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The broken shards of the Dodecahedron dig into his hands, his arms, burning so cold that it brings more agony than even his most scorching fires could. Trent Ikithon’s crystals are nothing compared to this, and he did it to himself all on his own.
He can hear Yasha roaring with rage in the distance, Nott screaming, Beau desperately shouting his name, feel Caduceus and Fjord’s magic thick in the air, headed straight for him.
It feels so unexpected and yet appropriate that Jester is the only one who reaches him. He’s hurt and bleeding, raw magic licking at his skin like sandpaper, standing tall and stiff as he stubbornly works his magics and his dear friends try and stop him. They think he’s going to damage space and time permanently, blow a miles wide hole into the Empire with him at the epicentre. They think he’s going to get himself killed.
But he has studied and he has experimented and he is as sure as he’s ever going to be and the guilt and the regret and the shame are simmering underneath his skin like his veins are filled with flame. He knows how to do this, and so now he needs to do this. He will do this. He’s doing this.
His friends are trying to stop him because they are worried and foolish and do not understand, will never fully comprehend his mistake no matter how hard he tries to make them. But it is fine. This will work, and then they will never have been afraid for him or of him at all.
This has to work.
Jester is the only one who reaches him. She was standing the closest to him at the edge of the camp before they realized that he’d stolen the Dodecahedron out of its lead case while no one was paying attention to him, that he had it in his hands and he was muttering the chants he needed to crack it open like an egg and harness the potent magics within. They would have noticed faster if he’d tried to sneak all the way away. They’ve known to keep an eye on him, after he’d foolishly tried to persuade them to let him do the spell, after he’d explained his intentions honestly and sincerely, thinking that for once that they would understand. He will always be a fool. But if there is one thing in his life that he will get right, then it will be this forsaken spell.
Jester’s fingers digging hard into his shoulder as she frantically grabs at him, his chosen name on her lips. He’s always been fond of the way she says it. Cayyy-leb. Drawn out out a bit, accent thick. She sounds scared. He hates that. He focuses on the spell. Only a few more words. She won’t be able to stop him in time, even as she’s touching him. She’ll hesitate to hurt him, and a moment is all he needs at this point. The thing’s already broken, painful frigid shards digging into his flesh, burying themselves deeper, pushing further and further inside by magic and intent, going for the bones.
“Please--” she begs, ragged, but then it is too late.
Caleb twists time and space and fate to his desires, undoing the unforgivable.
Finally.
The inside of his head is stuffed with muzzy fuzz, slowing and muting his thoughts. He feels dizzy, disoriented, slow as molasses. His eyes flutter open, and the world is as fuzzy as his brain, out of focus. He sees a ceiling that he does not recognize. He is lying on a hard wooden floor. His mouth is dry. Did Beau persuade him to overdrink again?
Blue moves into his line of vision. He is not alarmed. This is a familiar shade of blue that means safety and happiness and fondness.
Jester.
--her desperate grip on his shoulder, her sweet playful voice going sharp with fear and urgency in his ears, cold overwhelming pain in his arms as he focused on the spell. She’d stopped him.
“Nein!” he cries out, sitting up so quickly he feels dizzy with it. His chance--!
“I’m eight, actually, technically, almost,” a voice that sounds almost right says. Caleb blinks rapidly and looks, clutching at his arms that feel whole and unharmed.
There is a little blue tiefling girl in front of him, wearing a floofy pink dress and looking up at him with great curiosity. Caleb does not know any little tiefling girls, but every single freckle on her face is achingly familiar. He looks at her for a long moment, struck dumb and silent, and then he looks frantically around himself.
It is a decently sized bedroom, filled to the brim with pink and frills and stuffed animals and paintbrushes and pencils and papers and drawings littering the floor and the walls. This is not where he was. This is not where he was trying to get--
“My name is Jester,” the little blue tiefling girl says, and he startles and inhales sharply even though he isn’t really surprised. “What’s yours?”
“I,” he says, voice scraping out of his throat. He swallows and looks back at her, stares.
Jester is younger than him. He’s unsure by how much; the few times anyones asked how old she is within his earshot she’s only replied that it’s rude to ask a lady her age. There is a Bren out there somewhere, but he is not eight. He thinks, though, that he is probably maybe in the right time. That he has a chance to stop it all.
His parents are alive out there somewhere. Unmurdered, unbetrayed, unwronged. Their son has not turned on them in the worst possible way yet.
His vision is blurring again, and a noise escapes him. He thinks for a moment that it is sobbing, before he realizes that it's laughter.
“What’s so funny?” little Jester asks curiously, apparently not perturbed at all by the strange, grown, dirty man who has suddenly appeared in her bedroom where no one but her mother should be, crying and laughing on her floor. Jester has always been so ready for whatever life has to throw at her, though.
“T--this,” he rasps. “Life. Hope. Ah, happiness. It is funny, ja?” He laughs again, jagged and genuine. His smile feels wide and foreign on his face, unfamiliar. He has been so used to only taking happiness in small, wry smiles, a guilty aftertaste to every chuckle, every moment that he’s let himself forget even a little bit.
He can be happy now. He’s allowed. Oh, gods, he’s dizzy with the relief of it.
“I guess?” Jester says, head tilting like a puppy in time with the uncertain upwards lilt of her words. She smiles suddenly, friendly, and the expression looks much more comfortable on her face than it feels on his. “You are funny. Are you a friend of the Traveler?”
Ah, of course. This is why she doesn’t find this strange. From her point of view, strange men suddenly appearing in her bedroom is a perfectly normal everyday occurrence. He is merely a new one.
“More like a friend of a friend,” he says, and smiles at the sideways truth of it. The smile still stretches his lips in a way that feels strange, but it’s not exactly a bad kind of strange either.
“Oh, okay, okay,” she says, nodding along with the rhythm of her words, tail swishing in the air, rocking on her feet from the ball of her feet to her heels. Thrumming with energy. She knows as many people as he has fingers on one hand, he bets. Meeting a new person must be terribly exciting for this young, sheltered girl who was born to want to meet and talk to and love so many people. “The Traveler is the best, you know!”
“My friend always says the same thing.” He drinks the sight of her beaming, eager face in. Much better than the fear of the one he’d seen only moments ago.
This is the time he wanted to be in, but not the place. Jester’s hand on him, trying to keep him where he was, close and to her side. He supposes that in a way, she succeeded.
He will merely have to do some traveling first, then.
“They sound very wise, then,” Jester declares.
“She is,” he says, fond and warm and overflowing with the potential of how many mistakes he can now right. So many things that went wrong before, wiped away like they never happened. And then he thinks-- was. She was wise. Or she will be.
Mistakes have been wiped away, but so has the best things in his life. Fjord is living in an abusive orphanage, Yasha in a tribe that will one day kill her wife, Beau in a home that doesn’t love her, Nott in a village that bullies her, Caduceus in a forest that is dying, and Mollymauk is technically not even born yet. Jester only has her mother and her god and her room, and she loves them but she deserves so much more and is suffocating. They all escaped these things. They ran towards the future, and they made something better. Caleb has only ever wanted to return to the past. He took their hard fought for happiness and he made it like it never happened just so that he could have another chance for himself.
Well. He has always known that he is selfish, for as long as he’s been Caleb Widogast, because Bren was a self righteous and twisted and murderous fool. He had made a promise to himself, to undo the unforgivable, no matter what it took.
He hadn’t stopped to consider that what it would take would be to take everything from his friends. That he had to commit another unforgivable act to undo the first. It had all happened very fast; the realization of the Dodecahedron’s potential, the decision to use it, the talk, the sneaking, the conflict, the spell. All in one day. He hadn’t wasted any more time once he’d seen the way. This has been his first chance to stop and think.
The wide smile is gone now. He can feel his face settling back into something more familiar, something more dour and bitter and broken and quiet.
What had that been, two minutes of happiness? What a ride.
Two small hand pinch his cheeks and forcibly pull the corners of his mouth up in a painful sort of grimace.
“Ack!” he says, recoiling.
“Why are you so sad?” Jester asks. “Don’t be! I’m here to be your friend! Can we be friends?”
“Um,” he says, and rubs at his face, small points of already fading pain. “Sure.”
How was he supposed to say no? Jester beams.
“I do have things to do, though,” he says. “I’ll have to leave.”
“Not for forever, though, right? Mama has to leave sometimes to be with her guests and the Traveler has to leave to go and be a god, but they always come back.” Her eyes are big and earnest and pin him like a butterfly to a collection.
“... Ja. I will come back. As soon as I’ve taken care of something.” As soon as he’s killed Trent Ikithon (even though he was barely able to do so the first time with six friends at his back), as soon as he’s revealed to the public the grooming and abuse that has been inflicted upon young, trusting students Bren, Astrid, and Eodwulf.
She raises one pinky finger towards him. “Promise?” she asks seriously.
… as soon as he’s found a loving home for a small half orc boy, made friends with a surly little girl so she at least has one loved one, and perhaps chased a hostile goblin tribe far away from a vulnerable halfling village, cured a forest surrounding a graveyard before it devours a family of firbolgs, discovered the mystery of Lucien and how a lively tiefling named Mollymauk could ever come to be, and track down Yasha and do whatever he can for her.
“It seems I have quite a to do list,” he says, “but ja, I promise.”
Pinky finger crooking around pinky finger, a firm shake with solemn eye contact. As soon as it’s over, her smile comes back along with some delighted clapping and laughter. He smiles despite himself, the way only she can manage over and over again.
He can do all of that, and then come back and be one of a young tiefling girl’s only friends. He can show her cantrips and books and tell her stories, expose her to the world as much as he can from the safety of her room until she’s old enough to leave on her own, instead of having to steal away in the dark of the night after humiliating a particularly prickly lord.
“I am Caleb, by the way,” he says, and it is the truth. It has been the truth for years now.
“Cayyy-leb,” she says, drawing out the name, accent thick. His grin grows wider, his chest aches in a way that hurts and is warm at the same time.
He can erase as many mistakes as he wants to, not just his own. He can make this a softer world, a kinder one. At least for his loved ones. That is all Caleb Widogast has ever wanted. Forget Bren and his selfish ambition and drive and need to please and follow orders. He was a foolish child who died in front of his burning home along with his parents trapped inside. Caleb is a man born in a jail cell with a supposed goblin and no fanfare or notice, who flourished with aching slowness in a group nonsensically named the Mighty Nein. He is a better person than Bren ever was, even scarred and dirty and quiet and scared.
Caleb has an unprepared world at his fingertips, decades worth of steps ahead of it, and he is going to use it to help his friends and family. It feels more right than anything has since he murdered his childhood.
“It is very nice to meet you, Jester,” he says, and then Marion Lavorre, the Ruby of the Sea, enters the room and things get quite hectic and chaotic for just a bit.