Chapter Text
As he turns a page, Essek takes another glance at his husband through the mirror. Caleb had walked in the room, trailing after Essek and Asiren, dropped heavily directly onto the bed, and has not said a word since; he is laying on his stomach, his face shoved half into a pillow so all Essek can see are his eyes.
He's not—worried, yet. It is not a worrying silence, but it is a loud one, and the sound of thinking is beginning to resemble the whirlpool formed around a drain. He skims the next page of their new acquisition's collection of crumpled papers (an inane little pamphlet in which a tiny human woman in skimpy clothing gives terrible advice to people like Vaolu) and gives Caleb another minute to think.
When the minute is over, he sets the stupid brochure solidly in the ‘read’ pile and clears his throat.
“Asiren, what left do you have to do here tonight? Are you done with my clothing for tomorrow?”
She looks up. “Very nearly, Shadowhand. I need to select a parasol, and then help you with your toilette.”
He waves one hand. “Don't concern yourself with the parasol, thank you. I will choose one tomorrow, and tonight I'd like Caleb to attend me.” They give him a short bow and Caleb's eyes flick up in the mirror. Essek's voice softens just a touch as he meets Caleb's eyes. “Is that alright?”
Caleb peels the pillow off his face and gives Essek one of his genuine, weary half-smiles. “Of course.”
Asiren smoothes her hand over whatever she has laid out, and Essek nods to her. “When you leave, would you take a moment to debrief Vynweir? Make sure he's picked out something for the boy that matches with my outfit. I trust your instincts.”
“Of course, Shadowhand.”
When she has gone, Caleb stands, tall and bony, still dressed in his amber-brown robe and crosses reverently to Essek's vanity. He knows Caleb enjoys this long, slow movement, this absolute and easy purpose. Caleb has said so himself, said it makes him feel lighter to have but one, singular use. To be perfectly satisfactory in the art of combing Essek's hair. It quiets him, comforts and soothes him, opens up some well of simple desire and clear, unclouded water.
Essek can hear the grinding of Caleb's thoughts slow and quiet, happy to do nothing more than be of service, to do something well and useful. He is present enough to remember the order of Essek's serums and creams, to rub them into Essek's neck and ears, and very little more.
After a moment, Essek returns to the stack of papers before him. He skims, for the most part, around Caleb's hands. All of Vaolu's papers, all these informational pamphlets full of information Vaolu no doubt knows already, are inane and stupid and obvious. The blissed-out face of his husband—his husband! After so many years, still the thrill—is much more interesting. Still, he tries to pay attention until Caleb surfaces, his thoughts spinning like a gear that won't catch. He's holding the last bottle he used, still as the surface of a mirror, and Essek realizes what broke his flow.
He plucks a small silver bottle out of his products and hands it to Caleb. “They changed the bottle design since you've last done this,” he says, and purses his lips sympathetically when Caleb wrinkles his face before he continues.
Caleb is just as content, but more—awake.
The thought from earlier has almost taken shape, and out of respect Essek looks down at his papers to let it finish.
He flips a page to find it is the last of their new acquisition's paperwork, thankfully. Now he has a pathetic missive from a cousin trying to extract favors, too important for Essek to ignore completely, not important enough to force Essek's hand outright.
“Do you think I should have been a teacher instead?”
Essek lays the letter from his cousin on the vanity. He thinks ze is asking him to intercede in an argument on hir behalf, but doesn't have the decency to ask him outright, and is making him read between the lines.
Fuck the subtext. He'll write back a perfectly nice letter, until ze can find the spine to say what ze wants.
Essek lets his cousin leave his mind and goes back to his husband, and thinks.
“You would have been a good teacher. But no. I do not think you should have turned the Assembly position down.”
Caleb screws and unscrews the lid of a bottle over and over. “Why?”
“You're patient, and smart, and want your students to learn well. You're good at helping people want to learn. You—”
“Why shouldn't I have become a teacher?”
Essek cocks his head at Caleb. “We wouldn't be married.”
Caleb nods slowly.
“You can do more from where you are now than spending all your time stuck in a classroom. There is more power where you are to accomplish the things you need to. What is this about?”
“I just want to do something good. To—leave the world a little better.”
Caleb has grown enough not to say to make up for everything I've done or to justify my happiness out loud, but that doesn't mean Essek doesn't hear it. He approves of the changes his husband has learned and fought for regardless. At the heart of it all, he thinks Caleb is worried he is reaching for too much happiness, and can't allow himself to accept it.
“Are you happy with me?”
“Every day I have known you has been better than the last. Essek, there is—I cannot imagine a life without you, now. You know this?”
Essek nods. He did not ask the question for himself. “And you like him?”
Caleb flushes but doesn't drop Essek's gaze, as if emboldened by the mirror. “Ja, I do.”
Essek nods again and rifles through the papers until he finds the form with termination of contract written across the top, signs his own name, forges Vaolu's signature.
“Don't think about what you deserve. Don't think about right or wrong. That isn't something you need to worry about. I do that for you, the way you do it for me. Think about... Think about what would make you happiest.”
He turns in his chair to look Caleb in the eye.
“We can end this right now. We can return him whenever you like. Or we can keep him. I really don't mind.” He touches Caleb's arm, kisses his hand, presses the paper into it. “Just think about it. There are lots of things we can do.”
He stands and kisses Caleb's cheek. “For what it's worth, I like him. I think he could be good for you.”
Caleb stares down at the paper in his hands. “I'd like to think for a moment.”
“Of course. Take all the time you need. May I brush your hair?”
Caleb wraps his arms around Essek and tucks his chin into the top of Essek's head, the paper crinkling in his hands.
“You are so good to me,” he says, his voice rough.
Essek goes warm all over, and finds himself grinning like a child of thirty.
“I love you too.”
He buries his face in the vee of Caleb's robe, nuzzling into his chest and inhaling deeply.
They stand like that for—oh, Essek has no idea, breathing the scent of Caleb, feeling his husband's arms around him. Essek does not care much for luck, never has, but oh, is he lucky.
They stand like that until Caleb releases him, wiping his own wet face dry.
“You have a year to decide before the contract is even up,” says Essek. “At any point you can decide to go back. You don't have to make choices now.”
Caleb shakes his head. “You like him?”
“You looked”—he flushes—”good while you were—while you were blowing him. It's not a perspective I have seen before.” Outside the heat of the moment, he can feel himself go warm around the edges, and he stumbles on the words.
“And you're really alright?”
“I would not let you do anything I wouldn't want to.” He plays with Caleb's collar. “I think it could be good for us, to—to have more meaningful sex. Get the basics met, and then have more space. For us.”
He cuts himself off. Verbosity has always been a failing of his, and somehow, Caleb brings out the long and deeply buried part of him that is liable to talk and talk, when it would be better to let the silence rest.
Caleb picks up the pen and starts spinning it between his fingers, humming thoughtfully in response to Essek. He holds it to his lips as if to chew, then spins it between his fingers again.
Essek tucks his head against Caleb's side, giving his face a little privacy. He regards the paper through the window of arm and body.
Caleb shifts as he tilts his head up, takes a long, deep, thoughtful breath. He smells of resolve now.
The fire takes the paper in a few seconds, starting at the corner where Caleb holds it.
Caleb's magic is, as always, an absurdly, unfairly beautiful display of casting. There is something so exquisitely instinctive about watching Caleb shape the warm air to funnel the ashes into the palm of his hand. Like watching a hawk fly, or reading a devil-written contract, or writing an equation and watching someone sitting on a swing map the line with their natural keeping of balance.
When the paper is gone, just a fluttering of pale remains, Caleb twitches his fingers and mutters something in Zemnian, something beyond Essek's vocabulary. The room becomes cold, so cold Essek thinks he might die in his pale gold robe, and then back to the heat of a fire-warmed interior room so quickly nothing might have happened.
In the palm of Caleb's hand sits an uncut blue stone. It is the color of the sky at the horizon, with a whorl of something almost green running through the center.
Caleb easily swaps the stone and the pen from one big hand to another. He holds out the gem, pinched between thumb and forefinger, to Essek.
Essek takes it.
“It matches his eyes,” he says, and looks up into Caleb's face.
“I was thinking of him when I cast,” he murmurs.
There is something clear and assured in his face, something that satisfies whatever Essek needed to see.
Taking Caleb's face between his hands, he floats up enough to pepper Caleb with kisses until he laughs, then sinks down until his feet rest on the floor again.
“You look like you made the right choice,” says Essek, as soft as the moment requires.
“Do I?”
“You do.” He does.
There's a slow glimmer of something across his face, like curiosity whetted on a hungry stone. “If I had chosen to sign it—”
“If you would do it, I would follow you. If you had wanted to sign it, it would have been right.” He puts the stone in Caleb's palm and folds his long fingers over it. “But you didn't.”He is glad, though, that Caleb decided to take the joy he has spent too long denying himself.
“But I didn't,” Caleb echoes, and his face is clear again. “Thank you.” He wraps his other hand around Essek's, still resting with one finger on Caleb's wrist. “Thank you.”
He leans over and hooks a drawer of Essek's jewelry box, dropping the stone in among Essek's favorite earrings. “I think it would make a wonderful necklace for him,” he says, pulling Essek towards their bed.
“Or a collar,” muses Essek, and watches Caleb go pink around the edges. “I see you like that idea,” he teases. Caleb sputters and pushes him onto the bed.
Caleb goes with him, using the motion to pin Essek's wrists under his hands and pepper rapid kisses from Essek's face to the vee of his robe. He nudges it aside with his beaky nose to kiss the skin underneath, rubbing his cheek against the smoothness of Essek's skin.
Essek hooks one leg loosely around Caleb's body, enjoying the attention as Caleb takes his fill.
He stops, and Essek thinks it is a momentary pause until Caleb is staring down at him, face shining and soft.
“It's all worth it,” he says. “All of it.”
Essek's throat goes funny and lumpy, pinned under the force of Caleb's affection.
“You can't mean that.”
“I do,” he says simply, and rolls so that Essek is snug on top of Caleb's body. Their legs entwine. Like a cat orienting its fall, Essek automatically increases the pull of his weight to what Caleb has called “a good squish” in the past.
Essek finds himself, frustratingly, rendered rather without words. It is a luxury he finds himself often unable to afford around anyone but Caleb, and the Nein to varying degrees.
The first thing he wants to say would be on the subject of his dead in-laws, to ask if their happiness is worth their lives. It would be cruel, which Essek imagines is why it came so naturally.
The second thing he wants to say is all of it was worth it to him, as well, but—he would not imply his own, undeserved, happiness was a fair trade for the life he has led.
Instead, he presses his ear to Caleb's chest, until he can hear the soft, red-blooded thwoom thwoom of Caleb's human heart, and says, “I am glad you are here, with me.”
Caleb is a furnace; his fingers are warm where they wrap around Essek's head, absently curling and uncurling. After a long moment of quiet, Essek pushes himself off of Caleb, murmuring, “I should...”
“Ja, ja.”
He strips his robe and slides into the warm flannel sleep clothes Asiren laid out. When he turns back to the bed, doing up the last frog closures at the front, Caleb has hung his own robe. His back is to Essek as he nudges his components into orderly rows. He is wearing only an undershirt and shorts, despite the season; Caleb still sometimes surprises Essek with the things he considers indulgences, like blankets and a roof and a pan of heated sand at the foot of a bed in the colder months. Essek has chosen not to question or begrudge him the strange ways he luxuriates.
When Essek pulls aside their covers, Caleb joins him and extinguishes their fire with an indulgently flippant wrist flick.
Caleb cannot see in the dark, and so it falls to Essek to tuck himself into the curve of Caleb's body.
“They will like you,” says Caleb into the dark.
Essek knows Caleb's father was a soldier. Caleb knows it too.
Instead. “I can't wait to meet them.”
Caleb rests his beaky nose on Essek's head, and a puff of warm air makes his drying hair flutter.
“Ja?” he says against the back of Essek's head. It's the kind of intonation tired lovers use in bed, asking the kind of question where you already know the answer and just want to hear them say it.
“Absolutely.” The many versions of this conversation rest neatly behind his teeth, waiting to hear what pathway Caleb wants to trace tonight.
The lanky arm slung over Essek's chest pulls him closer. “She's going to love to talk yarn with you.”
Essek rolls to press his face into Caleb's chest, and the response he wants to give rolls out across his tongue like a marble in a tower. “I remember you telling me about her tarts.”
Caleb sounds properly sleepy, as he should at this stage of the conversation, and Essek gladly coaxes him through increasingly slow and yawning recollections and the meandering, idealistic plannings of a man half-conscious, and then a quarter, and then he snuffles in his sleep when Essek asks a question.
Essek shifts so Caleb's arms are wrapped around his legs instead of his chest, back braced against the headboard, and summons his bed jacket, two books, and his writing implements.
He flips open the first book to the title page, where it says, in three languages, “Spellbook of Arcanist Caleb Widogast, Archmage of Antiquity, and Shadowhand Essek Kestal uss Deirta Thelyss Widogast, Volume 4,” lit by the embers of the fire.
He rests his fingers on the “Widogast” in his name.
Essek sets the book aside; he may not have Caleb's memory, but he will be able to find the particular thought he intends to travel easily enough. It can stand to be patient just a bit longer.
The second book has no title. It's a journal, more than a book, and instead of a table of contents, Essek flips through the entire book to find the page he wants, through pages of mostly Caleb's handwriting, with his own scattered throughout. He stops to add “Emon” and “Syngorn” to a page loosely titled “Off-Limits Cities,” then flips through pages and pages of his own writing until he finds a blank page.
He titles it “Vaolu Setiram.”
Vaolu might need a book of his own. It was complicated enough to plan changing the past around two people, and now there was another variable. A complicated variable. But Caleb had been denied so many things in his life, and if he wanted a husband; and two parents; and a sweet, winsome whore to warm his bed when Essek was in one of his moods where no one could touch him; all at the same time—
Making demands of the universe and having them met was a specialty of Essek's. He would do it. He would make it work.
He bends over the book and starts writing.