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Yasha's rage leaves her when she needs it most. There's an inevitability to what she's seeing, a sort of closed loop. Beau managed once to escape death by Yasha's hands - how foolish was she, to think that meant Beau couldn't be taken from her at all? Yasha's love is a poison, and she'd fallen hard when Beau was at her sickest and most vulnerable.
And now Beau is the split second between the moment of impact, the crack of stone and Jester's duplicate mirroring her caster's face. Beau is the consequence of what's nearly a direct hit, a toss of the horns as the beast tramples past, and when the dust clears, Beau is.
She's.
She was just here.
Yasha's failed her, and there's no rage in her to dull the force of comprehension or to make it right in any way. There's just her, staring dumbly at a pile of rubble far too similar to the one in her chest.
The rage must be in Caleb. She hears him now, his cry of fury and anguish in the language that transcends translation and lodges in her chest as surely as her ears. At least someone has the ability to do something about this. Yasha's eyes stay fixed ahead, sword dragging the sand as she staggers over to Beau - to the scattered stone - and in her mind she hears the tip scraping over an echoing chantry floor. Beau's gone, wiped out by Yasha's heart where her hands had failed.
There's enough of her present to watch where she puts her knees when they give out. Do no more harm, not to Beau. The impact of the drop jars up her spine, but it's not enough to wake her. How inexplicably right it is, that only now with Beau shattered before her can Yasha allow herself to stroke that cold, hard cheek.
Zuala. Molly. These hands are made for death. That Beau should be motionless and stiff under her trembling touch, the only one of their bodies she gets to say any goodbye to - that someone who struggled so hard to survive should go never knowing what she was up against, that it's Yasha's fault...
Jester's here now, Nott too and Caleb on her heels. "We're going to fix her. We have to." Jester's voice cracks but holds firm, and Yasha doesn't have the heart to tell her that this is one thing she won't be able to will into existence with her divine words and her faith. When Jester speaks, the universe listens, but fate is not as charmed by Jester as it is ruthless in enacting Yasha's unending punishment.
Yasha shouldn't be here.
She can't be here.
She's not sure of the difference, but before she can pull herself up on numb legs, there's a hand on her shoulder and she looks up to find Fjord glaring down at her, breathing hard. He says nothing, just watches her with eyes that see through her urge to flee and shame her in place. It's what she needs, maybe the only thing more powerful than the grief choking her from chest to throat.
"That's part of her shoulder," says Jester. "Give me."
"It kind of looks like her hip," says Nott. "Are you sure?"
Yasha's hands itch to reach out again; she touches Fjord's hand on her shoulder and deposits her meager healing so she can't be tempted to touch and make it all worse. He says nothing still, just squeezes her shoulder a little too tightly.
Putting Beau together feels like it should be frantic, but the minute it takes Jester to pull pieces together and will them into painstaking shape makes everything slow and soupy.
Just stop, Yasha murmurs, but she blinks a moment later to find her mouth hasn't moved and isn't certain what to do with the pang of relief.
"I'm going to help Caduceus," says Fjord, voice low and husky. "He shouldn't be alone right now. Yasha, I think you need to come with me. They're not going anywhere."
Steel in his voice, but not at Yasha. It should be at Yasha. It's grief she's hearing, the tightness of hope and disbelief simultaneously. It's also an out, and Fjord's maybe the only one she'll listen to right now. He's the only one willing to hold her accountable for the things she's done to them all. Nott may joke and play both sides of doubt, but for Fjord she will actually have to prove herself trustworthy.
She's not, but she finds her feet anyway and does what she does best. Yasha walks away.
But it's a walk, not a run, and for the first time she breaks a personal rule to pause at the edge of the sand and look over her shoulder. She's so bad at talking to the Stormlord. So bad at asking for anything, of finding herself deserving of his presence in the first place, let alone his boon- his favor.
It's not for her, she tells herself. The wordless, aching prayer she sends in the direction of the gray clouds above is all for Beau. Let her live, and Yasha will do what Beau didn't. Beau had it all wrong. The Nein will be so much poorer for her absence. It's Yasha who has to go, Yasha whose presence threatens holds them back.
She loves them all, you see, it's just that it's Beau she loves to death.
Time passes and things happen. There are more firbolgs now, and Yasha's not so far gone that she can't offer Caduceus a smile when she happens to catch his eye. He doesn't smile back, seems caught between the family he's been missing for ten years and the fact of Yasha, like she's somehow equal. Like she deserves the consideration. She almost turns away, but she understands Caduceus on some strange level enough to catch herself at the last second and avoid alerting him to further investigation.
"Guys, I think we've got her!"
And Jester's voice should be Yasha's cue to start walking, shouldn't it, that surge of hope in her throat so painful as to render her completely without breath. Her lungs have been empty since the day she woke to Molly's grave, so it's startling in a distant way to understand that to lose air meant she must have regained some.
She hovers at the edge of the huddle around Beau - the thing that could be Beau again - this almost whole statue with its chips and cracks and fists jutting up from the ground. One's whole and one's repaired as best as it can be; Caleb's holding that one in his hands and keeping it from snapping under its own weight. Propping up pieces of Beau as he's done for a long time now.
Yasha looks at her empty hands and wishes there was some way she could help, immediately curses herself for the thought. She's done so much more than enough.
"Go on." Fjord's voice is soothing, eyes fixed on Jester and whole body angled to Beau. "You can do it, Jes. We all know you can. Beau too."
You can't, Yasha thinks, but her heart's going crazy and the voice is very small. She's not even certain it's her own. It's all still too fresh, hard to tell yet what's hers and what's echoes of his.
And then Jester's hands glow where they join the big crack along Beau's torso, nearly invisible with the force she's exerting as everyone works to hold one Beauregard Lionett in a single piece long enough for her to come back and take over the effort. There's a metaphor in there somewhere, but Yasha's never been good at those.
It's almost anticlimactic. Gray stone turns to color like dawn filling in the shadows of night, and at the first jump of soft flesh under Jester's hands Yasha takes a deep breath and steels herself to walk away. Don't look at Beau's face, at the relief that'll be there - which looks like anger, as most things do. Don't sneak one more glance at those eyes. Just go.
Just go.
One more look won't kill either of them. Probably.
Or maybe it will, because when she flicks her eyes to Beau's face - weak, Yasha's always so fucking weak - she sees the only possible thing that would change her plans on the spot.
It's not relief on Beau's face. Not even under the guise of anger. The rest of the Nein are staring at her body and looking for fissures - there's one entire second where Beau is alive and nobody but Yasha can see her. One moment before the lights come all the way on, one fracture in time where the look on her face is unguarded and raw. It's not relief. It's not even self-deprecation, that reflexive urge Beau has to put herself down.
It's…disappointment. The exhausted expression of someone woken from a rest they'd been looking forward to, only Beau hadn't been going to sleep. For all intents and purposes, she'd been dying.
The expression is gone before Jester sits up to beam at her, replaced with a tiny smile and a grimace when she starts moving. That too vanishes, and then she's on her feet and breathing and Yasha can't help but think as she takes in the way she holds herself that Beau seems harder now somehow than she had when she was stone.
Caleb's spotted it too, lifts his hand high when everyone's done hugging her and shrugs when Beau squints at him. "As a congratulations for not dying. Come on, just a little one."
She doesn't stop squinting at him, but she does return his high five. All of Yasha's alarm bells go off as she watches - the way Beau's arm seems to hit an invisible ceiling somewhere around her shoulder, the way it makes her wince in a way she can't hide. She recovers on a dime, spins on a back foot before anyone can think what to say and nails Caleb's hand with a high kick and a triumphant grin.
("Ow," he says, but it's quiet in the way nobody's meant to hear and so nobody replies.)
"What?" Beau rolls her shoulders (right one halting halfway through) and pins everyone but Yasha with a scowl. "I'm just stiff. Fucker made me a statue, locked up all my shit. Give me a minute to stretch."
Fjord steps forward and glances over her. "That fucker made you a jigsaw puzzle. Quit acting tough and give me your arm."
He reaches, and Yasha suspects that only the fact of him looking so harried prompts Beau to duck away rather than hit him and prove just how fine she is. "Yeah and last I saw, you looked like a gross soup. So maybe talk to Caduceus and let me figure my shit out. Wait." She looks around, eyes noting Yasha before bouncing off across the beach. "Where is Caduceus?"
She pushes through the group gathered round with a squeeze of thanks to Jester's bicep, and Fjord trades glances with Caleb before they start to follow.
None of them but Beau have noticed Yasha there, unmoving, but Beau's all it takes. She couldn't go now if she wanted to, and - weak, guilty - she never really wanted to. Yasha falls in behind them, her chest a mix of guilt and anxiety and joy and the image of Beau's resignation stamped behind her eyes.
"You have to let me get a good look," Jester's saying from her position at Beau's shoulder in front. "I need to know I got it all right in case we have to do that again for Caduceus."
"You did great, Jes. I know what you're trying to do and I'm fine, so save it for someone that needs it." Yasha watches her flick those keen eyes over Jester and soften as she always does, when it's her - they way they all do. "You know I trust you with my life. Thanks for using your miracle stuff on me."
The thanks is the biggest red flag Yasha's seen yet and Beau's made no secret of the value she doesn't place on her life, but Jester brightens as intended and falls right for hearing what she needs. Yasha can't blame her, not when Beau's being as sincere as she is deflecting attention. She's so good at nailing some ephemeral balance - if Yasha hadn't been through the shit she has, it would escape her notice entirely. But she notices the way Beau takes herself out of the center of attention because it's something she does effortlessly that Yasha's been trying to master for years.
"Aww, of course! I'm really glad you're not dead, Beau."
It's like looking at a mask - all of Beau's features make the right shapes for a smile, but her eyes are a million miles away. "Thanks to you."
Two weeks isn't long enough for Yasha to have forgotten the feeling of her eyes opening every morning against her will, the silent scream as her body lifted itself according to the command of someone else and held her fast until she stopped being able to tell what was her will and what wasn't. That pull, that friction between wanting to take her own body out of his ability to command and the knowledge it wouldn't matter…it scares her, seeing that same split second of vacancy in Beau's bright blue eyes.
Looking at her now, you wouldn't know there was anything to see if you weren't looking. Yasha's looking.
It's with an odd pull of pain and relief that she sees Caleb looking too, and it turns to anxiety when he says something quietly to Nott and Fjord and drops back to walk beside Yasha. His words are soft, but tone does little to cushion their impact. "You see it too."
Yasha nods, stares at the sand turning to undergrowth as they approach Caduceus and two others. "Something is wrong."
They look up in tandem as Beau makes a joking, derisive sort of sound in response to something Nott's said and chases off after her. She runs like anyone else would, which is to say completely different than the loose-limbed, almost preternatural sort of grace that normally propels her forward.
"I fear she was broken before the stone." Caleb's eyes finally pull from Beau and Nott to find Yasha's. "If I am right, this is not the sort of thing Jester or Caduceus can help."
He's almost always right; Yasha swallows something thick and sour and says, "Why are you telling me this?"
"Because you and I understand that it cannot be this way." He says it so simply that for a moment, it seems no easier or harder than just this - there is a fault line running through Beau that goes deeper than they realized, and it matters not at all whether her family or the gorgon has wrenched it open. It must close.
But Yasha thinks of the very vivid fissure running through the middle of Beau's chest, too, and again something clenches in her. "Everyone that I…care about," she murmurs, plaintive. "They die."
"Everyone dies regardless of who cares for them or how much." It's a mark of his concern that he speaks so sharply, and he seems to realize it as he takes a long inhale through his nose and squares his shoulders. "I don't wish to downplay your losses, Yasha. I feel I carry curses of my own - perhaps we all do. But that is twice you have lost someone you… cared for, and now twice Beauregard has returned from the brink because of your actions." They stop walking a few feet from where Jester is restoring a fourth firbolg and rests his hand on her forearm. "I saw you shield her from Obann with your body, and I saw her face when you spoke up after the witch. Consider that perhaps the field is more even than you think, and if you cannot, consider instead the possibility of your curse against the certainty of her loss if you had not been there."
Caleb is not capable of undoing these years of heartbreak with just a few words. This doesn't go away in a moment, doesn't shrink the balloon in her chest.
But.
It does stop expanding, even if for a moment as she takes his advice and considers. Not what he said, exactly, though she will chew on it later - Yasha thinks about what it could mean to face her past for the first time as something to be wielded and not endured. What it might mean to recognize the dullness in Beau's eyes and try for her to remove it in the way she can't manage for herself just yet. Beau doesn't need her, is likely in danger so long as Yasha is here and so utterly helpless to look anywhere else, to stop seeing so much of her.
But danger is where Beau will be found whether or not Yasha is here, and now she's hurt to an extent nobody can be certain of. Not helpless - never helpless, not Beau - but cracked on the inside as certainly as she had been on the outside. Yasha's no good at putting pieces back together, certainly no good at words that help instead of harm, but she's very good and getting better at wrecking what tries to hurt these people - up to and including her own body. So maybe she focuses on paving Beau's road to recovery for now, on joining the others in leveling the ground for her to walk on rather than offering a bloodstained and untrustworthy hand to someone who sees herself as such a liability already. She can't take the rejection personally if she comes at this in a way that doesn't require acceptance.
"I will do my best," she says, and it's the truth even if it doesn't feel like quite enough.
Caleb's face breaks into one of those non-smiles, the loosening of the grip he keeps on his sorrow that only ever occurs for the sake of someone else. "You are always doing your best. I am only asking that you stay in our vicinity. You were apart from us for your first two losses, alone in many ways. Let us be here to help you prevent the third."
He's so very like Beau, able to take something foregone and twist it into a shape recognizable as potential. Yasha can only nod, look out to where Beau is rotating her shoulder absently as she watches Nott fiddling with something shiny. She thinks of Jester and all the ways she bends reality without even trying, of gods and the way they see things inside of people before they're real. She looks around at the three extra firbolgs free of their stone prisons, of the brand of a scar on the back of her neck and the beautiful burden that is choice.
Maybe, just maybe, there are forces in the world greater than the ones weighing on her own shoulders. "Stranger things have happened," she murmurs finally. "I'm willing to try."