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Caleb does not think he often asks for much. He knows he doesn't, truthfully, because often, he simply cannot. There is something broken inside of him, many things. Things that were done to him, things that were innate, things that he did to himself, things that grew of their own accord. The words do not come, his voice does not work, the persistent whisper of memory reminds him that there is no point in trying - often Caleb cannot ask for much of anything at all.
So when he does ask, when he manages to fight through the difficulty and all of the everything trying so hard to hold him back, he would like to believe that the words would be heeded.
But in truth, he knows better. It's why he knows not to ask at all more often than not.
He had been reading. They're in a new town again, breaking bread at a shared table and discussing their plans, which Caleb often reads though instead of actively participating (the inn's are always loud places his senses struggle to handle, he needs something to keep him from disappearing entirely. He can contribute little to their conversations anyway; too unused to making decisions at all, not that he'll tell them this). Someone had asked why he wasn't eating and he answered that he simply wasn't hungry without looking up from his page. It's the easiest way to avoid further questioning - seeming absent and distracted - the only way Caleb knows how to dodge politely without inadvertently causing more curiosity. He had no interest in discussing nightmares with these people, regardless of how he wants himself and Nott to remain part of their group.
(Pushing hands and uncaring speech and force and restraint and punishments. His skin still crawls, stomach still turns, mind still creeping closer to escaping from reality. No, he has no interest in discussing nightmares with them, especially not these.)
There had been giggling soon after. Caleb ignored this more steadfastly; their planning often dissolved into jokes he failed to understand. Nott had left to retrieve something just before, squeezing the corner of his jacket to tell him without words that she'd be back, and there's little point in attempting participation when she's not around. He's simply not good enough with people to pull it off, and as of yet, she's the only one who explains without turning him into the next joke.
It isn't cruelly meant, Caleb thinks. They do it to one another often enough. Their laughter is mostly expectant, not cruel - waiting for him to join in rather than mocking him outright. He doesn't fault them for it, but that doesn't make the thought of his own involvement more desirable.
It isn't cruelly meant, he wants to remind himself, but that seems to mean so little now.
They had been giggling, whispering words among themselves too quiet for Caleb to parse. He hadn't thought much of it, focused on his book, scouring the pages for anything useful and clinging to the text to shake off the memories and the constant swell of sensory input around him. Giggling, whispering, nudging each other. They dared one another like this all the time. But then someone knocked into him, nearly upending him from his seat entirely, gaze startling off the page and up towards their faces, breath coming a little faster, scrambling for the words to ask what was wrong.
In no way prepared for someone to push a spoonful of their breakfast into his mouth, metal clacking off his teeth, pressing smooth chill down against his tongue. Familiar in all the worst ways.
Suddenly, he wishes he didn't want them to like him, wishes he didn't want to linger in their presence a little longer, it would have made it so much easier to simply run, flee. It's what he should do, he knows. Certainly what he wants to do.
But Caleb cannot run. He cannot ask. He cannot beg. He has never been permitted to do so, much less been granted the gift of being heard.
He splutters, rearing back away from them and only managing to bump into someone else. He can't see clearly and can't remember who was setting next to him besides. Even if he could run he doesn't know which direction would be the safest. He tries to shake off memories, remind himself that things are different than they used to be, this time things can be different. "Bitte," he chokes out, "do not."
His voice comes out too weak and too steely simultaneously, something desperate in the words that Caleb wants to cringe from. Too easy to be misjudged as unreasonable, but he is desperate. Desperate to be heard, to be listened to, to be pulled back from the hot swell of memories cresting in the back of his skull.
It does not matter. They're laughing too loud at his shock to hear his words, all of them, he's almost positive. Surely it's only that, he wants desperately to believe, that does not stay their hands, that forces another spoonful of food into his mouth.
It isn't cruelly meant, he has no time to remind himself. They laugh and Caleb can barely hear it, lost lost lost in a torrent of memory he wants to lay no claim to, heavy in his mouth with the texture of the food.
It takes only seconds for him to choke, and no time at all to vomit in wretched painful clarity.
'Nein. Bitte. Es tut mir leid,' he wants to cry, but he cannot. His body has not worked for years and his tongue for even longer. They do not wait for Caleb to speak because they had never known him to do so. He is broken, a shell, an inconvenient piece of furniture, always and nothing more.
A hand on his shoulder, and today his body allows him to cringe away from the bruising grip he knows is coming, but he should not. He isn't allowed. Punishments are earned - he is too stupid to learn any other way, they say - and flinching from them is no better received than whatever he'd done to earn them. Non-compliance, antecedent behaviors, whatever they choose to call it - the only thing cowering earns him is additional correction.
His tongue is heavy in his mouth, taste of sick thick behind his teeth. He almost gags again at the knowledge of what will come, the harsh grip forcing his jaw open while they brush his teeth like an aberrant dog. His stomach rolls. He should not have let himself choke, he knows. They have only so much time for far too many people like Caleb, their haste causes their careless harshness. It is his fault, they tell him often, though when Caleb is present to hear it he only ever wonders how. Now they won't let him eat again until tomorrow, and that is his own fault too.
He cannot apologize. Caleb's mind and body and voice are long broken and he will never gain them back.
Not that it would help, he thinks hazily, staring at the mess on the table with eyes that see but cannot look. Even the ones that can speak are rarely heard. They are all sick and broken and stupid, so they say, how could they possibly know anything of value? Even if only of themselves? Their own wants and needs? The bodies around him press close and Caleb can't breathe, patients or nurses or visitors he doesn't know and doesn't care. Their touches are gentle agonies, static electricity over his skin, and he doesn't want them to grab him, to shock him, to drug him, to tie him down to the bed where he can cause no more trouble. Bitte.
"What did you do?" a shrill voice cries, and Caleb shrinks back again. His hands are slick with his own vomit - did he do that or did they smear him with it as punishment? He doesn't know. He hopes his muscles remember how to clean themselves today; if he can get to the sink before they drag him there to do it for him then it will hurt less. He can't breathe. He wants to run, he wants to run, he wants to fight, Caleb is so tired of being good, but his body can't remember the movements. Voices swirl around his head too quick for him to latch onto - no one speaks to him anyway - the wet texture on his skin is agony, panic strangles him. He cannot breathe.
His hands cover his ears, and then he cringes in anticipation once again, but can't remember how to pull them back down. Sometimes they don't mind what he does as long as he's out of their way, but when he's being punished he's only punished further when he cannot look attentive. It is worse when he is absent fully, he knows, can tell once he resurfaces from the ashen noise of memory, but awareness does little for him here. Caleb exists trapped inches inside of his own body, locked in place as it moves around him or refuses to move at all, he can't remember how to fill his own skin anymore.
(When he remembers instead of forgetting, he wishes he had never known at all.)
Bitte, he can't recall how to beg. Mir geht's gut, lass mich in Ruhe. But Caleb can say nothing, can do nothing, because he had broken terribly and only breaks more every single day he remains in this place.
There are hands on his face, gentle, but he flinches in anticipation before he registers that they're too small to possibly belong to a nurse or warden. Small like a child, their voice delicate and gentle though Caleb's scattered mind cannot understand a word, but they stink like a child too. Small bodies lining the halls, fumbling and pathetic, too thin as they lay in forgotten filth. Caleb's body had only wandered there unimpeded once or twice, but he can never forget. He could not help them because he could not even help himself, but they haunt him still.
He does not want to be here. He wants to run. He wants to hide. His body cannot remember how and they would not allow him to besides.
It takes his body a long time to recall how to open his eyes, vision blurry and unfocused, taking longer still to figure out how to find the face in front of his own, to remember how to look instead of merely seeing. They're covered in bandages, and he hopes they weren't punished but knows that they were, they always are. All of them. Intentional or otherwise, this place is full of terrible cruelty, and Caleb's chest burns hot in useless rage. All Caleb can do is break, himself and the people he had loved, he can save no one, not anymore, if he ever could at all.
Their hands are cool against his cheeks. They do not push his own hands away or dig their nails into his flesh. Where did they learn such gentleness in a place like this?
"Come on," the child says, firm and loud and Caleb's body rises on an instinct his mind can't quite puzzle through.
'Lauf,' he should tell them. If they have made it all the way to him without being caught then they should ride that rare burst of luck all the way out to their freedom. 'Lauf,' he wants to demand of himself, gather them up and run and save them both from these punishing hands and crowding bodies and aching dehumanization, but he cannot.
Broken Broken Broken. If Caleb was ever good for something then he is worth less than nothing now.
His body follows when the child takes his hand to lead him, still painfully and achingly gentle when she pulls on the edge of his coat until his hands drop of their own accord. His thoughts catch on one another and fragment into sand and ash. Some distant part of him is aware that others are staring and it infuriates him. He hurts down to his soul, and the fractured pieces of his self shy away from it all, from himself and the impotent emotion he holds and the whole of the world around him, its staring eyes and grabbing hands and mocking laughter.
The small hand in his is the only thing his brain lets him cling to, the only input that isn't hurting him further. A solitary touchstone in the madness. It doesn't hurt and Caleb knows he doesn't deserve it, but he can't bring himself to let go.
He can do so little, but he stalls himself when they lead him to the stairs. He isn't allowed on them. The child tugs a little more insistently, voice not quite breaking through the din to be heard. Caleb feels his body whine, feet shuffling uncertainly. He is tired of being good, but he is so tired of being hurt. Yet somewhere in his brain, in a place he can't quite hold onto yet, he feels recognition, trust. This child wouldn't lead him into more pain, he knows this somehow. The little girl pulls again and this time Caleb follows.
He's tired of being good. There are times when he screams. Times when that is the only thing he can do, and more when his body is a storm he cannot hope to control - rocking and lashing out and tearing gouges into old scars with his fingernails. He wants that energy now, in a distant sort of way. Wants that lack of control instead of the passive stillness he is almost always damned with. He wants to run, he wants to fight. The goblin he trusts, yes, but every other body in the building? Certainly not.
Caleb does not want them to look at him, to see under his skin and into the red aching embers of his brain and chest, he does not want them to see him or hear him or touch him. He is tired of it, tired of being at the mercy of other people, of strangers. At least then the punishment is earned, at least then the pain is something he chooses - however distant he might be from the decision - something he can ground himself in rather than just another torment enacted upon him.
His body does not allow it. Today the madness is in stillness, silence, as it almost always is. The heavy aching void in the pit of his stomach, pulling everything inside of him down into it. Jaw wired shut and brain empty of words, too lost to do anything but follow where he is led. He tries to count, wants to, wants anything to help pull him out of this emptiness, but his skull is full of cotton and gauze and nothing connects as it should. How many steps has he walked? How many people have pushed past him in this hall? He doesn't know. How many days had he lost in that building? How many days had they stolen from him? Thousands, he thinks. Thousands and thousands of them - time Caleb will never get back, time he may never find again.
They pass a bathroom at the top of the steps and Caleb flinches from this too. He doesn't, he can't. He is so tired of living this way. He would rather take the awful wet cling of liquid on his hands than the terrifying process of being cleaned. Water that is too hot or too cold, soaps that burn his eyes and nose, hands and cloths that are far too rough, the terrible manhandling. Caleb is broken, he is mad, largely in the way that allows him to be easy in a way many of the others are not, or so they say. They clean him often, a respite or a quota or something else entirely, but he hates it. Caleb's brain is broken, but even it protests and revolts against being treated like an object, the careless way one would wash a broken doll. He'd take the filth easily, any day.
(They spray his face sometimes, when his body wanders to places it shouldn't, as if he were no more than a naughty cat. They feed him too quickly, pushing broth or grits down into his lungs when he is too slow to react and keep up. They pour water into his mouth and nose when they rinse his hair and body, leaving him gasping in pain and close to drowning. Some apologize - they simply don't have the time to be gentle or careful. Others laugh - they think it funny to watch his body struggle to react. Caleb hates them both equally. Bitte, lass mich in Ruhe.)
She does not push him inside. Does not acknowledge the room at all, save a quick look back and a gentle squeeze of his fingers. Caleb doesn't deserve the flood of gratitude, isn't sure he wants it. Nott shouldn't push herself to take care of him, she shouldn't, and he doesn't know if he wants her to. He should be better than this, so that others do not, cannot, continue to do this to him.
You are more than this, something inside him whispers, but is he? Decades an object, an animal, a tool, a weapon. What is he worth now? Truly?
Even furniture is granted more dignity than this.
He doesn't want to think. Can't. He had seen her in the prison cell alongside him, dirty and fragile and fumbling, and his brain had echoed with half-remembered children that Caleb could not have possibly helped because he could not even help himself. He had wanted to be able to help her, help anyone, for once.
He had succeeded, that time, hadn't he? The both of them. Caleb had finally been able to help someone else and she had chosen to help him in return. Caleb should not let her, should not want her to, but something inside of him still struggles to heal and truthfully most of the time he does not want to push her away. Weakness, undoubtedly, and stupidity besides, but Caleb always has been both.
(They had ignored each other for days, when they had first shared that prison cell. Caleb had been struggling against the stillness and the mere sight of her had flashed him back to prisons of different names. Trapped is trapped, after all, and nameless furious pieces of Caleb had raged at the reality of being at the mercy of others once again. She had snarled and bared teeth any time his restless body strayed too close, and only her small size had kept him from growling in return.)
(Then the guards had hosed them down, cold water spraying through the bars, a mocking and halfhearted attempt to clean both cell and prisoners and Caleb had been lost inside his body once again, pushed back inside of himself so easily. When he had finally resurfaced, she had been there, heavy against his side, and she has yet to leave. Caleb doesn't understand it, isn't sure he ever will, but it may be the closest thing to a blessing he has ever received.)
It does not make him cringe, the help, when it's her. Most of the time at least. Understanding in a way that Caleb had never experienced, she never presumes to know better than him, especially not when it comes to his own self, and that is the one distinction that makes her help bearable. He wonders when that happened, wonders how. But Nott is full of little wonders, Caleb finds himself in awe of her over and over again.
He stands where she leaves him in the center of their shared room, unmoored without her hand in his. He's creeping back to himself sluggishly, but cold hallways and empty aches threaten to drag him back into incomprehension. He does not remember what happened downstairs and can't figure out if he wants to find the memory. In a distant way, he is angry at both options. Angry at whatever, whoever, pushed him back into this state and angrier still that his body cannot give him the option of expressing this. He burns hot, then cold, why did they do this to him? He cannot stand it. He starts to shiver in the moments before her hand takes his again, dragging his eyes back into focus on her, the familiar shine of her teeth in the lowlight.
She looks back at him steady. Doesn't flinch from his empty gaze nor mocks it. There's a cloth in her hand that she presses into his own, and he struggles to remember how to use it. She waits, patient. She is always patient with him, one of the only ones to ever have been, and isn't that infuriating? The only since he had broken, since he had been hidden and locked away. Patient instead of forcing or bruising; it is so easy to force someone who cannot push back, Caleb has learned, but Nott never has.
Eventually his body remembers, switches from absently exploring the rag's texture to wiping away the drying vomit from his fingers. She doesn't joke about his slowness, or his reluctance, doesn't push him to move faster. It clings to the bandages, but Caleb can't remember how to find the end to unravel them and doesn't want to reveal what's beneath them besides. The fabric has been put through worse, and so long as there is no one forcing him under the water to clean him themselves then he will continue to clean himself only when he chooses.
Now, with the haze and the memories threatening to swallow him whole, is certainly not that time.
"Es tut mir leid," he finally recalls how to say. His body sways, absently reaching out to trace along a strand of her hair. The words slur and mangle, but they make it past his tongue and teeth and with Nott alone that can be enough.
She looks at him sadly. He's tethered to his body too loosely to know what his own face does in return.
"No need for that," she tells him, and Caleb's head jerks in a clumsy nod. He wants to close his eyes, exhaustion laying heavy on his shoulders despite the relatively early hour, but he's afraid to let them. Afraid that he will be unable to open them again and be trapped inside of himself once more, or worse, open them to find he's still in that institution, never escaped at all, pinned face down to a bed, sore and forgotten and alone.
The memory chases anger back into his chest. He wants to growl and bite once more, bite the helping and hurting hands alike. He is so sick of being touched, of being led, of being taught. Do not move, do not stutter, do not wander, do not fight, do not ask questions, sit still, make eye contact, listen, obey, obey, obey. It is an ugly thought, but he is an ugly thing. Their intentions mean so little when the hurt is still imparted and Caleb is beyond the point of being tired of it.
"Can you hold me, d'you think?" Nott asks while Caleb struggles not to blink. The question jolts him worse; he knows she means it kindly, even asks it for herself so that Caleb does not feel enacted upon, but in this moment it doesn't matter. She has led him here and no further, the one place they had agreed upon that he would choose to have gone could he make the decision. He knows it, but that doesn't soothe the sting of it. Irrational, perhaps, but Caleb's brain is long broken and he has never claimed to be otherwise, especially not in this.
"Nnnn," he growls, wrestling brutal control from his body and forcing it to do as he wishes, regardless of how badly it hurts him. "No. No, no," he repeats, the one word he has successfully pulled out from himself and not one he intends to let go any time soon. How many times had he wished he could use it? "No," he snaps at her.
She is not the one he is snapping at, not really, and whether she knows this or not she doesn't react. Nott doesn't snarl back at his animosity, misplaced or otherwise. She does not snap back about her intent or her goodwill or her knowledge, merely nods and steps back. She doesn't lift her hands to placate him and doesn't speak to defend herself or attempt to poke further answers out of him. Caleb loves her for it. His body snarls again, not at her, at the memories being pushed onto him, of all the people who did all of those things. The ones who told them they knew better and forced him to do what they wanted, regardless of his own desires. He hates them, their cruel intentions, their good intentions, their complete lack of intention at all.
Now that Caleb can choose, now that he is once again able to govern his mind and body as his own, at least most of the time, he will continue to do so. Even if others do not understand, or mock him, or tell him that they know better, or say that his decisions are stupid, Caleb will continue to choose for himself. He has to. He cannot go back to the way it was before, not with Ikithon, not with the institution, not with the prisons. He refuses.
Nott stays out of his way as he paces in furious circles. His hands roam over his arms and neck and face, to ground himself in the ability to move his own limbs and to prove to himself that he can. That there are not people waiting in the shadows to tell him that he is behaving badly, threatening to hurt himself, and restrain him for hours on end. His nails dig, the heel of his palm strikes once or twice, but no one stops him. These are Caleb's decisions, no one else's. He knows that Nott does not like it, but she doesn't say anything, not now. Rarely ever.
This is how Caleb reclaims his body. He hurts it, he does not clean it, he eats only with his hands, at whatever pace he chooses, does not turn the lights off, does not get under covers, speaks only what he wants to whom he chooses. Others call it stupid and Caleb does not care. This is what he needs to take back what they had taken, and he will not let them rob him further by allowing them to dictate how he copes.
Eventually the rage fades. Despite the flood of movement his body is still slow and clumsy, but when he tries to ease himself to the floor he mostly succeeds. Nott had stopped paying attention to him at all at some point, giving him a respite from staring eyes, so Caleb - still wordless - smacks his palm against the floor to regain her attention, gesturing at his chest when she looks.
She approaches immediately, clambering into his lap with a cautious care, giving him enough time for his delayed limbs to push her away if he changes his mind, but it is not an issue anymore. Her acceptance of his rejection is the thing that he had needed, once again safe in the affirmation that Nott will not push or force him the way so many others have before. She presses against his chest, her hands curled between their bodies while his arms wrap around her clumsily.
Her weight is grounding rather than restraining. Some part of him thinks him pathetic as he sways from side to side, old insults and lessons, but he can't hold onto the thoughts. He's tired and he aches and his brain is a dying whirlwind of half-remembered injustices. He doesn't want to suffer more. He's tired of it.
"It's okay," Nott tells him now. "I've got you."
He does not bristle at the words, but it isn't okay, not yet. Caleb is broken and still not put together quite right, still shatters at the slightest provocation and growls at the people who may or may not deserve it. Nott is one thing, understanding in her own ways, but the others? Caleb does not know them well and cannot possibly trust them, not with this, not with anything like it. If Nott had not shown up to pull him away, what would they have done with his body? If he had snarled at them the way he had at her, if he had paced and hurt and refused to clean in front of them, what would they do? It takes only one person to damn him back to that place again, to ensure that he is never heard or heeded again, his autonomy permanently overwritten. Eleven years. Thousands of days. It is not okay.
He wants to run. Wants to gather up their belongings and flee and never look back, refuse to allow them the opportunity to use this display against him. He doesn't think they especially trust him, and he does not have Nott's ease in getting along with others to displace that mistrust. This would be such an easy excuse to be rid of him forever, declare him a danger to himself and others, unfit to care for himself, unfit for anything at all, the same excuse Ikithon had taken.
"If I. break again," he chokes, pulling the words out like teeth, choking on the vibration of his own vocal chords. "If, if I'm," he doesn't know the word for what he was, still is. For all that they had made decisions for him never once had they deigned to tell him why. He fumbles over this gap in his knowledge and then skips over it entirely - there are more pressing matters at hand. "And I can't come back. If they. anyone. calls for them to take me back. Don't. Please don't put me back there."
He asks for so little, but what he asks for is always too much. Caleb knows this. To be treated well, with dignity, with autonomy, is too much to ask. He is a tool, a weapon, and could never be more, only ever less. What if next time he pushes too far? If his next flare of anger, of stubborn refusal, of bad behavior, is her final straw? If she sees how inconvenient he truly is? What then? Has he even told her what he means? Does she know?
Caleb keeps his secrets wrapped close around herself, desperate to keep what had been held out of his reach for so long, desperate to keep anything of his own without it being stolen, and now he doesn't know how to peel back the layers to show her. They had not asked, they had taken, and now Caleb struggles to figure out how to give, but now he can't remember what she has seen and what he still has kept for himself. Will she demand those answers from him now?
Nott demands nothing. Does not even ask for clarification, only presses closer to him, her fingers tangling into the folds of his coat to pull herself impossibly closer to him. "Of course not," she tells him, sounding sure, sounding honest. It would be so easy to lie, something inside of Caleb knows it well, but he's too desperate to believe her to care. "Never again. I won't let anyone take you, and I'll never leave," she says, and Caleb presses his face down against the top of her head and despite everything inside him that should know better, he believes her.
Little wonders. Perhaps out of any of those who could speak those promises, Nott is the only one who would truly mean them. Caleb doesn't know. But for now it is something to hold onto, something to keep him from tumbling back into fog and despair and rage. A piecemeal shield to defend himself from everyone else in the world. Nott will not leave him, she pays attention and knows him, has no desire to control him and knows how to help without simply smothering his will.
It is more than anyone else has given him in years. He holds her a little closer, any words that he had found are long since gone, stolen more by exhaustion than madness. He hopes that the embrace says what his voice cannot, his gratitude, the relief, that he is able to believe her despite the lessons that should have taught him otherwise.
She burrows her face against his chest, nudging in a way that reminds him of Frumpkin as she says, "You're mine," in a way that should maybe remind him of her stolen trinkets but does not. "I've got you, and anyone who wants to take you will have to go through me first."
It shouldn't sound as reassuring as it does, but ever since Caleb met her, Nott has seemed to care little for 'should's. Some fluttering restlessness in his chest, the constant thrum of threat and paranoia, settles. Little wonders indeed. Nott has him. Caleb closes his eyes, and the worry does not rise back to take him.
It does not even try.