Glass clinked against glass, dishes clattered in the kitchen, the slow murmur of conversation drifting around them. Caleb put up the aversion field so that people wouldn't be inclined to listen in; it made their service slower than proverbial molasses but it was worth it.

Especially since he didn't even want the others listening in on this conversation, or looking at who he was sitting with.

Chase looked older than the last time he'd seen him, which was explained by the fact that it had been six or seven years, but it wasn't just that. Chase was a man in his thirties, now, Caleb had just hit twenty five. And Chase was only two months older. It was sobering to look at him; there but for the grace of his friends, of Pogue, and all that. Something to remember every time he got the urge to make a quick fix.

It was also something to think about, and something to get used to, and beyond that he just wasn't sure what it was. Chase looked beat. To hell and back, and more than just physically; his eyes were strained and tired. Caleb couldn't imagine the man sitting in front of him now being the boy who had terrified him in his last year of high school. Psychotic, paranoid, destroying anything and everything in his way just to get that power he thought would help him live longer.

Chase just looked tired now, and as though he would be grateful for every second of life circumstance granted him.

"What do you want?" Caleb asked, and for a second it reminded him of the last time he'd asked that, but this time he didn't think Chase was going to throw him across the room. He wasn't sure Chase could.

No, that wasn't true, Chase could. Chase wouldn't, because it might mean wearing down some of the life he had left. It always went faster, the further you fell.

"I don't know," Chase said finally, after long enough that one table had gotten up and another had sat down. "It was a mistake to come here."

He stood up and Caleb found himself reaching out to the other man, tugging him back down into the opposite booth again. Maybe pity. Maybe empathy. Maybe relief: there but for the grace of god go I.

It was hard to tell. He let go once Chase had settled himself back into the booth and pretended he didn't see the arthritic wince.

"You came all this way," Caleb pointed out. "The others would probably kill you on sight right now. Hell, I would have..." If he hadn't turned up looking the way he did, and how he did. "So what do you want? You must want something, or you wouldn't have gone to all the effort."

Chase's lip curled and for a second there was a hint of the old, arrogant self-assurance. "There's nothing you can give me that I want."

"So, you've finally figured it out," Caleb said, with heavy irony and leaning back against the booth. Chase's arrogance crumpled back into weariness again, and Caleb felt a little sick about that. It was mean. He hadn't meant to be mean. "You know how to stop the aging. You don't need us to tell you that."

"You think it's so easy to try and stop?" Chase snapped at him. "You ever tried kicking a habit this strong? No, course you don't know what it's like, you never stopped to give a flying fuck what it might have been like for me."

"You didn't help your case by trying to kill us," Caleb pointed out, but quietly, more calm than Chase seemed to be right now.

The other man's hands clenched and flexed, and Caleb heard the popping of worn and broken joints. Leathery skin that looked so much different from his own hands, tanned but still mostly smooth. It felt odd. It made him sick, and yet he didn't say anything because if it bothered him, how must Chase feel? Sometimes he was too empathic for his own good.

"You didn't know what it was like," Chase said again, quietly. "Growing up not knowing what it was, not being able to stop yourself by the time you did know. Growing up alone, not having anyone to share it with. You had people you could talk to without them thinking you're crazy, or locking you up to study you like a rat behind glass for the rest of your life. I had nothing. I had no one."

"You still chose to try to kill us," he pointed out. "What do you want from me?"

This, Caleb saw, was the hard part. Chase threw himself back into the corner of the booth and looked over Caleb's shoulder, not at anything but to keep himself from seeing. Caleb wondered what the other man was afraid he would see on his face.

"I want your help. I want to come back..." And he trailed off, looking down at the table top, the fingers of one hand playing with his fork. He didn't have to finish, Caleb had an idea what he meant. Chase wanted to be part of the families again. He wanted to belong, to be whole, whatever it meant for the lost Son of Ipswich to be taken back into their brotherhood.

And now Caleb felt the weight of ten generations of eyes on him, at least. John Putnam had been excommunicated, to steal a word, from their brotherhood for damn good reasons at the time, or at least so Caleb had assumed. But in the years since high school he had wondered, did the Book of Damnation record everything? Were the family records free of bias? The answer, he knew, had to be that they were not. But how much was bias and how much was real? Chase had tried to kill them. Had nearly killed Pogue. Was he actually thinking of forgiving that?

He was. And what kind of friend or brother did that make him?

It was appalling to realize that he was. But there would be a price. There was always a price, and he wasn't sure Chase really wanted it. He was sure Chase didn't know what he was getting in for. Caleb might be considering it, but the other three might never forgive him.

"You want to come back into the families again." They could enter the name of Collins into the bloodline books easily enough. Chase came with his own fortune, if he hadn't spent it all, equal to the others' if not the name value of an unbroken, unbastardized lineage. "You want to be a part of our lives."

"Yes." And it sounded like it hurt to say it. "I don't have anywhere else to go."

Caleb leaned back against the booth, knowing that he'd made up his mind even while he pretended to think it over to himself. He wanted to think it over and deny him. He wanted to treat Chase the same way Chase had treated him.

But he wasn't Chase Collins. He was Caleb Danvers, and Caleb Danvers didn't do things like that, even to his enemies.

"You can't stay at their houses," Caleb decided quietly. He wouldn't put that kind of responsibility on anyone but himself. Not because he didn't think they couldn't handle it; maybe it would be better to say he wouldn't put that kind of danger on anyone but himself. "You'll have to stay with me, if you don't have a place in town."

Chase looked as though he was going to be sick, maybe from relief, maybe from self-disgust. "I can find a house. I won't be in yours long."

Caleb nodded, short and jerky. "The rest of them won't like it. You'll have to lay low for a while, stay quiet, not bother anyone."

"I can do that." He sounded so certain. Grimly so, but maybe he realized that he didn't have a choice.

Perhaps they weren't so different after all. "And you have to say please."

Chase wanted to kill him. It was right there in every inch of tension and anger in his body. Caleb gathered power, could feel the heat behind his eyes in case Chase actually tried something.

"Please."

It startled him, even more so when he realized he was smiling. It surprised him how much anger he felt, curling his hands into fists, this burning need for vengeance feeling as though it was literally burning him from the inside out. All kinds of other metaphors suddenly took on a frightening life of their own.

"Say pretty please."

They were going to come to blows soon, if one of them didn't get careless and start using right there in front of everyone. Caleb was breathing hard already, and grinning, and somehow he didn't think it was a friendly grin. Chase must want to kill him. Caleb was a little appalled at himself, but also a little glad that he wasn't so much of a pushover as to give in without a fight.

Too many conflicting emotions. He wished he'd talked it over with Pogue before he'd even started to say anything. And Chase was still glaring at him.

"Pretty. Please."

It was so ludicrous Caleb almost laughed. "With a cherry on top?"

"Fuck you," Chase snarled, pushing out of the booth and standing with enough of a violent thud to draw eyes. Especially now that Caleb had dropped the aversion field.

He thought about following the other man out the door and did after a moment, at least as far to the parking lot. A little bit of perhaps gratuitous power use sped him till he reached Chase's car just as the other man was disengaging the safety brake. Little uses of Power. Careful, Caleb. Don't want to end up like that.

"I'll call you in a couple of days and let you know what the others think," he told him. It wasn't a question, and it wasn't a request; Chase would stick around for at least long enough for Caleb to talk to the others. He'd been the leader of the motley gang of four long enough that he could pull some authority when he needed to.

And Chase needed them. He was tired, and he was beaten, and he wanted to come home and be welcome and safe more than he wanted to hit Caleb in his smart mouth, and they both knew it. It was visible in every clenched muscle and twist of his mouth, his downcast eyes.

"All right."

Chase had given him his phone number earlier, to set up this meeting. Caleb didn't need anything further from him, not right now.

"Good luck," he said, and it even sounded quieter, nicer than their previous words. He stepped back and let Chase churn gravel out of the parking lot, wondering what he had just done.

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