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"Cayyyleb."
Oh, good, she's here. Caleb resists the urge to sigh loudly. "Yes, Jester?" he asks without looking up.
"What are you doooing?"
"I am trying to copy this spell into my spellbook," he replies, "as you are perfectly aware."
"What spell is it?"
Caleb shuts his eyes briefly, trying to wring a bit of patience out of the aether. "Well, it is a high-level enchantment spell, mainly useful for — "
Jester sits down on his desk and knocks an inkwell over.
" — dear god." He lunges, but isn't quick enough to catch it, and it shatters on the floor.
"Ooh." Jester winces. "Sorry."
Caleb glances up at her — she's sitting awfully close, practically on top of his books, facing him and kicking her heels, her hands braced lightly on the edge of the wooden desk top at either side of her. She knows exactly what she's doing, and he is just irritated enough with her that he decides he's not going to play along.
He gets up and crosses the room to grab a towel from beside the washbasin on the bedside table, pointedly avoiding Jester's gaze. "That was expensive," he tells her, coming back to kneel down and start cleaning the ink and broken glass off the floor. "Not to mention my last bottle."
"Oh, are you gonna be grumpy now?"
It takes a real effort not to lift his head and raise his eyebrows at her. "Pretty sure I've earned the right to be a little — "
Jester puts one foot on his shoulder.
...Okay.
"Jester," says Caleb carefully, not moving, not sure he could move, "I need to clean this up before it gets into the floor and you have to pay for property damage and new ink."
"Pssh, they love us here, they won't care." Jester gives him a little shove with her foot. "We saved this entire town, they wanted to give us free rooms, they're not gonna worry about a little stain on the floor, Caleb."
"I am not a footrest," mutters Caleb, which immediately earns him a second foot.
He really should have seen that coming.
"Everybody is out drinking," Jester complains in a long drawl, "and there's nothing to do, and Nugget is too sleepy to play, and I don't have anything good to read…"
"So naturally you thought you'd come interrupt me." Maybe if he stays completely still he can control the blush that's threatening to take over his face. "While I am trying to learn an extremely complicated and important spell."
"You never answered my question!" says Jester brightly. "What spell is it?"
Caleb weighs his options for a moment before reaching up and gingerly removing Jester's feet from his back. He half expects her to resist and keep him pinned down, which would...be...educational, but she lets him, crossing her ankles blithely and leaning back where she's sitting on the desk to peer at his open spellbook next to her and he's looking at her again, isn't he, shouldn't he be picking glass shards out of the floor right now?
"An incantation of iron," Jester reads aloud, "the interlacing of fingers upon a weak mind, sixty seconds maximum. So you're grabbing somebody's brain?"
"...In a manner of speaking. That's not a bad way to put it."
"Did you come up with this yourself?"
"Ha." Most of the ink is soaked into the towel by now, and that's good enough for Caleb — there's no telling what else a bored Jester will do if he stays down here much longer. He stands and, for lack of a better idea, deposits the towel and the broken glass inside one of the desk drawers. It's not like there's a rubbish bin in here, and despite his better judgment, Jester is being especially...magnetic right now, and he finds himself reluctant to leave the room.
"You know, you should really learn prestidigitation ," remarks Jester as Caleb sits back down, picking up his inkpen before realizing he has no way to write with it anymore. "You could just clean stuff like that up with, like, a snap of your fingers."
"Or I could stop keeping company with people who knock over my things," he smiles.
Jester smiles back, and it occurs to Caleb that he is, in fact, playing along, which is the problem with Jester: she gets you before you realize it, and then it's too late. He forces his eyes back down to the pages of his spellbook before she can read anything else in his face, like how he's never been less irritated or grumpy in his life, or how certain concepts like being held down are making slow circles in his mind right now like water swirling round a drain.
"So does it have a name, this super secret spell?"
"Ah…" That blush he'd successfully gotten under control moments before returns with a vengeance. "Hold Monster."
"Hold Monster?!" Jester sounds entirely too thrilled. "Is that like Hold Person? Are you gonna be able to like freeze a dragon?!"
"Oh, that's a pretty tall order. Not for a while. But something smaller, maybe."
"A baby dragon?"
He looks up at her with as straight an expression as he can. "Jester Lavorre, I am not getting you a pet dragon, let's get that out of the way right now."
Jester grins, and then she — scheisse — reaches out and pokes his cheek. "You're blushiiing, Caleb."
"This?" He gestures to his face. "This is barely contained fury. You broke my inkwell. I am filled with rage."
"Mmm, so furious," she agrees, and before he can flirt back — reply, before he can reply, she's snatched up his spellbook out of his hands and begun to flip through it.
"Be careful with that!"
"I'm not going to eat it, Caleb." Jester riffles through the pages too fast to be reading anything, clearly just to get Caleb's heart rate going. "If you could invent any spell in the world, what would it be?"
"Banish Tiefling."
A startled giggle erupts from Jester's throat. "I'm serious!"
"I'm completely serious."
She smacks him on the shoulder with his spellbook. "You already know how to do that."
"Believe me, Jester, if I knew the trick to make you magically disappear — "
This time, when she smacks him with the book, he's too quick — he grabs it back, and before she can do anything about it he's shoved it under his coat and back into its holster. Let her try to steal it now.
(He might. This is beginning to worry him.)
"I think if I got to make up a spell," says Jester thoughtfully, staring up at a crack in the ceiling and kicking her feet lazily once more, "I'd do something that could, like…"
"Let me guess." Caleb folds his arms. "Infinite Pastries."
"Oh man, that would be amazing," Jester exclaims, eyes shining.
"Conjure Elemental Dick."
She laughs.
"Minor Catastrophe."
"What would that be?"
Caleb arches an eyebrow and inclines his head towards her.
She doesn't have a spellbook to smack him with, but she makes do with her hand. "Fuck you, I'm a major catastrophe, Caleb Widogast."
"Don't I know it."
"Anyway, like…" Jester purses her lips for a moment. "I mean, those all sound fun, but if I really got to create a spell, like, for real, I think it would be something like Cure Wounds or Heal or something, you know? But for other stuff, not just physical."
"How do you mean?"
"For, like, emotions." For the first time this evening, Jester avoids his eyes, though whether it's from embarrassment or just because she's trying to concentrate on finding the right words to express herself, he can't be sure. "Like, to help people heal from grief, or to give them courage, or just help them be less lonely. Or to be more hopeful."
Caleb feels like he's been pierced through the heart. "Jester," he says softly. "You don't need a spell for that. You do that already. Every day."
Now she glances at him briefly before blushing a little bit herself. "But if it were a spell I'd know for sure if it worked."
"It works. Trust me." Should he place his hand over hers? That's a terrible idea, surely — that's a dangerous idea, with her in the mood she's in tonight, the mood she's been in a lot lately ever since he winked at her that night in Xhorhas, something he hasn't stopped regretting once since the second he did it (something he can't imagine regretting for as long as he lives). There's been enough danger in this room already, between inkwells and spellbooks and hands and feet and that gentle, vulnerable turn that Jester's voice and words have taken. To give them courage. To be more hopeful.
She's got a soft smile on her face, and Caleb decides that that's enough — no need to aim higher than that for now. If ever. (For now.) "What would yours be?" she asks, meeting his eyes.
"My what?"
"What spell would you invent?"
"Summon Tiefling," he murmurs, not breaking eye contact. "So you could cast yours on me."
Jester grins, and she's slipping off his desk, stepping carefully over the spot on the floor that's still got a little smear of ink drying on the boards, and now she's walking backwards towards the door. "But Caleb, you already know how to do that."
He wants to jump up and follow her — he wants to ask her what she means, to demand it — he wants — but her eyes are holding him in place as surely as if she's pinned him physically to his chair, and the next moment she's gone, shutting the door carefully behind her.
All the breath goes out of Caleb's body in one long sigh. He's going to be useless for the rest of the night, even if he had any ink left to write with. The spell will have to wait. There's nothing to keep him here now — there's no reason why he can't go downstairs with the others, where Jester is probably waiting for him — that is, if she's — if she did go downstairs, and not just back to her own —
Nott must have some ink in her bag somewhere. She won't mind if he borrows some. It's never good to abandon a spell in the middle of transcription. You should never leave things like this half-finished.
Caleb gets up and walks out the door.
fin