Berserker who doesn't remember what happened last night or how that fire got started.
Kera sinks low into the forest floor. It feels gentle, like when the retinue still guested in the palace apartments. The morning sun is the same, and settles on a runestone table with intricate and orderly implements, overseen by a cabinet suffused within an oaken wall and bursting with jarred herbs, magical and mundane.
Kera thinks Bella would like this place, and keeps dreaming of her. She does not dwell on how these things do not belong, in their living nightmare.
The retinue's Elfish Healer, with gaudy-red ribbons and sour chokeberries in her hair, hiding cheeks that blush in the fell air. Her belt, blessed of oft-needed potions and holy tinctures, that keeps a white dress Kera oft-longs to slip herself under.
That is a different dream though, and one she daren’t share.
It isn’t safe — not here nor with her, Kera who does not belong wholly to herself. The Barbarian who took upon the bloody-handed curse so she might save the world.
She reaches out to wake to their quest, instead brushing against something soft and generous. She cups and squeezes and it squeals and elbows her in the face, sending her tumbling from the suddenly real bed to the actual wooden floor.
Kera is not dreaming.
She rises sharply and grasps something iron in her hand.
“Shh-shh-shh,” says a voice lurking in the bedsheets. “Grant me your hands, petal.”
Kera barely understands the words as her mind feels abruptly subsumed. She looks for the fragile healer and finds her, slipping a ribbon around Kera's wrists in a dimly-remembered ritual of reassurance. The iron poker falls back to the fireplace.
“Bella!?” her voice trembles, her rage now far and Elfishly fleet-of-foot. “Why aren’t you keeping watch— who is? They could be on us, at any moment, so close to—”
“Shhh,” Bella coos, and Kera settles unwillingly — this is a gift, or another curse.
Bella had seen the Enchantress leave it in her head, to help or maybe control her. She had learned soon after that sending Kera to sleep did naught for the axeblade already in motion.
“We’re safe here,” says Bella, sunbeams in her hair.
“We are? Bella— where are we?” Kera asks, unable to unperch herself.
She is still looking for her weapon, before seeing it hidden between her boots and Bella’s many, many shoes, by a small, round door. “A cottage — it’s ours, petal. Outside the city, but close, so our friends may visit, and often.”
The Enchantress does not, and when she does is always sure to guilt Bella’s meekened berserker by pointedly refusing help when her prosthetic leg struggles with the steps.
“Quiet, so we have peace. And, as it’s spring, your garden is in bloom.”
“That— that sounds like it’d be nice.”
“It is nice,” she laughs, sweet as the berries in her hair. The ones she’s missed, again, that have gotten squished, again. And Kera remembers she will need to wash the pillows, again—
Kera does not know how she knows this, and it escapes her.
She lets Bella take her head on her thighs, before realising which one of them is supposed to be the apothecary. “Bella, what do you mean my garden?” she asks, puzzled.
Bella’s smile stills a touch and she looks at Kera with a mournful eye. She knows where a Warlock bargains an apportionment, or a perilous clause upon its whole, Kera had just given her soul away. And prizing it back left her— incomplete. There were parts missing to her, scattered and obliviated upon cosmic winds.
“You’ll remember, don’t worry,” Bella prays, for parts who merely wander, to find her again.
“Yeah. But why are you here?” Bella was so much closer — and so much nuder — than she’d ever been with Kera. “Not that I mind but—”
“Cos you grow the garden for me,” Bella says, and Kera feels even less sure. Bella tilts her head and waits for her to realise. It’s a precious moment, on bad days like this one.
“Nn—nooo. Are we—”
Kera looks deep into Bella’s eyes, though still glancing at her ample and nodding bosom.
“Are we roommates?”
Bella pushes Kera to the floor, and slaps her own face. “Scirne’s tits,” she curses.
Kera shakes herself uncertainly and clasps her hands tighter in their gentle binding. Finally she hears Bella chuckling to herself. “You’re my wife, petal.”
Kera shoots up, her hands bursting apart.
“I’m your WIFE!?” she shrieks, “You mean that I— and we—” Bella nods, bemused, and catches the fluttering ribbon. “Fuckin’ GET— IN— hahaha!”
Kera sneaks looks, bolder and bolder, at every part of Bella. “No, but really? We’re—”
She freezes and finds herself bound in a different way as Bella rises to meet her and wraps her arms around Kera's hips. And her face runs redder than any long-banished rage as Bella knows how fun it is to tease her.
“Yes. Absolutely,” she says, sowing kisses and holding them together like trestled vines in summer wind, while Kera’s nerves begin to bundle up like kindling.
“But— Bella, a priestess can’t marry, can she?” she asks, as though it will summon her again to a demon-infested march. Bella holds a cheek that, on any other day, would make her think Kera is running a fever.
“The Mother doesn’t need my help anymore, you do.”
“Are you— my caretaker?” Kera asks plaintively, her tense smile pulling on Bella’s grasp, who kisses her again. Kera thinks she could have a thousand of these.
“When it’s a bad day, like this one.” Kera doesn’t know she’s had them ten-fold that, and a dozen seasons over. “They’re fewer every year, but there was much missing, of your soul."
“But we’ve found new pieces — together, petal.” Kera holds tighter, the once-again, yet-uncultivated sapling of her infatuation beginning to blossom. It is very endearing Bella thinks, feeling Kera pinching at soft places. “Perhaps I should make us breakfast?”
The Barbarian outs her secreted charisma, turns her heart colder than the Dread Lord’s toppled fortress, and pierces Bella with a lonely glance. She knows this well, Kera always makes her move quickly, when she finally realises she won’t hurt Bella.
Well— won’t hurt in a blinding, ungodly rage. This definitely still hurts, because Kera can be a wicked thing and is fast remembering it too, it seems.
“Though, I suppose—” Bella mutters, overripe with playful disapproval, “there might still be some morning sun to bask in.”
And, in mere moments, she finds herself, as she always does, flung back onto their bed, her wife gleefully pouncing after her.
