WHAT. After four years of Adaine in Atlantis and assumed lost by everyone on the surface, a father and daughter reunite. WHERE. Xhorhaus WHEN. 2033, a short while after main events of the future plot WARNINGS. None! STATUS. Complete
Just a month or so shy of four years ago, Adaine had woken up in Atlantis--healed after an ordeal at Galdin Quay that she barely remembered, whole despite having a tail for legs and gills, and utterly trapped. Her magic had been more or less entirely drained, her abilities letting her do little more than keep Boggy tied to wherever in Vallo he happened to be and cast Prestidigitation if she was feeling particularly daring. There was no teleporting from the underwater city, there was no Sending that she could cast to reach out to Caleb or Matthew, and there was no communication or chance of leaving as the powers that be kept the borders tightly locked as Interitus waged war on the surface world.
It had taken a good bit of time before Adaine accepted her situation, but eventually she had settled in for what she hoped wouldn't be the long haul. What else could she do, other than hope that the decision would be reversed or that the strife that she knew her loved ones were part of would come to an end? She got a teaching job, just as she had been doing before all hell broke loose. She spent more time with her rescuer, getting to know Kai better and eventually experiencing a type of love that she hadn't experienced for herself yet. She made other friends. She made a life for herself.
All the while, though, she craved knowledge of the surface world. It was bittersweet when news would reach her through the grapevine of some new battle or event; it meant that her people were still fighting, but at what cost?
As the Temporal Concurrence arrived, Adaine could feel the rise in magic. Magic was her lifeblood and it felt easier to breathe in a way that she hadn't felt in years, long before she had been taken below the waves to Atlantis. She still kept it at bay, afraid to use it until everyone felt the moment that she would later find out was when Interitus had been defeated, really and truly. That news came soon enough, along with the news that Atlantis would reopen its borders to aid in rebuilding efforts--which meant they were also open for their Outlander refugee.
Adaine had wasted no time in arranging to return to the surface. It was more emotional than she'd expected to walk on land for the first time in four years, but that was nothing compared to the feeling of the teleport to the first place that she could think of where she might find her first priority of people to track down: the Xhorhaus.
At first look, Adaine could see that the house had been cleaned up, at least to some degree. The years and nature had done its work, but the inhabitants had clearly been working on reversing it. There were some flowers planted, bushes trimmed back, and just a general air of occupancy. It was very nice to see.
After taking a brief moment to pat her hair down, as though that was something that even mattered, Adaine approached the front door, took a deep breath, and knocked.
There had been a lot of people that had come by lately. People who brought them food, or offered to clean up. People with questions or information that was to be shared. It had been a revolving door since they had made it back and since Interitus was defeated.
It had also been a lot of hope, and more cheer than he’d seen in people in days, with laughter finding it’s way back into this house even as the kids raced each other through the hallways. They’d all jumped in to clean, to make this house ready to live in again after it had been abandoned for years.
Caleb had been expecting a contractor, or a friend, or someone planning on asking a question to be on the other side of the door. He hadn’t been expecting someone he’d considered a daughter-figure to be there. Alive. It was probably a good thing he saw her in his brief stint back to the past, as that allowed him to recover from buckled knees a little quicker than he would have otherwise. “Ach du meine Güte.” Caleb sucked in a breath. “Adaine?”
A wave of relief washed over Adaine as the door opened and none other than Caleb was standing there. It couldn't even be dampened by the mental confirmation that his shock gave her; she had always suspected and worried that her loved ones assumed the worst with her disappearance, because what other option was there? That didn't make it any easier to know, though.
"Hey," Adaine started, voice a bit weaker than she'd expected, but here they were. "I mean, hi. I mean, no--yes. Yes, it's me. Adaine."
None of that stammered mess was what she had wanted to say, but Adaine hadn't really thought out this plan beyond finding Caleb. There wasn't really any standard social guide for how to announce your presence to your father figure that had clearly assumed you were dead for good reasons and then explain that you had actually been locked away behind the borders of an under-the-sea city instead. Still, one thing did feel right and Adaine did that in lieu of stumbling over any additional words. Instead, she rushed forward and threw her arms around Caleb in a tight hug.
Caleb wasted no time returning the hug, his arms wrapped without hesitation around Adaine’s slight shoulders. He leaned in, acutely aware of the metal on his arm as it flexed in place but ignored it as he did everyday. Instead he just pressed her face into his chest and let his cheek rest against the top of her head.
He wasn’t sure how much time had passed, door open, the two of them standing there just holding each other.
When Caleb finally leaned away, his eyes were a bit wet, and he took a good look at her. This wasn’t the Adaine from the past - the one he had seen when he visited. This one had aged. “Did you learn how to time travel?”
As Caleb looked over Adaine, she did the very same. Though he very much looked like himself, she could see differences that the last few years had brought; a little more grey, a little more aging, and--a metal arm? That was shocking and her eyes widened a bit at the recognition of a very new feature, but she forced herself to look back to Caleb's face and process the question.
"I wish I could time travel," Adaine replied, clearly not in the know of how the last several weeks had come to pass in the first place. Or, at the very least, she was just lacking some of the details that involved the wizard in front of her.
Adaine drew in a breath, then launched into her story. "During that battle at Galdin Quay, I got hurt. I don't remember this part, but apparently I fell into the water and got swept away until an Atlantean--their name is Kai--found me and took me to Atlantis for help. I was healed eventually, but they closed the borders while I was out." Her expression had grown progressively more stoic as she went on, her shoulders drooping. "By the time I woke up, I was stuck. They wouldn't let me leave thanks to, I don't know, bureaucracy and fear and I couldn't even cast Sending to you, let alone teleport out."
Caleb let out the breath he didn’t realize he was holding. It was a rough one, as jagged as he felt, and he pulled her back in for another hug, this one more firm and sure. “You had been here the entire time? Right below?”
He hated that. But he was glad she had been safe. Glad that she had been protected, had gotten to stay far away from the war, from the death and destruction. She had been safe and he was glad for that.
But Caleb valued freedom and choice above all else, and Adaine hadn’t been given that choice, and it made his heart hurt. “I wish you had been able to choose. But I hope it was not too bad for you.” It took another minute or two - he was in no hurry - to lean away again. “I am not mad that you missed all of-- this. And I am very, very glad to see you, liebling.”
"I hated it, at first," Adaine admitted, because it was very much true. She managed to be the inverse of a fish out of water, not feeling as though she belonged and longing very much to be with her loved ones. "I made it work, but I missed you all every day and hated not knowing what was going on or if you were even--"
Alive. Alive was the word that was on the tip of her tongue, but Adaine didn't want to voice it. She had barely let herself express the worries to herself mentally, knowing just how much of a dark spiral that could lead her down. But Caleb was alive, the evidence of that as clear as it could be with him standing there, hugging her. That relief she'd felt at seeing him open the door bubbled up in her once more, threatening to push her over the edge of her emotions.
"But you're here," she said instead, her voice a bit tight as she swiped the back of her hand across her wet eyes. "And okay, right?" Her gaze dropped down to the metal arm, then back to Caleb's face. "Mostly, at least? And the others?"
Caleb nodded, his own voice too tight to want to reply immediately. He needed to give himself a second, a long moment, a deep breath. “It could be worse.” In regards to his arm. Because he could have been dead, and at least Gilmore’s magic was working overtime on the contraption attached to him - it’d served him well over the years, had been a very nice conduit for the magic that came from him. “Everyone is--”
Alive. Good. They had gotten fairly lucky, all things considered. But it didn’t feel lucky, not with Adaine having been gone for the last several years. “We have only been missing you.” Finally, as if just now remembering his manners, Caleb swung the door wide open.
“Kir will be-- Oh. Emotional? In seeing you. He has missed you a great deal, so has Kiri.” They all had that empty hole, often left with a space reserved for her at the dinner table, or her room in the tower left untouched.
Adaine's heart warmed at the thought, not only of seeing Kir and Kiri again, but at the confirmation that they were okay. She had to think that they couldn't have been in better hands as she knew how fiercely protective their fathers happened to be, but it did her good to know that they had all seemed to have made it through to the other side of the conflict. The bird children had become like younger siblings to her, something she couldn't have imagined for herself after years of a far less than ideal sibling relationship with her own sister back home, but had nevertheless happened. If just knowing that they were okay was a balm, she couldn't begin to imagine what seeing them would be like.
"I'll be emotional, too--obviously," she said with a slight chuckle as she followed Caleb inside, motioning toward herself as evidence of how emotional she already was. That wasn't going to change anytime soon.
Glancing around once to take in the changes in the house that had likely been necessary after years of abandonment, Adaine's gaze dropped again on Caleb and her expression went almost sheepish. "This might be premature, as I just dropped on your doorstep and I do have things to see to and conversations to have in Atlantis, but I'm here to help and stay, as long as you'll have me."
Caleb smiled, a small but hopeful thing that made the small wrinkles around his eyes crinkle up a little more. “Adaine, you are always welcome here. Always.” There would never be a time she wasn’t, even after years apart. He gave her his full attention and smoothed his human hand over her blond hair. “Was Atlantis good to you, at least? You look good.”
She looked grown up, which was something he was still adjusting to the same as he had with Kiri and Kir. At least they were gradual, and before his very eyes, rather than Adaine, who just appeared and was an adult now in her own right, even if she had not been a child when she’d disappeared, it still felt jarring. “Though Kir is taller than you, now. You will have to take that up with him.”
"No." It made sense, of course, but Adaine nevertheless had to take a moment to imagine a taller-than-her Kir. It didn't take much and years had passed, but she'd come to think of Kir and Kiri as younger siblings and the thought of them growing was just, well--hadn't she been babysitting them just yesterday? What else had she missed?
A lot, she knew, but she didn't want to dive into melancholy, not when this was a very good moment, a reunion she had been wishing and hoping for. Instead, she said, "I'm absolutely going to have a talk with him," her eyebrow stern in a way that was clear she was only kidding.
"Atlantis was--it's good," Adaine decided, pausing just a moment to consider. "I didn't want to settle in, but I had to eventually and made a life there. I was teaching, like I had been before, just not with magic. I met someone, too," she added, almost nonchalantly and not as though she had been decidedly single and fine with it her entire life previously. "It's been good," she reiterated, "but I'm glad to be on land again."
“Ja, I am afraid so.” Caleb had the audacity to smile at it, even, thinking of future arguments that would be had over height issues. Perhaps it would take the heat off of Kir thinking Caleb and Essek needed to retire and live out the rest of their lives in peace and quiet.
Not that the idea didn’t have merit. Caleb was very, very tired, but there was still so much more to do. Thankfully, much less of it involved fighting. So perhaps a little sleep is in order. Now that Adaine was here, he would have more of an excuse to relax and catch up.
But his eyes went wide, and then narrow, and he straightened his back. He had only dealt with his once before, and it was determinedly not a topic they were allowed to touch on, when Kir had interest in someone. So he had not, even as he observed from the side. He was not prepared to deal with this again. “Someone. I will have to question you more about that at dinner. Do you want to go see everyone? They are all here-- somewhere. We could find them.”
Adaine smiled, enjoying that reaction more than she could put into words--something to do with having wanted to update Caleb on her life for years and wondering what expressions and advice he might have had for her, only to have to guess and ponder and now not having to do either. It gave her a sense of home even more than being inside the house again did and she couldn't help but reach out to give him another tight hug as he finished speaking.
"Sorry--yes," Adaine said in a rush, pulling away with another grin. "I want to see everyone." She reached out with a hand, taking his human hand and beginning to tug him through the foyer and further into the house, even though she had no idea where anyone might actually be. That was okay, though. It had been years and she wasn't going to stop until she'd hugged and cried on all of her people and told them just how much she loved them. Everything else could wait.