#i made a fatal mistake telling you i'd write something for each wip i get an ask for.... using this knowledge for evil i see

[thewrongshop]

I am casting the spell of making progress on your wips. Tell me of naming & being named!

(from this wip ask game!)

oh god oh god i'm under attack!!! spare me!!! of naming & being named is just kind of a sweet post-canon fic on the evolution of Caleb and Essek's relationship with a specific focus on names/endearments because Caleb calling Essek 'dear' in tm9 reunited uhhhh pretty much one hit ko'd me, and because I specifically have feelings about Caleb using German endearments :)) the fact that i never got to hear him say schatz in canon is devastating so I have to make up for it in incredibly sappy fanfiction!

“Herr Thelyss,” Caleb says with a raise of his eyebrows. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” Essek cannot, on pain of death, tell him the truth, which is that he teleported unannounced for the simple reason that Caleb always responds the same way when he does: with a smile and a Zemnian honorific that twists at Essek’s heart in a most cruel way. Even after all his years speaking Common, Caleb reverts to Zemnian in moments of surprise or tension, and the unguarded accent of the Herr always slips into the following words, warming the fricative at the beginning of Thelyss into a soft t: teh-liss. Essek finds it unbearably charming. He covets the sound of his name as only Caleb speaks it, in a way that is so intense as to be enormously embarrassing. And since their friendship has progressed to the point that Essek feels he can teleport into Caleb’s home without warning but not to the point where he can ask for what he wants, he has no choice but to take it, again and again, in the pockets of time where he can find it.

(i'm so weak for when people write caleb calling essek 'herr thelyss' but i always find that switching languages mid-phrase causes accents to carry over, at least for me, so my most self-indulgent hc is that Essek's name gets accented when it's used with german/zemnian endearments and yes he does love it and yes this is humiliating for him <3 )