Squirrel's nest

Mollymauk pushed aside the dangling row of beads at the door with the tip of his tail, escorted Jeren-Lir into the tavern with a level of concern that balanced just enough on the edge of humor for plausible deniability, and sat him at a corner table with his back to the wall. (Jeren-Lir could have blessed him for that insight, if he didn’t think it might encourage him too much.)

Then he pulled a deck of cards out of his pocket, with a bare semblance of a theatrical riffle that looked like sheer reflex, and he put the deck into Jeren-Lir’s hands with an anxious pat.

“Shuffle those for me. Just keep shuffling them til I get back. What’s your preference?”

“Something akin to Corellian brandy. Distilled from tree-fruits and aged, if the words are different here.”

“Bright stars, that’s a relief,” Mollymauk said, in utter sincerity. “You do at least know how to drink.”

Jeren-Lir glared at him, or tried anyway. It seemed to skate off him like oil over water. With a flick of that extravagantly embroidered silk-and-velvet coat, Mollymauk wove through the crowd toward the bartender.

With nothing better to do, Jeren-Lir kept shuffling. The deck was as spectacle-ridden as the rest of his companion’s personality; the card backs were illuminated with an artistic rendering of astrological symbols depicting a star system Jeren-Lir had never seen, painted in deep blue and gleaming gold and star-sparks of silver.

A few minutes later, Mollymauk came back with three pieces of blown-glass stemware, half a bottle of something that looked quite a lot like Corellian brandy, and ...something else, kind of greenish-brown and vaguely bubbling in a skull-faced mug.

“They called it Hell’s Ditch; I had no choice, under the circumstances,” he said, in response to Jeren-Lir’s skeptical look, then pulled the stopper out of the brandy and poured.

“First for the Moonweaver, whose mercy let me wake with my mind intact this time. Next for you. And third for me, later, because first I have to drink to the last several ditches I woke in, for thanks that I woke at all.”

He took an eloquently skeptical sniff of the skull-mug, shrugged a little, and took a sip.

“Well?” Jeren-Lir asked, amused despite himself by the extraordinary series of expressions that crossed his face.

After the first moment of absolute speechless incoherence Jeren-Lir had ever seen from him, he finally managed, “Accurately named?”

Jeren-Lir put a hand over his mouth, trying not to laugh in the face of the man who’d just brought half a bottle of brandy to the table.

“No, seriously, go on; this is in desperate need of laughing at, because I refuse to waste …well, this is not good alcohol. Any alcohol really.”   

“Did you even ask what was in it?”

“Nope!” And he took another sip, with a remarkably similar series of expressions. “Ginger beer, molasses-dregs soaked in grain-spirits, and the half-composted aftermath of what some wormwood-addled herbalist-witch forgot in the bottom of her cauldron for six weeks? Extremely well named.”

“You’re actually going to drink that.”

“It nearly made you laugh,” Mollymauk said, with a rueful smile. “Bargain at the price. And I do owe ritual offering to several ditches by now.”

He picked up the deck and fanned it with a one-handed twist, like a peacock’s tail. “Pick three, face down.”

(Several pages of AU-specific fortune-telling later...)

There was an entire half bottle sitting on the table. Jeren-Lir finished his brandy in one go, then poured himself another.

“Oh, don’t drink it cold. Here.” He plucked the glass from his hands, cradled it in both hands to warm it, and then glanced up with something power-touched glittering in his eyes.

“Corellian, you said? What’s it taste like? Think on that for me. ”

Jeren-Lir felt a soft cat-paw batting at his thoughts, and leaned into the curiosity-nudge with sense-memories of his first mission on Corellia.

The scent of sirpa fruit ripe on the trees; the distilled fire softened to embers by decades aging in caves near the northern coast. Sitting in a spaceport with another charming rogue whose personality was three sizes bigger than his body, and the way the stunned enlightenment of his first-ever taste of proper brandy in Corellia had made them both laugh...

“Oooh, nice.” He took a sip to test, then nodded briskly and handed it back: “There.”

When Jeren-Lir tasted the results, it was… Well, honestly, it was better than any actual Corellian brandy Jeren-Lir had ever been able to afford to buy for himself.

If this was the kind of thing Mollymauk’s circus-magic brewed out of a homesick Jedi’s wishful drinking, well then. Clearly he was going to have to go drinking with charming purple misfortune-tellers more often.

Then he looked at the seething skull-mug again.

“So why didn’t you do that to the cauldron-scrapings?”

“This is a ritual offering,” Mollymauk informed him piously, fingertips folded together. “A sacrifice to the ditch-gods and the liminal boundaries of the netherworlds. What kind of sacrifice would it be without anguish, suffering, and lamentation?”

“...You didn’t think of it.”

“I didn’t think of it,” he agreed with a sigh. “Honestly, I should have thought of it half an hour ago; I half fear none of my taste buds survived poison by cauldron-scrubbings. Caleb is the clever one of us; I’m lucky I can get by with being gorgeous and fascinating.”

“Not to mention modest.”

“Not to mention it at all; modesty is a bloody waste!” He held an intricately tattooed hand next to the peacock feathers trailing over his face and throat, and said, “I know damn well I’m a living work of art. I made myself a living work of art. There’s safety in colors.”

Jeren-Lir blinked. “Safety in numbers -- Mollymauk, how much of that did you drink?”

“Safety in colors,” he insisted. “I put on your mud-robe and pull the hood forward and walk down that street, and the minute someone notices I’m purple under there, out comes the screaming and the pitchforks. There’s so much less screaming when I advertise. Nobody thinks there’s a demonspawn trying to sneak around when I show up in this mad gem-dripping lily-gilding glory of a coat, juggling glass balls burning with feyfire and heralding the Carnival of Dreams.”

Flicking a hand at Jeren-Lir’s cloak, he added, “I grant that mud can be monastic camouflage, however tragic I may find the waste of a face like that framed in brown. Spectacle is my camouflage.”

That made a kind of bewilderingly inside-out variety of sense. Either that, or he’d not yet drunk enough of the brandy for it to make any other kind of sense. Jeren-Lir took another drink, to test the theory.

“By the way? I’m a little hurt.”

“That I think you’re not modest?”

“Pffft. That’s not an insult, that’s fact. No, you tease me about the coat, you pull frankly terrifying stunts bending the knife-edge of luck bare-handed, you drink the best damn brandy I’ve ever tasted, and you won’t even call me Molly?” Leaning his chin into his hand, he added, “My friends call me Molly, and if we’re not friends by now, I’m losing my touch.”

“Oh.” Feeling obscurely guilty, Jeren-Lir said, “Sorry, Molly.”

Molly stared at him for a moment, and then started to giggle.

“What?”

“You’re blushing. Gods, that’s too cute. Humans, honestly, just adorable… I mean, I assume you’re human.”

“I’m Akivan. Close enough.” Ruefully, he added, “I suppose the alcohol flush is camouflage too; I’m not as tipsy as I look. Usually.”

“Challenge accepted!”

“...Merciful stars, now I know how Kitrin felt.” Sighing, he admitted, “I owe her so many apologies.”

“Challenge not accepted...?”

How his eyes managed to look so woebegone even with that irrepressible quirk of a grin was a mystery.  Jeren-Lir wondered if he ought to be taking notes somehow.

“What the hell,” he said, and finished his glass. “But I draw the line at dancing on tables.”

“Why on earth would you limit yourself like that?” He sounded honestly baffled. “Tables are everywhere! Whenever you need a stage, there you are! And I know you’ve got the reflexes to -- no, stop laughing, I’m serious!”

“I know!” Jeren-Lir wheezed, knuckling laugh-tears from his eyes.

“All right, don’t stop laughing,” Molly said, rueful. “This is better anyway. I did want to know what it took. So, if that’s what it takes--!” He swept  up the cards and the kerchief; Jeren-Lir grabbed at his shoulder on reflex.

“You are not dancing on this table! I like this bar! --I like this brandy; you are not spilling this brandy!” He clutched at the bottle protectively.

“We are gods, sparrow-monk. It’ll be fine.”

“Every single word of that is wrong!”

Unfortunately, the next table over had caught a critical word through their own beer-haze, and started up the chant: “Dance! Dance! Dance!”

“This is not my fault!” Molly protested, in response to Jeren-Lir’s betrayed expression. “I never said that word! This one’s all on you, little songbird.”

“Dance! Dance! Dance!”

Jeren-Lir looked around the room, trying to assess exactly how many people he’d have to lean on in order for the dance-chant to slip through their mental fingers. ...It seemed to be spreading.

Molly read the frantic recalculation in his face, and said with a crooked grin, “Don’t trouble yourself, darling. I’ll save you from this dreadful threat to your monastic repression.”

He stood up with a dramatic swirl of the coat, flicked three glass balls into the air that burst into silver-gilt flame a foot above his fingertips, and whirled through a spectacular sequence of gravity-defying skylark-swoops of glass, fire, and acrobatics.

Tossing the first two fire-globes high enough to nearly graze the ceiling, he spun tight under the fire-arches and caught the third with the tip of his tail a bare handspan from the floor, then lobbed them all back into an easy one-handed juggling-circle as he swept a half-bow with fingertips to his heart.

“Never let it be said that the clarion herald of the Carnival of Dreams would disappoint an appreciative audience! Truth be told, though, I find myself lacking a certain note of inspiration. Or, in fact, any notes at all. Here, a glass of the finest brandy you’ve ever tasted, to grace a musician’s hand!”

Until that moment, Jeren-Lir hadn’t entirely realized there was a difference between Mollymauk and Melandrix.

He’d thought Molly simply waltzed through the world as the stage of a never-ending performance... up until the minute he’d turned Melandrix the Marvelous all the way on.

Learning that Molly came with a dial that could be turned up was a little disorienting. He hadn’t known Molly had been laid back at the Tilted Quilt, until he watched Mel project every snapped dance-pose, every finger-flick and every enunciated syllable to the entire room at the Dancing Cat.

It had to be exhausting to be that dramatic all the time, or to draw so much of his personal energy from others’ attention. Or to be throwing himself utterly and completely into a production for the entire tavern after the amount they’d both just put into that spar.

But it made something click into place about that odd notion of spectacle as camouflage. When performances like these demanded the perfect facade of boundless energy, and he’d trained himself to be able to pull out all the stops on command, that peacock-strutting display could mask fatigue or intoxication or injuries as well.

Spectacle as camouflage, six years of living memories, and Death reversed? Jeren-Lir had several increasingly concerning questions about the kind of damage Molly was hiding behind Mel’s façade.

Someone had produced a fiddle from somewhere, and a couple others were drumming on upturned buckets. One of the near-human waitresses was dancing with him, and she had enough experience and confidence to keep up with his theatrics; she was blue-skinned rather than lavender, but otherwise they might have been related.

They whirled round each other in an intricate elbow-locked flurry of steps and swirling skirts and coat-tails, trading under-and-over spins with aplomb, and then she bent him over into a laughing backbend of a finale.

He pantomimed reeling with spin-dizzy exhaustion, mock-stumbling toward the corner table, until the sound of a different instrument pulled him around as sharply as though someone had landed a hook around his horns.

Four long strides had him practically in the lap of an amused-looking middle-aged man with spectacle-lenses in a button-down shirt and cargo jeans who’d just plugged his instrument into an amplifier and tweaked a string.

“What IS that beautiful thing?”

“This, my lavender friend, is called an electric guitar.” He wrung a complicated electronic snarl out of the neck of the instrument, then interspersed some octave-slides with intricate picking, and Molly made a sound of pure lust.

“That is the sexiest noise I have ever heard from anything I wasn’t shagging at the time. I think I’m in love. Be right back.”

He leaned over, planted a kiss on the musician’s palm, dropped another on the guitar itself, and then dashed across the room while shrugging his way out of the coat.

“Make sure to drink some water,” Jeren-Lir said, as Molly dropped the coat almost in his lap and grabbed the skull-mug.

“Yes, dear.” A quick pour of water from the nearest pitcher… probably improved the taste of what had been in that mug, in all fairness. “Got to go. Music calls!”

What passed for music varied widely from planet to planet, and town to town, and bar to bar. Jeren-Lir thought he was at least casually acquainted with a fairly wide variety, but the bespectacled musician was something else entirely.

Fiddling with the tuning-keys on his instrument and running a riff, he grinned at Molly and said, “Pretty sure I’ve got a song for you. Ever heard of a little thing called Bohemian Rhapsody? ‘Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the fandango?’”

“Absolutely! What’s the fandango?”

“Heh. Make it up as you go, kid.”

Over the course of the next several minutes of maniacal musical genre-hopping, he did. At first Jeren-Lir wasn’t entirely sure whether it was all the same song, or whether the musician was pulling crazy improvisation out of the air just to watch Molly flail to catch up with the style shifts.

What tipped him off that it must have been all one piece to start with was the number of people drunkenly singing along across the tone-shifts without missing a verse. Either they were all from similar worlds, or the guitarist had performed this for them often enough to have learned it. Half a dozen of them were singing along: “Beelzebub’s got a devil put aside for me, for me, for meeeeeeee!”

At the abrupt transition from soaring trills to power chords, the poor tiefling took half a second to mouth “seriously?” at the ceiling before gamely throwing himself into a spot-on mimicry of the guitarist’s head-banging rhythm. The tavern choristers were hair-thrashing along with him, punching horn-hands in the air as they sang and swayed into each other; the waitress danced over to gyrate along with Molly again.

She knew enough of what was coming to cue him a bit; laughingly hair-tearing and fist-shaking pantomimes of angst -- something about “love me and leave me to die” -- drifted down into a matched set of languidly dramatic wrist-to-forehead draping backbends over each other and the nearest barstools on the final chorus of “nothing really matters to me.”

When the guitarist took his hands off the guitar and let the final notes fade, Molly slid to the floor with a boneless thump.

“That was cruel, Steve,” the waitress giggled, helping Molly off the floor and handing him a mug of something that foamed in a less hazardous-looking manner than the skull had.

“Kid’s never heard an electric guitar before; I had to start him off with the best,” Steve shrugged, adjusting the tuning knobs on the instrument a little. “Let me guess, less Queen and more renfaire? The best I’ve got on that front is like Seal or something, I never ran the renfaire circuit.”

“Loreena McKennitt on her middle-eastern kick,” the waitress suggested. “Caravanserai, Santiago, Kecharitomene, that sort of thing.”

“I’m a metalhead, Jen, not a musician.”

“Uh-huh. I might have bought that if you hadn’t just busted out Bohemian Rhapsody. You play Flight of the Bumblebee drunk, Steve. You just don’t like to admit you know Loreena.”

“You are not even from the right planet, Jen; where do you get away with lecturing an earthling on earth music?”

“From Akarlit’s MP3 collection, of course!”

“What’s an impy-three?” Molly asked, and both of them turned to look at him, and then traded slowly spreading evil grins.

Another waitress brought over a tiny device and a pair of wireless ear-hooks; she put one in his ear and the other in her own, and poked some buttons.

Two heartbeats later, Molly lit up as though he’d just heard some divine revelation speak to him by personal name.

“Akarlit, what did you do?”

“Dhoom Machale.”

“And you said I was evil,” Steve commented.

Swaying to the rhythm with apparently at least eight more joints in his spine than a baseline human would have, Molly breathed, “Oh, Goddess, I need my swords for this.”

“There’s an entire subcontinent where that came from,” Akarlit told him, grinning.

“Marry me.”

“Sorry, love, already taken.”

“Harem? Succubus? Love-slave?” he offered hopefully.