#I HOPE U LIEK THIS DISASTER MADDY D:

[moiraineswife]

The Courage Or The Fall - A WidoMauk Fic

Thanking yooou to @ace-absol for prompting this. I hope you like it, Maddy!!! 

A/N: For the purposes of this fic we’re gonna stumble into an AU in which the bathhouse scene never happened, and we’re going to pretend that we’ve all forgotten disguise self is  a thing, JUST LET ME HAVE THIS RIDICULOUS SET-UP IN PEACE, OKAY!? 

Title: The Courage Or The Fall 

Summary: Prompted:  “Shivering long after everyone else has stopped.” After ending up fighting a battle submerged in a  frozen lake, the Mighty Nein strip off in their camp to dry out and warm up. All but one.  Content warning: this fic deals quite a lot with scars, if that’s not your cup of tea, maybe avoid. 

Teaser: “I’m going to stop you freezing to death, you idiot,” he said simply, hand still extended. Caleb still didn’t move. “Trust me,” Molly murmured, his words only for the darkness and the wizard staring up at him, the firelight glinting on his pale eyes making them look strangely opaque and ghostly. “I should think I’d proved myself quite adept at keeping you alive after all this time.” 

Caleb stared at him for another long, thundering heartbeat, then he let a soft laugh huff past his lips. He reached up and grabbed Molly’s forearm, letting him pull him to his feet. 

Link: AO3

Molly had experienced a lot of interesting things in his life. In fact, he considered himself a connoisseur of interesting things. 

But in spite of that, he had never had the pleasure of battling a poisonous, enlarged serpent in the belly of a freezing lake. 

Until today.   

Nott sloped out of the lake last, shaking her head so hard her ears flapped, looking very much like a drowned rat. She padded right for the centre of their little bank-side camp where Caleb, bless him, had managed to get a fire going. 

Molly trailed after Nott, satisfied that all of them had now made it out, and made a beeline for the fire as well. Tieflings ran hot, and he was not at all fond of being cold. For all he loved travelling, and being on the road, and the wandering lifestyle he had with the Nein, he did not enjoy being frozen. 

That had diminished since he’d been travelling with Caleb, who was wonderfully good at producing fires. 

By the time he and Nott reached it, the fire at the centre was at the height of Molly’s waist, and roaring happily like an enthusiastic dragon as it consumed the logs the others were feeding it to keep it going. 

Molly stretched up on his toes, his tail quivering as it went taut, and then, without further ado, he began to strip. 

Living in a carnival had taught him several invaluable life lessons, and one of those was that if you wanted to survive on the road, privacy was something you learned to abandon quickly. 

“Molly, what in the heck are you doing?” Beau called from the other side of the fire, mock-averting her eyes as Molly pulled his loose shirt over his head and bared his scarred, tattooed torso for all to see. 

“What the rest of you should be doing,” he replied brightly, unlacing his trousers as he spoke. 

“We’re in the middle of the woods, Molly,” Fjord pointed out, as though he’d forgotten. 

“Yep,” Molly continued, shoving his trousers down his legs and leaving himself in nothing but underwear, which were also damp, but he decided to spare for the sake of keeping Caleb conscious, since the wizard was staring at him with dangerously wide eyes, frozen in the act of hunching over the fire and warming his hands. 

“Oh good, are we all getting naked?” Jester asked, her loud voice announcing her arrival as she bounced back into camp with Yasha, both of them carrying armfuls of wood for the fire. 

“The sensible ones of us are,” Molly said, giving Yasha a light tap with his tail as she passed him. 

“Why?” Nott asked, peering up at him from where she was crouching beside the fire. 

“Because we’re all soaked to our skins with freezing lake water,” he told her, “And if you don’t want to catch your death, you’ll take your clothes off, hang them up to dry by the fire, and huddle together with everyone under blankets to get warm,” he explained. 

There was a silence as the group digested his words then, one by one, they each seemed to see sense in the plan, and slowly began to strip off their clothes, too. Some enthusiastically (Jester), and some reluctantly, (Nott), but each of them did it in their own way and at their own pace. 

All except one. 

Caleb remained beside the fire in his long, tattered cloak, dripping, arms folded, that stubborn look coming over his face. 

“I will be just fine, thank you,” he said firmly. 

Molly walked over to him as Jester summoned Nott and Fjord over to her with promises of being their ‘tiefling hot water bottle’ for the night, and Yasha began wordlessly distributing blankets, glancing back at him but not saying anything. 

“I understand,” Molly said, quietly, “That you might not relish the thought of getting naked in front of everyone,” he began. 

Caleb made a soft, disbelieving sound in the back of his throat, “I doubt that you,” he informed his own feet, not looking at Molly, “Understand.” 

Molly raised an eyebrow at him, and waited until Caleb stole a glance up at him before he said, “You don’t think I’ve ever been reluctant to let people see my body?” 

“No,” Caleb said, so quickly, and with such firmness, bordering on reverence, in his tone, that Molly found himself smiling in spite of himself. 

“I’m flattered,” he said, warmly, leaning in just a little and letting his warm breath tickle the shell of Caleb’s ear, “But I promise you, I do understand what it feels like to not be uncomfortable in your own skin, to not want other people to see it. But you are going to freeze to death if you don’t take those clothes off and come and get warm with the rest of us.” 

“I appreciate your concern,” Caleb said, stiffly, “But I will be fine.” 

With that, he marched over to the other side of the fire that the rest of the huddle was happening, sat down, and stared resolutely into the flames, clearly considering this conversation done. 

Molly hesitated, opening his mouth to say something else, but he was interrupted by Jester’s voice, “Molly! They’re stealing all of my good tiefling heat away! I need you to come and help me stop the cold people from dying.” 

He gave one last look towards Caleb, then sloped over and allowed Jester to envelope him in her blankets. 

Half an hour later, exhausted from their fight, and designating him on watch since he was ‘the most awake’ according to Jester, the rest of his group had fallen together in a strange, lumpy pile on the forest floor, curled around one another for warmth, buried in blankets. 

Glancing across to the other side of the camp, Molly carefully extracted himself, wrapped in a single blanket, and padded towards Caleb, who was still dressed in his water-logged clothes, shivering as a drip of water fell from one lock of his auburn hair and splattered against the ground. 

“Caleb,” Molly murmured, quietly, “Come here.” 

He extended a hand towards him. The fire that Caleb had kept roaring all this time with occasional spells caught the lights of the rings on his fingers, and cast a strange, obsidian sheen on the tips of his black claws. 

Caleb stared at the hand for a very long time, but didn’t take it. 

“What are you going to do?” he asked, eyeing Molly warily. 

Molly laughed softly, “So suspicious,” he purred, padding a little closer, his tail lashing from side-to-side in worry. He only bothered to try and make it behave when Jester was around, since he doubted the others could read anything from it. 

“I’m going to stop you freezing to death, you idiot,” he said simply, hand still extended. Caleb still didn’t move. “Trust me,” Molly murmured, his words only for the darkness and the wizard staring up at him, the firelight glinting on his pale eyes making them look strangely opaque and ghostly. “I should think I’d proved myself quite adept at keeping you alive after all this time.” 

Caleb stared at him for another long, thundering heartbeat, then he let a soft laugh huff past his lips. He reached up and grabbed Molly’s forearm, letting him pull him to his feet. 

He stepped in close to Caleb, close enough to breathe in the scent of earth that seemed to cling to him. It was a good scent, a safe, soft scent that made Molly think of a home he couldn’t remember, yet still somehow felt and longed for. 

They were almost painfully close now,  Caleb still fully clothed, Molly with nothing but a thin blanket draped about his shoulders. It was a closeness that implied intimacy by its very nature, a closeness that Caleb would have fled from mere months ago, but that he now seemed to lean in to.

“Everyone else is asleep,” he told Caleb, his voice low and smooth, like the thick feeling in the air after a thunderstorm, heavy with words unsaid that nevertheless echoed between their chests. “It’s just you and me, now,” he continued, letting the darkness swallow his words as he swallowed the rhythmic sound of Caleb’s breathing, which was becoming faster by the minute.

Molly raised his eyes slowly and met Caleb’s, briefly, but enough. He raised his fingers to the small clasp of the simple cloak that Caleb had bought in Zadash, simple, not gaudy, not too loud, as he had once found Molly to be, and undid it with a soft snick, only audible because of the silence of the twilight that was closing around them.

“I will stop,” he said, his voice a steady, anchoring contrast to the nervous hitch in Caleb’s breathing, “The moment you say the word. But you do need to get out of these clothes and let them dry off.”

Caleb stared down at him for a long moment then, softly, he murmured a faint, “Alright,” in Zemnian, and gave Molly permission to continue.

He did so slowly. His fingers were deft and dextrous from the hours and hours he’d spent manipulating his card deck, and they could have had Caleb’s clothes from him faster than he could blink. A part of Molly, the part most closely connected to his boiling blood and swiftly lashing tail, wanted nothing more than that. But Caleb trembled slightly at the lightest touch of Molly’s hands, and so he forced himself to be slow, and calm, and controlled.

They didn’t speak as Molly slowly undid each of the clasps that held Caleb’s coat shut until it hung open and loose. Forcing himself to take slow, steady breaths, Molly slid it gently from his shoulders, and off his thin frame.

It always surprised him how much smaller, and slighter Caleb seemed without the bulky coat, that seemed to contain half his worldly possessions at any given time. He barely ever took it off, and Molly had simply learned to picture him wearing it, even though it more than doubled his bulk.

Gently, carefully, Molly arranged the cloak on one of the lines they had hung up with their clothes beside the fire.

As he turned and took a step away from him, he could have sworn Caleb shifted behind him, some instinctual part of him longing to be close to Molly, magnetically pulling him closer as he stepped away, as though they were connected by an invisible string of thread.

Molly gently unbuckled the belt around his waist, and lifted the brown tunic away, leaving him in only a ragged shirt Molly wasn’t sure he’d actually ever seen, buried as it normally was beneath other layers of clothing.

He hung that up as well, then moved his hands to the laces which had pulled the shirt tight closed around Caleb’s collar. He made a soft noise in the back of his throat and withdrew slightly. Molly stopped at once, glancing up enquiringly at him.

“The rest first,” Caleb gritted out hoarsely.

Molly gazed at him for a long moment, but said nothing before dropping to his knees and beginning to ease off Caleb’s boots.

The longer he spent with him, Molly noticed, his hands always deft and careful, taking care to establish an iron wall of boundaries between them, and refusing to step across it, let his touches be anything but respectful and casual, the more Caleb seemed to lean into him, as though seeking more, more contact, more intimacy. As though he too fantasised about, and longed for, the searing kiss of skin against skin.  

After what might have been minutes, or hours, or several days spent suspended entirely in darkness, not even the sun daring to disturb this moment, Caleb stood before Molly in nothing but the shirt he had still not allowed him to remove.

Molly straightened up and turned to face him, “This now,” he said softly, but Caleb withdrew as though his hands blazed with heat, and were like to burn him if they made contact.

“Mollymauk,” Caleb began, not looking at him, though he shifted uncomfortably in place, still trembling violently.

And though he was still wet, and no doubt frozen to his bones, something told Molly this was from more than just cold.

“What is it, Caleb?” he asked, as gently as he could, taking a cautious step closer, but not moving to touch him again.

Before he quite knew what was happening, Caleb’s hand was gripping his wrist, his fingers, thick with cold and what he could now see in his eyes was fear, fumbling until they managed to intertwine with his.

He still didn’t look at Molly, his eyes fixed firmly on a spot between their bare feet, but his grip on his hand was like iron.

Molly responded with softness, pulsing his hand gently, like a heartbeat, trying to reassure him.

“You have to understand,” Caleb began, shaking more violently than ever, and Molly couldn’t help himself from taking another step closer, his tail curling instinctively, protectively, around Caleb’s waist. “I, I am not- It, it is not...Not pretty. What is underneath.” His eyes darted nervously up, caught Molly’s for a second, then fell once more as he whispered hoarsely, “I am not pretty.”

Molly didn’t have any idea what this was in reference to. But he said, as staunchly and firmly as he could, “I don’t need you to be pretty, Caleb, I just need you not to freeze to death.”

This seemed both the wrong, and the right thing to say, for Caleb both deflated, but also nodded his head.

Hesitating due to the mixed signals, it was with surprise that Molly felt the hand that was still held in Caleb’s slowly rise. Caleb placed it flat against his own chest, right on top of the tightly tied laces, a clear invitation and nod of approval.

Molly watched him for a long moment, but Caleb neither spoke, nor met his eye, nor reacted at all. So, resigned, he gently tugged on the tight bow and began undoing the laces.

Neither of them seemed to breathing as they did so and, strangely, Molly felt as though this was more intimate, and more important, than the kisses he had dreamed of stealing lately, more so even than the sex he had found himself fantasising about more and more often, late at night, when he was alone on watch, or when he found himself unable to sleep.

Caleb helped him pull the shirt over his head, baring him, but for all his reaction to finally standing before Molly all but naked, he may as well have been carved from stone.

Molly hung the shirt up beside the rest of Caleb’s things, then turned back to him in time to see him jerk his arms instinctively to cover his torso. It was an empty gesture, however. For all that that concealed, there was far more that the firelight, and Molly’s eyes, accustomed as they were to darkness, revealed.

Creeping across Caleb’s chest, shoulders, and up the left side of his neck, where the scarf he wore usually covered, and which he had kept carefully angled towards the darkness the whole time Molly had undressed him, was a twisted pattern of what was, clearly, burn scars.

They covered the entirety of his upper body, and made Caleb’s aversion to fire instantly understandable.

Molly reached out instinctively and brushed the tips of his fingers against Caleb’s shoulder.

Caleb jerked back at once as though Molly had slapped him, hunching in further, attempting to hide more of the scars.

“I’m sorry,” Molly said, his voice hoarse, his throat tight. “I didn’t hurt you-“

“No,” Caleb said at once. Then, more quietly, calmly, “No. You did not.”

“They don’t hurt, do they?” he asked softly.

Caleb looked up and said, with surprising candour for the way he still tried to hide while he bared his darkest secrets before Molly and the watching stars overhead, “Do yours?”

“Sometimes,” Molly admitted.

A shiver rippled through him as, unbidden, he remembered the nights he had woken, thrashing, held down by Yasha’s strong arms, as phantom pains from injuries he couldn’t remember but still carried tattooed across his skin and his soul, had wrenched him from sleep and tormented him to the point of near madness, where he had wished with every last, strangled, agonised breath in his lungs for the merciful oblivion of such insanity. Or better still, death.

Caleb briefly met his eyes, then nodded and said quietly, in a way that made Molly quite sure he understood everything that word contained for them, “Sometimes.”

Caleb angled his body slightly away from Molly, seeming to want to pull his clothes from the line, put them on, and flee into the woods where he would never need to be looked at again.

Unable to bear the self-loathing implicit in every twisted line of his body, Molly moved closer and said, softly, his voice shaking uncontrollably now, “Caleb.” He reached out and gently took Caleb’s hand, which was still pressed over his chest, trying to hide himself. “Please,” Molly whispered imploringly, putting a very gentle pressure on the hand, just enough to communicate what he was asking for.

Slowly, reluctantly, Caleb relaxed, and allowed Molly to draw both of his hands away from himself, baring the ruin of his chest completely to Molly.

“I am sorry,” he bit out at last, his words clipped and his tone black.

“Don’t,” Molly snapped out, harsher than he had intended. He squeezed Caleb’s hands gently and repeated, his voice softer this time, “Please don’t apologise. Not to me.”

Caleb looked up at him and seemed to understand what those words, the tremor in them, meant.

“How do you do it?” he rasped, very deliberately, more deliberately than usual, even, not looking at Molly as he said it.

“Do what?” Molly asked, cocking his head slightly to one side.

“How do you-“Caleb broke off and gestured hopelessly, a broad circle that seemed to encompass Molly as a whole, “How do you...How are you so open about yourself, about, about-“

The word got caught in his throat, but Molly supplied it for him, “My scars?” he asked, eyebrow raised.

Caleb nodded jerkily, then continued. “How do you not seem to care about what other people think of you?”

Molly laughed softly, “There’s no secret to it, Caleb,” he said, shaking his head, “I just genuinely don’t care. I don’t give a damn what people think of me. Whatever it is that goes through their heads when they see me, they’re welcome to it. I spent too long hiding, and censoring myself for other people’s benefit. It got very tiring, very quickly.”

“But-“ Caleb began, brow furrowed, apparently not able to process this way of thinking.

“Caleb,” Molly interrupted him, “Look at me.” Caleb did so, and he said, “What do you see?”

“I see...You,” Caleb said, frowning again, apparently confused by this question.

Molly huffed a soft laugh, and allowed a brief interruption to the moment to press a swift kiss to Caleb’s forehead. “Alright, what do you think other people see when they look at me?”

“Well..I imagine that they see you, as well,” Caleb replied, looking more confused by the moment.

Molly resisted the urge to sigh with great difficulty.

“No,” he said, patiently. “They don’t see me. They see a monster.” Caleb opened his mouth, looking as though he wanted to protest, but Molly pressed a long, thin finger against his lips, stopping him. “They see a purple demon covered in tattoos, and piercings, and scars, with burning red eyes looking like it crawled out of one of the Nine Hells to be a perfect, living representation of the things that haunt their children’s nightmares.”

“That was a very detailed description, Molly,” Caleb muttered, “I think you might have given this too much thought.”

Molly continued, as though he hadn’t heard, “I can’t control what people think of me. If they look at me and scowl, or hurry their children to the other side of the road, then they’ve told me more about themselves than they ever learned about me from a single look. You only get one life, and it’s too short for me to bother limiting myself, and my existence, to try and provide some kind of hollow comfort for those that don’t deserve it.”

He shrugged as Caleb frowned, apparently digesting all of this.

“I might get fewer stares, and people spitting at me, if I didn’t have these,” he gestured towards his jewellery, “Or these,” he indicated the elaborate tattoos covering his skin, “Or these,” he pointed at the scars that criss-crossed his chest, “But they’re each a part of who I am, and if there’s one I will never apologise for, it’s of being entirely who I am. I can’t be anyone else, and trying is just a waste of my time. And it doesn’t improve matters. Trust me, I’ve tried everything, and it’s not worth it.”

Caleb bowed his head again, only to raise it once more as Molly’s fingertips brushed over his ribs, just above his heart.

“I won’t tell you they’re beautiful,” he said quietly, “Because they’re not. And I won’t stand here and lie through my teeth to you, or give you words you know are empty, because they don’t help. I know they don’t help.”

He stepped closer, their bodies pressed flush now. The kiss of bare skin burning between them was everything he had been craving since he had stepped away from the group and approached Caleb, everything and more.

“But I will tell you,” Molly breathed softly, stepping in closer, and brushing a stray lock of hair that had fallen into Caleb’s eyes back, “That I think you are beautiful.”

Caleb shivered at that, but it was no longer from cold. The heat eminating from Molly’s body seemed to have done him good, and there was a dull, warm flush of colour spreading up his neck and into his cheeks.

“Danke,” he whispered hoarsely.

He shifted, raising his head to look up at Molly, jolting slightly in surprise when his forehead knocked against the tip.

Amazingly, Caleb laughed softly at that. He looked so beautiful in that moment, so free, and vulnerable held in Molly’s arms, that he couldn’t help himself. Molly reached out, his claws grazing ever so gently along the line of Caleb’s jaw, rough with a faint dusting of stubble.

“Caleb,” he breathed softly to him, delicately cupping his face in his hand. “My promise to you still stands,” he shifted slightly, pressing their bodies even closer, “If you say stop, I will.” He leaned in, mindful of his horns and the jewellery that dangled from them as he tilted his hand, the fingers underneath Caleb’s chin tipping it slightly upwards without resistance, as he breathed softly against his lips, “But if you don’t...I’m going to kiss you.”

“Molly,” Caleb whispered back, his eyes fluttering closed, his lips slightly parted.

“Yes?” he rasped, not sure how much longer his brittle patience could stand the roiling tension between them before he snapped.

Caleb’s hand slid slowly up his spine before his fingers wound their way deep into Molly’s hair, “I’m not saying stop.”

So Molly kissed him.

And kept kissing him. He kissed him long, and deep, and slow. He kissed him with his fingers gripping tightly at his hair, and his claws biting gently into Caleb’s hip. He kissed him blind, and deaf, and utterly oblivious to the rest of the world watching them. He kissed him until they were both breathless, and panting, even as they held each other, arm’s around each other’s waists, soft, disbelieving little laughs on their lips.

“Come here,” Molly murmured softly against Caleb’s neck, drawing him gently down onto the ground with a soft groan, his body starting to ache after the beating he’d taken earlier, “We need to sleep.”

“Are you quite sure about that?” Caleb murmured, still breathless, twisting around and surprising him with another kiss.

“Caleb,” Molly said, in mock-shock, eyes wide, “How very forward of you,” he mumbled thickly against his lips.

This kiss was broken by a faint groan of pain on Molly’s end, and Caleb drew away, concern replacing the lust in his eyes.

“Might have bruised a few ribs,” Molly said, leaning in and stealing another messy kiss, “I’m sure it’ll be fine,” he continued, propping himself up on a hand and holding his body over Caleb.

The confidence of this statement was somewhat undercut as another spasm of pain flashed through him and he all but collapsed on top of Caleb.

“Hm,” the wizard said, delicately shifting Molly off to the side, “Perhaps you’re right,” he said, “Sleep.” Molly opened his mouth to argue, but Caleb gave him a suddenly stern look and repeated firmly, in a tone that allowed for no argument, “Sleep, Molly.”

Grumbling, Molly folded his body around Caleb’s, warming him, his tail coiling around his ankle, connecting them.

He let Caleb’s body relax, becoming soft and pliant in his arms as he settled against him, before he leaned up and nipped gently at Caleb’s neck, just below his ear, with his fangs and whispered, “But tomorrow...You’re mine.”

Caleb shivered again and Molly smiled, feeling rather pleased with himself as he tugged the blanket up over them and pulled Caleb closer.