nothing ever seems to happen

It’s hot out, full-on dog days, and she can hear Cad’s bees worked up over something back by the main house. Dumbass kids throwing rocks from the woods again, maybe, or recouping after a raid from something in the night. Jester keeps secreting single berries in the front pocket of her overalls, she knows, because her face always wrinkles right after eating one. Like she forgets they’re not really that sweet, every time.

She tugs, delicate as an afterthought, at a vine. The berries are still fine, jewel-red in the sun, but the leaves are stained purple in parts; a dark, graying thing, just like Cad said.

She wonders just how bad it must be, for not even Caduceus to know what’s going on. They’re the same vines the first Clays coaxed out of the peat, after all; it’s the same sphagnum that’s coated bodies for generations.

It seemed like such a strange business, when they met him, but now there’s something soothing about wading out into the bog, pulling up its fruits in handfuls, finding some relief from the late summer. She’s a little angry, all of a sudden, at the earth for turning on someone so gentle. Why it would come here, of all places, where Cad wanders among his cranberries in the mist of the cooling mornings, a tall, spindly specter draped in pale pink.

“Beauuuuuuu,” Jester whines, “come help,” and she’s pushing her fringe back into her hood, the shape of the whole thing warped by the twin curl of her horns. “The sooner we get done, the sooner we can go back for lunch.” And indeed, Beau can smell Cad’s cooking from up the shallow hill, something mushroomy and fried in that goat butter they’d picked up in Uthodurn.

And Cad needs more help these days since Yasha’s gone, as goes unsaid. It reminded her of home, she’d said, and she was the only other one who’d go out early. Another shape in the fog, mess of hair tied back and that blue-black line disappearing from her lower lip into the throat of the turtleneck she always liked to wear under overalls. One morning Beau had dragged herself out of bed at the asscrack of dawn to help out and ended up just watching Yasha work from the window, like she was some kind of deer in the yard, drinking Cad’s tea and trying to think of a reason she’d stuck around for when Yasha came trudging back up a few hours later.

She didn’t find one. It didn’t matter much— only with Cad and Yasha did Beau ever feel like she was the one talking too much.

(“Beau,” Yasha says, voice flat, fingers tugging at her hair tie.

Her skin prickles where, just below Yasha’s hands, Jester’s ink, Molly’s lines are stamped. Thin, sure-traced, loud in every silence, a triangle Yasha always likes to trace with her thumbs.

“Yeah?”

“You talk too much.”)

She shivers in the heat.

“Sorry, coming.”

—

“Beauuuu,” Jester says— she always says her name like that, bow-wuh— “you have such nice hair, you know.”

“Mm.” She tries for impassive, but it’s honestly hard to string more than one syllable when Jester’s fluffing her hands in her hair like that, acrylics a dull, heavenly scratch against her scalp. Jester’s the first person who’s complimented her like this since— since her mother, maybe, or Tori, but it’s way too early and she’s way too clear-headed to think about that for too long.

Her hands pause. “D’you think— you trim it yourself, right?”

Beau swallows, throat sandpapered over with hurt. “I do now.”

“D’you think you could cut mine like that? Like yours, I mean.”

“Yeah, if you want. You really like it that much, huh?”

Jester’s quiet for a long moment. “It’s really pretty on you, Beau, you know.” And that doesn’t answer the question at all, really, but Jester scratches at her scalp again and her eyes roll a little behind her eyelids.

Her next words are uncharacteristically quiet, and Beau barely catches them over the soft static in her skull.

“Do you think it’d be pretty on me?”

“Everything’s pretty on you, Jess,” and she’s almost slurring with how floaty everything feels, since Jester just showered and she smells like artificial mango and coconut, a little plasticky but sweet sweet sweet. It’s not any more of a confession than what she’d normally say, but there’s something hand-crafted about this moment, something tinged with a little too much sadness but still paper-tender, like crane wings, ghosting air past when you pull the tail.

“Oh.”

Jester’s head knocks against hers a little harsh when she leans over Beau, horns and all, Beau’s head still tilted back against her thigh.

“So you’ll do it, then?”

“Fuck yeah. I still owe you, like, eight million times over for the tattoo.” The tattoo, also hidden against Jester’s thigh, and damn if now doesn’t feel a little like then, quiet and syrupy like down at the parlor after hours, Beau’s hand wrapped around her ankle since both of Jester’s hands were busy. She was quiet the whole time, so still except for the first jump of her skin under the needle and the way the hair on her arms stood on end. Just like now she’d been sleepy afterward, and had just passed out there on the bed, head dipping like a swan’s into the little face hollow— sue her, it was a repurposed massage bench and it worked fine.

“I’d do it even if I didn’t, you know that. Could do it right now, even.”

“Okay,” Jester whispers, and her head feels so heavy, weighed down in a new way now the thought of it all was there. The thought of Beau, and mirroring that pose just so, tilting Jester’s head forward with those callused fingers, the smooth buzz of the razor and hair falling like raven-feather snow to the bathroom tile.

Here is the conversation Beau and Caleb do not have, both awake and leaning against the wall.

Was fashion the reason why they were there?

They disguise it, hypnotize it.

Television made you buy it.

I’m just sitting in my car and

Jester always draws out that second syllable— Cuh-dyoo-sus— and he gets lost for a second thinking about how nice one’s name sounds on the tongues of friends, until she squeezes his hand, and oh, he should say something, shouldn’t he?

“I wouldn’t really be gone,” he says, and lays his staff across his folded legs. “Friends never really leave you so long as you remember to carry them.”

“Yes, but,” and Jester shakes her hand free to throw her arms around his shoulders, butting her head against him like Mr. Caleb’s little orange friend, like a just-fed Clarabelle. Like he’s home, somehow— “I would still be sad, Caduceus.”

Caduceus pets her hair, blue-black like sleek raven feathers in the dim light, and thinks for the first time that maybe here, he matters in a different way. He thinks of her skirt pocket, recently emptied of its carbon cargo, how Jester keeps her diamonds on her person and never in the haversack. He thinks of bodies returning to soil, he thinks of laying friends to rest under fallen leaves, mushrooms and aerated earth, and that for these his first friends, these strange, angry people, perhaps his mother’s promise would not be enough to bring them peace.

dairon who had never called beau insolent, like zenoth, like her parents and everyone else, dairon whose tone sounded like she was about to call jester that.

beau looks at jester, jester who doesn’t hear that note to dairon’s words and would shake off the insult in a second, but it doesn’t matter that jester wouldn’t care, because she would. jester’s smile doesn’t fade, and beau watches her, and watches dairon watch her, and she thinks that jester’s exactly the kind of company to keep.

caleb, too, even if dairon could punt his ass between the two suns. and deuces, looking tall and wilted with mud running from his hair to his ears, and nott, and fjord, and yasha.

actually, she thinks dairon likes yasha, which, y’know. beau can’t exactly blame her for.

what she’s trying to say is, when dairon says she’s surprised they made it out here, it makes her this sort of angry she never used to feel. angry because maybe dairon could beat her within an inch of her life, but if jester hadn’t been dealing with that ogre they would’ve gotten the upper hand. and if they’d had fjord (even yelling the name of his spells like an idiot), or nott, nott who’s faster than any monk and twice as brave, or cad with his beetles, or caleb rather than frumpkin, or yasha, sword or no, there’d be no question.

because beau’s worked alone, and for once she knows she’s learned more than dairon about something because she met jester first and goddammit, she wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for her. jester’s dragged her ass back from the brink of the astral plane so many times with her cold hands and her smile pressed to beau’s cheek when her eyes flutter open and her arms so tight they almost re-break beau’s ribs, and before dairon sidles out of that dark, tobacco-damp room she thinks that learning to land like a cat (on your palms and one foot, and beau’s never felt cooler than when it actually works) doesn’t mean not letting someone catch you before you hit.

here on ao3

Caleb/Molly bc I am still sad. I am so constantly sad.

 Molly dies. There is time to mourn, lots of it, and Caleb doesn’t take it. His melancholy is locked up inside of him, where it belongs. He has lost so much already, after all. He has taken so much from himself. His parents, Astrid, everything before and after. And now Molly. Molly who was all tactless charm and sharp bitterness, teeth and blood and cowardice wrapped up in velvet and silk. Molly, magical and kind and joyful.

i’ve been thinking about that since this morning, when i got on twitter and saw that the last message had been sent with no reply. i remembered it, over and over, whenever i turned my phone on or looked out the window.

my battery is low and it’s getting dark, she said, before the winds of another planet drowned her out. it upset me. strange, maybe, certainly irrational, that i teared up every few hours thinking about a lump of metal on another planet, so far away that i can’t comprehend the distance, that i have no way to imagine or measure it. i’ve never spent much time before thinking about our tiny inventions, infinities away, rolling and moving and speaking back to us. i’ve only thought of her now that she’s done answering. but she’s a lump of metal that others spent fifteen years talking to, and god knows how many years before that dreaming with. and i care; whether it’s rational or not, whether it’s normal or not, i care. and i wish she had answered when we called last night.

she’s not really dead, of course. her solar panels may be covered, her instruments are silenced; she cannot sing to us from outer space, but someday, we will make it up there. we will find her, and perhaps she’ll be a metal shell and little else, worn down by martian winds and red, red sand, but we will find her. and, in the meantime, we will remember.

opportunity let us see beyond our comprehension. i look at photos of mars and i see the valley of fire in nevada, because try as i might, i can’t tell my brain that i’m seeing another planet. but opportunity did. opportunity saw, and heard, and spoke, and the things she told us live on, even as we try and fail and try again to understand them.