Chapter Text
In a deep fathom of shadow and speckled light, a ragged figure cloaked in moonshade bends over a faint handful of glowing stars.
A voice sounds around him, melodic, formless; in some ways, immaterial. It has been a long time since she has had a body though, so she’s quite used to it.
“You are fretting again, my dear.”
The figure sighs, his shoulders dropping, but his fingers curl inward anyway, cupping the flickering nascent lights in the curve of his palms like one might shield a dying flame.
“I know.”
“You have done all you can.”
“I know that too.”
“Which attempt is this?”
The figure’s shoulders rise, the tendons in his wrists tighten, his fingers darkening at the tips, and the lights around them start to flicker.
“The last.”
“Then we have no choice but to wait and see. You cannot stop what is to come now. Only guide them from here, and hope the choices they make will take them there.”
The figure’s spine tightens further, the shadows begin to shake in time with his shoulders.
“I wanted them to be happy.” He snarls wretchedly. “Why do they always have to be strong?” The tears that begin to fall swirl like galaxies, curling darkness and bright nebulas and the sparking dust of creation all suspended inside.
“You do not know that they cannot be both.”
“Don’t I?”
“They have always surprised you.”
The figure deflates, the shadows settling morosely. “Yes.” He admits. “That is what I am counting on.”
A subtle shift– like a breeze, or perhaps a caress– and a gentle force settles across the figure’s shoulders, a soft comfort.
“It is the greatest gift you could have given them.” The force assures.
The figure scoffs. “And yet it shall weigh as heavy as a curse. Their growth will be slow. Vulnerable. Brutal. Their bodies will take long to adapt. Their souls longer.”
“Is that not why you gave them each other?”
The figure has no words for that.
He reaches down, scoops one of the stars up into the bowl of his palm, a tiny flickering thing the color of amber. It is the faintest of them all. This chosen path has not been kind to it. None of them were. But this one, perhaps, has been the most cruel.
The light flickers warmly, tender, in pain, and the figure’s hands begin to shake again.
He’d had no choice. Of all their shared possibilities, of all their woven paths of birth and life and choice, it is this cruel reality that comes burdened with the greatest hope.
He can only have faith that he wove their paths to one another with enough care, that he changed enough without changing too much. Their scars are a part of them, and he cannot take them away, no matter how much he may now wish that he could.
But they will remember one another. Not with their minds or bodies, but with the essence of who they are– with the marks they once left on one another’s souls.
“It will be enough.” She assures him.
The figure carefully pours the amber light back where it belongs, among Cobalt and Cerulean and Topaz and Violet. “It will have to be.”
<•>
Sensitive. Trent had called him.
The words had been derogatory and reverent all at once, a strange and stomach-turning blend, and so Bren had never known if it was compliment or reprimand.
It made him more aware of the subtle nuances of some of the sharper spells, usually the more complex ones– but at the same time it made the Residuum experiments a thousand times more excruciating. Each cut was a burning electric line, the crystals themselves like hot coals stuffed between his muscles instead of stone– a searing, bone-deep agony. It took him ages to recover after, during which Ichithon would prod and examine his healing wounds with callous curiosity, find excuses to bandage and unbandage his work over and over again– just to look. Just to check in.
Because Bren was his favorite.
He’d said as much often– and oh, how sickeningly special Bren had felt each time– but it was often enough that he was afraid Astrid and Eduwulf might start to resent him for it, for Trent’s more obvious shows of favoritism.
But no. They never had.
They’d told him no, treasure, it only makes sense after all, over and over, as they’d kissed his eyes and his hair and his throat and his aching aching wrists, but he’d never really learned what they’d meant by that.
Now, his sensitivity is nothing more than another obstacle of life. One he must overcome regularly if he is to survive.
In a sharp and twisted way he is grateful– Ichython’s training and experiments had ensured that he was well accustomed to pain, in all its variants and flavors– that he knew intimately all of its sharp edges and seeking thorns. He can maintain his focus and concentration through all manner of clever tortures, now; the ragged edges of his sensitive magics are gentle pains by comparison.
He scrapes by, living a ghost, lost and paranoid, moment to moment, until jagged-edged survival is all he knows.
Good. He thinks. This is what I deserve, anyway. He knows, and he lets himself fade, lets himself be ground down, for a while. Lets the pain become him. For a long time he is not himself- not anything, really– only a reflexive weapon made of everything he was taught, and many things he never was. He always was too clever for his own good, just like Wulf and Astrid once told him in the sweet tones of fond irritation, and his mother too, long ago. It serves him well as a ghost.
He kills. He burns. He forgets.
Then he meets Nott.
It's like coming awake, again. Like remembering how to breathe again. What it means to be scared, to be angry, to be hurt, to be alive.
The numbness begins to fade, but that's okay, that's fine, he will face it– his agony, the things he’s done, anything to remember what that means again.
It has been a long time, at this point, since Bren– Caleb, Caleb now, Bren is dead, you killed him– has had anything like a mother, even if that isn’t quite what she is to him. Even with all her jittery sharpness, it is she that finally coaxes Caleb out of himself, little by little, out of the dead broken skin of Bren Aldrich Emundruud and into the ill-fitting thing that he is now– into aching, clear-eyed, Caleb Widogast. He owes her more than his life, for that alone, so when she lies to him about her age, about her name, about the strange hum of sticky, slimy magic he can feel against her peridot skin, he says nothing.
But the name she gives him is still the first word he’s spoken in a very, very long time, and that makes it special, anyway.
She feeds him when she can steal enough for them both, makes a point of it, and as soon as she realizes Caleb can breathe magic to life out of something so mundane as feathers and sand, she’s stealing those too.
He’s still not talking much, he can't find it in himself to say much more than her name and a few mumbled numbers in Zemnian she doesn’t understand, so her finds are wild and varied- pieces of broken pottery and shards of glass, scraps of colored wood and vials of tree sap, and many, many, buttons.
She is good to him, as much as he deserves nothing of the sort, even skittish and selfish as she sometimes can be, and so Caleb wants to be good back.
And if he’s to do that, he’ll need something to cling to, a scrap of comfort in the dark. Using her would not be safe, or fair, and so he does not think of it. Instead, he says the first full sentence he’s spoken in over a year, and asks her to find some incense.
This is not a spell he was allowed at the Academy. This is a guilty thing, a spell for children and fools, memorized from a glance at an Introductory Conjuration textbook, the one that belonged to the fair-haired gnome girl that sat next to him in Planar Mathematics. It was one of only two classes where Astrid and Wulf hadn’t managed to bribe or blackmail the professor into letting them sit on either side of him.
He has always been enamored with the idea in secret– with having a companion to your work, unique and loyal, a bond of trust and strength with a tiny spirit in exchange for a bit of your magic, a bit of your time and thoughts and attention. Something he could love that didn’t want something in return he couldn’t give.
During the ritual, as Caleb concentrates and casts his will and want out into the planes, he forgets for a moment why certain spells have limitations to them. He assumes, incorrectly, that leaving out the outer seal to preserve the precious remains of his chalk will be harmless, because what creature of any strength would find worth in him now but a simple familiar? A nascent spirit that truly knows no better? So he leaves out the restraint, and pours what little of his heart he has left into the spell, thinking only of the sweet impetuous cat that was once his very dearest friend.
But there is more love left in him than he can possibly know, at the time, and something, out there in the dark, hears it.
What he feels in the moment, however, hours of strange quiet later, is only a gentle nuzzle of response; a curious flex of magic, bizarre and mercurial, that registers a little as fey, a little as… something else. Having never cast the spell before this day, he senses nothing odd at all about it, but the distinctly sacred feel of it makes him tense– he isn’t– he is not worth–
But almost as if in response to that feeling, that hesitancy, the presence settles more firmly into the playful register of a faerie spirit– warm and Seelie, with just a touch of umber gloam too it.
Oh. That’s good. An Autumn Fey.
In a twining convergence of eventide light that smells of fallen leaves in cool mountain air, Frumpkin appears, surging into existence in a glimmering curl of heat and smoke.
Not his Frumpkin, of course– though the shape is the same. Something new and different, certainly; but a creature that, in response to his agony and longing, has agreed to take upon itself the mantle of his fallen friend. This Frumpkin tells him they are a He, which is good. The difference will help him keep them separate, and keep Caleb in the present– which is where he must be if he’s to look after Nott the way she has looked after him.
For a long while, it’s just the three of them. A pair of cracked open souls in ill-fitting bodies and a faerie cat, surviving together.
Caleb does not believe in fate. Bren hadn’t either.
But as it turns out, Fate does happen to believe in him.
<•><•><•>
On her way down from Zedash, in a seedy not-town half off the Amber Road, Beau, in a fit of self-destructive rage, picks a fight she knows she can’t win.
She should know better. Thugs like these always play dirty, and she would know that, but she hadn’t cared, at the time.
Because for a handful of fucking seconds, she’d let herself believe that things were finally gonna be different. That being a Monk might be different, that the Cobalt Soul might be different.
Which shows that she doesn’t really know anything.
Another kick impacts hard with Beau’s ribs, hard enough she flips over with a smack into the dirt and wet, and yeah, fuck, that rib sure is broken now if it wasn’t already. She spits hard into the mud, gritting her teeth around her ringing ears and spinning head, trying to leverage an elbow under herself to shove up– onto her knees at least, if she can't get to her feet.
Judging from the laughing bastard over her head and the snickers of his lackey chuckle-fucks, she’s not going to get the chance.
She’s not going to make it easy, but she’s not stupid either; at this point, all she can hope is that they get bored before she gets dead.
Just as she’s getting ready to twist and grab ahold of the asshole’s fucking tacky boots, she hears something strange– words, sorta, but not a language she knows; and they sound funny– like ringing in the air, like the tremble of vibrations across the strands of a spider’s web, plucking out a tune.
Or maybe she just has a concussion.
The voice is low, almost melodic, soft and heavy and deep– coming from somewhere over Asshole’s left shoulder; like the swell of drums at a festival, like the swell of a storm at the edge of the sky.
Before Dickhead can even wind up his next kick to her unprotected insides, something shifts– the ground underneath her trembles, and out of fucking nowhere an enormous clawed paw of dirt and mud and gravel surges up like a wave and slams over him, constricting hard like the coils of a snake until its got him pinned to the ground, like a mouse in the claws of a tiger.
He goes down screaming, the men around him scattering as chunks of earth smack them in the face and dust kicks up into their eyes, and Beauregard watches through a red tinted haze, fury temporarily frozen in her blood in the wake of surprise.
It doesn’t touch her.
It goes practically over her head, but while the ground under her shifts somewhat, it does so only to settle her battered body into a gentle blind of soil and soft clay, forming over her a bit on the edges like– like a shelter or something.
Because of it, she hears more than sees people dropping around her– a handful of grunts and yelps followed by clangs and crunches that eventually cumulate in the slack thud of bodies hitting the ground– dead or unconscious, she doesn’t know.
Then she looks up.
Standing in the shelter of the trees, like a phantom on the side of the road, is a tall filthy man in road-battered clothes and an oversized coat– the same homeless man she’d ‘dropped’ a silver in front of not a fucking hour ago. His hand is extended out, curled like the grip of earth and sand over the big asshole pinned to the ground next to her. His gaze is even and steady– almost bored– and a frankly startling shade of blue that burns like the noon-day sun.
As she watches, the fingers of his hand constrict slightly, like he’s gripping an invisible object, and the mound of magical earth constricts in turn, bearing down until Beau hears a sickening crunch. The body under the paw goes still.
Silence.
Then, out of seemingly thin-fucking-air, a tiny hooded figure appears over the edge of the blind near her head. She startles back, slipping in the loose earth and her own blood, but the form doesn’t come any closer, just looks her up and down with huge, unnervingly yellow eyes.
“She’s pretty banged up, but she seems okay!” the creature– which Beau now realizes must be a goblin, with the slightly hazy eyes and the skin and the pointed ears– calls out. The man nods, lowering his hand, and the earthen paw crumbles, losing structure and reverting to an inert pile of soil and stones. The blind falls away a bit too, but not entirely– just enough for her to crawl out now if she wants. The goblin turns back to her a bit warily, pointedly standing just out of her reach. “You alright, slugger?” she asks, oddly encouraging in the gentle ribbing. “Think you can walk?”
Beau just stares, dazed, looking back and forth between the little goblin girl and the strange (magical?) homeless man that, by all appearances, have just saved her fucking life.
She nods eventually, her throat working with a rough swallow. She tries not to stare too obviously “I-I think so.”
The goblin brightens. “Oh, good. Bye then!” she chirps, and then abruptly fucking scampers off like she’s not one of the reasons Beau is even fucking breathing right now. She lopes to a stop right up alongside lanky magic-man, slipping her hand into his slack one, easy as you please, and begins pulling him along, back into the cover of the roadside woods.
Beau, understandably, kinda panics. “Whoa, whoa, whoa– hey! Wait a second!” she shouts, stumbling clumsily to her feet, stepping jerkily over the slack bodies around her. “Fucking-just, wait! You're just gonna leave?”
The man pauses, and the goblin girl pauses with him. He blinks at her slowly, but there’s nothing remotely hazy about that gaze. It’s cool and it’s clear, sharply intelligent beyond reason, and Beau feels abruptly like he’s staring straight through her. She’s reminded suddenly of the stories of Bahamut, God of Dragons Just and Kind, who would descend upon the material plane in the guise of a simple elderly traveler, surrounded by Golden Dragons in the humble forms of singing canaries. Wouldn’t that be a bitch. “It’s not as though you needed much help.” The uncanny man tells her– a lie, but a kind one– in that low, soft-edged accent she recognises from the spell he must have cast. Zemnian, definitely. Heartfields, probably. Nice to listen to, even– if she were into that kind of thing. “Consider it, ah, ‘returning the favor’.” He mutters.
Yeah. Fuck that.
“Naw, man.” she mutters, meeting his eyes evenly, shifting to stand square with him, blowing blood out of her nose and checking to make sure all her teeth are still there. “If there's a favor to return here,” she growls softly, “It sure as hell ain’t yours.”
<>
He tries to leave without her anyway.
It’s a good thing Beau is a stubborn fuck, but there’s more to it than that– there is something about this man that doesn’t make sense, something about him appearing right when she needed him that sends her senses tingling– that feels a little too much like fate.
If I let him go now, I’m never going to find him again, am I?
Like hell if she’s going to let that happen.
Turns out his name is Caleb. Caleb Widogast. The lump under his collar is his not-cat, Frumpkin. Beau Loves Frumpkin, and makes it her personal goal to convince Caleb to let her pat his tiny little head.
The goblin with him is Nott the Brave, no comma, and is, indeed, a girl, though it's hard to tell under the mask and bandages unless she’s talking. Caleb has bandages too, ones on his forearms he doesn’t take off, but Beau doesn’t ask. She’s only just convinced him not to ghost her in the woods in the middle of the night, and she does have some tact, thank-you-very-much.
Caleb and Nott are close. Like really close, but not in a gross way. Nott is feral-dog protective of Caleb, and calls him my boy in a way that if Beau didn’t know better, she’d call motherly. Caleb Trusts Nott– full stop, capital-T– even though Beau gets the feeling he really doesn’t trust anybody– maybe not even himself. It makes something strange and prickly well up inside her, something almost competitive. She wants him to trust her. She wants to earn it. Wants it more than she’s wanted anything in a very very long time.
She feels like he’s worth it. Somewhere down in her bones, she knows it.
Just a few days after they meet, on their fifth day of roughing it in the woods because roads and cities make Caleb nervous and Nott twitchy, it becomes apparent that the feeling she had, that strange magnetic desire to follow the funny dirt wizard despite his bitching, was absolutely correct.
A Wood Troll takes them by surprise, and Caleb saves her life again.
Right as the damn thing is about to club her brains out with a meaty fist, Caleb lets out a string of words that make her ears ring, and suddenly it’s like the big fuck is moving through mollasses, slow as a lame mule in a mire, which just makes his ass a really big target. Beau unleashes on the poor guy; throws punches rapid fire until her muscles burn and her bones ache, Nott’s bolts making a pincushion out of its back, while Caleb pulls dark fire to his fingertips like an archer knocks an arrow. When the thing’s head explodes, Beau doesn’t even feel any heat–just a rush of air pulling back on itself unnaturally, away from her.
She knows, instinctually and certainly, that he somehow pulled his spell to keep her safe.
Here’s the thing– she’s pretty sure magic doesn’t work like that. Not unless you really know what the fuck you’re doing. She’d been taught how to dodge magic specifically because it doesn’t normally work like that.
Caleb made it work like that.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” he lies when she bullies him about it. He’s a good liar, but she’s getting to know him, and she thinks he maybe doesn’t lie so well to people he gives a shit about. Which includes her now. Maybe. Fuck yes.
Living as a vagrant isn't half bad when you're not going it alone, she discovers. She still figuring out herself, figuring out Caleb– and Nott by proxy– though it takes a long time for the Goblin to warm up to her. It’s rough, and occasionally downright degrading, but for some reason, leaving him for the comfort of civilization stops occurring to her after the first week. She learns him and he learns her, and they work in a way she’s never known, like it was always supposed to be this way.
After about three months and half a dozen more scrapes with weird forest monsters– and, on one notable occasion, the law– three moths of cuddling together for warmth and gently ribbing each other and fighting together like a fucking unit– things come to a head.
The thing Caleb’s not telling her, that is.
Beau isn’t stupid. Whatever it is is big. Dealbreaker big. He likes her, Beau knows he likes her, can feel it with the brush of every spell he uses to haste or help her, in every rush of flame that spills around her as though around a firebreak. But he doesn't trust her, not fully, not in the way she wants him to, in the way she wants to deserve. There’s something in the way of that trust he hasn’t said.
Nott knows what it is, whatever it is, because she fidgets when they sit together quietly, looking between them, and gets tense whenever she and Caleb have a moment where they feel… close.
She’s almost there, she can feel it. He almost relies on her in that strange heady way he relies on Nott. Just one more wall, one more obstacle, and she’s there.
It happens in the Cyrengreen a ways outside Trostenwald, and oh boy, is it a doozy.
Beau is self aware enough to know self-destruction when she sees it, and to realize this for what this is– him trying to get her to leave him, once and for all.
He drops a lot of heavy words. Kinslayer. Traitor. War Criminal. Wanted Man.
He seems to think they’ll scare her.
But here's the thing.
People like the kind Caleb makes himself out to be don’t save people on the side of the road for nothing. They don’t pull little goblin girls close when the sight of their own reflection reduces them to fucking tears. They don’t cry quietly into the fur of fey cats when the sheer magnitude of their loss and guilt overwhelms them. They don’t sleep between their friends and the door at night, even with a little silver wire at the threshold. They don’t sculpt powerful spells with iron will just to protect the people around them from the backlash, and they certainly don’t hand-tune haste spells to belligerent monks so that said monks don’t feel quite so sick when it wears off.
Caleb is a good man, even if he doesn’t believe it. A staggeringly good man made to do very bad things because he thought they were good. That is all that Beau is hearing, even as he tears himself apart explaining in excruciatingly gut-wrenching detail how a very powerful man brainwashed him into thinking the only people who really loved him were traitors.
And another thing.
Beau? She doesn’t really care if Caleb is a bad person. He isn’t– he’s maybe the best man she’s ever fucking met, to the point where he’s afraid of his own fucking capacity for cruelty– but that’s not the point. Even if he was a fundamentally, morally flawed human being, he’s been nothing but good to her. Nothing but good to Nott. Nothing but a heartbreakingly gentle and attentive and loving human being, in his sweet and awkward way, to anyone he remotely gives a shit about.
That is the long and short of it. That is what Beau gives a shit about.
By the end of his self-depreciating monologue, Beau has sworn something of an oath to herself.
It’s a quiet, iron thing that settles deep into her gut, fueled by a powerful, protective kind of rage that feels stronger and firmer than any kind of anger she’s ever felt before– and hey, she’s a fucking expert.
One. From here on out, people will hurt Caleb Widogast over her cold fucking corpse.
Two. She’s going to kill Trent Fucking Ichithon. It may not be now, it may not be soon, but one day, she will pin that motherfucker to the ground and beat him until there is nothing left but smears of blood. She’s considering making it her life’s work, actually.
Three. If family is a choice, a state of mind, then she is his. It’s decided. Caleb will just have to fucking get used to no longer being an only child.
The look that comes over her must really be something, because Caleb is just staring at it. Nott takes one look at whatever face she’s making and dissolves into something that's half sobs, half breathless laughter. Caleb is starting to look like he’s going to cry.
Beau isn’t exactly the most sensitive asshole on this plane of existence, so everything that just crossed her mind, she pretty much says out loud.
Except for that last part. That would probably be, uh, overwhelming to say the least– and frankly embarrassing for both of them– so she just tucks it down into her chest where things can grow around it. When it settles, it feels like purpose.
Caleb does, actually, start to cry, which makes Beau cry, so it’s embarrassing for everyone anyway. She gives him the first real hug he’s had in maybe decades, she’s not sure, and it’s unbearably awkward. He hugs her back, and it's a little less so, but only a little, because neither of them are very good at this.
They don’t talk about it.
<><><>
“Come ooon. Just a quick trip! In and out, I promise.”
“It’s not a good idea, Beauregard.” Caleb mutters. The ash in his hair is starting to come out, a couple strands of vibrant red shining through the dirt and soot. She wishes he’d lighten up for long enough to take a real bath– she’d kill to see what he actually looks like under the mud and dust and giant coat. She has a sneaking suspicion he might be really fucking good-looking, like actually pretty, and it makes her strangely proud to think about it.
“The rations are killing me, man.” She whines. “And our little green baddie is running out of booze.”
Caleb looks down at Nott, curled under his coat to avoid stares from a nearby passing carriage, and she shrugs sheepishly, shaking her flask a little to indicate how low the contents have gotten. “I am a bit dry.” she agrees. “And I’m on my last three bolts.”
Caleb sighs.
“We’re a long way from Rexxintrum.” Beau argues. “It’s been a long time. We’ll be really fucking careful, yeah?”
Caleb just grimaces, looking rather sick.
Beau gets the paranoia. She does. Trostenwald is a lot bigger than the little hamlets and logging settlements they typically frequent for supplies and petty larceny. From what she knows, it took him a long time to finally shake the people Trent sent after him for good, even with the fancy amulet he stole, and she knows now that he never did shake him off all the way. He’s a persistent prick, Beau will give him that. Half-mad or not, losing Caleb– Bren then, she supposes– must have really gotten under that bastard’s skin, because most of the people Cay had to kill for his freedom were former classmates of his.
It really says something, though, that even broken and despondent and resourceless, Caleb was still more of a force to be reckoned with than an Archmage’s pet killing machines, even with all their fancy augmentations and equipment. Her wizard is best wizard. Suck it Ichithon.
Beau aslo really wants to sleep in an actual fucking bed tonight though, so time for the big guns.
“Come on, Cay, it’s an actual town! Who knows, there might even be,” she pauses for effect. “Real, live, books.” She waggles her eyebrows obnoxiously, and Caleb scowls.
“I know what you are doing, Beauregard.” he mutters. “You are not subtle.”
She shrugs, grinning widely. “Not trying to be. Is it working?”
He pauses for a moment, sullen. “Yes.”
“Do we still have those Troll bits?” Nott asks. “The teeth and things?”
Beau pulls her bag around and starts to rummage through it. “I think maybe a couple?” They tend to give her the heavier stuff to carry, because Caleb is a squishy Wizard and Nott is tiny, but Beau doesn't mind. She’s finding she likes being relied on in little ways like this, too. It’s nice, okay? It’s nice. “Oh, we’ve got some of the big spider fangs, too. You think someone’ll buy those?”
Caleb nods, a hand rubbing at his scruffy jaw as he thinks. “Maybe, if they have an alchemist. Or a curiosity shop, I suppose.”
She nods, setting them into one of her side pouches for easy access later. “Nott? How we doin’ on cash?”
“Bad.” She says readily. “Really bad.”
“Three silver and twenty-one copper.” Caleb clarifies without needing to check. “We have been worse off.”
That is, in fact, pretty bad. Beau is certain Caleb could somehow survive on literally nothing, and has before, so his opinion doesn't count. Nott tends to agree with her. “We might be able to get some work at the breweries around here.” She offers. “A lot of those places have decent work for a strong back.”
“Whose?” Caleb points out, gesturing to himself and Nott. Beau just points at herself.
“Obviously.”
“Obviously.” Caleb growls sarcastically. “And, what? We hole up in a tavern room while you work menial labor for spare change?”
“I don’t mind it.”
“I do.”
“Children, please.” Nott scolds, sober and pissy about it. “Lebby, you need chalk and charcoal anyway. We can scrounge about while she works, right?”
Caleb doesn't look happy about the fact that she’s right. Damn, if only he knew what Beau’d do for him if he asked.
“It's moving boxes around.” She huffs, annoyed. “Easy work. I used to do it all the time for free, you know. The old man said it built character.”
“We see how well that worked out.”
“Dick.”
“Arschloch.”
“Children.”
If bitching at each other could be a love language, Beau and Caleb are on their way to perfecting it. They’re both awkward fucks, with more jagged edges than they know what to do with, but thats why they fit. Why all three of them fit.
She’s pretty sure she’d die for him, which is a scary thought to have over someone you haven’t known for more than a few months.
She’s even more sure she’d kill for him, which is less scary. For Nott, too.
<>
They approach Trostenwald, and Caleb freezes at the edge between the sparse treeline and the roadway in, eyes flitting back and forth over every soul that passes within a hundred feet. Beau knows he’s cataloguing faces and distinguishable traits, counting and filing, tracking the beginnings of patterns and searching for anything out of place. Beau reaches over, threads her fingers in his ratty hair and ruffles vigorously. That he even lets her says a lot, even if he swears up a Zemnian storm and shoves her hard (for him) in the side.
“Worrying yourself into the abyss about it ain’t gonna help any.” She tries, tempering the irritation with a gentle nudge to his shoulder. “And if something does happen, we’ll deal with it.”
“Hmm.”
Nott puts her hand in his bigger one, claws careful, and tugs a little. “Things go south, and we run. We’re good at running.”
It’s meant to be reassuring, but a strange look comes over Caleb’s features as he looks down at her, something wary and resolute that doesn’t match the gentle reassurance in Nott’s tone. “I know, my friend.” He sighs, settling Nott’s mask over her face. The air is heavy, but he no longer looks like he might bolt. Instead, he turns to Beau, and something warm in her thrills.
“Where will you be?”
“Nowhere till we get settled.” she promises, nudging him down the street, keeping herself between him, Nott, and the majority of the people walking by, as best she can. “We’re going to Nestled Nook. Cozy inn, mostly local little corner spot. Last time I was here it was run by good people.”
He nods, trusting. The warmth starts to crawl up her chest, spreading.
“After you.” he allows, nudging her shoulder back in camaraderie, and Beau has never been more certain that she is exactly where she’s supposed to be.