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He goes, with Caleb, to one of the battlefields he created.
(And with Caduceus and Yasha. But it’s Caleb’s eyes that Essek feels burning into him as they stand before the swath of bodies, Caleb’s breath that sounds loudest to him as they watch the ravens circle.)
It happens like this: news reaches Rosohna of monsters haunting the villages near the Ashkeepers. And when Essek visits the Mighty Nein and tells them that, apparently, the Cult of the Angel of Irons still has a hand to play, they all get very quiet very fast.
So he takes them to his laboratory. Sketches the teleportation sigil on the floor, bracing himself to complete the incantation without his hands clasped by a friend on each side. They must know that part was never necessary - it just felt a bit like security, and a bit like being part of something. Essek doubts they’ll want to continue the pretence. But he straightens up and pockets his chalk and they’re all linked in a circle, Jester looking at him expectantly. There’s a lump in Essek’s throat as he slips his hand into hers.
And then they’re standing under the open sky with the Ashkeepers looming beside them, and the sun is obnoxiously bright. Essek fumbles for his parasol. ‘A little off-target, I think, but only by an hour or so’s travel. We’ll be there before noon.’
The others stare at him, and he swallows. ‘Well, I thought – I don’t have any pressing duties back in Rosohna, and seeing as I’m here, I thought I could… be of assistance, perhaps. If I’m not overstepping?’
Caduceus beams and says, ‘Of course not,’ and Jester’s mouth opens in delight, and Caleb –
Caleb looks at him. With a gaze that’s far too heavy, too intense, for Essek to hold.
So he goes with them to the rift, and they spend a frantic sixty seconds dodging frozen blasts from a pack of ice devils (and oh, it feels good to fight alongside these friends he was once so sure he’d end up fighting against.) The rift is sealed, the anchor destroyed, there’s no sign of any lurking cultists. And Veth suggests hitting the local tavern to celebrate, and that’s where they learn from the innkeeper that the town sits next to a battlefield. One of the last of the war.
‘Think I’ll pay a visit,’ Caduceus says, as their corner goes uncomfortably quiet and Essek stares at the table. ‘Doesn’t feel right to leave all those bodies just lying there.’
Fjord stares at him. ‘Alone?’
Beau thumps her tankard down, sending vibrations through the tabletop. ‘Maybe you should go with him, Essek.’
‘So we’re sending one of the wizards with the cleric?’ Fjord says. ‘I mean, no offence, Essek, that gravity-well shit you were doing earlier was pretty sweet, but you’re still, you know – not exactly heavily armoured?’ Then he catches Beau’s eye, says ‘Oh,’ and falls silent.
A pause. Essek clenches his fists inside his cloak. ‘I’d be happy to accompany you, Caduceus.’
He is very, very aware that Caleb has been watching him from the moment the battlefield was mentioned. Now, Caleb gives the tiniest nod and says, 'I will join you.’
So they head out, with Yasha tagging along to provide ‘less-squishy protection’, as Fjord puts it, and it’s only a ten-minute walk beyond the town that a dark smear appears on the landscape ahead. There’s little left of the bodies themselves, looters having picked clean the garments, weather and beasts having picked clean the bones. But the ground is riven with the unmistakable scars of magic. Spears and arrows grow like strange plants from the earth.
Essek hovers an inch from the ground, and stares.
He’s seen the consequences of his treason before, in the prisoners filling the Dungeon of Penance, and in the reports from the frontlines, and in a shiv buried in Caleb’s neck. This is so much uglier, though, so much bigger, and he doesn’t want to look but he knows he must.
‘Do you still not regret it?’ Yasha says. Her voice is soft; more bewildered than scathing.
Essek tries to answer, but his tongue is thick and slow in his mouth, and it’s a relief when Caduceus – already turning the nearest bodies into flower and fungus – stands up and turns towards them. 'He can't. It's too big to regret all at once. If he says to himself that he wishes he'd never done any of it... it'll shake up too much of the person he's used to being.' Caduceus looks at Essek and smiles, which might be soothing if he wasn't ringed by corpses. 'It's okay to regret little bits at a time. You can regret that these people died, and that you made it possible. The rest can come later.'
And that makes Essek feel a little less like screaming, so he purses his lips until they ache, then nods. ‘I do. Regret this.’
There's silence, filled after a moment by an animal screeching further into the field. Caleb coughs. ‘Well, I’m sure there are all manners of creatures lurking around this place. We shouldn’t linger. A few minutes for Caduceus to do his work, and we should be getting back.’
Essek breathes out. Caleb is satisfied, then; Caleb thinks that Essek is heading in the right direction, at least a little. And it doesn’t feel like finding his better self, it just feels like being in pain, but – well. He’ll trust Caleb on this one.
He expects them to be quiet on the way back, and he’s dreading it. But - sensing Essek's tension, perhaps - Caduceus strikes up a conversation with Yasha about how ‘if you think about it, that battlefield might end up as the first flowering meadow in Xhorhas.’ (Essek almost wishes he believed in the Luxon, so he could ask it to bless this man.) Which leaves Caleb free to drop back beside Essek, and they walk together without speaking for some time.
‘You are facing it,’ Caleb says at last.
‘I’m giving it a try. I could tell that was what Beauregard intended.’ Essek doesn’t mean to laugh – it’s hardly the time – but he’s so nervous around Caleb these days, and it comes out anyway.
Caleb doesn’t seem offended. ‘It’s more than many ever do,’ he says. ‘And it’s a start. Facing it comes first; fixing it comes later.’
Another laugh, and this one is bitter helplessness. Essek jerks his head in the direction of the battlefield he made. ‘There’s no fixing this.’
Caleb looks at him. And then –
And he stops walking, and his hand is on Essek’s chest, a loose fist just below the base of his throat. His eyes are firm and fierce and Essek knows a sudden, childlike terror that Caleb might feel his heartrate quickening through his tunic and cloak.
Caleb pushes his fist forwards just the tiniest bit. Like he’s trying to restart Essek’s heart.
‘There’s fixing this,’ he says. ‘There’s fixing you.’
It’s funny. The first time Caleb touched him, Essek was enraged.
Not because of the touch itself. Because of what it represented. His anger was irrational, of course, not to mention hypocritical, because every moment he ever spent with Caleb took place under the understanding that they were using each other. And if there’s blame to go around for that, then the bigger share is Essek’s. Caleb only wanted to learn; Essek was hiding treason.
But after he returned from the Lotusden, Essek touched his sleeve, the place where Caleb’s hand lay. Thought about how that touch was so clearly manipulative, and how much he wished that it had not been.
Because he liked Caleb, liked his quirky cat-themed magic and his striking reddish hair and his soft-spoken delight in his work. Because it was the most tender touch that Essek could remember receiving. Because in that moment when Caleb squeezed his arm, something electric punched through Essek’s veins, spreading out from the point of contact - and he wanted, so badly, to believe that some part of it was real.
Now, Caleb’s hand rests warm over his heart, and Essek thinks, numbly, that this is very real indeed.
A month later, Caleb shows him the scars.
They are faded from age, but there are so many, and Caleb’s voice is blank as he explains their origins. Essek closes his eyes and thinks, I worked with the man who did this. I worked with him, I reached out to him and his people, I wanted him to respect me –
‘Your problem,' Caleb says, and Essek shakes himself back into the moment, ‘is that you still think the Assembly are like you. They don’t do what they do for knowledge, or in the hopes of finding intellectual peers. They don’t even do it for the Empire, no matter how hard they pretend. Everything they do is to further their own influence. Even this.’
But that means they are like Essek, of course. Selfish.
He swallows, and stares at the scars, because he can’t do anything else, and Caleb must have suffered so terribly, and Essek worked with the man who hurt him. And then a terrible thought occurs to him. ‘How long ago was this?’
‘Oh, it was – a long time. I spent some time in a sanitorium, after –’ Caleb stops. Stares very intently at the ceiling of his study. ‘Well. Scourgers are not trained to be merciful. There were people I tortured, people I killed, because my teacher asked it of me, and I – I broke a little bit. In the end.’
Essek stares at him. Then slips his hands out of his cloak and extends one finger towards Caleb’s arms. And when Caleb stays motionless, Essek traces his fingertip along the longest, most jagged mark. Imagines somehow reaching beneath the skin and drawing out every trace of Caleb's decade-old pain, pulling it all into his own flesh as penance.
‘I am – I am sorry, Caleb,’ he says. There’s a nausea clawing at his insides. ‘Sorry that this was done to you, and that I worked with such a man, and I’m sorry that – that I’m still being selfish, even now.’
Caleb frowns, questioning, and Essek looks away. ‘My first thought, when you told me this, was to be relieved that it happened before I met Ikithon. That his research on the beacons was not responsible for your pain. But – ’ Another thought strikes in a punch of panic – ‘There will have been other students who have suffered from what I gave him – ’
Caleb’s hand twists around and clasps Essek’s arm. Just below the wrist, where he once snapped a set of manacles.
‘Listen,’ he says, and Essek listens, because Caleb’s voice has taken on the same fierce tone he used in the hold of the ship. ‘This shit is hard. Changing is hard. For most of us, it happens little by little in in the smallest moments and we don’t notice it, we don’t choose it. But looking yourself in the face and deciding to be different – that is hard. The last person I saw do it was Fjord, and he died for his choice. You are unpicking threads of who you are that were put in place more than a century ago. And every time you unpick one, you can berate yourself for not doing it perfectly, but you will drown, Essek. You will drown.’
His grip on Essek’s arm relaxes a little; his gaze does not. ‘Just then, you were worried for the pain of people you have never met. I have never seen that from you before. It doesn’t matter if the steps you’re taking are messy, not when you’re further along than you were yesterday.’
Essek looks away. ‘Not far along enough. I am still too much like the man who did this to you.’
Caleb releases Essek’s arm and sits back. From beyond the door to the study, the rest of the Nein are clamouring.
‘You know,’ Caleb says, after a few moments, ‘when Yasha was turned against us, Jester said that we knew it wasn't her choice. We knew she was good, because we had seen her in her quietest moments. And, you know, I have seen you with a cat on your lap and your feet in a hot tub and your friends around you. I don’t think Ikithon has ever had moments like that.’
Essek chuckles, and for once, it’s not from nervousness. ‘No. That man is – how did Jester put it? A fuckhole.’
Caleb doesn’t laugh, but his eyes crease at the edges. And it’s so small a gesture, but something about it makes Essek feel inexplicably lighter.
The second time Caleb touched him, he didn’t even have time to be startled. The equation had clicked; the spell was finished. Nott’s eyes were saucers and Caleb’s lips were parted and Essek was about to look up and grin at them like a twelve-year-old when Caleb lunged forward and swept them both into his arms.
Only a few hours before, he had told Caleb that people of their ilk should always work alone. But in that moment, with Caleb’s arm around one shoulder and Nott’s around the other, it hit him that he had never felt euphoria at a spell’s completion like he did then. Nott’s laugh was breathless, and Caleb’s eyes were full of a boyish glee, and it felt like drinking light.
For a few shining minutes, until the Nein were gone, Essek didn’t think once about the beacons or the war or his lies. And later, working again in his laboratory, it struck him how empty the room was. How quiet.
And Essek thought, I wish Caleb could be working on this with me.
Followed by, I could fall in love with that man, if I gave myself the chance.
(He didn’t give himself that chance, of course. He couldn’t.
He wants to give it now.)
Journeys with the Mighty Nein become – not commonplace, exactly, but a regular occurrence. Regular enough for him to allow Jester and Caduceus to drag him around Rosohna and choose him plainer, rougher clothes for the road. The first time he sees his reflection in them, he thinks, mother would have a fit. And then, good.
On his fifth venture, he sees a nightmare he hopes never to see again: Jester, a spray of blood following her body’s trajectory onto the ground. The impact as she hits is like being gutted, and Beau screams from across the battlefield, and it is sheer ferocious vengeance that makes Essek wrench the onyx shard from his component pouch, clench his hand around it until the edges draw blood, and hurl it into the fray.
Beau is considerably less prickly towards him for the entire trip. Essek makes a mental note that if you wish to build trust with someone, one way to do it is by turning the creatures that injured their crush into a fine grey dust.
They walk him home, afterwards, and Jester hugs him tight as they say goodbye. Beau nods at him and smiles, and Caleb steps forwards, so that there’s only an arm’s length between Essek and himself.
‘It’s good that you were with us today,’ Caleb says. ‘You’re doing very well, you know?’
And he holds out his hand.
Essek stares, and everything in him sort of leaps, like gravity has lost its control on his insides. A you’re doing very well from Caleb is more than just praise, it’s more than affirmation, it means that Essek has changed, it means he’s making it better than before, it means Caleb might trust him again. And Essek feels so young, suddenly, and he hurts so much less than he did sixty seconds ago, and Caleb is standing very close indeed, Caleb made him feel this way with nothing but a few words and a smile and an offered handshake.
Essek takes Caleb’s hand. Then he lifts it to his lips and presses a kiss to the scarred knuckles.
There's a pause. Jester’s mouth is wide open. Fjord is grinning. Beau looks as if she is reconsidering how well-disposed she is towards Essek at present.
Without thinking, Essek bobs back up into a float. ‘Thank you, Caleb,’ he says, and flees.
The third time Caleb touched him, there were hands on Essek’s cheek, chapped lips on his forehead. And Essek’s world shuddered, fell away, and then lurched into a new pattern. Like a meteor pulled from its trajectory, falling into orbit around the insistent pull of a sun.
They throw a party in the Xhorhaus. Someone realises that it’s been a year since Fjord made his pact with Melora, and Jester slams both hands on the table and demands that they need to ‘celebrate properly, you guys.’
So Caduceus fills the house with flowers (and seaweed, somehow), and knocks together the most extravagant dinner Essek has ever seen him produce. A few guests are invited; Jester raids what seems to be every bakery in Rosohna, and Caleb and Essek set their dancing lights floating around the room.
They eat, and talk, and make toasts that grow gradually more ridiculous. Essek almost drains his entire glass at Fjord’s toast ‘to second chances,’ and promptly swallows it the wrong way when Jester adds, ‘to Fjord being ball-less.’ Then Yasha starts playing her harp, and Veth sweeps up Yeza and spins him into a dance, and suddenly Essek's friends are grabbing each other's hands and pushing tables out of the way, clearing space for all of them to do the same.
Essek fully intends just to sit back and watch - but then Jester yells at him that he must have learned to dance, ‘because you’re fancy, Essek, I bet the dens have balls and everything.’
And instead of saying that he hated every second of every ball he attended, Essek smiles and turns to Caleb. ‘Shall we?’
Essek’s a little bit drunk, or he wouldn’t have offered, and Caleb’s clearly a bit drunk too or he wouldn’t have accepted (surely, surely he wouldn’t have accepted.) And it’s not until they’re up and dancing, Essek tripping a little on the feet he’s still getting used to using, that it hits him that – well, that he’s dancing with Caleb Widogast.
It’s so new, having a body this close to his own. It's terrifying and thrilling, to have that body be Caleb’s. So much contact, a hand holding his, another on his waist. They’re too close, and Essek is feeling entirely too much, and he wants this to mean so much more than it does, and he shouldn't.
But Caleb starts humming along to the music, and Essek decides that later, later he will give a damn.
At some point during the night, he clearly decides to go into his trance on the couch in Caleb’s study. Because that’s where he is the next morning, when he’s stirred out of it by the sound of Caleb opening the door.
‘It appears I got drunk enough that I didn’t trust myself to go home,’ Essek says, as Caleb pulls a book from the shelf and settles down next to him. ‘I feel like I’ve passed an initiation ritual.’
‘One of us, now,’ Caleb says with a chuckle. Like it’s that easy, like it isn’t everything Essek’s been hoping for all these months.
Essek licks his lips. ‘I hope I am.’
‘I don’t think there’s any question about that anymore. Not unless you have more secrets hanging around.’
Which he doesn’t, of course. He came clean to them about his consecution, and about everything that happened with his father, and he’s told them that he has a little brother he barely speaks to, and –
And then Caleb smiles at him, and Essek freezes, because he never told any of them about this.
He hesitates too long. The smile slips from Caleb’s face. ‘That silence is, um, worrying.’
‘No, it's - nothing like that.’ Essek tries to smile, but if there’s one thing he learned at that damned party in Nicodranas, it’s that he is awful at lying to his friends under pressure. ‘It’s a personal matter. I just – it only affects me, really, and I haven’t wanted to talk about it in case it offends, or it’s unwelcome, or it makes things awkward, which – we know that I can make things very awkward, at times. So it never seemed – wise? Necessary? I don’t –’
Essek stops. Babbling. Hmm. That’s new.
But maybe it’s only to be expected. Because Caleb is still looking at him, and the caution on his face has shifted into concern, and Light he’s beautiful. And Essek danced with him last night, and he still remembers the imprint of Caleb’s hands, and Essek wants very badly to kiss him.
And he trusts Caleb. Trusts Caleb to be kind with his heart. Trusts him with all the steady, unremitting certainty of gravity.
‘I was joking before, mostly,’ Caleb says, after a moment. ‘If it’s personal, you don’t need to share. But, you know, we’re not going to turn away from you, not now, so if you do want to share things, you can. With me, or with any of us –’
‘I would share everything I am with you, Caleb Widogast.’
A long silence. Caleb says, ‘Oh.’
Essek’s mouth is suddenly, painfully dry. But he doesn’t give himself a chance to second-guess the words, and he doesn’t allow himself to look away from Caleb’s face. ‘If I thought you wanted it. If you would have it. Me. I – I have no expectations, of course, not after what I’ve – there’s no reason you would welcome this, but it’s there, and I can get over these feelings if you need me to, but they are - ’ Light, why can't he stop laughing when he's nervous - ‘very insistent on happening, so –’
‘Essek,’ Caleb says, very quietly.
And Essek stops. Because Caleb uses names as with as much precision as he uses high-level spell components, and it is so unfamiliar, so beautiful, to hear his own name in Caleb’s voice.
‘Listen to me,’ Caleb says. As if Essek isn’t utterly incapable of doing anything else. ‘I… will you give me some time?’
He scoops up Essek’s hands in both of his. ‘I don’t ask that because I don’t trust you, or because I don’t think you have changed. I do, and you have. You have changed bravely and magnificently, Essek Thelyss. And I don't ask it because I don't -’ He swallows. Looks down at their entwined hands. ‘Share. What you feel. It's myself I don't trust with this just yet. You know I'm carrying a lot of shit, and there are - things I need to recover from. I'm getting there, I think, but I cannot promise you anything only to find I can’t give it. You deserve for me to be sure. I will give you an answer, if you can give me a little time.’
And he’s screwing up his face in a way that’s dangerously endearing, so all Essek can do is chuckle. 'However long you need. As you know, time is one of my specialities.’
Caleb smiles, and squeezes Essek’s hands.
Essek has been starved of touch for over a century, and yet he’s never wanted touch before.
Touch never meant comfort to him, never meant warmth or companionship or steadiness or love. A handshake from a peer who would, without fail, be plotting sabotage the moment Essek’s back was turned; a hand on the shoulder from the Umavi after he was made Shadowhand, telling him your future selves will be proud of you. Touch was a shallow performance, nothing more.
But Jester’s hugs and Caduceus’s pats to the head and Beau’s punches to the arm are impossibly real. And Caleb. Every time Caleb touches him, it’s like Essek’s body is relearning how to be alive.
It doesn’t happen often over the months that follow. An accidental brush of the arm here and there as they study, a shove to knock Essek out of the way of an incoming spell, a hand to pull him up afterwards. And like he promised, Essek doesn’t say a word about the dizziness that courses through him in these moments, but he looks at Caleb day after day and thinks: I want to be alive with you.
Four months later, Essek is sitting cross-legged in his laboratory, and Caleb is lying on his back in the middle of the sigil-circle, holding a sheaf of papers in the air above his head. And Essek says, ‘Do you think it would be possible to integrate graviturgy into that fire of yours? Say, instead of having your fire reach out towards your opponents, you could create a spell that sucks them in towards a flame? Like a burning gravity well.’
Caleb twists his head aside to raise an eyebrow at him. ‘Ja, it sounds doable. Why – do you have a particular yearning to see someone burned and crushed?’
‘Now you mention it, I do have one particularly unbearable great-aunt.’
Caleb’s eyes crease with amusement, and Essek grins. ‘But that wasn’t my intention. No, I simply want to see if we can.’
And Caleb laughs, a quick sound that’s all the more beautiful for having been startled out of him, and he snatches up a blank roll of parchment before flinging another at Essek.
There’s an hour of muttering to each other, shoving papers back and forth across the floor; then they separate for Essek to focus on the gravity-based aspects, Caleb on the fire-based. After a little while Caleb shuffles to a desk and hunches over his papers in the way that indicates that he’s withdrawing from the world and into his head. (He’s sitting cross-legged in his chair again, Essek notes, and smiles to himself. Sometimes he thinks Caleb is incapable of sitting in a chair normally.)
Another hour later, Caleb is frowning and squinting and rubbing at his face: all familiar warning signs, by now. So Essek slips out of the room, brews a cup of tea, and returns to the laboratory to set it down on the desk. Caleb shows no sign of noticing any of this. But as Essek picks up his papers again, he notices Caleb’s fingers reaching instinctively for the cup.
It’s as Essek is putting together the last few pieces of the puzzle that Caleb sets down his quill with odd abruptness, and twists around in his seat. ‘When did you bring me tea?’
‘Caleb Widogast, losing track of time? Unheard of.’
Caleb’s hand strays to the mug, tilting it back and forth. ‘I just… I didn’t notice you putting this here.’
‘It was ten minutes ago, maybe? Fifteen? You’ve been drinking it.’
‘I know.’ Caleb is still looking at him, his expression slowly turning from bewildered to thoughtful. ‘How did you know I wanted tea?’
‘You were rubbing your face. So I assumed the spell was giving you trouble, and I thought I should get you something relaxing. Was I wrong?’
‘No. You rarely are.’
There’s a pause. Caleb releases the mug and drums his fingers on the tabletop. Purses his lips. Sits very still for another moment, then says, ‘I’ve had my thinking time.’
‘On the spell?’ Essek stands and crosses the room, leaning over the desk to see the pages of scribbled equations. ‘Did you work out how to –’
And he freezes. Because Caleb is touching his cheek.
Lightly. So lightly. Just three fingertips, resting warm and delicate against Essek’s cheekbone. There’s the slightest bit of pressure behind the contact, enough to turn Essek’s face towards him, and the look in his eyes is fond and wondering and reckless.
The room is very still.
The dizzy part of Essek’s mind says that it would be all right, if Caleb were to let go now. That this tiny contact is filling him completely. This is enough, it says. And the hungry part of him whispers, no, it is not.
Essek breathes out – slowly, carefully – and waits. One second. Two. And Caleb doesn’t move, and he doesn’t speak, so Essek allows himself to lean into the touch. Allows himself to feel how dry his mouth is, allows himself to lift one hand and slip it over Caleb’s. Allows himself to feel how much he wants –
Caleb’s hand slides further around the side of Essek’s face, fingers curling around the back of his neck. Then he leans up in his chair.
Soft, at first. More of a question than a kiss. And Essek almost laughs, because of course, of course Caleb Widogast would kiss with the same painfully deliberate care that he counts money and casts spells. He leans in closer, opens his mouth a little - and is swiftly reminded that there’s something else about Caleb that he has always loved. His intensity.
(Loved. He can let himself think that now.)
There's so much touch in this. So much. Caleb’s other hand coming up to run through Essek's hair, the faint trace of nails against his scalp, the feel of breath and the heat of another living body held against his. It’s spreading into every part of him, and Essek thinks vaguely that if this lasts long enough he might just forget what it was ever like to be cold or empty or alone.
Caleb kicks back his chair and stands. Doesn’t need to pull Essek against him, because Essek’s already stepping close, close as he can get. And every touch from Caleb’s lips, Caleb’s hands, is a cleric’s diamond, shattering across Essek’s body in a blaze of warmth. Drawing his soul back in.