Chapter Text
exhale, exhaustion, exotic
Loving Jester has always been easy. Far too easy — easy enough to happen without warning, to sneak up behind you and pounce.
Actually being with Jester, though…
Being with Jester is a challenge.
Not because it is unpleasant — not because he is not grateful — on the contrary, Caleb is nearly exhausted with pleasure and gratitude, with the heady and absurd knowledge that she is his, that she has made him hers. Getting here was like fighting their way through a sea of battle, separated from each other time and again at the last minute by enemy swords or cavalry charges or a rain of arrows, but now that they have finally crossed the field and reached each other, there are no more questions. They are together. End of sentence.
That doesn't mean the end of everything else, though. Of doubts, or of pain, or of the blood and mud and broken bones they've earned on their way across the battlefield. There are other kinds of exhaustion besides the ones found on the other side of long laughter or travel or a day spent together in bed. Love cannot actually heal all wounds. Not on its own, at least. It must work in concert with time, with effort, with tears, and with a fucking stubborn faith.
Or so Jester insists, anyway.
Caleb is less sure — that is, he is not sure that certain wounds can ever be healed, or that some battlefields can even be walked away from at all. He doesn't know where he would go. Where could he go? Where could there actually be peace and stillness and...he doesn't know how to say it...respite? Hope?
"Mmm, probably Ank'harel," says Jester after some thought.
Caleb looks down at her, affection running lazy circles around his heart. She is resting against him, one arm slung across his stomach and the end of her tail wrapped possessively around his ankle.
"I did not mean literally," he tells her, pressing a fingertip against the sharp point of one of her horns, just hard enough to send a spike of pain through the nerve endings and up into his hand.
Jester lifts her head so that her chin is nestled against Caleb's chest and gives him a long, languid smile. "You'd like it in Ank'harel. It's really nice."
"You have never been to Ank'harel."
"Well, no," she admits with a slight pout, "but I've read about it. I've read about Shamal Bay, and the Ozmet Sea, and Vasselheim, and Syngorn, and all kinds of places, Caleb, and I think you'd like Marquet the best. It's hot and there are palm trees."
"Very exotic," he murmurs, stroking her shoulder.
She hums against his skin. "I'd like to go there someday," she sighs. "There's a lot of places I'd like to go."
"I will go anywhere with you," says Caleb, and he means it — across any ocean, through any wasteland, into any battlefield. Gods help him, there are so many scars out there that he has not collected yet, so many more blades and burns in his future. He can feel it with every breath. The air is heavy in his lungs, like a mist of blood and sweat, roiling and poisonous and choking. The smog of war.
Jester looks up at him again, and her gaze is desert wind and open sand dunes, sapphires and amethysts. Clear blue sky and soft sunlight. Sea salt, spices, and the cry of seagulls.
Caleb exhales, and the smog clears. Not entirely. Not forever. But enough for now.
He can breathe again.
"Let's take a vacation," whispers Jester. "I mean it. Somewhere crazy, and warm, just you and me."
"Just you and me," he echoes, and he thinks: this woman will drag me across the world like a fucking hurricane, if I can just manage to keep up with her.
He is up for the challenge, he thinks.
He hopes.