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gynecologistmsfrizzle · 4 years

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asshole otp prompts (but jester’s a sweetheart so i took some Liberties with this one)

thank you @roguestorm once again i owe you my life!! have 1.6k words of college au beaujester, everyone. im kind of in love with this concept

Beauregard Lionett was not having a good day.

She'd missed her bus and had to run to campus to make her eleven o'clock lecture, and had found out that class was cancelled when she showed up, wheezing and sweat-soaked, to an empty room. That would have been bad enough— even if she hadn’t pulled an all-nighter to finish an essay by a deadline that just got extended— but when she went to pull out her water bottle she found the cap on crooked and half her backpack soaked. On its own, that would have been enraging. With everything else, it was enough to make Beau wheel around and punch the wall with a shout. The wall was unmoved. Beau swore loud enough to take the rust off a bike chain, and shook out her knuckles.

She went down to the cafeteria to beg one of the staff for a bag of ice, but was met by a line stretching a good thirty feet out the caf door— so that was a bust. She rerouted to the athletic center, where she asked for the icepack out of their first aid kit, but was politely stonewalled by a handsome butch who Beau might have asked out if she hadn’t been so pissed off about her busted hand. Finally, she gave up and made for the showers, where she scrubbed off the worst of the sweat and changed into the only spare clothes she had on campus— a ratty set of gym shorts and a shirt that was more stain than fabric. She looked like shit, which seemed about right for how she felt.

By the time two o’clock finally rolled around, Beau had resigned herself to the fact that her life was dissolving into a steaming, irredeemable pile of garbage. Her fingers were starting to swell up in a way that made her think she might’ve actually broken a couple of them, and she winced at the thought of cramming them into a boxing glove at practice tomorrow. One way or another, though, she was due at work. Her shift started at two-thirty, so she made her way morosely to the library and plodded to the elevator for the eighth floor.

Beau usually liked the library. Architecturally, it was a bit of a postmodernist nightmare… all concrete and steel, slapped together to make a building that was taller than it needed to be and twice as ugly. But Beau didn’t tend to judge on appearances, and the energy of the place was great. Full of the hum of people chatting and studying and asking questions. Busy, but quiet. Sometimes she’d go deep into the stacks and just inhale the smell of the old paper for a few minutes. It always calmed her down.

What she didn’t like, though, were how fucking slow the elevators were. It took them thirty seconds to make it up or down a single story, like they were getting towed by goddamn snails. There were two of them, because that’s what accessibility laws dictated, but whatever money the school had put into quantity had clearly come out of the quality budget. Getting to the rare books section on the eighth floor took five minutes, more if anyone else got on or off. People rarely did. It was faster to take the stairs. Usually, Beau would be right there with them and call it cardio, but today she felt sorry for herself, so she grumbled something incoherent and mashed the close door button until the doors began to slide shut.

Began.

They were stopped by another student clutching an armful of art supplies, who fucking skipped in the door and flashed Beau an infuriatingly wide smile. She was pretty— on the short side and a little chubby, wearing a frilly dress and so much jewelry that Beau was surprised she didn’t rattle every time she took a step. She radiated positivity. It was tremendously irritating.

Beau scowled at her, and started mashing the button again.

The girl pursed her lips. “You know, you seem very cranky.” She had a strong accent— probably an international student. Somehow, she even made the insult sound bubbly.

Then she grinned, and with surprising speed, reached out a hand and pressed the button for the seventh floor. Then the sixth. Then the fifth. Beau realized what she was doing and tried to swat the girl’s hand out of the way, but she was much stronger than Beau had been expecting, and managed to fend her off for long enough to hit the remaining buttons before the elevator doors finally shut.

The elevator began its agonizingly slow climb upwards.

“Fuck you,” muttered Beau, which she wouldn’t usually have said to a stranger, but this was a bad day.

“Don’t be like that,” said the girl brightly. “It’s a prank. Pranks are funny!”

“It’s not fucking funny,” said Beau, but there wasn’t much heart in it.

The girl seemed chronically incapable of taking a hint, and stuck her hand out to shake. “I’m Jester! Nice to meet you.”

Beau very pointedly did not shake her hand. Jester, at least, had the good grace to look a little bit hurt, and dropped her hand back to her side.

“I’m not your friend,” snapped Beau. “I don’t know what you were thinking. What an asshole move. We’re gonna be stuck in here for ages now.”

There was a long, awkward silence. The doors opened, then closed on the second floor.

“Sorry,” mumbled Jester.

Beau looked up. The girl looked genuinely sad, hugging her sketchbooks close to her chest like they were a teddy bear. The brief catharsis Beau had gotten from yelling at her curdled into guilt.

“Aw, shit,” said Beau. “Don’t cry.”

“I’m not crying,” said Jester.

“Fuck, just— I’m sorry, you’re not an asshole, or whatever.”

Jester sniffled, just a bit. “You just seemed grumpy. I thought it might make you laugh.”

“Why would you want to make me laugh?”

Jester looked at her like she’d grown a second head. “Because you were sad, obviously! But I got it wrong, and now I’m an asshole.”

Beau squinted at her. “What do you care if I’m sad?”

The doors opened on the third floor. A couple of guys walked past the elevators before the doors shut again, and the elevator resumed its climb.

“I don’t like it when people are sad,” said Jester. “I know it’s important and all, and— and— well, whatever, but sometimes I’m good at making people smile. And everyone likes smiling.”

“I’m awful at smiling,” said Beau. “It makes me look like I’m, like, super constipated.”

“Nobody’s bad at smiling,” said Jester with all the confidence of a white boy in a first-year politics class. “Everyone is beautiful when they smile. Only when they mean it, though. Only when they’re actually happy. Fake smiles aren’t the same.”

“You think nobody’s bad at smiling? You’ve never seen me smile,” Beau countered.

Fourth floor. One of the librarians got on, nose buried in an old paperback. Neither of them said anything until the librarian got off at the next floor, and it was just the two of them again.

Jester picked back up like they’d never paused the conversation, and said with a shrug: “I bet you have a pretty smile. Maybe you just don’t show it to people very often. That’s okay. It makes it precious. Like a diamond, or a ruby. It’s rare, so it’s special.”

Beau was a little taken aback. “Did you really come running onto this elevator and push all the buttons because you thought it might make me laugh?”

Jester’s face clouded over again. “It was stupid. I’m sorry.”

“No, no, it—” Beau snorted. “It was stupid, but it’s, uh, kinda sweet. I’ve never known someone who’d just do that because they saw a stranger having a bad day.”

Sixth floor.

“I’m Beau,” said Beau finally, and held out her hand to shake. Jester smiled widely and went to grab it, before she stopped and her eyes went wide. “Oh man, your hand is super broken!”

Beau winced. “Uh, yeah. I had a disagreement with a concrete wall.”

“You should go to the hospital,” Jester said. “That is really swollen. I bet they give you a cast. They make them in any colour you want now, you know.”

Beau shrugged. “I have work. I’ll call a walk-in clinic later.”

Jester looked like she was about to say something, but thought better of it. Instead, she shifted her sketchbooks to her other arm, and held out her left hand instead. Beau reached out with her good hand and gave it a shake.

“Sorry for pushing all the buttons,” Jester said.

Despite herself, Beau cracked a smile. “No, it’s okay. I guess you did it for the right reasons.”

Jester grinned. “I told you so!”

“Told me what?”

“That you had a cute smile! This is my floor,” she said as the elevator came to a stop on the seventh. “I gotta meet my study buddy. Maybe I’ll see you around, Beau! That means handsome in French, you know.”

The doors opened, and Jester skipped out, and they started to close. Beau watched her go, not entirely sure of what had just happened. The elevator suddenly felt very lonely.

Beau whacked the Door Open button, and ran out after her. “Wait!”

Jester spun around. “Hi!”

“I, uh—” Beau fumbled through her pockets, looking for a pen. “Can I— can I give you my number?”

And Jester smiled, a big, bright, real smile, and in that moment Beau understood what she’d meant when she said people were beautiful when they were happy.

“Here!” Jester said, and pulled out a glittery gel pen with a pom-pom on the top. “I’ll give you mine.”

#critical role #cr2 #beaujester #beauregard lionett #jester lavorre #rhi talks #prompts #asks #roguestorm #my writing #*#WHEW thats a lotta tags #oh and #beauregard #for my personal System

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