Work Text:
It is light, in the Alps. Summer's settled soft around them, and they spend hours in the open air, up between the mountains, as Ava runs across water and smashes rocks to shreds. They sit beside lakes, and hike up hills, and walk dusty roads in the sun.
It's lighter, Beatrice thinks, than she's ever really known. Not because of the weather, or the season, or even the specific light in the mountains that nowhere else can really match. She's seen a dozen bright summers, felt this warmth on her skin before.
It's lighter, she thinks, because she's spent so much of her life living in the shadows. Not just the dark of convent halls, the peculiar dimness of church, but the shadow of hiding, of never breathing free, never living as she truly was. The shadow of her parents' disapproval and the fear of what would happen if anyone else in the church found out she was... the way she was.
The shadow of constraints, of careful boundaries, of keeping half of herself locked away in the dimness.
Some people call it a closet; Beatrice built a vault, and never let anyone have the key. Not even Mary, not even Shannon, who loved each other someway Beatrice never fully knew, but always guessed. To tell someone who might be like her was still too terrifying, too far, too much. Her parents' words would echo in her head, and she would look away and pretend she didn't see the ways she could be like them. Because she didn't want to be something she'd been taught she should hate.
Only... then there was Ava. Ava, all badly-timed jokes and a free-running spirit, and she could talk to her, somehow. Could tell her.
What you are is beautiful.
So here, in the Alps, with Ava; Ava who knows, Ava who didn't flinch away, Ava who called her beautiful. Here, she feels like it could be true. Here, she hates herself a little less.
Here, she's taken a step out of the shadows.
So that's the sunlight, too. Being a little more herself. And then there's the sunlight in Ava's smile, her laughter, her bad jokes and the way she never really stays still.
Ava's a living ray of sunshine, and Beatrice wants to spend her whole life in that glow.
That's something she doesn't say. Something she still keeps to the shadows. It's one thing to hate herself a little less, and quite another to feel... to feel for Ava beyond what she's meant to, beyond protection, beyond friendship.
Worse, Ava's acceptance, Ava's care, might not extend that far, and losing this is unfathomable. So Beatrice keeps all thoughts of that smile locked up tight.
Only here they are this evening, sitting at the edge of the lake, the sun just starting to dip below the mountains. Ava's limned in hazy orange-yellow light, arms bare, hair damp because she still can't make it all the way across the water, clothes clinging to her body. Beatrice tries not to look, not to watch her. It's one thing to get caught on that smile, quite another to observe the shape of her below the fabric, to imagine... to imagine things she is not going to imagine, not now, not ever, not about her best friend.
She swallows down the half-formed thoughts and looks out across the lake, as Ava says something about heading back, heading home.
'Home', so casually, like she's found her place here, with Beatrice, the bar, the mountains. Beatrice can't say the same. The OCS is her home. Her sisters are. But she'd be lying if she said she didn't like it here, didn't half-wish she could make this home instead, out here with Ava.
“Let's stay a little longer,” Beatrice finds herself saying before she really thinks. Maybe the closeness of their apartment feels too much, right now, with the bed they've shared after Ava laughed at Beatrice trying to take the couch. (After Beatrice worried Ava would read into her rejection and think the awkwardness something more. Or that's what she tells herself, anyway. Better than admitting it was entirely too easy to agree to something she wanted so much.)
Ava laughs. “Sister Beatrice, suggesting we do nothing for a while? Are you sick? Have you been replaced?”
Beatrice rolls her eyes and nudges Ava lightly with her elbow. “Shush. It's beautiful out here.”
“No arguments.”
Ava flops on her back in the grass and closes her eyes, and Beatrice watches the play of the sinking sun on her skin, the softness of her posture, the small smile that hovers on her lips. Breath hesitates in her lungs at the sight, and she ought to look away, she really ought to. Only every time she does, every time she swallows it down, she feels echoes of that vault she used to live in, feels the shadows close around her again.
Just in this moment, she's too tired of it. Just in this moment, she lets herself watch.
“You're different here, you know,” Ava says, her eyes still shut.
“Different?” Beatrice panics, snaps her gaze back to the lake. Maybe Ava's seen the way Beatrice can't help but look at her, maybe she knows.
“Yeah, I don't know. Lighter, like there's less weight on your shoulders. You're worried about the others, and you're worried about what's going on, and you're always pushing me to train and to keep our secrets, but... you're not like you were when we met. You smile more. You laugh more. It's like you... breathe more, or something.”
“I do?” Beatrice says, because she does, but Ava isn't supposed to know.
Ava blinks her eyes open and grins up at Beatrice, wide and bright and dazzling, and Beatrice feels her breath catch in her throat and looks away. “Yeah. I think so. Seeing the appeal in not being a stick-up-your-butt nun?”
“That is... gravely inaccurate. And offensive,” Beatrice says stiffly, but she lets Ava see the glimmer of laughter in her eyes.
Ava shrugs and sits up. “Maybe. Still. I like seeing you like this.”
Beatrice narrowly avoids choking. “You, um. I...”
“I liked you before, too,” Ava adds hastily. “But. You weren't always being yourself.”
“And here... I am?” She's reduced to questions, to reflecting the truths Ava gives back at her. Anything else would be too close to a confession.
Ava considers. “More. I think you're more yourself. I think maybe we both are.”
“I don't think you've ever been anything but yourself,” Beatrice says. It's true. Ava has an unapologetic way about her that Beatrice envies and admires in equal measure.
Ava laughs again, and Beatrice watches, and wonders if it's worship, to love a laugh the way she does Ava's, then wonders if that's heresy.
“I'll take that as a compliment,” she says brightly, and Beatrice smiles.
“It wasn't an insult,” she replies, soft, the closest she'll get to the truth.
“You mean I'm not infuriating?” Ava teases, quoting Beatrice back at herself, from other training sessions, other days.
“Constantly,” Beatrice says back, unable to stop smiling.
“But you like it.”
There's triumph in Ava's tone, and Beatrice can't argue, because the shadows don't have the same hold on her anymore, and lying feels like more of a sin, right now, than letting that truth sit between them.
She doesn't agree, either. This feeling is still too dangerous.
But danger or not, she doesn't want to go back to living in the shadows. Her true self has spent far too many years in a vault. Now all she wants, as much as it scares her, is to step out of it, and spread her arms, and breathe in the sunlight.