Disclaimer: It all belongs to Tamora Pierce.
She falls asleep before him that first night together after the Midwinter ball, leaving him looking down at her and thinking about how much she had changed since he had first met her.
It took a solid year for her to stop looking like she didn't have enough to eat. He didn't know if her mourning kept her from eating, or if she really had had so little to eat in Saren. But he knew that she was too skinny when she first came to Tortall.
Thayet wore her grief elegantly. It was part of the fabric of her life, and she accepted her mother's sacrifice and continued gracefully forward. But Buri, Buri wore the burden of her family's death as though it was her own. As thought it were sandbags strapped across her shoulders and tied to every one of her limbs, dragging her down, dragging her back. As though she too had to die for her mistress.
Gradually, she opened up. She shook off the weight. Thayet marrying Jonathan helped. Suddenly, he and all of the Own were helping bear Buri's weight. She didn't have to watch out for Thayet on her own. She realized there were other options, that there was life beyond Saren and her past.
But before that, she seemed crushed. Her grief and her burden of care were so tied together, that if was impossible to say which affected her more. He'd noticed it even in the inn, and it made him want to seek her out, to give her a chance to be a teenager again rather than an embattled old guard.
They'd had their first conversation on the boat. Alanna had run out on them to puke over the side, and Raoul chuckled and told Buri to stay put. "Alan always—I mean Alanna always gets seasick. It's best to leave her alone."
"What was it like?" Buri asked. "Finding out your friend was a woman?"
"It was—" Raoul paused. He'd never really talked about this with anyone. After all, everyone else who mattered had already known before she'd been exposed to the whole court. "It was the single most confusing moment of my entire life, and then suddenly it wasn't. Suddenly it all made sense. All of her peculiarities, Jon's sudden lack of interest in all Court women, George's winks, Gary's cursed veiled hints of surprises coming my way. I thought at first it meant I didn't know her, and then I realized that it didn't. She was the same person she'd always been."
Buri smiled at his response, and he realized he'd just passed some test he didn't know he'd been taking. She'd studied him in silence, making him uncomfortable, so he left her to have a drink with a sailor. Now as he watches her sleep, he wonders how the many years between then and now would have been different if he hadn't left her standing alone on the deck of that ship.
Author's Note: Let me know what you think. Should I do some more Buri/Raoul fics? I have another one already written, so if you ask me nice I'll post it! For some reason the pair of them are smooth writing for me at the moment, so even in the midst of finals I can probably churn out a few of them in the next week until I have time to update again on Zenobia. As always, please review!