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It had started to rain at some point in the night, and the morning glooms into being, grey and slow and quiet. Clouds heavy with rain roll overtop the city and, with her nose pressed to the chilly glass, Jester swears she can see lightning crackling way up high. She only pulls away when she hears someone coming toward her; when she sees it's Beau, holding two mugs of something hot and sweet, she shifts to make room and Beau sits beside her on the chilly stone floor, hands off the second mug.
‘Good view?’
‘Mhm,’ Jester nods eagerly. ‘The best. Sorry—I should’ve told everyone what I was doing-‘
Beau waves the apology away. ‘Nah, I told ‘em. They went shopping but I know where they’re going, if you want to join.’ Jester bites at her lip and Beau shrugs, sips her drink. ‘You don’t have to. I know you like watching the rain.’
Jester pulls her attention from the window, frowns curiously at her best friend. ‘Huh? How?’
‘What do you mean how?’
‘How do you know that? And how come you knew I would be here? I mean - you told the others?’
Beau shrugs again. ‘Oh, that. I mean, yeah. I didn't know which window, exactly, I had to run around 'n find you but yeah, I dunno, I pay attention to - to all kinds of stuff. You like to sit by the window and watch the clouds and the rain, you’ve done it pretty much every time. First, I figured it’s ‘cause rain is great and storms are fuckin’ sick.’
‘And then?’
‘Huh?’
‘Well, if you thought that first, you must think something else now?’
‘Oh, no, I don’t know if -' Beau looks a little uncomfortable and she mumbles a little before, under jester’s impatient, questioning stare, saying, ‘I figured it was because you were in your room all the time, or something.’
Jester grins. ‘You put a lot of thought into little old me,’ she teases. Watches as Beau buries her face in her mug and mumbles, the words drowning in her drink. ‘I don’t know if that's the reason why. I don't know why I like it,' she admits, very simply. 'I just do.’
‘That’s fair. Is it cool… that I’m here?’
‘Of course, silly!’
‘Cool. Because I kinda just realised that I totally invited myself to your hangout and if you want me to book it, I'm gone, you just gotta say the word.’
'Beau,' is the only word Jester says, accompanying it with a fond, if somewhat exasperated look, and her best friend settles. Smiles.
They sit together in silence for a time, Beau draping her cloak over both of them, even though Jester doesn’t really feel the same chill Beau does. As the storm grows in its intensity, grey clouds bruising with black and that green haze that hints at hail, and the lightning flashes and bursts through it, Beau says,
‘I used to think that giants danced in the storms.’
Jester whips her attention away from the storm front to her friend, who looks like she regrets saying anything about it.
‘What?'
'You can’t leave it at that, Beau!’
‘I mean - there’s nothing more to it, though.’
Jester slaps her forearm, a smack really. ‘I don’t believe you. When did you think that? Why? Is it a story your mama told you?' she asks, hands clasped to her chest with a sweet smile.
Beau looks away. 'No.' Before Jester can apologise - remembering Beau's mama is nothing like her own, probably, though she hasn't heard all that much about her - Beau rolls her eyes. ‘Fine. Okay. So when I was like,’ she scrunches her face up, ‘I guess, six? Seven? I got really bored and I snuck out.’ She laughs a little at jester’s encouraging Ooh. ‘There was this favourite spot of mine, this massive tree I liked to climb. Massive to a six year old, anyway. Probably like twenty, thirty feet tall.’
‘Not like the Arbor Exemplar, huh.’
‘Nah. Not quite.’ Beau’s lips curl in a faint smile, nothing harsh about it. Fond and a little awed, as she stares out through the glass, to some old vision, to some old storm.
Jester can’t take her eyes off her. There’s something about storms, something electric in the air, and it makes jester’s skin tingle.
‘Anyway, it was a bit of a walk from the house and I had this little treehouse—I say treehouse but it was just a couple boards propped between two of the branches and, like, a hammock? So I climbed up to it and I guess I just hung out—pretended to be a, a pirate or a knight or whatever. Read some books, chucked acorns at the fence.’
‘Totally normal kid stuff.’
‘Yeah, basically.’ Beau grins right back at her. Her eyes are bright and incredibly blue, like they're the last two fragments of the blue sky left uncovered by the storm. ‘I bet you were trouble on two legs as a kid, huh?’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Jester lies, with a demure tilt to her head and a flutter of eyelashes. It makes Beau throw her head back and laugh; Jester eyes the line of her neck, listens to the laugh as it echoes against the glass, the stone around them. She clears her throat. ‘So…giants dancing?’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m getting to it,’ Beau waves her down. She leans back, hands behind to brace her. ‘Ah, I must’ve run out of dance class or something because I remember looking up at these storm clouds all coming in from the west and imagining them as carriages. These giant carriages, with the westwind horses pulling them across the sky.’ Beau doesn’t seem to notice the way Jester stirs with interest. Her attention is fixed on the storm still, but Jester’s mind is racing. She can’t remember Beau ever telling her a story like this before, something with imagination like this. ‘And then the sky was covered in them and it looked weird. Like the world was all flat on top. Like the sky was lower than it had been. Close enough for me to touch.’
‘Oh no.’
Beau throws her a careless grin. Jester fumbles with it, feels almost like she has dropped it when her heart lurches with - with ?
‘I climbed higher in the tree. Of course I did, you know me. It was the tallest tree I knew about, so obviously if the sky was lower I could touch it from there.’ Beau shakes her head. ‘I was fine, I didn’t get struck or anything, the storm was way off. But from that little bit higher, I could see the lights, and the way the lightning, y'know,’ She lifts a hand, mimics an explosion, the lightning darting out. ‘And the thunder. Like the loudest boots ever, crashing around.’ She grins again, smaller, crooked, achingly fond. ‘I remember thinking,’ she admits slowly, a little shy, and Jester is struck by the desire to have known Beau then, little Beau with the big, beautiful brain, little Beau who dreamed up giants in the sky, ‘I remember,’ she says, clearing her throat, ‘thinking it’d be fun to dance with them. They didn’t seem to care much about rhythm or being able to sing or be delicate or pretty. Stomping around upstairs. I thought it’d…yeah. Be fun.’
‘Beau!’ Jester nearly shouts, throwing herself over to grab at her face. She presses Beau’s cheeks tight together, squishing them. ‘That is so cute!’ It doesn’t feel right—she doesn’t want to embarrass Beau or anything—but she doesn’t know what to do when Beau just, just offers up something like that to her. She forces herself to settle, kinda doesn’t realise that she’s almost straddling her friend until Beau lifts a hand to steady her, sets it on her hip. She’s still holding her face and they’re very close together and the electric hum in the air seems to grow louder, press tingling fingers into her skin. ‘Thank you. for telling me that. It is very cute, even,’ she says over the way Beau tries to grumble, face still squished. ‘Even if you don’t like that word, it is.’
She can feel Beau’s cheeks heat up under her fingers. Feel the most delicate, soft lashes as they just barely flutter against her left hand, which sits a little higher up on Beau’s cheek.
‘Yeah, well,’ Beau mumbles as best she can. ‘You’re welcome.’