Work Text:
Sometimes being offered tenderness
feels like the very proof
that you've been ruined.
OCEAN VUONG
Where were you when I was still kind?
GREGORY ALAN ISAKOV
天
It is, of all people, Gideon who first notices.
"So that's the doctor," he notes, taking a sip out of his champagne flute. "He looks kinda young, no?"
They were currently at one of Linkon's bigger event halls, sequestered in the upper part of downtown where parking required valets and the laughs tinkled a little like wind chimes and less so the rough barometer of the barracks they were used to. Akso Hospital was holding a gratitude gala of some sorts to honor some of their combat medics who served time in the past decade, with some honorary invites sent to the military. Zayne was, predictably, one of the top billed in the guest of honors. Gideon had a cousin who served as a pediatric nurse in one regent. And Caleb:
Well, Caleb—
"That's him, yeah," agrees Caleb, eyes going over the bustling social scene. He feels the lining of the fancy invitation etched somewhere in his side pocket, the faint smell of jasmine carrying over a little even with the heavily perfumed air. He was there as Zayne's plus one's plus one's, after all. "He skipped a few grades, I think. Graduated from med school earlier than the rest."
Gideon considers that a moment, tilting his head a little to appraise Zayne more closely. Caleb knew what he was seeing: the lack of any telling white hairs compared to colleagues of his own professional standing. The relatively upright way he held himself that spoke of grace made steel, and not the amount of billable hours he'd lodged in the system.
"More like skipped an entire school division," he comments after a while, impressed. "He's what, you said, chief cardiac surgeon or something? Doesn't look like he has a decade on us."
"He doesn't," confirms Caleb. "He's one of those gifted genius types," he goes on, and adds more as an afterthought, "Or you know. Least that's what everyone's been saying. People like Josephine."
A beat.
Caleb didn’t know what possessed him to say it, only he did, and blames it on the overstimulation of the perfume and alcohol and less so his growing ire that was years in the making.
"Josephine," parrots Gideon, slow, turning his attention back to the sulking hulk of a frame his friend’s decorated uniform has uncharacteristically shrunk him to. "I see. Is that a little bit of hostility I’m sensing there, Colonel?"
Caleb rolls his eyes, loosens up a little. "You're not sensing shit, Gideon.”
"Uh-huh," Gideon looks amused. "And are we sure this has nothing to do with the way she's been hanging off his arm all night?"
Now Caleb was the one to straighten into himself, properly now, forcing his eyes to stick to the annoyingly smug smirk spreading on Gideon's face and not let it wander farther. Farther from them, across the other side of the event hall entirely, to a pair of polite eyes and even more sociable tone currently hanging off every word Zayne was saying. And Zayne was never a talker. He wasn't then and several years in medical school and a few of them at war and whatever fabled stories he heard of his time on Mount Eternal didn't divorce the introversion out of him.
And so when Caleb did look, which he did not do often at all he’d swear on his life, it was then he saw:
The natural way the corners of her mouth lifted up just a fraction when Zayne said a few choice words to a few choice people—Greyson, he thinks; Yvonne, who arranged his discharge papers, he knows—as if she was actually proud he was socializing. The easy way they moved against each other, her always just a step too close for his liking and Zayne so naturally attuned to the lines of her body; as if he, too, was listening in. The easy back and forth they seemed to have going on.
To an onlooker it probably didn't seem like much.
To Caleb, though, he saw an apparently beloved doctor who was being called left and right the whole night, who diplomatically waived those calls off, all in favor of being her glorified companion and not the other way around. He saw Zayne saying more than five words to her. He saw Zayne guiding her through the crowd of his colleagues with a hand perched at the small of her back, a little too familiar and casual enough to make his skin crawl. Her not putting him in place. Her indulging. Her living.
"We all grew up in the same street," Caleb forces himself to say instead, but even on his ears it lands defensive. He thinks he hears a tinkle bell of a laugh from the other side followed by a deep baritone and wretches his eyes even farther away from the sight. He finishes the rest of Gideon’s drink in one go.
"Zayne was—" he corrects himself, gruffly, "is kind of her childhood hero."
"Not yours then?"
"He invited her."
"And she invited you.”
"To be clear," Caleb eyes him. "We both didn't need invites to this thing. Zayne was always going to invite both of us, and, well. It just — sort of happened this way."
The knowing glint in Gideon's eye still didn't let up. "It just so happened you're not attending this in a friends of the family capacity but—uh—" he looks over at the polished onyx of his badges glinting under the fluorescent lights, teasing, "as a Colonel of the Fleet?"
"As a recognized military veteran on active duty for the community," amends Caleb, smoothing a hand over his uniform and tucking his hat further into him. "And plus, I'm not the only one in uniform tonight. Even the Commander is here."
"Commander has the social skills of a seasoned politician so he doesn't count," Gideon points out, before looking down at his modest but impeccably tailored civilian dress suit. "It just feels nice to let myself breathe sometimes, you know?"
"Hm."
"Could be nice for you too, Colonel."
"I told you not to call me that when it's just the two of us."
"Colonel Caleb, are you blushing."
"Shut up."
Gideon laughs before flanking down a waiter to deposit his depleted champagne glass before fishing out two more to hand to him. "Relax, man," he gentles his tone. "Seriously, you've been tense since you got here. We're not at war anymore. Nothing's gonna happen tonight. Not to you. Not to this gala. Certainly not to your girl."
"Certainly?" Caleb accepts the drink. “Girl?”
"Well," Gideon shrugs, nodding his head back towards the other end of the hall. "You know."
"No," Caleb forces himself to turn and regard him more pointedly. "No I, in fact, do not know."
There's a degree of something in Gideon's eyes and voice when he carefully says, "They just seem kind of close," and gestures towards where protocore specialists converged, to where Zayne seemed expressly interested in the conversation for once and his voice actually carries and Caleb feels a prickle of something turn in his stomach. "You guys all grew up together you said?"
"Mostly me and her," Caleb shakes his head. "Zayne—ah—moved away after a few years. Different state."
"Really?" that piques Gideon interested. "For how long?"
"What do you mean for how long?" asks Caleb.
"You said he moved away," says Gideon. "When did he come back?"
Caleb frowns. "Just recently. A year or so ago. I think."
"So you're telling me this doctor childhood friend of yours moved cities when you were younger and you didn't reconcile until just recently," Gideon points out, "but he's already made himself her primary care physician and is obviously chatting up those fancy protocore specialists for her benefit despite having spent all of what, a few years max with you guys?"
Caleb's frown deepens. "I—" he starts. "That's not—"
"I know you said you got a girl back home when we were in the academy," Gideon turns to him, and there's a sliver of something etched in the corner of his eyes: pity, otherwise thinks Caleb, maybe even a challenge. "But I'd think twice about that now."
⊹
Their monthly reunion goes on as scheduled.
Since Caleb came back, she encouraged—no, demanded—for the three of them to meet up every month on rotating itineraries depending on whoever wanted to do what to catch up. Because she, and he quoted, will be "damned if i let another one of you slip through my fingers or so help me god i will take you out of my non-existent will myself caleb".
It's her month, and lo and behold: they were all up at the ass crack of dawn tunneling through the outskirts of Linkon Forest to do, of all things, hike.
"So," she starts, holding the map up higher towards the light of the moon that did jackshit to illuminate anything. "If I'm right, which mind you boys I always am, we take a right here and keep walking and it should lead us to the hidden creek."
Zayne holds up one end of the map, scrutinizing it closely before delivering in possibly the most deadpan manner, "The map is upside down."
Caleb, blame it on the sleep deprivation or general exhaustion, stifles a laugh. She shuts him up with a glare.
"None of you seriously thought that out of the three of us, the pilot would be the one with the best navigation skills?" Caleb sobers himself, hand on his hip. "I expected more from you, Zayne."
Her head snaps up from the map. "And not from me?!"
Caleb pats her hair. "Never from you."
Zayne continues staring down at the map, giving it a few more intense moments of uninterrupted eye contact before relenting and passing it over. "Alright. Lead the way, Caleb."
It takes them a few rounds around the trees to get to the creek. Caleb, to no one's surprise, gets them there in less the time it took for the sun to start filtering in through the dewy filter of the forest and shine everything just a touch more whimsical.
The cicadas have started their morning jibber jabber. The butterflies have started unspooling themselves from their cocoons. And they made it in one piece to the sound of waterfalls slowly bouldering down the rolling stones, and a crisp morning air beginning to thaw the chilly underbite of their early morning hike.
"Right," Zayne sets down his pack. "Should we get a fire going for the food?"
She hums, and Caleb pauses, because it's not a familiar tune but it is to Zayne who hums right along. “Sure," she says. "Also, did you bring the—"
Zayne hands her the first aid kit, and Caleb tenses the moment their hands make contact. "I always do."
It’s a team effort to get things going. She collects the fire wood, scavenging around the area with the practiced ease of a hunter and gatherer. Caleb checks for any traps around the trees and secures a perimeter around the area, the eagle-hawk precision of being a fighter pilot making him more vigilant than usual. Zayne tends to the camp, setting up a few bits and pieces to resemble something remotely like a liveable tent.
When they settle down with the meat they procured a day before, and Zayne is passing her safety gloves to turn the wood around, and Caleb is making sure the food is cooked just right: everything feels, just then, just right.
Then she kicks him not so discreetly on the shin.
Caleb clears his throat. "So, uh, Zayne," he starts, a little awkwardly. "How — How are things? At the hospital?"
On his peripheral, he thinks he sees her muffle a laugh by coughing into her hand. Zayne, for his part, doesn't let his surprise at his unusual slip of confidence show.
"Fine," says Zayne, who turns to him suddenly, and just as suddenly Caleb finds himself bracing for impact. “I just realized I never got to thank you personally for the check you wrote," he says, earnestly all Caleb felt guns were going off in the distance. Zayne continues with no knowledge every word lands like a bullet. "Rest assured I’ll personally make sure the funds don’t go to waste.”
Maybe it’s the calm ether of the morning as dawn slowly breaks. Maybe it’s the light leaking into their little makeshift bubble in the forest. Maybe it’s the fact these are the only people left he’s known the longest in this life and who have known him just as long. But there's something about the way Zayne says things, Caleb now notices, with such a cool edge of calm just nearly crossing serene. Zayne could deliver the daily kill list with nothing but the cadence of his voice and the genuine, if not slightly pained, look in his eyes and that would have been more compassion than he’d ever seen in all his years on the battle field.
There's always been a little bit of grief built in Zayne's eyes, but really, thinks Caleb: it lives in his voice.
He can't recall ever talking to Zayne without feeling, however slightly after, just a little more mellowed out somehow. Not when he failed a final exam back in grade school and went home ready to cry in his room but was surprised by Zayne at the foot of their door, dropping off a care package from his parents apparently, who instead talked him down from his stupor and reminded him of everything else he was good at that. Not when he was working on a demo model of an especially rare plane that a stray cat unintentionally kicked over by his window, and he was ready to wreak havoc and fuck all, that Zayne saw from the corner of his street and offered to help him rebuild it piece by painstaking piece until their fingers ran raw and red and even then, even that: Zayne patched him right back up again after.
He wouldn't call Zayne a good friend by any means, because that required a level of vulnerability and intimacy he didn't know how to model on someone that wasn't her, but even so: a good person, at least, that's what Zayne was. Divorced from any semblance of morality he was now, even Caleb could admit as much.
"It’s—ah—no problem. Happy to help," he says instead. "You do good work, Zayne."
A ray of light catches somewhere behind Zayne's glasses, and for a second, Caleb thinks his eyes are smiling with him. "You too, Caleb," he says, and then: "Thank you for your service."
Caleb is mortified to find out he actually means it, and even more mortified when he braves a look next to him, to find the ghost of a smile on her face in turn.
⊹
It's not so much that Caleb refuses to be treated by anyone else, but that Zayne was also surprisingly insistent on taking over as his primary care physician.
"Rotate this for me," says Zayne, moving his arm this way and that. "Hold now, please."
Caleb does. There are small hitches inside his arm that keep pulsing in and out, and he can't for the life of him or the many second opinions he's since gotten find out where it's coming from. He tells as much to Zayne one day, which began their extensive once-a-week physical therapy session that was about the most thinly disguised therapy session Caleb has ever seen. Maybe she put him up to it. Or maybe Zayne was doing the Decent Person Thing again.
"How are you adjusting?" says Zayne. "With everything?"
Caleb quirks a brow. "Everything?"
"I've heard about veterans coming back from active duty changed," continues Zayne, still gentle with his probing, even more so with his words. "I treated a few of them myself. It was an adjustment for them, coming back to this. To Linkon and some quiet. Is... Is this experience the same for you?"
It should feel patronizing, but Zayne delivers it in a way that makes Caleb want to shrink back into himself. He feels younger. He feels like the kid that tried every night to escape and was sent back to Tartarus kicking and screaming. Only he wasn’t alone then, and now—
“I’m fine,” Caleb forces himself to say through a voice like gravel. “And it’s not me you should be worried about.”
A beat.
"I understand you had your reasons, and went through things no one should," Zayne clasps off the latex gloves and straightens back in his chair, maybe into an old version of himself that wasn’t so much doctor but more so childhood friend.
"But I think it's a different kind of pain, moving through a world you believe you had no one left. I think it’s the same for both of you. She—" he pauses, seeming to choose his words carefully, "fractured a little, I suppose, is the mildest way to describe what she went through. We were there at your hero's funeral. We really truly grieved you, Caleb. We went to the cemetery every week, even on the days she didn't want to. She lost her best friend and I think part of her still doesn't believe you're actually here with us now."
"But I am," Caleb grits out, hands fisting. Suddenly the temperature in the office wasn't enough to chill down the red-hot ire of his detest. "I don't know how I can make that more clear. To you. To her. I'm here now and I'm not going anywhere."
"You said that before, too."
"I meant it then and I mean it now."
"Of course."
"I mean it, Zayne."
Zayne pauses, and a part of Caleb withers just so, seeing this man able to compose himself in what was clearly an escalating situation that involved a younger version of him who just so badly wanted to be heard and wanted and needed; in the face of this man who so clearly never felt like he had to fight to be heard.
There's an imbalance here somewhat, thinks Caleb, because Zayne has never known the violence it took to get himself to this age. To stay alive. To skin anyone who threatened his survival in the process. And Zayne, Zayne: he thinks knows this about him, and about her, and maybe a little bit about what they went through because:
"I'm sorry," Zayne says thickly, and there's genuine remorse there, and Caleb thinks he could cry because here is a man he was a boy with only he has strayed so far while he grew up into someone who could swallow love and grief and repentance while he just bled resentment. "I may never know the extent of your suffering, or hers for that matter. I know you both went through an indescribable amount of hurt and that maybe these things will never truly leave you. I know she tries to think past it, but some days it's hard. I hope you can forgive her on those days, Caleb, when you think she isn't the version of herself that you grew up with just because she has to look twice at you now to make sure you're really hers."
Caleb is shaking now. He's actually shaking. Zayne couldn't possibly imply that he knew her better than he did, after what, a few blissful months of uninterrupted honeymoon bonding—
"Because you have to remember," Zayne continues, but there's an edge to his voice now, and belatedly Caleb remembers he wields the ice. His voice frosts, so easily, it's a wonder it had ever been warm for the most part. "You were officially declared dead and I watched her try to live with that truth. I think it's a lot to ask her to pretend those years grieving you weren't real. It was real for her, it was real for everyone who saw her. And I saw her, Caleb. I saw her.”
⊹
The fucked up thing is that Caleb still sees it now.
⊹
Caleb thinks he sees snippets of how it must have been like during those years when she goes to Zayne for help first in filling out any legal form, nevermind he handled all their emancipation documents as soon as they both hit legal age. When she goes to Zayne, now, for advice on how to maneuver a professional decision she's grappling with, even though he was there with a tub of her favorite ice cream and a rental of her favorite horror movie after her first interview in anticipation of a celebration or a crying session; that now, now: it is Zayne she comes to first, without her even noticing, at even the smallest inconvenience.
Zayne she sends reminders to eat to. Zayne she makes sure to drop by at the office to at least once a week to water his plants. Zayne she makes a point to know his upcoming days off.
Though there are remnants, still, of how it was like before with them: Caleb is where she begins and he ends where she starts. This is how it's been. This is how it's become. This is how it's going to be even if he has to will the world to bend if it doesn't.
Nothing has changed about this fact, but thinks Caleb, it's the peripherals. Elements that are beyond his control now that he didn't even think could be a threat now morphing into a tumor he can't get rid of. A kink in his armor.
⊹
Because the hardest part about hating Zayne is that he can't.
⊹
"So you and Zayne," Caleb starts. "When did that happen?"
She pauses halfway through a mouth full of soggy udon. Caleb reaches out to close her mouth, and when she wipes her mouth away, she comes away with a look of exasperation. "Not you too."
Caleb tries not to, but he stiffens. Not you, too. His hold on his own chopsticks grow tighter. So it's been a thing.
"We're just friends," she insists, but it’s a little weak.
How could he have missed it? Did he seriously and singularly think of Zayne as such a non-entity he didn't even consider he was going to be a pesky variable in the equation? There is ice somewhere in Zayne's bones, this Caleb knows, in his aloofness and general detachment with everything. There is a sliver of warmth that sometimes peaks through, this he also knows and has even been on the receiving end of, but he discounted it as Zayne also just generally being an upstanding person.
He's not going to be the first in line throwing rose petals down in celebration of him, but he also wasn't going to discount his attempts just because he didn't respond socially in a way that was acceptable. Caleb often prides himself in the totality of his tunnel vision, his attention to detail, the way he attacks threats with quiet violence and a savagery that slithers until the person he's choking isn't even aware of it.
But still.
This was Zayne.
The guy who taught him a trick to figuring out the dimensions of model planes easier. The guy who gave him a snowman band-aid for his skinned knee when he fell trying to chase bullies off the playground. The guy who once cried to his mom because his iced lollipop fell on the ground. The guy with the parents who asked about his day. The guy with food always on his table and leftovers he brought with him the next day on the playground to share. The guy with the everything.
And because he had everything, surmised Caleb, surely he couldn't have wanted—
"I'm grateful for him," she continues, and there's a whisper of nostalgia in her eyes and voice, a history that Caleb now finds himself frighteningly edged out of without his consent. "He — well. He was there for me when no one was."
Caleb thinks he's glad Zayne was there, but now he's just angry he still is.