped. His grip slackens. The burn in his muscles dissipates when his arm drops, second blade kissing the floor; it’s shrill as it scrapes the stone.
He wanted her to cleave the pain from his chest. To dispel the raw, clawing ache clean from his body and leave him empty. She only extended her arm, gathered him into hers, and held him tight enough to bruise.
“No,” she said eventually, and when he answered with a hoarse, broken noise, her hand found his curls. “We just…we learn. To walk in it. To…to bear it. Oh, Molly. Mollymauk, I am sorry—”
The wick between his ribs is set alight with familiar magic. It eats the breath from his lungs and the asphyxiation burns so sweetly.
Molly’s voice is a fragile thing that splinters across his name with terrified hope:
