Archive of Our Own ^beta

Astrid steps forward before he does. 

Wulf almost expects the snap of a wire as she crosses the boundary, but none comes. It stays eerily silent, the only sound that reaches his ears the whisper of her cloak as she moves, the soft tread of her boots against well-worn, once familiar floorboards. 

Even the second board from the bedpost dares not let out its customary groan, and for a split second, Eadwulf wants to pounce on that missing detail - to turn to Caleb, standing beside him, and point out the flaw. But he knows Astrid’s body better than he knows his own, enough to track the way her centre of gravity has been deliberately shifted, less weight put on her left to avoid the aged wood creaking beneath her toes the way it had a thousand times before. There is no space for carelessness, these days.

(There has been no space for carelessness for a long, long time.)

He doesn’t notice the way his breath is caught in his lungs until he hears the exhale beside him, cautious in a way that had always belonged everywhere except within these four walls. Caleb’s eyes are fixed on Astrid. 

Wulf’s chest stretches and pulls, time caught up in the muscles that hold his ribcage together, and the phantom touch of hands against his shoulders almost has his eyes closing to block the scene from view. Except he can’t - he can’t, he never could - because Astrid continues to step forward, and for as long as she does so, he cannot step back. Her fingers trail reverently across rumpled bedsheets, and Wulf is sentenced to watch. When she reaches the pillows, she rubs the fabric between her thumb and forefinger, arcana soft against her skin.

He might be burning from the inside out, he thinks. There’s a cool breeze from the cracked-open window, which doesn’t make sense , because they are everywhere and nowhere and past and present and there is nothing beyond this at all, but the breeze still comes, and goosebumps break out across flushed forearms. 

Sunlight filters through the glass, and the Rexxentrum air tastes like harvest is on its way.

Astrid’s hair glistens as faint, early-morning sun begins to creep through the window. Small flecks of dust dance, caught within the beams that slice through the glass, and she huffs, lightly, then shifts in her sleep, causing the fingers that curl against Bren’s hip to brush lightly against Eadwulf’s stomach.

Her features are softer in sleep, although he would never dare to tell her that. The furrow between her eyebrows is smoothed and her jaw slack, her cheek pressed into Bren’s shoulder as he lies in between them both, burning like a furnace beneath the sheets. Eadwulf’s gaze is drawn to Astrid’s lips as a small murmur leaves them, an incomprehensible fragment of one of the spells she’s been working on in the daylight, no doubt, and his lips twitch at the corners. There’s no need to prove herself, not whilst their eyes are closed and the sun is still low in the sky, but he would never dare tell her that, either - she’d more likely take it as a challenge. 

His gaze shifts lazily over to Bren; hair messier, eyelashes just as pale where they rest against freckled cheeks. Gangly legs had tangled with his as the darkness claimed them the night before, and now, lying on his side, he can feel every place where their bare skin meets.

The light in the room shifts from orange to gold as the sun creeps further from the horizon, warm against his back, warm where it melts into Astrid’s skin and lights Bren like a flame. Enough comes through the glass now to cast shadows from Astrid’s desk onto her wall - a pen-pot, with her quill resting within, the three tell-tale rectangles of their spellbooks, piled imperfectly on top of one another. An odd sphere and a handful of twisted metal pieces that Bren had emptied out of his pockets the night before, although Wulf has little idea why. He’d been too preoccupied, at the time, to ask.

He lies still and lazily tries to commit the scene to memory. The wonder he expected to find in Rexxentrum has been met and surpassed - not simply by the arcana that crackles in the air, not by the sheer volume of possibility caught within the academy walls, nor even by the spells he’s been learning and those he’s been shown, but by… by this.

It’s hard to tear his eyes away. In the sunlight, Bren and Astrid shine so brilliantly, so bright. 

Astrid shifts again, and her nose wrinkles before she curls further into Bren’s side, tucking her face into the crook of his neck in an effort to burrow away from the light. Wulf’s exhale is almost a laugh.

He could stay like this forever, he thinks, and be perfectly content.

Astrid’s fingers linger on the sheets.

He doesn’t know why it’s important, in this room that’s merely a ghost of the original, that Astrid’s fingers linger on the sheets.

(She has always been braver than him. His own feet have glued themselves to the floor just before the threshold, but she stands by the headboard and rubs the edge of the pillowcase between the thumb and first finger of her left hand for a second time, as if sampling the thread count of the conjuration, comparing it to something that he’s sure lives in her memory almost as clearly as Bren’s.)

This tower is breathtaking. The sheer intricacies, the level of detail, the ornate stained-glass windows and stretching halls. From the very first moment Caleb conjured a doorway out of thin air and, with an unreadable look in his eyes and a failed explanation on his tongue, led them both through it, everything Wulf has laid eyes on has been immaculately thought through. This room though… this is something else. 

Wulf folds his arms over his chest, the niggling feeling at the back of his mind impossible to ignore, yet not significant enough yet for him to grasp hold of and pull it into view. Instead, he looks to Astrid. He can see the cogs turning, synapses firing off at a pace almost too quick for him to follow, flipping through a long-forgotten calendar as if she can keep up with Bren and locate the exact month, day, time, that this place has been drawn from. Her gaze flickers down to the winter blanket tucked away beneath the bed, then back up, across the shadows and folds in the cotton, the imprint of three tangled bodies in the mattress. 

“Impressive.”

He’s certain she was aiming for unreadable.

He’s watched her lie through her teeth to people ten times more powerful than either of them will ever have the time to become, obscured by smooth smiles and diplomacy. He’s watched her wield words like a scalpel’s blade, cutting with surgical precision, shifting power where desired, always balanced, always in control. 

Bizarrely, Wulf has to hold down a laugh; short, sharp, ridiculous. She is the best liar he knows, and yet right now, a child could see through her cool demeanour. Caleb might as well have left a fishing line out, the crackle of amber-tinted arcana hooked onto the end as bait. Wulf hears a quiet, confident hum of agreement from beside him, and has to swallow a second laugh, a faint wave of hysteria rearing its head from within him at the cockiness of it - all Bren, their Bren. Impressive, indeed. He has never been anything less.

“And it’s stable?” Astrid asks, causing Caleb’s head to tilt; the fisherman, sensing his catch.

“Twenty four hours.”

Astrid flexes her fingers, as if itching for her spellbook.

Her gaze darts oddly to the desk, the stacks of bound parchment that sit there, filled with barely a fraction of the knowledge each of them now possess.

It’s only then that she turns. Wulf watches her gaze catch Caleb’s, but despite the cool, guarded edges, there is no mistaking the spark beneath her skin; a glimpse in a long-forgotten mirror. She finds Bren in Caleb’s eyes - Bren at seventeen, all crackling sparks, glowing embers, possibility - and Wulf watches the pair of them latch onto something unspoken, grasped out of the air between them.

Bren’s spellbook lies open on his lap, but he’s stopped flicking through the pages and is instead twiddling a copper piece around in his fingers, absentmindedly running it up and down his knuckles like a street magician in the centre of town back home. His gaze is locked on a single line of his chicken-scratch handwriting, his shoulders hunched as he stares at the ink. His back will ache later from the way he’s hunching it, but he’ll stubbornly deny it to prevent the I told you so he deserves.

Astrid lies with her back flat against the bedsheets, perpendicular to them both, her head dangling over the edge of the bed. Her own notes are held above her eyes, upside down to match her as she attempts to spot the error in their spellwork - unsuccessfully so, if the way she’s chewing her lower lip raw is any indication. Her lips move silently as she traces a path back and forth across the page.

The candles that had been lit hours ago burn low in their holders and darkness presses thickly up against the windows, but without the heaviness the three of them are used to, because night in Rexxentrum will never manage to feel as all-consuming as it did back home. Here, even in the middle of the night, darkness refuses to fully set in. Lights still glimmer all over the city, music faintly travels through the streets, and somewhere, people dance until dawn. 

He misses the stars. Viewed from here, they lack the lustre they had when seen from a lonely, silent field, with wheat brushing up against ankles. There are far fewer than there always seemed to be back home, obscured as they are by the faint orange glow of the city. It’s a small price to pay, Wulf thinks, for all this - but still. He’s allowed to miss them. Although - Bren’s inhale is sharp and excited, and before Wulf can blink, he has a pen back in his hand and is scrawling rapid-fire across the paper, eyes alight. 

“Got it,” he says, then reaches out to squeeze above Wulf’s knee and shake Astrid by the calf. “I’ve got it,” he repeats, more excitement bubbling beneath his words, and before Wulf knows it their heads are tucked together, half-finished sentences passing between them so quickly that he gives up on following the train of thought, and instead just watches -

Watches Astrid, now cross-legged in the centre of her bed, swiping Bren’s pen from his fingers the second it stops moving to jot down his additions beside her own notes. Bren, breath caught in his throat, kneeling on her mattress and reaching over to curl his fingers around hers to correct her somatics, Astrid shaking her head, repeating his motions back to him but with minor tweaks to adjust the flow. The whole room crackles with anticipation and delight; it seeps into the floorboards, settles on the walls, rests upon the cloak Astrid had tossed over the back of her desk chair when they’d come back from dinner hours ago. Sheets tangle around her ankle as she shifts too quickly, but she ignores them, oblivious, too consumed by the possibilities she and Bren are stretching out between them. Bren flicks his wrist and casts, and Astrid - oh, Astrid shines so brightly. Her eyes gleam.

Bren grins at him. His expression is a tangle of delight, pride, and exhilaration, which tugs an elated laugh from deep within Astrid, too, and … well, who needs the stars, really, when he has a universe right here in this room?

Astrid drops to a crouch to pick up a library book she’d knocked off the bed stand seventeen years earlier, causing Bren - Caleb - to take a step forward. Wulf’s forearms prickle inexplicably, hairs standing on end, goosebumps spreading up his arms, across the back of his neck. He waits for Caleb to cross the floor and join her, drawn in by the magnetic pull that always existed between the two of them, but oddly, Caleb turns. He’s two steps into the room now, whilst Wulf still lingers, the doorframe just barely in front of him.

Embers flicker as the three of them stand, points of an uneven triangle.

Caleb’s expression does something complicated that once, Wulf would have understood. Then a hand is extended to him. Palm up, and steady. 

For the second time in recent memory, Caleb waits.

Eyes meet his for a split second before Eadwulf breaks the contact, his gaze moving down, finding skin marked with unfamiliar calluses and scars, but beneath them, older and faded, familiar ones, too. A nick from a penknife, ten years old and cutting twine for a garden bean runaway. A small, raised white line down the side of his thumb, from the time in the tower when the razor had slipped. The small circle of a burn on his knuckle that they’d both teased him mercilessly for at the time, because it had been candle wax, not magic, that marred him. By all rights it should have faded, but clearly through the years it has persisted. 

Caleb’s eyes have softened by the time he looks back up. It’s not an expression that belongs to the boy he once knew, although it’s not unfamiliar; it was there in the Blooming Grove, as flames licked up the walls that surrounded them both, and later, outside, when Bren pressed his forehead against both his and Astrid’s. Something learned in his time away, now quietly offered. Misplaced, perhaps, but this stranger seems tired enough to open the door to an optimism that logic and caution would once have interfered with, and it’s earnest in a way that has Wulf’s heart jumping treacherously beneath his ribcage.

Astrid moves over towards the desk, her back to them both, but still Caleb waits with those grey-blue eyes fixed on his, until Wulf reaches out across the distance and takes the outstretched hand, allowing himself to be led across the threshold.

“Wulf,” Bren whispers, eyes barely more than glimmering flecks in the darkness.

He should have known better than to assume the steady rise and fall of his chest was enough to fool someone whose ear was laid atop his ribcage, listening to the unsteady beat of his heart, but he thought he’d gotten away with it. Astrid sleeps steadily beside him, her face tucked into his shoulder, his arm curled around her.

That, at least, is a small gift; a plausible reason not to turn and look, not to meet Bren’s eyes in the darkness. 

He does it regardless.

He can’t quite explain.

He could have gotten away with it. Could have continued pretending, forcing his inhales to follow his exhales at a regulated pace, willing the darkness to swallow him whole and allowing Bren’s whisper to go unacknowledged. Could have let Bren drift off to sleep without seeing the uncertainty swirling in his gut, that fear that Bren and Astrid never seem to be fazed by but that claws at him now, as the night creeps onwards and the morning threatens. 

Meeting Bren’s eyes betrays him completely. He still does it. And -

“Wulf,” Bren repeats, far softer. Barely a breath of air, but with such fondness attached to it. It’s steady hands on his shoulders, at the moments he needs them most. Limbs tangled with his in the cold, sheets tangled around him on sunlit mornings, fingers tangled in his on the stumbling walk home from the dance hall, laughter and whisky on his lips.

“What if everything changes?” he whispers, and Bren is quiet for a long, long time. 

Astrid’s short hair tickles his chin. The sheets are softer now than they were when this all began, used three times more than they were ever intended to be. The ones on his own bed are stiffer, more starched, and he knows Bren’s are too. 

“Change is inevitable,” Bren says, eventually. The words cradle his unease, not giving it a place to fully rest, but helping to slow the freefall. The darkness is thick and heavy, but the certainty of Bren’s gaze pierces through. “But time is … odd.”  

“Insightful,” Wulf murmurs, just to make Bren roll his eyes. 

“Take it from someone who is aware of every second as it ticks by."

Wulf’s thumb brushes over the dusting of freckles on Bren's shoulder blade, mainly just to watch the way it softens the intensity of Bren’s gaze, something almost imperceptible melting away. He can barely see the walls from here, the space disappearing away into the dark as if it continues on forever.

“It will move forward, and we will be great,” Bren says quietly. “We will serve the Empire. But we will still be here, in part, I think. In this room. Our room.”

Don’t let Astrid hear you call it that, he almost replies, the tease springing to his lips before his mind catches up and chases after the words like a runaway carriage, because there’s nothing true about them. She may tease. She may huff when one of them flops down on top of her, sweaty or bloody from training, or slam the door between herself and Bren after a row. She may roll her eyes at complaints about laundry abandoned on the floor, or about elbows in stomachs as they all fall asleep tangled in one bed together, and point out that both of them have their own rooms they could be in, if they choose to, and that this one is hers. But in truth, it’s shared. It's their room, and none of them would have it any other way. Designed for one, but comfortable enough for three, through sheer willpower alone.

In lieu of a response, Wulf runs his fingers through Bren’s short hair, nails lightly grazing his scalp.

The dark shine of Bren’s eyes disappears - he must have closed them- and his head rests back against Wulf’s chest, a steady weight pressing him into the mattress below.

“Get some sleep,” Bren whispers softly. “We’ll need it.”

“Why did you put this here?” Astrid asks, but it’s Wulf who shakes his head first.

“He didn’t.” Sun continues to trickle through the window, warm against his neck despite being barely more than a memory, and Caleb’s eyes meet his. “It’s an after effect of the spell,” Wulf adds. A guess, but a correct one. 

Caleb’s eyes are warm when they glance his way. His silence is a background hum growing louder and louder, but he adds nothing, yet. Just waits, and watches as the cogs turn for Astrid too, until she slowly nods, the parchment that is the inside of her mind covered in hastily-written smudged-ink scrawls. 

Her eyes flicker thoughtfully across the cool stone walls, pulling the pieces together as Caleb waits. “The form comes from within. Therefore any limitations are… you . Yes?” 

It hangs in the air.

“Constraints,” Wulf amends quietly. There is little distinction between the words, and his choice leaves a sour taste on his tongue just as hers had done. 

Astrid corrects them both. “Fixed pieces that remain, regardless of what you choose for the floors below.” 

Curiosity is needling at her, the unfinished but why? being kept inside only by her stubborn desire to put the puzzle pieces together herself.

“Correct,” Caleb says quietly, and her nod is slow, her brow furrowed. 

You are here , he is saying, so quiet, but so loud. You are here, you are here, you are here.

The blood running through his veins and the memories that shape him. The scuffs on the wooden floor and the half-finished notes on the desk and the imprint of three bodies on the mattress, curled into one another, arms bandaged and joints aching, happy in such a simple, uncomplicated way.

Caleb’s thumb brushing over his knuckle startles him, and only then does he realise he hasn’t let go. He can’t bring himself to, quite yet.

Astrid finds her puzzle pieces, and he watches them slot into place. The look on Caleb’s face earlier, the attempted words, before his tangled tongue had led to him frustratedly abandoning his sentences and instead beginning to pull components from his worn leather pouch. Crackling arcana, sleepless nights, breakthroughs, warm hands, warm lips, three stacked spellbooks and an unmade bed. Sunlight, falling softly through the window panes. Her gaze once more finds the sheets, then the pillowcases, the spellbooks, the streak of black across the floorboard three to the left of the door. The book in her hands that she’d rescued from the floor, Kearvyik’s Principles of Transmutation: Theory and Practice, third edition , which Wulf is certain contains a Soltryce library record card inside the front cover, with Eadwulf Grieve penned in the final slot.

That impossible breeze lightly brushes through the tips of her hair.

“I did not have you when I first made this place,” Caleb says carefully, looking between Wulf, and the book Astrid’s eyes remain fixed upon. “and I did not ever expect to again. So you are here.”

We will still be here, in part, I think.

When Astrid finally looks up, Wulf expects her eyes to drift back to Caleb, but instead, oddly, it’s his gaze she searches for. Then holds. 

This is an answer to a question neither of them have dared voice aloud in all the years since Bren slipped out of Vergessen and disappeared into the wind, and she wants him to confirm it before she dares to. Wulf nods. Carefully. No dust hangs in the air; they entered this room yesterday. 

“Words are not my strong suit,” Caleb says quietly. 

Bren Aldric Ermendrud must despise him for it.

Astrid’s exhale shakes. “Try ,” she orders, but it catches at the back of her throat, cracking at the final moment and betraying her completely. 

“Astrid -”

“ Try . You owe it to us.”

She drops the library book callously on the bed, where it bounces, lightly, before coming to a stop. Caleb’s hand is warm where it still holds his, his grip surprisingly steady, and Astrid’s gaze returns to the place the two of them are joined once more before curling her arms around herself, fingernails digging into her ribcage. 

This distance, Caleb crosses cautiously. He reaches out almost as if she is a wild animal and unfurls the fingers of her right hand, then simply holds them. Not the way he is holding Wulf’s - not quite her hand in his - but he doesn’t let go. The pause that follows has enough weight to raze a tower to the ground, and Caleb visibly swallows down emotions, the gesture twisting something in Wulf’s throat. When he turns his head, Wulf finds that piercing blue pinned on him. Not a glimmer in the darkness, any longer. 

The wind has stilled and in its absence, the thrum of Wulf’s heartbeat pounds within his ears.

“Bren,” Astrid whispers again, because she does not plead. Her voice cracks.

Wulf watches Caleb taste words on his tongue, sampling everything he could say, all of the reasons he could provide for why he cast this spell, why he pulled them in here, why he opened the door and let them in, why he is still trying, why he has come back after all the time he has been gone, better than they will ever be but still standing in front of them both attempting to patch up something so irrevocably broken.

“You are important to me,” he says. It is so simple, in the end.

Present tense, with the evidence laid out before their eyes.

Astrid is the one to shift. Her shoulder presses firmly into his and her hand raises, brushing Caleb’s neck, then resting on his cheek, his jaw. A mirror of Bren’s own, backlit by flames, seconds before the smell of searing flesh filled the air. Wulf’s own hand finds the small of her back, then slides up to her shoulder so he can pull her further into his space, his lips briefly brushing against the top of her hair. She will not let him say what he wants to, here, but this will do. He pulls Caleb into his side too, until the sulfur-ozone-woodsmoke mingles and the thrumming of his pulse in his ears slows, the room that surrounds them once more bearing witness to an intimacy that exists only here, within these walls. 

Except perhaps not, now. The past remains in place, but Trent is gone, and the world is changing. 

Standing in the ghost of a long-lost bedroom, something sets back into place.