Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

And when I sleep on your couch
I feel very safe
And when you bring the blankets
I cover up my face
(I do love you)

—

The apartment is small. The bedroom connects to the kitchen without a door for privacy, the bathroom’s mirror is cracked, there’s barely enough space for a double bed, and there’s a dark, suspicious stain on the ceiling, creeping out from the corner of the main room like a vine.

Beatrice loves it immediately and intensely, in a way she tries to avoid thinking about.

“Yeesh. The Church couldn’t have sprung for a two bedroom?” Ava asks, nose scrunched as she takes in the empty space, and Beatrice is no longer able to avoid thinking about it.

(She loves the apartment intensely, and how could she not, given the woman standing in the middle of it?)

“We’re meant to be two normal girls on sabbatical after university. Why would we be able to afford anything more than a studio?”

“Well,” Ava begins, spinning around until Beatrice can see the wide grin, the warming brown of her eyes. “We could be two rich girls on sabbatical after university. We could have very wealthy parents who are funding our summer in the Alps. And — ”

“ — And we decide to get jobs just for fun?”

Ava’s smile dims, and a sharp pain of regret for causing it cuts through Beatrice’s chest. Her remorse doesn’t show on her face — it never does — but the deep and burning need to step forward is harder to contain. (Ava encourages action in others, but Beatrice has always found herself particularly susceptible, despite — in spite of — her very nature.)

“Jobs? Like, job jobs? Like, what, you’re going to be an accountant or something?” The grin is back and it’s devastating. “Are you going to wake up every day at six and make coffee and eggs? Are you going to take a bus to the office and sit in a cubicle all day? Is our little closet going to be full of pant-suits? Because I gotta say; you could totally pull that off, but I don’t think anyone is buying me as the corporate type.”

The thought of Ava in a suit is enough to leave Beatrice without much of a clever retort, so she sticks to the truth instead. One day, this habit will get her in trouble, but she hasn’t figured out a way around it yet other than silence, something that was just as much of a liability in current company.

“I was thinking we would stick to the small bar down the street. There was a sign in the window promoting open positions.” Her tone turns droll, though too much fondness leaks through to keep it so for long. “I don’t think you’ll have much trouble with people ‘buying you’ as the bartending type.”

Ava’s eyes squint, still dangerously playful in intent, especially when she leans in. “Not totally sure what you mean by that, but I’m pretty sure it could be an insult, coming from you.”

“It’s not.”

She’s too quick, too earnest, and Ava’s expression slips into something far too soft. She knows, Beatrice thinks (always thinks), and ducks her head, stepping further into the apartment to avoid the stare. The floors are wooden and scratched and uneven, planks misaligned in places. Mary — who had once fixed a wobbly set of chairs in Beatrice’s room at the convent — would know what to do here. And probably (definitely) in ways more significant than improving the state of their new flat.

“Alright then, I guess I’m sold.” Ava is suddenly closer than she should be, shoulder knocking against Beatrice’s as she comes to stand at her side. It’s enough to break through the melancholy of missing someone who would offer advice Beatrice isn’t yet ready to hear. “We get part-time jobs at the bar, train a lot, and then go kick Adriel’s ass. I can think of worse ways to spend a month.”

In the empty apartment, Ava’s voice echoes slightly, no furniture or carpet or rugs to keep the surprising sincerity from resonating around the room. She finds much of the same in Ava’s face, peering at the peeling wallpaper of the bedroom with a strange contentment.

“How odd, given that you equated this plan to ‘swimming into a catfish hole and waiting to be noddled’, which — ”

“ — Which would have sounded really smart if any of you people educated yourselves with various important wildlife documentaries like Hillbilly Handfishin’. ”

“ — Which seemed to indicate you thought this was, in fact, one of the worst ways to spend a month,” Beatrice continues, finding contentment of her own in Ava’s resulting scoff, in the toss of her recently-sheared hair.

“You know why I said that and it had nothing to do with spending a month alone with you.” She nudges Beatrice again, this time with a gentle elbow. “I like spending time with you. And I like that this is ours.”

The heart is deceitful above all things, this Beatrice has read, has prayed, has thought she understood. But knowledge has little to do with the way hers throbs when Ava smiles with one corner of her lips and says the word ours.

“Despite our meager budget?” she questions, too lightly.

“Even with the Church being super fucking cheap, yeah.” Ava returns her gaze to the emptiness, and in her eyes Beatrice can see the world to come, narrowed down to a desolate room in a small apartment in a tiny town in the middle of the Swiss Alps. “We fight demons, Bea. We save the world. I think the two of us can manage to make a home.”

—

Home, to Ava, is flannel-backed chairs and worn quilts and lacy placemats and a rocking chair they find abandoned on the side of the road.

Home, to Beatrice, is Ava’s hand in her own as she drags Beatrice through the kitschy home store four towns over and Ava’s shout of triumph when she finds a matching set of salt and pepper shakers and Ava’s waggling eyebrows when they buy the bed that she (again) calls ours.

Home is also, it turns out, Beatrice hurriedly shutting their new curtains (built of the thickest fabric they could find) so no one notices Ava changing one of the lightbulbs in the crooked chandelier hanging in the middle of the room; a mundane task made less so by the fact that she’s levitating.

“I told you we didn’t need a ladder,” Ava calls down cheerfully.

“You say this as though you’ve convinced me otherwise.”

Finished with her original task, Ava winks and twirls around in place, an aerial pirouette that spins light around the room, bathing Beatrice’s face in the holy glow for a fleeting moment. It’s enough to stop her breath (because it always is), but it’s the halo flickering out — or, more accurately, Ava plunging to the ground — that stops her heart. Logic catches up with Beatrice quickly (the fall isn’t a long one and Ava can handle much worse), but by the time it does, she’s already moved without it. Three quick steps and she’s across the room, ready for the catch as Ava slams into the floor and stumbles, arms curled and knees braced.

Ava’s laugh hits her first, breathless and delighted, but then it’s the warmth under Beatrice’s palm, pressed firmly into Ava’s back, halo extinguished but leaving a heavy heat behind. The rest of it crashes into her at once (Ava’s cheek sliding against hers, wayward strands of brown tickling against her nose, the press of her calloused fingers against Ava’s bare hip, her shirt shifting just enough — too much — with the fall.)

“Point taken, I guess,” Ava says, humor still clearly present, saturating the words. “But, ooh, new joke; how many Warrior Nuns does it take to change a lightbulb?”

Beatrice groans. She groans because the joke is bad and Ava isn’t moving away and she’s moving closer, actually, her fingertips dancing up Beatrice’s bicep and it’s so much, already so much, even on day one. She groans because she knows Ava will only see the first of these reasons, and it’s in this simple mercy that Beatrice still finds God’s favor, even in the midst of His worst test.

“Okay, fine, party pooper. No punchline for you.” Ava straightens, slipping from Beatrice’s grasp with an ease that feels as impossible as anything else the woman manages on a daily basis. And then, more of the same: she slides back in with the same lack of difficulty and presses her lips to Beatrice’s jaw, just below the ear. “But thanks. For making sure I didn’t fall.”

You did though, Beatrice wants to say, but can’t explain (not even to herself) why the distinction is important, and remains silent, careful and blinking as she rolls her shoulders back with a steadying inhale.

This is not a choice.

The searing brand of Ava’s mouth has reduced her to autonomic functions alone: to breath and heart and sweat.

“I didn’t think I was running so low,” Ava continues, and when Beatrice’s eyes follow her movements, this is autonomous too, a rewiring of her nervous system that connects her to Ava without the requirement of thought. “But I guess I did spend the whole day using it. What with the couch and the bed and the incident with those salt and pepper shakes being so high up, I mean, come on, do they just not want people to buy their stuff? And yeah, I know, I hear you. Ladders. But what? I’m supposed to go find some poor sap who’d rather just be chilling behind the counter and make them drag over a ladder so that I can climb up the shelves and decide that yeah, maybe I do want to spend a single franc on some shitty wooden salt and pepper shakers?”

Ava pauses, if only to take a breath, but in the brief silence, Beatrice’s lack of response is apparent enough that she lifts her brow, a question in the gesture and the sudden slant of her lips.

“Three francs,” she blurts, a terrible deflection based on literally every metric (and the main one that matters: the laughter bubbling up in Ava’s eyes before the sound finds release). “They… were three francs.”

“Oh, well then!” The laugh slips out then, low and throaty in a way that would have Beatrice thinking once again about the feel of Ava’s lips on her skin, if only she had — at any point — stopped thinking about it. (And she most certainly hasn’t.) “Excuse the fuck out of me! I’m basically setting our money on fire, then! Three francs. Damn!”

“I didn’t mean to pass moral judgment on the purchase, merely provide clarification on the amount.”

Worse and worse. Never has Beatrice’s brain failed her in such a spectacular way. Outside of the forty-two other instances of Ava doing something similarly careless and earth shattering, of course. Not that Beatrice has been counting. Or mentally compiling a spreadsheet with columns to account for the numeric scale of devastation, the number of seconds it’d taken Beatrice to recover, and —

A sharp rap to the center of her forehead jolts her out of the spiral, the knuckle of Ava’s index finger knocking something loose, or maybe that’s her smile, half-amused, half-concerned.

“And I meant to make a joke. I’m not so uncool that you can’t tell anymore, am I? I’m posing as a broke uni student; my humor is the only thing I have going for me if I have to stick to that backstory.”

Now faced with Ava full-on — with her crooked little grin and the thinly veiled worry settled deep in the dark of her eyes — finally, a response comes easily.

“You know very well that’s not true.”

(How lovely it feels to release a sentiment based in nothing but truth, to not hide any double-meanings behind them, not even from herself.)

“Yeah, yeah, I’m a catch no matter what identity I’m using.” Ava’s hand hasn’t drifted all the way back down, and it jerks back up now, settling along Beatrice’s elbow, cradling the bend. “Are you okay though? That drop was like, two feet, so I honestly wasn’t even being reckless for once, so… You’re not mad, are you?”

Beatrice shakes her head, afraid (for just a moment) to trust words once again.

“No. Of course not. Though… you could show a little more care in making sure no one spots you from the outside. If I’m being particular about it.”

“You? Particular?” But Ava’s teasing again, worry released as quickly as it’d come. It’s easier to breathe when the earnestness is gone, though the playful side of Ava is hardly without its own risks (this Beatrice knows well, despite how often she forgets). “Honestly, I’m surprised we made it out of those shops without any of those little desk organizer things. Or like… a chore wheel.”

“I… ” Briefly, Beatrice considers lying. Ava, as though guessing she might, bites lightly at her bottom lip, holding back a full grin. “I did look,” she admits.

“You looked,” Ava repeats, an overload of fondness in her tone and look, enough of it to relax Beatrice once again.

“Tidy room, tidy mind,” she says, just to hear Ava laugh.

(She gets it, too: a loud and unrestrained snort.)

“When Southern Living does an issue on nuns, they’re really going to hit the jackpot with you, Bea. Remember me when you’re famous?”

Playful brings its own risk. She’d only just reminded herself, but forgets again, leaning in with ease, without any of the care she should take when Ava’s tone is conspiratorial. Or, worse, when she’s close enough to eliminate the need for steps to bridge the space between them.

“Of course. I’ll mention you in every interview I’m asked about handling messy roommates.”

“Hey!” Ava gaps, mock offended and not at all pulling it off. “You don’t know that I’m messy yet!”

“And yet you say that instead of if,” she tsks. “And I saw your room at the Cat’s Cradle.”

“That — ” Her finger lifts, in preparation of a great counterpoint, and then immediately falls again. “ — Is fair. But! Also! I didn’t have a lot of time for tidying, okay? I don’t know if you noticed, but there was a lot of demand for the Warrior Nun while I was there.”

“An interesting claim, given that I so often came across you sulking around the back hallways. Seems like someone would have come to find you before then, with you being in such high demand.”

With the taste of near-victory, she forgets to worry about the signs: the lift of Ava’s chin, the softening of her eyes, the dimming of her smile until it’s a quiet thing (a sigh of warm, dry air before a storm). And then the gentle touch; a brush against Beatrice’s side, catching more fabric than form, but still more than enough.

“Maybe I just only ever wanted to be found by you.”

Beatrice sucks in a breath and hopes it’s not audible. Blinking up at her with innocence, Ava gives little to no indication that it had been.

“You… aren’t adding any proof to your claim, you know,” she hazards, reaching behind her for the safe ground they’ve already skidded past. “About not being messy.”

“Eh, come on, Bea. At this point, we both know that’s a debate I’m not going to win. All I can do now is be incredibly endearing in the hopes that you let it go.” She blinks again, head tilting a bit further, exposing the long muscle of her neck, which Beatrice fights not to follow the downwards path of. “Is it working?”

It is very obviously working and if Beatrice is fooling anyone (Ava or herself) with her thin response, it’s a miracle of a magnitude people might write about.

“Not at all.”

Still, Ava holds her gaze for another moment more before the tension breaks, a rush of wind when Ava throws her head back and laughs, slapping her hands together once and spinning away. Her departure brings air that Beatrice can breathe without any particular strain; breath brings oxygen, oxygen brings thought, thought brings logic, and logic settles her.

And yet.

Relief, she has to remind herself. You feel relief.

“Guess I’ll have to work a little harder, then,” Ava says cheerfully, collapsing back onto the couch, briefly losing her joviality when the piece of furniture (old and cheap and the best they could get) groans with the newly added weight.

But only briefly, because this is Ava, and Ava treasures the small moments that others so easily miss. This time, it’s in her smile as she strokes her fingers along the worn flannel of the cushions. Beatrice sees the pride of ownership in her expression, and can’t imagine how anyone could ever call such light a sin. These are not thoughts she can share. So instead, she will tease, sharpening her affection into something a bit more bearable for them both.

“Sitting on the couch and doing nothing is a commendable start. Truly, I applaud you.”

Ava rewards her with a roll of her eyes. “Oh, ha-ha-hilarious. But no. If you’ll just chill and give me a second and — okay, actually, can you just sit? You standing over me with your arms crossed and your buttons all buttoned and your twisty little bun makes me feel like I’ve been sent to the principal’s office, or whatever. And while you can actually kind of really pull that off, I’m more of a positive reinforcement girl, in all aspects, so this isn’t my thing? I don’t think. Probably? I mean, not that it’s not — nevermind. Can you just sit?”

Approximately 25% of these words make any sort of sense to Beatrice, but, frankly, she’s a bit too distracted by the curious flush creeping up Ava’s neck as she says them. It starts somewhere under the low collar of her shirt, vanishes underneath her hair, curls around the shell of her ear, and persists even as Ava busies herself with reaching for her backpack from where she’d haphazardly tossed it sometime hours ago. If Beatrice had eons, she might continue to watch that spread of pink, might chart its eventual retreat, but time is limited and Ava asks and so she sits.

“Right. Better. Okay. I was thinking about this earlier, actually,” Ava begins with a deep inhale, pulling her bag into her lap and all but sticking her head inside as she roots around. “Because yes, maybe in the past I haven’t exactly been focused on putting my clothes in a laundry basket. And for good reason, I think! But you’re… you. So I’ve been thinking about it and I’m willing and able to prove to you that I am ready to take responsibility. I’m ready to take action. I am ready to make a change in my life. I am — holy fuck where is this fucking thing, I swear to Christ I am — ”

“— Having a lot of trouble with the lack of organization in your backpack?”

“No.” Beatrice lifts a brow. It’s all the push Ava needs to quickly correct herself; a surprisingly easy victory. “Okay, yes. But. If you’ll just give me like — just a second, I will be ready to prove to you that I am — a ha!”

With a triumphant cry, Ava pulls something from the bag, holding it up above her head like a character out of a video game. With all the hullabaloo, Beatrice might expect something made of pure gold, but it’s Ava, so she’s not particularly surprised when, instead, it’s a pad of paper with a cartoon frog eating a slice of cake in the bottom corner.

“To-do-Liste,” she reads — German accent exaggerated — with one of those trademark Ava grins (the ones that Beatrice can always feel as much as see). “Pretty sure they borrowed that one.”

“You bought a to-do list,” Beatrice realizes, slow on the uptake because of everything (because of every part of it). “Today? For… me?”

“For us.” The correction is light and so is Ava’s expression, but hits like a fall onto concrete, knocking all of the breath from her lungs. “I figured that you might like things a little ‘tidier’ than me, but that stuff doesn’t come super naturally to me because — well — I don’t really remember ever doing it. But if you tell me what I should be doing, then I’ll do it! I’ll even write it down myself on this little froggie list. My — ah — penmanship could use some work anyways.”

Beatrice had long ago learned that there were people in her life who cared. Cautiously, she’d opened herself to gentle touches and whispered secrets and little moments of kindness from the sisters she’d grown to love. She had learned, slowly, that she was allowed these things. But gifts were hard. Gifts held expectations, came with strings, never had been offered freely during the years most likely to leave the deepest scars.

“What do you think?” Enthusiasm unaffected by Beatrice’s silence, Ava waggles the notepad in front of her. “Want me as your official chore scribe?”

Gifts came with a catch. Except, perhaps, when they came from Ava, who had never really asked her for anything at all.

“You could use the practice,” she murmurs, finally, and there’s that grin again, bright enough to be holy. “And the frog is quite cute.”

Without a table to use, Ava makes a show of setting the to-do list against the plane of her thigh, setting in with a shimmy and sliding a finger up the bridge of her nose.

“I’m putting on my imaginary glasses,” she explains, stupidly, cheesily, charmingly. “Get ready, Bea, because I’m about to become the best scribe/roommate you’ve ever had.”

—

Several hours later, Beatrice knows that this was, perhaps, the greatest lie any person has ever uttered since the dawn of mankind.

The scribe bit works well enough; Ava writes in slow, careful strokes, her tongue sticking out as she forms letters she hasn’t used in more than a decade, and Beatrice watches, a weight on her chest that feels a certain kind of pleasant. They bicker over chore division, Ava makes a joke about maid costumes, Beatrice manages not to blush, and after all of it, they pin the list to the fridge, using a magnetic bottle opener that Ava had (ominously) promised would come in handy earlier on in the day.

But then it’s bedtime and Beatrice is offering to sleep on the couch and Ava is laughing like it’s a joke and not a plea and then they’re in bed together and then Ava is the worst roommate she’s ever had — the worst roommate by far — because they could only fit a double bed in the room and every time Ava shifts, some part of her brushes up against some part of Beatrice and whenever it does, Beatrice knows that Hell exists and she has found it.

This time, it’s Ava rolling over onto her side; one of her legs stretches out to help with the motion and then it’s skin on skin, Ava’s foot sliding along Beatrice’s calf, stroking upwards and then — when Beatrice begins to feel lightheaded, when she realizes she’s been holding her breath all this while — peeling away, as quickly as it’d come. For a brief, blissful moment, she’s free from torment. And then it’s Ava flipping onto her stomach, one arm flailing out and brushing against Beatrice’s chest; it’s her knee pulling in and rubbing along Beatrice’s hip bone; it’s the puff of air that slips from her lips and fills the space between them.

Tonight, she’d prayed for the strength to withstand temptation, but she’d forgotten one of her earliest Church lessons in the process. God, a kindly priest had once told her, does not simply give us the traits we pray for. He puts us into situations that will help us develop those qualities ourselves, through hard work and time and patience.

At the time, Beatrice — sixteen and desperate to be anyone other than herself — had taken comfort in those words. Now, she’s starting to think that maybe God, in all His infinite wisdom, simply didn’t know when to quit.

She, however, most certainly does.

“Ava?” she whispers. “I’m going to — ”

She’d hoped that Ava was merely an especially active sleeper, that she wouldn’t hear Beatrice as she begged retreat. But God didn’t know when to quit, and so Ava’s hand darts out and finds Beatrice’s wrist in the dark, fingers curling around and pressing into skin with the strength of the mostly conscious.

“Ugh, no, don’t. I’ll stop fucking around. I’m just — shit — I’m sorry.”

At night, their sleepy Swiss town shuts down. There are no lamps that remain lit past midnight, no cars that drive through on an overnight commute, no last-call drunks to stumble by with their phone flashlights on. This is not a surprise — they’d chosen the place for its remoteness, after all — but it does make observing Ava’s expression impossible, without a trace of ambient light to creep beyond their curtains and highlight the planes of her face.

“It’s alright,” Beatrice murmurs, gentle and lighthearted in the face of Ava’s unexpected frustration. “Clearly I should have allotted more of the budget towards our mattress. I admit that this one is somehow less comfortable than the ones found in most convents, which is quite a feat.”

Typically, this weak attempt at a joke would garner a pity chuckle from Ava, at the very least, but tonight it falls flat, leaving silence in its wake.

“It’s not that,” Ava says finally. “It’s — um — it’s stupid. Well, not stupid, but — ”

With another huff of frustration, Ava releases her, twisting onto her side once more. Beatrice, traitorous to herself or stupid or a sucker for punishment, immediately craves the thing she’d been trying to escape, but pushes past the disappointment with a fair amount of ease, concern burying most anything else.

“You don’t have to explain. Just tell me how to help.”

Somehow, it’s this that gets the laugh. Not one born out of pity, but — if the softness of it is anything to go by — affection. Before she can second-guess the assessment, Ava’s hand returns, palm laying atop Beatrice’s forearm with a new gentleness.

“You do,” Ava promises, overly tender here too. “You are. I’m just — I’m used to sleeping on my back. But I don’t… want to anymore.”

This is not something they talk about often, if at all. If Beatrice has her way, they won’t talk about it now either, because she doesn’t have to see Ava’s face to know that there’s pain etched in every line of it. She’s been told there’s healing to be found in discussions such as these, but has never managed to have much success with the concept. Action is easier, in her experience, even in the most extreme of cases.

“I see,” she murmurs.

“Do you?” Ava’s voice cracks with the effort to shift into a lighter tone. “I mean, it’s pretty fucking dark in here, so…”

“I understand,” she corrects, but that’s not quite right either. “That is, I know how to help.”

“I already told you; you are. You always are. You’re here and you’re — ” With a deep breath, Ava cuts herself off. “Look, it’s not a big deal. It’s just something I’m getting used to. But I’m sure it’s really fucking annoying to have me yanking the covers around every two seconds, so if anyone’s going to the couch, it’s me.”

Ava goes so far as to remove her hand, which is, frankly, unacceptable. (Nevermind Beatrice’s feelings on the matter only minutes ago.)

“No one is going to the couch.” She’s firm, at least for the first bit, but the reality of what she’s offering catches up with her in the second, slowing her words. “What if… you remain on your back, in the position your body — despite your best efforts — prefers to remain in as you fall asleep, and I will… help you remember that things are not as they were.”

A puff of laughter hits her face, turned towards Ava in a way that brings to mind flowers and sun.

“Oh, sure. Easy as that, huh? Don’t tell me you have hypnosis tucked away with your other seven thousand trillion talents, or whatever. Right next to aikido and Latin and probably knitting, or some shit like th— ”

Before she can think better of it, Beatrice shifts forward, quick and fluid. Her palm strikes out and flattens against Ava’s chest, pressing against it with enough force to push her back down onto the mattress, effectively silencing her mid-word. (Absently, Beatrice files this away as a surprisingly effective tactic to get Ava to shut up.)

“Bea?”

Coming out of Ava’s mouth, her name pitches high in the latter part of the syllable, a strangled sort of question that does an odd thing to Beatrice’s pulse and stomach and breath, all of which she immediately ignores.

“Relax,” Beatrice murmurs, mostly to herself. “It’s not like it was.”

Slowly now — with far more care — she drapes her right leg over Ava’s and drops her head onto her chest. Ava is warm and small and twitching under Beatrice’s weight, but her hand comes up immediately, instinctively, and slides into the loose bun at the back of Beatrice’s neck.

“You feel me, yes?”

A few strands of brown slip out of the knot, tugged out of place by the twirl of Ava’s fingers. This isn’t meant as a comfort to Beatrice (if anything, it’s meant to be the opposite: a test, a penance, a marathon of faith), but she feels herself relax all the same, eyes slipping shut as Ava’s movements continue.

“I feel you,” Ava confirms, achingly soft.

“So go to sleep. I’ll be here. You’ll feel me. And you’ll know it’s not like before.”

Ava’s nod presses her lips to the crown of Beatrice’s head, her exhale tickles against the scalp. This is intimacy on a scale Beatrice has only ever experienced painful flashes of, and it would hurt if it weren’t Ava underneath her, tension slipping away with each passing moment.

“Should’ve known you’d be the best at this whole roommate thing, too.” In a sure sign of Ava’s exhaustion, there’s a drawl already slipping into her voice. “What can’t you do, Bea?”

Cross stitch or tap dance, Beatrice could say. Make a soufflé or carve a statue out of ice. But were she to swear on the Bible and saints, God and His angels, the only answer she might truthfully give is stop wanting you.

“Goodnight, Ava,” she says instead.

One day down, thirty or sixty or ninety or more left to go. It can’t last, but Ava hums as she settles into a prelude to sleep, and underneath all the things Beatrice ought to feel about the trials ahead, there’s a small kernel of happiness, steady and true.

Chapter Text

Oh, and the night falls now with
Somnolent mouth on the ether garden

That's when I finally heard those voices
Singing 'oh oh oh oh'

—

“This looks like an especially effective layout for your bar glasses,” comes a voice, low and unfamiliar. “Are the wine and martini glasses hung underneath? That seems prudent, given the environment. How do you organize your liquor? Clearly, there’s a predetermined order, but not one I’m particularly familiar with.”

Hans — who’d placed every bottle and glass, who’d developed his system through years of experience, and who’d never had anyone notice any of it at all — falls a little bit in love, before he even turns around.

When he does, he’s struck by the notion that the young woman before him matches the voice, and perhaps more than that, matches the words: serious, leveled, and perfectly articulated. Her short-sleeve polo, buttoned to the top, is a deep gray; her hair, dark and straight, is tied back in a neat bun; and her expression, somber and attentive, holds something particularly unflinching within it.

“It’s arranged by popularity,” he explains, gesturing towards the bottles behind him with the pencil he’d been holding before (and only realizes then that he’s still holding now). “Ingredients for cocktails I’ve noticed we make the most are within two steps of the ice bin, always. Not that most people don’t just order beer.”

“I see. Practical.” She tilts her head, dark eyes surveying the bottles again, taking a half second with each one. “I’m Beatrice, the new hire. You must be Hans.”

This makes perfect sense, except for all the ways it doesn’t. Hans had been told to expect a small, English girl around his age at 12:00, but it’s 11:30 now and the girl in front of him is speaking German with a dialect he hadn’t thought to question as a native (if fairly formal) Hochdeutsch. Certainly, she could be close in age to Hans’ own 23 years, but also older or younger, depending on how much he spent blinking at her oddly rigid posture.

“Yes,” he finally manages. “You’re early.”

He’s unable to prevent the admiration from sinking into his voice, but still, when Beatrice nods, it’s with an apology in the motion.

“A habit that’s viewed quite differently depending on the person,” she returns with a thin smile. “I can sit somewhere out of the way until you’re ready. I certainly don’t mean to be an inconvenience.”

“Not at all.” He steps forward with the force of the denial, but clears his throat quickly after, hoping stowing of the pencil behind his ear looks more casual than it feels. “I view it as an admirable quality. We all have clocks, no?”

The not-quite-smile that’d be resting politely on her face blooms — without any warning at all — into something that transforms her face entirely. It lights her face and softens every line as though she’s been put through a filter, and Hans has to blink again, rapidly this time, to reassure himself that he’s staring at the same woman as before.

“You’ll find that’s not the case for your other new coworker. Ava’s never met a clock she didn’t ignore. I apologize in advance for her inevitable tardiness, and your equally inevitable forgiveness of it, if her track record continues.”

“Ava,” he repeats, and then stares at the woman’s fond smile a bit longer than is probably polite. “Right. Olivier — the owner — he mentioned you two knew each other. Friends from school? You traveled here together?”

Beatrice hums, features slipping back towards the serious expression of before, if not for the small quirk at the corner of her lips, a lingering aftershock of the conversion he’d so recently witnessed.

“That’s right. We decided to travel together, for a time. Spend our… sabbatical — such as it were — together. We’ve only just started, but it’s been oddly… ” She trails off, pauses for a brief moment, and then inhales sharply, back to business before the exhale comes, her polite smile returning. “Well, we’re here for the foreseeable future. So perhaps you can show me the basics now? If you don’t mind.”

“Ah, yes! Of course.” With a start, Hans gestures toward the bar, hurriedly correcting course to point at the hooks to the side instead. “Right, yes. Grab an apron and — I’m afraid I’m right in the middle of doing some work on the books. I was trying to get it all taken care of before you got here — it’s kind of the crummiest part of the job — but I guess you’ll have to learn eventually, so — ”

“Oi! Ehilà! Chi si rivede! Guten Tag!”

The last bit comes out louder than the rest, and it’s the only part he understands before the newcomer — Enza, of course — breaks off into a rapid Italian that she knows very well he can’t understand. Which, of course, means that all of it is undoubtedly at his expense, a suspicion that’s confirmed when Beatrice lets out a small puff of laughter, somewhere in the middle of Enza’s ramblings. Unfortunately, this sign means as much to Enza as it does to him, and her eyes light up before she swivels to face Beatrice, undoubtedly pleased to have someone behind the bar who she doesn’t have to switch languages for.

What follows is a back and forth that most certainly can’t be any good for him, especially not with all of Enza’s gesturing in his general direction, and the occasional spike of amusement on Beatrice’s face that results. It’s a small town and there are only so many pretty girls; Hans isn’t about to take any more chances on the entire encounter.

“Alright, alright.” He’s switched to English, the only language he and Enza have in common, and she shoots him a knowing glance as he does. “We are not open yet, Enza. Which you know, because you are here every day.”

“Give me a beer now and I won’t tell the new girl about the time someone put on Come On Eileen and you danced so wildly, you broke a table.”

“Was that not you telling me?” Beatrice asks, and the English accent comes through now, strong enough that Hans is taken aback again, a status which Enza immediately takes advantage of.

“Oh, no. I didn’t get into the fun parts involving a mop handle and — ”

“Yes, thank you!” He cuts in quickly, opening a bottle with a practiced motion and shoving it across the bar. “Here is your beer and goodbye!”

This, thankfully, does the trick; Enza snatches her prize and blows kisses on the way out to the patio, where Leesa and Fergus have already claimed a coveted corner spot in the shade, and Hans rolls his eyes with more than a little bit of affection.

“Regulars,” he explains, back to German. “This is what you’ll have to learn to deal with. Though, you might have an easier time of it than I do. How many languages do you speak?”

“Only three,” Beatrice responds, fast enough that there’s hardly a pause between Hans’ words and her own. “Just… yes, the ones you’ve heard. That’s not odd, is it?”

“Uh.” He laughs once, sure there must be a joke somewhere in the rushed words, one that he’s missed. “No, it’s… good. Explains why Olivier hired you so fast, too. You might have noticed, but we’re kind of a cultural crossroads here. Though, honestly, it’s pretty easy to get by just knowing the word for ‘beer’ in ten or so languages.”

This definitely is a joke, but Beatrice doesn’t return the favor of a pity laugh.

“I’ll work on expanding my lexicon, then. I can see how that would come in handy. Did you still want to start with the books you mentioned before, or should we go over standard operating procedure for the bar, now that we have customers?”

There’s a ruthless sort of efficiency in each of her words that Hans can’t help but admire. But it’s a far cry from the attitude of the people Olivier usually brought in: transient uni kids and summer stays and 30-somethings who thought they were on a journey of self-discovery. Hans thinks he prefers this, despite the underlying oddities, a predilection that might have something to do with the fact that he arranges his drawers by shirt color, categorizes his records by genre, and has an entire collection of mint-condition Transformers collectables still in their original boxes.

“Yeah, let’s go for the books. Can you get that big binder behind you? The red one on the upper shelf. Olivier likes us to follow this system, which — well, you’ll see.”

If he hadn’t been watching to make sure she found it, he would have missed it, but at the peak of her extension, Beatrice winces, little more than a twitch. By the time she’s passing the binder to him, there’s no trace of the pain left on her face, only the same small, pleasant smile.

“Are you — sorry, I wouldn’t have made you get it yourself if I’d thought…”

He trails off and Beatrice stares for a moment, expression completely blank, before seemingly coming to a decision to attempt to wave off the incident entirely.

“My shoulder? It’s nothing. A lingering bruise. My roommate — Ava, of course — she’s a bit… well. She caught me by surprise while we were moving some furniture.” She nods towards the books, clearly done with the half-explanation. “So what makes this so difficult then?”

“Well, it’s — it’s just a lot of numbers.” He stares for a second longer, trying to make sense of the girl, before flipping open the binder and revealing a mess of scribbled digits. “Olivier insists on categorizing each purchase and sale with an alphanumeric code and so it takes forever to line up the stock with his numbers, let alone the till. I’ve been here the longest so it usually falls to me, but honestly? I’m shit with arithmetic. I mean, Christ, if I was even kind of good I wouldn’t have dropped out of uni after a year.”

Beatrice, already bent over the binder and seemingly absorbed in the contents, looks up at that, a pinch to her brow that’s curious rather than unkind.

“There are plenty of programs that don’t involve maths. Why not switch?”

“Ah, well. It’s a bit… ” He sighs, resolved to tell the tale as simply as possible. “My mom’s a statistician. My dad’s an engineer. It was sort of the family business, I guess. Can’t say they were too happy with me, dropping out and all. But I’m happier here, you know?”

He’s told this story a few times and gotten more than a few responses, but nothing prepares him for the solemnity of Beatrice’s nod, of the way her palm presses flat against the page in front of her, as though to keep it still.

“I understand that the weight of expectations is never pleasant,” she says, and Hans is quite sure, in that moment, that she does, as implausible as it seems. “I think I can help with this though.”

It takes a second before he realizes she’s talking about the books again, index finger now tapping against the scrawled numbers.

“Already?” he asks, more than a little bewildered.

“I’m quite good at maths.” She shrugs. “And it would be simple to translate this to a system that does these computations automatically, which seems the most logical way of going about it, no? I’m here for the next four hours, so perhaps I can have something ready for you to look over by then, if you have a computer on hand.”

The bewilderment grows. (And maybe he becomes just a little more smitten.)

“Um. Sure. But — Christ! Languages, numbers, pouring drinks, presumably… what aren’t you good at, Beatrice?”

She laughs softly — a sharp twist to her smile that he doesn’t understand — like he’s told a joke that wasn’t particularly funny.

“I’m sure you’ll find out soon enough.”

—

“No way! Did you actually see Tocotronic live?” comes a voice, loud and unfamiliar. “I just had one of my friends give me some of their songs to try out!”

Hans — who’s been listening to the band since he was five years old, who’s seen them live no less than ten times, who owns several tour shirts like the one he’s wearing now — falls a little bit in love, before he even turns around.

“What’s that one? It’s like — uh — I never saw you up there hmm hmm hmmmmm. You´ve never been here. I only have hmmm hmmm hmmm. Uh, well, I don’t remember as much as I thought, but yeah! I’ve always wanted to go to a concert! Or — you know — one of their concerts. Obviously.”

When he does turn, he’s struck by the notion that the young woman before him matches the voice and words: excited, rushed, and all-together cheerful. Her smile is bright and wide, her shirt — decorated with vividly yellow rubber ducks — is only half-buttoned and half-tucked, and there’s a small smear of dirt along her jaw, as though she’s just come in from running around on a playground. German clearly isn’t her native language, but she bursts through the words with an exuberant brute force rather than any kind of finesse, in a way that’s strangely charming.

“They’re my favorite,” he says, already thinking of playlists he might share, metaphorical mixed tapes he might make. “I have a bunch of their live recordings, actually. I could bring them in to play during our shared shifts, if you’re — I’m assuming you’re Ava, ya?”

“Yes.” This interjection carries none of the same enthusiasm, and Hans feels his spine automatically straighten, for reasons he can’t quite define. “And you’re late.”

He’s known Beatrice for four hours, and already, the idea of being chastised by her leaves Hans feeling a little faint, but Ava’s grin only widens, showing off a flash of white teeth.

“Nah, I think that clock is just running a little fast. I can adjust it, if you want. First official duty on the job. What do you think, Hans?” She turns the look towards him, the very opposite of tentative. “You are Hans, right? The dude who interviewed me said to look for someone with a killer mustache, so I was kind of just assuming.”

“He definitely didn’t say that,” Hans laughs (but does have to keep himself from brushing her fingers along his upper lip, just to make sure each hair is still in place under such praise). “But, yeah, that’s me. I guess this means your shift is up, Beatrice. Sorry you didn’t really get much time behind the actual bar, but — well — apparently you’re pretty good at the behind-the-scenes stuff.”

Without need for further instruction, Ava tosses her bag up on the employee hangers, swiftly exchanging it for an apron, which she inspects with a cheer Hans has never held for any item of clothing, let alone a work one.

“Don’t tell me you spent your whole first shift in the back looking at dusty ledgers, Bea,” she teases, and Beatrice busies herself with removing her own apron, carefully untying and folding it. Ava, clearly, takes this as a sign that Hans misses, laughing in delight. “Oh, you did. Careful, Hans, she’ll have your whole system turned into some kind of Dewey Decimal shit in a week if you don’t rein her in.”

“That’s ridiculous.” Beatrice steps forward with a surprising lack of grace, missing the hook the first time she tries to hang her apron, not at all helped by Ava’s elbow jutting out to knock into her side as soon as she’s within range. Still, when she continues, her voice is quiet, with an odd tinge that Hans only recognizes as slyness after a long moment. “It would take me far less time than that.”

Hans has always been good with people, with recognizing the layers to them and guessing what might lie underneath. But nothing quite prepares him for the way Beatrice melts into Ava — how her posture, countenance, and demeanor shift into something else entirely — when she makes Ava laugh again, this time on purpose.

“Okay, fine. Next time, then. Lucky you, Hans!” Finished with her apron, she snaps both her fingers into a double thumbs-up, in another odd (but incredibly charming) show of enthusiasm for the mundane. “But alright. I’m ready to work! Where do you want me, Boss?”

Before he can formulate an answer, Beatrice steps forward, eyes narrowing in on the streak on Ava’s jaw that he’d noticed earlier, hand lifting up half-way in a decisive movement that… halts midway, frozen in place for a solid half second before it falls away, fingers twitching at her side.

“You’ve got dirt on your face. You didn’t even go home before coming here, did you?”

“No time,” Ava returns cheerily, wiping at the wrong side of her face with the back of her hand, careless with the gesture. “Better?”

“No. It’s — ” Beatrice sighs, hand jerking back upwards in the span of a blink, thumb rubbing at the spot and then… lingering, movement slowing, fingertips resting against the side of Ava’s throat. In her face, there’s an aching softness, something that feels entirely out of place, something that’s —

Hans looks away, feeling his cheeks heat.

(He remembers being seven years old and trying to catch Santa Claus in the act, only to find his parents slow dancing around the Christmas tree; being fourteen and seeing something foreign and bright in the eyes of the bishop as he pressed holy oil to Hans’ forehead in Confirmation; being sixteen and listening to his best friend talk about her very first kiss.)

“I should go,” Beatrice says, finally, and Hans can’t say how much time has passed, but he feels startled by the sound nevertheless. “Unless I could stay? For a drink?”

“A drink?” Ava questions, her brow rising.

“Of water.” Beatrice has stepped back, arms crossed over herself, and she takes a moment to look around the bar, as though she hasn’t been standing in it for the past several hours. “This is… a nice place.”

“A nice place that you just finished up a shift at. You should want to go home.” The words have the sense of a reminder, but in Ava’s face there’s only amusement, fondness laced throughout.

“Yes. Of course. I’ll — ”

“I’ll see you after my shift,” Ava finishes for her, and Beatrice’s shoulders lift, as though she’s taken in a deep breath.

“Right. Yes.” She nods, then crosses and uncrosses her arms, fitting in a wave somewhere in between. “Have a good evening.”

They both watch her go, though, admittedly, Hans shifts his focus to Ava fairly quickly, struck by the affection stored in the lift of her brow and the curve of her smile. This is a friendship that means something more than most, but he’s stuck in reasoning out an explanation for the palpable depth.

“So,” he begins, despite not knowing how he’ll continue. “You two are… roommates?”

“Yeah,” Ava returns easily, rounding the bar until she’s at his side, peering around at the contents, brushing her fingers along bottles and tools and trays. “Beatrice is… my best friend.”

She takes pleasure in saying the words, this much is clear in the emphasis she gives them and the sudden grin that seems to be entirely for herself. A regular comes up to order a drink and by the time Hans has dealt with it, the glow remains, a steady hum of contentment radiating outwards.

“Must be nice to travel with someone who’s looking out for you?”

He doesn’t mean to phrase it as a question, but Ava catches his meaning right away, laughing instead of taking any offense.

“Yeah, she’s a little — ah — protective?” The humor fades slightly, sliding into a half-smile. “We’ve kind of had a rough go of it the last half year. Big life stuff, you know? And I got into an… accident a couple months back. I’m okay! But Bea still likes to make sure I’m — I dunno — doing okay, I guess. She’ll chill out a little once it’s not so fresh. Probably.”

Trying not to make his instinctive scan for any apparent injuries on the woman too obvious, he busies himself with wiping down the bar, rubbing at an imaginary spot. It’s unlikely to fool anyone, but Ava doesn’t call him out on it, only looks on with amusement.

“Sorry, but should I be doing something? I don’t want you to think I’m a complete slacker, but — ”

“Ah. No. Sorry.” He tosses the rag over his shoulder, running a hand through his hair with his next motion. “I should be showing you the ropes and I’m badgering you with questions. I apologize. Truly.”

“Oh, hey, no need!” Ava lifts her hands, a crooked grin in place. “If you want to pay me to talk about myself all day, I’m totally good with that. It’s kind of my specialty: talking. Not to brag or anything, but I can usually talk until people are begging me to shut up.”

Hans laughs, charmed again. “No need to worry about that with me. Or anyone here. Everyone loves a bartender who knows how to chat; we can call that your first lesson.”

“And the second?”

He slides a glass across the counter, and follows it — once Ava’s neatly caught the first — with a cool bottle of beer.

“We’ll start with how to pour a good head. And you can chat all you want while you learn the way we do it here.”

—

Ava spots her first, and — not too long after — Hans spots the change come over Ava.

“She’s been outside for five minutes, trying to be subtle,” Ava says, just short of gleeful. “Pacing around bushes and stuff. What a dweeb.”

Coming from Ava, it sounds like a compliment of the highest order, complete with an eye roll so fond it might as well be a blown kiss. By now, Hans knows that Ava is funny and kind and excitable, that she has a fervor for life unlike he’s ever seen, at that can form a bond with nearly anyone. He knows that she and Beatrice met at university, that they went through something terrible that Ava won’t talk about, and that Ava would do just about anything for the girl waiting just outside of the bar for her. These truths have flown from Ava freely, in words and expression, but all of that knowledge pales in comparison to what he sees now, carved in her expression as she stares out the front windows of the bar.

(There is a crowd around them, a town, a country, a world, but in that moment, Ava surely wouldn't notice if all of it disappeared, as long as one person remained.) 

“It’s close enough to eight,” Hans says, tapping the outside of his shoe against her own. “Why don’t you head out?”

He’s rewarded instantly: a beaming grin that lights up Ava’s entire face. If it were for him, it’d probably make him more than a little weak in the knees. As it is, he merely smiles back.

“Really? You are my very favorite coworker, my guy!”

This is not remotely true, but Hans appreciates the sentiment nonetheless as Ava slugs his shoulder (harder than expected, but presumably meant in a friendly manner), tosses her apron back on the hanger, and darts out from behind the bar.

“We were going to go home and be boring, but now I’m totally taking Bea to that little underground cinema you were talking about. Thanks, Hans! I owe you one!” she calls, the last bit coming from over her shoulder as she heads out.

“Show up on time, next shift, and we’ll call it even!” he returns, but can’t be sure whether she hears him at all; she reaches the door surprisingly quickly, all but sprinting until she’s through it and able to cross the last few meters, leaping around a bit of foliage and onto Beatrice’s back.

From this distance, it’s impossible to hear the two of them, but their actions tell plenty; Beatrice catches her easily enough, but nearly topples over when Ava whispers something in her ear and sends her into a fit of laughter that would look entirely out of place without Ava grinning alongside, drawing out something that — if Hans had to guess — didn’t reveal itself especially easily.

Silly, really, that he hadn’t realized until so late (until just now — just a minute before — when Ava had looked up and seen Beatrice and everything had suddenly clicked). Indulging in the sight for another second longer, he laughs softly and turns away, shaking his head at his own stupidity.

“Laughing at the voices inside your head, Hans? Never a good sign, I’m afraid.”

Leesa offers him a cheeky little grin as she saunters over to the bar, dangling an empty bottle from between her fingers. He readies another before she has to ask, hoping it’ll soften her tongue in the subsequent and inevitable teasing to come.

“Perfectly sane still, thanks.” He gestures to just outside, where Ava — still hanging off of Beatrice’s back — has seemingly embarked on her quest to get Beatrice to agree to a night out at the movies, complete with dramatic one-handed gestures. “Just laughing at the new girls.”

The convincing doesn’t take very long; the music and chatter within the bar can’t quite swallow Ava’s shout of triumph that comes only a moment later, and even Leesa laughs at the dance of victory that comes as soon as Ava’s feet hit the floor, mission undoubtedly accomplished.

“They look fun,” she muses. “Hope they stick around.”

Hans hums in agreement, too distracted to offer a better response, which turns out to be a critical error that he immediately regrets.

“Ohhh,” Leesa drawls. “Our poor Hans-y thinks he’s going to snag a summer romance with one of them, doesn’t he? Have you been dreaming up date montages in your head, set to one of your depressing indie bands?”

“No!’ He flicks his rag at her, missing by a decent amount when she jumps back with another laugh.

“Then stop staring, creep!” She waves a hand in front of his face, but Ava and Beatrice have already vanished from sight, the former dragging away the latter by the hand (the latter looking entirely unbothered — and in fact, remarkably pleased — by change in plans).

He doesn’t know how to explain that it’s not that. (Or, that — yes — maybe it was that for a brief, fleeting moment, but not any more.) Don’t you see it? he wants to ask, but knows that he wouldn’t be able to handle any of the further jokes, or answer any of the obvious questions that were sure to follow. But the question remains. It lingers as he waves Leesa off with a roll of his eyes, as he cleans up at the end of the night, and as he steps out into the cool night air, breathing deep and looking at the stars.

Don’t you see it? he thinks, and it seems quite certain to him that, eventually, everyone will.

Chapter Text

You made me dance in the kitchen with you
If I was the night then you were the moon
Expectation is the currency of fools
I spent it on you, I spent it on you

Tell me once more, speak to my chest
I wanna bleed all of the words you said
Call us the dawn, a shadow of grace
You don't say you love me, so I'll do the same

—

Sitting at the small kitchen table, hands folded as though in prayer, Beatrice calls to mind the solemnity of one of the Church-sponsored, Renaissance-like paintings that had hung along the walls of the orphanage. There’s no visible bend to her spine, no attempt at a sprawl, no signs of any inclination to fidget. As always, Beatrice looks perfectly composed, and it makes Ava’s teeth ache in the exact way she remembers from her first taste of cotton candy. (She’d been eleven and one of the older kids had snuck out to the circus and brought some back for her to try and that doesn’t matter now, not at all.)

“We knew it would come to this eventually,” Beatrice sighs. “We can’t put it off any longer. It’s been nearly three weeks and we’re burning through our budget and the good graces of others.”

“Look, you don’t have to convince me! I’m here aren’t I?” And on her day off, no less; a rare day with no training and no work and the opportunity to maybe check out the little gelato shack that Leesa said had a flavor with little chunks of Kinder bar in every scoop. “Let’s just get on with it, Sister Dramatic. It’s just cooking.”

The key to understanding Beatrice is in the intricacies of her breath. This, Ava has discovered through swallowed gasps and moments of stillness and small hitches purposefully stalled before they might reveal themselves in sinew and bone. The key to Beatrice is in the air that passes (or doesn’t) through her lips, and if this results in Ava staring at her mouth a bit more intently than might be considered — strictly speaking — ‘friendly’, then so what? There were far less pleasant things to preoccupy herself with in the world, and sometimes, she’s wildly beyond her limit in being able to contemplate them.

If Beatrice’s soft, pained hum is indicative of anything (which it is — it always is), one of the least pleasant of these putrid preoccupations for the woman across from her might very well be the mere suggestion that she should have to use those long, calloused fingers to pick up a spoon and stir a bunch of random shit around in a pot.

“Bea, come on. Let’s just make some kind of soup. Anyone can make soup. I’m writing down soup, okay?”

She leans forward slowly, trapping the pad of paper (innocently resting in the middle of the table with a pen on top) under her middle and index finger and dragging it back towards her, eyeing Beatrice all the while. The experience is not unlike all those shows where various idiots threw themselves into cages with nature’s apex predators, inching closer while looking for any sign that said predator might suddenly strike and kill them instantly. Except that, in this case, one of the deadliest creatures on the planet looks closer to tears than violence, shuddering slightly when Ava does exactly as she’d threatened and (with uncharacteristic care) writes down the word ‘soup’ in all caps.

“Alright, if you start crying, I’m just going to ask Hans to make us another pot of chili, because that lasted like four days and it was insanely good, and I feel like we have at least two weeks before he strangles one or both of us, but probably you, given — ”

“I’m not going to cry, Ava,” Beatrice huffs, but then frowns, the rest of Ava’s words catching up with her. “And what do you mean ‘probably’ me? I’ve been nothing but cordial towards Hans, and I think he’s found my inventory system quite useful, actually.

“But nevermind that,” she continues, before Ava can cut in with any of the teasing comments she’d like to. “The point is, I’m perfectly fine with soup. We can make soup. I just think we may need a little more detail than the word soup before we head to the store. Did you have any grand aspirations for what type of soup this might be? What ingredients we might concoct it from?”

“I think potatoes, probably.”

Beatrice stares at her.

“Potatoes,” she repeats slowly.

“Yeah! Potatoes and like… garlic. Onions. Salt. And something to make it kind of… not bland. Paprika? That’s a thing. Then maybe some kind of… sausage? Is that a thing people put in soups? I feel like they do. Or is it pork?”

Beatrice’s exhale is loud and long and Ava knows to look up from where she’s started writing each of these ingredients on her list (stopping only briefly to draw a little bowler hat on the frog towards the end).

“Ava,” she says tightly. “I know this is not my particular area of expertise, but I think, perhaps, that cooking does not involve simply throwing random edible items into a pot and hoping it all comes together if you set it on fire.”

Ava ponders this, squinting her eyes to make sure Beatrice knows she’s definitely, really in super deep thought. At least for a whole five seconds or so.

“Nope,” she finally declares, emphasizing the point with a bounce of her pen. “I think that’s actually exactly how it works. Do you want to add anything?”

This time, it’s an inhale, just as long but not nearly as loud, and this time, it gives Ava pause. There’s something like real ire accumulating in the line between Beatrice’s brows, faint as it might be. She’s seen this before, but she can count on one hand the number of times she’s seen it directed at her. But then it’s gone — no more than a second later — wiped away by a gentle sigh and replaced by a far more familiar half smile.

“Yes,” she murmurs. “A recipe. I’ve been doing a bit of research over the past few days in preparation, and I seem to recall one for a soup that involved most of the things you mentioned. Perhaps we can start with that?”

I’m the brief silence following, Beatrice twitches. Just the once. Just barely. A single spasm of her thumb from within the careful fold of her fingers. But it’s enough to draw Ava’s attention, which is enough to make her want to touch, which is enough for her to reach over and do precisely that, her knuckles brushing up against the back of Beatrice’s hand.

“Well, sure, if you want to get all June Cleaver on me. Or — oh shit, wait — is this why you talk like you’re from the 50s? Is this your hint that you want me to buy you a pearl necklace for your birthday? Because I’m not sure my tips at the bar are going to cover it. Maybe just a nice house frock instead.”

For a moment, it looks like the joke won’t land. Beatrice’s face is eerily still up until the instant she draws in a sharp sip of air, but then she releases it and — when she speaks — her tone is droll enough to wash away any concerns.

“Right, yes, silly me. I’d forgotten that reading one recipe is all it takes to induce the change from nun to housewife.”

“Don’t worry though; it’s easy to reverse. Just go into the bathroom, turn off all the lights, and shout ‘fuck the patriarchy’ three times into the mirror. Or — wait — maybe that’s the ritual to go from housewife to punk. How would you feel about shaving part of your head?”

With this, she finally gets a laugh, something she hadn’t realized she’d been working towards until it happens and relief trickles down her spine, cool and hot at the same time.

“Best get on our way, then. It sounds like we have quite a lot to do.”

Flattening her hands against the table and pushing back, Beatrice pulls away — turns away — only for one of those hands to dart back in, covering Ava’s with one brief and weighty press. The quick squeeze strikes against something hard in Ava’s chest, scraping along the bone and starting a familiar flame.

“Yeah,” Ava breathes, raw in a way that catches her off guard. “You’ve got like three outfit changes to fit in, or something.”

Beatrice smiles, a startling flash of teeth, and Ava knows then what she’s known for an exceedingly long while now, maybe since the very start.

Beatrice is a certain kind of beautiful. (The kind that might drive a person to think of little else.)

—

Despite common opinion from nearly everyone around her at some point in time (which — ouch), Ava isn’t stupid.

She knows — as they stroll down the narrow aisle of the single grocer in town, Beatrice murmuring to herself as she goes through their list yet again — that she’s at least a little infatuated with her best friend.

Sometime around the moment Beatrice’s palm had first pressed to her cheek, when she’d finished one of her puns, when she’d laid down alongside Ava in the dark and told her it wasn’t like before; sometime during one of these moments or another in between, Ava had noticed — tucked away deep in her chest — the persistent and low heat of affection she held for the girl featured in all of them. But Ava isn’t stupid and Beatrice is a nun and so what can she do other than add that warmth to the catalogue of sensations that just happen to Ava now? Her life consists of the halo’s constant low buzz at the base of her skull, the pleasant press of the world on nerve endings she’d thought lost, and the steady blaze of affection she holds for Beatrice. (And — how can she forget? — the spike of that small flame into something else, something harder to contain, whenever Beatrice smiles or laughs or looks at her or says her name.)

“Ava?”

Like now, when she’s drawn from her musing by two syllables and the slight tilt of Beatrice’s head and the heavy, heavy attention of her dark eyes, and it’s like oil’s been spilled, seeping out into her chest, and then there’s a grease fire, thick smoke clouding up her lungs.

“Yeah?” She’s too breathless for it to come out as anything more than an embarrassing squeak, and so she coughs and tries again, lowering her voice considerably. “I mean… yeah?”

“The… potatoes?” Beatrice gestures to the produce in front of them, which Ava had utterly failed to notice in favor of thinking about how good Beatrice looked in the dark green sweater Ava had picked out for her only three days ago. “The recipe doesn’t specify the type, but I assume we want something with a medium starch content, to balance the soup’s need for thickening with the desire to keep some of the potato intact for a satisfying bite.”

Ava swoons. Just a little bit.

(This is her life now: feeling lightheaded over a girl talking about potatoes. She really, really doesn’t mind.)

“Uh — yeah. Yeah! Definitely.” She reaches blindly, absentmindedly patting one of the lumps of brown. “Let’s go with this one for sure.”

“That,” Beatrice says, “is a rutabaga.”

At the very corner of Beatrice’s mouth, there’s a smile, and Ava stares at it for a long moment before she’s able to look down at the vegetables and confirm.

“Well. Obviously.” She nods, flattening her lips into a thin, serious line. “That was a test.”

“A test,” Beatrice echoes and the smile has grown, the small dent at the corner pronounced enough that Ava wants to follow the curve of the divot with her thumb.

“Yeah! I mean, you’ve been reading up so much on cooking, or whatever, so I want your efforts to feel appreciated. Which for normal people would be like, ‘wow, good job, you’re incredible’ and for you is probably like, ‘here’s numeric proof that you’re actually, statistically incredible’. Right? So, you’re already killing it; one for one.”

“How very thoughtful of you.”

“I know right? So, what’s — ” She spins around in place, searching for the weirdest looking thing she can find. It doesn’t take long — two seconds at most — before she’s able to pluck something from the racks that might as well be a turnip from another planet. “— This?”

“Kohlrabi.”

“And this?”

“Black salsify.”

“This?”

“Parsley root.”

“And wha— ” Ava cuts herself off, throwing up her hands instead. “Okay, what the fuck, why are all these so freaky? Are these normal vegetables? Am I the weird one? Because I swear to God this one might as well be dildo for ghosts, Bea! Like! It looks exactly like that!”

Honestly, Beatrice should be used to this sort of thing by now, which is probably why Ava is so surprised by the magnitude of the blush that creeps up her neck, until she traces the path of Beatrice’s stare, turns around, and finds there’s a shopkeep standing awkwardly in the aisle with them, his cheeks just as (if not more) red.

“Ah — he— hello, ladies.”

Whoops.

Ava’s not sure who to apologize to first: Beatrice or the very slight German boy now awkwardly shuffling from foot to foot and avoiding either of their gazes. In the end she settles on neither after a stern sort of look from Beatrice (that’s actually kind of hot?) short-circuits her brain, just a little.

“Good afternoon,” Beatrice says, all visible traces of her embarrassment gone as she switches to German that’s probably overly formal for talking with a kid who can’t be more than sixteen. “I apologize for our volume. We didn’t mean to disturb anyone.”

“Not — not at all.” He looks relieved at the language change, abandoning the stilted English he’d used in his greeting. “I was only — I hoped I might help you. Maybe you aren’t so familiar with our shop?”

“What gave it away, Herr Bossman?” By now, she’s pretty sure that they’re not about to be thrown out by a kid with acne, so the laugh comes easily as she steps backwards, nudging a still-ridgid Beatrice with her elbow as she comes to stand at her side. “Was it the English, the volume, or the fact that I still think this thing looks just like — ”

“We’d appreciate the help,” Beatrice cuts in, as close to panicked as Ava’s maybe ever heard her (combat situations included).

“It’s just white radish,” the boy adds, blushing again. “One of the locals grows them in his greenhouse because everyone here is obsessed with Radi — uh — sliced radish with a lot of salt, basically.”

“Sounds like something even we couldn’t mess up, Bea. What do you think?”

With a deep sigh, Beatrice picks up one of the radishes and places it in the basket hooked around her arm. It feels like a victory to be celebrated, for some reason, and so Ava allows herself a small fist pump.

“Want to help us find the rest, bud? We’re trying to make soup. With potatoes and other stuff, or something.”

“Though we do actually have a list.” Beatrice lifts up the piece of paper not unlike one might show a passport to an official, ready for inspection. “And if it’s too much trouble, please don’t hesitate to — ”

“No!” The boy coughs, and shows that he’s quite prone to blushing, apparently, because his ears are pink now, and he’s started shuffling again. “I’m happy to help. It’s my… job. Let me take that basket for you, ma’am.”

Ma’am, Ava mouths to Beatrice as she hands the basket over, clearly too bewildered to object when the boy reaches for it. And oh she’s going to be using this for weeks of teasing, maybe years, because of course this boy is calling Beatrice ma’am and falling over himself to follow her around the grocery store. Of course he is, because just then, Beatrice favors him with a smile — one of the genuine ones that has a tendency to crack open Ava’s ribs until she’s afraid her heart might fall right out — and who could possibly resist that?

“You’re a legend,” Ava tells the kid, her grin bright with amusement and — as she loops her arm through Beatrice’s now-free one — affection for the woman next to her. “Let’s start with the potatoes. Which ones should we use in a soup?”

Beatrice rolls her eyes, but doesn’t pull away; the German kid starts going on about starch and moisture content and all the stuff Beatrice had mentioned before; and Ava leans into that familiar warmth and doesn’t feel bad about it, not even a little.

Because sure, maybe Ava has a crush on her best friend.

But who didn’t?

—

“Using the same pot,” Beatrice reads. “Add the butter and sauté the onions over a medium heat, until they turn translucent.”

Bent over the recipe resting on the kitchen counter, the knuckles of her right hand pressing into her cheek, Beatrice might as well be pouring through a theoretical physics textbook, what with the careful pronunciation of each word and the permanent crease between her eyebrows.

“That’s all it says. No mention of how long this is meant to take. I’m not sure why.” She pauses, drumming her fingers against the print out (offered enthusiastically by Lucas — the smitten shop boy — somewhere towards the end of their trip). “I’ll go look it up.”

“Bea!” Ava laughs, and cuts off Beatrice’s retreat out of the kitchen with a spatula now covered in melted butter and bits of diced onions. It earns her a look, but not one she can’t deflect with a grin. “Relax. Believe it or not, I know what translucent means. Let’s just keep watching them.”

“Maybe I didn’t cut them finely enough,” Beatrice muses, brow pinching in even further. “As I said before, ‘diced’ is hardly a specific metric.”

Earlier, when they had been focused on meal prep, Beatrice had absentmindedly twirled a kitchen knife in her fingers and Ava had nearly swallowed her tongue. She had also, apparently, missed Beatrice’s preoccupation with the sizing of her onion pieces, but this was, she feels, fairly understandable.

“I’m sure you cut them perfectly, even if it did look like you were imagining dismembering a man while you were doing it. Which — don’t get me wrong — that’s hot! But maybe the onions are going to need a little longer than usual to recover. Just… c’mere. We can watch them together.”

Hesitantly, Beatrice moves away from the counter (though she does bring the recipe page with her), inching closer until she can peer over Ava’s shoulder, dragging a strand of brown (escaped from Beatrice’s trademark bun somewhere in the midst of her chopping frenzy) across Ava’s cheek.

“See?” she murmurs, turning into it instinctively, until her nose brushes up against Beatrice’s jaw (until she aches a little with the thought of pressing closer, even if she knows that would be a step too far). “They’re close.”

Beatrice, however, suddenly isn’t. With a sharp turn, she’s back across the kitchen, paper clutched in her fist tight enough to crumple the side, as though staring at the imperfect and unfinished result of their work so far was too much to bear.

“Good,” she says, a little faintly, her face turned away. “Then… garlic next. Or — that is; ‘add the garlic and sauté for another minute until fragrant.’ At least we’ve been given proper instruction this time.”

Ava stares at her profile for another second longer, sure she’s missing something in the hard set of Beatrice’s jaw, but the onions are nearly there and there’s garlic to be added, and so she dutifully follows the recipe, since it’s the only way of proceeding that she knows Beatrice will commend.

“Okay, onions are translucent, so I’m adding the garlic now.” She tries (genuinely) to match Beatrice’s grave handling of the task, but fails almost immediately. “I feel like I’m disarming a bomb. Red wire or blue wire, Bea?”

“Chicken broth, actually,” she returns, dry again. “Then water, potatoes, salt, and pepper. And then we bring everything to a boil and wait until the potatoes are ‘tender’.”

Dutifully, Ava adds each. Beatrice had been in charge of measuring, preparing little bowls of the various ingredients so that all Ava had to do was add them at the right time and stir. But — well. Right there — next to all the neat and carefully controlled little portions — the small shaker of red pepper flakes haunts her. Ava’s pretty sure the sausage they’d gotten would taste a whole lot better with just a pinch of heat. Cooking people were always saying stuff like that: pinches and heat and flavor, so it probably wouldn’t hurt to just add a little.

Decision made, she casually turns her shoulder, hoping to block Beatrice’s view of the pot, grabs the shaker, and —

“Ow! What the fuck, Beatrice?”

It happens too quickly for Ava to process until after there’s a stinging sensation in her hand and the sad little bottle of red pepper flakes is rolling along the ground, away from them both: Ava, rubbing at the back of her left hand, and Beatrice, holding a twisted kitchen towel like a whip. (The kitchen towel is covered in smiling pandas, and somehow, this makes the betrayal worse.)

“There’s none of that in the recipe,” Beatrice says simply, her face a stone. “We agreed we would stick to the recipe.”

“So you towel snap me? Isn’t that shit like, banned by the Geneva convention? Or at least in Nun law, or whatever?” She shakes out her hand; though the initial hurt has long since dissipated, she still feels the shock of surprise. “Jesus! Little extreme, don’t you think?”

Beatrice drags in a breath, one that’s slow and calming and — on Ava’s end — more than a little unexpected. From here, she can see the tight flex of her jaw, the tension in the stiff lift of her shoulders, the stiff muscle running down the length of her neck, and the combination of all of it is far worse than the whipping sting Beatrice had delivered moments before.

“Wait, are you mad at me?”

The next inhale is softer, but shakier, muffled by the immediate turn of Beatrice’s head, the aversion of her eyes.

“No,” she says, enough heat in her tone that it can’t be anything but a lie. “I’m not.”

“You are,” Ava insists, and — with a brief glance towards the pot — crosses the kitchen in three steps, stopping only when she’s directly in front of Beatrice, who coils a little tighter at her approach. “And — hey — that’s okay. I know following a plan is important to you and I know I don’t always… do that, which is probably really fucking annoying in a life or death situation, but — ”

“I know.” Another sharp breath in and Beatrice slowly turns towards her, though her stare doesn’t quite lift to meet Ava’s, still landing somewhere around chin height. “I know it’s asinine. It was an overreaction. And I’m sorry, for… resorting to violence.”

Ava laughs — part relief, part genuine fondness — and reaches for Beatrice with instincts built of the same, fingertips hitting her elbow and tracing along her arm.

“Okay, let’s not go that far. Resorting to violence makes it sound like you took a hammer to my head, and I feel like you’re about to jump into some kind of Ye Olde Catholic self-flagellation as penance.” Her fingers skirt lower, rounding the bend of Beatrice’s slender wrist, ghosting along knuckles, and finally dropping to the towel she’s clutched in her grasp. She tugs until it’s loosened enough to remove and — with a reverent care — places it back over Beatrice’s shoulder, where it’d (charmingly) hung before the so-called violence.

“And it’s not asinine,” she continues, filled to the brim with everything ever, maybe, and unable to let her hand drop away from where it falls to rest on Beatrice’s bicep. “I just don’t get it. And those aren’t the same things like 97% of the time. Don’t forget; I don’t get a lot of things.”

Beatrice’s smile is weak, but, combined with her finally (finally) looking directly at Ava (eyes wide and sad and just a little glossy), it’s enough.

“Don’t,” she murmurs. “Don’t put yourself down to make me feel better.”

Which is stupid, really, because Ava would do anything to make Beatrice feel better, and calling herself a little stupid is the least of them.

“Well fine, but only if you clue me in. What’s going on, Bea? You speak twenty-seven languages, know how to kill a dude in five million different ways, and are like, the single most competent person on the planet, probably. But you’ve been on edge all day about fucking up soup, and I just don’t get it. Nobody is good at everything they do.”

“I am.” It’s clearly an instinctive response, a little too heated (a little too prideful) for Beatrice not to instantly regret. “I was,” she amends, but that’s not quite right either, because she tries again — one last time — after a deep inhale. “I strived to be, at least.”

Ava would do anything to make Beatrice feel better, and just about now, she’d chew on glass if it meant erasing even a fraction of the quiet, resigned sadness from her voice. But all she has are words and hands, so she presses the latter to the warm skin of Beatrice’s arms and tries to cram every millimeter of affection she has ever possessed into the former.

“Which wasn’t fair,” she insists, but gently, carefully soft. “Like, not even a little. You have to know now that wasn’t fair.”

“I do know.” The admission costs Beatrice, eyes darting away again, but still she continues, though not without difficulty, as haltingly as Ava’s ever heard her speak. “Logically, I know. But it’s — it’s foolish, but I still feel as though, if only I apply myself — if I form a plan and work hard enough to see it to fruition, then I’ll succeed. And if I succeed, then I’ll continue to feel.. acceptable. Because I — truthfully — I find the sensation of failure to be unbearable. Still.”

Throughout, Ava’s hands drift down, until she’s almost — but not quite — managed to give Beatrice space to think and breathe and speak. But not completely, because her fingers snag on two of Beatrice’s, wrapping around the digits in a way Ava is unable to counter, not even with conscious effort. Before she can wonder if the gesture is a comfort rather than a burden, Beatrice’s thumb presses down, sliding along the underside of Ava’s palm, holding her in place.

“Yeah, well. That’s not your fault. Your parents are fucking dicks and if I ever see them I’m going to show them just how good I am at kicking ass.”

She winces at the force of her own anger, but Beatrice’s lips twitch into a flickering smile.

“That would… end very poorly. And I’m afraid it doesn’t much help me now.”

“Right. Duh. Um, then why don’t we — I dunno — work on it a little bit at a time.” Though she starts off without a clear plan in mind, she warms to the idea quickly as the words leave her mouth, eyes brightening as it takes hold.

Beatrice looks less convinced, brow pinching as she contemplates a spot somewhere around Ava’s shoulder. “Meaning?”

“Meaning,” Ava begins, grin growing as she steps forward, unable to help herself from filling the space, from craning her neck at an odd angle until she can catch Beatrice’s gaze. “Mess up a meal with me. Let me put in extra pepper flakes or double the garlic or way too much salt. Let’s add in some of those freaky turnips or try to add spice to the sausage and let’s see if that makes it better or worse, so that we’ll know for the next time. Basically… let’s start with something small. Fuck up this soup with me, Bea. I promise it’ll be fun.”

Tension spreads through Beatrice like iron, like rebar, like titanium has settled in her shoulders and back and neck and lungs. It’s eons before she responds and the air might as well be full of that same heavy metal, for all the good it does when Ava attempts to breathe.

“Yes,” Beatrice murmurs. “Yes, okay.”

And despite the answer, Ava thinks she’s done something wrong — something irreparable — until all of that tension seems to melt away when Beatrice releases a huff that might be a laugh or might be a sob, and then she looks up and Ava knows.

“You really don’t realize what you do to a person, do you?”

Beatrice looks up and Ava knows, because, yes, there’s the affection she’s noticed before — all the fondness Beatrice has always carried for her in all the obvious ways — but now there’s longing and there’s want and it’s like a switch or a bolt of lightning or a mask pulled away, because now it’s heady and messy and profane and it’s all right there in her eyes, in the way Beatrice whispers these words, the same way someone might whisper a prayer.

And oh oh oh oh oh, Ava’s liable to burst, she’s likely to melt, she might collapse, because in Beatrice’s face, she finds the look of the anointed — of the faces carefully painted in the aged pages of books foisted on her by the OCS — staring up at the holy light above. But that awe is changed (transformed, tainted, improved) with something achingly and distantly familiar: something found in the looks between leads of mournful romances, sensual black and white films, tortured dramas that span years and years and years.

Ava has a crush on her best friend, but it’s not just a crush.

And it’s definitely not just her.

“I — ” For once, she’s at a loss for words. But how could she not be? Beatrice is staring at her like that and Ava can barely remember her own name. “I don’t — ”

“It’s — ” Beatrice shakes her head, letting out a trembling breath. “No matter where you go. The bar or the pool or even the grocer, with that poor shopboy. You’re there and everyone aches to be a part of the world you see. There’s something you generate that — I don’t know how you don’t see it. It makes a person willing to do anything to be noticed by you.”

Doubt creeps in; flashes of Sister Frances’s gravelly voice, a knobby finger underlining the words as she preached of Thomas pressing himself deep into open wounds. Because none of that’s right, not really. The kid at the shop had been caught on Beatrice, obviously, and that had nothing to do with anything, anyways. The halo didn’t have anything to do with this — not with the charge in the air between them — but Ava has to ask. Has to be sure.

“Is that… a halo bearer thing?”

Put your finger here; see my hands, Ava remembers. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.

“No,” Beatrice says finally, too softly to be mistaken for anything else. “I don’t think it has anything to do with that at all.”

The key to understanding Beatrice is in the intricacies of her breath. This, Ava has discovered through swallowed gasps and moments of stillness and small hitches purposefully stalled before they might reveal themselves in sinew and bone. And so, when Ava speaks next, she does with intent, ready to catch any shudder or rasp or inhale. (She does so with the knowledge that it would be easier — more concrete — if she could lean in and feel any of these precious signs on her mouth, Beatrice’s breath curling over her lips.)

“Maybe it’s just me then,” she says. “Maybe it’s just me whenever I’m around you.”

The sharp inhale tells her everything she’d already known.

And she could kiss Beatrice then. She could fit her hands to the sharp line of her jaw and consume the gasp that would surely result, taking care to make sure no trace of it remains. But Beatrice’s hands are curled into fists and she’s stopped breathing at all, and they have time, probably — they still have time — and so Ava will wait. Until Beatrice is ready, Ava can wait.

“Come on,” she continues, gentle now. “Let’s check on the potatoes. And add the rest of the stuff. After that, we’ll see if we can add in something new. A little bit at a time.”

Slowly, Beatrice nods, her steady breaths resuming as Ava steps away and returns to the pot. They spear the potatoes with forks and add in the cream and kale, and Beatrice lets her shake some red pepper flakes into the mixture without saying anything at all. Ava’s hands do not stray more than they usually might, her confession remains locked behind her lips, and when she leans into the woman next to her, making her laugh with a lame joke about watched pots and trees falling in forests, it’s like any other day.

As with teaching her about cooking and accepting imperfections, for Beatrice, Ava will take loving her slow.

Chapter Text

I'm mostly scared, I am mostly unprepared, I'm a mess
I lost most of myself as the waves came crashing down, I'm a wreck
I've been burying my sins and paid the deadly cost
Of a life full of success and an empty broken heart

—

Even in a town as small as theirs, there is a church, because there’s always a church.

This one (coincidentally, or perhaps — more frighteningly — not) is Catholic, and the environment is as familiar to Beatrice as anything else: the white cloth of the altar, the light smoke drifting through the rafters, the unadorned pews, the mournful statues of the sacred. She has not stepped foot in the space before today (her current role prioritized over her more standardized duties), but she moves through it easily, dipping her fingers into the holy water at the door and feeling the cool relief of instinct taking over. This church is new to her, but it still feels like home.

(There, at the Tabernacle, is where Mary had convinced Shannon to rig the door with a fake snake; there, at the votive candles, is where Camila caught the sleeve of her habit on fire, her first night at Cat’s Cradle; there, at the foot of the sanctuary, is where Beatrice once spied Ava positioned just so, the soft backlight illuminating her like something that could only — Beatrice had thought at the time and still can’t help but think now — be some kind of holy.)

Today, the church is empty, a consequence of the time (5:13 AM) and the day of the week (a random Tuesday). Had Beatrice selected the moment of her visit with the intention of being alone, she couldn't have done better, but instead, she is lucky rather than wise. Instead, she is here due to compulsion, due to necessity, due to Ava insisting on sharing their oft-cursed double bed and throwing an arm around Beatrice’s waist and hooking her foot around Beatrice’s ankle and pressing her mouth to the crook of Beatrice’s neck. It’s hardly the first time Ava’s actions — meaningless, unconscious, and devastating — have caused Beatrice to bolt in the early morning hours, lacing up her sneakers with shaking hands, throwing on attire she might push herself in, and running, running, running until the drain of the physicality burns every conscious thought out of her brain.

But today is the first time she’s ended up here, sweat cooling on her bare shoulders as she stares up the middle aisle, feeling naked in more ways than one. (The tank top isn’t hers. She’d realized too late — once she was standing out in the middle of the street and a measure of sense returned to her — that it was too short and too tight and too saturated with the smell of Ava, something that lingered on sheets and pillowcases and t-shirts, despite Beatrice’s best efforts to erase it with unscented detergent.) The rubber of her soles squeak on the simple (but polished) wooden floors as she begins to move forward, and she stills almost instantly, instinctively hiding a wince. This place is home, but there are still rules, and she’s desperate not to break them, lest she be banished from even here. Instead of risking further noise with her tread, she cuts right (steps light and careful), where a single confessional rests up against the wall, both curtains pulled back to reveal an unpadded kneeler on one side and an equally unadorned chair on the other.

There’s something calming about stepping into the side of the penitent, in drawing the curtain shut and dropping to her knees once she’s enclosed in the dark. In every booth, the air feels the same — stale and damp at the same time — and she’s brought back to her first confession, to her fifteenth, to her one-hundred and twenty-ninth, always asking forgiveness for the same thing. Nothing’s changed now — kneeling and prepared to give confession number five-hundred and thirty-two — except that it’s worse, in every way imaginable, because she has a specific name (face, hand, mouth) to pin her desires on.

(After her four hundred and sixth confession, she’d finally been told — Shannon’s shoulder pressed against hers, her voice patient and low — that keeping count wasn’t a thing normal people did, but she’s never quite been able to keep the individual moments from tallying in her mind.)

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, to no one at all, and maybe that thought alone — the implications of no one and nothing — is sin enough.

“I’m sorry,” she tries again, quieter still, but this time with a recipient in mind. “But I’m not strong enough to handle what you’re sending me. Surely, you can see that. Surely, you can see my heart.”

This is as far as she gets before words fail her. The thoughts are hardly new (in fact, they are worn repetitions, shared each night in prayer and with increasing desperation), but revealing them aloud is new, and infinitely more difficult. Aloud, she can hear the echo of her own voice, bouncing back off the wood (aloud, she can hear how little strength she has left).

It had been foolish to come here, really. She’d realized that as soon as she’d pulled open the heavy oak door of the church and felt the prickle of regret on her neck. But she realizes it more distinctly now, her forehead flattened against the cool wall of the confessional booth, the weight of the space nearly crushing her plea (for a mercy she doesn’t deserve). It’s suffocating, suddenly, and she’s on her feet, reaching for the curtain before sense can take over and instill caution. But then senses do, and she’s frozen in place by the barely audible step of someone padding closer: soft shoes against the floor and a robe dragging along the ground and — most horrifically — the creak of the half-door on the other side of the booth.

“I’m familiar with cities that never sleep, but I must admit, I didn’t think I was living in one.”

“I — ” Beatrice drops to her knees again, pressing her brow against the top of the bench, part in mortification, part in her hurry to not be seen — not even through the latticed opening — as the shutter pulls back. “I’m sorry, Father. I hadn’t thought I would wake anyone.”

The priest speaks in a soft Swiss German, a dialect that Beatrice finds not quite as easy to understand, but soothing in a strange, contrary way.

“The curse of technology,” he admits, with a small chuckle. “The bishop has declared that each of the confessionals in the diocese be monitored with pesky little motion detectors. Perhaps he thinks ‘on-demand’ refers to more than Netflix and Uber Eats.” He pauses. “These references are to make you think I’m a modern priest, you see.”

Truthfully, Beatrice isn’t doing much thinking at all, other than a heavy dose of self-beration, and a light topping of concocting various escape scenarios that might avoid breaking something vital (such as her and Ava’s cover, or the tenuous grasp she maintains on her very purpose in life).

“I’m truly sorry,” she murmurs again. “I had no idea.”

“Well, how could you? And besides, you only interrupted my rather mundane morning ritual of staring at the sunrise with a cup of iced coffee. Earthly pleasures and earthly weakness; nothing so important as the immortal soul.” She chances a glance through the lattice window separating them, and finds only a blur of tan skin and light hair, the vague outline of a middle-aged man. “Would you like to begin, my child?”

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, she’s meant to say. It’s been two months since my last confession.

(Two months since the night before their assault on the Vatican, when Beatrice had thought that if she could lay a few sins to rest, the people she had made culpable wouldn’t suffer should she fail to survive the night.)

“I — I don’t know how to do this.”

Five hundred plus confessions and this is still true. She doesn’t know how to do this anymore, doesn’t know how to do this now. The Sacrament of Penance requires contrition, and lately, Beatrice can’t be sure she possesses much of that at all. Because sometimes, she searches for regret, and only finds Ava instead, wearing the wide grin she makes whenever Beatrice indulges in her baser instincts.

“I see.” The priest doesn’t pause for a tremendous length of time, but it’s long enough that Beatrice knows what he’s thinking, and short enough that she’s unable to prevent the misunderstanding. “Typically, in this instance, you might say ‘bless me, Father, for I have sinned. This is my first confession’. But it’s early, and there’s no one here to correct us. So let’s do away with the formalities. Perhaps it will be easiest if you simply tell me what’s on your mind.”

Easiest feels like a particularly mean-hearted jab, but Beatrice does her best to place it into context and remove the sting. But easiest isn’t so easily worked out. Easiest might be telling a lie and maintaining their cover. Easiest might be admitting to every single inconvenient and sinful truth. Easiest might be running out of the confession booth, running until she’s back at the apartment, running until she can curl her fingers around Ava’s jaw and confess with lips and hands and tongue.

She should do the first, wants to do the last, and settles for the middle.

“I am promised to someone,” she begins, slow and careful in skirting around the delicacies of her truth. “I have been ever since I was young. It was not — at the time, it wasn’t a choice I made for myself, but it’s one I have found… purpose in. Peace, I think. But lately — for many months now, if I’m being perfectly honest with myself — I’ve found myself drawn to another. I have found myself craving things I should not. Things that are wrong, perhaps for more than one reason alone. Or so I have been told, I suppose.”

A confession is not a conversation; this, Beatrice knows well, but still feels surprised when the priest only responds with a quiet hum, no condemnation contained within. It makes her bold, or perhaps nothing quite so purposeful. Reckless, maybe, in searching for a judgment she’s sure she needs, for the acknowledgement of her sins in a way that will shame her into retreat.

“I know it’s wrong, but I can’t stop thinking about her.” Her voice cracks on the pronoun, clasped hands tightening until her knuckles are pale. “Little things, like what it might be like to hold her hand with regularity or to bring home flowers for her after a run. And worse things too. Things I haven’t thought about — or have made the greatest effort not to think about — in years. I’ve made so many promises. And I feel I’m on the verge of breaking them at all times. I’m terrified that at any moment I’ll slip and… it will be done. I’ll have ruined everything that matters to me, friendships and covenant both.”

The confession booth amplifies sound, but Beatrice only hears her own breath, loud and quick and out of her control, like so many things that she’d once thought manageable and contained. Every confession she has ever given — from her first to her five-hundred and thirty-first — has contained some variation on this theme, and she should be used to it, the terror that flares up after each admission, but still, her hands shake in the heavy silence.

“A more traditional priest might read you a passage on the nature of sin from James or John or even Leviticus, but I feel, perhaps, this would not help you much, would it?”

He sighs, not particularly sad or tired or disheartened, but with a small hum at the end, one that contains, within it, a trace of humor Beatrice cannot understand.

“But what sin is… that’s a crucial point, isn’t it? We Catholics believe that thought — sinful thought — might be considered itself a sin if that thought is indulged. If pleasure is found in the conscious and purposeful entertaining of these thoughts, that is what makes them unholy. But I feel a man might cast his net very far indeed and not find a single soul who has not sinned in such a light manner. In your case, my child, I cannot assign penance, for I find none to be needed based on what you have told me. If there has been indulgence, it’s been tortured indeed.”

“That’s — ” Beatrice swallows back her next words — forceful, shocked things — and pushes her anger into the tips of her fingers, until she’s no longer able to maintain the proper posture of the supplicant (hands clasped in quiet devotion). “I have sorely misrepresented myself, then. I have downplayed how often I think of her. Because, in truth, it’s nearly every moment. I have failed to stress how longingly I think of the things we might do together. Because I sometimes have to tear myself from the most piteous of daydreams. And I have done a poor job, indeed, in explaining how ready I am to throw away the vows I have made. Because sometimes I truly think I might, simply for a touch.”

Fury has never burned within Beatrice for long. It’s an ugly sort of emotion that has never led to anything productive in the past, and she’s learned — through failures and patience — to extinguish it quickly. She does the same now, helped along by shock and shame and the surprised inhale of the priest, audible even over the rush of blood, a loud throbbing somewhere at the base of her skull. She has overstepped, perhaps disastrously so, and she needs to end this quickly, before she comes undone.

“I’m sorry,” she says, low and cool and hiding the way her voice threatens to shake. “I didn’t want to be misunderstood. And proper atonement seems important.”

Beatrice leaves with a penance of one Hail Mail and one Our Father, but the prayers feel hollow — whispered to the empty back-alley she escapes to as soon as the bewildered priest delivers his verdict — tainted by the simple fact that her confession, such as it was, had been incomplete.

Here is the sin she hadn’t quite been able to confess: she’s fairly certain, after quite a lot of thought, that she’s in love with Ava, in a way that certainly wasn’t meant for her.

(And here is another, a deeper and worse truth: Beatrice is starting to think — in an oft-ignored and shadowed corner of her heart — that being in love with Ava wasn’t a sin at all.)

—

For the rest of the day, Beatrice misses Ava.

Misses in the sense of: when she finally makes her way back to the apartment, drenched in sweat from the run she’d been compelled to restart, Ava’s already gone. Beatrice’s phone has been placed with purpose in the center of the kitchen table, a move about as passive aggressive as Ava ever gets, if not for the note resting underneath (bring this with you next time! I worry about you too, you know) complete with a dramatically oversized frown drawn over the face of the little frog decorating the stationary they’d taken to using. She finds more of the same in her text messages, all seventeen of them, different variations of where are you or is leaving a note really so hard?, including a series of gifs of various crying women, an incomprehensible reference to someone named J. Walter Weatherman, and a pointed mention that Ava would be going to the pool before her shift. (Followed shortly, of course, by a see how easy that was, Bea? which makes Beatrice’s chest hurt in a way she doesn’t need to examine.)

Or: when Beatrice comes back from returning a stack of books to the library, Ava’s come and gone, her wet swimsuit hanging in the bathroom. This time, Beatrice had left a note with her location, and Ava’s replied with a smiley face underneath it and then, in her careful scrawl, I hope you’re getting more French stuff - that’s your sexiest language. (For once, she does not mind disappointing Ava; she had drifted once more over to the French poets, but quickly changed course, finding Éloa, ou La sœur des anges to be more relatable than she remembered it being before, when thoughts of Love and Hell were a bit more abstract.)

Or: when Beatrice reports to the bar fifteen minutes before her shift and Ava is already gone, released by Hans a whole half hour early because she’d been invited to a party by some really handsome lads, and did Hans really need to say it like that? Or with such a weird little look, which Beatrice most certainly does not spend the next four hours of her shift attempting to decipher while crammed into a corner of the attic with bottles of alcohol she seriously considers consuming, if only for a second or two. Come after your shift, Ava texts, with a set of directions so convoluted, Beatrice can only assume she’s already drunk. (And then, a little later: please, Bea?, with a woozy-looking emoji that Beatrice is — once again — unable to decode.)

But mostly, Beatrice misses Ava like this: her heart lurching painfully with every text, her shoulders drooping every time their schedules fail to line up, and her soft sigh when she returns to an empty, dark apartment, sometime around eleven o’clock.

By the time she’s showered, dressed, brushed her teeth, and settled on the couch with a book, there’s still no sign of Ava, other than one more text message: a simple frowning emoticon delivered just after Beatrice had told Ava she’d made it back home. By the time Beatrice gives up on attempting to reply and actually opens her book, there’s still no Ava, and the same is true ten minutes later, fifteen, twenty. It’s still true after thirty minutes, when Beatrice’s lack of sleep begins to catch up with her and Hardy’s prose is beginning to feel rather monotonic, a repeating sort of rhythm, words blurring together in a way that feels almost like a —

— sudden weight on her legs, and Beatrice is moving before she can process any further sights or sounds or smells. There’s a knife behind the couch and another under the bed and a handgun in the pantry and one more strapped beneath the small table in the main room, but the closest weapon is the one holding up her hair and it’s this she goes for now, without any conscious thought, slipping it loose and flipping it through her fingers until the point is pressed under the chin of the person on top of her, who is —

“Ava?”

Wide brown eyes and parted lips greet her, and Beatrice has a hard time getting past that — getting past just how close they are — to access anything else about the situation.

“Holy shit, Bea,” Ava breathes, chin still lifted by the blade, until Beatrice hurriedly removes it, tossing it blindly onto the cushion beside her. “That was so hot.”

“Ava,” Beatrice says again, this time as a groan, one that has her falling back against the couch. “I could have killed you. What were you — ”

It’s around then that the specifics of her situation finally catch up with Beatrice, and her words pause mid-sentence. Because Ava is close and this, combined with the pressure on her lap, combined with Ava having now started playing with the hair that had fallen loose when Beatrice had removed her back-up knife, combined with Ava’s knees resting on either side of Beatrice’s hips — this all means that Ava is most certainly straddling her.

“ — What are you doing?” she finishes, voice breaking on the last word in an embarrassingly panicked way that Ava completely fails to notice in favor of twirling a strand of Beatrice’s hair around her finger.

“Your hair is so pretty down,” Ava murmurs, instead of offering any kind of explanation. “Your hair is so pretty up, too, though. It’s pretty always. Like… flowers. Like those purple ones we saw the other day when you made us walk up a mountain for fun. Because those ones looked really soft. And — whoa — Bea, what if you dyed your hair purple?”

Ava is warm, tactile, and apparently removed of any inhibitions (ones that Beatrice hadn’t actually thought she possessed given how touchy she tended to be with everyone around her), and Beatrice is left wondering if perhaps God had viewed her confession not unlike a gossipy text message that He was now having a good bit of fun with. This isn’t how it works, Beatrice knows this isn’t how it works, but Ava shifts forward slightly, and her hips rock with the motion and — well. Maybe Beatrice doesn’t know anything at all. Not a single thing.

“I should have let you sleep,” Ava is saying, and Beatrice can’t at all be sure if it’s the beginning, middle, or end of her thought. “But you looked so — I dunno — alone? You’d fallen asleep on this shitty couch with your book all crumpled up on the floor, like it’d just dropped out of your fingers a second ago, and I just — I thought maybe you shouldn’t be alone anymore. I wish you’d come out tonight, so you hadn’t been alone at all.”

“I wasn’t lonely,” Beatrice says, before she realizes this is a lie.

“Maybe it was just me, then.” Ava smiles, a little sadly, and Beatrice wants to take the words back, instantly and magically, but settles on patting Ava’s thigh instead, awkwardly at first, but then — when Ava’s smile shifts back into something pleased — gently, her touch shifting into a steady and easy weight. “I missed you today, Bea.”

Slowly, one of Ava’s hands skirts away from where it’d been preoccupied with brown strands, dropping until she can deliver the lightest stroke of her fingertips down and up the full length of Beatrice’s jaw, like she’s painting the single most important brushstroke in history, like she’s putting the finishing touches on a piece that will one day grace the walls of the Louvre. It’s only her thumb that makes it past this point, drifting away in a parabola, stopping along the way at each freckle on Beatrice’s cheek. Ava has traced along these marks before — always playful, counting up to thirty-two before getting distracted — but she does so now with a new reverence, the slow and purposeful movement of fingers along a rosary.

“These always surprise me,” Ava murmurs, seemingly to herself. “Sometimes I think you’re probably some kind of angel. But then I see your freckles and it’s like — damn — you’re really real.”

“I — ” Beatrice blinks. “I’m sorry, but are you implying that angels would not deign to take the form of a being with freckles? Did your experiences with angels stretch to the point of leading you to discover this previously unknown factoid?”

“No,” Ava says, pulling back just enough to level Beatrice with a surprisingly serious stare. “I’m implying that if angels do exist — the real ones, not the asshole thief pretending — they’ll look like you. But they’ll forget to add in the freckles. Because they’re stupid and otherworldly, or whatever. They’d think it was a flaw. Instead of a really, really, really nice thing. So they’d look like you, but worse.”

“And their whole body, and their backs, and their hands, and their wings, and the wheels, were full of eyes round about, even the wheels that they four had,” Beatrice quotes, until Ava begins to pout, lips curling downward.

“No! Beatrice!”

The full name means she’s in trouble, and Beatrice — forgetting herself — laughs at the absurdity of it all. Because Ava is in her lap and talking about angels and freckles and it’s easy to forget about anything other than the vaguely pathetic (and supremely cute) expression on her face.

“I’m talking about how, like, in real life people draw angels however they think they’ll look the most banging. Like how in old times it was a white lady with some serious curves and then later on it was a dehydrated meathead with good hair. If there were angels they’d just turn into whatever people thought was hot, or whatever. Not the creepy billion-eye thing from the creepy Bible.”

“I — ” Beatrice opens her mouth to respond, but finds she has absolutely nothing to contribute. “Ava, I have absolutely no earthly idea as to what you could possibly be talking about.”

“I’m just trying to call you pretty, Bea,” Ava whines, and are her eyes glossy? Is she close to tears? Beatrice feels a little panicked at the mere possibility of such a thing. “Can you please just say ‘thank you for calling me beautiful, Ava’? That’s all I want.”

“I fail to see how you were — ”

Ava places a finger over her lips, a little too forceful to be comfortable. And then she shushes Beatrice. Properly. Not unlike the local librarian, who tended to produce the exact same sound whenever Beatrice sighed a little too longingly in the midst of trailing a finger along the rows and rows of doomed and old-fashioned romance novels.

“Say it,” she insists.

“Thank you for calling me beautiful, Ava,” Beatrice says dutifully (if overly softly).

“You’re welcome.” With a huff, Ava collapses forwards, chin coming to rest on Beatrice’s shoulder, arms winding around her back. It puts Ava’s cheek (warm) directly against her own (also warm, but only from the blush). “Oh my God, that was so hard. Bea, why was that so hard?”

“I’m sure I couldn’t say.”

This is not a lie, despite the unusually high pitch of her words. She could not say, because to speak of Ava’s hands trailing lightly along her back, to speak of her warm breath in Beatrice’s ear, to speak of her pleasant weight on Beatrice’s lap and the curling, hot feeling that’s been growing this whole time, somewhere low in her core — to speak of any of it at all would be to speak of so much more. But maybe Ava senses some of that, mortifyingly enough, because she pulls back to observe Beatrice’s face, eyes roaming over every plane and feature in a careful search.

“Oh,” she mumbles. “This is too much, huh?”

She emphasizes ‘this’ with a small bounce, another devastating motion of her hips that only serves to bring her a little closer in the end, and Beatrice’s vision flashes white, some vitally important part of her brain short-circuiting.

“Fuck. I’m trying to take it slow!” Ava insists. “I really am! I promised I would take things slow and I had good intentions, but it’s just — ugh — stupid! It’s stupid, Bea. But like, not stupid. Because it’s important to do things right. But, you know. Or — wait — I guess you don’t.”

As always, Ava in distress pushes any of her own issues out of mind, and she’s quick to reassure, for her hand to slip around and rest on Ava’s lower back, keeping her steady and close.

“I don’t,” she admits, fondness creeping into her tone as she takes in Ava’s mused hair and flushed cheeks, both most certainly the result of consuming drinks awfully fast indeed. “But you’re — Ava, you’re allowed to not take it slow sometimes.”

“I guess,” Ava sighs, sad again in a way that feels disproportionate to the situation. “I’ll do better tomorrow. It’s just… hard. Being here. Living like this.”

With a painful lurch, Beatrice is pulled back to reality, to the present, where they’re in hiding and on the run and Mary is missing and their friends are scattered and Ava is living a life that she never asked for, never wanted at all. It’s horribly easy to forget that, in moments like these, when the soft glow of the lamp turns Ava’s face into something that Beatrice thinks she’s meant to behold, just like this.

“I know.” She offers a smile she hopes comes across as understanding, thumb flattening the wrinkles along the back of Ava’s shirt. “I know you want more from life than this.”

Eyes nearly black, dilated pupils blurring into the dark brown, Ava nods, careful and slow.

“I hope we get it some day. Away from all this. I just — I really, really want that, Bea. More than anything. I want to give all this a chance, far away from here. Sometimes I dream about it and it’s just — ” Ava sighs again, but this time, falls once more into Beatrice, her face pressing into the crook of her neck. “It’s so easy to picture. Ugh. You’re so beautiful. God! You just don’t get it.”

Clearly, Ava’s lost the plot, circling back around to the start of their conversation, with Beatrice holding precisely the same level of comprehension as before (that is to say, none). It’s a sign that she needs to get Ava situated for bed, but the notion of pushing Ava off her lap fills her with an odd dread.

She’s full of contradictory desires, but that’s not quite true, is it?

“I’m sorry, darling,” she murmurs, the term of endearment slipping out without her notice (because otherwise it wouldn’t have slipped out at all). “You can explain in the morning, after you’ve gotten some rest.”

“In the morning,” Ava repeats, searching for a promise and securing it instantaneously, as soon as she pulls back and fixes Beatrice with wide eyes and a hopeful smile, before the rest of the words leave her mouth. “You’ll be here this time?”

Beatrice is full of contradictory desires, but that’s not true at all, because all she wants is Ava, and she’s quickly running out of ways to convince herself otherwise.

“I’ll be here,” she promises. “Whenever you want.”

—

Ava settles quickly, all but passing out after Beatrice forces her to brush her teeth and drink a full glass of water. She does not, however, settle quietly; stomping around the apartment, removing clothing at sporadic intervals as she searches for her favorite pair of sweatshorts and (loudly) negotiates the nature of their sleeping arrangements (involving a complicated back-and-forth arrangement of ‘little’ and ‘big’ spoons that Beatrice doesn’t follow).

In the end, it’s nearing 3:00 AM, and while Ava is no longer being ‘spooned’ in the particular way she prefers, she’s seemingly happy enough to be curled into Beatrice’s side, to have kicked a leg out from under the blanket and thrown it across Beatrice’s hips instead. It’s an unusually clear night and the curtains are skewed just so, enough to let a slice of moonlight through, cutting across Ava’s face at a diagonal, highlighting the curve of her open mouth, the elegant slope of her jaw. Beatrice does not feel guilt when she follows the line of it, fingertips brushing down Ava’s brow, over the bridge of her nose, just above the corner of her mouth. She doesn’t feel guilt and the absence cracks open her ribs with something new, because Ava turns into the touch, making a soft sound at the back of her throat, still in the midst of her sleep.

Or — not so much the midst of, because her next sound is a purposeful hum, her next movement a reach for Beatrice’s wrist. The guilt does hit then, but in a sharp and quickly fading spike; Ava’s fingers curl, keeping Beatrice’s touch in place as she nuzzles into it, cheek rubbing along the flat of her palm.

“This is nice,” she mumbles, an uncharacteristically low rasp that causes Beatrice’s shoulder blades to retract slightly, pinching towards her spine. “You’re still here.”

“You’re checking-in too early.” With Ava’s unspoken permission, her ministrations resume, fingers drifting to tuck a few strands of brown behind Ava’s ear. “It’s not morning yet.”

Ava shakes her head — once — lips brushing across Beatrice’s wrist, skirting just over the pulse point that throbs with the contact.

“You promised. I don’t need to check.”

For someone who has built a life around faith, this easy declaration of it leaves Beatrice a little breathless. A little scared that, perhaps, she’d never understood it quite as well as she’d always thought. (A little hopeful that she hasn’t, so she can learn anew, in ways just like this.)

“So what is it, then?”

“I can sleep any time.” Ava tilts into Beatrice again, eyes heavily lidded with the sleep that still holds her in its grasp. “I don’t want to waste this.”

“Waste what?”

For a long moment, Ava doesn’t answer. The silence stretches on long enough that Beatrice is sure she’s gone back to sleep, despite the odd angle of her neck, twisted towards Beatrice’s touch.

“Just… this.” It’s a soft drawl, one that Beatrice wouldn’t be able to catch if Ava’s mouth wasn’t so close to her ear, warm breath curling around the outer shell. “Everything kinda sucks. But it’s better with you. Safer. And — I dunno — good.”

Beatrice sucks in a sharp breath; it’s too loud and too sudden, and Ava startles slightly, blinking rapidly, as though to jolt herself awake.

“Is that wrong?” Ava asks, in a way that makes Beatrice think that, if she answers in the affirmative, Ava will figure out a way to prove anyone who says so (Beatrice, the Universe, or God Himself) wrong.

“No,” she murmurs, to save her the trouble (and because she doesn’t need to be convinced, not anymore). “I don’t think that’s wrong at all.”

That’s how it should be, after all. The Halo Bearer and the women who would do anything for her. (The women who make things better. Safe.) There’s a pocket of warmth that’s swelling in her chest the longer Beatrice lies with this realization. There’s a ballooning sort of emotion that she’s been afraid to recognize, and it’s lighter now, rising above every sinking feeling and filling her up. With her Ava feels safe, and God help her, but she can’t find anything wrong with that at all.

“Go back to sleep, Ava,” she whispers, and they’ve been here before, but never like this.

Ava’s touch is the same, her warmth just as intoxicating, but everything has changed, because Beatrice has been torn apart and a portion of her — some crucial piece, something really quite vital to her very existence — has been built anew, reinforced by the certainty in Ava’s voice, within the bones of her question (which wasn’t actually a question, but the softest declaration of war).

“Sleep tight, Bea,” Ava murmurs.

I love you, Beatrice thinks in reply, but doesn’t say (will never say).

I love you, she thinks, without expectation (without a need for anything in return).

I love you, she thinks, because she can let herself love Ava like this (in the dark, in the quiet, in that small, locked corner of her mind).

I love you, I love you, I love you, she thinks, over and over again, because — for now, like this, for the very first time — it doesn’t hurt at all.

Chapter Text

Suffer long when you are your own prodigal
For where your home is, there your heart is full
So suffer long
And be gentle with the splinters in your mind

—

Time changes most things, and around a month after meeting them, Hans is no longer in love with either Beatrice or Ava, not even a little.

He does, however, feel an odd warmth in his chest when his actions of the morning catch up with him, and he comes face-to-face with a very startled Beatrice; her returning home after a run, him standing on her stoop with a bag of pastries and three cups coffee (each having been prepared as differently as humanly possible: black, properly, and with approximately 27 pumps of 27 different syrups).

“Late night for Ava last night,” he explains, gesturing up at the window as though she’ll be standing there waiting and not passed out in bed until fifteen minutes before their shift starts. “She says Sunday is her cheat day, so I thought — ”

He lifts the bag and the cup carrier like a benefaction, some of that warmth curling upwards and filling each syllable of each word. It’s only then that he realizes — hearing it in his own voice — that it’s affection.

“Plus,” he adds, his grin teasing in a way he wouldn’t have dared not so long ago, “I remembered what happened the last time you two tried to make brunch.”

“That — ” Beatrice stiffens, but before Hans can regret his over-familiarity, her shoulders drop, a small smile appearing on her face. In her workout gear, with her hair slightly mused from the run and her lips lifted just at the corners, she looks softer than she is in every instance other than one, and Hans knows what (who) she will speak of next. “That was Ava’s fault.”

(That had been two weeks ago, the first and only time Beatrice had ever been late for her shift. And by a staggering 56 seconds, if Hans’ watch was accurate — which, of course, it was. At least we know the fire alarm works, Ava had said, trailing behind a Beatrice who could only be described as grumpy, at least until Ava had caught up to her and murmured something low, doing up the top button of Beatrice's oxford shirt, just the way she liked.)

“Undoubtedly. Which is why I know she’ll most certainly try again, if I don’t intervene.”

This time, he offers the bag rather than displaying it, and Beatrice takes it, after only a moment’s hesitation. There’s a tinge of red to her cheeks, and it might be a lingering flush from the run, but Hans suspects some of it might be due to the unexpected favor, or so he gathers from the way she holds the paper sack, gently cradled against her chest.

“Thank you, Hans. That’s… very thoughtful of you. Ava will appreciate it, I’m sure.”

“And you, I hope.” He lifts his own drink (the normal one, of course, a simple long coffee) and hands off the remaining two. “Your order is far easier to remember than Ava’s, but then again, most any order would be, no?”

The surprise is plain on Beatrice’s face; for all her other talents, she’s never been much good at maintaining her steady demeanor when life twists in a particular way she doesn’t expect. (This, Hans had discovered during the two separate instances of him catching her and Ava stumbling away from each other in a closet, both of which had resulted in Beatrice diving into an explanation on spreadsheets and nearly walking into a wall.)

“Surely you didn’t think I would forget my favorite boss?”

“Stiff competition,” she says, recovering quickly. “Since you think Olivier is a ‘dull dandy’, according to Ava. Having only met him once, I’m not so attached as to not appreciate the alliteration.”

Hans tries not to preen (struck by the same feeling that might result from being given a good grade by a favorite teacher), covering the embarrassing inclination with a shrug.

“He has no less than ten pocket squares in nearly the exact same shade of navy. It’s an apt description, I promise.”

He’s rewarded by a flash of teeth, a brief laugh.

(It curls into his skull and hooks out a memory: his sister breezing through a trigonometry worksheet as he tapped out a rhythm with his pencil, trying to fit the numbers to verse. He’d always failed, but made her laugh in the process, and so was it really a failure, in the end? Don’t fall behind, Hanny, she’d said, always said. I’ll fail out of Cambridge without your attempts at mnemonics. But that hadn’t turned out to be true, had it?)

“Hans,” Beatrice begins (too lightly for her not to have noticed his melancholic distraction, however brief it may have been), “would you like to come up?”

He should take longer to consider, but doesn’t, too caught up in the notion of half-pulling splinters from his mind.

“Yes, thank you.”

“There’s still an hour before our shift st — oh — yes. Good.”

Caught off guard again (Hans is two for two this morning), Beatrice busies herself with balancing the drinks while attempting to pull her keys from the crossbody running belt strapped across her chest; it’s nerdy enough to be charming on her (to be cool, even, on a person who cared about such things, but Beatrice certainly isn’t that).

“Ava’s first alarm should go off soon,” she muses aloud, pausing to hum in triumph when she’s successful in her search. “If she sees you’re here, she might not snooze the next three. So you’re doing me a favor. Beyond the favor you’ve already done, of course.”

As they ascend the narrow staircase — Beatrice unwinded by the climb, despite the kilometers she’s undoubtedly just run — Hans wonders if she thinks these are favors she will have to repay, wonders if he ought to point out they are favors he’s only returning. Because thirty minutes ago, as he’d stood in line at the only coffee shop open on Sunday morning, he’d thought of the extra croissant Ava had taken to bringing in for her midday shift, a habit that’d started exactly one day after he’d happened to mention to Beatrice that he always craved carbs around noon. (Ava, never one to take unearned credit, had only winked, her Bea said I should get two this time full of a soft pride he still felt a little in awe of.) He’d thought of the extra croissant and Ava’s grin and Beatrice’s quiet acts of kindness and changed his order to include a few extra items. But still, he means what he says next, words coming out easy and sure.

“I don’t think friends need to count favors,” he murmurs, and Beatrice takes more than a second to open the door to her and Ava’s apartment (an endearing response, though she probably wouldn’t think so).

The apartment is as he might have pictured, had he thought to picture it: a collision of Beatrice and Ava that’s been carefully assembled in something cohesive by only one of them. There’s a to-do list on the fridge and carefully stacked books on the small coffee table and two overlapping posters for upcoming music festivals (he can still see the creases — faint — from where he’d folded them up to fit in his pocket so he could bring them to Ava at their next shared shift). It’s small, even for a couple as close as these two, but understandably so, based on what Ava’s said (and Beatrice hasn’t said) about their budget. But despite the size, someone (Beatrice) has made a spot for shoes just inside the door, where he deposits his own after Beatrice carefully unlaces her sneakers and tucks them next to the neatly lined pairs.

If the space belonged to him, he might have filled the far wall with shelves, might have fit a record player in the corner of the kitchen, might have cluttered every surface with collectibles and music and graphic novels. But he never would have made it feel quite as cozy as it does when Beatrice nods towards the bed — where a large lump of sheets is the only indication that they’re not the only two people in the room — and rolls her eyes in the exact manner he’s come to recognize as one of the ways Beatrice says I love you (since she never seems to tell Ava out loud).

“Just another minute now,” she predicts, without so much as glance at her watch, and sure enough, by the time Hans has taken a seat at the kitchen table, accepting the stack of small plates Beatrice brings over, a sound not unlike a fire alarm erupts from within the ball of sheets.

“First alarm, you said?”

“Mm, yes. They increase in both volume and urgency. The last one is an exact replica of a nuclear attack warning siren.”

“And yet still, she is late,” he comments, raising his voice when he hears further rustling from the bedroom, continuing until the top of Ava’s head — mused hair sticking every which way — pops out from under the duvet.

“Uh — Hans? What the fuck?” Her head lifts out further, wide eyes appearing over the edge. “I could be naked.”

Beatrice blushes, a swoop of pink flashing under her freckles. More embarrassingly (but also more understandably, he thinks), so does Hans.

“You’re not naked,” Beatrice says, with the sort of gravitas that might suit someone defending their dissertation.

“You don’t know that. I could have taken off all of my clothes after you left.” But there’s the rest of Ava’s face appearing now, teasing smile revealed as the duvet drops, and Beatrice’s sigh is audible.

“Just — Ava — Please. Hans brought coffee and pastries.”

Magic words spoken, Ava drops all pretenses, throwing her legs over the bed and all but sprinting over, her oversized shirt (featuring what appears to be Jesus surfing without use of a board) still less than what Hans might wear in polite company, but covering more than Ava sometimes does at the bar on a hot day. (Hans has grown used to it, rolling his eyes rather than needing to purposefully avert his stare. Beatrice, not so much.)

“Hans, you’re my favorite dude. That isn’t even an exaggeration. Out of all the dudes in the world, you’re the best I’ve met.” She ruffles his hair as she slides past, drops into her seat with a loud oomph, and grabs a chocolate croissant from the bag, pointedly ignoring the plates and napkins Beatrice has prepared. “Huh, actually, Bea, do we need more dude friends? Fergus is fine, I guess. And that Miguel guy seems p — ”

“No,” Beatrice says curtly, and then takes a very long drink of her coffee. “I don’t think we need to go out of our way.”

Hans barely manages to hide his smile behind his cup.

But maybe it’s not just Beatrice’s inexplicable jealousy (which Ava seems to find part bewildering, part delightful). Maybe it’s something about sitting at a kitchen table in socked feet; something about Beatrice sliding a plate underneath where Ava’s holding her croissant, waving it about with abandon as she talks. Maybe it’s the way he and Beatrice share an amused look when Ava starts asking about how she might buy her own syrup flavors for her drink; or the way Ava absently slaps his arm for emphasis when she gets worked up (about said syrup); or how Ava feeds Beatrice the very last bite of her chocolate croissant. (She says it’s too sweet for breakfast, he remembers Ava saying once, but secretly, she always likes to have a little taste.) Maybe it’s something about a small family sitting down for a meal (his sister laughing at his jokes about their dad’s boring oatmeal, kicking him under the table whenever he went a little too far), or a group of friends crowding into a small space (pizza and beer and a weekly poker game that had continued after he dropped out).

But most likely, it’s about all of those things, and the way that Hans is so suddenly reminded how much he misses the idea of home.

“So what do you think of our place, man?” Ava asks, finished with her croissant and grabbing a few crumbs off Beatrice’s plate instead. “I know you’re going to say something like it looks nice thanks to Beatrice or whatever, but I’ll have you know that I do chores. Like… changing lightbulbs. And hanging stuff. And reaching the top shelf.”

“With a ladder,” Beatrice adds, weirdly pointed. “And only because she gets put out about being shorter than me.”

“It’s only a couple like… centimeters, basically. You can barely notice. Hans probably hasn’t even noticed.”

His laugh cuts them off before they can really get going, which he regrets, but only a little because there will always be time for more.

“I think it’s perfect,” he says, and takes another sip, lest they see just how earnest he is with the sentiment.

—

Sundays at the bar are uneventful and short, starting late and ending early. It’s also the only day of the week where the three of them are scheduled to be there together; Ava and Hans behind the bar and Beatrice tucked away at the little corner table she favors (the one the regulars have learned to leave open for her whenever she’s around.) Today is typically slow and Ava’s taken to constructing projectiles of folded up bits of paper, which she’s — with little success — attempting to flick towards Beatrice. If Hans were a braver man, he might be tempted to join, but as it is, Beatrice’s glance upwards (after one of Ava’s attempts lands directly on top of her paperwork) ends the game before he can begin to muster the required courage.

“Okay,” Ava says suddenly, perking up from where she’s draped over the bar top, chin resting on one of her hands. “Would you rather have the brain of a mouse but still be human, or have the brain of a human but be a mouse?”

“I doubt the brain of a human would fit inside a mouse,” Hans muses, familiar enough with Ava’s antics to not be thrown by the question. “I’m not sure it would be possible to shrink down that level of processing power, either.”

“Australopithecus afarensis had a smaller brain,” Beatrice calls over, almost absentminded. “But only by a third, so even that wouldn’t fit.”

“Lucy in the sky with diamonds,” Hans sings and Beatrice laughs, a soft snort that still carries far enough to be heard (and make Han’s feel weirdly proud, his chest puffing out, just a bit).

“What the fuck are you guys talking about?” Ava groans. “Oh my god, it’s like magic or whatever! Stop trying to science ‘Would You Rather’.”

“Fine. I would prefer… human brain, mouse body. I feel I could live a very comfortable mouse life with my current level of intellectual acuity.”

Beatrice waves her pencil in his direction, a sure sign that she agrees with choice, but Ava scoffs, pushing herself up to full height, as though adding centimeters might grant her authority in spades.

“You guys want to be mice? You’re insane. You’re both insane! Mice are like, smart, right? At least relatively! So what if I couldn’t do fancy math with my little pea mouse brain; I can’t do that stuff with my human brain! Mouse brain, human body for sure because then I’m still like — you know, hello!” She waves a hand down her body; Beatrice somehow manages to look away even more pointedly. “But also, I wouldn’t have to worry about anything other than like, eating and making little friends, or whatever else mice do. Probably having a lot of se — hi, what can I get for you?”

Ava waits until the last second, until the man is at the bar, his hands coming to rest on the wooden top. Hans, who’d been quite sure she wouldn’t stop at all, breathes out a long sigh of relief and turns away, nodding towards Enza, who’s entering from the courtyard and holding up two fingers.

“I asked for a bourbon, girl. This isn’t bourbon.”

The man is American and so the man is loud. It’s not the first time Hans has noticed him today — his twangy accent booming around the room as he’d ordered drink after drink — and he’s careful to watch him now, even as he slides two bottles across the bar to Enza (who shoots the American a sideways glance of her own, though hers is more antagonistic than wary). To Ava’s credit, she’s clearly unbothered by the whole of it, smiling in a way that isn’t too far from genuine, switching to English without a blink.

“We’re a little limited with bourbon choices, so Western Gold is your best bet. But if that’s not doing it for you, we can try something a little more local. Next drink’s on the house.”

This is what makes Ava a good bartender. Not her ability to make a drink (which is shaky at best), but the charming half-smile she offers now, the cheer in the face of something a little less kind. It’s an impressive quality, one that follows Ava when she’s off-duty as well, and it’s no wonder everyone who’s interacted with her has found themselves at least a little bit disarmed. At her table, Beatrice has paused, her pen hovering above the page, and though she does not look over, there’s a smile that tells Hans she’s thinking along similar lines.

“I asked for bourbon,” the man slurs, slamming his glass on the counter. “None of it has been bourbon. I should — you should give me a refund for all of them.”

Ava laughs and maybe this is what makes Ava a bad bartender; she doesn’t recognize the mean glint in the man’s eyes. Or, more likely, she does, but doesn’t fear it. (Not like Hans, who feels his spine straighten, who tries to remember where they keep the crowbar for opening those rare wooden crates of booze.)

“Yeah, I dunno about that, man, but hey, we have a pretty good scotch whiskey. Why don’t you go back to your seat and I’ll bring it over for you.”

The man’s hand darts across the bar — surprisingly fast given the fact he’s been drinking since they opened — and snatches at Ava’s wrist.

“Or you go ahead and pour that now. And then get me a manager to handle the rest.”

In the span of the five seconds that follow, Hans: exchanges a quick glance with Gian (the broad shouldered lad who owns the small home theater in town) who’s already lifting himself out of his chair; nods at Enza, who drops her beer on the nearest table and stalks forward, rolling up her sleeves; and abandons all plans for a crowbar, reaching for one of their oversized glass mugs instead.

But none of them — not even Ava herself, who’s barely had time for her eyes to widen — are faster than Beatrice, who surely had just been tucked away in her booth, but now has the American’s wrist between three of her delicate-looking fingers, now is lifting his hand away from Ava’s skin without seemingly any effort, now is causing the man a fair bit of pain with this particular grasp, if the grimace on his face is any indication.

“You asked to speak with a manager?” Beatrice asks, and oh it’s a certain cold level of hell that lies in her tone, furious in a way Hans hadn’t imagined she was capable. “How might I help?”

For a very brief moment, he fully expects to hear the crack of the man’s wrist, to see some sort of John Wick reenactment, featuring Beatrice as Vengeance herself, but then Ava murmurs a strangled sort of sound that might be Beatrice’s name, barely loud enough to travel the scant meter to where Hans stands. Despite the volume, it’s more than enough to break through. Beatrice releases the man, steps back with a breath that travels the full length of her frame, and folds her hands behind her back.

“What the fuck, you absolute bit — ”

“Pretty sure that was the Boss throwing you out.” Gian’s here now, placing a firm hand on the American’s shoulder as he cuts him off, his English light and pleasant. “Let’s get your things. I’ll help you on your way.”

Between Gian (towering, with muscles tended to on every day of the week) and Beatrice (nearly a half meter shorter, with dark eyes that have yet to move away from the American), Hans would take Gian any day of the week. Maybe the man gets that sense as well — once he’s looked up and seen the downright murderous glare from the latter — because he stumbles off without need for much more convincing. Beatrice seems to snap out of something as soon as he turns away, biting the inside of her cheek as she looks at Hans and then — for a length of time that feels heavy and thick — Ava.

“Too harsh?” she asks, and Hans — who’d felt his own tension leave him as he’d watched Ava’s shoulders drop in relief, as soon as Beatrice had stepped in — is quick to answer.

“Just right, I think.”

Beatrice nods slowly, eyes finally darting away, back to the American, who’s being escorted out the front door, not bothering to spare a glance back.

“Perhaps I should make sure he gets home alright,” she says, like a threat. “I’m finished with inventory, anyway, and I’d quite like a walk. I’ll still meet you both at Hans’ place at 8:00, of course. As planned.”

“Wait — uh — what?” For the first time, Ava speaks. Or, attempts to, stumbling over her words and running a quick hand through her hair. “Hans’ place?”

“For game night?” Hans lifts a brow, because he’s only noticing now that Ava’s cheeks are flushed, and he’s pretty sure it’s not an unpleasant sort of flustered. “Did you forget, Ava?”

“No! I didn’t forget! But today’s Sunday and — oh, right. Yeah. Yeah, okay, I forgot we moved it this week for your girlfriend’s trip. Duh. Sorry.” She shakes her head once when Beatrice looks at her strangely, head tilting as she attempts to process Ava’s state. “Yeah, I’ll be there. See you there. You, Hans, me, Maria. The whole gang. Obviously.”

Beatrice glances over at Hans, brief and calculating, before turning her full attention back to Ava, stepping around the bar so that she might come closer, filling Ava’s space and lowering her voice until Hans can barely hear.

“Are you alright?”

“Yeah.” Ava nods, once and then three more times, in quick succession. “Yeah, of course. Why? Because of the cowboy? No big deal.”

“I know you could have handled it yourself, but I thought I might have an easier time quickly deescalating. I hope you don’t think I was being — ”

“Bea.” Settled once more, Ava smiles, grabbing Beatrice’s hand — the one that’d been reaching for Ava’s hip, but never quite made contact — and bringing it up to her lips, mouth grazing along the knuckles before Hans has a chance to look away (his usual method of defense whenever his coworkers got like this). “We’re good. You can menacingly follow the guy home if you really want.”

“Oh,” Beatrice breathes. “Um. Yes. Of course. But I — menacingly is a bit much, isn’t it?”

Fifteen minutes later, once Beatrice has neatly put away her things (and accepted a small bout of congratulations from a few of the regulars on what Enza calls her badassery), she leaves the bar with a backwards glance at Ava that Hans can’t call anything but lingering.

“She definitely doesn’t know how hot that was, huh?” Ava asks him, lips tilted in a half grin as she stares at the exact point Beatrice had left her sight.

Hans, feeling he’s not quite at a level of friendship where he can call his friend’s girlfriend hot, only nods.

But maybe next time — after a few more shared memories stretch across the three of them like winding, comforting vines — he’ll be able to cheerfully agree.

—

This will be their fourth game night, going on three weeks in a row, and Hans suspects it might be the one that finally and officially turns a series of random meet-ups into a weekly tradition. He just hadn’t realized until that morning — sitting at Ava and Beatrice’s small kitchen table — just how much he desperately wanted that subtle change to occur. It shows in the spinach puffs he’s delicately assembled on his favorite platter, the specialty cocktail he’s spent the last week perfecting, and the way he takes his time in setting up the dining room table now, each chair arranged equidistant from each other.

“Whistling?” Maria asks, a little laughter sinking into her voice. “Someone’s excited for guests.”

It also, apparently, shows in this: an unconscious habit that always gives away his mood, something that’s been true ever since childhood. Maria looks pleased to hear it, or maybe she’s still stuck on one of the additional by-products of his mood: the new necklace resting prettily on her collarbone, a gift she’s apparently keen to show-off.

“It’s nice to have couple friends,” he says simply, and then, when the bell rings, nods towards the door. “Especially ones that show up on time.”

Which is a miracle in itself, given the way Ava had torn out of the bar after closing time, shouting something completely incoherent over her shoulder on her way out (something about clothing and Beatrice). This only makes sense now, when Ava skips into the room with wet hair and a vividly colorful shirt with only the very bare minimum of buttons done up. The latter would have gotten Hans into trouble with Maria had it been anyone else, but Maria’s too busy being charmed by the quiet compliments of Beatrice, who never misses anything, not even a new necklace.

“Hans got it for me,” Maria’s explaining, fingers brushing along the gold. “He’s been so much more romantic ever since you two started coming around. I think he’s inspired by you and Ava. Always doing such cute things for each other. He updates me like a soap opera, I swear. Like today! With that horrible American! How did you learn how to do that?”

Beatrice blushes furiously, but there’s no telling which part of Maria’s spiel had done it, not when any one sentence might have been enough to set her off. For someone as physically affectionate as she could be, Beatrice tended to turn various shades of pink whenever anyone drew attention to her obvious love for her girlfriend.

“Just… self-defense classes in college. Ava took them as well. She would have been able to handle herself just fine, I just — ”

“ — Got all riled up on my behalf,” Ava cuts in, suddenly leaning into Beatrice’s side with a half-eaten spinach puff in hand. “Maria, if you could have seen it. Phew! Move over Angelia Jolie as Lara Croft, you know?”

Maria laughs, Ava grins, and Beatrice does her best not to let her blush spread any further, jaw tightening with an effort that ultimately fails when Ava lifts on her toes to whisper something in her ear. This will be the blueprint for the rest of the night, just as it always is, and Hans settles into the first bit of the whole routine with a happy sigh that’s swallowed by Ava’s excited shout when he starts pouring out the drinks. (Three cocktails and one water; a detail that he always gets right and that always makes Beatrice smile, but only when she doesn’t think anyone is looking.)

“Shall we get started?” he asks, adding a little flourish to his last pour.

“Only if you promise we’re going to actually play this time. I know it was the best night of Beatrice’s life, reading a twenty-seven page rule book and setting up a five-story board, but I need a little more game in my four hour game nights.”

Two hours later, this protest rings a little hollow, because when Beatrice asks for a clarification on the rules with a little too much delight, Ava — chin resting on the knuckles of both her hands as she watches — looks as though she’s about to start composing a love ballad.

“See, it says here: You may place a Critter from your city beneath this Dungeon to decrease the cost of the played card by 3 of any resource,” Beatrice reads slowly, her finger following along the lines of words. “You do not gain the 3 resources. This card cannot be combined with any other card-playing abilities. I think that last bit is what’s causing the issue with your play, Maria.”

It’s the sort of thing that Hans knows will take a while, especially when Maria makes the mistake of asking a follow-up question and Beatrice’s eyes light up as she’s able to respond with what might very well be her favorite line (that’s a bit complicated, actually).

“I’ll just — I’ll take care of these while you figure it out,” he offers, and doesn’t wait around to hear if he gets away with it or not, scooping up the four plates and two serving dishes with a speed born from waiting tables long before he was able to snag a spot at the bar.

There’s no need for any worry; none of the three women at the table seem to pay him any mind, Maria surprisingly involved in the game, Beatrice unsurprisingly involved in the rulebook, and Ava (least surprisingly of all) involved in Beatrice. It’s only the latter that stirs, and only eventually, when Hans is depositing the plates into the sink with a clatter and she pulls herself out of her preoccupation with a visible jolt. Another minute later, she’s sliding into the kitchen, her smile apologetic, but fully self-aware.

“Sorry, man. Didn’t mean to make you take care of all of this on your own,” she says, walking in with the remainder of the dishes balanced particularly precariously. “I just got a little distracted.”

“You don’t say,” Hans laughs. “There’s no need to assist. Or apologize. I’ve learned to not take offense when I cease to exist while you’re in the presence of your girlfriend.”

“Oh, ha, sure. Very funny,” she drawls. “You can drop the act; Maria can’t hear from here. How about you wash and I’ll dry. That’s how me and Bea usually do it, so I’m a drying pro at this point.”

Hans nods, already handing over a dripping plate before the entirety of Ava’s rambling words catch up with him.

“What act?”

“Oh, you know.” She waves the dish towel through the air, as though this will prove her unspoken point. “The whole bit where you call Beatrice my girlfriend instead of my girl friend.”

Hans does his best not to laugh. Ava’s German is good, but she does sometimes make mistakes like these, always to humorous results. He switches to English, taking care with each word.

“Ah, no, Ava. You’re — see, it’s confusing in German because the noun is the same for girlfriend and a friend who is a girl, but the possessive — meine Freundin, in this case — turns it romantic. You mixed it up just now; it made it sound as though Beatrice was your non-romantic friend rather than your romantic partner.”

Ava blinks at him.

What follows is the longest period of silence he has ever experienced in the duration of their friendship.

“Hans,” she begins slowly. “Do you actually think Beatrice and I are dating? Have you thought that this whole time?”

Now, it’s time for Hans to doubt his proficiency in a particular language, running through the potential meanings for the English word ‘dating’ that made Ava’s questions make any sort of sense.

“You are dating.” He double-checks each word, makes sure every aspect of the short sentence is clear. “I see you both interact as a couple nearly every day. And you said so. In English! The first game night we had. Come now, Ava, what is this? A joke?”

“Oh my god,” Ava groans, but then breaks into a half-sort-of-giggle, a sound he’s never heard her produce and one that fills him with a certain amount of concern. “Hans, we were — we were just playing along! Because your insanely jealous girlfriend didn’t like that I was friendly to you or whatever. But then we ended up liking Maria despite her psycho tendencies and Beatrice really liked game night, so — ”

A sinking dread fills Hans stomach, curling like sour milk. The sink is still running, water pouring against an already clean plate, but Hans can’t bring himself to care.

“I have lied to Maria, then,” he whispers. “God help me.”

“He’s not very good at that,” Ava mumbles, but then grabs a dish directly from the sink, splashing a bit of water on Hans in the process. “But, look, it’s no big deal. Me and Bea could just keep doing what we’re doing. It’s not like it’s hard. Or! We could have a super messy breakup in front of Maria.” Ava warms to this idea quickly, eyes widening with delight. “Oh my god, we could stage this whole thing where I’m like Beatrice, my love language is words of affirmation and you never tell me I’m pretty and then I’ll start crying. Maybe throw something? Ohh, like throw a glass of water on her or something. Do you think Maria would buy that? And then also buy that me and Bea immediately make up and stay friends so we can keep doing game night? Because I can’t take game night from Beatrice; you should see how she starts humming right before we come over. Actually she does this thing where she’s trying to hide how excited she is — it’s so cute — she’ll like, start doing pushups, I swear, and then pretends like — what?”

As Ava rambles on and on, Hans’ stomach settles. In fact, by the end of his, his concerns have evaporated so thoroughly that he’s smiling, perhaps a little too widely, and it must be this that causes Ava to stop, her brows pinching in the middle.

“It is as you said,” Hans explains, smile growing another centimeter more. “It is ‘no big deal’. You may not be dating, but that is only a matter of semantics, no?”

“Oh.” It’s rare that he’s able to cause Ava to blush, and Hans finds himself to be a little too delighted by the turn of events. “Right, because of the whole me-obviously-being-in-love-with-her thing.”

“And let’s not forget the equally obvious reverse statement.” Ava looks at him blankly, and he continues with a sigh. “Beatrice. She is quite clearly smitten with you too.”

“Yeah? I mean, I’m pretty sure that it’s — it sounds super dickish to say, but yeah, I know. Or, I think I do? But it’s complicated. Because I can’t tell her. I mean, I can’t put that on her. Not right now. Me feeling the way I do or Beatrice feeling something too — that doesn’t actually matter.”

“Ava,” Hans says, his smile gone in the face of his friend’s twisting doubt. “That is all that matters.”

“Oh, um.” Ava laughs, as though this is more than she wanted or expected, as though she’s embarrassed by the force of her own feelings, spilling out in the way she twists the kitchen towel around her hand, wrapping and unwrapping the knuckles in fabric. “I didn’t realize you were such a romantic, Hans.”

He shrugs, returning to the dishes, but with less purpose now, his circular scrubs careful and slow.

“In the broad sense, perhaps. In German, we do not use the word ‘love’ like the English. We are not so frivolous as to say ‘I love pizza’ or ‘I love that shirt’. Love is for people, the ones we hold closest in our hearts; the family or friends or partners that carry a part of us. To not speak of this love, or to deny it, is a pain that cannot be described. I would not wish that for an acquaintance, let alone a friend.”

There’s a particularly encrusted bit of cheese stuck on the corner of the platter, and Hans rubs at it furiously for a half-minute, only pulled out of the effort when he realizes Ava has not given a response, instead just staring, her head tilted in question.

“I have not spoken to my family — my mother, father, or sister — in nearly three years,” he finds himself saying, filling the silence with a sudden exhale of words. “It started with something small. Or — not so small, I suppose — but it started with something we could not talk about. You remember I dropped out of university, perhaps? My parents were disappointed, my sister was sad, and no one enjoyed bringing it up. And so we avoided the topic. We would talk about anything other than that thing and the feelings surrounding it, until it grew and grew and swallowed everything else. Eventually we stopped talking at all.”

“Hans — ” With a start, Ava jerks forward, her hand falling on Hans arm. It’s an odd sort of familiarity, one that Ava fell into far too soon, but feels natural now, perhaps because of it. “That’s… awful. I’m sorry.”

He shakes his head, just the once.

“Things that are unsaid — happy things or sad things or things that are hard — they have a way of filling a conversation. You cannot avoid them for too long, or all that’s left is dead space. Ours are different situations, but I think, maybe, there is a commonality, no? Whatever it is that makes your love hard, I hope you do not make the same mistakes I did, and avoid speaking on it until you have reason to regret.”

They’ve been in the kitchen for too long, long enough that Maria will surely shout for them at any moment (no matter how thoroughly Beatrice dives into the rules). He’s talked for too long and too intensely, enough so that Ava surely thinks him mad. But things that remain unsaid have a way of filling space, and Hans does not wish for the conversations between him and Ava — a friend he is coming to view with a low, consistent warmth — to fizzle out and then die, muffled by the things she might need to hear.

(He should, perhaps, do the same for Beatrice, but after witnessing her ability to bend a man into submission with three fingers alone, he will have to build his courage before such a thing can occur.)

“You’re right,” Ava says, quietly at first, but then, tossing the towel onto the counter, again with more conviction. “You’re totally right. I need to talk to Bea and you need to talk to your family!”

The plate in Hans’ hand clatters against the bottom of the sink.

“That isn’t what I — ”

“Blood pact time, Hans! Or — okay, not blood pact because that’s unhygienic to do in a kitchen, but you know what I mean, right? Let’s give each other… one week. You call your sister, because she sounds like the easiest one to start with, and I’ll tell Bea that I — well, I’ll have to think of just how to put it, but I’ll tell her something.”

Ava steps away, but only so that she might hold out her hand, expression determined and set and excited, too, somewhere in the midst of everything else. And, Hans, swept up in the whole of everything, can only reach out and take it, surprised at the firmness (the official, sealing nature) of the shake.

And then, of course:

“Ava? It’s your turn.” Even calling from another room, Beatrice’s voice is low. (Even coming from another room, it makes Ava’s entire face brighten.)

“Coming, baby!” Ava calls, and then winks at Hans, as though she’s just made some significant progress on their deal. (And maybe she has; Hans can only picture the resulting blush, spreading up to Beatrice’s ears.)

“This is legally binding, by the way,” Ava whispers, already on her way out. “No getting out of it. Except in cases of like… near-death experiences that understandably keep us away from making any big moves.”

He shakes his head, unsure how else he might respond.

“Ah, yes, the extremely important and relevant near-death experiences clause.”

With a shrug and a crooked little smile, Ava vanishes around the corner. Only to appear once more, not three seconds later, lips now softened into an expression that’s a little less complicated than the one before.

“Thanks, Hans,” she says, quiet in a way she rarely is. “I’m really glad to have a friend like you here.”

He’s saved from having to answer when she disappears again, and this time, it’s followed by a series of shouts from the dining room (baseless and playful accusations from Ava that Beatrice had cheated while she was gone, and Beatrice’s immediate and far less playful response). Hans is left with a sink full of dishes that Ava completely neglected to help him dry and a steady, thrumming contentment pressing against the inside of his chest.

Home, to Hans, is cluttered shelves and a boiling pot on the stove and a stack of games that he might share with others, piled in a corner. Home has been the blanket fort constructed in his sister’s bedroom, or his mother showing him all the different spices in the pantry, or dancing with his roommate in their shoebox of a dorm room, the Pillow Queens blaring from their speakers.

But home might also be something that looks an awful lot like what he finds when he reenters the dining room: Ava laughing uproariously at Beatrice decisively decimating the rest of them, Beatrice failing to hide the pleasure in her smile, and Maria knocking her foot against his as he sits down. Home might be a group of friends playing a game, or it might be two new friends in particular, but either way, he’s looking forward to finding out for sure.

Chapter Text

So can we be friends, sweetly
Before the mystery ends?
I love you more than the world can contain
In its lonely and ramshackle head


—

Ava doesn’t keep secrets from Beatrice well, but she does keep a few.

The first, she keeps poorly: the three words she does not say, but fails to not show, saved only by Beatrice’s willful ignorance, by the weight of guilt pulling a thick veil over her eyes. The second, she keeps because of the first; Beatrice’s cooking hasn’t improved, not at all, and it shows with every meal Ava lies about having so much more flavor than the one before. The third and last is the one she keeps best, because it costs so little and gives so much; her three alarms and groggy mornings have little to do with laziness and everything to do with the hour or more she spends awake in the middle of each night, savoring the sensation of Beatrice’s body pressed against her own.

Slowly, Ava has gotten used to sleeping in new ways (on her side, on her stomach, in a particularly strange position Beatrice calls ‘the koala’, much to Ava’s delight), but always with the girl she’s snuggled up to now, breathing deep into the back of Beatrice’s neck (always delightfully exposed — even in sleep — by her tidy bun). Every position has its perks, and the press of Beatrice’s firm back against her front, the tickle of wayward strands of hair against Ava’s nose, the way her hand drapes so nicely across Beatrice’s hip — these are the ones she misses, long after the sun rises.

But god, does she miss Beatrice’s face.

It’s a stupid thing to think (even worse to feel), because she sees Beatrice more often than not: the proud smile at the end of their morning training, the frown that develops while she’s concentrating on inventory, the quiet lift of her brow when she watches Ava whenever she thinks no one’s looking. And fine, yes, maybe it’s also verging on Twilight-levels-of-creepy, but it’s not like Ava’s making this observation from outside the bedroom window with bloodlust on her mind. (Other types of lust — or the amount of time she’s spent observing the graceful line of Beatrice’s neck — these are the things she deems irrelevant in this particular situation, if only for her own piece of mind.)

From a bed she’s been invited into, though, there’s a certain kind of ache that spreads through her, watching Beatrice’s face when it’s turned towards her in sleep, when she can see the relaxation of features that never quite lose all of their tension during the day, even in moments of rest. Beatrice, in sleep, is exactly as beautiful as she is when awake, but in an entirely different way, and Ava can’t help but relish in seeing both sides of her (every side of her), especially when Beatrice takes such care in limiting who does.

Never once has Ava believed in some kind of benevolent god more than she does in that moment, because — seemingly on command — Beatrice turns over with a nonsensical murmur, placing the whole of her (long lashes, strong nose, full mouth that’s barely parted in sleep) on display. Ava thinks of showing a little gratitude to the guy upstairs (or through a portal or whatever), but figures if he actually had anything to do with it, he owes her this and more anyway, free of charge. Unable to resist (never able to resist, if she’s being honest with herself) she brings her fingers up to the side of Beatrice’s jaw, swoops them down the curve, and ends up right at the corner of Beatrice’s mouth, which has begun to lift, even so slightly, by the time she gets there.

“Why are you awake at four in the morning, Ava?” Beatrice murmurs, sleep coating her tongue, but not so thoroughly that Ava doesn’t immediately suspect she has Beatrice herself to thank for that which she’d whimsically attributed to holy intervention.

(This makes a great deal more sense, because between God and Beatrice, the latter had always seemed a whole lot more divine.)

“You don’t know what time it is. It could be like, noon already.”

She regrets her own inclination to push back immediately, because it causes Beatrice to actually look. Thankfully, the regret disappears just as quickly; Beatrice looks remarkably cute with a single eye cracked open, nose inexplicably scrunched with the effort.

“Mmm. See, that’s what I thought. I have a pretty finely tuned internal clock.”

“Is that — oh my god, Beatrice, did you just quote one of the shows I forced you to watch?” She’s delighted by the mere possibility, even as it occurs to her it might not actually be true. “Or are you just that much of a nerd that you naturally said that. I honestly can’t tell, which is kind of impressive if you think about it.”

“I feel like you’re insulting me, but it’s — I feel I should mention this again — four in the morning, so it’s hard to tell for sure.”

Ava hasn’t moved her hand (hasn’t felt a need to) and as her fingers resume their light promenade across soft skin, Beatrice lets her eyes slip shut again, this time with a small sigh.

“I’m not insulting you,” Ava promises, earnest with words that are always true. (I’m loving you, she could say, but not yet. Not yet.) “And I’m awake because I wanted to make sure you remembered that tomorrow — today, I guess — was our day off.”

It’s not a bad lie, mostly because it’s a little bit true. Beatrice never forgets, but she also never seems to really get that their rare day off from both training and work applies to her as well. They haven’t had many since they arrived in Switzerland, always doing one or the other or usually both, but not a single one of them has passed without Beatrice sneaking off at some point, coming home sweaty and breathless and really really sexy, like she’s just got finished shooting some kind of athletic gear commercial and —

And that’s not at all the point.

“I remembered.” Beatrice is amused rather than insulted; the twitch of her lips shifts Ava’s place on her cheek, and she gives into the impulse she’s resisted for so long, dipping her thumb into the dimple at the corner of Beatrice’s mouth. “I wasn’t going to wake you.”

“Beatrice,” Ava sighs, and it’s every bit of longing, exasperation, and adoration inside of her exhaled in one breath, expanding spontaneously and filling the spaces between them. It’s enough that even Beatrice notices something — for the first time ever, maybe — because she opens her eyes and searches Ava’s face for an answer to the question that rests somewhere in the slight twitch of her brow. (Ava could answer her easily, without saying a word at all, but she shakes off the thought before it really gets going.)

“I said our. Meaning both of us. Meaning you get a day off too. And a day off definitely doesn’t involve a run at the crack of fucking dawn. You know stuff about everything; aren’t there like, biological facts to back this up? You have to let your body heal, or whatever.”

“Yes, of course.” Beatrice pauses, gaze finally lifting to meet Ava’s fully, as though she’d come up empty in her search. “That’s why I take active rest days. An easy jog gives your muscles plenty of time to recover.”

Ava is in love with a maniac. This occurs to her often, but especially now, having a conversation about ‘easy’ jogs (which Ava’s pretty positive is an oxymoron) in the early hours of the morning, Beatrice's dark eyes wide and earnest. It would be funny if it wasn’t sad. Sad, of course, referring not to Ava’s deep and all-consuming love (which she refuses to call anything other than beautiful, despite what the recipient might think, if only she thought about it at all), but the sincere way Beatrice lives her life without any regard for herself. There’s no way around it, Ava’s found, except for the one, and she plays that card now without any regret (with the vow, the constant vow, that she’ll keep working on it until she doesn’t need to resort to tricks).

“You promised me a day off without any work or training,” she says, as firmly as the hour allows, the dark pressing on the words until they compress into a whisper. “And that means I planned a whole day without work or training. And that day includes you. Pretty much only you, actually. So no ‘easy jogging’. I want to spend the whole day with you. Okay?”

“You,” Beatrice begins with a smile, indulgent and soft, “will be sleeping until I get back anyway. What would you have me doing while you’re otherwise preoccupied?”

From where her fingers have come to rest — sliding down Beatrice’s cheek until they’re pressed lightly against her neck — there’s the echo of a heartbeat, a steady and slow thrum. This is the benefit of the quiet night; here, Beatrice has grown to accept Ava’s need for the tactile (for their breath to mingle, for the slide of bare skin against skin). It’s far cry from their first nights here, and Ava’s suddenly caught on the notion of change and growth and how innately each of those things are connected to love.

(Don’t you see? she always wants to point out. Don’t you see how we’re growing together? Like trees and roots or bees and flowers or those weird fish with a death wish and the sharks they’ve claimed as their own? But she hasn’t found the words for it — stubborn plants and stupid-looking animals won’t cut it — and so she only smiles and keeps hoping that the smartest girl she’s ever known will figure it out with just one more careful push.)

“What? You want me to give you a list?” Ava asks, fondness bubbling over until she can taste it on her lips. “Think carefully about your answer. We’re down to the last two pages of froggy notes. Also, I don’t want to move.”

“I’ll make a mental list. If it pleases you.”

“It pleases me,” Ava returns, pitching her voice in a very poor approximation of a British accent (if only to stop thinking of all the ways Beatrice might please her, should Ava figure out the right way to ask). “You could also sleep in, for one.”

“Mmm, but don’t forget my finely tuned internal clock, Ava. That won’t do at all.”

Beatrice has a certain way of invoking humor within her typical deadpan, something to do with the exact curvature of her mouth; Ava would not be able to explain it to anyone else, but she spots it every time and so she spots it now. (Or maybe it’s more to do with her, with the way it fills her with a heady warmth.)

“Yeah, okay, fine. No sleeping in. But no alarms either. And!” Unable to resist the impulse, Ava leans in, knocking her forehead against Beatrice’s, barely a tap before she pulls back again. “You have to stay in bed.”

From the back of her throat, Beatrice produces a low sound; an odd sort of sigh or maybe a groan. Her eyes flutter shut again, too, with the force of it.

“Doing what?” she asks, after a bit too long of a pause.

“Anything you want! Read one of your pretentious novels. Watch a stupid tv show. Or watch a good one. Do a crossword. Daydream about kicking Adriel in the dick. I’ll even allow mentally compiling lists or whatever. Just — stay in bed. Stay in your pjs. And maybe run your fingers through my hair in that way I like. I’ve got the rest of the day planned out, but everything hinges on it starting with a lazy morning. You wouldn’t want to ruin my really well thought out plans, would you, Bea?”

This next sigh is a little softer, soft enough that Ava knows she’s nearly won.

“I thought days off were meant to be relaxing. You’ve given me a list of things I can and cannot do.”

“Oh, please, like you don’t get off on lists.” Finally, finally she gets a flush; barely visible in the moonlight. “Come on, Bea. You suck at relaxing. I’m being so generous by easing you into it with planned activities and careful organization, so the least you could do is try!”

And there. Beatrice hums, her shoulders drop, and her hand comes up to brush against Ava’s side, running along the fabric of her oversized t-shirt. She concedes to Ava gracefully only in matters that she thinks don’t matter at all (nights out playing pool or piggyback rides up and down mountains or quick stops for gelato), and that’s always worked fine for Ava, who thinks maybe they matter more than the rest.

“I’ll try, then.” She waits a beat, lips twitching just the once. “If it pleases you.”

“It pleases me,” Ava responds again, but without the teasing accent in place to cover up just how much.

—

When she wakes, Ava is certain that God, Heaven, and every good thing every stupid religion has promised is real, but only on Earth and only for her. Sitting alongside her, back against the wall, Beatrice is humming softly as she reads a book (some dusty volume from before the dinosaurs went extinct), and she is running her fingers through Ava’s hair, light except for the occasional scrape of her nails against Ava’s scalp. In her sleep, she’s curled into Beatrice’s thigh, gripping the fabric of her thin sweatpants, and Ava remains there as she takes in the rest of the sensations that greet her, each one equally overwhelming in their own right.

“Awake, finally?” Beatrice asks, after not even ten seconds, despite Ava’s best efforts to remain still, to keep her consciousness under wraps.

“No.” Though she does roll into Beatrice a little more, now that she’s given herself away, throwing an arm around her waist and pulling herself a bit more completely into Beatrice’s lap. “I’m still asleep. Don’t stop.”

Beatrice’s laugh is as light as her touch, as though both come from the same impulse (one she’s only just learning to accept).

“Oh, are you? I think I’ve shown remarkable patience, given that the entire morning is nearly gone. Please tell me your plans are indeed plural in nature, Ava.”

“Oh ye of little faith,” Ava mumbles, mostly because there’s no way in hell anyone’s ever said that about Beatrice before. “Of course they are. It’s just that everything officially kicks with another five to seven minutes of intense cuddling. So. We probably shouldn’t cut any corners. That’d be reckless. You don’t want me to be reckless, do you?”

Five to seven minutes later, Ava is content and warm and has perhaps even more trouble getting out of bed than she would have earlier, but Beatrice’s smile is indulgent as Ava dramatically slumps back into her in between every step of getting out of bed, and by the time they’re dressed and ready for what Ava calls step three (and Beatrice claims can only be considered step two, as the cuddling had clearly been an extension of step one), none of that good humor has been lost. Today, Beatrice has thrown on a pair of light linen pants and a black and gray tank top that’s surprisingly fitted (and shows off Beatrice’s muscles in a way that Ava simply can’t think about if she wants to retain enough brain power to utter a single word that isn’t arm), and Ava feels more than a little giddy, watching her stand by the door, patiently waiting. She’s never felt more capital-c-Chosen than in that moment, halo very much included, because Beatrice is waiting for her and no one else in the universe has ever been so lucky.

It’s a hot day, but she’s running on time for once, so when they step outside, the large picnic basket waiting for them still feels cool to touch, dropped off by Hans only five minutes ago. There’s a note on top (written in careful English, a kind consideration given that Ava’s affinity for languages seems to only apply to speaking them), and Ava crumbles it up before Beatrice fully steps outside, tugging her baseball hat low as though it’ll be able to hide her blush.

(I had a very awkward conversation with my sister last night, the note says. If you don’t do the same with your girl today, I will never let you hear the end of it.)

“Did you — was that waiting for you? Did you actually plan for today? As in plan ahead?”

There’s enough surprise in her voice to be nearly insulting, and Ava takes her time with a bit of showy blustering, snatching up the picnic basket and reaching for Beatrice’s hand before she can talk herself out of it.

“Okay, look, despite what you seem to think, I am capable of planning things. I just… prefer to go with the flow.”

Beatrice appears bemused rather than terrified, which is honestly a pretty big win for Ava, who’s never quite managed to lead Beatrice anywhere without her wearing an expression that would suit someone being dragged to hell (rather than to look at a cute puppy or a pretty flower or a really nice shirt on display in one of the windows they passed by on their way home from work and okay — fine — yes, maybe Ava has used the Beatrice-look-at this hand-hold ploy a little too often, but it’s paying off in dividends now.)

“And yet today — your much lauded day off — necessitated a plan?” Beatrice’s lips twitch, like she can’t quite figure out Ava’s reasoning, which is funny, because Ava’s reasoning is always centered around Beatrice, even if the end result might wildly vary as a result. “What’s going on?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” She lifts the basket, which is far less of a casual gesture than she would have hoped — the thing ways a fucking ton — and grins. “We’re going on a picnic. A brunch picnic, because brunch is the laziest of all the meals, and I’m pretty sure that’s proven by a whole bunch of scientific facts that you should definitely just trust me about.”

“Brunch?” Beatrice repeats, the word sounding far more dignified coming from her lips, far more wondrous too, as though she’s speaking of a ritual both foreign and sublime.

“Yeah, you know; Sex and the City mimosas and chillers, but with more carbs and chocolate and syrup.”

“I don’t think I do know.” One of her shoulders lifts, a half shrug that looks out of place within the rigidity of Beatrice’s stiff posture, in the best possible way. “But I trust you. So carry on.”

This, Ava knows, is true.

Beatrice trusts her as Ava squeezes her hand and tugs her forward. She trusts her as Ava leads them through the town, careful to avoid the areas where Adriel’s goons have started to congregate over the past week, hanging up posters and proselytizing (each word or image or sign she attempts to ignore sinking to the bottom of her stomach, guilt and shame and anger piling up with alarming speed). She trusts her as they leave civilization and venture out into the gentle hills and sparse woods they’ve both come to know so well, though their pace — a casual meander that Beatrice seems to struggle with, her steps automatically quickening up after too much time has passed — feels odd when traveling through what’s become their typical training grounds.

Beatrice trusts her, and that’s a rare, precious thing, and Ava’s not sure how to hold it within herself, when she would prefer to shout, dance, or maybe even cry during moments where it hits her particularly hard. Instead, she picks a single forget-me-not, spinning it between her fingers until the blue and gold seem to blur together, and tucks it in the breast pocket of Beatrice’s tank, as though the addition of color to the otherwise grayscale attire might convey some of what she cannot say.

“I’m surprised you brought me here,” Beatrice says, fingers lightly brushing along the petals, even after they resume their walk. “I’d have thought you would find the very sight traumatizing, for all the complaining you do about this trail. What did you call it last time?”

“Satan’s asshole? Undeniably the Bad Place? A level of torture that the devil is probably taking notes on? The tenth and last circle of Hell, which was too fucked up for even Dante to chatter on about? Honestly, I don’t even know which ones I said out loud. By the time we made it to the top, I was seeing little cartoon stars floating around me, so my memory isn’t super reliable on this.”

Beatrice — who runs the whole trail on a weekly basis, like some kind of unhinged masochist — laughs, like she thinks Ava’s joking. Ava — who can barely stomach looking further up the trail, where the forest thins out and the steep ascent begins — is most definitely not joking.

“Yes, well, you can see, then, why I hadn’t thought this would be your first choice for a picnic location.”

“What can I say? The road to hell is paved with really great picnic spots.” She shrugs. “Or like, has really great picnic spots just off to the side of it, but that’s not as catchy.”

The day after tomorrow, they will be back here, Beatrice’s calm voice in her ear, telling her to blast apart boulders or pick up her pace or run across the water, but Ava pushes all of that aside as she steps carefully through the brush and settles on a spot where she might lay out the small quilt that Maria had donated to the cause, folded carefully atop the food within the basket Hans had helped assemble. The fabric is thick and soft and just wide enough for the both of them to settle on top of it (not so large that there’s all that much space between them), and Beatrice stretches out her legs as they do so, folding her hands in her lap as Ava rummages through the picnic, which — she realizes nearly instantly — contains far more than she’d purchased.

She recognizes the thin wedge of cheddar she’d bought on Tuesday — purchased from the cheesemonger whose daughter Ava had taken to helping through English worksheets during her lunch break at the bar — but alongside it is a large block of something soft and creamy and most certainly homemade. Here are the Schlumbergerli she’d ordered from the local bakery — where she has taken to swinging by on her way to work, if only to chat about Sturm der Liebe (a German soap opera Ava has become moderately addicted to) with the owner — but there are twice as many as she asked for and they are filled with chocolate and jam and cheese. Underneath, there’s an assortment of fruits — selected with help from Lucas, their favorite shopboy — but they have been washed and cut and arranged in a spiraling floral design within the container. Tucked into the side is a bottle she does not recognize, but scribbled on a makeshift label is Hans’ neat script (non-alcoholic but better than Sex and the City), which explains plenty. With each delicacy she pulls out — soon joined by jars of honey and marmalades and sticks of hand-cut butter resting at the bottom of the basket — Beatrice’s eyebrows lift a bit further, until a veritable feast has been spread out around them and she’s unable to hold her tongue.

“Is the entire village joining us? Because this is — ”

“ — A lot more than I ordered, I swear. I told Hans I’d pick up one of his half-shifts if he gathered all the stuff for me, but this is — uh — more than I thought there’d be.”

“I see,” Beatrice murmurs, a small smile in place, one that reminds Ava of that night in the kitchen and you really don’t realize what you do to a person, do you and the staggering blind spot Beatrice carries for herself.

But today is about truth and confessions, and she will not let this misconception pass again.

“I might have mentioned it was for a special occasion,” she admits. “And I’m pretty sure that half this town thinks we’re dating, so they probably thought it was an anniversary thing rather than your first day off ever. You know, like how Hans did, up until two days ago.”

She means to say: see how this thing between us is tangible or people watch us like you read poetry or I love you so much everyone else feels it too, but Beatrice is already blushing and they have a whole day ahead, and so Ava only pours their drinks, clinking her glass against Beatrice’s afterwards in a silent toast.

“We really ought to have caught that particular delusion earlier on,” Beatrice sighs. “I can’t imagine how unprofessional we must seem under such a lens. The power balance implications alone are severely uncomfortable.”

“Oh, since you’re my boss?” Ava considers this for a full ten seconds. Her thoughts do not go in a direction she can share with Beatrice in any kind of detail, but she does file them away for further reexamination at a later time. (When she’s very, very alone.) “Uh, yeah, totally uncomfortable and not hot at all.”

“Ava.”

“I’m just saying! The nuns at the orphanage were not jazzed about the whole 50 Shades of Gray phenomenon, but they definitely couldn’t stop it. Questionable consent issues aside, I totally got the whole buttoned-up-boss thing. You could pull that off no problem.”

Beatrice nearly chokes on her bread roll; Ava pats her on the back in sympathy, as though she hadn’t been the one to cause it.

“If that’s what people are assuming, we really should — ”

“Bea, no, I’m just joking,” she laughs, and though Beatrice’s coughing fit had come and gone in a second or two, Ava’s fingers still linger, stroking up and down along the planes of her back. “Look, it’s not a big deal. People are always going to see what they want to see, you know? It’s like… looking up at a cloud and someone sees one thing and you see another. It’s really hard to get someone to see a train after they’ve convinced themselves it looks like a duck, so you might as well not worry about it. Their duck isn’t hurting anyone.”

“Ava,” Beatrice says again, and this time, the name sounds like indulgence, fully wrapped in thick and obvious affection. “I understand you’re utilizing a metaphor, but surely it won’t come as much of a surprise when I say I haven’t spent much time cloud gazing.”

There’s an easy fix for that, of course, and Beatrice realizes it as soon as Ava tugs on the back of her shirt, insistent until Beatrice leans back onto her palms, until she can tilt her chin up to the sky. Unfortunately, (fortunately?) this exposes the long, curving lines of her neck, and Ava entirely forgets the whole point of the exercise for an extended, silent moment.

“Get what I mean now?” she remembers to ask, eventually.

“I don’t see any ducks or trains,” Beatrice says. “But I suppose that one could be a sheep.”

“Bea,” Ava groans, though it’s too full of laughter to be anything other than fond. “It’s a cloud. Of course it looks like a sheep! Let’s dig a little deeper.”

She leans into Beatrice’s side, craning her neck so that she can find the same angle on the shapes floating above (and — yes — of course get closer to Beatrice in the process; Ava is but a woman, and worse, she's a woman fairly hopelessly in love).

“See that little hump in the middle? And then the knobby part on top? Don’t you think that could be a little camel? One that maybe had a chunk taken out of him, sure, but he’s The Little Camel That Could, post-cheetah attack. Or, wait. Do cheetahs and camels live in the same habitat? No, right?”

Beatrice, because she’s a beautiful soul and a kind person and the greatest woman Ava’s ever known, actually squints at the quickly-breaking-apart cloud in an attempt to find any part of the creature Ava’s describing.

“I — don’t — I don’t think I see the camel.” She sighs, but doesn’t remove her gaze from the sky, forehead pinched in the middle. “I'm afraid I’m not going to be much good at this, Ava. Imagination has never been my strong suit, or so my English teachers always told me.”

“You’ve got plenty of imagination. You just use it really practically.” She nudges Beatrice’s shoulder with her own, shuffling closer with the motion, in an action that feels kind of impressively smooth (at least for her). “Besides, practice matters, and despite what you might think, I do have some experience with this whole thing. When I was a kid I used to have this roommate — Valencia — who was always coming up with ways for me to be… well, not completely fucking miserable, honestly. She would read to me or describe stuff that I didn’t know about or couldn’t see. She even came up with this crazy shelf thing so that I could read for myself, mostly. Anyway, one of the things she did was prop up a little hand mirror on my lap so if I looked at it just right, I could see the clouds that would float by the window behind my bed. We used to spend hours staring into that thing, coming up with stories based on the shapes we thought we saw.”

Beatrice has turned away from the sky completely, never one to miss taking in every part of a person as they spoke (a quality both charming and intense), but she doesn’t say anything, instead shifting her fingers just enough to cover Ava’s own, splayed out on the blanket.

“She was my very first crush,” Ava admits, for maybe the very first time, and she’s surprised how nice it feels, how the warmth spreads through her cheeks. “I was twelve. I didn’t realize I liked guys too until I was fifteen and one of the new kids at the orphanage looked a little like that High School Musical boy. But the first one sticks with you, right? That’s probably why, ever since the halo chose me, I always try to look up at the clouds. Whenever I get a chance. There’s so many, you know? I kind of forgot how many of them could fit.”

The camel cloud has broken apart completely now, spreading out until it’s little more than intertwining tendrils of white. Ava tries to find something new in the remnants, but gets distracted by Beatrice, who hasn’t stopped looking at her, not even after Ava’s fallen silent. There are so many moments where Ava’s sure she’s figured her out, but this isn’t one of them, because Beatrice is staring at her like she’s said something that might unlock the secrets to the universe, if only she thinks about it carefully enough.

“Oh, come on. You never had a first crush? Not from a movie or whatever, but on a real live girl? I’m not that unrelatable, am I?”

“Most of the time, yes,” Beatrice returns, but with a smile that softens the blow, twists it into a compliment. “But no, I — of course I did. It took me a while to realize, I suppose. Up until then I’d thought those feelings were just intense friendship, but — ” Her lips twitch, shifting from fond to sad to nostalgic with the most subtle of movements. “I was nearly sixteen. I’d always been a studious girl — I’m sure you can imagine — and she was a bit of a bad girl, I suppose. No one could figure out why we were friends, but I… she made me laugh. And she was sweet, usually when no one was looking. She played the drums and dyed her hair with pink streaks and one day she convinced me to skip class and hide out in the woods behind school and — ”

The breath Beatrice draws in is audible, held for a full second before she lets it out again with a shake of her head.

“Was this at Catholic school?” Ava asks, voice a little too gentle, even to her own ears.

“No.” The tight smile Beatrice manages tells Ava the whole of the story, though the rest of her words (clipped and painful) serve as confirmation. “It was right before. A couple of weeks before, in fact.”

“Bea — ” She begins, but another sharp shake of Beatrice's head cuts her off.

“It’s okay, Ava.” Her fingers curl inwards, wrapping up a few of Ava’s, thumb stroking along the knuckles of the rest. “I’m starting to think — that is, I think I’m quite sure — that I didn’t do anything wrong then. That I wasn’t wrong at all.”

Ava’s heart is a wretched thing, twisting and flipping and stopping and starting and speeding up, until she doesn’t know whether she wants to go back in time to hold the hand of that fifteen-year-old Beatrice and tell her that everything would be alright, or if she’d prefer to stay in place and kiss this twenty-two-year-old Beatrice quite softly on the mouth and tell her exactly the same.

“You weren’t,” she says instead (always instead). “You aren’t.”

Sometimes, she thinks Beatrice knows. Not fully. Not completely. Not enough. (Not yet.) But sometimes, in moments like this one now, when she’s staring at Ava with wide eyes that hold a hint of the hopeful (of some kind of forbidden, blasphemous faith), she thinks Beatrice might know something about how Ava feels, even if that knowledge is buried under everything else. This time, it last longer than she’s grown to expect, a solid five unsteady beats of Ava’s heart before Beatrice looks back towards the sky, tearing her gaze — which had come to rest somewhere in the near vicinity of Ava’s mouth — away with a smile that curls upwards like the tail end of one of the clouds they’re meant to be watching.

“So I am coming to learn,” Beatrice murmurs, and doesn’t need to say anything else for Ava to understand (doesn’t need to add the unspoken but obvious thanks to you).

—

It’s rare for Ava to plan and rarer for those plans to work out perfectly, every single second of the day an individual domino among hundreds of thousands, each landing in the exact right way and forming a perfect, cascading spiral. Rarer as in it’s never happened before, not even close, and as a result, she’s riding a dangerous high as she and Beatrice leave Gian’s home cinema, where a special showing (i.e. a showing at Ava’s request) of Nun of That has just finished up.

“That was — ”

“So good,” Ava cuts in, before Beatrice can say any of the things that are so clearly written all over her face. “I mean, ‘for over fifteen hundred years, The Order of the Black Habit has been fighting crime and keeping the world safe from evil’? Bea, the person who made this movie knows about the OCS, I swear. I swear! And, on top of all that? I think it managed to be offensive in every single possible way. Incredible. Best movie of all time. Twelve out of ten stars.”

“I can’t believe I just spent an hour and a half of my life on that,” Beatrice groans, rubbing her forehead with three fingers, a motion that cannot begin to cover her amusement, revealed in pieces by the tilt of her head and the slant of her lips and all the moments she’d gasped mid-movie, all the times she’d had to hide her laugh. “There’s a reason we were the only people in that basement. If I recall correctly, you’ve always said these showings are fairly popular.”

“Well yeah, but that’s just more of that whole, people thinking we’re having a special anniversary date or whatever. I’m a hundred percent positive Gian didn’t tell anyone else about this one. I planned this a little while ago, but ever since you kicked that American’s ass, Gian has texted me four times asking about tonight. He’s like, obsessed with you now. And not in a suspicious way, before you ask. He just wants you to teach him aikido or something.”

“I wasn’t going to ask,” Beatrice laughs — actually laughs, a bright smile briefly lighting up the world around her, leaving Ava to blink away the lingering spots in her vision. “Ava, I — I didn’t think about that at all, actually.”

They’ve been here before, so many nights just like this, walking home in the dark, shoulders brushing up against each other with every step. But tonight is different because the streets are empty and the skies are clear and when Beatrice laughs her head tilts back and there’s wonder in her voice when she speaks these words, the realization coming in real time.

“That’s good, right?” This time, with their next shared step, their fingers brush instead of their shoulders, and Ava takes it as a sign, snagging Beatrice’s hand just as she’d done this morning, intertwining the two of them with a motion as natural as anything else.

“I — ” Like with everything, Beatrice considers this carefully before responding. “I don’t know. Certainly, we need to be careful here. Adriel’s numbers are growing and we don’t know what he’s planning or when. It would be dangerous for me to lose sight of that. But, I suppose, maybe for a night, not worrying about every aspect of our cover isn’t the worst possible thing. Maybe taking a full day off — even from that particular side of things— was good for us, after all.”

“So what you’re saying is that I was… ”

She spins around to make sure she sees it — the moment of Beatrice’s admission — but she doesn’t let go, choosing instead to walk backwards, to twist her hand around until she can maintain the link with the tips of her fingers.

“You were right,” Beatrice murmurs, and apparently, it’s not much of a concession at all. “This will sound sad, I know, but I can’t remember ever having a day like this. Not for a very long time, at least. There’s always been duty and worry and something I needed to be careful to hide, but today, I didn’t feel that way at all. Not for all the moments I was with you.”

Ava stops walking (stops breathing too), and Beatrice does as well, but she’s a second too late, bringing them a little too close together to be acceptable, probably, if Beatrice was her typical self, worrying about all these things and more. But today is something special; today, Beatrice only smiles, a hard-won kind of carefree.

“What I’m trying to say is… Thank you, Ava.” Pink seeps across her cheeks, faint but lovely. “I think I might keep this day with me for a very long time.”

Protectiveness seeps into Ava, sudden and fierce. Should one of Adriel’s cronies burst around a corner then, should a demon drop out of the sky, Ava’s pretty sure the halo — unnaturally warm in that moment, pulsing something quite pleasant down her fucked up spine — would turn them to dust in an instant, before Beatrice’s beatific expression might begin to fade. There are days people always remember and some they’ll never stop trying to forget, but Ava resolves then to fill Beatrice’s life up with all of the former, until everything else gets pushed to the side.

There are words she needs to say, actions she craves to do, and she’d thought today would be all about building to the moment where she might confess and show. But today, Beatrice is happy and she’s forgotten to worry, if only for this random and impossible pocket of time. And Ava would not ruin that for the world, not for every single selfish bone in her body telling her (to open her mouth and tell her, to step forward and kiss her, to unfold all of herself and hope that Beatrice is ready to freefall into something Ava can’t promise won’t lead to damnation, one way or another) to do exactly that.

“Maybe I shouldn’t do anything for the rest of the night, then, just in case I say something that’ll fuck that all up,” she says, a little too earnest. A little too soft.

Beatrice doesn’t seem to mind, if her tone — the exact same kind of delicate — is any indication, saying something that her gently teasing words do not.

“As long as you promise not to float the entire way back, I think we’ll be fine.”

“I think I can manage that,” she concedes, though with the halo humming in her back, reacting to the words she still cannot say, it might be easier said than done.

Today, Beatrice is making jokes and she’s squeezing Ava’s hand as they stand in the dark and there’s something awfully soft about her when she’s free from any of the worries that Ava might normally cause.

And so today, yet again, Ava will wait.

But tomorrow…

Maybe tomorrow when she goes to the pool before her midday shift. Maybe tomorrow at work when Beatrice will inevitably call her up to the attic to discuss something serious just so she has an excuse to chat without shirking on her duties. Maybe later tomorrow night when Camila has reported in and they finally finally get some good news about Mary, the name of the place they’re holding her or the city or the country or something, anything that will make things a little more alright. Maybe tomorrow when they lie down in their bed and Beatrice’s fingers slide up and curl into the fabric of Ava’s shirt as she’s taken to doing every night. Maybe when she knocks her forehead against Ava’s own — as she’d done for the past three days — by way of saying goodnight. Maybe tomorrow Ava will tell her, during any one of those times or any moment in between.

Or maybe the next day.

Or the next day.

Or (though Hans will kill her) the next.

Ava will wait until the right moment to tell Beatrice that her world is about to change (for the better, Ava hopes, for the best). She’ll wait until Beatrice has stuff with God and herself figured out or for the world to be just a little more calm or settled or sure. She’ll wait for the stars to align in a singular moment where they have the space to breathe, she’ll wait until they’re able to give this thing every part of themselves, without fear.

Maybe that will be tomorrow, or maybe it won’t, but Ava will wait, and throughout it all, she’ll fight angels and demons, gods or men, until the forces around them back the fuck off and she’s carved out that perfect moment for the both of them (or until she has no moments left at all).

“Ready to go, then?” she asks, pushing thoughts of tomorrow away (if only for now).

“Sounds perfect,” Beatrice murmurs and lifts her eyes back to the stars as they resume their walk, Ava leading her home.

Chapter Text

Oh my dear, will you believe in me?
Can you see the moon lit up above?
I'm here for you if you want me to
Be the attention of your love

All I need is to come home to you.
All I want is to be close to you
All I need is to come home to you
All I want is to be with you

—

Day 1

—

In her dream, Ava is wearing a button-up, one with a familiar little green frog printed all over the fabric. She’s tan, as though she’s spent a couple months in the same too-bright sun they’re under now, and her legs are left bare by the tight jean shorts that barely make it mid-thigh. There's nothing but sand all around them, a vast and barren desert, but Ava is barefoot; this, Beatrice had known before anything else, since she’d followed Ava’s tracks to where she finds her now, sitting on a rock with her face turned towards the light.

Yesterday, Ava had been shot through with Divinium. Yesterday, there had been blood on her lips and hands and forehead. Yesterday, she could barely sit up, could barely breathe, could barely get out the few words she’d refused to die with. But in the dream, she is whole, and in the dream, when she sees Beatrice, she stands, as though the motion gives her no trouble at all.

“Bea,” she says, and Beatrice falls apart, as easily as glass or the petals of bluebells or camel-shaped clouds in the sky or carefully written letters or girls who have only just learned how to love not all that long before everything gets torn away in a haze of blue.

Beatrice falls apart two seconds into her dream and it’s the first time she’s done so completely, all those small, fracturing moments adding up to this; shaking in a body that doesn’t actually have form, in a landscape that doesn’t exist, with an Ava who’s a figment of her imagination, but still feels torturously real when she comes over and wraps her arms around Beatrice, the hug sure and warm and solid (experienced by Beatrice so reverently in the past that her brain gets all the details right, in the worst possible way).

“Hey, I know. Bea, I know.” Ava curls into her, or maybe it’s the opposite, with the same result: Ava’s mouth against her ear, words soothing and quiet, but packed with the unsaid. Somehow, it makes the ache worse, and Beatrice pulls in fistfuls of fabric, her hands clawing at Ava’s back until she finds purchase. “I cried for like three days straight when I got here. There was a super unflattering amount of snot involved and you’d think it would have made Reya reconsider who she wanted to kill God, or whatever, but here I still am, and — shit, Bea, I’m not — am I seriously so bad at this that I’m making you cry harder? Please don’t. I know how to fix this. I swear, I have it like, ninety percent figured out.”

Not a lot of this makes much sense, but things rarely do in Beatrice’s dreams (the ones she can remember, with less and less frequency over the years, until Ava came into her life and suddenly she was dreaming in color, dreaming of things she’d promised to forget, dreaming in ways that made her tremble when she woke). What does make sense is that she’s always felt better when Ava was touching her, and that works now too, synapses flaring to life with memories burned into each neuron, a devilish trick by her nervous system that she sees through, but falls for nonetheless. Ava presses her lips to the spot just under her ear and Beatrice calms like a switch has been flipped, hiccuping out one last sob before she slips into silence, rubbing her tears against the strangely scratchy material of Ava’s shirt.

“This is absurd,” she mumbles. “How can I still be dreaming if I know I’m dreaming? How is it you’re meant to wake yourself up? Something with mirrors. Or clocks?”

Ava pulls back and her eyes are soft, eyebrows lifted in sympathy. This is not the expression Beatrice would give herself right now — something far more exasperated would certainly suit the situation better — and the difference confuses her, pulls her out of her attempts to remember the mechanics. Or maybe that’s Ava’s fingers, stroking along her cheek — from freckle to freckle — as she used to do in their quieter moments, whenever she thought she could get away with it. (Though this isn’t quite the right phrasing; Ava could have gotten away with it always, anytime, whenever she’d wanted, and surely she’d known that at the end, or maybe at the start.)

“You’re not dreaming. You’re communicating.” Ava spreads her free arm wide, as though she’s going for a little ta-da but can’t bring herself to pull away enough to manage it properly. “Reya says it has something to do with quantum… stuff. I stopped listening after about three seconds because it didn’t make sense and Reya lies all the time anyway, so it probably wasn’t even true. Maybe you and Jillian can study it when I get back. I don’t really care either way. It means I get to see you and — ”

With a heavy swallow, some of the cheer fades from Ava’s face. Had this Ava been real, Beatrice would have noticed it earlier (instantaneously), but it’s obvious now, how she’s been putting on a front (so similar to how she’d been before the end, those moments in front of fake blueprints and layouts, lying through her teeth).

“I don’t care, because I just wanted to see your face. This whole time I — ” She swallows again, and real or not, Beatrice can’t see any version of Ava cry without taking action, without reaching for her hip or leaning into her touch. “I really missed you, Bea.”

“You only left yesterday,” Beatrice whispers, though there’s no point in arguing with herself, regardless of whatever bizarre form her consciousness takes. “Except that — of course — I’ve done the math based on the notes Dr. Salvius took on Lilith, which means that you’ve been gone for a year or more and I’m merely — my subconscious is using this information to put together a simulation of you that’s probable, I suppose. And, well, it’s pathetic. It’s truly pathetic. A grotesque amalgam of science and blind hope and you, which I admit, is really quite effective, given how much I — ”

She’ll cry again if she continues down this path. And so she stops, clenching jaw tight, sealing her breath inside of her mouth for a count of three. It normally works, but Ava is still staring at her, still so softly, still with so much care, and it’s a little too much.

“What happened to all that faith?” she asks gently. “Twelve hours ago, you were full of it.”

This, at least, feels familiar; a question she’s asked herself countlessly, with increasing desperation as time has gone by. What happened to all that faith, Ava asks her (she asks herself) and the answer is always the same: you, that’s what happened, you, you, you.

“My entire life has been built on faith. It has carried me through my worst moments, and it has always been enough.” Beatrice looks away because she has to, because it’s too painful to continue to be observed so kindly as she admits her latest and worst truth. “But then you kissed me and now it’s not. Perhaps it hadn’t been for a while. Since the moment I realized I — ”

But she can’t say it. She had barely been able to say it out loud to herself and certainly can’t now, not even to an Ava made of smoke and mirrors of her own design. Not even when Ava knows, smile curling until it’s a laugh, no more than a puff of sound.

“You didn’t say it then, either. Twelve hours ago, or over a year, depending on who’s telling time.” Ava pauses briefly, some of her humor disappearing as she sucks her bottom lip between her teeth. “You didn’t say it back. Which is fine! Like, honestly, I get it! I think I get it. I didn’t need to hear you say it back because I know you feel it. Right? I mean — you do feel it, right? Because this whole thing would be super embarrassing if I like, kissed you, sacrificed myself, told you I loved you, died-ish, figured out a way to contact you from another universe, and then all the while you’ve been like, oh yeah, that Ava! She’s sure a good pal of mine! A really great friend! Ha ha!”

There is an odd sort of sensation starting to curl within her, one that should be called doubt but feels an awful lot like hope. Because there is no part of Beatrice — not a single wayward neuron or atom or particle — that could possibly imagine that Ava would do all of this for her (for her) with any kind of uncertainty (no matter how jokingly that uncertainty might be stated). Surely Ava knew. Surely Ava had known. Despite all her efforts, Beatrice never had been any sort of subtle during their months together and Ava was Ava — beautiful, charming, devastatingly magnetic — and who could possibly resist falling in love with all of that?

“Ava,” Beatrice says, as calmly as she can manage. “What the fuck?”

She expects Ava to laugh or cheer, to mockingly gasp out a scandalized ‘language’. But instead she grins, wide enough that it seems to radiate out from her until Beatrice realizes that it’s the halo, glow spreading outwards in distinct rays of light.

“Okay,” she breathes. “Yeah, alright. That’s what I thought. Sorry, I know. I do. But it’s been a long time for me and not for you and for a second I just — I just wanted to check. The rest of the stuff we can work on, but that — that’s all that matters.”

The last bit she says with a smile that’s softened by a memory Beatrice isn’t privy to, which isn’t possible, surely, because this is a dream, surely.

“Do you curse a lot in your head?” Ava continues, and now the teasing comes. They’re close enough that Beatrice can see exactly how her amusement travels, starting in Ava’s eyes and carrying through to her lips, quirking at the corner. “Because I always wondered if like, secretly, you were running through swears I’ve never even heard of. Do you think Jesus ever said fuck? Did they say fuck back then? What was the Biblical ‘fuck’ equivalent?”

“Ava,” Beatrice sighs and it’s so normal that for a second she forgets where she is, the dreamland around them flickering in and out (desert to mountains to nothing to desert again).

“Hmm, yeah,” Ava hums, eyes flicking away from Beatrice for perhaps the first time since she arrived. “I guess I should try to stay on track. I don’t know how long we have or how stable this whole thing is. This could all collapse if your sleep changes, since I’m pretty sure your brain is filling in all the gaps.”

“That would explain the shirt.” She nods towards the button-up, the one she knows Ava’s never owned, given it most certainly doesn’t exist anywhere in the world.

“Oh, fuck, am I wearing something really sexy?” Ava looks down with a grin, getting distracted again, despite her most recent resolution. “Are my tits like, out? I always knew you were a boob woman, Bea. The way you’d try so hard not to stare! I was seconds from ‘accidentally’ flashing you towards the end of us being in hiding. Like, holy shit, you were driving me insane.”

“Me?” Beatrice chokes out. “You were the one wearing — ” She shakes her head, ignoring Ava’s pleased little grin. “No. I’m not doing this. This isn’t real. I can’t do this.”

“Hey, alright,” Ava’s close again (closer, really, since she’s been close this whole time), slipping back into her space, fitting her hand to Beatrice’s jaw. “Let’s just — okay, let’s take a second to look at this logically. Let’s sit down and just talk about this, okay? Let’s — get rid of this nasty desert, will you? Give us a nice place to sit and just talk.”

“Changing the environment will hardly help lessen my conviction that this isn’t simply my subconsciousness diving into a pathetic fantasy borne of desperation,” she murmurs, but complies with Ava’s request regardless, thinking of comfort, thinking of Ava, thinking of home, until the world shimmers around them and they’re in their Swiss apartment, looking just as they’d left it, not so long ago.

And maybe delusion is worth it, just to see Ava’s smile, then, as she runs a hand along the checkered couch, across the blue sweatshirt sprawled over the back (the one Ava would sometimes borrow and never fold back up).

“Yeah, this is what I was thinking about too. Do you know I think about this place every day? Every hour, probably.” Her stare returns to Beatrice, warm and understanding. “It’s going to be easier now, though. It’s hard to tell for sure, but I think the realm we’re in now has a better time conversation rate, or whatever we’re calling it. Reya’s place sucks for that, but it’s connected to all kinds of worlds? Universes? I dunno what to call them either. Point is, we’ve got plenty of time for you to work on things on your end without me turning a million years old in the process. Want to sit?”

Beatrice isn’t sure about want in this instance, but she does sit as soon as Ava does, sinking into the couch with a blank sort of stare that she only jolts out of when Ava scoots closer, close enough that their thighs nearly overlap.

“You’re — work on things? Ava, are you giving me a mission?”

“Well, yeah. Duh! What, like you people haven’t harped on about God doing this sort of thing for centuries now? There’s always some fucking angel showing up in a dream like, hey, Mary, what’s going on? Time to get to work popping out a baby. Name it Jesus, by the way. Not that I’m an angel. Or God. But I am kind of Jesus-y. Jesava. Jeava? Avasus?”

She pauses for a moment, considering, but then just shrugs. (Beatrice simply stares, feeling more than a little insane.)

“You know, when all of this first started — when I first felt you even though you were a whole universe away— I did ask Reya if it had anything to do with like, the whole eat of my flesh, drink of my blood thing, but that was mostly so I could build up to a joke about how we barely got a chance to kiss, so obviously you never got around to eating me out. She kind of just stared at me, though. Which… typical. No one appreciates my jokes over here. It’s all ‘kill God!’ or ‘destroy that interdimensional being’ or ‘the halo is a debt you must repay’ blah blah blah. But anyway. Yeah, I’m giving you a mission! We’re going to bust me out of this place! I just need a little bit of help.”

That awful bit of hope has its hook in her now, and Beatrice knows she won’t get away from it, no matter how hard she struggles. Because these words are Ava’s, foreign enough to make her blush and stare, and sitting here — in a perfect replica of their Swiss apartment, still with the lingering mess from when they’d packed up — she’s not so sure has the ability to maintain any careful doubt. It’s been twelve hours and she’s already tired of missing Ava, tired of the strength she’ll need to go on.

God is no longer enough, belief in the divine is no longer enough, institutions and rules and sin and shame and the sad little corner of her heart where she can conflate duty and love, none of it can possibly be enough, not any more. But Ava loves her, has loved her, will love her, and that most certainly is.

Faith is not longer enough, but love? What’s love if not faith with proof? She is tired of faith without return, but Ava has never failed to pay her love back in dividends, to twist devotion into something that’s double-sided. Faith is no longer enough, but this is something else entirely.

“Okay,” she breathes. “Okay. Tell me what you need me to do.”

Ava’s smile fills the room, fills every shadowy corner of Beatrice’s heart or soul or very being, until there’s no place left in her that doesn’t hold a new conviction, one that she’ll die before abandoning, that she’ll hold onto through whatever will come next.

“You won’t like it,” Ava warns, but with the grin, it reads as fond, the same expression that appears right before Ava makes her watch a terrible movie or add more paprika to their soup. “You’re going to need a lot of Divinium. A lot. Like… Arc levels of Divinium. You’re going to have to pull it from there, probably.”

Beatrice takes in a slow, steadying breath. “You want me to destroy the Arc. The one currently still in Adriel’s temple. The one that is the only known bridge between our worlds.”

“Yeah,” Ava says simply. “Told you.”

“Dr. Salvius won’t like it either.” She shifts on the couch. There’s a tear in one of the cushions (a result of her hairpin slicing the fabric, one she hadn’t noticed until much later on) and it scrapes against her leg now.

“You’ll convince her. You’ll just have to convince her that Michael’s alive.” She’s quick to continue after dropping this absolutely bizarre fact so casually. “Or, like, a part of him? He’s the little kid version of himself again and it’s really weird. He said Jillian will understand when you explain it, so don’t worry about it. Oh and also — uh — all that Divinium? I think you’re going to have to put it inside you. You’re kind of my… tether? But the connection needs to be stronger. But don’t worry about that either. I’m working on the specifics.”

“Ava,” Beatrice says slowly, the way she always does when she’s feeling overwhelmed and looking for easy and solid ground. “I am very much worrying about it. This is — ”

“Insane! I know!” Ava twists, just enough to look Beatrice straight-on, to grab her hand and take it between both of her own.

“It’s insane,” she says again, softer now. “And I know you’re done with faith, but I don’t think you’re done with me. I promise I’m coming back to you, Bea. I promise I’m coming home. I just need a little help.”

Faith in the unknown, in the unkind, in the unresponsive is no longer enough. But it’s love that Ava’s asking for now, and for her, Beatrice has a never-ending source.

“Okay,” she says again, her love like a sword or a shield or both. “Start from the beginning, Ava. Tell me everything you know.”

—

When she wakes, Beatrice grabs a loose pair of pants and a long-sleeved shirt, and leaves the safe house with as little discussion as possible. (It’s four in the morning and Sister Dora is on watch, and so she manages this more easily than she otherwise might have, with another guard who knew her a bit better.) Jillian does not answer her buzzer, does not come running when Beatrice scales the gate, but she does emerge — bleary, shaking, carrying a gun — when Beatrice breaks into her home and the alarms sound off.

“Beatrice? I — ” The gun does not drop. The shaking only gets worse. “I have given you people everything I can give. I’m sorry — truly — about Ava. But get out of my house.”

“Michael says he misses the pencils you used to bring for him,” Beatrice says, not unkind, but straight to the point. “He says they always smelled like wood when you’d take them out of the plastic. He liked to hold them close to his nose and pretend that he was outside. He liked when he didn’t have to draw structures or angels, best. He liked when he could draw you and him camping, because he knew he’d never get to go, but it always made you smile when he would say that he would, one day.”

Finally, the gun falls away, hanging loosely at Jillian’s side.

“I don’t know what kind of sick game you’re playing, but I cannot — ”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Salvius,” Beatrice cuts in, because she is, because she knows how hard it is to let yourself hope. “I know this is unfair. But some version of your son is alive and he’s helping Ava navigate the other side. I need you to do the same for me here so we can get them both back.”

Beatrice knows herself and she knows the expressions flickering across Jillian’s face, the bits of herself that she cannot hold back despite everything in her wanting to shut down. She is not surprised when Jillian leaves, disappearing into her home with the soft pad of footsteps and the quiet click of a door shutting. But Beatrice waits, and she’s not surprised, either, when Jillian returns, several hours later, a notebook clutched tight in her hand. And she’s not surprised to hear her earlier phrasing mirrored back at her, the same desperation tucked carefully into each clipped word.

“Start from the beginning, Beatrice. Tell me everything you know.”

—

When Beatrice returns to the safe house that night, she waves off the questions and stares and escapes to her room with the Cruciform Sword. No one stops her, no one knocks on her door as the minutes tick away, but Beatrice would have hardly noticed anyways, absorbed in her task. After the sword has been cleaned, wiped down with antiseptic and carefully dried with a cloth, Beatrice wraps her hand around the blade, until the edges cut into her palm, until her blood trickles down the newly-cleaned sides. She holds it until an invisible weight settles at her side, until she feels a familiar warmth brush along her knuckles, until the weapon glows the faintest of blues.

Later, when Camila is bandaging her hand, holding back at least a hundred well-meaning starts to some kind of intervention, Beatrice knows that she does not have time to keep her secrets, as hard as they may be to reveal.

“I need to tell you something,” she says simply. “And I need you to trust me.”

Camila, bloody bandages strewn around her, does not hesitate, not even to take a breath.

“Faith can be hard,” she says with a smile. “But trust has always been easy for me, when it's trust in you. Tell me, Bea. I won’t let you down.”

—

(Earlier that day, in the dreamscape of the apartment she’d shared with Ava for fifty-seven nights, their time together had not lasted forever. Ava had sensed it first, eyes flickering to the side where — Beatrice had noticed then — the walls had started to fade, sliding into a hazy black.

“Time’s up,” Ava had said, sad but smiling, brave like she always was, in all the ways she never realized. “I don’t know when we’ll be able to do this again. You’ll have to try a few different things out, but we’ll get it. I’ll see you soon. I promise.”

The couch had dissolved somewhere in the middle of her third sentence, until they were standing without Beatrice having to complete the action, until they were slowly fading apart without her moving at all.

“Ava,” she’d called, a little desperation leaking into her voice and into her hurried step forward, one arm reaching out and snagging around Ava’s wrist in a grip temporary but strong. “Don’t think I don’t feel it. I do. I do. But you said it like a goodbye. When you said — when you told me you — ”

Silhouetted against the closing darkness, Ava had waited patiently, her smile knowing, but hardly forceful, entirely absent of any pressure at all.

“When I tell you — when you hear me say it — I want it to sound like a beginning,” Beatrice had finally breathed, had felt the air expand in her chest, in her lungs. “That’s why I’m waiting. So it can be a start.”

And there’d been something in Ava’s eyes, a humor Beatrice hadn’t understood then but thinks she gets now, less than a day later and lying in the dark.

“Maybe tomorrow, then,” she’d said. “ Or the next day. Or the next.”

She’d faded little more with each word, until only a shadow of her remained, a vague blur of warmth.

“I can wait, Bea.” Her whisper had been soft, but disembodied; a quiet hum suddenly closer than it’d been before, brushing against Beatrice’s ear and traveling down her spine. “Turns out I’m pretty good at that, when it comes to loving you.”)

—

Day 124

—

The town slows down in the winter, not to a crawl, but certainly something approximating a slow walk; university students with bug-eyed sunglasses and backpackers with growlers switched out for university students with snowboards and skiers with gray in their hair. Hans has never minded the season in the past, not the leisurely pace or the cold air, but it feels different this year, sluggish and bitter, and today — as he trudges to the bar through the unexpected half-meter of snow that’d fallen last night — he feels something of the same.

His mood is hardly improved by the sight that greets him as he rounds the bend onto main street: a lone figure in a bulky, dark blue coat; an oversized, gray scarf wrapped around their neck and face; and a thick beanie pulled low on their forehead. Even from this distance, the person looks miserable: shoulders lifted up to their ears, back hunched, and their hands tucked under their armpits. In the past, he’s been known to let in the early birds while he sets up shop, and the regulars know this well enough that it might be one of them, if not for the attire (overkill for the temperatures, which have raised to a relatively pleasant negative two degrees). He doesn’t feel particularly compelled to rush for a stranger, but his conscience gets the better of him after around ten steps, and he lengthens his stride, picking up speed right until the moment the figure turns around and two familiar brown eyes peer out from all those layers, stopping his momentum completely.

“Beatrice?”

Of all the people he might run into here, now, and wearing what seems to be piles of coats (now that he’s closer), Hans would rank both the President of the United States and any one of the Mainzelmännchen as being slightly more expected than the woman who stands in front of him shivering in the cold.

“Hello, Hans,” she says softly. “I’m afraid I forgot about your winter hours, but I’m happy to wait outside.”

After all these months, her German is still formal and crisp, as though she hadn’t fallen out of practice at all. And maybe she hadn’t; Hans hadn’t known much about her at all, it had turned out, and he certainly doesn’t know what she’s been up to since he’d seen her last, outside of the few tantalizing peeks that had circulated around the town in contained whispers after that fateful day in late July. For a moment, his anger burns bright — bright enough that he considers forgoing civility — but politeness wins out in the end (or maybe it’s the embers of friendship, frustratingly fanned by a single look at her expression, openly earnest and cautiously pleased).

“Don’t be silly.”

Does the phrase come out sounding more curt or kind than he intends? Han can’t be sure, but Beatrice clearly finds warmth in it, her eyes squinting with a smile he can’t see. He has to turn away from it before he does something foolish (like hug her or shout at her or perhaps simply start to pout), and he’s glad for a distraction in the form of a locked door and a ring of keys tucked somewhere deep in the inner pocket of his coat. Beatrice waits without complaint, without an attempt to fill the strained silence, and Hans knows that, had Ava been there as well, the reunion would have gone far differently. (Unless Ava’s personality had been a lie as well; the thought has struck him before now, but never quite so painfully.)

A blast of warmth hits him when he’s finally able to open the door, the fancy app-controlled thermostat Olivier had sprung for a few winters ago finally working in Hans’ favor (and only after he’d learnt how to break into the system to control it himself). Beatrice does not run towards the heat, but she does move quickly, shuffling in after Hans and shutting the door firmly before he has to remind her that it tends to stick.

“Do you — ” he begins, but then pauses, working on how best to proceed as he hangs up his coat and ties on his apron, habit rather than show. “Would you like a drink?”

He thinks to ask, do you still prefer water or what’s your favorite drink now that you don’t have to lie or you seemed to like the alcohol last time, a few nights before you left, but thinks better of it, and cuts himself short. If Beatrice notices, she doesn’t say, working on taking off the first of her coats instead.

“Yes, please. Anything hot.”

Despite himself, he still wants to impress, and he dives behind the bar to find the cocoa mix, milk, and cinnamon, hesitating only a second before pulling their best dark rum off the shelf, a small treat for himself more than anything else. At home, he would use a stovetop, but here, the small hot cocoa maker would have to do; he adds the ingredients with a speed borne from practice, and by the time he looks up again, Beatrice has removed her coats and scarves and gloves and hat and Hans drops both his jaw and the container of milk when he takes in all of the changes, no longer hidden by no less than four layers of clothing.

It is, unfortunately, a long drop from his hand from the floor, and the carton lands with a loud enough thunk (and subsequent spillage of liquid) that Beatrice immediately looks up, takes in his expression, and smiles, mouth twisted in a way that can only be called wry.

“It’s okay,” she reassures, before Hans can apologize for his stare. “I know I’m… sporting a different style, these days.”

This is an understatement on the level of the sun is hot or a knife is sharp, and Hans is so thrown by it that it adds to the total time he spends staring at Beatrice’s so-called ‘different style’. She appears completely unbothered by it (unhurriedly arranging her winter layers on the bench next to her, at the table Hans still considers hers), probably used to the stares at this point, especially (surely) from the ones who had known her before. Beatrice’s hair is the same length as it’d been over the summer, but only on one side; the other has been entirely shaved off, though it’s starting to grow back in, a thick stubble that nearly hides the dark blue lines that have been inked along the side of her scalp. The tattoo continues down her neck, disappearing under her light gray henley, only to reappear on her right forearm — revealed as she sits down and pushes up her sleeves — only ending at the bottom of her wrist.

Beatrice has an undercut and an extended full sleeve, basically, and Hans is left wondering (as he finally ducks down to clean up the milk) who the fuck he became friends with, those three months ago.

“Your tattoo — '' So much of the tattoo is hidden by cloth, but Hans has spent nearly four years in this town, and he knows its lines, even when they are obscured. “ — Is it the trail that heads up Schlachtberg?”

“Yes,” Beatrice hums, pressing her fingers lightly to her own skin, reverence in the touch as she traces the path up to the edge of her shirt. “You might say my time here was a transformative experience. I’m trying to keep the memories… close, these days.”

“By visiting as well?” Hans asks, before he can help himself. “Is that why you’re here?”

In the silence that follows, the hot cocoa machine whirs to a stop, and Hans fills two mugs, checking the clock before he brings both (and the bottle of rum) to Beatrice’s table. At this distance, he picks up on a few new pieces of the puzzle that is Beatrice herself: a deep cut at her temple, where the stitches are still fresh; the dark circles under her eyes, the result of an obvious lack of sleep; and the level of detail in her tattoos (flowers and vines curl around the entire landscape, and there are twisting words in the stems: ‘in the next’ he thinks he reads, within the leaves and petals of a bundle of forget-me-nots).

“How much do you know?”

This is not an unfair question, but it’s not one Hans expects her to ask. It gets so quickly to the root of it all: to the broadcast that’d circulated worldwide and the endless online threads full of people devoted to identifying the women caught on camera while robbed in black (packed full of pixelated screenshots and papal conspiracy theories and comparisons to fantastical fiction).

“The rumors started the day you disappeared,” he begins, deciding to start (as one often did) at the start. “A few men showed up asking questions about where you’d gone, claiming to be some kind of law enforcement. They showed us photos of a guy who’d been beaten to a pulp and said you’d done it. You and Ava and Miguel, of all people. And then the broadcast with the Pope happened and people were calling it a scam or a joke or a publicity stunt but you were there, and there were a million tweets and articles about it and everyone here recognized you both — of course we did — but no one actually knew anything other than that American who went after Ava that one day really got off lucky, apparently! And then not that long after there was the explosion at Adriel’s cult-church and — nothing. The Vatican has called it an act of terrorism and the news didn’t figure out a way to tie it up any more nicely so… nothing.”

Beatrice waits patiently for him to finish before reaching for her mug, hooking a single finger around the handle and dragging it across the table. Even in the warmth of the bar, she seems to delight in wrapping both hands around the heated ceramic, her soft sigh clearly one of contentment.

“That’s not nothing,” she corrects, the corner of her mouth lifting. “But I can tell you more, if you’re interested. I’m not sure you’ll believe me, but I will tell you.”

In the set of Beatrice’s shoulders, in the exhaustion lining her eyes, Hans sees the characters of his grittiest graphic novels. In the way Beatrice holds her mug, in the fond look she gives the bar’s interior, he sees the person he’d come to view as a friend. The two images don’t overlap easily, and the latter wins out, personal hurt superseding global machinations.

“Is Beatrice even your name?” he blurts out, and is horrified when Beatrice does not answer immediately, looking down into her cup as though the question is one she has to carefully consider.

“Yes,” she says finally. “It wasn’t originally, but it’s mine now.”

“And when you left — when you left and didn’t say anything and I spent weeks calling both of your numbers and sending you so many text messages that I felt like a stalker — was that was because you had to? Because you and Ava were in danger?”

“Yes.” This answer is easier, coming fast and firm. “And everyone here would have been as well, had we stayed.”

“And… Ava? Is she — ?”

A part of Hans had known before he’d asked. A part of Hans had known as soon as he’d seen Beatrice, standing in the snow alone. Because a part of Hans — a part that was really quite large indeed — knew that Beatrice wouldn’t be here without Ava if she had any sort of choice in the matter at all.

“Currently unavailable,” Beatrice says, and Hans breathes again, dizzy with relief. “That’s why I’m here, in a sense. Ava needs… help. I think I might be able to provide that best from here.”

“You’re staying?”

Before hearing his own voice, he wouldn’t have been able to say how he felt on the matter, but there’s a clear current of happiness running through the words, one that has Beatrice smiling down at her drink, a quiet but warm expression that glows a soft cyan or — no — that’s Beatrice’s tattoos, suddenly vibrant, suddenly radiating an pulsing sort of blue under her skin. Hans nearly knocks over his own cocoa, but Beatrice does not look particularly surprised (even if she does look particularly pleased).

“Yes,” she says, eyes darting to the seat next to Hans, smiling growing for the half-second her gaze remains there. “I’ll have to leave from time to time, but I think this is exactly where I need to be.”

Beatrice is glowing and talking in riddles and might hold the answer to some obscure part of the universe, and he gets the feeling that, if he asked, she would share the truths to all this and more. But Hans is a bartender in a small town in the Swiss Alps, and before anything else, he wants to help his friends.

Decision made, he reaches for the rum, pouring a generous amount into his mug and (after an affirming nod that makes a half-smile bloom) into Beatrice’s as well.

“In that case,” he begins, that half-smile shifting into something a bit more sure. “I am at your disposal. What do you need?”

—

What Beatrice needs, it turns out, is something that Hans can easily provide. Two phone calls and thirty minutes later, they are standing in her old apartment, filled with a couple of boxes of things she and Ava had left behind, the same well-worn furniture, and (more unexpectedly) an entire makeshift curing chamber taking up an entire quarter of the bedroom.

“Nic says he’ll swing by on Sunday to take care of the whole meat drying situation. He and Mila had their kid a little while after you left — a little girl by the way — so they haven’t rented the place out since then. Or done anything other than turn it into an extension of the butcher shop, seems like. You may want to wash the sheets. And get some air fresheners, but other than that, it should be serviceable, don’t you… ”

He trails off at the end, finally turning back around to face Beatrice, still standing in the kitchen and holding a to-do list with a single page left, all the while glowing a faint but distinct blue. This is something that will take some getting used to, he thinks, and feels oddly warmed by the thought, even in the midst of everything else.

“Is that — they’re supposed to do that, right?” He squints, moving out of the bedroom to get a closer look at the bits he can see with only her scarf removed: the foliage and flowers that wind up the side of her neck. “It’s not like some kind of warning, is it?”

“The opposite,” Beatrice murmurs, and it’s only then that Hans realizes she’s a specific kind of sad, or maybe just wistful. (He’s been in this space only once before, but it’s only then he realizes that the wrongness of it all doesn’t come from the drying meats and empty walls and half-filled boxes, but from the absence of Ava, who’d filled up the space with life as much as Beatrice had filled it with care.) “It’s a good sign. It means I’m on the right track.”

“Not a normal sort of ink, then,” he hazards, grin wry.

“No. It’s… quite rare. And guarded quite jealously.” She gingerly touches the edge of the curving wound at her temple to emphasize her point. “Unfortunately, I need a great deal of it. The tattoos have to be touched up every couple weeks in order for them to be effective at — ” She cuts herself off with a twisting smile, as though she’s said more than she ought to. “Well. In assisting with my task.”

There’s not a lot to say other than the obvious, but Hans says it anyway, because there’s something shining in Beatrice’s eyes that’s still just a little too wearied for him to say nothing at all.

“That sounds painful.”

“It is.” Her gaze shifts to the stove, or more specifically, the air in front of it, and the exhaustion slips away slightly, tattoos glowing just a bit brighter. “But not nearly as much as the alternative.”

It’s riddles again, or at the very least, a compilation of things unsaid leaving him with little understanding. Except that’s not quite true, because from the very first day he’d met Beatrice, he has been convinced of one thing, and perhaps, in the end, it’s not any more complicated than that simple truth, no matter how much else might be piled atop it.

“I don’t really understand the things people are talking about these days,” he begins slowly. “Gods and angels and other worlds. It drove Maria crazy, to be honest; so much talk of the mystical and I could only bring myself to care about things far more worldly, like what’d happened to our friends, or if they had ever truly been our friends at all.”

Beatrice opens her mouth to respond, in clear distress, but for once, Hans does not feel fear at the prospect of cutting her off, lifting his hand and stalling her before she starts.

“I understand your world is bigger than mine. This is fine; I am not looking for answers. Or an apology or justification. Truthfully, you are concerned with forces that I do not wish to comprehend.” He shrugs, an apology of his own in the gesture. “I’ve come to find that I do best when I am focusing on the things I can see. But that does make me uniquely qualified to say something that I hope will help; from what I have seen, there is no barrier — nothing moral or divine — that you would not hesitate to rend, if it kept you from Ava. Whatever challenges you are facing, you will overcome them. I don’t need anything more than a month or two of memories to know that for a fact.”

Not all that long ago — three months or maybe four — Hans had waited outside of this very apartment, leaning up against the car Beatrice had asked to borrow (one that he would have freely given, without need for any kind of bargaining or pleas or exchange of favors, despite what she seemed to initially think). It’d been an early morning, but not so early that the sun hadn’t already risen fully, a backdrop for the two figures he’d watched trudge forward, one on the other’s back. Ava had been in the middle of a story, one that’d necessitated a wealth of gestures, each performed with the hand not occupied in making sure her piggyback ride didn’t end in disaster. There’d been a particular look on Beatrice’s face then, and it’s the one he once again sees now when she laughs, looking away and then down, a flush spreading up to the tips of her ears.

(There are surely more eloquent ways of putting it — comparisons to quiet explosions or a universe’s soundless start — but the look is one of love, as simple and as pure as that.)

“Ava’s right,” Beatrice says, still smiling softly when she glances back up. “You are a romantic.”

It doesn’t occur to him until later — when he’s rushing back to the bar, already having relied on the kindness of a coworker long enough — to wonder about her use of the present tense (as though Ava had been there after all, laughing right along with her).

—

It should be a slow day at the bar.

It is not.

His visitors make attempts at appearing casual, at least at the start. Gian swings by first, orders a single beer and nurses it for fifteen minutes before he happens to bring up that his boyfriend mentioned he saw a familiar face with Hans that morning, and then it’s: Is Beatrice staying for long? and Henri said you went up to Nic’s place? and Do you think she’d be into snowshoeing? After Gian, it’s Fergus and Leesa (still here, to the surprise of everyone, including themselves) and they are far less subtle, pestering him with questions for a length of time that feels excessive. Ada comes in around lunch, clucking over how thin Beatrice had looked when she’d passed her shop, and hands over a full bag of pastries and muffins and breads. Then it’s Emil from the library with a stack of books and a thermos of soup, Lucas with a bag of produce he claimed was looking a little dodgy, and Enza with a surprisingly heavy-duty first-aid kit, which she hands over with a wink. The final straw is Maria, showing up around closing time and wearing a scowl that (as far as Hans is aware) hasn’t left her face since their break-up one month prior.

(“Don’t speak,” she says, and shoves a packed duffle bag in his hands, one that he recognizes as his own. “Gian told Marisa that Beatrice is back in town to stay. Bring her these. I was going to burn everything you touched, but God knows what Nic did with her and Ava’s sheets and towels. Probably used them to wrap up pig hearts, or something equally disgusting, so these will be marginally better. And don’t think this means I forgive you.”)

All together, it makes for quite a load, one that Hans struggles with over patches of ice and banks of snow, but doesn’t think of feeling anything other than happiness over, especially when Beatrice opens the door to her apartment, looking a little smaller than he remembers, a little less sure.

“I forgot to mention earlier,” he begins, depositing the bounty at her feet, letting her sift through the contents with an expression that shifts from bewildered to surprised to something carefully blank (but with eyes shining a bit too much for it to be anything other than Beatrice being deeply moved). “When people came asking about you and Ava, that week after you left, no one told them anything. Not even Maria’s brother Ale, who gossips more than an old woman at a hair salon. And he never even met you two.”

A laugh bubbles over Beatrice’s lips — surprise and joy intermingling until the combined force breaks a dam and bursts downstream — and Hans thinks again about home, about how sometimes it’s a community wrapping itself around a person it has instinctively adopted as its own.

“Would you like to come in, Hans?” Beatrice asks, and Hans — months removed from the last time he’d been asked a similar question, in a similarly soft way — nods without pause.

—

(Before Hans leaves that night — when he’s crouched before the door, lacing up his boots — Beatrice glows once again, the low blue light highlighting the question that sits on her lips, and making up for the dead bulb they’d discovered (but not been able to fix) once they’d sat down to eat in the kitchen.

“Ava always wondered what happened between you and your sister,” she begins, each word strangely reluctant, as though they aren’t her own. “Did the two of you patch things up?”

Hans, who feels none of the same hesitation, is happy to hear it, if only to ask a question of his own, one that’s been on his mind since he saw Ava and Beatrice last, rushing out of the bar and not looking back.

“We talk frequently now. Every other week.” Finished with his laces, he stands, and though he can’t say why, his gaze darts around the apartment before settling on its only other occupant. “Our deal was she would do something similar with you. Did she tell you? Before she had to go?”

At the corner of Beatrice’s lips, there’s a smile, one that feels a bit too painful to observe for longer than a half-second, as full of everything as it is.

“She did,” Beatrice says, and — this too — is almost too much, especially when she continues: her certainty the blade of a knife; her affection the embrace of fingers curling around the hilt. “She does. She will.”)

—

Day 196

—

“Let’s go through the plan one last time,” Beatrice says, utterly calm and clearly a wreck.

Standing next to Ava and shuffling from one foot to the other, Michael rolls his eyes. This is not something he would do if Beatrice could actually see him, but they’ve never been able to manage this particular feat, only the reverse; where Michael is able to see Beatrice’s transparent form — a bit like a Star Wars hologram — just as Ava does. At the time, this had been a very exciting development, but now it’s something Michael clearly would rather do without, as he complains about their ‘sappy’ (his word) conversations on a near daily basis. Normally, Ava tries to cut the kid some slack — going through the early stages of puberty while in a separate universe from any other preteen couldn’t be easy, and Michael’s on his second try now — but today, she’s too anxious to be patient, and flicks him lightly on the ear.

“Hey!”

“Be nice! Beatrice being good at logistics is the only reason you and I might be getting out of this hellscape.”

Ava glances around, scowling at the barren, rock-strewn world that’d become her and Michael’s home over the past couple months, chosen for its similarity to the passage of time on Earth rather than any sort of particularly pleasing view. It’s not great, basically, but there’s breathable air and no gods trying to kill them, so she really shouldn’t be resentful. She is anyways, and Michael’s returning little grumble (something unintelligible and certainly unflattering), is a pretty good indicator for his feelings on the matter as well.

“What now?” Beatrice sighs. She’s gotten pretty good at guessing where Michael might be standing, based on Ava’s positioning, and she directs a stern sort of look towards the both of them now, one after the other. It works on both of them, for very different reasons.

“He’s just being a little shit. As usual.” Michael sticks out his tongue and Ava returns the gesture, completely unashamed to stoop to his level. “Hey, Bea, remember when you were jealous of this guy? Bet you feel really dumb about that now.”

The image of Beatrice is always monochrome in their waking hours — always a little bit ghostly — and Ava laments this fact now (as she often does) given that it prevents her from seeing the pretty pink that surely spreads across Beatrice’s cheeks when she ducks her head.

“I wasn’t jealous.”

“Yeah okay. Sure.”

“I wasn’t!” She pauses. “Also, in the current context, that’s… uncomfortably weird.”

“You’re weird,” Michael mumbles, in the devastating way only children can manage.

“Can we please just move on?” Beatrice continues, ignorant of the vicious (but uninspired) burn. “If our theories are correct, and Ava and I are now able to create a portal, it won’t be like the ones you both have passed through in the past.”

“Yeah, yeah. Something something temporal disturbance and quantum entanglement and deep emotional bonds. We get it, Bea. The portal should take us back to the places we connect to most. Or maybe it’ll spit us out somewhere totally random! But Mikey, remember the important bit; if we’re totally wrong and it spits you out where Beatrice is, close your eyes and plug your ears for at least ten minutes because we’re going to be making out pretty hard and you owe me big time for this shi— ”

“Ava!”

“Gross!”

The two voices overlap, a fun combo of exasperation and disgust that makes Ava laugh, even now, when she’s pretty much on the brink of losing her mind. The teasing and jokes are the only defenses she has from her nausea tipping to a point that would be unpleasant for everyone involved. They’ve tried this before — different variations and levels of power and places in time and space — but there’s a glint in Beatrice’s eyes now, one that looks a lot like hope, and the idea that this might be the time — that this might be the moment where everything will pay off — forms a knot in Ava’s stomach. It’s like she’s feeling all the excitement of the day before Christmas but with the fun little twist that Santa Claus might not come at all, or might murder her in her bed, or might open up a hellish dimension that would send a legion of demons towards the woman she loved more deeply than she ever thought possible and Ava would be forced to hopelessly watch as they —

“Ava,” Beatrice says gently, and Ava jolts, pulling herself out of her spiraling thoughts with a shiver.

“Uh. Yeah? Yeah. Totally here and listening.”

“You weren’t,” Michael tattles, probably just for the thrill of calling her out. “And I don’t owe you anything! I saved you. Tell Beatrice that it was me that saved you. You were stuck in Reya’s world, crying all the time, and then I found that open portal and helped you escape.”

“Okay it wasn’t all the time, buddy. It was a totally normal amount of crying for someone who had just lost the love of her life! I know you’re like six years old — ”

“I’m eleven!”

“ — So this stuff is way beyond you, but cut me some slack. Your older self would have totally understood.”

“Not him again! That guy was such a lo — ”

“Ava. Michael.”

Both of them quiet instantly, expecting disapproval. But there’s a small smile on Beatrice’s face, amusement settling into the quiet curves, and Ava feels a little better for it. (And the bickering, honestly, but that’s probably not a good look. She blames Diego, who’d always loved a vigorous debate, usually to the tune of which superhero is strongest or if a toaster got into a fight with a vacuum, which one would win?)

“Yes, dear?” she responds, a little too late, but with enough charm (she hopes) to make up for it. It works out in the end, Beatrice working her jaw for a good second before she’s able to continue, and when she does, it’s with Ava’s earlier infraction completely forgotten.

“Let’s just — let’s just try this.”

Action — fight or flight — has always been a whole lot easier for Ava, and she’s glad to have Beatrice's okay to give into this instinct now, rolling her shoulders and igniting the halo, something that’s become easier and easier, with each line Beatrice has inked into her skin. As the connection has grown, so too has the sensation she experiences in her day to day — an itch under her skin, the low hum of a live wire, an undercurrent of some kind of desperation — along with the relief she feels whenever they try to do something about it. Some things are meant to rest alongside each other, like magnets of opposite poles, and Ava aches to bridge the spaces between her and Beatrice in much the same way.

It’s only ever in their dreams that they’re able to touch — never like this, when they each see only a ghost of the other — but they’re looking to change that now, change everything; Ava reaches her hand out, light of the halo seemingly stretching along the limb, and Beatrice does the same, tattoos sparking a vibrant blue.

“In this life,” Beatrice murmurs, as she always does, and closes the last bit of distance between them, pressing the tips of her fingers to Ava’s.

The shockwave that ripples through the space is enough to send Ava sliding backward, leaving a long trail through the dirt and a giant, wobbling hole in the fabric of the universe. The image of Beatrice flickers, but returns full force, a bit brighter and more opaque.

“Ava, did it — ?”

“Yes,” she breathes, before Beatrice needs to continue. “You can’t see it?”

“There’s nothing on this end. Which isn’t necessarily a bad sign, but I think I’d prefer some kind of confirmation on any temporal disturbance on my end. Dr. Salvius will want to know the results immediately, so let me call her quickly and we can confer on the matter.”

About ten words in, Michael looks at Ava, and it’s pretty apparent what he’s about to do. And it occurs to her — as he starts running for the newly opened portal — that she should probably try to stop him. But this is what they’re both here for — both of them alive when they shouldn’t be, but greedy for more anyway — and so she only watches, sucking in a breath and daring to hope when he jumps through.

“Bea,” Ava murmurs. “Michael’s already gone. He jumped through.”

“He — ” In Beatrice’s heavy swallow, Ava sees her fears and doubts, but also the desperate burning hope that she’s been so careful to feed with the smallest bits of tinder. “Ava, I — ”

In the quiet moment between breaths, Ava is suddenly sure, and her halo flares in response, a warm and steady pulse rolling down her spine. Beatrice isn’t there yet, maybe, but that’s okay. Faith had always been Beatrice’s business, but now it’s Ava’s, ready to return it to the woman who’d given all of herself, and deserved no less than all of Ava, everything she knew how to give and then a little bit more.

“Don’t,” she says, quiet enough that she’s not sure how Beatrice hears her, if not for the connection burning between them, proven in the scar they’ve left on the universe, shimmering right there between them. “No more confessions that sound like goodbyes, remember? We’re doing this right.”

Beatrice nods, and Ava doesn’t miss the way her hands, curled into tight fists, have started to shake.

“Okay,” she breathes. “Then go. Come home, Ava.”

—

Ava does not step through as much as she falls, pulled by a force that’s always been an order of magnitude more powerful than her — or even Beatrice — alone. She is compressed and stretched and shifted and twirled around, and there’s someone’s name that might be her own and then color — blue and gold and then black.

Then there is nothing.

Sight and smell and sound, these things fail her, but touch — touch, which is still so new, even now — touch never fails her, and her feet hit the ground, stumbling over themselves until something catches her, warm hands and a firm front, arms that wrap around her and hold tight. And Ava knows before conscious thought returns to her, because touch never fails her, but she would give it all up — all other feeling — if it meant she could have this forever, Beatrice’s hand on the back of her head, her face in Ava’s neck, her breath against Ava’s skin. The rest of her senses trickle back around the time she’s able to return the hug, and then it’s her name on Beatrice’s lips, two times and then three.

“I’m here. I got you,” she says, like Beatrice isn’t the one holding her up, like her legs aren’t shaking, like she isn’t about to collapse in relief. And she’d never been one for counting the days, even when the days were at their very worst, because even a single one had been too long for her to go without this, without feeling and hearing and seeing Beatrice, and that last thought makes her pull back, just enough, just a little, just so she can see the familiar hue of Beatrice’s skin, the smattering of freckles on her cheeks, the warm brown of her eyes, the curve of her lips and and and and.

“Ava,” Beatrice whispers, before she gets lost in a spiral of thought that threatens to overwhelm. “You’re here?”

Ava’s nod is slow and sure, but it’s not enough, clearly not nearly enough. With a shaky inhale, Beatrice’s fingers press to Ava’s jaw, slide down her neck, run along the scratchy fabric of her shitty robe, move up to her chin and then lips, tracing the shape of her mouth without a sound. Ava is once again reminded of Thomas (reminded of the last time she’d had the same recollection, one day long ago under a cloudy sky) and of Sister Frances and the lessons she’d tried to bore into her skull: that touch shouldn’t matter, that doubt was a sin, that love was only good if it relied on fear and faith and removed everything that made us moral and messy and real.

But what’s love if not this? What is love if not Beatrice’s fingertips against her skin and the careful, trembling reverence she finds in something so solidly temporal? What is love, she has to wonder now, if not the profane creation of a god you can touch?

“You’re here,” Beatrice says again, this time without the lift at the end, this time sure.

“I’m here.”

“I love you.”

“I know.”

And she does. She’d always suspected and then she’d always known. But Beatrice is saying it now and it’s a beginning, it’s a start, and her eyes are glossy and her smile is wide and Ava has never, ever felt so very much. Beatrice loves her, loves her enough to say it, loves her enough to let Ava know, loves her enough to be here, in their old apartment where she’d been haunted by Ava’s ghost for months, and faith hadn’t come easy for her, not any more, but she’d loved Ava, and that had been enough.

Ava forgets, for a minute, that there’s more, but Beatrice, for the first time in the history of their relationship, is ahead of her in this one particular respect, and steps forward again, fitting her lips against Ava’s in the loveliest sort of proof.

The kiss is unhurried and soft, Beatrice’s hand at Ava’s jaw, her fingers cradling it gently. And Ava hasn’t had very many kisses, but she thinks maybe she could kiss every person in the world — even the really really hot ones, the people on tv she used to lust after with a sort of desperation that had nothing to do with them — and it wouldn’t begin to touch this: Beatrice smile pressed against her mouth, curling and widening and opening until Ava can kiss her harder, just a little bit harder, pulling Beatrice closer and sliding a tongue along her bottom lip. Beatrice makes a sound that might be a gasp or might be a moan, but either way makes electricity shoot down Ava’s spine, and even from behind her closed eyes, the room is suddenly a whole lot brighter, blue and gold when she cracks one (and then both) open.

“Bea,” she murmurs, because this is the first time she’s noticed just how the tattoos glow, on full display with the tank top Beatrice is wearing, like she’d thought that covering them up might lessen their power. “Holy shit, Bea.”

It’s her turn to touch in wonder, tracing along the stems and leaves and petals of bluebells and forget-me-nots and aster, along the trail and lake and mountain ridge that had become theirs, in the course of experiencing them together, time and time again. The Divinium reacts, warming at Ava’s touch, and Beatrice makes that sound again, eyes fluttering shut, shiver traversing her frame.

“Oh, that’s going to be fun,” Ava tries to tease, but only rasps, a little too affected to pretend otherwise.

She’s forgotten again, but there’s always more; more of Beatrice, more of this, more for the rest of their lives, and her brain can only contain a fraction of the possibilities before it shuts down, some kind of safety switch clicking on and preventing permanent damage.

“I look forward to it.” It’s not the response she expects, especially not with the laughter that slips into Beatrice’s tone, and it occurs to Ava that she doesn’t have to be patient, not any more. It’s such a shocking thought that she’s left breathless, left feeling like the world is opening up around her (around them).

“Holy fuck you’re beautiful. Holy shit, Bea. I love you so much. Like. Insane and crazy amounts.”

“I don’t think anyone’s ever loved anything like I love you,” Beatrice murmurs, and it’s Ava’s turn to shiver, because she thinks that very well might be true, if not for the one very obvious exception, which is Ava herself. “Like I’ve been storing it up this whole time. Or sending it somewhere I thought was real, but it just piled up inside of me instead.”

Action has always been easier for Ava, and so she kisses Beatrice again.

She’ll have time to find the words later, after all, all the time in the world.

(This time for real.)

—

Nothing compares to Beatrice, but a hot shower certainly comes close.

The other worlds — the dozen or so Ava hopped through while on the run — have entirely different rules from earth, to the degree that eating or drinking or bathing were entirely superfluous. But she feels various levels of ravenous for all three, now. Beatrice had promised to work on the first two while Ava dealt with the third, and it’s only the promise of the time that keeps Ava from propositioning Beatrice — right then and there — to help with all three.

Always prepared, Beatrice has laid out some of Ava’s old sleep clothes, waiting on the bed when Ava emerges from the bathroom. Curiously, she’s gone with Ava’s old surfing Jesus tee and a pair of loose sweatpants, but Ava forgoes both in favor of one of Beatrice’s too-large sweaters and no pants at all, because she can (because she wants to see Bea blush). In the kitchen, Beatrice is humming (not particularly well), and Ava lets the sound wash over her as she looks around the apartment, so familiar and so different at the same time. The furniture is all the same, still worn and comfortable; the corner of the ceiling still has that suspicious patch of yellow; but the walls are covered in a way Beatrice never would have allowed during the time Before (something Ava knows for a fact, given how hard she’d had to fight for the two measly postered she’d eventually convinced Beatrice to hang).

Ava takes her time with the new decorations, running her fingers along the photos and pages and print-outs that fill the walls, from floor to ceiling. Here, there are polaroids of every place Ava can ever remember visiting (the orphanage, one of the vacant houses she’d stayed in with JC, Cat’s Cradle, Ronda, and Switzerland, Switzerland, Switzerland). Here, there are dried flowers, post-it notes with Ava’s own hand-writing, trail maps, tv episode lists, screenshots of texts that Ava had sent seemingly a lifetime ago. Here, there are pages carefully torn from journals, paragraphs of Beatrice’s neat script, usually in English but sometimes not, and the words are memories, recollections, every thought she’d ever had about Ava, from start to finish. (I thought she had a pretty neck when I pressed the muzzle of the tranquilizer gun there, she writes in one of the first entries, I never did confess that, and maybe it should have been a clue about what was to come.) She could spend hours there, maybe days, but the present calls her more than the past, and she drifts towards the kitchen before she’s looked at a fraction of the things on display.

She doesn’t say anything when she enters, and she doesn’t need to. Beatrice is bent over the counter, still in the same tank top from earlier, and her tattoos glow as soon as Ava passes through the threshold, brightening with each step she takes, until she’s pressed up against Beatrice’s back and the entire kitchen is bathed in her light.

“This may grow tiresome, eventually,” Beatrice comments, but only half-heartedly, tilting her head when Ava nuzzles into her neck, pressing a kiss to the the intertwining leaves that disappear under Beatrice’s hair, where the undercut has grown in quite a bit, but still looks almost unbearably sexy.

“No way. It’s insanely hot. You literally glow around me, Bea. That’s like — I can’t even tell you how much of a turn on that is.” She pauses, pulling back so she can take another long look, gaze trailing from top to bottom. “Or I dunno. Maybe that’s just everything. I’m going to be honest; I knew all this stuff would look sexy as hell — what with me seeing your Force spirit, or whatever — but I was not prepared for just how fucking hot you’d look in person. Like, fuck, do you get hit on all the time now? You definitely haven’t been telling me every time it happens, right? It would have taken up all the time we’d had when we could make the connection work. Or maybe you just didn’t know; I swear, I could have stripped naked, laid on the bed, and written out please fuck me in sharpie across my boobs and you still would have been like, who’s that for?”

As expected, Beatrice blushes, but not quite as much as she might have before, when all the things unsaid filled their every conversation.

“Well, you never tried it, so I guess we’ll never know.”

“I mean, I could try it now. Unless you have other plans.”

With Beatrice’s new haircut, her right ear is so much more prominent, and Ava delights in watching the blush spread around it, seeping up around the outer shell. She kisses the spot when she remembers she can, only just restraining herself from pulling the lobe in between her teeth.

“I thought you were hungry.” And then, before Ava’s smirk can begin to form, adds, “For food.”

“That too, I guess.”

“Then let’s take care of that first.” That should be the end of it, probably, but this is a new Beatrice, one who’d left the Church and inked her skin and shaved part of her head and ripped open a hole in the universe with nothing more than the love she held for one woman alone, and so she turns to show off a smirk that Ava has only ever seen rarely, and never like this. “But perhaps we can try a few things out after that. If you’re good.”

Ava’s knees do buckle a little right then, and she’s not even slightly ashamed to admit it.

“Okay,” she breathes. “I can be good. Definitely. What do you need, baby?”

It’s the pet name that seems to get Beatrice — though it’d slipped out entirely unintentionally — and her smirk softens until it’s a soft smile, one that soothes some of the spiking heat that’d just raced through Ava fast enough to make her dizzy.

“I thought you might like to fuck up some soup together.”

“Wait, really?”

Beatrice laughs and the sound bounces around the kitchen, filling it as effectively as the color that pours from both of them, Divinium and Halo as happy to be rejoined as the both of them are.

“No. Hans wrote up extremely detailed instructions for me. But, then again, you’ve been known to make a mockery of instructions of any kind.” Beatrice can’t quite hide her fondness, even as she continues. “And that’s not a challenge, Ava.”

—

Hans' instructions do end up being impressively thorough.

Ava almost feels bad when they fuck up the soup anyway, but her swollen lips, the marks on Beatrice’s neck, and finally finally being able to explore the skin at the hollow of Beatrice’s throat (previously always hidden by buttons Ava felt genuine animosity towards), more than make up for it.

—

(That night in bed, with Beatrice lit up like a glow-stick and Ava finally noticing the small, glow-in-the-dark stars Beatrice had placed on the ceiling in a pattern that’s probably impressively accurate, Ava feels contentment settle deep in her bones.

“Should I be thinking about what’s next?” she asks, because she isn’t, for the first time in a while, and it feels a level of good that she worries might hold something forbidden in it, until she remembers that there’s nothing forbidden left, not for the two of them.

And maybe Beatrice feels some of that as well, even if she takes a little longer with it; her answer is slow in coming, but when it does, it’s without any trace of doubt.

“I’m not.” She sighs, curling further into Ava’s front. “I can’t believe I’m not.”

“Maybe…” Ava searches for something, grabs the first thing that springs to mind. “Gelato. I really miss gelato.”

“It’s February, darling. It’s freezing.” Ava, who thinks of the one time this term of endearment had slipped from Beatrice's lips before, can’t possibly imagine ever being cold. “No one is making it this time of year.”

“Then we’ll make it ourselves. Or we’ll go on vacation somewhere where they are. Or we’ll bribe the person who makes it here with a million dollars that I’ll get by phasing into some rich asshole’s underground vault. Come on, Bea. What can’t we do?”

Beatrice — practical and logical and full of the most important truths in the universe — smiles into Ava’s skin, the twist of her lips a brand that Ava would happily wear into eternity.

“Nothing,” she says. “I can’t think of a single thing.”)

—

Day ???

—

Home, to Beatrice, is a three bedroom chalet in the Swiss Alps where she has learned to stop counting the days.

The house is bigger than they need, perhaps, but it’d been a present, of sorts (one of the many increasingly extravagant thank yous from Dr. Salvius, which had continued for some time after her son’s return), and they fill it easily enough, with very little effort. This weekend, their spare bedrooms are claimed by Camila and Lilith, who visit often, though only Camila will fully admit just how much she’s come to care for the trips. Ava swears that once, after several bottles of wine shared among the group, Lilith had hugged her in the kitchen, but Beatrice isn’t entirely convinced it hadn’t been some kind of alcohol-induced fever dream, and Lilith had flat out denied the validity of the incident when asked. (But she visits at least once a month, always with a thin excuse, so perhaps there’s something to the claim, after all.)

It’s a Saturday, which means it’s game night, which means Hans is visiting as well, just for the evening. This time, he’s brought his sister Ainsley with him, and Ava seems to delight in the way both of them avoid looking at Lilith — most especially the stranger parts of her — for too long (Ainsley out of politeness; Hans because he has a weakness for mean girls, and Lilith is most certainly that).

Their dining room table is oversized, one of the larger pieces of furniture in their home, and the six of them fit there easily, along with the board game Ainsley had brought with her, the latest one designed by Vital Lacerda. Three of the people at the table are enthused by this. (The other three care a bit more about the 100 year old bottle of whiskey Lilith had showed up, one that everyone has staunchly avoided asking about, for fear of the answer.) Ainsley’s come especially prepared, with an customized organizational tray, and Ava had made a joke about Beatrice falling in love with her, as soon as she’d set it out on the table (but Beatrice knows, with absolute certainty, that Ava will later find out the exact model, and order it for her, to be gifted on a random day that holds no significance at all).

“The dragon character should hold more power than this,” Lilith is saying, scowling down at the figurine as though her scorn will result in actionable results. “Why are its movements so restricted? It has wings.”

“Yeah, Lilith, that’s a great point,” Ava jumps in, and everyone other than Beatrice looks at her with confusion, until she continues in a way that makes a lot more sense. “Which, sort of coincidentally, just happens to remind me of this thing where Hans is sleeping with his ex’s brother? Hello? Are we not going to talk about this? At all?”

For once, Lilith does not mind the interruption, brows rising as she looks at Hans with a sort of amusement that’s really quite scary. Camila leans forward, spilling a little wine out of her glass. And Hans buries his face in his hands, game entirely forgotten.

“Ava, please, my sister is — ”

“ — Getting tired of being asked by our parents why you’re still single, Hanny. Especially now that you’re a manager! Such an eligible bachelor, or so mother says to everyone who will listen.”

“Yeah, Hans, what’s up with that? Could it be that you have worse taste in men and women than anyone on the entire planet, maybe.”

“Mm,” Beatrice hums. “Lilith may have him beat.”

Ava laughs uproariously, in the way that always makes Beatrice feel proud, which is more than enough to counter Lilith’s renewed scowl.

“Oh, alright. Yes. It always comes back to that, doesn’t it?”

“He was a fantastically bad choice for your first partner after leaving the Church, Lily,” Camila cuts in, apologetic enough to surely make it worse. “Couldn’t you have followed Beatrice’s example?”

Lilith levels Ava with a look of disgust that Beatrice does not doubt would be capable of shriveling a man’s self worth to a pinprick, but Ava only grins.

“I would rather eat glass.”

This, of course, kicks off a particularly spirited round of Would You Rather, in which Beatrice learns that Lilith would rather have every single bone in her body broken, be set on fire for eternity, and slowly impale herself on seventy dull kitchen knives rather than kiss Ava just the once. She also learns that everyone else at the table holds absolutely none of the same reservations, which amounts to a huge net win for Ava, one that Beatrice knows she’ll be hearing about for quite some time. And hearing about it almost immediately, as it turns out, because when Beatrice gets up with the intention of refilling their bowl of pretzels, Ava leans back in her chair far enough that she’s unable to get around it.

“You sure you want to leave now, Bea? Seems like everyone — and I am including Lilith in that because she’s definitely protesting way too much — wants a piece of me. You better lock that down before you go, if you know what I’m saying.”

Beatrice does know what she’s saying, and laughs softly before bending down to plant a crooked sort of upside-down kiss to Ava’s waiting lips. She means for it to be a short one, but Ava hooks a finger under the neckline of Beatrice’s sweater and then it’s not, then it’s Lilith throwing a handful of the pretzels Beatrice is meant to be getting more of, in order to get them to stop.

“I’m not worried,” Beatrice murmurs, once she’s pulled back, and Ava doesn’t disagree, slumping forward — front chair legs returning to solid ground — with a happy little sigh. Another round of teasing kicks off when Hans makes a whipping motion, complete with sound effects, and Beatrice takes the opportunity to slip out, heading into the kitchen with the snack bowl and a few empty glasses that need refilling.

She’s not surprised when Ava follows, not four minutes later, soundless as she enters the kitchen in a way she never used to be. These days, Beatrice’s tattoos no longer glow — there’d been no real reason to continue the costly upkeep after Ava returned — but the lines of ink remain. The thought of removing them has never occurred to her; she has plenty of scars that are far less beautiful, and she’s become attached to the shapes etched in her skin, just as she’s grown attached to anything that reminds her of Ava, no matter how small. Still, she’s not left without warning when it comes to Ava’s approach; Beatrice’s tattoos no longer glow, but the band on her left finger does, Divinium set into gold.

“If you can’t stand the teasing, escape to the kitchen?” she says, without turning around, and is rewarded by a soft chuckle in her ear, by two arms wrapping around her waist.

“Would it be out of the frying pan and into the fire if I said I just missed you?”

“No, because I love you deeply and would never betray your sappiest secrets.”

The I love yous come easy now, but never absentmindedly, never without thought. She suspects the same is true for Ava, who smiles every time Beatrice says it, even in the moments where it’s called across a room or said after a fight or whimpered in bed. And so she knows, even before she twists around, that Ava is grinning now, and it’s impossible to resist pressing her lips to that mouth once she turns to confirm. (This too, has not lost any of its potency; every kiss laces Beatrice’s veins with heat, no matter how many years pass.)

“Can I help with anything? And when you say no, can we just make out in the kitchen for a while instead?” Ava murmurs, moving her attention to Beatrice’s jaw, nipping lightly at the skin.

“You can bring these drinks back to the table.” And if she’s a little breathless in her response, who could blame her?

“And then?”

“And then… after our guests leave — ” Ava groans, pulling away, but Beatrice sides a hand under her sweatshirt before she can get too far, nails digging into the skin slightly, a sharp bite of a reminder that Ava always enjoys. “After they leave I'll make sure you’re properly compensated. For all this lost time.”

“‘Compensated’,” Ava groans. “Oh my god, break out the spreadsheets, baby. Tell me about your ROI. I fucking love you.”

With one last kiss (this one a bit more heated than the last), Ava reaches around her to grab the two glasses of wine, but hesitates before leaving the kitchen fully, her steps faltering until she comes to a stop in the doorway, watching the scene in the dining room unfold. Camila, it seems, has performed an action during her turn that has plunged the entire game into chaos; Ainsley is leafing through the rules book, Hans is staring at his cards in shock, and Lilith’s dragon figurine has apparently been slain, if the way she’s now cradling the little plastic model in her hands is any indication. Ava does not bury any of the fondness she feels at the sight, not in expression, and not physical reaction either; under her clothes, the halo glows softly, now little more than a party trick that serves as a barometer for its Bearer’s happiness. The sight — rays of light spreading out from Ava’s back like wings — causes Beatrice’s heart to thud, as it always does, and she must make some kind of sound to go along with the feeling, because Ava turns, sees the look on her face, and smiles.

“What are you thinking about?” she asks.

Home, Beatrice is thinking, is the bonds between people, the threads that wind between her and the ones she loves. Home is watching Ava realize that, a little more every day, and feeling herself follow suit. Home is waking up to the smell of coffee, brewed by a machine Ava had purchased last Christmas, which automatically starts on Beatrice’s coffee when her alarm goes off. Home is Ava’s fingers running through her hair, the buzz of the clippers in her hand as she maintains Beatrice’s undercut and calls it sexy, always unable to resist kissing along the shell of Beatrice’s ear at some point in time in the process. Home is Beatrice’s office, where she goes to balance the books for the bar they now own (for the man they’d made manager despite his arithmetical deficiencies) and the way Ava never lets her lose herself in work for long, phasing through the door that to her (both literally and figuratively) is never truly closed.

Home, to Beatrice, is Ava, and all the parts she’s helped Beatrice heal inside of herself, all the ways they’ve both learned to connect to the people around them. And perhaps what Beatrice had once thought of as God had always only ever been that: a power that was strong enough to pull people between universes and nurture more than a couple neglected hearts.

Ava is still waiting for an answer, a patient and knowing smile to her lips, and Beatrice picks up her bowl of snacks and joins her in the doorway, knocking their shoulders together with a content little hum.

“Nothing new,” Beatrice finally responds, her words a stunning and simple truth.