Thinking about what it is to be a monk and how a lot of things about it probably fit Beau’s mental state after being rejected and kidnapped. Like yeah she never got the hang of meditation but think about it. When a trust breaks that you didn’t even know you had, when the plan set out for your life is destroyed before your eyes - on some level, you know, I think Beau always thought she’d settle down and find a way to follow her dad’s wishes while retaining her agency - your life gets very small.
That ruined trust shows up in the tiniest things. You learn to enjoy coffee or tea with no honey or cream, because what luxuries you don’t have you can’t miss when they go. You eat simple foods that are easy to get your hands on because if something happens to your income or there’s a shortage, your life carries on more easily. You wear the same few outfits, you pare down what you own so if you have to bolt you can take everything important.
And all of that would have likely fit a monastic way of life. In some ways, I bet Beau took to it beautifully. Maybe a little too well. The Cobalt Soul rewarded mistrustfulness and a do-it-yourself mentality despite the overall synchronistic way its members seem to work together. Dairon trusted nobody and it made them brutally efficient and respected. That had to look so good to Beau after everything, especially by the time she met them. Plain food, few possessions, self-reliance - by the time she got the letter about TJ and surmised she was no longer wanted…she’d already been alone for a long time, but now she had the skills to make being alone work for her. So off she went.
I’m not saying the Soul was bad for her. I think canon hashed out pretty well the intricacies that went into the circumstances that brought her versus her decision to make her place there a part of her identity. But I imagine how it looked at first, when Beau and Yasha got their place together. Yasha was nomadic, of course - relying only on what she could carry was a lifestyle for her in a whole other way and separate from the things that happened to her.
I just wonder what it was like to maybe walk into a little house somewhere close-ish to Beau’s work in Rexxentrum, to move in with what was in their pockets and maybe a housewarming gift. Spread out their bedrolls in the room, put whatever it is Caleb and/or Veth probably gave them on the mantel, ta-dah. Looking at each other in the quiet and realizing that Yasha’s never had a home like this and Beau is still affected by what happened the last time she thought she had one, however turbulent. The Nein was home, but now it’s them. So what does that look like?
I feel like they figure it out piece by piece for the other - I feel like that’s how this goes, how their house becomes a home. Beau doesn’t have anything she particularly needs if you ask her, but she comes home with flowerpots for Yasha and paints to decorate them because she loves Yasha and wants that joy for her. Yasha is fine sleeping on the floor, but she hunts while Beau is away to gather furs and make a proper place for them to sleep so Beau has comfort rather than adequacy. Beau picks up some little colored glass bottles for no other reason they’re pretty and Yasha will love them, and Yasha hangs them so the morning light spreads little chunks of color over their walls and floors when they wake. Beau always wakes up before her, which means Yasha frequently wakes to find her girlfriend watching those colors rustle and sway in the morning breeze coming through the window she opened, a contented smile on her face.
Little by little, they build a life together with the knowledge that they’re strong enough to defend it. And then one day they look up and they realize neither of them is waiting for that moment anymore when they’ll have to.
Just thinking about healing and the way it can show up in something as simple as a cup of coffee. It’s still black, but it’s in the one mug that survived the first kiln firing they tried, and the mug sits on the tablecloth they put down that first morning they woke to the chill of fall, and the yard is full of the things they’ve grown as surely as the life they share.
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