#How Do you Start An Eviction In Florida?

[bobbertskeetz]

Derek Morgan x Female!Reader

maybe something where reader goes into labor while Derek is away on a case or reader surprises Derek with a visit to the office and brings their new born along with her ( kinds how Haley did with Jack in the earlier seasons )

AHHHH!! love this one, thank you very much for the request. Actually thinking of combining both of these into a two part imagine?? For now though, enjoy panicked Derek <3

𝙪𝙣𝙥𝙡𝙪𝙜𝙜𝙚𝙙 𝙙.𝙢 𝙭 𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙙𝙚𝙧

Summary: Despite his desperate attempts to be by your side 24/7, Derek is convinced the universe is out to get him during the final days of your pregnancy

Themes/Warnings: pregnant!reader, fiance!derek, general themes of the show e.g unsubs, graphic cases (not in depth detail) fem!reader, fluff fluff Fluff!!! angst if you squint...

"Don't-"

"Derek please."

"Sit! Ah ah, stay... good girl, you get a treat."

A quick sloppy kiss is planted on your left cheek while Derek holds you down by the shoulders, trapping you in place in the nest of pillows and blankets he created to accomodate your swollen stomach and achy back. Your fiance stands behind you, knees kneeling on the arm rest, while he massages the knot growing at the base of your neck, while you lightly scoff.

"Speak to me like that again and I will knife you."

"Easy Mama, you shouldn't model such a hostile attitude for the little man!"

Reaching up behind you, you grasp at his neck gently, bringing him back down to your level for a kiss. The kiss goodbye which you had previously attempted to get up and give him, before he left for God knows how long.

A cheeky grin grew on his lips as you moved to his ear with a whisper;

"She, will be the most well-mannered child ever born, taking after her mother..."

"Bet?"

"Shut up," another kiss lands on his lips, "Hotch is waiting."

Derek lets a low groan, one saturated in frustration, slowly spill into your shared kisses. Eyebrows furrowed together, accompanied by a small frown, he allows his head to lull to one side, rubbing the pad of his thumb tenderly along your jawline.

"Don't dare move from this couch, Sweetheart. Not without Garcia or your mother here to help you out."

"Der-"

"Humour me gorgeous?"

A final kiss, and a huff;

"Fine."

You can't find it in yourself to feel any sort of remorse for agreeing to his terms as his blinding toothy grin leaves a fuzzy warmth budding in the pit of your stomach. What harm will a few days on the sofa do you anyhow?

Hotch was growing impatient, although, trying his best to remain understanding. He knew how hard it was, how the guilt of leaving your pregnant partner at home eats you alive. However, these were the demands of the job. One last nagging phone call from Hotch, and Derek was half way out the door, reminding you of the meals in the fridge (kindly prepared that morning by Penelope) and of the vitamin supplements you have to take before you go to bed.

With a swift, yet endearing exchange of I love you's, Derek was finally on his way to Florida. He knew it was silly, hating an arsonist more for taking him away from his growing family, than the actual crimes committed. Yet, these were the demands of matrimony and fatherhood.

--

Three days of couch-rotting down, and you were verging on insanity. Every slight movement left a series of uncomfortable spasms in your joints, the braxon hicks were something serious, and you constantly felt as though you had a gaping hole in your stomach, almost as if you were riding a never ending rollercoaster. Baby Morgan needed to make an appearence soon, or she would have to be evicted.

With twenty minutes left on the clock before your mother was scheduled to come and help you to the bath, you awoke from your half-sleep with a start. Why were your sweatpants sticking to your thighs?

Yes, Derek forbid you from moving unless absolutely necessary, however, peeing yourself was definitely classed as an emergancy. Except, you hadn't. There, as if it was the most normal thing in the world, sat a weird bloody substance on the line of your underwear.

Fuck. Me.

Immediately you called your fiance. Should you be calling him first? What's he going to do from Florida? This was a bad idea, he's busy after all... But, before your anxiety could hang up the phone, the one voice you so desperately needed sang down the line like a prayer.

"Hey gorgeous girl, how's my little famil-"

"Baby! Now- baby is- Help."

"What?! Sweetheart hold on, are you sure?"

"Honey, my mucus plug is very much unplugged and my abdomen is being ripped apart."

A sharp wail escaped you as a dull ache made itself known in the pits of your cervix, and then the anger came.

"Derek. I need you. Now."

"Everything is going to be just fine sweetheart, let me call-"

"No! Don't leave me, please don't leave me."

"Okay angel, I'm right here." His assurance soothed you for the time being, both of you awaiting your mother's arrival. And it was safe to say, Derek was sick to his stomach.

--

Every damn day. Every day he tried his hardest to be there, especially nearing the end of your third trimester. His biggest fear was accidentally leaving you alone when that one awaited moment came; and his greatest nightmare had just come true.

"I should've been there Reid!"

Spencer nodded, sympathetically, "You couldn't have predicted this."

"Well, I should've. Fuck. It's just exactly what I should've predicted" He felt as though he could cry, and stifling a sniffle he continued, "Of course the second I leave that's when the little guy decides to make an appearance."

"Murphy's law! Essentially everything that could go wrong will go wrong. Named after Edward A. Murphy Jr, for centuries this belief has plagued several societies-"

"Spence." JJ shook her head gently, nudging it towards Derek's defeated countenance.

Grimacing, Spencer blushed and tried again, "Morgan, honestly you couldn't have done any more than you already have."

JJ then chimed in, "She's not holding this against you, shit happens, and you are getting ready to go home right now! I mean - you got the call a half hour ago, and already the jet's almost ready"

Opening his mouth the respond, Derek was cut off by Hotch swinging the precint's office door open, informing him that he could go home.

"Jesus, that fast?"

He was already rushing out of the room when he heard the discussion between JJ and Hotch,

"Special treatment for the family man."

Family man. He was a family man now. Non-commital SSA Derek Morgan had a bride-to-be waiting for him, and a baby on the way. And he could never be happier.

--

Within hours, Derek was bulldozing his way through the ward, stopping every nurse who was unfortunate enough to get in his way, to ask for your room. When he finally found you, he all but fell through the door with panic.

"Is everyone okay?" Kiss. "Hi baby!" Kiss. "Are you okay?! Is baby?"

The tenderness with which he held your face immediately soothed every anxiety within your body, even only momentarily. He was here, he made it. After an elongated silence, you shook yourself into action, reminding yourself that Derek was not a mind reader, despite what his job would lead you to believe.

"Everyone's okay honey, little rascal is still inside me," you replied softly, almost inaudibly, the fear felt previously when you had first called him suddenly returning, "You made it?"

His heart lurched and eyes softened at the vulnerability in your voice, and Derek finally took in the sheet white anxious expression settled on your face. Gently, he clasped his warm hand around your own, careful to avoid tugging at your drip, and dropped a sweet kiss to the cracks of your knuckles.

"I made it sweet girl." Another kiss, then travelling to your trembling lips, "I'll always make it doll. That, I can promise you forever."

[hedgiwithapen]

The AU where Team Leverage is attempting to con Victoria Kord during the same few days that the Scarab is stolen.

Hardison adjusted the dress uniform he'd spent half the night sewing patches and arranging medals on. Authenticity was important, even if no one ever looked closely enough to see if one of the medals was a startrek badge. It wasn't--he wasn't going to risk a whole con, days of prep, on one of The Shadiest companies in Florida--for a geek joke. But he was tempted, sometimes, and never more than when he was posing as some stiff military monster at a party, talking atrocities with the Mark. Victoria Kord was certainly high on the list of 'People I feel Dirty Just Breathing The Same Air As' which was only not an official list because Eliot had pointed out that keeping such a list might bite them all in the ass.  Hardison had no intention of admitting he was right, but still. 

The food, catered by Eliot, was delicious, which counted for something. He glanced discreetly at his watch, pleased that the man he was impersonating was the type to wear real watches, and nodded to one of many hidden cameras. Originally, the plan had been to crash the party and find the paperwork about the illegal land seizures, find a way to get people back the homes they were being wrongfully evicted from. Snooping had revealed a bigger threat, and bigger target.  Parker would start her run for the secure project's room, plug in his code, and wipe all the OMAC data from Kord's system, ruining Victoria's credibility for her investors and tanking the company in three... two...

"Uh, guys? We have a problem. Like, capital p Problem," Breanna's voice hissed through the coms. 

"What?" he asked, then feigned a smile at Kord, "is that  fantastic--" he pretended to cut himself off. "My apologies, I was distracted by these canapes.  I tell you, we do not get food this flavorful in DC. You know how to make your investors feel welcome."

Over his chatter, Bre continued "Someone else just hacked the system. Majorly. I can't get it back. Hmm. I think I...might have seen this before..."

"We've got another problem," Eliot said from where he stood in chef whites, slicing meat at a table. "One of Kord's goons just walked in. Hardison, Parker, you need to bail. Now."

"Why? I'm almost--" 

"School of the Americas. That's Carapax. We'll find another way to shut them down, you need to move, now."

"And what are you going to do?" Breanna asked.

"Hey!" Parker said to someone in the hall with her. "You're messing up my heist!"

"Your heist? This is ou--my heist," said a young voice on the other end. 

"Parker, who's with you?" Eliot hissed, moving urgently now. Carapax was blocking the line of escape for Hardison, and that would not do at all.

"Uhhhhh blue buggy dude?"

Hardison's eyes bulged. "Excuse me," he said to Victoria, then muttering 

"Like... Blue Beetle?"

"I am Khaji Da," a new voice spliced into the com system, over the sound of Breanna's "Oh, no you did not just hack my coms." 

"Yes, I did."

"It's an expression," the same young man's voice said. "Um. Look. Why don't you steal whatever it is you're stealing, I'll get what I came for and we go before we all get killed?"

The overlapping chatter was going to give Eliot a headache.

"Oh, HEY," Breanna said again. "I do know you. Hey, can your hacker hear us? Tell him it's GarlicBre52. From the forums. Uh, Eliot, red truck, oh shit, and you're about to have company. the bad kind."

 Eliot rolled his eyes, and located the truck. Carapax seemed to have noticed it too. 

"Bre, Hardison, get ready to pick up Parker and go. I'll warn your nerd friend." Eliot rolled his shoulders, ready for a fight.  

Several stories up, a pulse of blue light shattered a row of windows, drawing all attention up. Eliot hoped the distraction would be enough to steal a superhero… and his back up.

[the-firebird69]

Homeowners Warned Against Taking Squatters to Court

This guy is a liar you can squat if you're found out in the evict you they're not squatting anymore and it has to be a solid period of time in 5 years and it means it's been abandoned and it's not legal practice to squat in the first place is a form of thievery and attempted robbery and you can charge with it and he is a liar he wants people who don't want squatters to get caught and in a way it's one of these trumpsters no it is and he's a fool and he is getting arrested right on the cover of picture they're arresting him for a squatting and he said squadron hunters and people are going and hunting them to take their stuff because of their illegally it is going to affect these two shortly too and it's someone they know and have been digging around with and he knows what he's doing it's Dukakis and right now he is forming a huge groups to go to the Mojave and burning Man and off Morocco and in the Sahara and several others for these Giants are they took advantage of me and was friendly going to say it to my face and nobody does that or it's his brother who did the same thing no and there's no proof they're his but I'm going to try and prove that so we're going after the a****** cuz he doesn't know and he's saying all sorts of s*** and threats

-other news the 3.5 billion ships out of the 10 billion warlock ships are out trumpster is not in that fleet and they're dead and it's a lot of people killed about 300 trillion yes and ancillary places are being hunted down and taking over and his other fleet is heading to Mars about 2.5 billion and the pseudo military empire is waiting there with a 5 billion ship Force and they are going to hit them and take them down and take their ships and they say if the others aren't coming out they're going to go get them and bja is moving now to three out of the five prepare areas to take the remaining ships it's about 6 billion total 3 billionaire completed and they'll start building and bja is going to be in a war with trumpsters shortly in the west they are taking the stashes and caches very fast they have taken about 10% so far and yeah it's up to 45% emptied and they are experiencing Trump's coming at them for the ships and they're going after the trumps getting information that burning Man and places like it the trumpsters are there falling huge numbers of them are going there momentarily for taking advantage of one of their guys very badly they're also sending contingents to Baja peninsula the tortugin islands and there are a few they send it to Arcadia Maine that's how they end up up there and that's where the song is famous war pigs and it is a famous famous song by Black Sabbath and we think it might even be tomorrow and it is a Sabbath and they're usually not called black they are in some religions in Germany and Norway and we do know about it and we are from there and that's why they're calling it that and they're saying it's a secret giant thing and they go up there several times during the week and they find trumpsters have a headquarters and they're constantly attacking it eventually they're attacked by the pseudo empire and they find a huge stash in cash nearby and that they're trying to take it out of there and they're fighting giants somehow no they're fighting Max again and they both end up fighting the max but after most of the trumps are dead and then they'd kill them all off cuz they are stupid

Thor Freya

Yeah we drink the water and we're stupid and we won't stop apparently you were paranoid about the bottled water and it says you can filter it with real filters and I noted it and show people home Depot and it costs a lot you have to buy like 10 of them because they fill up pretty quick but it's worth it and so I'm instructing mine to do so

And yeah it's part of a reverse osmosis system in a secondary water filter system that had the filter and the primaries have to be upgraded all of them

Trump

Olympus

[mikebay02]

How to Recognize and Manage Separation Anxiety in Dogs

Dogs that break out of crates, harm themselves in the process, and can’t be left alone for even ten minutes are not only a risk to themselves but the people who live with them, too.

"A well-trained dog and a well-behaved dog are two entirely different things. A trained dog will do what you ask, but a behaved dog? They will make good choices on their own."

This behavior is called separation anxiety, and. Single. Day. We are getting DMs, emails, and comments about how much this behavior is destroying peoples’ (and dogs’) lives. 

“I haven’t been able to go on a date night with my s/o since we got this dog.”

“I had to pull my kids from extra-curricular activities because we can’t leave the dog home alone.”

“My dog destroys the crate when left alone, and hurts himself in the process. If he’s not created, he WILL eat the window frames.”

“Our dog will howl and bark so loud, my landlord is threatening to evict me.”

These are REAL stories.

This is how separation anxiety is affecting families around the world. 

It’s heartbreaking, and we understand how much pain and stress this ONE issue can cause. We put it at the top of the “most painful to live with” list— above aggression, believe it or not.

There is no escaping separation anxiety when you’re in the thralls of it. It’s a problem that spills over to every part of your life.

That’s why when people describe It…it’s often accompanied by the words: “suffering” “struggle” “desperation” and “trapped” It’s a crappy way to live with your dog…

And we don’t want that for anyone.

But life doesn’t need to be that way. Despite what the internet tells you, this behavior can be modified, and you can get your life (and your peace of mind) back. 

Inside Separation Anxiety Solutions, you’ll join Jeff, Joelle, and Courtney of Solid K9 Training, to learn the exact dog anxiety training protocols and methods that are saving dogs from the prison of separation anxiety. Dogs just like yours.

As a dog owner, you deserve to have a dog that can live happily and peacefully in your home!

Your dog should be confident enough to calmly relax and self-soothe on its own—whether you’re gone for 5 minutes or a couple of hours.  

No dog should require 24/7 supervision. It’s not realistic, and most of us have jobs, kids, and other life events to put our time into. 

But if you you’re knee deep with a dog who is running your household and your life, you might feel like that’s impossible at the moment.

And you might be struggling trying a hundred different methods, a hundred ways, only to keep getting the same result: a dog that’s a danger to itself and your house. 

So how do you help your dog get past this behavior?

If you’re searching endlessly for solutions, or don’t even know WHERE to begin…

Be encouraged.

YOU CAN HAVE A DOG WHOSE BEHAVIOR DOESN’T TAKE OVER YOUR LIFE.

You just need proven methods to push you in the right direction and get you RESULTS, that’s exactly what you’ll find inside of Separation Anxiety Solutions. 

Meet Your Instructor

Hi, I’m Jeff Gellman, the guy with the hair that works with those insane dogs. I got my start in dog training 20ish years ago when I owned a wildly out of control dog myself. His name was Max, and he was large, powerful and had a lot of bad behaviors. He was making my life a living hell, and it felt like nobody could help me at all. That was until I finally met THE ONE trainer who looked me dead in the eye and said “you can tell your dog “no”, Jeff.”

And that was the day everything changed. I was able to stop all of my dog’s horrific behaviors rather quickly, and actually train him up to be one of the coolest dogs I’ve ever owned. He became my sidekick in mountain climbing, biking, and even my demo dog when I created a dog training business of my own (hello Solid K9 Training.) Max was the first “why” behind everything I do today.

I currently own and operate an exclusive, boutique style dog training center in Bradenton, Florida. I rehab and train dogs from all around the country and even traveled for 5 years holding dog training seminars around the world. When I say I have worked with the worst of the worst behavioral cases, I truly mean it. I own a highly successful virtual dog training company where I can put my passion into video format to help even MORE people who can’t reach me geographically. 

I also held dog anxiety training seminars around the world. Throughout my career, I have worked with tens of thousands of dogs and humans, and I know firsthand how lack of training can affect the quality of life for both ends of the leash. Between my free social media content, virtual one-on-one work, seminars, and in-person training, I have kept countless dogs in their homes who were on their last chance. 

I have always wanted to find a way to help EVEN more families and their dogs. There is such a need for dog training that works, and so I created this course. My Green to Graduate series addresses one of the most common pain points I see people struggling with- lack of training overall! So many folks are struggling to get their dogs to do the basics, so I wanted to create courses that truly covers it all. 

This simple and easy-to-follow video series will get you on the path to better walks, better obedience, and a better lifestyle with your pet for the long run. You'll finally be able to live life with your dog exactly as you imagined, and the best part is, you'll be there in 4 weeks or less.

We know the struggle is real out there with SA. So we will be putting everything we’ve got into this course with 20+ years of experience under our belts. 

We’ve worked with dogs who destroy kennels, break teeth, rip out toenails, and wreak havoc on their owners’ lives with separation issues—and we’ve got the tools, methods, and information (and creativity) to turn it around. 

We’ve never shown our protocols for separation anxiety on video before. This is a first for us. And the dog who we will be training in the course displays ALL of the behavior above ^.

We know what an impact this course is going to have not only on the dogs, but on the PEOPLE who are suffering in silence, too. 

For the first time ever, Jeff, Joelle and Courtney will all be working together in a course to show the exact process behind how we resolve separation anxiety with a dog who mutilates, breaks out of crates, destroys the house, and has put a halt to his owners’ social life.

Inside Separation Anxiety Solutions, you’ll get in depth dog anxiety training that you can apply to your own dog, in real life.

When you join Separation Anxiety Solutions you’ll…

Learn how to eliminate arousal, incessant whining, and non stop barking inside the crate

Learn our processes for stopping all crate breaking and self destructive behaviors

Receive step by step coaching on how to set up training protocols that address your dog’s state of mind (even when you’re not home.)

Learn our tried and true methods for creating calmness within the home, within the kennel, and within your dog’s MIND

Understand how you LIVE with your dog effects everything as far as your dog’s behavior is concerned

Learn how to muzzle condition your dog with our Muzzle Conditioning course ($99 value)

Recordings of Our 2023 Live Two-Day Leash Reactivity Seminar

Unlock the Masterclass Vault, where you’ll have access to FIVE of our best-selling live classes from 2023 ($997 value):

Walk Mastery LIVE where you’ll learn to teach a perfect on and off leash heel

Leadership LIVE where we break down our most impactful leadership exercises

Day 1 behind the scenes with a Client Dog LIVE

How to Walk a Pack of Dogs LIVE

Our exclusive “How To Work With A Biting Dog” masterclass where we teach our exact protocols on how to stop resource guarding within the home with a dangerous dog

-A 90 minute FREE group q+a session with Jeff and Joelle to support you on your journey

Our weekend problem solving seminar course ($197 value)

One month FREE of our Private Community Membership (2 coaching calls included! $997 value)

Here’s what you’ll learn inside of Separation Anxiety Solutions:

Part 1: Eliminating arousal to get your dog ready to learn

Part 2: Generalizing this training to every part of your dog’s life, including inside your home and out. We will teach you how to have a dog that is calm when told to do so. 

Part 3: Setting up real life protocols like leaving the house, and preparing your dog for success (and what to do if things go sideways)

Part 4: Troubleshooting. We know dog training is a roller coaster, and it’s not uncommon to have days that feel like a “set back.” You’ll learn exactly how we work through these scenarios and see the “messy middle” of training that isn’t being shown out there on social media. 

Every module is in order, so that you can follow the process in the most effective way. 

This is your one stop shop for stopping separation anxiety in its tracks, and helping your dog get out of this unhealthy headspace permanently. 

And you’ll get it all for just $197 presale pricing!

For a program worth more than $2500

Testimonials and Feedback

Don't take our word for it. Take a look here or look at our testimonials at the link on the top of this page.

-Kristen O

"It's SO helpful! Nice to be able to rewind and replay certain tips. It's like having Jeff in my house!"

-Michelle L

"Started the videos and will recommend to my clients. So easy for them to understand! Thanks Jeff!" -

-Sunshine T

"Love how the dog makes mistakes and you guide him through the process. Nobody else shows that." -

-Kelly A

"Best purchase. A no-nonsense approach to training. Teaching me how to be a better teacher for the path I want my dog to follow."

-Murph M

"Fantastic. I'm having fun learning and you make it very clear/straight forward."

-Tricia K

"These courses are amazing! Now I have more things to really get my skills where they need to be to do better for my dogs. Thank you Jeff for taking the time to expand on content and help the masses!"

When you join Separation Anxiety Solutions, you’ll get: 

    -The Muzzle Conditioning course

    -Walk Mastery LIVE where you’ll learn to teach a perfect on and off leash heel

    -Leadership LIVE where we break down our most impactful leadership exercises

    -Day 1 behind the scenes with a Client Dog LIVE

    -How to Walk a Pack of Dogs LIVE

    -our exclusive “How To Work With A Biting Dog” masterclass where we teach our exact protocols on how to stop resource guarding within the home with a dangerous dog

($997 value)

 PLUS the -90 minute Q+A with Jeff and Joelle ($600 value)

-Weekend Problem Solving Seminar Course ($197 value)

-One FREE month to our Private Community membership ($47 value for the month PLUS a discounted rate if you choose to join for the year)

These bonuses are only valid when you join within 48 hours! 

And in case you were wondering…

Q: Is this course right for me? 

A: this course is for EVERY dog who struggles with whining, self destructive behavior, inability to be alone, and even destroying the house. There is so much to learn, and likely some very simple changes you can make that will change everything for you!

Q: It’s on pre-sale, so the course isn’t done yet?

A: we’re offering this course at special pre-sale price since we are still currently filming. Videos will drip out as they’re completed! We should have the course wrapped up and completed by January 31, 2024

Q: How do you know this dog anxiety training works and that is will work for me? That it’s not just you, because you have years of experience?

A: I wouldn’t call something proven if it’s only worked for me, one time. The training I teach inside this course has worked on tens of thousands of my client dogs—around the world. If you commit to applying what you learn, and trying things that might not be familiar to you, but could get you the results you want, this program will work for you. 

Q: I’m exhausted. I’ve tried everything…what makes this any different?

A: I’m so sorry. I get it. Almost every single one of my clients comes to me after spending thousands and wasting time on training that doesn’t yield results. I wouldn’t wish this feeling on anyone. However, what if everything you’ve been trying just isn’t the “right” method? This is a self paced program, so no rush to consume it all in one day. Try it one module at a time. I promise you’ll make improvements. If not, shoot me an email and I’ll be happy to offer another solution. jeff@solidk9training.com

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BEAUTIFUL - ADS - TOP - SIDES - 

BOTTOM - NICE - SQUARES YES - 

VISIT - SITE - SEE - GIF - ALSO 2

ITCY - RIGHT - NOW - BODY - 

BRUSHING - I - BLED - THE - 

STOMACH - ARE - WITH MY - 

NAILS - LEAVING - 5:15A IS - 

NICE - AVOIDING - GERALD - 

BLK HAITI - MALE - HIS $20 - 

DEMANDED - HIS - QUESTIONS - 

ANSWERED - AS - HOMELESS - 

HE - WANTS - A - FAX - OF MY - 

SCHEDULE - OTHER - HOW 2 - 

MAKE - MILLIONS - WITH - SHOPIFY

SO - THEY - CAN - QUITE - EAT AND

DRINK - MORE - ‘WEALTH - DESTROYS

A - FOOL’ - JESUS - IS - LORD - SLEEPY

[tideswept]

Life updates under the cut! As it deals with uncomfortable topics, please do not read unless you a) truly want to know and b) feel that you can handle it.

if the answer is no to either of those, this is the casual tldr: I'm fine, just tired and busy. 💖 love you all, hope the holidays have been treating you well, fics coming soon!

HMM. Are you still here? Last chance to turn back. Think wisely.

Welcome concerned friends and busybodies alike. I'm not a sentimental person, so forgive the blunt rundown.

My mother killed herself in September as a final "fuck you" after I told her I wanted to move out. She had undiagnosed B(orderline)PD. If you know what BPD is and how it manifests in extreme cases, well, there you have my mother.

Unfortunately, I'd quit my job in order to essentially do her job for her, because I couldn't do two full time jobs and take care of her 24/7. I won't go into the thick of it, but for context's sake, let me just say that in the background of this whole sordid tale also skulks a) her HIV diagnosis and multiple months-long stays in hospitals where she became so infamous for her mental breakdowns that hospital staff to this day flinch when she's brought up, b) an abusive asshole stepfather who didn't let me leave the house for almost a decade, c) Scientology and d) 16 years of being illegal in the US.

Skip forward to now, and the only reason i survived this long was because of the kindness of you all, a few distant relatives, and my best friend--and pity from my landlord, who should evicted me weeks ago, but are seemingly waiting until Christmas is over.

There is no social help where I am. Perhaps there was pre-COVID, or pre the Republicans that have been destroying Florida, but it doesn't exist now. The help that there is (from churches and such programs) are exclusively for families. Pregnant women. The one shelter that's available I was warned to not go to no matter what by every volunteer and social worker I spoke with. They all told me the same thing; the informal name for that shelter is Rape City.

My last hope, as well as my last resort, was my mother's younger sister who lives a few cities away. Two days before Thanksgiving I laid my case out to her, the things I'd attempted (in trying to get a job, programs i'd applied to, etc.) and if I could please sleep in her garage for 4 months while I saved up money, because I truly did not think I would survive on the street.

Her responce was not kind. In the end, I accepted that she truly did not care and bid her goodbye. (It's very unfortunate that my mother named me after someone who hated both of us. I hope to be able to pay for a name change eventually, as we have the exact same first and last name.)

In the end, the landlords didn't kick me out when I kept bracing for the knock on the door that somehow still hasn't come. And my best friend has gone above and beyond to help me on a path out.

So, I'm okay. Currently been living without power for a few weeks, turning the house inside out to consolidate what I want to take with me. Heck, I even deleted my Animal Crossing save to start over. (Judy, I will get you back, I swear.)

Been applying for a new place to live, playing mental Tetris for what to take. I found homes for two of my cats, but three will be going with me. I leave so much behind and... it's fine. I'm taking what's important with me.

SO ANYWAY, that's the update, sorry for all the introspective nonsense 😅. I'm done packing and cleaning the house. I'll be moving either into a hotel or a new place in a few days. All is good. Been writing on my phone/tablet when I have the battery to spare, so sorry for some SERIOUSLY overdue updates and replies. I will be getting back on top of things this weekend. ❤️

Now, back to writing unrepentant smut.

Oh, and in case you might be wondering; yes, I'll be spending Christmas alone in less than ideal conditions, but holy fuck do I LOVE Christmas. And I intend to have the very best one I've had in many years. 🎄

Friends! Fellow countrymen!

My time online will be limited for a few days, I'll reply to things when I return. ❤️ Leave me reminders here if needed!

[joshscorcher]

3 Misconceptions about Americans and non-Americans

After interacting with many different people around the globe, especially on social media, I notice that Americans have very big misconceptions about the world outside, and non-Americans have big misconceptions about the USA. Most of it is just simple ignorance and not malicious racism, so I thought I’d try to clear some of it up.

3 Big Misconceptions that Americans have about the world outside the US.

1. Most other countries, especially non-Western ones, are not developed.

Many Americans don’t realize other countries are developed that we might realize., especially in countries that are described as “third-world.” One of Kenya’s biggest pastimes is cyber cafes, and they’re really cheap. Malaysia has a big (some locals would say internationally untapped) market for electronic entertainment.

Yes, there are countries that still need help and there’s a reason America is the biggest monetary contributor of foreign aid in the world, but take a step outside the continent and you’ll realize that things are not so different depending on where you are.

2. Other developed countries, especially in Europe, are paradises with more rights and better quality of life.

I’m not trying to poo-poo on other countries out of spite; I’m simply calling attention to facts. You know how you can’t be evicted in the U.S. for no reason? Australia doesn’t have that protection and they have a housing crisis now! You know how you can’t be fired in the U.S. if you get sick? You can in the UK! What many Americans assume are standard protections and rights that developed nations have? Other countries may not actually have them, even European ones!

I’ve noticed that Americans (and to a lesser extent all countries) have a bit of “grass is greener” syndrome when it comes to other countries. It’s fair to believe that other countries have some benefits that we don’t and it’s fine to want to implement them, but don’t automatically assume that moving to them will be “everything I have now +1.”

3. Other countries hate your country or consider you the laughingstock of the world.

Sorta. Many of them do, but in my experience, if you get non-Americans in a neutral setting and ask them about their own country’s politics, economics, and/or social issues? Oh ho, brace yourself for a RANT. I’ve also noticed that many make fun of the U.S. as a form of “punching up” humor, and this is often fueled by a little resentment that U.S. culture and news constantly permeates modern news and entertainment discourse.

People like to make fun of the U.S., but there are just as many people who see the U.S. as a bastion, just ask protesters who are sick of their regimes like Hong Kong and Cuba. It’s easy to believe that America is hated everywhere, but much of that comes from a very American-centric perspective of the world and social media. It’s not as bad as you think.

3 Big Misconceptions that non-Americans have about the US.

1. All states have the same culture.

Because the U.S. is so large, it has so many different geographical areas and so many different cultures who have called this place home. Louisiana is very different from Oregon. California is different from Texas. New York is different from Florida. Kansas is different from Massachusetts. Heck, even adjacent states like Idaho and Washington are wildly different! Or even in States like California, you’ll find that the coast and southern areas of the state are have completely different cultures from the northern and eastern areas. The State of New York? The New York you see in the movies is just the tiny little island of Manhattan and the rest of the state is almost nothing like it! 

There are rivalries between states that you might see echo rivalries like Scotland and England, Sri Lanka and India, Sweden and Denmark, or Tanzania and Kenya.

Financially, there’s a lot of disparity as well. A poor person in America is statistically better off than a poor person in many other countries, but don’t let that fool you. There is a lot of income and lifestyle disparity in the U.S. between the rich and the poor. Heck, the minimum wage and standard of living varies depending on which state you’re in! A studio apartment in New York City is MUCH more expensive than a two-storey house in Nebraska!

Point is, there is no “average” American.

2. The President is the leader of our country and can make laws and declare war.

This idea that the president is our leader is a misconception that started with Teddy Roosevelt, arguably our first “celebrity president.” (Some argue it was Lincoln, but I digress.) The president is merely the leader of our executive branch of government. We have an executive branch, a legislative branch, and a judicial branch. Each has checks and balances towards the other.

What powers does the president have? Check here. The office more limited than you might think. Many powers you think he has are actually delegated to the other branches of government or even the states themselves.

3. We are refused treatment or bankrupted by medical bills because we do not have socialized healthcare.

I’m not trying to defend our healthcare system as perfect (oh HELL no, it needs some big improvements), but the idea that we can get bankrupted by an accident is simply untrue. In fact, it is ILLEGAL for a hospital to charge a person more than they can afford or refuse them treatment for a medical emergency. It’s gotten to the point that even many Americans don’t realize they have this right!

Side note, this is an annoying thing about our culture and laws. Because we have been granted so many freedoms and protections, you see some people like landlords and hospitals try to get you to waive those freedoms and protections in contracts which is why it’s so important to read the fine print before you sign anything.

[inxspacetime]

@thereallordphoenix​

Week five had been a crazy one for sure - and technically week six thanks to a surprise double eviction. It was one of the first weeks his alliance wasn’t in power, and also the first he was targeted. It wasn’t a bad move, he already won quite a few competitions, he was the reason why his group had been been in power for most of the season so far. But that didn’t mean he would go down without a fight. And that fight may have been lost after he was second out of the veto competition, but thankfully Jake had his back and secured the win. They did lose a number by the end of the week, nearly two but they managed to get out a straggler.

Going into that week it was the four of them against six other people. He didn’t like those numbers going into the next competition, but thankfully he was able to make sure the power was back in their hands. The next target was pretty clear, but he wasn’t ready to get into all that yet. After the week he had, after how hard he went in that comp, he wanted nothing more than to finally relax. In his original plans he was alone doing this, but it would be no surprise to anyone in the house to know Jake was lounging on the bed right beside him.

He popped another candy into his mouth before turning onto his side, taking a moment to admire his best friend in the house before he broke the silence between them. “Hey,” he started as he reached over to gently pull back the headphones he’d been listening to. “Thanks for saving my ass this week. I’d probably be on my way back to Florida right now if it weren’t for you.”

[authenticmiya]

Punching Bag - Hawk x Reader

Summary - Having a broken home made the reader rely solely on being apart of Cobra Kai, but life doesn’t get any better when she has to face her ex best friend everytime she goes to the Dojo. (Part 2 here)

Words - 1.3k

Warnings - angst

Swallowing the lump in your throat, you took a deep breath and entered the dojo. It wasn't a good day, in fact it hadn't been a good day in a long time. Missing out on karate wasn't an option. All eyes were on you as it looked like Sensei Lawrence had already began today's lesson.

"Y/L/N finally made it to the session. Fifty push ups on your knuckles once you are clothed correctly." Johnny told you, a slight ping of concern running through him as he noticed how different you had looked.

Johnny was the only father figure you had, but he wouldn't treat you different to any other student in his dojo. He listened to all your problems - despite his annoyance to girls who were all emotional and had a bitchy attitude.

"Yes Sensei." You sighed, heading into the changing rooms.

"Y/N you good?" Aisha was quick to follow you and you just nodded. She couldn't really force you into talking about stuff you didn't want to.

When you had finally come out, the students had been put into partners, but before you had the chance, you dropped to the floor and done fifty.

"Something's up with her." You overheard Miguel say to Hawk. Like Hawk gave a crap. He left you.

Once upon a time, before Hawk had become one ball of anger, he was your best friend. You, him and Demetri were the golden trio growing up. However, his swift turn into popularity, turned him into an absolute asshole. He didn't want anything to do with you and that's how it was left.

You'd never have left Cobra Kai because of him, despite all of the hurt and the bullshit he had put you through, because Cobra Kai was your only sense of security.

"Y/L/N you're partnered with Stingray." Johnny demanded, you nodded and stood beside him.

"Badass push-ups today Y/N." Stingray told you and you shot him a small smile. Usually, you were the only one who would never shut up. Always talking, always coming in with a bright attitude.

"Right as you can see, I have got two punch-bags over there, I want sting-ray, Diaz, Y/L/N and Hawk on them. The rest of you, facing the mirror." Johnny demanded.

"Time to let your anger out." Stingray chuckled but it really was time to let loose. Small punches, turned into huge punches, and eventually you could feel your knuckles start to slowly bruise, but it didn't stop you.

"Y/N calm down." Miguel tried to stop you but you blocked out all the noise. Miguel shot a look to his friend. Hawk was the only one who knew you inside and out, the only one who knew you for you.

"You wanna slow down on your right hooks?" Hawk questioned with a raised eyebrow.

"No." You snapped, hitting the punching bag harder.

"Y/L/N come on, I think you've had enough on this activity for one day." Johnny tried to convince you to move, but you wouldn't.

"Y/N!" Johnny shouted and the whole class went dead silent, causing you to stop.

"Your knuckles are bleeding." Hawk reached out but you pushed him.

"I'm fine." You snapped, before rushing to grab your bag.

"You're not leaving until we've had a discussion." Johnny stopped you from leaving.

"Well I guess we'll be here until Christmas then." This wasn't like you, you never ever spoke to Johnny like that. You weren't the bad guy. He had been there for you, for so many years.

"Everybody class is over, get out!" Johnny shouted.

"You two are staying here." Johnny pointed to Miguel and Hawk.

"What is going on with you Y/L/N?" Hawk asked.

"Don't act like you care Eli, you don't know me anymore." You shot him a dirty look.

"Believe it or not, I know everything about you Y/N, so either you speak up so we can help you-" You immediately cut him off.

"No don't play the I'm so helpful card. You can't help me. You're the asshole who chose not to be apart of my life, you left me. You fucking left me." Your once big bright eyes, had turned into saddened, dull ones. Hawk felt terrible, but he'd never admit that or even show that because of his reputation.

"You keeping it bottled up in that big ass head of yours isn't gonna do you any favours Y/N, what's going on?" Johnny sighed.

"I don't really know what's wrong with me Johnny." You whispered and the man had never really had to deal with the whole emotional ordeal in women, let alone a student he thought of as his own daughter.

"You're not good with this bullshit so I'd rather save you the time." You went to head back out the door, but once again, Hawk was there to try and stop you.

"I know you hate me with everything inside of you, but believe me, we want to understand what's going on." Hawk tried to comfort you.

"Last night, I got a call saying my electricity was being shut down because dad didn't pay the bills. I woke up this morning to a letter saying that if I didn't come up with the money in a week, I'd be evicted." You began.

"Y/N, I don't have a lot of money myself, but you know you can always come to me-" Johnny began.

"It's not as simple as that." You whispered, suddenly feeling the waterworks. Now you were never one to cry, so this was a huge shock to all three of the guys.

"Where is the deadbeat anyway? Florida for a business meeting or Japan for vacation?" Hawk questioned.

"Dubai. He's not coming back. He married some women over there. They're happily in love and now he no longer wants to pay for anything. I work two jobs and it doesn't compare to what the rent is." You were on full on rant mode.

"I've always fucking hated your father. He was a slime ball in high-school." Johnny groaned.

“I don’t want any pity from any of you. Look I came here to just let my anger out, and I have now, so can I please leave?” You asked.

“I’d rather drive you home.” Johnny insisted.

“It’s not really gonna be home anymore, so I’m just gonna walk to clear my mind, Thank-you though.” You half-heartedly smiled.

“Please can you get them knuckles cleaned up? That’s gonna hurt like a bitch in the morning.” Johnny wasn’t going to push your limits.

“I’ll see what my lame-ass first aid kit can do.” That made them all chuckle a little bit.

“Safe journeys Y/N.” Miguel gave you a side hug and you quickly exited.

“You’re gonna walk out there, and you’re gonna take her home.” Miguel pushed Hawk towards the door.

“Did you not just see how she acted towards me? I’m the last person she’d want walking her home.” Hawk looked at him like he was crazy.

“Stop being a pussy and make sure she’s home safe.” Johnny glared at his student and Hawk was reluctant, but was quick to follow after you.

“Y/N, wait up!” Hawk called out, stopping dead in your tracks, you turned around.

“What do you want?” You asked with your arms crossed over your chest.

“Look, we’re obviously not okay, and we won’t be for a long time but I will never be able to live with myself, if I didn’t make sure you got home in one piece.” Hawk told you.

“Okay.” You simply said, and his eyes nearly fell out of his head because you had been so hesitant and cold towards him - just like he had been with you.

“Okay?” He questioned, and you nodded. Hawk lead you towards his motorcycle and handed you over a helmet. You set off, behind Hawk, with your arms wrapped around him. The ride was silent, and you were soon knocked out of your thoughts when Hawk drove straight past your apartment complex.

“You missed the turning.” You told him.

“I know I did, but we all know you don’t have a first aid kit, I do, and once I’ve helped you fix them knuckles, you and I are talking.”

[mostlysignssomeportents]

A weapon of mass financial destruction

Some things are hard to understand because they're complicated.

Some things are complicated so they'll be hard to understand.

The harder you look at the finance industry, the more evident it becomes that the complexity is deliberate, a means of baffling with bullshit.

Private equity is one of those baffling and mysterious phenomena that only gets worse with scrutiny: how is it possible that a handful of companies are able to borrow vast sums to buy up and then destroy successful businesses? Can that really be their business-model?

Yup.

"Private Equity at Work," Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt's 2014 analysis of the social consequences of private equity takeovers. It identifies many destructive PE practices, but singles out one as especially deadly: "club deals."

https://www.russellsage.org/publications/private-equity-work

In a club deal, "two or more PE funds join together to acquire a huge enterprise, and share ownership." The presence of multiple marquee names on the deal (like the Toys R Us acquisition, with Bain, KKR, and Vornado in a single "club") puts billions on tap from lenders.

Club deals' easy access to credit made them hugely popular, constituting 40% of leveraged buyouts in 2004. But the uncritical fortunes showered on club LBOs emboldened a series of increasingly destructive grifts that caused club deals collapse in popularity.

The "save businesses, fuck workers" Trump stimulus sent trillions of Fed dollars sloshing into the finance world, fuelling multiple asset bubbles, from cryptos to single-family dwellings - even a violent trading-card frenzy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/14/business/pokemon-cards-target.html

To that list, we can now add Club Deals 2.0, with billions being marshalled by PE alliances who are bidding against one another to acquire Medline America's largest manufacturer/distributor of medical supplies, serving hospitals and doctor's offices.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-06/top-buyout-firms-said-to-club-up-for-jumbo-lbo-of-medline

As Appelbaum writes for The American Prospect, this is cause for alarm. To the PE clubs, Medline is an asset, used to secure debt financing that can be handed out to fund managers and investors. To the rest of us, Medline is a matter of life or death.

https://prospect.org/economy/private-equity-club-deal-coming-to-a-pension-fund-near-you/

To remind us of the awesome destructive power of PE club deals, Appelbaum provides us with a rundown of their terrifying history:

The 2006 $5.4b Tishman Speyer/Blackrock deal to buy Stuyvesant/Cooper Village in order to undo its rent-control status, evict its tenants, and go condo. Tenants organized, and the fund went bankrupt in 2010, dodging the $200m it owed tenants for illegal rent overcharges. Though the fund managers made out fine on that deal, its investment partners weren't so lucky: "the Church of England, the government of Singapore, and three public-employee pension funds in Florida and California, lost a total of $850 million."

The 2007 $48b KKR/TPG/Goldman Sachs buyout of Texas energy giant TXU (AKA Energy Future Holdings). Bankrupt by 2012. PE extracted $538m from the deal, and millions more in "fees" to oversee the company's implosion. Investors lost 95 cents for every dollar they put in.

The 2004 Cerberus/Sun/Lubert-Adler/Klaff buyout of Mervyn's department stores: asset stripped, bankrupt by 2008, liquidated, destroying thousands of jobs and stiffing suppliers, kicking off a wave of knock-on bankruptcies.

The 2006 $30.7b Apollo/TPG buyout of Harrah's (now Caesar's): eliminated much of the 30,000 unionized employee workforce and cut the IPO offering from $17/share to $9 in 2010. Investors lost 40% of their cash.

The 2000 Caxton-Iseman/Sentinel acquisition of Buffets Holdings (Ryan's, Hometown Buffet, Old Country Buffet, Tahoe Joe's, etc). Bankrupt by 2008 after the PE extracted more than $250m. Thousands of jobs gone, forever.

PE firms claim that they are Good at Business in ways that the people who run profitable companies that employ people in good jobs that do things other people value simply are not.

With leveraged buyouts, PE firms borrow billions by putting up the companies they're targeting as collateral (like nonconsensually buying someone else's house by taking out a mortgage that puts their house up as security!).

Credulous lenders - your pension fund, your government, even your church - put up the money, accepting deals in which the key assets of the business are immediately liquidated to pay huge management and special dividend fees to the PE company.

PE rakes in hundreds of millions - even billions - and saddles the company with vast debts whose interest payments drain its profits. Meanwhile, the company is forced to lease back the capital assets the PE company sold off, exposing it to rent shocks and price hikes.

While the PE barons who devised this Excellent Business Strategy charge the company millions more in "management and consulting fees" in exchange for yet more of this species of commercial wisdom.

It's a (terrifying) sign of just how stupid big money has become that club deals are back. A leveraged buyout of Medline puts the whole medical system in jeopardy (raising a question: why didn't antitrust regulators prevent Medline from becoming a single point of failure?).

There is no credible case for PE making Medline a better company. As Appelbaum writes, "it's a highly successful company with no low-hanging fruit in the form of operational, marketing, or business strategy improvements requiring PE’s secret sauce."

Sticking Medline with $10b in leveraged buyout debts and saddling it with millions in payments for "management and consulting" will necessitate massive junk-bond raises and a spiral towards inevitable bankruptcy.

As Appelbaum writes, that doesn't mean that the funds bidding for the company (Advent/Bain/CVC, KKR/Clayton, Blackstone/Hellman) won't make out like (literal) bandits on the deal.

For decades, we've been sold the narrative that wealth is the reward for brilliance, in a concerted effort to overturn Balzac's maxim that "behind every great fortune there is a crime."

We've been told that we're not qualified to comment on finance matters because we don't understand its complexities, the underlying, unquestionable axioms that make it somehow necessary and valorous to destroy productive businesses in the name of capitalism.

We've been told that economic malaise is the result of workers demanding a living wage (especially through unions) and "burdensome regulations" that put the incomprehensible genius of billionaire saviors in shackles, to the detriment of us all.

Reality has finally come for that self-serving myth. At a time in which American union membership is at historic lows, support for unions is at historic highs, and our trust in big business has plummeted:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/13/americans-are-more-pro-union-and-anti-big-business-than-at-any-time-in-decades

Starting in 2012, and for first time in half-century the history of the American National Election Studies, public sentiment moved for unions and against business (historically, trust for unions and business rise and fall together).

The latest ANES data shows the most intense divergence ever, with all age groups and political groups hold "record or near-record positive views favoring labor over big business." Republican support of unions, which has grown since 2012, is at an all-time high.

The PRO Act, a landmark pro-union bill, is currently before the Congress, with strong support from the Biden administration. It presents the possibility that public sentiment will turn into public policy, making lasting change to our politics:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/07/pro-act-class-war/#sectoral-balances

Billionaires have always been sterling exemplars of class solidarity. Even when their private equity funds result in wealthy investors losing hundreds of millions of dollars, they stick together and argue for preferential treatment for capital gains and finance deregulation.

Today, we see serious signs of class solidarity among the rest of us, the first in many decades. All it took was decades of hugely destructive financial engineering, a nation brought to the brink of collapse, and a planet on fire, all in the name of "efficiency."

[arcticdementor]

Stefanie Gray explains why, as a teenager, she was so anxious to leave her home state of Florida to go to college.

“I went to garbage schools and I’m from a garbage low-income suburb where everyone sucks Oxycontin all day,” she says. “I needed to get out.”

She got into Hunter College in New York, but both her parents had died and she had nowhere near enough to pay tuition, so she borrowed. “I just had nothing and was poor as hell, so I took out loans,” she says.

This being 2006, just a year after the infamous Bankruptcy Bill of 2005 was passed, she believed news stories about student loans being non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. She believed they would be with her for life, or until they were paid off.

“My understanding was, it’s better to purchase 55 big-screen TVs on a credit card, and discharge that in a court of law, then be a student who’s getting an education,” she says.

Still, she asked for financial aid: “I was like, ‘My parents are dead, I'm a literal fucking orphan, I have no siblings. I'm just taking out this money to put my ass through school.”

Instead of a denial, she got plenty of credit, including a slice of what were called “direct-to-consumer” loans, that came with a whopping 14% interest rate. One of her loans also came from a company called MyRichUncle that, before going bankrupt in 2009, would briefly become famous for running an ad disclosing a kickback system that existed between student lenders and college financial aid offices.

Gray was not the cliché undergrad, majoring in intersectional basket-weaving with no plan to repay her loans. She took geographical mapping, with the specific aim of getting a paying job quickly. But she graduated in the middle of the post-2008 crash, when “53% of people 18 to 29 were unemployed or underemployed.”

“I couldn't even get a job scrubbing toilets at a local motel,” she recalls. “They told me straight up that I was over-educated. I was like, “Literally, I'll do your housekeeping. I don't give a shit, just let me make money and not get evicted and end up homeless.”

The lender Sallie Mae at the time had an amusingly loathsome policy of charging a repeating $150 fee every three months just for the privilege of applying for forbearance. Gray was so pissed about having to pay $50 a month just to say she was broke that she started a change.org petition that ended up gathering 170,000 signatures.

She personally delivered those to the Washington offices of Sallie Mae and ended up extracting a compromise out of the firm: they’d still charge the fee, but she could at least apply it to her balance, as opposed to just sticking it in the company’s pocket as an extra. This meager “partial” victory over a student lender was so rare, the New York Times wrote about it.

“I definitely poked the bear,” she says.

Gray still owed a ton of student debt — it had ballooned from $36,000 to $77,000, in fact — and collectors were calling her nonstop, perhaps with a little edge thanks to who she was. “They were telling me I should hit up people I know for money, which was one thing,” she recalls. “But when they started talking about giving blood, or selling plasma… I don’t know.”

Sallie Mae ultimately sued Gray four times. In doing so, they made a strange error. It might have slipped by, but for luck. “By the grace of God,” Gray said, she met a man in the lobby of a courthouse, a future state Senator named Kevin Thomas, who took a look at her case. “Huh, I’ve got some ideas,” he said, eventually pointing to a problem right at the top of her lawsuit.

Sallie Mae did not represent itself in court as Sallie Mae. The listed plaintiff was “SLM Private Credit Student Loan Trust VL Funding LLC.” As was increasingly the case with mortgages and other forms of debt, student loans by then were typically gathered, pooled, and chopped into slices called tranches, to be marketed to investors. Gray, essentially, was being sued by a tranche of student loan debt, a little like being sued by the coach section of an airline flight.

When Thomas advised her to look up the plaintiff’s name, she discovered it wasn’t registered to do business in the State of New York, which prompted the judge to rule that the entity lacked standing to sue. He fined Sallie Mae $10,000 for “nonsense” and gave Gray another rare victory over a student lender, which she ended up writing about herself this time, in The Guardian.

Corporate creditors often play probabilities and mass-sue even if they don’t always have great cases, knowing a huge percentage of borrowers either won’t show up in court (as with credit card holders) or will agree to anything to avoid judgments, the usual scenario with student borrowers.

“What usually happens in pretty much 99% of these cases is you beg and plead and say, ‘Please don't put a judgment against me, I'll do anything… because a judgment against you means you're not going to be able to buy a home, you’re not going to be able to do basically anything involving credit for the next 20 years.”

…

The passage of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 was a classic demonstration of how America works, or doesn’t, depending on your point of view. While we focus on differences between Republicans and Democrats, it’s their uncanny habit of having just a sliver of enough agreement to pass crucial industry-friendly bills that really defines the parties.

Whether it’s NAFTA, the Iraq War authorization, or the Obama stimulus, there are always just enough aisle-crossers to get the job done, and the tally usually tracks with industry money with humorous accuracy. In this law signed by George Bush, sponsored by Republican Chuck Grassley, and greased by millions in donations from entities like Sallie Mae, the crucial votes were cast by a handful of aisle-crossing Democrats, including especially the Delawareans Joe Biden and Tom Carper. Hillary Clinton, who took $140,000 from bank interests in her Senate run, had voted for an earlier version.

Party intrigue is only part of the magic of American politics. Public relations matter, too, and the Bankruptcy Bill turned out to be the poster child for another cherished national phenomenon: the double-lie.

…

Years later, pundits still debate whether there really ever was an epidemic of debt-fleeing deadbeats, or whether legislators in 2005 who just a few years later gave “fresh starts” to bankrupt Wall Street banks ever cared about “moral hazard,” or if it’s fair to cut off a single Mom in a trailer when Donald Trump got to brag about “brilliantly” filing four commercial bankruptcies, and so on.

In other words, we argue the why of the bill, but not the what. What did that law say, exactly? For years, it was believed that it absolutely closed the door on bankruptcy for whole classes of borrowers, and one in particular: students. Nearly fifteen years after the bill’s passage, journalists were still using language like, “The bill made it completely impossible to discharge student loan debt.”

…

The phrase “Just asking questions” today often carries a negative connotation. It’s the language of the conspiracy theorist, we’re told. But sometimes in America we’re just not told the whole story, and when the press can’t or won’t do it, it’s left to individual people to fill in the blanks. In a few rare cases, they find out something they weren’t supposed to, and in rarer cases still, they learn enough to beat the system. This is one of those stories.

…

Smith’s explanation of the history of the student loan exemption and where it all went wrong is biting and psychologically astute. In his telling, the courts’ historically sneering attitude toward student borrowers has its roots in an ages-old generational debate.

“This started out as an an argument between the Greatest Generation and Baby Boomers,” Smith notes. “A lot of the law was created by people railing against draft-dodging deadbeat hippies.”

He points to a 1980 ruling by a judge named Richard Merrick, who in denying relief to a former student, wrote the following:

The arrogance of former students who had received so much from society, frequently including draft deferment, and who had given back so little in return, accompanied by their vehemence in asserting their constitutional and statutory rights, frequently were not well received by legislators and jurists, senior to them, who had lived through the Depression, had worked their ways through college and graduate school, had served in World War II, and had been paying the taxes which made possible the student loans.

Smith laughs about this I didn’t climb the hills at Normandy with a knife in my teeth just to eat the debt on your useless-ass liberal arts degree perspective, noting that “when those guys who did all that complaining went to school, only rich prep school kids went to college, and by the way, tuition was like ten bucks.” Still, he wasn’t completely unsympathetic to the conservative position.

…

This concern about “deadbeats” gaming the system — kids taking out fat loans to go to school and bailing on them before the end of the graduation party — led that 1985 court to take a hardcore position against students who made “virtually no attempt to repay.” They established a three-pronged standard that came to be known as the “Brunner test” for determining if a student faced enough “undue hardship” to be granted relief from student debt.

Among other things, the court ruled that a newly graduated student had to do more than demonstrate a temporary inability to handle bills. Instead, a “total incapacity now and in the future to pay” had to be present for a court to grant relief. Over the course of the next decades, it became axiomatic that basically no sentient being could pass the Brunner test.

…

In 2015, he was practicing law at the Texas litigation firm Bickel and Brewer when he came across a case involving a former Pace University student named Lesley Campbell, who was seeking to discharge a $15,000 loan she took out while studying for a bar exam. Smith believed a loan given out to a woman who’d already completed her studies, and who used the money to pay for rent and groceries, was not covering an “educational benefit” as required by law. A judge named Carla Craig agreed and canceled Campbell’s loan, and Campbell v. Citibank became one of the earlier dents in the public perception that there were no exceptions to the prohibition on discharging student debts.

“I thought, ‘Wait, what? This might be important,’” says Smith.

By law, Smith believed, lenders needed to be wary of three major exceptions to the non-dischargeability rule:

— If a loan was not made to a student attending a Title IV accredited school, he thought it was probably not a “qualified educational loan.”

— If the student was not a full-time student — in practice, this meant taking less than six credits — the loan was probably dischargeable.

— And if the loan was made in an amount over and above the actual cost of attending an accredited school, the excess might not be “eligible” money, and potentially dischargeable.

Practically speaking, this means if you got a loan for an unaccredited school, were not a full-time student, or borrowed for something other than school expenses, you might be eligible for relief in court.

Smith found companies had been working around these restrictions in the blunt predatory spirit of a giant-sized Columbia Record Club. Companies lent hundreds of thousands to teenagers over and above the cost of tuition, or to people who’d already graduated, or to attendees of dubious unaccredited institutions, or to a dozen other inappropriate destinations. Then they called these glorified credit card balances non-dischargeable educational debts — Gray got one of these “direct-to-consumer” specials — and either sold them into the financial system as investments, borrowed against them as positive assets, or both.

…

Smith thought these practices were nuts, and tried to convince his bosses to start suing financial companies.

“They were like, ‘You do know what we do around here, right?’ We defend banks,” he recalls, laughing. “I said, ‘Not these particular banks.’ They said it didn’t matter, it was a question of optics, and besides, who was going to pay off in the end? A bunch of penniless students?”

Furious, Smith stormed off, deciding to hang his own shingle and fight the system on his own. “My sister kept saying to me, ‘You have to stop trying to live in a John Grisham novel,’” he recalls, laughing. “There were parts of it where I was probably super melodramatic, saying things like, ‘I'm going to go find justice.’”

Slowly however, Smith did find clients, and began filing and winning cases. With each suit, he learned more and more about student lenders. In one critical moment, he discovered that the same companies who were representing in court that their loans were absolutely non-dischargeable were telling investors something entirely different. In one prospectus for a trust packed full of loans managed by Sallie Mae, investors were told that the process for creating the aforementioned “direct-to-consumer” loans:

Does not involve school certification as an additional control and, therefore, may be subject to some additional risk that the loans are not used for qualified education expenses… You will bear any risk of loss resulting from the discharge.

Sallie Mae was warning investors that the loans might be discharged in bankruptcy. Why the honesty? Because the parties who’d be packaging and selling these student loan-backed instruments included Credit Suisse, JP Morgan Chase, and Deutsche Bank.

“It’s one thing to lie to a bunch of broke students. They don’t matter,” Smith says. “It’s another to lie to JP Morgan Chase and Deutsche Bank. You screw those people, they’ll fight back.”

…

In June of 2018, a case involving a Navy veteran named Kevin Rosenberg went through the courts. Rosenberg owed hundreds of thousands of dollars and tried to keep current on his loans, but after his hiking and camping store folded in 2017, he found himself busted and unable to pay. His case was essentially the opposite of Brunner: he clearly hadn’t tried to game the system, he made a good faith effort to pay, and he demonstrated a long-term inability to make good. All of this was taken into consideration by a judge named Cecilia Morris, who ruled that Rosenberg qualified for “undue hardship.”

“Most people… believe it impossible to discharge student loans,” Morris wrote. “This Court will not participate in perpetuating these myths.” The ruling essentially blew up the legend of the unbeatable Brunner standard.

Given a fresh start, Rosenberg moved to Norway to become an Arctic tour guide. “I want people to know that this is a viable option,” he said at the time. The ruling attracted a small flurry of news attention, including a feature in the Wall Street Journal, as the case sent a tremor through the student lending world. More and more people were now testing their luck in bankruptcy, suing their lenders, and asking more and more uncomfortable questions about the nature of the education business.

In the summer of 2012, a former bond trader named Michael Grabis sat in the waiting room of a Manhattan financial company, biding time before a job interview. In the eighties, Grabis’s father was a successful bond trader who worked in a swank office atop the World Trade Center, but after the 1987 crash, the family fell out of the smart set overnight. His father lost his job and spiraled, his mother had to look for a job, and “we just became working class people.”

Michael tried to rewrite the family story, going to school and going into the bond business himself, first with the Bank of New York, and eventually for Schwab. But he, too, lost his job in a crash, in 2008, and now was trying to break the pattern of bubble economy misery. However, he’d exited Pennsylvania’s Lafayette College in the nineties carrying tens of thousands in student loans. That number had since been compounded by fees and penalties, and the usual letters, notices, and phone calls from debt collectors came nonstop.

Now, awaiting a job interview, his phone rang again. It was a collection call for Sallie Mae, and it wasn’t just one voice on the line.

“They had two women call at once,” Grabis recalls. “They told me I’d made bad life choices, that I lived in too expensive a city, that I had to move to a cheaper place, so I could afford to pay them,” Grabis explains. “I tried to tell them I was literally at that moment trying to get a job to help pay my bills, but these people are trained to just hound you without listening. I was shaking when I got off the phone, and ended up having a bad interview.”

Two years later, more out of desperation and anger than any real expectation of relief, Grabis went to federal court in the Southern District of New York and filed for bankruptcy. At the time, he, too, believed student loans could not be eliminated. But the more he read about the way student loans were constructed and sold — he’d had experience in doing shovel-work constructing mortgage-backed securities, so he understood the Student Loan Asset-Backed Securities (SLABS) market — he started to develop a theory. Everyone dealing with the finances of higher education in America knew the system was rotten, he thought. But what if someone could prove it?

The 2005 Bankruptcy Act says former students can’t discharge loans for “qualified educational expenses,” i.e. loans given to students so that they might attend tax-exempt non-profit educational institutions. Historically, that exemption covered almost all higher education loans.

What if America’s universities no longer deserve their non-profit status? What if they’re no longer schools, and are instead first and foremost crude profit-making ventures, leveraging federal bankruptcy law and the I.R.S. code into a single, ongoing predatory lending scheme?

This is essentially what Grabis argued, in a motion filed last January. He named Navient, Lafayette College, the U.S. Department of Education, Joe Biden, his own exasperated judge, and a host of other “unknown co-perpetrators” as part of a scheme against him, claiming the entirety of America’s higher education business had become an illegal moneymaking scam.

“They created a fraud,” he says flatly.

…

Grabis doesn’t have a lawyer, his case has been going on for the better part of six years, and at first blush, his argument sounds like a Hail Mary from a desperate debtor. The only catch is, he might be right.

By any metric, something unnatural is going on in the education business. While other industries in America suffered declines thanks to financial crises, increased exposure to foreign competition, and other factors, higher education has grown suspiciously fat in the last half-century. Tuition costs are up 100% at universities over and above inflation since 2000, despite the 2008 crash, with some schools jacking up prices at three, four times the rate of inflation dating back to the seventies.

Bloat at the administrative level makes the average university look like a parody of an NFL team, where every brain-dead cousin to the owner gets on the payroll. According to Education Week, “fundraisers, financial aid advisers, global recruitment staff, and many others grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009,” which is ten times the rate of growth for tenured faculty positions.

…

Hovering over all this is a fact not generally known to the public: many American universities, even ones claiming to be broke, are sitting atop mountains of reserve cash. In 2013, after the University of Wisconsin blamed post-crash troubles for raising tuition 5.5%, UW system president Kevin Reilly in 2013 admitted that the school actually held $638 million in reserve, separate and distinct from the school endowment. Moreover, Reilly said, other big schools were doing the same thing. UW’s reserve was 25% of its operating budget, for instance, but the University of Minnesota’s was 29%, while Illinois maintained a whopping 34% buffer.

When Alan Collinge of Student Loan Justice looked into it, he found many other schools were sitting atop mass reserves even as they pleaded poverty to raise tuition rates. “They’re all doing it,” he said.

In the mortgage bubble that led to the 2008 crash, financiers siphoned fortunes off home loans that were unlikely to be repaid. Student loans are the same game, but worse. All the key players get richer as that $1.7 trillion pile of debt expands, and the fact that everyone knows huge percentages of student borrowers will never pay is immaterial. More campus palaces get built, more administrators get added to payrolls, and perhaps most importantly, the list of assets grows for financial companies, whether or not the loans perform.

…

“As long as it’s collateralized at Navient, they can borrow against that,” Smith says. “They say, ‘Look, we've got $3 billion in assets, which are just consumer loans in negative amortization that are not being repaid, but are being artificially kept out of default so Navient can borrow against that from other banks.

“When I realized that, I was like, ‘Oh, my god. They’re happy that the loans are growing instead of being repaid, because it gives them more collateral to borrow against.’” Smith’s comments echo complaints made by virtually every student borrower in trouble I’ve ever interviewed: lenders are not motivated to reduce the size of balances by actually getting paid. Instead, the game is about keeping loans alive and endlessly growing the balance, through new fees, penalties, etc.

There are two ways of approaching reform of the system. One is the Bernie Sanders route, which would involve debt forgiveness and free higher education. A market-based approach meanwhile dreams of reintroducing discipline into student lending; if students could default, schools couldn’t endlessly raise costs on the back of unlimited government-backed credit.

Which idea is more correct can be debated, but the one thing we know for sure is that the current system is the worst of both worlds, enriching all the most undeserving actors, and hitting that increasingly prevalent policy sweet spot of privatized profit and socialized risk. Whether it gets blown up in bankruptcy courts or simply collapses eventually under its own financial weight — there’s an argument that the market will be massively disrupted if and when the administration ends the Covid-19 deferment of student loan payments — the lie can’t go on much longer.

“It’s just obvious that this has become a printing money operation,” says Grabis. “The colleges charge whatever they want, then they go to the government and continuously increase the size of the loans.” If you’re on the inside, that’s a beautiful thing. What about for everyone else?

[the-firebird69]

So few other things happening that we thought we would mention one of them is

-there's a rule and law on cruise ships restricting their height over the deck and the law cruise ships are going to go out of business and will stop riding them and they should and they're gross something to be like four or five stories and now they have eight or 10 that's gross

-we will have a lot less trouble here come Monday because Sunday they are evicting Trump and son and that's right on Sunday well they plan to and people know about it and they're going to do it .

-this is a huge week coming up giant numbers of things will happen huge changes and yeah they're planning on evicting these two and they sort of know it and they said they don't care but they are going to get put out by the government and it will be because of written request to the court and people are saying it's you doing it and the other party saying you're the one doing it

+other changes are coming up pretty quick here and they are going to be permanent they're going to make sure that these people stop doing what they're doing so what they say and it's coming this week on purpose and they have a plan on how to do and they're going to follow it. To make a long story short there going to evict people out of these apartments who don't have agreements with their name on it. Do you think they can do something to our son because he doesn't have a full copy and it's not his responsibility but it should have one but it doesn't matter these things are going to happen shortly to a lot of them

-his other things happening and coming up real soon and they're decided to be done today they had a big meeting and they said it too they're going to kick out the morlock and get them out any plan to I have other plans but it started in the three tunnels going to get nothing but flak

-and speaking of which they did reference they think 20 households will go out there into the rings tonight they are constant source of annoyance and 20 is pretty big out of 100 it's a good size number and they said we're going to the campground to leave in campers it is really not necessary to say all that but that's what they did and those 20 households have very few in them but they do ever send it a decent size crowd globally but they have in some cases one person and that's two households and there are five households with two people then there are seven with three people and six of them have four people are better it's not really that many in those houses and they're tied to less people anymore than you would think it's not a huge number but it is a number and they plan to go out tonight in Florida and they can't seem to do that so they're trying to get others to go out too so far no go and it's huge and it's getting bigger

-huge numbers of people are trying to get to Florida it's not true anymore but they are trying to send military people here and the theory is to take over here you hold the leaders under duress and you can take over the planet it's at the morlock think others think that's kind of sketchy. And they don't want to do

-tonight is a huge night and one reason is the evacuation here it's getting bigger and we haven't even posted yet so it should it's now going to be 6.5% people think and bigger and out of 15% that's 8.5% will remain that's not very large it's a huge day there's a lot of people to leave and in moments it will probably go up so we're going to publish

Thor Freya

Olympus

Zues Hera

And yeah that's all more luck not just Macklemore pseudo empire 2

[boushh2187]

Unexpected - RCIJ 2020

Title: Unexpected

By @boushh2187

Fandom: Once Upon a Time

Pairing: Rumbelle

Rumbelle Christmas in July 2020 

Gift for @lotus0kid

Prompt: “I’m doing you a favor”

Word Count: 4053

Rated: PG

Author’s Note: I really hope you enjoy the story, lotus0kid, and that it makes you smile!

Summary: Storybrooke AU. Mr. Gold finds himself on an unexpected trip.

“When you think about it, I’m doing you a favor.”

“Shouldn’t that be my line?” Richard Gold looked up from his seat in Archibald Hopper’s office, his expensive three piece suit a bit wrinkled after all day wear. Dr. Hopper also wore a suit, though one that had seen better days. He looked slightly uncomfortable at being caught repeating the kind of words Gold often used, but only slightly. Perhaps, after a few long chats in this office over the years, Dr. Hopper felt as if they were friends. Gold wasn’t sure he’d go that far, even if Dr. Hopper knew more about Gold’s personal life than anyone in the town of Storybrooke, Maine. He had, after all, just threatened him with eviction for not having this month’s rent, but perhaps Dr. Hopper also knew that it was rather an idle threat. At least, due to the circumstances.

He looked across the room at Pongo. Dr. Hopper’s Dalmatian was resting on top of a comfortable looking blanket on top of his bed. The poor dog was recovering from surgery. His leg was wrapped up in a cast and he was drowsy from the procedure and the pain medicine. Gold had a soft spot for Pongo, and understood that Dr. Hopper had used the rent money and then some for this unexpected procedure.

“It’s the perfect solution,” Dr. Hopper continued, pushing up his glasses and sitting up straighter. I don’t have the money, due to Pongo’s surgery, but I do have this trip I was to go on, and now I need to stay with Pongo. You can go in my stead. It’s all expenses paid. I won it in a contest, so you don’t have to worry about a thing. I can make all of the changes with the company and you can even invite your son.” His smile reached his eyes, and the thought obviously made him happy. Dr. Hopper was one of very few people in this town that even knew he had a son, and how much Gold loved his son, and missed him.

Bae would probably enjoy it, and might be able to find a way to convince his mother to allow him to miss school. “That isn’t a bad idea. I haven’t seen him in months. It would be the perfect reason for his mother to allow him to go away with me.”

Archie brightened even more, if that was possible. “I told you! I really would be grateful if you would take this deal.”

Gold was amused. “I think you might be adapting some of my quirks.” This time, Dr. Hopper grinned and walked over to his small cabinet and pulled out a bottle of scotch. Gold nodded when Dr. Hopper nudged the bottle towards him as an offer. Adapting some of his quirks, indeed. Dr. Hopper poured them both a glass and they shared a moment of silence as they enjoyed the fine liquid. Gold put his glass down. “And I sincerely hope that Pongo mends swiftly. Call me with the details as soon as possible so that I can make arrangements with my son.”

“Will do!” Dr. Hopper was already rummaging through his papers to make the relevant calls. Hopefully, this will turn out to be a good way to reconnect with his teenage son. 

*****

Mr. Gold boarded the plane looking more like he was going to a business meeting instead of a vacation. He had a shoulder bag that held his travel essentials, and he’d checked his other luggage. It took some effort to move through the narrow aisle of the plane with his bag and his cane. He resisted the temptation of blowing his hair out of his eyes. His hair was shoulder length, as he’d worn it since before Bae was born, except that now there were generous amounts of grey along his temples and sideburns. Where had the time gone? He would hopefully be meeting his fourteen year old son at the hotel. Fourteen! In the last picture his son had sent him, Bae looked like he’d grown a foot, and he had grown his hair out like his father, except there was much more curl to his son’s hair, unlike his. He’d taken from his mother in that regard. Gold really hoped that Milah would not resist allowing Bae to take this trip on his own to meet his father.

After what seemed like ages of waiting for people to place their carry ons in the overhead bins, Gold was finally at his seat. This plane had two seats on either side of the aisle. It was quite small, and he had wished he’d convinced the company that provided Dr. Hopper with this winning trip to allow him to upgrade to first class.

The window seat was already occupied, and he looked carefully at his ticket. He did indeed have the aisle seat, which on the one hand helped because he could stretch out his bad ankle if he really needed to, but on the other hand he might have to get up over and over again if he had an annoying neighbor. He took his seat, took the newspaper out of his bag, and placed his bag underneath the chair. He put his seatbelt on and settled in with the folded newspaper in his lap. It read: June 1st, 1983. At least he was able to get today’s paper at the airport.

“Good Morning, Mr. Gold.” He started, and turned in the direction of the voice. The Australian accent was unmistakable. He knew this person. She was from Storybrooke as well. The daughter of the local florist. 

“Ms. French, I didn’t expect to see you here. Good Morning.” He was, in fact, quite taken aback. Truth be told she often took his breath away, especially when he ran into her unexpectedly in town. There were times when he knew he might see her: at Granny’s Diner for breakfast or lunch, at the library where she worked, at her father’s shop, or even in his shop, when she would stop by looking for rare books or tea sets. However, this was something else entirely. He’d never imagined running into here on a plane of all places, and looking as lovely as ever. She was dressed in bright yellow flower patterned sundress, and her sunglasses were perched on top of her head. Her  brown hair fell in waves, covering her bare shoulders.

“Didn’t Archie tell you I’d be going on this trip too?”

“Oh no, he failed to mention that. I… I didn’t realize that the two of you were together.” The last bit somehow made it out of his mouth instead of staying in his thoughts.

“Oh, no… we aren’t.” She reached out and touched his hand, and he tried not to react in any way. “We were just going as friends, since I was there at Granny’s and encouraged him to enter the contest. It was for up to four guests. Ruby and Billy were going to come too, but it didn’t work out.”

“I see… well I’m probably not going to be as good company as your friends…”

“Don’t sell yourself short, Mr. Gold. I always enjoy chatting with you.”

He managed to smile back at her. “I enjoy our talks as well, Ms. French.” She smiled back at him and leaned back in her chair. 

“Archie mentioned that your son might be joining us?”

For a moment, Gold was angry with Dr. Hopper for mentioning his son, but Belle was so very sweet in how she inquired that he relaxed immediately.

“Yes, I’m hoping his mother will allow him to make the trip on his own. He’s fourteen now, and I think he can manage. I’m supposed to call them when we land and make sure he will be joining me.”

“Oh I’m sure he will come. He’ll enjoy visiting Disney World too! So many rides. This is my first time visiting, but I did go to DisneyLand once when I was his age. I loved it.”

They mostly spent the flight in companionable silence. She read her book and he read the paper, commenting on interesting things they read. As they left their seats to exit the plane, Belle reached up to retrieve her carry on. Gold thought for a moment, how best to help her with his bad leg hindering him. Before he could come up with a solution, a tall lad reached up and took her bag down for her. She thanked him politely and Gold allowed her to move ahead of him as they exited the plane. He tried not to glare at the young man behind him.

*****

They shared a cab to the hotel and stepped up to different desks to check in. Gold made sure to request an adjoining room for Bae who would be arriving in the early evening as per his ex-wife’s assurances. Belle and Gold parted ways after check in, with Belle heading up just ahead of him. When he arrived at his room, he set up his luggage and looked around. It wasn’t bad. They had set them up at the Contemporary, which was quite nice, and had easy access to the Magic Kingdom park. The rooms were higher end than Gold had expected from a trip that was not paid for by the guests. Gold’s room had two double beds and a balcony with a theme park view. The concierge assured him that they would have a wonderful view of the fireworks. Gold discovered the door to the adjoining room and decided to take a look at Bae’s room and make sure all was well before he arrived. 

He opened the door and nearly fell back into his room. He had to steady himself with his cane. He hadn’t opened the door to an empty room, as he had expected. Instead, he had barged in on Belle, who was unpacking her luggage and laying out her clothes onto the bed. He had, unfortunately, arrived just in time to see her holding up her nightgown, which was practically see through, and definitely more suited for Florida heat than the cooler weather in Maine.

“I’m so… so sorry,” he stammered, as Belle stared at him with a mixture of surprise and what he thought was amusement. He felt flushed with embarrassment, and that never happened to him. She placed the nightgown on the bed, and put her hands on her hips. “I thought this was going to be empty. I had requested an adjoining room for my son…”

“It’s OK, I think I understand what happened.” Belle said, gently. “You need to remember that you and I are on the same vacation. You requested an adjoining room, but the trip was originally intended for a family vacation. One room for the adults, and the other for the kids.” She beckoned him inside. He took a few steps in, feeling very awkward, and hoping he didn’t show it at all. He normally didn’t betray his emotions, but with Belle, it was different.

Belle’s room had a large king sized bed, and the same balcony and view. “I see. So this must be the room they had intended for the adults, and I have...” he turned to indicate the open door to the other room.

“The kids room,” Belle chuckled. “Do you want this room? I don’t mind.”

“No, no. I’ll see if I can change things around. May, I?” he indicated the room’s telephone, and Belle nodded.

After a five minute long conversation with the concierge he gave up.

“No other rooms. Cheerleader convention.” That time, Belle laughed out loud, heartily 

“Bae and I can share my room. It’s quite alright. We have two beds. I had hoped to give him his own room, but this will be fine…”

“Thank you, Mr. Gold.”

“Not at all. I’m sorry to have barged in this way. I hope you know that I didn’t intend to interrupt--” he indicated all of the clothes on the bed.

“I didn’t mind.” She smiled at him, somewhat flirty, though Gold was sure that was his imagination. He had imagined that kind of thing on more than one occasion in their past interactions, and he always immediately admonished himself. Belle was not someone that would be interested in him. She was a beautiful, kind, intelligent, PhD student, who could find someone much better suited for her. And someone closer to her age too. He was a good fifteen years her senior. He shouldn’t even entertain the thought.

*****

Belle was done changing into her comfortable clothes for the evening. She had decided to stay at the hotel and order in, perhaps watch the fireworks from the balcony, and then get an early start in the morning. She thought that she might ask Mr. Gold and his son if they wanted to visit the parks together, but she hadn’t decided on whether she would be intruding or not. The thing was that she was quite excited to have found herself in this situation. She had always had a bit of a crush on Mr. Gold, ever since she had arrived in Storybrooke after Grad School. It was over three years already, and while she’d had a couple of boyfriends, no one ever really kept her interest. Of course, she knew he was quite a few years older than her, but she never paid much attention to that sort of thing. She was a grown woman who could go out with whomever she wanted. She was getting ahead of herself. Even though she had a feeling that he returned her interest, she wasn’t certain. Still, seeing how he blushed earlier gave her a little bit of hope. 

There was a knock at her door. Perhaps it was Mr. Gold calling? She opened the door and took a peek through the crack. It was a boy, a teenager, slightly taller than she was, with tousled brown hair. This had to be Bae! “Hello!” she greeted him.

“I’m sorry, I think I must have the wrong room.” He looked down at some wrinkled papers in his hand. 

“You must be Bae!”

The boy looked surprised at first, but recovered quickly. “I like Neal better, actually. My parents just call me Bae. It’s a nickname.”

“For Baelfire, I know. It’s your middle name. Your dad told me. He’s going to be so happy to see you. He’s been looking forward to it so much.”

Neal looked like he was trying to process everything. He was still standing outside the room and he looked like he was trying to peer inside. “Is my dad staying with you?” he asked slowly, uncertainly.

Belle smiled at him and responded coyly, “Yes, and no. He’s next door. I’ll let him explain it to you.” She put her arm on his shoulder and led him toward Mr. Gold’s room. Neal knocked on the door and it was a moment before Gold appeared and smiled so broadly that Belle was certain she’d never seen him look so happy. 

“Bae!”

Neal hugged his father tightly, “It’s Neal now, Papa. Remember?” He was smiling when he pulled away. 

“I’ll let you two get reacquainted,” Belle said. “Have a good evening.”

“Nice meeting you… I”m sorry, I don’t know your name.”

“Oh forgive me! It’s Belle. Nice meeting you too, Neal.” She waved goodbye and went back to her room, feeling very happy for Mr. Gold.

*****

“So she isn’t your girlfriend?” Neal asked, for the second time. He was sprawled out on one of the double beds, clicking through the channels on the TV.

“Bae, I’ve already answered that question.” He looked up over the large map of the Magic Kingdom park that he was analyzing. He was determined that his son have a good time on this vacation.

“Are you sure, though?” 

Gold folded the map in half and gave his son an exasperated look. “Of course I’m sure, Bae.”

“Well then, I’m pretty sure she wants to be your girlfriend.”

Gold sighed. This was getting a bit out of hand.

“She likes you, Dad. Mom says I have a 6th sense about these kinds of things. I always know who is going to end up dating at school before they do.” Neal sat up on the bed. “Don’t you think she’s pretty?”

“Of course, but that’s besides the point. She wouldn’t be interested in me, and that’s a fact.”

Neal laughed. “Trust me, Dad. She likes you.”

“Can we please change the subject?” Gold asked, wearily.

“Sure. I think we need to discuss something else. You aren’t going to go to the parks in a suit every day, are you?” Neal pointed at the suits hanging in the closet.

Gold suddenly found himself at a loss for words. He hadn’t considered that at all, but he had nothing else with him. “It’ll be fine, Bae.” He was trying to reassure himself, as much as Bae.

“No way, Dad. I’m going to get Belle to back me up on this one.” Before Gold could stop him, Neal was up out of bed and knocking on the door to the connecting room.

It took all of one minute for Belle to open the door curiously.

“Belle you have to tell my dad that he can’t wear his usual clothes to the parks. He’s going to melt.”

Belle laughed at the colorful expression. “I don’t think he’d melt exactly, but he’d probably be very uncomfortable. You don’t have anything more suitable for the hot weather and for all the walking?” 

She directed the question to Gold, and he shook his head, lamely. She turned back to Neal. “You know what you have to do then,” she said, solemnly. “You have to take him shopping. There are many shops in this hotel, and they all will still be open. Why don’t you two go shopping and before you go we can decide on something for dinner. I’ll order it while you two are out, and by the time you get back the food will be here for you.”

Gold couldn’t deny that this sounded like a good idea, and it made him feel so very good to have Belle helping him navigate this situation. 

*****

Over dinner it was decided that the three of them would go to the Magic Kingdom park together. Gold was dressed in a white t-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. Neal had tried to get him into a pair of shorts, but it wasn’t happening. It was going to look odd enough limping around with his silver tipped cane in that outfit. Not nearly as dignified as when wearing a suit. Both Belle and Bae wore tank tops, and shorts, and they slathered on the sunscreen. Belle made sure to give Gold some too, and she even rubbed some on the bridge of his nose before he could protest. 

They spent the day together going on various rides. Gold was glad that Belle was with them. Occasionally, he would sit out on some of the rides and she would go with Bae. They went on Space Mountain, and the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad together. They all went on the Mad Tea Party ride, even though it made Gold a bit queasy. Pirates of the Carribean was amusing, and they were able to ride that one together. Both Belle and Bae grabbed onto him when the ride suddenly dropped in the dark. By the time they went on the Haunted Mansion ride, Neal had made some young friends from the cheerleader convention. Belle and Gold ended up alone in the same car, and Belle held onto his hand the entire time, alternating being thrilled, spooked, and fascinated by the ride. 

By the evening the three of them functioned almost like a little family. That’s what it felt like to Gold, and he would be very sad when this trip was over and they went back to their regular lives. Neal had wanted them to stay in line for Peter Pan’s Flight, but Gold had asked to sit that one out. Belle offered to keep him company while Neal went with his newfound friends. It was getting close to the hour of the fireworks display and the park was emptying out in certain areas, as people gathered to watch the show. Many of the rides had shorter lines for that reason, so he hoped that Neal wouldn’t be too long and they would be able to find a spot to watch the fireworks show. 

Belle led him to a bench near a running fountain. This section of the park was quieting down as the crowds moved towards Cinderella’s Castle. The sound of the fountain was soothing after the long day. They sat together for a bit, and Belle slipped her hand in his. It wasn’t the first time that day, or the second, or the third. Gold had been trying very hard not to read into it, but it was difficult not to. Belle had been very close to him all day. He also had been behaving in a more familiar manner with her. Something was changing, or perhaps it was something finally coming to light.

“Mr. Gold. I have a confession to make.”

Gold swallowed hard.  “Oh?” He tried to sound more curious than nervous.

“I like you very much. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I have liked you for a very long time.”

“I like you too, Ms. French. You’re very good company.”

“Please call me Belle. I’ve asked you before.” 

“Yes, Belle. I’m sorry. Old habits…”

“You do understand what I’m saying, don’t you?” She took her hand and placed it on his cheek, making him face her.

“I do, I just don’t quite believe it.”

“I’ve enjoyed this day so much, haven’t you?”

He nodded.

“I want to have more days like this, where we get to spend time together, because I think you like me just as much as I like you.”

She was gently stroking his cheek. “Am I correct?”

He remembered Neal’s words from last night: “She likes you, Dad” and wondered if she’d overheard them. He had felt the connection between them all throughout this trip, but he refused to believe it. He wasn’t going to deny it anymore. “Belle French, I like you very much indeed.” 

She sighed in relief, and smiled. “Mr. Gold, I’d like to kiss you now.”

“Under one condition,” he said, smiling. “You have to stop calling me Mr. Gold.”

“Deal,” she said, and leaned forward. He met her half way and they shared a sweet, gentle kiss. He pulled back, and gauged her reaction. She didn’t seem like she wanted him to move too far, and pulled him back for a deeper kiss.

“Dad! Come on we’re going to miss the… fireworks… show…” Neal stopped in front of them, out of breath from having run over from the ride nearby. His jaw hung open, and it took him a moment to recover. He clapped and pointed at his father. “I told you, Dad! I know about this stuff! Since you guys are busy, is it ok if I head over with my friends? I can meet you back here.”

“You can go on ahead, but not too far, we’ll be right behind you,” Belle said, and pulled Gold up from his seat. She linked her arm with his and they followed Neal as he met up with his friends just up the path. 

“When we get back to Storybrooke, would you like to go to dinner with me?” Gold asked.

Belle chuckled. “Most definitely yes. Maybe we can have some fireworks in Storybrooke too,” she teased, and squeezed his arm. 

Instead of being taken aback this time, he teased in return, “I think it is quite likely after that last display.” She leaned in closer, and the fireworks went off above the castle. The crowd around them cheered, and music played through the speakers around them. They walked arm in arm and found a spot near Neal and his new friends. They were pointing and marveling at the display. Belle leaned against him as they watched, and Gold had a sudden feeling of gratitude towards Dr. Hopper. He really did do him a big favor.

The End.

[dvp95]

not trying to hide it

pairing: dan howell/phil lester rating: explicit tags: flatmate au, strangers to lovers, smut, fluff word count: 5.6k summary: Phil's parents want him to get a flatmate. Bryony wants to get her newly-evicted mate off her couch. It’s not quite luck or fate, but Phil is thankful anyway. 

a birthday present for the lovely and hilarious @karcathy !!!!! they deserve only good things and you should all go wish them a happy birthday!

read on ao3 or here!

Phil doesn’t want to get a flatmate. He likes having his own space, because he can mess it up as much as he likes and doesn’t need to worry about someone making noise while he’s trying to sleep. He only pays part of his own rent, though - half during a good month - so he doesn’t have much of a choice when his parents tell him to find someone who can cover at least a third of it. London isn’t cheap, and Phil makes a fluctuating amount of money, and he supposes his parents are well within their rights to insist he gets his life together at some point.

He’s pretty sure that they helped him pick out a two bedroom so that he would do that eventually. Maybe they’d had some kind of pipe dream about nurseries? In either case, Phil’s just had his miscellaneous junk piled in the spare for over a year. There’s a futon in it whenever Martyn or PJ come over and don’t feel like taking the Tube home, but it’s currently piled high with unopened packages and stuffed animals.

Clearing the room is probably the biggest task. Phil’s got a lot of clutter, and getting rid of it is weirdly difficult sometimes. Most of it just ends up in his room or in the common area, making the rest of the flat look even more topsy than it already did. Opening all the PR is fun, until suddenly he’s got dozens of empty parcels to dispose of and various merch items from his online friends scattered all over the rug. At least most of it is clothing and accessories - he’s got enough storage in his room to handle more clothes. It’s the trinkets that he’s got problems finding space for.

Phil’s parents didn’t give him a deadline, which was probably a mistake. He’s all too happy to just exist with a barren spare room until they get on his case again, but that’s before Bryony gets ahold of him. Somehow, she scares him a lot more than his own mum does.

“Phil,” she says, blunt and businesslike as if she’s calling from work. Maybe she is - it’s quarter to four, which he supposes is a normal time for adults to be at work. Phil is in his pants and eating cereal. He didn’t even want to answer the phone, really, too invested in the complicated storyline playing out on Riverdale, but he knows she’d just keep calling until he did. “Have you cleared out that room yet?”

“Yes, mum,” says Phil. “I hated every second of it.”

“Good,” Bryony says. Which part she’s replying to is unclear. “My mate just got kicked out of his place and I want him off my couch. Will you bump him up the nonexistent list of potentials you’ve got?”

Phil pauses the Riverdale episode. It’s hard to focus on that and Bryony’s drama. “Well, that depends on why he got kicked out. Like, is he a dick? Did he not pay rent? Did he leave dishes in the sink for three weeks? Did he kick a hole in the wall trying to do drunk karate?”

“You need to stop comparing people to your uni housemates. No, nothing like that.”

“Then what happened?”

There’s a pause, and then Bryony makes a disapproving sort of noise. “It’s not exactly my fucking story to tell, is it? I’ll just say he ran into a bigot landlord and leave it at that, yeah?”

Something like guilt for pushing the issue settles into Phil’s stomach, but he scolds himself. He couldn’t have known that, and he didn’t want to blindly do a favour for someone troubled and stupid and in need of help. Bryony has a habit of collecting those people. When Phil feels like being honest with himself, he can recognise that he’s in that category as well. He doesn’t really feel like it today.

“Fine,” Phil says, like it’s a bigger hardship than it is. “Send him over, uh, Thursday?”

“I’ll send him over tonight,” says Bryony. Phil makes a loud noise of protest that she bowls right over. “You said the room is empty. Dan is eight feet tall and he snores like a lawnmower. I want him off my couch.”

--

Bryony’s mate isn’t eight feet tall, obviously, although Phil thinks it would be pretty cool if he were. The flat has high ceilings that Phil has to jump to touch, and he’s been amusing himself by picturing a giant of a man reaching up and just tapping on them. He does have to duck around the hanging light in the kitchen, but so does Phil.

“I’m convinced that’s going to be the thing that kills me,” Phil says conversationally.

Dan hasn’t said much, mostly just mumbling awkward pleasantries, but he laughs at that. When he laughs, Phil sees a glint of silver in his mouth that has his brain short-circuiting a little bit.

“Maybe,” Dan says as he looks dubiously into Phil’s cupboards. “Only if the sugar intake doesn’t get you first, mate. Why the fuck do you need four bags of marshmallows?”

“They’re different sizes!”

“Do you do a lot of baking or something?”

The question makes Phil flash back to the last time he tried to make muffins. The stain from that adventure turned meltdown still hasn’t come out of his favourite jeans. Whatever expression twists onto his face makes Dan laugh again, louder, and Phil decides that being a little stupid is worth hearing that unabashed sound. He gives Dan a sheepish grin and sticks his hands in his pockets. “No. I just like marshmallows.”

“You know they’ve got gelatin in them, right?” Dan asks like he’s trying to be serious, but the twitching of his lips gives him away.

“I like jello, too.”

“That’s not what -” Dan starts, and then honks. “How d’you know Bryony again?”

That’s a bit of a long, mortifying story, but Phil tells it anyway. He makes tea as he relives spilling a blue cocktail on her very expensive shoes and then following her around like a puppy while he tried to make it up to her. Normally he’d feel like he was talking too much, but Dan leans against the breakfast bar with attentive brown eyes and laughs in all the right places, so Phil doesn’t feel that hint of self-consciousness.

He hands Dan’s tea over in a Kirby mug and pours his own into an ugly commemorative one from a dinky Florida gift shop. For a moment, there’s quiet. Dan doesn’t seem uncomfortable as much as he seems contemplative, running his tongue absently over his teeth to catch on the silver ball in his tongue.

Then Dan says, “I don’t have any mugs. Or furniture. Or anything, really.”

“Nothing?” Phil asks, wondering if he ought to be aghast or just empathetic. He wonders if that has something to do with Dan being kicked out, or if he’s one of those minimalist people. “Not even, like, clothes?”

“I’ve got clothes, Jesus,” says Dan. Despite his grumbling, he looks more embarrassed than anything.

“Well,” Phil says, then comes up short. He hasn’t had to live with other people in so long, he forgets how this part works. “You can use whatever I’ve got. I don’t expect you to go out and buy your own plates or something, that would be silly. And we’d probably put off dishes even longer if I did.”

Dan smiles, but there’s a wariness that Phil doesn’t quite understand. “Okay. Thanks.” He takes a long sip of his tea, eyes fluttering closed for a moment, and Phil reminds himself - not for the first time, not even for the first time today - that it’s pointless to think about how pretty a guy is when nothing is going to come of it. “So you’re, like, really okay with me living here? You don’t need to let Bryony bully you.”

“Not quite sure what the alternative is,” Phil jokes, “but I don’t mind. I need a flatmate.”

“I can be a good flatmate,” Dan says, with a weirdly determined air about him. Phil has no reason not to believe him, aside from his own bad experiences with young men sharing space with him, but at least Dan isn’t a uni lad.

Phil finds himself shrugging. “Okay,” he says, because this is all going much easier than he expected. He supposes Bryony was doing him a favour as much as he was doing her one, because the relief of not having to do a bunch of interviews with potentially creepy strangers is settling into him now. “Rent’s due on the first, the water pressure sucks on weekends, and I’m gay.”

Dan blinks. Some of that wariness melts into something that Phil can’t read before he looks down at his tea.

“Me too,” Dan tells the drink. “More or less.”

It takes actual effort for Phil to bite back the joke. Maybe if the admission weren’t pulling at Dan’s shoulders in such an obvious way, he’d ask if Dan meant he also sucked on weekends. Instead, he just smiles. “That’s good. If Bry sent me a homophobe, I’d have to return her Christmas present.”

--

Dan leaves just long enough to get his bags, and then Phil has a flatmate. He promises to get a key cut in the morning, but Dan just shrugs and says he doesn’t leave the house much anyway, so there’s not much of a rush. That’s when Phil figures out that they both work from home, and anxiety swirls in his gut at the idea of that quickly becoming an issue. It’s so much easier to get on each other’s nerves when they’re both around practically all day every day, but that’s a bridge he’ll have to burn when he comes to it, or whatever.

For a couple of days, Dan is like a wounded animal that only comes out of hiding when he hears the fridge door open. Phil knows there isn’t really anything left in the room aside from his futon and a desk that he and Martyn tried to put together tispy, but he supposes that Dan’s got a laptop and big padded headphones to entertain himself with.

After a little while of getting used to the place, though, Dan starts doing his work in the common area of the flat. He’ll sit at the breakfast bar to sort through potential articles with the air of someone very bored on Tinder or make a nest on the corner of the sofa to watch Phil play Zelda. He’s good about staying quiet whenever Phil is streaming, but sometimes he’ll laugh or tease Phil for a dumb move, and people start wondering who the voice out of frame is.

They play games together, too, when neither of them have work to do - or, more accurately, are avoiding their tasks for a little while with pizza and Mario Kart - and Dan wins more often than not. That should probably be embarrassing to Phil, since he plays video games for a living, but he’s never been the type to try and excel at every single game he plays. It’s more about the entertainment, both for himself and for his audience. He imagines Dan feels similarly torn between sheepish and intrigued when Phil looks at the HTML on Dan’s laptop and points to an issue that Dan’s been trying to find for an hour.

Dan is a nerd with a contagious laugh who writes up a chart of ridiculous Riverdale theories on their fridge whiteboard, and it’s getting more and more difficult for Phil not to notice him.

His hair looks soft, his eyes are as expressive as the rest of him, he’s all lanky limbs and hairless chest when he hangs out half-naked - which is unfortunately often - but his mouth is probably the worst offender. He’s always chewing on a pen or toying with his tongue ring, like he’s got to be doing something with it when he’s not talking, and that’s not a train of thought that Phil should be going down except during the privacy of his showertime.

At this point, he’s not sure if he should thank Bryony or strangle her for delivering him a gorgeous ‘more or less’ gay man with all the same hobbies and interests as him, because there are too many ways for this to end badly and only, like, one way he wants it to end.

--

Phil is streaming Apex Legends in a surprisingly competent team when his phone rings. It doesn’t ring very often, and it’s probably Bryony asking why he’s been holed up for over a month, so he ignores it. It’s only when it starts ringing again, immediately after it stops, that he frowns.

“Hey, Dan,” he calls. Last time he checked, Dan was rearranging the spice shelf into something that makes a bit more sense than its current state. He thinks it’s a little silly, and he’ll probably still reach for the hot chocolate in the wrong place, but he likes that Dan has been making himself more at home lately. He’s noticed a few of his knick-knacks shifting around the room as well. “Can you check who’s calling?”

There’s a clattering noise that slightly worries Phil, and then Dan says, “It’s your mum.”

Phil freezes. He’s in the middle of something, sure, but he’s been waiting for this call. He doesn’t want to tell the couple thousand people watching him play about his dad’s health, so for a long moment he doesn’t know what to do.

Then, Dan is leaning over the back of the sofa. He takes the controller from Phil’s hands and replaces it with his still-buzzing phone.

“Go talk to her,” he murmurs. “I’ll keep playing for you.”

Gratitude washes over Phil, and he practically runs to his room to take the call. He doesn’t have time to worry about what his Twitch audience will think of Dan’s sudden appearance after so much time as a disembodied voice, because he’s got to spend all his brain power concentrating on the things his mum is telling him. At least he knows he’s not letting his team down - if anything, getting Dan as defense is an upgrade.

The conversation with his mum is long, but it’s all good news. Phil lets his mum talk his ear off, because the relief in her voice is so palpable and contagious that he doesn’t have the heart to say he’s in the middle of a video game. She only says goodbye when he gently reminds her to call Martyn as well, and then Phil is alone in his room with nothing but the pounding of his own heart in his ears for company. They’ve had good news (and bad news and no news) from the doctors before, but every time it’s like a shot of adrenaline right to Phil’s system. His dad is okay, his mum is happy, and his rampant anxiety can take a short break.

Dan isn’t playing anymore when Phil comes back, probably because the round ended, but he’s rambling about his own Apex opinions to the chat. He’s passionate like he is about basically everything, his hands and mouth moving faster than his brain, and Phil feels more warmth settle into his skin.

“Gunning for my job?” Phil jokes, plopping back down on the sofa. His thigh is pressed to Dan’s, but neither of them shift away.

“Maybe,” Dan teases. He hands the controller back all the same.

There’s a question in Dan’s big brown eyes: Everything okay? He doesn’t need to know details to pick up on how important that call was, and Phil thinks that this would have been the point of no return if he hadn’t hit that a couple weeks ago. He beams at Dan and nods, and the crinkly-eyed grin he gets in response makes Phil feel like he’s floating on air.

Later, when the night is winding down, Phil’s body is thrumming. Normally he’d be curled up with a book on one side of the sofa while Dan and his laptop took up the other, and that would be enough interaction before they headed to bed, but Phil still feels wired.

“You wanna go out?” he asks for the first time since Dan moved in. He’s always been more of a homebody than most of his friends, but having a friend like Dan - because that’s what they are now, isn’t it? - who also enjoys sitting in relative quiet doing their respective activities has made him even more of a shut-in than usual. Dan is clearly surprised by the question, and Phil doesn’t blame him. “I just - y’know, I got good news earlier, and I’m happy, and I want to get a drink or something.”

“And you want it with me?” Dan asks, his dimple deepening in the tell-tale beginnings of a grin.

“Yeah,” says Phil. Maybe he ought to have some kind of explanation that doesn’t make him sound like an idiot with a crush, but he can’t be bothered to think of one right now. Besides, Dan is smiling with the silver ball between his teeth, so he probably doesn’t mind how Phil sounds.

“Alright,” Dan agrees easily enough, shutting his laptop. “I’ll get dressed.”

--

Neither of them dress up; Phil leaves his top buttons open and Dan’s jeans are distractingly tight, but that’s as much of a concession as they’ll make. Phil likes bars more than he likes pubs or clubs, and he thinks splashing ten quid on a neon pink cocktail is absolutely worth it tonight. Dan doesn’t offer his opinion one way or the other until they’re sat at a booth, and then he says, “Thank fuck you’re not a clubber.”

“You don’t like clubbing?” Phil asks, distracted by Dan’s mission of blindly finding his straw with his tongue. The longer he knows Dan, the more he’s tempted to look up whether or not oral fixation is a real thing. “I mean, I don’t really love it, but it’s fun sometimes.”

“I’d have to already be wasted to dance in public,” says Dan.

“Oh, I can’t dance,” Phil says, matter-of-factly, and Dan snorts into his drink. “But I do it anyway.”

The bar isn’t overly busy or loud, but Phil still has to strain his ears to hear when Dan mutters, “Maybe it’d be more fun with you.”

It’s a little too easy for Phil’s overactive imagination to picture. Dan, pressed close to him and laughing with his head thrown back every time Phil says or does something stupid. He hopes that the flush he feels high on his cheeks isn’t obvious in the low light, but he’s not optimistic. Dan’s smile is more of a smirk.

Maybe getting drunk with the object of his stupid affections is… not smart. But Phil’s drink is good, and Dan is striking up an easy conversation about the music that’s playing, so Phil pushes logic aside for the moment to just enjoy himself.

--

Phil wakes up with a dry mouth and a slight headache, which is honestly better than he expected after three cocktails and a greasy kebab on the way home. Either Dan drank less than he did or he’s better at holding his alcohol, because Phil remembers getting guided away from lamp posts by his big, steady hands a couple of times.

He remembers making a bit of a fool of himself in general, but if anything Dan got more and more smiley the more that Phil rambled about Star Wars. Phil had reached across the table and poked at one of Dan’s dimples, and Dan had laughed loudly before taking Phil’s hand and holding it to the tabletop for a couple of seconds. Phil hadn’t wanted him to let go, and he wonders now if the hesitation stemmed from Dan’s own reluctance to stop touching him or if that’s just wishful thinking.

Phil gets himself together enough to take some ibuprofen and a long shower. By the time he gets out, wrapped in various towels, Dan is awake and making breakfast. It smells like bacon, but Phil is wary. It might be that fake stuff Dan insists on buying.

“That smells good,” Phil says, suspicious. He drifts over to the breakfast bar to try and get a peek at the pan.

“It’s real bacon,” says Dan. He turns specifically to roll his eyes where Phil can see it.

“Oh, cool. I thought you weren’t eating meat.”

“I’m not,” Dan says. “This is for you. I’m not hungry.”

“God, you’re incredible,” says Phil. He thinks that maybe he should tone it down a bit, because Bryony will kill him if he messes up this very good thing they’ve got going, but he’s not humble enough to not notice the way Dan dimples and turns pink at the earnest compliment. “Seriously,” he adds, talking to Dan’s back as he plates up some toast and bacon. “I am so lucky you needed a place to stay.”

“Luck’s not real, first of all,” Dan says as he hands over Phil’s breakfast. “Secondly, you’re only saying that because I cooked for you.”

Phil isn’t just saying that for the food, but it certainly takes over his attention. He pulls the towel around his shoulders tighter and leans against the breakfast bar to eat. Dan steals the crusts off his toast, rambling the whole time about the work emails he’d woken up to. Every time Dan talks about the ins and outs of journalism and website upkeep, Phil feels grateful all over again for getting a job so far out of his official field that the sectors barely touch. He doesn’t think he could handle working with so many people who can’t figure out how to change the alignment of text in simple HTML or which words they should capitalize in a headline.

“Thank you,” Phil says when he’s done, coming into the kitchen proper to rinse his plate. It’s the least he can do, considering his inability to actually wash the dishes before Dan gets fed up with the mess.

“At the risk of sounding gross and sappy,” Dan hums, “it’s really me who should be thanking you.”

“Maybe we should just both thank Bryony,” Phil suggests, turning to look at Dan again. Dan’s eyes snap up from - somewhere? Phil’s bare legs, maybe? - to stare determinedly at Phil’s face as if he can pretend that they never wandered. “You being too big and loud for her couch is the whole reason you’re here.”

Dan honks a laugh and reaches out like he’s going to shove at Phil. He doesn’t make contact, possibly remembering that Phil is somewhat naked, and just lets his hand fall back to his side awkwardly.

“As if your futon is any fucking better, mate,” he says, seemingly insistent on not drawing attention to the weird things he’s doing. Phil isn’t exactly stupid, is the thing. He thinks about Dan hesitating before letting go of his hand last night, the way he always grins when he catches Phil staring at his piercing, how it feels less like an unrequited crush between them and more like they’re just hovering at the edge of something, and Phil decides to throw caution to the goddamn wind.

“Y’know,” he says, messing with his damp hair for something to do with his hands. “I don’t think you’d be too big and loud for my bed, if you wanted to try that out.”

Dan laughs like he’s not quite sure if it’s a joke or not, and Phil shrugs to hide exactly how much his heart is pounding.

“Where were you planning to sleep, then?” Dan asks. His dark eyes are careful, searching, and Phil’s anxiety doesn’t like that at all. He doesn’t need Dan seeing things that he’s not purposefully putting on display.

“With you,” says Phil. “If you’d want me.”

There’s a long moment of quiet where Phil starts to worry that maybe he’s made a huge mistake. Then, Dan grins slowly and comes closer, pinning Phil to the counter without actually touching him, and Phil grins back at him in sheer relief. “I dunno why, but I never figured you as the type to be so blunt about this sort of thing.”

“What, you thought I was capable of subtlety?” Phil teases, putting a hand to his own chest as if he’s touched by the sentiment. “That’s so nice of you.”

Dan laughs, louder and more genuine, and then his big hands are cupping Phil’s jaw as he leans in to press their smiling mouths together. It’s been a hot minute since Phil kissed anyone while he was sober, so for a moment he doesn’t remember what he’s supposed to do with his hands. When he feels cool metal drag against the underside of his tongue, though, his brain shuts down enough that his hands find Dan’s hips without endlessly second-guessing himself.

It takes a while for them to reluctantly separate, because Phil is busy figuring out how to snog Dan without metal clacking against his teeth too much and Dan is busy figuring out all of the weak points in Phil’s neck with his thumbs.

“You taste like bacon,” Dan says in a strangely scolding tone of voice for someone who had cooked it for Phil.

“Sorry,” Phil says nonsensically, sliding his hands up Dan’s shirt to trace shapes over his lower back. The movements pause when Dan shivers. “Bad? Or good?”

“Your hands are just cold, you spork,” says Dan. He kisses Phil again, quick but firm, and then takes a step back. Phil doesn’t even realise he’s frowning until Dan giggles at him. “C’mon. Bed sounds fucking great right about now.”

--

Phil doesn’t remember the last time he kissed someone for so long that his lips started to tingle, but he’s certainly not complaining. He stopped feeling self conscious about being naked almost immediately after Dan told him it was frankly illegal to put damp towels on a bed, because the hungry way Dan looked at him and grabbed at him after he hung them up quieted the anxiety right away. Dan’s shirt has been discarded somewhere in Phil’s absolute tip of a room, but the soft material of his joggers keeps making Phil bite back noises when it comes in contact with his cock.

“You’re so hot,” Dan tells him in one of the times their mouths aren’t locked, one large hand wrapped around Phil’s thigh and the other supporting his weight on top of Phil.

“No, you,” Phil insists, not caring how dumb he sounds. He’s been mapping Dan’s back with his hands, but he slides them down the back of Dan’s sweats to win the argument before it starts. Sure enough, Dan’s words get cut off by a loud whine of a noise that gets pressed into Phil’s collarbone. Phil feels up Dan’s ass a little before using his grip to roll their hips together. “Fuck. What d’you want?”

“That depends,” Dan hums against Phil’s skin, nipping at his chest.

“On what?”

“On if this is a one time thing.”

There’s a jolt of guilt in Phil’s stomach, and he winds fingers into Dan’s curls to force Dan to look at him. “Hey, no, it’s not like that. I like you, you idiot.”

Dan smiles, and there’s no small amount of relief in it. Phil feels like he should have been more clear, but at least he’s got Dan in his bed and smiling about it now. “Oh good. I like you, too, and it would have been really awkward if you just wanted a fuck.”

“I do also want a fuck,” Phil says, teasing. “If I’m being honest.”

“I couldn’t tell,” Dan says sarcastically, rocking his hips down again and grinning when a noise is surprised out of Phil. “Well, okay, since I don’t need to bucket list this, I wanna go down on you.”

“I’d love to hear that bucket list sometime,” says Phil. He lets go of Dan’s ass and uses his hold on Dan’s hair to push him down, a little more impatiently than he intended. He’s got an apology on the tip of his tongue, but Dan just grunts an approving sort of noise and presses his mouth to Phil’s inner thigh. “But - ah - not right now.”

Dan’s got a mouth made for sucking cock, so it doesn’t take Phil by surprise when he sinks down easily, squeezing Phil’s thigh and running his tongue over the head of Phil’s dick whenever he comes back up, but it sure does make his legs start to shake.

“Fuck,” Phil breathes, doing his best to keep his hips still. That’s a lot more difficult when Dan looks up at him with those big dark eyes and takes him as deep as he can. “You look so good like that, you know that? Bet you do.” Dan hums around his cock and the vibrations from his throat make Phil shiver. “Yeah, fuck, of course you do. Such a pretty mouth, huh?”

With a quiet, wet noise, Dan pulls up to catch his breath. He grins. “I also didn’t figure you for a talker.”

“Sounds like you’ve thought about this,” says Phil. He runs his fingers through Dan’s curls, tugging a little bit to watch Dan’s eyelashes flutter. “How’s it feel to be wrong about me?”

“In this case? Very good.” Dan presses his mouth to Phil’s stomach and bites down, just a little. It doesn’t hurt at all, but it still makes Phil’s hips jerk up. “I dunno, Phil, you’re usually a pretty fucking awkward person, which is, like, a big mood, and you don’t seem like much of a flirt.”

“I’ve been flirting with you for, like, a month and a half,” Phil laughs.

Dan grins wider. “Oh, oops.”

“I don’t have to talk if you don’t like it,” says Phil, even though he can fully tell that Dan does like it. Maybe he just wants to hear that Dan likes it.

The way Dan rolls his eyes makes it obvious that Dan can tell that he’s fishing, but he dimples anyway. “You don’t have to stop talking,” he says dryly, wrapping a big hand around Phil’s cock. “You know I like it.”

Dan takes Phil back in his mouth and closes his eyes like he loves it, which is a visual that Phil will absolutely be coming back to when he’s alone in the shower. Phil tells him as much, gives him a running commentary on every passing thought he has, because it’s hard to control his mouth as it is and the more he talks, the more worked up Dan gets. He sees Dan grinding into the mattress and pulls at him, not bothering to be gentle with it.

“Get rid of these,” Phil says, pushing at Dan’s joggers with a foot. He doesn’t actually think he’ll be able to help like that, but it gets his point across. “And then c’mere, I want to get you off.”

Dan laughs. “Alright, bossy.”

He sits up to get his sweats off and Phil sits up to watch. They grin at each other a bit as soon as Dan is naked, and Phil makes grabby hands.

“Bossy,” Dan repeats before knee-walking into Phil’s lap and kissing him hard. Dan wraps a hand around both of their cocks, but he doesn’t try to stroke. Without fully pulling away from the kiss, Dan murmurs, “Lube, now, I want to come.”

“Now who’s bossy?” Phil huffs a laugh, blindly reaching for his nightstand. He knocks over a couple of things in his search, but eventually he finds the bottle he’s looking for. He pours some over their cocks and gasps when Dan’s hand slides up and back down so easily. Phil would be lying if he said that he hadn’t thought about this, hadn’t wondered if Dan’s wide reach could envelop both of them, but he doesn’t bother telling Dan any of that. Instead, he drops the lube back onto his nightstand and settles a hand on Dan’s ass as he kisses Dan deeper.

Phil’s mouth finds Dan’s neck, and he can’t help laughing at the loud keen of a noise that seems surprised out of Dan’s mouth.

Even though Dan didn’t have his dick sucked, he’s as desperate and horny as Phil feels, and having a tongue and teeth on his pulse point seems to escalate it even more. His breathing is ragged, his hips are jerking up into his own hand, and he comes so hard between them that Phil feels some of it hit his face.

“Fuck,” Dan whines, letting go of himself to stroke Phil’s cock in tight, quick movements. Phil’s breath hitches, and he digs his fingers into the soft skin of Dan’s ass for something to hold onto. Dan kisses Phil’s forehead, then his nose, and then kisses his cheek. His tongue comes out to press against Phil’s skin, the cool metal ball still a small shock somehow, and it takes Phil’s brain an addled moment before he realises that Dan is licking his own come off Phil’s cheek. That’s so unbelievably hot to Phil that he couldn’t stop himself from coming if he even wanted to. He groans and fucks into Dan’s fist, tugging him into an open-mouthed kiss. He can’t taste Dan’s come on his tongue or anything, but the idea of it is enough to make him shudder through an intense orgasm.

Their kisses turn softer than Phil thought possible as they come down from it, and he nuzzles at Dan’s jaw. “I just had a shower,” he says, gently scolding. “Now I’m all gross again.”

“Oh, boo-hoo,” says Dan, grinning. “I’ll clean you up, you big baby.”

Phil is fairly sure that their shower isn’t big enough for that, but he’s always up for trying.

--

After a heated debate on the benefits of flowers versus gift baskets, they end up taking Bryony out for pizza and beer. As thanks.

[travel-voyages]

See wild cats roam among the ruins at a cat sanctuary in Rome

At the Largo di Torre Argentina cat sanctuary in Rome, you just might see a cat sunning itself on the very spot where Julius Caesar was assassinated.

This fascinating archeological site below street level  is located just a few blocks from the Pantheon.  The Roman ruins here date back as far as 4th century B.C.  The cats moved in when the site was excavated in 1929.

It’s become a major Rome tourist attraction.

But it’s hard to say whether people come here for the history or the cats.  

Read on for the story on both, plus what you need to know to visit this Rome cat sanctuary.  

An abundance of cats in Rome is  hardly a new phenomenon.  Indeed, the cat sanctuary’s web site quips that the ancestors of the cats at Torre Argentina probably met Julius Caesar.

Ancient Romans respected the ability of cats to catch pests, but also saw them as sacred animals.  Cats were associated with liberty and divinity and were the only animals allowed to walk freely around their temples.

The ancient Roman cats ruled.  Today, they still do.

Rome is a cat haven, with an estimated cat population of 300,000.   They’ve been recognized by law as a “biocultural heritage” of the city, and whenever five or more cats live together in a feral cat colony, they can’t be disturbed.

How the Torre Argentina cat sanctuary in Rome came to be

The cat ladies in Rome are a formidable group.

The ruins at Largo Argentina were discovered and excavated in 1929.  That’s also when Rome’s feral cats moved in.  Over the years, they were fed by cat ladies, known as ‘gattarre’ in Rome.

Two women, Lia and Silvia, started helping out in 1993.  As the cat population grew, they began raising funds and established a cat shelter in one corner of the site to care for them.

They’ve dealt with threats of eviction over the years, but their cat refuge continues to survive based on the support and donations of local citizens and visitors.

What they do at the feral cat shelter:

Newly abandoned cats are named and registered in the shelter’s log.  Every one of them is examined, sterilized and vaccinated.

In fact, the shelter runs a broader trap, neuter and release program.  One volunteer told me that in the past 25 years, they’ve sterilized 52,000 cats, performing an incredible public service for the city.

Currently, about 130 cats live on the site and are available for adoption.  About 20 cats live inside the small shelter because of disability or old age.

Spotting the cats among the ruins has become one of the fun things to do in Rome, especially for families.

Visitors are not allowed to walk among the ruins, but you can still get a good view from the street level.

You can also visit the cats that live inside the sanctuary.  To find it,  take the stairs down to the site at the corner of Via Florida and Via di Torre Argentina.  It’s open from noon to 6 p.m. on weekdays, and 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekends.

Be sure to take a look at the  Torre Argentina cat shop, where the annual Cats of Rome calendar is a popular item.

You may also wish to make a donation to the sanctuary or to adopt a cat at a distance.  That program is aimed at raising funds to support the older or disabled cats who are not likely to find a forever home.  When you adopt a cat at a distance, you’ll get photos and status updates on your kitty.  Click here to see the cats that you can adopt from a distance.

It’s believed that there are as many as 2000 cat colonies in Rome.  Visitors to the Colosseum will often see cats among the ruins there.  By the way, getting tickets to the Colosseum is not that straight forward, so check out this guide on how to buy tickets to the Colosseum.

There is another Roman cat sanctuary run by volunteers at the Non-Catholic Cemetery in the Testaccio neighbourhood. Here, the cats roam among the graves of famous poets like Keats and Shelley, in the shadow of the ancient Pyramid of Cestius.

And you’ll find one more at the Piazza Vittorio Emanuelle II near the Termini train station.  Note that this area is a little rundown and it’s best to visit the park during the day.

Wherever you go in city, you’re sure to get some cats with your history!

The Torre Argentina Cat Sanctuary:  Click here for the web site where you can get more information, make a donation or adopt a cat at a distance.

https://www.travelblissnow.com/cat-sanctuary-in-rome/

[ryland-rambles]

Writing Challenge - Start

 30 DAY writing challenge.. I have to write a two to four page story that’s deliberately really terrible and cliched. I’ll try.

Once a time there was a princess in a castle. She had long blonde hair that was perfectly curled no matter the fact it always rained outside and the humidity should have been terrible. She had a wonderful singing voice and all the birds would flock to her and sing along. She had big vivid blue eyes and pale perfect skin like ivory and was delicate and skinny despite there not being much else to do than to eat and laze about. Most days she would sigh dramatically and wonder when her prince would come. Nevermind that the door to the castle was unlocked and she had been told emphatically that if she wasn't going to pay her bill, then the hotel would have to evict her. Well, maybe her castle was really a shabby little motel and she wasn't quite as beautiful as she proclaimed but hey, working with fiction here. So the princess, for she had a faux rhinestone tiara that she'd found on Etsy and fell in love with - that made her a princess dammit. So the princess sighed and draped herself dramatically in the doorway, and contemplated doing the sillotte challenge that had been so popular on Tiktok lately. Though with her luck, by the time she actually posted, the fad would be over. That's how her life tended to lately, always one step behind and a dollar short. Speaking of dollars, the princess patted her pockets and frowned when pulled out only a crumpled dollar bill and an unwrapped piece of gum. Damn. The princess valiantly adjusted her crown, nodded fiercely, then sighed and readjusted her crown. It was time to stop wallowing hoping her prince would come to save her. Jeff had broken up with her, to be with some stupid bubblegum barbie and well, this princess was a washed up thirty something now. Nevermind that she'd been the one to help him with all his projects, all his hard work, had sacrificed everything for him to grow his business into the powerhouse it was now. Typical. Wasn't there a TV show about that very same life? Desperate Housewives maybe? Something like that. the princess .. Samantha Tarran as the rest of the world would know her as, just sighed and turned away from the doorway, where she had been staring out at the rain for the last half hour. Contemplating life, contemplating her choices and how she had ended up here, broke and homeless and wondering if anyone would pay for a frumpy, slightly overweight, thirty something woman's OnlyFans. Well, there were all kinds, she had to be someone's preference.. shouldn't she? Spying someone coming to her door with purpose, Sam sighed deeply. Probably the hotel had sent someone to officially kick her out. Well, whatever. She'd go peacefully, no need to involve the police. Her brother was one, and well, they were good to have in life, but if they were anything like her brother, they were just obnoxious. Well maybe that was just Noah. That was the role of big brothers after all. Sam was torn from her musings when the most gorgeous man she'd ever seen in her life stopped before and in that incredible deep voice asked, with the touch of an accent she couldn't place, "Mrs. Samantha Tarran?" Sam frowned, and sighed and waved one hand dismissively. "Just Miss, the bastard never actually signed the paperwork so the wedding was never really legal." Not that it had been a real wedding anyway, just the jerk had tried to appease her by dragging her to a courthouse. She hadn't even been able to invite her mom, it had been so last minute and the woman lived on the other side of the world. Or well, maybe the princess was exaggerating.. again. It was only in Florida and the princess lived in Kentucky. Where the weather was Construction, More Construction, Construction Signs Up But No One Is Actually Working, and lastly - Winter. Someone the man glanced up and down at her, making her all tingly for a moment before the harsh reality hit her. He was totally being all professional and not reacting to the fact she was a total mess currently. Her mousey brown hair, too long and escaping past her haphazard ponytail, face unmade up and dark circles and the stress was threatening acne she hadn't had since she was a teen, was bad enough. Add in the fact she was only wearing a men's shirt, that was probably see through, now that she thought about, with the way the sun  was setting in the horizon, highlighting a body that was long past its prime. Soft rounded shoulders, that lead down soft arms, breasts that were too full to be cute and perky, a tummy that she had tried so hard this past year to slim down, and hips that were too wide to ever be barbie's size, with her grandmother's thunder thighs that only fit into Torrid Jeans. She tended to wear out the seams in other brands. Sam sighed deeply and stared down at her hot pink painted toes, well the ones that the paint hadn't peeled off yet. She really missed her mani-pedi days. That rat bastard she swore to herself again. Rubbing her face and dislodging her glasses - her old pair, the ones that didn't let her read far away print, Sam really was blind as a bat without anything and the rat bastard had broken her good pair when he had pushed her down the stairs. Not that anyone would believe her, a ratty ex girlfriend versus a powerful CEO of the latest and greatest software engineering program.. something or another. Not that Sam had really understood it, but she'd been good at accounting and keeping the finances all tided up, handling the taxes, because Sam was above all things, a complete -nerd-. And she'd given up on being a cute nerd, the ditzy pretty girls who tittered and read Marvel comics while holding the spine holding upside.  Sam shrugged, then tried to refrain from smiling when the man's gaze glanced down at the movement of her chest. All men were all the same, distracted by boobies, Sam thought before she realized that he had been talking to her. Frowning, she held up one hand, this one with chipped bright neon orange painted nails. And yes, they clashed. She'd done that on purpose, she would tell anyone. Not that she had been drinking and wallowing in her misery. Oh no. "I'm sorry what did you say?" The man didn't even roll his eyes, which Sam thought was very admirable for him. "Ms. Samantha Tarran. Your presence has been requested by the Alpha of the Warren Pack and are expected to gather your possession and leave immediately. " The way his gaze swept across the room let her know he doubted that would take very long at all. Sam flusehd despite herself and wondered why she didn't just shut the door in this clearly deranged man's face. What the hell was an Alpha anyway?