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A fact about Jester that Caduceus doesn’t always mention on the basis he’s not sure if it’s polite to bring up: Jester Lavorre doesn't always smell like where she’s been and that’s weird.
Sure. Okay. Lots of things about Jester Lavorre are weird, but her weirdness is so often an affectation – decorative as her skirts and ribbons. This specifically seems like something she may be unaware of and he’s noticed (because he pays attention) that her propensity to smell like someplace far, far away has a direct correlation to how much magic she’s using in a day.
They’ve been in their new house for about a week and a half, building various domestic enchantments together, and as Jester lays light into yet another line of delicately strung filigree, he smells the ocean sure as he’s standing on the deck of a creaking ship.
Caduceus glances up from his own application of the light spell, warm yellow flecks of sunlight settling softly into twinkling nodes along a wire. The glow puts a gold dust across the blue plane of her cheekbone, hiding freckles a stripe of light. Her tongue pokes from the corner of her mouth, small and pink against her skin. He can see her tail flipflopping on the floor behind her precisely like an over-stimulated cat’s.
They’re sitting in the small garden enclosure at the foot of their improbable tree. A breeze ripples through the dark boughs, a ripple of leaves shaking loose to drift down on them. The thin lines of wire lay in coils among the roots and buckled stone where the arcane arbor thrust its roots between the stonework and into the architecture of the tower.
“Move, move,” she whispers, reaching across where he’s working to power one of the failing light clusters.
“Kay.” He obliges, letting her duck rather under his extended arm.
The lights sputter, then the glow levels out then intensifies. Jester sits back on her heels and resumes her casting. Enchanting of the domestic variety is, mostly, intuitive but still requires a level of focused discipline he’d been previously dubious she could maintain for this long. Given, she gets whiny and restless and must (much like a cat) take off running around the house yelling at the conclusion of their spellery, but she never flinches during the casting itself.
“Caduuuuceus,” she says, dragging his name out a little between her teeth.
“Yes?”
“I think I’ve got one more spell, but then I’m gonna nap. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“It’s gonna be, like, a big version of the spell, okay?”
“Okay.”
“I’m gonna give it my all, so when I do I might get a liiiittle bit dizzy. Can you just sit next to me and make sure I don’t fall over?”
Caduceus frowns. “Well that doesn’t sound great. Maybe don’t worry about it, Jester.”
“No, no! I want to do it!” She flaps a hand at him. “Just come over here, okay?”
Caduceus resolves himself a little hearing that one pitch of her voice that says, through all things, that she can handle herself thank you and please cooperate or else. So he rises and moves to crouch at her left, the bulk of his frame hunched as a wall to lean against. Brusquely and immediately, she grabs his right wrist and pulls his arm around her waist. He waits while she kind of tucks in close and fits his palm to her ribs.
“Juuust in case I fall,” she says.
He put his free hand on her shoulder, squeezing. “I’ve got you. No worries.”
She grins at him, all fangs and pearly in the dark blue of her face. Then she’s hunched and focusing. Her hands circle over the wires in a series of quick counter-clock and clockwise motions, slim fingers proceeding with machine-like precision through quick somatic motions. He can hear her softly saying something as she draws up a deeper well of magic now and slowly the magic builds like pressure with every motion. Light gathers in the dim bulbs beneath her hand, hundreds of small, stacked pin light pulsing, humming, and growing brighter until the flagstones burn like a swarm of fireflies have settled in the tower nest with them.
“Wow,” says Caduceus.
“Mmhmm,” says Jester. She doesn’t seem like she’s dizzy.
She also smells, suddenly and strongly, like the exact blend of wisteria, jasmine, and rosemary that breezes in from the back of the temple grounds in the late clutch of hot weather just before the turn to fall. He is so surprised, in fact, that he rather forgets that he’s supposed to be doing anything other than staring at the side of Jester’s head and proceeds to do so. As the spell builds so too does the scent of the Blooming Grove, warm and sap-sticky as summer, the light rising from beneath her hands and the smell of home in her hair as heavy as cut grass.
“Jester?”
“Yes?” she says, wiggling happily, gaze completely fixed on her work.
“Do you remember when we sat together in the crows nest? At sea?”
“Yes, I dooo.” She singsongs a little, her hands still outstretched, concentrating on her spell. “Why? Do you want to do more of that stuff? Because I would be super okay with that, you know. Practice makes perfect my mama says.”
“Remember when I told you, that you don’t always smell like where you’ve been?”
She ponders visibly, frowning at the boughs of their tree.
“I mean,” she says, “Yeah, I remember that. Why?”
“I have to ask, because it occurs to me I didn’t last time, can you do that on purpose?”
“Oh. No, I don’t think so. I mean, you know you can’t smell yourself super well, so I can never tell. I just— oh my gosh! Do I smell bad?” She drops her hands and grabs a fistful of her shirt shoving her whole nose and mouth against the bunched fabric, inhaling deeply. “Ahh! I can’t smell anything! Caduceus, you’d tell me if I smelled really really bad right? Like, I know you like smelly fungus stuff sometimes but not everyone else does and I don’t want to smell like Caleb, you know?!”
“You don’t,” Caduceus says, “but I honestly don’t’know why any of you say that. I think he’s self-conscious about it.”
“This is serious stuff, man! I don’t want to stink!” She airs out her shirt a little bit, whining somewhat melodramatically. “Why do you ask? Do I smell weird? What do I smell like?”
“Do you mind if I get closer?”
That seems to catch her attention. She blinks at him, big dark eyes suddenly a little round in the persisting glow of their fairy lights.
“No, of course not. Do whatever, man.” She says that in a tone that must sound very brash in her head, but emerges a little whispery. He scans her shoulder line, carefully, like a gardener gauging the strength of a vine. He eventually raises both hands, moving them up slowly to hover just short of touching her skin, impressing his intention to cradle her jaw. He peers at her, wordlessly and she nods.
So, he fits his palms there framing her face, setting his thumbs against the underside of freckled cheekbones. He leans in, gently drawing her head closer, turning her face so he can easily lean down and press his nose and mouth into her hair. He can feel her blink, the rapid little movements transmitting against the pad of his thumbs. Her hair is touchably soft and smooth, looping between his fingers and silk against his mouth.
He closes his eyes and carefully inhales – jasmine and wisteria, the sweet rot of ripe blackberries and briar. The thick, heady scent of late summer, his favorite part of the year before the extant decay of fall begins to take hold in all the green things. He knows, he know it down to the bones of him that he’s smelling home because in Jester’s hair he smells the strange, rose-like perfume of corpse blossom – the strange and ever mutating strain that breeds sweet and riotous on the funeral pyres behind the temple, deeper in the grounds of the Grove.
“Caduceus?” Jester murmurs.
“I’m sorry.” He whispers it against her hair. “You smell like home.”
"What do you mean?"
"Like... like you've been walking through my garden back in the Blooming Grove. I can smell that on you. I don't know why."
Jester makes a small noise, then says, wondrous, “I do?”
He nods, moving to lean his forehead against hers for a moment. “I wondered if you’d done it on purpose, because sometimes when you use magic, you don’t smell like where you are. And… I think I’m just a little homesick.”
Jester doesn’t move at all at this admission. He feels her hands unexpectedly gripping his wrists, slender and steely around him, holding his hands there against her skin. Jester leans up a little pressing her forehead more insistently up against him, the pressure a strange relief. She murmurs something and the smell of sap gets stronger, permeating the air as the lights coiled all around them begin to waver and pulse different colors as a gentle cantrip sets them alight.
“Do you want to go home?” she asks, so softly he only barely hears it.
“Always,” he says, “but this is home too, you know.”
“You mean our new house?”
“No.” He pulls back just a little to press a small, careful kiss against Jester’s hair. “This is home,” he assures her. “You and the others. This is home too, okay?”
“Okay.” She lets go of his wrists and instead loops her arms tightly around his middle, crushing herself suddenly against his ribs and saying loudly, “Don’t scare me like that, Caduceus! I thought you were saying you wanted to go all the way back to the Blooming Grove, you know?”
“I know.”
“That’s really far away!”
“I’m aware.”
“Holy crap, I’m all panicky now!”
“I’ll make us some tea. How’s that sound?”
“That sounds good. Lets do that.”
Jester then reached up to take his head between her hands (he has to lean down just a little bit to allow it), then she tugs him down a little and presses a quick perfunctory kiss against the corner of his mouth. He can’t tell if she was aiming for his cheek and missed or his lips and missed, because she had to bounce a little to reach. But it’s beside the point as she catches his wrist and tugs him toward the kitchen, leaving a glowing string of lights on the ground behind them.