[fic] when the timing is right
fic: when the timing is right
fandom: tvd/btvs
pairing: caroline/buffy
word count: ~1190
recipient: for snogged who wanted third time is the charm or something with cookie dough references for the october meme
a/n:this pairing was super, super difficult for me to conceptualize for some reason? I know a lot of people ship elena/buffy and so caro/buff wasn't a huge stretch - but I so often put both of those girls with Dawnie (she is my queer queen who exists to seduce ladies everywhere) that placing caro/buff in the same place at the same time ended up being a challenge. anyway, I hope the product doesn't show those misgivings
[you were all just waiting for the coffee-shop AU but no one wanted to say anything... so here it is at last... you knew it would happen eventually]You think there isn’t anything worse than your own life.
You meet someone new and aren’t surprised after all.
Caroline can’t tell if all college campuses are mind-numbingly the same, or if she’s just getting old. Elena has the decency to laugh, her voice tinny and garbled through the cheap phone she bought last week. She doesn’t bother with nice things sometimes, lets herself be a poor college student eating noodles and microwavable meals. This only lasts a couple of months at most before she’s back to compelling herself designer heels.
Everyone has their own façade.
This time she is a journalism major, she loves studying the ways people twist and manipulate the truth. Her professors tell her she would be better suited in in the Humanities department, arguing over semantics and morality with the scholars they feel are no longer connected with the real world. She stubbornly stays and interrupts lectures with a smile and a bounce of her blonde curls.
She dies her hair brown with streaks of gold two weeks in and the TA in her Intro to Media Studies class flirts with her and they go out for a very dull cup of coffee. He name drops theorists she’s read before and finds dull, he breezes past everything she has to say with a carefully planned joke at her expense, she sits and takes it because it beats being home alone with the latest Sookie Stackhouse novel.
She won’t let him walk her home.
She loved the coffee and comes back to the tucked-away café the next week, skipping what was shaping up to be her favorite class because she can’t abide the thought of him smirking at her from across the lecture hall.
The woman who serves her is just slightly out of the age range of most working-college-students, but not so much that she stands out. She weaves her way between the crowded tables and side-steps the laptop cords and arguing post-grads with a strange sense of restrained power behind her grace. She never spills or forgets an order.
Caroline orders a chocolate chip cookie because it’s been a shit day (it’s been a normal day and that’s enough, too) and the woman’s eyes brighten.
I made them myself. Her voice is softer than Caroline was expecting, hopeful and a bit anxious.
Caroline smiles and takes a large bite.
It’s a bit too crunchy and chewy, but she smiles anyway, Great!
The woman beams and weaves her way back through the tables, her chin lifted just a bit higher than before.
Caroline makes it a point not to lie to strangers anymore.
She lies enough to her friends.
She can’t keep all the lies straight anymore.
Anyway, she can always compel humans to forget.
The cookie was all wrong and she smiled through it and ate the whole damn thing, washed it down with her coffee, and left a nice tip.
The following week she’s back and the woman is standing in front of her with her favorite (soy latte with a shot of vanilla) and a cookie.
You are a liar.
And I'm a good one, most of the time.
The woman rolls her eyes and sets down the cookie, The last batch was no good. You know it and I know it and my boss really knows it. So I tried again.
Caroline smiles and takes a bite of the cookie.
It’s too crunchy, tough. Like something you buy in a grocery store pretending to be homemade.
It’s good.
The woman’s nose wrinkles. There’s something wrong.
Caroline reaches for her hand, You’ll get it next time.
She’s back the next day.
She tells herself that it’s curiosity.
Or boredom.
The woman’s eyes are less bright than before. The cookies just as tough. But there’s a smaller crowd and they have more time to talk. She teases Caroline for her paperback vampire romances and Caroline feels halfway like a normal girl.
They go on like this for a while, crunchy cookies, soy lattes, paperback novels, she compels her way into a 4.0 and stops going to class, she was bored anyway. She considers picking up shifts at the café and then decides to write the next great American novel instead.
They learn a lot about each other.
Neither one of them gives much away.
Caroline finds it freeing to not be the only one with a shadow they’d rather ignore.
So they giggle and flirt and she feels rather scandalous about the whole affair.
They learn very little about each other.
It all feels really easy.
In the moments when it starts to feel like there may be something more, that maybe tonight she’ll stay past closing and they’ll walk home in the moonlight like two normal girls or they’ll go to the movies together or Caroline will stop pretending to have her schedule memorized and Buffy will stop pretending to not notice that she doesn’t attend classes anymore, someone pulls away.
They both have their reasons for keeping their hearts close to their chest.
Caroline thinks they knew what they were the minute she sat down in that café on that terrible date with that boring TA.
A vampire.
A Slayer.
They ignore it until they can’t.
They ignore it again once the damage is done.
They stay in the café and Caroline writes her novel (kinda) and Buffy perfects her cookie recipe (not really) and pretend to be girls for as long as possible.
It’s the freest she’s ever felt.
You know, you aren’t supposed to keep them in the oven until they’re done cooking.
What do you mean?
I mean cookies - chocolate chip cookies - you take them out of the oven when the insides are still a bit gooey and mushy. That’s how it works.
But then they won’t cook all the way through.
No. They carry the heat with them out of the oven. You take them out, but they keep on baking.
So you have to take them out early?
That’s the tricky part of chocolate chip cookies. You have to time it just right. You can’t take them out too soon, or you’ll have goop on your hands.
So before they are done, but not before they aren’t done.
You take them out when they’re ready to do the rest of the work on their own.
Three months after that first hard cookie, Buffy presents Caroline with a cookie that is just right.
It’s after hours and they have the shop all to themselves.
Buffy presses a kiss to Caroline’s lips and then pulls back sharply, I’m sorry. Are we… are you ready for…?
Caroline shrugs and pulls her closer, I guess it’s time for us to stop waiting for the world to do our work for us.
Buffy’s smile is sad and it’s such a mirror to the smile she tries to hide that Caroline can’t bring herself to kiss it away.
She buries her face into the older girl’s neck and they keep pretending to be normal.
(There’s some things you just can’t prepare for.
There’s other things they won’t ever be ready for.
Oh well. Caroline guesses that’s what love is.)
note: an unexpected trip just clicked into place (yay) which means that the dates for the next week are (possibly) going to get shuffled around a little bit. if you are expecting a fic from me and it doesn't come - just give me a couple of days to catch up!
fandom: tvd/btvs
pairing: caroline/buffy
word count: ~1190
recipient: for snogged who wanted third time is the charm or something with cookie dough references for the october meme
a/n:this pairing was super, super difficult for me to conceptualize for some reason? I know a lot of people ship elena/buffy and so caro/buff wasn't a huge stretch - but I so often put both of those girls with Dawnie (she is my queer queen who exists to seduce ladies everywhere) that placing caro/buff in the same place at the same time ended up being a challenge. anyway, I hope the product doesn't show those misgivings
[you were all just waiting for the coffee-shop AU but no one wanted to say anything... so here it is at last... you knew it would happen eventually]You think there isn’t anything worse than your own life.
You meet someone new and aren’t surprised after all.
Caroline can’t tell if all college campuses are mind-numbingly the same, or if she’s just getting old. Elena has the decency to laugh, her voice tinny and garbled through the cheap phone she bought last week. She doesn’t bother with nice things sometimes, lets herself be a poor college student eating noodles and microwavable meals. This only lasts a couple of months at most before she’s back to compelling herself designer heels.
Everyone has their own façade.
This time she is a journalism major, she loves studying the ways people twist and manipulate the truth. Her professors tell her she would be better suited in in the Humanities department, arguing over semantics and morality with the scholars they feel are no longer connected with the real world. She stubbornly stays and interrupts lectures with a smile and a bounce of her blonde curls.
She dies her hair brown with streaks of gold two weeks in and the TA in her Intro to Media Studies class flirts with her and they go out for a very dull cup of coffee. He name drops theorists she’s read before and finds dull, he breezes past everything she has to say with a carefully planned joke at her expense, she sits and takes it because it beats being home alone with the latest Sookie Stackhouse novel.
She won’t let him walk her home.
She loved the coffee and comes back to the tucked-away café the next week, skipping what was shaping up to be her favorite class because she can’t abide the thought of him smirking at her from across the lecture hall.
The woman who serves her is just slightly out of the age range of most working-college-students, but not so much that she stands out. She weaves her way between the crowded tables and side-steps the laptop cords and arguing post-grads with a strange sense of restrained power behind her grace. She never spills or forgets an order.
Caroline orders a chocolate chip cookie because it’s been a shit day (it’s been a normal day and that’s enough, too) and the woman’s eyes brighten.
I made them myself. Her voice is softer than Caroline was expecting, hopeful and a bit anxious.
Caroline smiles and takes a large bite.
It’s a bit too crunchy and chewy, but she smiles anyway, Great!
The woman beams and weaves her way back through the tables, her chin lifted just a bit higher than before.
Caroline makes it a point not to lie to strangers anymore.
She lies enough to her friends.
She can’t keep all the lies straight anymore.
Anyway, she can always compel humans to forget.
The cookie was all wrong and she smiled through it and ate the whole damn thing, washed it down with her coffee, and left a nice tip.
The following week she’s back and the woman is standing in front of her with her favorite (soy latte with a shot of vanilla) and a cookie.
You are a liar.
And I'm a good one, most of the time.
The woman rolls her eyes and sets down the cookie, The last batch was no good. You know it and I know it and my boss really knows it. So I tried again.
Caroline smiles and takes a bite of the cookie.
It’s too crunchy, tough. Like something you buy in a grocery store pretending to be homemade.
It’s good.
The woman’s nose wrinkles. There’s something wrong.
Caroline reaches for her hand, You’ll get it next time.
She’s back the next day.
She tells herself that it’s curiosity.
Or boredom.
The woman’s eyes are less bright than before. The cookies just as tough. But there’s a smaller crowd and they have more time to talk. She teases Caroline for her paperback vampire romances and Caroline feels halfway like a normal girl.
They go on like this for a while, crunchy cookies, soy lattes, paperback novels, she compels her way into a 4.0 and stops going to class, she was bored anyway. She considers picking up shifts at the café and then decides to write the next great American novel instead.
They learn a lot about each other.
Neither one of them gives much away.
Caroline finds it freeing to not be the only one with a shadow they’d rather ignore.
So they giggle and flirt and she feels rather scandalous about the whole affair.
They learn very little about each other.
It all feels really easy.
In the moments when it starts to feel like there may be something more, that maybe tonight she’ll stay past closing and they’ll walk home in the moonlight like two normal girls or they’ll go to the movies together or Caroline will stop pretending to have her schedule memorized and Buffy will stop pretending to not notice that she doesn’t attend classes anymore, someone pulls away.
They both have their reasons for keeping their hearts close to their chest.
Caroline thinks they knew what they were the minute she sat down in that café on that terrible date with that boring TA.
A vampire.
A Slayer.
They ignore it until they can’t.
They ignore it again once the damage is done.
They stay in the café and Caroline writes her novel (kinda) and Buffy perfects her cookie recipe (not really) and pretend to be girls for as long as possible.
It’s the freest she’s ever felt.
You know, you aren’t supposed to keep them in the oven until they’re done cooking.
What do you mean?
I mean cookies - chocolate chip cookies - you take them out of the oven when the insides are still a bit gooey and mushy. That’s how it works.
But then they won’t cook all the way through.
No. They carry the heat with them out of the oven. You take them out, but they keep on baking.
So you have to take them out early?
That’s the tricky part of chocolate chip cookies. You have to time it just right. You can’t take them out too soon, or you’ll have goop on your hands.
So before they are done, but not before they aren’t done.
You take them out when they’re ready to do the rest of the work on their own.
Three months after that first hard cookie, Buffy presents Caroline with a cookie that is just right.
It’s after hours and they have the shop all to themselves.
Buffy presses a kiss to Caroline’s lips and then pulls back sharply, I’m sorry. Are we… are you ready for…?
Caroline shrugs and pulls her closer, I guess it’s time for us to stop waiting for the world to do our work for us.
Buffy’s smile is sad and it’s such a mirror to the smile she tries to hide that Caroline can’t bring herself to kiss it away.
She buries her face into the older girl’s neck and they keep pretending to be normal.
(There’s some things you just can’t prepare for.
There’s other things they won’t ever be ready for.
Oh well. Caroline guesses that’s what love is.)
note: an unexpected trip just clicked into place (yay) which means that the dates for the next week are (possibly) going to get shuffled around a little bit. if you are expecting a fic from me and it doesn't come - just give me a couple of days to catch up!