Ahhhh you are very welcome (and I share the weakness for Fjord)

to the curious – this is from this whump fic bingo post!

Another characters spots their hands shaking, so they hide them

Warnings: PTSD, anxiety

It looks as if a dragon has been through here. The town has been levelled, and there isn’t much left beyond the jagged remnants of scorched walls and the lingering smell of burnt flesh. Caleb has already been sick once, and he doesn’t have much left inside him. He’s trying hard not to think about how true that is in more ways than one. He feels like a spectre, haunting the ruins of this place he’d never seen before, now a place he never would see, not as it was. A dull, tired, jaded part of him thinks that he should probably be grateful for the fact that he didn’t know this place already. He isn’t sure how much more loss he can take. Somehow, that doesn’t seem to matter much. Sure, he doesn’t know these people. He probably wouldn’t have cared about them if he did. But they’re dead, and they died horribly, and that fact doesn’t change because of the way he feels about it. 

Molly had grown strangely quiet almost as soon as they’d seen the smoke on the horizon, and now he picks through the blackened streets, murmuring quiet prayers to the dirt. Nott, too, is far more silent than usual. Her fingers twitch and grab at her clothes, pulling on loose threads until Caleb has Frumpkin move to sit on her shoulders with half a thought. Nott relaxes a little as soon as the cat settles on her narrow frame, but her eyes are still wide with a quiet kind of horror that speaks far louder than words. 

Jester is making no effort to hide her horror. Caleb thinks that she has probably seen more of the world’s underbelly than she lets on: that it’s likely her apparently relentless optimism is as much a conscious decision as it is a character trait. She had wept almost immediately, and then she’d walked away from the group a little and sat down in the grass and begun to pray. Caleb, and the rest of them, had thought it best to give her space, though he had no idea what a god like the Traveller could do in the face of such a calamity.

Beau had just walked away. From the anger and the grief snarling across her brow and around her mouth, Caleb expected that she planned to deal with her problems by punching something. He couldn’t exactly hold it against her. Molly is small in the distance now, half away across the ruined village. His tail whips and coils through the air as if batting away invisible instincts. It’s the only outward sign of his tension. 

Caleb has no idea what to do with himself. The few soldiers left over: the ones that they’d crept up on, the ones who had been boasting that this would remind any would-be rebels of their place in the empire, are long dead by now. Caleb himself had a hand in one of those deaths, and hard as he tries he can’t find it in himself to regret that fact. Their armour bounces the sunlight back up into the sky, and it’s strangely bright around the ruined remains of their bodies. Caleb thinks that he knows what armour like that feels like. He thinks that more than once he’d wondered whether that brass carapace would serve as his coffin. He thinks that he, too, had once imagined himself left for dead in the road. 

There are other things he could be thinking about, but he thinks that if he does that he’ll drown in them. Instead he looks around for Fjord. He sees him checking over the bodies of the guards, a deep frown casting shadow over his usually youthful features like a cliff over the sea. Caleb walks over to him quickly. Nott is sitting next to Jester, in the long grass, watching her intently. Her ears hang low, and Caleb knows her well enough by now to know that means she’s hurting. But he can’t hold her together as well, not right now. He feels as if he’s barely doing that for himself. 

“We should leave.” Years ago, Caleb might have cared about the way his accent grows thicker with the knot of emotions he is so carefully avoiding. Now, he just persists in the absence of a reply, “It will not do to linger here. The Empire…” Caleb takes a deep breath. “They will send more. We must go.”

Finally, Fjord looks up from the scrap of parchment he’d apparently pulled from one of the soldier’s pockets, slipping it into his cloak as he does so. His frown softens, a little, the wrinkles fading from his brow like creases under a hot iron. He looks up at Caleb – which in itself always feels a little strange, considering the several inches Fjord usually has on him – and his gaze stops somewhere around Caleb’s chest. Caleb looks down on instinct, less self conscious than he is curious. Fjord speaks whilst he’s frowning at his own tattered coat. “Your hands are shaking.”

Like a straw on a camel’s back, this breaks him. Caleb immediately tucks both of his hands deep into his pockets, clutching the bits of trash that he kept inside them and rolling them between his fingers. He hadn’t even noticed, but now that Fjord has mentioned it he can’t stop thinking about it. His fingers fumble buttons and beads and one precious silver coin. His skin is cold and damp with sweat and he feels like his insides are going to shake themselves apart. 

The village: what remains of it, looms up in the corner of his vision like some great shadow. He thinks he can hear screaming. Maybe he can. There are sparks in the air and they’re copper and bright and he thinks that nothing so terrible should look so beautiful. There’s the smell of burning flesh in his lungs, thickening, and it’s stinging with the acrid, heavy stench of smoke, and he can’t breathe, he can’t breathe, and if he doesn’t die by the fire then he’s going to suffocate and how inglorious, how stupid, how bitterly deserved. 

“-leb, Caleb, hey. Come back.” There are hands on his shoulders now and they’re shaking him, and Caleb thinks that someone has come back for him, and they shouldn’t have done that, they really shouldn’t, because this was his fault and now they’re going to die too and there’s nothing he can do because he has nothing left, there’s no magic, no matter how much he pulls at his own mind. There is nothing left to do but fall and die and he can at least be grateful for the fact that he will not have to live with this, because even as he’s dying he knows that getting through this would be so much worse than letting it win. 

The hands on his shoulders tighten, and then there’s a light sting across his cheek, and a warm hand touching the side of his face, and Caleb blinks and there’s a green face in front of him, and that’s strange – because there are no orcs here, none of the other races really, except the occasional wandering, miserable half-elf who rarely stayed long. But as his vision focuses he realises that this is most certainly an orc: or a half-orc, his features are a little gentler, his teeth too small to be full-blooded. He has wavy, short black hair, and his skin fades from blue to green like the sea on a hot day. He looks worried, and Caleb wonders why, briefly. The afterimages of sparks float by behind him like snowflakes. He can taste the smoke in his mouth, and he thinks they don’t have time for worry, they need to be running. 

Then Fjord slaps him again, gently, and Caleb’s hearing crashes back into his ears as if he’s just broken the surface of a shallow pool. “Hey, come on, calm down, it’s alright, I’m here. I’m here. Do you remember who I am?”

Caleb frowns, a little distracted. He feels drained, suddenly, as if he’s cast a powerful spell, and his knees are weak. “You’re Fjord.” His frown deepens, and there’s comfort in the familiarity of the expression. “What happened?”

The relief on Fjord’s face makes him look five years younger, less like a world-weary traveller and more like the wide-eyed sailor Caleb imagined him as being, once upon a time. It was hard to imagine Fjord, with all his tricks and careful ploys, as ever being anything like guileless. It was also an impossibly charming daydream. “You kind of…went away for a minute there. Are you sure you’re alright?” There’s a burr to Fjord’s accent, the same roll around the vowels Caleb had come to associate with Port Damali. It’s pleasant, and it distracts Caleb for a good ten seconds more before he remembers what had just happened. Whatever strings had been holding him upright snap, and he stumbles, barely catching himself and only managing not to fall with Fjord’s help.

Fjord is not as strong as Jester, Caleb has seen this first hand. But he’s strong enough to hold Caleb, and his hands easily envelop Caleb’s narrow shoulders, drawn thin through years of going hungry.  “Hey, woah, alright. Take it easy.” Fjord is still speaking with a strange kind of quiet, and Caleb lets himself be led away from the soldiers’ bodies with an enormous sense of relief. 

Fjord gently pushes him into sitting down, and rubs soft, slow circles on his back. Caleb thinks, a little distractedly, that if this had been anyone other than Nott he would have pushed them away. He wonders whether Fjord knows how much of his feelings even this simple intimacy gives away. As much as he’d like to pretend that Fjord would continue to be clueless, Caleb is not the kind of man who spares himself from hard truths. As his heart finds its way back to a resting pace, and his lungs slowly remember how to breathe, Caleb finds himself flushing with no small amount of shame, and he curls away from Fjord’s touch, ignoring the part of him that wants to linger. He does not deserve such things. Not any more. 

Fjord immediately draws back, because Fjord is not the kind of person who pushes his company onto anyone. Caleb’s breathing comes a little easier. He stares at the grass, and he tries not to think about the blackened husk of a village behind him, and he listens to the sound of distant birdsong. In his mind, he starts reciting spell components, falling into the repetitive rhythm of the list and letting it drown out all the other thoughts he needs to be avoiding. 

Fjord clears his throat, quietly. “So, uh…I don’t mean to pry but, you gave me a real scare just now.” He passes a hand up over his face and through his hair. “Do you mind telling me what that was about?”

He’s sitting a foot away from Caleb in the grass, and one of his hands is tugging at a handful of blades, rolling them between his fingers. His skin is several shades darker than the plants themselves, and it’s an oddly pleasing sort of contrast. Caleb focuses on that, because it’s a lot easier than eye contact. “I became…confused. That is all.” His voice is hoarse, though he’s not sure why. He doesn’t remember saying anything out loud. He hopes that he didn’t.

“Right, right.” Fjord sighs, and sits back, looking past Caleb and back towards the ruined the town. “It’s a terrible thing, what happened here.”

“Yes. It is.” Caleb says the words quietly, but he means them as much as anything he’s ever said. He thinks of the dead here, and he thinks about how in all likelihood, precious few will mourn them. He shuts his eyes, as if that will keep the world away.

“It doesn’t take a scholar to draw some kind of connection between this and your, ah, chequered history with flame. You want to talk about that?” Fjord’s tone is carefully neutral, but Caleb can feel the curiosity behind his words.

He shakes his head. “We do not have time to talk. We should leave. We are lucky they are not here already.” With that, he leans forward and pushes himself up from the damp earth, standing and looking back towards where Jester and Nott are still sitting in the tall grass. Molly has made his way back towards what had once served as the entrance to the town. He’s standing in front of a small stick in the earth. If Caleb had to guess, he’d say that he was praying. He doesn’t why any of them put stock in the gods, especially when confronted with things like this, but he can’t find it in himself to hold it against them, either. 

Fjord stands as well, and moves to step between Caleb and the road. He’s not really blocking his way: Caleb has miles of field to choose from. He pauses anyway, forcing himself to look up and into Fjord’s eyes. They’re a dark antique gold in the shadow. Caleb continues to wonder at the fool who had ever spread the opinion that half-orcs were somehow ugly by nature. He has never met anyone more beautiful. 

“I agree. But I’m worried about you, Caleb, and honestly I think I’m going to need you to give me something. Because if that happens in the middle of a battle then – ”

“It will not.” Caleb cuts him off as he tears his eyes away from him, walking past him and across the road towards Nott and Jester. Fjord makes a soft sound of frustration as he moves past him, lifting one hand to grab his arm and thinking better of it, letting him go. 

“Caleb, please. Just talk to me. You’re obviously hurting and this kind of stuff…It eats you alive. Trust me.” There’s something beyond mere sympathy in Fjord’s voice, and it’s enough to make Caleb pause. He half-turns back to him, and tries to ignore the smell in the air. Fjord is looking at him with kindness, and a kind of recognition that came only from experience. “You’ve got to talk about these things.”

Caleb takes a deep breath, and he looks back, up and towards the blackened village. The gutted timber frames of houses jut out against the wide blue sky like broken ribs. He curses himself for a coward. “I cannot talk about it. I am not…It is too much. I cannot do that. Not right now.” He swallows, and doesn’t miss the disappointment that crosses Fjord’s face, fast as lightning in storm. Mentally, he snares the mangy rabbit that is his courage and holds it tight as he continues. “My family lived in a place like this, once. Nobody ever mourns for the peasants. They think: oh, they are poor. They are replaceable.” His mouth twists with an old, familiar, bitter anger. He says his next words with certainty, in a tone that brooks no argument. “No-one is replaceable. This is a lie told by the rich. I…” Caleb falters, and in the time it takes him to stop and search for another sentence, Fjord takes his hand.

Caleb nearly jumps out of his skin, and as it is he stiffens like an unhappy cat. He thinks, perhaps, that he is most unhappy because this is not uncomfortable at all. Not even a little bit, not the way it usually is. Fjord’s hand is calloused as any labourer’s, and his skin is hot. Caleb looks up at him, still lost for words, a silent, helpless, bewildered question in his eyes. Fjord lifts a shoulder in half a shrug, and squeezes his fingers. Caleb doesn’t dare to believe that the faint shadow of darker green and blue across his cheeks is anything like a blush, but the stupid, shallow part of him that has yet to learn its lesson takes a mental snapshot anyway. 

“Your hands were shaking again. Thought you might be cold.” Fjord’s voice is gruff and low and still soft, and somehow, in that moment, Caleb manages to forget every careful reason that says he should pull away. So instead, he says nothing. Instead, he squeezes back.

“Thank you.” The words are quiet, quieter than before, and Caleb half expects Fjord not to hear them. By way of a response, Fjord’s grip on his hand loosens, just for a moment before he entwines their fingers, holding him tightly. 

“I know that you’re still learning to trust us. I know that, whatever this is, it’s a lot, and it’s not going to be easy for you to share it with us. But you can trust me. You don’t have to do this alone. Not any more.” There’s a certainty in Fjord’s voice that Caleb wants to cling to like the remnants of a wrecked ship floating on a stormy sea. He does, after that, often, in quiet moments when his nightmares find their way into his waking life. 

It is perhaps one of the things that hurts most when Fjord drops his accent and the lie he’s been telling them since the day they met. But Caleb doesn’t mention that. Instead, he tucks his hands into his pockets, in an effort to hide the way they’re shaking. Judging by the look on Fjord’s face, he’s fooling no one.

That makes two of them.