Chapter Text
Nott dozes in the afternoon heat.
Nothing plays out behind her eyes, not yet, just the dark, and spots of red where the sun shines through the window onto her face. It’s...nice. Pretty. And very, very warm. So warm she thinks, vaguely, that she might just take a proper nap here. Not a long one. Just a few winks, a smattering, really, and then she’ll get up and find someone to pester.
But before she can actually drift off, Jester pesters her first.
“Hey, Nott!”
“Mmmmmmm?”
“Do you want to draw with me?”
Nott opens one eye. “...Draw?”
“Yeah, in my sketchbook! I got some cool new inks, so I thought maybe—”
“...Are you sure?” On some loose paper, maybe, Nott might be inclined to say yes. But in Jester’s sketchbook— (She’s only ever let Kiri use her sketchbook. No one else, no one else, ever.)
“Of course I'm sure, silly. I wouldn’t ask otherwise. Now come on, let’s go, I want to try them out.”
“Okay, okay.” Nott pushes herself up, scrambles over, and flops down on her stomach beside Jester, drumming her hands on the aged wood floor, buzzing with nervous energy. "What do I...?”
“Use this one.” Jester shoves a pen at her.
Nott holds it carefully, as though the slightest bit of pressure might snap it in half, and frowns down at the pages. “...What am I supposed to draw?”
“Whatever you want!” Jester’s already halfway through scribbling a little Kiri with very large eyes.
Nott blinks. Whatever she wants. That’s...pretty broad, as far as categories go. (Or is it narrow? She doesn't have any burning ideas at all, is the thing. But also there are so many possibilities.) Where to even begin—?
“Like you could draw you, or some shiny stuff, or Caleb, or flowers, or some booze—”
Jester keeps listing things (Kiri, Frumpkin, Jester, some crossbow bolts, Beau making a grumpy face, Jester again….), but Nott barely hears her. She’s already drawing.
One of her favorite rings, first. Simple, elegant, with a very shiny stone set in the band. Nott crosses out her first attempt because the ink goes all blotchy and the lines muddle each other, but the second comes out okay, and then she begins working in earnest, a little faster now she's got something of a handle on how this weird fancy pen works.
One of her favorite coins is next, a funny old one that probably should've gone out of circulation years ago according to Caleb, but according to her and anyone with sense is still perfectly good gold. Who would throw out gold like that? (Certainly not Nott.)
She draws a slightly wobbly circle first, then little squiggles for ridges, and some sparkle shapes like she’s seen Jester adding a million times to a million other pages. And then the pretty crest. (On her actual coin the impression is so worn she can’t tell what it’s supposed to be, but she likes to pretend it’s a kind of a bird-and-a-blossom, so she scribbles those tiny in the middle.)
Then she pauses, adjusting her grip on the pen, and glances over at the other page. Sees Jester adding a donut crown to the little Kiri's head and grins, imagining the crumbs and glaze dusting her feathers.
Nott turns back to the page and squints at it, then surrounds the ring and the coin with buttons—the little square one with the smooth stone in, the little round pair with the pearls, the cracked one with the shiny edges, the one with the little tree painted on, the one shaped like a feather. The last two come out a bit funny, a bit blotchy, but she leaves them—if she strikes them out, she’ll have to go and cross out the others, too, or else it’s wrong, and she likes those.
A couple of sticks, next. The old gnarled one with the ruby that she took from a very tiny gnome woman (she misses that one). And the really, really big one she had to abandon almost immediately after snagging it from a rather intimidating human man who looked the other way just a little too long (probably for the best, he could’ve almost eaten her whole, he was so big).
Then she sets the pen down and flexes her fingers, once, twice. (They’re getting a little warm in the joints, a little twingey, like she’s spent a bit too long with a lockpick.) Then she picks it up and dives back in.
Jewelry, now, necklaces, bracelets, more rings and things.
Nott spends longer on these, trying to capture the important little details without turning the whole page into a soggy hodge-podge of color. With a little focus, some squinting, and a very essential tongue-poke from between her teeth, she manages. (Or, well. The doodle-shinies seem to’ve come out okay, at least. She’s a little afraid to lift the page, though. Hopes Jester didn’t have anything too important beneath it.)
Nott stops adding ink on top of ink and settles for adding a few more sparkles and shine-lights, a little ways away from the main drawing, and then sets the pen down and scoots back to admire her masterpiece.
Before she can drink it in properly, though, Jester pounces, flomping over and snagging the sketchbook and beginning to scribble with it close to her chest. “No peeking!”
“All right.” Nott grins, resolving to peek anyway the moment Jester looks sufficiently absorbed. (She’ll never know.)
For the time being, though….
Nott pushes herself to a sitting position and massages her knuckles. (The little twinge has returned, and it’s brought buddies.) She makes a face when it has no effect, tries twisting her fingers over each other instead. (It helps, a little, but they’re still complaining—gone all jagged green inside, and loud.)
So she shakes her hand out instead, loose at the wrist, palm facing her chest, up and down up and down, over and over until her fingers blur and start buzzing and don’t stop when she goes still again. She lets them hang in midair, still prickling fuzzy and warm and nice, and then gives it one more go.
When she stops, finally, satisfied, Jester’s looking at her with a slight head-tilt and her mouth forming a small, curious ‘o.’
Nott copies the head-tilt. “What?”
Jester sits up and wiggles her own hands. “That. I've seen you do it before, but not that much. Are you just excited thinking about your shiny things or like does the pen feel bad or are you worried about something or—?”
“Oh,” Nott says, and drops her hands to her lap. “No, nothing like that.”
Though Jester isn’t exactly reading the clues wrong—Nott does occasionally wiggle her hands when she gets too excited (sort of like Caleb, but sideways more than up-down), and sometimes she shakes them out when she touches something gross (though usually she just wipes them on her front and calls it good), and—well. She hasn’t done the last one in years. But still—Jester’s very close with all her other guess—all her other deductions. They just aren’t what’s happening right now, is all.
She opens her mouth to say as much, but before she can—
“Well then how come?”
Nott shrugs and tries not to hunch her shoulders. (It feels a little like she’s being interrogated, like maybe there should be a little light swinging above her head and Jester should be holding a tiny little notepad, which is. Which is weird. Nott feels like that when she talks to a lot of people, of course, even most people, but talking with Jester hasn’t felt like that in—in—absolutely ages. Not since a little after they first met.) She gestures to the sketchbook as dismissively as she knows how. “Just all the drawing, you know?”
Jester blinks, and for a long moment Nott worries that maybe she doesn’t, in fact, know. That Nott's said something weirder than she thought. Then, “Ohhh, like a hand cramp?”
“Yeah!” A quick, relieved nod.
“Well why didn’t you say so! I can help!”
“Oh.” Nott twists her sleeve. "Well I, I don’t think—”
“Don’t be silly! I'm a really good healer you know. Now give me your hand, I will make it not be all sore and crampy anymore!”
Nott twists her sleeve a little more, then lets go and holds out her hand. “All right.”
It won’t, she supposes, hurt to try. It isn’t like Jester is going to need all her spells today, after all. Not midway through the afternoon in a mostly pretty safe town.
Jester scrunches her eyes shut, places one hand on Nott's, and holds her Traveler's symbol, and does her stuff. Then she pulls back, an uncertain smile on her face. “Well?”
“I'm cured!” Nott says, gazing at her still-twinging, still-wonky hands in her very best impression of Caleb staring at a new book. (Except, no, that isn't quite right.) She switches to Jester just after painting a fresh dick. (Closer. Close enough, surely?)
Jester pulls a face. “I knew it didn't work. I'm sorry, Nott. I tried.”
Nott drops the expression and shakes her head, pats Jester’s shoulder. “It's okay, it's not your fault.” She gestures with her hands vaguely. “They're just kind of like this.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean they're just shitty, you know?”
“Shitty how?”
“Shitty like—” She holds them up, in all their wonky glory. “Well, look at them.”
“I'm looking.” A beat. “What am I supposed to be looking at.”
She's kidding her, right. “You're kidding me, right? You're joshing me?”
“No, no, I don't—they have your bandages, is that what you're talking about? Are they.” Jester lowers her voice to half a whisper, though no one else is in the room. “Are they burned or scarred under there or something?”
“No, no, no. They—” Nott grits her teeth and unwraps the bandages just enough to expose the entirety of her fingers, but not the palms of her hands. Then she thrusts them in Jester’s face again without looking. “See?”
“...They are not burned or scarred,” Jester says. Then she gives her a wounded, reproachful look. “I believed you, you know, you didn't have to prove it.”
“That's not—” Nott wrestles with the urge to growl, and something funny twists in her chest. “You really don't see the problem?”
“No…?”
“They.” She frowns deeper. Lowers her hands and glances down at them despite herself. And sure enough, there, like always—the slight bend of her left pinky, the little divot on her left index finger, the clear curve of her middle one away from its neighbor when she tries to press all the fingers of that hand together, the general funny shapes, the sense that these are more individually assembled bits from a mismatched set than a single coherent appendage.
Nott flexes her hands, once, and frowns at the resulting ripple of muscle and bone beneath rough green skin, just a little to the left.
She tears her eyes away, looks back at Jester, holding her hands up and out flat so she can’t possibly miss it this time. “They're crooked, you know?”
Jester nods, but she still—somehow—looks confused. “Crooked?”
“Yeah? They're supposed to be all. Straight and smooth and stuff. They're not supposed to look like this.” (In more ways than one—but there's no need to get into all that again, just now.)
“...They're not?”
Nott splutters. “Of course not! Haven't you ever seen a pair of hands before?”
“Well,” Jester says defensively. “I mean of course! I have hands! Lots of people have hands! But yours are kind of different, you know? Like you only have four fingers, so maybe they are also just kind of bendy and weird, I don't know!”
“Other goblins don't have bendy fingers!”
“Well,” Jester says again. “I.”
And in that moment, as chatterbox Jester seems tongue-tied, Nott realizes that probably she hasn't met any other goblins, except maybe the ones they've fought on the road. And probably then she was too busy trying not to be killed to look very hard at their fingers. Which makes sense, because trying not to be killed is always the most important thing when you meet a goblin. So. So probably Nott's are the only ones she's seen up close. So of course, naturally, she might have (must have) just assumed all goblin hands are like Nott's. Which also makes sense, now that she thinks about it. Jester has no reason to assume otherwise, after all.
"Oh,” Nott says. “Um. Um. Nevermind. They just don't, is the point. The crooked stuff is all me.”
Jester nods, but her cheeks still look pretty flushed. Then her brow furrows. “Hang on though. If they're not supposed to be all crooked and stuff, then how come they are? What happened?”
Nott shrugs and begins to rewind the bandages, shoulders going loose with the familiar motions. “They got broke.”
“Oof.” Jester winces. “How?”
“Well,” Nott says, still winding. “Which time?”
-
Nott crouches in a bush, gripping a large dagger. It’s a bit tricky—her hands are kind of small, and the hilt is pretty big—but she’s managing.
The harder part is keeping still, when the thin branches are stabbing into her sides and the leaves are so itchy on her face and there are lots of little tiny bugs trying to zoom up her nose.
But she manages that too, mostly, mindful of the elder the next bush over, and resists the urge to scratch her ears or rub her nose or rock back on her heels. Just crouches, gritting her teeth, and waits. And waits. And waits.
And then a large hare shuffles its way out of the brush.
She holds her breath. Starts to straighten up.
The hare freezes, staring at the bush she’s in. Nott curses under her breath, stands all the way, throws the dagger—
Misses. The hare flees.
There’s a blur of motion and glint of silver and she barely has time to flinch before the elder’s reached over and grabbed her wrists and—the flat of his blade slams down on her fingers.
“Next time,” he says. “You wait for my signal.”
-
Nott wipes her muddy hands on her shirt and kneels in front of the pile of meat she’s meant to be sorting, fresh from rotting, lean from fat. She reaches for a scrawny-looking vole (it should go in the lean pile, probably, to feed the babes)—
An elder smacks her (still-healing) hand away. “You wanna make everyone sick? Clean off first.”
Nott wipes her hands (one stinging, one not) on her shirt again and then tries a second time.
Another smack, sharper than before, doesn’t re-crack anything but hurts. “With water!”
-
Nott is working with another elder. She’s new on the job, just transferred, not quite sure what she’s meant to do, and doesn’t want to fuck it up, so she’s asking questions.
The elder keeps answering them, so she keeps asking, and pointing. What does this do, what is this for, should I get that for you, is it all right if I move this, how does that work, do you mind if touch that, what would happen if I—
She grabs Nott by the arm and yanks her fingers back. “Shut up.”
-
Nott's trailing the back of her hand along the healer’s shelves. There’s lots and lots of jars on them, with funny-colored contents, all polished and gleaming and smooth.
The healer swats her, and her knuckles smack hard against the glass.
-
Nott's fretting in the dark, shaking her hands back-forth, back-forth, back-forth, rapidfire. She’s messed up. She’s messed up. She’s messed up. They’re going to be so angry. She’s messed up. They’re going to be so— She’s—
“Quit that.” An elder grabs her by the wrist and digs her claws in and yanks her forward and raps Nott's hands with her stick. “Now—”
-
Nott's paused in the middle of a job, massaging her knuckles.
A quick swat. Not even very hard at all, but the elder’s still holding the bone burnisher, and it strikes her first two fingers and she makes a strangled noise.
He seems surprised, but says only, “Back to work.”
-
Nott's helping construct a little shelter. She passes an elder a tool. It’s the wrong one. They sigh and whack her with it, then point out the right one.
-
Nott's said something stupid. She cringes before the blow comes, and gets an extra one for it.
-
Nott's done nothing, she’s just there, and the elder’s mad, and then—
-
Nott's—
-
Nott fiddles with the end of the bandages.
Jester’s looking at her kind of funny. Nott sort of wishes she'd stop, cause it makes her skin crawl, and anyway Caleb didn’t look at her this funny, when she told him—and she told him a lot more than she’s just told Jester, too. (Jester has a bullet point list, highlights, the exact words of which are already slipping away like smoke, buzzing kind of funny on Nott's tongue; Caleb has more, has details, stories, names, though he did not ask for them. She hopes Jester won’t, either.)
Jester doesn’t. Just looks at her with funny eyes and a funny turn to one side of her mouth and her hands very still on the pen in her lap, and says, “Oh Nott.”
Nott shrugs and looks away. “It was a long time ago. And—” She wiggles her fingers. “And they’re a lot better now, anyway! Used to be I couldn’t, you know, I couldn’t hold little stuff so good? But now I can—I can write, and I can do magic, and pick all kinds of locks, and—and steal things super good, so! It doesn’t matter really.”
The funny turn becomes a little smile, but Jester’s eyes are still all creased and wrong. “I'm glad they are better, that is good. And it is true, you are definitely the best thief, probably in the whole world even. But I don’t think—” She breaks off, and fiddles with the pen. “It still sounds pretty bad?”
Nott shrugs a single shoulder. “I mean it wasn’t fun? But, hey—could’ve been worse! You know, my hands coulda broke every time! Mostly they just stung a bit.” Or bruised. Or swelled. Or sometimes got kinda weird and crunchy. (Which now that she thinks about it maybe was just another kind of broke? But she could still use them those times, and they weren’t really broke unless she couldn’t use them.) “Or they coulda hit me in the face, or stabbed me or something, you know?”
“Well, that is true, and I am very very glad they didn’t do those things, because then you might be dead—and I would still be your friend if you were a ghost of course, but I kind of really like you better alive?”
“I like you better alive too,” Nott says, and doesn’t add that she’s pretty sure she wouldn’t have decided to travel with ghost-Jester. (It isn’t personal, it’s just that undead things are scary, and new people are scary, and undead new people is a whole new level of terrifying—and she isn’t called “Nott the Brave” for nothing.)
“Yeah! But.” Jester chews her lip. “Even if you are alive, and, and better now, and it could’ve been worse and was a long time ago, it still kind of matters I think? Because—because they hurt you, and family is not supposed to do that. They’re supposed to take care of you and teach you and stuff, you know?”
“Sure,” Nott says, because she does know. She’s seen families around, and heard stories and things, and there's Luke and Yeza and Caleb besides. And she isn’t stupid. She understands how it all works very well, thank you. But goblins don’t have families like that, is the thing, with moms and dads and parents and kids and all. Goblins have clans, and clans are different. (She’s explained this before, she’s pretty sure, but it seems like Jester’s forgotten.)
Jester nods very quick, and continues, “Like—like my momma didn’t do anything like that, ever. She never hit me, you know? Because parents aren’t supposed to.”
“I know,” Nott says. “And that’s good, and I'm glad your mom is nice! But,” she says, half-apologetic (because she doesn’t want Jester to think she’s calling her stupid), half-matter-of-fact (because it is very obvious), “You know. Your mom’s not a goblin.”
“No, but—”
“And I didn’t have parents, anyway, I had a clan.” Have a clan. Had. Have. (It’s confusing, sometimes.)
“Isn’t that kind of just having a whole bunch of parents, though?”
Nott laughs. “No! Not at all.”
“But you said all the grownups look after all the little kids and—”
“Yes, but there’s no family stuff. Just making sure kids don’t die and naming and teaching and that’s it. Mostly teaching, it’s really important. And—” Nott shrugs. “—I was just really bad at being taught.”
Jester makes a little noise in the back of her throat and twists at the pen. “You—”
“No, no.” Nott shakes her head. “It’s okay, it’s true. You know, most goblins, they mess up, they get a swat, they learn and don’t mess up again. I just...never learned. So, totally unteachable, me.” She pauses, indicates her hands. “But they kept trying.”
And really, they didn’t have to. They could have just abandoned her, or thrown her out, or even killed her. But they didn’t. (Nott hates her clan, she hates them, she does, but she has to give them credit for that. They kept trying, and that’s not nothing.)
Jester’s face has gone funny again. “Hitting is not part of teaching.”
“Not for regular folk, but for goblins it is. You know, I keep telling you, everything you’ve heard is true—they’re violent and cruel and angry, it’s just in their natures. You know, they’re—they’re just beasts.”
“Well,” Jester says. “Maybe. But even if that’s true—”
“It is.”
“Even if that’s true,” she continues. “It still wasn’t okay. And it definitely definitely was not your fault, and you did not deserve it even a little bit, even if you were the worst student in the whole entire world, and you are not.”
I kind of was, Nott wants to say, and yes, I am Nott, and I know, but her throat goes sort of narrow and prickly so she just shrug-nods and picks at her sleeves instead.
Jester makes the little noise again. “No-ott. I kind of really want to hug you right now, is that okay?”
Nott swallows and nods, because a hug does sound kind of okay and Jester looks like she can probably use one (her face is all creased again and her tail’s gone droopy and she’s just too still—Jesters aren’t supposed to be still).
In no time at all Nott’s pulled up onto Jester’s knees and half-squished in her arms. Nott hesitates for a beat, then leans in, slipping her own arms as far round Jester as they’ll go and pressing her face to her shoulder.
She closes her eyes for a long, long moment.
Then pulls back, stumbles off of Jester’s knees, looks up at her—and finds that her face is a bit blurry. And so is everything around it.
Oh, Nott thinks, and Fuck.
She stares at the floor, blinking like hell. When she can see right again and her eyes sting less, she looks back up, scrounging up an awkward smile.
Jester returns it, so bright and wide her eyes almost crinkle shut.
“Um,” Nott says, and fumbles for a joke. Comes up empty, and is forced instead to blurt, “You’re really warm.”
Jester grins. “Well I am a tiefling you know. We’re always warm. It’s why we’re so good at hugs!”
Nott grins too, a nervous sort of thing. “Well, I, I don’t know about all of you, but. You’re pretty good.”
“It is definitely all of us,” Jester says. “But I am the best, yes. You are welcome.”
“Yeah thanks,” Nott says, with a twitchy half-grin, because now it can be kind of a joke, even though she means it.
“Of course! I'm your friend, Nott, I am always here for hugs!” Jester beams. “And thank you, you know, for trusting me and stuff.”
Well. There goes the joke. But maybe Nott can still salvage things, brush it off.
“I mean, it wasn’t really a secret? I thought you already knew,” she says, because it’s true.
“Yeah but still. You could have lied once you found out I didn’t, you know? Because you are very good at hiding things and sneaking and stuff, so—ohhhh that reminds me! I appreciate your trust very very much but that reminds me!”
“What?” Anything to stop talking about this, Nott is sort of—sort of tapped, on that front. (Any more Jestering and she might just run out and steal half the street. And then she’ll have to run from any angry mob, and she’ll have another town to avoid.)
“I almost forgot!” Jester wriggles and lunges to the side and picks up her sketchbook and holds it out. “Look!”
Nott looks.
There’s the Kiri with the donut crown, and also Beau making a face, and Jester herself dancing in the street with bread. And on the other page, Nott's pile of treasure. (It’s all a bit blurrier than she remembers, each scribble bleeding into the next, but still recognizably her stuff.) And on top of the little pile, in Jester’s thinner-lined style—a small, shiny-eyed Nott, grinning wide with her hands raised above her head in obvious celebration.
“It’s you!” Jester bursts out, pointing.
“It’s me!” Nott pokes her little doodle-self. “It’s perfect!”
Jester beams, wiggling a little again, and Nott kind of wants to hug her again on the spot.
So she does, and is hugged back instantly.
After, Jester talks about her favorite bits of Nott's drawing, and about the rest of her own doodles on the other page, and Nott sits back, leaning with her hands pressed to the floor, and just listens.
(Her wrists complain, after a while, but she doesn’t care, just shifts onto her front and rests her chin on her arms, still listening.)
(It’s Jester, after all.)