#but what the fuck is a 32 year old’s face and disposition supposed to look like?

[ovisiphorus]

I know this person thinks they’re the protagonist, but they genuinely sound like a fucking freak. Bitch, what are you fucking jawing about? Yeah. COVID did a number alright. A number on you…

[ours-is-feral-love]

Summary: Caroline’s dog goes into labour in the middle of the night, and the only person who can help is her neighbour, Klaus. Who she happens to hate. Very much.

​Help Me, Hate Me, Love Me

She wakes up to a scratching on her door. Her eyes snap open. The dark room is silent save for the small fan whirring in the corner, there only to combat the New Orleans heat. She waits, her breath held, her heart colliding with her ribs, for a repeat of the scratching. After a few moments of quiet, she settles back underneath the covers and closes her eyes. It must have been a branch on her window. Or a phantom noise in a dream. Nothing to worry about. 

Several seconds after she closes her eyes, the scratching returns. She sits up, frightened despite her usually rational disposition. Pressing her silk nightgown against her chest, she takes in a single deep breath and goes over her options. She can call the police. But that would be silly - she doesn't even know what the source of the scratching is. It could be nothing and then she would be humiliated for wasting police time. She can grab the scissors on her bedside table and investigate. If it is someone breaking in, hopefully they don’t have a gun. She hasn't played this specific twist game of rock, paper, scissors, but she is fairly certain gun beats scissors every time. 

Or, she can listen to the rational parts of her brain - truly, the majority - and leave the scissors and her cell phone and check on the rest of her small house by herself. She is brave enough for that. 

Climbing out of bed, Caroline Forbes straightens the lacy bottom of her nightgown against her thighs and tucks her blond hair behind her ears. One must look confident to be confident. She has always thought so. Heading for the door, she swings it wide open as if to spook whatever intruders may be lurking on the other side. She almost says ha! But there are no large men wearing black ski masks and brandishing guns. There is only a fat border collie lying on the floor outside her room, her head lifting just enough to look Caroline in the eye. 

"Hey, Addie, what's the matter?" Caroline asks, crouching. She weaves her fingers through the dogs thick fur. Addie whines in response and looks at Caroline pleadingly. 

Caroline frowns. Smoothing her hand lower to Addie's swollen belly, Caroline's eyes go wide. "No," she whispers. Of course. How could she forget? "But..." she sputters, "but you're not due for another week!" 

But there is no other explanation for the scratching at the door and the lethargy and that human-like glint in her dark eyes. Addie is in labour. Her puppies are coming. 

And Caroline has no clue what she is doing. 

Scrambling to her feet, Caroline races to the closet outside her bathroom and grabs the dog birthing bag she gathered when she discovered the first foster dog she ever brought home was pregnant. She rushes back to Addie. Her mind races as she dumps the bag at her feet. Out pours the whelping kit - a handful of old newspapers, cheap towels, a couple of raggedy bed sheets, a pair of round tip scissors plus a haemostat she is not prepared to use in the slightest, and dental floss in case Addie starts bleeding from one of the umbilical cords. She gets to her knees and quickly sorts through everything, placing each item to the side in order of when she should need to use it. 

"Okay," she says aloud after spreading the sheets and newspaper out and helping Addie on to the makeshift bed. "We can do this, right, girl?" she asks. Addie side-eyes her. "Yeah, I'm kinda freaking out too. And I guess you can pick up on that. But it's okay, because we've got the internet on our side!" She waves her cell phone around. Addie continues looking unconvinced, and Caroline thinks this is the most judgemental look anyone has ever given her. 

Twenty minutes pass by and nothing has happened, and Caroline starts thinking that they do not, in fact, have this under any sort of control. She panics internally, hoping Addie cannot pick up on her freak out but knowing damn well she can. 

All of the websites she has looked at say to phone the vet if a puppy hasn't been delivered within one-two hours of the start of active labour, but Caroline doesn't actually know what that means. 

"I'm gonna kill you and your puppies, aren't I?" she says, stroking Addie's belly. The dog whines as if asking, begging, for help. "No, I was kidding. I hope. We can do this. You can do this!"

Another ten minutes goes with no movement. 

She cannot do this. Nor can Addie it appears. 

Caroline gets to her feet and starts pacing. Then she remembers something she wishes she didn't remember. One of her neighbours grew up on a breeding farm. The thought sours Caroline's tongue, but if he can help in any way, it would not only save Caroline a huge load of money, it would mean getting this done sooner rather than agonisingly later. 

The only issue is that she and this particular neighbour have never gotten along well. Literally never. The first day Caroline moved in, he rebuffed her offer of homemade triple caramel cupcakes and they have been practical enemies ever since. 

Does she really want to invite him inside her house? 

Addie makes up Caroline's mind for her. She lets out a long, pained whimper and Caroline finds herself banging on the man's door one minute later, wishing she had put something over her rather revealing nightgown. 

It doesn't take long for him to come to the door. 

"Who the fuck do you think you are," he says as the door opens, "knocking on my door at two o'clock in the fucking morning?" 

He is dressed about as indecently as her. He is in boxer shorts and nothing else, and in the moonlight his sinewy torso glistens. His bronze curls are a mess atop his head. Stubble dots his cheeks. Sleep invades the corners of his blue eyes. 

Caroline wastes no time. "My dog is in labour. I need your help. Something isn't going right. Please." She didn't have to add the please. She actually wishes she hadn't. The British bastard doesn’t deserve it. 

A look of pure confusion wafts over his sleepy face. He scratches his jaw. "Is this a dream?" he asks, his eyes wandering to her breasts. 

Caroline stands her ground. "Are you gonna help me or not?"

He rolls his eyes. "I've not aided in a delivery since I was 17."

"Right. Well, I've never done this, so I think the fact that it's only been fifteen years for you compared to thirty years for me, is a fucking ridiculous point for you to make."

"You think I'm only 32," he says, his hand going to his chest. "How flattering."

"I don't care how old you are! Will you help me? Please." The damn word sneaks out again. 

"Fine. For the dog. Not for you."

"Thank you," she says, ignoring the jab. 

And that is how she ends up with Klaus Mikaelson standing in her upstairs landing wearing only his boxer shorts and a pair of latex gloves. 

Her friend back home in Virginia, Bonnie, would be freaking out if she saw him. She has always had this wild idea that they secretly want to jump each other's bones. Caroline supposes she isn't all wrong. If she had a chance to jump on Klaus's literal bones, she might take it. 

"You're not happy, are you? You want them out and they're just not coming," Klaus says soothingly. His hand goes back and forth over Addie's belly. The furry beast looks at Klaus with no condescension in her eyes. 

"Is anything seriously wrong?" 

Klaus, seemingly reluctantly, looks over his shoulder at her. "I don't think so. She isn't in distress. She's just uncomfortable. We can get these pups out without issue, I think."

"Oh, thank god." Caroline leans against the wall and smiles. For the next however long, she can put her hatred for Klaus in a little box and then as soon as these puppies are all out, they can go right back to seriously disliking one another.

 . . .

"And that's the last one," Klaus says, handing the wriggling, slimy thing to Caroline before removing his gloves. She wipes it off, giggling, and places it beside the other five, and takes off her own gloves.

It took nearly an hour for all six to come out, but there they are. All goopy, tiny, and the cutest things Caroline has ever seen. Addie nudges them, cleaning the stuff Caroline did not get to. 

"We did it!" Caroline exclaims to Klaus, standing at the same time as him. He is covered in blood and fluid. And he is smiling. She doesn't think she's ever seen him smile. It suits him. "We fucking did it!"

She goes in to hug him. At least, she thinks that was her first instinct. Hug. 

But it isn't a hug. 

In a momentary lapse of common sense, maybe because of all of the adrenaline, it is their mouths that meet. Caroline almost squeals in surprise. Her eyes close as her lips press against Klaus's. His hands cup her cheeks. Hers hold his forearms. 

He tastes like mint. 

Heat blooms across her cheeks, and when she finally pulls herself away, she is panting. 

"Um," she says, placing her hands on her hips, "thanks, by the way. For your, uh, for your help."

He shrugs, sitting back against the opposite wall as if they did not just spend a few long seconds with their tongues in each other's mouths. "I'm sure you could have done it. I think she could just pick up on how terrified you were. She needed a stable influence."

Caroline scoffs. "Right. You, stable."

"I've done this countless times. She knew that I was better prepared than you," he says smugly.

"She's my dog," Caroline defends. "She trusts me."

"Clearly not enough to safely deliver her puppies."

Now that the ordeal is over, that box snaps open. "Whatever. Thanks for your help, Klaus, but you can go now. I've got this." Caroline makes a move for the bathroom, and suddenly someone is clutching her wrist. She looks down. 

"Wait, wait, I'm sorry," Klaus says. Another first. After all the things he's done - mowing over her flower bed because it apparently was creeping on to his lawn; calling the police on her when she has having a small get together with work friends all because he didn't like the music they were listening to; sneering at her and Addie whenever they passed him on a run; kissing her - he has never apologised. "I'm glad I was able to help. This just brings back all sorts of unhappy memories."

He is still holding her wrist. His touch is warm. Hot. Blistering against her skin. 

She wants to pull away, but she doesn't want him to stop talking. 

"What kind of unhappy memories?"

His eyes go in a circle. "All you shrinks are the same," he says. But he goes on, his hand around her wrist, his index finger pressed against her pulse point. "When I was kid in England, I had this dog. His name was Doodles"--

--"Doodles?" 

"Right, you Americans don't know what the Tweenies is. Doodles is a puppet dog from a British kids show."

"Ah." Caroline nods her head. "Go on."

Klaus lets go of her wrist and she suddenly feels ice cold. "Well, I loved this dog. He was my best mate, and for a while I thought he'd never die." Klaus stares at the puppies, and Caroline's stomach turns over. "Well, when I was 17, my dad found out I'd been sneaking out at night. He didn't like that. So, he took Doodles and shot him. Right in front of me as punishment for disobeying him."

Caroline's jaw goes slack. She wants to say something, but how the fuck does one respond to that? 

"I - I'm so sorry," is what she settles on. She looks down at Addie. In just a couple of months, the dog has managed to climb inside Caroline's heart. She can't imagine losing her. And she can't imagine what it would be like if in ten years someone took her and killed her. Someone she was supposed to trust. "That's horrible."

He shrugs again. As if it's nothing. "I left that afternoon. Crashed on couches doing odd jobs until I could afford a ticket to the States. Wound up here. I'm happy now, I think." 

Caroline doesn't think, but she refuses to say that out loud. 

"I should go," he says, getting to his feet. He looms over Caroline even though he can't be more than a few inches taller. 

"Yeah, okay," she says softly. Then she says something else. Something stupid. Something she would never normally say. "Or, you could stick around. We're both pretty disgusting. I have a shower that can easily fit two people."

She will forever blame it on the excitement of safely getting the pups out of Addie. On Klaus’s sob story. On Bonnie’s insistence that they were secretly in love with each other.

But it was the kiss. On top of everything else, it was the kiss. And those eyes. Those sad blue eyes.

Klaus tilts his head. He looks exactly like Addie when she's perplexed. "I thought you hated me."

"So what if I do?" she challenges.

"I thought I hated you," he says.

"Again, so. What."

He smiles again, only this one is darker. Dangerous. 

"Lead the way," he says. 

Caroline matches his smile and reaches for his hand.  

[bettsfic]

Hey so like...how do u justify romanticising a minor/adult relationship bc as a minor it kinda makes me uncomfortable. You’re an amazing writer, I just don’t quite get why you chose the age gap

before i address your question directly, and i will, i want to point out a few things that confuse me about this ask.

first, the admission of being a minor with the implication you’ve read my work, and now outright interacting with me. i’ve written maybe half a dozen g- and t-rated fics, and none of them are particularly popular, which i’m guessing means you’ve read my explicit fics, which means you’ve clicked past Ao3′s polite “18+ only” warning. my apologies if this assumption is incorrect – maybe you really have only read my three or four gen/teen-rated fics. that just seems very unlikely to me because all of my more popular fics are mature and explicit.

now, while admitting you are a minor made uncomfortable by minor/adult relationships, you have directly approached me, a 29 year old woman, to ask me why i’ve made the choices i’ve made. granted, by going on anon, you’ve ensured that this is a public forum, but if you’d PM’d me, i wouldn’t have responded, because i am not here to interact with minors.

which brings me to my conclusion of this portion of the ask, which is: i am not writing for minors and i do not want to interact with minors. i can’t control what you read or don’t read and it’s absolutely not my responsibility to cater to you in any way, especially if you knowingly and voluntarily click past the 18+ warning. but i can control my personal interactions, and i urge you not to reach out to me again. 

next i’m going to nitpick the word “romanticize” which is a word heavy in the current moral rhetoric. literally speaking, you are right. i am making an age gap romance romantic. rhetorically speaking, to “romanticize” something means to flatten or gloss over it, sweep potential consequences under the rug. to romanticize abuse, for example, is to make it beautiful, to ignore all the trauma and pain that comes along with it. (i think it is a worthy artistic endeavor to attempt to romanticize abuse in fiction, if for only the ability to highlight how fucked up abusive relationships can feel in the moment, but that’s a rant for another time).

since you haven’t read training wheels, i can tell you outright i am not romanticizing a minor/adult relationship. there are certainly unrealistic/porny moments, but i’m not shying away from the actual emotional consequences of being a 17yo* girl dating a 25yo man. i’m doing my best to depict this relationship the way these relationships are actually felt, because they do happen, and i have been in them. they can be very romantic, but that doesn’t mean i’m romanticizing them. though we’re not in his pov, bellamy is acutely aware of the greater context of their relationship. and clarke, who has no context, is doing her best to navigate the difficulty of her situation, semi-aware that it’s something that will be haunting her for a long, long time. 

i am not beautifying the ugliness of their relationship; i am not fetishizing (another word i take issue with) the minor body. being in clarke’s pov means that bellamy is object of desire, and meanwhile we get, through clarke’s thoughts, the sometimes awkward and confusing realization of what it means to be wanted, loved, used, seen, broken, trespassed, and all the other things teenage girls sometimes have to navigate. 

and i have one more thing to say before i answer your actual question: you are allowed to be uncomfortable reading fiction. in fact, i think you should be uncomfortable reading fiction. all art should make us uncomfortable, because in discomfort lies broader awareness. by consuming things which push at the boundaries of our narrow reality, we are capable of widening that reality, and that’s what it means to learn and grow and become the people we want to be. you cannot become a better, stronger, wiser person without facing and overcoming that which makes you uncomfortable. 

i also resent a bit the implication that i, a fanfic writer, a queer woman, am beholden to appeasing your comfort when straight white male writers are not. i assume you’re not sending jroth letters about how murphy’s sex slavery arc in s3 made you uncomfortable. or that the entire premise of the show revolves around putting a hundred minors in a ship and dropping them onto a potentially lethal planet. or raven, a teenager, sleeping with bellamy, an adult, in s1. and that’s not even mentioning the violence perpetuated against minors in the show. they die! and they bleed! like, a lot!! charlotte, a 12yo girl, dies a gruesome death in s1. they are minors forced to kill or be killed in exceedingly violent ways, and you’re in my inbox asking why i’m writing a fic that depicts a loving and consensual relationship between a 17yo (clarke’s canonical age in s1) and a 25yo. 

now i’ll answer your actual ask.

you use the word “justify” as if i had to do some kind of logistical puzzle to make this fic morally okay in my eyes. i can tell you now, i did not, because the story exists to navigate that logistical puzzle on its own. the conflict poses the question: is this okay? is this wrong? what about it is wrong? for what reasons is it wrong? and i also attempt (in a clunky way because it’s a bit rough, plot-wise) to navigate what “informed consent” really means to a 17yo who has no information to go off of. for me it’s an experiment in what consent really is. clarke wants bellamy, but she doesn’t have a full awareness of the consequences of that want, so is it truly consensual? what does bellamy have to do to fully inform her of those consequences? is it even his responsibility, or should clarke take more agency over her experiences? and lastly, the most interesting question of them all to me – what happens to the minors in consensual age gap relationships? how do they cope with that experience years later? in what ways does it change them?

though it’s not my responsibility to indulge my personal ties to this conflict in order to further “justify” it, i can assure you, i am writing this from clarke’s pov having been the younger party in many age gap relationships, at times a minor. at times coerced. at times completely uninformed. but each time, consensual. i sought out the men i dated. i took the lead. i propositioned them. and i consider: how has that affected me and the way i love now? 

my mom at 20, married my dad, 32. my older sister at 16, met her (now ex) husband, her then-boss, at 23 (they waited until she was 18 to start dating). i dated an 18yo and then a 19yo when i was 14. a 21yo when i was 16. a 32yo when i was 19. a 47yo when i was 22. but i also had a long-term relationship with someone who was just three months younger than me. age gap is not the only way i know how to love, but it is certainly a way to love, and one i find, in lieu of seeking it out in reality, narratively compelling. so i write about those experiences in order to better understand them now that i’m older. in order to take them apart and piece them back together. in order to, in some cases, relive them, because i enjoyed so much about them. 

i don’t pursue older men anymore because i no longer seek male validation. i don’t meet a handsome middle-aged man and need him to love me to feel like my existence in the world is warranted. but that doesn’t mitigate all the old habits and drive and potentially genetic disposition that led me to relentlessly pursuing them in the first place. so now i sublimate that into fiction and offer my experience and understanding to others who might be predisposed in the same way, or people who are not and curious about what that experience is like. and that’s what fiction does.

lastly, i’ve sort of saturated myself in age gap stories. i’ve watched every age gap movie i can get my hands on, read every book. i dive through google and ao3 looking for age gap recs, seeking out the one story or fic or movie that not only gets the relationship right, but figures out how to make it work. that’s all i want – a realistic, plausible solution to this very delicate and complicated kind of relationship. and i can’t find that story, so i’ve decided to write it myself. 

training wheels is an uncomfortable story about a romantic minor/adult relationship and the realistic psychological consequences of it, both in the immediate present and long-term, and you are supposed to be made uncomfortable by it, regardless of your age. it makes romantic but does not romanticize age gap relationships. i do not take the morality of this story lightly, nor its meaning or intentions. whether i succeed in this is up to interpretation, and i can’t control that interpretation, but i can tell you with certainty what my intentions have been going into this story, and exactly why i’ve made the decisions i’ve made regarding it. 

*the age of consent in ohio, where training wheels is set, is 16. i recognize the current rhetoric around this is “legality is not morality” or whatever, but again – the purpose of training wheels is in part to directly address this conflict