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Yasha has nightmares now.
Every night, when the air is cool and still, and all around her are sunk deep in their own sleep, lost in their own dreams. Every night, the horrors find her.
These are not visions. The Stormlord is not here with her in this, nor is any other god she knows.
These are born of her own subconscious, of the things she remembers, and the things she doesn’t quite. The memories that hover at the edges of her mind sometimes, just out of reach.
She doesn’t want to reach those ones. She’s too scared. More scared than she had been since the day they took Zuala from her. More scared than she knew she could be, any more. When the very worst thing has already happened, there’s nothing left to be scared of. And for a while she never was.
Until Obann. Until the Laughing Hand. Until the Nein left her, closed her in, down there in the dark, so that she couldn’t hurt them any more. Until she lost track of what was and wasn’t her own mind, her own will. Until she lost herself. Again.
She wakes in the night, over and over and over again. Sometimes she’s screaming, drenched in cold, sticky sweat. Sometimes she shakes so hard her teeth rattle and her bones feel like they might tear apart.
The ones that end in screams wake the others. She knows they do. The first time they were all on their feet before she could stop them, weapons drawn and spells at the ready. She doesn’t know, even now, if they were ready to defend her or to defend themselves from her.
“I’m sorry,” she says, over and over, as each fresh horror fades, leaving only a sick sort of shame. She has swung at whoever was with her once or twice, before the fog of sleep had fully cleared, and now they all know to wait just out of her range. She’s glad of that.
“I’m sorry,” she said when she found her way back to them. When they found her.
“I’m sorry,” she remembers saying to Beauregard, a lifetime ago, deep under a well in Asarius, when a succubus tried to take her mind, tried to make her hurt them. When she thought that was as bad as it could get.
The first time that it’s Beau with her when she wakes, she finds she can barely remember how to speak.
It’s been Jester before, a lot. Caduceus, too. Sometimes one or another of the others. She wants to tell them they don’t have to. She wants to tell them that they can leave her here with her nightmares. That she deserves this. She wants to be strong enough to leave them, so that she doesn’t risk hurting them again.
But Yasha’s a coward. She has always been a coward, and she’s a coward still.
So she stays, and she screams, and they’re there with her, the Mighty Nein, her friends, when she wakes.
And then there’s Beau. Beau who can’t look at her, who turns away instead of catching Yasha’s eye. Beau who wears her discomfort in every line of her body, in every single movement she makes around Yasha now.
In her darkest moments, Yasha thinks that maybe this was her punishment. For caring. For wanting. For summoning all the limited courage she briefly dreamed she might have to tell Beau that she saw her. The people Yasha cares for are taken from her - first Zuala, then Mollymauk, and then all the Nein and even though she got them back, it’s different now. Jester said they’d be her family, and she wanted that. She wanted it more than she’d admitted to herself, before.
And now… she doesn’t know. They’re with her still. They haven’t left her, and she can’t leave them. She doesn’t know what that means.
There’s a dim silver light by the window, where the moon shines through the gap in the shutters. Yasha focuses on that light, tries to slow her breathing from ragged gasps, tries to unclench her fists, to still herself. She tries.
And then she realises that it’s Beauregard, here with her. That Beau is beside her bed, just a little closer than is really wise. Calm, steady breaths that Yasha mimics with her own.
Yasha wants, still. Even after everything, she isn’t cured of this wanting. She wants and she hurts and she’s so very, very afraid, and she doesn’t know how to contain all of that together.
Beau isn’t looking at her, and somehow that helps. Yasha thinks that if Beau met her eyes right now, she might break. All the things that make her, whatever those are any more, might fly to pieces under Beau’s gaze. Yasha doesn’t want Beau to see her. Not now. Not like this.
But Beau is here, in this room, and they’re neither of them leaving, and that’s… good. It’s enough.
Steady breaths, steady heartbeat.
Beau stays until Yasha falls asleep.