Hi Do You Hear That - Tumblr Posts

i’m screaming heck yes

So @pigeon-sponge​ drew this hilarious picture of Ringabel as sort of a companion to her latest Agnes painting, and it inspired me.

“Agnès,” Ringabel said, breaking the long silence that had settled over the group comfortably. “Has anyone ever told you that you would be a delightful model?”

The four of them, plus the fairy, were sitting around on the Grandship, waiting for the skies to clear. No one liked having to go traipsing through the woods in the rain. Unfortunately, it had been raining all day, with no sign of letting up. They were all beginning to get a bit stir crazy.

They had long finished cleaning the inn from top to bottom, doing loads of every bit of laundry they’d been putting off for the past few months. Then, Edea and Ringabel had actually bothered to fold their clothes and put them all away, while Tiz and Agnès threw out rubbish from the inn’s lobby that no one had gone through before, left behind and half-rotted when the citizens on Grandship had evacuated. Only after they had exhausted all productive activities did they actually settle down to work on more creative endeavours.

It was here that the crew discovered that Edea liked to sew and to make her own clothes if she could, and Agnès  was eager to learn from her. The Vestal’s clothing had all been made by a small team of trained acolytes, but she herself didn’t know how to sew. The two girls sat together in a corner with the sewing supplies that Edea had accumulated over the course of the journey, with Airy acting as a light to help Agnès thread the needle.

Tiz was whittling some wood. It was a very rustic hobby that Ringabel had teased him over for a total of three seconds before realizing that whittling meant that Tiz had in hand a very sharp knife. The wood was a selection of leftover lumber from the repairs on Grandship, and so far he’d whittled out a figurine of a wolf and was working on some sort of flower. He was taking requests.

That meant that Ringabel had to entertain himself. Knees drawn up to support a sketchbook he’d picked up in Ancheim, he had set himself in the corner so that he could watch everyone and sketch them. His artistic skills had suffered as of late, not least because he hadn’t been practicing, and what better subject was there to use as practice than his dear friends?

He paid attention to the detail in Tiz’s hands, in the way that the boy clutched both his old pocket knife and his piece of wood. There was the way that Edea’s tongue stuck out slightly when she focusing on the tight stitches of what would be a seam. Agnes’s hair and the way it swept out from her face. Agnes’s entire figure was sweeps and swirls, and Ringabel found quickly that the Vestal’s form was interesting to sketch. Edea was his favorite artistic subject of course, and always would be, whether or not he drew her by memory or by reference, or whether or not his sketches contained some rather inappropriate items that led to him tearing out the pages and burning them to dispose of the evidence.

Agnès, though, Agnès was a masterpiece. Her long hair had the most interesting profile to it, leading to long lines that filled the page easily with strokes, looking lifelike. Her face was a pretty shape, easy to sketch, and her posture was prim and proper, not too full of movement like Edea, but not overly stiff, either.

He’d had to ask her about modeling.

“I beg your pardon?” Agnès asked him, looking up from the skirt she had been sewing with Edea. It was a fairly simply design, and needed only hemming and a zipper sewn in.

“Model of what, exactly?” Edea cut in, narrowing her eyes at him. Perhaps, once or twice, he had asked Edea to model for him in a private painting session. She had declined.

“Nothing inappropriate, I assure you,” he hastened to clarifiy as all three of his friends looked at him with suspicious glances. “I’m looking at Agnès purely from an artistic standpoint and that alone, though of course you are quite beautiful, Agnès.”

Tiz sighed. “Ringabel.”

“I mean it!” Ringabel insisted, pouting. “I like the lines that your hair makes, Agnès, especially when it moves. It’s so sleek, mature, and very nice. You have a well-shaped face, clear eyes… I would like to make you a subject in a painting.” Painting wasn’t necessarily his strong point,  but he had dabbled enough to know that it would be fun, and Agnès’s hair would be made in broad, thick brushstrokes.

Agnès flushed. “No thank you.”

He whined now. “Please? You need only sit there and pretend that I’m not watching you!”

“Ew,” Edea said. “Tone down on the creepiness there.”

“This is Ringabel you’re talking about,” Airy reminded her.

“If she doesn’t want to model, she doesn’t have to,” Tiz reminded him, frowning sternly. Ringabel shot him puppy dog eyes.

“Don’t you want a painting, or at least a sketch to commemorate Agnès’s beauty, Tiz?” What a traitor! Ringabel made a note to never show Tiz his secret book of sketches.

“Ringabel,” Tiz started, already beginning to flush with annoyance or embarrassment. Agnès interrupted him before he could finish whatever threat he was about to give.

“I only have to sit in place?” she asked Ringabel, turning to him.

Ringabel perked up. She was so sweet sometimes. “You only need to sit and continue doing what you’re doing. I won’t ask you for more,” he promised. That wasn’t quite what he wanted, but it was clear that Tiz and Edea wouldn’t approve of him trying to make Agnès model formally. Well, perhaps at a later time he could ask her for that. For now, he would take what he could get.

When Agnès nodded her approval, her cheeks pink, Ringabel moved closer so that he could see her figure up for what it truly was. His pencil scratched out broad lines on the paper, first planning out the long lines of her posture, then added in sweeps for her hair, curves for her face and her body, little circles to make where her limbs would be…

Before long, he had the finished sketch of Agnès sitting in her chair, her hair waving softly in the breeze (an artistic license he thought was filling, given the Crystal that she served). Her back was straight and her eyes were peaceful yet serious. The dress she had worn today was pretty, with straight lines and a pretty pattern, and while his sketch wasn’t in color, he made a mental note of it, in case he did decide to make a painting of it later.

As he admired his artwork, Edea leaned over his shoulder.

“Oh Ringabel, this looks wonderful! You’re a really talented artist,” she said, sounding surprised. He decided to take that as a rare compliment from his beloved, and beamed up happily at her.

“Of course it’s good. I have a beautiful subject.”

Agnès’s cheeks were still slightly pink. “You exaggerate, Ringabel.”

“I would never,” he promised her, then looked up at Edea. “You know, if you were to allow me to sketch you, it would turn out almost as nicely!”

“Oh?” Edea replied to him, raising an eyebrow. “Are you saying that I’m almost as beautiful as Agnès?”

… he was dead. He could hear Tiz cackling behind him, and Agnès inhaled, and he realized he was dead.

“O-of course not, my dear,” he stammered. “That’s not what I’m saying at all, it’s just that - well, you’re very beautiful, you know that you are, but - no, rest assured that your beauty is unmatched by any other, I promise. ”

She was enjoying watching him sweat, judging by the smirk on her face as he babbled. He ducked his face back down into his paper, flipping to a new page to draw something else, making a mental note that next time, he was just going to sketch by memory where no one could see the result. He certainly had some good references now.