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quantummindclassicalheart · 2 years

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a soft place to land

A companion to this piece by @belligerentbagel. A few years after their travels with the Mighty Nein, Caleb and Jester reunite for the summer and kinda sorta fall in love all over again.

Caleb Widogast never used to sleep easy. The downside of a keen memory was the way it came back to bite you in your dreams, the way it teased you with stained-glass fragments of the past (as beautiful as they were sharp, and more than capable of drawing blood).

There are nights when he still wakes up in a cold sweat, caught up in a memory of fire or blood or ash. He still puts the silver thread up around the bedroom out of force of habit.

But these days, more often then not, he sleeps through the night and wakes with the rising sun. For there is a cottage in a glen and it is his (for the summers at least) and it is a home for his heart and his friends (the two are one and the same). There is a bed, comfortable as any he's ever known and big enough for two.

And she is here, still asleep in the early morning light and curled up in her silky pink pajamas with a body pillow in the likeness of an oversized Frumpkin. Her chest rises and falls with each breath, filled with a gentle stillness that an awake Jester rarely has the patience for. She is here and she is so beautiful and also she is drooling on the pillow a little bit but she is beautiful anyway.

It was not so long ago that Jester had Sent him a message, telling him that she and Fjord had decided they needed a break, and could she stay with him for the summer while she figured things out, and also how was Essek and teaching—as the spell’s limitations cut Jester’s message short, Caleb observed that it was sort of nice to see she hadn’t changed one bit. Jester was still as Jester as ever.

And Essek is indeed around when he can be, but for now they too are on a break. He is a satellite that comes into Caleb’s orbit tracing eccentric trajectories through their shared space and time, pulling on the threads of their mutual attraction. It is still dangerous for him to remain in one place for too long, but the now former Shadowhand is clever and canny, and one day he may come to stay for good.

But for now, Jester is here and Essek is not. And summer has unfurled its warmth over the Marrow Valley. Strawberries have come and gone. Apples are growing ripe on the branch and the kitchen is filled with the smells of baked goods and stews and roasts in the evenings. They eat well. They spend afternoons at the market or reading in the shade of the apple tree that stands in the meadow. Caleb has learned to harness train a handful of his cats (with some helpful tips from Oremid Hass and the assistance of many, many treats), and so they take the cats for walks when the weather is nice and the cats are in a good mood.

It’s not hard for Caleb to turn some spare workshop space into a makeshift studio, so there is room for Jester to sketch and paint to her heart’s content—though one of the cats, Klaus, insists on being held while she paints, and so Jester has had to learn to paint with a cat in one arm. The paintings still turn out pretty good anyway.

Caleb asks Jester about her old friend Artagan (last she heard, he was off messing with some newly discovered plane of clockwork robots) and in turn Jester asks him about his colleagues at the academy (the Conjuration faculty are nice enough, but Professor Ostoroth in Abjuration is an insufferable bureaucrat, and not even a particularly competent one).

In time, Jester tells Caleb about Fjord and their time at sea. She tells him about sailing on the Nein Heroez, and how the exciting bits were usually separated by days or even weeks of nothing but open sea. In the evenings she sings him the shanties she’d learned from the other sailors to pass the time, including the bawdy ones. Especially the bawdy ones.

Jester tells him of traveling so far that she saw constellations she’d never seen before, twinkling jewels set into the darkest night skies in all of Exandria. On clear nights, Orly would lend her a spyglass and teach her their names—there was the Wyvern and the Manticore and the Great Owlbear and the Gelatinous Cube (though privately she thought this last one, an approximately rhombus-shaped bunch of stars, was kind of a cop-out by someone who’d probably gotten sick of naming constellations).

She shares stories of the many times that she and Fjord talked their way out of sticky situations, and more than a few where they had to fight their way through. “Fjord was always trying to protect me,” she concludes. “And he’s a really sweet guy for that. But… I don’t need protecting, you know?” And gods, does Caleb know it. He has always known it. Sapphires may sparkle, but they are tougher than they look.

In the years since their adventures with the Mighty Nein, Caleb has continued to change (as befits a Transmutation wizard, after all). There are the beginnings of smile lines around his eyes that never were there before. It is getting easier for him to let himself be loved, to accept that others will know him (even the parts he would rather stayed hidden) and they will love him anyway.

And through their conversations, Caleb has come to see that Jester has in fact changed too. She is less afraid to let the mask fall, to be more than the avatar of joy and chaos that others expect her to be. She is more sure of herself, of what (and who) she wants. And so when Jester tells him on a sunny afternoon that she might have more than just friendly platonic feelings for him, Caleb doesn’t immediately withdraw or try to hide away. Of the two of them, she has always been the brave one. But he is learning to be brave too.

And now she is here, sleeping beside him. She is here and she is as real as anything he has ever known and he loves her, plain and simple.

The new term at Soltryce will begin soon, and Caleb will have classes to prepare. There are students' names to memorize and lectures to write and new pedagogies to test and he really does look forward to it, even if it means that this respite will soon come to an end. But not quite yet.

Jester rolls over and her eyes flutter open. "Hey, Caleb." Her morning voice is still low and crackly and not quite warmed up yet.

“Ah, good morning. You slept well?”

“Really well,” says Jester, giving the plush Frumpkin a scritch. She yawns and stretches, catlike herself. “So, what are we gonna do today?”

Caleb thinks for a bit, tries to quiet the voice in his head that counts the days until summer’s end. “I do have Teleport prepared today. We could go anywhere you like. I could take you home for a bit, if you want.”

She looks at him with those shining violet eyes, places a hand softly on his arm, and simply says, “I’m already home.”

Caleb reaches over to muss her hair, carefully avoiding the horns (he has learned firsthand just how sensitive they are). “That is a lovely sentiment, though it does not help us decide what to do with the rest of the day.”

Jester pouts. “Caleb. I was just trying to say something cute, okay? Don’t ruin—mmph,” she says, as he leans over and interrupts her indignation with a kiss on the lips.

“It was very cute,” he says teasingly as they break away. “You are very cute. Let’s start with breakfast, ja?”

“Ja, bitte,” replies Jester. “…did I say it right?”

<Your pronunciation was flawless, darling,> says Caleb in Zemnian as he gets out of bed and puts on his slippers.

“Wait, Caleb! What does that mean? Caleb?”

“I’m afraid you will just have to catch me to find out,” says Caleb, starting to walk towards the kitchen. Out of the corner of his eye he spies her subtly preparing to cast Hold Person, and turns to brush it away with a swift Counterspell.

“If you wanted to Hold Person so badly,” he remarks wryly to a blushing Jester, “you could have just asked,” and he climbs back into bed to wrap her up in a warm and cozy embrace.

#widojest #critical role #caleb widogast #jester lavorre #writing #content note: contains fjorester and shadowgast mentions #dear bagel: i hope you have recovered well from covid. please accept this post-campaign fluff #you will i hope recognize some of the imagery from your painting and tags #(this was also inspired by a joke post suggesting that one ship their fave with 'a good night's sleep' and i took it too seriously)#the hardest part of this was figuring out a canon-compliant way to write post-campaign widojest without getting into fj/sg breakup details #and without dismissing the effort that the players put into those relationships in-game #i think i did all right #anyway. in my head the frumpkin body pillow is a combination of the plush in the cr shop and marinette’s giant kitty pillow from miraculous #jester’s gotta get her cuddles in. we all know this #also note that jester’s sending message is a paraphrase in the text which is why it’s not exactly 25 words #fun fact: sapphires are a nine (nein) on the mohs hardness scale so. pretty tough #also i used a translate app to check that caleb’s zemnian (german) sentence wouldn’t be immediately intelligible in common (english)#even though the german version does not appear in this text #internet translations are hit or miss anyway and caleb would know what he said so the reader should too #and yes. i ended the fic with a truly terrible pun. you’re welcome #as always a big thanks to my beta d.k.m. for many excellent comments and suggestions

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