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Jester never expected there could be a cost to loving people.
In the depths of a dungeon guarded by the animated dead and angels of stone, Jester snaps out her whip to drag Yasha to safety. It's a clumsy, desperate attempt, and doomed to failure before it begins. The whip doesn’t even make it through the gap in the doors, to the woman who was her friend, her dear friend, one of her best and only friends in the whole world.
All Jester had ever really wanted was friends. Growing up, she would chatter incessantly to a gaggle of imaginary fellow children, drawn life-sized on her walls, their adventures splashed around her bedroom in bright, primary colors. She’d thought the Traveler was one of those imaginary friends, at first, willed into true life through her own iron determination for companionship.
Sometimes, late at night, she still wondered if there might be truth to that.
But then… but then there came the Mighty Nein. Jester had never had so many friends, such good, dear friends. But oh, they were people who’d suffered so much, whose eyes held such sadness. They were in luck; Jester had always known how to make people laugh. She knew just how to cheer her Momma up, to clear the weariness and worry from her beautiful face. Jester learned to do the same with her new friends. She studied them, and she plotted ways to make them smile, make them laugh. She succeeded, of course. She was good at this. And then she had six friends, six whole friends in the world.
Of course, there could have been seven.
In her memory, purple hands danced, red eyes sparkled. Jester teased Molly in Infernal, an inside joke, a gift. Molly laughed, head thrown back in merriment, reveling in the joy and the joke and the moment.
That was the first time Jester had learned the cost of love. Molly’s death taught her that friends carve places for themselves within your heart, which form perfect seams along which to crack.
In the bowels of the Sour Nest, Jester’s hands were bound. Her mind, wild with terror, reached out for her god, her childhood playmate and confidant. The Traveler did not answer. Instead, Yasha’s melodic voice whispered through the darkness, a soothing balm, cutting even through the rattle of chains. She promised Jester they would get out of there. She promised that either they would break out, or their friends would come for them. Their friends. And Yasha had been right.
Yasha, dear Yasha. Tall, and strong, and solemn, but with an occasional twinkle of good humor in the corners of her eyes that called to Jester like a siren’s song. It told her this was a person who could appreciate a joke. A woman who didn’t laugh, rarely smiled, but loved her friends’ happiness, whether she thought she should be able to participate or not.
Jester painted her a field of flowers to wake up to every morning.
“Avenge me,” Obann’s last request is all for Yasha; a final smirk stretches across his dissipating lips.
“Never.” Yasha’s response is swift and fierce, and Jester’s heart swells with love for her.
But then, Yasha freezes. Her pupils contract; her face goes blank. Ice shoots through Jester’s veins.
And Yasha turns, and swings at Nott with her sword.
“We don’t have time for you to be controlled!” Jester shrieks at Yasha, throwing a charm spell without a twinge of conscience. It does nothing to dislodge the manic grin plastered across Yasha’s face. A mask, a horrific twisted facade of the person Jester knew. The woman who collected flowers for her dead wife, who had holes in her memory as deep and dark as graves.
Jester runs from this stranger.
With trembling fingers Nott shoves a flower into Yasha’s hand, tiny and pink and perfect, and follows Jester.
But Yasha chases, sword flashing with menace.
Beau pulls the knife from the statue of the angel weeping blood, a macabre key. The doors begin to swing closed, their grinding across the floor a sullen warning. The Mighty Nein have only seconds. They must get out, or risk being locked in the room with the behemoth of laughing wounds and flashing teeth… and with Yasha.
Jester looks back and forth between her charging friend and the closing doors, frustration and revulsion at what she must do colliding in her mind, filling it with static.
“Snap out of it Yasha!” Jester’s scream is barely coherent. Yasha’s cold, uncaring eyes tell her staying behind would be suicide.
Jester turns, and runs for the exit. She slides through the doors, a bleeding Caduceus grasping at her hands to pull her through. Yasha slashes at her from behind with deadly intent, and misses.
There is yelling, and running, and so much blood. Nott slides through the doors right after Jester. Fire erupts from within the room; one by one the rest of her friends leap and limp and squeeze through the closing doors.
All her friends but Yasha.
Jester can barely see through her tears; her last-ditch effort to pull Yasha through with the whip is a failure. She has one last chance to shake Yasha from this thing that grips her, from whatever had awoken the blind savagery that turned steadfast, quiet Yasha into an enemy. A sob tears from Jester’s throat, a ragged cry born of horror and naked desperation, and she stretches out a pleading hand.
“Yasha!”
Nott’s crumpled flower falls from Yasha’s grasp as she adjusts her grip on her sword, readying it for a swing. Her teeth are bared in a terrible smile.
And the doors close.
And another piece of Jester’s heart cracks, and falls, and shatters.