Work Text:
Beau didn't know whether she had the pack bond or her own insecurities to thank, but the fact remained that it was one in the morning, she had work tomorrow, and she was wide awake staring at the ceiling while missing Yasha and trying to convince herself she hadn't done something wrong.
Yasha had told her, right, in the aftermath of everything. Around the time the seasons changed, she would be all wolf for a day or two - not the wolf Beau usually knew her as, but something feral and outside of the rules and personality that usually inhabited her, with fur or without. Beau understood it on a fundamental level, knew it was one of the layers to what had happened that night.
Just. Yasha hadn't said anything about being distant and distracted leading up to running off, was all, and for Beau the last two days had been the spitting image of a pattern she knew all too well. Everything was fine when she met someone, and a few months in, they just…faded. Stopped engaging, always looked like they needed to be somewhere else, made excuses when she reached out to try and meet up.
Her mom had asked once, presumably in good faith, if Beau had ever considered what the common denominator might be in all of those friendships ceasing suddenly. Beau didn't have to ask. Not only did she know it, she'd spent a portion of every paycheck for two years on the therapy it had taken her to learn how to walk it back and stop blaming herself for other people's actions.
But with Yasha missing, she just ached. Tonight was not a good night, and those strategies felt far away.
What Beau had also learned from therapy was that if she couldn't sleep, it was best not to keep trying to force herself. She should read a book or something, literally anything besides lying here ruminating. But it was hard when the bed was cold - or more precisely, lacking the ludicrous amounts of heat Yasha's body put off in human or wolf form. The subtraction of it amounted to the same thing, really.
Fuck it.
Beau wiggled blindly into one of Yasha's oversized t-shirts and pulled her door open to peer down the hall. Her heart gave a little squeeze of relief when she saw the stripe of light that indicated Jester was still awake.
She knocked on her door in the special way they had, and Jester called "come in!" before she'd even finished. Smiling, Beau pushed it open and poked her head in. Jester was sitting cross-legged on her bed with her sketchbook in her lap and her open computer at the end of arm's reach, which meant she was talking to their other insomniac. "Hey Jester," said Beau. "And hey Caleb." She crawled up beside Jester as she scooted over to make room and adjust the screen so they were both in range of the camera. It might bother Beau in other circumstances, to be on video with sleep hair and ratty lounge clothes, but aside from the fact that she trusted Caleb and their group of friends with her life, she had no fears about being teased by a man who considered a snuggie to be clothes.
"Beauregard," Caleb greeted, looking perpetually tired but cheerful enough. He looked her over in kind, and she saw him come quickly to the correct conclusion that Beau plus Jester plus late night equaled something he'd be more comfortable hearing about later if needed. "It has been a while since I've seen you this late," he said, stroking the head of the cat draped asleep around his shoulders. "I was actually thinking of turning in soon."
Beau smiled. "No you weren't. But I did want to talk to Jester." Just to rib him, she added, "unless you wanted to stick around while we talk about feelings?" It was an offer she knew he would refuse, and he did not let her down.
"I am here if you need me, as you know." She did know, as well as she knew he would check in with her next time she saw him with three words or fewer. "Meanwhile, I will talk to you two tomorrow, ja?"
"Ja," Jester and Beau returned simultaneously, grinning at his tiny eye roll. They returned his wave and Jester shut her laptop, sighing.
Beau bumped her head against Jester's arm and leaned up a little to look properly at the sketchbook open in her lap. "Whatcha drawing?"
Jester looked down at the work, face clouding a little. "Garbage," she said bitterly. "I need to stop looking at it tonight for real." Beau squinted again at the page. As ever, it looked pretty flawless to her. "I can't get the expression right," Jester explained. "And I've been staring at it so long that I don't even remember what it's supposed to look like."
Beau snorted, sitting up and giving Jester room to pack up. "I think I know what you mean." She flopped back onto the bed and stared at the ceiling as Jester gathered her supplies and computer to set them on the bottom shelf of the night stand before turning off the lamp. Beau was already feeling a little better, which was the point, but she also knew that to come into Jester's room late was to invite her concern. That was alright - Jester never made her talk, and that made it easier somehow to do it. "It hasn't been just you and me in a while," Beau noted suddenly.
Jester waved a hand, dim in the light of her unicorn nightlight, and burrowed under the blankets next to Beau. "That's okay. I really like having Yasha too."
"Yeah," said Beau, smiling. She'd never stop being glad for the easy way Yasha had become part of their dynamic, the fact that it only seemed to add good things and left no room for jealousy or resentment.
Jester's pillow rustled as she turned on her side to look at Beau. "Do you miss her?"
Beau took in Jester's earnest face and reached out to scratch just lightly at the base of her horn. She knew that Jester knew she only touched people unprompted when she was nervous, but it was a peaceful kind of understanding. "I do," Beau said finally. She turned her eyes back to the ceiling. "And it's been a while since I missed anybody." She took a deep breath. "It's ah…bringing up some bad stuff. The usual, you know, so I just. Thanks for letting me come sleep in here with you."
Jester mock scowled at her. "Beau," she said severely. "You are literally always invited to come and snuggle me, with or without Yasha."
Beau smiled, and it was a real one. "I know. And thanks."
"Did you want to talk about it?"
Beau rubbed gently at the spot where Jester's horn met her head, considering. "I don't know," she said. "It's just that when she said the wandering made her kind of wild, I guess I didn't really know what that meant or the right questions to follow up with."
"She was acting so weird yesterday," Jester said. "All spacey, like she wasn't all the way here. It must be kind of scary for her, to feel like she's going away every few months."
Beau hadn't thought about it like that. "Yeah, I guess that's true."
Jester's head tilted to look at Beau more closely. "You were kind of quiet all day too," she said. "Were you still awake because of anxiety?"
Beau loved the way Jester pronounced the word 'anxiety' like the foreign concept it was for her, loved even more the effort Jester was always putting in to understand it and other related words so she could better help Beau and Caleb and pretty much anything that moved. "Definitely," Beau said. "I know she wants to be around me and there's an explanation, but. You know."
Jester brightened. "Want me to tell you why your anxiety is bullshit?"
Beau's mouth quirked - this was a game they used to play almost nightly, back when Beau's thoughts were uncontained and incessant. She was pleased to realize how long it had been since it had been necessary. "Sure."
"Okay," said Jester. "Come here." Beau sighed in mock resignation and let Jester pull her onto her side so that she was held in a warm hug and their limbs were all tangled. That was part of the game, that Beau had to be wrapped up like this before digging through her thoughts. And it was an excellent rule - Beau hadn't realized she was still a little tense until she felt it ease a moment later. Gods bless Jester and her tactile nature. "Okay okay," said Jester. "Give me a bad thought to smash."
"Hmm." Beau took a moment to push through the reflexive impulse to crack a joke instead and pulled one up. "It feels like I did something wrong," she said slowly, "and I won't find out until someone's angry."
"Oh, that one again." Jester's hand was rubbing Beau's back a little, and it made her smile that she probably wasn't even aware she was doing it. "Well," Jester declared. "Yasha would never get mad at you and she would tell you if something was wrong. Remember when you made those cookies with the salt and sugar backwards?"
Beau laughed a little. "It was two weeks ago, so yes." But the reminder was solid: Yasha was a straightforward person in a way Beau envied. A lot like Jester, really. She said what she thought - which in that case, had been more of a very communicative facial expression.
"More?" said Jester into the dark.
Beau blew out a breath. "Just one, I think. Big one."
"I like smashing those the best. Give it to me."
She waited patiently for Beau to put her voice to the worst of it, to the shadow that lay at the heart of things tonight. "What if she really is losing interest?" Beau said. It felt wrong even as thought became sound, which was a perplexing mix of validating and embarrassing. She pressed on, determined to expose the thought completely to the cold light of day - so to speak. "If she were, how would I be able to tell to fix it if not for knowing the pattern?"
Jester's answer was immediate and dry. "Beau, you are literally in the middle of buying a house together. With the money you guys got from like a bunch of people who hated Obann, who is dead. Because he tried to make Yasha hurt you, and she killed him instead."
Beau blinked. "Damn. You didn't even have to think about that one."
"It was about Yasha," Jester said. "That means it's easy. Also." She shifted to pull back and look at Beau, which was a line she didn't usually cross with this exercise. The nightlight shimmered, a gleam of eyeshine like Yasha's as Beau waited, more curious than embarrassed. "Do you seriously think anything about Yasha would fit a pattern?"
Beau burrowed close again, feeling that familiar and strange mix of relief and the final gasp of "what if" that liked to undercut it before shutting off. "No," she mumbled into Jester's shirt.
"No," Jester agreed. She hugged Beau and rested her sharp chin on her head. "Anything else?" she said after minute or so of contented silence.
"Just the tiny ones that don't bother me all that much. You pretty much killed it."
Jester preened. "I always do."
Beau smiled and spent another moment just drifting in the relative quiet that filled her mind after this game they played together. "It's going to be weird when we move," she said. "I'm going to miss you."
Jester snorted. "I'm going to be coming over and spending the night like all the time," she promised. "And we'll have all of our holiday parties at your house now, since Veth's is so small."
"Huh," said Beau. "I guess that's true." Her chest was doing something warm and gooey and strange at the thought. "We'll buy a bunch of baking stuff just so you can use it when you come over," she added, smiling.
"I'll just use what I'm giving you for Christmas," Jester said. "That's why I bought it."
Now Beau laughed for real. "You're not supposed to tell what you got us!"
Jester giggled. "I didn't tell you all of it," she protested.
"There's more?" Beau gasped and shook her shoulder gently, voice playful and urgent. "Did you get me a pony?"
Jester shushed her, laughter still in her whisper. "I think it's time to go to sleep."
"That's dodging the question," Beau whispered back. "You totally got me a pony." Smiling, she held on to Jester's hand and pulled back a little to get in her usual sleeping position. She could already feel the tiredness that had been pushing at the corners of her thoughts beginning to bleed through now that her mind was clear. Jester rolled onto her back with a huge yawn and squeezed Beau's hand.
"I'm glad you came in tonight."
"Me too," Beau said. "You're the best friend I could ever ask for, you know that?"
"It's true," Jester agreed. "And don't you forget it."
Beau's mind drifted deeper this time as she lay still. She wondered what Yasha was doing, how far she'd gone. She imagined a sprawling pine forest covered in snow, a huge white wolf running between the branches without a care in the world. It gladdened her to think of Yasha running free, the ache of wondering if she would come back diminished to almost nothing by her time with Jester. Yasha would be back tomorrow, probably - when they woke up, or maybe she'd turn up to say hi at the library, or come back in time for dinner. All of the possibilities were good, and Beau fell asleep warm and comfortable, smiling softly.