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He’s not a man of many words.
Caleb has been known to go entire days lapsed in silence, a book in his hand or parchment spread across his table. Even before this life, when his hair was kept shorn and his mind was in shambles, he was quiet. Weeks would pass in that cloying silence, just the ticking of his brain as time steadily moved on, as his parents ashes were buried under new growth, as the world forgot his very name.
Until he forgot too.
Jester is different.
She’s never been able to keep quiet longer than a handful of minutes at a time, usually after she’s been dared by Beau to see how long she can manage without words. It’s not her strong suit, the silence, but Caleb can see in the depths of her eyes that Jester knows silence, like the kind he has known, the kind he survived through. The sort of silence that comes from being hidden for twenty-two years, tucked away where she would be safe and warm.
He doesn’t mind her noise.
At the beginning it used to wear on him, her ability to move from one topic to the next entirely on her own, holding a one sided conversation like she’d spent her whole life practicing. Time has changed this, has changed him, and her voice is branded in his mind and in his heart, the very sound of her matching the thumping in his chest.
In the moments Jester is silent, when she’s convinced the world she’s fine even when she’s breaking, Caleb has learned to fill that quiet.
He’s not as adept at keeping the words flowing and there are more pauses, moments of gathering his thoughts, but Jester doesn’t complain. She just curls close and hides herself in his arms (and gods, his mind had gone empty and quiet the first time he’d held her, he’d kissed her, he’d loved her).
Caleb isn’t a man of many words, but Jester deserves every whispered I love you, every hushed promise of their future, every laugh she draws from his lips. Jester is noisy, and loud, and she’s filled the cracks of his silence and patched him back together with her laughter and her love.