Becky and River - Backdated
Sep. 30th, 2014 04:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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om_mainRiver corrects Becky on her RPS fanfiction, they chat over ice cream, then go looking for an adventure.
...Simon curled up against Jean Paul, thanking the universe one more time that he had decided to keep up their Sunday night picnic tradition, and that his lover had known exactly where to find him when he had flown in. He was still in awe that Jean Paul had ignored the gash on his arm to fly straight from the wastelands of Canada, right into Simon's arms. Stroking over the wound that he had painstakingly but skillfully closed, Simon murmured, "You're really back? Forever?"
Choked up by emotion, Jean Paul could only kiss Simon's hair and run his fingers along the young medic's nape. "Oui, mon chum," he eventually managed with a soft nuzzle.
Straightening, Simon turned to Jean Paul with a fierce expression. "Yes, I am your... chum." He still stumbled a little over the foreign phrase, despite practicing constantly to be able to better understand his soul mate. "And you're mine too! Even with all the... distractions you have around you." He hadn't forgotten about the kiss with Jack - necessary though it might have been, it was constantly floating in the back of his mind. "Don't you ever forget it!"
Becky paused in her typing. Something seemed... off about that last paragraph. Sighing, she leaned back in her chair, cracking her spine several times as she did. What she really needed was to use her powers to get a better vision of the scene, but she had been attempting to be more social by moving her writing to the kitchen and she couldn't risk the real Simon or Jean Paul wandering by. Frustrated, she started re-reading her story from the beginning.
"He never calls him that," River stated offhandedly as she walked into the kitchen, heading straight for the freezer. It was time for some non-problematic ice cream.
Squeaking at the unexpected interruption, Becky slammed the top of her laptop closed, expecting to turn around to find an angry Tam or Beaubier.
...well, she thought as she watched River nonchalantly poke through the freezer, it was a Tam, at least. "Uh, sorry?"
"'Chum'," River elaborated, her accent perfectly Québecois on the one word. "He never calls him that." She bent over the freezer, rooting around until she found the box of cones. She grabbed two, and held one out to Becky. "Cornetto?"
It didn't seem like River was upset with Becky... in fact, River appeared to be willing to help Becky out. Her eyes widened at the potential resource in front of her. "He as in Simon? Or Jean Paul? Oh, and I'd love one, thanks!"
"It's strawberry vanilla," she warned her, as she passed one over. She set about tearing the wrap off around hers in a thin, spiraling stripe. "And neither."
Becky took moment to appreciate River's talent as her own ice cream was more ripped into than 'opened' and quite a lot of it ended up on her fingers. "Well, that's disappointing." She licked a little despondently at her ice cream. She would have to do so much editing, now... "What do they call each other, then?"
"I don't think they'd like me to tell you," River replied with a thoughtful frown. "Just like they wouldn't like me correcting you about their respective sizes."
Becky pursed her lips. That was absolutely no fair at all. "Well, you're psychic, right? What if you just... corrected me when I was wrong? And, uh, didn't when I got it right? Then you wouldn't technically be telling me anything..." It was hard to imagine Jean Paul being even more well endowed than Becky tended to write him... maybe she just had them reversed?
"They still wouldn't like it," River replied offhandedly, and laid down the wrapping on the counter, arranging it into a perfect spiral before she gave her ice cream a first lick.
Becky tried to swallow her disappointment with a a large lick of ice cream, but couldn't help the pout that was forming. Mentally cursing the general lack of exhibitionist tendencies at the school, she let out a monster sigh. "Yeah, probably. I just hate knowing my characters are OOC. And the fandom has pretty much adopted chum as their sweet nothings to each other." Becky's pronunciation was horrendous - unless she meant that they called each other shark bait. "Like, do they even talk to each other in French at all?" That was a major plot point in at least three of her head canons.
She tossed her own crumpled up wrapper onto the counter in a moment of annoyance - though she made sure to avoid hitting the spiral. Looking at what she was sure was a geometrically perfect shape, she wondered if River turned all her meals into art... and then decided she was being ridiculous and got up to actually throw her wrapper away. After all, it wasn't like reality had ever stopped her from writing before.
"Not often," River replied with a slight frown, and hopped up on the counter, folding her legs lotus style and licking at her ice cream. "Writing the truth would be problematic. You couldn't run away with it."
Jealous of how graceful and acrobatic pretty much everyone else at this school was, Becky plopped back down onto her seat, angling the chair so she could face River. "I dunno, there has to be some truth in what I write, or else it isn't fanfic anymore. It's just... fiction, with really unoriginal characters." Besides, she would totally run away to Vegas and elope with the truth if it meant she got ringside seats to some of her favorite OTPs.
"So, are you part of any fandoms?" It wasn't a question Becky ever thought she'd open with, but she had been pleasantly surprised with how geeky the school as a whole was.
River frowned a little as she thought over the question. "No. Too many people I don't know, can't feel - it isn't safe."
"It isn't safe?" Becky had no idea what that meant. "Too many other people in the fandom, like online? Or too many characters in the show?"
River gave her a look, the sort she usually reserved for Simon when he was being an idiot. "Characters can't touch me."
Becky... didn't fully understand that. But she shrugged it off. "Well, that's good, at least. It would suck if you couldn't enjoy all the awesome shows and books out there. But the other fans are a different story?" Becky usually saw them as some form of 'character' - made up of story arcs and back stories plot twists - but she guessed that it might be different for a psychic.
"They can't be felt - measured - assessed," River replied, not liking where her mind was going. She didn't want to think of these things. "Intruders. Are you watching it?"
Becky shrugged with a 'fair enough' attitude, licking at a trail of melted ice cream that was trying to escape down her cone. "Oh man!" She replied after getting it all. "There are just way too many shows, way too little time! It's like ten times harder to maintain my TV schedule here than it was at home - but I guess that will happen when you actually try to do okay in class?" She didn't exactly care about her schoolwork, but she had promised to at least try. "But I take it, it's something I should look into?"
"Here come the drums," River warned her. Becky probably liked him.
Before she could even process why, Becky's entire body tensed, prepared to flee. As she realized what River had said, she slowly relaxed with an embarassed chuckle. "Sorry about that..." The Master was complex and misunderstood and just deliciously interesting - but he was also unhinged in a way that Becky just couldn't wrap her head around. And his Toclafane were pretty much the creepiest things, ever.
A thought hitting her, Becky whipped her head up. "Wait, is this a Who spin-off about the Master?"
By the time Becky relaxed, River had managed to push back, so that she was ensconced in between a set of cupboards and the angle of the wall, suddenly breathing short and hard. When Becky relaxed, so did she, and she forced herself to rely on her here and now. "No," she finally managed to say, still stuck in that corner of the kitchen, on top of the counter.
Becky's eyes widened as she saw where River was now perched. "Oh shit! Sorry!" She wasn't really sure what had happened to the other girl in the past, but she knew it hadn't been pleasant. Oh shit! She shouldn't be thinking about it! River was a psychic!
Scrambling for some happy thoughts, she looked desperately at her ice cream. Ice cream was good! The best, even! Just last week, she had written her first food smut based on... okay, probably should try to avoid thinking about Beautam fic, even if River seemed mostly okay with it. Looking at the oven, her mind flashed to her WIP of Dean nesting in the Men of Letters bunker, baking every type of pie imaginable, which had lead to... yeah, maybe she should try to avoid anything NC-17 in case River was feeling fragile? Determinedly, Becky turned to stare at one of the ceiling lights. Which, actually brought to mind...
Huffing out a laugh and covering her face with her hands, Becky apologized mentally and out loud. "I'm sorry I suck at this - but apparently all my happy thoughts involve naked men?"
"That's one way to fly," River said, under her breath, but she managed to move back from her corner, to the place where she had originally been sitting. She still felt a little off, but she picked up her abandoned cone from the counter, her hand curled around her pendant, a finger tracing along its curves.
With an embarrassed smile, Becky tried to send another mental apology River's way. Maybe it was a good thing River avoided fandom - like many a fangirl, Becky knew she reacted a bit... strongly to people mentioning characters. "Okay, well, now that I'm expecting the reference, I can totally rationally discuss the Master. But - the show isn't about Doctor Who?"
River shook her head, the cone in her hand following the movement so she could keep sucking on the ice cream inside. She pulled it away, swallowed, then gave her the key to everything. "The actor."
And suddenly it made sense. "Ooooohhh... Really? I don't think I've seen him in anything else! Is he good? He must be, right? What's the show about?" Becky leaned forward in excitement.
Before, the too loud enthusiasm would have been easier to cope with, but now River felt over sensitive, and it was a great effort not to crush the cone in her hand. She leaned back instinctively, as if that would help put distance between Becky's feelings, and herself. "There are two souls inside us, and some know how to activate the dormant consciousness."
Blinking, confused, Becky took a lick of her cone to try to process that. "That's either the tag line for the show, or something really deep and over my head." She wouldn't put the latter past River - the girl seemed wicked smart.
"Maybe it's both," River said quietly. She didn't like the thought of being taken over by another consciousness, but sometimes, it felt like she used to be somebody else altogether.
"Well! That sounds pretty psychologically interesting. I'll have to check it out! Though, I did just start watching a show with Victor, and I kinda maybe just started watching Gilmore Girls on Netflix." Becky could feel a happy blush climb up her face - Jared Padalecki as Sam Winchester was a fine piece of sculpted man-flesh. Him as the adorable Dean Forester? It made her feel all giggly and warm inside.
That sort of warmth was much more easily manageable than what Doug felt around her, but River was beginning to suspect that her own reaction to his emotions was what made it so. Nothing was ever simple, but usually it was easier to untangle things - or it cost her nothing to leave things beautifully tangled. Wanting to get at the heart of it; maybe that was another sign of her recovery. Maybe her original self was fighting her way back. "Intruders is shorter," she finally settled on, eyeing Becky and feeling compelled to warn her. "But there is much less -" her lips quirked up at the words, so much more Becky's than hers, "eye candy."
"Well, it is a BBC show - or at least I'm assuming it is? Does the UK even have more than the BBC?" Or had she just been attributing all British television to the BBC? Well, it was irrelevant for her point. "The UK only has like, ten amazing actors, so they just run with them even if they aren't conventionally attractive. It's actually better for writing about them - because you can actually explore body insecurities without having to dance around major body perception issues." Her headcanon Sam and Dean occasionally got into who was prettier, but it always felt fake when she tried to make them legit think they were ugly.
River blinked a few times, took another lick of her ice cream, then offhandedly stated, "You ought to watch more British TV."
Grinning, Becky replied, "From your mouth to the teachers' ears. Homework is such a drag!" And then spent a few minutes frantically trying to get all the melting bits of her briefly-forgotten ice cream.
"I don't think the teachers would listen to me," River replied, and paused. "I don't think I'd listen to me." On that subject, anyway.
"I swear, there must be switch that gets flipped in your brain when you grow up, that you suddenly forget what it's like to be a kid. And you should always listen to yourself! Even if you're really wrong about something-" like that one time Becky had tried to write a Supernatural/My Little Pony crossover - "you won't be able to figure that out if you don't at least give it some thought!"
River considered that for a second, as she ate the last of her cone of ice cream. "That's very wise," she told Becky, and hopped off the counter.
"Really?" Becky wasn't usually accused of saying wise things. "Awesome! I'll have to post it somewhere!" She looked down at the sticky mess that her hands had been reduced to and reconsidered. "Well, maybe later. So, do you have anything exciting planned today?" She asked before taking a big bite out of the side of her cone.
"I don't know," River answered, and headed for the door. "I'm off to find out." She paused in the doorway, then offered. "You can come, if you like."
"Totally!" Becky shoved the last bit of her cone in her mouth and hurried over to the sink to rinse her hands before grabbing her computer and bag. "Should I drop this off first? Will this adventure involve running?"
"Most adventures do," River confirmed, deadly serious.
Becky just grinned at River. "Well, I vote that any running today is after boys, okay?"
"There are so many better reasons to run," River pointed out skeptically.
Becky's eyebrows rose in disbelief. "I certainly don't know of any."
River doubted that; you didn't watch Doctor Who without knowing a lot of better reasons to run. But instead of saying so, she held her hand out to Becky, much like he would have done with Rose. "Let's find out."
...Simon curled up against Jean Paul, thanking the universe one more time that he had decided to keep up their Sunday night picnic tradition, and that his lover had known exactly where to find him when he had flown in. He was still in awe that Jean Paul had ignored the gash on his arm to fly straight from the wastelands of Canada, right into Simon's arms. Stroking over the wound that he had painstakingly but skillfully closed, Simon murmured, "You're really back? Forever?"
Choked up by emotion, Jean Paul could only kiss Simon's hair and run his fingers along the young medic's nape. "Oui, mon chum," he eventually managed with a soft nuzzle.
Straightening, Simon turned to Jean Paul with a fierce expression. "Yes, I am your... chum." He still stumbled a little over the foreign phrase, despite practicing constantly to be able to better understand his soul mate. "And you're mine too! Even with all the... distractions you have around you." He hadn't forgotten about the kiss with Jack - necessary though it might have been, it was constantly floating in the back of his mind. "Don't you ever forget it!"
Becky paused in her typing. Something seemed... off about that last paragraph. Sighing, she leaned back in her chair, cracking her spine several times as she did. What she really needed was to use her powers to get a better vision of the scene, but she had been attempting to be more social by moving her writing to the kitchen and she couldn't risk the real Simon or Jean Paul wandering by. Frustrated, she started re-reading her story from the beginning.
"He never calls him that," River stated offhandedly as she walked into the kitchen, heading straight for the freezer. It was time for some non-problematic ice cream.
Squeaking at the unexpected interruption, Becky slammed the top of her laptop closed, expecting to turn around to find an angry Tam or Beaubier.
...well, she thought as she watched River nonchalantly poke through the freezer, it was a Tam, at least. "Uh, sorry?"
"'Chum'," River elaborated, her accent perfectly Québecois on the one word. "He never calls him that." She bent over the freezer, rooting around until she found the box of cones. She grabbed two, and held one out to Becky. "Cornetto?"
It didn't seem like River was upset with Becky... in fact, River appeared to be willing to help Becky out. Her eyes widened at the potential resource in front of her. "He as in Simon? Or Jean Paul? Oh, and I'd love one, thanks!"
"It's strawberry vanilla," she warned her, as she passed one over. She set about tearing the wrap off around hers in a thin, spiraling stripe. "And neither."
Becky took moment to appreciate River's talent as her own ice cream was more ripped into than 'opened' and quite a lot of it ended up on her fingers. "Well, that's disappointing." She licked a little despondently at her ice cream. She would have to do so much editing, now... "What do they call each other, then?"
"I don't think they'd like me to tell you," River replied with a thoughtful frown. "Just like they wouldn't like me correcting you about their respective sizes."
Becky pursed her lips. That was absolutely no fair at all. "Well, you're psychic, right? What if you just... corrected me when I was wrong? And, uh, didn't when I got it right? Then you wouldn't technically be telling me anything..." It was hard to imagine Jean Paul being even more well endowed than Becky tended to write him... maybe she just had them reversed?
"They still wouldn't like it," River replied offhandedly, and laid down the wrapping on the counter, arranging it into a perfect spiral before she gave her ice cream a first lick.
Becky tried to swallow her disappointment with a a large lick of ice cream, but couldn't help the pout that was forming. Mentally cursing the general lack of exhibitionist tendencies at the school, she let out a monster sigh. "Yeah, probably. I just hate knowing my characters are OOC. And the fandom has pretty much adopted chum as their sweet nothings to each other." Becky's pronunciation was horrendous - unless she meant that they called each other shark bait. "Like, do they even talk to each other in French at all?" That was a major plot point in at least three of her head canons.
She tossed her own crumpled up wrapper onto the counter in a moment of annoyance - though she made sure to avoid hitting the spiral. Looking at what she was sure was a geometrically perfect shape, she wondered if River turned all her meals into art... and then decided she was being ridiculous and got up to actually throw her wrapper away. After all, it wasn't like reality had ever stopped her from writing before.
"Not often," River replied with a slight frown, and hopped up on the counter, folding her legs lotus style and licking at her ice cream. "Writing the truth would be problematic. You couldn't run away with it."
Jealous of how graceful and acrobatic pretty much everyone else at this school was, Becky plopped back down onto her seat, angling the chair so she could face River. "I dunno, there has to be some truth in what I write, or else it isn't fanfic anymore. It's just... fiction, with really unoriginal characters." Besides, she would totally run away to Vegas and elope with the truth if it meant she got ringside seats to some of her favorite OTPs.
"So, are you part of any fandoms?" It wasn't a question Becky ever thought she'd open with, but she had been pleasantly surprised with how geeky the school as a whole was.
River frowned a little as she thought over the question. "No. Too many people I don't know, can't feel - it isn't safe."
"It isn't safe?" Becky had no idea what that meant. "Too many other people in the fandom, like online? Or too many characters in the show?"
River gave her a look, the sort she usually reserved for Simon when he was being an idiot. "Characters can't touch me."
Becky... didn't fully understand that. But she shrugged it off. "Well, that's good, at least. It would suck if you couldn't enjoy all the awesome shows and books out there. But the other fans are a different story?" Becky usually saw them as some form of 'character' - made up of story arcs and back stories plot twists - but she guessed that it might be different for a psychic.
"They can't be felt - measured - assessed," River replied, not liking where her mind was going. She didn't want to think of these things. "Intruders. Are you watching it?"
Becky shrugged with a 'fair enough' attitude, licking at a trail of melted ice cream that was trying to escape down her cone. "Oh man!" She replied after getting it all. "There are just way too many shows, way too little time! It's like ten times harder to maintain my TV schedule here than it was at home - but I guess that will happen when you actually try to do okay in class?" She didn't exactly care about her schoolwork, but she had promised to at least try. "But I take it, it's something I should look into?"
"Here come the drums," River warned her. Becky probably liked him.
Before she could even process why, Becky's entire body tensed, prepared to flee. As she realized what River had said, she slowly relaxed with an embarassed chuckle. "Sorry about that..." The Master was complex and misunderstood and just deliciously interesting - but he was also unhinged in a way that Becky just couldn't wrap her head around. And his Toclafane were pretty much the creepiest things, ever.
A thought hitting her, Becky whipped her head up. "Wait, is this a Who spin-off about the Master?"
By the time Becky relaxed, River had managed to push back, so that she was ensconced in between a set of cupboards and the angle of the wall, suddenly breathing short and hard. When Becky relaxed, so did she, and she forced herself to rely on her here and now. "No," she finally managed to say, still stuck in that corner of the kitchen, on top of the counter.
Becky's eyes widened as she saw where River was now perched. "Oh shit! Sorry!" She wasn't really sure what had happened to the other girl in the past, but she knew it hadn't been pleasant. Oh shit! She shouldn't be thinking about it! River was a psychic!
Scrambling for some happy thoughts, she looked desperately at her ice cream. Ice cream was good! The best, even! Just last week, she had written her first food smut based on... okay, probably should try to avoid thinking about Beautam fic, even if River seemed mostly okay with it. Looking at the oven, her mind flashed to her WIP of Dean nesting in the Men of Letters bunker, baking every type of pie imaginable, which had lead to... yeah, maybe she should try to avoid anything NC-17 in case River was feeling fragile? Determinedly, Becky turned to stare at one of the ceiling lights. Which, actually brought to mind...
Huffing out a laugh and covering her face with her hands, Becky apologized mentally and out loud. "I'm sorry I suck at this - but apparently all my happy thoughts involve naked men?"
"That's one way to fly," River said, under her breath, but she managed to move back from her corner, to the place where she had originally been sitting. She still felt a little off, but she picked up her abandoned cone from the counter, her hand curled around her pendant, a finger tracing along its curves.
With an embarrassed smile, Becky tried to send another mental apology River's way. Maybe it was a good thing River avoided fandom - like many a fangirl, Becky knew she reacted a bit... strongly to people mentioning characters. "Okay, well, now that I'm expecting the reference, I can totally rationally discuss the Master. But - the show isn't about Doctor Who?"
River shook her head, the cone in her hand following the movement so she could keep sucking on the ice cream inside. She pulled it away, swallowed, then gave her the key to everything. "The actor."
And suddenly it made sense. "Ooooohhh... Really? I don't think I've seen him in anything else! Is he good? He must be, right? What's the show about?" Becky leaned forward in excitement.
Before, the too loud enthusiasm would have been easier to cope with, but now River felt over sensitive, and it was a great effort not to crush the cone in her hand. She leaned back instinctively, as if that would help put distance between Becky's feelings, and herself. "There are two souls inside us, and some know how to activate the dormant consciousness."
Blinking, confused, Becky took a lick of her cone to try to process that. "That's either the tag line for the show, or something really deep and over my head." She wouldn't put the latter past River - the girl seemed wicked smart.
"Maybe it's both," River said quietly. She didn't like the thought of being taken over by another consciousness, but sometimes, it felt like she used to be somebody else altogether.
"Well! That sounds pretty psychologically interesting. I'll have to check it out! Though, I did just start watching a show with Victor, and I kinda maybe just started watching Gilmore Girls on Netflix." Becky could feel a happy blush climb up her face - Jared Padalecki as Sam Winchester was a fine piece of sculpted man-flesh. Him as the adorable Dean Forester? It made her feel all giggly and warm inside.
That sort of warmth was much more easily manageable than what Doug felt around her, but River was beginning to suspect that her own reaction to his emotions was what made it so. Nothing was ever simple, but usually it was easier to untangle things - or it cost her nothing to leave things beautifully tangled. Wanting to get at the heart of it; maybe that was another sign of her recovery. Maybe her original self was fighting her way back. "Intruders is shorter," she finally settled on, eyeing Becky and feeling compelled to warn her. "But there is much less -" her lips quirked up at the words, so much more Becky's than hers, "eye candy."
"Well, it is a BBC show - or at least I'm assuming it is? Does the UK even have more than the BBC?" Or had she just been attributing all British television to the BBC? Well, it was irrelevant for her point. "The UK only has like, ten amazing actors, so they just run with them even if they aren't conventionally attractive. It's actually better for writing about them - because you can actually explore body insecurities without having to dance around major body perception issues." Her headcanon Sam and Dean occasionally got into who was prettier, but it always felt fake when she tried to make them legit think they were ugly.
River blinked a few times, took another lick of her ice cream, then offhandedly stated, "You ought to watch more British TV."
Grinning, Becky replied, "From your mouth to the teachers' ears. Homework is such a drag!" And then spent a few minutes frantically trying to get all the melting bits of her briefly-forgotten ice cream.
"I don't think the teachers would listen to me," River replied, and paused. "I don't think I'd listen to me." On that subject, anyway.
"I swear, there must be switch that gets flipped in your brain when you grow up, that you suddenly forget what it's like to be a kid. And you should always listen to yourself! Even if you're really wrong about something-" like that one time Becky had tried to write a Supernatural/My Little Pony crossover - "you won't be able to figure that out if you don't at least give it some thought!"
River considered that for a second, as she ate the last of her cone of ice cream. "That's very wise," she told Becky, and hopped off the counter.
"Really?" Becky wasn't usually accused of saying wise things. "Awesome! I'll have to post it somewhere!" She looked down at the sticky mess that her hands had been reduced to and reconsidered. "Well, maybe later. So, do you have anything exciting planned today?" She asked before taking a big bite out of the side of her cone.
"I don't know," River answered, and headed for the door. "I'm off to find out." She paused in the doorway, then offered. "You can come, if you like."
"Totally!" Becky shoved the last bit of her cone in her mouth and hurried over to the sink to rinse her hands before grabbing her computer and bag. "Should I drop this off first? Will this adventure involve running?"
"Most adventures do," River confirmed, deadly serious.
Becky just grinned at River. "Well, I vote that any running today is after boys, okay?"
"There are so many better reasons to run," River pointed out skeptically.
Becky's eyebrows rose in disbelief. "I certainly don't know of any."
River doubted that; you didn't watch Doctor Who without knowing a lot of better reasons to run. But instead of saying so, she held her hand out to Becky, much like he would have done with Rose. "Let's find out."
