Though Essek had spent over a century of trancing in a bed with no one but himself for company and the last half of a year had been hardly a blink in the grand scheme of his lifetime so far lived, he had grown comfortably used to waking up from true sleep with Caleb beside him. When he had woken that morning and Caleb's side of the bed was both empty and cold, free of both of the wizard and his familiar, it hadn't occurred to him that he should worry. It wasn't necessarily rare that Caleb would rouse before him and while it was certainly odd that he wasn't anywhere to be found in the Xhorhaus and hadn't left a note or text letting anyone know where he was, Essek let himself assume that his boyfriend had simply left early for school and he stopped at his favorite coffee shop, just like any other morning, and them both their usual before taking off to school himself.
When Caleb wasn't in his classroom, though, he knew something was wrong.
It soon became clear that Caleb wasn't the only one that had unceremoniously disappeared. Though some spoke of the disappearances feeling odd, the knowledge did little to comfort Essek as the names of those missing that he cared about piled in. Verin. Zoya. Gilmore. Blue and Ronan. Most of them he hadn't even known before Vallo, while his brother had been nearly the same shade of stranger despite their shared blood. And -- Caleb.
When Essek had returned to the Xhorhaus, he hadn't been able to stay there long. Though he tried to retire to the library, to the bedroom -- they were both spaces that had been Caleb's before Essek had laid claim to bits and pieces until they were both shared. After grabbing one of Caleb's softer scarves from their bedroom, he wrote a quick note explaining where he was, leaving it on the table nearest the door to the library should anyone look for him so they didn't assume he, too, had disappeared, then teleported to his towers. He could have walked. He should have walked, perhaps. But Essek didn't care about powerful spell usage in the moment.
The towers, it turned out, weren't much better. Essek tried to find something to work on or read, pulling every book he could think of on cross-dimensional travel and spreading them out on the table that he had once shared breakfast with the Mighty Nein on either a split second of a lifetime ago, depending on the day. He had read them all before, discussed them with Caleb early on when they had first arrived in Vallo and were trying to solve the puzzle of what had brought them to the island and if they could figure out how to leave. It was fruitless, but he needed to focus on something -- anything -- that wasn't this unfamiliar ache he felt at the absence of others.
Eventually, it worked. It was almost like muscle memory, Essek's body knowing how to study and take notes and get lost in magical theory. Malla curled up next to him, on top of the scarf. He was so absorbed that he didn't even realize anyone was looking for him, not even when the front door opened.
Jester may not have even realized that anything was amiss had the panic and confusion not begun to overwhelm the network and general Outlander community. It was a knowledge that bothered her more than she cared to let on. Though it was not unusual for Caleb to be any number of places where Jester was not, she thought she ought to have felt his absence. And what of Essek's brother, Atreus, Brigitte, or Blue? They weren't Caleb, no, but most of them were her friends and yet they, too, had disappeared without so much of a trace.
When she'd finally figured it out and the weighted knot of dread settled into her stomach, Fjord had been Jester's first priority. She'd almost forgotten to lock the door to the shop in her hurry to find him, but she'd doubled back before running off. She could have just messaged him for a quick answer, but an inherent need to see and feel him superseded any notion of efficiency. And he'd been there, solid and warm and very much present and some small piece of her dread had unknotted.
Essek was next on her list, though she knew he'd still been in Vallo before she'd set off to find Fjord. She'd found his note at the Xhorhaus and, for as simple as it was, it broke her heart a little bit for him as she understood at least in part why he'd retreated elsewhere. She didn't know if he'd want company, or if any of the Mighty Nein would be welcome just then when they were another extension of their missing wizard, but Jester wanted to go check on him regardless.
Essek was hers too now. She needed to be there for him, for herself as much as him.
"Essek?" she called out, letting herself into the tower. She resisted the urge to make some kind of light-hearted joke like you poopin? "It's me, Jester. Obviously," she said, instead.
Though he very much should have been used to Jester's voice pulling him from his thoughts by now, both through his ears and through his mind when he received a Sending, Essek still started. Having been writing, it caused a slight blot to his ink -- not that it really mattered. He may have been engrossed in what he was doing, but it didn't mean any of it made sense.
Sitting back in his chair, he set his pen down and ran the now writing utensil free hand through his hair, almost certainly mussing it up out of its normally neat style. "Hello, Jester," he called in response, indicating that he was in the room just off the entryway. Still, he added, "I'm in here."
For the briefest of moments, he considered getting to his feet and offering her something to eat or drink, to pretend to be some shade of a good host. But, he rationalized, there wasn't anything to eat or drink in his tower because he didn't live in his tower; it was, more or less, one giant library and an occasional escape when he needed quiet to read or grade papers. What more, it hardly felt necessary. Once upon a time, Essek would have leaned into being stoic in such a situation. Now? Jester knew him too well to not see past such a mask.
Jester set her backpack down just outside the door as she walked into where Essek had been working. Despite how calm Essek seemed, the sight of her having obviously interrupted his intense study session made her heart hurt. After all, books and notes were as much a refuge to him as sweets and tricks were to her. Her shoulders sagged just a little, the relief of seeing him in person too running parallel to the gravity of the situation. “I just came from Xhorhaus,” she said. “Fjord is there. We’re going to put together something for dinner for all of us that--” She trailed off. All of us that are left. She would never grow immune to how hard those words pierced through her. “I don’t think anyone is hungry, but we should eat.”
She bit her lip, uncharacteristically at a loss for words. So instead of blabbering on about food, she moved around behind her friend and leaned down to wrap her arms around him. She wouldn’t make him work for this hug, it would be freely given. She closed her eyes and said, “I’m also very sorry about Verin.”
As he always did -- even now, after months of being on the receiving end of Jester's hugs -- Essek felt himself tense for just the briefest of moments, then melted into the affection. He was still growing used to it, accepting that even if he didn't always feel that he deserved such care and that he often felt selfish for craving it, it didn't mean his friends didn't think that he should have it. Now seemed like an acceptable time to be selfish, though, and he lifted one of his hands to rest on Jester's arm, his head bowing forward just a fraction as he released a sigh.
"Thank you." He didn't know what was happening, if people were returning home or something else entirely given the strangeness of the circumstances. Regardless, it was hard for Essek to not imagine his brother back home, perhaps once more in Bazzoxan with his troops, and completely unaware of his treason and the tentative strides they had taken together. It was equally hard for him to not imagine Caleb back home, without the knowledge what they had become in the last many months. He could try, though, as he squeezed his eyes shut in some attempt to block out the thoughts.
Besides, he knew, of course, that he wasn't the only one mourning losses that day and that there had been names that he knew Jester held especially dear, too. "I'm sorry, as well, about -- " he hesitated, just briefly, before swallowing and finishing, "about Caleb and your other friends."
Jester didn’t have a reply, really. All she could do was accept the sentiment and know they both felt the pang of loss and confusion over what had happened and how to fix it. Letting go of him, she found a space on his desk not covered in books and parchment and lifted herself up to sit on it, legs dangling.
“Have you found anything we can use to get them back, yet?” She knew they’d tried to find ways to get back at one point, but she wondered if they’d ever looked into how to bring people back here. After all, only Mollymauk had gone back to something worse than being in Vallo.
Essek looked back down at the mess of research in front of him and released a long breath, an answer in and of itself. "Much of this is from when Caleb and I first arrived here," he admitted, turning over papers to show different arcane equations and questions jotted down. "It was to try to get us home, but I abandoned it after -- well, after this place became home." He didn't know when that had happened, but it had. Sometime between late nights with Caleb and dinners with new friends and old and taking Kiri to school, they had made a home here.
"I had thought that perhaps the work could be used, only in reverse, but..." Essek leaned back in his chair and looked up to Jester. "The magic here is just so unpredictable and different from my own. There's no controlling it, I do not think." He wanted to control it -- oh, he wanted to figure out how to dig his fingers right into the magical weave of Vallo to tear it apart and give him his wizard back. But, given that Caleb had made him promise not to destroy a forest if it hurt him, Essek wasn't so sure that he'd want him to destroy Vallo for him, either.
"It's frustrating" Essek admitted, reaching over to where Malla was curled up on the opposite side of his desk from Jester, his fingers curling into her fur.
Jester reached out and took Essek’s free hand in hers. “I don’t think we’re going to figure out how to control it tonight, anyway,” she said, knowing that it must have been just as frustrating that he couldn’t control it as it was that Caleb and Verin weren’t here right now. “Why don’t you come back to the Xhorhaus and eat with us? We can all work together to figure something out. I have it on good authority that there will be hot cocoa.”
Essek nodded. Jester was right, of course. This wasn't a problem that he was going to solve today, especially given that his focus might have been less than ideal. That split focus may have been for good reason, but it wouldn't do to try to force a breakthrough.
As he started to organize his things, slipping bits of papers into books to hold places and leave things in some shade of a vague order for when he inevitably tried to look over this all again, his movements paused. He debated with himself for a brief moment, then looked up to Jester once more. One thing, above everything else, had been nagging at him and he knew that Jester, of all people, wouldn't judge him for it if he voiced it. "There was... much that I didn't tell them."
Jester was glad it hadn’t been harder to get Essek to agree to come back to the house, if only because she knew there was a different version of her friend who may have been less open to the idea of suffering through this with others. It was a testament to just how much growth he’d been through here and she hated the idea that Caleb might forget it.
No. That wasn’t going to happen. If this situation was different, like it seemed to be, maybe it would be different in that everyone was only temporarily gone and they’d remember everything when they returned. Essek deserved that. She would will it into existence if she had to.
She nodded then. She thought she understood that feeling, though to a different extent than Essek probably did in that moment. “Maybe it would help to write him a letter, so that you can put everything you think of now into it and you won’t forget to tell him when we get him back.”
Essek considered that, thinking immediately to the letter that his older self had left behind for him when he'd briefly visited the past. It hadn't given too many clues to his future, only that it was a happy one. He'd had to dig to find the details, like that he had eventually gotten married. Though Essek dealt in time and timelines and was entirely too aware that such a happy future could have diverged the moment he had found out, he couldn't but feel a faint bloom of... hope.
"That is a good idea, Jester." He had never counted himself as being very prolific, at least when it came to letters or prose, but it might give him something better to concentrate on, even if the letter might stay folded up in an envelope. As he went back to putting his things away, Essek continued, "I appreciate you coming to look for me. I know there may not be anything I can do to help you through this as well, but if there is -- you'll let me know, yes?"
Jester was pleased that Essek seemed open to her idea, if only because maybe she’d helped in some small way. She furrowed her brow, though, and tilted her head to the side. “I’ll always come look for you, you know. And we’ll get Caleb back, one way or the other. I’m sure of it.” If she said it emphatically enough, maybe she’d believe it, too.
But she nodded, anyway, and said, “Yes, of course. I don’t know, I think maybe it would be good to gather all of the blankets and pillows from the Xhorhaus and pile them in one room and we all camp out together until we figure it all out. That would probably help.”
Essek appreciated Jester's optimism, as well as the casual assurance of their friendship. Such positive thinking didn't come easy to him; he had been trying to embrace it a bit more in recent months, but it was still hard for him to just hope when he so fully desired tangible evidence and outcomes above all else. It was hard not to get swept up in Jester's unique brand of positivity, though, even as his heart ached at the thought of camping out in a room of the Xhorhaus without Caleb sitting next to him. It was better, he reasoned, than trying to sleep or trance in their bed without his steady breathing and warmth at his side.
"That sounds like a fine idea. I think Kiri would like it," Essek said, tucking away the last bit of paper and deciding that was good enough for today. He would resume the work tomorrow. Lifting himself to his feet, he nudged Malla gently to coax her into standing and jumping off the desk, then picked up the scarf. Essek hesitated just a moment, then wrapped it around his neck for now.
Turning back to Jester, he managed a small smile. "Shall we? We have a lot of pillows to gather."