Archive of Our Own ^beta

“It doesn’t even really matter, does it?” Veth reasons. “I mean, he’s just going to forgive me anyway.”

“Eh?” Caleb has to turn his head to look at her in the doorway. He has one shoulder against the wall so he can balance as he unlaces his right boot. The left boot is already off, set aside next to the coat rack which is covered in scarves, Caleb’s usual brown coat, and a dark purple housecoat with silver embellishments that is definitely not Caleb’s, although he’d look very handsome in it. “I’m sorry, what are we talking about?”

“There’s a minotaur downstairs right now,” Veth reminds him, backing the conversation up. “He could be– I don’t know, he could be lonely! He said he’s new to his team, he might not know them very well, maybe he needs support! He could be worrying by himself about the big fight tomorrow with no one to talk to! He could be tense! Maybe he needs a massage and you know I happen to have very nimble fingers.”

“Ah,” says Caleb. 

Sometimes when Caleb is talking about a thing he really likes, like cats or books or magic or books about magic cats, and then they get interrupted by a giant monster attack or Luc shooting his crossbow in the house or they can hear Fjord telling Beau and Yasha to stop having sex in the hot tub when other people are using it so she has to go investigate the situation for herself, Caleb can just hop right back into the conversation in the middle of his sentence, even if it’s hours later. It’s very impressive, but she understands why he isn’t able to do it right now, since the beginning of this conversation happened in her head on the way over. 

Veth had been meaning to whip up a quick bomb before bed, because how cool would it be to get to say that she blew something up on the moon?! But the cats were still cleaning up the mess in the laboratory when she walked in and even though Caleb is powerful enough to create anything they could ever want inside the tower, she needs the real shit black powder if she wants to Fluffernut anything out there, and all of that was being swept up by a tiger holding a broom with its tail and Sprocket shoving a dustpan around with his head. 

It gives her a lot of free time this evening, if she’s not going to be making anything, but instead of using it, she’d just gone to her quarters and stood in her sitting room, imagining many things and feeling very indecisive about all of them, until she heard Caleb come down from the upper floors and wish goodnight to two of the girls from the other team, the dead one and the one Beau wants to sleep with. 

Caleb’s door had already clicked shut when she got to it and she figured she’d have to pick the lock, since Caleb’s always said the rooms are completely private and she’s never been able to sneak into anyone else’s before, but the door opened right up when she turned the brass knob. 

“It’s just one night!” says Veth. “Maybe two, if we survive this. This could be my one chance! And, let’s be real, what does he even care? It won’t make a difference to him! Every time I ask him what I should do, it’s like he’s never had an opinion before.”

“We are talking about your husband now?” Caleb asks. He gets his second boot off and drops it beside the first. It falls over and he pushes it back into place with his toe. “What does he care about your marriage? Is that the question?”

“Yeah. It doesn’t fucking matter to him what I do. It never does.”

“Well, I don’t think that is true. Yeza—the way he looks at you, you know, I do not know what he is thinking, I do not have that ability like some do, but it is very clear to me that he cares for you very much. I think that has always been true.”

“Sure sure sure.” Veth waves her hand. “We love each other. We have amazing sex. It’s incredible. And we have a whole life together. But he doesn’t care what I do. I’m always saying to him, ‘Is it too soon to have paella again? I know we just had it the other night,’ and he always says we should just eat whatever I feel like!”

“Well—”

“Or I’ll say, ‘Do you think I did the right thing, letting my friends go off without me to face that horrible old man while I stay here where it’s safe? Even though sometimes, and I don’t want to sound mean about it, but sometimes Caleb can get a little bit jibbity about dealing with stuff from his past and he might need me there to help him through it!’ and he’ll just say, ‘Honey, you should do whatever you feel is best.’”

Caleb starts unwinding his scarf but she can tell he’s still listening. She likes how she can tell that. Caleb doesn’t usually look right at her when they’re talking anyway, so she knows what to look for instead by watching the way he holds his head or shoulders, or the channel between his eyebrows. 

“Or I’ll say, ‘Do you think I’m a horrible person for all the really shitty things I’ve done?’ I mean. I tortured people. I killed people. I ate a baby one time, I think. I was going to start a whole war! And he’ll always say, ‘No, you’re the woman I married and you’re the bravest person I know.’”

That’s not even all of it. The last time they’d had this conversation, a few weeks ago, when they’d been lying sweaty and entangled on the bed and hadn’t yet noticed Luc wasn’t still locked sulking in his bedroom, Yeza tried to comfort her by equating her situation with the time he’d worked for the Cerberus Assembly. How was that supposed to make her feel better? A horrible woman who was really good with magic and really bad with tipping threatened their son to coerce Yeza into conducting harmless experiments on an artifact he didn’t even understand! As if that was at all like what she’s done. 

It didn’t dampen her libido, and they’d gone another two rounds after, but it had worsened that constant internal tug-of-war game that’s been playing out inside her chest for eight fucking years now and it hasn’t settled back down since. 

He always thinks she did it all because she had to, like him. He doesn’t understand the thrill she felt, almost impossible to untangle from the constant, sickening fear, as the dragon turned away from Jester to fix its eye on her, the way she’d felt good to take its blow, the way she’d wanted it. After her years as the unwanted little sister, the nothing shy girl, the quiet housewife, of being not anything, she was useful to these people. She was helpful. She was doing something big and kind, important and heroic. 

Yeza doesn’t know how often her mind wandered from him as he waited for her in that little hotel room, a stranger in enemy territory, while she and Caleb (and she thinks it was probably Beau who sat with them) rode off on a big weird cat thing through a totally unknown landscape of strange and twisted sights toward the promise of more conflict and danger. 

He doesn’t know that, after Molly died, she could have gone back to Felderwin. By then she had magic and she had Caleb and he offered to go with her. Her memory isn’t as good as Caleb’s is, no one’s is, really, Caleb’s is the best, but she remembers that much because she turned down the offer. She went to Nicodranas instead. 

She reunited another mother with her child. She chased down stupid Marius. She helped accidentally steal a pirate ship. 

And then she spent over a month of her life with her lungs unable to expand all the way, so shaky and knotted up from the horrible sight of nothing but water, horizon to horizon, dark and glassy at times or churning, frothy teal striped with angry white. And all the time she knew she could have gone home. But instead she ate psychedelic fruit and shot seagulls from the crow’s nest and made bombs and loaded cannons and got her hands so completely coated with black powder she forgot they were green underneath the dust and she never told anyone, not even Caleb, that she was a mother. 

It was awful. It was a terrible time! She’d been sick with anxiety. And when they came aground, she’d sunk those horrible claws of hers into the earth and held on with desperation. The only time she’d held anything so tight was the night Felderwin was raided. They’d tried to flee and she’d clutched Luc to her chest and known that if he was ripped away, she’d just die too. 

And eventually she had. 

This should be the easiest choice to make in the world! She already put in all this work to be with Yeza again! But she’s here in Caleb’s room, unable to choose. 

Caleb sighs. He finishes unwinding his scarf and hangs all thirty fucking feet of it on the coat rack over the shiny dark housecoat. It’s a funny image, two items so different hung together like they’re a set, but it matches the rest of the room. “I know what you are talking about, ja .” 

“Of course you do. You know everything.” She pressed on even though he’s still modest enough to look embarrassed when she says this, even after all these years of her encouraging him to have a little confidence. “So you can just tell me what I should do.”

“I cannot do that.”

Veth groans. 

“But I can tell you, you know, that I do understand. That it is difficult sometimes, even with them—” He indicates the door behind her and the rest of the tower beyond with his chin. The dimple she knows is there has been covered by his beard for so long now, but she still remembers it’s there. “We are all a group of fuck-ups. We have all done things we are not proud of, but, ah, I think it is a bit different for you and I. It is a gift, to be seen the way some of them see us. To be seen as what we could have been. But it feels like I am two of me, sometimes. The one I would have liked… would liked to have been, and the other one cannot be hidden all the time. So it is harder, being only half, then, with the ones who cannot understand this.”

“And my husband is literally the perfect man. I mean, he’s no minotaur, but we could fix that! And he’s so patient and he still wanted to kiss me even though I had teeth growing out of everywhere and he always takes care of our horrible son when I run off with you guys.”

“Well, he is a good man. I do not know if he is perfect.”

“No, he is.”

It’s her that’s the problem. It’s Veth and her horrible, traitorous feelings. Her impulses and distractions, the way a big set of horns and a deep voice make her so instantly horny. She’s just up here thinking about it and she’s turned on! And it’s the way she can’t keep herself from running off into a fight every time. She really thought when they came to tell her about Ikithon that she was going to finally sit one out like she’d been promising for so long. That she would finally be a good wife. 

She’s pretty sure she had been a decent wife when they first got married. She hadn’t been the best girlfriend: too shy, too weird, too uncertain of what to say to someone who actually wanted to hear her speak. But Yeza was shy too and they liked kissing very much after that first dare and they found they liked fitting their bodies together in other ways soon after. But she’d been a good wife, mostly, aside from the afternoons when she’d been unable to keep herself still, when she’d walk out the door and leave Yeza to run the shop and do the alchemizing and mind the baby all by himself while she walked along the edge of the river and collected rocks with interesting shapes or patterns. She kept the house and watched the boy and served meals and sat in the shop when Yeza was hard at work in the lab during business hours. She was never good at making sales, but she made sure nothing was stolen. She knew what to look for in the shifty types. 

He provided for them and his love made her more tolerable to the rest of the folks around. He took care of her and she did her best to help him in return. 

“Well, still,” says Caleb. “I understand. Harder to have a relationship with someone who does not have the same blood on their hands. There’s a connection, with the ones who know those stains, like we do. It makes a difference, I think, to find someone who knows that regret.”

“Like you found.”

Caleb smiles like he doesn’t mean to and it warms her heart.

She’s not sure the last time she was inside Caleb’s rooms in the tower. It must be years. The sitting room looks very different now from what she remembers. It used to match the guest room, before that became Kingsley’s room, all bland and boring. It’d been sad but not in a very Caleb way. Caleb is sad in lots of ways, almost all of the time, but he’s never bland or boring. 

Now the room looks like his cottage in Rexentruum had a baby with the Xhorhaus. Family portraits and cat figures all along every wall, a heavy coffee table in a dark wood that doesn’t quite match all the glass accents or the crisp lines of the purple couch. The stained glass over the fireplace is infinite, possibility after possibility. It’s the view of the night sky from the middle of the Lucidian Ocean, that trippy world inside the beacon, the ninth floor in miniature. She never sees it moving, but it seems to have shifted a little bit every time she glances at it. And there are books everywhere . There’s a whole gigantic library downstairs but this room still has books on shelves, books stacked on the tables, a book left lying face-down on the couch with its spine cracked, books with tasseled bookmarks sticking out of them. The room finally looks like Caleb lives here but it doesn’t look like Caleb is the only one who lives here. 

Caleb doesn’t need bookmarks. Caleb would remember what page he was on. 

“ Ja, you know, I think he made an impression on our, ah, new friends. You are not the first to bring him up tonight.” He looks proud and it’s so nice to see Caleb like this. This is what she always wanted for him. For him to be happy, to not be that sad, scared boy she met in their jail cell. For him to get to have what she has with Yeza. 

Essek’s done some truly awful things. Like, way way worse than her. But he gives Caleb someone to come home to and she’s very grateful for that. 

“You know, Caleb,” she says, and even though they’re the only two people on the entire floor, she lowers her voice just a little for the conspiring. It’s like cooking up their old cons, before they met the rest of the group. “If you propose soon, you two could probably get married before Fjord and Jester.”

“Oh, but why would I do that?”

“Think about it! Think about how bad it would make Fjord look! He took forever to even get around to proposing! You think he’s going to be any help planning anything? He’s clueless! He’s going to have Jester do all of it. You’d really show him up!”

“I think he will do all right. And Jester, you know, she has her own tastes, she will do well. But, anyway, it does not really matter, we are not going to marry.” He crouches next to her and touches their hands together to finish the conversation more intimately. “It is your choice what you do with your night. I will not judge you for whatever you do, but I cannot make your decision for you, Veth.” He runs his hand over her hair so that one of her braids snags and straightens up. “I will see you in the morning and you will still be my best friend. Now I am going to take a bath before bed.”

“Ew.”

At first she thinks that it’s just the prospect of willingly spending more time in the water that makes her feel seasick. They already crawled through that lake a few hours ago and they’ve been doing water stuff all week as they resealed Uk’otoa again . And at least then she’d been able to fire off some cannons to soothe her nerves. But her heart is already slamming violently against her breastbone even before Caleb says the B word. It’s an old unease that she feels, the kind that regularly seized her in the days of her wrong body, and it rushes through her in many different directions all at once, leaving her uncertain and jittery. 

She stands in the sitting room for a minute, breathless and alone. She could go back to her room. She could go downstairs. She takes off in pursuit of Caleb. 

The middle room is one she’s never seen before. Each suite is different and Caleb’s is a garden with a stone path leading them through to the bedroom. The walls are painted with a pastoral view of northern farmland, a little hazy like from a memory. There are flowers planted along the left half of the room, roses and poppies, oranges and reds and yellows that ripple and sway very gently like a domesticated wildfire. On the right are green beans, scaling trellises with twirling vines, and the tops of carrots that have just reached maturity. 

They’d torn up gardens together, the two of them, with bare and filthy bandaged hands. She’d been skinny, starving, and she’d found someone else who was the same. Broken and scarred and clawing their way back towards their families with their teeth closed tight around their secrets. They’d devoured tomatoes raw and blackberries straight from the bush until the juices stained their faces red and they’d glanced sidelong at each other, like animals with bloodied mouths, thrilled at their narrow victory of not starving this day, hearts hammering as they listened for signs that they might be caught. They always left Frumpkin as lookout and never trusted Frumpkin as lookout. 

“Caleb!” She’s loud enough that she startles him and he jumps. He gets a little tangled in his trousers that are midway down his thigh and he has to grab on the rim of the tub for balance. They all have the same brass bathtubs in their rooms, but where Veth’s is usually empty, Caleb’s is already steaming. “You shouldn’t talk about yourself that way! Of course you’ll get married! You’re so handsome and so clever and, look at you, you’re even cleaning yourself. Anyone would be lucky to have you as their husband. Anyone! And, I mean, Essek, sure, he’s smart, but if he doesn’t see that and he thinks he can just string you along? Fuck him! Who does he think he is? First he starts a war and now he won’t even propose?! I’ll kill him! I’ll slit his throat!”

“No, please do not do that,” says Caleb. He’s laughing as he untangles himself from his own clothing. 

The laughing is better than the moping, but he still has such low self-esteem. He doesn’t even realize what a catch he is. Smart and handsome and sweet. Any person with any sense would want to marry Caleb in a heartbeat! They’d be crazy not to!

The garden smells like sunshine and worked soil and that fades almost entirely the moment she crosses the threshold into Caleb’s bedroom. The walls are half-timbered, like a lot of the walls in the tower, and the furniture is heavy, dark wood. The canopy over the bed is deep purple with clouds of lavender, embroidered with threads of silver like a meteor shower on a clear night. The globules of light illuminate the room, but these take her by surprise because they’re colored silver instead of the usual amber. 

“Well, he deserves it,” says Veth. She folds her arms and gives him the stern look that sometimes works on her campers. “If he’s taking you for granted, if he doesn’t appreciate how good he has it, he’s earned it. You deserve better, Caleb. You have so much to offer! You should be with someone who cherishes and values you!”

“Listen to me. He is very good to me. It took us time, but we are very happy with what we have built. And I am so glad for what I have. I did not think, really, that I could have it. He and I see each other. It is like I said, it is a rare thing to find someone who sees you as if a mirror to their worst self, who has seen and understands the sickness inside you, and still chooses to spend their day with you.”

“Then you should just get married!”

Essek isn’t even here and he’s all over Caleb. Why put off making it a sure thing? They got together not that long after Beau and Yasha. It’s been years! They’ve had time. And they always seem comfortable when she sees them, even if she doesn’t see Essek all very often. 

Without a marriage to make things permanent, Caleb is so close to just being left on his own. He could have his partner snatched away and be single at any moment! Just cut loose, totally free on the wind. And then there she’ll be, at home with her perfect husband, and that just doesn’t seem fair at all. 

“We have found our rhythm,” says Caleb. He’s calm, mismatched from the frenzy of her feelings. He smiles and the way it softens the edges of his face, so fond and gentle, makes her heart hurt. He’s naked now and she’s barely aware of it. His expression is so much more captivating than any penis could ever hope to be. “We will go in different directions in time, but that is not today. And I will be very grateful for him always.” He steps into the tub, sinks down until the water rises to his chest, and sighs in relief. 

When she and Yeza got married, she couldn’t imagine a future with anyone else. It wasn’t anything like Jester’s smut books, but no one had ever caught her eye before and she’d certainly never caught anyone else’s either. Of course it would be Veth and Yeza, together, until one of them died. 

“What the fuck are you talking about?” says Veth. “You’re breaking up? When did this happen?! Is that why he isn’t here?! Why didn’t you tell me?!” She stands beside the tub, which is almost as tall as her shoulders, and she grips the rim tightly, frantically. 

The thought of Caleb just left floating out there in the dating pool, unattached, makes her uncomfortable to think about. It’s like a rush of vertigo, or like when she would glance over the gunwale of the ship and see the water all around them, everywhere, and she’d realize how little there was to keep her from being pulled under again. 

“No. Not for some time. He has his own part to play in this, working with Lady Vysoren and her contacts. I would like him to have joined us, of course I would, but I will see him when we have seen this through.”

“And then you’ll just break up.”

Caleb goes under the water and stays down there for a second while Veth squirms. He comes back up with his hair wet and his face flushed red from the heat. He wipes the water from his eyes. “If he continues as he has, he will live for a very long time after I have left this world. And much sooner than that, I will be old and he will be still the same. Time is not a constant and ours will have run its course.”

“You look great. He’s a war criminal! And he’s going to get scared off by some grey hair?”

“No. It is my choice. He is brilliant .” Caleb says the word like it’s the sexiest word ever, and it kind of is when he says it. “I will not have him shackled, playing nursemaid to an old man when he still has so much life left of his own. Our thing is good. Let it stay so. We will be friends, always.”

“And then, what? It’s twenty years from now and you’re going to be alone? Or you’re going to reenter the dating pool at sixty-one? You’ll be so out-of-practice!”

Caleb looks confused. “I would not say that I am particularly concerned with that, but that is not true. We have always been open to follow our own pursuits, he and I have been. That is what works for us.”

“Like an… open relationship?”

“ Ja. ” 

And she realizes he thought she knew. 

He isn’t going to be cut loose and put back on the market. He never left it. He’s always been an option. 

Caleb tips his head back to work a handful of shampoo though his hair and the glow from the silver globules now looks like moonlight as they illuminate his profile. He sinks under for a rinse. 

Veth feels like she’s suddenly underwater too. The tide has come in too strong and knocks her about. 

Something kicks in, the instinct that kept her struggling against the grips of the goblins who held her down, something frantic and primal and clawing, kicking her way back toward the surface. She pulls off her boots, steps up onto the small footstool beside the tub that houses the soap and a little jewelry dish of earrings and rings too skinny for Caleb’s fingers, and she climbs into the tub. 

The water is solid under her feet. She has her ring on, swiped back from her son who absolutely knows why he lost this privilege, and sits down on the surface. Caleb is under her, with the water a barrier between their bodies. 

If she takes off the ring, she’ll plunge in and fall against him. 

She looks down at him and takes him in in detail she hasn’t in years. The pale, pasty skin. The wiry red hair across his chest. The curved slope of his nose. The faded scars that crisscross his arms, uncovered and untouched. The bigger scar from Lucien, pinker, down over his chest and running jagged toward his navel. Deeper circles below his eyes but somehow he doesn’t look as tired as he used to. His hair, still rich copper even with the grey streaks, fans out around his head as he scrubs. 

He looks like Caleb, like her cellmate. He looks older. He looks new. He looks so handsome. 

Veth sees Caleb at least once a month, at least for a dinner, sometimes for a long weekend and a fight. She only sees Essek a few times a year. Really, now that she’s thinking about it, she’s not sure she’s seen Beau and Yasha in separate rooms since they got married. Caleb and Essek have never been like the rest of them, that’s just what she needed to be true. She was desperate for it. It made things easier, somehow, to picture them that way, even when all the evidence was right there to debunk it. 

She’s really not the best detective. 

But it made her feel a little bit more at ease, to imagine that Caleb was doing what most of them were doing. She wasn’t missing out on anything, if Caleb was also sitting at home, just like she was, budgeting out the monthly expenses while his own husband washed the dishes. It made it silly how much she ached for something more as long as there was nothing out there for her to chase but stress and pain and traps she’d fail to disarm. 

Caleb surfaces. He wipes the sudsy water away from his eyes and blinks at her in surprise now that they’re face-to-face. His breath still smells sugary from the heroic magic dessert. “Oh, are you joining me?” He starts to reach for her but stops with his fingers on her arms. 

“I’m a terrible wife.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I am! He’s so good to me. And I just wander off, any chance I get. I’m out here on the fucking moon, about to fight a thing that eats gods, and I’m thinking of sleeping with another man!”

“It is okay to imagine, I think,” says Caleb. “And even if your relationship is not as, eh, immutable as mine, there is no harm in that. We’ve all done that. We all have. And you and minotaurs, you know, there is a history there.”

It takes her a second to conjure the minotaur man back up in her mind. She hadn’t exactly forgotten about him, it’s just that he kind of got lost along the way, under all the rest of it. He feels less alluring now, as ridiculously hot as he is. She’s not going to trade away all her years of love and marriage just because she’s as horny as her teenage campers over a pair of big hooves. 

“But—” And now he does touch her, his wet palms over the thin leather of her suit. It has never left her, how easily Caleb touched her even then. She was monstrous and hideous, awful to look at, and no one had wanted to touch her. But then Caleb did. He came out of his shell and warmed up to her. He liked her and he showed it by slipping their hands together, sleeping through the nights coiled together, lifting and carrying her around even though he was so puny and weak. “If you are unhappy, I hope you do not stay that way. You have told me many times that I do not deserve to be unhappy—”

“Of course you don’t.”

“And I would like, if you would let me, I would like to return that to you. I would like for you to be happy as well, my friend. And I do not think all is as bad as you fear it is, but if things are not okay in your home, if that is the case, and you choose to leave or you feel that you must leave, you will have a home here with me—us.” He flinches when he misspeaks, his eyebrows knot together even further than they usually do and his gaze drags over the surface of the water. “The nein of us, we are a bunch of assholes. And I understand, what that is like. To want things that… that you cannot have. To have done these things we have done and to regret them. My sins are a bit greater than yours, so I am not one to judge. But I know what you are talking about and some of your things are ours. And I cannot tell you not to feel guilty about all of it. But some of it, maybe.” He sighs. “Ah, well. I am sounding like you now. But you are my best friend and I love you. And I will do so no matter what you choose.”

He means it. He does sound like her and she always means it too. 

Caleb killed his whole family, he tortured people, so what? Big deal. He was kind to her when literally no one else was. He took care of her when she was starving. He gave her her life back. 

Yeza still loved her in her new shape, but Caleb didn’t even know she’d ever been Veth when he started loving her. When she told Yeza she worried the change was too great, not even just the physical stuff but also her new feralness, her hunger, her fear and her bloodlust, the impulsivity and sticky fingers, he told her she was still herself, still the same old Veth. When she told Caleb the same, he told her he understood and it made no difference. He loved her at her worst as her worst. 

“Right now I choose a fucking drink,” says Veth. It’s the only choice she can make with any confidence. And she doesn’t have to make a choice forever. She can mix things up if it gets stale. Some sherry, to start, but then some Lionett wine when she’s a few glasses in. Maybe she’ll go back to whiskey. She hasn’t had any in a while, maybe it’s time to revisit that part of her.

“And you can stay here. You can stay tonight with—with me. So you do not have to choose. Like, ah, like old times. If you would like.”

Veth hesitates. 

She isn’t sure why. It’s Caleb. It’s nothing they haven’t done before. They spent so many nights on top of each other, wedged together, clinging to each other. They’ve slept with her cheek on his ass or him with his head in her lap or both of them cocooned in his coat together. 

She doesn’t say yes but she doesn’t say no either. 

“I will tell you what,” says Caleb. “I will leave my door—ah. Hm. Well, I think that we have both seen what that leads to. I do not think that would be a good idea after all.” He thinks a moment and she watches him think. She always likes to watch him think and he taps his finger over her arm as he does. “Now that I have already put up the tower, I cannot change around who is always allowed into which room until I cast it next, and there is no key, but, how about this, I will leave the door to the laboratory unlocked.”

She doesn’t mention that she won’t need it. He must not know. How could he not know?

“And that way you may keep your options open.”

She’s sailed into the eye of the storm. She doesn’t have to choose now, not until she’s got a little booze in her at least, and if she just focuses on that, she feels weirdly peaceful, sitting on top of the water in Caleb’s bedroom. She knows her problems will catch up to her soon, they always do, every time, but her family is on another planet, and she’s pretty sure she’s not going to fuck the minotaur to night, at least. Maybe tomorrow. If they win, she’ll need to celebrate somehow. And if they lose, then it really isn’t going to matter. But for now, her stomach has settled and the calm is here for as long as it will last. 

“Thank you.”

“ Ja . Of course.” He holds on to her arm, loose enough to let her leave, tight enough to say she doesn’t have to. 

She kisses him. 

Just softly, her lips to his, nothing they haven’t done before. And she savors having him so close, the breath of air from his nose against her cheek, the bristle of his whiskers over her skin, the strange smell of him actually cleaned up, and then she uses her hands on his shoulders to push herself up to her feet. “Goodnight, Caleb.”

He smiles up at her, sad and handsome, outlined in moonlight where her shadow doesn’t cover his face. “Goodnight, Veth Brenatto.”