I just finished Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett and it stirred some art in me

These two are Polly Perks, the main character/narrator, and Maladicta

From the start, their country of Belgravia is at war; basically every able bodied young man they’ve got is either missing, dead, or wounded. Polly, intending to find her brother, decides to masquerade as a man and join the company that he had the year previous.

She runs from home and joins a small band of other recruits—similarly green, similarly tiny and unfamiliar with weapons, ‘farmboys’—aaand it turns out that the entire regiment of recruits are women who dressed up as men to join the army. And then they proceed to outmaneuver everyone they meet (for the most part) and kick some serious ass.

Anyway, as for these two—Maladicta spends much of the book teasing and grinning at Polly, and Polly, for her part, expresses concern for Maladicta once she starts going kinda out of it (she’s a vampire—and has taken a pledge not to drink blood [hence the black ribbon on her chest] but she replaced that addiction with coffee…which gets stolen on the way to battle and Bad Things Happen)

The book ends with the pair of them pretty much sailing off into the sunset to continue adventuring together—the only girls from the regiment to do so—and Polly winks at Maladicta HOW AM I NOT SUPPOSED TO SHIP THIS

Anyway it’s a good book, you should check it out, and this totally counts as my first contribution to Femslash February okay