I hear the music and it takes me by surprise

by icenineporcupine

Summary:

“Jester’s here. The wedding is off. I had a dress and this huge prank planned for Fjord, and now nobody will see either one!”

The Sending blasts through the ordered calm of Caleb’s thoughts. Veth. Her shrill delivery is flippant. The message itself is a fluffernutter: an unmitigated bombshell.

Notes:

I listened to Lady Gaga's LoveDrug about 97 times on a red-eye from SFO and proceeded to sweat out a small novella like a fever dream.

Chapter 1: [Jester, Nicodranas]

Jester watches Catha's light dancing on the waves, and feels like she ought to be dancing along.

Somewhere up the hill from this raucous little tavern, fireworks crackle and bloom across the sky: another festival, though Jester’s been at sea for so long she can’t remember which one. The atmosphere is infectious, and it reminds her vaguely of Hupperdook, where it seemed like there were fireworks every night—as if the whole town had made a pact to find something worth celebrating, no matter the occasion.

"Still doing okay?" Veth asks, nudging her flask across the table.

Jester grins and nudges it back without sipping. “Doing great!” 

She recognizes her mistakes as she makes them: her grin is too wide, the affirmation too bright. Years in the Lavish Chateau taught her how to wear a mask, but now she's out of practice. And there’s still salt on her cheeks from an afternoon spent sobbing on Veth's sofa.  

Veth hums suspiciously, waits a beat, and then just launches in: “Do you want to talk about what happened?”

Jester makes a face and flutters her fingers in the air like she's trying to banish the words. “Ugh. No. Not really. I mean— yes, but also no, you know?” 

“Totally valid,” Veth says. "But if you did..."

Jester exhales hard and slumps against the booth. “I don’t know. Maybe love isn’t supposed to feel like you’re a little too much all the time?”

Veth’s expression sharpens with protectiveness. “If he didn’t appreciate you, he's even more of an idiot than I always thought he was, and I will totally go tear him limb from limb.”

Jester giggles, warmed by the flash of the little feral goblin still alive and kicking in Veth's heart. “No, no. It wasn’t his fault. We made the decision together. I just feel kind of stupid, you know?”

“Why do you feel stupid? You were in love!”

Jester hesitates. “Maybe…” She groans and hides her face in her hands. “I don't know!"

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”  

"I mean it was probably just being on the boat all the time, but I started feeling like we were only together was because the only other option was, like, Orly or something—”

“Ooof,” says Veth, and Jester lifts her gaze to see her face contort with a sympathetic grimace. 

“…and you know, at first it was funny to tease him with the wedding plans. I came up with the best ideas, Veth! Riding in on a giant seahorse-unicorn, or cutting the cake with my hand-axe and having it scream and bleed glitter—” 

“That would be amazing!” Veth’s eyes are round as saucers. 

“I know, right?! But I don’t think Fjord thought so. I don’t know if he had an opinion at all actually. It was just—whatever made me happy. Which… that’s sweet! Really! But I think I just… I got tired of having to make myself happy all the time...”

Veth’s expression softens, though a little wicked spark remains. “You should know I had the best prank planned for you. You would have loved it.”

“Oooh! Tell me?!” Jester leans forward, curiosity temporarily whisking her away from the heaviness in her heart.

Veth smirks and takes a long sip of her flask. “You’ll have to get married to find out.” 

“Aww, mannn!” Jester tries to keep her disappointment playful; she knows Veth didn’t mean anything by the remark, but it still wedges itself uncomfortably between her ribs. What if I never do? What if I just walked away from the only wedding I’ll ever get? 

A sudden restlessness seizes her—more like an urge to run than to dance. She glances down at the table, where a charcuterie board lies empty between them. 

“We totally need some more snacks!"

She makes Veth hold down their table while she gets up and weaves through the crowd toward the bar. They don't have pastries here, but that's okay, because there will still be vendors open selling fried dough and gelato and all sorts of lovely festival sweets by the time they leave this place. For now, she orders another charcuterie board, and some crab legs, and a few rolls of soft, warm bread.

Spinning around with the food in her arms, she nearly crashes into a man who has crowded in behind her. He narrowly misses dousing her with his ale, and for a moment all Jester can process is the flash of ginger hair and blue eyes—

Her breath stutters in her throat.

"Watch where you're going, devil girl!" the man grunts, and it rips Jester back to reality. It's not Caleb. Of course it's not Caleb; on full inspection the man is nothing like him at all: no blush, no book holsters. He smells like sweat and ale, not soot and arcana, and he's built all square and upright, like Fjord. Jester briefly considers that she should find that attractive, but instead she suddenly longs for a hug from lanky limbs, for kindness cloaked in an awkward accent...

"Watch your own stupid face!" she grumbles back; but darts out of the way before the man can react. She could totally take him in a fight, particularly with Veth at her back, but she's not exactly in the mood for a bar brawl tonight. 

She returns to the table, carefully setting down the food, and tries to tune back into Veth as she begins to recount Luc’s latest shenanigans at school, and her preparations for this summer's latest bunch of campers. She's pretty sure she manages to nod and laugh at all the right moments, but her focus drifts. Her heart is racing, and the sting of the man's tone lingers longer than she expects. Caleb would never speak to her like that; he’d fold himself up to give her space, stammering something apologetic in three languages…

It’s been over a year since she’s seen him—since the day they finally put an end to Uk'otoa. She remembers wishing for a chance to corner him—to hear how he was fairing up in Rexxentrum—only to wonder if he'd spent most of the reunion polymorphed so he wouldn't have to speak to anyone. But realistically, she knows he was also showing off a bit. Who wouldn't want to become a massive blue dragon if they could?

Dragon-Caleb had worn his spellcasting focus as an eyebrow piercing, so he still had access to his magic; it had been so very clever... and frankly, extremely hot. Not the dragon part. She’s not into dragons like that— 

But afterwards, when he'd dropped the spell and floated down onto the deck, soaked to the bone and squinting as the sun emerged from behind the clouds...?

“Hey, Veth?” she asks, and then immediately feels bad for not knowing if she's just interrupted. But Veth just smiles and lifts an eyebrow, gesturing for her to continue. “Back when it was just you and Cayleb, before you met the rest of us... Did you two ever... you know?” She makes a suggestive hand gesture that looks more like milking a cow than anything else.

Veth nearly chokes on her liquor. “What? No! Jester! No. Absolutely not.”

“Why are you reacting like that? He's handsome, in a noodley, nerdy sort of way,” Jester says, waggling a crab claw at her.

Veth swats it away.

"He was filthy, and destitute!"

"So were you!" Jester reminds her. "And you were a goblin. And you guys care about each other, like, a lot."

“Be that as it may, I was—am—still very much a married woman," Veth says primly.

"Tell me you didn't even think about it, though." Jester pries. "That hair, those haunted blue eyes,” she croons, “His nose is pretty cute too, even if it's a little crooked…"

She's slumping against the table, drawing the same dick over and over in the condensation from their glasses. The tavern is uncomfortably warm, despite all the open windows. She considers trying to persuade Veth to go skinny dipping with her, but that seems even less likely than getting Fjord to have an opinion on bouquets.

I could probably persuade Caleb to skinny dip with me, if he were here.

The thought of him drenched on the deck of the Drensala Vis barrels back into her brain, and she imagines skipping up to him, yanking him by the shirt collar until their noses touch. His eyes would go all big and bewildered—and then sharpen with a familiar glint. 

Is it cheating to polymorph? he’d whisper, before turning on his heel with a muttered Expeditious Retreat, leaving her squealing and sprinting after him toward the water…

“Jester… why did you really break up with Fjord?”

“Huh?" Jester sits bolt upright. "What do you mean? I told you—”

“You told me part of the story, sure." Veth is watching her now with the squinty expression she used to get when they were being the Best Detectives Ever.

“I told you all the story there is, Veth,” she says. “If there’s more…” She trails off, watching festival lanterns drift above their heads in the night breeze. “I totally don’t know how it goes yet.”

Notes:

Hello! Thanks so much for reading! Just in case you're nervous, this is a complete work. I'm just making some final edits! I'm hoping to post a chapter every other day. ^.^

I've tweaked the canon timeline such that Fjord and Jester got engaged after the Uk'otoa battle, rather than Echoes of the Solstice, mostly because this story just seemed to fit better in the time prior to EoS. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Lastly—I know I'm showing up late to this fandom party, only to find the ship wars burning for so long that they've already smoldered. Please know that I have no desire to stoke the flames again! I love canon Shadowgast, and also hold nothing but affection for Fjord and Fjorester—I'm actually going to the wedding live show this fall and I am *beyond* excited. But the heart wants what it wants, and my heart craves Shadowidojest, in all its messy glory. If yours does too, welcome to my dumpster! Please make yourself at home. If this *isn't* your cup of tea, I know Caduceus—and Ao3—have many, many other flavors for you to try, and I hope you find yours! <3

Chapter 2: [Caleb, Rexxentrum]

“Jester’s here. The wedding is off. I had a dress and this huge prank planned for Fjord, and now nobody will see either one!”

The Sending blasts through the ordered calm of Caleb’s thoughts. Veth. Her shrill delivery is flippant. The message itself is a fluffernutter: an unmitigated bombshell.

For the space of one breath—one perfect, stunned heartbeat—he forgets where he is—

That cannot be right. It is just a temporary thing, surely. She’s supposed to get her fairytale ending. How could they… No, how dare they just throw it away?! 

—and then the weight of his thoughts snaps him back into place: the high arched ceilings of the Soltryce Academy; neat rows of desks; attentive faces; transmutation diagrams scrawled across the blackboard behind him. The scent of old stone, drying ink, and fresh parchment lingers in the air.

The lecture hall is so silent he might well have induced the effect magically. His students all know what it looks like when someone receives a Sending, and not one of them dares make a sound. Not for the professor whose storied past has echoed through these halls till the tales grew taller than the ceilings. Not for War Mage Widogast, the man who could snap his fingers and ignite the world.

Caleb breathes. In. Out. Tries to force the face of a certain little blue tiefling—her eyes gleaming like precious gems with unshed tears—out of his mind. Just for now. I cannot think about this now. If he does, he’s liable to drop everything and teleport to Nicodranas right this second, and what would his students do? What would Herr Margolin do? 

No, he cannot think about this yet. 

Without looking up, without shifting posture, he speaks softly, as if delivering an incantation, or an offhand correction.

“I see. Danke for telling me. I hope she is alright. Let me know if either of you need anything.”

Neutral. Polished. Not a flicker of emotion. Gut.

He sets the chalk back to the board and continues the lecture. The diagrams—a twisting array of sigils and somatic flows—fill the silence. His hand moves automatically. His voice, when it comes, is steady.

Inside, he reels.

I hope she is alright. The phrase tastes as bitter as the chalk dust that blooms around him as he writes—not because it’s a lie, but because it’s so achingly insufficient. He wonders if Veth saw through him. Of course she did. She always does.

The hour crawls. He finishes the lesson a little too quickly, and dismisses the class with a gentle nod and a reminder about the essays due next week. There’s a beat of lingering hush, then the soft rise of conversation as students gather satchels and stretch cramped legs. The scrape of chairs and the shuffle of boots fill the space with white noise. Several students offer nods or words of thanks as they pass, warm and unguarded. More than a few glance at him with mild curiosity, clearly puzzling over what had pulled their usually attentive professor away in thought. Perhaps his mask of practiced calm hadn't been quite as opaque as he'd hoped. 

It never is when it comes to her. 

When the door closes behind the last student, Caleb exhales, only then realizing he'd been holding his breath.

He stands alone at the board, one hand still fiddling with the chalk stub. White dust clings to his blackened fingertips, ghosting over the stains of soot and ink he never fully manages to scrub away. Black, and white.

It should be as simple as that. It should be clear, by now, how he feels about Jester Lavorre. It should be.

The corridor outside his office is hushed, his footsteps soft on worn stone. His door groans faintly on its hinges as he eases it shut behind him.

The office is... dense. Towers of books rise along every wall, neatly squared and sorted by subject, their spines worn but aligned with care. Scrolls are rolled and bundled in labeled twine, stacked precisely in their cubbies. The powdered reagents, the herbs, the rarer shards of crystal—all categorized, each tucked exactly where it belongs. Sieben­und­achtzig pearls in a pouch. Fünf­und­vierzig little jars of bat guano, tightly sealed against the stench. 

It would look overwhelming to most. To Caleb it is effortless: his mind indexes these shelves and stacks more easily than it convinces his heart to beat. Essek has teased him before, likening the room to a reliquary. Caleb doesn’t mind. Order is the point. Order is what steadies him. Perhaps it comes from those hungry years—his lost years. He can’t afford to lose anything else.

He rests his hand on the desk, palm steady against the wood, as if the grain itself might anchor him. But he can’t brace against the idea of her in the doorway, bursting in like a cherrybomb— nein, a blueberry bomb—and upending the entire room: scrolls unfurling like streamers, reagents scattering like shrapnel, fine dust clouding the air. Parchment lifts and spins as if caught in a festival breeze, and she grabs him and whirls him around in a waltz. Towers topple. Order fails, and everything is ruined. Perfect. Fuck. 

He rips the nearest blank scrap of parchment toward him and collapses into his chair. Uncaps the ink bottle. Dips the pen.

Are you alright? he writes, carefully counting out the words for a possible Sending. He wouldn’t dare attempt to wing this one. I hope it was your choice.

He stares at it for a breath, then folds it over and brushes it aside.

Another scrap. Another try:

You don’t have to explain anything. I only—

No.

He crumples the paper, tosses it aside more forcefully.

Veth helped me once, when I was at my lowest. I hope she will be able to help you, too.

He drops the pen, squeezing his eyes shut. Resists the urge to scratch at his arms as the compulsion wells up inside of him.

Outside, Rexxentrum shifts and stirs. Somewhere far away, a bell tolls the late hour, or maybe Tolls the Dead. Veth’s Sending had been much the same, resurrecting something in his ribs that he had endlessly tried to lay to rest. 

The wedding is off.

He grabs the quill again, writes one last attempt at a Sending:

What are you going to do now, do you think?

He chokes on a miserable laugh before he’s even done. What kind of question is that? What right do I have to ask her a question I can’t answer myself?

Reluctantly, he swipes the final draft aside and begins to pack up for the evening.

The snow is falling in thin, aimless wisps by the time Caleb makes his way through the garden gate and up his front steps. Late spring or no, Rexxentrum always keeps one last breath of winter hidden in its eaves. Flakes of white speckle the cobblestones and cling to his hair like Enlarged specimens of chalk dust. The chill leaves his fingertips raw; he hadn’t bothered with gloves.

By contrast, the warmth of the house is immediate. Soft lamplight spills into the foyer from the living room. He hears the quiet rustle of paper before he sees Essek, curled with a book on the worn divan. The piece was a lovely but cumbersome import from a thrift shop in Marquet, completely at odds with the rest of their modest Dwendalian décor. Caleb hadn’t been able to deny him the indulgence. He finds it difficult to deny Essek anything at all.

A dear, coffee-striped creature is stretched along Essek’s thigh, stubby legs dangling like little tassels. Cat hair clings to the black fabric of Essek’s robe in defiance of his usual immaculacy, and Caleb pauses, struck for the thousandth time that this is what they’ve become together.

At the sound of Caleb’s boots, Tatzi abandons her post, hops down, and winds around Caleb’s ankles with a purr so loud it fills the hall. Caleb still has moments of missing Frumpkin, but they are harder to justify in the face of a feline who is so endlessly affectionate without any arcane obligation. Caleb stoops automatically, unwinding his wool scarf, and draping his little Tatzelwurm around his shoulders in its place. 

Essek watches this transfer of allegiance with a sigh as dry as parchment. “This house is full of traitors,” he says. A beat, and then his mouth curves. “Someday I will resign myself to being second best.”

He doesn’t mean a word of it. Caleb knows exactly how irked Essek would be if the cat he’d brought back as a gift from Issylra didn’t love Caleb above all else. But the words still lodge sharp in his chest. 

“Second is not a word that exists in relation to you, Schatz,” he insists, struggling out of his coat one-handed while still petting a cat with the other. 

Essek snorts: “I think it would be rather difficult to study chronomancy without a fundamental constant of time,” he muses. “Speaking of which—it is quite late.” 

Caleb makes a small sound in reply, something halfway between acknowledgment and apology. He turns to hang up his coat, and hears Essek set his book aside. 

“I assume you heard from Jester.” Essek has never been much for idle chatter, always preferring to head straight for the topic at hand. Caleb would be relieved that tonight is no exception to the rule, if it weren’t for how his stomach suddenly twists.  

He keeps his gaze fixed on the coat hook. "From Veth," he confirms, voice quiet.

The pause that follows is brief but noticeable. Caleb doesn’t have to turn to know that he’s being assessed.

"Ah," is all Essek manages to say.

Caleb hadn’t really expected more. He busies himself removing his boots. Anything to keep his hands in motion. Anything to keep himself from wondering what Jester might have said to Essek, or imagining the sound of her voice: bright and lilting and loud enough to split a skull as violently as her handaxe. Caleb didn’t know it was possible to miss a migraine so very much.

“She reached out just briefly,” Essek adds, more carefully now. “She didn’t say much, but she is well. Or… she will be.”

“Gut,” Caleb murmurs, his mother tongue easy in his mouth and empty beyond it. For a long breath neither of them says anything more. Tatzi continues to purr around Caleb’s neck, blissful and oblivious. The fire cracks softly. Somewhere down the hall, a floorboard creaks in the settling house. Both of them flinch at the sound, but neither one acknowledges it.

“Would you like some tea, ssussun ?” Essek offers at last.

Caleb’s mouth twitches in some faint and worn expression that he thinks—hopes—is a smile. “Ja. Yes. Please.”

Essek rises without sound, his movements liquid and deliberate. He tucks a soft kiss into Caleb’s beard as he passes, fingertips skimming his shoulder. Caleb watches him go, watches the way lamplight catches the edges of his hair like magnesium flame, and for a moment something swells painfully in his chest.

He swallows it back and sits at last, trying to relax into the divan. But as the silence stretches, and the warmth of the house seeps through him inch by inch, the unease only tightens its grip. 

This house. This cat. This comfort. This beautiful, remarkable, improbable man—all his. All here, right at his fingertips. So why, then, does some greedy, grasping part of him still ache like this? 

He scrubs a hand over his face, breath shaky, and lets the feeling flicker and fade like the snow against the window panes in the dark. 

Somewhere in the kitchen, a spoon tink tink tinks against a cup, and Caleb shuts his eyes and tries not to want for anything more than the blessings he’s already been granted.

Chapter 3: [Essek, Rexxentrum]

Caleb slips into sleep too quickly that night, his breath too even, too careful to be anything but theater. Essek lets him have the lie, but braces himself.

Four hours later, when he drifts from his trance to find Caleb still scrutinizing the ceiling through his eyelids, he merely rises, presses the ghost of a kiss against Caleb’s brow, and slips from the bed without a sound.

By morning, Caleb’s fragile quiet has crystallized over him like a second skin.

Essek watches him move through breakfast and last-minute lecture plans like a haunting of his own body, clearly not registering much of anything. This alone is not unusual; his Caleb is often a little distant in the mornings, as though returning from a different plane, where time moves strangely, and persistent dreams cling to bedclothes like burrs.

But coupled with last night's news, Essek doesn't need to wonder where his partner's mind has wandered off to. He is certain every member of the Nein has Jester in their thoughts this morning. Not that they aren't sparing one or two for Fjord as well, but Essek has learned firsthand that to care for Jester Lavorre in any capacity makes the idea of her sadness nigh unbearable. 

But where most of the Nein might hold a soft spot for the little blue tiefling, Caleb's regard is more like an abyss; a pit that plummets deep into the spaces between his ribs where despair and self-loathing still reign. Essek is fairly certain that Caleb’s feelings haven't been a secret to anyone for quite some time, though he suspects that Caleb sometimes forgets that—or simply hopes that everyone has forgotten since Jester sailed off with Fjord. 

Sometimes, Essek finds himself wondering why Jester made that choice in the first place—and why Caleb hadn’t attempted to stop her. It hadn’t felt right to question it at the time; he’d only just begun to rebuild rapport with the Nein, and his relationship with Caleb in particular had been too fragile, too precious to risk for the sake of simple curiosity. 

By the time Essek realizes he could ask now, Caleb is throwing on his coat and leaning down to nuzzle kisses into his hair. 

"Bis später, Süße," he mumbles, half-asleep but fully-earnest, and then he's slipping away out the front door, hoisting his satchel over his shoulder as he goes.

His vacant seat is immediately claimed by a disheveled mop of tortie fur that glares at Essek over the edge of the tabletop. 

“I was sitting right here when Caleb fed you breakfast, Wolly. I will not be giving you anything else.” 

While another cat might meow, this one makes a throaty, unimpressed noise and extends one paw to feel along the edge of Caleb’s plate for any forgotten crusts. Caleb coaxed him from an alley behind the bakery months ago, insisting that the grizzly, snaggletoothed thing only needed a proper bath to resemble any other cat. 

But no amount of bathing, brushing, or Prestidigitation could tame the creature’s kinky coat. Even his whiskers are bent. Caleb calls him Wolpertinger, after some fairy tale that Essek’s tongue still cannot shape. 

If pressed, Essek would say the two of them struggle to see eye-to-eye, but that would imply that he could avoid those gold-green eyes. They pin him in place, so much like Nott’s that Essek sometimes has to remind himself to breathe. 

But Caleb loves this strange, bread-hoarding lump, and so Essek tolerates the censure. It’s almost comforting: the tangible proof of Caleb’s capacity to love even the most wretched of strays—a category which includes Essek himself. 

He loves you, and you love him, Essek thinks. That ought to be enough to tackle whatever is to come. But as Wolly’s unblinking gaze holds his, Essek feels the weight of a century of times that love was there, and it made no difference at all.  

 

In the days that follow, Caleb makes a full tactical retreat into academic minutiae: his students' essays; an outlandish idea for demiplanar mirroring that would allow all of Essek's bolt-holes access to Caleb's tower in an emergency; a sudden preoccupation with transmuting textiles. Fortunately, this is a headspace where Essek is comfortable following—a sanctuary where they can coexist for hours at a time and pretend that nothing is different. 

Unlike Caleb, however, Essek finds he has a limit to his capacity for make-believe. 

"Have you Sent to her yet?" Essek ventures, on the third evening of this delicate dance. 

Caleb's shoulders bunch at his desk, like Tatzi pressing herself close to the ground in an attempt to avoid being seen. 

"Nein," he mutters, "She doesn't need any of that from me." 

"Any of what, exactly?" Essek presses, acutely aware that he is crossing thin ice in an attempt to reach a man who could melt it all out from beneath them in an eyeblink. "Support from her friends?"  

"Meddling.” Caleb gestures opaquely without looking up from his book. “Aufdringlichkeit. Belästigung."

Essek can't help but smile, despite his partner's obvious discomfort. It's a reflex they both share: offering copious synonyms in their first languages when Common doesn't suffice, as though it will somehow improve understanding. Sometimes, though, Caleb uses the behavior as a defense mechanism—spewing unfamiliar Zemnian syllables like so much squid ink, hoping to squirm away.  

Sweet, skittish, impossible man. Essek lets him go.

But just because Caleb is being stubborn doesn't mean Essek has to follow suit. 

"Dearest Jester," he Sends the next morning, after Caleb has left for his lectures. He immediately hears every other member of the Nein mocking him for the stilted tone, but he can't help it. The structure helps him conform to the parameters of the spell. "You are missed. Cared for. I hope you are finding some small joy in this... uncertain time." He begins to falter. Perhaps he really is being too stiff. But he only has six words left. 

His instinct is to mention Caleb. His instinct is always to mention Caleb these days, regardless of the context; sometimes it still takes his breath away how thoroughly they have enmeshed their lives.

But now is not the time. Six words, a handful more seconds before the spell fades, and to invoke Caleb now feels like a betrayal for reasons Essek will have to consider later. 

"Just... wanted you to know!" he finishes weakly with one word to spare, and flounders: "...Cupcakes!"

Jester's reply is immediate: 

"ESSEK! How did you KNOW?! I've been baking in Veth's kitchen and Yeza has all these weird ingredients that probably shouldn't go in cupcakes but—"

The spell cuts out. Essek waits.  

"—Aw, shitballs, where did I lose you. But anyway some of them are pret-ty tasty! I was thinking I could bring some to everybody!"

Her words leave an obvious opening—one Essek turns over in his mind for a moment before replying:

“I’m quite sure they’re as delightful as their baker. Caleb or I could teleport you anywhere you’d like to deliver them. Just say the word.”

He thinks he was satisfactorily neutral. Disarming. For once he hopes his Shadowhand sensibilities haven’t entirely deserted him. 

“Oh,” Jester demurs a moment later, her voice suddenly gaining that subtle sing-song quality it gets whenever she isn’t sure of what she wants to say and is making it up as she goes. “Caleb’s probably suuuuper busy doing professor-y things. Besides, it’s been forever since our Xhorhas days! You don’t mind, right?”

Essek exhales. He can no more say no to Jester than Caleb can. But she’s not asking Caleb. Somehow, while he’d expected his partner’s avoidance, he’d assumed that Jester would be quick to confront things head-on, the way she always had in the past. But in hindsight, he should have known better. 

“If I minded, I would not have offered. Let me know where and when, and I will see you safely there. Until then, be well.”

He lets the spell dissipate. No further messages follow. 

It takes time, Caleb had once told him, when he was first struggling toward some kind of future for himself without even knowing what it might look like. Essek thinks those may have been the simplest, wisest words he's ever been gifted—and Caleb has gifted him many, many lovely words in the time since. 

But ultimately, neither Caleb nor Jester have the embarrassing wealth of time that Essek knows he does. And both of them, in their own careful, clumsy ways, have spent so much of what they do have dancing around the truths they can't quite bear to name. 

 

Jester Sends to him six days later. It arrives, as always, like a firework in his skull, and Essek is thankful that Caleb isn’t around to see his telltale flinch.

"Hiii Essek! How are youuuu?! Soooo, Veth and I have been having like, the best time ever, and I’ve been helping her set up for—"

Somehow the follow-up arrives before the first message has entirely faded, which Essek might have found impressive if it didn't emphasize the urgent, almost manic press of her words:

“—camp. But now the campers are here and Veth and Yeza are super busy, and I think I probably shouldn’t overstay my welcome, you know?”

So come here, Essek thinks immediately. Caleb could pick up exactly where Veth left off. He’d spend a whole day with her as fuzzy caterpillars in the garden, or help her transmute half the cobblestones in Rexxentrum into brownies. He’d frame it as a simple favor, a distraction for a dear friend, but Essek has never seen him so alive as when he is caught in Jester’s wake. Essek wants that for him with startling intensity. It is a strange sensation, to feel such familiar greed but on behalf of someone else. 

“I could… that is, if you would like—”

But Jester’s third Sending barrels headlong into his own like some kind of psychic cart crash. He immediately drops his spell to let hers through. 

“Anyway, I messaged Caduceus, and he says he has a tea blend for breakups, and some weasels moved in beneath their steps, so Sprinkle could—” 

“To the Grove, then.” Essek finally replies, and feels tension he didn’t even realize he was holding slowly ease from his shoulders. “Shall I pick you up this afternoon?”  

 

When he arrives in Nicodranas, the sunlight greets him like a whetted blade that even his parasol and smoked spectacles can’t completely parry. It’s so overpowering that it takes him a few moments to comprehend that there are also, actual whetted blades greeting him.

A half-moon of children blocks his path, their faces obscured behind outlandish masks—dragon, basilisk, goblin king—each brandishing a sword that looks far too sharp to be in the hand of a hapless preteen.

“Invader!” one of them cries, and Essek stiffens, readying a spell by reflex before a second voice rings out. 

“Wait, wait! Hold on!” Another camper pushes through the clamor, and from beneath a snarling manticore mask appears Luc Brenatto, older than most of the other campers by several years but still shorter by several inches.

“Hi, Uncle Essek!” Luc exclaims—and then, with unmistakable hope: “Is Uncle Cay with you?”

“Ah, not this time, unfortunately,” Essek says. “I’m here for Jester.”

“Oh! Well, she’s over at the mask-making station.” Luc points off across the yard. “Come on, campers! Let’s make for the gladiator pit!”

Essek lingers as the little mob clatters past, considering, not for the first time, how children seem to take to Caleb as if by instinct, how Caleb returns their affection so unguardedly. Though he has tried to set the thought aside, he cannot quite make peace with the idea that his presence in Caleb’s life may have steered him from the chance to hold a child who shared his smile, his eyes, his brilliance…

The sun presses down, merciless. He shifts his parasol higher and continues on with a sigh, following the sounds of delighted chaos until he finds Jester, crouched among a scatter of paints and brushes, surrounded by campers. Just as he arrives, a boy in a freshly painted dragon mask takes a deep breath and spews a startling jet of acid across the grass. The children shriek. Yeza bolts from across the yard to maintain order.

Jester turns at that exact moment and spots him.

"Essssekkk! Omigosh! Hiiiiii!"

A heartbeat later, she barrels into him, throwing her arms around him in a hug that would have unbalanced them both, if he hadn't been hovering. She is somehow just as painfully bright as the sun, but a hundred times as welcome. 

"Hello, Jester," he says, with whatever breath managed to stay in his lungs through her squeeze.

"You came!" she says, and something falters in Essek's heart. 

“Of course,” he says, though they both know it used to be far from a sure bet. He doesn’t want to remember that version of himself right now. Not when she smells like linen infused with salt-air and confectioner's sugar, and her eyes are the same sleepless-bloodshot as Caleb’s.

“Holy shit, you must be frying out here! Let’s go inside—I have something to show you!” 

Essek spares Yeza an apologetic glance as Jester summarily abandons her post. She drags him back across the yard like a child with a balloon, through the Brenatto’s home and into the kitchen. 

"Okay, so, I made these crazy ginger cupcakes with pineapple frosting, and it's a whole situation. And before you say anything; I promise they're not too sweet—just sweet enough. And a lit-tle spicy!" She waggles her eyebrows at him like ginger root is some kind of a crime. "I think you’d actually really like them! You have to try one, okay?"

Essek hadn't imagined for a moment that he wouldn't. 

"Didn't teleport into the middle of the sea, Hot Boi?" 

Veth manages to appear at his side just as he's biting into the cupcake Jester shoved into his hands. 

He frowns, licking a bit of frosting from his upper lip and taking his time chewing and swallowing. The flavor is... actually quite lovely, if still a bit sweet for Essek's tastes. The spice of the ginger and the tang of fresh Nicodranian pineapple balance what otherwise would be a mouthful of sugar. 

He tells Jester as much before turning to Veth.

"Teleportation is not typically a fraught endeavor outside of Eiselcross." He knows by now that Veth's needling is harmless, but there's a tension that lingers all the same. They both know that if Jester hadn’t asked for Essek specifically, Veth would have called on Caleb in a heartbeat.

She jabs her elbow into Essek's calf and her voice drops to a strained whisper. "Look, we both know he didn’t just hook up with you because you’re pretty and awful in combat. You’re supposed to be the smart one among us."

Essek smirks miserably. "Perhaps when it comes to matters of the arcane," he allows, "But in this...?" He watches Jester hum to herself as she tucks box after crooked box of cupcakes into her haversack. He marvels at the sheer number of them, wondering how well they will keep on her journey. Then, unbidden, he wonders the same about Jester herself. "I'm afraid this is outside the realm of my expertise." 

"She’s pretending she’s fine. He’s pretending he’s fine. And you’re just… teleporting pastries like a… like a cowardly caterer!" She jabs her finger up at him, which does nothing to make the accusation less ridiculous. 

His smirk grows. "I thought you’d know by now that I cater to poor decisions."

They share a long-suffering look—long enough to understand that neither of them has an answer, and long enough for Jester to finish packing and rush back to join them. 

"All set! I can't believe they actually all fit! I didn't even have to unpack my underwear or anything!" She has her haversack tossed over her shoulder but still carries one box in her arms, as lopsided as the others but bound with a big sparkly blue ribbon. Essek realizes what's coming, but not quick enough to react elegantly when Jester all but smushes the box into his arms. 

"Since you like them—which I totally knew you would—that box is for you! And also for Cayleb!"   

The phrase tumbles from Jester's mouth with zero spaces and barely a breath behind it: andalsoforCayleb. But even through the rush Essek can still hear that tiny extra syllable, like his name is a clothesline and her heart is dangling from the center of it. Caleb Widogast belongs to many people, but Cayleb Widogast is hers, and Essek can't even begin to mind.  

"You have to promise to share them with him, since he's silly and probably still forgets to eat, okay?" 

"I will do my very best, Jester," Essek promises. 

"You'll do better than that, Hot Boi," Veth threatens, because she wouldn't be Veth otherwise. 

Essek takes Jester's hand and finishes casting Teleport before he finishes rolling his eyes. 

 

When he returns to Rexxentrum, the house is… humming. The sharp metallic scent of magic lingers faintly in the air, and the door to their shared laboratory stands half open, pale light flickering beyond. Essek pauses on the threshold, listening to the rise and fall of Caleb’s voice as he mutters incantation patterns to himself under his breath.

Caleb glances up when Essek enters, something bright in his expression, almost eager. 

"Come here, Schatz. Look at this!" he says, motioning Essek over to the worktable where he’s laid out an elaborate lattice of sigils and runes. "I think there might be a way to apply the mechanics of Mirror Image to metaphysical objects, then suspend the spell’s duration indefinitely, so every one of your hideouts could have its own door to the demiplane..."

Essek allows himself a small, genuine smile as he approaches, leaning over the table. "You’ve been busy, Ssussun Solen."

"Idle distractions," Caleb shrugs. He sketches another symbol in the air, the glow reflecting in his eyes. "Where did Beau have you ferrying documents this time?" he asks, still half-focused on the array.

"Actually," Essek says carefully: "Jester asked me to ferry cupcakes—and herself—to the Grove. To see Caduceus."

The change is immediate. Caleb freezes, the fingers pausing mid-sweep. The small light in his expression gutters, replaced by something still and brittle. His hands—steady and sure mere moments ago—tremble faintly as he grips the edge of the workbench.

"She’s well?" he asks, voice thin, a little raw around the edges. 

"She seemed well enough." Essek replies softly, because what is he supposed to say? She’s lonely. Exhausted. About as well as you seem to be right now. 

No, none of it would help. 

With a sigh, Essek reaches into his wristpocket and withdraws the small box of cupcakes Jester had pressed into his hands. “She sent these.”

Caleb hesitates before accepting the box. His fingers close around it too tightly, and Essek can pinpoint the moment the scent of sugar and ginger reaches him, because Caleb flushes — his ears and cheeks pinking as though he’s been caught with something forbidden. His eyes darken, distant and soft all at once, and he looks, Essek thinks with a pang, starving.

“They’re quite good,” Essek coaxes.

But instead of tasting one, Caleb carefully sets the box aside on the corner of the worktable, and returns to his tinkering with a new intensity. 

 

Nearly two weeks pass in much the same way. The days stretch soft and unhurried on the surface, but Essek sees the fractures spidering just beneath. He had thought, hoped, that he and Caleb had grown into something enduring—unshakeable. He tells himself he is patient, that he has spent a lifetime learning how to wait for what he wants. But he begins to wonder whether he is waiting for Caleb to come back to himself, or whether Caleb is slowly, wordlessly slipping somewhere unreachable.

“Hello, Jester,” he Sends impulsively, late one afternoon, when the thought of spending yet another silent evening in the study nearly rattles the flesh from his bones. “You’ve often been in my thoughts, of late, and I was curious if you—and the Clays—would mind a guest this evening?”

“I’d like that a lot, Essek!” Jester’s reply comes quickly, but so subdued he barely recognizes her. “Dinner is in an hour, I think, so if you come now maybe we could take a walk first!”  

Walking. The concept sounds strangely cathartic. Essek forgoes the fancier dinner wear he might have worn in another life—the Clays have no use for that sort of pretense anyway—and reaches instead for the scrubby canvas trousers and sturdy boots he wears for gardening. The simple tunic he tosses on top is light enough to let the evening breeze through while preventing the bugs from following. 

Wolly supervises as he writes a note to leave on the table: 

 

Ussta Vallabha,

Please do not fret. I am running a small errand, and will return before you retire. There is goulash in the larder and a quarter-loaf left of that seeded bread you favor. It would please me greatly to return to evidence that you have fed yourself, rather than the cats, who will undoubtedly attempt to convince you that I did not deliver their dinner before departing.

I love you ceaselessly.

E

 

“Where is the lie?” Essek exclaims as Wolly fixes him in his unnerving glare— Light, he really does look just like a goblin. “If he asks where I have been, then I will tell him! It is as simple as that.” 

“Rrow,” says Wolly, and jumps off the table to stand before his food bowl, where Tatzi already waits expectantly. 

Essek sighs. 

Notes:

I'm just going to post two chapters at a time I guess, because the first two went together and 3 & 4 do too. Thanks for continuing onward with me! <3

And a quick note for all the cat fanciers out there: yes, Wolly is a he. I am totally aware that tortie cats are almost exclusively female, but this is Exandria, and this cat has so many other genetic mutations going on, what's one more? Both of the kitties are strays / accidental mutations, but if you want visuals, I imagine Wolly resembles a Selkirk Rex, and Tatzi is a Munchkin, because Caleb would absolutely collect the creachurs of the cat world.

Chapter 4: [Essek, The Blooming Grove]

The air is humid and fragrant, like an obligatory embrace from a distant aunt, when Essek’s Teleport resolves, depositing him in the small clearing just before the entrance to the Clays’ home.  

Jester is there waiting for him, surrounded by a small whirlwind of weasels chasing each other through the tall grass that surrounds the steps. It’s difficult to tell whether Sprinkle is enjoying the company or fleeing for his life, but Essek quickly decides it is none of his business as Jester springs up and throws her arms around him. 

“There you are!” she says, as though they hadn’t just spoken twenty minutes ago. “Thank you so much for coming!”

He arches a pale brow at her, bemused. This again.  

“I believe I invited myself…” 

“Well, then thank you for that too,” she chirps. “I told Caduceus to set another place for dinner.” Before he can protest, she loops her arm through his and tugs him away from the house. “Come on! Let’s go before it’s ready.”

They make their way into the wilder part of the grove, arm in arm at first, like a pair of aristocrats on a promenade. But the deeper they venture, the less clear their path becomes, until Essek is forced to drop her arm so they can clamber over moss-eaten headstones. He almost regrets his decision to forego hovering as bright-thorned brambles bite at his ankles.

“Aren’t you worried about getting lost out here?” Essek cringes at the sound of his own voice in the oppressive hush of the forest—then immediately feels ridiculous for worrying as Jester’s voice replies twice as loudly:

“Not really! I’ve drawn dicks on basically every tombstone so we can follow them back! See?” 

She suddenly crouches—nearly sending Essek stumbling over her—and peels back a patch of lichen to reveal a familiar phallus in bright pink. 

“Jester!” 

Essek lifts his hands to his mouth to mask his reaction without exactly understanding what his reaction is. Amusement? Horror? Atheist bewilderment?

“It’s basically the feywild out here, so the Traveler feels right at home! And Clarabelle says dicks are natural, so the Wildmother totally won't mind!” Jester bounces back to her feet, grabbing her skirts to rip them free of the underbrush. Then her voice drops to a lilting whisper. “She actually helped me paint a couple, but don’t tell Mama Clay, okay?” 

“Your secrets are my secrets, Jester.” 

She doesn’t answer, just offers him a quick, flicker of a smile—like one of the fireflies starting to wink through foliage—before grabbing his hand again.

They walk until the Grove opens around them, revealing a small pond, its dark surface only disturbed by the skittering ripples of waterstriders, and small clusters of pale lilypads that glow faintly in the cooling light of dusk.

Jester leads him down to the mossy banks, brushing aside the dewy fronds of towering forest ferns to reveal a pair of weathered tombstones tilted toward each other, as though in conversation. She plops down on one with her characteristic lack of ceremony, then pats the other until Essek lowers himself beside her, their reflections bending together in the pond’s still mirror. 

Her gaze lingers on the lilies, so Essek takes the opportunity to look at her— really study her, without her awareness. 

She is a startlingly beautiful creature, but so perpetually in motion that Essek finds it difficult to conceptualize. Like a hummingbird. He realizes that he has never seen her quite like this, with all her whimsy swapped for wistfulness. The realization is quickly followed by the thought that Caleb—and perhaps only Caleb—probably has.

It’s not hard to understand how he fell in love with this. With her. 

“I’ve been meaning to ask Caduceus who’s buried here,” Jester whispers after a while. “It seems like they were probably lovers, you know?” She gestures at the way the stones are leaning. 

“Perhaps…” Essek allows. “Or perhaps the waterlogged soil just nudged them together over time.” 

“Oh my gods, can you imagine?” she hisses, conspiratorially. “What if they were actually like, worst enemies or political rivals or something, and Nature went ‘now you have to talk to each other forever.’” 

Essek smirks. “Fortunately, I don’t think the bodies buried here are doing much in the way of talking anymore. Far worse to live for centuries in a high-ranking den, only to be born again into its closest rival.”

“Oh, shit!” Jester squeaks. “That can happen?!” 

“Oh shit, indeed,” he agrees. “One of the hundreds of reasons I declined consecution, if I’m honest.” 

For what might be the longest stretch of time since Essek met her, Jester Lavorre says nothing, just studies him with a troubled little frown. Essek struggles to keep his posture neutral—not to stiffen or shrivel under the scrutiny. She is not judging you. The time for that has long come and gone. She is your friend. Just give her time to find her words, like you do with Caleb sometimes—

“Forever is pretty scary, huh,” she says, then, and Essek didn’t think it was possible for her voice to get any smaller, but now he almost has to strain to hear her over the hum of the Grove. 

“I tend to dislike things that I struggle to quantify…” Essek replies. His smirk this time is softer, more self-deprecating. “So yes, forever can be… troubling.”  

Jester picks a strange seed off of her skirt and flicks it into the water, and they both watch it cling to the surface for an extended heartbeat before sinking. 

“Back when the Nein were still together—like together together—we talked about all being buried here, someday. And… I used to think about our gravestones: mine and… and Fjord’s, resting side by side like these two. I thought it was the most romantic thing, you know? That we’d lie here forever, side by side.” 

She swallows, and Essek watches with apprehension as her eyes gleam as glassy as the lake. 

“But then… we kept getting into these horrible battles! Even after Uk’otoa was gone; there’s just so much bad shit out at sea, Essek! And there was this moment, about two months ago, where I really thought we were all going to die—that I was going to die, out in the middle of the sea with nobody around to bring me back. And… a-and I feel like I should’ve been scared of that, you know? Of the dying part. But in that moment, all I could think about was how awful it would be to be stuck in the ground beside him.”

Essek tries and definitely fails to hide his wince as the weight of her confession hits him. Surely she meant to tell this to Caduceus? Or to Caleb. Essek is certain he must be some sort of bitter compromise. But here she is, whispering into the growing darkness, and her secrets are my secrets. Hadn’t he just sworn as much? 

She wraps her tail tightly around the gravestone and draws her knees up to her chin, balancing in some kind of physical and emotional limbo. 

“Isn’t that terrible?” she squeaks, half into her skirts. “He’s so sweet, and so loyal. Anyone ought to want forever with him. But when my life was flashing before my eyes— I realized I hadn’t even wanted the time I already had.

“It took me weeks to tell him—I mean, how do you say something like that to somebody who loves you? But I did, finally. And he just said… he said he hoped I would learn to treat myself better.” She smears the back of her hand across her cheek, sniffing. “Can you imagine?”

Essek has never trusted his imagination, but in this moment he doesn’t need to, if only because he has heard the very same wisdom directed at Caleb, time and time again. 

Light, just an hour ago Essek left him a note coaxing him to eat dinner. More likely, Caleb has turned that gentle advice into admonishment as he sits alone in Rexxentrum, with nothing but a scrap of parchment in place of a person to cling to. Suddenly, what had felt to Essek like an act of self-preservation now tastes bitterly of self-indulgence.

“I think…” Essek sighs, and the sound is heavier than he anticipated. “I think it’s understandable to fear devoting forever to somebody. But forever is not the operative word here. The true terror lies in devotion, no matter the duration.”

Catha is just rising over the edge of the canopy, and Essek tilts his head toward the heavens. 

“The Dynasty spent centuries turning forever into ritual and decree: rebirth granted by clerks, lineage tracked like livestock, until eternity became just another mundane system to manipulate, rather than a fear to confront.”

He can feel Jester watching him over the tops of her knees, her expression the picture of curious compassion, and he almost reflexively balls his hands and draws them into his sleeves.

“It was easy to decline consecution. Putting aside all my other misgivings, what good is forever with nothing to fill it?” His mouth twists involuntarily. “I had already rejected the offer long before I met you all—before I met him, and he spoke to me of time and transmutation, with a cat wrapped round his freckled neck like some eccentric scholar’s stole, and I understood that devotion was not merely some melodramatic synonym for focus. That my forever could hold Caleb Widogast’s face, his laugh, his beating heart…”

Essek swallows and drops his gaze back to the graves beneath their feet, mired in moss and muck. 

“I often think that I would gladly take forever, now—not for myself, but for us. But now our only chance at forever lies here, in this Grove, and to have it, he will likely wait centuries for me, alone in the earth…

“And truly, I don’t know what frightens me more: the idea of him here waiting, or the chance that I might one day devote myself to another while he does.”

Silence hums in the wake of his words, and only then does Essek realize how much he has shared. He folds his hands together, as though the simple somatics could crush his confessions back into a manageable size. He had meant to offer Jester solace, not an unvarnished glimpse of himself. Is this how empathy works? He wonders if he’ll ever fully understand the rules.

“I get what you mean, Essek.” Jester offers, then, and Essek doesn’t miss the sparkle in her eyes, as muted as it is. “Really, I do! But I kind of think Caleb would be just fine waiting a few hundred years for you.”

“Oh?” His brow arches.

“Yeah! So long as you bury him with enough books!” Her mouth curls until a single fang peeks out. “That or the next generation of Clays may find him haunting the Grove, asking for smut.”

Essek drops his head into his hands, defeated. Still, the image makes him laugh—Caleb entombed in a vault of tomes, muttering over magically-lit margins, posture no worse than it is at his desk. The thought is, unexpectedly, a comfort.

“And if you did find someone else—” Jester’s voice tips lighter now, playfulness returning to her like a tide. “I don’t think he’d hold it against you. Sharing’s not exactly a foreign concept to him, you know? I think he might even prefer it,” she whispers, cupping her mouth like she’s just confessed the most scandalous secret of the evening.

Essek laughs, faintly. “Polyamory is hardly novel to me either, though I never had much reason to opine. In Rosohna, the Dens grow as wide as they do tall. By comparison, Caleb’s experience is elementary, and infinitely more fraught.” The water ripples with the faintest breeze and Essek reflexively reaches to smooth his hair. “He’s lived it, yes, and he might even prefer it, as you say, but he struggles to see what he stands to gain through the pain of what he’s lost...”

Jester’s face contorts, and her tail whips with a startling smack against the mud. 

“Speaking of forever, those Empire assholes deserve to rot in every one of the hells, one after the other, for what they did to him!” she growls, briefly feral. “Sometimes I wonder how he managed to survive it with any kindness left to spare, let alone so much …” 

Her fury fades almost as quickly as it arrived, leaving a strange restlessness in its wake. Her hands twist at the bangles on her wrists as though she’s found herself in shackles, and her feet kick against the headstone, knocking moss loose in little clumps. 

“He and I had this completely ridiculous fight once—has he told you?” she blurts, but doesn’t wait for him to answer before continuing: “I was sulking because my Mama only sent me two hundred gold in a care package. And Caleb—he tried to give me everything he had, which back then was maybe fifty. He said his parents had never seen that much money in their lives. And do you know what I said?” Her voice is brittle, threaded through with shame. “I told him that was what I got every day for my allowance. Like it was totally worthless.

“But he meant it, Essek. He wanted me to have everything, even if it left him with nothing.”

Their eyes meet, and understanding passes between them: two children once cushioned in privilege, both humbled and reshaped by the same sad, brilliant boy from the Zemni Fields.

“He has a way of… freely giving what you do not think you deserve,” Essek says, and something clicks in his mind, as faintly as a cricket’s leg against its wing. 

He wanted me to have everything, even if it left him with nothing. She’s talking about fifty gold, but that isn’t the whole story. Not nearly. 

Suddenly the fact that Caleb never said a word when Jester left with Fjord makes perfect, devastating sense. 

He is about to share his revelation when the Grove itself seems to decide that now is not the time, and disgorges a flurry of weasels. 

“Sprinkle!” Jester exclaims, and Essek jolts upright as half-a-dozen chittering, wriggling bodies tumble into view. She squeals with laughter, tipping sideways onto the mossy ground as the creatures clamber over her like a swarm of living roots.

There’s a note tied around Sprinkle’s neck with a piece of twine, and Jester plucks it loose, giggling as she reads aloud.

“Dinner is served,” she announces, in her best Caduceus voice. “That’s nice,” she adds, and Essek snorts. 

On their walk back through the Grove, Jester introduces him to all seven weasels—apparently unconcerned about whether Essek will retain any of the information she is offering. 

“The white one is Whipped Cream, but I call him WC,” she explains, skipping over a fallen branch. “We had a horse named WC when we first started adventuring, but Nott named that one, and it stood for Water Closet—”

By the time the temple returns to view, the sky is completely dark, and the warm glow from the Clays’ windows feels like something out of a painting. Jester tries to tug Essek toward the door, but he stops her gently with a hand at her elbow.

“Please give the Clays my apologies,” he says. “I’m sure dinner will be delicious, but I should really get back to Caleb.”

She pouts, predictably, and bats her best lashes at him. “Not even one cup of tea?”

Essek shakes his head. “He is… struggling, lately. It was callous of me to leave him for as long as I have, tonight.”

Something softens in her expression at that. She searches his face, then steps close, looping her arms around him in the softest hug she’s ever offered. Before he can fully register the gesture, her lips brush his cheek—light, quick, impossibly tender.

“That one’s for you,” she says, “for being such a sweet friend.” Then she leans in and presses a matching kiss to his other cheek. “And that one’s for Cayleb… if you’ll deliver it.”

Essek blinks, still reeling, but nods once. 

“I’ll see that it reaches him.”

 

The study is almost oppressively warm when he enters, and smells of ink and—reassuringly—reheated goulash. Caleb sits hunched over the desk, a mostly empty bowl tempting fate and gravity at his elbow as he scribbles page after page of lecture notes. Wolly occupies a good third of the surface, impervious to Caleb’s halfhearted attempts to nudge him aside, and Essek can see Tatzi’s striped tail flicking lazily against his lover’s lap. 

At least the cats will never abandon him, Essek thinks, as he crosses the room in silence. His fingers find the taught slope of Caleb’s shoulders, skimming over familiar knots before pressing in slowly, and Caleb exhales, the sound small and raw, caught somewhere between relief and torment.

“You are back earlier than I expected,” he remarks, attempting nonchalance, but Essek hears what lies just beneath: the dread, the exhaustion, and a fragile, unspoken hope: please keep touching me. Please don’t leave. 

“I thought I would take longer,” he admits, then bends to speak near Caleb’s ear. “And I gravely underestimated how much I would miss you, ssussun.”

Essek can feel the moment the words register—the moment Caleb pieces together where he has been. He tenses beneath Essek’s hands, the quill smearing a streak across his notes. 

Essek squeezes his shoulders and leans closer, his lips brushing Caleb’s stubbled cheek in a kiss nearly soft enough to be imagined.

“A gift,” he murmurs, and feels Caleb’s body shudder like a captive magnet, helpless to draw closer or pull away.

 

For a few days afterward, the house feels… softer. Like they might be able to sustain this equilibrium with just a little bit of patience. A little bit of pretend…  

But Essek knows borrowed time when he feels it. The worn routines, the careful silences, the nights spent in the same room but worlds apart—it was never going to last. Not with her voice waiting somewhere in the wings, bright and insistent, ready to tear through the thin walls they’ve built around themselves.

So when the next Sending finally comes, it feels simultaneously like a fever breaking and a punch to the gut.

“I think I’m going crazy, Essek. I mean, the Clays are fantastic, but I thought Caduceus might be able to do… something… about me?”

From Caleb’s desk across the study, Wolly and Tatzi lift their heads in silent unison, pupils dilating in the dim light. Caleb himself doesn’t look up from the lattice he’s sketching, but Essek knows better than to think he’s unaware. 

“But he just smiles and says ‘hearts do better in their natural habitats’, which, what even is my natural habitat, Essek? What if he’s—”

“—just too polite to kick me out? It’s not like I want to stay here forever, but I sort of forgot that people need houses…”

The statement is so absurd on the surface that Essek almost laughs, if only to avoid heartbreak. Instead he slowly exhales, fingers tightening around the spine of his book.

“I’ve been daydreaming about a flat in Rexxentrum: above a bakery, with a balcony for parties and a hammock for Sprinkle. And then I could—”

“—see you whenever I want! AndalsoCayleb… though he probably doesn’t want that because I’m… you know. A lot. But it’s still a nice dream, right?”

Something twists painfully beneath Essek’s ribs as he considers telling the man across from him that his name is now AndalsoCayleb— that it must be, because Jester Lavorre has somehow convinced the Sending spell to count the phrase as a single word. It’s just the sort of dear, impossible thing that would make Caleb smile, or melt—or self-destruct.

“She blew five spell slots on Sending.”

It isn’t a question.

Essek looks up, meeting Caleb’s gaze. There’s no surprise there—just the honed edge of someone attuned to every current of magic as well as the beat of his own heart. Someone who knows her patterns, her tells, and, worse: Essek’s own.

“Yes,” Essek says softly, the single word tasting like surrender.

Caleb hums low in his throat and bends again over his notes.

“Are you not going to answer her?” he asks, with a mildness so venomous that it turns Essek’s stomach. 

“I think you and I need to have a conversation before I do that,” says Essek, calling on every ounce of his hard-won Shadowhand serenity to see him through this moment. 

“I am not so sure we do,” Caleb mutters, but his shoulders curl inward, like he’s folding himself around the point of a blade. 

“She’s restless,” Essek says, deliberate and measured. “She thought the Grove would bring her peace, but it has left her… unmoored… instead. She doesn’t know where she belongs. And she…” He hesitates, weighing the truth. “She misses you, Caleb. Desperately.”

“Not desperately enough to spend a spell slot on me, much less five.” The remark is little more than a yowl, so dripping in ugly jealousy it sinks immediately to the floorboards. 

He is pitiful, sometimes, Essek thinks. It would be adorable, if it weren’t so painfully frustrating. 

“Shall I tell her to Send directly to you, then?” Essek takes the bait, gritting his teeth all the while. “I can easily extricate myself from the middle of this—”

“Don’t.” The word descends softly, but with the power of a Command, and Essek waits patiently for clarification. Caleb’s hand curls into a fist on the desk. “Essek, ich kann nicht —don’t make me talk about this right now.”  

“If not now, then when, Caleb?” Essek tosses his book aside and leans forward, beseeching. “She longs to see you, and I know you feel the same. It would be so simple to bring her to Rexxentrum—”

"Nein!"  

His fist hits the desk, rattling the ink bottle and pinning both cats’ ears back, though they stay devotedly put.

Essek holds his ground as well, feeling a silly, visceral kinship with the creatures as they all watch Caleb struggle, helpless to soothe him; clueless how to even begin. 

"No. Nein. Not yet. She… she should have more time to…” He presses the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, scrapes nails through his hair until the tie dangles from a single lock. “She just needs more time. And it is almost mid-term."

Essek sighs heavily. "If that is true, then she should have plenty of time to herself while you work, no?"

He watches the muscle in Caleb's jaw twitch.

“Essek…” he warns—

—but suddenly Essek’s patience reaches its limit. 

“Why are you acting like you don’t want this?!” he exclaims, tossing up his hands and a burst of Undercommon expletives with them. “She is one of your dearest friends!”  

“She is your dearest friend!” Caleb snaps back, and the cats scurry. “To me, she is—” 

His voice falters, strangled by something rawer than pride, and Essek wonders with his heart in his throat if either of them would have survived if he had finished that sentence. 

“What I want is immaterial,” he says, instead.  

Essek closes his eyes, feeling every syllable of that sentence like gravity doubled. 

“Caleb Widogast,” he whispers. “That is not true. ”

The clock on the mantel ticks steadily, indifferent. So many ways this could have gone worse. So many ways it could have gone better. And instead: this. A stalemate, heavy and airless. 

Caleb exhales first, the sound frayed at the edges. 

“Zadash,” he says, voice hoarse. “Take her to Zadash, to Beau and Yasha—just for now. She will be happier there than in the Grove.”

Just for now. Essek bites the inside of his cheek until he tastes copper, but nods. 

 

When Essek arrives at the Grove the following evening, Jester is frantically chasing the weasels through the graves, determined to bid farewell to each and every one—and also probably stalling a bit. Essek expected nothing less, but he wasn’t expecting Caduceus to step out of the house and pull him aside with a tilt of his shaggy pink head.  

“She’s been good company,” he says, in that way he has of making even the most benign of statements startlingly opaque. 

“I would hope so,” Essek replies, realizing just a moment too late how defensive it sounds. 

The faint quirk of Caduceus’ brow confirms it. He leads Essek around the house toward a makeshift little shed where the Clays store shovels and rakes. 

“I get the sense you’re really taking up cultivation.” 

Essek frowns, caught off guard. “I’m not sure I’d go that far…” he says carefully. “The garden seems to be doing well enough, but outside the Grove the season is still quite early—”

“Not what I mean,” Caduceus interrupts, his smile kind but certain. He gestures toward a patch of tall white flowers clustered by the foundation of the house. “Dittanies,” he announces. “Funny things—they started springing up after Mister Caleb’s old crowd came through. Come here for a second.”

Essek hesitates, but draws closer as Caduceus lowers his large, lanky body into a crouch.

He produces flint and steel from his pocket, and Essek’s stomach plummets, his mind filled with phantom smoke and the memory of the Grove devoured by Ikithon’s flames. 

“Caduceus! What are you—”

A spark catches, and fire flashes up the length of a stalk, flaring bright enough to sting Essek’s eyes and utterly consume every blossom. For a single, sickening heartbeat, Essek is convinced that his friend has gone mad, that he’s just watched Caduceus casually ignite his own home— 

—but then the light collapses, vanishing into nothing, and the flowers still remain, impossibly pristine.

“They live in their own little clouds,” Caduceus explains, seeing Essek’s dumbfounded expression. “It’s kinda like… one of your invisible wizard shields. Fire consumes it, but the blossoms stay nice and safe. They don’t mind at all.”

He plucks one of the flowers from its stalk and places it in Essek’s palm—not a poetic offering so much as a research specimen. Essek studies the fragile, pink-veined petals in even more delicate silence. 

“I know Mister Caleb is still afraid of what’s inside him,” Caduceus says, then. “But if you help her put down a few roots? He won’t have to worry so much. Not with her.”

Essek can’t think of a single thing to say in response, but fortunately Caduceus never really seems to expect one. He just straightens until he once again towers over Essek, smiling and clasping shoulder before ambling back the way they’d come. 

Essek glances once more at the flower in his hand before following in that unnamable awe that always trails in Caduceus Clay’s wake.

Jester is waiting by the front steps when they return, her haversack slung over her shoulder and Sprinkle curled around her neck.

“Are you sure they don’t mind me staying?” she asks, as Essek invokes his disguise and prepares to teleport them.

“They’ll be thrilled to have you,” Essek assures her. “Beau tells me that Yasha’s been preparing all day. You know how much she loves playing hostess.”  

She nods, but her voice betrays her. “I do. It’s just… I-I’d hoped—”

“Caleb wants to see you, Jester,” Essek insists, as the circle connects and glows around them. “He just—

—needs more time,” he finishes, as the Cobalt Soul Archives materialize around them. 

Jester says nothing, but he can feel the tension on her as they swiftly make their way through the austere hallways of the Archives. He can almost imagine a little flammable cloud enveloping her like a ditanny, building and building as they exit the Soul into the evening streets of Zadash... 

And the moment the doors shut in their wake, she bursts. 

“You keep saying Caleb needs more time, but… more time for what? What does he think he needs to be ready for?”

Essek exhales slowly, gazing up at the sky as he carefully chooses his words. “It’s not my place to tell you that.”

But when he glances over and finds her watching him with those wide violet eyes, something in him buckles.

“Jester,” he says, tilting his head, “you must know the way that man feels about you. How he has always felt about you…”

She blinks, as if the words don’t make sense. “I mean… I-I might have wondered, once or twice…” Her voice trails off, then gathers speed in a nervous tumble. “But he never said anything! And then I went with Fjord, and it’s been years, and now—” Her throat works around the words, and the city noise almost devours them when they finally escape: “Now he has you,” she says. “And you’re so perfect for him—” 

“I am far from perfect, Jester. You know that—”

“But for him, you are,” she says. “There’s no way I could ever…th-that we could…I-I mean… I-I don’t even know what I mean...”

“It sounds like you’re talking around the very thing that Caleb feels unprepared for…” Essek says. “Perhaps the same thing we discussed the other night…”

She stares at him, stunned, a hectic blush filling her cheeks.

“A-are you saying that… that the three of us could… that he might… that you would be okay if—“

“I am saying,” Essek stops her, gentle but firm, “that you are very dear to me. Both of you. And I am here for as long as it takes you to figure out what you are to each other.”

Jester swallows hard. “And… what about… after we figure it out?” she squeaks.

“Always, Jester.” 

Essek catches one last glimpse of Jester’s face—her eyes welling with tears—before she’s buried herself in his arms. He takes a second to wonder how he must look, standing here wearing his false-face and archivist’s robes, holding a little blue tiefling. But it doesn’t take him long to decide that he doesn’t care, so long as Jester Lavorre is alright. 

They linger on the steps for a long moment, just watching the cityfolk hustle through sunset-hued streets.

“I could paint this,” Jester says. 

“You could,” Essek agrees easily.  

“Essek?”

“Jester?”

“I just had a thought… and it’s probably silly,” she says. “But… have you ever told Caleb that?”

“Told him what?” Essek looks back at her. 

“That you’d… that you’ll wait for him. Even if he…” She swallows, twisting the strap of her haversack in her fingers. “Even if he devoted himself to someone else while you do.”

The world tilts. The conversation in the Grove, the fireflies, the gravestones— somehow she manages to channel it all like Divine Intervention with just a handful of shaking words.

“No,” Essek admits, finally. A feeling like shame and also like clarity washes over him. “I suppose I always thought it was obvious.”

Jester’s mouth twists into a wobbly smile. “Recently, I’ve started to think that most of the things I thought were obvious? They’re really, really not. And a lot of things I thought were going to be impossible are actually kind of straightforward. It’s sort of frustrating, actually.”

Essek’s own smile is warm. “Recently, I think you have spent too much time with Caduceus.”

“Holy shitballs, yes,” Jester agrees, laughing a little, “I probably need somebody to pop me on the head a few times.” 

“I don’t suppose we know anyone who could?” 

She just grins and hunts through the illusory sleeve of his robe until she finds his hand, dragging him down the steps, and onward toward Beau and Yasha. 

Notes:

Anyway, Caduceus is the best, and I had to force myself to not write about 14 more chapters about the Grove.

Chapter 5: [Caleb, Rexxentrum]

Notes:

CW: Canon-typical Caleb mental health struggles in this chapter, including self-loathing, panic, dissociation, PTSD, compulsive behaviors, as well as hints of disordered eating. I want to say they're all treated quite gently, but please be kind to yourselves!

Why are you acting like you don’t want this?!

Caleb keeps reliving it: the moment Essek’s patience snapped. The glint of the silver rings on his hands as he threw them into the air, the biting edge of his voice. Every time he lets his guard down, it lands like a fresh blow.

His days stretch thin and strange in the aftermath, like some dunamantic fallout. He sees Essek lingering at the edge of that viscous haze with hands half-raised, words half-formed. Caleb hears them anyway: 

Make your choice, Widogast.

Surely it's only a matter of time until Essek just leaves, summarily removing the choice from Caleb's incompetent hands. His nightmares, once overflowing with flames and screams, are marked instead by absence. He wanders through an empty house, searching for the swish of Essek’s robes. Awake, he clings to every detail of him, longing for the magic of their partnership, their relentless pursuit of arcana and intimacy alike. He aches for softly accented revelations in his ear and the drag of perfectly manicured nails down his back.

Me or her. 

There was never supposed to be a choice. Given enough time and space, Jester was supposed to realize how much she missed Fjord. Caleb was supposed to hear, via Veth—or Essek, or Beauregard, or anyone— that the wedding was back on. That life was continuing as it ought to, without temptation eating him alive.  

Instead the temptation manifested physically in the form of four little cupcakes in a lopsided box, with a big blue bow that shed glitter on Caleb’s fingers at the slightest touch. He’d immediately shoved it aside. Told himself it didn’t mean anything. That she’d baked enough for everyone, and then some. That she hadn’t thought of him specifically.

But when he finally tasted one—drawn back downstairs in the dead of night like a phantom—he’d nearly wept. Not at the taste itself, though the buttery sweetness layered with tropical fruit had been all but decadent after a long Rexxentrum winter, but at the desires that followed. Of dabbing that frosting onto the tip of Jester's nose and then immediately kissing it off. Of hauling her up onto the kitchen counter and kissing her and kissing her until she was wriggling and giggling, and all of his senses were suffused with ginger and cinnamon heat.

Before he could help it he’d eaten a second cupcake, and then half of another, until the sugar made him jittery and he’d ended up pacing in the garden, sipping water in a vain attempt to wash away the sweetness that choked him like a curse: far, far too much and yet not nearly enough. 

Days later, the cupcakes are long gone and he is still starving in a way that turns his stomach. He feels monstrous with it—filthy, the way he’d felt the day he’d met her. And in the grand scheme of things, could he really say he had changed? Wasn’t he still the same, selfish, navel-gazing wretch he’d always been?

Some nights, lying awake beside Essek’s motionless trance, Caleb’s mind drifts to Astrid and Eadwulf: to the jagged, adolescent shape of the three of them stitched together with trauma and breathless want. To this day he can’t make up his mind whether what they shared was love or just some sick, rotting pantomime of it. 

He remembers being unable to differentiate between his arcane fire and the naked envy he felt whenever he trained beside Eadwulf. The way Eadwulf fucked him like he wasn’t sure whether it was a reward for being so pretty or a punishment for stealing Astrid’s attention. And Astrid—she’d blown hot and cold like nobody else he’d ever met, holding them alternatingly in her arms and in contempt until Bren had lost track of which was which.

Caleb tries, once or twice, when he’s feeling particularly brave, or maybe just particularly masochistic, to imagine Jester and Essek in Astrid and Eadwulf's places—to picture something gentle, something enduring. But no matter how he turns it over in his mind, it always ends with him burning it all to ash. 

And still, Jester does not return to Fjord.

One week, two days, nine hours, and forty-seven minutes after he'd insisted that Essek bring Jester to Zadash, Beauregard's Sending picks Caleb up by the scruff of the neck like a stray cat, and dashes him against the wall of his bedroom.

"Hey. Wallowgast. You alive? One of our contacts found something near Molaesmyr. Lunch at The Gilded Wing. Noon. My treat. Brush your hair or whatever."

"Jawohl, Beauregard. Fick dich auch," Caleb hisses. If Beau wants to treat him like an animal then he'll behave like one. "Perhaps I will show up as a filthy ape, just for you."

He doesn't explicitly accept or decline her invitation. They both know that if he doesn't appear, she'll track him down and drag to lunch by the ear. Just like they both know that his hygiene hasn't lapsed since the Nein first arrived in Xhorhas, years ago. One can't exactly hold a Soltryce professorship while looking like a disheveled vagabond, even if he still feels that way inside more often than not.

Still, Beau’s heckling does motivate him to look in the mirror as he bathes and dresses. His eyes are bloodshot and heavy with shadows, but that's nothing new. His hair is fine—it's on the longer side, but it ties back elegantly enough. His beard, however, is looking a little scruffy.

He gets out his straight razor, scratching his fingertips through the coarse hair and trying to decide on the right length. Essek would likely be disappointed if he shaved the entire thing off; he's told Caleb more than once how dignified he looks with it, not to mention much he likes the feel of it on his skin...

But then another voice pipes up, and for a moment he's sitting in the middle of the Zemni Fields, the morning after Yasha had shorn him with her greatsword:

"Oh, you have a thingy! A little dimple, on your chin! It's the cutest!" Jester coos at him in the back of his mind, and his hands tremble so badly he has to drop the razor and grasp the edge of the sink for a moment to steady himself so he doesn't just open his own throat by accident.

"Verdammt noch mal!" he mutters at the drain, "Zwing mich nicht zu wählen!" He wonders what Beau would do if he showed up with one side of his face clean shaven and the other overgrown. She would probably punch both sides, he thinks with a despairing laugh, before pulling his shit together well enough to reach for the razor again.

He keeps the beard, settling for a subtle trim. 

The Gilded Wing is a bustling establishment featuring an assortment of tiny tables that spill out into the cobblestoned side-street during the warmer months of the year. Today happens to be one of the first true days of spring, and a pergola freshly strung with Zaunwinde and tiny lanterns lends the makeshift patio a cozy ambiance.

The atmosphere does nothing to calm Caleb's anxiety; if anything, it only reinforces his certainty that this is an ambush.

Beau arrives late and wastes no time ordering for both of them; her Zemnian has grown more fluent over the years, and the sound of his notoriously harsh mother tongue in her already brusque voice never fails to make Caleb smile a little.

She complains for fourteen minutes about the deskwork she's been stuck with at the Soul. Then they spend another twenty-two minutes discussing the implications of the journal that a fellow-expositor uncovered on the outskirts of Molaesmyr. Caleb pushes half a knackwurst around his plate and picks at a pile of rotkohl as she asks him questions she can't possibly want the answers to about his classes, his research, his students. She's trying to lull him into a false sense of security, which is absurd since he knows it, and she knows that he knows.

It's fortunate, he thinks, that they love each other in their own strange, roundabout way. It's the only reason he manages to stay in his seat when she finally gets down to business, idly spinning her glass of Kölsch in its puddle of condensation.

“Sooo. Jester’s been staying with us.”

Caleb pulls in a long, slow breath.

“... Ja , I am aware.”

“It’s been great. She recreated her mural from Yasha's bedroom in the Xhorhaus—but better , somehow. She's like, really talented. I don't think I ever gave her enough credit."

"We have all failed in that, at one point or another." Caleb manages to keep his voice level, but it doesn't matter, because Beau's still talking:

"The cupcakes she brought with her were stale as shit, of course, but she and Yasha baked more and I think the neighborhood has probably gained a collective hundred pounds. Let’s see, what else? Oh! Yeah, so Yasha and I have been getting more serious about adopting, right?"

"Ja...?" Caleb says, cautiously.

"Well, when she heard that, she took it upon herself to interview every last orphan she could find. Apparently she doesn't think any of them are the right fit for us. But I'm pretty sure Zadash has a Cult of Traveler now, and it's 85% children under ten.”

Caleb cannot help himself; he thinks of her—prancing through the streets of Zadash like a self-declared town crier, distributing hand-colored pamphlets to awestruck little girls and boys—and he laughs.

" Ja, well, she got her own start very young, so..."

And then, as he's contemplating how the apples of his cheeks hurt just from smiling for ten seconds, Beau tosses her arm over the back of her chair and looks him dead in the eye.

“Don't get me wrong: we love her to bits, and we've been happy to host her. But frankly? I want my wife back in the evenings, and we aren’t really looking for a threesome, you know?”

Caleb reels back so sharply the table scrapes against the cobblestones.

"Das ist —I-I—I am not—”

She leans forward, pushing the table back into place as she does.

“Really? You're gonna try to lie to me, Bren? About this?”

The name hits him like one of her throwing stars, sharper than Beau probably intended, and carrying shrapnel in its wake: Astrid’s laughter, Eadwulf’s breath against his neck, the terror of wanting and wanting without knowing how to love.

“Beauregard.”

The voice that leaves his throat might be his or might be some kind of wounded animal. His fingers twitch under the table, suddenly hot and dry as kindling: just shy of flaring with fire. When he throws his napkin onto the table there are singe marks on the linen, and he sees Beau wince.

“Wait." She catches the arm of his coat as he begins to rise and does not let him shake her off. "Just wait, Caleb. I'm sorry, okay? That was a cheap shot. I just... nobody knows how to get through to you, dude. And Essek's not exactly one for blunt force..."

Caleb's heart stutters.

"Did he put you up to this?"

"No!" Beau exclaims, then drags her hands down her face. "No, Caleb. Nobody fuckin' put me up to this. But she wants to come stay in Rexxentrum. She wants to come stay with you. And before you give me some Very Logical Excuse for why that’s not a good idea—”

“It would be...uncomfortable.”

Beau snorts.

“Uncomfortable? You can literally conjure a magical tower."

"That's not what I—"

"This isn’t about comfort. It’s about you being chickenshit.”

Caleb swallows hard. He tries to speak. Can’t.

Beau sighs like he's tossed another ten pounds of paperwork in front of her. 

"Will you please sit the fuck down? People are staring." 

Against his better judgement, Caleb does. He's fairly certain his knees were too weak to reliably get him out of the restaurant anyway. 

"Now look me in the eye, and tell me you never want to see Jester Lavorre ever again."

Caleb shakes his head, then looks up at the flowery canopy above them. The lanterns dance like little amber hamster unicorns through the tears in his eyes. He blinks them back furiously. Swallows again.  

"You know I cannot do that, Beauregard."  

"So then what's this about, Caleb?" 

She's swapped tactics; she's being almost gentle with him, now, and he struggles not to bristle under the scrutiny. 

"I am... afraid," he starts, clumsily. 

"Yeah, we already established that."

"I am afraid," he says again, more deliberately,"...that Essek will leave."

Beau’s brows lift sharply—surprise so genuine she can't mask it. Her voice drops to a low whisper. “We're talking about the same Essek, right? Hot Boi? War Criminal? Soup Connoisseur? Like, even setting aside the fact that he's a fugitive with nowhere to go, he’s not exactly subtle about the way he feels about you..." She suddenly tilts her head at him, as though seeing the same tired, freckled face she's known for years in a whole new light. It's disconcerting. "You uh... you have talked to him about this, right?”

Caleb stares at her, hoping she will understand how ridiculous she is being without him having to do anything else. 

Instead she just stares back. The seconds pass like molasses: ein, zwei, drei, vier —

Beau groans and rubs both hands down her face. “Oh my gods. Okay. Great. Cool. So not only are you terrified of wanting Jester, you’re terrified of Essek not wanting you because you want her. And you're not talking to either of them about it. Caleb Widogast, what in the actual hells is the matter with you?”

Everything. Caleb's whole body twitches with a renewed desire to flee. His knee bumps the underside of the table. He's leaving soot prints on the hem of the tablecloth now. We'll have to leave a sizeable tip.

"She should return to Fjord," he grits out: a last ditch effort to ward her off. He already knows it's going to fail, but he feels picked cleaner than the herringbones on the side of Beau's empty plate. "He… he made sense for her. I do not."

Beau sits back, crosses her arms. “Okay, first of all? Who the fuck are you to decide that ? I've talked to Fjord, you know. The breakup was mutual. There’s nothing there, Caleb. Second: you gave the Beacon back to the Bright Queen years ago, so maybe stop looking for alternate realities and start facing the one that's right in front of you."

Caleb stares at the table, shame rolling over him like furnace heat. Beau lets the silence hang for a breath before she stands, reaching into her coin purse to dump a gold and a handful of silver onto the table—more than enough to cover their meal and replace the linens he's fucked up, like he fucks everything up. It's lucky that he barely managed to touch his food, or he probably would be vomiting it up right now. 

“You know, for a guy who can calculate arcane vectors in his sleep, you’re absolute shit at basic arithmetic. Let me lay it out for you: you're in love, times two. Against all odds, they both love you back. Carry the one. Jester will be on your doorstep on Miresen morning. Figure it the fuck out, okay? And don’t tell me how it goes.”

For as snarky as she sounds, the squeeze she gives his shoulder on her way out is about as tender as she's capable of being with anybody outside of Yasha, and Caleb doesn't take it for granted. But the way she shakes him makes her parting words tumble through his brain like an avalanche and settle heavy in his stomach in place of lunch. 

Jester will be on your doorstep on Miresen morning. Figure it the fuck out, okay?


Caleb walks back through Rexxentrum in a daze, every step a silent prayer for calm, for order.

“Siebenunddreißig.“ A familiar copper fountain looms in the corner of his eye, its stacked owls patinated with age and mist, indicating his entry into the Tangles.

“Neunundvierzig.“ The crooked baker’s sign sways slightly in the wind, advertising fresh Baumkuchen . It looks like it hasn’t been updated in months. 

“Sechsundfünfzig.“ In the aptly named Court of Colors, a tailor’s window is all but exploding with spring silks—blues and pinks and yellows in florals and ginghams and dots. 

Caleb loses count of his steps and stares like some pathetic wretch caught by a Hypnotic Pattern. He can almost hear Jester squealing beside him— can feel her grabbing for his arm to drag him inside the shop. He can imagine standing there awkwardly, trying to disappear between bolts of linen and cotton while she tries on every last dress, each one more impractical than the last. 

“What do you think, Cayyyyleb?” She would tease, flouncing around him and daring his diligent eyes to drop to the latest sweetheart neckline or half-laced corset. “I think I could probably fight in this one. I feel like I could just run up to a giant ogre and SMACK it with my spiritual weapon right in the dick!”  

In his mind’s eye he sees her strike out at a mannequin, almost knocking it over before whirling back to him. “But do you think it’s cute? How do you say ‘cute’ in Zemnian? I bet it’s something like ‘shnurglikblurglik.’ Like, the opposite of cute. But you should say it anyway because you will still make it sound really sweet, you know?”  

The juxtaposition—her kindness and her violence, her absurdity and her grace—unravels him utterly. Always has. He would buy her every dress in the shop; he would pull Catha from the godsdamned sky. He would give her anything she wanted. 

Except a proper fucking place in your life, apparently.

That inner voice sounds a lot more like Beau. 

Jester will be on your doorstep on Miresen morning. 

The nausea returns from nowhere, and the cobblestones seem to slide beneath his feet, as if the whole street were tilting away from him. Instead of entering the shop, he veers toward the narrow alleyway beside it and presses himself flat against the half-timber wall. 

Breathe. Just breathe.  

Bile burns at the back of his throat. He squeezes his eyes shut, focusing on the grit of plaster dust caking under his clammy palms. 

Breathe.

The feeling passes too slowly. But eventually, it does pass. 

He rights himself, wipes his forehead with a trembling hand, and heads deeper into Vigil’s Circle. 

 

The market is bustling with vendors calling out their prices in staccato bursts, hawkers with trays of bright baubles, and buskers singing tunes with their hats by their feet on the cobbles. The spicy steam from a cart cooking currywurst reminds Caleb how very little he’s eaten. 

A pack of his students are haggling over paper and ink, probably to complete their assignments for his course. Caleb ducks his head and tries to blend in. But it’s hard to disappear when he’s apparently trying to buy half the Circle.

He starts simple. Milk. Eggs. Butter. Flour. Then sugar: powdered and brown. Yeast. Salt.

The only fruit worth buying in Rexxentrum this early in the spring comes from the Menagerie Coast, but he grabs a few boxes of berries and a bag of apples.  

He passes a spice cart and adds cinnamon sticks. Cloves. Star anise. He starts to move on and then doubles back for ginger. He picks up cocoa even though he’s fairly certain Essek already restocked it. And then, as he’s paying, he sees a row of glass jars filled with pastel candy, and remembers The Pillow Trove.  

Each little room had been a decadent sanctuary, with perfumed linens and a little dish of sugar pearls beside the bed. He remembers staring blankly at them as he braced himself to bear his sins to Beau and Nott, not even registering what they were or why they were there.

He buys a jar with some of every flavor, not knowing which ones she likes best, or if she likes them at all. 

He almost stops there. But the idea of her walking through his door makes something cold and tight curl behind his ribs, driving him relentlessly deeper into the market. 

Caleb loves his house. Yes, it is modest and old, with creaky floorboards and narrow halls and mismatched decor, but it’s his . His and Essek’s. And he’s proud of it. He’s proud of Essek’s garden, and their overflowing bookshelves, and the breakfast nook that catches the morning light just so. He’s proud of all the little enchantments and enhancements they’ve woven into the very fiber of the structure to transmute it from a house into a home. 

But Jester grew up in a place called The Lavish Chateau. She’s spent the last few years sailing the Lucidian, trading exotic goods and swapping stories of romance and adventure. What could she possibly want with the humble little life he’s built himself from ashes? 

Before he quite understands what he’s doing, he’s standing in a cramped stall swaddled floor to ceiling in textiles—breezy linens and beautiful handstitched quilts and thick woolen blankets and furs—muttering color combinations to himself like a prayer.

Sanftrosa. Erdbeer. Lavendel. Lila. Himmelblau.

He wants softness —the kind she’d drape over a pillow-fort without a second thought. Something beautiful, delicate, but resilient enough to survive paint and berry preserves.

The homely older woman minding the stall finally finishes with another customer and takes pity on him, probably interpreting his paralysis as a symptom of class, or gender, or maybe a simple lack of aesthetic sense. He sees her dawning surprise when he offers up his pile of very specific opinions with a generous side of angst, and tries not to blush into his ears when she says the girl he’s shopping for must be a special one indeed.

Twenty-two minutes later, he leaves several gold poorer, but in possession of a set of bed-linens in dusky pink and bath towels just a shade darker, a thickly-batted blue quilt embroidered with local wildflowers and fuzzy little bees, and a throw of winter fox fur.

You don’t even know if she plans to stay, he thinks, as he instinctively points himself in the direction of home. You could have just summoned the tower. She’d probably like that better than these strange attempts at—what? Courtship? Domesticity? Desperate bargaining? He braces against another wave of anxiety, gritting his teeth and quickening his pace.

He’s nearly out of the market when he passes a familiar stall stacked with used books—crates overflowing, cracked spines jutting at odd angles, a chalkboard sign advertising Romances, Rhymes, and Rare Arcana. He knows the last claim is a bold-faced lie. The rarest arcana that passes through this market manifests in the form of secondhand textbooks taught at the Academy. Caleb knows better than to think he will find anything of true academic merit, but the smell alone: mildew, dust, leather, a hint of tobacco—it lures him in like an aphrodisiac.

He hesitates for just a moment before crouching down to trace his fingers along a stack of tattered novellas tucked away from the polite public: rose-pink covers flaunting shirtless heroes holding buxom beauties, their titles embossed in glittering gold: The Tempting of the Tempest, Bardic Blues, A Fling in the Feywild, The Syllabus of Seduction.

He stares at the last one in sudden horror. What would it even mean to give her another romance novel? Would she laugh at the idea—at him, imagining himself as a romantic lead? Or worse: would she see the gesture for what it is: a man who only knows how to hand her stories, because he can’t believe he could ever be part of one? 

Essek has told him otherwise, has held him and kissed his shoulders and insisted he is worthy of care. But Essek is broken too. Their souls are the same sort of ruined. It isn't the same thing...  

The urge to find Essek here and now—a sudden, reckless desire to collapse into his arms and confess every conflict in his heart—is what ultimately pulls Caleb back to his feet and carries him home. 

Essek is nowhere to be found, likely still occupied by whatever Beau dragged him off to do after lunch. Caleb isn’t sure whether to be relieved or despondent. He decides on the former when his pride balks at the thought of Essek watching him stagger through the garden gate, cheeks pink and arms straining with… with all of this : the jars and bundles and extravagances. The frantic excess of it all.

He begins unloading groceries with mechanical focus as Tatzi winds around and around his feet. Wolly sniffs skeptically at the linens and towels set by the stairs. Caleb tells himself he’ll take them up shortly. 

He gives the cats their dinner, then heads to the study instead, because she could still probably use some new books to read, even if buying her smut would be inappropriate. He scans the shelves for titles she might enjoy: folktales, travelogues, puzzle-box mysteries with clever heroines and just a hint of flirtation. He skips the ones that are basically pornography, then hesitates and adds two back with a huff. This is Jester Lavorre, and for better or worse he knows her tastes in literature. To suddenly act like he doesn’t would be even weirder than just admitting it.

When his arms are full, there is literally nowhere else to go but upstairs.

The guest room doesn’t get much use, outside of the rare nights when Beau is too tired to return to Zadash. The door stays shut most of the time to keep the cats out. Reaching for the knob, Caleb feels the wholly irrational, yet deeply ingrained urge to Message Veth and ask her to check for traps. He almost expects the room to hiss like a vault when it opens, but the door yields with nothing more than a quiet creak.

Everything inside is uncomfortably still.

He sets the new linens down on the mattress, and surveys the room. It’s a modest size, just large enough for a full-size bed, a wardrobe, and a little armchair by the window for reading. Essek has always kept it tidy, decorated with a courtly restraint and a scholarly budget: a few books stacked on a mounted shelf, candles in sconces, a little woven jute rug underfoot. Practical. 

“You mean totally boring, Caleb,” Jester crows in his mind. His heart sinks.

He turns the armchair toward the window a bit.

No, wrong.

He moves it back, only to shove it all the way toward the corner a moment later. 

She should have an easel by the window. I should have bought her paints.

He pulls the curtains wide open to let in the golden afternoon light, then immediately narrows them to soften the glare.

He steps back. Tilts his head. Sighs.

None of it looks right. None of it is enough. He scratches at his arm.

You should just cast the tower for her.

No. No. He doesn’t want to cast the tower, doesn’t want her banished away to another realm like some cloistered princess. If she’s here, he wants her here.

Caleb feels a familiar urgency seize him: the need to leave something—anything, everything —better than he found it. 

He lets it take control, transmuting the curtains from heavy linen to something gauzier that dapples the sunlight. He adjusts the upholstery of the armchair to match the blue of the quilt, fingers tingling with the hum of arcane release. It’s cheating, he thinks. But only a little. He infuses the rug with another burst of color: a deep emerald green that calls to mind the Traveler's cloak and the garden at dusk. 

Then he’s down in the garden, picking hellebores and fragrant pink hyacinths and loud branches of forsythia, and arranging them in a spare milk bottle in a way he hopes will feel quaint and not shabby. He finds a small bowl for the candies and a fresh beeswax candle, then brings all his offerings back upstairs, arranging them on the bedside table. He cleans out space in the wardrobe and hides the rest of the candy there for her to inevitably discover within minutes of her arrival.

He’s feeling almost giddy by the time he sets to work making up the bed, stripping off the simple sheets and pilled woolen blanket and replacing them with the ones he purchased. He carefully tucks each corner, fluffs each pillow and props them against the headboard. It takes three tries for him to toss the fox fur over the quilt in a way that feels both accidental and artful. 

He can hear her laughing at his fussing—

“I’m just gonna mess it all up, Cayleb. Don’t you want to help me?”

She flops gracelessly onto the bed, squirming there amidst the blooms and the bees with her indigo curls clinging to the pillowcase, her smile toothy and beguiling. There’s paint on her fingers—and then on his—as she grabs his hands and tugs until he tumbles over her. Her laugh continues to reach into the farthest corners of the room as he stammers something ridiculous, until she shuts him up with a kiss, and then another: urgent and sweet and all-consuming, and not taking no for an answer—

The air goes out of his lungs. He stares down at the empty bed, heart slamming against his ribs.

You’re going to mess it all up.

He doesn’t know whose voice it is, anymore.

His fingers itch. Twitch.

Then they scratch: small, frantic motions. First his wrists, then his forearms. Not enough to bleed. Just enough to feel it through the giddiness: the giddiness which is abruptly bone deep exhaustion.

Distantly, he thinks he should probably lie down, and that it is very convenient that there is a bed right in front of him. He curls up on the edge of it and grabs a handful of the quilt. The little embroidered bees are fuzzy, and he rubs one with a fingertip, back and forth, back and forth. The other hand is still busy clawing lines over his skin, and he can feel them, so that is good. The wall beside the bed is still blank, white, boring. Nothingness. Just like the inside of his skull.

Through the nothingness, a lone thought arrives: Essek cannot find me like this. But no, that is wrong, just like everything else he thinks and feels is wrong. Essek must find him like this. He must see Caleb for exactly what he is, and finally put him out of his misery.

Notes:

Only one chapter for now because I have to run away to do IRL things :c -- but I may post Chapter 6 later today if I have time!

Thanks so much for sticking with me as this story unfolds! I don't always have spoons to reply to every comment, but please know I am so grateful for each and every one! <3

Chapter 6: [Caleb, Rexxentrum]

Notes:

Sooo... anyone here for some soft shadowgast smut? (๑•᎑•๑)

Scratching.

It’s always the last thing to leave and the first thing to return. The sensation of short fingernails chafing scar-striped skin, of something ugly caught inside his mind that needs to be picked at, extracted… 

But this scratching has a strangely wooden sound. Perhaps he’s fallen into the Feywild—into one of those stories his Mutti used to read to him about little carved dolls becoming boys and girls… 

The sound grows more insistent: a soft chorus of claws against a tree—no, a door. And then: a plaintive little chirp. 

Frumpkin, his brain supplies, but that is wrong, because he tries to snap him into his arms and nothing happens. Or maybe his fingers just don’t work for anything but scratching. 

Another chirp: sweet and manipulative, worming its way through his heart. His little Tatzelwurm.  

“Caleb? Are you in there? Have you fed these beasts?”

He is no more capable of summoning an answer to his tongue than summoning a cat. He doesn’t quite know where he is, or how long he’s been lying here, or what brought him to this point. Everything smells faintly of flowers and beeswax.

The doorknob turns, and Caleb blinks slowly as Wolly and Tatzi tumble into the room, one nearly on top of the other. Wolly begins to sniff everything in sight, while Tatzi scurries straight for Caleb, clambering over his useless body to curl around his head. 

Her purring is nice. It eases the scratching in his skull, lets him focus on the familiar silhouette in the doorway.

Essek. His Essek has found him, like Caleb knew he would. His mind swims with faint reprieve: this will all be over soon. He's not entirely sure what the thought means, but it sends a bit of warmth through his heavy, numb limbs.

Essek's dancing lights flicker to life, casting the room in gentle shades of twilight. Is it dusk? He doesn't know; the relentless cog in his mind that ticks away the time feels like it's stuck on something, counting the same second over and over again.

Essek steps further into the room and looks around.

"Caleb," he says softly. "This is… this is lovely."

And just like that, it all comes crashing back. The candle. The armchair. The embroidered quilt. The fox fur. The bowl of candies. The flowers.

He’s in the guest room. On the guest bed. The bed he was making for Jester.

And Essek is seeing it. All of it. All of him. 

Caleb stares at the quilt and waits. For judgment. For the sound of Essek's receding footsteps. For the door to close behind him. For anything at all.

For a moment he almost wishes Essek would rage. That he would finally abandon all pretense and just call Caleb exactly what he is: greedy, selfish, unfaithful. At least then there would be closure. But if Essek says nothing—if he simply shakes his head and walks away—Caleb doesn’t know if he can survive it.

But Essek does not rage, and he does not leave.

Instead he enters the room, crossing it in slow, deliberate steps until he reaches the side of the bed. Then he sinks to his knees—not too close, not too far—and meets Caleb’s eyes.

Caleb blinks again, uncomprehending. This is the way Essek approached a baby bird that fell from its nest in the garden last spring. It’s the way he approaches Caleb when he's polymorphed into something stupid and unpredictable: when he's a creature that only half-remembers how to stay in its own skin.

When he speaks, his voice is low, careful.

“I know that empathy will never be my expertise, but even if it were, I doubt I could fathom how much it must hurt, sometimes, to contain as much love as you do.”

The words don’t make any sense. There is no love within him, just an ugly, yawning pit of want that has devoured his insides and left a Caleb-shaped husk. If Essek were to touch him right now, he thinks he might just crack into fragments and blow away, like the moltings of Caduceus’ beetles.

“You are not a monster for loving her, Caleb,” Essek says, then.

It’s torturous to hear Essek’s voice—its warm, melodic cadence and liltingly accented words—having a conversation with somebody else: another version of Caleb who is functional and devoted and worthy of something other than anger.

“If you know how I…” Caleb doesn’t quite register that he’s speaking until he feels the tightness of his throat try to stop him. “If you know, then why haven’t you left?”

Essek tilts his head.

“Is that what you want, ssussun?”

Caleb shakes his head, sharp and fast, and immediately wants to vomit. His throat has fully closed up, and the rest of him is quickly following. He squeezes his eyes shut and drags his knees toward his chest.

“Caleb Widogast.” The sound of his name is firm but not cruel, and just a little desperate, like Essek is throwing a wedge into a slamming door. For a moment, silence stretches in its wake like a held breath.

Then, softer, sweeter: “May I touch you?”

The question shivers through his beetle-husk of a body. He doesn’t know how to say no to Essek, and gradually discovers he doesn’t really want to. He thinks if he disintegrates that at least the dust of him would find rest in Essek’s hands.

“Ja…” he croaks, and a heartbeat later he feels fingers carding into his hair. A warm thumb smooths over his cheekbone, guiding away tears he didn’t know he was shedding.

“Jester Lavorre changes people,” Essek says, and they’re the first words Caleb can actually grasp, because he has also said them. He clings to them like a fundamental principle of the arcane, or a simple truth of the universe: Axiom JL-1: ∀p ∈ People : Jester Lavorre ⊢ Δ(p). 

“I know that without her, I would still be lost,” Essek continues. “I know that without her, you may never have healed enough to love again at all. So who would I be to deny you the possibility of sharing that love with her, in whatever shape it might take?”

Caleb opens his eyes in shock, only to find the room prismatic and blurred, distorted by the tears he still hasn’t entirely registered. He blinks until they spill away to be caught against the press of Essek’s thumb, until he can finally see him properly.

It occurs to Caleb that perhaps he’s never seen Essek properly before this moment.

“Was sagst— what are you saying?”

“I’m saying what I should have said weeks ago. Perhaps years ago,” Essek replies. He reaches across the bed and takes Caleb’s hand—the one that has been petting the bees. He threads their fingers together and squeezes, and relief begins to roll through his veins at the pace of warmed wax. “I didn’t realize until very recently that it needed to be said.”

“I-I can’t—” Caleb gasps; he feels like he’s just recalled his need to breathe but hasn’t yet remembered how. “—can’t bear for you to think you’re not enough for me…”

Essek tilts his head again, his smile small but deeply fond.

“Caleb, I know that I am not enough for you. Much like she alone would never be enough for you either, no matter how… omnipresent… she might be at times.” Essek reaches for his other hand as well, the one that is still twitching at his reddened forearm. “There’s something I’ve never said, maybe because I feared how it might sound, especially in the wake of… all that I’ve done... 

“But I think—I know—that a part of me fell in love with you, because your heart is a Beacon. The potential it holds—for kindness, connection, intimacy in every permutation and configuration—it takes my breath away. And I am grateful daily to be offered even a mote of that possibility.”

Caleb feels his skin prickle with a hot flush. “Essek—”

“I am not finished,” Essek says, not unkindly but stern, and for a moment it reminds Caleb of his earliest days in the Dynasty, when he had been so hungry for Essek to teach him the secrets of time and space.

“As much as we both would rather ignore it, the fact remains that I have centuries still ahead of me. When you are gone—” His voice does not break, but it is a near thing, and his thumb strokes Caleb's palm. “—I may love others. I likely will, now that you have taught me how. 

“And I would grant to you what time has granted to me. I want to see you love freely. I want to witness every facet of your joy. And I want the same for her.”

Caleb’s muscles lock, as if motion might dispel whatever tender illusion this is. His vision wavers again—not from tears this time, but from the sheer, wrung-out effort of staying present. He needs an anchor, something to ground him. He needs—

"Essek," Caleb says again, urgently. "Come here. Come up here..."

He falls onto his back, head shifting in the soft swaddle of Tatzi’s fur, and Essek wastes no time rising and crawling onto the bed, draping over him like a Rosohna night splashed with starry pale freckles. He is stunning—a miracle in Caleb's arms, and yet he is looking at Caleb as though he is the holy one.

"Gentle thing," Essek whispers, stroking Caleb's hair until the sensation shimmers over his skin like moonlight on water. "Lovely thing. Ssussun sollen."

"These gifts you would grant me..." Caleb says. "I don't deserve them. I don't deserve you—"

The end of his protests are silenced by the soft press of Essek's lips, the slow sweep of his tongue through the parted hollow of Caleb's mouth.

“If you'll allow me,” Essek says, dropping kisses on his nose, his brow, his temple. “I'd like to prove to you exactly how mistaken you are.”

That melted-wax feeling in his blood heats and quickens into something molten, and Caleb thinks he may be forgiven for flashing-back again to their earliest encounters, when Essek was untouchable and over-confident and so eager to measure Caleb's magic against his own.

When the words come tumbling out, they're shaky and bewildered, but Caleb can finally start to recognize his own voice:

"I do so enjoy it when you teach me a lesson, Herr Thelyss."

 

Essek leads him out of the guest room and down the hall, holding tightly to his hand as though he knows that Caleb needs the tether. He feels off kilter, unbalanced— like he might be sleepwalking. He remembers the first time he polymorphed into a whale and realized he could doze with half his brain. Perhaps he never stopped.

Then the door clicks behind them and Essek is crowding him against it—not roughly, more like he wants Caleb cocooned—pushing up on the tips of his toes to press soft kisses to his mouth, while his lovely quick fingers pluck at the buttons of Caleb’s shirt. Caleb’s hands fumble immediately for his waist as he tries to keep up; he slants his mouth over Essek’s to deepen their kiss, and something broken and loose inside him suddenly slips sideways to match.

“Schätzchen…” he mumbles against Essek’s lips as he feels sneaky hands start to creep beneath the hem of his shirt, seeking heat on the soft plains of his stomach. “I-I do not know if I can get it up for you, the state I’m in…”

Essek hums a soft noise into Caleb’s mouth and pulls back until he can look up at Caleb through his lashes. Caleb doesn’t have a word in Common or Zemnian for the color of those eyes—Celestial seems like the surest bet, but he would need a dictionary—and now Essek is smiling at him: one corner of his lips quirked and a perfectly arched eyebrow to match. He feels one of those devious hands leave his stomach to wander lower, cupping him gently through his clothes, and it’s only then that Caleb realizes that he’s already hard. Not entirely, but more than halfway, and the deliberate, practiced pressure of Essek’s palm sends a slow rush of arousal blooming through him like a drop of watercolor. He gasps and his eyes flutter shut, his head hitting the door with a thump he barely feels.

“Trust me to take care of you, Caleb Widogast,” Essek whispers.

“I trust you with everything,” Caleb replies, without hesitation. It’s the truth, and it’s been the truth for a very long time now.

Essek undresses him there, against the door, pressing kisses to every bit of his body until the cool spring air and the heat of Essek’s mouth leave him shivering.

Time fractures again, and when the world reforms, he’s on the bed, curled loosely on his side with half a mind for rolling onto his front. He settles for turning just his face, nuzzling catlike into the softness of the pillowcases Essek insists upon, and indulging in the way his beard catches on the satin. It smells like Essek’s shampoo, like his sweat. Somewhere behind him, he hears Essek rummaging through his bedside drawer, and the telltale metallic twist of a lid. He can feel his cock—fully hard now, resting heavy on his thigh—but the realization is still distant, his desire dreamlike, settling over him like a blanket as Essek returns and cuddles up behind him.

“Alright?” his whisper tickles the back of Caleb’s ear.

“Ja, so gut,” Caleb sighs, melting into the long line of heat that has just embraced him. He feels Essek’s smile against the nape of his neck, feels his soft hand pet over his flank, over the curve of his ass.

He leaves Caleb’s bottom leg stretched out but coaxes the top one to bend until Caleb hooks an arm under his knee to pull it to his chest. Essek hums quietly in approval just before he presses a slick fingertip to Caleb’s hole, slowly circling, rubbing the pucker without pushing in. And Caleb is suddenly agonizingly aware that they haven’t had sex in over a month, because he is apparently a fucking idiot. He groans like he’s never been touched in his life and immediately flushes at the sound of himself.

“Yes, yes. I’ve got you, ssussun…” Essek soothes, massaging his lower back with one hand while the other begins to open him up. His touch is torturously tender and slow, scissoring and curling inside him with maddening restraint, and Caleb would normally be writhing and begging like a brat about it, but right now he can’t bring himself to do anything but hug his own leg tighter and let his body become the easiest cantrip in his partner’s practiced hands.

He’s drooling onto the pillow a little by the time Essek finally gives him his cock. It’s not all that much thicker than his fingers, but Caleb’s belly flips when he feels the familiar length of it settle inside him. It is viscerally, unspeakably good, and oh, his Essek is no stranger to the things Caleb craves; he wastes no time finding a deep, steady rhythm that only barely skims his sweet spot. It brings Caleb swiftly to the cliff’s edge and then holds him there, just shy of release, and Caleb stuffs his mouth full of the damp pillow, biting down to smother the embarrassing sounds he can’t quite silence.

“That’s it. Just feel it,” Essek urges, only a little bit breathless as he kisses up the back of Caleb’s neck and into his hair. His words are hot against Caleb’s scalp. “Such a good boy. You are so very, very beautiful…”

The praise washes over him like a fever chill. Essek rarely plays the ‘boy’ card with him lately, preferring to position the two of them as equals in all things, intellectual or intimate. But in the wake of their earlier conversation, it can only be deliberate: a paradoxical offering of possession and permission that Caleb falls into with grateful abandon.

The hand on his side withdraws for a moment and Caleb hears the lid of the lube jar again. Then Essek’s arm is back around his waist, his slick hand dipping down into the cradle of Caleb’s hips to find his cock. He caresses it from root to tip in a single, smooth pull, and Caleb jolts against him, arching.

“Ja, ja— y-yes —bitte!” he gasps. He knows how this plays out: Essek will pick up the pace, stroking in time with his thrusts until Caleb tumbles over the edge into helpless ecstasy. The taste of imminent satisfaction starts to well in the back of his throat.

Except what actually happens is the opposite. Essek stops moving entirely, his cock only halfway home in Caleb’s body and his hand curled loosely around Caleb’s length, except for his thumb and forefinger, which squeeze just slightly tighter: a temptation. An invitation.

His stomach swoops. Despite being tangled in bed with his lover he suddenly feels like he’s walking a wire, doomed to plummet no matter what he does. And so he does the obvious thing, the safe thing, and holds himself deathly still, feeling the sweat trickle from his hairline and down the slope of his spine, feeling Essek’s chest rise and fall with remarkable calm against his back. Then:

“Go on, sweet thing,” he coaxes, his voice as smooth and soft as the satin beneath Caleb’s cheek. His fangs graze the shell of Caleb’s ear and Caleb’s hips buck forward in blissful animal reflex.

And oh, oh, it’s good. It’s so good: the warm, wet grip of Essek’s hand yielding to the press of his cock, his spellcaster fingers rippling up the length of him in a coordinated pattern of squeeze and release. He draws back slowly and feels Essek’s cock sink back into him, and Scheiße, he wants it there, but he also wants the hand, and his hips are twitching toward it again before he can help himself. Yes, yes, there it is, that slow, peristaltic pulse that makes every nerve in his body seem to sparkle with pleasure.

He doesn’t mean to imagine her, but the fantasy steals him before he can brace for it: his face is buried, not in a pillow, but in a sweetly perfumed breast, blue and faintly freckled, and his cock is—he is— oh Götter: they are sharing him. His Essek and his Jester, embracing him from both sides until he is drowning in them—in the euphoria of being held and had like this—of not having to choose.

“Fuck…” he gasps, as the full weight of the concept crashes over him. “… fuck!”

“Mmm, just look at you, ssussun—taking what you need,” Essek whispers, and Caleb pointedly tries not to imagine how wrecked he probably looks. But he’s too far gone to resist the fiction that stirs in him: his body a pale, writhing wisp of a sandbar dissolving between two rolling waves of the Lucidian. He is inconsequential, but they are all deep blues and deeper beauty…

Essek’s voice slips back into his ear like a stiletto:

“I don’t mind, if you want to scream her name.”

He comes like Essek sucker punched it from him, so immediately and intensely it almost hurts. He’s definitely screaming, though it’s not her name, and not Essek’s either. It’s not anything remotely comprehensible, just a flood of dammed up desperation. Hazily, he feels Essek’s hand coaxing him through it, the gentle rock of his hips sending bolt after bolt of perfect, blinding pleasure through his shaking body, until he’s so fucked out he thinks he might’ve fallen through the bed and the floor beneath, only to drift back down to himself from the ceiling.

Awareness sinks gradually into flesh and bone. His heartbeat recalibrates in his chest, and with it, time restarts its familiar forward march. He is exhausted, thoroughly sated, but no longer adrift.

Essek gently withdraws, flopping onto his back with a sigh, and Caleb rolls eagerly to follow him, insinuating himself against Essek’s side and offering a helping hand—only to discover Essek's cock already softening.

"No need..." he sighs, batting Caleb away. There's a faint smirk on his lips that speaks of deep fondness and a deeper afterglow, and Caleb belatedly registers the sticky warmth where his ass meets his thigh. “If you think I could watch you get that lost in the throes of pleasure and not follow you, you deeply underestimate how compelling you are.” 

Caleb lets out a startled laugh and nuzzles into Essek’s shoulder.

“How are you still so articulate after you come?” 

Essek hums. “Behold, the caliber of secrets The Shadowhand keeps lately." 

Caleb smiles against Essek's skin, tracing nonsensical runes across his stomach. They lapse into comfortable silence—or at least what passes for it, with Tatzi and Wolly resuming their assault on the very concept of doors.

He knows the moment is coming, but somehow it's easier to bear when Essek finally shifts and says: 

“I meant it, you know. Your preparations were beautiful. She will love them.”

Caleb lets his eyes fall shut, breathing slowly in, then out again.

“Are you—you’re really alright with this.” At the last minute he reforms his question into a statement. Something a little more surefooted. “Inviting her into our home. Sharing me...”

“I am. Though, like any sort of advanced spellcraft, we’ll need to agree upon the correct framework, and establish some ground rules to avoid calamity.”

Caleb laughs again and shifts closer, resting more of his weight against Essek’s side. “That’s the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me.”

Essek snorts. “If that is the case, then Jester truly can't arrive with all of her novels quickly enough." 

Miresen morning. Caleb's heart skips a frantic beat in sudden recollection. 

“Götter, what if she doesn’t even want this, Essek?” he murmurs. “...want me?”

“There will be time enough to establish the lie of that later, ssussun,” Essek says, and then, before Caleb can begin to spiral again: “Right now, it is time for dinner, and Beauregard informed me that you barely ate at lunch.”

Caleb groans. “I am going to kill her.”

“No, you are going to get out of this bed,” Essek replies, already sitting up with one smooth motion, and Prestidigitating away their mess, “and you are going to let me cook you a meal.”

Grumbling under his breath, Caleb drags himself upright and follows. He is tired. He is sore. He is absolutely, devastatingly in love.

Jester will be on your doorstep on Miresen morning.

But Essek is here with him now. And he is staying. 

Chapter 7: [Jester, Zadash]

Notes:

Sorry for the delay on this one, folks! This chapter wrestled me like Uk'otoa... I'm not sure if it's because I find Jester's POV way easier to write or way harder. o_o

Anyway, I hope you enjoy whatever this *gestures frantically* is!

Yasha helps her pack, which is great, really, because Jester feels like she has no idea what she is doing. 

Her belongings are somehow in, like, every corner of the house: boots by the hearth, brushes in the bathroom (for hair, makeup, and paint alike), a growing drift of sketchbooks on the dining table, shoved this way and that to make room for their meals. She’s been on the road for weeks, and on a boat for ages before that, but for some reason, this is where she's apparently let herself get comfortable. 

Maybe it's not so surprising. There's something soothing about this little domestic bungalow tucked near the Pentamarket: the Dwendalian architecture, the cozy lantern light, Yasha's little garden in the back, where she grows flowers and vegetables to supplement the Empire's weighty cuisine, rich with butter and cured meats. Beau and Yasha are familiar too, not just because of their shared history, but because of the way they occupy the space, orbiting around each other in a graceful dance, making Jester feel welcome—but never quite included. 

She has spent the last week pretending she can't hear them fucking in the other room at night. She doesn't mind. Not really. But she can't help but feel like this whole interlude is some kind of weird dress rehearsal for what's ahead. 

Yasha moves through her chaos with quiet patience; she folds everything with careful hands, as though she's afraid she might tear through satin just by touching it. Beau alternates between lounging on the couch and wandering around the living room, spinning a broom like it’s her old bo staff, the bristles barely skimming the floor. The motion is lazy, practiced. It totally doesn't mean anything, but for some reason, it makes Jester feel like she isn’t leaving fast enough, like Beau is already preparing to sweep her chaos out the door behind her. 

"I'm not mailing you your socks if you leave them behind," Beau remarks during her latest patrol of the living room. Jester wrinkles her nose at her. 

"I don't even wear socks, Beau!"

"What the fuck do you mean you don't wear socks? You have a million of them: thigh-high and woolen and lacy and embroidered and fit with those garter things that break the boys' brains when your skirts ride up..."

Jester giggles, waggling her eyebrows. For a moment, all of her nerves recede in the face of familiar banter. This, she knows how to do: "You seem to notice them a lot, Beau. Like A Lot a lot. Do they break your brain? Do you think I'm cute?"

Beau sighs, long suffering: "You already know I think you're cute, Jessie. Everybody thinks you're cute. You and your fucking socks."

"They're stockings, Beau. Totally not the same thing!"

"Whatever! Just pack them!"

Jester’s still snickering as she turns back to her haversack, eyeing the growing pile Yasha has retrieved for her. When did she collect so much stuff? Of course there are the winter-proof boots, and a pretty new coat—not that the northern chill ever truly bothered her. She refreshed her paint pots somewhere along the way with half-a-dozen vibrant pigments from Marquet. Caduceus gave her a little pouch of berry-hibiscus tea, and Yasha a big patchwork unicorn stuffie after she'd cried on the couch a few days ago. And then—of course—there's that carefully wrapped package from Veth (and Yeza, apparently). The one she isn’t supposed to open 'unless things go well.'

Jester's not smart like Essek, or Caleb, but she grew up in a brothel. She has a fairly good idea of what Veth's package contains. It should feel ridiculous, maybe even insulting, given how many years she was with Fjord. But Veth is a mother, and perpetually horny, and startlingly perceptive besides. It's somehow unsurprising that she would take one look at Jester and diagnose the distinct lack of smut in the last few chapters of the novel she's been living. 

That doesn't mean that the idea of 'things going well' with Caleb doesn't fill her stomach with misbehaving hamster unicorns. 

Beau must notice that she's just standing there, because she's suddenly elbowing her in the ribs, grinning.

"Got your emergency flares? Grappling hook? Contingency scroll?"

"That’s what Essek is for," Jester says breezily, shoving random baubles into the side pouch of her haversack and tugging the drawstring shut.

"Yeah, okay. Just remember, if you need a dramatic extraction? I’ve got great arms and zero tolerance for wizard nonsense."

The joke lands. Mostly.

It's just... weird... how everyone in the Nein seems to have so many expectations about her life. Nobody seemed to bat an eye when she sailed off with Fjord. But as soon as they called it quits, the attention turned to her and Caleb, like it was a given, despite the fact that Caleb was already with Essek. Despite a whole pile of reasons, actually. 

It wasn't like anybody was sitting around whispering about who Fjord was likely to hook up with next. 

Probably because Fjord isn't about to hook up with anything but his dumb boat, she thinks. It's unnecessarily petty, and she knows it. She just didn't sleep well last night. She's just nervous, that's all.

"Hey," Beau says, drawing Jester's attention away from where it had strayed again. "Seriously, though. I see those two idiots all the time. If you forget something, we'll get it to you. And if it ends up not working out—"

"I'm not even sure I know what 'it' is, Beau!" She tosses her arms up. 

"Sure, but that's why you gotta go up there, yeah?" Beau insists, prodding affectionately at Jester's foot with the broomstick. "If you don't see him, how are you ever gonna find out?" 

Jester sighs; she knows Beau is right. 

"I know, I just... what if it's..." she pauses, scowling at her own thoughts before deciding to just say them anyway: "What if it's too late, you know? For us? What if we missed our chance?" 

Beau grimaces, as if she knows that feeling too well. She takes Jester by the upper arms—not shaking, just steadying her, like she might bolt—and says, "Jessie, what does 'too late' even mean for a pair of wizards who can manipulate time?"

Then she hesitates, frowning.

"You know what, don't answer that. If he tries to take you back in time to kiss you in Hupperdook or some shit, I will Step of the Wind back to his first birthday and kick his ass."

"Beau!" Jester scolds, unable to help the stream of giggles that follow. Fuck the Traveler, she's so nervous.  

"She can kick his ass herself," Yasha offers, supportively. 

There's a knock before Jester can insist that she has no desire to hurt Caleb in any capacity.

"Hold your fuckin' horses!" Beau hollers with a gleeful lack of patience, chucking the broom aside to go answer the door. 

Unbidden, Jester lets herself imagine how this scene could unfold, that it's Caleb on the other side of the door—disheveled but handsome, holding a bouquet of hot pink roses that clash with both his flushing cheeks and his hair. The scent of them would swirl over the threshold, mixed with spent arcana and amber and char and him. And he'd look at her with those devastating blue eyes, reach out his hand and say—

"I believe horses would rather overcomplicate this errand, Beauregard." 

The bubble bursts at the sound of Essek's voice, clipped slightly at the edges like he’s been rushing, though still perfectly polite. Of course it's Essek. They had planned it this way. She knows Essek can slip through the Cobalt Soul network without a fuss. No spell slots wasted. Caleb sleeps a full eight hours and teaches before lunch. It makes sense this way.

But she had hoped. She wonders with a tightening throat if she will ever stop hoping to be swept off her feet. If she will ever stop being so incredibly naïve about everything. 

Yasha reaches over to touch her shoulder. 

“This will be good,” Yasha says, voice low and certain. “I think… I think that you have needed this. Both of you. But ... just remember: we all love you.”

Jester nods gratefully, lips pressed tightly together, afraid that if she tries to speak she will end up crying on Yasha yet again.

Beau tosses a rolled-up scarf at her as Essek steps inside: one last item she'd almost forgotten. "Your ride's here. Try not to break anything. Or anyone."

"No promises," Jester says, and follows Essek out the door before she breaks herself.

 

Frost crunches under Jester’s boots. It will all have melted away in an hour, but for now it clings to the cobbles and curls along the edges of morning, and the chill nips pleasantly at Jester’s cheeks, making the world feel crystal clear and expansive.

Her coat swishes with every step: cream with a rosy shearling lining and a cut that floats over her layers of ruffled skirts. Embroidered unicorns prance along the bottom hem, and a matching belt cinches it at the waist, its buckle jingling faintly with a handful of golden strawberry charms. A matching set dangle from her horn jewelry. 

"That coat suits you," says Essek. Well, it sounds like Essek, but Jester has never seen anyone look less like Essek. “Seth” cuts a far less dramatic silhouette: plain even by human standards. His archivist robes are baggy and drab, and a pair of square spectacles rest upon his nose. “You likely won’t need it for much longer, though—”

“I know! But it was on sale!” she chirps. She didn’t strictly need a new coat at all. The cold has never really bothered her, and she’s also pretty sure that she still has her gear from Eiselcross somewhere in the bottom of her haversack. But the coat had been so her, and maybe—just maybe—Jester had been thinking about that helpless, hypnotized look that sometimes sneaks onto Caleb’s face when she puts on her prettiest things… 

The recollection makes the hamster unicorns kick up another fuss in her stomach, and she keeps talking in a terrible attempt to ignore them: 

“The lady who sold it to me also makes hats! The one that matched this coat had a plume that was like, an entire pheasant, but pink! Can you imagine? Oh! I bet she could make you a coat as well, if you wanted! There were more fabrics—there was one in blue with silver constellations in the lining, and another one with little crystal toggles shaped like birds, and—"

"Perhaps we can return some afternoon when the market is open, and you can show me," Essek offers then, and it's sweet, really, how accommodating he's being. Somehow it makes her squirming stomach worse, not better. 

They walk a few more blocks in silence before Essek speaks again, with a sort of deliberate calm that instantly reveals he has been planning his words for several minutes: 

“So, I will be leaving after we get you settled—just for a few days. Beauregard could use my assistance for an errand in Tal’Dorei.”

Jester’s heart plummets and soars at the same time. “Oh...?”

“Something about a collection of buried temple ruins with signs of Pre-Calamity dunamancy," he laughs a little, and it sounds self-deprecating. "She’s very persuasive when she wants to be.”

“Essek… did you and Beau… did you plan this?”

Essek’s mouth twitches with a grimace, and there’s the faintest flush of color along his neck. 

“The two of you need time,” he says, with a wry little smile. “And time is one of my specialties, lest you forget.”

Jester doesn’t know what to say to that. Her throat tightens. She had assumed—naively, maybe—that Essek would be there to buffer whatever happened next. To catch her eye if things got weird. To break the tension when she couldn’t. 

Instead, she's going to be alone with Caleb. With his restless fidgeting and aversion to touch and halting, half-swallowed endearments. 

Alone with nobody for those blue eyes to haunt but her.  

She's dizzy by the time they reach the steps of the Cobalt Soul and pass back through its halls. Over in Rexxentrum, in a maze of austere corridors not unlike these, Caleb is probably already teaching, distracted by sigils and silly questions from his students, and completely unaware of how much her stomach hurts as she follows Essek into the teleportation chamber.

 

The world reassembles with a faint pop of displaced air. Caleb and Essek's teleportation circle is tucked into a corner of their basement, obscured behind old crates and barrels. As the gleam of runes fades into the stone beneath her boots, the only remaining light comes from an everburning lantern, bathing the packed-earth walls with a gentle flickering glow. 

Jester scans the dust-mottled shelves—the jars of reserve spell components, the endless rows of strange looking potions—and thinks: back to where we started: secrets buried beneath dirt.

“Well then,” Essek says, smoothing his sleeves with the smallest tilt of his head toward the stairs. “Come. Let me give you the tour.”

She lets Essek usher her up the creaky steps, one hand trailing along the wooden banister, the other gripping her haversack tighter than necessary.  The faint scent of furniture polish and hearth smoke greets her as she reaches the top and opens the door, as well as—

“Oh!” Jester squeaks, startled, “—hi?” 

It takes her a moment to understand that the tumbleweed of fur blocking her path is in fact a living creature. It stares at her with huge golden eyes, then offers a low meow better suited for a bullfrog. 

Sprinkle erupts out of her coat in a blur of red fur and sharp little claws, skittering across the wood in a panicked scramble.

“No, no, no, no, no—Sprinkle, wait!” Jester yelps, dropping her haversack as she rushes after him.

The commotion summons a second cat: a dramatically striped little crossbow bolt that chirrups brightly as it enters the fray. Sprinkle squeaks and dives into a rain boot, but the cat is so long and low that it simply follows its quarry right in. 

“Tatzlchen, komm hierher!” The voice is sharp, urgent—heartstopping—and it freezes Jester mid-lunge. “Tatzi! Ach—verdammt…” 

Jester clambers to her feet just as Caleb reaches the scene and swoops down to collect his cat. The boot comes with, and she watches him fumble for a moment to separate the two. 

“Du bist kein Wiesel. Und dieses Wiesel schmeckt nicht!” he tells the wriggling creature as its head pops free. 

Sprinkle springs from the boot in its wake, launching his little body three or four feet through the air to land back on Jester’s shoulder and disappear into her coat once more. 

You could’ve just stayed there the whole time, silly! She thinks, but she suddenly can’t summon her voice as she finds herself face-to-face with the man who has been consuming her thoughts for so much longer than she knows how to admit. 

"You are going to be late, ssussun," she hears Essek comment from behind her. He doesn’t sound at all surprised by this turn of events. 

"I already am," Caleb replies, but his eyes don’t leave her. She feels their slow sweep from her toes to the tips of her horns, drinking her in like a castaway faced with fresh water. Like she might be a mirage."But I couldn't leave without seeing—" His throat works and a flush steals across his freckled cheeks. "—seeing that you arrived safely."

It's so polite. So careful. He has a cat—a new cat, not Frumpkin—wrapped around his neck, and he is still holding the rain boot. Fuck the Traveler, how are his eyes are so blue? 

Jester wants very, very badly to kiss him. She also wants to scream. 

"Well, here I am, I guess!" she laughs instead, breathless. 

"Here you are," Caleb echoes. "Hallo, Blueberry." He pauses again, and Jester watches his smile tip sideways. He reaches out to tap one of the charms on her horn—an endearingly feline little gesture. "... or is it Strawberry now?"

"Don’t be silly, Cayleb!" 

“Nein,” he says solemnly, though his eyes are anything but. “I am never silly, Lavorre.”

She surges forward and wraps her arms around him, trying not to squeeze him too hard, though it might hurt more not to squeeze him hard enough. 

She notices it all in a rush: the way he freezes, then melts into her in the space of a heartbeat. The way he is shaking as his arms lift to wrap around her in turn. The lingering dampness at the back of his neck and the ends of his copper hair from a morning bath. She almost smiles. Is he still haunted by all those times she called him stinky?

He hasn't been stinky for a long time. He smells like sage and cinders and alchemy. Like a forest coming back to life after being burned to the ground. Not for the first time, she considers that if Fjord is Sea and Sky, then Caleb is Fire and Earth—elemental opposites. She doesn't know what that means, only that she feels settled in Caleb's arms, like she can finally stop running. 

She pulls away before she decides to do something crazy, like press him up against the front door. And—oh, Traveler—the sound he makes when she does: a strangled little noise like something vital is unspooling from him with every inch she moves. 

"I am sorry," he says, and lets it linger, ambiguous in its scope and meaning. She fights the urge to ask him what for, because she knows he'll probably say something silly and sad like 'everything.' "I really do have to leave now. But I will be home after lunch, and we can... we can talk, ja?" 

"Ja!" Jester agrees, just to see him blush again. 

"We'll get brunch, and I will make sure she's comfortable," Essek says, and Jester is suddenly embarrassed to realize she'd forgotten he was still there. 

Then the embarrassment intensifies into shame as Caleb leans in to kiss Essek tenderly, murmuring 'Danke, Schätzchen,' against his lips, and Jester has to look away so she doesn't simply die there in the entryway only minutes after arriving. 

She's focusing so intently on the little assortment of sweaters and scarves on the hooks by the door—how many of them did Essek knit himself, she wonders—that she startles slightly when Caleb's hand suddenly returns to her arm. 

"Tschüß, Süße," he whispers, and then plants the tiniest kiss to her right horn. 

He stoops to set down the cat and boot, and then he's gone, whisking out the door and down the front steps without another glance. 

Essek shuts the door behind him, and Jester can hear the distant hum of wards re-engaging. 

"What does choos soos mean?" Jester asks, just as Essek says: "Tour or food first?"

For a moment they just blink at each other. In the silence, the soft thump-thump of Tatzi pawing and mewling at the front door is nearly heartbreaking.

"You should probably ask him that," Essek says. 

"I probably shouldn't," she laughs, adrenaline still twisting her voice into a pitch she doesn't quite recognize. "I don't think my pronunciation is very good." 

"I don't think he minds," Essek says, and then adds in a whisper, as though Caleb might still somehow be able to hear: "Mine is not very good either." 

It makes Jester laugh again, less manic this time. She's not certain how Essek manages to diffuse her when she feels like she’s going to explode, but she is so, so grateful for it, every single time.

“Tour,” she tells him, whirling around in the foyer and throwing up her arms. “I vote tour. Sprinkle needs to know all the best hiding spots, you know?”

 

Beau had warned her not to expect all that much in the way of accommodations. The room is plain but perfectly comfortable, she'd said with a shrug, and: The wool blanket is a little scratchy but you can probably ask for a different one if it bothers you.

There is no scratchy wool blanket to be found. And light pours through sheer drapes, lending the entire space a dreamlike glow that only reinforces the surreal feeling of seeing Caleb again. Jester feels like she’s stepped directly into a sunrise.

A vase of spring flowers sits on the sill—hellebores, hyacinths, and bright forsythia—their colors dancing in the morning light and their perfume flooding the space with sweetness. A little porcelain bowl on the nightstand teases her with the promise of candy, though she hasn't even eaten breakfast yet. And there's a pretty blue chair in the corner with a pile of well-loved books waiting just beside it.

“Essek," she gasps, knowing that her mouth is dangling open but not quite ready to do anything about it. "Is all of this... I mean... did you—?”

“We want you to feel at home here. But the effort was all Caleb,” Essek admits easily. “Consider the room yours for as long as you wish to remain here.”

“You sound like you’re offering us the Xhorhaus all over again,” she says with a little laugh, crossing into the room to examine every element. It feels like an illusion, and she half expects it to vanish if she touches anything.

Essek grimaces. "Forgive me, I still don't have much practice playing host. When Beauregard... graces... us with her presence, she often storms upstairs and falls face first on the bed without so much as a hello."

Jester snorts as her fingers skim over the quilt on the bed. It's absolutely gorgeous—clearly handstitched by somebody very talented—and the bees are sewn with little tufts of golden fur.

“Hello, bees!” she whispers, charmed delirious, before her eye catches on something even more tempting. She picks up the fox fur and buries her face in it. It’s thick and so, so soft, and she squeals into it without meaning to. 

Essek lingers in the doorway, apparently content to watch her explore.

“The cats are used to this door being shut, so Sprinkle should be perfectly safe. The wardrobe has space for anything you might wish to hang,” he says, ever gracious and prudent. “And I believe he selected some books he thought you might enjoy from our collection, but you’re of course welcome to read anything in the library downstairs. Our own bedroom is at the other end of the hall, and the washroom is in the middle—”

“That’s so smart, putting the bathroom between the two bedrooms. Beau and Yasha’s room was right next door to mine, and you will not believe how kinky they get!”

“I have no need to extend my imagination in that direction,” Essek coughs.

Unfortunately, Jester finds that her own imagination has no such restraint. The fox fur is still bundled in her arms, and she can suddenly feel with maddening clarity what it would feel like to be naked against its plush pile, writhing indulgently on her belly while Caleb trails kisses down her spine. She wonders if his pretty hair would feel as soft as fox fur against her skin. 

She wonders if he was thinking about fucking her when he decided to buy it.

The idea sweeps through her like fire and she flinches away from it, quickly placing the throw back on the bed and smoothing it like it might hide the evidence of her thoughts...

"Would you like to see the washroom next?" Essek's voice is still effortlessly composed, either oblivious to her turmoil or unwilling to expose it. "I think I have some soaps and balms you will appreciate, but we can also visit the market later if you'd like to buy your own—"

“What if Caleb and I have sex while you’re gone?”

The silence that follows is so complete she swears she can hear Sprinkle sigh in her coat.

Essek blinks at her from the doorway, expression blank in the way it gets when his mind is running far faster than his tongue. 

“That’s… fine?” It comes out like a question, and her stomach drops.

“‘Fine,’” she parrots, narrowing her eyes. “You don’t sound fine. You sound like Fjord, if somebody handed him a turtle.”

“I have no objection, truly! I just…” Essek folds his arms across his middle, hugging himself a bit. “This is not a topic I am accustomed to discussing quite so… plainly.”

“Essek Thelyss,” she says, with a grin that is mostly fondness with a few sharp teeth. “You’re like a hundred years old! Are you blushing because I said the word sex?”

“Perhaps,” he admits, with a scrunched-up face that is frankly adorable. “But discomfort is not disapproval. If you and Caleb wish to be… intimate, then that is your decision, and it does not trouble me. In fact, I…” He falters, only strengthening his resemblance to Fjord as he visibly wrestles his next words out: “... I may find some relief in the notion.”

That makes her tilt her head. “Relief? Why relief? Do you… do you not like… being intimate?” She uses his words; they seem even more awkward to her, but if it helps him talk, so be it. 

Essek sighs, fiddling with one of his rings. 

“It is… complicated, Jester,” he confesses. 

Jester plops down on the edge of the bed and pats the spot beside her, feeling her own bit of relief when he accepts the invitation. He steadies himself with a breath as he sits, and Jester tries not to let her tail thrash around too much as she waits for him to gather his thoughts.

“I love Caleb immeasurably. Invariably,” he says at last. “But desire, in the physical sense, is an unreliable bedfellow—sometimes absent. And Caleb… he is such a cautious, considerate creature. He takes such pains to ensure I never feel inadequate. But I still worry, sometimes, that it comes at the cost of his own satisfaction.”

He is staring at his hands as he speaks, scrutinizing his cuticles. “I would very much like to see that his needs are met. And I’d like it even more if … if I knew he was seeking the company of someone we both already trust so deeply.”

Her heart squeezes tight at his words. Trust has always been a heavy concept between Essek and the Nein. But Jester isn’t used to holding the weight of it in her own hands. Essek trusts her with this—with Caleb. Even after she sailed off for years and almost married another man… 

Gods, who would trust me with anything to do with this? She feels like Essek just handed her a telescope and asked her to name the stars. 

“You know, sometimes my Mama would entertain couples who wanted a third. And I learned a ton of stuff just by listening through the walls—like how important pacing is, and how to keep everyone involved, and so many crazy positions. I-I guess I kinda thought I would be super good at this. But I don’t feel super good at it. I don’t think I realized how much of it would be about trying not to hurt anyone…” 

“Well, you are not exactly negotiating one night at the Chateau. Perhaps you shouldn’t judge yourself so harshly.” 

“I guess…” Jester huffs. “But my Mama is just so good at making people feel comfortable, you know? She always seems to understand what they want. I just… I wish I knew what he wanted. What you want.” 

Essek smiles ruefully. “Neither Caleb nor I are making things particularly straightforward, are we?” He sighs again, picking a few stray cat hairs off of his clothes. “I’m sorry, Jester, but the two of you really just need to talk to each other. Until then, the only thing I can offer is my unwavering support.” His expression suddenly turns considering. "Well, perhaps that is a lie. I can also offer you a little café near the Shimmer Ward that serves unwieldy pastry towers, and tea with too much milk and sugar, if you're ready for brunch?”

Jester recognizes an out when she sees one, but right now she accepts it without question. 

"You know me so well," she laughs, straightening her skirts. "But somehow not well enough to know that there's totally no such thing as too much milk and sugar." 

"Of course, Jester. My mistake," Essek concedes as he rises and offers her his hand.

She accepts that as well, only to muster her most mischievous smile as she follows him toward the door.  

“Can I ask you just one more thing, though?” 

Essek spares her a look over his shoulder that is entirely deserved. 

“…Yes?” 

“When you said you want to see that Caleb’s needs are met…” She drags out the word ‘see’ until it sounds absurd. “Would you want to, like, actually watch?”

“Jester!” 

 

Brunch is lovely. So lovely, in fact, that for an hour or two Jester almost manages to forget that this isn’t just a joyful reunion of best friends. Essek holds his face in his hands as she accepts the already-sweet tea and then, without blinking, drops two more sugar cubes into it. They people-watch from the terrace and spin increasingly outrageous stories about where the other patrons have come from and what they’re thinking about. She nearly convinces herself that this moment of levity will last forever—critiquing Dwendalian fashion, gossiping about Beau and Yasha, and arguing about which fruit makes the best jam.

Essek takes her by the market on the way back, just in case she wants to pick up anything Caleb might have missed, but Jester is quick to discover that Caleb missed basically nothing. 

"He could have just cast the tower," Jester says, standing before a vendor as Essek enumerates the list of baking supplies Caleb acquired the day before. "The cats could have just cooked everything for us." 

"We don't make much use of the tower, lately, outside of emergencies," Essek admits. "I think, for him, it is part of a process of learning to live in his own skin." 

They end up leaving with nothing more than a fresh stick of kohl and a pretty palette of eye shimmer, which Essek pays for despite her protests.

"Caleb redesigned an entire room for you. At least let me offer you a welcome gift," he says as he hands over the gold. "Besides, I have been meaning to sample this apothecary's cosmetics. You can tell me how you like them." 

The vendor gives him an odd look, and Jester giggles as they turn away. 

"You look like Seth right now!" she reminds him. "Can you imagine Seth in make-up? 'Cause I bet she totally couldn't." 

Essek heaves a put-upon sigh. 

 

Caleb is already home by the time they arrive. He still has a breathlessness about him, like he's holding some spell just beneath the surface of his skin, and slowly losing his grasp on it. She knows he will blush at the slightest provocation, and it's so hopelessly sweet she doesn't know what to do with herself. 

Fortunately, Essek suggests they finish the house tour, and enlists Caleb to help him, but he proves next to useless, acting more like a guest in the house than she is. He trails behind as they enter each room, curling into himself like he's trying not to leave fingerprints on his own belongings. More than once, Jester turns as Essek speaks to find Caleb lingering in the threshold. He tears his gaze away each time, but not quickly enough. 

He's not giving this tour because he can't focus on anything but you. The realization makes something shiver inside of her. She fidgets with her many necklaces. 

"Oh, and this is really quite clever..." Essek is saying as he leads her into the study.

Abruptly, the light streaming through the windows has a dim, cool tint that barely illuminates the room, leaving the majority of that burden to the little fire in the hearth, and a handful of little lanterns that Essek fills with Dancing Lights with a flick of his wrist.  

"Ooh, it's like Rosohna!" Jester says. "But just in one room!" 

"Indeed," Essek says, and there's a note of pride in his voice when he continues. "How do you suppose it works?" 

"Oh come on, you know I'm not smart like the two of you," she pouts. "Um, an Illusion, maybe?" 

"A reasonable guess, but an Illusion would not mitigate the discomfort, only mask its cause. And if it were an illusion, why not extend it to the world outside the window?" 

"Well I don't know, because you're silly wizards probably!" she laughs, but heads to one of the windows all the same. It's solid, and cool to the touch, and like glass in every possible way, and yet very weird. Outside, it is undeniably still mid-afternoon, and Jester makes a mental note to ask to see the garden next, because from here it looks like an explosion of rainbow confetti. And yet, the image feels to her eyes like she is seeing it beneath moonlight. No squinting required. 

"Caleb enchanted the glass," Essek reveals, when whatever internal timer he was running expires. "It transmutes sunlight into moonlight."

"Wait, you can do that?" she asks, tearing her eyes from the view of the garden.

"No, but he can." She finds Essek smiling over at Caleb like he's the most magnificent creature in the universe, and even in the faint light, Jester thinks he might be correct. 

"Ach, nein. Es ist nicht—" He is most definitely blushing now, and rubbing at the back of his neck. He can't make eye contact with either one of them. The wrong language is tying his tongue. Jester needs to shove him against the nearest bookshelf more than she needs to breathe. "It is not so big a thing," he insists, once he has remembered Common. "I just wanted him to feel comfortable here, that is all."   

Out of the corner of her eye, she just catches the look Essek gives her. 

My Mama is just so good at making people feel comfortable. 

"Cayyyleb," she exclaims before she can overthink it. He blinks at her like she's Witch Bolted him as she closes the distance and takes his hands. "Speaking of really cool magic stuff, you haven't told me about your classes yet! Do you like them? How are your students?"

"Oh, ah—ja." He fumbles for words as his face heats up again. "They are... they are very good."

"They're like, what, fifteen? I bet they play the best pranks ever." 

She watches with a feeling like triumph as the corners of his eyes crinkle with delight. 

"I have no doubt that both you and the Traveler would be proud."

"Tell me?" She gives him her sweetest, most innocent smile. All batting eyelashes and exposed eyeteeth. 

"Why don't we sit in the garden for a while, and you can tell her all about your industrious students," says Essek, who has now assumed Caleb's old position in the doorway. Unlike Caleb, he doesn't drop Jester's gaze when she beams at him. 

"Yes please!" 

 

They sit on the back steps, enjoying what has turned out to be a balmy spring afternoon. Caleb sends Schmidt to fetch them tall glasses of something he calls an Apfelschorle that turns out to be sweet apple juice cut with fizzy water. Essek's is mostly water. Hers is mostly juice. Caleb's seems to be about 50/50.

"I had to re-administer the book exam on basic Polymorph last semester," he's recounting, "... because one student paid a sixth year to become a cat, hide in her book bag, and communicate the answers via a code consisting solely of slow blinks."

"What?!" Jester exclaims. "Okay but that's like, actually super clever. I think you should have given them extra credit instead." 

Caleb laughs darkly. "Ja, it was very clever, right up until the point where she had to take the practical exam, and nearly distributed her vital organs across the classroom." 

Jester gasps. "Was she okay?" 

"Fortunately for her,” Essek says from Caleb's other side, “Professor Widogast has a war caster's Counterspell speed."

"I know, right?" Jester laughs, and then something reckless flares inside her, and she waggles her eyebrows up at Caleb as she adds: "It's super sexy."

Essek hums his agreement into his glass. 

Fortunately, Caleb seems to have relaxed enough that he doesn't immediately bolt. Instead he just clears his throat and sips his drink, but Jester can almost feel the heat radiating off him. 

"More relevantly, the entire class learned that one must master theory before putting it into practice."

"Or, you know, they could just ask Artie for a little help," Jester teases.

"Judging by the number of dicks that need to be Prestidigitated off the desks each week, I would not be surprised if The Traveler has been teaching night classes." 

"I think those are probably just regular dicks, Cayleb." 

"I defer to your expertise on the matter, Fräulein Lavorre," he replies without missing a beat, and this, this is what she's missed for so long: their easy banter, his impish smile and his eyes shimmering the same color as the sky above their heads.

Jester snorts and sips her slightly fizzy juice—which is pretty good, but would totally be better as just juice— and dares to lean her head against his shoulder. 

He tenses, but doesn't pull away.

 

This fragile peace—this feeling that something is budding, or maybe re-establishing itself after a long winter—carries over into dinner. Essek and Caleb insist on cooking for her, so she sits at the table and tries to keep the chatter idle and safe as she watches the way they work. They're so elegant together, passing utensils between real hands and Mage Hands alike, ducking into each other’s space, offering soft reminders without speaking over each other. It’s like a dance. And Jester, watching, can't help but wonder...

It seems like a lifetime ago that she asked Caleb for a dance in Hupperdook. He'd been so sweet, so careful with her. He'd been so drunk. She wonders if she'll ever be able to simply exist with him, the way Essek does. Or if they are destined to dance an endlessly clumsy waltz of desire and denial. 

They serve her a dish called Labskaus: a hearty stew of northern root vegetables and beef with a fried egg on top. Jester is skeptical at first, but the beets and the pickles on the side lend the whole thing a pleasant sort of sweetness, and before she knows it she's devoured her first serving and is going back for seconds. As she does, Essek shares that it reminded him of a Xhorhasian dish with a similar flavor profile, and so he and Caleb have created their own version—Bi-Bim-Babskaus— that incorporates Rosohnan-style beef and spicier pickles than the original.

"S'really yummy!" Jester offers, trying not to speak with her mouth full and mostly succeeding.

"Bit fancier than what the sailors are used to up in Icehaven," Caleb says.

The word sailor hangs in the room like an enormous sea-snake demigod. 

 

Eventually, she turns in early, claiming the bath is calling, which isn’t a lie, exactly. The wizards let her go without a fuss, settling into the study for their evening reading. 

After a bath, which is quite enjoyable, but not as relaxing as she'd hoped it would be, she retreats to her room, busying herself by hanging all her clothes up in the wardrobe. She loops one of her scarves through the curtain tiebacks to make a little hammock for Sprinkle, then curls herself up with her unicorn plushie in the soft little bed. 

The bed that is hers, now, apparently, unless she decides to go somewhere else.

The anxiety that seizes her feels oddly belated. Fuck the Traveler, she's here. She's really here. Not just dreaming about inserting herself into Caleb's life, but actually doing it. She doesn't have a back-up plan for where she will go or what she will do if this doesn't work. All of her scattered and spiraling thoughts have only ever led to this. To him. 

She stares at the wall and tries not to hyperventilate. Just go to sleep. 

She can't. The walls are blank. 

The room is beautiful, but it’s so tightly wound, like all of Caleb's fragile hopes and fears made manifest. The orderliness hums beneath her skin like a tension wire. Jester is seized by the sudden, violent urge to throw paint at the walls, to splash ink across the floorboards until the restlessness in her mind and body finally settles—until it stops feeling like Caleb is trying to use Hold Person to keep her here instead of his own arms. Maybe she’s too much for him. Maybe she’s too much for everyone.

A murmur of voices floats up the stairs. Muffled at first. Then louder.

"How long have you and Beauregard been planning this?!" Caleb’s voice cuts through the quiet.

Jester stiffens. Essek’s reply is too soft for her to decipher, but then Caleb speaks again, frantic:

"Ich kann nicht... I cannot do this without you. I don't... I don't think I know how to be alone with her. I-I don’t know if I ever did…"

She draws her knees up to her chest, wraps the quilt tight around her shoulders, and presses her fingers to her lips, willing herself not to cry—or worse, run downstairs. Every fiber of her is still wired to cast Cure Wounds when she hears him like this. To try to protect him.

But how is she supposed to protect him from herself?