The Consummation

Disclaimer: All rights to Tamora Pierce.

A/N: A little loopy, and for that I am sorry.

Beka came home one day very tired. It had been such a tiring day.

She didn't even know if she would have the strength to write every single thing that had happened to her in her journal in minute detail.

As she climbed the stairs to her room, she noticed Rosto at her door, bending down to leave another vase of gillyflowers at her door.

Beka was tired of this. "I'm so tired of this!" she said to Rosto. "Let's just get on with the canoodling already!"

Rosto was surprised. "But I'm a rusher! I'm the King of the Rogue and you're a Dog! And you haven't grown enough as a person yet!"

"Now you listen to me," Beka hissed, jabbing her Peter Pointer in his face, "you started this! We're having sex right now whether you like it or not!"

She dragged him into her room and slammed the door.

Rosto was trying to bargain now. "What if I just let you see me naked?"

"Sex, Rosto."

"Okay, what if I just see you naked?"

They started to undress. And, as you know, people of the Lower City keep a lot of secret things under their clothes, so it took a long time to take it all off.

Beka tossed her clothes and hidden knives into a pile in the corner. Rosto added about twenty knives, two loops of wire, a boomerang, a wooden club, and a bottle of sunscreen. "For protection," he said.

Beka looked at the pile of knives. "You are pretty angular. Alright, let's get on with it. I haven't got all night."

Five minutes later:

Rosto and Beka were sitting up in bed with the sheet over them, Beka looking very cross, Rosto looking at the wall. "I can't do it with the pigeons watching," he said.

"Well, then maybe we just aren't meant to be together."

"Beka, be reasonable!"

"Where I go, the pigeons go! You can't have one without the other!"

"Fine," said Rosto, on the verge of tears. "I deserve better than this, you know. I do everything I can to make you happy, but you treat me like trash! Well, I'm not trash."

Beka stared at him with her mouth open.

Rosto leapt out of bed and raised his chin. "There's someone out there who'll love me for me, just the way I am! Maybe I'll have to search for a long time, maybe I'll never find her, but I know she's out there, waiting for me!"

Beka sighed and put her face in her hands. "I understand Rosto."

"I've just never been enough for you," he whispered, stroking her hair. Then he reassembled himself (clothes, knives, hand grenades), and walked out the door.

Just as he reached the stairs, Beka called out to him, "Wait!" She ran to the door, wrapped in a sheet, pigeons on her shoulders. "Rosto…" They looked deeply into each other's striking and unusually-coloured eyes for a long moment. "I hope you find her, a woman to love you," Beka whispered, "I hope you do find love."

Rosto nodded. He walked down the stairs and out the front door, where he bumped right into a beautiful woman and they were really embarrassed but attracted to each other and after a natural progression to intimacy, they got married and had ten children and she convinced Rosto to give up his life of crime and become a florist. Some people thought he was kinda gay because of that.

The End.