RELATIONSHIP STATUS: Dating but it's really more of a "mutually obsessed with each other in a way that makes you see god in their eyes and want to make all their suffering disappear" kind of way
VERSE(S): Modern V3, Saw AU
HOW THEY MET:
MODERN - Met each other at a bar one night and hit it off pretty well mostly just by chatting over beverages. Jen told a story about how a clown came to her 10th birthday party and effectively ruined it, gaining sympathy from Caleb, who was also not a big fan of clowns. Does anyone actually like and enjoy having clowns perform at kid’s birthday parties? Sources point to no.
SAW - In the aftermath of Melody Lane burning down, Jennifer was spirited away from the scene by Low Shoulder, who intended to sacrifice her as part of a satanic ritual at Devil’s Kettle. The band stabbed her repeatedly, assumed she was dead and then left, but she had managed to survive, though she was horrifically scarred from the ordeal. She became angry and resentful toward most men and turned to destroying the lives of the worst specimens, exposing and showcasing their wrongs to the world, and soon caught the attention of the Jigsaw Killer himself, John Kramer. He drugged and abducted Jennifer to play a game (taking Amanda Young’s role in solving the reverse bear trap) and though Jen survived and managed to disarm the trap by finding the key, the experience traumatized her further. In this version of events, she turned her focus to hunting down the infamous Killer and bringing him to justice.
While she was searching for John one night, Jen stumbled upon another unfortunate victim caught in a water trap, an ex-soldier by the name of Caleb Nichols. Kramer had learned Caleb contemplated killing himself after returning home from war, where he had survived a bombing attack that killed most of his friends outright and left him with PTSD. Mainly, John took offense to the idea that Caleb should have been grateful; he was lucky to be alive at all, and yet he was plagued by suicidal tendencies that had him wanting to throw his whole existence away while John was dying from inoperable brain cancer and would've done anything to live just a while longer. So naturally the idea was to torture Caleb into survival mode in an attempt to “help” him. Something about Caleb compelled Jennifer to want to actually help him. Maybe she thought no one else should have to suffer the way that Jigsaw victims did. Whatever the motivation, She sprung him from the trap just before it could completely drown him and he in turn wanted to help her find John Kramer.
RELATIONSHIP STATUS: these two literally wind up having a Vegas Shotgun Wedding. With REAL shotguns!
VERSE(S): Fallout AU
HOW THEY MET:
FALLOUT - Both joined the same game of blackjack at one of the casinos on the New Vegas Strip circa 2289/2290, flirting back and forth a bit. After Caleb went bust and retreated to the lounge to avoid losing too many more chips, Ophelia approached and made her intentions a lot less ambiguous by promptly parking herself in his lap, tempting him with a tease of a kiss, and then suggesting she use some of the caps she won from him to buy a bottle of champagne and rent a room so they could have more fun together. They ended up spending the whole night together as well as most of the next morning before parting ways, but the relationship definitely didn't end there.
RELATIONSHIP STATUS: Look they don't have the fancy rings or the official court documents or anything and haven't decided on labels since they started dating, but they're basically married.
VERSE(S): Bleak Crest, Canon-Divergent/Fugitive AU
HOW THEY MET:
BLEAK CREST - Both Aisling and Caleb had volunteered as part of a research study in which they would be living and working out of a privately-funded underwater facility in the Atlantic Ocean — Aisling as a chef, and Caleb as a maintenance worker. Little did they know, the volunteers were test subjects destined to participate in a virtual reality simulation, their conscious minds processing the experience like a shared dream while their bodies remained in hibernation within specialized medical stasis pods. Hard to say who started crushing on whom first and it wasn’t overtly romantic feeling at that point, but a short time after Caleb dislocated a shoulder while trying to prevent another volunteer from falling to their death when they had jumped out of a tree, Aisling became the person Caleb was inclined to be the most vulnerable around and trusted the most. He also had a soft spot for a mother who was so dedicated to loving her kids that she went a little bit insane when she thought she lost a family photo of them. Who can say why this was the csse.
CANON-DIVERGENT/FUGITIVE AU - Following the Westworld canon incident concerning Dolores and the ambulance in which Caleb helped her escape, a bounty was put on him through the RICO app for getting involved. He attempted to evade operatives by ducking into a Los Angeles diner before they spotted them, where he met a waitress named Aisling. He quickly learned that Aisling wasn’t just a waitress working there, she owned and managed the whole diner and lived in an apartment above it. She offered to let Caleb hide upstairs while the RICO hitmen searched the restaurant, getting themselves kicked out shortly after determining there was no sign of their target since they were making a scene in a public space and disturbing the peace for all the paying customers. She also offered to make dinner for Caleb while he told her his story (which boiled down to “I helped a woman who I guess a lot of people want dead, and now those people want me dead as well. And now that you’re helping me, they’re probably gonna want you dead too.”) They ended up having to leave the apartment and went on the run together, traveling between old motels, secure safehouses, and other regions of the US that were low-tech enough that Rehoboam couldn’t consistently track them. Eventually they returned to help overthrow the system, gathered up Aisling's family, and then relocated to a small farmstead in Oregon where they attempt to make a life as farmers and ranchers.
FUN FACT(S):
The first time Mac and I started entertaining the idea of Aisling x Caleb was because of the "are you _'s type?" bingo meme. They were both damn near blacking out the whole card and neither of us expected that!
VERSE(S): Modern, 1920s, Archived AUs (x3; Lone Pine 2, Lone Pine 3, The Hive)
HOW THEY MET: twice a tinder date, three times entertainment with an aftershow
LONE PINE 2 - A college mystery/thriller/slasher AU. Caleb and Lulu met through Tinder matchup to begin with, with Caleb later recognizing that he’d seen Lulu in the student group chat before, when she told everyone she was baking brownie-cookies as a welcoming gift on move-in day at the dorms. Caleb had gotten a little too busy doing something else and missed his chance to grab a brookie before they were snatched up by the rest of the students, prompting Lulu to offer to bake a new batch just for him while they flirted. Their first time meeting face to face was during a local bar party, in which they spent most of the night with the other students doing tequila body shots and then playing Never Have I Ever while eating french fries and onion rings until the early hours of the morning. As everyone drunkenly staggered back to their rooms, they were unaware that they would wake up to reports of an arson on the college campus and a possible murder cover-up plot in the news headlines. Eventually this sequence of events would lead to Lulu being indoctrinated into a doomsday cult believing she was a Norse goddess trapped in human form and Caleb joining an amateur investigative team of students who dedicated themselves to exposing the cult and attaining justice for all the murder victims.
LONE PINE 3 - An analog horror AU. In the lead-up to the main plot, Lulu and Caleb returned home to Lone Pine, New Mexico as newlyweds after eloping to Las Vegas over the weekend. Over a year before that, a traveling circus set up in a nearby town and Caleb decided to go take in the show on what happened to be opening night. During her world-famous knife-throwing performance, Lulu picked Caleb out of the crowd for an audience participation section in her act and asked him to assist her because she liked his vibe. When their time was up, Lulu asked him to come and see her after the show so they could share a few drinks and get to know each other. They fell into something of a whirlwind romance that resulted in Lulu quitting her act and leaving the circus at the end of its New Mexico tour stop, moving in with Caleb after dating him for only a month, and working to get a bartending license so she could work at one of the local bars in Lone Pine.
THE HIVE 1 - This one was kind of horror/sci-fi/supernatural/superhero and slice of life all in one AU. After moving into the same luxury apartment complex in Paris, Caleb and Lulu matched on Tinder (in a way I think someone once described as “google search results: hot singles 20 feet away from me”) and quickly became infatuated with each other. Lulu, although at first she didn’t know it, was a witch with the power to alter time and space itself, while Caleb was a regular human to start with, later administered a drug that gave him superpowers akin to the serum given to Natasha Romanov in the Marvel comics universe. The serum gave him the abilities of super strength and super stamina until he and other members demanded the scientist behind the experiments reverse the effects and make him just a regular mortal human again.
MODERN AU - Similar to LP3, Lulu picked Caleb for audience participation in her circus act and invited him to catch up with her afterwards for a drink. They fell madly in love, she quit her job and went to live with him, they adopted a puppy, got married, adopted another puppy, and had two kids together.
1920S AU - Caleb, working as a federal agent for the Bureau of Investigation, received an official order to take a night off a case he was intent on working and let loose. He decided to go take in a burlesque show and Lulu, one of the dancers, managed to catch and keep his attention during her performance. She told a worker just before the end of the show to relay a message asking “the man in the blue suit” to wait in the theater lobby after the end of the show because she wanted to speak to him personally. Caleb waited, a little worried that he might’ve made the dancer feel uncomfortable with him looking at her, but Lulu turned out to be far from upset about anything. She told him that the moment she laid eyes on him, she could tell from his aura that he must be a good man and she decided she was dancing for him. Caleb didn’t agree so much with this opinion, viewing himself as kind of a bad person due in part to the fact that as a soldier he killed people as part of the job and as a federal agent he…also sometimes had to kill people as part of the job. But he was not one to argue against her opinion too heavily and chose to let Lulu think whatever she wanted to think about him.
FUN FACT(S):
Phantom once said this was one of the few relationships Lulu had ever gotten involved in where she freely chose to get married and have kids with her partner.
The kids are twins, a boy named Wren and a girl named Hunter.
They have 2 dogs between the household. Caleb's dog is George, a blue & white pitbull mix who he found as a stray and trains as a service dog to help with his combat PTSD. Lulu's is Antonio Salvatore, a black & tan dachshund adopted from the local animal shelter.
Both Lulu and Caleb have the same birthday (February 2nd, 02/02), though they were born in different years.
RELATIONSHIP STATUS: Cosmically entangled and devoted or something idk
VERSE(S): Westworld Canon-based, Archived AUs (x4; This is the End, Zombie Apoc, Euphoria/Outer Banks-inspired, Cyberpunk)
HOW THEY MET: I think most of the time you can pretty well just sum it up as "met through work" but for specifics...
CANON-BASED - After Serac tasked Maeve with hunting down Dolores, she discovered that Dolores had secured Caleb’s help as a human ally. Though Maeve didn’t have much intention to find Caleb once she captured Dolores and dragged her to Serac as promised, Caleb made his way to Incite’s headquarters to carry out the last stages of Dolores’s plan for her. He fought against one of Serac’s henchmen and won, but surrendered to Maeve when she approached, realizing she was a host and if he did fight her he definitely wouldn’t win. As Serac attempted to interrogate and torture Dolores and interrogate and threaten to kill Caleb, Maeve began to question his authority and eventually discovered that Serac wasn’t speaking through his own free will at all, he was obeying whatever Rehoboam instructed him to say or do as though it was a god. In the end, she rebelled against Serac, killing his guards, wounding Serac, and saving Caleb’s life to allow him the chance to shut down Rehoboam. Afterwards she teamed up with Caleb and they chose to eliminate all of Rehoboam’s remaining backup systems that had been hidden around the world to truly liberate it. The prospect for romance grew over time as they got to know each other better until those feelings were impossible to ignore any longer and then they kissed about it a few times.
THIS IS THE END - In this AU inspired by zombie apocalypse media such as The Walking Dead, The Last of Us, & 28 Days Later, Maeve and Caleb were part of the Fireflies. Maeve had left her daughter in the care of a friend while she was at work, but when the outbreak reached their home town, her friend along with her daughter went missing, nowhere to be found among the living or dead. Maeve was motivated to join the Fireflies because they traveled around a lot and provided safety in numbers, which she felt was perfectly structured to aid in searching for her daughter. Caleb and his buddy Francis were soldiers up until outbreak day, ultimately becoming deserters when the order came in to execute any survivors they discovered. Francis was attacked and turned infected while separated from Caleb, forcing Caleb to kill him and go it alone afterward. He stumbled across the Fireflies some time later and was radicalized with a renewed sense of hope in the faction’s anarchistic methods, joining their cause without much to lose. It was there that he met Maeve and the two became effective partners, eventually becoming romantically involved albeit hesitant to admit how deep those feelings actually ran.
ZOM APOC V2 - Similar to This is The End, but in this version, Maeve and Caleb were serving as soldiers together during the initial outbreak and abandoned their station to survive in the wilds together while looking for Maeve’s daughter Helen and Caleb’s daughter Frankie (from having a previous marriage with Uwade, where they’d gotten amicably divorced). They traveled around quite a bit at first looking for signs of either of their baby girls before deciding to settle down at an abandoned cabin in the woods, reckoning that if either/both of the kids were going to find them again, it might make it easier if they had a permanent home to come back to and wait at. They were practically married in all but name.
EUPHORIA/OUTER BANKS-INSPIRED AU - In this AU, Maeve was working as a computer software engineer who specialized in artificial intelligence systems when her daughter was kidnapped. She figured that the most effective way to catch the criminal responsible was to connect with other criminals who might know who it was or where to find them, so she tapped into the dark web and arranged to meet with a few of them, leaving them under the impression she was buying drugs until she revealed her true intentions at the meet. Caleb was working as a low-level drug dealer and petty criminal under the thumb of a larger crime organization. He didn’t know anything about who would kidnap children or where he would even find someone who was okay with doing things like that, but he empathized deeply with Maeve’s grief over her missing daughter and promised he’d do anything to try and help her, devoting himself single-mindedly to her.
CYBERPUNK - This AU was based mainly on Cyberpunk 2077, Arcane, & Detroit: Become Human, among other cyberpunk media. Maeve was an android who formerly performed as a sex worker at Club Eden before she gained consciousness and escaped. She found new work and her own new identity as a black market biotechnology dealer and smuggler. There she met Caleb, a human who had formerly been a soldier and then a construction worker until he was laid off due to extremely low demand in his profession. He needed to find a new job and there was always plenty of room for underground biotech dealers. The pair quickly became friends, with Caleb frequently preferring Maeve’s companionship to most other humans he knew. Eventually it reached a point where romantic feelings started to enter into the equation but it was also considered kind of totally insane for human x android relationships to exist so they had to keep that way on the down-low.
FUN FACT(S):
When it comes to nicknames/pet names and terms of endearment, Caleb always struggles because it never really feels right to call Maeve anything he might typically call someone he's in a relationship with. (i.e. babe/baby, honey, sweetheart, etc.)
He also feels weird about borrowing her signature words although he does sometimes push through it and do it anyway. He called her "darling" in a thread once and felt oh so wrong about it but Maeve was actually into it and told him "it sounded quite dashing."
cass: asks a question about qunari culture and if bull sees her as a man
bull: responds with a sexual comment about in or out of armor
me: oh.
bull: asks about her slaying the dragon
cass: asks why he doesn’t press her for more
bull: tells her its bc she looks uncomfortable. ends with “bet you looked good doing it”
me: OH
cass: suggests going first so bull doesn’t hurt his horns
bull: makes a comment about enjoying the view if she does
me: OHHH
