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Under the usual blue-black of night and the more unusual ley lines and stolen moon light, Blumenthal is finally quiet. The towns people are more terrified than elated and don’t really know how to party, and there are fields to tend in the morning and children that need to go to bed. Caleb casts the tower for the Nein, but he’s not in it.
Beau gives him forty five minutes before she goes looking. Well, she gives him an hour. She knows where he is. It just takes fifteen minutes to walk there. She is slow. This isn’t something that needs to be rushed, and to be honest, she’s a little sore. It’s been a fucking day. She’s had a few drinks, but she’s not drunk, and she’s still more than a little pissed.
Yasha had kissed her before she left, breathless and stinging and beautiful, and whispered against her lips like a secret, “I know you’re still angry. Use it, baby.”
So, here she is. Walking.
Caleb is kneeling on the edge of the still-burned grass. There’s really no house, not even the bones of one. It’s a dark void of corrupt wood and smoke. It smells horrible. Beau coughs, but he doesn’t turn around.
Shit.
She approaches him slowly, but five steps away he says, “You should be with your wife.”
He sounds fine, but she’s not fucking fooled. “What are you doing out here?” She sits down cross legged on the ground beside him. He’s cleaned up since the fight, at least. There’s no blood on him, no ash, no dirt. His hair is pulled back from his face. He’s still not looking at her. He’s staring forward, towards the house, past it, at the horizon.
“Oh, I don’t know.” He tilts his head up, back, eyes on the sky.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Talk about what?”
She laughs; she can’t help it, and he finally does look at her. He’s clear-eyed, although there’s still red around his eyes. He looks at her and not through her, steady and horribly sad and so very, very tired. She chokes on her next exhaled laugh, swallows it down.
“Caleb-“
“What are we doing, Beauregard?” He whispers. "What the fuck are we doing?”
“Come here.”
He looks at her.
“Get the fuck over here.”
When he doesn’t move, she growls and pulls him into a hug that is more headlock than anything. He stiffens, but only minutely.
“Today was really fucked,” She whispers into his hair. She can feel him shaking just a little, and she holds him tighter. “I’m so sorry, man. I’m so sorry.”
Shit, she might cry.
“I can’t breathe,” Caleb whispers, and she lets him go. He pulls back, but slings an arm around her shoulders, presses his forehead to her temple. He’s breathing hard, quick, sharp exhales in her ear.
“Are you going to-“
“Yeah,” he whispers, and pitches forward to vomit on the burnt ground.
Beau rubs his heaving shoulders. “Okay, yeah. I got you. You’re okay.”
He spits and laughs, a terrible, hollow scraping sound. He rocks back on his heels, wipes his mouth with a hand. “Fuck.”
“Yeah.” She slaps him on the back. “Please come home.”
Another keening laugh. “I am home.”
“No you’re not,” Beau snaps, not caring how it sounds, not caring that her voice shakes. “You know that. Come home with me. Please. Or I’ll sleep out here with you and the others will worry.”
He lets out an unsteady breath. He leans back into her touch. “I’m so angry,” he says. “But I’m so tired.”
“Me too,” Beau says. “Me fucking too.”
He stands first, pushing up off the burned ground, fingers sinking slightly longer than needed into the scorched earth, like he wants to get it caught under his nails. He looks out again at the space of his childhood home while she stands.
“Home?” It comes out like a question. She needs him to answer it.
He smiles, just barely: a trembling, crooked thing. “Home.”
The others are still awake. She keeps her hand on Caleb’s shoulder when they step into the comforting warm glow of the tower, mostly she can feel the way he relaxes in the space, that unguarded exhale. She squeezes.
He shoots her a look.
Yasha goes to them first, and reaches for Caleb before Beau. “I’ve wanted to do this all day,” she says softly. “Can I give you a hug?”
She feels more than sees the way this overwhelms him, and gives Caleb a slight push forward. He stumbles into Yasha’s arms and she lifts him up. He disappears entirely as she lets her wings encircle them all too. Beau is swept up in the heat of it, the warmth and pressure of feathers, downy white and safe, safe, safe.
“You’re home, now,” Caduceus says from behind Yasha, quiet and steadier than breathing.
Caleb lets out a soft sound that is either a laugh or a sob or a plea for help, and Yasha lets him go.
Beau steps forward to fill the space, and Yasha wraps an arm around her, tucking her in the space where she fits fucking perfectly against her side. Beau feels the push of her heart against her, skin against skin, and breathes a little easier.
“Where’s Luc?” Caleb asks.
“Luc is sleeping. He’s fine,” Caduceus says. “How are you doing? And you’re not allowed to say you’re fine because we all know that’s simply not true.”
Caleb pinches the bridge of his nose. “I’m tired.”
“He might need some healing,” Beau says, and Caleb shoots her a look of absolute betrayal. She sticks her tongue out at him. “He kind of threw up everywhere.”
Caduceus nods and holds out a hand. “Why don’t we start with sitting down?”
“You don’t need to treat me like—“
“Caleb sit the fuck down,” Beau snaps, and he listens. Wise of him.
They spend the night together, Caduceus, Beau, Yasha, and Caleb. Beau stays awake and watches until Caleb falls asleep, watches longer until his breathing even outs, and then again when he starts to twitch from familiar nightmares. She doesn’t wake him, and they aren’t bad enough that he wakes up. It’s a pattern she knows well. She waits until his breaths even out again, and then whispers, “Yasha?”
“Mmm?” Yasha isn’t really asleep either, but she’s close. Her response is more exhale than speech.
“Love you.”
Yasha hums and rolls over, her back to the door, pulling Beau closer. Beau marvels at it, the casual way her wife pivots from the door and the world outside, the comfort and safety of this space. She holds onto the feeling hard enough to really feel it, hard enough to keep her awake.
Getting Luc home is quick.
Caleb wakes first and is nearly done sketching the circle by the time the others stumble into the foyer in various degrees of alertness. Beau has been up for an hour, watching Caleb work.
“Are you at least going to make us coffee, Lionett?” He’d asked her after twenty minutes.
“I’m really comfortable here, honestly,” she’d whispered, because Yasha still had her pinned in an embrace.
He’d flipped her off, but smiled, just a little.
She did make the coffee, eventually. “I don’t think you need caffeine, though, man,” she’d said. “You’re already wired. Are you that worried about Veth? Luc’s fine. He did fucking great.”
He hadn’t looked up from the circle, so she didn’t quite know what to do with that. Whatever. At least he was speaking.
“Wow, we’re leaving already?” Jester says now, stretching. She flashes her teeth at Luc. “You’re ready?”
Luc’s hair is bed-tussled and he looks positively mullish. “No.”
“Don’t give me that,” Caleb says immediately. “You wanted to go home last night and I know your mother is worried. We don’t need to make her worry longer. Six seconds. Get in.”
“Oh, we’re all going?”
“I’ll buy you a pastry, Jess,” Beau says, grabbing her hand. She feels Caleb grip her other shoulder, and then—
“CALEB WIDOGAST YOU BETTER HAVE MY SON OR I SWEAR TO ALL THE GODS—”
The flash of teleportation magic is still sending sparks behind Beau’s eyes when she hears Veth’s shriek. “Oh gods,” she says.
Beside her, Caduceus is laughing. She feels Caleb stumble out of the spell before she opens her eyes, and then everything is a blur of shrieking green as Veth grabs her son by the shirt and hauls him into her arms.
“We got him home safe,” Yasha is saying. “He did great, Veth.”
“Mom!” Luc is shouting. “It was AWESOME!”
Beau finally opens her eyes, and finds Caleb watching her. He smiles. It’s a trembling, quiet thing.
Under the usual blue of a midday sky and the more unusual fucking ley lines, Rexxentrum is quiet. Caleb teleports them to their house first, and Beau blinks back something aching and breathes in the familiar warmth of their house like she’s surfacing from a nightmare. It’s such an antithesis to the last fucked up 48 hours, the soft light of this place. She takes it in with wide eyes and sees Caleb doing the same, leaning against the door frame like it’s the only thing keeping him standing.
“Home,” Yasha says in her ear. She kisses her cheek, because she understands.
Caleb clears his throat. “Well, I’ll leave you two—“
Beau can’t stand the thought of him going back to his house with his godsdamn wilting green beans and his stack of papers and the dusty quiet books. “Caleb, I think-“
“Please,” he says, quiet. “I need to uh, think, I think.”
She studies him, notes the firm set of his jaw, the slight tremble in his hands even if she knows he got a full night sleep, that hollow burn in his eyes that hasn’t gone away since Trent’s voice whispered in the dark. “Are you sure?”
Of course he’s sure. Of course she needs to ask anyway.
He looks at her for a long time. Takes a breath. Lets it out. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“See you tomorrow.”
She closes her eyes and doesn’t watch him leave. It’s so quiet. She breathes it all in. She knows it’s not going to last.
Yasha rubs her shoulders. “You okay?”
“I’m home,” Beaus says. She says it one more time, so the words taste true. Before she can say it a third time, Yasha laughs and kisses the words away.