Caleb knows the man is responding, can hear the vague shapes and taste the sounds of words from the drow’s mouth, but it’s all dulled by the roar of blood in his ears and the panic spreading throughout him. They have his friends. Fear, sudden and sharp and worse than anything he’d experienced in here, worse than forgetting, so much worse, he’d rather forget then get them hurt, it’s just like the Iron Shepherds, just like his parents, he has failed them again, it’s happening again, he lets people in, he loves people and then he gets them killed—
“Calm yourself,” that same voice from before, only closer, too close. “Hearthweaver!” The voice calls loudly, sound bouncing off the far wall, and then it’s in his ear again. “Young man, you must stop, you will hurt yourself if you— shit.
Caleb is shaking, is wrenching himself upward despite the pain, despite the feeling of something tearing all over again in his left shoulder. Something is suddenly holding him down and oh god, it’s happening again. It’s all happening again and it will happen to his friends as ell.
“Be calm.”
He feels a wave of magic wash over him and he is too weak to fight it off. Oh gods. Oh gods what will they make him do…
He is calm. A pressure leaves his upper body and he realizes belatedly that it was the man’s hands. The Shadowhand had apparently risen from his chair to restrain Caleb. Caleb doesn’t mind. He is calm. They have his friends. He is sad. He is heartbroken. He has failed them completely but he is calm, and—
“What happened?” The Hearthweaver is back. She sounds very frustrated.
“I don’t… I thought he…” the Shadowhand sounds genuinely flabbergasted. Has he never seen a prisoner crack before? That does not make sense. “I was trying to tell him that his friends were here—“
“You what?!”
“I did not exactly get the chance to explain, Grithis.”
“You don’t know how to talk to people other than to torture them, do you?” No response. Caleb is breathing evenly now. It is a relief. Breathing is important, after all. “Float somewhere else for a while.”
It’s funny. The man does look like he’s floating as he moves to the door and exits. Heh. Jester would like that… Jester would… Nott… they… but he’s breathing… he’s calm, and…
“Your friends are fine,” says the Hearthweaver, pulling a chair to sit by his bedside and getting more water to ladle into Caleb’s mouth. “They have petitioned for your release. The Shadowhand insisted on a little more questioning before they let you go, but then they found you in… the state you were in.”
“My friends are fine,” repeats Caleb. He feels muddled, confused.
“Yes. They have… requested the release of you and another prisoner. He has already been put into their custody.”
Good. That was good.
“They should leave,” he murmurs, knowing it to be true.
“I do not think they would agree,” responds the Hearthweaver.
“It is not safe here for them,” he objects, feeling the tendrils of emotion beginning to seep into the sides of his body, like soothing fingers releasing his brain back into his own burning hands.
It’s then that Caleb starts to hear a clattering in the hallway, even through the thick wooden door. He hears the Shadowhand’s voice and… and someone else’s… it’s screeching and it… no, it’s low and worried… it’s cursing?
The Shadowhand opens the door, but steps aside immediately lest he be knocked down by the small figure that comes flying in. Nott the Brave runs into the center of the room, yellow eyes wide and worried, locked onto Caleb immediately.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO HIM?!”
Nott has nearly leapt upon the Hearthweaver when fast brown hands are suddenly there, snatching small green limbs right out of the air. The hands are holding Nott back, a voice both soft and rough — like fur being stroked the wrong direction — bidding her to stop. Beauregard.
“Nott, Nott, NOTT,” exclaims the monk, still struggling to keep her grasp on the small figure in her arms. “You gotta cool it or they’re not gonna let us talk to him!”
They are a Hearthweaver,” the Shadowhand projects his voice a little nervously from the door. “They… they are a healer. Be calmed, if you would.”
“LEMME SEE HIM! LET GO OF ME—“
“Nott, you’ll hurt him!”
Caleb is just staring in amazement, his eyes welling with tears. They’re here. It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make any sense. They’re here…they’re here and they’re not in chains. They’re here and they’re not screaming in pain. They’re here and no one is demanding he talk under threat that his friends will be tortured. No one is holding scalpels or brands to them. No one is… they’re really…
“A-are you here?” Caleb asks, his voice sounding so small even to his ears.
Nott immediately stills in Beau’s arms as though only now fully grasping his presence before them. The monk lets her climb down and they both approach tentatively,
“We’re here, Caleb,” says Beau. He wants to believe her. He really really does.
“D-did they hurt you?” he asks.
“What? No, they haven’t done anything to us.”
That makes it harder to believe that it is truly them. Their appearance could well be an illusion. And there are ways to read the surface thoughts of a person — Ikithon used to do that. It was a parlor trick, to him. He cannot ask them a question if they can pluck the answer from his mind…
“What is something… something you have never told me?”
Beau and Nott look at each other nervously, unsure how to respond. Caleb understands: either it is truly them and the request is confusing, or it is not truly them and they need to come up with something on the fly.
“I wrote Astrid a letter,” comes the rough, scratchy voice of the goblin before him. “A while back, I wrote a letter to—
“Nott told me that in the well. Something else.”
“Oh, but uh, details, details, right,” Nott wrings her hands.
“Wait,” interrupts Beau, “You wrote Astrid a letter? Like his Astrid?!”
“We’ll talk about it later, Beau! I-it was stupid, okay, I know. But look, Jester said she heard you say Astrid’s name one time, and she told me, and so we thought we’d try to… I dunno, reconnect you or something. So we wrote her a letter claiming that her uncle had died and she’d inherited a large sum of money—”
“Oh my god,” Beau was now groaning, her hands over her face.
“And we were his attorneys and she should contact us about the estate, that was all. And we said it was from Nott and Brave Legal Practice at the… Pillow Trove, yeah, okay, that was maybe really stupid…”
Caleb sits there, stunned for a moment.
Such a tremendously sweet, tremendously stupid gesture. So terribly dangerous, so ludicrously foolish, so deeply well-intentioned. And just outlandish enough that he did not imagine any Kryn interrogator could have fathomed it. But none of that matters. None of that insane risk matters because it means she is here. It means she is real.
“It… It’s really you, then?” His voice quavers and it shames him even more than the tears on his cheeks. “I c-cannot see you very well…”
“Oh, ah fuck,” Beau removes her goggles and cringes, turning back to the Shadowhand. “Can we get some light in here or something? Fucking shit, it’s dark in here…”
And the image becomes only clearer as the Shadowhand summons a small globule of gentle light. Even this low light almost hurts his eyes, but it is a blessing to be able to clearly see someone’s face rather than having to guess at their features and expressions. Caleb breathes deep, the air feeling somehow cleaner for the clarity of sight, and looks over each of his friends carefully, blinking tears away. They don’t look injured. Beau looks like she always does when someone’s hurt and she doesn’t know what to do about it, and Nott has that look on her face she used to get when he was sick or starving. The look that made so much more sense, so much more, when she revealed that she was a mother. He missed her face so terribly.
“Caleb,” comes Nott’s quiet, gentle rasp. “D’you need some water or something? Uh, a pillow?”
Sweet girl. Always so good to him. Better family than he deserved. Better family—
“Fam… Wait, wait, N-Nott, your husband,” he interjects, sniffling.
“Oh, we got him out already, Yeza’s fine.” She’s already rushing around to the basin and carrying the water-full ladle back to him.
“He’s… fine?” Caleb repeats, hackles rising again at the impossibility of that statement. But Nott is already carefully bringing the ladle to his lips, brushing that one strand of hair out of his face the way she always did.
“Well,” she pauses, weighing her words carefully. “He will be. He was in a cell upstairs; lower security I think? They said you were much more suspicious. I mean, he was being held by the Assembly, but he’s no soldier, he was pretty obviously terrified, not very threatening.”
“Much more…” Caleb moves to wipe the tears from his face and a drop of water from his lips before remembering that he cannot move his arms and wincing at the pain from his aborted movement. Nott wipes his mouth with a small handkerchief before he can say another word. It looks new. She must have gotten the itch recently.
But it’s Beau who clocks the pained twitch of Caleb’s arm.
“They saw your scars,” she says, and Caleb cannot help but stare at her face, her beautiful face, gods he had missed these women so much. “They said it meant you were from… Caleb, why can’t you move your arm?”
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timeasmymeasure
FILL: “Tough Crowd” [Caleb torture, non-con] 8/10
Date: 2021-08-08 10:03 am (UTC)Caleb knows the man is responding, can hear the vague shapes and taste the sounds of words from the drow’s mouth, but it’s all dulled by the roar of blood in his ears and the panic spreading throughout him. They have his friends. Fear, sudden and sharp and worse than anything he’d experienced in here, worse than forgetting, so much worse, he’d rather forget then get them hurt, it’s just like the Iron Shepherds, just like his parents, he has failed them again, it’s happening again, he lets people in, he loves people and then he gets them killed—
“Calm yourself,” that same voice from before, only closer, too close. “Hearthweaver!” The voice calls loudly, sound bouncing off the far wall, and then it’s in his ear again. “Young man, you must stop, you will hurt yourself if you— shit.
Caleb is shaking, is wrenching himself upward despite the pain, despite the feeling of something tearing all over again in his left shoulder. Something is suddenly holding him down and oh god, it’s happening again. It’s all happening again and it will happen to his friends as ell.
“Be calm.”
He feels a wave of magic wash over him and he is too weak to fight it off. Oh gods. Oh gods what will they make him do…
He is calm. A pressure leaves his upper body and he realizes belatedly that it was the man’s hands. The Shadowhand had apparently risen from his chair to restrain Caleb. Caleb doesn’t mind. He is calm. They have his friends. He is sad. He is heartbroken. He has failed them completely but he is calm, and—
“What happened?” The Hearthweaver is back. She sounds very frustrated.
“I don’t… I thought he…” the Shadowhand sounds genuinely flabbergasted. Has he never seen a prisoner crack before? That does not make sense. “I was trying to tell him that his friends were here—“
“You what?!”
“I did not exactly get the chance to explain, Grithis.”
“You don’t know how to talk to people other than to torture them, do you?” No response. Caleb is breathing evenly now. It is a relief. Breathing is important, after all. “Float somewhere else for a while.”
It’s funny. The man does look like he’s floating as he moves to the door and exits. Heh. Jester would like that… Jester would… Nott… they… but he’s breathing… he’s calm, and…
“Your friends are fine,” says the Hearthweaver, pulling a chair to sit by his bedside and getting more water to ladle into Caleb’s mouth. “They have petitioned for your release. The Shadowhand insisted on a little more questioning before they let you go, but then they found you in… the state you were in.”
“My friends are fine,” repeats Caleb. He feels muddled, confused.
“Yes. They have… requested the release of you and another prisoner. He has already been put into their custody.”
Good. That was good.
“They should leave,” he murmurs, knowing it to be true.
“I do not think they would agree,” responds the Hearthweaver.
“It is not safe here for them,” he objects, feeling the tendrils of emotion beginning to seep into the sides of his body, like soothing fingers releasing his brain back into his own burning hands.
It’s then that Caleb starts to hear a clattering in the hallway, even through the thick wooden door. He hears the Shadowhand’s voice and… and someone else’s… it’s screeching and it… no, it’s low and worried… it’s cursing?
The Shadowhand opens the door, but steps aside immediately lest he be knocked down by the small figure that comes flying in. Nott the Brave runs into the center of the room, yellow eyes wide and worried, locked onto Caleb immediately.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO HIM?!”
Nott has nearly leapt upon the Hearthweaver when fast brown hands are suddenly there, snatching small green limbs right out of the air. The hands are holding Nott back, a voice both soft and rough — like fur being stroked the wrong direction — bidding her to stop. Beauregard.
“Nott, Nott, NOTT,” exclaims the monk, still struggling to keep her grasp on the small figure in her arms. “You gotta cool it or they’re not gonna let us talk to him!”
They are a Hearthweaver,” the Shadowhand projects his voice a little nervously from the door. “They… they are a healer. Be calmed, if you would.”
“LEMME SEE HIM! LET GO OF ME—“
“Nott, you’ll hurt him!”
Caleb is just staring in amazement, his eyes welling with tears. They’re here. It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make any sense. They’re here…they’re here and they’re not in chains. They’re here and they’re not screaming in pain. They’re here and no one is demanding he talk under threat that his friends will be tortured. No one is holding scalpels or brands to them. No one is… they’re really…
“A-are you here?” Caleb asks, his voice sounding so small even to his ears.
Nott immediately stills in Beau’s arms as though only now fully grasping his presence before them. The monk lets her climb down and they both approach tentatively,
“We’re here, Caleb,” says Beau. He wants to believe her. He really really does.
“D-did they hurt you?” he asks.
“What? No, they haven’t done anything to us.”
That makes it harder to believe that it is truly them. Their appearance could well be an illusion. And there are ways to read the surface thoughts of a person — Ikithon used to do that. It was a parlor trick, to him. He cannot ask them a question if they can pluck the answer from his mind…
“What is something… something you have never told me?”
Beau and Nott look at each other nervously, unsure how to respond. Caleb understands: either it is truly them and the request is confusing, or it is not truly them and they need to come up with something on the fly.
“I wrote Astrid a letter,” comes the rough, scratchy voice of the goblin before him. “A while back, I wrote a letter to—
“Nott told me that in the well. Something else.”
“Oh, but uh, details, details, right,” Nott wrings her hands.
“Wait,” interrupts Beau, “You wrote Astrid a letter? Like his Astrid?!”
“We’ll talk about it later, Beau! I-it was stupid, okay, I know. But look, Jester said she heard you say Astrid’s name one time, and she told me, and so we thought we’d try to… I dunno, reconnect you or something. So we wrote her a letter claiming that her uncle had died and she’d inherited a large sum of money—”
“Oh my god,” Beau was now groaning, her hands over her face.
“And we were his attorneys and she should contact us about the estate, that was all. And we said it was from Nott and Brave Legal Practice at the… Pillow Trove, yeah, okay, that was maybe really stupid…”
Caleb sits there, stunned for a moment.
Such a tremendously sweet, tremendously stupid gesture. So terribly dangerous, so ludicrously foolish, so deeply well-intentioned. And just outlandish enough that he did not imagine any Kryn interrogator could have fathomed it. But none of that matters. None of that insane risk matters because it means she is here. It means she is real.
“It… It’s really you, then?” His voice quavers and it shames him even more than the tears on his cheeks. “I c-cannot see you very well…”
“Oh, ah fuck,” Beau removes her goggles and cringes, turning back to the Shadowhand. “Can we get some light in here or something? Fucking shit, it’s dark in here…”
And the image becomes only clearer as the Shadowhand summons a small globule of gentle light. Even this low light almost hurts his eyes, but it is a blessing to be able to clearly see someone’s face rather than having to guess at their features and expressions. Caleb breathes deep, the air feeling somehow cleaner for the clarity of sight, and looks over each of his friends carefully, blinking tears away. They don’t look injured. Beau looks like she always does when someone’s hurt and she doesn’t know what to do about it, and Nott has that look on her face she used to get when he was sick or starving. The look that made so much more sense, so much more, when she revealed that she was a mother. He missed her face so terribly.
“Caleb,” comes Nott’s quiet, gentle rasp. “D’you need some water or something? Uh, a pillow?”
Sweet girl. Always so good to him. Better family than he deserved. Better family—
“Fam… Wait, wait, N-Nott, your husband,” he interjects, sniffling.
“Oh, we got him out already, Yeza’s fine.” She’s already rushing around to the basin and carrying the water-full ladle back to him.
“He’s… fine?” Caleb repeats, hackles rising again at the impossibility of that statement. But Nott is already carefully bringing the ladle to his lips, brushing that one strand of hair out of his face the way she always did.
“Well,” she pauses, weighing her words carefully. “He will be. He was in a cell upstairs; lower security I think? They said you were much more suspicious. I mean, he was being held by the Assembly, but he’s no soldier, he was pretty obviously terrified, not very threatening.”
“Much more…” Caleb moves to wipe the tears from his face and a drop of water from his lips before remembering that he cannot move his arms and wincing at the pain from his aborted movement. Nott wipes his mouth with a small handkerchief before he can say another word. It looks new. She must have gotten the itch recently.
But it’s Beau who clocks the pained twitch of Caleb’s arm.
“They saw your scars,” she says, and Caleb cannot help but stare at her face, her beautiful face, gods he had missed these women so much. “They said it meant you were from… Caleb, why can’t you move your arm?”