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1) The Invitation
It’s pure luck that they end up with invitations to the party at all, Yasha knows. They’ve been circling the Tri-Spires for the better part of two days trying to get some kind of work that will get them an in to this party, which is their best chance to steal the information they’ve been looking for. Beau and Fjord managed to get jobs as serving staff, Nott and Caleb are fairly confident in their abilities to sneak in, Caduceus offered to stay invisible and stay outside as a lookout for the evening, but that still leaves Jester and Yasha without anything. Serving jobs had been full by the time they got there, which, Yasha reflects, might have been just as well since the two of them can be a little too noticeable.
Their luck comes in the form of a young moneyed man with a sick moneyed mother, who mistakes Yasha in the street for a proper healer, rather than a hedge cleric of a god she’s always being told not to talk about too loudly. But she knows the sickness, the same fever that had stalled the circus for a few weeks last spring, and so she doesn’t key him in to the origins of her abilities, and does her best to help. After a long afternoon, with Jester helping where she can, Yasha is able to get the old woman stable and on her way back to recovery. Her son offers them their invitations to the party as he’s rifling through his desk for gold to pay them.
“Don’t think either of us are really up for a night on the town tomorrow, but you and your…” His eyes flit between Jester and Yasha, down to where Jester’s wrapped one of her thick muscled arms around Yasha’s leaner one. “…lady might enjoy it?”
Yasha’s not sure what she would have said here if she’d been given the chance to answer. She probably would have corrected him and said that no, they’re just friends, but they’ll have a nice time, absolutely. Yasha’s good with a good deal of things — names of flowers, telling when there’s a storm on the horizon, hitting someone with a quarterstaff and healing them afterwards if need be — but lying has never, ever been one of them. She never has a chance to say anything, truth or otherwise, before Jester pipes up.
“Fiancée!” Jester says, smiling, indicating one of the rings on her hands. She wears so many, the better to give her punches an impact, but the man clearly doesn’t see the bits of blood that linger in the edges of the settings. He doesn’t seem like the sort who would smile so brightly at them if he did, but he congratulates them and sends them off with a small, heavy purse that still seems negligible compared to the prize of the invitations.
“Why did you say that?” Yasha asks, walking back to their lodgings. There are worse lies Jester could have told, surely, but none that quite get to the heart of all of Yasha’s problems so neatly. None that remind her so keenly of the ways in which she misses Zuala and she misses her home and her youth, and also the ways in which she’s fallen in love with this life on the road, with all these people around her — with one brightly-colored, stocky berserker in particular.
“I don’t know, I got caught up in the moment! I just…wanted to make sure I could be your plus-one,” Jester says, with that not-quite-guilty furrow in her brow that Yasha lately finds herself staring at and thinking of smoothing out. “It’s okay, right? Just pretending for the evening?”
“Yes,” Yasha says, steadying her breath, trying her best to hide the twist of joy and melancholy that the idea of being so close with Jester for the evening, of the whole plan that they’ll have to come up with now. But she doesn’t lie well, not even to herself, so she’s going to put that thought away for now.
2) Planning
Jester is talking, and Yasha’s lost track of what she’s saying, not for the first time.
“Okay.” Yasha breathes out, blinks, and shakes her head just a bit to feel her braids rustle around. “…Go over it for me again?”
Jester matches her exhale, and then smiles again. “Okay! So, you —” she points at Yasha “—are a mysteeeeerious and beautiful wise woman from Xhorhas, and I—” she tilts her thumbs back towards herself “—was contracted as your bodyguard, but we fell in love and now we’re on our honeymoon.”
Yasha lets that settle in again, trying not to blush on the word love. “And you’re not a magic bodyguard or anything?”
“Nope! I just punch things, no magic at all!”
Yasha can’t help but smile too. Jester is surely a fearsome fighter on her own, solidly built with enough muscle to heft her battleax like it weighs no more than a broomstick, but Yasha can’t picture her in battle without a glimmer of fey light in her eyes behind the rage. Without the unpredictable magic that follows her like thunder after lightning.
She understands why she’s drawn to Jester too, despite herself. If ever she met a sunny summer rainstorm wrapped up in a person, it would be Jester. Hurricanes and thunderstorms may be the most powerful manifestations of the Stormlord, but Yasha sees him plenty in daylight showers as well.
“And I just do…herblore, and potions and such.” The words feel strange in Yasha’s mouth. Long before anyone tried to teach her practical healing, ozone had dogged her footsteps and gentle currents of healing lightning sprang out of her when she called for them. Healing and magic and faith in the forces of the sky have always been wrapped up in one for her.
“Yep!” What can you do, Jester’s smile says now. A cleric of the Stormlord would be no more welcome at a fancy Zadash party than a warrior aided by fey magic. They’ll hide their lights under a bushel just for this one night, to keep an eye on the party downstairs while the rest of the Mighty Nein raid the upstairs. If things go wrong, they’ll be the distraction.
Yasha pushes down the butterflies and the thought of the word love again. She can do this. Just for tonight. She can put that thought away for now.
3) Getting Ready
Jester is doing up Yasha’s hair, and it’s all Yasha can do to keep still, to keep her eyes on the little mirror in their rented rooms, to not feel Jester’s hands on her neck quite so keenly.
They spent the afternoon finding new dresses in a shop piled high with every kind of clothing imaginable, with Nott and Beau and Caduceus offering commentary and sometimes even help. Jester already dresses a lot better than most fighters Yasha’s ever known, much better than Yasha in her dull armor and dark robe, but for the party she’s cleaned up even more beautifully, in a bright green dress that shows off her shoulders. For Yasha they found a gown of deep, rich gray, so rich it borders on purple, with an almost silvery embroidery around the borders that cleans up very nicely with a bit of Mending from Jester. It drapes just enough to hide Yasha’s holy symbol, tucked into her dress.
“Don’t put it all up like that,” Nott chides from the other side of the bed, kicking her heels with her spellbook on her lap. “That hasn’t been the style around here for years, it’s too uptight. Leave some of it loose.”
“I never heard of that,” Jester says, pulling the pins from her mouth. “How many parties have you ever been to?”
“I hear things,” Nott scoffs. “I’m telling you, leave a few braids down, it looks weird.”
“I don’t think Yasha ever looks weird,” Jester asserts. “She looks great in everything.”
Yasha’s sure there’s no mistaking the blush that travels down her neck at that. “I like it all the way up,” she says, carefully. “It’s not uptight, it’s… neat.”
Neat. Fuck. She does her best not to worry about it. She can put that thought away. She really can.
4) At the Party
Getting into the party itself turns out to be the easy part. Zadash is a big enough town that no one questions where they got invitations too closely, and Jester is charming enough to get the both of them around the party. The music is just loud enough that it can’t be ignored in any conversation, and between that and the sheer number of people that keep filing in, Yasha does start to get a little overwhelmed, faster than she does in even more crowded markets.
It takes Yasha a little while to realize what it is that feels so uncanny. She’s used to being stared at, even when she’s stooping and covered up in her armor; she's aware that she’s tall enough to be imposing and odd-looking enough to draw the eye. This is a different kind of being stared at, though, one she’s only experienced a handful of other times. People keep looking at her like they can’t take their eyes off of her. Like it’s a delight to look at her.
“What is it?” Jester asks, catching her eye.
“I think people here think I’m beautiful,” Yasha says, not quite believing it as she says it.
“Um, yeah, cuz you are.” Jester strokes a hand down Yasha’s arm, supportively. Affectionately, nearly. Yasha puts that thought away.
“Not like this. Not normally.” Not like they look at you, she thinks, but does not get the chance to say before they are interrupted.
“Newlyweds, then?” The woman who sidles up to them drips in stones and silks. She’s somewhere in her middle years, and has the air of someone rich or important enough that she expects everyone to know her and be happy to talk to her. When they both look at her, she smiles. “No one who’s been together that long fusses over each other like you do.”
“We’re getting married in the summer, actually,” Jester says, taking up the conversation like some sort of challenge Yasha’s missed the rules on.
“Oh, wonderful, wonderful, how long have you been together?” The woman swirls her wine glass with an unsteady hand, and Yasha thinks that perhaps it is not her first. “Three years!” Jester says brightly, catching Yasha’s eye.
The rest of the conversation melts away as Yasha thumbs at the rim of her glass and considers just those two words. There’s no one Yasha’s had consistently in her life for the last three years. There’s hardly been any constants for her at all for years, even since she met the rest of the Mighty Nein. Will she know them in three years? What would that even look like?
“I can see your girlfriend’s not much of a talker,” she hears the woman say to Jester, in a sort of half-conspiratorial way Yasha almost feels like she’s not meant to hear.
“She’s not a big fan of parties,” Jester says, squeezing Yasha’s arm to get her attention, smiling when Yasha turns towards her. “But we always find some fun in it, don’t we honey?”
“Oh, yes, dear,” Yasha says, knowing she’s blushing before she even gets the last word out. She puts. The thought. Away.
5) When All Hell Breaks Loose
It is, surprisingly, none of the Mighty Nein’s fault that the party descends into an all-out fight. As far as Yasha can tell, there must have been a few old grievances here that bubbled up to the surface the same as all the champagne that was floating around. She doesn’t see who throws the first punch; she’s not even aware that there’s fighting until she hears a glass smash, and when she turns around she is met with what is already growing into a sizable brawl. Her hand flies to her chest, holding tight to her holy symbol through her dress, before she remembers Jester, some thirty feet off at the dessert table. She looks over to Jester just in time to see someone upend the table next to her, and she loses sight of her in the continued spread of the fight.
Yasha pushes her way around the room, trying her hardest not to hurt anyone, but it turns out rich people fight just as dirty as the seediest barroom brawl she’s ever been in. She starts with holding people in place with magic or putting shields up in their way, but eventually she just starts throwing elbows because this is getting ridiculous.
And of course Jester is doing fine in the fight when Yasha catches up to her; if anything Yasha’s a little worried for anyone who gets in Jester’s way. She’s not the only one fighting with magic, but it’s clear that she’s the only one at least in this part of the room who hits just as hard with magic and her fists. It’s loud, but they don’t need to say anything, just a nod and they’re moving through the crowd back to back, looping around each other and moving in an eerie, electrifying sync.
This is not quite Yasha’s element, they’re still a little too indoors for her tastes, but it is much closer to it than the refined pretentions of the earlier half of the party. This is energy, raw and crackling, this is where her jumpy, decisive movements make sense, where the magic that courses through her can fully cycle through itself. She goes from healing to harming to pacifying, pinpointing Beau and Fjord at one corner of the room, Nott and Caleb’s near-invisible presence in another, and guiding Jester’s wild, joyous fury over to them. They push their way out the front door, all six of them, and Jester, once again, catches Yasha’s eye with a broad, madcap smile.
Yasha reluctantly, barely manages to put the thought away.
+1 The Afterparty
The Mighty Nein pile back into a single room of their lodgings with a few assorted bottles Caleb pilfered from the bar before it got smashed, and toast themselves many times over to a job well-done. The theft they went in for went off without a hitch — Caleb describes the security systems they’d been so worried about as “amateurish at best,” and everything else that happened at the party ensures there will be no tracing the theft back to them. Even better, Beau and Fjord found several leads into some promising next jobs from talking to the other staff.
Yasha’s nerves want a drink, but she keeps stealing glances over at Jester, happily worn out and only drinking mixers, and something else in her decides to abstain for the evening. Eventually, they’re the last ones up, the others spread out on the beds in a chorus of gentle drunken snoring (save Caduceus, who had nodded off of natural causes). Cautiously, Yasha moves over to sit right next to Jester, at the end of the bed.
“It was fun, wasn’t it?” Jester says, not quite looking at her. “The party, I mean. And…pretending.”
“Pretending. Yes.”
“Maybe next time we do something like this…” Jester motions to the rest of the group, to their hard-won prizes. “Maybe we can do this again.” When she turns towards Yasha, her face is cautious, hopeful.
Yasha draws the thought forward, like a flower from her book.
“Maybe,” she says, hoping so desperately that she is meeting Jester where she is. “Maybe we don’t have to wait to pretend.”