Work Text:
She had always hated the cliches.
The overused plots and recycled lines in books never appealed to her. She stuck with the classics, the originals; the stories that held the well known cliches before they’d ever become one.
The classics were different. Enemies to lovers were intense and thrilling, each line and spoken word a new, unsuspecting surprise. Now they were all the same. A declaration of ‘because I love you’ while in the middle of a heated argument.
Star crossed lovers, like Romeo and Juliet. A tragic tale, one that everyone knew the ending to, unlike it’s characters. The endings were happy now. The people on her pages fighting and winning the battles that had tried so desperately to keep them apart.
Fake-relationships used to be about being with someone for the case of life or death —maybe eternal misery. Now, the books she saw lining the library shelves were about the popular boy dating the nerdy girl in the hopes to win back his ex.
Cliches had never appealed to her.
So she didn’t know how she wound up in the middle of one.
The student and the teacher —an age old tale, told time and time again.
A tale of forbidden love, a tragic one at that; full of complications and turns of events, the universe doing everything in its power to stop them from being together.
Aria Montgomery was living a cliche, but for some reason she didn’t seem to mind.
Because while she internally scoffed at herself for feeling butterflies in her stomach during stolen glances they shared across the classroom, she would later brush her fingers along his as she exited the doorway, and she knew she couldn’t blame herself for living the life of a cliche.
They made the best love stories, after all.
He had always loved the cliches.
He admired the way the same stories could be told over and over again and never lose their appeal, how so many books could be exactly the same, but drastically different at the same time.
Maybe the reason he loved them so much was because he was one —a rich boy breaks away from family money and values to pursue an age-old dream. The man who read books in bars rather than dancing with pretty women. Writing his anger and frustration away instead of taking it out on bags or other people.
He finds it ironic, how he had always admired the cliches —only to become part of one.
The curses he finds himself mumbling to his apartment at night seem to voice his inner thoughts —mainly about how he could be so stupid. Stupid enough to fall completely, head over heels in love with his student.
But if he’s being honest with himself, he started falling for her long before he turned around and met her eyes in his classroom that day.
There it was —another cliche; love at (almost) first sight.
He had tried to stop it —he knew how the stories went, he’d read them all, and they didn’t have the happiest of endings.
But the more he tried to climb his way back to solid ground, the harder he seemed to fall.
The time came when he had to eventually give up fighting —because no, this wasn’t part of the plan. He was never supposed to know how she liked her coffee in the mornings or that she was near impossible to tear away from an old movie playing on his television screen, he does now, and he can’t say that he regrets living the life of a cliche.
He doesn’t know how it will end.
It could be tragic, him locked away behind bars, her with someone new.
Or…
It could be the most popular cliche of them all.
A happily ever after.
(he hopes it’s that one. after all, it had always been his favorite)