caffeineivore

[caffeineivore]

[caffeineivore]

[caffeineivore]

Cucumber Gin Soda, a Drink Recipe

It's hot outside, y'all, but this here is a super simple and refreshing drink recipe that hits the spot on a muggy summer day. Omit Gin if you want to make it non-alcoholic.

***

Ingredients:

1 can flavored seltzer water, such as LaCroix (you can pick your flavor of choice, really, but anything berry or citrus would work well)

1 lime wedge

2-3 sprigs of fresh mint

5 or so slices of English or Persian cucumber

1 oz Simple Syrup or honey

2 oz Tanqueray Gin

Ice, to serve

***

Muddle mint, lime wedge, cucumber and the syrup or honey in a tall glass such as a highball or Collins. Add in Gin and crushed ice and stir. Top off with the soda and serve.

[caffeineivore]

I suppose.

I was expecting anything but not Bard

[caffeineivore]

Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.

[caffeineivore]

Reblog if you’re 30 or older

This is an experiment to see if there really are as few of us as people think.You can also use this to freak out your followers who think you’re 25 or something. Yay!

[caffeineivore]

Terminal

Liminal spaces Pt 4, M/K, PG13-ish? The end...?!

That the flight is re-routed to Detroit for the weather is unwelcome news, but not a complete surprise. Flying anywhere in the northern United States in January meant rolling the dice with Mother Nature, and Kane Grantham can do little but grumble as he disembarks with the rest of the passengers into the deserted terminal at DTW at the indecent hour of 10:29PM. To add insult to injury, the airport is perforce their port of entry into the country on the flight from Heathrow, and not only does the airline not provide hotel and transportation reimbursement for the weather-induced flight delay, but he and everyone else has to drag themselves through Customs and Border Protection at roughly an hour to midnight.

Naturally, everyone is testy and tired, which just makes the process drag on even longer. By the time Kane is declared not-a-terrorist and his personal effects are returned to him, it is twenty minutes to midnight and outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, the snow is falling steadily. Kane opens up the Uber app, and even with the unholy late-night premiums, there are no drivers available. A search for hotels is equally unpromising. Jet-lagged, hungry and wearing a non-blizzard-grade peacoat over his suit and wingtips, he sinks down into one of the seats in the terminal with a sigh.

"Well, this sucks, doesn't it? And I was so hoping to get home and indulge in a bubble bath with a glass of wine."

The melodious female voice sounds next to him, the tones friendly and the accent vaguely American. He glances over to see the trim blonde figure of a young woman wearing the navy blue skirt suit of a flight attendant complete with a jaunty red ascot that precisely matches the ribbon in her hair. She's seated one chair away from him, the only other person in the terminal, and gives him a wry yet cheerful sort of grin. "Oh well. It is what it is, hmm?"

That's an Americanism that he doesn't quite understand, so he settles for a shrug and a nod. "You're stranded too, I take it?"

"Honey, we're all stranded until tomorrow, but might as well make the best of it." She stretches out a pair of very slim, very nice legs (not that he's paying them any mind) and kicks off her stiletto heels with a sort of forwardness that he's not accustomed to, but then again, who the deuce could blame her, at this hour? Certainly, he's dying to get comfortable himself, and he's not the one freezing his arse off in a knee-length skirt. That done, she rifles in her bag, and pulls out several packets of those ubiquitous airplane biscuits, offers him one. "Hungry?"

"I am, rather. Thank you, miss."

"You'd think I'd get tired of Biscoff, but it never fails in a pinch." Somewhere, somehow, she also procures two mini bottles of water, a few slightly-squashed granola bars.

The two of them eat an objectively unappetizing dinner at the hour of midnight in the cotton-wrapped silence of that snowy airport terminal, and yet it's satisfying in a way that Kane doesn't quite understand. She's rather beautiful, despite-- or perhaps of-- the lateness of the hour. The sort of woman that one took to the ballet and bought flowers for, back home. But he's never been a ladies' man even in broad daylight, in a raucous pub. Certainly not in the middle of nowhere, in a town that both of them had no business in, on a snowy night.

"Thanks for the bite to eat," he finally says, because it felt necessary to acknowledge her-- acknowledge SOMETHING. "I do hope you get home soon."

"We'll all be on our way in the morning, won't we?" She tilts her head to the side, gives him a smile with something strangely wistful in it. "You'd best get some rest, sweetie. You're stuck here with me tonight."

Kane is reasonably certain that he'd never been called 'sweetie' ever before, not even once, in his whole life. Certainly not by a pretty blonde with her bare feet propped up on top of her suitcase, assiduously unpinning her cornsilk hair in a way that is far more distracting than it was ever meant to be. At this distance, it smells faintly like the types of windblown, summery wildflowers that grow far away from London's prim streets. Had he been smoother, more clever with his words, he might have come up with something flirtatious to say in response. But it's so quiet, and the terminal is rather like a different, tiny world where no one else existed and time meant very little, and he feels his eyelids grow heavy as he slouches down in his chair. The last thing he recalls himself saying, as he settles into the folds of his coat, is a mumbled, "I don't mind."

It's the sound of luggage wheels on the buffed floors that snaps him awake, and when he opens his eyes, the sun has come up. The terminal, though still empty, is showing signs of returning to life as a nattily-dressed gate agent takes his spot at the podium. Kane's suitcase and messenger bag are still right next to him, precisely where he'd left them.

Tucked securely around his shoulders, slightly scratchy but warm and fragrant with a delicate whiff of wildflowers, is an airline issue blanket, navy blue, the colour of her skirt suit. The girl herself is nowhere to be seen, and he wonders if she's on her way home already, to that bubble bath and glass of wine. He wonders where 'home' is, for her.

He wonders, for the first time in his staid and orderly life, if he's going mad and imagined the episode last night, then dismisses that as a laughable notion. Certainly the world wasn't so cruel, so terminally hopeless, that a woman so lovely only appeared in one's dreams.

[caffeineivore]

Night Train

Liminal Spaces Pt 3, A/Z, PG13-ish?

Taking the midnight train rarely bodes well in this city. Zavier is accustomed to a strict hoodie down, headphones-on, no-eye-contact policy on those occasions, sharing that cold subway compartment with emaciated druggies sleeping off a binge and dead-eyed transients traversing through a merciless world that's forgotten them. He doesn't love this place and time, but there aren't that many jobs-- legitimate ones-- available to a boy from the projects who never grew up knowing any but the absolute wrong people, and the night shift paid far more than the day shift.

Tonight isn't too awful, because for the first two stops, the compartment is completely empty, and Zavier takes the time to enjoy the rare solitude. Despite the lateness of the hour, the subway is lit almost hectically bright in contrast to the darkness of the tunnels. He gradually lets his posture relax, a wiry, golden-haired young man with a deceptively pretty face as he slouches against the seat-back, and then he sits bolt upright as the subway car comes to a halt at the next station and the doors slide open. Growing up in his neighbourhood, he'd conditioned himself to be hyper-aware of his surroundings even before he'd taken the security job, ready for anyone and anything.

But the slim, blue-eyed apparition who steps into his compartment doesn't bear the faintest resemblance to the usual characters as she takes a seat across from him, all spotless scrubs and sensible shoes and eyes like a clear sky before dawn, somewhere far away from the grit and streetlights and artifice of the city--- somewhere with starshine and moonlight. She says nothing when his gaze meets hers, but affords him a faint, unapologetically kind smile. It should put his back up, and give him every single reason to look for an ulterior motive, and yet it doesn't.

(Hours later he would still have no idea what on Earth possessed him.)

"Late night."

He really doesn't talk to people on the subway even in the light of day-- who even DOES that? -- but even if he did, it would logically not be to state the obvious to a girl with the type of face that was found on priceless paintings in art museums.

She, though, simply nods, answers as though this were completely normal instead of batshit insane. "Yes, it really is. It has been a long day."

"Are you getting off work, I suppose?" Even as his mouth makes stilted conversation without any input from his brain, Zavier can't quite piece it together. "I didn't know there was a hospital close by."

"I had a house call, subbing for a colleague out on his honeymoon. Everyone deserves that time with the person they love." That smile again, soft as snowfall, deep as the moonlit sea. "Are you also leaving work, or going in?"

"Beginning, not ending, I'm afraid." Zavier gives a self-deprecating shrug. "Down in the warehouse district. I get off at seven. The pay's not bad and the schedule works well enough with grad school."

The darkness of the tunnels gives way to the bright lights of the next station-- Zavier's stop. It had been two stops already since she'd gotten onboard, and he hasn't the faintest idea how the time had passed in such a brief conversation. Even in the glare of those lights, the unflattering harshness of them, she's delicate and lovely and almost not real, like a soap bubble rainbow against concrete. Zavier gets up, his legs taking him by rote towards the door, and glances back over his shoulder at her. "Well, goodnight."

"Be safe out there."

The door closes behind him and the train pulls off before he can even catch another glimpse of her through those windows, and he makes his way out of the station, down the barren city streets. He's restless in a way that has nothing to do with danger lurking in the dark shadows, and curses silently to himself that he didn't even ask for her name. Then shakes his head, incredulous, at that train of thought.

Just a stranger on the night train, just a moment in time, never to be repeated. There's no reason for him to see her again, or to feel a desire to.

[caffeineivore]

Medianoche

Liminal spaces, pt 2. M/N, PG13-ish

Everything they said about Texas was fucking true, and he'd been driving through the damn state for a day and a half with a shitty four-hour nap somewhere in the middle, and he was still within its borders.

Working for a moving company means that Noah sees a lot of time on the road, hauling anything from furniture and electronics to someone's fancy-ass fish tank complete with tiny underwater castle, Nemo, Dory and the whole gang. This trip includes curio cabinets full of highly-insured antique knick-knacks and fine china and some fancy artwork, all from some dearly-departed old lady's grand estate in Aspen, en route to her son's home in Freeport, and honestly, he would rather have hauled another damn fish tank. The responsibility of transporting old, fragile, irreplaceable rich-people shit sits differently than hauling someone's generic IKEA set cross-country.

Texas traffic is an absolute nightmare in the greater Houston area, and in the interests of saving time, Noah powers through what would have been dinnertime to continue on well into the outskirts, but by time the roads around him are finally in some semblance of "normal", it's full dark outside and his stomach is growling louder than the hard rock he's blasting on the radio. He's in the middle of freaking nowhere, of course, and for another fifteen miles, doesn't see so much as a freeway exit. Finally, though, a blue road sign with the fork and knife symbol for food pops up ahead, and he signals, turns right onto an exit ramp that leads down into a small side street.

There's a tiny tin can of a building ahead, where his truck takes up three spots in the stingy little parking lot, and in place of a name, there's simply a neon sign with a picture of what might optimistically be called a sandwich. But every single light inside is lit up, and the door pulls open easily. A faded handwritten sign tells Noah to sit anywhere he likes, and he makes his way to the deserted counter, rings the bell.

"Buenas noches," The woman who emerges from behind the swinging double-doors is tall and tanned and buxom, wearing a candy-pink blouse just a few shades lighter than her smile. She says something else in Spanish, and Noah only surmises that it's a question based on the quizzical look in her forest green eyes.

"Do you have a menu, darlin'? I'm hungrier than a bear out of hibernation."

That only earns him another quizzical look, but damned if she's not a sight for sore eyes. There's an endearing spray of freckles across her nose and when she tilts her head, the lights pick up the glossy chestnut tints of her hair, tied back in a practical ponytail. Noah mimes eating a sandwich, taking a sip of a drink.

"Tienes hambre," she says slowly, and he nods in agreement. Whatever that means.

"Sure. Surprise me. I trust you."

She hums something to herself, then pours him a cup of coffee in a sturdy white mug, slides it across the counter. It's hot and strong and he gulps it down black as he watches her disappear back through those double-doors.

It's perhaps a few minutes later when she reappears like a benevolent goddess, and sets down a generous-sized sandwich in front of him, its bread crisp and crossed with grill marks and still slick with melted butter. "La medianoche," she tells him, and waves a hand at the wall clock which reads the hour of midnight.

Noah is too busy inhaling possibly the best fucking thing he's ever tasted before in his whole natural life to look at the time. The bread is grilled crisp on the outside but is sweet and pillowy-soft around decadent slices of ham and roast pork, sharp mustard and melty cheese punctuated with the sweet-salty bite of sliced pickles. In his peripheral vision, she refills his coffee cup, then leaves the bill at his elbow. He pulls out a twenty-- roughly twice the bill-- and shouts a "Keep the change, sweetheart!" over his shoulder as the food and coffee give him a new lease on life. Maybe with luck, Grandma's creepy antique shit will make it to its new home before whatever undoubtedly haunted artifact decides to rise up and possess his soul from the trailer of the truck.

He makes it to his destination sometime the next day, and takes the night off to rest at a decently nice hotel, and his dreams sound like lightning storms and smell like roses and fresh bread. He sees her in his mind as he sleeps-- that gentle smile, that statuesque figure draped in emerald silk rather than pink calico. The next trip takes him west, and somewhat impulsively, he passes through that stretch of lonely Texan road again. It's not too much out the way, after all.

In broad daylight, though he's quite certain it's the same exact road, there's no blue road sign, and no neon sandwich atop a tin can diner shining like a beacon anywhere on that stretch. It's as though the place and the girl sprung to life, only at midnight.

Only when he needed them.

[caffeineivore]

The Witching Hour

Liminal Spaces, moments in time, beautiful and forlorn and uncanny.

R/J, PG13-ish?

The parking lot is lit by a single pole light that flickers erratically, and the neon sign reading "Vacancy" has both A's out. Jace usually isn't one for such Uncanny Valley trappings, but beggars can't be choosers at midnight and his low fuel light came on twenty miles ago.

It's a small motel in the middle of a small town in the middle of a lonely stretch of freeway in the middle of nowhere-- the type that some poor idiot in a horror movie would probably get gruesomely murdered in, but then again, he was hardly a nubile ingenue or a dumbass jock. He'd certainly stayed in worse places during a long stint as a UC in LA, and he thinks he'd take the tumbleweeds and the flickering neon over the seedy underbelly of the City of Fallen Angels anytime. He doesn't have much on him to attract the bad sort of attention anyway-- a lone man in worn jeans and a leather jacket that had seen better days, bearing an old duffel bag and dark gold five-o'-clock shadow, a few battered twenties in his wallet and an ankle holster that doesn't show as he walks.

The lobby is small, neat as a pin and almost inhumanly bright in the glare of harsh fluorescents as he comes in. A pair of tired-looking armchairs and a loveseat in faded red chenille, gunmetal-grey industrial carpeting. The front desk is shielded by a panel of reinforced glass and features a computer that looks positively ancient, but he does a double-take when he comes up to the counter. As a rule, night auditors at places of lodging are a bit unsociable, slightly Eldritch, with the uncanny factor increasing proportionate to the lateness of the hour and the remoteness and shabbiness of the location, and this specimen certainly had nothing ordinary about her, either. She looks up as he raises a hand to ring the service bell, holds his gaze in an unblinking violet stare for a moment too long, but it's her beauty that stops him in his tracks.

Fifteen years in Los Angeles has Jace all but immune to the countless number of meaningless beautiful faces all around him. A starlet's lush-lipped smile looks a lot less inviting two hours later in a rictus of drug-induced convulsions. Diamonds and bullets, champagne and smog, sunsets and blood-soaked asphalt. This woman could be twenty or a hundred, with an ageless face that he imagined angels would have if they were real-- the type of angels that smote a sinner with swords and fire, not the type that graced Hallmark cards and Victoria's Secret catalogues. Fathomless violet eyes, blood-red lips and a curtain of inky hair. "It's pretty late to be traveling, isn't it?"

"Absolutely, and I'm tired the hell out. Do you have a room for the night, and maybe a gas station close to here that opens sometime tomorrow morning, sweetheart?"

She cocks her head to the side rather like a bird might as it stares at a new street sign. "This isn't where you're supposed to be right now, but I won't begrudge you a night's rest and shelter," she says at length, almost to herself. She slides a tattered registration binder and an honest-to-God fountain pen across the desk, under the panel of glass, and her voice takes on a slightly brisker tone. "Name and address, please. That will be fifty dollars. Room 12, which will be six doors down, on the right. We don't have breakfast, but there's a cafe down the road next to the gas station, about five miles out. Check out is at ten."

"Thanks, love." His fingers brush hers for the briefest of moments as he takes the keys-- old fashioned metal ones, not plastic cards, and he would have expected her hands to be ghostly-cold. But they're warm and soft, like the glow of hearth fire behind a screen. He almost wants to give them a squeeze, but that would be creepy. He signs "Jacen Reinhardt" and puts down the address of an apartment that he'd not set foot in for the last two years, and slides three twenties across the table. "Keep the change. I'd've driven on, you know, but I can barely keep my eyes open, and I'm almost out of gas. You probably saved my life." He tacks that last part on with a wink that would have melted a model or a gun moll alike, but she simply continues to look at him with something that looks weirdly like silent absolution in those dark, mysterious eyes.

"I wish that were true," she murmurs, tipping her face downwards towards the registration binder as she puts it back in its drawer. "Rest well. You're safe here."

"I'll catch you tomorrow morning before you're off, doll. Sweet dreams."

He finds Room 12 without much difficulty, unlocks it with those old-fashioned keys. It's just as tidy as the lobby under the glow of the incandescent table lamp, with a single bed and heavy burgundy drapes over its windows, but the shower runs hot and the pillows are soft under his weary head. Jace is asleep almost as soon as he lies down, before he could even have taken any of the types of precautions he might have been accustomed to in the big city, but she's a woman of her word and he sleeps soundly and well. He dreams in flashes and fits that night, fleeting images that flit across his subconscious-- snow-white lilies, stark black ravens, fire that arrows across an eerie silver sky, the clash of swords and the crush of lovers' lips-- but nonetheless, the sun is high in the sky when he wakes from the best sleep that he's had in a long time.

One look on the old-fashioned analog alarm clock on the nightstand tells him that he has all of nineteen minutes to check out, and so Jace hurries into the lobby, raking one hand through his tousled blond hair, keys in hand, duffel bag slung over one shoulder, eyes peeled for that oil-slick of black hair. In daylight, it's a much-different place-- not cheery, perhaps, but pleasant. Almost welcoming. Ordinary. Manning the front desk is a perky redhead who cheerfully points him towards the direction of the gas station as she accepts the keys and wishes him safe travels.

"Thanks... Molly, is it?" He reads the name on the gilt nametag pinned on her blouse, and racks his brain for whether the woman last night had worn one. "This might be an odd question, but... who was here last night? The overnight lady."

"Oh, I don't know any of the others," Molly replies, furrowing her brow in a bewildered way. "I usually just miss her. I've just started here, you see, for a summer job. But I know she's been here for a long time. She's never here after daybreak. I work nine to five."

That is, of course, supremely unhelpful, but it's not something that he can fault her for. Jace coaxes his car into life and drives off into the sunshine, towards the very ordinary gas station and very ordinary cafe that likely serves very ordinary coffee and bacon and eggs that would fuel him until his next destination, and wonders if he's lost a night or a small eternity of his life that he just won't ever quite understand.

Strange things always happen during the witching hour, that's a given. But there's never been cause to wonder, before this, of lost time and liminal spaces that have never been his before, beautiful and forlorn and uncanny, of ghosts and angels when neither of those things were real.

(The other three will be put up on AO3 when I can be arsed to write them)

[caffeineivore]

Free dating apps

Places to eat near me

Sephora

Uber

Wine and food pairings

First date red flags

Dictionary.com gaslighting

How do I tell if someone is lying to me

Mayo clinic: GHB

Free bahlkgruoung cehck -> no results returned

9-1---------

Write a horror story in the format of an Internet search history

[caffeineivore]

㋡🥀

[caffeineivore]

We had a sangria last meetup as well. I am renaming this drink Vancouver Sangria.

I think every meetup will now involve a new sangria recipe based on locally available wine and fruit and mixers.

Ficchat Meetup White Sangria: A drink recipe

For @adriannasharp @nelwynp @ellorgast and @galaxylily

1 bottle white Portuguese wine

1 20 oz bottle of mango soda, from 7-11

1/3 cup mint leaves, coarsely shredded

3 ripe peaches, pitted and sliced

A dozen lychees, pitted

2 ripe kiwi's, peeled and sliced

***

In a pitcher, combine wine and fruits, muddle slightly with a spoon to crush the fruit slightly. Add mint, muddle some more. Pour in mango soda and stir. Serve chilled.

[caffeineivore]

Vancouver Sangria: A drink recipe

For @adriannasharp @nelwynp @ellorgast and @galaxylily

1 bottle white Portuguese wine

1 20 oz bottle of mango soda, from 7-11

1/3 cup mint leaves, coarsely shredded

3 ripe peaches, pitted and sliced

A dozen lychees, pitted

2 ripe kiwi's, peeled and sliced

***

In a pitcher, combine wine and fruits, muddle slightly with a spoon to crush the fruit slightly. Add mint, muddle some more. Pour in mango soda and stir. Serve chilled.

[caffeineivore]

One Heart, One Mind - Chapter 1 - caffeineivore - Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon | Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon [Archive of Our Own]

I wrote a thing while I was on vacation. Prequel/sequel/companion piece of the R/J I did for one of the bangs. M/K tropey trash.

[caffeineivore]

H6 @antivanruffles @cursedwithgloriouspurpose

being a writer with writer friends is just:

writer: *unhinged idea*

writer friend: *encourages unhinged idea*

writer:  😈 

writer friend:  😈 

[caffeineivore]

Sorry if some of these overlap a little/if I left out something obvious kajbdsjkd I tried my best haha. And that's why there's an "other" option!