#true love is i explain the timeloop to you every reset and you believe me without hesitation#<- okay but Essek does time stuff so there’s no way he Doesn’t have like#a time loop password#like something he would only tell to someone if they said they were in a time loop in order to prove it#he believes Caleb right away and tells him#so that the next loop is even smoother#but it wouldn’t have mattered because that trust is already there#I was thinking about this so much yesterday @spottedenchants
and ok now i’m imagining caleb in the early loops, shaky and a touch manic, essek’s first death still so fresh in his mind there’s bile in the back of his throat and the situation still new enough that he’s sure it’ll end at any moment and this will be the last loop and essek will be dead, permanently and there he is, for the first time he’s got essek to himself for just a moment and he’s desperate and practically vibrating as he talks too fast, the whole horrible nightmare spilling out of him like a broken damn of words flooding forth, most of which are promises to fix it and he’s going back and around on his own explanations until its a tangled web of barely coherent sentences that essek, who is still startled by caleb’s sudden storming of the dungeons, half mad and injured, his gaze torn between the babbling mage before him and the cell door that’s bowing under the pressure of the guards ramming into it
essek can just about decipher what’s going on and he takes a breath, pulls together some measure of calm born of years of service in the bright queen’s court, and he gently cups caleb’s face and gives him the password he never wrote down and barely thinks of, just a simple secret that is just words at this point because he knows in heart he believes caleb, he’ll always believe caleb. he has faith in this man with tears in his eyes and feverish fire behind them that steels essek’s breath with the certainty that he will find a way to save him even if he has to bend the universe to his will to do it and caleb repeats it, repeats it like a prayer even though the words were committed to memory the moment essek spoke them and they just gaze into each other’s eyes, time pausing for just a moment and there are so many words unspoken, heavy in their throats, so many secrets choking them and it's too early to say them and yet too late as well and then the guards break the door down and caleb shuts his eyes to the blood and hears the last gasp of essek before he wakes to jester’s scream all over again but this time, this time he breathes because now he has a secret that can ensure essek hears him, now he has something solid to build a foundation on and its loops and loops that end horrifically before caleb realises he never needed the password to begin with
