Archive of Our Own ^beta

They take ten minutes to regather.

“Do we carry on?” Nott asks. “Do we go in deeper? I don’t know if we’ve finished, yet. I mean, that wasn’t what we were expecting.”

“I think we were lied to,” Beau says.

Caduceus shrugs. He’s folded himself up onto the floor, settling in for a breather. “I don’t know that we were lied to, exactly. We were told the miners were vanishing into the shadows and sometimes they’d find dried-out bodies. Makes me think that portal was being powered by the miners.”

“Grab a new victim when the old one runs dry? But then, why did nobody mention the giant glowing hole in the wall? That was pretty noticeable, you know? Kinda hard to miss it. Kinda weird nobody would tell us it was there, when they sent us down here to fix it.”

Nott sorts through the trinkets she found after the fight, passing the shinier ones over to Jester for a second look. “Maybe it’s both,” she says. “Maybe, there really is some kind of monster down here, and that’s why the villagers asked us to come, but then Ikithon heard we were here, and took advantage.”

“Could be any of those. But look, we’re all pretty banged up, and not all of us are in a position to fight right now.” Fjord glances over at Caleb, who is staring unfocused at his coat, making no move to put it back on. “So what I’d say is, we’re not that far down yet – even going uphill, it’s only going take us an hour to reach the surface. We climb back up, camp for the night – I know it’s early, but we’ve got plenty of supplies. We can rest up, come back down in the morning and deal with any loose ends.”

Jester nods, her curls bouncing. “I agree. I don’t think we should leave yet, but that was pretty bad. Are you okay, Beau?”

“I’m fine,” Beau says. “I’m totally fine. I mean I’m not, like, totally, but I’m fine. Caduceus fixed me up.”

“So do you want to carry on?”

“Nah, let’s go back up and camp. I’m not the only one who got hurt.”

Fjord follows her gaze back towards Caleb. “Exactly,” he says heavily. “We’ve got to look out for each other.”

Caleb, thankfully, can walk. They take turns leading him along, the way they do when he looks through Frumpkin’s eyes. But there’s no running commentary this time, no description of what Frumpkin sees; Caleb just watches the ground pass beneath his feet, his reactions slowed to a crawl. Nott takes his hand for a while and talks to him as they walk, encouraging chatter he doesn’t respond to. Eventually Beau takes off her sash and gives him one end to hang on to and they pass it around like a leash.

Fjord tries to shake off that thought, but the image stays with him.

It takes longer to reach the surface than he expected. Without Caleb’s memory to guide them, they take a couple of wrong turns, and even on the right track they move slowly. By the time they get above ground, the sun is low and glowing golden through shreds of purple cloud.

“It might rain,” Caduceus says. “Maybe we should stop here, under cover.”

Fjord nods. “Yeah, and then we can only be approached from two directions. Let’s do that.”

“What about-” Jester says, and stops herself. “Oh. Right. No bubble tonight.”

Nott frowns. “No alarm spell, either. Whoever’s on watch better not fall asleep.”

“We won’t,” Beau says. “I’m going to go outside and look for firewood, is anyone coming?”

“I’ll come with you, yeah. I think I saw some hazel trees up the hill a ways. We might still find some nuts, if the squirrels didn’t hide them too well.”

Fjord helps clear a stretch of tunnel. They’re right up towards the entrance, where the passage opens out, and the worst of the smoke should escape from their campfire. Leaves and debris have blown in – the miners haven’t been at work for weeks – but the ground is mostly dry underneath. He can hear Nott back at work with Caleb, trying to persuade him to sit down, take off his pack, say something, and the pitch of her voice is rising.

He moves over to the pair of them. “Let me take him for a while, Nott.”

“We’re fine,” she snaps, and immediately deflates. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him. He should be happy. This was a shadow over his head for such a long time and it’s finally dealt with. We should be celebrating. But he’s like this, and I don’t know what to say.”

“I don’t know either,” Fjord says. “I think maybe he needs some more time. I don’t know. But let me sit with him for now.”

Nott weighs him up. “Alright,” she says, reluctantly. “Caleb? I’m going to leave you with Fjord for now, but I’ll be right over there if you need me, okay? Anything you need. You just call, or wave, or anything, and I’ll be here. I won’t go far. Is that alright?”

Caleb’s head turns in her direction. He nods, just once. Nott beams. “Alright,” she says again. “That’s good.”

As she scurries off towards the entrance, Fjord sees her reach for her flask.

“She’ll be blind drunk by the time that fire gets hot,” he says. “Well, we all had a rough day. Come on.”

He sets his hands on Caleb’s shoulders and guides him over to the wall. It doesn’t take much to move him, if you don’t wait for him to make a decision. The pack comes off the same way, and Caleb keeps his bedroll strapped to the top, so Fjord can easily unroll it and make a serviceable cushion for them both.

He tugs on Caleb’s sleeve until he gets the picture.

For a while, they just sit, their backs to the wall. The Nein are a quiet bustle around them, claiming the best spots for their bedrolls and building up the fire. Caleb’s hands are loose in his lap and Fjord can see, in the fading sunset, the burns still red and weeping on his fingertips.

He beckons Jester over. “Can you do anything for his hands?”

“His hands? But I thought Caduceus – oh, why didn’t you say something, of course I can help with that. Since we’re not, you know, doing anything else tonight, I mean, I don’t need to save it, I guess-”

“Jester. Can you just – help? Or if not, can you fetch Caduceus, and ask him to help?”

“No, no, of course I’ll help, I was just saying – Here.”

There’s a faint glow where she touches Caleb’s arm. He frowns as the healing passes through him, gathering in new skin over his palms.

“It’s not a lot,” Jester says, pretending she’s sorry. “But it should stop it hurting.”

Caleb’s frown settles into a grim misery. He gathers himself, starting to push to his feet.

“Oh, no! No, no, Caleb, it’s okay! You don’t have to do anything! I mean, maybe, if we get attacked, it would be kinda helpful if you did something then, but assuming that doesn’t happen you don’t have to do anything until morning. I wasn’t fixing you so you could keep fighting. I was just – wanting you to be okay.”

She looks at Fjord anxiously. He shrugs, impressed by her insight. “We are all off duty until the morning,” he agrees. “’Cept for somebody will have to stand watch but that’s not going to be you, Caleb. Not tonight.”

Caleb lowers himself back to sitting. His back hits the wall. For the first time in hours, he looks – not relaxed. Fjord knows relaxed and this is a thousand miles from it. Caleb looks like a sack of potatoes, and it’s an improvement, because a sack won’t get up and walk the moment someone pulls on its arm. He’s an inch closer to being himself.

The fire is not quite close enough to make them comfortable, but moving now would be a cruelty. Fjord sits quiet and waits.

He’s roused from a weary half-trance by Caleb speaking to his own knees. “He always fucks with my head.”

Fjord considers that. “Fucked,” he says at last. “Past tense.”

“Are you sure?” Caleb looks at him sidelong, his eyes narrow. “Are you really sure?”

“Pretty sure, yeah. I mean, I know there are ways sometimes, but we finished him off. Caduceus did his compost thing on the body. There won’t be enough left for a necromancer.”

Caleb grimaces. “Are you sure it was the right body?”

Fjord shifts on the blankets, half-turning towards Caleb. He puts a hand on the other man’s shoulder. Caleb doesn’t react. “What’s worrying you? Why are you not sure?”

Caleb stares at his hands, slowly flexing his fingers. “I always remember,” he says. “I always remember. The only time, before, it was because he had been fucking with me, and all I have of today is – pieces. They don’t go together.” He glances up at Fjord, briefly making eye contact, before he looks down again. “I don’t know what happened.”

There’s a faint shiver running through Caleb’s body. Fjord can feel it under his hand. He keeps his voice low, not wanting to invite attention from the others. “What do you remember?”

“I remember going into that portal, alone. And then it is just – chaos.”

“Do you want me to tell you what happened?”

Caleb breathes in sharply. “Please do not lie to me.”

Fjord nods. “I won’t lie to you. I promise. Well, not about this – I give you my word, I will tell you only the truth about what happened today. I know you’re a man who appreciates a realistic offer.”

“Ha.” Caleb’s laugh is a strangled thing, catching in his throat and making his shakes worse. Fjord recognises it, the way a person laughs when their body wants to weep. “Tell me.”

“Okay. Alright, so I saw – well, I heard, actually, you sending me a message telling me to look after the others, and then the creature I was fighting just – melted away, and you were gone, and the portal was starting to flicker out. So I yelled for everyone to run into it and I pulled Deuce along with me and we ended up somewhere – I’m not sure, a tower maybe? There were windows, so it wasn’t a dungeon, but I’m not really sure where it was.”

“And what did you see there?” Caleb asks in a whisper.

“You,” Fjord says, reluctantly. “You, on the floor, kneeling, and Trent Ikithon standing over you.”

Caleb’s breathing breaks to raggedness. He hunches forward, his body shaking. Fjord rubs slow circles on his back and keeps going.

“The rest of us, we all got pinned to the wall with some kind of air magic – I thought it was Ikithon doing it, but Caduceus spotted it was actually one of the guards, so I – no, before that – everyone was screaming, first off, I don’t know if you could hear that from where you were, but Ikithon made you bring out Frumpkin and blasted him to pieces. That’s when I knew absolutely for sure that something was wrong. I could imagine you’d been coerced or forced but you would have looked like something, some kind of reaction and you were completely blank. So I knew that had to be magical.”

“I couldn’t – I tried – I was a puppet-”

“I know,” Fjord says, and puts both arms around him. “I know you did.”

He’s startled by Caleb’s sudden movement, turning into the hug, both his hands coming up to grip Fjord’s shirt. “I remember that,” he says, between shaking breaths. “That’s a piece that I have. Everyone watching me.”

“Worried about you. Not angry.”

Caleb shrugs, as if to deny the difference, and Fjord’s heart breaks a little. He holds him tighter. “Do you want me to keep going?”

“Did he – hurt Beauregard? Did I?”

“He did. Just him.”

He’s worried Caleb is going to gasp his way into a faint, but somehow the words make their way out. “I remember – screaming, and fire.”

“I hit the other wizard, so we got out of the magic ropes, and then it turned into one big scramble. You joined in at some point, you went for Ikithon, and then there was this blast of fire. You were burned all to hell, Beau was burned to hell, the guards were dead, so we all just piled into Ikithon and that was it.”

Caleb’s eyes are closed tight, screwed up against the panic still shuddering through him, when suddenly his palms press flat against Fjord’s chest, as if to push him back. “I burned you.”

“No,” Fjord says, calmly as he can, but Caleb is already snatching his hands away, holding them in the air where they can’t do any harm. “That’s not how it happened. I got burned, but you didn’t do it.”

“I did.” Caleb stares through him. “I can see it.”

“No. No, Caleb. Bren.” That brings a little focus to his gaze, and a deeper betrayal. “You didn’t burn me. I – I put my hands into a fire. You started it, but you weren’t in control. That’s why I reached in. To pull you out. I took a calculated risk. And not because I thought you were going to hurt me or any of us. I just couldn’t stand to see you lost like that.”

His words get through enough to stop the panic, but Caleb still shuts down. He twists to lean his back against the wall, his hands crooked up against his chest. Fjord swallows a sigh – frustrated at himself, not at Caleb, but there’s no way he’d know the difference right now – and settles himself against the cold rock again. He’ll just sit here, watching the fire across the passageway, and wait for Caleb to stop staring at his own knees.

It wasn’t a long fight, but Fjord picked up some injuries, even before he stuck his hands into Caleb’s flame. Even with help from the clerics he’s tired, and his ribs ache where he got hit. Now that they’re sitting somewhere dry and he doesn’t have to move, it’s easy to doze. Or at least to drift, watching Caduceus do his thing over the campfire, and not realise until Cad’s crouching in front of him that he’s coming over.

“What?” Fjord says, blinking his way back into the present. “Sorry, I think I was asleep there. What’s this?”

“Ginger tea,” Caduceus says. “One for you and one for Caleb.”

Caleb turns his head slowly. “Just ginger?”

“And a few other things. There’s some dandelion in there, some dried rosehip. Nothing exciting, it’s all just there for flavour.” He holds the mug out, patient as a rock, and eventually Caleb takes it from his hand and breathes in the steam.

Fjord sips from his own tea and says, “Thank you,” meaning not just the tea itself. Caduceus smiles.

“Don’t go anywhere, the food’s ready too.”

Caduceus must have found the hazelnuts he was hoping for. The bowls he hands down are full of toasted oats and nuts and a dark stew of fruit, seeping hot syrup into the grains.

“It was quick to make,” he says to Fjord’s quizzical look, “and I figured we could all use something sweet.”

Fjord follows his gaze and nods. Caleb’s not moving, so Fjord settles his mug on the ground and takes both bowls. “I don’t know how we got along without you, Deuce.”

“Oh, that’s very nice of you. Thank you. I mean, I’m sure you did just fine, but it’s nice to be appreciated. I’ll go and take Jester hers, before she starts feeling left out.”

Caleb has switched from staring at his knees to staring into his mug of tea. He doesn’t respond to Fjord looking at him, so Fjord says, “Caleb.”

“Hm?”

“Caduceus brought food, as well.”

“I’m not hungry.”

Fjord knows he’s not the most intelligent man in the room – that’s Caleb himself – or the most insightful – that’d be Caduceus – but he knows the difference between not hungry and can’t deal with the complex task of eating, and he knows some shortcuts. “Alright. Well, would you mind taking your bowl anyway? Because I don’t have enough hands.”

There’s a moment when he’s very worried about Caleb’s lap and his hot cup of tea, but somehow the shuffling resolves itself into Caleb sitting cross-legged with the mug still safely upright in one hand. He takes the bowl when Fjord reaches over with it, and settles it in his lap. “What is it?”

“I have no idea. I think it’s real food and not the magic kind, though. Hazelnuts and – I guess blackberries? Some kinda dried fruit from our supplies?”

Caleb frowns. “It smells like honey.”

“It does,” Fjord agrees, and starts eating his. He tries not to hurry – a lifetime of habit tells him to eat fast or risk losing the chance, but he’s trying to be companionable here – and instead picks through the fruit trying to identify it. Apples, for sure. Something dried in chunks that’s turned very pink with the berry juice?

He’s not good with culinary details. That’s okay. Caleb has picked up his spoon and is staring listlessly at its contents. Another few moments, and he takes a cautious nibble.

It’s slow going. Even with all his effort, Fjord finishes his bowl before Caleb is halfway done, and has to lean against the wall with his legs stretched out, sipping on his cooling mug of tea, to keep the momentum going. Caleb chews mechanically, small bites with no sign of tasting what he eats, but he eats the whole thing and licks the spoon when he’s done.

He stacks their bowls and leans forward to put them on the ground, instead of on his bedroll. The sky outside has faded completely to night and in the firelight Caleb glows against it, a golden portrait over black velvet. He says, “You know I’ll still be all fucked up in the morning.”

“Maybe so,” Fjord agrees, “but I don’t see the problem. God. That sounded terrible. What I mean is, it’s no fun for you, and none of likes to see you unhappy, but it’s not something to feel guilty for. You did what you had to do – you probably saved Beau’s life – nobody begrudges you the time to grieve.”

“I don’t grieve him.”

“I never said you should. You grieve for what he cost you. The chances you won’t get back. That’s what I think.”

Caleb hunches into his ragged coat. “I think I want my cat back.”

Nott has been listening in, or at least watching to be sure that Caleb eats something, and she has expensive incense and a packet of odd-smelling herbs in her pack. Caleb takes them – accepts, stiffly, the hug she gives as well – and hitches himself forward to sit on the edge of the blanket and make little smouldering piles of his spell components, muttering to himself in Zemnian until the smoke shimmers and becomes a tabby cat, yowling with disapproval at how he was banished.

“I know,” Caleb says, rubbing him behind the ears. “I know.”

It’s not exactly early, but by the Nein’s standards it was a short day of work, and nobody is quite ready to sleep. Beau and Jester go outside to practice wrestling throws on each other. Fjord relaxes enough to go into the bushes for his business and then potter around their little camp, stacking firewood for the night and helping with cleanup. Caleb sits on his blankets and pets his cat. Sometimes Frumpkin comes to sniff at the dirty supper bowls or rub his face on Nott’s knee, and Fjord thinks Caleb is riding him, but can’t quite be sure. Caleb is very good at acting like a cat when he needs to. Maybe it’s that Frumpkin is good at being a cat even when Caleb is directing him. It’s hard to get answers about that.

When the temperature starts dropping, even inside the tunnel with the fire to help them out, Fjord unrolls his blankets and sets them up next to Caleb. “Do you want the tunnel side, or the wall?”

Caleb blinks at him, surprised out of his reverie. “Ah – wall, I will take the wall.”

“Alright.”

It used to be strange, trying to sleep on rough stone, or earth or floorboards or flattened undergrowth. That was in the early days, when they hardly knew each other and sleep was always a risk, trusting yourself to the care of strangers and with your body complaining you didn’t have a hammock. It’s been months since Fjord had that difficulty. He knows the quiet voices as well as any ship’s crew, and if they’re on watch it’s easy to relax. He closes his eyes and listens to Caleb fidgeting with his own blankets, still keeping alert for more breakdowns. It was a hell of a day. He won’t be surprised if it’s not over yet, for Caleb and his fucked-with head.

But Caleb settles in to sleep after a while, and nobody has to coax him to lie down, and compared to earlier that’s a damn fine thing.

Sometime after midnight, Fjord wakes up to a small body nudging against his chin. Frumpkin is headbutting him insistently, a lithe shadow in the darkness. He reaches up to tickle the cat’s chin. “Hey there.”

Caleb shifts behind him, blankets rasping against stone. “He likes to cuddle sometimes,” he says quietly. “You can send him back if he’s annoying you.”

“No,” Fjord says, “no, that’s fine. He can come in here with me. It’s probably warmer than the outdoors.”

He lets the cat curl up against his chest and tries not to roll over in his sleep. Tomorrow will be another battle. That’s okay.