Wizardpostingworld - How's This Even Supposed To Work?

Windswept 🍃

If he doesn't say "Hello Juno, it's been a while" in part two I'm gonna riot

Okay but when Nureyev comes back from finding himself and isn't relying on thievery anymore, what new job is he gonna have?

Good and bad answers please.

Well into the night, Essek folds his hands at last with nothing left to say. Caleb’s study feels hollowed out, refilled to bursting with the ghosts of every word exchanged. There had been a lot of them. All carefully chosen, some shouted, all heated.

This isn't the end of the conversation, but it's the end of their talk. A satisfactory end to the first of many chapters. Essek takes a deep breath.

"Thank you for listening."

Across the coffee table, his mother folds her hands in her lap. "Thank you for your honesty."

As though this is the end of a business meeting and not the second most harrowing conversation of Essek's life, they exchange a polite nod.

He stands, clasping his hands behind his back.

"Allow me to show you to your room."

Hours ago, Caleb had retreated to his quarters to allow them some privacy. Much as Essek would like to follow, he will stay away while his mother is here. Whatever assumptions Deirta might make about their involvement would not be true—not yet, anyway—and he will not sour their uneasy truce with a misunderstanding.

“My quarters are there,” he says, gesturing to the door with the star carving. “Caleb’s are across the landing.”

He points out the rest of the rooms below as they approach the landing. The tower has been tinkered with over time; the rooms usually reserved for the rest of the Nein have become workshops, research stations, and other such spaces that have proved useful in their explorations.

Before he can lead her down through the iris, his mother holds up a hand.

“If I might impose,” she says, “I should like to read over the reports you mentioned.”

Of course—he had mentioned the Vurmas reports during the initial buffer of small talk. They would make their way to the Dynasty eventually, but reading them beforehand will give his mother a leg up. The first of many gestures Essek suspects it will take to make up for her silence.

A small price to pay. Until he had known for certain that the Umavi would not cut all contact upon learning of his treason, he hadn’t realized how much he had dreaded the possibility.

He turns away from the iris and toward his room. His mother waits outside as he slips in, leaving the door ajar behind him as he sifts through the stack of papers left on the table in the entryway.

“Pardon the mess,” he says out of habit, as though the space is not spotless. Caleb arranges this room from scratch each night; there is not so much as a speck of dust to offend.

It stops Essek mid-hover, then, to see his mother’s eyebrows raised when he turns back.

“Think nothing of it,” she says, and already the polite smile is back in place. “Tell me, do your friends’ quarters share the same design?”

Essek follows her eye line over his shoulder. Caleb has laid out his rooms as he usually does, all purples and stars and fine fabrics. An array of arcane instruments waits patiently on a table under the window. Essek's mother looks past it all and into the bedroom. He frowns. There is nothing terribly unusual there, save—

It's all he can do not to swallow his own tongue.

The bed. His mother is staring at his bed.

For a drow of his age to sleep once in a while is not unheard of, of course; particularly when ill, they are known to indulge. Be that as it may, Essek knows as well as Deirta that one would hardly purchase a bed for a once-in-a-blue-moon nap. It comes with certain implications. 

It was not a purchase, Essek insists to himself. Everything in this room was pulled from the ether to make him comfortable. The logic is with him.

"Indeed," he says. "The colors are customized to suit us each as individuals, but the layout is the same."

This is the part where he pretends that he hasn't spent more than one night positively snug under those blankets for comfort's sake, and especially pretends he has not realized that the mattress is wide enough to fit two.

Essek’s mother is an intelligent woman. She will put two and two together: Caleb is a human, and a human unused to drow customs might make such a faux pas with innocent intentions. One tends not to think twice about habits that are second nature, and someone of Caleb’s background would not think twice about placing a bed in a bedroom.

Essek has done the same mental math more than once, with varying levels of desperation.

“Well,” he says, and presses the files into his mother’s arms with as much dignity as he can scrape together, “let me show you to your rooms.”

They make their way in silence down through the tower’s central column. Essek thinks auf rather than saying it this time; better, just in case, to keep the magic words from his mother.

He leaves the way to the front door open. She has far too much decorum to snoop during the night.

They touch down on the fifth floor. Silently, Essek thanks Caleb for neglecting to put a dodecahedron on the guest room door.

“These are yours.” He draws the door open for her, bowing his head as he gestures inside.

With no small swell of pride, he watches her take in Caleb’s handiwork as her head turns on a slow swivel, then sneaks a glance himself.

Strands of crystal drape the ceiling like a canopy of iridescent vines. Caleb has replicated perfectly the sitting room Essek had described, complete with his mother's favorite tea steaming on the low table. Everything from the molding to the doilies speaks to both the gravity of her station and her own personal tastes.

There is no bed.

The Umavi’s manners are immaculate. He knows, as she turns a smile on him that is barely thinner than usual, that he will not hear a word about it. He will simply be cursed with the mortifying knowledge that she has arrived at her own conclusions.

Perhaps, if he tried very hard, he could claw his way out of his skin.

“Thank you very much,” Deirta says, hands folded in front of her. “Please pass on my gratitude to Master Widogast.”

He will hold eye contact. He will hold eye contact and smile politely. It is perfectly acceptable for his mother to suspect that he—

“Of course,” he says. “Should you require anything, the cats will assist.”

With utmost grace and one final nod, the Umavi shuts the door behind her. Essek, hands folded behind his back, counts to ten before deflating.

The bed is just as they’d left it, when he finds his way back to his chambers. Essek lingers in the doorway regarding it for a long moment before sinking down on the edge.

The bedding is soft. Is this the sort of fabric Caleb imagines Essek would prefer, or the sort that Caleb himself enjoys? He runs his thumb over a seam, letting the thought settle in with a warm buzz. It feels less forbidden this time, and several times more dangerous.

He leans into both feelings, climbing the rest of the way onto the bed and under the covers.

Two floors down and two doors over, his mother is doubtless turning their conversation over in her head. She will spend the night picking apart his every transgression, weighing it against whatever sentimental value he holds to her.

Essek breathes out and turns his face into the softness of the pillowcase.

It smells like him. Like Essek himself—just the way it would after many days of use. Essek shuts his eyes, pressing his hands to his face as the liquid warmth of that realization makes its way through him.

Two doors down, he is increasingly certain that Caleb, too, is thinking of him.

His mother is in the tower. This is not the time to dwell on such things, much as his body would like to.

With a deep breath, Essek runs his thumb across the soft ridges of the duvet. His nail catches on one, then two, then three—he counts until his pulse begins to listen to reason, then breathes out. For now, he will take it as a safety net. Something to fall into at the end of the day when all else is uncertain. A soft place to land.

Let his mother assume what she will. It would be the least of his crimes she’s learned of tonight.

The threads of a Sending pull taut between his fingers, buzzing with potential. He takes a breath and lets it out.

“We are finished for the night,” he says. “Much more to come. My thanks and hers for your hospitality.”

He curls his lip at himself. Formality is not a leg on which he’s felt the need to stand in some time, where Caleb is concerned. His mother’s presence has him falling back into old means of keeping balanced.

“Sleep well. Perhaps with one eye open.”

Caleb knows him well enough to take it in jest. Essek lets the spell go, shutting his eyes with a long breath out.

Later, the memory of Caleb’s voice in his head as he sinks into the mattress will do him no favors at all.

“Glad to hear it went well,” he says, laughter in his voice. “I will have breakfast ready early. She will be impressed, I hope.”

Essek counts the stars on the ceiling. The pause stretches on for two constellations.

“Until morning, dear friend,” Caleb finishes. “Sleep well.”

Something warm unspools in Essek’s chest as the magic dissipates around him. There is more than one story in the tower that is only in the first of many chapters. The words to this one will be harder to find—but their writing, he thinks, will be sweeter.

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a very happy, very late birthday to my friend @sosobriquet, who tossed this concept around with me many months ago 🍰💜