#lingerxng

drunken confession ( selective ): @lingerxng​

Percy is alive and there’s a dragon in the castle wearing someone else’s face, so Molly is doing what he does best before they confront things in the morning: tactical emotional avoidance maneuvers. Not that it’s so difficult with this group, save the few times Pike has looked at him questioningly, because Keyleth is too preoccupied with her own worries to ask these days, and Vax—Vax lets him avoid talking about his feelings the same way Molly lets Vax walk away, and he’s grateful.

But Vax’s shoulder is warm where it’s pressed against his own, trading a bottle back and forth against an outer wall of the mausoleum-turned-Matron-of-Ravens temple. He still prays to the Moonweaver, but something about the Raven Queen calls to him in a way he doesn’t think belongs to his two years of memories. He places his lips where Vax’s were on the bottle and drinks deep, swallowing passed the burn.

“Sometimes,” he murmurs. “But then I realize I can still get it up, and I think: maybe not so scared after all.”

He rolls his head Vax’s way, smile lazy and red eyes haloed with a fuzzy glow. He’s close enough that if he sighs the stray strands escaping Vax’s loosened ponytail will tremble. Close enough to drop a kiss onto his armored shoulder if he so pleased.

There are dragons over Tal’Dorei, and the one that started it is playing dress-up in Percy’s ( living, breathing, sleeping Percy’s ) ancestral home, and Vax is close and warm, and Molly is cold with terror.

No matter how Molly pins him down against wall or bed or floor, no matter how close Molly gets short of climbing inside of him, he’s still–he’s–slipping away. Maybe it doesn’t matter because whatever’s between them isn’t serious, was never meant to be. Maybe they’ll all be dead in the morning, so wherever Vax goes, Molly will have no choice but to follow, but they are all so determined to make it out of this bloody gods damn mess alive—

Except Vax.

Except Vax. He can see it in the distant look he gets sometimes, the way he smiles at his sister with nostalgia despite being in the present. How he sits away from the group by himself, or with Pike. It sings in Molly’s blood the way his swords do when they cut through the air, shrill and desperate, and the song haunts him, but what is he to do? Tell Vax to defy a goddess Molly is beginning to think a part of him answers to as well? He takes such a long drink from their shared bottle that the burn threatens his gag reflex, then waits for the seasick tilt to pass.

“Let’s get away,” he whispers hoarsely around a smile, on his way to proper shit-faced as his words rear-end one another, and for a moment he means it with all the width and breadth of his own caution. Get away from Whitestone, from Tal’Dorei, leave the whole bloody continent behind. The terror knotting his chest eases at the thought of running. He’s a coward. He’s always been a coward. 

He doesn’t belong here with Vox Machina. 

“What do you make of our options?” he asks. The rest who stood around the Inquisition’s war table had made their opinions clear, yet the Herald hadn’t. At least, not to him. “We will have to approach either the mages or the Templars sooner or later. I am curious which you favour.”

god, she hates ferelden. it lacks...the civility that orlais has. ( she recognizes that there’s nothing civil about playing the game but she’s not going to admit that. certainly not out loud. ) but she puts aside her bias to attempt to enjoy herself. she has no purpose besides “expanding her horizons”, which was how her father put it.

bah.

she enters a tavern and looks around. it’s busier than she expected and her fingers twitch. as much as she’d love to relieve some people of their coin, but she doesn’t want to risk getting caught. she sidles up to the bar, sitting beside a dwarf. ( a rather attractive one, if she’s being honest. )

There’s a sort of aura that clings to those like them. Not everyone can sense it, not everything can feel it but- things that have died and come back wrong, come back- strange. They’re different. 

She can feel it- a chill up her spine that sets her teeth on edge, and she knows, just like that. Mirkella has become- incredibly adept, at discovering that which lies between life and death. 

But she’s been like this for decades, so maybe she’s just old.

Still, she doesn’t flinch from it, raising her gaze and scanning the tavern, quietly. It’s practically the end of the world, and drinking away her unlife for the night feels apropos. Tomorrow she’ll have to return to business and battle- survival. 

But for now, she buys a drink for the being like her, moving across to that table, and laying it before him. 

@lingerxng | Send ‘Trick or Treat!  🎃’ to my inbox and I’ll give you a treat!

Nohemi bc I love her and I’m predictable 

zone of truth, but like the speed metal version of it, ( open ).

Molly smiles. The gesture crumbles at the edges the harder he pushes it, until it’s less grin and more grimace, vicious at the corners. His answer is coiled behind his teeth, a lie ready to go in the chamber, but his tongue is drunk-leaden at the prospect. He hates the truth. He hates this. 

His hand lifts to touch the scar bisecting his sternum, drops to smooth the front of his shirt down instead. There are things he doesn’t want to say: falling asleep scares him now, afraid that this life will be ripped from him again. That blankets, heavy ones, are too reminiscent of the weight of the earth piled atop him so he’d much rather freeze. How when his friends fall to their knees on the field he’s ready to do it all over again so they won’t know what it’s like to be something, then nothing.

“It’s fucking miserable,” he admits, and there’s a bite of defiance, of bitterness to his words. The admittance feels like it’s being cleaved from his chest. “You ever watch a magician pull kerchiefs from his sleeves?” Molly mimics the act, wrist turned skyward as he mimes pulling from his arm, pulling and pulling and pulling. “Blood, coming out. Then that final cut.” He scissors his fore and middle, feels the familiar ghostly thuck against his ribs. “And it’s dark. It’s quick. But—” he licks his lips, presses them together around you have time to think about all the things you didn’t do, how you’re failing the people you’ve come to trust, how you don’t get to see if they make it. 

 Alternatively, send 💀 for a drabble of your muse dying in my muse’s arms. / accepting

It had started off as a simple cough.

A week after it started, Raoul expressed his concern for Christine, offering to send for a doctor. She had brushed him off, telling him that it would go away soon. But after another week or two, it started to get worse. She would be gasping for air and sometimes there would be blood on her handkerchief. By the time a doctor arrived, she was too sick for him to help.

Despite the danger of catching whatever illness she had, Raoul never left her side. He fetched her water and whatever food she could stomach. He would read to her, keeping her tucked against his side.

As her breathing worsened, he tried to remain optimistic. The color left her cheeks, her skin was clammy to the touch. He prayed for her to get better, prayed that she would pull through.

She was shivering in his arms, the blankets tucked around the two of them. He was overheating, but he refused to let her go, refused to move. He pressed a kiss to the top of her head, hands moving up and down her back soothingly. Her breathing was slowing down and she was in and out (mostly out) of consciousness. He fought back tears as he clutched her to his chest.

“I’ll be all right, darling. You’ve fought so hard. It’s okay if you no longer want to fight.” His fingers slid shakily through her hair. The tears began to fall and he barely stopped himself from outright sobbing.

“Let go, my love. Be free.”