Chapter Text
Beauregard is nine years old when she first feels her heart flutter.
She's on the kickball field, looking at the girl with skin as dark as cedar and braids that swing with beads as she gives a light smile. She sprints across the field with dust kicking up from her sneakers and legs flexing with speed, and Beau realizes for the first time that this is what she wants everything to feel like.
She doesn't say anything until the last day of school, waiting underneath a tree for their parents to pick them up. She looks her in the eyes, firm and giddy all at once, telling her that she loves her in the way that boys and girls do, and that it can be a secret love just between the two of them.
And so, she's nine when she realizes that there's no one left for her. The girl with cedar skin and beads in her hair has a thin red string, stretching out across the streets and the fields and everything out of sight to someone that waits for her with the same patience and fervor as someone who knows that the cosmos cared enough to carve out someone just for them.
In the sea of stars and string and wonders of love, Beau sits in silence, a dark space that the universe didn't care enough to check. Because as the girl leaves and Beau is left alone in the shade, she finally understands why there's no string stretching out from her fingers. And when she's nine years old, she understands the loneliness of a heart no one cared to touch.
It's years later, thirteen when she has her first kiss in the bathroom during lunch. It was a dare from some girl whose name she never cared to remember, to a girl whose name would be stitched on her heart no matter how many times she tried to take it out.
She remembers the softness of her lips, painted with gloss since it was the only makeup her parents would let her wear. She remembers the flutter of her eyes and how Beau only knows to close hers because the girl did the same. And she remembers the dizzying electricity that spiked down her throat, short-circuiting her brain so that she doesn't know to pull away until the girl does first, eyes bright with the same look of someone who felt nothing but the triumph of a challenge conquered.
And there's no reason why it wouldn't. Her soulmate string doesn't lead to Beau, and so there's nothing else here for her but a dare.
Beau doesn't cry then. She laughs along with everyone else, taking her extra fruit cup in stride and spending the rest of the day with knives choking up her throat and tearing her from the inside out. And when she gets home, she only lays in her bed and quietly lets the tears stream down her cheeks as she wishes, not for the first time, that her heart was empty in a way that didn't feel pain.
Weeks turn into months, months to years, and soon she's seventeen, standing in the middle of the street as the sky runs pink and orange with dawn and fire lights in her veins. Just a couple of houses down lay the girl who Beau had in a way she didn't think possible, in quivering thighs and the small of her back, with lips full of passion and a voice that screamed her name.
And in the middle of her sleepy suburbia, in sweatpants and a tank top and hair that hangs loosely from a hairband lost some time last night, Beau screams at the sun and she feels alive and suffering in all the ways that the poets proclaimed.
The world doesn't want her to love, and neither does she. Love is smothering, she realizes, choking and deadly with all the power to squeeze your heart and make blood spill, and she is free from that. No one will ever have a hand on her chest, who will look her in the eyes and love her only to leave. She will kiss and smile and hold and forget with all the lightness of one whose heart isn't tied down, and it will be a freedom none before she ever had, and she will relish it in all the ways that she can.
And she realizes in her screams ringing across empty houses that her life is one of the loneliest things in the world, and she tells herself that she does not care.
She first sees her on a day that is special in no way at all, talking to Jester about nothing in particular.
"Hey hey hey, shut up a sec," Beau quickly says out of the blue, waving her hand and interrupting Jester from complaining about how unfair her new professor was. Before Jester can start complaining to her about interrupting, Beau takes a long, noisy sip of her smoothie and points with her straw down the courtyard. "Check out the arms on that chick."
The courtyard is quiet and calm around them, warm in that strange autumn way that promises a chill on the horizon. But even so, Beau is glad that she wore her nice tank top today and bothered to put on a little bit of makeup.
The girl that struts down the campus is tall in the way that most boys wish they were, biceps swelling out of a loose tank-top and eyes two different colors—something that Beau has only seen in movies. She takes a long look at the curve of her muscled shoulders, the way her hair fades to white and takes an appreciative sip of her smoothie as she enjoys the view.
Jester only looks, then snorts and gives Beau a playful shove. "Beau!"
"What? She's cute," Beau huffs, leaning back with a smirk. It's no secret by now that she doesn't have a soulmate, and Jester knows this. Still, that doesn't stop Beau from noticing when a particularly good-looking woman passes her way, and hey, if they think Beau isn't too bad looking herself? That certainly doesn't hurt.
"Yes, but that doesn't mean she wants you staring at her," she hisses with a giggle, practically falling onto Beau in an attempt to cover her eyes.
"I'm not staring, I'm observing. There's a difference, Jes," Beau insists, twisting and turning around Jester to keep trying to spare a glimpse.
In fact, Beau and Jester are so busy falling over each other and laughing that they don't notice when the girl comes to a stop, watching them over her shoulder silently. It's only when Jester sits up long enough to catch a glimpse that she quickly elbows Beau, and Beau immediately comes to a stop. She feels the heat flood her cheeks in waves.
Shit.
They all stay there for a moment, the three of them staring at each other before Jester clears her throat and gives a nervous smile. "Uh...sorry, my friend just thought that you looked really nice!"
The girl doesn't say anything at first. She only stands there, one hand gripping a duffle bag and the other hand holding on her shoulder before she finally seems to process Beau and nods.
"Oh," she says. "Thanks."
With that, she turns around and walks away, leaving Beau in a boiling pit of her own embarrassment.
As soon as she's out of sight, Beau groans and sinks into the bench. "Oh god...she totally thinks I'm a creep."
"That's not true," Jester insists. "I think the compliment was very nice!"
"Yeah, but we were being creepy while we said it."
"...While I said it. You were staring at her and panicking" Jester points out, which earns her a shove from Beau. Jester only rolls her eyes and giggles.
"Oh come on, Beau," she says, giving Beau's shoulders a firm shake. "Cheer up! There will always be other girls for you to talk to!"
Beau sighs. Sitting up, she throws her arms over the bench. She takes another sip of her smoothie, and she shakes it off. Because right then, she actually believes that Jester is right.
Beau never thought of herself as the type to go to college. She thought she was more the girl who would take off in her car right after graduation and end up one of those cool nomads who never stayed in one place too long and left nothing but broken hearts and an air of mystery in her wake.
Of course, that was the optimistic take. Ask her dad, and the vision of a future like that would go more along the lines of becoming a hippie with a heroin addiction, drunk and dead under a bridge at thirty.
Cool nomad girls didn't have overbearing dads who were already disappointed with them in high school, and Beau wanted to do something to prove to her dad that she wasn't a complete waste of space.
But of course, that's how she ended up at a college in a small town in the middle of nowhere, two hours away from home with an undeclared major two years in and no idea what she was going to do after graduation. If she ever graduated at all.
Beau finds that it's best not to think about that.
"Beau, are you sure you shouldn't be wearing a little more...protection?"
Beau only snorts and leans on her skateboard. "Come on Fjord, what am I supposed to do? Waddle around like a penguin?"
Fjord only huffs, and Jester shoves him with a grin. "Oh, come on Fjord, it's fine! Don't be such a worry wuss," she says, patting him on the cheek. Fjord rolls his eyes at that, but Beau knows he can't be annoyed with her for too long. She wasn't actually there when they met, but as Jester puts it, finding that the guy at the end of her soulmate string was just a "big old puppy" was incredibly lucky on her end.
And although Beau only saw the 'big, dark emo' side the first time they met, the puppy side is starting to show itself more and more - for example, his growing worry as she Beau slowly attempts more and more ambitious skateboarding tricks.
To that, Beau only smiles and reaches up to ruffle Fjord's hair. "Aw Fjord," she says with a sly grin. "You scared I'll skin my knee?"
Fjord only scoffs, but despite himself, Beau can see the smile fighting at the corner of his lip. "Yeah yeah...I'll be here to buy the bandages."
Beau only snorts and clips her helmet under her chin. She had never actually thought about skateboarding until one day after class last year when she went to the park and hung out near the skater kids, one of them lent her their board, and that was that.
Now, six months and a million cuts and scraps later, Beau stood in the empty parking lot next to the gas station, Jester and Fjord watching with rapt attention as the sky sits blue above them. Beau climbs to the top of stairs, skateboard until her toe, psyching herself up. She's been practicing a firecracker - or the move where you ride a skateboard down the stairs - for weeks now, and she isn't going to mess up now.
In fact, she's so focused on preparing that she almost misses the girl with the black hair and thick biceps cross the parking lot. Or at least, not at first. But in a cruel twist of fate that plays in perfect harmony with how the universe has been treating her thus far, Beau notices her just as he wheels clear the first two steps. Her attention slips, her balance shifts, and suddenly Beau remembers that the ground is really, really hard.
Now, Beau has fallen off her skateboard before, but this is...different. The stairs weren't as high as they could have been, but something is definitely wrong. She can feel it in Jester and Fjord's panic that breaks through her shock-induced haze, and she can definitely tell when she tries to move her arm.
Because that's where the pain starts. Suddenly, the shock is over, and there's nothing but pain, pain, exploding and cracking in her arm and up her shoulder and down her hands and it's everywhere and nowhere and Beau is squeezing her eyes shut, trying to cradle her arm as best she can.
"Shit," she shouts. "Gah shit shit shit shit shit shit shit..."
It's in those moments of panic and confusion and pain and a slew of cursing that Beau forgets why she even fell, and why it takes her a moment to remember here's a third person here now: a girl with black hair faded to white and eyes that differ from the other.
But she only manages to catch a glimpse of her before she winces, brows knitted together as Jester leans beside her, face contorted in concern. "Beau, are you okay?"
"Gah...fuck I'm not okay," she hisses, tensing as she tries to move her arm. "I just fell down the fucking stairs!"
She sees Fjord and the girl talking out of the corner of her eye, Jester babbling something that's probably supposed to keep her calm but only serves to tense her up more.
"Ohh...okay okay, just stay calm...Fjord, should it be making that shape?" Jester brings her fingers to her lips in worry, and it's then that Beau realizes that as much as she loves Jester, she's not the best person to have in a medical emergency.
"Ngh...fuck fuck fuck," Beau groans, and suddenly the girl with the faded hair is kneeling beside her, studying her as she writhes on the ground.
"Okay, okay...can you try to move it?" The girl's voice is light and worried, but Beau doesn't exactly have time to appreciate it right now.
"Nope...can't do it, not doing it again, moving it is a bad idea," she snaps, squeezing her eyes shut.
Just then, she feels a set of thick fingers reach out and poke it, and all of a sudden it's like someone lit a fire in her bones.
"Gah! What the fuck? Fuck you," Beau exclaims, causing the girl to jump back in shock. In the background, Fjord shakes his head.
"Yeah, I think I'd better call an ambulance..."
In the end, Beau thinks that her cast looks quite nice. It's a cool, calming shade that Jester always refers to as 'cerulean,' even though Beau thinks 'blue' works just fine. It's covered from top to bottom from signatures in all different colors, making it look cool in the kind of eclectic way that Beau is kind of starting to love.
But she supposes it doesn't matter either way, because her parents still give her a very lengthy phone call when she sends them the medical bill, including an especially grating conversation with her father.
"Beauregard, you're not eight anymore," he had said, and Beau could practically see his disapproving gaze through the phone. "You need to stop horsing around and act like an adult. Adults don't break their arms trying to...what was it?"
"Firecracker," Beau supplies.
Silence on the other end. "Firecracker. Beauregard, you need to stop messing around. What, are you still shaving that undercut as well?"
Beau decides that particular moment is a good place to hang up.
"Calling about the broken arm again?" From the other side of the library, Caleb calls out, and Beau slams her head onto the table with a groan.
"God, the sad thing is I think this is the most they've called me since I left," she mutters. It's October and the leaves are knee-deep in every color of fall. Cheesy Halloween music quietly hums over the library speakers, and Beau can't decide if it's annoying, comforting, or somewhere in between.
But Caleb only sighs, shelving the last of his books and walking over to her, eye-bags deep as ever. In between his studies as a grad student and his part-time job at the library, Caleb hardly even has time to sleep. In fact, he stifles a yawn as he goes to sit next to Beau, rubbing at his eyes.
"Well, the good thing is you don't have to see them until Christmas," he says, but Beau only scoffs.
"If I go home for Christmas. I honestly might just crash on campus this year," she mutters, rubbing the back of her neck. "Christmas last year was...not fun."
"Oh, believe me, I remember," Caleb says, leaning back in his chair before waving his hand. "Not that I was there, of course. But I uh...I do remember your phone call," he says with a small smile that falls somewhere along the lines of a grimace.
Even so, Beau still chuckles. It's moments like this, sitting in the library while Caleb works and they chat about whatever comes to mind that make anything else in her day just a little bit easier.
And so they stay that way for a while, Caleb getting up now and again to help whoever comes in or reshelve some books, and Beau awkwardly flirting with a handful of girls who walk in—both of them with their red little soulmate strings frustratingly uninterested.
But it's then, with her eyes trained on the door watching for whoever might come in, that she sees her.
It's colder now, and she's dressed in a black sweater with combat boots to match, hair tied half-up-half-down behind her. Beau didn't even realize she had been missing until she saw her, standing near the library entrance pinning something to the announcement board as if it was just another normal day.
But it's certainly not for Beau; at least, not anymore. In fact, she chokes on her coffee when she sees her, remembering the, uh... the unseemly way she spoke the last time she saw her. Her face practically heats red just thinking about it. In between that and their first impression, Beau can already hear Jester beside her pushing her to apologize.
"Beau, I know we allow capped drinks, but if you're going to be messy with it—"
"Yeah, yeah, no Caleb, yeah," Beau says, waving him off and quickly standing up. "Yeah, I'm just gonna..."
The girl doesn't notice Beau until she's right on her, which Beau realizes probably only serves to make the situation worse. One moment she's clipping up a sign, and then the next, she's turning to see Beau standing right beside her, gazing up with a smile that's probably a little too big for the situation.
"Gah!" She jumps with a start, and Beau's smile immediately falls as a couple of people in the library turn to look at them.
"Oh, oh god, shit, sorry," she says, voice falling to a whisper as Caleb looks at her and arches a brow, to which she only gives a small shrug. "God, sorry, I didn't mean to startle you, I just—"
"No, no, it's okay," the girl quickly, says, her voice quiet as she composes herself. "I'm sorry, I just...sometimes I startle easily, is all."
Beau didn't recognize it before, but her voice is soft with an accented lilt to it, though she can't place exactly where. Probably somewhere up north. It's a very nice voice, Beau decides. But she can't decide if that's creepy or not, so she decides to keep it to herself.
"No, no, it's fine," she quickly assures, rubbing the back of her neck. "Probably shouldn't have snuck up on you."
"Yeah...yeah no, you're fine!" The girl nods and Beau nods back.
"Good...that's always good," Beau says, rolling on her heels. The girl nods again, and Beau swallows something deep in her throat. Shit, she did not think this through.
"Yeah, sorry, just uh...you remember me? From a couple weeks ago," Beau says, waving her hand as though that somehow adds to the story. "I was trying to skate down the stairs outside the gas station? Didn't, uh...end very well?" She smiles, lifting her broken arm, and the girl blinks at her.
"Yes, I remember you," she says slowly, looking her up and down. "You weren't, uh...very pleased about that."
"Yeah! God, yeah...look, I just wanted to apologize," Beau says with a tense smirk. "I swear I don't usually...you know, swear like that. I mean like, I had just broken my arm, there was a lot of panicking, I swear it was nothing personal—"
"No, it's fine," the girl insists. "I probably shouldn't have poked your arm like that. I'm sorry, I was just trying to check for swelling; I heard that if there's swelling, then it's broken, but I really should have been more careful."
"Yeah no, you're completely good," Beau says, giving a small smile. "I'm just glad you came to check on me is all."
"Yes, well...it did look like a pretty nasty spill, falling down the stairs like that," she nods. "Plus, I work with sports, so I have, uh...seen some injuries before."
"Really," Beau asks, crossing her arms and giving a smirk. "Wow, cause that would definitely explain the biceps you've got there." That's frustratingly hot, but she would die before she admitted that.
"Oh...oh, yeah," the girl says, absently touching at her arms as though she'd just remembered them. "Yeah, I uh, help out with a lot of the sports at the school."
"Wow...that's actually really cool," Beau says with a chuckle. "Yeah, I was just wondering, cause like...I haven't seen you around recently. Like the past couple weeks." She hesitates, then quickly adds, "Not like, I'm stalking you or anything. Just like, uh, kind of noticed. You know, it's a small town, small school."
"Oh," the girl replies simply. She glances away and clears her throat. "Yeah, no, I've just been in neighboring towns. Odd jobs making money, you know the sort." She turns back to the board, finishing whatever she was putting up, and that's when Beau sees the sign.
"Haunted House, huh," she asks, leaning over to look at the sign. It's very loud, on a black background with big letters and a crudely drawn skeleton holding a jack-o-lantern. "Hosted by the drama club? What, are you an actor too?" She gives a smile, but the girl only shakes her head.
"No no, I just...help out with some of their stuff," she clarifies. "Props and all that. Costumes don't exactly move themselves."
"Well..." Starting to feel a bit of her confidence return, Beau leans against the wall and waggles her eyebrows. "I definitely wear costumes, and I definitely like Halloween. Maybe I'll, uh...see you around?"
The girl only stares at Beau. She blinks, then stares some more. Just when Beau starts to feel like she made the wrong decision, the girl nods. "Alright then."
"...Great." Awkwardly doing finger guns, Beau slowly begins to back away before something comes to her mind.
"Wait; one sec!" Sprinting over to the front desk, Beau gives a grin to Caleb—who responds with a confused look—before returning with a Sharpie in hand.
"How about you, uh...sign my cast? Make sure there are no hard feelings?"
The girl nods, taking the Sharpie and silently leaning in to write.
"Oh, I'm Beauregard, by the way. Everyone calls me Beau, though."
The girl nods again, capping the Sharpie and tapping it against the place where she signed. And as the girl turns to leave, bag under her arm to wherever she may go next, Beau turns to read a single word in slowly drying ink.
Yasha.
"Allies, dears, and esteemed guests alike, I would love to welcome you all to Mollymauk's House of Horrors!"
The tiefling before Beau is odd in every way imaginable, with horns laced heavily in jewelry and widespread arms covered in more tattoos than Beau thought possible. He looks at Beau not with their own face, but with a Venetian mask that spins in a twisted smile and provides no insight behind the two dark voids it calls eyes. The long purple cape waving grandiosely behind him only adds to the whole show, complete with a strange accent that Beau can't decide is performance or not.
She regards them with a cocked brow and looks on skeptically, but beside her, Jester squeals and claps with a beam. "Ooh—look, guys, a party," she exclaims waving her arm to the house before them—and Beau has to admit, it does indeed look like a party. Black, orange, and purple lights fill something that probably used to be someone's basement, now serving as a den for drunk college students to chug beer and scream conversations over Halloween remixes that bump through unseen speakers.
Jester looks over and Fjord and Beau with hands on her hips. No matter how close they were, there was no way Beau could convince Caleb to actually go out tonight, and Nott always talked about how she had "outgrown" the college event scene, even though Beau was certain Nott was only a couple of years older than her.
Still, as Beau shoots a glare at the last lingering skeleton behind her, even she has to admit that the idea is kind of cool. Upstairs, she can still hear people screaming as vampires and witches jump out of the haunted house's unseen corners, but the three of them had cleared all that, now reaping the benefits of a reward at the end: a Halloween party thriving in a basement—which is, admittedly, the part that Beau is excited about.
"And what do we have here?" The tiefling called Mollymauk sweeps his cape behind him, almost seeming to glide over to Jester and place a kiss on her white-gloved hand much to Jester's giggling delight. "And I didn't even know we were serving peaches so sweet."
In her flowy pink Princess Peach costume, Jester beams and adjusts the crown on her head, glancing over at Fjord. "Oh Fjord, isn't he so nice?"
"...Yep, real charmer," Fjord says with a simple nod, tipping his bright red Mario hat. It's the only part of the costume that Jester actually bought, considering Fjord already had the overalls sitting in the back of his closet. The only one who might have put less effort into their costume might be Beau, wearing only a plain white t-shirt where she scribbled 'Nudist on Strike' in black marker.
Mollymauk pauses when he sees Beau's costume, smile falling empty as he looks her up and down. "Going for a bit of the...low-effort look tonight, are we?"
Beau cocks a brow at them. "Yeah...no, big fancy costumes aren't really my thing."
"...Ah." Mollymauk stares at Beau for a moment longer before clapping his hands together in a gesture that is much more dramatic than Beau thinks it needs to be. "Well, my avid Halloween lovers and Halloween-partaker! Don't delay! A night of fun festivities awaits!"
Beau barely has time to think about 'partaker' before Jester is pulling her along, deep into the thrum of drama kids a little too into their costumes and college kids a little too drunk this early, even though Beau has no doubt that she'll be one of them soon enough.
She has to admit, in between the thrums of Monster Mash, the promises of cheap beer to guzzle by the bottle, and the girls chatting like the end of their soulmate string hasn't found them yet, Beau is very tempted to let Jester sweep her away and get caught in the thrums of drunken partying until morning.
And then she sees her with black hair fading to white leaning against the wall, and suddenly all of that is swept away.
"Hey." Beau hopes she doesn't look like too much of a dork as she stands there, beer bottle in hand and admittedly last-minute costume staring Yasha in the face as she towers over Beau by a whole head.
But all of those worries seem to only exist to Beau because when Yasha looks down, she raises her brows in greeting. "Oh—Hello."
"Hey, look at that," Beau says, shimmying her shoulders. "I didn't startle you this time."
"Oh, I suppose you didn't," Yasha replies as Beau leans on the wall next to her. "Um...thank you for that, then."
"Yep..." Beau says, clicking her tongue and rolling on her heels. She takes another shot of her beer. "I, uh, I like your costume."
"Really," Yasha says, sounding genuinely surprised as she reaches up to touch her witch hat. It is, truthfully, about where the costume ends—the rest of her outfit seems like something she would wear every day, with a black cardigan over a black tank top and black jeans to match. Beau still thinks she looks good in it—though maybe, that's more on her end.
"Yeah! Yeah no," Beau insists, taking another swig. "It's like, going for the super casual, 'I'm a modern witch' kinda vibe. Plus your outfit is cool too, so that like, definitely helps."
"Yeah...Mollymauk got the hat for me," Yasha says, nodding to the tiefling greeting the next set of partygoers. "I'm sure you've met him already."
Beau scoffs and turns the bottle in her hand. "Yeah...he was not a fan of my costume," she mutters, waving a hand over her t-shirt. "Said it was 'low-effort or something.'"
Yasha chuckles, and it's a sound with a touch more affection than Beau would expect. "That, uh...that does sound like Mollymauk. Sorry about them, by the way. He's just very into performance and Halloween and what-not."
"Uh...yeah, I can tell," Beau says with a snort. "God, I thought he would kick me out just for wearing a t-shirt."
"I mean...I like your costume."
"You do?" Beau glances up at Yasha curiously, and Yasha nods.
"Yes, I do actually. I thought that it was very...clever." She smiles then, and Beau suddenly understands what everyone means by not knowing you missed something until you have it. Yasha's smile isn't wide, or bright, or anything that would draw attention in a photo, but maybe that's the best thing about it.
It's small, Beau notices. Quiet. It slips in the cracks and doesn't try to do much, but somehow it says so much more. In the small effort and silent movement, it's as genuine as a painting is to a museum, and somehow just as precious. It's all in the small movements: the slight tilt of her head, the dimple in only one of her cheeks, and suddenly Beau is onlooker to a work of art, rare and fantastic and beautiful all the same.
And for the first time in a long time, Beau feels the terrible, terrible, god-awful sensation of a heart beginning to flutter.