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In the unmaking of him, he does the thing that has always guaranteed the survival of his mind. He pricks his finger on the most base level of spell craft and the aching visceral want of a lost boy seeking warmth, and he casts Find Familiar. Once, hollowed out and nameless, it would have been a painstaking ritual, months spent scraping together spell components, weeks on his knees, sanity held in place only by his damned inability to forget.
Now, reality fractures and something else strangles his will into submission, but into the writhing space of an ancient artifact from a time long lost to most wizard’s recollections, his childhood cat (not his cat, not really, but Caleb Widogast has long had the luxury of lying to himself) becomes one more impossible thing.
When his mind itches the psychic scar tissue of this later, he will need something familiar to ground him.
Frumpkin looks at him, eyes amber and ancient and large with concern.
Caleb blinks once. His mind fractures and falls.
Cat claws prick his cheek, his throat, his shoulder.
The world dissolves in static. Or purrs. He can’t tell.
In the remaking of him, he is the still-shaky, well-trained, Volstrucker down to his bones boy. There is really no remaking of him because he can never forget anything and so he remembers the shape of hands on his throat, on his mouth, on his mind, in his hair, ripping at his will. And he remembers dancing in the shadows with Astrid and with Jester and with Not-Jester, and with Beauregard, and he remembers a shell of a murderer under a table stuttering out names that taste like ash. He is as he has always been. Which is to say he is burned out. And so very sorry. And capable of great and terrible things.
(And loved).
He has never been able to forget the love, even when he deserves it the least.
Essek has one hand on his shoulder, the other on the back of his neck, fingers tangling in his hair in a restless pattern, as familiar as somatic spell components. This is sometimes their language, this repetitive, anxious touch. A grounding. A spell that’s just for them. Essek flexes his fingers along the shape of Caleb’s shoulder again, tracing bone and skin and shredded cloth. An inhale. An exhale through his teeth. Because he is loved and because he is known, Caleb doesn’t say anything, and Essek doesn’t either.
Yasha says, “Hey. Can I keep you company?”
Time doesn’t slip like it used to for the decade he spent in the Sanatorium, but even when he knows the exact second, it can be a fractured thing. His time in the disjointed maze of his own making had felt a bit like dreaming. A puppet, under his own hands. Not unlike his youth, really. Only no Trent to bend him to a purpose. He is ever and often the instrument of his own destruction. He says, “okay.”
Yasha sits. She reaches up and rubs a thumb along his cheek, wiping a tear he hadn’t realized was there. Essek must have missed it. “Bad day,” she says quietly.
Essek makes a sound, low, rasping in his throat. It’s like a growl. It has the shape of a purr.
“Yeah,” Caleb says.
Yasha sighs, runs a hand through her hair. She keeps it short these days, a severe, knife-slash cut along her jaw.
“Were you frightened?” It’s a worry, always, when they get too close to the story they know of him. Only Beau has read the liner notes. The mercy of half truths and the general attitude of the rest of the Nein means that his most monstrous parts are often lost to the empathy of their recollections and their fondness for adventure.
Essek’s hand worries at the back of his neck, pressing on the ridges of his spine.
“Of you?” Yasha smiles, crookedly. “Oh, I don’t think so.” She extends a hand out, snaps her fingers. And the cat that’s been sleeping in Jester’s lap trots over. Yasha scoops Frumpkin up into her arms and buries her face in his fur. He looks at Caleb and blinks, long and slow. “Will he be staying awhile?”
“If he wishes.”
Yasha whispers something in Frumpkin’s ear.
Essek kisses Caleb’s salt stained cheek.
“Are you really going to call him, Bren?” He asks Veth, when they’ve both recovered enough to see each other, but before the anger has had a chance to fester into something dangerous.
She’s bathed, since the birth, but she still looks tired. Bedraggled. Beautiful. Her hair freshly braided, streaked with gray. She’s wearing a bright yellow nightgown and a large sweater. Yeza has the baby. He’s giving them space. Caleb suspects he’ll get a talking to, once Veth finally sleeps.
“Why the fuck not?” She says, and she smiles, but it’s mostly teeth. That’s the thing he’s always loved about her, his Veth. Nott. Monster-shaped and bursting with a love he doesn’t deserve. She’ll rip his throat out with her teeth herself.
“I-“
“If you apologize I will kill you.”
He shuts his mouth. He wants to cry. He wants to hold her. He must be making some kind of expression because she rolls her eyes and says, “Come here, you.”
“Veth—“
She pats the space beside her on the too-small halfling bed. “Get over here. You tortured me today. You have to listen to me.”
He crawls into the bed, pressed close. She curls up into his chest. He kisses the top of her head. She smells like shampoo and the clean, sweet sting of healing potions, the familiar bubblegum bite of Jester’s arcane signature still heavy in the air. Veth’s magic usually has far more sulfur and acid to it, but she’s spell-spent and exhausted and there’s far too much of Caleb, of Bren, of whoever he’d been in that maze, lingering.
“Sorry,” he whispers into her hair.
She scoffs. “That wasn’t you.”
“It was—“
“That wasn’t you.” She pulls away, grips his chin. Her nails are too-long. She leaves crescent marks on his cheek. Light pinpricks of pain. “Caleb Widogast. I know who the fuck you are.”
She does. She made Caleb Widogast herself. She’s the only reason he’s here.
“Still,” he says.
“Still,” she agrees, and kisses his nose. “Do you mind? If I call him Bren?”
“It’s just a name. You used it yourself once, if I recall.”
“Alright,” she says slowly. “I’ll ask again in a few days.”
“You’re going to not call him anything for a few days?”
“He’s a fucking baby, Caleb. He doesn’t know shit.”
That makes him laugh.
Frumpkin is waiting for him when he leaves Veth room. He lets out a soft yowl when Caleb steps into the hall.
“Hi, old friend,” Caleb says. “Thank you for coming.” He crouches down, and the cat steps into his arms. He’s warm, solid. Very real. “You can leave, if you need,” Caleb tells him.
Frumpkin presses his wet nose to Caleb’s cheek.
“Are you ready to go home, dear?” Essek whispers, once Yeza and Fjord have finished the dishes and Jester has made Veth hot chocolate, and the house is sleepy with the sounds of Nicodronas at night.
“We should, yes,” Caleb says.
“That is not what I asked.” Essek gestures around the Brenatto living room. “You know we are welcome to stay.”
“Is it safe for you to stay?”
“I’m with you.”
“Dear.”
Essek flattens his ears, right fang piercing his lip. “Caleb Widogast,” he says. “I almost lost you. Forgive me for not sparing a thought for my own safety at the moment.”
Except Essek is always calculating his own safety. Love does not necessarily negate a century of selfishness, and self preservation is an instinct older than both of them.
Caleb says, “take me, home, please.”
While Essek sketches the transportation circle, Beau catches Caleb’s eye from across the room. She’s been avoiding him, at least after the initial check in when he’d woken up with her by his side, when she half-carried him to standing, her familiar heartbeat an anchor to a reality that made sense as everything else shattered and burned around them. She knows when he needs space, and he suspects she’s still mildly pissed off he ruined her weekend.
How are we? You and me? He doesn’t say. He doesn’t need to say it. He thinks it, and even if there’s no actual telepathic link between them, she reads the downturn of his mouth, the flicker of anxiety in the tremor of his hands, the tension in his shoulders.
“We’re good, man,” Beau says aloud. “Go home. Go the fuck to sleep. See you at work.”
When he doesn’t say anything she rolls her eyes and crosses the distance. Plants both hands on his shoulders, fingers flexing hard enough to hurt, to ground him, to bruise. “We’re good,” she says again. She looks at him and looks at him and looks at him, and they could be young, screams hoarse in their throats, ideology caught under their bloody nails, fury burning fierce. “Trust me?”
“Always.” It’s a whisper, but it’s steady. It’s one of the few things he knows with absolute certainty. It’s why he’d taunted her in the maze. She’s always been able to figure everything out.
“Good. Fuck off.”
Essek extends a hand. The runes of the circle begin to glow.
Beau shoves him forward.
Caleb stumbles into the surging magic. Essek’s fingers close around his wrist. They fall.
He wakes in the pre-dawn light with a cat on his chest.
He breathes in. Barely. The air scrapes the roof his mouth, sour with bile. He breathes out.
Frumpkin yawns, teeth flashing in his face. His breath stinks of pastries that a cat almost certainly should not be eating, but that’s never stopped Jester.
Bren tangles his fingers in his cat’s fur, feels the push-pull of his breath under his hands. His ribs ache. He tries to breathe and finds it wanting. He isn’t—he’s not--
Essek whispers, “You’re safe. We’re home. Tell me one thing you see.”
“You,” Caleb says.
Essek’s hair is shorn now, a repetitive cycle that mirrors the ebbs and flows of anxiety and dynasty wizards tracking his fading footsteps around the wilds of Exandria. Caleb misses it when it’s long. This Essek holds more of the Shadowhand in the shape of him, and even if that is who Caleb first grew to love, he doesn’t love the pain he brings Essek.
Now, in the early morning quiet, Essek is Essek. His hair is bed-tossed, sticking up at odd angles. He’s wearing a shirt from a smut bookshop Astrid loves. His breath smells like coffee. His spell book is open on their bed, arcane glyphs sparking faintly, the ink not quite dried.
Essek smiles, beautiful and sharp. He tucks a strand of hair behind Caleb’s ear and says. “Yes. And?”
“Frumpkin.”
“Mmmh. I notice he hasn’t left. And?”
“Dear, I’m fine.”
“I’m sure. Answer the question.”
Caleb casts his eyes to the window. “The beginning of sunrise. The sky is starting to change.”
“What time is it?”
“5:12am.”
Essek shifts. “Bren,” he whispers, and oh, the name is safe when he says it, but there’s a question in it.
Caleb swallows the impulse to correct him, and a deeper impulse to lean into the question, to reach out and wrap his hands around Essek’s throat and kiss him until they both bleed. “They met him, in there,” he says.
Essek does not ask what he remembers. He says, “Yes, I believe they did.”
“I thought we killed him, at the T-Dock. I didn’t think he’d—I didn’t mean to hurt—“
Essek doesn’t shush his stammerings, although Caleb is half hoping he will, desperate for something else to take his words and reshape them, or catch the air he’s struggling to inhale and turn it into something else. In the morning he’s aching with far too much arcana and not enough spells written out. It’s all so close to coming apart.
Essek says, “he’s you, love. You’re not him. But he’s still you.”
Frumpkin stretches, reaching up, paws tangling in Caleb’s hair, claws flexing into his temples. He starts to purr.
“Would he have come to anyone else?” Essek asks.
“This isn’t my cat,” Caleb says.
Frumpkin blinks.
He opens his spell book and writes out what he remembers of the being they found that ripped his mind apart.
Essek comes up behind him and wraps him in his arms, all elbows and light touches and the special sting of fresh arcana on his fingers. He kisses his temple, his cheek, his throat.
He says, “your handwriting is sloppy. Move. I’ll do it.”
“That’s insulting.”
“Check your work, Widogast.”
“That’s what I have you for, dear.”
Essek rolls his eyes. “Show this to Astrid. I need an empire wizard to check your glyphs. And go to the library. We need to see if there’s anything—“
They slip into the language of research and spell script and Caleb’s fractured thoughts begin to settle into a shape that he can make sense of.
On the walk to the library, Frumpkin hops out of his arms and disappears down an alley. Caleb lets him go. He loses himself to the cat vision, for a moment, missing the sense-assault of feline eyes and whiskers. He could polymorph himself into a cat. But Frumpkin is not really a cat. He’s a creature made of fae stuff who is particularly good at pretending.
The city, to Frumpkin, follows a heat pattern not unlike magic, and he trades the steps of crowds, weaves his way between laughing students and disgruntled teachers, and animals fighting to survive on the bustling streets.
They make their way to the library together, half a step out of sync, tracking the same movement through two different eyes.
When they reach the door, the wizard goes in. The cat stays out. When the door closes he watches it for a long time, tail flicking back and forth, back and forth. He does not blink. He does not want to miss anything.