Also posted on archive of our own (ao3) under the same title and username
Set right after The Mighty Nein Reunion: Echoes of the Solstice, with spoilers through all of Campaign 2 and also through Campaign 3 episode 51: The Apogee Solstice.
Title and epigraph from the song Saint Catherine St. by Sea Wolf
I'll be looking, be looking, be looking
by sapphireswimming
Come back, come back to yourself
Now that your father is gone
"-leb? Caaaaleb, where are you? Oh, there you are, I found you!"
Jester bounds across the richly carpeted central hall of the nine-sided tower until she reaches the alcove where Caleb is sitting on one of the lowest of the broad steps leading down to a cozy fireplace.
"I've been looking all over for you. You weren't in your room and I-" she pauses at the dark wooden railing beside the stairs when he doesn't respond.
He doesn't even move from where he's sitting stiffly, staring into the quietly smoldering embers of the once crackling fire.
Jester frowns - there's no reason for one of the cats not to have taken care of the fire unless Caleb had asked not to be disturbed, but it's clear from the fluffy mounds of ashes that it hasn't been tended to in hours.
"Oh," she mutters under her breath. "Well, that's not great."
He still hasn't moved and, after another moment of hesitation, she calls out, "Hey, Caleb, are you okay? Do you... want some company? Can I come down and join you?"
There's still no response.
"Okay, if you don't say anything, I'm going to assume it's okay for me to come down, alright? I'll give you ten seconds to say something," she warns. "Ten, nine, eight, seven, can you even hear me, Caleb? Six, five, actually you better be okay down there. You didn't like. Try to open up the Icky-egg after we all went to bed last night, did you?"
Hastily, she tucks away the parchment in her hand and finishes the countdown all in a rush, "Okay, three-two-one I'm coming down now and you better not be mind controlled or anything, okay, because I really don't want to, oh."
Jester takes the stairs two at a time until she's reached the bottom and immediately rounds on Caleb, peering down into his face, the energy for a Greater Restoration already surging to her fingertips in case it's needed.
It's not.
"Oh, Caleb," she sighs, and lets the spell fizzle.
The expression on his face, while not one she particularly hoped to find there, is at least familiar. It's been some time since she's seen Caleb so lost in the recesses of his own mind, but honestly, after the day they'd just had, she's kicking herself for not anticipating this exact thing.
She might have, if she hadn't been preoccupied by… other things when retiring for the night, but the giant feast they had thrown had quickly turned into a makeshift engagement party in addition to a survival celebration for both the Mighty Nein and the entire town of Blumenthal, and things had just sort of escalated from there.
"I'm sorry I didn't really check on you too much last night. But I'm here now, okay?" Her voice is gentle as she watches his face for a reaction that doesn't come, yet.
"That's alright," she assures him. "I'll just sit right here and keep you company, okay? For as long as you need."
She nestles into the space beside him on the broad step, and smooths out her skirts, running her fingers through the many folds and ruffles as she gets ready to sit in silence.
The tower is always such a wonderful, safe place, but she hasn't often taken the opportunity to admire it this early in the morning, before the others are awake and bustling about, filling the air with the sound of their voices and the smells of their breakfast.
It's surprisingly cold, though, sitting this close to the fire. At this point, the embers are all but dying out, and only give off the barest hint of warmth.
Jester pushes up and grabs the small brass shovel from its holder on the hearth to scrape away some of the ashes.
"You know," she says as she works, "I said I'll keep you company for as long as you need but I think it's only fair to warn you that if you wait too long, Beau might wake up and I'm pretty sure she'd try to punch you out of this. I know she's gotten a lot more mature over the years, but her go-to solution to most things is still just punching them. Which is fair, honestly, since she actually like, punch ghosts and stuff."
She tosses a few logs onto the fire, artistically inserts some kindling, and blows with puffed cheeks until the embers catch.
She's just wiping her her hands clean when there's a soft, startled noise behind her.
"Oh," Caleb breathes, starting to come back to himself.
Jester turns around with a bright smile. "Good morning, Caleb!"
"Ah." He blinks. "Jester."
"That's me!"
"I- what time is it?" Caleb shakes his head a little. "Never mind, it's five thirty-seven. Wait," he turns to her, squinting a little. "Why are you here at five thirty-seven in the morning?"
"Just building up this fire because it was getting pretty chilly in here," she says, coming back to sit next to him. "Sorry if I woke you? I didn't mean to."
"No," he says. Then frowns. "No, but why are you here? Surely nothing, ah, untoward has happened between you and Fjord since your engagement last night?"
"Oh!" she suddenly understands his concern. "No! Nothing like that, no, things are, aha, things are pretty great between me and Fjord. I mean, they usually are, but last night was, ah, really super good, if you know what I mean." She leans over, eyebrows waggling.
"I can, ah, I can imagine." After a moment, he adds, "Congratulations, again, to both of you. I'm very happy for you."
"Aww, thank you, Caleb!" She lays her head on his shoulder and reaches out for one of his hands.
They're stiff, and cold at the fingertips, but when he doesn't resist, she takes his hand into hers and sighs contentedly. They sit together for a while, watching the fire, and Jester begins to hum softly under her breath as Caleb slowly starts to relax beside her.
Eventually, Caleb is the one to break the silence.
"You still haven't told me why you came down so early, you know. Unless… was it for this?" he asks, holding up their hands. "Because, if so, I can assure you that I am okay."
She hums. "Are you sure, though? I mean, that was a lot. That was a lot, a lot."
Caleb nods, gently jostling her horn.
"It was," he agrees.
"It was pretty cool, though," she says, kicking her legs out and pointing her embroidered boots toward the warming fire. "Not having to fight against Icky-thong again, because he's like, totally the worst," she clarifies, "but I mean, you were a T-Rex and a dragon at the same time so like."
"Ja, that part was pretty cool," Caleb admits, and when Jester turns to look up at him, she sees that he's smiling a little.
Jester's remaining apprehension bleeds out of her at the sight - Caleb is okay, or, at least, he will be.
And that means she should probably do what she came here to do in the first place, although somehow, she doesn't feel as ready now as she did when she first came downstairs to look for him.
Something about the fireplace and the coziness seems too nice to disturb with sad thoughts now that Caleb has finally shaken them off.
But Jester knows that this isn't something she should put off any longer.
"So," she says, staring at their intertwined hands as she plays with Caleb's fingers.
"So?" he mirrors, gently bumping shoulders when she doesn't say anything else.
"So there was something else I came down here for," she admits.
"I thought there might be."
Jester nods. "I didn't want to do it when everyone else was around, and I figured you might be up already, so that's why I came down to find you so early."
"I see. Well, you have found me now."
She pulls back and takes a deep breath to brace herself. When she still won't meet his eyes, Caleb frowns.
"Jester?"
"I wanted to-" she tries. "You see, I-" Then she decides to take a different track entirely. "Well, I wanted to give you a present!" she says, suddenly all smiles. "I hope you like it!"
Caleb looks a little bewildered at the abrupt shift in tone, but says, "Of course, I would treasure anything that you gave to me."
"Well then, here you go!" she says, producing the parchment from behind her back with a flourish before she can change her mind. "Ta-da!"
He reaches for it, and recognizes the material immediately because he has taken great pains over the years to always keep the tower's library well stocked with it. His finest spell paper.
Taking it gently from her hands, he brings it closer to examine the artwork she has surely graced it with, and freezes as soon as he catches sight of what she has drawn.
It's a portrait. Or, rather, two portraits, of a man and a woman who are as familiar to him as his own face in the mirror.
His mother and his father stare up at him from the page.
"Ohh," he exhales shakily.
Jester bites her lip and watches him closely as he continues to stare at her painting.
Their likenesses are astonishing – Caleb isn't sure how it's possible for her to have drawn them so accurately, when all she'd ever seen of them were Trent's undead parodies sitting at the table for barely a few minutes before their harried fight. No matter how perfectly Ikithon had tried to replicate them, he couldn't get them perfectly, couldn't capture their essences like Jester has.
Here is the warm sparkle in his father's eye, there the soft curve of his mother's smile.
Caleb's hand shakes above the page, hovering over their faces but not daring to touch.
"I- I hope it's okay?" Jester blurts out. "I did the best that I could, you know, and I know they weren't quite the real things that I saw so it's probably not even that accurate but I tried to at least make them feel… nicer, you know? Like what your parents probably would have actually been like, but. But of course, you probably remember them super duper well and. I'm sorry if they're not right. I can try again later if you want, and if you want me to take a little more time, and you could probably walk me through it next time, and if we wait a little bit I can actually get a canvas instead of just using your spell paper, Caleb. I hope you didn't mind me using it, but it was the best I could find on short notice because of course I left most of my actual art supplies back home in my studio because I didn't think they'd be super useful in shoving the moon back into the sky or anything, but- please say something, Caleb, you're making me nervous that I really messed this up and this was supposed to be my apology to you and-"
"They're perfect," he says, and even though he whispers it, his voice still cracks on the words.
"Ah-"
"It is perfect. Just the way it is." Caleb clears his throat. "Thank you, Jester. This. This is an incredible thing that you have done."
"It isn't really anything too special," she protests.
"No, it is. I should know. I have. I have tried several times, before, to draw them, but." He taps his forehead and smiles ruefully. "Just because I can remember exactly what they look like does not mean I can draw anything remotely similar. People do not draw as easily as transmutation circles, I have found. So, thank you. Truly, Jester."
"I just." Jester sniffs. "I wanted to apologize again, you know, for, for casting that spell on them and turning them into, you know. I mean, I know they weren't really your parents, but-"
"They weren't," Caleb says firmly. "And it was good, what you did. It was better to see them for what they really were, since we needed to fight them. I don't think I thanked you for that, earlier, but truly, it. It was much easier fighting those things when they weren't wearing my parents' faces. Much easier than it would have been otherwise, and…" he swallows heavily, looks at their portraits again. "Thank you."
"Well, I figured that since we ended up having to fight them when they were all undead and burn-y and stuff that, well, you're so smart and I know you must remember them perfectly from, you know, from before, but you would probably remember them even better better from the fight and I didn't want that to be the last you remembered of them because that would just be awful. So I. I wanted to make sure that you had at least a little something to remember them by."
Caleb gives her a watery smile. "This. Jester, this is far from a little something. This?" he shakes the parchment in his hand. "I will treasure this."
And he will – it's the only likeness of his parents that exists in this world.
It's more accurate than his memories of them from the day before, where they stared too blankly, replied too slowly, laughed too easily with the man puppeting them in a perfect recreation of the childhood home he burned to the ground so many years ago. More real than the way his not-parents had turned, twisted and charred and screeching after them until Beau put her fist through their heads, split them open along their spine, put their burning bodies to rest a second time-
It is something concrete, something he can hold, can look at every time the old nightmares return at night, or the new ones come crawling after him even in the light of day.
Even minutes before, their images had danced in his mind, heat-hazed, fire-licked, poor imitations of the man and woman who had loved him so dearly. But now, now, he has simply to duck his head for a moment to come face to face with them in Jester's drawing once more.
His Mutter. His Vater.
As they should be.
As they used to be.
His eyes start to burn, and he closes them for a moment, blinking back the prickling tears, although he's too slow to stop all of them - one escapes, trailing down his cheek and glistening in the firelight.
"Oh!" Jester exclaims, hands fluttering in front of her. "Oh no, Caleb, I didn't mean to make you cry, this was supposed to make things better, oh no, I'm so sorry, I-"
"No," he says vehemently, not bothering to wipe it away before he pulls her into a hug, mindful of the treasure in his hands. "Don't be," he tells her. "Don't be sorry. This is. I will cherish this until the day that I die."
"Oh," Jester says, voice very quiet.
"It's perfect. It looks just like them."
"Oh, does it? I mean, of course, of course it does," she laughs, and happily throws her arms around him in return. "It's because I'm the best," she says.
Caleb huffs a laugh. "That is true," he agrees.
Jester squeezes him tighter, rocking them back and forth until the trinkets in her hair jingle merrily.
"Ah, ah, Jester, you're making it a little hard to breathe," he finally manages.
"Oh, sorry!"
She relaxes her grip and they rearrange themselves, Jester's cheek nestled firmly into Caleb's shoulder, and one of his arms pulling her close while the other continued to hold the portrait of his parents.
The fire crackles before them, warm and safely contained in its hearth.
"You did it, Caleb," Jester whispers. "You beat him again."
"We did it," he corrects, just as softly. "There's no way I could have done this again without you. Without all of you."
"Even Luc! Aren't you glad we kept him with us? Since, you know," Jester pulls back far enough to count off on her fingers, "he was the one who found out where Trent was hiding behind that tree like a little creep, and then he made your T-Rex sooo much bigger than it already was so that it was big enough to fight the thing, and he was the first one to realize that we needed to get to the egg inside the big scary monster rampaging through the town?"
"Yes," Caleb agrees, but then he pulls his hand down his face with a groan. "Oh, Veth is going to kill me, though."
Jester laughs. "She won't really, though."
"Oh, I think she actually might just do it and I'm not sure there's anything on this planet that can stop her."
"Hmm," Jester thinks for a moment. "Well, if she's actually serious, I'm pretty sure we'd all be able to do something about it. After all, we just took out one of the members of the Cerberus Assembly."
"An ex-member of the Cerberus Assembly."
"That's true. And, to be fair, he was all old and stuff and had just been sitting in prison for like the past seven years, but still. We were all with you for that, so we'd all try to protect you if Veth actually tries to kill you just because Luc decided to sneak through your transportation circle at the very last minute and we couldn't message her about it because some evil wizards decided to do some terrible Solstice stuff that's ruining everything everywhere," she says with a grin.
Caleb hums, unconvinced.
"Besides," she continues. "You just said that you'd treasure my drawing until the day you died, didn't you?"
"Of course," he says, solemnly.
"Well then, I have to do what I can to make sure that isn't like, a day, you know?"
That startles a laugh out of Caleb.
"I suppose that is only fair," he says with a grin. "You keep me safe from Veth's ire, and I will treasure this for a very long time to come. Deal?" he asks, hand extended and eyebrow arched.
Jester laughs as she takes his hand and shakes it.
"Deal!"