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They all retire early the night after the rescue, their still-aching bodies and the weights of Molly and Keg’s deaths hanging over them making them less eager than usual to celebrate their victory. And so Beau finds herself lying on her bed in her room with Jester as the last rays of the sun finally sink below the horizon, shuffling and reshuffling Molly’s tarot cards and trying to figure out what, if anything, she wants to ask the deck of bullshit. She’s never believed in that nonsense, not since that old hack in Kamordah told her parents to expect a boy and they made her life hell for sixteen years when she didn’t turn out as promised. But these are Molly’s cards – maybe they have some of Molly’s je-ne-sais-quoi stored up, and besides, it’s not like she has any other options. If she wants answers to whatever the fuck her questions are, it’s the cards or bust. She wishes she knew what she wanted to know. Maybe that would help.
“Beau?” Jester asks, and her voice is so small, so lacking in Jester’s usual verve, that it pulls Beau out of her thoughts to listen.
“Yeah?” Beau says, propping herself up on her elbows so she’s facing the door and Jester’s bed. Jester sits hugging her knees to her chest, head hung and lank, greasy hair curtaining her face. Although Caduceus had healed Jester, Fjord, and Yasha’s major injuries, Beau can see a nasty purple-brown bruise peering out from beneath the hem of Jester’s nightgown, a darkness underneath some of her nails where Caduceus had had to regrow them. Beau knows the people who did this to Jester are dead – she administered the final blow to Lorenzo herself – but somehow that doesn’t feel like enough. She’s not sure there’s enough suffering in all the Nine Hells to make the Iron Shepherds really pay for what they did.
“Is he a better cleric than me?”
“Huh?” Beau says. “Is who a better cleric than you?”
“Caduceus. Is he a better cleric than me?”
“He’s … taller than you,” Beau says, for lack of any other comparison to make. She kicks herself, though, when Jester looks over at her with teary red eyes and tight, scowling lips. Wrong response, clearly. This is why Beau sticks to hitting things – every time she opens her mouth and tries to talk, she fucks shit up.
“That isn’t an answer, Beau. Is he a better cleric than me?”
Beau knows what Jester’s really asking – does Caduceus heal more frequently, and with less grousing, than Jester does? But the answer to that is yes, and Beau’s not about to tell Jester that Caduceus is a better cleric than she is. That’s bullshit, first of all, and second of all Beau is done with hurting people who don’t deserve it. She can’t think of anyone who deserves to be hurt less than Jester, especially after all Jester has gone through these past few days.
“He’s a different cleric than you,” Beau says. “He has a different god, he does different shit. He makes tea from dead people.”
Jester’s face scrunches up into an expression of haughty revulsion far more familiar than the glassy-eyed numbness she wore only minutes ago. It is relieving its familiarity. “Eww.”
Beau shrugs. “It’s not bad tea, actually.”
“You drank it? Beau!”
“I didn’t know it came from dead people. But it really wasn’t that bad.”
“That’s disgusting. You’re disgusting. I do not want to say it but his god? Is maybe a little bit disgusting, if he is letting him or asking him to make tea from dead people.” Jester clutches the symbol of the Traveler that hangs around her neck. “The Traveler would never ask me to make tea from dead people. Although maybe he would like a drawing of it.”
Beau relaxes as Jester rants. This is good. This is the Jester she knows, the Jester of whimsy and filterless speech rather than the Jester of quiet sadness and questions Beau knows she won’t be able to answer to Jester’s satisfaction without being cruel. But then Jester quiets, looks down at her lap again, and Beau’s stomach sinks with the knowledge of what’s coming next.
“Is he better than me, though? I know he’s different, but like, different-better or different-worse?”
“Different-different.” Beau says. She can’t find the words to comfort Jester, can feel in the burning tightness of her chest that nothing she could possibly say will ameliorate things (if Fjord were here, Fjord would know how to deal with this, would know how to make Jester feel better – but Fjord, she reminds herself, needs his sleep, and Beau can’t quite explain it but she really wants to be the one to dry Jester’s tears.) So she slides from her bed and kneels beside Jester’s, takes one of Jester’s hands in one of her own to get Jester’s attention, and then reaches up and lays her other hand on Jester’s knee where it has slipped from her embrace. “Look, Jes, I don’t know much about clerics as a group, but it’s all about, like, faith, right? That’s how you get your magic: you have faith in your god, and your god grants you power.”
Jester sniffles. “It’s a little more complicated than that, I think” she says. “But … yeah. Yeah, basically.”
“Well you’re the most damn faithful person I’ve ever met.”
Jester hiccups. Beau, dumbass that she is, hadn’t put together that Jester was crying before until her eyes begin to overflow again, but she acts on instinct now, rising to her full kneeling height to brush tears from Jester’s eyes with the pads of her thumbs. She waits until Jester’s sobs have died down to a quiet whimper again to continue, but doesn’t take her hands from Jester’s face.
“I’m not gonna lie,” Beau says, “Clay’s not too shabby at the healing gig, but the only thing I know about his faith is that it can’t be stronger than yours, Jes.”
“But if he heals more … I was shitty at being The Cleric because I just wanted to cast Spiritual Weapon, and now I’m not even The Cleric. I’m just The Shitty Cleric.”
Beau’s parents, and then again the monks at the Cobalt Soul, had tried to teach her that “sticks and stones can break your bones, but words will never hurt you.” She should have known that that, much like everything else she ever learned from any of them but Dairon, was a bare-faced fucking lie, the only one she clung to because it gave her an excuse to be an asshole. But she’s leaving her asshole days behind her now. She owes it to Molly.
She hates owing Molly. But she can’t quite find it in herself to hate the person owing him is helping her become.
“Fuck that” she says. “I told you, you’re not a shitty cleric. You’re a fucking kickass cleric. And you know how I feel about kickass women.”
Jester furrows her brow. Beau retraces her verbal steps and realizes, far too late to actually be useful, that that really sounded like a come-on. Fuck, she thinks, dropping her hands from Jester’s face and letting them hang at her sides, fingers twitching like dying fish. Dammit. Shit. Where is Fjord when you need him to help you pay a goddamn compliment to a fucking friend?
“I like them,” Beau clarifies, as if that’s actually any better. “Y’know, I think they’re cool.”
“That is the word you’d use to describe Yasha?” Jester asks. Her lips curve up like the sickle with which she used to fight, and mischief glimmers in her eyes. Beau might be imagining things – it’s certainly late enough, and she mixed up as hell from all the shit she’s said wrong and then gone back and tried to figure out how she could’ve said right – but she thinks she sees a faint glow begin to emanate from Jester’s holy symbol. “You’d say Yasha is cool ?”
Beau gulps. The bossy cross-examination is not helping the “friends” mindset. “Yeah, that’s one of the words I’d use,” she agrees.
“What are the other words?”
“Uh … strong. Buff. Built. Stacked, in, like, the muscle department. Y’know.”
Beau curls her bicep to demonstrate Yasha’s musculature. Even with the flowy sleeves of Jester’s nightgown, Jester’s mimicry is much more impressive than Beau’s own, and Beau feels her throat go dry at the sight. She swallows, hoping Jester doesn’t notice, although the way Jester’s violet eyes flicker down to Beau’s Adam's apple tells Beau that her prayers have almost certainly gone unanswered. Maybe she should be taking that Knowing Mistress shit more seriously; it can’t hurt to have a goddess on your side when the going gets tough, or when you stick your foot in your mouth in front of a pretty girl and shove it so far down it comes out the other end. Hey , she thinks. She’s never been much for praying, but she might as well start now. Ioun. I know this isn’t, like, your domain or anything, but I kinda sorta work for you so. I don’t know, help me out here? Thanks, Beau .
“Yasha is really strong,” Jester agrees. “But technically, that is a fact, technically. Cool is an opinion.”
“So?” Beau’s not sure where this is going.
“So what other opinions do you have about kickass women?”
Jester has turned toward Beau, set her feet on the floor and her elbows on her thighs. The way she’s looking at Beau, as unblinking as Frumpkin in cat form and with the tip of her tail swishing slowly back and forth through the air like a metronome, makes Beau feel like the question is loaded, although she can’t begin to imagine what with. “Uh …” she says, dumbly. And then, because “honesty is the best policy” is one of the many childhood lessons she ignored, but she’s all out of other options now, she settles for telling the truth. “I’m really not sure where this interrogation is going, but I’m kinda getting the feeling you want something from me. Am I off base with that?”
Jester’s tail comes to curl around her ankles. She looks down at her lap as she speaks, her voice higher than normal and her eyes darting across her knuckles. “I want you to tell me if Caduceus is a better cleric than me,” she says, “that’s all.”
“Well, I already answered that one.”
Jester won’t meet Beau’s eyes, so Beau takes her hand again, carefully avoiding the rawness of Jester’s nail beds in favor of slipping her thumb across Jester’s downturned palm and rubbing the back of Jester’s hand with her remaining four fingers. When her thumb slips lower, to Jester’s wrist, Beau feels Jester’s pulse racing just under the skin.
Jester glances up at Beau, lips slightly parted, a purple flush creeping up her neck and across her cheeks. Beau looks down at their joined hands, up at Jester. An idea forms in her head that maybe should have formed earlier, but, if she’s right, it’s not like her obliviousness is entirely on her.
“Jes,” she says slowly. “Tell it to me straight here: is this about Deuce and the group, or is this about, like, you and me?”
Jester nods.
“I kinda need an answer here, Jes.”
“Both,” Jester says.
“Well, I answered your Deuce question. So what’s the other one?”
Jester bites down on her lip, spilling blood. Beau reaches up to brush it away with her thumb, freezing when Jester stills, Beau’s fingertip on the corner of her mouth. She looks up through the curtain of Jester’s bangs, meets Jester’s eyes.
“Is this okay?
Jester nods. Beau brings her other hand up to Jester’s shoulder, never breaking eye contact with Jester. She sets her hand down, tilts her head, leans forward, straining up, until her face is only a few inches from Jester’s. “Good?” she asks.
Jester kisses her.
The fierceness of the kiss catches Beau off guard. As a rule, Jester’s dominance does not surprise her, but after the week Jester’s had, Beau couldn’t fault her for a little timidity. But there’s no hesitation, not the slightest hint of uncertainty, in the way Jester’s hands clutch the sides of Beau’s face. Beau’s neck burns from the prolonged stretch required to keep her lips on Jester’s from her kneeling position on the floor, so she scrambles up and into Jester’s lap, arms wrapping around Jester now as she swears to them both that she’ll never let Jester go again. If she keeps at least one hand on Jester at all times, on her shoulder, her wrist, the fleshy curve of her hip, then Jester can’t wander off in the night and get captured, at least not without Beau, and there’s strength in numbers. (Not that numbers helped Jester and Fjord and Yasha against the Shepherds, but Beau does her best to push that to the back of her mind because if she can’t do anything to protect her friends then she’s a shitty adventurer).
She’s losing breath when Jester finally pulls back, tears shining in her eyes again. Beau curses herself, sure she’s done something wrong, but then Jester scoots back, tugging Beau into the bed with her. It’s a tight fit, but Beau follows Jester’s lead and lies down, resting her head on one of her arms, fingers curling around Jester’s horn, and draping her other arm across Jester’s torso. Jester takes her hand and clutches it.
“Good?” Beau says, although she hopes she knows the answer.
Jester nods. “Yes,” she says. “Better.” A pause, and then, “you guys won’t leave me behind? You promise? Even though you have another cleric now?”
“I fucking won’t,” Beau says, gripping Jester’s horn more tightly. She feels the ridges pressing red lines into the palm of her hand. It hurts a little, but it’s worth the warmth of Jester’s back against her chest, the odd but not unpleasant tickle of Jester’s tail as Jester curls it around Beau’s legs. “On my honor, or whatever.”
“On your pocket bacon?” Jester asks.
“On my pocket bacon.”
There’s silence for a moment, and Beau thinks that maybe Jester has fallen asleep – when she’s truly tired, she does so quickly. But then she speaks.
“Thank you, Beau.”
“Uh, yeah,” Beau says. Her chest flushes with warmth, butterflies in her stomach taking flight. “No problem. You’re my – I mean, you’re my friend at least.”
Jester hums in agreement and snuggles closer until eventually they both drift off to sleep.