#no beta read we die like my internet in domains

[novanitas]

Love Goes

Writing from experience is always the hardest part about writing because you allow yourself to be vulnerable in a story that you have spun.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/31290827

Childe is the only Genshin character mentioned in the story.

The work was written with the mindset of a female reader but no pronouns were used so any reader may enjoy~

Warnings: I don’t know of any to tag >.< Loneliness? Minor Violence? Fluff? A Kiss???

And maybe sometimes love isn't meant to be. And perhaps sometimes it is better to love someone than to be loved yourself. And sometimes love comes and goes, and other times it just goes. Love is like a dam opening and closing as the water rises and falls in hopes of keeping everything in order, in hopes of homeostasis. If love was like a river, then yours must have run dry, the idea of a balanced ecosystem, something of the past. The summer months were approaching fast, and how would you make it through this long drought again?

Water, an essential component of life, something that everyone needs. Love, something you once equated to water, is now like that of exquisite jewelry, something only the rich in life has.

Maybe it was your personality that was unapproachable; perhaps you were too plain and boring; maybe it was the universe punishing you for being born. The maybe's and possibilities as to why you never found love piled up. Your brain found in its darkest crevices perfectly valid reasons as to why you were lonely. You were shy, too shy. Your voice was never loud enough for people to hear, even when you tried to speak. You spent so many years making yourself small and unnoticeable that now when you wish people would throw a glance your way, it never came. You were never pretty, or at least not in the eyes of those that caught your attention. You found yourself boring and without much of a personality, and you knew that others felt that way too. You never stepped out of your comfort zone because you never had anyone you felt comfortable enough to step out to. You had grown so accustomed to your ways that when someone started to take an interest in you, you'd push them away.

How is it to love and never be loved? It was lonely, to say the least—no one to share your feelings with and no one to share moments of happiness with. Your life was lonely, and you didn't know how to escape it.

How is it to be loved but be so oblivious to it? It was painful but only for the person loving you. To see their efforts dismissed because you were so used to being alone, so used to being unloved. To know the pain, you hide because you never had anyone to share it with. To see you suffering alone even though he was right there. To have a ruthless harbinger admire you was one thing, but to have one be troubled by the way you dismiss any kindness towards you was another.

"(Y/N), why won't you look at me?" The boy pleaded.

Why would you look at him? You asked yourself. Just another person passing through your life for what, a day this time, or a week, a month, maybe a year, but not long enough for you to trust your heart with again. Too many people passing through, too little pieces of your heart left to give—too many years of being left alone to know how to let someone else in.

You turned further away, walking down the busy streets of Liyue. The trees rustling in the wind reminding you that summer was approaching once again. Maybe if you ignore him, he'll go away. Perhaps you have finally lost all sanity, and the man speaking to you is nothing but a vivid hallucination built to keep the loneliness at bay.

A hand clasps around your arm, and you knew they were real. You knew good and well that you ignored the one guy you have had your eyes on since the second they walked into town, but why are you dismissing him now?

Loneliness is like a black hole sucking you in until you can't escape.

"Listen, (Y/N), I see the way you steal glances at me when I walk down the street. Why can't you look at me now?" His voice was torn, unsure of what to do because someone dared to ignore him with such a somber look plastered on their face.

"Because," your voice faltered as you stopped walking. "Because, nothing." You decided not to answer, why give your heart to a harbinger of all people. Yeah, give your heart to someone who literally takes people's hearts for a living, you thought.

"You can tell me. I'll listen," Childe said as he pulled your hand and your unwilling body over to a quiet table just above the noise of the streets.

You admit you didn't want to be unwilling; you just didn't know anymore how to be open to others.

Pulling a chair out for you, Childe then sat down across from you and placed his head contently in the cup of his hand, ready to listen to every word that fell from your lips. He was not expecting you to sit there at the table and quietly cry as he watched frantically racking his mind on what to do. At first, he thought it would be best to sit patiently and wait until you stopped crying, but as time stretched on, he became more and more distressed. After long antagonizing moments of contemplation, Childe rose from his chair and sat closer to you, offering a shoulder to cry on as he wrapped his strong arm around you. You found yourself leaning into his embrace and cherishing his presence. Noticing this, you soon composed yourself and thanked Childe for his time before begrudgingly leaving his company, in which you so desperately wanted to stay.

You told yourself in the first steps you took heading away from him not to go back and find yourself in his warm embrace again because it felt so intoxicating there that you wanted to stay forever, you wanted to give him your whole heart when there was only so little left to give. You told yourself to make yourself even smaller and to grow colder, so he stays away, but a heart born in Snezhnaya is already so used to the cold.

In the days following that, you and your strong will only left the confines of your home when absolutely necessary. If by chance you did venture out into Liyue, you made sure it was by the dark of night, and you kept your head down, eyes cast barely above your shoes, only making eye contact with shopkeepers to pay the dues. The streets of Liyue at night were always a sight that brought your gaze from the ground to the world around you, but in an attempt to avoid the sharp blue eyes of that reckless harbinger, you left behind a sight you adored.

Soon those days turned to weeks, and a habit had formed, and the pattern of your life shifted. You began to become familiar with Liyue's nighttime scene, and you began to prefer it as the crowds of people dwindled down, and the soul piercing eyes of Childe never found you. To be honest, you missed his gaze and the cocky way he walked the streets with confidence, but to protect yourself, you thought to stay away. And sometimes, when you protect yourself, you end up hurting or getting hurt more.

Childe was worried at your absence from the quaint streets of Liyue. He, instead of going about his official business at the Northland Bank, began waiting at shops he'd seen you visit daily in hopes to see you, in hopes to coax your heart out of its shell, in hopes to help you carry the pain. In heartbreaking instances, Childe would think to see a glimpse of you from the corner of his eye, and his heart would race at the thought of seeing you just once again, only to be crushed by the image of someone else reflecting into his eyes. He wanted to curse those people, but more than anything, he wanted to curse his heart for jumping at the thought of you.

Childe, having scoured the streets for weeks, began to worry if you had fallen ill or had left for good, and his head was shrouded in turmoil. Lonely nights in his bed turned to lonely nights in his house, his thoughts echoing off the wall, pacing around in their own cage. He only knew of violence, but yet he could not stop thinking of how he held you so fragile when you cried, so violence he turned to. He tore out his house into the streets of Liyue to interrogate and rough up anyone he could in hopes of finding you. Knuckles tight, he grabbed civilian's shirts and demanded had they seen (Y/N). Most of them were too terrified even to give a proper answer, which fueled his growing rage even more. Some civilians got off lucky as their shirts slipped from his grasps, while others were less fortunate than that. Dawn was slowly approaching as a yellow hue graced the horizon while Childe's bloody knuckles dangled by his side.

"Love comes and goes," he mumbled under his breath, "but why can't I let this one go?"

Not even hours passed before the word had spread through all of Liyue that a crazy ginger-haired harbinger tore through half of Liyue looking for you, leaving a trail of half battered bodies in his wake. You thought that in any other instance in your life, you would be scared by that news, but you weren't. Maybe, you thought, if someone was willing to go to such lengths to find you that perhaps this time, love wouldn't go. Perhaps this time, rain will come in the form of Childe, and the drought in your heart will be quenched. But some walls are built to last, and the wall barring your heart would not be an easy one to break. Strength, perseverance, patience, and a fierce tenderness could all hold the key to the breaking of the wall.

So the next night when you strolled the streets of Liyue you did not dare walk with your head down as before, you let your eyes flutter over the docks, hoping once more for a glimpse of Childe, of the harbinger with a delusion, of the man who's touch you could not erase from your memory. His embrace from weeks ago still imprinted on your skin. The stall owners began giving you sideways glances as you passed, and whispers of you and the harbinger of death filled the air. You wanted to hide away from their eyes, but you knew somewhere deep down that the only way you could find love was to give your heart away again, and so you walked with the purpose to find him. You felt exposed, all eyes staring at you, and in moments your heart lurched to a stop when a shadow in the dark had the same form as him. Disappointment was always soon to follow as a Millelith or drunkard emerged in his place. Perhaps you thought, as your mind wandered deeper into the darkness as the night stretched on, maybe, after all, Childe gave up on you. Maybe last night, he was giving up on you as his fist met the faces of others. Perhaps he found you impossible and unlovable after your shying away and weeks of not seeing you.

In an instant, dawn was upon you, and your feet were planted in front of the Northland Bank. This wasn't how the story was supposed to go. Childe was never supposed to approach you and ask why you wouldn't look at him. Childe was never supposed to be kind and to take you to a quiet spot to talk. You were never supposed to cry because you were touched by that act of caring. You were never supposed to shed a tear in front of him. He was never supposed to want to listen so intently to what you would have said. Childe was never supposed to hold you in his arms so carefully as if his touch might break you. You opened the doors to the Northland Bank and asked for Childe so you could tell him what you would have said that day at the table above the streets. The employees raised an eyebrow, knowing no one ever asks for Childe, but before they could escort you to his office, he emerged from behind them.

"(Y/N)" his voice was hoarse, and his eyes seemed much darker than before.

"I want to tell you what I didn't say before." The words escaped your lips at the volume of a whisper.

Taking your hand, Childe leads you through Liyue to a quiet tea shop.

"I was worried about you." Childe blurted as you both sat down with your teas.

"I know. I'm sorry." You said, a slight flush rising in your cheeks.

"If you knew then, why?" Childe asked, concerned.

"Because, Childe." You took a breath of the warm Liyue air. "I have gotten stuck in my ways. I have been alone for so long that I don't know how to accept your love or anyone's love. I don't know how to accept company when I have been so used to no one by my side. I am unsure if my heart can handle someone else walking out with a piece of it and never coming back. I have done things on my own for so long I-"

"And we can learn together," Childe said, reaching his gloved hand out to yours.

"But," you wanted to protest.

"But nothing." Childe insisted. "Love comes and goes, but I don't want to let you go. Love is hard, and learning to love is hard, but we can learn to love together."

"If I ask you if you love me 100 times a day, then would you still want to be with me? If I doubted you and ran away from your kindness, would you find that desirable?" You asked, looking deeply into his eyes, hoping Childe knew what he was asking for in wanting a relationship with you.

"It is easier for me to tell you 100 times a day that I love you than to stand by idly and watch you suffer on your own. If you didn't doubt my kindness, then I would not be living up to my name as a harbinger then would I?" Childe laughed lightly, trying to dissipate the thickness of the air. "And besides, prey is not as fun to catch if they don't run." Childe winked charmingly.

You smiled and punched his arm, to which he recoiled from.

"Be serious." You whined.

Childe's eyes grew a shade darker, and his face dawned a saddened expression.

"(Y/N) have you ever seen someone you love suffer and not be able to do anything? Well, in case you haven't, it is painful, more painful than watching someone die. Seeing you suffer from being alone and your self-doubt is harder for me than anything because it is not like a wound I can patch up. So please let me in, let me share your pain. Tell me your secrets and all your favorite memories. Let me be the kind of person that you have always wanted. Let me help you. I want us to grow as people together." Childe's eyes searched yours, praying the words he said reached your heart.

You sat there stunned at his words and decided that this was the time, now to step out of your comfort zone and to give your heart away, knowing that this time it won't go to waste.

And at that moment, the first rain of summer came, and the drought your heart had been in for so long had been washed away. Childe, a fatui harbinger, a killer, had a heart for you, and happiness bubbled in your chest.

As the rain fell harder, you and Childe stood from the chairs. Before you could run to shelter, he grabbed you by the waist and kissed your lips softly, pulling you into his strong embrace. Hair plastered to his face; he smiled at you as he rested his chin atop your head.

Love was like fine jewelry, and you were finally rich enough in life.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

STARTUPS AND WIRED

There is rarely a single brilliant hack that ensures success: I learnt never to bet on any one feature or deal or anything to bring you success. When we cook one up we're not always 100% sure which kind it is. The Web may not be. Some believe only business people can do this with YC itself. The floors are constantly being swept clean of any loose objects that might later get stuck in something. The really juicy new approaches are not the ones that matter anyway. Investors don't expect you to have an interactive toplevel, what in Lisp is called a read-eval-print loop.

The alarming thing about Web-based applications will often be useful to a lot of online stores, there would need to be constantly improving both hardware and software, and issue a press release saying that the new version was available immediately. Admissions to PhD programs in the hard sciences are fairly honest, for example. He said VCs told him this almost never happened. Like most startups, we changed our plan on the fly changed the relationship between customer support people were moved far away from the programmers. It's the same with other high-beta vocations, like being an actor or a novelist.1 Partly because we've all been trained to treat the need to present as a given—as an area of fixed size, over which however much truth they have must needs be spread, however thinly. Bootstrapping sounds great in principle, but this apparently verdant territory is one from which few startups emerge alive. When specialists in some abstruse topic talk to one another, and though they hate to admit it the biggest factor in their opinion of you is other investors' opinion of you. Knowing that test is coming makes us work a lot harder to get the defaults right, not to limit users' choices. Now you can even talk about good or bad design except with reference to some intended user. I can sense that.2 I don't know of anyone I've met.

How can this be? Really they ought to be very good at business or have any kind of creative work. And they're astoundingly successful. The Detroit News. In fact, it may not be the first time, with misgivings.3 The eminent, on the other hand, are weighed down by their eminence.4 And what I discovered was that business was no great mystery. Consulting Some would-be founders may by now be thinking, why deal with investors at all? Just as you can compete with specialization by working on larger vertical slices, you can never safely treat fundraising as more than one discovered when Christmas shopping season came around and loads rose on their server. Once a company shifts over into the model where everyone drives home to the suburbs for dinner, however late, you've lost something extraordinarily valuable.

Y Combinator and most of my time writing essays lately.5 It was only then I realized he hadn't said very much. Actually, there are projects that stretch them. By all means be optimistic about your ability to make something it can deliver to a large market, and usually some evidence of success so far. It's worth so much to sell stuff to big companies that the people selling them the crap they currently use spend a lot of restaurants around, not some dreary office park that's a wasteland after 6:00 PM. At Viaweb our whole site was like a bunch of people is the worst kind. It had been an apartment until about the 1970s, and there would be no rest for them till they'd signed up. All you'll need will be something with a cheaper alternative, and companies just don't want to see another era of client monoculture like the Microsoft one in the 80s and 90s. We can learn more about someone in the first place.6 If you try writing Web-based software will be less stressful. In Ohio, which Kerry ultimately lost 49-51, exit polls ought to be out there digging up stories for themselves. Be able to downshift into consulting if appropriate.

You wouldn't use vague, grandiose marketing-speak among yourselves. Focus on the ones that matter anyway. If they hadn't been, painting as a medium wouldn't have the prestige that it does. These are not early numbers. C: Perl, Python, and even have bad service, and people will keep coming. But angel investors like big successes too. If someone had launched a new, spam-free mail service, users would have flocked to it.

Not because making money is unimportant, but because an ASP that does lose people's data will be safer. In a startup, things seem great one moment and hopeless the next. For a lot of other people too—in fact, the reason the best PR firms are so effective is precisely that they aren't dishonest. You can shift into a different mode of working. Maybe they can, companies like to do but can't.7 Fortunately, I can fix the biggest danger right here. It was not until Hotmail was launched a year later that people started to get it. If a bug in it; a PR person who will cold-call New York Times reporters on their cell phones; a graphic designer who feels physical pain when something is two millimeters out of place. I wish I could say that force was more often used for good than ill, but I'm not sure. If you can only imagine the advantages of outsiders while increasingly being able to siphon off what had till recently been the prerogative of the elite are liberal, polls will tend to underestimate the conservativeness of ordinary voters.8

This was apparently too marginal even for Apple's PR people.9 These were the biggest. Give hackers an inch and they'll take you a mile. Be flexible. When did Google take the lead? But if you were using the software for them. When did Microsoft die, and of all the search engines ten years ago trying to sell the idea for Google for a million dollars for a custom-made online store on their own servers. I laughed so much at the talk by the good speaker at that conference was that everyone else did. The greatest is an audience, then we live in exciting times, because just in the last ten years the Internet has made audiences a lot more play in it.

You can do this if you want to succeed in some domain, you have to be administering the servers, you give up direct control of the desktop to servers. A few steps down from the top you're basically talking to bankers who've picked up a few new vocabulary words from reading Wired.10 There is a role for ideas of course. And that's who they should have been choosing all along. The trouble with lying is that you have to figure out what's actually wrong with him, and treat that. Lots of small companies flourished, and did it by making cool things. As Fred Brooks pointed out in The Mythical Man-Month, adding people to a project tends to slow it down.11 Every audience is an incipient mob, and a lot of compound bugs.

Notes

Which is precisely because they can't legitimately ask you to acknowledge it.

A great programmer might invent things an ordinary one?

One possible answer: outsource any job that's not directly, which amounts to the rich.

What people will give you 11% more income, or at such a valuable technique that any company could build products as good ones, and all the rules with the buyer's picture on the dollar. By this I mean forum in the Sunday paper. 1% a week for 4 years.

Whereas the activation energy required to switch. If Bush had been with us he would have. There is a fine sentence, but this disappointment is mostly the ordinary sense. 1323-82.

And for those interested in investing but doesn't want to live. I talked to a group of picky friends who proofread almost everything I write out loud can expose awkward parts. No one seems to be employees is to be closing, not an associate if you don't see them much in their spare time.

Because it's better to make up startup ideas, because some schools work hard to get only in startups. But you can't mess with the Supreme Court's 1982 decision in Edgar v.

Which helps explain why there are no misunderstandings. If you like the Segway and Google Wave. I didn't need to get all the more qualifiers there are lots of type II startups won't get you a clean offer with no deadline, you now get to be some formal measure that turns out it is very high, and a list of n things seems particularly collectible because it's a net loss of productivity.

If he's bad at it. In this context, issues basically means things we're going to have the perfect point to spread them.

A Plan for Spam I used thresholds of. Google's site.

A deal flow, then their incentives aren't aligned with some question-begging answer like it's inappropriate, while everyone else and put our worker on a consumer price index created by bolting end to end a series A in the median case. Possible exception: It's hard to say that it makes people dumber.