Work Text:
The Nein stepped below the deck of the Ball-Eater, leaving the chill night air and the flickering lamplights of Nicodranas behind. Caleb found that being on the ship again was oddly comforting and slightly nostalgic. The group’s time at sea had been dangerous and complicated. But for that time, it had been a home, and now those conflicts with Avantika and dealings with Fjord’s sea god felt tame. They had since faced, and now it seemed were set to face, much worse.
They reached the doors of their old quarters, which had been offered back to them for the night. “Oh, we’re roommates again, Beau!” Jester said excitedly, grabbing the other woman’s arm and dragging her towards one of the doors. Fjord and Caduceus looked at each other and nodded, then split off to the room that they had shared. Of course, it only made sense to fall back on their old sleeping arrangements, which meant-
“Hey, roomie,” came Nott’s quiet, raspy voice. Caleb glanced down at the goblin. In the dim light, the fresh aquamarine tattoos that curled around her catlike eyes shone faintly but strikingly; part gemstone glitter, part magical glow. The green skin around the markings was raw and puffy, forcing her to squint back at him. Intrusive thoughts of the sharp edges of the tiny crystal shards grinding deeper under her skin and the rising heat of infection setting in brought a phantom itch to his forearms. He looked away, but placed a gentle hand on the back of her shoulder as he swung open the door to their old room.
As they entered, Caleb lingered in the doorway for a few moments and watched her make her way towards one of the bunks. For so many weeks, they had either slept in their separate rooms in the Xhorhaus or crowded together with all of the others in his magical bubble. This sharing of space between just the two of them, second nature over months of travelling together, was unfamiliar again. He sighed, turning away to draw the door closed behind them. Maybe it was right for this too to be strange, with so much else changed between them since those days.
Nott flopped down on her back on top of the covers and grumbled something about not being allowed to drink. He sat down on the opposite bed, shrugging off his coat and unlacing his boots. After a minute of silence, he cleared his throat, and spoke.
“How are you holding up, Nott?”
“I think this might have been a bad idea,” she admitted with a groan. “I mean, it was fun at the time. You know, having a girl’s night. But, ow .” She lifted a hand to poke experimentally at her own cheek. “Do you think it’s meant to still sting this much? And it’s really itchy and -”
“Perhaps,” Caleb interrupted, rushing to cut off her tangent before he lost the courage to speak. “I don’t know much about tattoos. But I was also referring to-”
He stumbled on the words because to say it was to think of it again. To remind her was to remember himself, in perfect clarity, the way she crumpled to the ground. It had happened in an instant. Nott was standing over the chest and then she wasn’t. Her body was limp and unresponsive and her yellow eyes were wide and unblinking. She was so small and light, cradled in his arms. The soot thick in the air forced him to hold back his panic, choke on his desperate pleas. No, no, no. Not her. Please, not her.
“I was referring to the other thing,” he finished grimly.
“Oh,” Nott said quietly. Caleb saw her hand drop back down to her side, but it was too dark for him to make out her expression. When she spoke again, her wavering voice was slightly more chipper. He couldn’t tell how much of that levity was false. “Right. Yeah.”
“If you don’t want to talk about it-”
“No, I’m fine,” she interrupted. “It’s fine. I just remember touching the chest, and then waking up when Jes brought me back. It wasn’t like be- it didn’t hurt, or anything like that.”
Caleb exhaled as he considered her words. No amount of pain or fear - that was a blessing. And then she hadn't had to experience those terror-stricken moments, that stumbling race to carry her away from the prison in time. She hadn't sat with a heart turning to ash, counting each passing second as the clerics fumbled to produce a diamond. She was fine. Was it selfish of him, then, to be so haunted by her brush with death? To become weak and shaky at the memory of it?
Perhaps she was hiding the scars of the experience, wearing a brave face like her old porcelain mask. The thought worried Caleb. The sad and selfish part of him worried because the idea that she would lie and he couldn’t tell when she was telling the truth spoke of a distance growing between them, greater than the physical distance between their two beds. The rest of him worried simply because he worried for her. If she was hurting, she deserved reassurance and comfort. She would do, and had done, the same for any one else in their strange group.
But all that she had admitted was that she was fine, so all that he said out loud was: "I'm glad to hear that."
Nott’s response was a quiet noise of affirmation, and then they lapsed into silence again. She restlessly shifted against her pillow, staring up at the cabin ceiling. Caleb hung his head and looked down at his hands, anxiously twisting them around each other, and then back up at her. Once again he mentally counted out a minute to let the silence between the, linger, before speaking up. As much as he wished to avoid the topic, there was more that he had to say to her.
“I want you to know that I am not mad at you for what happened,” he began. “I know that I yelled, but I was only-”
“You think I’m stupid for not checking for traps,” Nott spoke up. Her tone wasn’t harsh or accusatory, but there was a bite of bitterness to it that made Caleb wince.
“No,” he reassured her, shaking his head. “ No , I would never think that you’re stupid.”
It was the truth. Throughout their time travelling together, from when he thought she was nothing more than a twitchy goblin, he had always seen her brilliance shining through. She tinkered with tools and chemicals in ways that he couldn’t comprehend, and had picked up magic like it was second nature. Nott was the most intelligent being that he knew.
What explanation for what had transpired could he grasp at, then? Was she careless because she was drunk, drowning out the fear of what they would find the Archmage Bane? Caleb had been so twisted up in his own head, the psychology of navigating a place designed to trap him , that he hadn’t been keeping note of how often she had been reaching for her enchanted flask. Her decisions on when to drink were her own, but his lapse in watching over his friend’s habits filled him with some measure of guilt.
He was acutely aware that this wasn’t the first time she had faced down death within Halas’s Folding Halls. Last time, it was in the form of a terrifying blue-scaled beast that made the air around it crackle with currents of power. He, the coward he was, had fled to safety at the first sight of it. But Nott had lingered to ensure that Jester made it out as well. Their protector, always, even to her own detriment. Even when it left her on fire and spilling her guts onto the wooden deck of their ship.
“I think you’re brave. It’s like you told me at Kravaraad, you are always ahead of the rest of us, first to face the danger. I can’t blame you for a lapse in concentration. That place was terrifying, it- I think that it messed with us all a bit.
“I do wish you would be more careful though,” he continued, voice cracking slightly. “Because I do not want to lose you. The others do not want to lose you. Your husband and son do not want to lose you.”
Last time he could be entirely selfish about his fear for her. He could gather her up into his arms and hold her as tightly as he could, and she would sleep tucked into the crook of his knee, and the reassurance that the other was there and breathing was all that mattered to each of them. He still longed for that same comfort, but now the idea of physical closeness was wreathed in awkwardness in a way it had never been before, and his possessiveness felt foolish. How could the two of them still huddle like their partnership was all that they had in this world? The position of closest companion and only friend no longer fit, not when she had so much else waiting for her.
Caleb held eye contact and braced himself for the possibility of a snippy response, for Nott to resent the leveraging of her family against her. But her reply was devoid of any venom.
“Yeah, I know,” she said, fiddling with something between her clawed fingers, speaking so quietly and tiredly that Caleb felt a pang of guilt for bringing them up. But if reminding her of the people that cared for her was what it took to force her to take better care of herself, it was worth that discomfort. “It’s just…” She sighed, then finally looked across to meet his eyes again. “Okay Caleb, I’ll try.”
“I think that maybe the end of the world is coming, Nott,” he said. This was the second current of fear and worry that swirled through his thoughts, since their scrying with Allura had revealed darkness and chains and an evil older and deeper than they could have ever imagined. Sitting beside Fjord and Caduceus at the pier and staring out into the night, the enormity of it all had pressed down on him. Yet it also brought a strange sense of peace and purpose. It somehow felt right, that their motley group of runaways would stand up to face this, together. Except…
“I think- if you think that you should go back to Yeza and Luc and enjoy what time you have left, no one in this group would think badly of you.”
But I’d be lost without you, was the thought that he held back. He couldn’t keep trying to convince her to stay like this, he couldn’t deprive her of her own family because she was the closest thing to one that he had.
“It’s not that I don’t want to spend time with them, of course I do,” Nott said, an odd note of some emotion in her voice that Caleb couldn’t recognise. “But I can’t, anyway. Not properly. Not when I’m still like this.”
“I understand,” he sighed. And he did, he was intimately familiar with what it felt like to carry around a wrong that would not let you settle until it was set right. Perhaps they had both always recognised that in the other, another desperate and dissatisfied soul, and it was what had drawn them together so quickly and closely.
Understanding how badly she needed this only made him feel more guilty for how he had barred her from speaking to Halas. The trapped Archmage had all the answers that still eluded Caleb. But he could have never forgiven himself if Nott had let herself be lured into a dangerous deal, and now he had a portion of the mage’s knowledge tucked safely beside his own spellbook at his side. He lifted a hand to the holster and ran his thumb across the top of the pages, reassuring himself that the notes were still there.
“With what we just found, we’re closer to a solution than we’ve ever been. We will get you what you want,” he promised. It was an echo of the same oath made so long ago, when he could only guess what she was after and had no idea of the true motivations behind her quest - the true importance of it. But he had known that he would promise her anything, and however complicated things had become, that loyalty hadn't changed.
She nodded slowly but resolutely, and Caleb hoped that she genuinely believed him.
“How about you?” Nott ventured, after a few moments of silence. “Did you find anything that you were looking for in there?”
He looked away. Halas’s fancy for toying with time had not escaped him. Thoughts of those long-coveted plans hummed in the back of his mind, as they always did. But they were nebulous and impossible and wound up in doubt, as they had been for a long while now. This, all of this - the Nein, the war, the world in danger, Yasha kidnapped, Nott dying, fixing Nott, Nott - burned louder, more presently.
I’m sorry, mother and father.
“Oh, you know, perhaps,” he said evasively, “there’s still a lot to read through.”
“Just need to finish saving the world first, right?” Nott said. Her voice was still painfully worn and tired, but as he looked back at her he saw a light in her yellow eyes and the beginnings of a small smile. Anxious but excited, it was the same expression he’d seen across a dark jail cell all those months ago, as he summoned a burst of flame to set their escape plan into motion. “When do we start?”
Caleb let out a breath of laughter, unable to stop the sudden surge of fondness he felt for her from bubbling over. How selfish, to be so glad that despite what she had just been through she would continue to risk her life alongside him.
“I- at least after we sleep, I think. We’ve all had a long day,” he said.
“Yeah, you’re right,” she sighed, lifting a hand to scratch at the puckered skin over one of her cheekbones. Of course, the pain of a new tattoo would keep her from resting soundly when she needed rest the most.
If they had been lying side by side, a simple calming gesture - a reassuring squeeze of a hand, a gentle pat on the head - would have come easily. But if there had been a time in this conversation to close the physical distance between them he feared that he had let it pass. Instead, he called for Frumpkin to appear beside her with a subtle snap of his fingers. She let out a small startled noise at his sudden appearance. But then, as the cat purred and cuddled up to her, she wrapped her spindly arms tight around him and sunk back down onto her mattress.
“He’ll help you out,” Caleb said.
Nott’s returning thanks was muffled as she closed her eyes and pressed her face into Frumpkin’s soft ginger fur.
Content that the distraction was offering some comfort, Caleb pulled up his own ratty salt-scented blankets and settled down on his side, still facing the other bed. Looking over at their shapes in the darkness, he felt a sharp ache in his chest for those nights spent curled together with her: by a campfire or in a shabby inn or on this very bed, back against back or head on chest or body sprawled over limbs. Now, telepathically instructing his cat to watch over her was the only way he could abate his instinct to join her.
“Goodnight, Nott,” he whispered across the room.
A single yellow eye flickered open again to meet his, before closing again.
“Gute Nacht, Caleb,” she murmured back.
Eventually the moonlight shifted away from their window and the room darkened to a depth that human eyes could barely pierce. But Caleb lay awake for a long while, counting the quiet, rhythmic rasp of each exhale and inhale to reassure himself that she was still breathing, she was still breathing.