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Beau knew how to get wasted. She knew how to drink herself into a stupor, forget all the failures of today and wake up tomorrow with a wicked hangover and a fresh look on life. Those nobles, they know how to drink themselves miserable and hopeless and wake up dreading the future. It was a point of pride that Beau didn’t take after them in that sense – just in their taste of expensive alcohols.
So with another day of malicious looks from uneasy allies and being beaten within a few inches of her life – and watching her friends fall and fall and finally rise again – she was ready to drink herself into oblivion with the rest of them. Celebrating another night together and alive (and only barely concealing the hysteria that follows a brush with death).
So tonight was a night of oblivion and tomorrow would be a day of excitement and hoping the future would take them somewhere less deadly.
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Caleb might not have been raised in luxury but he knew how to imagine his way into nobility with the quality of his tower and its contents. Beau cornered him as they [one of the almost death places] and demanded quality alcohol to be served by fey cats. It was the least he could do after they had holed up in relative safety after their hide and seek chase with literal assassins.
(Volstruckers even, people the Cobalt Soul had been trying to identify for years to pull apart the Cerberus Assembly. If there weren’t a million other threads to keep pulling at she could finally start to expose them further. She had insider knowledge she could pry from Caleb, years of conditioning and torture. The awful testing of children - their strength, their devotion, their obedience, their willingness to go over the edge for the idea of an empire.
She could prove her worth to the Cobalt Soul, that she had completed their training and it made her better. She was pursuing truth because it was important to know, it was vital to bring it to light, so much thrived in the darkness, in the shadows, in the forgotten spaces that everyone else forgot to look in. That is where she started to find herself, in those forgotten dark places, away from disapproving eyes, away from people who heard her name and demanded her to be what she couldn’t. She knew those spaces, they all knew those spaces so well.)
So yeah, assassins before bedtime deserved a bit of drinking. And Caleb provided. Lionett wine, ales and beers they chugged once in a tavern in Hupperdook before everything went to shit, cheap hard liquors that mixed well with the fruit juice Jester seemed to favor, margaritas they once enjoyed on a tropical island away from everything.
And this was the first time in a long time that Beau found herself floating in her own mind, far before she thought she would be this drunk. (Every now and then she would twist or reach and wince as she pulled at the scab that stretched across her torso that Cadeuceus had prevented from a series of fractures and lacerations, the blood loss probably didn’t help her tolerance this night). Dinner was over and everyone was chatting as they dispersed towards their rooms, but Beau had a mission to follow through with tonight, she was determined to attempt a bit of B&E. Well, as much B&E as you could do in a tower created by a man who had such a density of secrets he hid within him – sometimes she wondered if it felt like a weight holding onto all those memories (she felt the weight of responsibility grow heavier and heavier the more she uncovered about the plots they were pursuing. Her muscles may be exquisite, but how do you train yourself to hold world-changing secrets without breaking?) But she was reasonably sure that she could twist her way through the cat tunnels to get a glimpse of the things Caleb imagined when he thought of safety.
-
The night progressed as conversations revealed love and loss and grief and hope and fear. And Beau was slowly making her way through every floor, much to the amusement of those who spotted her. She was concentrating so hard on her quiet footfalls and contorting herself to fit into every hiding spot she could find that she circled back to the same three floors. Somehow drawn to her friends, maybe shepherded by the cats she avoided, maybe trying to ensure they remained alive and well and not fallen.
When she snuck into where Yasha was quietly discussing blooms with Cad, the quiet contentment radiating off of them wiped her mind clear. She had to take a minute to remember what her goal was with this sneaking, and find that floating sensation that drove her to a bit of crime in the first place, and continue forwards. But she circled back once, twice, and on the third time she noticed Cad’s eyes tracking her from across the way, and finally stepped off the catwalk to enter the room properly.
Cad greeted her with a warm smile, but she was more focused on the way Yasha was cradling a small patch of fungi from the top of Cad’s staff (Beau had almost died by those hands, and then had been healed by them bare moments later. Her own hands are a patchwork of scars and calluses and blisters and blood and ink). There’s a stilted conversation to have there. Full of fear of committing too early, committing in the middle of chaos and world-ending bullshit. Full of insightful, if bluntly delivered, comments and advice – and maybe a retreat to a more private spot to discuss date plans. But they are talking and they are full of hope and love and fear and love and grief and love.
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Let’s leave them there. At that conversation of something blooming. Something in their hands, something in their hearts, something in their minds – blooming.