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“Beauregard,” Caleb says flatly. “May I borrow your staff for a moment?”
Her immediate reaction is to pull it closer.
“No. Why?”
“I need it.”
“What for?”
She’s four drinks deep and the tavern lights have blurred to a pleasant glow. They backlight Caleb as he lingers near her seat at the bar, turning the flyaway strands of his hair sharp, like embers.
She wonders how much he’d hate that comparison. She’d say it to check, but she’s not drunk enough yet.
“I need to reach something,” he sighs.
Beau takes another sip of her whiskey. “Do you even know how to use it? It’s a pretty fuckin’ finesse-full weapon you know.”
Caleb rolls his eyes. “If I break it Jester can fix it and I will let you hit me. Is that a good deal?”
“Deal,” she says immediately, shrugging the staff off her shoulder. She hadn’t really intended to not give it to him in the first place, but now she gets a fun deal out of it. Waiting is good sometimes.
He nods a thank you and walks back upstairs, twirling the staff back so it comes to rest on his shoulder.
And that’s what sets Beau’s alarm bell off.
She’s never seen Caleb with a weapon before – not a physical one, at least. She’s vaguely aware of the fact he owns a dagger, but she’s only ever seen it used to whittle the ends of his quills or get mud out of the hard-to-reach parts of his boots. But the staff spins delicately through his fingers like it does in hers – maybe with a little less finesse – but with a control that comes from familiarity with a weapon.
It’s just a small motion, but it piques Beau’s interest, and she keeps her eyes on him until he disappears.
“So, what did you really need it for?” she asks when he returns it a few minutes later. It’s not broken, so she doesn’t get to hit him, but that’s okay.
“I needed to hit something.” He reaches into the folds of his coat and pulls out a small object. He holds it out in his palm for her to examine. It’s a bead, no bigger than one of Beau’s ball bearings but semi-translucent and pale. It’s cracked too, which Beau assumes is his fault.
“It was flying all around the ceiling of mine and Nott’s room,” he explains. “We couldn’t catch it, so I knocked it down.”
Beau doesn’t take it out of his hand, but reaches over to roll it around in his palm. “What is it?”
“Not sure yet, but I believe it had some kind of divination magic infused within it.”
Caleb pockets the bead and Beau cocks an eyebrow. “Wait, so like, someone was spying on you?”
“I cannot be spied on,” Caleb says assuredly, but Beau doesn’t miss the flicker of doubt in his expression.
“Sure,” she says. “What are you going to do with it?”
“I’ll identify it, see what exactly it is. If someone is trying to look in on us we may have more of a problem than we thought.”
She nods and Caleb turns to head back upstairs.
“Hey, Caleb!” Beau shouts after him, making him pause at the foot of the stairs.
“Ja?”
“You hit that thing?” She asks.
He furrows his eyebrows. “Ja. Is there a problem?”
“You hit it?”
“Yes, Beauregard.” If Beau isn’t mistaken, he appears to flush a little bit. “Is that all?”
Beau smirks and knocks back the rest of her whiskey. “That was a good shot, Widogast. I’m impressed.”
Oh, he’s definitely blushing now. Beau cackles as Caleb whips on his heel and stomps upstairs. She didn’t get to hit him, but she’s still counting this as a win.
He comes downstairs for her later.
“I am in no way your mother, Beauregard,” he mutters, “but we have to be out of here in four hours and fifty-seven minutes and I think you will regret not sleeping.”
Beau pokes at her half-finished flagon of ale, listening to the liquid slosh around inside.
“Did Jester send you?” she drawls.
“No,” Caleb says. “I sent me. Jester is asleep like a normal person.”
Beau grumbles. She doesn’t look at Caleb, but she hears the tone of his voice soften and can imagine the expression going along with it.
“Beauregard…”
“Ugh! Fine!” She exclaims, a little bit too loud. “I need to go throw up though, you gotta come with me.”
Caleb winces, but agrees.
Of course.
Beau spends the next five minutes coughing up her dinner in the tavern’s back alley.
“Do you want some water?” Caleb asks. He’s standing a ways away, so as not to get dirty, and Beau thinks if her brain wasn’t so booze-addled she might have had the concentration to be able to be offended by that.
“A-after…” she gasps.
She hacks up what she hopes is the last of it and turns to Caleb, who’s drifted just a little bit closer.
“Here,” he says. “Wipe your face.”
He unwinds his scarf and hands it to her. The material is patterned with the delicate geometric designs they had all become accustomed to in Xhorhas. It’s not silk, but it’s soft, and Beau tries to shove it back at him.
“This is too nice Caleb, m’not gonna get sick on it.”
“I can always wash it, Beauregard,” he says softly. He curls her fingers over the scarf, securing it firmly in her grip.
Beau wipes her mouth on the scarf and keeps her eyes on Caleb, back-lit by those alcohol-softened lights once more, hair glinting like the ends of firecrackers. She thinks she’s drunk enough this time.
“Your hair’s like fire, did you know?” she says, words slurring just a little bit.
There’s no change in his expression that Beau can see, but he doesn’t reply for a very long time – long enough that her muddled brain begins to worry she’s upset him – but then he sighs.
“Are you alright?” He asks.
“I’m fine.”
“Are you?”
“Yes!”
He crosses his arms. “Then why are you getting shit-faced at two in the morning?”
Beau purses her lips, hyper-aware of the tight ache behind her eyes that’s come from dehydration.
She hisses through her teeth. “I dunno, man, maybe I’m fuckin’ nervous… or sad… or maybe I just wanna get drunk! I dunno. You don’t know me.”
“I think I know you very well.”
“Y-yeah… No yeah, I think you do too. That was stupid.”
Caleb gives her a small smile, which Beau counts as a win.
“Let’s get back inside.”
“Sure.”
She finishes wiping her face and hands the scarf back to Caleb, who pockets it gingerly. He helps haul her to her feet – though she does most of the work. Hey, at least the thought is there.
They’re almost at the end of the alley when a voice calls out to them from the shadows.
“You two. Hold it.”
They turn, and Beau has only a split second to clock who’s talking – a tall, heavyset human and a much shorter, stockier one – before Caleb is being punched in the face.
Wait.
Caleb is being punched in the face?
Beau sobers up almost immediately.
The smaller guy, who had jumped forward to deck Caleb, steps back. Beau snarls and spins around, balling her hands into fists and she strides forward to–
Caleb grabs her arm, fingers digging painfully into her skin.
Her eyes flicker to him, blood pouring from his nose, and he shakes his head.
She almost moves to shrug him off. Almost.
“Hey fucker,” Beau spits, slipping in between Caleb and the thugs instinctively. “Back off! We don’t want trouble.”
The bigger one of the two laughs. “Shoulda thought about that before you came wanderin’ into our business.”
She grits her teeth and tries to take a step forward, but Caleb grips her arm even tighter. Don’t start a fight, she can almost hear him saying.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Is what she says instead.
“Your friend right there.” He points at Caleb, who’s got his free hand clamped over what very well might be a broken nose. “Destroyin’ our property.”
It takes a second for it to click. Beau thinks back to the little broken bead Caleb had shown her a few hours ago. “Wait… you’re the ones who were spying on us?”
“Gotta keep an eye on new folks to town, you understand?” The big one smirks.
The little one pipes up from beside him. “And you folks are real suspicious, ain’t ya?”
The big one cracks his knuckles. It’s almost cartoonishly intimidating.
Still, they look tough... ish. Beau grabs Caleb by the arm and whispers in his ear, “Go inside and get help. Fjord or Yasha or someone.”
“I can help, Beauregard,”
Beau squeezes his arm. “An alley brawl is one thing. If word gets out we’re setting people on fuckin’ fire we’re gonna be kicked outta this place real quick.”
She almost hears him purse his lips in frustration, but the next thing out of his mouth is, “Fine,” and then he’s running back to the tavern.
“Hey!” The little one shouts and surges forward, but Beau, even under the haze of alcohol, is faster.
He whips her staff from her shoulder with lightning speed, twirling it in her fingers before cracking it straight into the little guy’s ribs. He chokes, almost comically, and doubles over, staggering back as his larger friend jumps forward.
She dodges his first hit, parrying it with a strike to the chest of her own, but she isn’t fast enough to escape his second fist, which comes crashing into her jaw at full force.
Beau staggers back from the sheer weight of it, feeling her teeth rattle in her mouth. She spits and twirls her staff back into attack position, trying to shake the ache in her head that has only seemed to worsen with this quick movements she’s having to make.
She springs forward, kicking off the smaller man and launching herself at the big guy, cracking her staff first across the side of his head and then driving her knee into his jaw. He barks in pain, but isn’t thrown enough not to quickly shoot his hand out and grab Beau’s ankle, tossing her backwards into the flagstones.
Beau skids to a stop and staggers to her feet and runs forward again. The smaller man rushed to meet her, and Beau drives her staff into his kidney, relishing in the hacking cough he emits before she swings her leg up and kicks him directly in the temple.
He collapses like a sack of potatoes, and Beau snorts in amusement.
It’s that hesitation that gets her.
She’s taken her eyes of the big guy, and in an instant he’s gotten far too close for comfort.
He brings up his fist and clocks her on the side of the head with more power than Beau ever could have guessed he’d had in his body. It takes her entirely by surprise.
It’s a lucky hit – she's just so fucking drunk and so fucking tired – and it forces her to the ground. She feels her staff slip from her grip and clatter against the paving stones just before she, too, hits them full force. She feels her elbow crunch – not broken – but maybe dislocated, and she lets out a muffled cry. The ache in her temples growing almost unbearable.
The remaining thug looms over her, half his face swollen and crunched from her attack, but a smile plastered on his lips all the same.
“You dumb bitch,” he spits. “I’ll teach you to fuck with us like that, you–”
There’s a sudden flash of movement to her side, and through a swollen eye, Beau can only stare.
Caleb is in front of her in an instant, stumbling – scrambling – across the cobblestones. It’s not graceful in any sense of the word, but Beau had not come to expect grace when it came to Caleb. No, it’s not graceful, but it’s fast – faster than she’s every rightly seen him without any magic – and he almost drops to his knees as he fumbles her discarded staff into his own grasp. He staggers to his feet, spinning the staff once in his hand before squaring his shoulders, steadying his stance, bringing the weapon up in two hands, and–CRACK.
The bo staff connects with the man’s temple with the powerful and deafening sound of something very important breaking. He howls, a pitiful, pained noise that the tight walls of the alley almost muffle. He stumbles back, blood seeping from a fresh break of skin on the side of his head.
He blinks, curses, sees he’s outnumbered, and runs off down the alley.
After a beat, Caleb drops the staff to the ground with a dull clatter. After another beat, his knees give out. He slumps, joining Beau on the rough flagstones, breathing heavily.
They sit there in mutually stunned silence for a while.
“You okay, man?” Beau asks.
“No,” he says, breath wheezy and stilted. He turns and she sees there’s blood running in a stream from his nose and a cut on his lip. “But don’t ask me that.”
Oh yeah. Beau figures she must look much worse. She’s not too sure, but she thinks she might be looking out of only one eye right now. Fuck.
She hauls herself up onto one arm. “Why’d you come back?”
“It looked like it was getting bad,” he says. “I didn’t… I didn’t want to leave you.”
She smiles and lets him crawl over and help her to her feet. “You did amazing!” She says, clapping a hand on his shoulder.
Caleb winces and rolls his eyes.
“You did ninety-nine percent of the work.”
“Yeah but you got to land the final blow! With a real weapon! That’s gotta feel cool, right?”
Caleb seems to consider it for a moment, but finally settles on: “It feels like I broke my hand.”
“That’s just the sting of victory, dude,” Beau says, waving him off. “I can show you how to adjust your grip, so you don’t get shocked as bad next time.”
“Uh, thank you, but I think I really broke my hand.”
“What?”
“My hand is broken, Beauregard.”
“Oh shit.”
He grips his left wrist tightly. “Mhmm…” he whimpers.
“Oh, uh, ‘kay, let’s uh…” She doesn’t know what to do suddenly, resorting to just giving his shoulder a steadying squeeze. “We should probably wake up Jester?”
Caleb nods.
With her hand still clamped firmly on his shoulder, they turn to stagger back to the tavern, leaning on each other in equal measure.
“I meant what I said, you know,” Beau says.
Caleb raises an eyebrow.
“About teaching you,” Beau continues. “I’m not sure where you learned to use a bo staff–”
“Quarterstaff,” he interrupts, like the distinction actually matters.
Beau laughs. “Sure – either way, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say I’m probably a nicer teacher than the one you had.”
Caleb smirks, halfway between a wince and a real smile, but the accompanying laugh is genuine. “You’re not wrong about that.”
They're silent for a moment as they limp together.
Beau leans her head against Caleb's .
“You’re full of surprises, Widogast.”
“Ja?” She can still hear him smiling. “Maybe we’re more similar that we thought.”
“Nah. I woulda definitely kept my elbows higher.”
“Beauregard–”
“Also, we’ve gotta work on your follow through. It was abysmal.”
Caleb sighs again and Beau laughs.
She’s counting this as a win.