#cr2e69

Beau: “We shouldn’t have gone. We knew we were outmatched and we walked right in, and we let her go.”

(They don’t really live regretting like that, not anymore.)

Caleb: “There is nothing we could have done.” (He doesn’t believe that.) “We are all still alive.”

Beau: “We almost fucking lost Deuces again, and Fjord.” (They have diamonds, now, and it didn’t faze Cad last time. Is Fjord even theirs?)

Caleb: “She is not lost, Beauregard. We will find her.” (She knows.)

Beau: “I know.” (She knows he knows.)

Caleb: “Do you love her?” (It doesn’t matter.)

Beau: “Did you love Molly?” (It didn’t matter.)

They step over hours of conversation like this, always. Conversations where they both know the other doesn’t believe what they’re saying. Beau has always liked that about Caleb, that he never says the things one is supposed to feel like they should say to show emotion.

Here is the conversation they do have.

Beau: “It happened again.”

Caleb says nothing. He never talks just to agree.

Beau: “They were the middle of us, and they never stayed in the middle.”

Caleb: “If Molly had stayed in the middle, we would have gotten in a bar fight in Trostenwald when Nott tried to steal your money. She would’ve been too drunk to do it well, and I wouldn’t have stopped her, not really. You and Jester would’ve beat the shit out of us, and then we would have left.”

Beau: “Would twenty-two silver have done anything?”

Caleb: “Nothing would have. She never takes what she needs.”

Beau: “She needs you.”

Caleb: “That’s why she never asked me to change her.”

Beau: “Are you going to?”

Caleb: “If she still needs it when she learns how to ask.”

Beau: “Did you take a single hit in there? Y’know, besides that.”

Caleb: “No.”

Beau: “Last time?”

Caleb: “Nothing enough to matter.” He traces where the bridge of his nose now interrupts, sounding bloody and muffled.

Silence seeps back in, neck-high, until Jester starts crying in her sleep and Beau drags her head over into her lap.

“Can we borrow Frumpkin?” He’s a communal teddy bear, these days.

Caleb shakes his head. “He’s out.”

Beau doesn’t ask where. “Can you see anything?”

“No. He’s too far away. I’ll bring him back in the morning.”

“Can you let me know before everyone else? Wake me up if you have to.”

He doesn’t say anything, and Beau knows he will.

“Y’know, I feel like Fjord should name his demon. He uses it almost as much as Frumpkin, and it’s saved our asses, like, three times.”

“He wishes he had a Frumpkin.”

“Caleb, I wishes I had a Frumpkin. I just asked for him.”

He smiles at that, eyebrows still pulled together. Beau wonders, not for the first time, if he gets a lot of headaches.

Jester presses her face right into Beau’s thigh, like a cat. She’s stopped crying, and Beau’s just left sifting her hands through her hair. It’s overgrown, just like all of them. Past her shoulders, even. Pretty, but she thinks everything about Jester is pretty. It’d be moot to say it.

“She’s the only one who ever stays in the middle, huh?”

And it’s true, but only because everyone just crowds around her.

If Jester had had more than a few seconds, they’d have gotten Yasha back. She would’ve crumbled like old brick the moment Jester got close enough to touch her face. They all already have, before.

Caleb falls asleep with his head rolled back against the wall, and she sits there for a few more minutes, braiding and unbraiding Jester’s hair until she goes back to snoring, thinking about Zadash and irony.

Jester carrying Yasha in the street, Beau being scared Yasha would leave them for those mercenaries in the Victory Pit, Fjord threatening Caleb for not putting the team first.

The house in Rohsana is nice— fuck, it’s a house, they shouldn’t even have it— but gods, she hopes they live long enough to make it back to Zadash. So they can all stay in the Pillow Trove, and so they can all watch Deuces and the Pumat Sols have the world’s gentlest conversation, and get that fucking box they never picked up.

And Beau falls asleep thinking about watching Caleb stand at the top of that mage spire, whatever the fuck it was called, above the Cerberus Assembly like he deserves to be. Watching the Gentleman’s face twist in person when Jester starts asking him about Marion; maybe helping Jester punch him in the face.