Miss Moony would like to say that she doesn't own Tortall and that she had no help with this story from Miss Wormtail, Miss Padfoot or Miss Prongs.
Basheba is a modified form of "Bathsheba", which means "daughter of the oath", more or less.
Guide to Japanese (Yamani) terms: -Tenshi – angel
-Onii-chan – brother
------- I solemnly swear that I'm up to no good -------
Fighting Demons
She'd known it would have to be this way for a long time. Since Irnai the seer took her aside and told her so. 'No telling,' the seer had whispered in her ear, so Basheba had kept it to herself, and she never told a soul.
And now she is a page, and all around her, there are people jeering and laughing, and taunting her about her brother, who had to send his sister to come and defend his family's honour. Every time they mention Jacen, she thumps them, though, because he can't be here to do it himself. If he finds out (if- when he gets better), he'll thump her back.
The Training Master sometimes watches her, not knowing why she does it. Why she's in trouble every other minute for fighting with the other pages and squires (why she's always got fingernail-marks scarred into her skin, worn in so deep that she feels she'll never get them clean). He thinks she's in trouble, that the boys are trying to force her into things she doesn't want to do, but Basheba keeps quiet, and so he can do nothing.
She goes home in the few months she gets away from training, and spends her days sitting with him, sometimes crying (and the tears dry up and leave crisp tracks down her cheeks that make her face feel funny every time her expression changes – it doesn't do that much these days – and she can't seem to bring herself to wipe them away). When he sleeps, he looks like an angel, a younger version of their papa, with floppy mouse-brown hair which splays on his pillow, creating some kind of shining halo, and skin as pale as the untouched snow banks in the woods at winter. When he's awake, she can see his misty green eyes, Yamani-shaped and beautiful (he's more beautiful than most girls she's known).
He spends his days looking straight through her, talking to his best friend Gideon (staring at some point over her left shoulder, eyes never wavering).
"They found him in the woods, tenshi, staring at the sky, talking to Gideon Hunter."
"How long does this have to go on, Mama? When will I have my onii-chan back?"
And then her break's over, and she has to go back to the palace and endure every slight to his honour that her fellows can toss into the overflowing cauldron of her fury.
While Jacen runs to a sanctuary inside his head, from all the invisible demons that have chased him since Gideon died, his little sister, his sweet protector, fights away all the other demons that are after him (all the ones she can see; all the ones he can't see).
She does it because she's his sister, and she loves him.
It's always sunny, but never too hot. He sits in the sand, building castles with flags and turrets. Gideon sits beside him, building his own fortress, and later they'll make soldiers and mages and immortals from the sand, and they'll stage a battle.
There's a little girl sitting just between him and Gideon, staring at him with sad eyes, almost overflowing with tears, but he doesn't recognise her. She's there sometimes, always sitting in the same place, and he frowns and tries to ignore her every time she comes but once, when he grasps her hand and, giggling happily, he says, 'Ssh; don't tell. This is a secret place.'
She cries in loud, shaking sobs, and swears she'll never tell a soul, and he doesn't know why because all he knows is himself and Gideon and their endless, carefree games in the sand, but she calls him onii-chan, and the name makes him happy.
