Lady's shoulder is too bony to make a very good pillow. Étoile's butt is too sore and the chariot's seat is too hard for the ride to be at all enjoyable. There are rope burns criss-crossing all over her tender skin that sting whenever air whispers over them too sharply. And if that weren't bad enough, Jezcha hasn't shut up the whole way back. She bounces back and forth between crowing about her 'amazing haul' and making all sorts of cutesy put-downs for Étoile to pretend to smile at. 

It's impossible to get the rest she so desperately needs right now. But even so? There's nowhere in the world she'd rather be.

"Who's a good girl? Who's my good girl?" Lady softly whispers, just for her.

Étoile's voice is so exhausted from squeaking, giggling, and wailing for help in increasingly less believable ways that she can't even croak out a 'me~', so she has to let the fluttering of her eyes do it for her. She pulls her legs in close to her stomach and leans as hard as she can against Lady's hard but oh-so-relaxingly warm body to take the pressure off of the sorest parts of her body. One of Lady's hands glides through her mussed up hair and slowly untangles the matted clumps into something resembling the golden splendor that made her such an expensive slave in the first place.

And Étoile? She melts. Burns and bruises and silly disheveled costumes and all, she uncoils and unwinds until she's nothing so much as a vaguely Étoile-shaped noodle. Her eyelids grow heavy. It's not an easy thing to act badly on cue, you know? All of the training that goes into presenting a believable face works against you when you suddenly have to sound wooden and clueless and still shut it off and go back to being a real person at a moment's notice. It's even harder when you have to bounce back and forth between "tricking" humans in such a stupid way that they couldn't help but pop out to look insulted and then needing to sound plausibly excited whenever Jezcha got bored and decided the dumb little pet wanted smacking, instead.

But Lady kisses the top of her head and calls her a good girl, and the happy shiver that runs up her spine tells her today was a good day. Lady is safe. Is it too much to hope she realizes how much her [i]lamassie[/i] had done for her today? And Jezcha seemed much more relaxed around her than she'd ever been before. Even Marianne felt happy right now, if only because she was imagining the possibilities a sloppy Jezcha represented. Étoile could possibly have access to new depths of intel soon, if she could keep her silly mask in place. Oh, the fun that they would have...

Her eyes are too heavy to keep open any longer. The pain doesn't matter. The work doesn't matter. Étoile is a good girl, safe in the arms of her Lady. With a sigh and the tiniest of groans, she lets those warm and tender fingers coax her to sleep. And maybe, she thinks as she slips under, she'll be lucky enough to get tonight in Lady's bed.