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“Beau, you look like a sunset! Or maybe a sunrise, since it’s morning!”
Jester’s voice pierced through Beau’s sleep like an arrow. Beau groaned, opening her eyes to see Jester’s grinning face mere inches from her own. “Ow,” she said, and then winced when she felt her split lip re-open. “Jester, morning volume please.”
“Oh right!” Jester’s whisper was only slightly less loud. “What happened to you? Were you out doing secret superhero monk stuff again?”
“I’m not a—“ Beau looked up into Jester’s smiling face and decided it was way too early for, well, anything. “Yes Jester, it was superhero monk stuff again.”
Jester clapped her hands. “I knew it! Let’s go down to breakfast and you can show off your new bruises and you can tell us all about it!”
“There’s not a lot to tell,” Beau said, throwing an arm over her face to block out the morning sun streaming through the window of their room, wincing at both the pain in moving her arm and then the pressure of her arm on her bruised face. They had finally, finally made it to Zadash after several weeks, and Beau had gone to see Expositor Dairon after the group had gotten settled in because well, might as well sooner rather than later. Beau had had a feeling that if she didn’t seek the Expositor out, the woman would seek out Beau herself, and Beau had wanted the meeting on her own terms, unlike last time. Not that it had helped at all. The Expositor had put Beau through her paces for several hours, seeing what she had learned, asking about everything Beau had seen and heard and done on her travels. She had then been sent away, told to come back again in a few days for more training. “It was pretty awesome though. Definitely awesome.”
“Well, still, come down to breakfast. We will eat and we will go shopping and I will buy colored pencils so I can draw you with all your pretty new bruises.”
Beau tried to sit up and felt every abused muscle scream in protest. “Ow ow ow fuck ow.” She flopped back onto the mattress. “I don’t think moving around is something I’m going to be doing a lot of today, Jester, sorry. Listen, could you just like, bring me up something to eat? Something that’s not just pastries,” she added quickly. “I’ll go shopping with you tomorrow, promise.”
“Okay!” Jester chirped. “You should probably wash your face. It’s kinda crusty.”
“Thanks for the tip,” Beau replied. She waited until she heard the door close behind Jester before she moved to get out of bed again. She should have stretched before going to bed, but instead she had just stumbled in sometime before dawn and passed out fully clothed, and now she was paying the price. Every movement brought another wave of burning pain, but she just gritted her teeth and smiled though it as she managed to sit upright. It was another set of small agonies to get her boots off, then the rest of her clothes except for her breast band and her underwear, because if she was staying in anyway, might as well be comfortable. The only other person who would be seeing her was Jester, and well, after weeks on the road they had seen each other in various states of undress more than once.
Once Beau managed to get over to the wash basin and the small looking glass above it, she could see what Jester had been talking about. There was the blood from her split lip, both dried from last night and fresh from this morning, and a cut over one eye, which had bled quite a bit despite being small, as wounds on the face tended to do. Beau washed away the blood, checking out the red-purple bruise blooming on her cheek with a grin that made her face hurt, before swiping the washcloth at various other bits of herself. Later she would have a proper hot bath, but at that moment all she wanted to do was go back to bed, eat whatever Jester brought her for breakfast, and then sleep until dinner.
Beau crawled back onto the bed, feeling her abused muscles twitching under her skin as she tried desperately to get comfortable. That turned out to be impossible, but she finally just gave up and lay on her stomach, the non-bruised side of her face buried in the pillow. She was half asleep when she heard the door to her room open and close, followed by footsteps on the wood floor. “Just put it on the table, Jester. I’ll get to it eventually.”
Silence, and that wasn’t normal because Jester didn’t do silence unless it was absolutely necessary. The boys would have knocked, and if Nott had come in for some reason she definitely would have said something by now. Heart pounding, spitting out a string of curses, Beau rolled off the side of the bed and came up in a defensive stance, ready for anything, or so she thought.
Yasha stood in the middle of the room, breakfast tray in two hands, smiling slightly. “Perhaps I should have knocked. Surprise?”
Beau held her pose as her mind frantically tried to switch gears. Yasha. Yasha was here. Yasha was here and Beau was standing there in her underwear. “This has to be a dream. I’m dreaming, right?”
“I don’t know,” Yasha said with a glint in her mismatched eyes. “Do you dream about me often enough that that’s a possibility?”
How was she going to answer that? Why yes, I dream about you quite a bit and sometimes you’re even wearing clothes?
Beau was spared a response by a muscle in her left shoulder spasming painfully. “Ow ow ow godsdamnit,” she said as she clutched at her shoulder and sat down heavily on the bed.
Yasha walked over and set the breakfast tray down on the bedside table before sitting on the bed next to Beau. “Here, let me,” she said, and then her large hand, rough with calluses from her sword, was rubbing Beau’s shoulder and it was possibly the best thing Beau had ever felt in her life and she never ever wanted it to stop because even though it hurt it felt amazing.
“Ummm, thank you,” Beau said, hating how awkward she sounded. “When did you get here? Not that I’m not glad to see you. Because I am. Glad to see you, I mean.”
“Late last night,” Yasha said. “I saw you coming in and I would have come down and said hello but you looked pretty exhausted.”
“I didn’t see you.” Beau had looked around the common room when she had come in, hoping that maybe Fjord would have been still been up, because he probably would have bought her a drink and complimented her bruises. She knew she would have seen Yasha, even sitting down the woman would have been taller than anyone else in the place.
“I was on the roof,” Yasha said casually. “And you didn’t look up.”
“The roof?”
“Mmmhmm. You should drink your tea before it gets cold.”
There was indeed a cup of tea on the tray. Beau picked it up and just stared at it for a moment. “I haven’t had tea since I left the Cobalt Reserve. That’s all we drank. All the time. Big on routine, the other monks were. Boring as hell.”
“Well, this is willow bark tea and it should help with your soreness. It’s bitter as hell though, for warning.”
Yasha hadn’t been kidding, the first taste made her shudder. This was not a sipping tea. She braced herself and knocked back the rest of it like a shot, just to get it over with.
“That’s the way to do it,” Yasha said, and Beau swore she could hear the smile in her words. “I would have had Molly put honey in it, but it doesn’t actually improve the taste for some reason. I know, I’ve tried.”
“Wait, Molly made that?” Beau looked down at the empty teacup. “For me? He doesn’t even like me.”
Yasha chuckled. “Well he said it was to make you slightly less insufferable, if that makes you feel any better. But no, he started brewing that the instant Jester came downstairs and announced to the entire common room that you were staying in bed because you’d gotten all beat up doing ‘super secret vigilante monk stuff.’”
“Oh gods,” Beau groaned.
“And Jester said that your bruises were all pretty, like a sunrise, and that I should go take a look. And I hadn’t seen you yet, and I was curious. I’m sorry I didn’t say anything when I came in I was— quite taken by the view.”
Beau was going to die, she was sure of it. Was it possible to blush to death? “Did you like what you saw?” Beau asked, congratulating herself on the fact that her voice sounded smooth, almost nonchalant. It felt like her heart was going to beat straight out of her chest.
“Mmmmhmmm,” Yasha hummed. “Jester was wrong though.”
“Oh? How so?”
Yasha stopped rubbing Beau’s shoulder and let her fingers trail down Beau’s arm, to one of her more spectacular bruises. “This bruise here. It’s reddish-orange at the edges,” she said, ghosting her fingers gently along the bruise, “and then it deepens to purple in the center, like the night sky. So it’s more like the sunset.”
Beau swallowed hard. “It could be a sunrise, if you go from the center outward.”
Yasha’s fingers traced the colors back the way she had come. “That is very true,” she said. “It all depends on how you look at it, I suppose.”
There was a silence, one of those silences where everything seemed heavy and important, where anything could happen. If either of them leaned an inch or two closer they would have been kissing, but Beau, for all her usual bravado, didn’t make that move.
“I am distracting you from breakfast,” Yasha said suddenly, getting up from the bed.
It felt like the world had lurched underneath her, and Beau had to hold onto the bed frame to keep from falling over. “Don’t—“ she said, then, “did I…?”
Yasha crossed over to the open window, took a deep breath. “I am not going anywhere. It is nothing you did. Please just…” Yasha ran a hand through her hair, looking frustrated. “Give me a minute. Eat. Something.”
“Okay,” Beau said, and drew the breakfast tray towards herself with hands that were shaking with spent emotion or adrenaline or arousal, she wasn’t sure which. She started to eat, even though her stomach felt queasy, and she only looked at Yasha out of the corner of her eye. Her face had gone impassive, and Beau couldn’t tell what she was feeling, if she was feeling anything.
The silence stretched. It was not the pleasant silence of a moment ago. It was an agony, broken only by the sound of Beau eating. She was going to scream, or say something stupid, anything to fill the silence. Her mind went back to the window Yasha was standing at, remembered that Yasha had said she disliked small, confined spaces, even though she had also said that she wasn’t claustrophobic when Beau had asked.
“You can open the other window, if you want,” Beau casually said around a mouthful of toast, as if nothing was wrong.
Silence.
“That was not it either,” Yasha said softly. “But thank you.” Footsteps, the sound of shutters being opened.
Silence.
It looked like she was going to have to do all the talking if anything was going to happen. Might as well just open her mouth and get on with probably screwing things up. “Yasha, if you don’t want to be here, you can just—“
Yasha hissed something, and Beau snapped her head up, wincing at the sudden pain. Yasha had sounded like Molly did right before he cursed someone in battle. There was a tightness in her shoulders and her jaw that suggested anger, and Beau would know, because she knew anger very well.
“I am stuck in my own head and I am making you suffer for it. I am sorry. This was not how I had been planning to do this.” Yasha passed a hand over her eyes wearily, anger fading as suddenly as it appeared. “I concluded my business down south and made my way back up here and the whole time I was thinking about what I was going to say when I saw you again. I had several pretty speeches prepared. I picked flowers.”
“You…. Flowers?” Beau felt like she was missing something very important.
“A dire wolf ate them. I killed it, of course.”
“Flowers.” If Beau repeated the word again maybe what Yasha was saying would make sense.
“I---” The words Beau heard come out of Yasha’s mouth were musical and liquid, like one of Caleb’s spells.
Beau got up, ignoring her screaming muscles and trembling knees, and walked over to where Yasha was standing. She had to reach a ways to get her hands on Yasha’s shoulders, but she managed. “Yasha, calm down for a second. Look at me. Breathe.”
Yasha shut her mouth and took a deep breath, and then another.
“Yasha, are you trying to court me?”
Slowly, very slowly, Yasha nodded.
Oh. Beau felt a blush rising up her neck. “No one’s ever done that before.”
“Really?” Yasha sounded incredulous.
“I’ve been told I come off as intimidating and a little bit frightening.”
“I wouldn’t know what that’s like at all,” Yasha said with a straight face.
Silence again, but this time the silence was of two people trying desperately not to laugh.
Beau broke first, leaning heavily against Yasha because her damn legs wouldn’t stop shaking but that was okay because Yasha was holding her and she was laughing as well. Yasha’s laugh was soft and rich, music played on a dark violin, and Beau couldn’t get enough of it.
“Okay, okay,” Beau said after she finally managed to stop laughing but not to stop grinning. “So why did you get upset earlier? Because the flirty seduction thing? That was totally working, if that wasn’t obvious.”
“Oh, I know it works,” Yasha said. “I just… this felt different. You felt different. So I wanted this to be different too. I want to get to know you, not just you know, have sex and leave in the morning. Though I can’t promise I won’t be gone again tomorrow. My time--- isn’t strictly my own.” A shadow passed across her face, and Beau longed to reach up and wipe it away.
“Is it a secret?”
“Technically,” Yasha said, and Beau was immediately reminded of Jester. “But it’s my secret to tell.”
“Not now,” Beau said quickly. “I’m curious as hell but I’ve also had maybe three hours of sleep and everything hurts and I need time to process all this.” Beau waved a hand vaguely in the air.
“So you accept my offer of courtship then?”
“Of course I--” Beau looked up and saw Yasha looking down at her with that slight little grin of hers. “I had no idea you liked to tease people so much.”
“Molly is a bad influence,” Yasha said. “So we’ll talk after dinner? If it’s a nice night we can go up on the roof. You can see the stars and everything.”
“You might need to carry me,” Beau said with a smile, remembering the first time she had met Yasha, not all that long ago.
Yasha swept Beau up into her arms as easily as if she weighed nothing at all. “How about I carry you over to the bed and give you a massage? Very relaxing, you’ll be asleep in no time.”
“I don’t know,” Beau said. “What’s the going rate for a massage? I mean, it was five gold just to be held by you, last time I checked.”
“I can think of an alternative form of payment,” Yasha said with a gleam in her eye.
“I thought we weren’t doing the flirty seduction thing,” Beau said. “Not that I’m complaining,” she added quickly.
“I didn’t want to just do the flirty seduction thing. Maybe nothing too strenuous until you’ve recovered from your little late night workout, though.” Yasha raised an eyebrow. “Wouldn’t want you to strain something.”
Beau tried to shift in Yasha’s arms so that she could kiss the smirk right off the barbarian’s face and felt a muscle in her back twinge. “Ow, okay, fair. Little help?”
Yasha smiled and leaned down.
Beau had had weeks to dream about what her first kiss with Yasha would be like, back when she had assumed it would forever remain a fantasy. She had imagined something rough, something bruising and claiming. She hadn’t expected gentle, she hadn’t expected soft. Yasha, it seemed, was full of surprises. When Yasha finally pulled away, Beau saw she was blushing, the pale pink spreading over her skin like the light of dawn.
*************
Jester tread lightly up the stairs, her arms full of things she had bought while she was out. She entered the room she was sharing with Beau as quietly as she could, because Jester had learned very quickly that waking up Beau when she was sleeping was only slightly less dangerous than poking a sleeping bear. She had put down her things and was halfway through the room before she spared a glance at the bed.
Beau was indeed asleep, and so was Yasha, curled protectively around her.
Jester clapped both hands over her mouth to contain her excited squeak before rushing back downstairs to tell the others.