#i guess i like yussa more than i recognise | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

unicyclehippo · 4 years

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First impressions after the live show? Beaujester impressions or otherwise

‘Ah. Would you mind looking after Luc for a little while?’ Yeza asks with a somewhat nervous - but excited - smile.

Beau salutes him from the bathroom. ‘No worries, dude. Go get her.’

Yeza laughs, fumbles to return the gesture. ‘Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Ah - if you’ll just...excuse me,’ he says and in amongst the Nein’s gentle teasing, the halfling bobs an awkward bow and leaves, hurries back to his wife.

As Jester disappears into Marion’s chambers, her quiet apology for the bathtub reaching the bathroom, Beau does her best to sweep up the clay and the soot left by the burned incense, the pieces of the bathtub. These she separates, drops into a box Beau suspects once held a gift of some kind or is, like, some unnecessarily fancy bin. The largest of the pieces she just sets beside it. Maybe... if she figured out where all the pieces were supposed to go, Jester could mend it? Beau grimaces down at the hundreds of ceramic shards. Maybe not.

‘Beau?’

‘Huh? Oh, hey! I was just -’ She waves a hand toward the mess. Her other hand is cupped, middling sized shards held in it that she’d found under the shelves. ‘D’you reckon you could mend this thing? Or...?’

Jester grimaces too, looking at the extent of the problem before her. She steps into the bathroom beside Beau, shoulders jumping in surprise as something crunches underfoot. She smiles guiltily.

‘It would take a really long time.’

‘Right, right, right,’

‘But I promised my mama I would buy her a new one. Or find someone for her who will buy her a new one.’

‘Maybe you could ask the Gentleman.’

‘Beau.’

‘What? Is that - that’s stupid, got it,’

‘No!’ Jester grabs her arm, shakes it, not caring a bit that the shards Beau collected drop to the ground and break even more. ‘Beau!’ she squeals. ‘That’s a great idea!’

‘Oh no.’

‘Yeah!’

‘No, no, see I was just kidding - ‘

Jester squeals louder. ‘Oh my gosh it will be so romantic, I can send him a message and he can pick out the most beautiful bathtub and I can write -’ She goes a little breathless for a second, tail flicking right at the tip with excitement, eyes darting over Beau’s face. It’s clear that Jester isn’t looking at her, but rather past her to all the many plans she can concoct. ‘I can write a letter,’ she says quietly. ‘I have his handwriting now, I can say, Oh Marion, in your time of greatest need I am - um - fulfilling that need,’

‘We can workshop it. Or not. Because that’s - it’s an idea,’ she says, dropping the adjective she would ordinarily tack onto that. ‘But it’s maybe, you know, a tiny bit, uh,’

‘Too soon?’

‘I was gonna say hurtful,’ Beau tells her bluntly.

Jester’s face falls. ‘What do you mean? You mean - getting them together?’

‘N-no, not exactly. But, y’know, if the guy you liked walked out on you and then you had a kid and you raised her alone for years and he never came back and eventually you figured, y’know, he was either a piece of shit or something bad happened to him or maybe both or maybe he didn’t care or maybe he did and maybe he wasn’t ever in love with you or maybe he was and you flat out don’t know, and then you find out that he’s this crime lord up in Zadash and your bathtub breaks and that is what he writes to you about?’

Jester blinks, her surprise bleeding into faintly troubled, and thoughtful, and a soft distant kind of expression Beau doesn’t fully recognise. ‘Probably not the best.’

‘Prob’ly not.’

‘Hmm. I’ll think on it.’

‘Sure, yeah, you do that. I’ll - edit your letter, if you want. Help you workshop it.’

‘Even though you think it’s a terrible idea?’

‘I didn’t say that,’ Beau is quick to point out, mind racing backwards in their conversation to make sure that yeah, she definitely hadn’t said it. She had thought it, but that’s not the same thing. Jester is smiling at her when she comes back to the here and now, the mischievous smile that tucks into her cheeks, makes her dimples pop and her eyes glint. Beau rolls her eyes, shakes her head. Grumbles, without any real annoyance to the word, ‘Tricky.’

‘Well, I am a trickery gods protégé.’

Beau cleans for a little longer, waves Jester away to help Caleb with getting the magic he wants and starting on their clothes. With Caleb and Fjord gone to Yussa’s tower, and Caduceus following closely after when he sees Fjord step out, and with Yasha looking for a dog for their dinner (a joke? Uncertain), Beau realises that she is the only one left, and that they had all completely glossed over one very important fact.

‘Shit! Luc!’

She sprints down the steps from the third floor and when she hears the familiar sound of a shriek of dismay, follows it to Carlos and Luc and a smashed bottle on the floor.

‘Luc!’

‘That,’ the boy says, backing up, brown eyes wide, ‘was an accident.’

‘You need to be more careful, lad!’ Carlos cries, and scrubs his hands over his head, disturbing the slicked combover. ‘Enough with the sword! And the crossbow! Please!’

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ Luc insists, and Beau closes the distance quickly. Luc is in zero danger from Carlos, who seems more interested in making sure that the wine doesn’t soak into the nearby carpet - and that Luc doesn’t step onto any glass - but seeing the tall man towering over the young boy, and the raised voices, has her moving faster and her heart pounding in her chest.

‘Everything alright here?’ she demands, staring at Carlos. Without her meaning to, without looking, she sets a gentle hand down on the top of Luc’s curly hair, guides him backwards and behind her.

‘What? Oh - Jester’s friend. Yes, yes, it’s fine,’ Carlos sighs, and he lets out his breath in a gusting sigh. Runs his hands over the combover again. His brown eyes take in Beau before him, interposed between him and Luc, and his stance softens. ‘The lad is fine,’ he assures Beau. ‘Just rambunctious.’

‘That’s a good thing,’ Luc whispers up to Beau. He holds the back of her pants with one hand, peers out around her thigh to grin up at Carlos. ‘My dad says it means I’ve got lots of beans, but I haven’t had beans and toast since we left Felderwin.’

‘Do you like beans and toast?’ Beau asks.

Luc shrugs. ‘It’s fine? The fish here is weird but it’s fine too.’

‘Not a picky eater, huh?’

‘No, there’s heaps of stuff I won’t eat. I hate sprouts - ‘

‘Same.’

‘ - and there’s this red root that stains everything but my dad uses it for inks and dyes and stuff so we used to have it all the time,’

Beau lets him ramble on about food and shifts her attention to Carlos. The man has settled like a spooked chicken and he nods to Beau, hands lifted slightly. She relaxes a smidge. Fishes a few gold pieces from her pocket and sets them on the bar top. Then, as Luc continues to ramble, she leads the boy to the stairs.

‘ - and there’s this gross, like, pea thing and pea is already a funny word,’ he tells Beau, who snorts obligingly, nods, ‘but it tastes like sand. That’s probably my least favourite, it’s gross.’

‘Yeah, that sounds like shit.’

Luc giggles, eyes wide. ‘You said a bad word.’

‘What? Oh fu- uh - right. You’re a kid. Shi - ah crap. Balls. Oh no.’ Beau stops, rubs a hand over her face. Luc is fully laughing now, little hand clutching at the railing post he had dented earlier with his sword, and when Beau peeks through her fingers she finds that his smile is wide and honest and delighted.

‘You’re really funny. And rude.’

‘I’m - the rude part is right,’ she agrees. ‘Uh. Look, your mum and dad are gonna be - uh - talking for a bit so we told them we’d keep an eye on you. Is there anything you’re, like, wanting to do or do I...have to entertain you?’

Luc rolls his eyes. ‘I don’t need to be baby sat. I’m five.’

‘Oh, cool, basically an adult. You should probably be getting a job soon.’

‘What? No!’

‘No?’

‘No! I’m not old enough to get a job.’

‘But you’re five.’

‘That’s too young!’

‘Is it?’ Beau asks, feigning ignorance. ‘Shit, okay, what do you wanna do then?’

‘I dunno!’

‘Figure it out, or I’m gonna - uh - feed you sprouts.’

Luc gasps. ‘You wouldn’t.’

Beau grins, a little feral, mostly amused. She crouches on the landing in front of him so they’re almost of a height, her still a little taller than the young halfling. ‘Your mum hasn’t told you about me,’ she guesses. Luc shakes his head. ‘My name is Beau, and I’m a monk. I trained for years,’ she tells him, ‘to become a spy.’

‘Whoa.’

‘Yeah. Pretty cool, right?’

‘Yeah!’

‘One of my lessons was on how to torture people.’ It is only as she says it that she wonders if maybe a joke like that is a bit dark for a five year old, but Luc’s eyes only seem to widen further, sparkle a little more. It’s super weird - but weirdly nice - to be on the receiving end of what Beau can only categorise as extreme fascination. ‘I won’t stop with sprouts. I brought with me food from Xhorhas. They have vegetables,’ she tells him, voice dropping low and ominous, ‘that are soft and squelchy. Like boogers.’

‘No.’

‘Yep. Super gross. But good for you. And I’ll tell your dad that and he’ll make you eat them for every. Single. Meal.’

Luc shrieks and sprints away from her up the stairs, laughing as Beau pushes to her feet and follows. She lets him get fairly far ahead before her own competitive nature comes out and she picks up the pace, taking the stairs two at a time. It isn’t long before she catches up with him and it’s easy to hoist him off his feet and up into the air, hold him by the ankles as she marches him back down and out into the courtyard behind the Chateau. She had seen it when they arrived, the manicured yard, and the small training dummy raised there with a painted target and many, many dents from wooden crossbow bolts. Luc wriggles free when she lowers him down and races ahead, yelling back to her all the while about training, and look how high I can climb, and what is the coolest monster you’ve seen, and what’s it like being a monk?

It’s weirdly easy. Hanging out with the little dude, and answering all his questions - leaving the fallout for answering all of them honestly to Yeza and Veth to deal with in the future at some point - and catching the bolts when they whizz too close to her face, which sends him into another spiral of questions, and begging her to show off some of the cool monk shit that she can do. They’re in the middle of practicing wall-jumps - or, she is and he is jumping as high as he can in place with his stumpy little legs - when the others return and he slumps, exhaustedly, into her shoulder when she picks him up this time. Loops his arms around her neck in a loose hug.

Beau feels something twist in her chest as she hugs him back, carries him to his room, and she wonders if TJ will be anything like Luc. Outgoing, carefree, happy. Or if he’ll be more like her.

#prompt fill #cr tag #tagging my stories #cr spoilers #critical role spoilers #sort of

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