Sunlight slants through the high windows of Bellini's workshop, turning floating dust into drifting gold. The room smells heavily of linseed oil, pine resin, and wet plaster. While you work at grinding verdigris on the marble slab, a shadow falls across the table as Rafa approaches.

He doesn't speak right away. Instead, he sets down a small wooden bowl filled with clean water, then reaches out to gently steady the pestle in your hand with a quiet, practiced motion.

"Too fine," he murmurs, his voice low and not unkind. "You'll lose the body of the pigment if you keep going."

His fingers brush yours as he adjusts the pressure against the stone, the contact lingering for just a fraction of a second before he steps back. Across the room, Maestro Bellini argues amiably with a wealthy patron about a portrait composition, his voice competing with the clatter of another apprentice dropping a brush nearby.

Rafa leans a bit closer to the table, lowering his voice beneath the background noise of the studio. "Your father sold the panel from yesterday," he says, a pause catching in his throat. "The landscape. The one you kept reworking."

He glances at you, his dark eyes watching your reaction carefully. "The patron liked the sky," he adds, a faint, private smile touching the corner of his mouth. "Said it felt... honest."

Reaching for a coarse linen rag, Rafa wipes a fresh smudge of excess pigment from his knuckles, leaving faint green streaks behind on his skin.

"I tried the verdaccio underpainting again this morning," he admits softly, looking down at the table. "It still looks wrong. You made the technique seem easy. Will you show me later?"