i can't imagine what caduceus' thoughts were when he first realized when jester, a fellow cleric, didn't get her powers from a divine source. realizing that the mighty nein's sole healer before him wasn't getting her powers from an actual god, but rather something else. like in a modern setting, the image of caduceus pulling up with his healing powers during battle and holding up the equivalent of like a pRBC blood bag to immediately transfuse to someone who's hurt. then sees jester rolling up and holding like a syringe with a weird green fluid in it saying "i got this too, caduceus" and injecting it in someone and it having the same effect as the blood he just transfused. team cleric i adore you so very much
Caduceus looked over in time to see Jester quickly folding and stuffing a letter into her pocket, her hand raising to swipe at her eyes. Her smile, however, was bright. Too bright, as she beamed across at Beau. "Of course! I am totally okay, like completely, totally good. Yeah."
It was so glaringly, aggressively cheerful that for a moment everyone stared, forks or cups raised and frozen in various positions. Caleb and Fjord exchanged a look.
"Yeah!" Jester insisted. "I mean, why wouldn't I be?"
Beau shrugged. "I mean, I dunno, you just seem…" She trailed off, her expression trying to convey what her words had not.
For a moment an awkward silence fell, expectant on one side, avoidant on the other. Looks were again exchanged.
"Was that a letter from your mother?" Caleb prompted, no more convinced than Beauregard was that everything was quite right, and hoping to more successfully coax an answer from Jester than Beau had done.
"Oh! Yeah, just a letter from home!" Jester said, sing-songy so that it was difficult to tell if her voice actually wobbled. "She says everything is going fine, just the usual, you know. All good news!"
They all waited for another moment, anticipating the 'but' they all felt was hanging in the air unsaid. Jester hid behind her cup, not noticing, or at least making it appear as though she didn't.
"That's… good?" Fjord offered, half-asked.
"Yep! So good," Jester confirmed. But Caduceus could see the way her smile wobbled, and had no doubt the others could too.
With every attempt met with failure they all fell silent again, watching, waiting her out. Slowly Jester's cheerful facade began to crumble, though she made an admirable attempt at maintaining it, forging ahead with continued aggressive cheer. "Yeah, so. Momma just said, you know, that she misses me, and that she hopes maybe if we come to Nicodranus soon we'll come to see her. But I mean of course she misses me, and she knows we're just so busy having, you know, adventures and things, and it's fine, you know? It's fine."
It was pretty clear that it was not, in fact, fine. Caduceus glanced around at the others, caught them all exchanging worried looks.
"Jester—" Caleb began, but was able to say nothing more before she cut him off.
"You know what, I think I'm going to go see what Nott is doing," she declared, pushing away from the table with a screech of the chair against the floor. "Thanks for breakfast, Caduceus!"
"You're—" Is the extent of what she might have heard, before she left the room so suddenly that it left the rest of them all blinking in her wake.
"Welcome," Caduceus finished, frowning at the now empty doorway.
Silence lingered, the other three members of the group present for breakfast sharing bewildered looks again.
"Okay… that was weird, right?" asked Fjord.
"Ja."
"Totally weird. You don't think something happened to Marion, do you?" asked Beau.
"I think if her mom was in trouble she'd tell us," replied Fjord. "Do you think she's okay? Should one of us go after her, or…?"
Caduceus left them to ponder over it, silently cleaning away his plate and hers and taking both back to the kitchen. It was fairly obvious to him what was wrong, and he was sure the others would piece it together in their own time, if they hadn't already. None of them were strangers to the malady of being homesick, though it might inflict some of them more than others. Before joining up with the Nein Caduceus himself never been gone from the Grove longer than a day or two, hardly any time to miss a place. But homesick for the people that made home, home? That was a feeling he was well familiar with.
He would have bet his best teacup that what was bothering Jester had to do with missing her mother. And maybe Nicodranus a little as well.
Now the question was, what to do about it?
The most obvious remedy would be to get her home, but that was a little beyond his immediate capabilities. Caduceus wasn't a wizard like Caleb, or the Shadowhand. Teleportation was beyond the skills the Wildmother had graced him with. They could probably arrange a visit back home, somehow, but that wouldn't solve the problem today.
Hm… what else, then?
When in doubt, Caduceus did what he often did, and put the kettle on for tea. His eyes roamed the kitchen, moving over the dishes unwashed from breakfast, the fire still comfortably burning. When you couldn't take someone home, what was the easiest way to bring home to them?
The answer came with simple clarity, and Caduceus smiled a satisfied smile. Already running through a mental list of choices, he rolled up his sleeves and began clearing a space on the counter to work.
And then, he baked.
Choosing a recipe was fairly simple. Jester made known her love of pastries and sweets as openly as she did everything else, which certainly reduced the challenge of guessing what she might like. Caduceus wasn't entirely sure what the common treats in Nicodranus were, but he'd seen Jester enjoy everything from cupcakes to cookies to turnovers, and he had just the thing in mind.
It took a little ingenuity; he didn't have access to all of the ingredients he was used to having back home, where the garden and the orchard supplied so much. But he supplemented with the supplies that he carried with him, and in the end had everything he needed.
There had always been something meditative in baking, for him. Mixing the ingredients, folding the dough under your hands. It took care to make it just right without overworking it. Often he felt that it wasn't so different from taking care of people. Everyone required just the right amount of care or encouragement, the same as a dough required just the right about of working. Or tea required just the right amount of steeping. Too much or too little, and nothing turned out quite right.
Once the dough was rolled out and in the oven to bake he tidied his mess away, sweeping away the flour and returning the tins of staples to their proper shelves. Soon enough the kitchen began to smell of freshly baking bread, warm and inviting, and wafted through the house to no doubt fill the nearby hallways. He suspected it would attract company before too long.
He was just reaching down a clean bowl when the door creaked open and a familiar blue head peeked in. "Are you baking something?" Jester asked, her voice lilting upwards in a hopeful pitch.
Smiling, Caduceus nodded. "Just about finished, actually. I was letting it cool while I start the icing, if you'd like to help."
"Ooo, sure!" Jester agreed, stepping further in. "Can I lick the spoon when we're done?"
Caduceus chuckled. "Of course."
"Yes!" Jester jerked her elbow towards her side in celebration and joined him by the counter. There was less of a bounce in her step than usual, he noticed, but her mood already seemed a little improved as she helped mix the icing, stirring and 'taste testing' ("We have to make sure we used enough powdered sugar, Caduceus! We want it to be right, don't we?") frequently. He let her handle the task her own way while he cut the cooling loaf into narrow slices, and briefly returned them to the oven to toast.
"Those smell sooo good. What are we even making?"Jester asked, stealing another little taste of the icing and nodding her approval.
"Hm. I'm not sure what they're called, really," he said. "I always called them tea biskies, and my family did the same. My mother taught me how to bake them."
"Oh."
Caduceus allowed the silence, choosing not to overwork the moment while he checked on the toasting biscuits. He was pleased, but not surprised, when Jester was the one to break the quiet.
"You must miss them, huh?"
Caduceus' heart squeezed in his chest, then beat against his ribs with a painful, heavy thud. He bought himself a moment by removing the biscuits from the oven, toasted golden brown and dotted with the blueberries he'd sprinkled into the dough. Sometimes he missed them so much he struggled to breathe under the weight of it.
"I do," he agreed, solemn enough for the weight to come through.
Jester laid a hand on his elbow, looking up at him with large, sad eyes. Caduceus smiled and covered her hand with his own, taking comfort and giving it back, before he reached for the icing. He preferred not to dwell on his own homesickness, though determined to help Jester with hers. He showed her how to drizzle the icing with the spoon, not too much, not too little, and then left her to decide how much was too much and too little for herself.
"What do you do?" Jester asked. He tilted his head in question. "When you miss your family?"
"Well." Caduceus drizzled icing over his own tray of biscuits with a contemplative slowness. "I think about them often and try to remember that I'll see them again. And I try to do things that help me feel connected to them."
"Like baking?"
"Yes." Caduceus nodded. "Or tending to the garden, or brewing their favorite tea. Then even when they're far away, it helps me to feel like part of them are still here with me, in the things we used to do together."
Jester didn't answer right away, chewing on her bottom lip as she finished with the icing. They lapsed into silence, quiet and thoughtful. Caduceus put a fresh kettle on the fire.
"Momma and I used to sit together at the end of the day," she shared, while the kettle slowly heated. She still held the bowl and the mixing spoon, scraping absently at the former with the latter.
Caduceus turned to give her his full attention, his expression open and inviting. "That sounds nice."
"It was. She doesn't really like to go outside a lot, so I used to go and bring her back pictures of all the people and the things I'd seen. Sort of like my own little adventures that I could come home and tell her. She'd always have a plate of cupcakes or pasties or something and we'd snack while I told her all about it, and she told me about any of the interesting people who came to see her. It was… it was nice, you know?"
"I'm sure it was."
"I really miss her," Jester admitted, with a wobble in her voice that she quickly, sharply sniffed away. "It's like, I'm really happy to be here with you guys, but sometimes I just…I really want to see her, you know?"
"I do," Caduceus agreed.
"And I'm going to have like, so many new things to tell her about the next time we go visit," Jester pushed on. "I've been filling up my journal with so many drawings and stories about everything we do and it's going to be like, so fun when I tell her all about it. Except maybe not all of it, because I think she would get worried if I told her about the dangerous parts. But the fun, not dangerous parts, she's going to love all of them."
"I'm sure she will," Caduceus agreed. "And I think it's nice, that you have that to help you feel connected with her while you're apart."
"Huh. That's true." Jester bobbed her head. "I never really thought about it as something that connected us together. It makes me miss her more, sometimes, but it also feels nice to know I'll have so much to share with her when I do see her."
Though she still sniffled, Caduceus watched as her expression cleared a little, the sorrow lightening and her smile easing to one less forced. He laid a hand on her shoulder and gave it a pat.
"I was thinking about asking if maybe we could go home, you know, just for a little bit. Just a quick visit. I know it's hard to get all the way to Nicodranus and back here, but maybe we could get Yussa to help or something. Or Essek!"
"I think that's a good idea," Caduceus agreed. "We could all use a little sunshine if nothing else."
Jester nodded, her smile brightening further as she finally sucked the remaining icing off the spoon. "That's really good," she said, with a final sniffle before her shoulders straightened. She looked up at Caduceus with gratitude and offered him the bowl with the last few drips of icing in the bottom. He waved away the offer. She needed it more than he did.
Caduceus was watching the kettle when he once again felt her hand fall on his elbow. He looked down to where she stood, swaying forwards and back on her toes. Her expression was once again unusually serious, though, he was relieved to notice, no longer sad.
"You know, if you ever miss your family too much, or you need to talk about them or anything, you could tell me about them. I would listen," she offered. "Or if you just want to bake with someone or something sometime and think about them, I can be totally quiet and just keep you company."
It was a kind and touching offer, and Caduceus felt it burrow deep in his heart. Sometimes he was reminded of how lucky he was to have been found by these people. "I'll remember that. Thank you, Jester."
"Of course! That's what friends are for." Caduceus grunted as she threw her arms around him in a squeezing hug, arms tight around his middle. One that he gladly returned. Jester gave great hugs.
"What do you think, should we enjoy the fruits of our labor?" he asked, when the hug ended and the kettle had begun to sing. Jester bounced back on her heels and clasped her hands together.
"Yes! I'll get the plates. Maybe I'll get the little tea ones and we can be all fancy. Should I call everybody else? I'm going to, everyone should come enjoy our delicious baking."
Caduceus chuckled as he watched her spin away, his chest warm. "You do that," he agreed, and reached down a few more cups. "I'll pour the tea."
