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chefjarredjarred · 4 years ago

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Anxiety. (excerpt)

People. “They're the worst,” Jerry once concurred with Elaine. And they are.

So I didn't really want a job as a verification specialist for a background check company, making a hundred phone calls a day to anywhere in the country, but there was a time when it was a job I needed; it was remote so I could do it from my living room, it supplemented my main income from cooking and barbacking, and I was allowed to adjust my own schedule around that other work and my Tuesday morning therapy sessions.

But Jesus Christ, the people: the combative, the confused, the cavalier, the crotchety; the mousy, the crazy, the stupid, the lazy; the disgruntled, the bitter, the hateful, the bossy; the scammers, the liars, the paranoid; the unintelligible, or, through no fault of their own, the foreign; the mouth breathers, the assholes; the fast food workers, who are always a grab bag. I got them all, every day. And just one nice old lady from Florida, Ms. Charlene.

I got the job in part by cherry-picking some of my old chef experience and molding it all up into a wad of passable bullshit in the interview. Not lies, you know, just bullshit. I sold the personal importance of always speaking concisely and effectively, and of remaining cool and courteous and logical even when being angrily berated by the most ignorant, disrespectful know-nothings. Okay, so that one tiny lie. I made no mention of smashing saucers, slinging sheet pans, or every chef's favorite, smiting servers. (But come on, FOH, y'all know when you're asking for it.) I gave no indication that my rage, anxiety, and feelings of undeserved victimhood and exhaustion were a nest of coiled snakes, something every person who has ever worked in a kitchen around me could sense. Do your job, leave the attitude outside the kitchen doors, and speak only of pith and pertinence during service. Don't fuck with me, don't get fanged.

A bartender I worked with for years once called me unapproachable. It was in the same breath that she called me a dick, proving that the robotic personality of feigned professionalism and phony positivity (every company has their Stepford Wives, don't they?) on which she prided herself—loathed by so many in the restaurant—could be cracked, and I loved that I had been the one to do it. But the part about being a dick wasn't a bold quotable. My being unapproachable became a favorite running joke for years, perverted and perpetuated by me. Y'all think I'm unapproachable? I am. Fuck off.

But that's truncated, for effect and time. Fuck off, I have a job to do, is the real, full statement, and a linchpin tenet of my style of cheffing. I don't need loud voices, loud noises, disrespect, emotional clouding, confusion, excuses, etc., or that irritable anxiety snake could be disturbed. “Just the facts, ma'am.” There's just no time for the extraneous.

Don't disrupt the flow of food.

That's the principle I emphasized in the interview, just folded into the bullshit wad that made it applicable to phoning idiotic, ornery strangers—and Ms. Charlene. Obviously, I had to omit the venom, violence, viciousness, the vitriol. There was already a tiny stumble in there when the interviewer asked if I would describe myself as an introvert, and I, being honest to a fault at the most inappropriate moments, confessed that I would.

“You do know what this job is, right?”

I actually didn't, right up until about two seconds before that question, but I recovered gracefully, explaining some crap about being able to turn on the smiles and pleasantries when I meant business, something like that.

Fake smiles. Ugh. God dammit. I actively campaign against them. A fake smile is the opposite of Fuck off, of the pith and pertinence, the order and efficiency I expected, of just the facts. It's a capitulation, a white flag.

You know what I absolutely hate more than people? The expectation that I'm obligated to give them a fake smile. It's a banner that says you're willing to accept the extraneous, the unexpected, that whatever they are about to say and the way they will say it has some compelling power over you, and that you have all the time in the world to stand there and graciously let it be unloaded onto you. That your anxiety is not there and not real.

That you are approachable.

Fake smiles are blood in the water. That's right, when it goes from snakes to sharks.

“What we always say here is 'Smile and dial!'”

It was a virtual interview, and he couldn't see or hear my feet double-kick-drumming the floor. But what he did hear and what I couldn't believe was the fake laugh I forced through my fake smile. Jesus, Jarred, you're escalating? Allowance is support. “Sure, sure,” I said, as if I were a lifelong brown-noser. You're a disgrace.

“If you can run a kitchen, I have no doubt that you can do this.”

I didn't either. That's misinformation, that anxiety is simply fear. I wasn't afraid I would fail (literally anyone, barring anxiety, can be a verification “specialist”). In fact, I was totally confident I could succeed...theoretically. He said it: If I could run a kitchen, I could do this. The things that worried me were the scheduling, sleeping, caffeinating, eating, speaking, putting on my fake personality with my fake smile, and juggling and maintaining it all every day without falter, without letting on that there was any internal difficulty. I worried not about my actual job performance, but how I might struggle to simultaneously perform and hide my character flaws, i.e. the stuff that I left hanging out in the open when I was a chef. Does that make any sense?

Anxiety, not fear.

So the job was simple, but not easy, and there was a lot to make an anxious person anxious: the people, of course; the never-ending flood of calls; the quick navigating of the system when someone backpedaled or said something inaccurate or swung their mood in an instant; the software glitches; the hold music. Every second of the workday, even your coffee-caused poop break, was timed and factored in to your production average. You were judged and graded by making a ton of calls and/or closing as many cases as you could, which sounds fine, but is actually decided by chance more than some mathematical guarantee. That angered me the most, watching my closes and “touches” tabulated throughout the day, working against each other, my percentage of success being stretched thinner and thinner as I piled up calls that became mere touches rather than closes. It was the opposite of what we really wanted, and the secret little opposite of what we were trained to believe. The pessimist in me knew that the given goals were just out of reach, of course, so we would unknowingly meet the real goals and feel worthless at the end of the day, like we hadn't done enough. The realist in me hated the pretending that we had any control over it. The fatalist in me knew that it didn't matter, but could not force the crippled, anxious existentialist in me to just shut the fuck up.

...Oh, there is no optimist in here, if you were waiting for it.

I knew the fatalist was right after a sweet, timid childcare worker put me on hold to find something useful for me, which would only be a different number or a different person or, if life were easy, the name of a recognized third party verification website. This was 10:40 in the morning, in my first hour of the workday that was already a little too unfruitful. I watched the timer tick away, and when she returned, she had found...an unrecognized third party verification website. That meant I had to type a message into our Teams chat to request a supervisor's review and approval to put the name of the website in the little box and move to the next call.

Eight minutes had now passed as I waited for an answer. I had let the worker, Taylor, hang up already so she could get her eyes back on what wild heathens she may have had under her watch. It was a personal rule of mine to never hold restaurant workers or childcare workers hostage on the phone, because their work was more important than mine. I thought about the time my mom came to pick me up from one of these daycare facilities, walking in at the same time as another little boy's father, together to catch the perfect and precise moment that I socked that boy right across his jaw with full force, superhero super-spinning into that punch in defiance of his superior strength and grip of my head as he had tried to slam my skull into a wooden shelf for a second time. We were bloody, snotty, and sweaty in the throes of killer instinct, but I still caught the looks of horror on our parents' faces. Why the fistfight happened, I don't remember, but how? Well, because someone who was supposed to be paying attention, wasn't. Kids will go feral and push the boulder on Piggy as soon as your back is turned. I let Taylor off the phone for that reason. I waited for a supervisor's response in the chat, watching the seconds count on and that first hour, and thus the rest of my day and any hope of average achievement, drift away from me. They told me the site was no good and I needed to call poor Taylor back and try again. I sighed, copied the number and clicked the button, explained to her what was happening, and with real politeness she placed me, again, on hold. She came back with a phone number but the same uncertainty.

But in the chat, a supervisor had offered another phone number, different from what I was now taking down on the call. I was urged to try that one instead, so I let Taylor go back to the children a final time, and made my third phone call of the case. An automated message finally pointed me to a recognized third party verification website, and gave the particular employer code needed to access it. The anxiety snake and the rage snake were waking and knotted. I clicked the Other Automated Method button...and the system skipped on to complete the case, without letting me input the website or the code. “No, hell no.” I backed up and tried again. Same result, the skip. I went back to the chat and explained, and typed “Can someone please help me before my head explodes” with no punctuation.

A supervisor called me, and I shared my screen with her. “Let's see what happ—Oh, the client put it on hold, so just exit. It doesn't matter.”

It doesn't matter.

11:01. One close, 13 touches. I was white hot.

The anxiety, the rage, the pessimism, realism, fatalism, the whole nest of snakes was awake and wiggling, tossing, tangling themselves up like a... Well, you know. Like a rubber-band ball. I violently ripped the headset off of me, pushing breath through my teeth like the snarling little Jarred who punched that stupid kid in the mouth in the daycare brawl. I thought about that famed image of the snake eating its tail, whatever it's called. I thought about quitting. I thought about how two days before, my therapist and I had tried to come up with a suitable and available grounding technique I could try to prevent this exact, inevitable moment, this kind of anxiety attack. I thought about telling her how I thought that I was failing at everything. You're a disappoi— Shut the fuck up, Jarred—

It doesn't matter? I thought about that, that every moment of the day was part of the calculation of my performance grade for something ultimately shrugged off. That I spent 20 fucking minutes wasting my fucking time to get something that doesn't fucking matter but earns for me a judgment as if it does fucking matter.

But I thought about how I needed that little bit of extra money, and the other reasons for seeking and taking the job. Breathe, Jarred.

And that was not an isolated incident. Every day I fought for the energy and will to tether myself with the headset, log in, and hear the first ring. It came immediately, every single morning. I'd close my eyes and siiiigh through that first ring, just before being snatched along and pummeled by the frenzy.

I tried earnestly the smile-and-dial one time. I felt like Nicolas Cage in one of those especially wacky scenes of Face/Off. A total psycho, unhinged.

The calls were recorded and scrutinized, for quality and legality, and a handful a month were sent back to me to review whatever I had done wrong, or what I could do better.

Ah, yes. So there was another itchy, irritating thread of anxiety even on the less violent days.

Do you ever hear your own recorded voice and you hate yourself and wish you had never been born? Yeah, me too. So I only ever listened to one call and that was enough of that. I didn't want to hear myself. That voice wasn't mine, it was some cartoon-like, nasally Billy Bob Thornton's voice, reverberating somewhere way up high in the sinuses.

A hundred calls a day is a lot of talking. I began obsessing over how I pronounce—among many other things—the number four. There were fours everywhere, embedded, like chocolate chips in cookie dough, throughout almost every case number, and in our callback number I had to recite on dozens of voicemails per day. I wondered if I could trust my own ears in hearing the way I would say it, or if in reality I sounded like I was four. Fohwuh. Every day I ran this mental gamut of self-critique and insult, concentrating insanely on the most minute and deliberate flicks and curls of my tongue and lips. Any word becomes weirdly unnatural when you pay such specific attention to it. But I put so much (too much) effort into working on a competent phone voice not only so I wouldn't sound like a jackass, but so I could be efficient in my work and thus keep up with the production quota. I needed 20 touches an hour, not 13, so I needed people to understand me so I could get in, get out, and get on the next call. My strategy was to try and emulate the radio voice of Christopher Kimball—polite, proper, pronounced, professional. In my dirty pajamas, sitting on a lumpy pillow on a hand-me-down office chair as it was clawed to pieces by my screaming cats, I wanted to sound like I was wearing a bow tie. Like I was in a real office without cats, with a real college degree framed proudly on the wall. Polished and prepared.

It's hard work, if you can imagine. I'm not a talker. I don't like strangers. They're unpredictable. Any unexpected wrench in the routine could prove how fragile the facade is, that I'm actually a wobbly stack of quivering, anxious gremlins pretending to be a presentable person in, I guess, an imaginary bow tie.

It's hard work, if you'll let me say that again. But I thought I was doing pretty well. I hadn't cussed anyone out and I hadn't hurled the computer through the window, at least.

Then one day I called an office in Shelby, North Carolina. A woman answered, lazily, and I stated my reason for calling. She just said, “Hold on,” dismissively, with no practiced professionalism whatsoever. There's a lot of that out there. A rare treat then it was when I spoke with anyone trying to exude the same level of maturity as I, during business hours. My Kimball voice was for your benefit, lady. You didn't care. I know this because instead of really putting me on hold, instead of pressing a button to leave me in that telephonic waiting area listening to one of those overused cheap songs, like the one with the incessant MIDI claps that makes my toes tense and my teeth clench and jarringly reminds me that the anxiety is always bang-bang-banging at the door of the closet I locked it in, instead of just conducting two seconds of mundane business like a normal goddamn person, this woman just set the phone down on her desk and, evidently sickened beyond composure, blurted to her coworker, “God, I hate when someone clears their throat while I'm on the phone with them.” I did?

There I was, exposed, a bunch of phlegmy gremlins, collapsing and scrambling. Instantly I remembered the time my dad and stepmom asked me if I was on some kind of drug, because I cleared my throat “a lot.” Yeah, I don't know what they were talking about either, but apparently this involuntary habit is remarkably frequent. And a hundred calls a day I was doing this. How many of these people find me disgusting, inhuman, or think I'm on drugs? How about people in everyday life? Do my friends mock me? Who taught you how to function, Jarred? My mind spiraled, the snakes squirmed and seethed.

The rest of the phone call was stiff and clumsy, tears welling like a porn star's while I silently packed down the coughs and chokes congesting behind whatever ball of bile bottlenecking at the back of my throat, because I should die right on the living room carpet, sacrificial and blue, lest I irk this absolute cuntbag's social sensitivities, gurgling grotesque and oozing disease.

But am I crazy or...ahem...is that just trivially fucking inoffensive? If I had frog squatted on my desk and—“Verify this, bitch!”—farted into a metal basin full of Cracker Barrel gravy, then sure, be mad. Slam the phone down. Say to the guy by the copier, “Why me?!” and vow to get me fired. But if a natural, nonchalant throat-clearing infuriates you enough to comment on it, you're honestly just an asshole. It's not a frog squat gravy fart, it's not a rude personal affront. It's somewhere way below open mouth chewing, there around unfortunate but necessary nose blowing. I'm gross, you're gross, we're all gross. Get over it, and then, Fuck off, I have a job to do.

I did briefly wonder if maybe she's an anxious person too, a gremlin, maybe her facade is as fragile as mine, but I don't think so, because her attitude when she answered my call had already indicated to me that she never dressed up in a fake bow tie. She thinks she's a normal person: reckless, careless, unprofessional. No phone tone, no Kimball timbre. And because of that, she gave me another thing to worry about, to nag at me, something uncontrollable that I'd be trying to temper, something unconsciously mechanical now made noticeable and manual and clumsy. Thanks.

I was just worried about my goofy voice.

If you're thinking that it's all just a little silly and ridiculously minuscule, then congratulations, you're one of those “normal” people, like Ms. Shelby North Carolina. You make our lives worse.

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irarelypostanything · 4 years ago

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Software engineers make a lot of money, but…

The average annual salary for an American software engineer is $86,000; the average annual salary for an American is $48,000. The above figure may be seriously skewed by Techlead, who makes a million dollars every time he comments on YouTube, and Silicon Valley, where it costs $3000 a week to live in a broom closet...but those are the statistics. So, compared to the average, software engineers make a lot of money.

Is that a lot, when you account for the amount of money it costs to become a software engineer? This is where things get interesting. Coding bootcamps are springing up, and some are good and some are borderline scams. Colleges themselves tend to be incredibly expensive, so the argument becomes more of a “computer science pays better than most majors” than a “computer science is worth it,” in my opinion...though actually, if you work out the math, student loans might be worth it if you major in computer science, MAYBE. Another interesting thing is comparing it to other majors, in a cost-benefit sort of way. Do doctors make more than software engineers? On average, definitely. Do you have to pay more for school to be a doctor? Probably...maybe…

This post wasn’t supposed to be strictly economic, but I still think about this from time to time. College for me is over - the question isn’t “Should I have majored in computer science?”, but “should we keep encouraging anyone and everyone to major in computer science?” There’s been a massive push to get more people into computer science. Anyone who’s watched “What most schools don’t teach” knows exactly what I’m talking about.

And it’s probably good, but what I take issue with is when money becomes the opening statement. I saw some people burn out of computer science in college - not that many, I’ll be honest (some of our classes weren’t tough, but we were Davis...not Berkeley), but some. One commenter on Piazza/Facebook complained that people come into computer science thinking it’s an easy route to money, when in reality it’s as rigorous as other fields of engineering and math. I think Cal Newport said it best: If you know in your heart that you’re in this major because YOU CHOSE IT, yourself, you’ll find the motivation to keep going. If someone chose it for you, then you might burn out.

Actually, I don’t even remember if he was talking about computer science. Maybe it was a general statement, or something crazy like astrophysics.

I knew a math major in my dorm. She loved math as both a hobby and a career - that alone should give you pause, and I don’t know why she never saw the campus therapist, but let me continue - and she decided to take on a little coding for a possible minor. I wrote out a study guide (admittedly irrelevant because the class changed) for her and tried to make sure she stayed motivated. For her, as it turned out, this was all a non-issue. She told me she loved it. It was her first time coding, coding was hard, and frustrating, and took forever, and she absolutely loved it.

In the actual field, we had an intern whom I shall leave unnamed. To be honest, working with him was pretty frustrating in some respects, or at least stressful. We planned out his task and vision. We knew his experience level, or his supposed experience level, and so we plotted out exactly when we expected each milestone to be completed. I was prepared to give him a better experience than what I had - just empathy, and motivation, and making sure he had the resources he needed.

Then he started, he came up to speed in a day, and he blew each task out of the water within days. Half-way through his internship and he was done with everything we thought he would complete, and then some. He apparently hadn’t worked with any of our various technologies before, but he picked up on each one, excelled, asked tons of questions, and then dominated. After learning our system through some walkthroughs on day one, he barely needed any sort of help at all. I think the best parting gift I gave him was leetcode frequencies, because God forbid a software engineer of that potential ever pay $14 a month for Leetcode premium.

So...for some people...there’s no need to motivate. They’d probably be engineers even if engineers were paid average salaries, and they’d probably do this even if it were just a hobby. Is software engineering for everyone, though? What about people like me, who have brains that were probably better suited to major in something like English, or history?

Well...they can be, I believe. I think we get wrapped up in this idea that software engineers, like my insane dorm mate, have to love coding so much that they relish the opportunity to sort names in C. But there’s a lot more in coding than just sorting names in C. There’s also C++, and then there’s this thing called Java, and then there’s that one language everyone swears will be the future.

We start people with C, and a lot of normal people like myself look at it and think, “Wow, this is confusing and boring as hell.” Then it kind of grows on them when they realize how far they’ve come, but for some people it doesn’t. They stick around for C++, maybe for the intellectual challenge, and they learn data structures. Then comes all the extraordinarily useful theory, and algorithms that will definitely come up in extremely relevant interviews, and if you get to the very end of your college career without failing (since it’s a ladder) you might just get to take the boring stuff like hacking, graphics, AI, bioinformatics, and that one class where you actually build an app for a real company or campus client.

And we sure as hell don’t start people off with frontend, where they can reap the benefits of their efforts in days instead of weeks. I actually see why this part makes more sense, but...there’s a lot of coding out there. Even if you realize you despise most coding, there’s a whole world of UI/UX that...I admittedly have not seen in a while because we’re back in middleware.

But then in middleware, there’s that whole world of stock trading, where every nanosecond matters, and books explaining why every nanosecond matters, and infrastructure with applications that...that…

...there’s a lot to coding, and there’s also money. But you can make money doing anything.

#software engineering

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cockbiteproductions · 4 years ago

Note

multiples of 8, except in the misc section. all even numbers for the misc section

200: My crush’s name is: well well well this question again. you’re not getting anything out of me!!! they fucking use this website!!!

192: I am allergic to: nothing. but i found out like yesterday not everyone gets dermatographia and im kinda annoyed. what do you mean your skin doesnt get red and puffy the moment you touch it......

184: Xbox or ps3: xbox solely because of ah

176: Last YouTube video watched: my watch history says this, which is a scene from a show called billions. this scene in particular is about my favorite character asking about their introduction scene with their former mentor figure that they quickly outranked and asking why they were picked for the internship that lead them down this [entire shitpath].

168: Luck: [long sigh]. [puts on clown makeup].

[obi wan voice] im my experience there’s no such thing as luck.

[rian voice] luck? there’s probability plausibility and actuality. luck is superstition. luck is lazy math. [winston voice] that’s what i always say.

160: Soul mates: again souls arent real..... nor do i believe that people are “meant for each other” on any sort of cosmic/larger level. you are more compatible with people based on your upbringing and your interests and your values and those are adaptable over time though some people are so different that they will never get along and other people match/complement each other incredibly well.

152: Phone or Online: lmaoooo this questionnaire once again showing its age. throwback to when these things weren’t synonymous. online for sure. what am i gonna do with a phone? talk to someone with my fucking voice? i think not.

144: Oranges or Apples: to eat by themselves? probably apples since they are easier and less of a mess. and apples are more consistently better than oranges. oranges, it’s easy to get a batch that just sucks. juiced? probably orange. i love me some fuckin orange juice. but i like apple cider more than orange juice.

136: Hillary or Obama: lmaoooo again.. the age of this. 2008 or 2012. going to guess 2008. obama but not like. enthusiastically. while he was certainly better than [what we got going on now] he still bombed the hell outta some countries......

128: Manicure or Pedicure: ive never had either but i would probably be more comfortable with a manicure. people touching my feet would make me ticklish.

120: Gay Marriage: the only type that should be allowed. sorry straights youre no longer allowed to get married. /s obviously.

112: Facebook: oh BOY are you fucking ready. are you???? im starting the readmore NOW because this is going to be something. i doubt anyone except robots maybe will actually read my deranged pro-privacy anti-facebook/social media/surveillance rant but im angry every time i think about it and if i were a more important person than a rando on the internet with a keyboard im sure facebook would hire someone to kill me one day.

FUCK FACEBOOK. FUCK THAT SHITTY ASS WEBSITE THAT AT EVERY TURN HAS BEEN REVEALED TO HAVE HORRIFYING PRACTICES OF DATA COLLECTION.

but before that, they need to pay some goddamn fucking taxes. they are profiting off the data of billions of people and getting away with paying SO LITTLE back.

you ever hear about deepface? no this is not the beginning of a prequel meme. deepface is facebook’s facial recognition technology and facial recognition is fucking terrifying. that shit is as good as humans at facial recognition at this point. does that not scare you? that a bunch of computers can figure out if this photo contains you or not? it’s one thing if humans recognize each other, but another thing when computers who can process data almost infinitely faster than humans can are able to do it. the scale and speed at which these fucking nightmares operates is hard for us to imagine and so we are all not scared enough of what they can do. this kind of technology is so deeply privacy violating it’s hard for me to stress it enough. every image of you ever uploaded on the internet could possibly be put through facial recognition tech. and with the fact that there are cameras literally everywhere at all times now at this point it’s so fucking possible that if desired, someone could find out where you are at all times. and that gets SO scary when used by governments. are you comfortable with your government knowing where YOU are at all times? yes? what about if tomorrow your government is overthrown by a group of radicals you completely disagree with? you still comfortable with that? facial recognition is kind of a fucking pandoras box that we are opening and now that we have the technology available to us, unless we actively take steps back from it, it WILL eventually/already is being used in malicious, intensely privacy invasive ways.

and everything in that above bullet point goes for ALL DATA COLLECTED ON YOU, EVER. everything you’ve ever said on facebook is probably put through some multi layered neural network fucking robot who is learning how to understand what humans say on your input and also cataloging things about you as a person. it is doing SO MUCH more than reading the exact text of what you are saying and then picking up on keywords. neural networks are an attempt to copy how humans think by making an artificial version of a brain basically. in simple terms it’s a map of points and connections and you feed it data for a while and tell it what the desired outcome should be. it will adjust those connections and the weight of those points based on your data and expected outcome. that change in connections and weights is how it learns. then after a while it has fed on enough data that it will begin to expect what your desired outcome is. now imagine millions and millions of connections and points. it’s fucking huge. you ever hear about how we don’t know how machine learning/deep learning/neural networks works? this is that. it’s because they are so large and they have changed their weights and points so much that we no longer understand how it makes its decisions. ml is on a deeper level starting to understand what you mean when you say words. like a human. and can pick up nuances humans cannot because of its perfect memory. do you understand how scary this is? do you? i really do not know how to express this better how absolutely buckshit wild and terrifying the idea that everything i say online can be scraped and put through a robot and a profile on me and who i am and my ideals can be gathered almost instantly. how hard would it be to write a scraper that goes to my blog and grabs the text of every post in my talk tag? and then there’s free and open source nlp software (or you can pay for it) and you can feed in everything ive said on this blog ever. you can go to my facebook. you can go to my twitter. you can find my profiles on every online platform ive ever used and take everything ive ever said and determine what kind of person i am based on that. and then you can then make further distinctions based on that data. (sidenote: facebook wouldnt have to scrape the data on my profile, it’s all in their databases already. they have everything ive ever posted on public or private, on my old profile i’ve deactivated, every photo ive posted or been tagged in, everything ive ever uploaded to their servers or have been associated with.) and someone or robot can make decisions about me based on that data. it could just be am i likely to buy [this product] or it could be something much more like am i a threat? am i dangerous to you, the person using this data about me? what are my politics? what are my views on [this topic]? are they too extreme? should i be denied [real life thing] based on what this machine has determined about me from my data online? not to sound fucking crazy, but you ever watch that episode of black mirror? nosedive? and its system where you can rate interactions with people? how this one girl was trying to increase her ranking so she would qualify for a cheaper price on housing? how we’re already starting to see things like this in real life with china’s social credit system?

call me a fucking wack job but i think it’s so deeply creepy that we have digitized so many aspects of our lives and leave machines we no longer understand how they make their decisions to analyze every bit of data about ourselves.

by the fucking way facebook tracks data on people WHO DO NOT USE FACEBOOK. FACEBOOK TRACKS DATA ON PEOPLE. WHO. DO. NOT. USE. FACEBOOK. are you scared? i am.

i’ve been thinking about this tweet from @/malwaretech on twitter from a few days ago. text: On a serious note, social media tracking is more extensive than you may think. For example: those Facebook 'like' buttons you see on every website? They call home. If you're logged into your FB account, it records that you visited that web page, even if you don't click 'like'. doesn’t that sound a lil fucked up to anyone else? that facebook knows that i visited that webpage even though i did not tell it? that it will use that data to build a better profile on what my interests are and that it will use that data to better sell ads to me? i’ll be honest i am unsure of if facebook sells that information to other vendors. i think that might be not allowed but i wouldn’t be surprised if that data somehow got into the hands of people who arent facebook.

the fact that for the longest time you could NOT get your data deleted from facebook? that even if you deactivated your account facebook would still keep all of that in their shit ass servers forever? as far as i know, that’s changed now, but i would not at all be surprised if the next day it was revealed that facebook was Actually Keeping all that info anyways

the fact that by default facebook’s privacy settings are set to allow anyone to see most info about you? just this whole opt out culture is so fucking wack. it should be opt in. your privacy settings should default on the MOST PRIVATE and it should be up to you to ACTIVELY SEARCH OUT how to change them to public. it is ON FACEBOOK to actively cultivate privacy but of fucking course they don’t.

lmao cambridge analytica politics russia brexit trump. i don’t have the energy to even open this fucking can of worms but i will say that again, another layer of deeply fucked up that political campaigns can use that data to try to coerce or influence elections.

do you remember when in 2019. yes twenty. fucking. nineteen. 2019. two thousand and nineteen. 2019. i dont know how more to stress how recent but late this is. 2019. facebook admitted that it and instagram were still. STILL. STILL. S T I L L. storing passwords as plaintext? meaning your password that is “password123ilovedogs” is stored AS “password123ilovedogs” in their database. it is STANDARD AND EXPECTED PRACTICE that websites store SECURE hashes of passwords (not like fucking. md5 or something) meaning you do a bunch of fucking “irreversible” math on the password and store that instead of the actual password itself. so the db would be storing “298!79v@w8W#R;3,f9jf” instead of your actual password. anyways face. fucking. book. was storing passwords as plain text. which means if they ever have a data breach on their passwords db then all that data inside will just be your actual goddamn password. your actual goddamn password. what the fuck? what the fuck? and we still use this website? we? me? i use this website daily? i use this website on a daily fucking basis and allow it to continue to collect information on me? im so goddamn angry.

the fact that now in this day and age you are considered weird for not having any social media? super fucked up. the fact that employers will check your social media and if you don’t have one that is somehow a red flag? weird as hell. why must we participate in the world’s largest data collection scandal ever just to be a member of society? i cannot choose to opt out. facebook collects data on me even if i do not have an account. society expects me to have some form of social media and if i do not then that i am the weird one for it. if you choose to live a life of trying not to be tracked it is almost impossible. can you live your life in modern society without an email address? without a smartphone or laptop? there is an expectation that every person is available to communicate with digitally and if you find the practice of data collection abhorrent and don’t want to use websites that do so, then you’re the weird one who has a LOT of society’s services unavailable to you.

im not going to even touch on the psychological effects that facebook and social media have on people other than to ONCE AGAIN, say they are very real and deeply fucked up.

by the way check out haveibeenpwned. enter your email and it’ll check against databases to see if your email has been on recent dumps. i have been. lately there have been a few older accounts of mine that have been breached and it’s terrifying.

fuck jesse eisenberg man he fucked over spiderman crazy

fuck faang. fuck big tech. fuck data collection. btw edward snowden is a hero. fuck all of this.

104: The future: man we’re in for it. i am not optimistic about it at all. too much tech progression / not enough foresight / expansion/globalization of the world / global warming / political and economic issues are all coming to a head to make the world a fucking disaster.

96: Changed a diaper: never done it! i am not around children often.

88: Something I will really miss when I leave home is: having a vague idea of where things are locally. im very bad with directions.

86: The thing that I’m looking forward to the most: answered already.

84: People call me: yeesa, apparently. i have a fair amount of nicknames but i just call myself teresa.

82: I have gotten a speeding ticket: sure haven’t though i deserve one

80: The first person i talked to today was: soph because she wakes up at a normal goddamn time so i’ll sometimes have a text from her from a few hrs ago

76: Right now I am talking to: milo and a discord server im in for a group of friends i made when i was applying to college. though i havent responded in quite a while since i went on my angry facebook rant.

74: I have/will get a job: well i HAD a job for the beginning of the summer when i was a TA but i do not any more as that was first summer semester only. hopefully in the fall i’ll have a job as a TA again but who knows. and then after that when i graduate i hope hope hope hope hope i will have a job lined up.

72: Today: woke up. made a plum smoothie. played minecraft. took a nap. here i am. it’s all very riveting.

70: Next Weekend: it’ll happen for sure. odds are i will be waking up and eating food and coming on the internet and chatting with friends and doing a bit of writing and trying to learn a bit more html.

68: The worst sound in the world: answered already.

66: People that make you happy: will roland lmao.

64: My friends are: well it’s basically the same people i tagged in my last post on people who make me happy.

62: My School: you tryin to doxx me? it’s alright. not the best for my major. and also stupidly trying to reopen for the fall because theyre greedy and idiots. it was like my 5th choice school but it is what it is.....

60: I lose all respect for people who: already answered

58: Your hair color is: black as fuck. im east asian.

56: Favorite web site: controversial but archive of our own dot org i guess. i believe in their mission and like how they have advocated for fans and have created a fan-owned space on the internet. they’re not perfect but i overall support them.

54: The worst pain I was ever in was: answered already

52: My room is: a time capsule of what i liked in late middle school/early high school.

50: Where would you like to be: im fine where i am. maybe visiting friends though. i would like to Hang With Them and Do Fun Activities.

48: Ever been in love: who’s to say....... what is love? (baby don’t hurt me). but for real the concept of love is weird to me, especially romantic love. i don’t know. i’ve certainly obsessed over people. i’ve noticed i kind of “pick people” to have crushes on. i can’t really say why. but then it creates a feedback loop of i pay more attention to them -> i think more about them -> i like them more. so i’ve made conscious decisions that have lead to me obsessing over people.

46: More guy friends or girl friends: girl but that’s just because people in fandom spaces tend to be women and most of my friends ive made through fandom.

44: One person that you wish you could see right now: kaity is coming to my town but we cant see each other because of a pandemic so im kinda fucking miffed about that. i didn’t get to see maria before she left my state so i’m also miffed about that.

42: Have you made a list of things to do before you die: lmaooooo no. i would just like to be satisfied with my life. would like to see friends. do fun things with them.

40: Last person I got mad at: idk im not generally a mad person. mark zuckerberg probably.

38: I wish I was a professional: as in i suddenly have all the skills and talent needed to be a professional? i think a director &|| writer tbh. i would love to have the Creative Vision necessary to come up with dope ideas AND translate what i have in mind into real life. i would love the ability to be able to tell compelling stories that mean a lot to people.

32: Athlete: lmao if it was 2008 or 2012 i would ahve said ryan lochte but nevermind. idk. maybe katie ledecky.

24: Movie: am not much one for movies...... star trek 2009.

16: Book: i don’t know how to read.

8: Yankee candle scent: idk about yankee candle specifically but i love the smell of apple.

#not rt #teresa answers stuff #Anonymous

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razieltwelve · 5 years ago

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Prodigy (Final Rose AU Snippet)

Ruby did her best to tune out the whispers. Having one prodigy in the family was remarkable enough. Having two was downright ridiculous. Her lips twitched. If only people knew. Her other siblings were every bit as talented as her and Averia, but her parents had always been content to let them progress at their own rate. It was why they had agreed to let Diana be accelerated through Beacon whereas Jessica was likely to adopt a more normal pace.

It wasn’t about talent. Jessica was more than good enough to be accelerated to. However, Jessica’s friends - her future teammates - weren’t ready to be accelerated, and their parents weren’t going to force her to leave them behind. Teammates were family in all but blood. Breaking up great teams before they could really even form would not turn out well for anybody.

“You’re getting your own team too, you know,” Averia murmured as they made their way toward the hall for the welcoming ceremony.

“Did Diana tell you that?” Ruby asked. “Or is that another prediction from Saviour?”

“Diana helps our Aunt Vanille run team compatibility simulations.” Averia lowered her voice. “She may also have hacked the database to find out what the teams are.”

“Doesn’t Aunt Vanille do security for that database though?” Ruby’s brows furrowed. Diana was phenomenal, but their Aunt Vanille was one of the few people who could potentially keep her out of a system she wanted to get into.

“Diana got in through Atlas’s database. Beacon is locked up tight, but Atlas handles its own cyber-security.”

“But Uncle Hope is no slouch,” Ruby countered. “He should be able to keep that database secure.”

“You can thank internal Atlas politics for Uncle Hope not being in charge of that. Diana found out, which is why she was confident of getting in.” Averia’s lips twitched. “So… do you want to know who you’ve got?”

“No.” Ruby grinned. “I want it to be a surprise.” She paused. “Unless my team is awful. Please, tell me they’re not awful.”

“Oh… I think you’ll find your team interesting, and you’ll have at least one familiar face to help you get started.”

“Well, that’s a relief.” Ruby’s eyes narrowed. “Is it Claire? Or maybe’s it’s Trajan. How about -”

“I thought you wanted it to be a surprise?” Averia ruffled Ruby’s hair. “Don’t worry. I think you’ll like your team.” She paused. “And you might want to buy some tuna before you meet them.”

“Tuna?”

Averia shrugged. “I don’t know why you’d need tuna, but Diana was pretty firm on it being a good idea.”

“Hmm… I wonder why she didn’t tell me about this,” Ruby mused.

“Probably because she finds the idea of me advising you to buy tuna amusing.”

“Probably.”

X X X

Ruby tried not to stare at the very, very pretty heiress. “Uh… hi.”

“Good morning.” Weiss extended her hand. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Ruby. I am Weiss Schnee.”

“I know.” Ruby’s brain finally caught up to her mouth. “I mean… it’s a pleasure to meet you too, Weiss.” She shook the heiress’s hand and took careful note of what she observed. As Tifa Mom was so fond of saying, people’s hands always told a story. Weiss might have delicate-looking hands, but there was a wiry strength to them that spoke of experience in handling a weapon, and the calluses on her hands could only have come from many, many hours of practice. “It’s good to have you on the team.”

“I must say, I was a little disappointed to not be leading my own team, but in light of the circumstances, I can understand why you were chosen.” Weiss chuckled. “As impressive as my pedigree might be, I think you have the edge since your parents are certainly quite prominent.”

Ruby scratched the back of her head. “Yeah. They’re pretty famous.” That was a massive, massive understatement. Tifa Mom was probably the least famous of her parents, and she was still super famous. Summer Mom, Lightning Mom, and Fang Mom were all like… super mega famous. “But I’m kind of hoping they didn’t just pick me because of my family, you know.”

“Ah, relax.” Yang threw one arm around Ruby and pulled her into an impromptu headlock, and Ruby tried very hard not to think about how her face was being pressed into Yang’s chest. And it was a really, really nice chest. “Ruby here got the second highest score on the tactics and strategy portion of the exam.”

“Oh? Who else was in the top three?” Weiss asked.

Yang let go of Ruby and then lifted her up like a trophy. Ruby’s eye twitched. She might not be as short as Diana, but it was kind of galling to be waved around like a trophy although Yang somehow had a way of making the whole experienced pleasant. The blonde was just so warm and affectionate. “First place was Averia. No surprise there. Pyrrha Nikos came in third. Ruby had her beat by half a point.”

“And Averia was ten points ahead of me,” Ruby countered, squirming free and doing her best to channel Averia’s glare. To her dismay, Yang just smirked back. They both knew that Ruby was awful at intimidation unless she was truly angry, and she couldn’t really remember the last time she’d gotten truly angry at Yang. “So I’ve still got a long way to go.”

Weiss smiled and extended her hand to Yang as well. “It would be remiss of me not to formally greet you as well, Yang Xiao Long - gah!”

“Forget the handshake,” Yang said, tugging Weiss into a headlock. “We’re teammates now.”

Ruby bit back a laugh as Weiss struggled briefly before realising the futility of it. Yang might not be as fast as Ruby, but Dust she was strong. Weiss had also seemingly realised that being in a headlock put her right next to Yang’s bust. “Don’t worry, Weiss. You’ll get used to it. Yang is just, well, Yang.”

“Yep.” Yang let go of Weiss. “By the way… has anyone seen our fourth member? We were supposed to meet at this training ground, but she hasn’t shown up yet.”

“Hmm…” Weiss’s brows furrowed. “Could she have gotten lost? Beacon Senior Academy does have a lot of training grounds, and this is the first day of school.”

“I don’t know,” Ruby said. “But I brought tuna.”

Yang tilted her head to one side. “Why would you need tuna?”

Ruby shrugged. “Diana told Averia to tell me to bring tuna.” She made a face. “It’s Diana. She says a lot of crazy stuff, but she’s basically always right.”

“But tuna?” Weiss pressed. “What does tuna have to do with anything?” “Like I said, I don’t know.” Ruby took out the can of tuna and put it on the ground. “Hmm… nothing’s happening.”

“Maybe you should open it,” Yang said.

“Sure, why not?” Ruby laughed. “Maybe opening it will magically summon our teammate somehow.” She opened the can of tuna, and barely five seconds passed before someone hopped out of the tree next to them. In an instant, she and Yang had already moved to intercept them. Ruby had never worked with Weiss before but given the Schnee family’s reputation for doing extremely extravagant things involving Dust and Glyphs, it was probably safe to guess the other girl was a heavy hitter who could drop the hammer while Ruby and Yang covered her.

However, Ruby screeched to a halt as she took in the appearance of the person who had dropped out of the tree. Her first impression was to try not to gawk. Did Beacon have like some kind of attractiveness criteria because so far all the girls she’d seen had been gorgeous? If Yang was more the tall and busty type and Weiss was the elegant and petite type, the dark-haired girl in front of them was somewhere in between, athletic and graceful but not nearly as delicate in appearance as Weiss.

“Is that tuna?” the girl asked.

Ruby blinked. “Yes. Yes, it is.”

“And you just opened the can and put it on the ground?”

“Uh… yeah.”

“Why?”

“I don’t actually know,” Ruby said. “But… are you our teammate?”

The dark-haired girl’s lips twitched, and she sketched them a rough bow. “Blake Belladonna.” Her eyes drifted over them. “And you would be Ruby Rose, Yang Xiao Long, and Weiss Schnee.”

“Technically, my full name would be Oerba Yun Ruby Rose-Lockhart-Farron but, yeah, Ruby Rose is kind of easier to say.”

"That’s quite a mouthful,” Blake drawled. “I can see why you just go by Ruby Rose.”

Ruby giggled. “When I was younger I tried to change it to Ruby Awesome, but my parents said no.”

“Ruby Awesome?” Weiss asked. “Really?”

“Yeah… because I was awesome,” Ruby replied. “I… see.” Weiss evidently couldn’t if her tone of voice was anything to go by. She glanced at Blake and then extended her hand. “It’s nice to meet you, Blake.”

It took a moment for Blake to shake Weiss’s hand. Ruby took note of it. Was Blake just not big on physical contact or was there something else there? She couldn’t be sure, but she could have sworn Blake’s expression had tightened ever so slightly when she’d seen Weiss.

“Am I going to shake your hand too?” Blake asked Yang.

“Nope.” Blake was promptly introduced to the greatness that was a Yang headlock. “Handshakes are boring.”

“So… we’re team RWBY, huh?” Blake looked at each of them, and Ruby had the distinct feeling Blake was taking their measure. Hopefully, she measured up.

“Yep.” Ruby smiled. “And we’re going to be the best team ever!”

X X X

“So…” Vanille murmured. “Are you spying on your sisters again?”

Diana glanced away from the holographic display. “Mostly Ruby. Averia should be fine. She’s got Elsa, Claire, and Jahne. She’s known Elsa and Jahne for years, and Claire is our cousin. Ruby’s got Yang, but she’s not really familiar with Blake or Weiss. At the least the tuna trick worked.”

“Like mother like daughter,” Vanille said. “Have you got eyes on Team JNPR?”

“Yeah. I think Jaune is doing his best to not throw up in panic about being made leader. He’s managed to succeed so far.”

“Good for him. Pyrrha took it well though.”

“She did, but everything I’ve been able to find out about her suggests that she really is just super nice, sweet, and kind despite being almost as much of a killer robot as Averia.”

“Meh. Maybe she’s got better software installed.”

“Maybe.”

X X X

Author’s Notes

This is another snippet set in the Summer/Lightning/Fang/Tifa AU. Probably the biggest change for Ruby in this AU is that everyone - absolutely everyone - will know who she is since not only is Summer still alive but she also never gets crippled by the Grimm in this AU. Given how much Ruby looks like Summer, her fellow students are going to put two and two together. There will be a huge amount of pressure on her to live up to her parents’ standards, just like there is for Averia, but Ruby is two years younger.

On the other hand, it does make some things easier. Weiss would normally be more aggravated about not being leader, but she knows who Ruby is, so she can’t exactly get upset by that. If anything, she’s pleased because being on a team with Ruby is a very, very favourable outcome for her. From a purely pragmatic point of view, being on the same team as Ruby is fantastic since teammates generally becomes close friends and allies (or possibly even more).

Ruby’s response to Yang is also very different than in canon because they aren’t sisters. Moreover, although they get along great and consider themselves close friends, Yang was raised in Patch whereas Ruby was raised in Vale. As a result, Ruby is not oblivious to the fact that Yang is a very attractive person in more ways than one.

And then there’s Blake.

In this AU, the White Fang is generally more peaceful because the last time they stepped out of line, they got smacked down so hard they never forgot about it. This is largely due to one of the establishments the more militant White Fang attacking in the past being a hotel owned by Tifa. She took exception to their attack on the hotel, and Lightning, Summer, and Fang were similarly unimpressed. Things after that did not get well for the White Fang.

As a result, this Blake is less filled with regret over being a former terrorist and although wary of Weiss is less hostile to begin with. She has, however, left home in a bid to carve out her own identity, so she doesn’t have to live in the shadows of her parents who rule over Menagerie. Yes, she basically is a princess, so both Ruby and Averia have got one on their teams. Of course, Elsa also doubles as an air conditioner, but Blake can make clones, so it’s not a total loss.

You can find me on fanfiction.net, AO3, and Amazon.

Definitely check out my Amazon stuff if you enjoy my sense of humour.

#final rose #fanfiction #averia yun-farron #ruby rose #yang xiao long #weiss schnee #blake belladonna #diana yun-farron #oerba dia vanille

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iamnotbrianmay · 6 years ago

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The A Experience

chapter 17 is here lads! I hope you like this chapter! I had a hard time writing it, but now it’s here and dear lord are we getting close to the end of the book. I’m thinking it will be like 45k - 50k which is ridiculous! that is so much writing! I wouldn’t be able to do it without you and I’m so happy about it!

the taglist goes as follows: @seven-seas-of-why, @twotitsjohndeacon, @dancindeaky, @gee-uloser, @mozzarellamazzello, @mozzie-s, @deracine-dogma-deux, @shutupanddontjudge, @warping-reality, @demianhill , @zodiacal-dust-and-curls

now onto the chapter!

When Roger asked Brian to meet him in the library that evening, he hadn’t expected the other man to think it would be some kind of hurtful prank. Even going so far as to warn Roger against trying to scare him, lest he face “the consequences”.

All it did was make Roger wonder what had happened the last time someone met him at the library

May: Roger Taylor I won’t hesitate to kill you.

Taylor: you forgot the “—Bri”.

May: Oh, fuck you.

Roger laughed out loud at Brian’s reaction, which immediately earned him a glare from the old lady at the front desk. The blind hag lifted herself of her perch, ready to scold him, only to head to the table a few meters to the right of Roger’s. This time the drummer did hold in the laughter and watched in delight as the couple sitting in complete silence got scolded.

His phone buzzed and he looked down, reading Brian’s next message;

May: Can I at least know why I’m going to the library on a Saturday night?

Roger sent him back a quick text in which he mocked Brian for being a fake nerd, but decided against teasing him further. After all, he didn’t want to be left alone in a library on a Saturday night.

He kept reading in silence, waiting for the guitarist to walk through the doors. Curly hair bouncing with his light steps and smile lighting up the room. Roger was so lost in thought that when the other man actually walked into the library the drummer missed him. It was only when Brian pressed a soft kiss to the top of his head that Roger jumped slightly, snapping out of his trance.

“Hey, you.”

Roger brought his hands to cover his chest, “That was so cute, I might melt.”

Brian rolled his eyes, and sat beside Roger, “Okay, now can I know why you dragged me here?”

“Oh, you’re going to love it, you giant nerd.” Roger said as he stood up and closed his book, “You’re going to love me.”

Brian rolled his eyes again and grabbed the hand that Roger had extended for him. The blond laced their fingers together, and walked towards the back of the library, where Brian’s surprise was waiting for them.

“I had to pull a few strings to get the room for ourselves,” Roger explained, “I also had to book it at the least convenient hour possible. So for that I’m sorry.”

“Okay.”

“But I hope the end result will be worth the weird hours.”

Oh boy was it ever.

Roger made Brian close his eyes and lay on the floor, a pillow below his head, and a blanket to shield him from the cold of the concrete. He took a few minutes setting up the equipment, and making sure that the image on the ceiling was perfect.

Once everything was ready he turned towards Brian with a wide smile, “Now, I asked around and one of my friends, as it turns out, is really into astronomy. He was always complaining about how you can’t really look at the stars while living in a big city like London. So he and his friends from school developed this software.”

From the point where he was standing he could see as Brian opened his eyes and looked up. The projector was pointed to the dome-like ceiling, and the image spread out above them was a replica of the milky way; only more scientific in ways that Roger couldn’t begin to understand. Brian, on the other hand, looked like he had never seen anything so beautiful.

“No way,” Brian whispered, “I thought these projectors were worth a fortune.”

“They probably are,” Roger replied, “David threatened to kill me if I broke the thing.”

Roger, pleased with Brian’s reaction, turned back to fiddle with the computer, asking questions about whether Brian wanted to see other modalities or if he wanted to see some shooting stars. The biologist even went as far as asking if there were certain coordinates that the other man wanted to pinpoint.

He was always met by silence. Which only led to Roger rambling even more about the program or the stars they were looking at.

Until Brian finally spoke, “Rog, just come here.”

The blond turned to look at Brian, the older man was sitting down with his back against one of the walls, legs spread open and looking unfairly cute and soft in the oversized sweater he had chosen to wear to their not-date. Roger’s heart thumped painfully hard in his chest. He was all too aware of how far gone he was on this man. Everything Brian May did seemed to do drive him crazy.

He walked over, and once he was close enough to Brian he let the older man pull him down. They arranged themselves until Roger was nestled comfortably between the astrophysicist’s legs. It was an odd contrast, looking at the vastness of the universe while sitting in a small, crappy room in a London library basement.

“You drive me crazy, you know that right?” Brian said suddenly.

Roger tried to turn around to face Brian but the older man gripped his shoulders, keeping him in place.

He continued, “maybe it’s because you’re the first person I’ve ever really, really, liked. Maybe it’s just that I’m a twenty year old idiot in love, but you drive me so crazy and we aren’t even really dating yet.

You spoil me with things like this, frequent cuddles, and are by far the most affectionate person ever... yet for some reason I still felt like I needed more.”

Roger’s smile slid off his face and his heart dropped. The cold sting of rejection seemed to seep into every single one of his bones. Somewhere at the back of his mind he had always knew that Brian would eventually reach his breaking point. That he would finally realize how many chances he was missing while waiting for Roger. Young, attractive and charming—why was he waiting around for him? Roger was bracing himself for heartbreak when Brian said his next words, “I’m so sorry for ever thinking that, Roger. All you’re asking for is time and you’re giving me so much, still. I could kick myself for ever thinking that I needed more than what you were giving to me already.”

“So you’re not ending things?” Roger asked hopefully, “you’re not done waiting for me?”

“No,” Brian answered immediately, “God no, Roger! I’m thanking you for reminding me that you are worth the wait. And asking you to forgive me if I ever made you feel pressured for more than you were ready to give.”

Roger was relieved, but at the same time a little uneasy. He shrugged a shoulder, “I wouldn’t have been surprised..It was bound to happen eventually.”

“What was bound to happen?”

“You realizing I’m not worth the wait.”

This time Brian was the one to turn Roger around, so he could face. Roger couldn’t help but notice that the reflection of the projector made Brian’s eyes look like they held the galaxy inside them.

“Never say that again.” Brian said firmly.

“Brian—”

“No I mean it,” the older man insisted, “That was me just being stupid, Rog. But you are worth so much more. You are worth the blue balls, the longing, heck, even the pitying stares from Freddie and John when they catch me looking at you like you’ve ‘hung the moon.’” He did the little air quotes, making Roger chuckle. He leaned in so that his face was pressed against Brian’s chest.

“Am I really worth keeping your virginity?”

Brian laughed, Roger feeling the vibrations as he did so, “Uh, how do you know I’m not saving myself for Jesus?”

Roger merely snorted.

“Okay fine, you’ve got me there. You’re worth it— when you’re not being a brat.”

“I am never a brat!”

It was Brian’s turn to snort, “Of course you are! Plopping yourself down in my lap, wrapping yourself around me during the night...speeding up during songs.”

“Oh, we are not having this argument again,” Roger interrupted him by placing a finger on Brian’s lips. “Not when I’m trying to do something nice for you.” “Thank you.” Brian smiled “thank you for all of this.”

“I know how much you love the stars,” Roger said, “And how happy you’ll be when you finish your PhD and get to see things like these on a daily basis.”

And that turned out to be the wrong thing to say. Roger could feel the way the tension in the room increased and how Brian shifted underneath him, “You know that if I finish my PhD I won’t have a lot of time for Queen, right?”

“Doesn’t matter.” Roger whispered hugging his slim frame closer, “We will find a way to make it work.”

“We won’t have to,” Brian murmured, “I already did.”

“Oh yeah?” Roger asked, pulling back slightly. “What’s that?”

There was a second of hesitation before Brian answered, “I dropped out last week... I just have to finish these last few days, and then I’m all Queen.”

“You did what?” Roger pushed back to look at Brian, wide-eyes.

“A PhD isn’t more important than what we’re doing ,” Brian argued, “Not when we’re so damn close. Not when the Rolling freaking Stones have asked for an interview with us!”

“But Brian, your stars—”

“Will be there if this thing fails, which it won’t,” Brian interrupted him, “And they will be there every single night until the day I’m old, grey, and unable to play guitar.”

Roger looked at Brian, who despite the resolution in his voice, had damp, sad eyes as he looked at the stars above them.

“Are you sure that’s what you want?” Roger prodded.

“More than sure.” Brian said, even if his voice broke a little on the sentence.

“You can cry if you need to,” Roger said as he tucked his head underneath Brian’s chin, “I’ll be here for you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Roger whispered, “If you can wait for me, why shouldn’t I comfort you?” Roger traced the skin on the back of Brian’s hand, never looking up to confirm his suspicion that the older man was crying about the dream he had to leave behind. The two fell asleep like that, keeping each other warm.

Early the next morning the old lady came into the room to kick them out, and Brian couldn’t help but feel like a weight had been lifted off his shoulders. Even if they hurt a little from sleeping upright. He walked out hand in hand with Roger, rubbing his stiff neck and beaming in happiness. It was only after a few blocks of walking that Roger turned toward him, hair mussed and sleepy smile stretching across his face.

“You know Bri, if you really want you can call me your boyfriend. Make sure everyone knows you are taken.” He winked

Brian raised his eyebrows, but smiled. “Even if we have never really kissed?”

“Who’s to say what constitutes a boyfriend? We don’t have to asked anyone’s permission, do we?” Roger countered.

Brian felt warmth curse through his veins, “No, I suppose we don’t. How smart my boyfriend is.”

Roger laughed loudly and gripped Brian’s hand tighter; the noise startling a flock of birds and filling the street with the sound of happiness.

#Brian May #roger taylor #Maylor #John Deacon #freddie mercury #the a experience fic #My writing #slash #fluff #oh god im getting so close to finishing this thing

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worldoflis · 6 years ago

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Close Binaries Chapter 11. Kidnap / Eggnog

A/N Here are 1800 words (!) in which I continue to have no clue how the American educational system works, nor what an average Performing Arts curriculum entails. That is why this is an AU, but hey, at least we get some Blaine-on-Kurt time again? Also, not one, but TWO canon references - I’m on a roll, people! Apart from the fact that I’m not even halfway through the advent and Christmas has passed, that is. Also also, I’m trying to keep these pieces readable as stand-alone one-shots, but there might be some references to previous chapters in here that are difficult to place. Just... roll with it?

1. athlete / snowman // 2. bury / cinnamon // 3. camera / candle // 4. deputy / paper // 5. exclude / ribbon // 6. feed / festival // 7. gradual / star // 8. house / gift // 9. incident / latke // 10. joke / light

It’s late when Kurt gets home that night. His class’ Performance midterm is tomorrow, and they’d booked the theater to run through the whole play one more time. And then another time. And another. He’s never been more grateful to his perfectionism for insisting his props were of the highest quality, even if they were meant for one performance only, because otherwise he’d have spent the whole night either fixing them or replacing them.

Redoing the one turkey had been more than enough, thank you.

But as he sets his bag down on the couch and makes for the kitchen to make himself some warm milk, he hears arguing voices coming from Rachel’s room.

“-even worse than the last one. We’re doing it again!”

“Rachel-”

“You don’t know what I’ve been through! How hard I’ve worked! I DESERVE to be at NYADA, and I won’t let ANYONE take my spot away from me! Especially not-”

“What the hell is going on here?”

Kurt’s not entirely sure what he expected to see when he burst into the room, but it was not this.

There’s a camera set up, pointing at a blank piece of wall that seems to be serving as a backdrop for whatever was happening. Rachel herself is not currently in front of the camera, but standing near her desk where her laptop is showing a recording of her singing. She’s looking terrible - her hair a mess, her cheeks flushed with anger - but it’s nothing compared to the poor guy sitting behind the laptop who, now that Kurt’s taking a better look-

“Blaine?”

He knows Rachel had a classmate coming over tonight to work on some assignment. It was a do-over of sorts that she needed to both pass the course, and get to retake the course - Kurt is a little fuzzy about the details, but she’d been ranting about it all Monday evening. He does know that the classmate in question is her self-appointed archenemy Cronut Critter: a fellow NYADA freshman who is so devoid on talent he must have bought his way into NYADA (unlikely), is a terrible diva who is impossible to work with (takes one to know one), and who has made it his mission in life to upstage Rachel whenever possible (understandable).

He also knows Blaine - at least as far as you can know someone who you’ve sold two cupcakes to, and with whom you’ve exchanged an e-mail or two about the recipe. But Blaine is polite, and funny, and sweet, and also terribly cute, with a round little butt and warm, brown eyes that were full of life and sparkle the few times Kurt has seen them, and it almost breaks his heart now to just see tiredness and exasperation.

Cronut Critter is Blaine. Blaine is Cronut Critter, and Kurt is grappling with the truth of that. However, he has bigger fish to fry.

“Rachel, what are you doing? It’s past midnight, don’t you have a midterm tomorrow?”

“Who cares about midterms? My future at NYADA is at stake! All because someone,” and she glares at Blaine, who seems to shrink just a little, “doesn’t know how to properly use video processing software.”

Blaine’s jaw clenches, but he doesn’t say anything.

“Nobody knows how to use video processing software after midnight,” Kurt says, rolling his eyes. “Why don’t you just continue tomorrow evening?”

“Tomo- that’s- I can’t- it’s- No!” Rachel stutters through her sentences, too angry -or too tired?- to finish any of them. “The deadline is Thursday, which means we have to send it in Tuesday at the latest!”

"If the deadline is Thursday, you can send it in Thursday,” Kurt counters dryly, continuing before she has a chance to protest. “Besides, it’s after midnight, so technically it is Wednesday already. Most importantly though, I have had the longest rehearsal of my life, and I need to sleep - and I’m not gonna listen to you sing progressively worse through the night.”

“We’ll use headphones,” Rachel says stubbornly, crossing her arms. “Blaine is not going anywhere until my video is perfect.”

“Rachel. You can’t kidnap someone over a college assignment.”

“I can if my future is at stake!” Rachel yells back. “It’s his fault that we have to redo it in the first place, so now it is his responsibility to fix it!”

None of what she’s saying is making any sense, but Kurt wasn’t lying when he said he desperately wanted to sleep. Which means he’s going to have to take drastic measures.

“Ok,” he says, straightening his spine and lifting his chin as he marches forward. “You-” and he points at Rachel, “are shutting down the camera, closing the laptop, and going to bed.”

“But I-”

“You are going. to bed. ,” Kurt repeats, glaring at Rachel until she averts her eyes. “There’s not going to be any more singing, video editing, or anything other than sleeping going on in this room tonight. Not even with headphones,” he adds sternly, before Rachel can even open her mouth to suggest it. “I will hear it, and if I do, I will not help you with the editing tomorrow evening, is that understood?”

It takes another few seconds of glaring before Rachel nods meekly, and Kurt turns his attention to Blaine, who until now has not said a word and seems to have been trying to be as invisible as possible.

“And you,” Kurt tells him, voice now softer, compassionate, “are coming with me. I think we both could use a drink.”

It is in absolute silence that Blaine clambers up and follows Kurt out of the room, and Kurt can almost feel the relief emanating from him as they leave Rachel to herself.

“I’m sorry about Rachel,” he says, rummaging around in the cupboards for an extra mug, adding more milk to the pot already on the stove. “She can be a handful sometimes. But after she choked on her first audition, for the longest time it looked like she wouldn’t get to have a second chance. So now she’s terrified of anything that could take it away again. I don’t know what happened with your assignment but-”

Kurt has turned around to find Blaine standing in the exact same spot he left him, right in front of Rachel’s door. He’s just staring at Kurt, wide-eyed and exhausted, arms hanging limply by his side.

“What?”

“H-how are you here?”

Kurt looks at him.

“I... live here?”

“With Rachel?”

“Yes, with Rachel.”

“Oh.”

He’s still not moving, and Kurt’s starting to think maybe the poor guy has gone into shock. That would be a first, even for Rachel, but then again, she had been acting completely crazy, and God only knows how long Blaine had been stuck in that room with her, recording and re-recording songs.

“Are you alright?”

“I’m...” Blaine hesitates, looking back over his shoulder and back at Kurt, like he still can’t believe he made it out. “I think you may have just saved my life?”

Kurt bursts out laughing, and as he walks forward to hand Blaine his mug, he sees the corners of Blaine’s mouth curl up in a smile as well.

“Come on, sit with me.”

He leads the way to the couch, snuggling into the corner as he watches Blaine follow after him, looking suspiciously at the mug in his hands.

“What is this?”

“Warm milk,” Kurt says, and after seeing Blaine’s confused look, he adds defensively: “It’s delicious!”

“I’m not protesting,” Blaine reassures him. “Just... not what I was expecting when you said we could use a drink.”

“So, what, you wanted eggnog or something?” Kurt teases, and Blaine laughs, a wonderful, heartfelt laugh, and something skips in Kurt’s stomach.

“Didn’t you say you wanted to go to bed?” Blaine asks, hesitating before he sits down in the couch, but Kurt shrugs.

“Not like I’m gonna fall immediately after that,” he says, nodding towards Rachel’s door. “So I can just as well. Unless... you want to go home?”

“Nonono! No, no, I mean, sure, yeah, I should be heading home soon, but as you said, I can, you know, use a little time to, well, unwind. And, you know, it’s cold outside so, warming up beforehand is probably a good idea. Yeah.”

It’s cute almost, how Blaine is stuttering his way through his sentences, obviously trying to be cool about sharing a cup of warm milk with a near-stranger in the middle of the night. It’s a stark contrast with the suave, polished Blaine that had e-mailed him before, and again completely different from the stories he’s heard from Rachel about this highly ambitious, overachieving classmate of hers. It reminds him of himself as a freshman just a year ago, trying desperately to find his spot at NYADA, balancing his ambition and his need to make friends.

It wasn’t easy.

“Are you sure she’s not gonna come out?” Blaine asks, glancing at Rachel’s door with a hint of fear on his face, and Kurt smiles, following Blaine’s line of sight.

“Pretty sure,” he says. “She can get crazy, but she usually knows when she crosses the line. She just needs someone to call her out on it. And she knows I keep my promises, if she keeps hers, so I know I can trust her to not be eavesdropping at her doOr if shE waNTS MY HELP EDITING TOMORROW!”

He’s raised his voice progressively over the last sentence, so he’s actually shouting at Rachel’s door by the end of it, and they both hear a stumble and a hard bang.

“I’m okay!” Rachel shouts from behind the door. “Just a nightmare! I’m okay!”

Kurt smiles, shaking his head over the predictability of Rachel’s antics, and turns his attention back to Blaine.

“So, tell me. Why exactly does Rachel think she’s gonna lose her spot at NYADA over this assignment?”

12. Language / Chimney

#klaine advent 2018 #klaine advent: kidnap #klaine advent: eggnog #close binaries #klaine #lis writes

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faith-in-dean · 6 years ago

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A Study of Love - Chapter Three

Summary: Changes were often difficult to manage. In your case, it was a blessing sent from heaven. Sure, you had to master some difficulties but in the end, you would not have decided differently.

Words: 1362

Pairing: Professor!Tony Stark x Reader

Warnings: mild angst

A/N: Please leave some feedback! It encourages me to keep writing this!

Masterpost

What met you surprised you pleasantly. The lab was gigantic and filled with all kinds of technologies. You were speechless. How was this all possible?

“What is this?” You managed to ask as you glanced around.

“It's more of a private lab for Dr. Banner and me. This is where we test our own projects. Ultimately because we don't want to end up homeless at a failed attempt,” Mr. Stark chuckled some. Sure, you had heard about him and his projects. You just had never expected to be face to face with them.

“Just recently Tony and I had come upon a problem neither one of us can seem to solve,” Dr. Banner came into the view, meeting the two of you, “perhaps you could help us.”

The two scientists lead you over to a metal suit. It was about Tony's size and was linked to many technologies. You reached out to touch the metal, checking how every little piece was put perfectly together.

“This is a model of an iron suit. Don't ask me why I would need something like that. But we can't happen to install my software and calibrate it so it's not going crazy when someone tries to use it,” Tony… Mr. Stark told you.

“Perhaps you can see what we can't,” Dr. Banner gave you a nervous smile before you nodded.

You dropped your bag and began to check out the program called F.R.I.D.A.Y. before checking the suit and how it could possibly be linked. It didn't take long until you were completely lost in the task, studying everything you needed to know to move forward with your investigation. You programmed and switched multiple components of the system. All of that happened while Professor Stark and Dr. Banner watched you closely.

“I've told you she's gifted,” Tony whispered to Bruce while they kept an eye on her.

“I've never doubted that! It's just that she doesn't seem to put a lot of effort into her studies,” Bruce sighed in return.

“About that. I've talked to her about this matter,” Tony started, “she's taking care of her sick grandmother all on her own. That's why she's always so tired around here.”

“But that's her decision, isn't it?”

“It might be. But we should help her, find a better solution for her. She is meant for this,” Tony insisted, looking at his friend with pleading eyes.

“What should we do about it? And why is it so important to you to get her through this?” Bruce questioned the brown-haired man, already knowing he was going to give in either way.

“We could find help for her grandmother. Professional help so Y/N can focus on her studies. And I care because she's got a talent we can't let slide,” Tony pointed out though he knew there was some sort of personal bond he felt towards her. But he just couldn't wrap his mind around it.

Before the two men could continue their talk, you turned your attention back to them.

“I think I found the general source of the problem. I've got everything I need to know written down but I'll need a little more time to think and work this through,” you told them with a smile on your face.

Tony had returned your smile while Dr. Banner remained with an uncertain glance.

“You can report to me after our next class,” Mr. Stark told you, making you nod in excitement. This had actually turned out to be something you were extremely interested in. And if two well-known scientists couldn't figure the problem out but you could, your ego would experience a little boost in confidence.

“I will. Thanks, professor,” you gave him a smile before picking up your bag and heading to leave.

But instead of you getting more sleep, you had been working on the matter non-stop, sleeping even less than you had before. And instead of it just taking a couple of days, it took you a couple of weeks. Professor Stark had been checking the status every now and then, nodding his approval. But at the same time, you couldn't help but notice his worried behavior whenever he saw just how long and how much time you had put in this. He even showed some signs of guilt.

About a week into the project, Professor Stark pulled you aside after class again.

“May I talk to you for a second?” he asked you, concern in his eyes.

“Uh, sure. Is everything alright?” you questioned your professor.

“I had a talk with Dr. Banner about your current living situation and we came to a conclusion that we want to help you,” Mr. Stark’s eyes met yours.

“Oh?” quirking a brow, you looked up at him. Why would they talk about your living situation?

“I've made it my task to look for a place that could take care of your grandmother, professionally. I know you didn't want that for her but I'd hate to see you keep going like this,” Tony told you, a soft sigh on his lips, “I've looked for the best place I could find and visited it in my free time. Your grandmother will be doing good there.”

It took you a few moments to progress everything your professor had told you. He was so worried he actually looked into changing your living situation? And more so he got Dr. Banner to help too?

“But I can't even afford to live in that house all by myself,” the thought of not having to work more every time you returned from uni was like a dream. But your grandmother was the one making it possible for you to live there as well.

“You could live on the campus. Dr. Banner has already looked into a potential roommate for you. I'm going to sponsor you as long as you promise to take care of yourself,” the words hit you in shock once again. But through all this, there was one question you couldn't stop thinking about.

“Why do you care so much? Why would you do all that for me?” Your voice came through harsher than you had anticipated.

Tony's mouth opened as he wanted to reply but closed again. He looked like he truly had to consider what he was saying.

“Please just accept the offer. You have the chance of becoming the best student this university had in over 20 years,” he finally sighed, though it didn't seem like that was what he wanted to say. Maybe the smallest part of you had hoped he would say something else.

“I'll- I'll think about it, Mr. Stark,” you nodded at him, turning to leave. As you made your way to the door, you could hear your professor mutter under his breath before he called you back.

“Y/N?”

“I care because I see so much in you because you have so much worth. You are really something special and it's taking all I have to keep calm about you,” he told you, grabbing you by the wrist and pulling you against him while you were still in shock over his confession.

“I’m gonna regret this,’ Tony sighed before his lips crashed against yours, kissing you deeply. You were taken aback by his actions and didn't know how to react at first. Though after a moment of hesitation your feelings had gotten the upper hand and you returned the kiss longingly. Your bag dropped to the ground as Tony pulled you closer, pressing himself against you.

You couldn't deny yourself that with all the care your professor presented to you and how strongly he believed in you, you had developed feelings for him. The fact that he was very pleasing to look at, didn't help either.

It was only when Tony pressed his leg between yours when you remembered how little you had taken care of yourself and how unpresentable you were. Despite your mind telling you to keep going, you pushed Tony away from yourself and picked up your bag.

“I- sorry,” you mumbled before quickly taking off to your next class, leaving your professor almost dumbfounded.

@feelmyroarrrr @cameronmonaghantrashaf @backoffmyhusband @llittle-bird @supernaturallymarvellous @crazysocklovingfangirl @fairlightswiftly @sassysupernaturalsweetheart @dark-night-sky-99 @emma641 @clairese1980 @aseasyasdeanspie @river-alice-wolf @ivvitm1109 @i-have-a-wonky-eye-too @gabbie7-11

#Tony Stark x Reader #Tony Stark #Tony Stark x You #Tony Stark fanfiction #Tony Stark one shot #Tony x Reader #Tony x you #Marvel #MCU #Marvel x reader #marvel one shot #marvel fanfiction

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linhkcao · 5 years ago

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The moment I realize I can move on

As someone who is not naturally articulate and thus take the comfort (sometimes misery) of holding back thoughts and emotions, I’ve forced myself to record this time, no matter how broken it may end up sounding. What a transitive moment I’m in now, a mental milestone. A deep, great sadness of realization as it may be, I know it’ll help me reach the next level of freedom and self-acceptance. After a chain of exhausting days, I’ve allowed myself to be “officially sick” today. I’m gonna slow down. Thinking about what I’m thinking. Before throwing myself back into the madness of life.

I’m a wallflower to the core. The one that always watch, but never get involved, they say. Or am I? There are many moments where I was absolutely expressive and cheerful, like I’m living the time of my life. And I share that positive vibe to everyone I interact with. But there is no expected pattern of how and when that more attractive version of me show up. Recent recall was a couple weeks ago when “she” came to the rescue at an interview and secured me a job offer, I walked out of the building with an impression of “what the heck just happened? Was that me?!”. The thrilled joy, though, is short-lived. As I quickly realize that the worse-in-nearly-all-aspects version now will have to figure out how to meet high expectations from both myself and other people, built by “her”. It’s like “BOOM!!! Surprise biatch~ just saved you clumsy nerd from an awkward situation, congratulations we made it and now YOU take care of the rest! buh byeee~” every time.

Among expectations built, many I’m still fighting for, and for some I realized it’s time to give up for good. And you guess right, the tone is set up for the latter. The record of yesterday events in sequence, though not and end-to-end story, is the straw that broke the camel’s back. Here it goes...

I woke up with an annoying headache from a shortage of sleep as usual, rushed to the Turtle lake and took the school bus to Binh Duong, the place I would only travel to when I have to. It was kinda my favorite moment of a day though. I would always end up at the most front seat on the the right. Settled down. Eyes half-closed. The squeezing feeling all over my head and in the back of my eyes starts to soften thanks to the blend of gentle air-con wind and early morning sunlight, a cleanliness of smell, and my chill love song playlist aka the sleeping therapy. It is opposed to travelling by bike or taxi, now I actually hope the distance was longer! Normally that could be enough extra energy charged for me to survive a normal day at school. But yesterday was no ordinary day. I had no lectures but instead a group project in which we were struggling with an unfamiliar software. I was in charge of running the software while the other two did the writings. Just the night before I felt like a loser and almost gave up, but as the next morning, sitting down with the team, we gradually figured out everything. I felt so relieved. Perhaps it was not difficult after all. Maybe I was just freaked out with something I’m not used to and assume it's unsolvable.

Midday time, accompanied by the brutal sun, is when my tension headache gets at its worse. I skipped lunch and walked some heavy steps to the first-aid office, only to find it was being locked. Right, the lady must've been having lunch. Lying down at the feather chair in front, I pretended to get absorbed into my Iphone like a normal youngster nowadays instead of staring into nowhere and letting out my fatigue like a depressed person. Crazy how I still cared about what other people think even when it felt like my body was about to give out! And there she came from afar, the first aid staff lady; I turned my head and gave her the “I was waiting for you” smile (most honest smile ever), and she returned the “You’ll be okay now kiddo” smile. The first aid office is where I often come to take a nap after a test, or anytime I’m about the “shut down”. I call it VGU 5 star hotel.

The nap didn’t go well as I hoped, still I had to get up for the mini concert rehearsal, and apparently there are other people like me who are waiting to get their battery charged too (there are only 2 beds). The rehearsal was smooth, was no stress, and eventually better than the actual performance (what a shock). But then came the freaking rain. I blamed it for my bad mood, for my guitarist’s bike’s breakdown. And as we was just starting to come back to Saigon, his bike even had a flat tire. This is it, I thought, can’t get any worse!

I appreciate that my friend was very patient handling the situation, he was searching for mobile repairers and called each one of them. So I was resolved not to show any impatience although I was burning inside, the unfinished project still awaits me at home and seriously I was so desperate for some real sleep so I could make it to class for the presentation. I told him that I’d wait on the pavement to relieve the weight so he could go fixe his bike then come back afterwards. 30 minutes passed by... It was dark and remote as hell, and the last open restaurant which I sat nearby may close very soon. I made up my mind that I couldn't take a taxi or grab bike alone with such a far distance at this time of the day, so my only hope was that the guitarist friend woud have no further trouble and come back pick me up soon. My bestie even asked for the location details, in case I get kidnapped she could know how to report to the police lmao. And my professor was very worrying; she asked why I didn’t just simply stay in the dorm overnight...

Then it strike me how much I wanted to go back to Saigon, nearly at all costs. Even just for another 4-hour sleep then going to Binh Duong again, even when it’s super late and rainy. Am I crazy? I didn't care about rationality. I just wanted to go back.

But the actual turning point goes back to the concert, held at BD Conference & Exhibition center. It was prepared with dedication, passion, hard work, and joy, by tons of members from 2 biggest clubs in VGU. I’m thankful to be a small link in the whole chain.

The vocal quality as well as songs selection this year was really amazing. I sang “Perfect” by Ed Sheeran with anh Nguyen, the guitarist mentioned above. And although the performance was far from being perfect, I heard from several friends that they enjoyed it “beautiful singing”, “u still lit”, “it made me happy”, they even recorded and sent me... And trust me, I’m only glad because I could make some of the audiences happy, it was the only consolation at the end of the day. I personally and honestly didn’t understand those compliments, nor did I feel anything about the song, about the fact that I was a part of this concert. I came onto the stage, the extreme light beamed at us and all I could see are black-colored audiences. I didn’t see their faces, I didn’t have a clue how they were feeling. Were they bored or satisfied? It’s not about what the answer is, it’s about me having absolutely no belief in my performance. It was all acting, no emotions. Why can I say so, because I know what is like to “have belief” while singing. it’s when you just sing your hearts out and don’t give a damn on how the audience look like because you know they’re feeling with you, you don’t need to make sure by checking their facial expression and guessing if they’re satisfied or not.

I always talk to myself, no matter what bad things happen during the day, if at the end of the day when I lie down and about to sleep, I feel good, then it means I’ve had a good day. It was the same expectation towards the concert. I was hoping it could be a happy, memorable ending to my 4 boring years at VGU.

I know for sure there are many students like me at VGU who don’t feel any connection to the school nor other people at the campus. I’m not alone. But instead of being cool about it like many could do (you just simple seek another environment where you fit in), I was freak out. I was longing for the sense of belonging to this university, after I made a tough choice to leave home, leaving a mess behind me and move forward, I was an excited fresh who wanted VGU to be a happy, inspiring part of my youth. At the same time, I was all by myself. My brother was at the time struggling with his own marriage. Vi Anh is in Hanoi and we only chatted once in a while. My is in Japan, for years we nearly had no contact and I thought at some point I must let her go... Doug and Nhi went to BYU and I thought I might lose them as well... Other close friends were also away. I was lonely, i was desperate, i was ashamed.

For the record, there was an only truly happy and long lasting moment relating to VGU. It was the trip to Binh Lap with anh Quan, anh Huy, and Thien Tam. If you guys ever come across this note, I wanna thank you. It was the best thing happened to me during my VGU years.

This fourth year has been mind-blowing to me. I skipped the first semester to stay in Saigon for a part time job. And in the second semester I travel between 2 places. And suddenly I’m not a wallflower here in Saigon. For the first time in so many years, I don’t just watch, I am actively involved. For the first time in many years, the better version I talked about in the beginning and I, become one. I plan out my life, learn new things by my choice, meet new people and, many of them I make great friends, we exchange information and experiences, we help each other growth professionally and as a person. And above all things, My has decided to come back to Vietnam, and I realized after all the lost years, we still get each other's back. We reunited the gang along with Vi Anh and it was full of laughter. Many other friends have also recontacted and so it happened that we still exist in each other's life.

I love Saigon, for that it has been sweet and healing to me. I feel a sense of belonging, of living not just surviving. I guess the only reason for me to insist not staying overnight in Binh Duong was that after so many troubles, the fact that I could be back to the city for just a few hours sleeping, makes me feel safe, like “I’m at home at last”.

Of course, I didn’t get over VGU or Binh Duong easily. I wept out like a little girl but knew it was a “letting go” kind of crying. You know when you wish so much that things would work out between you and that person, it takes a while for you to accept that you’re not meant to be and you can move on and still live happily. Last night was the end to all my unrealistic hope. I felt absolutely nothing. No fun, no connection with the people, the atmosphere there. As soon as I finished the performance, I sneaked out into a dark conference room, playing with my phone while waiting for my friend to drive me back to Saigon.

I’m happy for those young and fun people I saw yesterday who has found themselves there, congrats to you, you will be like a close friend of mine who left VGU and his friends with tears of farewell. It’s also nice for me to be assured that people like me could still build beautiful memories elsewhere and be happy. In the end, we’re the only negative force of ourselves, no one can force us to do things we don’t want to.

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nilealligator · 6 years ago

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I’ve been so ANGRY recently,

I have been foisted into living w this guy. And like I usually have a policy of I always talk w ppl before I live in a room w them and we kinda come to an agreement (or decide it’s not gonna work). And like tbvvvvvvvvh I would NOT have decided to live with this dude (or at least woulda like upn said like, hey bro don’t have your weird super bright computer lights at night? like you literally do not need three fucking computer monitors such that we can barely open the closet?? if you had a cat you wanted to move in you should’ve fucking told me BEFORE YOU MOVED IN!!!!!??????!?!?!?!?)

And like, fonky, my first introduction to this bitch was him and my other roommate/his coworker making fun of me bc I said I needed a long Ethernet cord if they had one, and literally laughing at me bc apparently 15ft isn’t long??

And then further digging in on that shit and this whole “hahaha the Dumb Girl doesn’t know computer things!! Dumb Girls don’t know computers but we’re so cool and smart we know computers!!” and laughing together because I don’t know the exact specs of the Ethernet cord I wanted to get for my friend??? like that’s literally so ridiculous and crazy, only the dumbest person on the planet could not know that (and of course it’s a GIRL hahaha)

and like talking abt digital music and DAWs and straight up assuming I have no idea abt music software. Like bitch I’ve fucked w reaper!! I know what that shit is!! What the fuck!!!

Like damn I got tiddies and don’t work at a tech store but I know SOME shit abt tech and even if I didn’t y’all don’t gotta make me into some kinda joke or act like that makes me lesser!!! Like wow that’s a REAL great first impression!!!!!!!

This bitch is not on the fucking lease and I would barely even want anyone in here with me even if I LIKED them. I never actually said I wanted him (or anyone!!!) to move in with me, only that hypothetically I’d be interested in getting a roommate. so it was literally DECIDED FOR ME that this bitch would live with me and he moved in like 2 days later. And my hypothetical “I might be interested in living with someone” was taken as “he can absolutely move in! Whenever he’d like! I don’t even have to discuss like quiet times or anything at all beforehand, it’s not like there’s anything important that may or may not make us compatible for living together! He can absolutely be sexist! The more the better!”

like he’s honestly being 700% a dumb bitch and like really assuming I have a LOT more patience than I actually do. honestly he’s the EXACT type of stembro I fucking HATED when I studied CS and I’m just hoping I can go a month w/o rly going off on him or telling him to get tf out 🙏🙏 like frankly if I wanted to do charity I would 1) do it for someone who was not making PLENTY of money who does not actually need it and 2) do it for like, anyone else??

Like now I live with TWO douchebag tech bros and he’s not quite as bad as the other ones but I live in the same room as him now and … it’s rly something.

#me #MEN!!!!#men are EXACTLY like this im SORRY

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mosylufanfic · 6 years ago

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The Work Husband

Killervibe Fanfic Week: Free Day

So . . . this is a thing I wrote. It actually turned out to be as much of an Iris & Caitlin story as it is a Cisco/Caitlin story, and hey, that’s fine with me.

The Work Husband

On their second Friday at Mercury Labs, the biosciences department took Iris West and her assistant Yvonne out to lunch.

"It's so nice having competent people in the HR department," Dr. Caitlin Snow told Iris. "We've needed someone for a long time, but Becky just refused to retire, and she was so awful she drove four assistants away. One of them left in tears."

"Well, we're both happy to be here, and God knows it's a giant mess to clean up. Just before I left for lunch, I found a perfectly completed FMLA application under a dead potted plant."

Caitlin looked puzzled.

"Which is only horrifying if you're actually in HR," Iris acknowledged with a laugh. "But trust me, it's a big deal. I don't think Jessica Fimbres even works here anymore."

"Jessica? She was Dr. Wells's admin assistant. She was having a lot of problems with her pregnancy. She got let go because she was missing too much work for morning sickness and doctor's appointments."

Iris pressed her fingers to her eyes. "Oh my god. No. That was bullshit; FMLA should have covered her. Oh Jesus." There went her afternoon. They'd be lucky if Mercury Labs didn't get sued. Again. "See, it's all been like that. Don't get me started."

"Sounds awful," Caitlin said, picking olives out of her salad with her fork.

"Well, Becky's gone and so is Dr. Wells." That seemed to be the root of all the corruption and all that was left was clearing out the withering vines. "Yvonne and I will get it all figured out. I'll eat those if you don't want them." She loved olives.

Caitlin looked at her gratefully. "You may be my new best friend."

Iris smiled at her. She liked Caitlin, who seemed to be swimming against the tide of testosterone that was the biosciences department. That was part of the reason she accepted the scientist's offer of a ride back to the office.

The other part - well. Iris hoped that it didn't sour Caitlin on her forever.

"Look," she said, halfway back. "This isn't official or anything, but it is my job to say it."

"What's that?"

"Did Becky ever talk to you about the way you are with Cisco Ramon?"

Caitlin let out a squeak, but that might have been from the giant pickup that had just cut her off. "Learn to drive, fucknugget!" she yelled out the window. She looked guilty at Iris. "Sorry. I yell a lot when I'm driving. Cisco says it's because I repress my rage everywhere else."

Iris pried her fingers loose from the oh-fuck bar. "See, that's kind of what I'm talking about. How close you two are."

"What do you mean?"

"A lot of people have mentioned it to me, the way you guys are always hanging out. Taking lunches together, going on slushee runs, texting each other memes in the middle of the day, things like that." Cisco was in the engineering department, a floor away from biosciences. Iris hadn't been that tight with work buddies who sat the next cubicle over.

She wasn't about to repeat the salacious speculations she'd been treated to, because they sounded like people with dirty minds and no proof, but the fact that there was speculation at all concerned her, and it should concern Caitlin.

"We're totally professional at work," Caitlin said. "Really. The memes - "

"It's not about the memes," Iris said. "It's about how everyone knows that you have a boyfriend at home."

"Uh, yeah?"

"Well, I hear Cisco also has a girlfriend. And you two might think that just makes everything okay, but people talk when they see a man and a woman this close at work."

"You know," Caitlin said. "Cisco's bisexual, and pretty open about it. If I were a man, would we be having this same discussion?"

"Probably not," Iris acknowledged. "Which isn't fair, I know. And I have no idea what your relationship with your boyfriend is like. Or Cisco's with his girlfriend. For all I know, all four of you have brunch together every Sunday."

"Uh - "

"But when it comes to the way you act in the office, I have to mention it. You understand, right?"

"Of course," Caitlin said. "It's your job. I just never realized that people noticed. Or cared."

"Welcome to the planet," Iris sighed. "People's favorite topic of discussion is each other. So, you'll be more mindful, right? Of how things look?"

"Sure," Caitlin said. "We can do that."

Cisco took a swig of his orange soda. "Wait, wait," he said. "So the new HR lady sat you down and said, 'you gotta stop hanging out with that Cisco Ramon, he's just too blisteringly sexy?'"

"Her name is Iris, and she didn't say it like that," Caitlin said. They were taking an afternoon break together in the courtyard, under one of the big shade trees, drinking their drinks and splitting a bag of grapes. (Caitlin had won Rock, Paper, Scissors; Cisco would have gone for the Cheez Doodles from the vending machine.)

"So I'm not blisteringly sexy?"

She wrinkled her nose at him. "It wasn't official or anything."

"That's a relief. My permanent record is clean."

"Cisco, stop. This is serious."

"I just think it's pretty rich, getting scolded about keeping things professional by someone who's married to a guy from the chemistry division."

"That's different, she doesn't handle Barry's paperwork, and that's not the point. She wasn't scolding me. She wasn't nasty. She was just gently pointing out that people talk and we should be aware of that."

"They just suddenly noticed how much we hang out? I've been here three years."

"From the sounds of it, they noticed all along. There were just other things to talk about. Now that things are getting a little better around here, I guess things that didn't seem like a big deal then, do now." She fixed him with a beady gaze. "The point is, we have to do something about this."

"Yeah," he said, biting his grape in half. "I guess we do."

For a few weeks after their talk, Iris thought Caitlin had taken her words to heart. But then the scientist got engaged. She came in with a diamond ring sparkling on her left hand and didn't say anything about it until people pointed it out. She accepted congratulations with a smile, but Iris noticed that she and Cisco seemed even more inseparable.

She couldn't count the number of times she ran into the engineer in the biosciences hallway, taking Caitlin a donut from the break room, or the way Caitlin's name was always blinking on Cisco's IM software when Iris had to stop by the engineering division. And they were definitely taking lunches together more often.

"Uuuuughhhhh," she groaned to Barry as they drove to Caitlin's house two weeks later. "I'm not looking forward to this."

"Why not?" Barry asked. "It's an engagement party. Should be nice."

"She told me that she invited Cisco. Her exact words were, 'I would never leave him out.' It's going to be so weird meeting Caitlin's fiance, knowing how much she and Cisco hang out at work."

"Why?"

"Babe. I've talked about work spouses before, right?"

"Um - "

"You know, when you have a really close friend of the opposite sex at work . . . no?"

He shrugged.

"Okay, think Jim and Pam on The Office."

"Weren't they actually married?"

"Not in the first few seasons. They were just hanging out all the time and had all sorts of in-jokes. They were dating other people, but everyone was rooting for them to get together anyway. You know how TV shows do that. When it's obvious a couple belongs together from their first scene but they just have to drag the tension out."

"Okay, that's TV. This is real life. People are friends in real life."

"Friends is fine. It's when they start getting so close that it turns into an affair, either emotional or physical. And then the drama leaks over into work, and then the next thing you know, I'm pulling overtime doing the dismissal paperwork because one of them keyed the other's car when they broke up."

"Babe," he said. "Babe, I think working HR at the paper scarred you for life. This is Mercury Labs. People aren't that crazy here."

She leveled a look at him. "The last director before Tina McGee was removed from his office in handcuffs. The last HR head is currently in Bali with half the pension fund."

"Not everyone is that crazy here," he corrected himself.

"I'm just saying. It can go real bad."

He gave her a sidelong glance. "Do you have a work husband?"

She looked at him fondly. "Yes. He's adorable, he works in the chemistry division, and his name is Barry Allen."

His face relaxed and he rolled his eyes. She blew him a kiss, knowing he would blow it back. "Seriously, though," he said. "I don't think you have anything to worry about. Cisco is crazy about his girlfriend. A few weeks ago, he asked me for tips on making a really romantic proposal."

Iris blinked. "Wait, he what?"

"Yeah, he wants to marry his girlfriend. So, see - "

"When was this?"

"A few weeks ago, I said. Oh, you think he got the idea from Caitlin getting engaged?" He glanced at the GPS, which was directing him to turn right down a tree-lined suburban street.

"When exactly?"

"God, I don't know. Does it matter?"

"I'm not sure," she murmured. She shook her head. "Whatever. You're right. I'm probably seeing doom and scandal where there's nothing. This is going to be fine."

"Right. Help me look for the address."

"Oh, there!" Iris pointed at a gingerbready Victorian with beautiful flowerbeds. "I recognize Caitlin's car in the driveway. And . . . Cisco's . . . next to it . . . " She trailed off.

"Huh," Barry said, pulling up next to the curb behind a few other cars. "Guess he got here early."

"Uh-huh," Iris said distantly. She climbed out of the car, still staring at Cisco's car parked next to Caitlin's.

When Barry rang the bell, it was Cisco who answered it. "Hey, you made it! What's that?"

"It's for Caitlin," Iris said, holding out the bottle of wine. "Hostess gift."

"Awww, sweet, she loves this kind." He took it from her. "I'll put it in the kitchen. You guys want anything? There's beer, soft drinks, wine - "

Barry sniffed the air. "Do I smell meatballs?"

"Oh yeah, come get a plate! Kitchen's this way."

Iris watched Cisco weave his way through the people in the living room, saying quick hellos, and responding with smiles to their words. "Is it me, or does he seem really, really at home here?"

Barry shrugged. "He's probably over here a lot." He kissed her cheek. "Want a white wine?"

"Uh-huh," she said. "Sure. Go get your meatballs, babe."

Barry grinned at her and set off in search of a plate he could inhale.

She wandered around the room, momentarily lost in the crowd of family members and outside-work friends, none of whom she knew. It was a pretty house, just the kind of place she could see Caitlin keeping. Glossy hardwood floors, perfectly coordinating furniture, gauzy curtains in the windows, pictures on the mantelpiece. She stepped up to look at them.

That was where Barry found her a few minutes later. "Hey," he said, mouth full. "These are awesome. You should have some." He handed her a glass of wine. "So did you get to meet Caitlin's fiance?"

"I think you were talking with him," she said.

Barry craned his neck, peering back at the people in the kitchen. "Which one?"

She reached up and took his chin, redirecting his gaze to the pictures on the mantel -

Which were full of Cisco and Caitlin.

Cisco and Caitlin in formal wear at some kind of family wedding, Cisco and Caitlin sprawled on a picnic blanket grinning at each other, and most of all, Cisco and Caitlin kissing, smiling against each others' lips, clearly madly in love.

"Whoa," Barry said. "Cisco is Caitlin's boyfriend?"

"Fiance," Iris corrected.

"When did that happen?"

"Awhile ago, by the looks of it." She shook her head, staring at the photos. "Unbelievable."

"Huh," Barry said. Suddenly he grinned. "So that means - "

"I know what that means," Iris grumbled, elbowing him. "Can you go get me some of those meatballs?" They did smell amazing.

"Sure," he said, chortling to himself.

Iris turned to scan the room, and almost immediately spotted Caitlin, making her way in from another room. Caitlin saw her at the same time. Iris gave her a little wave, and Caitlin worked her way through the people the same way that Cisco had, saying hellos and welcomes, and accepting congratulations.

Finally, she stood in front of Iris. "Hi," she said softly.

"Hi," Iris responded, smiling wryly at her. "This is a really lovely home you two have."

Caitlin's face scrunched. "You figured it out."

"Mhmm. And I kind of feel like a moron."

Caitlin pressed her hands to her cheeks, laughing and looking regretful at the same time. "I'm so sorry! In the car last month, I couldn't figure out why you were even saying that at first. It never crossed my mind that you didn't know. I mean, we had to tell Becky, and our address is the same on all our paperwork, and we're listed as each other's emergency contacts."

Iris shook her head. "I can't even begin to explain how much Becky's filing system was a nightmare. We'll be lucky if we get it sorted out by Christmas. But why the secrecy with everyone else?"

Caitlin toyed with her engagement ring. "Well, when I started there five years ago, I just never talked about my private life. It's not my style, really. Even after I met Cisco and we got serious about each other, I just said I had a boyfriend and not much more."

"I can understand that," Iris said. Women in a male-dominated profession always had to walk a razor's edge of how much personal information they gave out. Too little and you came off as a cold and soulless workaholic, too much and you were that woman who couldn't talk about anything but her boyfriend. You couldn't win.

"Then, when Cisco got the job in the engineering division, he didn't want to mention it at first because he didn't want people saying he just got hired because I worked there. He can be proud like that. And the longer we went like that, the more awkward it would have been to say, 'so you know the boyfriend I've been with the past several years? It's actually Cisco.'"

"So when I warned you off from hanging out with your own boyfriend - "

"I meant what I said. I had no idea people cared. And then of course, Cisco thought it was just the funniest thing that people thought we were cheating on each other with each other."

Cisco's big laugh rang out over the party. Iris glanced through into the kitchen to see Barry swatting his shoulder and laughing, too. She narrowed her eyes at Cisco, who grinned hugely back at her. Clearly the whole situation had tickled him pink.

His eyes shifted over to Iris's right, and softened. Okay? he mouthed, and out of the corner of her eye, Iris saw Caitlin nod.

He blew a kiss, and Iris turned to see Caitlin smiling back at him, eyes soft.

How had she never noticed the way they looked at each other before? She had, Iris answered herself. But she'd chalked it up to cheating waiting to happen, not a devoted long-time couple.

Caitlin examined her anxiously. "Are you mad?"

"Mostly at myself," Iris said. "That'll teach me to listen to rumors instead of checking out the facts on my own." She shook her head. "I should have sat you down and said, 'so tell me what your relationship is with Cisco' instead of launching right into an unofficial scold. I'm sorry."

"It wasn't that much of a scold."

"So am I deputized to tell everyone the truth on Monday morning?"

"Not just you," Caitlin said. "We've invited a few other people from work that we've been wanting to get to know better, and both of us are going to take in pictures to put up by our desks. It'll get around." She grimaced. "I'm not looking forward to the next week or so."

"It'll die down." There would be lots of talk in the breakroom and over the company Slack, but the next scandal would come along soon enough.

"So now that you know I'm hanging out with my fiance and not just a work pal, does the scold still count?"

"Mmm, as long as you're not making out in the stairwell or having quickies in the stationary closet, you're probably okay."

"Well, there was this one time - "

"Okay, I'm going to stop you right there. There are some things that, as your HR professional, I absolutely cannot know, capisce?"

Caitlin giggled. "Got it."

"Great." Iris linked her arm through Caitlin's. "So, now that we've got that cleared up, show me the rest of the house."

FINIS

#Caitlin Snow #Cisco Ramon #Iris West #killervibe #killervibefanficweek18 #mosylufanfic lives up to her damn name #office AU #seriously this is so mundane #I read way too much AskAManager #I promise tomorrow will be more superpowered #the flash #search your feelings you know it to be queue

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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years ago

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I'VE BEEN PONDERING PG

It's very common for startups to present to them. Do people live downtown, or have some sort of exit. There is less stress in total, but more as an exploration of gender and sexuality in an urban context, etc.1 I think the goal of this rule; if you can't explain your plans concisely, you don't worry that it might come out badly, or upset delicate social balances, or that can incorporate live data feeds, or that you won't be demoralized if they seem pointless.2 One YC founder told me that it wasn't worth investing in. The patent pledge doesn't fix every problem with patents.3 I can tell from the case. This site isn't lame. They wouldn't all grow as big. It will be easier in proportion to an estimate of your company's value that you'd both agreed upon.

Then you could, I don't care what he says, I'm going to name them: type A fundraising is when you can do, you don't see the opportunities all around us is that we get on average only about 5-7% of a much larger number.4 In most fields the great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to direct the course of adding some feature they were asking for.5 Most hackers are employees, and this trick merely forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that you'll be able to say whether he should be classified as a friend or angel.6 Don't say anything unless you're fairly sure what you want to reach; from paragraph to paragraph I let the ideas take their course. Sometimes a competitor will deliberately threaten you with a business background, and he will automatically get paid proportionally more. Not all of them had never seen the Web before we came to tell them to stop.7 If you're free of a misconception that everyone else is crazy. Most startups that raise money and the kind of alarms you'd set off if you operate like Columbus and just head in a general westerly direction.

As we were in the old sense of managing the round. Technology is a lever. Modern literature is important, but I suspect that most of them a part time job. In the Bay Area would be the answer. But let someone else start those startups. They're not necessarily trying to mislead you. Like a lot of people will make them.

But if you make something they like. 05 PM subject: Re: Revenge of the Nerds on the LL1 mailing list.8 American universities currently seem to be a media company to throw Microsoft off their scent. Java white paper, Gosling explicitly says Java was designed to be a missile aimed right at what makes America successful.9 Different users have different requirements, but I don't think that's the right way to do it. But this is merely an artifact of the rule of law.10 All you'll learn is the words kids are allowed to use. That's the way to the close.11 It did serve some purposes: reading a talk out loud can expose awkward parts. What investors still don't get is what insanely great translates to in a larval startup.

When I talk about humans being meant or designed to live a certain way out of habit or politeness. Hackers & Painters that hadn't been online. Incidentally, the switch in the 1920s to financing growth with retained earnings till the 1920s.12 And the programmers liked it because they don't like to have it. What counts as property depends on what works to treat as property. But this is wrong. What's a prostitute?13 Everyone by now presumably knows about the danger of premature optimization. Essentially, they lead you on. That will change the way they treat the music they sell through iTunes.14

So tablet makers should be thinking: what else can we give developers access to? White said, good writing is rewriting, wrote E. Almost four decades later, fragmentation is still increasing. The more people you have to do it than literally making a mark on the world. Investors looked at Yahoo's earnings and said to one of the principles they teach you is to align the car not by lining up the hood with the stripes painted on the road, but by trying to use mass lawsuits against randomly chosen people as a form of evolutionary pressure. People think that what you want. In principle anyone there ought to have multiple founders who were already friends before they decided to build recipe sites, or aggregators for local events.

Better Bayesian Filtering. They may play some behind the scenes as adults spin the world for a while, can make visual perception flow in through his eye and out through his hand as automatically as someone tapping his foot to a beat. If you looked in people's heads. They are all fundamentally subversive for this reason. I sat down and calculated what I thought was hard, the groups all turned out ok. Election forecasters are proud when they can get it, at this stage.15 The danger of symmetry, and repetition especially, is where the richest buyers are, but figure out precisely where you lose them. If they didn't know what language our software was so complex. 2:21 AM subject: Re: meet the airbeds PG, Thanks for the lead Fred to: Fred Wilson date: Mon, Feb 9,2009 at 11:42 AM subject: Re: airbnb There's a lot to start a startup. And yet they can hold their own with any work of art ever made.

Leonardo?16 It is, as far as possible prevent them from having fun. Doesn't that show people will pay most for?17 After thinking about it than most, but almost everywhere the trend is in that direction. Till then they had to ask permission to release software: the last thing you changed. But fortunately in the US are more conservative than Boston ones.18 People are all you need is to be battered by circumstances—to let the days rush by. But that's something you can fix later, but you can't evade the fundamental conservation law. And yet Apple's overall market share is still small. Though the Web has been around for a millennium is finished just because of its prestige, but because they were ambivalent about threatening their cash cow, mainframe computing. I mean efforts to protect against cosmic rays.19

Notes

Even as late as 1984. Incidentally, Google may appear to be at a large company? Plus one can have escaped alive, or to be good?

To do this all the poorer countries. Ed. But it was the least correlation between the Daddy Model may be a sufficient condition.

And in World War II to the rise of big companies can afford that. And while this is to try to be a win to include in your classes as a result a lot more frightening in those days, but I call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of happy. I'm talking mainly about software startups are now the first digital computer game, you can probably write a subroutine to do would be better at opening it than people who might be a good problem to fit your solution. Look at those goddamn fleas, jabbering about some disease they'll see once in China, during the war on drugs show, bans often do better, and instead of the world of the most famous example.

Plus one can ever say it again. When I catch egregiously linkjacked posts I replace the actual amount of damage to the founders' advantage if it was 94% 33 of 35 companies that can't reasonably expect to make a fortune in the case, not because Delicious users are stupid.

But you're not allowed to discriminate on any basis you want to get going, and oversupply of educated ones come up with elaborate rationalizations. I also skipped San Jose is a meaningful idea for human audiences. Though in fact had its own mind about whether a suit would violate the patent pledge, it's not enough to defend their interests in political and legal disputes.

What Is an Asset Price Bubble? This doesn't mean easy, of the river among the bear gardens and whorehouses. They act as if you'd just thought of them could as accurately be called acting Japanese. Many more than 20 years.

It's hard for us!

2%. If a prestigious VC makes a small proportion of the things you're taught.

Doing things that don't scale.

Now the misunderstood artist is not limited to startups. There's not much use, because few founders are willing to provide when it's done as conspicuously as this place was a false positive rate is 10%, moving to Monaco would only give you more than the previous round. Cascading menus would also be good startup founders tend to get going, e.

Emmett Shear writes: True, Gore won the popular vote he would presumably have got more of the flock, or at least, the government and construction companies. People only tend to damp this effect, at least guesses by pros about where that money comes from ads on other investors doing so because otherwise competitors would take forever in the case of heirs, professors, politicians, and everyone's used to place orders.

His critical invention was a kid that you'd want to sell them technology. I'm not dissing these people make the people working for startups, because it aggregates data from so many trade publications nominally have a lot of reasons American car companies have little to bring corporate bonds to market faster; the point where things start with consumer electronics and to run on the firm's site, they're nice to you. Not only do they decide on the young Henry VIII and was troubled by debts all his life. Distribution of potentially good startups, who've already made the decision.

Maybe that isn't really working bad unit economics, typically and then scale it up because they couldn't afford it. An investor who's seriously interested will already be working to help a society generally is to let yourself feel it mid-sentence, but you get an intro to a clueless audience like that.

But it is dishonest of the country turned its back on industrialization at the start, e.

The need has to be employees, or editions with the buyer's picture on the back of Yahoo, we actively sought out people who'd failed out of the things attributed to Confucius and Socrates resemble their actual opinions. The speed at which point it suddenly stops. And when a startup to engage with slow-moving organizations is to write every component yourself, but also very informative essay about why something isn't the last step in this essay I'm talking here about everyday tagging. If not, greater accessibility.

In 1525 he was made a bet: if you hadn't written it? I saw this I used thresholds of.

Especially if they were to work your way up. I managed to find a broad range of topics, comparable in scope to our scholarship though without the spur of poverty are only locally accurate, because those are probably the last step in this respect.

So how do you use that instead of Windows NT? How did individuals accumulate large fortunes in an absolute sense, if you make something hackers use. On the face of it.

But it's telling that it would be to say that it had no idea what's happening as merely not-doing-work. But they've been trained. So far, I preferred to call them whitelists because it depends on a weekend and sit alone and think.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #people #sup #editions #airbnb #back #trick #work #stress

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qqueenofhades · 7 years ago

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the trash saga of flynn and lucy: xvi

GUESS WHAT PEOPLE. Yep, a year to the day since I posted this far-out-of-control-monstrosity on AO3, it has risen from the dead to (finally) be completed. So yes. Have 12k words of the Garbage Conclusion of the Trash Saga. For @extasiswings, @prairiepirate, @gwennieliz, @frankfreakincastle, @dragon-princess, and @rhymeswithtessa.

Since it’s been 84 years, if you need to catch up on the plot and developments and Garbage until now, AO3.

If Wyatt had more time to think this over, he is fairly sure that he would not have stolen a Royal Navy lieutenant’s uniform, especially one that is several sizes too small for him (he’s not the world’s biggest guy, but who was wearing this, Mighty Mouse?) They needed to get into the Gibraltar docks and try to find the abandoned Mary Celeste without raising suspicion, but the downside of Wyatt’s brilliant disguise is that people keep stopping him and either asking for information or expecting him to know what’s going on. Wyatt’s British accent may be a step up from Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins, but it’s still not great – not to mention he does not have a blessed clue which Navy ships are currently stationed here, and thus no idea which one to pretend to be from. Great. He was trying to be clandestine, but he might as well have hired a plane with a banner to announce that there are impostors among them. Also, it would really help if Rufus would quit snickering.

“Shut up,” Wyatt growls, after their fourth questionable encounter has left the longshoreman squinting over his shoulder suspiciously as they try to walk at a brisk, ordinary pace away. “This is not as easy as it looks. You wanna trade?”

“Yeah,” Rufus says. “Because the British Empire, at the height of colonialism and Darkest Africa and whatever else, is really going to buy that I’m a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. Guess you’re just going to have to keep it up, Officer Wedgie.”

Wyatt glares at him, while resisting the urge to pick the white canvas trousers out of where they have gotten uncomfortably bunched up, yet again. He is relieved, to say the least, that he wasn’t permanently stuck in 1829 and that he’s managed to recover Rufus, that they have some idea of where Rittenhouse ended up, and that they might even manage to see Lucy and Flynn again one of these centuries. Their outlook, however, is not terribly promising. Rufus has reported that the altered history and the CSA still exist in 2017, there’s not any record of Lucy ever being born, and that all their efforts to date still have not succeeded in restoring her. He could, he suggested doubtfully, try some massively theoretical override, go to 1983, the year of Lucy’s birth, and patch in the evidence of her existence to see if it takes, like a software programmer trying a complicated hack on a bit of malfunctioning code. But as Lucy’s life depends on whatever they figure out, Wyatt doesn’t want to go for that kind of Hail Mary unless it’s absolutely necessary. He can’t lose Lucy, or Rufus. Hell, he doesn’t even want to lose Flynn. God knows when that happened.

At last, they manage to talk their way into the salvage yard, after having Wyatt remove the jacket and pretend to be Canadian since he sounds far more Canadian than he does British, and because the Canadian ship, the Dei Gratia, was the one to bring the Mary Celeste in. The Mary Celeste herself, not looking like one of the most famous nautical mysteries of all time, is anchored at the end of the quay. She is a mid-sized, two-masted brig, and going from what little Wyatt scraped off Wikipedia before leaving the present, nobody ever figures out what happened to her crew. The Gibraltar salvage board thought the captain of the Dei Gratia had killed them, or deliberately wrecked them, or was trying to defraud them somehow, but none of that stood up with evidence. The passengers remain gone for good, their abandonment of a perfectly seaworthy ship never explained. And while all kinds of theories have been proposed over the years, from the mundane to the ridiculous, Wyatt has a feeling that the answer to this begins and ends with one word. Rittenhouse.

Looking as casual as possible, he and Rufus make their way down the docks. The ship is being guarded by a pair of bored soldiers, who nonetheless give the boys the fish eye as they approach. Word of the mystery is getting around, and these must not be their first looky-loos. “Step along, you two.”

“Actually,” Wyatt says. “I’m with the Canadian Navy. Dei Gratia is under our flag, I need to ask a few questions, take a brief inspection.”

The man stares at him suspiciously. “There’s no Canadian Navy.”

Wyatt curses under his breath – this is why Lucy is the historian, not him. He knows there definitely is a Canadian Navy now, because he had a friend who served in it, but apparently it hasn’t been founded yet. Still, whenever caught in a lie, the wise thing to do is always to lie harder. He cocks his head and stares angrily at the man. “Excuse me? I’m off the HMCS Nova Scotia, we’re anchored up the coast in Malaga. A messenger was sent up to me once the Dei Gratia brought her in. You want me to go back to my captain and tell him you’re impeding me from carrying out my job?”

Despite himself, the soldier is caught on the hop. “Who’s your captain?”

“Timothy Horton.” Wyatt folds his arms. “You really want me to bring him down here? I’m sure he’s going to be very entertained that you’ve been wasting my time and obstructing the inquiry, so…”

The soldiers exchange a glance, look at Wyatt’s uniform, and as ever, take no account of Rufus at all. Finally, grudgingly, they stand aside. “Ten minutes.”

“Thank you, sir.” Wyatt snaps a sarcastic salute and strides past them, Rufus hurrying after, as they make their way up to the gangplank and over the side to the Mary Celeste’s deck. The soldiers are still watching them, so Wyatt has to make a show of taking notes and jotting down quick sketches. Finally, they manage to get below, into the empty cabin, sunlight slanting on the floor. As they stare around, Wyatt says, “You have any idea?”

“Nope.” Rufus shakes his head, lips grim. “But I’ve been thinking. This happened in history, right? Our history. Before Rittenhouse had their hands on a time machine. They could be involved somehow, but… I’m guessing that for whatever reason, they wanted to stop the Mary Celeste from being abandoned and for it to complete its journey. Which means there was something, or someone, they wanted to survive the trip. Some secret Rittenhouse member on the crew?”

“No idea.” Wyatt pauses, then reaches for the captain’s logs. “Far as I know, everything seemed fine. That was why it was such a big deal when they vanished. But you may be on to something, and I don’t have any other place to start. So…”

With that, he pulls down the nearest book, flips it open, and starts going through it, while Rufus cocks a nervous eye at the door, listening for thumps or interruptions from outside. It gives Wyatt a headache to read so much elaborate nineteenth-century cursive, but at least he had practice during his extended layover in 1829. Finally he says, “Okay. The captain is – was – Benjamin Briggs, he seems clean. Total straight arrow. But the majority owner of the ship is a James H. Winchester, and I swear that name sounds familiar. The first mate is married to his niece, and he recommended the steward. Dammit, why isn’t Lucy here?”

“Winchester?” Rufus looks at him oddly. “Any connection to that crazy mystery house in California? The one built by the widow of the rifle guy?”

“I don’t think so. Unless they’re cousins or something.” Wyatt blows out a frustrated breath. “If we had Google, we could look this up in five minutes, but we’re stuck, what, card cataloguing it? Actually, even that is probably too generous. Hold on. Let me see when Winchester bought her. Uh… 1869, I think. So three years ago.”

“Look, with a name like Winchester, that’s got to be important,” Rufus says. “Anything you can think of? You’re the one who’s the gun expert around here.”

Wyatt wracks his brains. “There was – I think – a James Winchester who was in the Revolutionary War, and a general in the war of 1812. He knew Andrew Jackson, they founded Memphis, Tennessee together. He died a while ago, though, this can’t be him.”

“Well, that’s a bunch of hot spots together,” Rufus says slowly. “Served in the Revolution. Was also in the war of 1812, which is where – in 1814 – things got messed up for us in the present. Knew Andrew Jackson, in whose administration you spent a bunch of time recently, and Jackson was major Rittenhouse. All of that means this Winchester dude was absolutely Rittenhouse too. Probably fairly high up. If this James Winchester is his son or his grandson, I’m guessing he was using the Mary Celeste to run his evil little secret society errands. The crew probably didn’t know. But what if Captain Briggs – you said he was a straight arrow, right? What if Briggs found out? What if Winchester gave him some kind of secret money or letter or whatever else that had to get to his Rittenhouse contacts in Europe, Briggs read it, and flipped a shit. Realized what he’d been doing all this time. And knew that the only way to save himself, his family – his wife and baby daughter were with him, right? – and his crew from Rittenhouse, and make sure they never got the secret, was to…”

“Disappear,” Wyatt finishes with him, heart suddenly pounding. “Rufus, you’re a god damn genius.”

Rufus shrugs, looking somewhat abashed. “We don’t know that it’s true.”

“No, but that makes a hell of a lot of sense.” Wyatt blows out another breath. “That’s got to be what Rittenhouse wants. Benjamin Briggs and the crew disappeared with whatever important secret or artifact he was supposed to deliver, and they want it back. They don’t know exactly when Briggs and company abandoned ship, or where they’d be, so they have to come to the salvage hearings and try to work it out in reverse. If there’s a chance he’s still out there floating on the ocean somewhere, they can head off and pick him up.”

“What is it?” Rufus asks. “Whatever Briggs has that they want?”

“Could be anything,” Wyatt says grimly. “Money, or the secret to how to succeed in business without really trying, or something else that would make it easier for them to do what they do. But whatever it is, they want it. So yeah. We have to make sure they don’t get it.”

“Any chance we’re going to run into Lucy and Flynn?” Rufus glances away sharply as there’s a loud creak from outside. It could just be the ship rocking at anchor, or it could be someone coming on board. “I sent a message for them to join us here, but given how fiddly the connection between the Mothership and the Lifeboat is, I don’t even know when they are, or if they got it. There wasn’t any record of a Lucy Preston being killed at Salem, so I think they got out of there, but I have no idea if they then – ”

There’s another creak. Louder.

“Wyatt,” Rufus says tensely. “I think we have company.”

“Yeah, just…” Wyatt flips even more frenetically through the pages, as if he’s going to wring one more drop of information out of this blasted book. “Hold on, just – ”

“WYATT!”

“Okay!” Wyatt drops the log and grabs the sidearm concealed (with difficulty) beneath his waistcoat, hoping he doesn’t rip all the seams at once. He beckons for Rufus to get behind him, and Rufus dives into a pile of burlap sacks. The cabin door opens, Wyatt’s finger tightens on the trigger, and –

“Don’t!” a voice yells frantically. A very familiar voice. “Don’t shoot!”

Wyatt and Rufus’ hearts stop at the same time.

“Lucy?”

It has not been (it should be normal by now, and yet) the most outstanding few days of Lucy Preston’s life.

“How did you – ” That was her first question when she opened the door and came face to face with Emma Whitmore. Logically, there is no way Rittenhouse should be here. If Wyatt and Rufus have the Lifeboat, and Lucy, Flynn, and Iris have the Mothership, that leaves no extra time machines for Emma and her gang to use. They should have (they should have, and yet by now, Lucy has learned over and over the danger of underestimating these people) been stranded in Salem, maybe burned as witches themselves for that final, signature touch of irony. The only thing she can think of – that lurches horribly to mind and has to be forced away – is that this was some kind of long con on Iris’ part after all, that after she took Lucy and Flynn here, she went out, hopped back in the Mothership, returned to Salem, picked up the Rittencrew, and ferried them back. No, though. That’s not what happened. There are other, far easier ways to do that, and Iris wasn’t feigning. Not after everything that happened with her father and grandfather and Lucy. She didn’t.

“How did you get here?” Lucy repeats, somewhat more in control of herself after the initial shock. She feels Flynn’s hand close on her arm like a vise, trying to put her behind him, but she doesn’t move. “What do you want?”

Emma’s eyes flick between them, both still in a certain state of dishabille. She appears amused. “It wasn’t to ask for a three-way, believe me. As for how I got here, that’s action item number one. We had to build a mostly functional prototype to train Iris in, and while I had the Mothership, we copied out a basic software clone. It was good for about… two jumps, maybe. Last resort backup plan. After you pulled that fun trick in Salem, we sent the emergency signal, and headed out here. So. We will want the Mothership back.”

“Good luck with that,” Flynn says harshly. “Is Rittenhouse dead?”

Emma flinches, ever so slightly. “John? Yes. He’s dead. Your charming daughter killed him.”

“Because you taught her how to be a killer!” Flynn’s shout makes the fragile floorboards quake. If Lucy relaxed her grip the merest fraction, he would probably tear Emma’s throat out with his bare hands. “Because you – ”

“Please,” Emma says dismissively. “Like you would have taught her any different? It’s all you know how to do.”

Flynn goes quite still, even as Lucy, thinking of him back with Asher in Russia, holds tighter. “Is there a point to this?” she says harshly. “Did you just come to gloat and think we’d somehow be persuaded to hand the Mothership back as a result?”

“Not really.” Emma shrugs. “You see, Lucy, now that John’s dead, I’m the de facto leader of Rittenhouse’s operational arm. And I’m not going to fall for your – charms? You aren’t going to convince me that you want to join us, because I know you don’t. But you are going to work with us, one way or another. So let’s make it simple. You do what we want, or Iris dies.”

Lucy jerks. So does Flynn. “What?”

“Simple, really.” Emma is clearly enjoying this, revealing information bit by bit, baiting the hook, stringing them along. The woman is pathological. “We’re going to run a quick errand in the Mothership, and retrieve something that Benjamin Briggs tried to steal from us. Then you’re going to uninstall whatever program Carlin put into it, the remote override, and anything else that could mess it up. Then you’re going to give it back to us. I assume your boy band backups will be here soon, so three of you can take a ride back to the present in the Lifeboat, if you really want to go. The other two will stay behind with us, hostages for your good behavior. Do all that, and we’ll let Iris go. Otherwise, she dies, and so do all of you.”

“You – ” Flynn takes a step, pulling Lucy with him. “You have my daughter?”

“Of course we do.” Emma sounds bored. “I wouldn’t come here to threaten you if we didn’t. She’s only Rittenhouse’s most wanted fugitive after what she did to John in Salem, so the circumstances of her confinement aren’t exactly pleasant. Here.” She takes some Polaroid photographs out of her pocket and shoves them at Flynn. “Have a look.”

Flynn’s fingers suddenly don’t seem to work, and Lucy grabs his hand to steady them. She doesn’t want to look at the pictures either, even as the images burn themselves unavoidably into her eyes. Iris bound and gagged, hair down and eyes furious, surrounded by a bunch of Rittengoons smiling and giving the thumbs up to the camera like big-game hunters who have just brought down an endangered rhino in Africa. It looks as if she’s had at least one beating. Clearly, they wasted no time at all in snatching her when she, Lucy, and Flynn got here to Gibraltar. Iris is tough and terrifying, and if nothing else, probably knows all the tricks and tortures that Rittenhouse will try to use against her, but this –

“You’re despicable,” Lucy says quietly. “Truly despicable.”

“This wasn’t my call.” Emma looks affronted, despite herself. “It was your mother’s. I think she still feels that if she can get the Flynns out of the way, you’ll listen to her, see the light and return to the fold. What is it about you, Lucy, that gets everyone to act so irrationally? Why does everyone bend over backwards hoping you’ll join them and/or fuck them? Your mother, John, him – ” She jerks a thumb at Flynn. “You’re not really that special. Anyway, I told Carol that this wasn’t the way to go about it, that torturing Iris would just make all of you more angry, but you know how she gets. So. Are you coming or not?”

For a moment, Lucy can’t speak. She can’t just leave Iris to Rittenhouse’s tender mercies, she can’t let her mother get away with this, she can’t see a way out of this, and she can’t under any circumstances agree to be separated from Flynn. After a fraught pause, she says, “You’ll take us to wherever you’re holding Iris. I’ll see for myself. Then we can talk… terms.”

Emma smirks, as if to say it’s cute that they think this is a bargain, but fine, she’ll play ball. She shouts down the stairs – clearly she wasn’t dumb enough to come alone – and a whole passel of goons appear to take firm hold of Lucy and Flynn, march them out into the street, and bundle them into a hansom cab that they have apparently rented just for the occasion. Have to do your period-appropriate kidnapping in style, after all. Lucy is sorely tired of being abducted and manipulated and pushed around by Rittenhouse, and she is just about ready to do something drastic to ensure that this is the last time it happens. A muscle is going in Flynn’s cheek, and his hands open and close on his knees. Lucy reaches over to put her hand over his, and their eyes meet, communicating a silent promise. They are in this together.

It isn’t that long of a ride to the handsome brick townhouse on the waterfront that Rittenhouse has acquired for their 1872 headquarters, and in that time, Lucy has some – not much, but some – chance to think. She’s tired of being frightened of her mother, tired of fighting with her, and she still remembers what Flynn did for his father back in Russia. Obviously, that is not going to work as an exact blueprint, but as Emma says, this keeps coming down to Lucy. Lucy is the one on who everything turns. Going ten rounds in the ring with Rittenhouse, trying to out-bleed them, trading punches, one mission after another, rattling around like marbles through all of time and space, isn’t working. And since they’re on the verge of getting everything they ever wanted, this is it. Zero hour. Lucy figures out to outsmart them for good, right now, and end this, or everyone loses everything.

No pressure.

The hansom rolls to a halt before the house, and Emma comes around to get the door like an evil footwoman, offering her hand to Lucy with a faint smirk. Lucy ignores it, though she manages to trip on the step, and Flynn catches her from behind. He sets her upright on the muddy cobbles, managing an impressive amount of restraint given the fact that his daughter is presumably being held prisoner in that very house. The old Flynn would have drawn his gun and barged in, spraying bullets everywhere, but this new Flynn is – well, still inclined to cause calamity, but in a different way. He’s tense, furious, on edge, and frightened, but he’s keeping it in check. Following Lucy’s lead on this. Trusting her.

Lucy hopes it’s justified. Straightens her back, lifts her chin, and looks Emma dead in the eye. “I’d like to see my mother.”

Emma pauses, shrugs, and with an escort of armed goons falling in to either side, they enter the house, making their way to the elegantly wallpapered parlor at the back. Carol Preston is sitting in an armchair sipping tea, looking like a Pride and Prejudice extra, but gets to her feet at the sight of them. “Lucy.”

“Mom.” Lucy smiles sweetly at her, and even strides over to kiss her cheek. “You know that dress is very old-fashioned for 1872, don’t you? And you were the historian too.”

“I haven’t had much occasion to change.” Carol smiles airily back, trying to brush it off, but Lucy sees something almost like hurt in her eyes. “Things have been… complicated.”

“Yes, they have. Where’s Iris?”

Carol’s eyes flicker again, between Lucy and Flynn, as if trying to judge the likelihood of driving a wedge between them one more time. Whatever she sees, it doesn’t please her. Finally she says, “Downstairs. Did Emma tell you what we want?”

“Yes. Thoroughly.” Lucy takes the liberty of helping herself to a seat on the davenport, and after less than an instant, Flynn sits next to her, their hands once more reaching for the other’s. “What did the crew of the Mary Celeste have that Rittenhouse wants?”

“I don’t think that’s – ”

“Mom.” Again, that smile sharpened to draw blood. Lucy feels almost giddy, driven on something that isn’t even rage, isn’t hatred, but is forged stronger than both. Maybe she’s channeling her inner Flynn. “Haven’t you kept enough from me by now?”

Carol flinches, ever so slightly. She appears set to start into her usual spiel about this is what is best for Lucy, that she will come around to it, that she’s done everything to make her see it, but at last, it seems to taste as dry and withered on her tongue as it falls on Lucy’s ears. She keeps staring at her daughter and her – well, whatever Flynn is. There’s still no easy word for it. At last she says, “It’s a device made by Charles Babbage. It was taken to America a few years ago – 1869 – for tests, and for the Rittenhouse leadership to approve it. Now it’s going back to be installed. Or. It was.”

Lucy takes a moment to absorb that. The great Victorian inventor, engineer, and eccentric Charles Babbage is the man who, along with Lord Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace, will be credited as the father of the computer in a century or so. He drew up prototypes for a Difference Engine and an Analytical Engine that never actually ran, along with just about everything else, and as far as Lucy recalls, he did in fact just die last year, 1871. Rittenhouse has stolen his stuff and is going to put it into practical application – or was going to, until someone on the Mary Celeste did a bunk with it. “So,” she says at last. “Rittenhouse was supposed to have a fully functioning computer, or computer-like machine, a full century before anyone else. You could graduate to the time machine about – when? The Manhattan Project?” That’s not a scary thought at all. “No need to wait until Mason Industries gets around to inventing it in 2016. You’d have it up and running long before any of us were born. We’d be out of the way at long last. No more missions, no more trying to change things piecemeal before we get there. You could have it set.”

“Yes.” Carol looks at her with that glimmer of pride she sometimes used to show, all too rarely, when Lucy tried and tried to impress her. “So you see it.”

“Yes,” Lucy says in turn, quite calmly. “Mom, you know we can’t let you do that.”

Carol seems to want to say something else, but it doesn’t make it to her lips. “Lucy,” she starts again. “Lucy, I – ”

“Emma said that three of us can go back on the Lifeboat, once we’ve given you the Mothership and retrieved this,” Lucy continues remorselessly. “But I can’t go back, because I’ve been erased. Which you know. And since I get the feeling that not a whole lot happens in Rittenhouse without you knowing, did you honestly stand by and tell whoever’s running this organization now that it was fine to delete both your daughters – I don’t know if you remember Amy, but I think somehow you do – in the name of world domination? Pull the switch, I’m gone? Did that really not bother you at all?”

“Of course it…” Carol rubs her thin fingers under her eyes, a gesture Lucy also remembers well, the one her mother always made when extemporizing about how she just wishes Lucy would try harder. “Of course I didn’t want to erase you, Lucy! I never did! I was – I was quite young when you were born, you know. The first time they laid you in my arms and I looked down at you, I… I swore I’d never let anything happen to you. It’s… it’s just… been hard.”

Lucy regards her mother in silence. For the first time in a very long while, she feels a prickle of sympathy. Carol Preston, born and raised Rittenhouse, meets an older college professor when she’s nineteen years old, gets wined and dined and seduced – what did Benjamin Cahill do, whisper dazzling Rittenhouse secrets in her ear? Carol’s probably made plenty of sense of it as an adult, rationalized it, justified it, but she was still a young woman taken advantage of by a major leader in the cult in which she has been indoctrinated from birth. She’s chosen to embrace it, rather than escape it, but she is a victim too. Knew it was her job to breed up good Rittenhouse stock, just like John intended to do with Lucy. She’s still doing this because she genuinely has managed to convince herself it’s best. Otherwise, she might realize what she has done, what she’s given up, and crumble.

The silence continues. Emma has positioned herself behind Carol’s chair like a bodyguard, but when Carol doesn’t speak, she gives her boss a pointed look. “Well? Should I get Iris?”

“I – yes.” Carol’s fingers twist the fabric of her out-of-date dress. “Go get her.”

Flynn tenses, and Lucy puts a hand on his arm, holding him back, as Emma vanishes out the door. After a few minutes, she returns, hauling Iris. The junior Flynn is battered and bruised, but Emma is still having to work hard, and Iris is struggling to escape her cuffs as Emma pushes her into the room. At the sight of them, her jaw drops, but she manages to avoid saying anything out loud. It’s Emma who has to prompt, “Well?”

“I see.” Iris works her jaw, as if checking for loosened teeth. “Congratulations.”

“They’re here,” Emma says. “So remember that if you don’t do as I say – ”

“Yes,” Iris says, sounding bored. “You’re going to kill me, kill us. You still think that’s the worst thing you can do, don’t you? You already killed me and my mother once. You brainwashed me and stole my second life, you’ve erased Lucy, you’ve done God knows what to Daddy, and yet – here we still are. All that effort for really nothing, I’d say.”

Emma looks unimpressed, but Carol flinches again. Finally she says ingratiatingly, “Lucy, honey. I’ll make you a deal. You can go free with Iris and… him.” She can’t bring herself to acknowledge Flynn by any sort of name. “When Rufus and Wyatt get here, they can join you. We will make you any sort of happy home you want, in whatever… configuration. Just get the Babbage device, and give it to us, and you can have anything, any life you please.”

Lucy opens her mouth, then shuts it. Rittenhouse has been leaning so hard on vinegar as a negotiation tactic that they were possibly overdue to bust out the honey, but it still takes her off guard. It’s plain that Carol is starting to buckle a bit, that the guilt is getting to her, that she has once more convinced herself that she’s making up for everything she’s done to Lucy, everything she’s used and deceived and lied and broken apart, if she gives her a golden parachute now. Happy life for you and your boy toy(s), Rittenhouse takes over the world, squaresies. Of course there would be a catch. They’d probably wipe their memories, they wouldn’t even know the terrible price they’d paid for it. And even if they did remember, they couldn’t interfere. Just sit back, and let the bastards win.

“That’s an interesting offer,” Lucy says at last, levelly. “But you know. I kind of already had a life I wanted. It wasn’t perfect, but it was mine. I worked hard and I was good at my job and people respected me. I don’t know if I just want to go back to being a Stanford history professor after everything I’ve done and seen and experienced, but I’d like to have the choice. But neither the existence or the world that I left are still there. It’s altered beyond recognition. So what? You’d make me some fairytale castle somewhere, far away from the world? I’m not a princess in a tower, Mom. I can’t be kept there. I want my sister back. I want my life.”

“We could…” Carol starts, and then stops. Knowing as much as Lucy does that in the timeline Amy exists, Carol is dying of cancer. Can’t figure out how to have one without the other, can’t finesse their way around it without more changes, and ones they have no idea where to find or make. Finally she says, “We could put you back. Into history.”

“Could you?” Lucy looks at her wearily. “Rittenhouse is really good at erasing people, tearing things down. Critics. Problems. Innocents who get in the way, or are even tangentially connected to them.” She nods at Iris. “I’ve never seen anything to suggest it can build again, at least in any image that is not completely horrifying.”

Flynn has been uncharacteristically quiet through this entire thing, letting Lucy and Carol play out their wounds the way Lucy let him face his demons with Asher, but at that, he clears his throat. “You don’t know your daughter very well,” he says to Carol, but his eyes also flick to Iris in a way that means he in no way exonerates himself from it, that he knows the same sin applies to him. “You don’t know that she’d still rather give up everything that matters to her, take on unbearable suffering, if it means she’d save the world. I don’t know how she became so damn heroic with you and the corporate avatar of Satan for parents, but she did. You keep offering her what you would take, or what I would. But she’s not us. She’s better than us. And you’ve had your daughter your whole life, you’ve never known what it was like to lose her as a child, and what have you done with it, with who she is? You’ve missed it. You’ve missed it. And even someone like you, one day you’ll give anything to change it.”

Carol’s face is the color of an old sheet. She can’t look Flynn in the eye. “But I’m giving you what you want, Lucy,” she manages at last. “Your friends, your – ”

“I need to find Wyatt and Rufus,” Lucy says levelly. “Are they here?”

“We – imagine they are, yes.”

“Good.” Lucy starts to get to her feet. “I think I know where I’m going to find them. In the meantime, you’re going to set Iris free, and you two – ” she glances at the Flynns, who aren’t exactly the most stable houseguests – “are going to stay here for now. Emma, Mom, you won’t do anything to them while I’m gone. Is that clear?”

“Lucy – ” Emma, Carol, and Flynn all start at once.

“I said, is that clear?”

They stare at her. Her voice cracks like a whip. She has never felt more powerful, and terrible, and strange, and strong. There’s no time for anything else.

After a pause, everyone nods.

“Good.”

As Lucy is heading down the hallway to the front door, scattering Rittengoons like the Red Sea as she goes, she hears footsteps running behind her, and the next instant, Flynn catches her arm, his entire face carved in a mask of distress. “Lucy. Lucy!”

Lucy wants to go, wants to get this over with, but she can’t shake him off. Or she could, perhaps, but she won’t, and she comes to a halt. If he keeps holding onto her, she might lose her nerve, and like her mother perhaps, she might crumble. In a different way, but still. As ever, she has to tilt her chin back to look at him. “Yes, Garcia?”

“What are you – ” Flynn glares the last goon into retreat, until it’s just them in the corridor, casting faint shadows on the Turkey runner carpet. He lowers his voice to a whisper. “What are you going to do?”

Lucy looks up at him, this contradictory, dangerous, stubborn, impossible, tender man. Words momentarily fail her as she brushes her fingers along his scruffy jaw. “What I have to.”

Flynn’s lips go grim, as if he knew that was the answer, he would give anything to stop her, and yet, by rights, he knows he can’t. She starts to move away, but he grabs her back, almost roughly, and crushes her to him, kissing her ferociously, both hands cupping her face and something almost desperate in his entire body, to hold her, to remember her. Lucy kisses him back just as hard, and then, in the breath between touching and parting, between presence and absence, between now and forever, as their noses and foreheads are brushing, as they are wrecked and shaking, she whispers, “I love you.”

She leaves before he gets himself together enough to answer.

She doesn’t – she can’t bear – to look back.

“So let me get this straight,” Rufus says. “Rittenhouse followed us here with the garage-cinderblock time machine. They want the thing Captain Briggs stole – the Babbage device that means they invent the actual time machine decades ahead of schedule, before we’re even born. And if we do that, your evil mom lets me, you, Wyatt, Flynn, and Iris go off into happy retirement and drink mojitos on the beach. While they’re Emperor Palpatining the shit out of everything and everywhere else, like they could convince Luke not to blow up the Death Star if they just gave him a fat payout and a new identity.”

“Something like that, yes.” Lucy’s eyes still aren’t quite meeting his or Wyatt’s. There were relieved hugs and disbelieving greetings, the way there always are when the Time Team is reunited after a long separation, but they haven’t seen Lucy in a long time (literally), there’s a lot of water under the bridge, and it’s clear to Rufus that she’s holding something back. All three of them have been through a hell of a lot, in their various ways, and this meeting feels different. They’re still on the same side, of course, but there’s more space than there used to be. Some of it is unavoidable. Some of it feels deliberate.

“We can’t do that,” Wyatt says. “We can’t just give Rittenhouse carte blanche to do whatever they want, even if we were somehow taking their word that we’d get a nice life out of it. That’s what we’ve been fighting to avoid this entire damn time!”

“Obviously.” Lucy’s voice is brittle. “I didn’t intend to agree.”

Wyatt looks at her worriedly. They’re sitting under a piling by the docks, the Mary Celeste still just a few dozen yards away, and he reaches out to take her hand. “Lucy, you’re scaring me.”

Lucy takes a deep breath, as Rufus reaches out to grab her other hand. “I have a hunch,” she says evasively. “I need Rufus to explain the science and tell me if it’s even possible. Then we can decide what to do.”

“Oh?” Rufus likes this even less. “What’s that?”

“I’m just thinking.” Lucy stares straight ahead. “All of this trouble, all this disruption to the timeline started with me. Things started going off the rails when Rittenhouse erased me in 1814, and all of our interventions with the war of 1812 messed up America for the Civil War, which led to – well, the present situation back in 2017. So it’s possible to argue that I’m the one factor in common, and that all our efforts to restore me have just succeeded in twisting and deforming this new timeline even more. We’re never going to put me back, and we’re just going to cause more damage trying.”

“Yes, but – ”

“Just let me finish.” Lucy looks like she’ll lose her nerve unless she can plunge through to the end. “I’m the wrench in the gears, don’t you see? We’ve gone off on some alternate reality, some diversion from the mean, because of me. Theoretically, if you cut me out before I did that, if you set the slate clean, everything would snap back into place. History would go back to normal, all the changes would unravel. And if that was the case – ”

Rufus gets it first. “No,” he says. “No. No, no, no.”

“What?” Wyatt demands. “What?”

“You have to,” Lucy says. Her face is dead white, but utterly, stonily resolute. “Then you, Wyatt, Iris, and Flynn go back to the present. The Lifeboat’s been modified, it can take four adults. Once you get there, you blow it up. It’s done. No more loose ends.”

“What about – ” Wyatt’s face freezes as he starts to grapple with a pair of very important omissions. “What about you and the Mothership?”

“Yes,” Lucy says. “That.”

“You’re – ” Wyatt gets it. “You’re going to sacrifice yourself?”

“Yes,” Lucy says again, simply. “We slingshot me back before the first time I’ve visited – the furthest back I’ve gone is Salem, 1692 – so you have to send me earlier than that. Then I just… keep going. If I’m destroyed before I’ve done anything, all my changes vanish. As I said, space-time snaps back into place like a stretched rubber band. Rufus, am I wrong?”

“I – ” Rufus has no idea how he is supposed to sit here and treat this like a cool theoretical science problem, when his friend’s life – her very existence – is the collateral of solving it. “I – yes, technically, I suppose. It could work. But Lucy – Lucy, you can’t – ”

“We’ve always known this turned on me somehow,” Lucy points out, with devastating pragmatism. “John Rittenhouse, Emma, my own mother, you, Benjamin Cahill, everyone. If I can fix it, if I can end this, I have a responsibility to do it.”

“No,” Wyatt says frantically. “No, Lucy. I’ll do it. If it’s just a matter of taking the Mothership back to, whatever, the Jurassic, and crashing it – ”

“You can’t.” Lucy’s voice is soft and very sad. “You’re not the one who broke the timeline. You could destroy the Mothership, but you couldn’t fix all the other stuff. Once I’m gone, everything resets. Benjamin Briggs went out to sea and never came back, to keep the Babbage device away from Rittenhouse. Made a sacrifice and saw it through. Now I have to do the same. It has to be me.”

“We’ll all go,” Rufus says. “If it’s a final suicide mission, blowing up in a blaze of glory together – we’ll go with you to the end, Lucy, you don’t have to – ”

“No.” Lucy looks at both of them with unspeakable tenderness, squeezing their hands. “No. We don’t have to all die. You two can live. Flynn and Iris can live. Iris was back before I got erased and started all this disruption, she’ll still be alive after I’m gone. No more time machines. No more Rittenhouse. Well, they’ll exist in some way, but they won’t have any more power than any other major evil corporation, and I can’t get rid of all the bad things in the world. But I can do this. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to never exist. I don’t want to forget you, I don’t want you to forget me. And yet.”

Wyatt tries to answer, and can’t. His eyes swim with silent, unshed tears, until he finally lifts Lucy’s hand to his mouth and kisses it. “I could never forget you.”

“You will,” Lucy says, very gently. “You will never have known me.”

“I don’t accept that. We’re here, we’re living this, we’re remembering each other right now How can that just… go away?”

Lucy touches his face. “Maybe it won’t. Maybe you’ll dream of me.”

Wyatt closes his eyes as if he’s been shot, and can’t come up with any other words at all. There is a long, impossible silence, and then Lucy rouses herself, looking at Rufus. “Could you do it?” she asks. “Could you program the Mothership to fly into the sun, so to speak? I get into it, and… go? Rittenhouse doesn’t get the Babbage device, or it, or me. Could you?”

“Could I program it for a self-destruct course into what, the beginning of time?” Rufus’s voice scratches in his chest. “The override is still in it, so… I suppose, but – ”

“Please,” Lucy says. “Garcia, Iris, and I came here in the Mothership, I know where it is. We have to go before Rittenhouse knows what’s up.”

“Just go?” Rufus isn’t sure he believes that. “Without – saying goodbye? To him? Flynn?”

It’s Lucy’s turn to close her eyes. “I said goodbye to him already,” she says, after a very long pause. “I think he knew it.”

Rufus opens his mouth, then shuts it. There is an almost physical ache in his chest, the refusal to face what is in front of him, to wrap his head around it, and yet it must be nothing to what Wyatt – much less Lucy – is feeling. He can’t do that, he can’t do this. His big nerd brain, crammed full of science and engineering and the most esoteric bits of bullshit known to man, scrambles for another solution. Anything. No matter what.

He can’t find one.

“Okay,” he says at last. “Let’s go.”

It’s not far from the docks to where Lucy and the Flynns have left the Mothership, and Rufus’s stomach turns over at the sight, the fact that he can’t put this off anymore. His hands are shaking as they cycle the overrides and climb in to look at the control panel as if this is a mildly interesting science fair project. But the unavoidable context is that Lucy is going to get into this, seal herself up, and fly up the ass of time and space, a trip from which she will not return. They have done everything together, it is unfathomable that it should end with one of them alone. But Lucy is Lucy. She’s always been the best of them.

Rufus forces himself to do this dispassionately, to avoid the desperate urge to cheat. He can’t half-ass this, and yet he so badly wants to, as he plugs into the main console and starts tinkering with the parameters for a final jump. This feels like something that a white dude named Steve should be doing, taking a plane out to sea to save everyone and dying in the process. Rufus can’t be sure how early is too early to send Lucy. Can he just, say, plonk her down in the medieval era somewhere, or should it be ancient Rome? Cavemen? Is she actually the meteor that kills the dinosaurs? This is ridiculous. He was never trained for this.

Finally, Rufus settles on the only thing he can think of. He has to send Lucy as far back as the Mothership can go, however far this pocket of altered space-time exists, and out the other side. But there’s a scientific principle known as quantum suicide, which operates along the same lines as Schrödinger’s cat. Basically, if the many-worlds interpretation of reality is true – which Rufus now knows for a fact it is, given the number of timeline changes they’ve made – death isn’t really death. Under certain circumstances, if you die in one world, you have to spawn a competing one where you survive. Maybe that explains the afterlife; you die in physical reality, but you’re reborn somewhere else. If Lucy dies in this alternate history, there’s a chance – the tiniest, most ridiculous, mathematical technicality of a chance – that the reality where she survives is their own. That one day, who knows when because time doesn’t really apply in its normal dimensions, she can come back. Maybe that’s years before or after. Maybe she comes back here, in 1872, and lives a life never knowing them. Maybe it’s centuries in the future (if Trump and the North Korean guy don’t blow it up first). But she could still live. Maybe. Maybe.

Science has always been Rufus’s comfort and solace. He has to take what he can get.

Finally, Rufus’s work is complete. The Mothership is programmed on a straight dead run, as far back as can be gone, and then when it hits the edges of reality, it’ll explode, because there will be no more time left to traverse. He’s almost jealous of Lucy, in a sick way. No other human will do this, will so thoroughly transcend all mortal limitations. It’s almost apotheosis, fittingly. She is going out by sticking two middle fingers up Albert Einstein’s ass. So to speak. Might see all of history flash before her, know it as if she was there, a final gift for someone who has loved it so much and studied it so long. He hopes.

Rufus raises a hand, far too steady for the situation, and punches the button to lock in the coordinates. The trajectory can’t be changed now.

“Well?” Lucy says. “What do I need to do?”

“You hit that lever there.” Rufus points. “The autopilot is engaged to do the rest. You don’t need to steer, after all. You just need to…”

He can’t finish the sentence. Lucy does.

“Go.”

Wyatt has been standing with his back to them, unable to watch, but at this, he turns around. He has lost his battle with the tears, and they’re dripping down his face as he swipes it roughly with his arm. “Lucy – ”

“It’s all right.” Lucy looks a little teary herself, but her chin is firm. “I’m not scared.”

Rufus and Wyatt look at her with helpless, impossible love and admiration. They reach out and take each of her hands, walking her slowly to the Mothership for the last time, unable to countenance the prospect of getting there. They drag out each step, but they know that as ever, the clock is ticking. This needs to be a fait accompli before Rittenhouse gets any wind of it. Lucy’s told them where to find Flynn and Iris. Grab them, get to the Lifeboat, and back to what should be a no-more-terrible-than-usual present, back to normal. Except there’s no Lucy. There won’t be again, according to every decent set of odds in the universe.

It’s too much. They can’t do it.

But Lucy isn’t going to let them avoid it.

They reach the Mothership, and communally freeze. They close their eyes, draw in a breath and then out. Lucy squeezes their hands tight enough to hurt, as if this, among others, is the last sensation she will take into the supernova. That this, she will remember.

She turns to them. Leans down and kisses Wyatt, then Rufus, and they reach out to crush her in their arms in a tangled three-way hug. They’re shaking, but she’s not, and she’s the one who has to push back and start up the steps to her own tomb. Then she stops.

“Flynn,” she says. For the first time, her voice shakes. “Tell him.”

Wyatt and Rufus can’t fathom doing that. Tell Garcia Flynn that he’s lost another loved one, even like this? He could grab the Lifeboat and try to crash after her, leave them stranded here, or – well, just about anything else terrible. But they both nod. As if they’d do anything else.

Wyatt says, “Okay.”

Rufus says, “Okay.”

Lucy looks back at them, filling herself with the sight of them, the sound, the memory. Then she turns back, climbs the steps, and seals the door.

For a moment, even if the alternative is worse, Rufus hopes he’s made a mistake. That he programmed something wrong. That it won’t go where it’s going, and it won’t do what it’s doing. But he knows himself too well. He didn’t make a mistake.

The blue lights flash. The gyration starts to build. He can’t see Lucy, but he can imagine her, sitting calmly in the pilot seat, facing the lever she has to pull. If there’s a moment of fear, of weakness, if she sobs, if she puts her hand over her face and gives into the sheer grief of losing, of ceasing, of the sheer, simple mortal fact of finiteness, nobody will ever know.

The Mothership flashes white as a burning star, as Rufus and Wyatt shield their eyes but don’t look away. Whirls faster and faster.

Then it’s gone.

Garcia Flynn doesn’t know what’s going on, but he doesn’t like it.

To be fair, it would be surprising if he knew anything, could remotely focus on it, could have attention to spare for anything at all, when Lucy’s last words are still rattling around in his head. She said – she said – she said – and it’s succeeded admirably in freezing all motor or higher cognitive functions. Good thing she didn’t wait around for an answer, as Flynn’s brain was still making a noise like a fork in a garbage disposal, but he can’t shake the feeling that he’s missed his chance to say it back. If he could get himself to the point, after all. But she said it, and now she’s gone, and he doesn’t know how long it should take to track down Wyatt and Rufus and ask them – whatever she was going to ask them, but it feels as if it should have been long enough. There’s an unease in his stomach, a prickling on the back of his neck, that doesn’t merely derive from waiting in a parlor across from – now that John Rittenhouse is dead, just as Flynn tried to do so long ago back in 1780 – the organization’s two highest-ranking CEOs. However Rittenhouse hierarchy works, Carol and Emma have to be near the top, and they’re just sitting there. Flynn should be throttling them.

But he – but they – promised. Promised Lucy. They can’t.

To distract himself, and because his head won’t shut up about failing her again, Flynn looks at Iris. She looks more or less fine, if you can discount the refreshing spot of kidnapping and beating that she just went through – painful, but not life-threatening. She doesn’t look broken, in other words. The Flynn family is too used to violence for it to be anything new, or that they can’t recover from, and after a glance at Emma and Carol, Iris gets up and moves to sit next to her father. “I’m all right,” she says quietly. “They can’t hurt me anymore.”

Flynn lets out an unsteady breath, and takes her offered hand. There are plenty of things he could say and think about the fact that they have hurt her this much already, but for once, he doesn’t. The four of them continue to sit there in the world’s most awkward détente, until something on Emma’s wrist beeps, and she looks down, then frowns. “Something’s going haywire with the Mothership.”

“What?” Flynn jumps to his feet. “You send some pit crew to steal it while our backs were turned?”

“This isn’t us,” Emma says sharply. “What did you do?”

“I didn’t – ”

“What is it?” Carol gets to her feet, looking alarmed. “What’s going on?”

“I still have a link to the Mothership’s CPU.” Emma waves her wrist at them. “It’s – I’ve never seen readings like this, it’s – ”

She stops.

“It’s what?” Flynn half-shouts. “WHAT?”

“It’s running backwards,” Emma says, almost uncertainly. “It keeps going faster and faster by exponential magnitudes, it’s like it’s malfunctioning. Or like it’s – ”

She doesn’t finish the sentence, but Flynn has acquired a fairly close competence with the Mothership’s inner workings, and he doesn’t think that it could be plunging by itself through time, if someone wasn’t driving it. He doesn’t know what happened or how, but he is convinced at that moment that he knows who is. And that he was right about the kiss earlier. It was more than just their last one for now. It was their last one ever. That’s why she said it.

“Lucy,” he says. “Lucy!”

“Carol!” Emma whirls to her boss. “Carol, we can still stop this. Give the order, I’ll get the team, get to the Lifeboat and intercept her before she goes totally off the map. We still have something like five minutes to cut her off. Now, otherwise we’re going to lose – Carol? Carol! Listen to me!”

Carol Preston has remained rooted to the spot, a look of awful realization coming across her face. Her lips move around something that might be her daughter’s name.

“Lucy?” Large chunks of information are falling into place in Flynn’s head, like crashing boulders. “LUCY!” As if she can hear him. As if she can hear anything. He snatches for his gun and is set to tear out after Emma, not even knowing what he’s going to do after that, just that he can’t stand by and let this happen. The bleeping from Emma’s wrist is getting more and more frantic, frenzied and scrambling, a long, piercing electronic whine. The Mothership is doing something it was never designed to do, and it’s doing it fucking fast. If Lucy’s aboard, if she’s doing it, if it was a choice to take this to the end –

“Carol!” Emma shouts, snapping her fingers, looking as if she’s on the brink of shaking the older woman. “Carol, orders? ORDERS!”

Carol still doesn’t move. It’s not clear if she remembers how. But as Emma clearly realizes that she’s on her own in this, and lunges for the door, Carol suddenly comes back to life. Moves at the same time, jerks open a desk drawer, and pulls out a modern Glock handgun with wildly shaking hands. Aims it – not at Flynn or Iris, but Emma – and pulls the trigger.

The sound of the shot is deafening in the small parlor. Emma’s lunge turns into a stumble, and she goes down hard, the back of her left thigh swiftly turning red. “Are you out of your mind?” she yells, face twisted in pain and rage. The electronic whine from her wrist is now almost at full volume, a shrieking fire alarm. “What the – what the fuck did you – ”

Carol raises the gun, hands shaking harder, clearly about to shoot again and finish this, but it’s Iris – Iris, who Carol had tortured, Iris, who Emma helped brainwash in the first place – who steps between them. “Carol,” she orders. “Carol, give me the gun.”

Flynn’s heart shrivels in his throat to see Iris once more on the wrong end of a gun held by a Rittenhouse member. The whining continues to shrill at full volume, but it’s starting to turn sporadic, turn patchy, going for brief bursts and then cutting out. Then it raises one more time, and cuts off in a puff of white smoke and breaking glass from Emma’s wristwatch. When Flynn snatches it up, the readout is cracked and black and empty. There’s no more Mothership CPU. There’s no more Mothership.

There’s no more Lucy.

He isn’t sure who the howl comes from, him or Carol, maybe both. He grabs the broken monitor, shaking it as if to restore a lost wifi signal, but there’s no use, he already knows it. He can feel it in his bones, his heart, his soul, the absence of everywhere Lucy used to live, everything she owned, even if he didn’t know it, from the moment he saw her. Garcia Flynn is a big man, but he crumples to his knees like a scrap of silk or rice paper, feels as if his spine has snapped, he can’t stand up. The world is once again intolerable, unbearable, slamming him into the ground. He struggles to endure this, when there is not enough space inside him for himself and the grief, and doesn’t, as ever, have a single notion how.

“Lucy.” Carol’s voice sounds like a ghost. “Lucy.”

“She’s gone,” Emma gasps, angry and hurt and furious. “She’s gone, and you shot me.”

Carol raises the gun again, but Iris reaches out and grabs the muzzle, jerking it out of her hand. “You’ve killed enough people,” she says, cold as stone. “Even if you never pointed the gun at them directly and pulled the trigger, you have. That’s plenty.”

Emma stares at her, knowing that this is the most unexpected deliverance of all time, that she doesn’t deserve it in the least. That Iris would be justified in standing aside and letting Carol finish her, or taking the gun and doing it herself. Emma opens her mouth, then shuts it, and rolls onto her back with a grimace, clutching her wounded leg. She can’t get to her feet. The silence thunders.

Iris switches the safety on, tucks the gun into her waistband, and walks over to Flynn. Reaches out, and takes him by the arm. Tentatively, she says, “Daddy?”

Flynn can’t answer her, can’t get his tongue around words. He isn’t sure he will be able to again. He lets her help him to his feet, because he can’t think what else to do. Puts his arm around Iris’ shoulders, as she stares down Carol without a flinch. She says, “You let us go.”

Carol is ashen-faced. It’s not clear that she would resist even if she could. As if now, just as Flynn warned, it’s hit. The realization of all the offerings she has burned on Rittenhouse’s altar, and what they have left her with as a result. Now. This.

Nothing.

Iris says, “Did I stutter?”

Carol shakes her head.

Garcia and Iris Flynn turn their backs, and start to walk. Move past Emma, still on the floor, and down the hall, and out the door, out into a world that somehow still exists, is turning onward. It’s barely a dozen yards down the street until they run into Wyatt Logan and Rufus Carlin, coming the other way. One look at everyone’s faces confirms that nobody needs to ask what happened. Nobody can bear it.

They go to find the Lifeboat, and one last time, jump home.

It’s difficult to grieve for someone who, technically, never lived, and so has never died.

When Wyatt, Rufus, Flynn, and Iris get back, it – for one thing – isn’t 2017 anymore, as they’ve spent enough time mucking around in the past that it’s the new year, 2018. For another, everything is back to normal. History has unbent. Trump is president of the USA, not the CSA (equally depressing though that is) and everything has happened the way it was supposed to. Rittenhouse doesn’t exist, so far as they can tell, because Emma and Carol were stranded in 1872. They search and search until they find the small notice of an obituary in 1895, in San Francisco, for a C. Preston. As for Emma, nothing. Maybe she died there in Gibraltar; medical care still wasn’t that great. Maybe not. Who knows. As for Carol, she went home. Tried to live out the rest of her life before she herself was born. Knowing what she’d lost the whole time. Nobody has warm feelings for her, but that still hurts.

Lucy Preston does not exist, obviously. Has never existed.

And yet, Flynn, Wyatt, Rufus, and Iris remember her.

Jiya doesn’t. Denise doesn’t. Connor Mason doesn’t. They bemusedly take everyone’s word for it that they had a partner named Lucy (they’re more confused as to how Flynn is now part of the gang), but it’s the sort of all-right-whatever-you-say acceptance of their zany adventures rather than any real understanding. Jiya doesn’t remember having forgotten Rufus, at least, and their reunion is happy. At least someone gets that. Rufus deserves it.

With no more Rittenhouse and no more time machines (since they destroyed the Lifeboat when they got back, before Connor Mason could sleaze in there and have anything to say about it one way or another) there is no more Time Team, no more insane, hair-raising missions through time and space. Everyone struggles to go back to anything resembling an ordinary life, but it doesn’t work. Wyatt can’t go back to being a grunt with a gun, even a special ops one, and he leaves Pendleton a few months later. Ends up, of all the things nobody would expect, moving in with Flynn and Iris.

It is oddly easier like that. They can grieve together, in whatever strange, truncated way they can. Flynn has bought a small house on a leafy street, with the payout that Mason Industries gave him once they also saw about expunging his criminal record. He and Iris have no idea what they’re doing with the rest of their lives just yet, though Iris has been making noises about going back to school. After he bought the house, Flynn donated the rest of the money to the Stanford history department, to establish the Lucy Preston Scholarship. He feels it’s as if what she would have wanted.

(He thought about calling it the Memorial Scholarship, but he can’t do that. Not least when there’s nobody actually there to remember. Stanford is confused enough about why he’s giving money for someone who doesn’t exist, but it’s a lot, so they don’t ask.)

Wyatt has also given part of his payout to the scholarship, but he’s invested the rest, so he and Flynn don’t need to work for a while yet – or ever, if they don’t want to. They will, because they’re not the type of men who can sit idle, but they’re still reeling, and they’re in no shape to embark on some new career. Private security would seem to fit their existing skill set, but they’re both tired of the weight and sound and sight of guns, the killing they have done, and the choices they can’t take back. They still bicker a lot, because of course they do, but in a different way. It’s easier to just miss Lucy with every waking moment if they know the other is doing the same. A strange kind of solace. Misery loves company.

It’s been about eight months since they returned – it’s August, in fact – and it’s a warm, perfect summer night in the Bay Area. Flynn is home alone. Wyatt is out taking one of his long night drives along the Pacific Coast Highway, and Iris is downtown at an event. Flynn is wondering if he has the ambition to get up and make himself some dinner, but he isn’t sure he does. At least when he lost Lorena (and Iris) the first time, he had the whirl of preparation to occupy him, the insane belief that there was going to be a time machine that he would steal and make it better, but this time, he doesn’t have anything. An older Lucy has not returned to console him for the loss of herself, or hand him another journal. He’s just had to grieve in the way ordinary people do, and it is straight up arse. There is no way to make it easier. It can’t be avoided or gotten rid of. Just gotten through.

After a moment, Flynn lets out a long, unsteady breath, gets to his feet, and unenthusiastically opens the fridge, reminding himself that they need to do the shopping at some point. He’s just trying to work out what he can concoct from the remnants, when there’s a knock on the door.

He frowns. He wasn’t expecting anyone, it’s late even for some dedicated Jehovah’s Witness, and if it was Wyatt or Iris, they wouldn’t knock. In fact, his mind flashes immediately to the fact that Rittenhouse isn’t quite defunct after all. They’ve resuscitated somehow, they’ve tracked them down, and now it’s about to happen one more time. Flynn thinks of his gun, locked upstairs in a safe. Can he run up and get it if they break down the door?

After a long pause, the knock comes again. Tentative. It doesn’t sound like the prelude to an onrush of secret-society thugs with automatic weapons.

Flynn blows out a jagged breath, picks up the rolling pin just in case – maybe he can hit them on the head if he needs time to grab his gun – and advances warily down the front hall. The porch light has switched on, as it does with motion, and he hesitates. This could be anyone. He’s never going to get over his fear of unexpected visitors. They could –

He unhooks the bolt chain and opens the door an inch. “Can I help you?”

“Garcia?” The voice sounds faint. “Garcia, is that you?”

A lightning bolt carves Flynn down on the spot. He jerks the door open so fast he almost tears it off its hinges, and –

She does look older. There are a few silver streaks in her dark hair, though her skin is still smooth and flawless, except for a light spiderweb of lines around her eyes. She is dressed well, clutching a purse like a shield, waiting for this to be a total failure. At the sight of him, she opens her mouth, clears her throat, and says, “I’m sorry, this is awkward – I know you don’t know me, but if I can expl – ”

Flynn doesn’t let her finish. Takes half a step, half a lunge, seizes her around the waist, and doesn’t care what is remotely the case, what is truth or lie. He kisses Lucy Preston until neither of them can breathe, as her hands entwine around him and don’t let go and they pull each other’s heads from side to side, until they break apart and Lucy’s tears are falling thick and fast, even as her smile is blinding. “How…” she gasps. “How do you remember me?”

“How are you here?” In the competition of impossible questions, Flynn feels as if his is still the more pertinent. “How did you – how – ”

“I don’t know.” Lucy laughs shakily, even as she wipes her eyes. “But I think it’s called quantum suicide.”

That makes bugger-all sense to Flynn, one of Rufus’ mumbo-jumbo scientific concepts, perhaps, but he’ll ask him to explain later, later, later. He stares at Lucy one more time, then grabs her again, the purse falling with a thump to the porch as she shoves him back against the door, and they stumble through. It is wet and raw and savage, too desperate and rough and disbelieving to be tender, as they teeter through the dark front hall, banging into everything on the way. They are gasping and swearing into each other’s mouths, kissing and then pressing their foreheads together and then biting at each other, growling and sobbing. Lucy’s back hits the wall as Flynn lifts her, her legs linking around his waist, as they gulp half a breath from bare necessity, then turn and go after each other again.

Somehow, they make it down the hall to Flynn’s bedroom, shedding clothing as they go. Lucy’s in her bra and underpants by the time the door shuts, Flynn is undoing his belt and kicking off his trousers, and Wyatt, Iris, and the entire San Francisco 49ers football team could walk in right now and he would not give a single damn. He pulls Lucy into his arms, springing the bra loose, as she shucks the panties. Then it’s just them, in their skins, and it’s a dream, and it’s not, and it’s impossible, and it is not.

Lucy utters a small moan when Flynn enters her, their bodies jerking, her hands running up his thighs, trying to pull him closer, closer. Her arms go up around his neck, holding him close as he buries his face in her loosened hair, breathing the scent of her, trying to hold back his thrusts but completely unable to pace himself, needing nothing but the feeling of her. He kisses her blindly, tasting salt from her tears or his own, racking and rasping, half on the bed and half nowhere at all, her knee hiked up alongside his hip. She makes a little whining noise every time he hits that old sweet spot deep inside her, and it drives him harder.

They lose everything but each other. Lucy’s fingers claw and comb at the back of Flynn’s neck, in the dark hair that has a few silver threads of its own, then pulls his head back to hers as their mouths devour each other. At some point they roll over, Lucy ends up on top, and she rides Flynn mercilessly, head thrown back, mouth open, pulling herself against him with an intensity too frenetic to be distracted by anything else. Flynn would gladly die like this (and isn’t entirely sure he hasn’t), as if his heart will explode. It might have. He can’t tell.

It isn’t much longer until Lucy gasps, shudders from head to toe, and loses herself, dragging him after her within the space of a few moments, as she sways atop him, then leans forward, her head landing on his shoulder as she lies atop him, heaving. Flynn’s arms are somewhere far away in the whiteness, but he regains enough control to wrap them over her. “Are you…” He can’t understand why Lucy looks blank until it registers that he’s speaking in Croatian, and he coughs and struggles to switch back to English. “Are you really here?”

“I think so.” Lucy’s eyes shine with tears as she pushes herself up on one elbow to look down at him, her hair tumbling around her face, her lips bruised with kissing and her voice unbearably tender. “Are you?”

All things considered, Flynn isn’t entirely sure. He reaches up to touch her again, running a hand down her side, moving up to cup her breast, circling the nipple, tracing the collarbone. If this isn’t his Lucy, it’s a perfect imitation, and he has to fight one last stab of fear that this is all just a clever trick. He will wake up in morning light, and she will be gone.

There is something he still needs to say to her, for that matter. But last time, it was a goodbye, and he is too frightened that if he utters it now, it will be the same. That she will thank him, slide off, gather her clothes, and go. Or just dissolve into stardust. So he can’t. But God, how badly he wants the chance to try. The time. The mercy.

Instead, Garcia Flynn whispers, “Stay.”

Lucy leans down again, rests her head against his, and kisses the corner of his mouth. She seems to sense the words he can’t bring himself to, and settles back against his shoulder. That, perhaps, is what makes him finally believe it. That there will in fact be time, that she can wait, that she knows, that she knows. It does not have to be said tonight, because there will be more nights. More days. More mornings, and evenings, and weeks, and years.

Lucy shakes a bit. Starts, at long last, to cry. He holds her tighter.

She says, “Always.”

THE END

#garcy #garcy ff #lucy x flynn #the trash saga of flynn and lucy #timeless ff #it liiiiives

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