Chapter Text
No matter how long you fly, you must land.
After a gorgeous, languid summer of kisses pressed under fluorescent lights, strolls along the swampy Potomac, and bubbly laughter in the Nein’s backyard, Essek light heart landed when his gaze fell on that train ticket. The heavy weight of familial commitment dispersed his joy — at least, until Caleb volunteered to lighten it by coming with him.
Essek prepared him properly, drilling flash cards on the couch where Caleb previously held him.
“And, Thuron?”
“Currently out of the country.”
“Where?”
“... Somewhere…. West…?”
Essek glanced up at Caleb, who looked back in an imploring gaze. He put down the cards.
“Please understand, you want to come with, but it’ll be miserable if you’re not prepared.”
Caleb leaned in. “What makes you think that I’m not ready already? I know how to get around the inhabitants of a certain distinction.”
Essek stared back. “It’s more than habit. You, as part of me, need to be up to the level of scrutiny. There will be scrutiny.” God, will there be scrutiny.
“Then what’s wrong? That I don’t know the people that I’ve never met?”
Essek slumped in defeat. Caleb meant well and made sense.
“Well, most of them are allergic. To cats.”
“No worries, Jester knows how to look after animals, we’ll leave Frumpkin with her.”
“Your clothes. We need to consider your wardrobe.”
“Is it that I don’t wear expensive, uncomfortable sweaters? I could if you wanted.”
Essek managed a weak smile and a weaker chuckle. “They’re … awful…”
“You should try one of mine, like the one with the patches on the elbows?” The thought of wearing Caleb’s clothes nearly kills him on the spot. Covered in Caleb, comfort over optics. “Frumpkin can manage a few days without us.”
“He’s a good cat.”
“He’s the best cat. And he’ll wait for us to return.”
That weekend, Caleb left Frumpkin at the Mighty Nein group house. Jester held him in her arms as a concerned Fjord walked by and mouthed an “are you sure?” at Caleb. He mimed a finger across his throat, eyes and tongue out, and walked away. Beauregard sidled up to Jester and Frumpkin licked the fingers she brought up to him.
“Good luck with family,” she said, looking at Frumpkin.
“Thank you — I feel prepared,” Caleb responded.
Jester stepped forward and kissed each of them on the cheek, for good luck, she said. Behind her, Beauregard looked at Essek, and he nodded back.
The teasing chill of the DMV autumn plunged into ice as their train richoteed to Boston. Colder and colder, Essek stepped out onto the platform on the North End and kept walking along that familiar path, head down against the wind, black peacoat collar turned up, inertia carrying him forth. Steps came up closer behind him, until Caleb caught up in his brown coziness, eyes barely visible above his large blue scarf, and scooped his arm in his. They walked together, the two of them more formidable against the cold, inertia working its magic on the cobblestone streets of Boston.
They kept to themselves before the dinner, Essek showing the empty family manor in Cambridge. They dropped their bags in the library, collected over centuries. Caleb, probably sweating in the New England interior heat under his heavy coat, ran his fingers over the oldest of tomes, finding them immaculate and immediately. He took a book — definitely some disproven astronomical text from the Colonial period — and had enough self-awareness to at least glance up at the family portrait staring down at him, the most recent one amongst the other slowly fading representations of their clan over the years. It hung above the fireplace, where it was usually ominously lit by the orange glow, but today its flat representation of the family with their father flattened further under the weak, monochrome winter light.
Essek checked his work phone; an organizational update concerning that client that would otherwise have dragged them to endless investigation. He felt a bit of relief, again and again, for jumping from that project as soon he could.
They spent the day wandering around MIT, relishing the light under that beautiful rotunda, failing to find errors in student research projects hanging in the cold halls. Caleb kept him close, squeezing his hand every once in a while, looking back with barely veiled concern. The yellowed trees near the Charles River delighted in their blitz of fire amongst a dreary city already slick with a layer of ice. Autumnal gloom at its best. Essek tried not to think of HBS, just upstream.
Caleb pulled him farther in, the warmth of his arm enveloping.
“Hallowed halls and expectations. How did, you, back then, survive?” He murmured.
“I did just enough,” Essek breathed, voice solid and understated. “By doing just enough that they couldn’t say anything back. First Williams. Not an Ivy, but close enough in reputation and far enough way that I fell out of the immediate orbit of influence. Consulting is adjacent to investment banking. The current fad of prestigious college grads. They couldn’t argue, even if I wasn’t doing exactly everything by plan. DC is still reputable, even though it’s not.” He looked around, “Boston.”
Caleb also looked up. “Must be quite a jump.”
Essek looked down.. “Not as much as a continent, but…. They keep pulling me back in.”
They fell into the center of the web during the main theatrical event of the family dinner. Essek rarely had an opportunity to see Caleb dressed up to impress: his hair braided back, a pressed suit that Essek had never seen before, proper gleaming cuff links. Essek paused his own buttoning to brush imaginary cat hair from Caleb’s chest and shoulders, just to have an excuse to enjoy him closely, like this, alone. Caleb kissed him on the nose with a knowing smile. Essek melted into the affection, trying to hold onto this sense of who he is around Caleb, this caring, daring side — who he has learned to be these past few months, while putting on the guise of who he thought he needed to be.
At the dinner, the familiar faces mixed in with the soon-to-be-familiar. Some aunts barely veiled their disappointment in Caleb’s yet unfinished dissertation, who politely cut the meat of his fascinating abstract into a logline. Verin floated near the edge of his vision, shifting congeniality in a crowd. His false bravado and crew arms barely held that moralistic goodness underneath.
Behind him, Dietra glaciated in Essek’s direction: white silk, the image of controlled, viper-like power and poise. She reached out her hands and Essek helplessly puppeted towards her hug behind a champagne glass. She whispered into his ear:
“Your plus one?”
“Caleb, yes.”
Her eyes darted from Essek to Caleb, who was yielding to the ignorant mercylessness of the aunts.
“What does he do?”
“An astrophysicist.”
“Where did you meet.”
“At Bible study.”
“And you live together?”
“Of course not.”
She released her locked gaze from him and looked down at what she had hugged. Her nose pricked. He was wearing Caleb’s burgundy tie.
“The lavender one I gave last Christmas… You could wear it tomorrow.”
“I’ll see if I brought it.”
She pressed her lips together in the shape of a smile and left to give a half-hug to Verin, to serenade further guests. Caleb appeared at his elbow.
“Your aunts interrogate like sharks,” he huffed, straightening out his own tie.
Essek took a sip in silence. Caleb placed a hand on his back and leaned in.
“Your spine is straight.”
Essek felt his warmth, his scent more pleasant and grounding than the familiarity around him. He made himself roll his shoulders, unlock his jaw, blink the champagne bubbles away. In his gaze, Dietra returned to the kitchens, barely holding in her displeasure at some appetizer slight inconspicuous to everyone else.
“Habit,” he whispered.
“What else is planned this evening?” Caleb asked.
“Dinner will be worth sticking around for.”
Caleb nodded. “And after?”
“More… show-ponying,” he finally looked away from the crowd and to Caleb. “You’ll probably be seated next to Carmela on your other side. She’s the one -“
“Who just finished her dissertation.”
“Nicely done. They probably hope that you’ll have something to talk about.”
“Thank you, I pride myself on my memory. I hope hers is done, for her sake.” He turned to face Essek directly, gaze directly orthogonal to his joking tone. “We can leave whenever we want.”
Essek looked back and wondered if a gaze can showcase that he did, that you, Caleb, you could, you can, I can’t — and just nodded. Coming back always tied him in spiderwebs of lies.
The actual dinner delivered on its grand expectations. Servants laid plates with too little, too gorgeous, still clogging stomachs with wine. Essek sat between Verin, winning arms and smile, and Caleb, polite stance and gaze.
Over a couple beautifully rendered scraps of kale, apple, and feta, Verin’s lacrosse optimism grated and also didn’t.
“How are applications going?” He asked between forkfuls.
“Finally submitted. Now I’m waiting for responses.”
“Wow, already! Any chances you’ll be, maybe, somewhere closer? I mean, you toured HBS this visit, right? Imagining how it’ll be, hah? Campus is gorgeous this time of year.”
“That is one of the schools I applied to, yes.”
“A bit more orange, a bit more Robert Frost, than the good ol’ swamp, hah?”
“A lot more.”
Essek bit his cheek. He knew he could do better. He ran full seances with Caduceus. He unloaded so many familial bruises onto Veth. He gleefully gossiped with Jester. Yet their previous brotherly cadence wrapped them both up like puppet strings, and they wiggled under the pull like they did their whole childhoods.
Essek fit in because he hated all of this expectant posturing, yet he was so good at the bladed dance between them all, he slotted himself into the emotional machinery of this family with cutthroat ease. Verin played his part well, the dumb jock with a bright smile that puts everyone else at ease, but behind those dimples, Essek saw for the first time this inner desperation for… emotional vulnerability? Friendship? It felt so much more real and so out of place in this place. He was suddenly reminded of Jester, of that sad pout she oozed when he snubbed her questions. He felt, just like with her, the need to fix that face.
The budding seed of comfort rising through Essek throat withered in acid once Verin began about the situation with Bain.
“But seriously, the Feds! On your project! With no actual criminality found! It’s ridiculous, I mean, talk about government overreach.”
Essek remembered Beau striding from the elevator with a stance of purpose.
“Bain, fortunately no, but Cerberus was attempting various high-level schemes to avoid accountability, as well as demanding our own complicity on it, so I wouldn’t say that nothing was found. The fact that their plans were leaked and they had fallen under their own sword wasn’t horrible at all.”
Caleb tensed near him.
“Maybe they shouldn’t have gotten caught —“ Verin continued.
Beau’s clear, owl gaze.
“Maybe they should have. Maybe we all need a good look at whatever we’re doing.” Essek snapped.
He felt a hand on his elbow. Caleb was trying to be discreet, looking down at his plate, his fiery alertness present in his stance, but that made him realize how loud he had been.
Dietra looked down at him from the head of the table. He tried to straighten his shoulders, not from habit of judgement but from strength of stance. Who he has learned to be was someone who met the gaze with opportunity, not with knives. He responded with his own owl gaze.
“When was the last time you had been to confession, Essek?”
No use in wasting the learned skill of a liar. “I’ll go soon.”
“See to it. No one can get a better look at what you are doing than there.”
Caleb squeezed his elbow further, waiting until everyone else had returned to their conversations before coming close to Essek, radiating heat and concern.
“I’m fine,” Essek whispered before Caleb had a chance to say anything. Caleb closed his mouth. “Sometimes they need to be reminded that intentions matter beyond optics.”
Caleb leaned back, set to smoulder. Essek finally felt what he wanted to say.
“Sometimes I need to remind myself. It took me too long to realize, well, you, because of,” he lowered his voice even further, “all of this.”
Essek grabbed his hand, screw everyone, and held it with solidity and commitment, the best, real apology he could give at the moment. Caleb saw something that lowered his defenses; he smiled back, he squeezed back, and he sat back, posture as if he was at his lab laptop than a dinner worth his semester’s pay.
Essek turned back to Verin. He made the conscious choice to say what was on his mind. He felt his habits return, felt himself decidedly act against them.
“It may have been a bad show on the company, but I think it’s fine to go through an investigation like that and come out clean. It’s good to own up to mistakes,” he lowered his voice, glancing at Dietra, wrapped in her own plastered smile, visibly not listening to the conversation happening at her, “And to actually own up to them.”
Verin looked at him with a puzzled look, like Essek gifted him a blazing star, before the weight of realization came onto him, and he nodded in understanding.
Essek leaned away from learned ice and into the innate warmth that his brother had already offered him.
“I think I saw your team win the latest semifinal?”
Verin volleyed back with a story of their most recent triumph, a rare real smile on his face, that his pitch was finally thrown back.
With Caleb’s warmth and Verin’s smile, he felt that resolve to do it. To commit against what was learned, this venom and ice, to be different. To melt, to calm, to thaw. To resist against falling back into line. To embrace that sincerity that he had all along. With the Nein, teaching him to unfurl those spikes; with Caleb, who caught him when he fell; with Verin, who glowed with reciprocated, unyielding connection.
He and Caleb left soon after desert, hugging Verin and ignoring the aunts and cousins. They walked around Harvard Square arm in arm, like they did along the sweltering summer months on the buzzing Potomac.
“Thoughts?” Essek asked.
Caleb chortled at that, his breath bright against the needling air. “I’m glad I was there. Your mother wanted to eat me like a radish, for being close to you. And your brother…”
“If you had met him first…” Essek was still new at jokes.
Caleb smiled further. “No, but thank you for the nonexistent vote of confidence.”
He kept walking and Essek could see the equations crunching in his beautiful brain. He began, eyebrows drawn in focus.
“Meeting you was like looking at a box. You don’t know the accurate status of Schroedinger’s cat, no one knows, but I felt like it was there.”
“That cat didn’t know that it wanted to live, that it wanted to love.” Essek pressed himself closer to Caleb.
“All it took was to open the box.”
Essek ground his face further into Caleb’s coat.
“The patterns I have seen — there is curiosity powered by malice, intent to kill the cat, even if it is alive— ” Essek thought of viper-eyes. “— And there is curiosity powered by love, that wants to see something alive.” He looked down at Essek. “And love, powered by curiosity.”
Essek turned to Caleb. He didn’t have words for this. He took Caleb’s cold face into his hands, running his thumb over that cutting cheekbone.
“Thank you.” He kissed him, trying to convey what he couldn’t with words. He understood, he knew, he wanted Caleb to know, he wanted Caleb to know he knew. He moved slow and intent, holding Caleb close and hoping they could capture this moment, these hearts committed to living with truth, these two cats released from disparate boxes, both alive.
Snow feathered around them, enveloping in the memory of a cold goodbye at a bar. It bit their faces not yet warmed by their kissed breath, and they stood, wrapped in each other, warm and content; Essek swore he could hear Caleb’s heart through his layers. They held onto each other, caught each other, and kept wandering into the dark, continuing their endless conversation. Essek knew cold, he knew what it was like to have the self frozen over and then thawed; now he knew, he could be different