#thankfully the Lamb's skin is grey rather than black so my eyes will be spared having to knit black yarn | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

mnemememory · 5 years ago

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sweet little lamb

(part 1)

beauty in the beast au; where jester is a teapot, caleb is a candelabra, and yasha is an evil demon (except she's really not)

Beau exists in a perpetual state of making bad decisions.

At least, according to her mother. Beau’s gotten good at tuning out the rants about coming home late, coming home drunk, coming home with hickeys on her neck or not bothering to even come home at all. Beau spends most of her nights crashing on couches with people she hadn’t known before that evening. The village of Kamordah is small, but the city located just an hour out certainly isn’t. Every time Beau leaves behind the stink of a thousand people, she feels a little less herself.

Still. She hadn’t actually expected them to kick her out.

“Hey,” she yells, banging on the door. The locked door. They even moved the spare key out from under the doormat. “I’m back! Let me in!”

Nothing.

Beau scowls and kicks at the doorframe one more time, before turning and stuffing her hands into her pockets. She looks around at the street. Thankfully, it’s still early enough that no one was out and about to witness her inglorious disownment. Apparent disownment. If they want to get rid of Beau, they’re going to have to look her in the eyes and say it. If anything, she wants to be able to punch someone before the village police are called.

The neighbourhood is already fairly used to bursts of random shouting coming from wherever Beau turns out to be, so no one rushes out to demand Why are you awake at this ungodly hour of the morning? The answer is, obviously, Beau is drunk off her ass and wanted a nice place to sleep tonight. It is her birthday, after all.

Well. It had been her birthday, right up until midnight last night. She is officially eighteen years and one day old. Hurray.

Beau can just imagine what her mother would say now: “I can’t believe you’ve managed to survive this long.” Even in Beau’s imagination, she’s dressed immaculately, holding tight to her little brother’s hand. “Given how often you’ve tried to drink yourself – and us – into an early grave.”

Beau doesn’t drink that much. Her mother tends to overexaggerate for comedic effect, especially when the neighbours were involved. Beau can’t count how many times she’s hidden at the top of the staircase as her mother entertained guests, listening to the horrible things they said about each other. Your daughter certainly is a handful, was often the topic of conversation. I heard she –

It was different, every time, but the tone never changed. Beau always thought it funny how different they sounded when they thought no one was listening.

“I can’t believe this,” she says, kicking at the sidewalk and stubbing her toe. She spits out a few curses that her mother would have killed her for had she uttered them around her baby brother, and then collapses onto the hard ground. She spreads her limbs out like a starfish. Beau is just intoxicated enough to know that this is a bad idea but not particularly care. If someone runs me over with a cart, she thinks, then at least my death will be as messy and inconvenient as possible.

She wonders what her parents would tell her little brother. Maybe he’d wake up early, like he always seemed to do. Maybe they wouldn’t catch him fast enough to stop him from looking at her mangled corpse. People died all the time in villages like hers, where hygiene came in the form of bi-weekly bathes and soap strong enough to give sensitive skin chemical burns, but her little brother hadn’t really been in the forefront of all that.

Beau stares up at the stars. She counts the specks of light until she loses track, until the sunlight starts to bleach the sky pale. It’s cloudless and beautiful. The weather is perfect. Of course it is.

(It had been raining yesterday. Beau can already feel the water pooling in-between the cobblestone cracks, soaking into her jacket and chilling her to the bone.

Of course the weather was perfect for her little brother’s birthday, but not for hers. Of course).

“You’re looking rather down, young lady,” someone says.

Beau opens her eyes. There is a man standing above her, silhouetted by the rising sun. He’s a drow, his long tattered black cloak pulled loosely around a set of grey leather armour. There’s a blue cloth wrapped around the lower half of his face, obscuring everything but his eyes. Yellow eyes.

Very slowly, Beau sits up. There’s still no one around, which is odd but not unusual. It’s the day after a festival, after all. People were probably still nursing off their hangovers in the comfortable cool darkness of their own homes.

“What do you want?” she says, reaching up to press a hand to her forehead. Gah. That was such a bad idea. Now the world is spinning. As much fun as it would be to get robbed just outside her parents house, she doesn’t exactly feel like mugging some poor random to get back whatever shreds of her dignity remained.

The man seems to smile down at her. It’s a little hard to tell, with the only reference she has being the slight upward curve of his glowing eyes. “I was just passing through,” he says. “Thought you might be in a bit of trouble.”

Urgh. “No,” Beau says, bracing herself. She jumps to her feet without too much wooziness, which she’s going to count as a win. “Everything’s fine. Nothing to see here.”

“Is that so,” the man says.

“I haven’t seen you around before,” Beau says, flexing her fingers. She bends down again to grab her staff. “You here for the festival?”

“You could say that,” the man says.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Beau says. “I don’t speak bullshit.”

“On the contrary, I expect that’s the only language you do speak.”

Beau lunges forward. “Excuse –”

He’s gone.

Beau whirls around at the sound of mocking laughter. The drow is standing behind her, eyes in half-moons, arms crossed. He’s leaning casually against the pole of a streetlamp.

Twirling her staff, Beau rushes him. She lands a blow with a sickening crack, following up with her fists –

Only to hit the pole. Beau’s knuckles bounce off the metal, numb.

“I’m here to collect a debt,” the man says. He’s still behind her. How did he manage to get behind her again?

“I don’t owe you shit,” Beau says. “I don’t even know who you are.”

The man tuts. “I think you owe quite a few people you don’t know quite a few things,” he says. “That speakeasy you opened up in the city certainly hasn’t been making bank on generous donations from wealthy benefactors, after all.”

“You’re here about the Mighty Nein?” Beau says, clenching her teeth. “What are you, a tax collector?”

“Well, you certainly don’t pay for all that alcohol,” he says. “But no. In this, you’re not incorrect. You don’t know who I am. But I certainly know who you are, Miss Lionett.”

Beau briefly closes her eyes. She shifts around her grip on her staff. “Is this something Dad owes you?”

The man lifts up his hand, like he’s ringing an imaginary bell. “Ding! And your father insisted on you being slow. No, I think you’re just the intelligence level I need for this.”

“For what?” Beau says, and then snaps into a flurry of blows. He’s gone before she can even land a glancing hit, which is nothing if not a blow to her pride.

“Just a little job I need done,” he says. Beau doesn’t turn around this time. She looks from side to side, mind frantically working out some new strategy. There’s still no one outside, despite the sun being well above the buildings by now. Festival or no festival, the harvest must be tended. Beau’s father would skin anyone who thought about skipping a day of work because of too much late-night partying. Beau would know. She’s borne the brunt of one-too-many early-morning shouting matches over that exact situation.

“I don’t work for assholes,” Beau says.

“And yet you work for your father,” he says.

Beau grins into the distance, sharp as a knife. “I wouldn’t say I work for him exactly.”

The man snaps his fingers. “Of course! What I meant was ‘embezzle’! But that’s not important right now, Miss Lionett. I’m here because I was promised something very valuable in return for services rendered, say – hmm. Eighteen years ago?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Beau says.

“Why doesn’t it surprise me that Thoreau Lionett never mentioned how he came into his wealth?”

Beau stops short. “You can’t be.”

“Oh, he did mention me. How delightful.”

Beau spins on her heel to stare at him. “You were the one who told him to come here. To start making wine.”

“And oh, how he has prospered,” he says, holding out his arms wide to encompass the buildings behind him. “And all I asked in return was a promise for help. Eighteen years later, and here I am, seeking to have that promise fulfilled.”

“I didn’t promise you shit,” Beau says.

“But your father did, when I talked to him last night,” the man says. “He suggested that you might be more than capable of killing the beast that hunts in the dark forest. You are decent with that weapon of yours, am I correct? Decent enough to kill a monster?”

Beau narrows her eyes.

“You want me to kill something,” she says. “That’s your repayment. Eighteen years ago, you looked at my Dad – who is pathetic when it comes to weapons – and thought, gee, this guy looks like just the man for the job.”

“I didn’t know I wanted this beast killed eighteen years ago,” the man says. “Now I do.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You don’t have to believe me,” the man says. He snaps his fingers. His eyes flare an intense gold, and for a split-second Beau can almost see the misshapen shadows of wings burned into the wall behind him. Then the wall is gone, the ground is gone, everything is gone. Beau unbalances and falls down onto her knees, staff automatically digging into – into something to stabilise herself. She blinks heavily and looks around.

They are no longer in the village. Beau cautiously gets to her feet, head still pounding, and looks around at the dense forest that stretches out as far as she can see – which isn’t very far. The trees are packed so closely together that it’s impossible to make out anything from more than three feet away. She takes a step forward and gets her foot tangled up in a web of tree-roots that are just sort of chilling on top of the dirt.

“Find the monster and kill it,” the man says. Beau looks up. He’s sitting in the branches of a tree, lounging casually. “All your father’s debts will be repaid, and I will never trouble your doorstep again.”

“I didn’t agree to this,” Beau howls, stumbling over to kick viciously at the tree trunk. She peels off some sodden, moss-covered bark, but the rest of it is healthy. Mostly she just gets wet for the effort.

“Who knows,” the man says. He sounds almost amused, the jerk. “Maybe it will kill you first. That would certainly be entertaining, if inconvenient.”

“Take – me – back!”

The man snaps his fingers, and he’s gone.

Beau would like to say that she handles the situation with maturity and poise.

What she does is yell out every swear-word known to man (and a few only known to halflings) and kick at things until her ankles are swollen and her knees are bloody and damp. It takes her a good ten minutes to calm down. By then, she’s already figured out that she’s probably scared off all the small game in the area and attracted this “monster” for an easy feast.

“What a dick,” she says, trudging in – a direction. A random direction. There are no signs of anything monstrous anywhere, Beau is literally faking this whole thing until she can make it. “What was Dad thinking, listening to someone who won’t even show his face – it’s shady, that’s what it is, and I know Dad isn’t as stupid as he pretends to be –”

Beau keeps walking. And walking. And walking.

There’s some part of her that thinks that maybe she should just – stop? For a little while? Take a break, try to get some bearing on her surroundings. Climb a tree, yeah, that’d be a good idea. Beau is too irritated to be thinking logically, though. Maybe in half an hour. Maybe in an hour.

(It takes two hours and twenty minutes).

“Okay,” Beau says to herself when she’s finally calmed down from her impromptu temper tantrum. She limbers up and looks around for the nearest sturdy-looking tree, which is all of them. There are so many trees here. Beau is starting to feel claustrophobic just thinking about it. “Here I go –”

And then she’s shooting towards the sky.

There’s nothing quite so freeing as parkouring up a tree. Beau can’t quite stop herself from laughing as she twists mid-air, catching onto a low-hanging branch and propelling herself up. She’s at the top almost too soon, but she hasn’t even broken the canopy, so she just jumps onto the closest trunk and keeps going.

It takes a while to find somewhere she can get a decent view from. She clings to the bendy part of the top of the tree and sways with the wind. The sun is already settled comfortably into the centre of the sky, heat tickling the back of Beau’s neck. The view is incredible.

And also – unfortunately – familiar.

“Oh fuck,” Beau says, staring in dismay at the castle which emerges out of the canopy in the distance. It looms, dark even in the sunlight. “That’s what he meant by monster.”

Once upon a time…

(“Why do you always start your stories like that, grandpa? Can’t you just tell me when it happened?”

“I don’t always know that. And shh, stop interrupting you impertinent girl. It’ll be worth your while.”)

…there was a girl.

These things always seem to start with a girl. She was beautiful, because all good heroines must be beautiful, and brave, because they must always be brave too. And she fell in love, as beautiful brave girls do, and everything was right in the world.

Only, she fell in love with the wrong person.

Destiny is a funny thing, little girl. She fell in love with teeth and claws and bloodstained blades. There was a Creature stalking in the night, and the girl went outside and made it her friend.

(“That’s stupid. Who would fall in love with something like that?”

“Hush, it’s only a story.”)

And when the time came for the girl to be married to the man chosen for her, she repudiated him and instead ran to the comfort of her Creature. Her family, fearing the worst, hurried after her, and –

(“And? And what? You can’t end things like that!”

“It’s getting late, Beau. I’ll finish this story tomorrow night.”

“Please? Please? Tomorrow is so far away, grandpa.”

“What do you want me to say? The girl dies and the Creature forever haunts the forest. The end.”

“That’s a horrible end.”

“That’s the one I was told, and the one I’m telling you.”

“Make up a better ending, then.”

“Go to sleep, Beau.”)

There are stories about the castle.

Of course there are stories about the castle. Kamordah is a small village. There are stories about the well being haunted. There are stories about how Miss-So-And-So definitely killed Mister-So-And-So at that crossroads over there, and if you look on the night of a full moon, you can still see the bloodstains. There are stories about the castle.

Kamordah is surrounded by a forest, as all good villages are want to do. Beau has to trudge through an endless expanse of greenery to get to the city, and has to trudge right back through to return. As with any forest that encompasses more than sixty square feet of shrubbery, people get lost.

It happens. The village has learned to accept that sometimes, people walk too far into the trees and don’t come back for a good few days. Maybe even weeks, depending on how stupid they are. They come back wild-eyed and so scared.

(some of them stay scared for the rest of their lives).

“There’s – there’s something in there,” people say, shaking. Always shaking. “A beast – a monster – I was walking for hours – days – lifetimes – and then there it was. A castle, right out of a fairy tale. Tall enough to touch the sky. Spiked to stab the sun. And there was nothing else, no other way out. I turned around and walked away and it was still there in front of me. And eventually I had to go to the gate.”

Beau used to hide on the side of the staircase, half-hidden by wine barrels and the railing. Her father was the unofficial-official leader of the village, and the police always brought crazy people to his house when they reappeared.

Her father had never seemed surprised at any of the insane ramblings. Beau would peek out between the slats and stare at him, and the policeman, and whatever person for that month was hunched over in a chair.

“Wings,” they would say. “Bat wings – skeletal wings – eyes right out of the fires of hell. A bloodless face.”

“And what happened to you when you went inside?”

“I didn’t have a choice,” Beau heard a thousand times. “No matter how far I ran, the castle would always be waiting for me. I opened the gate and that – that thing was there, and it spoke to me, but I can’t remember what it said. It was too horrifying. I passed out.”

(Or, sometimes, if they were more foolish than fearful, it was:

“I opened the gate and it was there, the creature. It spoke, but I don’t remember what it said. Then it led me into the castle. I don’t remember what happened after that, only that it was – it was horrifying beyond words. Please. Please. Don’t make me think about it anymore.”)

They would all walk free the next day, unrestricted by wounds, barely a half-hours straight walk from the village. And they could not stop shaking.

Here’s what everyone knows:

There’s a monster in the castle.

It’ll get you if you wander too far.

“Looks like I’m caught,” Beau says to herself, leaning back against the tree and closing her eyes.

That was something everyone had agreed on. Once you saw the castle, there was no escape.

She slides down the trunk and lands on the ground with her knees bent. She doesn’t immediately straighten up, just looks down at the ground with pursed lips and balances her elbows against her knees. She has to think this through.

On one hand – the monster has never really killed anyone. Traumatised, yes. Ruined lives, absolutely. But not necessarily killed.

There’s something she’s missing here. Something that man doesn’t want her to know.

On the other hand…maybe this would do it. Maybe this would be the thing that stopped her father from looking through her. Maybe he would finally see that he fucking owed her for throwing her under the cart like this. Maybe –

Beau leans back and collapses into a cross-legged position, laughing.

“Sure,” she says, grinning up into the green-dappled light of the canopy. “Yeah, that’s gonna do it. Let’s wash the slate clean.” She rolls her eyes.

Beau gets up and brushes herself off. She’s spent the last few years bouncing off from person to person, learning what she could and stealing what she couldn’t. She’s gotten good at reading people, is what she’s saying. And that man had wanted nothing good from her, or from her family. In the loosest sense of the word, of course.

She starts walking forward. It doesn’t matter if she’s walking towards the castle, or away from it. According to the stories, it’ll find her eventually.

And it does.

Beau isn’t surprised when she looks up and sees the castle. Still, it’s a little jarring – she’s been periodically checking the horizon, trying to catch a glimpse of anything off in the distance. There aren’t too many clear spaces between the branches, so she’s working with a very limited amount of vision. She’s careful, and methodical, and it still manages to catch her off guard.

The castle is large. It imposes itself between the spaces of the forest, dark and ominous despite the light. The bricks are old obsidian, chiselled smooth and worn rough. The walls are crumbling in on themselves, the edges uneven and covered in thick layers of ivy. At the front there is a gatehouse, tall and spiked, framed by the two separate towers built into the far edges.

Beau breaks free of the forest and into the clearing, stopping at the edge of the still lake that surrounds the building. Around the sides, the trees are reflected almost perfectly against the dark waters. The only entrance to the castle is the long, thinly arched walkway leading to the front gate.

She wets her lips and unslings her staff from across her back. Okay. Okay. The castle has stepped out of her dreams and made itself stone, surreal and beautiful and imposing.

Beau walks forward.

Beau doesn’t remember walking across the moat.

It’s like she’s in a dream, already being pulled too many ways. She’s following flawed logic. The closer she gets, the more muddled her thoughts become, until she’s a hazy mess of thoughts and images. She leans forward, and back, forward, and back, and keeps moving. The Creature who greets her is tall and solidly built, with sad eyes hiding beneath a white mask.

“Beauregard,” it says. “You’ve returned.”

Beau blinks a few times, but nothing comes into focus. She tries to say something, but the words don’t want to come out. All of a sudden, she’s drowning. Her lungs strain under the thick weight of the air.

What’s happening to me? she thinks.

The Creature steps forward as soon as Beau’s feet hit the end of the moat, lifting Beau like she weighs nothing (which is certainly not true, it’s all muscle) and carrying her back towards the Castle.

“It will wear off in a few hours,” it says.

Beau makes a noise in the back of her throat. Mostly she’s trying not to vomit.

“I’ll leave you with Jester until then.”

Which means nothing to Beau. She grabs onto the Creature’s fur coat with all the strength in her inexplicably weakened body. Leaning up into the Creature’s ear, she hisses: “What the hell is going on?”

The Creature stares down at her through the expressionless mask. There are no wings. There is no fire, or blood, or ice. Beau is almost let down by the lack of melodrama – or she would be, if her head would stop spinning.

“You’re here to kill me, aren’t you?” the Creature says. “You’ll want to sleep off the nausea before you do that. I’ve heard it’s rather unpleasant.”

Beau punches the Creature. Tries to.

Embarrassingly enough, she faints.

#critical role #critical role campaign 2 #beauyasha #part 1 #beauty and the beast au #beau #yasha #fanfic #critical role fanfiction #my writing #4k

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