For @beaurcgard for @critroleexchange 2018! Please note mature rating, mildly nsfw text.
They both tumble through the door of their room, kissing as they go. Jester’s mouth is warm, soft, and hungry for as many kisses as Beau can give her. Jester’s kisses always remind Beau of sweets, those kind of tangy ones. It’s not a taste, exactly, just some kind of innate Jesteriness.
Jester slams the door shut behind them with her tail, then slams Beau into it, knocking the wind out of her. Which is just fine by Beau, it's fun when Jester gets bossy.
Jester takes advantage of Beau’s momentary breathlessness to transfer her attention from Beau’s mouth to her neck and start sucking, and all of a sudden Beau’s breathless for a totally different reason. Damn, that feels good. She groans, which only encourages Jester to redouble her efforts. She closes her eyes and starts lazily tracing her fingers up and down Jester’s back. It's not her best work, if she’s honest, but she’s kind of distracted.
“These are fun. It's kind of like drawing dicks on tables. ‘Jester was here’ or ‘property of Jester’, you know?”
“Oh my gods, I can't work out what's worse, that you said that, or that I'm kind of into it.” Jester just snorts and returns her attention to Beau’s neck.
“Ow!” Her hand flies to the spot where Jester had been diligently leaving a hickey, almost smacking Jester in the face in the process. “What the fuck?”
To Jester’s credit, she backs off in an instant, which Beau’s in favour of in principle, at any rate.
“What is it? Did I hurt you?”
“Ow,” she says again, mostly as a reflex at this point. Now she's had a moment, it wasn't that it was even that painful, just surprising. And sharp. Fuck.
“Beau! Seriously. What’s wrong, do you need me to heal you or something?”
She looks down at her fingers and holy shit, that's blood.
“Damn, Jes, your teeth are sharp.”
Jester grins widely, showing off the culprits. “Yup. I'm pretty sure they're fangs, technically. Wait. Did I <I>cut you</I>?” Jester sounds likes she's caught somewhere between pride and chagrin, which isn't far off where Beau’s at, with something else swirling around in there too that she can't quite put her finger on.
“Huh.” She rubs thoughtfully at her neck.
“Seriously though, did I hurt you?” Jester closes the gap between them and starts inspecting Beau’s neck.
“What? Oh, no, it's just I wasn't expecting it, y’know? It’s fine.”
“Wow, you can totally see it’s my tooth marks! Well, kind of.” Jester wiggles her head side to side, frowning slightly as she squints at the mark in question.
“No, you totally can. OK, that's pretty cool.” Jester sneaks a glance at Beau’s face and, evidently reassured by what she finds there, has come down firmly on the side of pride.
Beau, in the meantime, has finally identified that she…might be super into biting that draws blood, what the fuck? How messed up is that? Eh, whatever, she can add it to the list.
“Hey Jester? How would you feel about doing that again, on purpose? Is that too weird?”
“I mean, it's pretty weird, Beau, but that's OK! Weird is good. Besides,” Jester grins again, and Beau’s eyes are immediately drawn to the four larger canines poking out ever so slightly, “this way it’ll be kind of like painting, and the marks will probably last longer.” The look Jester gives her turns her knees to water, and yeah, OK, enough talking about this and more doing. She pulls Jester in for another kiss to start with, and now she's thinking about it, she's not sure how she never noticed that extra edge to Jester’s kisses before, or how fucking much she likes it.
Jester breaks away and Beau moans impatiently. “Just hold on, Beau,” she says, moving back down to the same spot on Beau’s neck which sure, fair enough, was kind of the point of the exercise. And oh, wow, that <I>hurts</I>, but in a <I>really good</I> way. It's not news to Beau that she's a fan of a little pain mixed in with her pleasure, it’s just another facet of the good kind of pain after a really tough workout, but she's realising very rapidly she's never taken that thought all the way to its logical conclusion before.
Jester pauses briefly, and Beau realises it's to admire her handiwork. “I like it,” she says a little indistinctly. “It's like a little bloody flower. I feel kind of like a vampire now. It's not a <I>lot</I> of blood, but I can definitely taste it.” Her eyes rake over Beau, plotting her next move and honestly, that's pretty hot too. Jester steers her across the room till Beau feels the backs of her knees hit the bed and she flops down, with Jester straddling her lap. Before Beau’s quite sure what's happened, she's on her back and Jester’s easing her shirt up, fingers dancing across her rib cage. Jester wriggles slightly to adjust her angle and picks a spot, seemingly at random, right by Beau’s belly button, and gets to work with lips and tongue and yup, teeth. Beau twitches a bit, hips jerking off the mattress. Almost without pausing Jester plants a hand firmly on Beau’s chest, breaking off just long enough to bite out a bossy “hold still!”
“Yes, ma’am.” Beau flops back and focuses on doing just that. Which is very much not her strong suit, damn it, and whatever Jester’s doing is <i>not</i> making it any easier. She squirms and, yup, this is definitely working for her.
Jester sits up and examines the new mark she's left critically, then turns her attention to Beau’s face.
“You know what I think would be fun? If we tied you up, you’d just <I>have</I> to hold still, and we could see how many I can make before you come. I mean, I don't actually know if you can make a person come just by biting them, but we could find out?”
Beau feels a jolt run straight through her. She swallows hard.
“Uh. Yeah. Sure, that definitely sounds like my idea of fun too.”
For @soofdope for @critroleexchange 2018! Spoilers up to and including campaign 2, episode 46.
Beau has missed a lot of things about being on dry land, but being crammed into Caleb’s hut spell for a night is definitely not one of them.
Jester snores next to her, and Caleb mutters in his sleep, and Nott wriggles again and kicks Beau in the leg and Beau thinks of her cramped cabin on the Squall/Ball-Eater with a rose-tinted fondness she didn’t know she had.
Yasha’s awake too.
Beau knows she is - she can tell by now what Yasha’s breathing sounds like when she’s actually asleep. So she’s not surprised when she hears Yasha scramble to her feet, clearly aiming for stealth but that’s really fucking hard in this small space even when you’re not nearly as tall as she is. Beau cracks her eyes open and watches Yasha pick her way to the edge of the hut and slip past the barrier, murmuring something to Cad as she passes. He says something back, too low for Beau to make out, then settles back to his watch.
Beau waits.
It doesn’t get easier to do, waiting, but she does it. She waits, and she considers, and she decides. And after a moment, she gets up, as silent and light on her feet as Frumpkin, and she follows Yasha outside, nodding to Cad, who nods back in turn and doesn’t give her away.
She gets her bearings and the first thing she notices is that she can smell rain on the air. It’s not here yet, but it smells fresh and green and imminent, and it solidifies her resolve. She slips through the night after Yasha, keeping to the darkest shadows, minding her footsteps.
After a little distance, Yasha leaves the surrounding woods, emerging on a grassy cliff top that Beau knows in daylight would overlook sweeping plains and distant mountains. Beau hangs back at the edge of the undergrowth, unsure of her next move.
“I know you’re there, Beau.”
Yasha’s voice is clear in the quiet. Clear, and kind of annoyed. Shit.
Beau steps out into the open and waves awkwardly. “Uh. Hey.”
Yasha sits on the edge of a hulking rock outcrop, where she has an unobstructed view into the reaching darkness, and doesn’t look at Beau. Faint, on the edge of the horizon, a flicker of lightning forks through the sky, and the dull roll of thunder follows.
“So, uh, you leaving then?” is what Beau says eventually, when the weight of silence becomes unbearable. Damn it, she was hoping she could find a better way to come at it than that, something a bit less blunt at least.
Yasha breathes deeply, a gulp of storm-scented air, but she doesn’t reply.
“‘K. I mean, ‘s cool if you need to leave. I get it.” Beau finds herself filling in the gaps and she hates the way her voice almost shakes. “You’ve got your duty or whatever. When you gotta go, you gotta.” She knows she’s not first mate anymore. You can’t be first mate on a ship you don’t have. She knows it’s not her job to take care of everyone. Like she’d even fucking want that job. Like she’d be anything other than terrible at it if she had it.
She would be terrible at it, wouldn’t she? Had she been terrible at it? The crew hadn’t fucking killed them in their sleep or anything. That had to count for something.
So whether or not she’s first mate, whether or not it’s her fucking responsibility, she’s the one who’s fucking here, and damned if she’s going to let Yasha take off into the night without saying goodbye. Without knowing whether the Mighty Nein care about what happens to her. Without knowing whether Beau cares what happens to her.
She could say that to Yasha. She could. Or she could just as easily set herself on fire and learn to raise the goddamn dead. So, instead, Beau gauges the distance between herself and the rock. “Hey Yasha, watch this!”
She somersaults, head over heels, gives an extra flip and a kick that really wasn’t necessary but looks cool as hell, and makes perhaps the least graceful landing she’s ever managed on the rock next to Yasha. Pinwheeling her arms madly, she regains her balance and sends a quick thanks to whichever gods might be listening that she doesn’t actually fall.
She feels her cheeks burning. Maybe it won’t matter, surely Yasha won’t actually have looked at her.
She glances down. Yasha definitely looked. Yasha looked and Yasha… is she smiling? It’s hard to tell in the darkness, even with her goggles on, but Beau thinks Yasha might have been smiling at her, just a little bit. In her head she does a fist-pump of triumph, though outwardly she’s quite proud of how calmly she sits down beside Yasha.
There’s a long moment of continued silence that Beau doesn’t know how to break, but then Yasha takes an audible breath.
“I am not planning to leave tonight,” she says, quietly. “I came out here to… to watch the storm. To see if the Storm Lord chooses to send me another vision, I suppose.” Her cheeks are a bit pink, Beau notices. Or, like, a different shade of grey in the dark, but she’s going to assume it’s pink.
“Yeah, I heard a bit about the last one. Jester told me, uh, just a little.” Beau pauses, considers. “Sorry if it was, like, a secret or something.” She doesn’t think Jester would have told her, if it was a secret, but it occurs to her that she didn’t check, and she doesn’t want to fuck up Jester and Yasha’s friendship. That would be a low she hasn’t hit in a while.
Yasha looks at Beau, and then off into nothing again, just long enough that Beau thinks maybe she’s fucked up by even mentioning it, though Yasha mentioned it first, damn it. But then, “It’s not a secret,” Yasha says. “It is hard to talk about, but not a secret. Zuala is never a secret.” Her voice is wound as taut as one of Nott’s bowstrings in the moment before release.
Beau nods. “Yeah, I get it. There’s stuff I find hard to talk about too,” she offers. “It’s not secret either, but it hurts, you know?”
It’s Yasha’s turn to nod. If Beau didn’t know better, she’d think maybe Yasha was crying, just a little bit. If Beau didn’t know better, she’d think she wanted to cry herself maybe. Just a little bit. Fuck. She can’t go soft, not now. She gathers herself, shakes her head to clear it.
“Hey, uh,” she begins, without really knowing where she’s planning to end. “I won’t push, yeah? But if you do want to, like, talk about stuff, I’m here, and I know I’m not real good at knowing what to say, but I’m here, ok?”
She’s getting used to Yasha’s pauses. Maybe it doesn’t immediately mean that Beau has said something wrong. Maybe this is just how Yasha is, taking a moment to think before she speaks, so that her words, when they come, have weight behind them. It’s one of the things Beau’s trying to get better at herself.
“Thank you, Beauregard.”
She sounds calm and clear, and not at all annoyed this time. She sounds like she might have meant it. Like Beau might have helped her. A shiver of something runs right down the back of Beau’s neck, through to the tips of her fingers.
Without a thought, Beau reaches out and puts her hand on Yasha’s arm, and for a moment it feels absolutely right, but then Yasha flinches. So slightly that another person might not have noticed at all, but one thing Beau is good at is keep tracking of all the tiny movements a body can make, whether hers or someone else’s.
Beau pulls her hand away as quick as lightning. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.” She’s stumbling over the word, drawing her body back as best she can without actually getting up and moving away. “Sorry.”
Yasha’s eyes are wide. “No! Beau, no, don’t be sorry, I…” She trails off, helpless, and Beau knows she somehow has to fix this tear before it rips too wide and destroys the fragile thing they’ve built here tonight.
“Look,” she says, launching into yet another sentence that she doesn’t know the end of until it comes out of her mouth. “Yasha. We both know I think you’re hot, I’m not real fucking subtle about it, and you’re so fucking hot, but I’d never, y’know. I’d never want anything from you that you didn’t want.”
With a blush so deep Beau’s sure she’d be able to see it even without her goggles on, Yasha half-smiles, though she doesn’t quite meet Beau’s eyes when she answers. “I do know that. But thank you for saying it.” She takes a long breath and lets it out slowly. “I am not uninterested in, um, physical things, you know. But I do not want anything, anything more than that at the moment, not with anyone. I do not know if I ever will.”
Beau, who has always spoken better with her body than her words, thinks about Keg, and about the courtesan at The Landlocked Lady, and about all the women she’s known before that, and maybe even the women she suddenly suspects Yasha’s fucked along her road from there to here. She lets herself grin, flexes her arms as dramatically as she can. “I can do physical. I’m real good at physical.”
And Yasha laughs, a deep, bubbling sort of laugh that makes Beau laugh too, pride ringing through her head. She grabs onto that pride and uses it as the leverage she needs to push forward, with an eyebrow raised and her best smirk firmly in place. “Why don’t you find out? Come on, Yasha, want to spar?” She hops to her feet, dances into a fighting stance. “I bet I could take you.”
“Oh, you think so?” Yasha stands, slowly, unfolding her full height with the grace and power of a stalking tiger, each angle calculated to show off the lines of her muscles, and fuuuuck, Beau can’t take her eyes off her, thinks she could just watch Yasha move forever...
Yasha’s fist flashes out, any trace of her prior languor vanishing, and it tests Beau’s reflexes to their very limit not to let herself get punched in the shoulder. Instinct kicks in and Beau ducks to the side, the blow glancing off the edge of her arm, and she can feel the strength behind it. She lets out a wild sound halfway between a whoop and a laugh, and gets her head in the game.
Yasha is strong as hell, and Beau is quick as a cat, but Yasha isn’t slow and Beau isn’t weak, and they’re just as well-matched as Beau assumed they would be. She’s watched Yasha fight a hundred times by now, and fought alongside her, with moves that seem to gel so well together naturally that you’d think they practiced it or something, but she’s never fought against her before, though she’s pictured it. There’s a fierce joy in this, in how hard she has to work at this, in how well she trusts her body to know what to do - a joy that’s pure and all-encompassing.
Beau keeps her feet for a long time, using every bit of her speed to her advantage, but the goggles make it hard to see, and she’s tired, and if she’s honest, she can foresee how she wants this to end and she knows how to get to it. When Yasha takes her down, when she gets in past Beau’s guard and brings her to the ground, pinning her in place with hands and hips and delicious weight, it might have been because Beau let her, just a little bit. Beau really isn’t sure, and she doesn’t want to think about it too hard just now.
She wriggles against Yasha’s grip, panting, and is gratified to notice that Yasha’s breathing heavily too, beads of sweat visible along her hairline. She’s worked as hard as Beau to get to this. Beau makes herself fall still, with Yasha there above her. She wants to know what will happen, what Yasha wants to make happen.
Beau waits.
Again, she waits. Again, it doesn’t get easier, but perhaps, just perhaps, she gets a little better at it.
Yasha looks down at her, with a strange intensity that Beau can’t quite place, and then she leans in and kisses Beau on the mouth. It lasts a moment, her lips soft and hot against Beau’s, and it feels almost like a test, rather than a kiss. Like a question Yasha’s asking of Beau, and of herself.
Beau doesn’t know what answers she finds, but when she pulls away she’s still smiling, at least, and Beau can live with that.
They get to their feet, a few moments later, and untangling their limbs is awkward, but that’s ok too.
“I can go?” Beau asks. “Or, uh, I could stay? If you want? Watch the storm with you?” She doesn’t know if it’s too much, what she’s asking, if she’s too much, right here and now, so she braces herself for rejection.
“I would like that.”
Oh.
“Cool. Right, yeah, awesome.” Beau settles herself next to Yasha, facing the place where the dark sky is darker still, where lightning sparks and thunder rumbles, a little nearer than it was before.
Somewhere, far away and beyond the clouds, the sun begins to rise.
warnings: mentions of neglectful/abusive parenting
My secret Santa contribution for the Critical Role Gift Exchange (@critroleexchange) ! This is for @primtheamazing, who for some reason I can’t properly tag in this? They asked for a Tangled AU of Jester and Beau, with Jester as Rapunzel, and I couldn’t resist the opportunity to write that! Hope you enjoy.
Jester lived her life more or less away from the world. Her father — who she knew adored her and did everything to keep her safe and protected — couldn’t risk the knowledge of a daughter. Hence, Jester had grown up in a tower. This tower had no doors and just one window, looking out over the sea.
She loved the sea air. The breeze came through every day, the sounds of the nearby town she could just watch for hours on end. She had journals and journals and walls coated in writing between her and the Traveler, the god no one knew existed.
There was so much she wanted to do and see. She trusted her father that the world out there was too terrifying — it would hurt her and her father would lose her like he lost her mother, to awful and terrible people. She thought to herself that one say she’d be ready to go and un-lose her mother, and then maybe she’d be allowed to leave and adventure all on her own. With the Traveler’s help, she could do anything.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Critical Role (Web Series)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Beauregard/Keg (Critical Role)
Characters: Beauregard (Critical Role), Keg (Critical Role), Nott (Critical Role), Caleb Widogast, Caduceus Clay, Jester (Critical Role), Yasha (Critical Role)
Additional Tags: Sharing Body Heat, Sharing a Bed, well it's a sleeping bag, Abandonment Issues, but they're not like a Thing, First Second Time, Mission Fic, Porn with Feelings, Trans Female Character
Summary:
Well, the first time was good.
But Beau doesn't get past that. She doesn't want to.
So when she meets Keg again, back up in Shady Creek Run while they're taking care of Caduceus, it's a little awkward.
For @walkthegale, as a gift for @critroleexchange ! I hope you like it. It took a direction I wasn’t quite expecting, but I’m still pretty happy with it! Happy New Year!
Here is my gift for the @critroleexchange, I drew for @themightynien who asked for Vax & Vex hanging out together. I hope you’ll like it, and to make up for the delay in posting, I’ll be working on an other of your prompts. (Thank you for your patience!)
I hope you had a nice holiday. =)
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
This is my gift for @smartlions for the @critroleexchange! They requested holiday party and studio ghibli vibes hope you enjoy!
'Tis the Season
Royalwriter
Summary:
Jester's already putting a holiday party together for her friends, and if she's learned anything from the copious amounts of romance novels she's read, the time for a confession of feelings is after everyone is stuffed full of cookies and friendship. She just hopes Fjord shares the sentiment.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
This is my @critroleexchange gift for @celebreultimaverba ! It was my first time writing Vox Machina ever and I’m pretty proud of how it turned out. Hope you like it!
Rating: T
Pairings: Multi
Summary: “Keyleth has a lot of thoughts about what happened at the Raven Queen's tomb.
They are not the nicest of thoughts. They make it hard for her to sleep, a cold sensation seeping through her lungs and her heart until it feels like it stops beating.
Fandom: Critical Role
Pairing: Beau/Keg
Summary:
“Aw shit. Was I – Was it the blue? Was I too tall?”
“I mean, you guys have your weapons drawn. I’m assuming – are we gonna do this or what?”
or: soulmate AU where the first words they say to you are tattooed on your body.
Written for @goinggrimdork for the @critroleexchange. I hope you enjoy it.
Also on AO3.
Beau had never liked her tattoo very much.
It wasn’t even about the actual words scribbled on her midriff – although, to be fair, those words were pretty fucking weird – but more that she’d never liked the whole idea of it all. Soulmates. She could certainly see how there might be an element of reassurance to it, in knowing that there was someone out there that was right for you, and it wasn’t that she didn’t understand how some people got immense joy and hope out of something like that. It was just that Beau herself would have been perfectly fine opting out of participating in this particular experience and leaving it for other people to enjoy.
She’d spent her whole life trying to get away from the path that had been rigorously pre-determined for her, fighting to make her own choices and to be the one forging her own destiny. She wanted freedom, to not be controlled by her parents, nor by some magic too old and powerful to even comprehend, let alone circumvent.
She’d never been a fan of magic to begin with. Even now, despite all the ridiculously cool shit she'd seen her travelling companions pull off, she still wouldn't trade her training for any of it. Maybe it wasn't as impressive as summoning walls of fire or swarms of beetles or literal otherworldly demons, but at least her power was something that was inherently hers. She didn't need some fancy book, like the one Caleb clung to, or the approval of some fickle immortal being. She’d earned it, all by herself, and nobody could take it away from her.
And that quote, so indelibly imprinted on her body, represented the entire antithesis of everything Beau stood for.
Overcome with curiosity, Beau had even done some research on the phenomenon, back when she’d first been with the monks in Zadash. Those few days had been the only times she’d voluntarily ventured into the library to check out some of its vast collection. There were many books and scrolls on the subject of soulmates in possession of the Cobalt Soul. Beau had only had to leaf through a small portion for her fears to be confirmed. There were widely varying theories about the subject – about how it worked, where it came from, what the determining factors could be – but none of them seemed to question the fact that it existed, that it was always right, and that it could not be changed.
And for Beau, that just didn’t fly.
It had never felt comforting to her, this knowledge that no matter what she did, or how hard she tried, there was this one omniscient force that could have predicted every single action she would ever take leading up to meeting this one person that it had somehow determined to be just right for her.
She was perfectly capable of making that assessment herself, thank you very much.
Sometimes, when she'd meet a particularly hot woman (and maybe she was often a little tipsy in those moments), there'd be a brief moment of consideration, maybe even something like hope. But then the moment would pass, and maybe she’d leave them be, or maybe, emboldened by the fact that her quote was just too particular to be used in any random kind of setting, she’d take the risk and talk to them. Maybe they could spend an enjoyable evening together, and then that would be the end of that. Beau was perfectly happy this way.
-------
Of course her luck was meant to run out someday. She just really hadn’t expected it to be this particular one.
It had been the absolute last thing on her mind, so soon after waking up to find half of her friends missing. Some hot mess of a dwarf, just sauntering around with her beat-up armor and her oversized weapons, talking shit about Beau’s stealth skills. The intensity of it all, how the words had seemed to vibrate through her entire being, nestling in her bones. It had been almost dizzying.
And Keg had seemed so casual about it all. As if she didn’t care one bit that Beau’s stupid words were most likely embedded on her own body somewhere. It was simultaneously an immense relief and a surprising source of frustration.
Beau, for her part, had been momentarily dumbstruck at hearing those all too familiar words so unexpectedly.
She’d tried to mimic the dwarf’s nonchalant approach, but that mostly backfired, Keg even reacting with hostility to what Beau still thought was a perfectly good compliment to her powers of perception. She’d even taken Caleb’s advice to make conversation, but asking Keg about her day had apparently just made her look like an even bigger weirdo.
Caleb was truly the worst wingman.
-------
Reluctantly, over time, Beau had let her guard down, and to her annoyance, she found that Keg was actually pretty pleasant to have around. Beau had desperately tried to keep everything casual, but she hadn't failed to notice the looks of admiration and attraction that Keg would send her every now and then, and, well, she was many things, but immune to flattery was not one of them.
So when they'd finally done it, finally gotten that little sliver of vengeance for Molly and the abduction of her friends, she'd given in to a moment of courage and foolishness and made Keg a proposal. Something light and easy, of course, no commitments. She wasn’t that stupid.
And it'd been a good night. A great one even, to be honest. There had seemed to be a sort of unspoken understanding that their respective tattoos didn't have to be acknowledged throughout it all. Even if Keg’s did look pretty hot, the way the words wrapped around her left shoulder and biceps so that they accentuated her muscles.
Still. She probably shouldn't have done that.
Keg had left, as agreed, and the concise but flattering note that had remained, had found its way, carefully folded, into a small notebook Beau kept in her bag. Every now and then, in rare moments of stillness in between pirate hijinks, important First Mate duties, scouring the ocean floor, and making the long journey back to the empire, she’d look for it again, and couldn’t help a small smile from creeping up at the warmth in her belly. The creases in the paper where she’d folded and unfolded it so many times were starting to get a little worn now.
-------
Somehow, she’d begun to believe that she would never see Keg again. It was a big world, and she was far away from where they’d first met and said goodbye. And yet here she was, at the entrance of some random bar in Zadash, freshly bloodied and bruised from an intense training session at the Cobalt Soul archive, with none other than Keg sitting right in front of her, hunched over at the bar. Her battleaxe and warhammer rested against the chair beside her, and she seemed to still be wearing the same dingy armor Beau remembered, though she hoped the blood stains were not all still the same as all those months ago. As Keg looked up upon her entry, Beau could tell she’d let her beard grow in a little. It suited her.
Realisation dawned on her face quickly enough.
“Beau? Is that you?”
Beau grinned, kind of sheepishly. She didn’t think to move away from the entrance until the door opened again a few seconds later, nearly slamming into her.
“Uh, yeah.” She moved to sit down next to Keg, making quick work of ordering a pint of beer.
Keg grinned at her, as if she still couldn’t quite believe she was here.
“Just you these days? No more Mighty Nein?”
“Oh no, we’re still a thing, yeah yeah,” Beau responded. “We’re just – we just got into town again yesterday and we’ve been spending a lot of time cramped together recently, so everyone’s just been sort of doing their own thing today. Jester, Caduceus and Yasha are on some spiritual retreat – whatever the fuck that means – and I’m pretty sure Nott and Caleb went to raid the magic shops. Fjord is off on his own doing gods know what. He’s had a pretty intense couple of weeks.”
“And you figured you’d spend the day getting the shit beaten out of you?” Keg remarked.
Beau laughed, ignoring the flash of pain from one particular scrape on her cheek.
“Basically, yeah,” she shrugged. “I got some good blows in though.”
“I’m sure you did. I would’ve loved to have seen it.” There was something about the way Keg said it that made Beau very relieved that she looked away right as the words left her mouth. An unexpected blush crept up on her cheeks. She cleared her throat and took a long swig from her cup.
“How’ve you been?” she said eventually. “Since, you know, last time.”
Keg rubbed her neck with a half smile. “Eh, not too bad. You?”
“Yeah, fine.”
“Cool. Cool cool cool.” Keg tapped the edge of her cup with her thumb, not really looking at Beau. “So what’ve you been up to?”
“Pffsh, so much,” Beau responded, waving her hands for emphasis. “We went to the Menagerie Coast, got Yasha back on the team –“
“The pale, buff one?”
“Yeah,” Beau nodded. “We were sort of pirates for a bit. I was First Mate. Very important role, very difficult. But I rose up to the challenge, you know. And, uh, we went on some crazy quests, got a few close calls, but uh, no more losses,” Beau cleared her throat, “So that’s good. And now we’re back in the empire.”
“Wow, sounds like you had quite an adventure.”
“Yeah, we did.” Beau nodded, running a finger over the brim of her cup in contemplation. “Anyway, what’ve you been doing? Got any exciting tales of your own? Met any cool people?”
“Oh, eh,” Keg laughed half-heartedly, “Not anything near as interesting as what you’ve been up to. Mostly just wandering around. Doing some odd jobs to get by. Drinking my problems away. Occasionally making an effort to not be so much of a dick anymore…”
Beau smiled at that, genuinely.
“Hey, that’s good! That’s great.” She didn’t know when she’d turned into the group’s motivational speaker, but she’d found that it was actually quite nice to see the reactions her compliments and encouragement could bring out in her friends.
“It’s super hard. But I guess as long as you’re trying, that’s what matters. And I’ve really had to try a lot lately, especially being First Mate and all. There’s a lot of stuff to learn if you come from a background like ours. And to unlearn. But I’m sure you’re doing great.”
“Yeah, I don’t know about that,” Keg muttered, with another one of those half-hearted chuckles.
“Don’t sell yourself short,” Beau said, maybe a bit too seriously. She gently elbowed Keg in the side to lighten the mood.
-------
“Hey, can I ask you something?” Beau asked, several refills, a good meal and much talk and laughter later. It had been gnawing at her for – well, months, really – but over the last few hours it had started to gather a sense of urgency, what with having Keg right there to finally provide her with an answer.
“Ask away.”
“Did you –” Beau paused, deciding that she needed another long sip of her beer before continuing, “Did you not care at all, that we’re soulmates? All the way from the start, I mean?”
“Oh man,” Keg laughed, a little nervously maybe. “To be honest, I completely missed that whole thing until like hours after it happened. I’m not always the most perceptive, as you may have noticed.” She started absentmindedly tapping her thumb against the edge of her cup again. “I definitely had a major freak-out over it once it’d finally dawned on me though.”
Beau smiled a little at that, picking at a splinter in the wood of the bar.
“You always seemed so chill about it to me.”
Keg took a few seconds to respond. “I guess once I calmed down, I figured, what’s the point in fighting it?” She shrugged. “I don’t understand any of that magic shit, but if we’re like, supposed to be together, then that’s fine with me. Makes things easier, you know. We don’t know how long we’ve got on this world. And I mean,” Keg hesitated, just briefly, before pushing through, “the universe obviously gave me quite a catch.”
Beau felt her cheeks reddening despite herself.
“Sorry, was that…? Sorry,” Keg said immediately.
Beau hesitated, then took Keg’s free hand, the one that wasn’t wrapped around her cup, and threaded their fingers together lightly.
“I, eh,” Beau took a deep breath. “I guess I didn’t do too bad either.”
Keg said nothing at that, just squeezed her hand with a smile.
It didn’t take long for them to make their way to the room Keg had rented for the night. It was not a glamorous place by any means, but it had a functional, if somewhat small bed, and that was all they needed.
They were already glued together by the time they made it inside, Keg fumbling to close the door behind them and haphazardly dropping her weapons on the floor as Beau’s hands began working on her armor, smiling through their kisses.
Once the various layers of metal and fabric had been discarded to the floor, Beau made quick work of her own monk robes.
Keg didn’t need to be told what to do. Her hands were all over Beau in an instant, and she lifted her off the ground with ease. Beau kissed her more hungrily as Keg carried her slowly to the bed.
She didn’t need to be told what to do there either.
-------
Beau had no idea what time it was when she awoke, but there was bright sunlight streaming in from between the poorly closed curtains. She took a second to process her surroundings, and, the memories of the previous night flooding back to her, turned around in the bed. Her hand reached out for Keg’s warm, muscular body, but instead, found only cold sheets. Frowning, she sat up, and that was when she noticed the familiar figure huddled on the floor, leaning against the foot of the bedframe.
“The fuck are you doing on the floor?” Beau spoke, her voice still heavy with sleep.
“Shit,” Keg startled, knocking something over that clattered and rolled over the wooden floor. An inkwell, Beau realised, seeing the dark substance pouring out of it as it came to a halt against the far wall. Keg turned around to face her, and Beau could see she was wearing spectacles that looked like it had been a while since they’d seen better days.
“What’s going on, Keg? Why are you-” Beau began drowsily, but Keg interrupted her.
“I’m – shit – listen, I’m sorry. I was just –” Keg seemed to realise she was still wearing the spectacles and hastily took them off, “I was just writing you this letter,” she held up a sheet of paper already containing a lot of crossed out writing, “because –”
“Were you going to leave?” Beau couldn’t keep the indignation out of her voice.
“No!” Keg said hastily. “I mean, yes, but not for long. I just have to be somewhere, but I’ll be back later and I didn’t want to wake you.”
“Oh.”
Beau rubbed her eyes and made a quick decision.
She got out of the bed, and Keg’s expression at the sight of her naked body was very easy to decipher.
“I think you should stay here instead,” she said bluntly.
“Um. I really need to –” Keg muttered half-heartedly as Beau walked up to her and ran a finger lightly across her cheek. “I mean, it’s work.”
“I’m sure it’ll be fine if you don’t take this one job,” Beau said, bending down to place a kiss on the side of her throat.
Keg actually whimpered.
“I’m – Fuck.”
“You could just travel with us for a while,” Beau said, trailing light kisses across her jaw and cheek. “I mean, if you want.”
Keg actually put some distance between them – just a few inches, but enough to make Beau frown. Keg seemed to want to study her face for something. “You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure,” Beau said, as nonchalantly as she could muster, “I don’t have to explain to you that it’s a dangerous life, but there’s a pretty steady cash flow.” Keg looked at her intently for another moment.
“And,” Beau continued, gently placing a hand on the arm that was keeping them apart, “I’d like it if you were around.”
“Okay,” Keg breathed. She moved closer once more so she could continue their earlier activities, hands grabbing Beau softly by the waist.
“I think we're due for a repeat of last night. You know, to make up for all that lost time?” Beau grinned, already leading Keg back to the bed.
Keg pulled her down for another kiss, nodding avidly against Beau’s lips.
“Just for the record, though, I’ve turned into quite the cuddler.”
