Chapter Text
and i don't know how you show such gentle disregard
for the ugly in me that i see that for so long i took so hard.
but i truly believe that you see the best in me;
i'm enough for your love and the thought sets me free in you.
/
It becomes a bit of a routine.
Not a daily thing or even weekly, but when they can. When they have some downtime, it’s secrets and shots. She’s never really talked to Nott this much before, having written her off as hard to talk to. She is, sometimes. Nott is loud, quick to judge, and a big interrupter. But she’s a mother, too; she can turn on a dime and suddenly she only has sensitive and safe words to offer. Beau supposes that’s the quiet half of the Chaos Crew—something has to balance out all the pranks and near arrests.
(Still. What you say can be just as chaotic as what you do).
/
She likes to think that as much as Nott has drawn thoughtfulness and honesty out of her, Beau has helped Nott appreciate silence and calm. Beau hasn’t worried about Nott and Caleb running off together for a long time, but even so she rarely sits still. Nott is always keeping an eye on other patrons in a bar, or people in a crowd; she rarely walks anywhere, preferring instead to leap from shadow to shadow. She’s so sneaky that sometimes Beau thinks she must be creating the shadows.
Beau finds herself taking watches with Nott more often. Jester brushes it off the first few times but when it becomes a regular occurence, she starts throwing Beau sad looks. It almost works; Beau almost caves. But night is a dangerous time, when the moon is bright and the world is asleep. That’s when Beau is at her softest, when Jester could absolutely bowl her over. (Truthfully she could do it anytime, but at night Beau would let her). So Beau makes sure they’re still regular best friends during the day, and on nights when Beau isn’t keeping watch. But ever so slightly, a wall begins to rise.
/
“Okay, you owe me a secret if I can climb up that tree in under ten seconds.”
“Five seconds.”
“Seven seconds.”
“...Alright.”
Beau is off and running before Nott even stops talking, really. She counts in her head as she jumps from branch to branch, making sure she gets at least two branches further before she gets to the next number. It’s a close call, but Beau touches the top of the tree just as Nott whisper-yells, “Seven! Fuck!”
She takes a bit longer coming down, sliding where she can and jumping where she has to. Her hands are never scraped or calloused anymore, having taken so much wear already. Still, she claps the dirt off of them.
“Alright, spill,” she says, sitting back down next to Nott.
Nott takes a long sip from her flask and pretends to think. “One time, when he was just a baby, a little bit of Luc’s pee got into one of Yeza’s experiments and it almost blew up his lab.”
“Wh—okay, one: that’s pretty fucking funny, but two: that’s not a secret. It’s just a really good story.”
“Yeza doesn’t know what really happened; he thinks he just miscalculated a chemical ratio.”
Beau narrows her eyes. “Hmm, that’s...yeah, okay. Whatever. That works.”
“Perfect,” Nott mutters. She rubs her hands together and that never precedes anything good. “Now it’s my turn.”
“You’re definitely not gonna make it up that tree faster than me.”
“No, no; of course not.” Nott brandishes her crossbow and Beau, in spite of her monk training and reflexes, flinches and leans back. “Calm down, I’m not going to shoot you.”
“Okay, well, you have before. I’m just sayin’.”
“After all we’ve been through since then, give me a little credit.”
“After all we’ve been through? Absolutely the fuck not.”
“Alright, alright.” Nott swings her crossbow up, stopping a little when it lines up with Beau’s face, and eventually settles on pointing at a pinecone hanging from a tree about a hundred and fifty yards away. “One secret if I hit it, one secret and one answer if the pinecone sticks to the tree behind it.”
Beau cranes her head, assessing the angle the shot would require. “Okay, sure.”
Nott laughs to herself and steadies her weapon against her shoulder, taking a few slow breaths before firing.
Of course it sticks in the tree.
Nott hisses in triumph. “Okay, okay.” She cups her chin in her hands and opens her eyes wide. “Spill.”
“Uh…” Beau picks at what little grass is still trying to grow in this cold weather. “I, uh, I have a brother.”
“What! Hang on, hang on. You’re going through a period of deep emotional turmoil, and your secret is that you have a brother?”
“I could have two turmoils, you ever think of that? I could have seven turmoils! You don’t know!”
Nott grunts, high-pitched and raspy. “Fine. That’s fine. I still get a question.”
“Ask away; I don’t know anything about him so I won’t be able to tell you much.”
“No, I don’t care about that.” Nott squints and leans her face closer to Beau’s. “When you said before, that your feelings about Jester weren’t serious—were you lying?”
“Come on, man.” Beau turns away, blinking back tears against the moonlight. Nott’s sharp, spindly fingers scratch their way up her back in an attempt at a comforting gesture. “I mean, you know, you’d never be able to tell if I was lying without asking because I’m that good, right? I’m genuinely that good. But yeah.” She shrugs. Nott holds on. “‘Course I was lying.”
Nott doesn’t say anything. Beau can hear her lean back for a second before pressing into her side, Nott’s ears twitching against Beau’s shoulder like a cat.
When Fjord and Caduceus wake and ask them if anything happened, Beau and Nott both lie.
/
Everything explodes when they get Yasha back.
Beau catches Jester watching her more and more—in the first few hours, as they deal with a brainwashed Yasha; during the first week, as they help her through her guilt; at the end of the month, when they make it back to the Xhorhaus for a much-needed rest. It takes three of them just to convince Yasha to even go into her room. Jester keeps her eyes on Beau almost the whole time.
She watches her during the day and waits for her at night. Sleeping in their room has never been tenser. Beau can feel Jester’s eyes on her back and she thanks her training for the ability to fall asleep quickly. She’s legitimately asleep by the time Jester would work up the courage to ask questions. It feels bad lying to her friend, even if this isn’t really lying. But worse than Jester rejecting her romantically would be losing her entirely, and that can’t happen if nothing changes. Beau works as hard as she possibly can to ensure it doesn’t.
Some things are just out of her control, in the end.
Jester, it seems, has been doing more at night than just hoping Beau won’t fall asleep. Almost two months after they get Yasha back, and just when Beau is about to drift off, Jester turns on the light by her bed.
“Beau!” she whispers aggressively.
Beau turns onto her back, covering her eyes with her hand. “Jes, it’s late. I was almost asleep.”
“I know; you had, like, thirty seconds left, I think.”
Beau sits up just a little. “Have you been timing me?”
“You snore, you know. I think that’s what happens when you make yourself go to sleep instead of just letting it happen.”
“I snore at the exact same time every night?”
“Duh.”
Beau smiles in spite of herself. Jester gasps almost immediately.
“See, that! God, I missed that. You haven’t smiled at me like that in a long time.”
Oh, fuck—they’re just diving straight in.
“Oh, fuck,” Beau huffs. She drops her head to her pillow and sighs, lifting up her blanket after a few moments. “Okay, come on, let’s do this.”
Jester giggles and hops up onto Beau’s bed. Instead of cuddling next to her, however, she drags the blanket to the end of the bed and sits cross-legged facing Beau. Beau pulls herself up and mirrors Jester’s position at the opposite end.
“You gonna let me go cold?” Beau teases.
Jester grins. “I’m always cold, you know that. I need more blankets than you.”
“Right, my mistake. How could I forget?”
Jester smiles to herself this time, soft and sad. “It kind of feels like you did, though. Forget about me.”
This is exactly what Beau was afraid of. Thirty seconds more and she would have been in the clear. Instead, she’s melting.
“Forget you? Jester, I—”
“Do you like Yasha?”
“What?” Beau sits up straighter, scoffing and shaking her head. “Of course I like Yasha; she’s family, she’s part of the Nein.”
“No, I don’t mean like that. I mean, do you like her romantically.”
“Oh.”
“Because I thought that’s what it was,” Jester continues. “I thought that’s why you stopped talking to me sometimes, because you had feelings for Yasha and you wanted to help her instead. But you don’t really seem to spend more time with her than anyone else, so I don’t know, really. I was just curious.”
“Jester…” Beau scoots up further, flattens her pillows against her headboard. “It’s complicated,” she explains, “and I don’t want it to sound like I’m saying that to try and shut this down because I’m not. It really just is complicated.”
“I have time, Beau,” Jester says softly. “It’s only you and me right now.”
Beau smiles and sniffs, once again surprised by a swell of strong feelings. “I think that’s my favorite part, you know? How it’s always just you and me. After everyone else goes to sleep, or before anyone wakes up, hell—if I have to choose, I’d choose you. Every time.”
“I know.”
“And it just happened so fast, you know? I’ve been burned by so many people—my family, friends I thought I had, people I thought I loved. And then all of a sudden I’m in Trostenwald with two Coast kids and I feel like I have people again. And maybe it was Molly, maybe he happened and something kind of flipped inside me, but. I didn’t know it was possible to like this many people at once because I haven’t ever done that before.”
Jester’s already crying, probably started as soon as Beau spoke. She reaches her hand across the bed. It doesn’t stretch all the way to Beau’s, so Jester leans forward until it does.
Beau looks up and exhales, just in case she starts crying, too.
“That night on the ship,” she continues, swallowing around what has to be a whole fucking boulder in her throat. “I hadn’t said ‘I love you’ to anyone in years, and I said it to you after, what, four months? And god, I meant it.”
Jester nods and wipes a few tears from her cheeks. She takes in a big breath, talking as she puffs it out. “It kind of feels like you love me a little less now.”
“What?” Beau furrows her brows and looks closer at Jester, waiting to see a smile or anything that says, ‘Gotcha!’; that says this is a joke. Nothing happens. “That’s really—you feel that way? You’ve been feeling that way?” Jester nods, reluctantly, after a long pause. “God, I suck.” She can’t help the tears this time and they fall absolutely without her control or consent, big and fast.
“Oh my god, Beau…”
“Don’t say that, Jester.” Beau presses the heels of her hands into her eyes, willing everything to go back inside. (It doesn’t). She keeps pressing and folds at the waist, making herself as small as possible, squeezing her chest to her lap for at least ten seconds. She stays there until she can feel Jester reaching out again.
“Please don’t,” she mumbles, her words trapped against the rest of her body. Presumably, Jester retracts her hand. Beau sniffs a few times, swats at her eyes before sitting up. She looks at Jester and wishes she hadn’t.
“I’m really sorry,” she says. It’s garbled and heavy and Beau barks a laugh before clearing her throat. “This is so—I’ve been so fucking stupid about all of this. I told Nott I didn’t want her to change anything and look at what I just went and fucking did…”
“Nott?” Jester sits up and scrunches her nose, genuinely confused and momentarily removed from the seriousness of the conversation. “What does Nott have to do with this?”
Beau waves a hand. “Don’t worry about it; I’ll tell you everything later if you still want to hear it. But I—okay.” She sits up straight again, scratches at the nape of her neck. “Okay, I’m just gonna—it needs to—okay. Here’s the thing. Sometime in the last nine months, I caught a big case of the feelings for you. I mean, I love you in a big way. A big, romantic...way.”
Jester rests a hand on her knee and Beau stops talking. “It’s okay, Beau. I get it.”
“Do you?”
“No.” Jester shakes her head, laughing. “I mean, sort of. It’s...complicated?”
“Yeah,” Beau smiles, “it is.”
They sit there for a few minutes, looking at each other, laughing occasionally. For once, Jester’s tears dry up before Beau’s.
“I don’t think I’ve seen you cry before,” Jester eventually says. “You’re very pretty at it.”
“I am?”
Jester nods. “Some people are ugly criers. I think Fjord probably is. Nott definitely is.”
“You’re not,” Beau murmurs.
“I know. And now I know you’re not either.” Jester slips her legs over the side of the bed. Her back cracks as she stands up, groaning through a few stretches. She sits back down next to Beau, pushing her over until there’s almost enough room for the two of them.
She leans her head onto Beau’s shoulders and reaches down to take her hand. Jester’s horns fit perfectly into the curve of her neck. “You have to tell me the scary stuff, Beau; that’s what I’m here for. I love you so it won’t be scary.”
“Yeah. Okay. I might ask you to remind me once in a while.”
Jester giggles and squeezes Beau’s hand. “If you hadn’t been avoiding me, I could have reminded you sooner.”
“Okay, you know what, we can let some of this go.”
“Okay.”
Jester shifts onto her side, taking Beau with her as she wraps the hand already holding onto Beau around her stomach. Jester gathers the blanket with her other hand and wraps it around both of them.
“Your light’s still on,” Beau mumbles into her pillow.
“Who cares; you’re almost asleep anyway.”
“Am not,” Beau counters, but she’s lying again.
Jester pulls the blanket up even further so it covers Beau’s eyes a little. For a moment, Jester’s hand is near Beau’s cheek and she leaves it there—swiping her thumb across Beau’s temple, tickling a finger across her nose. She nestles in a little closer and Beau is pretty sure she feels the ghost of a kiss on the back of her neck.
“I know it’s complicated, Beau,” Jester whispers. “But, I love you big, too. Maybe it could be simple.”
Beau falls asleep with a smile on her face.