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As soon as it’s over—as soon as she’s sure that Fjord and Jester can handle the surviving bandits, that Caleb isn’t going to bleed out—Beauregard bolts after Yasha.
Yasha’s fine, there’s really no way she couldn’t be, but the man who ran, the man she just went chasing through the trees, he had known her, Beau is sure of it. She saw the jolt of recognition on his face, the sudden terror before he turned to run, and then, too, there was something about Yasha, a moment of perfect, silent stillness, that twisted up under Beau’s ribs and told her shit. Go. Go go go.
Yasha is standing in a small, pine-limned clearing. There are yellow wildflowers growing in riotous, random patches all around her, and at her feet there is something that is less a man and more a pile of flesh with a greatsword sticking out of it.
Beau stops at the treeline.
“Yasha,” she says. Instead of looking at the pile, she looks at Yasha’s back. Her shoulders are heaving. Between them, tattered wings are folding in on themselves, and in and in and in until it’s like they were never there.
“His tattoo,” says Yasha.
“I..” says Beau, and feels the new ink on the back of her neck itch. “Ok…?”
Yasha bends down to the pile and picks something up, and Beau comes to stand beside her. Yasha nudges the man’s broken torso aside and holds one arm up by the wrist, and oh. .
“Motherfucker,” says Beau. It’s quieter than she means it to be, and she presses one arm over her ribs, holds herself.
The ink has faded some, but there on his forearm is a shepherd’s crook and a pair of manacles.
“Yasha, I swear,” she says, voice low in the very heavy silence. “We cleaned that place out. We killed them all, I was sure we killed them all.”
“He left before you got there,” says Yasha. She drops the arm and walks a few paces towards the trees.
Beau nudges it with her foot and flops it back over onto the corpse’s chest so she can’t see the damn tattoo anymore. There are a lot of words bursting inside of her, words like sorry and how did… and fuck fuck FUCK, but she holds her tongue.
Eventually Yasha, her voice flat and her arms hanging heavy at her sides, says “they sent him for me first, after they locked us up. He hit me, and prodded at me with hot things. I think that he was meant to break me. When I didn’t...when they.” She stops. Shakes her head, combs one hand through her matted hair and then tugs at it. “It didn’t work, and he went away, and then Lorenzo came and put me in the other manacles.” She drops her hands back to her sides, then lifts them again, and turns back to Beau, rubbing one wrist against the other.
Beau thinks about her caged, unnaturally still. “Fuck,” she says. Then she remembers Fjord, and the days he sat in silence after they found him. Even now , she thinks, he watches them all like they’ll disappear if he doesn’t. He still feels responsible...
“You don’t...” she says, and shakes her head. “You know that none of this is...was. Like. Fucking none of it is your fault. Not the kidnapping or the torture or...or,” or, fuck, “Molly. You know that right?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah?”
Yasha paces past her, carefully does not touch her, and wraps her hands around the hilt of the Magician’s Judge. Wordlessly, effortlessly, she drives it further down into the corpse. Something makes a dull, wet sound and something else cracks. “Yes,” says Yasha, nodding, and drawing back and turning around to look at Beau with flat eyes and a gore-stained, blood-slick sword in hand.
“They kidnapped me. They tortured me. They took me from him, and they killed him. If I was there he would not have died, but that is their fault, not mine.
Crack, goes something deep in Beau’s chest. She stumbles back as if she’s been struck. If I was there…
I was there.
“I was there,” she says. “Yasha, I’m sorry, I couldn’t, I tried to, I tried, I tried, I’m…”
...alive, I’m alive and he’s not and that’s on me, he came back for me, why would he whywouldhe why and oh.
There are hands on her hands. There are fingers pulling her fingers out of her hair.
Beau opens her eyes, and Yasha is right there, looking spooked. “Beauregard,” she says. “Beauregard, that is not what I meant.”
“It’s true though,” says Beau, panting, staring the hands on hers. “I didn’t want him to. I never asked him to fucking die for me.”
“And he would not have wanted you to die for him .”
“Bastard,” says Beau.
The startled look fades from Yasha’s face and the corners of her mouth soften. “He was a bastard,” she says, with so much warmth that Beau feels the clenching, cracking feeling in her chest start to ease.
“You loved him.”
“I still love him,” says Yasha. She lets go of Beau’s hands.
“Did you, uh,” says Beau, and the part of her head that sounds, just, way too much like Fjord says dammit, have a little tact, but she has to know. “Were you two, I mean… I didn’t think you were, like, a thing- thing, but…”
“Ah,” says Yasha, her eyes wide again. “No. I loved him, and he was beautiful, but it never could have been...that. I couldn’t have...and he knew. He was like—”
“Like a brother,” says Beau, who has just enough shame to recognize that she should not feel relieved.
Yasha shakes her head. “Not a brother, no. More like, like” She looks at the sky, and down at her hands. “Molly was all of the color in the world. He was all of my color.”
Beau’s chest squeezes up again. Dammit, Molly. She opens her mouth, maybe to apologize again, and then Yasha says:
“I’m sorry.”
“What?”
“I know—or, um, Molly knew, and he told me, and then I saw it too—I know that you want more out of me and, and out of us, than I can give. And I know that I have been very distant from all of you, and that I have left so many times. I have just...” she shifts from one foot to the other, looks at Beau and then looks away.
Beau's eyebrows furrow and a hundred words clamor on the back of her tongue. She keeps her mouth shut. Just listen , says a voice in her head that is halfway Fjord’s and halfway her own.
Yasha says, “I was lost, for a very long time, and then for a time Molly was a beacon, and I knew that wherever he was, I wanted to be there too. And now he is gone and it is difficult, again, to be with people. I do not want to go far, truly, not from you or from the others. But I am still so lost. So I am sorry.”
She looks Beau in the eyes, finally. She’s beautiful , thinks Beau, because that’s what Beau always thinks, but she’s also so clearly hurting.
Beau gets it now, more than she did before. It isn’t about her.
““Come’ere,” she says. She folds herself down so she’s sitting in the half-crushed little patch of wildflowers, and pats the grass in front of her. Yasha sits.
“I have been,” she says, “kind of a little shit to you.” Yasha frowns, but Beau pushes on before she can speak. “You’re really hot. Seriously, really, very hot. But I got maybe too caught up in that and in traveling and flirting and shit and it took me way too long to realize that the sort of thing I wanted wasn’t the sort of thing you wanted. And then you told me about Zuala and…” and something in Beau feels like it’s melting, because, “ shit, Yash. She sounds amazing. And after everything that happened to her, everything that happened to you... I’m just, really so sorry. About a lot of things.”
“I am not upset, Beauregard. Not at you. I am not always very good at people, and the flirting was...it was different. It was fun, sometimes. I’m just...not there, yet. Not now.”
“And that’s ok. Everything else aside, I want to be your friend. I want you to know that even if you leave, you’ll still have me, and us, all of us, to come back to ” says Beau. “And hell, maybe I’m not there either. I’m trying to be better, y’know? I’m trying to do better, and it’s kind of a bigger job than I expected it to be,” she says.
“You are not doing do so bad,” says Yasha. She smiles small and shy. Beau melts again.
“I mean, I’m pretty great,” says Beau, smirking all carnival-cocky like Molly used to smirk as she sprawls backwards into the grass. A single, un-crushed wildflower winks at her from her peripheral vision.
“You are all right, I suppose,” says Yasha. “And I...I do not mind that. Having people to come back to.”
Beau laughs, suddenly and inexplicably so full of warmth that it must be leaking out her ears.
She snatches up the flower and curls half-way up to sitting.
“Here,” she says, and holds it in her open palm.
Yasha hesitates a second, and then takes it.
“Thank you, Beau.”
“Oh, no,” says Beau. “It’s not for you.”
Yasha frowns.
“It’s for Zuala,” says Beau, and she’s warm, warm, warm. “They’re all for Zuala, right?”
“Yes,” says Yasha, softly, staring at the flower in her hand.
Beau nods, and stands, and starts dusting grass and petals off her pants. “Well then,” she says, “tell her that one’s from me. So she knows that you still have people to come back to.”
Yasha smiles, her eyes mismatched and beautiful and bright.
“I will.”