Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The alley they were hiding in (if you could really call a gap between buildings that ended in a brick wall an alley) was kind of awful, even by Beau’s plummeting standards.

The pervasive smell of rotting fruit, ammonia, and general despair choked down her throat even with the front of her robes pulled over her face. Jester, who was entirely to blame for being in said alley, seemed totally fine as she peered around the corner of what was either a brothel or a haberdashery—or, hopefully, both—and called back “do you think we lost them?” in an exaggerated whisper.

“I don’t know,” Beau hisses back. “I wasn’t playing lookout.” Which was true; one second she was been absentmindedly browsing the shelves of a general store while Nott and Jester put on an elaborate routine involving Nott being Jester’s ailing daughter who’s dying wish was to own sixty feet of rope, two healing potions, and some incense and the next Nott had decided to swipe some candles while Jester dramatically moaned about…something resulting in Jester grabbing Beau by the hand and dragging her out of the store as the owner shouted for the guard. Beau spared a thought to wonder how Nott was faring and then dismissed it. The girl had a knack for disappearing when she didn’t want to be found that Beau could respect.

“This is so exciting,” Jester said in her stage whisper, tugging at Beau’s robe. “We’re fugitives from the law!”

Beau pulled her robe back up from where Jester’s yanking had threatened to expose her mouth and nose to the pungent air and said, “I mean, you are. They only know I’m with you because you pulled me out of the store while the owner tried to have you arrested.”

“You sound muffled. Do you have a cold?” Jester said, neither looking up nor addressing Beau’s very valid point, which Beau was about to call her on when the tiefling hissed out a curse and jerked back into the alley so quickly she nearly toppled them both over.

“What, what happened?” Beau said.

“I think one of them saw me!” Jester looked at her with wide eyes.

“Are you su—” Beau began, only to be cut off by a shout.

“You in the alley, please step out,” called a low voice, Jester and Beau freezing.

A beat of silence passed, then Jester leaned in a bit to whisper—in an actual whisper, this time—“yes, I’m sure.”

Beau grumbled something along the lines of “great” and the voice called again, “I would advise not making me come in there and get you. You have ten seconds to show yourself.”

“Ohhhh, what do we doooo?” Jester had both her hands in Beau’s robe’s now, her nervous bounces pulling Beau up and down with her and forcefully reacquainting the monk with the alley air.

“I don’t know, why would I know? I’m terrible at ducking the guards!” Beau answered, putting her hands around Jester’s wrists in a futile attempt to keep them both still.

“Seven!” boomed what Beau could only assume was their newest escort to a jail cell.

“You’re the superhero, this is, like, your job,” Jester said like it should have been obvious as an ominous six rang from the entrance to the alley.

“Yeah, it’s not that kind of secret society,” Beau answered because the last time (and the six times before that) Beau had tried to explain that “superhero” wasn’t exactly the right wordage Jester had just laid one blue hand on hers and said, all big purple eyes and sugar, that she would totally keep Beau’s secret identity, then mimed sewing her lips closed in worrying detail and winked.

Jester made a noise of pure frustration and then her face lit up with an expression Beau had learned to anticipate and fear in equal measure.

“I know what we should do! I read about it in one of the books I stole from Caleb!” she said as the countdown reached its end.

“Alright, hard way it is,” the voice said, which Beau would absolutely care about except that at that exact moment, Jester’s eyes fluttered closed and she leaned up to kiss Beau.

And Beau, because she was absolutely the sort of secret society operative who prioritized kissing cute girls over escaping arrest, kissed back, which was apparently all Jester needed to pull her hands away from Beau robes and instead moving them up to slide one over the monk’s prickly undercut to cup the back of her head and other to rest at the side of her neck as she slammed them back against the brick of the alley wall. Beau, dazed from a combination of being pushed into a wall and the reminder of how strong her pretty little companion was, just let her lips fall open and wrapped her arms around Jester’s waist.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” said the same low voice from earlier, but much closer. Beau looked over to see an incredibly unimpressed woman in the city guard uniform, arms crossed.

“Oh, hello, ma’am,” Jester said in a voice full of calculated innocence. “Do you need my wife and I for something?”

“Yeah,” Beau said, her voice more hoarse than usual. “Are there laws against kissing your spouse in an alley now or something?”

The guard’s expression did not change at all as she leaned back slightly to call, “Davin, gonna need you” over her shoulder. Lowering her voice again to address Beau and Jester, she said: “now, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but that works a whole lot better in a town with more than one blue tiefling and more than one individual in monk robes from the Cobalt Reserve.”

“It worked in the book,” Jester grumbled, and Beau had just enough time to wonder what, exactly, the fuck Caleb was reading when another guard jogged into the alley, manacles at the ready.

“It was a very nice try,” the guard said in a voice balancing somewhere between indulgence and condescension as she moved forward to separate the cleric and the monk, which only causes Jester to pout harder.

The slide of steel around her wrists is getting worryingly familiar, and Beau just signs as one of the guards gives her a hard shove to get her to step onto the main road.

“Sorry it didn’t work, Blue,” Beau said, if only because Jester pouting occasionally ended in property destruction.

Jester brightened. “It’s okay!” she chirped. “We can try again next time!”

Beau could feel her gay little heart skip several beats as a smile wholly inappropriate to the situation split her face. Two hours, bail, and yet another “my poor, dying, definitely-not-a-goblin daughter” routine later, the smile had yet to fully fade, severely unnerving Caleb and prompting a round of mockery from Mollymauk. Beau almost cared.

Chapter Text

So they get caught in a mall heist.

It’s technically Nott’s fault because she took advantage of the chaos of a mall mid-plunder to go rob a jewelry kiosk, but Nott, being Nott, vanished into the shadows the second a robber pointed a weapon at her and was probably halfway to Marquet by now. Meaning that more immediately it was Jester’s fault for realizing Nott wasn’t with them and charging back into the building, and then everyone else’s fault for being big enough idiots to run in after her. So now here they are, an idiot parade ducking fire from some apparently very desperate burglars.

“How the fuck do we keep gettin’ ourselves in these situations?” Fjord asks, apparently talking to no one in particular, as he leans around a corner and jerks back as a bolt of energy nearly melt a chunk of his face off. He leans back around for a moment, and the tang of seawater hits Beau’s nose as one of the burglar’s goes down and doesn’t get up.

“I’ve been asking myself that ever since I left the circus,” Molly shouts from somewhere in the fray accent in full force, “which I might add is not the sequence I would have expected that to happen in.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll be fine!” chirps Jester. Caleb, who has a gaping wound in his side that the cleric is currently healing, gives her a doubtful look. “Nobody knows this mall better than I do!”

“Jester, we have never been here before,” Beau grits out sliding into some leather-clad jackass attempting to take a stab at Molly while his back was turned and taking them out at the ankle. She twists up to catch her hapless victim and falls back with them, wrapping one arm around their throat to choke them out. She turns to where one of the poor, poor nightguards is tied up in a corner and looking on from the corner she’s huddled in, her Segway tipped sadly to one side. “Ma’am, don’t worry, we know what we’re doing,” Beau says just in time for the person in her chokehold to crack their head back into her nose, giving them all the opportunity they needed to break free.

“Motherfucker,” Beau spits out as she feels a warm coppery stream of blood leak from her nose into her mouth. Her newly freed opponent yanks a dagger from the small of their back and prepares to rush. Beau swallows another curse—and some blood—and lunges forward to headbutt them right over their nose. They crumple, and Beau delivers a particularly vicious kick to their ribs for good measure.

“And here I thought you couldn’t win a fight with a headbutt,” Molly says, his own opponent neatly dispatched of and his voice very nearly as smug as usual. Beau flips him a gesture crude enough there was fine for using it in some countries and he laughs delightedly in response. He’s about to say something else—he usually is—as a cry of pain rings out. They spin around to see where one of the would-be-robbers is halted mid-lunge at a cowering Nott, who apparently decided to reappear. Molly and Beau watch as the man’s flesh seems to melt off. The two slowly turn to where Caleb is back on his feet, pointing at the pile of bubbling flesh and glaring hard enough to kill the man twice.

“Dude,” Beau says, slightly stunned. “Nice.”

Caleb’s expression smooths over into something Beau might call sheepishness as Nott, perfectly fine, scrambles over to him. “Ah, well, you know,” he says, “the mind is the only weapon that doesn’t need a holster.”

There is a brief pause, and then Fjord’s sword disappears in a puff of sea air as he puts his hands on his knees and laughs, long and heavy.

Jester cocks her head. “I don’t use a sheath for my scythe.”

Beau quirks an eyebrow and holds up her fists.

Molly grins. “Oh, I prefer it without sheaths, actually,” he says, winking. Jester looks intrigued and Beau tries to glare at her over Molly’s shoulder to try and convey exactly how much she wants this train of thought to continue. Jester shoots her a filthy smile that lets her know she’s already too late and that she might as well try and figure out how to fit two tieflings in her bed.

As Nott tries to comfort the embarrassed wizard—“don’t worry, Caleb, you’ll get ‘em next time”—they set about untying the night guards. One of them clutches at Beau, shaking slightly but determined to get his thanks out.

"…and you were here on holiday,” he finishes, seeming mortified that the burglars could be so inconsiderate as to interrupt the vacation of a band of wandering fuckwits. Jester frowns and nods seriously.

Fjord shakes his head at her and, ever a people person, rests a broad, warm hand on the guard’s back. “Don’t worry about it,” he says. “Heroism never takes a holiday.”

Chapter Text

The thing you had to know about the Traveler is that he’s a dick. But, like, a fun dick. A dick who likes pranks and lets Jester do cool magic stuff.

He comes to her in dreams, sometimes, all tall and beautiful and sad. But he smiles for her, and sometimes Jester even thinks he means it. He seems to go through settings for their meetings on a whim; sometimes it’s a tavern where they drink ale after ale. Other times it’s a store packed full of beautiful things that cause Jester to squeal in delight and bounce from shelf to shelf. The Traveler trails behind her, chuckling as she coos over all the shiny baubles. He seems to enjoy the experience almost as much as she does. Whatever plane he stays in must be pretty boring, Jester thinks.

She tells him about everything: her new friends, her mother’s reprimands, her worries about her father. For all his dickishness, he isn’t a bad listener and when the undercurrent of fear breaks through the cheerful tone she puts on (because having honest conversations with people about her emotions? Disgusting.) he reaches over with a smile and ruffles her short hair until she looks like she was caught in a windstorm.

And the pranks. The Traveler is a combination of clever and devious that Jester adores. She knows it isn’t a traditional deity-cleric relationship, but it’s just so much fun. She gives him her devotion and in return he gives her magic; she gives him drawings and stories and in return he tells her that it might be funny if someone drew a beard on Fjord, which she could probably do if she stole some of Caleb’s charcoal and was very quiet.

He’s easy to like in a way that makes Jester think he somehow accidentally stumbled into being a deity—If he actually is a deity, Jester isn’t really clear on that? But he gives her magic so it’s cool—and is actually supposed to be some sort of poltergeist because as it is he’s just kind of a cosmic annoying brother who sometimes gives her powers. She asked him about it once while they were in one of the store-dreams and if her curiosity wasn’t overflowing she would probably have regretted it pretty immediately. He’d been absentmindedly turning over a carving of a…bird? Maybe? Of something with feathers. Anyways, she’d asked, and his hands had choked over the carving and if it hadn’t been a dream she’d have been concerned about dashing before the store owner realized it was broken.

“‘Accident’ sounds… close,” he had said, somewhere between resignation and bitterness and sadness. “There were… circumstances. Complications. I made choices. I met my current employer. That was that.”

“And now you’re the Traveler? Or were you the Traveler before?” Jester had asked, aware she was pressing on a delicate subject but to intrigued for tact.

“I was a traveler before, of sorts,” he had answered, eyes dark and far away.

The silence that followed felt like sand in Jester’s skin so she forced a smile and a laugh and said, “and now here we are!”

The sadness faded from his face, there but muted. “And here we are indeed, you and I.”

Jester giggled. “And all because you were the only one who answered when I prayed.”

The Traveler had looked at her, all faux-solemn, and said, “they don’t know what they’re missing. I bet none of their clerics draw them zombie erotica.”

“Is that why you picked me?” Jester had asked, teasing. “For my beautiful drawings?”

“That, and…” The traveler shook his head, his dark hair swaying with the motion. “Before this. There was… well. You remind me of someone. Sometimes you almost sound like her.”

“Well,” Jester had said, somewhat at a loss, “she sounds like she was wonderful and beautiful and very, very smart.”

“She is,” the Traveler had answered, and that had been that.

The next time he came to her, they both acted like the conversation had never happened. Jester sometimes wonders what would happen if she pressed just a little bit harder, but she doesn’t want to lose the ability to kill people with her mind or access to all those great pranks, so she keeps her mouth shut and when he looks a little sadder than usual she tells him her best jokes. And when she wakes up, she feels his power in her like she feels the air in her lungs and she knows it’s just a matter of time before she sees him in another dream, sharp and raven-dark in the corner of a bar.