Chapter Text
Essek enters the Tower to the sounds of an argument.
The voices are muffled at first, behind a closed door hidden between shelves in the library, and Essek only really notices it when he wanders over to find something to flip through. No one was in to greet him when he arrived, so he had assumed he was to wait for someone to remember that they had invited him in the first place.
Eavesdropping is unbecoming. He knows that even as something tangentially akin to an arcane spymaster he was held to a higher standard than hiding around corners and listening in. He certainly has no right now, in this place with these people.
And yet...
It's not that he moves closer with the intention of truly overhearing. He's content enough to let the words go on angrily yet indistinct.
It's just that...
It sounds like Caleb. Like Caleb barely holding himself back from shouting, syllables hissed through gritted teeth and his accent catching on the ends. Like Caleb, angrier than Essek has ever heard him.
When he's close enough, the first thing he hears clearly is "I won't," in what sounds like Caduceus's low, pointedly even voice.
Caleb bites back, dangerously quiet. Furniture creaks - a chair, as someone stands? A teacup clicks against its saucer. Footsteps begin to pace, rapid and stumbling.
"Whatever it is that you think you want-“
"I do not want this," Caleb snaps, finally audible. Essek barely holds back a gasp. Caleb's voice is ragged like he's been screaming or crying or desperately trying to contain it. "Want has never been an option, not with - not for me." Footsteps move further from the door. A chair scrapes across the carpeted floor.
"Living in what happened to you wont make it easier to bear."
"Please," Caleb begs, and if his anger before had been frightening than his desperation now is heartbreaking. Essek realizes he's pressed a hand to the door in front of him, reaching out without meaning to. He doesn't pull back.
Caduceus sighs heavily, like he's carrying the burden of the world on his shoulders.
"...It's cruel of you to ask me to hurt you like that."
Essek can imagine how Caleb must rear back, his eyes flashing with offense-anger-fear-grief. An echo of the same feelings pangs in his own chest. Men who know how to inflict pain at the marrow level, who excel at it - to even think of hurting these people who have somehow seen good in them is - it’s an insult, a nightmare.
Essek steps away from the door. He pulls a book off a shelf at random and finds a seat on the other side of the salon, and when Caduceus passes him on his way upstairs - ears pinned low, gait heavy, expression troubled - and their eyes meet and Caduceus nods like he knows -
Essek takes a deep breath, steels himself, and goes to see Caleb.
Caleb is pacing. He walks in tight circles, his steps quick and controlled in contrast to the loud heaving of his breath. One hand runs through his hair - already knotted and half out of its tie - and the other moves restlessly from his spellbook at his side to his chest, gripping his attuned amulet tightly enough that the cord bites into his neck, to his opposite forearm to begin scratching at his bared scars only to be snatched back with a curse and a wild shake of his head.
He doesn't even notice Essek entering. His eyes are squeezed shut as he mutters to himself, some repeated phrase in Zemnian that Essek of course cannot parse.
He's unsure of how to proceed. He's never seen Caleb so... Unstable, he supposes. Vague memories of the Nein joking about Caleb in the early days of their group, a cowardly, paranoid 'dirt wizard' who tried to hold himself carefully, painfully apart from them all, suddenly make more sense.
Here he can see a man who lived years on the run, looking over his shoulder for the looming shadow of the man he feared and hated most in the world.
Caleb has scratched hard enough to draw blood, no longer pacing but standing with his head down. He's facing away from the door and muttering to himself. His breath hitches as his nails dig into his skin. Essek finally moves.
"Caleb," he starts. His voice rings too loud in this small study and he immediately regrets it as Caleb whirls around to stare at him.
His eyes are wide like a prey animal's, glassy and bloodshot with dark bruises under them. They look through Essek first before focussing enough to see him. He slumps, staggering back to fall into a chair. One bloodied hand pushes his hair out of his eyes and leaves a streak of red up his forehead.
Essek moves automatically, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket and boxing Caleb into his seat as he wipes away the blood first from his face, then taking his hands one at a time to clean them off. He only realizes what he's doing and how close they are mid-motion, but even though Caleb hasn't spoken yet he's already breathing steadier.
He sways in his seat, exhaustion obviously weighing on him, leaning towards Essek's chest as if to rest against him.
"Entschuldigung," Caleb mumbles. He leans back, tipping his head to look up at Essek for once. "Ich war - We were talking, and you - you were due to arrive, I remember, but he..." He trails off, gaze turning distant again.
Essek carefully moves from his hand up his wrist. The cloth is swiftly staining red, but a cantrip restores it well enough, and he doesn't like how ragged some of these deeper scratches look. He wishes a cleric were here - then he remembers that Caleb had seemingly asked too much of the Nein's more focussed healer, and his terrible muddled curiosity-concern nearly overwhelms him.
Caleb gasps a breath that Essek hadn't even noticed he'd held. His eyes find Essek's, searching. Eye contact is a rare thing with him and is all the more piercing for it. Essek feels seen by those eyes in a way he rarely does. He looks away first.
"Do you still keep bandages on you?" He asks, willing his voice to stay steady. "I'd like to wrap these up before they begin bleeding too heavily again."
Caleb shrugs, a boneless, full-body motion that nearly dislodges Essek's light hold on him.
"Not deep enough to worry," he says in a worryingly casual tone. "You overheard?"
Essek pauses before carefully withdrawing. He hesitates to put real space between them. Caleb is still faintly trembling beneath his veneer of forced calm.
"...Nothing specific," he admits. "And not… entirely intentionally. I'm sorry."
Caleb shakes his head. Another one of those broken, hollow laughs escapes him.
"My fault for asking him," he says vaguely. "I needed -" he falters. One shaking hand motions limply to the desk pressed up against one of the corner walls. "First aid in every room here. Seemed prudent with them - us." He falters, mouth falling slack and eyes unfocussing before he snaps back to attention.
Essek presses his handkerchief more firmly to the worst of Caleb's injuries, but he doesn't react beyond an instinctual tensing of the wrist. It's unsettling, how he fades in and out of the moment. Mania clings to his shoulders, the bulging tendon in his neck, his wavering voice.
He doesn't want to ask. He knows, with the same certainty he feels when a spell breaks from his control, that he won't like what comes of it.
Caleb Widogast is a Dark Star on the verge of collapsing inwards, devouring the base matter of himself until he's less than dust. Essek feels terrifyingly like the trigger, like the last straining pieces of concentration keeping the weight of void and gravity in check. Caleb Widogast is a well-timed Firebolt, a dancing amber globe leading the newly devout to the surface, a Tower of a home made to hold and comfort and protect and love. Essek is helpless in the face of the heat, the light.
He doesn't cup his face, but it's a near thing. He settles for brushing copper strands behind one rounded ear.
"I will help you," he says. He doesn't know what he's offering. He doesn't think he cares.
Relief breaks across Caleb's face, reviving him. He always looks so pale next to Essek's dark skin, but he only now realizes how wan he has been, colour and life leeched by whatever is eating him from the inside out.
Caleb's hands come up to clutch at his clothing, pulling himself upright and Essek closer. He steadies himself with a hand - not on Caleb's shoulder, but it's a near thing, grabbing the back of the chair he's sitting in.
"Please," Caleb says hoarsely. It echoes his earlier plea to Caduceus, just as urgent. "It's just a spell, just a little while but I need to know, I need to know and I can't without being it again but no one will -" he chokes, gasps for breath. "But you will." His eyes are wide and searching and hollow and ecstatic. A smile tugs at his lips, not one Essek recognizes in his face but one he knows all the same: An addiction, fed.
He begins to regret his offer - the timing, at least, but never the spirit of its intention.
"Tell me what you need," he says anyway. It is a twisted, dead joy in Caleb's expression, but he'd rather move forward from this than return to that teetering edge between hysteria and numbness.
Caleb's hands fumble at his side, pulling out his spellbook and shoving it into Essek's chest. He grabs it automatically, mind whirring.
"It's on loose pages," Caleb tells him. His hands join Essek's around the binding, opening the book to the back where loose pieces of spell-grade parchment have been tucked into a pocket on the inside cover. "I don't want it but I transcribed it anyways because I needed it but it can't - it can't - it can't be in my book, ja?"
"Slow down," Essek says just a little bit desperately, scrambling to keep up. He puts the weight of the spellbook back in Caleb's hands - his fingers trace the stitches of the binding, over and over and over - to unfold the loose pages. "Let me catch up. What have you been working on?"
Caleb leans in, recoils, snarls and shakes his head and mumbles an apology. He sucks in a long breath, pushing the heel of his palm into his eye. His arms have finally stopped bleeding.
Essek takes the opportunity to scan the equations at the top of the first page, establishing energy output and defining limits. It's written in base-Sylvan, Caleb's preferred notation, but the glyphs are scribed haphazardly, none of his usual care in the balancing of equations or component measurements. A rush job, he thinks, done out of necessity rather than Caleb's usual savouring of study for its own sake. He spots the shorthand for Otiluuk's Fifth blotted and messily crossed out in favour of Dreyan's Arc - a direct copy of someone else's work rather than Caleb tweaking it to suit his casting style.
It's a strange piece of work over all, and then Essek's mind catches up with what he's reading and he realizes the truth of the matter.
He speaks without meaning to, his voice flat and horrified.
"Why do you have this?"
Caleb freezes, flinches, exhales sharply. His upper lip curls as he stares at the papers in Essek's grasp. He turns to ice - no, to blue flame, searing.
"It has its uses." His accent is thick, his tone somewhere between stilted monotone and mocking. "Isn't it enough to have wanted it?"
Essek flinches. He thinks about the spells he collected, the spells he designed, that were dramatic and showy and powerful and deadly and all meant to prove how brilliant he was. Heresy, blasphemy, treason, all to sate his damned curiosity, to soothe his bruised ego. And for what?
Wasn't it enough to simply want?
Caleb meets his stunned gaze steadily, challenging. His mind is working but the light gone from his eyes, entropy of motion that has lost all purpose. Essek shakes his head slowly, not breaking away.
"Why do you have this?" He asks again.
Feeblemind, he thinks is the Common translation. A highly concentrated burst of psychic energy designed to shatter a person's mind. It's the sort of magic most only encounter is books, and even those texts are usually restricted. Essek has never seen it cast, has only come across partial transcriptions meant to demonstrate some concept and its practical application. It’s the sort of magic that exists only to destroy, to lay waste to the fundamental parts of a person with little recourse.
He knows Caleb - or at the very least he knows his magic, knows the feeling of the Weave as Caleb plucks at its strings and makes it sing, makes matter bend and shift and break so he can rebuild it in the image of the world as he desires it. This is not that. Even that deadly Web of Fire he built from scratch serves a purpose, a carefully targeted destruction that burns soot patterns like art into the ground, artistry and defense and last desperate measures all woven together. That is Caleb's magic. This is the most artless kind of breaking.
Maybe Caleb sees some of what he's thinking in his face, or maybe he's just too tired to stay so burning-cold. He curls into himself, the unstoppable collapse of a dying star, his face in his hands and his breathing unsteady.
"I don't want it," he moans, a pitiful sound. His shoulders begin to quake.
Essek lets the papers flutter to the ground and kneels in front of him, hands hovering over his wrists but not sure if or how to touch.
"You don't want it," he repeats back, speaking slowly and softly. "That's alright, I see now, it won't stay in your book." Caleb's hands drop to clutch his spellbook to his chest protectively. He's back to looking through Essek, distant and afraid and terribly resigned to that fear.
"It's awful," Caleb says plaintively. Essek nods, but he's not who Caleb is trying to convince. "It breaks.”
The knife's edge that Caleb has been on this whole time seems to have collapsed under him, and in lieu of manic anger or dissociation he's ended up small and scared, diminished in some intangible way. Essek thinks this might somehow be the worst option. This man cannot meet him as an equal, cannot explain what troubles him or discuss how it might be patched if not repaired. Essek is at a loss. He takes a deep breath, steeling himself before taking a risk.
He cups Caleb's face as gently as he can, skin searing where they touch, and presses his lips carefully to his brow. Caleb makes a quiet, wounded sound that comes to rest in the hollow of Essek's throat. Unsteady breaths pant hot and rapid against his collar. Essek moves to awkwardly withdraw but Caleb chases after him, pushing his face into Essek's shoulder with his whole weight behind him. Essek shifts to rebalance them both, a spell at the ready to catch them if he falters. He hopes to every god that he doesn't.
It's quiet for a few minutes, their breathing the only sound as it eases into sync. Caleb shifts in place eventually, not quite pulling away but beginning to supporting his own weight rather than leaning on Essek.
“Entschuldigung,” he whispers hoarsely. Essek assumes this is some sort of apology, but before he can refuse it Caleb continues, “I've been a poor host.” He sits up. Essek immediately misses the warmth and weight of him.
"Please don't," he says, quiet but firm. "My offer stands; tell me what you need."
Caleb wipes a hand down his face. He looks exhausted, drained of any lingering tension or frenetic energy.
"It was a mistake to ask," he mutters bitterly. He glares at the scattered parchment around them. "I should just burn it."
It's the outcome that Essek should want, would have pushed for if Caleb hadn't brought it up, but...
"At least tell me why?"
Caleb stares at him wearily, warily, defeated and embarrassed. Essek knows the feeling. His mouth buzzes with the memory of skin on skin.
"...I lost time," Caleb admits. His brows pinch. In his expression there is frustration and grief and what Essek is beginning to realize is an ever-present rage at what has been done to him. Caleb huffs, shakes his head. "I don't do that, really - I didn't, before..." Unsure of where this is going, Essek makes a sound of acknowledgement and urges him on. “I - when I burned them," he makes to shy away but can't. Essek realizes that he's been holding him this whole time. "You know. I couldn't bear it. It didn't make sense, and I turned it over and over but it always came out wrong." His breathing picks up. "It was like pulling loose thread and having the whole cloth unravel, I kept losing and losing - and then it. Stopped." He shudders. "I stopped. And then nothing is clear, until the end of it. And then I ran, and I never - I just assumed it was me, that I had - but maybe I didn't break all the way and he did it to me, for me -"
Essek shushes him as he begins to hyperventilate, prying his nails from the meat of his palms before he can injure himself any further. His thoughts spin along half a dozen tracks that all come to the same conclusion:
"You think you were... Kept? Under the effects of this spell."
Caleb nods. Essek feels sick.
Essek tries to picture Caleb under Feeblemind’s effects, if only because his mind often goes to the worst possibilities first and he can't quite stop the imagining. Caleb cowering on all fours like a cornered animal, all bared teeth and blind panic. Caleb but younger in the way that humans look so young so briefly. His hair cropped short, probably, the way many captured Volstrucker wore it - it would make his cheekbones sharper, his eyes wider. One room in a row of identical rooms, cot bolted to the floor and walls scratched with bloodied fingernails. Fear without root, grief without cause, anger without direction.
Essek exhales shakily, feeling the flyaways of Caleb's hair moving against his face. He presses his thumb into the dents in Caleb's palm, faintly feeling his pulse - rapid but steady, gradually slowing but not quite settling.
"You want someone - me," he surprises himself with the force behind that single word, like - like he would fight for the right to do this, like he wouldn't let anyone else even try. "You want... this spell cast on you to compare the experiences."
Caleb nods against his shoulder, rocking both of them.
"I need to know," he says wretchedly, voice thick with emotion. His anger seems to rally as his hands close tightly around Essek's, spitting out his words. "I need to know how much he broke me and how much I was just broken myself."
He should say no. He should take these papers and tear them to shreds and disintegrate them and then fling what remains into the wind. He should end this. No answers could be worth it.
But Essek knows desperation, and he knows the ceaseless ache of having answers within reach but out of your hands, and even if he knew nothing else he would know Caleb Widogast.
"...Very well," he says solemnly, bile burning the back of his throat. Caleb shudders, clutching tighter. He starts to cry silently. Essek presses his face into his hair and sears this awful feeling into his memory. "Very well, my friend."
Essek is damned already. What's one more sin?