#Cyber Security Job Openings

[jsrvanna]

Bharat Dynamics Limited (BDL) Recruitment 2025

January 31, 2025 Bharat Dynamics Limited (BDL) Recruitment 2025 is a Miniratna Category-I Public Sector Enterprise under the Ministry of Defence, Government of India. BDL has invited applications from eligible candidates for multiple positions in various disciplines. Important Post: Broadcast Engineering Consultants India Limited (BECIL) Recruitment 2025 Total Vacancies: 49 Job Post: Multiple…

[whats-in-a-sentence]

Aside from learning these technical skills, he also recommends a range of infiltration and forgery techniques to get around security boundaries that cannot be solved with hacks alone:

Get jobs fill roles that you might find useful to compromise people working within the future. This means sysadmin stuff, helpdesk stuff, etc. Also, you can usually get into everything at a company just by being hired as a sysad. If you can talk your way into a systems role repeatedly, you don't need zero-days,²⁵ you can get given the keys to everything.

Getting a job as a skiptracer²⁶ in the collections industry will give you access to datasets that will turbocharge your ability to dox individuals.

Become a more competent programmer by submitting git pull²⁷ requests for fixes on outstanding bugs and desired features on well used open source products. Get a dev job.

Try to talk your way into restricted areas, and call up random support lines and talk then into giving you sensitive customer information. This is a hugely useful skill.

Learn to pick locks and break into buildings that you have permission to be in (riskless if you get caught but actually lets you field test barging through locked doors and evading security).

Practice credential forgery very often, just takes photoshop and a print shop.

Read poetry, particularly 19th century stuff and really old epics, eddur, and sagas. Sounds weird but it gives you hide insight into manipulating people with language.

For the same reasons, getting copyediting positions in advertising where multivariate testing is done is also a useful thing. Same with learning hypnosis, cold call sales, all sorts of things.

25. A 0-day is a form of cyberattack that exploits a vulnerable spot in software that is unknown or unaddressed by the software vendors.

26. A skiptracer is a person whose main job is is to geolocate and track down individuals.

27. A git pull is a command used to download and change content from a remote repository.

"Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists" - Julia Ebner

[romerona]

Ethera Operation!!

You're the government’s best hacker, but that doesn’t mean you were prepared to be thrown into a fighter jet.

Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw x Awkward!Hacker! FemReader

Part I

This was never supposed to happen. Your role in this operation was simple—deliver the program, ensure it reached the right hands, and let the professionals handle the breaching.

And then, of course, reality decided to light that plan on fire.

The program—codenamed Ethera—was yours. You built it from scratch with encryption so advanced that even the most elite cyber operatives couldn’t crack it without your input. A next-generation adaptive, self-learning decryption software, an intrusion system designed to override and manipulate high-security military networks, Ethera was intended to be both a weapon and a shield, capable of infiltrating enemy systems while protecting your own from counterattacks in real-time. A ghost in the machine. A digital predator. A weapon in the form of pure code. If it fell into the wrong hands, it could disable fleets, and ground aircraft, and turn classified intelligence into an open book. Governments would kill for it. Nations could fall because of it.

Not that you ever meant to, of course. It started as a little experimental security measure program, something to protect high-level data from cyberattacks, not become the ultimate hacking tool. But innovation has a funny way of attracting the wrong kind of attention, and before you knew it, Ethera had become one, if not the most classified, high-risk program in modern times. Tier One asset or so the Secret Service called it.

It was too powerful, too dangerous—so secret that only a select few even knew of its existence, and even fewer could comprehend how it worked.

And therein lay the problem. You were the only person who could properly operate it.

Which was so unfair.

Because it wasn’t supposed to be your problem. You were just the creator, the brain behind the code, the one who spent way too many sleepless nights debugging this monstrosity. Your job was supposed to end at development. But no. Now, because of some bureaucratic nonsense and the fact that no one else could run it without accidentally bricking an entire system, you had been promoted—scratch that, forcibly conscripted—into field duty.

And your mission? To install it in an enemy satellite.

A literal, orbiting, high-security, military-grade satellite, may you add.

God. Why? Why was your country always at war with others? Why couldn’t world leaders just, you know, go to therapy like normal people? Why did everything have to escalate to international cyber warfare?

Which is how you ended up here.

At Top Gun. The last place in the world you wanted to be.

You weren’t built for this. You thrive in sipping coffee in a cosy little office and handling cyber threats from a safe, grounded location. You weren’t meant to be standing in the halls of an elite fighter pilot training program, surrounded by the best aviators in the world—people who thought breaking the sound barrier was a casual Wednesday.

It wasn’t the high-tech cyberwarfare department of the Pentagon, nor some dimly lit black ops facility where hackers in hoodies clacked away at keyboards. No. It was Top Gun. A place where pilots use G-forces like a personal amusement park ride.

You weren’t a soldier, you weren’t a spy, you got queasy in elevators, you got dizzy when you stood too fast, hell, you weren’t even good at keeping your phone screen from cracking.

... And now you were sweating.

You swallowed hard as Admiral Solomon "Warlock" Bates led you through the halls of the naval base, your heels clacking on the polished floors as you wiped your forehead. You're nervous, too damn nervous and this damned weather did not help.

"Relax, Miss," Warlock muttered in that calm, authoritative way of his. "They're just pilots."

Just pilots.

Right. And a nuclear warhead was just a firework.

And now, somehow, you were supposed to explain—loosely explain, because God help you, the full details were above even their clearance level—how Ethera, your elegant, lethal, unstoppable digital masterpiece, was about to be injected into an enemy satellite as part of a classified mission.

This was going to be a disaster.

You had barely made it through the doors of the briefing room when you felt it—every single eye in the room locking onto you.

It wasn’t just the number of them that got you, it was the intensity. These were Top Gun pilots, the best of the best, and they radiated the kind of confidence you could only dream of having. Meanwhile, you felt like a stray kitten wandering into a lion’s den.

Your hands tightened around the tablet clutched to your chest. It was your lifeline, holding every critical detail of Ethera, the program that had dragged you into this utterly ridiculous situation. If you could’ve melted into the walls, you absolutely would have. But there was no escaping this.

You just had to keep it together long enough to survive this briefing.

So, you inhaled deeply, squared your shoulders, and forced your heels forward, trying to project confidence—chin up, back straight, eyes locked onto Vice Admiral Beau "Cyclone" Simpson, who you��d been introduced to earlier that day.

And then, of course, you dropped the damn tablet.

Not a graceful drop. Not the kind of gentle slip where you could scoop it back up and act like nothing happened. No, this was a full-on, physics-defying fumble. The tablet flipped out of your arms, ricocheted off your knee, and skidded across the floor to the feet of one of the pilots.

Silence.

Pure, excruciating silence.

You didn’t even have the nerve to look up right away, too busy contemplating whether it was physically possible to disintegrate on command. But when you finally did glance up—because, you know, social convention demanded it—you were met with a sight that somehow made this entire disaster worse.

Because the person crouching down to pick up your poor, abused tablet was freaking hot.

Tall, broad-shouldered, with a head of golden curls that practically begged to be tousled by the wind, and, oh, yeah—a moustache that somehow worked way too well on him.

He turned the tablet over in his hands, inspecting it with an amused little smirk before handing it over to you. "You, uh… need this?"

Oh, great. His voice is hot too.

You grabbed it back, praying he couldn't see how your hands were shaking. “Nope. Just thought I’d test gravity real quick.”

A few chuckles rippled through the room, and his smirk deepened like he was enjoying this way too much. You, on the other hand, wanted to launch yourself into the sun.

With what little dignity you had left, you forced a quick, tight-lipped smile at him before turning on your heel and continuing forward, clutching your tablet like it was a life raft in the middle of the worst social shipwreck imaginable.

At the front of the room, Vice Admiral Beau Cyclone Simpson stood with the kind of posture that said he had zero time for nonsense, waiting for the room to settle. You barely had time to take a deep breath before his voice cut through the air.

“Alright, listen up.” His tone was crisp, commanding, and impossible to ignore. “This is Dr Y/N L/N. Everything she is about to tell you is highly classified. What you hear in this briefing does not leave this room. Understood?”

A chorus of nods. "Yes, sir."

You barely resisted the urge to physically cringe as every pilot in the room turned to stare at you—some with confusion, others with barely concealed amusement, and a few with the sharp assessing glances of people who had no clue what they were supposed to do with you.

You cleared your throat, squared your shoulders, and did your best to channel even an ounce of the confidence you usually had when you were coding at 3 AM in a secure, pilot-free lab—where the only judgment you faced was from coffee cups and the occasional system error.

As you reached the podium, you forced what you hoped was a composed smile. “Uh… hi, nice to meet you all.”

Solid. Real professional.

You glanced up just long enough to take in the mix of expressions in the room—some mildly interested, some unreadable, and one particular moustached pilot who still had the faintest trace of amusement on his face.

Nope. Not looking at him.

You exhaled slowly, centering yourself. Stay focused. Stay professional. You weren’t just here because of Ethera—you were Ethera. The only one who truly understood it. The only one who could execute this mission.

With another tap on your tablet, the slide shifted to a blacked-out, redacted briefing—only the necessary information was visible. A sleek 3D-rendered model of the enemy satellite appeared on the screen, rotating slowly. Most of its details were blurred or omitted entirely.

“This is Blackstar, a highly classified enemy satellite that has been operating in a low-Earth orbit over restricted airspace.” Your voice remained even, and steady, but the weight of what you were revealing sent a shiver down your spine. “Its existence has remained off the radar—literally and figuratively—until recently, when intelligence confirmed that it has been intercepting our encrypted communications, rerouting information, altering intelligence, and in some cases—fabricating entire communications.”

Someone exhaled sharply. Another shifted in their seat.

“So they’re feeding us bad intel?” one of them with big glasses and blonde hair asked, voice sceptical but sharp.

“That’s the theory,” you confirmed. “And given how quickly our ops have been compromised recently, it’s working.”

You tapped again, shifting to the next slide. The silent infiltration diagram appeared—an intricate web of glowing red lines showing Etherea’s integration process, slowly wrapping around the satellite’s systems like a virus embedding itself into a host.

“This is where Ethera comes in,” you said, shifting to a slide that displayed a cascading string of code, flickering across the screen. “Unlike traditional cyberweapons, Ethera doesn’t just break into a system. It integrates—restructuring security protocols as if it was always meant to be there. It’s undetectable, untraceable, and once inside, it grants us complete control of the Blackstar and won’t even register it as a breach.”

“So we’re not just hacking it," The only female pilot of the team said, arms crossed as she studied the data. “We’re hijacking it.”

“Exactly,” You nodded with a grin.

You switched to the next slide—a detailed radar map displaying the satellite’s location over international waters.

“This is the target area,” you continued after a deep breath. “It’s flying low-altitude reconnaissance patterns, which means it’s using ground relays for some of its communication. That gives us a small window to infiltrate and shut it down.”

The next slide appeared—a pair of unidentified fighter aircraft, patrolling the vicinity.

“And this is the problem,” you said grimly. “This satellite isn’t unguarded.”

A murmur rippled through the room as the pilots took in the fifth-generation stealth fighters displayed on the screen.

“We don’t know who they belong to,” you admitted. “What we do know is that they’re operating with highly classified tech—possibly experimental—and have been seen running defence patterns around the satellite’s flight path.”

Cyclone stepped forward then, arms crossed, his voice sharp and authoritative. “Which means your job is twofold. You will escort Dr L/N’s aircraft to the infiltration zone, ensuring Ethera is successfully deployed. If we are engaged, your priority remains protecting the package and ensuring a safe return.”

Oh, fantastic, you could not only feel your heartbeat in your toes, you were now officially the package.

You cleared your throat, tapping the screen again. Ethera’s interface expanded, displaying a cascade of sleek code.

“Once I’m in range,” you continued, “Ethera will lock onto the satellite’s frequency and begin infiltration. From that point, it’ll take approximately fifty-eight seconds to bypass security and assume control."

Silence settled over the room like a thick cloud, the weight of their stares pressing down on you. You could feel them analyzing, calculating, probably questioning who in their right mind thought putting you—a hacker, a tech specialist, someone whose idea of adrenaline was passing cars on the highway—into a fighter jet was a good idea.

Finally, one of the pilots—tall, broad-shouldered, blonde, and very clearly one of the cocky ones—tilted his head, arms crossed over his chest in a way that screamed too much confidence.

“So, let me get this straight.” His voice was smooth, and confident, with just the right amount of teasing. “You, Doctor—our very classified, very important tech specialist—have to be in the air, in a plane, during a mission that has a high probability of turning into a dogfight… just so you can press a button?”

Your stomach twisted at the mention of being airborne.

“Well…” You gulped, very much aware of how absolutely insane this sounded when put like that. “It’s… more than just that, but, yeah, essentially.”

A slow grin spread across his face, far too entertained by your predicament.

“Oh,” he drawled, “this is gonna be fun.”

Before you could fully process how much you already hated this, Cyclone—who had been watching the exchange with his signature unamused glare—stepped forward, cutting through the tension with his sharp, no-nonsense voice.

“This is a classified operation,” he stated, sharp and authoritative. “Not a joyride.”

The blonde’s smirk faded slightly as he straightened, and the rest of the pilots quickly fell in line.

Silence lingered for a moment longer before Vice Admiral Beau Cyclone Simpson let out a slow breath and straightened. His sharp gaze swept over the room before he nodded once.

“All right. That’s enough.” His tone was firm, the kind that left no room for argument. “We’ve got work to do. The mission will take place in a few weeks' time, once we’ve run full assessments, completed necessary preparations, and designated a lead for this operation.”

There was a slight shift in the room. Some of the pilots exchanged glances, the weight of the upcoming mission finally settling in. Others, mainly the cocky ones, looked as though they were already imagining themselves in the cockpit.

“Dismissed,” Cyclone finished.

The pilots stood, murmuring amongst themselves as they filed out of the room, the blonde one still wearing a smug grin as he passed you making you frown and turn away, your gaze then briefly met the eyes of the moustached pilot.

You hadn’t meant to look, but the moment your eyes connected, something flickered in his expression. Amusement? Curiosity? You weren’t sure, and frankly, you didn’t want to know.

So you did the only logical thing and immediately looked away and turned to gather your things. You needed to get out of here, to find some space to breathe before your brain short-circuited from stress—

“Doctor, Stay for a moment.”

You tightened your grip on your tablet and turned back to Cyclone, who was watching you with that unreadable, vaguely disapproving expression that all high-ranking officers seemed to have perfected. “Uh… yes, sir?”

Once the last pilot was out the door, Cyclone exhaled sharply and crossed his arms.

“You realize,” he said, “that you’re going to have to actually fly, correct?”

You swallowed. “I—well, technically, I’ll just be a passenger.”

His stare didn’t waver.

“Doctor,” he said, tone flat, “I’ve read your file. I know you requested to be driven here instead of taking a military transport plane. You also took a ferry across the bay instead of a helicopter. And I know that you chose to work remotely for three years to avoid getting on a plane.”

You felt heat rise to your cheeks. “That… could mean anything.”

“It means you do not like flying, am I correct?”

Your fingers tightened around the tablet as you tried to find a way—any way—out of this. “Sir, with all due respect, I don’t need to fly the plane. I just need to be in it long enough to deploy Ethera—”

Cyclone cut you off with a sharp look. “And what happens if something goes wrong, Doctor? If the aircraft takes damage? If you have to eject mid-flight? If you lose comms and have to rely on emergency protocols?”

You swallowed hard, your stomach twisting at the very thought of ejecting from a jet.

Cyclone sighed, rubbing his temple as if this entire conversation was giving him a migraine. “We cannot afford to have you panicking mid-mission. If this is going to work, you need to be prepared. That’s why, starting next week you will train with the pilots on aerial procedures and undergoing mandatory training in our flight simulation program.”

Your stomach dropped. “I—wait, what? That’s not necessary—”

“It’s absolutely necessary,” Cyclone cut in, his tone sharp. “If you can’t handle a simulated flight, you become a liability—not just to yourself, but to the pilots escorting you. And in case I need to remind you, Doctor, this mission is classified at the highest level. If you panic mid-air, it won’t just be your life at risk. It’ll be theirs. And it’ll be national security at stake.”

You inhaled sharply. No pressure. None at all.

Cyclone watched you for a moment before speaking again, his tone slightly softer but still firm. “You’re the only one who can do this, Doctor. That means you need to be ready.”

You exhaled slowly, pressing your lips together before nodding stiffly. “Understood, sir.”

Cyclone gave a small nod of approval. “Good. Dismissed.”

You turned and walked out, shoulders tense, fully aware that in three days' time, you were going to be strapped into a high-speed, fighter jet. And knowing your luck?

You were definitely going to puke.

Part 2???

[kdh-tally]

Abby x MakeupArtist!Reader [pt 3/?]

Prompt : How did Baby get your location... Anyways, we're still mad at Abby :(

Authors' Note : So this isn't gonna be 3 parts lol maybe 4 or 5 i dunno lol. I didn't plan on writing this much ionfwe. Not sure why I've been posting in the morning for the last few days but dont get used to it... (Not proof read...)

Part 1 || Part 2 || Part 3 [you are here!] || Part 4 || Part 5

You hadn’t gone to work in months. 

Okay that was a lie, it had only been a week and a half.

You loved your job, you really did. The ability to use someone's face as a canvas for your art gave you so much joy, especially when your client loved their look.

So it really pained you knowing that your safe space at work was not only tainted by some stupid, cocky, jerk but also a stalker who was trying to get you to quit. 

You had called Angela, alerting her of the situation. You hadn’t wanted to but the girls, specifically Rumi, insisted. 

– (lets say this happened before she left and i just didn’t put it in the last chapter…)

Mira and Zoey had gone to meet with Bobby, he said their cyber security team had found important information regarding your case. That left you with the purple haired leader, who immediately forced you to make a meal.

“You need to tell her Y/n,” Rumi encouraged gently, standing at the kitchen counter while forcing you to eat.

You simply stared at your, now very cold, jajangmyeon. “What if she fires me?”

“Now why would she do that?” Rumi sighed, “You said she was nice and really open.”

“Yea but what if she doesn’t believe me? What if she asks about the pictures–”

“Then you tell her the truth,” she insisted. “You weren’t put into those positions of your own will, he moved you around. If anyone, this is Abby’s fault.” 

You looked up at Rumi who seemed ready to punch someone and nodded your head. “I’ll do it, but I'm not going back there until this thing is figured out.”

Rumi smiled, “perfect by me.”

–

And you had kept your promise. 

You sent Angela a lengthy email, attaching screenshots of the stalkers messages as well as the images they had sent you. You wrote a little paragraph explaining how you got into each situation, citing specifically that it wasn’t your choice to be in the very… intimate positions you were in. 

You waited anxiously for an email back and when it finally came, you felt as though a weight was being lifted off your chest. The woman had told you to take as much time off as needed, even adding that she would get the boy’s company to find out who the stalker was.

The last line of her email really got to you though.

Thank you for trusting me with this Y/N. I really hope this event won’t stop you from wanting to work with us. You’re wonderful to have around!

“You’re too nice,” you sighed before flopping back onto your couch. There was truly nothing to do at this point.

You had two of the biggest companies in Korea working on figuring out who was stalking you and you didn’t have to come to work either. Actually, there was still one issue…

Abby still lingered on your mind. 

You thought about your last interaction with him, the way he had seemed genuinely worried about why you were so upset and you had lashed out at him. But it was his fault! If he hadn’t been such a man-whore with every woman he met then you wouldn’t be getting threatened by one of his crazy stalker fans. 

“I can’t do this,” you groaned into your pillows. You quickly stood up and headed for your door, you already had your wallet and phone with you so there was no need to go back to your room. 

You put in your earbuds and a pair of black crocs and headed out into the night. 

At first, you had no destination in mind. Takedown blasted in your earbuds as you navigated your way around the city. Soon enough, you came across a pretty convenience store that was still open. 

Upon entering, you were greeted with an extremely energetic cashier. She had already started talking so you quickly motioned to your earbuds. 

She nodded in understanding, waiting patiently as you took them out before talking again. 

“Hi! Welcome to Fresh Choice! I’m Lucky, if you need anything I’ll be right here :D” 

You couldn’t help but smile at her, she seemed to be filled with light. You headed into a random aisle, it was fortunately the snack aisle, and got to shopping. 

You really didn’t need to buy anything, your apartment was fully stocked, but in your mind, if you ate the food at home then you would have to go out to buy food later cause you had no food. By buying the food you wanted to eat now, you could preserve the food in your house for just a bit longer.

Girl Math.

You nodded proudly at your genius when the bell of the store chimed. You thought nothing of it, smiling as you heard Lucky go on her little spiel again.

“Does she do that every time someone comes in?” You chuckled to yourself.

“Yep”

“WHAT THE FU-” you screeched, falling to the ground as a voice appeared out of nowhere. You laid on the ground, clutching your non-existent pearls, as you stared up at the stranger in absolute shock. 

He wore a grey hood that was hiding most of his face, but you could see the cheeky smirk on his lips. 

Now you were pissed. “Who the hell do you think you are?!!” You scolded, getting up and dusting any dust off your clothes. The guy was basically your height, give or take a few inches.

“Your worst nightmare noona~”

“Who the fuck?”

His hood slipped off and the biggest frown formed on your face.

It was Baby.

Baby Saja.

You didn’t like this guy.

Why? Let me take you back to when you two had first met.

– (This is a flashback to pt 1 (this scene isn’t written there lol) )

You were in the lobby of SoulStealer, the company which the Saja Boys worked under. 

It was the day of your interview, and although you were 100% sure you would be getting the job, you were still nervous. 

The front desk woman had directed you to an elevator that you would take to get to the interview floor. You thanked her before getting on the elevator. As you waited patiently for the doors to close, you made eye contact with the person you had spoken to on the phone, Mr. Shin. 

He was the same man conducting your interview. 

A big smile appeared on your face, this was going to be your lucky day. He too had noticed you and sent a polite smile, he opened his mouth ready to greet you and that's when it happened.

A random guy, quickly shoved past the unsuspecting Mr. Shin, and slipped into the elevator with you. That wasn’t the issue, although the poor interviewer was a bit dizzy. The issue was, in his hurry, the random man, who held a cup of–ice coffee fortunately–had released the cup and it landed all over you.

Your arms immediately flew up in shock. You watched helplessly as the drink soaked your light blazer and dark top. No one said a word.

“Damn,” the random man broke the silence, “Sorry noona.”

You finally looked at the man, trying to identify him so you would have someone to point out the cops when you eventually called them. Your eyes then widened with recognition. It was Baby Saja. 

And the brat was smiling.

–

“Are you still mad about the coffee thing?” He asked, a mischievous grin on his face.

“Jump off a bridge,” you grumbled, turning back to the shelves of food and picking out a pack of ramen. 

“Only if you do it first~” He retorted, following you around.

“Why are you here?” You sighed as you searched in the freezer for a good ice cream flavour.

“Abby told me to find you,” he shrugged nonchalantly, also looking for ice cream for his group. You froze at his words. 

“Why would he do that?”

“Angela told us about what happened.” He quickly looked at you, all forms of mischief gone. “Sorry about that by the way.”

You waved it off, more invested in Abby’s reaction. “It’s alright, how did he take it?”

“He felt horrible.” Baby smirked, “Romance punched him in the stomach.”

You gasped in surprise. You hadn’t expected the gentle Saja Boy to have done that, “Why????”

“Well, you might not know this, but Romance is like a really big fan of yours.” Baby explained, finally selecting an ice cream flavour. “When Abby was telling us about how he was… moving you around, Romance got pissed at his lack of respect or something like that and punched him”

You stared in shock at the maknae before shaking your head. Romance was a fan? No Y/n that's not the focus!

“Abby also said he’d been calling you for the last few days but got no response so….” Baby shrugged as he opened the ice cream container. 

“Aren’t you gonna pay for that?” You murmured as you thought through everything you had just learnt. 

“Nah, Lucky and I are chill. I get this for free,” he grinned as he waved to the cashier.

You nodded, following him around mindlessly. Abby had been calling you? To be fair you hadn’t been on your phone since the whole stalker thing happened. Too scared of receiving another message or threat. 

Should you call him back? See what he had to say for himself?

You hadn’t even noticed that you’d followed Baby out of the store. As the cool night breeze hit your face, you looked back in realization. “Oh my gosh I didn’t pay!”

You were about to head inside again when you were suddenly pulled back by your hood. “Don’t worry noona. I paid for your stuff.”

“Now why on earth would you do that?”

“Think of it as a peace offering for the coffee incident,” he shrugged before heading off to the company, the opposite direction of your apartment. “I’ll see you later!”

You watched him walk off. The Saja Boys were so weird.

–

Back at your apartment, you set all your food down. Your ramen, your ice cream, your chocolate bars, your soda, your bungeo-ppang… Wait. You didn’t buy half of this stuff???

“Baby,” you chuckled before putting everything, except your ice cream away. 

You got settled on your couch once more, putting on a random k-drama, before pulling out your phone.

As you opened the phone app, you grimaced at the number of calls you hadn’t answered.

98+ Missed Calls From Pretty Idiot

It had only been three days since you had last seen him and you already had 98 missed calls. With a breath of courage, you clicked on his contact, about to call him when suddenly-

Incoming Call From Pretty Idiot

You tried not to smile before picking up.

“Hello?”

“Y/n? You picked up–”

“What do you want?” The longer you stayed on call, the faster you remembered why you were mad in the first place.

“Are you alright? Somewhere safe? I heard about the stalker and–”

You cut him off again. “Why do you care?” There was silence on his side of the phone and you felt frustration coming back. “That’s what I thought. You’re just calling to make yourself feel better right?”

You couldn’t stop running your mouth. Sorry Angela, I might have to quit after this.

“Y/n I don’t understand why you would say that,” he sighed.

“Of course you don’t. This is nothing to you. Just another check on one of your fan girls isn’t it?”

“Fan Girl? Y/n you’re not one of my fan girls.”

“Might as well be. Gosh I’m so stupid.”

“Y/n–”

“I let myself believe that I actually meant something to you when all you’ve been doing is flirting.”

“Y/n.”

“You flirt with everyone! I’m so stup–”

“Y/n!”

You were silenced.

He let out a deep sigh and you could literally feel the exhaustion filling his body. “I don’t flirt with anyone other than you.”

You were now confused and pissed. “The fuck do you mean? I’ve seen your performances Abby. You literally throw yourself out for the people in the crowd and–”

“That's an act Y/n. It’s part of the job. It isn’t real.”

“Okay fine. But what of your other stylists? I saw the way you were talking to that clothes stylist a few days ago. I swear you touched her lips and everything–”

“She was the other make-up artist on set that day. Manager-nim was scared you wouldn’t make it in time and called a back up.” You listened to him explain, unsure of whether he was telling the truth. 

“I was supposed to get my make-up done before Romance but she wouldn’t let me leave. So, in my complete stupidity, I flirted with her so she’d get distracted and let me go but you had already gotten started on Romance’s make-up by then.”

The phone line went silent.

“I’m sorry you had to see that but it was the quickest thing that came to mind.”

You still didn’t respond. 

“Y/n please believe me.”

“I don’t know if I can.”

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[reallyromealone]

Title: online safety class

Fandom: the rookie

Pairing: Tim Bradford x male reader

Genre: fluff

Warnings: omegaverse, male reader, Omega male reader, mentions of heat, swearing

Summary: being one of the few omegas in the department, (name) didn't fuck around especially being head of cyber security and coming into work he's forced to give a lesson on online safety

Notes:

🌜🌛🌜🌛🌜🌛🌜🌛🌜🌛🌜🌛🌜🌛🌜🌛🌜🌛

Eyes turned to the mysterious figure wnovwalked in sporting Sunglasses, hoodie with a dress shirt and black skinny jeans all while sipping boba. He was a pretty thing, delicate looking with sharp eyes while he takes in the department "who is that?" Lucy asked softly, looking at Angela and Tim who stared down the other "(name), he's head of cyber security and occasionally he helps out in the call room--- only if absolutely necessary" Angela said seriously, the Alpha woman not taking her eyes off the Omega who locked eyes with her from behind his sunglasses.

"Why haven't we ever seen him?" Jackson asked curiously, he wouldn't admit it but the energy the Omega radiated was a bit intimidating, the Alpha had never been intimidated by an Omega like this before and frankly he didn't know what to do with it. "He doesn't go on field and he's usually locked away in his hobbit hole" Tim stated simply and (name) tilted his head at the militant alpha and simply sipped up a few boba pearls and wandered off.

"He seems nice!" Nolan said not quite reading the situation correctly and seeing the best in everyone "he's something" Angela said with a lace of sarcasm before making Jackson follow her to go take their seats for the morning briefing.

(Name) Was a ghost in the department, rarely seen and only heard if something and happened or for a meeting-- frankly everyone just let him do his shit and lead his small team of nerds. He was one of the few omegas in the entire department and he made sure he wasn't to be fucked with and thus earning the nickname 'ice prince' and his cold and distant nature didn't help with the nickname.

Tim stared off where he walked before walking off, Lucy following nervously.

-

(Name) Plopped into his chair, setting his drink on a coaster on his desk and looking around at the quiet security department, it wasn't the biggest room but he argued hard to let them get the best tech to do their jobs (a bit of a lie since they didn't need fancy gaming computers but damn they looked nice compared to the dated office ones). The office was tidy, (name) was big on messes and didn't tolerate crumbs 'crumbs attract pests and pests destroy our time and our resources' were his rules and and he made sure they were followed strictly but to not seem like a complete stickler, he managed to get the empty storage room to be converted into the departments breakroom and kept it stocked with plenty of snacks and foods.

Only thing allowed at desks were non spillable drinks that were sealed or strawed and thus started (name)s boba addiction.

Turning on his computer, he signed in with an overly complicated password and immediately went to his email and looked through the countless emails and replied with simple and professional answers before noticing something from the captain marked 'MEETING' and quickly opened it "teaching the rookies cyber security in their shops....? Gotta be kidding me" he grumbled and stood up and walked out with his drink and tablet, sunglasses off as he actually respected Captain Anderson.

She was one of the four omegas in the building and he actually enjoyed being around her.

He briskly walked through the building and ignored any stares or whispers before getting to the briefing room and knocked twice before opening the door "there you are, was wondering when you would show" Captain Anderson stated calmly and the cops looked at him with various looks, some curious, some intrigued by the pretty Omega and some seemed annoyed by his very existence though (name) didn't even acknowledge anyone in the room outside of the Sarge and Captain "why don't you just look like sunshine incarnate" Grey teased and (name) blinked his eyes lazily "everyone, this is (name), he's head of cyber security and he's gonna be teaching you all how to not get scammed and destroy your issues phones with viruses"

"And please note, security and I.T can see everything you look up on those phones and yes that means content that should definitely not be seen during work hours" he said calmly and tapped a few buttons on his tablet "as you all saw on your schedules, this is a planned meeting though a surprise for me but fret not as I do this yearly" he said and set his drink on the podium much to Grey's annoyance "captain, do you know what the most common ways a police phone gets hacked into?" The Omega glanced over to the Omega woman with his usual intensity but with a kindness behind his eyes and the Captain spoke confidently "malware and spyware typically due to phishing or outdated software" her words simple and clear cut through the room "correct!" And with another tap to the screen, examples of phishing emails showed on the screen.

Bradford raised his hand and (name) raised his eyebrow "yes, officer Bradford?" His voice calm and a bit bored as if he expected this "half of us don't need this, why do we have to be here?"

"First, this is mandatory so if I have to be here so do you and second no one is immune to being hacked so we are all going to use our listening ears and learn how to not get all of our personal data and this police departments data stolen, ok? Good! And save future questions for the end please"

It was funny seeing Bradford put in his place by the Omega, the Alpha staring at (name) with an annoyed expression but anyone who knew him would know there was more to that stare than annoyance.

It was a well known secret that Bradford and (name) had a complicated relationship, it was mostly hate with vicious mockery masked with flirting and there may or may not be a betting pool on who would confess to who. "Officer Nolan, can you spot the mistakes this Officer made in their email to this scam bot?" (Name) Asked simply and officer Nolan scanned the email intently and spoke with a sense of uncertainty "he added his personal phone number? And he mentioned the area he lived in?"

"Correct but you missed one thing, he used his private phone" (name) pointed down to the 'sent from Android' at the bottom "my team works very hard to make those work phones of yours damn near impossible to hack, any work emails are to be sent from those or the work computers, do not risk your personal data because of this job"

(Name) Continued on and grilled a few officers for their lack of attention or snide answers, by the end a few officers left with their tails between their legs and (name) gained a few more people who were intimidated by him.

After the meeting, he was surprised when the rookies came up to him "If this is about me fighting the vending machine you didn't see that" (name) said seriously and Lucy shook her head "n-no, we just wanted to know how we can protect ourselves with our devices better? Your presentation really opened our eyes at how easy people can hack into our stuff or sell our data"

(Name) Was pleasantly surprised, most of the time people just brushed him off for being young or being an Omega "that is actually easy-- here is a list of softwares that can help" he wrote them down on a notepad on the podium and handed it to Lucy "I'm not writing it down three times so share that, anyways I'm happy you liked it because you will see it next year" he said simply before wandering off, probably to go raid snacks from the communal kitchen.

"What a weird guy" Nolan said simply and Jackson nodded "he's definitely one odd Omega"

-

It was late, (name) was hunched over his desk working away when the door creaked open and lifting his eyes briefly to see Bradford "your shift ended two hours ago" he said simply and (name) snorted "I'm almost done"

"Save your work and let's go, we gotta prep remember?"

(Name) Grumbled and saved his stuff, the officer already grabbing his belongings for him "thought I was gonna have to drag your behind out of here" he teased the Omega who let the Alpha drape an arm around him when he wandered over "not the first time" "and definitely not the last, brat" the two walked out and (name) allowed himself to relax a little bit, body losing its tension while they went through the building, night shift coming in and barely passing them a glance, too busy getting ready and to anyone it would seem like Bradford was just annoying (name).

Especially because they argued the whole way about being able to drive.

"I am perfectly capable of driving"

"You say that yet you're practically passing out, shut up and let me help you"

"Why do you have to be like this?"

Chen and Jackson watched with snickers as the two argued, (name) clearly exhausted but still fighting the other who actuality decided to help each other.

(Name) Fell into the passengers seat and buckled himself in, Bradford getting into the drivers seat and watched (name) almost pass out in the seat "you did good with that presentation today" the Alpha murmured to the Omega who gazed back at him sleepily "even though you didn't want to be there?"

"I didn't want to relearn it, nothing about not wanting to see your fine ass grill my boot"

"She had the fear of God struck into her..." (Name)s voice slurred a bit and the Alpha chuckled "she sure did"

The streets were dark while (name) slept, Bradford was thankful his mate was finally getting some relaxation especially with the insanity that had been going on in their lives and the upcoming heat that had given (name) a fair amount of anxiety as it was the first one without surpessants in six months.

Tim carried the Omega into the house, Kojo looking at them confused and followed the Alpha to the bedroom where (name) was placed carefully into the bed, Kojo crawling in behind the Omega and snuggling with a relaxed sigh "you watch him ok, bud? I just gotta do some stuff" the dog didn't reply obviously but proceeded to close his eyes and stay with the human.

Tim grabbed blankets and his dirty laundry, water bottles already sitting in the bedroom and their mini fridge stocked with fruits and snacks.

(Name) Was snoring when he returned, completely out cold and snuggled so sweetly.

After everything was brought in, Tim changed into loose clothes knowing it won't stay on for long once the heat kicks in, Angela agreeing to take Kojo the following day just to be safe.

Kojo hopped off the bed when the Alpha got into bed, deciding to go sleep on his plush bed in the corner. Sniffing (name)s neck, the Alpha peppered a few kisses along his mating bite before holding him close and slowly closing his eyes, at work they kept their relationship downlow for (name)s safety but at home?

He would kiss and worship the very existence of his mate.

[duskier]

Cyber stalker Laswell who meets you as a server in a fancy restaurant. The bill she pays without a blink of her eye is about a week's worth of your pay.

You're obviously attracted to her from the second she's seated, how your eyes follow the silver necklace she's wearing down between the open buttons of her silk collared shirt. How then your eyes flick to her hands, pupils dilating when you find her ring finger bare. It's like the general sitting across from Laswell doesn't even exist. She immediately likes that about you, how quickly and easily she's able to capture your full attention.

She watches your tongue behind your teeth move as you take her order, determined not to fuck it up. You were still new to this job, but the authoritative aura Laswell gave off had you at attention. Even her little smiles and nods when you confirmed her order felt like rewards. Like a dog being clicker trained.

Laswell tests you- she doesn't like pets who are obedient just because they can't think for themselves. She asks you to pick out a wine for her. You offer to have the sommelier come by, but she just shakes her head. You feel like a deer caught in headlights.

When you bring her the wine, a glass of '91 Penfold Grange, you can't help but watch her take a sip. Raptured at the sight of her rolling the taste in her mouth, lost in the idea of licking it off of her tongue. Laswell looks you right in your eyes when she thanks you, tells you that it was an excellent choice. She might as well have bent you over the table and fucked you right there, it made you melt. How could she make you feel so much with so little said?

(When you went to the back, her empty glass in hand, no one noticed when you licked at the stains on the rim where her mouth was. The wine tasted fucking fantastic.)

She left you a tip well over what was necessary. More than what the bill actually was, a number with one too many zeroes that made you gasp. She wrote out that it was a thank you for your service, and you shove the note in your pocket.

...Your heart sunk at the fact that she hadn't left her number though. Of course she wouldn't, a classy older woman such as herself? She probably only entertained you out of pity, because you were working and she was a professional.

You went home in a needy daze, her note burning in your pocket. You could still smell her perfume, the scent inoffensive but strong. If you fingered yourself with the note held in your other hand, Laswell's looping blue-ink cursive making you clench on your fingers every time you glanced at it, you didn't feel shame for it. Too busy lost in her pretty eyes, the thought of sitting naked in her lap, the idea of her voice praising and guiding you to orgasm.

...

What a pretty show, Laswell thought. Before she'd even gotten home, she'd had connections find everything about you. For such a smart person, you put much too much about yourself online. Not to mention, an open laptop on your desk, right across from your bed? You're lucky Laswell is looking out for you, remotely setting up security so no one else could see through that camera. Only she should see how your pretty thighs clench and jerk as you cum, only she should hear her name on your lips like that.

You were perfect for Laswell, exactly her type. Smart, pretty thing just waiting for someone to scoop them up, take care of them properly and teach them how to be a good pet.

[eponastory]

Watching From the Tower Part 2 (Bucky x F! Reader No Y/N)

Your code name is Scout and your job was easy. You worked the cyber side of things for the New Avengers. You directed them where to go with your hacking skills, and you are the eyes in the sky. There was just one problem... you don't like leaving the tower. You are not a complete agoraphobe, but you are pretty close. Leaving makes you feel so unsafe and people touching you, that's even worse. So, when James Buchanan Barnes the former 'Winter Soldier' tries to get you out for one mission, things got a little hectic after that.

Part 2 Summary: You are getting sick while working comms when the mission takes a slightly scary turn.

Part 1 | Part 2 |

Word Count: ~4.4k words. (6.9k total words so far)

Rating: M (Later parts will be marked 18+ for smut, but for now, it's okay.)

Pairings: Bucky/F!Reader (Non-descriptive, No Y/N) Squint for GhostWalker and Boblena (Platonic)

TW: Angst, Depression, mentions of past SA, phobias, Anxiety, MDNI for sexual content in later parts (Will be labeled).

You weren't exactly feeling great by the time the team landed in Singapore. As a matter of fact, you had already started sneezing and every time Bob saw one coming, he'd tell you to say ‘cucumber’ because he thought it would help. Because he saw you getting progressively worse as you started hacking into one of the Chinese satellites over that region, he opted to help you out with the simplest tasks. You had found out that Bob was not as useless as he thought he was. 

“So… I press this button and the door pops open?” He's sitting in the chair next to you with an extra keyboard you showed him how to hook into the system. 

“Bob… make sure it's the right door.” Bucky's voice comes over the comms linked up to the sound system in the room. “Is it the right door?” 

“I like how encouraging you are, Barnes. So Leader of you.” Yelena's accent comes through, causing Bob to smile as he presses the key you pointed out. “Ah, very good. You have opened the correct door.” 

“Now if only there was a pot of gold and tequila behind it.” Ava's smooth voice comes in making you smile even though your throat is getting scratchy. 

“Cut the chatter.” Once Bucky says something they all shut up. “Walker, status?” 

“Ground clear, moving into position.” You could hear Walker grunting as he likely jumped over something to get into his position. 

“Once inside, let the bot fly so I can get you a readout.” Your eyes are on the screen that is showing footage from the cameras on each team member's person. “I can only do so much with your body cams and the security cameras.” 

“Scoutbot is ready.” Bucky lets you know as he holds the smallest bot you could rig up with Flir and night vision. “On your mark.” 

You look at Bob who is intensely watching the screen to make sure everyone's vitals are as they should be. It was now or never as you pulled the Xbox controller you rigged up to connect to the Scoutbot remotely and the VR headset for better guidance. You think that Bob is ready for this since he's gotten pretty good at gaming with you on slow days. 

“You want to do it, Bob?” You hold the controller out to him and he pulls his soft eyes away from the screen. “Don't worry, you don't have to do anything except control Scoutbot.” 

“Uh… sure. Yeah, it'll be like playing that game with the planes.” He takes the controller and headset before putting them on. “Okay, connect me! I'm going into the Matrix!” 

“Connection established.” You put in your codes and commands for the bot. “Okay, release Scoutbot. Bob is in control.” 

“Are you sure that's a good idea?” Of course Walker would object to letting Bob do this. 

You roll your eyes as you pull up the feed onto another screen and see that Bob is doing very well at guiding the bot around the corners in the long corridors. You have complete faith in Bob. Bob hasn't let you down yet and when you let out a cough, you see that Bucky has gone still. 

“Are you getting sick, Scout?” You can hear the concern in his voice. 

“I'm fine. Corridor is clear, proceed with the directive.” 

“Copy.” 

“Uh… I'm getting some interference.” You look up and see that there is a little static on the bot and that doesn't actually mean too much, at least not at first until. “Too much static to see what is going on.” 

“Bucky, we're getting interference on the bot as it gets closer to the center of the building.” You study the static. It's making the image grainy with white specks showing up every now and then. “Wait… I know what this is. Those are Alpha particles. It's radiation.” 

“I thought the machine was a laser?” Walker questions. 

“It is, but that doesn't mean that there are other things going on in the facility.” You don't have access to a spectrometer, but you do know that Bucky has a small Geiger counter on him. He's always prepared for these things. “Bucky, I'm not positive it's radiation, but maybe use that counter to see.” 

“On it.” You hear the sound of velcro as he reaches into one of his pockets for the small Geiger counter. It isn't long before you see it on his body cam and then the clicking as it measures for charged particles in the air. “Nothing so far, but I'll keep moving in.” 

“Great, so now we have potential radiation.” Ava is moving in after Bucky. “Our day just got so much better.” 

“Could be much worse. We could be in a place like Chernolbyl.” Yelena pipes up after you watch her take out a guard on her side of the building. “You ever been there?” 

“Yes.” Bucky doesn't hesitate to answer. 

“Of course you have.” Her lazy tone makes you smile. “Let me guess, you were there to assassinate a whistle blower in 1986 after the explosion.” 

“More or less.” The counter goes off with a squeal as he turns the corner of another hallway and then eases back. “Unsafe levels.” 

“Shit.” Bob says as the bot goes dark. “Something took out the bot, it just went off.” You look at the screen where your bot has been active only to receive a NO SIGNAL message. “Sorry.” 

“Guys, I think this mission is a botch.” You don't like that the radiation coming from the center of the building is at unsafe levels and possibly a lethal dose. “That radiation is definitely a problem and unless you are resistant, you aren't getting through.” 

“So, what do we do now?” John lets out a breath. 

“I can look into hijacking a satellite that can see the building in infrared. Radiation does sometimes release heat if there is something that is making it react.” You are able to hack into a Russian satellite that is in orbit over the area long enough to get your data. You see the Flir data and the location. It’s white hot in the middle of the building. So much concentrated heat that it has to be a mini nuclear reactor that is leaking radiation. “It’s like a mini reactor– sending the image now.” 

With a few keystrokes, you upload the image to Bucky’s phone and then you hear him grunt in disbelief. You know what he’s going to do next because there is no way to get any further without getting a lethal dose. It’s the one thing that they can’t fight because it’s subatomic particles that are slicing through you at every second. 

“What are the chances the target has been moved versus being dead?” He sounds a little disturbed. 

“High probability that everyone in the building is probably either dead or close to it. I suggest aborting the mission.” You say it with a heavy heart because you know how Bucky handles these missions. You know he’s going to be a storm when he comes back. You cough before looking at the photo again. “I’m sorry Bucky, but none of you would survive radiation this high.” 

“She’s right. I’m already feeling woozy and I’m not even that far into the building.” John is on the end closest to the output. “It’s really hot in here too.”

“Stifling really. This radiation is messing with my phasing.” Ava is in danger too. 

“Bucky, we have to leave.” Yelena stresses to him. 

You can hear Bucky’s thoughts from here. He knows the answer already, it’s just that stubbornness in him that he is fighting. 

“Bucky–” You start out then switch the comms to where you are speaking to him directly. Bob looks at you with the headset still on his head, but he gives you that soft look of understanding before he takes it off and sets it on the desk. He leaves you before he walks into the kitchen. “I know that you will consider this a failure, but it’s not. It’s a tactical miscalculation. We didn’t know this was going on and it could've happened at any point before you got there.” 

“I’m really starting to regret taking on this position.” He grumbles out before you see him turning around. “I’m not good at this.” 

“No time for self doubt, Boss.” He’s already going in the direction of ‘I’m not equipped for this’ when you know he’s got more experience than all of them combined. He just doesn’t believe he can lead this team even though he’s been doing it for six months without fail. But one failure makes him spiral out of control. “Look, there was no indication of this before the mission, so it’s an unforeseen variable that we didn't know about. This isn’t on you, but you all need to get out of there.” 

“Copy.” His tone is dark. He’s back in business mode when he gets over himself. You switch it back to full comms. “Everyone out. Rendezvous at the jet.” 

“Roger.” 

“On it.” 

“Does anyone else taste metal?” 

“That’s from the radiation.” Bucky probably knows because he’s been to radioactive places before, but that still doesn’t dismiss that his experience is what is going to save the team next. “Scout, we need potassium iodide, stat.” 

“Uh– There should be some in the med kit on the jet. I stocked it myself.” You see Bob walk back in with a Grape soda in one hand and your favorite smoothie in the other. Bless him, because your throat is sore and the cold will help. “Only take the recommended dose guys, otherwise you’ll increase your chances of hypothyroidism.” 

“What would be the recommended dose for a super soldier?” You hear John ask and you aren’t exactly sure.

You roll your eyes. “I don’t know, ask Bucky.” You aren’t a nurse even though you’ve patched them up a couple of times. “Thank you, Bob.” He smiles at you as you take the smoothie in hand. He’s such a sweetheart, taking care of everyone because they take care of him. 

“Barnes, how much do we take?” 

“The normal amount.” That made sense. You think. Potassium Iodide is a compound that can be broken down to straight elemental form within the body, but it doesn’t add or subtract anything. At least that is what you remember from high-school chemistry, which was a long time ago. “Just get back to the jet.” 

You listen to the chatter between the team as they make their way back to the place they landed the Jet. You just want them to come home safe and hopefully not full of radiation. You don’t think you can handle it if someone came home with radiation poisoning that is very much hard to cure. 

Leaning back in your chair, you sip on your fruit smoothie that you had prepared days ago and put in the freezer just for this occasion as you listen to the banter. They sound like siblings arguing over stupid things, but you love them. You don’t have a family as you were a child placed in the system at an early age before you were fostered over and over again. Family was a foreign term for years until you stuck it out with no real support system. When you finally found someone to hold on to, they vanished for five years. Five long years that ended up with you being put in a horrible situation. 

Five years of loneliness and then ‘it’ happened. 

When the Blip happened, your partner came back and you weren’t the same. They knew that, but they couldn’t deal with you not wanting to leave the house or do anything other than lay in bed. You started using your skills again out of boredom, to the point where you were working on exposing Val because someone anonymous had contacted you about it. Turns out that anonymous person was Congressman James Buchanan Barnes. 

That man that you were trying really hard not to get too close to. But it was hard. It was hard because he was very much your friend and he brought you into this because you were good. You were really good. 

“Scout, we’re on the jet.” His voice comes through and you let out a sigh. “Minimal radiation exposure detected.” 

“Okay, good. Can you just come home now?” You cough before you hear him hum softly. “We’ll regroup and learn from this okay?” 

“Sounds like mother hen is worried about us.” Yelena’s smile comes through her tone. “Don’t worry, we are fine. It was just a snag.” 

“Just get home so I can make sure everyone is fine with my own eyes.” You are worried. They have become the closest thing you have to family and you don’t want to lose them. The thought terrifies you. 

“We’re in the air. Go rest, we’ll see you in eight hours.” You hear the concern in Bucky’s voice before looking at Bob who is happily sipping on his grape soda. He still puts the straw in it like a little kid. He isn’t a kid, but some habits die hard. 

Eight hours later, you’re being woken up by a proximity alert. You had fallen asleep on the couch in the hub, but by now you were running a fever and you didn’t feel like getting up. How on earth did you get sick when you barely leave the tower? It runs through your head that maybe it’s from one of the people that come in and out all the time. Actually, you think back to the guy that dropped of the groceries three days ago that looked half dead and in need of a vacation. He was also sort of coughing. 

You groan when you know it was him because you accepted the delivery while everyone was at their respective places. Sure, Yelena, Bob, Ava, and John lived in the tower full time, but not Bucky and Alexei. Bucky had his own place because he said if he lived here, he would probably go crazy. He was the type of person that needed to have his social battery recharged in solitude. And it rang true because he always went home at night unless the mission was just too much and he’d find a quiet place to crash, usually on your couch that is in your workshop. 

But as it stands, you did not want to get off the couch you were on. You were shivering and partially delirious because you couldn’t get your fever to go away. Bob had thrown a blanket over you at one point, even bringing you a heating pad to keep you warm, but you were both on fire and freezing at the same time. It was awful. You were so tired and all you wanted to do was sleep. 

It isn’t until you feel a hand on your forehead that you realize you fell asleep again. You open your eyes to see Bucky. He’s not in his ‘work clothes’ but rather wearing his standard black t-shirt with a jacket that you desperately wanted to steal off of him and wrap yourself in. Yes, you were definitely sick because you were thinking these thoughts. 

“Hey.” You hear him as he rubs his thumb on your forehead. “We’re back.” 

“Mkay.” It’s a fog because you see his face, but you are so tired and feel so bad that you just want to sleep forever. You wouldn’t mind if he smothered you with a pillow because you feel like you are dying. 

“You’re sick.” The tenderness in his voice does something to you though and that look in his eyes. You want him to actually keep touching you because you are too sick to care at this point. He knows you have an issue with being touched. You have to initiate it or otherwise it’s uncomfortable and pushing the boundaries that you have set in place. You hate that you’re like this because when you see the look in Bob’s eyes when he wants to hug you after you have a tiny meltdown over something stupid or when Bucky wants to touch you to let you know he’s there. 

The fact that he’s not hurting you now is what is keeping you sane. 

Ava isn’t a touchy person either and that is why the two of you see eye to eye. Yelena sees you as a surrogate sister, but she respects those boundaries you have set up. Walker is terrified of you. He barely speaks to you, but he’ll leave your favorite candy on your work bench when he goes out to get food or something. It’s these little things that make you feel like you belong and that there is a healthy respect between all of you. 

But here Bucky is, looking down at you with those blue eyes of his and all you want to do is curl up. “I feel like shit.” You pull the blanket up to cover your face which forces his hand to vacate your forehead. “I just want to die.” 

“Not allowed.” The rough conviction in his voice says a lot to you. “Did you take anything?” 

“Uh– I gave her some Tylenol to make her fever go down a few hours ago.” You see Bob looking down at you from the back of the couch with his hoodie on. He smiles as Yelena comes to stand next to him. 

“Oh, you look like you have been dead.” She doesn’t hold back on her snarkiness even when you aren’t feeling good. “Like you died and then came back to life just in time for us to get home.” The soft smile on her face is enough to make you sigh. 

“Could all of you just stop yelling at me.” Your head hurts because everyone is talking to you now. “And maybe turn off the lights.” Turning over, you hide your face into the cushions as the bright lights start getting to you. “Stupid grocery guy.” You mumble. 

You hear Bucky sigh. “Okay, time to get you to your own bed.” Normally you would shirk away when someone lays a hand on you, but this gentle touch from Bucky to turn you onto your back is more like asking permission. It’s in his eyes when you turn your head to look at him. “Hey.” 

“Hey.” You blink slow like a cat. 

“Will you let me bring you to your room?” The fact that he’s asking makes you feel better about this and all you can do is nod. He peels the blanket off of you as Yelena drags Bob away to work on something else entirely. “Come on.” You don’t protest when he’s helping you sit up enough to put an arm around his shoulder so he can pick you up. 

You cough as he puts his arm under your knees and hoists you up into his arms. Anyone of the super soldiers on the team could do this, but you only let Bucky because you knew him better. You were his friend before you were theirs. Alexei would if you asked him to, but you never would because that was not the relationship you had with him. Still, when Bucky is carrying you out of the hub and to the elevator, you lay your head on his right shoulder because you can’t keep it upright. Your arms are around his neck as he carries you without getting tired, because he doesn’t get tired. 

He’s made out of sturdy stuff and nuclear energy. He goes on forever out of spite at what happened to him in the past and you admire that about him. Although, as seen earlier, he still has some things to deal with on an emotional level. You saw how he started going down this path of self-doubt the moment you told him to abort the mission. The moment you told him the team was in danger. He knows it was the right call, but at the same time, you could tell through his voice that old training was telling him to keep going. The circumstances were just out of their control and he knew that too. Now, he’s probably going to replay this in his head for hours before he actually falls asleep. 

“You’re quiet.” There is nothing but the sound of your voice and the elevator. “You’re thinking about what went wrong.” 

“Nothing went wrong.” He denies it. “Everything went wrong.” He sighs as he grips his hand tighter around your leg just before your knee. “What could’ve caused that much of a radiation leak?” 

You wrack your brain for something. “Cesium.” That’s the only thing you can think of for a radiation leak that big in a medical facility. “They use it in MRI machines. But it would take a lot of it to cause that much radiation.” You are surprised that you are lucid enough to recall that information. “I don’t know, but as soon as I feel better, I’ll be on the case.” You promise even though you feel like shit. 

The elevator stops on your floor and Bucky is carrying you out. Your workshop and apartment are only two doors away from the elevator, so it’s barely five seconds before Bucky is maneuvering himself to press the keypad on your door while you are still in his arms. As soon as the code is in, the one you programmed specifically for him, the door pops open and he’s pushing it with his foot. Once inside he gently kicks the door shut behind him. 

It’s lonely in this apartment, but you like it. You’ve made it your home with the warm colors and low lights that the AI brings up when you enter the room. It’s yours and Val will have to drag your cold body out of there before you ever leave. You are pretty sure the entire team will be turning Val over if she even thought about kicking you to the curb. Bucky would actually kill her. You know it, he knows it, and she knows it. So she lets him do his job and that means you get to do yours. Even if it means fixing Alexei’s phone every two weeks. 

“Did you get more books?” Bucky sees the stacks of books that you have acquired for reading even though it takes you no time to sit and read one. 

“I ordered a few for Bob because he pretty much read all the ones I recommended already.” When you learned that Bob liked to read, you were ready to start your own little book club with him and eventually Ava joined in on it too. “Some of them are for you too.” And Bucky was a reader too, he just didn’t tell anyone. “The small stack with your name on it are the ones I got for you.” You cough again as he passes by the stacks you had sorted out for everyone. 

“You didn’t have to do that, you know.” Yes you did. You have been sneaking books to him for six months, always leaving a copy of something you think he’d like on his desk. Then you’d find it on your workbench a week later with a note in his handwriting about what he liked or didn’t like about the book. 

“I do.” 

“Thank you.” He barely says your real name under his breath as he brings you to your room. 

You weren’t a very tidy person. You like your home looking like you lived in it, but it was clean. It was crowded with things that you kept around for comfort, but the only thing you didn’t have was pictures of a family you can’t remember. You remember the people that you lived with, the good and the bad, but you don’t remember your real family. 

He sits you down on your bed before he’s pulling the white comforter back and organizing the pile of pillows that you have on your bed. You need eight pillows. You do but he is moving most of them to the other side of the bed as you take off your shoes and make yourself comfortable. He finds your penguin Squishmallow buried underneath the pillows and throws it at you. It’s big enough for you to hold at night because sometimes you get nightmares about your time in foster care. 

“Come on, get in.” You aren’t a child. You’re a grown woman with a mind of your own, but this is him taking care of you because there is no one else. “I’ll get some more medicine and water for you.” 

“Okay.” You do as he says because you don’t have the energy to be disobedient. You slip in under the covers in just your hoodie and pajama pants that you had not changed out of since you were working comms. You were still on fire, but still freezing. There was no happy medium. 

When Bucky comes back to your room with a glass of water in his vibranium hand and two Motrin in the other, you sigh. Motrin. The standard go-to for anyone in the military since no one knows when. You curl up on your side with your penguin and watch as he holds the two little orange pills out to you. Your teeth are chattering at this point. You sit up and take the pills, throwing them in your mouth before swallowing. You reach for the water and gulp it down before handing it back to him. 

“Get some rest. I’ll call you in a few hours to check on you and if you don’t answer, I’m coming back here.” He is very serious because he does care. Probably more than he should, but you aren’t complaining. This is how he shows his affection. 

“Okay, Bucky.” You lay back down on the pillow before he’s pulling the covers over you and tucking you in tight. Sometimes you don’t mind that someone wants to take care of you. It rarely happens, but right now, it’s the look in Bucky’s eyes as he makes sure you are okay that has you feeling much better already. Maybe he’s always looked at you like this. You were too busy wrapped up in yourself and in others to really notice. 

“Good night, Sweetheart.” He says before flipping the lightswitch off and closing the door. You think he would probably make a good father someday, if not a good husband to some lucky woman. You definitely weren’t that lucky woman. You had too many problems to be that lucky woman. 

It doesn’t stop you from thinking about him as your body fights off whatever virus is inside you. 

[mariacallous]

In the spring and summer of 2008, when Donald Trump was still a registered Democrat, an anonymous blogger known as Mencius Moldbug posted a serial manifesto under the heading “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives.” Written with the sneering disaffection of an ex-believer, the hundred-and-twenty-thousand-word letter argued that egalitarianism, far from improving the world, was actually responsible for most of its ills. That his bien-pensant readers thought otherwise, Moldbug contended, was due to the influence of the media and the academy, which worked together, however unwittingly, to perpetuate a left-liberal consensus. To this nefarious alliance he gave the name the Cathedral. Moldbug called for nothing less than its destruction and a total “reboot” of the social order. He proposed “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law,” and the eventual transfer of power to a C.E.O.-in-chief (someone like Steve Jobs or Marc Andreessen, he suggested), who would transform the government into “a heavily-armed, ultra-profitable corporation.” This new regime would sell off public schools, destroy universities, abolish the press, and imprison “decivilized populations.” It would also fire civil servants en masse (a policy Moldbug later called RAGE—Retire All Government Employees) and discontinue international relations, including “security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration.”

Moldbug acknowledged that his vision depended on the sanity of his chief executive: “Clearly, if he or she turns out to be Hitler or Stalin, we have just recreated Nazism or Stalinism.” Yet he dismissed the failures of twentieth-century dictators, whom he saw as too reliant on popular support. For Moldbug, any system that sought legitimacy in the passions of the mob was doomed to instability. Though critics labelled him a techno-fascist, he preferred to call himself a royalist or a Jacobite—a nod to partisans of James II and his descendants, who, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, opposed Britain’s parliamentary system and upheld the divine right of kings. Never mind the French Revolution, the bête noire of reactionary thinkers: Moldbug believed that the English and American Revolutions had gone too far.

If Moldbug’s “Open Letter” showed little affection for the masses, it intimated that they might still have a use. “Communism was not overthrown by Andrei Sakharov, Joseph Brodsky, and Václav Havel,” he wrote. “What was needed was the combination of philosopher and crowd.” The best place to recruit this crowd, he said, was on the internet—a shrewd intuition. Before long, links to Moldbug’s blog, “Unqualified Reservations,” were being passed around by libertarian techies, disgruntled bureaucrats, and self-styled rationalists—many of whom formed the shock troops of an online intellectual movement that came to be known as neo-reaction, or the Dark Enlightenment. While few turned into outright monarchists, their contempt for Obama-era uplift seemed to find voice in Moldbug’s heresies. In his most influential coinage, which quickly gained currency among the nascent alt-right, Moldbug urged his readers to rouse themselves from their ideological slumber by taking the “red pill,” like Keanu Reeves’s character in “The Matrix,” who chooses daunting truth over contented ignorance.

In 2013, an article on the news site TechCrunch, titled “Geeks for Monarchy,” revealed that Mencius Moldbug was the cyber alias of a forty-year-old programmer in San Francisco named Curtis Yarvin. At the same time that he was trying to redesign the U.S. government, Yarvin was also dreaming up a new computer operating system that he hoped would serve as a “digital republic.” He founded a company that he named Tlon, for the Borges story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in which a secret society describes an elaborate parallel world that begins to overtake reality. As he raised money for his startup, Yarvin became a kind of Machiavelli to his big-tech benefactors, who shared his view that the world would be better off if they were in charge. Tlon’s investors included the venture-capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund, the latter of which was started by the billionaire Peter Thiel. Both Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan, then a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, had become friends with Yarvin after reading his blog, though e-mails shared with me revealed that neither was thrilled to be publicly associated with him at the time. “How dangerous is it that we are being linked?” Thiel wrote to Yarvin in 2014. “One reassuring thought: one of our hidden advantages is that these people”—social-justice warriors—“wouldn’t believe in a conspiracy if it hit them over the head (this is perhaps the best measure of the decline of the Left). Linkages make them sound really crazy, and they kinda know it.”

A decade on, with the Trumpian right embracing strongman rule, Yarvin’s links to élites in Silicon Valley and Washington are no longer a secret.

In a 2021 appearance on a far-right podcast, Vice-President J. D. Vance, a former employee of one of Thiel’s venture-capital firms, cited Yarvin when suggesting that a future Trump Administration “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” and ignore the courts if they objected. Marc Andreessen, one of the heads of Andreessen Horowitz and an informal adviser to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has started quoting his “good friend” Yarvin about the need for a founder-like figure to take charge of our “out of control” bureaucracy. Andrew Kloster, the new general counsel at the government’s Office of Personnel Management, has said that replacing civil servants with loyalists could help Trump defeat “the Cathedral.”

“There are figures who channel a Zeitgeist—Nietzsche calls them timely men—and Curtis is definitely a timely man,” a State Department official who has been reading Yarvin since the Moldbug era told me. Back in 2011, Yarvin said that Trump was one of two figures who seemed “biologically suited” to be an American monarch. (The other was Chris Christie.) In 2022, he recommended that Trump, if reëlected, appoint Elon Musk to run the executive branch. On a podcast with his friend Michael Anton, now the director of policy planning at the State Department, Yarvin argued that the institutions of civil society, such as Harvard, would need to be shut down. “The idea that you’re going to be a Caesar . . . with someone else’s Department of Reality in operation is just manifestly absurd,” he said.

In another timeline, Yarvin might have remained an obscure and ineffectual internet crank, a digital de Maistre. Instead, he has become one of America’s most influential illiberal thinkers, an engineer of the intellectual source code for the second Trump Administration. “Yarvin has pushed the Overton window,” Nikhil Pal Singh, a history professor at N.Y.U., told me. His work has revived ideas that once seemed outside the bounds of polite society, Singh said, and created a road map for the dismantling of “the administrative state and the global postwar order.”

As his ideas have been surrealized in DOGE and Trump has taken to self-identifying as a king, one might expect to find Yarvin in an exultant mood. In fact, he has spent the past few months fretting that the moment will go to waste. “If you have a Trump boner right now, enjoy it,” he wrote two days after the election. “It’s as hard as you’ll ever get.” What many see as the most dangerous assault on American democracy in the nation’s history Yarvin dismisses as woefully insufficient—a “vibes coup.” Without a full-blown autocratic takeover, he believes, a backlash is sure to follow. When I spoke to him recently, he quoted the words of Louis de Saint-Just, the French philosopher who championed the Reign of Terror: “He who makes half a revolution digs his own grave.”

Earlier this year, Yarvin and I had lunch in Washington, D.C., where he had come to celebrate the regime change. He was in his usual getup: bluejeans, Chelsea boots, a rumpled dress shirt under a motorcycle jacket. After taking a few bites of a cheeseburger topped with crispy onions, he pushed his plate away. Last year, he explained, he’d decided to start taking an Ozempic-like drug after a debate with the right-wing commentator Richard Hanania about the relative merits of monarchy and democracy. “I destroyed him in almost every way,” Yarvin said, nudging a tomato with his fork. “But he had one huge advantage, which was that I was fat and he was not.”

The injections seemed to be working. As I ate, Yarvin’s phone filled with messages, some of them complimenting his glow-up. That morning, the Times Magazine had published an interview with him, accompanied by a moody black-and-white portrait. Until recently, Yarvin, with his frazzled curtain of shoulder-length hair and ill-fitting wardrobe, had seemed indifferent to his appearance. Now, wearing his leather jacket, he glared out at the reader through stylishly tousled hair. His friend Steve Sailer, a writer for white-nationalist websites, said he looked like “the fifth Ramone.”

In person, as in print, Yarvin expresses himself with imperious self-assurance. He is nearly impossible to interrupt. “When the rabbi is speaking, you let the rabbi speak,” Razib Khan, a right-wing science blogger and a close friend of Yarvin’s, told me. Even his friends and family, however, acknowledge that he has room to grow as a communicator. He talks in a halting monotone, rarely answers questions directly, and is prone to disorienting asides. In the middle of saying one thing, he is always getting distracted by something else he could be saying, like a G.P.S. that keeps suggesting faster routes.

Yarvin, for his part, was relieved at how the interview with the Times had gone. “My main goal was, how do I not damage any of my relationships?” he said. For years, Yarvin was best known, to the extent that he was known at all, as the court philosopher of the Thiel-verse, the network of heterodox entrepreneurs, intellectuals, and hangers-on surrounding the tech mogul. He mentioned that a businessman he knew had once complained to a journalist that Thiel had not invested enough money in his company. “That’s one strike and you’re out, and he was out,” Yarvin said, sighing theatrically. His second goal, he said, was to reach the Times audience. This seemed surprising: he has called for the government to shut down the paper. “I tend to be more interested in outreach to people who share my own cultural background,” Yarvin explained.

He likes to tell the story of his paternal grandparents, Jewish Communists from Brooklyn who met at a leftist gathering in the thirties. (He has less to say about his maternal grandparents, Tarrytown Wasps with a cottage on Nantucket.) “The vibe of American communism was ‘We’ve got thirty I.Q. points on these people, and we’re going to win,’ ” he said. “It’s like, what if all the gifted kids formed a political party and tried to take over the world?” Yarvin’s parents met at Brown, where his father, Herbert, was pursuing a Ph.D. in philosophy. After finishing school and failing to get tenure (“too arrogant,” Yarvin said), Herbert tried his hand at writing the Great American Novel, then joined the Foreign Service as a diplomat. In the following years, the family lived in the Dominican Republic and Cyprus. Herbert was cynical about working for the government, and Yarvin seems to have inherited his disdain: he has repeatedly proposed closing America’s embassies, a prospect the State Department is now considering in parts of Europe and Africa.

Yarvin is reticent on the subject of his childhood, but friends and family suggested to me that his father could be harsh, domineering, and impossible to please. “He controlled their life with an iron fist,” someone with close knowledge of the family told me. “It was absolutely his domain.” (Yarvin vehemently rejected this view, saying that people who are controlling tend to be insecure, “and that is very much not the way of my father.” Better words to describe him, he said, would be “stubborn,” “intense,” and “formidable”—like “a good manager.”)

Growing up, Yarvin was sometimes homeschooled by his mother, and skipped three grades. (His older brother, Norman, skipped four.) The family eventually moved to Columbia, Maryland, where Yarvin entered high school as a twelve-year-old sophomore. “When you’re much younger than your classmates, you’re either an adorable mascot or a weird, threatening, disturbing alien,” Yarvin said, adding that he was the latter. Yarvin was selected to participate in a Johns Hopkins study of math prodigies. He attended the university’s Center for Talented Youth, a summer camp for gifted children, and was a Baltimore-area champion on “It’s Academic,” a television trivia show. Andrew Cone, a software engineer who currently lives in a spare room in Yarvin’s home, told me that Yarvin’s childhood seems to have left him with a lifelong feeling of inadequacy. “I think he has this sense of being not good enough, that he’s seen as ridiculous or small, and that the only way out is to perform,” Cone said.

Yarvin went to Brown, graduated at eighteen, and then entered a Ph.D. program in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Former peers told me that he wore a bicycle helmet in class and seemed eager to show off his knowledge to the professor. “Oh, you mean helmet-head?” one said when I asked about Yarvin. The joke among some of his classmates was that the helmet prevented new ideas from penetrating his mind. He found more of a community on Usenet, a precursor to today’s online forums. But even in groups like talk.bizarre, where intellectual peacocking was the norm, he stood out for his desire to dominate. Along with posting jokes, advice, light verse, and “flames” (blistering takedowns of other users), he maintained a “kill file,” a list of members he had blocked because he found their posts uninteresting. “He wanted to be viewed as the smart guy—that was really, really important to him,” his first girlfriend, Meredith Tanner, told me. She was drawn to Yarvin after reading one of his virtuosic flames, and the pair dated for a few years. “Don’t get involved with someone just because you’re impressed by how creatively they insult people,” she warned. “They will turn that skill on you.”

Friends from Yarvin’s twenties described him as a reflexive contrarian who revelled in provocation. “He wasn’t a sweet kid, and he could sometimes be nasty, but he wasn’t Moldbug,” one said. Politically and culturally, Yarvin was a liberal—“a big old hippie,” as Tanner put it. He had a ponytail, wore a silver hoop earring, dropped acid at raves, and wrote poetry. Tanner recalled that when she once questioned the value of affirmative action in college admissions, it was Yarvin who convinced her of its necessity.

After a year and a half of doctoral work, Yarvin left academia to seek his fortune in the tech industry. He helped design an early version of a mobile web browser for a company that came to be known as Phone.com. In 2001, he began dating Jennifer Kollmer, a playwright he met on Craigslist, whom he later married and had two children with. Phone.com had gone public, leaving him with a windfall of a million dollars. He used some of the money to buy a condo near the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco and the rest to fund a self-directed study of computer science and political theory. “I was used to getting pats on the head for being smart,” he said of his decision to leave the cursus honorum of the gifted child. “Diverging from the pat-on-the-head economy was a strange and scary choice.”

Out in the wilderness, Yarvin delved into recondite history and economics texts, many of them newly accessible through Google Books. He read Thomas Carlyle, James Burnham, and Albert Jay Nock, alongside an early-aughts profusion of political blogs. Yarvin traces his own red-pill moment to the Presidential election of 2004. As many of his peers were being driven to the left by lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Yarvin was pulled in the opposite direction by fabrications of a different sort: the Swift Boat conspiracy theory pushed by veterans allied with the George W. Bush campaign, who claimed that the Democratic candidate, John Kerry, had lied about his service in Vietnam. It seemed obvious to Yarvin, who believed the accusations, that once the truth emerged Kerry would be forced to drop out of the race. When that didn’t happen, he began to question what else he’d naïvely taken on trust. Facts no longer felt stable. How could he be confident in what he’d been told about Joseph McCarthy, the Civil War, or global warming? What about democracy itself? After years of energetic debates in the comments sections of other people’s blogs, he decided to start his own. It did not lack for ambition. The first post began, “The other day I was tinkering around in my garage and I decided to build a new ideology.”

The German academic Hans-Hermann Hoppe is sometimes described as an intellectual gateway to the far right. A retired economics professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Hoppe argues that universal suffrage has supplanted rule by a “natural élite”; advocates for breaking nations into smaller, homogenous communities; and calls for communists, homosexuals, and others who oppose this rigid social order to be “physically removed.” (Some white nationalists have made memes pairing Hoppe’s face with a helicopter—an allusion to the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s practice of executing opponents by throwing them from aircraft.) Though Hoppe favors a minimal state, he believes that freedom is better preserved by monarchy than by democracy.

Yarvin nearly ended up a libertarian. As a Bay Area coder and a devotee of Austrian-school economists in his late twenties, he exhibited all the risk factors. Then he discovered Hoppe’s book “Democracy: The God That Failed” (2001) and changed his mind. Yarvin soon adopted Hoppe’s imago of a benevolent strongman—someone who would govern efficiently, avoid senseless wars, and prioritize the well-being of his subjects. “It’s not copy-and-pasted, but it is such a direct influence that it’s kind of obscene,” Julian Waller, a scholar of authoritarianism at George Washington University, said. (Over e-mail, Hoppe recalled that he met Yarvin once at an exclusive gathering at Peter Thiel’s home, where Hoppe had been invited to speak. He acknowledged his influence on Yarvin, but added, “For my taste his writing has always been a bit too flowery and rambling.”) Hoppe argues that, unlike democratically elected officials, a monarch has a long-term incentive to safeguard his subjects and the state, because both belong to him. Anyone familiar with the history of dictatorships might find this idea disingenuous. Not Yarvin.

“You don’t ransack your own house,” he told me one afternoon, at an open-air café in Venice Beach. I’d asked him what would stop his C.E.O.-monarch from plundering the country—or enslaving his people—for personal gain. “For Louis XIV, when he says, ‘L’état, c’est moi,’ ransacking the state holds no meaning because it’s all his anyway.” Following Hoppe, Yarvin proposes that nations should eventually be broken up into a “patchwork” of statelets, like Singapore or Dubai, each with its own sovereign ruler. The eternal political problems of legitimacy, accountability, and succession would be solved by a secret board with the power to select and recall the otherwise all-powerful C.E.O. of each sovereign corporation, or SovCorp. (How the board itself would be selected is unclear, but Yarvin has suggested that airline pilots—“a fraternity of intelligent, practical, and careful people who are already trusted on a regular basis with the lives of others. What’s not to like?”—could manage the transition between regimes.) To prevent a C.E.O. from staging a military coup, the board members would have access to cryptographic keys that would allow them to disarm all government weapons, from nuclear missiles down to small arms, with the push of a button.

Mass political participation would cease, and the only way that people could vote would be with their feet, by moving from one SovCorp to another if they became dissatisfied with the terms of service, like switching from X to Bluesky. The irony that dissenters like Yarvin would probably be repressed in such a state appears not to concern him. In his imagined polity, he insists, there would still be freedom of speech. “You can think, say, or write whatever you want,” he has promised. “Because the state has no reason to care.”

Yarvin’s congenital cynicism about governance disappears as soon as he starts talking about dictatorial regimes. He has kind words for El Salvador’s strongman, Nayib Bukele, and has encouraged Trump to let Putin end the liberal order “not just in Russian-speaking territories—but all the way to the English Channel.” Picking at a plate of fried calamari, Yarvin praised China and Rwanda (neither of which he has visited) for having strong governments that insured both public safety and personal liberty. In China, he told me, “you can think and pretty much say whatever you want.” He may have sensed my skepticism, given the country’s record of imprisoning critics and detaining ethnic minorities in concentration camps. “If you want to organize against the government, you’re gonna have problems,” he admitted. Then he returned to his airbrush: “Not Stalin problems. You’ll just, like, be cancelled.”

For certain people, like meth addicts or four-year-olds, Yarvin said, too much freedom could be deadly. Then, gesturing to the homeless population camped in the neighborhood, he suddenly began to cry. “The idea that this represents success, or this represents the ‘worst of all systems, except for all the others’ ”—he was referencing Churchill’s famous comment about democracy, which I’d paraphrased earlier—“is highly delusional,” he said, wiping away the tears. (A few weeks later, on a trip to London, I watched him break down while giving a similar speech to a member of the House of Lords. It was less affecting the second time around.)

Presumably, Yarvin’s monarch would act decisively to safeguard his wards. At the Venice café, Yarvin lauded the Delancey Street Foundation, a nonprofit rehab organization, whose strict program he has characterized as exerting “fascist-parent-level control.” Some of his own proposals go further. On his blog, he once joked about converting San Francisco’s underclasses into biodiesel to power the city’s buses. Then he suggested another idea: putting them in solitary confinement, hooked up to a virtual-reality interface. Whatever the exact solution, he has written, it is crucial to find “a humane alternative to genocide,” an outcome that “achieves the same result as mass murder (the removal of undesirable elements from society) but without any of the moral stigma.”

Yarvin’s call for an American strongman is often treated as an eccentric provocation. In fact, he considers it the only answer to a world in which most people are unfit for democracy. An “African country today,” he told me, has “enough smart people in the country to run it—you just don’t have enough smart people to have a democratic election in which everyone is smart.” Because of such remarks, Yarvin is sometimes identified as a white nationalist, a label he delicately resists. In a 2007 blog post titled “Why I Am Not a White Nationalist,” he explained that, though he is “not exactly allergic to the stuff,” he finds both whiteness and nationalism to be unhelpful political concepts. During lunch, he told me that he feels a rueful sympathy for the bigots of the past, who had some of the right intuitions but lacked the proper science. Neo-reactionaries tend to subscribe to what they call “human biodiversity,” a set of fringe beliefs which holds, among other things, that not all racial or population groups are equally intelligent. As Yarvin came to see it from his online research, these genetic differences contributed to (and, conveniently, helped explain away) demographic differences in poverty, crime, and educational attainment. “In this house, we believe in science—race science,” he wrote last year.

For several hours, Yarvin shuffled through his pitches for strongman rule, like an auctioneer desperate to clinch a sale. I listened patiently, though I was often puzzled by his factual distortions and peculiar asides. “What is the right policy in a completely new-from-scratch regime for African Americans?” he wondered aloud at one point. At first, this seemed like a non sequitur: I’d been pressing him on how he would define success in the second Trump Administration. Answering himself, he said that the “obvious solution” to problems of inner-city drug abuse and poverty would be to “put the church Blacks in charge of the ghetto Blacks.” Yarvin, who is an atheist, is not particularly interested in theocratic rule, but he advocates creating different legal codes to govern different populations. (He has cited the Ottoman millet system, which granted religious communities a measure of autonomy.) To keep the “ghetto Blacks” in line, he went on, they should be forced to live in a “traditional way,” like Orthodox Jews or the Amish. “The approach that the twentieth century took is, if we could just make the schools good enough, they would all turn into Unitarians,” he said. “If you’ve seen ‘The Wire’ and lived in Baltimore, both of which I have, that does not seem to work at all.” It wasn’t until he reached the end of his speech, ten minutes later, that I realized he was, in his own way, addressing my initial question. “Unless we can totally reëngineer DNA to change what a human being is, there are many people who should not live in a modern way but in a traditional way,” he concluded. “And that is a level of revolution that is so far beyond anything the Trump-Vance regime is doing.”

Yarvin is not known for his discretion. He has a habit of sharing private correspondence, as I discovered when he started sending me unsolicited screenshots of text messages and e-mails he’d exchanged with his wife, his friends, a fact checker at the Times Magazine, and someone nominated to the new Administration. He seemed troubled by the thought that the wit and wisdom they contained might be lost to posterity. He was more guarded about his friendship with Thiel, but he did mention a conversation they’d privately filmed together last year and boasted about a fortieth-birthday gift he’d received from the billionaire: Francis Neilson’s “The Tragedy of Europe,” a contemporaneous commentary on the Second World War, though not the first edition that Yarvin had been hoping for.

Thiel has always had a prophetic touch. He co-founded PayPal, became the first outside investor in Facebook, and created Palantir, a data-mining firm that has just received a new contract to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers carry out deportations. Thiel supported Trump back when doing so still made one a pariah in Silicon Valley. In 2022, he donated fifteen million dollars to J. D. Vance’s Senate campaign, the largest amount given to a single candidate in congressional history. A longtime libertarian, Thiel appears to have taken a Yarvinian turn around 2009, when, in a widely quoted essay published online by the Cato Institute, he wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Yarvin linked to it approvingly in a blog post titled “Democraphobia Goes (Slightly) Viral.” They soon met for the first time, at Thiel’s house in San Francisco, and, according to private messages I reviewed, struck up a confiding correspondence. Yarvin’s e-mails were long and homiletic, full of precepts gleaned from pickup-artist blogs; Thiel’s were straightforward and concise. Both men seemed to take for granted that America was a communist country, that journalists acted like the Stasi, and that tech C.E.O.s were their prey.

In the fall of 2014, Thiel published “Zero to One,” a best-selling treatise on startups, with Blake Masters, his employee and a longtime Moldbug fan. Before the book tour, Thiel asked Yarvin for advice on fielding questions he might get on how to steer more women into tech. The premise appeared to strike them both as misguided, since women, in their view, were less likely to have men’s aptitude for computer science. As Yarvin put it in one e-mail, “There’s simply no way short of becoming a farce for Google, YC”—Y Combinator, the startup accelerator—“etc, etc, to ‘look like America.’ ” Yarvin suggested that Thiel deploy a pickup-artist tactic called “agree and amplify”—that is, ask a journalist, who probably had no solution in mind, what she would do to tackle the problem. “The purpose here is not to get the interlocutor to sleep with you, but to get her to fear this issue and run away from it—and ditto for future interviewers,” he wrote. Once, at a dinner, Thiel quizzed Yarvin on how one might go about taking down Gawker. (As it turned out, Thiel had already decided to secretly bankroll Hulk Hogan’s defamation lawsuit against the online publication, which eventually bankrupted it, in 2016.) In e-mails obtained by BuzzFeed, Yarvin bragged to Milo Yiannopoulos, the Breitbart editor, that he’d watched Trump’s first election at Thiel’s house and had been “coaching” him. “Peter needs guidance on politics for sure,” Yiannopoulos replied. Yarvin wrote back, “Less than you might think! . . . He’s fully enlightened, just plays it very carefully.”

When I recently visited Yarvin’s Craftsman home, in Berkeley, I noticed a painting that Thiel had given him: a portrait of Yarvin in the style of a role-playing-game character card, bearing the legend “Philosopher.” As I sipped tea from a novelty mug featuring an image of Yarvin with a cartoon crown, he told me that it would be “cringe” for him to broadcast his relationship with Thiel—or with Vance, for that matter, whom he met through Thiel around 2015. “Does a normal Ohio voter read . . . Mencius Moldbug? No,” Vance reportedly said one night at a bar during the 2021 National Conservatism Conference. “But do they agree with the broad thrust of where we think American public policy should go? Absolutely.” “He’s a really cool guy,” Yarvin said of the Vice-President, who followed him on X earlier this year. (The White House did not respond to requests for comment.)

Although Yarvin tried to be discreet, he mentioned that Thiel has a bit of a “weirdo edge” and described Andreessen, the venture capitalist, as someone who, “apart from the bizarre and possibly even nonhuman shape of his head, would seem much more normal than Peter.” After Andreessen invested in Yarvin’s startup, Tlon, the two got to know each other; they texted and went to brunch long before Andreessen came out as a Trump supporter, last year. Andreessen has been known to urge his associates to read Yarvin’s blog. “Tech people are not interested in appeals to virtue or beauty or tradition, like most conservatives,” the State Department official said. ��They are more like right-wing progressives, and for a long time Moldbug was the only person speaking to them this way.” (Andreessen and Thiel declined to comment.) Apropos of his relationships with powerful men, Yarvin paraphrased to me “a wonderful piece of advice for courtiers” that he’d picked up from Lord Chesterfield’s “Letters to His Son,” an eighteenth-century etiquette manual addressed to the author’s illegitimate child: “Never bug them. And never let them forget you exist.”

Yarvin has had more success as a courtier to startup founders than as a founder himself. He launched Tlon in 2013, with a twentysomething former Thiel fellow. Yarvin approached computer science the same way he approached the U.S. government—with, as he put it, “utopian megalomania.” Yarvin’s visionary goal was to build a peer-to-peer computer network, named Urbit, that would allow users to control their own data, free from scolds, spies, and monopolies. Each user on the Urbit network is identified with an N.F.T. that acts like a digital passport. Even though Urbit promotes decentralization, the system is designed around a hierarchical model of virtual real estate, with users owning “planets,” “stars,” or “galaxies.”

In an early sketch of the system, Yarvin named himself its “prince,” but he struggled to attract subjects to his imaginary kingdom. Like Yarvin’s political theory, his programming language, which he wrote himself, was daring, abstruse, and sometimes mistaken for a hoax. Ever the contrarian, he reversed the meaning of zeros and ones. After decades of work and an estimated thirty million dollars of investment, Urbit seems to function less like a feudal society and more like the Usenet forums of Yarvin’s youth. (The trade publication CoinDesk has called it “a slower version of AOL Instant Messenger.”) “It doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to,” a former Urbit employee told me, describing Yarvin as “the world’s first computer-science crank.” Yarvin left the company in 2019.

No longer needing to worry about spooking investors, Yarvin threw himself into the life style of a self-described “rogue intellectual.” Under his own name, he launched a Substack newsletter, “Gray Mirror of the Nihilist Prince.” (Today, it is the platform’s third most popular “history” publication.) He became a fixture on the right-wing podcast circuit and seemed never to turn down an invitation to party. On his travels, he often hosted “office hours”—informal, freewheeling discussions with readers, many of them thoughtful young men, alienated by liberal guilt and groupthink. What wins Yarvin converts is less the soundness of his arguments than the transgressive energy they exude: he makes his listeners feel that he is granting them access to forbidden knowledge—about racial hierarchy, historical conspiracies, and the perfidy of democratic rule—that progressive culture is at pains to suppress. His approach seizes on the reality that most Americans have never learned how to defend democracy; they were simply brought up to believe in it.

Yarvin advises his followers to avoid culture-war battles over issues like D.E.I. and abortion. It is wiser, he argues, to let the democratic system collapse on its own. In the meantime, dissidents should focus on becoming “fashionable” by building a reactionary subculture—a counter-Cathedral. Sam Kriss, a left-wing writer who has debated Yarvin, said of his work, “It flatters people who believe they can change the world simply by having weird ideas on the Internet and decadent parties in Manhattan.”

Such people have come to be known as the “dissident right,” a loose constellation of artists and strivers clustered around the Bay Area, Miami, and the Lower East Side micro-neighborhood Dimes Square. The milieu was drawn together by a frustration with electoral politics, Covid lockdowns, and the strictures of “wokeness.” Vice signalling has been central to the scene’s countercultural allure: instead of sharing pronouns and employing the approved nomenclature (“unhoused,” “Latinx,” “justice-involved person”), its members have revived insults like “gay” and “retarded.” Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan, the hosts of the “Red Scare” podcast, are among the most prominent avatars of the scene. In 2021, Thiel helped to fund an anti-woke film festival in New York, and Yarvin read his poetry at one of its packed events. Urbit now hosts a literary magazine designed to look like The New York Review of Books. “If you are an intelligent Jewish-American urbanite who wants to play around with certain Nietzschean and eugenic themes, you aren’t going to join tiki-torch-bearing marchers chanting that ‘the Jews will not replace us,’ ” the conservative commentator Sohrab Ahmari observed in an essay last year. “No, you turn to the dissident right.”

Yarvin has emerged as a veteran edgelord of this crowd, which he compared to San Francisco’s gay subculture in the seventies and to the Lost Generation of literary modernists—tight-knit communities whose members bonded over their sense of being outsiders. James Joyce, he said, sold few copies of “Ulysses,” but his friends, like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, “knew that what he was doing was good.” So it was with the creatives of the dissident right, whose endeavors, he felt, had been overlooked by the intolerant Cathedral. This past April, Yarvin pitched Darren Beattie, the acting Under-Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, on a plan for “dissident-right art hos” to take over the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Lately, Yarvin has been trying to flip some of his newly acquired cultural capital into the real thing. Last year, he returned to Urbit as a “wartime C.E.O.,” after which several top employees resigned, and in February he raised more money from Andreessen Horowitz. According to a draft of an unpublished Substack post, his newest plan is to promote Urbit as an élite private club whose members, he believes, are destined to become “the stars of the new public sphere—a new Usenet, a new digital Athens built to last forever.”

The night before Trump’s Inauguration, I drove Yarvin to a black-tie “Coronation Ball” at the Watergate Hotel, in Washington, D.C. The event was organized by a neo-reactionary publishing house, Passage Press, which recently released Yarvin’s book “Gray Mirror, Fascicle I: Disturbance,” the first of a planned four-part cycle outlining his vision for a new political regime. Its endnotes predominantly consist of QR-code links to Wikipedia pages: “Denazification,” “L’État, c’est moi,” “Presentism (historical analysis).” As I negotiated the icy streets, Yarvin explained that during the Elizabethan era the finest minds in the arts and sciences were to be found at court. When I asked if he saw a parallel with Trump’s inner circle, he burst out laughing. “Oh, no,” he said. “My God.”

Like most journalists, I had been denied entry to the ball, so I ordered a drink at a bar in the lobby. Standing next to me was a man wearing a cowboy hat and a burgundy velour suit—a Yarvin enthusiast, it turned out, named Alex Maxa. He ran a party-bus company in San Francisco, and in his free time he made memes featuring Yarvin’s likeness. He said that he was drawn to Yarvin’s work because “it makes me feel like I’ve got something that people in Washington who think they’re really smart can’t actually make a compelling argument against.” He’d wanted to go to the ball but tickets, whose price had surged to twenty thousand dollars, were now sold out. Not long afterward, I met two of Yarvin’s friends, who encouraged me, and another journalist I was with, to confidently walk into the party with them. Maxa was already inside, having taken a similar approach. “Lol I just waltzed right in by asking where the coat check was,” he texted.

Passage Press had billed the event as “MAGA meets the Tech Right.” It was not false advertising. In a banquet hall awash in pink and purple light, Anton, from the State Department, Laura Loomer, a Trump whisperer known for her anti-Muslim bigotry, and Jack Posobiec, who popularized the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, mingled with venture capitalists, crypto accelerationists, and Substack all-stars. Earlier that evening, as guests dined on seared scallops and filet mignon, Steve Bannon, the ball’s keynote speaker, called for mass deportations, the “Götterdämmerung” of the administrative state, and Mark Zuckerberg’s imprisonment.

Eight years ago, Mike Cernovich, a first-gen alt-right influencer, had co-hosted an inaugural party known as the DeploraBall, a winking reference to Hillary Clinton’s unfortunate crack about half of Trump’s supporters belonging in a “basket of deplorables.” It was, by all accounts, a shambolic affair, plagued by journalists and protesters. One of Cernovich’s co-organizers, Tim Gionet, who goes by the online pseudonym Baked Alaska, was removed from his role after posting antisemitic content on Twitter. Now, at the Coronation Ball, Baked Alaska was served for dessert—a nod, it seemed, to Gionet, who was then on probation for participating in the January 6th insurrection. (He was pardoned by Trump the next day.) Cernovich pushed a baby around in a stroller and marvelled, like a proud father, at how far the movement had come. “I was one of the oldest guys in the place!” he tweeted the following afternoon. “Real right wing. High energy and high IQ.” In 2008, Yarvin, in his “Open Letter,” had called for a reactionary vanguard to form an underground political party. The Coronation Ball made it clear that this was no longer necessary. His web-addled counter-élite was now the establishment.

Yarvin was dressed in the same tuxedo, including a bright-red cummerbund, that he’d worn to a party at Thiel’s house in D.C. the night before, where, as Politico reported, Vance had amiably greeted him with “You reactionary fascist!” He’d also worn the tux to his wedding last year. Yarvin’s first wife died in 2021, from a hereditary heart disease, at the age of fifty. At the ball, he was accompanied by his second wife, Kristine Militello. A former Bernie Sanders supporter and an aspiring novelist, Kristine described herself as having been “red-pilled” during the pandemic, after losing her customer-service job at an online wine retailer. She first encountered Yarvin on YouTube, where she watched a video of him arguing against the legitimacy of the American Revolution, and proceeded to read everything he’d written. She sent him an admiring e-mail in 2022, seeking advice on how to break into New York’s dissident-right literary scene, and they met for drinks a few weeks later.

Recently, Yarvin has taken to describing himself as a “dark elf” whose role is to seduce “high elves”—blue-state élites—by planting “acorns of dark doubt in their high golden minds.” (In this Tolkien-inspired metaphor, red-state conservatives are “hobbits” who should submit to the “absolute power” of a new ruling class made up, unsurprisingly, of dark elves.) He didn’t always express himself so quaintly. In 2011, the day after the far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik killed sixty-nine people, many of them teen-agers, at a summer camp in Norway, Yarvin wrote, “If you’re going to change Norway into something new, you need the present ruling class of Norway to join and follow you. Or at least, you’ll need their children.” He praised Breivik for targeting the right group (“communists, not Muslims”), but condemned his methods: “Rape is beta. Seduction is alpha. Don’t slaughter the youth camp—recruit the youth camp.”

Yarvin’s own recruitment efforts seemed to be working. Near the open bar, I spoke to Stevie Miller, a sprightly sophomore at Carnegie Mellon who has been reading Yarvin since the seventh grade. (Yarvin told me that he’d encountered several gifted Zoomers who’d read him as preteens because his “high-I.Q. style” served as a “high-I.Q. magnet.”) Two years ago, Miller hung out with Yarvin at Vibecamp, a gathering for nerds and techies in rural Maryland. Yarvin, who left early, asked Miller to help him throw his own party in D.C., which came to be known as Vibekampf. Afterward, Miller became Yarvin’s first personal intern. “My parents, New York Jewish liberals who I love, were totally mystified,” he said.

After half an hour, I was escorted out of the party, as were other reporters throughout the evening. Security mistook Maxa, my friend from the lobby, for one of our kind, and he was ejected, too, though not before pressing through the crowd to get his photo taken with the dark elf.

Even Trump’s most pessimistic critics have been startled by the speed with which the President, in his second term, has moved to impose autocracy on America, concentrating power in the executive branch—and often enough in the hands of the richest men on earth. Elon Musk, an unelected citizen, has led a squadron of twentysomethings on a spree through the federal government, laying off tens of thousands of civil servants, shuttering the U.S. Agency for International Development, and seizing control of the Treasury Department’s payment system. Meanwhile, the Administration has launched an assault on civil society, revoking funding at Harvard and other universities that it claims are bastions of ideological indoctrination and punishing law firms that have represented Trump’s opponents. It has expanded the machinery of immigration enforcement, deporting three U.S.-born children to Honduras, a group of Asian and Latin American immigrants to Africa, and more than two hundred Venezuelan migrants to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, where they may remain until the end of their lives. U.S. citizens now find themselves with a government that claims the right to disappear them without due process: as Trump told Bukele, the President of El Salvador, during an Oval Office meeting, “Homegrowns are next.” Without a vigorous system of checks and balances, one man’s crank ideas—like starting an incoherent trade war that upends the global economy—don’t get filtered out. They become policies that enrich his family and his allies.

Since January, a cottage industry has arisen online to trace links between the government’s chaotic blitz of actions and Yarvin’s writings. Yarvin is hardly the Rasputin-like figure with Oval Office access that certain Bluesky users imagine him to be, but it isn’t difficult to see why some people may have come to this view. Last month, an anonymous DOGE adviser told the Washington Post that it was “an open secret that everyone in policymaking roles has read Yarvin.” Stephen Miller, the President’s deputy chief of staff, recently quote-tweeted him. Vance has called for the U.S. to retrench from Europe, a longtime Yarvin desideratum. Last spring, Yarvin proposed expelling all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and turning it into a luxury resort. “Did I hear someone say ‘beachfront?’ ” he wrote on Substack. “The new Gaza—developed, of course, by Jared Kushner—is the LA of the Mediterranean, an entirely new charter city on humanity’s oldest ocean, sublime real estate with an absolutely perfect, Apple-quality government.” This February, during a joint press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, Trump surprised his advisers when he made a nearly identical proposal, describing his redeveloped Gaza as “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

Whenever I asked Yarvin about resonances between his writing and real-world events, his response was nonchalant. He seemed to see himself as a conduit for pure reason—the only mystery, to him, was why it had taken others so long to catch up. “You can invent a lie, but you can only discover the truth,” he told me. We were in London, where he was attending the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, a conservative conference co-founded by the psychologist Jordan Peterson. (Yarvin described Peterson to me as “a dandy” with “a weird narcissistic energy coming off of him.”) Accompanying Yarvin on his travels were Eduardo Giralt Brun and Alonso Esquinca Díaz, two millennial filmmakers who were shooting a documentary about his life. Their goal was to make a naturalistic character study in the style of “Grey Gardens,” in which, as Brun put it, “the camera just happens to be around.” It wasn’t going to plan. Yarvin kept repeating the same monologues, which meant that much of the footage was the same. The filmmakers worried that his racist remarks would turn viewers off. One afternoon in London, Díaz had filmed Yarvin getting his portrait painted with Lord Maurice Glasman, a post-liberal political theorist who has been called “Labour’s MAGA Lord,” for his support of Brexit and his ongoing dialogue with figures like Steve Bannon. At one point in their discussion, Yarvin had pulled out his iPhone to show Glasman that he’d hacked the chatbot Claude to get it to call him by the N-word.

Some thinkers would envy the attention Yarvin is receiving. But he dismissed his influence as a “fraudulent currency” since it has yet to cash out in the revolution he desires. He poured scorn on DOGE (“so much libertarian DNA”) and Trump’s tariff plan (not mercantilist enough). In a recent essay on Substack, he criticized the decision to dispatch plainclothes ICE officers to jail college students and professors for political speech—not on moral grounds, but because the thuggish optics were likely to provoke resistance. Yarvin’s oracular pronouncements and bottomless disdain for actually existing politics have inspired a viral post: his face under the words “Your anti-regime actions work well in practice. But do they work in theory?” The conservative activist Christopher Rufo has compared Yarvin to “a sullen teenager who insists that everything is pointless.” I came to think of him as a reactionary Goldilocks who would be satisfied with nothing less than the inch-perfect autocracy that he’d constructed in his mind.

This apparent desire for control also shows up in some of his relationships. Not long ago, I visited Lydia Laurenson, Yarvin’s ex-fiancée, in Berkeley. The two began dating in September, 2021, after Yarvin posted a personal ad on Substack, explaining that he’d recently lost his “widower virginity” and was looking to meet someone of “childbearing age.” Laurenson, a freelance writer and editor, replied the same day: “I have historically been a liberal but my IQ is really high, I want kids, and I’m incredibly curious to talk to you.” Yarvin went on Zoom dates with other women who answered the post—among them, Caroline Ellison, the ex-girlfriend of the now imprisoned crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried—but he and Laurenson soon found themselves in an all-consuming romance. She told me that the ethos of her relationship with Yarvin was “ ‘We’re going to be geniuses together and have genius babies.’ I’m making fun of it a little bit, but that really was it.”

Like Yarvin, Laurenson had been a precocious child who went to college early. She’d also maintained a blog with a cult following, where, under the pseudonym Clarisse Thorn, she wrote about sex-positive feminism, B.D.S.M., and pickup artistry. She and Yarvin fought often, sometimes about politics. Laurenson had moved away from the left, but she hadn’t fully embraced neo-reaction. When I asked her if she’d ever changed Yarvin’s mind about anything, she said she’d gotten him to stop using the N-word, at least around her. (He later told this magazine that he was not using the word in the spirit of “a Southern plantation owner.”)

The bigger source of tension, according to Laurenson, was Yarvin’s autocratic attachment style. When they fought, Laurenson said, he insisted that she provide a rational justification for ending hostilities. She felt that Yarvin’s slippery personal attacks resembled his manner in public debates. “He makes up explanations that seem reasonable, but are actually false; he attacks the character of the person who is trying to point out what he’s doing; it’s like a DDOS attack of the soul,” she told me in an e-mail, referencing the cyberattack strategy of overwhelming a server with traffic from multiple sources. James Dama, a friend of Laurenson’s who had his own falling out with Yarvin, recalled, “He would make a coarse joke about Lydia’s weight or looks, not get a laugh, and then get angry at Lydia for being too stuck up.” (Tanner, Yarvin’s first girlfriend, described a similar pattern of insults and demands.)

Laurenson and Yarvin broke up in the summer of 2022, while Laurenson was pregnant. He told me that his desire for closeness might have struck Laurenson as “overbearing and stifling,” and that he had a bad habit of making “a joke that’s sort of a barb,” but he denied that he was ever purposefully cruel during the relationship. (He added that, after the relationship ended, “my natural instinct was, I’m going to cut her down to size every time I can”—something, he noted, he was “very good at.”) A few weeks after their son was born, that December, Yarvin sued for partial custody, which he received. An ongoing family-court case remains acrimonious. “The parents are in disagreement about nearly every issue,” their mediator observed last year.

Now that they share a toddler, Laurenson spends a lot of time thinking about Yarvin’s own childhood. “He has this class-clown thing going on, where he very much craves attention,” she said. To her, it seemed that his embrace of a provocative ideology was a kind of “repetition compulsion,” a psychological defense that allowed him to reframe the ostracization he experienced growing up. As America’s most famous living monarchist, he could tell himself that people were rejecting him for his outré ideas, not for his personality. She wondered if he’d first adopted “the monarchist thing” as a kind of intellectual sport, a bit from Usenet, and then, like the parallel world in the Borges story, it had slowly taken on a reality of its own. “Is it just like you found this place where people admire you and allow you to troll as much as you want, and then you just live in that world?” she asked.

In the past decade, liberalism has taken a beating from both sides of the political spectrum. Its critics to the left view its measured gradualism as incommensurate to the present’s multiple emergencies: climate change, inequality, the rise of an ethno-nationalist right. Conservatives, by contrast, paint liberalism as a cultural leviathan that has trampled traditional values underfoot. In “Why Liberalism Failed” (2018), the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen argues that the contemporary American emphasis on individual freedom has come at the expense of family, faith, and community, turning us into “increasingly separate, autonomous, non-relational selves replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone.” Other post-liberal theorists, including Adrian Vermeule, have proposed that the state curtail certain rights in the service of an explicitly Catholic “common good.”

Yarvin is calling for something simpler and more libidinally satisfying: to burn it all down and start again from scratch. Since the advent of neoliberalism in the late seventies, political leaders have increasingly treated governance like corporate management, turning citizens into customers and privatizing services. The result has been greater inequality, a weakened social safety net, and the widespread perception that democracy itself is to blame for these ills, creating an appetite for exactly the kind of autocratic efficiency Yarvin now extolls. “A Yarvin program might seem seductive during a period of neoliberal rule, where efforts to change things, whether it is global warming or the war machine, feel futile,” the historian Suzanne Schneider told me. “You can sit back, not give a fuck, and let someone else run the show.” Yarvin has little to say on the question of human flourishing, or about humans in general, who appear in his work as sheep to be herded, idiots to be corrected, or marionettes controlled by leftist puppeteers.

Whatever gift Yarvin has for attracting attention, his work does not survive scrutiny. It is full of spurious syllogisms and arguments retconned to match his jaundiced intuitions. He has read widely, but he uses his knowledge merely as grist for the same reactionary fairy tale: once upon a time, people knew their place and lived in harmony; then along came the Enlightenment, with its “noble lie” of egalitarianism, plunging the world into disorder. Yarvin often criticizes academics for treating history like a Marvel movie, with oversimplified heroes and villains, but it’s unclear what he adds to the picture by calling Napoleon a “startup guy.” (He has favored the revisionist theories that Shakespeare’s plays were really written by the seventeenth Earl of Oxford and that the American Civil War, which he calls the War of Secession, worsened living conditions for Black Americans.) “The neat thing about primary sources is that often, it takes only one to prove your point,” he has proclaimed, which would come as news to historians.

Some of his most thoroughgoing critics are on the right. Rufo, the conservative activist, has written that Yarvin is a “sophist” whose debating style consists of “childish insults, bouts of paranoia, heavy italics, pointless digressions, competitive bibliography, and allusions to cartoons.” He added, “When one tries to locate what it is that you actually think, he cannot help but discover that there really isn’t much substance there.” The most generous engagement with Yarvin’s ideas has come from bloggers associated with the rationalist movement, which prides itself on weighing evidence for even seemingly far-fetched claims. Their formidable patience, however, has also worn thin. “He never addressed me as an equal, only as a brainwashed person,” Scott Aaronson, an eminent computer scientist, said of their conversations. “He seemed to think that if he just gave me one more reading assignment about happy slaves singing or one more monologue about F.D.R., I’d finally see the light.”

Intellectual seriousness may not be the point. Yarvin’s polemics have proved useful for those on the right in search of a rationale for nerd ressentiment and plutocratic will to power. “The guy does not have a coherent theory of the case,” the Democratic senator Chris Murphy, from Connecticut, told me. “He just happens to be saying something out loud that a lot of Republicans are eager to hear.”

It is not difficult to anticipate the totalitarian endgame of a world view that marries power worship with a contempt for human dignity—fascism, as some might call it. Like his ideological nemeses the Bolsheviks, Yarvin seems to believe that the only thing standing in the way of Utopia is an unwillingness to use every means possible to achieve it. He claims that the transition to his regime will be peaceful, even joyous, but fantasies of violence flicker throughout his work. “Unless the monarch is ready to actually genocide the nobility or the masses, he has to capture their loyalty,” he wrote in a Substack post in March. “You’re not going to foam these people, like turkeys with bird flu. Right?”

Yarvin’s strong opinions on how the world ought to work extended to this profile. Some of his suggestions were intriguing: he floated the idea of staging a debate with one of his ex-girlfriends, and invited me to follow him to Doha for a meeting with Omar bin Laden, one of Osama’s sons. Others were officious. At one point, he sent me nine texts objecting to my use of the word “extreme”—“a hostile pejorative,” he explained, which my article would be better off without. (He’d previously boasted several times in our taped conversations that he was more “extreme” than anyone in the current Administration.) A few days after the Coronation Ball at the Watergate Hotel, he wrote to The New Yorker to complain that I’d walked in without his publisher’s permission; he said that he hoped the incident would not turn into “Watergate 2,” and referred to himself as “certainly the most media-friendly person in the scene!” (Jonathan Keeperman, his publisher at Passage Press and the host of the ball, once suggested that the Republican Party should “lamppost”—that is, lynch—“the journos,” so this was not a particularly high bar to clear.)

One morning this winter, I woke up to twenty-eight texts from Yarvin expressing concerns about my reporting technique. “The problem is that your process is slack and I can feel it generating low-quality content—because it’s not adversarial enough,” he wrote. “When the process is not adversarial, I don’t know what I am contending against.” He briefly considered whether I was “too dumb to understand the ideas,” or whether I’d succumbed to the mental self-censorship that Orwell called “crimestop.” He urged me to watch “The Lives of Others,” an Oscar-winning film that depicts the relationship between an East German playwright and a Stasi agent who is tasked with surveilling him. The Stasi agent, he wrote, “can actually write up the ideas of the playwright, *without even thinking them* It is not even that he is ‘opposed’ to the dissident ideas. It is that he does not even let them touch his brain.” In the film, the Stasi agent eventually “cracks,” after he comes to sympathize with the playwright’s views. Yarvin, presumably, was the playwright.

He said that he was coming to see me, on the other hand, as an “NPC,” or non-player character. He proposed giving me a Voight-Kampff test, the fictional exam in “Blade Runner” used to distinguish androids from humans. His version would involve the two of us debating “the ‘blank slate theory’ versus ‘racism’ ” and recording the conversation. (“By ‘racism’ I mean of course human biodiversity,” he elaborated.) When I explained that my reporting process did not include submitting to on-demand tests, Yarvin sent me a screenshot of “August 1968,” W. H. Auden’s poem about the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia to suppress the Prague Spring:

The Ogre does what ogres can Deeds quite impossible for Man, But one prize is beyond his reach, The Ogre cannot master Speech

He went on to say that although he’d agreed to participate in this story because “no publicity is bad publicity,” he would now try to kill it if he could.

I was struck by the contrast between his messages and the coolheaded tone he’d recommended that Thiel and other friends deploy when handling the media. After the 2013 TechCrunch article identifying Yarvin came out, Balaji Srinivasan, the entrepreneur, proposed in an e-mail “to sic the Dark Enlightenment audience on a single vulnerable hostile reporter to dox them.” Yarvin dissuaded him. “What would Heartiste say?” Yarvin asked, referring to the white-nationalist pickup-artist blog “Chateau Heartiste.” “Almost always, the right alpha answer is ‘nothing.’ Say nothing. Do nothing.”

On a balmy afternoon in late February, Yarvin and his wife, Kristine, were driving down a country road in the South of France. They were accompanied by the documentarians, Brun and Díaz. “Where are we going, Kristine?” Brun asked from the passenger seat, turning the camera around to film her in the back beside me.

She said that she had only the vaguest notion. “Honestly, he just tells me everything last minute,” she explained. “It’s kind of like being a dog. You just know that you’re going in the car, and you don’t know if you’re gonna go to the dog park, or you’re gonna go to the vet, and you’ll find out when you get there.”

“Spontaneity,” Yarvin chimed in.

“That’s a word for it,” Kristine teased.

We were on our way to meet Renaud Camus, a seventy-eight-year-old novelist and pamphleteer, who, in 2011, published “The Great Replacement,” an incendiary manifesto that argued that liberal élites were behind a conspiracy to replace white Europeans with migrants from Africa and the Middle East. The title phrase has since become a rallying cry for white nationalists around the world, from Charlottesville, Virginia, where, in 2017, marchers chanted, “You will not replace us,” to Christchurch, New Zealand, where, two years later, a man who’d published a manifesto with the same title as Camus’s killed fifty-one Muslims.

As we crested a hill, the walls of Camus’s castle, Château de Plieux, loomed into view. “Does anyone know if he’s related to Albert Camus?” Yarvin asked. “I think he’s not related to Albert, but he’s a lovely, old, gay, literary Frenchman.”

Brun, who is Venezuelan, wondered what he would do if Camus “has a sign that says ‘No Foreigners Allowed.’ ”

“Well, are you here to replace us?” Kristine joked. Nobody replied.

Yarvin rang an impressive metal bell beside the door, and we were soon ushered inside by Pierre Jolibert, Camus’s partner. Upstairs, Camus was waiting for us with a bottle of champagne. With his manicured white beard and brown corduroy jacket, complete with a bow tie and gold pocket-watch chain, he looked like a nineteenth-century man of letters. Speaking perfect English, with an English accent, he made it sound as though he’d had no choice but to buy the castle, which dated from the early thirteen-hundreds, after his library grew too large for his small Parisian flat. That was thirty-five years ago. Now, acknowledging the stacks of books that were overtaking his cavernous study, he said that he was running into the same problem here.

Over several glasses of champagne, Yarvin fired a series of questions at Camus, though he rarely waited long enough for his host to give a full answer. What did Camus think of Philippe Pétain? Charles de Gaulle? Napoleon III? Napoleon I? Ernst Jünger? Ernst von Salomon? Ezra Pound? Basil Bunting? More than an interaction, Yarvin, the former trivia champion, seemed to want a pat on the head for his display of learning.

After we headed downstairs for lunch—strips of sizzling duck, a quiche Lorraine, red wine—Yarvin resumed his cross-examination. Did Camus rate Thomas Carlyle? Michel Houellebecq? Louis XIV? What would he say to Charles Maurras if he were alive today? What would Dostoyevsky have thought about the Covid lab-leak theory?

Camus let out a high-pitched giggle whenever Yarvin asked a particularly odd question, but he was baffled by his guest’s repeated inquiries about Brigitte Macron, the French First Lady, who Yarvin suspected was actually a man. “We are dealing with the most important thing in the history of the Continent,” Camus exclaimed, referring to the rise of nonwhite immigration to Europe. “What does it matter if Mrs. Macron is a man or woman?”

Brun asked the men to move to a window so that he could shoot them from outside. As Yarvin gazed at the patchwork of neatly tended fields below, he spoke about the Great Replacement as “one of the greatest crimes” in history. “Is it greater than the Holocaust? I don’t know. . . . We haven’t seen it play out yet.” He’d been drinking since his arrival and seemed to be in an emotional state. “I have three children,” he told Camus. “Will they be basically lined up and marched into mass graves?” They had been discussing Jean Raspail’s apocalyptic novel, “The Camp of the Saints” (1973), which depicts an invasion of Indian migrants destroying European nations. Sobbing now, he continued, “I want my children to die in the twenty-second century. I don’t want them to experience some kind of insane post-colonial Holocaust.”

After dessert, coffee, and a rum from Guadeloupe, it was time for an evening stroll. Carrying a wooden cane, Camus led Yarvin through the small town of Plieux. Spring had arrived early: a cherry tree was blossoming with little flowers. As they passed the local church, Yarvin took out his phone to show Camus a photo of the toddler he shares with Laurenson. “The mother of that child was not my wife,” he said confidingly. A moment later, he was reading a poem by C. P. Cavafy, in tears once again.

When Yarvin and Camus went on ahead, the filmmakers paused to assess the day’s shoot. Brun said that Yarvin reminded him of the long-winded character in “Airplane!” who talks so incessantly that it drives his seatmates to kill themselves. We wondered what Camus was making of the afternoon. It wasn’t long before we found out. “If intellectual exchanges were commercial exchanges—which they are, to a certain extent—the amount of my exports would not reach one per cent of that of my imports,” Camus wrote in his diary, which he posted online the following day. “The visitor spoke without interruption from his arrival to his departure, for five hours, very quickly and very loudly, interrupting himself only for curious fits of tears, when he spoke of his deceased wife, but also, more strangely, certain political situations.”

It was dark by the time we all returned to the château. “Thank you so much for your hospitality and your duck and your castle,” Yarvin said, looking around. “How much money did you spend on it?”

Lovingly squeezing Yarvin’s arm, Kristine said, “You can’t just ask people that!”

Camus gave Yarvin some of his books as souvenirs, but Yarvin’s mind already seemed elsewhere. Tomorrow, he would fly to Paris to meet with a group of red-pilled Zoomers and Éric Zemmour, a far-right polemicist who once ran to be the President of France.

As we headed to the car, Yarvin was buzzing with boyish excitement about his performance. He turned to me and the filmmakers. “Was that good?” he asked. “Was that good?” 

[fuck-customers]

I work in tech support for a cyber security company offering various different products, including physical devices such as firewalls, meaning we handle returns sometimes.

The other day I received a ticket for a faulty firewall, describing in detail that half the customer's server room got fried in a storm because they have no protection from lightning in place. They asked for us to write a confirmation for his insurance that actually, it was just a hard drive failure, not the lightning he wasn't insured against. I denied the return due to our policy, we don't cover damage like this.

So what does he do? Opens a second ticket, which I happen to see while assigning tickets (I only do this every 2-3 months, pretty bad luck for him). No hint that a first ticket existed, no mention of lightning damage, just "oh my device can't detect the drive anymore". I denied this of course and made sure to not get a survey sent out to this guy that he could use to retaliate.

I still cannot believe the audacity of this guy, first trying to use us to scam his insurance, then trying to scam us. Not to mention my name was on this, he was happy to risk my job to save 15k his company likely budgeted for anyway because things break. My company is spending so much money on returns that they monitor every return and will contact managers directly over the smallest issues.

Also, just a suggestion: Don't explain your insurance fraud in writing to a tech support rep.

Posted by admin Rodney

[love2write2626]

The Way Home

Anthony Bridgerton x Orginal Female Character

Lilly once had a perfect life—a loving home and wonderful parents—until tragedy shattered everything. After losing her parents, she is sent to live with her Aunt and Uncle. But when misfortune strikes again, she is left alone in the care of her cruel and abusive Uncle. The only light in her dark world is the Bridgerton family. Her best friend, Daphne, and their warm, lively home offer her a refuge from the pain. But more than anything, Lilly treasures the moments spends with Daphne’s eldest brother, Anthony. She has loved him from the moment she met him, though she knows he could never feel the same… Or could he?

Chapter 1

My mother use to tell me that when one door closes another door may open – or perhaps a window… I always thought that quote to be odd but now I think about it daily, she use to say it often and I wish I could hear her say it again. I wish I could hear her and my father in the kitchen making breakfast laughing at something that honestly wasn’t that funny, but they were so in love with each other. Our home was filled with love, so much love.

Now, I know I’ll probably never feel that again. My parents passed away in an accident while on an expedition in Egypt – my parents were archaeologists. Along with love our house was filled with history. Anyway there was some accident, that was never clear but they both lost their lives that day… honestly I believe I died as well. I ended up having to live with my Aunt and Uncle. Neither of them were happy about it.

It was no secret that neither of them wanted the responsibility of raising a child, they were partiers. They drank, did drugs, and smoked like crazy. My aunt loved me in her own way, she made sure I never went hungry and that I had clothes on my back but that’s as far as her “love” went.

My uncle was a different story, he hated having me there. He would yell at me if I showed my face when their friends were over, and didn’t care when he would make me cry. Honestly, he got joy from it.

When I was 14, my Aunt passed away from cancer and that left me with him part of me hoped he would send me to a foster home or something, but no such luck. He kept me trapped there, I became his maid. Cooking him meals, cleaning the house, and other various things. I had to beg him to let me go to school. I need those 8 hours away from him, and telling him that I would be gone for 8 hours is what sold him on the idea.

When I turned 16, is when the beatings began. He came home drunk, and dinner wasn’t on the table and he hit me. Then laughed when I cried, that was the first time I tried to ran away… but he caught me before I made it out the window. Almost like he expected it. I had a part time job for a little while to get some money but when it started interfering with his feeding schedule he made me quit.

The day I turned 18, I cried. My parents promised when I turned 18 they would take me to London. I always dreamed of going there… now I know that will never happen. I hate my life more than anyone will ever know. I know I am not beautiful by any means, I have baggier clothes because my weight constantly fluctuates depending on when and how much I get to eat, I wear glasses – broken glasses my uncle snapped them straight down the middle one night for fun so now they are taped together and they look so stupid. Something else for the kids at school to tease me about. That’s why I kept to myself… I didn’t need any friends or so I thought until I met Daphne Bridgerton.

The Bridgerton family moved here all the way from London when her older brother Anthony – wonderful, beautiful, funny, smart, sexy Anthony started a cyber security company here. It didn’t take long for everyone to find out the kind of money the Bridgerton family had, and all the popular kids tried to become friends with Daphne… but when we were assigned to a project together we instantly clicked… and I can honestly say she is my very best friend.

I spend most of my time at their home, it is my sanctuary. I love when I get to see Anthony as well. He is so amazing, he makes me smile, and sometimes I find it hard to look at him without blushing… especially when he winks at me. Why do I have to have feelings for my best friends older brother… he’s 25 years old. I mean not only do I never have a chance with him because like I said I’m nothing special but he’s also 7 years older than me. I try my hardest to get him out of my head, but it is so difficult.

“Lilly” I am broken out of my thoughts when I hear my name. I turn and see Daphne just sat down next to me, holding a bag out to me. “This is for you” she said

“What is it?” she rolled her eyes and pretended to be annoyed at me.

“You won’t know if you don’t open it, now will you?” I opened the bag and saw an assortment of clothes and some shoes,

“Daphne…”

“Nope, don’t you start with me. I saw them and thought of you! They will look wonderful on you” she said with a bright smile

“But I…”

“Can’t you just say Thank You Daphne?” she asked. I laughed

“Thank you Daphne” I said with a smile.

“Oh, and this is from Anthony” My eyebrows lifted when she handed me a small box. “He picked these up for you and asked if I could give them to you” I slowly opened the box and gasped when I saw a brand new pair of glasses.

“But… what… I”

“He thinks he got the right prescription, but make sure” She said

“I can’t accept these, the clothes are already too much”

“Lilly” Daphne said in a soft voice “We have been talking about getting new glasses for you for a while, and it’s not out of pity so don’t think that.” She said sternly before continuing “We want to do things for you, you have been the most amazing friend we all love you dearly and if we can help you out we want to” I wanted to cry. I took off my broken glasses, and slid on the new ones, and I could see perfectly.

“These, are perfect” I mumbled “Do I want to know how he got my prescription?” I asked

“The man is good with computers” she smiled “It’s not hard for him to get information” I rolled my eyes. “You’re still coming over tonight right?” She asked

“I’m going to try; there’s a lot that needs to be done at the house for my uncle’s party tonight.” She nodded hesitantly; it didn’t take long for them to figure out that my Uncle was not nice to me, and treated me like a servant. I constantly assured them I was ok, and I’m just happy I have been able to keep the bruises hidden from them.

“I hope you can come over, its Friday night so you should stay the night”

“I don’t know if I can….”

“Please, ask” I nodded

“Ok, I’ll try” She hugged me just as the bell rang.

She said, “See ya!” I just sat down in my next class when my phone buzzed, my heart started to race when I saw Anthony’s name pop up. I have all of their numbers, but it’s very very rare that I ever text Anthony. I opened it up and smiled

Hey, Lilly Pie Daphne told me she gave you the glasses. Do they fit good? I bit my lip at his nick name for me.

Hey, Anthony. Yes, they fit perfectly. I will never be able to thank you enough for these! Also do I want to know how you know my prescription?? I giggled when he replied with a eye winky emoji.

God, I am so head over heels for him. But I need to get those ridiculous thoughts out of my head. I know he only sees me as a little sister, someone he cares for but definitely not in the way I care for him.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

After school I ran home and started cleaning the house and making all the requested snacks. I was humming quietly to myself in a very good mood, until I heard the front door slam and my blood ran cold.

“Are you almost done?” he asked. I nodded and kept my face looking down at the ground. “Look at me girl” I did, and I saw anger flash in his eyes. “Where the fuck did you get those new glasses?” Shit I am so stupid, I should have worn the broken ones. I had to quickly come up with something

“The nurse at school, she wanted me to have new glasses” I muttered. “Please, please don’t break them. Please” I said begging. He gave me a very creepy smile

“I won’t break them…” Then before I could do anything he kneed me hard in the stomach causing me to fall forward. “But I can and will break you” I let out a sob “Man do I love it when you cry” he said laughing. “Now get the fuck out of my house, I don’t want to see you for the rest of the weekend” I nodded and quickly left without a second thought.

I know I should have called Daphne and she would have come to get me, but I just needed a little bit of time to myself. As I walked, I couldn’t stop the tears from falling down my face. I hate everything. I am so angry, why did this happen to me? Why?

I made it to their house, and of course Daphne just happened to be outside, and saw me crying. She ran over to me.

“Lilly?” what happened? She asked worried.

“Nothing” I mumbled “Just my Uncle being an asshole… as usual. He just knows how to get to me, I wish I could just let his insults go in one ear and out the other but…” She sighed

“Come on then, lets get you inside and cleaned up” I nodded. As soon as we walked in I suddenly felt so safe. I know here nothing can hurt me. She brought me upstairs to her room and I washed my face, and I couldn’t help but cry. I’m crying because of the pain in my stomach but i just let her think I’m crying because of what he said to me.

"Lilly" I let out a sob

"Daphne, what am I going to do? He kicked me out of the house for the whole weekend" I said

"You can stay here" she said, I shook my head

"You know, I hate being a bother"

“Of course, you can. You are always welcome here” She said pulling me into a hug.

“Hey Daphne! Did Lilly tell you if she is going to be here for…” Anthony’s voice was cut short when he walked into her room, and saw me crying. I saw his face fall.

“Lilly pie? What happened?” he asked crouching down on the floor in front of me. I simply looked down at the ground and shook my head

“Her uncle being an arsehole… again” Daphne told him “I'm trying to convince her to stay here, he kicked her out of the house for the weekend” I looked up just in time to see so much anger cross over his face.

“Lilly pie. You are ALWAYS welcome here”

“I hate being a nuisance”

“Never” He said quickly “You never are and never will be a nuisance” I wanted to hug him, to surround myself in his scent, but instead I just wrapped my arms around myself.

“So, pizza for dinner, yeah?” Daphne asked

“Only if that’s what Lilly Pie wants”

“You know I’m fine with anything” I said laughing a little

“Yeah, but do you want pizza?” He asked jokingly, I bit my lip, and for a split second I saw his eyes flicker down then just as quick back to my eyes. I nodded “It’s settled then, pizza for dinner!”

“Oh, we are also playing charades tonight” Daphne said

“Lilly’s on my team” Anthony spoke quickly

“WHAT?” Daphne exclaimed “But she’s my best friend”

“Yeah, but you always seem to win because of her, I want a to win just once” he looked over at me “What do you say Lilly Pie?” he asked  

“No, tell him you’re going to be on my team” Daphne said. I looked between the two of them.

“He technically called dibs first” I mumbled, she looked shocked

“Ha” Anthony said smugly “See you ladies later” he said winking at me before walking out.

“Ugh, why did you let him win?” she asked. Because, I’m head over heels in love with him I wanted to say… but of course I didn’t “I feel bad he never wins” I mumbled

“Ugh, fine. But because you’re going to be on his team… I get to pick the movie tonight” I giggled

“Deal”

[moonlight-tmd]

Club Mates AU where Prowl and Bee used to work together at a club.

Bee used to work as a bartender and pretty much everyone on Team Prime knows this by now. What they didn't know is that Bee used to work at one of the better-end night clubs in Cyber City.

The place had good vibes and rather good opinion, Bee got hired as a secondary bartender after he lost his previous job. He had to say that the place was much bigger than the pub he used to work at. He fit in the place pretty quick, other workers enjoyed a chat with him off and on shift.

Then one day the local was hiring new dancers to entertain the guests, it was then that Bee saw the slim smooth-looking mech walk thru the doors and ask one of the security mechs something before he was led into te boss' office. He thought nothing of it at first, many candidates were trying to get the place. But to his surprise the mysterious mech got to dance on stage the next night.

The club had many entertainers, including pole dancers. The mech was one of them. Bee tried talking with him but every time he was either ignored or told to keep his business to himself. From other workers, he learned that the mech was named Prowl.

He was sleek in build, black and beige paint job contrasted with gold detailing. He surprisingly lacked any features that would indicate the type of his alt mode, Bee assumed he must be a monoformer then, a rare sight but not uncommon for mechs to not acquire t-cogs later in life.

One time he spotted a troublesome customer, getting a bit too close ot the stage and clearly drunk. After Prowl's shift was over and he tried to leave, he was stopped by that customer near the entrance. He was getting way too close and handy, Bee had to step in. He approached the two and grabbed Prowl just like one would a close friend or a sparkmate and pulled him away with some excuse. He discreetly motioned one of the security mechs to the lousy customer and the two of them went in the back.

Of course, Prowl was stubborn and said he had everything under control. However, Bee knew better. "A small tip; better use the back door for clocking in and out. There are types that hang around here that will take it upon themselves to harass the workers." He said right before Prowl made his wordless exit the way he was pointed.

Bee had hoped that Prowl would at least open up a bit but to no avail, he was simply there to do as he was told. Most often it was dancing and acting all seductive (which was really good, Bee caught himself staring at the show more than once before going back to work), sometimes however he was sent down to one of the tables to entertain a specific customer as a VIP treatment.

It was after one of those times that Bee notices Prowl's odd demeanor after the end of his shift. There was a sway in his walk and Bee just knew he had something slipped in his drink. Against all that Prowl said to him, he clocked out early and followed him. Due to not having an alt mode, Prowl was forced to take the paths between the buildings since there was no sidewalk near the main roads. He kept his distance and saw how Prowl's swaying got more intense the longer he walked. He also noticed the other mechs following him not that far off- they were the same customers that Prowl was entertaining that evening. They got close and grabbed him with attempt to pull him into one of the alleys. Had Bee not sprinted towards them and shocked them with his taser something awful might have happened.

Prowl woke up near noon inside unknown quarters, he still was a bit hazy and startled when someone opened the door. Bee had taken Prowl back to his quarters to make sure he got a safe space to sleep in, he put him in bed while he snoozed on the couch. Of course Prowl was jumpy, seemingly knowing something must've happened yesterday. Bee explained what happened and where he is. He also apologized for following him, but his intentions were good! While Bee didn't expect it Prowl actually thanked him, they spend the day in Bee's quarters. Prowl wasn't a fan of the remedy mixture Bee has given him to quicker get rid of that drug in his system but it did work pretty well. Bee drove him back in a trailer to his apartment near afternoon, they parted ways in silence.

Surprisingly, Prowl has become more tolerating for Bee's chats after that. He didn't brush him off anymore and was generally nicer towards him, at least compared to how he previously was. Sometimes they chatted when their shift together was over or when they caught each other clocking in while the other was clocking out. Bee has actually gifted Prowl a taser on his own so he could protect himself if anything was to happen on his way back again. Whenever they ended a shift together Bee would offer to drive Prowl back home, to which Prowl always accepted.

It was pretty nice, both of them were enjoying the other's company and they got along quite well in the club. Bee, having been promoted to lead bartender, was very efficient with organizing everyone to their tasks. One could say he was the boss of the room while the manager handled the paperwork.

But then Prowl stopped showing up to work. Bee was worried, he hoped nothing bad happened to him, after few weeks of his absence the management was hiring again. He didn't know which quarters Prowl had since all he ever did was drive him under the right complex.

What was unknown to Bee was that Prowl got attacked while going back home after a late night shift. It was a robbery attempt and he got pretty injured while trying to fight back. Luckily for him a stranger spotted him and helped. Prowl woke up in a dojo being treated by Yoketron. He ended up staying a long while due to his injuries, on top of that Yoketron has refused to let him go before he was taught proper self defense.

When Prowl finally left he dojo and went back to work he found the club has been bought by another investor. The old staff was replaced and there was no sight of Bee being there anymore. He tried to look for him, even going as far to check at his quarters but only finding that he has moved out. He was sad, he started to actually like Bee and didn't expect their relations to end to suddenly. With no job and no friend he decided to go back to the dojo, Yoketron offered to train him before he left and seeing as he had no other choice he went with it.

Decades later, Bee found himself and his crew answering the SOS signal on a nearby asteroid ring. He was too busy scouting the area to make sure it was safe to notice a lion-like predator creeping up on him. Even with his stingers the thing would not leave him be, he thought he was done for when he slipped and rolled down some crater but to his favor someone shot at the beast and injured it. making it retreat back where it came from. When he looked up to thank his savor never would he expect to see Prowl standing there, seemingly just as shocked to see him too. They didn't get to say much before Optimus and Bulkhead showed up to answer Bee's distress comm.

Turns out it was Prowl who sent an SOS, his ship has crashed and was pretty much a wreck. Optimus promised him to put him back on Cybertron once they are done with their repair stops. In the meantime, Bee got to chat with him and catch up on what happened.

After the club had been bought out, Bee couldn't find another job so he did the only thing he could think of and enlisted in the military- which didn't go as planned since he got kicked out and had to downgrade to a mechanic course with Bulkhead. He's just been traveling across the galaxy, fixing space bridges and other stuff with his team. He was quite surprised to hear what happened with Prowl. He felt sorry about the Yoketron mech, but he was glad that he provided a cog for Prowl before he was assassinated. They exchanged comm-lines and chatted from time to time while the crew has few more stops before the trip back to Cybertron. But that didn't go as planned and they ended up running into Decepticons and Megatron himself.

On their time on Earth Prowl has discovered his passion for the nature and its wildlife. Bee wasn't very fond of it but tolerated it for the sake of befriending the little aliens that inhabited the planet. He made that plan right after one of those aliens decided to befriend him.

They never spoke about their relations going farther than the crash landing. Whenever they had an argument everyone just thought they were clashing again but Bee knew it was just how Prowl was and couldn't help but bicker with him. He didn't take any of his insults seriously, to him it was just bander with an old friend.

And that's it for now, feel free to send asks. This is the first official blog AU that I've written in one go.

[ixhika-jsx]

Resources and study tips to get you in cyber forensics

Master post • Part1 • part2

let's get you prepped to be a cyber sleuth without spending any cash. Here’s the ultimate tips and resources.

Ps: you can't become one while doing these pointers but you can experience the vibe so you can finally find your career interest

### 1. **Digital Scavenger Hunts**

- **CTF Challenges (Capture The Flag)**: Dive into platforms like [CTFtime](https://ctftime.org/) where you can participate in cyber security challenges. It's like playing *Among Us* but with hackers—find the imposter in the code!

- **Hunt A Killer (Digitally)**: Create your own digital crime scenes. Ask friends to send you files (like images, PDFs) with hidden clues. Your job? Find the Easter eggs and solve the case.

### 2. **YouTube University**

- **Cyber Sleuth Tutorials**: Channels like *HackerSploit* and *The Cyber Mentor* have playlists covering digital forensics, cybersecurity, and more. Binge-watch them like your fave Netflix series, but here you're learning skills to catch bad guys.

- **Live Streams & Q&A**: Jump into live streams on platforms like Twitch where cybersecurity experts solve cases in real-time. Ask questions, get answers, and interact with the pros.

### 3. **Public Libraries & eBook Treasure Hunts**

- **Library eBooks**: Most libraries have eBooks or online resources on digital forensics. Check out titles like *"Hacking Exposed"* or *"Digital Forensics for Dummies"*. You might have to dig through the catalog, but think of it as your first case.

- **LinkedIn Learning via Library**: Some libraries offer free access to LinkedIn Learning. If you can snag that, you've got a goldmine of courses on cybersecurity and forensics.

### 4. **Virtual Study Groups**

- **Discord Servers**: Join cybersecurity and hacking communities on Discord. They often have study groups, challenges, and mentors ready to help out. It's like joining a digital Hogwarts for hackers.

- **Reddit Threads**: Subreddits like r/cybersecurity and r/hacking are packed with resources, advice, and study buddies. Post your questions, and you’ll get a whole thread of answers.

### 5. **DIY Labs at Home**

- **Build Your Own Lab**: Got an old PC or laptop? Turn it into a practice lab. Install virtual machines (VMware, VirtualBox) and play around with different operating systems and security tools. It’s like Minecraft but for hacking.

- **Log Your Own Activity**: Turn on logging on your own devices and then try to trace your own steps later. You’re basically spying on yourself—no NSA required.

### 6. **Community College & University Open Courses**

- **Free Audit Courses**: Many universities offer free auditing of cybersecurity courses through platforms like Coursera, edX, and even YouTube. No grades, no stress, just pure learning.

- **MOOCs**: Massive Open Online Courses often have free tiers. Try courses like "Introduction to Cyber Security" on platforms like FutureLearn or edX.

### 7. **Scour GitHub**

- **Open-Source Tools**: GitHub is full of open-source forensic tools and scripts. Clone some repositories and start tinkering with them. You’re basically getting your hands on the tools real investigators use.

- **Follow the Code**: Find projects related to digital forensics, follow the code, and see how they work. Contribute if you can—bonus points for boosting your resume.

### 8. **Local Meetups & Online Conferences**

- **Free Virtual Conferences**: Many cybersecurity conferences are virtual and some offer free access. DEF CON has a lot of free content, and you can find tons of talks on YouTube.

- **Hackathons**: Look for free entry hackathons—often universities or tech companies sponsor them. Compete, learn, and maybe even win some gear.

### 9. **DIY Challenges**

- **Create Your Own Scenarios**: Get a friend to simulate a hack or data breach. You try to solve it using whatever tools and resources you have. It's like escape rooms, but digital.

- **Pen & Paper Simulation**: Before diving into digital, try solving forensic puzzles on paper. Map out scenarios and solutions to get your brain wired like a detective.

### 10. **Stay Updated**

- **Podcasts & Blogs**: Tune into cybersecurity podcasts like *Darknet Diaries* or follow blogs like *Krebs on Security*. It’s like getting the tea on what’s happening in the cyber world.

### 11. **Free Software & Tools**

- **Autopsy**: Free digital forensics software that helps you analyze hard drives and mobile devices. Think of it as your magnifying glass for digital clues.

- **Wireshark**: A free tool to see what's happening on your network. Catch all the data packets like you're a digital fisherman.

### 12. **Online Forensics Communities**

- **Free Webinars & Workshops**: Join communities like the *SANS Institute* for free webinars. It's like attending a masterclass but from the comfort of your gaming chair.

- **LinkedIn Groups**: Join groups like *Digital Forensics & Incident Response (DFIR)*. Network with pros, get job tips, and stay in the loop with the latest trends.

### 13. **Practice Cases & Mock Trials**

- **Set Up Mock Trials**: Role-play with friends where one is the hacker, another the victim, and you’re the investigator. Recreate cases from famous cybercrimes to see how you'd solve them.

- **Case Studies**: Research and recreate famous digital forensic cases. What steps did the investigators take? How would you handle it differently?

There you have it—your roadmap to becoming a cyber sleuth without dropping a dime. You don't have time find your interest after paying pennies to different ppl and colleges. You can explore multiple things from comfort of your home only if you want to.

[dylanamedinas]

open starter ➛ any! location ➛ bookmarked @windsorbaystarters

One thing Dylan enjoyed was a good book, often times, with his job continually keeping him on the computer for extended periods of time he needed to shut his brain off. Being the lead on the current cyber-security project, meant that lately he was pulling longer than twelve hour shifts. Delegation wasn't something that was Dylan's strong point, his manager pushing him to learn those techniques or he'd be loosing even more time. After making sure projects were given out and tasked properly, and with a click of a button his dual monitors and laptop faded to black. The rest of the day and the following two were all his to enjoy — or attempt to enjoy. Earlier that day he had placed a small order of books on hold but decided to go pick them up and do a little browsing before actually purchasing the books he already had there waiting for him.

Just as he was exiting one aisle, a few other books in his hand he went around too fast and bumped firmly into someone, sending his books spilling to the floor. "Shit — my bad." Turning to look at the person he had just knocked into and see if he had sent anything tumbling to the floor for them.

[romerona]

Ethera Operation!!

You're the government’s best hacker, but that doesn’t mean you were prepared to be thrown into a fighter jet.

Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw x Awkward!Hacker! FemReader

Part III

You stared at the inside of your closet like it had personally betrayed you.

Phoenix’s words echoed in your head 'something that doesn’t scream high-stress lab goblin' which, okay, was technically unfair. You did have clothes, you had plenty of workwear. Dark slacks, fitted blazers, collared shirts and what not.

You weren’t a lab goblin, you were a certified government-grade digital menace. Totally different.

Still, she wasn’t wrong.

You flipped through hangers, each one offering some variation of government-issue chic. Professional, structured and mostly black. Great for briefings and tech demos, but utterly useless for looking like someone who belonged at a bar full of cocky yet unfairly hot aviators and sunburnt adrenaline.

It wasn’t that you were trying to be one of those people who say, “Oh, I only wear comfy clothes, I don’t even own makeup, haha,” like some badge of honor. You weren’t. Truly. You actually liked getting dressed up— when there was a reason, but you rarely had one.

Working in cyber intelligence didn’t exactly come with a thriving social calendar. Most days, your job happens in your house or sealed secret rooms under terrible fluorescent lighting, surrounded by other chronically caffeinated keyboard warriors who wouldn’t think going to a bar is fun... well, at least your friends don't think so.

So your off-hours wardrobe? Pretty much whatever was clean, soft, and didn’t have crumbs in the pockets.

But buried at the back—wedged between a surplus hoodie and a pair of emergency heels—you found it.

A dress.

You’d bought it on a rare, feral trip to a department store clearance rack, swayed by the fact that it had pockets and didn’t itch. It wasn’t flashy, but it was soft and kind of cute, even if a little wrinkled. You remembered holding it up in the mirror under brutal fluorescent lighting and thinking, Huh. Not terrible.

You pulled it on, added a jacket that looked slightly less formal than your usual outerwear, and gave yourself one last look in the mirror.

You didn’t look like a security clearance badge or a drone operator or someone whose last full-body adrenaline spike happened in a simulated crash dive.

You looked… good. Put-together enough to pass for someone with a social life. Which, frankly, was more than you could say for most of the past year.

The dress skimmed just right, the jacket added a hint of structure, and your hair, while still slightly chaotic, managed to fall in that strategic mess kind of way instead of I lost a fight with my pillow. Your face looked… soft, less “up all night decrypting hostile intel,” more “hey, I could flirt with a bartender if I had to.”

You blinked at your reflection.

Damn. It's been a second since I felt like this.

There was a knock on the door—two quick taps—and then Phoenix’s voice. “You decent?”

You grabbed your bag and opened the door. "Hi"

She took one look at you and smirked. “Well, damn. Who knew the Doc had legs?”

You froze in the doorway. “Too much?”

“Depends," She raised an eyebrow. "Are you trying to win a bar fight or start one?”

You blinked. “…Neither?”

“Then you’re good.” She stepped back, still grinning, "If anything, we might need to keep you away from the pilots. Some of 'em are barely house-trained.”

You rolled your eyes but couldn’t help the flicker of warmth that crept up your neck. It wasn’t a you’re trying too hard kind of comment. More of a huh, didn’t know you had that in your arsenal one.

“Come on,” she said, already turning. “First round’s on you.”

You locked up behind you and followed, still tugging self-consciously at the hem of your dress as you walked.

Soon enough, you stepped into the bar and immediately regretted every life choice that led you here.

The place was loud, warm, and packed.

It smelled like beer and sweat and salt and confidence. The kind of confidence that came from people who routinely defied physics and came back grinning. You tugged at the hem of your dress instinctively, suddenly aware of every inch of exposed skin and every decision that had brought you to this exact moment.

Pilots laughed over pool tables, boots scuffed against the floor, music blared from a jukebox in the corner. The whole place crackled with energy you weren’t sure you belonged to. It was like stepping into someone else’s world, where the rules were different and everyone spoke in call signs and inside jokes.

Phoenix, of course, didn’t even blink. She moved through the crowd with practiced ease, greeting a few people with nods, bumping knuckles with others. She had that home-field advantage thing going on. The kind of comfort that came from knowing no one here could outfly you or outdrink you.

You stuck close for a few steps, then leaned in toward her over the music.

“I’ll grab us drinks,” you said, gesturing vaguely toward the bar.

Phoenix gave you a look like she was about to argue—then thought better of it.

“Alright, I'll be by the pool tables,” she said, pointing at where the tables were. “Two beers, whatever’s on tap. And don’t let anyone hustle you into a conversation about call signs unless you’re ready to hear about fly accidents and bad tattoos.”

You snorted. “Noted.”

With that, you turned toward the bar, and you didn’t notice him.

Didn’t see how Rooster’s laugh died mid-sentence when his eyes caught on you from across the room. Didn’t register the way he straightened slightly from his lean against the bar, the way his gaze tracked you with something half-stunned, half-something-else.

You were too busy weaving through the crowd, trying not to look like you were in the middle of an identity crisis, squeezing between a guy in a bomber jacket and someone loudly retelling the story of a near-miss over Guam, edging your way toward a clear spot at the counter.

The music thumped in your ribs, and you adjusted your jacket. Tapped the edge of your nails against the wood to feel like you belonged here.

You were just beginning to feel the tiniest bit grounded when your phone buzzed in your jacket pocket.

You fished it out instinctively, screen glowing with a text from your mom that read,

Are you eating real food or just caffeine again? I read on Facebook about how it shrinks your brain.

You snorted under your breath and started typing a reply, thumbs already moving—

“Careful.”

You jumped and looked up and there he was.

Bradley 'Rooster' Bradshaw.

Closer than you expected.

He was already smirking—more amused than smug, but still with that slow-rolling confidence like he lived in places exactly like this. One hand cradled a drink; the other gestured toward your phone.

“I’d put that away,” he said. “Unless you’re looking to buy a round for the whole bar.”

You blinked. “Wait—what?”

He nodded toward a sign nailed just above the taps—worn, wood-burned, and clearly older than some of the lieutenants here. It read:

DISRESPECT A LADY, THE NAVY, OR PUT YOUR CELLPHONE ON MY BAR. YOU BUY A ROUND

Your eyes widened. “That’s real?”

Rooster gave you that maddeningly easy grin. “It’s real enough when someone’s watching.”

You immediately shoved your phone back into your pocket like it had personally betrayed you. “Okay, that feels like entrapment.”

“More like tradition, "He took a sip of his beer, clearly enjoying it this way too much. "Penny enforces it and trust me—you do not want to be on her bad side.”

“Wait, did anyone see?" You glanced around, paranoia kicking in. "Is it too late? Am I financially ruined?”

He leaned in, lowering his voice just enough that it skimmed across your skin. “Nah. You’re good, I caught it in time. Consider it a rescue.”

You gave him a look. “How heroic of you.”

“That’s what they call me.” He raised his bottle in a mock toast.

You snorted under your breath, the last bit of nerves starting to bleed out of your shoulders. “What, Captain Save-A-Phone?”

“Could be worse,” he said, eyes flicking over you again—quick, but not subtle. “I’ve been called worse.”

You rolled your eyes, but the corner of your mouth twitched before you could stop it. “Thanks for the save, I guess.”

He tapped the rim of his bottle against the bar. “Anytime, Doc.”

The bartender—a pretty woman with stunning blue eyes and the kind of effortless confidence you’d need three drinks to fake—stepped into view. She gave Bradley a nod, like they knew each other well (of course they did), then turned her attention to you with a warm, curious smile.

“What can I get you?” she asked, voice smooth but edged with something sharp, like she didn’t miss much.

You blinked. “Oh—uh, two beers. Whatever’s on tap.”

Bradley made a quiet sound beside you—definitely a laugh, definitely at your expense—but you caught the flash of amusement in the bartender’s eyes, too.

“Coming right up,” she said smoothly.

As she turned to pour, Rooster tapped the bar twice with two fingers and said casually, “Put it on my tab, Penny.”

“You don’t have to,” you said quickly, shifting the beer money in your hand. “I told Phoenix I’d buy the fir—”

He cut you off with a look. Not sharp, not smug—just easy, steady, and mildly amused. “She won’t care, I’ll let her bully me at pool later to make up for it.”

You frowned. “I’m serious, Bradley, you don’t have to.”

He didn’t flinch at the use of his name, if anything, his eyes crinkled slightly, like he liked the way it sounded coming from you.

“I know I don’t,” he said, already lifting his drink to his lips. “Take it as a congratulations on your first week in the Navy.”

You groaned, cringing a little. “God. Don’t say it like that. I already feel like I need a morale patch that says ‘I’m not supposed to be here.’”

“You survived five sim runs, didn’t cry, didn’t puke, and only mildly panicked under G-force, that’s a win.” He tilted his glass in a casual toast.

You raised your brows. “You set the bar real low, huh?”

“It’s not the bar that matters. It’s clearing it.” Bradley grinned, "Either way, you're one of us now."

You rolled your eyes, but the corners of your mouth tugged up anyway. He wasn’t teasing to embarrass you—he meant it, and that was somehow worse and better and worse again.

“Temporarily.”

“Mmhmm.” He took another sip, then added, almost offhanded, “By the way, you clean up dangerously well, Doc.”

Your stomach did a small, unapproved somersault.

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” you said lightly.

“Should,” he said, already stepping back with that damn lazy confidence of his. “’Cause it was.”

A beat passed, the music changed, something with a heavier beat and just enough bass to rattle the glasses.

You reached up to adjust your jacket, only now realizing how warm the bar had gotten, or maybe that was just him, standing too close and way too comfortable.

You turned to him, trying to focus on literally anything but the way his big arms looked in that damn Hawaiian blazer; it was clear he did pull-ups for fun.

“Do you always hang out here?” you asked. “Or just when unsuspecting civilians walk in and almost rack up a bar tab the size of a defense budget?”

He raised his bottle in a half-toast. “Could be both.”

Just then, Penny returned with the beers, setting them down in front of you with a quick glance between the two of you that said she was clocking everything.

“Enjoy,” she said, and moved on.

"Thanks," You reached for them both, fingers brushing condensation, but Rooster was already lifting one.

“Come on,” he said, nodding toward the back of the bar. “I’ll show you where we are.”

You blinked. “We?”

He was already moving, weaving effortlessly through the crowd like he did this every weekend. Which, judging by the way people kept nodding or shoulder-tapping him, he probably did.

He was already walking, weaving through the crowd with the easy confidence of someone who knew the terrain. You followed—beer in hand, pulse doing strange things—trying not to stare at the way his shirt shifted across his back or how everyone seemed to move from his way like he belonged to this place in a way you couldn’t fake if you tried.

You spotted Phoenix before you spotted the others, posted up near the pool tables, one hand on her hip, the other holding a cue like she was about to ruin someone’s night.

As you approached, she looked at you both, raised an eyebrow, and smirked.

“You get lost, Doc?” she asked, taking her beer with one hand and motioning you over with the other. “Or did Rooster here decide to give you the full VIP tour?”

“She was about to buy everyone a round,” Rooster said innocently, sipping his drink. “I intervened.”

You rolled your eyes, the last of your nerves slipping into something looser, lighter. You handed her the drink and shook your head. “Next time I’ll bring cash and a fake name.”

“Smart,” Phoenix said, already lining up her shot.

That’s when he appeared.

The smug blonde from your briefing, the one with the impossible bone structure and the kind of confidence that came standard-issue with being extremely good-looking and knowing it.

“Well, if it isn’t our favorite payload,” he drawled, a grin tugging at the corner of his mouth.

You turned slowly, beer halfway to your lips. “I’m sorry?”

He gave you a quick once-over—same as in the briefing room—but this time, his grin was dialed down just enough to pass as charm instead of mockery.

“I mean, you are the most heavily guarded piece of government property in the room,” he added, taking a sip of his beer. “Just odd to see the brains of the operation drink.”

Rooster made a low sound beside you, half-choked into his beer. Phoenix didn’t even glance up from her shot while saying, “Play nice, Hangman.”

You raised an eyebrow. “Hangman's your call sign?”

“One and only,” the blonde said, holding out a hand like he expected a spotlight. “Jake Seresin. Resident heartbreaker, ego booster, and occasional lifesaver.”

You stared at his hand for a beat, then gave it a brief, polite shake. "Nice to officially meet you,"

"It really is, ain't it?" Jake grinned as he leaned his elbow on the edge of the table, clearly unbothered. “So what’s it like? Building a superweapon and then getting tossed in with the flyboys?”

You tilted your head, calm and even. “About as fun as being verbally dissected by a man who uses hair gel like it’s armor.”

“Oof, rough,” a voice said to your left.

You turned as another pilot stepped forward, who had a slight grin that softened the otherwise sharp edge of him. He held out a hand. “Reuben Fitch, Payback. Nice to meet you.”

You shook it. “Likewise.”

“Mickey Garcia, call sign Fanboy, ” said the one beside him, shorter, with a buzzed head, already half-laughing as he raised his beer in a little salute. “We’re not usually this charming, by the way.”

“That’s not true,” Payback said. “I’m always this charming.”

Before you could respond, another voice chimed in, softer. “And I’m Bob.”

You turned to the speaker, glasses, clean posture, a deceptively polite face that probably hid a mind like a scalpel.

"Nice to meet you," You smiled at him, still holding your beer but relaxing, just a little.

This wasn’t a debrief, It wasn’t the sim room, just a bunch of pilots talking shit and maybe, maybe letting you sit at their table, at least for tonight.

Rooster leaned in slightly, shoulder just brushing yours. “They aren't so bad.”

“But come on, Doc,” Jake said, still lounging against the table like gravity worked differently on him. He lifted his bottle in your direction. “Even you have to admit, there’s something kind of electric about all this. High-stakes, high-speed, secrets and skyfire. Gets the heart racing, doesn’t it?”

You took a sip of your beer, breaking eye contact. “Heartburn, more like.”

Mickey laughed behind his drink.

Jake just grinned, unbothered. “No shame in a little adrenaline. Means you’re alive.”

“Yeah,” you said dryly. “That, or dangerously overstimulated.”

Rooster was still grinning when he leaned in slightly, voice low and warm, just for you. “You’re doing great, by the way. In the sim.”

You blinked, caught off guard by the sudden shift from teasing to genuine. “Thanks,”

And then, mercifully—because your brain was dangerously close to short-circuiting—Phoenix lined up her shot and sank the ball with a clean, effortless clack.

She straightened, gave the group a look, and said flatly, “Can we play now, or are you all done peacocking?”

Fanboy raised his hands in mock surrender. “Wasn’t me this time.”

Jake, of course, gestured grandly toward the table. “By all means and for the record, I wasn’t peacocking, I was flirting, there’s a difference.”

"You? Successfully flirting with someone besides your precious AC?" Rubeus snorted. "Now that I’d pay to see."

Bradley grinned. “Still carrying a torch for her since the academy, Hangman?”

Jake shot him a look, sharper, more serious than usual. “Can it.”

“And you were peacocking,” Bob added.

“I was multi-tasking,”

Phoenix rolled her eyes and turned to you. “You in?”

You hesitated for half a second, then took the cue. “Just for the record, I haven’t played in years.”

Phoenix’s smirk widened slightly. “Perfect. You’ll fit right in.”

Rooster leaned in again, voice just loud enough for you to hear. “We’ll go easy on you.”

You glanced at him over your shoulder, raising an eyebrow. “That sounds like a challenge.”

He just smiled, lazy and lopsided. “Good.”

So, you weren’t the best.

You scratched and missed some easy ones. Once, you managed to completely launch the cue ball off the table and nearly take out Hangman’s drink, but you held your own and by the time the first game was over, you were laughing.

Not politely or nervously but actually laughing.

The night stretched on better than you’d expected, better than you’d dared hope, by the fourth round of beers, you were… joyful.

Which, for you, usually meant a bit flushed, very talkative, and unreasonably confident about things like your pool strategy and your very unpopular stance on pineapple on pizza. Someone made the mistake of letting you pick music on the jukebox, and now, Take My Breath Away is playing in the background.

Mickey had just finished explaining—very dramatically—how Reuben once got pantsed mid-flight suit and refused to acknowledge it ever happened. Bob, with whom you had been sharing fries for half of the night, had chimed in with the exact timestamp. Jake kept interrupting with side commentary that no one asked for. Phoenix, who nursed her drinks and pretended she wasn’t smiling.

And Bradley never strayed too far.

Sometimes sitting on the edge of the table, sometimes leaning with one elbow on the bar. Always watching, but not in a way that felt heavy or possessive, but like he was making sure you didn’t drift too far from shore.

At one point, he even slid a glass of water into your hand without saying a word, just gave you a small smile, a raised brow, and took it anyway.

The pilots—the ones who’d rolled their eyes when you dropped your tablet, who’d heard your entire mission explained in hesitant, caffeine-fueled rambles—were now just… people. Loud, messy, sharp-witted people who might be the only thing standing between you and death next week.

Could’ve been the beer, or the fries, or the mood around you, but somehow, that fact wasn’t setting off alarm bells the way it probably should.

You were still the outlier, sure, still the civilian with the classified code and the anti-flight instincts, but tonight, with your fifth beer half-finished, surrounded by chaos and music and the first real belly laugh you’d had in months.

You’d come to genuinely like them all—even Jake... but that was when you were half-drunk, laughing, and firmly planted on solid, lovely, unmoving ground.

Not like now.

Because Monday rolled up like a freight train, and with it came Cyclone’s voice echoing through the hangar with all the warmth of a court summons, “You’re ready for a test flight.”

You’d tried to argue. Oh, you tried.

Tried logic, begged for another sim, even floated the possibility of “emotional unsuitability,” which earned you a long, dead-eyed stare and a crisp, “You’ll be fine.”

So now, here you are.

in the gear room, shakily wriggling your way into a flight suit that feels more like medieval armor than government-issue. It's too heavy, too stiff, and somehow manages to make you feel both protected and wildly exposed at the same time.

Your hands fumble with the last few clasps, fingers trembling, heart somewhere up in your throat, and when you come out, finally wrestle the zipper into submission and stand upright—barely—Bradley's already there.

Leaning casually against the doorframe, sleeves tied around his waist, holding a helmet in one hand like it’s the easiest thing in the world. His gaze flicks down to your suit, then back up to meet your eyes.

“Turn,” he says gently.

You do.

He steps forward and fastens a strap you didn’t even know you’d missed—steady, practiced, close enough to smell the faint trace of cologne and jet fuel on him.

“I tried,” he murmurs, his voice low and honest. “Tried to talk Cyclone into letting me take you up there today.”

You turn back to face him, eyes wide. “And?”

He gives a small shrug. “Didn’t work. He wants you with Hangman."

Your stomach sinks, your knees aren’t far behind.

Of course, it’s Hangman. Of all the people. Jake Seresin, the smug, cocky pilot, the Navy's most charming landmine, was the one who would take you on your first fly.

You inhale sharply through your nose. The flight suit suddenly feels even heavier, like it's made of wet concrete.

“Okay. Cool. Coolcoolcool. That’s fine. That’s actually great,” you say, nodding like you’re trying to gaslight your own nervous system into cooperating.

“I know how it sounds,” Bradley says, voice even but gentle. “Don’t tell him I said it, but Jake’s good in the air, okay? He might be an ass, but he’s not a psychopath.”

“That’s not exactly a reassuring distinction.”

“I mean it. He talks big, sure, but he knows what he’s doing. And more importantly, he knows he’s supposed to bring you back in one piece.”

You swallow hard, fingers tightening slightly around your helmet. “I hate that that even has to be said out loud.”

“Welcome to Naval aviation,” Bradley mutters, deadpan.

You shoot him a flat look, and he softens again. “Hey. Look at me.”

Bradley dips his head just a little, voice dropping even lower. “You’ll be strapped in before you even realize you’ve left the ground and before you know it, you’ll be back on it.”

You glance down at the helmet still in your hands, fingers gripping the edge tight enough to leave marks.

Your voice comes out smaller than you mean for it to. “What if I freak out?”

“Then you freak out,” he says, simple, steady. “And then you breathe, and you come back, and you keep going. That’s it.”

You swallow hard, blinking up at him a he lifts a hand—pauses, like he’s asking permission—then sets it lightly on your shoulder and part of your neck.

“You’re gonna be okay. Just trust the process, and remember what you've learned and when you land? I’m taking you for coffee.”

You try to smirk, but it wobbles. “Coffee.”

“Or something stronger.” His mouth quirks. “Dealer’s choice.”

You nod once, trying to breathe past the knot in your throat. His hand lingers just a second longer, grounding, then falls away.

"Okay," you say, more to yourself than anyone else. "Let’s get this over with."

Before you can overthink it, Rooster takes the helmet gently from your hands and settles it over your head with a quiet, practiced motion. The visor lowers slightly as he steps back and taps the side.

“Godspeed.”

You don’t say anything, simply give him a look, because if you open your mouth now, you might lose your nerve.

And then you walk—wobble? march? shuffle?—toward the hangar, where Jake Seresin is waiting beside the jet with aviators and zero shame.

“Look at you,” he called, grinning like the sun. “All dressed up like a real pilot.”

You stop in front of him and cross your arms—partly to seem composed, mostly to hide the way your fingers are trembling. “You’re aware you’re the last person I want to see right now, right?”

Jake just grins, entirely unbothered as he passes you a replica of the tablet you'll be using the day of. “Give it ten minutes in the air. You’ll be singing a different tune.”

You take it while shooting him a look. “Highly doubtful.”

Jake just grinned wider, entirely undeterred. “That’s the spirit.”

Then he nodded toward the cockpit and stepped aside, one hand sweeping toward the ladder like he was inviting you to your doom with all the charm of a game show host. “Hop in.”

You gave the jet a long, slow look, then him. “Just remember—I’m the one with access to your digital footprint.”

“Don't worry, I promise we'll have fun." Jake winked.

You gave him one last flat stare, then looked up at the cockpit like it might lurch away if you got too close. The jet gleamed under the morning light, all sleek lines and barely concealed threat. Your stomach did a full somersault.

“You and I have astronomically different ideas of fun,” you muttered, hands tight on the ladder as you shakily began to climb.

Jake chuckled behind you, the sound entirely too amused for your liking. “That’s what makes this partnership so special.”

You didn’t dignify that with a response, mostly because your brain was too busy screaming IT'S OKAY, YOU'RE FINE on a loop while you hauled yourself into the back seat.

The cockpit was tighter than you expected—too many buttons, too little legroom, and absolutely no exit once that canopy closed. You slid in, stiff and awkward in the flight suit, your fingers fumbling with the harness as your nerves caught up to your hands.

“You good with the harness, or do you need a hand?” Jake asked, pausing at the top of the ladder with just enough smirk in his tone to be irritating.

“I have it,” you snapped, then immediately got the buckle caught in your sleeve.

“Sure you do.” He stepped closer, leaned in, and without waiting for actual permission, reached in to unhook, untwisting the strap and buckling it across your chest with the ease of someone who’s done this a thousand times. "You’re a whole government-certified genius, yet seatbelts are tricky.”

You clenched your jaw. “I was getting to it.”

“I believe you,” he said, clearly not believing you at all.

“Helmet?” he said, but he already was adjusting the chin strap and checking the comms line with irritating precision.

“There,” he said once everything was settled, slapping your helmet twice, making you wince. “Now you look like a real pilot.”

“Thanks,” you mumbled, the word slipping out before you could reel it back in.

Jake didn’t gloat, which was somehow worse; he just gave a crooked smile, like he was letting you have that one. “Anytime, Doc.”

Then he turned and hauled himself into the front seat with that same effortless grace, flipping switches and tapping controls like it was muscle memory.

You settled back, the harness tight across your chest, helmet a little heavier than expected, and every inch of you vibrating with nerves, tensing as the canopy sealed shut with a pressurized hiss, and suddenly everything felt very real.

The cockpit was smaller than it looked from the outside, like the world had narrowed to buttons, switches, and the sound of your own breathing echoing in your ears.

Jake’s voice crackled to life through the comms. “Comms check—how we doing back there, Doc?”

You cleared your throat. “Mildly regretting every life decision that led me here.”

“That’s a ‘loud and clear’ in pilot-speak,” he replied, flipping another switch. “Alright. Let’s light her up.”

The engines growled beneath you, the whole jet vibrating with coiled power. You felt it in your chest, your spine, the soles of your feet.

Jake’s voice crackled through your headset, smooth and practiced. “Tower, this is Hangman requesting clearance for takeoff. Got one backseat VIP and a perfectly good morning to ruin.”

"Oh, god!" Your hand was tight on the seatbelt.

A female voice crackled back, calm, smooth and efficient. “Hangman, you are cleared for runway three-five. Winds at five knots. Try not to scare her off, will you?”

“No promises, darling,” Jake said, grinning into his mic.

A faint "Ugh!" came through the comms.

You resisted the very strong urge to scream I can hear you, but you didn’t trust your voice not to crack.

Instead, you gripped the sides of your seat, tried to remember the breathing exercises Phoenix drilled into you, and muttered to yourself, “Okay. Just… breath.”

“Just think of it like a roller coaster,” Hangman said, voice as easy as ever. “A really fast, really expensive roller coaster. With missiles.”

"... I've never been on a roller coaster."

Jake let out a sharp laugh over the comms. “Well, hell. Firsts all around, then.”

You squeezed your eyes shut. “That’s not comforting.”

“Didn’t say it was,” he replied, clearly grinning. “But hey—at least I’m the one driving.”

The jet lurched forward, taxiing with more confidence than you currently had in your entire body. You could hear the subtle clicks and whirs as Jake ran through the final pre-checks, his voice calm as he rattled off confirmations to the tower.

Jake’s voice filtered through again, smooth as ever. “Okay, tower’s good to go. You’re strapped in, I’m charming as hell, the sun’s out—it’s a perfect day for a little ride.”

“God, I hate your voice,” you muttered.

He laughed. “You’ll miss it when I go radio silent during the loop.”

Your heart stopped. “What loop—?!”

Your question got swallowed by the roar of the engines as the jet picked up speed, the world outside streaking past in a blur of tarmac and heat shimmer.

The nose tilted skyward and the force slammed into you like a truck—your back flattened against the seat, the sky rushing toward you in a dizzying, g-force-laced blur. Your stomach dropped somewhere around your ankles as the ground vanished.

Your breath caught somewhere in your chest, maybe your soul, too and through it all, Jake’s voice came steady and maddeningly cheerful in your headset.

“Welcome to the sky, Doc.”

You didn’t open your eyes until the shaking slowed.

Even then, it was just a squint, enough to see sky and clouds and nothing solid whatsoever beneath you. You swallowed hard, barely able to focus as Jake leveled them out.

“There we go,” he said, like they hadn’t just ripped into the sky at bone-rattling speed. “Smooth as butter.”

Your mouth felt like sandpaper, your pulse thundering in your ears, and your hands were locked in fists so tight your knuckles ached—nails digging into the inside of your gloves like you were trying to anchor yourself to the Earth that was now very far below.

Jake’s voice came through again, “Still with me, Doc?”

“Barely,” you managed, voice rough.

“That’s fine,” he said easily. “You only need like… one lung for this.”

You didn’t dignify that with a response; your heart was still trying to beat its way out of your ribs.

“Hang in there, Doc,” Jake went on, maddeningly upbeat. “We’re running the basic sim—mock target tracking, maneuver drills. Nothing fancy. Just stay awake, listen for the tone, press the button on your panel, and try not to scream loud enough to spike the comms.”

You knew this—you’d done it in the sim more times than you could count. It just felt different now, with the sky actually moving around you and gravity trying to shake your teeth loose.

You unclipped the tablet with shaky hands but managed to power it on, fingers already flying through the familiar security layers. The interface booted up quickly, screen flashing through the loading prompts of your prototype system.

“I know the drill,” you muttered, not looking up.

“Good,” Jake said. “Because this time, it’s not a chair bolted to a fake cockpit. It's the real sky.”

You ignored him and focused on the startup sequence. The display for ETHERA glowed to life on your screen, diagnostic overlays already sweeping across the mock flight path.

“Target simulation’s loading in ten,” Jake said, tone shifting just slightly into something more focused. “Once I give the signal, you’ve got a few seconds to let her breach their Blackstar—just like in the sim. She’ll run her ghosts or whatever, and we’ll peel out before they know what hit ’em.”

You drew in one last breath and steadied your grip on the tablet, eyes locked on the countdown.

“Copy,” you muttered, voice clipped and controlled.

There was a beat of silence, then Jake’s voice cut in, smug as ever. “Look at you—almost sounded like a real aviator.”

“Don’t push it, Hangman.”

The timer hit zero.

“Go,” he called.

You tapped the screen without hesitation.

ETHERA spun to life like a second set of instincts. Streams of code rippled across your display as the system initiated its mock infiltration. Within seconds, the simulated Blackstar interface cracked open—mock enemy systems lit up on your tablet: communications, targeting schematics, internal logs. All exposed, all accessible.

“She’s in,” you said tightly, eyes locked on the data flowing in.

Jake let out a low whistle. “Hot damn.”

You didn’t wait for a reaction; your fingers were already flying across the screen, scanning the mock architecture as ETHERA slipped deeper into the system, laying digital breadcrumbs, mapping out pathways, preparing to ghost your signal off their radar entirely.

You were just about to execute the override when the jet banked hard.

Your whole body jolted, the Gs slamming you sideways into the harness as the tablet nearly slipped from your hands.

“Hangman!” you shouted, gripping the seat with both hands now. The tablet tumbled against your chest, still tethered but dangling.

“Oop—looks like we’ve been made!” Jake chirped, way too cheerful for someone yanking you through a tight evasive maneuver. “Time for some fun!”

The jet pitched into a sharp barrel roll, sky and sea flipping over each other like a blender set to maximum chaos.

You couldn’t breathe—literally couldn’t. Your lungs locked up, every muscle in your body tensed like they were bracing for death. The harness bit into your shoulders as the Gs slammed down, and you were 90% sure your soul tried to leave your body mid-roll.

Jake whooped over the comms like it was a rollercoaster. “Now that’s the good stuff! Let’s get low!”

The jet dove, slicing just above the simulated terrain, a blur of digital mountain ridges whipping past. Then up again, then a snap turn left, followed by a hard roll right that sent your tablet sliding sideways before you caught it with a wild swipe.

“Hangman—!” you managed, voice ragged and strained.

“Don’t worry, Doc, this one’s just a corkscrew,” Jake said casually, as the jet spiraled sharply downward before leveling out in a gut-lurching drop. “Keeps the ghosts scrambling.”

You wheezed like a deflating balloon. “What the hell does that even mean—!”

“Means your fake enemies are probably panicking. Which is great for us!”

Another hard bank to the left, then a roll that tipped you nearly upside down. Gravity vanished, reappeared, and tried to fold you in half, and thought all this, your ETHERA was still running.

Mock Blackstar systems glowed steadily across your tablet, icons shifting with your trajectory, responsive and alive. Despite the chaos outside, the code held.

The system was moving with you as it was programmed to do, yet, you could not deploy anything else, not because it couldn't, but because you were frozen in your seat.

“Breathe,” Jake said through the comms, and though it was still annoyingly smug, there was a thread of real focus beneath it. “Seriously, in through the nose, out through the mouth or, you know, scream. Either works.”

You clutched the tablet to your chest like it might somehow anchor you back to solid ground. “I hate you. How’s that?”

Jake laughed, full and unbothered. “Music to my ears.”

“Don’t talk to me.”

He was definitely grinning—you could hear it—right before he pulled another sharp dip that knocked the air from your lungs. Your fingers clawed at the harness, heart thudding so loudly it was practically echoing inside your helmet.

“That's enough, Hangman. Bring her home,” Cyclone’s voice cut through the comms, clipped and final.

“Copy that,” Jake said, voice sobering just a bit. The jet leveled out in one smooth motion, like all the chaos had been flipped off with a switch.

“You did good, Doc,” he said after a beat. Still calm and very much still irritating, but not unkind.

However, you didn’t answer, you didn’t even move.

As Hangman guided the jet back toward the base, smooth and casual like he hadn’t just flung you through the sky at Mach terror, you stayed frozen, shoulders locked, hands clenched, every muscle still braced for impact that didn’t come.

The landing jolted through the airframe, not rough, but enough to make you wince like it had hit bone. You exhaled slowly, only then realizing how long you’d been holding your breath. The harness dug into your chest, the helmet felt too tight, and your heart was still somewhere up in the stratosphere.

Jake popped the canopy with a hiss of pressure and sunlight.

You climbed down the ladder on legs that felt more decorative than functional—your boots hit the tarmac with a little more force than necessary, just to remind yourself you were back on solid ground. The helmet was off, your tablet tucked under one arm, and you were vaguely aware that your hands were still shaking.

Jake hopped down behind you, helmet tucked under his arm like he hadn’t just tried to give you a heart attack at 30,000 feet.

“See? Piece of cake,” Jake said, voice smug, but laced with something that sounded almost like genuine approval.

“Yeap,” you managed, though your voice came out faint, barely there.

The ground didn’t feel quite solid anymore, your knees buckled slightly, and the edges of your vision blurred like smudged ink, and just as you tried to blink it away, the world tilted.

You swayed once, then everything went quiet and black.

A/N:

HEYYYY!!!!! I just wanted to say thank you all for reading, like seriously, I had no idea this story would get big!! and I'm so glad people are enjoying it so much and supporting it too. <3<3<3<3<3<3

Another thing, the AC that is mentioned in this story, Hangman's beloved? yeah, that's you in a different font because I am lowkey thinking of making a hangman fic too.

Plot: He fell first and harder and you don't like him at alllll.

Anywaysss, once again I want to thank you all so so much for the support and love for this fic (and the patience)<3<3<3<3<3<3<3

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[lolly-in-a-strange-land]

aequoreal

Ch.4

At the start of the week, Fae had heard back from Willow. It was unusual for Willow to wait so long between texts and Fae assumed it was because of the stress of the whole situation. After college on Monday, she headed to her older sister’s apartment. Willow had left college and gone straight into a job as a cyber security worker and she’d worked her way to management level.

Fae arrived at the apartment at 4pm with some Reeses for her sister. The door opened and Willow smiled brightly, hugging her sister tightly. She practically dragged Fae inside. The apartment was warm and cozy, decorated with Willow’s various knick knacks. She loved horror films and had a collection of memorabilia.

“Did you wanna test out my new barista style coffee maker?” Willow grinned.

“You did not?” Fae gasped, getting up.

“Dropped $1300 on it. Come see.” Willow said.

Fae followed her into the modern kitchen. The silver and chrome barista style espresso machine was mounted to Willow’s countertop. It was stunning.

“It’s not pumpkin spice season yet, but I think we should have us some lattes.” Willow said.

“Absolutely.” Fae said.

Willow set up the machine and started making the lattes. Once she was finished, she handed one to Fae and picked up her cup, following Fae back to the lounge to sit down. They shared a packet of Oreos while they talked.

“I’m sorry I didn’t reply on Sunday,” Willow said. “Of course I want you to meet Katrina, but I was reeling from that shit with mom.”

“It’s ok. What actually happened. Mom was super cagey about it.” Fae said.

“I phoned mom on Saturday, asked her if I could bring someone for Sunday dinner. She asked who and I told her. I was tired of hiding myself and I’m 27 and allowed to be happy, ya know.” Willow said.

“I’m really happy for you, Wils.” Fae replied.

“I know you are. I appreciate it. And I know uncle Paul, Aunt Marla, Jake and Azzie will be too,” Willow said, softly. “But mom was not. She practically screeched at me. Accused me of being under the gay agenda, whatever that shit means, and told me Kat wasn’t welcome.”

“Did you get to speak to dad?” Fae asked, sipping her drink.

“Fuck no. Dad always sides with mom,” Willow said, ruefully, and then she huffed out an angry sigh. “Anyways, I wanna focus on all the nice things with Kat. We’re going to a cabin retreat next week. It’s gonna be amazing.”

“It sounds it. I loved going to that cabin when we were younger.” Fae said.

“The one in Vermont? Yeah, that was stunning. Shame, mom got in a fight with her sister and it all went to shit.” Willow laughed.

“Do you think aunt Denise is ok?” Fae asked.

“I have her on Instagram. She’s doing good,” Willow replied. “So, I hear my little sis has a boyfriend. And he’s a big, tattooed wrestler.”

“Yeah, his name’s Joe. We’ve been official for 4 weeks this week.” Fae said, blushing.

“How much of an aneurysm did mom have when she found out?” Willow cackled.

“She wasn’t happy. I sorta stormed out of the house on Sunday when she said he only wanted me for one thing.” Fae said.

Willow nodded and touched her sister’s shoulder. Fae rubbed her eyes with the sleeve of her top and Willow stared at her sister’s clothing. It was always jeans and a long sleeved top or very modest dresses. Wendy still had Fae’s wardrobe in a vice like grip, sending an allowance to Fae for college with the stipulation that it be spent on books and things for college. Wendy still picked Fae’s clothes out, like a child with a doll.

Willow had hated it. As soon as she was 14, she started rebelling, demanding to be able to pick out her own clothing. Naturally, her mother had disagreed. Arguments followed and for a while, Willow complied, then when she’d turned 20, Wendy had insisted on going shopping for swimwear and Willow wanted a bikini. That was a huge no and turned the shopping trip into a chaotic fight with poor Fae on the sidelines.

“You dress like that in front of Joe?” Willow asked, not wanting to come across as judgy or mean.

“Yeah, I try and wear dresses. He liked the one with blueberries on it.” Fae replied.

“The one I got you,” Willow sighed. “Why don’t you let me help you pick out some new stuff?”

“But the money I get isn’t for frivolities.” Fae said.

Willow winced at that term. ‘Frivolities’ was a Wendy word. It was half four now and the nearest mall wouldn’t close till 8pm. They had time to get Fae some new clothes, more fitting for a 23 year old, then have dinner at the food court and she could drive Fae home and burn all those old, unsuitable clothes that Fae was still using.

“I will pay for some of it,” Willow said. “Fae, do you even like the clothes?”

“Not really. But I don’t want to make mom sad.” Fae said.

“You’ve already made her sad by dating Joe. Make the next step and let me help you. Honestly, let me help you pick out stuff and I swear to you, you’ll get a good reaction from him.” Willow insisted.

Fae nodded and finished her latte. Willow drove them to the mall and they spent a few hours going store to store. Willow suggested high waisted skirts, some tight and some pleated, cropped t-shirts, cute summer dresses that showed off Fae’s figure. They had dinner together at their favorite Japanese buffet, and Willow drove Fae and the bags of clothing and accessories back to her dorm.

Once inside, she opened her sister’s closet and clicked on the overhead light to get a look. The clothing inside was dreadful, to put it mildly. The jeans were fine. They could stay and be worn with the cropped t-shirts. The long, hideous ankle grazing skirts could be burned. Some looked like tablecloths.

The next to go were the dresses. Most of them looked like something someone far older would wear. They were modest, yes. But they were also boring and aged Fae in a way that wasn’t helping. Next to be tossed was the swimsuit. It was a grey and pink one piece.

“He liked the one piece.” Fae said, shyly.

“He’ll like the bikini a lot more,” Willow said. “Trust me on this one.”

They put the new clothing in the closet and bagged up the old stuff. Fae had also purchased new panties and bras with Willow’s insistence. Once it had all been put away, Willow looked at her sister.

“What’s gonna happen to that stuff?” Fae asked.

“I’m burning it like I did with my old clothes,” Willow said, smirking. “Whenever mom buys you something new, take it back for store credit and get something suitable.”

Fae nodded. She was excited for Wednesday now. She had so many new things to choose

from. She could be herself. She thanked Willow and settled down for the evening.

*************

On Wednesday, she debuted a new outfit; a black high waisted skirt with a cropped t-shirt, tights and sneakers. The skirt was short but she felt like herself for the first time in a long time. She styled her hair into loose waves and applied minimal make up.

Her classmates didn’t notice the difference in her, but she felt like she fit in a lot better now. She’d received a good morning text from Joe. He’d boarded his flight back and she’d almost spoiled the surprise, barely able to contain herself.

Her lectures finished at 3pm and she practically skipped to the exit. She got to the steps leading down towards the street and looked around. She smiled when she saw the black SUV parked across the way. Fae watched the car door open and he got out, shutting the door and leaning against it.

His gaze found hers and she saw his jaw clench a little, dark eyes trailing down her figure, taking in the new clothes. She wanted to run to him. There were a few students milling around and she could hear the whispers as they started building.

But she still wanted to run to him. She started walking and it turned into speedwalking and a light jog. Roman caught her in his arms as soon as she was close enough. He couldn’t get over how different she looked. The skirt was tight and short, showing off her legs. And the t-shirt was cropped and tight enough to show off her figure. Her hair was in loose waves but she’d tied a little section off with a black bow.

She giggled when he scooped her up and he usually wasn’t one for public displays of affection, but he’d missed her and she’d clearly missed him. He knew he was in trouble, knew he wouldn’t be able to stop touching her. He set her back down again and leaned back against the car, still holding her hand.

“Turn for me, baby girl. Let me get the full view.” He said.

Fae turned carefully on the spot. The whole outfit was adorable. It suited her a lot more than the slightly frumpy dress she’d worn on their first date. Fae faced the front again and she looked a lot happier too.

“Do I look ok?” She asked, shyly.

“Better than ok, Fae.” He replied, still staring at her.

“I was a little worried about looking bad.” She said, shyly.

“I’m likin’ the view, Fae.” He said, pulling her closer.

She giggled again in that giddy way she always did. Her head tilted back to look up at him and she smiled.

“You look handsome also.” She said, blushing again.

“Tryin’ to make me blush, baby girl.” He teased.

“Did it work?” She asked.

“Try harder.” Roman smirked.

“Aw crud.” She said, pouting.

He chuckled at that. He opened the passenger door for her and she climbed in. He got in the driver’s side and shut the door. He steered the car away from the sidewalk. Fae glanced at him and she found she liked watching him drive.

“Supervising my driving.” He said.

“No, just watching….not supervising…..or judging.” She babbled.

“That’s a very rambly way to admit to bein’ turned on watching me drive.” He said.

“That is not what’s happening, Joe.” She said, drawing his name out in a way that made him laugh. It was petulant and she almost giggled at the end.

“You stain these seats and I’ll put you over my knee, Fae.” He said.

“I will beat you up.” She insisted.

“Not if I handcuff you to my fuckin’ bed, baby girl.” He replied.

“W-why do you own handcuffs?” She asked, voice going shrill with embarrassment.

He laughed again. She was staring at him, blushing again and waiting for an answer. He raised a brow at her and she seemed to put two and two together. She was a lot more giggly and excitable and it seemed the new clothing had given her a little more confidence.

They arrived back at his house and he parked the SUV, killing the engine and looking at her. She was staring at her hands in her lap. He gently laid a hand over hers.

“I missed you.” She said, softly.

She’d said it in the text she’d sent him last Sunday. So, this was the tone she was going for in that text. A slightly sad, but hopeful tone. He smiled a little and cupped her face, making her look at him. And she’d get to hear his tone for the reply.

“And I thought about you every second of every day, Fae.” He murmured.

“Could I come next time?” She asked.

“For Wrestlemania 41? Yeah, next year, you can.” He said.

“And that’s ok? I don’t want to be in the way.” She said.

“Always be in my way, Fae.” He said.

She smiled at that. Her cheeks flared red again and he kissed her forehead, shifting back and getting out of the car. She did the same, following him towards his house.

The inside was modern and tidy. Across the way was a huge flat screen tv mounted to the wall above a massive modern fire place. The lounge was open plan, leading to a huge kitchen. Fae looked around. This was amazing compared to her tiny dorm room. Roman watched her and walked over, wrapping his arms around her.

“You good, Fae?” He asked.

“Yeah, this is a really pretty house.” She said.

He smiled at that and held her close. And it was happening already. He didn’t want to let her go. She smelled nice too, like wild flowers. Had she bought new perfume too?

“Drivin’ me fucking crazy with how you look and smell, baby girl.” He murmured.

“I got new perfume. It’s Marc Jacobs. It’s in this really cute bottle.” She said.

“Not gon’ be able to stop touching you, Fae.” He said.

She giggled and that turned into a gasp when he nuzzled her neck, kissing the sensitive skin near her ear and she whined and tilted her head, offering complete submission. He wanted to keep going, take it as far as he could, but he didn’t want her feeling pressured and her comfort was far more important. He pulled back, but stayed close.

“Did you want to watch a film and order some food?” He asked.

“Can we order from Panda Express?” Fae asked.

“Whatever you want.” He smiled.

With the food ordered, they sat on the couch and she curled up on his lap as they watched a horror film. The modern horror films never really scared him. He’d grown up with icons like

Freddy Kruger and Jason Voorhees. Those guys were scary especially to a kid that watched those films when he wasn’t supposed to. Fae, however, seemed terrified by the alien film they were watching.

Dark Skies wasn’t scary, but Fae was hiding her face in his chest. He started rubbing her hair, carding his fingers through the auburn strands. She went limp against him, mewling softly. He smiled at that little noise.

“This film is a shitshow.” Roman said.

“No, it’s spooky.” She insisted.

“My poor baby scared of aliens.” He teased.

“Just you wait till the aliens take your thumbs.” She said, and he pulled back to look down at her.

“My thumbs? Why the fuck they want my thumbs, Fae?” He laughed.

“Aliens don’t have thumbs.” Fae said.

“You’re an expert on alien anatomy.” He said.

“I saw pictures as a kid and they don’t have thumbs,” Fae said, lifting her head to look at him.

“They want our thumbs.”

“So, this fear is completely rational. Good to know.” He said.

“You’re making fun of me.” She pouted.

“You come out with shit like aliens not havin’ thumbs then yeah.” He said.

She smiled and giggled again. She leaned back against him and snuggled into him. He kissed her forehead. The film didn’t matter too much. What mattered was this moment. The food arrived and they ate Chinese food together.

After they’d finished eating, Fae curled up again on his lap. They watched more films. Fae picked Pitch Perfect and seemed to be enjoying it. He picked Seven for the next film and she was a little scared of that too. It was approaching 8pm and time had gone so quick. Fae hadcollege tomorrow and he had training and a zoom meeting. Fae didn’t want to go home. She wanted to stay with him, but he probably wanted some time alone. Once Seven finished, she looked up at him and he gently traced his fingers across her cheek.

“I don’t want to go home.” She said.

“I know you don’t, Fae,” He said. “I do want you to stay, but it’s a little soon.”

She sagged a little and nodded. She rested her head against his chest again and didn’t move for a moment.

“Can I see you tomorrow?” She asked, softly.

“Not tomorrow, baby girl.” He replied.

“Ok.” She said.

“Friday, Fae. That good for you?” He said.

“Yeah, I’d like that.” She said.

He wrapped his arms around her. She lifted her head and looked up at him. Her eyes were full of affection. She desperately wanted to stay with him, but they’d only been together for 4 weeks and hadn’t seen each other for the last two. She rested her head against his chest, determined to soak up the affection until she had to go back to her dorm.

“Fae, talk to me, please.” He said.

“I’m sorry.” She whispered.

“Explain to me why you’re apologizin.’” Roman said.

“For being needy.” She said.

“That’s not somethin’ you need to apologize for,” He said, touching her cheek and making her look at him. “I have an early start tomorrow, baby girl. Don’t think I don’t want you here because I do.”

“I’m sorry.” She mumbled.

“Gon’ getchu a jar for all the unnecessary apologies.” He chuckled.

“Can I stay for a little longer, please?” She asked.

Her gaze was imploring and he leaned his forehead against hers. She’d very obviously missed him. He’d missed her too. It was quarter past 8 and what would an extra 45 minutes be. He didn’t want her to go either.

“You earned yourself an extra 45 minutes, Fae.” He said, and she squealed.

She hugged him and he smiled at that. 45 minutes felt like both a long time and not enough time, but she was happy with that. It was enough time for her to snuggle against him and relax.

“Which side of your family are Italian?” She asked.

“Mom’s side.” He said.

She was snuggled closer, head tilted up to look at him and he’d leaned down, maintaining eye contact with her, gaze tender as he watched her.

“Can you speak Italian?” Fae asked.

“Yeah, I’m fluent. Why?” He asked.

“Can I hear, please.” Fae said, and her cheeks went pink.

“Puttin’ me on the spot, baby girl.” He laughed.

“You can ask me to speak French.” She said.

“You know French, Fae?” Roman said.

“Rudimentary French. I can order coffee.” She said.

“That’ll really set the mood.” He said, and she giggled.

“And I can say thank you as well.” She said.

She smiled in that cute way and he couldn’t help but chuckle. She went to look away. She usually did when she became embarrassed or shy, but he wanted eye contact from her. She lifted her head again when he cupped her cheek. Her hazel eyes reminded him of a sunset with the flecks of amber and blue.

“Sei cosi bella,” He murmured, and her eyes went a little wider. “Tesoro mio.”

That fluttery feeling was building in her lower tummy, heat pooling there and she didn’t have a cold shower to drench herself under.

“W-what did you say to me?” She asked, softly.

“Nothin’ that wasn’t true, Fae.” He replied.

Her cheeks flared red again and she didn’t pull back when his lips brushed against hers. It should have been enough, but it wasn’t. His lips lingered and then he was kissing her again. And she moaned into the kiss. His control snapped at that little sound, that little go ahead from her. And he took control of the kiss, lips moving against hers. She was tentative and so nervous, but she pressed closer, showing she was eager. Her body pressed against his.

Her lips parted when his tongue demanded entrance and she surrendered to him, moaning again. Her small hands hesitated, but she didn’t need to be afraid to touch him. He pulled back from her lips, briefly, to drape her arms over his shoulders. She gasped when he kissed her again, pressing herself even closer. He could feel her softness against him. Their lips parted again and hers were swollen.

“Shift for me. Bring this leg over here,” He murmured, and she moved, shifting her position so she was straddling him. Her skirt hiked up in the most enticing way. “Atta girl. Don’t be shy.”

She blushed and he kissed her again. She pressed herself closer, squeaking into the kiss when he grabbed her ass through the skirt. It had been tempting him all afternoon and evening when she’d appeared in the short skirt. His other hand squeezed her thigh and she moaned into the kiss again. His mouth left hers, kissing down her jawline and towards her neck, which she tilted, allowing more access.

Fae’s lips parted in a soft whine and then a gasp when he bit her neck, sucking at the skin between her shoulder and neck, marking her. The hand on her thigh slid up, cupping her right breast through her t-shirt and she gasped again. She arched into the touch and was disappointed when he stopped, pulling back.

She looked at him and Roman looked back at her. His pupils were blown wide, staring at her. Any more and he’d end up fucking her. She deserved better than a quickie on his couch. She looked shy again, like she thought she’d done something wrong. Her hazel eyes were cautious and filled with anxiety. She tugged at her skirt a little, trying to hide herself.

“I-i did something wrong?” She asked.

“No, never,” He replied, taking her hand and kissing her knuckles. “Don’t leave here tonight thinkin’ you did anything wrong, Fae.”

“You stopped.” She said, plaintive and still nervous.

“One day soon, I won’t stop, I promise you, Fae,” He said, gently. “But I know you’re not ready yet. And your comfort, your safety, means more to me than anything.”

She smiled shyly and nodded. Her eyes lifted again and she leaned, resting her head on his chest. He gently stroked her hair, fingers carding through the auburn strands.

“I thought maybe it was because I was a bad kisser.” She said.

“No, your kissing technique was 10 outta 10.” He smiled.

She giggled softly and her body relaxed against his. He checked the time on his phone and it had just gone 9pm. Much as he wanted her to stay the night, it was time to drive her home. She seemed to realise that and moved when he tapped her leg. She adjusted her skirt, neatening herself up.

She was quiet on the drive home, possibly still a little sad that she couldn’t stay with him. He parked up at her dorm and she looked out the window, staring at the grey brick building.

“I finish college early on Fridays. Can I walk to the training centre and meet you?” She asked, softly.

“I’ll text you the address, baby girl.” He said, and she looked at him.

“T-this is gonna be a stupid question,” She said, suddenly and her soft eyes lowered. “But, will there be a day that I don’t have to come back here? That I’m with you permanently?”

Roman watched her. She was asking about the future of their relationship. He was in this for the long term. She was clearly hoping for long term as well. They’d both been up front about this when they started this nearly a month ago.

“Ask me again when we hit the year mark, Fae.” He said.

“That’s a long time.” She said.

“I know I said I wanted commitment and I do, but these are all things that will happen further down the line.” He said.

She nodded quickly and her silence was odd. She’d been giddy earlier, excitable even and now they were parting, she was quiet. It wasn’t a sullen, petulant silence, just an anxious, melancholic one. Very on brand for Fae.

“I’m being silly.” She said.

Her button nose wrinkled a little and she sniffled. She was sad, but was doing a very stellar job of hiding it. She needed comfort, reassurance. She squeaked when he moved her across the console onto his lap.

“Communicate with me please, Fae.” He said.

She looked uncertain and she clearly thought this would be some kind of burden on his time.

“I just….I missed you and it made me sad realising you’d be away a lot, but I wanted to be supportive and not talk about it because it’s a lot and I want to be with you all the time.” She said.

She whispered out an apology. Who had taught her that any expression of her feelings was a reason to apologise? Where had she learned this?

“Don’t you dare apologise, Fae. I ain’t mad at you. I get it,” He said. “I missed you too. Understand that this is my work, my career, and I don’t want to change it.”

“I don’t want you to. I’m proud of you.” She said.

“Then what did you want from this conversation?” He asked.

She shrugged and he cupped her face, making her look at him. She’d argued with her mom whilst he was away and she had probably wished he was actually here with her.

“Just to vent.” She said.

She wasn’t looking for a solution, she just wanted reassurance that one day she’d get to maybe live with him.

“What time did you leave your folk’s house after the argument?” He asked.

“About 12pm.” She said, softly.

An argument, followed by her being alone for a prolonged period of time, where she probably did cry and probably had wanted to speak to him.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t available, Fae.” He said, gently.

“It’s ok. It’s not your fault,” She said. “I’ve never stood up to my mom before.”

There it was. She’d fought her mom, someone she probably obeyed without question until now. She’d fought with her mom about him. She’d defended her right to date him and then left her family home. This had probably left her feeling even more alone. She’d made a sacrifice for him. And she wanted the reassurance that she’d made the right sacrifice, that her decision to defy her mother was the correct one.

“There will be a day when you wake up next to me and fall asleep next to me, Fae. Where I won’t have to drive you home because you’ll already be home.” He said.

“O-ok.” She said, and her lower lip wobbled.

“C’mere, it’s ok.” He murmured.

She leaned against him and sniffled and broke down. He’d never seen her cry before. Her eyes shone and the blue in them deepened, the hazel shifting to an almost bottle green mixed with amber. She wasn’t a loud crier, she was quiet and she must have learned to mask her emotions. Her cheeks were red now and so was her button nose.

“I got your t-shirt all damp.” She whispered.

“It’s ok.” He said, because it was fine.

She nodded and her sniffles quietened. The guilt that followed was awful and she felt like she’d ruined something.

“I ruined the evening.” She said.

“You didn’t ruin shit.” He said.

“I just didn’t want you to dump me.” She said.

“I’m not going to dump you, Fae,” He said, because that thought was almost laughable. “Let me walk you inside your dorm room.”

She nodded again and moved herself off his lap. He walked her back inside and turned around when she changed into her pajamas. She laid down under the comforter and he sat next to the bed, reaching out and brushing her hair from her face.

“Sweet dreams, baby girl.” He said.

“I hope you have sweet dreams too.” She whispered.

Her eyes drifted shut whilst he was stroking her hair. Fuck, he really didn’t want to leave. There was space behind her, space for him to slip in next to her and hold her all night. He got up, if he didn’t leave now, he wouldn’t. He pressed a kiss to her forehead and left the dorm room.

[cityzenshark]

How to fix certain things in Earthspark

The dugout,

Dorothy,

Alex,

the triplet's relationship with their family

This is my own take, no hard feelings

1. The dugout.

Have the parents plan the dugout with Wheeljack while Nightshade, JB and Thrash eagerly joins building it.

No one should be 100% okay if their dopted child builds an underground bunker on their own and without telling them at all. What if the barn collapsed?

The security systems Hashtag and Nightshade install are done without guidance from Wheeljack, hence why the siblings get stuck inside for ten hours in 'Security Protocols'.

They could've called Wheeljack for help in that episode.

TLDR; anyting regarding the bunker should've involve Wheeljack. It makes his character more relevant than being just Twitch's Dad-2.

2. Dot should be a more strict mother.

Please know the difference between strict and abusive.

She's a veteran who wants a normal life as a forest ranger only to get roped back into Transformers issues without her consent. On the same day, her kids found newborn Transformers and want them to be family from the get go?

Have her relunctant about it and have Alex talked her out. Have her warm up to the twins gradually. She just found out her dream job is bait for GHOST. If I were her, I'd be angry for a week.

After she fully warms up to twins, the warmth is then immediate to the triplets.

She shows actual concern about the kids' cyber-sleeves. Have Dot monitor the sleeves herself every episode until she's assured they are harmless. Then have her and Alex be worried triple time after 'Disarmed'.

She knows about the events of 'Home' and have the kids grounded while worrying about Hashtag's mental condition. They were in the city for heavens sake -- Dot and Alex were bound to know!

Think about June Darby. June is rightfully concerned about the kids being involved with the Autobots. Raf nearly died to something normal medicine can't cure, Miko is impulsive around soldiers, her own son went to a desolate alien planet. As a teenager, I find June annoying. Now as an adult, I find the kids even more annoying. Dorothy should've been more strict than June and Fowler combined because she was directly involved in the Cybertronian war.

It makes more sense if she doesn't want her children involved directly with Cybertronians at all. With the Terrans, there isn't much of a choice but to rely on Cybertronians so the Terrans could learn about themselves.

3. Alex is the person the kids and Terrans first get info about the 'Bots and 'Cons & he's the family's reassurer (idk the suitable word to use here).

The point of his profession in Cybertronian history is only shown in episode 1. That's it. He should be the first person the kids go to when they want to know about a Bot or a Con and anything Cybertronian related.

Have him be more open about Cybertronians than Dot. Sure Dot is shown to be positive with Cons changing their ways because she's friends with a redeemed Megatron, but she's also seen the Cons' heinous actions so she's likely reluctant to talk about them/double standards.

Things like these can be offscreen by having dialogues mentioning them: "Dad says Optimus used to--" / "Dad told us--" bla bla bla

Mention his past connections with Meridian clearly. I have no idea about that until @monocle-teacup mentioned it.

3. Aside from each other, the triplets are closer to the parents than their older siblings.

Hashtag is close to Twitch but after 'Home', perhaps it's best to see her going to Dot for help and get a bit clingy.

Nightshade and Alex should have more screentime togather. Alex did introduced NS the book that lead him to the author's grave where NS gets their alt mode.

NS is essentric by copying the main character of said book. Kids often copy their favourite fictional character, so why not? And when they get into character, Alex plays along.

JB can be ruled out from this as he is close to Mo but something feels missing... I can't pinpoint where though.

to e continued maybe