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Beau hasn’t ever really looked at Caleb’s scars.
Not properly – not since that day by the river in Felderwin – not closely.
She hasn’t ever really had a reason to. Hasn’t had an opportunity; his bandages had too soon been replaced with long sleeves, his tatty coat replaced with one that cuffed properly at his wrists.
But winter has turned to spring, for better or for worse, and hotter weather has shed their layers.
He’s sitting across from her in their little corner of the camp, eyes cast down at his hands in concentration. They’re helping prepare a hunted dinner, a once-common ritual they’ve grown unaccustomed to after time jumping between taverns has softened them some. They’re on the road again, now, trying to get back into the swing of roughing it.
Caleb is skinning one of the rabbits Nott had caught. He’s got his sleeves rolled up to his elbows as he carefully works the knife under the thing’s fur, baring his scarred forearms to the world.
Beau watches as surreptitiously as she can.
With its lack of bandages, Caleb’s pale skin has had a chance to brown a little bit in the sun. The new colour has only made the scars stand out more – little white flecks amid a galaxy of freckles, almost akin to snow if Beau didn’t know better.
They’re in patterns, which is something she hadn’t ever noticed before. The Scourger in Xhorhas had scars too – more than Caleb – winding in strange arrangements up the entirety of her arms, so it makes sense for Caleb’s to do the same.
Caleb has fewer than she had, so the patterning is less obvious. Beau wonders off-hand if it’s because he never made it as far in the process as her – or if Trent has just had more time to perfect his craft.
Beau’s knowledge of arcana, though pretty fuckin’ good, is in no way comprehensive, but she knows musculature intimately.
Her eyes trace Caleb’s scars, connecting them like an astronomer might connect constellations, tracing the contours of their bearer’s arms. There aren’t many scars, but the ones that are there coincide almost perfectly with the location of tendons and connective tissues. She can almost see the crystals being plunged into the spaces between the muscles.
The placement is almost surgical. It makes Beau shiver.
“Can I help you, Beauregard?”
Beau’s eyes snap up to meet Caleb’s.
“Nah,” she says casually. “Just looking.”
“Enjoying yourself?”
“Not really…” she says, because it’s true. Then she keeps talking, because she doesn’t know how to stop. “Just… they’re pretty fucked up.”
Caleb’s eyes widen almost imperceptibly. There’s a pause in which his eyes dart from her to his arms to her again, and then he scoffs.
He shakes his head. “Ja. They are.”
Beau bites her lip, regretting the newfound tension in the air. But if there’s one thing she’s good at it’s prolonging shit.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“You can,” he says slowly. They’ve both stopped working now, but his knife still sits loosely in hand. “There is no guarantee I will answer it, though.”
Gods he’s annoying. She forges ahead. “Do you ever wish you could get rid of them?”
He takes pause and seems to think about it for a moment.
“I don’t know.”
That seems to be all she’s going to get out of him, which is dumb, so she pushes again.
“Do they hurt?” she asks.
Caleb purses his lips and narrows his eyes.
“You have far more impressive scars than I, Beauregard, I am sure you can answer that question yourself.”
Beau doesn’t tell him that’s not entirely true – that she hadn’t had any scars until she started travelling with the Nein. The monks are about fists and kicks and pressure points. She hadn’t been in a bladed fight in almost the entire time she trained with the Soul.
That was a relic of her older days, when her parents had had enough money and enough vested interest in keeping up appearances that her late-night brawls would be followed up with begrudging, early-morning healing sessions.
That the scars she has on her face and her stomach and her arms are superficial, ones she was okay with leaving to heal because they looked cool. They don’t hurt.
She doesn’t want to tell him she has a bigger reason for asking about his scars – a weaker reason.
But she decides to bite the bullet.
“That’s… that’s not why I’m asking.”
Beau scoots over so she’s sitting next to Caleb, ignoring his small sound of alarm at the sudden closeness, keeping her back to the rest of the group gathered a ways away. Before he can say anything, she tugs the collar of her shirt down, revealing the length of her sternum.
A thick, ropy scar stretches from just below her collarbone to just above her solar plexus. It’s wide and long, though it has faded some in the days since its creation – since the day in the Chantry when Yasha had all but cleaved Beau’s chest in two.
Caleb makes no noise, but he finally lets go of the knife. His lips press into a thin line and his eyes go wide as they fall to the scar.
“Have… have you shown this to the others?” he asks quietly.
“Only Jester,” Beau replies. “She said it won’t heal any more than it has.”
Caleb looks sad, and it’s an odd expression on him, not because it’s unfamiliar but because it’s the first time in a long time it’s not directed at himself. She’s the object of that sadness, and it’s… weird.
“Does it hurt?” he asks, echoing her question.
“Do yours?” Beau asks again, an instinctive side-step.
“Yes,” he answers bluntly, no longer concerned with being evasive. “Do yours?”
Beau looks away.
“Yeah,” she admits. “This one does, at least. I don’t really know why.”
Caleb bites his lip, then drags his eyes up to met hers.
“May I?” he asks.
When Beau realises what he's asking, she nods.
He reaches out slowly, stretching a hand towards her sternum. His fingers make contact with the scar and the first thing Beau notices is how warm they are. Unnaturally warm – almost uncomfortably warm. The second thing she notices is that they’re rough – calloused at the tips.
The third thing she notices is that she could, before now, count the number of times Caleb has willingly touched her like this on one hand.
“It’s deep,” he says, pressing his fingers to the scar in a way that makes Beau wince. “There is discomfort in deep scars like ours. It will hurt, maybe forever, that is just how the new tissue works. I’m sorry. But it is normal, especially for one of this… size.”
Beau sighs. The dull pain in her chest is not overpowering, but ever since it had been hastily healed it had been a dull presence in the back of her mind. An ache.
“You will get used to it,” Caleb says. The ‘like I did’ is implied.
“Maybe I don’t want to.”
“You don’t have much of a choice.”
Beau grumbles.
Caleb sighs. “I’m assuming you haven’t told the others this.”
It’s true, but she doesn’t like how easily he guessed it.
“No. I haven’t,” she admits. She hadn’t even told Jester – didn’t want to worry her about something she probably couldn’t fix.
“You do not like showing weakness, Beauregard,” Caleb says, like it’s an interesting little character detail and not a scathing read. “That is valuable in combat but… we are your friends. You can let them – me – know when you are not… at your best.”
You make vulnerability look so easy, she tells him. The Barbed Fields are dark on the horizon. She clutches her ribs as she eases off their shared moorbounder.
It is, he replies.
“If it can’t be helped what’s the point?” Beau reasons. “I don’t have much of a choice, right? I just have to live with my fuck up.”
He reaches out again, pointing to, but not touching, the jagged scar on her chest.
“This?” he says, voice suddenly very stern. “This is not a ‘fuck up’. This is a reminder. A reminder that you survived.”
His hand drifts back, but instead of picking the knife back up it reaches up to rub the raised, pinprick scars on his left arm. The movement is almost subconscious – would almost be idle if both of them weren’t hyper aware of the fact he was doing it.
His fingertips begin to curl – to dig – and just as quickly has he had reached up, Beau is reaching out, hand clamped firmly over his wrist.
Their eyes meet and there is only silence.
In the distance, Jester laughs loudly at something Nott says. The sound is a joyous one, and it cuts through some of the thick tension in the air – dismantles a bit of the heavy sadness.
“These are my reminders,” Caleb says softly, tapping his arm gently. “Of what I did… of what was done to me… of what I must do. So no. To answer your question, I don’t think I would want to get rid of them.”
Beau thinks about her own scar, the knotted jagged thing on her chest that keeps aching – that will always ache, apparently.
She looks over to the group, to Yasha, caught up in some soft conversation with Caduceus, firelight dancing through her pale hair, woven with flowers – she’s never looked less terrifying.
Does she want to be reminded? Reminded of Not-Yasha driving her sword through her? Spreading her blood in a pool over the floors of a house of a god?
“They will hurt, from time to time,” Caleb continues. “They will always hurt a little. But that just means you’re alive.”
Beau thinks on that for a moment.
She’s alive. Maybe that’s a nicer thing to be reminded of. That she was down but now she’s up.
She just wishes It didn’t have to hurt like this. But that’s childish.
It’s not childish. It’s just vulnerable, says a voice in her head that sounds just a little bit Zemnian.
She shakes the thoughts off and turns back to the roots she had been chopping, thinking the conversation had run its course. Caleb, however, doesn’t appear to be done.
“You know it was…” he cuts himself off, and Beau can almost see the words forming on his tongue before he continues. “When you went down, Beauregard… it was… familiar.”
“Is that some kind of shady way of saying I go down too often? Because I remember you getting dropped pretty soon after that so–”
“It was like Mollymauk,” he murmurs.
“O-oh.”
He looks down at the knife, at the rabbit he’s only half skinned.
“It felt the same as back then,” he says in a matter-of-fact tone, like he’s delivering a report on the weather and not some ancient, aching worry. “I felt helpless. I couldn’t help you.”
Beau’s mind is filled with the image of Molly, lying in the snow with Lorenzo’s glaive hanging like an executioner’s axe above him. She had been too far away – not fast enough, not skilled enough – to stop it.
Helpless, she thinks she knows exactly what Caleb is talking about. It’s not a very nice thing to be reminded of.
“I wouldn’t say you didn’t help,” Beau says, trying to cling to some humour. “Didn’t you, like, eviscerate the Laughing Hand?”
"Killing the Laughing Hand would not have brought you back," he says simply. "I don't know if I could have lived with that."
Beau doesn't say anything to that, neither does Caleb. He’s looking at her scar again, blue eyes shadowed with tumultuous emotion.
Beau feels the tattoo on the back of her neck prickle.
She supposes that’s a scar too – a colourful one, infused with soft jade dust and ebbing a nebulous power into her veins – but still a scar, at least in the way Caleb means.
A reminder.
A reminder that she’s alive, but not everyone else is.
A reminder that she’s never going to let something like that happen to her or anyone else, ever again.
“Yeah, well, it’s like you said.” She claps a hand on his knee, not knowing what else to do. His gaze snaps up to hers. “I’m still here. I’m alive.”
He gives her a small smile. “I’m glad you’re alive, Beauregard.”
She doesn’t know what to do beyond smiling back. But with her and Caleb? That’s always been enough.
“I’m glad you’re alive, too.”