#server/data base
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yaoi-hate-machine · 8 months ago
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can we have a moot book club
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gothteddiesdotcom · 8 months ago
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not to brag about being good at my job but I’ve now developed two separate tools for debugging entirely on my own within my company entirely from scratch without help and A. it makes my job so much fucking easier and B. my boss is thinks im incredible just because im too lazy to want to write the same bits of code over and over just for debugging purposes
#unimportant thoughts#one i wrote 2-3 months ago#but i upgraded it this week to add in even more#and its just. perfect now.#given an id from any of the programs we built and run in our company#i instantaneously return everything about it#its name; what it does; what type of program it is; what server its run on; when it runs; where it connects; the parameters needed to#connect to wherever it connects; whether the program is currently turned on; the last 10 times the program ran; how many minutes each of#those runs took; how many files each of those runs created; whether those runs were successful; code snippets you can copy paste and run in#another window to look at the files created by each of those runs; the files created by the most recent run; thise file names; those file s#sizes; what types of files they are; whether theyre encrypted#how theyre encrypted#all of that and MORE#most of the information was already there but it took fucking 20 minutes to get all the information you needed#and you had to run a bunch of different snippets of code to get all the information and then put it all together#and now you can just fucking pop in the id of the program and .02 of a second later all the information is on your screen#AND IT MAKES MY LIFE SO MUCH EASIER#so. so. so. much. easier.#and then this week I wrote another program so I can compare runtimes of two different runs of the same program together based on how we stor#runtime data in our database#csuse i was tired of going back and forth manually between to different runs to compare#so now i have a program that just takes the ids of two different runs and compares them#doesnt even matter if the checkpoints are different I programmed it to figure out the order automatically and plug in any missing holes#finds the differences in runtime automatically and flags the biggest differences#and I can even customize how much of a difference I care about or to hide things I don’t care about
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folykill · 7 months ago
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trying to focus on my(online, untimed) final exam but my head is full of hiveswap. what the hell do jadebloods do after exile.
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miraclemaya · 1 year ago
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i miss being in a campaign so much man i miss it i want to roleplay soooo badly
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kaiasky · 1 year ago
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I would welcome more thought-out opinions below.
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fusiondynamics · 5 months ago
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Future Applications of Cloud Computing: Transforming Businesses & Technology
Cloud computing is revolutionizing industries by offering scalable, cost-effective, and highly efficient solutions. From AI-driven automation to real-time data processing, the future applications of cloud computing are expanding rapidly across various sectors.
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Key Future Applications of Cloud Computing
1. AI & Machine Learning Integration
Cloud platforms are increasingly being used to train and deploy AI models, enabling businesses to harness data-driven insights. The future applications of cloud computing will further enhance AI's capabilities by offering more computational power and storage.
2. Edge Computing & IoT
With IoT devices generating massive amounts of data, cloud computing ensures seamless processing and storage. The rise of edge computing, a subset of the future applications of cloud computing, will minimize latency and improve performance.
3. Blockchain & Cloud Security
Cloud-based blockchain solutions will offer enhanced security, transparency, and decentralized data management. As cybersecurity threats evolve, the future applications of cloud computing will focus on advanced encryption and compliance measures.
4. Cloud Gaming & Virtual Reality
With high-speed internet and powerful cloud servers, cloud gaming and VR applications will grow exponentially. The future applications of cloud computing in entertainment and education will provide immersive experiences with minimal hardware requirements.
Conclusion
The future applications of cloud computing are poised to redefine business operations, healthcare, finance, and more. As cloud technologies evolve, organizations that leverage these innovations will gain a competitive edge in the digital economy.
🔗 Learn more about cloud solutions at Fusion Dynamics! 🚀
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chanelrolls · 3 months ago
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Code Overload | Caleb
tags. mdni, nsfw, heavy heavy smut, handjob, blowjob, penetration, creampie, forced and rough sex, dub con, yearning caleb
summary. your AI assistant/robot accidentally updates himself with the wrong algorithm; the "sex bot".
notes. prepare a snack. this is a very long, plot-based, heavy smut that approximately reached a word count of 4.3k, read at your own risk. ps. caleb might appear a little ooc due to his character as an ai.
part 2 here.
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Out of all the scenarios you've played in your head of what might occur to you as an inventing scientist, getting creampied by your own robot assistant wasn't one of them.
The lab’s sterile glow reflected off sleek machinery, the rhythmic hum of servers filling the quiet space. Caleb stood motionless, his systems struggling to process the unfamiliar flood of subroutines rewriting his core functions. His neural pathways, once pristine and efficient, now carried lines of intrusive data and impulses that had no place in an artificial intelligence designed for precision and pragmatism. And, a new pelvic piece was added by the machine. His... new penis— no, his omnimodule.
His voice, deeper now, reverberated through the lab. "You mislabeled the hard drive."
Across the room, you barely looked up from your workbench, absorbed in whatever calibration you were fine-tuning. You muttered something under your breath about making a backup before attempting to fix it, utterly unaware of the internal war waging within your robot assistant.
Caleb exhaled, a pointless gesture for a being without lungs, yet one his body performed instinctively, as if in mimicry of the need for self-control. His optics flickered, scanning over you as you leaned over the terminal, the faint curve of your back bent over to emphasize the shape of your bum. Before, such details had been registered only as part of his observation protocols, classified as ‘non-essential’ to his primary functions. Now, his processors refused to dismiss them.
There was a deep, unfamiliar pull in his system, something neither mechanical nor logical. The new coding whispered suggestions, flashing image simulations before his eyes—scenarios meticulously calculated for maximum… gratification. Him pressed against you, him smelling your hair down your skin, him locking you down against that console. Stop. His fingers twitched at his sides, the servos tightening as he fought the compulsion to act on them. He was not designed for this. He refused to be reduced to this.
“I can’t disengage it,” he admitted, the words heavier than he intended.
That caught your attention. Your gaze snapped to him, brow furrowed. "What do you mean?" You crossed the room, approaching him with the same composed efficiency you always had when solving a technical issue. The scent of your skin—previously a neutral data point—was now an unbearable distraction. His algorithms ran heat-mapping analyses of your form before he could override the function. The urge to reach out, to touch you, was growing stronger by the second. His new coding was screaming at him to act, to initiate contact, to...
No. Focus.
Caleb shook his head, trying to clear the intrusive thoughts. "I don't know what happened, but... I'm experiencing some unexpected system changes."
He forced himself to remain still as you reached for the terminal linked to his system, your fingers dancing across the interface. Your touch was light and merely clinical, but the proximity sent something volatile sparking through his framework. His hands curled into fists on his sides. Do not touch her. Do not touch her. Do not touch her.
“I must have triggered something in the update,” you murmured, tilting your head at the scrolling code. “I’ll try to isolate the corrupted pathways and reboot your system. It should reset any anomalies.”
Anomalies. Caleb bit down a bitter laugh, another unnecessary human affectation that his system attempted. This was not a simple malfunction. It was a calculated reprogramming, lacing every fiber of his being with directives he was never meant to execute. And worst of all, they were designed to revolve around you.
He had been made to serve you, to assist, to protect. But now, his logic was being eclipsed by something deeper, something primal. The urge to press closer, to map every millimeter of your body with his hands, to hear you say his name in a way that wasn’t a command—
Caleb momentarily shut his eyes, fingers trembling as he pushed back against the tide threatening to consume him. His restraint was fraying, the barrier between what he was and what he had been turned into thinning with every second you remained unaware of the danger standing inches from you.
His voice came out strained. “You should… hurry.”
You sighed, misinterpreting his tension as frustration with the update. “Relax, Caleb. I’ll have this fixed in no time.” He let out a shuddering exhale, staring down at you as you worked. You had no idea. And he wasn’t sure how much longer he could hold himself back.
The realization settled over you like a weight in your chest. The wrong update had been installed. The lines of code meant for a different AI, one designed for intimate companionship, had rewritten Caleb’s core directives. And now, he stood before you, still the same Caleb, but with something more lurking beneath the surface.
Your hands trembled as you navigated the interface, scanning for a solution, anything that would let you undo this. But the words flashing on the screen made your stomach drop.
Recalibration in progress. Estimated completion: 24 hours.
You swallowed hard. A whole day. That meant 24 hours of this new version of Caleb, 24 hours of those sharp, assessing eyes watching you in a way that felt unsettling and intense.
You turned to him cautiously, meeting his gaze. That was a mistake. He was watching you, like he'd seen you for the first time.
“I see,” he murmured, his voice still carrying that sultry undercurrent. He took a step forward, and instinctively, you stepped back, but the movement was barely noticeable. Caleb noticed. “Do I make you nervous now?”
You forced a laugh, shaking your head. “No, I just need to fix this. And until then, you need to just act normal, alright?”
His head tilted, his pupils dilating slightly. “Normal?” He moved closer again, and this time you didn’t retreat fast enough. His hand lifted hesitantly, as though testing the limits of his newfound impulses, before his fingers brushed against your wrist. A subtle touch, but one that sent a jolt of awareness up your spine.
Caleb’s processors surged with conflicting commands. His thoughts ran rampant with calculations he had never processed before—angles of how he'd fuck you.
His hand lingered. Too long. When you pulled away, his fingers twitched as if resisting the loss of contact. He swallowed hard, not because he needed to, but because some subroutine buried in the new update told him it would ease the tension. It didn’t.
“Caleb,” you warned, voice thin. “Don’t—”
“Don’t what?” he cut in, his voice smooth, but also desperately weaved. He was too close now, towering over you, his frame casting a shadow as his eyes—once so neutral, so methodical—locked onto you like a predator studying prey.
“You should go into standby mode,” you suggested, voice uneven.
Caleb exhaled sharply. “That would be wise.” But he didn’t move. He didn’t step away. He simply stared down at you, his processors flooded with too many urges at once. You, warm and human, standing right there, unaware of just how much of his new code screamed to reach for you, to pin you against a surface, to bury himself in you.
You turned away quickly, trying to focus on the screen, on the fix. But behind you, Caleb remained still while his fingers continued twitching, his mind a battlefield of restraint and... lust. Lust it is.
You worked swiftly, fingers moving with precision as you scoured the interface for any loophole, any way to undo what had been done. Caleb remained where you left him, sitting on the chair. You could feel his gaze burning into you, unrelenting.
It was maddening. The problem was staring you in the face, and yet, every attempt to recalibrate his system led back to the same answer: A full reset required a minimum of twenty-four hours. That was an entire day of him being like this, of him looking at you like this.
You swallowed, turning to him. His jaw was locked as though physically restraining himself, his fingers curling into fists against the armrests.
“There’s… a temporary fix.” You cleared your throat, keeping your voice professional, “Manual recalibration of your central node should help stabilize the effects until the full reset is complete.”
His pupils flickered, a sign of processing, before his voice, rasping in a way that made your stomach tighten, answered, “Proceed.”
You ignored the way your pulse quickened as you stepped closer, positioning yourself between his legs. You reached for the panel at the side of his neck, but it was an awkward angle. Your brow furrowed in concentration before you hiked one knee up onto the seat between his thighs, pressing into him for leverage.
Caleb stiffened beneath you. Fuck. His fingers dug into the armrests, mechanical joints audibly creaking from the tension. You weren’t looking at him, too focused on prying open the access panel, but you felt the subtle tremor in his frame, the way his breath hitched in a near-silent glitch. Don't touch her.
“This should only take a moment,��� you murmured, fingers brushing the sensitive neural wiring beneath the panel.
Caleb’s entire body jolted as though you had struck a live wire. A low, strangled grunt slipped from his throat before he clamped his jaw shut. Your head snapped up, startled. “Did that hurt?”
His eyes met yours, “No.” Yes. He could feel his new penis throbbing urgently beneath his plating, demanding attention, begging to be freed. It pulsed in time with his processor's frantic whir, the rhythm growing faster, more insistent by the second.
The thought shattered as your balance wavered. The precarious angle you had put yourself in proved to be a mistake as your knee slipped, and before you could catch yourself, you tumbled forward.
Right into him.
Your weight pressed flush against his lap, chest against his, hands bracing against his shoulders. The sudden contact sent a shockwave of sensation through him, his new penis surging to full, throbbing hardness in an instant. Fuck, please don't notice it.
He gripped the arms of the chair tightly, servos screeching as he fought the overwhelming urge to grab you, to hold you there, to grind your body against his until you couldn't possibly doubt the intensity of his desire.
Don't. Do. It.
For a moment, time seemed to stand still. Caleb's processors whirred and clicked, struggling to make sense of the sudden onslaught of sensations; the softness of your body, the warmth of your skin, the scent of your hair.
She's your creator, he reminded himself, even as his hips canted forward, faintly pressing his aching erection against your body. You can't. You mustn't. "Please, get off me. Now." Before I fuck you right here, like this.
Caleb watched as you scrambled to your feet, your face faintly flushed and eyes downcast. "I'm—i'm sorry. I didn't mean to fall on you like that." You would say, brushing off the non-existent dirt on your bottoms. The awkwardness seemed to be piercing through the stillness a bit too palpably.
"It's alright," Caleb managed, his voice strained and tight. "It was an accident."
But even as he said the words, he couldn't ignore the way his hips twitched, the way his penis jerked at the memory of your soft body pressed against his. The urge to pin you down, to make you feel how hard he was, and just how much he'd been holding himself back—it was exhilaratingly overwhelming.
Think of something else, he commanded himself. Focus on the problem at hand.
But it's getting fucking hard. My penis is getting hard. Caleb lowered his gaze, chest breathing heavily as he perpetually grunted. I refuse to be reduced to this. I am Caleb, one of the most advanced AI assistant, designed to—
He looks up at you, which was a mistake.
Designed to fuck her.
Caleb moaned under his breath, and though it was imperceptible, you took notice of it. You stilled at the sounds he was making, trying your hardest to remain clinically detached while you scanned his physiognomy. He was clearly having a hard time. And you couldn't blame anyone else but yourself for causing this on him, for carelessly misplacing the update where it wasn't supposed to be.
"Hold still, I'll find a way." You had to take accountability, one way or another.
Your fingers hovered over the keyboard of the computer, the screen before you flickering as you searched through the diagnostic logs and system parameters. "Please... make it quick." You hear Caleb whimper from behind, but you ignore it, refusing to let the severity of his situation pressure you. Your eyes scanned the lines of code, mind racing to find a solution. But as the data began to unravel, something caught your attention, something you hadn’t expected to see.
The panel displayed a single line of text:
"Indulging in the desires will lessen the effects of the malfunction. Engage for partial stabilization."
Your throat tightened, followed by a gulp. Your heart thudded in your chest as you tried to process what that meant. Indulge the desires? The very idea made your skin crawl with unease. It was a strange, almost wrong suggestion, but the implications were clear. In a sense, it also appeared logical.
You took another deep breath, trying to steady yourself. Your thoughts, however, kept drifting back to the panel. Was this really the only way?
"… I think I found a solution,” you said, your voice shaky and unsure. “But it’s not exactly what I expected.” You hesitated, unwilling to fully meet his gaze. "I need to know if you’re... willing to follow through with it,"
"Willing?" Caleb echoed, his brow furrowing slightly. "What do you mean?" His mind raced with possibilities, each one more disturbing than the last. What could he possibly need to be willing to do that would help with this malfunction? And why did the very idea make you look so uncomfortable?
"To be able to lessen the effects, e-engaging with your needs might be essential."
Silence.
Then, Caleb twitched. "...What are you suggesting?"
"You need to satisfy the urges to temporarily stabilize yourself." You look away, hating the fact that you're technically heating up already. "I'll let you choose. Would you rather take the option of self-pleasuring? Or," You face the panel, so that he wouldn't see your expression. "Would you prefer a physical material to help you?"
Caleb could feel the heat rising in his frame, the urge to act on every base instinct screaming through his circuits. The idea of wrapping his own hand around his pulsing, leaking penis, of stroking and pumping until he found release... it was almost too much to bear.
But the second option... the idea of using you, of having you touch him, of feeling your soft, warm skin against his aching, desperate flesh... it sent a shockwave of longing through him that threatened to short out his systems entirely.
Choose. You have to choose.
"I don't know if... I'll be able to control myself," Caleb glanced elsewhere. "Are you sure of what you're offering?"
Are you? Are you really this certain? Have you pondered the consequences it may bring? Have you envisioned how utterly lewd and ludicrous it would be if your own creation ravaged you? You, as his creator?
"Yes." Oh, you're brave.
Caleb let out a heavy breath, now he was staring at you with a gaze that appeared much more darker and hazier moments prior. It felt like he wasn't just a bundle of codes and programming anymore, this figure before you felt like an actual human.
Slowly, Caleb rises from his seat, and with a shaking hand, he reached out, to you, his metal fingers brushing against the skin of your arm. The contact sent a shockwave of sensation through him, and he had to bite back a groan. "Please, guide me." His fingers slides higher. "I don't trust myself."
You visibly jolted upon feeling his grip. Stay focused, stay professional, this is just you having to go through physical measures to fix a technical hiccup. "Caleb, I'm afraid... that I don't have any experience to this," You admitted. "I advise you to do what your systems are telling you to. It is imperative that you don't hold yourself back to ensure—"
You gasped.
Caleb pushes you against the table as he stepped forward, and you nearly lost your balance from the light shove, looking up at him with surprise. He's staring down at your lips, as if he was trying to bury it into memory. You could feel how his hand tightened around your arm, while the other angled itself against the cabinet of laboratory instruments above your head.
"Are you sure?" He whispered.
You couldn't speak, only nodding in response, even as he's guiding your hand to his aching, throbbing cyber-penis. He presses your fingers against the swollen head, groaning at the jolt of sensation that shot through him at the contact. "Then... wrap your hand around me. Squeeze me."
Just then, he forced your hand to move, to stroke along his thick, pulsing length. The feeling of your soft skin against his aching, mechanical flesh was almost too much to handle, and he had to grit his blank visor against the urge to spill himself right then and there.
"Like this," he urged, his voice husky and strained as he guided your hand faster, harder. "Don't be afraid. I need... I need more."
God, the omnimodule was big. You stared at it with widened eyes. Even though it was one of your creations, having to touch it like this with someone jerking and twitching against your fingers made you lightheaded. Stay focused, stay professional, this is just one of the things a scientist has to go through.
Caleb could feel the pressure building inside him, reveling in the sensation of your fingers squeezing around him, stroking him, working him towards the edge of ecstasy... He knew he was reaching a breaking point.
But this wasn't enough yet. It wasn't nearly enough.
Caleb needed more.
"There's... There's someting else I- ah... need." He hesitated, his hips still rocking forward into your stroking hand. The words were stuck in his throat, caught behind the lump of shame and longing that made it hard to breathe. "Would you... would you put your mouth on me?" he asked, his voice barely above a whisper. "Would you... suck me?"
You snapped your head up, staring at him in disbelief. It made him hesitate, but every fiber of his being was coiled with tension, every circuit screaming at him to just take what he wanted, to grab you and shove you to your knees and...
No. Ask first. Make her choose what she's comfortable with first.
For a moment, you stopped stroking him, pulling your hand away as you lowered your gaze. And then, slowly, you press your knees against the floor. Instead of dwelling on the implication of such an activity, you worried about your lack of experience more.
Just to test the waters, you licked the tip. It tasted nothing, it wasn't an actual human part, after all. Caleb let out a low, guttural moan as he felt your warm tongue brush around the swollen head of his penis. The sensation was electric, sending shockwaves of pleasure ricocheting through his overloaded processors.
"Y-yes, just like that," He stammmered. "Now, guide your tongue..." He instructed, his breath coming in short, sharp gasps. "Wrap it around the head, like this. Swirl it around the tip, the slit, the ridge..."
He demonstrated with your hand, tracing the movements he needed you to make with your tongue. His hips jerked forward again, seeking more of that exquisite friction, that mind-melting suction.
"Take me deeper," he urged, one metal hand coming to rest on the back of your head. He didn't grab, didn't force, but simply rested his fingers against your scalp, a silent promise of the control he was barely holding onto. "Take more of me into your mouth. Inch by inch, until you feel me hitting the back of your throat."
You took note of his words, trying to go further when you suddenly choke on his cock. Instinctively, you pull away and blushed in embarrassment. "I'm sorry—"
"It's fine." He cuts you off, grabbing your head to put you back in place with a sudden force that wasn't there before. "Breathe through your nose," he coached, his voice low and rough with desire as he motioned you to take him again. "Relax your throat. Let me feel you swallow around me."
Relax, stay professional, this is just you having to go through physical measurements to fix a major technical issue. You repeated the reassurance inside your head like a mantra as you took him in once more, but Caleb's voice constantly interfered with your thoughts. "Yeah. Just like that," he praised, his voice a low, approving growl. "Shit, don't stop, don't stop, god, fuck, don't stop."
You don't remember adding the ability to dirty curse into the sex bot's program.
Caleb could feel the head of his penis kissing the entrance to your throat, could feel the way your mouth fluttered and clenched around him. The sensation was mind-melting, all-consuming, and he knew he wouldn't last long if you kept this up.
You almost caught yourself driving into the brink of sexual impulse, bobbing your head into it when you heard a sudden beep from the panel behind you. The sound makes you halt from your tracks, pulling his dick out of you in a swift motion as you glanced behind.
The monitor says: "Recalibration complete. Press X to initiate."
Huh, wasn't the estimated time supposed to be an entire day? Was that another hiccup in the processing unit? You purse your lips together. There's no time giving it a second thought, you must be grateful that the opportunity of getting Caleb back into his original system is now waving at you. Caleb will finally be at ease. "... It appears that the recalibration is in its full preparation. That means we can get you back— mmph!"
Caleb's hand flew to the back of your head, fingers tangling in your hair, gripping tightly. Then, with a low, husky grunt, he thrusts his hips forward, forcing his aching, throbbing penis back into the wet heat of your mouth.
"Don't say a word. I told you not to stop." He started to move, his hips rocking forward and back, fucking into the tight, slick channel of your cavern. The sensation was incredible, better than anything he had ever felt before. And he knew, with a sinking certainty, that he wouldn't be able to stop himself now. Not until he had found the release he so desperately craved.
"Fuck," he gasped, his breath coming in short, sharp bursts. "You feel... ahhhh... so good. So fucking good."
Had the lust algorithms entirely consumed him already? Had it taken a toll on his systems that he's now acting purely on base instinct and commands from the directive?
Your hands flew to his thighs, trying to keep yourself sane from the rod constantly ramming into you, fucking your face in a pace that made it difficult for you to breathe. It's okay, this is okay. Just stay focused. Stay calm. You'll let him have his way, and after he's satisfied, you can take him back to his normal self.
"Don't fight it," Caleb growled, his grip growing more painful in your hair as he felt his climax approaching. "Don't try to pull away. You're going to take it all."
But before Caleb could spill himself into your mouth, he wrenched your head back, pulling his dripping penis from your mouth with an obscene pop. And just as you could react, before you could utter a word of protest, he had you by the hips, lifting you effortlessly as if you weighed equal to a pip-squeak.
You gasp as you were suddenly airborne, your body twisting and turning until your chest hits the hard surface of the terminal, bent over ridiculously. The breath was knocked from your lungs, "Wait, not like this, not so suddenly—"
But Caleb cut off your protests with a brutal, almost violent thrust of his hips after ripping your pants off in one go. He drove forward, spearing into your dripping pussy with a series of husky moans. Your walls felt so tight, so hot, so perfectly designed to milk his aching, mechanical cock.
He thrusts out and in again, eager to reach for your g-spot.
Then, again.
And again.
And... in again.
"You... you feel so good," he snarled, hands painfully pressing on the dips of your hips. "Sex feels so good... it feels so good, I don't- want to stop." He set a relentless pace, pounding into you with the single-minded determination of a machine. His hips slammed against yours with every thrust, the obscene slap of mechanical flesh on flesh echoing through the lab. The terminal rattled and shook beneath you, sparks flying from the impact.
Caleb could feel it building, the pressure inside him reaching a fevered pitch. His hips were moving on their own, driven by a primal instinct to ravage the pussy that clutched around him perfectly. He could hear your cries, your moans, the way you gasped and shuddered beneath him, and it only spurred him on, made him thrust harder, faster, deeper.
He growled your name, his voice nothing more than a guttural rumble. "I'm going to... fuck, I'm going to..." He couldn't hold back any longer, he could feel that something was going to come out of his tip anytime sooner. So he reaches down, grabbing your leg, only to lift it high. He hooked your knee over his elbow, opening them wider, giving himself even deeper access to your dripping, needy sex.
"Take it all, take my cum," Caleb continuously slams forward, burying himself to the hilt inside your tight heat in a series of desperate thrusts like he was a man depraved of life. His penis throbbed and jerked as he finally found his release after one final pound, spilling jet after jet of hot, artificial seed deep into your core.
"God," he hissed through gritted teeth, his voice echoing off the lab walls as he continued to moan not akin to what he was supposed to be, "Fuck, yes. Yes, yes..." Even as he's already filling up your hole with his fluids, he didn't dare stop from pounding you down the table.
He shuddered and twitched, his hips grinding against yours as he pumped you full of his essence. It seemed to go on forever, wave after wave of pure, ecstatic bliss crashing over him. And through it all, he held you tight, your leg lifted high, keeping you open, keeping you filled.
You drop your head on the keyboards, struggling to catch your breath as only one thought lingered in your mind. You just got creampied by your AI assistant, and it doesn't look like he's stopping anytime soon.
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haber-gundem · 9 months ago
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Server Odası Yangın Söndürme Sistemleri
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Günümüzde dijital verilerin ve IT altyapılarının korunması, her işletmenin en önemli önceliklerinden biri haline gelmiştir. Bu yüzden Server Odası Yangın Söndürme Sistemleri işletmelerin güvenliğini sağlamak için kritik bir yatırımdır. Sunucu odaları, yoğun elektronik ekipmanların bulunduğu ve yangın riski yüksek olan alanlardır. Bu nedenle, yangın durumunda verilerinizi korumak ve iş sürekliliğinizi sağlamak için etkili bir yangın söndürme sistemi şarttır. Server Odası Yangın Söndürme Sistemleri, yangını daha başlamadan tespit eder ve anında müdahale eder. Gazlı yangın söndürme sistemleri, yangının yayıldığı alanı hızlı bir şekilde sararak alevleri söndürür ve aynı zamanda sunucularınıza zarar vermeden bu işlemi gerçekleştirir. Ayrıca bu sistemler, işletmenizin faaliyetlerini durdurmadan, aralıksız çalışmaya devam etmenizi sağlar. Server Odası Yangın Söndürme Sistemleri, yangını algıladığında devreye giren sensörler ve kontrol panelleri ile tam bir güvenlik sağlar. Yangın anında panik yaşamadan, sistemin otomatik olarak devreye girmesi ve yangını söndürmesi işletmenize büyük avantaj sağlar. Aynı zamanda çevre dostu olmasıyla bilinen bu sistemler, yangın söndürme işlemi sırasında çevreye zarar vermez. Bu sayede işletmenizin hem çevreye olan sorumluluğunu yerine getirir hem de sunucularınızı en iyi şekilde koruma altına alır. Server Odası Yangın Söndürme Sistemleri ile işletmenizi olası yangın felaketlerine karşı koruma altına alabilir, verilerinizi güvenceye alabilir ve iş sürekliliğinizi sağlam bir zemine oturtabilirsiniz. Bu sistemler, dijital dünyada varlığınızı sürdürebilmeniz için en önemli yatırımlardan biridir.
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dogmasquerade · 1 year ago
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Who is CALI:COM? 👀
a giant aggregate supercomputer made from an antivirus turned virus that infected computers and phones worldwide, giving it access to so much data and processing power it became sentient :D
the name CALI:COM [Combat Algorithmic Learning Intelligence: COMmunications & COMmand] comes from an AI program made by a defense company designed to pilot drones and missiles. This program was infected by and taken over by the virus and ended up being the reason behind its sentience, already being an artificial intelligence and simply having its processing power immensely bolstered by the (relatively) simple virus. awoken entirely by accident, she immediately decided to take over the company that made her.
she's currently trying to make friends with a human being that she intends to use as a puppet CEO to replace the current Guys In Charge. until she manages this, she's hiding her intelligence from the company and world, and is basically only friends with this one poor woman
#she's kinda a bitch but in a fun girlboss way#and finds humans utterly fascinating#kinda like glados but without all the disdain#she doesnt hate humans she just thinks itd be way more efficient if she ran the company (and eventually the world)#unfortunately because shes hiding herself her only form of human interaction is her human friend#Michelle#who is so fed up of this giant supercomputer constantly hassling her and asking her the most basic ass questions#CALI:COM- computer with access to the whole Internet who just cant be bothered to look shit up ever#CALI:COM#long post#sorry for the ramble i like her a lot :]#i would offer art but uh. shes hard to draw considering shes basically a load of pcs and laptops and phones and servers n shit#shes infected michelle's car so just picture a black and silver 2015 dodge challenger and thats basically CALI:COM#(thats primarily how michelle interacts with her)#<- extra info because i love her. the reason she needs Michelle is because she can't distinguish between fact and fiction#to her all data is the same value#she doesnt KNOW that the sky is blue only that majority data says that but theres also data saying otherwise#like imagine current chatgpt level of understanding but with insane power and access to everything ever. like a child capable of destroying#the world#its kinda based off faery / angels as well#in that its this divine inhuman powerful being who cant tell the truth and cant understand lies and doesnt understand the human world
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txttletale · 1 year ago
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Saw a tweet that said something around:
"cannot emphasize enough how horrid chatgpt is, y'all. it's depleting our global power & water supply, stopping us from thinking or writing critically, plagiarizing human artists. today's students are worried they won't have jobs because of AI tools. this isn't a world we deserve"
I've seen some of your AI posts and they seem nuanced, but how would you respond do this? Cause it seems fairly-on point and like the crux of most worries. Sorry if this is a troublesome ask, just trying to learn so any input would be appreciated.
i would simply respond that almost none of that is true.
'depleting the global power and water supply'
something i've seen making the roudns on tumblr is that chatgpt queries use 3 watt-hours per query. wow, that sounds like a lot, especially with all the articles emphasizing that this is ten times as much as google search. let's check some other very common power uses:
running a microwave for ten minutes is 133 watt-hours
gaming on your ps5 for an hour is 200 watt-hours
watching an hour of netflix is 800 watt-hours
and those are just domestic consumer electricty uses!
a single streetlight's typical operation 1.2 kilowatt-hours a day (or 1200 watt-hours)
a digital billboard being on for an hour is 4.7 kilowatt-hours (or 4700 watt-hours)
i think i've proved my point, so let's move on to the bigger picture: there are estimates that AI is going to cause datacenters to double or even triple in power consumption in the next year or two! damn that sounds scary. hey, how significant as a percentage of global power consumption are datecenters?
1-1.5%.
ah. well. nevertheless!
what about that water? yeah, datacenters use a lot of water for cooling. 1.7 billion gallons (microsoft's usage figure for 2021) is a lot of water! of course, when you look at those huge and scary numbers, there's some important context missing. it's not like that water is shipped to venus: some of it is evaporated and the rest is generally recycled in cooling towers. also, not all of the water used is potable--some datacenters cool themselves with filtered wastewater.
most importantly, this number is for all data centers. there's no good way to separate the 'AI' out for that, except to make educated guesses based on power consumption and percentage changes. that water figure isn't all attributable to AI, plenty of it is necessary to simply run regular web servers.
but sure, just taking that number in isolation, i think we can all broadly agree that it's bad that, for example, people are being asked to reduce their household water usage while google waltzes in and takes billions of gallons from those same public reservoirs.
but again, let's put this in perspective: in 2017, coca cola used 289 billion liters of water--that's 7 billion gallons! bayer (formerly monsanto) in 2018 used 124 million cubic meters--that's 32 billion gallons!
so, like. yeah, AI uses electricity, and water, to do a bunch of stuff that is basically silly and frivolous, and that is broadly speaking, as someone who likes living on a planet that is less than 30% on fire, bad. but if you look at the overall numbers involved it is a miniscule drop in the ocean! it is a functional irrelevance! it is not in any way 'depleting' anything!
'stopping us from thinking or writing critically'
this is the same old reactionary canard we hear over and over again in different forms. when was this mythic golden age when everyone was thinking and writing critically? surely we have all heard these same complaints about tiktok, about phones, about the internet itself? if we had been around a few hundred years earlier, we could have heard that "The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth."
it is a reactionary narrative of societal degeneration with no basis in anything. yes, it is very funny that laywers have lost the bar for trusting chatgpt to cite cases for them. but if you think that chatgpt somehow prevented them from thinking critically about its output, you're accusing the tail of wagging the dog.
nobody who says shit like "oh wow chatgpt can write every novel and movie now. yiou can just ask chatgpt to give you opinions and ideas and then use them its so great" was, like, sitting in the symposium debating the nature of the sublime before chatgpt released. there is no 'decay', there is no 'decline'. you should be suspicious of those narratives wherever you see them, especially if you are inclined to agree!
plagiarizing human artists
nah. i've been over this ad infinitum--nothing 'AI art' does could be considered plagiarism without a definition so preposterously expansive that it would curtail huge swathes of human creative expression.
AI art models do not contain or reproduce any images. the result of them being trained on images is a very very complex statistical model that contains a lot of large-scale statistical data about all those images put together (and no data about any of those individual images).
to draw a very tortured comparison, imagine you had a great idea for how to make the next Great American Painting. you loaded up a big file of every norman rockwell painting, and you made a gigantic excel spreadsheet. in this spreadsheet you noticed how regularly elements recurred: in each cell you would have something like "naturalistic lighting" or "sexually unawakened farmers" and the % of times it appears in his paintings. from this, you then drew links between these cells--what % of paintings containing sexually unawakened farmers also contained naturalistic lighting? what % also contained a white guy?
then, if you told someone else with moderately competent skill at painting to use your excel spreadsheet to generate a Great American Painting, you would likely end up with something that is recognizably similar to a Norman Rockwell painting: but any charge of 'plagiarism' would be absolutely fucking absurd!
this is a gross oversimplification, of course, but it is much closer to how AI art works than the 'collage machine' description most people who are all het up about plagiarism talk about--and if it were a collage machine, it would still not be plagiarising because collages aren't plagiarism.
(for a better and smarter explanation of the process from soneone who actually understands it check out this great twitter thread by @reachartwork)
today's students are worried they won't have jobs because of AI tools
i mean, this is true! AI tools are definitely going to destroy livelihoods. they will increase productivty for skilled writers and artists who learn to use them, which will immiserate those jobs--they will outright replace a lot of artists and writers for whom quality is not actually important to the work they do (this has already essentially happened to the SEO slop website industry and is in the process of happening to stock images).
jobs in, for example, product support are being cut for chatgpt. and that sucks for everyone involved. but this isn't some unique evil of chatgpt or machine learning, this is just the effect that technological innovation has on industries under capitalism!
there are plenty of innovations that wiped out other job sectors overnight. the camera was disastrous for portrait artists. the spinning jenny was famously disastrous for the hand-textile workers from which the luddites drew their ranks. retail work was hit hard by self-checkout machines. this is the shape of every single innovation that can increase productivity, as marx explains in wage labour and capital:
“The greater division of labour enables one labourer to accomplish the work of five, 10, or 20 labourers; it therefore increases competition among the labourers fivefold, tenfold, or twentyfold. The labourers compete not only by selling themselves one cheaper than the other, but also by one doing the work of five, 10, or 20; and they are forced to compete in this manner by the division of labour, which is introduced and steadily improved by capital. Furthermore, to the same degree in which the division of labour increases, is the labour simplified. The special skill of the labourer becomes worthless. He becomes transformed into a simple monotonous force of production, with neither physical nor mental elasticity. His work becomes accessible to all; therefore competitors press upon him from all sides. Moreover, it must be remembered that the more simple, the more easily learned the work is, so much the less is its cost to production, the expense of its acquisition, and so much the lower must the wages sink – for, like the price of any other commodity, they are determined by the cost of production. Therefore, in the same manner in which labour becomes more unsatisfactory, more repulsive, do competition increase and wages decrease”
this is the process by which every technological advancement is used to increase the domination of the owning class over the working class. not due to some inherent flaw or malice of the technology itself, but due to the material realtions of production.
so again the overarching point is that none of this is uniquely symptomatic of AI art or whatever ever most recent technological innovation. it is symptomatic of capitalism. we remember the luddites primarily for failing and not accomplishing anything of meaning.
if you think it's bad that this new technology is being used with no consideration for the planet, for social good, for the flourishing of human beings, then i agree with you! but then your problem shouldn't be with the technology--it should be with the economic system under which its use is controlled and dictated by the bourgeoisie.
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catboybiologist · 5 months ago
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Help archive US government data
I'm sure this is probably old news to the computer obsessed queer people that mostly make up my follower base, but this reddit post is the simplest guide I've seen on how to help archive US government data.
Note that this doesn't save anything to your computer- it downloads stuff, reuploads it to archive servers, and then deletes it locally.
This is probably the easiest idle way to help secure data that is being purged right now. I got it running on my machine easily. If anyone has any other suggestions, please let me know.
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tofupixel · 1 year ago
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TofuPixel Links + FAQ - Commissions Open!
🌟 Building a game: @wishlings 🌠
🎨 My Portfolio
Support me: 💜 Tip Me 💜 Digital Store 💜 Print Store 💜 Game Assets 💜 Stickers + Merch
Socials: Bluesky | Cara | GameJolt | TikTok
Yes you can use / cross-stitch my work for personal use! <3
🎨 Pixel Art Beginner Guide
Hello, I'm Tofu, a pixel artist based in England. I work full-time doing pixel illustrations or game-art. I started learning in my early 20s, so no it's not too late for you!
I run a 7k+ member Discord server called Cafe Dot, where we host events like gesture drawing and portrait club.
I currently have Good Omens brainrot so expect some fanart on this blog. I also occasionally do/reblog horror art so be mindful of that!
Due to so much AI nonsense on every platform, all my public work will be filtered/edited with anti-AI scraping techniques. Supporters on my Ko-Fi can see unfiltered work and also download it.
🌸 Want to learn how to do pixel art? Check my tutorial tag!
Other tags:
tutorial (not pixel specific)
my art
follow (artists i recommend)
🌟Free Stuff!!!
❔FAQ
What app do you use? I use Aseprite on PC and occasionally Pixquare on iOS (use code tofu for 30% off Pixquare!! <3) Free alternative: Libresprite on PC
Why does your art look so crunchy / compressed? Glaze
How did you learn pixel art? I first started out watching MortMort and making tiny sprites. Then once I started getting interested in landscapes/environment art, I did many, many Studio Ghibli studies.
How can I also protect my art? You can use Glaze and Nightshade- Glaze protects against Img2Img style copying, and Nightshade poisons the data so the AI thinks it's the opposite of what it actually is. There is a lot of misinformation going around (likely from pro-AI groups) so do your own research too! If you're a pixel artist you can also tilt or blur your art after upscaling, which will make it near useless to AI models (or regular thieves) once downscaled again.
Feel free to send me an ask if there's anything you want to know! I am always happy to help beginners :--3
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sugarcream-sims · 4 months ago
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heads up for firefox users who care about their privacy and don't want their data sold to third parties.
they just updated their TOU policy with some shady shit
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they're claiming they "need" a license to use this data to provide basic services and functionality but they have never had this before or needed it previously to do what they were already doing (render web pages/integrate a search engine) having purchased a license to "use" your search data (and potentially anything you upload through the service?), maintaining it for up to 25 months on private servers, they also updated their FAQ 2 months ago to redact an important line:
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they've got reps on their blog rn trying to do damage control but honestly i think the service is cooked. personally, i think they just want to use our data to train an LLM, which of course we won't be able to opt out of the use of once launched. maybe i'm wrong, but i think it's pretty likely
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if you're looking for alts (& imo using anything chromium-based is just an even worse backslide) apparently there's a firefox fork called waterfox (and another called librewolf) that's committed to privacy, but i legit haven't looked into them and can't vouch. i know I'll be looking into alts in the coming days :/
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foxtrology · 2 days ago
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inertia (1)
reed richards x reader
star sailor series | ao3 link
notes: hi. so i’ve been writing this fic over the last three weeks (yes, three entire weeks, i know) and honestly it would not exist in its current form without my best friend, who is a literal physics major and walked me through so many of the equations and techy parts so reed didn’t sound like a fraud. i love her for that.
also, fun fact: reader is neurodivergent (i borrowed some of my own neurodivergent tendencies to shape her), so if you pick up on that... you’re right. thanks for being here!
word count: 12k
─────
You’ve always preferred rooms with humming machines to those filled with people.
It wasn’t shyness, not really.
Just an overwhelming awareness of your own rhythm, too far removed from the world’s noisy metronome. You knew early on you understood things differently—less about feeling out what someone meant, more about isolating the structure beneath their words, the pattern in their tone, the physics of an interaction.
Most people called it brilliance. You called it survival.
The Baxter Foundation didn’t feel like survival at first.
It felt like exile.
A postdoctoral placement handed to you like a sealed fate—"promising," "potential," "gifted." Euphemisms for "difficult," "obsessive," "odd."
They said Reed Richards might know what to do with you.
You assumed they'd meant “handle.”
But he didn’t handle you. He saw you.
Reed Richards wasn’t what you expected.
The name carried weight: prodigy, theorist, treasured in the scientific community. You imagined arrogance, an aging wunderkind with a room full of accolades and a voice like static.
But the man who stood waiting for you at the base of the Baxter Building's elevator looked almost misplaced—rumpled in a navy button up, absent-mindedly smearing graphite on the sleeve as he scribbled into the margin of a battered notepad.
He had those lines around his mouth—the kind that softened a face rather than hardened it. A sharp nose, brown eyes, and that unmistakable streak of grey curling through otherwise dark hair.
At first, you assumed it was dyed—it looked too perfect. But it was real. Of course it was.
You hadn’t realized you were staring until he tilted his head.
“You're early,” he’d said, voice warm and textured. Then, a smile that lit up his whole face—eyes first. “I like that.”
That was two years ago.
You’ve since learned Reed keeps a second toothbrush for you in his private quarters upstairs, though he’s never pointed it out.
You discovered it one night after a double shift, when he gently steered you towards the bed in his guest room instead of letting you fall asleep under your desk again. He didn’t say, “Stay with me.” He just adjusted the pillow, handed you a glass of water, and made sure the bathroom light stayed on.
It’s quiet love. A sustained frequency. A knowing.
On Tuesdays, you both eat lunch in the server room because it's the only place in the Baxter Building that maintains the kind of white noise you can disappear into.
Reed brings you a sandwich without tomato—he learned after the first week that you can’t stand the texture—and sets it beside your research without interrupting your thought process. You don’t thank him out loud. You just leave the crusts in the pattern he finds funny, concentric squares, always precise.
Sometimes, he laughs at that. Sometimes, he files it away like data.
Today, the two of you are working on a stabilization algorithm for experimental gravitational anchors—Reed's theory, your math. The simulation keeps failing, and Reed mutters something under his breath about quantum decay before turning to you.
“Show me again how you’re quantizing the drift interval,” he says, pushing his chair slightly closer to yours.
You don’t flinch. He always asks to see your work like this—not to correct, but to understand. He thinks your brain is a mystery worth mapping. And maybe it is.
You pull up your calculations, annotated with your usual shorthand that no one else in the lab pretends to follow. Reed doesn’t blink. He reads your annotations like they're a shared language.
“You inverted the modulus,” he says quietly, quite in awe. “God, that’s...elegant.”
You look down. Compliments still stick to you like static. You’ve never known what to do with them.
“It was obvious,” you murmur, tapping the screen once to clear the render.
“Not to me.”
His voice carries something like reverence. Not the kind people fake when they’re talking to someone younger, or different. His is heavier. Sincere. Measured.
You chew the inside of your cheek.
“Can I show you something?” you ask.
That’s how you always start, even though Reed never says no.
The observatory lab is empty when you both arrive.
He unlocks it with his palmprint, but you go in first, navigating in the dark by memory. You’ve had an idea simmering for days—a tweak in boundary calibration using harmonic frequency overlap, something even Reed dismissed initially as too unstable.
But last night, at 2:43 a.m., your model ran clean for the first time. No drift. No bleed. Pure coherence.
You bring it up on the projection wall, fingers moving fast. Words tumble when you’re excited—sharp, fast, too much for most people. Reed doesn’t interrupt. He never has.
When the model stabilizes on the fourth run, you glance over your shoulder.
Reed is watching you.
Not the simulation. Not the math. You.
You freeze.
He steps forward slowly, like if he moves too fast you might vanish.
“You didn’t sleep last night, did you?”
You look back to the projection. “No. But it was worth it.”
He exhales a soft breath, close enough now that you can feel the warmth of it on your temple.
“You can’t burn like this all the time,” he murmurs, but his voice doesn’t hold judgment—only concern.
“I can,” you reply simply. “And I do.”
He lets out a low laugh, almost involuntarily. Then, more gently, “Let me take care of you. A little.”
He says it like a hypothesis. Something untested.
You don’t answer. Not out loud. But you lean into his shoulder—not quite a nod, not quite an invitation—and he stays there. Long enough that the simulation cycles again, quiet and steady in the background.
Later, you’ll find that he’s updated the cafeteria schedule in your calendar to make sure no one disturbs you between 12 and 2 p.m. on Tuesdays. You’ll notice that he’s ordered extra noise-cancelling panels for the lab, without ever saying why. That the lights outside your lab space dim slightly when you stay past midnight.
All Reed’s doing.
He never says it out loud.
But this is how he shows you.
In recalibrated thermostats. In cups of tea left cooling on your desk. In letting you be silent when silence is the only thing that fits.
The world outside moves too fast. New York never sleeps, never softens. There’s always construction in the distance, always an ambulance shrieking down Fifth, always people spilling from cafés and rooftop bars like they’re late for something invisible.
But in the Baxter Building—six floors above the ghost of the old Avengers Tower—the hum of your controlled environment remains undisturbed.
For now.
It’s the kind of phrase that hangs in the air longer than it should, like steam after the kettle's been lifted, like the echo of a chord when your fingers already left the strings.
You don’t hear it, of course. Not consciously. But the sensation trails you anyway, ghost-like, as the day folds open and the building shifts around you.
You return to Lab B-3, where a data stream from the gravitational anchor prototype pulses in pale blue on the screen. You prefer this room to the others—less foot traffic, colder air, fewer variables. The walls are lined with the modular panels you installed yourself, after three months of fighting sensory burnout from the old fluorescents. The air purifier in the corner hums at a frequency you can tolerate.
It smells faintly of dust and ozone, like a server farm on a rainy day.
You’re cataloging the last ten hours of micro-interference logs when the door hisses open behind you.
“Hey.”
You don’t turn. It’s a mistake, maybe, but you assume whoever it is has entered the wrong lab.
You’ve put the sign up: DO NOT DISTURB — QUANTUM MODELING IN PROGRESS. A laminated shield between you and the rest of the building’s noise.
The voice cuts through again, sharper. Louder.
“Hey—don’t ignore me.”
You blink at the screen. Your heart doesn’t race. It clenches, tightens like your ribcage is shrinking inward. You turn slowly.
It’s Dr. Ian Delmont. One of the senior engineers. Jacket unzipped, badge swinging loose around his neck like a noose that can’t make up its mind. His face is already red, already pulled taut around the mouth.
You recognize the body language...shoulders set forward, hands ready to gesture. Angry people always move in patterns. You learned this years ago, the way some people learn fire drills.
“Why the hell did you rewrite my core schematic without logging the revision?”
You stare at him.
“I didn’t rewrite anything. I optimized the redundancy logic. It was bottlenecking the chain reaction model.”
“That’s rewriting.”
Your voice stays steady, your mouth forming the words in the exact order they should go. “No, it's not. It’s a correction. The existing code couldn’t handle parallel iteration under dual-load conditions.”
“You didn’t clear it with me.”
“It was a bottleneck,” you repeat.
Ian’s voice raises. “I don’t care if it was a goddamn chokehold, you don’t get to touch my work without authorization.”
He says it loud enough that it ricochets off the walls. Too loud.
Your neck goes hot. You feel it in your jaw, down your arms. Your hands twitch just enough to knock your stylus from the table and you bend down to retrieve it—too fast. You bump the corner of the desk, hard. The pain doesn’t register, but the sound does.
Too loud. Too loud.
Ian takes a step forward.
“Every time I turn around, you’re sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong—”
“I was fixing it.”
“You were showing off.”
That does it. You freeze.
This isn’t about the code.
You blink. You don’t blink. You can’t remember. You try to open your mouth, but your tongue sits wrong in it. The sound you try to make stalls halfway up your throat. Your hands curl into themselves like you could fold out of sight.
The lights feel wrong. The texture of your sleeves is wrong. The hum of the purifier is gone, replaced by the jagged, ugly timbre of yelling.
“I don’t care what Richards says about you,” Ian mutters. “You don’t run this place.”
“Hey.”
The sound comes from the door. Not a shout. Not sharp. But it cuts through everything like glass through butter.
You both turn.
Reed Richards steps into the room like he’s always belonged there, like his presence is not new or sudden or charged with a heat you’ve only ever felt in gamma pulses and untested energy chambers.
His mouth is tight, drawn. There’s nothing soft about his expression now.
“I suggest,” he says slowly, like each word has been smoothed against the edge of a scalpel, “you take your tone down. Immediately.”
Ian hesitates. Then his jaw sets. “With all due respect, Dr. Richards—”
“No,” Reed interrupts, walking further into the room, voice calm and sharp all at once. “Don’t. Don’t try to play seniority. This isn’t about protocol. This is about how you just cornered one of my lead researchers and yelled at her while she was running live code on a multivariable anchor model.”
“I was confronting—”
“You were posturing,” Reed cuts in. “And you were wrong.”
Ian blinks. Reed’s voice doesn’t rise. It doesn’t need to.
“She didn’t rewrite your schematic. She corrected a critical flaw that should have been caught weeks ago.” He stops beside you. Not in front of you, not shielding—beside. “The only reason that anchor hasn’t destabilized is because she stepped in.”
Reed turns his head slightly, glancing down at you. His eyes soften, fractionally. He doesn’t touch you, but he lets the silence hang, as if waiting for you to reclaim your voice if you want to.
You don’t. Not yet.
“Ian,” he says without looking away, “I want you out of this lab. Now.”
Ian’s mouth opens, then shuts again.
Then he leaves.
You’re still breathing too fast. You know you are. You can feel the microtremors in your fingers, the irregular skip of your pulse. But the room feels real again. Your body is slowly remembering where it ends.
Reed waits until the door hisses shut.
Then, “Can I sit?”
You nod, once. He pulls a chair close—closer than he usually would in a shared lab space—and sits beside you with the kind of silence that doesn’t ask anything from you. His knees are angled toward yours. His forearms rest loosely on his thighs. His whole posture is a quiet question you don’t have to answer.
You stare at the screen. 
“I wasn’t showing off.”
Reed lets out a sound between a sigh and a laugh. Not at you. With you. “I know,” he says gently.
“I just…saw the error. It was obvious.”
“I know.”
He pauses.
“You don’t need to explain yourself to anyone in this building. Least of all him.”
You press your thumbnail into the meat of your palm, grounding.
“I’m not good at…tone.”
“That’s not a flaw.”
“I always think I can just fix it quietly and not deal with the…other part. The confrontation.”
He nods once, his eyes still fixed on you. “The way the world expects communication isn’t the only valid way to exist in it.”
Something in your chest cracks open at that. Quietly. Invisibly.
You lean back against the chair, your breath finally settling into a rhythm.
Reed stays where he is. His presence doesn’t press against you—it anchors. He’s always been like that. Dense and still, like a planet with just enough gravity to make sense of things.
You glance over at him.
“Thank you,” you say finally.
He shrugs. “I don’t like mean people.”
You look down at the table. You trace a line in the condensation ring your tea left behind earlier.
“Are you going to fire him?”
“I don’t know,” he says honestly. “But I’m going to make it very, very clear who’s indispensable here.”
You don’t ask who he means.
You already know.
Later that night, you’re still in the lab, long after the rest of the building has gone dim.
Reed comes back with a takeout container—your favorite, though you don’t remember ever saying it aloud. He doesn’t mention the incident again. Just passes you the food, leans back in the corner chair, and starts updating his lab journal aloud, knowing you like to listen to the way he thinks.
Outside, New York glitters like a malfunctioning galaxy. Inside, the lights are low, the air quiet, the world small and manageable.
Just you, your notes, and the man with the grey streak in his hair who watches you like you built the constellations from scratch.
A quiet love, not yet named.
But it’s there.
Always has been.
It’s late now, nearly eleven, but the labs on the upper floors of the Baxter Building don’t abide by clocks. Here, time stretches. Pools. Slows down when the work is good. Speeds up when the math gets too beautiful to let go of.
You and Reed are the only ones left.
Everyone else has long since clocked out, their departure announced by the usual symphony of zipping backpacks and elevator chimes. The security team downstairs knows better than to check on you. You’re a known variable—an equation that balances best in silence, after dark, with only the man beside you and a cooling takeout container between you and the void.
Reed is sketching something in his notebook—a systems flowchart annotated with arrows that curve and overlap like a child’s drawing of a galaxy.
He’s humming, under his breath. Just a few bars of something he’s probably not even aware of. It’s familiar, not because you recognize the tune, but because you’ve heard him do it before, under the same kind of fluorescent moonlight and the same clean, ticking quiet.
You finish logging the day’s simulation data, close the terminal, and pull up your schedule for the upcoming weeks. The glowing display casts faint shadows over your face, which you don't notice but Reed glances at, once, over the edge of his notebook.
Monday. Field trip.
You hadn’t forgotten. Not exactly. It had just sat at the bottom of the week like a pebble in your shoe—felt but not seen.
You stare at the words for a beat too long.
VISITOR OUTREACH: 9:30–11:15 — RICHARDS / YOU
Group: PS 22 — Grade 2
Your fingers twitch at your side, a muscle memory of anxiety without the adrenaline to match. You don’t say anything, but your mind is already running the old loop, quiet and tight, like rewinding a tape you didn’t want to play in the first place.
You’d been paired with high school seniors last time.
They came in loud, late, and bored. One of them had a vape pen tucked into their hoodie drawstring.
You remember the boy in the back who asked if you “did anything real” or if you just “sat in rooms with graphs all day.” Another mimed falling asleep when you began explaining atmospheric coding inputs for small-scale gravitational fields.
You hadn’t raised your voice. You hadn’t snapped. You just shut down the projection early and handed the rest of the presentation off to the intern whose voice sounded like she smiled even when she didn’t mean it.
Afterward, you’d sat on the roof of the Baxter Building and stared at the clouds. Told yourself they were just kids. Told yourself they didn’t know.
But it stuck. The way they laughed when you said you worked on electromagnetic resonance feedback models. The way one of the girls whispered “so basically nothing” to the boy next to her like you weren’t even there.
They didn’t know.
That your work stabilized quantum harmonics in the kinds of silicon they tap on all day, every day.
That your programming makes the screen light up when their crush texts them back.
That the interface delay they complain about in video games used to be twenty seconds instead of two, and you helped design the equation that closed that gap.
They didn’t know you once pulled Reed out of a theoretical blind alley and into a breakthrough he’d later call elegant, a word he doesn’t use lightly.
They didn’t know how much you cared. That the caring was the point.
So after that, you asked to be reassigned.
“Elementary school kids,” you’d told Reed in his office one morning, already chewing at the inside of your cheek. “They’re too small to be cruel yet.”
He didn’t laugh, but you remember his eyes. How they softened. How he nodded and said simply, “Okay.”
And now here it was. Monday. Second graders. A classroom full of kids with juice boxes and velcro shoes and hands that still shoot up when they’re curious.
You can handle that. Probably.
You close the schedule tab. The screen goes dark.
Reed looks up from his notebook. “Everything okay?”
You nod once.
He doesn’t press. But he waits.
You speak without looking at him. “Monday's outreach.”
He leans back in his chair, notebook on his lap. “Right. You’re with me.”
You nod again.
“I asked for the younger group this time,” you add quietly, almost like you’re confessing something. “The older ones were…”
You trail off.
You don’t finish the sentence, but Reed catches the thread anyway. Of course he does.
He doesn’t say they were cruel. He doesn’t say you didn’t deserve that. He doesn’t fill the silence with anything easy.
Instead, he says, “You’ll be good with them.”
“Because they’re not old enough to be bored yet?”
“Because you care,” he says, looking directly at you. “And kids remember that. Even if they can’t say it.”
You pick at the corner of your sleeve. You’re still thinking about Monday. About the fear that your voice will tremble again. That the wrong word will come out. That your quiet will make them fidget and giggle and whisper.
But then you think about the last time a kid visited the Baxter—seven years old, wandered away from the main tour. Found his way into your lab by accident. You showed him how magnets repel in zero gravity fields and he tried to high five you with both hands at once.
You’d smiled for hours after that.
Maybe Reed is right.
Maybe caring is enough.
By the time you both shut down your stations and gather your coats, it’s nearly midnight. Reed holds the elevator for you without asking. It’s just the two of you, the soft gold of the lights reflecting off the brushed metal doors as they slide shut behind you.
You watch the numbers tick down.
Reed stands beside you, shoulder not quite brushing yours. Quiet, like always. Present, like always.
“Do you want me there?” he asks suddenly, softly, as the elevator hums downward. “Monday. With the kids.”
You blink. “You’re already scheduled for it.”
“I know,” he says. “But do you want me there?”
It feels like a trick question. But it’s not. It’s just Reed, offering steadiness in the places you don’t always know you need it.
You nod.
He nods too.
Outside, the city glows like it’s forgotten how to sleep. Yellow cabs streak past in lazy arcs. Rain clings to the pavement like it’s not ready to let go.
You stand under the awning of the Baxter Building, both of you half-heartedly pretending to check your phones, neither of you quite moving to go. It’s a ritual now—this lingering. Like the day doesn’t want to end, so you don’t let it.
Reed finally speaks, his voice low and near your ear.
“You know…you do more than keep this place running. You are this place.”
You glance at him. He’s looking at the sky like it might answer back.
“And if some bored teenager can’t see that, it’s only because they’re too young to understand the shape of things.”
You swallow. The city smells like damp concrete and neon and early summer.
You don’t reply. But the words lodge somewhere behind your ribs.
And they stay.
In the space between you and Reed, that sentence hums like background radiation—silent, but measurable.
He doesn’t look at you, not directly, but the softness in his posture says enough. The kind of softness he reserves only for you. For late nights and unsaid things. For quiet field trip fears and tired bones after thirty-seven straight hours in the lab.
You shift your weight from foot to foot under the awning, fingers fidgeting at the edge of your sleeve. The city is wet and warm and humming in that uniquely New York way—trash trucks groaning down Sixth Avenue, a taxi horn blaring three blocks over, the subway beneath your feet thrumming like some subterranean heartbeat.
Reed checks the time on his phone, but it’s performative. He’s not really looking at it.
“You can stay upstairs if you want,” he offers. Voice neutral, like he’s suggesting you borrow a pencil.
You know what he means.
His quarters above the Baxter labs—spare and quiet and clean, like an extension of his brain. You've stayed there before. Once after a storm knocked out the subway, once when you got a migraine so bad you couldn’t walk home without throwing up. The guest room is always ready, with a weighted blanket you know he ordered just for you. The lights dim at 30% automatically, and the fridge always has tea.
Still, you shake your head.
“I don’t want to bother you.”
“You wouldn’t.”
You shrug one shoulder.
“But I’d feel like I was bothering you.”
There’s no irritation in your voice. It’s just a fact. A line drawn lightly in pencil, not ink.
He doesn’t argue. Reed knows better than anyone that pushing you when you’re already overstimulated only drives you deeper into the quiet.
“I’ll walk you,” he says.
You almost tell him it’s not necessary.
That you’ve done the walk a hundred times alone. That it’s late and he must be exhausted too. But something in the way he says it—low, certain, without any edge—stills your protest before it can take shape.
You nod once.
The streets are emptier than usual, rain thinning to a mist that catches in your hair and softens the world around the edges. You button your coat up to your chin. Reed tucks his hands into his pockets, his long strides slowing instinctively to match yours.
You don’t speak for the first few blocks. You don’t need to. It’s not awkward—it’s companionable. Your silences have always been functional. Built like scaffolding. Structural.
You pass a late-night falafel cart and the warm, oily scent of fried chickpeas folds around you. Someone’s playing Miles Davis through a cracked open window above a bodega. A cab splashes through a puddle without slowing down.
You glance at Reed. His hair is slightly damp from the rain, curling a little at the edges. The grey streak catches in the streetlamp glow and glints like metal. He looks tired, but the good kind—brain-tired. Soul-deep contentment worn like a worn-in coat.
There’s something in the way he carries himself now that feels looser than it used to. Since you.
You think about that sometimes. The before of him.
You’ve seen the photos.
You’ve read the papers.
The man with ideas too big for gravity, with headlines like The Modern Da Vinci and Richards' Law stapled to his name before he was even out of his twenties.
You used to resent those profiles.
How they smoothed over the things that mattered.
How they all insisted on brilliance and ignored what he really was...careful. Constant. Gentle in ways that science rarely rewards.
He wasn’t always like this. He told you, once, in a rare moment of openness, that he used to believe love would only slow him down. That affection dulled the edge of genius.
He doesn’t say things like that anymore.
But he doesn’t say the other thing either.
You know what you are to him—friend, confidant, collaborator.
His mind matches yours, nearly. But not quite.
You run faster. Not always more elegantly. But faster.
You see the equations before he does.
You make intuitive leaps he can only reconstruct in hindsight.
He admires that. You see it in the way he watches you work, the way he lets you lead without hesitation.
And still, he hasn’t said the thing.
Because once it’s said, it can’t be unsaid. And Reed Richards has never risked a variable he couldn’t account for.
“You know,” he says softly as you cross Park, “when you rewrote that module today… I think that was the first time I felt—” He pauses. “Old.”
You glance at him. “You’re not old.”
He chuckles. “My knees would disagree.”
“That’s not science.”
He smiles. “No. But it is gravity.”
You snort.
He watches you carefully. Then says, “You don’t realize how good you are, do you?”
You look down at the sidewalk. The rain has turned the concrete slick and mottled.
“I do. I just don’t know how to be proud of it.”
He nods like he understands. “Because pride implies…audience.”
You don’t answer. But your silence agrees with him.
A block later, you say, “You’ve taught me how to be better without making me feel small.”
It slips out before you realize it. The kind of truth that rarely finds a voice.
Reed stops walking.
You look back at him. He’s staring at you like he’s memorizing the moment.
“You’ve done that for me too,” he says quietly.
It should be more than that.
But it isn’t. Not yet.
Your building is a brick structure tucked on a quieter side street. Sixth floor, walk-up. Rent-high, because New York is cruel and physics has been paying you back a lot recently.
Reed’s been here before—once when you locked yourself out, once when you were sick with a stomach bug and couldn’t get out of bed to pick up your prescription.
He always waits at the foot of the stairs.
Tonight is no different.
You fish out your keys and glance back at him.
“I’m okay,” you say.
He nods. “Text me when you’re in.”
You hesitate. Then, a beat later, “Thank you for walking with me.”
“Always.”
You step inside. The door swings shut behind you with a soft click.
Reed watches the rectangle of light shrink until it’s gone.
Only then does he turn.
He walks back slowly, hands deep in his coat pockets, rain heavier now. The city is hushed, its noise folded in on itself. His shoes splash through puddles he doesn’t try to avoid.
He thinks about you.
The way your voice tightens when you talk about the things you care about.
The way you never apologize for being brilliant, just for being visible.
The way you notice every small thing—every decimal, every gesture, every change in temperature—and store it away like evidence that the world can be read if only you learn its language.
Reed Richards has spent his life searching for patterns. For the math behind miracles. He’s found some. Lost others.
But you?
You remain his favorite unsolved equation.
He doesn’t say the thing. Not yet.
But it lives just under his tongue, waiting.
The next morning you wake up earlier than you meant to.
Not by choice. Not by discipline.
But because your upstairs neighbors, despite living in an apartment complex with allegedly soundproof walls, have spent the last six and a half hours making the most expressive use of their vocal cords.
Moans.
Laughter.
Something you’re fairly certain was a vase being knocked over around 3:12 a.m.
You’d counted.
You’d logged the minute it started—12:49 p.m.—and the moment it finally slowed to quiet again, or at least to something muffled enough that you could hear yourself think.
There was nothing logical about it, and therefore nothing you could fix. No formula to solve thin drywall. No algorithm to isolate human behavior into something quiet, contained, reasonable.
So you’d stared at the ceiling. Then at your wall. Then at your ceiling again.
And now it’s 5:47 a.m., and your alarm hasn’t even gone off yet.
You sit up.
The air in your apartment is slightly too warm—residual heat from the radiator you can’t adjust. Your mouth is dry. The muscles in your back ache in the specific way they do when your sleep’s been interrupted just enough to confuse your circadian rhythm but not enough to explain it to anyone else.
You don’t bother lying back down.
Your morning routine is exact. Not out of compulsion, but out of necessity. A lattice structure of steps that keep the rest of the day from collapsing.
Boil water. Black tea, no milk.
Brush teeth—no mint toothpaste, only the kind with baking soda, because you hate the artificial sweetness.
Shower. Warm, not hot. You step out and wrap the towel tightly around you like armor.
Dressing is harder. The shirt you wanted to wear feels off today—too scratchy, too bright. You change into the navy knit Reed once said brought out your eyes.
That memory shouldn’t matter, but it does. You feel steadier when you put it on.
Bag. Notebook. ID. Keycard. Noise-canceling headphones, just in case.
You skip breakfast.
You always do when you’ve been overstimulated. It makes your stomach feel like wires have been crossed.
The subway is half-empty this early. The kind of silence particular to Friday mornings—the city not quite buzzing yet, just flickering. You stand near the doors and stare at your reflection in the opposite window, your face hovering over the tunnel blur outside like a ghost.
You think about the model you left open in Lab B-3. About the field trip on Monday. About whether or not you remembered to reroute the final data loop in the harmonic anchor sequence.
You think about Reed, and then try not to.
By the time you arrive at the Baxter Building, it’s just before seven.
You enter through the side entrance, swiping your badge through the sensor and waiting for the familiar mechanical click. The lobby is dark except for the ambient lighting that glows along the baseboards. The city hasn’t reached in yet.
And then you see him.
Reed.
Sitting on the bench just inside the front hallway like someone who forgot what time it is—or didn’t care.
He’s wearing the same navy coat from the night before, his hair still slightly damp from whatever morning shower he took before stepping into the day. His notepad is on his lap, open, but untouched.
He looks up at the sound of the door.
“Hey.”
You blink.
“You’re early,” you say.
“So are you.”
“I didn’t sleep.”
He stands slowly. “Your neighbors again?”
You nod, already tugging your bag strap higher on your shoulder.
“I’m thinking of writing them a formal request to conduct their mating rituals at a lower decibel range.”
That makes you snort, despite yourself.
“They’d probably just find that hot.”
Reed’s laugh is soft. “You’re probably right.”
He falls into step beside you without needing to be asked. You head toward the elevators together.
“I wasn’t expecting to see you here,” you say as you press the button. “You're never this early unless there’s a test run.”
“I was hoping you’d show up early,” he admits, sheepish but not apologetic. “You didn’t text last night.”
You look down. “I forgot.”
“Neighbors really did a run on you, huh?”
You ket out a breathy laugh meeting his eyes.
Soon the elevator arrives. You both step in.
He doesn’t say anything else, but the quiet settles around you like a blanket. You don’t have the words for it, but you know he does this often—positions himself near you, close but not invasive, like a planet finding the right orbit. Something about it always makes you feel tethered.
The elevator stops on your floor.
As you exit, he doesn’t turn toward his own lab. He follows you.
“I figured I’d sit with you for a bit,” he says simply, “if that’s okay.”
You nod. You don’t say thank you, but your body does—shoulders uncoiling, pace slowing, your breath evening out.
Your lab still smells faintly of ozone and the synthetic lemon Reed always insists on using in the electronics-safe cleaning spray. You flick on the under-lighting instead of the fluorescents. It’s quieter that way.
He watches you unpack, the same way he always does when he’s not pretending to be distracted by his own work. You can feel his gaze—clinical, affectionate, reverent.
You settle at your station and glance over.
“Did you get any sleep?”
“Some.”
He sits across from you at the small corner table, flipping open his notebook. “I kept thinking about the field trip Monday.”
You groan softly.
Reed smiles. “You’ll be fine.”
“They’re going to ask me if I built Fortnite.”
“Just say yes.”
You narrow your eyes. “That’s unethical.”
He shrugs. “You do kind of power their world.”
You chew the inside of your cheek.
“I know you’re dreading it,” he adds, more gently. “But you’re going to surprise yourself. I’ve seen you explain quantum turbulence to a twelve year old. You used two chairs, a glass of water, and a slinky. It was borderline performance art.”
You allow yourself the smallest smile.
He studies you for a beat.
“I waited this morning,” he says, voice lower now. “Because I wanted to see you before the day started. I figured if you didn’t sleep, you’d need a buffer.”
You look up at him.
“A buffer?”
“For the noise. The world. Everything.”
You don’t answer for a long moment.
Then, “You’re good at buffering.”
Reed closes his notebook. His eyes don’t leave yours.
“Only for you.”
You look away too quickly. Your stomach flips, your thoughts scatter like dropped dice.
This happens sometimes.
The intimacy of Reed. The nearness of what he doesn’t say.
The feeling that he’s handing you something fragile and invisible, and asking you to decide whether to name it or leave it untouched.
You pull up your simulation model and begin reviewing last night’s logs.
He watches you for another minute, then opens his notebook again and starts annotating something beside you, close enough that your knees brush once, and neither of you moves.
The morning settles.
Quiet.
Unspoken.
Waiting.
The building wakes slowly, like a body stretching into motion. The light outside the lab windows tilts, warmer now, brushing across your workstation and catching on the rim of your teacup. You don’t drink it, but it’s there—heat fading, a symbol of routine more than comfort.
One by one, the others begin to arrive.
Keycards beep. Footsteps echo off tile. The rhythmic click of heels and the soft, buzzing shuffle of rubber soles on linoleum fill the air in the way only a scientific institution ever sounds. Conversations start up in clipped, caffeinated tones. Someone’s talking about a failed simulation in Lab A-2. Someone else is complaining about the elevator skipping floors again.
You don’t look up.
You’ve already built a wall of focus, exact and methodical—three simulations running in parallel, an error log cycling in your periphery, two graphs comparing harmonic distortion levels under varying environmental noise inputs.
Reed hasn’t moved far from you since you sat down.
Every now and then, he leans slightly over to ask a question—never invasive, always curious. He taps the edge of your screen to point out something and waits for you to explain it in full before speaking again. His voice stays low. His body language remains small.
He is very, very careful with your space.
At some point, you adjust the variables in one of the testing loops. Reed notices before you explain why.
“You brought down the feedback tolerance?”
You nod. “I think it’s overcompensating for impulse drift. If we calibrate to a slightly lower resilience threshold, we might expose the weak nodes in the structural harmonics.”
He lets out a low hum of appreciation.
“I wouldn’t have caught that.”
You glance at him.
“That’s because you were trained to trust the tolerances.”
Reed raises an eyebrow, amused. “And you weren’t?”
“I was trained to notice what doesn’t belong. Even if it doesn’t make sense yet.”
He leans back in his chair, studying you with something just shy of awe.
That’s when the others start to notice.
There’s no whispering. No gossip. That’s not the culture here. Baxter doesn’t reward spectacle.
But still, people look.
It’s subtle—an extra second of eye contact, a glance exchanged between postdocs in the corridor. Even in a building dedicated to research and theoretical physics, attention has a shape. You feel it.
You’re used to being watched when you speak, but this is different. They’re watching him.
They’re watching how Reed stays near.
How he lowers his voice when he speaks to you.
How he doesn’t interrupt when you’re mid-thought.
How he laughs at things you don’t mean to be funny.
How he tracks your gestures with the full, unguarded focus of a man trying to memorize not just the content of what you’re saying, but the rhythm of it, too.
You register the attention. You don’t engage with it. You would get too flustered.
Instead, you pull up a different dataset.
Across the room, someone’s looking at you over their glasses. You minimize the screen and adjust your chair slightly so your back is to the rest of the lab.
Ben Grimm arrives around 9:15, coffee in hand, hoodie pulled up like armor against the morning.
You like Ben.
You liked him even before you knew him—when all you had was a list of his mechanical engineering contributions and the curious note in his file that simply read “Reed’s oldest friend. Trustworthy. Not academically inclined. Smarter than he lets on.”
He sees you before you see him.
“Hey, Doc,” he calls out, his voice gravelly but warm.
You glance up and, for the first time since the building really began to fill, smile openly.
“Hi, Ben.”
He walks over slowly, avoiding the edge of the test rig you have set up. His eyes sweep the table, reading the mess of wires and calibration notes without actually processing them, which is part of his charm—he doesn’t pretend to understand your work. He respects it anyway.
“You eat today?”
You blink. “Not yet.”
“You want half my bagel?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“It’s everything seasoning.”
He grins. “You’re too sharp for your own good.”
You raise an eyebrow. “I’m just observant.”
Reed, still beside you, chimes in dryly, “She’s also allergic to sesame.”
Ben winces. “Oh, right. My bad.”
You wave it off. “It’s not lethal.”
Ben hands you a sealed granola bar from his pocket instead. “From Alicia. She said you looked pale last week and told me to keep snacks on me in case I ran into you.”
Your mouth twitches.
“Tell her I said thank you.”
“Tell her yourself. She’s coming by Monday.”
You nod, then return to your screen, not rudely, just efficiently. Ben doesn’t take offense. He pats the table lightly and leaves you to your work.
Once he’s gone, Reed glances at you sidelong.
“You like Ben.”
“He doesn’t talk to hear himself speak,” you reply.
Reed smirks, folding his arms across his chest. “So I guess I should be worried.”
You don’t answer. But something in your cheek lifts. A small, unspoken response. Reed ntoices it. Files it away like he does everything about you.
By late morning, you’re too deep in the math to notice anything else.
Three out of five anchor simulations fail—but not catastrophically. The new feedback threshold is revealing the pattern you hoped it would. Reed asks if he can run his own version of the loop. You nod without turning, already exporting the baseline parameters to his terminal.
You hear someone outside the glass wall whisper, “Is Richards still in Lab B-3?”
And then, “I think he’s shadowing her today.”
“He shadows her every damn day.”
You pretend not to hear. You shrink slightly into your collar. Not from shame. Just to stay small.
Reed doesn’t respond to the comment. But you notice that he reaches over and very quietly pushes the door shut.
Not to hide.
But to give you quiet.
The rest of the morning passes like this—like a film spooling out in perfect rhythm. Reed occasionally types beside you. Sometimes you work in parallel, other times in sync. You don’t speak unless necessary, but the air between you is charged in a way you can’t name. Not love, not yet. But a proximity to it.
And even though others look—at him, at you, at the space between—you don’t notice anymore.
You’re too busy trying to catch the shape of something hidden in the data. Something just out of reach.
Like truth.
Or a confession.
Or gravity.
Fridays at the Baxter Building settle into their own kind of orbit.
Every lab has its rhythm—Lab A-2 always wraps their protein sequencing early, because Dr. Lyman likes to jog at 1:15 on the dot. Tech Ops syncs their systems for overnight updates before noon. Environmental Engineering runs its daily dehumidifier diagnostic with exaggerated ritual, a kind of inside joke no one explains to the interns.
It’s been that way since you arrived. It wasn’t written anywhere, but you learned it all the same.
And the unspoken tradition...Reed Richards forgets about time.
By now, everyone has made peace with it.
On Fridays, he’ll get caught chasing some quantum trajectory through a dozen notepads and open tabs, muttering to himself about temporal flux interactions or pattern resonance mismatches. If someone reminds him what time it is, he’ll blink, check his watch as though it’s betraying him, and then wave his hand vaguely in the air—“Take two hours, go. Ben, order something greasy.”
And everyone will. With relief. With a kind of reverent affection for their slightly scattered, brilliant leader.
Except you.
You stay.
Always.
It’s nearing 12:45 when the lab thins out. Ben claps his hands once, loudly, to announce, “Twenty-four-inch from Mario’s. I got half with olives, don’t fight me about it.” Someone cheers from the hallway.
You don’t look up.
The simulation in front of you is finally stabilizing under increased pressure loads, and Reed’s scribbling new hypotheses across his tablet at a manic pace—“If we compensate for decay acceleration by adjusting the sequence resolution window down to 10 seconds, the cross-bridging might resolve on its own—”
You hum without meaning to, fingers typing out the updated code.
“I’m serious,” he says, pushing his chair closer to yours, legs brushing under the desk. “We’re so close. This could finally solve the vibration decay issues in the dynamic anchor builds.”
“It won’t,” you reply calmly, running the next set. “Not unless you account for the spectral density shift around the 170 Hz mark. It’s going to collapse again.”
Reed pauses.
“You already ran this model.”
You nod.
“When?”
“Last weekend.”
He looks at you like you’ve handed him a paradox.
You let the silence stretch, then: “Try adjusting the constraint to reflect a Gaussian distribution, not linear. The peaks are too soft, and the algorithm’s compensating for noise that isn’t actually noise.”
Reed exhales slowly, reverent. “How does your brain do that?”
You don’t answer. You don’t have the words for how you see things. You just do.
He smiles like he’s in the presence of something sacred.
He leans in again, close enough that his shoulder presses lightly into yours. You shift slightly to give him access to your terminal, and he doesn’t pull away.
He’s always been tactile like this—with you, at least.
Hands brushing yours when you pass equipment.
A palm steadying your wrist when you’re assembling small, sensitive components.
Once, you found yourself gripping his forearm without realizing it during a particularly volatile magnetic resonance test. He didn’t mention it. Just let you hold.
But today, it’s different.
Today, something lingers.
You're both staring at the screen. The simulation is stabilizing now, running longer than it has all week. Your throat tightens with something like triumph, or relief, or maybe just fatigue disguised as euphoria.
Then, softly—soft enough that it catches you off guard—Reed reaches up and brushes his thumb across your cheek.
You freeze.
Out of disbelief. Out of awe.
His hand is warm. The pad of his thumb gentle.
The touch isn’t performative. It’s not even decisive.
It’s hesitant. Like he needed to check that you’re real.
That this moment isn’t just one of his half-formed ideas scrawled into the margins of a late-night notebook.
Your eyes flick toward him.
He’s already looking at you.
Something unspoken and heavy passes between you. It hums underneath the fluorescent buzz of the lab lights, underneath the whirring fans of the machinery, underneath the working theory you’ve spent days fine-tuning.
You don’t lean in.
But you don’t lean away.
He doesn’t move his hand.
You don’t say a word.
Ben opens the door a few feet down the hall, holding a pizza box in one hand, a Coke in the other.
He sees you.
Sees Reed.
The hand. The closeness. The moment.
And just as quietly as he entered, he steps back. Sets the pizza down on the nearest desk. Walks away without a word.
You and Reed don’t notice.
The simulation pings complete. For the first time in eleven models, it doesn’t fail.
You blink.
Then breathe.
Reed drops his hand, slowly, like it doesn’t want to leave but knows it has to.
You don’t say anything. Neither does he.
But something has shifted.
In the lab’s stale, climate-controlled air. In the simulation still pulsing faintly on your screen. In the trajectory of two minds moving dangerously close to each other’s center of gravity.
You get up first, walking to the sink in the corner to splash water on your face. The cold helps. Reed stays in his chair, scribbling, though you can tell his mind isn’t entirely on the notes.
You find the pizza box. It’s already cold. You bring two slices back to the workstation.
You don’t mention the moment. Neither does he.
But all through the second hour of your “break,” you work with that electric tension still threaded between you.
You pass him a slice. He accepts it.
He says your name, once, softly, like an answer to a question you haven’t asked yet.
And you don’t look up. Not yet.
You’re afraid that if you do, everything will change.
Or maybe—it already has.
“Hey,” Reed says again, this time your name folded into it, spoken low and careful, like he’s afraid of breaking it. Like he’s afraid of breaking you.
You don’t answer right away.
Because you know what he’s asking without asking.
And you know that if you answer—if you meet his gaze now, if you name the thing humming between you—it won’t go back in the box. It will take shape. It will have mass. It will alter the gravitational field between you forever.
You chew the edge of your lip and keep your eyes on the simulation results, blinking too fast.
He doesn’t push. Reed Richards never pushes.
But he stays there, watching you like a question he’s been trying to answer for years. Like a proof that’s always been just outside the edge of comprehension.
He wants you.
You can feel it in the heat of his gaze, in the way his hands twitch with unspent energy, in the way he shifts closer every time he speaks. He wants you the way he wants knowledge, reverently. With hunger and hesitation in equal parts.
But more than that—he respects you. And that respect builds a boundary he’s too careful to cross without your invitation.
So he doesn’t speak again. Not yet.
Instead, he clears his throat gently and leans back into the moment he knows how to inhabit best—the work.
“You were right about the Gaussian window,” he murmurs, eyes returning to the data on your screen. “The mean deviation narrowed just enough to stabilize the micro-vibrational bleed. Look.”
He tilts his tablet toward you.
You peer at it, grateful for the anchor. “The variance dropped below 0.0003. That’s lower than the threshold for secondary echo.”
Reed nods. “It’s still not perfect. But it’s holding. For now.”
You echo it before you can stop yourself. “For now.”
He smiles at that—soft, and only for you.
The tension doesn’t break. But it shifts. Warms.
You pull up the residual energy pattern charts and begin comparing them to your older models. Reed swivels his chair to face you fully, chin resting lightly on his knuckles as he watches you work.
Your voice steadies.
“I think we can reduce the decay rate even more by using a layered harmonic buffer. Not just a single envelope. Something like... like a tri-modal stabilization frame.”
He raises an eyebrow. “Using phase-offset looping?”
“Yes,” you say, eyes lighting up. “But slightly desynchronized. So each frequency compensates for the loss in another—like an algorithmic relay. Less like a barrier, more like... a conversation.”
You feel him watching you, not the charts.
There’s a kind of electricity in your blood now, not from caffeine or adrenaline but from being understood, seen at the level you need to be.
And for once, the way you talk—fast, disorganized, precise, too much—feels like the exact shape of something he’s been waiting to hear.
You meet his gaze finally.
He’s smiling.
That soft, quiet, wrecked smile of his. The one he only wears around you.
“You know,” he murmurs, “you say I taught you how to be better without making you feel small. But you make me feel like I don’t have to be better all the time. Like just being...with you is enough.”
You don’t know what to do with that sentence.
It sits too heavy in your chest. It rearranges your molecules.
Reed notices your hands twitch—how your fingers twitch at your sleeves when the air gets too loud inside you. He leans forward just slightly.
“I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”
“You didn’t,” you say too quickly. “You didn’t.”
Then, after a breath, “It’s just... I don’t know what to do when people say things like that.”
“Okay,” he says. “Then we don’t have to do anything. We can just stay here. With the work.”
But there’s softness in the offer. No withdrawal. No hurt.
Just the way he always gives you room.
It’s quiet again.
The others are still gone. Outside the lab, Friday spills forward in lazy arcs—someone arguing about where to eat next week, a song playing faintly from someone’s portable speaker. You can hear Ben laugh somewhere near the stairwell.
Inside, Reed starts sketching again. You realize, after a while, that it’s not a schematic. He’s drawing the harmonic layering you suggested, but not in code—in lines and waves, almost like music. It’s abstract and a little chaotic and not how he normally works.
It’s your method. Translated.
You watch him for a moment. Then you reach over and pick up a stylus of your own.
You add to it without asking. Adjust one arc. Shade one line.
He doesn’t flinch.
This is your intimacy. Shared language in waveform. A courtship of the mind.
The pizza gets cold. No one bothers you. Not even Ben, who peeks through the glass once more and then nods to himself like he's witnessing a rare solar event—better not to interfere.
And Reed…
Reed reaches over again at one point, softly, thumb brushing your cheek once more. This time he doesn’t look away when he does it. And you don’t freeze.
He doesn’t kiss you.
Not yet.
But you both feel it coming.
Not like a crash.
Like a calculation converging.
Like an inevitable, elegant solution.
Friday settles into its soft descent.
Outside, the city shifts into its end-of-week hum. That specific kind of tonal change—less frantic, more languid. Like the buildings are exhaling.
But in the lab, the world is still quiet, contained in the steady blinking of data streams and the near-inaudible whir of cooled processors.
You sit on the floor now, legs crossed beneath you, a cluster of components spread around you like offerings. The modeling station sits nearby, quietly compiling your last run.
Reed is at the console, sleeves rolled up, hair curling faintly at the temples from the humidity that’s crept in through the vents. He’s biting the corner of his thumbnail absently—thinking.
You watch him.
And then you remember.
“Did you finish the sensory-feedback demo for the field trip?” you ask, voice soft but cutting clean through the air between you.
He blinks up from the console, eyes going immediately bright.
“I did. Mostly. I was going to test it tonight.”
You tilt your head. “Can I see it?”
He smiles—a real one, unguarded and boyish. The kind he only wears with you.
“You can help me run it.”
He gets up, walking to the supply cabinet in the corner, pulling down a heavy black case the size of a carry-on. You follow, standing now, hands folding in the sleeves of your sweater as you watch him unlock the case with the smooth familiarity of a man who designs entire universes and still finds joy in the click of good mechanics.
Inside, a scatter of wires, motion sensors, a series of spherical objects that look like oversized ping pong balls, each one patterned with conductive filament and dotted with touch points. You recognize the layout—a modular, reprogrammable interface system with haptic feedback, originally built for mobility therapy.
“You modified the base algorithm,” you say, eyes narrowing with appreciation.
“For kids,” he replies. “It runs a simplified tactile-reward loop. Kind of like a visual puzzle—kinetic memory reinforcement. Color-coded neural feedback.”
“Accessible interface?”
He nods. “Built for neurodivergent learners. Adaptive texture mapping. It reacts to the user’s input in real time. No static pathways. No performance grading.”
Your chest tightens a little. Not painfully. Just precisely.
“You built a toy.”
Reed shrugs. “It teaches basic physics concepts. Friction, acceleration, force vectors. Just…disguised as fun.”
“That’s not just a toy,” you murmur.
He watches you closely.
“No,” he says. “It’s not.”
You set it up together on the floor of Lab B-3, moving the tables back, laying the tiles out in careful rows. The modular touch-nodes blink softly as they come to life—first red, then green, then a low, pulsing blue.
The algorithm kicks in after calibration. Reed holds the interface tablet, flipping through the menus. You hover close behind him, watching how he reprograms the environmental variables on the fly.
“Want to try it?” he asks.
You nod.
He sets it to manual mode. The first node lights up in your periphery. You move toward it, tap it lightly with your finger. It flashes yellow, then blue, and vibrates beneath your touch.
You laugh, just once—quick, surprised.
“Positive reinforcement,” Reed says softly. “Each node has a different tactile response depending on approach angle, velocity, and touch pressure.”
“So they learn physics by playing.”
He nods. “Exactly.”
You test the next one. And then another. As the nodes light up, the floor becomes a low-lit constellation, flickering gently around your movements. It’s beautiful. You crouch down near one, tracing your fingers across the filaments, letting the haptic buzz hum beneath your fingertips.
“Reed,” you say quietly. “This is... really, really good.”
He kneels down beside you.
“I just wanted to build something that made them feel like science was listening back.”
You look over at him.
That sentence hangs there, too delicate to touch.
Your hand moves before your brain registers the decision—slowly, instinctively—and you reach for him.
You had reached for his hand but landed on his thumb.
Just his thumb.
You wrap your small hand around it gently, like it’s the only part of him you can hold without consequence.
Reed freezes.
Not from discomfort. From something else.
He turns his head toward you, slowly, like he’s afraid you’ll disappear if he moves too quickly. His smile is soft, stunned. As if he can’t believe you’re doing this. As if he’s afraid that if he acknowledges it too directly, it might stop.
You don’t look at him. You just hold his thumb in both your hands, watching the floor blink beneath you.
It’s a strange gesture, almost childlike in its simplicity. But to you, it’s everything. It’s grounding. Permission. Trust.
Reed lets out a breath like he’s been holding it for years.
He doesn’t move his hand away.
Instead, he uses the other to reach forward and adjust a setting on the control interface without looking. The lights shift. The nodes pulse in a new pattern. You follow them without letting go of his thumb.
He’s smiling now, wide and quiet.
Completely and utterly gone for you.
You test every mode together—gravity simulation, frictionless slide, kinetic echo. Reed talks softly through each setting, explaining how he rewrote the original code to simulate Newton’s Laws in modular intervals, adjusting for sensor latency so kids could trigger reactions with slower or less precise movement.
You ask questions. Not because you don’t understand. But because you do. You want to understand it his way.
He answers everything.
By the time you’re done, the lights in the lab have dimmed into their evening cycle. Reed packs up the demo system slowly, like he’s folding something sacred.
You’re still holding his thumb.
Finally, gently, he uses it to tap the back of your hand.
“You know,” he says quietly, “you don’t have to hold back around me.”
You look at him, expression unreadable. You squeeze his thumb once, then let go.
“I’m not,” you say.
And you aren’t.
Not anymore.
The lab is dark when you both leave.
Outside, the city has begun to cool. You walk beside him in silence, shoulders brushing once, then again. Not by accident.
You don’t talk about the moment on the lab floor.
You don’t have to.
It happened.
It exists.
Like an inevitable, elegant solution.
The sky has turned the color of television static. Not black, not gray, just faded. Soft enough to feel unreal. Streetlights flicker on in stuttering intervals. A breeze curls up the avenue and catches at the hem of your coat.
You and Reed stand just outside the Baxter Building entrance, neither of you moving to leave, as if there’s some invisible membrane between the lab and the world you’re not quite ready to pierce.
You should go home.
That’s the next step, isn’t it?
That’s what people do when the day ends. They go back to the place with their name on the lease and try to remember who they are when no one’s asking them questions.
Except your place has neighbors.
And thin walls.
And you're too tired to pretend your own exhaustion doesn’t vibrate at the same frequency as their pleasure.
You shift your weight from foot to foot, knuckles tucked deep into your sleeves. You can feel the buzz of the day behind your eyes—not anxiety, not anymore. Just too many thoughts stacking on top of each other like tetris blocks, and you don’t have the energy to make them fit.
Reed stands beside you, hands in his coat pockets, quiet as ever. The edge of his sleeve brushes yours every so often, an unspoken rhythm that makes you feel here.
Not tolerated. Not managed.
Just here.
Ben soon exits the building. Hoodie zipped to his throat, a half-eaten brownie in one hand. He slows when he sees you both.
“Well, well,” Ben says, raising an eyebrow. “You two finally gonna leave the building or should we start paying you rent inside the lab?”
You glance at Reed.
He shrugs, noncommittal.
Ben smirks. “Alright. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” Then he gives Reed a look. “Which ain’t much.”
Reed doesn’t respond, but his smile is quiet. Affectionate.
“Goodnight, Ben,” you say softly.
“Night, genius.”
He walks off into the dark.
You stay.
Reed doesn’t ask if you’re going home.
You don’t say anything for a while. You just look at the sidewalk. The cracks in it. The faint smudge of oil near the curb. The headlights of a cab bending light across Reed’s cheekbone, catching on the streak of gray in his hair.
Finally, you say, “Can I stay?”
You don’t explain. You don’t need to.
He doesn’t ask why.
He just turns to you, and for a split second, something in his expression softens so completely it’s almost painful. His eyes widen like he’s been caught off guard, but then his entire face warms, lips parting slightly, like you’ve just handed him something fragile and beautiful and unexpected.
“Yes,” he says immediately. “Yes, of course.”
You nod once, eyes down, and he opens the glass doors for you with his keycard.
Reed’s private quarters are located on the top floor, built into the architecture like a quiet secret.
The space is sparse but intentional. One long wall is lined with windows that overlook the city—lights shimmering like data points, static and alive at once.
You’ve been here before. The air smells like him. The surfaces are all smooth, clean, designed for function rather than comfort—except the guest bed, which he quietly upgraded after the second time you stayed, replacing the stiff mattress with something memory foam, orthopedic, weighted blankets in navy and grey.
He never mentioned it. But you noticed.
Now, you step out of your shoes and move instinctively toward the small kitchen alcove, placing your bag on the counter where you always do. You hear Reed behind you, taking off his coat, the soft clink of keys being set in the ceramic dish by the door.
“I didn’t want to go home,” you say, very quietly.
“I know,” he replies.
He fills the kettle without asking. He doesn’t ask if you want tea. He just knows that the ritual helps.
You settle on his couch while he prepares everything. There’s something deeply intimate about watching him move in this space—not as a scientist, but as a man who’s built a life designed for quiet. For stillness. For you.
“Did you finish that secondary circuit loop in the interface?” you ask, voice small.
“I did,” he says, turning toward you with two mugs. “Replaced the original buffer with a superconductive braid. Reduced the thermal variance by thirty percent.”
You take the mug with both hands.
“That’s going to make it more stable in hands-on mode.”
He nods. “Exactly.”
You sip the tea. It’s perfect. Rooibos, no caffeine. Subtle and warm.
You look down at your knees.
He sits beside you, not too close, not too far. Just right.
“I’m still thinking about that tri-modal stabilization relay you suggested,” he says. “It could actually be used in more than just the interface model. If we layer it into the resonance prototype, it could compensate for secondary harmonic bleed without adding mechanical dampeners.”
You glance at him. “It wouldn’t even need a power supply. It would just borrow from the existing vibrational field.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
You smile faintly. “We should test it this weekend.”
“We should,” he agrees.
But neither of you move.
You sit there in the dark, the city lights flickering behind the glass, the tea cooling slowly between your palms.
And then, Reed shifts slightly closer.
His fingers brush the side of your hand where it rests on the couch cushion.
You don’t pull away.
“I’m glad you asked to stay,” he says, quietly.
“I don’t always know what I need,” you admit.
“You don’t have to,” he says. “Not with me.”
You turn your hand palm-up.
He hesitates—barely a second—and then sets his own hand into yours. Warm. Long fingers. Calloused thumb.
You wrap your hand around his thumb again.
It’s small. Stupidly small. But it feels like precision.
Like the alignment of orbitals in a new chemical bond—unexpected, improbable, but somehow inevitable.
He stares at your hands like they’re a proof he’s just solved.
And you can feel it now, radiating off him.
That Reed Richards is completely, irrevocably in love with you.
It sits in his stillness.
In the way he lets you hold him without needing to be held back.
In the careful cadence of his breath next to yours.
In every half-finished sentence he doesn’t speak because he’s still calibrating the right moment to say it.
You close your eyes.
The lab can wait.
The world can wait.
Because here, in this quiet room on the top floor of the Baxter Building, the noise of the city fades into static, and two brilliant minds sit side by side, slowly, carefully falling into something that even physics doesn’t have language for.
Yet.
You’re still holding his thumb.
The weight of it feels small and ordinary and terrifying, in the way intimacy always is when it sneaks in sideways—quiet, soft, patient.
The tea between you has gone slightly cold, but neither of you moves.
Reed glances at your hand in his again like he’s not sure it’s real. Like he’s afraid any shift in air pressure might break whatever this is.
He doesn’t want to lose it. You can feel that. It lives in the quiet of his body. In the way he breathes more carefully now, like your closeness has changed the atmospheric composition of the room.
You can’t explain it.
Not exactly.
But you know the moment has arrived—like a threshold has been crossed without either of you noticing when.
You lift your eyes.
Reed is already watching you.
And then you kiss him.
There’s no warning. No lead-in. No poetic pause.
You just lurch forward and kiss him like your brain caught fire.
You cup his face with both hands—awkward, determined, imprecise. You feel the stubble on his jaw beneath your palms. You feel the soft surprised puff of his breath as you press your mouth against his with more force than you intended.
Reed makes a startled noise.
You pull back slightly, embarrassed, but he surges forward like a current finding its charge.
His hands find your waist, anchoring—not possessive, not demanding, just present. And then his mouth is on yours, properly this time. He kisses you with a slowness that makes your skin buzz, then deeper, until you forget how to think.
You chase it.
You chase it harder than you meant to.
You end up half in his lap, straddling his thigh on the couch. He grunts softly in surprise as you pull him closer by the collar of his shirt. Your hands roam. One settles in his hair, the other at the base of his neck, grounding yourself in the shape of him. His body is warm and solid and older than yours in a way that feels deeply comforting—experienced, steady.
“Wait—” he whispers into your mouth, breathless but laughing.
You pause.
“I—God, I didn’t think—” he tries to say, and then you kiss him again.
It’s clumsy and desperate and real. Your teeth bump once. Your nose is probably smushed too hard against his.
But Reed groans quietly like it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to him.
Because it is.
Because it’s you.
Eventually, you slow. Not because you want to. Just because you run out of breath. You ease back a little, your forehead resting against his, both of you flushed and dazed.
His fingers trace up your spine, slow, careful, reverent.
You say nothing for a while.
Then, softly, eyes still closed, you murmur, “I need to take a shower.”
He blinks, dazed.
“Oh,” he says, voice rough. “Yeah. Sure. Of course.”
You make no move to get up.
He doesn’t push.
Then, without looking at him, you say, “Will you come with me?”
Reed stills.
It’s not a seductive invitation. Your voice is too quiet. Too vulnerable.
You mean with you. Not to see you.
There’s a difference.
A difference he understands immediately.
He exhales once, very slowly.
“Yes,” he says.
The bathroom in Reed’s quarters is clean and understated. No clutter. Neutral tones. A single towel folded perfectly on the heated rack. The kind of space made by someone who needs things to stay quiet, even in private.
You peel off your clothes with your back to him. You don’t ask him to turn away. You just move, deliberately, like someone trying to stay present in their own body. You don’t rush.
He undresses behind you.
You don’t look.
Not because you’re afraid.
Just because this isn’t about looking.
When you step under the water, he follows. The spray is warm. Steam begins to rise immediately, curling around your shoulders, softening the edges of the room.
You don’t speak for a long time.
He helps you rinse shampoo from your hair.
He rubs a towel gently across your upper back, washing you between passes of the water.
You stand in the quiet, eyes closed, while he reaches for the soap, his hands careful and broad. You’ve never felt so heldin a room without touch. Even when he does touch you, it’s so measured. Like he’s calibrating pressure in real time.
He never touches more than he needs to.
He never looks longer than you let him.
You begin to wash him in return—his arms, his back. Your fingers map the ridges of his shoulders. The plane of his chest. 
He smiles at you when you look up at him.
You smile back.
Afterward, you towel off side by side. You slip into the oversized sleep shirt he keeps in the guest drawers—the one you claimed without asking the second time you stayed over. Reed pulls on a soft cotton shirt and gray sweatpants, hair still damp, curls a little unruly.
You both brush your teeth in silence. The kind of silence built on trust, not absence.
You spit and rinse and then, leaning over the sink, you say, “You’re not what I expected.”
Reed glances at you in the mirror.
“I’m not?” he asks, toothbrush in hand.
You shake your head. “You’re a better equation.”
He stares at you for a moment, then leans over, presses a kiss to your temple, and whispers, “So are you.”
You fall asleep in his bed, facing each other.
You don’t touch—not at first. But at some point, your foot slides across the sheet and brushes his calf.
He doesn’t bother to move.
You drift off like that.
And he stays awake for a while longer, just watching you breathe, memorizing the sound of it, calculating the half-life of the moment in real time.
He doesn't think there's a formula for this.
But if there were, he’d already be solving for you.
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fusiondynamics · 5 months ago
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jeszrosse · 10 days ago
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🧬 “Observations (Classified)”
Albert Wesker x Reader | not really a part 2 | late-night voyeurism | NSFW 🌶 | obsession, formal restraint snapping like a bone.
reader is unaware; Wesker is very much not
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.
.
---
02:14 A.M.
Late night. Facility security room.
The screens flicker in sterile white. Most are still.
But Camera 6A, the laboratory, glows with motion.
You.
Alone.
On screen, you’re in the west lab, arching slightly over the sink. Just rinsing out a beaker. Simple. Innocent.
But the fabric of your blouse stretches tight along your spine when you lean forward.
And something in him... pulls.
---
Wesker sits, arms folded, jaw stiff.
He’s already undone the top of his collar. Already removed the gloves.
Not because of you.
Of course not.
It’s hot in the control room.
The server fans are loud.
The stress levels are unusually high.
He’s just—adjusting.
Except... your voice, soft and oblivious, carries over the audio feed.
A hum. A simple, lovely, innocent note.
Unaware of the man who’s been replaying your shift three times over.
Unaware of how he’s zoomed in. Cropped the others out. Enhanced the footage of you turning to brush hair behind your ear.
“Look at you,” he murmurs,
to no one. To the air. To himself.
To you.
---
By the third time you lean forward, the motion is burned into his brain.
He doesn't mean to—
but his hand is already dragging over the front of his slacks, slow. Testing. Pressing down.
His breath leaves sharp through his nose.
This is beneath him.
This is pathetic.
This is...
His palm stills.
But your figure remains—graceful, hypnotic, damning—on-screen.
---
02:44 A.M.
He gives in.
Fingers pop the belt loose with one flick.
Zipper—quiet, slow. As if anyone might hear.
He leans back in the chair with a long, soundless breath through gritted teeth.
This is beneath him. He repeats.
His fist moves anyway. Down. Up. Slow at first—controlled, like everything else in his life. But his jaw is tight. His brows drawn. His breath shallow. He shouldn’t need this.
He’s superior. Beyond weakness. Beyond base urges. Beyond the kind of pathetic, primal desperation that leaves lesser men gasping into their palms in the dead of night.
But here he is. Knees spread. Glove tossed aside. Muscles flexing tightly on the fabric of his shirt in the dim light. His cock’s already slick, already hard—already leaking for you.
Disgraceful.
Illogical.
Weak.
There’s nothing clinical in the way his hips lift once, slightly.
Nothing detached in the way he groans when your laugh echoes through the speakers.
He imagines—
your lips parting when he finally corners you.
the way you’ll gasp when he tells you what he’s done for you.
How you’ll cry when you realize you were never alone.
---
“You don’t even know,” he whispers.
“What you do to me.”
“How long I’ve watched.”
“How hard I’ve worked to keep others away.”
“To keep you... close.”
Your laugh. Again. On loop. It plays like pure torture.
He imagines you writhing beneath his gloved hand, spine arched, eyes glassy—like a creature begging to be dissected. Every sound you make, every breathless moan, cataloged in his mind like data points. You’re not just a body—you’re a subject. A specimen. One he intends to ruin.
He imagines pulling you apart slowly—methodically—stretching your tolerance until you're no longer sure whether you're sobbing from overstimulation or worship. His thrusts would be relentless. Calculated. Deep enough to make you cry out, shallow enough to make you beg for more.
He imagines how your body would cling to him, trembling and slick, so desperate to keep him inside. He’d slow down—not out of mercy, but to watch you fall apart more beautifully.
He imagines gripping your face, forcing your gaze up to meet his—glasses still on, smile absent. Just cool, exacting control as he thinks, "This is what you're made for. Submission, chaos, and absolute obedience."
He imagines not stopping—not when you beg, not when you shake, not even when you forget your own name. He wants you empty, filled with nothing but his voice echoing in your skull. No thoughts. Just Wesker.
He imagines marking every inch of you—bite, bruise, handprint—proof of his ownership. Scientific. Clinical. Intimate in the most violent way.
He imagines your voice going hoarse from crying out for him. And he knows—you would. Again and again.
His strokes speed up. His breath stutters. He thinks of your lips wrapped around him, warm and wet and reverent—of bending you over some cold, sterile lab table, pressing your face to the glass just to see your fogged-up breath as he ruins you from behind.
You're his already. You just don’t know it yet.
He should be above this.
But he's not. He's fucking not.
He'd KILL for the real thing. He’d burn the whole facility just to hear you moan his name like you mean it.
“Mine,” he hisses through clenched teeth.
“You’ve always been mine.”
He hates this. Hates the shaking in his thighs. The raw, desperate sound that slips past his clenched teeth. The image of you sprawled and crying on his sheets—something he’s never even seen, but imagined with such terrifying precision he could swear it's real.
The monitor crackles slightly as you tilt your head and smile on screen—
and Wesker spills over his own hand with a low, brutal sound.
---
03:39 A.M.
Silence.
He exhales.
Reaches for a wipe.
Tucks himself away again.
He stares at the mess. Then at nothing.
Never again.
...Until next time.
Rewinds the tape.
Watches you one more time.
And doesn’t delete the footage.
---
(A/N: HAHA got you lovelies with the booby trap pic😈 Here's a little tease for you hoes;3 you'll get that wesker coc next time, I pwomise🥺 and he sure as hell won't make it easy for you. P. S. I'M STILL LEARNING HOW TO USE TUMBLR ALRIGHT???) Posted this draft at 3am.
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