WHO: Scorpia and Yasha WHAT: “Do you want to be friends and maybe hang out sometime?” WHEN:Sometime in mid-November! WARNINGS: None, other than a mention of tea made from the graves of dead people. STATUS: Complete!
There really wasn’t any sense in Scorpia thinking that a flower and bug shop was exactly the kind of thing that she and Perfuma could have opened up together in Etheria, Perfuma being all flowers and Scorpia being part scorpion. Not that Scorpia had any particular affinity for bugs like Perfuma did for flowers, and she’d never actually tried eating them before, but still, it was both nice and a little painful to think about. Scorpia never had gotten around to asking Perfuma out on an actual date, though she’d planned on it. It was for the best though, probably, because now she was here, and Perfuma wasn’t, and maybe Perfuma would have said no anyway.
There was no point on thinking of any of that now though, staring at the front of Yasha’s shop, so she shook her head to clear it from any thoughts of Perfuma. She’d liked Yasha when she’d met her at the book store and when they’d talked over the Network, and she hoped they’d become friends, and that wouldn’t happen if she was just going to mope about Perfuma.
She took a deep breath, and sure that she was free from any sort of melancholic thoughts, she entered the shop, spotted the other woman, and smiled. “Hi! Yasha! Scorpia.” In case Yasha had forgotten her name. “Wow, this is a nice shop you’ve got here.”
Yasha was not a small woman, by any means, so even as she was crouching down she took up a good amount of space in the tiny shop, clearly visible to anyone that entered. She perked up like a meerkat on watch, and a smile popped up on her face. “Hi, hello, I remember.” She did - there weren’t a lot of other tall, gorgeous, white-haired women in Vallo, and none that she could remember that had pinchers for hands. Yasha was a fan.
She looked around her little shop, pleased smile on her face as recent fond memories popped up, of setting it up with Beau and the others, of Ziggy and Barth spending time here before they had to go home. It made her happy and sad all at once, and if she continued down that line of thought, she’d end up crying. Again.
So Yasha wiped her hands on her flower-y apron and powered through. “Thank you, I had a lot of help making it-- this nice. Are you um, looking for anything in particular?”
“Oh, not really,” Scorpia said, remembering too late that this was a shop and not just somewhere to socialize. Etheria didn’t really have a lot of shops. The Crimson Wastes did, and people there seemed to get pretty annoyed if you just stood around taking up space without buying anything though. “I was thinking my apartment could use some flower though? Maybe something pink? And easy to care for?”
She had a couple of small plants in her windowsills already, but she didn’t think they’d have flowers.
“Oh-um--” The gardening part of Yasha’s life was still very new to her, but she’d had years of flower knowledge and research, from the time of Zuala’s death to putting all of her collected flowers on the grave. Early on was where her appreciation for them really began, but growing them was a new matter all together.
Still, she brushed her hands off on her apron and gave Scorpia a gentle smile. “I have a few things that might work well in fall and through winter. Have you ever seen a Christmas cactus?” She gestured to the one blooming bright pink on a nearby ledge, it’s interesting, leaves drooping with growth. “They’re quite fun and will bloom a few different times of the year. I have some pink amaryllis flowers too potted up, if you want to go with something a little simpler.”
"I haven't seen one, no," Scorpia said. Most of the flora and a lot of the animals were different in Etheria, but the Christmas Cactus was pretty, and Scorpia felt some sort of affection for it. Possibly because it’s leaves looked a little like her shoulders. “I’ll take that one if it’s alright.”
Yasha lit up like she supposed a Christmas tree would - she’d looked up a few of the upcoming holidays for this world just because she was curious. “It’s more than alright. I’m happy to trust it in your hands.” She reached behind a nearby table and pulled out a spool of pink ribbon. “They’re easy to take care of, keep it indoors on a window ledge with some sunlight, and keep the soil moist but not soggy wet.”
She took the ribbon and tied a jaunty, cheerful bow around the pot. “And you can trim back it’s leaves at the joints if it gets too long or out of control. Should brighten up any room.” As if it was a secret, Yasha leaned in a little. “I also recommend talking to it and giving it a nice name, that seems to keep the plant spirits high.”
Scorpia took a moment to admire the bow and how well it matched the flowers. “I promise I’ll take really good care of it. I name and talk to all of my plants,” Scorpia said, and then added, almost shyly, “I sing to them sometimes too. My friend back home, Perfuma, she told me how much they enjoyed that.”
Yasha brightened up at the mention of the singing to the plants, she didn’t do that much but there was the bone harp stashed away at home that she was known to pull out and play for them. “That sounds-- nice.” Her awkward shuffle had nothing to do with Scorpia and everything to do with Yasha not really sure if she was coming on too strong, as she had a tendency to do.
“Your friend Perfuma talks to plants? My friend Jester does sometimes too. I mean- and can understand them. She has a spell.” As much as she wanted to tell tales of Henry Crabgrass, Yasha couldn’t quite let herself go down that road just yet.
“She does! I mean, I don’t think she talks to them like you and I are doing. Well, she does, but they probably don’t talk back to her like that. But she still understands them. She has plant magic, so she can make flowers appear out of thin air, and she can make plants that are already around grow bigger and do what she wants; she used some vines to tie me up once.”
Talking about Perfuma was bittersweet. On one hand, Scorpia was really happy talking about her. It made her feel close to her even though Perfuma wasn’t here. But on the other hand, it made her miss her even more, and Scorpia didn’t want to get sad about it, so it was probably best to try to move past that particular topic.
She shifted, tapping the tips of her pincers together. “Can I be honest though? I didn’t really come here for a plant - though I love it and can’t wait to take her home with me. But I was hoping that uhm… maybe we could be friends? I’m probably doing this all wrong, I’m not really that great at making friends, really.”
“She sounds like she’d fit right in.” Yasha responded quietly, but she picked up on the topic shift, and was fine going along with it as Scorpia needed. She’d always been good at being quiet support to others, even if sometimes she was a little oblivious.
The question did surprise her, and it probably was plain as day on her face when her eyes widened. It was - honestly - a pretty good way of going about it. Yasha had only met the Mighty Nein because of Mollymauk, and Molly had pretty much just adopted her, as he did everyone he met that he found interesting. The Mighty Nein were her family now, but not by Yasha’s own doing.
A pink flush spread across her pale white skin. “I’d like that, if we were? You don’t have to be great at anything to be friends with me, I don’t really know how to do this either. Everyone usually just tells me we are friends and that is fine with me.”
Perfuma would fit right in. But, of course, Perfuma fit in pretty much anywhere, so that was hardly a surprise.
She beamed at Yasha’s answer though, some of her nervousness easing. “That’s how it seems to work with everyone else too.” Though, it hadn’t worked out so well with Catra that first time. Even if she and Catra were good now, Scorpia was a little wary of just assuming friendship anymore. “But I’m pretty great at a couple of things. I make pretty good tea, and I give great hugs.”
Yasha gave Scorpia a fond smile at that. “I like tea. I have a friend back home that makes it from dead people. It’s really very good.”
Hugs weren’t something she was particularly accustomed to, however, since there was a very small list of people she would have allowed just a year ago, and an even smaller list of people that would have dared. “Maybe sometime we can have tea and you can show me a hug? When we get to that point?”
Scorpia grimaced, recoiling slightly, before she could help herself, though she quickly, and poorly, tried to cover it up. “Oh. Dead people tea… That… That sounds like it would be very… uh…” She searched for an appropriate adjective. “Very interesting. So do they just… uh… How, exactly, do they make the tea from dead people?”
Yasha’s laugh was a small wispy thing. She liked thinking about Caduceus, even if she missed him and his gentle giantness a great deal. Though some of that was because he actually rivaled her in height and she liked that too. “I don’t know. He manages a graveyard and is good with nature. It might come from the moss that grows on the graves? It’s very good, I promise.”
“Oh, well, that’s not so bad,” Scorpia said, still not sounding entirely certain that it didn’t sound so bad, though it certainly sounded better than any of the options her imagination hadn’t quite let her think about. “I’d love to have tea with you sometime though! It wouldn’t be dead people tea though, would it? Not that there’s anything wrong with dead people tea.” Scorpia just wasn’t sure if she was ready for tea from a graveyard just yet. It sounded like a good way to get haunted by the ghost of some sort of horrible princess or something.
“I don’t have any dead people tea here, don’t worry.” Yasha did have roasted crickets though, but suspected they wouldn’t make very good tea.
She glanced around the shop, it was quiet and had been quiet, and she had plans to meet Beau in a little more than an hour in the city. Back to Scorpia, Yasha sounded hopeful. “Would you like some company back to the city? I’m going to meet Beau and I have a little time before that, we could get uh-- normal people tea on the way?”
Scorpia tried not to look too relieved at that. She was sure that the tea really was good, but probably only if Scorpia didn’t have to think about how it was made.
“I’d like that lot,” she said. “I bet you know some really great places in the city to get tea.”
Would you look at that? She’d made a friend all on her own.