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Yasha is in the middle of the ocean on a slowly, slowly sinking ship, and she is both more and less than lonely.
Next to her, Jester adds to the tattoo on the back of Beau’s neck, the one meant to honor Mollymauk. “Stop moving,” Jester chides, but her smile doesn’t waver even as she manhandles Beau into place.
Beau snorts, rolls her eyes. She probably thinks no one else can see the tight line of her jaw or the tremble in her shoulders. “Hurry it up, Jessie,” she gripes without malice. “I’m getting sore just sitting here like this. It’s like meditating, but worse.”
On Beau’s tan skin, the feather earns a shadow. For the dark side of the good times, Caleb had noted wryly when Jester sat down and got back to work. Yasha has had a hard time remembering any good times, after, but she cannot bring herself to argue about it when her friends are healing. She mostly remembers the sound of the scuffle, the awful silence, and then hours and hours of blinding pain upon arrival at the Sour Nest. She bears no scars from her time there. It is hard to decide whether she is thankful for that or not, some days.
“Yasha,” sing-songs Jester, peering over at her, “what do you think?” She finishes her question with a flourish of the ink and a wide, toothy smile. The tattoo is finished, or as finished as it can be without giving it time to heal.
It’s beautiful, thinks Yasha, even ignoring her own bias toward the curve at the nape of Beau’s neck that she never lets herself dwell on, because it is beautiful, expertly and lovingly rendered. And it looks exactly like Molly’s did, but darker, more layered, and no one has forgotten anything about why it is where it is, and Yasha’s throat closes in on itself.
So she doesn’t say anything. And she looks away.
And she spends yet another evening lurking in the shadows of the deck where the crew knows by now to leave her well enough alone.
/
Darktow radiates anger and soot.
It breathes down Yasha’s neck like a scorned lover, furious and persistent, and it is human in a way she hates. Xhorhas is a land of monsters, or so people call it, but they don’t understand that it’s simpler that way. You find the evil thing and you kill it.
Yasha wonders, more and more often now, how to recognize an evil thing when it’s shaped like a dear friend. Caleb casts suggestion spells without sparing them a second thought— Fjord barrels toward a goal that none of them understand— Beau spits, You are trying to control this, stop using your trauma as an excuse— Jester presses ink into the skin of someone she’s never met and laughs while he stammers in fear— Caduceus nearly gets left behind by the group in the clamor— Nott tips over into too drunk to smile territory—
And Yasha watches it all, impassive. She offers her opinion when they remember to speak to her, but she can guess what they are thinking when they forget. She follows them like a shadow, and usually makes about as much noise as one.
Though there are always exceptions.
At the bar, a man puts his hands on her and Yasha breaks his ring and pinky fingers in one smooth motion. “Try it again,” she warns, low voice nearly getting lost under his high, reedy whimpers, “and you lose the whole hand.”
He nods quickly, and Yasha releases him and watches him scamper off with his tail between his legs. The one good thing about Darktow, she supposes, is that no one around them blinks at her response. In this place, no one will protect you if you get what you deserve.
“You good?” asks Fjord, sidling over. He must have been watching that as it happened.
Yasha nods. “It was...not anything I couldn’t handle.”
Fjord grimaces, nubs of his tusks poking out by his lower lip. “You shouldn’t have to.”
“I know.” It is an impossible thing to not know, when you are Yasha, when you are exotic or different like she is, when people look at you with a hunger like they want to kill you or fuck you and after a while you stop bothering trying to differentiate between the two. “I don’t mind it so much when it gives me an excuse to fight.”
“You and Jester both,” says Fjord, shaking his head. He is looking at the other side of the room, where Jester is sizing up the burly men who have caught wind of her passion for hand to hand combat in bars.
Yasha wants to answer, but she knows his attention is lost. Those two are like planets in orbit. She can’t guess who will pull in the other first, or what the collision will look like, but the truth that it will happen someday rings clear like a bell even in the wet air of this grimy city. Eventually, Fjord stands and walks over to the swelling crowd that gathers around Jester. Gravity, tug. Like a dance.
The seat beside her is empty, and the odds of someone who she won’t have to hurt filling it are small, so Yasha decides to go for a walk. It isn’t raining out. It hasn’t rained for a while, no matter how often Yasha looks anxiously at the sky.
In the stillness of the night, she reaches for her god. It is a slow process, the way the lightning in her body grinds against her bones. Her focus narrows to the heat in the palms of her hands, and everything else fades away. Are her eyes glowing? Do her torn wings threaten to spread from her back and stretch out? Do you need me to go? she asks, and the feeling transcends language.
The warmth in her palms turns to ice, and Yasha clenches her fists.
Not yet, says a voice like thunder, and her relief is an ugly, jagged thing.
/
“I don’t think I like the ocean,” says Caduceus in a low, warbling voice.
He sits against the inside wall of the deck, back to the open water. Yasha takes off her shawl and drapes it over his shoulders the same way she did Molly when he was new to the world and nothing, not even a warm fire or a good kill, was enough to stop the trembling.
/
Between the moments of controlled chaos, skill-building, and keeping watch that come with time spent asea, Yasha often sits near Caleb during mealtimes.
He picks apart his food as meticulously as he does most things, separating it into what Yasha considers to be fairly arbitrary categories. Some days it is color; others, food group. Still others, Caleb tries different combinations, first one system and then another, pushing things around aimlessly until Yasha steps on the outer edge of his foot glancingly, just enough to get his attention, and then nods to his plate.
“Oh,” says Caleb, blinking owlishly as if from a daze. “Thank you.”
He says it in Zemnian sometimes, if the memories—because Yasha knows that look, and she knows what it looks when there are no memories to draw from, too—are particularly persistent.
He also will, on occasion, ask her questions. Magic things, usually, like Do you think healing is a kind of necromancy? or What do your wings feel like when they’re not extended?
Maybe, says Yasha, and They’re not wings, which is only a partial truth.
“Ah,” answers Caleb, looking at her carefully. “I understand.”
He doesn’t, but he wants to, and by the plodding drumbeat that her grief marches to, Yasha has come to find that those can look like the same thing if you want it badly enough.
Yasha turns back to her lukewarm oatmeal and focuses on wanting things she can have, and here in the weak morning light it is so very nearly enough.
/
They steal a ship almost by accident, but only almost.
This is the point where Yasha stops convincing herself that it matters whether they are good or not.
The Mighty Nein become pirates by every definition of the word except the ones that count, the ones that indicate any level of skill or purpose, and Yasha would laugh about it if she could only find her voice. It’s gone, like so much of the rest of her personality. She was someone’s best friend, a confidant, a hype man on the days he could convince her to put on the act, and now she’s stumbling through her own life like a drunkard, letting the edges blur, letting instinct take over when it needs to. Rage flows through her like an endless font, hot one moment and frigid the next, and accessing it is merely an extension of her grief. There are days where she says nothing at all, like a bystander in her life, her prayers echoing in her mind, but she can always fight, and she can always get angry, and she can always look around her and find a familiar face, even if it’s never the one she’s looking for.
Because ultimately, when you cut through the bullshit, it boils down to this: Molly is dead and Yasha is still here.
The rest—the glittering waves, the stale food, the damp jungle—is merely window dressing.
/
The stone of the temple chills her skin every time her arms brush against it. Beauregard is sick, or else the pallor of her skin simply shifts in the shadows, and her footsteps just ahead of Yasha echo in the empty chamber.
“Are you all right?” A voice comes from around Yasha’s waist, and she looks down to find Nott, eyes starry and intoxicated from whatever was in that fruit she and Caleb ate. “I think there are three of you.”
Fondness tugs at Yasha’s chest. She pats Nott on the head, mussing her hair a bit by accident. “I’m fine, thank you. I liked your trick, with the explosion.”
Nott brightens. “Really?” She is all doe-eyed innocence, uncontrollable chaos. A ghost in the wrong ways, a memory at a precarious slant. “I have plans for more, to make it bigger and better. Oh, the shapes around you are so pretty right now.”
“The shapes?”
“Yes, they’re all squiggly.”
“Wow,” says Yasha, fully prepared to keep indulging Nott. Hydra blood coats Yasha’s shawl, her hands, her chest. The killing blow had sprayed the viscous black liquid across her body, but still this moment acts as respite. The false guardian, dead. Her friends, largely scattered around the room turning it upside down as they look for clues.
Nott opens her mouth to speak again, but before the sound can pass from behind her sharp teeth, Fjord’s voice rings through the room. “Let’s get a move on. It’s dangerous here. And if there’s another guardian waiting to fight us, who knows how long it’s known we’re here? Better to try and catch it off guard.”
Jester and Caduceus have begun fluttering around again, triage in action as they decide in the moment who needs healing most. Yasha’s left leg is bleeding sluggishly, and her head pounds, but she knows how to look put together, to draw herself close.
They leave her be, though Caduceus catches her eye with a meaningful look. Like Molly, he sees more than he lets on. Unlike Molly, he always lets it go.
/
Avantika dies and Yasha merely tilts her head and watches it happen. While the others gasp and gape, suppress their cheers, Yasha swallows down her satisfaction that the woman is dead. She was evil, yes, and dangerous too; Yasha herself would have killed her in a heartbeat given the chance. But she was not the first dangerous thing Yasha has seen be put down like an old dog, and she likely will not be the last.
“What do you think?” asks Caleb that evening, after they have fled from the island. His gaze lands intensely upon her, pensive. He has that way about his voice that reminds Yasha of how little they all know about him, maybe Nott excluded. There are layers to him that she has not yet even begun to comprehend.
The waves beneath the boat rock them back and forth, a constant reminder of how far they are from land. This is the farthest I have ever been, Yasha had told Beauregard on a watch near Zadash. How naïve she had been then. These days, Yasha worries she will never see Xhorhas again.
She swallows back bile. “I did not like her.”
“I did not either.”
“I’m glad she’s dead. It seems mean to say that,” she adds, because the circus had taught her to be gentler with these matters, “but it’s true. I just hope we are not, well, biting off more than we can chew.”
Caleb nods. “And of this,” he says, gesturing around them. They are below-decks, but every conversation carries the implication of the sea. “What do you think of that?”
“That we are pirates?”
“Ja.”
“I think it’s badass,” she says carefully, “but I’m not used to staying in one place for so long.”
Caleb’s head tilts. “One place?” The true question sits underneath, asking of distance and motion and their new nomadic lifestyle.
“With one group for so long,” clarifies Yasha.
“Ah.”
“Yes. I should, um. Go to bed now.”
Caleb, bless him, nearly as awkward as she is, turns on his heel and leaves her there alone.
Alone.
Yasha falls to her knees gracelessly. She used to do this on mountaintops, craggy hillsides, great plains. Not a small room on a broken ship. Please, she prays, head bowed in supplication, please, tell me where to go. I don’t know where we’re going.
But Yasha has never known where she was going, not really, not even Before, and the silence swells, leaving her bereft, empty, and the word bites at her. Yasha grew up in the swamps of Xhorhas, land of monsters, land where nothing grows, and she found religion after going to hell, so reasonably this quiet should not faze her, but things surprise her all the time.
Avantika is dead and Yasha’s god has gone quiet.
Has she done something wrong? But the question is moot, and goes unanswered. The boat keeps rocking. Yasha stays on her knees with her head bowed, back bent, hands up like she is waiting for someone to hold them, but no one comes, because she is constantly asking both out loud and not to be left alone, and so of course they have done so.
Before the Sour Nest, Beauregard had taken every opportunity to cross Yasha’s boundaries, but some change is irrevocable. The old wood by the door does not creak, and Yasha continues to pray to the sky.
/
Many times throughout the journey, Fjord startles at Vandren’s name.
We all have our ghosts, a bitter part of Yasha wants to say, but then she catches a glimpse of the Summer’s Dance blade in his hand and the words go slack in her throat. If she were kind, Yasha would admit to herself, finally, that all of them lost Molly, not just her, but Yasha has never been more kind than she is honest.
“We’ll find him,” she promises instead, maybe impossible, maybe empty.
Fjord inclines his head graciously. “I hope so. He did a lot for me, and with what we know now...it would be good to see him again.”
Yasha carefully does not flinch. When is a ghost not a ghost? There’s a punchline, and it isn’t funny.
“Right,” she says instead. “And then?”
Fjord laughs sheepishly. “Hell if I know.”
“I might not stay with the group when we get back to land,” she tells him, offering her honesty like a premature olive branch.
“Oh. I mean, we’d miss you.”
Maybe they would, but then again maybe they wouldn't. Things have moved so quickly in the last few weeks, lulls at sea the only thing separating battles, revelations, and death—always death, following wherever they go. “You would see me again,” says Yasha, the only thing she can be sure of. The Stormlord, for whatever reason, wants her with this group. He has been cryptic and quiet, but clear in his message. Even if she leaves them, she will return.
“Of course,” says Fjord, with more confidence than she expected him to have. But his jaw does not waver, set in a firm line, and his mouth crooks into a smile.
“Of course,” echoes Yasha, and wonders again if she is allowed to call this family.
/
The bottom of the ocean swallows them up and spits them out with a grimace, and Yasha relishes in the rain that pelts her skin.
Finally, finally, He calls her back—
“The ritual!” yells Caleb, looking wildly around trying to meet Fjord’s eyes. “Dashilla, she must have finished it.”
“Good thing we didn’t,” answers Fjord, clawing his way back onto the ship. “Shit, we’d have been stranded.”
Their laughter is tired, a little hysterical.
Yasha squints into the storm and then shuts her eyes. Now?
A pulse fires through her stomach, so strong she nearly curls up and sinks back into the water from the force of it, nausea and strength commingling until she cannot tell one from the other. Stay, it commands.
Yasha hoists herself up over the side of the deck with an acceptance that stings like tears in her eyes.
/
“Whoa,” breathes Jester, leaning practically over the side of the ship to get a better look at the scene raging behind them. The clouds are the color of pitch. A bolt of lightning crackles against the roiling waves. The storm is fury, vengeance, an impassive passion that roars against the landscape like it hates to be contained. “That could have killed us, you guys.”
Yes, thinks Yasha, and I would have let it.
/
On their first day at sea after seizing the Mistake, Beauregard sits cross-legged on Yasha’s tiny bunk and begins fixing the wrappings on her hands. She must have been training before, even post-battle, if the flex of her hands is any indication.
“Hello,” says Yasha, too familiar with Beau by now to be bewildered by the intrusion. Above decks, their hired crew does something that makes an awful creaking sound.
Beau smirks, though it’s softer than it was when the two of them first met. Everyone has done that, Yasha realizes, changed in little ways while she wasn’t watching. “Hi. So I know we’re trying to give you space and shit, but we should probably talk about it.”
“It?” There are only a few ways this conversation can go, and Yasha doesn’t like any of her options. “I don’t think we need to—”
“Yash.”
Yasha sighs. “What?”
“Are you okay?” Again, that uncharacteristic softness that might not be uncharacteristic at all. “We got you back, and then you left, and we haven’t like, dealt with that. Ugh, I’m so bad at these conversations, I should’ve sent Nott or something.”
Yasha pauses. “I don’t think Nott would have been better.”
Beau snorts. “Yeah, okay, maybe not. For real though, it all got really fucked up.”
“Yes,” echoes Yasha. “Really fucked up is, ah, the right way to put it, I think.” That is true, but the truth is also rage, is heartache, is the kind of missing someone that you can never, ever shake. She hears Molly’s voice all the time, gesturing at her with that cocky smile and telling people This is Yasha, she’s the charm, a joke that never got old to him, like he never got old, like—
“See, you’re doing that shutting down thing you do right before you kill something, so I’m gonna go. But seriously, we should, like. I don’t know.”
“Okay,” she says, and makes no move to continue.
Beau’s head cocks. Her eyes narrow. “Okay,” she repeats slowly, as if waiting for something, but Yasha doesn’t know what Beau is hoping for, or how to give it over.
The trick of it is that Yasha is never going to be the one that’s good at this. When Beau evidently gives up and slides gracefully from the bed, when she saunters out the door with an awkward, too jaunty, “See you at dinner,” Yasha lets her, and the cramped room goes quiet again.
Why are you still here? Beau hadn’t asked, and so Yasha asks herself.
I like these people, they’re good people, chirps Molly’s voice in her head, needling at her, poking at her side until she cracks a smile and agrees. When she looks out the porthole in her room, the light on the water reminds her of the way his jewelry caught the sunshine, always a spectacle. He was the center of attention, and of her world. He was all glamor and no grit and she misses him, gods, she misses him.
After he died, Yasha walked for days on end without food, without water. What she needed to stay alive, the Stormlord provided, an irony that she failed to catch on account of the building sob in her chest.
I want to go home, she remembers thinking over and over, desperate like a wounded animal. But Xhorhas was only barely home, and Zadash would call her traitor. Alfield was still recovering from the gnoll attack, the circus was defunct, Shady Creek Run would know her fury well before it knew her love…
Yasha walked for a long time before she stopped. And by the time she looked up from her feet to find her friends, slack-faced with surprise, staring back at her, she had made her way to Nicodranas, which was not home at all.
But that was where she paused, and the respite could have been sweet in the light had she chosen to see it that way.
There is not a lot of space to walk on a ship.
For the better, Yasha thinks, even as the claustrophobia raises bumps on her arms.
They are sometimes good people, but not always, she imagines saying to Molly, to his dancing red eyes and cheeky grin, to his devil-may-care attitude and jangling jewelry, to his cheeks that she would literally kill to cup in her palms one more time if only it would stop him dying— and they feel more like home than anything ever has.
Yasha stands from the tiny desk chair and plants her feet on the wood, the old wood, hears it creak and groan beneath her feet. Later that night, she will pray. For now, she walks up to the deck, grabs some rope, and learns to make herself useful.