#Free up drive space in Windows 10

[lovemomhatepolice]

drivers licence - f1 drivers multi!

navigation taglist requests

pairing: f1 drivers x fem!reader

warnings DRIVERS LICENCE, swearing, English is my second language

belonging: f1 drivers multi!

type: fluff, some are a little angst

summary: short stories about how a particular driver would teach you driving (or try)

more content: formula 1 masterlist, lando norris first meeting, max verstappen nswf alphabet 2

charles leclerc

“Are you sure you know how to park?” [Y.N] teased him, buckling her seatbelt, while Charles combed his hand through his hair, already exasperated.

“Of course I know how to park,” he muttered, putting the car in reverse gear. “It's just… sometimes I misjudge space,” he said.

“Sometimes?” she snarked, scrolling through countless memes on her phone depicting Charles' parking failures. “You're literally known for that.”

Charles groaned. “Fine, fine, laugh all you want, but today I'm the teacher and you're the student.”

“That's what worries me,” she said, smiling.

They were in an almost empty parking lot, Charles having chosen the safest place imaginable to prevent any disaster. He turned to her with the most serious expression on his instructor's face.

“All right. First, check the mirrors. Then slowly…”

“I know how mirrors work, Charles,” interrupted [Y.N].

“Let me teach you! - He growled, before continuing. “Now gently turn the steering wheel while reversing. Feel the car, control the movement and…”

The car jerked violently backward, causing him to grab the seat in terror. In response, it additionally turned off, causing silence in the car for a brief moment.

“[Y.N]!” the Monegasque shouted, looking at his girlfriend.

[Y.N], despite her slight dismay, burst out laughing. “You said to feel the car!”

“Not like that! You want to crash my Ferrari?!”

“You have a whole garage.” She then looked at him indulgently and put her hand on his shoulder. “Besides, Ferrari will give you 10 more of these if you ask.”

Charles looked at his girlfriend, not at all convinced, and nodded toward the ignition keys to start the car back up. “Come on,” he muttered, tilting the window. “We have to finish this before it gets dark.”

Then she followed his instructions more carefully this time, the car smoothly backing into the spot. She stopped and looked at him expectantly.

Charles inspected it, then tilted his head. "Hmm. A little crooked, but—"

"It's better than your parking," she quipped.

He groaned, dropping his head against the seat. "Remind me why I’m teaching you again?"

"Because you're my boyfriend, and I need to learn from the best," she said sweetly before adding, "Well, relatively speaking."

Charles shook his head with a smile. "Alright, fine, but you owe me something,” he laughed lightly, looking in her direction.

“Is a kiss enough?” she asked, laughing under her breath and moving closer to him to then join their lips in a kiss.

“More than enough” muttered the man, smiling into her lip

—————

kimi antonelli

Kimi sat down in the passenger seat, clasping his hands in his lap so tightly that his knuckles turned white. “I don't think this is a good idea.”

[Y.N] smiled sweetly. “Relax, you just got your driver's license. You can pass on your wisdom to me, it's fresh.”

“That's exactly why I'm scared.” - he muttered under his breath. “I gained it so quickly, I don't want to lose it any sooner.”

They parked in a quiet neighborhood, where the most dangerous thing on the road was an elderly man walking his dog. But for Kimi it might as well have been Monza at full speed.

“Okay,” [Y.N] said cheerfully after a moment of silence, putting the car into first gear. “Let's go!”

The car shot forward as if it had been launched off the grid. The girl knew more or less what she was doing, since she had already had some lessons with a real instructor, but who would disdain free lessons with her boyfriend?

Her daring drive through a small intersection was interrupted by a terrified Kimi, who looked as if he had been forced to drive. Not at all, like a professional driver who just got into Formula One - the most prestigious and perhaps also dangerous racing in the world.

“OH MY GOD-[Y.N], BRAKE!”.

She pressed the brake and they both moved forward. Kimi instinctively grabbed the dashboard as if it were a life raft.

“Okay,” she said, panting. “A little too much gas. I understand, too extreme for you.”

Kimi exhaled slowly. “Mi ucciderai!.”

She giggled. “Don't be dramatic! You drive race cars!”

“Yes, but at least I know what I'm doing!

Ignoring him, she started the car again, this time more gently. Kimi started breathing again, but just at the moment he relaxed his fists….

She reached a traffic circle. There was nothing difficult about it, she even thought it was the best she could do for now. Yet all it took was a moment of inattention and the girl drove into the wrong lane, admittedly not causing any collision, but enough to make Kimi gasp for air again.

“Pull over to the side,” - he said weakly, but the girl initially ignored him, continuing to drive. “[Y.N], please, I'm too young to die. I just got a Formula 1 seat!"

As she pulled over to the side of the road, Kimi slumped back in his seat, wiping imaginary sweat from his forehead. “I've never been so scared in my life. Not even in my first F4 race.”

[Y.N] burst out laughing. “Come on. It wasn't that bad,” she said.

Kimi turned to her with his eyes wide open. “We drove for five minutes and I think I just saw my life flash before my eyes.”

Suddenly he began to gesture, at which the girl had to hold back her laughter. Sometimes she forgot that her boyfriend was Italian.

She rolled her eyes, but smiled. “So you mean to say that … I just need more practice?

Kimi groaned and leaned his head against the seat. “I'll never get into a car with you again.

“Even if I pass the first time?” she asked, raising her eyebrows and looking at her boyfriend.

Kimi looked at her, looked at the car, then sighed in defeat. “I have to make a will first.”

—————

oscar piastri

“All right,” Oscar said, buckling up and looking ahead with his usual focused expression. “Parallel parking. It's not difficult. Just follow my instructions exactly,” he said.

[Y.N], sitting in the driver's seat, looked at him sideways. She smiled under her breath, seeing his confident expression. “You sound so self-assured.”

“Because I'm pretty confident, and even more so that you can do it.” - he replied matter-of-factly. “Now pull up next to this car.

She did so. A little crooked, but enough to fit in.

Oscar sighed, but said nothing. This was their first, if you can call it a lesson. “Good. Now turn the steering wheel all the way to the right and start reversing slowly.”

She carefully followed his instructions, and her hands gripped the steering wheel as if her life depended on it. The car began to reverse.

“Good,” nodded Oscar, smiling slightly at her. “Now straighten the steering wheel. You're doing great.”

She tried.

Oscar's eyes narrowed. “No, no, no, you're going too far. A little to the left - no, not so much! Right again - no, no - stop!”.

The car came to an abrupt stop. [Y.N] squirmed, looking sideways at Oscar. “Oops.”

Oscar breathed, pinching the back of his nose. “It's okay, it's okay. I put too much pressure on you. We just need to improve the angle.”

As he started to drive it again, a car pulled up behind them and honked. Oscar immediately went into a fighting mood, although of course he didn't show it from himself, but only made a snearky comment.

Oscar turned his head. “Are you serious?”

She looked in the mirror. “Uh… should I-?”

“No. Stay where you are,” he said in a flat voice.

The driver behind them honked again.

Oscar clenched his jaw and muttered more to himself than to the man behind the window. “Buddy, we're clearly parking. Get around us.”

The driver didn't move, and Oscar rolled down his window and looked at him with a crooked look. "Unbelievable. An old man who doesn't know the rules of the road. And he still thinks he'll impress someone with his expensive car."

[Y.N] bit her lip to keep from laughing. "Oscar, I just…"

"No, because what's his problem?" he continued, glancing in the rearview mirror. "Does he think that honking will magically make you park faster?"

She turned to him, amused. "You sound more pissed off than I am."

Oscar crossed his arms. "Because it's annoying. People in normal traffic are worse than race drivers, I swear. And he honks at my girlfriend, let him go fuck himself."

Finally, the car behind them gave up and drove off. Oscar watched as it disappeared down the street, still clearly irritated. Then, he sighed contentedly and looked at [Y/N] with an encouraging nod.

“Okay,” he mumbled, exhaling. “Let’s go back to the parking lot.”

With his instructions (and fewer distractions), the girl managed to park the car perfectly. She looked at him happily, seeing his satisfaction.

“Did I do it?”

Oscar checked. He nodded. “Yeah. Nice on, you did well without that jerk in the back.”

She laughed, shaking her head. “You know, for someone who’s supposed to teach me, you spent most of your time yelling at other drivers.”

Oscar shrugged. “Well, if people knew how to drive, maybe I wouldn’t have to. They drive worse than Carlos, who pushes around on the track.”

She rolled her eyes, but leaned in to kiss his cheek. "Thanks for the lesson, coach Piastri."

—————

max verstappen

[Y.N] sat in the driver's seat, arms crossed, staring at the steering wheel as if she had personally insulted her. Her eyes were watering and her lips were pursed in a grimace. It had been over five minutes since the girl had turned off the car and had sat in silence as she hit the traffic cone on the maneuvering yard yet again.

Max, sitting in the passenger seat, watched her breakdown in silence, allowing her to take offense.

Finally, she sighed dramatically. "I'll never pass."

Max winked. "Okay."

She turned to him indignantly. "Okay? Is that all you have to say?"

"Would you rather I lied?" he asked slightly mockingly, glancing at her out of the corner of his eye. "Don't stress out so much. It's just a driving test."

"Just a driving test?" She caught her breath. "Max, you're a professional driver. You wouldn't get this."

He raised his eyebrows. "I became a Formula 1 driver before I even got a regular driver's license."

[Y.N] paused. "What's that supposed to mean? Should I just give a fuck and become a Formula 1 driver?"

He smirked. "You really could. The Formula Academy is growing, such a pretty and a smart woman would fill the spot perfectly."

Max sighed, reaching up to adjust her hands on the wheel. “Stop thinking too much. I’ll explain this to you properly.”

She sniffed. “Really?”

“Yeah, but if you cry while you learn, you won’t get anywhere. You’ll definitely not see the cones.” He smiled weakly at her, which she returned.

He led her through it step by step—slowly, methodically, making sure she understood each part before moving on. When she got frustrated, he’d crack a joke to lighten the mood.

By the end of their lesson, [Y.N] had managed to do the task flawlessly, even several times in a row, so she smiled happily to herself as she parked her car on the side of the parking lot.

She turned to him, her eyes widening. "Did you see that?! I did it!"

Max smiled at her and clapped his hands. "Amazing. A true performance by a world champion."

She rolled her eyes but smiled. "Shut up."

He smiled pityingly. "You're not as bad as you think. I'd say you're good, it's just that you have too much on your mind and stress is eating you up. You'll pass in no time."

The girl looked at him and smiled at her boyfriend, fixing her hair. "Thank you Max," she said, grabbing his hand. "Time to go home."

"I'm driving," Max muttered, opening the passenger door and stepping outside.

“Thank God,” the girl laughed, repeating his steps.

A/N: first part of the driving license stories. two more to come. I keep my fingers crossed that you had fun. Any feedback is welcome

please do not copy and translate my works! in case of any issues related to this - I invite you to discuss privately :)

[donjuaninhell]

How I ditched streaming services and learned to love Linux: A step-by-step guide to building your very own personal media streaming server (V2.0: REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION)

This is a revised, corrected and expanded version of my tutorial on setting up a personal media server that previously appeared on my old blog (donjuan-auxenfers). I expect that that post is still making the rounds (hopefully with my addendum on modifying group share permissions in Ubuntu to circumvent 0x8007003B "Unexpected Network Error" messages in Windows 10/11 when transferring files) but I have no way of checking. Anyway this new revised version of the tutorial corrects one or two small errors I discovered when rereading what I wrote, adds links to all products mentioned and is just more polished generally. I also expanded it a bit, pointing more adventurous users toward programs such as Sonarr/Radarr/Lidarr and Overseerr which can be used for automating user requests and media collection.

So then, what is this tutorial? This is a tutorial on how to build and set up your own personal media server using Ubuntu as an operating system and Plex (or Jellyfin) to not only manage your media, but to also stream that media to your devices both at home and abroad anywhere in the world where you have an internet connection. Its intent is to show you how building a personal media server and stuffing it full of films, TV, and music that you acquired through indiscriminate and voracious media piracy various legal methods will free you to completely ditch paid streaming services. No more will you have to pay for Disney+, Netflix, HBOMAX, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Peacock, CBS All Access, Paramount+, Crave or any other streaming service that is not named Criterion Channel. Instead whenever you want to watch your favourite films and television shows, you’ll have your own personal service that only features things that you want to see, with files that you have control over. And for music fans out there, both Jellyfin and Plex support music streaming, meaning you can even ditch music streaming services. Goodbye Spotify, Youtube Music, Tidal and Apple Music, welcome back unreasonably large MP3 (or FLAC) collections.

On the hardware front, I’m going to offer a few options catered towards different budgets and media library sizes. The cost of getting a media server up and running using this guide will cost you anywhere from $450 CAD/$325 USD at the low end to $1500 CAD/$1100 USD at the high end (it could go higher). My server was priced closer to the higher figure, but I went and got a lot more storage than most people need. If that seems like a little much, consider for a moment, do you have a roommate, a close friend, or a family member who would be willing to chip in a few bucks towards your little project provided they get access? Well that's how I funded my server. It might also be worth thinking about the cost over time, i.e. how much you spend yearly on subscriptions vs. a one time cost of setting up a server. Additionally there's just the joy of being able to scream "fuck you" at all those show cancelling, library deleting, hedge fund vampire CEOs who run the studios through denying them your money. Drive a stake through David Zaslav's heart.

On the software side I will walk you step-by-step through installing Ubuntu as your server's operating system, configuring your storage as a RAIDz array with ZFS, sharing your zpool to Windows with Samba, running a remote connection between your server and your Windows PC, and then a little about started with Plex/Jellyfin. Every terminal command you will need to input will be provided, and I even share a custom #bash script that will make used vs. available drive space on your server display correctly in Windows.

If you have a different preferred flavour of Linux (Arch, Manjaro, Redhat, Fedora, Mint, OpenSUSE, CentOS, Slackware etc. et. al.) and are aching to tell me off for being basic and using Ubuntu, this tutorial is not for you. The sort of person with a preferred Linux distro is the sort of person who can do this sort of thing in their sleep. Also I don't care. This tutorial is intended for the average home computer user. This is also why we’re not using a more exotic home server solution like running everything through Docker Containers and managing it through a dashboard like Homarr or Heimdall. While such solutions are fantastic and can be very easy to maintain once you have it all set up, wrapping your brain around Docker is a whole thing in and of itself. If you do follow this tutorial and had fun putting everything together, then I would encourage you to return in a year’s time, do your research and set up everything with Docker Containers.

Lastly, this is a tutorial aimed at Windows users. Although I was a daily user of OS X for many years (roughly 2008-2023) and I've dabbled quite a bit with various Linux distributions (mostly Ubuntu and Manjaro), my primary OS these days is Windows 11. Many things in this tutorial will still be applicable to Mac users, but others (e.g. setting up shares) you will have to look up for yourself. I doubt it would be difficult to do so.

Nothing in this tutorial will require feats of computing expertise. All you will need is a basic computer literacy (i.e. an understanding of what a filesystem and directory are, and a degree of comfort in the settings menu) and a willingness to learn a thing or two. While this guide may look overwhelming at first glance, it is only because I want to be as thorough as possible. I want you to understand exactly what it is you're doing, I don't want you to just blindly follow steps. If you half-way know what you’re doing, you will be much better prepared if you ever need to troubleshoot.

Honestly, once you have all the hardware ready it shouldn't take more than an afternoon or two to get everything up and running.

(This tutorial is just shy of seven thousand words long so the rest is under the cut.)

Step One: Choosing Your Hardware

Linux is a light weight operating system, depending on the distribution there's close to no bloat. There are recent distributions available at this very moment that will run perfectly fine on a fourteen year old i3 with 4GB of RAM. Moreover, running Plex or Jellyfin isn’t resource intensive in 90% of use cases. All this is to say, we don’t require an expensive or powerful computer. This means that there are several options available: 1) use an old computer you already have sitting around but aren't using 2) buy a used workstation from eBay, or what I believe to be the best option, 3) order an N100 Mini-PC from AliExpress or Amazon.

Note: If you already have an old PC sitting around that you’ve decided to use, fantastic, move on to the next step.

When weighing your options, keep a few things in mind: the number of people you expect to be streaming simultaneously at any one time, the resolution and bitrate of your media library (4k video takes a lot more processing power than 1080p) and most importantly, how many of those clients are going to be transcoding at any one time. Transcoding is what happens when the playback device does not natively support direct playback of the source file. This can happen for a number of reasons, such as the playback device's native resolution being lower than the file's internal resolution, or because the source file was encoded in a video codec unsupported by the playback device.

Ideally we want any transcoding to be performed by hardware. This means we should be looking for a computer with an Intel processor with Quick Sync. Quick Sync is a dedicated core on the CPU die designed specifically for video encoding and decoding. This specialized hardware makes for highly efficient transcoding both in terms of processing overhead and power draw. Without these Quick Sync cores, transcoding must be brute forced through software. This takes up much more of a CPU’s processing power and requires much more energy. But not all Quick Sync cores are created equal and you need to keep this in mind if you've decided either to use an old computer or to shop for a used workstation on eBay

Any Intel processor from second generation Core (Sandy Bridge circa 2011) onward has Quick Sync cores. It's not until 6th gen (Skylake), however, that the cores support the H.265 HEVC codec. Intel’s 10th gen (Comet Lake) processors introduce support for 10bit HEVC and HDR tone mapping. And the recent 12th gen (Alder Lake) processors brought with them hardware AV1 decoding. As an example, while an 8th gen (Kaby Lake) i5-8500 will be able to hardware transcode a H.265 encoded file, it will fall back to software transcoding if given a 10bit H.265 file. If you’ve decided to use that old PC or to look on eBay for an old Dell Optiplex keep this in mind.

Note 1: The price of old workstations varies wildly and fluctuates frequently. If you get lucky and go shopping shortly after a workplace has liquidated a large number of their workstations you can find deals for as low as $100 on a barebones system, but generally an i5-8500 workstation with 16gb RAM will cost you somewhere in the area of $260 CAD/$200 USD.

Note 2: The AMD equivalent to Quick Sync is called Video Core Next, and while it's fine, it's not as efficient and not as mature a technology. It was only introduced with the first generation Ryzen CPUs and it only got decent with their newest CPUs, we want something cheap.

Alternatively you could forgo having to keep track of what generation of CPU is equipped with Quick Sync cores that feature support for which codecs, and just buy an N100 mini-PC. For around the same price or less of a used workstation you can pick up a mini-PC with an Intel N100 processor. The N100 is a four-core processor based on the 12th gen Alder Lake architecture and comes equipped with the latest revision of the Quick Sync cores. These little processors offer astounding hardware transcoding capabilities for their size and power draw. Otherwise they perform equivalent to an i5-6500, which isn't a terrible CPU. A friend of mine uses an N100 machine as a dedicated retro emulation gaming system and it does everything up to 6th generation consoles just fine. The N100 is also a remarkably efficient chip, it sips power. In fact, the difference between running one of these and an old workstation could work out to hundreds of dollars a year in energy bills depending on where you live.

You can find these Mini-PCs all over Amazon or for a little cheaper on AliExpress. They range in price from $170 CAD/$125 USD for a no name N100 with 8GB RAM to $280 CAD/$200 USD for a Beelink S12 Pro with 16GB RAM. The brand doesn't really matter, they're all coming from the same three factories in Shenzen, go for whichever one fits your budget or has features you want. 8GB RAM should be enough, Linux is lightweight and Plex only calls for 2GB RAM. 16GB RAM might result in a slightly snappier experience, especially with ZFS. A 256GB SSD is more than enough for what we need as a boot drive, but going for a bigger drive might allow you to get away with things like creating preview thumbnails for Plex, but it’s up to you and your budget.

The Mini-PC I wound up buying was a Firebat AK2 Plus with 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD. It looks like this:

Note: Be forewarned that if you decide to order a Mini-PC from AliExpress, note the type of power adapter it ships with. The mini-PC I bought came with an EU power adapter and I had to supply my own North American power supply. Thankfully this is a minor issue as barrel plug 30W/12V/2.5A power adapters are easy to find and can be had for $10.

Step Two: Choosing Your Storage

Storage is the most important part of our build. It is also the most expensive. Thankfully it’s also the most easily upgrade-able down the line.

For people with a smaller media collection (4TB to 8TB), a more limited budget, or who will only ever have two simultaneous streams running, I would say that the most economical course of action would be to buy a USB 3.0 8TB external HDD. Something like this one from Western Digital or this one from Seagate. One of these external drives will cost you in the area of $200 CAD/$140 USD. Down the line you could add a second external drive or replace it with a multi-drive RAIDz set up such as detailed below.

If a single external drive the path for you, move on to step three.

For people with larger media libraries (12TB+), who prefer media in 4k, or care who about data redundancy, the answer is a RAID array featuring multiple HDDs in an enclosure.

Note: If you are using an old PC or used workstatiom as your server and have the room for at least three 3.5" drives, and as many open SATA ports on your mother board you won't need an enclosure, just install the drives into the case. If your old computer is a laptop or doesn’t have room for more internal drives, then I would suggest an enclosure.

The minimum number of drives needed to run a RAIDz array is three, and seeing as RAIDz is what we will be using, you should be looking for an enclosure with three to five bays. I think that four disks makes for a good compromise for a home server. Regardless of whether you go for a three, four, or five bay enclosure, do be aware that in a RAIDz array the space equivalent of one of the drives will be dedicated to parity at a ratio expressed by the equation 1 − 1/n i.e. in a four bay enclosure equipped with four 12TB drives, if we configured our drives in a RAIDz1 array we would be left with a total of 36TB of usable space (48TB raw size). The reason for why we might sacrifice storage space in such a manner will be explained in the next section.

A four bay enclosure will cost somewhere in the area of $200 CDN/$140 USD. You don't need anything fancy, we don't need anything with hardware RAID controls (RAIDz is done entirely in software) or even USB-C. An enclosure with USB 3.0 will perform perfectly fine. Don’t worry too much about USB speed bottlenecks. A mechanical HDD will be limited by the speed of its mechanism long before before it will be limited by the speed of a USB connection. I've seen decent looking enclosures from TerraMaster, Yottamaster, Mediasonic and Sabrent.

When it comes to selecting the drives, as of this writing, the best value (dollar per gigabyte) are those in the range of 12TB to 20TB. I settled on 12TB drives myself. If 12TB to 20TB drives are out of your budget, go with what you can afford, or look into refurbished drives. I'm not sold on the idea of refurbished drives but many people swear by them.

When shopping for harddrives, search for drives designed specifically for NAS use. Drives designed for NAS use typically have better vibration dampening and are designed to be active 24/7. They will also often make use of CMR (conventional magnetic recording) as opposed to SMR (shingled magnetic recording). This nets them a sizable read/write performance bump over typical desktop drives. Seagate Ironwolf and Toshiba NAS are both well regarded brands when it comes to NAS drives. I would avoid Western Digital Red drives at this time. WD Reds were a go to recommendation up until earlier this year when it was revealed that they feature firmware that will throw up false SMART warnings telling you to replace the drive at the three year mark quite often when there is nothing at all wrong with that drive. It will likely even be good for another six, seven, or more years.

Step Three: Installing Linux

For this step you will need a USB thumbdrive of at least 6GB in capacity, an .ISO of Ubuntu, and a way to make that thumbdrive bootable media.

First download a copy of Ubuntu desktop (for best performance we could download the Server release, but for new Linux users I would recommend against the server release. The server release is strictly command line interface only, and having a GUI is very helpful for most people. Not many people are wholly comfortable doing everything through the command line, I'm certainly not one of them, and I grew up with DOS 6.0. 22.04.3 Jammy Jellyfish is the current Long Term Service release, this is the one to get.

Download the .ISO and then download and install balenaEtcher on your Windows PC. BalenaEtcher is an easy to use program for creating bootable media, you simply insert your thumbdrive, select the .ISO you just downloaded, and it will create a bootable installation media for you.

Once you've made a bootable media and you've got your Mini-PC (or you old PC/used workstation) in front of you, hook it directly into your router with an ethernet cable, and then plug in the HDD enclosure, a monitor, a mouse and a keyboard. Now turn that sucker on and hit whatever key gets you into the BIOS (typically ESC, DEL or F2). If you’re using a Mini-PC check to make sure that the P1 and P2 power limits are set correctly, my N100's P1 limit was set at 10W, a full 20W under the chip's power limit. Also make sure that the RAM is running at the advertised speed. My Mini-PC’s RAM was set at 2333Mhz out of the box when it should have been 3200Mhz. Once you’ve done that, key over to the boot order and place the USB drive first in the boot order. Then save the BIOS settings and restart.

After you restart you’ll be greeted by Ubuntu's installation screen. Installing Ubuntu is really straight forward, select the "minimal" installation option, as we won't need anything on this computer except for a browser (Ubuntu comes preinstalled with Firefox) and Plex Media Server/Jellyfin Media Server. Also remember to delete and reformat that Windows partition! We don't need it.

Step Four: Installing ZFS and Setting Up the RAIDz Array

Note: If you opted for just a single external HDD skip this step and move onto setting up a Samba share.

Once Ubuntu is installed it's time to configure our storage by installing ZFS to build our RAIDz array. ZFS is a "next-gen" file system that is both massively flexible and massively complex. It's capable of snapshot backup, self healing error correction, ZFS pools can be configured with drives operating in a supplemental manner alongside the storage vdev (e.g. fast cache, dedicated secondary intent log, hot swap spares etc.). It's also a file system very amenable to fine tuning. Block and sector size are adjustable to use case and you're afforded the option of different methods of inline compression. If you'd like a very detailed overview and explanation of its various features and tips on tuning a ZFS array check out these articles from Ars Technica. For now we're going to ignore all these features and keep it simple, we're going to pull our drives together into a single vdev running in RAIDz which will be the entirety of our zpool, no fancy cache drive or SLOG.

Open up the terminal and type the following commands:

sudo apt update

then

sudo apt install zfsutils-linux

This will install the ZFS utility. Verify that it's installed with the following command:

zfs --version

Now, it's time to check that the HDDs we have in the enclosure are healthy, running, and recognized. We also want to find out their device IDs and take note of them:

sudo fdisk -1

Note: You might be wondering why some of these commands require "sudo" in front of them while others don't. "Sudo" is short for "super user do”. When and where "sudo" is used has to do with the way permissions are set up in Linux. Only the "root" user has the access level to perform certain tasks in Linux. As a matter of security and safety regular user accounts are kept separate from the "root" user. It's not advised (or even possible) to boot into Linux as "root" with most modern distributions. Instead by using "sudo" our regular user account is temporarily given the power to do otherwise forbidden things. Don't worry about it too much at this stage, but if you want to know more check out this introduction.

If everything is working you should get a list of the various drives detected along with their device IDs which will look like this: /dev/sdc. You can also check the device IDs of the drives by opening the disk utility app. Jot these IDs down as we'll need them for our next step, creating our RAIDz array.

RAIDz is similar to RAID-5 in that instead of striping your data over multiple disks, exchanging redundancy for speed and available space (RAID-0), or mirroring your data writing by two copies of every piece (RAID-1), it instead writes parity blocks across the disks in addition to striping, this provides a balance of speed, redundancy and available space. If a single drive fails, the parity blocks on the working drives can be used to reconstruct the entire array as soon as a replacement drive is added.

Additionally, RAIDz improves over some of the common RAID-5 flaws. It's more resilient and capable of self healing, as it is capable of automatically checking for errors against a checksum. It's more forgiving in this way, and it's likely that you'll be able to detect when a drive is dying well before it fails. A RAIDz array can survive the loss of any one drive.

Note: While RAIDz is indeed resilient, if a second drive fails during the rebuild, you're fucked. Always keep backups of things you can't afford to lose. This tutorial, however, is not about proper data safety.

To create the pool, use the following command:

sudo zpool create "zpoolnamehere" raidz "device IDs of drives we're putting in the pool"

For example, let's creatively name our zpool "mypool". This poil will consist of four drives which have the device IDs: sdb, sdc, sdd, and sde. The resulting command will look like this:

sudo zpool create mypool raidz /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sdd /dev/sde

If as an example you bought five HDDs and decided you wanted more redundancy dedicating two drive to this purpose, we would modify the command to "raidz2" and the command would look something like the following:

sudo zpool create mypool raidz2 /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sdd /dev/sde /dev/sdf

An array configured like this is known as RAIDz2 and is able to survive two disk failures.

Once the zpool has been created, we can check its status with the command:

zpool status

Or more concisely with:

zpool list

The nice thing about ZFS as a file system is that a pool is ready to go immediately after creation. If we were to set up a traditional RAID-5 array using mbam, we'd have to sit through a potentially hours long process of reformatting and partitioning the drives. Instead we're ready to go right out the gates.

The zpool should be automatically mounted to the filesystem after creation, check on that with the following:

df -hT | grep zfs

Note: If your computer ever loses power suddenly, say in event of a power outage, you may have to re-import your pool. In most cases, ZFS will automatically import and mount your pool, but if it doesn’t and you can't see your array, simply open the terminal and type sudo zpool import -a.

By default a zpool is mounted at /"zpoolname". The pool should be under our ownership but let's make sure with the following command:

sudo chown -R "yourlinuxusername" /"zpoolname"

Note: Changing file and folder ownership with "chown" and file and folder permissions with "chmod" are essential commands for much of the admin work in Linux, but we won't be dealing with them extensively in this guide. If you'd like a deeper tutorial and explanation you can check out these two guides: chown and chmod.

You can access the zpool file system through the GUI by opening the file manager (the Ubuntu default file manager is called Nautilus) and clicking on "Other Locations" on the sidebar, then entering the Ubuntu file system and looking for a folder with your pool's name. Bookmark the folder on the sidebar for easy access.

Your storage pool is now ready to go. Assuming that we already have some files on our Windows PC we want to copy to over, we're going to need to install and configure Samba to make the pool accessible in Windows.

Step Five: Setting Up Samba/Sharing

Samba is what's going to let us share the zpool with Windows and allow us to write to it from our Windows machine. First let's install Samba with the following commands:

sudo apt-get update

then

sudo apt-get install samba

Next create a password for Samba.

sudo smbpswd -a "yourlinuxusername"

It will then prompt you to create a password. Just reuse your Ubuntu user password for simplicity's sake.

Note: if you're using just a single external drive replace the zpool location in the following commands with wherever it is your external drive is mounted, for more information see this guide on mounting an external drive in Ubuntu.

After you've created a password we're going to create a shareable folder in our pool with this command

mkdir /"zpoolname"/"foldername"

Now we're going to open the smb.conf file and make that folder shareable. Enter the following command.

sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

This will open the .conf file in nano, the terminal text editor program. Now at the end of smb.conf add the following entry:

["foldername"]

path = /"zpoolname"/"foldername"

available = yes

valid users = "yourlinuxusername"

read only = no

writable = yes

browseable = yes

guest ok = no

Ensure that there are no line breaks between the lines and that there's a space on both sides of the equals sign. Our next step is to allow Samba traffic through the firewall:

sudo ufw allow samba

Finally restart the Samba service:

sudo systemctl restart smbd

At this point we'll be able to access to the pool, browse its contents, and read and write to it from Windows. But there's one more thing left to do, Windows doesn't natively support the ZFS file systems and will read the used/available/total space in the pool incorrectly. Windows will read available space as total drive space, and all used space as null. This leads to Windows only displaying a dwindling amount of "available" space as the drives are filled. We can fix this! Functionally this doesn't actually matter, we can still write and read to and from the disk, it just makes it difficult to tell at a glance the proportion of used/available space, so this is an optional step but one I recommend (this step is also unnecessary if you're just using a single external drive). What we're going to do is write a little shell script in #bash. Open nano with the terminal with the command:

nano

Now insert the following code:

#!/bin/bash CUR_PATH=`pwd` ZFS_CHECK_OUTPUT=$(zfs get type $CUR_PATH 2>&1 > /dev/null) > /dev/null if [[ $ZFS_CHECK_OUTPUT == *not\ a\ ZFS* ]] then IS_ZFS=false else IS_ZFS=true fi if [[ $IS_ZFS = false ]] then df $CUR_PATH | tail -1 | awk '{print $2" "$4}' else USED=$((`zfs get -o value -Hp used $CUR_PATH` / 1024)) > /dev/null AVAIL=$((`zfs get -o value -Hp available $CUR_PATH` / 1024)) > /dev/null TOTAL=$(($USED+$AVAIL)) > /dev/null echo $TOTAL $AVAIL fi

Save the script as "dfree.sh" to /home/"yourlinuxusername" then change the ownership of the file to make it executable with this command:

sudo chmod 774 dfree.sh

Now open smb.conf with sudo again:

sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

Now add this entry to the top of the configuration file to direct Samba to use the results of our script when Windows asks for a reading on the pool's used/available/total drive space:

[global]

dfree command = /home/"yourlinuxusername"/dfree.sh

Save the changes to smb.conf and then restart Samba again with the terminal:

sudo systemctl restart smbd

Now there’s one more thing we need to do to fully set up the Samba share, and that’s to modify a hidden group permission. In the terminal window type the following command:

usermod -a -G sambashare “yourlinuxusername”

Then restart samba again:

sudo systemctl restart smbd

If we don’t do this last step, everything will appear to work fine, and you will even be able to see and map the drive from Windows and even begin transferring files, but you'd soon run into a lot of frustration. As every ten minutes or so a file would fail to transfer and you would get a window announcing “0x8007003B Unexpected Network Error”. This window would require your manual input to continue the transfer with the file next in the queue. And at the end it would reattempt to transfer whichever files failed the first time around. 99% of the time they’ll go through that second try, but this is still all a major pain in the ass. Especially if you’ve got a lot of data to transfer or you want to step away from the computer for a while.

It turns out samba can act a little weirdly with the higher read/write speeds of RAIDz arrays and transfers from Windows, and will intermittently crash and restart itself if this group option isn’t changed. Inputting the above command will prevent you from ever seeing that window.

The last thing we're going to do before switching over to our Windows PC is grab the IP address of our Linux machine. Enter the following command:

hostname -I

This will spit out this computer's IP address on the local network (it will look something like 192.168.0.x), write it down. It might be a good idea once you're done here to go into your router settings and reserving that IP for your Linux system in the DHCP settings. Check the manual for your specific model router on how to access its settings, typically it can be accessed by opening a browser and typing http:\\192.168.0.1 in the address bar, but your router may be different.

Okay we’re done with our Linux computer for now. Get on over to your Windows PC, open File Explorer, right click on Network and click "Map network drive". Select Z: as the drive letter (you don't want to map the network drive to a letter you could conceivably be using for other purposes) and enter the IP of your Linux machine and location of the share like so: \\"LINUXCOMPUTERLOCALIPADDRESSGOESHERE"\"zpoolnamegoeshere"\. Windows will then ask you for your username and password, enter the ones you set earlier in Samba and you're good. If you've done everything right it should look something like this:

You can now start moving media over from Windows to the share folder. It's a good idea to have a hard line running to all machines. Moving files over Wi-Fi is going to be tortuously slow, the only thing that’s going to make the transfer time tolerable (hours instead of days) is a solid wired connection between both machines and your router.

Step Six: Setting Up Remote Desktop Access to Your Server

After the server is up and going, you’ll want to be able to access it remotely from Windows. Barring serious maintenance/updates, this is how you'll access it most of the time. On your Linux system open the terminal and enter:

sudo apt install xrdp

Then:

sudo systemctl enable xrdp

Once it's finished installing, open “Settings” on the sidebar and turn off "automatic login" in the User category. Then log out of your account. Attempting to remotely connect to your Linux computer while you’re logged in will result in a black screen!

Now get back on your Windows PC, open search and look for "RDP". A program called "Remote Desktop Connection" should pop up, open this program as an administrator by right-clicking and selecting “run as an administrator”. You’ll be greeted with a window. In the field marked “Computer” type in the IP address of your Linux computer. Press connect and you'll be greeted with a new window and prompt asking for your username and password. Enter your Ubuntu username and password here.

If everything went right, you’ll be logged into your Linux computer. If the performance is sluggish, adjust the display options. Lowering the resolution and colour depth do a lot to make the interface feel snappier.

Remote access is how we're going to be using our Linux system from now, barring edge cases like needing to get into the BIOS or upgrading to a new version of Ubuntu. Everything else from performing maintenance like a monthly zpool scrub to checking zpool status and updating software can all be done remotely.

This is how my server lives its life now, happily humming and chirping away on the floor next to the couch in a corner of the living room.

Step Seven: Plex Media Server/Jellyfin

Okay we’ve got all the ground work finished and our server is almost up and running. We’ve got Ubuntu up and running, our storage array is primed, we’ve set up remote connections and sharing, and maybe we’ve moved over some of favourite movies and TV shows.

Now we need to decide on the media server software to use which will stream our media to us and organize our library. For most people I’d recommend Plex. It just works 99% of the time. That said, Jellyfin has a lot to recommend it by too, even if it is rougher around the edges. Some people run both simultaneously, it’s not that big of an extra strain. I do recommend doing a little bit of your own research into the features each platform offers, but as a quick run down, consider some of the following points:

Plex is closed source and is funded through PlexPass purchases while Jellyfin is open source and entirely user driven. This means a number of things: for one, Plex requires you to purchase a “PlexPass” (purchased as a one time lifetime fee $159.99 CDN/$120 USD or paid for on a monthly or yearly subscription basis) in order to access to certain features, like hardware transcoding (and we want hardware transcoding) or automated intro/credits detection and skipping, Jellyfin offers some of these features for free through plugins. Plex supports a lot more devices than Jellyfin and updates more frequently. That said, Jellyfin's Android and iOS apps are completely free, while the Plex Android and iOS apps must be activated for a one time cost of $6 CDN/$5 USD. But that $6 fee gets you a mobile app that is much more functional and features a unified UI across platforms, the Plex mobile apps are simply a more polished experience. The Jellyfin apps are a bit of a mess and the iOS and Android versions are very different from each other.

Jellyfin’s actual media player is more fully featured than Plex's, but on the other hand Jellyfin's UI, library customization and automatic media tagging really pale in comparison to Plex. Streaming your music library is free through both Jellyfin and Plex, but Plex offers the PlexAmp app for dedicated music streaming which boasts a number of fantastic features, unfortunately some of those fantastic features require a PlexPass. If your internet is down, Jellyfin can still do local streaming, while Plex can fail to play files unless you've got it set up a certain way. Jellyfin has a slew of neat niche features like support for Comic Book libraries with the .cbz/.cbt file types, but then Plex offers some free ad-supported TV and films, they even have a free channel that plays nothing but Classic Doctor Who.

Ultimately it's up to you, I settled on Plex because although some features are pay-walled, it just works. It's more reliable and easier to use, and a one-time fee is much easier to swallow than a subscription. I had a pretty easy time getting my boomer parents and tech illiterate brother introduced to and using Plex and I don't know if I would've had as easy a time doing that with Jellyfin. I do also need to mention that Jellyfin does take a little extra bit of tinkering to get going in Ubuntu, you’ll have to set up process permissions, so if you're more tolerant to tinkering, Jellyfin might be up your alley and I’ll trust that you can follow their installation and configuration guide. For everyone else, I recommend Plex.

So pick your poison: Plex or Jellyfin.

Note: The easiest way to download and install either of these packages in Ubuntu is through Snap Store.

After you've installed one (or both), opening either app will launch a browser window into the browser version of the app allowing you to set all the options server side.

The process of adding creating media libraries is essentially the same in both Plex and Jellyfin. You create a separate libraries for Television, Movies, and Music and add the folders which contain the respective types of media to their respective libraries. The only difficult or time consuming aspect is ensuring that your files and folders follow the appropriate naming conventions:

Plex naming guide for Movies

Plex naming guide for Television

Jellyfin follows the same naming rules but I find their media scanner to be a lot less accurate and forgiving than Plex. Once you've selected the folders to be scanned the service will scan your files, tagging everything and adding metadata. Although I find do find Plex more accurate, it can still erroneously tag some things and you might have to manually clean up some tags in a large library. (When I initially created my library it tagged the 1963-1989 Doctor Who as some Korean soap opera and I needed to manually select the correct match after which everything was tagged normally.) It can also be a bit testy with anime (especially OVAs) be sure to check TVDB to ensure that you have your files and folders structured and named correctly. If something is not showing up at all, double check the name.

Once that's done, organizing and customizing your library is easy. You can set up collections, grouping items together to fit a theme or collect together all the entries in a franchise. You can make playlists, and add custom artwork to entries. It's fun setting up collections with posters to match, there are even several websites dedicated to help you do this like PosterDB. As an example, below are two collections in my library, one collecting all the entries in a franchise, the other follows a theme.

My Star Trek collection, featuring all eleven television series, and thirteen films.

My Best of the Worst collection, featuring sixty-nine films previously showcased on RedLetterMedia’s Best of the Worst. They’re all absolutely terrible and I love them.

As for settings, ensure you've got Remote Access going, it should work automatically and be sure to set your upload speed after running a speed test. In the library settings set the database cache to 2000MB to ensure a snappier and more responsive browsing experience, and then check that playback quality is set to original/maximum. If you’re severely bandwidth limited on your upload and have remote users, you might want to limit the remote stream bitrate to something more reasonable, just as a note of comparison Netflix’s 1080p bitrate is approximately 5Mbps, although almost anyone watching through a chromium based browser is streaming at 720p and 3mbps. Other than that you should be good to go. For actually playing your files, there's a Plex app for just about every platform imaginable. I mostly watch television and films on my laptop using the Windows Plex app, but I also use the Android app which can broadcast to the chromecast connected to the TV in the office and the Android TV app for our smart TV. Both are fully functional and easy to navigate, and I can also attest to the OS X version being equally functional.

Part Eight: Finding Media

Now, this is not really a piracy tutorial, there are plenty of those out there. But if you’re unaware, BitTorrent is free and pretty easy to use, just pick a client (qBittorrent is the best) and go find some public trackers to peruse. Just know now that all the best trackers are private and invite only, and that they can be exceptionally difficult to get into. I’m already on a few, and even then, some of the best ones are wholly out of my reach.

If you decide to take the left hand path and turn to Usenet you’ll have to pay. First you’ll need to sign up with a provider like Newshosting or EasyNews for access to Usenet itself, and then to actually find anything you’re going to need to sign up with an indexer like NZBGeek or NZBFinder. There are dozens of indexers, and many people cross post between them, but for more obscure media it’s worth checking multiple. You’ll also need a binary downloader like SABnzbd. That caveat aside, Usenet is faster, bigger, older, less traceable than BitTorrent, and altogether slicker. I honestly prefer it, and I'm kicking myself for taking this long to start using it because I was scared off by the price. I’ve found so many things on Usenet that I had sought in vain elsewhere for years, like a 2010 Italian film about a massacre perpetrated by the SS that played the festival circuit but never received a home media release; some absolute hero uploaded a rip of a festival screener DVD to Usenet. Anyway, figure out the rest of this shit on your own and remember to use protection, get yourself behind a VPN, use a SOCKS5 proxy with your BitTorrent client, etc.

On the legal side of things, if you’re around my age, you (or your family) probably have a big pile of DVDs and Blu-Rays sitting around unwatched and half forgotten. Why not do a bit of amateur media preservation, rip them and upload them to your server for easier access? (Your tools for this are going to be Handbrake to do the ripping and AnyDVD to break any encryption.) I went to the trouble of ripping all my SCTV DVDs (five box sets worth) because none of it is on streaming nor could it be found on any pirate source I tried. I’m glad I did, forty years on it’s still one of the funniest shows to ever be on TV.

Part Nine/Epilogue: Sonarr/Radarr/Lidarr and Overseerr

There are a lot of ways to automate your server for better functionality or to add features you and other users might find useful. Sonarr, Radarr, and Lidarr are a part of a suite of “Servarr” services (there’s also Readarr for books and Whisparr for adult content) that allow you to automate the collection of new episodes of TV shows (Sonarr), new movie releases (Radarr) and music releases (Lidarr). They hook in to your BitTorrent client or Usenet binary newsgroup downloader and crawl your preferred Torrent trackers and Usenet indexers, alerting you to new releases and automatically grabbing them. You can also use these services to manually search for new media, and even replace/upgrade your existing media with better quality uploads. They’re really a little tricky to set up on a bare metal Ubuntu install (ideally you should be running them in Docker Containers), and I won’t be providing a step by step on installing and running them, I’m simply making you aware of their existence.

The other bit of kit I want to make you aware of is Overseerr which is a program that scans your Plex media library and will serve recommendations based on what you like. It also allows you and your users to request specific media. It can even be integrated with Sonarr/Radarr/Lidarr so that fulfilling those requests is fully automated.

And you're done. It really wasn't all that hard. Enjoy your media. Enjoy the control you have over that media. And be safe in the knowledge that no hedgefund CEO motherfucker who hates the movies but who is somehow in control of a major studio will be able to disappear anything in your library as a tax write-off.

[ethereal555]

THE SIDE

Lewis Hamilton x older!reader

Monaco.

6:28pm.

Annelise, weary with toil, taps impatiently at the elevator’s closing button imploring it close with haste as she sees her ‘fiance’s neighbour’ speedily progress from the apartment complex’s lobby towards the open  elevator she was in. The large expanse of glass windows in the lobby reveal a herd of middle aged men, and a few women (mostly grey-haired and stubby) with cameras and microphones in hand incessantly banging on the grandiose windows for his attention obviously–  in the process leaving multiple sweaty handprints– tainting the pristine appearance on the luxury complex, yuck.

The security would soon kick them off of the property but that wasn’t her problem, her problem was the awkward conversation she’d have to endure with her neighbor if he got in. Rebuking this, she tucks herself discreetly into the corner of the elevator to avoid being seen as she continues tapping, her despair manifested in the volume of the impact her knuckles made on the same button repeatedly; she hoped the cacophony of paparazzi’s yelling outside would prove to be overbearing enough to drown this out, and consequently enable her to continue her day without crippling anxiety.

Finally the doors– after years - decided to listen, drawing closer and closer together within seconds. She leans slightly, just enough for her right eye to peer between the decreasing amount of space in between the two metallic sliding doors and to her shock he was closer than expected, it made her heart jump.

Fuck, he’s going to make it. No!

The 30–year–old’s left foot wedges in between the sliding doors and they recoil, revealing an irritated looking Annelise. She lets out a prolonged huff and scoots the flood of groceries she’d bought, alongside some bits from Dior she indulged in during her grocery trip, to her side of the elevator. Scratching the back of her neck passively as the panting man bursts through the door.  Her tongue instinctively laps around her mouth when the dripping sex symbol enters, using the back of his free arm to wipe the perspiration off of his large forehead, a few loose curls around the circumference of his head clinging to his face. Unfortunately for Annelise, the beads of sweat don’t end on his forehead but rather along the side of his tattooed neck, collecting at his deep collar bone. 

She had to stop before her gaze went lower than a engaged woman’s should.

She gulps, all of a sudden becoming overly aware at how intensely she’d been hawking at him. His sleeveless grey compression shirt is visually damp and sticking to his fit body, but nothing other than expensive cologne hangs in the air between them.

He reaches over towards her side of the elevator, a tired smile tugging at his lip, to press the already glowing number 10 button, to take them to their shared apartment floor.

 The doors shut slowly, and they are in silence. The silence is infused with the low hum of the elevator ascending, alongside Lewis’ faltering pants, and the occasional scrunch of the shopping bags by Annaelise’s foot as she shook her foot impatiently (for what had already seemed like hours) until she could leave this hot, tight space. The sounds he was making were driving her to insanity as she tried to think….more productive thoughts.

She envisioned the way it would look if Christian would be waiting outside of their door, ready to hopefully embrace her and collect their shopping only to see a sweaty Lewis and a flustered Annaelise, the thought of what would transpire soured the duration of the ten floors they travelled up slowly, for Annelise anyways.

“Thank you for holding the doors for me, Anna.”, he smiled warmly, turning to face the 40-year-old, giving her his full attention. His vibe was warm, his smile as charming as always.  A discreet look travelling up and down her physique followed. She wore a white tube top and matching white shorts that she paired with basic black flip flops; these showed off her pink acrylics well. In a rush a few hours prior to this moment, her hair was tied up with a purple shoe string on the top of her head, her curls gracing the shape of her sharp face. He adored the sight of her butterfly tattoos peeking from underneath her shorts. He wanted to trace them again—

She shifts her weight under his gaze, sneaking a glance at the camera at the centre of the elevator’s ceiling nervously. Unlike him, her attention didn’t stray away from the metallic doors of the elevator. She wanted to keep this civil, falling under the lure of his eyes wouldn’t befall her— again!

“Annaelise, Lewis.”, she finally replies.

He hums, a single nod feigning understanding.

Key words, feigning. This wasn’t the nature of their conversations two days prior, on Sunday morning.

“Annaelise….Mmmm, Right.” his soft voice soothes, and there's a funny twitch in his brows, her full name rolling off of his tongue playfully

He observes her body language, oh…

His playful humour wasn’t being reciprocated. She was deadly serious with her newfound boundary which truly perplexed him. But the rising of his confusion halts as he transfixes on the small cut on her bottom lip.

The intermittent deafening  silence between their dialogue was so uncomfortable, and the hawking from him stilled her, she didn’t want to make any sudden moves that would reveal to him how fast her heart was beating against her chest because of his presence, she feared he may see it or even hear it if they were too close. But even from her peripheral vision he was so intense, alerting every single micro hair that decorated her body to stand up, especially the ones around her dainty neck. They knew his presence well.

Once returning his look, she found his eyes lingering on her jaw, a tepid look of his face now.

For God’s sake

“Is it still Annelise after that?” he asks, dragging the last word and his eyes narrow at her jaw, unapologetically.

His transfixion on her jaw was starting to burn, she turned her head swiftly towards the metallic doors this time looking above them to see that they were only on the 5th floor of this slow elevator. For the amount of rent the residents here were paying, this sure wasn’t a perk.

Jittery wasn’t the word, she was itching to be let out.

She shrugged her shoulders and crossed her arms over her stomach, portraying uninterest.

“Anna–”

“It’s fucking—” she stops herself, finding any remenance of composure she had in her before correcting herself.

 “It’s Annelise to you, Lewis.” Her voice is pinched as she becomes wary of their proximity to their floor.

He’s silent, not even a nod comes from him .

“Is that understood, Lewis?”

He scoffs at her charade.

“Do you think I’m thick Annelise? Seriously, this tough girl act is boring. Get a grip.” 

His curtness leaves her slack-jawed, he turns from her and mirrors her stare towards the doors, this accumulation of tension in the air between them palpable, heavy. He continues..

“And after this act, again, you’ll still expect me to welcome you back in with open arms and a hard dick when he fucks up again!” the bracelets on his left wrist clink and clank against each other as he gesticulates with frustration.

“Oh—Watch your fucking mouth Lewis—” A grim chuckle erupts from Lewis, “Is it not true, Anna?”

As if she hadn’t already had the air smacked out of her lungs, he’s able to pull more out leaving her gasping incredulously.

“How dare you throw that in my face? T-that has nothing, not a thing to do with you, what happens with me and him!” she attempts to swallow the hard lump of embarrassment in her throat.

She rolls her eyes, starting to piece together how she’d carry her flood of bags to her door. Lewis, his nostril still red with irritation, looks reluctantly from the “interesting” metallic doors and sees her struggling, hunched over a string over curses leaving her mouth. He reaches his hand, like an olive branch, offering to help her with some of the bags to which she replies with a hard slap on his tattooed wrists. A loud ‘slap’ echos against the four corners of lift from the impact on his clammy wrists.

Never had she ever thought a day would come when she’d prevail over the strength of his wrists. Well today was the day. In an elevator on a random Tuesday afternoon.

“Don’t touch my shit.” she spits harshly.

The doors open abruptly, followed by an announcement.

“Tenth Floor” the monotone voice announced.

Slow fuck.

Annelise gathered all the bags successfully, releasing a huff as she stood up in her full height with the weight of all the bags pulled down her arms and shoulders. With moans and groans she left the lift without a glance back at Lewis, who intentionally waited for her to back all her bags, standing in the way of the doors so they wouldn’t shut in the middle of her struggle. He follows her body as she stumbles to the door.

Later that night...

The vocals from Ella Fitzgerlad fill Lewis’ luxury apartment, the L.E.D lights fitted underneath his kitchen appliances red and comforting. The view from his high rise apartment was absolutely gorgeous, he was gifted with the view of the Mediterranean Sea everyday before his eyes, they had become close companions. Even in the darkness, he felt her tranquility from the miles between them, leaving him breathless everyday. The abundance of city’s lights that seeped through the opulent, monumental windows to grace his open plan living room would make a grown man cry. It was breath-taking.

He had just come out of the shower, hot and burning just how he liked it. Steam vapor was still dissipating from his skin’s surface and he stood before the city, his towel hanging low from his groin, exposing V-line. He admires the hush that descends upon his beloved city as night falls, where various silver flickers from the city’s landscape  travel to reflect off of his windows and illuminate the tiny silhouettes of late wanderers. 

Suddenly, the romanticization of his city is called off when Roscoe becomes over excited, jumping and barking by the door, his high pitched whines catch Lewis’ attention. After some time, the excited dog settles onto the wooden floor in front of the door. Why? When he literally has a bed just over there, Lewis thinks.

The man never liked when his dog sat directly in front of the door, it made him feel anxious. He felt at times Roscoe could sense things that maybe couldn’t be captured by the naked eye. Lewis whistled to catch his dog’s attention, clicking his fingers and tapping his lower thighs (where his towel ended)  but all those attempts were futile, Roscoe’s face layed toward the door, his  tail wagging rapidly. Lewis walks over slowly, “Come e’re good boy, come here”, he coos but Roscoe stays slumped, his whines louder.

Lewis gets onto his knees before Roscoe, pulling his baby gently onto his lap, his barking and whining halting as his tattooed fingers stroke his dog’s back, enjoying the sensation of his fur around his fingers tips. Roscoe let out a sigh and sunk deeper into his father’s lap, each slow, calming motion of his hand melting both their tension away.

 Until there was a knock.

The knock was urgent, jolting both the father and son alert  from their sentimental moment. Roscoe responded with an ear splitting bark, jumping up and pacing around the door. Lewis fastened his towel around his waist tighter before getting up and looking through the small peephole of his door. He strains his eyes, until he makes out the figure standing outside the door.

Like clockwork the pretty woman next door stands, wrapped in a red blanket with streams of smudged mascara down her face and swollen lips. Her red eyes pleading, as she waited, looking behind her constantly in trepidation.

It was as if his heart had plummeted into an endless abyss and been lost in the darkness. That’s how he felt seeing her, begging at his doorstep just hours after disrespecting him in the way she did in the elevator. She always came back. It was a vicious cycle Lewis was trying to rip himself free from, but he couldn’t shake free from this grip of her presence, her pussy, her scent, her cries, her moans. His jaw ticked. He was sick and tired of her but she wasn’t the only one to blame– it was partly because of his pushover tendencies. After they were done, Annelise would act as if he was a piece of shit on the bottom of her shoe but he��d still let her back into his home and his bedroom with open arms time and time again. Inadvertently, allowing her to treat him like a peasant as if he couldn’t give her the life of her dreams. She’d make a point to ignore him, block him and make him feel inferior and these things made him mad, really mad. But the sweet man couldn’t bring himself to set boundaries or communicate with her how he felt, it was like everytime they were in each other’s presence he was put under a spell, a spell to which Annelise had to be worshiped as if she were a saint until she’d leave and go back to him and then Lewis pussy whipped and frazzled would get all in his head.

Was it the feminine post nut clarity? Hell, even if it was ..it didn’t excuse her disrespectful behaviour.

Another loud knock shattered through the air and broke Lewis out of his thoughts, Roscoe’s barks are louder now. He hushes his dog, and takes a long steady breath, letting it fill his lungs before slowly exhaling the weight of his thoughts. He opens the door masking behind his eyes the pain he knew he’d soon ensure after this night was over.

She lets out a sigh of relief. “Lew—” she drags, sniffling between broken breaths, struggling to speak past the lump in her throat. “I need you”

Roscoe’s barks stop, and he runs over to his bed behind the kitchen island, as normal as ever now. His wet tongue outstretched as he yawns ready to take his nap.

Lewis drinks her appearance in, he can’t hide the look of reluctance as he stretches his arms out for her to walk into. She sniffles into his bare chest, her arms circulating his groin where his loose towel hung. His breath gets caught into his throat  as she places her cold hands dangerously close to his manhood.

“You don’t deserve me Annelise, I hope you know.” His warms hands press against her back.

She nods rapidly, looking up at him and pressing a kiss onto his tattooed chest.

“I know, I know. Just make me forget, okay?”

---

TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK. YOU WANT?

[kenzlovesyou]

could you write something about you and Caitlins families being very close in high school and ur relationship growing from there?

ur idea is so cute! i’m so sorry it took me so long to get to it, i hope i executed it well!

Every Season - Caitlin Clark x Reader

➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖

Yours’ and Caitlin’s family had been friends for many years. The two of you had grown up neighbors, as your moms were best friends and it was their lifelong dream of living next door to each other. You remember when you were little, always going over to Caitlin’s house or her coming over to yours. Caitlin was your best friend in the entire world. The two of you did everything together. There wasn’t one day in the past 10 years that you hadn’t seen Caitlin.

When you and Caitlin hit your junior year of high school, time seemed to start moving too fast for your liking. It was a cold winter morning and you buttoned up the last button on your coat. With that done, you grabbed your bag and walked out the front door. Caitlin was there waiting for you in her car. That was the deal. As soon as one of you could, you would get your license and drive the other around. Caitlin, being 4 months older, had begrudgingly agreed on getting hers and now she was your personal chauffeur. You got into the car and went to buckle your seatbelt, “Morning, Cait,” you said to her absentmindedly, more focused on finding the buckle. Caitlin groaned as she took the buckle from your hand and did it for you.

“Y/n! Why’d you have to run late today of all days? I’m tireddd and I wanted to get coffee!” You knew she was halfway joking about her level of disappointment, but you still had an idea on how to help her feel better. “What if,” you started, “we just went now? We can skip first if you want?” You smiled at her expectantly.

Caitlin just stared back at you with a smirk. “When did you become such a bad girl, Y/n?” You wondered yourself where that idea had come from. You were always wondering where the sudden heat was coming from.

Caitlin drove you two to the drive thru window of a chain Coffee shop, and ordered for you both. She hadn’t even asked what you wanted. You always got the same thing, and she’d had it memorized ever since you started drinking coffee. You got your drinks and Caitlin pulled around to a parking space in the lot so you could hangout and drink them.

You stared at her as you sipped your ice coffee, taking in how her brown eyes sparkled more and more as the sun rose higher in the sky. You nearly choked on the caramel tasting drink as her hand reached down to grab your free one.

“Y’know I’m really glad you suggested this, Y/n. We haven’t spent much time together lately. Honestly I’ve missed this,” Caitlin stared at you with those sparkling eyes that you were just staring at a minute ago. ‘When did she get this..hot?’ You thought to yourself. Perhaps you were just delirious from lack of sleep. That was the only logical explanation. How else could it be then that you had known Caitlin all your life and never noticed her beauty in that way before?

Spring break of that same year, your parents plan a family camping trip with the Clark’s. The car ride is long and bumpy, but you don’t complain one bit because you think that you’d endure a lot more than a bumpy road trip if it meant you could spend time with your best friend. Your family pulled up to the campsite and you hopped out of the car. Caitlin’s family was already there and had done the majority of the unpacking and setting up camp already.

Caitlin sees you and jogs over to you. “Hey you.” She wore her usual smirk on her face. “Hey yourself,” you say back as you wrap your arms around her in a hug.

Sure, you two had always been a bit touchy, having known each other for so long, but you and Caitlin had found a new comfort in each other lately. From Caitlin having her arm protectively draped over your shoulder, to laying her head on your shoulder, to you rubbing her back after a long practice, the two of you had definitely grown more comfortable expressing your affection physically.

Caitlin grabbed your duffel bag off your shoulder and slung it over her own and led you to a tent. “I thought we could share one, and Colin and Blake could share with your brother. Is that cool with you?”

You had definitely been cool with that. In fact you were more than cool with it. You weren’t sure why, but the thought of alone time with Caitlin had made you feel so special lately. Like, wow! Caitlin wanted to spend time with you. Just you.

The summer before your senior year was when you really felt a change in yours and Caitlin’s relationship dynamic. You two were much more physical, and were hanging out even more than you already had been before. You’d stay after school to watch her practices, and after she’d drive you home. She’d go in your room with you, and the two of you would study together. Since she lived just next door, she wouldn’t even bother going home most of the time and would just sleepover with you.

It was another day just like that. You stayed after school to watch Caitlin’s practice, a particularly hard one at that, and watched as Caitlin slowly got more and more upset at the shots she was missing. Each time she missed, she huffed and looked away from you. She was embarrassed to be missing this much. After practice, her overall mood was still pretty low. She grabbed her bag and your arm and pulled you directly outside and to her car, not staying and chatting with her teammates for a couple minutes like she usually did. She sighed as she got into the drivers seat and banged her head on the steering wheel.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” You could tell she seemed like she wanted to cry. You looked up at her face and saw her eyes were glassy. “Cait, there’s nothing wrong with you!” You reached up to wipe her tears and you pulled her upper body to you and she stretched over the console. It wasn’t the most comfortable position, but you had hoped it would pose as some sort of comfort for the poor girl. “You are amazing and I love watching you play! Trust me, someday everyone’s gonna know who Caitlin Clark is” Caitlin chuckled and looked up at you from her head’s place on your shoulder. She admired how sweet you always were to her, you never yelled at her or made fun of her for crying like she knew her coaches or teammates could have done. You had always been her safe place, her place to run to whenever she was upset and needed comfort you. She saw comfort and you as synonymous. But lately, things seemed different. Had you been more sweet lately? Had you gotten prettier? Funnier? Caitlin wasn’t sure what it was, but now she had constantly felt a surge of emotion whenever she was around it. It was addicting to her, and she couldn’t get enough of it. It took over her mind and her thoughts so much to the point that she almost forgot how upset she was over her bad practice.

“Cait? Is everything ok?” You looked down at her.

“Everything’s perfect now. Thank you Y/n.” Caitlin smiled at you and resisted every urge not to kiss your lips that seemed to be taunting her.

Fast forward to summer, you and Caitlin had both committed to Iowa. Her for basketball and you for Caitlin. Your actual major was not Caitlin, but instead psychology. You could’ve studied it anywhere, so why not alongside your lover best friend? The two of you got a little apartment together, and you were somewhat happy.

You’d gotten what you wanted; to be with Caitlin. So why was it so painful for you to be around her now? Why did she feel so close and yet so far away all at the same time. You wondered if you could stay happy simply playing house with Caitlin, never making a move, but you knew that wasn’t the case. It was eating you alive.

Sure, she could feel the same. But what if she didn’t? What if she didn’t even like girls like that? Or worse. What if she did like girls and she just didn’t like you. That would be an even harder pill to swallow. You had always admired Caitlin’s ambitious spirit. For as long as you’d known her, she always worked hard to get what she wanted. Surely you could do the same and take of leap of faith for her.

Tears filled your eyes as the thoughts of possible rejection entered your mind. They encapsulated you so much that you didn’t even notice Caitlin walk in. She saw you on the couch curled up in a ball and was instantly confused. ‘Why hadn’t you called her and told her you were upset?’ She wondered to herself. She knows she would’ve came to see you at the drop of a hat.

“Y/n. Y/n, what’s wrong? Talk to me, it’s going to be okay. Come here, baby.” ‘Shit.’ Caitlin thought to herself. Had she really just called her best friend baby? Sure you were a little baby in her eyes, but you weren’t her baby.

“You’re my best friend, Caitlin. You’re my best friend and I’m so scared.” Caitlin immediately read you like a book. Was this you being the bravest girl in the world and breaking the invisible line of attraction that had been drawn between the two of you.

“Y/n. Shhhh. I love you. I love you so much you’ve gotta be my soulmate. I know it’s scary for us to admit it but honestly there’s nobody I would rather risk anything for.”

Your tears quickly dried and you wiped your nose. You saw Caitlin pouring her heart out to you and knew you had her in the palm of your hand. “Ohhhh. That’s great and all Cait, but I meant I was scared for my chem final coming up.”

The look on Caitlin’s face was priceless. “Fuck.” was all she could muster and stared blankly at the wall, contemplating every life decision. You started cackling uncontrollably, “Oh my god, Caitlin! I’m joking!” All she could do was scowl at you, then she got a bright idea herself. “Really? Prove it then.” You rolled your eyes at her, “Gladly,” and you pulled her in for a sweet kiss. It was soft and supple and you never wanted it to end; this kiss had to be like 18 years in the making. That first kiss, that was when you made the promise to yourself that now that you had Caitlin you wouldn’t let anything come between the two of you. She was yours, and you were hers. That was how it was meant to be, no matter the season of life you were in. You would always have Caitlin.

[bellasprettywords]

Parallel Parking (Spencer Reid x Reader)

a/n: When Olivia Rodrigo said "I can't even parallel park" lives were changed. I saw this really cute video and I couldn't help myself

y/n – your name

Warnings: Use of the word "shit", and I can't parallel park, so this would be a dream scenario for me

Word count: 940

My Masterlist

Part of your daily routine included getting to work at least with 20 minutes of anticipation in order to find a good parking space; but today your alarm didn’t go off on time, your heater broke down, and you were completely out of bagels and cereal, so naturally, your morning wasn’t going great, and you were afraid you’d come into work late.

The clock on the dashboard of your car signaled 7:50 am as you were pulling up to the parking lot, which meant you were still on time for work, but definitely the good parking spots were going to be taken.

“Shit, shit shit” you muttered under your breath as you were finishing your third lap through the parking lot, when suddenly, you heard someone call your name. You turned your head and you could see Doctor Spencer Reid waving his arm up as if he was calling you. Shit you knew Spencer because you were coworkers at the BAU, but you couldn't say you were friends, merely acquaintances, as you’ve joined the team while he was away in prison and the times you’d spent together were awkward, but polite to say the least. You slowly drove towards the Doctor, who now seemed a little exasperated, as instead of turning the car around, you decided to give another lap through the parking lot.

“Good morning Doctor Reid” you said rolling down your window with a smile that was trying to cover up the fact that you were starving, he made you nervous and if you couldn’t park in the next five minutes, you’d be late for the briefing

“Is it really a good morning? You’ve been driving through this parking lot for at least 10 minutes” he said looking impatiently at the watch resting on his wrist

“I… I… It has been kind of a rough morning, but everything’s fine, I’ll be up there for the briefing in a couple of minutes” you said trying to sound confident even when you were almost certain you’d have to find parking somewhere outside the FBI Academy

“Just park over there, and let’s go” Spencer said pointing to a free parking space where you’d have to parallel park

“Oh… sure… just…” you stuttered unable to find the words to properly communicate that you couldn't parallel park, without sounding like a child

“What is it? You don’t know how to parallel park?” Spencer said furrowing his brow and with a small smile beginning to form at his lips

“I just… I never really do it” you said, feeling your cheeks warming up and gaining a reddish color as his lips curled into a cute smile

“Alright, step out, I’ll park it for you” Spencer said opening the driver’s door and offering you his hand to step out of the car

“No no, no way Doctor Reid” you said completely embarrassed at the situation, and feeling the red from your cheeks spread through your whole face

“Just take my hand, I’ll park it for now, and later we can come down, and I’ll show you how to do it” he said with a sweet smile that made your stomach flutter. You took his hand and he helped you out with a swift movement; you walked to the sidewalk and watched as Spencer parked your car with ease.

Sure, you weren’t really friends, or knew each other a lot, but he definitely was cute to look at. Your mind started to wander; you couldn’t peel your eyes off of him as he placed his arm over the passenger’s seat to get a better look at the parking spot he was going to occupy; you stared at him, carefully examining the way his hands gently held the steering wheel, almost as careful as he held your hand; the way his profile looked almost angelical with his long curls framing his face and the soft beard that covered his jaw… Spencer got out of the car and walked towards you, with your eyes were glued to his figure, taking in every detail in hopes of keeping it safe in your mind. Your brain was a mush, when suddenly your train of thought was interrupted by your stomach growling

“Next time you stare, try to keep your mouth closed” Spencer said jokingly as he handed you your car keys

“I… I wasn’t” you stuttered when it happened again, once more and as if this whole situation wasn’t embarrassing enough, your stomach growled again, this time louder. This time, you were ready for the earth to open under your feet and just crawl into it

“Here, take this; it may not be breakfast, but it’s something” Spencer said handing you a white paper bag he retrieved from his messenger bag

“Oh, no, thank you, Doctor Reid, but I’m alright” you lied low-key praying that your stomach wouldn’t give away how hungry you were

���Please, take it y/n, and please, just call me Spencer, I’m not that old, you know?” he insisted, this time offering you a warm, reassuring smile, and you couldn’t help but chuckle

“Thank you… for everything” you said shyly as the two of you walked together towards the building

“Don’t thank me just yet, I still have to teach you how to parallel park” Spencer said, opening the door for you

“Oh, so you were serious?” you asked a little surprised, mostly because you thought he was joking when he said he’d teach you

“Of course I’m serious! You can’t keep arriving into the office freakishly early just because you can’t park” he added laughing as the two of you made your way into the elevator

[xiao-come-home]

stone faced anon (💫 anon if it's free) here; as someone who has a hyperfixation in IT and coding I also think it would be very funny if Boothill had an s/o who wasn't necessarily a mechanic but like a software engineer or just a real big nerd about coding or something. He'll be experiencing a malfunction or a memory leak and go "oh yeah this happens sometimes don't worry about it" and then 10 minutes later he's sitting down plugged into a laptop listening to his s/o rant about how terrible his code is (crack hc: boothill's code was written in javascript) and how it's a wonder he hasn't bricked* yet

Would also be mad funny if Boothill ever got hacked and his s/o basically says "no you're not" and uses a previously made system restore point or something because of course they would both use and design every feature imaginable to keep Boothill in control of his own body, can you imagine the stress that losing control would cause him?? Even better if whoever designed him originally intentionally left a backdoor incase he ever went against their orders and when they try to use it his s/o just goes "oh yeah I quarantined and encrypted all the old files related to that backdoor and whatever else you were planning on a partition as bait and personally rewrote every file and function involved since your code is *an actual crime against technology*. by the way i'm going to go ahead and format that partition i mentioned, boothill- we won't be needing anything on it now that we can trace whoever made it. trust me, this won't be happening ever again."

*(bricking is a term mostly used to refer to hardware that's been rendered basically completely nonfunctional and beyond saving by using it wrong, mostly by messing with system files. Kinda like how windows can't even repair itself if you delete the system32 folder. Though i guess you could still install it with a usb stick if you formatted your pc- i digress you get what I mean. also since this almost happened to me recently: if you manage to fill up a hard drive to the brim, with literally 0 bytes of space left, that bricks it. reminder to check your storage thoroughly and often!)

Honestly wow I read it all and I'm a little bit speechless 🥹 thank you 💫 anon, it was great 🙏

Boothill would DEFINITELY appreciate a s/o who's a tech savvy in general! I think at some point, he'd be pretty shocked you're so knowledgeable and just sit there, listening to you rant.. and just letting you do your thing.

Don't get me wrong, he definitely knows a lot about his body, his system and the way he works, but once you start to get in the zone and explain stuff to him, berate his code even, he just sits next to you, plugged in to your laptop, leaning his cheek against his hand listening to you like he obviously understands everything you say.

His other hand begins to gently play with a stand of your hair, humming deeply when the soft clicking sounds of your keyboard reach his ears; he twirls your hair with his fingers and chuckles, "mmm, really now?" Boothill raises an eyebrow, "encryptin' this, encryptin' that... How about we do somethin' more fun instead?" And then you shut him down from your laptop (😭).

Jokes aside, he'd feel very secure with you especially when he first got his new body, just knowing you'll probably fix a lot of things that could possibly blow up his face in no time, maybe even improve his life even more.

[wisteria-blooms]

sunburns & dragons (charlie weasley & reader) (10/??)

CHAPTER DIRECTORY

TAGLIST AT THE BOTTOM! (Let me know if you'd like to be added or if I've missed you!) A/N: I might have a cold coming on, ugh. Thought I'd get this out if I'm afflicted by illness AGAIN. And apologies in advance if there are mistakes I missed while reading it over! Feel free to let me know about them + what you think about the story!

CHAPTER 10 : What goes up must come down. Your relationship with Charlie is no exception. (5.6k words)

CHAPTER 10: YOU DON'T OWN ME

“What happened?”

Your voice was pitchy and stricken with worry. Your eyes urgently implored Charlie to provide a reason for his concern as if it was more important for you to hear than it was to him. You’d never seen Charlie in this state, though you supposed you’d barely been around for two months of his life, and no important moments at that.

Charlie read: “Fleur’s in labour. Come when you can. Love, mum.”

“You got it, Charlie.” Stan obeyed by performing the sharpest u-turn known to mankind, on the narrowest road known to mankind. The force flung your body towards the windows this time but Charlie effortlessly caught you by the wrist. When you recovered from another near-death incident with the metal insides of Knight Bus, Charlie’s words sunk in. 

“Charlie!” you exclaimed.

“(Y/N)!” he returned with equal excitement, blue eyes widening. 

You got back on your knees, bone meeting the plush covers of the bed, found a stable moment in Stan’s driving, and clapped your hands together giddily. “You’re going to be an uncle!” 

The moment—half past midnight—you entered the obstetrics wing of St. Mungos was precisely the moment you asked yourself: why were you here? Why had you followed Charlie here? It felt natural to drunkly stumble out of Stan’s bus with Charlie to help him find his way to the right wing, but when Bill (who was standing by a water fountain) came into view, you felt like you had intruded on a personal moment. 

”Shit, Bill, I’m sorry,” Charlie apologized as he strode into the waiting area. Your nervous gait reflected in the windows, the colours of your long skirt spilling on the black skies outside, brightened only with a speckling of stars. You left a considerable amount of space between Charlie and yourself, not wanting Bill to perceive your being here as impolite. You hoped the green chairs would provide enough coverage if you stood behind them.

“This was precisely the reason I told you I couldn’t make the concert,” Bill explained, pulling Charlie into a hug. The hug was long. Bill made eye contact with you as he released Charlie. 

“How was the concert?” Bill asked, looking at you. 

“It was excellent,” you said. “We got—Charlie got Molly’s letter at the end of it.” You hoped this would absolve you of your uninvited presence. 

”Well, thank you for taking my place,” Bill said with a smile. “Charlie was never going to let me live it down.”

”(Y/N) was better company, anyway,” Charlie scoffed. “And easier on the eyes.”

“Of course she is,” Bill agreed, nudging Charlie with his elbow.

“You wound me, Bill,” Charlie protested, holding his side.

Bill smirked. “You know what wounds me? The fact you missed the birth of your niece and almost made me miss it, too.”

“What are you boys bickering about now?” Molly chided, stepping out of the room. Her hair was frazzled, the bulk of it pulled back into a bun. She appeared more stressed than the nurses walking out the room before her. Her expression softened immediately at the sight of her second eldest son. “Charlie! You’re here.”

“Of course, mum.” Charlie walked over to give his mother a hug, his body towering over hers.

“Come meet Victoire. The others will come tomorrow to give Fleur some breathing room.” Then, Molly noticed you. Your grasp on the green leather chair tightened and your chest strained anxiously at the same. “(Y/N),” she called out sweetly. “Would you like to come, too?”

“Oh, no, I can wait here,” you said, sliding over to sit on a chair. “Please, take as long as you need.”

“Alright, then,” Molly said. She placed a hand on both Charlie and Bill’s backs and guided them back into the delivery room. 

You exhaled heavily when they left. A pounding tension still lingered in your jaw; you were so embarrassed. You should’ve waited downstairs in the lobby instead of following Charlie upstairs. You were certain that as nice as Molly was, she was going to talk about your gaffe with her neighbours over tea: her perfect son’s only-remarkable-because-of-what-her-last-name-affords-her girlfriend invited herself to meet her first grandchild. And can you believe she might’ve been drinking prior to it? Ruined the occasion. You groaned, squeezing your eyes shut. Next time, you’d think things through. 

“Don’t drop her!” a shrill voice, muted by the door, rang out. 

You looked up. 

“I promise I won’t, mum! Now, calm down. Not even Fleur is worried,” came the response. Definitely Charlie. 

“He did a decent job holding onto the snitch back in school.” That was Bill.

Then, a delicate little laugh complemented by Bill’s deeper one.

“See, mum, nothing to fret over. She’s perfectly happy in her uncle’s arms.”

Your mind crafted an image of Charlie holding the newborn in his arms. There was a tender look in his blue eyes as he cradled something so delicate and precious. You felt the look of love through your vision and for a moment, the weight on your chest lifted. 

Every single detail of the night of the concert lingered in your mind for the next couple of days. You replayed each segment in your mind. Charlie taking you to pub and meeting Don. Charlie’s show of some emotion—jealousy?—and the touch of his hand on your hip in front of Alex. The moment in Stan’s bus, and had it not been for that owl, something might’ve happened. A confession, a kiss… you would’ve been pleased with either outcome. But you sung high praises for that aforementioned owl; it led to you being able to witness him being there for his niece’s first moments. You reckoned you handled it perfectly well, passing yourself off as a supportive partner rather than a nosy one.

Feelings of infatuation overwhelmed you as you tried to scrub them away at the dirt-speckled skin of a potato. It was Monday evening and you were running high on the fumes of adrenaline. You’d decided to expel that energy by trying your hand in the kitchen. A recipe for leek and potato soup caught your eye and it seemed easy enough. You figured Charlie might appreciate it too, given how he’d made fun of there not being a meal ready for him previously. He said he’d be back this evening, and you were going to be ready for it this time.  You even pulled down two wine glasses in anticipation.

You nearly nicked your finger with the peeler when you heard keys in the front door. You drew in a deep breath and extended your hands over the top of your head to smooth out any flyaways. But really, did the rugged, sun-kissed, outdoor-prone Charlie Weasley care about how your hair looked? Before you could answer, Charlie walked in with a small duffel bag slung over his shoulders. His hair was dishevelled, his cheeks rosy, and a thin sheen of sweat coated his skin.

Your heart nearly gave out at the sight. Heavens, he looked even more handsome like this. 

“Letter for you, (Y/N),” was Charlie’s greeting.

”Thank you,” you said. “Just set it down on the table there, if you don’t mind.” “Where’ve you been?” you asked, trying to keep your eagerness to a minimum. 

Charlie closed the door behind him. “I took up Mallory’s offer of Quidditch.”

Oh.

Your smile dropped but you prayed that Charlie didn’t see it.

Something more bitter and darker washed out the sweet taste in your mouth. “How was it?”

”Great!” Charlie replied cheerily. “Reminded me of old times.”

You didn’t dare ask what those old times consisted of. Treacherous images of post-celebratory locker room make-outs and late-night “practice” sessions came to mind. 

“I got around to chatting with her brother, Marcus,” Charlie added. “ When I wasn’t being tackled down to the ground or gasping for breath, at least. I forgot how well-connected he was to all the Ministry departments.”

More treacherous images flooded your mind. Charlie. Entangled with Mallory. On the field. “Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah, stellar guy. I reckon I should keep in touch with him.” Charlie shedded his bag and his jacket. ”What are you making? It smells good.”

You beamed at his question. “I figured I’d take one out of Millicent’s book, seeing both you and I are such fans now.”

Charlie sucked some air through his teeth. “Bad night for me to grab dinner with old classmates, huh?”

“Oh, not at all,” you waved Charlie’s sentence off with a shake of your head. You shuffled slightly over to your left to conceal the second wine glass you’d pulled out. “There will be quite a bit left over, if you want it.”

“Thanks, (Y/N),” Charlie said. “I’m going to shower before I head out. Want to join?”

”No, I have dinner—” you stopped yourself, your peeler wedged in the crevice of a potato and refusing to budge. You swallowed a lump in your throat. Your chest felt strange, a strong ache casting shadows on where there was just so much joy. “I’ll see you afterwards.”

Charlie responded with a crooked smile and clamped his lips together like he was concealing a retort. You imagined it would’ve gone something like, ‘Ah, so you were thinking about joining me in the shower. How naughty of you, (Y/N).’

Well, no kidding. What sane person would refuse an elusive chance to see Charlie shirtless? The longer you thought about it, the more you could taste the hot beads of water coating his hair, running down the nape of his neck, down his chest and into the ridges of his abs. 

Your steam-ridden daydream was shot by you remembering of why he was in such desperate need of a shower. 

His mention of Mallory and his dinner plans made you want to dump the contents of the soup—that you’d made a second time over because you’d burned the first batch—into the sink. You feared how much more Mallory could get under his skin when you weren’t around him. Trying to quell your building insecurities, you had to rationalize it and break it down for your own sanity. ‘Friends’ was a plural word; Charlie and Mallory weren’t going to be alone at dinner. Charlie loved Quidditch. Mallory loved Quidditch. You didn’t love Quidditch. It was easy for the thought of inviting you to slip his mind. Charlie clearly talked to Mallory’s brother, Marcus as well. And most importantly, Charlie wasn’t your boyfriend or some committed lover or a lover of any sort. That prohibited you from asking anything of him.

Besides, he was going to come home after…right? 

You brushed off these thoughts as fanatical insinuations. Maybe you were going a little stir-crazy from Charlie’s flirting. When you heard the shower start, you slipped the extra wine glass back in its place and topped your own glass off. You needed it, because what else did Malfoys do when faced with trivial matters besides drinking them away? The dose was derived from observing your father: two glasses for a mild inconvenience, four for a moderate one, and the whole bottle for a considerable issue.

The situation at hand was pretty moderate, so four glasses it was.

In the reflection of the window, you saw your father’s eyes staring back at you. They held the same look of perturbance and wondering of why you should have to deal with any misfortune. You really were his daughter. 

The effect of the alcohol cushioned the pain of Charlie leaving through the door. He looked well-combed and delectable and ready to slip right into Mallory’s arms. Or into her mouth. No, you scolded yourself, none of that nonsense. After a lonesome dinner, your fork scraping your teeth in contemplation more than scraping the bowl, you sorted the leftovers into containers. You had your bath and went straight to bed.

Sleep that night was not only futile, it was wishful thinking. You tossed and turned. When you turned the light on again, both the hour and minute hand on your clock inched perilously close to two, meaning it was that late and Charlie still wasn’t back. He’d been gone for almost six hours.

You should’ve been asleep right now. You should’ve been fine right now. You shouldn’t be fretting over Charlie right now. So, why were you staring at the ceiling, a bruising feeling consuming your bones?

Before Charlie came into your life, you were trying to prove a point to your parents: you didn’t need a partner. And you’d always sworn you wouldn’t let the affections of a man change you; you preferred to operate independently.  Now, you were absolutely sick over Charlie. Sometime in the past couple weeks, you’d gone from not really caring where he was to your mood beating to the sound of his drums. Merlin, you were a raging hypocrite. 

The memories you had thought beautiful seemed so ugly now. His act of blowing off dinner in favour of hanging out with Mallory and her friends cheapened everything that happened over the weekend. And how was it fair that Charlie was free to spend his nights as he pleased, while the moment you engaged with Alex, he led you away? Wouldn’t it be preposterous if you showed up to the bar he was at right now and made a show by snatching him back in front of Mallory? If you did it, you’d look crazy. But when Charlie did it, it was chivalrous. 

As you fluffed your pillow just to lay down again, you thought about your friend, Alicia Spinnet. She used to complain about the men she dated and the ways they cycled hot and cold. They were indecipherable, affectionate one day and gone the next. In the end, they wanted nothing more than a fling which led to numerous late-night conversations with her asking you where she’d gone wrong or if those men were really interested in the first place. The pain she felt was only punctuated when she saw them out with a real partner months later. 

While you empathized with her by providing long hugs, ice-cream, and promises of getting petty revenge, you didn’t think yourself as so naive to find yourself in such a situation. You’d look for the signs, you’d know when to leave. But now, you felt so, so stupid. 

Charlie Weasley was not different; he was exactly the type of men Alicia complained about. At this point, you weren’t even sad. You were angry and you didn’t know who to be angry with.

“You look like shit.”

You eked out a smile. “Thank you, Fred.”

You stopped by Cauco and Weasley Wizard Wheezes the next morning just before work. Neither place brought you much peace after what had happened with Charlie there, but Fred and George were the cure-all to any sort of pain. And the last time you trekked from Cauco to the shop, you hadn’t met Charlie yet, so maybe this would serve as some sort of spiritual reset. 

You almost choked on your coffee order. You’d asked for the strongest drink as a feeble attempt to get through the day and you were served accurately. You peeled off the sleeve trying to ascertain how many shots of espresso were exactly in this concoction. Oh—was that a 3 or 8?

The delivery man finished stacking a boatload of parcels near the front and readied a slip in front of you. You counted the boxes and signed off on it for Fred and George who were busying themselves with opening duties. You thanked the worker as he left.

From there, you walked around the shop and gently rearranged some crooked products as a means to distract yourself. Charlie did get back last night, interrupting your very light sleep. You heard him brushing his teeth around 3 a.m. It was early enough to signify he didn’t spend the entire night in Mallory’s bed but late enough for the opportunity of an emotional and physical rekindling to occur. You slipped past him this morning as he slept in. You had no desire to ask him how last night went as your first conversation of the day.

You were confused. The burning desire to be by Charlie’s side flamed out so quickly after he’d mentioned Mallory. Was what you thought you felt even real, then?

“Want to do something this weekend?” you asked quickly.

“I always want to do something,” Fred was the first to respond. “But I figured your days were better spent on maintaining appearances with Charlie.”

“No,” you corrected quickly. “I think we’ve done well enough not to require anymore… appearances together.”

“It’s settled then,” Fred proclaimed. “Let’s hop a couple of bars and see where we end up.”

“(Y/N) will be on the floor,” George sang. “Just like before.”

You giggled at George’s lyricism as you propped up a Skiving Snackbox. “I will not!” 

Talking and making plans with Fred and George always took a weight off your shoulders. You went home that night feeling ready for whatever punches and hooks life was going to throw at you. You, however, stalled when you arrived back to an empty apartment again. You walked down the hallway and into the kitchen where you stopped in front of the fridge. Curiously, you peeked in to find your leftovers untouched, and you felt your resolve falter for a moment. Did it taste bad? Or did Charlie have no need for it because he was sustained by something else?

You took a deep breath to ground yourself. You had to stop thinking about this for your own sanity. Charlie and Mallory could move out to the countryside and have their perfect, beautiful academically-gifted, athletic, curly-haired, bright-eyed babies. You swore you’d wish him well when that day came. Maybe you’d even send him a gift basket. 

You were going to be fine.

You didn’t see Charlie until Friday evening after he’d arrived home from the train station. He intercepted you at the door just as you were about to leave for your night out. 

“Hold up, (Y/N). What are you doing next week?” Charlie asked, leaning against the doorframe. 

You felt as if you’d been punched in the gut. He looked so good. 

Composing yourself, you said: “You’re going to have to be more precise.”

“End of the workweek?” Charlie tried again. 

“I’ll be working.”

“Can’t take the time off?”

“I can’t afford to anymore.”

Charlie frowned. “That’s unfortunate.”

You put on a smile that didn’t quite reach your eyes. “I don’t have years worth of vacation banked up like you.”

“What about the weekend?”

“I’ll have plans.”

“They’re more important than me?”

“Maybe.”

“I like this new side of you, (Y/N),” Charlie remarked with a smirk. The same smirk that would’ve sent a heart-stopping shockwave through your body last week and left you dreaming the whole night. “I didn’t know you could tease like that.”

You now felt nothing but annoyance. Charlie obviously didn’t care enough to ask who your friends were or why you were blowing him off like this. 

“Thank you, Charlie,” you said amicably. “I’ll see you soon.” 

With that, you slipped out from the gap underneath his arm and hurried to the lift.  

Fred and George were more than ready to go when you joined them on the main floor of their shop. It was pitch-black outside and the shop was long closed, but they’d left a side door open for you. George already had a potent shot prepared for you which you happily accepted. 

“To another one of (Y/N)’s successful schemes!” proclaimed George as he clinked glasses with you and Fred. You threw back the shot with the boys. 

“What was the scheme again?” Fred set his glass down and exhaled in pleasure. “That’s some good stuff.”

”I think it was to throw her bloodhound parents off her scent,” George said. “By using Charlie.”

“Or to seduce our brother.”

George nodded. “We may never know (Y/N)’s true intentions.”

“Hey!” you protested. “That was not the reason.”

“I don’t know,” George tutted. “You seem to rather fancy living with him.”

“He’s not a terrible roommate. I like that he doesn’t talk incessantly like some people. You know, by trying to fill in any quiet gap.”

It was Fred’s turn to protest. “Hey!” 

“It’s true, though!” you laughed. “Charlie said you told him about our adventures in Care of Magical Creatures. Is that any detail you couldn’t have spared?”

“Oh, of course,” Fred stated. “There isn’t a soul in the world who doesn’t know about your failed adventures.”

You went quiet. The rush of bantering with Fred and George was washing out into a muted anger. So, Fred did tell Charlie you’d failed. Your voice was low when you asked: “Is that how you described it? My failed adventures?”

Fred stroked his chin. “Something like that. Maybe not those exact words. I said it was interesting he’d spend so much time around someone the complete opposite of him.”

“No, I reckon those were the exact words you used,” George said with a laugh. Neither men had picked up on the way your jaw tensed. “Don’t sugarcoat it.”

“How do you do reckon we’re the opposite?” you asked. You had to know.

Fred, still oblivious to the fact you were getting upset, answered honestly. “He’s a natural with beasts and creatures. You’ve no instinct for them—”

“And Quidditch, and the opposite sex,” George added. “Amongst other things.”

If this conversation had occurred on any other day, you would’ve belly-laughed yourself into the ground; you knew your faults. But today wasn’t any other day. You still had unresolved pain to contend with. Your mind instantly jumped back to Charlie and Mallory. Mallory was probably great at handling creatures and Quidditch, and if she had Charlie in the bag, then she was great with the opposite sex. 

“Is there anything you can’t keep to yourself?” you snapped. Fred finally picked up on your cues, your question slapping the grin off of his face. “Why do you have to hold the fact I failed that stupid elective over my head?”

“Whoa—what’s this about? You haven’t cared about this in 10 years.” Fred said in defence. 

“What makes you think I don’t care? I don’t go around telling people what you’ve failed!” 

“It’s just Charlie, (Y/N),” Fred rationalized. “He won’t hold it over your head.”

“I’m sorry, you mean the Charlie whom I’ve barely met until this September?” You inched closer to Fred. You wanted to hammer the point home, make him feel sorry for the first time in his life. “How about you give someone a chance to meet me before you give them an opinion of me?”

“Hey, I didn’t mean—”

“(Y/N), really,” George stepped in against your wishes, “He’s our brother, we know him. He really doesn’t care.” 

You wanted to scream. “Why do you think it’s just about Charlie?” But it was, it really was. “It’s about how you treat me in front of other people. Do you find it so humorous to take jabs at me?”

“Of course not!” Fred responded hastily, genuine worry in his eyes. “(Y/N), let me—”

You pounded the table with your palm. “Just forget it!” 

The shot glasses rattled. Fred took a step back.

George’s eyebrows furrowed. “(Y/N), let Fred—”

You threw your arms up in the air, exasperated. “Why don’t you talk to me when you’re ready to apologize?” 

You grabbed your coat and stomped out of the shop and out onto the cold, cobbled street. The door swung shut behind you and blocked out any last apologies if any were to be had. You waited for a couple seconds. Fred didn’t bother to follow you out. Of course he wouldn’t. And you weren’t going to look back to confirm it. 

Diagon Alley was afflicted with wintry darkness and a nippy front. It only got worse as you walked on, your face battered by headwinds. The cold winds stung your cheeks and froze the tears that had begun forming in your eyes. Not only was your friendship with Charlie deteriorating right in front of you, but you were letting how you felt about him dictate your feelings towards other people: Fred who unwaveringly had your back, and George who was just trying to help. You lost both of them in the span of one night and it was all your fault. 

As much as you tried to shake off your last name, you were a Malfoy through and through. Pleasant when people served your purpose, cold when you got what you wanted. You deserved to be standing here, shivering as you walked down the street with no one rushing up to put an arm or coat around you. 

Now where were you going to go? You couldn’t find refuge within your family. Hadn’t you worn down your relationship with them because of Charlie, too? You couldn’t go back to the shop with Fred and George—you were sure they resented you. You couldn’t go back to your apartment. But why even consider that? Charlie was probably taking advantage of your outing to escape under the covers with Mallory. 

And Charlie, oh, Charlie. If he wasn’t going to like you because of your poor handling of magical creatures, then he certainly wasn’t going to like you after the way you treated his brothers—his family. You kicked up a patch of dirt in anger and let the loose soil splay over your stockings. 

The thought of being alone and the pain shooting up your toe released the tears you’d been holding back. Once you started, you couldn’t stop. The salty stream trickled down your skin until they caught on the corners of your lips. You pulled your scarf upwards to mute the sob working its way up to your throat. And much like your tears, once the cries started, you couldn’t stop. 

You woke the next morning with a strong ache in your back and a pounding headache. Your lips were chapped, glued in certain spots from the lack of water. You pushed yourself off the scratchy pillowcase, your movement stirring a creak in the bed. The cloth that wrapped around the lamp beside you was mottled, and the gold paint scratched away to reveal the harsh grey base layer. 

Your sense of hearing came back when the pounding of your head retreated, but it was only to make way for the thudding of bodies and moans spilling out on the other side of the thin wall.  Your sense of smell came alive next, picking up on the smell of bacon grease wafting upwards through the floorboards. As if you couldn’t feel sicker.

How the mighty (Y/N) Malfoy had fallen, you thought as you scrunched up the starchy bedsheets. From her canopy bed in her mansion to a paper-thin mattress in a sketchy motel she checked herself into because she had nowhere else to go.

In the washroom, you did your best to comb out your hair with your fingers and wipe off the smudged makeup from under your eyes. You’d figure out the wrinkled clothing later on. At the very least, your topcoat would conceal the fact you slept in last night’s clothes. When you deemed yourself presentable, you walked onto the street and turned towards a different coffee shop.

A rush of blonde hair suddenly obfuscated your peripheral vision. You stumbled from the impact of two girls grazing your sides. You looked up in confusion at what had just happened.

“Girls, come back here,” a stern voice called out. 

The two girls turned back but caught your eyes first.

“(Y/N)?” the taller one called out.

Okay, now you were even more confused. “Clara?”

“That’s me!” she said. Clara ran over and threw herself in your arms. Still in a state of shock, you returned the hug. 

If this was Clara, then there was only one possibility as to who the other girl was. “Hello, Charlotte,” you greeted. Charlotte came sprinting over in a frenzy and enveloped you from the side. 

You never understood how Clara and Charlotte weren’t twins. They had a whole two years of genetic possibilities separating them, but they still maintained so much likeliness. It was as if Aunt Rosamund and your Uncle Leon copied and imprinted preset genes into their offspring. They both had Aunt Rosamund’s platinum blonde hair though wispier and wavier. They were both small and nimble, fairy-like in their stature. It was impossible to detach either girl from their love of reading fantasy and romance novels. You supposed childish wonder helped preserve their everlasting youth. 

Given that Clara and Charlotte were here, it could only mean one thing. The woman who’d called for them was none other than—

You turned around. “Hello, Aunt Rosamund.”

Aunt Rosamund quirked a pointed eyebrow at you, her inquisitive green eyes sweeping you up and down. Her blonde hair was pulled back into a tight bun. Her silver hoop earrings perfectly complemented her white suit and cloak. She twisted her mouth which pulled her cheekbones—looking so much like her older brother, Lucius, in the process—meaning she was ready to pass judgement. You braced yourself. 

”Goodness, you look terrible, (Y/N). Did you sleep on the streets yesterday?”

Ouch. Well, at least it wasn’t your Uncle Theo. Things could be worse. 

“I had a long night. It’s been busy at work,” you responded. 

“You may benefit from a de-puffing potion,” Aunt Rosamund continued, now staring into your eyes. “I have a contact in Luxembourg who is the Chief of Operations at a cosmetic company that carries simply the best line of anti-aging products. I’ll set an appointment up for you.”

You touched your face, fingers grazing swells of your eyelids from all the crying you did last night. “Oh, this is temporary. It’ll fade.”

“Hm,” Aunt Rosamund said, half-believing you as she pressed her red lips together. 

“She doesn’t look like a vagabond, mother. I like it. It’s rather bohemian,” Charlotte commented sweetly as she smoothed out your topcoat for you. “And (Y/N) looks even more youthful with her puffy eyes.” Alright, bohemian and youthful—you’d take it. 

“So, what are you girls doing here?” you asked, trying to move the limelight away from your appearance. 

“We wanted to see Christmas in London!” Charlotte piped up.

Clara sighed wistfully. “There’s a certain sense of romance that lingers in the air here that you can’t find anywhere else.”

You were gobsmacked. These girls had the entirety of Europe in their little hands and they wanted to see Christmas here? “Really?“

“You should know, (Y/N)! You live here,” Charlotte harped. 

Even more puzzled, you stated: “It’s only November.”

Charlotte took your hand. “Sure, but we have to be back in Switzerland in December. And I can’t wait for you to visit us then.”

You squeezed her palm affectionately. “Me neither.”

”Come on, girls,” Aunt Rosamund called. “We have to be on our way to brunch. You can discuss your plans with (Y/N) when we arrive at your uncle Lucius’s at noon.”

“See you later, (Y/N)!” Charlotte said, giving you one last hug, before running off to her mother.

“Bye, (Y/N)!” Clara repeated. 

As the three ladies ambled on, you stood there motionless, wondering what the hell you had missed.

Charlie was on the couch when you ran into your apartment. You huffed as you shut the door, having sprinted here to make the best of the hour you were given before you had to be back at the Manor.

“Hey,” was the first thing out of Charlie’s mouth when he saw you. Were your eyes betraying you, or did he genuinely look concerned? “Where were you last night?”

“Uhm,” you stammered, his question really wedging you in between a rock and a hard place. Should you lie or lie? You didn’t feel like divulging about the night you spent crying in a dirt-cheap inn. “With Fred and George.”

Charlie’s shoulders released in relief. “That’s good. I was a little concerned when you didn’t come home.”

Well, didn’t that make two of you?

“I’m going to freshen up. I have family visiting today.”

Charlie perked up. Begrudgingly, you attempted to read him. Was he excited that you were going to be gone? Your absence would surely afford him more opportunities with Mallory. 

“Which side?” he asked. “Mum, dad?”

“My father’s.”

“Is it your Uncle Theo or Aunt Rosamund?”

You raised your eyebrows. “You remember?”

“I couldn’t forget your fantastic descriptions. So, who is it?”

“My Aunt Rosamund.”

“Do you need me to accompany you?”

Sharply, you said: “No.”

“Alright then,” Charlie said, falling back on the couch. “Don’t forget about me.”

“I’ll try my best, Charlie, no promises.”

You opened the door to your room and rummaged through the closet for an outfit that wouldn’t suffer the scrutiny of Aunt Rosamund. You heard the thud of footsteps drawing closer and stopped. 

“Before you go, (Y/N), can you think over one thing for me?” Charlie asked.

You almost laughed when you spun around. Charlie’s head looked like it was decapitated and hanging from the way he positioned himself at the door. “Depends on what it is.”

“Is there any Thursday and Friday you could take off?”

You frowned. 

Like how Alicia’s stories usually went, this was the part where the guy (Charlie) would try to win your affections back after realising you’d turned cold. Shower you with praise and compliments and his undivided attention. Charlie was about to feed and rescue you from the famine he started. And when you thought you were safe in his arms, he was sure to starve you for good. 

You weren’t going to let that happen. You weren’t going to be a crumpled mess on the floor again. 

“Sure,” you said coolly. “I’ll think about it.”

However deflated you sounded, it didn’t impact Charlie in the slightest. He looked as gleeful as the day he’d gotten his Hogwarts acceptance letter. “Aren’t you going to ask why?”

You placed a hand on your hip, willing to humour him one last time. “Alright, why, Charlie?”

When the response spilled from Charlie’s lips, you realised you had no playbook to navigate the question he’d just posed.  

>> NEXT CHAPTER

CHAPTER DIRECTORY

@badgerqueen07 @superduckmilkshake @k-k-merlin @kisskittenn @pluiesdefleurs@lilianelena39 @bathwater101 @evilunicorns4minions @noah-uhhh-what @earth-to-lottie @kissingyourgrl @sihtricswife @adalia-jaycee @anuttellaa @weasley-clan @morks-watermelon @nobodysbabydoll @annoyingbean630 @bathwater101 @ladylizzieofdarbyshire

[petitelepus]

The Demon Gift: Choosing Hantengu, Part 4

Demon!Slave!Hantengu X Fem!Reader

Summary: You manage to find yourself and your Demons a new home and go shopping for stuff.

Warnings: None

A/N: Demon Slave AU, Domesticated Demons, Reader Insert, Fem!Reader, Hantengu, Master/Slave, Karaku, Sekido, Urogi, Aizetsu

Tags: @hantenguclonesimp-minuszoha

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8 - Part 9 - Part 10 - Part 11 - Part 12 - Part 13 - Part 14 - Part 15

After a good night's rest and a healthy breakfast, you called a van for you, Hantengu, and his 4 clones with tinted windows so the sun wouldn't burn them. Sadly, due to the law, you had to put collars you had bought the day before around Sekido's, Karaku's, Aizetsu's, and Urogi's necks.

"These collars are humiliating!" Sekido growled from the back seat and you silently cursed in your mind. Bratty Demons usually got beaten to submission, but you didn't want any of that to happen to any of your Demons.

"You have a mouthy Demon there, little miss!" The driver said and you were almost tempted to tell him to mind his own business, but instead, you just laughed a little, "Ha ha, yeah…"

"Want me to help you with it?" The driver asked and you almost choked on air, "Excuse me?"

"I can beat some sense into it if you like and I only charge you 50 bucks for it!"

Were you hearing right? This man wanted to beat your Demon so he would quiet down and he expected you to pay for it!? How cruel could someone be? Then again, you remembered that your wicked family was in no way different.

Sekido and the other clones must have heard the driver's offer because they were all quiet in fear of being beaten by the burly driver. You scowled as you looked at the driver, "Thank you, but no thank you."

"Okay, I will do it for free!" The man tried and you shook your head, "No."

"Fine, I pay you!"

"I'm seriously not interested." You were starting to lose your patience with this idiotic driver. He was about to say something but before he could, you snapped, "One more word and I will give you a review so awful you will never drive in this city again!"

That made the man shut up and you were pretty pleased with yourself for the rest of the drive. Finally, you made it to the house you were supposed to see and you thanked the Gods that it was a cloudy day so the sun wouldn't burn the Demons.

"That would be-!" The driver started, but you didn't let him finish.

"Don't bother waiting." You said as you slapped some money on his palm and got out of the car, the Demons following behind you and you were all awed by what you saw.

The house was absolutely gorgeous looking and there was an enormous backyard that looked more like a fucking meadow.

"Ooh, look at all this space!" Urogi laughed as he looked around, excitement clear on his face, "So much space for me to spread my wings!"

"It does look amazing." You nodded as you guys walked towards the front door. You raised your fist, ready to knock, but before you could do so, the door was opened and a small woman with huge glasses greeted you.

"Oh, you must be the buyers I was waiting for!" She smiled and you blinked, "Uh, sorry, we were told to come here by 11am?"

"Oh, that Randal must have given me the wrong time, AGAIN." The lady chuckled, "I'm Hortensia and- Oh? Who are these handsome young men?"

"Oh, uh," You looked at the Demons over your shoulder and then smiled at the lady, "They are my Demons. This place does allow Demons, right?"

"Honey, this place and all the land are yours if we can agree on a deal." Hortensia smiled, "Now come on in before the sun comes out! We don't want you young men to ruin your handsome faces!"

You were a little stunned but this lady's acceptance towards Demons, but you were welcoming the change to usual harassment. You and the clones entered the house and you were taken aback by how amazing the whole place looked. Huge and spacious and the furniture was just as gorgeous.

"Does the furniture come with the house?" You asked and Hortensia smiled, "They do! Of course, you are going to have to bring your own electronics such as a TV or two, but the house comes with furniture. The owners want to get rid of this place as soon as possible."

"Why?" You asked, honestly confused why someone would want to do so to a house this gorgeous, and the woman smiled, "Nasty divorce."

"Aah," You nodded, suddenly understanding. As you guys explored the house, you found out that the kitchen was big and connected to a spacious dining room. You could see yourself and the Demons eating there together.

The open living room was huge and so were the windows, letting in as much light as possible… Which wasn't so good for Hantengu or his clones.

"These windows, uh…" You started carefully.

"The windows are huge, yes, but it's nothing that proper curtains won't fix." Hortensia smiled, "The whole place was renovated by the sellers to fit their modern taste."

"I see." You nodded as you glanced at the Demons who were following behind you, "What do you guys think?"

"It needs curtains…" Sekido nodded and you had never seen him so calm yet, "But it's sufficient."

"It's wicked!" Karaku laughed and Urogi joined him, "And awesome!"

"I could see us living here." Aizetsu thought quietly and you smiled and looked at the real estate agent.

"Honestly, this place looks amazing." You said and the woman smiled as she showed you guys around the house, "There are 5 bedrooms and a home office but if you want you can change it into a guest room with the convertible sofa in there. There are 4 bathrooms, 2 here downstairs and the other 2 on the second floor."

"Wow," You smiled but just as you were thinking that the place couldn't get any better, Hortensia smiled, "I also have no doubt in my mind that you are going to love the basement."

"Why is that?" You asked and she smiled as she motioned you to follow her, "Come come and you will see!"

You and the clones followed the old woman down to the basement and what you saw made you and the Demons gasp out loud. There was an absolutely amazing-looking indoor pool, but it wasn't actually a pool but a bath instead?

"What is this…?"

"You like it, right? The owners used to travel around the world and they fell in love with Japan's hot springs. Of course, they wanted almost exact replica so they built this indoor bath."

"It's amazing…!" You were in awe but then you noticed a glass door on the side and you got curious, "Where does that door lead?"

"Go ahead and take a look!" Hortensia smiled and you walked to the door and opened it to look inside.

"A wooden room?" You wondered out loud.

"That's a real authentic Finnish sauna! Like I said, the sellers loved to travel." The older real estate agent said cheerfully and you were honestly speechless. Just how amazing can a house get? Your old home, back with your horrible family was amazing, but you only felt safe and nice in your own room. This house felt so much like that safe room of yours.

"What do you think? Is this your new home?" The woman asked and you smiled as you looked at her, "When can we move in?"

Hortensia explained that as soon as the sellers got paid, the house and the land that comes with would belong to you. Not wanting to waste any time, you told her to contact the sellers and tell them that you were ready to pay and move in as fast as possible.

While your agent was calling the sellers, you were waiting for a new taxi van with a different driver to pick you and the Demons up and take you back to your hotel. You looked at your Demons and smiled, "So? How are you feeling about this place?"

The clones shared a quick glance with each other before nodding.

"It's far away from nasty humans…!" Sekido said and Aizetsu nodded, "Here we can be free."

"And I can fly as much as I like as long as the sun is out!" Urogi smiled and Karaku grinned, "Do we get our own rooms? That's wicked!"

"What about you Hantengu?" You asked as you pulled your shirt's collar down and looked down to see the small Demon who was trapped or resting between your breasts. It honestly depended on how you looked at it.

"I- I liked it…! N- no bullies here…! Just Mistress…!" The tiny Demon whimpered and you awed as you gently petted the bump on his head, "Aww, that makes me happy."

"I wish I could turn small," You heard Karaku comment behind you and Urogi laughed, "Yeah, that would make me happy also!"

"When the two of you need special care like Hantengu I'll make sure to give you some." You said and the two gleeful clones cackled as they high-fived each other. You couldn't help but roll your eyes at them, but you were still smiling.

Behavior like this would have earned you some glares back at your family, but now you and your Demons could be as free and silly as you liked to be.

Thanks to Hortensia, you were able to meet the sellers as quickly as was just possible. The couple looked like very normal people who used to be in love but were no longer. They were more than happy to sell the house and land to you and you were more than happy to move in as quickly as possible.

So couple of days later, it was time to say farewell to your hotel room that had served as your temporary home and you moved to the new house with the 5 Demons of yours.

"Freedom!" Urogi and Karaku both laughed as soon as they made it inside.

"Quiet down you two!" Sekido snapped, "You're being too loud!"

"Who cares?" Karaku laughed, "This is our place now!"

"Karaku is right Sekido," You said as you closed the front door behind you, "This is our place now so you guys can do whatever you want."

"Still…!"

"We are more than thankful for this humble home." Aizetsu said as he looked at you and you smiled, "I'm happy that you guys are happy."

You looked inside your shirt, and gently pulled Hantengu out to show him the huge living room area, "How do you like your new home Hantengu?"

"I- it's huge…!" He whimpered and you smiled a little as you walked to the huge dark couches and set the small Demon on the table between the soft furniture and your only possession, your computer.

You sighed, tired due to all the stuff that happened lately, but you still had so much to do. For example, your stomach was empty and so was your new fridge. You would have to buy food for yourself, meat for Demons, and at least curtains for the living room's huge windows to block out the sun…

But as you thought about what you needed, more and more things popped into your mind. Clothes, electronics, bed sheets, towels, and the list went on. You would no doubt also need a car so you could move all the stuff you would need to buy. That, and you wanted to be able to move easily with Hantengu and his clones and not rely on some unknown driver.

Good thing that you had a driver's license, so all you needed was to get a car. There was still plenty of money left from what your stepfather gave you so money shouldn't be a problem. You just needed a car big enough for 6 and space for groceries and other stuff.

"Guys, I need to go shopping in the city." You said and this caught the Demons' attention.

"You're leaving us alone?" Aizetsu asked and you remembered that no one really left their Demons alone in fear that they could escape or such. But these five weren't your slaves, but more like roommates.

So you told them that, "You are free to do as you please. I was thinking of buying us a television, but if you want, you can come shopping with me? While we are out there we could get you guys some stuff you would like in your own rooms?"

"I'm in!" Karaku jumped up from the couch faster than you had ever seen anyone move.

"Me too!" Urogi said, but you shook your head, "Urogi, you better stay here and watch the house. No offense, but you may attract a little too much attention right now."

"I'll stay with him." Sekido said, "It's better that someone sensible is here than just one knucklehead."

"If it's just alright, I would like to accompany you to the city?" Aizetsu asked, "I can help you carry stuff?"

"Okay, sounds good. But!" There was a huge but, "You need to put the collars on for the time we are out."

Karaku whined and you frowned, "I don't like it either but if you guys don't wear them then you could be taken away from me."

"P- please, don't leave me alone…!" Hantengu whimpered and awed as you gently petted the small Demon, "Sekido and Urogi will be here with you. I promise I will bring you something extra nice so wait for me here, okay?"

Hantengu looked like he wanted to cry, but instead, he nodded a little and you smiled as you ordered a taxi for you and the clones of sorrow and pleasure. While you waited, you fastened the collars around their necks, looking sorry and apologizing to them, "I'm sorry about these…"

"I know… But you're doing it because you care…" Aizetsu nodded as he frowned, "So I understand."

You smiled a little, "Thank you for understanding."

Finally, your ride arrived and you and the clones got on and headed towards the city. The first thing you did was to go and buy a new and spacious car for you and the Demons, but apparently, you couldn't just walk in there and buy the car you wanted.

No, they had to be ordered and delivered first. You were a little frustrated, but you couldn't do anything about it. You ended up ordering the biggest minivan there was and paid extra to have the windows tinted so the sun wouldn't burn your Demons. The nice salesman promised to have your car ready after a week and while you waited he rented you a huge delivery van you could use meanwhile.

With that done and over, you, Aizetsu, and Karaku headed to the shopping mall. As soon as you stepped inside, the Demons were in complete awe of everything, the lights, the number of people, and the stores.

"So many people…" Aizetsu muttered quietly and Karaku grinned, "So many!"

"Okay, you guys are about the same size as Sekido and Urogi, right?" You asked and the Demons nodded and you smiled, "Great, let's get you guys some clothes then."

The three of you headed to the clothing stores and time really passed when you were shopping. You were never a huge clothing shopping fan, but with your wardrobe shredded to pieces, you needed some new clothes as well.

Spring was on and Summer was just around the corner so you needed something light to wear. You could buy heavier and warmer clothes when Fall comes. You were rather happy with the bags of clothes you had gotten and even happier that you had two strong Demons who helped you to carry some of the bags.

"Okay, then we need-!"

"Ooh, Mistress, Mistress!" You heard Karaku call you and you stopped and turned to see what had caught the Demon's attention.

"What is it Karaku?" You asked and the Demon pointed at the store he had stopped in front of. You took a look and saw that it was a videogame store and a pretty big one also. There were even some kids trying out the games set for customers to try.

"What are those kids doing?" Karaku asked and you blinked, stunned that he didn't know what video games were, but then again, he was part of Hantengu and you doubted that the timid Demon had ever seen a game like that before.

"They are playing video games." You replied and Karaku repeated after you, "Video games?"

"We can get some if you would like?" You asked and that was when you remembered your destroyed Nintendo Switch that your awful stepsiblings had broken. You still had what was left of your console so you should be able to regain all your saved files.

Actually, you started to like the idea of having video games in your house. While it was daytime and you would be forced to stay inside to hide from the sun, you could play games together.

"You know what? Let's buy a couple of consoles and games." You smiled and Karaku was absolutely beaming in joy, "Alright!"

The three of you stepped into the stores and started to look around for interesting games and consoles. Knowing pretty much what to get, you grabbed a couple of Just Dance, Pokémon, Mario, and Sports games, and three newest Nintendo Switches. The salesman looked a little stunned by the Demons who followed your every step, but no man or woman ever says no to money.

Happy with your shopping, you and the Demons took the clothing bags and gaming things to your rental van, before heading back to the mall to continue shopping. You bought some pillows, blankets, curtains and sheets, cleaning supplies and once you had those bought, you went to buy something to fill your huge fridge with.

When you made it to the meat section in the store, you turned to ask Aizetsu and Karaku if they preferred their meat cooked or raw, but when you turned you saw them staring at the raw meat on the butcher's display. They must have been hungry and rightfully so, your last meal was at the hotel before you left.

"What are you guys looking at?" You asked as you walked next to them and they both looked at you.

"Lamb!"

"Beef." They replied in perfect unison and you couldn't help but smile a little as you turned to look at the butcher on the other side of the display, "Can we get some lamb and beef to go?"

"Of course, young miss!" The man nodded as he grabbed the meats on display and chopped them into fine pieces that he quickly wrapped in paper.

"Your Demons have a fine taste!" The butcher laughed as he handed you the meat over the display and you chuckled a little, "Thank you."

You noticed that Karaku and Aizetsu were staring at the meat packet and you smiled a little, "You can eat in the car once we leave."

The Demons nodded, both excited over the idea of food. You and they finished shopping quickly and once you had everything a human or Demon might need, you got into the van, removed the collars from Demons' necks, and drove out of the parking hall and towards your new home outside the city. While you were driving, Aizetsu and Karaku enjoyed some of the beef and lamb at the back.

"Leave something for Hantengu, Sekido, and Urogi!" You called and Karaku laughed, "They have their own meat!"

"But sharing is caring…" Aizetsu tried to say and you quickly added, "There is enough meat for all 5 of you! Now, tell me what did you like most at the mall?"

The three of you went through the things you had seen or bought and before you knew it, you were back at your new home and just in time as the sun settled. You parked the car and honked, accidentally startling poor Demon of sorrow, to which you quickly apologized.

Hearing the honk, Urogi, Sekido, and Hantengu on Sekido's shoulder came to inspect the noise and saw you guys with many, so many bags full of things you had bought.

"What is all this?" The Demon of anger asked as he took in all the bags at the back of the van and you smiled a little, "Clothes, food, stuff we might need."

"Ooh, did you bring anything for me?" Urogi asked excitedly.

"There is some prime meat for all of you. I'm going to put them in the fridge so they won't spoil while we get all the things in their places." You said as you grabbed heavy shopping bags and carried the bags filled with meat for Demons and food for you to the kitchen.

While you were gone, the Demons looked at each other.

"What did you find out?" Sekido asked and Aizetsu frowned, "She was very sweet and thoughtful… I think she is genuine."

"She bought us games and gave us delicious meat!" Karaku grinned and Urogi smiled excitedly, "Games?"

"Quiet!" Sekido snapped, "Are you two certain we can trust her?"

"Absolutely!" Karaku nodded and Aizetsu sighed, "I believe so also, so do we must test her so?"

"We can't be too careful…" Sekido glanced at Hantengu on his shoulder who whimpered as four sets of eyes bore into him, "I- I want to trust her, I really do…!"

"What are you guys talking about?"

The 5 Demons turned to see you standing by the house's entrance and you smiled, "Can you grab bags and bring them inside while I prepare some meat for you?"

"It would be our pleasure!" Karaku cackled and you smiled as you turned and headed back inside to prepare the Demons' meals.

"I think we can trust her, right?" Urogi thought out loud.

"Time will tell." Sekido nodded before looking at the bags in the van, "For starters, let's get everything inside. We are starving."

[ataliagold]

Drove Through Ghosts To Get Here

For @astrangersummer week 10 prompt ' "I'm a great driver!" ' Title from Drove Through Ghosts to Get Here by 65daysofstatic.

Pairing: Steve Harrington and Robin Buckley, Steve Harrington/Eddie Munson, very background Robin Buckley/Nancy Wheeler

Rating: T

W/C: 1227

Tags: Post-Vecna, everyone lives, established Steddie, Robin and Steve are soulmates, learning to drive, mild angst, Eddie is a little shit, heart to heart in the ruins of Starcourt

Summary: During his last summer in Hawkins, Steve teaches Robin how to drive.

___

“Ready, Steve?”

Robin’s got the keys to his beemer in her hands, jiggling them as she stands by the door.

“Got your crash helmet, Stevie?” Eddie teases as Steve peels himself off the couch, mournfully now out of reach of the mildly-refreshing airflow of the fan on the coffee table.

“Hey!” Robin retorts, “I’m a great driver!”

“Mmm hmm,” Eddie hums, eyebrow raised.

Steve leans over, plants a kiss to Eddie’s mouth, briefly shutting him up.

“I’ll pray for your safe return, my love,” Eddie says dramatically, flopping himself across the now-free space on the couch.

Steve smirks, Robin rolling her eyes as she stomps out the door towards the car.

Steve had been teaching Robin to drive over the summer, Robin begging him to after the first few lessons with her mom had gone…well, terribly, involving a near-miss with a traffic light and her mom gripping the seat with white knuckles and shaking whenever she got in the car with her.

“Pleeeeease Stevie, I want to be able to visit Nancy when she goes to college and I can’t afford to fly back and forth all the time,” she’d implored him, and Steve had caved within moments.

It couldn’t be as bad as that time with Max after all, right?

It was evening now but it was still far too fucking hot, Steve sweating in his t-shirt – one of Eddie’s, soft and worn - and shorts even as he cranks the car AC as high as it can go.

“Ok so just…remember to take your foot off the clutch slowly,” Steve reminds her.

Robin nods, determined. “Ok. Gotcha. Slowly.”

The beemer lurches, stalls in the driveway.

“Slowly!” Steve barks, slapping a hand on the dash in surprise.

“I was slow!” Robin snaps back, turning the key in the ignition again.

A cackle of laughter from behind them - Eddie in the doorway, having ventured over to watch the show.

Robin winds down the window, sticks her hand out, flips him off.

A little flustered now, she gently places her foot on the accelerator. The engine whirrs, louder and louder.

Steve places his head in his hands.

“Why are we not moving?” Robin asks quietly.

“You’re not in first,” Steve says, pointing at the gear box.

“Right,” Robin nods, “first.”

She slams the clutch in again, Steve watching as she successfully maneuvers to first gear, then lets the clutch out painfully slowly, the car starting to roll forward.

“There you go,” Steve says, fighting the urge to grip his seat like Robin’s mom used to.

He glances in the wingmirror. Eddie’s waving his bandana in a delicate hand like a woman seeing her husband off for war.

Steve shakes his head, scoffs a little under his breath, and keeps his eyes on the road as Robin pulls out into the flow of traffic.

“Where should we go?” Robin asks, gripping the wheel tight with both hands.

“Wherever you like. Preferably somewhere without many hazards.”

Robin scowls at him, and Steve laughs.

“I’m kidding, Robs. You’re a lot better than when you first started.”

That was an understatement.

Eddie had joined them for one of Robin’s first lessons, sitting in the back seat and crying with laughter as they’d bunny-hopped down the road, Steve trying to keep calm and give Robin advice while she’d shrieked that there was something wrong with the car.

Eventually, they’d had to let Eddie out of the car to relieve himself after he’d almost laughed hard enough to piss his pants, Steve cursing at him and swearing he’d make him scrub the upholstery if he couldn’t control himself.

After that, Steve was the only one to accompany Robin for her lessons.

They end up in the old empty lot where Starcourt once stood.

Robin brings the beemer to a stop and kills the engine.

Steve glances over at her. Notices the way Robin’s hands tremble a little where they’re still resting on the wheel, the way her breathing has picked up slightly.

“You ok?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Robin replies, her voice tight.

Steve senses there’s more she wants to say. He waits with his window wound down, warm breeze stirring his hair, darkness starting to fall. They’re the only ones here – that was no surprise, what with the invisible heavy cloud that always seemed to hang over this place. Even those who didn’t know the truth about the Upside Down knew that something bad happened here, something unnatural that took the lives of many.

The scorch marks in the concrete were still here. Steve can see them in the low light, the concrete gouged out and charred even more than two years after the mall had burned down.

“Do you think about it, still?” Robin asks quietly, “this place, what happened here, how we nearly…died?”

Steve nods. “Sometimes.”

“I know everything that happened after with Vecna sort of…overshadowed everything else, but whenever I have nightmares it’s about this place still. I’m stuck underground, I can hear you getting hurt but I can’t get to you, and sometimes they drag your body in and I’m just tied up in a room with you lying there…”

Steve squeezes her knee as Robin trails off, choking up.

“Hey,” he murmurs, “we did it. We beat it, Robs, we survived.”

“I know,” Robin replies, bringing her hand down to rest on his larger one. “I just…sometimes I feel like everyone’s moving on. Nancy’s going off to college, the kids are getting older, you and Eddie are moving to Chicago in a few weeks…and I’m still here.” She flaps a hand out the window, gestures at the empty lot around them.

“You can come visit us whenever you like. Hell, what do you think we got a two-bedroom place in Chicago for?” Steve smiles, tries to cheer her up.

Robin huffs out a small laugh. “I will definitely be taking you up on that offer, dingus. Just…do you ever feel like…like everything that happened is just stuck with us now, that it’s a part of us and we’ll never…we’ll never be normal?”

Steve clutches her hand. “Have you ever been normal?” he teases gently.

She slaps his shoulder with her free hand. “Shut up. You know what I mean.”

Steve’s smile fades. “I do. And I think…yeah, it’ll always be part of us. S’not like any of us are ever going to forget it. But I think about all the shit that wouldn’t have happened without the Upside Down, as terrible as it all was. I met the kids, Eddie, you…my life changed completely and a lot of it was honestly for the better. Unfortunately we just gotta…find a way to deal with everything that came with it.”

Robin nods, sits in silence for a few moments before speaking again. “You ever think about those two dumb kids who slung ice cream for a summer and thought that was the worst thing that could happen to them?”

Steve had known even back then there were a few things far worse things than a minimum-wage customer service job, but he understood the sentiment.

He grins. “Yeah, I think about them sometimes. I think they turned out ok, right?”

Robin laughs. Reaches for the key again, turns the engine back on. “Yeah, I think so. Anyway, shall we get out of here?”

“Sure. But remember, slowly.”

“You got it, dingus.”

___

[catboybiologist]

So. This has lived on my hard drive for over a year and a half now, and in my head for much longer than that. I have the entire plot mapped out in my mind, and it's not *too* long. But it's gonna require a lot of careful writing that I think is beyond my ability, and definitely beyond my current available free time level. Maybe when I advance to candidacy, or maybe this is the story I use a portable backpacking writing setup for.

Either way. It's very deliberately allegorical, and taps into a few sci fi cliche "twists" that you're supposed to kinda figure out early on, but are used for bigger themes later.

As I said. Probably beyond my ability.

But here's how I kicked it off a while back. It has a similar "flow" to the intro of biologics, where it cuts between expository introspection and the actual events happening. Idk if that's weird, but it's what made sense to me.

Also I hate the working title I gave it, but I can't think of it as anything else now.

Symphony of the Stars

The bar I found myself in wasn't much different than millions of others like it. A couple cheap liquors that could be found anywhere, maybe a halfway decent local beer or two, and some tacky tourist paraphernalia hang haphazardly on the walls. Absentmindedly, I swirled my drink. My eyes slowly drifted through the panel windows behind the bar, and onto the orange gas giant visible through it.

That was one thing that made me partial to this little backwater- that damn view. Sure, the closer moons might advertise themselves on their intimate little peeks at the red spot, or the faintest glimpse of Jupiter's barely visible rings, but the people there... Not that I minded the workers, I'm a mechanic of sorts myself- but the miners, water pumpers, and atmospheric skimmers of Jupiter's inner moons were a particular brand of insufferable. Thinking that a couple years managing equipment in the Hellas basin made them the most rugged people on the planet, and then shipped themselves out to the furthest flung inhabited spot in the damn solar system. Joke's on them- most of them don't survive 10 years out here. The ones that make it are a different story, I'll give you that. A certain breed of person actually has what it takes to make it out here, and those people have earned some respect.

But I digress.

Callisto was a remote place, damn far from the sprawling metropolises of Mars or the more cushy mining jobs in the belt. Up until recently, it had been my own little sleepy backwater that I had used to escape my extended hours fixing ships for the harvesters on the other moons.

That was before jumping.

Callisto boasted a small engineering and research center near the south pole, most famous for getting artificial gravity fields working nearly three centuries ago. That bit of notoriety let someone set up a particle accelerator that looped the whole damn moon on its equator. Forty eight years ago, a researcher hit the right island of stability when making ultra-heavy elements, and something just... came together. The exact right amount of mass was focused in the exact right amount of space to dent space time in a perfect little way. A few measurements later, they realized that they had created the smallest documented black hole.

My eyes again wandered to the space in between us and Jupiter. That was the other reason I came to this bar so often. It was also the only place around where you could watch the show.

After a few times generating and collapsing this infant of a black hole, some idiot of a scientist decided that they just had to throw something into it. It wasn't much of anything, just a probe that blasted a repeating live image from its camera in all directions. And hopefully, if it survived in any identifiable form, someone would pick up on it.

Well, someone did. A little over four years later, we got a picture of a star. Real helpful- there's only a couple septillion of those out there, right? But what mattered was the timing, and the direction. The star was eventually identified as Proxima Centauri. The moment the image from the probe had been received, the receiver was exactly 4.2465433 light years away from Proxima. And the image was received exactly 4.2465433 years after the probe was thrown into the hole. Meaning that the probe was at Proxima, exactly 4.2465433 years before the image was received. And it was thrown into the hole, on Callisto.... also exactly 4.2465433 years before the image was received. One moment, Callisto. One moment, Proxima Centauri. In some unit of time that was smaller than our ability to measure, it had traveled to the next star system. It was the textbook definition of a wormhole.

And with that discovery, well....

Jupiter's red spot quivered ever so slightly. They were right on schedule, it seemed. Just need to gain a bit of mass in the accelerator, get the magnetic railgun to throw it all into the space above it....

Like fluid down a drain, the image of Jupiter swirled as a dark spot appeared in front of it. Slowly, it grew, twisting the orange and red tones of the gas giant in mosaic patterns, until the black orb stopped, hovering in the emptiness.

After the initial wormhole generation all those years ago, it was found that by nudging the mass to be a little less, or a little more, or nudging to position of the superheavy object that created it, you could target distant parts of the universe. Soon, small spacecraft were being sent to distant stars. The scientists started it, of course. Shortly afterwards, the Callisto government began lobbying to make our little outpost the first official launch point for interstellar settlement.

That was forty years ago. And at this point, the five established settlements were fairly self sufficient- they just needed occasional contact and resupplies. Every week, a wormhole would be opened to one of the colonies. And every week, a freighter would be there to make the jump through, grab what supplies it needed, leave behind a new list of requests, and then disappear again until their specific colony was contacted again in another five weeks. And every week, I would be in this same bar to watch the fireworks.

My eyes narrowed as the perfect black circle reached its stable state. I watched these things every damn week. Part of me wants to say "blink and you'll miss it", but the truth is, at this point in the process, there's nothing to miss.

One moment, a featureless orb. The next moment, a deep space freighter. No flash. No gradual fade. No coming out of a tunnel. The hole was large enough for the entire mass of the ship to fit through at once, and the jump was seamless.

And to tell the truth... I didn't like it.

Humanity had reached and settled the furthest reaches of space, because of a magic substance that broke physics, stumbled upon by accident, in a random lab, by a some guy who was just trying to whip up a new element.

It was perfect. It was too perfect. And it bothered me.

And well, that's why I was here. I'd been visiting Callisto for years, and the pressure to make jumping more and more accessible to small spacecraft was insane. Pretty soon, everyone trying to engineer or maintain any kind of ship would need to have half of a quantum physics degree, and I wanted to be ahead of the curve. So when the launch point was made official, and they called for mechanics to service the ships that made the jumps to the colonies and back, I lept at the opportunity.

But the push was always for more applications, with little thought to the physics. More jumps, more colonies, more resupplies, more energy efficiency to increase the frequency at which it could be used. Some people were interested in the mechanics of the phenomena to exploit it further, sure, but most seemed to stonewall when you questioned too far. How the hell had this been missed? Why is everyone pushing for applications, and no one freaking out over how much this broke our understanding of the universe? Is it possible to measure the unit of time that the jump occurred in? Was it below detection limits? If it was, what did that mean?

And so, here I was. Sipping some herbal thing, staring at Jupiter, and thinking a little too hard about reality.

Eh, at least I could fix that last part.

"'scuse me bartender?" I asked. "Can I get another one of these, with an extra shot in it?"

He silently nodded, and poured me the synthetic gin mixed with... well, I didn't question it much. Anything to help keep these ideas in check.

The carbon fiber fingertips of my left hand gripped the glass with their usual calculated precision, while the skin of my right idly tapped the bar. I sighed.

[becomingkatie]

Mattress Saga - I don't know if I shared any of this story before, so you're getting the whole thing now, even if some of it is a repeat.

Short version: we bought a mattress, it was terrible, the return process was difficult, and then we bought a new mattress.

Last fall, we decided to upgrade from a queen to a king bed based on how much better we sleep when we're in a big bed at a hotel. We were sleeping separately more often than not, or starting together and then one of us moving to the other bed because we needed space to flop to try to get comfortable. We ordered a bedframe to be delivered months later, and then bought a mattress recommended by a trusted source. She and her husband are similar in size to us and sleep in the same positions, and they loved this mattress, so I was like that sounds good.

The mattress we got was a DreamCloud Premier - one of the mattress-in-a-box ones. On their website it made it seem like it was medium-firm, more on the firm side than soft. OH MY GOODNESS it was SO SOFT. Like sinking down into it. It felt luxurious to lay on it and sink into it, but that level of support (none) was terrible overnight. My back was deeply unhappy.

Like most of the direct-to-consumer mattresses, there's some sort of guarantee and return window, and it was hurting me enough that we decided we had to return it. They don't let you initiate a return until you've slept on it for 30 days since bodies need to adjust, so I slept on it as much as I could and then have been sleeping in the guest room. When we were able to initiate the return, they were like "yep our return partner will come get the mattress from you" but then the return partner was like "we don't have reps in your area, so your options are to trash it or donate it and then prove you did that and don't still have it."

I didn't want to throw away a basically-brand-new mattress, but it's really hard to find charitable orgs that will take them. I know I could have donated it to a member of the community via facebook marketplace or similar, but I haven't had good experiences giving away free things on there (people require tons of back-and-forth and then never show up) so I asked around and found an org in Maryland that takes mattresses. That's almost an hour from us, but they do pickups for some items, including mattresses! Woohoo! Except they only come to our area every other month, and we had 30 days from initiating the return to proving we'd disposed of the mattress. Boo.

So we made plans to drive this mattress to Maryland, but then on the morning of, Ken is like "I don't think this is gonna work with my truck." And he was right, but maybe we should have thought of that sooner. We've moved full and queen mattresses on the truck before, but the king was going to be bigger than the truck bed by a lot, and we wanted to keep it as clean and nice as possible since we were donating it. New plan: we rent a small U-haul to pick up immediately and return in a couple hours.

The U-haul pickup process was its own miniature nightmare, but then we did okay at getting the mattress out of the house, down the stairs (townhouse! multiple sets of tight stairs! annoying!), and into the U-haul. Traffic was another miniature nightmare with parts of 495 closed, but we made it! And then we returned the van, and this morning I got the receipt from U-haul and it did not have any unexpected charges, which I was worried about. I sent in the appropriate forms to the return partner to prove we donated it, but it says to allow 2 business days before reaching back out. I'm anxious they'll somehow refuse our refund.

That was Saturday, and yesterday morning Ken pulled up consumer reports. They rank the mattress we had as a 2/10 on the firmness scale. That is MUCH more aligned with our experience than DreamCloud calling it something like a 7 on their website. He found us a few options he thought would be good based on our sleeping positions and we went to the store and laid on them. It is hard to get the salespeople to stop sales-ing, even when you're like "I want to lay on these three mattresses and pick one and buy it and not buy any extras. Nothing you say will alter this." The one we liked the best ended up being the cheapest of the three. We were looking for the specific ones Ken had identified, and when we found that one and started to lay on it, the guy was like, "Oh, that's a really cheap mattress. It's for students. You want one of the others." But then when he realized we liked it and were going to buy it and not one of the others, he was like, "That's a great mattress! You like it? You should buy it today!"

The checkout process was another nightmare. Sales guy was armed with a tiny tablet but not great at using it. He said our receipt would be emailed but I asked for a print version so I could look at it and make sure he'd put everything in right, since there were multiple stages during the checkout process where he made mistakes. But it looks like in the end we got the one we wanted, and it should come tomorrow. We paid for white glove delivery. Someone else can carry that up all those stairs - we've done it enough times by now.

Fingers crossed that this one feels good! I feel like it's so hard to tell by laying on it for a few minutes, but I could tell the other one was wrong immediately, so I think this should be fine. And only one more night together on the small bed!

[countzeroor]

I've been thinking long and hard about the BDS Microsoft Boycott call. The request focused on Microsoft Games, on the basis that, in theory, that's the easiest part of the Microsoft financial ecosystem for people to disconnect from in order to send a message. This includes pushing people (including parents) to uninstall and get their kids to stop playing Minecraft.

First off, the way the game industry is now, unfortunately, is that game developers or even full divisions of larger companies that underperform - or even just indy developers who self publish and underperform, just get shut down and everyone gets fired. Even if we boycott South of Midnight as part of the BDS movement and clearly communicate that message, what's more likely to happen is the company would be shut down, everyone would be fired, and a bunch of alt-right chuds would ignore the BDS boycott and call this a triumph of "Get Woke, Go Broke". They might even try to co-opt the movement as a half alliance of convenience, half desire to redirect the movement for antisemitic ends, with no actual interest in the plight of the Palestinian people.

There was an opportunity here to point people towards alternatives outside of either abandoning the software entirely, or alternative programs people who want to boycott can use to abandon something that they didn't think they could.

First, and this feels weird to say, Minecraft is something that doesn't have a lot of alternative replacements - it's a sandbox that allows children to indulge their imagination to create large scale ambitious projects that can't be replicated the same way as, for example, Lego, because they take no space in the real world, and thus you have no real world storage concerns, both in terms of space and in terms of risk of damage. The alternative to Minecraft isn't Palworld or Ark Survival Evolved. It's Roblox. And Roblox is also a bunch of dark patterns and sexual predators stacked on top of each other in a trenchcoat.

https://youtu.be/cGAXGroHZKA?si=SNfL_seTHlLTzLh4

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2024-roblox-pedophile-problem/

Now, on the other hand, Microsoft will happily charge you money to host a Minecraft server through them, and that puts money in the Azure division, the part that is directly aiding and abetting Israeli war crimes. But you don't have to go through Microsoft. You can run your own Minecraft server. Microsoft even tells you how to do it.

https://help.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/articles/360058525452-How-to-Setup-a-Minecraft-Java-Edition-Server

So, cancel your Minecraft Worlds subscription, and roll your own server. You can even set it up so it stays in your network, so your kid's friends have to come over to use it (or so it stays in the family).

Next up - Microsoft pushes OneDrive hard as part of Windows 11. They also pushed it hard on Windows 10. They insist that it's the best and biggest way, and easiest way to backup your data. It's not. There are myriad alternatives, from Google Drive, to Dropbox, to the Apple iCloud (if you use iOS devices). And, OneDrive uses Azure Cloud services to host your data

So, disable OneDrive, and go somewhere else. I've listed several alternatives above, but if you're okay with the backup being on site, you can also build a NAS (Network Attached Storage) server to store files locally. This does have the disadvantage that if something damages your house, your kinda in trouble, though using something like Backblaze on the NAS can make up for that.

Then there's the whole Microsoft 365 suite. Azure is connected to the Microsoft Office part of the business, and they've been incorporating some of those services, like Copilot, into Microsoft 365. So, again, there are alternatives.

LibreOffice has been around for years, is free, and runs locally with no cloud hooks. You can replace Outlook with Thunderbird, or the BetterBird fork.

Finally, there are the hooks to Copilot, which also runs on Azure, which Microsoft runs in the operating system. Turn that shit off.

https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/software/how-disable-copilot-in-windows-11

Also, turn off the Bing websearch hooks as well, as those also connect to Azure.

https://www.howtogeek.com/826967/how-to-disable-bing-in-the-windows-11-start-menu/

Also, if you use DuckDuckGo, that links with Bing for part of their search results, so you may want to switch back to Google or find another search engine in the interim.

[axuanmii]

clip studio paint is driving me up a wall

do you use clip studio paint on windows? are you fucking tired of running out of storage space because you download a lot of materials and brushes? are your materials files stuck on your local c drive and you don't know how to move it?

making this tutorial because for some reason all other tutorials miss what you're supposed to do after changing the directory. btw, i use windows. fuck ya macos (i don't know how to help you guys)

close all clip studio programs and go to clip studio

2. go to the settings icon in the top right corner and hover over it. click on location of materials (p)

remember the address of the current location of materials.

3. create a new folder in your alternate drive/storage space. do not add anything in it. do not copy anything in it. simply write that new folder's address in here. click save changes.

now if you're like me and downloaded a ton of stuff, it's gonna take a while to load. it's transferring your document and material folders over. let it run. when it's complete, acknowledge and accept the popup.

4. CRUCIAL: after this step, delete the old "Document" and "Material" folders from the old directory (the address you memorized) (likely located in some address that has AppData (newer versions) in it or Documents (older versions)) (if you can't find this, turn hidden folders on in file explorer, AppData is a hidden folder).

when you try to exit out of this clip studio instance, it will also remind you to remove old files before closing the application. do NOT delete the CLIPStudioCommon folder. LEAVE the DB and other folders there.

before:

after:

5. after deleting the old folders, exit out of the clip studio instance. and you're done.

now you should enjoy like, a good 10 more gb of storage. at least for me. i'm enjoying that. also i use csp latest version 1 version (like 1.13 something idk) (i'll upgrade when they give me a free upgrade).

i forget if this is available for earlier versions but i did migrate csp across devices a lot, and that was a bunch of manually copying folders, which won't work for transferring between drives like this tutorial.

by the way if you're doing something like manually copying full folders over (like the old method of transferring csp between devices), you may find that your materials/organization structure is gone. you can go through clip studio and run both "Organize Materials" and "Organize Material Folders" to restore them to that tab in clip studio paint. at least when i was fucking around trying to find out how to put my materials on a different drive, i went through several iterations of backing up and copying back over 13.4 gb of data because i'd mess up One step.

disclaimer: i have not tried downloading new materials yet. i swear to fucking god they better download in my other drive. i am sick and tired of running out of storage. imagine being an engineer debugging code and then files on your computer start to disappear because your C drive ran out of space. happened to me!!!

no i don't know what will happen if you try to put these materials folders on a flashdrive. i think that's an "external drive" and there's some warning for that in the middle of this process. i feel like there's nothing wrong with that so long as you always plug that drive in when you use clip studio products or CSP at least.

if you encounter problems in the middle of this, i don't know how to solve them. i saw some people encounter problems when transferring the data over after changing the address and i don't know where their issues were (this issue seems to be because they installed CSP on D). this seems to be an article summarizing transferring csp across devices (both cloud and the old manual way)

discussion below:

my theory is that the DB folders are like a "database" that holds addresses towards those files and therefore need to stay in the C drive for. some godawful reason. i think i tried installing csp on my D drive before, but it would automatically create a new folder in users/documents in my C drive (in older versions).

after weakly changing this directory and not giving a shit for a while (idk when updates come out. it must've been a year or a few), they changed this address to Users/AppData/somethign/blah blah

i spend too much time trying to manage storage on my computer it's not healthy. anyways kudos to treesize the program for telling me that this entire time clip studio paint fucking updated and changed my meticulous structure to place files in places where there's space to it's shit default structure.

oh and i don't think there's a solution here but it's kind of informative on clip studio's organization structure?

first wacom, now csp. sai1 didn't work with my huion either. maybe i'm forever doomed to be cucked by japanese art products. come to think of it, micron pens hate me too.

nobody ever let me touch copics.

[klarriel]

Nimrod

Chapter 10/27 - Time In A Bottle

Dean takes a swig of the half-drunk beer he’d left sitting on the table an hour ago, swallowing and turning to Cas, smiling softly.

“That’s real nice of you, Cas.”

Cas shrugs, and returns the smile.

“If you had known, I’m sure you would have done the same.”

Dean almost laughs at how highly Cas thinks of him - he’s known the kid for months and hasn’t given two thoughts to the fact that his mom is never there to welcome him home when he drops him off.

Maybe this is a moment to make up for it.

Fic Summary:

It's 1979, and the world is at the cusp of a new decade.

Dean Winchester lives in the small town of Smith Center. He keeps himself invisible, his father's words in his head a never-ending reminder of the past he'd rather forget.

When the mysterious musician Castiel Novak becomes his next-door neighbour, Castiel will see him, and save him, in more ways than one.

Dean will have to learn that people don't always leave - if you ask them to stay.

First section of the chapter under the cut!

Please check the tags on ao3

A loud bang echoes through the room.

“Dean! Open the door!”

Dean shuffles where he’s sat, pressing his back against the wall. Sam is crouched beside him, burrowing himself into his brother’s side. Dean slings a protective arm around him, pulling him in further.

“Dad, you’re drunk!” Dean yells, the heat of a fresh punch still stinging his cheek.

Another bang shakes the door frame

“I swear boy, if you don’t open this goddamn door, I’l-”

“You’ll what Dad, hit me?” He tries some defiance.

A third bang, and Dean hears a crack.

Suddenly, the door swings open. Sam cries out in terror.

John stands in the doorway, a blistering white light filling the space behind him. The light shrouds John in a dark shadow, and Dean can’t make out the expression on his fathers face. 

“Stop!” Dean cries out, moving his body so he’s kneeling in front of Sam, shrouding him from John.

The bright white light intensifies, and Dean is blinded.

Dean jolts up from his sleep, breathing heavily, sweat plastered across his brow. His arm moves on reflex, muscle memory making him reach underneath his pillow, searching for the kitchen knife he keeps under there as a defence.

The knife isn’t there - Dean panics, throwing the pillow aside. There’s nothing - fuck , John must have found it. 

As he whips his head to look around the room, primed to defend himself, his eyes adjust to the darkness. He notices the dark wood bedside table, the grimy windows, and the cold late-autumn air that is passing through the small opening in the window frame. 

He is not in his childhood house. He is in Smith Center, in his apartment. He’s okay.

He lets out a staggered breath, and the relief is bittersweet. 

He checks the clock - 4:55. 

He swallows the lump in his throat and rests back down, discarded pillow forgotten on the floor. He tries for the better part of a half hour to fall back asleep, but it’s hopeless - his nerves are shot. 

Eventually, Dean accepts his fate - he draws a slow hand across his face and sits up again. 

He needs some coffee. 

-

The mornings that Dean works at the store have gone the same way for the past few weeks. Thirty minutes before his shift starts, he’ll make his way outside, where the Novaks will be waiting for him next to the Impala. The first morning it happened, Cas and Anna had both been running late for their respective shifts, and Dean was on his way to work anyway. They repaid him that evening with dinner, and that’s how things have been since - Dean will drive them to and from work (when he can), and he gets free food at least a couple nights a week. Not a bum deal considering the fact he can now forego cooking time for sleep. 

There seems to have been this unwritten decision between all of them that Cas rides shotgun - Anna is usually midway through her makeup routine and needs to use the space in the back seat for her touch ups. Dean’s pretty sure that if his less than nutritious diet up until this point in his life doesn’t lead to him having an an ill fated heart attack, Anna’s near miss spills onto the Impala’s leather upholstery will.

This morning, however, Cas is alone. He’s turned away from Dean, and Dean watches as he seems to crouch to pick something up off the Impala’s hood, before standing again, hand raised up to eye level.

Dean joins him, and as he gets closer he makes out a small, furry blob of black and yellow perched on Cas’ finger. The crunch of Dean’s boots over gravel makes Cas turn to him, smiling lightly.

“Good morning, Dean.”

Dean stands, eyebrow raised. 

“So, you’re a bee whisperer now?”

Cas’ eyes droop in mild irritation, and he turns back to the bee.

“Bees are fascinating creatures, Dean. They’re one of our primary sources of pollination.”

“Yeah, well, this bee is gonna be the primary source of me being late. Hop in, sunshine.”

As if on cue, the bee flutters its wings and buzzes away, Cas watching its path as it disappears from view.

-

Once it’s been a couple minutes of silent driving, Dean reasons he should probably be the one to make conversation - to make up for the bee comment earlier.

“No Anna?” is what he decides to go with.

“She’s ill - just a cold, I think. All she’ll eat is chicken soup.” Cas comments absentmindedly, rummaging through his satchel as he searches for one of the items in the pile that always pools at the bottom of his bag. 

Dean offers a sympathetic look from the driver's seat of the Impala, but doesn’t say much more.

Cas finally hums happily as he finds his glasses case, dropping it back into his bag - he doesn’t always need glasses, Dean’s noticed - it only seems to be when he’s reading. Cas notices him looking over and shrugs.

“I’ve got an astigmatism”

“Gesundheit.” 

Cas groans.

Dean still hasn’t mentioned anything to Cas or Anna about the deal he made with Bobby. Of course, the sooner he gets the van fixed, the sooner he can go back to walking to work in the morning, and start cutting back on his fuel spending. Hell, at the rate he’s going, he’s gonna have to resort to his old chequing scams - but considering how badly that went down in New Mexico, it’s not a risk he’s willing to take lightly

Dean glances over to watch as Cas sits, almost stoically, hands placed on his lap like he doesn’t know what to do with them. It’s the position Cas seems to default to - Dean figures his parents sound like the type who’d be suckers for some weekend prep school shit, and it’s just become Cas’ normal to relax into the angles of a mannequin.

Cas seems to sense his gaze, and turns to meet his eyes. He furrows his brow at Dean, but his lips turn up slightly at the left side, and his shoulders seem to relax slightly. 

Cas and Anna are new in town, and Dean would be cruel to leave them on their own to navigate things while they’re getting their fresh start. 

The van can wait for now.

[hidelias]

A bend in space-time Season 1 - [Chapter 26: The Academy's last lament]

Chronological markers: this scene fits like a deleted scene from season 1, épisode 10, between 05:20 and 08:40 (at the start of Hargreeves Mansion's collapse).

Suggested soundtrack : Youn Sun Nah - Lament

---

April 1st, 2019 - 07h33 pm

It still amazes me how quickly my brain shakes off anxiety. It only took one sentence from Five for me to put the apocalypse behind me, for the stony cloak that had weighed constantly on my chest for a week to lift, for me to start making plans again for a day, a week or a month from now. I feel stupid for having believed that I could be the cause of the end of the world. And I can't help wondering if - in the end - it was ever certain that it would happen.

I have been nice to Rodrigo today, I haven't been reluctant to restock the plumbing supplies section, and I've managed to sell ten flush floats for a kindergarten renovation. Klaus hasn't called. I imagine he's spent some time practicing materializing Ben, and the thought alone makes me want to hum: this time for free, with no ghosts to bust. I sincerely hope they make it.

It was with a remarkably light heart that I boarded the bus back to Hargreeves Mansion this evening, with the aim of collecting my things and going home for good. This week has probably changed me, perhaps for the better. I'm almost thankful to Reginald Hargreeves for his decision to kick the bucket.

Now that the bus is on its way along the straight avenues of The City, I look at the crowd in the early hours of the evening. Those walking alone to their destination, those holding each other's arms, those with children in tow. Usually, one doesn't even look at them, but these lives depend on all the others, and on the generations before them. No doubt, this world is not perfect, but it exists in an unstable and beautiful state of balance, which will go on.

The bus heads north, and traffic becomes heavier, as it often does at this time of day. The red lights of the cars' taillights streak through the windows, and the driver is exasperated by the way some people are driving. For once, I'm in no hurry to push its engine with my power. I almost don't mind the traffic jams. I can take my time, because it's no longer running out.

I take out my Walkman and put the track on where I'd left it. Solsbury Hill's unusual rhythm fills my ears, never seeming to stop. Inspired lyrics, calling to embrace change. I watch as a group of people cross in a bit of a hurry, right in front of the bus, and the driver continues to rant. Transport headquarters has just radioed him a detour order, and I silence Peter Gabriel for a moment to listen to him spell out which stops will not be served.

"Argyle Public Library, Argyle Park, Rainshade Square and Seventh Avenue".

I frown. These four stops are the ones that literally circle Hargreeves Mansion. Suddenly, I turn off the tape, stuff my headphones in my pocket and step up to the driver, asking for permission to get off, even though it's not at a stop. Since traffic has come to a complete halt, he allows me to do so, and I make sure that no scooters sneak up on me while I reach the damp sidewalk. The night is pitch black with a clear sky, but there's a strange smell in the air. Something unusual. Dust, perhaps gas. All around me, people are walking massively in the opposite direction now.

Crack! I've just covered 650 ft, and I turn the corner of the Central Bank annex, hurrying along. The air is vibrating in my ears in a way that makes me squint. Further on, some of the street lighting seems to have stopped working. It doesn't matter, it's a clear night and the moon is full. I don't mind not being able to see very well anyway: in this neighborhood, I could teleport with my eyes closed.

Crack! I'm now only a few dozen feet away from the backstreet, which runs along the side of Hargreeves Mansion below the bedrooms. What worries me now is the noise, dull, jarring the ground asphalt, similar to that of a wrecking yard. The dust in the air is more thick than ever. And my heart is now pounding in my temples.

Crack! I've barely reappeared near the dumpster where Klaus has been searching so hard, I freeze and step back by reflex, my eyes wide. My gaze drifts up the fire safety staircase, which shakes as if it's about to fall off. The electricity is still working but shivering: Klaus's room is lit, and Luther's too. I don't know what's going on beyond the facade, but from the way the dust is rising, I fear that part of the other side of the house has collapsed. My breath is short, my legs trembling, my thoughts staggering.

I don't have time to think: not about the apocalypse being called off, nor about the relief I'd felt, which is now painfully gone. I ache to see these cracks, as if I wanted to prevent them from opening onto this building to which I shouldn't be particularly attached. But I am, or rather to those for whom and by whom it exists. The bathroom light flickers, and its ceiling seems to bend as it tears at my heart. Did they all get out? Fuck, is Klaus still in there? A twitch of my eyebrows is all it takes to make me intangible. Now no matter the chaos, no matter the stone, glass, metal and wood.

Crack! In the blink of an eye, I'm standing at the door of Klaus's room, which, like the whole corridor, is empty. On the walls, the writings he left crumble, one after the other, on his mattress, on the carpet, on the tumbled hookah. His words disappear, all the thoughts he once exteriorized there: "Years gone by without a word, but now in ink that's soon to smudge", "All must be ground to dust to start anew". And precisely, the dust, takes them away, away, as I step back. The beaded curtain by the door has just fallen near the bookcase, and I step out into the corridor, abandoning my belongings to the chaos of magazines and darts that room 33 has become.

Crack! I reappear in the trophy gallery. For a reason I don't comprehend, the corridor from which I've just come explodes, room after room. A piece of the ceiling breaks off, and my arms reflexively protect my head, even though I can't feel it. It goes right through me, crashes to the floor, literally through my feet, and I look around me, not comprehending what I'm really looking at.

I can't believe I had this conversation with Pogo right here, a few days ago. I can almost see his posture in that armchair again, and his aching back beneath his incomprehensibly British manners. Eight days spent here come back to me, and I stand still, my gaze searching everywhere for a trace of anyone who might have stayed.

Suddenly, the glass display cases explode as if by a high-pitched sound. My hands reflexively protect my face again even if the broken glass can't hurt me, but through the opacity of the air, I catch a glimpse of Klaus at the end of the gallery, running off with Diego, with Ben, towards a window and the frail metal staircase that descends into one of the brick alleyways that once separated the composite building.

Crack! Trying to reach them, I reappear in the middle of the dust of the Grand Staircase main landing, which seems to have only a few moments left before collapsing. Disoriented, I don't even know which way to turn. I'll only be able to teleport once more, maybe twice, as I've crossed long distances already. A large section of the gallery floor collapses nearby, and I shudder, as I see the night sky through what was once the Moorish-style skylight, which I have so often judged out of place. I must at least reach the lower level. I try to focus…

Crack! All around me, the entrance hall is rumbling now. On the floor, the chandelier is drowning in a chaos of rubble. For a long moment, I'm speechless. I've always thought of Hargreeves Mansion as a form of creature, growing, decade after decade, like a sprawling organism engulfing the neighborhood. A being of brick and gilt, devoted to its founder, with a mission to both abuse and protect. The only place that - against all odds - Klaus had ever called home. And before my eyes, this monster is dying in its turn, gaping cracks gnawing at the vertical colonnades in a senseless thunder.

Upstairs, the rest of the gallery crumbles, and with it the entire section of wall it supported. Hargreeves Mansion seems to weep all its tears of brick, metal, glass, trophy copper. Sinking down. On and on. But I freeze, because I've just sensed something more than just the sound of this meltdown. The air, all around… has just changed.

A vibration, like the one I'd already felt in the distance when I was on my way down the street, without really paying attention. But now I perceive it clearly, powerfully, closely: a terrible sound wave, outside the audible spectrum, with a power that makes energy rumble everywhere. In every single brick, in every single girder, and possibly in the flesh for anyone who isn't intangible. I shudder, my eyes locked on the place from which these variations spread, and then…

I see him.

He's no taller than me. Viktor, in his blue shirt. I become acutely aware of this as he turns at the door of the reception room, collapsing behind him. The sofas, the display cabinets, everything crumbles to dust. Our eyes meet, but I don't know if he can see me, even though I'm clearly visible. A beam passes right through me, and I don't even react. I just stand there, in the middle of the chaos of the collapse that doesn't affect me, looking into his white eyes that don't even blink anymore. If his face had once been gentle, sensitive and sad, it now expresses nothing but cold, disconnected indifference. And now I sense them around him, those sound waves, as he makes them vibrate like the living tuning fork he now seems to be.

I get it, right now. I understand that Viktor has always had this power, possibly stifled by Reginald Hargreeves whose exuberant madness is now crumbling everywhere. A power linked to the material waves of sound, themselves capable of mobilizing energy in the same way I bend space-time secondarily. An immense power, far beyond his violin. A power he never had the chance to learn how to curb, just like his emotions, stifled by anxiolytics. Five had told me that the issue had never been the kind of powers we had, but the extent to which we were able to control them. To ~control ourselves~, actually. And on that matter, Reginald Hargreeves literally abandoned Viktor after adopting him.

I open my eyes wider, as the entire living room has just given way to a pile of bricks, wood and glass, the immense sky above spreading moonlight over the marble that should never have seen the wind seep in.

Harold Jenkins is dead. I don't know what he did to him, I don't know how he manipulated him, but I can see what this trauma has awakened. That, and possibly the way they all treated him: his siblings, no doubt in a way even worse than they treated Klaus. I've felt it at times this week, and it pains me to have witnessed it. I've seen his vulnerability, I've seen him take medication, I've seen him smile sweetly. But beneath his shy, trembling demeanor, Viktor was probably just ready to implode.

I don't believe he deliberately intends to do any harm: he's all instinct now, and what's going on around him is just the unfiltered expression of his emotions. He now strides across the hall without looking at me, with a slow, detached step, as if he were simply going out to catch his cab, like so many times in the past. Except that all around us, everything is falling into a chaos of rubble and shards of glass, in the terrible ripple he creates. He disappears in the direction of the main door, once adorned with stained-glass umbrellas, blown up, while the outside and inside merge under an impassive Moon.

I turn around: the steps of the Grand Staircase are now tumbling down, one after another, like a terrible domino game reminding me that we'll never climb them again. Above my head, all that remains of the Hargreeves Mansion floors are collapsing. Downwards, towards me. And I understand something else: what Five meant when he said that my power would allow me "to stay after the end", even if everything was swept away. Omega could probably stand there, intangible, motionless and sorrowful, letting the chaos or even an apocalypse unleash, just waiting for it all to be over. To open the eyes again in the midst of the steaming ruins: alone after the end, just as Five had been.

But I don't want to. I can't, viscerally, and I'm desperate to get out of here. All around me is dust, and I can't make out the sky or the edges of the art-deco debris that is falling on me and burying me inexorably. Crack! I teleport one last time, towards the only thing I can still distinguish: Ben's spectral energy, somewhere beyond the chaos, possibly outside. Unfortunately I don't go far enough, I guess, because once again I encounter nothing but incoherent rubble, all around, on top, underneath, and I crouch where I am, just clutching my knees as I wait for the blocks and dust to settle.

The resounding thunder is not that of the sky. It's the Academy's last lament, in the demise of what had once stood there with a form of oppressive majesty. Gradually, the blocks of brick and cement, the shards of glass, Klaus's writings, the plumbing pipes, the woodwork, Five's equations and the smashed luxurious furniture… everything seems to find a new place, without order, but back in stillness. I stand there, my eyes open to the wreckage across and around me, hearing familiar voices, just beyond. Diego. Luther. Five?

Trembling, I stand up, I move forward, I step out of the rubble that hasn't scratched me, and I become material again while letting the wholeness of this devastation hit my eyes. There's nothing left, and all around the rest of The City continues to stand, legitimately unmoved and untouched. I remain breathless, speechless. Sounds of sirens and helicopters overhead fill the sound space, and soon the rushing of footsteps.

"Shit, Rin, you were in there…"

Klaus's voice has just brought me back to reality, and he's already pulling me by the arm, while helicopters flash their spotlights over the smoking rubble of Hargreeves Mansion. I put my hand over my eyes, and see the remains of the "Kids' Lounge's" table, the red billiard, the coffee machine. The shards of crockery, on the floor, bearing umbrella fragments. And he pulls me away again, as I struggle to take my eyes off what - he - has already left behind.

" Dammit, hurry up!"

And then, by instinct, I start running too. Running, even if I don't know to what.

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Notes:

I knew it would be a sad scene to write, and an important one at the same time. Writing the first part, where Rin was still in a positive mindset, but knowing where her bus was going, was particularly tough. Especially the way she gradually realizes that something abnormal is going on.

This chapter is a farewell to Hargreeves Mansion, in this version anyway, and I wanted to bring it to you from the inside. Like Hermes, this big building was for me a character in its own right, now gone with Grace, with Pogo, and I feel a kind of sadness about that, because I too felt as much resentment as affection for it, in the end.

Rin understood a lot of things in the rubble: about Viktor, about herself. Now everything is unfolding at a rapid pace: it's almost strange for me to have come this far.

Any comment will make my day! ♡

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A bend in space-time, the masterlist :

- Season 1 (complete): Table of contents - Season 2 (complete): Table of contents - Season 3 (complete): Table of contents - Season 4 (in progress) : Table of content

[chaletnz]

Arrival to Panama City

I had to wake up at 3am to get my Uber to the Bogotá airport on the other side of the city, despite being so early I was happy to leave before the traffic started for the day as it would’ve taken much longer than the 45 minute drive. I talked my way into getting my bag checked for free and then spent the last of my Colombian pesos in the airport buying some coffee and souvenirs. I was seated in an aisle seat but when I boarded of course someone else was already in it and expected me to squeeze past them to their window seat. I don’t understand that selfish mentality, everyone has to check in - can’t you just ask to be allocated an aisle seat then instead of taking someone else’s seat and expecting them to move when you’re actually on the plane already. Once I landed in Panama I’d been delivered to terminal 1 but my bag had been sent to terminal 2 and if I hadn’t been paying attention to the signs I would’ve cleared immigration and then been unable to get back to pick it up! The taxi into the city was $30 which felt very expensive after how cheap everything was in Colombia, and then he also dropped me off at the top of the very steep street so I still had to walk down to the hostel! The drive had been nice though, lush green on both sides of the road scattered with palm trees. I waited for 3 guys to check in for their hostel dorm room at 10am - no problem for them. But for me, I was given the cold shoulder for even asking despite paying 4x what they were for my private room. I got changed into something lighter and packed a day bag to go out exploring for a while. I started at Sisu Coffee Studio for a cappuccino and a grilled cheese which was very nice but American prices! After cooling down and refreshing, I walked around the old town area and found a cool art shop where I bought a $5 magnet. I’d browsed a lot of shops on the way and even the shitty magnets were only $3 if you buy 5-10 of them! Very overpriced country so far it seemed… I took a break in the shade with a little cat lying not he ground that was happy to receive some pats and scratches. A Japanese tour group walked past exclaiming “kawaiii ne!” when they saw the cat. After my little break I walked to the main square trying to keep in the shade, and stopping in at more shops along the way to cool down. I treated myself to a cold bottle of water and pack of maduritos at the shop beside the hostel and my room was ready when I was back so I could fire up the air conditioning and lie down for a bit as I was feeling quite tired and sick from the heat. After a couple hours I figured I should get some food now rather than wake up starving in the middle of the night and decided on the Turkish place next door for a shawarma. I went down to the tour desk and booked my space on the Panama Canal tour for tomorrow and then headed out for dinner. Surprisingly it was much cooler now the sun had gone down so it was almost pleasant to be walking around and I did a 15-20 minute loop around to get a look at the skyscraper section of Panama City in the distance. I picked up a falafel shawarma, fries, and baklava and took it back to the room as I still wasn’t feeling very well. Luckily the food helped me feel a bit better but I was still so exhausted from the early morning and dramatic change in climate from Bogotá to Panama that I fell asleep around 8pm!