Anon of course I will do this. From the Whump Fic bingo post!

Collapsing or Falling Asleep and Looking Far Younger

Warnings: Canon typical violence

The worst thing about moments like this was the fact that when she was unconscious, Nott looked far more like a human child than she did a goblin teenager. (That wasn’t true: the worst thing about moments like this was that it reminded him of them. The worst thing about moments like this was how sharply and unforgivingly they reminded him that he could do nothing, that he had never been able to do anything, that what little power lay in his hands was useless when he needed it.)

Caleb really needs to not be thinking about things like that, though, because right now they’re fighting a wild owlbear and they’re losing and Nott is unconscious on the forest floor. Her hair is spread across her face (like a child’s in sleep, like a child he knew) and there’s a little blood at the corner of her mouth. (He’s seen that before, too.) Her fingers, usually curled and clutched tightly around something, whether it’s her weapon or her flask or her trinkets, are loose and unfurled against the dirt, like the hand of a little girl on her pillow. 

Caleb doesn’t think about his fear, or the beast looming up onto its hind legs in front of him, standing tall enough to block out his view of the moon. He ducks and he runs forward and his heart gets left somewhere behind him in his panic. He slips his hands under Nott’s too-slender back and her skinny legs and he lifts her and she’s almost weightless, and he holds her close and he keeps running, diving back into the tree line.

The shadows of the night rush back up around him like a tide, and Caleb doesn’t think, he breathes a host of dancing lights into existence around his head and chest as he drops to his knees, glancing back towards the owlbear to see Beau leaping through the air at it in a vicious looking kick. Satisfied that it is at least distracted, he turns back to Nott and tries to ignore the panic that’s trying to crush his lungs. Nott’s brow isn’t furrowed, not even a little bit, and her mouth is slightly ajar. She looks like nothing so much as a sleeping child. (She looks like nothing so much as one particular sleeping child he knew once, long ago.)

Caleb knows that Nott has two answers when people ask her her age. At least, she has two honest answers. She doesn’t know how old she is, and to a goblin she is of child-bearing age. He also knows enough and has read enough to understand that in human terms that puts her somewhere between 12 and 15. He does not think of her as an adult, though he also does not think of her as an infant. If anything, on any given day when their lives are not in danger, he’d say he saw Nott as somewhere in between – more like a wayward and formidable teenager. 

But he really doesn’t know how old she is, and she either truly doesn’t know herself or else has chosen to be deliberately vague. Part of Caleb: the part of him that had been alone for too long and still saw all of this as far too good to be true, wanted with a bitter kind of desperation to leave it at that and not push his luck. But the rest of him, the part of him that had once been a better man, and a braver man, and a kinder one – that part of him looks at Nott now as he gently lays her down on the forest floor and tries to ignore the owlbear’s roars – and he thinks she doesn’t look a day past 10. He thinks that she shouldn’t be here, she shouldn’t be putting her life on the line for a bunch of barely put together strangers. He thinks she shouldn’t be drinking, and he thinks she shouldn’t be alone.

He thinks that maybe, in some strange way, part of that is his responsibility now. 

Caleb knows nothing about healing magic, but he knows something about injuries, and Nott is still warm – as warm as she ever gets. He takes that as a sign of encouragement, and slips a healing potion from his coat pocket with shaking fingers. The lights around his head cast a soft, butter yellow glow into the dark, but they emit not heat, and it’s a cold night now that he’s weathered enough of his panic to notice it. 

Caleb slips one hand under the back of Nott’s head, and it’s striking, really, just how small she is. The back of her skull fits into the palm of his hand, and her hair is soft like a child’s. Her ears brush his wrist and fingertips, rough with scales and cooler than a humans would be. He supposes that if he were somebody else he might be disgusted by that, but Caleb finds it hard to imagine a universe in which anything about Nott would disgust him. Instead, he moves his knees in the dirt, and tries to ignore the commotion behind him, lifting Nott’s head as he tips the potion into her mouth.

She drinks it, apparently on instinct, and that’s reassuring – that she, or her body at least, is not yet far gone enough to need help doing this. The potion dribbles down her chin, and Caleb slips the empty vial back into his pocket, moving his hand from her head to slip an arm around her shoulders and help her limp body sit up. With his other hand, he tugs on his sleeve and gently scrubs away the trail of earthy-brown liquid from her chin and mouth. Then he waits.

Nothing happens.

Caleb can feel panic opening up beneath him like a window to the void. He can feel himself starting to fall into it. It’s as if the blood rushing in his ears is a great wind howling, and some vicious creature has wrapped its claws around his chest and started to squeeze. The more rational parts of his mind are nothing against this hurricane: the parts of him that say she’s still warm, and she’s breathing, and she drank the potion. All of it is lost in an ever darker, ever faster, ever stronger moving whirlwind tying up his ability to think clearly and tugging the breath from his chest with it. 

Caleb squeezes Nott’s shoulders, tightly, and he can see his own dirty, ruddy fingers going white with the force of it, and he thinks it might hurt her and he doesn’t want that but he also can’t find a way to be calm. He’s speaking, he thinks, rapidly, in his native tongue. It’s just nonsense, a long litany of repetitions, “Wake up. Wake up. Come on, little one, you’re going to be alright. I’m here, I’m here I’m here I’m here. I’m so sorry. I should have been quicker. I will be quicker next time. I promise, just wake up. Wake up. Please, please, wake up.”

Caleb is so busy holding Nott’s limp body tightly to his chest as he curls over her, rocking back and forth, that he doesn’t notice the fight stop. He barely hears the heavy, crashing thump of the owlbear’s body falling to the floor. Time ceases to have meaning, and the sobs that rip their way out of his throat are as senseless as they are inevitable. He’s gone somewhere else, and he can’t come back, because Nott has gone where he cannot follow her, and she won’t come back, and he’s let her down, just like he did with everybody else.

When Nott breathes, suddenly, wet and coughing like a toddler with the flu, it’s not very loud. It’s much quieter than a fallen owlbear. Somehow, though, it slices right through the bubble and the hurricane of silence and fear and anger and grief that Caleb had been drowning in. She frowns, and it’s a shallow frown, the frown of a little girl who doesn’t understand something about the world even after she’s been given her answer. She doesn’t try to pull away from Caleb, and he doesn’t relax his grip, though he knows by now he’s holding far too tightly to be comfortable. Instead, she wriggles one skinny, grazed elbow up between their bodies and touches his cheek. The edge of one of her claws grazes Caleb’s skin, light as a feather. Caleb doesn’t move. Nott’s frown deepens. 

“You’re crying.” She coughs again, still wet, still hoarse. But the limp, heavy weight to her limbs is gone, and her chest is moving as she breathes, and there’s light in her eyes. Caleb helps her sit up, and Nott’s frown deepens as she looks around them, at the tall dark trees and the fire a few feet away in the clearing where they’d been attacked. “What happened?” Confusion gives way to concern as Caleb lets go of her, and Nott moves forward, sharp cat like eyes examining him carefully in the dark. “Are you hurt?”

Caleb laughs, a little wetly, and wipes away the tears on his cheeks with the heel of his palm and the back of his hand. “No, no, I’m fine. Are you alright?”

Nott frowns, sitting back, her ears pricked for any potential danger whilst she gives herself a once over. Caleb waits patiently. He can hear the rest of their group talking to each other now: Beau’s voice is raised, but then it usually is, and he doesn’t really have the energy to care about anyone other than the goblin girl in front of him. After a long moment, Nott lifts one clawed hand to her mouth, and her frown returns. “I was unconscious.” It’s a statement that sounds a little like a question. 

Caleb takes a deep breath. “Yes. But I gave you a potion, and you are alright now, I think. Does anything hurt?”

Nott takes his question seriously, and in this way she is not at all like a child: she has been hurt too often and too cruelly to shake away an injury with the naivety of youth. So instead she stretches her arms out in front of her, squinting at them in the dark, and she gets unsteadily to her feet. As soon as she does, Caleb stands with her, stooping to offer her a hand to lean on. Nott takes it, her bony, cool fingers wrapping around his dirty human ones with an easy familiarity. It pulls at something in Caleb’s heart: because she trusts him, she trusts him without question, and he’s known that for some time. He has absolutely no idea how he could possibly live up to it.

After a few moments more, Nott nods to herself, ears twitching as one of the others starts stomping across the forest floor towards them. “I’m alright.” Caleb’s dancing lights are reflected in her eyes like fireflies, and she gives him a wide grin full of sharp, crooked teeth. Caleb echoes it, albeit a little faintly, still shaken and drained from before. “You saved my life Caleb! Thank you!”

“Oh, no, no, I do not think… You were only unconscious, this is bad, but you were not going to die. I just. Helped you out a little. But only a little.” He honestly doesn’t know whether it’s self-deprecation, or self-hatred, or fear of admitting exactly how close he’d come to losing her that makes him deny it. Caleb only knows that he needs her not to be any more indebted to him than she already thinks she is. 

Nott gives him a look, and it’s cannier than most ten year old’s would be. She looks more like herself this way: street smart and rough around the edges, but still not quite fully grown. Somewhere in the hint of softness left in her cheeks, and the messy tangle of her hair, there’s still the faintest echo of childhood, and with it the wisdom that innocence brings. “You still saved me. Thank you.” Then the wisdom melts into another big, toothy grin, and she jumps up and down, grabbing at Caleb’s wrist as she does so. “You’re the best friend anyone could ever have! I’m so lucky to have you!” 

Everything in Caleb wants to deny this, vehemently. But this is not about him, it’s about her, and most of him is still just more relieved than he can say than she isn’t unconscious in the dirt. So he sighs, and he reaches out with his free hand and musses her hair, absently tickling the backs of her ears when he does so. Nott snorts and ducks away from him, but her ears are pricked high and she doesn’t let go of his arm. The dancing lights follow her head like earth-bound stars.

“You two alright? I thought I saw Nott go down for a minute there.” Fjord speaks softly, as he usually does. Caleb turns to him. A few feet behind him, Molly and Beau are going to the bloody work of dissecting the owlbear for things they can sell in front of an enraptured Jester. Caleb opens his mouth to reply, but Nott jumps in between he and Fjord before he has the chance.

“I was unconscious but then I wasn’t because Caleb saved me and he is the best.” Fjord raises his eyebrows a little at Nott’s enthusiasm, and both he and Caleb glance up at the trees when her voice echoes. But he doesn’t question her. Instead he smiles a little: a tired, relieved smile that Caleb recognises. He’s worn it often enough himself.

“Well then, I guess you’re lucky to have such a loyal friend.” Fjord looks up, and his eyes are golden in the half light, with the fire behind him and Caleb’s magic between them, the shadows of the forest stretching to either side. “Seriously though, you both ok?” Fjord doesn’t say it looks like he’s been crying, because Fjord is the kind of man who values things like discretion and tact. Caleb continues to be inexpressibly grateful for it. 

So he nods, and he gives Fjord the greatest part of a smile he can muster. “We are fine. Thank you.” Fjord’s expression relaxes into what looks like honest relief, and he claps Caleb gently on the arm that isn’t currently occupied by Nott.

“I’m glad to hear it.” He sounds sincere, and for just a moment, the tiny, stupid part of Caleb that hasn’t entirely given up on hope at his own chance of happiness is stupidly flattered. Then Nott tugs on his arm hard enough to almost hurt, and Caleb looks down at her.

“I’m going to go help them with the monster now. It looks gross.” Caleb has barely had a chance to digest that before Nott lets go of him and sprints back across the clearing, waving at Jester, who immediately waves back.

Caleb watches her go: and he thinks of another little girl he knew once, long ago, running away from him across the fields under a wide blue sky. Then Fjord steps into his line of vision, blocking the fire from his view. His expression is still gentle. “Kids, right?”

Caleb shakes his head, and starts to walk with him back to the group. He lets out a long, shaking breath, and he puts the memory of the other girl back into the dusty, battered box at the back of his head. “You have no idea.”