#leechbrain

Jester didn’t think of Beau that way.  Beau was a friend!   The bestest friend you could have!  A friend who supported you whenever you needed it and told you how awesome you were, how hot you were, how right you were.  And cuddled a lot, which was great because Jester loved cuddles!  It felt really good to have someone in bed.  It felt really good to have someone wrap their arms around you.  It was so different from nights when she was little.  Sometimes, when Beau was asleep (Jester could tell she was asleep because Beau didn’t snore, but she did make a sound that was almost snoring) she would mutter something and squeeze Jester close and it was like a hard press of … care and it filled Jester up with this warmth.  It also made her feel tingly.  Sometimes the tingle was in her arm because it fell asleep because she didn’t want to wake Beau up to move, but other times it was a tingle in her head that made her want to jump up and down and other times it was in her chest and made her want to turn around and squeeze Beau back and sometimes—just sometimes, it was really rare and barely happened at all—it was lower and made Jester feel like when she was reading the super interesting parts of Tusk Love all by herself and, well ….

Beau was Jester’s bestest friend, but she’d never had a friend that made her feel so confused.

Still, she was Jester’s bestest friend, so when the group had split up to check out the different cults they thought were related to the Chained Oblivion and one of those cults was near Kamordah, it had made perfect sense for Jester to volunteer to go with Beau.  And when Beau had (jokingly, Jester knew she was just joking) suggested they pretend to be married and stay with her parents because it would “fucking freak them out to see their failure of a daughter show up dressed as a high ranking member of the Cobalt Soul with a wife in tow,” of course Jester had agreed!  Not only was it a great prank, it was a chance to mess with Beau’s parents.  And—Jester thought with a very intimidating frown—they deserved to be messed with after what they had done to Beau.

It was weird because Jester had assumed when she jumped with excitement and said they should do it that Beau would give that cocky grin and agree immediately like she did to (most) of Jester’s schemes, but instead Jester had to convince her to do it, all while Beau kept shooting Nott weird looks.  But she’d given in in the end because it was obviously the best plan and each of the groups had headed their own way.

And it had gone so well so far!  They’d showed up at the door and the servant had gone wide-eyed and then Beau’s mother had gone wide-eyed and then her father had gone wide-eyed and they hadn’t been able to say no because Beau was an Expositor now and you can’t turn down someone that important and they had definitely been thrown off by Jester being blue and a tiefling (which had made Jester hang on Beau three hundred percent more) and Jester had even gotten a couple of super obvious dick jokes in during dinner!

And Beau’s brother was adorable!  And he loved her!  And she’d made him laugh, even though Beau’s parents clearly wanted Jester to stop making faces and little pink unicorns.

Beau and Jester had laughed through the night.  Jester loved it when she made Beau smile.

Of course, then they’d had to take care of the boring mission, which meant spending most of the day and some of the night wandering and watching and waiting.  They didn’t find anything, but, as they got back late (the clocks in the house long past striking midnight), Beau smirked and held a finger up to her lips.

“Want to see how I used to sneak in?”

Jester fairly vibrated her head into a nod.