Chapter Text
The pigment dust filled the air the moment you set foot in that house. The rugs had faded, muted hues due to the passage of time, though a light dusting of various colors adorned them with a certain charm, offering yet another clue as to the trade of one of the people who lived there. The curtains, also stained by traces of pigments, swayed gently in the breeze that drifted in through the small gaps in the windows, which were always left slightly ajar.
However, the real chaos reigned in one of the rooms on the second floor, where the famous painter unleashed all his creativity and inspiration. The only victim of all this was his oil painting, lying on an easel.
In that room, unless you were used to spending hours surrounded by pigment dust, you probably couldn’t stand there for even two minutes. The windows were closed, and the floor was covered with paint splatters, matching the poor curtains, whose original color was now impossible to discern.
But Jabber didn’t care much about any of that. He needed to feel the art in his brush, in his hands—stained with pigments—and also inside his body, which absorbed the paint dust, unconsciously contaminating him.
Jabber didn't bother buying cans of paint from stores in town. Instead, the young man gathered his own pigments and mixed the ingredients for his next work of art himself. He found it incredibly fun. The fact that he prepared everything he used and needed to paint his pictures himself made the work feel more personal to him. More his own.
The brush moved like a ballerina across the canvas. It left traces of white paint on the oil, and Jabber smiled to himself, amazed by his own genius and effort. He had extracted that paint himself, right from the lead white itself. Its opacity and warmth made him want to decorate the painting with those shades of white, mesmerized by their soft beauty.
Cobalt blue was his next choice to complete his work of art. After cleaning the brush, he took some of the color from his palette to apply it over the oil paint and continue his arduous work. As the name suggested, Jabber had been working with cobalt compounds, not caring whether the dust got into his nostrils or not. That was the least of his concerns.
In fact, after working with pigments for so long, he had realized that they simply turned his mood into a roulette wheel full of surprises. It was a way to stave off boredom. At most, he’d have to deal with a couple of headaches lasting a couple of hours. But it was worth it.
Emerald green was another common color in his works. Made with arsenic, Jabber was eventually forced to wear a handkerchief to protect his nose if he wanted to work with it, since just inhaling it seemed to drain the air from his lungs, causing him terrible breathing problems.
But that wasn’t going to stop him. That color was interesting enough for Jabber to use it despite the health problems it caused him, leaving traces of that green in many of his paintings.
“Jabber,” Cthoni entered the room, her forearm covering her nose and part of her mouth. “The mail arrived a couple of hours ago.”
The painter remained mesmerized by his own work for a few seconds, and the girl had to suppress a few coughs before closing the door slightly, in an attempt to shield herself from the strong smell of pigments filling the room.
“Jabber,” she called again, and the boy finally snapped out of his colorful reverie.
“Cthoni!” He set his tools aside next to the easel, not caring if he stained the floor or the walls. “You’ve arrived at just the right moment.”
The girl rolled her eyes.
“I’m not interested in the painting you’re working on,” she said, holding some envelopes in her free hand (the one not covering her nose and mouth). “I came because of this.”
“Letters?”
“For you.”
Jabber’s lips twisted into a grimace of disgust, but Cthoni ignored him completely. He walked reluctantly over to a table in the corner of the room, piled high with art supplies and all sorts of objects that, according to Jabber, were essential to his work. He set the envelopes down on top of a pile of dirty paintbrushes, then hurried back to the door.
“They’re important. Read them as soon as you can.”
“Have you been going through my things?” Jabber raised his eyebrows and smiled charmingly. “I thought privacy and personal space were very important in this house.”
“Only if it’s for me,” Cthoni returned the smile, though more discreetly. “You’re full of surprises, Jabber, mistrust is my natural ally when it comes to you.”
“What an honor,” he said, bowing slightly and chuckling under his breath.
Cthoni laughed quietly as well and left the room, closing the door behind her.
When silence fell once more in the room, Jabber resumed his work, picking up his beloved brushes and pigments again, unconcerned about the paint smudges left on his hands—victims of his passion.
The letters could wait. Right now, the painting was more important.
━━━━━━✧♛✧━━━━━━
By the time Jabber deigned to open the envelopes, the moonlight was peeking timidly through the curtains. Along with it, the candlelight cast a somewhat mysterious atmosphere over the room, but the paint splattered everywhere completely overshadowed it, revealing Jabber’s unique personality.
Jabber had finally deigned to rest and slumped into a red armchair, right in front of the table where Cthoni had left the letters that morning.
With a knife, he easily slit open the envelope and pulled out the letters rather roughly, tossing the envelopes onto the floor as he scanned the inked words on the paper. His lips curled into a bored grimace at the excessive formality that seemed to permeate the letters resting between his fingers. Jabber didn’t like refined people—or, which amounted to the same thing to him, fake people. People who only showed a facade full of lies to others out of sheer politeness and to comply with social protocol.
Bah, a string of nonsense that didn’t deserve even a minute of his attention.
The letter went on and on, with verbiage that made Jabber want to drop the pages onto the candles lying on the table, bored to death. However, there was one specific word that caught his attention.
‘Commission.’
“Oh!” he exclaimed to himself, and unconsciously sat up straighter in his chair to continue reading the letter.
‘A portrait of His Majesty, the Prince.’
“Oh!!” This time, the scream could have been heard from the street.
Now things were really getting interesting.
Jabber didn’t have a well-formed opinion about the royal family. He saw them as just another bunch of snobbish, phony people who merely went along with what society expected of them—but at least they served some purpose by ruling the kingdom.
However, a commission? From His Majesty the King and the Queen? Regarding one of their children? Why him? How had they even heard of him? A reclusive artist who took refuge in a friend’s house and devoted himself to painting and exhibiting his works, earning a living through commissions from upper-class gentlemen and ladies, who were amazed by his curious and innovative choice of colors.
Perhaps his fame was much greater than he realized. Perhaps an opportunity had presented itself to leave that place and build a better reputation—and, with it, a more suitable studio and home. Although, did he really want that?
Cthoni had picked him up off the street when Jabber was only 12 years old, taking him in as a younger brother and taking care of him. Jabber remembered it perfectly. A carriage had stopped in front of him as the poor boy tried to shelter from the rain in an alley surrounded by trash and the urine of stray animals. The coachwoman had asked him several questions, then offered to take him home, and although Jabber knew there was a chance they might take advantage of him and his life could get even worse, he accepted Cthoni’s outstretched hand and climbed into the carriage with her, sitting beside her, next to the reins.
Back then, it was rare to find a woman working as a coachman, but Cthoni had made it happen, and that was one of the reasons Jabber had felt such curiosity and a certain admiration for her from a very young age. By now, he considered her an older sister, regardless of the disparaging remarks she occasionally directed at him when she walked into his studio and found all the commotion related to his art.
But she was like a sister to him. And siblings behaved that way. Or so he’d read in books.
However, what mattered now was the new commission that had landed right in front of him. A commission capable of changing both him and his surroundings in so many ways. And Jabber was more than willing to dive headfirst into it all. Living in the palace while working on a portrait of the prince? Done.
It was strange, extravagant, and surprising. Just his style.
Jabber chuckled to himself as he took a sheet of paper and ink from a small glass bottle, then held a quill in his other hand and deftly wrote his response to the request. His hand trembled slightly from the nerves of this new path in his life, and his handwriting came out a bit distorted, but he couldn’t care less.
“A portrait of His Majesty, the prince.”
It would be his pleasure.