Work Text:
"What are you working on there, Jessie?" Beau said. She sat down next to Jester and motioned to the sketchbook in Jester's lap.
"Oh! Hey Beau!" Jester's voice was in a loud, excited whisper. "Look, I'm drawing them!" She put down a loose page and pointed out across the grassy field that neighbors the Xhorhaus, where Caleb and Yasha were sitting and talking under a tree. They passed a decanter of water back and forth, filling their glasses and sharing a moment under the timeless sky of Rosohna.
"Huh!" Beau responded, keeping her voice low too. She and Jester were a fair distance away, sitting on a rock wall that bordered their home. Still, Jester's body language was contagious, making Beau feel like at any moment Caleb and Yasha would notice them, and fly away like a pair of frightened starlings. "What do you think they're talking about?"
Jester paused for a moment.
"Oh, Caleb!" She blurted out in a thick Xhorhassian accent. "We are both so quiet and mysterious! Whenever will we be able to talk to our friends about what makes us sad?"
Beau clamped her hands to her mouth to stifle her laugh. She gave her best Caleb impression:
"Aaahh...eet is so hard. I hef a cat! Unt I hef so many beeg spells in mein brain! But aaahh, I am ze weenie when eet comes to mein feelings!"
This time, they both had to hold their sputtering laughter back. Their laughing trailed off and Jester set back to her sketchbook. Beau looked over her shoulder and watched how rough lines formed into the swell of Yasha's biceps or the sharp lines of her chin. Swooping downward strokes, like falling greatswords, became a torrent of dark black hair. Two gentle lines, lightly shaded, transformed into Yasha's lips.
"You're really good at that," Beau said, her throat suddenly very dry. She swallowed harder than she expected and felt a familiar fluttering in her chest. "You really uh...capture her." She added
"Aw, thanks, Beau. It took me a long time to get good. But I learned better once I was able to associate words with people. Like…Caleb is ‘Ember’, and Yasha is 'Polar'! She is hot and cold. Big and small. Loud and quiet."
"Close and distant." Beau added, without even realizing.
Jester smiled a bit at that. "Yeah, you get it." She waggled her eyebrows at Beau and held out the sketchbook to her. "You wanna add any details yourself, Beau? You notice more about Yasha than I do."
Beau blushed heavily and stood up. “Oh look at the time! Caduceus REALLY needs my help in the kitchen. I just remembered that!” She and Jester shared one last laugh as Beau strode back to the estate. She turned back one more time to see Jester pulling a stack of pages from her notebook and setting to her work again.
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Laughter and conversation trailed out of the kitchen as Beau left the rest of the Nein to finish their dinner. Her exercise and extra time outside left her tired early. A satisfied, slightly-boozy smile settled on her face as she went up the stairs to her room. As she passed the door to Jester's room she hesitated. She wanted to see those drawings of Yasha again.
She took a step back to the top of the stairs and listened. Even though the wine and beer in between her ears, she could hear Jester's raucous laughter. She wouldn't be coming upstairs for a bit.
Beau opened the door to Jester's room and shut it gently behind her. As expected, Jester's green sketchbook was right on top of her desk.
Beau opened the cover and ran her thumb over the stack of pages, letting the flit past in a kaleidoscope of pastry, landscapes, and half-finished sketches of this or that. About a third of the way through the book, she found the drawings of Yasha. But as Beau inspected the lines of Yasha's chin and the turn of her brow, a set of pages fell out the back of the book onto the floor.
"Ah, shit! Shit!" She laughed, setting the book down and scrambling to collect the pages again. Were they in a particular order? Would Jester even notice if they weren't how she left them?
As Beau set the pages back together, they seemed to be anatomy studies. A page of bony, masculine hands. A page of jawlines, smooth and bearded, and every stage in between. Eyes, pages, and pages of eyes, all distant and weary. Pages of lips and back muscles, and forearms. Lots of forearms. Flipping back and forth through the pages, a realization hit Beau right between the eyes like a fist.
Caleb. All the drawings were of Caleb. Hidden in the back of Jester’s sketchbook.
"Oh," Beau mumbled.
Then the final mental tumbler clicked.
"OH?!"
A huge, Cheshire grin immediately spread on Beau's face. She coughed out a laugh, still processing her disbelief. She flipped through more of the pages, and as she did the disparate studies of body parts were coming together to form a rendition of the grumpy wizard downstairs, talking with Jester right now. And as Beau kept going, the drawings were getting more and more fantastical.
Caleb’s hands cupped his face, his hair sticking to his brow, Caleb’s forearm muscles twisting as his hands formed some spell. They seemed normal enough at first, but as Beau held them all together, there were clear erotic undertones in each of the drawings. Most notably in the studies of his chest, back, and rear-end.
Eventually, Beau’s curiosity and giddiness gave way to an awkward realization: Beau was looking at porn of her ersatz brother, made by one of her best friends for sexual fantasy.
“I'm uh…I’m just going to put these back…” she whispered to herself, gathering the pages into a tight stack. Ioun willing, Jester wouldn’t remember what order the pages were in. In Beau’s assessment, the only thing more embarrassing than finding these things would be Jester asking her if she had found them! Beau slid the pages back into the rear of the notebook and tried to position it just as she had found it on the desk. She then retraced her steps in the room and closed Jester’s door softly behind her.
“Oh, there you are.”
Beau nearly jumped out of her skin and whirled around. “HEY, I WASN’T - ”
Caleb stood at the top of the stairs, a quizzical look on his face. “Are you alright, Beauregard? You had a bit more to drink than the rest of us, I wanted to see you got into bed alright.”
Beau straightened her shoulders and threw on her friendliest manners. “Whaaaat? I’m fine, dude. Just catching my second wind, in fact!” she strode over to him and clapped his shoulders. “In fact, let’s get back into it! I just had some sweets from Jester’s room and now I’m craving something to wash it down with, catch my drift?”
Caleb laughed it off and said something about Beau being a bad influence, but it worked, the bomb defused. Beau’s heart was still thudding in her chest when she entered the kitchen again, the Mighty Nein all gathered around the dining table sharing drinks and stories.
“Beau!” Jester piped up. Her chair slid back and she ran over. Jester linked her arm with Caleb’s and smiled. “You found Caleb and brought him back!” Her laughter was like a windchime: clear, honest, and ringing for someone special. Caleb gave Beau a look as if to say ‘look at what you got me into.’, but as Jester pulled him back into his seat - his seat next to Jester’s - Beau saw his smile morph into something soft and genuine.
Beau had a hard time believing in “Love”, she didn’t have any examples to look for. Not between her parents, or in her neighbors, or in her own life. But she was seeing something new between Jester and Caleb, something taking shape. There was attraction, to be sure: she was familiar with that. But as she sat and sipped a new glass of beer, the rest of the table seemed to fade into the background while she watched the two of them. They listened to one another in conversations, remembering and adding to what the other said. They anticipated the other’s needs and wants. And they honestly couldn’t break eye contact if they tried. There was a tenderness there she had never seen from Caleb before. And likewise, she never saw Jester as serious as when she was deep in a conversation with Caleb.
Something was taking shape in front of Beau. And as awkward as it was to think about it, she was curious, and even a bit hopeful, to see this art piece finished.