“What?”
This is all Fray manages to choke out upon returning to his tent. With good reason: lazing on his own bedroll, ankles crossed and tail-tip flicking, Right sits peering through a flimsy booklet, hand-sewn. It’s seen better days.
Right’s ears react an instant before the rest of them does, which is always the way with them. “I was going to ask you that, actually,” says Right. “Were you maybe holding on to this to burn it?”
Fray is locked in place, feeling himself turn crimson. He can’t get his mouth to work, but his expression says most of it.
“You left your tent flap open,” Right says in answer to his unasked question. “I think I heard that this play has been banned in four cities. It must be something. I’m enjoying this Piku character, the one scared of tieflings? Kind of like you?”
That’s what shoots Fray forward with a growl, vaulting into the tent. He snatches at the book, but Right is too quick, and too tall. They leap to their feet, and with their legs straight they’re a good three inches on him. They just hold the booklet out of reach. A wry look paints their face. “For someone who doesn’t like tieflings, you have pretty strange taste.”
“Give it here!”
“Unless,” Right continues, fending off another lunge with their tail, “it’s some kind of secret fetish. How funny would that be?”
“Right!”
“Fray,” they answer, and knock the play against his forehead. Fray snatches it, but the tiefling does not yield their hold. “Just so you know,” they tell him with that serious face of theirs, “the author’s understanding of tiefling anatomy here is rubbish.”
When Fray yanks on the script, they finally release it. He scrapes his mind for something to say, something to defend himself with, but there’s little that comes to mind. It’s been another long day, and a goblin spell nearly dropped him, and nothing in their supplies was appetizing. He really had been looking forward to curling up in his tent and reading his secret find until sleep took him; it’s easy enough to pretend the tiefling protagonist is human, when he feels too guilty not to. Apart from some details, that is. This, in fact, might be what causes his answer in the face of Right’s statement. “What’d they g, get wrong, then?”
“What?”
In for a penny, thinks a weary Fray, throwing propriety to the wind. “About your anatomy.”
He doesn’t mean Right specifically, of course. This doesn’t stop the party locksmith’s eyes from growing wide, nor the dark green-gray flush from flooding across their face. Their mouth opens and shuts several times, and their gaze flicks toward the tent flap, cut off from them by Fray. Maybe it’s Astarion’s shit-stirring influence, maybe it’s a creeping corruption gone unchecked, maybe it’s leftover amberthroat mead from the celebration some days ago. Maybe it’s simply that no one else can see them. The reason regardless, Fray presses: “The barbs? Or the, the teats?”
The way Right’s ears flatten back and how the light of those luminescent eyes floods their nose and cheeks as they widen tell Fray he’s struck some kind of nerve. Perhaps Right had not gotten that far yet.
“Actually,” he goes on, summoning a self-assurance he doesn’t really feel, “don’t worry ab, bout it. I’ll just ask Karlach.”
Right chokes slightly, and that makes Fray laugh, reflexively, which makes Right laugh, and suddenly they are both laughing, both embarrassed and hot-faced and not looking at one another there in the half-dark of his tent. Right’s laugh is dusty and understated, full of pointed teeth, and the tent feels like it was made just the correct size to hold the two of them.