Chapter Text
"So what are you guys gonna do tonight?” Adaine asks as she picks at her salad. The five of them are sitting at their usual table in the cafeteria talking about mundane midday updates and vehemently trying to avoid Simeon du Vayne as he prances around the cafeteria.
Kristen scrunches her nose as a glob of mustard falls out of her shitty school burger and she throws it haphazardly back down onto the tray. She glances up at Adaine then, just registering the question, and raises her eyebrows. “Why, so you can show up and do a really bad job at stealthily spying on me?”
The wizard scoffs as Fabian snorts. “Hey! That was one time freshman year, and we just wanted to make sure that Tracker wasn’t going to wolf out and try to kill you.”
Riz nods, his head buried in a notebook as he scribbles something out, almost unreadable in his chicken scratch that rivals Kristen’s.
“Well now I’ve been in rooms alone with Kipperlilly enough times that if she wanted to try to kill me again she would have by now,” she says with a grin.
Adaine frowns and waves her off. “I don’t like your face when you say that, it makes it seem like some weird kinky thing that I absolutely do not want to hear about.”
“Get your mind out of the gutter, Adaine,” Kristen chides, even though she immediately starts laughing. “I’m just saying that I’m fine. And if you really want to know, there aren’t supposed to be any clouds tonight so I’m taking her stargazing.”
At the same time, Adaine, Gorgug, Fabian and Riz all let out a really loud ‘awwww’ that draws the attention of a couple tables close to them. Kristen’s face immediately flushes and she tries to shush them, slapping a hand over Fabian’s mouth.
He licks her hand and she pulls it away, her nose scrunched as she immediately wipes her hand on his shoulder. “Gross, man!”
“That’s adorable,” he says with a knowing smile that kind of makes her want to push him off of the shitty lunchroom stools.
“First she’s throwing rocks at your window and now you're stargazing, I’m gonna throw up.” Adaine groans, although there’s still a smile on her face.
Kristen lets herself smile, that giddy feeling that stopped her from sleeping last night coming back with full force. “Yeah, yeah, okay.”
“Are you gonna ask her to homecoming?” Gorgug asks, looking up from the machine that he had been fiddling with. Cloaca squawks as he twists the screwdriver weirdly, and he frowns before setting the screwdriver (and the homunculus) on the opposite end of the table.
The other three ‘oooh’ again and Kristen flips all of them off as she shoves a slightly cold french fry into her mouth. “I mean, yeah, but I don’t know how. We still need to have the ‘what are we’ conversation, and it’s literally only our first date so everyone needs to stop freaking out about it.”
Riz looks up from his book to pat her hand. “I think you’re the one who’s freaking out about it, K,”
“Okay, you don’t need to read me like that.” She frowns and slumps over, putting her elbows on the table and resting her head on her hands.
Adaine reaches a hand out and, after a sigh, Kristen grabs it. The wizard gives her a reassuring squeeze and Kristen feels herself relax a little bit. “It’s gonna be fine. Just don’t overthink it.”
“That’s easier said than done,”
“Especially for you,” Fabian adds. Kristen throws a french fry at him.
Riz snaps his notebook closed and casts it aside, finally focusing on the lunch in front of him, the lettuce of his salad definitely getting a bit soggy from the dressing that had been on it untouched for the past ten minutes.
“Are we gonna have to go to homecoming as a big group, then? Like…us and the Rat Grinders?”
“I mean I would like to go with my girlfriend, so yes.” Gorgug says flatly.
Adaine grins and drums on the table excitedly. “Have you figured out how you’re gonna ask her yet?”
Gorgug hesitates and Adaine groans and rests her head on his shoulder. “Come on , let me live vicariously through you!”
“Okay, okay, fine. If this is stupid you can tell me, but I was thinking of just like…sending her a letter on Quoki Pets.”
The table is silent for a second before they all erupt into another round of ‘aww’s’.
“That’s fucking adorable, I’m gonna vomit.” Fabian says, a grin on his face that makes Gorgug roll his eyes, but a blush creeps up his cheeks.
“Yeah, yeah, okay,” He waves them all off, laughing when Kristen puts all her weight on him, leaning against his shoulder as she keeps badgering him. “Let’s go back to you asking Kipperlilly, huh?”
Kristen frowns. “Stop putting the attention back on me, I don’t want it.”
“When has that ever been true,” Adaine comments, eyebrows raised in slight disbelief.
“Hey!” Kristen scoffs. “You must be mistaking me with Fig.”
Fabian hums. “Okay, Saint Applebees.”
“President Applebees,” Riz adds.
Kristen opens her mouth to retort, but instead just pouts and focuses on her shitty school lunch again. “Fuck off,”
They go back to chatting about classes and homecoming outfits and their plans for the party this weekend, Fabian making all of them promise to help him clean up this time.
“Last time you all left me with so much shit to do,” he grumbles.
Adaine rolls her eyes. “Oh come on , I had all my mephits and unseen servants clean that up, you did like, one thing.”
“Get wrecked,” Kristen says through a mouthful of french fries. Fabian flips her off and ignores everyone as they “oooh” at him.
When lunch dismisses and they all part ways to go to their classes, Fabian and Adaine trailing off to one of their electives while the rest of them go to their core classes.
Kristen takes her normal seat in the cleric classroom, Lucy and Buddy already seated as the girl drums on his desk excitedly, a giant smile on her face.
“What’s so exciting?” Kristen asks as she ungracefully drops her backpack down on the ground and slides into her seat. Lucy immediately turns to her with that same giga-watt grin but Buddy looks down, fiddling with his hands in his lap as a blush grows on his cheeks.
Lucy glances back at Buddy then and puts a hand on his shoulder. “Hey, if there’s anyone you can talk to about this, it’s Kristen.”
“Well now I’m invested,” Kristen says, scooting forward in her chair. “But also you don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to, I’m just nosy.”
“No, no, I want to tell you,” Buddy says with a sigh. He scrunches his nose and glances up at Kristen. “I was just telling Lucy that…” he groans and tips his head back. “Luce, can you just tell her?”
Without missing a beat, Lucy leans forward and grabs Kristen’s forearm excitedly. “He told me that he has a crush on Ruben!”
Kristen’s jaw drops and she looks past Lucy at Buddy, who was scrunching his nose and looking anywhere but the two girls. She stands up and tackles him in a hug, the boy letting out a quick ‘oof’ as she squeezes him.
“Yes! Yes, man, that’s so awesome.”
“But I don’t think that I’m gonna do anythi—”
“If you start spouting some more shit about how Helio wouldn’t want you to be gay, I’m going to banish you again.” Kristen says flatly, and Buddy immediately closes his mouth and just looks at her with a slightly exhausted look on his face, like this had been keeping him up for who knows how long. “I’ve met him, and he’s the most frat boy-ass dude you’ve ever seen. I don’t think that I’d trust him to hold my drink at a party, but that’s besides the point. It’s our fuckass families that instill that shitty homophobia in us, okay? Absolutely nowhere in the Book of Helio does it say anything about not being cool with the gays. I really doubt that if he was homophobic he and Sol would have basically begged me to come back, okay?”
Buddy and Lucy stare at her with wide eyes and slightly dropped jaws. “Wait, hold on—” Lucy starts. “They begged you to come back? I don’t think that I knew that.”
“You met Sol ?!” Buddy says loudly, his eyes widening more.
Kristen snorts. “Oh, yeah. I met both of them and Galicaea when I died the second time.”
“What the hell, I didn’t meet anyone when I died.” Lucy grumbles, crossing her arms and sitting back in her chair.
“Well I didn’t have a God and had just been gored through the heart by a unicorn, so they were both there to convince me to worship them or whatever,”
Lucy exhales loudly. “Holy shit, that’s wild.”
“So you just talked to all three of them? Just like…sat in a room with them?” Buddy asks, scooting forward in his seat.
“Well, I kind of really insulted Sol and Galicaea and then punched Helio in the face and then booked it out of there and revived myself, and then immediately after that was when he had to fight a fuck ton of people to stop the Nightmare King from coming back and I met Cassandra, so it was a wild couple of hours.”
Lucy and Buddy are silent then, blinking at her like she had just told them the most insane shit they’ve ever heard. Which, granted, might have been true. She doesn’t really think about it that much because all of her friends have done super crazy, wild, impressive stuff, but it was pretty cool. At least, after the fact. While it was all happening she really wished that they could just be sitting at Basrar’s.
“So anyways…” Kristen says after another moment of silence. “You don’t need to beat yourself up over being gay. I left for a lot of reasons, y’know? My fuckass homophobic parents and the homophobic hypocritical church, but like…you’re not going to get fucking smited for kissing a dude and also being a cleric of Helio.” She shrugs then, because it’s really as simple as that.
Buddy takes another moment and then nods slowly. “Okay.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to like, totally shit on your religion. It’s just what happens whenever I talk about Helio.”
Lucy snorts. “That’s fair.”
“But do you guys think that Ruben even likes boys? I know he was really in love with Fig’s, what did you call it, her ‘alter emo’?” Kristen and Lucy both laugh. “But I don’t know if that means he’s straight, or if he’s bi, or what. I just…I don’t think I can just ask , y’know?”
“I’ll ask.” Kristen says flatly.
Lucy purses her lips and puts a hand on Buddy’s shoulder again. “I’ve known Ruben since middle school, and that boy is definitely not straight.”
A laugh involuntarily comes out of Kristen and she quickly stops herself, waving off the other two when they glance at her. “Sorry, that was just really funny.”
“I don’t know if he’s bi or pan or demi or anything else, but he’s written way too many love songs on his ukulele that say ‘he’ to just be into girls.” Lucy finishes.
Buddy sits up a little straighter and nods. “Okay…cool.”
“We’ll back you up,” Kristen winks at him. “But also don’t do anything you don’t want to.”
“If you want me to, y’know, test the waters a bit, I can.” Lucy says with a shrug. “I’ll figure something out.”
Buddy is quiet for another moment before a small smile appears on his face, and Kristen feels herself relax a little bit. The last thing she wants is for him to be uncomfortable with his sexuality or any crushes, she’s had enough of that for fifty people. She opens her mouth to tell him that he should ask Ruben to homecoming, but then Yolanda comes into the room and calls everyone’s attention and Kristen quickly walks back to her seat on the other side of Lucy.
Kristen
we’re not done talking about this ;))))))
Lucy
lololol
Lucy
i will be literally so smooth and casual and cool when i ask
Kristen
since when are you any of those things
Lucy
wtf
Buddy
Haha
Lucy
im being bullied 911 yes hello
Kristen
guys pay attention ur literally being bad students rn!!
Lucy
what did yolanda just say to all of us when she walked in the room
Kristen
uhhhhhhhhhhh
Buddy
Either Kipperlilly’s going to make you way more attentive or you’re going to make her way more laid back
Lucy
AHAHAHAHAHAHAH
Lucy
so real
Kristen
haha ur literally soooooo funny
Buddy
Thank you
Lucy
get wrecked!!!!
***
“Can I still borrow your car?” Kristen asks, popping her head into the kitchen. Jawbone looks up from his papers, glasses perched on his nose.
“Yeah kiddo, keys are on the front table.”
She grins and goes to leave, to avoid any other questions, but apparently today isn’t her lucky day because Jawbone calls after her. “Make sure not to run into any poles, okay?”
She groans. “Who told you?”
“Doesn’t matter who told me!” He grins, and it seems that everyone’s favorite hobby these days is giving her shit.
“It was Kipperlilly wasn’t it.”
Jawbone scoffs dramatically and puts a hand to his chest. “Now Kristen, whatever things people tell me during our session is confidential!” He winks and she groans.
“It was an accident ,”
“I believe you, kid.”
Kristen frowns. “I got Gorgug to fix it!”
He snorts and takes his glasses off to wipe the lenses with his shirt. “Look at me, do I seem mad?”
“…No.”
He slides the half-moon glasses back on and gives her another smile. “Keys are on the table.”
She looks at him hesitantly for a moment, not really believing that he’s done shitting on her. When he gives her another wink and goes back to scribbling something down on some student forms she exhales and quickly goes to the front door.
Have fun on your date! Adaine’s voice says in her head. Kristen jolts for a moment and then sighs and looks up and points to where she knows her tower is.
Lol thanks, I’ll tell you about it tomorrow!
Is that your way of telling me not to wait up?
It’s silent for a second and then another message from Adaine appears in her head.
If we were texting I would have put a winky face, but clearly I can’t do that here. They should add that to the Message spell. But then I guess that would just be texting.
Kristen snorts. Winky face received, thanks. And yes. Winky face.
Gross.
You asked!
And I regret doing so. Have fun.
Thanks girlie.
She grabs the keys off the front table and leaves, the cool evening air hitting her as she exhales loudly, her shoulders dropping. Even when she woke up with the sun, when she was supposed to be worshiping everything it brought, she couldn’t help but relax when the air turned cool and the sky turned a beautiful gradient of oranges, pinks, purples and blues.
She used to think of it as sacrilegious, but now she knows that it was the twilight reaching out to her, a siren song calling her home.
Kristen glances down at her crystal and shoots off a quick message to Kipperlilly, giving her a heads up that she was headed over, and starts the engine of Jawbone’s slightly beat-up car. It takes a couple of tries—she should really ask Gorgug to look at it again—but then it’s smooth sailing and she’s carefully cruising down the streets toward the Copperkettle house.
***
Kipperlilly is sitting in the living room rhythmically tapping her fingers on her knee, one at a time, hand by hand, something she always does when she’s nervous.
Except she shouldn’t be nervous, she keeps telling herself that she shouldn’t, but that doesn’t stop her brain and body from filling with anxiety.
Breathe in for five, hold for six, breathe out for seven. She hears Jawbone say in her head, a response to yet another outburst.
It hadn’t been a particularly big one, but she had been stressed about college applications and her dad had said something that had hit just the right nerve to have her lash out and stomp off to her room, chest heaving and hands shaking.
The healing process wasn’t a linear one, which, to someone that was very much a perfectionist, was just another thing that caused a lot of irritation.
The doorbell rings then, snapping her out of her spiral, and she immediately tries to take another cooling breath as she feels her racing heartbeat in her chest.
She opens the door and can’t help but smile when she sees Kristen standing on the porch looking as equally nervous as she feels.
“Hi.” The cleric says, fidgeting with her hands.
“Hi.” Kipperlilly parrots back. They stand there for a moment, staring at each other, both internally panicking a little bit.
“You have your glasses on again.”
Kipperlilly nods, eyebrows raised. “Correct, I do.”
“I like them.”
“Oh.”
Kristen clears her throat. “Um, you ready?”
“Yes,” Kipperlilly says quickly, and then immediately scolds herself for being so incredibly eager. “Yeah, let’s go.” She says then, trying to sound a bit more casual.
Kristen, of course, sees right through that, grinning and shaking her head before putting a hand out. Kipperlilly knows her face heats up as she grabs the cleric’s hand. She lets Kristen pull her out the door, only stopping to let her lock the door, before guiding her out to the car.
“Are you going to tell me what we’re doing now?” Kipperlilly asks, eyes narrowing. Kristen opens the passenger side door for her and grins.
“Nope.”
She scrunches her nose and gets in the car, trying to stop herself from smiling as Kristen laughs and gives her a quick wink.
Kristen starts the car and looks over to Kipperlilly, a little bit of nervousness on her face. And Kipperlilly relaxes a little bit at that, the way that she’s clearly just as nervous.
***
“This is a field, Kristen.” Kipperlilly says flatly, looking at the cleric as she gets out of the car to see nothing but grass and a couple of trees.
Kristen scoffs dramatically and walks around to pop open the trunk. “C’mon Kipp, you wound me. This—” she takes a large blanket and a small picnic basket out of the trunk. “Is one of the best places to see the stars. Y’know, because we’re far enough away from the light pollution of the main city.”
Kipperlilly grins. She looks at Kristen, then up at the sky, then back to the girl in front of her, looking slightly hesitant. “I’ve never been stargazing.” She says, because she’s not really sure what else to say. She thinks it might be a little dramatic to say ‘ this is one of the sweetest things anyone’s ever done for me ’, because that seems a little much for a first date.
“C’mon,” Kristen tries to rearrange the things in her arms to free up a hand, but Kipperlilly snorts and moves to grab something.
“You’re going to drop something, it’s okay if you don’t hold my hand all the time.”
Kristen frowns. “But I want to,”
Kipperlilly forces herself not to look completely giddy at that, ignore the urge to put her face in her hands and excitedly scream. “Sweet, but dramatic.” She says instead with a smirk.
Kristen shrugs. “I’ve been told that I can be dramatic, so,” she adjusts again, getting a better hold on all the things in her arm and grabs Kipperlilly’s hand, leading her out into the field.
Ten minutes later they’re laying on a blanket on the ground, Kristen pointing out stars with one hand as the other one finds its place wrapped around Kipperlilly’s shoulders. The rogue is tucked into Kristen’s side, head resting on her shoulder, trying her hardest not to have a heart attack from how fast her heart is beating.
“Sorry, hold on, is your pinky glowing?” Kipperlilly asks, brows furrowed in confusion. She grabs Kristen’s hand and examines the finger with the detail she does everything.
Kristen snorts. “Yeah, it does that.”
Kipperlilly looks up at her flatly. “What a great explanation, thank you so much.”
“You know what Copperkettle?”
“What?” Kipperlilly asks, raising her chin, a goading, challenging tone in her voice. Kristen grins and grabs the hand that was holding her finger, pressing a quick kiss to the back of the rogue’s hand.
Kipperlilly adjusts, scooting impossibly closer to Kristen. She grabs her hand again and runs her fingers over the slightly-shimmering pinky. “You gonna tell me about this now?”
“ Fine ,” Kristen says with a sigh. Kipperlilly glances up at her, not wanting to push for something that Kristen didn’t want to tell her, but the look on Kristen’s face was one of fake exasperation. She gives Kipperlilly a quick wink. “It’s not that complicated, Adaine took the tip of my pinky when I died the last time so she could resurrect me.”
The rogue frowns. “So she just cut part of your pinky off? That’s…morbid. Didn’t you get resurrected like, right away? I didn’t think you were in active combat then.”
Kristen shakes her head, just now realizing that Kipperlilly doesn’t actually know the whole story of how she died in the Nightmare Forest. She swallows, her throat suddenly dry. She and her friends may all joke about their many deaths, but that one is still something that Kristen occasionally has nightmares about.
Well, both her deaths are. She, Gorgug, Adaine and Riz have had many discussions about their deaths. Fig and Fabian are sympathetic and understand that it’s a traumatic experience no matter how you die, but they don’t get it. Kristen and Gorgug had, unbeknownst to everyone else at the time, held a funeral for themselves when everything had calmed down after freshman year. Then, after the Nightmare Forest, they had done the same for Adaine and Riz, the four of them standing there silently in the grave plot at Mordred at the two new gravestones they had added.
Kristen and Gorgug hadn’t had actual gravestones at theirs, but when they moved into Mordred Manor, the two of them went out one night and added themselves to the small plot. Zayn gave them some privacy.
Although she has to imagine that the same is true for Kipperlilly and the rest of the Rat Grinders. Joking about their deaths in public and being haunted by them in private.
“No, uh, it was a little more complicated than that.” She lets out a forced chuckle, although her smile doesn’t meet her eyes. Even in the twilight, Kipperlilly can see it, and she moves to lace their fingers together and squeeze Kristen’s hand in reassurance.
Kristen clears her throat again. “We were a couple days into the forest, and we were looking for this temple that we had seen in some visions. It was massive , this old and decrepit temple to Cassandra, and we split up to try and look around. I found this room with a bunch of old tomes and this shattered image of Cassandra on the wall and this creepy old unicorn skeleton in the corner.
She takes a deep breath. Kipperlilly squeezes her hand again. “I was holding the pieces of this image that had come off the wall, trying to see what she had looked like and when I tried to tap into it, when I tried to offer any sort of prayer, I heard this whisper in my head. I still remember it, the chill that it sent down my spine. ‘What praise will you have in death?’ And then I looked down and there was a horn through my chest. Fabian said he saw the unicorn reanimate and gore me through the heart. The horn came out and I died.”
Kipperlilly stays silent, simply nodding and squeezing her hand. After a moment she takes a deep breath, her thumb stroking over the back of Kristen’s hand. “And so the pinky…”
“Oh, right.” Kipperlilly snorts at Kristen’s quick shift to normal, like she had just forgotten something easy and wasn’t in the middle of what was a clearly traumatic story. “So Fabian left the room to get everyone and then when they came back the archway was gone. Gorgug eventually smashed a hole in the stone wall but when they finally got back into the room everything was like, I think eight hundred years old? Eight hundred and fifty? Like thick layers of dust, that smell when things are closed up for too long, the whole nine yards. But they found a skeleton on the floor and when Adaine cast Identify on it it said that it was mine, but that it was eight hundred and fifty something years old. So Adaine took one of my finger bones so that she’d be able to cast some sort of resurrection in the forest.”
Kristen exhales loudly, the story an exhausting one to tell. “So…yeah. When I finally snapped awake, still mostly dead but not a skeleton or anything, I was missing part of my finger. I also had a giant bloody hole in my chest, but that’s not a super important part of the story. Then I met Sol and Galicaea and punched Helio in the face and then went to find my friends, and when I resurrected myself I got my pinky back. But it glows now, so that’s kind of cool,”
Kipperlilly’s jaw drops. “Sorry, what? You punched Helio in the face?”
“Yeah,” Kristen grims. “It was awesome. I told Lucy and Buddy about it earlier today, they were equally as shocked. I think Buddy was a little more horrified, though.”
The rogue is quiet for another moment before she bursts into laughter. “Holy shit, sorry I’m not laughing at the whole traumatic death thing, that’s horrific and sounds awful but now I’m really only thinking about you decking a God.”
“Hey, I get it. It’s truly the best part of the story,”
Kipperlilly smiles and shakes her head at Kristen’s ridiculousness before sighing and remembering what she actually wanted to say to her. She puts her other hand on top of Kristen’s that she’s already holding. “You’re really amazing, you know that, right?”
Kristen scrunches her nose and shakes her head. “I mean it was cool, but it’s not super—”
“No,” Kipperlilly interrupts her, not letting Kristen discredit herself. “Don’t do that. Don’t try to brush off all the amazing things you’ve done, okay? I know that…I don’t know if it really means anything coming from me. Hell, I didn’t think I’d ever say it. But I’ve been so… angry , by the fact that you had all done these amazing things, I don’t think I ever really thought about all the traumatic parts of it for what they really are. Not some big character development stuff, not something that gets you ahead as an adventurer, but really fucking shitty things that have happened to you. But you're brilliant, Kristen. And I know that you don’t think that about yourself, but I’ve never met anyone like you. You’re an exceptional cleric, and you always manage to pick yourself back up when really fucking shitty things happen to you, and you—”
She’s cut off by Kristen quickly cupping her jaw and kissing her, something fast and hard and desperate. When she pulls away Kipperlilly blinks slowly, still caught off guard.
Kristen clears her throat and looks up at the sky, trying to deflect a little bit. “Um, thank you.”
Kipperlilly rolls her eyes and takes her hand out of Kristen’s to take the cleric’s face in her hands, to get her attention back. Kristen looks at her with wide eyes and Kipperlilly steels herself. “I need you to actually listen to me when I say all of that. Because all of it’s true.”
Kristen nods then, but she holds her breath, too afraid that if she makes a sudden movement the moment will be over. And, similarly to that night in her room, she feels like they’re on the precipice of something.
“I’m not very good at…this.”
Kristen raises her eyebrows and looks at Kipperlilly, a mixture of amusement and skepticism on her face. “You’ve been doing a pretty good job so far,”
Kipperlilly rolls her eyes, but that same stupid smile grows on her face that Kristen’s learned is one that she gets a lot whenever Kristen says something sweet and stupid.
“You know what I mean. I’m not good at the whole…dating thing. I don’t really know what I’m doing. But I want to, y’know, figure it out.” She’s quiet then, looking away from Kristen, her shoulders stiffening as the anxiety she’s feeling wins out for a second.
“Is this your confusing way of asking me to be your girlfriend,” Kristen asks, a wide grin growing on her face. Kipperlilly glares at her.
“You don’t need to say it like that ,”
“Like what!”
“Like you’re making fun of me.” She frowns, and Kristen quickly puts a hand over one of Kipperlilly’s, which is still cupping Kristen’s jaw.
She looks Kipperlilly dead in the eyes, wanting her to know that she’s serious. “If you wanna ask me, ask me.”
Kipperlilly swallows and her hand tenses slightly on Kristen’s face, but she doesn’t look away from her. “Do you—god damn it, this is so annoying,” she scrunches her nose and squeezes her eyes shut, trying to ignore the way her heart seems to be beating out of her chest.
Kristen laughs, a light sound that gets Kipperlilly to look at her again. “Kipp,”
“Doyouwanttobemygirlfriend.”
The cleric raises her eyebrows. “What was that?”
Kipperlilly huffs. “Are you really gonna make me say it again?”
“I mean, I just didn’t really hear you…”
“You’re such a jerk.” Kipperlilly rolls her eyes, and Kristen just laughs again.
“You’re off to a really good start with this.”
“Do you…” the rogue starts again, looking away to steady herself before looking at Kristen, her honey brown eyes wide. “Do you want to be my girlfriend?”
Kristen’s grin is radiant. “Yes.”
“Oh, good.” Kipperlilly says with a slightly relieved sigh. Kristen snorts and grabs the hand that’s on her face so lace their fingers together.
“What, did you think I was gonna say no?”
Kipperlilly shrugs, and Kristen really has no choice but to kiss her then, to assure her that she wants this just as much as Kipperlilly does.
Kristen doesn’t get home until well after midnight, her drive to take Kipperlilly home taking a lot longer than a quick drop off. She creeps in the side door to the kitchen, not wanting to open the gigantic front door and potentially call attention to herself. She really just needs to drop Jawbone’s keys on the counter and then she can bolt to her room, taking the small and winding hallway that connects the main house to her church.
When she sets the keys down with a sigh, her shoulders dropping, a lamp flicks on from the living room and she internally groans.
“Oh good, you’re back.” Sandra Lynn says behind her, and Kristen turns with something between a wince and an awkward smile on her face.
“Hey…girlie.”
The ranger raises her eyebrows and tries to stifle a laugh. “How was your night?”
“Good.” Kristen says too quickly, shrugging with a forced-causality that Sandra Lynn immediately sees through.
She nods instead. “Good. I just wanted to make sure you got back okay,”
“Thanks.”
They’re both silent for a moment. There’s always been a bit of awkwardness between the two, the uncomfortableness of sophomore year never really going away.
“So,” Sandra Lynn starts, a small smile appearing on her face. “Did you have a good time?”
Kristen can’t stop the megawatt grin that appears on her face. “Yeah, it was, um, really good. Um, were you just sitting here waiting for me?”
“I just wanted to make sure you were okay, Kristen. I…worry about you.”
Kristen frowns and looks at Sandra Lynn with very blatant confusion and skepticism. They’ve always had a slightly tense relationship, and after sophomore year that was even more awkward. She lived with them, yes, but whenever she needed an adult in the house she went to Jawbone or Lydia.
Sandra Lynn smiles slightly awkwardly, slightly exhausted. It is late, but Kristen can tell that part of the exhaustion probably comes from the almost-constant worried state all of their parents are in. It’s hard to be the parents of adventurers and not always be slightly terrified that your kids are going to die again.
“You’re my kid, too. You know that, right?”
Kristen freezes. It’s really not what she expected Sandra Lynn to say. She’s not sure what she thought she was going to say next, but the admission that she’s not just Fig’s best friend that also lives with them is an odd one.
She sniffs, not really sure what to say.
Sandra Lynn raises her eyebrows and goes toward Kristen. After hesitating for a moment she puts a hand on Kristen’s shoulder and squeezes slightly. “I mean it. You aren’t just someone that lives here. You and Adaine, you’re my girls too, okay? I’ve got three daughters, and I’m always going to worry about whether or not you’re all good.”
Kristen’s once again at a loss for words. She does the only thing that she can really think of doing, which is crushing Sandra Lynn in a hug. The elf is startled for a moment, honestly not really expecting her words would be this kindly and positively received, but holds Kristen tightly.
“You don’t have to worry about Kipperlilly, though. We’re good.” Kristen says softly, her head resting against Sandra Lynn’s shoulder. The woman gives her another squeeze and lets her go, but keeps her hands on Kristen’s arms.
“I’m glad. You deserve to be happy, you all do. But if anything happens, know that you can—”
“I know.” Kristen interrupts.
Sandra Lynn smiles and nods. “Good.”
“I’m uh, I’m gonna go to bed now.” Kristen glances back at the hallway that leads to the church, then back to Sandra Lynn with an awkward smile. The woman mirrors the smile and lets go of Kristen.
She clears her throat and looks slightly uncomfortable again, but Kristen can tell that a hint of that worry and exhaustion from her face is gone. “Goodnight, Kristen.”
“Night,”
Kristen goes down the small and winding hallway that connects to the church, all the while grinning like an idiot as she thinks about the night. She thinks the way that Kipperlilly so easily tucked herself into her side, the starry-eyed look on her face when Kristen told her what they were doing, her radiant smile when Kristen said ‘yes’.
And since she’s alone in her room, since there’s no one there to make fun of her or give her shit, she flops onto her bed and kicks her feet, that stupid smile never leaving her face.