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Essek arrives unexpectedly.
One moment, there is Caleb’s rug (soft, so warm to stand on barefoot, a luxury he would never have justified on his own, but he has shopped a little with Jester, and a little with Yasha, and he is slowly making a home of this place), and the hearth fire just close enough to warm, and the curtains across the room (closed against the freezing night, snow on the sill), and the half-darkness beyond the glow of his reading Lights, and the next, there is Essek—or ‘Kessel’ for now, blonde and pale and lovely but not quite so lovely—in the middle of Caleb’s little living room.
Caleb stands immediately—calmly (calmly) but immediately—because it means one of a small number of things, when Essek appears unexpectedly.
Essek does not look injured; Essek does not look…stressed in the usual way. Essek looks, if Caleb had to put a finger on it, a little sheepish.
“I am unharmed,” he says first, which is good of him, and perhaps a response to Caleb’s expression (there is always the terrifying possibility of gaping wounds beneath his disguise). And then, a little tightly, “I—hope this is not a bad time?”
He has been here more often this year—has begun to slink in a little like a cat out of the cold, Caleb will never say out loud—but it is usually a planned thing. He has begun to teleport in directly, at least, stepping through the precisely Essek-shaped gap in the wards, rather than appearing down the street and knocking on the door like a casual caller: a step in the right direction.
He remains hesitant, though, to name himself a proper place in Caleb’s home, the sort of place that lets one invite oneself or stay too long, despite the standing offer. The hesitation is not mysterious: fear is an old friend, and when fear gets tired, shame never rests. Caleb is tempted some nights to throw himself from his own home, because it is warm and and wonderful and deeply unfit for a thing such as he. So, they do not talk about it, not really, not often. Essek is scared, always, and they are both terrible, unworthy things, and somehow, Caleb has this anyway: the rug and the hearth and the currently-sleeping beans in the front garden and Essek, lovely Essek, suddenly here.
“Never a bad time, dear,” Caleb offers, because Essek has this anyway too, whether he has accepted it yet or not.
Essek smiles—Kessel smiles—and for a moment it is mostly the Shadowhand’s smile, a little too glib, meant to hide rather than to share. Part of Essek would like to be at the front door, Caleb thinks, knocking and being permitted in, even as it would be freezing cold and with risk of engagement by the neighbours. It would soothe the part of him that worries he is intruding, even when told he is not.
The court smile softens minutely when he meets Caleb’s eye. He huffs a tiny breath through his nose. “Still, I am sorry to arrive unplanned. It is only...” he pauses—looks at his own hand a moment—and huffs again as the illusion drops away.
There he is.
(There is something in Caleb’s chest that drops with it, or expands a little, like breathing in more deeply. There he is: lovely, dear, difficult, suddenly-here Essek. Catalogue the details, quickly now, time for more later: he is indeed uninjured, at least by visual sign; he has not lost any more weight; there is a little of a soft sort of panic if one knows where in his eyes to look—he is tired of the illusions, Caleb knows, and it is wearing badly on his nerves; he is dressed for the cold, and there is a little snow now melting on his knitted hat—it would be no good for Kessel Teylen to magically shed the snow and rain, of course—he was out somewhere before here, then; he has been trancing a little better than last visit, perhaps, but not nearly as well as either of them might like.)
Caleb lets the inspection show; lets the warmth show too. “Hallo, my friend.”
Essek rolls his eyes.
Caleb crosses the remaining few steps of distance; raises a hand slowly, and when Essek does not stop him, slips a thumb gently under the edge of the damp woollen hat, eases it from his friend’s head. Essek’s ears pop out, pleased to be freed (perhaps that is just Caleb’s conceit for them; he is fond of them, lovely terrible things, and certainly they would be pleased to be warm and dry as well). Essek’s dear, fussy hair is terribly flattened underneath.
Essek huffs again, a tiny thing, still not quite impolite. “You did not have plans tonight?”
Caleb casts his eyes back at his abandoned reading chair. “None that will not wait for me.”
Essek is inspecting him too: eyes flickering over his face, over his warm, comfortable robe and the nightshirt underneath, over things Caleb doesn’t see in his own eyes, perhaps, in the set of his own shoulders.
Finally, Essek raises a hand of his own and, with no snowy accoutrements to remove in return, places it lightly on Caleb’ jaw instead, and leans in—a pause, an inch away, a tiny breath in—and kisses him with the soft deliberation that he always does (this is a choice they make deliberately, every time: to kiss, once more and again). His lips are a little cool; Caleb kisses him a second time for good measure, and then they are just a little warmer.
Caleb keeps his hand at Essek’s hip when Essek’s fingers trail from his jaw (for now, for now). “To what do I owe the pleasure, dear?”
Essek’s little sigh this time is less politic (and isn’t that warm, to watch him relax by increments). “You will think me foolish. I think me foolish.”
Caleb raises an eyebrow.
“It is only…” Oh, he is sheepish. If he were any other man, Caleb thinks, he would be shifting awkwardly where he stands. He is not, and so he stands perfectly still and looks almost like he is here on some terribly professional business. “There is a holiday in Tal’dorei called Winter’s Crest. You are aware of it?”
“…I am aware.”
Another tiny huff. “Yes. Yes, well. You see—” he is flustered; he is out of sorts with himself more than anything else, Caleb thinks. Another little roll of the eyes. “It is coming up, on Da’leysen. Would you believe that I have been asked 13 times in the past week whether I am seeing family for the holiday? I barely speak to 13 people in a week. I am fairly certain Jester had an agenda, but she certainly cannot have coordinated the rest without knowing where I’m living.”
Oh.
Essek shrugs, very tightly. “And, well, I…” He trails off with surpassing awkwardness. Blinks several times, too fast. “I had been thinking…it seemed a silly reason to—well. But then…” He looks down a long moment, as though Caleb’s shoulder might provide some unexpected clarity. “If I am honest, Caleb: the woman who rents next-door to me asked as I set out to Beldrash’s this afternoon, and I told her 'no', of course, no plans, though people do not much like that answer—and then Beldrash asked while he was counting across my fee, which I did not expect, and I told him the same thing—and then as I turned into the street on which I have been staying, I saw the other neighbour loitering by her fence hanging—there are these dyed streamers that people—it doesn’t matter—and I just…” Essek straightens minutely. He looks completely put together. He looks mortified, if one knows where to look. “Didn’t go home, instead.”
There is a holiday this time of year in Wildemount too, of course: there are lanterns and candles and little bonfires lit tonight for the eve, and tomorrow Caleb will eat lunch with Beau and Yasha for the Day of Heart and Hearth (two days early for their weekly dinner; two weeks early for the Nein’s monthly weekend, though he ferried Veth and her family back into the Empire yesterday, a little rented place not so far from where they used to live, so that Luc can play in the snow; and Jester has already exhausted her every spell on Sending tonight, and will do it again tomorrow). He thought last week about inviting Essek for the lunch, and didn’t: because Essek panics easily, and because Caleb is almost certain that Xhorhas doesn’t celebrate the same holidays, which would make it a little…something, and because…well, he didn’t. He didn’t. They are both awkward, perhaps.
Caleb does not get asked whether he is seeing family for Heart and Hearth, because most everyone at Soltryce is perfectly, horribly aware of…ja. And for the most part, that spares him the well-meaning chorus that has been afflicting Essek. He still hears the way it’s addressed to everyone else, hears the warm way it’s answered, lets it burn him, fort, doch nicht vergessen; and twice, some poor student has asked him, to a chorus of poorly hushed gasps from those in earshot (a whole small workshop class, in one case), which is fairly horrible.
And now, Essek has come home.
Caleb does not laugh, and does not think about what his mother would have done with such an extra head for Heart’s Eve dinner (oh, oh), and does not say ‘these things are not for men like you and I’, and does not grab and clutch at his friend like a child. He says, very calmly, “I am very glad to see you for Winter’s Crest, my friend.”
Essek blinks several times, very fast.
Caleb brushes a little snow off his shoulder. “Come, dear. Let’s get you out of your street things.”
It is not, Caleb thinks as he hangs Essek’s coat by the door (“I’m sorry, I should arrive in the entryway so that—” “Nonsense”), quite the same thing yearning in Essek that burns Caleb this time of year.
Essek, after all, has no memories of Heart and Hearth with family.
He misses Verin, Caleb knows, in the abstract way that one misses something one is about to lose: he has not yet been in hiding any longer than he would go without contact anyway, but he will be. Before, there was always going to be another meeting, eventually. Now…perhaps.
Essek misses his mother in a way that is deeply complicated and not new: that relationship was fraught to begin with, and then he lost her in pieces, over decades, by changes in himself and in her, and by distancing himself, and much of it was never reversible even when he was minutes from her and visiting most days for tea and frustration, but none of it is reversible now. There is something hollow there, Caleb knows, that Essek doesn’t know how to treat because he hasn’t figured out yet how to touch it. Perhaps that is closer, with all the talk of family.
But also…perhaps there is a little of the second, more ordinary pang that Caleb feels when colleagues glow about their Hearth plans, never meaning him to hear. There is the specific pain, the one that is right and proper and unmoving, the one that is vast and wild enough to tear worlds apart, the one that cracks at his ribs when ‘my family are dead because I killed them’ is not an appropriate response to almost any question. But there is also the one that blooms and warms when Jester sends; the one that ached when he measured out Caduceus’s tea earlier this evening, and again when he put a little whisky in it once brewed; the one that is so very, very eased by the knowledge that tomorrow, he will wrap his scarf and tie his boots and teleport to Beau and Yasha, and they will share a hearth, as family does.
An easier pang to soothe.
Essek always looks small in the first moments out of his coat (the man loves a very wide shoulder); today, he looks just a little fragile as well, standing perfectly straight in Caleb’s entryway, here with neither notice nor emergency for the very, very first time, and not quite sure what to do with it.
Caleb opens his arms.
Essek sniffs once, and stands up very straight (oh so very tired), and steps in to meet him.
It is such a particular thing, to hold a person one loves in one’s arms.
They end up back in front of the hearth where it is warm, and where there is a book that Caleb has been meaning to share, and also still most of a pot of tea with whisky. There are lebkuchen too, three from the little paper parcel Agnes gave him yesterday, and Essek nibbles at the edge of one and does not express a conclusive opinion, but eventually eats most of it.
Caleb is not sure what words he could possibly put together about Essek—lovely, scared, foolish, brave Essek—eating lebkuchen and slowly warming through in front of his hearth on Heart’s Eve. Essek talks about the piece of work he has just finished for his current most frequent employer, and Caleb looks at him, and nods in the right places, and hears his mother humming alle jahre wieder from just in the next room. Sees the kaminblumen his father’s mother dyed and cut from rags before he was born pinned over the mantel, as though they are not ashes with all the rest. Sees, so clearly, he and Essek and Beau and Yasha sitting down to lunch tomorrow (it could—maybe?), and sees all nine of them and Yeza and Luc too sitting down to lunch in another year perhaps to come, futures and futures allowing (oh, that is—oh), and sees all of them and his mother and his father and Molly and Cad’s family and Jester’s and every person they all have loved, all packed around the big table in his Tower, in another impossible year, and sees Essek, dear, tired Essek, looking at him from a foot away on the sofa, very delicately licking crumbs from a fingertip, warm, a question in his face but all the uncertainty and the courtier’s mask bled out of his posture, and thinks—
—oh.
Oh.
These things are not for men like he and Essek.
These things have never been for men like he and Essek.
And yet…
It would seem that heart and hearth have come to them anyway.
They are warm in Caleb’s bed when the endless sweep of time ticks over past midnight, the eve to the day itself.
The great bell peals deeply in the distant Chantry, just five times (it is not a holiday of Pelor, after all), and a few people cheer perhaps a few houses down, or maybe a little further, and Essek shifts a little beneath the blankets, fingers curling in some unrecognisable snatch of somatic against Caleb’s chest, not surfacing from his trance.
He is soft-limbed, sharp-elbowed, mostly bare, utterly warm; he is all rest, trusting and quiescent in Caleb’s arms.
Heart and hearth have come to them anyway.
Caleb breathes in deep—his bed, his home, his terrible, foolish, dear friend—and breathes out slow.
It is a strange and wonderful thing, to be so warm in every way.
(It will get less strange every year.)
(For both of them.)
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