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Snow had been falling since dusk - soft at first, polite as a whisper against the glass - but now it came in steady sheets that blurred the world into a single, muffled color. The windowpanes held the cold at bay with a thin film of frost around their edges, and the lamplight inside turned everything amber and gentle, like the room had decided it would not acknowledge winter’s teeth any more than it had to.
Caleb sat on the sofa, a table pulled close, with his shoulders slightly hunched, as if the act of leaning forward could hide him from time.
A half-finished scarf lay pooled in his lap and across the tabletop: deep red, threaded through with darker flecks where the yarn had been spun unevenly. The color suited him, he told himself, something warm, something that looked like it had lived through fire and come out softened. He told himself that as though this scarf were for him and not for the person pretending not to watch him from the chair by the hearth.
The needles clicked.
Not evenly. Not beautifully.
They clicked like a conversation in a language Caleb did not speak fluently yet - hesitant, sometimes halting, sometimes too fast, the rhythm catching and slipping as his fingers decided, stubbornly, to be bodies first and tools second. This was not a language magic could translate for him. This took time.
He tightened a stitch without meaning to.
A brief, sharp protest flared at the base of his thumb. He felt it like a spark caught under the skin, the kind that begged to be ignored, the kind he had ignored for decades.
His mouth went thin.
He loosened his grip. Forced it.
The needles continued.
Across the room, Essek’s book did not turn a page.
Caleb kept his eyes on the yarn.
His hands had always been… precise. He had built an entire life on precision. On angles and syllables and the exact flex of a finger as magic snapped into place. Even in the early days - back when he was still running, still raw, still convinced every kindness was a trap - his hands had been the one thing that obeyed him without question.
Now, on the worst mornings, they took a moment to remember him.
It was subtle. A reluctance. A stiffness that made him pause with his palm against the edge of the bed, waiting for the joints to soften enough to make a fist.
It was nothing, he had told himself, for a long time.
Just cold. Just age. Just the price of living.
But there had been a moment the month before - only a moment, barely long enough to name - when Caleb had been mid-incantation and his hands had locked.
Not failed. Not collapsed.
Just… stopped.
The spell faltered, magic stuttering at his fingertips like a breath caught halfway in the lungs. For the briefest instant, his fingers refused the shape they had known for decades. The heat he’d called never quite arrived. The air went still.
Then it passed.
His hands loosened. The spell unraveled harmlessly into nothing. No one else would have noticed. No damage done. No witnesses. Nothing to report.
Caleb stood there afterward, heart pounding, staring at his hands as if they belonged to someone else.
Enough to scare him.
So when he had reached for a match a few weeks ago - choosing the old, quiet way instead of calling fire to his fingertips - and his fingers had not quite closed around it, the moment landed heavier than it should have.
The match slipped from his grasp and fell, tapping softly against the floorboards like an accusation.
He had stared at the match, stunned, as if it had betrayed him.
Essek had not said anything then, either.
He had only crossed the room, knelt with an ease that still felt faintly wrong on a man who once floated everywhere as if the ground were beneath his dignity, and picked the match up. He had lit the candle himself, the flame blooming steady and calm.
Magic could have fixed the candle.
It could not fix the moment.
And Essek, blessedly, understood that - which was why he crossed the room instead of casting anything himself.
And then, not even a day later, Caleb had found a small stack of books on the table, as if left by accident. Medical treatises. Notes in familiar tiny handwriting. A pamphlet that looked like it had been handled a dozen times. A list of remedies in Zemnian.
Caleb had pretended not to notice.
He had always been good at pretending.
Tonight, he knitted.
He had not expected to hate it.
Jester had been the one to suggest painting first, weeks ago, when she’d come by with her hands full of bright chaos and her hair dusted with snow. She had kissed Caleb’s cheek, kissed Essek’s forehead without waiting for permission, and declared, as if she had discovered a secret truth of the universe, that what Caleb needed was a hobby.
Because of course Jester - sweet, kind, Jester - had noticed the brief clenching of fingers over the past several months, rubbing palms over knuckles, flexing his hands in his coat pockets when he thought no one was looking.
“You need something cozy!” she had insisted, shrugging off her coat, stomping her boots by the door. “Something with, like - winter vibes. And you could paint! You could paint little snowflakes and sad wizard towers and -”
“I am not good at painting,” Caleb had said, because it was easier than saying: I am not good at making things that do not have a purpose. I am not good at failing where people can see it.
Jester had waved her hand as if that was nonsense. “That’s not a real problem. You just paint anyway.”
He had tried.
He had sat at this same table with a brush between his fingers and a blank canvas in front of him, and the whiteness had felt like a trap. The brush had trembled - just slightly, just enough to make his stomach tighten. The first stroke had gone crooked, and something in him had clenched hard and sharp, like a fist closing around his throat.
He had stopped after three lines.
Essek had watched him wash the paint from the bristles with slow, careful motions and had said, very quietly, “Perhaps… not that.”
He had sounded thoughtful, not dismissive. As if he were already turning through other possibilities in his mind.
A few days later, he had suggested knitting.
Caleb had stared at him over his tea. “Why?”
Essek had lifted one shoulder in a mild shrug that did not quite disguise the satisfaction beneath it. “Because,” he’d said, “I have read that it keeps the fingers moving. Gently. And because you are already so fond of wearing scarves. It seemed…” His mouth had tilted, something almost like amusement. “Appropriate.”
“I do not need another scarf,” Caleb had argued automatically.
“You do,” Essek had said, and then, softer, “Even if you give it away.”
So here Caleb was. Bitterly, begrudgingly, incredibly grateful.
The needles clicked. The scarf grew.
And then the yarn gave a sudden, decisive tug.
Caleb frowned and followed it with his eyes just in time to see their sandy colored cat trotting proudly across the room, the ball of yarn trailing behind it like a captured prize.
“Absolutely not,” Caleb said.
Essek did not look up. “I warned you,” he said calmly, turning a page. “Loose threads invite chaos.”
The cat vanished beneath the table.
The scarf tightened ominously.
Essek sighed and stood. “Stay there,” he told Caleb. “Neither of you are to move.”
Caleb obeyed. The cat did not.
There was a brief, undignified scramble beneath the table, the soft thump of something bumped and righted, and then Essek emerged with the yarn ball reclaimed in one hand and the cat tucked securely under his arm.
The cat blinked at them both, unrepentant.
Essek set the yarn safely out of reach before lowering the cat back to the floor.
“You see,” he said mildly, returning to his chair, “contained.”
The cat immediately flopped onto its side and went to sleep.
Caleb stared at it for a long moment, then huffed a quiet laugh and picked up his needles.
His fingers stiffened again, midway through a row. He tried to ignore it. The way he always did. The old instinct rose up so familiar it tasted like smoke: push through. Ignore it. Do it anyway.
His grip tightened.
Pain flared, bright and sudden, and the needle slipped.
The yarn snagged.
Caleb swore under his breath - low, harsh Undercommon that he had not meant to say aloud.
The chair by the hearth scraped softly against the floor.
Essek’s shadow fell across the table before his hands did.
“Caleb,” he said, like a warning.
“I am fine,” Caleb replied at once, because he was still, infuriatingly, himself.
Essek did not argue with the word.
He did not scold. He did not take the needles away.
He only reached for Caleb’s hands.
His fingers were cool when they first touched Caleb’s skin - always a touch cooler than they should have been, as if the Luxon’s blessing held winter somewhere close to Essek at all times - but his palms warmed quickly, magic or blood or both.
“Let me,” Essek murmured.
Caleb almost pulled away.
The instinct to refuse care was older than the Empire’s cruelty. Years ago, it was Trent’s voice in his ear. Refuse. Deny. Make yourself small and sharp and self-sufficient so no one can take anything from you. Now, it was simpler than that. Stubbornness. Pride. The quiet shame of growing older beside the same, unchanged, beautiful face he had fallen in love with a long time ago.
Essek’s thumb pressed lightly at the base of Caleb’s aching joint, and the protest in his hand softened in spite of him.
Caleb exhaled, a small sound he did not mean to make.
Essek’s gaze flicked up to his face, quick and assessing, then back down. He held Caleb’s hand as if it were something fragile he respected, not something broken he pitied.
He guided Caleb’s fingers open, one by one.
Caleb watched his own hand unfurl with a strange detachment, like he was watching someone else’s body.
A bowl appeared on the table - Caleb hadn’t noticed Essek cross the room. Warm water steamed faintly from it, scented with something herbal, something clean.
“You prepared this?” Caleb asked, and the question came out sharper than he intended.
Essek’s mouth twitched. “Of course I prepared this.”
There was a faint, fond irritation in it, as if he could not believe Caleb would ever assume otherwise.
Essek dipped a cloth into the water and wrung it out, then paused. He held his hands over the bowl for a moment longer than necessary, letting the steam warm his fingers before he touched Caleb again.
Only then did he wrap the cloth around Caleb’s hand.
The warmth seeped in slowly, coaxing rather than demanding.
Caleb’s shoulders loosened without permission.
Essek worked in silence, methodical, the way he did everything - like he had decided a thing was worth doing and therefore it would be done properly. He massaged salve into Caleb’s knuckles with careful pressure, circling each joint as if he were tracing runes.
It would have been easier if it were runes.
Easier if this were something that could be solved with the right spell, the right incantation, the right cleverness.
Instead it was time, settling into bone.
Caleb swallowed.
Outside, the wind pushed snow against the window with a soft hiss.
Inside, Essek’s hands moved with quiet devotion.
Caleb’s throat tightened around words he did not want to say.
He stared at the scarf - at the uneven stitches, the places where he had pulled too tight, the little imperfections accumulating like proof that his body was changing whether he allowed it or not.
Essek finished with his left hand and moved to the right, fingers sliding along Caleb’s palm.
Caleb’s voice, when it came, was quieter than he meant it to be.
“We always said…” He had to clear his throat. “We always said this would be temporary.”
Essek’s hands did not stop.
But something in him went still.
Caleb’s gaze stayed fixed on the scarf, as if the yarn could keep him anchored.
“It is not -” Caleb began, and then the words tangled, because that was the problem with speaking about things you did not want to acknowledge: the mouth did not have practice. “It is not fair,” he said finally. “To ask you to… to stay. To watch this happen. To…”
To watch me fail.
To watch me diminish.
To watch me die, slowly, in increments.
He did not say any of those things.
Essek’s thumb pressed gently against the inside of Caleb’s wrist, feeling the pulse there as if confirming something.
“I am not being asked,” Essek said, very softly.
Caleb let out a humorless breath. “You are, though. Even if I do not say it.”
Essek’s gaze lifted. He looked at Caleb the way he always did when Caleb tried to turn himself into a problem to be solved: with a measured patience that contained, beneath it, something fierce.
Caleb’s voice slipped into the shape of logic because logic was safer than pleading.
“You are Drow. You will live a long time.”
“And you are human,” Essek agreed, as if stating the weather.
Caleb flinched anyway.
He forced himself onward. “We agreed a long time ago. We said we would not -" He swallowed. “We would not bind each other to grief.”
Essek’s hands stilled fully then. He held Caleb’s right hand between his palms, warm now, sheltered.
“We agreed,” Essek said slowly, “when we were both still very proud. And very frightened. And,” he added, almost dryly, “not yet accustomed to each other’s stubbornness.”
Caleb’s mouth tightened. “Essek.”
Essek did not let him deflect.
"I do not view time as a ledger of fairness, Caleb Widogast."
Caleb felt the truth of that like a weight in his chest.
“You still do not need to stay,” Caleb said, and the words came out rougher than he wanted. “You do not need to -” He tried again, softer, as if gentleness could make it less of an offering. “You can move on. Later. When it is… when it is time.”
Essek’s eyebrows rose, faintly incredulous.
“You are dismissing me,” he said, with a calm that was not calm at all.
“I am giving you permission,” Caleb corrected, because that was what it felt like. A mercy. A release. A way to control the shape of loss before it arrived.
Essek’s grip tightened - barely, but enough that Caleb felt it.
“I did not ask for your permission,” Essek said.
Caleb looked down at their hands. At the contrast: his pale fingers, Essek’s darker skin; the faint scars on Caleb’s knuckles from a lifetime of work and war; the smooth, steady pressure of Essek’s touch.
“I do not want to be the reason you stop living forward,” Caleb said, and he hated the way his voice cracked on the last word.
Essek’s expression softened into something that hurt.
“I have lived forward,” he said quietly.
Caleb’s eyes flicked up.
Essek’s gaze held his.
“I have lived centuries before you,” Essek continued, voice even, “and I do not find that argument persuasive.”
Caleb’s breath caught, sharp.
Essek lifted Caleb’s hand, still wrapped in warmth, and pressed his lips to Caleb’s knuckles - not dramatic, not performative. A simple contact. A vow made small enough to fit in a room.
Caleb’s throat tightened again. He blinked hard, furious with his own body for wanting to cry.
“It is not a moment,” Caleb whispered. “It is… it is years.”
“Yes,” Essek said, as if that proved his point.
Caleb shook his head once, small. “It ends.”
Essek’s mouth curved, faint and sad, as if he had expected this exact turn.
“I am not afraid,” Essek said, “of loving something that ends.”
Caleb stared at him, helpless.
The room was warm. The world outside was white with snow. Everything felt unbearably temporary and unbearably alive.
A knock sounded at the door.
Both of them stilled.
“Widogast! Open up. It’s cold as shit out here.”
Caleb blinked, as if waking. “Beau?”
Essek released his hand, not quite, and rose with a smoothness that made Caleb want to laugh, bitterly, at the unfairness of bodies. Essek crossed to the door and opened it.
Beau stood there with snow in her hair and a scarf of her own wrapped haphazardly around her neck. Her cheeks were red from the cold. She looked like she’d been arguing with the weather and lost.
She stomped her boots once inside, then paused, eyes flicking from Essek to Caleb to the scarf on the table to the bowl of water, still steaming faintly.
Her gaze sharpened.
Beau shut the door behind her with her heel. She didn’t take off her coat.
She exhaled through her nose.
“You two good?” she asked, tone casual enough to be suspicious.
Essek straightened first.
“Yes,” he said, evenly. “But I believe you wished to speak with Caleb?”
Beau’s eyes flicked to him, surprised. Then she huffed a short laugh.
“Damn. Yeah. Actually.” She jerked her chin at Caleb. “You. Minute.”
Caleb hesitated.
Essek’s hand brushed his wrist - not restraining, not urgent. Just present.
“I will make tea,” Essek said, already turning away. “I can get some of the kind you like from the Grove, Beauregard. Take your time.”
Because of course his husband would waste teleportation magic on retrieving one of their friend's favorite blends. Even after all these years, he was still going out of his way to please the people Caleb loved. The people Essek now had long since loved.
It also helped that it was a convenient excuse to get out of the house.
Caleb watched him go with a familiar mix of affection and dread. Essek would absolutely use the opportunity to consult Caduceus about his obstinate partner, and if he came back with the cleric in tow, Caleb was done for. Entirely. No argument. No defense. Just soft-voiced wisdom and devastatingly gentle disappointment.
Beau’s gaze dropped.
“Uh,” she said.
Caleb followed it in time to see the yarn looped neatly around Essek’s ankle as he passed through the room.
Essek stopped. Looked down. Looked up.
“I appear to be… entangled,” he said mildly. "Apparently, I am no more graceful than a common cat."
Beau barked a laugh. “Geez, Caleb. If you didn't want him to go, you could've just said something."
Essek stooped and gently freed the yarn from his ankle without comment.
He left the room without another word, quiet as snowfall.
The door closed.
The warmth shifted. Thinned.
Beau crossed the room in three steps and leaned her hip against the table like she owned the space, like she had been doing that since they were all twenty-something and filthy and exhausted and still learning how to survive each other.
Her eyes went to Caleb’s hands.
Then to his face.
Then, slowly, sharpened.
“What’s going on,” she said - not a question.
Caleb opened his mouth. Closed it.
Beau snorted. “Yeah. That tracks.”
She folded her arms, studying him the way she used to study suspects who thought they were smarter than her.
"Come on, I walked in on enough arguments growing up to recognize the vibes. Notice how I mentioned my shitty parents, and not my own marriage. Because Yasha and I are perfect. Disgustingly perfect."
Caleb’s mouth twitched, the ghost of a smile that didn’t quite make it all the way there. He knew Beau was only trying to provoke him, he even maybe appreciated it - but he was too tired, too exposed, too close to the truth to spar.
“You are trying to irritate me so I will argue instead of… whatever this is,” he said.
Beau’s mouth curved. “Is it working?”
“Annoyingly so,” Caleb admitted.
Her eyes went to Caleb’s hands again.
She tilted her head, eyes narrowing, reading him like a book she’d memorized years ago.
Beau snorted, then winced and shifted her weight.
“You know,” she sighed, “for the record? Yasha had to carry me halfway home three days ago because I tweaked my back doing something incredibly heroic.”
Caleb raised an eyebrow.
“I was reaching for a book,” Beau admitted. “A very dangerous book.”
She rolled her shoulders carefully.
“Did I love it? No. Did I survive? Unfortunately, yes. And also - after I got over myself, I realized it was pretty fucking hot. We had to take a little detour home to stop and - take care of things, if you know what I mean."
Caleb rubbed his temple, but he couldn't scrub the traces of fondness playing at the edges of his mouth.
"Unfortunately, Beauregard," he said dryly, "I always know what you mean."
Beau huffed a laugh and dropped into the chair across from him, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees. The humor drained from her expression as she settled, replaced by something intent. He felt the weight of her attention, familiar and unflinching.
Then, like a knife finding the seam -
“A long time ago,” Beau said, “I told you not to do it.”
Caleb’s jaw clenched. “Do what.”
“You know what.” Beau’s voice was rough, impatient, but there was something careful beneath it that she would die before she admitted to. “Back when your past was right there, snapping at your heels, and you were so scared it would touch us."
"Don't run."
He could still remember the rare earnestness on her face when she’d said it. The concern.
Caleb’s chest tightened.
"You can say you don't believe in anything, and that's fine. Believe in us, just a little bit?"
“Back then, you were scared of your past," she continued. "Now you’re scared of your future. Same shit. Different costume.”
Caleb swallowed. “Beau -”
“Don’t,” Beau cut in, and her eyes went sharp with it. “Don’t leave him because you think you have to. Don’t decide for him what he can handle. That’s -” she made a face, frustrated with her own sincerity. “That’s not you being noble. That’s you being a coward.”
Caleb’s throat closed around the words he wanted to throw back at her.
Beau pushed off the chair and took a step closer, lowering her voice like that made it less exposed.
“You’ve done the running thing,” she said. “It didn’t save you. It just made you lonely.”
Caleb’s eyes burned.
Beau held his gaze a heartbeat longer, then rolled her eyes hard, as if to cover up the fact that she cared at all.
“Anyway,” she said, louder, backing away. “That’s all. I’m not staying. I didn’t come here to watch you have feelings. I just came to drop off those stupid books Jester told me you’d pretend you don’t need.”
Caleb blinked. “What books?”
Beau pulled a small stack from inside her coat, paper-wrapped and slightly damp from snow. She slapped them onto the table beside the scarf.
“Hand stretches,” she said, making a disgusted face. “Old monk stuff. Also some annoying herbal thing from Caduceus that smells like a forest threw up.”
Caleb stared.
Beau pointed at him, two fingers like a warning. “Don’t run.”
Then, without turning, she lifted her chin slightly toward the doorway.
“Don’t let him."
Caleb followed her gaze just in time to see Essek standing in the threshold, a small paper-wrapped bundle of tea in one hand.
Essek’s mouth quirked, almost imperceptibly.
Beau paused, as if considering something else, then seemed to decide against it. She turned and strode past Essek, snatching the tea as she went.
"Thanks, Essek. We can have some when you come over tomorrow for book club with Jes."
Beau yanked the door open, letting a gust of cold air sweep in.
“Oh,” she added over her shoulder, “nice scarf.”
And then she was gone, the door shutting behind her, the room returning to quiet so abruptly it felt like being dropped into deep water.
Caleb sat very still.
"I thought you would be gone longer." He said simply.
"Caduceus wasn't home."
Caleb's hands rested on the table, still warm from Essek’s care.
He stared at the scarf.
At the books Beau had brought.
At the small, domestic evidence of people refusing to let him disappear.
He laughed once, a tiny sound with no humor in it.
Essek crossed the room and sat with his book again, this time right next to him on the sofa. He didn’t speak immediately.
He waited, the way he always did, letting Caleb have the space to arrive at himself.
Caleb swallowed. His voice came out hoarse.
“I thought,” he admitted, staring at the yarn as if it could hold him together, “I thought this would hurt less if I left first.”
Silence.
Then Essek’s hand covered Caleb’s - not to fix, not to coax. Just to be there.
"But I'm afraid I am also very selfish and hadn't worked up the courage to do it yet."
Essek’s thumb traced a small, absent circle against Caleb’s wrist as he listened.
“I would rather it hurt,” Essek said, “than never have happened.”
Caleb’s eyes shut.
For a moment, he let himself lean into the warmth of Essek’s touch. Let himself be held, not as a patient, not as a problem, but as a partner.
When he opened his eyes again, the scarf lay where he had left it, still unfinished. Still waiting.
Caleb reached for the needles.
His fingers moved more carefully now.
Essek shifted closer, and when Caleb’s hands trembled on a particularly stubborn stitch, Essek didn’t take the work away. He only lifted the yarn slightly, kept it taut, steadied the line so Caleb could slide the needle through without strain.
Together, they coaxed the next row into being.
The needles clicked - still uneven, still imperfect, but steadier than before.
Caleb nudged Essek’s book aside just enough to keep the firelight from glaring on the page.
Essek paused. “Thank you,” he said, surprised.
Outside, snow kept falling, piling quiet and deep.
Inside, the lamplight held.
Caleb’s head dipped forward once, heavy with warmth and exhaustion.
He blinked, tried to focus on the stitch in front of him, and failed.
Essek’s shoulder was there when Caleb leaned, as if it had always been there.
The needles slipped from Caleb’s fingers and landed softly on the scarf.
Essek didn’t move them.
He only tilted his head until it rested, gently, against Caleb’s hair.
Caleb slept.
Snow deepened outside.
And the scarf - unfinished, uneven, real - lay between them like proof of the long work still ahead. Not something to be rushed. Not something to abandon halfway through. The long work of staying.