#i had some issues with the shadowgast prompt i filled a few days back

[mithrilwren]

ok idk if this has been asked yet but #22 for shadowgast or #23 for beaujes?

I finally finished this!! Thank you so much for your patience

soulmate au prompts: the one where once you meet your soulmate, it’s physically uncomfortable to be apart from them for too long.

[also on Ao3!]

1.

Jester doesn’t realize it, at first, that anything has changed.

Her whole body is in pain, everything is in pain, she has never felt pain like this before. She doesn’t think she could bear to again.

Three days in the dark, with manacles around her wrists, a gag in her mouth, and her heart clenching every time she hears a scream ring out from the chamber beyond. Sometimes, it clenches with no reason, an ache in her chest like a scarf wrapped too tight around her heart, and no way left to tell if oxygen is still making it into her lungs. Her fingers have long gone numb.

She thought she heard Beau’s voice, while they were on the cart, crying ‘Molly’ into the open air. In her mind, she cries ‘Traveller’, who has never left her alone before, and when he does not answer, she cries out to the only others who’ve stayed. She cries ‘Molly’, and ‘Caleb’, and ‘Nott’, and ‘Beau’, and doesn’t let herself lose hope, though she doesn’t know how long she can hold onto it.

(Cries ‘Beau’, softer now, as she relearns what it is to sleep alone.)

—

Beau doesn’t realize it, at first, but that’s not really surprising. She had nothing to compare the feeling against.

She’s never had anything like this group before.

(Had never had-)

The squeeze in her chest as she looks over to Jester’s bedroll and finds her blanket empty is disproportionate to the gravity of the situation, at least then, before any of them know what’s happened. Later, she’ll call it a premonition, that aching churn inside of her - not a fortune or a magic trick, but just the inevitability of it all. Like she should have known that this would fall apart.

Molly is dead, and the others are gone, and she never said goodbye to Tori, and thought that was what loss was. She was thrown out of her parents’ house, and thought she knew then, better still.

She didn’t.

She doesn’t know if she’ll live through this, if they don’t-

They have to.

She can’t do this alone.

(Not anymore.)

2.

I’m going to go sleep in my own room.

Jester shrinks back, cheek smarting like she’s been slapped, though Beau is across the table, too far to reach her-

Too far to-

But it’s only one night, right? And- and Yasha will be there. It won’t be the same as waking up next to Beau, but at least she won’t be by herself.

There’s an empty pit in her chest, growing hollower, and Beau is still there so she really shouldn’t feel this bad already, but what if this is the end? What if Beau never wants to room with her again?

(What did she do wrong?)

—

I thought that’s what you wanted.

Of course it’s not what she wanted. Of course it’s not. Beau wants-

Well, she only said it because she thought if she didn’t, then she’d have to hear Jester say the same thing to her. That she wanted a garden room to herself, filled with all the pretty things that Beau can’t provide: luxury, security, a door that latches with a key. Peace and quiet. Something beautiful to wake up to.

(And besides, pain’s always a little easier to bear when you’re the one holding the switch.)

But now Jester’s hurt too, and Beau doesn’t know how to make it right, other than to take back her words, pulling them back inside herself with a new sprinkling of guilt on top. Guess it’s true what her father said: she somehow manages to break everything single thing she touches.

(How’s she supposed to be there for Jester, in all the ways she needs, when she can’t even fix herself?)

3.

Beau doesn’t need to think hard to come up with an offer.

It needs to be a sacrifice, of equal weight to what Nott’s suffered.

It would hurt, to be alone. It would hurt more than anything else she can imagine. But she knows now she could bear it. She can bear a hell of a lot more than she knew. And even if she can’t, well- Nott can’t bear much more either. And it’s better that it’s Beau. It’s better. Then at least, if it’s all got to end sometime, the pain could actually mean something.

She doesn’t look at Jester as she walks into the hag’s cottage. Doesn’t look at anything but her own feet.

At least if it’s only her, nobody else has to feel this way.

—

Beau walks out the door, and says what she offered, and Jester can only think in syllables.

No.

No no no-

No time for thinking. No time to contemplate the way her heart is pulling out of her with every step she takes away from Beau, pleading with her to stay.

If she closes that door, she might not come out alive. She might not survive this, if it all goes wrong.

But if she lets Beau go, Jester doesn’t think she’d survive that either.

She shuts the door before anyone can stop her.

4.

Jester always thought it was strange, that her body should feel so hot inside, when what comes out of her is ice. Tieflings are supposed to burn, but it’s frost that courses in her veins.

And still, she’s always felt warm. Her mother used to tell her so. Even Beau gives her most of her share of the blankets on nights they share a single bed, saying she doesn’t need them with how hot Jester runs.

(Beau never lets Jester close enough to see if her olive skin is just as warm as Jester’s blue, though her feet are always cold in the morning.)

Lots of things in this world are cold. Jester’s magic is cold. The ocean is cold.

Stone is cold.

She watches Beau’s skin turn ashen, that skin that might have been warm go icy and grey, and she freezes too. From her throat to her stomach, any trace of warmth snuffs out, and she is screaming, and she is running, and she is-

—

-glad this is the last thing she sees: a blue lake, and violet eyes, open wide and shining. Beau gets just enough to time to turn her head towards Jester before her neck locks in place, before her vertebrae fuse and her spine becomes one rigid column. She gets to see her, one more time, before everything goes dark.

She’s almost glad, that it’s her chest that petrifies first. By now, she can hardly stand to be out of Jester’s sight - mere minutes before the ache becomes unbearable. She’s not sure her organs could take the pain of saying goodbye with a look, instead of words.

If she has to live forever in a body that will never touch Jester’s again, then at least her heart will hold together. It won’t have a choice.

Her vision fades, and fades, and she sees grey. Grey water, grey eyes, and-

Blue.

So much blue.

The tension releases from her shoulders first, as small hands knead warmth back into her bones, and Jester is here, in front of her, alive and smiling, and as the oil drips down her back and seeps between her ribs Beau’s chest feels-

—

-warm.