Picks 'cuddle' in 30💎 scenes

(i dont ship them btw)

Summary: Beckett prides himself on being familiar with every branch of magick, but this particular spell? He can’t work it out at all.

Word Count: 1,900

Book: The Elementalists

Pairing: Beckett Harrington x MC (Freya Brindley)

Author Note: This is just ridiculously indulgent. Horrible bus rides have that effect.

“You don’t have to do that all the time, you know.”

“Do… what?”

“The… well, it’s not strictly speaking a glamour because there is no rearrangement in the visible spectrum, but it’s similar.” And it as something that he hadn’t yet found in any of the text books he’d tried. “You’re casting it continuously, but your energy levels don’t seem to deplete. And you don’t eat an excessive amount –“

“Now hold on, you’ve seen me at breakfast.”

“What I mean to say is, you are using your magick without pause and without noticeably replenishing. You are powerful, but that is extraordinary and I want to know how.”

“Beckett, I have no idea what you’re on about. I think I’d know if I was casting something continuously.”

“Are you saying you’re not?”

I’m saying I’m not.” She looks up at him with an unwavering, challenging gaze.

Beckett scowls. “You’re doing it right now!”

“Am not!”

“You are!” he protests, “That… thing where you juggle people’s insides and turn their minds fuzzy and jumble their speech and why are you looking at me like that?”

She’s trying not to laugh, but he’s surprised to notice that her cheeks have turned pink.

“Oh…” she says, her voice impossibly gentle. “Beckett, really?”

“Really what?” With a start, he wonders whether she even realises that she’s doing it. That would be a level of power he has never encountered before. Are all Sun-Atts like this?

Freya bites her lip and slides off the bench to stand in front of him. For a few seconds she just looks at him with her head tilted to one side before she gives a short nod and smiles.

“I want to try something,” she says, “An experiment.”

“You… what?”

“I want to… erm… test the spell. Close your eyes.”

Ha! So she finally admits it. With a smug smile, Beckett stands straight and hesitates for a moment before closing his eyes. When she speaks again, he turns his head to follow her voice.

“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. When I ask, if the spell feels stronger I want you to say ‘more’. If it feels weaker, you say ‘less’. If you want me to stop, say ‘stop’. I want to check how it works and it’s not something I could ask most people.”

“Yes… well… most people aren’t as perceptive as me.”

“Uh huh. Yep. That’s it. Exactly. Whatever you say.”

He can hear in her voice that she’s trying not to laugh and he frowns, almost opening his eyes to check.

“So we’ll call this the starting point,” she says and he hears a rustle of fabric. “More or less now than normal?”

Beckett considers. “Slightly less,” he said. Interesting. Perhaps there is some visual element to this spell, even if it’s not a glamour. Certainly its effects are increased by eye contact, he’d worked that out weeks ago. This could be a useful experiment for him too, to figure out exactly how this spell of hers works.

He hears soft footsteps on the wooden floor and then silence. A long silence. Beckett starts to fidget. Is this a prank? Has she left him standing alone in the middle of the library while she runs off to laugh about the whole thing with her friends? Just as he’s given her up for gone, something nudges his hand and he lets out a startled yelp.

“Sorry.” Her voice is a murmur now and filled with warmth. And right by his ear. Beckett’s skin prickles as he pictures how close she must be, how she must be standing on tiptoes and leaning towards him for her breath to be tickling his skin like that. “More or less?” Was her voice this smooth before? Is this part of it? Tremors skitter up Beckett’s spine and he squeezes his eyes more tightly shut to stop himself from opening them.

“More,” he says, and is rather pleased at how steady his voice is, considering.

A beat, and then there’s that touch again. Slower now, fingers brushing over his palm. Freya take his hand in hers, her thumb rubbing back and forth across his knuckles in slow, gentle sweeps. Deep in his chest, he can feel his heartbeat quicken.

“More or less?”

“More.” Definitely more. The entire surface of his skin feels heated.

“Beckett,” she sighs and he feels the breath rush from him in one go. Her voice is laced with magick that sinks deep into his bones. Even if he hadn’t known that names had their own kind of power, the way she whispered his can only be a spell. She sounds so gentle and soothing, like blankets worn out to fuzzy softness.

“M- More.” It takes him a moment, this time, to collect himself. This is a strong spell, he realises, and not like any he has come across before, in person or in books. The sound of his name in her voice like that, her making it caress his very core, is making him thrum like a plucked string.

She moves closer, close enough that her breath ghosts along his jaw. “Oh, Beckett,” she whispers again. Her fingers lace with his. “Haven’t you realised yet?”

He frowns at that, thrown off and confused. He hasn’t missed anything, he’s sure. He’s so caught up in thinking that when her free hand traces his hairline he lets out a groan before he can stop himself.

For a few moments, Freya doesn’t speak. Her fingers comb slowly through his hair and he is aware of her touch in every follicle. He can feel the tension in his spine melting away and has to bite back another moan. She pauses, then squeezes his hand.  He squeezes back, ‘I’m okay’. Her spell may be utterly disarming, but he has never felt bliss like this before.

“It happens to me, too,” she whispers as her hand comes down to cup his cheek. It takes everything he has not to lean into her touch.

“You… What?”

“It happens to me.” Her palm is cool and her thumb is brushing a distractingly slow line back and forth along his cheekbone. “When you look at me like you can’t work out what I am… when you blush… when you smile… oh my god, Beckett, when you smile…”

There’s a huskiness in her voice now that makes him shiver. His face, his whole being, is burning and he clings to the hand holding his as though it will help him from sinking completely into distraction.

“Beckett, it’s not a spell.”

“Wha-?” He almost opens his eyes at that. Snapping his mouth shut, he gives his head a little shake. “More. Of course it’s a spell.” It’s so strong now, plucking right at his core. How can she deny it?

“Really,” she whispered. “I get this warm, shivery feeling whenever  I see you looking at me. When you talk about magick and you get so excited that you almost trip over your words in the rush to get them out, it makes me feel like I never want to hear anything else again. And now…” She lifts his hand and presses it to the soft skin just under her jaw and he has to resist an impulse to learn her face as thoroughly by touch as he already has by sight. Freya tilts her head away and that’s when he feels it under his fingertips. Her pulse is fluttering like a baby bird.

“I… You… I don’t…”

“If I’m casting a spell then you are too,” she murmurs, her hand covering his where it still rests against her neck. “And I’m under it.”

That’s when he opens his eyes.

His breath catches. They’re so close, almost touching chest to chest. One of his hands is still tucked under her jaw and one of his still cups his cheek. Her gaze meets his, warm and liquid and enchanting and as he watches, she turns her head towards his hand. As her lips brush his palm, he lets out a whimper. She sighs and looks up at him again.

“More,” she whispers, her smile achingly soft.

“Freya…” He doesn’t quite understand, he can barely focus.

Her whole face lights up as he says her name and she gives his hand a squeeze that’s echoed in his stomach. His breathing is unsteady, but he can’t bring himself to care. He lets himself smile back.

“You feel like this?”

She nods, tracing his cheekbone. “Constantly, when you’re around.”

“I…” His brow furrows. Freya watches him, patient and steady as he thinks. When it hits him, he feels himself flush. “Oh…” he breathes, eyes wide. “Oh, I…” He’s been so stupid! “It’s not a spell.”

She smiles and shakes her head. “Might be easier if it were, hmm?”

“It’s you.”

She laughs at that, a soft, warm sound that hollows out his insides and replaces them instead with something rich and molten and wonderful.

“If it’s me, it’s you too,” she murmurs.

He moves his hand to cup her cheek and she lets out a sigh, her eyes fluttering briefly closed.

Beckett bites his lip. “M- More or less?” He can’t stop his voice trembling.

“More.” She bites her lip and rests her hand against his chest. He knows what she’ll feel there. If this continues, he’s sure he’ll have a bruise on the inside of his rubs.

Freya tilts her head up and he watches her, entrances, as her gaze darts from his eyes to his mouth and back again. Her cheeks are pink and he is certain that his own must match. The more he looks, the more he aches with want. She opens her mouth as though to speak, then frowns a little and bites her lip.

She’s going to step away. He knows it. She’ll make some excuse and pull back from him and he’s just trying to remember the words to ask her to stay close when her lips press against his, shocking the breath out of him.

Freya’s hands cup his face with a light touch, as though she’s holding something delicate and precious, while his own hands clutch at her waist in a hopeless attempt to ground himself in reality. His heart soars. Too soon, far too soon, she pulls away.

Beckett shakes his head and follows desperately. “More,” he begs, seeking out her mouth again. He’s not sure that he can hold so much happiness and so much longing inside himself without bursting.

Freya makes a startled noise as he kisses her again, but he feels her smile just before she flings her arm around his neck and pulls him closer. A voice in the back of his head wonders whether he’s doing this properly, but then Freya’s hand finds its way into his hair again and no part of his mind can focus on anything other than the girl in front of him anymore.

Finally, finally when they break apart, Beckett rests his forehead against Freya’s and allows himself to smile. She grins back, biting her lip as her fingers slowly weave through his hair.

“More,” she says and he can’t help but feel a little proud that she sounds breathless.

He nods and on impulse steals another quick kiss. Freya gives a delighted laugh and gives him yet another.

I can still remember writing it so vividly, all cramped up at the back of a bus that stank of vomit while the rain absolutely battered down outside. Tapping away this little romantic moment of my phone got me through a terrible journey and started an amazing one.

At the time I hadn't written anything in years, but some little spark caught that afternoon and I couldn't not write. I'm really happy to say that that spark is still going and I'm still writing, although it's been a long time since I have been active in the Choices fandom, let alone posted any stories on here.

So a very very very late thank you to everyone who read More or Less and to everyone who told me you liked it. It's not an exaggeration to say that you changed something in my life forever.

Choices Spread Kindness Celebration

Welcome to the second annual Choices Spread Kindness Celebration! This event begins on Social Media Kindness Day (November 9) and "ends" on World Kindness Day (November 13). I say "ends" because I added another bonus day for the 14th, which is new this year (so it technically ends on the 14th, but that's not a special World Kindness day lol)

The goal of the event is simple: spread kindness in the fandom by shouting out people who make it great. Sometimes the smallest acts of kindness can change someone’s day.

Event Overview / Themed Days

November 09: Choices Fandom Shoutout Day

November 10: Writer’s Love Day

November 11: Artist's Love Day

November 12: Creator's Love Day

November 13: Fandom Love/Secret Admirer  (Please sign up by 11/6)

November 14: Self-Love Day

Use the tag #ChoicesSpreadKindness when you post

*Special prize/giveaway opportunity at the end of the post*

***Please see below the cut for details on each day and how to participate

Each month CFWC highlights one of our talented fanfic writers, and this month’s writer of the month is @missameliep ​! We hope you will enjoy learning more about her and her work below! The writer is selected at random. More info can be found on the navigation page.

Quick Links: 

Tumblr blog: missameliep Tumblr Masterlist

“Oh, Liam, I can’t marry you! I’m in love with someone else!”

“Who?”

“This bear dug a sitting pit to watch her favorite duckies”

i very much want to do that.

I feel a little guilty, sometimes, over this. I made all these innocent people fall in love with Carpathia, and then they go to read more about her and learn she was unceremoniously sunk in WWI and it understandably upsets them.

But I don’t think it should. So today I’m going to tell you what happened on July 17th, 1918.

There’s…poetry, in the story of Carpathia’s final hours. Sometimes things happen that make you believe in fate. Parallels. Things that ring true, the echoes of harpstrings across time. History doesn’t repeat itself but sometimes it rhymes.

She was a comfortable little cruise liner, not flashy but safe and steady; perfect for getting people where they needed to go. Arthur Rostron having been promoted and given a new position following the Titanic rescue, she was under the command of a Captain William Prothero. The British navy commissioned her as a troop carrier at the beginning of WWI, transporting supplies and soldiers from Canada to the European front. On this mission, she was part of a convoy en route from Liverpool to Boston.

This is how Carpathia dies: On the morning of July 17th, 1918, she is 120 miles off the coast of southern Ireland.

So is the German submarine U-55.

She takes one torpedo on the port side; the damage is serious, yet not catastrophic. But it knocks out her wireless. Her attempts to send an SOS fail.

The second torpedo hits the engine room.

Three firemen and two trimmers are killed instantly in the explosion that dooms her. One life would be too many, five men are dead and five families are in mourning. I do not dismiss or disregard that loss. But there will be no more casualties today. Carpathia has never given people over to Death without a fight.

The order to abandon ship is given calmly and professionally, long before the situation becomes desperate. Lifeboats are lowered in time, and filled quickly. They know what they’re doing, and they do it well. By the time she begins to sink in earnest, every person onboard is safely in a lifeboat and well away from her.

She stays afloat exactly long enough to save them. There are worse ends for a good ship than this: No one dies in the sinking of Carpathia. There is no terror in the dark, no drownings, no one trapped and forgotten.

The U-boat surfaces. There’s a third torpedo.

Carpathia buckles quietly and starts to vanish, and that harpstring…shivers.

There was another group of lifeboats, once. Alone and facing death, too small, too scattered, tossed like toys and struggling to stay together. Helpless on the open ocean.

This is not the sinking of the Titanic. Carpathia has done everything right, and her people are still alive. They can still be saved. But this is not the sinking of the Titanic, and the threat is not cold and time but German torpedoes.

And this time, Carpathia cannot come for them.

There is a cosmic cruelty in this moment. It’s wrong, an injustice the universe can hardly bear. It’s not fair, for Carpathia’s story to end like this. It’s not right. 706 lives were saved because of a moment of kindness and a friendly wireless transmission; she should not go down cut off and silent, unable even to cry out. This ship who gave so much, who tried so hard, who broke and transcended herself in a thousand tiny moments of bright glory, burning hope as fuel against the dark–for her to die alone, and have no one even try to help.

U-55 comes about. Its machine guns train on the lifeboats.

HMS Snowdrop appears on the horizon.

She’s a little thing, relatively speaking; not a battleship, not a destroyer. A minesweeper sloop on patrol–important but not terribly prestigious. But another member of the convoy, seeing the steam liner taking on water and understanding the radio silence, has sent Carpathia’s SOS for her. And Snowdrop may not be the strong arm of the British navy, but she is no refit passenger liner.

U-55 has done what it came to do; its crew came here to eliminate ship tonnage, not risk themselves and their vessel over a few lifeboats. There is a brief exchange of gunfire with Snowdrop, but U-55 quickly peels off to run.

Carpathia disappears quietly. It breaks my heart that we lose her–but far better, always, to lose a precious ship than to lose her crew. She will sink and drift more than 500 feet below the surface before she settles, almost upright, on the ocean floor. She will rest there until 1999, when an expedition that could not bear to forget her, that could not bear not to try, will finally locate and identify her wreckage.

But that’s in her future. Right now, on a clear morning off the coast of Ireland, the minesweeper HMS Snowdrop takes on 215 people–save for the five lost in the engine room explosion, the entire ship’s company.

Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.

(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)

Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.

All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.

I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.

Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.

And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.

Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.

I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.

Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.

No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a respondibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.

They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.

This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.

In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.

At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.

So Carpathia was not a top-end luxury liner. Her reputation was for being Jolly Comfortable - she was very broad in her proportions, and not super-duper fast, and the result was that she didn’t rock so much on the waves and you couldn’t particularly hear/feel the engines. She was solid and dependable, and lots of people liked using her, but she therefore occupied a lesser niche than Titanic or Olympian or whatever - and crucially, as a result of that, she only had one radio operator on board. This means she only had radio ops for a certain window in the day, unlike Titanic, which had 24 hour radio ops.

So on that night, when Titanic went down, Carpathia’s wireless operator - one Harold Cottam - clocked off his shift at midnight, and went to bed. While he was getting ready for bed, though, he left the transmitter on for the hell of it, and therefore picked up a transmission from Cape Race in Newfoundland, the closest transmitting tower sending messages to the ships. They told him that they had a backlog of private traffic for Titanic that wasn’t getting through. So, even though his shift was over, and it was now 11 minutes past bloody midnight, and he just wanted to go to bed, Harold Cottam decided that nonetheless, he’d be helpful, and let the Titanic know they had messages waiting.

And that’s how he received the Titanic’s distress signal. In spite of no longer being on shift to receive it, and therefore in order to send Carpathia galloping to Titanic’s rescue, and thus saving 705 people.

All because Harold Cottam decided one night to be kind. 

Rostrum had ordered that no messages to the press be sent out of respect to the survivors, for they would have their privacy destroyed as soon as they reached New York. Cottam respected this order, even under extreme duress of fatigue, stress, and the knowledge that in some cases the bribes were almost three times his annual salary.

He eventually went to bed but not before working with one of the rescued Titanic’s radio operators, Harold Bride, to transmit as many messages as possible. Bride was injured (his feet had been crushed in a lifeboat) and had just passed the body of the second of Titanic’s radio operators aboard (Jack Phillips), so neither of them were really in the best shape to keep working, but they did.