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If Beau had a role in a fairy tale, it would be something like a dashing rogue. Parent approval issues, dexterous, rough around the edges. It wasn’t a bad way to be, running through life like an obstacle course. Never staying in one place too long. Never letting any person or thing too close.
Shrug it off. Nothing matters. Cross your arms. Everything is good. Flirt for the night, gone in the morning. What’s the point in a name anyway?
Beau lived like she was meant to die in some ditch by twenty-eight. When she got into that school, it was more of a “fuck it, why not” decision than anything. A year at community college wasted, why not waste another at another school? But by the time her first adult year came to a close, she started to feel tired.
Out here, in this new city, she wasn’t anybody special. No expectations, parents leagues away, no ties, no obligations. And, in the strangest way, it made her want to try. She was an adult now, and adults got to choose who they were. She wasn’t sure she wanted to stay the same anymore.
One little strawberry cupcake taught her what happened when someone went the other way. When they took the cruelty of the world, the loneliness and pain, and turned it into laughter and joy and chaos and fun, instead of bitterness and walls and distance and running.
If Beau was a rogue, Jester was absolutely a fairytale princess. Fully equipped with bright eyes, pink dresses, and the tower she was raised in. And, of course, a handsome prince ripe for her love to “save”.
Beau loved Fjord. He was like a brother to her, and seeing him get entangled with Avantika and that weird cult killed her as much as anyone. But seeing him and Jester flirt before Avantika, seeing Jester’s quiet, fuming jealousy at the other woman, and even playing witness to their playful moments to this day hurt in a different way.
Fjord made a pretty good prince. He was handsome and kind, charming but sincere. If he could just get his head out of his ass for five minutes, he’d be in a much better place. But Beau couldn’t fault him for feeling the need to fit somewhere. And in all, if he ever figured his way out of this mess, she couldn’t imagine a better partner for her best friend.
She could imagine a partner she preferred but not a better one.
Sugar-sweet princess who was locked away all her life and a charming hero who needed a little saving himself. There wasn't a better ending to a fairy tale.
And every time Beau convinced herself that her life was not a fairy tale, and she wasn't meant to be with a princess, and fairy tales were dumb and never gay enough anyway, Jester did a little something to make her believe all over. And each time, she only fell further in.
"Fjord and Caduceus seem to get along really well," she said innocently, the afternoon after Fjord had confessed to wanting to stay at the Xhohaus. "Do you think they like each other?"
"Yeah, obviously."
"No, I mean like like. Like do you think they kinda wanna bone?"
Beau had looked at her carefully, surveying every line in her expression to see if Jester was really so casual about this. But all of that tension and agitation she used to harbor for Avantika was absent.
"I thought you and Fjord…" Beau trailed off. Everyone had known, but talking about it?
Jester waved a hand at her with a laugh. "Don't be silly! I had a crush on him for, like, five minutes! The flirting was just for fun, you know?"
"Yeah. Of course."
Jester smiled at her, carefree and wide open, and Beau wondered if she'd had Jester wrong from the start.
Fairytale princesses didn’t draw dicks under the table at her first college seminar. They didn’t paint mustaches on the founder statue, or make dirty jokes, and their fathers were never in the mob.
Above all, they never fell out of love - or lose a crush - on the handsome prince unless he did something terrible.
Jester lived in some kind of fantasy world, but it wasn’t a fairytale. It was a world of color and laughter and dick jokes and bad pranks and sometimes taking it a little too far, but never out of malice. It was a magical world all in itself.
Beau hoped Jester had a place for her in this world.
"Now come on," Jester said. "We have to get the others together so we can steal Fjord's stuff back."
And if that place was her right-hand man, then Beau would take it gladly.