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elliemarchetti · 6 months

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Habit Rouge

If I recall well, this is my first Halloween themed fic. Not that spooky, I know, but I suppose some of you might enjoy.

Plot: Nesta finds the perfect dress for a last-minute party with her best friend.

Words: 2325

Gwyn's invitation had come unexpectedly, just a couple of days earlier.

Would you like to come to a Halloween party with me?

A simple message, straight to the point, exactly like the young witch she took under her wing some decades ago. It had been years since Nesta had real friends. She had a few lovers, a couple acquaintances with whom she liked to spend her time, but after Claire’s death she’d preferred to keep her distance, scared she would suffer again because of the mortality that wasn’t granted to her. Not that she’d expected the enormous powers she’d acquired since being initiated into the path of sorcery to come without offering anything in return.

She was born in 1837, in a now forgotten village that would currently have been in Poland. Her mother was a stern woman, and her absent father a wealthy merchant, who barely remembered he had three daughters at home. When his wife died of influenza, together with his mother-in-law, the girls were left in the lurch, but what really took a toll was the loss of their fortune. Gambling, drinking and a nasty spending habit nearly threw them on the streets, and since Nesta was the oldest, she felt the need to do something.

The woman in the woods, a middle-aged lady who lived in a stone hut surrounded by trees and shrubs of all sorts, had seemed a solution as good as any other. It mattered little that many feared her, and that her name sounded like it came from times now forgotten. Nesta had knocked on her door when the moon shone bright in the sky, and had returned home the next morning as something different, no longer just a desperate girl, but the pupil of one of the most powerful witches in Europe.

It hadn’t taken long for the student to outdo the teacher, and so Nesta had taken her place, initiated her sisters, and begun to age so slowly that staying in the village, even though the hunt for her kind was long over, became dangerous. She’d said the only goodbye worth saying on a dreary winter evening, Claire wrapped in a heavy shawl, her now grey hair tied in a bun at the base of her neck. She received a letter the following year from her daughter.

Mom passed away peacefully, please don't come back.

Few words, but they made her understand how little she was welcome in the place she once called home. Within a couple of minutes, the paper had become a pile of crunching ash in the fireplace, all evidence of hatred destroyed before her sisters could see it. For nearly fifty years it had been only the three of them, but over time they’d understood that a bond as strong as theirs didn’t require constant closeness, so each had taken their own path. The first to leave was Elain, although, to be fair, it was Nesta and Feyre who left her behind. Their warnings had been of no avail: she had chosen to marry a human, and it mattered little if after about ten years, fifteen at most, she would be forced to leave him, she loved the guy and wanted to be his dutiful wife. They were in Provence at the time, and the wedding had been so lovely that Nesta had almost managed to ignore the burning sensation she felt at being in a church. Feyre had been the second to meet who she thought was the love of her life, the head sorcerer of a French coven located on the northern border with Spain. Nesta let her go reluctantly, but the liaison didn’t last long, and in 1940, shortly before the outbreak of the war, they all fled to America.

New York had been Feyre’s favourite place. Despite the dark period, it was teeming with art, with new and experimental painting techniques the youngest of them couldn’t wait to try. Elain was the one who had struggled the most the adapt, so Nesta was left to act as a bridge between them, even though what she would’ve most wanted was to go somewhere warm and read the novels of her era, those she’d set aside in favour of grimoires and religious dissertations. She’d never worried much about what would be of her soul, but she feared for those of her sisters, so she’d tried to understand if Catholicism and the Bible were really to be taken so literally. After the end of the war, she told herself that if a God existed, he couldn’t be so benevolent.

From the 50s onwards, change had been so rapid that Nesta had struggled to keep up with it. Technology and globalization made slow life and superstitions die, but at least they allowed her to move freely from place to place without too many questions being asked.

She had already resided in half the states of America when she met Eris Vanserra, and for a brief moment, she thought Massachusetts was a place where she could grow roots and finally rest. She was in Boston, doing some research on the actual existence of the Túatha Dé Danann, to whom Feyre's new boyfriend seemed to be related, when she decided to take an evening walk in the Public Garden. Somehow, the place exuded magic, so she wasn’t surprised when a vampire tried to seduce her, probably in an attempt to drink her blood and then throw her body into the Atlantic. Being a witch, Nesta hadn’t fallen prey of his spell and he’d begun to court her with flowers, jewels, and hard-to-find editions of her favourite books. When she finally gave in, long games of chess and slow dances in the moonlight became the norm, until he told her le loved her. It was 1968, just after the preview of Promises, Promises at the Colonial Theatre. Truth be told, he said he loved her laugh, but something had shone in his eyes, so Nesta run away the next morning, leaving behind most of her things and a short apology note. Feyre had hosted her in New York for a while, and there she’d met Cassian, a werewolf who’d made her forget the way her heart fluttered when she was in Eris’s arms, at least for a dozen years. Upon hearing the news of their reunion, Elain also returned to New York, but after a brief fling with a friend of Rhysand and Cassian, she left again to join a traveling circus as a seer. Nesta had attended one of their shows, but one of the acrobats had reminded her too much of her immortal lover to bear the entire performance.

She met Gwyn on that occasion, the skinny girl struggling in a vain attempt to escape the grasp of a guy twice her size. He’d dragged her in the darkness behind the colourful circus tent, convinced that his wickedness would go unpunished if he’d chosen a novice as his victim. Nesta had made him change his mind, and Gwyneth Berdara had abandoned her pious life to learn how to defend herself with the most unorthodox means she could find. Her powers had proved less destructive than Nesta’s, more based on life than death, but for the duration of the 80’s they’d formed a duo worthy of a couple of newspaper articles. They’d told themselves they’d made the world a better place, for what little they could, and it was on the day they met Emerie they received the long-awaited confirmation. She was a werewolf, young enough she managed to survive alone after she left her pack to look for the witches who killed her father. Nesta never thought she would receive gratitude for the murder of a relative, and although she was relieved, from that moment on they’d dedicated themselves to helping the victims rather than prosecuting the perpetrators.

The Valkyries, the association they’d opened with proceeds obtained in a not entirely legal way, helped women who no longer wanted to hide what the violence of patriarchy had done to them to find a voice and a support system. Emerie had found her calling in running it, and although she once used to transform often to stay young, she no longer did so. Last time she saw her, her once perfect skin had begun to shrivel and her joints started to ache as well as her back. Nesta, who had faced that kind of suffering before, had stuck around to help however she could, but Gwyn, who had only endured the consequences of mortality when she was mortal herself, had walked away, choosing to travel for a while further north. She hadn’t notified anyone of her return, nor did Nesta knew how to take her invitation. Had she continued to practice magic like her or had she aged like Elain did in Provence? Would they still look almost the same age, or would Nesta have to hide her face with a mask?

I don’t know if I have anything suitable to wear, she replied, casting a wary glance at her immense wardrobe. Thirty years of fashion and memories, plus some memorabilia she wouldn’t have worn to a costume party even if someone threatened to torture her, were all she had left.

No problem, Gwyn had replied, so quickly that Nesta wondered if she hadn't been glued to the phone the whole time, waiting for her attentions, we can always go shopping!

So Nesta found herself in a thrift store more similar to an antique shop, surrounded by old oil lamps and countless replicas of the most disparate items.

“Were you alive when they used these things?” asked Gwyn, who hadn’t changed a bit, waving some obsolete electric hair rollers under her nose. A smile spread across Nesta’s face, and although she was very amused that her friend didn’t seem to have the slightest idea of how different things were when she was born, she simply nodded. In all honesty, she had never styled her hair much, preferring the thick braids of the Polish tradition to frizzy bangs and ringlets, but Elain loved them and was the first to try a perm when it boomed.

It was one of the things she liked most about her sisters, how each of them had their own personality, well-defined interest, and unmistakable sense of style, yet they still supported each other no matter what. If someone spending so much time together could lead outsiders to not understand where one person began and the other ended, the differences between them were so clear there was no doubt even whether a dress belong to one of the other. Maybe that was why Nesta recognized the gown as soon as she saw it, because nobody else would’ve liked it as much as she did. The velvet was a little dusty, and the golden chain on the back had been removed, but the design, the draped bodice, and the flowy gown, were still the same. It was one of the few lavish things she’d managed to bring with her from Europe, a piece that earned her many compliments in the twenties for how it accentuated her straight shoulders and slim figure.

“I think it will suit you,” Gwyn said, once she reached her at the end of the aisle. “Maybe it needs a bit of readjustments, but you’d make a great entrance.”

Nesta knew for a fact that the dress would fit her perfectly, but since she wasn’t ready to share its story, she didn’t contradict her and asked the owner how much he charged for it.

“When I got it they told me it was a one-of-a-kind piece, but from that day on no one gave it a second glance,” the old man admitted, and although Nesta was sure he was right, after all it was custom made, she still gave him less than a hundred dollars. Being a witch undoubtedly had its benefits, but she wasn’t able to make money appear from thin air, and as long as she didn’t turn to theft, or decided to abandon the Valkyries to find a real job, she couldn’t splurge.

“You should add a pair of fake canines,” joked Gwyn on their way home, but Nesta had put the idea aside, determined to relive one of the balls Eris used to bring her to.

A quick glance at the fabric neatly folded inside the unassuming paper bag made her relive a sea of moments she had relegated in the depths of her mind. Feyre’s laughter as she dragged her to on the French dance floors, the chatter with Elain as they ran arm in arm through the narrow streets of Paris, and Eris’s long, thin fingers, caressing her bare skin in the privacy of their apartment.

“You still haven’t told me why you care so much about this party,” she teased, if only to chase away the melancholy. It was normal to stumble when you’ve lived so long, yet Nesta was determined to compartmentalize and not let the mistakes of the past ruin her present. Boston was an error, she knew it now and probably already knew back then, but life went on, and judging by where she’d found one of the dresses she’d left there after her hasty departure, Eris did it too.

“I made a few friends on my road trip,” Gwyn replied, vague enough to spark her curiosity. “I would go alone, really, but I thought that after all this time among humans, a celebration open only to supernatural beings might be stimulating for you too.” “You had a wonderful idea,” Nesta lied, forcing a smile as she took her friend’s arm. Under no circumstances she intended to disappoint the lively redhead, but between witches, vampires, and werewolves there must’ve been at most a hundred of them in the entire United States, and if her sixth sense wasn’t deceiving her, she would soon see many faces she would rather forget.

#halloween themed fic #neris #nesta archeron #eris vanserra #gwyneth berdara #emerie of illyria #cassian #feyre archeron #elain archeron #witch!nesta #vampire!eris

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griefpersevering · 2 years

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Peter Parker & Matt Murdock Fic Recs

I absolutely love both Peter and Matt so when they finally shared a screen together I can confirm I lost my mind xD So here are some fics where they interact!

The Teenage Vigilante's Guide to Saving New York (And Making Friends Along the Way) by candlesneedflame (103k)

This is one of my favourite fics of all time - all of the characters (and there's just about every vigilante in New York!) are written perfectly and the plot is just *mwah*.

In Absentia by whitchry9 (19k)

Peter finds Matt beat up in a dumpster, and hurt/comfort ensues. It's actually really sweet even though Matt isn't having much fun <3

avocado socks and burnt pancakes by aloneintherain (2.8k)

If Matt has a secret nurse friend who helps to patch him up when he inevitably gets injured... well, Peter should definitely get to meet Claire (and Karen. And Foggy.)

maybe he is born of grit and hellfire by aw marvel no (36k)

A fic where Jess and Matt had a one night stand many years ago (it isn't Matt/Jess though) and it resulted in a random child... who they accidentally find many years later. This is really sweet and also child Peter is adorable <33

A Different Kind of Mask by aloneintherain (1.4k)

I think this is actually the top fic in this tag, so what are you doing if you haven't read it? But it definitely deserves the place, and Peter and Matt actually being good at their jobs is amazing.

From What I Hear by Merely-Specters (743)

Yeah, I had to include a little post No Way Home in here, okay? Matt is so nice in this and it does give us just a little bit of comfort in these trying times, which we all deserve :D

Devil's Food Cake by Biromantic_Nerd (7.6k)

I'm saving one of my favourites til last... if you've ever wanted to see Matt trip up a bigot or you love nonbinary Peter or Foggy, you should absolutely read this fic. It's so sweet and soft and it always puts a smile on my face.

And there we have it! Thank you so much to all the authors who blessed us with these fics, and as always, if you have any more to recommend to me then please send them!

#matt murdock #daredevil #peter parker #spiderman #no way home spoilers #spiderman no way home #fic recs #matthew murdock & peter parker #lina lore #marvel #mcu

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anotheronechicagobog · 4 years

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Connor Rhodes x Reader Motherfucking Done

requested prompt: Hey!😊 Could you write an imagine with Connor Rhodes, like the reader is a doctor, and he is jealous of her friendship with Will? Cute ending maybe. Thank you so much

written by: @anotheronechicagobog

warnings: swearing, pregnancy complications, this is shit, I’ll probably redo it later, but I’m so tired and stressed, oh and Cornelius Rhodes murdered his wife and no one can tell me otherwise

You and Connor returned to the U.S. as fast as you could. Connor more anxious than you, but then again, he had reason to. Two weeks ago you and your husband were at a party thrown by one of his patients at his penthouse. His massive, over the top, Fast and Furious 7 penthouse. It was three stories with a balcony with a pool. You and Connor always felt out of place at these parties, not even Connor had grown up around such extravagant wealth. But you made do, it was part of doctor-patient culture apparently, so you went. You hadn’t been feeling all that well, nauseous and with a skull-splitting headache. Connor had gotten another email from his sister, so you didn’t want to stress him out more than he already was. You and Connor had mostly stuck to the shade of the indoors, but eventually, you both had to go outside. Connor went to socialize with the host while you went to the third floor to the balcony that hung over the pool. There was a bar there, but you weren’t interested in alcohol. You didn’t think you could stomach it, but you hadn’t been able to stomach anything lately. You’d just sat at a table with a large umbrella and ordered a water.

You’d started feeling dizzy, the heat was suddenly beyond unbearable. You started panting and you knew that stressed out or not, you needed to tell Connor what was going on and leave. Something was very, very wrong. You turned in your seat, waving trying to get his attention. You leaned against the railing while still sitting down and he didn’t notice again. So and flimsy, shaking legs you stood up, clutching the railing. Sweat was pouring down your face and neck, it became so much more difficult to breathe, you were about to try yelling his name over the blaring music when, in a matter of seconds, you felt like you were going to faint, your entire body went limp, and you fell unconscious.

When you woke up you were, not only in a hospital, but the one you worked at. Connor, who was clutching your hand and praying in Hebrew noticed you stirring. “Y/N, sweetheart? Oh thank heavens, how are you feeling?”

“Groggy. What happened?”

“You fell off of the balcony at the top on the penthouse, three stories into the pool. Why didn’t you tell me you weren’t feeling well?”

“It wasn’t bad when we left for the party, for most of the time we were there even. It was just at the end, I tried to wave at you, but looking back on it I probably should have just gotten one of the waiters to get you. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Please don’t be. The, uh, the doctors found out what was wrong though.”

“Really? What? Oh please tell me it’s not cancer, you know I’ve got a family history of that.”

“No, you don’t have cancer. You, uh... You’re pregnant.”

“I’m pregnant? Like with a baby?”

“Yeah, heat just doesn’t agree with some women and pregnancy though, so we need to move.”

“I’m pregnant.”

“Yeah, you are... We’re going to be parents.”

“We’re going to be parents.” The dam finally broke and happy tears flooded your face. Connor joined you seconds after, but his tears were a combination of joy and relief, after all, he did watch you fall three stories into a pool.

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You and Will had gone to med school in New York together. You’d been fair acquaintances, but he was a bit too cocky and you were a bit too serious. You both decided to have two specialties, the one you shared was emergency department medicine. You became Facebook friends, but that was about it. Truthfully, you didn’t think you’d see him in person again unless there was a reunion. So you were a bit surprised when you ran into him on your way to your OB appointment. “Y/N? It’s been a while, how are you?”

“I’m doing great. Really, really great, actually. I didn’t know that you came back to Chicago, though. When we were in school you always said you’d never come back.”

“Things changed. Congrats, by the way,” Will gestured to your obviously pregnant belly, “how far along are you? How are the symptoms?”

“Five months. Uh, the symptoms have been really bad. And I’m just on my way to an appointment though so I should get going. But maybe we could get dinner sometime, I’d love for my husband to meet you so that he’ll finally believe all the crazy med school stories I have thanks to you. He works here too, actually.” You weren’t kidding, pregnancy had taken a huge toll on you. You had wretched morning sickness, high blood pressure, gestational diabetes, and a pregnancy-related iron deficiency. It was a quick walk from the entrance to the elevator to the OB ward, so you thought you’d be fine, but you were starting to feel weak and Will noticed. “Hey, are you okay?”

“I need to sit down.” Will whipped around and grabbed a wheelchair for you, helping you to get in. “What’s wrong do I need to call your doctor or husband?”

“Honestly, I already feel better, but would you mind taking me to OB or getting someone else who can? This has just been a difficult pregnancy overall, so feeling faint really isn’t unusual for me.”

“Yeah, I’ll take you, don’t worry.”

“Thanks, I’m just gonna text Connor and let him know, he was going to try to meet me there if he can get away from work for a minute.”

“You don’t happen to mean Connor Rhodes, do you?”

“I do, why?”

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You found out why when Connor burst through the doors just after you and Will had entered. He kissed you on your forehead and gave you a once over. “Y/N, are you okay?”

“Connor, I’m okay. I just started feeling weak so Will got me a wheelchair. I think that I was just on my feet too long, well too long while pregnant. I really hate that I can’t do what I used to be able to...”

“I know, but you should have just gotten help at the door, here let’s go talk to Dr. Hajjar. Thanks, Halstead, I’ve got it from here.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Excuse me?”

“Will!”

“You heard me, Rhodes, why didn’t you meet her at the car or entrance? You can’t really think you’re too important to help your pregnant wife.”

“Will that’s not-”

“That’s enough Halstead, you should get back to the ED, where your obnoxious presence is actually required.”

“Okay, that’s more than enough jabs from both of you. Will, thank you for helping me get here after I tried to get here myself when I probably shouldn’t have, Connor, I’m sorry for being so stubborn and I’m glad you had time today to come to another of my appointments which are happening more and more frequently.”

Will and Connor begrudgingly nodded at each other. “Thanks for getting her here safe Halstead.”

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You decided to hold off on dinner together after seeing how little they got along. Having only realized at that first meeting that the ‘doctor douche’ your husband ranted about so much was your friend from med school. So instead you did what you could to keep the peace whenever you were in the hospital, which was frequent, but their pissing contest was grating on your nerves. It all came to a head the day you went into labour two weeks early. Connor was finishing up a surgery with Dr. Downey so Will was the one in the ED when you were rolled in. “Get Connor, Will.”

“Are you sure Y/N?”

“YES I’M SURE!”

Connor came running into treatment four minutes later and gently kissed you all over your face. “I’m here, Y/N. I love you so much.” Will, who had been holding your hand while you waited for Connor, scoffed.

“ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME WILLIAM?! I AM SO OVER THIS SHITTING CONTEST YOU HAVE WITH CONNOR. YOU ARE BOTH GROWN-ASS MEN GET OVER YOURSELVES. YOU ARE BOTH GOING TO APOLOGIZE TO EACH OTHER AND HUG RIGHT NOW BECAUSE I AM MOTHERFUCKING DONE!”

“Y/N-”

“WILLIAM SEAMUS HALSTEAD I KNOW THAT YOUR MOTHER TAUGHT YOU BETTER THAN TO INCUR THE WRATH OF A PREGNANT WOMAN!”

“I’m sorry, Will.”

“I’m sorry, Connor.”

“Y/N Y/L/N you are officially my favourite person in the world, I was just about to ring their necks!”

“No problem Maggie.” You gave a weak smile as another contraction hit and Dr. Hajjar looked under the blanket before nodding. “Alright, Y/N, it’s time to push. If you’re not her husband or part of the delivery team; get out.”

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Five days later you were still in the hospital, because of all the complications you’d had during pregnancy. Dr. Hajjar wanted to make sure your blood pressure wasn’t a high average before she discharged you. So when Natalie went into labour, you could hear her screams from down the hall. You’d also been where Will briefly went to hide with his tail in between his legs after Helen, Natalie’s mother in law, dressed him down. When you heard her screaming for Will, where he was, you gave Connor one look before he sighed and called Will.

Connor briefly appeared at his father’s ‘I-want-control-as-much-of-my-son’s-life-as-possible-so-I-donated-money-in-my-wife’s-name-for-mental-health-when-it’s-mostl-likely-that-I-murdered-her’ ceremony. He only went for the speech, and when it was over he approached his sister. “Connor, it’s nice to finally see you. You’ve been back in Chicago how long?”

“Almost four months. I, uh, want you to meet my wife and daughter.”

“You- what? Who? How?”

“Well I personally have absolutely no idea how I got lucky enough to have a baby with my wife Y/N, much less have her love me as much as I love her, but I’ve decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth.”

“How old is your daughter?”

“Five days today.”

“Oh my God... When can I-”

“Now. You can meet them now.”

“I’ll get dad-”

“Claire don’t. Please. He’s the reason I left Chicago, you’re the reason I came back. I just don’t want the happiness I feel to end just yet.”

“Okay.” She hooked her arm around his as he led her out to the hall. “Did you really come back for me?”

“Well Y/N couldn’t stand the heat while pregnant, but you’re the reason we came back here and not to Seattle.”

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You were cradling your bundle of joy and poop, Aviva Nadya Rhodes, in the lounge chair when Connor and Claire came in. “Hi, you must be Claire, I’m Y/N.”

“Hi, it’s nice to meet you too. Is it okay if I hold- Aviva?”

“Sure, here just sit down on the loveseat and I’ll pass her to you.”

“Oh, she’s so tiny. And she looks just like you Y/N. Doesn’t look like she got anything from Connor. You sure are a lucky girl, huh?” Claire had Aviva’s head in the crook of her elbow and was giving the infant an unbridled, beaming smile.

”Hey! Stop trying to turn my daughter against me.”

“Connor don’t worry, you’re going to be an amazing dad and she is going to love you so, so much. I can feel it.”

“Y/N’s right, Connor. You’re going to do great, plus I’m only joking, I promise. Aren’t I, my sweet, sweet girl?”

“She loves my daughter more than she loves me.”

“I’d normally say no and try to reassure you, but she does,”

“And that’s not a bad thing.”

“Yeah, exactly. I love you, Connor.”

“I love you too Y/N.”

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Sorry this was so bad, I’ll probably re-do this at some point cause I really like the whole faint-cause-pregnant-move-to-Chicago storyline I came up with.

Again, sorry.

#One Chicago #chicago med #connor rhodes #connor rhodes x reader #will halstead #maggie lockwood #Natalie Manning

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helloooofandoms · 4 years

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Old Friends

Hisirdoux x reader. Platonic! It had a theme I swear but then I couldn't stop writing. This takes place after Merlin's death but before Douxie and Nari leaves for New York. There's a little timeskip to the present Douxie in New York as well.

word count: 5k

History was not your favourite subject. You loathed it actually, but when the topic of Camelot came around in class you were absolutely thrilled! To you any lesson that seemed like the fantasy shows you watched made you attentive. This wasn't your usual telling of the Camelot tales, the fall of King Arthur and the knights of the roundtable. No, your professor had gone the extra mile of stating that Merlin, a great wizard, was also a key factor in this tale. Accompanied by his apprentice named Hisirdoux. According to him, the Camelot battle was just some side plot that was hiding the bigger story. The fact that King Arthur's sister, Morgana was a sorceress who only wanted to reign destruction. The rest of the class waved it off. Mr Choi was no stranger to conspiracy theories. You always knew there was some truth to your teacher's words. Even if the truth was buried in a few myths it was still there right?

For the whole day you couldn't get the thought of wizards out of your head. It was farfetched but not unbelievable. You knew wizards, witches, and warlocks existed. They had to! The worldwide witch trials were proof of it. Whether or not some of the people were just simple humans and some secretly having power over the arts, there was definitely proof that they existed. Even if the proof was downright criminal. It's just like humans to kill the things they don't understand.

Yawning, you had a lot of time to research the fact that Merlin was indeed present at King Arthur's death and perhaps even beforehand. Your teacher had urged you to go to the nearest bookstore and find evidence to either build your case or deny it. Of course you chose the first. Something was telling you that you'd have no trouble looking for information. Call it a gut feeling. Though you decided to head home first and see what the internet had to offer. Your nearest bookstore wasn't too far from your home. On your way there you couldn't help but wonder about the wizard Merlin and if it was true about him having an apprenticee. Even even storing about Morgana seemed way too good to be true. How cool would it have been to be alive in that era! Watching brave knights and seeing magic first hand. Perhaps they even had monsters-

Your thoughts were cut off by you colliding with something. You stumbled back managing to take a fall. Did you run into a pole somehow? Groaning you opened your eyes to see a hand stretched out towards you. It belonged to a man. One with black hair and blue tips. Hesitantly you took it and he helped pull you up on your feet. Offering you a smile and a pat on the head he apologized. "Terribly sorry about that little lady, you should always watch where you're going." Perhaps it was your fault. You were too focused on daydreaming instead of looking where you were going.

"Its my fault. I wasn't paying attention." You nodded as your eyes darted down to his hand. What an interesting watch he was wearing. It almost seemed as if it was glowing. Looking down at your own wrist you grew surprised and started walking again. "Thank you for the help. I've got to get going." You waved at him before picking up your pace. Your parents weren't fans of you going out into town during the night so you needed to make it home quick before it got too dark out for you to come back to the bookstore.

After your arrival home you spent an hour searching for anything that mentioned this wizard Merlin. You came up empty handed. There was a lot of information about the battle at Camelot but most of it was centered around the King and what he had done. About his knights and even mentioned him having a sister. But there was absolutely nothing to be found about wizards. Sighing you let your head hit your desk. Books would be your only answer now. History required a lot of reading and you were much better processing information given to you orally. It's not that you found books boring it's just that when it came to history it was extremely extensive and there were oh so many details. It gave you a headache and after a while you could barely remember the key details.

Grabbing your house keys you told your father that you wouldn't be out too late and that you would only be going around the block to the bookstore. He was wary at first but as soon as he heard that it was for a school project he relaxed. Ah yes adults and their 'school is everything' mindset. He told you to be safe and you laughed at the comment once you walked out the door. This is Arcadia. The townsfolk might as well be invincible at this point. The amount of damages this place has seen and the way that everyone just becomes immune to it at some point is honestly astounding.

As you swung open the door of the bookstore that was about 2 blocks from your home you smiled as the scent of books hit your nose. A lot of people you knew found the scent suffocating or have told you that it made then sneeze. It didn't bother you at all in that aspect.

The front desk was right ahead and you didn't see anyone there so you took it upon yourself to browse. Who ever was working this shift had to have known a customer came. The door had a little bell that rang when you entered. It was odd that there weren't any alphabetical organization of the books so that meant the workers probably knew where everything was by memory. It would be a pain to fire someone and have to teach a new worker where everything was. You knew for a fact that if you worked here you would be absolutely lost when it came to the whereabouts of any book here.

You were heading into another aisle and stopped once you saw one of the workers. He was on a ladder putting up some of the books. You couldn't see his face but for some odd reason you look familiar. Then you realized it once you saw him reaching to put a book back in place. The weird watch on his arm, that was the man you ran into just an hour ago. What a coincidence that he worked here at the bookstore. "You!" Pointing your finger at him you watched as he screamed and lost his balance. Resulting in him falling off the ladder. You wanted to move and help him but you could only watch in fear as the ladder tipped over as well. It could have crushed him if he didn't move out of the way fast enough. You watched as this man rolled over out of the way and laid there on his back panting. "I've never felt that frightened since I dropped from the sky."

What was he talking about. Nervously walking over you glance over at the ladder then at him. You didn't mean to cause so much harm. What if he hurt his ankle really badly? Or dislocated something. "Sorry mister." You said offering a weak smile and an outstretched hand.

"Not mister." He groaned accepting your hand as you pulled him up. Dusting off his clothes he looked down at you. "Just Douxie." He said before moving to pick the ladder back up. While he leaned it against the bookshelf you wondered why his name had a familiar ring to it. Douxie.... it was quite unique, almost old fashioned. If that was his full name you knew for sure it was at least French in origin. Doux meant soft or sweet in the language. And the -ie ending just made you giggle. His name could be translated to sweetie or softie. Judging by his appearance that was probably not something he would enjoy being called.

"Softie huh?" You chuckled. He turned to walk over to you with a face full of confusion.

"What?" He asked. Douxie was really wondering what had made you laugh. All he did was say his name. He's gotten weird looks before because of it and the occasional "Did your mother really name you that?" But he never saw a problem with it. His name was definitely rare but even he has heard some names that would put his to shame. He prefers going by Douxie instead of his full name because well he was no longer living in the 12th century and well 21st century people can be cruel. Especially kids like you.

"Doux in french can mean sweet or soft. I think it fits you well." You were obviously teasing him.

"It's short for Hisirdoux." Douxie rolled his eyes and tapped his foot. "I thought you would've taken my advice the last time we spoke." He chuckled. "Now then what brings you to my humble shop?" He asked mentioning for you to follow him.

Your feet were moving slowly as you followed him. Your mind however was raging. Did he just say his name was short for Hisirdoux? That was not a common name in any way, shape, or form and if he was telling you he shared the same name with a wizard you needed information about you'd be lying if you said you weren't bouncing around right now.

He seemed to have noticed your current state of excitement and decided to address it. He couldn't recall saying anything that would've resulted in you staring up at him like he saved the universe or something. Granted, he has but it's not like you would've known about it. "What is it?" He asked slowly, knowing that the last time he asked this question it was only met with a silly remark.

"Your name is Hisirdoux?" You asked once for confirmation and he nodded. Clapping you gently gripped his arm. "Are you telling me that you share the name with a wizard that may have been around in the 12th century and may have been involved in the battle for Camelot? Not to mention the apprentice of a wizard named Merlin?!" Your eyes were huge now. Douxie thinks they resembled a chameleon's but that wouldn't be very nice to say to a girl. Besides how did you even know about him. He wasn't in the history books. No, that was just Arthur and maybe a bit of Morgana. Merlin also wasn't involved in too many stories read by humans. The only people that knew about him nowadays were Jim, Claire, Steve, and the other kids that were mixed up in the time travel drama. Anyone else was probably familiar with magic or was someone who knew of his master's death.

Anyway, you knew quite a bit and it could potentially be disastrous if the Arcane order were to find you. The possibility is slim to none but that didn't mean it couldn't happen. He just couldn't let you run around saying that you met a wizard, not that you could prove it, but it would be better for him to diffuse this situation now. "I have no idea what you're talking about." Douxie hummed as he attempted to lean on the wall casually. He accidentally tripped on the broom but managed to settle himself on the wall despite it.

"Oh Douxie I was supposed to tell you that Merlin-" a voice said but came to a stop. You and Douxie looked up to see a a flying cat descend to the floor. You were quite shocked but this had to mean that you were right. No ordinary librarian had a talking and flying cat with glasses. Besides he said Merlin's name too. There was no way he was getting out of this.

There really was no way douxie was getting out of this. Dragging his hands down his face he gave a glare to Archie who immediately stopped flying and instead meowed. As if that would help him. You've already interrogated him and managed to witness his non human best friend who happened to be a familair talking and flying. Maybe he should just resort to answering your questions after all. It didn't seem like you would leave empty handed. Besides he was curious about how much you knew too. Beckoning you to follow him you smiled as the cat brushed between your legs and moved to catch up to Douxie.

He guided you to a table and pulled out your chair before sitting in the one opposite from you. Resting his chin in his palms you stared at one another. He looked tired. There were literal bags under his eyes and- oh he just yawned. Now that you were actually face to face with him you were sort of nervous. Sure he may seem cool on the outside but he was still a wizard who lived this long. Maybe he sacrificed kids for his immortality. Just then his cat nudged his foot and he sat up straight. The guy was totally dozing off. In Douxie's defense he was too busy saving Arcadia to think about regulating his sleep schedule, not to mention the fact that he had like three part time jobs and also needed to continue his wizard studies while protecting Nari.

You offered a smile and he rubbed his eyes. Oh yeah, you were supposed to be having a conversation. Archie jumped into his lap and he gently stroked his friend while he spoke. "As you have somehow figured out. My name is Hisirdoux Casperan and yes I'm a wizard. This is my Archie, he's a familiar and my best friend who can also shape shift. You're correct about my involvement in the war and being Merlin's apprentice but how in the world do you know all of this?" He was curious as to why this kid was sitting in his bookstore at 7pm inquiring about his old life in Camelot.

When you inhaled Douxie had expected a brief response not a full on ramble. "Okay so my teacher started telling us about Camelot and the battle. He said you were there and your master too! That the two of you helped greatly and there was something about the King's evil sister but he couldn't get into all the details because well it's a research project. What kind of research project would this be if he just gave us all the answers, you know? Anyway everyone else thinks he's making it all up but I'm totally going to get the best score because I've actually met a wizard!"

Douxie only nodded slowly to show that he had in fact heard you. Did he understand? A little your words were way too jumbled and he swore he heard something about a sea search? Who knows the main point was that your teacher had told you all about this and from the looks of it the rest of your classmates. Definitely alarming, he was a bit worried that someone else out there knew the truth of what happened. Someone that wasn't directly involved. He just hoped that the information he gave to you wouldn't be used recklessly. By the sound of it the rest of your classmates would rule it off as some piece of fiction and maybe, just maybe your teacher would think it was ridiculous too. The latter seemed the most difficult.

Now it was his turn to riddle off information. He started simply from the beginning about how he became Merlin's apprentice then went on to talk about the battle, how he got his cool staff, Merlin's unfortunate death and what happened with Atthur and Morgana. He left out Nari for obvious reasons and the fact that a few of your classmates may have been involved. You don't need all of those details for your report after all.

You were thrilled really that not only was a master wizard sitting in front of you but the whole story checked out and you were glad you asked for that pen and paper earlier. Not only did you get to witness his magic but it also allowed you to write down everything important. "Its a shame really." You hummed.

Archie had long gone off to take his nap not feeling very up to listening to the retelling of incidents. Truthfully he didn't want to be reminded about Merlin's death again. Douxie had to hold himself together as well when he mumbled out the fact that his master had died. He still blames himself and sometimes he gets nightmares but he shouldn't dwell on that right now. "What is?" He asked watching you scratch down sloppy notes.

Sighing you placed your pen down gently on the paper as your eyes ran over the text before peeking up at the guy before you. "That someone as great as you didn't make the history books."

It grew silent and you stayed quiet as you watched the look of uncertainty on his face. In the past 30 minutes of sitting in this bookstore you've learned that Hisidoux Casperan was probably one of the greatest people you've ever met by chance. He basically saved the world and nobody even knew. He was so...normal. It was difficult to believe he had been alive for 919 years now. Sure he had an extensive vocabulary filled with British slang and words that date back centuries but he fit into the mold of the 21st century so well. You guessed that's why no one was able to find out about his secret. He was great at adapting.

Hisirdoux didn't exactly understand where you were coming from. He's told you the story you wanted to hear. He thought the hero was painted as clear as day. His master Merlin. Even if you didn't pick up on that it seemed a bit farfetched for you to assume that he was the hero of this story. He wanted to tell you that you've got it all wrong. That he had no place in those books your school deemed mandatory. But you interrupted him before he could speak.

"It's alright." You said standing up while collecting your paper. "Even when the years go by I'll surely remember the master wizard. The apprentice who became a legend. I'll write this down someday, that way your legacy won't be lost." You moved towards the door as you spoke and he followed after you. Interested in what you were saying. "I'll call it the Tales of Hisirdoux." A goofy grin made its way on your face. "What do you think?" You turned back to get his response.

Shaking his head with a smile he opened the door for you. "I think it'll be a best seller some day. Just make sure you pass your report first."

"It's a research paper." You rolled your eyes playfully.

"Uh huh.....there's a difference?" Douxie asked trying to blink the sleepiness away as he yawned.

"I can forgive that. Only because you're really old." You teased giving him a peace sign when you bid him farewell and hurried back home. Your parents would freak but hey at least you were being assured an A.

Douxie watched you leave before shutting the door. "What an interesting kid." He thought aloud.

Douxie wrestled with the doorknob to his apartment. He didn't know why they needed so many locks. If the Arcane Order showed up they most likely wouldn't stop to pick it. They'd probably just knock the blasted door down. But Alas, his familiar wanted to make sure Nari was safe from New York thieves, as if he couldn't handle one or two himself. Finally getting it opened he entered then kicked it closed. "Archie did you leave any pizza for Nari and me? You know I'm running low on money and-" he was taking off his shoes when he felt a spike in magic. How did he not notice it before he came in? He was on high alert as he slowly looked up. There was Archie, Nari, and some random girl standing in his kitchen obviously interrupted from their precious conversation.

"Douxie!" The girl smiled as she came charging towards him. Did he know her? Crushing him in a hug he felt the remaining life drain from him in an instant. He was already tired from working at the pizzeria downtown and the subway ride back had him in shambles. Seriously, how could you just allow your baby to wail like that? He would've moved but that would be considered rude and there weren't any empty seats. The last thing he wanted to do was squeeze himself under five other people holding onto one pole.

"Okay okay you're squeezing the daylights out of me." He muttered gently pushing the girl back.

"You don't sound so happy to see me. I mean for someone that's writing a book about your legacy you would think I'd get a hug back or I don't know a hello?" You huffed crossing your arms over your chest and turning your head.

Hisirdoux was beyond confused. With a raised eyebrow and a familiar that was expecting him to say something he took another look at you and sighed. "Alright love, just tell me who you are, why you're in my apartment, and if you're just here to lead the Arcane Order to us don't you think you could have done this earlier in the day to save me the trouble of going to work?" Originally he thought that maybe Nari had gone from collecting plants to collecting New Yorkers but with the magic radiating from you he knew it was a little unrealistic.

It was your turn to be confused. "Arcane Order?" You repeated. Who the hell was that? Glancing down to Archie who was no longer sitting on the countertop but rather brushing past your legs you smiled.

"Hisirdoux, since you're not aware this is y/n, from Arcadia." He spoke as he pushed his glasses back. Nari had soon joined your side as well looking ecstatic to see a new face.

Arcadia? The only kids he knew from Arcadia was the trollhunters gang and that little girl who-

Wait.

You were that little girl?!

You laughed as his sudden realization affected his expression. He didn't have droopy eyelids anymore and wasn't standing like he was about to pass out from exhaustion. No matter how long he's lived he still can't sleep regularly. You sighed internally. Would you end up like him too? "Y/n L/n." You stuck your hand out. "Perhaps I didn't state my name when I pestered you three years ago."

Douxie accepted your hand shake before shuffling over to the couch. You followed him and took a seat as he did. Archie had curled up on his lap and Nari wormed her way beside you. His couch was fit for two people but Nari was smaller than you were so she managed to fit fine. "What brings you to New York y/n?" The wizard asked as he stared at the television. It seemed that after he realized you weren't a threat his tired mood had made a reappearance.

"I'm going to NYU this year and a certain sorceress mentioned that you were in New York so I decided to drop by." You answered. Honestly, you had wished to see Douxie after you turned in your research report but it had been too late. You weren't able to see him on that day or the next. It took a month before you went back to the bookstore and by then he had already up and left according to Claire.

Douxie looked at you with one eyebrow raised as if he wasn't buying anything you said. "Okay fine! I'm not lying about NYU by the way but last year I started noticing weird stuff happening." You looked down at your hands then back up at your friend. He was urging you to continue. "Something dark had been following me around. I have no idea what it was or who it was until it attacked me. I managed to run away at least I thought I did but this thing cornered me. I must have gotten so scared to the point that I blasted it." A yellow ball of light shone in your palm. "I've never done anything like that before and I was scared it would return so I tried my best to read some of those books you left lying around in the bookstore. The ones about magic. When I learned a few basic spells I knew it wouldn't be enough to protect my family so I decided to track you down. So here I am." The glowing light came to a stop.

Douxie was thinking. Something attacked you, something that scared you to the point you unleashed magic you never knew you had. It could only be the Arcane Order but why would they come after you? Was it possible that they already knew about your powers? Dragging his hand down his face he yawned. "How about you get some sleep and we talk about this later?" You suggested.This man looked exhausted. Archie had briefly mentioned that Douxie worked all the way across town from where they live at a pizza parlour during the weekdays on top of another job at a fish market down the block on the weekends all while tackling odd jobs and making sure there was a protection spell around the apartment at all times. No wonder he was drained.

"No no it's okay." Another yawn escaped and you stood up only to grab a blanket and drape it over him.

"Master wizards need their energy." You reminded him as he settled into the couch.

"But-"

"Don't but anything me Douxie. I'll make sure to leave out the fact that you're sleep deprived in the book. Don't want the kids thinking they can do anything without needing a good night's rest." You said using your magic to turn down the television. It was five in the afternoon now, you could just hang out with Nari and Archie until he woke up.

Hisirdoux reminded himself to offer you some of the pizza in the fridge whenever he woke up. You decided to continue your conversation from earlier with Archie and Nari back in the kitchen. "Are you going to ask him?" Nari asked as she tended to her plants.

"I don't know. He has a lot on his plate right now I don't think I want to add more. Besides what if he says no? What do I do then just go back to my ordinary life and hope that thing doesn't find me?" You opened the fridge to help yourself to whatever they had. To your amusement they had pizza. Knowing this family's circumstances it would be best to leave them with what they have but Archie was currently begging you to put him out of his misery. They had been eating pizza for about a month now and no matter the different toppings the smell of it alone was dreadful. Archie was quite glad that Douxie didn't come home with a box today.

"Douxie may be busy but he's not heartless. Now that he knows you're in danger and this may be linked to the Arcane Order the chances of him saying yes outweigh the chances of him saying no." Archie riddled off. It sounded like he was scolding you but you knew he was just looking out for you. Pouting you threw a slice on a plate and stuck it in the microwave for a minute.

"Who's this Arcane Order anyway?" You grumbled. If they even made Douxoe scared then they were a big deal. The wizard was a bit of scaredy cat though so maybe he was just in his head again. You think he would've improved in three years. You watched as Archie stretched out his back and Nari tried to shush you. Weird. Even they seemed to be on edge and well Nari was a literal goddess was she not? And Archie was a cat who could speak! Okay he was a really powerful familiar who took on the form of a feline but still. Grabbing your pizza from the microwave you desperately blew on it.

"A group of very evil people who ate after Nari. Before Merlin died he trusted Hisirdoux with protecting her." Archie said hopping off the counter and onto the floor.

You almost dropped your hot pizza out of shock. The greatest wizard is dead? "H-how long has he been...you know?" You asked as Nari picked up Archie and stroked him gently.

"About 3 years." The girl said with a sad smile. "Merlin gave his life to protect me and it's the last thing I want Douxie to do." She glanced over at his body now sprawled out on the couch as light snores could be heard.

"3 years?" You spoke in disbelief. That meant he would've died around the time you first met him. That was when you realized that he had never strayed from telling the story of Camelot those years ago. He didn't give you the luxury of extra details he kept it simple and straightforward. Not spending too much time on Merlin and Morgana's personalities in fact he would somehow direct the conversation back to you and your childish enthusiasm about the tale. Allowing you to add your own input. You suppose he's been on the Earth long enough to know how to build people's narratives. Besides you wouldn't have noticed it then, you were merely a child. One that had no idea about the mess she was getting into. You took a bite of your pizza and sighed. That cool wizard you met 3 years ago was just a guy stuck in some eternal time loop with his cat and adopted sister. Running from danger while working too many jobs and not getting enough rest. You were seriously contemplating not going to college to help him out.

Okay so what you met some weird wizard three years ago on a whim but now that you had magical powers maybe you could assist him in some way. He wouldn't have to be living on a prayer anymore. You could help him take down those bad guys and then he wouldn't have to stay in hiding like this. He would be safe to roam the world along with Nari and Archie. If he was in your place you think he'd do the same. He is awfully selfless. To the point that you knew he was planning on giving his own life during the Camelot battle. It still chills you to this day to think about it. Maybe you would take that offer the familiar was pushing you towards. Archie and Nari were staring at you worriedly. You did basically stop talking.

With the last bite of your pizza you stepped forward with a grin. "I'll do it. I'll ask Douxie to be my mentor and I'll help him fight the Arcane Order!" You declared loudly. Nari had accidentally dropped Archie when she went to clap. A hiss came from Archie as he was about to mouth her off.

"I'm trying to sleep!" Douxie slurred from the couch. You wondered if he was conscious enough to know what you were saying.

"Sorry master" you chuckled alongside Archie and Nari.

#douxie #hisirdoux casperan #toa hisirdoux #hisirdoux x reader #wizards tales of arcadia #archie #nari #douxie x reader

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amazingphanisnotonfire-imagines · 4 years

Text

Betty//things change and friends leave. life doesn't stop for anybody.

Request: Can I request a Betty/Reader where you fly in with Nick St Clair as one of Veronica's old friends and you ask her to show you around Riverdale

hey! i hate nick...a lot. i wonder if that translates in this? anyway, i hope you like it! also, it seems every gay thing i write always has some sort of quote in all lower case letters as the title. hmm... this one is from the perks of being a wallflower. maybe i rushed in with the romance and lovey stuff, maybe i don’t care.

“You really are an awful person.” You spit as you get out of the cab. Nick smiles sweetly at you while he gets out the other side, practically sprinting so he can get to the boot and pull your bags out before you have a chance. He places them on the ground but doesn’t take his hands off the handle until a few seconds after you’ve grabbed it, and your fingers touching his makes you feel even sicker than the plane here.

“Thats not very nice Y/n.” He replies, before sending a very fake, but very big smile to the cab driver and giving him a large tip. “Especially not to someone like me. Or do you want me to tell my parents?”

“Your parents know you’re an ass, they just don’t want to be murdered in their sleep.” You reply and spin on your heel, pulling your suitcase behind you.

“Hey!” He calls after you and you groan, you’ve already been stuck on a plane and in a taxi with him and the short walk from the side of the road to the hotel you’re both staying in seems like a lifetime away. “You’re supposed to be my friend.”

“I am not your friend. I tolerate you because of Veronica, and after she left to move here, I’ve barely seen you. And when I have, it hasn’t been enjoyable.”

“Clearly, that plane ride made you grouchy.” He teases and pinches your cheek. You stop abruptly and turn to face him, you’re just about to slap him when Veronica’s cheery voice stops you.

“Next time. I won’t stop.” You whisper in his ear before looking at your friend, a bright smile appearing on your face as you take in her appearance. She looks different since the last time you saw her, but thats what a small town does to someone like Veronica, however she doesn’t look sad, she looks happy instead, and even though she left you in New York to deal with Nick St douchebag, you’re happy she’s happy.

“Y/n!” She squeals and wraps you in a tight hug. “Nick!” She says once she’s pulled away and you can tell she isn’t as excited to see him, that fact alone makes you feel a little better about all the time you’re inevitably going to have to spend with him. “How’s New York?” She wraps an arm around your shoulder, guiding you up the steps of the hotel and Nick walks on the other side of her.

“Not the same without you.” You say genuinely and she looks at you sadly.

“I’ve missed you.”

“I’v-”

“We’ve missed you too.” Nick interrupts and as soon as he starts talking its like your automatic response is to roll your eyes.

“Aww.” She hits his arm lightly as you walk through the front door and in to the lobby. Its not as fancy as the hotels you’ve stayed at before, but for a small town you’re quite impressed, however you can’t imagine that they get many people staying.

Veronica’s told you so much about Riverdale, about how quaint it is, and how it looks like it would be the backdrop of some coming of age film that the two of you would watch back home. You would fawn over the protagonist, who would be trying to figure out what she was destined to do with her life, while trying to juggle everything else that was thrown at her. And Veronica would drool over her love interest, who would look far to old to be playing a 17 year old, with a chiseled jaw line and abs that definitely did not fit the aesthetic. You missed those times, but like in those coming of age movies, life doesn’t always go the way you want it to, and usually the universe will throw a curveball your way, and you can’t always dodge it.

So, when she invited you to come visit, you were excited to see her new home, meet her new friends, and a small part of you had hoped that your own film, romantic or adventurous or anything in between would start here. But, thats not how the real world works. And instead of meeting the love of your life, you end up stuck with the devil himself on a plane, while he talks about how much he’s missed Veronica and if she’s got a boyfriend yet.

“Oh, before you guys check in, I want to introduce you to some people.” She smiles. “Archie! Betty! Come here!” She waves behind you, and you and Nick both turn around at the same time. You’re met with a red-headed boy and a girl with very light green eyes, pink lips and blonde hair. The pale pink shirt underneath her short dungarees, is so simple but so elegant and even though you’ve never met her, it seems to be so her. “Y/n, Nick.” The sound of his name in the same sentence as yours makes your face scrunch up and the blonde girl seems to notice, a small smile flickering on her face. “This is my boyfriend, Archie.” She says and you glance at Nick, the bright smile on his face drops, and your smile widens. “And this is my best friend, Betty.” She introduces you all.

“Rude.” You mumble and send her a teasing smile before waving at the two. “Y/n.” You smile, your eyes lingering on Betty for a moment longer than normal and a soft blush dusts her cheeks.

“Nice to meet you both.” Archie says while shaking Nick’s hand. “Veronica has told us so much about you.”

“All good I hope.” Nick jokes, but the tone of his voice seems to make you all a little uncomfortable.

“Nothing about you is good.” You reply and send him a sarcastic smile. Both Betty and Archie stifle a smile at your comment, and you can tell you’re going to get along with them. Veronica decides to change the subject to stop any fights happening and soon the five of you are exchanging in polite small talk.

“Anyway.” She claps her hands together after a few minutes. “I need to take Nick to talk to my delightful father.”

“Yeah, I have to go back home.” Archie scratches the back of his neck awkwardly. “Sorry I couldn’t hang out with you guys more.” He sends both you and Nick apologetic smiles, to which you return and Nick just huffs.

“Who says hang anymore.” He whispers in your ear, a small snicker following it making you roll your eyes...again.

“Everyone that talks about how they’d like to watch you die.” You return and shove past him as you walk closer to Veronica. As soon as your by her side she looks between you and a very annoyed Nick before giving you a confused look.

“Well Betty, I guess you’re stuck with me.” You move to look at her, and the two of you send each other small smiles. “Thats if you’ll have me.” You add and she nods, some would say a little too quickly.

“Yeah.” She says. “I can show you around if you want.” She suggests.

“Yeah, that would be great.”

“Well, we all have our orders. Y/n, I’ll meet you at Pop’s later on if you like.”

“Pop’s?” You ask.

“I’ll take you there last.” Betty says.

“You can leave your bags here and they’ll put them in your rooms.” Veronica tells you before calling someone over. She gives them their orders and you smile gratefully at them as they grab your bags. “See you later Y/n. And thanks Betty.” She hugs both of you, before kissing Archie quickly and then guiding Nick out into the street.

“See you Betty. It was nice meeting you Y/n.” Archie is the next to leave and you wave politely at him before he disappears.

“So where do you want to start?” Betty asks.

“I don’t know.” You shrug. “Do you have a favourite place?” You ask as the two of you walk down the steps.

“Hmmm.” She thinks about it for a few seconds before her face lights up in a bright smile, and the sight alone makes you feel a whole lot better about being here for a week, even if you do have to spend some of it with Nick. “I know just the place.” She says before turning on her heel and walking in the opposite direction than you were originally going.

“Is this place far?” You ask. “Because these shoes are not made for walking far. I’m not like Veronica, I can’t sprint in heels.” You giggle and she glances at your black heels.

“I think Veronica could run a marathon in heels if needed.” She laughs. “But don’t worry, my car is parked down the street.” She reassures you. Once the two of you are in the car and driving down the small streets she glances at you quickly before looking back at the road. “Do you miss her?” Her tone changes drastically and the sound of the street your walking down seems too loud all of a sudden. You came here to have fun and see your friend, not talk about serious things with a stranger, no matter how cute said stranger is.

“Erm. Yeah. I do. New York doesn’t feel the same without her.” You admit and look at the passing trees. She sighs, trying to think of something to say to you. However, no matter how much of a people person she thinks she is, she knows how close you and Veronica where, and she knows that if Archie moved to a different street let alone city or town, nobody would be able to make her feel better. So instead she keeps to simple girl talk, something that you’re grateful for, even if you don’t tell her.

“I like your outfit.” She says and you look at her, a small smile on your face.

“Thanks. I like yours too.” You reply and she rolls her eyes.

“You don’t have to be nice.” She shakes her head and you stare at her confused.

“I’m not. I genuinely like what you’re wearing. Why is that so surprising?”

“I just thought it wouldn’t something you liked, I mean based on your outfit right now, I can’t imagine you ever wearing short dungarees.”

“I’m full of surprises Betty.” You nudge her causing her to giggle.

“I’m sure.” She replies, stomping at some traffic lights. Her gaze lingers on your profile for a few seconds too many, and when you catch her staring she can’t help the blush that burns her cheeks.

“So, where exactly are you taking me?”

“I am also full of surprises.”

You continue looking out the window, and wonder what type of place could pull someone like Betty in.

-----

“This is your favourite place?” You wonder as you look around.

“Yep.” She smiles back at you before sitting down on the ground. “Its great isn’t it?”

“It’s an abandoned railway.” You quirk an eyebrow as you look at her. “Its hardly paradise.”

“It is to me.” She smiles, her eyes are closed and her head is tipped back slightly, a soft breeze making her ponytail sway a little and she looks so calm, so peaceful, so at home. “Me and my sister, Polly, used to come here when we were little. Our mom would always tell us to stay away from this place but we never listened. We’d play and run around and just escape into our own little worlds.” She explains before looking back at you. “Do you have anywhere like that back in New York?”

“Hmm.” You think for a few seconds before sitting beside her, your legs outstretched on the cold concrete while hers are crossed next you. The coldness of the ground makes you shiver a little and she’s quickly untying the jacket from her waist and handing it to you. You’re about to argue, but the look she gives you shuts you up and so you smile at her gratefully before draping it over your shoulders. “Not really. When you live where I do, there’s not a lot of places like this. Its all high rise buildings and busy roads, not sleepy streets and abandoned railways. Plus, with my parents being who they are, especially back then, I couldn’t really go out alone. I was always with someone, whether it was a nanny or a chauffeur.” You sigh. “I know.” You hold your hands up. “That makes me sound really stuck up. But I promise I’m not.”

“That honestly never even crossed my mind.” She replies quietly and you turn your head a little to look at her. “Nick however, is an ass.”

“Don’t even get me started.” You groan. “He is the worst person in the world. I honestly don’t know why Veronica is friends with him. Literally the only reason I talk to him, is because of he-what?” You ask when you notice her still looking at you, an un-readable look in her eyes.

“Nothing.” She shakes her head. “Come on.” She stands quickly and pulls you up with her. “I have somewhere else to show you.”

-----

“Oh yeah. This is it.” You smile brightly at her and she gives you a confused look.

“This is what?” She asks as the two of you look around. The bridge connecting Riverdale to the outside world is quiet for the time of day. The sun is high in the sky, warming the two of you, and her jacket is now wrapped around your waist, it doesn’t entirely go with your outfit but Betty thinks its cute, and she has to give her head a shake to get rid of that thought. You’re Veronica’s friend from New York who she’s showing around, nothing more and nothing less. The water from Sweetwater River is gentle beneath the red bridge, but you can hear it none the less, and that sound mixed with the birds in the trees makes you smile as soon as you parked.

“This is where my coming of age story starts.” You spin around and take in your surroundings, and Betty’s looking at you even more confused than before.

“What?”

“This.” You look at her. “Is where everything starts. I’m going to fall in love and have to defeat evil all while trying to figure out who I am.”

“You’re...” She tries to find the word to describe you, to describe how you look right now. But there’s no word to describe how Betty feels when she looks at you. Despite knowing you for less than two hours, she can’t help her stomach doing summersaults every time she looks at you, or the way her heart hammers in her chest every time you laugh. So her sentence dies, whatever compliment she was going to give you disappears, and she’s left watching you while you try and find a stick to drop into the water. “Coming of age?” She asks and hands you a small twig. Your eyes light up as you take it from her and the two of you lean over the ledge, you watching the way it falls and her watching you. You then grab her hand in yours, quickly look at the road before running across it and leaning over the other side. As soon as you see the stick you do a little celebratory dance, and the laugh that comes from your lips is something Betty could never get sick of hearing.

“What about it?”

“Whats it about?”

“Well, Veronica told me that Riverdale could be used in a coming of age film. And we used to watch them all the time at home, so I was excited to see it for myself. The railway was a good contender, but this bridge...this is it. I mean look at it. Its so old and solid and just...here.”

She nods and she looks around. “I get that. But I have somewhere else to show you.”

----

“This place is great.” You look around in awe. “Why the hell was this placed closed.”

“You know, I have a friend called Jughead who you would get along with very well.” She says as the two of you walk through the empty drive in. “So where does this come into your story?”

“Oh, okay.” You stop suddenly and she almost walks into you. “So, two options. Which one do you want to hear?”

“Both.” She nods.

“Well, first option. I’ve met my love interest...whoever she is.” The word she makes Betty’s heartbeat pick up, and now she’s even more interested in what you have to say. “And, she’s showing me around, hey, kind of like this.” You laugh. “And we break into here, and she’s trying to show me that there’s more to life that whatever the hell I’m worrying about, maybe a murder or something. Basically she’s showing me how to live. And we end up here, stood right in this spot, both of us inching closer to the other.” You’re both hyper-aware of how close the two of you seem to have gotten and you don’t remember being this close before. “And...she’ll hold my hand softly in hers, tip my chin to look at her and then lean in slowly, and the whole thing will feel slow and fast all at the same time. And she’ll kiss me, and it’ll be soft and gentle and everything I thought it would be.” You finish, your eyes feel heavy as you look at Betty, your lips centimeters apart and Betty’s hand is holding your arm gently.

“What happens in the second scenario?” She asks quietly and you glance at her eyes. Very light green from far away, but when you look at them up close, they have darker green and even golden specks in them.

“Well, its gotten to the point where everything has gone to shit. My whole life is falling apart, I’ve lost friends, made enemies and the whole reason for my story seems lost. So I come here to make myself feel better, to remind me of the happier times. And she follows me. We fight. We scream and shout at each other and its raining so much you can barely see in front of you. And just as she’s about to storm off, I grab her wrist and pull her back to me, pressing a quick kiss to her lips.” You’re voice is practically a whisper as you look at her. “And then we make out.” You say the last part casually making her laugh loudly.

“Is that the night you guys go like all the way.” She teases, her voice high pitched and mocking and now its your turn to laugh loudly.

“Erm, duh.” You reply, flicking your hair over your shoulder and the two of you giggle.

“Ooooo.” She wiggles her eyebrows.

“So, where are we going now?” You ask.

“Somewhere, that I think you’re really going to like.” She replies, her eyes shining as she stares at you.

For a split second while you’re looking at each other, it feels like you truly are in some sort of movie.

----

“This our last stop before Pop’s.” She turns to face you, as she rambles about the history of this place she walks confidently backwards until you stop at a clearing.

“We’re in the middle of the forest.” You look around.

“I know.” She says. “But its so much more. This is where stories begin.”

“What do you mean?” You ask and she smirks at you.

“Sit down.” She guides you to a worn out brown sofa, pushing you to sit down. She then stands in front of you, a bright grin on her face as she begins. “This.” She points to the ground. “This is where me and Archie buried treasure when we were 8. Its where me and Polly dug it up a week later and its also where Archie got annoyed at me for digging it up, despite him being there with Jughead, to also dig it up a week after that. Its where Cheryl Blossom had her first kiss at 12, with an unknown boy, the mystery of who it was still causes controversy. Its where Jughead went when his dad was drunk, and its also where me and Archie would meet him. Keeping him company until one of us had to go home. Polly told me she had her third date here with Jason Blossom, and that something else happened too, but I won’t divulge.” She scrunches her face up at the last bit and you do the same, standing up quickly and dusting yourself off.

“Gross.” You mumble and decide to sit on the plastic chair.

“We’ve had bonfires, fireworks, parties, fake weddings...don’t ask. Even a fake funeral...definitely don’t ask. There’s been first kisses, first dates, first friendships made. Handshakes and hugs, and everything in between...for generations. This is where everyone’s coming of age story starts and ends. So how do you want to start yours?”

“Like this.” You stand up and walk the short distance towards her. Your hearts in your throat and your stomaches seems to have dropped to your knees while your hands cup her cheek. Her breath hitches at the sudden close proximity but she doesn’t seem to mind, in fact she leans into your touch, her eyes fluttering closed. And then you’re kissing her, softly at first, just to test the waters. Her lips taste like strawberry chapstick and vanilla ice cream and you can’t help but wonder when the hell she had that because you met her at 11 this morning. But that melts away with the rest of your thoughts when her hands rest on your waist, squeezing ever so slightly as you deepen the kiss.

Yeah, this is so much better than any film.

#betty cooper #betty cooper x reader #betty cooper x you #betty cooper imagine #betty #betty imagine #betty x reader #betty x you #riverdale #riverdale imagine

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tthankstoyou · 3 years

Note

Bestie, from one hevans shipper to another, what is it about Hevans that does it for you? Why are you a shipper? What was the moment that made you realise you felt this way? What are your favourite cannon moments? What are your favourite headcannons? Tell me EVERYTHING teehee uwu

ASJHF THANK YOU FOR THIS ASK ILY!! This got long so everything is under the cut...... sometimes I just can't shut up about them. I love these boys so much <3

OKAY SO I actually made a masterpost type thing of reasons that I ship hevans, which you can find here

BUT I WILL ADD TO THAT LIST OF THINGS! I also love how the au's aren't that far removed from canon. Like. A secret relationship when they're living together in s3? Yes please! It's not too crazy to think about model!sam x vogue!kurt, swimmer!sam x kurt , & jock!sam x cheerio!kurt. These tropes all take from things that are canon, which is something that I love. You don't have to change a whole character and their interests to write stuff.

Bestie, on the moment that made me realize I ship them... I'm sorry to say this but I used to... really not like Hevans. Like before I came onto Glee Tumblr, I used to lurk on Glee Instagram and whenever ppl posted about Hevans on there, I was like "Okay... and... what's even the point" (but then again I didn't ship any crackship/non-canon ship at the time). BUT OH GOSH then I joined the Glee fandom on here... and I remember searching through the Hevans tag bc #yolo & after scrolling past the third gifset, I was like "Fuck, I think I ship them now."

On top of that, I think what really got me hooked wasn't the canon scenes (although I do love those so much), but it was the thought of how much they would help each other grow as people. Like if you look at Kurt and Sam, they are both rocks for people in there life and are always there for them... but they don't get much of that reciprocated. Like we don't see Kurt asking for help with things he's struggling with past s2x06. AND! That's especially seen with his father's health problems. Sam has been through family troubles too, he knows how hard it is to ask for help and I think he would encourage Kurt to open up to people and not internalize all of the pain he's going through. And okay this part is canon, but Kurt helped Sam so much when he was homeless. Like Kurt was selfless enough to go out of his way and help out Sam when he was at his lowest, that shit gets me right in the heart. I just think they would be great for each other and encourage each other to be the best versions of themselves.

My favorite canon moments would probably have to be when Sam fought Karofsky for Kurt and deadass everything in season 6. On fighting Karofsky, I know that Kurt doesn't need anyone to defend his honor, but try to look me in the eyes and tell me it isn't fruity to get into a fistfight for a guy that you've just met. Like Sam barely knows Kurt, but here he us throwing punches in the locker room. It's just all in how much Sam must have cared about Kurt to do that for him.

And on the s6 scenes..... OH BOY.... Hevans should have dated in s6. Like okay okay 1) that scene where they're talking to everyone about a plan to bring Rachel back to New York. How Sam keeps on looking at Kurt.... and they way they turn to look at each other.... wow I love them. Oh and dear God, I die a little bit every time when I see that shot where Sam brushes his hand across Kurt's arm... please kiss already. And idk man just the thought of Sam and Kurt hanging out after work (maybe at the Lima Bean) and coming up with a plan to help out one of their friends get her life back on track. They're both such caring people and work so hard to make those that they love happy.

I made posts for Hevans headcanons, which you can find part 1 here and part 2 here.... maybe one day I'll make a part three... hmm just maybe. BUT UNTIL THEN!!! I will give you some little headcanons hehehe

- Kurt babysat Stevie and Stacy alongside Quinn.

- The reason why Kurt wasn't in that video about how great Sam is, is because Kurt put together something special for him that was super personal. It's a list of reasons why Kurt loves Sam... they're broken up at the time so Sam seeing how Kurt wrote "loves" instead of "loved" makes him fight to get back together with Kurt. So not only does this list of things give Sam motivation to not give up in life, but he also gets a boyfriend out of it.

- Kurt helped Sam touch up his roots and trimmed his hair.

- Branching off of what I said earlier about Sam and Kurt meeting at the Lima Bean to conspire about how to help Rachel, they played footsie underneath the table. And it took all of their strength to not reach over and hold each other's hands on top of the table... bc they didn't know if their relationship was at the point yet of holding hands so casually.

- Kurt bought Sam those soda and candy flavored chapsticks from Claires. Kurt ended up loving the scents of some of them and stole them for himself... but Sam could tell right away that Kurt stole them based off of the flavor of his lips.

- They're both huge Taylor fans and made sure to go to every show together, even when if they were on a break. (This is based off of Kurt's love for female artists & Sam's love for country).

- Carole knew they were dating before they told anyone about their relationship. Burt sensed there was a new boy in Kurt's life, based off of how he was acting, but didn't know who. Carole could tell it was Sam because of how Kurt always suddenly wanted to hang out with Finn when Sam came over to play video games.

- Kurt helped Sam get some modeling jobs through his Vogue connections before he quit modeling... Isabelle absolutely adored Sam and wanted to hire him on as a full time model.

#they own my heart #asks #nonny #hevans

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writers-hes · 4 years

Text

cherry.

hello! this was a request made by anon a few weeks (or days) ago and last night, i was finally able to listen to cherry and grant her request.

i hope you enjoy thing super ANGST-y piece about harry’s new album. if you want a request, don’t hesitate to submit something on my ask box. my finals are finally over so i now have all the time in the world to write you guys new fics. thank you so much, by the way, for the 100 notes on late christmas! if you haven’t read it yet, you can do so by clicking on this link: masterlist.

i hope you enjoy cherry and i will be waiting for your comments!

WARNINGS: unedited + swearing + super angst + mentions of sex and alcohol

—————————

you grew up in france. harry grew up in england. it was a miracle that you both found each other in such a great, big, world but when life is bored and wants to play, it’s the cruelest thing. you both met when he was on tour. your friend was friends with jeff and invited her to come over to his hotel and have a drink with some lads, since it’s been awhile since they last saw each other. she asked you to tag along, afraid that she would feel out of place in case his famous friends were there. you nodded.

arriving at the hotel, you were immediately greeted by fans waiting outside the hotel door, wanting to take a peek at the infamous harry styles. you were a fan yourself, and was actually quite nervous to meet him—if you would even meet him tonight. you were dressed in your white shirt, tucked inside denim bell bottoms, and mary janes. natasha, your friend, said that you were underdressed but you argued that it was fine, it wasn’t a big deal.

you met harry that night, spent the night in his hotel, and met each other a couple of times before he had to leave france. a few months of you coming to his shows, to l.a., new york, and meeting each other’s friends, you made it official. it wasn’t a publicised but you both loved the idea of being protected by the sheets in harry’s hotel room. it was the best thing.

you met each other’s parents and dated for over a year. it was quite heaven but life works in the worst fucking way possible.

“hey, y/n?” harry said, over the phone. you were in your apartment in versailles. “mon bébé?” you greeted back. you loved to call him baby, as he was one, behind the closed doors of your secret rendezvous together. “i missed you. i was in this book store with jeff and i thought about you and the nights we spent reading under the covers,” he sighed. you smiled softly, and although he couldn’t see it, you wanted that too. “we can have that again…when you’re on your break, will definitely come down to london and stay there until you’re sick of me,” you chuckled lightly. “will never get sick of you…wanna spend the rest of my life with you,” he murmured. “me too,” your heart was beating inside your chest loudly and so does his. it was a silent, yet fleeting moment but you two loved it. thinking about a home with the both of you and perhaps, a couple more little yous and harries around the house.

“will you…sing for me?” he asked. he was tired but he wanted to hear your voice again. he wanted you where he was. “i have a bad voice!” you told him. he was the singer between the both of you but seemed to enjoy your voice more than you enjoy his. “don’t care…just sing me to sleep, yeah? i…love the way you sound and your voice…accent, too.” he chuckled. your accent switched in between french and american and it was the most precious thing that harry ever heard. you nodded anyway and sang a la claire fontaine until you heard his breathing grow deeper and slower. you started to hear his loud snores and you giggled lightly. you really do love this man. j'aime cet homme de tout mon tout, you thought to yourself. you really did love harry with your whole everything and wanted for that to be your reality until you both breathed your last breath.

———

“mon bébé?” you called to harry. he was in london home and your relationship hasn’t been working. the distance for the both of you was far too much for the both of you to bear. so you both decided to just meet in home for privacy. you knew that this was it—it was the moment that you both dreaded but you knew…you knew that this was something that would haunt the both of you forever. “y/n…” he breathed, seeing you in the outfit the first time you both saw him in france. his eyes were blood-shut, as were yours. you had bags under your eyes and was hoping that this was something that you could both end as quickly as possible but it wasn’t possible. it wasn’t fucking possible.

“harr—i don’t want to do this,” you cried in the middle of his foyer. your bag was on the floor and you were wiping your eyes, trying your best to stop the tears from leaking. you looked like a frail child and harry went to you, locking you into his embrace. “i don’t want this too, love but—we’re just hurting each other,” he says and it was true. over the tour, he managed to kiss someone else in places that only you should whilst you managed to fall back in the pits of longing for your dead ex-boyfriend. he died in a car accident and during a big fight, you told harry that you wished that adrien was still here. you told harry how adrien was better and how you loved him more than you did harry. it wasn’t true. you loved harry with your everything. you loved harry more than life itself but all you did was hurt each other in the process. it was the right love at the wrong time—or perhaps, it was the wrong love all along. you nodded into his white shirt, inhaling his scent. you felt his body wrack and heard his sobs. tonight was the last night you both had together. “i wish—i wish i still had one more day with you. one more night. one more dinner…one more everything of what we did, bébé…i—“ you didn’t know what to say to him.

“i know…i—let’s just…sit on the couch first, yeah? i’ll get us a drink.” harry removed his body from you but still took your hand as he led you to his living room. he left where you were and went to his kitchen, opening a bottle of wine and pouring some in two coffee mugs. he sat beside you, offering you a drink. you took it from him and gulped the contents in seconds. you wanted to feel numb. “this is it?” you asked him. “this…this is the end of us?” “no, love…i’d still see you around,”

“i don’t want to see you in public and think about what we could’ve been harry—wanna be with you all the time,”

“wanna have you here too, love but…it is what it is. i can’t keep on hurting you and i can’t keep on being hurt,” you nodded. he cried. you made love for one last time. you wrote him a letter and left his home at five in the morning—before he woke up. it took every cell in your body not to cry as you took his tattooed arms from your naked body. you stole three of his shirts and went to his bathroom, spraying all of them with perfume. it would suffice until you’re ready to remove them from your body.

the next day, harry opened his eyes, feeling you through the sheets, in hopes that his nightmare wouldn’t be his reality. he cried. he saw the letter from you and cried harder.

mon bébé,

if you’re reading this, i hope you forgive me for stealing some of your shirts.

what we had together was something that i will always think about. i will always be grateful for the times that we spend together, for the kisses, your embrace, the sweet glances that we gave each other in the room. when i first met you in france, i knew immediately that i loved you. it was probably a part of the reason why i agreed to spend the night with you…i thought i would never see you again but you asked me what my number was and the rest was history.

this was the hardest thing that i had to write. our love letters would usually just have the both of us saying i love you’s and see you soon’s but now, we have to say goodbye. i can’t think of a single reason why i wouldn’t marry you. you were my dream boy and i loved the way you made me feel. the thrill of knowing that you love me was what pushed me through when you were in other places and to be honest, i’ll only be thinking about the ways and how you loved me for me to push through. your love was with me even though you weren’t and that will be my motivation to wake up, brush my teeth, and do what i have to do.

when i said that adrien was a man that you could never be, it was true. adrien was my love and i would never stop loving him. but harry? you would always be my soulmate, the love of my life, and my best friend. we may have stopped talking but you will always be my favourite boy. i will never love someone the way i love you.

i hope in the future, when you see me, you won’t think about the times we fought and the bad times we had. i hope you see me as your friend and i hope you will remember our times under the covers and how we told each other that we loved each other. i hope you will see me the way i see you, in a good light with love and adoration in my eyes.

i love you harry. always did and always will. please take care of yourself, mon cherie.

all the love, y/n.

————

it’s been a year since that horrific night and it’s december. you were waiting impatiently for harry to release his new album. you and him were friends now but you always felt so distant. he got mad at you when you started to date your ex-beau, vincent. he didn’t like it and no matter how much you tried to friends with him, he wouldn’t budge. it was only a few months after when you saw each other in new york and worked things out. you were still with vincent that time but you were single right now and all you ever wanted was harry.

harry asked if it was alright if he could use the voicemail you left him in his song. you agreed but still haven’t fully heard the whole song with you in it. you were anxious to hear the song and how it will affect you. you’ve been hearing rumours about the whole album was dedicated to you. harry admitted to it, even crying to you one night about how he missed you and how much he wanted to have you back but you were with vincent. it was currently 11:54 in france and six minutes couldn’t come sooner. you heard his releases, watermelon sugar, adore you, and lights up. it was nearing 12 when your iphone notified you that the whole fine line album was downloaded to your music app.

you immediately fished for your phone, and pressed on golden. you listened util light’s up was over, in shock to hear your voice in his song. it was titled cherry and you smiled—the fruit being a constant motif in your relationship. when you first met, you ate the maraschino cherry from his cocktail. whenever he ordered cakes, you both would compete for the cherry until one of you ate it.

the song was beautiful, you concluded. it was him mocking vincent and asking you not to call him the way you called harry. it was one of those nights when harry was crying. it was a few weeks after your break-up when he was begging you not to call vincent ‘mon bébé’. you assured him that you weren’t. you sang to him until he fell asleep and cried after your ended the call. there was truth in the whole song, from him having a piece in how you dressed—florals and wide pants to him talking to your friends about how he missed you much. you talked to his friends and he talked to your friends, thinking that it was the only way for the both of you still have a piece of each other. it was sad—really fucking sad but you were at your best now and so was harry.

it was a full minute or so when you thought cherry had ended, only to be met by your voicemail, the last voicemail you sent to harry.

Coucou ! Tu dors ? Oh, j'suis désolée... Bah non... Nan, c'est pas important... Bon allez... On a été à la plage, et maintenant on— Parfait ! Harry

the voicemail missed some parts because right now, as you sob into your hands in versailles, you could still remember what you told him. it was just a couple of months ago and you were still with vincent when you left this voicemail. he dropped a voicemail hours ago, telling you a joke about cherries. it fucked you up and in that time in paris, with vincent, you wanted nothing more but to go back to him and his arms. perhaps it was the static or the poor connection but you know what the song had wasn’t complete.

Parfait! Harry je t’aime toujours et tu me manque. S’il te plaît reviens.

(Perfect! Harry, I still love and miss you. Please come back.)

as you lay in bed, at 2 a.m on december 13, 2019, in versailles, you wondered what the future held. you wondered if there was still a chance for you and harry. you wondered if he would come back into your arms. you cried and then, drifted to sleep.

read falling here.

sorry for the french,,,,i asked my friend to translate it for me im not sure if it’s correct,,,

#harry #styes #Harry Styles #harry styles fanfiction #harry styles angst #harry styles fanfic #cherry #angst #fanfiction #fan #fiction #fan fic #fanfic #fine line #fine #line #camille rowe #one direction fanfiction #fluff

363 notes · View notes

faerune · 3 years

Note

💘 + leon and cassie 🔫 now

also asked by @ottobooty!

where they first met and how hot local racoon city survivors in YOUR area want to fuck! no for real, cassie had holed up in a diner with a group of other survivors and prior to leon getting to the police station he helps cassie fix/find parts to load up an old delivery truck in the back alley to get them all to safety. when leon leaves cassie promises to come back and make sure he + claire have a ride out of town and she does appear in that last shot in her shitty little happy dairy truck like hey you guys look like you need a ride.

how long their ‘flirting’ phase was before feelings got involved cassie has always been kinda of a flirt just offhandedly and i feel like leon is kinda of the same way just he’s cheesy and awkward about it when he’s a little younger. they flirt during the couple months they’re all trying to get their bearings after racoon city and then don’t really stay in touch much until the gov drags them both in separately.

after that more flirting, some undercover missions and zombies and leon finally asks her to dinner. cassie teases ‘don’t expect me to put out on the first date just because you saved my ass today’ pft.

who fell for who first cassie will never ever admit it but it was her. like hard. she fell for leon like she was carrying a drink carrier full of hot coffee across a busy intersection in new york, tripped off the curb in front of hundreds of people and slammed her knee into the pavement.

where their first date was and what it was like dinner and a movie! cassie loves film but also is not a snob and adores laughably bad movies so they went and saw a goofy ass B action movie and then went to a late dinner at a diner that they always eat at after work.

who asks who out and how ( with a sign? spelled out on a cake? just a simple ‘will you go out with me’? ) leon just pretty simply says let me take you to dinner and cassie teases ‘oh are you asking me on a date kennedy?’ and he just shrugs and goes ‘yeah. i am’ cassie admittedly gets like flustered for half a second and she’s like. okay cool fine.

who proposes first cassie. she’s been so weird and avoidant about getting married so leon has always let her bring it up. when they get back together a few months later they’re laying in bed together and cassie is like can you propose to me now? and leon is like well do you wanna be surprised or do you want the ring now? and cassie just smiles and plops her head on his chest and is like ‘surprise is okay’.

if they keep / kept their relationship secret or let everyone know right away due to their jobs and them being afraid of having each other just be another thing people hold over their heads to keep them working there, they keep it really quiet at the beginning. everyone on their team kinda knows but they aren’t announcing it everywhere.

where the proposal happens and how ( kiss cam at a baseball game? on a hillside surrounded by ducks? at a disney park? ) leon takes her out to dinner and then they take a walk in the park! they sit on a little bench all lit up by the winter christmas lights and he gets down on one knee :’)

if they adopt any pets together absolutely! i just have not figured out what kind yet! probably a cat because cassie has cat person energy.

who’s more dominant it kinda flip flops. cassie is more dominant in terms of talking to people, making decisions but in terms of progressing the relationship that’s definitely leon. in terms of some more ahem other times cassie’s a brat and leon just wants to give her whatever she wants.

where their first kiss was and what it was like they’ve kissed on undercover missions before but i’m not sure if it really “counts”. their first kiss as just leon and cassie was when leon dropped her off at her place after their date and cassie pulled him down for a kiss. after they finished leon was smiling all dopey and still kind of leaning down to her and she just smirked at him and wished him a good night.

if they have any matching couples stuff ( mugs? sweaters? pillowcases? ) sdgjksdg i can see them at the most having like a set of cute matching mugs but that’s about it. cassie would die before wearing matching sweaters with him no matter how much she loves him.

how into pda they are they hand hold/give each other pecks/leon throws his arm around her shoulders while they walk but they’re not too obnoxious about it! cassie likes it but if he tries to do anything else she gets flustered. admittedly, leon kinda loves when she does so he’s always whispering sweet stuff in her ears while she tries to elbow him in the stomach sdklgsdg.

who holds the umbrella when it rains leon!! he’s taller so it just makes sense.

where their usual ‘date spot’ is the diner where they just always got dinner cause it was near the facility where they worked together for so long! they both have never been to DC so they just went to the nearest place after their first day and they were like so this is OUR diner.

who’s more protective leon. cassie is very annoyed by it pft. especially when she pops up during the civil war. ya know. in the middle of an actual warzone with possible biological weapons. cassie: :) im here to cause problems on purpose. leon: why in the FUCK is my ex here armed with a thousand dollar camera and a tiny pistol.

how long it is before they sleep together they almost sleep together the day before their second date, making out on leon’s desk but they get interrupted and they’re like okay we gotta chill. leon arrives to pick her up for their date and cassie yanks him into her bedroom. needless to say they miss their movie.

if they argue about anything they bicker playfully but also cassie accuses leon of not treating her like an adult who can make her own decisions because he’s so fucking overprotective. leon accuses cassie of being careless with her life. they have i guess..not arguments but debates over morals?

who leaves more marks ( lipstick, hickeys, scratchmarks etc. ) leon leaves hickeys like he’s a teenager but he’s usually good about keeping them in places that can’t be seen. cassie wears red lipstick a lot so leon has to pay extra attention if they sneak away at work to make sure he doesn’t have it smeared all over his lips. she likes to kiss his cheek and leave a big mark too.

who steals whose clothes and how often cassie: not your hoodies babe, our hoodies.

how they cuddle ( spooning? facing each other? ) they are spooners through and through. cassie needs to be held and leon is happy to do it.

what their favourite nonsexual activity is watching movies together! leon is happy that cassie wants to share all her favorites with him and they have movie nights.

how long they stay mad at each other leon normally just needs a second to cool down normally but cassie holds a grudge for a day or maybe two then she’s ready to talk. but uh...in terms of big betrayals leon gives off the im not angry im disappointed and betrayed and you hurt me energy loud and clear and takes a long time to forgive and settle. it’s the worst cassie has ever felt.

what their usual coffee / tea orders are cassie gets a tall black coffee (iced or hot depending on the season) and leon likes lattes with whipped cream and carmel.

if they ever have any children together yes absolutely! i haven’t decided on names or anything yet but they definitely have two little boys just because that tweet that’s about that dad and two lil boys getting out of the car and the dad goes “who can go hug mom the fastest?!” is THEM.

if they have any special pet names for each other pretty normal ones! baby, babe are the most common. cassie likes to say honey and dear sarcastically because she thinks those make her sound like she’s a 50s housewife but secretly kinda likes calling him honey.

if they ever split up and / or get back together hah UH yeah. cassie leaks information about completed STRATCOM ops and leon eventually finds out and they have a huge fight. leon leaves the next morning and they end their relationship. he doesn’t turn her in because he still loves her and knows she did it with goodness in her heart but he’s just so conflicted. he just basically says turn in your resignation and leaves. they do eventually get back together! they break up early 2004, see each other in 2006 when cassie reaches out to him for his contacts to help her father who gets sick and then in 2011 they’re present in the civil war in the east and they get together after reconnecting through that.

what their first christmas / hanukkah / etc as a couple was like they meet each other’s parents for the first time! they invite them over for dinner along with cassie’s sisters and nieces and nephews. it’s VERY chaotic but it goes really well. leon’s mom loves cassie. uhh cassie’s dad scares the shit out of leon just because he’s a Jokester and lives for freaking leon out because he’s so obviously very nervous lmao.

what their names are in each other’s phones leon’s phone has cassie as “cassidy 🖤”. cassie has him in her phone just as “baby”. bonus she has his name in her phone the few days after they decide to have a kid as “sperm donor”. leon goes “cassie” in his disappointed voice and she rolls her eyes and finally changes it.

if they have any ‘couple traditions’ ( buying a new mug for their collection every year? baking every friday evening? ) at the moment just their friday movie nights and whenever they go out of country on a mission they buy a magnet for their fridge!

who falls asleep first and who wakes up first leon usually falls asleep first and wakes up first. cassie usually stays up late on her laptop researching and writing.

who’s the big spoon / little spoon leon is big spoon 80% of the time but he likes to be jetpacked too!

who hogs the bathroom leon after he gets back from a really gross ass mission takes hours but cassie usually hogs it day to day.

who kills the spiders / takes them outside cassie flips out and leon gets a cup and a piece of paper, puts the little guy outside. there have been multiple occasions where it sounded like cassie was in legit danger and leon came skidding into the bathroom only to find cassie standing on the toilet.

#chuckhansen #asks #PHEW #thank you so much you guys <333333 #this helped me a lot with them tbh #ship: conflict of interest

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mymelodyheart · 3 years

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Highland Destiny Chapter 5 ~Dinner for Two~

They were standing in the middle of the lounge, suspended in time and space, between heaven and earth, looking into one another's eyes. Claire's hand was still in Jamie's, his fingers generating tiny sparks that surged erratically through her body, fanned into a flame with just a little pressure of touch. His eyes, dark with wanting, bore into her soul, sending delicious heat to her core. She felt the sudden rush of blood to her head as her heart raced, scattering all logic and reasoning into some unknown dark abyss. She tried to summon a memory from the past; Frank, Oxford, the hospital corridors, her parents, uncle Lamb... anything to keep her from drowning into Jamie's deep blue. But it was futile. She was falling, dropping, slipping, but she had no idea into where.

The electrically charged interlude was interrupted by the sound of ringing from Claire's iPhone, jarring them from their trance and making them both blink. " Dhia !" Jamie murmured under his breath as his hand released Claire's, to rub the nape of his neck.

Ding! Ding! Saved by the bell.

O' sweet Lord Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ! Ding ding indeed!

Regaining a tiny bit of composure, Claire reached behind the back pocket of her jeans, extracting her phone. "I need to take this," she whispered hoarsely, barely audible.

He nodded and motioned with his hands towards the doorway as he made his way to the kitchen. She nodded back with an apologetic smile.

Seeing the image of the caller on her phone, Claire momentarily forgot Jaime and what just transpired. "Geillis, darling!"

"Hiya chick! How are you daein'? O' my God, o' my God ah heard from Joe yoo're in town. Sae, ye moved here for good?" answered an animated woman's voice in broad Glaswegian.

" Absobloodylootely – YES! Oh God, it's so good to hear your voice, Geillis. We ought to meet up as soon as possible. Listen, are you free Friday night? If so, let's catch up then. It has been bloody ages!"

"Och this is so excitin'! Aye definitely, let's meet up. Maybe Joe will come too. Ah cannae wait tae see you and show you our shop. By th' way, what's wrang wi' ye? Ye sound like ye hae bin runnin'. 'Tis a bad time?"

Claire twisted backwards to peek through the doorway. She saw Jamie leaning over the sink, splashing water to his face and neck and felt the heat crept up her own. "Well, kind of. Look, sorry to make this short but got to go. I promise to call you first thing tomorrow. Is Scotch & Rye Pub on Friday at 7 ok? I've been told that its the place to be. We can grab some fish and chips if you fancy."

"Brilliant, sorted! Scotch & Rye pub it is then Friday at 7! Ah cannae wait. An', och, Claire...you hae a laddie there wi' ye?" She can almost see her friend's cheeks dimpling and giving a wicked wink.

"Sod off, Geillis!" She always knows, the bloody cow! With that, Claire turned off her phone.

Although she was so thrilled to hear from her friend, the call was a welcomed distraction. Geillis was one of her closest mates in Oxford in medical school. And along with Joe, they were the three Musketeers in the campus until Geillis dropped out. In the earlier days, she developed an interest in Alternative Healing after joining a movement against big pharmaceutical companies; hence, she left her medical studies and followed her boyfriend to Inverness to set up a health and herb shop.

Claire was staring at the phone in her hand when Jamie walked back in. He leaned on the doorway, smiling, his breadth blocking the light from the corridor. "Hey, Sassenach. Shall we start dinner?"

She smiled back. "Sure!" And she followed him to the kitchen taking his outreached hand.

..........

In the next half hour, Claire busied herself with dinner's preparation while Jamie chopped the shallots and washed the chanterelles. Still rattled from earlier, she carefully stirred their conversation onto something neutral and avoided eye contact, but working in such a small area, touching was unavoidable. A couple of times, he had to place his hands on her hips as he navigated narrow spaces, and his mere touch sent bolts of heat coursing through her body. But with his laid-back and relaxed manner, it wasn't long before they were back to bantering and joking. Once the chanterelles had been sauteed, and the rice and shallot simmering in broth and wine, she left him to continue cooking while she washed and changed.

Drying herself after a quick shower and shave, Claire was very conscious of Jaime in the other room. Just knowing that he was there under the same roof was enough to make her heart do somersaults. She could hear him moving about as the wooden floors creaked and the pots and pans banged. For a very big man, he looked right at home and comfortable working in the kitchen.

In her bedroom, she looked for something to wear but looking into her wardrobe, there wasn't really a lot of choices. Well, it's only Jamie anyway, it's not like it's a date!

Well Beauchamp, ready for round 2? Ding! Ding!

Wot round 2? There will be no round 2.

So why did you shave your legs?

Rubbish! I always shave my legs.

Liar, liar, pants on fire!

Annoyed with herself, she decided to put on a pair of black leggings, an over-sized sweatshirt emblazoned, OXFORD and white woollen socks. She twisted her hair to the top of her head and fastened it with a hair clasp after giving up on taming her wayward curls. Looking into the mirror, she scrunched her nose and poked her tongue out.

Ok, Beauchamp, let's do this!

Do what?

Get laid?

Not gonna happen.

But you want to.

I do not!

Liar, Liar, Pants on fire!

Sod off!

Satisfied with her reflection, she went to the kitchen.

When Claire walked in, Jaime was in the process of opening a bottle of Chablis. He gave her one of those heart-dropping smiles as he took in the sight of her. His eyes travelled up and down, lingering for a moment at her breast. Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ! Can he tell I don't have a bra? She quickly reached down to touch the hem of her sweatshirt to check its thickness. Taking it as an awkward moment, Jamie reached out and guided her to the table, placing a hand on the small of her back. The scent of her favourite food made her stomach growl ferociously. He must have heard her belly rumble. "Hungry Sassenach? he said with a grin.

She was pleasantly surprised to see that Jamie did make himself at home. There was nothing else for her to do: the table was set, the green salad dressed, her flowers haphazardly arranged in the vase and placed on a side table, and he even had a few of her scented candles burning. In the background, she could hear L-O-V-E song by Nat King Cole playing softly in the lounge. In spite of her nervousness, she couldn't help but smile. Maybe the hunger was getting the better of her.

"Very hungry, indeed!" she replied. Then cocking her head, she exclaimed, "Oh my God, Jaime, you have Uncle Lambs record player working! Sorry, I don't have any sound system set up yet. It's been a hectic during the last few days. There's still a lot of things I need to do with this house."

"Och, dinna fash Sassenach. I love old music and light jazz. We still have my grand parent's record player in our family home, and occasionally, we play some of my ma's collections for 'ol time sake. I hope you dinna mind me going through your uncle's records."

"No of course not, that's what it's there for. Maybe after dinner, we can go through some and listen to some old jig."

"That's grand, Sassenach!" He took her hand and kissed the inside of her palm.

Over the next couple of hours, Jamie and Claire got better acquainted over Rissotto and wine. As the evening progressed, Claire began to relax and enjoy herself as they exchanged stories about their families and life. She found Jamie charming, and like most Scots, he was born a storyteller. He spoke of his late parents and his sister in Lallybroch where he grew up, and in return, she reciprocated in kind and spoke of her travels to archaeological sites with Uncle Lamb and what she can remember of her parents.

After dinner, they moved to the lounge to listen to records. While Jamie lit up the log burner and prepared the whisky and tumblers, Claire fixed a tray of strawberries and cream and coffee. Claire couldn't help notice how at ease Jamie was - he looked like he's lived in Uncle Lamb's cottage forever. For the first time she arrived in Inverness, Claire felt at home, and she wondered if it had to do with Jamie.

..........

Three-quarters of the whisky bottle later, Jamie and Claire collapsed on the floor, spent from laughing so much, after attempting to dance the can-can to Sinatra's "New York, New York." Jamie was a terrible dancer, and Claire couldn't help but giggle her way through the routine. After a few more twirls and twists, they decided to call it a night. She didn't want the evening to end, but it was getting rather late.

Claire got up from the floor and holding up an almost empty bottle in the air, she announced, before slumping on the sofa, "Ok, Jamie, last drink. I'm totally knackered."

Jamie followed suit, but instead of sitting beside her, he sat down on the coffee table facing her. He reached out and took her hands between his own. This time, there was no hint of seduction or suggestion of flirt. "Sassenach, thank ye so much for a lovely evening. I've never laughed so much in my life, but I will need a taxi, I canna drive back home in my state," he said with a slight slur.

"Rubbish, you can stay here, there's plenty of room. I won't have you driving after drinking so much, and you can have my bed, it's the biggest in the house. I'll take the guest room," Claire insisted. She tried to stand up but swayed a bit. As she regained her balance, she looked up at him and smiled. "And Jaime, I had a wonderful time too. Thank you." Claire got on her tip-toes and gave Jamie a kiss on the cheek before swaggering backwards. She giggled. "Ooops."

"Weel, if ye don't mind, then I don't mind either." Jamie slightly unsteady on his feet, caught Claire by the elbows and laughed.

Claire peered into the almost empty bottle of whisky and poured the rest in each of the tumblers. "Good! That's settled then. And no, I don't mind at all. Last drink?" she said, handing a glass to Jaime.

"Aye." And raising his glass, he made a toast. "Slange var Sassenach!"

Claire wobbling on her feet managed to raise her glass, laughing. "Cheers mate!"

After downing their whisky, Claire handed the glasses and empty bottles to Jamie. "Right, I'll go and get some fresh sheets, and you can bring these in the kitchen. Then off to bed."

"To bed or to sleep?" he asked mischievously with a glint in his eyes.

"Ha-ha,"

Claire hurried to the bedroom, slightly zig-zagging as she made her way. That last remark from Jamie made her conscious of him all over again. Damn you, Jaime! As she was getting some fresh linens from the cupboard, she heard a thump and glasses falli

"Jamie, are you alright?" She went quickly to the kitchen and found Jamie taking off his shirt stained with wine. On the floor were shards of glass and spilt leftover wine.

"Och sorry Sassenach, I'm not familiar with your house, and I forgot you had boxes laid there. I tripped over them."

Claire thinking he might be still shaky on his feet due to intoxication, pulled him away from the broken glasses. "It's alright, Jamie. Just stand back a little please." After cleaning up, she went over to him to see if he had a cut. "Let me see you hands Jamie."

"Dinna fash Sassenach, it's just a wee cut." He held up his thumb, and she saw there was a shard sticking out. She quickly went to her first aid kit drawer, to get a tweezer, iodine and some cotton. It was a small cut, but the shard had to be taken out.

Holding Jaime's thumb to the light, she pulled the glass out from the cut, and fresh blood started to flow. Without thinking, as if it was the most natural thing to do, Claire put his thumb to her mouth to suck the blood. Oh, sweet Mother Mary, what did I just do? She only came to her senses when she felt Jaime drew a sharp intake of breath. She felt embarrassed. Feeling idiotic and foolish, Claire didn't dare look up to Jaime and slowly released his hand. Head bowed, she realised he had taken off his shirt after forgetting about it for a moment. As her eyes wandered to his naked torso, she noticed his hard washboard abs and the movement of his breathing. On the hollow of his navel, ran a trail of dark reddish-gold hair that disappeared into his jeans. The thought of running her finger on that trail made the insides of her legs quiver. The skin on her face and neck turned hot. Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ, what have I done, and what am I thinking?

"Sassenach, are you alright?" Jaime said softly as he lifted her chin to look him in the eye. What she saw in Jaime's eye was a concern, instead of his usual mischief. She can only nod, too aware of Jamie's naked torso "You dinna need to be scairt of me - I wouldna force me on you." He paused, taking her hand. "But I would verra much like to kiss you. Would you mind?"

Point of no return, she swallowed. "No Jaime, I wouldn't mind." She paused and then continued, her voice sounding raspy to her ears. "Please kiss me," Then she placed her cool hands on his hard abdomen.

The moment, Claire touched him, he felt his body was on fire. He thought of the other women in his life in the past, Louise, Geneva, Annalise, Laoghair e, and looking back, he realised how shallow they have been. The sex was always a welcome release, but beyond that, there was nothing. With Claire, everything came naturally; he was himself, he can laugh, and most of all, she was herself. He looked down at the woman before him but still found himself confused with what he was feeling.

Jaime, staring into Claire's golden caramel eyes, slowly lowered his head, one hand behind her neck and the other on her waist, pulling her against him. Their lips met, just the lightest touch, but it was enough to send electricity sparks across every nerve ending. It was just a grazing of lips, but he was shaken to the core. He pulled away, his heart hammering, taking shallow breaths. He looked at Claire's beautiful face, her eyes were closed and her lips lightly parted. Dhia! Unable to contain himself, he pulled her back once more, this time into a more passionate and intense kiss. He gently thrust his tongue to the opening of her mouth, parting them to delve inside, teasing and probing until she made whimpering sounds. Her own kisses became hot and urgent, her arms snaking around his neck while her fingers ran through his hair, and this made him kiss her harder more. Standing on tiptoes, she pressed her body closer, crushing her breast against his hard chest, sending pleasures down his groin and making Jamie groan.

They pulled away for air, and Jamie searched Claire's face. "Sassenach, I want ye so much, I can scarcely breathe. Will ye have me?" His voice cracked.

He thought his heart would burst when she nodded.

Feeling emboldened, Jamie then hoisted Claire on to the kitchen counter and clumsily pulled up her sweatshirt, releasing her hair from its clasp and revealing her white breasts. Her curly mass came tumbling down, and Jamie ran his hands through them, raining her neck with urgent kisses and nibbling her earlobes. " Mo Nighean Donn," he whispered. Her legs automatically wrapped themselves around his waist, and she arched her back as an invitation, Jamie's Gaelic endearments making her wild. "Christ Claire, ye are so beautiful!" Jamie whispered in a ragged voice.

Claire moaned loudly as he lowered his head to suckle at each breast, paying homage to each erect nipple. Then his tongue started its frenzied exploration on her skin as his hands tugged at the waistband of her leggings. Once released from the constriction of clothing, Claire said in a husky voice, "Take off your pants, I want you now."

Seeing Claire exposed on the kitchen counter with her legs apart, was enough to drive Jamie wild with lust. He quickly unbuckled his belt and lowered his jeans without taking his eyes off Claire. Relieved of his jeans, he gathered her into a crushing embrace, his hands fondling her round arse, pressing his hardness against her. Her hips started to rotate, wrapping her legs tighter. He reached down between her thighs, and the feel of her slippery wetness made him groan and grab her thighs even tighter. "Jamie, I want you inside me, please."

Hearing the plea, Jamie lifted her with ease, spreading her legs as he pinned her against the wall. Without a word, he plunged his cock into her wetness. Jamie silenced her cries with a hard kiss thrusting his tongue in the same rhythm as his cock. After a moment, breathing hard, he released her lips, biting and kissing her neck, his hands tightening their hold on her arse as he rammed into her, slamming Claire's back against the kitchen wall. She whispered "harder," and "deeper" as she bit him hard on the neck, which drove Jamie to the edge. He did as she asked and more. As Claire let out a loud cry, her body began to convulse, making his balls tighten. Finding his own abrupt rush of release, Jamie arched his back as he thrust one last time and let out a grunt.

They held each other for a long while, not speaking, not moving. Eventually, Jamie carried Claire to her bed. She was limp in his arms. As he laid her down, he slipped in under the duvet with her and gathered her close to him. They fitted perfectly. And then he whispered softly, tha gaol agam ort mo chridhe.

#melodyheart #highlanddestiny #Claire Beauchamp/Jamie Fraser #outlanderfanfic

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allie1804-fan · 4 years

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Ile de Re (Chapter 1)

I wrote this fic last year, mostly while on holiday on this lovely island. If you are on Archive of Our Own, you may have seen it before. Written before Matrix 4 was announced and before Covid so sorry that the timelines are no longer realistic!

Summary

Keanu meets a chef to help him prepare for a movie role. Events conspire for them to spend even more time together than they planned and despite the large age gap, romance ensues.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

April 2020

Keanu hung up the phone and quietly fist pumped to himself. He’d just had news that a new project had been green lit. It was one he’d been collaborating on for some time - where he’d play an American chef, somewhat down on his luck who was establishing a new restaurant in a rural French town. The thing that thrilled him most was that the project afforded him the chance to finally learn how to cook – at least a bit - because he’d need to demonstrate some skill in the film itself and to ‘find’ his character he wanted to understand more about the craft of being a chef – especially the passion that drove them.

He went to his office and pulled out his laptop, opening a file holding details of some chefs who Erwin’s team had tracked down that fit the bill in terms of the knowledge they had and their personal experiences. He dropped an e mail first to a chef names Yves Le Gouhier and another to a woman called Claire Bonnevin. They each had restaurants in LA but were French natives who had trained at home before heading to America to open restaurants of their own. He hoped that the guy would say yes since he felt he’d probably relate better to his experience however he checked out both of their bios and looked at restaurant reviews on line.

A few days later, the decision was made for him as to who would give him the coaching as Mr Le Gouhier was out of town for at least a couple of months, establishing a new restaurant whereas Ms Bonnevin was able to fit him in for some daily ‘classes’ starting the following week. Whilst mildly disappointed, he also recalled that he’d actually eaten at Ms Bonnevin’s place once and had really rated the cooking which mixed homespun flavours with Gallic finesse - the seafood there was to die for. He responded quickly in the affirmative, and ever the perfectionist, asked if there was anything he needed to bring or any preparatory work he could do before Monday. Claire replied that if he could let her have a working copy of the script and tell her what his favourite meal was before the weekend – they could work on the skills he’d need to demonstrate in the film and, depending on what the meal was, also aim to make his favourite meal to a good standard by the end of the week. If he had some friends who’d like to eat what he made, then he should ask them if they were free.

“What a question!” he pondered, thinking about what his favourite meal was. Keanu was a man who liked to eat - so much so that he needed the counsel of his trainer Denise to keep off the pounds in between films! Would it be a good steak with garlicky greens and crushed potatoes?, veal with a cream and mushroom sauce, roast lamb with flageolets and dauphinois potatoes – this task was just making him hungry! He decided on the latter thinking it would be a challenge and fitted with the style of cooking they had at “Le Chat Botte” which was Claire’s restaurant. The pressure of feeding something he’d made that wasn’t bacon and eggs or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich was both thrilling and unnerving. He messaged his sister Kim, his mother and friends Rob, Alex and Josh who were all pleased to be free although they joked that they might need to go to Macdonald’s to fill up afterwards!

Monday came around and Keanu pulled up at “Le Chat Botte” at 9am prompt. Entering via the service entrance as instructed, he walked into a spotless kitchen with gleaming stainless steel work stations, hobs and ovens ranged along one wall and a large wooden kitchen table in the centre which had 2 sets of chopping boards in different colours along with a variety of knives, spatulas and other cooking implements arranged side by side in the centre of the table. No-one was in sight though Keanu could hear the sound of a voice coming from an adjoining room. Walking across the kitchen he stuck his head round the door of what turned out to be an office where he saw a petite, dark haired woman he recognised (from her bio) as Claire Bonnevin - she was speaking to someone on the phone in French. She raised her hand to him in greeting, mouthing sorry and hurried to complete the call.

“Oui, Oui, je te rapellerai demain - mon nouvel client vient d’arriver, oui oui c’est lui, donc il faut que j’accroche. D’accord d’accord, je sais. Au revoir”

Claire turned to Keanu blushing - she had the distinct impression that he’d understood that she’d just referred to him in her conversation.

“so sorry about that – that was my restaurant manager back home in France just giving me an update on my dad - he’s not been too well recently so we’ve been talking every day” Her English accent was excellent with only a slight gallic note.

Keanu stuck out his hand

“Nice to meet you Ms Bonnevin and no problem – you didn’t need to rush them off the line on my account”

Claire smiled and shook his hand, “I heard you were impossibly polite! – of course I did, I was eating into your paid time – nice to meet you too by the way. Keanu grinned - Claire could feel the colour rising in her cheeks again - she wasn’t exactly sure why - maybe it was the directness of his gaze or the brilliance of his smile.

“So, are you ready for your training?”

Keanu chuckled and responded with what he thought was the expected reply “hell yeah” but Claire didn’t react, “maybe the Matrix reference was unintentional” he thought – she was pretty young after all, (her bio said she was 35) so maybe she was one of the few whom it had passed by!

“So let’s go through to the kitchen and get started” she said leading the way back to the room where Keanu had entered earlier.

For the next 4 hours they talked through and tried out some of the particular skills that would be needed in kitchen scenes. Whilst they worked, they got to know each other a little with Claire wanting to find out about Keanu’s food knowledge and experience and Keanu quizzing her about her beginnings in the industry. He discovered that she grew up on a tiny west coast island in France called L’Ile de Re” where her Dad still owned a restaurant called, like hers in LA, “Le Chat Botte”. He no longer worked as a chef there but lived in the little village where it was, hence the manager being able to keep Claire appraised of his health. She’d learned her craft there and then moved on to train in Paris, New York and then LA to establish her namesake restaurant in the US.

For her part, from what Keanu said, she could see that despite not having grown up in a house where people had a passion for cooking, he nevertheless clearly had a passion for food - from the humble sandwich to fine foods from around the globe. He was also a quick study, picking up the knife skills needed to finely chop onions and garlic on film that he’d need. She was a patient teacher, though she would occasionally break into French when she was struggling to communicate the exact technique such as when at first he couldn’t master the rotation of the knife needed to chop finely:

“tient tient, comme ca” she said, placing her hand over his to show how the blade needed to rock back and forth over the garlic.

At 12 they broke for lunch at which point Claire challenged Keanu to make her his best sandwich from the ingredients on hand. He asked her what she liked and created a layered club sandwich which she declared excellent. By the time he left at 1pm, Keanu was convinced that she was an excellent choice of teacher and one he’d enjoy learning from. He could hardly wait for the next day when they were going to study cuts of meat by going to Claire’s favourite butcher.

The week progressed with a mix of hands on cooking classes and continued trips to suppliers which served to explain the importance of provenance and quality ingredients. They also worked on timings and started to plan the stages of creating the menu Keanu had planned for Friday’s lunch.

On Thursday Keanu tried out the dauphinois potatoes and was thrilled with the result - he was really starting to enjoy cooking and his rapid growth in skill. Claire praised him warmly and suggested he try a dessert as well for the next day.

“You could try something simple like a mousse au chocolat but I think you’re ready to really wow them”

“Oh yeah?” Keanu grinned “With what?”

“A tarte Tatin”

“What!, are you sure?”

“Absolutely – you’re an excellent student - let’s do one today together, you’ll master it I’m sure”

She showed him how to prepare the sugar and butter in a special tin that could go on the stove and then in the oven to finish. They prepped the apples placing them rounded side down in the tin and proceeded to caramelise the butter and sugar until it was a gorgeous molten mahogany. Then he learned how to make the shortcrust pastry using cool hands to rub the butter into the flour then bring it together to a dough which rested in the fridge. Once rolled out, he placed it onto the cooled apples, tucking in the edges round the sides. The result when they turned the tarte out (upside down to reveal the apples) was amazing – sweet, tender apples with the sugary caramel cut a little by freshly grated lemon rind and a melt in the mouth pastry to top it off.

“See!” she smiled, “I knew you could do it”

“No, you did it!” he grinned

“Well, OK so today we both did it but tomorrow it will all be down to you”

Friday came and Keanu got to the restaurant at 8am wanting to have as much time as possible to get everything perfect.

By 11.30 the lamb was resting, his gratin and tarte were in the oven and the beans were simmering gently.

The meal was beginning with a simple salade aux lardons - it was time to dress it with the vinaigrette he’d made earlier. He started to toss it gently but some lettuce flipped out over the side

“Watch out you don’t drop too many said Claire – unless you want lots of children’ she laughed!

“What?” Keanu asked, shooting her a quizzical look.

“it’s a saying we have in France that the number of leaves you drop when you’re tossing the salad tells you the number of kids you’ll have.

“Oh right” he chuckled, “that’s cute, but it’s way too late for that”

“What do you mean?, you’d have time to have them if you wanted, surely”

“I’m too old Claire”

“What, you must only be what?”, she paused to look at him and consider his face “…. About 45”

“Ha ha” Keanu laughed heartily.

“No, I’m fifty five”

“Merde” she exclaimed “ce n’est pas possible!”

Keanu shook his head and smiled - he loved how she reverted to French when she was reacting spontaneously to something.

“I’m afraid it’s true, so even if I had a wife or even a girlfriend, I still think it’s too late to be having babies. I might be dead before they’re 20 or 30.

Claire’s face clouded over

“Sorry I didn’t mean to be all maudlin” he said

“Don’t worry, it’s just my mother died when I was 25 so I know that’s hard – but people die all the time, young and old.

“Ain’t that the truth” Keanu agreed quietly, remembering his own past.

“and lots of guys have babies when they’re older. Maybe you shouldn’t rule it out”

“Maybe maybe, anyway, enough serious talk, we should raise a toast before our guests arrive”

He poured himself and Claire a glass of wine.

“Here’s to satisfied customers!” she said

“and here’s to you for being such an amazing teacher – I can’t believe you’ve got me this far so fast”

“well that’s really down to you” she replied, smiling, “you work so hard and learn so quickly, it’s very impressive”

“I don’t know about that!” he said blushing, “Anyway, let’s not get ahead ourselves, I haven’t served it yet!!

They put down their glasses and Claire went to see if the guests had arrived at the table they had set aside in the restaurant. Meanwhile Keanu busied himself with finishing the salad and carving the lamb which he was happy to see was just the right shade of pink. He put it in the warming oven and also took out the tarte Tatin praying that it would be as good as the one yesterday when he turned it out later. Finally, with the main course as ready as it could be, he took the salad and some French bread through to the dining room.

The meal went down a storm - at the end Keanu stood and raised a toast to Claire

“Thank you for all your kind words folks but we really need to toast this amazing lady who has taught this old meat head some cooking skill. He took her hand and placed it over his heart

“ thank you, thank you, merci beaucoups, I’ll be forever grateful!”

Claire laughed and blushed.

“Just wait until next week when we’ll have you working in the restaurant kitchen, then you might not be such a fan!”

He laughed

“That may be!”

They said their goodbyes to Keanu’s amazed guests and went to clean down the kitchen.

“How’s your dad by the way?”

“Oh about the same apparently – no better, but no worse, he just needs to take it easy and stay off his damn bike”

“Oh, a pushbike or a motorbike?” Keanu asked, his interest peaked

“A push bike – he’s not a racer guy like you!” Claire saw Keanu pull up each day often on different bikes so she knew about his passion for them.

“everyone goes everywhere on bikes on the Ile de Re” she continued - it’s a cyclist’s paradise with cycle paths across the salt marshes and oyster beds and through the forests. But he had a heart attack last year and whilst he is supposed to exercise, he just pushes himself too much and that worries me”

“Do you have any other family there to keep an eye on him?”

“No, I’m an only child and there are no aunts or uncles either.

“Is your father still alive? She asked.

“Yeah – well at least I haven’t heard otherwise! He left my mother when I was three and I haven’t seen him since I was 13.”

“Mon dieu that must have been tough growing up without a dad”

“Yeah well I had my mum and my sister - he wouldn’t have been a good role model anyway”

“I could see today that you adore Kim and your mother”

“Yeah, yeah I do - family and friends are my rocks to come back to - after every project that’s what I look forward to”

“You know you’re not at all what I expected!” Claire stated.

“Oh, how so?” he asked

“Well, a couple of people I mentioned you to said they heard you were a nice guy and very polite but I guess I just expected someone more ………..starry, you know!”

Keanu burst out laughing.

“Well I’ll take that as a complement” he said

“you should – you’ve made it a very easy first week of teaching” she smiled

“Well thanks” he said the colour rising in his cheeks.

They finished up in the kitchen and Keanu took his leave saying he’d see her at 9am prompt on Monday for his week in the working kitchen. He’d enjoyed her company so much that he’d almost asked her to dinner but held himself in check. She was so much younger than him and he knew his feelings weren’t entirely platonic. She was very cute with olive skin, beautiful eyes and a slender yet not too skinny figure – he didn’t really have a type but she hit the spot with him. He’d just have to quash those thoughts, focus on the learning and keep things on a friendly footing.

https://allie1804-fan.tumblr.com/post/625977593110364160/ile-de-re-chapter-2

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jckelly · 4 years

Text

updated intro / 25/09/20

Is that JACK FIELDING? Wow, they do look a lot like VAN MCCANN. I hear HE is an NINETEEN year old FRESHMEN who are studying AEROSPACE ENGINEERING at Luxor University. Word is they are an ARISTOCRAT student. You should watch out because they can be PHILOPHOBIC and INSINCERE, but on the bright side they can also be WITTY and IMAGINATIVE. Ultimately, you’ll get to see it all for yourself. [YUNI, 20, GMT, SHE/HER]

hello to anyone who has yet 2 be cursed w my presence in their dms, i am yuni and this is an updated intro for my demon boi jack! this one is a lilll bit more in depth but not to worry there is a tl;dr at the end ion expect u to read this. feel free to dm me if you would like to plot!

01: BASIC INFORMATION

Full Name: Jackson Noel Fielding (previously Kelly; recently changed)

Nicknames: Jack - he dislikes the use of his full first name, and only really answers to Jack, unless joking around with Caitriona.

Date Of Birth: December 4, 2001 (currently aged 19)

Zodiac: Sagittarius sun, Leo ascendant, and Aries moon.

Place Of Birth: Northern General Hospital, Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England.

Nationality: Dual UK and US citizenship; he was born and raised in England so was a UK citizen from birth, and acquired US citizenship through his American adopted mother after being formally adopted in 2017.

Sexual Orientation: Bisexual

Course: Aerospace Engineering (Freshman)

02: PHYSICAL

Faceclaim: Van McCann

Voiceclaim: Also Van McCann (but w ... not a Welsh accent LOL think Northern)

Ethnicity: White (English, Irish, Scottish)

Height: 173cm (5′8)

Weight: 52kg (115lbs) / BMI 17.4

Eye Colour: Blue

Hair Colour: Brown

Distinctive Features: Freckles (many), ear piercings (one hoop in his left ear), scars on his wrists which he hides with long sleeved shirts.

Clothing Preference: Jack really only wears black, or something close to black like grey. He usually opts for simple clothes, just jeans and long sleeved shirts, and beat up black converse. His Sheffield United hoodie makes an appearance more often than not, because he has a ridiculous amount of hometown pride.

03: PERSONALITY

Overview

Positive Traits: Witty, imaginative, perseverant, passionate

Negative Traits: Philophobic, disloyal, insincere, callous

MBTI: ENTP

Religious Beliefs: Atheist

Description

The first side most people see of Jack is the side he wants you to see. A total asshole. It’s not an exaggeration - he’s pretty much infamous for flirting with everyone, dating anyone and as a serial cheater. He’ll actively try to worm his way into your life, and then just when you start to care, he does something to hurt you. He’s strangely persistent, probably helping him to push people even further, until they snap. There is nothing which satisfies him more than managing to wind people up to the extreme, get them to the point where they give up. Adopted parents, friends, nobody is immune to this side - he even tries it on the people he genuinely cares about, as if just to see if he’ll still be able to push them away.

The second side, which most people don’t see, is that at heart Jack is a kid. He’s the type of person to ask if owls have ears at 3am, or get some childlike joy out of dumb jokes. Of course, this is the side nobody but a very small number of people see. And even if you do see it, it never lasts long. He keeps his true personality under wraps even amongst those he does like, and it only slips out if he’s extremely comfortable with you. Otherwise, he’ll go straight back to being a sarcastic, flirty piece of shit.

04: PAST

Biography:

Jackson Kelly was born in a council estate in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, in the UK. His life prior to adoption is not something he routinely talks about, but that’s mostly because he’d rather not give people reasons to pity him: his mother, 15 when she gave birth to him, was a drug addict; he has no idea who his birth father is or was, and no inclination to find out. Jack’s first ten years of life pretty much fell into the same cycle: get put into foster care, his mother would get clean and take him back, and then the cycle would repeat. But when the cycle ended when he was ten, and he was removed from his mother’s care for good, he wasn’t ready for it to end yet.

Sure, she wasn’t the best parent. But she was his mother. Jack quickly developed a reputation for running away, always found back at the same place. Foster parent after foster parent always ended up returning him, unable to cope with his rebellious tendencies and the constant hunt for him after he had run. As he aged, he only became better at avoiding being found. It practically became a game to him, a way for him to entertain himself. So when a wealthy American heiress and her British CEO husband decided that of all people, they wanted to foster a now thirteen year old Jack, social workers almost wanted to ask if they’d misspoke. (Jack had assumed it was a practical joke.)

Claire and George, his new “parents,” were patient. They said he didn’t have to call them mum or dad, that even after they officially adopted him two years later he could keep his own surname, that they just wanted him to be happy. They moved him to a better school, got a private tutor to make up for lost time, tried to take an interest in his favourite things. But that wasn’t enough for Jack. Eventually, the situation resulted in drastic measures: a rainy afternoon with a social worker being told that Claire wanted to move the family to her birthplace of New York, and send Jack to the school she had attended many years prior. A fresh start would be better for him, they said. As if Jack didn’t know the real reason. He couldn’t run away if he was thousands of miles away.

And that was how a fifteen year old Jack made his way to Carnifex, with absolutely no change to his desire to wreak havoc or to his somewhat disturbing attitude towards other people. Therapists paid for by his adopted parents might say he was pushing people away to manifest emotions about neglect in early life; Jack would just say that he was keeping things interesting. Either way, the next couple years of his life escaped past him, and before he knew it he was in a school office, being told that his birth mother had died.

Obviously, Claire and George freaked, as if he would do anything. Pulled him out of school for a month, flew him back to England for the funeral, and practically wrapped Jack in bubble wrap like he was a baby or something. All he wanted to do was go back to school, ignore the guilt he felt in his stomach for letting them take him away, and go back to what he did best.

Timeline:

December 4 2001 - Jackson Noel Kelly is born in Sheffield.

2005 - Jack is removed from his mother’s care for the first time. He is frequently removed from her care and then placed back in it for the next seven years of his life.

2012 - Jack is removed from his mother’s custody permanently and placed in a temporary foster home. He bounces through foster homes for the next few years, including one where he meets Caitriona and becomes close with her.

2014 - Jack is fostered by Claire and George. He resists any attempt for them to get close to him, and continues to act out.

December 2016 - Jack is legally adopted by Claire and George, acquiring US citizenship, although he does not change his surname.

January 2017 - Jack attempts suicide. He is placed in therapy and plans are made for his relocation to the US.

March 2017 - Claire and George move back to America, taking Jack with them. He begins attending Carnifex. He continues to visit the UK regularly to visit his birth mother, who he keeps in contact with.

April 2020 - Jack’s birth mother dies. He immediately disappears from school for a month, without telling anyone where he went.

May 2020 - Jack returns to Luxor. It’s later accidentally blurted out mid fight with Zander that his mother is dead.

June 2020 - Jack graduates and Leo tells the school Jack attempted suicide.

September 2020 - Jack legally changes his surname from his birth name - Kelly - to his adopted parents surname, Fielding.

December 2020 - Zander and Ches spread posters around claiming that Jack is HIV positive and gave it to Balo. They don’t provide any proof for this allegation, and Jack continues to deny it.

(These are the events ur character would probs vaguely know about!!! Anything else is personal info so they wouldn’t know unless Jack explicitly told them. Feel free to ask me if you’re ever unsure if something is ic knowledge or not!)

05: OTHER TRIVIA

- He has a fairly strong Yorkshire accent which is obviously something other characters would likely notice when interacting with him. So if he uses words you don’t know it’s safe to assume he’s just being his dumb British self so you are free to have your character question the meaning/not know. (LMK if you’re unsure tho!)

- His favourite band is Oasis (closely followed by Arctic Monkeys), favourite film is Fight Club, go to drink is either a double vodka coke or a pint of Heineken, and his favourite place is Leadmill in Sheffield because it’s where he’s seen some bands (and fucked girls in the bathroom. Such a romantic.)

- Dyslexic, but if you mention it Jack will fight you, although it’s partially why he leans more toward math based subjects where his spelling ability is irrelevant.

- Notoriously has a thing for redheads, although that doesn’t prevent him from being crude and sexual towards anyone he happens to meet or interact with.

- Chain smokes anything he can get his ratty little hands on (cigarettes, weed, meh) so expect him to smell of ciggies 24/7.

- Diehard supporter of Sheffield United and insists there is no better football team even though they really suck

- Weetabix, Weetabix, Weetabix

06: NOTABLE CONNECTIONS

Within Luxor:

- Friendships: Caitriona, Balo, Avery, Zai, Oakley, Lennon

- Former Relationships: Oakley Prescott

- Current Relationship: Juliet McCoy

NPCS

- Claire Richardson Fielding & George Fielding: Jack’s adopted parents, who just want to love him despite him being terrible to them.

- Lauren Kelly: His birth mother, who he misses a lot.

- Violet Richardson: Claire’s mother, who for some reason adores Jack and considers him her favourite grandchild. Meaning Jack will probably inherit everything when she dies, although he doesn’t really think about that.

- Emily French: His ex girlfriend from back home, also known as the only girl who Jack truly cared about before Juliet. She broke up with Jack for being too toxic, which although fair, fucked him up for a little bit. Not that he’d admit it.

07: CONNECTION IDEAS/WCS

Exes (Lots)

Jack has a habit of dating people, dropping them as soon as feelings get involved, cheating on them, and generally being an asshole. So if you want an ex for your muse… yeah.

Enemies

Again, he tends to happily mess with as many people as he possibly can. So he’s probably gotten on the wrong side of at least a couple people.

Friends (fake or real)

Like when he dates, he tends to get close to people before ditching them or screwing with them. So people who think they’re his friends but who aren’t really as close as they think are very welcome. I’m also down to have a couple people who can be the few he genuinely cares about.

08: TL;DR

If you already knew Jack at Luxor:

Little has changed! He’s the same manipulative dick as ever except that he has legally changed his surname. Your characters are tots fine to comment on the change, it’s not a secret or anything.

If this is your unfortunate first experience with Jack:

Jack is manipulative, crude, outright insulting, and nasty. He enjoys nothing more than messing with people, and often acts friendly initially just to hurt you later. He is British, adopted, and I call him rat man.

#luxorintro #finally got around to it #RIP #also wow yuni #what a great van gif to use #i rlly show him in his best light #rat mAN #suicide tw #self harm tw #depression tw #abuse tw #neglect tw #drugs tw

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hollandroos · 5 years

Text

until I see you again | T.H

Summary: You don’t know when you’ll get to see him again so you make the most of the time you have.

Warnings: Uhhh this is an angel!tom x angel!reader au so please only read it if you’re okay with that au! hate is not appreciated and will only be deleted.

Words: 1047

MY IMAGINES | MY SERIES ✧

Wings tickle the side of your face and you open your eyes to see little, white feathers. Your favourite.

They’re nothing short of soft, the most heavenly things you swore you’d ever lay your hands on as you reach up and stroke through the familiar things. Starting from the roots and running nimble fingers to the tips, making the boy beside you stir in his sleep. His lips part slightly and he lets out a barely audible moan, burying his face and tousled brown curls in your neck.

“It’s morning, my darling.” You whisper, lips meeting the top of his head. He doesn’t budge, accepting the warmth you hand out so willingly to him. “You have to get back, can’t have you getting in trouble again.” You tell him, hoping that the thought of being scolded by his superiors for wandering around Earth again would get the angel up.

It wasn’t that you wanted him to leave the comfort that was your New York apartment. It was that you didn’t want him to get in trouble. It was you having something angels weren’t supposed to, empathy, selflessness.

“Don’t wanna go, you’re too comfortable.” He groans, head resting in your chest.

You giggle, black wings of your own fluttering at his words. You always basked in the fact that his voice was raspier in the morning, deeper too and he was always more romantic this early in the morning. Though you did love how high his voice could get when he begged.

“You have to go soon, my love. People will start to get suspicious about you and me.” You wet your bottom lips, curling your legs around the ends of the plush white sheet. The only thing that covered your nude body. “Goodness only knows what'll happen to an angel that dares sleep with a demon.”

You practically sput the last word, only slightly ashamed of your own title – which wasn’t like you at all.

He pushes himself up until he’s resting on his arms, groaning softly. “I thought we agreed not to talk about that. You know how it makes me feel.”

Guilt washes over you as you remember just how much he hated hearing about the possible repercussions. The two of you had both agreed that it’d remain something unspoken, though it was always there taunting the both of you. With that in mind, you reach over to play with strands of his hair, loving the softness beneath your fingers and you feel him relax almost instantly. Much like his wings, they were fluffy, smooth beneath you.

“I do, but you were out cold and I don’t want you to get in trouble again. I remember how distraught you got the last time it happened.” You tell him, wincing as you remember the night he begged you to meet him on Earth once more after a week of not hearing from the young angel – who was actually around the same age as you. He had hiccuped as he spoke over the phone, salty tears meeting wet lips.

Tom shakes his head, trying to rid the awful memory. Being told off made him feel like a child. “I wasn’t that bad. I can handle being told off.” He lies right through his teeth, knowing that if anyone could see through him it’d be you. His love.

“Darling, you came to me in tears. Your wings were drooping and everything.” You giggle, eyes flashing black and your angel buries his head back in your shoulder. “I spent hours comforting you but I have no regrets. Seeing you smile after hours of sobbing bought me more relief then I knew possible.”

Tom spends a moment thanking whatever force bought the two of you together before he sits up, the sheet slips exposing your bare chest and his, pooling around his waist almost perfectly. Outside, birds chirp and the sun streams in through sheer curtains. It’s a sight you wouldn’t see in either heaven or hell and Tom allows himself to feel the sun on white skin. Warmth melts away his fears, leaving him feeling new again and embraced in both the heat that radiates off of the sun and your fingertips that draw circles on a covered thigh.

While Tom savoured the warmth, he knew that you favoured the cold.

When it snowed he could find you outside, collecting handfuls of the stuff in bare hands with a grin wider then he swears he’d seen and would ever see. Your eyes would glimmer but not a jet black, no. Any colour but. They’d be wide and bright and beads of snow would sit in sprawled strands of hair. Even rain. You’d stand in the rain in nothing but a tank top and shirts and feel the icy beads shimmy between pure black feathers.

“You’re the softest demon I know.” Tom murmurs, heat rising to his cheeks. He’s practically mesmerised.

“Only for one angel, got it?” You smile, stretching your arms above your head. Two sharp teeth taunt him. “Now as much as I’d love to spend more time with you, you have around twenty minutes to get you and your wings back to Heaven before people come looking for you.”

“I don’t want to go.” He tells you, angelic white wings falling slightly as well as the grin that had previously taken place on his features. “Let’s run away together, you and me.”

The thought sounded blissful. The most self-indulgent idea he’d spoken up since he had asked you to meet up with him this weekend. But apologetically, you sit up to press a gentle kiss to his lips. It lasts no more then five seconds but the two of you appreciate every second, wanting nothing more then to stay there forever.

“I love that idea, my love, but not today.” You smile, giving him a wishful look. It spoke more then a thousand words, telling Tom everything he needed to know. “I’ll be counting down the hours until I get to feel your lips on mine again, angel.”

The once romantic, relaxed atmosphere is now anything but. It’s filled with sorrow for you’re unsure if the next time you see him will be two days or two months. Whatever one it was, you’d wait for him.

With one more hand squeeze, he stands up, tugging a white shirt over his head. “I’ll be counting down the seconds until I get to see you again.”

Tell me what you thought! + My writing ♡

Everything tags: @cosmetologynerd @holland-ish @smexylemony @dej-okay@hollandsletters @ive-got-some-lies-to-tell @liz-gayllen@marvelismylifffe@lovelyh0lland @tomhollandandmarvelsworld @woah-jess@southsidefandoms@justannothermonday @its-claire-louise@sophiatomlinson23 @mockingjaygirl1221@joyfullyjenny@damnhisfaceisliketheskyatnight @bride-of-loki-odinson @in-the-corner-coffee-please@futuremrsb-r-main @spideyyypeter @saturn-aka-six@c0prolalia @buckykinz@ashtonsbandannas @dennasaur @amyyleblanc1999@fnosidam@randomfangirl1701@maybeandperhaps @acciorinn @marvel-language @micki-smiles@justmesadgirl @converseskyline @niall2017@gavemylifetotomholland @tomuchmarvel@leslieandjensen @painted-soulss@practicallylivesonline @mischiefmanaged49 @its-the-unknownspidey@holyrose96 @for-my-mind @mlxbm @erindillon11 @captainbuckyy @shawnandhisroses @converseskyline @smitten0-0kitten @parkeroos @whileinparis @unicornio-vomita-mierdas @draqcnheartstrinq @rainyboo-posts @mikalaka @petxrpxrker @tony-starks-ego @thedaydreamingwriter @peter-quackson @kateelyse96 @lesbian-jesus-jr @wheresmyquill@elyshugh@hollanderheart @tomshufflepuff @marvelismylifffe @tomsh0lland @obsessed-fandoms @girl-in-the-chair @trashqueenbitch @dramatic-and-young @honey-honey-5644@parkerluvs @chingonaconcha @captainbuckyy @jes-sica1@tomsfireheart @Rainbow-marvel @spideysimpossiblegirl @spideys-gurl@thomasstanley-holland @mlxbm @ixchel-9275@parkerssweb @peter-parkersbb @tom-hollands-eyelash @starlightfound @vldlvj @paradoxparker @lustfulcry @mlxbm @musiclover1263 @justatheatredork@peterparkerscamera@fandomnerdsarecool @thequeensardine @cutesy-angst@httplayer @mischiefmanaged49 @loca-lola @softboyparkerr @desir-ae @dangerousluv1 @t-hotland @laucontrerasv @peter-parkersbb@whatdafricklefrackle @thatblondebelgiangirl @fairydustparker @they-call-me-le @jamiemac26@nephalem67 @underoos-tom @quaxon-holland@lovelyspidey @no-shxt-sherl @xlatinaaxx@starlightfound @mikexpeter @moonandstars-xo @httpmcrvel @evelyn120700@fromheroestodust@hollandfieldblurbs @ghostlypandacolorpersona@spazclaiire @curlyhairedparker @josierosie@unicornio-vomita-mierdas @icondy@euphoricholland @desir-ae @lovelyspidey @thelazypangolin@ameeravioli@ramen-tically @mellifluous-tom @mrs-webslinger @krazykiara @scottyisthatyou@@s0cial-retard @sithskywalkers @avenirectioner @cokemania147@awkwardfangirl2014 @thot–holland @tomsmelanin @tryn25 @marvelismylifffe @fratboievans @draqcnheartstrinq @mellifluous-tom @obsidiandolans @peter-parkersbb @slingingwingingspidey @darlingxholland @50shadesoflaurmani @tomhollandswh0re @ixchel-9275 @hellaparker @vintagexquill @spidey-caps @parkerspideyman @particularnarry @marvelismylifffe @iluvmesomemarvelndc @magical-fandoms @chennyetomlinson @beautifullydisconnected @atlas-of-the-world @awokenfandoms

#tom holland #tom holland fanfic #tom holland fanfiction #tom holland imagines #tom holland imagine #tom holland x y/n #tom holland x reader #tom holland x reader insert #tom holland fluff #angel!tom #angel!tom holland #tom holland oneshot #tom holland angst

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lingthusiasm · 4 years

Text

Transcript Episode 40: Making machines learn language - Interview with Janelle Shane

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 40: Making machines learn language - Interview with Janelle Shane. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 40 show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about artificial intelligence – teaching computers language – with special guest Dr Janelle Shane, who runs the blog A.I.weirdness.com and is the author of You Look Like a Thing and I Love You, which is a fun new book about A.I. But first, we have some announcements.

Lauren: It’s a new year and we have new, big, exciting plans for the Lingthusiasm Patreon page. We are introducing a Discord, which is an online chat space, for patrons to share their lingthusiasm with their fellow lingthusiasts.

Gretchen: We’ve heard from a lot of you that you got into linguistics because of Lingthusiasm or it reawakened your memories of how much you like linguistics because you did some courses on it way back when and now you wish you could talk about linguistics more. We’re giving you a space where you can talk about linguistics, share your interesting linguistics links that you come across, and talk about them in a space with other lingthusiasm fans. We’re really excited to see what this community becomes. It’s a bit of an experiment, but we think it’ll be really fun to do. You can join the Patreon at the tier where you get bonus episodes as well, and you also have a space to talk about those bonus episodes and the regular Lingthusiasm episodes and any other linguistics things you wanna talk about.

Lauren: We want to see more Lingthusiasm not just online but also on all kinds of things, which is why we are also sending stickers over the next few months to patrons at the Ling-phabet tier. Patrons who are at that tier for three months or more will get stickers that say, “Lingthusiast” on them.

Gretchen: You can stick that to your laptop, your water bottle, your notebook, anything else in your life. Because the original trial run of stickers that we did with the special offer last year were really popular, we thought we’d provide a way for you to do that around the year. You can join that tier on Patreon as well.

Lauren: You can get other items at our lingthusiasm.com/merch page, but the stickers are an exclusive for our patrons.

Gretchen: Thanks to everybody who’s been a patron so far. We’re really excited to see you in the Discord. And we’re excited to get to try that out.

Lauren: Our last exciting announcement is that our patrons also helped us meet a new funding goal, which means that we now have some additional ling-ministration support.

Gretchen: Our fantastic producer Claire, who’s been with us since the very beginning, is also going to be taking on some more of the administration for the podcast, so you’ll see her around a bit on social media and on Patreon. You can listen to a bonus episode with Claire if you’d like to get to know her better as well.

Lauren: Our current bonus is on the future of English and what English might look like in a couple of centuries from now, inspired by Gretchen’s New York Times article.

Gretchen: You can get access to this episode and 34 other bonus episodes – that’s twice as much Lingthusiasm that you can listen to – at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Gretchen: Hello, Janelle. Welcome to Lingthusiasm!

Janelle: Hi, it’s great to be here.

Lauren: Janelle, we are so excited to have you on the show today to talk about how we can make machines do language.

Gretchen: I think one of the things that we have in common, definitely one of the reasons I enjoy following your blog and Twitter feed and so on, is that both linguists and your approach to A.I. like poking at systems and seeing where they break.

Janelle: Yeah, for sure.

Gretchen: In case some people aren’t already following you on all of the internets, I wanna give people an idea of some of the stuff that you have tried to make break.

Lauren: Janelle, in your work, for people who haven’t seen it, you take large data sets of particular sets of terms or particular language genres, I guess, and then you feed them into an artificial intelligence, and we’ll talk about what that is later, and then it spits out these delightfully whimsical outputs. It takes inspiration from the data set that it’s given. I have a sustained history of laughing inappropriately loudly on public transport while reading your blog because the results are always so entertaining. Gretchen, do you have a favourite to share with us so I can chortle inappropriately?

Gretchen: Lauren, I think we should start with ice cream because I know you have a deep and abiding love of ice cream, and Janelle has come up with ice cream flavours.

Lauren: Yes! Yes, yes, yes. Janelle, where did the ice cream data come from? Did you have a list of ice cream flavours that someone gave you or…?

Janelle: Yeah. In this case, it was a group of middle-schoolers, actually. There’s a school in Austin, Texas, called Kealing Middle School where there is a group of students in the coding classes who decided that – they saw my blog. They wanted to do it too, and they wanted to generate ice cream flavours.

Lauren: Aww.

Gretchen: That’s so great!

Janelle: The thing is, I had looked at that, and I’m like, “Oh, this would be cool.” Then, I looked online and I say, “I need examples of existing ice cream flavours” because the A.I. has to have something to imitate. It doesn’t know about ice cream flavours unless I have some to tell it about. They’re scattered around. There wasn’t any big master list of them. So, I kinda said, “Oh, well. I guess that’s not gonna work.” Then, these middle-schoolers kicked my butt because they went and there was, I dunno, dozens of them – 50, 60 of them. Like, a lot of them. Each of them went and collected a few from this site or that site. Each one site would only have a few at a time. They had to manually copy and paste to this data set. They just, through the sheer numbers and having the time to do it, they put together this amazing data set of existing ice cream flavours. These middle-schoolers ended up getting about 1600 different ice cream flavours. Whereas, I only managed to get together 200. With the data set that much bigger, it made a huge difference. They started generating pretty amusing flavours.

Gretchen: I’ve got the blogpost up about the ice cream flavours from the middle school students, and some of them are really good. There are these whimsical flavours like “It’s Sunday” and “Cherry Poet” and “Brittle Cheesecake” and “Honey Vanilla Happy.” These seem like kind of reasonable ice cream flavours, right?

Lauren: I’d be open to ordering a “Vanilla Nettle.”

Gretchen: “Cherry Cherry Cherry.” If you like cherries, this is the flavour for you. There are also some weirder flavours from this data set like, “Chocolate Finger” and “Caramel Book” and –

Lauren: “Washing Chocolate.”

Gretchen: “Texas Charlie Covered Stunt.” Then, there’s this even weirder category, “Nuts with Mattery,” “Brown Crunch,” “Cookies and Green.”

Lauren: Aww, so close, and yet…

Gretchen: “Mango Cats.”

Lauren: They’re weird to us because of the semantics of them – just to be linguist-y and spoil the moment for a second – but they still are English words, or they look like something we’d recognise as English words, even though I don’t think “mattery” is a word that I know of. I think it’s worth saying artificial intelligence doesn’t know what ice cream is, right, it’s just using this list of flavours to figure out what kind of patterns could fit into that list.

Janelle: Exactly. It’s doing it at a very basic level. Like, what kinds of letters tend to come after other letters? What letters are we often finding in combination? Which letters are we never finding in combination? It’ll learn frequent words like “chocolate” or something. It’ll learn how to spell that after some false starts during training, but, yeah, without any concept of what chocolate is.

Gretchen: If it ends up with something like “Vervette’s Caramel Borfle,” it learned “caramel” but who “Vervette” and “borfle” are, I don’t know. That’s just randomly combining some letters in ways that are probable as English words.

Janelle: Yeah, it’s like a kid who learns how to write and immediately starts putting down letters on paper like, “Is this a word? Is this a word? How do you pronounce this?”

Lauren: Because obviously we train the neural nets that are children’s brains by talking to them a lot and giving them more input and taking them to school and doing those kind of things, but a neural net-type artificial intelligence that we’re doing this kind of training by giving it lots of data, how does it know if it is generating something that is more or less English? Is there a little thing in the computer saying, “Good work, Computer”?

Janelle: What it’s trying to do, how it knows it’s making any progress at all, is its job is to try and predict the next letter or the next combination of letters. Then, it just checks its prediction against some example of real texts that it hasn’t seen before that it saved aside to check itself with and said, “Okay, did I guess close or am I still way off? Am I going to have to change my internal structure so that my guess would’ve been better and see if, going forward, that’s gonna be an improvement?” It’s like a trial and error, guess and check.

Gretchen: When you look at the different sorts of stages – because it goes through several different generations, right? It might start out with just “Here’s a bunch of Es because E is really common.” And then the check is like, “Yeah, but you could do better.”

Janelle: Yeah. It’s like guessing lots of Es is more correct than guessing lots of question marks or lots of Qs. Yeah, it has to say, “Oh, well, maybe I could work in an S from time to time. What do you know? That’s slightly more correct,” and proceeds from there.

Lauren: So, that’s how it learns “chocolate”? Because it might go in with CH and HC, and every time it goes, “Is HC right? Is HC right?” And the data set is like, “Naw, not really.” But when it’s got the CH for an ice cream list, it’s like, getting lots of positive feedback that that’s gonna appear in “chocolate” and “chip” and “cherry.”

Janelle: Yeah, exactly. The process, yeah, it is a lot different from the human child learning language because it’s taking place, really, in isolation with no other context. It’s as if you are setting somebody in a room with just a few dictionaries or a few encyclopaedias written in a language that they don’t understand. It’s even harder for the A.I. because it doesn’t have a concept of what language even is to start out with. It’s all just guessing what comes next in this sequence of arcane symbols.

Gretchen: It doesn’t have a sense of what’s probable in the world either, right?

Janelle: Yeah.

Gretchen: Because you have some of these flavours like “Peanut Butter Slime,” which those are all English words, it’s just it would make a terrible ice cream because slime and peanut butter and ice cream are not things that go together.

Janelle: Yeah, exactly. Or, if I’m getting it to generate Halloween costumes, it’ll come up with “zombie school bus.” It’s like, “Okay, zombie school bus. There’s magic school bus. Why is that more likely than zombie school bus?” We know. It doesn’t.

Gretchen: It doesn’t have any of that real-world knowledge that you can do – or like “Mango Cats.” What does it mean for a cat to be mango? I don’t know.

Lauren: If an artificial intelligence gained sentience, it’s likely it actually wouldn’t be a very good linguistics student because it doesn’t really understand the concept of sounds. It doesn’t seem to have a lot of understanding of the structure of a sentence. We talk in one episode about syntax essentially being this structure that we can hang other bits of sentences off. It has much more of a flat, just looking at the patterns on the surface kind of approach to language.

Janelle: Yeah. Keep in mind, too, the amount of computing power it has to work with is so much less than what it takes for sentience or anything near human level. If you’re looking at raw computing power, the neural nets we have today are somewhere around the level of an earthworm.

Gretchen: Maybe an earthworm would like peanut butter slime-flavoured ice cream.

Janelle: I’ll give all my Peanut Butter Slime to the earthworm.

Lauren: That’s very generous of you.

Gretchen: This was one of the analogies that I liked in your book, which I enjoyed very much. You Look Like a Thing and I Love You – the title of this book was named after another neural net, right?

Janelle: Mm-hmm. This was a phrase generated from a neutral net that was trying to do pick-up lines.

Gretchen: I guess that could be a pick-up line.

Lauren: We have things like ice cream names, and you’ve done death metal names, and Halloween costumes, and colours, and these are all three or four words at most. Pick-up lines is moving into more of the sentence/couple of sentences-type of thing. As the amount of words you’re trying to generate grows longer, how much more difficult does that make it for the artificial intelligence?

Janelle: It makes it a lot more difficult. When I was generating the ice cream flavours and things, I was deliberately going exclusively for these kinds of problems where it would just have to do a couple words at a time because when it tried to do longer sentences or phrases, it would not make sense. One of the things is that the A.I. I was working with at the time didn’t have very much memory at all. So, it would kind of lose track of things that happened a couple of words ago. It wasn’t really able to figure out then how to make a sentence work or make phrases work. It was a bit beyond it. The pick-up lines was definitely a case of, “This is too hard for the A.I.” It struggles, okay, not just the “How do you make a grammatical phrase?” but also “How do you do puns? How do you do innuendo?” These were all things that require a lot of background knowledge that this thing just did not have.

Gretchen: Another example that you use in the book is with recipes, right? It can figure out that you need to list some ingredients, you need to list some instructions, but then those instructions won’t contain the ingredients that were previously mentioned, necessarily, because it doesn’t remember that those are what it listed before.

Janelle: Yeah, we’ll see that. You’ll get something that on the surface at first glance looks like a recipe and then, when you actually read more closely, you’re like, “Wait a second. It has no idea what’s going on. It’s forgotten its ingredients. It’s telling me to chop the milk into cubes. Something’s going on here.”

Lauren: There’s something very confident about the way it fakes its ability.

Janelle: Yeah. Well, I mean, part of the reason it sounds so confident is that it’s copying what humans have written, and humans generally didn’t tend to write in the middle of a recipe, “Uhh, wait a second. I have no idea what’s going on.” It learns that is not a phrase that appears in a recipe, so it’s going to express any kind of confusion. It’s just going to plough ahead with its best guess at what a human would say.

Gretchen: This is where, I think, your famous giraffe question comes from.

Janelle: Ah, yes. I love this chatbot. It’s a chatbot called Visual Chatbot. It’s designed to answer questions about an image. You show it an image and then it comes up with a caption, and then you can have this back and forth conversation with the bot about what it sees in the image. You think that premise would be fairly straightforward, but there are weird quirks that arise just because this thing is trying to copy how humans ask and answer questions about images. The training data is important. In this case, the training data is a whole bunch of people hired through Amazon Mechanical Turk to take turns asking and answering questions about images. Then, the chatbot was trained on answers. So, given this kind of image, given what the question is, what would humans tend to answer in this situation? Some weird quirks emerge just from that premise. One of the things that they wanted to make sure to avoid was this thing called priming. People tend to ask questions to which the answer tends to be “yes.” They found in an early version of this chatbot that they could get 80% accuracy just by answering “yes” to every single yes-or-no question.

Gretchen: Uh-oh!

Janelle: They ended up having to hide the image from the person who was asking questions, so that helped a little bit. Now, it’s about 50/50 if you ask a given question whether it’s going to answer yes or no to that. One of the things that they weren’t able to correct was this interesting thing with the giraffes. What happens is, if you ask the question, “How many giraffes do you see?” the chatbot will almost always return a non-zero answer. It can be doing great about an image and, “Oh, yeah. This is a person on a snowboard. There’s snow,” up until the point where you ask, “And how many giraffes are there?” It will answer, “Three” or “Two” or “Too many to count.”

Lauren: I think it’s just worth clarifying, just to really make this clear, this is not a data set in which giraffes appear in every image.

Janelle: True. Yes. I would love to see that data set – snowboarding with giraffes.

Lauren: “Yeah, there are three giraffes.”

Gretchen: Giraffe snowboarders – this is possible. Because I know this is an ongoing joke that you have, I tested with an image of the cover of my book which, as I think as everyone knows, contains zero giraffes because it’s not about giraffes. Visual chatbot told me that it is a sign that says, “Unknown, unknown, unknown,” on the side of it which I guess is not the worst for a cover that has text in it. It just can’t read the text – sure. Then, I said, “How many giraffes?” and Visual Chatbot said, “Two.”

Janelle: It comes from this thing is copying how humans tend to answer this question. In its examples of humans hired through Amazon Mechanical Turk, the humans had not tended to ask the question, “How many giraffes are there?” when they didn’t know if there were any giraffes.

Gretchen: Right. You’d say something like, “Are there any giraffes?” The person says, “Yes,” and then you say, “How many giraffes?”

Janelle: Exactly. If you ask the chatbot, “Are there any giraffes?” it will answer, “No,” quite often. But then, if you follow up with the question, “And how many giraffes do you see?” it’ll say, “Five.”

Lauren: This approach reminds me of, as Gretchen said earlier, as soon as I get my hands on some kind of thing that’s doing this back and forth question asking or as soon as I’m let loose on a Google Translate, I think it’s a very linguist-brain thing to try and find these points at which the computer can’t handle language properly. It’s always great when you have an approach that understands how humans actually interact with this data that helps explain why you end up getting these really strange answers and why it’s good to have linguists help design artificial intelligence or chatbots and these things because the way humans choose to do language is very different to what we think of as the nice, straightforward application at the end.

Janelle: There’s so many start-ups that are trying to have some kind of bot that you can interact with in an open-ended manner. Then, they run into trouble. Facebook M is one of these services that was discontinued last year because they thought it was going to be like a digital assistant, lives in your browser, you can ask it to do things like look up show times and stuff. But what people ended up asking for was the weirdest, most complicated things. One guy documented, oh yeah, he asked it if it could arrange for a parrot to visit his office. I mean, you’re not gonna prepare for that when you’re training one of these chatbots. It turned out to be the chatbot kept needing humans to step in and rescue it. They realised it was going to be too expense because they were always gonna need these humans.

Lauren: This is a company that has no shortage of resources to throw at a problem like this.

Gretchen: I think if you tell people, “You can interact with this like a human,” they think they can do things like make a request for parrots because humans can understand a request for parrots. Even if I can’t personally deliver you a parrot, at least I understand this request. Whereas, a chatbot, if parrots aren’t in the training data, then parrots don’t exist.

Janelle: This is one of the things, too, that makes it hard to tell the difference between humans and computers when you’re chatting with them. If you’re in a customer service situation, they try to really narrow the context in which you can ask questions and not make it open-ended, especially if they’re going to invisibly use bots because they don’t want you asking for parrots out of the blue.

Gretchen: Right. It’s like when you call into a customer service line, it’s like, “Press 1 to talk to this,” “Press 2 to talk to that,” they really wanna keep your options constrained because then the computer can help you. It’s when it’s open-ended and people start behaving as if it can do anything that a human can do that you start running into problems.

Janelle: Yeah. What you’ll get is you’ll get these companies that’ll build chatbots where it’ll start out as an open-end conversation with something that is secretly a bot but it hasn’t said it is. But then if it gets confused, it’ll invisibly hand control over to a human. That can be problematic because then, if the customer by then is frustrated and thinks they’re dealing with a robot, the poor human employee may not have a very pleasant time with that conversation. What I would really love – what I would love linguists to design for me – is some kind of very polite, in-context way to ask a question or interact with one of these bots that would reveal whether it is a human or a computer, some kind of shibboleth that is never – not asking about his favourite Star Wars character, because that’s impolite if you’re talking to a human employee – but some phrasing or something that’s tricky.

Gretchen: That’s an interesting question because I think, a lot of times, asking for something that’s a little bit non-cooperative, like “How many giraffes?” out of the blue, is maybe gonna deliver that answer. But it’s also gonna be confusing and annoying to a human.

Janelle: Exactly. My default has always been, as soon as a human – because better be polite to a computer than rude to a human sort of thing – but it would be lovely to be able to tell the difference. Companies should just tell us or have a “Talk to a human” button or something, but yeah.

Gretchen: You’re looking for an inverse Turing Test. A Turing Test is this classic test in computer conversation where, if a computer can fool a human into thinking that they’re talking to another human, then they’ve passed the Turing Test. There are ways of passing the Turing Test if you constrain the context enough. Or if you tell people that they’re talking to a child or they’re talking to somebody who’s on some drugs or something like this – or a philosopher – then they’ll be more likely to believe – these are the three kinds of people that a robot can be. But if you try to do something that’s very practical or that is grounded very much in reality, then people aren’t as willing to be generous with the computer’s misinterpretations. Janelle, your blog post that you make the neural nets do funny things, they’re really funny. And yet, I have a feeling that it’s not only that the neural nets are funny, it’s also that you’re really good at spotting the funny bits and bringing them out to a blog post for us.

Janelle: Yeah, there’s a lot of human storytelling work that goes on. How is this going to be interesting? Where is the funny thing that it’s doing? Sometimes, the ratio is like 100 to 1 of things that aren’t very funny that it generates and the one thing that I’m like, “Oh, yeah. I’m posting that.”

Lauren: Because, I guess, the thing about it being a computer process is that you could just generate infinite numbers of nonsensical ice cream names, but a lot of those are too nonsensical to even be particularly amusing.

Janelle: Yeah. It also has a tendency to – especially if we’re dealing with something short-ish and simple-ish like ice cream, then it’ll generate something and it says, “Mint Chocolate Chip,” and I’m like, “Oh. It just copied that.” It learned that one.

Lauren: Learnt that one too well.

Janelle: Yeah. Because as far as these A.I.s are concerned, exactly copying my examples is a perfect solution to the question I’m asking of it. If it can predict every single word, word for word, in the text file that I gave it, then that is a perfect score. Sometimes, it’s almost like a battle for me to try to get it to be just bad enough at the task.

Gretchen: Not so bad that it’s incoherent, but bad enough that humans can resolve what it’s supposed to mean and it’s still funny.

Lauren: One application of this name-generation process you’ve been doing was when you created a list of craft beer names and a company actually took one of those names to create a beer. Was that a process that you embarked on because you thought this was a good place to experiment with creative naming or how did that come about?

Janelle: This was one of the things where I happened to know somebody who was friends with the owner of the brewery, and I thought, “Well, this would be fun to actually get one of these beers to exist in real life,” because people keep saying that the names A.I.s are generating are pretty good. In the case of craft beer names, there’ve actually been companies who have taken each other to court over having beer names that were too close to one another. There’s this need to maybe show there’re ways to still come up with new beer names and we hadn’t exhausted all the possibilities yet.

Lauren: It’s really a collaboration between you and the A.I. where you are curating all of the names that it gives you in order to find the ones that have that perfect balance of following the rules you’ve given it but with a bit of a lateral thinking approach.

Janelle: Yeah. Just the right amount of lateral thinking as well, too. Sometimes, it’s way off the mark and comes up with, I don’t know, “Farm Fight,” as a name for beer. I’m like, “Well…”

Gretchen: Here are some of the beer names that were on the list like “Dang River” and “Binglezard Flack” and “Toe Deal” and “Devil’s Chard.”

Lauren: Some of them I can almost imagine being a craft beer. In the end, it was “The Fine Stranger” that was bottled and labelled.

Gretchen: That’s good. I think the examples are very funny, but there’s also an important part of making a lot of funny examples, right? It’s not just to entertain people, even though it is very entertaining.

Janelle: There’s people using these practically as their business in coming up with brand names. I did this one beer. There’s a whole art to naming brands, and it’s not just coming up with the names, but it’s also this whole framing of “Because of the etymology of this and that” or “Because the computer mashed this together with that.” There’s definitely a storytelling element to it as well. When I was going through this process with the beer, I was definitely getting the sense of, “Oh, yeah. I’ve got all these great names.” Any – not any one of these – but many of them would make great beer names, and the beer would sell well, and the brewery would be happy with it. But, yeah, how do I put it on the marquee, put it on the silver platter and make them actually say, “Yes. The authority has spoken. This is the name.”

Gretchen: Beyond brand names, there’re also lots of other practical applications people are using artificial intelligence for now, whether that’s machine translation or self-driving cars or all of these sorts of very practical aspects to things. It’s hard to see the inside of a self-driving car, and what that looks like, and how it’s making problems for things. Whereas, it’s easier to see what happens when you make a bunch of weird ice cream flavours.

Janelle: Exactly. That’s why I like doing these tests. Some of the biggest applications for A.I. is in doing financial predictions or looking for fraudulent logins and things like that where it, maybe, is comprehensible to somebody who’s in that field, but the way that they’re making mistakes in that field is not very obvious, not very interesting, if you’re not right there in that field working with these kinds of numbers all the time. If it’s making a mistake on an ice cream flavour, that is much faster to see, “Oh, yeah, it’s doing pattern matching. Oh, yeah, it doesn’t understand what it’s doing.” A lot of these same mistakes really do translate over to commercial applications.

Lauren: We’ve talked a little bit about how you have to curate the output because it will just keep spitting out silly ice cream names forever. We’ve talked a little bit about some of the problems with the types of data that are put into these processes in terms of, you know, if you don’t set it up very well and you have people answering questions about giraffes in a way that the A.I. is going to implement weirdly. There are bigger and more serious implications for thinking about the kind of data that we are using to create artificial intelligence processes not just with language but particularly for this topic looking at the kinds of data that people use to build artificial intelligence. You talk about this a bit in your book. Where do you see some of the biggest challenges in creating good A.I.?

Janelle: One of the things is, remember these A.I.s have about the raw computing power of an earthworm and they don’t have the context, then, to realise that there are some things that the humans do that they probably shouldn’t be copying. Completely unknowingly, they will copy things like racial/gender discrimination and they won’t know that that’s what they’re doing. They won’t know that that’s a bad thing. They just really can’t comprehend it.

Gretchen: It’s kind of like the chatbot that figures, “Oh, if I just answer yes to everything, I’ll get 80% accuracy,” even though it’s not actually useful, communicatively, to just answer yes to everything.

Janelle: It’s like this is exactly what you have asked for but is not necessarily what you want. When we give it a bunch of human decisions on resume sorting, for example, and we tell it, “Copy these human decisions,” then these algorithms can look and say, “Well, this is a very difficult problem, but looks like all of the applicants who’ve gone to this one college tend not to be hired” and “Oh, that college is a women’s college” and it is implementing the gender discrimination that it’s seeing in its training data because it saw this signal, didn’t know what it was, only knew that it was helping it copy the humans a little better.

Gretchen: Right. If the humans are already having their sets of bias and if I can magnify that bias, like if you have a human that’s answering “yes” 80% and now the A.I.’s answering “yes” 100% of the time, it doesn’t know what it’s doing.

Janelle: Exactly. Yeah. They are so good about being sneaky about – you may think that if you set up a resume sorting algorithm saying, “Well, we’re just not gonna tell it what gender any of these applicants are” and it is very good at figuring this out not just through colleges but through if somebody has their extra-curriculars listed and “women’s soccer team” is on there, it will glom onto that. Or even subtleties with word choice and phrasing, it will start using those kinds of trends and use them to copy the humans better.

Gretchen: I’m thinking about a different resume study which showed that people – they had the same sorts of resumes – people with a white-sounding name versus with a black-sounding name were more likely to get called back for interviews. You can imagine in the A.I. that it actually just learns how to predict based on someone’s name. Like, “Oh, we’ve hired a lot of people named ‘Mike’ at this company.” We all know these companies that have a whole bunch of people named “Mike” and “Adam” and stuff. “Maybe we should just only interview the people named ‘Mike.’”

Janelle: It will absolutely do that sort of thing. You see there’s a lot of companies out there that are offering resume screening but knowing what I know about how commonly these A.I.s can pick up on this bias I would not want one of these programs screening resumes for my company, for example. Or I would, at the very least, demand to see the evidence that this thing is not making biased decisions.

Gretchen: Right. That’s a sort of way of saying, “Okay, well, if this A.I. still thinks ‘Slime’ is a good flavour for ice cream, then really how much can we trust it to make a good decision about resumes?”

Janelle: I think that’s almost the counter-intuitive danger about A.I. in a lot of ways. It’s not that it’s too smart and it’s going to take over the world and it’s not gonna obey humans – no. The problem is that it’s not smart enough to realise what we’re actually trying to ask it to do.

Lauren: It keeps obeying us too well in ways that we don’t want it to.

Janelle: Yeah, if it can. When it comes to language generation, language processing, human language is really, really difficult. So, that particular domain, more than a lot of others, you’ll see these A.I.s that are really struggling to get a handle on what the humans are saying.

Lauren: It’s good news that linguists will have jobs for a little bit longer.

Janelle: Yeah.

Gretchen: One of the questions that really came up in my mind when we were thinking about interviewing you was, can the A.I. take my job as the co-host of the podcast, Lingthusiasm? If Lauren and I want to go live on a beach somewhere, can we replace, as co-hosts, a bot-generated Gretchen and Lauren to run this podcast? Lauren, what do you think?

Lauren: We actually put this to Janelle a few years ago, back when we started releasing transcripts for our early episodes. About three years ago, in 2016/2017, we didn’t have many episodes, so we didn’t have a lot of data to work with, but also it seems like in these last few years, the ability to process larger text has gotten better. Is that the case, Janelle?

Janelle: Yeah, that’s definitely the case. The kinds of things I was doing in 2016 – generating words, short phrases, paint colour names, ice cream flavour names, those sorts of things – I wouldn’t think of tackling entire sentences or, let alone, sentences that follow one another that make sense. But now, just pretty much in the last year, there’s been some really big A.I.s that have been trained on millions of pages from the internet. They are much better at generating text. They can generate grammatical sentences most of the time now. Most of the words that they use are real words. They still don’t understand what they’re saying. I think, yeah, it has gotten better.

Gretchen: You can potentially take something that’s been trained on, let’s say, most of the English pages of the internet and then fine-tune it on a smaller data set to try to push it more in the direction of just, for a random example, Lingthusiasm episodes.

Janelle: Yes. If, hypothetically, I had many episodes worth of Lingthusiasm transcripts, I might be able to make a robo-Gretchen and a robo-Lauren.

Lauren: Do you know what else has happened in the last couple of years, Gretchen?

Gretchen: I think we’ve produced a lot more episodes of Lingthusiasm.

Lauren: Between the main episodes and the bonus episodes, we have 70 transcripts, which is over 800 pages of data. Janelle, would that be enough to have a go at creating a robo-Gretchen and a robo-Lauren?

Janelle: There’s one way to find out.

Gretchen: Oh, boy! Let’s do some live neural netting on the podcast.

Janelle: All right! What could possibly go wrong?

Gretchen: Okay. Can you walk us through what are you doing right now on your computer?

Lauren: Janelle’s gonna share her computer with us so that we can see what’s happening, but we might get some screen grabs as we go through.

Gretchen: We may put some links into the show notes if there’s stuff that’s visual that’s hard to see as well.

Janelle: What we’re looking at right now, this is actually just a browser window in Chrome. What I’m looking at is a thing that is an interface to an A.I. that’s being hosted on Google’s computers right now. Google is graciously allowing people to use their powerful computers that are pretty specialised for these kinds of calculations. Even though I am working on a fairly ordinary laptop, I’m able to connect to some fairly serious firepower here.

Lauren: It’s really interesting to get to see under the hood of making an A.I. run. I think we’ll give people a bit of a taste of that here, but if you want more details and more of an explanation of how we made “Robot Lingthusiasm,” we’ll make that into a bonus episode.

Janelle: So, here we are. I’ve connected to this A.I. I’ve downloaded a copy of it. Now, I’m going to upload lingthusiasm.txt. I’m going to upload this file of 2.4MB of you two talking. Let’s – okay. Okay. We’ve got our first sample out here right now. “It is already conversations.”

Lauren: Except it’s just conversation by someone called “Gina.”

Gretchen: Maybe this is the hybrid between the two of us – our merged alter-ego? Shall we read a few of these lines, Lauren? I think we should each start with “Gina” as we’re reading the lines.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: First line. This is the first of Gina’s lines. “Gina: Yeah, that’s why I’m gonna be honest with you.”

Lauren: “Gina: We’re not always going to be like, ‘Oh, we don’t know why we did that.’ That’s why.”

Gretchen: “Gina: I know. The people who’ve come to me to ask me are gonna be like, “Yeah, I didn’t know who was getting up and down the stairs and going to a doctor’s appointment.”

Lauren: Okay. So, not very Lingthusiasm in content there, but I like where Gina’s going.

Gretchen: Yeah. I like that it’s getting a dialogue thing. We’re pleased to announce that, in fact, your Lingthusiasm hosts will be replaced by robots but only for one episode and it will be bonus and it will be very, very funny. You can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to listen to the next bonus episode, which will be written by robots and performed by you and me, Lauren.

Lauren: To listen to that bonus episode, check out patreon.com/lingthusiasm. You can hear us reading some of our favourite examples. We will also give patrons access to some of those reams of examples so you can find ones that make you chortle as well. It’ll have some screenshots from the A.I.-building process for patrons as well. Thank you so much, Janelle, for taking us through the process of actually training a neural net artificial intelligence and showing us some of the pitfalls and some of the challenges and for talking to us today. If people want to read more about how artificial intelligence is making the world weirder and more wonderful, and some of the challenges and limitations, your book is You Look Like a Thing and I Love You. I loved reading it.

Gretchen: Yes, I can personally attest that I got my copy the night before my book came out when I was very distracted. It successfully distracted me for several hours while I was waiting for that countdown, midnight, to have that happen. It has lots of fun pictures of weird things that the A.I.s are doing as well. Thanks again for coming on the show.

Janelle: Oh, it was my pleasure. This was a lot of fun. I loved listening to your very strange generated conversations.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, including extended versions of A.I.-generated Lingthusiasm transcripts, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts, and you can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, IPA ties, IPA socks, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet.

Lauren: I tweet and blog as Superlinguo. Janelle Shane is @JanelleCShane on Twitter, her blog is aiweirdness.com, and her book is You Look Like a Thing and I Love You. To listen to bonus episodes and help keep the show ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Recent bonus topics include future English, onomatopoeia, and linguistics fiction. If you can’t afford to pledge, that’s okay too. We really appreciate it if you could recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.

Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer to Claire Gawne, and our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Janelle: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#language #linguistics #lingthusiasm #episode 40 #transcripts #Janelle Shane #artificial intelligence #Neural net #roboLingthusiasm #AI

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ogmosis · 4 years

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CRIME FICTION INTERVIEW: ROD REYNOLDS

Rod Reynolds is one of the best crime fiction authors to emerge in the last five years, his Charlie Yates trilogy set in the USA up there with other British writers such as Ray Celestin as well as Americans like Attica Locke and James Lee Burke. I had heard of Rod's work in the industry, but it wasn't until lockdown that I had the time to indulge in his writing. His ear for American dialogue from the 1940s is excellent, while his plotting and characters draw you in - the protagonists and antagonists constantly criss-crossing the line between good and evil. After moving on from Charlie and Faber for the time being, his latest book Blood Red City for Orenda Books is set in London - the city where he grew up as a council estate boy. Rod kindly took time out from working on his new book to talk about his career journey, inspirations and fitting writing in around bringing up young children.

How did a lad from Camden end up mining 1940s America for his first published novels?

I took a sabbatical from advertising in 2010 for a year to try and write a novel. I took a distance learning course with The London School of Journalism. I had never written anything, even though I have always been a big reader of crime. I grew up on a council estate in Camden and I didn't know anyone who had ever done anything like that. It was only as I got older, one of my old bosses was writing a book and he said, "You know what, why can't it be someone like us". I wrote a novel, sent it off to a million agents and got rejected, but got some really nice feedback saying, “This story doesn't work, but keep writing”. I went back to work with a new job, real life took over for a couple of years and it got to a point where I needed to decide whether I needed to do anything with this or put it away as a flight of fancy. I had the idea for the book that would become The Dark Inside after I stumbled across a real-life case that inspired it and I did some research into it. I had the voice at least that would become the character of Charlie Yates and it was quite vivid in my mind, so to give myself a shove I signed up to do the Masters course at City, University of London in novel writing. I was really lucky as it was the first year they ran a crime specific course with novelist Claire McGowan, amongst others. I had some amazing teaching that helped me develop the book and I ended up getting picked up by my first agent before I graduated then, not too long after, I landed with Faber. Lucky coming together of different circumstances.

How hard was it to change your mindset from advertising to novel writing?

I was a buyer in advertising, so that was a very social job. Great in some ways as you could get to take clients to drinks, dinner and parties, but I was working silly hours. I had reached my natural conclusion with advertising as I had done my 10-year stint. I wasn't passionate about it anymore. I was specifically dealing with newspapers, which was a declining sector of the industry. I was already looking at having to change my skill set if I wanted to carry on, so it wasn't too hard for me to walk away in that sense. I miss being around the office with the team I worked with. If I could have done the job from Thursday lunchtime to Friday evening, I would have happily done that forever. The rest of the week I could leave out. One of the reasons that I wanted to do the City of London course, because I was working full-time, I needed something to structure me and find that time in my week to write. I was also working on a deadline that we were due our first child halfway through the course, so I had to get that done. After I left my job, I swapped with my wife once she finished her maternity leave so I was looking after our little one at the time. It was helpful in a way because the only time I could write was at nap time or in the evenings. No time to worry about whether it was perfect, so I just got the words out and got the book done. Towards the end of the second novel, we were expecting our second child so the book had to be done again. My kids are school age now. I kind of look back and think, "How the hell did I work to those restrictions?" It is like anything - you get used to it and find a way.

I think Charlie Yates is one of the most flawed and interesting crime fiction protagonists we have seen in recent years, so how did he evolve?

James Ellroy was the big starting point for me, even after I got into Chandler, Hammett et al. Charlie started out as a voice that I could hear in my head, even if that sounds ephemeral or arty. I had this world weary, beaten down, over the hill journalist who kind of hated himself. I could hear how he would approach this situation whereby he is taken from being cynical in New York City and plunged into this seemingly nothing story in the Deep South which suddenly becomes very important to him, because he can see the effect on people in the town, the victims and their families. It is a matter of life and death. It is based on the real-life Texarkana Moonlight Murders in 1946. I wanted to fictionalise that scenario. The reason he comes from New York is that I read that a journalist from The Times in London was sent over to cover it, but it felt a little bit contrived so the next best alien place for me was New York as it was closer to understanding someone's life from London than somewhere else.

Did the clever FBI through line arrive at the start of your outlining?

Initially it was only going to be a standalone book, then I was going to write a second novel set in the same universe with different characters - something that Ellroy has done and I love. When Faber bought The Dark Inside, they asked for Charlie to come back and that wasn't too tricky. Colt Tanner came about essentially as someone I wanted to write to challenge myself and have fun with. He is unashamedly on both sides of the law. He is willing to do bad things, but he is on the side of the angels in his own mind. He is utterly convinced that the ends justify the means because of what he is trying to achieve. Charlie has got his own flaws and is riddled with self-doubt, while Colt is absolutely certain of his own moral rectitude.

How difficult was the Bugsy Siegel arc to write about?

I have been lucky enough to travel to Las Vegas a number of times over the years and I wanted to write something set there in the early days because it was such a sleazy, strange, literal desert outpost that became almost overnight this gambling mecca. I hadn't planned to involve it in the series and, when I travelled to Texarkana on a research trip and I was finishing up a draft of The Dark Inside, we were driving to Memphis to catch a flight to somewhere else and we passed this town called Hot Springs. I started reading up on the history of this town and how it had been run by this English gangster, who was sent down from New York and all this incredible history that it had. Bugsy Siegel was a regular visitor there and it looks like he took some of its influence as the blueprint for Vegas. Suddenly it just came together. That was book two sorted and I had a story I wanted to tell, and I can then link that straight to Bugsy finishing off the Flamingo in Vegas throughout book three. I was very lucky that Hot Springs, this town in the middle of nowhere in Arkansas that was really isolated in a valley fifty miles down the road from Texarkana, was Siegel's favourite location.

Are you a pantser or a plotter?

I love dialogue. I enjoy it the most and find it the most natural. I am a reluctant plotter. I started out as a pantser with a plan only really in my head but, with each book, the more I plan at the start the more it helps me at the back end. I was worried that it would stifle creativity and actually it is not really the case. I can now start with the synopsis and a route map I know I am going to try and follow. If I veer off from that and find better ways that is not a problem, but it is when you don't have that and don't know how to get from A to B or E to F in the middle of the story - that is when you can end up struggling.

Did you struggle getting back into a British groove for the new book?

All the stuff that I had written had been set in the States, even my first novel that was unpublished. You think it would be easy to write British as it is all around us and I am also writing in the present day without having to worry about anachronisms and regional dialects which was a tricky thing with the previous books, but it took a while to get those beats to make it sound authentic and the way I heard it in my head. I am not one for sharing my stuff until I am absolutely happy with it and satisfied it is as good as I can make it, then I am quite lucky in that I have a couple of trusted readers that I send it to. One will tell me if the story is good and then one will find any tiny mistake that I have made and picks up stuff even copy editors can miss. Karen Sullivan from Orenda Books is great. She does the first edit for Orenda, then we work with West Camel who is her editor and he goes through it a second time and incorporates his feedback. It is nice to have that two-stage process. Blood Red City is out in paperback and has done really well. Financial Times picked it as one of their summer reads. The reviews have been great and people have been getting in touch to say that they have enjoyed it. Orenda have a big network of bloggers and readers on board and that is helpful as it touches on themes that some people might find off-putting. It starts with financial crime and I didn't want to put it solely in that direction as it is about murder and London. Orenda have a small team, but they have built an incredible presence.

What are your hopes going forward?

The story I am working on at the moment has elements of a psychological thriller about it, even though it didn't start out that way. This new one was supposed to be a big departure. I was looking at something like a Sliding Doors thing with parallel lives, but at the start of lockdown I cut half the story, which was quite painful, but I am enjoying writing it. I also have a second book with Orenda, which is going through edits and is set in the present day in the States based on another real-life case. Hopefully that is out in 2021. As a community, you will do well to find a warmer or more welcoming bunch of people than we have in crime fiction. You think there would be some competitiveness, but I haven't seen any.

Find out more about Rod HERE. Buy Rod’s Charlie Yates trilogy HERE. Check out his new book Blood Red City HERE.

#true crime #crime #crime fiction #rod reynolds #orenda books #faber #books #books and literature #texarkana #bugsy siegel #fbi #blood red city #the dark inside #black night falling #cold desert sky #charlie yates #publishing

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amazingphanisnotonfire-imagines · 4 years

Text

Veronica//Everybody Talks

Request: Can I request a Reader/Veronica with/using the song Everybody Talks - Neon Trees, maybe reader moves from new york or visits with Nick st. Clair and decides to stay in town?

happy valentines day gays!

part 2

“Well.” You clasp your hands together as you look out the window of Veronica’s bedroom. “Its no New York. But it’ll do.”

You’re feeling awfully home sick, but your parents wanted you out of the house for a few weeks while they tried to secure as many clients as they could with the lavish house parties they’re throwing, so they sent you to Riverdale ‘so you could catch up with an old friend’, which translates to, the Lodges owe us a favour so they’re babysitting you until we want you back.

Its not really your parents you’re missing, you don’t particularly have the best relationship with either of them. They liked you when you were little and cute and they could parade you around their friends, but as soon as you had your own thoughts and opinions, they kind of just forgot about you. You’re missing New York. You like how busy it is, everybody doing their own thing, following their dreams, doing whatever the hell they want. You blend in there, but in Riverdale you stick out like sore thumb. And Veronica can tell you’re feeling uneasy.

You and Veronica Lodge had been best friends from 5 years old. The Lodge’s did some business with your family, and while your dad’s talked and your mom’s got drunk, you and her played together. You would be princesses, mermaids, superheroes, anything.

And you’re friendship grow stronger as the two of you grew up. She was the first person you came out too, both of you whispering about it while hiding under a duvet, too scared to speak any louder in case anyone was listening.

So when her dad went to prison and she told you she was moving, the two of you were devastated. You gifted her a pair of diamond earrings as a going away present, and she gave you your first kiss, leaving the feeling of her lips engrained in your brain forever. When you’d asked her about it, she’d said it was heat of the moment, ‘i’m probably never going to see you again so i need to do something for you to remember me by’ type thing, and then she never brought it up again.

“You’re going to love it here. I promise!” She says excitedly. “Oh, you’re sleeping in my room, I hope thats okay.”

“Ye-yeah. Thats fine.” You stutter. The past few years she’s become even more gorgeous. Her hair is longer than it was the last time you saw her, and she’s actually wearing glasses sometimes, which is a lot more than when you knew her. She also seems so happy here, and you’re unsure how such a small town managed to keep someone with such a big personality.

“Mom was going to make up the spare bedroom but I said it didn’t matter seeing as though we’ll probably be up all night anyway.”

“Hu-What?”

“Catching up.” She replies, a small giggle passing her lips as she brushes her hand over your arm.

“Oh, yeah, right.” You shake your head, trying to get rid of the many, many gays thoughts that have littered your brain.

“Come on. Dump your bags in there and then I’ll introduce you to everyone.”

-----

“Guys!” Veronica leads you into a small diner, the red neon sign lights the parking lot giving it an 80′s vibe and you can’t help but smile. At least there’s something similar to New York here, the bright neon signs. However they’re everywhere back home, just here in Riverdale though. But the way Veronica is smiling at you is enough to make you feel less home sick. “This is my best friend all the way from New York. We’ve been friends since we were five and she’s staying with us for a couple of weeks. So everyone, meet the one and only, Y/n y/l/n.” She introduces you to the group of teens sat in the red booth, all with kind smiles on your face, and you must admit, you don’t get this kind of hospitality in New York.

“Hi.” You wave shyly.

“Wow. We finally get to meet the famous Y/n.” A girl with a high pony-tail teases causing Veronica to blush softly. “I’m Betty by the way. Betty Cooper. And this is my boyfriend, Jughead Jones.” She introduces herself and the boy beside her and you shake both their hands.

“I’m Josie.” A girl walking past you says and you smile kindly at her.

“Nice to meet you.” You reply and she nods before sitting at a booth a few away from you.

“The boy she’s sat with is Kevin. They’re step siblings and the funniest people you will ever meet.”

“That I am Veronica.” A boy interrupts. “And who is this.” They add, looking you up and down as he sits down in the booth, Betty and Jughead grumble angrily as they move so he can fit in.

“This Reggie, is Y/n. My friend from New York.”

“It is a pleasure to meet you.” He holds you hand, pressing a kiss to the back of it before winking at you and you chuckle uncomfortably.

“You’re not her type Mantle.” Veronica rolls her eyes. “Now, I’m going to leave her here while I order food. Anybody want anything?” She asks and they all shake their head, pointing to the food in front of them. “Y/n. I’ll get your favourite. And Betty, look after he while I’m gone.” She says, glaring at Reggie as she does, before spinning on her heel and marching towards the counter.

“Sit here.” A red-headed boys says and you slide into the booth beside him.

“Thanks.” You mumble. “I don’t think we were introduced.”

“I’m Arch-”

“So what is your type?” Reggie interrupts.

“I’m more into girls.” You reply simply and his eyes widen.

“Ohhh. Cool.” He shrugs before starting to annoy Jughead. You turn your attention back to the boy beside you and he smiles softly before continuing his previous sentence.

“I’m Archie. Veronica’s boyfriend.” He introduces himself and your mouth goes dry.

Boyfriend? She never told you about a boyfriend. Why didn’t she tell you about a boyfriend?

“Boyfriend?” You ask aloud, probably more surprised that you should have but whatever.

“Yeah.” He laughs. “Is that so surprising?” He asks.

“No. I er. I just never heard of a boyfriend.”

“Oh.” He sighs, looking at the table.

“But thats got nothing to do with her though. She probably did mention you but I here the word boy and just tune out.” You say quickly and he lightens up a bit.

“One burger and fries.” Veronica places the tray in front of you and your lips twitch into a smile, however it doesn’t quite each your eyes. Not like it usually does, not the way Veronica loves, and she can’t help the frown that comes to her lips. “Whats wrong? Did Reggie say something? What did you say Reggie?”

“No, nothing.” You shake your head. “Do you want to sit beside Archie?” You ask.

“Why?” She replies confused.

“Because he’s your boyfriend.”

“Oh right yeah. Sure.” She shrugs and you stand up, allowing her to sit in your seat before you sit down on the end.

Why wouldn’t she tell you about her boyfriend? You guys were supposed to be best friends. She promised that when she moved that wouldn’t change. But maybe it has, things have changed since the last time you saw each other. You hair is a tad shorter, and you’ve changed your fashion a little, but nothing major. What the hell happened?

You eat your fries in silence while they talk about the new school year and whats in store for them as being seniors. Half an hour passes and you’ve finished your food, as well as the majority of your drink and you can’t help but think if you disappeared right this second, nobody would notice.

Hell, Reggie’s talked to you more than Veronica has, and even though you get that she has a new life here, with new friends and new memories, it still sucks that she’s moved on.

“Have you seen that Y/n?” Archie asks and you blink rapidly, everyone at the table is staring at you expecting an answer to a question you didn’t hear.

“What?”

“Sicario? The film.”

“Yes!” Veronica jumps in and Archie’s eyes widen, the two of them talking animatedly about the film.

Did we hell see that. When that was at the cinema, you and Veronica went to go see some shitty teen romance movie that made the two of you cry. Why was she lying? The first time she’s shown interest you in 35 minutes and its all a lie.

“I didn’t think those type of films were very you.” Archie says shocked and she shrugs.

“She’s full of surprises.” You sigh, stirring your drink around with your straw as you lean your head against your hand.

“She really is.” He replies making her giggle softly before the two of them make-out.

Why does this always happen? You fall in love with her years ago which ends in disappointment and heartbreak, for it to just happen again the next time you see her. Damn.

------

“Ronnie?” You whisper into the darkness. Everything seems darker in Riverdale, everything is quieter, and its keeping you awake. Its not the only thing thats keeping you up though, the fact that the girl you’ve wanted since you were 13 and just discovering your sexuality is lying next to you, her body so warm as she breathes slowly, is also making it difficult to sleep. Plus, why is she so different than to how she was. Its like nothing major has changed about her, its just subtle things, but when they’re added all together its like she’s someone completely new. And why didn’t she tell you about Archie? Or anything that has happened since she moved here, the rest of her friends told you more in an afternoon than she has in three years.

”Yeah?” She replies, turning over. Her hair is a mess and her eyes full of sleep but you don’t think she’s ever looked more beautiful. Actually. Thats a lie. She’s always looked pretty to you. “Are you okay?”

“Can’t sleep.” You reply and she sends you a sympathetic look.

“Its okay. Why don’t we play the alphabet game?” She suggests and your eyes widen as you remember the stupid game you made up when you were younger. Whenever either of you had trouble sleeping, wether it be due to nightmares, parents arguing or just that fact that you were to excited to sleep, you would pick a topic and work together to try and think of something relating to it for each letter of the alphabet. On one particularly boring afternoon, you even made a proper game out of it. Scribbling down loads of topics and placing them all in a shoe box.

“I haven’t played that in years!”

“Me neither. But...” She trails off as she dangles over the bed. You can hear her searching under the bed for a few seconds before she stops, movements halting as a smile breaks out onto her face. “Aha!” She cheers and pulls a shoe box from under the bed. “Lets hope its the right shoebox.” She wiggles her eyebrows and you groan, pulling a disgusted face making her giggle. “Yes!” She says triumphantly. “I knew I still had it.” She shows you the box and smile brightly. The multicolored paper that you scribbled on when you were 11, and kept adding to as you grew older and learned more things about the world, is in there.

“Okay!” You bounce a little. “Let me pick. Let me pick!” Your hand dives into the box as you search for a bit of paper. Pulling a bright yellow piece out you read it aloud. “Flowers.”

“Ooooo.” She muses, placing the lid back on the box before pushing it down the bed. The two of you lie down, facing each other, both of you giggling like children as you try and think of a flower that begins with the letter A.

“Aster!” You start and she looks at you impressed.

“Wow, your flower knowledge has improved since the last time I saw you. When we did this five years ago, you said ‘A flower’.”

“Well, there’s a lot of things I know now that I didn’t back then.” You reply. You didn’t mean for it to sound so serious, but it does and it hangs in the air for a few seconds before her eyes brighten again, something she always does when she’s about to answer these.

“Baby’s breath.” She says and you hum in approval. “I’m gonna have them mixed in my bouquet when I get married. Them and roses, the classiest flower obviously. And the wedding scheme is going to be royal blue and gold, with lots of activities for the guests to do.”

“Yeah? And does Archie know all of this or are you just going to spring it on him the day he proposes?” You tease making her roll her eyes.

“Who says I’m going to marry Archie.” She replies and you stare at her. The two of you make eye contact, your breath hitching at the intensity of her stare, and then you’re leaning in, closing the gap between the two of you. Your lips brush against hers softly, almost as if you’re testing the waters to see if she’ll pull away, but when she doesn’t, when her hand grabs your waist pulling you closer, and she closes the gap completely, her lips completely pressed against you, kissing you like you’re air and she can’t breath, you figure she isn’t going to pull away.

Until...she does, and you’re left breathless.

While she’s left more confused than ever.

“I’m so sorry. I should not have done that.” She pulls away from you quickly, her eyes wide while yours are barely open, she’s definitely gotten better at kissing. Or maybe you have. No matter what, that was pure bliss- “That was such a mistake. Sorry. Lets just forget that happened.” She turns over, facing the wall and scooting as far away from you as she can. Your heart beats faster and your fingers trace your lips, you’re brain running at a thousand miles per hour as you try to remember everything. Everything leading up to the kiss to the kiss itself, while also trying to block out what happened after. But its no use, and your heart sinks when you hear her muttering to herself. “I have a boyfriend.”

-----

“Y/n?” A soft voice lulls you from your deep sleep and you shuffle a little, turning around to follow the voice. “Y/nnnnn.” They continue and your eyelids flutter open to reveal Veronica smiling at you.

“Morning.” You mumble, stretching your muscles while you sit up.

“Morning.” She replies. “Here, I got you a drink.” She hands you a mug and you take it from her gratefully, blowing the steam away. “Listen.” She starts, her voice changing from soft to serious and your eyes flicker up to meet hers. “I really want to hang out with you, but Archie’s had a disaster so I need to go help. But, fear not, because Cheryl Blossom may be the biggest bitch in Riverdale, but she throws the best parties and we are invited to one tonight! So pick out your sparkliest and shortest dress and be ready by 8. Okay?” She kisses you on the cheek before grabbing her purse.

“Bu-”

“Bye! Love you!” She calls over her shoulder and you sigh, taking a sip of your drink before looking around the room.

The room screams Veronica, some of the old Veronica, and some of this new one that you aren’t entirely sure of. The pearls hanging on the jewelry holder, pictures stuck in the mirror of her vanity, that is more make up products than actual wood and glue, some of you and her back in New York, some of her family, some with friends, but most of them are her with Archie and you feel your heart drop to your stomach, you sigh and push the covers off you, throwing your legs over the side. Its barely 10am, meaning you have god knows how many hours to kill before she comes back. “Oh.” She comes back and you whip your head to look at her. “About last night, can we just forget anything ever happened?”

“Sure.” You nod, forcing a smile. “My lips are sealed.” You add and she grins at you.

“Great. Bye!”

“Yeah. Great.”

--------

“Y/n?” Veronica whispers. Your mom had turned the lights off in your room hours ago, but the both of you remain wide awake. She stares at the glow in the dark stars on your ceiling, trying to find constellations, while you stare at her face, finding constellations in the freckles that dust her cheeks, freckles that will soon disappear after she leaves and decides she doesn’t like anymore.

“Yeah?” You whisper back, deciding to join in with the star gazing, thankful that she hasn’t looked at you yet.

”Do you know when you were a kid and you wanted to talk to everyone and anyone?”

”No. I was an anxious child.” You reply making her giggle.

”Fair enough.” She shrugs. “But you know what I mean though. Like everyone seemed so fascinating to talk to, and you just wanted to learn everything about them. You become friends with them within seconds no matter who they are.”

“Yeah. I know what you’re talking about.”

“I feel like that everyday with you.” She admits, both of you blushing but refusing to look at the other.

“You think I’m a stranger?”

“No.” She replies and you can practically hear her rolling her eyes. “I mean that if you were a stranger, I’d still want to be friends with you. No matter what.” She says, the words weighing heavy in the air as she says them but they make you feel light. At that age, nobody knows who they’re going to be in a month, a year, five, ten, but both of you knew you’d still be friends.

Veronica and Y/n against the world.

“Veronica?” You ask.

“Yeah.”

“I like girls.”

“Oh.” She looks at you with a puzzled face and you sigh, knowing whats coming next. ‘i hope you’re not in love with me’ or ‘thats great, but just so you know, i’m straight’ and ‘get out’, are a few that come to mind. But she smiles at you, that smile only Veronica can do, grabs your hand and simply says, “I love you.” And you grin back at her, because she supports you and you still have your best friend and it doesn’t matter who you love.

“I love you too.” You reply and then the moments gone, she starts talking about cute girls you go to school with, but your hands remain intertwined and thats the only thing you can really focus on.

------

“Are you almost ready?” Veronica shouts from her bedroom and you roll your eyes at her patience. Studying your outfit one last time in the mirror, you re-apply your lipstick before smoothing out your dress and flicking your hair about until your happy with how you look.

You’d decided on a classic black dress with a bold red lip and sparkly shoes, very New York chic, you finally felt like the old you. Sneaking out to parties with Veronica by your side and fake ID’s in your purse.

“Yes I’m ready. But what the hell happened to you, Miss ‘start getting ready at 4 and don’t get out at of the house until 10′. Living here has really changed you.” You tease but when she doesn’t say anything you stop putting your phone in your purse to look at her. She’s already staring at you, a look in her eyes that you can’t quite read, but her lips are parted slightly and the sight is enough to make you fee breathless, a blush creeping up your neck.

“...wow.” She mumbles as she stares at you. “You look amazing.” She snaps herself out of whatever she was in and you smile bashfully at her.

“You look even better.” You reply.

“Not possible.” She rolls her eyes.

“So, is Archie okay?” You ask and she pauses putting her shoes on.

“What? Oh yeah. Turns out he just missed me. He’s such a dork.”

“You saw each other yesterday.” You laugh awkwardly.

“I know.” She laughs. “Hey, are you okay?” She asks, noticing your frown.

“Yeah fine.” You shrug, pushing the feeling that you’re being pushed out deep down. “You ready?”

”Always.” -----

‘Hey honey you could be my drug You could be my new prescription Too much could be an overdose All this trash talk make me itching’

You and Veronica are more shouting the lyrics than singing at each other.

Veronica was not wrong, Cheryl was a bitch, pointing out three things she didn’t like about your outfit as soon as you walked through the front door, but boy did she throw a good party. The house was packed, people squeezed into each room and spilling out into the garden. The music was loud enough to be heard in Greendale and there was enough alcohol to last everyone at least a year.

Unfortunately, Veronica had started on the drinking pretty much as soon as she walked in the front door and there was only one reason she would binge drink, she was conflicted about something. However, she refused to talk to you about anything other than another drink, dancing, or cute girls that you could hook up with. But the only cute girl you wanted to talk to was drunk, swaying and about to puke into a very expensive vase.

“Come on Ronnie, we need to get you to a bathroom. You need to sit down.” You gently reach out to her but she continues to sway, swallowing whatever was trying to crawl back up her throat and you crinkle your nose in disgust.

“No.” She shoves your hands away, stumbling slightly. Your arms are around her instantly, keeping her up right but she pulls away from you, staring at you as if your a stranger.

“Ronnie. You need a sit down and some water.”

“No!” She shouts. “The only person that calls me Ronnie is Archie.” She adds and tears prick your eyes.

“But Archie isn’t here. I am. So please, come with me.” You plead.

“No! God, you just can’t deal with the fact that I have friends other than you. You’ve been following me around for the past two days like a lost puppy and I’m sick of it. But I have a life outside of you and New York. I have friends, a family that supports me, and more importantly a boyfriend. And I don’t need you coming into my life and making everything all complicated. You-you should have just stayed in New York.” She shoves you out of the way, leaving you crying in the middle of the dance floor.

People start talking as she pushes further and further into the party, and the songs thats just ended seems oddly fitting, everybody does talk, no matter if you’re in New York or Riverdale. Just before she completely disappears into the crowd you hear her shout one last thing that completely shatters your heart.

“Hey! Lets play the alphabet game!”

“Oh hey Y/n.” Archie greets you as he walks through the front door, but you ignore him, pushing past him while wiping the tears from your face.

“Where’s Ronnie?” He asks making you cry harder.

“Somewhere where she doesn’t need me.” You reply before disappearing into the night, walking the unfamiliar streets back to a home you know longer felt wanted in.

You never thought you’d live to see the day where Veronica didn’t want you in her life. But here you are, and now you’re not entirely sure what to do with yourself. Should you call your parents and ask if you can come home early with a promise that you’ll hide out in your room? Or should you go to a hotel for the remainder of the trip?

You decide to stay at Ronnie’s Veronica’s for the night and then go to a hotel tomorrow.

Riverdale sucks.

Friendships suck.

Especially when you’re in love with your best friend.

Everything sucks!

-----

“Hey.” Veronica’s voice is quiet as she walks into her bedroom. You glance at her, her make-up is smudged, her hair messy and she’s carrying her heels, but she still looks cute.

“Hey.” You reply, placing another dress in your suitcase.

“Soooo. What are you doing?” She walks into her room cautiously and you roll your eyes.

“Packing.” You shrug. “I rang my parents this morning about staying in a hotel and they wanted me back early so they can parade me around like when I was 2. I think one of the possible clients they’re talking to has a son around our age, so I think they’re planning on ‘setting’ us up.”

“Yikes.”

“Yep.” You pop the p and she huffs.

“Listen.” She starts, moving some of your clothes so she can sit down. “Before you go can we talk.”

“There’s nothing to talk about Veronica. You said exactly what you thought of me yesterday. So I’m doing what you want, I’m going back to New York and you don’t have to worry about me confusing you and getting in the way of your new life. Which by the way isn’t as great as you think it is. Your friends seem lovely, but they know nothing about you, you know Cheryl forgot your name twice yesterday. Betty doesn’t know what you’re favourite food is, and as for your boyfriend, he seems lovely, but you are way out of his league. And you feel the need to lie to him so he likes you more. Veronica, I think you are the greatest person I have ever met, and I’ll always follow you wherever you go, because I’m your best friend and I love you, but if you’re over this friendship thats fine. Just don’t be an ass about it.” You rant, flopping down beside her.

“Wow.” She mumbles and silence takes over the two of you. You’re waiting for her to say something, to do something, but she doesn’t. So you sigh before standing up and starting to pack again. A few minutes go by before she speaks up again. “I made a new category for the alphabet game.”

“Yeah?” You reply while folding a pair of jeans.

“Its things that remind me of you...and I er, I don’t need any help with this one.” She adds and you pause.

“A. The Adorable way your nose crinkles when you see or hear something you don’t like. B. The fact that you love Bees and that you’ll do literally anything to help them. I watched you sprint across a road because you saw a bee lying by the curb and to this day I have no idea how you saw it from that far away, but you picked it up and put it on a flower so that it would be safe and I don’t think I’ve ever loved you more...also B, because of how Brave you are to be yourself. Even when you have a family like yours. C. How much you hate Cauliflower, and how when you were 7 you were convinced it was a snowy tree for fairies to live in, and how upset you get when your mom first showed you one because you thought she’d cut their house down. D. The fact that you love Dogs more than anybody I have ever met, and every time I see a cute dog in the street I always think of how happy you would be if you saw it. And how every time you see a dog you always send me a picture, no matter what time it is or what you’re doing. E.-”

“Ronni-Veronica.” You stop her. “I get the point. You don’t have to do all of them.”

“Okay.” She nods. “But I can do all of them if you want.”

“Its okay.” You smile.

“Can I skip to L?” She asks and you quirk an eyebrow, but nod anyway. “Okay. L. The fact that I am so in Love with you and that I have been since I was 12, that I turn into an idiot whenever you’re around. I’m so sorry, I was just confused and I didn’t know what to do because I love you but I didn’t want to upset Archie, and I’m just sorry.”

“Its okay.” You cup her cheek. “I love you too.” She lets out a breath before sending you a soft smile. “Why don’t you skip back a bit to K?”

“K?”

“Kiss me.” You whisper.

#veronica lodge #veronica lodge imagine #veronica lodge x reader #veronica lodge x you #riverdale #riverdale imagine

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