Chapter Text
The little house sits along the western edge of the Tangles, just beyond the elegant disorder of the Court of Colors and its lively, winding streets. Its door is made of sturdy Dwendalian oak, but the floorboards are rosewood, brought from the shores of Nicodranas and laid in neat order by Caleb’s own hand. When rain falls over Rexxentrum, the scent of sea salt still lingers: faint, but there.
When all is hammered and fixed in place, there are four rooms: a kitchen, cupboards only half-filled; a living room, table and chairs set against the wall, its window looking out over the weedy garden and the quiet street beyond; a study, soon to become cat refuge; a bedroom, with an ashen wardrobe and a wicker chair by the bookshelf, set at just the right angle to catch the evening light. The towers of the Cobalt Soul are close enough to glimpse from the bedroom’s window. When Caleb wakes the first time in his new home, he cannot tell if the blue that spills between fluttering curtains is stone or sky.
If he had wanted it, Caleb could have had any of the Shimmer Ward’s opulent dwellings. The King had promised as much after Ikithon’s trial, and even without a royal guarantee, he has the money now to purchase almost any house in Rexxentrum. But he enjoys the seclusion of the Tangles, and the walk to school each morning. The twilight is soft and cool in the hours before the city wakes, and he is close enough to the perimeter walls to hear the shouts of the farmers just beyond, calling out to their cattle and sleepy children as they go about their early morning chores. He always arrives at the Academy with time to spare before his first class – earlier even than his fellow professors, whose fancy homes line the last few minutes of his stroll. The Candles still glare down, imperious and disapproving, as he passes them by, but when he returns to the Tangles in the evening not a single peak is visible from the house’s shaded windows. The swell of the city lies between him and the grey spires, obscuring their grandeur; they are not so impossibly tall as they seemed when he was fifteen.
It takes Caleb a month to set the house in order, and another to finish the last of the protective wards. He spends one more there alone, savouring his privacy after a year in the Nein’s constant company, and half a year after that dodging enamoured apprentices in the Cobalt Soul dorms. Beau visits occasionally, once he’s finally settled, and Yasha with her, but for the most part he breathes in the quiet and the candlelight, and sleeps deeply, and well.
And when Caleb has at last had his fill of solitude, he asks Essek to come home.
It’s dusk when they arrive. Essek’s wind-chapped hands are hidden beneath thick sleeves, too warm even for Rexxentrum’s northern climate, and Caleb takes his winter coat from him once they pass the threshold and hangs it on a nail by the door, as his mother did for guests when he was young. He feels a little like a child now – anxious to show off his creation, equally anxious that it won’t be to his companion’s liking. Essek was born to finer things, gilded halls and robes of silk. Caleb’s childhood house held three in its single room: a man and a woman cuddled close on a hay-filled mattress, a trundle bed on the floor, those are his recollections of home. And he’s had even less than that – a corner of an alleyway, only the pinprick warmth of Nott’s body at his side to ward off the frost…
At first, the child’s sensitivity wins out over adult reason, and Caleb’s heart begins to sink as they pass from room to room. Essek’s admiration is quick and plentiful, but reserved in tone, and his feet never light upon the ground. He follows Caleb dutifully as he leads him through the house, nodding at everything but touching none of the objects Caleb points out. He praises the gingham curtains, the gentle lighting, the table that Yasha carved so delicately with her blade, but his eyes often flick to the window – searching, Caleb thinks, for an avenue of escape.
He had hoped, after months of relative peace in Uthodern, that Essek’s eyes would have lost that hunted look.
“Welcome home,” he says, and Essek smiles, but there’s something unknowable in his expression. Even when they go to bed, buoyed by laughter and warmth and the comfort of long-craved touch, Caleb wakes in the middle of the night to find Essek leaned up against the window: pulling the curtains closed, then drawing them back again by inches, staring out through the thin portal of moonlight to the dark street beyond.
They spend their first week together in companionable, but awkward company. Caleb goes to his classes during the day, his apologies waved off with a gracious smile. He hurries home to find Essek working in the study, or reading at the table, even fashioning a clumsy but heartfelt dinner of potatoes and beans from the stores in the kitchen cupboard. Things seem alright. But more than once, he spies the shimmer of two grey eyes at the window as he rounds the corner – ever watchful, gone at the first sound of footsteps. Despite his frequent suggestion, and the little spark of interest that he sees in those same grey eyes before hesitation sets in, he never once finds Essek in the garden that Caleb left deliberately wild, hoping to give him at least one place to tend that he could call his own.
The evenings are subdued in a way that Caleb can’t blame on the awkwardness of a new living situation. Essek’s unhappiness is impossible to ignore, no matter how often his assurances against Caleb’s cautious inquiry, how certain his protestations of wanting only to be where Caleb is. This is the most worrisome point: no matter what Caleb tries, he cannot be persuaded to leave the house. Sun-sickness, the late hour, dishes to be washed all become shades of the same excuse. Again and again, Caleb tries to remind him that they are safe here in Rexxentrum now that Trent is gone, and again and again Essek demures, assuring Caleb that he’s simply tired, or wrapped up in research, or just not in the mood for a stroll tonight.
And so all of Caleb’s imaginings begin to unravel. There are no late night walks together, no trips to the marketplace, no bittersweet revistings of Caleb’s childhood haunts. There is only the house, and the two of them: still lonely, even in the company they have.
One evening, during the second week after Essek’s arrival, Caleb doesn’t come home. He detours from his standard route and walks until he finds himself on the stoop of a familiar dance hall. Once inside, he settles himself in the corner to wait.
His second flagon of ale has dwindled to dregs by the time he spies Beau’s dark head weaving above the crowd. She’s shorn her hair to the root since the last time they saw one another, nearly as short as Dairon’s. The hard angles suit her, though Caleb thinks she’ll grow it out again before long. Monotony has no place in her style.
He barely has time to gesture for another drink before Beau throws herself down and grins, leaning forward across the table.
“So. Trouble in paradise?”
He sighs, casting a quick Silence spell before addressing her question. He can’t guarantee that none of his more impetuous students have snuck their way in for a late-night drink and a song, and the last thing he needs are rumours flying around about Professor Widogast’s mysterious… well, beau.
“Things could be better,” he admits, but his jaw still clenches at her self-satisfied smirk.
“Didn’t I tell you?”
Caleb rolls his eyes. “You did.”
“And?”
“I still think it can work. I just need to figure out how to– ah.” Caleb pauses, mulling a slow sip of ale as he ponders how best to present a problem whose shape he still hasn’t satisfactorily grasped himself. “Essek is… uncomfortable, here. Unhappy.” Beau raises an eyebrow, and Caleb bats away her unspoken ‘ and you’re surprised?’ “More so than I expected.”
This is a conversation they’ve had before, and Caleb begs Beau with a tired look not to take them through it again. He knows full well that Beau thinks Essek being in Rexxentrum is too great a risk for both of them. He also knows that there’s nowhere in Exandria that Essek won’t be at risk. At least while he’s with Caleb, they can be together in the danger. And at least together… well, there are other things they can share as well.
Essek had been convinced by that argument. He had agreed, enthusiastically even, to Caleb’s suggestion that they live together. Caleb just can’t understand what changed between then and now.
“When you say ‘unhappy’... he wants to go?” At last, a little sympathy creeps its way past Beau’s smirk, and her expression sobers to match Caleb’s dour mood. As always, they take a little time to align, but they always manage to meet in the middle in the end.
Caleb shakes his head. “I don’t think so. But he won’t leave the house.”
“And I assume you’ve tried, you know, talking to him about this?”
“Of course. But you know as well as I do how cagey Essek can be when he sets his mind to it.”
“That’s what you get for dating a former spy.”
“I’m not unaware,” he says flatly. “But it doesn’t solve the problem at hand.”
Beau leans back, tapping her chin. The last of her playful smirk vanishes, replaced by the hard-eyed focus that comes with a mystery to be solved, and Caleb remembers why it was he came to her in the first place. They often see things from different angles, and so there is no one else better to help puzzle through a difficult problem.
“So this is kind of like Marion, right? Doesn’t want to go out, can’t give you a good reason why?” He nods slowly. The parallel had occurred to him as well, but from what he knows of Jester’s mother’s phobia, it seems a lifelong sort of trouble. He’s never known Essek to avoid the open world before. Of course, there was his flight to Eiselcross, but that was a practical solution to a very real threat, motivated by logic more so than emotion... or so Caleb has always assumed. “He’s scared,” Beau goes on. “He’s got pretty good reason to be, let’s be honest. But you know, he’s never exactly been ‘Essek the Brave’ either. It isn’t like this is the first time he’s shut himself away when things get a little too hot.”
“But rationally, he must know that here is as safe as anywhere else. If I could just show him–"
Beau cuts him off with a laugh, though not an unkind one. “Yeah, good luck with that.” Caleb glares, and she shrugs. “Speaking from past experience: convincing didn’t exactly do much good with you, at least not at the start. I seem to remember something about a stupid bowl, and not letting trauma make you a dick...” Caleb winces, and a second later Beau does the same. Both take a sip of their drinks, while the moment and the memory passes. “Look, I’m just saying… it took you a while, right? To feel like you didn’t have to be so fucking paranoid about everything. Maybe he needs more time too.”
Caleb lets out a low breath. Beau’s solution is reasonable, though not nearly immediate enough to uncoil the knot of anxiety around his heart.
“I’m afraid he’s going to run,” he says softly, staring down into his mug. Only once he says it aloud does it crystallize in his mind: the true reason why Essek’s distant eyes have left him pacing his office nearly every day. “I thought us living together would bring us closer, but I fear all I’ve done is chase him off again.” He can’t bring himself to finish the thought.
I’m afraid that if he leaves now, it will be the end of us. We have used up all our second chances.
“You were going to run, right?” Caleb looks up to find Beau staring at him thoughtfully, no judgement in her eyes. “After Felderwin. You said you were going to run.” A rush of unchecked shame floods through his chest. He swallows the self-recrimination down, tries to remind himself that he does not need to pay penance for what actions he might have taken. He has enough to shoulder with all the things he’s actually done. “Why didn’t you?”
The question isn’t accusatory, though he might once have read it as such. He’s known Beau long enough to hear the kinder intent behind the harsh delivery. She’s looking for an answer, but not for her own sake. He takes another breath, and tries to focus not on the emotions of that terrible time, but on the thoughts that created them. It wasn’t just that day in Felderwin: there were many moments when he wanted to leave, and chose to stay.
Why didn’t I run?
When at last he and Beau drain the last of their ale, bidding a tipsy goodbye to the owner and stumbling over the threshold between fire and darkness, he still doesn’t have an answer. But by the time he reaches the gates of the Tangles, the flush of alcohol has worn off slightly, and a few new ideas have managed to pierce through the haze.
At home, he finds Essek at the table, slumped against the rough-carved wood in a dozy place between meditation and sleep. One ear twitches at the click of the door latch, but he doesn’t stir. Caleb takes a long moment to look at Essek, to try and see him as he really is in this unguarded state. He examines the bruises beneath his eyes, the hunch of his shoulders, the tight muscles that frame his jaw even in rest. His exhaustion is plain, though Essek has done nothing exhausting that he knows about.
Caleb still doesn’t understand.
He aches to brush his hand against his forehead, to smooth away the worried lines there, but doesn’t want to wake Essek from what meagre rest he’s found. Instead, he slips away into his study and waves a hand to light the candle on the desk.
He sits and thinks, and thinks, until in the twilight hours of morning a pattern starts to emerge, and in it, the essence of a solution.
He found his way back. There were things – people – who helped him. He can help Essek find it too.
It’s simple, really. All he needs to do is retrace his steps.