NOTE: Thanks to the reviewer who let me know that my page breaks were not coming through onto the posted chapters. They should be marked off now and less unreadable. Thanks, Pho.

To my other reviews (and also Pho) thx for driving my chapter writing!

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Chapter 3

Tega stood in the doorway, unable to find words. Jarlaxle just grinned at her in a lopsided sort of way, not even having the grace to look mortified.

"I - Sorry," she said already turning away and going back the way she had come, "I'll just give you..." She didn't bother to finish her sentence, closing the door. She wasn't sure if she should wait or go back to her rooms and work from there. But all of her things were in the office and she didn't know how long they would be. Awkwardly, she waited outside the door, hoping there would not be too many drow who walked passed.

She didn't even know if that should have been embarrassing for Jarlaxle. It seemed like it wasn't. But was a regular drow embarrassed by such things? She hadn't seen his companion's face so she had no gauge on what he was feeling.

It can't have been very comfortable sprawled out on the desk. It was all very well for Jarlaxle who just had to stand there, but the desk was rather hard to be laying over face first. And, Tega suspected, thinking of the polished stone the desk was made out of, very cold. It would have been nice for Jarlaxle to put down a blanket or something.

Had she thought about it a day ago she might have supposed that seeing Jarlaxle undressed from the waist up would not be so different from how she saw him every day. She would have been wrong. It was very different. She had wanted the day to be less awkward than the night before had been. She had gotten up early to make sure she could be entirely settled by the time he made it to his office.

And he was….he was… Wasn't that Kar'Dritch who brought breakfast? Jarlaxle had just been… It wasn't as though she was entirely naive about that sort of thing. She had grown up in a glorified tree house which had not provided much privacy. But she had not expected for it to be thrown in her face so early in the morning. It seemed much more a time for eating pancakes than taking young mercenaries on desks.

She was finding it rather difficult to think about something other than Jarlaxle yelling out with his head thrown back. She felt the tiniest of flutters in her belly and flushed even more red than she had been. She tried instead to construct a list in her head of all the things she wanted to get done that day in order of importance, but she found she wasn't quite able to.

In his office, Jarlaxle tossed Kar'Dritch his pants and began retying his own. The pretty little thing still looked dazed. His hair glittered in the lamplight and Jarlaxle noticed for the first time that he had silver strands woven into it that caught the light prettily.

Jarlaxle didn't bother putting on the rest of his accoutrements, bundling them up and dropping them into his extradimensional pocket. He would have to bathe and rest anyway. Besides, he wanted to remain a little unkempt when Tega came back in.

Kar'Dritch finished rebuttoning his shirt and Jarlaxle grinned at him wolfishly. Kar'Dritch demured, looking down at the floor. Jarlaxle tilted his chin up with his fingers and touched the boy's silver woven hair, letting his fingers run through it.

"Beautiful," Jarlaxle said, making the corners of Kar'Dritch's lips turn up.

Jarlaxle gave him another grin and waved him dismissively out the door. He looked over his shoulder before he left, eyes still lust hazy and affection filled. Jarlaxle preened happily.

On his way out, Kar'Dritch saw Tega waiting in the hall, cheeks still bright and pulling at her sweater with discomfort. He shrugged at her, looking half embarrassed and half proud of himself.

He was gone before Jarlaxle poked his head out the door to fetch Tega, "You can come in now," he laughed.

She didn't look at him, just slid passed into the office and took her seat at her desk.

Jarlaxle returned to his own desk and sat on top of it. It was still cleared off rather tellingly and he was only in very tight pants and nothing else. She did not look up.

He raised his eyebrow in affected boredness, "Are you going to spend the rest of the day not looking at me?"

Rather defiantly she did glance up at him, then finding him mostly unclothed, immediately looked back at her papers, "Is there any way that you could warn me if you are using your office for personal affairs?"

He very nearly retorted that she could take part in them and therefor never be taken by surprise again, but he didn't think that would help the situation.

Tiredness was settling back over him, so he stretched and stifled a yawn. "I'll be back later," he said, shrugging at her even if she wasn't looking, "Would you like me to have Kar'Dritch bring you some breakfast?"

She hunched lower in her seat, "No no, I'm not hungry."

He left her in the office, going back to his quarters to finally get a little rest.

In the office, Tega worked undisturbed for nearly half the day. Left to her own devices it did not take her long to recover. She would simply act as though it had never happened. That would not be difficult. She could have guessed that Jarlaxle spent his free time in such a manner, but it was a little disconcerting to see him with a direct underling. She thought it a little unprofessional.

Irritated at herself for continuing to think about it, she threw herself into her work. With no Jarlaxle to hand her new reports to deal with, she had all the time in the world to work on her new big idea. It wasn't particularly elegant or innovative, but the paperwork had been so long mismanaged that it took a very long time to make headway.

The Bregen D'aerthe's inventory was spread across myriad sheets of awkward notations and meaningless scribbling. It was impossible to tell what they had and what they didn't. Impossible to tell what belonged to them and what miscreant drow were making off with. Jarlaxle might think that a negligible cost but she was quite certain that it would add up to something significant. And it calmed her to take things from chaos into order.

She had been working on this for a few hours before she was interrupted. He knocked before he came in, but didn't wait for a reply.

Kar'Dritch slipped inside with a tray of lunch and a sheepish grin.

Tega forced herself not to fuss with her sweater, "Jarlaxle isn't here," she said in her still struggling drow.

"Yes," he said, speaking slowly for her benefit, "I thought you might be hungry."

She felt mollified, "Well...yes. Is it really among your duties to bring food to me? I thought my favors had run dry with the lexicon."

He laid the tray on her desk, "Finding a tray of food doesn't take all that much doing, and besides, Jarlaxle finds you profitable."

It took her a moment to work through his words, when she did she shrugged rather awkwardly, "It seems he find you profitable as well."

He laughed at grinned, she was happy his skin was so dark so she didn't have to see any sort of evidence of his evening.

He plucked a morsel from her tray and ate it lazily, leaning on her desk, "Does the book help?"

She nibbled at the food, ravenous and touched the lexicon he had brought for her one morning before Jarlaxle had gotten in, "This? Oh, yes, thank you."

He snagged more of her food, grinning at her, although something in his face looked like he was thinking precautiously, "Well people like us should stick together, yes?" He said slowly, as though feeling her out.

"Consorts and accountants?"

He took one of her reports and a spare pen, correcting her grammar. "I'm not yet a consort."

She saw what he was doing and tucked away the reports with anything other than innocuous information into a desk drawer.

"Is that your goal then?" She asked, not looking up from her ledger book.

He shrugged, "Sure," he said just crossing out an entire sentence, "Can't hurt can it?"

"Hmm." was her only reply, not certain if she agreed or disagreed with him.

XXXXX

Khovus had not ever again brought up leaving Tega in a less dangerous home. But she had not forgotten about it. It sprang up in her mind every time she hurt herself trying to do something all of her peers found as easy as breathing. She remembered it every time another elf her age came back from a successful coming of age hunt. She thought of it every time she bathed with the others and saw all of their dark tattoos while her body was pale and unadorned.

She was the oldest one in the tribe who had not completed her hunt and she was not foolish enough to even try. She knew just which plants to eat and which to leave alone, she knew exactly how many meals each kill would last. There were many things that she knew, but how to survive on her own with only a spear was not one of them.

But what would happen if she never completed it? Would she remain a child in the eyes of her people forever? Would she be forced to go and die in the attempt? She felt that there was so much more to be seen and to be understood before she died. She certainly didn't want to fall to a wayward animal.

Perhaps she should ask, really ask, to be left somewhere else. Wouldn't that be more fair to her father. She knew he was growing desperate with her. How much easier would it be for him if his only children were the surefooted twins and hunter extraordinaire Mieka? Sometimes she thought of leaving all on her own, but she couldn't. First of all, she wouldn't survive the trip, having no earthly idea where an established town was. Second, her father wouldn't be able to stomach it. Hadn't her mother left? She had been too young when it had happened to really remember any reason. But she knew her mother had yelled and her father had cried. As much as she dreaded the life it might entail, she worried that it might be her duty to stay right where she was.

But it was getting harder and harder. The twins were taller than her now, and lean and strong. And they had finished their hunt the week before. That had been a blow for her, outpaced by her younger brothers. But they were kind about it, they were unfailingly kind to her, if a little patronizing.

They were slowly becoming nearly as well inked as Meika. She felt guilty for not being happy for their accomplishments. They were her baby brothers, she was supposed to get more joy from their successes than they did.

At that very moment, while she sulked under a tree, her twin brothers dropped down on either side of her, seeming to materialize out of the air, "T!" Shikra beamed, "Come on we're going-"

"-to swim in the river" Drindok finished for him.

Their identicalness had only been exacerbated by their choices in tattoos. Although sometimes earning them at different times, their achievements were similar and their choices in how to demonstrate them on their skin the same. Their dark hair, a gift from their mother, stuck up in the same sort of swirl, their freckles hit the same spots. One body in two iterations.

"No, thank you," she said softly, "You two go on."

They grinned at each other and scampered off. She knew that they had only asked her because they felt like they should. She was no fun to take to the river, she could hardly swim. Besides, it was already getting dark, and she had somewhere she wanted to be when it got dark.

She dusted herself off and glanced around, making sure Meika was not watching. Finding that he was not, she slunk out of camp and a little ways into the forest. She had stolen one of the swings used to get up into their home and gotten it up over the branches of a big sturdy tree. She clambered into it and pulled herself up, carefully getting out and onto the tree.

By the time she was secured in her tree it really was dark out. From her vantage point she could actually see the stars, a sight that was blocked out by foliage from the ground. This was why she had come up here, she wanted to watch the stars.

When she had first started coming up here she had brought discarded hides and strips of bark with light undersides along with ink stolen from the person who did the tattoos. She bided her time until it was well and truly dark waiting for it to get really dark. And then she began.

She worked steadily, enjoying the silence of being on her own and methodically adding stars to her chart. She wondered how best to draw the blurred smudge of each star. But it felt nice to have something she felt like she wasn't so bad at.

Her brother had told her that they moved a little bit every night. She wanted to know by how much and if they moved the same way and if there were any patterns and if they ever got back to where they were one time.

"Tega?"

She twisted around, nearly falling out of her tree. Her father peered at her, brow furrowed.

"What are you doing up here?"

Two equally strong impulses warred at her. She both wanted to conceal her project and show it to him eagerly in hopes of him telling her how good she was at it. In the end, it didn't matter, he reached out of his own accord and took one of her charts.

"What is this?" He turned it this way and that and for a moment she felt a rush of childlike superiority that nearly made her lightheaded.

"The stars," she whispered, looking back up at them.

He didn't speak for a long time, but Tega watched his eyes move slowly over the chart then up to the stars. "Tega," he said slowly, "Describe how the stars look."

She heard the trepidation in his voice but was determined to make him proud of her, "They're bright blurs!" She said defensively, "Like little bright speckles with a bunch of blurs of light."

"You only drew fewer than thirty."

She hunched her shoulders, "Well I didn't know how to draw the big blurs, so I just did the nice clear ones."

He reached out and brushed back her hair. His eyes were clouded with sadness, "Oh, Tega." His voice was so full of disappointment.

"What!" She said, for the first time, perhaps in her life, nearly shrieking, "What! What's wrong!"

"There are so many stars, Tega, and nothing is blurred, it is only your eyes."

She had had just this. She had felt so sure she was doing so well and she hadn't been able to do it again. Her body had let her down so thoroughly she thought she would come apart.

Khovus watched her rock for a moment before howling, the pained shriek of a dying animal.

He pulled her against his chest and she pounded her little fists ineffectually against him.

XXXXX

Tega peered through her spectacles the corrections and crossings out Kar'Dritch had left on her papers in looping handwriting.

"Thank you, Kar'Dritch," she said beginning to rewrite the papers with her grammar improved.

"Just Dritch," he said with shrug.

Of all things, the request to use this short and familiar name stoked a rush of empathy. She looked up at him, "Aren't you tired?"

He laughed, "Exhausted, but I'll have to wait until tonight."

"Why?"

He rubbed a hand through his hair, "The soldier in my barracks I have a deal with to make sure I don't get a knife in my back doesn't have his shift to rest until tonight."

"Is that a deal you have for a particular reason or just a general precaution?"

"There's a soldier in my barracks whose old house got destroyed by mine, he lost an eye. I think he wants me dead."

She looked at him with soft eyes, "You can sleep in my room." She said, holding out the key to her rooms.

He reached out then hesitated, eyeing her warily, "Why?"

She gave him an appraising look, "Well, you have no idea how to do my work, so you can't possibly be harboring dreams of replacing me, we have no personal qualms, I'm not trying to usurp you as Jarlaxle's consort, so there is no reason I'd be in danger from you. And we are both short on allies."

By the end of her speech, he was grinning at her, "So, are we allies then?"

She tossed him the key. He had to stand up and reach all the way across the desk in order to catch it, her aim was so poor. He deftly spun it in his fingers, "Then I'm going to go have a nap." He turned back when he was at the door, "Come get me if Jarlaxe gets up will you? I have to bring him breakfast."

"Sure thing."

He gave her a broad grin and disappeared.

Tega smiled to herself and settled back into work, methodically rewriting her corrected reports. She hummed under her breath, picking occasionally at the food that Kar'Dritch had brought her. Dritch, she corrected herself with the tiniest tingling of contentedness at having one person besides her employer who was, at least, not openly hostile.

She got three more hours to herself before Jarlaxle turned up. She would have never admitted it, but near the end she had sort of missed his company. He did say funny things sometimes, even if she forgot to let him know that she had heard him.

He swung into the office, fully dressed again, boots clicking. He crossed the office and dropped into his plush office chair. He kicked his feet up onto his desk, grinning at Tega.

"You've been working hard I see!"

"Yes, I have reports for you." She said, shifting the tray Dritch that was sitting on top of some of her completed papers.

He took them from her and smiled, "I see you found something to eat without thieving half of what I was brought."

"Oh, yes, Dritch brought some for me." She thought she was getting nearly able to see how Jarlaxle ticked and was happy to find an opportunity to test herself, especially since she thought it might end well for her new ally. It helped that she was sure Jarlaxle wouldn't be overjoyed about it and she was all for that at the moment.

He looked up from his reports, brow furrowed. He carefully took off his hat and put in on the desk before addressing her, "Dritch?"

"Yes," she responded continuing to work back at her desk, "You know, Kar'Dritch."

He gave her a sarcastic look, "Yes, I am familiar with him." he deadpanned. "He brought breakfast...for you?"

"Mmm." Tega idly agreed, erasing the numbers from her slate and doing her math again to check herself.

"Did he mean-"

"No," she cut him off, guessing where he was going, "He knew you were sleeping. He brought it for me. He helped me with my grammar."

"Why..what."

Tega shrugged, still not looking up from her work, "We talk."

"You...talk?" Jarlaxle asked

"Yes," she replied.

"Since when?"

She pretended to ponder for a moment, "Since he gave me my lexicon."

"He's giving you breakfast and gifts?"

"I suppose that he is." She went back to writing for a moment then perked up again in in mock surprise. "Oh!" She said, getting up, as though she had just remembered, "I have to go wake him up."

Jarlaxle looked doubly perplexed.

"I promised I'd get him up when you got into the office." she explained.

"You shouldn't go into the barracks." Jarlaxle said, half rising from his chair.

Tega turned back from the doorway, "Oh, he isn't in the barracks." And disappeared into the hall.

Jarlaxle wasn't entirely sure how to classify the sour feeling in his stomach, but he did not like the proceedings. The young and pretty drow boy brought his accountant lunch and fixed up her grammar? He glowered at her thick, black lexicon. He wondered if they were… no.

Regularly he wouldn't have had much of an issue with the private goings on of his employees, although he would like to know every detail. But he wasn't happy with what he thought was developing. She was too trusting, small and pretty though he was, he was still a drow. And if last night had been an accurate display of her ability to defend herself he felt confident a well armed toddler could assassinate her.

Besides, as the one who had discovered her, and brought her down into the underdark, he thought it only right that if someone were going to discover if her entire pale body blushed as easily as her cheeks did, it was going to be him. Not that he had had any immediate plans of that nature, but it was the principle of the matter.

Down the hall, Tega slipped inside her room. Kar'Dritch was sprawled across her bed, sleeping soundly.

He opened a single eye when she closed the door and let out a disappointed groan. "Already?" He moaned.

"Comfortable?"

He snuggled deeper into the plush comforter and mattress that Jarlaxle had provided her with a grin. She kept a lamp lit in her room and his silver woven hair twinkled in the light. His eyes, when they weren't red with infravision, were a light blue grey that was almost silver of themselves. He was indisputably beautiful. She shuffled, staring at her shoes.

Unwillingly, he pushed himself out of the bed and sat up, running his fingers through his hair to straighten it.

"Thank you," he said only a little stiffly, "For letting me sleep here."

She shrugged and looked down again, away from his sleep mussed hair. She knew that he was in her bed and she shouldn't feel like she was intruding. But wrapped up in the covers he looked soft and intimate. She felt uncomfortable to be part of it.

He stretched so languidly that he belly showed under his shirt before he got up all the way, "Well you have work to do," he said, following her out.

She locked the door behind her and returned to the office without him.

Jarlaxle didn't look up at her when she came back and quietly took her seat at her desk, resuming her work without comment. Jarlaxle, in fact, said nothing until, thirty two minutes later (and she was counting) a timid knock came at the door.

"Come in," He said, sparing a glance at Tega, who did not look up.

Kar'Dritch came in, no longer looking sleepy and fuzzy, but being returned to rather shy and nearly too beautiful. Jarlaxle met him in front of the desk.

"I brought something for you to eat, Captain." He said, coaxing heat out of his final word.

Jarlaxle took the tray and put it unconcernedly on the desk behind him, "Thank you, Kar'Dritch."

He smiled demurely and turned to go. Tega, looking up from her work, caught his eye and gave him a small, encouraging smile.

It had been the keystone to Tega's itty bitty ploy and it worked just like she had wanted it to. Jarlaxle, seeing the private look, pulled Dritch around by the arm, kissing the boy proprietarily, gripping his jaw and burying his other hand in his silvery hair. He released him, growling into his ear just loud enough for Tega to hear him, "Come to my chambers when Narbondel is dimmest."

Tega couldn't tell if it was acting or genuine yet, but Dritch's eyes burned with affection as he nodded, a small smile at his lips.

When he left Jarlaxle sat himself back down and glowered at Tega momentarily, then he softened by degrees, finally saying, "I hope that didn't upset you."

"Why would it have upset me?" Tega asked.

Jarlaxle raised the eyebrow that was over his patched eye, creating an off effect. "Well if you would like me to be more discreet…"

She sighed, "I suppose it is your office, I'll just knock before I come in."

He gave an unconcerned sort of shrug, "If you have no qualms about sharing him, I certainly don't and I'm sure he wouldn't."

Tega sat straight up and blinked. Somehow, it had not crossed her mind that he would reach this conclusion. For a moment she nearly laughed at the absurdity of Jarlaxle's assumption. But she realized with even more confused blinking, that he might not be entirely wrong.

While he may be a little ahead of himself, she wasn't really sure that Dritch would turn her down if she proposed...that sort of arrangement. She might have laughed. She almost did. She was in a situation where a handsome and powerful drow mercenary was asking her opinion on sharing a beautiful drow between their beds.

"I - um - really?" It was all she could come up with to say.

He gave her a coquettish shrug, "Well, do you mind?"

"Um...I suppose… No?"

She wasn't actually going to take him up on it, how could she possibly. The whole idea was ridiculous. She was going pink just thinking about it. She ducked her head down, scribbling at her work and refusing to look back at Jarlaxle so she didn't notice that, now back in his chair, he was scowling rather deeply.