@princington's amazing art brought me back to this fic so have a little extra for them.
There are many, many terrible things about dating Beatrice.
For example: she manages to wake up at six AM every single morning to go jogging and comes home looking sweaty and sexy while Ava is still dealing with bedhead. She's also organised to the point of insanity and remembers every important date, even the ones Ava didn't realise she knew (like the date she opened the coffee shop. They hadn't even met for fuck's sake), and manages to swoop in with a thoughtful gift or kind word to mark the occasion. Meanwhile, Ava is still scribbling DON'T FORGET DENTIST - TUESDAY?? on the back of her hand like a high schooler.
And if all of that wasn't horrible enough, even after almost a year of dating, Beatrice can still roll up the cuffs of her sleeves or adjust her glasses or recite some complicated piece of research, and Ava winds up hopelessly turned on in public on the regular.
It sucks, actually. Ava's life is awful.
None of that is the worst part of it though. The worst part of dating Beatrice, who is sexy and thoughtful and intelligent, is that she's fucking impossible to buy gifts for.
Beatrice doesn't actually want anything is half the problem. She reads a lot of books but she mostly checks them out from the university library. She drinks a lot of tea, but Ava runs a coffee shop. If her girlfriend wants tea, she has a store room full of it. Other than that, she mostly likes crosswords, the gym, her friends, and… well. Ava.
It's making planning for the first birthday Beatrice has had since they've been together exceptionally stressful. Particularly since Ava knows for a fact that Beatrice's parents believed in a "socks and school supplies" style of gift giving which, as far as she's concerned, barely even count.
"What are you getting Bea for her birthday?" she whispers conspiriatorially to Camila one Saturday afternoon in Mary and Shannon's back yard. Beatrice herself is bouncing the baby on her knee and debating some obscure scientific hypothesis - something about mold. Ava is surprised to find she actually has an opinion on the topic. Probably all those mold documentaries.
Camila snorts, "Have you just figured out she's impossible to buy for?"
"Yes," Ava stresses, "C'mon, what are you getting her? And if it's really good I'm stealing your idea."
"Oh no." Camila shakes her head, "It took me all year to think of something. You're on your own."
"Cam." Ava tries her best pleading, puppy dog eyes. They don't work nearly as well on Camila as they do on Beatrice.
"Ava." Camila pats her hand comiseratingly, "Just get her what every self-respecting lesbian wants for their birthday."
Ava frowns, "Power tools?"
Camila smirks, "Strap-on and lingerie."
So that conversation was entirely useless - mostly because Ava already owns more than enough of both those things and they sort of seem like a gift for both of them more than just Beatrice. And more than anything else, Ava wants her girlfriend to feel special. Like she's worth something great that's for her and only her.
Shannon is her next port of call. Ava corners her in the kitchen where she's refilling drinks and, probably pre-warned by Camila, looks entirely unsurprised to be accosted.
"We normally order some of the gross British candy she likes," Shannon informs her. "And before you even try it - she knows that's what we get her every year, so don't try and steal the idea."
Ava groans despondently, "I'm hitting a wall here. What the fuck do you buy for someone who doesn't actually want anything?"
Beatrice does always say that her best friend is unreasonably logical and practical in her advice. For the first time, Ava understands her plight when Shannon shrugs and says, "Have you tried asking her?"
With nothing else to do, Ava tries. Admittedly, she probably picks a bad time to do it: she's shirtless and sitting cross-legged on their bed while Beatrice massages lotion into the new tattoo on her shoulder. Bea's fingers are gentle and thorough and very, extremely distracting.
"Hey," Ava says a little breathlessly, her eyes closed, "What do you want for your birthday?"
Beatrice, because she is Beatrice, says, "You don't have to get me anything."
Typical. This is why dating her is so difficult. "Obviously I do," Ava points out. "For my birthday you took me to a theme park even though it's your idea of actual, literal hell." Bea had even bought and worn a t-shirt that said "I RODE THE BIG ONE". Camila has the photograph framed in her office.
"Not actual, literal hell," Beatrice argues, "I enjoyed that you had fun."
"There's really nothing you want?" Ava asks.
Disappointingly, Beatrice's fingers stop their movement and she puts a cap on the lotion, moving off the bed behind Ava. "Is this what you were whispering with Camila and Shannon about earlier?"
"Maybe. They weren't helpful."
Beatrice's smile is affectionate, "They never are." She leans in to kiss her, her hand landing on Ava's bare shoulder and skirting over her neck, "I'd like to spend my birthday with you. That's all."
Ava wraps her arms aroud her shoulders and sighs, "Dating you is the worst."
"Mm, awful," Beatrice agrees, kissing the corner of her mouth and then her jaw. "Shall we break up?"
"Yep." Ava turns her head to press their lips together again and uses her distraction to lie back, pulling Beatrice down on top of her. "We're over."
(On her birthday, they drink tea in bed and do a crossword puzzle with Ava's head on Beatrice's shoulder. Later, they wander through a museum eating wine gums and holding hands. At Shannon and Mary's place, Beatrice unwraps the cordless drill that Ava bought for her.
"Thank you," she says, "It's just what I wanted.")
(Ava saves the strap-on and lingerie for later.)
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Chapters: 5/10 [46k]
Rating: M
the star wars au 💕
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Back in the Temple with its sun-swept halls, Beatrice had her own little space. A bed full of rumpled sheets and a little bookshelf where she kept her three printed copies of what otherwise lived on the holos. They were cheap but uncommon and she had to trek all the way down into the guts of Coruscant to visit the printer shop where they came out smelling strange and sharp and then softer over time. She’d spend hours there leafing her fingers through all the different kinds of paper. Pressed bark and woven fabrics and the scraped skin of dead things. She always chose synthetic paper, which didn’t adhere to her fingers when she turned the pages.
She had a desk and her sketchbooks cataloguing all the different poses in her lightsaber forms. There was the simple one all apprentices learned and then most of Soresu’s utilitarian shapes. Beyond that a smattering here and there of Ataru and Niman. She loved that room and often came back to find it dusty from her absence.
By the time the war felt almost over there were so few apprentices and padawans left that no one needed the space while she was gone.
There, on occasion, something soft and very beautiful would come to visit her. It was simple and sweet and mildly forbidden, but not love. So she always told herself. Not love because that would have to be the end of it.
She dressed it in different names. It was comfort – a pretty face she can’t call out of memory now, showing mostly the slant of its jaw as the girl it belonged to stared out the open window. Sunset over Coruscant and their hands entwined on top of the sheets, Beatrice’s mouth sore from kissing and her hands aching to do more than form a counter-shape to jawline.
They’d talked about it then – Force-bonds and two souls tangled together in a way that defied language. “Wouldn’t that be nice?” Brown eyes glancing over at her, chasing Beatrice’s away from their quiet observation, “To be so close to somebody you could feel them clear across the galaxy?”
Her hand was bigger, between them, and Beatrice played with a set of slender fingers tucked inside her own as she turned the question over and over in her head. “I don’t know,” she decided eventually. “What if they got hurt? Wouldn’t you feel that too?”
“Wouldn’t you want to feel it, if you really loved them?”
Beatrice hadn’t thought that was the point of a Force bond, but she didn’t say it. “I suppose it would be useful to know if your ally was hurt or captured or-”
“Ally?” Her words, echoed in the parting of a mouth Beatrice was becoming too familiar with. She remembers looking away from it, out the window, and then back after a while. Fingertips scrubbing lightly at the inside of her wrist, the way she liked it. “What other word should I use?”
She’d been a coward, not darling to look away from their entangled hands until they were untangling, the girl next to her squirming out of bed. Standing, turned away so that Beatrice could once again see the strange constellation of scars that peeked up from the back of her shirt. Springing like starbursts up to the tip of her spine.
“Is that really what you want, Beatrice?”
Behind her, at her, Beatrice had frowned in response. She could see the real question hiding behind those words, but what was she supposed to say? This was the cost of holding a lightsaber.
“I want to be a Jedi.”
A low noise, like a hum with something breaking underneath it. A face turning back, the over-shoulder glance she always stole when she rushed into the classroom ahead of Beatrice. “Yeah. Me too.”
That night, Beatrice left the Temple for the last time, and when she arrived in the hanger bay there was no shape hiding in among the starships this time to see her off.
She’d searched, her duffel hanging off one shoulder, pressing into a bruise high on her arm made in the shape of teeth, but there were only droids moving back and forth with fuel lines and new screws and a certain anxious air haloed around their dull metal bodies. Beatrice had asked the other padawans about sensing droids like this, but apparently it didn’t happen and it wasn’t real, so she kept quiet.
Her Master had limped into the hanger with a look almost identical to Beatrice’s and swept her up with a wave of her arm. “Let’s get out of here kiddo. I think we’ve done enough damage for one rotation.”
“Master?”
“Don’t worry about it. Did you pack your books this time?”
Beatrice touched the blocky shapes through the fabric of her duffel, “Yes Master, but wh-”
“Just a feeling, kiddo. Probably nothing.” They walked toward their ship, Beatrice squinting at the back of her Master’s head. Her braids looked a little more unkempt than usual, like someone had tangled a hand in them once, or twice, or many more times than that.
She reached the ship and put her hand against the paintjob – dark skin on polished durasteel – “You learn, as you get older, that some people won’t betray themselves, or what they think they are, no matter how hard you try to convince them.”
“Yes Master.”
Beatrice followed her into the ship, putting her bag in its secure locker and trudging up into the cockpit. She didn’t exactly slump into her co-pilot’s seat, but her Master wasn’t a Jedi for nothing.
“Something wrong?”
Beatrice turned her chair around and pressed a few buttons to test the flight stabilisers, the manoeuvring thrusters. She tapped the fuel gauge, sighed, and shook her head. “Nothing important. It looks like they fixed the rear nitrogen jets this time, Master.”
A pause. “Looks like it.”
And then the hum of the engines, Beatrice settling back into her seat and sweeping her eyes over the hanger bay once last time, checking for stray PIT droids left idle on the launchpad. As she cut from the polished floor up toward the decommissioned ships propped on struts along the walls, her eye caught a flash of sun-kissed brown.
Blinking, just in case, she looked again. Scanning between Lambda-class shuttles folded up into skinny triangles and a T-6 propped a bit lopsidedly with its big fin-shaped body resting on a strut above, to an ETA-2 ACTIS with red and yellow racing stripes.
Beatrice has heard about this particular ship at length, lying on her bed with an astonishing weight resting on her hips – so casual, so breath-taking – listening with her eyes closed to how the ACTIS can reach a top speed of 1,500 kilometres in atmosphere and how its seats are soft leather and how this one, specifically, is fresh off the assembly line and just begging to be assigned to the most gifted pilot on Coruscant.
“That’s me, Bea, in case you need reminding.”
Beatrice did not need reminding. She’d seen this girl fly.
There she was, tucked under one of the raised-up radiator panels that sat on the outermost edge of each wing, her hand pressed to one of the panels and the other resting down by her leg as she crouched, grinning. Beatrice stared at her and thought of the colour yellow and of the feeling deep in the pit of her stomach that they were leaving this time.
She felt like putting that feeling to language would be like putting it up to a flame.
Around her, the starship hummed to life and Beatrice pressed what she needed to press, functioning on autopilot without looking away from the girl crouched on the shiny wing of the ACTIS fighter. Maybe they would give it to her after all, when the war was over and such things were mostly artefacts and mere modes of conveyance.
As the ship lifted away, she watched as the girl, still above her with the decommissioned or not-yet-assigned starships, raised a hand.
She waved, and Beatrice thought again of Force-bonds and what it would be like to feel that hand from lightyears away.
With all her thinking, she forgot to wave back.
And then they were gone, gathering speed to escape from Coruscant’s gravity, the ship getting darker as they turned from the starward side of Coruscant, to wherever it was Jedi were needed.
That night, the Temple fell.
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