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That day seeing the cabin door ajar as it was, he had assumed Nott had gone out to conspire with Jester or make her acids elsewhere so he entered with little wherewithal. “Wha – Caleb! Close the door, close the door!”
Caleb did not close the door. Instead, startled, he dropped his papers on the floor and scanned the room to find where Nott’s voice, for it was decidedly hers, was coming from.
It was the flash of her eyes that gave her away. He never would have been able to track her movement to the side of the bed otherwise, but once he recognized the yellow of them with her black pupils wide in shock he was able to make out, well, something.
Because Nott wasn’t there, except yes she was. It was just an outline, really, but in the air itself. He followed it down from her face to her hands and there he could see frantic gesturing that looked like… well it was something somatic. He was sure he recognized it too. It was almost the reverse of –
“You’ve cast invisibility!”
“No,” Nott hissed, inching further behind the bed frame, “I am trying to uncast it because someone came in before the spell was ready!”
Despite her cross tone of voice Caleb could not keep the sprawling smile off of his face. He set his books down gently and carefully made his way around the bed.
“Oh, come on,” Nott said, less cross now and seemingly just exasperated. “You’re not allowed to come any closer! Close your eyes right now.”
“Alright, alright,” Caleb said, covering his eyes but unable to control his expression of delight. He had never seen Nott prepare a spell before except for their first months together when he had first taught her Disguise Self.
He heard rather than saw Nott’s continued attempts at cancelling the spell. That too was fascinating. Rather than simply use one of the many dispelling maneuvers he had taught her she was working backward. It did not seem to be working at the moment judging by the strung-together swears he was hearing but perhaps she had done this before?
“You know,” he ventured, “there’s really no need to hide, I can barely see you. In fact, you could pick my pockets right now and I doubt I’d even feel it.”
“Humph,” Nott said and then laughed. “You never would anyway! And stop grinning you are not convincing me to show you this until it’s done. Might as well go upstairs again.”
“Ah, but how could I when you’ve just revealed your plans to me,” he shot back, voice giddy even as he turned his back to her and let his hands fall from his face. “I was wondering what you and Jester had planned this time around. If I leave now, you’ll take this ship by storm.”
Nott cackled in the endearing way he had hoped she would. “Don’t worry it’s only our Captain Tusktooth who’s in danger of losing his position. You’re much too smart to turn against the best detectives of this generation, right Navigator?”
“No, I’m sure I won’t be able to beat them,” Caleb said, grinning at the wall, “but I have a friend who might just have what it takes.” He snapped his fingers and Frumpkin appeared at this side as he turned back around, eyes closed again as promised.
“Are you looking at me through your stupid cat!”
Caleb sighed. “I would never do that. Frumpkin pay no mind to Nott’s blatant falsehoods and find her for me, will you?”
“It’s,” Nott protested, trying not to laugh, “it’s still cheating!”
“Perhaps,” Caleb admitted, opening his eyes and following Frumpkin to other side of the bed Nott had been attempting to sneak around. This time she seemed less like a tracing, more like the air itself, and Caleb marveled at the seemingly empty space Frumpkin now nuzzled against.
He could still see her eyes, glowing with mirth this time, and going off that and Frumpkin’s position he was able to sweep her up in his arms and twirl her around. He could still only see her eyes but judging by her shrieks and the feel of her breathing joyfully against him he had done a good job.
“You – you’re terrible,” she said once they had both finished another laughing fit and Caleb had sat himself down on the bed.
“Yes, yes, but you Nott! You are wonderful! I can’t believe you’ve gotten so far on such an advanced spell in such time as this.”
Nott sniffed. “Would have gotten it all and surprised you if you hadn’t come in just then,” she said, but he could tell by her tone of voice she was smiling too.
“You always surprise me,” he said, truthfully. She blinked at him and he realized that holding her as she was now they were face to face. He could feel though not see her hands bunched in his coat and something warm and precious rose inside him.
He had meant to kiss her on the forehead, really, but even he could miscalculate. That was what had happened or perhaps Nott had moved so silently, so slightly as she sometimes did but surely – no, it must have been his mistake for when his lips met her skin it came with the feeling of jagged teeth and a new softness that must have been her bottom lip.
It seemed as soon as he had realized this that they broke apart, Nott skittering to the floor and he pressed up against the headboard. He shoved his hands in his coat pockets before he could do something even worse like trace the feeling of that softness on his lip with his forefinger.
He watched the papers he had dropped to the floor earlier shift as Nott made her way through them, following their trail to the door. He searched for her eyes again but her back must have been turned to him and he counted it a blessing when she murmured, “I, you know, better show Jester this. Never hear the end of it she thinks we’ve been keeping a secret, er, magic stuff from her.”
“Ja, yes, yeah. Of course,” he replied, hands still rigid in his pockets. “I will see you at dinner.”
There was no reply and Caleb watched his disarray of papers for any further hint of movement with a sense of dread. The room seemed uncomfortably quiet and he very suddenly did not know what to do with himself.
He kept his hands in his pockets until they stopped shaking and he could begin to clean up the mess he’d made.
-
After, they do not speak of it.
They did not speak of it when Nott carefully handed him a healing potion the next time they visited one of Fjord’s temples and their hands brushed. He held onto the glass vial and tried to focus on her words, but all he could really feel was relief that he had the wherewithal not to comment on her wistful expression as she told him she would not, could not forget him even in favor of the group.
It was hard to tell with the water pressure but he thought his heart might have pounded then just as hard as it had in the moment when –
as it once had.
The evening after coming to Felderwin the party arranged for their usual three rooms. Caleb had said nothing while Beau and Jester spoke in hushed whispers to Nott, prodding her on whether the arrangement was the best course of action. Everything in the apothecary had seemed too bright, too loud, and just much too much but now opening the door and watching Nott slip him in before him it all seems far too dark.
Nott curls up in a corner of the room and Caleb sits at the opposite end, staring at but not truly seeing his spell book. He does not make any lights even as the sun continues to set.
They sit like that all night. They do not speak.
-
Not speaking makes Xhorhas easier.
Oh, they talked after those first awkward weeks in the tunnels and they continue to talk upon reaching Asarius but it is different. Perhaps not in any way evident to the rest of the group but to Caleb who had once been so used to navigating the eddies of his and Nott’s relationship it is almost unbearable in its awkward nascency.
Still, while he may not quite know how to get his footing right yet but he knows he wants to continue walking with her. They cannot go back to who or what they were before, but they still have common ground – the ground they built together, and Nott is seemingly as incapable of holding a grudge as “Caleb” is at existing separate from her.
He holds her close when she’s nearly melted by fire giants and builds her a lab. He cannot be what he once was – “second smartest” and all, no, they cannot go back but he can still build. He may not be the best at putting things together or as deft as pulling them apart seeing as that had been Nott’s area, but they never broke did they? So on and on, new and new.
(It is fine, and they are friends again, if nothing else. Friends, comrades, addicts: all words that continue to be true and if he still thinks of her first as his partner it is only because Caleb has never been any good with change).
It takes as much work to build a dam in the eddies of their relationship as it had building Nott’s laboratory, so he does not tell her he thinks she is beautiful when she joins Jester on her moorbounder, tossing her cloak aside to reveal the dress the two had bought together.
(The dress they had bought together, with Yeza).
Instead he leaves his own tattered coat in a ditch with her cloak and tears off his bandages too before mounting his moorbounder after Beau. He focuses on the unfamiliar sensation of leathery hide beneath his bare skin rather than the realization that no one in the group besides Nott has seen his scars for so prolonged a time.
(It was because of her any of them knew at all, he thinks; she has opened him up, literally, and that is a very frightening state to be in).
He dwells on the journey ahead rather than the image of those bandages winding around her forgotten cloak and marvels that he still aches.
-
He is not sure what to expect when Nott rides with him and Beau on the way back from the Braan but a discussion about her marital doubts had certainly never been on the table until she put it there.
She wonders if Yeza cares for her, and of course, Caleb insists, of course he does. He’s catalogued every look they’ve exchanged since the prison cell and emotion like that cannot be faked.
He is having trouble enough putting his own emotions in order so when Nott – not Veth, Nott, asks him how she should feel he can only give a baffled laugh.
He hopes Beau does not see something in that smile of his or his tone, too soft even to his own ears.
The thing is Caleb is quite good at compartmentalizing. He is adept at putting up walls and waltzing around the truth so long as he knows that truth is there. When it comes to Nott, who is Veth, who is also Nott he has come to realize he knows very little.
He’s able to admit he wants to know more but only in the darkness of an ancient-tomb-turned prison.
He’s not one for metaphors but he sees it.
-
There is a weight to their interactions since Bazzoxan. Of course there is – after all, the entire group feels the loss of Yasha but he feels it particularly strongly (as he does most things) with Nott.
He had almost lost her. He realizes it is a selfish thing to think as is his next thought, which is that without her he would lose his pace, here with the Nein, but he is a selfish man. With Fjord as he is now – heated and impulsive like Caleb has not seen since the man held a blade to his neck, and their feet on the beach where they had started their first mutiny it is hard not to make comparisons to past travels.
Then, of course, they visit Marion at the Chateau and as Yeza and Luc run down the stairs to meet them Caleb feels forced to admit that, yes, many things have changed within the group after all.
Certainly, there is something changing within him, but he still has no name for it. If you name something, he thinks wryly as he summons Frumpkin on the beach, it will make that thing real.
Nott walks away from her husband and son and comes to him on that same beach with a question, so he answers in his own way with another reflected in his eyes. The Nott he knows, the Nott that he, what. What can he say? She who he trusts to a point so fine it cuts him when he tries to sleep at night is not real to Veth.
Vth tells him she loves him.
And he –
honestly, truly,
owes her everything. That is the only truth he can admit staring into her eyes, so different from the yellow cat-like ones he had come to know (but no less dear), as the tide tugs at them there on the beach at Nicodranas.
But there is another.
The chambers they are given in Kravaraad are less rooms than they are a maze of interconnected tunnels. If not for the steady glow of the Sanctum his mind may have twisted it into the darker corridors of Bazzoxan. He does not find himself inclined to explore but when he sees Nott starts to inch towards the corners of the place as Beau and Reanminere grow ever louder and more buoyant he decides to follow.
He knows her well enough to recognize a small side chamber as the safehaven she might see it as, still within sight if not hearing of Jester and Caduceus. He has to stoop to enter and settles down while calling out to her. She responds and although he cannot see her he realizes the oddly intimate setting for what it is.
He allows himself to wonder for the first time if she remembers the other moment they had spoken like this. He speaks to the air while looking at Frumpkin who he has summoned to his lap and chooses his words carefully, though still prodding.
He wonders if she has sat next to him like he asked. He does not move his hands from his lap to check though if she had he would touch her as carefully as he speaks now.
“I wish I could see you right now,” he admits and it is as close to that other truth as he can allow himself without her help.
He looks for eyes in the dimly lit room and knows his heart would leap to see either slitted yellow ones or round brown ones. Neither appear and the only warmth he feels after their conversation is second hand from the kiln.
That’s fine, he thinks. After all, he never named it.