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He can't stop staring at the blood; there's too much of it, everywhere, and it glistens just too brightly from the light of the embers now dying out on the flank of his fallen mark. In the relative ashen blue-gray of this newest cave that they have found themselves lost and separated in, Caleb can hear only roaring in his ears now from his own frantic breathing, and feel a hot shock of evaporating adrenalin. He can smell burnt earth and sweat, and copper. And again, sees so much blood. Not his own, but much of it Beau's.
A shoulder barrels past him with a frightening force of haste. The gasping of his breath continues, his nostrils flaring and his teeth chattering, but then "–-Caleb? Caleb!? Help her!"
He grunts. Shakes his head, all but tears the hair back off his face and rushes with Yasha across the small clearing in this awful tunnel network. To the blood: to the bright - too-bright - red scene.
It's coming from her hip, mostly, and from her ears, from diagonals and horizontals all over her arms, then her nose. She's standing, hunched at the waist and flexed at the knees, her whole left side pushing against the domed, clay-brown wall of this especially neat cave clearing. Her shoulders tense up to meet her jaw line as she grunts, heaves out breaths like her body is rejecting the stagnant underground air.
Yasha is so close to grabbing her when Beau lets out a feral growl, and Caleb sees the Barbarian flinch. Yasha never flinches, or at least he's never seen as much. But she stops dead on her toes. It always amazes Caleb how she can move and stop, and turn and weave on a hairpin, Yasha makes no mistakes, wastes no effort when she moves. And she stops now with deft precision, a long arms length away. She is watching Beau.
He sees it as well, in Beau's face. The locked-out stare, the shifting of a frantic, glassy gaze between Yasha and Caleb, seeing them both but… as strangers.
"She has been hexed, I think?" Caleb suggests, just a pace away from Yasha's flank. They watch her together, and Caleb feels them share tension in their exhausted muscles, neither ready for another fight, especially not this one…
Yasha clenches her jaw and stretches her hands, rolls her shoulders, but only looks frustratedly back at Caleb, lost and burning out. "Then how do we undo it?"
Beau huffs. She's pushing herself into the wall, as if to try and disappear. She seems oblivious to the gratuitous wounds cast upon her, she seems–
"I think that whatever this is it has only made her frightened and unaware of who we are and maybe of herself, and I do not know for certain how long it will last, but if you can just keep her in your line of sight and stop her from running away if she tries, then maybe I can–"
He interrupts himself by rooting hastily through his pockets; he knows his components are sparse and he does not remember keeping spare rose petals or dried crickets on his person today, but…
His worn boots scrape back along the ground, a grainy texture underfoot. He does not smile, but his gaze sparks with intent. He bends, with great effort - reminded of his own wounds by dull pains in his ribs and in his armpit - and digs his nails into the cloying earthy ground. He comes back up with a skim of sand across his fingertips and buried under his nails.
Beau's heels begin sliding, her toes pushing into the ground to leverage small steps back, towards the maw of the tunnel that she had emerged from, that they had by all wholly hell of timing and luck run into her and her adversary at.
Yasha starts forward but Caleb stops her with a pull at the wrist, and steps ahead instead.
"I am so sorry, Beauregard," he winces, knowing she acts now as she does, feral and wordless, something of a projection of herself, because magic has been done to her, and he can only think of more magic to fix it.
She finally makes to turn and run, at shocking speed, but Caleb goes faster, spurred, he suspects, by pure hyper determination. He grabs a bloodied elbow, and with the dirty hand he transfers the wet sand from his fingers down the side of Beau's fear-contorted face.
"Sleep," is all he incants. Beau gives no response, except her face goes soft, and her eyes roll shut, before she collapses where she stands. Caleb drops with her, pitching quickly down on his knees to stop her head from ricocheting against the hard packed ground.
"Caleb…" Yasha rushes down to meet them both, face oddly luminescent in the darkness of the alcove now that the embers have died off from the creature he smote not a handful of moments ago.
"Yasha make sure it is dead for me please, I trust your strength more than my ability with flame at this moment."
Soundlessly she complies, and stands again to tower over a cerebral lump of tacky, sinewy flesh with four stubby limbs now curled in the immediate stiffness of sudden, violent death.
"An Intellect Devourer, I believe."
Despite the gravitas, Yasha lifts an eyebrow to Caleb. "Excuse me?"
"Not you…" And Caleb feels a pull at the corner of his mouth, not a smile but some sense of relief at having the familiarity of Yasha here, an ally: though rarely alone together, still kindred in the commonality of cause.
"Well it seems dead, this… Intellect Devourer, you call it?"
"Yes. But we must go, I do not think they travel alone, and I am concerned that we have one here at all in this… well I thought we might have called this quite an unassuming set of tunnels and caves until right now… but never mind, we must go regardless. Beau? Beauregard…"
She's on her side, curled into herself with her head raised onto Caleb's knee. She is very still, and very warm. Her breath is slight, and she continues to bleed, mostly - Caleb can see now - from a gnarled, circular gouge at her hip. "This is not a powerful spell, she should wake from this almost immediately, certainty easily. Beauregard, now is not the time for this."
He shakes her, but it is a gentle gesture, one hand on her shoulder whilst the other worries some blood away from a rip in her brow. Caleb looks up at Yasha, looks around at the environment, looks with indecision and teetering frustration, marred with an ebbing panic.
Yasha crouches again with them. She regards Beau with a look that Caleb wants to turn away from, he almost wants to leave just for a moment to give her privacy to regard Beau with the deep, deep affection he knows she holds for her, but cannot yet admit. Either of them.
"She is badly hurt Caleb, I don't think she has the reserve to overcome your spell. I think it is a mercy at this point. And I have no healing left, she should sleep, keep her out of pain."
Caleb looks to Yasha, now with a little more direction in his thought. "Do you trust me to cover us all with what magic I have left for this day? I cannot carry her out of here, I think you know."
Yasha nods, looks back at the opening to the path they came from, when they were still following the sounds of familiar yelling and cursing, expecting to find Beau, expecting to see fallen foe and then expecting her to run to them, laughing, cursing and running the fuck back out with them.
"I trust you very much, Caleb Widogast. I think we were close, I think we keep going as we were and we will get out that way."
Caleb nods, in easy agreement. He looks down. Gently, almost with hesitancy, he brushes loose, matted hair from Beau's face, tucks it behind her ear, then sets her head down off his knee and stands stiffly. Yasha moves past him, takes a knee and carefully slides her arms under Beau's prone position. Lifted, Beau is small and limp, unreactive to being moved. Yasha shrugs one arm until Beau's head rolls into the nook of her shoulder, and then slides the other arm so she's holding her with it from the crook of her knee to her hip, resting her as such along both long, broad forearms. Caleb thinks about how he has seen beasts and demons slayen easily by those arms, cleaved with a sword he can barely nudge along the ground with his whole weight behind it. He thinks fleetingly of his preconceptions of Barbarians from those he had met before, and heard of from others, then chides himself that ruminations are for campfires, for later.
"You are good?" he says, though he is not really asking and Yasha knows they have nothing left of time to waste. He looks just briefly once more at Beau, sunk into the arms of Yasha, breathy and now covered with a clammy sweat. Her hands are curled in and resting on her stomach, and her knuckles are raw, exposed where the wraps have torn and puckered apart. Trust Beau to punch her way through a fight with a literal walking brain.
Yasha moves. It's not slow, but it's careful. The tunnels are big enough that she does not need to crouch, but there is no room for a sword to be swung, especially with the ferocious breadth Yasha can deliver at in the crux of battle. Caleb is behind, because they are silently confident between them that in front is clear and the proverbial party remains at the back, deeper in this shit-tip. He wants to call on Frumpkin, the thought a reflex in these scenarios where his cat's eyes would be infinitely more useful than his own dull human ones. But it is just the three of them now, and he is their line of offense. Have mercy on us, he pleas sarcastically to himself.
They traverse for a time that Caleb thinks becomes a full hour. They only check in occasionally with each other by asking sparse questions, but neither of their hackles raise, they hear nothing untoward, or sense anything to stir them for battle. Caleb is too afraid to ask about Beau, and the tunnels too narrow to peek forward over Yasha's shoulders (which he is too short to see over anyway). He can only see Beau's legs, very slightly bouncing with Yasha's exacting gait. He can see Yasha's head slightly bend every so often. Beau is being plenty watched
After the hour though Yasha stops. They have marched through several clearings, each with signs that they continue in the right direction of doubling back on themselves, with footprints, scuffs on the walls, and other easy tells signaling that they came this way to get to where they ended up.
"I need ten minutes."
Caleb doesn't argue, knows that a brief repose is wise despite the itching in his joints to keep going. He looks down the throat of the path they have come from, its grey stillness transcending to a shiver across his skin. Nothing is following them but their own shadows, and yet he fears the possibilities.
Yasha's robes crease and rustle as she bends down and lays Beau at the curve where the floor meets the walls of this larger opening than where they had all found each other. Her hands are huge and gentle, as dextrous as her feet when she positions herself in battle, but exposed and a little waning. She rolls her shoulders, her neck, and pronates at her elbows before touching her hand to Beau's hip, where the worst of the bleeding has faltered. Caleb watches her inspect the muddy sash tied to Beau's waist, bringing together the light cottons of her outfit. She ruminates briefly, before doing nothing and sinking into a seat on the floor with a weighted sigh. Again, Caleb feels an urge to leave them, to sit away in a shadow and abstain witness while Yasha tends to Beau.
Beau catches them both off guard though by moving. Limbs stir as if to stretch. Her nostrils twitch and flare. But as she moves she groans, weakly, and tries to roll onto her injured side with a pained frown. Yasha stops her, not by force but by a gentle touch, cupping the whole side of her face into one hand. "Hello Beau, welcome back," she says with a shy smile, not a little without obvious worry as Beau squints up to the ceiling, barely seeing, hardly registering her environment. "You can be a hard one to track down when you decide to go off and make distractions to save your friends."
Yasha waits as Beau negotiates consciousness, slowly, painfully. Caleb looks beyond them both, at the tunnel they must keep tracking through, and decides another minute can pass before he needs to push them on, and continue their evacuation.
"Yash…" Beau's voice is paper dry, quiet and easily engulfed in this warren, but they share a rush of relief, that she recognises Yasha, that she speaks at all even, rather than snarl and growl. "Hey…" She slurs, her eyes struggling to open, maybe not fully cognisant, "this, sucks. Iwanna.. go drink, go with you…"
Yasha allows Beau a moment to stumble over words and scrunch her eyes and try to move her limbs before laying a hand again on her flushed cheek to still her.
"Beau, we are going to move again. You are very hurt," (now Beau does manage to open her eyes, and frown indignantly at Yasha as if to try and prove her wrong with only a glare), "and we are still far from safety, far from healing. But for now…" And Yasha kneels closer to Beau, shuffling forward on her knees and though crouched still towering over her. "We have stopped for long enough, I think…" Yasha spares a brief glance back at Caleb, gives a knowing look to say they will go as soon as she has done what she can to summon what healing she has mustered in this poor rest.
Beau realises too late, tries to protest as she puts together the scenario. Still stuck underground, seperated into this trio. "No, save it–" but she has no strength to raise even a finger in protest, and even at her peak she doesn't think she could take Yasha in an arm wrestling tussle. Yasha rests her palms on Beau's hip, on the concentric wound that she fears threatens to harbour infection, as she catches the sheen of sweat on Beau's forehead, and the ruddiness in the whites of her unfocusing eyes. The familiar warmth of the spell pulses only once through her wrists, then her palms and into the wounded skin beneath. It is not enough, but Yasha thinks some of the growing heat in Beau's hip abates, and Beau lets go a sigh like she feels some relief.
Yasha watches her, watches her body slacken again, her eyes soften and close, and thinks maybe Caleb's own spell continues to have a residual sleepy effect. She's quick to gather Beau from the floor, tuck and fold her into her broad grip again, and then turn back to Caleb. He's looking at her, steadily, not yet making efforts to move despite his angst to leave. She knows he wants to say something to her. She knows he cares more deeply for Beau than he can express himself. She knows they do not need to say it to each other, what friendship means to both of them now. But she is not sure what Caleb thinks of her and Beau and everything they won't say to each other right now.
"Yasha…" he starts, scratching his shoulder for distraction, struggling to maintain eye contact. "Ah… thank you."
Yasha nods. She wants to laugh, but it's not an easy humour she feels, and the environment is becoming more oppressive, and Beau…
"Caleb. I think I would like to get to know you better. Under different circumstances. Tonight even, by a fireside once we have left this shit hole."
Caleb is surprised to feel his shoulders slump, with some invisible tension snapped and severed as they speak to each other. His stomach still knots with every glance at Beau and the stillness that hangs over her, that is so against the energy she lives with, but he manages a nod of agreement with Yasha. "It is a deal."
Yasha forges forward, holding onto Beau a little tighter, walking just a bit quicker. Caleb behind, ready to be quick and merciless with whatever might try and stop them. Tied to these people, in bonds he treasures, protected from loneliness by a forge of genuine friendship. He thinks, he would lay down much more for them then he ever dared he could imagine before for that.