Work Text:
Beauregard Lionett was a used name. A name given to a young and upstanding heir to the Lionett family, a name etched into an ostentatious headstone years before it was used again.
Beaureguard.
She preferred Beau. “Beauregard” was reminiscent of her father’s sour breath and ill temperament, her mother’s false hopes and unabashed disdain for Beauregard Lionett Number Two.
She had often wondered, alone at the Cobalt Soul, if there had been anything she could’ve done to please her parents. She had tried. Maybe it was just her luck that Beauregard Lionett One, the perfect and tragically lost son, the dream of every mother and pride of every father— had been her brother.
Could things have been different if she was given her own name? If every time her father thought of her, his thoughts didn’t cling to the image of the real Beauregard, didn’t compare the two and find reality so unsatisfactory?
It wasn’t that Beauregard was born less than Beauregard One (she refused to believe it, no matter how untactfully her mother alluded to it), it was that she was hot iron ore poured into a delicate ceramic mold, too much, too different. Iron in itself is valuable– if handled properly, and while ceramics are classic and lovely, they can never be iron, and iron can never be ceramic.
They put Beau in frilly little dresses befitting of a noble little lady, and gave her pink bed sheets and little heeled shoes. That was about the end of the differences in the rearing of Beauregard One and Beauregard Two.
They gave her his old books to study from, his old toys, his old room splattered with pink to make them feel they actually hadn’t tried to replace Beauregard One.
Every crumb dropped, stocking ripped, tear shed, Mother was there with her red painted lips and disgusted eyes.
“Your brother would have never done something like this!”
Beauregard was not Beauregard. Her parents had a hard time understanding this, so she helped them see with late nights and stealing and making friends with the sort whose whereabouts could be traded for with 10,000 gold and a kiss from the mayor‘s wife.
Every passing day, the disgust grew and grew. Her father flicked her head with his gargantuan knuckles when she “forgot her manners” or “spoke commonly”.
He called her a disgrace to the name, a shame to his poor Beauregard, the biggest regret he had.
At the height of her abandoning dresses for pants, dallying with women (which she’d thought would have pleased her parents since it was the only legitimate way she was similar to Beauregard One), and selling the family wine by the wagon load, she was disposed of.
Two, in shock blue gowns materialized by her bedside one night and yanked her sleeping form from the warmth of her covers. She’d been scared, she’d fought. She’d screamed, expecting her parents to burst in to lash her for causing such a disturbance then see their daughter being kidnapped by rouges, but instead, they dragged her down to the living room and she’d had the pleasure of seeing Mother and Father wrapped tight in their robes on the sofa, watching Beau fight against the two strangers as they dragged her out the front door, arms crossed and a steaming pot of tea on the table in front of them.
She tried not to, but always thought of her parents faces on that night— hard and disgusted at the commotion.
Much later at the Cobalt Soul, a monk handed her a letter with a large lion stamped in the red wax seal. She debated throwing it away immediately, but curiosity got the best of her. It was her father’s handwriting.
”We now have a son.”
Code for “We do not need you, do not contact us, you have been replaced.”
Beau tore the letter into two halves and launched it out a window. She wondered if his name would be Beauregard too.