Archive of Our Own

What is the metaphor

for two animals

sharing the same space?

Marriage?

— from “Dear—”, Donika Kelly

Once again he lost track of time—or lost track of the tracking, rather, if he were going to be accurate. One always had to be precise, oh ja; on such details were magic and possibility made.

But it was three in the morning when Essek’s hand curled delicately against his elbow. A new day, another possibility. And yet it was always this. Perhaps it had always been fated to be this. Joy surged up under Caleb’s ribs, giddy and effervescent as they champagne they had used for their toasts (to the couple, to the wedding party, to Jester’s parents, to the Nein, to the chocolate fountain and the Pumats, to black moss cupcakes and desserts more broadly, to Kiri and Reani and Keg and each and every guest)—

Essek had switched to water after the second, he recalled. He had teased him about it. Perhaps he was the wiser on that score.

No matter. It was three in the morning, and his friends were married, and Caleb Widogast was in love. He was surrounded by love.

Essek raised an eyebrow in the face of Caleb’s broad smile. He was rumpled, hair staring to fall from its complicated weave of braids, eyeliner becoming smudged and lip tint all but gone. Caleb wanted to dance with him again. He wanted to kiss him again. He wanted to dance and spin Essek around and dip him in front of the crowd of hundreds and kiss him again. He knew that eyebrow quirk was Essek’s ‘you are ridiculous, but I am feeling fond,’ one, as opposed to his ‘I am refraining from comment in public’ quirk or the more dangerous, ‘we will be speaking about this later,’ one.

Impulsively, Caleb leaned down unsteadily to kiss that raised brow. How blessed he was, to have had opportunity to learn the nuances of its expression. The age of gods was finished, and he was blessed all the same. Overcome, he pressed his nose into his partner’s hair.

“Hallo, Essek.”

“You are drunk, Caleb Widogast.” Essek’s voice matched his expression: exasperated, fond.

“Ach, nein, I am simply happy.” Caleb rested his cheek on Essek’s head and snuck one arm around around his waist. The band was still gamely playing on, ineluctable; obedient to its whims, Caleb began to sway them gently in time with the fiddle, with the new-bloomed branches of the trees that had caused the Tempest an oddly outsized amount of stress.

“That does not negate what I said,” Essek observed, but after a moment he obligingly looped his arms around Caleb’s neck.

Yes, he might be the branch and Essek the incomparable, arcane blossom, and the music the wind that swayed them. Caleb had never been much one for metaphor, but the night was warm and scented with flowers, people were laughing around them, and he had Essek in his arms. He admired him under the twinkle of the arcane lights (pink and gold, of course), and felt his heart swell.

“For all that the hag had nefarious intentions, she was quite a wedding coordinator after all.”

“It is a little predictable, but the final result is effective.”

What a beautiful snob. Under the warm lights, Essek’s colouring was made a sunrise. Caleb’s hands tightened on his hips. “You would seek something far classier, naturlich,” he deadpanned.

Essek sighed and rested his cheek on Caleb’s shoulder. “I am ready to go home. Have you left anything as yet un-toasted? Kindly rectify that quickly if so.”

“You are prepared to risk Jester’s upset by leaving early?” Caleb raised his eyebrows (his ‘you are not saying anything worrisome, and yet I am worried,’ eyebrows).

But Essek just turned his head to kiss Caleb’s throat. “For all that you have spent more time with them, I think sometimes you do not know your friends at all, Caleb Widogast.” He raised one hand to his temple; Caleb felt the whisper of arcana like the warm breeze off the ocean, like the warmth of Essek’s breath on his skin.

“Jester—Caleb and I are leaving to have sex. Recall, you may make the honeymoon suite’s bed a giant cupcake if you so wish.” He paused, and added, with a smile Caleb could feel down to his marrow, that giddiness in his chest growing, “Boop.”

Caleb hugged him more tightly.

“That’s such a great idea, Essek! Oh my gosh, it could be cupcake topped with MARSHMALLOW!” Jester bellowed, both aloud and directly into Essek’s mind, if his wince was anything to gauge by. “You go have just the best sex. Oh! Should I throw my bouquet at you?”

“To, Jester. You should throw—toss, actually—it to someone, not at them.”

“Fjord! Now I’ve lost count!” Jester wailed.

“Thirty-five,” Caleb mouthed at Essek, who rolled his eyes and steered them swiftly away to the fringes of the crowd.

“I think she is quite fond of her bouquet and has no intention of parting with it,” Caleb teased him.

“Of course she does; she simply wishes her mother to be the one to catch it,” Essek corrected. “I have preserved the flowers with chronurgy should she wish to take them back later, of course, but… she was quite insistent that her parents would be the next to wed.”

He toyed with his rings, then added, in a shockingly passable Jester impersonation, “You just know that once he gets back with my gift, dad is going to be so overcome with romance and how beautiful everything is, that he’ll just BURST into mama’s room and sweep her into his arms and propose right there, and then they’ll do it. Like in a novel!”

Caleb snagged a loose lock of Essek’s hair and twined it around his finger, giving a gentle tug. “Ah, Herr Thelyss, I concede you know her quite well. Perhaps the loud yelling in the middle of her party should have been more predictable to you, though. A possibility you did not foresee?”

“She has had no liquor,” Essek muttered, peeved.

Caleb gathered him close again, back against his chest. “I suspect it does not matter. We both have, and the two of us are not as young as we once were. Come, let us go home.”

“Teleport or Tower?”

Caleb grimaced apologetically. Though in the years between Cognouza and their spectacular sundering he and Essek had taken casting of complicated spells in turn to equalize components and arcana, he was ill-equipped to participate now. “Neither, I am afraid. Apologies, Essek, but I—”

“Are too drunk?” Essek teased.

“I fought a hag earlier,” Caleb tightened his arms around his partner and nosed at his ear. “Let me get you home and I’ll show you ‘too drunk.’”

“Let me get us home, clearly.” Essek stepped away and summoned his spell book. “You will have to tell me more of this hag story; Kingsley and I were quite left out.” He flicked an amused, sidelong glance at Caleb. “Kingsley was quite vocal about being left out.”

“Will you impersonate him for me, too?”

“Don’t be impertinent.”

He had to step forward then and return Essek to the circle of his arms. Ten years and he’d had no idea Essek could do voices quite so well; ten years, and perhaps Essek had never been tipsy enough in front of him for Caleb to find out. That would have to change; Caleb wanted to know everything, greedy for each piece of knowledge like a magpie turning over shiny baubles.

Or… well. Or a wizard gathering scraps of knowledge.

“I was quite impressive,” he boasted in a way that he would never do in front of his friends, or when he was sober. But Essek liked hearing that he was impressive. Essek enjoyed Caleb’s unusual applications of magic. “It involved using Wish in a manner you might find compelling… and I will trade you the story for more information on this Chadwick fellow.”

Essek narrowed his eyes and began to cast. In the vivid void-edged purple of his magic, in the residual gold and pink from teh party, Caleb could see that the tips of Essek’s ears had gone a charming shade of violet. He was struck with the visceral urge to suck one into his mouth.

Then the spell resolved, shunting them into their Rexxentrum house, and there was no reason not to obey the impulse.

“Caleb—!”

The cats that had come out to twine around their ankles scattered away again as Caleb backed Essek up against a wall, taking the tip of one elegant ear into his mouth. He caught one piercing between his teeth and tugged, gently. Essek dissolved boneless against him.

“Veth told me some of it,” he growled, pinning Essek’s wrists to the wall. “He was quite impressive, ja?”

“Compelling, yes,” Essek groaned. “But I do not think he could cast Wish at all. You might, hah, be in trouble if he could.”

Well, that was fair. “Fortunately, us wizards tend to be scrawny assholes.”

Essek twisted his arm free of Caleb’s grip, knocking a few picture frames to the floor in the process. Elegant fingers wrapped around his clothed cock, gripped him firmly.

“Indeed,” he laughed. “When is Magister Grieve next coming to visit?”

That remark kindled a fire in his belly, though not entirely the jealous one Essek might expect even jokingly. Possessive, oh yes. Caleb was desperately possessive of this beautiful, witty, wonderful man now that he had so inexplicably come back into Caleb’s life. Maybe it was inevitable. Maybe it had always been meant to be so.

So Caleb would treasure him. Cherish him. Be possessive of him so that nothing in the world could bring him harm or even moderate inconvenience if he could avoid it. But be jealous over Essek’s affections? Ach, nein; Caleb wanted what Essek wanted if it would bring Essek joy.

Perhaps this was a somewhat self-effacing thought. Perhaps he was more drunk than he’d meant to be. Caleb braced his forearm on the wall over Essek’s head and breathed out shakily as Essek fondled him. He did not wish to come in his trousers like an inexperienced teenager: he had before, with Essek, but not today. Today, he wanted….

His gaze snagged on Essek’s earrings. He had not properly appreciated them before, with everything else that had demanded his attention throughout the day. Now, he could see that they were little golden hamsters and bejewelled cupcakes. One string of winking, pink gemstones dangling from looped chains was carved to mimic hard candies.

“Is there a penis?” He blurted out.

Essek gave him a deliberate squeeze. “Yes, Caleb Widogast, I believe there is.”

Ah. His knees were turning to custard. “In your jewellery. You look beautiful, Essek; if I did not tell you earlier, I am remiss.”

“Oh.” Essek kissed the underside of his jaw with a soft laugh. “Other ear. They were a gift from Jester. As were the rings—most of the rings.” Deft fingers opened Caleb’s trousers at last and drew out his prick; he stroked him slowly, firmly. “I am afraid pink is not my colour.”

“Every colour is,” Caleb replied hoarsely. “You are so—” the clever flick of Essek’s wrist blotted out sight and language. “Upstairs,” he gasped.

“Mm. In a minute.” Essek slipped elegantly to his knees.

It didn’t take much. It never did, with Essek, not without some significant effort on Caleb’s part to hold back. He came with a soft cry, the half-formed syllables of Essek’s name, fingers buried deep in the ruin of his braids.

“You are my heart, ah, Essek, my Light. My hearth and my home and my—”

“Sober companion?” Essek kissed Caleb’s belly gently, and tucked his spent prick back into the pastel pink trousers.

Caleb thumped his fist against the wall in denial, because there was teasing, playful Essek but there was also self-effacing Essek, and he could not bear the latter. Not when the words were too elusive, smoke when he needed runelight, breeze and not … not blossoms, or trees, or fairy lights. Tangible expressions. “No, no, that is—set aside my indulgence a moment, ja?”

Or, no, not that either. Indulgence was the word, catching in his mind and solving the equation for him. “No. Do not set indulgence aside. I am a fool.”

Essek rose, letting Caleb’s arm fall across his shoulders rather than against the wall, taking a bit of his weight. “Beloved, if this line of thinking is to end with a sculpture of my bare ass in the garden for all to see, kindly truncate it.”

“Upstairs,” was all Caleb replied. He had the shape of it now, and he would not be dissuaded.

He had blundered against it quite by accident in the early days of their courtship, as he blundered into so many things it felt like. After gently charming Essek into spending the night with him for the first time, in the ‘sleep next to me when we’re not in mortal peril’ sense, not the ‘have sex with me’ sense—that had been achieved a few weeks prior—Caleb had prowled around him in an anxious desire to be a perfect host: would you like some tea? Is the temperature of the room agreeable? Perhaps additional pillows, as you sit to trance, do you not? Ach, do not mind the cats; here, let me get them out of the room.

And, coming back from herding his truculent felines, two mugs of tea to hand in case Essek preferred one to the other, he had found the former Shadowhand perched stiffly at the edge of the bed, removing his earrings hastily.

“Ah, permit me to help,” Caleb had said, setting the tea down and moving to gently unhook one heavy-looking teardrop of sapphire from a tender lobe.

He still remembered the way Essek had looked at him. That startled, frozen, electrified look.

Caleb had apologized. Essek had demurred. Caleb had pressed. Essek had insisted.

Essek had gone home the next day.

Caleb had disguised himself, Teleported to Rosohna, and paid 400 gold to a very amused woman at a very prestigious pleasure-house for her to teach him the more intimate details of Kryn etiquette. It took some effort to take her lessons while dodging her hands, but once she realized his gold was good and his intentions were, truly, just to listen, she had laughed herself to tears for ten minutes, and then instructed him accordingly.

Bare hands when attending an event alone were for those who had no standing or decorum. Whoring about, if one were casual about the display.

A lowered collar might indicate one was taken, or that one was being coquettish. Lace gloves, too. The younger generation now sometimes dared fingerless gloves, but that was tasteless.

Bare hands in company were permissible in the company of a serious partner, though it did not have to be to the level of declared courtship.

“Though you can always have bare hands for fucking. The gloves get filthy otherwise,” she said with a smirk, drawing one very bare finger across her lips suggestively.

“And, ah, ears?”

Made much of in smutty novels, it turned out, though some Kryn were sensitive enough to get off from oral stimulation on them. “Just like nipples. Everyone is different.”

Ears were very much not for public contact or affectionate display, however (“…just like nipples,” she laughed, “unless you keep interesting company, little scholar.”), and handling one’s jewellery… that was for husbands or soul-bound couples.

(“And really, first-life husbands only if the husband is especially lucky.”

Uncertain if that were a joke or not—she smiled, but did not laugh, at the saying—Caleb duly made note.

“If I may be impertinent… what might such a thing cost, here?”

“It isn’t for sale. Some things just can’t be bought.”)

It was both illuminating and mystifying. When next Essek had been coaxed back to Rexxentrum, Caleb had not offered again to help. When Essek, eventually, moved in with him, he held his tongue, stepping in only when directly invited—a twisted chain here, the haste of a second pair of hands required there.

Caleb loved to suck and nibble and lick Essek’s ears, loved to make him weak-kneed and overwhelmed and irritated with himself about it, but he respected the unspoken boundary. He dwelled, often, on the heat of that one, ignorant moment.

Now, when Essek began to drift toward their bed, shrugging off the light sage wrap that he’d kept over his bare arms, Caleb grabbed him gently by the waist and redirected him toward the vanity (purchased between that first sleepover and the subsequent one, though the bench had been reupholstered to be more comfortable since). “I would have you here, if I may.”

“Indeed?” Essek shot him a quizzical smile, but took his seat. Winced, immediately, and began to Prestidigitate away his smudged makeup. “You might have told me it looked like I’d let a Wildmount Wildling do my makeup,” he chided.

“Essek Thelyss, you are and remain the most beautiful man I have ever known.” Caleb put his hands on Essek’s shoulders, and gently slid them down his upper arms, forcing his hands down and to stillness. “Please. Permit me.”

He began with the earrings. He felt Essek tense immediately, and paused with the little golden cupcake in his hand. Essek was staring at him very, very intensely in the mirror, lips parted. That same electricity. But there was no objection raised, and Caleb continued.

Plink!

Plink!

Gold and gems, placed one at a time, on the vanity’s surface. Essek’s breathing, slightly too loud. Caleb’s heart, thunderous in his ears.

Let me make so many memories of this man that no one can ever take them from me. Let this be both the hward-won and the inevitable, the through-line to every possibility. Let me be soul-bound, if he will have me.

“Caleb.”

“You are very important to me, you know.”

Essek shuddered with a long exhale, pale lashes sweeping his cheeks. But he leaned back into Caleb’s body, a small surrender.

Hamster. Penis. Candy. Candy. A cupcake adorned with diamond stars. Caleb couldn’t help but stroke one admiring finger up the length of Essek’s ear once it was bare, understanding for the first time the depth of the intimacy the Kryn woman had tried to impress upon him. It was the difference between sitting down and having a lover pull out a chair for you. Between shucking off your boots and having someone kneel to unlace them. Undressing and being undressed.

Once he was finished, Caleb moved to Essek’s hair, tugging free the pins that held the braids coiled and interwoven, and then undoing each painstaking braid. Essek’s hair was heavy in his hands now that it was long, and even more curly after being bound thus all day. He didn’t dare to try to brush it, knowing it might snag, but instead settled for digging his fingers into Essek’s scalp to massage away the ache of its weight, and then carding them through its length in generous sections.

“Hmm,” Essek chuckled, abruptly.

Caleb paused in his ministrations.

Violet eyes found his once more, now rather more sleepy than before. “Indulgence. I see.”

“You deserve to be indulged.”

“I will hold you to it.”

Earrings, hair. Necklace next, just the one, and then rings.

“Not that one,” Essek corrected, when Caleb made to remove the single, incongruous platinum band. “You gave me that one.”

“I meant to replace it once we’d saved the world again,” Caleb frowned at the inelegant little thing, so unstylish on his stylish partner’s hand. A little too much an echo of the rather shabby wizard he had tied himself to. “But the wedding….”

“I would prefer to keep this one. It has served me well.”

They both knew there was no true magic to it, but, indulgence. Caleb drew Essek to his feet and kissed him, undressing him as they backed toward the bed. It was almost five in the morning in Nicodranus, and the sun would be rising; here, they still had hours of night remaining.

But he was indeed very tipsy, and his arcana was entirely spent, and somehow when he laid down with Essek in his arms he blinked, and it was daylight, and there was a cat’s hindquarters mashed into his nose instead.

“I know Essek taught you better manners than that,” he half-grumbled, half-yawned. Onyx just stretched elaborately in response, and tucked her nose under her tail.

Apart from the headache blooming behind his eyes, Caleb felt a thread of unease under his ribs as he moved through the silent house. It was the sense of a monumental fuck-up forgotten. The drop of a missed stair in the dark. The last time he had truly, irredeemably ruptured things with Essek, at least he had been able to—

Ah, he was an idiot.

Barefoot, tea abandoned on the kitchen counter, Caleb dashed into their workroom, went back to look at the front porch, then finally made the connection. In the garden, in the greenhouse, Essek was ostensibly tending to his orchids. Twisting his ring around and around his finger.

“I worried it was too soon,” he said. “That is all, Essek. It has only been a few months.”

Essek slowly drew his eyes to him, a man who had been deeply lost in thought. “Good morning, Caleb Widogast.”

“I’ve backed myself into a corner here, haven’t I?” Caleb strode swiftly down the aisle toward Essek, noting as he did that the stones warmed under his bare feet. The tenderness of the gesture almost undid him. “Essek, I made you a promise, and it is one that I wish to keep, but—”

“It was too soon,” Essek nodded. “I do not fault you for it, Caleb. We should be… quite sure, yes? Before making a commitment again.”

“I am sure. So do not take this as simply… reactionary.” Awkwardly, Caleb lowered himself to one knee.

Electricity in Essek’s gaze. Then frank alarm. “Bren! Your knees are not up to this. On stone?” He inverted Caleb’s gravity to pull him up, Caleb countered, was countered in turn. Still half-kneeling as he was tugged to his feet, he wrapped his arms around Essek and laughed and laughed and laughed.

“You are every Wish, every impressive thing, to me,” he said, when Essek started to laugh too. “Seeing you in that frankly ridiculous pink outfit—”

“Ah! I knew you were lying to me.”

“—and you still outshone the very stars. Our gift was a hearth and home, ja? With whom else could I create that spell?”

“Veth,” Essek gripped the front of Caleb’s shirt tightly. “And Beauregard.”

“Fuck Beauregard,” Caleb said succinctly.

“She would snap me in half,” Essek laughed. “I’ll leave you the joy of it.”

Caleb accepted a kiss that was warm as tea and soft as the morning mist over their garden. It was… ah, adjusting for time zones once more, six in the morning in Rexxentrum, and he was very, very in love.

“So is that a ‘yes,’ Herr Thelyss?” He was abruptly, overwhelmingly, on the verge of tears. He wanted to laugh some more. What a strange and paradoxical thing joy was.

“You have yet to ask me a question, Magister Widogast.”

It was a very fair point.

Caleb whispered it into his ear, still bare in the early dawn.

He murmured it, ardently, into Essek’s skin, once he’d tugged him back upstairs to the still-warm nest of their bed, scattering away several opportunistic cats.

He asked it again, when they finally made it downstairs for breakfast in the mid-afternoon, this time in front of the cats to be sure his suit met with their stern approval.

Just shy of 578 days since he had so foolishly said no; he had many questions to make up for it.

And—

“Yes.”

And—

“Yes.”

And—

“Yes, of course.”

—greeted him each time.

It was today and it would be tomorrow and tomorrow again, and for the sweet passage of every hour, he would be in love.

I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming.


Much earlier, the alarm broke us from each other,


you’ve been at your desk for hours. I know what I dreamed:


our friend the poet comes into my room


where I’ve been writing for days,


drafts, carbons, poems are scattered everywhere,


and I want to show her one poem


which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate,


and wake. You’ve kissed my hair


to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem, 


I say, a poem I wanted to show someone . . . 


and I laugh and fall dreaming again


of the desire to show you to everyone I love,


to move openly together


in the pull of gravity, which is not simple,


which carries the feathered grass a long way down the upbreathing air.

— “Twenty-One Love Poems [Poem II],” Adrienne Rich