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“Okay, but what if they are just travelers like us, stranded and afraid? Shouldn’t we help them out? The two of us are more than able to fend for ourselves. Even if they turned out to be Treasure Hoarders, we’d make quick work of them!” Barbara protests, trying her best not to raise her voice above a whisper.
“Barbara, trust me, I know their kind. Besides, the Millelith are more than impatient for our arrival. We must preserve our strength,” Rosaria whispers back, annoyance biting through her tone. “Just trust me on this one, please.”
Barbara’s eyes travel back and forth between the so-called merchants and their broken carriage, and Rosaria’s insistent look. She sighs.
“Okay. But let us send someone to check in on them when we arrive at Wangshu Inn.”
“Sure,” Rosaria replies with a sigh.
Barbara turns to the stranded group. “I apologize, but we are eagerly awaited at our destination. We cannot suffer any delay. We will send for you whenever we reach a Millelith outpost! I hope you can understand.”
“Of course, milady,” replies a guy who seems to be their leader. His tone is soft and smooth, but bitterness still shows through it. “Farewell, be careful on the road.”
“Farewell!” Barbara replies.
The rest of their day of travel goes by without a hitch. They reach Wangshu Inn at sundown, and book a room for two and dinner. However, Barbara appears pensive and distracted during the meal, and Rosaria doesn’t need her to say anything to know why. As they get back to their room, she finally says it.
“You’re still thinking about those merchants, aren’t you?” she asks.
Barbara turns towards her and pouts. “It’s not that I don’t trust you, or the Millelith, when you say that they’re very likely to be Treasure Hoarders who would have robbed us for every single Mora. It’s just that the possibility, however slim, that someone in need of help was left to their own devices because I didn’t want to take a risk weighs heavily on me.”
Rosaria cups Barbara’s cheek. “It’ll be fine. Someone else will have crossed their path by now, or they’ll have a solution figured out. Now get to sleep, we have more travelling to do tomorrow.”
“Fine,” Barbara replies, but it’s obvious that she’s upset.
Despite her agitation, a while later, she’s fast asleep. Rosaria hasn’t dressed down yet, and doesn’t intend to. Instead, when she’s sure Barbara won’t wake up, she gets up, grabs her spear and slips out into the night.
The way back to the place where they crossed paths with the pretend-merchants is not too long under the cover of darkness and without their haul of medical supplies. In about an hour, she’s made it back to the site. Footsteps are still there, along with the trail of their cart, leading away from the road and into a hiding spot behind a small cliff. From a distance, she hears laughter—not quite the voices of stranded, scared travelers who were hoping to be rescued or helped by someone but weren’t.
Rosaria hides behind the rock formation and bides her time. Her arm itches to strike, but she waits until the noise dies down, until they’ve fallen asleep. She thinks she’s about to get away with waiting unnoticed, until one of those idiots stumbles out of the camp to go for a piss, precisely where she’s hiding.
The guy doesn’t quite know what hit him.
She doesn’t kill him, of course—but she ensures he won’t be enjoying the next couple of months. Pinned to the collar of his shirt, a Treasure Hoarder insignia confirms her suspicions. She doesn’t get much time to dwell on getting the first man down, though—the yelp of surprise the guy let out when she hit his head with the pole of her spear alerted the others. In a matter of seconds, she’s surrounded by four more rather angry, but half-drunk Treasure Hoarders. There’s no contest here, they’re no match for the biting, ruthless precision of her strikes.
In a matter of minutes, the fight is over. Rosaria stares over her enemies, strewn about on the ground, groaning in pain. There’s no blood spilled, but such was not her intention—only broken bones and nasty bruises. Satisfied, she then goes towards their camp to find rope to tie them up with, something that’ll hold until the Millelith can find them in the morning. As she’s rummaging about their supplies, though, something cold and biting is pressed to her neck, just above her collar.
“Not a move, or I slit your throat,” hisses a disgruntled man’s voice.
Rosaria sighs. The man’s breath reeks of cheap beer. She eyes her polearm on the ground nearby, but her hand surreptitiously slips down to her thigh to grab a not-even-truly-concealed dagger. Before the man realizes she moved, she strikes quickly in his abdomen, he grunts, she flips around and throws him on the ground. She grabs her polearm and points its tip towards the man.
“ You better not move, or you’re dead,” she spits out.
As the man is starting to beg, she feels something warm and wet seeping into her dress’s collar. Reflexively, she touches it with her hand; then, when she looks at her glove, the fingers are now bright crimson. She’s unsure what to do, but the man is losing blood quickly; not that she wanted to kill him, but…
Soon, he appears too feeble to be any menace. Before his accomplices can come back to their senses, Rosaria flees, annoyed and upset that what should have been an easy job turned quite dangerous in the blink of an eye due to her own overconfidence and lack of vigilance.
On her way back towards Wangshu Inn, she crosses paths with a Millelith patrol of two soldiers.
“Ma’am, can we help you, are you injured?” one of them asks.
“No, I’m fine. But if you go further up to where I came from, you’ll come across an encampment of knocked out Treasure Hoarders. You'll find money and wares they’ve stolen from unsuspecting travellers in the last few days or weeks. There’s at least five of them,” Rosaria replies without stopping on her tracks. “Goodbye,” she adds as she passes them by, so as to signal she has no intention of stopping for a chat.
Truth is, she feels the world wanting to spin around her, and struggles to maintain a steady breath as she runs back to the inn. She hates to admit it, but she needs Barbara’s help.
It’s a sudden ‘thud’ against the door that wakes up Barbara from her dreamless slumber. The first thing she notices is the cold, empty bed space beside her, where Rosaria should have been.
The second thing she notices as the door opens is Rosaria’s silhouette. And the third is the blood soaking her dress’s bib.
“Rosaria!” she squeaks, barely managing to keep her voice just a shy bit above a whisper. “Oh, Archons above, Rosaria! What happened?!”
She springs out of bed and runs to the door. It’s evident by Rosaria’s demeanour that she’s the one who’s injured; this is not someone else’s blood. She doesn’t protest when Barbara drags her to the table and chair in the room and brings forth her Catalyst.
The only response the other nun gives to her questions is a groan.
Her eyes look glassy, her breathing ragged. This is… really bad.
“Oh, Rosaria,” Barbara whispers to herself as blue light appears at her fingertips.
Rosaria hisses in response as the blue light moves from Barbara’s fingers to her throat, sinking into the open wound in her neck. Barbara doesn’t cringe at the sensation of blood on her hands, instead keeping her jaw tightly wound and her eyebrows knitted tight, deep in focus as she pours all of her energy into the healing spell. She bites her lips and sighs as the wound stubbornly resists being closed, but after a deep inhale and a long exhale, she manages to close it.
Only then does part of her relax.
“Rosaria, where did you go? What happened?” she asks again as she walks to the tiny washroom to clean her hands.
“Do I really have to tell you?” Rosaria scowls.
Barbara looks at Rosaria above her shoulder as she turns off the faucet. “After how much you insisted on keeping our strength to aid the Liyue Qixing, I think you owe me an explanation.”
Rosaria slowly gets up from the chair, leaning on the table for balance. Then, methodically, she starts removing her headdress and her clothes. It’s a long few beats of silence before she deigns answering Barbara’s question.
“I wanted to verify if those merchants we passed by were really Treasure Hoarders.”
“Rosaria!” Barbara exclaims. She pouts. Then she sighs. Then she walks up to Rosaria to help her get out of her dress. “You know it’s safer when I’m with you and I can watch your back. Do you not trust me? Am I not strong enough?” She lands a kiss on Rosaria’s exposed shoulder, arms wrapping around her waist.
It’s Rosaria’s turn to sigh. “It’s not that. I just don’t want you to get hurt.”
“But as a result, you ended up getting hurt… Is that not worse if I’m not around to heal you?” Barbara says, leaning against Rosaria’s back.
Rosaria whirls around, taking over the task of unbuckling her dress and slipping the sleeves off her shoulders. “It rarely ever happens. I don’t need you to protect me.”
“I don’t need you to protect me either,” Barbara snaps back, in a rare fit of exasperation.
Hands on her hips, she glares at Rosaria. She knows this pattern, this song and dance. Rosaria does not want to be coddled or protected or helped. Babara does not want to be treated like a child. It’s always the same cycle—has been this cycle, ever since they started becoming closer and closer and going on trips and missions for the Church together.
Barbara sits down on the bed, and then continues. “I don’t want to get mad at you, Rosaria. I… I care about you. It worries me to no end to know that you’re taking such imprudent risks on a regular basis when I’m not around, when you go out at night, to help out the Knights or on solo missions. I still let you do it because I know you’re capable, you don’t need to prove that to me. I trust you. I need you to trust me in return… And let me help where I can, when you’re out of your depth.”
Her eyes are starting to prick at the corners. She takes a deep breath, trying to contain the shaky, clammy, uncomfortable emotion that wants to grab her by the throat.
“I…” Rosaria starts, and then she stops. She finishes slipping her dress down, revealing pale expanses of skin marred with battle scars. She sighs. “I’m… I’m sorry,” she says, the words seeming almost painful to utter out loud.
Silver moonlight bathes her naked silhouette. It’s always Rosaria’s habit to sleep in the nude, but rarely does Barbara get to see it on display like this. Barbara has always slept in loose-fitting, cotton sleepwear. The simple white shift dress she’s wearing right now is no different, so seeing Rosaria so confident and uncaring as she puts away her garments, washes her face, neck and chest of the blood she lost, feels a bit strange. Still, she should be used to it by now; it’s already been a few months since they started sharing a bed.
“It’s fine,” Barbara finally replies to Rosaria’s apology. “Don’t do it again, if you’re sincere.”
“I never lie,” Rosaria replies.
“I know.” The slightest hint of a smile tugs at the corner of her lips. “Now come here, let us sleep.”
Minutes later, Barbara finds herself snuggled up against Rosaria’s back. The faint smell of tobacco clings to her hair, but there’s a hint of copper, too, from the bleeding. Even if Barbara is still upset, this, this she finds comfort in. She wraps her arm around Rosaria’s waist again, and soon her consciousness drifts away to the realm of dreams. They sleep soundly, tangled in the sheets, until daylight comes.