Sweet Romance14 min read
The Morning My Teacher Woke in My Arms
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I woke up and found my teacher lying in my arms.
"Callahan?" I croaked, voice thick with sleep and something worse.
He blinked at the ceiling, then at me, then made a sound that was almost a laugh and almost a cry. "Oh, Gavin. You moved."
"I didn't—" I tried to move my arm, found it numb, and froze. "My arm's asleep."
"Poor thing." He touched my forehead with two fingers, gentle and ridiculous. "You were very brave last night."
"Brave?"
"You fought like a storm," he said, ridiculous and proud. "Your heat nearly burned me."
"Callahan—"
He pretended to be offended, then jabbed my chest with his fist, playful as a man who could level mountains. "Be a good boy, Gavin. You were relentless."
I pulled my blanket higher and remembered nothing after the tavern steps. The roof above our bed had a hole where sky swallowed moon. A piece of that hole still dotted our blanket with cold dust.
"Don't call me that," I rasped.
"Call me what?" He grinned, fingers already finding the pot of warm water and the soft cloth by the bed. "Call me your honorific? Your title? My pet name?"
"Call me nothing," I muttered, and that was all the argument my battered head could carry.
"Enough." He hopped off the mattress like a man who couldn't keep still. "I'll fix you. Sit up."
I tried. My knees folded without asking permission. I fell out of bed and hit the floor with a thunderous ache.
"See?" He didn't rush. He leaned on the bedpost, as if watching a ridiculous play. "Clumsy. You always were."
"Shut up," I said, but the breath in my chest was thin and hot. I felt raw where I could not see.
"Do you remember anything?" he asked softly.
"No." The single syllable tasted like defeat.
"Good." He was oddly relieved. "Then let Teacher patch you."
"Don't call yourself Teacher."
"Too late." He bent and gathered hot water, soap, and a small jar of ointment. His hands moved with kindness, and with the old, careful patience of someone who had tended wounds for decades.
"You're ridiculous," I whispered when he dabbed cold cloth at the scratch on my shoulder.
"Ridiculous enough to still have you, though," he said, and there it was—a small, private softness.
"You're my master," I said a little louder than I'd planned.
"Yes." He smiled like a sun. "But also your guardian. And sometimes, your pest."
I wanted to laugh and to push him away. The memories came back in a rush and a blur—mud-damp streets, a child with a face too small for the world, Callahan's strong hands scooping me from a pile of bodies, his ridiculous proposal to name me after his title, the many small oddities that made him a person who kept one eyebrow permanently amused.
"Do you remember when I rescued you?" he asked suddenly.
"I remember you saying the name 'Blue Cloud' like it was a joke," I said weakly.
"Blue Cloud?" He made a small sour face and then the expression softened. "You were filthy. You were like a small, furious shadow. I couldn't leave you."
"You stole me," I said. The long memory of that night lived in my chest like a slow burn.
"No stealing." He smiled and pretended to scold. "You were adopted."
That was the beginning of everything. He said he had found me after a border town was sacked, a child with a stare that did not belong to someone so small. He rubbed my head in a way that he later claimed was fatherly; I called him out for centuries of pretension and he only laughed and kept my name.
"Why would you pick me?" I asked now, because the roof hole made it feel like honesty or doom would fall through.
"Because you didn't blink," he said simply. "Because you looked right at the world and it didn't make you smaller."
That was all the reasoning I would get from him for a long time. He would claim mystic things, tell tall stories of being a minor god's cousin, of studying secret arts in places with names I could not pronounce. Mostly, though, he would show up with hot water and a jar of ointment. Mostly, he would smile.
"Last night..." I began. "You said—"
"Ah, punishments." He puffed up theatrically. "For being so outrageous."
"You drugged me," I said flatly, remembering a slick, burny heat that had started in my belly and spread upward like a fire. "You put something in my drink."
"Not in your drink." He made a face. "We used a little ritual. A small thing I learned in the South. It helps feelings find direction."
"You're impossible." My jaw ached from the movement.
He laughed, and for a moment the laugh tumbled into something softer. "Yes. I know. You still love me."
"Do not," I said, and then, softer, "Don't be absurd."
He fetched a bowl and began to wash my hair with a tenderness that made my face go hot. "Gavin, for a warrior, you are the worst liar."
That moment—his hands in my hair, the moon hole above leaking a pale light, his voice low—was the first of the things that made my chest trip in a way the battlefield never had: he bent the rules for me. He, who did not bend.
"Teacher," someone shouted at the courtyard door.
"Yes?" Callahan's voice turned from easy warmth to a blade.
A young man in traveling gear slid in, shaking off snow. He looked half-made of sunlight. "Master," he said, voice trembling just slightly. "There are rumors in the town. A band of brigands took children to the southern road. The market says—"
"Logan," Callahan said. The single name changed the air. He reached for his robe. "Bring word of the wound here. Gavin, stay."
"Who's Logan?" I asked, but I already knew. A boy I had fought with, who had stood in the crowd and left when a fight turned real. A boy who carried quiet concern like a second skin.
Logan Ferrari knelt by the bed when Callahan gave him the nod. "Are you well?" he asked, looking down at me like someone testing a delicate instrument.
"I am alive." My voice carried the honest smallness of ache.
Logan's face relaxed in a way that made my heart contort—he had always been gentle with pain. "Eat when you can. If you want, I'll go see the apothecary."
"Good." Callahan's hand found mine under the blanket. He did not let go.
There were small things that cut into the old story of being a lonely child and a larger, gentler, older man. Callahan would not show his teeth for others, but he would smile at me. He would not tell tales to the elders, but he would hammer a failed ironworker because the man had been cruel to my scar. He rarely removed his coat in front of the assembly, but he would take his cloak off and wrap it around my shoulders when wind bit my shoulders raw.
Those small breaks—he laughing at something I had done, him protecting me from a cruel joke, him once—a single time—closing the gate to a hall and letting his stern face melt into a smile just for me—those were the moments. They came like fireflies across a summer night and made the whole sky stop.
Days slid by. I learned to walk again, to let the aches dull into muscle memory. Callahan taught me strange arts—ways to breathe and shift and feel the world around me. Logan taught me how to patch a wound so the scar would not bleed for months. Gillian Arroyo—a bright and stubborn woman—laughed at my fumbling attempts at herbology and taught me a thousand names for things that tasted like leaves.
"Why didn't you ever tell me your real age?" I asked Callahan one night as snow made the courtyard shine.
He thought for a long while. "It makes me dangerous if you know too much." He tapped my forehead as if to close the thought. "Be quiet and sleep."
And yet, all the while, our world was thinning around the edges. Tales traveled faster than a sword. Treasure hunters and desperate nobles scraped the land for artifacts, and someone had found a name that set men like wolves on a road with no return—the Lock Tower. They said under the tower slept a bronze bird, old as the world, called the Golden Copper Quail. Whispers claimed a crystal, the Dragon-Blood Stone, might be bound near it. A thing like that, pushed into the wrong hands, would unbalance everything.
It was Logan who found the first trace of it. He did not look like a thief. He looked like someone who had been looking for lost sheep and found a wolf instead.
"We should leave it," I told him when he returned to camp late, boots muddy. "Let the legends be."
"It's a chance," he said, and there was a new edge to his voice I had not heard before. "We can use it. We can fix things."
"Fix things by stealing power?" I asked.
Logan swallowed. "Things are broken, Gavin. Everyone is picking sides. I thought— I thought we could get ahead and help everyone. We could help Callahan."
I wanted to believe him. A hunger glinted behind his eyes that looked like wanting to be better. Callahan had a kind of quiet power that people wanted to bend around. Logan wanted to grab, to seize, to do things quickly.
He left with a small band, and I did not go, because I trusted Callahan, and because the weight in my bones told me to sleep.
One week later, the Lock Tower's bell sounded three times at dusk. A signal. Men in masks moved like ghosts through the market. By nightfall, someone had begun to pry the copper plate from the city gate.
The accusation found Logan first.
"Traitor!" someone screamed in the market square.
"Thief!" another cried.
Logan stood there like he was being accused of forgetting how to breathe.
"Logan?" I stepped forward as the crowd pressed in. "Explain."
"Don't listen—" a woman shouted. "He's the one who sold out the southern pass! He led the brigands to the trade caravans!"
"He's lying!" Callahan's voice cut through the noise. He pushed a path to my side as if to shield me, but he was tired. The world had already been wearing on him.
Logan's face changed like a mask ripped off. Pride and guilt and something like terror warred across his features. "I tried—" he began.
"You sold us!" someone spat.
"Shame!" "Traitor!" The circle closed. A child's voice called for blood.
Logan turned his face to me. "Gavin—"
"Stop." I could feel the wrongness in my throat. "You would not—"
"I did what I had to," he said. His voice was a blade that trembled. "We took a chance. We broke the seal, but we never meant—"
"To hurt people," Callahan finished quietly. He stepped forward, and then the last of his reserve seemed to flee him. "Logan, you betrayed my trust."
"Forgive me," Logan whispered.
They bound him and dragged him to the public platform. They stripped the gilded collar from his throat. The city magistrate—who owed too many favors—sat in his carved chair and read the charges with a perfunctory voice. The crowd gathered like stormwater.
This is where they will make an example, I thought then, and did not fully understand how deep an example this would be.
"Logan Ferrari—" the magistrate intoned. "For conspiring to unseal the Lock Tower, for trafficking with brigands, for betraying your own—what do you have to say?"
Logan's eyes were nowhere. He had grown pale as the moon. "I thought I could fix things," he said. "I thought—"
"Save it," the magistrate snapped. "You were caught trying to sell the Dragon-Blood Stone to an outer lord."
"No—" Logan's voice broke.
"You were the one who guided the brigands to the southern pass. You sold the location of our stores and led them to our children. You opened the way to the Lock Tower."
A hush fell. Voices turned from accusation to something else—shock, then a wet sound of disgust.
"Logan." I took a step forward and he flinched like a small animal. "Why?"
He looked at me as if seeing me for the first time. "Because everyone was crushing us," he said. "I wanted more than this—more than being second fiddle. I thought I could take the stone, control it, and then help everyone. It was arrogance. It was—"
"It was greed," someone from the crowd spat.
That word landed like a stone. He had been trying to be a hero the only way he knew—by grabbing power. But power was a greedy thing. It ate the hands that tried to hold it.
The magistrate's sentence was immediate and merciless. "In public humiliation and restitution shall you be made an example. In the plaza, before the whole city, your misdeeds shall be displayed. Your privileges are stripped. Your name will be spat from the doors of every inn. You will be set in the stocks and made to recite each crime while the townsfolk jeer and throw refuse."
"Please." Logan's voice was a child pleading.
They led him to the wooden stocks. Men and women pressed forward to hurl sneers. I watched as the wind lifted remnants of snow around his knees. Callahan stood beside me and put a steadying hand on my shoulder.
"No," Callahan said. "No to tearing a man apart."
The magistrate paused, uncertain, then went on. "Public punishments breed caution. Laws must be seen to be believed."
Logan was stuck. A rope pulled his shoulders down, the wooden plank biting into his wrists. A crowd formed wide like an angry sea.
They put the charges—written, signed, stamped—on a table near the stocks. A man read them aloud, slowly, each sentence a cold bell:
"To date, eight caravans have been raided; three children taken and sold; the Lock Tower's seal corrupted. To you, Logan Ferrari, the crimes of collusion and betrayal are proven."
A woman spat in his direction. Someone else tossed a rotten apple. Children shouted for a show. An elder coughed out a prayer. I could not move. I could not speak.
"Look at him," someone shouted. "He wore our robes and led us into the wolves."
"Shame on him!" several voices joined.
For an hour, they made him stand while rumors flew like hawks. They read the ledger of his dealings. They showed the letters he had written to nameless buyers. Old neighbors stepped forward to recount small slights and small betrayals. Behind each small betrayal was a thread; they pulled it until the whole fabric was a shred.
At first, Logan stood tall. His jaw was set like he'd carved it there. People called him liar, thief, traitor. His eyes flickered. He tried to speak once, to explain—his voice turned thin and raw and got swallowed by the chorus of cries.
Then, slowly, at the moment the children began to chant his name like a chant to call rain, his face shifted. The old harbor of arrogance cracked. The first fissure was a line down his cheek, the salt of fear. His expression changed from bitter bravado to stunned denial.
"I didn't—" He began, and the words vanished under a roar of contempt. An old woman pushed forward and slapped his cheek. Logan staggered.
"Please!" he cried then, not as a thief defiant but as a person stripped of illusions. "I wanted a way out. I thought I could bargain for it. I never wished harm on the children."
"Sir," the magistrate said, voice flat, "then why did you write to the caravaneers?"
"I—I thought—"
He was crying now. The crowd's mood changed in slices: first cruel, then horrified, then a small, terrible compassion. The man who had drunk the bribe and led the brigands suddenly seemed not monstrous but small and breakable.
"Were you bought?" someone asked.
"Yes," Logan whispered. "I was bought by hopes."
That answer made the crowd angrier and more pitying at once. They wanted someone to hate, but they had instead found a scared boy who had tried to play god. Trumpets that had called for blood now fell silent under the weight of reality.
The humiliation had to continue, the magistrate insisted. "Repent him," he declared, "and let the city decide his recompense."
They made Logan kneel. People spat into his hands. He tasted filth and apologized, again and again, voice unraveling. He begged for forgiveness, a chant both sincere and pitiful. He crawled to the families harmed and asked to be forgiven, and their faces were mountains—some soft, some stone. One woman shoved him away, another slapped his palms with an old rag. A child, the size of my own past, stuck his finger into Logan's tear-tracked cheek and then ran away hysterical.
When the formal rite was done, they set him to the road to scrub and mend the caravans, to return what he could and to serve every merchant he had wronged without pay. They shaved his head and pinned his name on a wooden placard: TRAITOR.
I stood, hands numb, and for the first time in my life felt like a country had turned on someone and someone I loved was the wreckage.
Logan looked up, and among the crowd's jeers I heard a single thing that cut deeper than any insult: the relief in Callahan's sigh. Callahan did not celebrate. He only looked tired in a way the moon had never been.
Logan bowed his head again, shoulders trembling. "Gavin—I'm sorry."
"Do not speak," I said. My voice was small but steady. "Do not apologize to me. Apologize to the caravaners. Pay them back."
He went, and the world went on. The Lock Tower shuddered back into rumor for a while; the immediate danger had been averted. But the price was a man broken in public.
I forgave him in pieces: when the dusk came and Callahan and I were alone, I found Logan's name carved on a plank where he used to sit and scrub the swords. I held it like a small, half-healed wound.
Callahan's voice was soft. "You did right to stop him."
"Right?" I asked. "Is there a right thing here?"
"We stop the immediate harm," he said. "We teach the rest."
He smiled, those rare muscles at the mouth pulling just so. "And we mend what is left."
Days later, Logan returned—shorn, hunched, hands callused. He did not meet my eyes. He carried sacks of grain and carved small wooden toys for the children he had frightened. The town accepted him in a way—some gave him sideways nods; others offered silent service; many still spat when they thought no one looked.
One evening after work, he found me on the roof, where the starhole glinted cold. He sat down beside me and breathed out, "I deserved the stocks."
"You deserved to be stopped," I said.
He swallowed. "Can you ever forgive me?"
I turned and watched his face for a long time. "I don't know," I answered honestly. "But I know this—our brotherhood is broken in us both. You will have to live with that. And I—" I leaned into Callahan's shadow and felt the familiar warmth and fear. "I will keep being with the ones left."
Callahan's hand settled over mine then. He did not lecture. He only said, "We keep walking."
On some nights I'd wake and find his face in my arms. "You are a stubborn oak," he'd say, and press his forehead to mine. "You make me laugh."
"Do not," I'd say, and he would, somehow, stop.
The hole in the roof was repaired slowly, piece by piece. The small last piece of tile never quite fit, and a sliver of sky always showed. When rain came, it would find us. Callahan would move the bed and laugh at me as if the world loved laughter.
There are three moments I remember like snaps of light:
"Remember when you let that laugh slip?" I asked him once.
He had sat at the edge of the training yard, hands on his knees. "Which laugh?"
"The rare one. The one you save for when nothing else matters."
He looked at me, eyes miles deep. "I only save my laughs for what matters."
He tied my cloak around my shoulders when I caught a fever and would not let me move, though he pretended to fuss and grumble at the waste of time.
Once, the smallest thing: I didn't close my hand properly and dropped a tiny carved fox. He laughed like a boy and, with a single rough finger, bent to pick it up and hand it back to me with the gentlest of touches.
"You're the only one who can make me break the rules," he'd whisper. "Do you know that?"
I did know. I wrapped my fingers around his as if they were a lifeline.
The world still cracked at the edges. The Lock Tower rumor returned in whispers. Others would come with maps and promises and the glint of greed. Each time, Callahan's eyes cooled and only ever went to me, like a weathered lighthouse checking for a ship.
"Stay," he said to me once, under the hole of the roof as rain rattled like a thousand tiny drums.
"Where?" I asked.
"Here," he said simply. "Beside me."
I thought of Logan, of public shame and hammered names. I thought of the boy I once was, found in a ruin, and the man who had taken me and given me a life. The answer caught like a bird in my throat.
"I will," I said.
He bent his head and kissed my brow the way a priest might bless the last candle.
The morning after, I woke to find him in my arms again, breathing slow, horizon brightening behind the hole in the roof. It was an ordinary miracle—small, private, ridiculous, and utterly ours.
"Don't leave my side," he murmured.
"I'm not going anywhere," I said, holding on.
We finished our chores. We mended nets, boiled bitter herbs into broths that tasted like survival. We taught the children to read the stars instead of fearing them. We watched over the town as best we could, because sometimes living was the truest kind of bravery.
And at the very end of that year, when the winter's breath had made the river a hard ribbon, we stood in the market square. The magistrate had a new man; the stocks had a thick layer of moss. People moved with the slow cautiousness of those who had learned something hard.
I had Logan's name carved into a new plank on the community hall—not for praise, but as a sign: we remember. We do not forget. We heal or we rot trying.
Callahan pressed a worn stone into my palm that evening: a red bead of something like coal, warm as if it had been held in a human hand. "Keep it," he said. "It will warm your pockets."
I put it into my coat, then slipped my hand into his. He smiled in that small way that would still cut me.
One night, when moonlight braided through the roof hole and made small, obedient patterns on my bed, I asked him, "If I die, will you keep telling the story?"
"Only if you make it worth telling," he said.
"Then stay alive," I told him, and he laughed, small and real.
And when morning came and I lifted my head, the roof's hole above threw a strip of cold sky across his face. He woke later with my head on his chest and muttered the same ridiculous, tender thing he did when he thought no one listened.
"You're mine," he said.
"Don't be dramatic," I replied, and the roof rattled as if it agreed.
That was our covenant—more silent than oath, more stubborn than law. We kept each other with small things: a patch on a sleeve, a warm bowl at dawn, a hand that did not let go when the light fluttered away.
The tower still waits in story. The city still has its teeth and its medicine. Men still try to be gods.
But for now, there is a bed, a hole in the roof, a warm stone in my pocket, and a man who will laugh at me in private and scold me in public—and I will wake into that, again and again.
The End
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