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motorsportbarbie13 · 6 months ago

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What's A Soulmate? - Part 1

In which something magical begins.

Warnings: none, just a bit of mutual pining. but this will be an angsty one i think. Pairing: Lando Norris X SainzSister!Reader Words: 2.6k

Master List

(a/n: new series alert! friends to lovers featuring lando norris. this one will be several parts spanning from 2019 to present day. I've tried my hardest to make sure the timeline/race results are accurate but I may have adjusted something to make it work a bit better for the story line. this is a total work of fiction, purely for entertainment.)

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February 2019

Woking, Surry, England

“This is not going to be a year of partying and laziness, Chiquita.” Carlos throws you a sidelong glance as he pulls his new McLaren into a parking spot early one February morning. “You are here with me to work, not spend your gap year playing.”

“If I’m here to work, then you can’t me ‘little girl’ while we’re here, Carlos.” You bite back, hauling your tote bag from the floor of the low slung sports car.

Carlos chuckles, throwing his arm around your shoulder as you both begin the walk into his new workplace: the McLaren Technology Center. “Fair enough, Chiquita.”

Last spring, you had graduated from high school and had spent one miserable semester at the University of Madrid in the fall before dropping out just a few months ago.

Carlos dodges the swat that you aim at his bicep, taking a few quick steps ahead of you as you approach the front door of the large white building. The sprawling MTC is an intimidating building and you knew that if you hadn’t been here with Carlos, there was no way you’d be able to find your way.

After spending a few listless months bouncing from Carlos’ couch in Monaco back to your parent’s estate in Spain, they had laid down the law. You needed to figure out what you were going to do for the foreseeable future if going back to University wasn’t in the cards for you at the moment. They were fine with you not going back to uni right away, in fact, they encouraged you to take a gap year but they expected you to do something productive with your life while you figured out what you wanted to do.

And that had been when your older brother had entered the chat. He had finished third year as a Formula 1 driver a few months ago and would be changing teams come the new season in March. In December, he had parted ways with his long time assistant, who wanted to spend more time with her new husband and less time traveling. Carlos and you had always been the closest of the four Sainz siblings despite the six year age gap (his 25 years to your 19) so it had been the most natural thing in the world to have you be his assistant and social media manager for the 2019 F1 season.

Up until today, Carlos had been attending pre-season meetings and putting time in at McLaren’s sim setup by himself but you had arrived at his flat five minutes from the MTC yesterday, suitcases in hand, ready to get started as your brother’s assistant. It had been ages since the two of you had spent this much time together and while you were mostly excited to spend the year traveling and reconnecting with your big brother, there was a bit of trepidation and anxiety sitting in your chest as you walked through those sliding glass doors this morning.

You were barely 19 after all, little real world experience and you knew absolutely no one in this entire country beyond your brother. All of your friends were attending university in other countries, far away from the world you now found yourself in. Yes, you were excited but you were also insanely nervous.

Carlos leads you down a long hallway, lined with trophy cases filled with motorsport winners trophies on one side and sleek F1 cars on the other. It was an entire shrine to McLaren history, of which there was a lot, and you were in awe as you followed after your brother. “Where are we going?” You ask as he turns down another quiet hallway, convinced you’d be utterly lost if Carlos asked you to show him how to get back to the front doors.

“I have a little office tucked away back here next to Lando’s, I wanted to get you set up with the laptop and sync my calendar so you could get yourself ready.”

You nod, ears perking up at the mention of your brother’s new teammate, Lando Norris. You knew a little about him from a few causal Google searches. He was 19 like you and this was his rookie season in Formula 1. From everything you read, he was a karting prodigy that had been signed by McLaren for a while and had been tapped to drive opposite of Carlos this year. Just knowing that there would be someone around the offices and on the road that was your age made the tight anxiety that sat in your chest ease just a touch, even if you two didn’t end up being more than acquaintances this year.

Carlos hadn’t been lying about his ‘little’ office. It was barely more than a broom closet if you were being honest. Just enough room for a desk, a pair of chairs, and a bookshelf, but there was a large window that faced south so at least there’d always be sun spilling into the small space making it feel a little airier.

You pull your MacBook out of the Dior tote Carlos had gotten you for your birthday last year as Carlos chatters away about schedules, press duties, and what he expected out of you. You listened carefully, taking notes in a little spiral bound notebook as you waited for your laptop to boot up.

“Are you in here talking to yourself again, Carlitos?”

Your head snaps up at the sound of an unfamiliar voice and you find yourself smiling at the boy standing in the doorway. He’s a few inches taller than you, with short brown hair, and bright green eyes surrounded by thick black eyelashes. The deep tan of his skin surprises you a bit, considering its February in England and you hadn’t seen the sun since you left Spain yesterday.

The boy’s face instantly sobers when he sees that your brother isn’t alone. “Oh, I’m sorry.” He blushes, hand coming to cup the back of his neck. “I didn’t realize you had a guest.”

Carlos laughs, “This isn’t a guest. This is my sister, the one I was telling you about Friday. She’s going to be my assistant this year.”

“Of course, it’s nice to meet you. I’m Lando.”

You stand, crossing the small office in just 2 quick strides to shake Lando’s outstretched hand, “Nice to meet you too, Lando.” You say, polite smile playing on your lips.

Lando turned around then, not wanting to intrude on the sibling time but also needing a moment to collect himself. He had known that you would be spending the season with your bother and that you two were around the same age but what he hadn’t prepared himself for was for how pretty you were. Your hair was even darker than your brother’s and it tumbled over your shoulders in layered waves that shined in a way that made Lando’s mouth go a little dry. Those dark eyes, round and doe eyed, threatened to swallow Lando whole and he’d barely spent more than a handful of seconds in your orbit.

He leaned against the door frame leading into his office, the sound of your laughter drifting through the walls. He had been used to the constant travel that was required of drivers of his caliber, having spent most of his teenage years on the road but all that time, he always had someone with him. His father, mother, manager. Someone that was ‘in charge’ of him and his schedule.

Now though? Now everything is different. He’s of age, a driver in the pinnacle league of his chosen sport, and totally alone. His friends are either jealous of his success or away at school and Lando often finds himself spending the entire weekend alone in his little flat down the road from the MTC. He was happy, of course, ecstatic that he had been given this chance by McLaren but the truth of the matter was, Lando Norris was quite lonely.

As the image of your face flickered through his mind, Lando felt the tight grip of anxiety ease just a little bit. There was something so open about the way you had greeted him, something about how easy your laugh seemed to come, that told Lando that you were a good person, someone that would somehow be very important to him this year.

“That is your teammates sister, mate.” Lando mutters to himself as he pushes off the door frame, making a beeline for the sim rig that was on the other side of the MTC, hoping that the time spent focused on racing would be enough to get your image out of his brain.

April 2019

Baku City Circuit

“Lando, I swear to God if you’ve slept in again I’m ordering fish whenever I eat with you for the rest of my life.”

Somewhere between Australia and China, you had morphed into not only Carlos’ personal assistant but also the assistant and babysitter of sorts to his stupid, idiotic, hilarious teammate. You adored the boy but most of the time he drove you to the brink of absolute madness.

“I didn’t sleep in! My alarm didn’t go off!” Lando groans, breathless on the other end of the phone.

“That is literally the same thing. I have one simple job here, Norris: get you and my brother to where they belong during race weekends and right now? You’re making me look like an amateur.”

“I just got into the paddock, relax darling, no one is even remotely close to being fined by the FIA. I’ll be on the fan stage in five minutes, meet me there?”

Pinching the bridge of your nose, you desperately try to will away the Landache, the term you’ve come up with when you get a headache caused by the Brit. “Fine.” You breathe.

It’s your fourth race of the season and while Lando and your brother were seemingly hell bent on driving you to an early retirement, you had never been happier. Managing the busy schedule and life of now two Formula 1 drivers had come naturally to you. Engineers and mechanics in the garage were always a little in awe of your ability to keep the two drivers in line and where they needed to be when. The communications team at McLaren loved you because sometimes, you were the only one who would be able to get the Carlando, as the duo was coming to be known as, to behave.

It was total chaos pretty much all of the time but you were thriving. You and Carlos were closer than ever, working tighter like a well oiled machine. But Lando and you? You two were the textbook definition of Partners In Crime. While you were the picture of professionalism on the track and during business hours, you were the other half of the chaos gremlin duo that terrorized half the grid.

Right now though? Now the chaos gremlin was the perfect paddock princess that had to make sure her best friend and brother got to the right places on time. You round the corner of the back stage area, desperately searching for the mop of wavy brown hair covered by a papaya colored hat.

“Lando!” You call, relieved when your dark eyes catch with a familiar pair light colored eyes. Today, they were an icy blue thanks to the bright desert sun of Baku. “I didn’t think I had to add ‘alarm’ to my list of race weekend duties.” You grouse, brushing at the dust on his team polo.

Lando shakes his head, easy smile spreading across his face. “Am I late though?”

You glare at him, “No.” You huff.

“I would never make you look bad, pretty girl.” He winks and your stupid stomach does its traitorous little flip that it’s been doing lately. It’s disgusting.

“Flattery will get you nowhere, Norris.”

“And please welcome to the stage, McLaren drivers Carlos Sainz and Lando Norris!” The presenter calls from behind Lando’s shoulder, interrupting your sparring match.

Lando gives you a wink before spinning around following your brother up the stairs of the stage.

July, 2019

Germany

“That was my fifth DNF this year.” The pain in Lando’s voice sends your stomach twisting. You follow behind him, hands wringing together, as he stalks down the hallway of the hotel in Germany. The race had finished up hours ago but Lando had just been released from media duties a bit ago. Carlos had been caught up in some post-race meetings so you had hitched a ride back to the hotel with Lando instead but now, as you followed his stiff frame stalk down the hall, you wondered if that had been a good idea.

“Lando, it wasn’t your fault. Your car lost power, it’s not like you binned it into the wall or anything.”

Reaching his room, Lando stops and pulls out the key before letting himself in. He leaves the door open though, indicating he wanted you to follow him. “I know that.” He groans, scrubbing his hands over his face. The hotel room is pretty normal where hotels are concerned, 2 queen sized beds dominate the space with a large flat screen tv on the opposite side. Lando flops down on the farthest bed, his eyes closed.

“I’ve barely finished in the points yet this season. Haven’t had a sniffing chance at a podium. I feel like such a fucking fraud.”

You had stopped just inside the door, wanting to give Lando some space as he had his tantrum but now, seeing how truly upset he is, you cross the carpeted floor and sit down next to your best friend. “Lan.” You coo, running your fingers through his hair, knowing how the scratches from your nails relaxes him. “Lan, it’s okay. You knew coming in, just like Carlos, that McLaren is in a bit of a rebuilding stage. This isn’t unexpected.”

The problem with Lando is that he is utterly too hard on himself. You had clocked the fact quickly, by the time you had been landing in Australia for the first race of the season, you knew he needed to work on his confidence.

“I know. I mean, I don’t know but I know that you know and I trust you enough to know that you know what you know is right.”

Your head spins. “Pardon me?”

Laughter spilling from your lips pops the bubble of tension in the room, Lando unable to keep the smile off his face either.

“You heard me.” He gripes, sitting up. “And I know -” He stops, glaring at you when you double over with laughter once again. “I know you understood me, you cheeky monkey.”

“I’m sorry but I’m just so terrified by the fact that I did understand that whirlwind of a sentence and can’t decide how to process it.” You say, chest heaving from laughing so hard. “We’ve been spending too much time together.”

Lando grabs the remote from your hand before turning on the movie you had both fallen asleep to last night before the race. “Are you going to be mean to me all night, or are we going to finish this movie?”

You roll your eyes, but toe off your shoes before settling against the headboard of the bed, shoulder bumping with Lando’s as he joins you. “Pizza or sushi for dinner?” You ask, grinning because you already know the answer.

“You’re an idiot.”

“Love you too, Lan.” You counter, pulling out your phone to order some pizza.

Tag List: @anilovessadbooks, @shelbyteller, @formulaal, @martygraciesversion381, @longhairkoo, @samantha-chicago, @stelena-klayley @dark-night-sky-99 @luckylampzonkland, @chlmtfilms , @inarabee @aykxz98 @forensicheart @cheer-bear-go-vroom @charlesgirl16

*as always, if you want to be added to the tag list, leave me a comment or send me a message*

#lando norris #formula 1 #f1 #lando norris x you #lando norris x reader #lando norris imagine #f1 fanfic #f1 imagine #f1 x reader #mclaren #Youtube

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catboywarlock · 3 months ago

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hey op sorry to drag this post out of the graveyard but Holy Shit The UI...

WHY

#i need to preserve this like a relic #(i started playing shortly after fortuna was released so spring of 2019)

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jack-abbot · 1 year ago

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"I love sweaters. I did a film in England, and I started wearing sweaters every day. Suddenly it felt great, you know? And I went back to Mexico and now I sweat every day, but I still wear them. I got hooked onto sweaters; it's a good addiction.

I kind of like the idea of the pieces you wear reminding you of moments of your life or people that you've met, those key moments that you want to remember forever. I, for example, have the shoes of Tenoch [from 'Y tu mamá también'], and I still wear them. I mean, I have to wear them once a year because otherwise they break apart. But I do wear them, and it's a nice feeling to wear something that matters more than how it looks."

— DIEGO LUNA for C Magazine (Spring 2019)

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mariacallous · 3 months ago

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A short note here on what I’m covering and why. The political changes we’re seeing across the world are underpinned by technological ones that are now accelerating. For more than a decade, I’ve been trying to investigate and expose these forces. Since 2016 that’s included following a thread that led from Brexit to Trump via a shady data company called Cambridge Analytica and the revelation of a profound threat exploit at the heart of our democracies. But what’s happening now in the US is a paradigm shift: this is Broligarchy, a concept I coined last summer when I warned that what we were seeing was the proposed merger of Silicon Valley with state power. That has now happened. Writing about this from the UK, it’s clear we have a choice: we help lead the fight back against it. Or it comes for us next. Please share this with family and friends if you feel it’s of value. Thank you, as ever, Carole

Let me say this more clearly: what is happening right now, in America, in real time, is a coup.

This is an information war and this is what a coup now looks like.

Musk didn’t need a tank, guns, soldiers. He had a small crack cyber unit that he sent into the Treasury department last weekend. He now has unknown quantities of the entire US nation’s most sensitive data and potential backdoors into the system going forward. Treasury officials denied that he had access but it then turned out that he did. If it ended there, it would be catastrophic. But that unit - whose personnel include a 19-year-old called “Big Balls” - is now raiding and scorching the federal government, department by department, scraping its digital assets, stealing its data, taking control of the code and blowing up its administrative apparatus as it goes.

This is what an unlawful attack on democracy in the digital age looks like. It didn’t take armed men, just Musk’s taskforce of boy-men who may be dweebs and nerds but all the better to plunder the country’s digital resources. This was an organised, systematic, jailbreak on one of the United States’ most precious and sensitive resources: the private data of its citizens.

In 2019, I appeared in a Netflix documentary, The Great Hack. That’s a good place to start to understand what is going on now, but it wasn’t the great hack. It was among the first wave of major tech exploits of global elections. It was an exemplar of what was possible: the theft and weaponization of 87 million people’s personal data. But this now is the Great Hack. This week is when the operating system of the US was wrenched open and is now controlled by a private citizen under the protection of the President.

If you think I’ve completely lost it, please be advised that I’m far from alone in saying this. The small pools of light in the darkness of this week has been stumbling across individual commentators saying this for the last week. Just because these words are not on the front page in banner headlines of any newspaper doesn’t mean this isn’t not happening. It is.

In fact, there has been relentless, assiduous, detailed reporting in all outlets across America. There are journalists who aren’t eating or sleeping and doing amazing work tracking what’s happening. There is fact after fact after fact about Musk’s illegal pillaging of the federal government. But news organisation leaders are either falling for the distraction story - the most obviously insane one this week being rebuilding Gaza as a luxury resort, a story that dominated headlines and political oxygen for days. Or…what? Being unable to actually believe that this is what an authoritarian takeover looks like? Being unsure of whether you put the headline about the illegal coup d’etat next to a spring season fashion report? Above or below the round-up of best rice cookers? The fact is the front pages look like it’s business as normal when it’s anything but.

This was Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Tuesday. She’s a historian of fascism and authoritarianism at New York University and she said this even before some of this week’s most extreme events had taken place. (A transcript of the rest of her words here.)

“It’s very unusual. In my study of authoritarian states, it's only really after a coup that you see such a speed, such obsessive haste to purge bureaucracy so quickly. Or when somebody is defending themselves, like Erdogan after the coup attempt against him, massive purge immediately. So that's unusual. I don't have another reference point for a private individual coming in, infiltrating, trying to turn government to the benefit of his businesses and locking out and federal employees. It is a coup. I'm a historian of coups, and I would also use that word. So we're in a real emergency situation for our democracy.”

A day later, this was Tim Snyder, Yale, a Yale professor and another great historian of authoritarianism, here: “Of course it’s a coup.”

History was made this week and while reporters are doing incredible work, to understand it our guides are historians, those who’ve lived in authoritarian states and Silicon Valley watchers. They are saying it. What I’ve learned from investigating and reporting on Silicon Valley’s system-level hack of our democracy for eight long years and seeing up close the breathtaking impunity and entitlement of the men who control these companies is that they break laws and they get away with it. And then lie about it afterwards. That’s the model here.

Everything that I’ve ever warned about is happening now. This is it. It’s just happening faster than anyone could have imagined.

It’s not that what’s happening is simply unlawful. This is what David Super, an administrative law professor at Georgetown Law School told the Washington Post.

“So many of these things are so wildly illegal that I think they’re playing a quantity game and assuming the system can’t react to all this illegality at once.”

And he’s right. The system can’t and isn’t. Legal challenges are being made and even upheld but there’s no guarantee or even sign that Musk is going to honour them. That’s one of the most chilling points my friend, Mark Bergman, made to me over the weekend.

Last week, I included a voice note from my friend, tech investor turned tech campaigner, Roger McNamee, so you could hear direct from an expert about the latest developments in AI. This week I’ve asked Mark to do the honours.

He’s a lawyer, Washington political insider, and since last summer, he’s been participating in ‘War Game’ exercises with Defense Department officials, three-star generals, former Cabinet Secretaries and governors. In five exercises involving 175 people, they situation-tested possible scenarios of a Trump win. But they didn’t see this. It’s even worse than they feared.

“Those challenges have been in respect of shutting down agencies, firing federal employees and engaging in the most egregious hack of government. It all at the hand hands of DOGE, Musk and his band of tech engineers. DC right now is shell-shocked. It is a government town, USA, ID, the FBI, the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, CIA, no federal agency will be spared the revenge and retribution tours in full swing, and huge numbers have been put on administrative leave, reassigned or fired, and the private sector is as much at risk, particularly NGOs and civil society organizations. The more high-profile violate the law, which is why the courts have been quick to enjoin actions. “So yes, we've experienced a coup, not the old fashioned kind, no tanks or mobs, but an undemocratic and hostile takeover of government. It is cruel, it is petty. It can be brutal. It is at once chaotic and surgical. We said the institutions held in 2020 but behind institutions or people, and the extent to which all manner of power structures have preemptively obeyed is hugely worrying. There are legions ready to carry out the Trump agenda. The question is, will the rule of law hold?”

Last Tuesday, Musk tried to lay off the entire CIA. That’s the government body with the slogan ‘We are the nation’s first line of defense’. Every single employee has been offered an unlawful ‘buyout’ - what we call redundancy in the UK - or what 200 former employees - spies - have said is blatant attempt to rebuild it as a political enforcement unit. Over the weekend, the Washington Post reports that new appointees are being presented with “loyalty tests”.

Musk’s troops - because that’s what they are, mercenaries - are acting in criminal, unlawful, unconstitutional ways. Organisations are acting quickly, taking lawsuits, and for now the courts are holding. But the key essential question is whether their rulings can be enforced with a political weaponized Department of Justice and FBI. What Mark Bergman told me (and is in the extended note below) is that they’ve known since the summer that there would be almost no way of pushing back against Trump. This politicisation of all branches of law enforcement creates a vacuum at the heart of the state. As he says in that note, the ramifications of this are little understood outside the people inside Washington who study this for a living.

And at least some of what DOGE is doing can never be undone. Musk, a private citizen, now has vast clouds of citizens’ data, their personal information and it seems likely, classified material. When data is out there, it’s out there. That genie can never be put back into the bottle.

Itt’s what it’s possible to do with that data, that the real nightmare begins. What machine learning algorithms and highly personalised targeting can do. It’s a digital coup. An information coup. And we have to understand what that means. Our fleshy bodies still inhabit earthly spaces but we are all, also, digital beings too. We live in a hybrid reality. And for more than a decade we have been targets of hybrid warfare, waged by hostile nation states whose methodology has been aped and used against us by political parties in a series of disrupted elections marked by illegal behaviour and a lack of any enforcement. But this now takes it to the next level.

It facilitates a concentration of wealth and power - because data is power - of a kind the world has never seen before.

Facebook’s actual corporate motto until 2014 taken from words Mark Zuckerberg spoke was “Move fast and break things”. That phrase has passed into commonplace: we know it, we quote it, we also fail to understand what that means. It means: act illegally and get away with it.

And that is the history of Silicon Valley. Its development and cancerous growth is marked by series of larcenous acts each more grotesque than the last. And Musk’s career is an exemplar of that, a career that has involved rampant criminality, gross invasions of privacy, stock market manipulation. And lies. The Securities and Exchange Commission is currently suing Musk for failing to disclose his ownership stock before he bought Twitter. The biggest mistake right now is to believe anything he says.

Every time, these companies have broken the law, they have simply gotten away with it. I know I’m repeating this, but it’s central to understanding both the mindset and what’s happening on the ground. And no-one exemplifies that more than Musk. The worst that has happened to him is a fine. A slap on the wrist. An insignificant line on a balance sheet. The “cost of doing business”.

On Friday, Robert Reich, the former United States Secretary of Labor, who’s been an essential voice this week, told the readers of his Substack to act now and call their representatives.

“Friends, we are in a national emergency. This is a coup d’etat. Elon Musk was never authorized by Congress to do anything that he’s doing, he was never even confirmed by Congress, his so-called Department of Government Efficiency was never authorized by Congress. Your representatives, your senators and Congressmen have never given him authority to do what he is doing, to take over government departments, to take over entire government agencies, to take over government payments system itself to determine for himself what is an appropriate payment. To arrogate to himself the authority to have your social security number, your private information? Please. Listen, call Congress now.”

It’s a coup

I found myself completely poleaxed on Wednesday. I read this piece on the New York Times website first thing in the morning, a thorough and alarming analysis of headlined “Trump Brazenly Defies Laws in Escalating Executive Power Grab”. It quoted Peter M. Shane, who is a legal scholar in residence at New York University, “programmatic sabotage and rampant lawlessness.” It was displayed prominently on the front page of the New York Times but it was also just one piece among many, a small weak signal amid the overpowering noise.

There’s another word for an “Executive Power Grab”, it’s a coup. And newspapers need to actually write that in big black letters on their front pages and tell their tired, busy, overwhelmed, distracted, scared readers what is happening. That none of this is “business as usual.”

Over on the Guardian’s UK website on Wednesday, there was not a single mention on the front page of what was happening. Trump’s Gaza spectacular diversion strategy drowned out its quotient of American news. We just weren’t seeing what’s happening in the seat of government of our closest ally. As a private citizen mounted a takeover of the cornerstone superpower of the international rules-based order, our crucial NATO ally, our biggest single trading partner, the UK government didn’t even apparently notice.

The downstream potential international consequences of what is happening in America are profound and terrifying. That our government and much of the media is asleep at the wheel is a reason to be more not less terrified. Musk has made his intentions towards our democracy and national security quite clear. What he hasn’t yet had is the backing of the US state. That is shortly going to change. One of the first major stand-offs will be UK and EU tech regulation. I hope I’m wrong but it seems pretty obvious that’s what Musk’s Starmer-aimed tweets are all about. There seems no world in which the EU and the UK aren’t headed for the mother of all trade wars.

And that’s before we even consider the national security ramifications. The prime minister should be convening Cobra now. The Five Eyes - the intelligence sharing network of the US, UK, New Zealand, Australia and Canada - is already likely breached. Trump is going to do individual deals with all major trading partners that’s going to involve preposterous but real threats, including likely dangling the US’s membership of NATO over our heads all while Russia watches, waits and knows that we’ve done almost nothing to prepare. Plans to increase our defence spending have been made but not yet implemented. Our intelligence agencies do understand the precipice we’re on but there’s no indication the government is paying any attention to them. The risks are profound. The international order as we know it is collapsing in real time.

It’s a coup

We all know that the the first thing that happens when a dictator seizes power is that he (it’s always a he) takes control of the radio station. Musk did that months ago. It wasn’t that Elon Musk buying Twitter pre-ordained what is now happening but it made it possible. And it was the moment, minutes after Trump was shot and he went full-in on his campaign that signalled the first shot fired in his digital takeover.

It’s both a mass propaganda machine and also the equivalent of an information drone with a deadly payload. It’s a weapon that’s already been turned on journalists and news organisations this week. There’s much more to come.

On Friday, Musk started following Wikileaks on Twitter. Hours later, twisted, weaponized leaks from USAID began.

This is going to get so much worse. Musk and MAGA will see this as the opening of the Stasi archive. It’s not. It’s rocketfuel for a witchhunt. It’s hybrid warfare against the enemies of the state. It’s going to be ugly and cruel and its targets are going to need help and support. Hands across the water to my friends at OCCRP, the Overseas Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, an investigative journalism organisation that uncovers transnational crime, that’s been in Musk’s sights this weekend, one of hundreds of media organisations around the world whose funding has been slashed overnight.

It’s a coup

By now you may feel scared and helpless. It’s how I felt this week. I had the same sick feeling I had watching UK political coverage before the pandemic. The government was just going to ignore the wave of deaths rippling from China to Italy and pretend it wasn’t happening? Really? That’s the plan?

This is another pandemic. Or a Chernobyl. It’s a bomb at the heart of the international order whose toxic fallout is going to inevitably drift our way.

My internal alarm bell, a sense of urgency and anxiety goes even further back. To early 2017, when I uncovered information about Cambridge Analytica’s illegal hack of data from Facebook while the company’s VP, Steve Bannon, was then on the National Security Council. That concept of highly personalised data in the control of a ruthless and political operator was what tripped my emergency wires. That is a reality now.

The point is that the shock and awe is meant to make us feel helpless. So I’m telling a bit of my own personal story here. Because part of what temporarily paralyzed me last week was that this is all happening while my own small corner of the mainstream media is collapsing in on itself too. The event that I’ve spent the last eight years warning about has come to pass and in a month, 100+ of my colleagues at the Guardian will be out of the door and my employment will be terminated. I will no longer have the platform of the news organisation where I’ve done my entire body of work to date and was able to communicate to a global audience.

But then, it’s all connected. We are living through an information crisis. It’s what underpins everything. In some ways, this happening now is not surprising at all. Moreover, many of the people who I see as essential voices during this crisis (including those above) are doing that effectively and independently from Substack as I will try to continue to do.

And, the key thing that the last eight years has given me is information. The lawsuit I fought for four years as a result of doing this work very almost floored me. But it didn’t. And I’ve learned essential skills during those years. It was part of what powered me to fight for the rights of Guardian journalists during our strike this December.

The next fightback against Musk and the Broligarchy has to draw from the long, long fight for workers rights which in turn influenced the fight for civil rights that must now power us on as we face the great unknown. What comes next has to be a fight for our data rights, our human rights.

This was former Guardian journalist Gary Younge on our picket line and I’ve thought about these words a lot. You have to fight even if you won’t necessarily win. Power is almost never given up freely.

If you value any of this and want me to be able to continue, I’d be really grateful if you signed up, free, or even better, paid subscription. And I’d also urge you to sign up also for the Citizen Dispatch, that’s the newsletter from the non-profit I founded that campaigns around these issues. There is much more it can and needs to do.

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crushpunky · 3 months ago

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drew starkey x actress!reader timeline

masterlist | actress!reader masterlist

here is an updated version of the timeline, including a lot of the fics that i consider "canon" or related to each other a lot of fics don't have a specific time and can fit anywhere :)

may 2019: met while filming OBX 1

jun 2019: drew helps y/n while she’s sick (as told here)

nov 2019: moved into an apartment in charleston following OBX season 1 wrapping

april 2020: OBX 1 premieres

april 2020: public finds out y/n and drew are roommates (as told here)

may 2020: officially start dating (as told here)

august 2020 - april 2021: OBX 2 filming

jan 2021: y/n's family visits (as told here)

feb 2021: first valentine's day (as told here)

may 2021: first anniversary + adopting charleston (as told here)

may - july 2021: y/n films “bones and all”

june 2021: relationship goes public (as told here)

july 2021: OBX 2 premieres

aug - oct 2021: drew films “hellraiser”

nov 2021: first red carpet together (as told here)

feb - apr 2022: OBX 3 filming

may 2022: second anniversary + greece vacation (as shown here)

may 2022 - sept 2022: OBX 3 filming (cont)

sept 2022: “bones and all” venice premiere + “hellraiser” premiere

nov - dec 2022: holidays w/ drew's family + home purchase

feb 2023: poguelandia (as told here)

feb 2023: OBX 3 premieres [reader’s final season]

mar 2023: move into charleston house (as told here)

mar 2023: y/n and drew's first interview (as told here)

mar 2023: y/n and drew thirst tweets, hot ones, kitten, vanity fair interviews (as told here, here, here, and here)

mar - jul 2023: y/n films "the substance"

apr - jun 2023: drew films “queer”

jun 2023: OBX 4 filming (drew)

jul - nov 2023: SAG-AFTRA strike

aug 2023: engagement (as told here)

jan 2024: y/n attends the golden globes + engagement announcement (as told here)

feb - jun 2024: OBX 4 filming (drew) (cont.)

mar 2024: y/n visits OBX 4 set (as told here)

may 2024: "the substance" cannes premiere

may - jul 2024: y/n shoots "just between us" (rom-com w tom blyth) (as told here and here)

aug 2024: private wedding ceremony (as shown here)

sep 2024: "queer" premieres at venice film festival + wedding announcement (as told here)

sep 2024: loewe spring show (as told here)

oct 2024: OBX 4 premiere

oct 2024: y/n and drew take the rizz quiz (as told here)

oct 2024: pregnancy scare (as told here)

nov 2024: "queer" la premiere (as told here)

nov 2024: drew esquire interview (as told here)

jan 2025: drew and y/n test how well they know each other (as told here)

jan 2025: y/n calls drew on phoning it in and reveals whats on her phone (as told here and here)

feb 2025: "just between us" premiere

mar 2025: y/n and drew shoot the music video for "relationships" (as told here)

mar 2025: y/n and drew attend the 2025 oscars (as told here)

the future (events at unspecified times in the future)

future: y/n's pregnancy is announced (as told here)

future: y/n and drew attend an awards show (as told here)

#drew starkey x reader #actress!reader #drew starkey x actress!reader

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sparkleofpizza · 6 months ago

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The Alchemy

Lando Norris x fem!reader

Two idiots.

THE 2020 SEASON

WINTER BREAK London, England, 2020

Formula 1 might be on a break, but university isn’t. I’ve been studying non stop and working all my free time to get extra credit so I’d be able to graduate early, right at the end of spring so I’d have the rest of the year more chilled out.

But being a 21 year old college student, living alone at an apartment at a college campus meant trouble, obviously, and that’s how after long hours of studying at the library, instead of being in my bed catching up on some sleep, I was at a frat house party.

The music was blaring and I was nursing my third drink of night, but in all honesty completely tired now that the alcohol had relaxed me.

I was sitting on the couch, watching my friends dance around me. I grab my phone to get some pictures of them when I notice a new notification.

Lando: what are u up to on a Friday night as a college student?

Lando and I have been texting non stop since the end of the 2019 season, our friendship solidified. We even hung out a couple of times in between Christmas and new years. And now he has been bugging me that I’ve been working and studying too much.

Me: I’m at a frat house party

He instantly replied back.

Lando: YOURE WHERE DOING WHAT

Me: I’m at a frat house party

I smirk to myself as I texted back the same question then before.

Lando: no way, you’re messing with me

I open the camera of my phone, scratching my arm out as I smile hazily before snapping a picture and sending it to him.

Lando: OMG ARE U DRUNK????

Me: yessss

I expected him to make fun of me, but his answer caught me a bit of guard.

Lando: are u alone?

Lando: who’s with u?

Me: my friends are around here somewhere

There a few minutes of silence from his since and I wonder if our conversation is over. He probably fell asleep.

My phone buzzes again.

Lando: how are u going home?

Me: I’ll walk back to my apartment, why?

He’s typing and typing and typing. I bite my lip anxiously, wondering what he’s going to say. Is he going to ask me to let him pick me up? Like in those romance books where the guy picks up the girl from a party when she’s drunk?

Lando: ok

My face falls momentarily.

Lando: I’m not in London

Lando: be careful and text me when you get home safe

I smile, so he was considering picking me up.

Melbourne, Australia, 2020

The world was insane, and I was going insane with it. I was higenyzing my hand every time I touched something. I was in an alert state of the coronavirus.

“They should have canceled the race.” I say, taking a seat with Lando, Carlos and Caco at the McLaren hospitality. “They are saying there are employees who got infected.”

I squeeze hand sanitizer on my hand, rubbing it.

“You’re talking about as if it’s some kind of zombie apocalypse.” Lando chuckles, draping his arm casually over the back of my chair “Relax, they wouldn’t keep up the race if it wasn’t safe.”

Carlos nods “Lando is right.”

I scoff with a tense smile “Oh, but they would. FIA doesn’t care about it, they care about the money. They always have and always will.”

The boys are silent for a moment before Caco nods his head.

“Hamilton and Vettel said something similar during the press conference.” He says “And they’ve been around the same amount of time you have.”

My phone rings and it’s Sophie calling. I quickly brings it to my ear, listening to what she has to say. My frown only deepens when she says two McLaren employees tested positive for covid and that there are more people around the paddock with symptoms as well.

I hang up the phone.

“The teams principals are gathering together to get FIA to cancel the race.” I tell them, watching as both drivers’ faces fall in disappointment “Two McLaren employees tested positive and there are other people around the paddock who are feeling ill as well.”

We gather our things and start to make our way to the McLaren garage, probably the news will get there first if the race is canceled.

I hang back on the group and Lando slows his steps to walk beside me.

“Can’t believe we just got back and we’re already going to leave and be without racing.” He groans, a whine voice a bit high pitched.

“It’s better for it to be canceled and you getting the chance to race again when it’s safer, then getting sick and ending up in the hospital.”

He sighs, shoulders slumping slightly.

“You’re right. I was just excited to give my all at this new season.”

I smile “I know, and you will soon.”

He smiles back at me, nudging me with his shoulder.

“So, are you gonna be able to graduate this spring?”

“I am! I mean, I’ve been doing everything possible for it to happen and I think it will.”

Lando smiles and for a brief moment his fingers brush against mine in a sweet gesture.

“That’s great. I’ll make sure to be there cheering for you at your graduation.”

And my heart flutters at his words.

PANDEMIC London, England, 2020

“Did I do it right? Are you listening to me?” I ask into the microphone I bought.

Lando’s face show up on the screen of my computer, grinning widely.

“Hiiii! Yes, you did. Now turn on your camera so I can see your face.”

“How do I do it?” I ask, completely lost as I had never used the app discord before. “Oh, never mind, found it.”

“Look at you!” Lando beamed “Are those bunny ears on your hoodie?” I chuckle as I put on the hoodie over my head so he can see the bunny ears “You look adorable! Doesn’t she look adorable, chat?”

I tilt my head to the side, confused.

“Chat? What chat? It’s just the two of us here.”

Lando laughed “I’m streaming, muppet.”

“You’re what?!” I screech “Lando! Why didn’t you tell me we’d be live? I’m in my pijamas!”

He laughs again “You still look adorable and the chat agrees with me.”

I huff, flustered at his words and at the fact that I’m live for god knows how many people while I’m wearing my bunny pajamas. If people didn’t take me serious before, they never will now.

“Now, here’s what we’re going to do.” He claps his hand, a mischievous smile on his face “You’re going to play LOL with me.”

“LOL? But I only know how to play the sims.”

“Yes, you’re going to play LOL. I think it’s the easiest for now.”

As I download the game and start to follow the tutorial, all while sharing my screen with Lando and him judging me at how I can manage to keep dying on the tutorial, I wonder how in the holy hell he managed to convince me to play online with him.

Finally, after an eternity, I finish the tutorial and I start to play with him. Lando keeps instructing me because I don’t even know what buttons to press on my keyboard and he keeps screaming that I’m not running fast enough.

“Oh my God!” I scream “I died! I died!”

Lando laughs delighted.

“My screen is black and white! Why is my screen black and white? Is my computer broken? LANDO!”

That only makes him laugh harder, that infectious laugh of him as I keep yelling questions of what I should do next.

My dad opens the door to my bedroom, peeking his head inside, looking concerned as he calls out my name.

“Are you ok, sweetheart?” He asks, walking further into the room “I can hear you screaming from the living room.”

“Yeah, sorry dad. I’m playing online with Lando and I died.”

My father chuckles, bending down slightly to look at my screen. He smiles at Lando while waving.

“Hello, Lando. Have you been taking care of yourself while quarantining?”

Lando smiles back as he nods “Yes, I have. Your daughter also texts me everyday reminding me what I can and can’t do. It’s like she thinks I will die because I’m living on my own.”

My dad looks amused at me, but he knows I’m right and Lando would have probably set his house or fire by now if I haven’t been instructing him properly on certain things.

My dad pats my head as he stands up straight again “I will leave you kids to it. Take care, Lando.”

“Thank you, Jenson! You too!” Lando smiles. “Now, where were we?”

Later that night, after four hours of online gaming with Lando, I lied in bed scrolling through my social medias. I couldn’t help to read the comments people were making about our live stream together.

Jenson Button worried about Lando I CANT

OMG y/n checking up on Lando daily to make sure he survives

So am I the only one who thinks there’s something there?

She can’t suck on her dads fame anymore bc he’s retired so now she’s going after Norris

I sigh, closing Twitter and putting my phone on the bedside table. People are mean.

Spielberg, Austria, 2020

July and we’re back at Formula 1. The season is being cut short, there won’t be fans attending, but we’re back at racing.

I finished my finals a week ago, just in time to go back to traveling. My dad gave an hour-long lecture about safety and health before finally letting me board the plane.

I haven’t seen Lando and Carlos yet, but I have met uncle Seb who is pissed off at Ferrari for firing him over the phone. I could tell for the way he was talking about meetings and stuff he has to do that he’s plotting something and I couldn’t help but smirk at whatever hell fire he will bring down on Mattia Binotto.

I enter the McLaren garage and I smile underneath my mask as I see Lando talking to his engineer. He turns his head when he hears my footsteps.

He basically bonces on his feet until he meets me halfway.

“Hi!” He says loudly “It’s so good to finally see you in person again!” His eyes are wide “Can I hug you? I want to hug you. I know I probably shouldn’t, but I want to. I haven’t touched anyone in months and and…”

I cut him off with a laugh as I wrap my arms around his middle, resting my head on his chest. Lando brings his arms around me, squeezing me onto his body.

“Hi, Lando. I missed your energetic aura.”

I feel his grin against my shoulder, even with half his face covered in a mask.

“I missed you.” He says back.

He detangles himself from he hug, but keep his hands on my shoulders. He analyzes my face.

“You really do look good with bangs.”

I chuckle, running my hands over the bangs I cut on my hair after a moment of reflection and desperation when I couldn’t leave the house.

“Thank you. It was a moment of… insanity, but at least it looks good.”

He laughs “Oh I know. You texted me like fifteen times saying you did something horrible and it was just bangs.”

I shake my head “Hey, to be fair you called me at two in the morning to ask me how to kill a wasp and I had to wake up my dad to ask him.”

Lando's eyes widened in mock sadness.

“Hey, your dad loves me! I’m sure he was very very delighted to be woken up in the middle of the night to give out instructions on how to kill a wasp.”

I snort out a laugh.

Later that weekend, after the race was finished, I watched as Lando parked his car in p3. It was the first podium of his Formula 1 career. He had been screaming on the radio during the last five laps and I was grinning like an idiot behind my mask.

He got out of the car, helmet still on as he ran to the team, letting them hug him and clap his back. The whole McLaren garage was in a frenzy of celebration.

I’m waiting for him by the parc fermé, to guide him to the podium and then to the press conference room where they interview the winner, second and third place of the race.

Lando takes off his helmet and balaclava and I see his whole face for the first time this year. He has a huge smile on his face as he runs to where I am.

“My first podium!” He yells

I smile “Congratulations, Lando. It was beautiful to watch.”

He wraps his arms around me, jumping around and making me jump with him as I laugh.

“My first podium! Oh fuck! I’m gonna get a trophy!”

I giggle, letting him jump around with me “Yes, you are, Lando, you’re getting a trophy!”

He then stop jumping and just gazed into my eyes, the smile never dropping out of his face.

“Fuck, I’m so glad you’re the one here and not Sophie.”

My heart leaps on my chest.

“I’m glad I’m here, too.”

Silverstone, England, 2020

It was the Silverstone Grand Prix weekend, there were going to be two weekends of races here. My dad had decided to come along since this is his home race and he wants to relive some of the memories.

I walk inside the McLaren hospitality with my dad who is babbling about my graduation to one of the mechanics that have been working here since his driving days.

I hear someone yell my name and I know that voice very well. I turn around and there is Lando, no mask on his face, grinning widely.

“Hey.” I smile back, walking to where he’s sitting

He stands up fast and lifts his hands up, holding a beautiful bouquet of pink flowers.

I gasp in surprise.

“I couldn’t go to your graduation because the attendance was limited, but I couldn’t let it pass by.” He hands me the flowers before enveloping me in a hug “Congratulations, love. I’m very proud of you.”

For some reason his words and sweet gestures make tears gather in my eyes. It’s probably because I was expecting my graduation to be a big even, full of people who I love and cherish and that didn’t happen because of the pandemic.

“Thank you, Lan. This means a lot to me.”

He squeezes me before letting me go. He wipes some of the tears that leaked out to my eyes.

“I know this is a special moment and you wanted it to be a big celebration. We’ll go out to celebrate once things get better, alright? My treat.”

I smile, hugging the flowers to my chest.

“You’re the best, Lan.”

He winked at me.

“Only the best for my best girl.”

My dad stood to the side, watching the scene with a smile on his face. I didn’t know that now, but he took pictures of all of that happening.

Krasnodar Krai, Russia, 2020

Carlos broke the news to the team two weeks ago during our weekly zoom calls. Lando had shut himself out the moment his best friend on the grid said he’s leaving McLaren to go to Ferrari.

He hasn’t been answering my texts or sending me TikToks. He even declined my calls and I was growing not only worried, but annoyed as well.

I knock on his hotel door late at night. My flight had landed an hour ago, I got to the hotel, showered and now here I am knocking on his door.

Lando opens the door, his curly hair disheveled and he’s only in sweatpants.

“You’re not room service.” He says

I glare at him.

“You’ve been ignoring me.” I accuse him, hands on my waist.

“I uh… I’ve been busy…” he stretches the back of his neck “a lot of work.”

“We work together, I know you haven’t been busy.” I glare even harder now “Stop lying to me.”

He stepped to the side and let me inside his room. I walk past him, going to the middle of the room as I stand there with my arms crossed. Lando sits on the bed and looks at me.

“What’s going on with you?” I ask

“There’s nothing wrong with me.” He answered too quickly.

“Lando… you’ve been ignoring me ever since Carlos told us that he’s leaving for Ferrari.”

He grows quiet and looks away from me.

I sigh. “Lando, just because he’s switching teams it does not mean he won’t be your friend anymore. It will be a bit different because you won’t be together all the time like the past two years, but he’s not gonna forget about you.”

He nods. “I know. Carlos already told me all that.”

“Then why have you been ignoring me?” I ask confused. I thought he was isolating because he was sad that Carlos is leaving, but if he’s already on good terms with it, than what’s wrong.

“Because I’m preparing myself from when you leave me as well.” Lando says, he doesn’t look at me, his eyes trained on the carpet floor.

“Wha- What?” I ask completely dumbfounded “What do you mean when I leave you as well?”

He runs a hand through his hair “You’re an intern at the communication department and- and you just graduated from uni. I know you will leave me at the end of the year as well. You’ll move on to much bigger and better things. I’m just… trying to soften the blow of being without you.”

There’s a moment of silence as I process his words. He still won’t look at me and I’m too stunned to speak anything. He’s sad because he doesn’t want to be without me.

Finally, I snap out of it.

“Oh Lando.” I whisper softly, kneeling in front of him and peering up at him. “Lando, no.”

He shakes his head “I know, ok? I’m not dumb…”

I cup his face in my hands to get him to stop talking. He looks at me in surprise and I can see the broken look in his eyes.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Please, don’t lie to me.” He whispered brokenly “Just rip the bandaid already.”

“I’m not lying.” I say, catching a stray tear from his eye with my thumb and wiping it away. “McLaren hired me to be their junior PR manager. You would have known that if you haven’t been declining my calls, you muppet.”

He widens his eyes.

“You’re not leaving?”

I shake my head “No. You’re stuck with me.”

Lando breaths out a laugh, resting his forehead against mine as he closes his eyes.

“Oh, thank god. I’m not ready to say goodbye.”

I smile, enjoying our close proximity.

“You don’t have to say goodbye. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Good… good.” He mumbled. “I don’t want you to leave my side.”

We stay like that for a few moments longer, before he helps me stand up from the floor. Lando pats the bed and I soon join him. We lay on opposite sides, he covers us up and we stay in silence, enjoining each other's company as we fall asleep. Right now we don’t need to say anything, everything is understood in the comfortable silence that hugs us.

Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, 2020

It was yet once again the last race of the season.

Lando had a great finish in p5, and although he had a happy smile on his face we took team pictures and toasted, I could see he was sad. This was Carlos's last race as Lando’s teammate. And I could see Carlos was a bit sad as well.

The team principals had gathered together and rented out a club in the city so the party would be just the Formula 1 team and drivers. We had been traveling together all year in the middle of the chaos of the pandemic, so we were all kind of in the same boat, if someone was sick, the odds of everyone else also being sick were extremely high.

I watched from a far as Lewis celebrated his seventh championship. I chuckled as he, Valtteri and Toto started a shot competition between the three of them. Sebastian was chanting chug chug chug and waving his hands around.

I feel the familiar presence of Lando standing beside me as he nurses his drink.

“How was your second year as a Formula 1 employee?” He asks me.

I smile against the rim of my glass. Just one year ago he had asked me the same question, at the rooftop of the VIP lounge at the paddock, hours before the last race of the season began.

“It was weird. My last year as an intern, next year I will have to reinvent myself to be on top of my game.”

“You’re already on the top of your game.” He nudges my shoulder with his arm.

“Yeah, but I still haven’t proved myself here.” I point out.

Lando frowns, turning his body around to look at me. I’m leaning against the wall and now he’s looming over me.

“Have you been getting hate online?”

I give him a weak smile.

“Let’s not talk about this right now. Tonight is about celebrating.”

He’s still frowning and opens his mouth to protest when I cut him off.

“How was your second year as Formula 1 driver?”

He chuckles, probably recalling the same memory from last year. He rests his forearm on the wall right beside my head.

“It was good and weird. I got my first podium ever. I also lost my first teammate…” Lando smiles a bit. “And I got you to be here with me one more year.”

I smile, raising my glass.

“Here’s to another year of Norris and Button traveling around the world together.”

Lando grins, clinking his glass against mine.

“Together.” He repeats.

#fanfiction #f1 imagine #f1 smau #f1 social media au #f1 x reader #lando norris #lando norris imagine #lando norris x reader #lando norris x you

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valyrfia · 10 days ago

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You haven’t pissed me off, strangers online don't have that power. But in other words, you can't actually answer the question. I just genuinely thought you had an opinion based on facts and not just "compilations of past world champions saying so" and "he's my favorite therefore he's the most talented", and I wanted to know that it was.

Also, nobody is surprised you're a Charles main, I think that's why majority of us follow you. It’s not like you try to hide it, which you shouldn't - nobody should hide who their favorite is.

He is my favourite therefore he's the most talent, daghe Charles Forza Ferrari etc., but I digress.

To give a slightly more fleshed out answer, Charles had a more difficult start to his career whereas Max's way in karting and the lower formulae was paved with money and the connections of his dad. The Monaco of it all hides Charles' upbringing but they were essentially a very middle class family that just happened to live in a rich country, whereas money was of no concern for Max's family. Yes Charles used the living in Monaco of it all to his advantage for connections, but his family ran out of money a lot when he was karting, and he had to take on sponsors quite early on, and money is a MASSIVE part of success in the route to F1, so I take karting stats with more of a pinch of salt because the winner is more likely to be based on familial income (which is why I kind of wish we could put Esteban Ocon in a top car just to see something.....but I digress). I think Max fans tend to gloss over this privilege a lot of the time in conversations because Jos yes is a POS but Max still had one of the best launchpads of anyone on the grid.

Re: them into F1. I do want to put them in equal machinery just to see something, and I WISH we had gotten Max F3/F2 seasons just for a more direct comparison, I think the closest comparison we maybe have is 2019, before Mattia Binotto got his grubby hands over too much and we got nerfed. Sure there's Austria, which Max won, but immediately after then there's also Silverstone, which is a h2h that Charles won.

And then we entered the Horrors era which we're still suffering through, meanwhile red bull have given Max a car capable of winning WDCs, so all comparison falls apart. But it's little things that makes me think and believe in the talent narrative, Charles' tyre-saving masterclass at Suzuka last year that flew under the radar, followed by his VERY famous one at Monza, the only other driver who tried to pull off drives like that got disqualified (RIP George Russell) and while Max can save tyres, he's not quite as good at it as Charles is. Same with adapting to the car, Max needs a car with a pointy front and he's gotten pretty much that all throughout his career, Charles on the other hand has had to drive all sorts of shitboxes, understeer, no-steers, tyre-munchers, etc. and really makes up that extra difference to pull cars kicking and screaming to where they don't belong. I will concede we're seeing more of that with Max this year too, the RB21 has no business being on pole, but "Charles Leclerc and inshallah" is a widespread joke for a very good reason. I have the data to believe that Charles is a more adaptable driver.

Finally I rely and trust the words of former WDCs, almost all of which have said that Charles is the most talented driver they've ever met. I'm using past WDCs as sources and benchmarks because I think they know better than the rest of us what all of that really entails.

And you may not like this but at a certain point it really does come down to belief. I have data, and I'm sure you'd like to poke holes in my argument because you're a Max fan and your belief is incompatible with mine, but you're not changing my mind because to me part of the fun of the sport IS the absolute blind conviction that Charles is Il Predestinato and spring will come again etc. etc. I think that's why a lot of people follow me. At the end of it all, I believe.

#asks #charles leclerc

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itsguysnightitsironic · 1 year ago

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"Gresca i destrucció, riurem i ens penedirem, el cremarem el dimarts i patirem fins el diumenge."

"Party and destruction, we will laugh and repent, we will set him on fire on Tuesday and we will suffer until next Sunday."

I almost forgot the whole Carnestoltes and Vella Quaresma celebration when it literally goes hand in hand with OAUW themes.

Some context under the threat:

- The Carnestoltes i la Vella Quaresma represent the two extremes of the balance, the excess, "El rei Carnestoltes", and the abstinence, "la Vella Quaresma".

As the story sings: the King Carnestoltes brings party and joy for days, but after a whole week of partying, no sleeping and "sinning", the people find themselves exhausted, with their homes destroyed and no food for the winter.

So Carnestoltes is sentenced to death by the stake on Tuesday and on Wednesday "El dimecres de cendra" (Ash Wednesday) starts the 40 days of penitence (no meat, no eggs...) marked by the seven legs of the Vella Quaresma who loses one every week, ending in Pasqua (the return of Spring).

-The style is inspired by the nostalgia and softness of Pere Torné Esquius illustrations.

"Venedora de globus" cap els 1907 de Pere Torné i Esquius.

-Also, also, the demons represent the Correfocs, pyrotechnics spectacles made by adults and children dressed as demons throwing fire and spurns around.

Diables de les Corts fotos de Albert Pedra 2019

Which is the coolest thing ever. Also there's dragons dances.

Correfoc de Manresa 2011

This is a threat for you to forget Sant Valentine and go watch Correfocs-

#legends of avantris #once upon a witchlight #gideon coal #kremy lecroux #gricko grimgrin #morning frost #hootsie grimgrin #torbek #twig #bavlorna blightstraw #endelyn moongrave #skabatha nightshade #jaaberwock #tw long post #tw body horror #you're gonna listen me talk about my culture and you will like it-

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diamonddaze01 · 1 month ago

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WINGS AGAINST THE WIND

PAIRING: kwon soonyoung x reader| WC: 6.7K GENRE: hurt-comfort | non-linear storytelling | based on boys by alfie jukes WARNINGS: alcohol consumption A/N: for keopihaus’s spring event! i picked pantalone | had this brain worm at work and this is the end result. not entirely happy with it, but we ball. happy to finally be able to write for svt again | hochi’s debut on the blog! welcome sweet boy RECOMMENDED LISTENING: boys, alfie jukes | motion sickness, phoebe bridgers | sweet disposition, the temper trap | summertime sadness, lana del ray | cherry, harry styles | out of my league, fitz and the tantrums | lovers' carvings, bibio | i wanna be your girlfriend, girl in red

SUMMARY: The tide pulls in. The stars burn on. Neither of you move.

JUNE 2019

The first time you see Soonyoung that summer, he’s chasing seagulls down the shore, barefoot and grinning, arms spread wide like he thinks he can fly.

The ocean wind tousles his hair, strands of it sticking to his forehead, but he doesn’t stop running. The birds scatter around him in startled flurries, wings beating against the sky in protest, but Soonyoung only laughs—a sound carried away by the tide, swallowed up by the crash of the waves.

You watch from the porch of your family’s beach house, hands curled around a cold glass of lemonade, condensation damp against your palm. The sun hangs low, turning the sky soft at the edges, streaks of rose bleeding into gold. The scent of salt lingers in the air, familiar and thick.

It’s always like this with him. Soonyoung, with his sunburnt nose and scabbed knees, the boy who never walked when he could run, never whispered when he could laugh. Soonyoung, who arrives with the summer and stays until it ends, as much a part of this town as the sea-glass that washes up on the shore, as the rusting Ferris wheel down by the boardwalk.

And just like that, it begins again.

JUNE 2002

You are six, and the world is too big.

The ocean roars, an endless, hungry thing, swallowing the shore in foamy white before retreating like it changed its mind. The sky stretches too wide above you, and the sun is too bright, pressing hot fingers against your skin. Even the voices—grown-ups talking, seagulls screaming—are too loud. So you hide, small hands curling into the fabric of your mother’s dress, peeking out at the unfamiliar boy in front of you.

He is loud. He is all knees and elbows and wild energy, his hair sticking up like he’s been running into the wind for hours. His shirt is untucked, one sneaker untied, a smear of something suspiciously orange at the corner of his mouth. He stands with his weight on the balls of his feet, like he might take off at any second.

And then—he grins.

"TAG!"

He smacks a hand against your arm. Then he spins on his heel and bolts, kicking up sand as he tears toward the water, his laughter trailing behind him like a kite in the breeze.

Your feet stay rooted. Your heart pounds. You glance up at your mother, searching her face for an answer, but she only nudges you forward, voice warm with amusement.

"Go on, sweetheart," she murmurs. "He’s waiting for you."

You look back at the boy—Soonyoung, she had said his name was. He is already halfway to the shoreline, but he pauses, turning back to you. His hands cup around his mouth as he shouts, "Come on! You’re it!"

Your fingers twitch. Your toes curl in the sand. And then, something in you—some quiet, cautious thing—loosens just enough.

You take one step. Then another.

And then you run.

SEPTEMBER 2008

You are twelve, and summer is ending. The world has narrowed.

Once, it had felt endless, stretching beyond the dunes and the boardwalk and the chipped-paint fences of this beach town. But now, it feels smaller, shrinking to the space between sun-warmed pavement and the steady crash of the tide, to the places where Soonyoung goes and where you follow.

You don’t remember when you started falling in love with him. Maybe it was when he climbed onto the roof of your house just to prove he could, his grin bright as the moon above, his breathless told you so floating down like a dare. He had scaled the old oak tree by your window with the reckless confidence of a boy who had never believed in falling, fingers gripping the rough bark, feet scraping against the gutter as he pulled himself up.

Now, he sits there, legs swinging over the edge, toes brushing against the night air like he could dip them into the stars if he tried hard enough. His hair is mussed from the climb, sticking out at odd angles, and his t-shirt is streaked with dirt where he must’ve wiped his hands. But his eyes—his eyes shine with something wild, something boundless.

"You coming up or what?" he calls down, voice laced with laughter.

You hesitate. Your mother would kill you if she knew, but Soonyoung is already scooting over, patting the space beside him like it’s the easiest thing in the world. And maybe, for him, it is.

You climb. It’s clumsy, slow-going, your fingers fumbling against rough bark, but when you reach the top, Soonyoung is waiting, grinning like he knew you’d make it all along.

The roof is warm beneath your palms, still holding the heat of the day. The town spreads below you in quiet patches of light—porch lamps glowing amber, the boardwalk flickering in the distance. The ocean is a dark, endless thing, breathing against the shore. And above, the sky stretches wide, a mess of constellations neither of you can name.

"You ever wonder what it’s like to be a bird?" Soonyoung asks suddenly, voice softer now.

You turn your head, catching the way the moonlight skims the curve of his cheek. "What do you mean?"

He shrugs, tilting his face toward the stars. "Just—flying wherever you want. Never having to stay in one place."

You frown, pulling your knees to your chest. "But don’t birds always come back home?"

Soonyoung is quiet for a long moment, his fingers drumming against the shingles. "Maybe." Then, turning to you, eyes crinkled at the edges, "But I think I’d want to see everything first."

Something flutters in your chest, strange and new. You don’t know what it is yet.

So you don’t say anything, just tip your head back and watch the sky, the stars too many to count, the night stretching wide and open before you. And beside you, Soonyoung hums under his breath, legs still swinging, like he’s testing the air��like he’s already getting ready to take off.

JULY 2019

The waves lap gently against the wooden beams, the water below shifting with the tide, black with hints of silver where the moonlight kisses it. A faint breeze rolls in from the horizon, cool against your sun-warmed skin, and beside you, Soonyoung hums some half-forgotten song under his breath, the tune swallowed by the wind before it can reach your ears.

He’s always humming, always moving—tapping his fingers against the railing, shifting his weight from foot to foot. Even now, leaning over the edge of the pier, he rocks onto his toes like he’s daring himself to fall forward, like he trusts the ocean to catch him. You don’t know if it ever occurs to him that it wouldn’t.

"Bet I could jump," he says suddenly, tilting his head toward you, eyes glinting in the dim light. He grins, teeth flashing white. "Bet I could survive."

You roll your eyes, but your heart stutters anyway. "Bet you could break your leg."

Soonyoung laughs, pushing off the railing to stand upright. He stretches his arms above his head, his t-shirt riding up slightly, exposing the strip of tanned skin just above his waistband. "C’mon," he says, nudging your shoulder with his. "Where’s your sense of adventure?"

You huff, turning your gaze back to the water. Somewhere in the distance, a boat bobs along the horizon, its light a tiny pinprick against the vast dark.

It’s not that you don’t have a sense of adventure—it’s just that Soonyoung’s is always bigger, always wilder, always burning too bright for you to hold in your hands without it slipping through your fingers like embers.

"You don’t always have to prove something, you know," you murmur, watching as a gull drifts lazily above the water, its wings barely moving, carried by the wind.

"I’m not proving anything," Soonyoung says, voice softer now. He nudges you again, more gently this time. "I just like knowing I could."

You don’t answer right away. The breeze carries the scent of salt and something sweet—funnel cakes, maybe, or the last wisps of cotton candy from a boardwalk stand closing up for the night. The sounds of the carnival are distant now, nothing but an echo of laughter and carousel music winding down for the evening.

Soonyoung swings an arm over your shoulders suddenly, tugging you into his warmth. "Hey," he says, voice teasing, but you hear the quiet sincerity beneath it. "If I ever do something stupid, you’d catch me, right?"

You exhale a small laugh, shaking your head, but you don’t pull away. "Yeah," you say. "I’d catch you."

Soonyoung grins, satisfied, and you stand there together, the waves below whispering secrets you’ll never quite understand.

AUGUST 2011

You are fifteen, and the ocean is endless.

It stretches before you, vast and rippling, the sky above painted in the soft pastels of late afternoon. The waves are restless today, tumbling toward the shore in a frothy rush, stealing the sand from beneath your feet as they recede. You should have been more careful. You should have braced yourself better. But Soonyoung was beside you, and it’s always easier to forget things when he’s there.

The wave catches you off guard—one moment, you’re standing ankle-deep in the water, and the next, the current surges forward, swallowing your knees, your waist, knocking you off balance. The world tilts, salt filling your mouth as you go under, the water curling around you, flipping you end over end until you don’t know which way is up.

And then—hands.

Soonyoung's grip is firm, fingers wrapping around your wrist, tugging you up, up, up until you’re breaking the surface, gasping as the air rushes back into your lungs. He’s laughing, because of course he is, his eyes crinkled at the corners, his hair dripping saltwater down his cheeks.

“Damn,” he breathes, grinning wide, “I thought the ocean was about to steal you.”

You’re breathless, stunned—less from the tumble, more from the way his hand is still wrapped around yours, warm and solid, grounding you. Your heartbeat is a staccato rhythm against your ribs, matching the waves that crash around your legs.

“You okay?” Soonyoung asks, squeezing your fingers lightly, like he’s making sure you’re real, like you haven’t been carried off with the tide.

You nod, but you don’t move. You don’t let go.

And neither does he.

A gull wheels overhead, crying out against the wind, and the moment stretches long and golden, suspended between you like something fragile. His thumb brushes against your knuckles absently, as if he doesn’t even realize he’s doing it, and you think, suddenly, that you’ll remember this forever—the salt on your lips, the sun-drenched glow of his skin, the way his laughter still lingers in the space between you.

The tide rolls in again, swirling around your calves, and finally, reluctantly, Soonyoung pulls away, raking a hand through his wet hair. “Come on,” he says, stepping backward toward the shore, “before the waves drag you under for real.”

You follow, but you swear you can still feel the ghost of his touch, the warmth of his palm against yours, even as the ocean tries to wash it away.

SEPTEMBER 2012

You are sixteen and have realized summer doesn’t feel the same when Soonyoung’s not there.

The days stretch long and golden, but they feel hollow, like an echo of something that once was. The ocean still hums against the shore, the seagulls still wheel lazily overhead, crying out into the heavy afternoon air, but everything feels off-kilter, like a song played in the wrong key.

You walk the boardwalk alone. The wooden planks creak beneath your feet, weathered and warm from the sun, but they don’t bounce with Soonyoung’s unrelenting energy, don’t tremble beneath his eager footsteps as he drags you from one end to the other, chattering about nothing and everything.

He’s not here.

He’s in a city miles away, where the air smells of pavement and ambition, where he spends his days in mirrored studios lined with scuffed wooden floors, his body moving through the shapes of something greater, something bigger than this sleepy town could ever offer. You know this is what he wants—have always known that Soonyoung was meant to move, to run, to fly.

And yet.

You sit on the pier at sunset, legs dangling over the edge, watching the waves catch the last light of the day. The seagulls drift overhead, weightless and free, carried by the wind like it loves them. You wonder if Soonyoung ever stops to watch them in the city, if he looks up from the rhythm of his own body long enough to remember the way the ocean breathes, the way summer feels here, with you.

You press your palms against the wooden planks, grounding yourself in the familiar, in the place that has always felt like home. But without Soonyoung’s laughter ringing through the streets, without his sunburnt hands pulling you forward, it feels smaller somehow.

The wind shifts, carrying the sound of distant music from the boardwalk, the scent of salt and spun sugar. You close your eyes and pretend, just for a moment, that if you turn your head, Soonyoung will be there beside you—grinning, wind-tousled, eyes alight with something that makes everything feel alive.

But when you open them, it’s just you.

And summer has never felt so quiet.

AUGUST 2019

The days stretch long and golden, collapsing into nights laced with salt and the hum of cicadas. The ocean is a constant whisper in the background, ebbing and flowing like breath, like the slow pull of time neither of you try to fight.

Soonyoung drives with one hand on the wheel, the other draped lazily over the window frame, fingers trailing through the wind as if he’s conducting an invisible orchestra. The air is thick with heat, the scent of sunscreen and sun-warmed leather filling the car. The radio crackles, the same summer songs playing on an endless loop, and Soonyoung sings along—offbeat, off-key, always a lyric behind. You don’t correct him. You just listen, watching the way the wind tosses his hair, the way the sun paints his skin in soft gold.

Some nights, when the sky is wide and full, he takes you to the dunes. He doesn’t ask, just tugs you by the wrist, his grip warm and insistent, leading you past the weathered wooden fences, past the sea grass swaying in the breeze. The sand is cool beneath your bare feet, grains slipping between your toes as you climb higher, until the town is just a scatter of distant lights behind you. The ocean stretches vast and inky beyond the horizon, the waves gleaming silver under the moon.

Soonyoung flops onto his back with a sigh, arms sprawled like he’s trying to hold onto the whole sky. “Look,” he says, pointing upward, “Cassiopeia.”

You follow his gaze, but all you see are stars—scattered and bright, endless pinpricks of light. “That’s not Cassiopeia,” you say, wrapping your arms around your knees.

“Sure it is,” he argues, tracing a messy W in the air. “And that’s Orion, and that’s the Little Dipper—”

"You’re making them up," you accuse, raising an eyebrow.

He grins, rolling onto his side to face you. “Maybe. But who’s gonna prove me wrong?”

You roll your eyes, but you lie down beside him anyway. The sand still holds the heat of the day, warm against your spine, grounding you. Above, a flock of birds shifts in the sky, their silhouettes carving soft, fluid patterns into the dark.

Soonyoung watches them too, something quiet settling over him. “Do you think they know where they’re going?” he murmurs, voice barely above the hush of the waves.

You exhale, watching your breath dissolve into the night. “I think they just go.”

For a moment, there is only the sound of the ocean, of the wind moving through the dunes. Then, Soonyoung turns to you, his gaze steady, unreadable. The wind ruffles his hair, brushes softly against your skin.

“Yeah,” he says at last, voice low. “Yeah, I think so too.”

The tide pulls in. The stars burn on. Neither of you move.

AUGUST 2013

You are seventeen, and the summer tastes like salt and firewood smoke.

The nights blur together, one bleeding into the next, stitched together with sand sticking to sun-warmed skin and the hum of cicadas in the dunes. The air is thick with the scent of the ocean, of burning driftwood, of marshmallows turned molten over an open flame. Somewhere down the shore, music drifts from a crackling speaker, the melody warped by the wind, and Soonyoung—always Soonyoung—is beside you, too loud, too restless.

Long days melt into long nights. You spend the afternoons sprawled on the sand, the sky above a vast and endless blue, the kind of blue that makes you believe in forever. The kind of blue that makes you think forever might look like this—Soonyoung’s laughter bright and uncontained, his body twisting away from the incoming tide, only for him to launch himself straight back into it, fearless, unrelenting.

At night, the two of you wander the boardwalk like ghosts, dodging pools of neon light, walking the railings with your arms outstretched, breathless, unsteady, pretending the ocean below is nothing but air. Soonyoung, always first to jump, teeters on the edge like he’s trying to touch the sky, his fingers splayed wide, his laugh caught in the wind, pulling you in with him. The world is full of motion, but here, together, you feel like you’re part of something still, something that lingers in the spaces between his words and the sounds of the ocean.

A mockingbird calls from a distance, its song old and familiar, a note of something that’s already slipping away. You know it’s a song that used to belong to summers long past—before the world started demanding things of you, before the noise of growing up began to drown out the simple things. Before Soonyoung’s laughter, wild and free, was something you couldn’t hear without a tinge of fear.

You both sit on the railing, the wood warm beneath you, your legs dangling into the night air, too far from the ground but not enough to feel unsafe. The ocean is a dark mass below you, a black expanse of water that pulls at your feet as though calling you in. You breathe in the salt, the smoke, the unspoken understanding that summer is already slipping away.

Soonyoung is a constant, a whirlwind, a never-ending movement. He is arms waving, words tumbling, laughter spilling over like waves crashing against the shore. And yet, here, now, in this in-between moment—his gaze steady, his body still except for the absentminded fidget of his fingers against his thigh—he doesn’t feel like motion at all. It’s as if even Soonyoung is holding his breath, waiting for something, maybe for the summer to tell you both what comes next.

And as the ocean sings beneath you and the stars hang heavy above, you know for certain, with a clarity that hits you like the warm evening breeze, that you love him. It’s not a revelation. It’s just the way the world feels right when he’s here. You realize you’ve always known, that the way your heart flips every time he’s near isn’t just the rush of summer or the thrill of adventure. No, it’s something deeper, something more permanent.

You don’t say it. You don’t need to. The ocean is enough, the wind is enough, and Soonyoung, sitting so close you can feel the heat of his skin even through the night air, is enough.

“You ever think,” he asks, his voice quiet for once, the ocean’s roar filling the space between his words, “if birds feel trapped by the sky?”

It’s a question you don’t know how to answer, but you don’t need to. You both sit there, staring out into the distance, the waves crashing like a quiet promise. A mockingbird whistles in the distance, and for a moment, the world stops moving. It’s just the sound of the ocean, of the night stretching long and endless, and Soonyoung, who has always been everything, sitting quietly beside you, as still as the sky.

APRIL 2014

You are almost eighteen, and Soonyoung calls you at midnight like he has forever.

The phone buzzes in your hand, sharp in the quiet darkness of your room, a signal of something both familiar and foreign. His name lights up the screen, and for a second, you're back to summers where the nights felt endless, where time seemed to bend around the two of you. You press the phone to your ear, and even before he speaks, his voice settles into you like the weight of an old song, one you’ve memorized in the corners of your heart.

“I made my decision,” he says, words spilling fast, but there’s something different in them tonight. They feel heavier. Like he's holding something back, or maybe you are. The sound of his breath, quick and charged, vibrates through the line.

“What decision?” You try to keep the steadiness in your voice, but there's a flutter, a pulse in your chest you can’t ignore.

“About college,” he says, and the words feel like a blow you didn’t see coming. “I got in. I’m going across the country. I—I’m going to dance.”

And the world feels too small for a moment, like the walls of your room are suddenly pressing in on you. Across the country. It might as well be across the world. His dream is taking him somewhere far away, somewhere you can’t follow.

There’s a quiet stretch of silence on the other end, the kind that fills the space with too many things unsaid. Your fingers tighten around the phone, the cool surface grounding you, but not enough. Not enough to stop the sudden ache that settles into your bones.

You want to say something. Something that makes this okay, something that makes it feel less like the earth is shifting beneath your feet. But you don’t. Because there’s nothing to say to make it okay.

“Soonyoung,” you whisper, barely enough to hear, but he catches it, and his laugh is soft, uncertain.

“I know,” he says. “I know it’s far. But it’s what I want.”

You hear him breathing, and you know this is it. The moment when things start to change. Not a slow shift, but a sharp one. The way the seasons will turn, the way you’ll look back and realize the summer you thought would last forever is slipping through your fingers.

“I might not be there this summer,” he says after a beat, his voice quieter now. “The program’s got pre-season stuff... It’s in June, right? I won’t be here for any of it. I—” His voice falters, and for the first time, you hear the uncertainty in it, the crack where his words don’t fit quite right.

And it’s like someone took the last bit of air out of the room. You both know what it means, even if it isn’t said directly. This summer—this one that’s always been the same—is about to slip into something unrecognizable, into something new.

“Okay,” you finally say, your voice low. And the weight of that word feels like too much to carry. Too much for one night, too much for one phone call.

You know he’s still there, still waiting for you to say more, but there’s nothing left to say. Soonyoung’s dream is his own now, and you’re left standing on the edge of something, unsure how far you’re willing to fall.

“Happy birthday,” he says softly, as if it’s a way to close the space between you. But the distance feels like it’s already there, stretching out farther than the ocean between you.

JULY 2014

You are eighteen, and June slips away in the space between breaths.

Each day blends into the next like the tides rolling in and out, each wave a soft reminder of everything you’re losing.

The air is warm with the promise of summer, thick with the scent of salt and the distant whisper of fireworks. The city hums with the pulse of late-night life, but the streets outside your window feel empty now, quieter than they should be, as if the world is holding its breath, waiting for something.

Anything.

Then, there’s a knock at your door. It’s sharp, unexpected, and when you open it, Soonyoung is standing there, his chest heaving with shallow breaths, his hair damp from the cool night air. His eyes, wide and alive with something unspoken, lock onto yours and without a second thought, he grabs your hand and pulls you out into the warmth of the night.

“Come on,” he says, his voice breathless, but urgent, like he’s chasing something, like he’s trying to outrun everything that’s coming. “Come with me.”

Before you can ask any questions, before you can make sense of the moment – there are a million questions in your head. What happened to pre-season? Why are you here? Are you here for me – he’s dragging you down the empty streets, past the shuttered shops and the quiet houses where people are already asleep. You can hear the soft tap of your shoes against the pavement, but it’s drowned out by the sound of his laughter, the wild, unrestrained joy of someone who doesn’t know—or doesn’t care—about the world waiting for them. His grip on your hand is firm, like he’s afraid you might slip away if he lets go.

The boardwalk is silent as you pass it, the lights above flickering like old memories, casting long shadows that stretch across the empty path. And then, finally, you reach the beach, the sand soft beneath your feet, the cool breeze of the ocean sweeping over your skin. The sound of the waves is constant, a steady rhythm that seems to match the beat of your racing heart. The moon hangs high above, bathing the shoreline in a silvery glow, casting everything in a dreamlike haze.

“Soonyoung,” you start, breathless from the run, but before you can finish, he pulls you into his arms, his hands finding their way to your waist, his body warm and solid against yours.

“Dance with me,” he says, the words more like a command than a request, and before you can respond, he’s moving you, spinning you in circles, no music but the sound of the waves crashing, no rhythm but the way your feet meet the earth, the way your heart thunders in your chest, in time with the crash of the waves.

You laugh, caught up in the madness of it all, in the feeling of the night, of him, of everything slipping away and yet feeling more alive than you’ve ever felt before. The stars above are a blur, a smattering of white across the black sky, and for a moment, it feels like you’re the only two people in the world, like this—this strange, reckless dance—might be all that matters.

“Where did you come from?” you ask between breaths, trying to catch your own as you stumble in the sand, laughing.

Soonyoung doesn’t answer right away. Instead, he tilts his head back toward the stars, his hair falling in messy strands across his forehead, the moonlight catching in his eyes, turning them silver. He looks like he belongs here, in this moment, with the world at his feet and the night surrounding him, as if nothing else has ever mattered but this dance, this night, the two of you.

“I don’t know,” he says softly, but the words hang in the air like they’re something sacred. “But I don’t ever want to leave.”

The wind picks up, ruffling your hair, pulling you closer into the dance, and you feel it then—the unspoken promise, the feeling that this moment is all there is, that the world can shift and change around you, but nothing will matter as long as you’re here, together, in the glow of the moon and the rhythm of the ocean, with the sound of your laughter echoing into the night.

For a second, just a second, you think it could last forever.

JUNE 2017

You are twenty-one, and you still love Soonyoung.

The dingy dive bar on the boardwalk smells like stale beer and regret, the kind of place you've always passed by, nose scrunched in distaste, never once thinking you'd step inside. But tonight, Soonyoung winks at you with that signature grin—daring, mischievous—and says, "We're twenty-one, let's have some fun!" as he drags you in.

The air inside feels thick, the dim lights casting shadows that stretch across the worn wooden floors. The smell of cheap liquor clings to everything, but for some reason, it’s comforting tonight, like the world is giving you a small, tight hug. You glance around, noting how it’s exactly what you expected—grungy and lived-in, with cracked bar stools and neon signs that buzz faintly, but there's something about it that feels like a secret you've been let in on.

And then there's Soonyoung, his grin lighting up the room like he's the only thing in it that matters. You realize, in the half-faded light, how much has changed. He’s older now, sharper. His shoulders are broader, and his hair falls messier, less like the careless perfection of youth and more like someone who’s been fighting to make a name for himself. But his laugh—his laugh still holds that same reckless joy, the kind that turns ordinary nights into something more, something you’ll remember for years.

The past few years have been a blur—his choreography intensives, your internships. Summers were fleeting, slipping through your fingers faster than you could catch them, leaving only the echoes of missed chances and unspoken words. But here, now, in this bar, with the stale air and the clink of bottles around you, time feels still. You hold on to everything he says, every word like it’s gold. You try to memorize the shape of his smile, the way his eyes crinkle when he laughs, the way he’s always looking at you like you’re something more than just a friend, even if neither of you ever says it aloud.

He nudges you, his fingers brushing yours as he hands you a drink, a little too full, a little too fast, but you don’t care. “To being twenty-one,” he says, and for a moment, you wonder if this is what it feels like to be young forever.

You sip your drink, the burn of alcohol mixing with the sweetness of something unspoken, and you can’t help but feel dizzy—not just from the booze, but from the way he’s looking at you, the way his presence fills the room in a way it never used to. And maybe he’s tipsy, and maybe you are too, but when he leans in—his face too close, his breath warm against your lips—and presses a sloppy kiss to your mouth, you don’t pull away. You don’t even think to.

His lips are soft against yours, a little too wet, but it’s familiar, in a way that’s almost too much. And when he pulls away, eyes still hazy with the remnants of alcohol, you find yourself smiling—grinning like an idiot—and somehow, you’re both still standing there, in this dingy bar, as if the rest of the world doesn’t exist.

The next morning, sunlight floods through the blinds, the world outside still too bright and too loud. Soonyoung doesn’t bring up the kiss. You don’t either. Instead, you nurse your hangovers with orange juice and your mothers’ chiding, a familiar kind of torture.

You pretend like it never happened. Like it didn’t mean anything. But both of you know it did.

You swallow another sip of juice, a little too bitter, a little too heavy. His eyes flicker to yours across the kitchen, and for a moment, it’s like everything that’s unsaid is spilling over. But then he just shrugs, grins like nothing ever changed, and asks, “You wanna hit the boardwalk later?”

You say yes, because there’s no reason not to.

Soonyoung never brings up the kiss.

SEPTEMBER 2019

The air is different now. The ocean feels colder when it reaches your toes, like it’s finally remembering the sharpness of autumn that’s waiting just beyond the horizon. The sky dims earlier, stretching the shadows long across the shore, as if the world is already preparing to move on from the endless days of summer. The light no longer spills like honey—it’s thin, fragile, slipping away in fragments, as though the sun is reluctant to leave.

One evening, Soonyoung drives you to the cliffs, to the highest point in town where everything feels a little more distant, a little more infinite. He doesn’t speak much on the drive, his hands lightly gripping the wheel, his eyes focused on the road, though his mind feels miles away. You don’t ask what’s on his mind, not yet.

When you reach the top, the wind greets you like a forgotten friend, strong enough to make you feel weightless. Soonyoung steps out first, slamming the car door behind him with a sharp thud that echoes against the rocks. He walks toward the edge, the same familiar sway to his movements, like he's always been here, like he’s always been this person—fearless, reckless, unafraid of the unknown. His arms stretch wide, the wind catching his shirt, lifting it like he might take flight.

His silhouette against the fading light is something you know by heart. You’ve seen it before—seen him standing at the edge of the world, the one constant in a summer full of changes, a quiet promise that nothing would ever really shift. But now, he seems smaller somehow, as if the weight of the night has already begun to settle on his shoulders, as if he’s already carrying something he can’t let go.

"Summer’s almost over," he says, his voice barely audible over the wind, but still, you hear it—clear and sharp like a bell tolling in the distance.

You nod. You both know what that means.

Summer has always meant everything, and now, it’s slipping away faster than either of you can grasp. Somewhere, in a place far beyond this summer, this town, these nights—life is waiting.

Soonyoung turns to you, his face still half-lit by the fading light, his eyes unreadable in a way they’ve never been before. The way he looks at you, like he’s searching for something he hasn’t quite found yet, makes the air feel heavier. You swallow, fingers curling tightly into the fabric of your sweater, the warmth of it barely enough to chase away the cold creeping in.

"You ever think about what comes next?"

You take a moment before answering, your heart catching somewhere in the gap. "Yeah," you say, and it’s the truth. You think about it all the time. About how everything seems to be moving, how things are slipping away, and how you don’t know how to hold on when the world keeps shifting.

"Me too," he says, and the words feel too final, like a door closing softly in the distance. His eyes are searching yours, as if looking for a reflection of the question in them, but you don’t know what answer he wants, what answer you have.

In the distance, a flock of birds takes off, heading toward something unseen, something only the wind knows. You watch them, the flutter of their wings a reminder that not everything has a destination—that sometimes, they just go.

You don’t say it, but the thought lingers there, the answer to a question he asked only a month ago—maybe they don’t know where they’re going. Maybe they just go. Maybe that’s what you’ll do, too, when the time comes.

Soonyoung exhales, long and slow. "Guess we’ll figure it out."

And maybe that’s enough. Maybe it always will be.

Soonyoung doesn’t come back the next summer. Or the summer after that.

The silence between you stretches, a quiet that fills every corner of your life. The sky is still the same shade of blue when summer rolls in, but it feels emptier now, as if it’s lost something it never meant to lose.

Your mother sends you news articles. They arrive in the mailbox, pressed between the usual letters and bills, but they stand out. Always. She folds the pages carefully, her handwriting neatly scrawled across the top: Look what Soonyoung's up to now.

One article is about how he’d been selected to join a world-renowned dance troupe. Another talks about how he’d choreographed for Coachella, the way his name shimmers in the lights of the stage, filling every word with something grander than what you remember. Then there’s the Super Bowl. His name, in bold letters, nestled between those of stars, as if it belonged there all along.

Each article feels like a different version of him, a version you never thought about until now. The way he stands at the center of massive stages, the weight of his presence carving space in places you always knew he was meant to reach. But still, with each new article, you can’t help but feel that familiar ache in your chest, the one that comes with absence. He’s somewhere out there, taking up space in the world in ways you’d never thought possible, but not here. Not here with you.

You can’t help but wonder, as you read about his successes, if he’s forgotten. If the days on the cliffs, with the ocean at your feet and the wind in your hair, have faded into something like a dream, a summer you shared once but can never go back to. Maybe he never felt it the way you did. Maybe he was always meant for something bigger than that small town, something grander than the boardwalk and the rusty Ferris wheel and melted bubblegum ice cream.

You try not to hold it against him. But it lingers—soft, insistent. The part of you that once thought you were forever, that once imagined summers and years stretching into something permanent. Now, it's just you, the ocean, and the echoes of a laughter that’s grown fainter with time.

But then, every time you close your eyes, you can still see him—the way his arms spread wide on the edge of the cliffs, the way the wind tugged at his hair, and the way, just for a moment, you thought he might fly.

JUNE 2024

Years later, you find yourself back on that same beach. The air hangs thick with memory, the scent of salt and sand settling into your lungs, familiar in a way that aches. You stand at the water’s edge, toes curling into the cool, damp sand, and for a second, you half-expect to see Soonyoung running down the shore, legs kicking up spray as he chases after the birds—always just a little too fast, just a little too wild, a laugh spilling from him like the ocean itself.

But he isn’t here.

The beach is quieter now, the laughter of summer replaced by the steady hush of the waves, the soft whisper of the wind that cuts through the air, carrying with it the weight of everything that’s changed. It feels different, but in a way, it doesn’t. The same sky, the same ocean, the same stretch of sand you once walked barefoot with him.

You stand there, the pulse of the tide at your feet, and listen. His voice is there—woven into the crash of the waves, into the way the wind tugs at your hair. It’s him, lingering like a shadow you can’t quite shake. You can almost hear him, shouting your name, daring you to join him in one more race down the shore, one more moment that was never really enough.

You wonder, for just a second, if the ocean remembers him the way you do—how his laughter once filled the air like music, how his presence used to make everything feel like it was meant to last. Maybe the ocean knows. Maybe it’s kept him in its depths, tucked between the rhythm of the waves, as if it, too, is holding on to the summers you had.

You are twenty-eight, and you will always love Kwon Soonyoung.

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