Chapter Text
Caleb wakes up to fingers in his hair.
Solitude is sweet, when chosen freely, and he doesn't mind it these days. He can hardly call it that, in truth, when so many of his days are spent in the quiet company of the Benedictines and, most of all, with the brilliant minds of past and present, courtesy of the monastery’s library and the heft of his correspondence. Paper, parchment and vellum carry the voices of his friends, those long dead and those merely far away, his own ink providing the answer.
But some kinds of company are precious in their rarity.
He was informed of the visitor earlier, almost as soon as he came back from Bramsche. The roads were muddy from last night’s rain, and Caleb was leaning against the archway, scraping dirt from his soles when Brother Franz reached him and gave him the news.
“He is sleeping the journey off,” Franz said in his sweet Westfalian lilt. “But he has returned.”
“He has earned his rest,” Caleb replied, letting the warmth of that news seep under his skin. He has returned. If his heart started beating faster at those words, it was his secret to cherish.
Even as a layman, he earns his keep with the monks doing work in the library and the garden, but he obtained an exemption from praying. Fifteen years as the left hand of the Bishop of Minden—the hand that wields the knife—wouldn’t leave a kind disposition towards churches in anyone. Bren Ermendrud didn’t mind services; Caleb Widogast will be happy if he never has to listen to one again. “You wouldn't ask Herr Thelyss to join you in prayer,” he had objected with kind, reasonable firmness when the prior suggested his soul could benefit from it.
“The state of his soul is his own concern,” the prior replied good-naturedly, then added, “If he is interested in our customs, though, there is the possibility for you to bring him along. He may be curious, and after all, gaudium erit in caelo super uno peccatore…”
The prior isn’t really trying to convert Essek, just as he isn’t really trying to bring Caleb back to the flock, but that doesn’t stop him from occasionally nudging the both of them in that direction.
Trying to save two souls with one stone, Caleb had written Essek in his next letter, amused.
It is unfortunate for you, my friend, Essek’s next missive had said, that I am indeed, as always, curious. Tell the prior I'll partake of his hospitality in this fashion as well on my next visit.
Interestingly, the prior—a cultured, soft-spoken man who worshipped God and the written word to the same, slightly sacrilegious extent, and whose fondness for Caleb was returned—had immediately taken a shine to Caleb’s Andalusian correspondent, especially after Essek brought with him a gift upon his first visit to the Malgarten monastery, a rare edition of Boethius purchased in Venice, to enrich the library. While Caleb has pleasant but short chats with the prior on crop rotation, maths and architecture (subjects he is slowly teaching himself), Essek is stolen for entire afternoons when he visits.
Later, in Caleb’s bedchamber, he recounts their long talks on philosophy and theology, astronomy and physics and Islamic jurisprudence. It should perhaps make Caleb jealous, but truthfully he is just happy to see how well Essek slots into his life.
The Vigil bells are still tolling, calling the monks to the nightly orations. In his bed, Caleb is still adrift between sleep and wake, not sure if he is in a vivid dream with an Essek conjured by his imagination. The fingers in his hair barely brush his scalp as their owner combs it in absent-minded strokes, absorbed in his reading. Candlelight is an expensive luxury, one of the few Caleb indulges in. His life is simple nowadays, simpler than it used to be, but he feels richer than he ever was under the Bishop’s service when he disentangles his legs from the covers and stretches alongside the warm form of his friend.
He has a blurry recollection of his door opening without a knock and closing again, of candlelight, of welcoming Essek in the comfortable warmth of his bedding and being rewarded with a murmured greeting and his hair smoothed back. Once Essek had settled next to him, Caleb rested his head against his thigh and let himself drift into the dark, welcoming waters of a deep slumber for a while longer.
Blinking at the gentle candlelight, Caleb looks up.
“Awake already,” croons a voice he hasn't heard in much too long.
Essek’s soft-spokenness is habitual; it’s the tone you’d keep in a church, not out of place in a bedchamber either. Caleb’s lodgings are far from luxurious, but there's a lock on the door, and Essek knows to turn the key of it—something Caleb never does when he's on his own—after letting himself in.
His friend's face is dark, wisps of pale hair framing it like a halo. “Have you rested enough?” Caleb asks, falling back into Latin, the language of their correspondence. He is familiar in varying degrees with the language of several courts, including the Arabic spoken by Essek’s peers in Granada, and he dabbles in the coupling of Spanish and Arabic that was the language of Essek’s childhood, but he won’t make a fool of himself by attempting to speak either of those while barely awake.
He presses his face against Essek’s thigh, inhaling his smell. Essek always bathes before coming here, despite several reassurances, and one singular outspoken request, that there’s no need. (The blush that crept onto Essek's face when they had that conversation is something Caleb is going to cherish for the rest of his life. And he’d enjoyed the night that followed.)
“It was a short trip.” Essek hasn’t stopped playing with Caleb's hair yet. “My ship docked two days ago, and I had business in Bremen yesterday, so I spent the day there. I had much to—ah.” The hand in his hair tightens.
With heavy-lidded eyes, Caleb looks up. Under the covers, his hand keeps slowly making its way between Essek's thighs. “Go on.”
It’s a sight he missed, Essek looking at him like that. There are other things he also missed.
He noses at the cloth of Essek’s sleep gown. His friend walked in here with a robe and a cloak, of course, both for propriety’s sake and because the stone halls of the monastery are ruthlessly cold, this late in November. If he looked around, Caleb would see them neatly hanging from a knob near the slumbering fireplace.
Instead of doing that, he runs his hand higher, gathering the fabric on the way, his eyes fixed on Essek, their heat undisguised. An ember of desire sparks in his gut, licking low in his groin, as Essek blinks slowly and then puts his reading aside, setting the book gently on the floor, far from the candle still burning on the mantelpiece.
While these visits are too infrequent to have acquired a routine, some general patterns have become familiar: once fully awake, Caleb sits up and helps Essek undress, making quick work of the linen sleep gown until he’s as naked as Caleb. Then Caleb is usually too taken with the pleasant softness of Essek’s body to do much at all except running his hand on his fine collarbones and his sharp, birdlike shoulder blades, tracing the bumps of his spine and of every rib and counting them in his head, feel the fine hairs on his forearms under his fingertips. His palms are made to measure the width of Essek’s slender waist, the beam of his hips.
As he takes the measurements of his lover’s body, Essek’s hands are also busy: scraping well-kept nails through Caleb’s beard, fingertips finding and tracing his mouth. It’s long, these days, as he’s more preoccupied with his mind than his appearances, and he only shaves on special occasions. If Essek stays the night, maybe he’ll shave in the morning, just to give his fingers something different to touch.
Their coming together is natural and unhurried. Lips replace fingers, and as deeply as their bodies remember each other, something settles in Caleb’s chest when Essek leans forward and presses his mouth on his, like the sudden recollection of something he hadn’t realised he’d forgotten.
Essek is cautious, deliberate in this as in all things, and Caleb savours this pace, the uncomplicated press of their mouth. A greeting, ceremonial. They stay like this for a slow, long breath, before Essek pulls back.
“I have much to tell you,” he says, one hand clutching Caleb’s forearm for support as he brings their dance to the next step, lying down. The mattress is supple, accommodating his shape like an embrace. “And a gift, which you will not open without me.”
“As you command,” Caleb says, wrapping his fingers around Essek’s ankle. “What is it?” He shifts one of Essek’s legs enough so he can settle between them.
“Something precious, delicate and useful,” Essek says, smirking at Caleb’s unimpressed look. “You will see. I will teach you how to use it while I’m here. It will take a few days, but you are clever enough.”
There is no disguising the smile breaking on Caleb’s face at those words, or the shiver at the thoughts they put in his mind. And he wouldn’t want to hide either. “I look forward to it, teacher,” he says, sliding his arms under Essek’s thighs to cant his hips a little higher.
The agreeableness with which Essek lets himself be looked at and arranged in bed always fills Caleb with wonder and gratitude, and not a small amount of lust. They are both aware, in different measures, of the interest his cock had taken in the proceedings even before Essek got undressed, and Caleb feels it fill up further and hang heavy on his thigh as he bows his head down, eyes closed, to kiss Essek’s cunt.
The first contact is always an unlocking of recollections. There are a few turns in Caleb’s fatefully perfect memory which have the weight of cornerstones: the first bite of an apple in his parent’s orchard when cold started nipping at his shoulders—still bare in aestival boldness—at night. His blade sinking into the belly of a boy like him, only born on the wrong side of a border, blood baptising the dust of the eager battlefield. A stifling afternoon in Granada, the set of Essek’s jaw a moment before he parted his thighs for Caleb for the first time, one revelation following another.
They aren’t trembling like they did back then; many things are different, and they’re not the people they used to be. Caleb was a besotted young man, but Essek was putting more than just his own heart in Caleb’s hands with that decision. That trust hasn’t gone to waste. Caleb would bite off his own tongue before breathing a word of what Essek has entrusted him with.
He kisses the soft, soft skin of Essek’s inner folds, letting his lips do nothing but brush them for a moment, just because he is allowed to, because when Essek is like this—open, amenable, in his bed—it would be a sin to use anything but the greatest care, the greatest patience. A glance tells him Essek is fully reclined and his eyes are closed. His belly rises and falls with poised breaths. Caleb’s eyes drift down to the trail of white hair starting low on his mound, gathering where he can feel it catching in his beard.
The barest pressure of thumb and forefinger is enough to part Essek’s folds. A sweep of his tongue catches the dewy wetness already gathering there. Both the sigh this elicits and the warmth radiating from the flesh under him make Caleb dizzy with love and desire.
He pulls infinitesimally back, enough to look up. After a moment, he meets hazy violet eyes. “Tell me about the comet,” he says, before bowing his head again.
Like in the story of the three kings, a star is what brought Essek here from his most recent venture in Constantinople: the chance to observe an astronomical phenomenon at different latitudes, so that the measurements could reveal how far it was from Earth. He had been detailed in his letters, letting Caleb in on his plans to leave and follow the trail of the comet to measure its distance from Earth, instead of merely collecting data and observations from fellow scholars. His usual excitement was spurred even further at the thought of being the first to attempt such a thing.
“I am still working on the calculations,” he says as Caleb lets his forefinger slip into him. It goes effortlessly, time and desire easing the way. “I have almost collected enough data, I just need to piece it together. I will do it before the—ah—before the comet is gone again.”
“Again?” Caleb echoes, slowly withdrawing the finger he’s just hooked the way Essek likes.
“Yes, again.” Essek belongs to the school of thought of those who believe comets not only to be regularly reoccurring phenomena, but the same celestial bodies each time, cycling back to Earth on round celestial trails. No, not round, Caleb corrects himself: elliptical. Having known Essek for almost two decades, Caleb has picked up enough to be convinced by his points, even without being a scholar himself.
(You are a scholar, Essek reproached him in a letter not long ago, after Caleb expressed some doubts regarding his capability. You could teach some of my peers many things they are too biased or dull to learn. Caleb had shaken his head at those words, but he had traced his fingers—a soldier’s fingers, a murderer’s fingers—on them nonetheless.)
He is brought back to the present when Essek gently bumps a thigh against the side of his head. “Again, Widogast,” he commands with an idea of a smile, letting his eyes close again.
Caleb obeys. He slips two fingers back in, crooking them cleverly once again, and that same lovely thigh twitches against his cheek when he bends down and licks up with the flat of his tongue, from the place where his fingers are sunk to that small bit of flesh he remembers. He still isn’t in a hurry, but he doesn’t waste time either before he seals his lips around it and sucks.
The lateness of the hour, as well as a sense of respect for their hosts, has Essek muffling his noises in his own arm. His free hand, he threads its fingers through Caleb’s hair, and the light tugging becomes another focus in Caleb’s consciousness, another instrument to trace his course as he licks and sucks and moves his fingers in and out.
There is no more talking as Essek is unmade by Caleb’s mouth, just the haunting symphony of his well-tuned body, and a long, subdued moan eventually, which sounds ripped from Essek’s very lungs. The hand in Caleb’s hair slowly relaxes, petting and stroking as its owner heaves a long sigh. Caleb slips his fingers—his hand slightly sore and drenched to the knuckles—from Essek’s cunt and places a light kiss on the swollen pearl of flesh, then another one to Essek’s mound, then a third one to his belly, taut and sweaty.
After that, Essek’s other hand comes down, reaching blindly, fingers unsteady. “Come, come, come,” he says faintly, urgently.
After wiping his hand on the linens, Caleb climbs up. He knows better than to clean his face. Greedy fingers pull him by his arms and come up to his face, tracing his jaw and chin, relishing in his wet beard.
There are no words still as Essek pulls him close, kissing him with a lazy, open-mouthed hunger, humming at the taste he finds in Caleb’s mouth. Habitually a reserved man, he has never been shy in bed. Caleb knows for a fact that this is just for him: this openness, this knowledge that he can ask for whatever he wants and Caleb will give it to him. Asking isn’t even required of Essek, he’s been reassured of it, but politeness is another of his ingrained traits.
These are some of the things he misses when Essek is away: his frantic grasping at Caleb as they’re kissing, as if Caleb were the only one who could sate this thirst, nails clawing his back in a way that will leave marks afterwards. The hands move, landing on the naked skin of Caleb’s torso, their coolness pleasant on the feverish planes of his body.
At last, Caleb parts from him with a last peck on his lips. “Fine?” he asks, balancing over him on an elbow as his left hand cups a bony hip.
The question is met by a slight shuffling on the sheets, a moment of serious, if languid, consideration. “Yes,” Essek says eventually, as his hands travel downwards until one of them wraps around Caleb’s cock, which has been resting swollen and neglected against the crook of Essek’s thigh.
It’s not unexpected but sudden, and Caleb inhales deeply at that, closing his eyes for a just moment. He almost misses the smile on Essek’s face, matched with a pleased blush when Caleb’s cock jumps in his hand. “Are you going to leave me empty for much longer?” Essek murmurs.
No, asking is not required, but Caleb will be damned if questions like this one don’t set his very blood on fire.
He knows Essek is wet and ready: he’s had proofs all over his hand and his mouth. He still holds his breath as Essek nudges his folds with the head of Caleb’s cock, parting them again. He lets out a long groan as he pushes slightly in. Essek’s other hand cups the nape of his neck as Caleb lets his forehead fall on his shoulder.
Thus, cradled so fully by Essek’s body, Caleb pushes in a little bit more; his hardness is broader and finds more resistance than his fingers, but this part—the slow breaching, the filling—is apparently Essek’s favourite part. Once the head is inside him, Essek lets go of Caleb’s cock, his hand joining the other on Caleb’s neck. His legs are warm buttresses to Caleb’s sides as he slips another inch of himself in.
When Caleb rocks his hips back and then forward again, sinking ever deeper, Essek heaves a long breath under him, letting out a sigh so pleased and satisfied that Caleb has to kiss it out of his mouth. The hands on his nape rub up and down his neck, mussing up his hair even further. Essek drowns several small noises in his mouth as Caleb pushes in and out still, the slide eased by Essek’s own dripping eagerness, until he’s fully inside him.
He turns his head, finds himself overwhelmed by Essek’s scent when he inhales with his nose deep in Essek’s hair. “Do you consider yourself properly filled, habibi?” he murmurs against the warm skin of his neck. This is the only occasion he has of calling Essek sweet names in Essek’s mother tongue, and they both know it. Essek lets him get away with much when they are together like this.
Time is distant, its shackles lighter, as Essek arches his back and stretches below him. His thighs ride up, sliding smoothly against Caleb’s sides, ankles locking at the small of Caleb’s back. The pressure and the change of angle make Caleb sink a little deeper, and he adjusts on both elbows with a groan. “You do it very well,” Essek says sincerely.
A palm on Caleb’s cheek—which is burning, because this small compliment from the man he’s fucking was what it takes to make him blush—coaxes his face towards Essek’s until their eyes lock. “I find myself anticipating my visits in many inopportune moments,” Essek confesses. “One should think doing the same thing over and over again would take away its novelty, no?”
His tone is light and inquiring, with just the barest strain betraying the way he’s currently pinned on a mattress and about to be fucked. Caleb breaks eye contact for a mere second to press a kiss on willing lips. “The water you drink today won’t quench your thirst tomorrow,” he observes. “And besides,” he adds, snapping his hips forward sharply, delighting in the fluttering of Essek’s eyelids and his perfect mouth falling open, “I hope I give you some variety.”
Never one to be bested, after the momentary surprise Essek clenches his thighs around Caleb’s midsection and pushes back. “You talk as if you’re doing all the work,” he replies, softening his reproach with another kiss.
They go on like this, stoking each other’s fire with slow, unhurried thrusts, letting their bodies fill the silence for a while. “When you have all the answers, once you have discovered everything about the comet,” Caleb asks eventually, “what is next for you?”
A thoughtful frown appears on Essek’s forehead. “I don’t think I will ever have all the answers,” he replies slowly. “This is the nature of this kind of research, is it not?”
“If there is anyone who can discover all of the universe’s secrets, it’s you.” Caleb is only half joking.
There is fondness behind the swat of Essek’s hand to his buttock. “I’m already in your bed, Caleb Widogast,” he observes wryly. “There is no need to flatter me.” His thighs close around him a little more, and Caleb’s thrusts turn into a shallow grinding. While still mindful of the pressure he’s putting on Essek’s body, their chests are close enough that he can feel Essek’s heartbeat.
As he bends down to kiss him again, he shifts his weight on an elbow, tracing Essek’s hipbone and then running his fingers up, stopping on Essek’s rib cage in a silent question. As an answer, Essek takes his hand and places it on one of his breasts. He doesn’t break the kiss, but he hums into Caleb’s mouth when he starts playing with the small, sensitive nipple. Essek doesn’t always like to be touched there, and Caleb is happy to suit his preferences and find other ways to draw the same sounds out of his lover. But Essek’s breasts each fit entirely in his hand, and have a slight give when he squeezes them, and the clench around his cock when he brushes his pads over his nipples in a certain way is gratifying.
It ends, after a long while but still too soon, with Essek hissing and holding Caleb’s hips with both hands, stilling them, eyebrows pinched. Caleb stops at once. “Too much?” he asks, and Essek nods.
Caleb moves immediately, pulling out carefully before taking Essek’s left leg and gently bending it at the hip. “Alright?” he asks, and Essek nods again.
“It isn’t bad yet,” he says, letting Caleb help him ease the stress on his joints, “but almost.”
There are many things Caleb wishes to say to that, mostly to curse the unfairness of whatever God he doesn’t really believe in when it came to giving Essek a body that has only caused him grief and hardships. He puts all the anger and the love burning through him in the kiss he presses to Essek’s ankle.
As if he heard him, Essek sighs, and when Caleb looks at him, the fire quells. “You are beautiful,” Caleb says, off-handedly enough for Essek to believe he’s telling the truth.
In all his naked, aching magnificence, Essek smiles as his eyelids drop over his eyes, candlelight painting wispy shadowy strokes on his cheeks. Patiently waiting for Caleb to alleviate his pain a little, he rests his hands on his stomach and cracks his eyes open again to look at him. He doesn’t have to say anything. Caleb sets his foot back on the bed, knee bent, and moves to the other leg.
“I am feeling better,” Essek says.
“I don’t know if I should believe you,” Caleb replies, placing Essek’s foot on his knee.
Immediately, Essek’s toes travel up, dangerously close to the most delicate parts of Caleb’s anatomy. After hushing his first instinct to withdraw, Caleb lets his thighs part. A shiver racks him when Essek’s foot fondles his balls, playing with them. It doesn’t stay there for long, but travels up where his erection has been slightly softening. It lingers for a moment where Essek’s own wetness is drying, then Essek looks at him almost mournfully. “You are the best man I have ever met,” he says in the same detached tone Caleb used earlier, which is how Caleb also knows he’s telling the truth. “It would be a shame for your patience to go unrewarded.”
The toes retreat as Essek sits up. Caleb wants to say he doesn’t have to, that Caleb doesn’t need anything more. But wanting and needing are different things, and when Essek reaches out silently to ask for Caleb’s help in shifting on his belly, his hand finds Caleb’s fingers unerringly.
“There,” Essek says. He’s rested his cheek on the pillow, arms folded under him, the curve of his back rising and dipping and then rising again with the swell of his perfect buttocks.
Yes, Essek’s body is difficult, and it has wronged him in many ways, but it’s also beautiful. And yes, wanting is a different, powerful thing, and when Caleb absentmindedly takes his cock in hand, he feels it already filling up again. Then Essek looks back at him from the pillow. “Please,” he says simply, and the word, combined with the way he lifts his rear towards Caleb, almost melts the last of Caleb’s hesitations.
He pulls himself up on his knees, a hand on Essek’s buttocks, stroking them. They are round and shapely and perfect, and between them, the evidence of their earlier lovemaking in Essek’s cunt, swollen and stretched. He runs his fingers on it, gently probing with his middle one. The tightness and the noise Essek smothers in the pillow almost make his heart stop. And it is just a finger.
“Caleb, please.” It’s just a whisper, urgent and intense, not yet desperate but close in the quiet of the room. “I want to feel you inside me again.”
Caleb withdraws his finger and moves, straddling Essek with one knee. “And then?” he asks, lowering his hips until his swollen cock rests between Essek’s buttocks.
“Then you will fuck me.” Essek moves his hips as much as he can to follow Caleb’s shallow, deliberate rutting back and forth. “And you will make me come again, and you will spill inside me.”
Caleb shivers again, and he pulls back his hips enough for the tip of his cock to fall between Essek’s legs, pressing at his waiting entrance. Essek shifts hurriedly, reaching down to guide Caleb inside, where he so vehemently wants him. Caleb breaches him, and Essek whimpers. He turns his face into the pillow, remembering too late his intention to be quiet. Caleb does not feel sorry.
Like this, about to sink into Essek’s tight, welcoming heat, Caleb feels his chest expand so much it could fit a starscape, the whole firmament. He loves Essek when he needles him and when they confess their deepest, ugliest thoughts to each other, when they correspond about the laws binding the world and the heavens together and when they tell each other about the inconsequential details of their day. This is why it doesn’t just feel good to be with Essek like this: it feels deeply, universally right.
Inching deeper, Caleb realises he’s shaking as he holds back the urge to just bury himself, to follow his baser instincts, to rut mindlessly and lose himself in the cradle of Essek’s body. They will get there. Not yet.
“Good?” he asks, half sheathed and trembling.
The reply is a low noise in the back of Essek’s throat, and the shifting of his hips to try and take more of Caleb.
So he obliges and gives it to him.
Soon enough his hips are flush against Essek’s lovely arse, and he hangs his head until his forehead is resting between Essek’s shoulder blades, taking a deep breath. He runs a hand on Essek’s side, a silent question, and Essek breathes out, the tension in his body dissipating slowly.
Good. Caleb moves until his mouth brushes Essek’s ear. “Earlier, you asked politely to be fucked,” he says. “I am going to do it now.” And this is all the warning he gives before he starts doing just that.
It’s different from the lazy, slow coupling from before. That was them, but this is them also: raw and fast instead of easy and gentle, and equally good. Caleb knows—because he’s been told so in plain terms—that this is Essek’s second favourite way to have him: held down, made to take whatever Caleb gives him. (His favourite is riding Caleb, who knows a thing or two about the appeal of being held down and fucked blind himself.)
Essek is so much tighter like this, with his legs pressed together by Caleb’s own, and he knows the drag of his cock on Essek’s walls is more intense, the different angle pressing on different parts of his anatomy, making him stifle open-mouthed moans in Caleb’s pillow.
At some point, distantly, he feels Essek reach down again, touching himself, then gasp and twitch as he comes for the second time tonight, as quietly as he can. Caleb’s hands close on his hips, coaxing them upwards as he changes the angle yet again. His movements grow frantic and irregular as his orgasm comes closer and closer, the promise of an imminent release coiling in his gut with an intolerable tension.
Until eventually it dissolves, his climax torn from him almost violently as he spills into Essek, his heartbeat fast and loud as he rests his head on Essek's back again. He isn’t always allowed to do this: Essek knows his body and its cycles well enough to tell when it is safer to avoid it. Caleb has spilled over Essek’s back, his chest, even his face once. It wasn’t less appreciated: Essek enjoys—once again, his own words—to be marked that way.
The noise Essek makes as he stretches, clenching his muscles to wring every last drop from Caleb, makes Caleb shiver. Still light-headed, he kisses Essek’s neck with such tenderness and enthusiasm he startles a laugh out of Essek. “Have mercy on me,” Caleb murmurs in his ear, pressing another kiss on the tender spot behind his lobe.
Blindly, Essek reaches for him, keeping him close. “Don’t leave yet,” he murmurs.
He sounds like Caleb feels, wrung out and satisfied, but his voice has a plaintive note. Don’t leave yet: Caleb will say the same to him, too soon, as they walk together under the gates of the town square, where Essek’s carriage will be waiting to bring him to wherever he’s headed next. With his back straight and his hood in place, Essek will look perfect and untouchable as he always does; a long woollen cloak of a deep aquamarine will hide his body, thick gloves sparing his hands from the November wind.
The thought makes Caleb want to wrap himself around him and hold him fast. So he does. Their fingers tangle when he brings his hands to Essek’s chest, and soon he can’t tell their heartbeats apart. When he buries his face in Essek’s feathery hair, Essek sighs contentedly.
Caleb stays like this until it becomes unpleasant, until the sweat on his back cools enough to make him shiver. He withdraws gently, sucking air through his teeth as he leaves the sticky mess between Essek’s legs. He lets himself fall on his side, not reaching for the covers yet, face turned towards Essek, who blinks slowly.
“Don’t move,” Caleb says, even though Essek hasn’t even twitched. “I’ll fetch you warm water and a cloth in a moment.” Essek doesn’t reply, but he closes his eyes and hitches a leg higher on the bed. “Are you comfortable?” His only answer is a low hum that Caleb interprets as a yes.
The intention set, he allows himself to drift off for a moment. Drowsy and sated, Essek is wearing an unguarded expression that, by contrast, tugs at a recollection in Caleb’s faultless memory, one he hasn’t revisited in a while: Essek in the shadows of the Alhambra palace, to the left of the Emira, standing out among her scintillating cohort for grace and pride. The diplomatic affairs with which Caleb was entrusted by the Bishop of Minden and, through him, by the Emperor himself, were delicate and important, but his gaze was helplessly drawn to the bright, kohl-lined eyes of the man behind the sovereign. And his intuition, which had saved his life again and again, proved correct once more: he didn’t utter a word, but guided and nudged Caleb with an arched eyebrow or a subtle nod.
It was only natural for him to seek out the man who had kept him from making a fool of himself, both to thank him and to find out for himself what he would want in return for his help.
Naturally, he got lost. The fortress was a beautiful place, and he didn’t mind admiring the lovely architecture, but he was growing concerned at what the locals might think of a foreigner wandering aimlessly. He was lucky once more: it was Essek who found him.
“I have to thank you again,” Caleb told him, absolutely butchering the bastardised Romance dialect he'd tentatively picked up in the five years he’d spent in the peninsula. The fountains roaring in the garden provided a perfect excuse for him to lean close, and his head swam at the suggestion of jasmine and sandalwood lifting from the man’s dusky skin. “Twice today you have saved me.”
His gaze—open and honest, because manipulation works best when it’s paired with genuine interest, and Caleb’s master knew what he was doing when he chose him for this diplomatic effort—was met by the most striking violet eyes, framed by unfairly long lashes. “You never needed saving in the first place, Master Ermendrud,” the man replied in perfect Latin, with a wry smile.
Then and there, Caleb knew he would never tire of hearing him say his name. And it would be true, no matter what that name was.
Everything else came later: Essek was a scholar, versed in anything, but the study of the firmament in particular; Essek was even smarter than Caleb, a prodigy by any definition; Essek was not born as Essek, a knowledge Caleb apparently earned after being the only one who’d ever truly listened to him, on a warm night—even nights were warm in Granada—filled with the scent of jasmine and the rustling of fine sheets.
Essek had hidden motives and ruinous secrets. Essek had never loved anyone before.
After his treason was discovered, after repentance, after the exile, Essek looked for him, but Caleb wasn’t there. He came back home to find home had burned down while he was gone, while he wasn’t there to protect it. What good were fifteen years of training wielding sharp blades and a sharper tongue, if not to keep his home from ruin? And so he broke, and so he was saved. But that’s another story.
Kloster Malgarten has old roots: its foundation spoke the Latin of the first emperors, its stones sit on soil drenched with blood from the Clades Variana. The first few nights he spent there, Caleb thought he could hear them, the cries of soldiers long gone, not different from the ones still ringing in his ears. By luck or grace, he’d always walked away from the battlefield, but in his dreams, he was the one who remained. Bellum quod res bella non sit, the prior might say.
The nightmares never really went away, but the peace of the monastery was good for him. It was a decade after their first meeting that he saw Essek’s name again, in the missives delivered to him by an old friend after she’d learned who Caleb Widogast truly was: they had reached the right place, only there was no Bren Ermendrud to receive them anymore.
Even as a wandering scholar, Essek had a few fixed waypoints. After days of feverish writing, Caleb sent letters to all of them, and one day he got an answer.
“What are you thinking about?”
The question brings him back to the present, to the man looking at him between heavy, satisfied eyelids. The thick fog of his memories still lingers as Caleb reaches up and combs Essek’s hair back from his forehead.
When they finally met again, ten years after Caleb left Granada, they weren’t ambitious, confident men barely in their third decade anymore. There were new scars to count, both on their bodies and their souls. But they were perhaps a better version of those young people, and they were committed to being true to themselves.
Caleb runs his knuckles on the soft cheek of the man he loves. “The first time we met. Do you remember?”
A long sigh, a chuckle. “I remember the heat,” Essek says, with amused wistfulness.
The pads of Caleb’s fingertips slide on Essek’s back as he strokes it. His sweat, which anointed and blessed them earlier, has cooled down, creating a grimy layer on his skin. Forget the cloth: he will stoke the embers in the hearth into a fire and run them a bath. It will take time and effort, but Essek is worth it. “I wish I could show my younger self this,” he says, and even as he impertinently cups one of Essek’s buttocks as he says that, his real meaning is not lost on either of them.
The shiver that runs through Essek isn’t just due to the cold. “You were already looking at me with such a fire in your eyes,” he murmurs. “The first time I saw you… Nobody had ever looked at me like that before.”
Caleb smiles and feels young. “You looked back.”
Essek adjusts himself on the bed and scoffs. “I thought I was taken with you because you were a foreigner,” he replies, closing his eyes again. He is living those memories again, just like Caleb did a minute ago. “But your companions were like candles while you shone like the sun.” His brow furrows. “I wish I’d known. I wouldn’t have wasted so much time.”
Caleb’s hand comes back up until it’s cradling Essek’s cheek. “It wasn’t wasted.”
“Used it better, then.” His eyes open again, searching Caleb’s face for an answer. “Tell myself you were what I was missing, what I didn’t think I’d need.”
“A lover?”
An arm is carefully bent, then stretched. Essek’s body needs to be indulged, but there is still enough satiation in it to make this just a necessity, not a struggle.
Eventually, he reaches for Caleb’s hand, and when he’s found it, he brings it to his lips. “A companion,” he says, kissing it.
*
There is a universe in which they are less complicated people, living less complicated lives. They would meet like sweethearts used to meet in Caleb’s youth: through little incidents of everyday life. The capacity of Caleb’s heart is broad and deep, and his imagination powerful: he can conjure a small world that doesn’t blink at their love, just like his monastery.
(“Where are you going?” he asked, after the first time Essek graced his bed in Malgarten.
Hair still mussed, Essek stopped halfway through donning his robe, pulling the neckline over a lovebite. “I won’t let the priests toss me, and you as well, in the street in shame,” he answered curtly. Caleb couldn’t help but smile at the word he chose for the Benedictines, which was closer to ‘witches.’ “I don’t wish for anyone to make assumptions on where I spent the night.”
“Essek.” When his pleading didn’t work, Caleb stretched out from the bed and held out an open hand. He waited patiently, like a boy with breadcrumbs in a field, waiting for the skittish birds to peck from his palm, until eventually Essek placed his warm hand into his. “They don’t care. Some of them have girls in town. Some of them have each other. Nobody cares where a guest spends the night. The prior is a good man, and he likes you. No, you brought him that Boethius: I think he might love you.”
And that had mollified Essek enough to return into his bed, where for the second time that night Caleb showed him with words and deeds how much he had been missed.)
There is a universe in which they have a life together and they get to grow old with each other.
But this is not that universe, and Caleb wouldn’t risk this imperfect happiness for anything in the world. In this universe, they are one system, even if their orbits only cross rarely. Even separated, they always come back to each other, like comets loving earth so much they can’t help but come back again and again.