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When he was very little, little enough to still have a mother but not yet old enough to be embarrassed by discussing such things with her, Bren asked his mother about love.
What does it feel like he had asked, though really what he wanted to know was what does it taste like, because that’s the sort of thing that interests a small child. She had smiled and curled down from up above his head so that her hair fell on each side of his face like curtains. Sunlight had cradled his back in safe summer warmth and it had felt like they were the only people in the entire world. She had told him it feels like when you look up at the stars and cannot look away, schatzi. When the cat does a funny thing and you want to bite him. When you laugh so hard your stomach hurts.
He’d furrowed his little eyebrows, which was a major talent of his even back then, and said mama I don’t get it, and then she laughed and told him it was a happy thing, Bren, and that he should worry about it when he gets older and then he’d moved on to more pressing matters like making the cat do that funny thing again.
Caleb Widogast can no longer remember what his mother’s smile looked like at that moment, or what her hair felt like against his cheek. But he knows that just that once, she had lied to him.
–
It’s the cusp of night, though that hardly matters in this ever-dark city. Some bits of dust are flicking in and out of the irregular purple light emanating into the empty space from the street lamp outside, but most of the room in the Xhorhaus is swallowed by darkness.
Correction: His room.
It’s been so long since he’s had a room to claim as his own, even longer since he’s had one all to himself. Caleb doesn’t know what he is to do with all the empty space, arms twitching fruitlessly against the mattress with the discomfort of solitude. It’s almost strange – he was always alone when he was a child, has had his nose buried in books almost before he could walk. He’s always been a creature of habit, always most comfortable in dimly lit corners and back rooms at parties, even when circumstances often would have it otherwise in his youth. Now, silence is the oil pouring over the hot coals of his thoughts.
Oh but it had crept up on him too slowly, really. He tries to rationalize it to the impartial crowd of his shadowed wooden ceiling. It had invaded his defenses while he wasn’t looking, gradually filling the corners of his mind in a way that was disturbingly similar to the noiseless, noxious gasses of a trap set up in a dungeon. While he was too busy marveling at the fact that he has friends now, fucking hell, he has people who know his name and his face and won’t kill him for it it had made its way through flushed dreams and disregarded afternoon fantasies until his whole body lay under the siege of its brutal conquest.
The ceiling of the Xhorhaus, unhelpfully, doesn’t respond. The bandages make his chest itch. Caleb continues, unperturbed. He is a creature of habits ingrained. He knows how to problem-solve.
[First step is to guard your mind. Look at the whole picture. Retrace your missteps.]
This one is easy. The problem is the very thing that landed him here, on strict bed rest. Though, of course it is ridiculous that he should have been coerced into such a thing, they have all patched themselves up from worse and gotten back up for a second charge at every sort of formidable monster, but then– oh she had given him that look, the one that made Caleb’s stomach feel like a wasp’s nest, and been all ‘ but Cayy-leb what if those things were poisonous, we did some lesser restorations but those claws were all purple and shit, we don’t know about that, what if it spreads and turns you into a bug or something, let’s just be careful for now yeah?’ and Caleb had suddenly become incapable of protesting.
Problem: He is a little in love with Jester Lavorre.
[No, not like that Bren. Don’t try to sweep things under the rug. Face your mistakes or they will burn you. Try again.]
Addendum: He is terribly, hopelessly, uselessly in love with Jester Lavorre.
- Somewhere between having his first fight with Beauregard and getting to step into the well polished shoes of a local hero.
- Somewhere between letting Yasha shave him with a fucking greatsword and bleeding out, and bleeding out, and bleeding out again and again and again.
- Somewhere between dancing drunkenly in a town with a name that made her giggle while she spun him around with reckless abandon like he weighed nothing, and looking up from his own clumsy feet to see that smile, oh that damned smile, like he was being confided in, like they were sharing a secret, like the whole rest of the world wasn’t a burning terrifying mess but just a silly shared joke that only they were in on, like nothing could reach them, like he was nobody, like he wasn’t–
[Bren.]
He glares at the ceiling. It is indifferent to his perils. Caleb exhales all of the air in his body until he is completely deflated and the wound in his chest aches and then he goes to sleep.
–
There are so many moments where Caleb has been convinced, utterly convinced, that there is no way that she is even a real person. There are enough examples of it to last a lifetime.
One day, weeks and miles from here and now. It is one of those days where there is nothing on the agenda except for moving forward on the map and they are laying on the sun-warmed wood of the Balleater like lizards soaking up the heat. Nott is braiding some flowers into his hair and he has taken off his coat, though not yet the wrappings around his forearms; Beauregard is sparring with Fjord but stopping every five minutes to brag about her bruises, and it is the kind of day where that might almost be enough to make him laugh out loud.
Though he is lulled by the sedative daze of friendship he finds her (always, always in every room, by touch or sound or the color blue in a crowd or the scent of lavender anywhere). She is sitting down further on the deck, closer to the edge of the ship with her legs stretched wide and skirt flown all around her, making a comical figure next to Yasha’s politely folded giantess stature. She sits on the side of the sun, fluttering arms making her jewelries twinkle and catch the light. She barely reaches Yasha’s navel in height but she is gesticulating like she’s twice her size, like always. His smile catches him before he can even try to combat it.
Nott is the only one who can really see him anyways, and the sun is warming him so nicely and except for the occasional roar of victory from the Beau/Fjord-direction the only noise around him is the low hum of the country song he doesn’t think Nott is aware she’s singing somewhere over his head, and that is low enough that he can easily overhear Jester telling Yasha about how she found this reallly cool bird the other day Yasha I swear its beak looked like a penis it was craazy and I mean like I’ve seen a lot of dicks so when I say it’s crazy I really know what I’m talking about y’know and he thinks there must be some undiscovered deep arcane work at hand here, she must be the sole proprietor of a new power that bends the universe to her delighted whims. That she walks among them must be nothing short of a divine miracle.
He wishes sometimes, selfishly, when he feels himself become lifeless and dull and seeping the joy out of his surroundings that he could take some of that lustrous light and pour it into a flask, to keep it all for himself. Though he always buries the thought with the swiftness of a man who has practiced that particular motion a thousand times, he could never bring himself to feel that selfish impulse right here, right now.
He knows, as they all know but few have spoken of that Yasha has been down lately, quiet and withdrawn as the date of her wife’s passing approaches. Caleb knows it well, knows it like he knows the back of his hand the kind of hurt that dates bring back. The hurt that you think you’ve left behind, the memories that come swinging back down under the indifferent gavel of the passage of time as each year passes. He knows it intimately, deeply, contemptuously – but doesn’t have enough time to feel it before he sees Jester swing so wide with one gesticulation that she overshoots and falls back on the deck, ass over teakettle, legs akimbo. Caleb watches the worried lines of Yashas forehead smooth out with laughter, watches her shoulders fall relaxed and thinks through the furious burn of his own infatuation: learned scholars could study the magic of Jester Lavorre for a thousand years and never figure her out.
It is a worse day by far. Caleb has always been grateful for the ticking constant of the clock in his head, for the ever-running background calculation that lets him know exactly where and when he is. It was something to keep him grounded while he was starving in back alleys, the steady thrum of a pulse to keep his fingers on while rotting away in a prison cell that told him he was still here, days were still passing, the earth was turning. Not to mention how useful it is for keeping an aspiring but terribly ill-coordinated adventurer’s party on schedule.
Now, it is not so much a blessing as a curse. It is day 3 of walking the underground tunnels and his vision has been nothing but grayscale rock and suffocating air for exactly 74 hours 32 minutes and 24–25–26 seconds and his shoe has a pebble in it and everything is silent except for the echoes of their footfalls and the off-key song Beauregard has been humming for the last 33. Minutes. Straight. He has nothing but poor renditions of Sweet Caroline and echoes and the unspoken fear of ghosts that just so happen to be of his past to occupy him, and Caleb Widogast is about to lose his mind.
The air tastes like dirt and earth and the mineral-tinged flavor of Wet in his throat. Caleb never even knew wet was a taste. He can tell the others are having about as good a time as he is. Yasha’s shoulders are raised an inch higher than normal. Caduceus has not looked down at the ground once in the last 55 minutes, studying the interlocking network of roots bursting through the porous rock with the alert gaze of a prey animal on the run.
The last few days have been a shitshow.
It should be funny. Maybe if they tell his tale amongst the heroic stories of the Mighty Nein in taverns a hundred years of now it’ll be told as a comedy of errors. He hopes it’ll evoke some laughs. The tangled mess of a man who left his past behind to become nobody, only to end up with his history biting at his ankles as he ran from it. In fairy tales the evildoer was always awarded the satisfying conclusion of narrative symmetry; with the weight of their crimes choking the life out of them, a triumphant defeat gilded with righteousness. He hopes that’s what he’ll get. He hopes they’ll write his story with justice in mind.
It’s a classic: A man walks into a bar. A war criminal walks into a bar. A grotesque monster in the shape of a man walks into a room filled with the evidence of his mistakes, of the blood-spilling and hostage-interrogating that was once a regular weekday night of his curriculum and throws up on the floor just by the reminder of it. Caleb often thinks of the boy he was, the young prodigy with star-dazzled eyes so blinded by the brightness of his future that he’d gore the throat, rip the heart, dampen his hands in blood and forget it by morning. He wishes he didn’t recognize that boy when gazing at his reflection. He wishes he could bury him and move on, like Mollymauk had.
There are so many things he regrets about Molly, but that one selfish desire has always burned him the most. Some nights Molly dances in his dreams, light on his feet as he leaps across a burning field– the flames never seem to touch his feet, no matter where he goes. The dream always ends the same way: Caleb chasing, chasing, across that field in flames, distance growing further until he trips his feet over the burning bones, until he looks into that bright abyss and sees the faces of his mother and father, contorted in pain amongst the embers, cursing his name until he wakes drenched in cold sweat, gasping their names into the night. He never falls back asleep, those nights.
But they – his family, his companions, his brothers and sisters, they simply don’t– they simply don’t deserve it. They stumble from place to place with good intentions and worse preparations, but they don’t deserve the heavy lead weight of things larger than them all dragged into their midst. The things he’s brought with him.
Nott’s eyes are the size of twin moons, pale and yellow in the darkness of the tunnel just like a cat’s. They haven’t talked, not since everything.
Your people did this your people did this your people your people your people.
The sound of her heart breaking echoes in the tunnel still, even though Caleb knows she didn’t mean it, that she had just lost everything and that the hurt made her lash out. Caleb also knows that she was within her full rights to mean it, should she have wanted to. The barbs sting, nonetheless. They haven’t really talked it out, there hasn’t been enough room or privacy for them to chat like they used to – that’s another one of his selfish wants, to return to the simple, terrible times, for it to be just the two of them against the frightening world, like it used to be. The world had seemed so overwhelmingly large that its movements had hardly concerned them. Great battles and deeds were carried out by heroes whose names were carved in golden plaques, who had schools and castles and coliseums named after them, not some scrawny boy from a podunk town who didn’t own more than one shirt and his goblin friend. Their days were dedicated to hoarding food, to robbing tipsy crownsguard of their meager coin, to being unseen, unheard.
The world seems so terribly within reach now. His footsteps have enough weight to leave footprints in the sands of time. The thought is more frightening than anything.
Still, Nott never strays far from him, even with things as they are. She still nudges him away from low-hanging stalactites, still steers him away from the uneven ground his feeble human sight can’t parse. Even though the question is not will she forgive me but should she, she stays . Caleb has tried to convince her otherwise many, many times and he has never once succeeded. He wonders, sometimes, if he had been her outlet for the motherhood she couldn’t tamper down, still so natural to her after all these years without her child. He wouldn’t blame her for it – he had been a son in terrible need of a mother.
“Hey Cay-leb!”
It takes him a second to return to the present, blinking heavily to wipe away the remnants of memory burned solidly to the backs of his eyes in this darkness.
“Ja ?”
Jester bounces to his side, like the treacherous path is simply arranged there to give her extra flair as she skips. He supposed it is, to her.
The tip of her tongue peaks devilishly above her upper lip as she seemingly struggles to search the depths of her skirt pockets before procuring a small item with a triumphant a-ha! and presents the thing to Caleb in a curled hand, expectant.
Caleb looks at it blankly.
“Ah. Is there something you needed me to identify, Jester?”
She pauses for a second before giggling with that girlish soprano of hers. “Oh haha, I totally forgot you can’t see shit in here. Hold on.” She puts the tip of her finger to her lips and blows on it like it’s a birthday candle. With a whoosh a small, golden, sacred flamelet erupts from it.
The sight steals the breath from Caleb’s lungs for a second, steals all thoughts from his head. In the darkness, the flame paints her face with a cascade of bejeweled light. The pure white firelight refracts in on itself, casting a halo of ephemeral prismatic colors over her ocean skin and twinkling like fading stars in the gemstones that adorn her. He thinks of watching the sun shine down on them from the bottom of the sea. He thinks of touching her.
Caleb quickly looks aside. That’s a forbidden line of thought.
Jester points the fire over her cupped palm, illuminating what Caleb now sees is a small leather pouch filled almost to the brim with small multicolored pearls glittering softly in the reflected light.
“ Ta-daa! Cool right? I got them on Bisaft from this really nice lady, she was suuper cool and she told me they were totally real which I don’t really know if I believe ‘cause they were real cheap but she told me they were the perfect gift for a boyfriend of such a nice lady as yours truly so she put down the price for me and so I got a whole bunch of them-aren’t-they-cool-Cayleeb?”
How she manages to speak without ever pausing for breath, he will never know.
“Ja, they are very nice.” The awkward silence that always seems to follow his interjections is especially deafening when it’s in comparison to Jester’s digressions so Caleb makes another effort. “They are, um, for Fjord?”
“No, silly! They’re for you, gosh.”
Caleb pauses mid-step. “For me?”
“Yeah, for you! Well, for Nott, really. I bought them ‘cause I thought they’d look cool braided into Beau’s hair, but then everything went down and I figured Nott would probably appreciate them more right now.”
“If they are for Nott, why are you giving them to me?” Caleb asks, puzzled.
“Well, I think she wants them from you,” Jester replies, head cocked like the answer should be obvious.
It is like that sometimes with Jester. How she manages to fit so many contradictions into one tiny body, Caleb has no idea. Most days she is a young girl, so full of childlike glee and wonderment that it borders on naivete. Delighted by most things, delightful always. And then she catapults a situation with some comment that makes her seem far beyond her years, some observation that once she’s said it seems so obvious it feels crazy that nobody else has thought of it yet. It’s that extra sense that tells her when Caduceus is feeling homesick enough to make him tea or how to say the exact right joke to make Fjord’s shoulders drop and his laughter reach his belly.
Jester Lavorre is like quicksilver on a stone slate, full of anomalies, a maddening impossibility of a person. Prancing around like she’s a fancy lady walking the streets of the Tri-Spires even when they’re deep in the bowels of devilish lairs, being intensely excited by the sights of strange bugs or phallic imagery while dressed in swaths of silken skirts that almost certainly cost more than anything Caleb’s ever owned. Surprisingly squeamish around blood when the situation allows it to, brutally efficient in setting back bones or pumping someone’s heart until their chest breaks without so much as a twitch of her face.
She is an enigma, yes, but she makes it seem effortless, like she does everything. Keeps on teasing and smiling as she dances herself through the most jagged of paths.
Jester pats his shoulder with a frisk one-two before sauntering around – what Caleb a few seconds later painfully realizes – is a hole in the ground.
The night had been peaceful, tucked inside some anonymous grove in the southernmost vestiges of the Cyrios mountains. The war had everyone on edge, and their particular group did not mix well with the enforced border patrol, so they had opted for a slightly longer but safer path. They didn’t exactly have time for leisure, but Caduceus had gently explained to them all that should the Crownsguard discover that the strange, multicolored troupe officially crossing to resell proprietary farmer’s tools were adorned with one ostentatious silver bag from the Kryn Empress – here he had paused and given Beauregard a prolonged Look – it would in fact take them longer than just taking the further road. Nobody had argued long after that (a miracle by their group’s standard, truly), and so Caleb found himself halfway dozing on the latter end of a night’s watch in a rocky woodlet a few hours south of Deastok.
The orange glow of the campfire paints an ever-flickering topographical map of light across Fjord’s face, giving his profile stoic shadows as he gazes at the stars. His head is tilted back against a tree for comfort, seemingly lost in his thoughts. Caleb sighs as he suddenly feels his own limbs come alive with prickling pain, reminding him how long he’d been sat in the same position. The leather-bound tome falls shut in his lap as he shifts and stretches. Which was no matter, really. Everybody only ever lauded his memory when it got them out of devilish labyrinths or haunted forests. They were all fools not to see its premiere functionality, that he was blessedly bookmark-free (not to speak of dog-earing, perish the thought!) for life. Gosh, his shoulders ache though. His body somehow knit itself into a complicated pretzel shape every time he got lost in a book, which was very often, and he swore he never caught himself in the act until his back started screaming in protest. A relatively young man of 33, with the body of an old curmudgeon already. He is one pulled muscle away from accepting Beauregard’s invites to the workout circle at this point. Desperate times and all that.
Shhhhnk.
Fjord meets Caleb’s eyes at a whiplash speed. Caleb freezes, arms hovering inches off the ground.
Shhrhhhnk.
The forest is buzzing with critters, alive even in the velvet darkness of night. It’s hot out, heat of the day captured within the blanket of heavy clouds gathered in the inky sky. The air whispers with the promise of thunder. Fjord looks at Caleb. Caleb looks at Fjord.
The night is green, dark, precarious.
Shhhhr–Crack!
“ Scheiße ,” Caleb wheezes.
–
The battlefield is a mess of screams and confusion.
Smoke. Smoke as dark as the night sky, heavy with dust that used to be people.
Not now, not now. [ Focus, REDACTED.]
The creatures are a mass of undulating, serpentine flesh, slick spines covered in an oily black sheen. They emit waves of chirping, clicking sounds that make the hair on his arms stand on end; it’s an unnatural, grating sound. Hundreds and hundreds of spindly orange skewer-like legs slice in and out of the earthen ground with a vicious shhnk-shhnk as they skitter in and out of the darkness.
Where are they? The fog is choking the sight out of the night, rendering his transmuter’s stone completely useless. Panic is steadily rising-rising-rising in his chest.
You cannot see. You cannot breathe. You can only dig your bleeding hands into the ground as the screams burst through melting lungs and cooking flesh.
You can only listen.
You can only listen.
Behind him, someone screams. Caleb turns towards the noise, and comes face to face with an open monstrous jaw, twice the size of his body. For one heart stopping moment all he can see is the two burning hateful suns embedded in the monster’s face – it has a face – boring themselves into his very soul. The world is redredredredredredredredred. He has just a fragment of a second to think oh I am going to die, your mother’s face, the sound of her voice
before the creature’s mouth rips in two under the outrageous force of Beauregard’s fist.
“Oh shit, Caleb, you okay?”
Beauregard wipes the back of her hand on her cheek, leaving an inky purple smear on her face, looking completely unaffected save for the exertion. Next to her the mountain of oozing black mass still heaves in its death throes.
You are the coolest person I know, Caleb thinks to himself, leaning his hands on his thighs for just a moment to regain control over his body before straightening up to look – not in her eyes, but maybe 20 or so inches to the left of her face.
“Where are the others?” he asks.
Beauregard shrugs, elbow flying dangerously close to his lamentably frail body with the movement. Why every movement had to be a full body movement for this woman Caleb does not know.
“No idea. Did you see those fucking things? Fucking centipedes? With giant evil baby faces? And mouths?”
And mouths, Caleb silently agrees. Though mouths might be a generous term. Those fearsome creatures had rows and rows of gnashed teeth, deathly sharp and longer than his entire arm. Its bellowing breath had released a foul odor, clouds of sickening purple and brown ooze, cancerous twisting tongue filthy with cadaverous remains and necrotic sludge. He had thought his last moments would smell of corpses and–
“Sulphur,” he mutters.
Understanding immediately dawns upon Beauregard’s face.
“You think they’re abyssal?”
“ Ja, maybe.”
“This fucking close to the major cities? How fast can they be opening these portals up?”
“Trostenwald isn’t that far from here,” he reminds her.
“Well, yeah, but that was peanuts. This is full on demon shit!”
“Do you know what they might be?
Beauregard ignores him in favor of leaping somewhere to his right, and Caleb whips around to find her bo staff jammed between two plates of vertebral armor that jangle together unpleasantly at the intrusion. He reaches inside his pockets with the quickfire speed of a man who’s kept the same system of organization for years, snatching a bit of dried squid between his fingers and whispering Iss Tintenfisch, Arschloch very very gently to it, watching with no small sense of satisfaction as the creature cracks and bleeds under the force of the dark tentacles pulling it into the ground.
“Sheesh,” Beau said, janking out her staff with a look of disgust as viscous black ooze stuck to the end of it, “Remind me never to get on your bad side.”
Somehow, even in this situation, Caleb wants to laugh.
“You have been on my bad side many times, Beauregard. I think you can handle it.”
She punches him on the shoulder, which could mean anything, really.
A beam of light erupts in the mist beyond them, followed by a booming sound. Beauregard is off before Caleb has the time to say ow, and he hurries best he can in the direction she had disappeared in (59º39’29” N 12º35’19”. Easy to remember.)
Another flash, this time a vibrant green. The screams of Nott. Not in the direction Beau had gone, but to his left. It takes him barely a fragment of a second to react, so hard wired is he to react to her anguish.
Well. The choice is easy to make.
He pivots in his step and makes for the source of the sound, trying not to startle at the skittering that emanates in and out from the dense, unnatural fog. It is sparser, here, leaving gaps of visible ground. The noises of battle somehow seem to be coming in louder now, too, as if the clearing of the air has released them from whatever muffling effect this mist has.
Suddenly, many things happen at once.
- The deep reverberations of Fjords voice from 59º39’29” N 12º35’19” saying one single word: “Barlgura.”
- An explosion of wind, expanding with the heavy impact of the spell, carrying the echoes of that infernal command on its whips as for a moment, the mist is dispersed.
- Caleb turning around an outcropping of rocks and seeing:
- Nott, pinned against the stone, reloading her crossbow with a frantic screech.
- Jester running towards them, shouting something too far to hear.
- The fast approaching hulking figure of a monster, jaw wide, teeth sharp and deadly.
Some things are easy, because he’s been made for it. Instinctual, on the molecular level. He reaches into his component pouch before he can even think about doing it.
Bat guano + sulfur. Tracing a figure in the air so familiar that he doesn’t have to follow it so much as just reaching out to touch that river of energy inside of himself and thinking fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire.
Flames erupting from his hands like screaming, wild beasts. Singeing the hair on his arms and the air in his lungs and devolving the whole world into pure scolding heat.
your mother’s hair your mother’s hands
The creature shrieks and writhes, trying to escape the flames now encasing its massive body. Its front raises up in the air, thrashing violently before it throws itself downwards to put itself out. Towards the ground, where Jester is running for them.
Jester.
Jester.
Jester.
There is no choice. No active decision on his part. Barely time to even think. Just the fact that she cannot– will not– not fall while he is within reach.
And so one second Caleb is huddled next to Nott, embers not yet cooled within his palm. And the next he is standing in front of her, arms outstretched, with a long oozing fang deeply embedded within his chest.
(For a split second, he traces the sharp protrusion that emerges from his ribcage with a dissociated fascination. Jester is holding his face between her hands, though he cannot feel them. It is strange – it looks like she is yelling, but no sound comes. Her eyes are a furious, wet purple and he allows himself to think, in this liminal moment, that she is beautiful.)
Then he thinks nothing at all.
–
Caleb doesn’t know why he’d even bothered with trying to sleep. He’s been tossing and turning for hours with this terrible prescribed “bed rest”, whatever that is. He’s pretty sure he’s never heard of such a thing in his life and his so called friends are just trying to torture him with this dreadful boredom. Left with so little stimulation after such an adrenaline-filled series of events, sleep would be the naïvest of wishes. Plus, there is a lingering taste of bitterness in the back of Caleb’s mouth. They’d had to change their plans because of him. Stop mid-journey and go back home rather than risk him catching something of the devil-worm-baby variety out in the middle of nowhere. Luckily, they had Essek to send them back once Caleb could convince them he was fine and not about to sprout a bunch of tiny legs, but still. He shifts uncomfortably for the hundredth time in his sheets. His mind races, thoughts loud and inexorable with everything that has happened the recent few days. They’re all tinged an unavoidable blue. The ceiling offers no guidance.
The room is unchanged still, muted street lamp still pouring its bloodless purple light through the window. He imagines if they ever were to spend a prolonged period in Rosohna he might slowly go cooky, always knowing in the back of his head that it was 3:46 or 11:23 or five-past-half-past-midnight but having the sky stay that everlasting black through it all. Motes of dust breeze in and out of the light, dancing in the air as Caleb shifts on his mattress again.
It crept up on him too subtly, really, it had. Gods. The bed creaks, and a small jolt of pain creeps from his wound. Beauregard had informed him of the rest of last night’s events while the rest of them had crowded awkwardly around his bed, looking at him like he was going to spontaneously combust or something which was frankly kind of offensive. Jester had been too tapped to do any more than stabilize him, apparently, but she’d carried him to Caduceus and he’d managed to deal with the worst of it. Somehow – and this part he has no recollection of – Caleb had drawn up the teleportation circle to the Lucid Bastion in his still half-impaled state and then promptly passed the fuck out again. Beauregard had finished the report by letting him know they had used up all their last spell slots for lesser restorations to try and get the unidentified poison out of his system, and then given him a pat that somehow managed to be both violent and awkward. It had made something in the back of Caleb’s neck itch at the thought of having been the recipient of so much attention, medical or not, so he had quickly shooed them out of the room and told them to go out and drink in his stead.
The muffled sound of the doorbell jingling downstairs jostles him from his thoughts, followed by the rumble of nine (more or less) pairs of feet thundering through the doorstep, of excited voices too deafened by the floorboards to make out. Caleb nervously fiddles with the edges of the bandages that come wrapped up over his shoulders as he hears the tap-tap-tap-tap of quick footfalls making themselves up the stairs. Not the light, rapid pitterpatter steps of Nott, but a dancing, skipping rhythm. Alarm bells immediately go off in Caleb’s head and he quickly reaches for the nearest book and drags himself into a sort of sitting position; he leans heavily against the wall for support before immediately realizing what a foolish impulse it is. It isn’t like he has been doing anything visibly incriminating – he’s just been lying here, thinking. Still, he flushes with the childish feeling of having been caught as the door to his room flings open with a vicious force.
“Heyy-Caleb! How! Are! You!”
As always, the entrance of Jester in any room felt like suddenly being blasted with the force of a thousand suns. This is no exception, as she sings her words and gives him one finger gun for every syllable (his name always turns monosyllabic in her mouth, but with double the vowels. It is a delightful rush down his spine every time she sings it.)
“I’m, ah , alright,” he manages, clutching at the spine of the book.
Jester’s gaze slides down to the object in his lap and her face splits into a wide smile. “Oh– oh! Are you liking the gift I gave you?”
Caleb stiffens as he realizes he’s grabbed the latest bodice ripper Jester had let circulate through the group after she’d finished it. Something about a vampire with a dark past and a glistening chest falling in love with his human blood donator, which involved a great many corsets and eyeliner. Mortification makes heat rise to his cheeks, though it quickly melts into something warmer as he thinks of the way he’d sometimes find Nott, or even Yasha with their noses buried in one of the Jester hand-me-downs. She was single handedly raising the reading rate of the group by double at least.
“It is very engrossing.”
“I’m so glad you like it. Ooh, wait, did you get to the part where they're stuck in a cave and Azalur has to suck the poison out of Thenrir’s blood and they’re all naaked and stuff? It’s super sexy, oh man, what about the part where they have to share a room and there’s only one bed – omigosh that part was great.”
At this point Jester has folded her knees and plopped unceremoniously down on the floor by his bed, invigorated by her own recounting. His urge to smile is unsurmountable, even in this pitiful state.
“I haven’t yet, but I’ll make sure to tell you when I get there.”
“Please do,” she nods decisively.
Caleb waits patiently for her to continue, but is met with an uncharacteristic silence instead.
After a few moments he coughs to clear his throat. “Was there… anything you needed, Jester?”
Jester bites her lip quietly before speaking again, this time in a much softer voice. “Well… yeah, I just wanted to check in on you, y’know?”
She is wringing her hands in her lap, a seemingly unconscious movement as she looks up at him nervously. Her eyes are wide and shining like two pale moons in the darkness of the room.
“Oh.” Caleb doesn’t quite know how to react to the sudden shift of her tone. He fiddles with the cover of the book. “Well, now you have.”
Something about this seems to take her aback for a moment. Jester makes a strange expression, stiffening somewhat. For a second she just looks at him, face unreadable. Then she shifts and attempts the same jovial tone as before.
“Yup! I guess you’re right!” She trails off with an awkward giggle.
The room goes silent again. Caleb’s forearms twitch.
“Did you, uhm. Did you have a good time tonight?”
“Hm? Oh. Yup.”
“Was the tavern rowdy?”
“Yeah, for sure.”
“...Did anything happen?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Jester.”
“Tootally.”
“How many fingers am I holding up?”
A sudden look of determination settles on Jester’s face. “I’m gonna try something.”
Caleb really has no idea what is going on at this point. Even by Jester’s standards, the turns of the conversation are inflicting exceptional levels of whiplash. Which is why all he can really do is sit and stare at her, frozen and wide-eyed, and go; “Oh. Ja . Okay.”
She looks at him intently for an excruciatingly long time. For once Caleb doesn’t know if it’s seconds or minutes, but it feels like years. He can feel the sweat forming at his temples. Then she starts moving towards him, with purpose, but slowly enough that Caleb is pretty sure he goes through every single spectrum of emotion that he’s ever felt in his entire life as she stands up and puts her knee on the mattress beside him, dipping the bed with her weight. She hasn’t stopped looking at him, and he realizes with sudden paralyzing clarity that she hasn’t stopped moving, either.
Caleb’s heart is fluttering with the terrified wildness of a newborn chick. His mouth turns dry as he goes from this-can’t-possibly-be-what-i-think-it-is to oh-gods-it-is-exactly-what-i-think-it-is to the mind-numbing earth-shattering heart-stopping realization that Jester Lavorre is inches from his face and she is going to kiss him.
She hovers just moments from touching him, as if waiting for him to change his mind. Caleb can feel her breath on his lips. He is absolutely, utterly powerless. He cannot move, cannot breathe, cannot think.
And then Jester kisses him.
The world seems to tilt on its axis. Caleb feels like the ground has disappeared from underneath him, like gravity has changed its course as everything he thought was true about the world disintegrates into ineligible chaos. He makes a pitiful sound against her, helpless as the weight of months of longing come crashing down on him. For a moment that stretches out into eons, all he can think of is the soft dampness of her lips, the smell of her hair, her weight on his lap. There is nothing at all in the world but the need to get closer, to have more, to feel this wonderful electric heat that trickles down his core.
Jester cards her fingers through his hair and makes a soft sound, and suddenly Caleb’s thoughts catch up with him. Realization shoots through him like splinters of ice burying themselves in his chest, every reason why this is a terrible idea. Slowly, gently, he extracts himself from her touch, leaning his forehead against hers for just one second. Just one, as he prepares himself for how he is about to shatter.
“Jester.”
His voice comes out too weak. Too broken. Caleb tries again.
“Jester.”
“Mhm?”
“Please don’t.” It comes out barely a whisper. A desperate plea for mercy.
Jester pulls back to look at him, worry painted all over that beautiful face.
(Don’t think about it now, don’t think about how beautiful she is. Fuck. Shit. Fuck.)
Caleb inhales shakily, every muscle in his body stiff with tension before he gathers the small amount of bravery he has left to look her in the eye. She’s worrying her lower lip between her teeth, eyebrows knit in concern as she waits for him to show any discernible reaction. Just this once, she seems to be wordless.
A pang of grief shoots through his heart. Despite his confusion and the storm of emotions waiting to burst from under his skin, Caleb knows that she doesn’t deserve this. Whatever rejection he’s about to give, it will be another notch in his long list of wrongdoings. The ceiling still offers him no advice. Caleb wants to scream. He steadies himself with one breath. Two breaths. Three.
“I think you should go.” His voice is nothing but dust and ash. He cannot look at her.
“Oh,” she says in a small voice. “Okay.”
He watches in his periphery as Jester’s face falls, as her shoulders slump and she withdraws from his space. It takes everything in him not to follow her warmth, her touch, as coldness once again seeps in from the places they had been touching. (Gods, they had been touching. )
She looks at him once more, standing by the bed. Caleb is entirely unmoving. The shadows of the night sky paint the room a distant purple.
“Sorry,” she says, and then she disappears out the door.
It closes softly, and Caleb’s heart shatters into a thousand pieces.