Work Text:
Caleb prided himself on his grasp of all the languages he spoke. Under certain circumstances, however, his control over them had a tendency to slip. Most of his cursing was done in his mother tongue, particularly when the reason for it came as a surprise; a stubbed toe brought out a Scheiße!; being short-changed by a merchant prompted a Hurensohn hiss. It was only natural, he felt; these were instinctive reactions, and his brain took the path of least resistance every time.
There were less explosive examples, of course. There’d been a time before the Nein when he and Nott were fleeing guards, and only thanks to her hiding skills tucking him away did they escape, and—
“Dank den Göttern für dich,” he panted, and only when he saw her befuddled look and ran that back in his head did he realize. “Thank the gods for you,” he clarified in Common, and she broke out into a wide and fang-filled grin.
Another time, Beau helped him up off his ass in the midst of a fight and asked him if he was alright. “Ich glaube, er hat etwas losgeschlagen,” he groaned. Standing was mostly a matter of letting her strength do the work.
“Aw shit, he hit you so hard you forgot Common!” Beau slapped him twice on the shoulder.
Caleb shook his head to clear it. “I’m fine,” he insisted and readied another spell.
And so on.
—
Perhaps it was just when his guard was down.
The first time it happened with Essek was quite early on when they were deep in study. The room’s dimness was starting to hurt his eyes, so he asked, as politely as he could, if he could get a little more illumination, as he was far less suited to the dark than a drow.
Essek gestured, and the lights grew brighter. They looked up at each other in acknowledgment, and the light caught Essek’s eyes. For the first time, perhaps, he noticed their exact hue: a clear, pale violet like iolite, perfectly nestled between purple and blue, the kind of color a human could only mimic with illusion. He opened his mouth to thank Essek but what came out instead was, “Deine Augen sind wunderschön.”
Essek stared at him, perfectly neutral save for the subtle rise of stark white eyebrows. “I don’t speak Zemnian,” he said, flashing his customary, placid little smile.
Caleb shouted curse words at himself in his head, and those were, true to form, in Zemnian too. He cleared his throat and said, “I was wondering if you could help me with this glyph.”
“Of course,” Essek said, rising to join him on the settee.
Caleb was aware enough of himself to know the heat in his face meant he’d turned red as a beet, but mercifully it went without comment.
—
The second time, he was feeling petulant. Essek was normally a very patient and talented teacher, but there came a time when they butted heads over the best way to work a spell: Essek’s experience and Caleb’s contradicted each other, and neither was willing to admit that he was wrong because they weren’t. Caleb couldn’t have said why they were getting spirited over it. It was unlike them to lock horns this way, and the condescension chafed fiercely.
In a fit of pique, he muttered, “Du hast Glück, dass du abartig schön bist, denn du bist so ein Arsch.”
Essek’s head whipped up so fast that, for a moment, Caleb thought maybe he understood after all—but Essek just squinted at him without recognition and said, “I beg your pardon?”
Caleb passed a hand over his face and scratched at the beard he desperately needed to shave off. “Nothing,” he lied, “just annoyed with myself. This should be a moment of discovery, now that we know this can go either way. A door has unlocked and we’re both pulling it shut. Can we start again?”
Essek regarded him with the same squint for a moment, as if he didn’t believe him. Caleb schooled his breath, fighting not to betray himself, but it was a thin lie, and he knew it; his tone had been arch, and Essek was no fool.
Finally, though, whether he bought it or was simply letting it go and cataloging it for later, Essek let out a very measured sigh. “Yes. Perhaps we’ve both approached it from an inappropriate angle. If we hold that either of these runes can open the circuit….”
He turned back to the slateboard, and that was that, but Caleb scolded himself on his slip all the same.
—
The next time it happened was research again: this time, with Nott’s help, they were deep in the throes of developing the transmogrification that would give her her life back. They had all been puzzling over one part of the equation for the last solid hour without getting anywhere, and Caleb was slowly but steadily losing his mind over it.
It was Essek, of course, who held two discarded pieces of paper up to the light, one over the other, and moved them until they aligned just so, and cried out, “Usst’ol inbal—I have it!”
Caleb and Nott were on their feet and by his side in an instant as he swept his way back to the second slateboard and began sketching out symbols.
“Transposition,” the drow crowed. “We had these right, just not their relationship. If we introduce this one in first form and this in third—”
Caleb’s eyes widened as he took it in. He was on to something, but…. “It’s missing something though. In first and third there’s a dissonance.”
Essek’s face was too delighted to be smug. It was a very good look on him. “Not if it’s called in B flat.”
It was—of course, of fucking course the intonation mattered. “A tonal shift,” he breathed. He took Essek by the lapels of his robe and shook him gently, and blurted out, “Ich könnte dein Gehirn küssen und dann deinen Mund.”
“What the hell is going on,” Nott squeaked at the same time as Essek chuckled almost nervously, “Caleb, I don’t—”
“Sorry, sorry, I know, neither of you speak Zemnian, I’m just—” He slapped his hands together, then clapped them to Essek’s shoulders and shook him again, which only served to fluster the drow more. “Brilliant, fucking brilliant, we have a way forward!”
The work moved on, his outburst…not forgotten, but tucked away for later rumination.
—
There was a night—insofar as there was day and night at all in Rosohna—that Caleb and Essek studied far later than they’d planned because things were going well, and both were too lost in their collaboration to think about the time.
It caught up with him as he was cross-referencing a ritual layout for the latest spell Essek was allowing him to copy. One moment he was stretched out on his side on a chaise poring over a book; the next, snorting awake on the very spot, only now there was a pillow under his head and a blanket draped over him. Essek knelt before him, having carefully extracted the book from his sleeping grasp.
“It is alright,” Essek said gently. “Jester asked after you and I let her know you are resting here. I apologize that I do not have a guest bedroom ready here, but you are welcome to stay here if you are comfortable.”
Caleb sniffed and muttered warmly, only half-conscious, “Dein Bett wäre besser.”
Essek smiled indulgently and brushed a stray lock of hair out of his face. “Sleep well, Caleb.”
And he did.
The following morning, though, all he could think about was Dein Bett wäre besser and Essek’s careful fingers touching his face.
It did not help matters that no matter how much he insisted that nothing happened, the Mighty Nein were dead set on believing that he’d slept with his mentor, and they spent the next three days teasing him about it, none of them aware that he was simultaneously tormenting himself.
—
They didn’t see each other for what felt like a lifetime, and then one earth-shaking thing after another happened so quickly they could scarcely get a moment to breathe in between. They braved Eiselcross; they delved into Aeor; they were hunted by terrors of the past, both ancient and their own.
In the midst of a messy ambush by three of the wolf-cat eye-beasts, one of them managed to get the drop on Caleb, and it pinned him, screaming, to the ground. Its claws dug fiery punctures into either side of his chest. He thrashed, trying to get both hands up to cast, but it would be too late—his reflexes weren’t good enough. His body had never been nearly as sharp as his mind, and he was about to pay the price in the form of massive, dagger-like fangs lunging towards his throat. He screamed again, chest nearly frozen with fear, when—
CRACK!! A black bolt of lightning blasted the beast clean off him. Fjord had already injured it pretty badly; he watched it bounce off the cracked stone floor once, twice, and finally lie still, smoke rising from its fur. He looked the other way to find Essek rushing up to him and offering a hand up, which he took.
“Was würde ich ohne dich tun?” he panted as they clung to each other’s sleeves.
Essek just shook his head a little, patted Caleb’s cheek, and echoed his own words back to him: “Stay close.”
Hours after the fight, his cheek still felt warm where they had touched, despite the cold.
—
Through some miracle, Caleb managed to stick to Common entirely when he confessed his feelings in the Blooming Grove, once all was said and done; but it opened a floodgate, just a little, in their everyday lives from then on.
Schatzi, Caleb called him, and Leibling, and Süßer when he was feeling amorous, and Essek called him Ssinjin and Lo’larox right back. Most of their time together was spent speaking their second language, but there was something comfortable about letting their mother tongues slip through in these little ways to fill the space, expressing a depth of feeling that Common didn’t seem to fill.
There came a morning when they were in Essek’s kitchen sipping tea and breathing in the rich scent of Vollkorn Broetchen from the oven, and Caleb took in Essek’s bedhead sticking up over a rested, peaceful face with still-sleepy eyes half-closed, and his heart felt too big for his chest. This man was an untouchable ice sculpture less than a year ago, and now Caleb got to share his bed and his home and see what he looked like first thing in the morning—before he was the Shadowhand; before he was the scion of Den Thelyss; when he was simply Essek.
He could not help but murmur, “Götter, ich bins so verschossen in dich.”
“Das Gefühl ist Gegenseitig,” came the warm and sleepy reply.
Which. What.
“Du…du kleine Scheißter!!” Caleb sputtered. “Du sprichts Zemnianisch?!”
Essek, the fucker, smirked like the cat that got the cream over his teacup, violet eyes twinkling under his eyelashes. “Katerchen, ich bins ein Spionagemeister. Natürlich spreche ich Zemnianisch.”
In his shock, Caleb switched to Common. “This whole time?!”
Essek tilted his chin up. “Tell me again about my eyes.”
Caleb took a deep breath, set his tea aside, and launched himself at Essek, who yelped, laughing, and danced out of his grasp. Essek led him on a merry chase around the kitchen and held out as long as he could before crying mercy at Caleb’s vicious tickling.
The rolls were a little burnt that morning, but Caleb had no regrets.
end.