Chapter Text
The second time Mollymauk comes back to life, Yasha pulls him out of the ground unceremoniously and lays him down on the damp grass and brush on top of the hill where they'd buried him. He's pale, dirty, his hair long and tangled, his jewellery rusted and tarnished. He coughs and winces and cringes away from the light, squeezing his eyes shut. She's shaking with the exertion of the dig, panting hard, her eyes wild with the reality of what she's done and the fervour with which she had followed the summons from the stormlord. She doesn't know what she expects, but it's not this, and something about it feels terribly wrong. Molly stays like that, curled up and shaking, and she doesn't know what to do. Eventually she pulls him into a hug, and it's not the same - he goes willingly but he doesn't make a move to hug back. She can hear his breathing, rattling and stilted. Eventually she gives up and carries him to her tent where she lays him down on a bedroll. He lies there, staring at the canopy, and if she didn't see him breathing she'd think he was still dead. She falls asleep staring at him.
That first night she wakes to the sound of him coughing, screaming with no sound, scrabbling at the sheets. His chest is heaving when she scrambles to her feet; he looks up at her, eyes finally focusing, then twists and vomits on the ground next to him, a mixture of bile and grave dirt. When he finally stops his chest is trembling with shaky breaths, head still turned to the side and eyes shut, and when she moves closer towards him he holds his hand out to stop her. He's crying, face twisted in a pitiful expression, and she's absolutely torn. She makes one aborted move towards him and then retreats, sitting back down helplessly on her bedroll. She watches him stumble out of the tent a while later, hears him throw up again, peers out to see him on hands and knees in the darkness, still as stone.
On the second night she wakes up, finds him gone, pushes herself to a sitting position and stares out the opening in the tent. He’s stumbling around, barely able to keep upright, sometimes falling and staying there on hands and knees for a good while, spitting yet more dirt onto the ground, his arms shaking with the exertion of holding himself up. Occasionally he glances up at the moon above, and she can make out the horrible twisted expression on his face, betrayal and anger and confusion. Then he turns and spits again. She turns around and goes back to sleep.
She wakes again, later, to a rhythmic thumping and scraping sound. She stumbles out of the tent, looking around, eyes adjusting to the dark. She sees him a way off, body slumped sideways against a tree. She watches for a second, and sees his head tilt sideways and then SMACK into the side of the trunk, his right horn hitting the bark and causing a few leaves to flutter downward. She hears him tilt his head forward a little, horn scraping, and then he does it again. She runs towards him and, without thinking, shoves her hand into the spot between his head and the tree. He notices the lack of impact, turns his head, and looks up at her blearily.
'Please don't do that, my friend' she says quietly. He doesn't respond, just pulls himself heavily to his feet and walks away.
The third night she finds him, at the same spot as before, woken by the same sound. As she approaches she sees that his horns are now chipped, cracked, and dirty. His tarnished jewellery hangs in broken chains. He doesn't look up.
‘Leave me alone’, he says quietly.
‘No.’
He turns around then. ‘Why do you keep bothering me!’ He snarls through clenched teeth. ‘You got what you wanted. I’m alive. Now fuck off and leave me.’
She walks away. It begins to rain.
Time passes like this. She waits. She listens to him howling in the night, in the drizzle outside the tent, cursing and thrashing and screaming into the silence and indifference of the night sky with its pale moon. He spits curses in Infernal, mumbles to himself in a choked voice, and sometimes she picks up quiet sobbing, right out at the edges of her hearing. Some nights he returns to the tent, and sometimes she finds him in the morning, curled up on the ground, damp with morning dew and shivering in his thin, bloodstained shirt and trousers. She had offered him clean clothes but he wouldn't take them. Something of him is still underground, quiet and alone beneath the earth. She looks at the long pale scar running down his chest, where the glaive had sliced right through him, and feels like she's looking at something obscene, something private and not meant for mortal eyes.
Time passes, and she's at the edge of despair, wondering whether she should try to get a message to the group, feeling woefully unequipped to deal with her friend and his terrible circumstances. She looks up, and he's lying on his bedroll, breathing slowly and deliberately, staring up at the fabric of the tent. She can feel his anger; the tension in their small space is palpable. She turns over and she must sleep, eventually.
Sometime later she wakes to the rustling of fabric and feels a small, lean body press into hers, so tentatively. She opens her eyes in surprise and finds Molly with his back to her, in the clean white shirt and smallclothes she had brought for him, curled up into her like he's hiding from the world. He tilts his head slightly, his poor cracked horns shifting a little, and peers at her with one beady eye as if he is waiting for her reaction. Her eyes widen, and she has a split second to react, to make things normal and safe. She huffs out a little breath and pulls the blanket over both of them, carefully draping an arm over his chest, so thin and tenuously tied to this world. There's a pause, and he brings an arm up to hold hers there, fingers wrapping around her wrist. She can feel him fall asleep like that, and it feels like the most fragile thing in the world, and the most miraculous. They stay like that, huddled together in the dark, as the rain continues to fall on their tent and on the nearby grave that is slowly filling with water, slowly washing away.