Work Text:
You position the knife between your fingers, humming as you do. The knife’s blade meets the wooden board with a subtle thunk, and then the lemon breaks apart into two halves, one slightly larger than the other.
Even though there are kitchen gadgets nowadays that make the job easier, you still prefer doing it manually. It’s how it’d always been done at Grandma Josephine’s house, how Caleb always prepared the fruit juice that accompanied your breakfast every morning. And even though you haven’t done this in a while, the motions are still familiar: place the larger half into the lemon press, close the upper lid, then squeeze.
The juice trickles into the waiting saucepan, where sits a glossy mixture of reduced apples, water, and sugar. You mix the juice with a spoon until it dissolves into the other ingredients, leaving behind hardly a trace but for the steam that billows out up to the exhaust fan overhead—the ghost of something sweet and effervescent, missed but gone regardless.
There’s a note that sits on the countertop beside the stove, and though it’s there, you’re doing everything in your power not to look at it. It’s late at night and you have work tomorrow, and the entire apartment is silent except for the sound of bubbling heat and the clock that hangs in the living room, tick-tick-ticking away. You know without knowing what the words on it say, can picture that familiar handwriting like it’s been bleached to the backs of your eyelids. And you do not look at it, you don’t —your attention is on the stove, the jam in the saucepan, the clock. That blasted clock.
You figure that it should be ready by now, but the truth is, you don’t know. It’s not like you’ve ever done this before, not even when you thought all those months ago that he was gone. But here you are, trying to make a point, though what that point is, you don’t really know.
You don’t know a lot of things, really— you realise with the stark clarity of an oncoming truck as you turn down the heat without fully turning it off and scoop a tiny spoonful of the jam up to your lips. You only know what you can grasp between your fingers, like the hard plastic of your Hunters Association-sanctioned gun, or the cold metal of those dogtags you gave him, or that endless well of grief between your lungs. The slight brittleness of his hair ever since the explosion, like he hasn’t been taking care of it properly, or like it never grew back right. The skin of his right arm, his lips, his eyes.
You swallow the lump in your throat, and you do not look at the note. You blow the spoon with a paltry excuse of a breath and then push it past your lips, let it rest on your tongue. And then the flavour hits, and it’s—
—not like how he usually makes it.
The disappointment hits you like a thunderstorm before the rain, and your fingers tighten into a fist against the countertop. Your eyes flit, finally, to the crumpled piece of paper just beside it.
The secret ingredient to my special apple jam is a splash of lemon juice. Now that you know my secret recipe, will you think of me whenever you make jam?
Your knees buckle, and your palm finds the paper to pull it down with you. With trembling hands you reread every line, trying to find some hidden message in the words, the way he curves his a’s. You turn the paper backwards, sideways, upside down—but nothing. That’s all it says.
So why doesn’t it taste the same?
You sigh something old and aching, like grief for something living. Something vibrates in your pocket, and as if on autopilot, you fumble for it with a vacantness to your eyes that belies every sinking fear pulling from within you, your ear catching the ever-present ticking in the other room. You unlock your phone to a message from him, something about why you haven’t contacted him since you left Skyhaven, and you can’t take it.
He doesn’t know, doesn’t know. That everytime you look at him and touch him and try to commit everything of his to memory, he becomes a contrail across the blue expanse of your sky: sharp and stark and wondrous, but in the next moment, gone. Always gone.
You press the call button without hesitating, and your entire body is trembling but it has to go through, he has to pick up. It rings for three centuries or three seconds, and then his voice, blessedly, filters through the speakers.
“Pipsqueak? What’s—”
“I added lemon juice, but the apple jam still doesn’t taste like yours.”
Silence at the other end of the line. The clock ticks away in the background, excruciating and ignorant to the way your bottom lip quivers, the way saltwater threatens to spill from the corners of your eyes.
“Caleb,” you try. On every holy thing, you swear you try. Your hands grip the phone to your ear as if it’ll keep him where you can always hear him. “I don’t think I can make it.” I don’t think I can make it without you.
A shattered sigh, crackling at the edges, and then, “Oh, princess. Princess…”
You sob into the mic like there’s this monstrous spirit carving its way up your bowels and through your throat, and then your sobbing becomes the shrieking of a harpy, a planet excised from orbit, a soul curdling without its sun. You can’t go through that again, you can’t, it doesn’t matter how many god-forsaken letters he writes before every god-forsaken mission, it will never replace the presence of him. Even if he rearranged all the dishes one shelf lower so you can reach them or told you where he’s hidden all the presents he’ll ever give you or recorded himself saying good night for every single day of the year or made you an entire fucking lifetime’s supply of apple jam, it wouldn’t matter, because he wouldn’t be there. He wouldn’t be there.
“Shh, I know. I know. But I’m okay right now, hm? I’m okay,” he’s hushing, and you realise you must have been saying this out loud through all your wheezing and hiccuping. “I’ll be there soon. Stay on the line with me, okay?”
You don’t know how long you remain sitting there, your knees curled up to your chest and the world carrying on without you. The jam remains simmering on the stove, and you don’t know if it’s burnt by now but you don’t really care, you can’t find it in yourself. All you can do is remember those days when you couldn’t taste a thing, when everything reminded you of him, when your grief was grief and then denial then rage, then floundering into vacuity until he clawed his way out of the grave that fateful day in the interrogation room. The world carries on, the clock keeps ticking, and the jam is burning. You don’t care, you never have.
The front door unlocks; there’s only one person with a spare key. You cast your eyes listlessly to the entryway that separates the kitchen from the living room, and then he’s there. Oh, you could cry again. He’s there.
Caleb approaches you like he sees nothing else, like the world could explode tomorrow and he’d carry on just from the sight of you. His frantic aconites don’t leave you for even a second, even as he turns the stove off and sinks down beside you. He gathers you in his arms, unchanged yet not. You cling all the same.
“What brought this on, hm?” he asks softly after a while. His palms run soothing paths up and down your back, and you let yourself find solace in the steady beat of his heart. Still alive, you remind yourself. Still here. “I told you not to read those silly letters.”
“They aren’t silly,” you mumble against him. “They’re—They’re yours.”
“And? Doesn’t matter. I told you, any man who makes you cry isn’t worth it, pipsqueak.”
You hit his arm gently with a curled fist, but don’t respond. How do you let him know? How do you make him understand? Your tears slow to a mournful trickle until he’s dried them all with his thumb, that gravitational force that swipes your cheek and keeps you tethered to him forever.
“Any of them could’ve been your last,” you finally say. “I could’ve lost you— really lost you—all those years ago. All those times you were injured, and even now…”
Your gaze finds his left arm, and Caleb sighs. He holds you tighter, like it’ll squeeze out all the sadness from you like the juice from a sour lemon and you let him, you’ll always let him.
“I’ll always, always come home to you. Alright? Even if you don’t want me to,” he murmurs into your hair, his breath fanning your scalp. “Nothin’ will take me from you. Promise.”
You have to wonder if this is how he feels every time you brush him off, or do something dangerous, or ignore his fervent warnings. It’s like nothing matters, not even his promises to never leave, because the fear is there and known and you never want to know it again. You reach up and cup his forlorn face with clammy hands, trying as always to carve the sight of him into your soul. The clock keeps ticking, and you try regardless. There’s nothing left to do but try.
It’s like he knows what you’re doing, because Caleb kisses the apples of your cheeks with the reverence of a devotee, and he pulls from you just enough that you can meet the blazing dawnlight lying dormant in his lilac eyes, soft like the flame of a candle.
“I’ve lost you once already,” you tell him, and he flinches. “I can’t, Caleb. You didn’t—you couldn’t know. How it felt. That sensation gnawing in my chest, it was like—”
“Like a void that couldn’t be filled,” he mutters. “I know.”
“And I can’t do it again, you can’t make me. Why is it that you’re always… always slipping away to somewhere I can’t reach? Don’t go somewhere I can’t follow, Caleb.” And you’re pleading, you think, against the weight of his life in your throat. “Don’t go.”
“I won’t, I won’t,” he soothes. You let his familiar tenor envelope you entirely, let him hold you like that a little while longer. “Someday, it’ll just be us two. You and me, in our own little world. I’ll make it happen, princess, I swear it. But for now, you gotta have faith, okay? That you can reach me, wherever I go. Can you do that for me?”
You nod your assent gingerly, and Caleb finally smiles softly in triumph. “Good girl. Tell you what—I’ve got a place I wanna show you. Someplace nice. If you’re free this weekend, I could come back, pick you up. Take you there.”
You’d let him take you anywhere. You nod again, huffing against the warmth of his lips that trail from your forehead to the slope of your nose to the corner of your mouth. He finally kisses you properly, achingly tender; you kiss back with all the promise your existence can hold.
And you don’t know if you could really reach him, if it came down to it. Nobody could know, not even him. But you swear to yourself as your hand slots with his that you’ll try. If it’s the last thing you do, you’ll try.