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Veth is more than aware of what she is now, and how she looks. Every time she catches a glimpse of her reflection, it seems worse than before. At least in the first days, she still had some fat on her, some familiar roundness to her newly-green cheeks, but it isn't taking long for her sentence to hollow her out. She shares a cell with three human men and a half-elf woman, and they're fed in their cell. The others usually leave her something, but it's not always much, the best of the food always claimed by the biggest people well before she works up the courage to dart out from her corner, snatch something, and run back.
She hates her fangs, but she appreciates how they keep the others away, as long as she stays in her corner. She doesn't trust these people, doesn't trust the guards, either, doesn't even trust the judge who sent her here, techically, but as long as she stays in the corner, as long as the fangs keep everyone away, maybe she can make it through her sentence. And maybe the fact that she isn't dead yet means that if she can do that, they'll let her go. Maybe. It's too scary to think about trusting that, because what if she's betrayed?
The medium-sized man and the surprisingly burly half-elf lady take up all the energy in their little cell, pacing and shouting things at people in the other 3 cells and rattling bars at the guards, partially, she thinks, because they are bored. The other men are quieter. The biggest one sits casually against the back wall, occasionally chiming in or complaining about the noise or playing a game he'd invented with pebbles. The third is like her, and not only in that he's scawny and under-fed. He has a corner, diagonal from hers, and he stays in it with the same desperation she feels. He's quiet. He sits curled up. He watches, like she does. Unlike her, he sits in one of the front corners by the bars, so he looks out into the rest of the prison more often than she does, but sometimes she catches him watching the cell with her, watching her the same way she watches him, searching but not aggressive.
Sometimes, the rowdy ones turn on their cell-mates, and she knows all three of them can feel it coming just before it does, because the guy who sits on the back wall always goes with them, getting ahead of the energy before it can hit him, and the quiet one starts watching inside the cell instead of outside of it. His eyes dart from the rowdy ones, to the casual one, to her, around and around and around.
When the rowdies come after her, they never expect her to talk, and mostly, she doesn't. Her bared fangs are usually enough to keep them at bay, laughing amongst themselves like the whole joke was just making her growl and hiss and leap up to get her feet underneath her, ready to run, as if there were anywhere to go. And maybe that is the joke. She doesn't ask. She doesn't ask them to back off. She growls and snarls and lets them think she's a wild, feral thing, because she thinks it might be a safer thing to be. Because her voice can't shake and she can't say the wrong thing if she's not talking.
When they come after the quiet one, it looks friendly, but she knows it's not. She sees how he flinches when an arm is casually thrown around his shoulder, sees how he pulls away. He isn't mute, because sometimes he cries out in his sleep, usually in a language she doesn't know. She isn't sure how good his Common is, because he doesn't speak. Sometimes if a guard asks a question, he makes himself answer, and that seems to go fine. But he doesn't make the effort for their cellmates, no matter how much they press and prod, whining in a half-panic as they crowd into his space. Sometimes, they tell him he's stupid. Sometimes, they tell each other he's a useless idiot. Sometimes they even tell her he's stupid, as stupid as her. They're right, but only because she's not stupid. She knows she's not, and she knows he's not, either. She knows his eyes are just as aware as hers, just as active in watching.
Her back corner and constant, restless focus on the more direct dangers of their cellmates mean she doesn't see what the scrawny man sees when something falls out of their guard's pocket as he rifles through his pocket for his keys. She just sees her cellmate's hand twitch, faintly, and his posture shift. She knows he sees something, but she can't make sense of the rest of it, and then the guard is unlocking the hatch they use to slide in the food for the group and she's too distracted weighing exactly when to run in to pay attention to what anyone else is looking at outside.
She doesn't find out he's taken something until the guard is stomping around, looking down at the ground along the perimeter and telling one of the other guards that he must have dropped part of something he was trying to fix. Even then, she isn't really listening until the guard starts rattling cell doors, telling everyone to turn out their pockets. Her cellmate's hands are fast and clever, fast and clever enough that the guard doesn't have an angle to spot what she does, the tiniest glint of light off of metal as he palms it while he's turning his pockets out.
It takes a real search for them to find what she thought, initially, was a coin or a ring but was, in reality, a tiny bell, the size for a cat's collar. It's shiny but not expensive, and the other guards make fun of their colleague for caring the whole time he's looking, but then her cellmate tries to keep the bell, hunches his whole body around it and makes the guard peel his fingers away from the bell and take it back by force. It's weird, objectively, but she remembers that twitch when he spotted it, feels an answering twitch in her own hand as she thinks about it, and she knows she fought like a howling mad-woman to try to keep them from taking her button bag when they threw her in here.
The guard back-hands the scrawny man for the inconvenience, but just before the cell door can clang shut, one of the other guards shouts over, "Fuck, actually, that one's a caster. Make sure he doesn't have any other random shit. They're supposed to be able to do magic with, like, belly button lint and shit. Just random."
Veth has watched the scrawny man flinch away from physical contact for weeks, even theoretically friendly contact, and she isn't surprised when the moment the guard puts a hand on him, he flinches and tries to tug away. The man's face is starting to bruise, and his eyes are wild with panic. She sees the panic in his body, too, in the way he twists and writhes, trying to escape the guard's touch more than the guard himself, or the cell, or the prison.
The guards shout at him like he's making an escape attempt, like he's trying to start a fight, like he's been caught in the middle of a grand plan. The guard he's trying to pull away from wrestles him to the ground like it's nothing and drags him away, and she still thinks he's wriggling instead of fighting, either because he doesn't know how or because he's too panicked to put up a real fight.
Her cellmates laugh and joke about it, but she feels shaky and she doesn't know why.
When they come near her, she reacts like a trapped animal, but it's mostly pretend. Even so, a little of it sparks inside her for real, every time. She is a creature, and so are the rest of them, and usually they bury their creature-ness under the rest of being people, but she knows the part of her that is a creature, the part of her that knows only life and death and needing air. She knows there are parts of her that can snap back there with less cause than dying, and she knows that's what her cellmate was when he was dragged away, that creature they were all supposed to be too sentient to be.
She thinks she won't feel really calm again until he's back in the cell, watching, like she does, tucked away safe in the corner like being there can keep them from being touched.
When the guard hauls the man back out of the office, she expects him to be brought back to their cell, but instead, he's led to the middle of the prison, where he's tied to the whipping post in the middle of the room. All four cells have a view of it, and she can't imagine having all of those eyes on her, especially not for this. He's been stripped down to a pair of long johns, and he looks even scrawnier with his shirt off.
She only half-hears the declaration that he's been caught stealing, hoarding spell components, and planning an escape, because she's not close enough to count his ribs from this back corner, but she can definitely tell they're visible. He does always wait for the others to eat first, like she does. And he does always leave her something, his eyes flicking toward her in the moment before he moves, every time. Maybe it's not just her. Maybe this place is hollowing out both of them. Or maybe their cellmates are greedy and they're too afraid to fight back. Either way, she almost misses the number of lashes the warden has ordered, processing the number only after the other prisoners react, the big man in her cell whistling in shock as other people chatter about it.
She feels confused in the moment between realizing what the guard just said and the first blow landing across her cellmate's back, because she knows what he is, knows he's like her, and this is a sentence for something else entirely. The confusion vanishes the moment the first strike hits, the ugly sound of the whip hitting flesh making everything else moot.
She can see him trying to adjust his stance between the first and second lashes, and then the second and third, but he's eerily quiet. They've all watched floggings before, and she knows full well that prison tough guys like to pretend it doesn't hurt, but this isn't that. It's not blustering, and there's no bravado, no drama. He doesn't even make half-stifled noises, and while she can see that his breath is unsteady, any noise that accompanies that unsteadiness is impossible to pull from the sounds of the rest of the prison watching, or the awful sounds of the whip landing.
The fourth strike draws blood, but nothing changes, not the tone of the second guard's voice, counting, not the force behind the whip, and not the eerie silence from the prisoner.
The longer the prisoner is silent like that, the more her cell mates chatter and make it hard to hear if he makes any sound at all. But even if he is, it's labored breath, even long after everyone she's ever seen whipped had been screaming. Even long after she thinks it should be possible not to scream.
It doesn't take long for his back to be torn bloody, and when the blood starts to drip down onto his underclothes, she squeezes her eyes shut so that she doesn't have to worry he might die. With her eyes closed, the sounds are worse, but she also starts to detect a hint of panic in the voice of the guard keeping count, panic she thinks might be because of the man's continued and astounding silence.
She opens her eyes again when their other cellmates make a collective noise of surprise, and the man's legs have given out, leaving his full weight to hang from his wrists. She feels nauseous when the beating continues anyway. He can't brace himself like he is now, sagging in the restraints, and now she hears the breath driven out of him with each strike, even through the noise of the room.
He takes three lashes in almost complete silence, but the fourth crosses some kind of line she can't see. He doesn't break. He shatters.
What comes first is a flood of words in the language he speaks in his sleep, the one she doesn't understand and doesn't need to. He's begging, presumably for the pain to end, but as surprised as the guard flogging him is, the next swing is already in motion. When it lands, sounding wet, against the ragged skin of his back, he lets out a scream that sounds like it's coming from the depths of him, from his guts and not his lungs, and he doesn't even fully catch his breath before the begging resumes, breathless and agonized.
This time, when Veth squeezes her eyes shut, she covers her ears, too, and for nothing. Every cry they beat out of him comes from that same deep place, filling her stomach with nausea as the sound cuts through everything. With her eyes closed, the screams don't even sound like they come from his body. They sound like something else, like the agony is coming from his spirit, or maybe his soul. Between screams, the begging never stops, staying essentially incoherent even as he switches to Common.
She doesn't open her eyes or uncover her ears until it's over, and, by then, her whole body is shaking. She can tell from how the guards and other prisoners talk that they didn't hear like she did, that they don't know like she does.
His incoherent begging, all 'no' and 'please' and dips back into his native language, continues until the guards open the cell door and dump him unceremoniously inside. His body is limp, lying on his stomach, but his bruised face is turned toward her and she can see that he clings narrowly to consciousness. His eyes are open but blank with pain, and for the first time, they fall in her and she can't tell whether he even sees her. Part of her wants to reach out toward him, but she knows better, knows her hands aren't hers anymore, so she doesn't.
The rowdy man complains that he's bleeding on their floor, but no one will touch him to make him (or help him) move.
The time before lights out feels longer than it ever has before, the light changing far too slowly. She can't seem to tear her eyes away from the man on the floor, not even when their other cell mates move or talk or joke about her looking at him. They say she's bloodthirsty, that she's going to eat him. It stings, but that's small. The big thing is the man on the floor. The big thing is his labored breathing, the way the bleeding slows as his body tries its hardest to heal itself, the occasional flickers in those blank blue eyes, when she can almost see him again.
No one moves the man from where he's been dumped until dinner comes, and then the other two men in the cell work together to drag him by his arms across the ground, leaving him off to the side, her side, instead of his usual corner, which feels mean, somehow. Then, she can't see his eyes, which makes her nervous. Her fingers twitch, and she winds them in the hem of her shirt. The rest of their cellmates don't leave enough food for two, but she scoops it all up anyway, trying to hide it even though she knows there's no hiding things in a space this small, really.
It's a relief when darkness falls and she knows the half-elf is the only other one in the cell who can really see, because it makes her feel less trapped. She continues to watch the shuddering rise and fall of the man's breath, continues to check that it hasn't stopped, until she hears faint snoring all around and decides it's time to make her move.
She creeps toward him carefully, not wanting to draw attention if she's missed anyone else who's still awake, but nothing happens, and she makes it to his side unbothered by anyone else. When she gets there, she realizes she doesn't know what to do, doesn't really have any way to help, but she's already moving, so she can't let that stop her.
She expects him to be asleep, but he isn't, or if he is, he's asleep with his eyes still open and staring. She feels her resolve build back up again. She can't shake his shoulder without jostling his back, and his head is turned so that the side with the black eye is up, slightly swollen from the guard hitting him before they even took him from the cell. For a moment, her hand just hovers, reaching toward him and then jerking back in little hesitant twitches. Then she steels herself and reaches both hands out to grab one of his, cradling his hand between hers. His wrists are bruised and bleeding, too, so she tries to be as gentle as possible as she squeezes his hand to let him know someone is here.
His brow furrows as he searches for her in the dark, his eyes looking more focused, even though she knows he can't really see her. She takes a hesitant half-step to the side, letting moonlight fall over her monster's face, and for a moment, she's absolutely convinced that everything is about to crash down on her, somehow. The furrow in his brow deepens, and she tries to get ahead of things, to dodge out ahead of the danger. "I have food," she whispered, "I kept it, from dinner. Do you think you can eat, so you can heal? Or is the pain too much?"
His thumb traces along hers until he finds the claw at the tip, and he whispers. "Oh. It's you. You are - the goblin."
"I'm not-" she starts instinctively, but she can't finish, doesn't finish, because all of that is too complicated.
He doesn't pull his hand away. It stays in hers, and he lets her hold it. "Hello, Nott," he manages, his voice half-ruined from screaming. "I am - Caleb."
"Caleb," she repeats, trying not to let her heart run away with her just because she's been offered a name, like she's a person and not an animal. "Do you think you can eat, Caleb? You're very badly off, and you're going to need your strength, but I don't know if-"
"Is there any water left?" he asks, "I need-" He has to stop to catch his breath and she cuts him off. "I think so, yeah. They refilled it later than usual before lights out, and the others are asleep, so you can have as much as you want."
Usually, she gets a drink of water only in the dark of night, and usually she bolts to their water bucket to drink swiftly from their shared cup before running back to her spot. Tonight, she keeps her head on a swivel, watching carefully and lifting the bucket even more carefully, carrying it all the way over to Caleb.
She's worried he'll choke, trying to drink lying down, but she's careful, and he's careful, and he manages. His breathing sounds a little easier, after, but she doesn't know if that's real, or just an illusion because she'd soothed his throat.
She's been carefully focused on his face, his sides, his arms, anywhere but his mangled back, but now she can't avoid it. She looks.
Up close, it's worse than she'd even realized, nothing precise or manageable in the tangle of cuts, some deeper and some shallower, and where his skin isn't torn, it's welted or bruised. Her breath hitches in shock, and she's surprised when his hand reaches for hers again. "Thank you," he whispers. "I don't know about food. I don't - know anymore."
She frowns, but she needs him to know it's not at him, so she does the only thing she can think of that might be soothing and brushes his hair back away from his forehead, carefully avoiding his black eye. "I think we need to clean your wounds out. They didn't, and we'll get new water in the morning. But I don't know how you stayed quiet so long before, and we can't wake anybody up."
His eyes close, and his face is impassive, but every breath he takes requires so much effort that she can see it as he steels himself, even without other clues.
He swallows. "I - have practice. Not - with this exactly. But pain. I have - practiced pain. So if you are going to clean my wounds, I can be quiet, and I can tap the ground if I think I will not be able to stay quiet."
She nods, but then realizes he may not be able to see that. "Ok," she agrees. "I'll try to be gentle, but there's not much I can do. I have one little scrap of cloth, and it's not really enough, but we can't just let you get infected, either."
The longer they go, the more often Caleb taps out, nearly breathless, and has to rebuild his strength before they can go on. The longer they go, the more she is certain that he will need her help long after the sun comes up. By the time his wounds are clean, they're both shaking and his blood is all over her hands, but none of that is as important as the extra shifting and noise starting around them as the rest of the prison hovers at the edge of waking up, the sunrise perilously close.
She helps him drink one last time and then returns the water bucket, mostly empty now, to its usual place at the front of the cell, by the bars. Then she hurries back to Caleb, whose eyes follow her as she moves, even as he lays still.
She needs to get back to her corner, but that means either leaving Caleb where he lays or bringing him with her, and neither feels safe.
His breathing is steadier than it was yesterday, but he still hasn't eaten, since he let her scarf down all of last night's food from the fear that he would throw up if he moved wrong. He'll need food, and he won't be able to get it himself. He'll need water again, too. Shelter, she can't really offer, or protection, but she can help with half of what he needs. She knows, after hours and hours of watching him stay alive in a heap on the floor with no help from anyone, that no one else will do it. She's the only one, and for the first time since she got here, she's not the weakest thing in this cell.
She sits beside his head, looking at him as he looks back, his eyes exhausted but almost agonizingly conscious. She can see him there, as they start to get the very first of the pre-dawn light, as clearly as when he'd sat in his corner, across from her, and watched.
She takes a breath to steady herself. One thing is clear. She can't leave him here, nearly in the middle of the room. He likes his corner, and she likes hers, and the middle is less safe. No matter what she does, she can't leave him in the middle.
"It's about to be light," she whispers. "Do you want me to help you move to a front corner, or do you want to come share mine?"
She hopes he'll tell her he wants his own corner. She hopes she can move him and have done with it, even though part of her knows she'll still worry. But she doesn't get it.
"You would - allow that?" he asks, hesitant, and there is a faint air of wonder in his voice that sparks something in the middle of her chest.
She swallows past a sudden lump in her throat. "Come on. I know it hurts, but we have to hurry. Can you crawl, if I help?"
As he gets up enough to crawl, his back twists slightly and she sees the tension in his jaw and, a moment later, blankness in his eyes again, like he isn't there. He's silent but empty as they make their halting way to her corner, Caleb lumbering forward as if on instinct as she guides him with soft, careful nudges.
When they get to the corner, she whispers, "You can lie down again, Caleb. It's ok. You can rest, now."
His eyes stay empty for long enough to make her stomach start twisting up, but eventually, he comes back, his eyes alive again.
Their cellmates wake up all at once and the rowdy man nudges the woman. "Holy shit! She really is gonna eat him!"
Veth expects them to come toward her, to try to make a fight of it, but they don't. The big man does, though, losing his usual casual air and suddenly giving her the sense that he might be the most dangerous thing in this cell. She gets instinctively to her feet, climbing between the man and Caleb and baring her fangs.
"If you're fuckin' eating people-" he starts, but she's already keyed up too far and he takes one step too close, setting her off.
Panic floods through her, both for herself and Caleb, and the fear takes her over, calling up instincts she still doesn't understand. She snarls and snaps her teeth in the open air and then screeches, "Stay back! Don't touch him! He's hurt!"
The man stops, his eyebrows shooting up. "You speak Common?" the half-elf woman blurts.
"Get back!" she snaps again, swinging her claws through the air, purposefully not getting too close.
Behind her, Caleb shifts, only slightly, but enough that she can hear the movement. She glances backward at him, still panicked. "Hold still! You're hurt!"
"It is - alright," he says, his voice still rough and quiet. "I am - okay. Nott, I am - okay."
That's reassuring, but not reassuring enough, not when the big man takes another step in their direction. Nott wheels on him, snarling again. "Back!" she demands.
Caleb reaches across the ground and grabs her ankle, holding it gently. "Nott," he says, "Do not get yourself hurt for me."
"Then don't get hurt again!" she said, her voice a half-enraged howl.
The rowdy man sums things up for all of them. "What the fuck?"
Nott snarls at him, too, ready to lash out at anyone and anything because her body is doing that thing it does sometimes where things that are not living and dying become that, where all of the air in the room feels like it will elude her, like she will have to fight for it, like if she loses her next breath she loses everything.
The big man backs down. "She didn't try to eat you?" he asks Caleb.
"No," Caleb says. "She has - helped."
The big man's eyes narrow. "What's your game, goblin?"
Caleb squeezes her ankle reassuringly, but it isn't enough to soothe the swirling terror at the core of her. "Go away!" she shouts.
She isn't sure if this is the right time or the wrong time, but whichever one it is, the guards come out with breakfast and rattle the door, yelling for them to stop fighting. Nott snaps at the big man as he turns to walk away, but she doesn't even lunge, and she's sure it looks as half-hearted as it is. She doesn't want to hurt him, she just wants him gone, and every step he takes away from them makes her breath come easier.
The guards start on the other side, waiting to feed them last, and by the time the food slides into the cell, she's worked up her courage and, for the first time since she was thrown in this cell, she dashes for it immediately, beating everyone else there and hissing a wordless warning at the others as she gathers up what she thinks is enough for both her and Caleb and then scurries back to him and her corner.
She thinks Caleb can see her hands shake, but with his eyes on the rest of the cell, she can turn her back on the others to hide the tremor as she breaks up a hunk of bread into smaller pieces.
Caleb eats, finally, as she hands him one bite of bread at a time. He chews slowly and swallows carefully, and she thinks she can see his strength returning, just a little, but she knows it might be wishful thinking.
She isn't used to the rest of the people in the cell watching her. She's used to watching them, and their eyes make her feel uncomfortable. She shifts awkwardly, but things get a little easier when she works up the courage to go get Caleb a drink of water and nobody goes for her. The rowdy ones are only wandering the other side of the cell, never getting too close, but she still waits to eat until Caleb is finished and then eats while watching the cell, glaring at the others every time they look at her.
By noon, things have settled, the other calm of the cell mostly ignoring her and Caleb, and the big man only looking, never coming over. Caleb sleeps, and she tries not to look at his face, because even in his sleep, she can see the pain in it. By 3 or 4 in the afternoon, she's asleep, too, even though she's never allowed herself to sleep in the daylight here, but when she wakes up, neither of them is dead and none of their cellmates are any closer than before.
Dinner is the same as breakfast. She snaps and snarls to grab food first, then feeds Caleb bite by careful bite, shredding things with her claws so that all he has to worry about is not getting anything down the wrong pipe while he still can't really sit up.
The next day starts out much the same, but she's better rested. For a time, Caleb seems to be, too, his eyes actively sweeping the area. But then he starts to droop, even though he hasn't moved, and his eyes start to drift again, not fully empty, but glassy enough to concern her.
She rests a hand on his forehead and swears. He's hot to the touch, and as she hovers a hand over his back, she would almost swear his wounds are pumping heat into the air, too. She runs back and forth from the bucket to him with her little scrap of cloth, wetting it so that she can press it to his forehead, but it does too little, and she gets so desperate she stops bothering to snarl at their cellmates.
Nott keeps Caleb alive through the afternoon and the night, but by morning, he's moaning when he's awake and crying out almost constantly when he falls asleep. She learns that the language she doesn't speak is Zemnian, but that doesn't tell her anything about what he shouts as he comes awake, jostling his own wounds so that he cries out a second time, his own echo.
When his wounds start to smell, the guards take him away, and Nott flies off the handle, trying to keep them from taking him. She bites and kicks and scratches, and only the fact that the big man in the cell catches her in the air stops her from taking down a guard and buying herself a fate worse than Caleb's. Her claws dig deep as he huddles her against his chest, grunting with pain, until he can catch her hands and contain her.
When the guards are gone, he flings her away from him so hard she slams into the wall, her head colliding with the stone and filling her ears with a moment of static. "What the fuck, goblin," he snaps. "Don't fuckin' -" he sighs, giving up on saying whatever it was he was thinking, trailing off with - "shit."
When he sits down, she knows better than to talk back or go near him, and she buries herself back in her corner, tucking herself as far into it as she can. It feels strangely lonely, now, and it just makes her more worried about Caleb. Part of her wants to move, to sit in Caleb's corner instead so that she can watch for him better, but she doesn't, because it seems like too much of a risk. She's felt how strong the big man is, and she has no intention of tangling with him for real.
Caleb returns bandaged like he should have been from the beginning, though they still haven't returned his clothes, and relief washes over her more strongly than she'd expected. They haven't healed him as much as she knows a good cleric could, but he's strong enough that he can be helped instead of dragged, and when he goes sprawling when the guards let go and push him into the spell, he scrambles most of the way to his feet on his way to her corner. He can even sit up, which puts his face at a height where she can grab his face and stare into it, peering directly into his eyes with her brow furrowed.
"I am alright, Nott," he says quietly, his eyes flicking down and away from hers, and she remembers how much he dislikes being touched, so she lets go and steps back.
"You'd better be," she growls. "I really tried, you know?"
His mouth doesn't smile, but something around his eyes softens enough to almost look like one. "I know," he answers, voice still soft. "Thank you."
For a moment, she's too stunned to speak. Then habit takes over, and she says a pleased, "You're welcome."
Caleb looks down at his own hands, folded in his lap, and he sounds hesitant. "May I - stay in your corner, for now? I - can go back to mine, if you do not want - ah -"
She interrupts. "Of course you can stay in my corner. How else am I gonna know you're not dying and ruining all my hard work?"
He blushes faintly, and she doesn't know if it's embarrassment because he's turned out to be only a project or embarrassment because he's seen through the lie and figured out that he's not a project, or she could call it done and send him away.
He can't sit for long, and he needs help getting up and down, so they keep sharing her corner for another day, and then a second, and then a third. The other two human men get out, and when their new cellmate looks askance at Caleb and Nott curled together in a corner, the half-elf woman just sighs and says, "I don't fuckin' know, man. They're fine."
They don't talk much, but she helps Caleb when he needs it, and he squeezes her hand when he doesn't have the words to thank her, which is only sometimes. Her heart races when they get another new cell mate, and he squeezes her hand again to calm her, which the new cellmate observes with an arched brow only to be told, this time by the new guy, that everything was fine and nobody fuckin' knew.
The first time Nott sleeps cuddled up against Caleb's side is an accident, an instinct on a cold night that she follows without waking until the morning, when it's too late to worry that he'll decide that's a step too far for a goblin.
The first time Caleb sleeps with his head in Nott's lap is on purpose, the first night he has his bandages off, when he wakes up screaming from a nightmare he'd stopped having while the bandages held him in. She thinks of a baby's swaddle, wonders if the bandages had met the same purpose, but she doesn't suggest that to Caleb, because somehow it will show her hand too much.
Once he's asleep, she plays carefully with his hair, brushing his bangs back lightly off his face, and she thinks of other faces, other bangs, other nightmares she couldn't fix. She'd felt powerless then, and has felt even more powerless since. For so long, there has been nothing she could do, no way to fix the ills of the world around her, no fixing and no mending and no power, but this - this actually might be something. She might be doing something. Accomplishing something.
It isn't until a week later, with the half-elf woman also gone and Caleb nearly asleep with everyone else, that she asks what happened. "Caleb," she prompts gently, "I've been meaning to ask. When they hurt you, it was because you stole something. Because you picked it up and wouldn't give it back. But why did you do that? Because I get the itch sometimes, but I don't know how to - I don't know." She frowns and starts her sentence over. "I get the itch sometimes, so maybe if you do, too, you can explain it."
His voice is always quiet, but it's even quieter at night. "I - did not feel an itch, exactly. It is - difficult to explain." She lets him have all the time he needs, and for a moment, she thinks he's fallen asleep trying to think of an answer.
Finally, he starts up again, quiet and faltering. "You heard them in my paperwork, ja? I am - I was a mage. I am - something else now, I think. Or perhaps I am nothing at all, anymore. But I used to be, and some of it, maybe all of it, is still up there." He gestures to his own head and she nods. "But it's all in pieces. Fragments. Sometimes, they are so clear, and sometimes they are like - ah - a broken mirror. Just little slivers, and I can see what is in them, but I cannot - they do not always make a whole."
"And the bell," she says softly, "It was like something in one of the mirrors?"
"Ja," he confirms. "It was. I don't know why it felt important. I don't know what spell it would be for. But I could tell that it - that something was there. I - was once - worse - than I am now. So maybe one day, I will put back together the pieces, and then I will have an answer for you. But that is why they will not give back my pockets. I had burnt toast scrapings, and a little bit of salt. I do not remember what those would have let me do, once, either. I'm sure I had other things in my pockets. Sometimes, I see things, and part of my brain still knows. But I cannot see that part, right now. It is - that piece of the mirror is flipped over, ja? I - catch things and lose them again. I am still only getting better."
She mulls that over for a moment. "Caleb?" she asks, "Did you used to be very powerful?"
"Yes," he answers, sounding confident but uncomfortable.
"Do you think you'll be very powerful again?"
He furrows his brow. "I don't know. Maybe. There are some things still up here, but - I don't know."
He doesn't know, but in a flash, she does. She thinks about his eyes, watching and alive, about the way she can see in them whether he's there or not. Sometimes he is gone, but he is never stupid. His mind is a puzzle, but if she can't see the pieces, she can at least tell, sometimes, where they are. Her body is a puzzle, and maybe if she solves his, he'll solve hers.
She sees a future. Caleb is strong. Healthy. Powerful. His eyes are always the ones she sees him in, never the ones that are blank and lose the world for a moment. She has kept him alive once already. She can keep him alive again. For all of her failures, she has kept people alive. She can do it again. She will do it again.
She takes Caleb's hand and squeezes it. "I think you'll be powerful again," she tells him, pushing every ounce of confidence she can into her voice. "I think you can be whatever you want to be."
She knows he doesn't believe her, but when he can't find the right words, he just squeezes her hand back, and she lets herself pretend that it's agreement, just for now. Just until she can show him.