Work Text:
Caleb has nice hands.
They’re average size, wide in the palm, with long and delicate fingers. The perfect hands for writing, dragging a quill across parchment to fill in arcane glyphs. Easy to finger the edge of a page in a book and flick it over to the next one at a rapid pace, eyes taking in each word faster than most others could. His fingertips are usually blackened at the tips from the fire magic that spouts forth from them, and they leave smudges on the corners of pages, the string he fiddles with, on his forehead after he absentmindedly brushes hair out of his face.
Her chin rests in her palm, head tilting to the side as she considers Caleb sitting across from her. He’s bent over his books and parchment, one hand tangled in his hair, strands slipping out of the tie that sits on the base of his neck. His other hand rolls around his Transmuter’s Stone between his fingers. His hands are almost always in motion, touching something, grasping something, moving unconsciously through the motions required for his spells. Just like his mind, Jester thinks.
It’s a rare quiet day for the Mighty Nein. A lull in their typical chaotic and urgent log of quests that could mean life or death for them and thousands of others. He, of course, was content to stay at Lavish Chateau and use the establishment’s daylight downtime to read and study. Jester for once had no idea what she wanted to do. But Caleb was easy to have as company. Despite how he teased about needing quiet in order to concentrate, he was always very kind in responding to her thoughts and questions.
Jester saw him sitting alone at a table, gathered her paints, and sat herself beside him. She had no particular idea or inspiration in mind to create, and she’s spent the last 20 minutes or so distractedly staring at Caleb while trying to come up with something.
Oh.
Grinning wickedly, Jester forgoes her brushes and dips her fingers directly into the paint bottles and begins dragging them across her sketchbook. The lines aren’t as thin or precise, there’s more room for messiness and errors, but she prefers her art like that anyway. It’s fun, carefree. Jester lets out a delighted laugh and spreads paint across the page.
Caleb glances up at the sound, Jester being one of the few things that he allows to interrupt his studies. He takes one look at her paint covered fingers dancing over the page and then he too has lost his concentration on his book, captivated as he is by the image of her blue hands in gradients of pinks, greens, purples, and yellows. His fingers still and tightly grasp the stone in his hand.
“This is a new method for you,” he says.
“What do you think?”
“Beautiful.”
“Yeah,” she says, the image of a pale hand with blackened fingertips taking shape before her. “It is.”