#raleigh beckett anyone can fall

[bethanyactually]

I was tagged by @ladytharen to list ten comfort movies, and that is what I shall do!

The Mummy (1999) - This movie has its flaws, but also it is perfect.

Pride & Prejudice (2005) - I love all the many adaptations of P&P but this is the one I turn to when I just need something pretty and soothing to watch.

Josie and the Pussycats - This movie is just exactly my sense of humor, the satire about our advertising-saturated culture is on point, Alan Cumming is there, and the music slaps.

Groundhog Day - I have loved this movie for 30 years, I can recite every line of dialogue. The line "Paaastry, Larry?" gets quoted surprisingly often in our house.

Pacific Rim - Mako Mori. Raleigh Beckett. Giant robots powered by teamwork fighting giant aliens. And it's super gorgeous to look at.

That Thing You Do! - This movie is also perfect. And the music slaps. My only complaint is that I wish more people would watch it and write fanfic.

Say Anything - A very formative movie for me personally.

Little Women (1994) - I've enjoyed other adaptations but this is the adaptation of my heart, and a movie I am virtually always in the mood to watch.

The Princess Bride - As you wish!!!

You've Got Mail - Don't you love New York in the fall?

Low-key, no-pressure tagging a few folks from my recent activity: @the-errant-bard, @brazenbells, @silikat, @thepotentialpolyglot, @kiran-wears-science-blues, and anyone else who'd like to do this!

[lovesosweeet]

KNOW IT ALL x THE BAND CAMINO

part 8

a calum hood songfic

read 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7

tw: suicide

one year ago

Tillie isn’t a sound sleeper. The slightest movement, the smallest amount of light, and even the quietest sounds can wake her up. Calum is the opposite and can fall asleep whenever, wherever, for however long he’d like. 

When her phone starts buzzing at 4 am, she assumes it’s a spam call, so she ignores it. When it goes off again, she sighs, now wide awake. She takes it off the nightstand next to Calum’s bed and looks at the bright screen. 

2 missed calls from the Raleigh police department. 

Why’s she getting calls from North Carolina? She hasn’t been “home” since she was 18.

She gets out of the bed and heads to Calum’s kitchen, hitting the “call back” button and pressing the phone to her ear. It rings a few times before someone answers.

“Raleigh police department, how may I direct your call?”

“Hi, um, I just got two calls from this number.”

“What’s your name?”

“Tillie —sorry, Matilda Beckett.” 

The line goes quiet. 

“Hello?” She asks.

“Yes, Ms. Beckett, my colleague was trying to reach you. Just a moment. Let me transfer you to him.” 

Elevator music plays, and Tillie starts to get a little nervous. Her family doesn’t live in Raleigh, but that doesn’t mean they can’t have been visiting the city. Not that she wants to hear from her family. Would anyone in her family call her to bail them out of jail, despite not speaking to her for several years? 

“Ms. Beckett?” A new voice asks.

“This is she. And Tillie is fine.”

“Okay, thank you for giving us a call back, Tillie,” he says. “I have some, uh, unfortunate news to share with you this morning.” 

“Okay?” Her heart is hammering in her chest. What happened?

“It’s about your sister, Madison Beckett.”

Fucking hell. Not Maddie. Tillie still hasn’t ever answered one of her calls. She’s still too scared to face her. Was Maddie getting arrested her only hope to actually speak to Tillie?

“What about her?” 

“Tillie, I apologize that we have to deliver this news over the phone, but you were her emergency contact. Madison, unfortunately, passed away very early this morning.”

Everything feels stuck in her throat. Words, cries, questions… there’s a huge lump. A painful one. Her head is spinning. She doesn’t feel able to walk, so she just sits down in the middle of the floor in the kitchen. 

“Oh,” is all she’s able to say.

Tillie starts crying. She’s having a hard time breathing and the weight of the world feels like it’s pushing down on her chest. Calum's checkered black and white floors are dizzying, so she closes her eyes while she tries to stay coherent enough to listen to this man on the phone.

“Are you able to come and organize funeral arrangements? We will also need you to empty her apartment, and meet with her lawyers to discuss her will.” 

Is Tillie the only person in the world left to do that for Maddie? 

“Yes, I’ll get on the next flight to Raleigh. I live in Los Angeles.”

“Thank you, Ms. Beckett. My name is Officer Perez. I’ll shoot you a text with other information if this is a good phone number.”

“Sure, that works. Thank you.”

“Alright, I will see you whenever you’re able to get here.”

“Um, can I… ask, um, what happened?” 

Officer Perez sighs. “Maddie passed away from a drug overdose. She left a note, so it’s ruled as a suicide. I’m so sorry, Tillie.” 

Tillie feels like a shell of a human as she goes through her next set of motions. She grabs her shoes and sweatshirt from Calum’s bedroom. In the kitchen, she finds a sticky note that she can leave a note for Calum on. She’s sobbing as she writes the note. 

I need some space. I’m sorry. I love you.

She stares at the black ink on the blue paper and feels horrible for this being how she tells him she loves him. She’s leaving him. Maybe even forever. Does it matter if she says she loves him?

She sighs, crumpling the paper into a ball and stuffing it in her pocket. She rewrites the note without the last sentence and sticks it on the coffee machine, somewhere she knows Cal will notice it. 

As Tillie drives, she’s racked with guilt.

Her sister had tried for years to reach out to her. She was the reason she was kicked out. This all feels like her fault. She should have been there for her. 

Tillie feels like the blood is on her hands. 

She’s the reason her sister is gone. How is she supposed to let anyone be close enough to possibly do the same thing? She’s done so many bad things. Is someone as kind as Calum someone who should be with her?

How does she even tell anyone about this? Cal is the only one who knows anything about her sister. What will he think when he finds out she committed suicide? The only person to contact about her death was the person who had her thrown out of their family home. 

How fucked is that?

Tillie drives straight to LAX, headed to the information desk to figure out what the next flight is so she can get to RDU as quickly as possible. 

-

When Tillie lands in Raleigh, she rents a car and heads straight for the police department. She catches a glimpse of her sunken in eyes in the rear view, the blue bags underneath pulling out the blue in her irises. 

Officer Perez walks her through the whole thing that happened. Maddie didn’t show up for work, so her boss had the police do a wellness check when Maddie didn’t answer anyone’s calls or texts. They found her on the bathroom floor with an empty bottle of pills and a typed note on the bathroom counter.

He gives her the keys to her apartment so she can go collect everything and begin the process of emptying the apartment. Tillie doesn’t say anything at all except “okay” a few times. She’s stunned and feeling like the worst person to ever exist. 

A death. The death of her sister. It’s on her hands. 

Tillie drives to the apartment, immediately feeling like an outsider as she pulls in to the lot. She doesn’t want to talk to anyone, so she wanders around for a while to find the unit. When she finds it and gets in, she heads straight for the bathroom, which has caution tape on the doorway, but Officer Perez said she’d be allowed to take it down. 

She just wants to read the note. 

Tillie, I hope you read this.

I loved you. I missed you. I forgave you a long time ago. But you didn’t care. You were the only person left that I still considered family.

I guess it didn’t matter. 

I can’t live like this anymore. I’m so alone. I’ve always been so alone. 

Maybe my assets will be of use to you, at least more than they were to me. 

I’m proud of you, you know. You’re so talented. I always knew you’d go far.

Tell Mom and Dad they fucking suck for me, please? I don’t know if you speak to them anymore, but I doubt you do. That’s my last wish. You have to tell them they ruined my life. They're why I’m gone. 

You were what kept me going. The hope we’d have some kind of relationship. But I know now that’s not happening. 

I love you.

Maddie

Tillie looks up from the note and sees a stranger in the mirror. She sees a monster. Even though the note said that her parents were the reason that Maddie was gone, she can’t ignore the fact that she played a huge hand in it.

The pit in her stomach is only growing. She’s a horrible person, and she shouldn’t have anyone close to her. She can’t do this to anyone else. She fears she’ll betray someone again.

read next part!

[durindaina]

hmmm i think i like andrew garfield’s spiderman better because his peter parker gives me very similar vibes to charlie hunnam’s raleigh beckett

[screechthemighty]

Okay, but where is my gifset paralleling Steve Trevor in Wonder Woman saying “I can save today, but you can save tomorrow” and Raleigh Beckett in Pacific Rim saying “All I have to do is fall. Anyone can fall” because I need that kind of gut-punch in my life.

[polytropic-liar]

Today I was thinking about Mako Mori--as you do, and if you don’t maybe start I promise it will greatly improve the quality of your life--and thinking about how, though fanart eventually sold me on the idea of Mako/Raleigh as a sexual and romantic relationship, I still love best the world in my head where they don’t have sex. I was thinking about why, and what about that distinction is important to me for this particular work, and eventually I came to understand that it starts with two things: one, the fact that Mako is so incredible and that Raleigh as a character acts out the audiences’ own joy and respect and awe about her everything; and two, the deep, deep conviction that Raleigh Beckett is asexual.

Those are the building blocks of it, for me. Because he loves her so much, he is so besotted and in awe of her everything forever. And what’s more, the way he looks at her doesn’t seem the slightest bit artificial, because wouldn’t we all if she was in our lives? This is not one of those times where Love Between Two Names And Color Schemes Occurs Because The Plot Says So, this is basically the opposite, where two people who we understand as people react to each other by realizing they’re pretty damn incredible individuals and fucking transformative together. 

And thanks to the wonder of the Drift, Mako would never doubt that. Not for a second. So the minute they connected there, she knew exactly how he felt about her. Which, with ace!Raleigh in mind, means she experiences both the stunning magnitude of what he does feel and the quiet clarity of what he doesn’t. And I think that’s probably a pretty amazing gift, really, because how could she possibly react badly or be hurt by it when she’s inside the experience herself? Whatever she might have thought if this guy who was sighing on her every breath had said to her verbally that he wasn’t attracted to her physically, she isn’t going to think that because she can feel how it feels instead. How the depth of his feeling for her isn’t diminished by the dimension that it happens not to have. How “not attracted” is nothing like a rejection, not of any part of her including her beauty.

And I think maybe after feeling that, Mako wouldn’t really have trouble fitting herself into that understanding of what they are to each other? I don’t know if it would be true for anyone, but I think it would be true for her because she’s such a protector, is so ready to identify and uplift what is precious about someone and keep it safe, especially if it is threatened or fragile. And I think she would do that wholeheartedly for Raleigh’s feelings, she would see them for what they are, precious and valuable and worth her dedication. Especially for the woman who grew up with Stacker Pentecost showing her how respect for the totality of your own and others’ worth is a vital part of love. So though I don’t think she would ever come to identify as ace herself, I think she would come pretty quickly to identifying as a person who is happy and fulfilled in an asexual relationship.

The way they connect is just so immediately and obviously with their minds and hearts and basic selves, who the fuck even cares if their genitals aren’t heavily involved? Like, they move in sync. They respect and care for each other so much after two days’ acquaintance that they are going to beat the face in of anyone who looks at them funny. They are so excited to be around each other and inside each others’ heads that they beam helpless sunshine smiles during the apocalypse. That joy, that connection, that intimacy, is more valuable to me when sex doesn’t factor in. 

And I just see them growing old together and beating each other with sticks and building robots and being in love and literally never feeling like something is missing.