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“Aw, shit,” Fjord curses.
He’s standing shirtless in the middle of his and Molly’s shared room with a clawed thumb poking out through a hole in the arm of his shirt. It’s not particularly large—his finger just fits through—but it has split the seam between the breast and the sleeve. Tears like this one are the reason he’d once upon a time opted for shirts that had a looser fit, hanging off his shoulders and billowing in the wind.
Across the room Mollymauk perks up, brow raised, as if Fjord had called his name. He’s laid out on his bed, one booted leg hanging off the side, and his tail falls down beside it and swings back and forth, brushing against the splintered wood that comprises the whole of the tavern’s upper floor.
“Oh, what a shame,” he smirks, eyes catching on Fjord’s shirt and propping his chin up on the heel of his hand. He looks like he belongs hidden at the back of an artist’s sketchbook. “Guess you’ll just have to walk around without that.”
Fjord scowls and pointedly turns so his back is to Molly, looking down to further investigate the hole and the strings leading off of it. He’d never repaired his own shirts, but the tear doesn’t look too bad.
Molly hums loudly, obnoxiously contemplative. “And would you look at that…”
It takes all of Fjord’s willpower to not turn around. Molly’s a bit like a child, he’s found. Ignore him for long enough and he’ll get bored.
“View’s just as good from the back.”
Fjord’s ears go two shades darker and a good ten degrees warmer, and his shoulders hike upwards.
“Yeah, okay,” he starts, a bit too perturbed for his liking, though he suspects Molly is highly enthused by it. “I’m taking this to Nott. Don’t wait up.” As he begins to make his way over to the door, he risks a glance back at Mollymauk, who flops onto his back.
“Spoilsport,” he calls, loud enough to Fjord to hear, though there’s no real heat behind the words.
Fjord continues to ignore him, and pulls the door to their room open, stepping out into the dim, damp hallway before Molly can call out anything else. The Mighty Nein have purchased three of the rooms for the evening, all of them bunched together in one of the far corners on the second floor of the inn. Upon arrival, Molly had claimed the room at the corner of the building—the one with two windows—for himself, and, by extension, Fjord. The next door down led to the room the girls had claimed, since it was the largest of the three. The final room, centered along the back of the building, belongs to Caleb and Nott.
Fjord glances around the hallway, searching for any peering eyes. Even with his shirt held tightly against his chest, having the entire length of his back open to the musty air makes a handful of old anxieties roll around in his stomach. The hallway is clear—though that doesn’t do much to ease his worries, if he’s honest—and he pulls the door to his and Molly’s room shut behind him before using a few extra-long strides to cross the space, bringing him directly in front of Caleb and Nott’s room.
He raises his fist to knock when he notes the crack in the door, and the slight moment of hesitation that comes with it lends enough time for the voices floating out from the room to reach his ears.
“Well,” he hears Jester’s familiar lilt, “I think you should just tell him.”
A moment passes. Fjord thinks, maybe, he hears a snort.
“No, really!” Jester says. “Trust me, Caleb, I’m very good at these things.”
“Oh, I believe you.” Caleb sounds amused, a little sarcastic. The way his tone curls makes Fjord’s ears heat up, just a bit.
“So, you’ll tell him?” Jester gasps.
“Eh, no.”
“Caleb…” she whines, drawing the rather short name out into a lengthy show, and Fjord affectionately rolls his eyes purely out of habit.
Someone shifts, bringing with it the creak and groan of springs, and Fjord susses out that the two of them, or at least one of the two, must be sitting on one of the beds.
“Do not pout at me, you,” Caleb says, and Fjord can almost picture him, his finger pointed directly at Jester’s nose, brows raised and blue eyes wide, chin tilted down. “He’s… good. Kind.”
Jester huffs impatiently. “Yes, and?”
“He deserves someone worthy of that kindness, ja?”
“Caleb—”
“Ja, Jester?”
Jester huffs. “Ja, Caleb,” she mocks.
Caleb breathes—a long and heavy, uneven thing. “Then it is best I keep my feelings to myself.”
Fjord can’t see what happens next—the door is open a centimeter at most—but he can imagine exactly what occurs when Caleb yelps and a pencil hits the floor sharp end first, rolling through his line of sight to settle against the wall.
“You deserved that,” Jester says bluntly.
“Jester—”
“He should be happy, right? And he smiles more when he’s with you. Like, with his teeth, even!”
Fjord flinches and steps back from the door.
“I am not—”
“Yeah, yeah, you’re not a good person, you hurt people, blah, blah, blah,” Jester interrupts, pulling Fjord’s attention away from self-consciousness bubbling in his stomach and back to the conversation at hand. “Whatever. You’re wrong. I’m super positive. Do you want to know why?”
Caleb doesn’t respond.
His silence grows and warps like the weeds of the Labenda Swamp, and it drags Fjord’s thoughts back two days, to the unexpected encounter with Trent Ikathon.
They’d run into him four days ago.
The man had stood tall despite his apparent age, posture presenting an arrogant type of authority that had set at least half the Nein on edge, Fjord included. And it had only gotten worse from there. His gaze had swept over each and every one of them, ignoring the people flowing around them through the slums of Zadash—the people who seemed oblivious to the tension, to the emptiness that Ikathon carried with him. Eyes that judged alleged worth and calculated risks.
Those eyes had landed on Caleb last, where he’d been standing halfway behind Fjord’s larger form.
“Caleb,” he’d said, the name a command. “I see now. You always were the cleverer of your peers, weren’t you?”
Fjord wouldn’t have needed to see the blood disappear from Caleb’s cheeks to step fully in front of him, but he had anyways. He’d caught the pallor beneath the smears of dirt and streaks of mud, the shaking of Caleb’s hands as his right went to settle anxiously on his component pouch.
“Shame about your illness,” Ikathon had continued. His voice reminded Fjord of the crash of waves on the beach. “And a shame we meet here, instead of somewhere more appropriate.”
A pedestrian had bumped into Fjord’s shoulder at that point, as if proving a point, bringing attention to the busy square around them as Fjord completely blocked Caleb from view.
“I’ll see we meet again, child. Don’t stray too far.”
And then the old man had turned, disappearing far too easily into the crowd, and the Nein had rushed Caleb into the distance, back towards their lodgings to pack their things, find somewhere more secure.
They had yet to see Ikithon again.
“Nott thinks you’re good,” Jester continues in the present, her voice a soft facsimile of her usual boisterous exclamations, slipping between the crack in the doorway like silk.
On the other hand, Caleb’s silence gains weight, rests heavy on the moist air.
The smell takes Fjord back once again.
The air in the safehouse the Gentleman had allowed them to use after their encounter with Ikathon—one of many scattered throughout the city of Zadash—had been much the same. Fjord clearly remembered the staleness of evaporated petrichor filling his nose as Caleb had told his story. Beau had refused to look anyone in the eye, Nott had held his hand, and the rest had listened.
“I am despicable,” he’d concluded into the silence left behind by his speechless friends.
It had taken what felt like ages for anyone to speak.
“You should tell him…” Jester’s voice interrupts in the same quiet tone she’d used that night, once the silence had broken.
A noise, somewhere between a laugh and a sob, slips from between Caleb’s lips like an accident, and Fjord feels his heart break, just a little.
“We shall see…” he whispers, barely loud enough to reach Fjord.
Jester sighs, but, for once, she doesn’t push any further. Her bare feet pad across the floorboards, and Fjord catches a brief glimpse of her blue skin as she walks past the door and then back. The bed creaks again.
“Did I get her nose right?” she asks, quietly.
“It is—it was… a little bigger,” Caleb says. His voice makes Fjord think of the bags that have taken up residence beneath his eyes. “But… yes.”
Jester hums, and both of their voices drop away.
Fjord breathes.
He should have left. He shouldn’t have heard any of what just passed through the door. But he did, and the conversation rattles between his ears like sand, blown this way and that by a slight change in the wind. There’s too much. He tries to absorb things in the correct order, starting at the first thing he heard, but instead ends up jumping between words, between Caleb not feeling worthy of kindness and—
--and smiles with teeth.
Fjord doesn’t notice his knuckles against the soft wood of the door until they’re already there and the rap of his bones against the wood echoes.
Everything goes still.
“Ja?”
Fjord’s heart picks up a handful of unexpected beats. “It’s me,” he calls around his swollen tongue.
A moment passes, a couple of hushed, conspiratorial whispers behind the door that make the spike of terror in Fjord’s stomach twist. He listens closely as the springs of the bed groan, as Caleb quietly snaps, and then the door swings inward, Jester’s bright, smiling face revealed in its wake.
“Hello, Fjord!” she exclaims, folding her hands behind her back.
Fjord coughs. His throat feels like sandpaper as she steps back and to the side, allowing him to cross the threshold of the door an into the room. This particular tavern doesn’t differ much from any of the others they’ve stayed at, but this room specifically feels slightly smaller than the one Fjord is sharing with Mollymauk. The beds are pushed against opposite walls, a small table between them on which rests Nott’s crossbow—though the goblin herself doesn’t appear to be present—and the odd harness that Caleb uses to keep his spell books close to his chest. Other than that, the only furniture consists of a dirty rug and a handful of stubby candles.
The most extraordinary thing in the room is Caleb, sitting on one of the beds with his eyes on the floor and one of his hands covering his mouth.
“Uh, hi there, Jester,” Fjord manages. He wrings his torn shirt between his hands, the slowly growing nubs of his tusks digging into the flesh behind his bottom lip. “Evenin’, Caleb.”
At his name, Caleb glances up, and his face immediately goes two shades darker, the tips of his ears flushed deep crimson as his eyes land on Fjord’s bare shoulders. Fjord instinctively pulls his shirt in closer to his chest, reminded of his state of undress, and Caleb’s eyes flick back to whatever interesting spot he’d found on the floorboards.
“Uh,” Fjord starts eloquently, heart in his throat, “is Nott here?”
Jester looks over her shoulder at the obviously empty room and snorts. Fjord wants to go out back and bury himself in the dirt.
“I mean, I, uh, need her to fix this,” he says in an attempt to recover a fraction of his foot from his mouth, holding out his twisted shirt only to feel a breeze against his stomach and pull it back in.
“I believe she is downstairs with Yasha,” Caleb says through his fingers, eyes stuck to the floor as if it gleans forbidden wisdom.
Jester gasps, the noise so sudden that Fjord nearly jumps.
“I can go get her!” she says, grin turned towards Caleb, who has lifted his gaze and is staring at her, eyes wide with horror.
“Jester—”
“I can just leave—”
“Don’t move!” she calls, already halfway out the door, the satchel she keeps her art supplies in knocking against the doorframe before she pulls it shut behind her.
Silence strikes, and Fjord is suddenly very, very aware of the fact that he’s half naked and alone. With Caleb. Who apparently has feelings he doesn’t wish to divulge.
About someone who doesn’t generally smile with his teeth.
“You can set that on Nott’s bed, if you’d like,” Caleb shuffles awkwardly and mutters into the still between them, his hand falling away.
Fjord jumps at the chance to move, instead of standing there, allowing the awkward weight in the air to fester. He paces over to the other bed, shaking his shirt out and folding it into some semblance of a manageable shape before setting it on the scratchy cotton blankets. When he turns back around, eyes coming to rest on Caleb, he’s suddenly very aware that his hands have nothing to do but flounder at his sides.
He folds his arms tightly across his chest, hiding behind them.
“So…” he starts, claw scratching at his bicep in a futile attempt to work out his built-up nervous energy. “What were you and Jester workin’ on?”
Caleb blinks and looks up, timidness gone in a fraction of a second, with his brow furrowed, his mouth set in a line, and the whole expression reading with a mix of confusion and suspicion.
“She had her satchel,” Fjord’s mouth provides before his brain has a chance to register that he’d let something slip, something Caleb had caught, because of course he had. Fjord clears his throat. “Figured she wouldn’t, y’know… have that in here unless she was drawin’ you something.”
It takes a moment, but Caleb seems to accept this as a valid explanation, and the severe look to his face calms, somewhat. He shuffles, folding his legs tighter beneath him, and turns his eyes to the book holster on the table to his left.
Another second passes, Caleb’s eyes flick to Fjord and away, brow furrowed—a brief, painfully obvious hesitation. Fjord watches Caleb’s throat bob.
“She was—” Caleb’s rough voice breaks off, and whatever hardness had remained in his expression twists with a flicker of something worse. “I… She offered to—do a portrait, for me.” He won’t look at Fjord, not even in his general direction, but Fjord still catches the way his presence begins to leak away like ale from a broken barrel. “Of my parents.”
The ones he burned alive.
Fjord flinches the second he registers the thought, shame rising in his throat.
It had taken a few days for Fjord to decide how he felt about the gruesome tale woven into Caleb’s past, or at least to come to terms with the irrational emotions that had cropped up with it. Caleb had been tricked. Caleb’s trust had been betrayed by someone who should have been watching out for him. Nothing that happened was his fault.
Those were the easy conclusions, the ones Fjord wanted to listen to.
But there’d been a tiny corner of his mind—there still is—that couldn’t help but zero in on the fact that Caleb had had parents who loved him, parents he knew, who had raised him and made sure he got every opportunity he deserved.
And he’d burned them alive.
He’d been sure of it.
Fjord only realizes he’d closed his eyes when he reopens them. They find Caleb with his lips pursed in a tight, painful frown, his own gaze stuck on the dark boards beneath Fjord’s feet, eyes wide. His shoulders are hunched, pulled up and in towards his center, in an attempt to make himself smaller. It’s a familiar posture. Fjord used to sit like that, when he’d been a lonely, parentless child afraid of being struck.
Caleb stays deathly still as Fjord carefully sits down next to him, a safe distance between them.
“Can I ask you a question?” he asks, risking a glance at Caleb out of the corner of his eye. Fjord doesn’t blame him when, despite his best attempts to keep his voice quiet and gentle, Caleb still jumps and pulls further into himself, his head ducking. Still, he nods regardless.
Fjord frowns and bites at the inside of his lip, the nubs of his tusks digging in gently. In his lap, his hands are restless, wringing one and then the other—just as he had his shirt before.
He heaves a breath.
“Why keep using fire spells?”
Caleb’s face screws up, mouth twisting into a painful scowl, nose wrinkling, but he doesn’t open his mouth, doesn’t make any move to respond.
“You don’t gotta answer,” Fjord prattles as something goes sour in his stomach. “I’m not meanin’ to pry.”
Caleb shakes his head quickly, as if there’s something crawling around inside that he’s trying to get rid of, and the scowl on his face deepens, the wrinkles between his brows more obvious as they drop over his eyes. Fjord can’t decide if he looks offended, confused, or both. He turns that expression on Fjord, his breath too quick for comfort.
“Why—” He chokes on his words, and closes his eyes, breathing in through his nose. The scowl remains. “Why do you ask?”
There’s a niggling voice at the back of Fjord’s mind telling him to stop, to cut his losses, but…
“I, uh… I just wanna understand, I think,” he says instead. “That’s a mighty big risk you bring into every fight.”
Everything goes still for a fraction of a second, and then the silence is broken by Caleb taking a deep breath—rickety as an old fence—that he holds long enough for Fjord to start itching, unsure. But he eventually lets it back into the world. His shoulders sag, he leans forward. One of his hands rise to rub across his forehead, smudging the combination of dirt and ink that had built up over the last few days.
He covers his eyes, mouth set in a tight line. “I deserve it.”
Those three words make a stone drop into Fjord’s stomach. Some part of him had been expecting them; he’s known Caleb long enough, heard the things he said about himself. But that doesn’t make Fjord any happier about the connotation. Disquiet roils between his ribs.
“I know it don’t mean much,” he mutters, focused, unblinking, on Caleb’s sneer, “but I’m not sure you do.”
And, finally, Caleb looks at him. The hand over his eyes slides down his face, covers his mouth instead. The whites of his eyes are rimmed with red, and his brows are drawn low; he looks exhausted, broken. Disbelieving. Fjord hates that he can’t snap his fingers and make it all go away.
“Kinda figured I’d made it clear, but—” He leans forward, putting himself at Caleb’s slouched height. “I think you’re pretty damn incredible. And I’m a stubborn fuck, so don’t try to change my mind.”
Caleb snorts and the tension in his eyes all but vanishes, his lower eyelids pinching upwards to betray the smile hidden beneath his hand. The air shifts—something warm and full filling the space between them, curling around Fjord’s naked shoulders like an embrace. His heart begins to beat out a quick, steady rhythm against his ribcage.
Words start to kick at his clavicle—things he’s not sure he should say. Pretty sure now isn’t the right time. But he wants to. Gods, does he want to.
He bites his tongue. Takes a shuddered breath.
“And, just so you know,” he breathes, pausing, hesitating, before he reaches out to tuck Caleb’s hair behind his ear, “Jester knows me real, real well.”
Caleb’s eyes widen. He goes stock-still, gears turning and clicking into place while Fjord continues to touch him, gentle strokes over his temple. Soft scratches to the skin beneath his ear.
“How long were you standing outside?” he asks, reminiscent of a child caught stealing candy.
Embarrassment creeps up Fjord’s spine, culminating in a darker green tinge to his cheeks. But he stands steadfast, combs his hand through Caleb’s hair again, the backs of his claws ever so gently scratching at Caleb’s scalp.
“Honestly?” he coughs. “Um… Pretty long time.”
“So, you heard—”
“Yeah.”
Caleb goes white as a sheet. “Oh…”
“We don’t gotta talk about this tonight, if you don’t wanna, but…” Fjord clears his throat and takes his hand back, but he doesn’t stop looking Caleb in the eye. “Y’know… I’d like to, sometime. If you would.”
Caleb swallows, and then he nods. He keeps eye contact, which in and of itself is enough to reassure Fjord that he’s not making a complete ass out of himself.
“Okay,” he breathes. Something akin to relief floods his chest. He takes a deep breath. “Okay. Do you want me to go, or—”
“No!” Caleb cuts him off. He looks slightly shocked at his own outburst, but he recovers quickly, clearing his throat. “No, you should… stay, probably.” Life returns to his face by the way of a blush, crawling up his cheeks. “I imagine Jester took her time asking Nott to come look at your shirt.”
Fjord snorts. “I’d reckon you’re right.”
Caleb nods. “Ja, so—so you should stay. Until she can return it to you, I think.”
“Alright,” Fjord says. “So long as you’re alright with me keeping you company.”
Caleb doesn’t even deign that with a response—just a strange half-smile, like Fjord had made a bad joke.
And so, Fjord stays.