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It’s been a little over a month.
Well, it’s been longer than that since she changed. Since she died. But it’s been a month since she got out and time didn’t really mean anything in the period in between, so she doesn’t count it. It’s been a little over a month and her teeth are too sharp and her eyes are too wide and her skin is too green. It’s like putting on a shirt that fits wrong in all the most awkward places. Everything about it is wrong.
She saw herself only once, reflected in the polished metal of an empty pail. The reflection, imperfect and distorted as it was by the curvature of the surface, showed more than enough for her tastes. She has become a monster.
She’d tasted her name, then. Spoken it in a voice just barely above a whisper. Seeing it form on green lips and between craggy teeth had been so viscerally wrong that she’d found herself choking on bile. She can’t keep that name. Not now. Not yet. Not until...not…
It’s been a little over a month. She’s been running, and hiding, and sticking to the shadows, and none of it was good enough because she saw something shiny and thought of her collections back home and, starving for some sense of normalcy, she’d taken it.
Now she’s in jail. Face full of dirt from where they tossed her to the ground. Mouth full of metal.
She’s not alone.
He’s small. Not in the literal sense, exactly, though he’s thin enough—unhealthily so—to qualify the statement. He’s certainly larger than her, being human, but it’s the way he sits that creates the illusion of smallness, all curled into himself and covered in dirt. He is nondescript and filthy, like someone wishing to fade away, but beneath his grimy red hair she catches a faint glimpse of brilliant, shining blue.
Luke had (has, had, has—) blue eyes, just like that. She used to poke his nose and sing about bluebells until he giggled.
They don’t speak. Not at first. She sits in one corner and he sits in the other and they watch either subtly, in the sideways way that means both are pretending to look elsewhere. But they watch, and she sees. She sees bandaged hands (like hers) and tense shoulders and a worn coat too big for his frame. She sees something that was discarded; a button that fell through the cracks in the floorboards.
“Hello,” she says, after some hours have passed. He flinches and lifts his head, but his eyes stay fixed on the floor in front of her. She wonders if he’d be less afraid if she was still Veth. (Maybe not. He’s broken, discarded, alone—maybe not.)
“Hallo,” he says. His voice cracks. There’s an accent to the word, lilting and foreign, and she instantly decides she likes it. (It’s different. Something new. Not goblin, not Yeza, not Luke.)
“What’s your name?” she asks. She scoots just a bit closer to him, slow and careful in her movements. He cringes away but does not shift aside. She moves a bit further.
“Caleb. Caleb Widogast.”
She notes the hesitation, in that moment, but thinks nothing of it. She’ll forget it soon, lost in memory until several months from now, when secrets by a riverbank will draw it forth. It won’t matter, then. It doesn’t really matter now.
“Nice to meet you,” she says. She thinks to offer a hand to shake, but then remembers curving claws and one-too-few fingers and decides to keep her hands to herself. Wouldn’t want to spook him even further, after all. There’s a pause in the air, though, and she realizes he’s waiting for her name in return for his own.
Not Veth. She can’t be Veth anymore. She can’t be herself anymore. She’s not a halfling, not a wife, not a mother, not—
“I’m Nott,” she says, and then she thinks coward , and then, “Nott...the Brave.”
“Hallo,” says Caleb, “Nott the Brave.”
And she scoots a little bit closer, and he doesn’t move away, and they sit in silence as the hours pass by.
They do not speak, the first day out. But she wakes up at dawn on the second day and he’s still there, so she plucks her second-shiniest button from her pocket and hands it to him. “Here,” she says. “For helping me escape.”
Caleb looks at it like something foreign, and embarrassment floods through her even as he speaks his puzzled thanks. Of course he will not want her garbage. What was she thinking? Her collections are so foolish, and frivolous, and—
He puts it in his coat. Six days later, when he turns out his pockets in search of loose money, it’s still there.
It’s two months in and he hasn’t left, and his voice is so soft, and his eyes are so blue. He’s a broken, battered thing, lost and afraid, and, well, so is she.
So they cling to each other. A broken boy, a broken mother. Nott watches him sleep, so close by that she can feel his breath, warm against her leg. He is almost peaceful, like this, when he sleeps and does not dream.
“Hm,” says Nott. She thinks about little boys with blue eyes. She wishes she knew how to make Caleb giggle like Luke used to, or even smile just once. It’d look nice on him, she thinks. It’d be nice to see him happy.
She wishes she could lift the weight from his shoulders and carry it herself, or at least share the load. Whatever it is he carries is too great for one person to bear. She won’t push him, though, and he won’t push her.
But every morning he doesn’t leave is another morning that filters warmth into her chest. She hadn’t thought it possible to have closeness ever again. Not looking like this. Not when she’s become everything she once feared and despised. Not…
He shifts in his sleep, forehead wrinkling. Nott lifts her hand and brushes a thumb over his brow, oh-so-careful of those acursed claws. The skin smooths beneath her touch and she finds herself carding her fingers through his dirty hair.
“You need a bath,” she murmurs to no one. “Who let you get this filthy?”
(“Oh, you’re all dirty,” laughs Veth. Luke scrunches up his face, fresh from tumbling around outside in the yard, and fights her all the way to the bath. By the time she gets him in the tub, he’s laughing so hard she has to hold him up to keep him from giggling his way straight underwater. “Silly boy,” she grins, and reaches for a washcloth. “Who let you get this filthy?”)
Frumpkin stretches and yawns in Caleb’s lap. His paws knead the dirtied coat and one eye opens to meet Nott’s gaze. She’s frozen for a moment, caught suddenly by a sense of being judged, and then that eye closes again.
She’s overwhelmed by the sense of having passed some sort of test, but she shakes it off as ridiculous, and puts a tiny braid in Caleb’s hair. Tomorrow he’ll ask her about it and she’ll smile quietly and not say a word.
It’s five months since they met. It’s six and a half months since she ran away. Nott looks at his blue eyes and his bandaged hands on the pages of the worn spellbook.
He’s not Luke. And she’s not Veth. But she thinks, for the first time, that maybe that’s okay.
“Hello,” she says one day, standing on the riverbank with the people who have become her family. “My name is Nott the Brave, and I am a little goblin girl. But once upon a time, I was Veth, a halfling woman.”
And his name was Bren. And hers was Veth. And neither of them is who they were when they met. Yeza is missing, and Luke barely knows her, but…
Maybe it’s not okay. Maybe it’ll never be okay. But she knows this: she is Nott, and he is Caleb, and he is her boy.
And that’s alright.