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mostlysignssomeportents · 8 months ago

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Bullies want you to think they’re on your side

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT (Mar 13) in SAN FRANCISCO with ROBIN SLOAN, then Toronto, NYC, Anaheim, and more!

Bruce Schneier coined the term "feudal security" to describe Big Tech's offer: "move into my fortress – lock yourself into my technology – and I will keep you safe from all the marauders roaming the land":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/05/battery-vampire/#drained

But here's the thing about trusting a warlord when he tells you that the fortress's walls are there to keep the bad guys out: those walls also keep you in. Sure, Apple will use its control over Ios to stop Facebook from spying on you, but when Apple spies on you, no one can help you, because Apple exercises total control over all Ios programs, including any that would stop Apple from nonconsensually harvesting your data and selling access to it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

It's a tried-and-true bullying tactic: convince your victim that only you can keep them safe so they surrender their agency to you, so the victim comes under your power and can't escape your cruelty and exploitation. The focus on external threats is key: so long as the victim is more afraid of the dangers beyond the bully's cage than they are of the bully, they can be lured deeper and deeper until the cage-door slams shut.

Think of how the capital class talks about labor and immigration. For 40 years, workers' wages have stagnated, even as workers grew more productive and GDP grew and grew. In other words, workers held up their end of the bargain – creating value for the companies that employed them – but their bosses reneged on the part of the deal where they got a fair share of that value.

Historically, there are two ways that workers get a fair deal: either they get bargaining leverage because there aren't enough workers to go around, or they form a union and get bargaining leverage through solidarity. The former never works for very long: if wages are high because of worker scarcity, other workers will move or retrain until wages start to fall again. The only way to keep wages high is for workers to unionize and meet their bosses' concentrated power of capital with the concentrated power of a union:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

Bosses know that the reason that workers' wages stagnated is because they smashed unions, but they told workers that it was because "immigrants stole their jobs." This set the stage for decades of increasingly authoritarian measures ("build the wall") that weaken the rights of all people – but especially brown people. They say they're making a fortress to keep others out, but really they're making a prison to keep us in.

Tech is especially skilled at playing this fortress/prison gambit. 20 years ago, Amazon claimed that publishers who used "digital rights management" for Kindle ebooks and Audible audiobooks would be protected from their real enemy – pirates. But the real threat to publishers was Amazon, not pirates. Amazon was the entity hellbent on extracting huge discounts from publishers, even – especially – if it drove those publishers into bankruptcy:

https://www.businessinsider.com/sadistic-amazon-treated-book-sellers-the-way-a-cheetah-would-pursue-a-sickly-gazelle-2013-10

By locking their titles to Amazon's platform with DRM, publishers surrendered their bargaining leverage with the tech giant. Every time a publisher sells a DRM-"protected" book to a customer, they add to the cost that customer will have to bear if they ever quit Amazon, because only Amazon-approved apps can read DRM-encumbered files sold by Amazon:

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/11/cutting-their-own-throats.html

Jeff Bezos is a canonical protector-turned-jailer. By tricking publishers into permanently shackling their products to technology he controlled, he was able to shift billions in value from their side of the ledger to his own – and he did it by telling them he was keeping publishers safe!

Not that entertainment companies are always on the side of the angels. Today, entertainment companies – publishers, stock photo companies, etc – are chasing "AI" companies through the courts, seeking to eliminate the fair use status of making transient copies of works, performing mathematical analysis on those copies, and turning the results of that analysis into software:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/how-we-think-about-copyright-and-ai-art-0

The thing is, it's not really controversial among copyright experts to say that these activities are fair use. Scraping isn't stealing – not legally and not ethically. Scraping is good, actually:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

Which is not to say that artists don't have a legit – and serious – beef with AI companies. Their pitch is: "train our products on your workers' skilled output, fire your workers, replace them with our products." That's a monstrous proposition – and that's before we get to the part where their products aren't anywhere near good enough to do your job, but their salesmen are absolutely good enough to convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI model that totally fails to do your job.

But while the corporations that pay artists may hate the idea of AI companies scraping their archives, they hate paying the creative workers that fill those archives every bit as much. If we end up changing the law to make scraping, mathematical analysis, and publication of that analysis without permission illegal, it won't do anything to stop the media corporations suing AI companies from building models with the intent of firing workers and replacing them with software.

More than a year ago, I predicted that the very same companies that are suing over AI training would happily sell their data to AI companies. They don't want "no AI" – they want "AI that they control":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

Today, Apple is offering tens of millions to media companies for access to creative works in order to train models. These media companies require overbroad, one-sided contracts with creative workers that give them the power to sell their work to Apple:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/22/technology/apple-ai-news-publishers.html

Media companies aren't on their workers' side in just the same way that Amazon wasn't on publishers' side. The promise of a new, broader copyright that bans scraping, mathematical analysis and writing code is like the promise of DRM: it's a prison pretending to be a fortress.

Because if that new copyright law controlling training is created, media companies will immediately amend those one-sided, non-negotiable, take-it-or-leave-it contracts to demand that every creative worker sign over that new right to them. Hell, they're already doing this in anticipation of that change:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d37za/voice-actors-sign-away-rights-to-artificial-intelligence

Remember, AI companies make money by selling models to companies hoping to fire their workers. But for that to work, companies have to plan on making money by firing their workers and replacing them with AI. If no company was interested in this proposition, we wouldn't have to worry about AI. Capital and labor are not on the same side. Creative workers don't have the same problem with AI as the media companies that want to drive down their wages, and the "solution" that media corporations favor isn't going to do a damned thing for workers – but it'll do plenty to them.

The media companies providing training data for Apple's "ethical" AI model will use it in exactly the same way that the media companies who're slavering over the "nonethical" AI models want to use them.

Meanwhile, every time a worker – or their ally – is tricked into calling scraping "stealing," they do the bosses' job for them. And the bosses – being remorseless seekers of return to capital – don't care about the collateral damage in their war on scraping.

Scraping is how we find out if Facebook is making money by selling paid political disinformation:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/06/get-you-coming-and-going/#potemkin-research-program

Scraping is how we preserve the web:

https://archive.org/web/

Scraping is how journalists rescue their work from media companies after private equity owners shut them down and delete their archives:

https://slate.com/business/2024/02/messenger-gawker-vice-media-layoffs-sites-deleted-why.html

Scraping is how we'll get new, better search-engines that filter out the botshit, scams and SEO nonsense:

https://kagi.com/

Media bosses also don't care about the collateral damage in their war on mathematical analysis – right to make temporary copies of works and subject them to scrutiny. They don't care about extinguishing the entire exciting, useful discipline of computational linguistics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_linguistics

They don't care about inadvertently banning the use of language models to analyze police records for the Innocence Project New Orleans:

https://hrdag.org/2023/03/09/quantifying-police-misconduct-in-louisiana/

Or the records of killings during the Colombian civil war, to produce evidence that the vast majority of these killings were carried out by CIA-backed right-wing militias:

https://hrdag.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/20220818-fase4-informe-corrected.pdf

Back in the Napster Wars, when record companies sued 19,000 American college kids, single moms, and dead people (!), a RIAA spokesman notoriously said, "When you fish with a net, you are going to catch a few dolphins":

https://www.theregister.com/2008/03/20/tanya_andersen_complaint/

If this Copyright Wars 2.0: AI Edition ever gets going in earnest – if we manage to snuff out the right to scrape and the right to analyze without permission – we won't stop media companies from selling creative workers' output to AI companies. We won't stop them from using AI models to suppress our wages. We will kill all the beneficial uses of scraping and analyzing.

In other words, we'll create a tuna net that catches nothing but dolphins.

How do we make workers whole? How do we protect their interests? Remember, there are only two ways that workers have ever gotten a fair shake from capital. The first is to exploit a temporary and doomed shortage of labor for short-lived bargaining advantage. The second is to form a union and force our bosses to give us what we deserve. The only successful campaign against AI – the only campaign that actually advantaged workers, not their bosses – was the Hollywood strikes last summer.

What's more, in this fight – finally, for once! – workers have the law on our side. The US Copyright Office has repeatedly confirmed (and courts have upheld) that the output from AIs isn't eligible for copyright, meaning that if our bosses ever manage to replace us with algorithms, they can't stop their rivals from scraping the output of those bots and selling it in direct competition with them:

https://hyperallergic.com/840331/ai-generated-artwork-not-eligible-for-copyright-judge-rules/

In other words, adding copyright to AI will make it easier for our bosses to fire us and replace us with botshit.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/12/market-failure/#car-wars

Image: Skelanard (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Entrance_to_the_Belgrade_Fortress.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #immigration #drm #monopoly #monoposony #publishing #workers rights #feudal security #copyfight #labor #lets you and he fight

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highladyluck · 3 years ago

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Wheel of Time 01x06 liveblog

Teaser:

Why is Alanna always eating fruit, is this a metaphor or what

Bring Your Children To Work Day is going well, I see

Shunning rituals! WE CONSTRUCT INTRICATE RITUALS TO TOUCH THE SKIN OF OUR GAY LOVER

I was promised homoeroticism and I better get it

Sea Folk? ooooh baby Siuan. Ooof, Tear really does not like channelers.

AL'NATIO!!! I guess it really is Siuan's theme, specifically. I still like my more general translation, though.

We have FISHY SAYINGS, I REPEAT, WE HAVE FISHY SAYINGS

She's so baby T_T

"Fish touch the moon's reflection every night" damn girl you got poetry and a refreshingly can-do attitude towards teaching male channelers doing the impossible

She comes, she comes! If your showverse Moiraine/Siuan fic doesn't include this phrase echoed at a crucial moment, then what the fuck are you even doing, go write Perrin/Mat instead if you need to get your gay on

THE OUTFITS

Moiraine like: "my hot GF is the pope"

Leane please step on me

Tower guards or Accepted?

Oh my god she sounds like Siuan should

Aes Sedai are unpopular, noted. Siuan like "I won't be goaded"

Siuan that's kinda fucked up, but otoh really sets up some parallels

Mmmm, a Green defending a Red (for the sake of a Green), got some shakeups in the standard politics maybe

"Laws exist to protect people from us" what an interesting thing to say- like, absolutely correct, but there are certain other countries that would say the same thing and mean it entirely differently, certain other countries that were already reminding me of Tear

Liandrin like *pouty face* "I wish mommy would yell at someone besides me"

Moiraine and Siuan staging a homoerotic drama to put Liandrin off the scent

"I will think on your penance" -> it's gonna be gay af

Why is Alanna always eating fruit, is this a metaphor or what

Tar Valon as Constantinople, I want to go to there T_T

Ooooooooh it's trauma time for my boy :) my stupid boy :) :) :)

I love how Rand is like "You'll have to go through me" and Lan is like "that's sweet but I'm going to disarm you now"

The way the black gunk interacts with the weaves almost looks like magnetic fields- kind of repelled and compelled at once- and I look forward to more special effects of that nature in future seasons [eyes emoji]

Give Barney an Oscar

"I would do it for any of you" love this Moirane and Rand sort of bonding moment

"He's stronger than he has any right to be" THAT'S MY STUPID BOY

Iiiiiinteresting so she's healed him of the dagger connection, but he can't touch it again or it's probably curtains. [So, knowing Mat, I would assume we are on track for the usual shenanigans... wait, y'all, what are the odds Mat ends up introducing the falcon to the party in this iteration? I want them to be friends.]

"Feeding on a darkness in him" wtf is that all about, though?

*nods to Rafe* This bisexual thanks you for Moiraine side butt [typing this now I have to confess that this is seared into my brain and I'm gonna be horny forever, also I originally left out those disappearing ships from my notes, which should confirm exactly how distracted I was]

When will people learn that you can't keep Moiraine in the Tower? She's like Mat, if you try to trap her she will run away

More Aes Sedai truthiness, on poor Egwene too, rude

Oh Egwene, count no one in this series dead until you see the body buried, and then check for supernatural allegiances XD

"It'll be like it never happened" Moiraine, honey, that's not how profound emotional trauma works

Moiraine like "Please don't tell anyone Perrin is a werewolf, they'd take it the wrong way"

"You masked our bond." "I'm delegating." "You're getting laid is what you're doing."

GIVE. ME. THE. GAY.

Guessing T'A'R? [later thoughts- my best guess is a ter'angreal that creates a construct space, like vacuoles or something]

Moiraine is a power bottom

yaaaaay someone is swearing by the Light!

I love the theme of untrustworthy data, incomplete information, etc

"You little pufferfish" omfg what an adorable petname for Moiraine I'm dead

"I'll kill them myself before I let him have them." yessss classic Moiraine lines

Siuan as a Dreamer? I'll accept it

eeeeey it's the plot, Dark One and the Eye of the World, which appears to be kind of Bore-like in this instance (no one make fun of the Dragon later when they make the speech, you know the one- in this turning Moiraine really is setting them up to think that!)

Moiraine like "please exile me, in any Turning of the Wheel I need to get out of this place"

"In this life or the next" MY HEART

Got some clumsy blackmail on Liandrin [The man in North Harbor- I've seen speculation this is Fain, but tbh it could be any bad guy or even related to those ship disappearances that got mentioned in the bath scene. Whoever it is, I will eat Mat's horrible coat if it's a romantic liaison.]

Moiraine gets her pun in: "A Way to surmount it"

"Confusing to have the woman and the throne named the same thing" *froths at the mouth* I *need* to write that Egwene and The Problematic Fave parallels essay, what delicious foils they are to each other

Omg, these actresses, Nyn is perfect, so is Egg

Bring Your Children To Work Day is going well, I see

Nyn vs Siuan is so fun "Then you must have very low standards"

"The Wheel doesn't care what you want, the only thing that matters is what you do" [Mat rejects your determinism! Mat rejects your determinism so hard he yeets himself out of the storyline XD]

You could cut the sexual tension with a knife

Swearing fealty on the oath rod to the judgement of the Amyrilin Seat... but Moiraine makes it VERY GAY and & specific to one person. That's a smart strategic choice, but also sets a precedent for oaths sworn to the person rather than the seat, at least if anyone else heard. [eyeballs emoji]

Shunning rituals! WE CONSTRUCT INTRICATE RITUALS TO TOUCH THE SKIN OF OUR GAY LOVER

It's Waygate time, bitches

Moiraine is such a horse girl

The gang's back together!

Am I reading too much into this or is this a ship tease between Mat and Perrin? Mat has such bisexual energy in this show and I do actually support it, I just literally can't believe I kinda ship Mat and Perrin

*Everyone* is a horse girl

WHO IS GONNA TAKE CARE OF MANDARB??? And Bela I guess

Rand's "are you shitting me" face is so good, he's like "Wait, you don't know who the Dragon is?"

"The earth itself will burn" EXCUSE ME WHY ARE WE LOOKING AT MAT RIGHT NOW XD

Nyneave asking the tough questions, as usual

Sidebar why has no one gotten Mat a better coat? There is wind in the ways, too!

Moiraine like "this is now beyond our control, the Wheel weaves as the wheel wills..." meanwhile Mat is like "Please don't make me deal with the darkness again, hahaha just kidding but actually not kidding at all." [OK, so obviously this was because Mat's actor left when Covid hit, but "You have no control and Fate is gonna chew you up and spit you out and you'll likely die if you're not the Dragon" is literally the most anti-Mat statement you could possibly make and I don't blame him for noping the fuck out. Besides, his fate is gonna find him anyway.]

Mat really is being set up as the Edmund Pevensie of the group here XD hope that deeply cursed Turkish Delight is worth it, buddy

"It's fairly obvious that one of them is the problem, and it's Mat. They should have been spending more time watching him!" - My beloved spouse, who is correct

#wheel of time #wot on prime #wot on prime spoilers #wot on prime s1e6 #wot on prime liveblog #tl;dr I am not concerned about Mat except in the sense that I am concerned about Mat literally all of the time #he is a concerning boy #also what's up with tumblr not having the stupid boy gif from the shoes video #I was going to make that my teaser #also I tried to talk around book data enough to not have to use my tag hopefully it works

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twistedmusings · 4 years ago

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A/N: Planning to post some finished requests tonight thankfully but I wanted to share something super self indulgent with you guys since I just recently got an Alexa! I'm still kind of in a funk (since classes are STILL not over with) so thank you everyone for your kind words in my inbox q wq For now I only have Riddle and Leona...but if everyone likes it I'll make an effort to finish! I kinda am working on Azul's as we speak >:3 Warnings: Boys missing you terribly, Riddle justifying the breaking of rules and Leona realizing that he is talking to an inanimate object.

The Ramshackle Prefect leaves to go to RSA for a month, following a lead that could get them back home. And while the dorm leaders do miss them terribly, it seems one of them is hiding something.

. .

“AZUL-SHI DO SOMETHING.”

The Octavinelle dorm leader barely listened to his friend's request as he also crowded over Idia’s phone, the other five dorm leaders looking down at the screen as a pair of familiar eyes stared back at them.

“Where is Idia? Can you please hand me back to him?”

Riddle blinked at the sprite on the screen before looking back at Idia with a frown.

“Explain yourself, Shroud.”

Idia whimpered as he hung his head low in shame.

“[Y/N]-san...I mean...the Prefect left to go to RSA for a whole month, right? Crowley said it was to help them find a way back home but apparently there was some trouble there too and...and he brought them to fix it...”

Malleus’s neutral expression changes into something a bit sadder while Kalim lets out what everybody was thinking.

“To take them away so suddenly...I didn’t even get a chance to give them a goodbye party!”

“They’re only away for a month, Kalim.” Vil’s eyes stay on Idia’s phone screen.

“But I’m sure a party would have let them know how much I would miss them!”

Riddle clears his throat, “That still doesn’t explain anything about what I am seeing. Why in the world do you have something that looks like...that looks so much like them on your phone!”

Idia was sure this was hell. Of all the people to catch him using his phone during a dorm leader meeting, why did it have to be Riddle? What was he even supposed to answer to that question! That he missed talking to [Y/N]-san about the new animes that were releasing this week that he had purposefully made an AI from data Ortho had collected on them and their mannerisms?

He would rather die!

“I--I was testing a new AI! Just...for schedules and stuff like that! And I didn’t have anything else to base it on so I just took [Y/N]-san’s information and made a prototype! It’s not just going to go out to the public like that! They can customize it however they like--!”

Azul hums as he taps the screen, the sprite giggling as he touches their cheek before looking up at all of them expectantly.

“...A prototype, huh.” he smiles and leans back while taking his phone out, “Everybody stop crowding around him, we might as well be breaking his arm slowly at this point.”

The rest of the dorm leader's move back with only some protest, Idia’s eyes shining as he looks up at his other friend.

“Azul-shi…”

The dorm leader of Octavinelle grins, “If it’s a prototype then that means it needs users, correct? More people to test it out?”

“Eh?”

Azul puts his phone in front of Idia and smiles at him like he was just about to close a rather important business transaction.

“Well then I want the prototype as well. Download it to my phone, will you?”

“Eh?!”

Idia presses his phone to his chest as if Azul was about to take it, looking around nervously as the other dorm leaders take their phones out and set it in front of him.

“If it’s an application for scheduling then I could use it to keep Heartslabyul’s matters in check. I’ll take one too.”

“Ruggie is gonna be busy during exams...this thing better work as an alarm.”

“Surely this would help me keep track of my schedule for both the Monstro Lounge and school. I’ll take one with a statistics program built in, Idia”

“Oh!! I want mine to be able to sing! And can I also get them in Scarabia’s dorm uniform? I want to see what [Y/N]-san would look like!��

“I’ll take that as well. I also want a photo re-touch feature as well as one hour updates as to what is going on in my Magicam account.”

Each phone was placed in front of him as Idia felt his head start to spin. He just wanted to keep this thing a secret only for himself! He wasn’t even planning to release it, it was all just a lie so they wouldn’t know his greatest shame!

A shadow was casted over him, Idia looking up slowly as Malleus smiled and placed his phone down.

“I am eager to see your finished product, Shroud.”

The tarts in front of him looked absolutely delicious.

Trey had really outdone himself this time. The strawberries were cut into perfectly neat shapes and the glaze over them made them so mouth wateringly shiny that he could practically taste the sweet treat without even having to taste it!

Which only made his want of one grow even more.

“And here comes the next batch.” Trey smiles as he puts down another plate in front of him, Riddle’s eyes now staring at that plate while his vice dorm leader cleans himself up.

“When did you say the Unbirthday party was going to be today?”

“A-At three o’clock sharp.”

Trey nods as he looks at the clock in the kitchen.

“Perfect. I promised to meet Jade to get some herbs he has been growing as well as letting him teach me how to make this one soup they had in the Monstro Lounge about a week ago.”

He grabs his phone and heads out, leaving Riddle with a quick goodbye and a promise that he would make it back as quick as possible.

Leaving him all alone with two plates filled with his favourite treat.

The dorm leader looks around once...then twice...checking if anybody was coming into the kitchen before going back to stare at the plates.

It wasn’t like he was going to grab one

The Unbirthday party today would be using pastries that Trey had made yesterday. It was the third of the month so the rules required a completely different pastry. The strawberry tarts were most likely for tomorrow.

So Riddle could wait. He was the Heartslabyul dorm leader after all so not only could he wait but he was required to wait! As the dorm leader he was to set an example and he couldn’t let himself be seduced so easily by just two plates of such yummy looking tarts--!

He quickly takes his phone out and looks down at the screen, face flushing as he tries to remember how Idia told him to open up the new app.

“[Y/N]-san…?”

A face peeks out from the corner of his phone, smiling as it recognizes his face and steps out while giving him a polite bow.

“Good morning, Riddle-san! What can I help you with?”

He can’t help a small rush of excitement at seeing the Prefect’s face after not seeing them for two weeks. Riddle would make an effort to stop and talk to them whenever they made their way to Heartslabyul that not seeing them for so long had almost thrown him off his schedule.

And...he missed the conversations he had with them.

As the dorm leader and a student in NRC he didn’t necessarily have time to go to any other events or take part in any of the shenanigans others would get up to, not that he necessarily wanted to, but it was entertaining when the Prefect talked about it with him.

It felt like they were letting him into their world.

So maybe this substitute would suffice...it was a scheduling app after all so it wasn’t like he was using it for pleasure only.

“Would you please repeat rule 56 of the Queen’s handbook?”

The AI clears their throat as a book animation appears before them.

“Rule number 56: On the third of April, black tea should be served along with pineapple tarts. Followed by a game of cards in which the loser must pour the Queen tea for the rest of the Unbirthday party.”

Riddle sighs as he looks back at the plate of tarts.

“...I guess I’ll wait until tomorrow…”

“Wait until what?”

He looks down at the AI, the sprite blinking in confusion as it waits for an answer. Idia had mentioned adding a conversational feature…

“There is no rule about what to eat tomorrow so I decided that we would have strawberry tarts.”

“Are those your favourite?”

Riddle nods and steps out of the kitchen, making his way to his room as he stared back at the open door.

“They are. Ever since I was little. I couldn’t have many because of--”

He decides to not go deep into the subject.

“I’m sure Trey’s pineapple tarts will be excellent. I will just have to wait until tomorrow to enjoy the strawberry ones.”

The AI hums before the book animation pops up again, looking down and flipping a couple of pages before speaking up.

“Riddle-san. While it does say that black tea should be served with pineapple tarts...it does state that it should be done for the Unbirthday party and the Unbirthday party only.”

He frowns, “Your point?”

“I am sure no rule would be broken if only the Queen has a tea party before the Unbirthday party. From what I am seeing here--”

They flip a couple more pages.

“There is no rule about a tea party of one enjoying a strawberry tart.”

Riddle blinks before looking down at his phone, the sprite smiling as they shut the small book and lets it disappear with a ‘poof.’

No rule would be broken...if it was only a tea part of one?

He looks down at the AI when he hears them giggle.

“Riddle-san looks really happy.”

A blush covers his face at being called out on how big his smile probably was.

“Did I help in any way?”

The dorm leader takes a deep breath before smiling as he looks down at the phone and presses his fingertip on top of their head, rubbing it back and forth as if they were petting them. Something he knew he could never really do with them in real life lest he was looking to get odd looks.

“More than enough. Would you like to accompany me during this tea party?”

“Yes please!”

Riddle nods before looking around once more and clearing his throat.

“And...would you refer to me as ‘dorm leader’ from now on?”

The sprite nods as they give him a polite bow.

“Yes, dorm leader!”

He would need to send his report of the app as quickly as possible, Idia had really outdone himself this time...maybe he could ask if he could get them dressed up in the Heartslabyul uniform?

Riddle still wished you would hurry back.

“Leona-san! Please wake up!”

The blankets on the bed wriggled a bit as the phone was tousled over from one side of the bed to the other, the sprite inside frowning as they tried again.

“Leona-san! Please wake up! Ruggie-san texted you!”

A hand comes out of the blankets before holding the phone up.

“Read the text out loud then.”

Sighing, the AI pulls the text up and reads out loud.

“Please be awake by the time I get there, Leona. I need to make sure I get your signature on these papers for the dorm budget. If you don’t I’ll hold your lunch captive!”

Leona’s face finally pops up from under the blanket, the man sitting up and running a hand through his hair as he speaks up again.

‘Oi. What time is it?”

“It is 3:14 in the afternoon, Leona-san.”

“And when did Ruggie send the text?”

“At 3:00 o'clock.”

He groans and lays back down, the pillows flying about as he holds the phone to his face and smiling when he sees the sprite looking down at him worriedly.

“You really do look like them…” Leona whispers before tapping the screen so that he is poking the sprite’s cheek, “What is that face for?”

“I’m just worried for you, Leona-san. Too much sleep is a symptom of some sicknesses so--”

“Hah? You think I would get sick so easily?” he yawns and stretches, “I’m different from humans. Beastmen need a lot more sleep than regular humans do so...I’m just doing what my body tells me.”

Green eyes watch a notepad appear before the AI as they write down the information, smiling as they close it up and watch it disappear.

“I’ll keep that information in mind so I can serve Leona-san better. Thank you so much.”

Leona blinks at the words before a lazy smile crosses his face.

“Serve me better, huh? Never thought I would hear you say that.”

Usually the herbivore would be frowning and telling him to get up and actually take charge of his dorm and how he didn’t act like any grown up they knew. The sprite, however, tilts their head in confusion before speaking up once again.

“I am yours, after all.”

“Damn right you are.”

He looked at the phone a bit more, the sprite smiling up at him as he poked their cheek or patted their head. A part of him wondered if you would react like that with him as well. You always seemed so annoyed with his antics yet you never failed to come back to talk to him, telling him how he needs to get his act together if he is ever planning to go back to the Afterglow.

Leona would bet money that if he patted your head out of nowhere you would be highly flustered. Getting praise from him was something that didn’t happen often, after all.

“What day is it?”

“The 12th day of April, Leona-san.”

Another two weeks of you being gone. He frowns and closes his eyes as he thinks about you meeting those other students. RSA was just full of idiots...like his brother--

“Dammit.”

He slams the phone down but blinks when he hears a small yelp, turning the phone back around to find the AI looking rather frazzled with their eyes closed and hair all over the place.

“Shit. Are you....okay?”

Great, he was asking an application if it was okay. He could understand why Idia would hide this, right now he felt like he was crazy.

“Y--Yes! It was just unexpected!”

The sprite fixed itself up quickly and smiled back at Leona.

“Are you okay though, Leona-san?”

The dorm leader chuckled and nodded as they set the phone down gently and laid down next to it. At least that part was very much like you, worrying about others before focusing on yourself.

“You’re not going to complain? I almost just threw you.”

Without missing a beat, the AI stands up and looks at him.

“Leona-san is still working hard despite his body telling him to sleep. My program tells me that it would be a natural emotion to feel frustrated if you are not allowed to do something you want. Normal actions of frustration speak of physical manifestations such as kicking, punching or throwing. I was simply calculating it for it to be the latter and for it to happen towards a pillow. I’ll make sure to fix my calculations next time.”

He shakes his head and sets the phone down gently.

“Weird thing. You shouldn’t forgive someone so easily after they wronged you.”

“But you didn’t wrong me, Leona-san. I didn’t feel any pain. I just want to make sure you are feeling your best! You are my number one priority!”

This machine is going to make him go insane, he knows you would never say that but the fact that Idia had gotten your voice down so well that it was almost as if you had just told him he was your number one---

He was already getting a headache.

“Set an alarm for an hour. Ruggie will take around that long anyway.” Leona lays down and wraps the blankets around him.

“Of course. Alarm set for one hour. Would you like to be woken up with a personalized message?”

Leona hummed before grinning.

“Wake me up by calling me ‘King’.”

The sprite fixes its settings before giving a polite bow.

“Yes, my King. Please enjoy your rest.”

After this he would send his report to Shroud and maybe ask for an outfit upgrade. He only needed to show him some Afterglow clothes and the nerd would probably be able to make the AI wear them, right?

Whatever, the moment you came back Leona would make sure that you gave him some headpats for making him wait so long.

#twisted wonderland #twst #twst imagines #riddle rosehearts #leona kingscholar #riddle x reader #leona x reader #twst mc #//yeah this is extremely self indulgent...BUT I HAVE An ALEXA NOW AND I FEEL FANCY

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soundsfaebutokay · 3 years ago

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youtube

So I've recc'd this video before, but it deserves its own post because it's one of my favorite things on youtube. It's a Tedx Talk by comics writer, editor, and journalist Jay Edidin, and I really think that it will connect with a lot of people here.

If you live and breathe stories of all kinds, you might like this.

If you care about media representation, you might like this.

If you're neurodivergent, you might like this.

If you're interested in a gender transition story that veers from the norm, you might like this.

If you love the original Leverage and especially Parker, and understand how important it is that a character like her exists, you will definitely like this.

Transcript below the cut:

You Are Here: The Cartography of Stories

by Jay Edidin

I am autistic. And what this means in practice is that there are some things that are easier for me than they are for most people, and a great many things that are somewhat harder, and these affect my life in more or less overt ways. As it goes, I'm pretty lucky. I've been able to build a career around special interests and granular obsession. My main gig at the moment is explaining superhero comics continuity and publishing history for which work I am somehow paid in actual legal currency—which is both a triumph of the frivolous in an era of the frantically pragmatic, and a job that's really singularly suited to my strengths and also to my idiosyncrasies.

I like comics. I like stories in general, because they make sense to me in ways that the rest of the world and my own mind often don't. Self-knowledge is not an intuitive thing for me. What sense of self I have, I've built gradually and laboriously and mostly through long-term pattern recognition. For decades, I didn't even really have a self-image. If you'd asked me to draw myself, I would eventually have given you a pair of glasses and maybe a very messy scribble of hair, and that would've been about it. But what I do know—backwards, forwards, and in pretty much every way that matters—are stories. I know how they work. I understand their language, their complex inner clockwork, and I can use those things to extrapolate a sort of external compass that picks up where my internal one falls short. Stories—their forms, their structure, the sense of order inherent to them—give me the means to navigate what otherwise, at least for me, would be an impassable storm of unparsable data. Or stories are a periscope, angled to access the parts of myself I can't intuitively see. Or stories are a series of mirrors by which I can assemble a composite sketch of an identity I rarely recognize whole...which is how I worked out that I was transgender, in my early thirties, by way of a television show.

This is my story. And it's about narrative cartography, and representation, and why those things matter. It's about autism and it's about gender and it's about how they intersect. And it's about the kinds of people we know how to see, and the kinds of people we don't. It's not the kind of story that gets told a lot, you might hear a lot, because the narrative around gender transition and dysphoria in our culture is really, really prescriptive. It's basically the story of the kid who has known for their whole life that they're this and not that, and that story demands the kind of intuitive self-knowledge that I can't really do, and a kind of relationship to gender that I don't really have—which is part of why it took me so long to figure my own stuff out.

So, to what extent this story, my story has a beginning, it begins early in 2014 when I published an essay titled, "I See Your Value Now: Asperger's and the Art of Allegory." And it explored, among other things, the ways that I use narrative and narrative structures to navigate real life. And it got picked up in a number of fairly prominent places that got linked, and I casually followed the ensuing discussion. And I was surprised to discover that readers were fairly consistently assuming I was a man. Now, that in itself wasn't a new experience for me, even though at the time I was writing under a very unambiguously female byline. It had happened in the letter columns of comics I'd edited. It had happened when a parody Twitter account I'd created went viral. When I was on staff at Wired, I budgeted for fancy scotch by putting a dollar in a box every time a reader responded in a way that made it clear they were assuming I was a man in response to an article where my name was clearly visible, and then I had to stop doing that because it happened so often I couldn't afford to keep it up. But in all of those cases, the context, you know, the reasons were pretty obvious. The fields I'd worked in, the beats I covered, they were places where women had had to fight disproportionally hard for visibility and recognition. We live in a culture that assumes a male default, so given a neutral voice and a character limit, most readers will assume a male author.

But this was different, because this wasn't just a book I'd edited, it wasn't a story I'd reported—it was me, it was my story. And it made me uncomfortable, got under my skin in ways that the other stuff really hadn't. And so I did what I do when that happens, and I tried to sort of reverse-engineer it to look at the conclusions and peel them back to see the narratives behind them and the stories that made them tick. And I started this, I started this by going back to the text of the essay, and you know, examining it every way I could think of: looking at craft, looking at content. And in doing so, I was surprised to realize that while I had written about a number of characters with whom I identified closely, that every single one of those characters I'd written about was male. And that surprised me even more than the responses to the essay had, because I've spent my career writing and talking and thinking about gender and representation in popular media. In 2014, I'd been the feminist gadfly of an editorial department and multiple mastheads. I'd been a founding board member of an organization that existed to advocate for more and better representation of women and girls in comics characters and creators. And most of my favorite characters, the ones I'd actively seek out and follow, were women. Just not, apparently, the characters I saw myself in.

Now I still didn't realize it was me at this point. Remember: self-knowledge, not very intuitive for me. And while I had spent a lot of time thinking about gender, I'd never really bothered to think much about my own. I knew academically that the way other people read and interpreted my gender affected and had influenced a lifetime of social and professional interactions, and that those in turn had informed the person I'd grown up into during that time. But I really believed, like I just sort of had in the back of my head, that if you peeled away all of that social conditioning, you'd basically end up with what I got when I tried to draw a self-portrait. So: a pair of glasses, messy scribble of hair, and in this case, maybe also some very strong opinions about the X-Men. I mean, I knew something was off. I'd always known something was off, that my relationship to gender was messy and uncomfortable, but gender itself struck me as messy and uncomfortable, and it had never been a large enough part of how I defined myself to really feel like something that merited further study, and I had deadlines, and...so it was always on the back burner. So, I looked, I looked at what I had, at this improbable group of exclusively male characters. And I looked and I figured that if this wasn't me, then it had to be a result of the stories I had access to, to choose from, and the entertainment landscape I was looking at. And the funny thing is, I wasn't wrong, exactly. I just wasn't right either.

See, the characters I'd written about had one other significant trait in common aside from their gender, which is that they were all more or less explicitly, more or less heavily coded as autistic. And I thought, "Ah, yes. This explains it. This is under representation in fiction echoing under representation in life and vice versa." Because the characteristics that I'd honed in on, that I particularly identified with in these guys, were things like emotional unavailability and social awkwardness and granular obsession, and all of those are characteristics that are seen as unsympathetic and therefore unmarketable in female characters. Which is also why readers were assuming that I was a man.

Because, you see, here's the thing. I'm not the only one who uses stories to navigate the world. I'm just a little more deliberate about it. For humans, stories formed the bridge between data and understanding. They're where we look when we need to contextualize something new, or to recognize something we're pretty sure we've seen before. They're how we identify ourselves; they're how we locate ourselves and each other in the larger world. There were no fictional women like me; there weren't representations of women like me in media, and so readers were primed not to recognize women like me in real life either.

Now by this point, I had started writing a follow-up essay, and this one was also about autism and narratives, but specifically focused on how they intersected with gender and representation in media. And in context of this essay, I went about looking to see if I could find even one female character who had that cluster of traits I'd been looking for, and I was asking around in autistic communities. And I got a few more or less useful one-off suggestions, and some really, really splendid arguments about semantics and standards, and um...then I got one answer over and over and over in community after community after community. "Leverage," people told me. "You have to watch Leverage."

So I watched Leverage. Leverage is five seasons of ensemble heist drama. It's about a team of very skilled con artists who take down corrupt and powerful plutocrats and the like, and it's a lot of fun, and it's very clever, and it's clever enough that it doesn't really matter that it's pretty formulaic, and I enjoyed it a lot. But what's most important, what Leverage has is Parker.

Parker is a master thief, and she is the best of the best of the best in ways that all of Leverage's characters are the best of the best. And superficially, she looks like the kind of woman you see on TV. So she's young, and she's slender, and she's blonde, and she's attractive but in a sort of approachable way. And all of that familiarity is brilliant misdirection, because the thing is, there are no other women like Parker on TV. Because Parker—even if it's never explicitly stated in the show—Parker is coded incredibly clearly as autistic. Parker is socially awkward. Her speech tends to have limited inflection; what inflection it does have is repetitive and sounds rehearsed a lot of the time. She's not emotionally literate; she struggles with it, and the social skills she develops over the series, she learns by rote, like they're just another grift. When she's not scaling skyscrapers or cartwheeling through laser grids, she wears her body like an ill-fitting suit. Parker moves like me. And Parker, Parker was a revelation—she was a revolution unto herself. In a media landscape where unempathetic women usually exist to either be punished or "loved whole," Parker got to play the crabby savant. And she wasn't emotionally intuitive but it was never ever played as the product of abuse or trauma even though she had survived both of those—it was just part of her, as much as were her hands or her eyes. And she had a genuine character arc. My god, she had a genuine romantic arc, even. And none of that required her to turn into anything other than what she was. And in Parker I recognized a thousand tics and details of my life and my personality...but. I didn't recognize myself.

Why? What difference was there in Parker, you know, between Parker and the other characters I'd written about? Those characters, they'd spanned ethnicities and backgrounds and different media and appearances and the only other characteristic they all had in common was their gender. So that was where I started to look next, and I thought, "Well, okay, maybe, maybe it's masculinity. Maybe if Parker were less feminine, she'd click with me the way those other characters had." So then I tried to imagine a Parker with short hair, who's explicitly butch, and...nothing. So okay, I extended it in what seems like the only logical direction to extend it. I said, "Well, if it's not masculinity, what if it's actual maleness? What if Parker were a man?" Ah. Yeah.

In the end, everything changed, and nothing changed, which is often the way that it goes for me. Add a landmark, no matter how slight, and the map is irrevocably altered. Add a landmark, and paths that were invisible before open wide. Add a landmark, and you may not have moved, but suddenly you know where you are and where you can go.

I wasn't going to tell this story when I started planning this talk. I was gonna tell a similar story, it was about stories, like this is, about narratives and the ways that they influence our culture and vice versa. And it centered around a group of women at NASA who had basically rewritten the narrative around space exploration, and it was a lot more fun, and I still think it was more interesting. But it's also a story you can probably work out for yourselves. In fact it's a story some of you probably have, if you follow that kind of thing, which you probably do given that you're here. And this is a story, my story is not a story that I like to tell. It's not a fun story to talk about because it's very personal and I am a very private person. And it's not universal. And it's not always relatable, and it's definitely not aspirational. And it's not the kind of story that you tend to encounter unless you're already part of it...which is why I'm telling it now. Because the thing is, I'm not the only person who uses stories to parse the world and navigate it. I'm just a little more deliberate. Because I'm tired of having to rely on composite sketches.

Open your maps. Add a landmark. Reroute accordingly.

#Jay Edidin #LGBTQ #autism #mind and body #gender norms #why humans need stories #Leverage #Parker #Abby posts Leverage #my faves #Youtube #I did my best with the transcript #sorry for any mistakes

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sunjaesol · 3 years ago

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love, between the shadow and the soul

chenford | drabble | post-canon | title: sonnet xvii - pablo neruda

///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Look, Tim Bradford did not get attracted to rookies, okay? In all the years he had been a TO, none had grabbed his attention. Not when he and Isabelle were dating, or married, or when she disappeared into the night with a trail of illicit affairs and a shot of heartache for him. Dozens of young women had sat in that car beside him and never ever had he let their femininity distract him. He served his country. He fought wars overseas. He looked Death right in the eye every single day and never blinked.

But then came officer Lucy Chen. He instantly knew the type of cop she’d be the second she turned in her seat, meeting his gaze for the first time, and nervously smiled at him. Nerves were normal, he was aware, but the doe-eyed look and the hopeful grin sold her out. No mystery. Just another young cop that would either slip through the cracks by the exam by tanking their grade due to stress, or she’d become a desk duty cop — one that stayed far from danger, that handled life with a perpetual softer touch ‘cause of her shrink parents.

Nothing wrong with that, Bishop would chastise him. Every cop had its use, she’d add. Sure, that might be true, but Tim didn’t want to babysit an armed toddler waiting for it to cry and call for mom. With just a couple well-placed Tim-tests, she’d be out of his hair in no time and then he could cross his fingers for a better recruit in the following weeks.

Life had the ability to change in a snap though — their funny, yet stern reminder that the universe called the shots, not the gun in his holster, or the rulebook. He got shot. Officer Chen backed him up. Her stubborn, yet brazen, yet honest attitude reeled him in just enough to ignore her little quirks she always joyfully displayed in the shop. Whenever he didn’t nip her ramblings in the bud fast enough, she babbled on and on about her personal life, her personal issues and relationships, like they were best friends (They weren’t! Boots and him never befriended!), like their relationship was anything more than a transactional training period. They got each other’s six. That was it.

But fuck, man. She got under his skin, too.

Lucy wore this… really nice perfume. A lot of female officers had make-up and perfume on, allowed a small sliver of self-expression, and he and Lopez had spend countless hours in a shop together. He was used to it. But somehow, Lucy’s stuck in his nose and didn’t leave. He felt like a creep, thinking about the blend of cardamom and oranges and cherry blossoms mixing with her warm skin, uncontrollable while also wanted. He wanted to fantasise about that fucking perfume of hers, a realisation that took a long time to come to terms with.

That didn’t mean he liked her though — he quickly corrected himself the first time he caught the pattern of behaviour — all it meant was that Lucy had good taste in perfume. Case closed.

So why did he linger whenever her shimmery eyes flicked up at him, why did his breath catch in his throat when her voice dropped to that infuriating sincerity as she uttered words of appraisal? Why his heart go haywire when she recorded all those audio books for him; an out of line gesture and overzealous task for a boot, which would normally result in him laughing their face.

Tim never thought he’d get over Isabelle, nor did he ever believe he’d have his happily ever after with Rachel, but with Lucy he foolishly hoped for more. A more that came from such a stupid and deluded place, probably fostered through months of loneliness and the Pavlovian response to her perfume, but one he didn’t stop. He couldn’t stop it. The man was always in control about everything, ran his own tests and went over every possible outcome every day, every hour — and yet he didn’t see her coming. Lucy Chen had been right under his nose and he hadn’t been prepared for the ground to disappear beneath his feet; something that should honestly get him fired. The callousness of his emotions while entertaining the idea of a relationship with his own boot sentenced him straight to P2 or desk duty, or whatever.

Lucy deserved someone better, anyway.

Someone that understood her love for sage and cleansing homes. Someone that liked veggie burgers, chai lattes, karaoke nights and social media lurking. Someone that wouldn’t hesitate for one second to open her door for a teenage girl in need of safety and a little bit of that Chen-love. Someone that wasn’t any of those firemen assholes, but wasn’t Tim either.

He never let his insecurities get the best of him, but after seeing her thrive as a P2 without him, handling undercover stints like a pro, conquering her trauma of being buried alive, it only showcased that she had more bravery in her index finger than some army members had in their entire body, all while staying innately kind. Of course Tim lost his mind over her. Of course he tried shaping officer Barnes to be more like Lucy — more sun and bite and charisma, less army BS. Of course, of course, of course. Even Rosalind, the person he hated most besides Caleb, had him figured out in seconds. He was obvious as hell.

Which was why he had to move stations. Away from the Mid-Wilshire Division and to another. He couldn’t be around her anymore and risk compromising missions or attacks. He didn’t tell Angela the details, though her knowing look said enough, and simply replied that she’d miss him and that she was sure the chief would happily reinstate him any time.

He should’ve known that information leaked through like a wildfire.

The morning of his resignment, uniform neatly folded in his locker, Lucy stopped him in the hallway with the most befuddled expression he’d ever seen.

“What?” he said.

“What the hell,” she exclaimed. “You’re leaving and I have to hear it from Angela? Why’re you…? You love this division. Is everything okay?”

Shouldering past her, he drawled over his shoulder: “Everything’s fine, officer Chen. I’d advise you to put on your uniform and get to roll call.”

“Don’t pull this crap with me,” she bit back, latching onto his arm before he was out of reach. His feet reflexively stopped in place, stupidly waiting on her to finish her train of thought. “Tim, you can tell me if something’s wrong. We’ve been through… way too much for you to act this cold with me.”

He scoffed, feigning mockery, and put his hands on his hips. “We? Chen, I was your TO. That’s it. Get it out of your head it was more.”

Lucy blinked, once, twice, a hurt expression crossing her features, followed by disbelief and a quiet contempt he had become awfully familiar with. Swallowing back the regret, he watched as she pursed her lips and took a step back. “Wow. Okay.”

“Don’t take it personally.”

“Hard not to, officer Bradford,” she muttered. Turning to the locker rooms, she added, “Talk to me when you’re ready to not be an asshole.”

That should’ve been his cue to let her go and resume his trek to sergeant Grey, but a whiff of her fragrance wafted in his face from her dancing curls and any sensical thought was knocked out his head. He wanted to embrace her and burrow his face in her hair, he wanted to hold her with intent, he wanted to kiss the scent off her skin. His feet followed her instead, both fully aware and totally impulsive at once. He chose the excuse of loving a good argument with her to then utter: “I’m not an asshole, Chen. I’m honest.”

“If you’re honest, you’d admit that we’ve been very close friends these past months,” she exhaled, refusing to look him in the eye. He supposed he deserved that. Stopping in front of her locker, she continued with, “Distorting your own reality to fit your macho narrative isn’t healthy. Also, this is the women’s locker room. Out. Now.”

Tim sputtered out a laugh and crossed his arms. “Macho narrative? Please.”

Lucy’s eyes narrowed, all air sucked out the room at the intensity of her stare, and Tim felt himself flailing, suddenly wondering why the hell he wanted to turn in his badge when the only place he could have moments with lucy was, well, here. Why was he giving up on this, how silly it might be?

With a resolute voice, she said, “Tim, why are you resigning?”

Nothing in his entire career prepared him for this. Tim Bradford had survived Iraq and Afghanistan, twelve years of the LAPD and counting, a deadly virus, hundreds of bullets taken by the vest and felt the power of death on the blue lips of Lucy in the quiet countryside. Fear got pushed aside. Pride pulled him forward, onwards. But right now, he had to take a leap of faith — the sole thing he never relied on, but Lucy did — and trust she’d be there after the fall.

(He wanted to be that amazing someone for her.)

“Because of you,” he whispered. His fight or flight told him to run for the first time in forever, but he kept his feet glued to the floor.

Her jaw fell slack in shock. “E-excuse me? Me?! I’ve done nothing wrong!”

“Exactly,” he spit. “You… you’re…” Tim sighed. “You’re the best, Lucy.”

Faltering, her brows furrowed in utter confusion, a grain of her fury replaced with compassion. He wasn’t sure if that was warranted. All he was trying to do was get it off his chest, confess, before it escalated to insurmountable heights. “I don’t think I understand.”

“Uh…”

“You’re resigning, because I’m the best?” she tried to deduce. “No offense, any other day I’d be dancing right now, but this is just…” She gestured at him. “So weird.”

Tim let out a miserable sigh and ripped the band-aid off. Fuck it. “I’m trying to be honest about my feelings, Lucy.”

She froze. “What?”

“I like you. A lot.” Her wonderstruck expression didn’t make him feel better, so he quickly added: “Which is why I gotta decrease the risk of this exploding in our faces and go.”

“Whoa!” Lucy’s hand wrapped around his, eyes wide and searching, like any empirical data would be found within his green irises, otherwise known as fondness and unresolved tension with every quiet moment they had. “Is this… another test? Are you getting back at me for pranking you?”

He quirked a brow. “You’re a P2 now. Tests are over.”

“Right,” she quipped, catching herself. She let go of him and nervously tucked a lock behind her ear. “Yeah. Okay. And you’re serious?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. O-kay. Let me, uh…” the locker swung open “… wrap my head around this.”

“It’s a pretty easy thing to—”

“Tim.”

“Yeah, okay.” He backed off, hating how the control was out of his hands now, how he practically shoved his heart in her grip and her pretty fingers could crush it to dust if she wanted to. “I’ll let you do that.”

Walking out the locker room, he took a deep breath and straightened up his face. Alright. He royally screwed that over. If his army buddies knew, they’d all laugh in his face and tease him for the rest of his life. But at least he told her and got his answer, that a relationship was off the table but that they could save their friendship once he switched divisions and some distance mended his twisted, inside-out heart. Lucy had rocked his world and all she had to do was exist.

“Tim!”

“Wha— wow!”

Her body crashed into him the second he turned around to her beautiful voice, Lucy’s arms wrapping around his neck and pulling him down to her level ‘til all he experienced were her sweet eyes and breathless smile and a kiss. Lucy kissing him, slow and tentative, but it lit his heart aflame and urged him to hold onto her. Her perfume was all-encompassing, nose full of the fragrance and the soft slope of her neck and long, brown hair and fuck, he was kissing Lucy Chen. Except he didn’t care if the entire precinct idly watched by, or if she yanked him out the building on impulse, or anything — ‘cause he was kissing her and it was perfect. Her plump lips were better than he ever imagined.

Her hands slid from his hair to his shoulders, arms and then his hands, squeezing. His forehead pressed against hers, embarrassingly weak in the knees from that incredible kiss that he didn’t dare to stand up straight. Two silly grins broke loose on their faces. He had no clue what to do now, or not do, but he did know he wanted her. He wanted everything.

Lucy decided for him.

“Don’t go,” she whispered.

Tim smiled. “Okay.”

#testing the waters... figuring out their voices...#chenford #the rookie fanfiction #the rookie x pablo neruda overlap is the funniest thing about this whole thing #the rookie

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thestorycfus · 3 years ago

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The Sweetest Apparition - Part 3

Pairing: Peggy Carter x fem!Reader

Summary: Reader is a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent and historian who specializes in the life and legacy of Captain Carter. After Nick Fury uses the Tesseract to bring Peggy back, the Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. contacts the reader to help her navigate life in the XXI century.

Warnings and notes: Food, mentions of Steggy, mentions of Stucky, very small mentions of war. Other characters are also mentioned. This got way longer than the first two parts, but there’s also way more Peggy here. This series takes place after the last scene of What If… episode one, including spoilers to that episode. Reader uses she/her pronouns.

Word count: 2,304

Series Masterlist

It should be a short walk to your apartment, but you made a small stop each time Captain Carter was curious about something. You also got some take out on the way, making sure to pick at least four different options from separate places and a couple of desserts too, since you didn’t know her taste yet. It was a while before you made it to your street.

During the entire time, your chatting was limited to safe topics - how loud and bright the city was, how many screens there were, the amount of coffee options that existed now. You watched Carter fall in love with her caramel coffee and made a mental note to buy her more sweets.

Soon, the Captain would also need to go shopping. Fury had gotten her the formal white blouse and the black pants she wore now, an outfit much more discreet than the uniform she was wearing when she fell, but that was her entire wardrobe at the moment. That was another mission you should handle, but it could wait until after lunch.

When you finally got home, you placed the food over a kitchen counter and gave Carter a quick tour of the apartment. It wasn’t much, but hopefully it would be enough for both of you until she was more familiar with this century. The tour ended where it started: in your tiny kitchen. You pulled a stool for the Captain and presented her with the options for lunch.

“I suppose you’ve never tried some of those, so I got a few different meals. Burritos, sweet and sour chicken, calzones and Pad Thai. For dessert, there’s lemon tart and triple chocolate cake. I might have gotten a little carried away.”

Peggy took a seat and examined her options. You wondered if that would be, technically her first meal since the 40’s.

“They are all tempting, but I might start with this one.” Her eyes were fixated on a burrito as if it was the Holy Grail. Yeah, that was surely the first time she ate in seventy years. She dove in, so focused on her meal that you didn’t dare to interrupt. Meanwhile, you took the other stool and picked a calzone, eating it while you watched Carter.

You were still trying to wrap your head around the fact that she was really here, and it was surprising that you hadn’t completely freaked out so far, but the prospect of the rest of the day started to worry you. The Captain would certainly have a lot of questions and, if there were inquiries that Fury left for you to answer, they probably pertained more to her personal life than to great historical events.

If the registers about her were right, it wouldn’t be long before the real conversation started. Peggy Carter was too smart to have such a debate in the middle of the street, but she wasn’t known for stalling. As soon as she finished her meal, in the privacy of your (now shared) kitchen, you would have to provide about seven decades of answers.

Before you could try to prepare yourself, she was done with her second burrito. You almost suggested dessert, but the look she gave you left no room for pauses. Carter turned on her stool to face you directly, her posture becoming straighter and her eyes never leaving yours. She was the perfect image of Captain Carter, the hero, the legend who defeated all odds. Still, when she spoke, there was softness in her voice.

“The meal was lovely and so is the apartment. I can’t thank you enough for you kindness, Agent L/N, but I must ask a few things more of you. If you have studied about my life, you must know what happened to Steve Rogers after I was gone.”

You should be ready for that. Of course her first personal concern would be about Rogers. His story with Carter went down in history as a tragic tale of love, bravery and loss. To his last days, Rogers had made it his mission to honor her legacy, but that wasn’t all that he did. How do you tell a person that the love of her life went on to live a decades long, fulfilling relationship with someone else, even though, from her perspective, they were together the day before?

“Please, call me Y/N. And you can ask anything, Captain. I will tell you everything I can.” You took a deep breath, going through the words in your head in search of the best way to let her know. It was best to keep nothing out. Carter deserved that. “Steve Rogers continued to serve as the Hydra Stomper until the war had ended and all known Hydra operations had been eliminated. After that, he stepped out of the suit so that Howard Stark could continue his research with the Tesseract. I believe neither of them ever gave up on bringing you back, but, in many ways, they also moved on to build new lives.”

You made a small pause, in case she wanted to say something, but Carter only gave you a nod, encouraging you to continue. It was impossible to look away from her eyes, or to keep anything hidden when she stared at you with such intensity. Even in silence, sitting still, she emanated a power that kept you talking.

“A few years after the war, Rogers and Stark started an intelligence agency to keep the world safe from threats we could barely understand. They named it S.H.I.E.L.D., because of you. That is the agency I work for, directed by Nick Fury.” There was something poetic in the way that same agency ended up being the reason Peggy Carter was back, but it wasn’t your place to point that out. “Rogers never stopped fighting, even without the suit. He was a legendary agent, working along with James Barnes until they retired. They were also together for the rest of their lives.”

That was the piece of information you feared would break Carter’s heart, but she had a bright smile after hearing that.

“That suits them. All of them.” The joy in her voice sounded so sincere, and you couldn’t help but ask.

“Were you and Rogers… Together? It is said so in the official files, but…” In your studies, you sometimes wondered if their relationship was just a myth, maybe a publicity stunt to humanize the fallen super soldier. It was your job to question the data, but you had never paid that possibility much attention until now.

Instead of being offended by your invasion of her privacy, Carter laughed so lightly and freely that you felt your cheeks getting warm.

“Oh, darling, Steve Rogers had a heart too big to have only one soul mate. He was the love of my life, yes, and I was the love of his, but not the only one. A love so beautiful and dedicated is supposed to be shared. Of course I’m sad I didn’t get to share the rest of his life with him, but I’m relieved to know that he and Bucky had each other. And that’s not to say I’m a being of such virtue that I’m above jealousy. I felt jealous of Steve alright, many times, but I could never be jealous of him with Buck. They fit well together and they were good for each other. They were real, just as Steve and I were. Steve deserved to be loved through a lifetime. I’m grateful that he was.”

Carter’s eyes shined with tears, but she didn’t allow any to fall. Maybe she would let herself grief for the lost possibilities later, but for now she was handling such an emotional journey with more elegance than you thought possible. It didn’t seem to be an act at all. On the contrary, what touched you the most was the honesty in her words. That selflessness of being genuinely happy to hear of how her soul mate lived on without her, in love with someone else, told you more about Peggy Carter than any history book ever had. And that’s how she reacted right after being thrown into the next century, coming directly from a war and landing in a world she didn’t recognize.

“I don’t think history ever made you justice, Captain. The general public thinks of you as a hero, but they’re so far from knowing the person behind the suit... You know, it’s very nice to meet you.” You couldn’t help but sharing a bit of what was on your mind. To that moment, your hero was turning out to be even better than your daydreams, and it was only fair to let her know so.

At that, she gave you a big smile and your heart skipped a beat. You would have a hard time sharing an apartment with this woman.

“You are far too kind to me. To be honest, they never showed much interest on me, suit or not, until I went against official orders and started throwing tanks around and fighting the battles that needed to be fought. I am more concerned about what I am able to achieve, regardless of how they will see me. And there’s no need to call me Captain, Y/N. Heavens, we live and work together now and you’re my guide to modern life. Peggy is fine. And it’s nice to meet you too.” She took the initiative to get a slice of chocolate cake, already making herself at home. You had the feeling that her adaptation to this world wouldn’t be too difficult, all things considered. Peggy Carter would take whatever she was given and make more of it than anyone imagined possible.

“As you wish, Peggy. Speaking of that, there’s a lot I think you’ll like to see about life now. What else are you curious about?” You took your own slice of cake, trying to feel at ease in this conversation. You couldn’t be on high alert whenever Carter was around if she was going to be around all the time, but that was easier said than done. Your responsibilities here were enormous and, to be frank, you were determined to be your best self and impress her, even if just a bit. Maybe telling her about the wonders of nowadays technology would do the trick.

“I am curious about everything. I can’t wait to know all about the development of science, or what I missed in seven decades of sociopolitical turmoil, but there’s one more person I’d love to hear about before we get to that. You mentioned Howard moving on with his life, didn’t you? What exactly was that little menace up to while I was gone?”

Now, that was a rich topic of conversation.

“Well, Stark continued his research with the Tesseract and with many other projects, sometimes along with the US government, and he built a billionaire empire. Weapons, all sorts of technology, wild parties. The man had everything. He has a son, Tony, who inherited the tech, the money and the brains, but with a stronger inclination to heroism. You see, Tony Stark built himself a supersuit, partially inspired by his father’s Hydra Stomper, but with a larger variety of uses. It’s said that Steve Rogers was a sort of mentor to him, but I couldn’t get Stark to talk a lot about it when I interviewed him.”

You couldn’t tell which part made Peggy more excited. She nodded along as you listed Howard Stark’s achievements, as if it was all expected, and her eyes got wider when you told her about his son. When you mentioned Rogers, she almost jumped in her seat. She was already invested, but dropping that name sealed the deal.

“Fury gave me this.” She took two business cards out of her pocket. “It has his telephone number and Barton’s too. Could I use your telephone to call him? I would like to meet this Tony Stark, and I bet Fury would be able to reach him.”

Giving Director Fury a call from your cellphone felt strange, but how could you deny Peggy that? If the Director gave her the number, he wanted her to be able to reach him, right?

Instead of dialing yourself, you showed Carter how to use the phone. She looked like a kid on Christmas whenever she was given access to new technology. You would make sure she got a cellphone of her own soon so you could show her everything the device could do.

She called Fury and you waited as they talked for less than two minutes. Peggy handed you the phone when she was done, with a smile that said she got what she wanted.

“So, what did the Director say?” You asked, anxious to know the outcome of the call.

“We’re meeting Tony Stark tomorrow at 2pm in his tower. Was it him who named it Stark tower or is that Howard’s doing?” She narrowed her eyes a bit, still smiling.

“The tower was built by Tony, so I think we can’t blame Howard for that one.” You joked. “Are you meeting Fury at S.H.I.E.L.D. before you two go to Stark’s?”

“Oh, Fury is not going. He booked the meeting for you and me, if you would like to accompany me.” Peggy sounded hesitant, as if she had just considered that you might not want to join her on that plan.

"You’re asking me if I wish to be there when Captain Carter meets Tony Stark? Please, if I didn’t get the chance to be a part of that exchange, I would beg you for a detailed retelling as soon as you got home.”

Your reply made Peggy laugh once more, and you were getting used to that sound very quickly.

#peggy carter #peggy carter x reader #peggy carter imagine #peggy carter x you #captain carter x reader #captain carter #what if #what if spoilers #marvel #peggy carter m #marvel m #m #the sweetest apparition series

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flyingkiki · 3 years ago

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We played dangerously (1/?)

Because we need more stories that show us just how much of a dirty boi Timbo is. The more smtty #TimRae the better. So excited for this story and delve heavily into their drama and dirty deeds. Strap yourselves in, bbs. it's a steamy one.

The history between them ran deep and long, mostly unspoken, messy, and painfully raw. Years later, here they are - older and carrying just a little bit more baggage than necessary. Tim and Raven reflect on their dangerous history and sift through the extra baggage they acquired.

~~~~

“You’re quitting?”

Raven frowned and crossed her arms defensively. She steeled herself as Red Robin stared at her, a look of total disbelief on his face as he processed what she just told him. She ignored how a heavy feeling settled low in her stomach.

“I’m taking a sabbatical,” she said levelly.

“For an undefined period of time,” continued Tim, his voice strained as he drew his eyebrows together trying to process what he just heard five minutes ago. “That sounds like quitting to me,”

She pressed her lips together as she tried to ignore the harsh press of Tim’s emotions against her. She watched him stare at her from across the briefing room, the sound of their computer working on data broke the heavy silence between them. “It’s my life, of course it’s indefinite,”

Tim blinked and followed her stance, crossing his arms as he studied her intently. “I’m not trying to take control of your life, Raven,” he bristled.

Raven tilted her head in challenge. For whatever reason she felt annoyance crawl under her skin. “It sounds like you are,”

“I’m not,” Tim pressed, sighing loudly. With a huff he pulled off his mask and threw it on the briefing table. Raven watched it slide on the flat surface before looking back up at Tim’s confused blue eyes. “Look, I don’t want to fight. You can do whatever you want, Raven. You’re right, it’s your life. I’m sorry if I sounded controlling,”

Raven hummed in acknowledgement. She knew he meant well. She knew Tim well enough that he wanted to understand the situation at hand. She shifted under his gaze and ignored how her stomach gnawed painfully. “When are you leaving?” Tim asked, his tone softer as he slid into the seat across from her. Raven watched him grab his mask and fiddle with it absently. The atmosphere shifted and her stomach churned painfully.

“In two weeks,” Raven replied and sat down in front of him. She watched Tim press his lips together and frown at the news. “I got into a special program. School starts early in August,”

Tim swallowed and threw her a torn look. “I’m glad you’re going off to university,” he began. He paused to inhale as he tried to think. “And this is not something you could do, like part-time online or something?”

Raven frowned at the way he tried to find ways to make her stay. “No,” she said. “Our work is a tight schedule as it is,”

Tim nodded in agreement. He gave a halfhearted smile. “At least I tried,”

Her stomach lurched without her consent and she ignored the jumble of emotions in the room. Her decision was final. This conversation made the move incredibly real. Pain settled low in her stomach. She needed to pack and get things going. “I want a life outside of the Titans, Tim,” she said. “Most of you have lives outside of the Tower. Gar does his stupid acting. Jaime has his family and volunteer work. You run WE, Tim. You all get to do something outside of our uniform. I just want something as close to normal as I can get, whatever that is for Rachel Roth, even if it’s just for a while.”

Tim sighed. The tension was palpable as Tim frowned. His brows furrowed and he nodded. “Yeah, I respect that, Rae,” he said, voice low. Running his hand through his hair, Tim leaned back into his chair with a huff. “Yeah, okay. Yeah,” he breathed and looked deep in thought. She felt the faint press of his carefully controlled emotions. “We’ll make some preparations for your transition and make sure that everything is in order. I’ll let the Justice League know,”

There was a beat of silence between them. Raven was surprised how methodological the conversation was. Then again, was she really expecting an argument for her to stay? There was an inexplicable pin-like pain in her chest she could not shake off. Wasn’t this what she wanted? Sighing softly, she assumed their conversation was done and stood up. Tim probably had to file a report to the JL. She had to pack up and get going with her life – they all did. Raven swallowed a thought.

“Well, thanks,” she said and turned to leave the room. She heard Tim stand up.

“Hey,” Tim called, voice slightly strained. Raven paused and turned back around, eyeing him curiously. Tim swallowed and his brows pressed together and there was a cautious look on his face. “This is not about –”

“No,” Raven cut him off sharply. “It’s not.”

Tim sighed and his shoulders lowered slightly. He caught her blue eyes and Raven watched an expression she cannot quite place cross his face. He offered her a tentative smile and nodded, his brows still furrowed and still looking torn. “Okay,” he breathed. “Yeah, good.” He paused before continuing. “We’ll tell the team after dinner tonight.”

Raven nodded. Her stomach felt heavy, she had enough of this conversation. It was done. “I’m going to start packing up stuff,” she said and made her way towards the door.

“Everyone’s going to miss you, Raven,” Tim said as she opened the door.

She paused at the door, hand resting at the metal doorframe. Her finger tapped the frame thoughtfully as a few stray thoughts ran through her mind, before turning to look over her shoulder, catching Tim’s piercing blue eyes. She sent him a tight smile and buried whatever errant emotions tickled her heart. “Yeah, I’ll miss everyone too. I’ll be back soon, I promise.”

She did not come back anytime soon.

Tim forgot when he was last in the Gotham Public Library – perhaps back when he was still in high school, 11 years ago? He wasn’t all too sure. His high school memories were blurry, given how his vigilante life was far more exciting than high school calculus.

But he was sure that the Gotham Public Library did not look this modern or dazzling since he last stepped into it when he was 15. The large library atrium was cleared out from its usual chairs and tables and instead filled with cocktail tables, round tables with sparkling black and gold table settings, buffet tables lined the walls, upbeat jazz music and heavy conversations filled the usual quiet halls, and every single one of the Gotham’s elite was dressed to the nines.

It was a charity dinner with plates going for the thousands. There was a silent auction too, some collectors’ books were up for grabs. The library was launching a new exhibit with some new codex they found out of Gotham. Wayne Foundation was funding most of the research and restoration work that went with it, and tonight’s event was supposed to help cover costs for the library’s expansion projects.

He idly listened to some politicians talk to Bruce and his siblings, Damian and Cass. Jason had moseyed off somewhere (likely browsing through the bookshelves or bidding on some of the collectibles in the silent auction) – lucky for the asshole. Tim wasn’t really paying attention. There was a lot going on, Tim barely kept up if he was being honest. A business merger was keeping his mind preoccupied, he was flying out to Japan tomorrow morning, and tonight’s dinner was the last place he honestly wanted to be at – but press as CEO of WE was important, Bruce liked to constantly remind him.

“So I was saying to him, ‘Johnny, son, if you don’t pull your pants up, that’s gonna be a lawsuit waiting to happen,’,” said the old man, assistant city treasurer – or whatever – to their small group. The old man heartily laughed, wheezing into his champagne glass. Bruce looked like he just swallowed bad caviar and cleared his throat while Damian and Cass made no effort to hide their bewildered faces. Tim sighed.

“Well, it does sound like a lawsuit waiting to happen, Mr. Peters,” Tim absently fiddled with his scotch glass and wondered if he should get anything stronger to get him through the night.

The man made a wounded sound and said something before slinking off. Bruce and Tim shared an exasperated look. Damian clicked his tongue, absently tapping his glass of orange juice. “This party is terrible, father,” he sniffed and icily scanned the crowd. “May we leave early?”

Bruce eyed his teenage son blandly. “We came here together, we leave together,” he said.

“Tt,” Damian frowned and took a sip from his orange juice.

Tim glanced at Damian, mildly feeling sorry for the 16-year-old gremlin. He remembered how he felt over these galas when he was younger. Internally grimacing at the galas when he first became CEO back when he was 17, Tim hid his displeasure behind his scotch glass while taking a sip.

They milled around more, talking to investors and guests from Gotham’s elite and academe. Tim smiled politely and held conversations where necessary, idly wondering when the night would be over. The crowd soon gathered in the middle of the atrium at the soft chime of a bell, signaling the start of another round of speeches from the library. Tim and his siblings slowly followed Bruce and the rest of the crowd towards the atrium. Tim caught Damian and Cass sharing bored glances.

“We’d like to thank everyone for being with us tonight,” said the Gotham Public Library Head Librarian, a well-dressed elderly man. The man went on with library expansion updates and the latest figures on tonight funds that were raised. Tim barely listed as he checked his phone for his flight details Tam sent him earlier. Ignoring the polite applause that filled the room, Tim continued to discreetly scroll through his itinerary.

“Tonight we’re also delighted to announce the opening of our exhibit, the Life Codex: Ancient Celebrations of Life. The library is honored to house this latest discovery and carry out the research, restoration, and preservation work of these recent discoveries,” the librarian droned on about ancient documents and the restoration work involved. Tim felt Cass nudge him and he blinked, looking up from his briefer. He stared at her quizzically.

“Attention,” she whispered. Tim offered her a sheepish look and pocketed his phone. They both turned their attention back to the stage. He caught sight of Jason’s large built shuffle in next to them, looking utterly bored. Since Jason was ‘legally alive’ again, they had roped him into attending a few events once in a while – much to the older man’s displeasure.

Mr. Tompkins, the Head Librarian, went on to discuss the project details that had gone underway since last month. Documents from Africa had been flown in and the research team had been working on restoring paper and decoding the codex. Tim barely listened as the elderly man droned on and silently wondered if he could still catch some sleep before his flight in the morning. His phone vibrated and he pointedly ignored Cass' look as he pulled out his phone to check an update from Tam.

"Doctor Collins, Dean of Gotham University's history and anthropology department is leading this project and she has built an excellent team for this project. Doctor Collins?" The head librarian welcomed an elderly woman with salt and pepper hair up on stage. Tim drowned out the speech as Dr. Collins started talking about the project, briefly looking at his phone and going through the project document for tomorrow's meeting with the Japanese tech firm. Tim wondered if he could at least get some good sushi while in Tokyo. Perhaps he could ask Tam to squeeze that into his schedule, they could --

"Hey, isn't that…" Jason paused and squinted at the stage. "Huh."

"Tim, look,"

Tim closed his phone and glanced at Cass curiously before turning his attention to the stage. Tim stopped short at what he saw.

Dressed in a flowing halter gown with a modest v-neck and a teasingly stylish slit up her right leg, a strikingly familiar woman walked up on the small platform offering the crowd a tentative smile and a modest wave. Tim watched the small woman carefully shuffle across the platform as a few more members of the research team were introduced. He blinked and stared at the violet-black haired woman and felt his throat tighten.

As if sensing his stare, dark blue eyes caught his light blue ones from across the hall. They zeroed in on him, easily catching him in a sea of hundreds.

There was an inexplicable tightness that seized his chest briefly, as Tim stared back at the woman, watching transfixed as emotions flickered across her face before quickly slipping back into a small pleasant smile and keeping her gaze briefly at him before turning to her colleagues and chuckling at something they were whispering to each other on stage. Tim watched and stared at her, schooling the surprise on his face, and just drinking in every familiar slopes and planes of her face because it had been what? Five? Six? Years since he last saw her.

"That's -"

"Rachel," Tim cut off Cass, blinking away his brief surprise and instead stared intently at his (former?) teammate.

"Rachel Roth leads our research team. Is there anything you'd like to say, dear?" Dr. Collins asked, turning to the group on stage. Rachel looked surprised before shaking her head and waving her hand in decline. "Ms. Roth does excellent work in ancient runes and languages, and restoration work. It's a pleasure to have her on the team. She's a guest lecturer at Gotham U, so if you're lucky, you best sign up for her special lecture series on ancient runes."

Tim watched as Rachel blushed at the praise, ducking her head briefly before chuckling at something a blonde haired woman next to her said. The group on stage shared a laugh and Tim watched curiously at the familiar sight of Raven smiling. There were few more pleasantries on stage before the group had their photo taken

“If we could invite Mr. Bruce Wayne, Mr. Lucius Fox, and Mr. Tim Wayne, to come up on stage for a quick photo with the rest of the team? After which we can proceed with our evening, and hopefully get your support in our library’s expansion work,” the head librarian called.

Tim blinked as Cass nudged him and pulled him out of his thoughts. Clearing his throat, he handed Cass his drink and quickly walked up the stage, following Bruce and Lucius up the small steps. Pulling on his practiced Tim Wayne-CEO-of-WE-smile, he dutifully shook hands with Dr. Collins and the head librarian. He briefly caught Raven’s stare as he moved across the stage to shake hands with people on the stage. Their gaze briefly met and her lips quirked into a small smile before quickly turning away and shuffling to the end of the line and out of reach for any other contact without attracting too much attention on them. Photos were taken swiftly and before Tim knew it everyone was ushered off the stage and he was wrapped up in a rather lengthy conversation on library work and the ongoing renovation projects.

Tim discreetly tried to look over his shoulder, barely catching a glimpse of the familiar slope of Raven’s shoulder disappearing into the crowd.

“Bruce Wayne,” Dr. Collins walked up to them just as the head librarian excused himself. The elderly woman beamed and quickly shook Bruce’s hand.

“Julia, it’s nice to see you again,” Bruce smiled warmly. “You know my son, Tim,”

Tim smiled and shook her hand. “Dr. Collins, it’s a pleasure to meet you,” he said, easily pulling himself out of his thoughts of trying to find Raven in the crowd.

“Mr. Wayne,” The elderly woman beamed and regarded both men in front of her.

Tim chuckled. “Just Tim, please,”

“I worked with you parents, Jack and Janet, many years ago on a few of their archaeological digs, back in their early years. I met you when you were a little boy once or twice. I must say I am impressed at what a successful grown man you've become, Tim,” praised Dr. Collins. The elderly woman hummed and smiled. “CEO of Wayne Enterprises,”

Tim chuckled, pulling on his best boardroom smile. “Thank you,”

“Also, this makes me realize that time certainly flies when the young boy you last saw in diapers has become the CEO of the world’s most successful conglomerate,” Dr. Collins chuckled, beaming up at Bruce with a mischievous smile. “That does make me feel old,”

Bruce chuckled as Tim politely made a face and their small group fell into an easy conversation. “The last eight years with Tim as CEO have been the best years for the company,”

Tim grinned playfully over his scotch. “Careful, is that praise I hear?”

The small group fell into an easy conversation discussing work and the research project. Tim quickly gathered that Dr. Collins was an old family friend of the Waynes, particularly of Bruce’s parents. He kept rapt attention to the conversation, nodding and chiming in where necessary, while occasionally glancing around the room for even a hint of purple or black.

Feeling distracted by tonight’s discovery of Raven, Tim was ready to excuse himself from the conversation and pretend to make a phone call. That seemed to be the best way to try to look around and catch Raven.

“There you are,” Dr. Collins glanced over Bruce’s shoulder and beamed. She beckoned for whoever was behind Bruce to come closer.

“I was looking for you,”

Despite the years that passed, Tim recognized the familiar voice in a heartbeat. He watched as Raven appeared from behind Bruce. He schooled his face, trying to fight away any signs of recognition and familiarity towards the black haired woman. Tim watched in a mix of curiosity and internal surprise as Raven smiled softly at their group and confidently walked up to them. From the slopes of her shoulder, the elegant movements of her hands, to her black-violet hair, deep stormy blue eyes, and that achingly familiar errant dusting of a few freckles just around the hollows of her neck, Raven looked exactly like how he remembered her. Tim blinked and absently tapped his scotch glass as he stared openly at her, a sight he had not seen in years.

“Rachel, please meet Bruce Wayne and his son, Tim. As you know Wayne Enterprises provides extensive funding for our work,” Dr. Collins said, waiving at both men in front of them.

“Mr. Wayne,” Raven began, moving her champagne glass into her left hand and went to shake Bruce’s hand. A smile appeared on her face as she and Bruce exchanged pleasantries. There was no air of familiarity between them, despite the schooled smiles that stretched across both of their lips. Tim knew that practiced look from all the undercover missions he had seen, been with, her. “It’s nice to meet you. Thank you for all your support,”

Raven turned to Tim and he watched as her smile immediately curled up just a tiny bit more in that familiar teasing way he had not seen in the last six years. There was that achingly familiar twinkle in her eyes he often saw back in the day, reserved for rare occasions, and Tim found himself smiling back at Raven and eagerly drinking in her familiar presence. “Mr. Wayne,” she said to him, a small quiver in her voice that no one but him seemed to pick up. She reached out and shook his hand.

Tim gave her hand a brief squeeze and he was pleased to see how the corner of her lips curled into a familiar amused smile he remembered. “Just Tim,”

Raven hummed and nodded, pulling her hand back. “Thank you again for supporting the research and restoration project,”

“What were you busy with before joining this project?” Bruce asked curiously. There were little updates from Raven throughout the years as she left the team for university and eventually work. While in the early years of her sabbatical Tim kept some updates on her, these eventually became less up to date as Raven eventually seemed to do her own thing.

“I was in Iceland,” Raven supplied and explained that she worked on an ancient runes translation project with the local university for six months.

Tim felt a distant memory tickle the back of his mind and he ignored the tight feeling that accompanied those distinct memories. He ignored the whisps of memories that teased his mind. Dark blue eyes briefly caught his stare and he watched that familiar curl in the corner of Raven’s lips appear. Tim smiled in return. “Iceland is a beautiful country,” he commented.

Raven stared at him, dark blue eyes intense as he remembered them. “It is,”

“We’re glad that Rachel has joined our project. She’s a fine addition to our team,” commented Dr. Collins. The elderly woman smiled teasingly. “And we’re definitely hoping she’ll considering staying in Gotham after the project ends,”

Raven rolled her eyes in amusement. “We’re just two weeks into the project. We have a long way to go,”

Tim looked at her curiously. How could he have missed her entering Gotham?. “You’ve been here for two weeks?”

Raven looked at him as if catching the slight jump in his emotions at this little discovery. “Three actually, if you count my moving in week,” she shrugged in amusement.

Three weeks. Tim stored that information for later, for a later conversation, and ignored how it settled uncomfortably in his stomach. He instead smiled at her and titled his head curiously. “I hope the transfer into Gotham wasn’t too difficult,”

Raven made a face. “It’s been interesting,” she said and Tim easily caught her familiar teasing lilt in her voice.

“Let us know if you need any assistance getting you settled, I’m sure we can send over someone to help you with your apartment,” Bruce offered, smiling charmingly at Raven.

Raven waved him off. “It’s just a few more boxes, nothing really major,”

Tim watched as a young woman tentatively approached them and offered the group an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” she said to the group and quickly turned to Raven. With a quick tilt of her head towards the right, she made a face. “The University Press wants to talk to you,”

Raven made a face. “Oh, Why?”

“Just stuff about the project and the lecture,” supplied the young woman. She offered Raven a wry smile and made a face. “Also one of them asked if you were single,”

Raven rolled her eyes before smiling tightly at Bruce and Tim. “I’m sorry, if you’d excuse me. It was really nice to meet you. Thank you again for all your support. I hope you’ll visit the library again and we could show you around our work,” she said. Quickly turning to Dr. Collins, she nodded politely. “I’ll see you later, Julia,”

Smiling at Bruce and Tim, she tilted her head and there was an amused glint in her eyes as she stared at them. “Gentlemen,” she then turned on her heels, casually drank the rest of her champagne with just a little bit more purpose and seemingly bracing herself for what was about to happen next. Standing a little taller and squaring her shoulders, Raven followed the young assistant towards the press. “So, what did you tell them?” she asked, amusement lacing her voice.

As the conversation between Dr. Collins and Bruce resumed, Tim took a long sip of his scotch and stared at Raven’s retreating form. A million thoughts ran through his mind and he silently wondered just how fast he could get through his business trip in Tokyo. Sushi would have to wait for another time.

#timrae #tim drake #teen titans fanfiction #raven roth #raven #timrae 2021 year of smut and steam #be ready for baggage #lots of drama #and lots of steam because WE KNOW THESE BBS

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canyouhearthelight · 3 years ago

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The Miys, Ch. 154

Happy Tuesday, everyone!

I was able to get the Master Post cleaned up this morning. I know there is a reblog going around with some of the links missing... I put that one up originally as a place holder so I could update my page links in chapters 101 through this one. I did NOT anticipate it would get immediately reblogged, which made me squeak in pleasant surprise. I’ll reblog the full post so everyone has the right one.

Also, thanks to @baelpenrose, @the-raven-fae, and @charlylimph-blog for keeping me going and all your help beta-reading and checking my links. You three are the real heroes here!

“The quiet rooms are done,” Hannah yawned the next morning. “It’s a good thing we decided to make them available immediately, because the first one had people scheduling time before we finished the second one.”

“How many did we end up with?” I asked, pushing down my own urge to yawn. I had always prided myself on being able to resist the urge to yawn when others did, and I wasn’t letting that stop now.

The model of the Ark came up on the table emitter, and Hannah zoomed in on the highlighted areas. “Right now, we have twelve, just like you set up for the second Food Festival. But I’ll be honest, they rooms are already booked for the foreseeable future, and I don’t think that’s tenable.”

“Agreed. I’ll talk to the rest of the Council, but at this point, we need to see about setting all available spaces for quiet rooms.” I nodded and added that note to my agenda. “Moving on, food vendors being allowed in BioLab2. Any updates?”

Parvati flicked the data to everyone. “Grey isn’t thrilled with the possibility that the food will contaminate the aquatics, but is willing to allow vendors in ‘The Fairy Circle’?” She gave me a questioning look. “They said you would know what that meant.”

I just smiled and shook my head. “It’s where I go camping. Conor managed to pull off a prank that fooled even Charly and made a Faerie circle. It’s a good choice, though: ten, eleven feet across, accessible, and far enough from the water that there wouldn’t be any risk.”

She rolled her eyes and smiled. “Credit to Conor on that one. But, Grey was very enthusiastic about the idea of setting up some picnic tables throughout the woods and letting people bring picnics.”

“I already have some vendors on board, there,” I breathed in relief. “Especially the ones who specialize in the type of foods that lend themselves well to being portable.”

Hannah’s face lit up. “Do we get to taste test some of these? I’m really getting some bento box and pasty vibes from what you just said, and I’m not sure which I’m more excited about.”

“I think I can get that to happen,” I laughed. “I wouldn’t mind trying some of the options myself, but I can at least already confirm that all bases are covered for dietary requirements. Next up, where are we on the holiday date?”

“Still working with the other departments to finalize a date where all projects can be completed, paused, or at least at a point where they don’t require direct observation. Everyone is on board, though.”

“That’s the biggest hurdle,” I confirmed. “Means we can proceed with at least putting the rest of the events together in preparation for the final date. I trust you two in handling the party aspect of it, and Charly is already working Bash on another Kink Night event at the Undine - minimal planning needed there. So, let’s figure out who is coordinating the paint-tag fight, and we can loop back to the plans for the party.”

“While I am entirely sure Charly can handle planning for both the paint tag and the other - seeing as both were her ideas - it doesn’t feel fair to leave them both entirely on her shoulders,” Hannah agreed. “It says here that you already had Conor confirm we missed Holi?

“By about six months,” I confessed. “So we’re pretty much both too late and too early.”

“I do believe the arrows would be frowned upon, in any event,” Parvati joked. “I still have her paint formulas - flavors are not listed, but there is a distinct lack of both black and yellow.”

“Those were… scotch bonnet for the black, I know that one. I think the yellow was gochujang, which would still hurt if you got it in your eyes,” I recalled.

She flicked her hands, bracelets chiming. “I will ask for a new formula for yellow, but I think we can live without black paint. The yellow was lovely, though.”

“Ask nicely, and she’ll probably give you the glitter formula colors, which I think are different flavors from the regular palette,” I suggested. “And the glitter is ultra-violet reactive, so that’ll be fun.”

Emphatic stabbing at her datapad ensued - impressive, because it wasn’t even physically there, just emitted from the band on her wrist. “Once I have those, I believe Hannah and I can coordinate that along with the party. There is no food component, it is only for one day, so the scope is far smaller than the Festival was.”

“And besides,” Hannah added with a shrug, “whip up some paints and some spongy balls to soak it up, set boundaries, invite anyone who wants to attend. Planning done.” She dusted her hands off for emphasis, but she had a point.

“I’ve got the care packages well underway, so we’re solid there. The party. What’s the plan there?”

Parvati dismissed the schematic from the table emitter and sent a different image to it. This one was practically the opposite of what I had expected: where I had anticipated Food Festival 2: Pyrotechnic Boogaloo, I was instead looking at a park that I was reasonably certain only existed in dreams.

Soft green grass that my toes wiggled to touch spanned a rolling, looping thoroughfare. Trees arched overhead like an arbor, and were either woven with lights are absolutely covered in fireflies. Between breaks in the canopy, a night sky filled with more stars than I had seen in my living memory. Here and there small braziers burned brightly with fire, resting on sturdy rugs and dotted around with cushions.

“Vati,” I whispered hoarsely. “We can’t use BioLab2 for this, can we? Will Grey allow it?”

“We can, and they are.” Her smile was the feral one that usually preceded a coup de grace of event planning. “This, however, is not BioLab2. This is the corridors of levels twelve through fourteen, leading into the lab.”

My first urge was to guess what she was planning, but my mind came up blank. I circled around my desk to stand closer to the table. “Okay, talk to me. Make it make sense.”

She nodded. “The grass is real, laid down like sod. The terraforming teams have agreed to let us use it, provided we allow them to collect data on how it holds up to so much foot traffic and include a post-event question regarding the tactile feel on bare feet. So, bare feet they shall have.” She winked when I realized she and Hannah were going to make it part of the theme. “The trees are an illusion, simple light emitters against the corridor walls, combined with the existing texture of the surface.”

When she moved the image to mimic walking further down the path, Hannah picked up. “The larger spaces are actually where the corridors are longer between quiet rooms. Rather than trying to pull off the tree illusion, we’re going to create a night sky with shooting stars, comets, the works. Like a dream.”

“I like it. It’s not what I was expecting, but I’m even more impressed for that.”

“We couldn’t compete with Charly,” Parvati confessed. “She is already going to have our base desires covered. Anything we tried to do would look like a pale imitation. So, we went the other direction: What else do we do to feel alive?”

“We dream,” I laughed. “It’s all a fairy tale dream, isn’t it?”

“That’s the goal,” Hannah confirmed. “A beautiful dream. One day and one night where you can live out your humanity however you want, without having to compromise. If someone wants to throw paint with childish abandon, then stroll and dance through a dream, and finish the night at the Undine trying something they never dared to do before, they can do that.”

“When you put it like that, it sounds decadent.”

“I was going for hedonistic, over all, but you’re on the right track,” Parvati laughed. “Hannah and I agreed that everyone on the Ark needed one perfect day. And since perfect is different for everyone…” She shrugged. “We just decided to give them all the options. The quiet rooms will be open if their perfect includes a botanical garden, or a cloud… the mess halls will be open if it means a feast, or even just decadent hors d'oeuvres they could never make an excuse to try. It’s literally all on the table.”

“Consider it signed off on.” I still couldn’t take my eyes off that grass, toes wiggling happily. “Just let me know the date when we have one, I need a pedicure to enjoy this completely.”

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#the miys #found family #humans are weird #science fiction #aliens #apocalypse #humans are space orcs #humans are space fae #earth is space australia #post apocalypse #post post apocalypse #original science fiction #original sci fi #original writing

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adragoninshiningarmour · 2 years ago

Note

Speaking of the Warrior Ten, what are your guys' preferred forms. Be it your humanoid forms or 'feral' per say.

AncientGreymon: Right! Well, I guess it's no surprise that a lot of our Ancient forms are pretty huge. While great in battle, it can make things difficult when going about our every day business, so we tend to stay in our smaller, more practical forms most of the time. For me, personally, I prefer to stay in my KaiserGreymon form. Not only is it bold and dashing, but it's what I'm used to and it's way easier to move around in! I've always been something of a swordsman as well, so I like to stay sharp with the Ryugonken. Not to mention I look particularly heroic and sexy, if I do say so myself. vwo

AncientGarurumon: *rolls his eyes* While you do cause somewhat less destruction in that form, you are somehow more troublesome, dragon. -.-;

AncientGreymon: What's that supposed to mean, mutt?! ¬.¬

AncientGarurumon: *ignores and folds his arms* As for myself, I typically use my AncientGarurumon form. It is small enough in size to be on par with a standard humanoid Digimon. However, when I require the ability of flight, I revert into my MagnaGarurumon form.

AncientWisemon: Oh, me? :3 I prefer to use my spectacular Wisemon form, of course! Why, when when my Ancient form's amplitude is not a mitigating issue, you ask? The reason is my arresting, advantageous, academic and absolutely utilitarian Book! I have access to its vast library of information, as well as its myriad other functions!

AncientGreymon: That bloody book tried to eat me on numerous occasions! >A>

AncientWisemon: Poppycock. vAv It has more discriminating tastes than to consume the likes of you.

AncientVolcamon: Well, I suppose I prefer to use my PileVolcamon form in most cases. It is a little more wieldy, as well as less scary to the average Digimon. ^.^;

AncientMegatheriummon: You are pretty sexy in your PileVolcamon form, Volca. You might even get more attention than I do! xD

AncientBeatmon: Heh, I'm sorta with Volca, apart from the sexy part, obviously. xD AncientBeatmon's a pretty useful form in combat, but when I'm just talking to random Digimon in a city, it gets all awkward because they never know which face to look at and then they look at what they think is my crotch and it gets even more awkward. xD So, yeah, I prefer to use my AtlurKabuterimon form when I'm travelling, since those electroreceptors are pretty useful. I also usually use my Blitzmon form in social situations because... you know, AtlurKabu- also big and scary. xD

AncientTroiamon: Um, w-well... as you probably know, my AncientTroiamon form is very b-big and a little awkward, although very useful in battle. ./////. I prefer to use my Shurimon form most of the time, as it is far more mobile and versatile. With it, I am able to make the most of my ninjutsu abilities.

AncientMermaidmon: And you hate how being so big makes you the center of attention, right, Shuri? -wo

AncientTroiamon: >//////<;

AncientMermaidmon: xD As for me, I'm pretty cool with being in my AncientMermaidmon form most of the time. I think I look best in this form. vwv It's also pretty handy that, in true mermaid fashion, I can shift my data to have legs on-land and use my fish tail while in the water. I get the best of both worlds. ^.^

AncientMegatheriummon: Hah, I'm pretty grateful for that too. I'd hate having to carry you around all the time, fishy. xD Anyways, obviously it's pretty hard for me to just walk around town without causing enough tremors to knock a load of buildings over, so I generally just use my Blizzarmon form. It's waaaay more useful, and I can't exactly cook my delicious meals with no hands. xD All of you'd starve, otherwise.

AncientMermaidmon: You're forgetting to mention that Blizzarmon's better for your pick-up game. =P

AncientMegatheriummon: *wiggles his eyebrows* vwv What can I say? Everybody loves a big, hunky bear.

AncientIrismon: -.-;; ...Well, as with AncientGarurumon and AncientMermaidmon, it's really no problem for me to remain in my Ancient form rather than my Valkyrimon form. Fortunately, my bird remains with me between my two Ultimate levels.

AncientSphinxmon: v.o For me, I am fine with either form, although I tend to prefer my Anubismon for the advantages that having hands affords me. AncientSphinxmon is better suited for high mobility and making the most of my darkness abilities. However, I also tend to use Anubismon due to my responsibilities to the Dark Area. It is the form that I am known for as the current judge of the dead.

AncientGreymon: Don't worry. He seems scary, but he's actually kinda cute. xD

AncientSphinxmon: ?

#Digimon #Warrior Ten #Ask the Warrior Ten

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kenganparadise · 4 years ago

Note

Hey how are you love!!!

I was wondering if I could get a head canon of agito confessing his feeling, planning a first date, and losing his virginity to his S/O please!!!!!!

Im doing pretty wonderful after seeing this in my ask box!! I love you for requesting this- Thank you so much!! I’ve always wanted to write HCs about Agito falling in love❤️ it’s so obvious that he’s my favorite. I hope you enjoy this as much as I loved writing it💙❤️💜

Agito-

• Agito doesn’t know what he’s feeling. He never conciders finding a partner or finding love before. He’s spent his whole life serving Metsudo.

• That is till he meets his S/O. He doesn’t know what it is about them, he just knows that they’re special to him. He knows that the feeling he has for them is much different than anything he’s felt toward anyone ever before.

• They make him feel so warm and fuzzy inside. Every time he sees them his gut tightens and churns. He goes out of his way to pass by them. Even if it means inconveniencing himself he’ll go out of his way just to see them.

• Sometimes he is unable to stop thinking about his crush. He does everything and anything to get them out of his head. They’ve plagued him. He even sees them in his dreams

• He sees things that couples do, maybe in books and movies. He also does a lot of people watching (more like analyzing and collecting data while he’s the fang) but when he’s living his nomad biker babe days he watches how people act and treat each other.

• He sees couples kiss and hold hands, he takes note of people who do PDA, he imagines him and his crush doing things like that.

• His feelings confuse him. He tries to bottle them up. He’ll probably have this nasty crush for a very long time before he even speaks to his crush. He’ll just silently watch them from afar.

• However bottling up emotions and feelings is never ever a good idea. Eventually they’ll bubble over. This could be due to jealousy or maybe his feelings grow and grow even more till it gets downright uncomfortable.

• Finally he does something about it- he confides in his friends/family. He probably approaches Metsudo and Sayaka. maybe Takayama and Omori if he’s feeling desperate. He probably even goes to Okubo. He knows Metsudo and Okubo have experience in love and relationships (Metsudo more than Okubo)

• Mestsudo is delighted that Agito has fallen in love. He advises that Agito go out and buy his crush a bunch of gifts then give a very grand confession to his love. Agito adores Metsudo but he’s not going to put on a show.

• Sayaka does the same. She tells Agito to write anonymous love letters to his crush. She’ll deliver them of course. He considers it but doesn’t want to do that either.

• Okubo give Agito a bunch of pick-up lines. He thinks that a little demeaning so he’s definitely not doing that. (Could you imaging Agito telling a pick up line to his S/O. It would be so Awkward)

• Omori and Takayama tell him the exact same thing “just go tell them how you feel.” Omori says. “Just tell them how you feel, dumbass” Takayama says. Agito does exactly that.

• Agito approaches his crush at their usual spot. “I’d like to speak with you privately.” He says with a poker face. He’s all business. He takes them somewhere private where they won’t be bothered.

• When he’s alone with his crush he feels a pang of nervousness in his heart. Seeing them look up at him in confusion/curiosity makes his gut churn.

• It’s hard to read him. So his crush has no clue what he’s speaking to him about. His tone and body language doesn’t tell them a thing. They have no idea the things that they have put him through. They don’t know the turmoil going on inside him.

• “I think I’m in love with you.” He speaks, still all business. His crush is taken by absolute surprise. They’re frozen. “A-ah I’m sorry did I hear you right? Can you repeat that?” They’ll say. “I think-no. I am in love with you.” He says, reassuring his crush.

• “well. How about we go out on a date?” They say timidly after processing this shocking information.

• Dates- Agito knows about these. “Yes. What would you like to do?” He asks still all business. “Dinner! Just the two of us!” They’ll say. The hearing his crush say ‘just the two of us’ makes his heart leap.

• The date is set. They’ll meet the following night. Agito will pick them up and they’ll go to a traditional restaurant.

• He wears his finest suit. He picks out an expensive cologne. With Metsudo’s help get gets a dozen of the most vibrant roses- only the best for his date.

• He meets them at their home. “You look pretty.” Is all he’s able to say. He does think they look beautiful. They did their hair and obviously put lots of thought into their outfit.

• During the date his crush does most of the talking. He is having a wonderful time just listening to their voice. He replies every now and again. Sometimes he’s unable to hide the smile on his face.

• After good food, drinks, and desert he walks his S/O home. He asks his crush politely if they’d like to see him again. Hearing them say yes makes his heart skip a beat.

• If his crush wants a kiss they’ll have to make the first move. “Bend down a little please.” He of course obeys without a second thought. They better not expect him to kiss back. But his lips will twitch when he’s feels their warm ones press to his. When his crush pulls away they’ll be about to see pink dusted across his cheeks.

• He’ll walk home. He will absolutely ponder for hours about that kiss and he will definitely be seeing them in his dreams again at night.

🔞WARNING NSFW AHEAD🔞

• After dating for a while Agito feels himself ready to lose that pesky virginity. He waits for his S/O to make the first move.

• Agito has spent many nights touching himself to the thought of his S/O. Even before when it was just a crush he’d be in his room, dick in hand, thinking about them.

• He’s imagined what their body looks like beneath their clothing and that they feel like from the inside.

• The first time- He’s practically champing at the bit watching them undress slowly. His dick is practically twitching in his pants. His breathing gets ragged watching them strip down to their underwear.

• When they stare at him he realizes it’s his turn to remove his clothing. He hurriedly rips of his clothes down to his boxers. To say he is impatient is quite the understatement, he’s spent many nights thinking about this exact moment.

• Their fingers are like fire on his skin when his S/O touches him. The two are sitting on the bed as his S/O begins kissing his neck and chest. They feel up his pecs and abs. Their hands trail down to his hips and stop at his boxers.

• He jumps and blushes a deep crimson color when they they squeeze his ass.

• He realizes he should probably be doing something too. He grabs their chest and massages it roughly making them moan.

• Hearing them moan spurs him on more. He pinches their nipples lightly in his fingers. It doesn’t matter if his S/O is AFAB or AMAB he’s sucking on those titties. After playing with their chest a little he takes their nipple in his mouth. He sucks roughly. He moves his hands down to their hips.

• He touches them through their underwear. He rubs them roughly. He flinches when feeling them palm him through his boxers. Feeling their hands on him makes him very impatient. “How do you- what position should we do?” He asks. “Well do you want to be on top? Or do you want me to be on top?” They purr in his ear. Ugh that’s the hardest decision he could make right now.

• He wants them to be on top first. He lays on his back with soft pillows behind him. They pull down his boxers, his massive cock springs out. He watches as they remove their panties finally.

• His S/O coats his dick with a generous amount of lube. He grunts as they stroke him a couple times while coating him. Then his S/O mounts him.

• He listens to his S/O hiss as they sink down onto his dick. It’s a delicious stretch. He exhales as their hips meet his. His Adam’s apple bobs. It’s such a stark contrast. He’s so used to his rough cold calloused hand, and now he’s deep inside his soft, warm, tight S/O.

• He uncontrollably bucks his hips up into his S/O. They moan as he does. They grab his hands and place them on their hips. He’s got a vice grip on them. Then they start to move.

• He watches like a hawk as they bounce on his dick. He literally can’t look away. They set a steady space. He’s got insane stamina but It’s his first time. He cums rather fast.

• He can’t really help it, his S/O is so soft and warm. And they look gorgeous moaning and being pleasured above him. He’s never felt this before, so he pumps his load inside quickly.

• He doesn’t warn them before hand, it’s only when they feel his dick go soft and the huge load inside their belly that that they’ve realized he’s finished.

• He feels bad for not warning them beforehand- but seeing his release seeping out of them makes his dick come back to life.

• The second round however is much different. He is on top and controlling the pace. He enters them and sets a rather brutal but steady pace. His S/O better get ready to get fucked into the mattress.

• Their legs would be locked around his waist as he pounds into them. he’ll be grunting in their ear the whole time, his hands are clawing at the sheets beneath. Hearing them moan in his ear spurs him on.

• He lasts much longer this time. He’ll only finish after his S/O cums. He grunts loudly as he dumps another load in his S/O.

• After that it’s quite a long night for his poor S/O. He excited and wants to try everything in one night (but we know that’s not possible)

• He switches positions. He loves the sight of his S/O getting fucked in different poses. Each round he lasts longer than the previous.

• Once he’s had enough and he realizes his S/O has definitely had enough, he carries them to the bathroom for a nice hot bath. Then it’s off to bed. He cuddles his S/O the whole night. He’ll probably fall asleep after them.

#nasty

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copperbadge · 4 years ago

Note

Hi Sam! I saw the recent ask you answered about the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft. Are there books/articles/documentaries about it that you *would* recommend, that you think do a particularly good job of analyzing aspects of it? Hope you and your wonderful kitties are having a lovely day!

It’s tough to know, because all that information now just sort of lives rent-free in my head, and the problem is that there’s no one definitive source that I think has everything right -- one of them will be great but will be very credulous about the reporter who says he saw the paintings, another will be skeptical of most of the information available but adhere very tightly to one pet theory, a third will be just a single theory to begin with that might even be a good one but they don’t take into account a ton of other data I’d want to at least know if I were going to evaluate theories. There are many that focus on Boston’s criminal networks and completely ignore anything happening in and around the museum itself at the time.

And also some of what I know about the Gardner theft is actually context that’s nothing to do with it -- stuff about the world of art crime in general that most books don’t really think to include, often because the author is so narrowly focused on the Gardner that they haven’t thought to expand their knowledge. For example, almost all priceless art that is stolen and then returned comes back, at this point, for one of two reasons: either it was ransomed in the first place, like stolen specifically to be “sold” back to the museum, or it was used by a criminal to get a lightened sentence. That’s something you want to know when reading about various criminals who have been in custody but not tried to use the Gardner heist, or been unable to produce the paintings if they have. There are a few theories where everyone involved in the heist died before they could say anything and the paintings were destroyed, but they’re a) few and b) unlikely and c) generally being told by someone I wouldn’t trust to tell me the time, let alone to be truthful to a journalist.

And also, working in the nonprofit world and talking about the Gardner as much as I do, I’ve learned things that aren’t a part of the general body of Gardner knowledge in the public eye, which gives me a potentially skewed but also larger perspective. So to me, additionally, most documentaries are working with incomplete knowledge that badly damages their case for any single theory.

So the problem with the new documentary (for me personally) is not that it’s bad, it’s just there’s no new information and I know everything it’s saying and not saying already -- like watching a true crime show that pulled all its interviews from other shows and repackaged them. It’s a decent piece of work on its own, just better in combination with other knowledge.

I do think The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser is worth reading even though at this point it’s probably a bit out of date. And for context I can’t recommend Noah Charney’s work highly enough -- his books, blog, and talks on art crime are extremely educational about how art crime functions. I don’t believe he’s done anything specific on the Gardner but his work obviously borders on it. And there’s a strong list of Gardner-related books here that contains most of the ones I’d recommend.

But my greatest recommendation while reading these books or watching or listening to media is always, always to remember that the person telling the narrative generally has a pet theory they might ignore evidence for, and most of the “career” criminals they speak to have zero motivation to be truthful.

#gardner heist #art theft #art crime #ambystomatidchanterelle

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utanoprinces · 3 years ago

Text

Tokki Works Part-time

TN: This is a memorial (bonus text story) from Debut, written from Tokiya's perspective. He's been sent to do some work for the professor (yes, the same one who developed Ai) in exchange for help with operating a complicated video device used during the Master Course. I'm a fairly new translator still, so do take this with a grain of salt! Enjoy, and please don't repost anywhere without permission!

⁂

“Here…?”

Based on the map I received from Kotobuki-san, I've arrived at the laboratory belonging to the professor who developed the monitor.

I look up at the building before me.

Given the dubious name, “Professor’s Laboratory”, I imagined something more ominous, but the exterior appearance gives a very tidy, somewhat ordinary impression.

I press the doorbell and a moment later the door opens to reveal a man wearing a white lab coat.

“Who is it?”

He seems to be somewhere in his thirties. No, maybe even older.

Because of his large glasses, it’s hard to see his face and what expression he has.

“Excuse me. Kotobuki-san referred me to…”

“Oh, I heard~ Ichinose Tokiya, right?”

“Yes. I’m Ichinose. Pleased to meet you.”

“Likewise. Feel free to call me ‘Professor’. That's what everyone calls me.”

So this is the “Professor” Kotobuki-san was referring to… It may be rude to say, but his hair is shaggy and the way he talks has an overall shady atmosphere to it.

There's no way this is actually the person who designed the monitor…

“Right. So what is it you want me to do?”

Kotobuki-san had called it an experiment, but I hadn’t even been told what kind of research this person does.

“Ah, I’ll explain the details inside.”

The professor beckons me lightly and turns to go back inside. He guides me to a room that looks like a lab, with simple desks lined up against a gray wall. However, the surroundings are so cluttered that it’s impossible to set foot anywhere.

A mountain of books, an array of miscellaneous equipment... Because of the whole monitor affair, I assumed he might work in the electronic and electrical engineering field, and that assumption doesn’t seem to be wrong based on these surroundings.

“Before the experiment, I’d like to request that you do some office work for me.”

As he says that, he heads deeper into the room, dexterously avoiding the equipment that’s scattered haphazardly across the floor.

It might be my first time walking through such a messy room.

I take a small breath and follow, feeling as though I’m traversing a jungle.

The professor boots up the laptop on his desk and brings over two stacks of paper.

“I want you to input the data here… and rewrite these handwritten documents.”

“All… of it?”

As far as I can tell, there’s a considerable amount.

“It’s a lot, sure, but it’s simple so I don’t think it’ll be too hard. Still, if we had more manpower, we could get done right away.”

Come to think of it, Kotobuki-san also said four people could finish it immediately… and that it’d take one person half a day.

“Go with the manual data first. The format’s already been created, so you should be able to do it without even thinking.”

The professor opens the spreadsheet software and points me to a chair in front of the laptop.

It’s going to take a lot of effort, but it’s a job I’ve accepted, so I have to do it.

I slump down in the chair, feeling somewhat overwhelmed.

I flip through the stack of documents to briefly assess the contents.

It's all numbers lined up in rows. It does indeed seem like it should be done manually.

The one thing that’s bothering me a little is that there is almost no indication of what the data is for. It seems as if it’s been intentionally hidden.

The same goes for the handwritten papers I’m meant to rewrite—it looks as though most of the important details have been omitted.

...he's surprisingly secretive.

“Well, I’m sure you don’t know what any of it means, but since you just have to type it, don’t worry about it, alright?”

I get the impression from his tone that he’s implying I wouldn’t be able to understand it anyway, which makes me slightly irritated.

Even so, he is my employer. I’m a part-timer. Work is work.

“Well then, I’ll get started right away.”

“Sure. If there’s anything you don’t understand, just ask.”

I softly clear my throat and begin to work.

Once I've started, I discover that the formatting and the documents have been designed to be easy to work with, so it makes for surprisingly quick work.

I expected him to be working on something else, but instead, the professor sits beside me and props his elbows on the desk.

“Ichinose-kun. What are your thoughts on the recently-announced discovery that could potentially disprove the theory of relativity?”

When he asks me that nonchalantly, I stop working for a moment.

Why ask me that out of the blue?

It seems strange, but I decide to answer him anyway since I recently read about the news in a magazine.

“Wasn’t it from a foreign research institute? I can’t really speak on it unless I’m given proper evidence. In my opinion, I think it’s a measurement error.”

“Oh, I see.”

The professor nods, maintaining his relaxed demeanor.

“Then… why do you think people get so irritable during the rainy season?”

“That is… it’s probably because of the high humidity.”

“I know, right. Isn’t it awful when everything’s sticky?”

...what the hell is this guy going on about?

After that, the professor repeatedly tries to start a conversation with me.

“Have you tried the latest product from the donut shop in front of the station?”

“I don’t go to places like that too often.”

“Did you know that penicillin was discovered by accident?”

“I have read that. Quite the miracle.”

“Boooriiing~”

“...what was that?”

“An impression of Reiji. Did it sound like him?”

“...that person is even more annoying.”

“You’re right.”

The conversation jumps from topic to topic with seemingly no thread of continuity.

However, it's inefficient to keep talking like this, no matter how simple the work may be.

He doesn’t seem to be the type to enjoy teasing people for their reactions like Kotobuki-san, so just what is he up to?

I can’t help but wonder, but I try to give appropriate replies while continuing to work dispassionately.

Met only by my half-hearted replies, the professor eventually gives up and stops trying to speak to me.

I take advantage of the silence to increase the speed of my work output.

"...kun, Ichinose-kun."

"Yes?"

Before I know it, when I look up, the professor is standing beside me, smiling.

"I’ve been calling you for quite some time. Your concentration is amazing. You must be tired. Here, go ahead."

He offers me something steamy.

Is that… a beaker?

No, a beaker is a beaker… but this thing has a handle.

Is it something he uses for experiments? Inside, a steaming, dark-brown liquid shifts around.

"What is that…?"

"It's coffee."

"I can see that, but…"

I hesitate. To be honest, its appearance is reminiscent of chemicals, which spoils any desire I might have had to try it.

"Oh. It's my special mug. I call it 'bea-cup'."

"Why… the handle?"

"It'll be too hot if you grab it as-is."

Ah...

As I thought, he's a strange person.

I have a headache.

He’s one of Kotobuki-san’s acquaintances. I was prepared for this.

"Come on. Don't be shy. Don’t you like your coffee black?"

"It’s not that. It's just… I appreciate the offer, but I'm not thirsty right now."

"Is that so? Shame."

After I politely decline, the professor responds in a slightly lonely, dejected voice and slinks off to the corner of the room.

Well, the manual data is done. Rewriting doesn't seem to be too difficult either.

I get so absorbed in working that the only ambient sound is that of the keyboard tapping away.

"Finished."

The last one. When I look up after checking over the contents of my work, the professor, who had been reading for a while, raises his brows behind his glasses slightly.

"I'm surprised. You're quick, huh?"

"Thank you."

"Want some coffee?"

"I'm fine."

The doctor stands, pours some coffee for himself, and—bea-cup in hand—peers at me.

"You really saved me. It must have been boring with all those words you didn't understand."

All those words I… didn't understand?

“No, no. I actually found it quite interesting. I thought you specialized in electronics and electrical engineering, but it seems you’ve done a lot of research in a variety of fields like… medicine.”

When I say that, his eyebrows rise even higher.

“...did it say something like that?”

“No. However, with this many units and numbers, it should be easy to make a conjecture. The first half of the data was all about the human body.”

“Oh, I see...”

He shrugs slightly when I present one of the papers to him.

“It’s intriguing data. It seems to me that it entails how muscle and fat tone affect the elasticity of the skin. Not that I can see any use for researching something like this.”

The professor silently lifts the bea-cup to his lips, his large glasses fogging up with steam.

Immediately after, his mouth twists into a grimace.

"Haha. Is that right? Why that certainly strikes a nerve. It’s actually meant to be a countermeasure against middle-aged weight gain."

"Middle-aged… weight-gain?"

“I’m old enough to be curious about it, myself. Even so, when you hear 'macho' it doesn’t fit the image of 'professor', so it’s research to determine how to achieve the ideal body type—not too muscular and not too chubby.”

“I hate to say it, but… Wouldn’t it be better to just go to the gym instead of researching this kind of thing?”

“You don’t get it. It’s not just about how it looks, I care about the feel of it. It’s not enough to simply work out.”

“Haaa…”

“Now that you mention it, you seem surprisingly fit—would it be okay if I take a look?”

“No.”

I duck away from the professor’s outstretched hand and pick up another document.

“Then, how about this one? Chemistry this time. It seemed to me like textile research.”

“Ah, well…”

“This new fiber, when exposed to a certain amount of ultraviolet light, takes in carbon dioxide from the air and—”

“Yeah, I know, it’s my research. Fibers that gradually grow as they’re exposed to sunlight. You want to know why I’m studying something like that?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I like plants a lot, but I always end up killing them by accident. I was thinking I could develop a grass that can grow without water or fertilizer.”

The doctor looks out the window.

“I’m actually growing it right now. Oh—it withered.”

“Isn’t that bad?”

“No… it’s…”

“It’s bad. Next, this one. At a glance, it seems to be a small rocket. A unique feature of this model is that it’s designed to minimize its impact when launched.”

“Don’t all boys dream about rockets?”

“That’s it?”

“You don’t need a reason to dream.”

“...this is all just nonsense.”

I sigh in exasperation.

The person who designed that monitor… I’d been thinking they must be quite remarkable when he was actually just doing all of this...

“I don’t mean to sound like an amateur, but you should at least narrow down your field of research.”

“No! I like doing all types of research, so I can’t pick just one.”

Seeing his flippant smile, I realize he’s even more difficult to interact with than Kotobuki-san.

“If that’s the case, then why not make some sort of composite of the data and try using it for more meaningful research? For example, based on the data about the human body, we can use the fiber to…”

I’m about to turn over the document when the professor hurriedly sets the bea-cup down beside me.

“...?!”

“Coffee… you want some?”

“No…”

The lenses of his glasses glint. I clear my throat and take my hands off the documents.

“So… what do I need to do for the experiment?”

I wasn’t interested in his research from the start. I just wanted to get back at him for treating me like an ignorant teenager twice.

It doesn't seem to be in either of our best interests to pursue this any further.

“Experiment? Oh, it’s already over.”

“Eh…?”

The doctor grins and laughs at my surprise.

“You know how I’ve been talking to you for some time? Lately, I’ve developed an interest in human reactions. I’ve been collecting data from you.”

“And you didn’t even ask for my permission? Isn’t that a little in poor taste?”

“If you’d declined earlier, I wouldn’t have been able to gather accurate data. Besides, I thought the condition was that you were supposed to help with any experiment.”

When he says that, I fall silent. It doesn’t feel good to admit, but he’s right.

“I didn’t think you majored in psychology as well.”

At my pained reply, the professor grins as if to get back at me.

“I research what I want when I want.”

Really… he’s a shady person from top to bottom. Just how serious is that statement?

“You made an unexpected point earlier, but honestly, the reactions of a serious person like you aren’t interesting because you’re so predictable. I would have liked to work with someone with more unpredictability, more erratic behavior, instead.”

“That really is too bad. As you can see, I’m an extremely uninteresting person.”

As I reply, I consider how relieved I am that I hadn’t brought Otoya or [MC] to this part-time job.

I couldn’t endure [MC] being observed this way, let alone Otoya.

Even if it yielded data more akin to what the professor had in mind...

“If you’ve finished your experimenting, then I guess my work is done?”

“Yeah. I suppose you’re right.”

“Then. If you’ll excuse me.”

As I move to stand, a thought strikes me, and I turn back to the professor.

“Speaking of psychology, I do know one thing.”

“Oh…?”

I point in the direction of the eyes watching me through lenses.

“The reason people hide their faces with glasses or sunglasses is that they think that by doing so, they’ll be the only one to see the other person, that the other won’t be able to see their eyes. In other words, it makes them feel less anxious to have a psychological advantage. People who hide their faces for most of the time are actually shy and awkward.”

I wag my finger in front of his large glasses and receive a laugh in reply.

“Haha. You’re a funny one, huh? I see how Reiji’s having a hard time.”

“I’m the one who’s having a hard time.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

I pick up my bag, and this time, the professor approaches me.

“Ichinose-kun. If you don’t mind, I’d like for you to come work for me again.”

“I’m afraid I can’t. I’m busy with other things.”

“That’s a terrible shame.”

For a moment, our eyes meet through the lenses of his glasses. We exchange faint smiles and I leave the lab at last.

#uta no prince sama #utapri #ichinose tokiya #hakase

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dimensionwriter · 4 years ago

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100 Days

Part 2

Part One

M! Alien x GN! Reader

Warning: Innuendos, mention of torture

Word Count: 2519

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Remember to LIKE, COMMENT, and REBLOG, please. I love to see the comments on my stories.

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The air was so cold and dry in the room. The room was dead silent except for the low pitch buzz emanating from the computer. This room seemed unwelcoming to any person who dared to enter; However, you barely noticed as you stared at your creature in the giant container.

His form was still leaning against the wall with his eyes closed. Two black arms wrapped around his thin grey torso. The second and third set was just lightly floating in the liquid as he continued to sleep. A giant smooth tail that laid on top of his first set of arms, allowing his head to lay against it. His grey skin was a lot more muted while slumbering, it seems. A glance over would allow you to think that everything was the same as you left it.

However, there was something new. On his neck were these tiny slits that were moving with his chest. It was unknown to you that the creature contained gills. It was theorized that the creature breathed through the tiny slits sitting below his eyes. Maybe it had to do with something about him being a shift shaper. Was the creature changing his respiratory system while sleeping?

Walking over to the computer, you open the coding program. You couldn’t help how quickly you put in the stop coding for the sleeping medicine. It has been two days since you last saw him due to the weekend and you were just itching to learn more about this fascinating creature.

You fixed your lab coat and walked to the front of the container. Gosh, it felt so nice to do it. You are so used to seeing him floating in the container unconscious that now that you get a chance to interact with him, it was thrilling.

His tail slowly slid off his arms as he shifted in his sleep. He seems to be snuggling into the glass. So he enjoys sleeping. How does his species do their sleeping arrangement? Is it more of a hibernation or daily occurrence?

“...” He let a small grumble as his eyes fluttered open. You were expecting to see a pair of pitch black eyes, but instead they looked quite humanish. In fact, they looked really familiar. Wait a minute.

“Morning, Shark,” you spoke slowly. He looked at you groggily before turning his head around. You could see the confusion on his face. You’ve heard from coworkers that this sometimes happens. “How do you feel, Shark?”

“I had this dream where this beautiful angel was in front of me,” he grumbled as he stretched his arms out in every direction. It was kind of unique the way he had to contort his body in order for his six arms to get that stretch. “And I open my eyes and they’re still there.”

“You dreamed about me so much that you decided to wear my eyes,” you teased. It was odd seeing an alien with such human eyes. So far, most of the aliens usually have odd shaped eyes or none at all. But you guess with Shark, you can’t put him under the category for normal aliens.

“I-what!” His top arm went to his face and rubbed his eyes harshly. Guess he didn’t even notice that he didn’t have his normal eyes. You should document that and see if that’s a constant when he wakes up. “When I said I wanted you on my body, I didn’t mean this.”

Your movement towards the computer stopped as you processed what he said. Did he mean- that’s more of a human phrase- can he even? Your brain is becoming overwhelmed as you unpacked the single sentence. How does he even know that type of language?

“Sorry, sweetheart. Didn’t mean to fluster you like that, even though you look so cute. I’ll tone it down for you,” he explained. He swam up to the top of the tank where he folded his top arms on top of it. A giant smirk was on his face revealing that he most likely didn’t regret his comment.

“You seem to have quite the understatement on the human’s culture.” He manages to talk in perfect English while also using phrases that only people integrated in the culture could understand. Has he been hiding within the humans for a while?

His tail swishing slowly in the liquid made him appear relaxed in his environment. That’s a good sign for most specimens to have. If his behavior continues on this path, he might be able to leave the container and you can gain more data on him that doesn’t involve verbal communication.

“I got it by abducting a human and strapping them to a lab table to eat their brains. I learn the different waves of human’s vocals by their screams of pain. Quite the range, I may say,” he spoke with a glint in his eye.

Cold sweat dripped down your back as you froze in front of the computer. This is the first time you have felt fear in a while. Just the thought that a few feet away from you is a killer and the only thing stopping you is a glass container that he has proven many times to be able to lift himself over, is enough to make your stomach lurch.

You won’t lie and say it’s uncommon to contain an alien that has kidnapped humans or killed them in the search of science. But, they never understood what they did was wrong. However, Experiment 337 has shown signs of understanding human’s speech, therefore he should have an understanding of the human moral. Does he just not care?

“Sweetheart, you look so adorable when you scrunch your face up from overthinking. But to calm your nerves, I was joking,” he sang out. He released his hold on the top of the container and floated down. His grayish blue muscular legs began to lightly move causing him to swim a little. He contains mobility in liquid, noted.

“You got nothing to worry about. The only person I want to strap down and have screaming is you.” His black eyes looked at you through the liquid and gave a swift wink. Heat started crawling up your neck to your face.

“Didn't moments ago you said you would ‘tone it down’?” You asked, turning to the computer to appear busy. There’s pros and cons to having an alien that can speak english and have them understand some phrases. Although, you didn’t think being flirted with or having a dirty mind would be one.

“Oh that was tone downed. What I wanted to say was I would love to have you lying underneath me with your legs spread as I-” You cut him out with a loud screech. He jumped before laughing at you.

“Okay, my apologies for complaining. I don’t mind sticking to the previous level,” you squeaked out, rubbing your cheeks to get them to calm down. Do you even put this down in the notes? How would you word that your alien has a libido?

You pulled up the notes on the computer and stared at it for a while. Then just typed it “Understands the human language, Appears to be in search of mate.” That’s the best you can do at the moment.

“I’ll give you a break. I know so much about the humans because you have all of it in the open. Stacks and stacks of books on languages, anatomy, how you interact, ways of thinking,history, etc. Then there’s also this system humans have called ‘The Internet’ where I can interact with humans in multiple ways without having to show my face. It was great practice,” he explained, rolling his top left wrist. His bottom set of arms were pushing against the base of the container to bounce through the water.

You were quick to write down what he was saying and highlight how he used the internet to communicate with humans. You never heard of an alien using Earth’s own resources to learn more about it. How many are out there that are using these resources at this very moment? How many people online are actually humans?

“So, have you just been studying just human?” You asked, turning toward him. He flipped himself around to sit on the base of the container. His legs folded on top of each other and surprisingly the muscles seem to fit together to allow for a smooth surface.

“Nah, not really. The animals on this planet are pretty cool,” he grumbled. His top right arm went to his chin slightly as if he was thinking for a moment. “Yeah, my favorite animal is the… the um… I forgot what you call it. Just look.”

Suddenly, a giant black smoke cloud exploded from Shark’s skin, covering all the liquid in the water. You couldn’t see a thing inside. The now black liquid only showed your worried and terrified expressions. Who knows what this specimen has in store?

“Tadaaa,” he yelled, somewhere in the black liquid. You moved around the container as you tried to see what he was and where he was. The blackness seems to be dissipating the longer you stared at it. However, even that wasn’t enough to see him.

“I can’t see you, Shark.” You were trying to call out to him, but he didn’t seem to be appearing. The liquid at this point was a murky grey that allowed you to see through with it. But the container was empty. Did he escape?

Oh gosh, what’s the protocol for an escaped experiment? You need to press the alarm button. No, you need to lock down the room so he can’t leave. Which one goes first?

“Human, babbbbeeeee,” a tiny voice called out to you. You looked around the container for anything. Grey, grey, grey, orange, grey, grey… wait.

In the upper corner, there was a tiny fish with shimmering orange and yellow scales all over. Tiny black eyes stared sideways at you. The fish seem happy to have your eyes on it because it started swimming around in circles.

“Shark? You can shrink to 1/50 of your height and 1/400 of your weight. How? That-that breaks all laws of physics,” you rambled in disbelief. He has too much mass for it all to just condense into a goldfish. He would collapse into himself due to the density.

“Once again. Yeah, and you can’t,” his now squeaky voice teased from inside of the water. You were quick to press your face to the glass of the container. Shark swam over until he was right in front of your face. “It’s not that hard.”

“I have the coolest experiment in this place,” you whispered. His body wasn’t showing any signs of distress or struggle with swimming. The gills on the side of his neck showed that he was still breathing just fine, telling you that he could transform his lungs to fit his changed body.

“And I have the hottest scientist in the entire universe who I am going to make mines.” It felt so weird to be flirted with by a tiny goldfish that you couldn’t even take his comment seriously. You wouldn’t mind all his flirty statements if it was delivered by a cute little goldfish.

“Let me document this. And I got to check your vitals,” You mumbled to yourself. The vital cords were still attached to him, but seem to have shrunk to accommodate his new form.

You pulled up the vitals recorded to see everything had changed. The oxygen level had dropped significantly and so had his heart rate. His body temperature was so much lower that anyone reading this would think he temporarily died.

“Shark, you amazed me,” you mumbled, scrolling through the documentation. Now you need to go back to the previous day to see if his reading has changed when he shifted into you. From the looks of things, he understands the organ system of the organism that he shifts into.

“But I haven’t even taken you to dinner yet and you already tell me how good I am.” You turned back to the container to see he had transformed back into his usual self. His giant six palms were pressed against the glass closest to you as he stared at the computer screen.

“Just take the compliment,” you teased. You flipped to your notes and began to type in everything that has happened. Shark swam a little closer and squinted his beady black eyes. Guess he was reading what you were writing.

“Appears to be in search of a mate?” He read out with a tone of confusion. Once again, you were in a state of cold sweat as you realized what he read. It just happened, but you were so in science bliss of him breaking physics that you forgot about his earlier statement.

“Just an assumption...based on the way you speak,” you stuttered, avoiding his look. A deep laugh escaped out of him. His grey body swam up again, so he was peeking out the top of the container.

“Sweetie, did you not hear me earlier? I’m going to make you mine. You are my mate. Okay, darling,” he purred, sending a swift wink. There’s that warmth crawling up your neck. How do you respond to this in a formal way?

A buzz in your ear alerted you for an incoming call. You pressed the ear piece with your shoulder to answer it. “Hey, it’s lunch time. Meet in the section Sub 4B in 20 minutes.”

“Everytime you get on that ear piece, you leave. I might just take it away from you, so you will never leave me.” You let out a laugh as you pressed the ear piece again to end the call. Even though you are a scientist that works with experiments, that doesn’t mean all your time is with them. It happens outside, where data is collected and talked about.

“I’m sorry. But you’ll go to sleep again, so you won’t even notice time has passed.” You slide the reading off the screen of the computer and pull up the medicine supplier. The code for the sleeping medicine was quickly placed in.

A huge frown came onto Shark’s face as he watched the blue liquid coming from the computer and towards him. He instinctively swam to the bottom and sat down. His back was placed against the side glass with his tail wrapped around him. The top and bottom set of arms were crossed over his knees while the middle set just floated down.

“See you later, Shark,” you whispered. His calm even breathing was the only response you got back. Leaning towards the glass, you gave it a little kiss. It was something dumb you did when he was unconscious and had to leave him.

You discarded your lab jacket in the waste bin and grabbed your things. As you exited, you gave one last glance at Shark’s sleeping form with a happy smile. You were so grateful to have him here at work.

“97 days left.”

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Here it is. You guys asked for it and I provided it. I’m actually starting to really love writing Shark’s character. It’s different from the usual soft boy that I write. I like it. Anyway, remember to leave a LIKE and a COMMENT. Hope you enjoy the rest of your day.

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spn-romantica · 4 years ago

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So I watched SPN for years, right up until the end of S11, when they brought back Mary. I heard that S15 would be the last season, and I was like ‘oh ok I’ll rewatch (for like the 8th time) and finish SPN then’ BUT THEN 15x18 happened and I was violently pulled back into the SPN fandom. I still haven’t caught up fully watching yet, but I’ve read so much discourse now...and I have thoughts. Hypotheses currently. I’ll wait to finish the whole show for real to call any of this theories but, I wanted to record my thoughts.

They’re about Chuck. As a villain. Which weirds me out. As an antagonist? Sure. As evil? No. Can’t envision it. I just finished my rewatch of S5 and, damn, but if Chuck is the ultimate villain, S5 reads very differently. :0

But I recently saw a post comparing Dean’s reaction in 1x18 (I believe) to his in 10x05 (for sure) about when someone mentions his mother’s death. In 1x18, it’s Sam when they were children and Dean gets angry. In 10x05, it’s a group of high school girls and Dean just bops his head along to the song. The post was framing it as 10x05 not understanding Dean’s thoughts about his mother, but I think that both episodes understand Dean. When Dean is a child, the trauma over his mother’s murder is still fresh. By 10x05, the event is 70 years in the past. Of course it still affects Dean. Of course. You never really get over something like that. But I’d argue that after 70 years, Dean has moved through the stages of grief to acceptance. It still hurts, but like an old ache, not a fresh, still-bleeding wound.

Interestingly, 10x05 is when we see Chuck, after a long absence. He’s watching the play, probably happy that someone loves his work enough to even make a musical, but he is also watching the Winchesters. The actual episodes of the show, aka the books Chuck writes, are what Chuck knows/cares about regarding the Winchesters. Despite being God, I’d argue he doesn’t pay attention to every second and all the little minutia of the boys’ lives. So, here in 10x05, we have confirmation that Chuck is around to see that Dean has healed from his mother’s death.

Later, in S11, Dean acts as therapist/life counsellor to Chuck/God, regarding Amara and Lucifer. And it works! Dean teaches God about family and about healing. Why does God listen to Dean Winchester, a random human? Perhaps it is because of S1-5. Perhaps it is because Dean and Sam were part of God’s test, as God himself describes it in 5x22.

What was the test? Was it God’s experiment about choice and free will? About freedom vs peace? Or, perhaps, was God trying to understand sibling relationships? He and Amara are two faces of the same coin. They are siblings, but with very different outlooks and it caused a rift between them, caused Chuck to seal Amara away before she could destroy his creations. Chuck regretted this, but saw it as a necessary betrayal. But then, some time later, Chuck’s angelic children experience their own betrayal and sibling rift. Lucifer tries to turn the angels against God, rebel and reject God. He makes demons, for sure, and maybe even Hell. But why? God figures that Lucifer was maybe jealous of the new baby (humans) like others in the show postulates. Or maybe Lucifer had beef specifically with Michael, because humans are little more than amoebas from an angelic perspective. Aside from Castiel, Anna and a handful of other angels, angels consistently view humans as humans might view dust mites. Maybe humans were the cause of the rift between Michael and Lucifer, but it was Michael and Lucifer’s relationship that needed fixing in the end, regardless.

So God is left with the sad conclusion that maybe close siblings will inevitably betray each other and be unable to forgive and heal. He wants to heal with Amara. But he also wants Michael and Lucifer to be able to heal. (It doesn’t occur to God that maybe Lucifer’s problem was never with humanity or Michael; it was with God.)

So God has research to do, to see if it’s possible for siblings to experience such deep betrayal and still heal. He turns to his little hairless apes, the only sentient species on Earth with potential to parallel the angels. He starts testing siblings. Cain and Abel are first up. Needless to say, but the betrayal was too strong and left no room for healing. But on down the line of Cain, God continues testing. Eventually, we come to Sam and Dean.

God has scheduled Michael and Lucifer’s family counselling session for 2010. All the data up to this point says it can only end badly. Maybe it’ll half-kill the Earth, but it’s finally time for Michael and Lucifer to meet and for one of them to die. God isn’t happy about this conclusion, but it’s what the data says. So, finally, the last test subjects, the last in the line who will be the vessels for Michael and Lucifer’s showdown, arrive. Sam and Dean Winchester are to be the last sibling test. The conclusion seems foregone at this point, but there is no point in cancelling the last bit of the test after so long, so it continues. God watches. And Sam and Dean surprise God. Siblings after siblings had failed for millennia to heal. Betrayals too strong, healing too little, too late. But Sam and Dean. no matter how badly they hurt each other, find a way to come back together and heal. They don’t give up on each other, despite millennia of data to the contrary. Still, the angels and demons push and push at Sam and Dean until their rift is as wide and as deep as Michael and Lucifer’s, as God’s and Amara’s (in late S4). It seems, despite the brothers’ best efforts earlier on, it’s all for naught.

But there is a further element of randomness, something God couldn’t foresee. Castiel. God hasn’t had occasion for romantic love in his own experience, so he is entirely blind to what choices Castiel is likely to make. He provides an element of randomness to the experiment, an essential part that gives Dean the ultimate chance to go back to Sam and begin to heal (4x22).

Throughout S5, Sam and Dean heal. There is hurt, still, of course, but they love each other and forgive each other. By 5x22, they’ve surprised everyone. Even the angels have given up on turning them against each other, and have shrugged and settled for using Nick and Adam as the vessels for the showdown. Sam and Dean passed their test. They were siblings who betrayed each other and healed from it. God reconsiders how family counselling will go with Michael and Lucifer. He figured it would be the Apocalypse, the end of the problems between Michael and Lucifer, as one of them dies, as had always happened before. But, Sam and Dean showed God, that though it is rare, it is possible to heal. So God gives Sam and Dean an out. He gives Sam the strength to seize back control from Lucifer, should things go south.

Finally, the showdown arrives. Michael and Lucifer meet. They talk things out. To God’s surprise, Lucifer reveals that he never had a problem with Michael. He had forgiven Michael long ago. But Michael couldn’t forgive Lucifer. He had to be a ‘good son’ and do what he thought God wanted him to do. But Michael didn’t realise, that God doesn’t give orders. Free will all the way, baby! But the whole thing comes as a surprise. Apparently, all this time, the problem relationship wasn’t siblings, it was parents.

Oops.

Good thing God had a back-up plan.

Sam throws himself and Lucifer (and Michael and Adam) into the Cage. Michael and Lucifer have an eternity to figure things out between each other now. But that’s beside the point. The point is, now, that God has to start testing all over again. Not how to fix sibling relationships, but how to fix parent-child relationships.

God restores Castiel, perhaps for a few reasons because God exists outside of time, but originally it may have been just for one. He likes Castiel. He is impressed that Castiel invented free will for himself, broke free of angelic programming (multiple times over), and did it all for love. It’s novel. It’s interesting. God might even think it’s sweet. But God has had time later, and thought about it, and he has a plan. And Castiel is essential.

But Dean Winchester is the key.

Sam and Dean’s relationship with their own father has been strained, but both boys find a way to forgive John his flaws and failings, and love him. Whenever they do get a chance to see him again, post his death, they don’t hate him. They’ve healed. John’s relationship with Sam and Dean is one point of data, Abraham and Isaac another. There are many data points that God can reflect back on and consider.

But as S6 through S10 roll on, God watches Sam and Dean and Castiel. He even watches Crowley and Rowena for another data point. Dean is his main focus, however. (This is a little meta, but as the story focuses more on Dean than Sam post S5, it ties in. Prior to S6, both Sam and Dean were essential - the sibling test. Now, post S5, the parent test, Dean is the most essential. Of course, Sam and Castiel are important too. But Dean is key.)

Dean is a good father. He was a good father to Sam, even when he was only 6 years old himself. He was a good father to Ben. He was willing to die for Bobby John. He’s always good with kids. Not only that, but Dean is blunt enough, brave enough, and crazy enough to tell God to God’s face what he thinks. God needs Dean’s advice, his perspective and opinion on family relationships, but he also needs to see what Dean would do if he were in God’s shoes.

[Edit (1/04/21): After seeing Michael and Lucifer (mostly) heal, and after seeing Sam and Dean heal their relationship, God finally has hope for him and Amara. So God logically wants to retrieve Amara from her prison. But how? Well, he could just wander on up to Cain and do it himself, but what would Amara say? “So I see you’ve come crawling back, eh, Chucky?” She wouldn’t be impressed with God. She wouldn’t understand, because she’s hopeless too. SO how to give her hope? How to make her see that she and God can be okay again? Why, stick her near Dean Winchester, of course! So God sets things up for Dean to get and lose the Mark of Cain, thereby ensuring that Amara will feel a connection to Dean and stick around him/keep him alive long enough for Dean to work his life-coach magic.]

In S11, God and Amara heal their relationship because of the hope Sam and Dean gave God, and also the direct advice Dean gives God. God and Lucifer, not so much.

God needs more data. He needs to see what Dean would do. In comes Castiel’s relevance. God sets things up so that Lucifer can have a son. A nephil. Jack. And God points Castiel in Jack’s direction, trusting Castiel’s ability for unconditional love to keep Jack alive long enough for the experiment. Castiel becomes Jack’s father. But Castiel will never betray Jack, the way God betrayed Lucifer. And, besides, Castiel isn’t the target of this experiment. But it is Castiel’s relationship with Dean Winchester that provides the link needed to get the experiment rolling.

Because Jack is Castiel’s son, he is therefore Sam and Dean’s nephew. Except, God has been watching Castiel and Dean. And, frankly, their romantic love for each other is so obvious even God cannot miss it. Through Castiel, Dean sees Jack as his son too. He loves Jack, exactly like a son. In this way, Dean parallels God, and Jack parallels Lucifer.

But God knows Dean would not easily turn on any child, let alone his own child. So God had a plan for that too. One that Amara helped him with.

They brought back Mary Winchester.

Mary is the one person in existence whose loss would hurt Dean enough to spur him to action. So, she was brought back to die. It was a matter of only a few years of gentle prodding to get everything in position. Jack causes Mary’s death. Dean is faced with a horrible decision. If Jack can kill Mary, what’s to say that Sam and Castiel wouldn’t be next? Mary’s death is like everything beginning all over again for Dean as well. Her first death set off a chain reaction, a series of unfortunate events that spanned decades and nearly caused the ruination of not only Dean’s life, but Sam’s and John’s and even the world. That scar, which had healed as well as it could after 70 years, that God saw was healed in 10x05, has been violently opened up again. It’s the only thing that could force Dean’s hand, that could get him to betray Jack and try to kill him. If Jack had killed Sam or Castiel, it wouldn’t have had the same effect. Both Sam and Castiel had died and come back so many times, and while it would hurt Dean and make him doubt Jack, their deaths would be a sacrifice that Dean would feel obligated to respect, to give Jack a second chance like they would both want. (And God has been laying the groundwork for Dean, convincing him that Jack is evil, will be evil like Lucifer, can’t be allowed to live. All things God has thought about Lucifer over time. Was Lucifer inherently evil? Was their rift inevitable?)

So, here it is. The big test. Will Dean kill Jack? Will he betray Jack and cause an unhealable rift? Or will he find a way to heal, like he did with Sam against all the odds?

And, once again, Dean impresses God. He refuses to kill Jack.

But now we’re in the endgame. Sam, Dean and Castiel are aware that Jack’s life was only on the line because of God. It’s not something they can forgive, or understand. They’re all God’s guinea pigs, and while he loves his guinea pigs, he knows he’s hurt them in the name of science, of knowledge. or healing, and God can’t undo what he’s done. Free will is linear, after all. So it is time for the Winchesters, Castiel and Jack included, to be done with God. God is done with them, too. It’s time for them to be free and at peace. The experiments are done. God has decided not to kill Lucifer. He has decided to try to heal. He can get Lucifer out of the Empty and talk and try to fix things. He has forever to fix things, now that he knows he can. (The last element of this, Jack forgiving Dean for trying to kill him, is something I have limited knowledge of, but I am under the impression happens so... To be added in the edit once I finish the series.)

But the only way the Winchesters will be able to rest, is if they think God, the last and greatest villain, is out of the way. They know they’ve been manipulated their whole lives, first towards the sibling experiment and now the parent experiment, so they need to think God is gone so they can feel secure in their free will once more. Truthfully, God never took their free will. He set them up in situations, maybe even gave a bio-chemical nudge of anger (Dean) or attraction (Sam and Eileen) every now and then. But the choices were always theirs. Still, God knows they won’t see it that way. So he sets things up so that they can defeat him.

He lets them win. He wants them to win. They cannot defeat God, after all. It’s not God’s time, and Death is the only one who can claim God in the end, as the two embrace as friends and walk to the next existence. But the Winchesters need this, and so God allows it. A last gift, to the beings who have been such help, hope and inspiration to him.

With an eye for an eventual S16, 15x20 is written to be ‘an ending’ but also one that could easily be reframed as a bad dream.

For example...

Unfortunately, after Jack, suped up on a extra Grace God lent him, restores the Earth and expends all the Grace (”giving up the mantle of God so that their is no God, no plans, only Free Will”), and Dean, Sam and Jack head back to the Bunker to regroup and gather the ingredients to do the spell to rescue Castiel from the Empty, they’re jumped by monsters who are angry with how much God has fucked with them on behalf of the Winchesters. 15x20 is all a djinn dream Dean is trapped in.

16x01 is Dean waking himself up from the djinn dream, Sam and Jack escaping their own monsters, and then the end of 16x01 is Dean saying something about waking Castiel up from his own dreams in the Empty. The rest of S16 sees the boys save Castiel, reunite with Eileen, start a monster-hunting Bobby Singer/Men of Letters-esque organisation, Dean and Castiel getting together and getting married on Valentine’s Day, Jack getting to live a normal life, going to school, making friends, etc.

If their is no S16 ever (which would be criminal), then 15x20 makes no sense, unless it is plainly a recount of an old, hopeless ending written by God. However you spin it, 15x20 is not the way it seems (like owls).

All things being said, God is an antagonist, but he’s not evil. He’s an asshole, sure, but he never once worked against the Winchesters, never bet against them, never tried to erase or end them. He wanted them to win. He wanted to see the fruits of free will be love, second chances, hope, forgiveness, healing, and happiness, not just betrayal, pain, selfishness, jealousy, disappointment, and hopelessness.

Why is the ending he shows Becky ‘hopeless’? Because God is. He has spent his long existence losing his most loved family members. Amara, Lucifer. How can things end well for God, when they can’t even end well for humans? But Sam and Dean defy the script, again and again. They surprise God, defying the statistics, defying the hypotheses, throwing the experiment into disarray. Giving God hope. Sam and Dean were okay. Dean and Jack were okay. If God had a romantic love, he would find hope from Dean and Castiel being okay. But when God wrote the book he showed Becky, he was writing what he thought would happen. In the end, surely, not even Dean can be enough to hold Sam and Cas and Jack together. But in the end, as we see, as God sees, he is proven wrong and he’s happy to be wrong. He’s hopeful. And he can leave Dean, Sam, Castiel and Jack, and all the angels and all the humans, to rule the Earth and the Heavens. He doesn’t need to learn anything more from them, so he heads to the Empty, with Amara, with Lucifer, with Death (Billie or not, Death is there for God in the end), and they can all depart for a better existence of their own.

If you read all of this, thanks! I eagerly anticipate watching the remaining 10 seasons so I can come back and edit the heck outta this, but until then, if y’all have any thoughts, I’d be interested to hear them~

TLDR: God is a morally bankrupt scientist and the Winchesters are his guinea pigs, but he’s not evil and he does love his guinea pigs, even if he could really treat them nicer.

#supernatural #spn #dean winchester #sam winchester #jack kline #castiel #god #chuck #amara #lucifer #mary winchester #destiel #deancas #this is what i get for living on spn tumblr in a post s15 world while rewatching s5 and having memories ranging from hq to 8bit about s1-s11 #be kind i haven't finished my rewatch/finished the show so i probably have stuff wrong #what if god isn't evil just has no inherent moral compass because he has to teach himself everything #and he's taken to using the winchesters as his guinea pigs/life counsellors

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keltonwrites · 3 years ago

Text

I bought a house in the middle of nowhere

“Yeah, I loved it, but she’d never move there.” It was something akin to that, at least. He didn’t mean any mischief, no deceit or planning. It was an honest take on what, at the time, was true. I saw the road into town on Google Maps, noted that it was closed during the winter, acknowledged the reality that a person can own a snowmobile, and I said, “we are not moving there.” But, all good truths are just dares in the making.

And here I am, living in the “there” I said I would not. Two years ago, I left my job at Headspace for a life reset. It was pre-pandemic, and Ben and I were planning a big road trip. Our perfect paradise in Topanga, CA, had crystallized itself as many people’s perfect paradise, and those “many people” all had more money than us. Our options to buy a home were nil, and home-buying was essentially all we wanted. Ben’s a builder and I’m a world builder, and we wanted somewhere to invest that didn’t belong to someone else. We packed the car with the tent and the bikes and the dog and all the things that come with tents and bikes and dogs, and off we went on our own Tour de l’Ouest, looking for a place to call home. We knew what we wanted, knew our odds of finding it, and hit the road anyway. Here was the dream list — concocted by two pie-in-the-sky dummies who married each other:

Not rainy or consistently windy

Notable access to the arts

Remote and challenging to get to/close neighbors

Wild West influenced architecture

Progressive community

Exceptional trail access out the front door

High-speed internet

In our budget

And my personal favorite: had to “feel right” Good luck to us with a list like that, but thus began our hunt. We camped in the snow, tried every dirty chai in the Rockies, and explored every town we could. Whatever a good time it was, it felt useless. Every town Ben was OK with, I hated. Every town I was OK with, Ben despised. And the few places we both loved required money we just didn’t have. We came home with our sails down, limping into the harbor of our rental. But as is the way with romantics, our dreams began to slowly eclipse our reality. Books fell victim to Zillow and Trulia. TV was replaced by the MLS. All writing time was dedicated to Realtor.com. Hours were spent pouring over maps, county records, and updating spreadsheets that tracked price per square foot compared to beds and baths. Over time, all that internetting led to one singular town of 180 people at 10,000 feet in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado with a road that said “Closed Winters” on Google Maps. Look, I don’t know what happened. Ben found this town on a map, I said don’t be ridiculous, and after a year or so of him telling people I'd never move here, here I am, being ridiculous. Was it reverse psychology? Maybe. Was it the charming “town plan” that mandated all houses be rustic cabins and forbade AirBnB? Could be. Was it the fact that when I looked at Strava’s Heatmap, it showed what seemed like thousands of miles of trails just out the front door? I mean, yes. All these things played a part, but all I know for certain is that one day I woke up and said, “we’re going to move there.” Ben doubted this conviction (and the realities behind it) thus cementing it into place in my head. In a town of 180 people there’s only ~60 houses, which means maybe 2 or 3 get listed per year — but my spreadsheet had the proof: we hadn’t missed our chance yet in this tiny town. The data showed a strong likelihood there would be at least two houses listed within the calendar year. This, however, was also our last chance. The spreadsheet also showed that if we didn’t find a house this year, we wouldn’t be able to afford one the next. We called a realtor, made our case, and harangued her until she believed us that we were truly the kind of yahoos who would move to an avalanche field and stay there. And then it happened. A pocket listing. It was a darling home built in 1890. It had the beds, the baths, and the views. We were the first and only to know. We put in an offer, they agreed, and we would come to see the house in a few weeks. But in those few weeks, the circumstances changed. The sellers lost their own sweet deal, and they couldn’t sell yet. Their agent promised we had right of first refusal, it was only a matter of time. Ben lamented, I preached patience, and we went to see the house that was no longer for sale anyway.

It was a quiet winter morning in Covid when we drove across the packed snow to meet our realtor outside the house. The sun was out and the 13 degrees Fahrenheit felt warm. I unzipped my jacket, mask on my face. I took long videos and talked about where I would set up my office and where we’d put the bikes. As we closed up and I settled into a future where this house would eventually be mine, our realtor told us there were comps in the area — other residents quietly interested in potentially closing out. Would we like to see them? Sure, let’s.

One home came with an incredible commercial kitchen. The whole house was a whopping 3500 sq ft if my memory serves me correct, which falls under the category of “houses too big to find your cat in."

Another home had an open-air-to-the-kitchen bathroom.

The third was dark and overpriced with cracked windows and open beer cans scattered about.

And then, plans changed. “Hey guys, there’s actually one more house we can see.” The last house we saw was a log cabin, nestled in the hillside by itself, with massive A-frame windows looking out onto the peaks beyond. Inside was a labyrinth of a life lived long and large. The cabin was built and loved by a man we’ll call Jack. Jack was 82, and as we walked toward the front door on that sunny winter morning, he exited with two beers in his pockets, headed to the mountain to ski. Jack was an attorney — in his life he’d been both criminal and defender — and from the stories, somewhat interchangeably. There were artifacts from running in the same scenes as Hunter S. Thompson and Willie Nelson; there were stuffed birds, bad books, sheet-covered couches, smoked spliffs, and piles and piles of mouse shit. Every inch of the house was lived in, and not just by people. You think millennials like plants? No. This man likes plants. The biggest monstera deliciosa I’ve ever seen, spanning some 10 feet wide and 15 feet tall. Draping cactuses, spider plants, massive aloes, and an ambitious hoya carnosa clawing its way to the top of the massive fireplace. But there were problems. I’m trying to be diplomatic saying the house was lived in. The wood by the door handles was dyed black from years of hand grease rubbing against it. The carpet in the upstairs was soiled almost everywhere with bat scat. Newspaper was stuffed between the massive logs to keep the wind out. There was cardboard taped over almost every window, blankets nailed over the others. Half the doors wouldn’t open. It was unnerving to touch the crusted light switches. It was early enough in the season of Covid-fear that touching anything felt like gambling. On our way back to our rental in the bigger neighboring town, we shared our awe and our no-ways, lamenting how long we’d have to wait for the little 1890s fixer upper. That night, I sent the video I took of the cabin to my parents. “Can you believe this?” I asked. And do you know what my dad said? “Great log construction.” After that, the cabin was all we could talk about. “Could you believe those plants?” “Did you see how big those logs were?” “I just googled Jack, look at this.” “Do you know what the insulating factor of logs is?” “How much did he say he was asking?” It came down to the plants. Amidst all the chaos in that house, the tender care of those decades-old plants sung the clearest. This wasn’t just a place Jack lived in, it was a place that wanted to be lived in. We made an offer the next day.

Jack had six months to clear out his 30 odd years of collecting, and the town had six months to speculate about the worrisome Californians moving to their high-altitude, high-risk town. The town itself is an old mining town. It rests in a high valley, surrounded by peaks over 13,000ft, and is over six hours from the nearest major airport. Five people died around this town in avalanches this past year. The dirt road into town is littered with avalanche fields, warning visitors to not stop when driving in. The other way out is a pass road, only drivable in the warm months, but you could skin out if it was dire. Most August days, the high is in the mid-60s. The valley is blanketed in wildflowers, and the aspens littering the mountainsides suggest a promising fall display. The town had a heyday, a low day, and now it’s a community of preppers, adventurers, appreciators, and “get all these idiots away from me”ers. We don’t know these people yet, but the ones we’ve met have the same like to live hard attitude we do. Heli-ski guides, ex-CIA agents, woodworkers, bakers, teachers, just a general can-do group of people. The kind of people that see a California license plate and peer with skepticism between the thin gap over their sunglasses and under their caps.

You might say I’m romanticizing the place, but the residents are worse. Like all good old-timers, they’re full of threats: “wait’ll you see the snow drifts,” “let’s see how you do outrunning an avalanche,” “good luck with the winds,” “the last Californians didn’t last a year.” God, what does that remind me of?

“Yeah, I loved it, but she’d never move there.”

With every taunt, my teeth ground more enamel, fingers rolling into a clench. And maybe Jack recognized this intensity, because on the day of closing, he hosted a gathering for us in the town's open space. He had us introduce ourselves to the skeptical locals, and I made my case in court, eyes narrowed and lips curled. “I’m the daughter of a smokejumper and wildlife biologist. I grew up watching the wind and the door. I’ve lived in big cities, small boats, and more than one cabin. I always take the stairs, I never use air-conditioning, and I’m a very good shot.” I’m just a girl, standing in front of a town, asking them to give her a fucking chance. Jack stepped forward to speak. “You know, I had my doubts about a couple Californians coming to look at my house. But these people? These are the nicest people you’re ever gonna meet.” And then I helped Jack set up his cot so he could spend his last night under the stars in the town that kept him young. Cooper ran circles with the other dogs. People brought homemade cocktails and bowls of dip and we felt welcomed. Even the mayor, a fellow writer, came and she struck up a conversation. “I hear you’ve got a little bit of a following on social media!” She teased. “I guess, nothing wild.” “Well I just wanted to let you know if you ever geotag this town, I’ll drag you out of it.” She grinned. This was a special place. And every visitor who couldn’t handle the realities of being here threatened the very wellbeing of the people who lived here. This town survives on a delicate balance. They source their own water, manage their own roads, and fervently protect the land and the people around them. Their stories about racing avalanches, snowmobiling in the dark of night to the doctor’s house, hunkering down in each other’s homes as the storms pass — these stories were bylaws. You can join when you’ve proven you’re ready to join. By their own projection, they are hardy and steadfast people, and when they see a Californian, they see something fleeting. Many years ago, I worked in the British Virgin Islands. The people born and raised there were called Belongers. At the customs office, the placards above the lines literally read, “If you belong, stand here” and “If you do not belong, stand here.” Whether or not we belong isn't up to the town council, and it's not up to these residents. It's up to years spent drifting my old Mustang in the snow on the way to school, up to Ben's months and months spent in the backcountry, up to my years of reading fire reports and assisting with evacuations, up to Ben's ability to read the landscape and the weather, up to my doggedness, his diligence, and our pathological love to do difficult things well. It’s up to us, to these old logs, and to this valley. Doesn't mean we'll belong, but it does mean we'll try. And for the record, the road is open in the winter. But do these sound like the kind of people who’d tell Google that? Next week, a tour of the house that we get to call ours — stuffed with newspaper, run by plants, and filled with mice. P.S. Here's where we get our mail.

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#newsletters #amwriting #relocation #home renovation #cabin life #cabin living #colorado #log cabin

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