Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It is the first day of the new week, and Bren is kneeling in his master’s office, as he does every week. His knees ache, and his wings are throbbing from being held out to the sides for so long. Some part of him notes that the planks of the floor will have to be replaced soon, since some of them are splintering, and he can feel the sharp edges digging into his knees. Ikithon will not tolerate anything less than perfection, and that extends to the upkeep of the places under his command. 

His eyes are downcast, and he can only see the very bottom of the door in his peripheral vision. It stays firmly closed. Usually his master arrives promptly, ten minutes after Bren, which gives him time to tidy up a bit and get into the position that his master expects from him. He could probably fall into it in his sleep at this point; on his knees, wings raised slightly and splayed outwards so that they are fully displayed, head bowed, hands stacked behind his back with the left one on top. 

It has been hours and Ikithon is still not here. He’s a busy man, Bren knows, and he is unbelievably selfish for needing so much attention, but he can’t stop wondering if he is being left here on purpose. It wouldn’t be the first time that Ikithon has been cruel for no reason, in order to remind Bren of his place. Of course, Ikithon has the right to ignore him if he chooses, but Bren still feels something ugly twisting in his chest at the thought. 

A piece of hair works its way loose from the bun at the back of his head and falls over his forehead. He resists the urge to reach up and swipe it away, even as it tickles his skin. He does not move, because he is a Volstrucker, and Volstruckers don’t care about petty things like hair in their eyes. He is not weak, and he will not disappoint his master. 

By the time that Ikithon opens the door, his legs have gone numb where they are pinned beneath him. He tenses at the click of the latch, pulling his spine out of the slight slump it has fallen into. His fingernails bite into his skin for a second before he very purposely relaxes them. He’d accidentally made himself bleed before, and it had not gone well when Ikithon had discovered the blood smeared over his palms. Ikithon had broken his fingers for that, one at a time, and Bren had stood silently and taken it, because he knew that he deserved it. His body doesn’t belong to him, and he doesn’t have the right to hurt it. 

Ikithon is alone, and Bren feels a rush of relief. His master sometimes brings others with him to these sessions, letting other wizards or politicians he’s trying to impress come and admire Bren’s wings like he’s a piece of meat. He keeps his head down as Ikithon locks the door and approaches, watching his polished black shoes come to a stop in front of him. They’re close enough that if Bren looked up, his head would brush against Ikithon’s thigh. 

“Take off your shirt,” Ikithon commands. His voice is quiet and smooth. It means nothing; even when he’s furious, Ikithon sounds calm. 

Bren unclasps his hands and starts undoing the line of buttons that lead from the base of his wings to the bottom hem. All of his shirts have to be tailor-made for him, with slits for his wings and buttons or zippers that let him close the garment around them. It’s yet another expense of his existence, one that his master often reminds him about. 

He unbuttons the shirt quickly, practiced at it and not wanting to keep Ikithon waiting. When he’s done, he pulls it up over his head. His knuckle brushes against Ikithon’s knee as he does it, but his master doesn’t react or move away. He folds it into thirds and puts it to the side, out of the way. He doesn’t necessarily need to remove his shirt, but Ikithon says that it makes it easier to get at the feathers near his back, and Bren, of course, does not object. 

Ikithon makes a soft noise of approval and walks a slow circle around him, trailing a hand over the top of a wing, knocking the feathers out of alignment. He stops at Bren’s back and puts a hand on each wing, pulling outwards so that he fully extends them. He’s not gentle about it, but he’s not rough either, and Bren is grateful. 

His master cards through feathers at the top of his wings, plucking out any loose ones. They fall to the ground around him, their fiery red color standing out against the cold stone floor. Ikithon has always been so disappointed with the color. He would have preferred gray or black, for blending into the night and sneaking up on his enemies. He said that the red was too flashy, and he always sounded so disgusted, like Bren had chosen the color of his wings just to spite him. 

Ikithon pries a hunk of dirt away from a feather, and it tugs at his skin. He’s not ready for the pain, that doesn’t usually happen so early, and his wings flinch inwards for half a second before he catches himself. Ikithon’s grip on him tightens, and he steps forward, pressing his leg between his wings, so that he physically can’t tuck them away at his back. 

“You’ve let the dirt build up,” Ikithon said, faintly disapproving. 

He can’t preen his own wings. His master knows that, he’s the one who performed the spell, and he bristles at the unfairness of being blamed, before his rational mind takes over. He should’ve been more careful to keep his feathers from dragging in the mud or brushing against the dust caked over so many of the surfaces in Ikithon’s mansion. 

“I’ll do better, Master,” he says, and his voice is monotone. 

“Yes, you will,” Ikithon says. 

His master always starts at the ends of his wings and moves inward from there, tugging out old feathers, smoothing them together so that they interlock properly, and picking out the grime. Some days, when he’s in a good mood, he uses a wet cloth to loosen difficult bits of mud and wipe away excess grease. Most of the time, he just pulls at the clumps until they come out, sometimes taking feathers with them. He’s slow about it, taking his time, often aimlessly running his hands over Bren’s wings even once he’s done with the preening. Bren’s skin crawls when he does it, waiting for the gentle touch to turn into pain. There’s always some sort of pain, whether it’s the sting of a feather pulled before it's ready or bruises left behind by Ikithon’s tight grip or, on two memorable occasions, the sharp snap of a bone breaking. 

His master only breaks his wings when he’s done very, very badly, because his wings are a large part of his value, but every time that Ikithon touches him, he anticipates it. He hates being forced to stay grounded while his bones heal, even though he hasn’t properly flown in years. 

Ikithon pauses at a spot on his lower right wing, where he was thrown into a wall while sparring with Astrid. They’re not supposed to injure each other, technically, but magic can be volatile, and accidents happen. He knows that Astrid resents him. His wings have assured his place as Ikithon’s favorite out of the three of them, and she hates it. 

Bren can tell that at least a few of the feathers are broken, and more have been twisted out of place. He’s been feeling them throb for the last four days, unable to do anything about it, his fingers itching with the urge to nudge them back into place. 

“These need to come out,” Ikithon says, and with no further warning, he takes a fistful of the damaged feathers and tugs harshly. 

Bren cries out, wrenching his wing away from his master. He presses it against his side and instinctively reaches for the place that hurts. As soon as his fingers touch his wing, electricity races up through his palm, burning into his skin. He catches the sound of pain before it leaves his lips, this time, shaking out his hurt hand. The faint pink lines of burns branch up his arm, concentrated at his fingertips. 

“I’m sorry,” he gasps, “I didn’t mean to, I’m sorry.” 

“Your idiocy astounds me,” Ikithon says drolly, but he must be feeling merciful, because there’s no punishment other than the burns. 

Bren mumbles out more apologies, and agreements with his master. Ikithon is right, he is so, so stupid, and he forgot about the spell on his wings for the split second that it took for him to grab them. 

He belongs to his master, and so do his wings, so Ikithon set up a curse over them, a long-lasting spell that feeds on Bren’s own magical core. If anyone other than his master touches them, it delivers a shock until they let go. It had taken him some time to figure out how to use his wings without accidentally brushing against them, but at least Ikithon had fixed the spell so that it no longer hurts him when he brought his wings to their normal resting position against his back. 

Ikithon thoroughly preens every inch of Bren’s wings, bringing his feathers to a shine, and even when he’s finished, he doesn’t move away. 

“Get up,” his master commands, and Bren shudders, because he knows what’s coming next.

Bren goes to the desk without being ordered, and braces his forearms on it. They press into the papers scattered over the desk, and he stays carefully away from anything breakable. His wings are easier to clip when they’re relaxed, so he lets them droop loosely over his back while Ikithon gets the scissors from a drawer in his desk. 

Ikithon places a warm hand between his wings to keep him in place, and brings the scissors to the bottom of his right wing. They’re sharp, and they cut through his primaries easily. The clipping doesn’t hurt, but he feels it as pressure against his remaining feathers. The metal of the scissors is cold when it brushes against his skin. 

The preening happens every week, but the clipping doesn’t. His wings need to be cleaned often, or they feel weighed down and itchy, but his cut feathers grow back slowly. He ends up leaning against the desk every two months or so, when his molt cycle starts and the previously cut feathers start to fall out in favor of new ones. 

The clipping doesn’t keep him from flying fully, but it does limit him to gliding and short hops. He can faintly remember the wind ruffling against his feathers, from early in his time with Ikithon. It’s been so long since then that he doesn’t dream about the sky anymore. 

His master calls it a safety measure, and never explains it more than that, but Bren knows that it’s meant to keep him from running away. He would never, he is loyal, but he tells himself that he understands Ikithon’s caution. 

Ikithon finishes with his right wing and moves on to the second, again cutting halfway down his primaries. Bren jerks his right wing to get the disturbed feathers to settle, shaking it like he’s seen wet dogs do. 

His master puts the scissors away when he’s done, and takes his opportunity to feel his wings one last time, touching them proprietarily. Bren stands obediently still until he’s finished. 

“Dismissed,” his master says, already turning away. 

Bren walks away with his wings feeling lighter and nausea settled deep in his stomach. 

***

Caleb’s friends don’t make him kneel when they preen his wings. They don’t tear at his feathers or order him to lay face down on the desk and not rip the paperwork underneath him with his clenching hands. 

They sit behind him on the floor and ask permission for everything that they do. On bad days, once he has gotten to all the spots that he can, he sits in front of a mirror so that Molly or Nott can preen the places that he can’t reach himself. In the mirror, he watches everything that they do and reminds himself that they are not Ikithon. 

Caleb doubts that he will ever enjoy having hands on his wings. There have been, and will be, weeks when he lets the oil and grime build up underneath his feathers because the idea of someone touching them makes him want to curl up in a ball and hide. There are too many bad memories associated with it, and sometimes he still wakes up hearing the crunch of a wing breaking. 

His friends are so gentle with him, though. Molly is chattering about the newest addition to his wardrobe while touching Caleb’s feathers like they’ll shatter if he’s not careful, and for the first time, he feels like his wings are truly his own.

Chapter Text

Magic doesn’t come from nothing. When Caleb winds ice around his hands like manacles, he does it by unlatching water from the air, coalescing the humidity in his hands. He freezes it between his palms and holds it in that state, not allowing any melting from his body heat. 

He’s aware, distantly, that he’s standing in the kitchen of the Xhorhaus. The tiled wall presses up against his back, taking most of his weight, and he can see the dim outlines of the counters. Someone left a candle burning in the corner–probably Fjord, he never remembers to blow them out–and the faint scent of raspberries floats from it. The rest of the Nein settled down for sleep several hours ago, and the house has slowly eased its way into calm. There’s snoring drifting down the stairs that he can recognize as coming from Beau, and he knows, he knows that he should go back to bed. The next day is going to be busy, and he can’t afford to be tired. But it just isn’t happening, and he kind of wants to slam his head against something sturdy until his circling thoughts ooze out of his brain. 

The nightmare hadn’t even been particularly bad. It had just been snatches of memories, all stitched together like the quilts that he vaguely remembered his mother making. A fire above his bed, blood fractaling down his arms in the pattern of a lightning strike, the itching vulnerability of a touch on the back of his neck. He’d woken sweating into his sheets and stumbled downstairs, trying to get the stuttering rhythm of his breathing back under control. 

He had paced from room to room, trying to be quiet, his fingernails digging trenches into his arms, unwrapped from their bandages for sleep. Tiny flames flickered around him, scorching his skin. It was only when he started to draw blood and blisters began to rise on his shoulders and back that he had released his grip on his own arms with a gasp. He shook out his hands to try and get rid of the urge to claw himself apart.

Under Ikithon, Caleb learned to accept pain. He allowed it to nest inside the medullary cavities of his bones and when it came, he welcomed it home as an old friend. There was no other way to survive; he would be hurt no matter what he did, so he couldn’t let it consume him. Even now, decades of distance in between himself and the teenager that he was, there is a certain rush that he gets when he is anticipating agony. It may not be pleasant, but it is familiar, and so few things bring him that comfort. 

And, always, there is a voice in the back of his head, whispering that he deserves it. 

The Nein don’t like it when he hurts himself, even if it’s not intentional. They pull his scratching hands away from his skin and look at him with so much sadness in their eyes that he could practically drown in it. That’d be a sad way to go–Caleb Widogast, asphyxiated by the sympathy of his friends. 

His thoughts get loud sometimes. They scream at him like a bag full of wet cats and he can’t think over the racket. The pain calms him down enough that he can find a sense of self in the ratty canvas that is his mind. He knows that it’s a bad coping mechanism but it works when nothing else does and so it is hard to stop.

He remembers Jester squishing his face between her palms so that she could look into his eyes, and asking him to stop with a tremble lacing through her words, and he promised that he would try. 

Caduceus had recommended ice. He’d said it in the same slow, careful way that he did everything, tapping a pencil against the table as he did. He had a journal open in front of him, and he was slowly filling in the pages with tiny spirals. It calmed him, apparently. 

“Ideally, you wouldn’t feel the need to hurt at all,” Caduceus had said thoughtfully, while Caleb flushed red and tried to sink into the ground. 

Caleb made a noise of general agreement. 

“But that seems a bit unattainable right now,” Caduceus continued. “I think that you should focus on minimizing harm.” 

That is what the ice is for. It hurts and it lets him settle fully into himself with the pain, but as long as he’s careful, it doesn’t do lasting damage. There’s no scars in the crescent-moon shape of fingernails or dime-shaped burns, just a tingling numbness that’s gone in minutes.

When Nott slips into the room, she’s almost silent, her bare feet padding over the floor with little more than a squeak. Caleb hears it anyway. He’s intimately tuned to the sound of her movement. 

“How do you always know when I’m upset,” Caleb asks, trying to laugh. It comes out as something closer to a choked wheeze. 

“I’ve got a special Caleb sense,” Nott says seriously. “I’ve got my sight, my hearing, and my Caleb.” 

She looks at the ice, but he can read nothing on her face. Caduceus told her about their conversation, maybe, or perhaps she just knows him so well that none of his actions are a mystery to her. 

She hops up onto a nearby counter, almost losing her balance and having to frantically windmill her arms for a moment. She leans into his side and her warmth burns like something being frozen. 

Caleb cups the ice in his palms and tries to breathe.

Chapter Text

The thieves go down easy, once Nott figures out the twisting corridors and trapped rooms of their base. There are only four of them, and although they fight well, with the desperation of cornered rats, they’re no match for Beau, Caleb, and Nott. They knock out the thieves without killing them–they are wanted alive by the mayor of the small city that they stole from. Once the ropes are tightly secured, they split up. Nott goes to check for any leftover traps, clearing a path for their exit, and Beau watches the bandits, tapping her quarterstaff against the stone bricks that make up the floor. The most skittish thief, a young woman with deep bags under her eyes and exhaustion in her posture, flinches every time it hits. The other three keep sending her concerned looks, and one scoots over to her, as best he can with his limbs tied, and presses his shoulder against hers in silent support. 

Caleb is sent to get the stolen money and treasure back. He wanders for a bit, trying to stick to the areas with less dust collecting on the floor, on the assumption that they would keep the loot somewhere they went often. The base is fairly small, crammed into the sort of underground bunker that Caleb equates with doomsday preppers. It doesn’t take him long. 

The stolen goods are in a small room, closet-sized, near the center of the bunker. It’s mostly gold coins in thick burlap sacks, but there’s also a nice collection of objects. An intricate gold bracelet, a glass vase that looks both expensive and old, a full set of armor and two swords to go with it, a silver ring covered in tiny writing in a language that he doesn’t know, and a smattering of other items. He weighs the ring in his palm for a moment, and it feels far heavier than something so small should. The metal feels cold, despite the almost oppressive heat. It’s tarnished, especially on the inside where it would touch skin, but he bets that it would polish up well. He tucks it into one of the coin bags, and heads back to Beau. 

Nott isn’t there yet, but Beau is starting to look restless, so they start getting their prisoners ready to transport. Caleb wraps more rope around them, making sure that they’re thoroughly incapacitated, and ties all of the thieves to each other. Nott arrives just as he’s finishing up, and she leads them out of the bunker, with Caleb at the rear, ready to cast if it’s needed. He doesn’t want to waste spells on these amateurs, but he will if he has to. 

They step out into the sunshine and he ushers the prisoners towards the prison wagon that they’d demanded from the mayor. It’s made of sturdy, strong wood, with iron bars leading from the floor to the ceiling. The thieves don’t fight, and he locks the door easily once they’re all inside. 

Before he can turn away and join Beau and Nott in the seats at the front of the wagon, the skittish woman reaches through the bars. She snags his sleeve, flinching when he jolts violently away. His hands go to his component pouch automatically, but she’s already cowering away, head ducked. 

“Yes?” he asks coldly, trying to ignore how afraid she looks. It isn’t his job or his responsibility to help her. Still, something inside him turns over unpleasantly at her fear. 

She coughs several times, clearing her throat. “Be careful. Please, please be careful with that.” 

She nods down at the bags of treasure, piled at his feet. 

“These are going back to the mayor,” he responds, and he doesn’t say it kindly, but he can’t bring himself to be cruel either. 

“Good,” she says in a whisper, almost too quiet for him to hear.

She slumps back against the bars and closes her eyes. 

He blinks after her, then shakes off the strange interaction and goes to help Beau with the horses. 

At the city, once they’ve handed the thieves off to the city guards, they reunite with the rest of the group, who were getting some shopping and chores done while the three of them hunted down the thieves. 

The mayor is pleased with them. The town hall is opulent, dripping in gold and crystals, and he sits in a throne more fit for a king than an elected official. He has the frankly disgusting habit of chewing on the end of his long, white mustache. Caleb has to struggle not to grit his teeth every time he sees it happen. He laughs when he talks, at the end of almost every sentence and sometimes in the middle of them. Jewelry glistens on every inch of him and he dismisses his servants when they try to talk to him. 

Despite Caleb’s personal dislike of the man, he pays them as soon as the thieves are in his custody, and he does it well. Once Caleb’s pockets are loaded down with coins, he even invites them to choose something to keep from what they brought back. Beau goes for a small dagger, Nott wants an emerald necklace, and Caleb…he picks up the silver ring and it feels so right in his palm that he can’t even think of choosing anything else. His pockets are full so he slips it on his finger instead, and it immediately warms to match the temperature of his skin. It’s so comfortable that he can almost forget it’s there. 

Nightmares are not unfamiliar to him. More times than he can count, he’s woken up tasting smoke, with tears in his eyes. They’re definitely not enjoyable, but once he wakes up a bit, maybe goes outside to get a bit of sunlight, they start to fade away. He has the luxury, now, of forgetting his dreams. 

After they finish up with the mayor, Caleb falls into his bed gratefully, exhausted enough that he falls asleep almost immediately. He dreams of rolling hills extending in every direction, with sloped tops that pierce into the sky. It’s more vivid than most of his dreams; he can feel the dry wind stinging his face and the uncomfortable rasp of a dust mask over his nose and mouth. The sun is almost down, but its fading light is enough to see by. He squints at the hills, trying to work out why they’re disturbing him so much. They’re a bit lumpy, sure, but he’s not going to go around judging landscapes for their shape. 

He takes a step closer, hoping that he can get closer for a better look, and something squishes under his foot, in a disgustingly wet way. When he looks down, he sees Beau’s face staring back at him, his boot embedded halfway inside the soft, decomposing flesh of her head. His heel is pressing into one of her eye sockets. Gasping, he instinctively stumbles backwards. He knows damn well that it’s just a dream, he has a lot of experience with them and he was trained in mind magic. That does nothing to protect him from the fear, because as he backs away from Beau’s stony, cold face, he trips over the lumpy ground. 

Caleb lands on his back, his eyes turned up to the sky. It’s completely dark, not even a hint of star or moon, and it reminds him of gazing down the length of a sword. He turns his head to the side, preparing to get to his feet, and sees an outstretched hand, contorted in a rictus of pain. He follows the arm, up to the shoulder, then the face, and Nott is looking back at him, her eyes open and furious. He fights his way to his feet, his hand bracing on a soft body to do it—Fjord’s chest, part of him realizes—and suddenly the true horror of this wasteland is revealed to him. 

The corpses of his friends are stacked in layers. Like a lasagna, he thinks hysterically. There must be tens of thousands of them, repeated over and over again with slight variations. This Molly has a slice across his throat, that one is cut nearly in half, one Nott has no apparent injuries while another is torn to shreds. The hills are made of more bodies, limbs and heads poking out haphazardly. 

He’s caught, stuck in the horror of it, and then he wakes up. 

Caleb hyperventilates for a solid couple of minutes, spinning the ring on his finger to calm himself down. Eventually he pulls himself together, and goes to find breakfast, like he always does. At least now he knows that the next night will be safe. His nightmares never come so close together. 

This nightmare isn’t so easy to shake, not like the others that he has. He cooks bacon and remembers the faint smell of death, brushes against Beau and can’t stop thinking about the way her face caved in beneath his foot. It’s distracting, and he’s glad that he doesn’t have anything important to do today, because he wouldn’t be able to properly focus.

Caleb dreams of the wasteland again. He’s standing in the same place, sunk up to his ankles in Beau’s liquefying corpse. Her eyes roll to face him from where they are lying loosely at the base of her hollow skull, focusing on him with unwavering attention. It’s hard to step back, his feet getting trapped between bones, and before he can move, she snaps out a hand to catch his ankle. 

As if that sent up some invisible signal, the other corpses start to move too, wiggling like ground infested with maggots. They’re all drawn towards him, some of them walking, some crawling, some pulling themselves forward by the stump of an arm. 

They snare him with the horrible intensity of all their eyes, and between that moment and the next, he’s safe in his bed, sweat drying on his skin. 

He tries to read the next morning, because it usually calms him down, but the words swim on the page, and he ends up just staring blankly at the book without comprehending any of it. 

At some point, Jester bounds over, asking if he needed cheering up because he looked very sad. When he admits that he’s having trouble reading, she yanks the book out of his grip and replaces it with a pastry. 

“I’ll read it for you, then,” she declares, like it’s the simplest thing in the world. 

She uses strange voices for some of the characters, but she’s surprisingly good at it, and Caleb scoots a little closer, not enough to touch, but enough to feel her body heat. 

“This is your fault,” the wasteland corpses say, in unison, a chorus of scraping voices, and they keep coming back, night after night. 

Beau thinks that his nightmares are about flames. It’s a fair assumption to make, honestly, considering the tragic backstory that he’d dumped on her. 

“I am fine,” he says, after the many nights when he greets the morning without having slept at all. “I’m just tired.” 

Her comfort becomes a pattern. Beau pats him on the shoulder, or slips him an extra snack, tells him to go take a nap, snatches the pen from his hand when he tries to write, or sometimes doesn’t notice at all, too wrapped up in a conversation. 

“That’s rough, buddy,” she says, and it barely stands out from all the other times she’s offered her sympathy to him, the words flowing freely, like blood from a wound. “I dreamt about fire too.” 

He doesn’t correct her. 

At this point, even Caleb has to admit that it’s a problem. It’s not sustainable; he can’t keep having nightmares so bad that they mess him up for the rest of the day. The Nein need him to cast for them, and he can’t do that if he’s shaking and terrified. 

He just needs to reset, he decides. Something in his brain has latched onto this one specific dream, and if he just waits for it to shake loose, then he’ll be fine. 

It’s a simple solution, in the end. He can’t have nightmares if he doesn’t sleep. 

He still goes to his room and pretends to sleep, because he doesn’t want to worry anyone, but he doesn’t lay down. Instead he reads, or practices his spells, or paces. When one lost night of sleep turns into two, it becomes harder to concentrate, so he starts sitting on the floorboards and staring at the wall until morning. 

Beau notices that he’s tired, of course she does, but she doesn’t say anything about it. She just makes him tea and cookies and sits with him while he rests his head on his folded arms and tries not to cry from pure frustration. He just wants to go to bed. But every time he closes his eyes, he sees the wasteland, and he wants to not go back there more. 

Four days after he stopped sleeping, he sits down in the kitchen because his head is spinning, and closes his eyes. There’s a blur, a gray fuzz, and then he’s in the wasteland. The corpses are on top of him. They’re holding him down with their wounded bodies and pressing him beneath the tidal wave of their anger. Fingers wrap securely around his throat, one finger at a time, and tighten. It happens so, so slowly, and Beau hisses insults in his face the whole time. She tells him that he’s toxic, he ruins everything he touches, no one would stay if they knew the reality of him. She says that he should have died in that fire. 

He believes her. 

As his air closes off, his finger starts to burn. It hurts, so much that he starts to fight again, trying to stop whoever is cutting his gods-damned finger off. The world starts to flicker between the wasteland and the tiled kitchen. Someone is yelling in the kitchen, probably more than one person. In the center of the room hovers something inky and insectoid. It has long, dangling tendrils that attach it to Caleb, and he should probably do something about that, but he can’t muster the energy. 

The agony of his finger builds to a crescendo and then is gone, instantly, like a cork exploding off of an overpressurized bottle. The kitchen snaps into sharp focus, and he sees Beau hovering over him, where he’s slumped on the floor. 

“—leb. Caleb,” she says, and from the sound of it, it’s not the first time that she’s said his name. 

He makes a vague affirmative noise and she sighs in relief. 

“You were attacked,” she says crisply, and starts laying out the situation with brutal efficiency. 

She’d come into the kitchen to see him unconscious, and the inky creature that he’d seen earlier latched over his face. Their attempts to hurt it had done nothing, but Nott had noticed that the ring on his finger was glowing a deep red. She’d pulled it off of him, and the creature had shrieked. 

At that point, Beau paused in her story, before she visibly mastered herself and continued on. She described the way that it had dug into his head, leaving no visible wounds. After the ring was removed, though, it was vulnerable, which Fjord discovered when he sliced through it and it actually died. By the time she finished, Caleb had a fairly cohesive idea of what had attacked him. He’d read about it in a monster compendium, during his years as a student. 

“It was feeding on me. Fear can be, ah, a potent source of energy,” Caleb says, proud of the way his voice barely trembles. “It used the ring as a siphon and anchor, if I had to guess. Once it was removed, it could no longer use my power to keep itself safe.”

“Great,” Beau said. “How the fuck do we make sure that it stays dead?”

He pointed one trembling finger at the ring. “Destroy that. A sacred flame should do it, not much else will cause damage.” 

He worries that they will pity him, or treat him like he’s delicate. As always, he underestimates him; they check in on him, constantly concerned, but they don’t do anything more than that. It’s a relief. 

“What did it do to you, really? You were screaming when I found you.” Beau asks hesitantly. She’s been gearing herself up to ask for thirty minutes, sending him sideways glances and shifting in place. It’s the middle of the night and they’re on watch together, sitting alone in a field of empty grass, the others sleeping behind them. The crickets almost cover the sound of her voice. 

“It showed me a reality that I will not allow to exist,” Caleb says. 

She nods, like she’s satisfied with that answer. He knows that she’s not, but it’s all that he’s willing to give. If he were anyone else, she’d be hugging him now, but she knows how he feels about unexpected physical touch. She’s hugging herself instead. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, unusually subdued. “I should have protected you.”

Caleb doesn’t think that he can handle a hug right now, not with the memory of the nightmares so close. He reaches out his hand instead, setting it on the grass between them. Beau slips her palm into his. 

He feels a moment of nausea at the feeling of her skin against his, remembering the repugnant softness of her decaying body. It’s easy to fight down. Her hand is warm and crusted with calluses. 

They sit like that for the rest of the watch, pressed palm-to-palm. Caleb relearns the life inside her, down to the scratchiness of her fingernails and the way that she hums when she’s bored.  

Chapter Text

Theo joins their group with little fanfare, and settles into their rhythms like he’d always been there. He has his own tent, a patchwork wonder of colorful fabric and clever stitching. Caleb doesn’t like it inside the tent. It always feels like he’s being muffled, like a heavy layer of fabric has been draped over his thoughts and woven like a garrote between his vocal cords. It makes him want to lie down on the bumpy ground and close his eyes, even though naps completely wreck his ability to sleep the next night. He avoids it as much as he can, and it’s so silly, he knows. Theo would never do anything to hurt him. 

Theo takes over most of the cooking, because he’s amazing at it and the rest of them could probably burn water if they tried hard enough. It’s mostly meat. When he sets off into the woods with the aim of hunting down some food, he’s a force to be reckoned with. Caleb tried to go with him once, and lost him within the first couple minutes as he blurred off between the trees. He always comes back with his arms full of squirrels and rabbits, or dragging a deer behind him. 

“I don’t know what we did without you,” Jester says, biting into her roasted squirrel. 

Beau, who cooked most of the meat before Theo came along, huffs and crosses her arms sulkily over her chest. 

Theo chuckles, leaning over to pluck one of the onions off the top of her plate. “Thank you, dear, but I’m sure you managed just fine.” 

Caleb pokes at his meal, trying to spread it around so it looks like he ate more than he did. He’s got a headache brewing, the nasty sort that pulses behind his eyes and makes him want to tear his hair out. The food smells delicious, as always, but the throbbing has thoroughly killed his appetite. Even the couple bites that he swallows have his stomach turning over unpleasantly. He pops one of the tomatoes into his mouth and grimaces at the way it bursts on his tongue, resisting the urge to spit it out again. It’s fine, no matter what his friends have to say about his eating habits. It’s not the first time he’s skipped a meal and it won’t be the last. 

Theo turns to him and tuts disapprovingly at his plate. “You’ve barely eaten a thing, Caleb. Do you not like squirrel?” 

“Ah, it’s good,” he says. “I’m just not feeling too well.” 

“That’s no excuse. It’s not good for your blood,” Theo says. 

Something about that phrasing strikes him as strange, but before he can think about it for more than an instant, Theo’s hand is slipping underneath his chin, tilting it up so that he has to meet Theo’s eyes. If it had been anyone else touching him without warning like that, he would have flinched away and maybe fired off a couple spells, but something about Theo’s touch freezes him in place. 

Theo’s eyes are—they’re blue, right? Caleb’s mental map of Theo has always marked him with blue eyes, blue like the sky before a storm, blue like murky water. But staring into them now, they’re the deep red of fresh blood being spilled, and he can’t look away. He opens his mouth, thinking that he should say something. He’s not sure what, exactly, but definitely something, maybe a request to not touch him like that in the future. Nothing comes out, though, his mouth hanging stupidly open, and when he tries to close it, his body doesn’t respond. 

“Finish your food,” Theo says mildly. 

Even when he’s been released from Theo’s grip, the memory of his eyes hovers in his mind. He finds himself eating the rest, bite after bite, even as his stomach complains and his breathing picks up. He can feel Theo’s gaze burning into him the whole time, and Theo sits with him until he’s finished, long past when the others have scattered to their own tents or their various pastimes. He doesn’t stop until every last scrap is gone and his fork is scraping his plate. He slumps, altogether too relieved at finishing his meal, and the horrible sensation of being watched finally abates. Theo just nods, getting to his feet in a movement that seems just a bit too smooth. 

Caleb doesn’t skip meals after that. Even when the thought of eating makes dread coil inside him, red eyes flash in his mind and he makes himself finish. 

***

Caleb doesn’t quite remember how Theo joined them. It’s a fuzzy spot in his remembrance, but it’s not the kind of blurred that would make him suspect that the memory has been removed. He can still find the shape of it, if he concentrates, lining up the sequence of events from context clues more than anything else. Everyone has lapses sometimes, he supposes. Something in him screams that he’s always had a great memory, and how could he possibly forget something as important as this? That part is easy to squash, pressing it down into the dark corners of his mind where it can’t kick up too much of a fuss. 

He knows that they were settling down for the night at a halfway point between towns, because he remembers leaving one town without Theo and arriving at the next with him, and the flickering way the fire illuminated Beau’s face. Her face had gone tight, and she’d scrambled to her feet, looking out into the darkness of the woods. He couldn’t recall what had happened after that, but Theo must have been in the woods and given her a fright. 

The next thing that sits clear in his mind is Theo sitting cross-legged next to the fire, one arm slung companionably around Caleb. His shirt was scratchy, dried blood making it stiff. He must have cut himself somehow; he had always been so clumsy. Beau was on the ground, groaning, and Theo had assured him that it was just a concussion, nothing to worry about. And so he hadn’t worried. 

From that very first night around the campfire, none of them mention Yasha. She was gone when Theo arrived, and she hasn’t been back since. Whenever he’s telling a story about their adventures as a party, he smoothes over Yasha’s actions, replacing her with someone else or not mentioning that section of events at all. It’s not something he means to do, but whenever he goes to bring it up, there’s something at the back of his head stopping him. He can see it in his friend’s faces too, when they hesitate for a bare moment before plowing on. All of them lay out the tangled web of stories that have led them to this present moment and neatly snip Yasha from the threads. 

Theo would surely be interested in their absent member, and so there’s no real reason to exclude her. Really, there’s not, but he does it anyway. During the brightness of noon, when he feels safest, he hopes that Yasha will not return to face Theo’s notice, and he does not allow himself to think about why. 

Theo loves to hear about their adventures. Almost every day while they’re traveling, he attaches himself to one member of the group and demands to be told about something new. Usually, it’s Caleb. He says that Caleb tells it the best.

He talks until his throat aches with soreness and then past that, ushered on by Theo’s probing questions. His voice is usually cracking and raspy by the time that he’s permitted to stop.

***

It’s a cool night. Caleb is wrapped in blankets, with Nott curled against him, and the air bites at him through all those layers of warmth. He’s been awake ever since the sun started to set and Theo ordered everyone to their tents. Nott is silent and motionless, but he knows that she’s awake too. Theo rotates between the tents every night, starting at Beau and Jester’s, which is always closest to his tent, and moving outwards from there. He took Fjord the previous night, and Molly before that, which means it’s their turn. 

It has to be close to midnight by the time Caleb hears Theo leave his tent, his boots crunching the leaves underfoot loudly. He makes his slow way across the campsite, towards them. 

Nott’s small hand clamps onto his, and he squeezes back, holding tight. Theo stops outside, and his breath catches in his chest. The flap of the tent opens and it’s far too dark to make out Theo’s face but he can see the two glowing red holes of his eyes.

“Nott, will you join me, please?” he asks.

Nott gives his hand one last squeeze and gets slowly to her feet. The profile of her body is outlined in red, and when she steps within reach, Theo takes her by the upper arm and guides her out of the tent. 

He’s glad that it’s Nott instead of him, and he hates himself for it. 

Nott comes back an hour later, stumbling and confused. He lights up the tent with a quick spell and helps her dress the messy wound in her throat, coating it in medicine and gauze. It’s healed by the morning, the scar barely noticeable unless he squints. That’s the one good thing about it all; the wounds never last long. Caleb doesn’t know why, and he doesn’t dare research it. He doesn’t want to think about what would happen if Theo caught him. He’d nearly killed Beau when they’d run into another group on the road and she’d asked them if they knew anything about vampires. The long claw marks on her chest didn’t heal over with the speed of the other injuries. They closed laboriously slowly, and Theo refused to help, even when infection set in. 

But he would have intervened if she’d truly been in danger. He wouldn’t actually let her die. He needed to make sure that she learned her lesson, that’s all, and it had worked. She’d deserved it, for being so unwelcoming. 

Caleb flinches away from his own thoughts but they keep coming, pushed into his head one at a time until they overwhelm everything else. 

Nott is pale from the blood loss, and she buries her face into his shoulder. She doesn’t cry, but her shoulders shake. 

His respite only lasts until the next night. Nott is already asleep beside him, secure in the knowledge that she will not be disturbed and exhausted from not resting the previous night. He tries not to wake her when the tent flap opens and Theo gestures for him with a predatory gleam in those crimson eyes. He gently disentangles himself from her and tries to step quietly. He’s almost out, nearly within reach of Theo, when she shifts, murmuring in her sleep. He freezes, and Theo’s eyes narrow in annoyance. She settles after a long moment and he finally ducks outside. 

Theo throws an arm over his shoulders, pulling him into his side. Caleb feels small next to him, dwarfed by his height and kept captive by the strength of his grip. He is led towards Theo’s tent, and his heart starts to beat out of his chest. Theo chuckles and brushes a knuckle across his cheek. 

“I can sense your heart racing,” Theo murmurs. His hold tightens until it’s painful and then they’re inside.

The muffling effect of the tent descends immediately, calming his rising panic and pushing him towards lassitude. There’s a lamp flickering in a corner, for his benefit, he assumes, since Theo doesn’t need it to see. Theo leads him to the center of the space where a tarp has been put down on the floor. It’s dim enough that the blood already on it looks like nothing more than smudgy splotches. 

Theo takes hold of his jaw, guides it up, and he slams his eyes closed on instinct. 

The fingers move from his jaw to his eyelids, ghosting over them and tickling at his cheeks. 

“None of that, now. Open your eyes,” Theo says gently, and then his voice lowers, suffusing with an inhuman rasp. “Or I’ll rip them from your skull.” 

Caleb opens his eyes. Red fills his vision until it’s all he can see. 

“Stay still and don’t scream,” Theo says. 

The command sinks into his bones. He doesn’t move, even when Theo weaves his fingers into Caleb’s hair and tilts his head to the side, exposing his neck. Theo pulls him close, setting one hand on his waist and keeping the other twisted in his hair. The tips of his teeth touch Caleb’s skin, and he doesn’t move. His head flops limply forward until his cheek is resting against the rough fabric of Theo’s cloak and he doesn’t move. The teeth pierce his skin, ripping into his skin and muscle and it hurts like nothing he has ever known and he does not move. 

There’s a common misconception that vampires have two fangs at the top of their mouths that they use as neat little straws, punching small holes into their victims and sipping from them like a juice box. It’s a pretty story, but very far from the truth. Only having two fangs with which to tear open the skin would be remarkably inefficient. Vampires have several rows of teeth, all lined up behind each other, and all of them are sharpened to a point. 

Theo is gentle when he feeds on Caleb and the others. It’s something to be grateful for, Caleb supposes. Theo doesn’t want to lose his easy food source from blood loss and Caleb doesn’t want to die, so their interests align in that way. He doesn’t dig in nearly as far as he could, and he’s careful to use only the first few rows of teeth. 

It hurts, though. Gods, it hurts. He’s trapped in place, unable to lift a hand to defend himself while dozens of needles sink into his skin from just under his jaw to where his shoulder meets his neck. He grabs blindly at Theo, his vision swimming with black spots and swirling nauseatingly. He gets handfuls of Theo’s long black jacket and holds onto them desperately, searching for anything to ground himself from the waves of pain.

His body is going numb, everywhere except his neck. His legs buckle underneath him, and Theo holds him up with the hands hooked around his waist and in his hair. There’s a twinge in his scalp that warns him of soreness that will come later, but he can’t focus on anything but Theo’s body against him and Theo’s teeth inside him. 

It’s hard to choose the worst part. There’s so many awful aspects that deciding on one is impossible. A worst part, then, is the sensation of sucking that comes once minutes, or possibly decades, have passed and the wound starts to clot up, stopping the easy flow of blood into Theo’s mouth. It comes at regular intervals, spaced ten seconds or so apart. The sucking pulls at damaged muscle, lighting it up again, but more than that, it solidifies the fact that he is being drained. A piece of him is being taken and there is nothing he can do to stop it, nothing he can do to make it hurt less, and that breaks him down more than the pain. He knows how to deal with pain, as awful as it is. He has never figured out how to recover from the violation of being excised with little precision and less regret. 

Caleb is floaty and disconnected by the time the sucking stops. Theo rests there for what is probably several more minutes, teeth still stuck in his skin. It’s stopped hurting so much, and when Theo unlatches his jaw he feels it more as pressure than as pain. He can’t support his own weight, collapsing against Theo instead, and he’s steered down to the floor. 

Caleb is maneuvered so that he’s resting practically in Theo’s lap. His hair is being stroked in a way that is wretchedly comforting and the buzzing in his neck can’t really be classified as pain. It’s too much, all at once, and his brain…shuts off for a while. 

He comes back to himself in his tent, with Nott talking worriedly at him. She’s being quiet, likely to keep from waking up the others. He blinks at her, and vaguely registers that his neck has been bandaged. 

“I am…fine,” he says to Nott, cutting her off. 

She obviously doesn’t believe him, but there’s nothing else she can do, and so she puts her arms around him like she can protect him. She tells him to get some sleep and he lies when he says that he will. 

***

Yasha comes eventually. Of course she does. He knows her too well to think that she would ever truly leave them. She comes with rain as her justice and lightning as her vengeance and she builds her storm until it’s seething with her rage. 

She descends on Theo when the sun is at its peak and he is at his weakest, her sword crackling with lightning. Caleb sees her coming an instant before she arrives, running fluidly between the trees with barely a leaf out of place to indicate her passing. He’s already on alert from the rain pelting him, and the recognition of Yasha’s particular strain of magic in the ozone in the air. It would be long enough for him to tackle Theo out of the way, or throw up a quick shield spell, and his instincts scream at him to do it, to protect his friend. He fights it with everything he has and it almost doesn’t work. He’s reaching into his component pouch to fling a spell at Yasha, his fingers trembling with the effort that it takes to stop them, but she’s already there. 

Her sword swings a perfect arc, flashing with the reflected light of the sun, and severs Theo’s head from his body. She raises her blade into the sky and lightning flares down its length, slamming into his head, then jumping to his body. It sears him into ash, and vampires can live through a lot, but they can’t survive that. 

The thrall breaks with Theo’s death and Caleb falls to his knees, holding his head in his hands and trying to sort out the sudden recontextualization of memories. They find their way to each other, once the initial shock has worn off. Caleb is on the outer edge of the huddle, Yasha at his back and Nott in front. The ash that used to be Theo crunches under his feet and he kicks it resentfully. 

Chapter Text

It begins like this: Fjord’s hand rests in the fire, strips of blackened flesh curling up while he stirs the stew. The skin bubbles, crackling in the way of mud in the heat, and it smells like dead air. Caleb knows the pervasive scent of burnt bodies well; he is very familiar with the way a pyre can feel like an invasion. There is nothing to Fjord but the forest around them as he ladles out a bowl and passes it over to Caleb, even when the skin of his hand sheds into the soup with a wet plop. He quells his shaking before he takes it and rests it in his lap, appreciating the warmth of it, if nothing else. That’s what his life has become—silver linings. 

He’s starting to think this forest doesn’t end. They’ve been traveling through it for weeks, and there’s been nothing but leaves and dirt and trees that look just similar enough to be unnerving.

It begins like this: his friends gather around him when he sleeps, now. He puts it off as long as he can, until his vision is blurred and his exhaustion overtakes his terror. He wraps his blanket around his head so that he doesn’t have to see them circling him like mushrooms in a fairy ring. He doesn’t know if they stay there all night, standing silent vigil over his motionless body, but he hopes that they don’t. 

He knows that it’s a useless hope. 

Either way, they’re always there when he wakes up. Sometimes they are in the same places they were when he fell asleep, and that is…not ideal, but he can deal with it. Sometimes there’s thin scratches down his neck and over his chest, and he knows that they touched him while he was unconscious, trailing cold fingers over the helpless line of his throat. Sometimes, on the worst days, they’re still on him when he wakes up. There have been many mornings when he has gasped out of sleep to find Beau resting her head on his chest, with Nott perched over his calves and Caduceus sitting cross-legged behind his head, hands bracketed around Caleb’s wrists like bracelets. 

Are they still his friends? Can he call them that? 

It begins like this: a week that he can’t remember, clawed from his mind to leave nothing but ragged ribbons of memory. It’s not a wall so much as a pit, one that goes all the way down to bedrock, and it’s a neat sort of division between the before and the after. There’s the time when the Nein were themselves, and then there’s when they descended into the darkness of the week he cannot remember and came back wrong.

They could kill him in an instant, and he wouldn’t be able to stop them. They could slice his head off and drink from the stump of his neck, or pin him down and pry him apart with their nails, chunk by chunk, or pop his eyes out and squirm their fingers back to his brain. But they don’t hurt him at all, and he doesn’t understand. 

It begins like this: all of their faces start to look the same. They bleed together, sharing features back and forth like an awful game of cards. More and more, they speak with the same voice. 

It begins like this: Caleb tries to escape and they catch him in minutes, running him down with legs that don’t quite move quite right and dive-bombing him from the air with fleshy wings. Beau catches him first, smiling at him with a mouthful of glass. She holds the shards of her teeth to his throat and he almost wishes that she would just bite down. Instead they dig a hole and put him inside it and don’t let him out until he’s babbling repentance to whatever gods care to listen.  

It ends like this: one day Caleb wakes up and he can’t tell them apart. There’s a face right in front of his, lips close enough to kiss, eyes wide open, and he thinks that maybe he can see the sharp curve of Beau’s jaw, but he’s not sure. Tears gather like pearls at the corners of his eyes and he doesn’t bother to wipe them away. 

He’d been holding on to his hope with white-knuckled fervor, telling himself that they just had to get to a city, then he could find a cleric and sort this all out. But the trees look the same. He can’t stop noticing the acorns placed with symmetrical precision and the exact same number of branches extending from each trunk. 

His friends are dead. It hurts to accept it, it burns into him and scours him empty, but at least they aren’t here with him, in the belly of whatever beast has gotten hold of them. He’s just glad they were digested quickly instead of spending weeks dissolving in the stomach acid like him. 

Chapter Text

Eadwulf hunched further over his paper, tapping irritably at the desk with his pencil as he tried to work out the energy coefficient for casting Fireball. His hair was mussed, sticking out in places where he’d run his hands through it, and his eyes were red-rimmed and droopy. 

Caleb had been watching him work on the same worksheet for four hours, sprawled out comfortably on the carpet with a book in his hands. Astrid was curled up in an armchair adjacent to him, with her eyes closed and a fluffy pink blanket tucked around her. He would have called it cute but Astrid would stab him if he did. She was dozing, slipping in and out of sleep, her eyes slitting open whenever Eadwulf started getting frustrated. 

Eadwulf had been singled out for special tutoring—it had been presented as a privilege, but everyone knew that it was because he wasn’t quite up to standard with the rest of their class. He came back from those sessions with bruises scattered over his body like constellations from sparring and enough homework to keep him awake into the night. 

Eadwulf set down his pencil, dropping his forehead into his palm, and Caleb carefully closed his book, marking the page by folding the corner down. It was a terrible habit, he knew, but it was one that he’d never managed to quash. He peeled himself off the floor with a groan, hearing his back crack as he did it. He’d been laying in the same position for several hours at that point, and he shook out his limbs to chase away the pins-and-needles feeling. 

An arm over Eadwulf’s shoulders was usually enough to make him relax, but when Caleb tried it, he was shrugged off. He could see the tightness of Eadwulf’s muscles in his neck, all of them stretched to the breaking point. 

“You’ll figure it out,” Caleb said. He didn’t offer to help him with it. It had only taken one punishment for him to learn that lesson. 

“It feels like I never will,” Eadwulf said, true frustration bleeding into his tone. “Maybe I’ll be stuck on this goddamn worksheet until the heat death of the fucking universe.” 

Towards the end of the sentence, his voice raised, anger clenching around every word. 

Caleb went tense, and Astrid lifted her head. 

“Be careful,” she warned. 

“I know, I fucking know,” he almost snarled, and Astrid fully sat up, her blanket falling away. 

“ Careful ,” she hissed again, but it was too late. 

The collar around Eadwulf’s neck sparked once, electricity arcing across the smooth, seamless surface of it, and he went down without a sound. His elbow knocked against his chair as he fell, and it came with him, clattering loudly beside him. Eadwulf himself was locked in a half-curl, muscles twitching. His face was hidden, but Caleb knew from experience that it would be curled in a rictus of pain. A groan escaped through his clenched teeth as the shock died down, and Caleb purposely slowed his breathing, relaxing his shoulders. 

He couldn’t react like he wanted to, throwing himself down next to Eadwulf and clutching at him until he can be sure that he’s okay and promising that they’ll work out the worksheet together and killing everyone had been involved in hurting him, just absolutely eviscerating them—

Caleb’s own collar twinged sharply at that line of thought, and his fingers went to it instinctively, skin-warm, nestled at his throat like the blade of a guillotine. He shoved aside everything except for the ticking of the clock in the corner and forced himself to stillness until Eadwulf began to stir. 

He whimpered, soft enough that Caleb almost didn’t catch it, and pushed himself up on trembling arms. He scrubbed his palms over his face, breathing raggedly, and Astrid and Caleb stood silent vigil around him. 

“You’ve got a minute left,” Astrid warned eventually, everything in her ironed down to blandness. 

Eadwulf nodded jerkily. There was a five minute grace period, after a shock, where any horrible thing could be thought or felt without retribution. It was, Caleb supposed, too hard to stay grateful and appropriate right after being punished. 

Astrid counted down the last ten seconds, and Caleb could see Eadwulf shuttering himself back up in real time, blocking away everything that he couldn’t afford to have in his mind. 

Caleb’s hands were shaking. He flattened them against his thighs and didn’t think about it.  

“I guess I’d better finish my work,” Eadwulf said grimly. 

He did, though it took him all night and into the morning. He went into the next day tired and off-balance, and Caleb found himself shooting glances down the row of desks, searching out Eadwulf to soothe himself. He was caught at it by the teacher, who rapped his knuckles sharply against the back of his head. He winced away from it and his collar sparked at him until he moved back into position. 

That was one of the first things he’d learned, when he was seven years old and so newly collared that the shape of it still felt unnatural around his neck. Volstruckers did not flinch away from discipline. They accepted it stoically and with gratitude. At first, it was enough to be obedient in his actions. He could rage and yell and imagine punching his teachers as much as he wanted as long as he didn’t act on it. But as he grew into puberty and his magic blossomed alongside him, he was expected to be subservient in his mind as well, to not even think of disobeying. 

“Dreaming of rebellion is the first step to acting on it,” his teacher had said, to him and the dozen others gathered with him, their necks free for the first time in years. “And that is unacceptable.” 

There was one thing that he hated, more than anything, when they had taken his old collar away and replaced it with the one that would hold him even more tightly captive, that would hook itself into his brain and rewrite it from the inside—he was relieved when the new metal had been settled in place, finally chasing away that itching, horrible vulnerability that came with his throat being bare. 

Caleb and Astrid would watch the adult Volstruckers file into the dining room every evening, while Eadwulf shoveled his food down like he’d never seen it before. They walked in perfect lockstep, sliding into their seats together. They didn’t talk while they ate, like the trainees did. There was no giggling or stories told, they didn’t so much as look at each other. Caleb was terrified by it, and he saw that same fear reflected in Astrid. 

They were permitted a certain amount of freedom, as the not-quite-full-Volstruckers that they were. It was true that they could not yell for no reason, speak ill of the academy or of the teachers, dwell too much on sadness, or express anything other than contentment, but Caleb was used to that by then. Volstruckers were perpetually calm, level and composed even in a warzone, and he was being trained to that. He didn’t like it, but he understood the need for it. The best way to make sure that he didn’t lose his shit in battle was to take away his capacity for it. 

Adult Volstruckers didn’t even get their happiness. It was the final collaring, the third time that the heavy iron band would be placed around his throat. Then he would not be able to laugh too loudly or tell Astrid and Eadwulf that he loved them. Any romance or relationship would need to be short and unimportant. 

There was a reason that so many Volstruckers chose to die rather than continue to live like that, and a reason that so few succeeded. 

His collar was sparking, pulsing out electricity in a steady, threatening thrum, like it did whenever he considered his situation for too long. He focused on his professor and did not look over at Eadwulf again. 

They were to learn torture in the next lesson. There were a dozen of them, clustered together like grapes on the vine at the top of the staircase that led down into the dungeons. Astrid knocked her shoe against his, in a motion that would look accidental to anyone else. They’d developed it in their first months together, when they’d been stuffed into the same room along with Eadwulf. A smile or a squeeze of the hand were too revealing, too likely to be punished, so that was how they gave reassurance. It was a silent reminder that he was not alone, and his spine straightened. 

The teacher led the way, torch in her hand, and the rest of them followed, not daring to falter. The tunnels were long and winding, branching off periodically, and lined with thick iron doors. Caleb ended up near the front of the line, purely by chance, and so he was one of the first to see what was waiting for them. The room that they entered was vaguely circular, and dim enough that he had to squint, the only light being provided by the torch and by a pair of sconces on either side of the door. 

There was a man at the center of the room, naked and tied down to a long bench. He was blindfolded and adorned with red cuts down every inch of his skin. They meandered like roads, some of them digging deep enough to expose fat and bone. He was breathing roughly, bruises over his chest that indicated a fractured rib at least. His head turned at the sound of their entrance, and his panic visibly picked up, his limbs straining against the leather cuffs that kept him down. 

The teacher stepped out in front of them, close enough to the bound man that the light of the torch flickered over his torso. She was talking, Caleb thought, outlining the best places to dig in for maximum effect, how using the captive’s name could often make them feel more helpless, what to do if the captive started bleeding out, and other things like that. He could barely hear her over the ringing in his ears, and he couldn’t look away from the small trickle of blood making its way down the man’s collarbone. 

“The most important thing about torture is anticipation,” the teacher said, as Caleb snapped back to attention. 

She paused, her gaze sweeping over them, and they all nodded obediently. She turned to face the man, lowering her torch so that he would feel the heat of it but not be burned. 

“I will demonstrate,” she said, then tilted her head, addressing the man. “Samuel. I will be burning you at some point in the next ten minutes. Prepare yourself.” 

He watched the man—Saumel—start to hyperventilate, arching his back up off the table and tugging fruitlessly at his restraints. The slight sheen of sweat stood out against his body. He started begging at five minutes in, and the teacher just watched him with a slight smile on her lips. Caleb felt dizzy and sort of floaty, like he wasn’t quite in his body. Astrid nudged her foot against his and he barely felt it. 

Fifteen minutes later, she brought the torch down against his shoulder and held it there. Caleb shifted his eyes away, looking at the ceiling instead, and jolted as a warning shock echoed its way through him. 

She moved the torch from his shoulder to the bend of his knee, then to his stomach, and the whole time Samuel was screaming and at some point Caleb just…checked out of the whole situation. 

This was wrong. The thought started tiny, and his collar lashed out at it, making him shudder. Astrid gave up on using her foot and pressed her whole side against his. Judging by the way that she was shaking, it wasn’t just for him. 

Caleb tried to swallow and couldn’t do it, tried to breathe and could only smell burning flesh. He took a step back, then another, until he was fully out of the doorway and his classmates were sending sideways looks at him. He needed to go back, he needed to stay and learn, but this was wrong, and he was stumbling back, and then he was running. 

He made it almost to the staircase before the electricity caught him. He hit the ground hard, his knees taking the brunt of the impact, but he barely felt it over the burning force of the shock lighting up his brain like a Christmas tree. The shocks were familiar to him, but they weren’t something that it was possible to get used to, and this was a true punishment, not just a warning. He wrapped his arms around his stomach and tried to hold himself together like that while he was torn apart. 

He came back to himself curled up with his face pressed into his knees and the cold of the stone working its way into his muscles. It took some effort to raise his head, his neck protesting at the movement. Astrid and Eadwulf were sitting across from him, holding hands, down low where it was shadowed by their legs. The other students were absent, probably waiting in the torture room, and he was distantly relieved that they weren’t here, watching this. His teacher was standing a little ways down the hallway, her arms crossed over her chest. 

“There’s always one,” she said, sounding bitterly disappointed, and strode back towards the torture room. 

“Five minutes,” Astrid said lowly. 

He buried his face back in his knees, trying to regulate himself. It wasn’t working. The image of Samuel kept creeping back into his mind, screaming with his skin burning off him, and each time there was a little voice in his head, screaming about how cruel this was, how inhumane. 

By the time Astrid gave the ten second warning, he was no closer to getting his thoughts back under control. He was brimming with anger, at the academy and at the world in general, and it wouldn’t be squashed so easily. 

The second shock felt inevitable more than anything. He thought he heard Astrid gasp, before he slipped back under that awful haze of pain, but it could have just been his imagination. 

When it was over that time, Eadwulf was holding his hand. His nails were digging in, and he should probably stop that, but he just didn’t have the energy for it. 

“Please,” Eadwulf said to him, five minutes later. 

Caleb turned his head away. Mercifully, he fell into unconsciousness halfway through the third shock. 

It snowed that winter, for two wonderful days. That far south, snow was rare, and when it did come, it was icy and melted as soon as it hit the ground. Caleb knew heat; he knew the weight of the sun on his shoulders and the way that sweat could sometimes smell like seawater. The unbroken layer of the snow was like nothing he had ever known, though, shining like a sheet of metal and blanketing the world into quiet. 

He spent most of those two days outside with Astrid and Eadwulf, kicking the snow at each other and going sledding. He’d never been sledding before, and it was an invigorating sort of rush, hurtling headlong down a hill with nothing but a plank of wood beneath him and trust in his own reaction speed. 

He ended up toppling over more than once, tumbling head-over-heels into a snow drift. Once, he came very close to braining himself on a tree, and then Eadwulf made him move to a more open hill with less inconvenient obstacles to run into. He grumbled a bit about it, because the new hill was slightly less steep, but Eadwulf was even more stubborn than him, when he wanted to be. Astrid was less willful, in that sense at least. She’d concede easily enough, but somehow he’d find himself doing what she wanted anyway. 

Classes had been shut down for the snow, so they only went back to their room when the sky was darkening and their noses were red with cold. The fireplaces had been stoked with magically hot flames, and the three of them huddled together around them, warming their hands over the fire. Astrid had stolen hot chocolate from the kitchens, the nice ones with the little marshmallows, and they’d sit outside to drink. The snow fell constantly, but lightly, shivering its way down from the sky. 

Eadwulf nudged him with an elbow, and he looked up from stirring around his marshmallows. There was a woman coming out of the Volstrucker barracks, bundled up in her robes. She couldn’t have been warm in just that, but she didn’t shiver or put her arms around herself. The woman stopped nearby, but didn’t seem to see them, lowering herself to sitting and resting her wrists on top of her knees. She turned her face up to the sky, staring into the snow, her hood falling back. Her fingers grazed through the snowfall on the ground almost reverently. She didn’t smile, and she didn’t cry, but her shoulders shook like she was sobbing. 

“Do you think she’s sad?” Caleb whispered, ignoring the sting from his collar. 

There was a long silence as all three of them considered the blasphemy of his words, of even suggesting that a Volstrucker would dare to be unhappy. 

“Yes,” Astrid said, even quieter. She’d always been the bravest of them.

“That’ll be us, soon,” Caleb said. 

Astrid dropped her head against his shoulder and Eadwulf nodded slowly. 

The topic of them becoming full Volstruckers didn’t come up again until the snow was gone. It was one of the rare evenings where none of them had homework, and they were enjoying the free time together, in front of the fireplace. The snow had melted, but the academy was still cold and drafty. 

“Our final collaring is in four months,” Eadwulf said. He made it sound like a dry observation. 

“Indeed,” Astrid said. 

“How do you two feel about that?” Eadwulf asked. 

Astrid shifted a bit, looking away from him.“That’s a dangerous question.” 

“And why’s that?” Eadwulf had a skill for sounding perfectly casual, like what he was saying didn’t matter at all. 

“It’s got a dangerous answer,” Caleb said. 

Eadwulf nodded like he understood, and Caleb supposed that he probably did. 

“Two months left,” Astrid said, later. “I’ve heard that there was a Volstrucker who escaped, once, when they took off the collar to put the new one on.” 

That was too direct, too much of a rebellion, and Astrid was being shocked almost before she finished the sentence. She was usually more careful than that, but all of them had been on edge recently. And maybe there just wasn’t any way of getting that information across in a way that the collars would find acceptable. 

“I didn’t know that,” Caleb said, once she had recovered. “That’s very interesting. Academically, I mean.” 

He could feel the magic of his collar reacting, slithering sleepily over his skin, but it settled after a long moment of tension.

The day of the final collaring dawned with a thunderstorm. It was a bad omen, he thought, and the collar grumbled at him for it. It always happened outside, in the fields near the academy where the rolling plains started to transition into forest. The affair was perfunctory at best, with all the trainees kneeling and saying an oath or two. Then there was a shift of magic in the wind and the whole row of trainees lost their collars together. There were two mages there to secure the new collars, and they had already started on the student at the end of the line, their backs to Caleb. 

Caleb turned his head to find Astrid and Eadwulf looking back at him. Astrid held up three fingers and put them down one at a time. When she finished, they moved as one. They had been training their magic since they were children. They’d been torn away from their families for it, molded into soldiers, put through drill after drill until they were perfect. There were two teachers, and three of them, and they had surprise on their side. Eadwulf was setting off a fireball in the first teacher’s face as Astrid was sinking poison into the side of the other and Caleb was throwing up a shield around them. 

The other students were starting to startle, some of them jumping up, but Caleb was already running, the other two on his heels. They went between the trees, and the branches seemed to open up to him, like he was being accepted home. 

In the glimpses he caught of Astrid and Eadwulf, he found them grinning just as wildly as he was, just as savagely. He touched the empty space on his throat and all he felt was free. 

Chapter Text

“There's mold in the fridge!” Jester yelled across the room, already tying on her shoes. 

They were the type with laces that crisscrossed up her ankle, and so her dramatic escape stretched out into half a minute of her threading the eyelets and cursing whenever she lost her grip. Once she was done, she careened out the front door, nearly tripping on the piles of shoes that had formed there despite Caduceus’ best efforts to institute order. She waved over her shoulder, shouting pleasantries behind her, as she successfully made the mold in the fridge into someone else’s problem. 

“Nope,” Beau said from the couch, her head hanging off the side. 

She was staring intently at the crossword puzzle on the floor, an adorable little furrow between her brows that Caleb wanted to poke. The puzzle was upside down, because, in her words, she liked to live life on the edge. She had a pen stuck between her teeth, and a pot of white-out within arms reach. Apparently unerasable mistakes didn't count as “the edge.”

With a murmured word, Caleb lit a flame in the cage of his cupped hands. He fed power into its molten core until it was lapping hungrily at his fingertips, belching up thick tendrils of ash. Then he lobbed it directly at Beau’s face. The tiny firebrand sailed through the air in a perfect arc and splashed harmlessly against her skin. She yelped, arms flailing, and fell backwards off the couch, landing on the carpeted floor with a thump. She blinked the glare of the fire out of her eyes and glared at him, hand inching towards the pen which had fallen with her. 

Caleb quickly vacated the room before he could become the unfortunate victim of death by writing instrument. 

It was a long trip to the fridge, through the many drafty rooms of the manor that was owned by an acquaintance of Caduceus. None of them except for Caduceus had ever actually met the man; he communicated solely through slips of paper pushed underneath the door in the dead of night. His messages, which said things like gimme rent and keep it quiet 2nite were often crusted in dirt stains, like they’d been dug from the earth itself. The rent was delivered through the oak box at the edge of the property. One of them would place the appropriate amount of money in the box, and it would be gone by the next morning, with nothing behind except for the faint scent of something rotten. But it was by far the cheapest option, and big enough for all of them, and that was enough to make them overlook its quirks. 

The ground had been fully carpeted at one point, but years of wear had worn it down in places to reveal the plywood subfloor beneath. Caleb avoided the tack strips that were revealed by the thinning fibers and stepped onto the tiles of the kitchen. Sweat immediately beaded on his forehead. Even when the rest of the house was unpleasantly cold from the inadequate heater and dry enough to give him a nosebleed, the kitchen was sweltering and had condensation dripping down the walls from the humidity. The tiles were especially uncomfortable, nipping a burning heat into his bare heels. A plastic folding table had been set up in the hallway outside the room, and it was there that they did all the prep work, chopping vegetables and marinating meats. They only went into the kitchen to access the stove or oven, and to collect ingredients from its many cabinets. 

The fridge was pushed against the far wall, framed by the curling embellishments of the wallpaper, which was peeling up in flaky patches. It was an imposing metal box of an appliance, marked by the rust flowering across the bottom of the door. Usually, it was bristling with icicles, trapped the things inside in a frozen nest.

When Caleb opened the door, he was expecting to see the growths of that cage, icing over the shelves and the back wall. Instead, he was hit with a wave of hot air that tapped gently against his chest and face. The fridge light had burned out years ago, and most of the back of it was shadowed in a darkness that not even the bright overhead light could reach into. He put out a hand towards one the shelves, meaning to confirm that the cold was truly gone. As soon as he touched it, though, he felt something soft and slimy under his fingers. It was uncomfortably warm, and reminded him of nothing so much as reaching into the guts of a still-living animal. 

He let out a noise that he would call a manly yell, and which Beau would probably characterize as a squeal. He yanked his hand away, and the substance came with it, clinging to his fingers and offering a sucking resistance, like it was trying to pull him towards it. It only came off when he reeled back, shaking his hand wildly until it was gone. 

Hand held protectively to his chest, he cast the same fire spell that he’d terrorized Beau with earlier, sparking power into the universe until it acquiesced to his will and folded over into a spherical ball of fire, floating in the air before him. With a flick of his fingers, he sent it wobbling into the stomach of the fridge, lighting up its contents. 

Black mold grew thickly over the metal-plated back, and stretched over the walls and everything contained inside as well. It fell in gloopy pillars from the top, pooling on containers of pickled okra and half-empty jugs of oat milk. The vegetable drawer had been overtaken completely, replaced by dripping mounds of mold that oozed its dark tendrils out of the sides of the drawer. It was inches thick in some places, and turned the environment of the fridge into an infested landscape; a block of cheddar cheese transforming into the bulky silhouette of a hill, the condiments forming the looming shape of a village. 

The ball of fire floated towards the top of the fridge, coming to a stop at the ceiling, not touching the mold, but hovering near it. And the mold reached out, carrying itself on on spored legs, dark appendages flashing outwards with a speed that he could barely follow and spearing the flame through its core. The fire wavered, like a soldier with a gut wound, already dying as he fell to the bloodsoaked grass. Then it broke apart, dissipating into the mold at its center. The spell slipped from his grasp. 

“Try a different spell,” Beau suggested, five minutes later. He’d called for her with enough panic in his voice that she’d come running, and been annoyed to find him perfectly intact, kneeling in front of the fridge.

One of the things that Caleb respected most about Beau was her ability to keep a level head even when things were falling apart around her. When he’d demonstrated the fire spell, her only reaction had been a slight widening of her eyes. Immediately afterwards, she’d leaned towards the fridge to get a closer look, extending a finger to poke at the mold. Caleb had slapped her hand away before she could. 

Caleb cast a thin sheath of magic over his hand, letting it settle into the shape of his own pores and his jagged fingernails. Then he lifted the magic away, peeling it from his skin, and sent the mage hand into the depths of the fridge. He lifted it to one of the pillars of mold, reaching out a finger to poke at it in the same way that Beau had wanted to. 

The pad of the construct’s finger touched the column of mold, and for a moment, it seemed as if nothing would happen. The surface gave way at the pressure, letting the mage hand sink into it, but the mold itself stayed inert. 

Caleb twisted his magic, starting to pull it away, and then the mold moved. It snapped out before the construct could escape it, surging up the finger in a black wave. It overtook the palm, then spread down the joints of the other fingers, crawling up the nub of the wrist last. The shape of the hand lingered, an impression cast in mold, but collapsed quickly, sliding to the bottom of the fridge. 

Like before, Caleb felt it when the spell fell apart. But that time, there was something else too, infringing on the mental space that his magic usually monopolized. It was a monolithic presence, and he could feel the thick tentacles of rot that circled its core, rooting it deep into the physical plane. He slammed his mind’s defenses down, reeling back from the fridge. 

He collapsed at the entryway to the kitchen, his legs refusing to support him. He bent over his knees, wrapping his arms around his head to protect himself from the light which had suddenly become blinding. His mind was aching in a stretched-out kind of way, like his neurons had been rearranged into an order that was not quite identical to how they used to be. Something wet had pooled on his cheek, and when he blotted at it with his fingers, he found that it was blood, leaking from his tear ducts. 

“Are you dying?” Beau asked dryly, but he could see the concern in the furrow of her brows. 

“I’m fine,” he gasped, and lowered the arms around his face so that he could glare at the fridge. “But we need to get rid of that.” 

They waited for Fjord and Jester to get home before they tried anything, because Caleb wanted backup if things went wrong. Beau and Jester had declared that they could lift the fridge, and had seemed so disgusted when Caleb mentioned the hand trolley in the closet that he’d shut up and let them work. Fjord stood off to the side, sword in hand, stony eyes fixed on the small puddle of mold that was dripping from the crack between the door and the main body of the fridge. 

Useless as it likely was, Caleb readied his spells. 

In the end, disposing of the fridge was anticlimactic. Beau and Jester shuffled through the house, turning sideways to squeeze through doors, and set the fridge down at the end of the driveway. Beau gave it a resentful parting kick. 

By the morning, the city garbage services had taken the fridge away. All that was left were the blotchy puddles of mold that followed the path that Beau and Jester had taken, and those were disposed of with a good scrubbing of bleach. 

Caleb worked nights, and so he was often alone in the house, during the day when his housemates went off to school or their jobs. It worked well for him; he loved his friends, but he also valued time to himself. In the morning before he went to bed, he’d catch up on his reading or write in his spellbook, secure in the knowledge that nothing and nobody would disturb him. He’d been working his way through a mystery novel featuring a murdered man and a deserted island. The plot was somewhat predictable, but the characters were interesting enough to make up for it. He had just gotten to the part where the two main characters were leaning in, lips almost brushing—and a screech came from upstairs. 

He jolted, the book falling out of his hands. It wasn’t the sort of noise that came with living in an old house, not the creak of wood settling or the quiet gurgle of pipes. It sounded like a cry echoing from deformed lungs, like the thing making it wasn’t sure on the specifics of how a scream could sound. It ended in a wet gulp, and by then Caleb could pinpoint that it was coming from exactly above him. 

Caleb wasn’t ashamed to admit that he almost fled the house and waited for his friends to come home. But he’d had a long day and had been looking forward to going to bed. He was a wizard, and a powerful one at that, so he squared his shoulders and ascended the stairs. They squeaked like an entire nation of mice was living beneath them, and he tried to lighten his steps. 

He stopped in front of the bathroom. The door was open, and from what he could see, nothing inside looked out of place. The soap still sat daintily on the little plate that Jester had bought for it, the soulless paintings that had come with the house were hanging straight, the porcelain of the sink was unmarred. 

His entrance was hesitant. He scanned every inch of the room, noting the missing plug on the bathtub—he’d have to get that replaced sometime soon—and saw nothing but the innocent landscape of a suburban bathroom. His heart was starting to calm down from the double-time beat that it had been maintaining since he’d first heard that scream, and he was willing to accept that it had just been a creepy coincidence. Maybe he’d heard a bird or a fox and been mistaken in thinking that it had come from inside the house. 

Something plopped against his forehead. He flinched back, reaching up instinctively to wipe away the dampness, and his breath froze in his chest when he saw the black stain on his fingers. He looked up. 

The mold had formed a perfect circle above his head. He stepped back, and it followed him, shifting sinuously to remain in that precise spot overtop him. The interior of it was moving, like earth infested with maggots, bulging up in uneven bursts. Thin wires of mold were hanging down, almost long enough to brush against his hair. His mouth opened in shock, and another node of mold fell, landing between his teeth, nestled against the roof of his mouth. He tried to spit it out, but it had hooked in, gripping onto his tongue. He reached up and grabbed it, squeezing the warmth of its mass between his fingers, and ripped it out. Chunks of his tongue came with it, and he coughed the blood onto the floor. He flung the little piece of rot to the floor before it could get a hold on his hand. 

Another piece of mold fell, then two more, and he dodged backwards, slamming the door behind him. He blazed down the stairs and through the many rooms of the manor, out the door, through the front yard, and down the street until his breath started heaving in his lungs and he had to slow to a walk. His housemates came home to him sitting on the curb, cupping a hand beneath his chin so that his mauled tongue didn’t drip blood on his shirt. 

His friends didn’t disbelieve him, exactly, but they didn’t understand his fear. He told them not to go into the house, and they assured him that they’d be careful, but went anyway. They came back with the news that there was no sign of the mold except for wet spots in the bathroom ceiling where it had been. 

“Maybe it’s gone?” Jester suggested, and Caleb just shook his head. 

They got motel rooms for the night, and from the glances that his friends exchanged, he knew that they were doing it to satisfy his fear, not out of any real worry. While the others were getting ready for bed, he called a professional inspection service, and paid extra to get it done the next day. 

He was sharing a room with Beau. Most of the time, she was up late into the night, but by the time he’d finished his call, she was asleep, splayed out on her bed with her boots still on. He cast mage hand and sent the little construct flitting over to pull them off and line them up against the wall. He pulled the strings of the spell taunt, meaning to move it back towards him. The hand didn’t move. Caleb frowned, tugging harder, but the construct was frozen, hovering in the air, not responding even when he tried to dismiss the spell. 

Then it swiveled towards him, fingers moving outside his control, stretching out lazily. Something dark speckled over its surface, growing so gradually that he thought it was a trick of the light first. He tilted his head, squinting, and the mold came into sharp relief. 

Caleb scrambled backwards on the bed, horror stealing his words. He could see spores in the air, outlined by the moonlight streaming in through the window. He was already surrounded, encased on all sides. 

“Beau—” he started, but the mold stopped him, slapping wetly over his mouth. It was on his tongue again, bristles scraping against the inside of his cheeks. It crawled towards the back of his throat, and he choked, scratching at his neck with his fingernails. His hands were grabbed by the same substance, held firmly down against the bedsheets, and mold crept over his legs and his chest, squirming against his skin and penetrating slowly inwards with a thousand tiny pricks. The mold slipped down his throat, and he felt it make it all the way to his stomach and expand outwards from there. It was in his veins. It was between the fibers of his muscles. 

Beau grumbled, rolling over, and her eyes fluttered over. She blinked, hazy with sleep, and that was right about when the mold encased his eyes. It burned, a deep pain that felt like it was going all the way back to his brain, and he couldn’t see anything but darkness. 

Beau was talking, yelling to him or the mold or maybe both. He couldn’t make out her words; the mold had taken over his ears. Something sliced against his side, opening up a burning cut in his skin, and the mold attacked it eagerly, using that opening to get under his skin, oozing between the layers of it. He heard Beau make a hurt, broken sound, and figured that the cut had been from her sword. The mold bore down on him, holding him flat on his back, invading him down to his core. It ached like a migraine, pulsing waves of pain over every inch of him, and he was alone in the darkness. 

Something that was not the mold touched his hand. It was warm, but not in the unnatural way of the rot, just a human warmth that Caleb strained towards, fighting against the bonds holding him to get closer to it. Beau was still talking, quieter than before, and he could make out the determination in her tone but nothing of her words. 

The grip on his hand tightened, and suddenly he could hear Beau’s words, muffled but audible. 

“I’m not going to leave you alone,” she whispered. She embraced him, human warmth pressed against him from chest to knees.