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After she told them, things changed, just like she knew they would.
They had seen her as a person before, sure, but they’d all had to learn to see her that way - not as some creature, some familiar to Caleb, not as a child, but as her own person. Even then, she wasn’t the same to them in this body as she would have been in that one. The goblins in their story books didn’t settle down with a husband and a child, run a family business, or go through harrowing experiences that the so-called civilised people of the world learned as children that they should care about.
So it had been another part of her curse, being so alien to them, more sentient, surprisingly endearing vermin than person, and she hadn’t hated them for it, because she would have done the same.
But not being a real person also meant she didn’t have to obey the rules that applied to people. Didn’t have to think of her son growing up without her, her husband coming to the realisation that she would never come back. She’d been unable to think of anything else, except perhaps the screams, as she’d dragged bodies from squalid cages to the cooking area for the clan.
Then she had been a captive. Only when she escaped did she find out what it really meant to not be a person. It was easier to accept Veth’s death after that, and later, when she met her wizard, perhaps her salvation, easy to accept that Veth was in a sort of stasis, and to let her existence and obligations in the present go.
A good halfling wife from Felderwin keeps her home, her husband, her children, and her job in good order. She offers tea to the neighbours and looks beautiful without makeup, and her herb garden is full of healing herbs, not hallucinogens. Veth had never been amazing at these things - their house was a mess, her husband washed the linen and their child was too smart to be kept out of trouble, but Yeza hadn’t minded, and she had tried not to mind, either. He was hers and she was his, and that had been enough.
But a goblin? She can drink all she likes, and no one will judge her for it, because she can’t be any more wretched drunk than she is sober. She can steal, and people expect it of her, she can eat what she likes as messily as she does and people see an animal, or a monster, or a child, and not an adult who can’t conform.
A goblin could sleep in the bed of a man who is not her husband, and see him undress, and like what she saw. For months, she entertained the idea that she might never go back to being Veth, and even though it made her skin crawl to imagine herself as a goblin for the rest of her life, she let herself think of a future that Veth could never have. She would stay with Caleb. She knew she loved him, and that he loved her, even though he, a human with a bloody conscience, was not allowed to love by his own silent decree. She knew he didn’t think of her the way she sometimes thought of him. After all, she was a person, and he respected her, but he met her as a caged monster, and treated her for a time like a child. And she had let him see her that way, because sometimes humans liked children more than they hated goblins.
And that was okay. There was no reason for him to want her, or anything remotely like her. She knew it so completely that she thought it would be impossible for him to disappoint her.
And anyway, initially at least, he’d shown little interest in anyone at all - he was abstinent to a degree even those in her small rural town would have considered austere, even punitive. A few times she’d awoken before him and found him hard in his sleep. She had shifted away and lain still until he awoke and dealt with it himself - which he did by muttering in disgusted Zemnian under his breath, and clawing at his bandaged arms. The erection subsided in minutes, and his self-loathing would eat well into the morning, bubbling up from its endless well.
She never mentioned it to him, and if she felt the need to masturbate, she confined it to the sparse few moments she had to herself. No one would want to see that, anyway.
She settled into being Nott, to the intimacy that she and Caleb had, which the two of them were only ever allowed because she occupied the liminal space between person and alien, even let herself take it for granted as they got closer to the others, and she had a group she could call friends. It stayed so platonic that even though she’d known it wouldn’t stand the shock of the reveal, she was still surprised at how much it hurt to see things change.
Veth emerged from her deep slumber, roused in the only way she could be - panic - and hurt Caleb with her words, with her love for her son and her husband and her anger at the situation, at herself, and at Nott. Of course Nott was guilty - she left her son and husband after all, left them here in a town where she’d known they wouldn’t be safe.
Caleb forgave her, even though his own panic, fear, hurt, ran as deep as hers, and as close to the surface. He slept beside her that night, both of them too shell-shocked to know what had changed.
There followed a week of travel, where she still slept curled up beside him. They were far enough from the rest of the world, and the situation so dire, that it kept reality from the door a little longer. As they got closer to her husband, she got further from Caleb, a wall of expectations slowly erecting itself between them.
In the next town, she slept in “the girls room”, knowing that it wasn’t a one-off, and finally had time to register what it felt like, outside of the panic and rush of the tunnel - an ache. She swallowed it down - her friends were here to help her. She should have felt more loved, not less - and she did. But another part of her - the part of Nott that Veth hated the most - was worried they would succeed.
She’d tried for the last few months now to ignore the conflict that comes from being two people at once. Veth’s future and Nott’s plans were nebulous but different, but there was only one future to be had.
They got Yeza back, so it was Veth’s future that won out. Sort of.
She hated her goblin self even more, because somewhere in there lay a selfish longing for a broken heart that Caleb would try to put back together.
She brokered for a sort of internal peace - she would get him back, do her duty as Veth to her husband and child, and reunite what remained of her family. Then Nott would go away, leaving them behind as she sought a way she could be with them.
At the very last hurdle, she was paralysed with the fear of Yeza hating her, and almost as terrified that he wouldn’t. It left her spinning, more conflicted than she had ever been, to wake with Yeza beside her on the floor instead of Caleb. Disturbed, elated, lonely.
She probed at Yeza with the idea of sex, willing him to reject it, but he simply seemed... not indifferent. Not hesitant. Just... nothing. Like he thought she hadn’t been serious, but that if she was, he’d be up for it some other night. They never did it. Perhaps he was very good at hiding his disgust, or perhaps he was right, and she wasn’t serious.
The non-rejection - the acceptance, the sad longing for her to return to their family, the admiration, even - all made her desires, Nott’s desires, seem even more selfish.
The worst of all of it was that he could see the conflict, and he didn’t even judge her for it. He gave her permission to be Nott a while longer, rather than just be Veth in Nott’s body, like Nott was a valid thing to be.
The longer she spent on the fence, the harder and easier it became. On one side, her husband and her son were an hour’s travel from any location, and on the other Caleb was close enough to touch, but too far across the new emotional gulf between them. Each day she spent away from her family, she could put them and Veth further from her mind, until she found herself facing a dragon, or a trapped box, or an archmage promising the world from a dreadnought’s stomach. Then she had to reconcile just how selfish Nott was, taking Veth from her family to spend a little longer with her friends, to hold Caleb’s hand and go on an adventure.
Caleb had been correct that she was an addict, but she had been lying when she’d said the problem was that she couldn’t imagine herself living a domestic life. She’d barely been domesticated to begin with.
She was horrified to find that she had died, planes away from Yeza and Luc - but Nott got some small, twisted pleasure in finding Caleb holding her, as Jester raised her from the depths.
She should have put her foot down then, but Caleb had asked her not to. Of course Nott would have faith in him, even though Veth would have, should have, taken the offer she knew was a bad one, and let the world pay the price for her to be with her family. She couldn’t see a decision that wasn’t wrong, wasn’t selfish. Only one that was stupid - trusting Halas - and one that was doomed - travelling with the nein until the inevitable happened, and Jester’s cult failed her.
Splitting into two people is painful, especially when the separation is so incomplete, all jagged edges and overlap, and displacement of responsibilities and obligations and desires into their own compartments. That was all it really was, of course - Nott and Veth were just one person who wanted two things - but even incomplete and incompletable, the division was still bone deep, literally down to the structure of her flesh, and she couldn’t stop seeing it once she realised it was there.
It was easier to admit a crush - so trivial - than to think about the kind of crisis that philosophers with too much money could base their life's work upon. So that was what she told Beau, three shots down, as Jester choked on disappointment and Caleb choked on rancid milk on the far side of the bar.
Embarrassing, she said, putting the blame for that on Caleb. Embarrassing, though, because it was impossible, because no one would ever want her. She framed her confession in the past, even though she’d thought about him constantly, even with her husband waiting for her in Nicodranas, because Veth was married, and she was ashamed, and she still wanted him to hold her hand sometimes or hug her, and for it to not be awkward.
Nott was sad for Caleb as they neared Rexxentrum and he grew more and more anxious and afraid. So was Veth, but it was Nott who got a little kick from knowing that he would need her even more here. Wrong. Selfish. Doomed. When he was choking on his terror, he reached for Beau’s hand, not for hers. When he did reach for her, fell with her, the arms he wrapped about her were warm and clean and smelled of incense and catmint. As her feet touched the ground with the softness of a feather, the tear between Nott and Veth ripped further from the impact, as though he’d cast his spell on one, but not the other, and she was peeling away.