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He is going to have to say goodbye to her.
Caleb has shrugged on his coat halfway before it occurs to him that, in the Nicodranas sunshine, something lighter might be more appropriate. Something like the short-sleeved, half-jacket, half-robe thing hanging from the wall hook over there that is apparently the fashion on the Menagerie Coast in autumn, when there is just enough of a bite to the air that another layer is nice.
He would prefer his coat, he thinks, hesitating. The Nicodranian robe is a bit flashy, with its deep reds and its gold and silver embroidery. It reminds him a little bit of Mollymauk's old coat, and Mollymauk was never one for blending into the background.
Caleb is still not used to this, to...freedom, he supposes. To not having to look over his shoulder everywhere he goes. To being allowed to...to...well, to exist.
He eyes the robe suspiciously. All his old instincts tell him that if he puts it on, it will give him away.
But Jester bought it for him. So he only hesitates for a moment.
"Caleb!" she exclaims when she sees him descending the stairs down to the first floor of the Lavish Chateau. A broad smile spreads across her face. "You're wearing it!"
"Well, it was a gift," he smiles back.
Jester is sitting at a table with Beau and Nott, the remains of what must have been a huge breakfast spread out between them on the crisp white tablecloth. The bar is empty except for them.
"You look so good, Caleb," beams Jester. "Doesn't he look good, Nott? I told you it was perfect, I knew this was your color scheme."
It is barely eight in the morning and already Caleb is blushing. "I have a color scheme?"
"You do, yeah, kinda," says Beau. "Y'know, the whole fire thing." She waves a hand vaguely at him as he approaches the table.
"You're an autumn," adds Nott around a mouthful of toast.
Caleb leans against the back of one of the dining chairs, fairly certain that he made the worst decision of his life when he ditched his coat back in the room upstairs — but then he catches sight of Jester's smile again, and, well. Not all attention is terrible, as he's been discovering recently.
Nott swallows another piece of toast in one bite and then, scrutinizing him up and down, announces, "I think you should tie your hair back like you did yesterday, too."
"Aww, man, see, now he's never gonna do it again," Beau complains, leaning back and crossing her arms. "He's gonna be all self-conscious."
"I'm just saying it was a good look for him! He should try it out more often!"
"This is Caleb, Nott, we're not gonna get anywhere giving him fashion advice, you know better than that — "
Caleb ignores them. He walks around the table to Jester, touches her shoulder lightly with a few fingers. "Can we speak outside for a moment, please?" he asks quietly.
She jumps up. "Of course!" she says, as bright as ever, and his heart constricts.
He is going to have to say goodbye to her, and it has to be today.
They leave Beau and Nott at the table, still bickering in their usual friendly way. Jester leads Caleb out the door of the Lavish Chateau and around to the side of the building, where there is a bench shaded by a small palm tree. The city is still relatively quiet at this time of the morning — Nicodranas rises late, and the vendors have just begun setting up their stalls in the streets as the fishermen make their way in with the night's catch and courtesans retire to their homes.
"It's really beautiful out here in the morning, isn't it?" asks Jester as they sit down.
Caleb looks out at the horizon — they can just make out the ocean from here, like a strip of silver ribbon glinting in the sun. "Ja, it is very beautiful."
"Remember the first time we came here?"
Now he turns to look at her, and he can't help but smile a little. "It was the first time I had seen the sea," he says softly.
Jester's eyes sparkle. "You ran out into the water naked and we all thought you'd gone mad or something."
"Maybe I had, in a way."
She searches his face for a moment, with those violet eyes he can't look away from, and then his heart nearly stops when she reaches out to tuck a strand of hair behind his ear. "You know, Nott was right, you do look nice with your hair tied back."
Caleb clears his throat awkwardly and leans forward to rest his elbows on his knees. "Ah, where do you — " His ear burns where her finger brushed against it just now. "Where do you think Fjord and Caduceus are, by now? Port Damali already, or not yet?"
"Mm, depends on how much time they are spending on the road." Jester is gazing out into the distance, he sees when he glances sideways at her. "They are probably not in a rush. I don't think Caduceus is ready to say goodbye yet."
He's not the only one, thinks Caleb.
"But maybe he will stay in Port Damali for a little while, too, before he goes home. You never know."
"We are all scattering to the winds now, aren't we?" murmurs Caleb.
"Well, some of us." Jester sounds surprisingly carefree. "I think Nott and Luke and Yeza are going to take Mama up on her offer and stay here until they can find their own house! And you know Mama will help them find someplace with room to open up their shop."
Caleb laces his fingers together, staring at his hands, feeling the familiar lump rise in his throat as it has every time he's thought about Nott over the past week or so. "They will be happy here," he forces himself to say. "Better than Felderwin. It will be good for them."
"Oh, Caleb." He feels Jester lean into him just a little bit, like she's offering him a piece of her warmth. "You're going to miss her."
"Ja." The tears fill his eyes before he can hold them back, and he blinks rapidly, refusing to let them fall. "Ja, well…"
"It's okay. To miss people."
"I miss a lot of people," he confesses, still staring at his hands, at the faint burn scars barely visible on his thumbs and fingertips.
I will miss you most of all.
He swallows. The words stick in his throat.
"The nice thing is," says Jester gently after a few moments, "now that we've saved the whole world, we can pretty much go wherever we want. We're heroes. We can visit Fjord, and Caduceus, and Beau and Yasha when they go back to Zadash, and Cali and Twiggy, and Bryce in Alfield, and Orly, whenever he's not out on the sea…"
Caleb glances up at her, and she's got a dreamy look on her face. It's a look he's seen before, but he wonders, again, why she doesn't seem more sad.
"You would miss your mother, though," he remarks, watching for any change in her expression. "If you left home again, after all this time."
"Oh, well." Jester shrugs. "Of course. But she'll always be waiting for me here."
"You have no charges against you here anymore. I thought you would be wanting to stay for a while."
He speaks as lightly as he can, for his own benefit as much as hers, because there's something stirring in his chest, the tiniest spark of hope, but surely —
Jester stands up. "I have a surprise for you," she grins.
Before Caleb can respond, she reaches down and grabs both his hands in hers, pulling him to his feet — and then she's dragging him after her down the street, past building after building, faster than he ever expected to move at this time of day.
"I was going to wait till this afternoon," she calls over her shoulder as he nearly stumbles trying to keep up, one hand caught in her strong grip, "but then I had a feeling just now that you were going to start saying something sad, or, well, sadder than we were already talking about, so I think I'm just gonna show you now. Hurry up!"
"You know there is no rush — "
"I've been planning this for days, Caleb!"
"You are a danger to yourself and to others," he replies, but that grin of hers is infectious, and he really doesn't mind being pulled somewhere unexpected and mysterious by Jester — how could he mind, since this is what she's been doing to him since the first time they met?
Finally, after turning a few corners and taking one or two shortcuts through sandstone-bordered alleys, Jester leads him to what looks like a stable, though at second glance Caleb thinks it might be a carriage station of some kind. There in front of them is a covered cart, or a stagecoach, or...he's not sure what is, actually, it reminds him of the circus wagons he remembers seeing a long time ago with Molly's carnival. One side is painted with bright colors, vines and flowers and architectural motifs that bring to mind Nicodranas's arched doorways, the Tri-Spires of Zadash, the crystalline structures of the Lucid Bastion in Xhorhas. He sees a pirate ship, a purple forest, a mountain covered in snow, a wreath of coral.
"I'm not done painting it yet," says Jester, and for the first time today she sounds almost shy. "And I haven't bought the horses yet either. I was going to try to finish it all before you left, but...I don't know, Caleb, you've had this look for the past couple of days, and I thought if I wait until then you might just disappear."
He turns and stares at her, dumbstruck.
"Because I know that you have places you need to be, and you have stuff you have to do — and that's good! I'm really proud of you, Caleb."
"Jester." It takes him a second to find his voice. "I would not leave without saying goodbye."
She lets go of his hand, and there's the palest pink blush in her cheeks as she clasps her own hands together behind her back. "That's what you were going to do this morning, wasn't it. Say goodbye."
"I — "
"It's okay." She smiles. "I understand. But you don't have to, now."
Caleb's heart stutters. "Why don't I have to?"
Jester doesn't answer; instead, she grabs his hand again and leads him around to the back of the wagon, where there is a double-hung door, the top half set with glass panes. A small set of steps has been folded out to meet the ground.
"Go on, open it," says Jester.
He does so, at a loss for words, even more so when he sees what's inside. It's a small room, perhaps ten feet by twenty, almost more like a hallway, with a high flat roof and wood paneled walls. This was certainly meant to be a carnival wagon, he sees now at once, but it has been turned into something else, with plush carpet and chairs, bookshelves bolted into the walls, curtained windows, a lamp glowing with arcane energy hanging from the ceiling, a roll-top desk in one corner…
It has been turned, he realizes, into a home.
While he stands there frozen in the doorway, overcome, Jester pushes past him into the room and does a little twirl with her hands outstretched. "What do you think?"
Numbly, he follows her inside.
"It's pretty small, of course," she says, crossing to the far wall and tapping the wood with one knuckle, "but I thought you could just cast magnificent mansion right here, with the doorway in the wall like this, and so then this could be more like a foyer, yeah? And when the weather is nice we could just open the windows and sit out here while you do your work or whatever, and I could paint — oh my god, Caleb, I found this perfect little easel, it's still in my room back at the Chateau but I think it will fit right here, and it folds up so we can just put it away when we're on the road — "
"Jester," he begins, but she continues:
" — and there are hinges on the bookshelves here so we can put in doors, if you want, like cabinets, so your books don't all fall out while we're moving, or maybe you know spells that can just do that, I don't know — "
"Jester."
" — and — oh!" She points up at the ceiling lamp. "I got that from Yussah! He was very grumpy about it, of course, but I told him he owed us big time for basically saving his whole laboratory, so he asked what I wanted, and when I told him I wanted something like this he was just like you want a LAMP? and I was like, yeah, Yussah, I want a magic lamp, we've gotten favors from kings and empresses and mages and pirates all month so it's not like we need anything huge, and you have a really nice taste in home decor, and — "
Caleb has to actually grab her by the shoulders. "Jester. You can stop talking."
She bites her lips.
"This is...this is wonderful."
"Do you like it?" she asks softly.
"It is wonderful," Caleb repeats, and a relieved smile lights up her face — she was nervous, she was worried that he would...what, hate it? Reject it?
Reject her?
It's almost enough to make him laugh, if he weren't feeling so breathless.
"This is for us, liebling?" he asks, and when she nods, something like fire springs to life under Caleb's skin. "For you and me?"
"I just thought, you know…" Jester's tail is flicking back and forth behind her; her heart must be racing as much as his is. "I thought maybe we could travel together, for a while. If you wanted. Because I love being home, obviously, but I'm not done seeing the world, either. And I'd...I'd really like to see more of it with you."
The fire is roaring.
"So since you're already leaving soon — "
Caleb kisses her before she can say any more. As soon as his mouth is on hers she grabs the front of his ridiculous Nicodranian robe with both hands and pulls him closer, and it's exactly how he always imagined it would be, kissing Jester, her lips soft and eager, the barest hint of cinnamon on her breath, and when he curls his fingers into her hair just where it falls down to brush the back of her neck, gives it the slightest tug, she lets out a little strangled squeak into his mouth —
He pulls back. "Too much?" he gasps.
"Too much?"
Jester gives him a look, and she's given him these looks before, but he's never gotten to see them so close up, just inches between their faces, and scheisse, she has beautiful eyes, she has beautiful lips, how was he going to say goodbye to her fifteen minutes ago, what was he thinking, how could he ever —
"You can be a little slow sometimes, Caleb," says Jester with a brilliant smile, and gods, she's right, isn't she.
He presses his forehead against hers, shuts his eyes, while the pounding of his heart steadies and his breath comes back to him. "I thought this was going to be our last day together. I thought you would want to stay."
"You weren't even going to ask me to come with you?"
"I didn't — " Caleb pulls back just a fraction again, afraid he's hurt her, but she's still smiling, thank goodness. "I didn't think — I wasn't sure you felt the same way. Even if you had, I would not have asked you to leave your mother — "
"I've been in love with you for like six months, Caleb," she tells him, and her eyes are dancing.
He strokes her cheek, runs a thumb over her freckles. "Only six months?" he teases, to keep his emotions from spilling over. "I'm offended, Lavorre."
"Oh, what, you've been in love with me since the moment you laid eyes on me or something, right?"
"Not quite that long. I thought you were a bit weird at first, truth be told."
Jester giggles and pecks him on the lips. "What changed?"
"You introduced yourself."
"Oh my god, that is really cheesy, Caleb," Jester crows, "that is awful — "
"It's true!"
" — are you always going to be like this, or am I going to have to, like, give you tips from some of my books, because I swear to the Traveler — "
"It's true, and what's more it was romantic as fuck, so do not tell me you didn't like it, Jester Lavorre, you are not that good of a liar."
She's laughing now, and Caleb can't help but laugh with her, as she takes his hand and leads him out of their new home, back to the Lavish Chateau, where the only thing that could possibly put a damper on this morning now will be the smug looks on Nott's and Beau's faces when they see the two of them walk in holding hands — but, he thinks, as he has been discovering more and more recently, some attention is worth it.
He stops them only once on the way back, to take a ribbon from one of Jester's horns and use it to tie his hair back. Just for the kiss this earns him, of course.
Caleb is not sure he will ever be used to this, but he is not going to hesitate for a moment.
fin