#beanfam

[they didn't skive often, but i picture them as students who do well in class because it's expected, however they're not stand-outs by any means really.]

[if we want to get super into it, we could also say that the classes they ditched were the ones where their teachers had no concrete facts about their home lives, but could colour in the picture enough to not say anything when they needed to get air]

i think that vanessa was the first to open up about her parents and her mother especially and her older half-brother

not immediately spouting off about them, but little, carefully crafted comments dropped here and there until she could get a gauge on what chris thought

i think they bonded over overbearing and critical mothers and rather absentee fathers

it was slightly different for vanessa because her mother had been married thrice, and as a result she had an older brother

i think their gap in age is at least six or eight years. enough to really notice a difference in their upbringing

chris didn't speak often about his mother but when vanessa would rant about something and her words hit close to home, there was a certain set to his jaw that she learned to pick up on

i think eventually there was a parents' day and chris and vanessa accidentally bumped into each other again, but their mothers were present

and before they could hide that they knew each other, they were accidentally too familiar with their body language to have just been two teenagers who met on the street

celia immediately was on the defence against vanessa, thinking that she was going to usurp her place as the number one woman in chris' life

that feeling was quickly assuaged by kathryn wilcock-wynn-carroway's presence, which eclipsed vanessa's

celia found her kindred spirit

(of course, this didn't mean that the two women weren't jealous of each other's lives or didn't gossip about them to their friends)

(they were very frenemy coded with a kind of false nicety that would set your teeth on edge)

[they're the worst mothers in the world i love them so much]

as chris and vanessa got older, their interests and life paths shifted

chris ended up moving to cornley to join the polytechnic's drama program

vanessa moved to london to work on a communications and public relations degree at university of east london

(we know how their stories go from here, chris with cpds and the murder at haversham manor. vanessa gets an internship with the bbc where she's required to work as a receptionist once a month over the eight or nine months it is. she is able to get a spot in their fellowship program* and continue to work at the bbc whilst studying)

*i have no idea if the bbc has a fellowship program, but it sure does sound nice eh?

the two of them fell out of touch for the most part, occasionally sending emails and letters around birthdays and holidays

and then a christmas carol happened

chris isn't stupid

he knew that vanessa knew who he was and what he was planning on doing

she grew up with him

and he grew up with her.

he knew that her observational skills were much, much better than what she showed to the rest of the cast

there's no way that she didn't see them sneaking into the studios again, that she didn't see the fire alarm get pulled

especially not with their costumes and the two cameras they were toting with them

the next week he emails her

begs her to join the little acting troupe he's in

partially because he knows her mother would hate it

partially because he knows his parents would find it irritating

but mostly because he misses his friend

sandra has usurped the role of best friend in his life

but vanessa was there first

saw him when he was still figuring out who he was, what he wanted, and maybe most importantly, what he didn't want

and he knows that she didn't want to be behind that desk for the rest of her life

he wasn't sure if she'd like being on stage, but trevor's a good stage manager. she'd do well backstage, too

he just…

he just wants to see his best friend again