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The hours between come back in fits and bursts, always startling, and he can feel himself seize without meaning to every time another image or motion or snatch of sound comes to mind. It must be apparent, at least at close range, because Essek’s hand in his tightens when it happens, and the pressure brings his mind back to the present.
The walls closing in on his friends, wreathed in flame, their yells—some of them only noise, others his name. Beau’s accusatory shouts drowned out by Jester’s pleas.
Fjord, beneath the guise of Trent’s face, too masterful at mimicry not to make him flinch.
Veth, trying to push through the leech’s grasp on him, even in the midst of labor.
As the hours wear on, the Brenatto house full to bursting, everyone tripping over each other to help in some way—first with the birth, and then with everything that comes after—most of it has found its way into place, his mind organizing the memories in a convenient chronological order for him to review, whether he wants to or not.
Every time it flashes behind his eyes, he finds a hand already against him, the grip grounding. Fretfully hovering over the women who have taken charge, held back from toppling into their midst mostly by the hands tight around his shoulder and waist. The squeeze of hands tangled in and around his own as everyone coos over Veth, holding the newborn now that he’s been cleaned up and swaddled. An arm tucked through his elbow as they lean against the kitchen counter in a moment of calm amidst the chaos.
It helps. There will be more than enough time to dwell, and it helps to delay that process for a later date. Now he needs to be helpful when possible and out of the way when not. He knows—it has been so long since he’s needed to remind himself, but he knows—that he should not grovel, no matter how much he wants to. It will not help anything, and it will only burden those he loves further. The grip feels like a restraint, in a way, keeping him from flinging himself to the floor to prostrate himself in exchange for their forgiveness.
“Caleb,” Essek murmurs at his ear, and only then does he notice that Fjord is speaking to him, where they have ended up on the balcony, gulping in the fresh air. He barely recalls how he got here from inside—the night is mild but the breeze off the sea carries a chill with it, and that chill cuts deeply, as wrung out as he is. Essek’s arm around his waist is the only warmth. “Fjord is wondering if you have the resources to return Beau home tonight.”
“No,” Caleb says, feeling his inadequacy in the weight of his bones. “Everything I had at that scale, the leech used for its own purposes.”
Fjord leans against the railing, looking little the worse for wear. He has changed out of his singed clothing, though Caleb had not noticed him leave to do so. His eyes scan for the horizon. “Of course, as I figured. I’ll let Beau know that she should stay here with Yasha. The two of you can take the spare bedroom at our place, if you’d like.”
“Ugh, fuck, man,” Beau says, appearing at the doorway as though summoned. “I smell like smoke and baby.”
“We all know you and your wife sleep naked,” Essek retorts, some of the bite lost in his weariness. There is a hollowness to his face, eyes and cheeks sunken, a grayness to the tone of the skin where the shadow is deepest. Caleb thinks to bring a hand to those hollows, to soften the valleys of his cheeks with his thumbs, but his arms are leaden at his sides.
“I just wanted a change of clothes,” Beau drawls back, but vanishes again before the bickering can continue.
Caleb has not asked his partner yet about the cost of keeping the sphere open and the time dilation in check; had there been a moment, he hasn’t brought himself to open his mouth to learn. The cost of his curiosity has already been too high today. His daze settles in at that again, the city and the home fading into a blur as the questions and the guilt overwhelm him, and he retreats back into himself, led onward by the hands on and around him, letting himself be led.
Perhaps it should’ve struck him before the threshold of the door, as he is ferried out of one home and onward to the next, that this is unusual—that he is certainly not unused to his partner’s touch, but not so constantly, not so unbroken as it has been. His attention has been elsewhere but his memory has cataloged the time regardless, and he parses through the day. When Veth’s child had been passed around from person to person, Essek had not let go of him to take the boy, shaking his head when Caleb had held him up, letting Beau take him instead. When they had had a moment to remove their outerwear, and then to don them again before leaving, Essek had helped him out of his coat, tugging one sleeve away while gripping the other hand, then resting the hand onto the now lighter arm before removing the second sleeve, methodical motions. As though working with lightning, there has never been a moment when Essek has let go of him with one hand without first taking hold with the other.
He freezes briefly, drawing back. “I think I forgot—“
He turns as though to reenter the house to retrieve something, and Essek’s hand on his does not drop. “What?” he asks instead. “We can get—“
“No, no,” Caleb waves him off, and turns back to the road. It is late enough that the usually busy streets of Nicodranas have quieted to a low hum, only a few passersby moving along. “I am disoriented. I misremembered. I have everything on me.”
Essek’s narrow gaze is intense upon him, but he must accept this explanation, because he falls into step beside him without further comment. As they have left the foyer, he has drawn a disguise upon himself, similar to his Cobalt Soul archivist appearance but distinct now that that persona has been compromised. The sallow tone of his skin disappears into a rosy complexion that is as flawless as it is fake, for many reasons.
“I’m not going to disappear if you let go of me,” he whispers, when Fjord and Jester have pulled a few paces ahead. Essek starts.
“What do you mean?” he asks, too quickly, hand pulling away as though caught at something.
Essek’s fingers have barely left his, skin absent though the soft presence of palms cupped around palm remains like a phantom limb, before it feels as though air has abandoned him, as though he is floating untethered as Essek is, but unlike Essek is, the earth is pulling away from him and he is spinning—
Caleb’s fingers close again, capturing Essek’s hand before he can be shuffled off into the void of his own horror and the memory of that thing’s grasp.
“Nothing,” he says, just as fast, though his quick breathing is echoed beside him in his partner’s rising shoulders, trying as he might to conceal or quell it.
This tether carries them at least to the Stone-Lavorre home, their quiet bungalow, which is today musty with disuse. He reminds himself absently that they had been on their honeymoon for the past few weeks, a reminder that feels only like one more punch in the gut to an already bruised and broken body.
There is, he is all too aware, a threshold at which there simply is nothing left that does not already ache, even for a mind as large as his. It has been a while since he has seen that threshold come and gone, even longer since it has been surpassed so quickly.
It would be usual, in a friend’s spare bedroom, to move to either side of the bed, to begin getting ready to sleep to their individual habits and routines, but when the door closes, left in the dark, Essek seems to stumble, his grip on Caleb’s hand tightening, and Caleb does not move to break it.
“You did not hold the baby,” Caleb remarks, as casually as he can, and feels in the motion of his arms that Essek shrugs.
“It is easy to overstimulate a newborn,” he says, with the tone of a recitation.
“How often have you been around newborns?” he prods, more out of surprise than anything else.
“Often enough, in my adolescence—in the dens, support is offered for expecting parents, and as head of the den the Umavi is expected to arrange and coordinate such help and generally be present and attentive as needed—well, in Den Kryn it is generally a surrogate, as the Bright Queen is of course occupied with matters of governance—“
This explanation could last all evening, if he let it. “Essek.”
If it was not so dark, he imagines the flush would chase away the sallow tone of his partner’s cheeks. “I assisted my mother on a number of occasions. I mostly tried to stay out of the way.”
“Perhaps you can teach me what you know,” Caleb says, trying to keep his voice light, but doesn’t manage it. “Thank you,” he adds, “for seeing me through, today.”
“Of course,” Essek answers, as though this is natural, and it is these days. In the recesses of his memory, attention and presence extended through the Folding Halls by the leech’s parasitic imposition, commanding his eyes and ears and voice, his eyes meet Essek’s as he turned, for the last time, back to him before fleeing the sphere.
How long had it been before the Nein had entered? Caleb doesn’t know. He knows, somehow, that there had been an initial struggle, the sphere opening and then the leech wrenching it shut again, trying to lock it around him, keep anything from getting in or him from getting out. He knows that then it was quiet, for a time, as the leech continued to wrap its bonds around him, pulling from him the function of his mind and magic and motion. Caduceus once told him, rather idly, about a wasp that somehow took control of beetles for its own purpose, followed such a wasp and its beetles back to a small lair of its eggs, where the beetles fought to protect the young and the home, at the cost of their own peril.
He has not felt so small in years.
“Dear,” he says, only a sigh on his lips. His transmuter stone is gone, and he cannot see Essek beyond his silhouette, but he raises his free hand to Essek’s forearm and feels the tremble on his skin, the texture of the goosebumps. “I’m alright.”
“Are you?” Essek asks, his voice piercing, an unexpected knife in the dark.
He sinks to the edge of the bed with a chuckle. “Are either of us?”
Now, whether due to the protection of solitude or darkness, Essek doesn’t lie. “No.”
Caleb uses their entwined hands to pull Essek to him, face sinking into the soft pillow of his stomach before releasing his hand to wrap his arms around his waist instead. For a moment Essek allows it, awkwardly embracing his shoulders and head from above, before he squirms enough to make space between them to fold himself into Caleb’s lap.
As Essek’s arms circle his shoulders, it creates a similar sensation to the leech wrapping around him, and he seizes suddenly. As he has every time Caleb has done this today, Essek’s grip tightens, not understanding his panic, and his breath only quickens further. The way he wrenches back is unconscious, unthinking, though he knows, his mind knows underneath, that it is irrational, that it’s only his partner.
Usually Essek, not so comfortable and easy as he with physical touch, withdraws, and Caleb, so used to it as to be muscle memory, reaches. Much of his mind and his world has been turned upside down today; he should not be surprised to find that this too is a casualty of it.
Even with only half a thought, the cantrip comes easily. Warm globules burst into light around them, lighting the room.
Essek blinks rapidly against the sudden change, sensitive pupils retracting too slowly, and only in the light do the tear tracks, shed so silently in the dark, shine on his face.
“Es tut mir leid,” Caleb says. It feels like the thousandth time today, yet he has only spoken it aloud once. It would not have been welcome again, had he tried. “Ich brau— I need—“
“Was?” Essek falls into his mothertongue easily enough, a sharp mind and years of practice. “Was brauchst du? Sag mir— Kann ich dir—“
“Nein, nein,” Caleb waves away his sudden worry, and returns to a language more rote among those they share. “I wanted to be able to see you. I didn’t think—”
Essek cuts him off by hugging him again, burying his own tear-soaked face into Caleb’s shoulder, and Caleb holds onto him just as tightly, eyes open. He brings his hand up to Essek’s head to sink into his hair and inhales deeply. The sight and feel and smell of him, the scent of dunamis and home, fends away any thought that this embrace is anything but what it is.
“I told you I would come back for you,” Essek says, his voice choked, and Caleb takes another large breath in and out, feeling an infinitesimal budge in the tension of his shoulders, then takes another. Perhaps he will have let go of it before he dies.
“I know,” Caleb says. “Thank you.”
Essek’s head shakes under his grip. “I didn’t— I had to— the others—“
Caleb leans back only enough to look at him, seeing for the first time the guilt on Essek’s face, though he owes Caleb no anguish.
“I’m sorry,” he adds, and Caleb blinks.
It is hard to gauge time, not only because they had been in the sphere for so long beforehand, but also because the memories are still disjointed, all there but unconnected, like a skeleton in the absence of tissue. When Essek had fled, when the Nein had arrived. How long it had taken for them to pass through the maze.
“If not for you I would still be under that thing’s control.”
“If not for me you may not have been in that room to begin with.”
Caleb cocks his head and catches his gaze again pointedly. They should have examined the wards further before dispelling them, perhaps, the possibility that he could’ve identified the danger from them gnaws at him idly when he thinks about it again, but there was little likelihood they would not have opened that door. There is rarely much that differentiates wards intended to keep someone out from those that keep something in. “That is false and you know it.”
Essek deflates slightly, looking if possible even more morose. “Perhaps we can share the fault, in this matter.” Then, as the offer lingers between them, “I know you have been swallowing down your apologies all day, Caleb Widogast.”
“You are too observant, Herr Thelyss,” he says finally.
“Only of subjects engaging enough to be worth my study,” Essek sniffs.
“Then I must be an illuminating specimen.”
“Sometimes.” Essek sniffs again, this time without the air of haughtiness. Caleb can see the sheen of the tears in his eyes, but they don’t fall. “Two hours, Caleb Widogast. I was alone, in our home, forced to trust others to bring you back to me, for two hours. After you pushed me out.”
“And if I had not?” Caleb asks, growing defensive now. “If you had become entangled in its grasp? Or worse, if you had been trapped and at its mercy, at my mercy—“
Essek scoffs. “I’d like to think I could’ve—“
“If I had killed you?” Caleb snaps. He is too tired to continue this conversation, Essek certainly just as exhausted, to let it build into an argument, but as bad as the day has been, the hypotheticals are far worse. “How long do you think it would’ve taken for someone to notice our absence, let alone to discover where we had gone? Would we ever have been found? Would it have been possible for anyone else to open the sphere as you did, to get inside, even if the leech and I had not grown too strong to overcome by then?”
Essek doesn’t answer, gaze somewhere around Caleb’s collarbone.
“I will allow you to share the responsibility,” Caleb says finally, “if it makes you feel better. But not because I believe it belongs to you.”
Essek exhales, and his shoulders shudder as he does, shining eyes cast off to the left, still avoiding his eyes. In the sharp lights, the sunken areas of his face look almost etched in stone, the warring shadows falling across one another, a construction of geometry rather than living flesh. Caleb leans forward to press a kiss to the hollow of his cheek, and then the corner of his eye. His white lashes flutter closed, and Caleb adds another to the eyelid before Essek turns back to look at him.
“Do not ever,” he says, “cast me out like that again.”
“Don’t put constraints upon the things I would do to keep you safe,” Caleb replies.
A distant, high shout reaches them, and in an instant they have both jumped to their feet. Caleb’s pulse pounds as the sound clarifies, Jester’s tone, but odd—not one of fear. Essek keeps moving toward the door, hands held at the ready, not recognizing it before Caleb catches his arm.
He realizes that, aside from that brief moment as they’d left the Brenattos, it has been the first moment since his exit from the Halls that there has been any gap between them. The alarm has cut through the anxiety of letting go, for a moment, though he is glad to feel Essek beneath his hand as he stops him. “It’s nothing,” he says, and Essek looks back to him and past him, eyes still searching for enemies, hands reaching for components, and Caleb adds, “Well, nothing we want to be a part of.”
This gets through to him. “Ah,” he says flatly, and all of his raised hackles seem to settle again. His voice rises slightly, certainly not enough to carry through the unnatural space, as he shouts wearily, “For fuck’s sake, shut the fuck up—“
“I think they have the right of it,” Caleb says, pulling him back from the door, reaching for Essek’s clothes to begin the process of derobing him. He tugs the vested overrobe over his head, Essek letting him, then grins, “We could always start a competition. I think I could make you scream louder tha—“
“We will do nothing of the sort,” Essek says, though he does nothing to prevent Caleb from removing his blouse and working on the buttons of his trousers. “I have been awake for twenty-seven hours.”
Caleb’s fingers pause as he does the math himself, then grimaces. “Alright.” His partner’s sallow face is almost slack, eyes glazed, and he can see the hours weighing on him. “Is there anything I can do for you?”
“You can let me get some fucking sleep,” Essek says, without bite, and begins to unbuckle Caleb’s holsters while Caleb helps him out of his trousers. Only once Essek stands in his undergarments alone does Caleb let go to pull the shirt over his head. Essek’s hands find his waist even before he has it off. “And in the future you can keep yourself from… from becoming possessed.”
Caleb pauses, head free but his arms still in his sleeves, as Essek pulls them together again, and places one hand on Caleb’s chin to guide his mouth to his. He is caught there, pinned in place with the shirt between them, but being caught and cornered like this, by Essek—he would do anything asked of him. He would put himself in harm’s way before it could reach his partner without question, without being asked.
“If you were a wasp,” he says, and Essek’s brow wrinkles in consternation, “I would be your beetle.”
“I think you may be delirious,” Essek says, with a sigh of amused impatience, and rids him of his shirt.
“There are wasps, that—” he says, trying to explain, though he has a feeling Essek might be right, “that collect little armies of beetles to protect their young. Their eggs, or, or, larvae.”
Essek half-chokes on his laughter. “I certainly don’t have any need of that.”
“Or their food stores, or—“
“I am starting to believe these beetles are another of Jester’s bug stories.”
“No, Caduceus told me,” he insists.
“If you say so, my love.” Essek sighs and lets his hands circle Caleb’s waist. “I do not want you to be my beetle. I want you to be my partner, nothing more, nothing else.”
Caleb opens his mouth—what else would he be? Then he freezes before he can ask.
“Alright?” Essek prompts.
Caleb lets his brow fall to Essek’s, breathing him in again, and closes his eyes. His mind flashes through each image, still disjointed, moments he has seen, absent the connective tissue of time and experience. “If the wasps are anything like that thing, I do not think the beetles have much choice in the matter.”
Essek gives one more mangled laugh and does not press again. “No. I imagine not.”