#I will put up with SO MUCH BULLSHIT to be able to do Spreadsheets for Money

[thesnacken]

Gnawing and biting and tearing and.crying and shitting I fuckinf hate looking for jobs its soncoul crushinggggggggg

[wannab-urs]

The Spreadsheet Digest - Fic Recs | Vol. 9

Hi friends!! This week I read several series that had like... a lot of parts... including ones I've previously recced but just now finished (Looking at you Lie To Me by @iamskyereads). I also went to Pride and basically read nothing from Saturday to Monday. That being said, I'm pretty proud of the amount of fics I was able to scrounge up for y'all this week, and I think we have a pretty good selection.

The Spreadsheet can be found here and you're always welcome to tag me in a fic or send it to my askbox if you want me to read it (I'll read any Pedro boy!).

Recs below the Pedro:

Puppet - an Ezra one shot by @jksprincess10

I love these fics that are like "What if we went to extreme lengths to shut Ezra the fuck up," and I especially love how this one ends. Also the side effect bit made me giggle. You're a genius, Nad <3

Hot and Heavy - a Joel series by @tieronecrush

I think I established recently that I'm a sucker for the nanny trope. We also know I love angst. So here we have one of those time bomb relationships where we know it's gonna end, not once, but twice. Excellent angst/tention building. Then we also have super fucking sexy delicious smut, Joel being a fucking adorable father, reader being like actually awesome... and I lowkey think readers mom is on it but that's just me. OH and "Mariposa" are you KIDDING ME?! perfect.

Run to You - a Marcus Pike series by @foli-vora

Talk about angst... and it's fucking PERFECT. The little flashback scenes and then the sharp cut to such a painful present situation UGH. The world building is excellent. The characterization is so fucking good bc of COURSE Marcus would fall in love on an op of fucking course he would. Marcus "Marry Me" Pike over here. Fucking idiot. I love him. I can't wait to see how this story progresses. It is so. fucking. good.

Pretend Alleyways - a Dieter/Marcus Moreno series by @radiowallet

Would I ever have thought about pairing up Marcus Moreno and Dieter Bravo? No. Am I eternally grateful someone put my two softboys together? YES. They are so perfect together. So sweet and precious. They need each other fr. This made me all warm and fuzzy inside and also horny obviously.

Like Water in Your Hands - a Joel one shot by @beskarandblasters (Part of the Punisher anthology)

I. Love. This. So. Fucking. Much. Top tier. The smut? The plot? The characterization? Queen shit.

Don't Be Scared - a Din one shot by @beskarandblasters

Din being scared/nervous omg. So cute and sexy. I love him so much UGH. Looking forward to the Din revival fr

the lakes - a Joel one shot by @tieronecrush (Part of the folklore anthology)

This is literally one of my greatest non-smutty fantasies with Joel. Just telling him how much he means to me and promising to be there for him and convincing him to let himself be happy and comfortable. I wanna hug that man so bad AGH. This was beautiful Sam <3

Summer Lovin' - a Joel one shot by @atinylittlepain

I don't know why I've been reading so much asshole!Joel lately.... but I'm loving it. I love all the little details in this. I was genuinely pissed the fuck off at Joel. I have more sympathy for the ice cream than that fucking idiot. Sarah, his ex, and reader all deserve so much better than that dipshit UGH

Unusual Situation - a Din/Ezra one shot by @absurdthirst

Not only am I back on my Din/Reader/Ezra bullshit AND my M/M/F bullshit in general, but this is the fic that caused it. These two space idiots were meant to be together, I am 100% certain. The way Ezra manages to gently reassure Din that reader wants him while they're both balls deep in various holes....??? How do you do it. How do you make something tender and sweet while also being complete and utter filth. I am fascinated.

Of Gorgons and Gardens - a Din/Ezra series by @concussed-to-pieces

Following the absurdthirst story, I found this one.... and boy howdy. I am a SLUT for sex pollen fics, so obviously that was excellent. I also love how it was like "oh the plant makes men want to fuck women" but hinted that neither of them would be particularly upset about fucking each other either. Mando was like... i don't give a fuck, dude. And then it went from absurdly smutty (but also kinda sweet) in part one, to just like tender and sweet in part two. Like yeah yeah horrible harrowing near death experience yada yada... the STUBBLE SCENE??? The PAIN KINK?? the TOUCHING?? I just about died. And then in part three we get my top all time kink PLUS Din and Ezra and Reader just being so sweet it hurts a little. I am feral for these boys UGH. AND AND the nickname being bird in mando'a was so clever??

Late July - a Jack (Whiskey) series by @concussed-to-pieces

So I read the Din/Ezra thing and obviously had to peruse the masterlist. I love my dear appalachian cowboy. I really really liked the whole premise of this story and the follow ups. The smut is fucking masterful but also like hello, plot??? Truly incredible. I really liked seeing frat-boy Jack and also seeing him work through his trauma and shit. But also Jack tied to a chair need I say more?

Defanged - a Din one shot by @concussed-to-pieces

Alright so this one is the same sex pollen from OGaG but it doesn't hurt which is super dope. Hey Alexa play "In Love with a Stripper" but it's Din in love with a sex worker just bc he put his dick in her. I fuckin love this.

hunt and peck - a Javi P one shot by @toxicanonymity

You really said lets take this slut and make him even hornier and I LOVE IT.

----------oldies but goodies-----------

soft!dom joel - a Joel a series by @joelscruff

Letterman Jacket - a Javi P series by @fuckyeahdindjarin

I want you to stay - a Dieter one shot by @ezrasbirdie

Below the Line - a Dieter series by @prolix-yuy

Midnight Rider a Jack (Whiskey) one shot by jazzelsaur (ao3)

Rare - a Joel a one shot by @swiftispunk

One Hundred and Fifty Seven - a Din one shot by @theidiotwhowritesthings

Heatwaves - a Javi P two shot by @mishasminion360

In the Dark - an Ezra series by @frannyzooey (favorite ez ever maybe)

Lover of mine - a Dieter one shot by @psychedelic-ink

Morning - a Dieter series by @write-and-buried

--------------my recents-------------

In the next one - based on Lucy Dacus' (boygenius) song We're in Love and a standalone addition to my loose fit Dieter series A Ghost of You - focuses on Dieter's belief that he's been with you in every single past life and lost you in each of them + him coming to terms with his belief that he'll lose you in this one too.

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

Happy Reading

[darkcircles4lyfe]

Why Tiger is kind of a big deal, actually

Folks, I have a headache. I just spent the better part of my day doing research, and having even less fun than I expected while doing it. However, coming out the other end of it, I can say this: Tiger, in terms of representation of trans male characters in manga and anime, is practically an anomaly. And we should all be more aware of the weight that carries, not just because it shows how little representation we have, but also because maybe this says something about Horikoshi. Before I get into that, though, some backstory. 

Originally, I wanted to do this as quantitatively as possible, show you how much representation there is, where and when and who it comes from, regardless of how subjectively good or bad it is. Basically all I wanted to say was, “look, there isn't much.” But even I didn’t realize just how bad and messy things were going to turn out to be. I’m not going to show you my spreadsheet because it’s a fucking dumpster fire. For starters, there are a lot more instances of trans female characters, some that could be described as non-binary, genderfluid, or otherwise ambiguous, and very few trans male characters. I ended up with a list of about 20 alleged trans male characters, spanning roughly 40 years of Japanese media. (Not exhaustive, especially because not everything is available in English) Of those, some turned out to be inexplicit/vague/unclear, some were tragic, some were demeaning, some were very minor characters, and some belonged to creators and/or stories with exceptionally problematic aspects. Again I’m not gonna show you my spreadsheet because it got messy and subjective and honestly I was so frustrated I kinda lost my patience. In the end, only one survived as a manga I will definitely be seeking out for substantial, gratifying, therapeutic representation of someone like me. That one manga is Boys Run the Riot, by the way. I wish I could say more about it here, but I haven’t read it yet! Anyway, a few more did survived this filtering process excluding the fact that they’re minor characters, and Tiger was one of them. I want to reiterate how utterly abysmally tiny this pool of characters is. But I swear I still want to have some fun with this post, so let’s talk about Tiger, aka Chatora Yawara.

And what’s more fun than calling out our good buddy Mr. CC on his translating bullshit! Yeah! This all started when I was looking back at ch 72 and I realized something didn’t make sense:

Like, what does this even mean? “Genre?” “Wrong??” I can’t even understand what this statement is referring to exactly, just that it sounds bad. Seems very much like something got lost in translation. I unfortunately can’t really do the work myself, especially without access to the original Japanese, but sometimes I like to try to triangulate with multiple translations put together. Btw though, if you have access to the Japanese versions and can/want to translate, please do reach out to me to either confirm or deny all this. For now, here is a side by side comparison of officials (blue) vs. available fanscans (yellow) for Tiger’s introduction:

It’s subtle, but the officials get things a little more muddled. The most glaring difference is that CC has Aizawa refer to the whole hero team as “these ladies,” which sounds very bad! Idk if the original Japanese has any gendered language to justify translating it to “ladies,” but I’m guessing probably not. My interpretation of what went wrong here is that CC thought Horikoshi wanted to make Tiger being trans part of the joke, playing it for shock value, when really what was meant by “wrong gender” was more like “the only Pussycat who isn’t a woman,” and not “wrong” as in “mutilated woman who thinks she’s a man” (yes, transphobes call us that). After all, how would Deku be able to tell Tiger is trans and be shocked about it anyway? The other comments make a lot more sense with the added translator note in the fanscan as well, letting us know that the whole bit is a reference to Billy Blanks. Hence the “wrong genre.” Basically, all put together, the scene is actually just a joke about Tiger being a hard-ass buff dude instead of a cute, fun little kitty. So yeah, this is all fine. Cannot stress enough how refreshing that is after the research hell I went through today. 

Now let me get into what takes Tiger from okay to great in terms of representation. I want to underline the seemingly tiny detail that he is 31 years old and has been a part of his team for 12 years, so since they were 19. That likely means they were all friends in high school and had already been planning to work together for years. Perhaps their friendship even dates back before Tiger came out and started transitioning. I mean, imagine young Yawara happily befriending a group of girls (same bro, same) but being uneasy about the fact that the hero agency Ryuko is dreaming of starting is going to have them all themed as catgirls. Like, if he comes out, will he ruin that dream? But no, he cares enough about them and they care enough about him that it makes no difference whatsoever, and he even has fun going along with the theme too. Seriously, the fact that he has a gender-nonconforming style of hero costume is some next level shit. 

The other thing that makes him great is he’s just, there. Doing his thing. No one questions him, acts like he’s a fraud, scandalizes or misgenders him. His being trans at all is only mentioned in a quick note next to his sketch page, which is fine by me tbh. Better that than some dramatic reveal. He also doesn’t have any stereotypical traits. I mean, I guess some trans men being gym rats is kind of a stereotype, but not a bad one? It’s more of an actual thing that we can joke about. A negative portrayal I would expect might emphasize a trans man’s “womanly” body, for example, simultaneously fetishizing and mocking it. If anything the fact that Tiger’s body is very masculine suggests he was designed by someone who knows how medical transition works, and the fact that he happily participates in gender-nonconformity suggests he was designed by someone who understands the complexity and diversity of gender presentation. He’s just ya know, casually and quietly one of the most genuine representations of a trans man in manga ever.

Horikoshi does seem to have a way of making even the most minor characters feel real and complex. But with this there’s more to it than that. Trans men fly under the radar constantly. People don’t know shit about us. They forget we even exist. No cishet man who decides on a whim to make up a random trans male character magically gets it right. So lemme just point at Tiger with every ounce of emphasis I can possibly cram into my finger, and look you in the eye with the war-hardened stare of someone who has seen just about goddamn everything: This. Is. Significant. In a world where trans men get next to zero representation, let alone decent representation, this isn’t just good, it’s suspiciously good. Like Horikoshi Knows Things type of good. I hate to go here, but I don’t know how else to articulate this... like, in my spreadsheet elimination, the only examples that fared as well or better than Tiger were written by actual queer people and/or come from stories with more major queer characters. At the very least this means that for a cishet man, Horikoshi is way more knowledgable of lqbtq+ issues than average, and at most…well, you know what I’m getting at. I will also go ahead and say that a character like Tiger could very well be a sign of Horikoshi testing the waters for other more central queer characters in the future, getting a read on his audience, editors, publisher, etc. and how they react to it.

Regardless, I’m writing this post not to speculate, but because I want y’all to be armed with the confidence to say Horikoshi is on your side, and not the side of the ignorant dudes who think bnha is their personal plaything. I’m tired of those people pissing all over this manga like it’s their turf. You know, the kind of people who tell you bnha is a shounen, which means it’s “for boys,” straight, cisgender boys, and you don’t belong here so you should shut up or go read something else. Please take this post as a reminder that you’re not delusional, you do belong here, and you're in good hands with Horikoshi, whether you’re queer yourself or just enjoy a good queer ship/headcanon. 

Anyway have a nice rest of your Pride Month everybody <3

^also enjoy this little exchange with class A, it’s very cute

[absolutebl]

Senpai noticed me 🙀😄 Thanks for following me!

I love your blog! You make so many interesting and informative Posts! Thanks to you I try to notice more details while watching BL. And my BL-to-watch-list is now endless xD

When did you start watching/consuming BL material? You seem to know every BL that exists, so I was wondering how long it took you to get to this point.

Aw, thank you for the ask, kohai! (or maybe nong?)

How Long Have I been Watching BL?

Well, I read yaoi back in the late 90s early 00s so that was kinda my start. It's one of the reasons I know a lot about the source tropes in particular. I pretty much read any yaoi I could get ahold of in translation.

But back when the first live action yaois (proto BLs) were coming out of Japan in 2005+ they were impossible to get hold of, especially with subs. Also I got slightly distracted by some pesky higher education bullshit.

So I kinda drifted into early American indie queer cinema for a while.

I started becoming aware of BL as a thing around late 2017, but I only watched what I could easily find with subs on YouTube. So like BL cuts of Love Sick and Puppy Honey and the Kiss series. Lots of bootlegs and bad subs and FMVs. Love By Chance was my first real addiction.

Then I got really sick late 2019 (before C19) and bored out of my skull, discovered UWMA, and started to dive into it in a slightly more obsessive fan way.

Then with lockdown and the great quar suddenly I had a ton of time on my hands. (About half my job is travel so not traveling, it turns out, frees up a ton of time. Also I don't really have a life.)

I went deep into Thai BL and then Taiwanese BL. Rediscovered that Tumblr was the place to talk about it. Resurrected, and renamed this old blog. Got on MDL, and figured out Daily Motion, Drama Cool, and Viki. And ta da!

About midway through our first major lockdown I decided I should be organized about the whole thing and spent two days putting together this elaborate tracking spreadsheet, because I can't just enjoy anything. I HAVE TO ORGANIZE IT.

That, of course, meant I should watch everything I could (to fill in the spreadsheet), and chronicle it ALL.

Specifically I got intersted in the early stuff out of Japan and China that bridges yaoi manga and BL. I'm one of the few that bothers with these because they are deeply problematic but I did discover some gems like Seven Days and Just Friends?

I'm currently at 266 shows/movies/microfilms.

There's still quite a bit (mostly early Japanese and Taiwanese, and Korean B-plots, and GL) that I can't for the life of me get ahold of subbed (probably about 75 or so).

I stopped following Pinoy, Chinese, and Vietnamese stuff carefully, but I do try to keep up with the other four BL producers (Thailand, Korean, Japan, and Taiwan). Thailand doesn't make that easy these days.

But BL and Kdramas are all I watch for entertainment now. I don't watch any Western media at all anymore. Try to stay away from most social media and don't read as much as I once did.

Once I resume regular travel next year I'm not sure if I'll be able to keep up this pace, but I can manage it through the end of the year.

Then I get to pretend my 2020-2021 was well spent. I want all my memories of this time in my life to be BL.

[deobienthusiast]

office love

• pairing: lee jaehyun (the boyz) x reader

• word count: 1,684 words

• genre: fluffy, slight humor

• warnings: slightly suggestive

• notes: imagine working in an office with the boyz tho👀

requested: yes | no by @q-ianna

You always told yourself that you would never be one of those 9-5 office workers that sat in a cubicle all day long. You wanted to travel and see the world. Little did you know, that to travel the world, you needed to be seated in that cubicle. For four years, you have been working in the same cubicle with the same 12 co-workers, one of whom stood out to you more than the rest.

Lee Hyunjae was quite the character. With such an upbeat personality, he was the life of the office. Hyunjae was the first person you met when you started working at the office. He liked to be the center of attention. Not that you minded. Hyunjae made you feel so welcome when you first started to work here. He talked you through everything, would partner up with you for certain jobs, and even take you out for lunch or dinner, depending on how late the day became. You two built up quite the friendship, and along the way you developed feelings.

According to your other coworkers, Hyunjae felt the same way. You never believed them, however, the now constant flirting and small sexual innuendos that had made their way into your daily conversations with Hyunjae made you question whether he did feel the same way or not. Hyunjae was naturally a flirt, but he only just started to flirt with you. Maybe he was interested.

“Hello,” Juyeon, your coworker, said as he waved his hand in front of your face. “Are you even listening to me?”

You shook your head, snapping back into reality as you looked at the dark-haired boy. “I’m sorry, Juyeon. Did you say something?”

Juyeon huffed before following where your gaze was currently focused. He looked back at you and smirked. You raised an eyebrow at him before speaking.

“What?” You asked him.

He chuckled. “You know what? You were checking out Hyunjae.”

You rolled your eyes. “No I wasn’t.”

Juyeon scoffed. “Yeah sure.”

You turned back around in your chair so your back was to him before hearing someone speak.

“You know,” You heard a soft voice exclaim. “ You could just tell Hyunjae you like him. Rather than ogle him like a horny schoolgirl.”

Your eyes widened as you looked up at the top of your cubicle and made eye contact with Jacob. Jacob was a more soft-spoken worker. He wasn’t overly loud or insanely crazy, though he did have some spurts of wild in him every now and then.

“Will you shut the hell up!” You stated, making both Juyeon and Jacob laugh.

You went to focus back on your computer before hearing Juyeon speak.

“You know he feels the same way,” He started.

“Bullshit.” You countered, keeping your eyes on your computer screen.

Juyeon eyed you for a moment before giving a look to Jacob who disappeared back behind the walls of your cubicle. You worked diligently and quietly, unbothered by Sunwoo and Eric’s daily shenanigans before feeling a tap on your shoulder.

“I’m hungry. You want to go get some lunch with me?” Hyunjae asked.

You exited out of the spreadsheet you were working on as you turned around in your chair, a smile growing on your face when you made eye contact with Hyunjae.

“Yeah,” You stood you, grabbing your coat. “Let’s go.”

Hyunjae smiled at you as he waited for you to gather your things. You threw a goodbye to Juyeon and Jacob as you walked out the door, not being able to miss the snide ‘be safe’ that came from Juyeon which you knew for a fact had a double meaning.

You and Hyunjae decided on a little café just a couple of blocks from the office as you both got comfortable and ordered.

“So, how's the workload today?” Hyunjae asked.

You looked at him with a raised brow as you smirked. “You took me out to lunch to talk about work?”

Hyunjae chuckled, smiling. “Okay you caught me. How was your date last week? I’ve been meaning to ask.”

You nodded with a tight smile. “It was good.”

He snorted. “And by good, you mean terrible?”

You let out a laugh, making Hyunjae grin. “You can read me so well. He was insanely self absorbed. All he did was talk about himself. I’m never letting Changmin set me up with one of his college buddies again.”

Hyunjae took a sip of his drink as he nodded. “Changmin isn’t too fond of that guy anyway.”

You almost choked on your coffee. “Thanks for telling me that now.”

Hyunjae laughed. “You could always avoid getting set up on blind dates if you just find the right guy.”

“And is that your way of saying it should be you?” You looked up at him over the lid of your coffee cup, catching his strong gaze.

“Maybe it is.” Hyunjae said.

Your breath hitched in your throat at his tone. It was a questionable one as you couldn’t tell whether he was being a tease or being serious. Part of you hoped he was serious. You both ate and drank your coffees in silence before throwing away your trash. You wrapped yourself back in your coat before feeling Hyunjae grip your hand.

“Come on you. You’re taking too long.” He said with a teasing smile as he pulled on your hand.

Without realizing it, you two had managed to make it back inside the office hand in hand as Hyunjae walked you to your cubicle. You both were laughing at something Hyunjae had said about Sunwoo as you say in your chair. Hyunjae peeled off his jacket as he made his way over to his cubicle.

You logged into your computer before hearing someone clear their throat. You looked up and met the warm eyes of Jacob as he smiled.

“Someone had fun at lunch.” Jacob said with a grin.

You looked at him. “And what are you implying?”

He shrugged as he held his head up over the cubicle wall to look down at you.

“Something obviously happened.” You heard Juyeon counter behind you.

“Says who?” You said without turning around.

“Says the hand holding when you two walked through the door.” Jacob said before falling back into his seat when he saw your boss come out of his office.

You kept yourself busy as he walked around each cubicle, looking over the work. He studied Hyunjae for longer than usual as he tapped his shoulder before heading back to his office. You heard Hyunjae sigh as you watched him make his way to your boss’ office. The office stayed quiet, trying to listen in on the conversation before the door swung open. It was closed gently as you all watched Hyunjae stand outside the door. He took a deep breath before loosening his tie and heading for the break room.

You turned yourself around, trying hard to concentrate on the spreadsheets on your screen before giving into the nagging temptation to go check on him. Scooting back your chair, you quickly made your way to the break room. As you approached, you saw through the blinds, Hyunjae with his head in his hands.

You knocked on the door, closing it behind you as you entered. “Are you okay, Jae?”

Hyunjae lifted his head to look at you and smiled. “My consumer report came back. It’s not looking too good.”

You frowned, sitting down next to him. “That can’t be right. You’re our best salesman.”

He shook his head. “I guess I’ve been a little distracted this quarter.”

It was your turn to laugh as you watched him stand up and grab yet another cup of coffee. You watched him add an unreasonable amount of sugar that was likely to put him on the ground as he mixed it. He stared at the sugar coffee as you stood up, reaching for the glass.

“Okay, first. Don’t drink this,” You told him, pulling the glass away from him. “Second of all, what could possibly have you so distracted that you went from top of the sales to bottom of the sales faster than Jacob goes through the cereal?”

Hyunjae smiled before looking back at you. It was another look you weren’t used to, it was almost an admirable look.

“You,” He whispered quietly, hoping you wouldn’t hear him.

You cocked your head. “What?”

He repeated it, louder this time. “You. You’re distracting me.”

You felt yourself get slightly offended. “What do you mean I’m distracting you?”

Hyunjae could tell by your tone that you didn’t understand what he was saying as he decided to take matters into his own hands. He grabbed your hand, pulling you into him as he kissed you. You kept your arms on his chest, putting tension on your palms, almost as if you were trying to push him off before bringing them up to wrap around his neck. Hyunjae pulled away first, leaning his forehead on yours as he spoke through heavy breathing.

“You know, I would be good for you. I know so much about you. Too much if I may add,” You hit his chest as he continued with a laugh. “But I know for damn sure, I can treat you a hell of a lot better than anyone that those idiots out there try to set you up with.”

You grinned at him. “Could you now?”

He nodded as he leaned by your ear, nibbling on the lobe before whispering. “And I am confident that I could touch you better as well.”

You bit your lip to stifle your laughter as Hyunjae tightened his grip on you.

“Well then, I guess we’ll need to test that before I think about giving you a chance on a first date.” You said, feeling yourself being moved forward as you heard the break room door lock.

You giggled as Hyunjae closed the blinds. “Just try and keep the noise level down.”

You kissed him again as he lifted you on top of the small table. “Whatever, Hyunjae!”

Juyeon and Jacob would not let you live this down.

[themanwhowouldbefruit]

Oh my god, feel free to answer this or not, but, I just played your fic ? game ? And I am astounded? It's such a cool idea and so much could be expanded upon it in terms of interactive story telling. Would you consider making a tutorial or explaining how you did it? And also may I ask, why is it only for today? Is it because of the transnatural week ending or because of some AO3 limit? Sorry for the novel length ask, but I'm losing my mind over how cool your fic is!!!!!!!! <3

Hey! The game is up forever (hopefully), sorry for the confusion!!! I have no plans to take it down, the only urgency was getting it posted in time for transnaturalweek day 7. If it does for some unseen reason go down or the images do down just let me know! I have contingencies😇😇😇😇🔪

Yes I do want to make a tutorial at some point, it’s just kinda hard because I learned how to do the css in exactly one week, which was actually last week, and so like, in some ways I myself don’t fully understand how it works? It’s all a blur.

Basically the game is all workskin based, which is how ao3 lets you add css styling to your fics. css is basically this funky little language that says hey lets do a little container thingy here, we’re going to control everything inside this container, we’re gonna give it a name so we can summon it, hey let’s make it red, then let’s put a picture inside of it, so we can summon this red background box with picture inside whenever we want to see it. Um so basically you go to workskin editor and you write out the recipe for the container thingy with the dimensions, properties, ect. (In this case I made a container for each outfit variation that used each png as a background image)(so like 389) Then in the actual fic typing window, you have to summon the box like <div class="x0000"> everything else you want within the box goes here, like text and stuff </div>. Um....and you can have other little boxes inside that box? Like that was how I did the text bubbles, which were like <p class="left dean">Um….</p> for the talking bubble, the bubbles which I did not code myself and learned how to do from this guide. <-------- Um......that guide is probably a really good place for you to start honestly, it’s like a real tutorial which this is not.

Also on top of all this ao3 was giving me some fun little 500 errors which made things more difficult. Originally I was going to do this game as one workskin, one work, but whenever I pasted all the code into the skin editor it would just 500 error me, and so I tried like half the code.......a third of the code........eventually I found that one fifth of the code would go through and save and that’s why the game had to get chopped up in 5 different workskins/works.   

And I talked briefly with ao3 support about that, but they haven’t gotten back to me yet with a different solution. (Apparently it shouldn’t happen because the character limit for workskins is 500,000 which I didn’t come close to passing)(Sometimes your workskin code will 500 error if there’s something undoable in it? but i was able to get all my code saved, just in portions so.........) Um so I kind of want to wait and see if they do respond, just because it would make things soooooooo much easier for everyone if they were able to work with all the code at once instead of juggling it.

ALSO ALSO ALSO there’s a big part of this that isn’t coding based at all, and is just my batshit crazy um.........spreadsheets??? maps?? I don’t even know what to call them...can’t even take screenshots either cause they got stupid big so I’m just linking them.

Here’s the road mappy one??

Here’s the master list one?

Fully aware that these are batshit insane though! And probably just raise more questions than they answer! If you look at them you may notice that I lowkey invented this bullshit counting language to help myself understand and keep track of all the outfits and yeah it totally is complete and utter bullshit that makes no sense if you haven’t been dealing with it for a month. I literally have no idea how to explain that to people with a straight face and kind of want to go live in cave lol.

I guess overall disclaimer..........I went to art school and I am insane😍😍😍✌ I do want to see more interactive work and I do want to share what I learned but finding a way for me to make this accessible for other people is gonna take a hot minute.

[steppedoffaflight]

Summer’s a Knife - Chapter 2

Catch up on Chapter 1 here

You don’t respond, silence in the air as you both catch your breath.

“I’ve got no use for sex that sounds straight out of a porno.” Van lifts his head, and you flinch at the intensity in his eyes. “I’d rather it be fucking real. No bullshit. If you’re having a good time, sure, say it. But if you’re not, say that too.”

or

Almost three months later, Van McCann is back in L.A. and ready to take you up on that dinner date

Word count: ~15k

Chapter Two

April 2019

By the time you’ve pulled into the Whole Foods parking lot, having squeezed through afternoon traffic, you’re at your wits end. Work had consisted of eight tedious hours fixing someone else’s mistakes instead of working on your own projects, and you’re already dreading the hit your paycheck is about to take from this grocery shopping. 

Your phone buzzes on the passenger seat next to you, no doubt Mary offering up some positivity in response to the giant work rant you’d just texted her. You already roll your eyes before you’ve picked up the phone and pressed your fingerprint to the sensor.

Hey. It’s Van x The gray bubble on your screen catches you off guard. You’d saved Van’s number months ago, his contact info at the top of the conversation reading “Van San Diego”. Thinking about how long ago your trip feels makes the whole thing seem even more surreal. 

You gape at your screen for way too long, heart pounding, before you respond with a Hi!

After you’ve hit send, you panic over responding too fast. You let the car continue to run for the sake of air conditioning and you don’t let your screen lock, waiting anxiously for Van’s next message. When one doesn’t come after ten minutes you resign to cutting the ignition, finally facing the fact you’ve got shopping to do.

You can’t stop checking your phone as you roll your cart through the aisles, careful not to let your eyes wander to any items that aren’t on your list. You’re carefully examining the label on an overpriced pasta sauce when you hear the buzz of your phone against the cart. You almost drop the jar in your hand.

I know it’s been a while but I’m finally back in la. Still up for that dinner?

As you’re reading the indication that he’s typing starts, sending a shot of adrenaline through you.

No worries if not just let me know x

You screenshot his messages immediately and forward them to Mary for her opinion. Predictably, she hadn’t responded to your rant, but sends an OMG the second you show her the screenshot. 

Have you messaged him back ?! she sends in response to your I knowww!!! 

Nooo I don’t wanna look too eager you tap excitedly to her. You’re jolted back to reality when another cart suddenly bumps into yours.

“Sorry,” You apologize, quickly steering your cart away. You say it purely for the sake of politeness, even though you’re almost positive you weren’t in the way and the person could have rolled by without jostling all your things. All of your mundane worries are pushed to the back of your mind. You’re finally getting that promised dinner date with Van!

The rest of your shopping trip is as chaotic as your brain feels. Between lightning-fast exchanges with Mary about what you’ll say and when you’ll say it you haphazardly scrap together the rest of your list. You’re sure you’re forgetting something as you send it down the conveyor belt to the cashier, but you’re too frazzled to care. The only thing that matters at this point is getting home, cracking open the bottle of wine you’d purchased (on impulse, unfortunately) and accepting Van’s invitation. 

And you do just that. Upon getting home you only put away your fresh items, leaving the rest to sit on the floor in their bags. It’s not the best practice, but it’s necessary after the day you’ve had. You pour a generous amount of wine into a regular glass, not caring enough to fish out a wine glass, and change out of your work wardrobe and into your most worn-in sweats. Only after you’ve plopped down onto the couch and taken a swallow of wine to calm your nerves do you allow yourself to respond: We could totally do dinner! When?

You feel slightly remorseful for leaving Van without a response for almost two hours. You chew the inside of your cheek as you berate yourself for it.

What works best for you? I’m here for the next two weeks and free most nights

You consider his response. Most of the time it feels like you’re the only person in L.A. that’s free most nights. Is he not the partying type? He seems like he would be, considering the way he went straight to the bar after his show in January. 

Does tomorrow work? You send. It feels a bit off to schedule something so soon, but tomorrow’s Friday, and you wouldn’t have to worry about staying out late considering you’ve got no work Saturday. Plus, the longer you wait the more likely things are to be packed into Van’s schedule. And, you remind yourself, this dinner is more than two months in the making.

Another text from Van interrupts the churning thoughts in your head. Tomorrow’s ace, he says first, and then another message: I’ll pick you up followed by a third: What time? 

You exchange a few more messages, setting up a time and making sure he has your address. Once the logistics are worked out, Van sends Look forward to it x and that feels like a good note to end the conversation on. You melt into your couch cushions and down the rest of your wine with a sigh.

\\

If yesterday felt like a long workday, then today feels like it’s lasting an eternity.

You try to burn though time texting Mary, attempting to cut down on your getting ready time by verbally planning your outfit in advance. Still, the minutes seem to tick by at a snail’s pace. You try to get some work done and catch yourself repeatedly screwing up your spreadsheet with typos. Even triple-checking everything you enter doesn’t seem to eat up any time. You visit the water cooler too much, and pee repeatedly as a result. Eventually, somehow, you make it to 5, slinging your bag over your shoulder and murmuring quick goodbyes as you dash out of the office. 

When you get home you’re laser focused. You tackle showering first, the task made longer with all of the shaving that needed to be done, followed by the slippery process of moisturizing every inch of your skin. It takes up more time than you’d like, but in San Diego you’d been completely unprepared for a hookup. This time you wanted to be ready. 

Van sends a heading over text just as you’d finished blow drying and styling your hair. You get dressed, then, layering the outfit you and Mary had agreed on over a matching black lace bra and panty set. They were at the bottom of your underwear drawer, crumpled and forgotten, tags still intact. As you clip away the tags you hope out loud to yourself in the kitchen that they still fit, and sigh in relief when you’re able to shimmy the set on. 

Maybe it’s the traffic, or maybe Van lied about when he was leaving, but by the time he texts that he’s arrived you’re waiting for him on the couch, having managed to get your makeup routine done just in time. The house is in complete disarray from your rush, and you cringe to yourself as you get a look at the tornado you’ve caused before you shut the door, locking it securely, and turning to seek out Van’s car.

There’s a black Range Rover pulled up on the street, the only car on the block running right now. You can see the dim blue light of Van’s phone screen through the tint of the windows, and as you approach you can see his silhouette. 

He looks up when you tug open the car door, sliding into the front passenger seat. 

You’re pleased when his face lights up. A part of you had almost been expecting that he’d rethink his attraction to you now that there was no post-show adrenaline or late night beers to cloud his judgement.

“Hello,” He laughs, “Long time no see!”

He’s just as charismatic as you remember him, your nerves easing as you make yourself comfortable. The crisp lace underneath your clothes is stiff and itchy, and you wiggle around as discretely as possible.

“Hey,” You greet him. “It feels like it’s been forever.”

Van nods, kicking the car into gear. “You’re telling me. Been a busy couple months.”

You hum in sympathy even if you can’t relate. Your busiest times of the year were summer- when most of your coworkers went on extended vacations and you were responsible for making up their work- and the holidays, when you had to coordinate trips home to see your family.

“You look amazing, by the way,” Van says, managing a quick glance over at you with a smile.

“Aw, thanks,” You murmur, chronically awkward at receiving compliments. “You look great, too.”

“Ah, stop. Makin’ me blush, love,” he jokes, and you can’t help but giggle at his sarcasm. It’s strange how familiar he feels, the result of just one night.

“So.” You peer out of the windows, looking for any hint of where you were headed. “What do you have planned?”

“Got a reservation for eight at this really nice place, dunno if you’ve ever heard of it.” Van stumbles over some sort of French pronunciation. “We’ve had a couple of dinners there with label people and it’s always class.”

“Sounds lovely,” You tell him. You’ve never heard of the place, but then again your Los Angeles friend group was lacking any musicians making a big break, let alone getting invited to dinner with Capitol Records staff. “Never heard of it.”

“You’ll like it,” Van says confidently.

You glance over at the clock on the dashboard display. It’s set to 24-hour time, so you pick up your phone instead of mentally trying to calculate it.

“How far away is it?” You ask nervously. It’s dangerously close to eight. 

“Not too far,” Van shrugs, but he’s driving into the tail end of stop-and-go traffic. You try to swallow down your anxiety.

\\

Finding a parking spot is a pain in the ass, but eventually Van’s maneuvered his car into one of the parallel spots lining the sidewalk.

By the time you two are out of the car, crossing the street to the restaurant, it’s almost ten minutes after your reservation time. Van seems oblivious to this, breezily strutting into the place, holding the door for you as usual. He’s whistling absentmindedly, and you wonder if it’s one of his own songs. He keeps whistling until you two approach the podium in the lobby.

“Reservation name?” The hostess asks, turning the pages in the binder in front of her.

“McCann.”

The hostess takes a second to look over her pages before she motions. “Right this way.”

There’s no mention of the fact you guys are late as she opens a door on the wall behind the podium, leading you two into the dining area. It’s a stark contrast from the drab, dim decor of the small lobby area. The floors are glossy white, almost shiny enough to reflect your face back to you, and although there are some larger tables most of them are the quintessential small, circular two-seaters with silky white tablecloths draped over them. The walls are dark in typical L.A. style, but covered in windows that frame the courtyard outside, lanterns glowing and candlelit outdoor tables visible. 

Almost everyone is in black tie attire, and you feel self-consciousness broil in your stomach as the hostess leads you and Van to to your own small table. You’re curious if there’s other celebrities here, but you’re too afraid of looking like an outsider by trying to peek at people as you pass by. You keep your eyes on the back of Van’s head instead, examining where his hair parts on his scalp. 

You’re waved to your assigned table with the assurance that someone will be with you shortly before the hostess sees herself back to the front room. In the time you’ve paused to listen to her words Van’s already ahead of you, pulling out one of the covered chairs and motioning for you to sit.

“You know you don’t have to do that,” You tell him as you sit in the seat he’s designated for you. He takes his own seat opposite you.

“Does it offend you?” Van asks, and you watch his brow crease in concern.

“No!” You’re quick to assure him. “I’m not offended, or anything like that. I’m just saying, I won’t tell everyone this was the worst date of my life just because you didn’t pull the chair out or hold the door.”

Van laughs, the worry easing out of his expression. “S’ just a force of habit. It’s more trouble for me to stop at this point in my life than it is to just keep doing it.”

You nod in understanding before reaching for the menu and searching for the drinks.

“Do you know what you’re drinking?” Van asks after a small stretch of silence where you’re both looking at your respective menus. 

“What are you drinking?” You answer his question with a question, eager to be able to gauge the most appropriate choice for yourself. The drink menu is long and most of the items seem hard to pronounce, and despite knowing Van intimately you’ve still got first date jitters. Not to mention, you were on a budget.

“I usually get this wine,” Van tells you, using his index finger to point it out for you on your menu. “M’not gonna drink too much considering I’m drivin’, but it goes great with the lobster.” 

You hum as you read over the tiny italics font describing the wine. “Sounds good,” You say finally, “I’ll have it with you.”

“I’ll get us a bottle, then.”

You swallow hard when you read the price listed for the entire bottle, but manage to stifle any worries. You’ve waited 3 months for this date, there can’t be any real harm in one luxurious dinner. And the cost of the bottle divided into two wasn’t so outrageous.

“Perfect.” You close your menu, decision made.

By the time the server has taken your wine order, returned with chilled glasses and doled out servings to each of you, and delivered a fresh bread basket and dinner menus, your stomach is grumbling and you’re eager to scour through the menu and figure out what you’re having. 

“God, I’m starving,” You sigh, buttering a warm bread roll. In your ravenous state you bite off more than you can politely chew, but thankfully Van doesn’t notice as he’s taking a peek at his phone. 

“Same.” He was listening even in his distracted state, and as soon as he sets his phone back down he reaches for his own roll.

“So…” You start, flipping open your menu to (surprise) even more expensive, french-titled meals. “What’s good here?”

“The lobster,” Van laughs. “It’s the only thing I’ve had here. Had it once and kept craving it forever.”

He must be able to sense that answer doesn’t satisfy you, because he opens his own menu. “Bondy loves the roast. Says it’s one of the best he’s ever had.”

“Not a huge fan of roast,” You tell Van, but flip the pages until you find the meal he’s talking about. “Who’s Bondy?” The name sounds familiar, and in your head you replay the encounter you had outside of Van’s hotel room in San Diego. Was Bondy the one stuck behind the luggage?

“Johnny Bond, he’s our guitar player. Goes by Bondy.”

“Ah. Who’s the one with the…?” You trail off, but motion with your hands around your head to convey the thick head of curls you remember from that night.

“That’s Benji. Our bassist.”

“Benji,” You repeat quietly to yourself. The name doesn’t ring a bell, but the hair does.

“He likes the roast chicken,” Van suggests. “But he’s not allowed to say it’s the best because my mum makes a mean roast chicken and it’s deffo the best.”

“That sounds good. I’m gonna get that.” You try not to openly cringe at the price.

Van opens his mouth to speak, but from the way he’s looking over your shoulder you know the server’s returned to take down your orders. 

“There’s Bob, too,” Van says unprovoked when you two are alone again. “He’s easy to pick out. Wears glasses.”

Your brain can connect the dots there: A man with glasses hidden away behind a drumset in the few photos you’d seen on google.

“Is he drums?” You’re hesitant in case you’re wrong, but Van perks up so you know you’ve got it right.

“He is.” Van takes a drink from his wine glass.

There’s a pause in conversation. You try to wrack your brain for a topic, but your knowledge of his band is shaky and not trivia-proof. 

“Are you guys close?” Seems like a safe enough question to ask.

“Me ‘n Bob?”

“Everyone,” You elaborate, lacing your fingers together. “Are you guys, like, at each other’s throats?”

“Nah. They’re my best mates. I’ve known Bob and Benji since we were younger, in school. Used to play on the same footie team and all’a that. Bondy didn’t come into the picture until we were a bit older but I’d heard of him before. Thought he was crazy talented, couldn’t believe he actually wanted to join us. Everyone’s massively talented, really. Wouldn’t be the same without them.”

You drink in the reverence in his voice as he talks about his friends.

“I was just with ‘em today, actually. Been at the studio for most of the day.”

“Well, that’s good that you guys get along.” You offer him a smile which he returns.

“You’re telling me. Couldn’t imagine if things went sour. Having fights over guitar riffs and drumbeats all day.”

You try to picture Van angry and fail. “What do you do in the studio?”

“We’re putting the finishing touches on our next album. It’s due out at the end of the month.”

“Oh, no way!” Your eyes widen in interest. “That’s really cool.”

Van grins. “Yeah, proper excited. Think it’s our best one yet.”

“So is that how you ended up in L.A.? Music?” As much as you’re trying to get a feel for Van, L.A. seems like the last place on earth he’d enjoy living. Considering his lack of social media presence or desire to pressure others into buying sponsored products, and the fact that the band definitely seems more popular in the U.K. than America, you can’t quite put a finger on his motives.

“Yeah. I lived in New York for a bit, when we first got signed, but ended up moving down here. L.A. is sort of the hub for the business end. I spend a good bit of time in London, but the weather down here is nice.”

“So nice,” You agree. The constant summer is worlds different than the unpredictable midwest climate you were raised in.

“Right?” Van beams. “We just spent a while at this place in Ireland, writing and doing most of the recording. And it was just absolute pouring rain everyday. So once we got outta there we thought why not enjoy some time in the sun?”

You chuckle in agreement, taking the first drink of your wine. It tastes better than you were anticipating, and the pleasant surprise must show on your face.

“It’s good, innit?” Van takes his own sip. “Not much of a wine guy, but this stuff…” He trails off, nodding in approval. “Anyway, enough about me. Been droning on for ages. You said you weren’t from L.A., right? How’d you end up here?”

It’s your turn to be interrupted by the server with fresh, hot meals in tow. There’s the momentary fuss of getting situated with food in front of you, and by the time you guys are settled again the question has slipped away as you two dig into your food.

“This is amazing,” You affirm after your first hot forkful of chicken and roasted vegetables. “Who said this was amazing? They were right.”

“Blakes,” Van replies through a mouthful of lobster.

“Blakes?” You stop your fork midair. “Who’s Blakes?”

Van is still chewing his food, so you hurry up and eat the piece of potato speared on your fork. 

“Benji,” Van clarifies after he swallows. “Benji is Blakes.” He coughs around a sip of his drink when he must see the confusion on your face.

“His name is Benji Blakeway. Blakes is his nickname.”

The name attaches itself to the memory in your head. The c’mon, Blakes, from the guy in the hat rings through your mind.

“Who wears the hat?” You try to get the last puzzle piece in place. You’ve seen whoever it is on google, always wearing the same flat cap.

“Bondy.”

“Okay. So you, Bob, Bondy, Benji.”

Van nods, looking pleased, and you feel a sense of satisfaction spread through you.

“I forgot,” Van says suddenly, “You were just about to tell me how you ended up in L.A.”

“Oh, right.” You look down at your food. “Full disclosure, it’s really lame.”

When you look up, Van’s put his fork down, prepared to listen fully.

You have some wine to calm your nerves. You’ve finished your glass, so you procrastinate by pouring yourself some more.

“It’s just… really childish and impulsive.”

Van laughs. “You’re only making me more interested!”

You huff out a laugh at that. “So… I guess it all started in high school. Which I went to in Michigan, by the way. It’s um,” You gesture with your hand, “It’s the state that looks like a mitten. Close to Canada. Anyway, I had this boyfriend in high school, and senior year he broke up with me.” You laugh at yourself, bringing a hand to your forehead for a moment. “God, this sounds so dramatic. But when you’re in high school you think you’re going to last forever with someone, your first love and all that, y’know.”

Van seems amused. “How old were you?” 

“Well I was like…” You scrunch your face up, thinking back, “14 when we first met, and we were close friends for a while, and then 15 when we actually started dating, and 18 when we broke up.”

“Right,” You plow on, “So, first love and all that good stuff. So we break up when we were 18, which honestly needed to happen. We just didn’t get along anymore but we were so comfortable being a couple by then, you know? We were different as adults, so naturally we break up, whatever. The point is I was fucking devastated.”

You take a deep breath, another drink, and try to prepare yourself to tell the rest of the story.

“So my best friend and I had always had it in our heads, I don’t even know why, that we wanted to come to L.A.”

“Mary?” Van cuts in.

“No, not Mary. I met Mary once I moved here.” You clear your throat, getting back on topic. “I think it’s because of the weather, honestly,” You laugh at your immaturity at that age. “We were so tired of Michigan winters. They’re fucking… cold. And my friend can sing, so naturally we’re thinking you get into L.A. and boom, you’re discovered.”

You gauge Van’s attention then. He’s still listening close.

“So after high school, we had both been saving up for what we thought was this imaginary sort of dream, but then I was broken up with, and depressed, and I kept seeing him everywhere because our town was kind of small, and so we decided… Let’s just pack up and leave!”

Van’s lips quirk up at that. “I was always the same way,” He interjects softly. “Small town thing. Your parents didn’t mind?”

“Well, I convinced them that UCLA was my dream school. So of course they couldn’t say much because I ended up being accepted into a really amazing school, and they had heard me talk about L.A. before. So we get here, and… y’know… Things just didn’t work out that way.”

“When do they ever?” Van jokes.

You nod in agreement around a quick bite of chicken. “Exactly!” You say, wiping the corners of your mouth with your napkin. “It costed so fucking much to live here, and we burned through our savings really fast, and… We ended up becoming even closer through that and we dated for a couple years, and I invested a lot of time into trying to get her discovered because we couldn’t afford rent, but then she got into the wrong group and was getting into cocaine, it was… Intense.”

Your palms are sweating from your admission, and you can’t get yourself to look Van in the eyes, heart racing. 

“So… yeah. Thankfully I’ve made a lot of friends here- the right kind, not the cocaine kind- and I got a really nice internship through UCLA and found an okay job, and me and her went our separate ways. And that’s when I met Mary, and she grew up here so she was able to show me around, and we’ve been inseparable ever since.”

You can feel anxiety clenching in your chest while your admitted interest in women still hangs in the air. You wish it still wasn’t so nerve-wracking to come out, and maybe it wouldn’t be except for the fact you and Van seem to really hit it off, and you would hate for this to be a dealbreaker for him. 

You finally manage to look away from where you’d been carefully inspecting a small stain you’d made on the tablecloth. Van’s leaned back from his plate, an easy smile spread over his face. His arms are crossed across his chest as he marvels at you.

“We’ve got more in common than I thought,” He says grinning. “We can both discuss our ex-girlfriends. Cheers.”

He reaches for his wine glass and you reach for yours too. If Van notices how your wine is trembling from the hand holding the glass, he doesn’t call out as you two clink your glasses together, relief starting to seep through you.

“I love that,” He remarks, still beaming. “Proper ‘escape the small town’ story. I wish mine was as interesting as yours.”

“You do not,” You roll your eyes good-naturedly. “Yours is better! You ended up actually getting discovered.”

“Lots of hard work, that’s all.” Van shrugs. 

Van tells a few lighthearted stories about struggling to get discovered while you guys finish up your meals. True to his word, he stays light on the wine in preparation to drive, spacing out only two glasses the whole time you’ve been here. You’re not sure how many you’ve had, but you figure it can’t be that many. The only telltale signs that let you know you’ve got alcohol in your system are the flush in your cheeks, the way the lights seem to shine a bit softer, and the way you can feel your eyes drifting over Van dreamily.

When the waitress brings the check Van reaches for his back pocket immediately, procuring a card from his wallet.

“You didn’t have to do that,” You say, your eyes widening in shock. “I was gonna pay for mine.” The cost of the entire bottle of wine, combined with both of your dinners floats in your mind.

One side of Van’s mouth lifts in a confused half-smile. “I said I was taking you out for dinner, didn’t I? Dunno if it means the same thing here, but if I’m taking you out why would you pay?”

“I mean, I just… Didn’t want to assume, I guess.” It’s burned you before, dates gone wrong where the check gets split by surprise. “It’s happened before.”

Van snorts. “Sounds fucking awful.”

You nod, eyes wide. “It really was.”

Your mind flips through a few of your worst dates, interrupted only by Van’s card being returned, you two sent on your way.

Van starts humming when you two meander out of the restaurant and across the street to his car, sidling into the front seats.

“Should I take you back to yours?” He asks as he gets the car started. “Or we could go back to mine. Watch a film or somethin’.”

There’s silence in the car while Van checks his phone. You decide to look at yours, too, checking the time. The night is still young.

“Back to yours sounds nice.” The wine makes your voice soft, betrays the way your heart skips at the suggestion.

Van licks his lips, still typing something. He looks up finally. “Mine?”

“Yeah.”

He gets the car into gear, pulling out of the parking space. With a few taps on a screen in the center of the dashboard his phone is connected by bluetooth and music rings out through the car. You recognize it as the song he was humming minutes ago.

You drive in silence for most of the ride, all talked out from dinner, but your interest piques when Van turns the music down.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure,” You say nervously. Your head tries to predict what’s coming next.

“The thing, with you and your ex. Was it a one time sort of deal? Or do you still play for both teams?”

You chew the inside of your cheek. “I still play for both. I’m bisexual.”

“Got it.”

“Why?” You feel yourself bristle. “Is it a problem?”

“Not at all,” Van shrugs, slowly turning the music back up. “Just wasn’t sure what to call it.”

\\

It takes about a half hour to get to Van’s, a journey that includes weaving through a winding, uphill street crammed with upscale homes. Van’s home is in a cluster at the top of the hill, and typing in the gate code reveals a long driveway up to a house surrounded by a tall thicket of bamboo.

“I love the bamboo,” You tell him as he pulls the car in front of the garage, but doesn’t bother to park it inside. “The worst part of living here is feeling like your neighbors are breathing down your neck.” When you step out of the car you soak the privacy in. You could easily be murdered with this level of seclusion, but the fact that you can still hear the bustling sounds of the city and a dog in the neighbor’s yard is reassuring. 

“Totally agree,” Van tells you, jingling his keys, “It’s most of the reason I chose this place. Can sunbathe totally naked and not feel like everyone’s watching me.”

Although Van delivers the joke completely deadpan, you burst into laughter, and in the soft glow of the porch light you can see him smile.

“M’not kidding!” He insists, pointing a finger towards the sky as he gets the door unlocked, letting you in first. “There’s a patio upstairs perfect for getting some sun.”

Inside, his house is decorated eerily similar to the restaurant you’d just been at, with glossy white floors, dark painted walls, and soft lamplight. 

“I’m gonna grab a beer,” Van says as he locks the front door and sets his keys on a small end table that’s covered in unopened mail. “You want anything?”

You think for a moment. “What do you have?”

“No idea, honestly,” Van snorts. He starts walking through the living room and you follow behind. He turns the corner to a dining area that looks pristine and untouched, and around another corner is the kitchen, all windows and clean appliances and glossy countertops. The only indications that anyone’s been in there are the few dirty dishes in the sink, the amazon prime packaging scattered on the kitchen island, and more than one unfinished mug of tea sitting on different surfaces. 

The windows in the kitchen look out into the backyard, where you marvel at the sparkling blue in-ground pool and what looks like a hot tub.

The sound of the fridge opening tears your eyes away from the windows.

“I’ve got, uh,” Van holds the fridge door open wide, the sound of glass clinking as he pulls a bottle of beer from one of the side pockets. “Some Coke, Dr. Pepper, lemonade…” He lets go of the door to pick up a bottle of orange juice, which he inspects carefully. “Some orange juice. Dunno if it’s good, but if you wanted to risk it be my guest.” He offers you a sheepish smile. “Haven’t made it to the shop in forever.”

“Coke’s good,” You tell him, and he sets one of the red cans on the island.

Van shuts the fridge. “Do you want ice?”

“Nah,” You shrug him off, “The can is fine.”

You use the tab to crack open your can while Van rustles through a drawer until he can find a bottle opener, getting his beer open. You two gravitate back to the living room, Van taking a seat on the dark, plush sectional in the center of the room.

He sets his beer down on the coffee table, no coaster in sight, before shucking his shoes off and stretching his long legs across the short end of the L shape. 

Taking your own shoes off buys you a moment of contemplation before you decide to sit down next to where he’s stretched out. There’s no space for you to stretch your legs out, but you’re comfortable folding them up on the couch with you, getting comfortable cross legged while Van procures the remote from somewhere, starting the TV up.

“Look at the moon,” You marvel quietly. The living room features an entire glass wall that leads to an outdoor patio, the moon and stars sending a white shimmering glow over the furniture.

Van doesn’t say anything, but when you turn your head to glance over at him he’s admiring it too before he meets your gaze. He still doesn’t speak, the moment doused in comfortable silence.

“Can I use this?” You ask him suddenly, your hand landing on a folded up blanket a few cushions away. 

“Course.”

You unravel the blanket and lay it over your lap while Van gets Netflix going.

“What do you wanna watch?” He asks when prompted to pick a profile. There are only two on the screen; Van and mary. You smile to yourself at the fact he shares an account with his mom as he clicks his.

“Um,” You look over the options on the screen. “Are you in the middle of anything?”

“Not really. Caught up on just about everything in Ireland.”

Van starts absentmindedly flipping through the trending now category, previews playing automatically.

“Have you seen that?” You ask when he hovers over one of the titles. “I heard it’s supposed to be really, really good.”

Van lets the trailer play out, detailing what looks to be a plot about infatuation and stalking. You can tell you’re both interested by the silence that falls over you.

“Sound good?” Van gets up to switch the lights off. The room is shrouded in darkness, Netflix lighting up his silhouette as he gets settled on the couch again. 

“Yeah,” You nod, “Let’s see if it lives up to the hype.”

You’re all too aware of your proximity to Van as the show starts. You can’t look over at him without him noticing considering it requires you to turn your head, but you can’t help but feel like you can sense his eyes on you. The result is you spending the first half sitting stiff as a board, paralyzed.

But the show lives up to it’s viral social media hype, and you soon become so engrossed that without really realizing it you’ve stretched your legs down the long side of the couch, your head coming to rest on the cushion you had been sitting on. Van passes you one of the throw pillows he’s been hogging, and when you elevate your head you’re so close you can hear his breathing.

The longer you watch, the more convinced you start to become that this date was all an elaborate plan devised by Van to kill you, and that he really did stalk you months ago in San Diego. Your mind wanders for two seconds, contemplating your current position on a stranger’s sofa, and suddenly the plot has taken a twist and the main character is having sex.

It’s almost like watching a sex scene with your parents in the room, although Van is anything but. You cringe as breathy moans ring out through the surround sound and you’re forced to watch a trainwreck of a scene where the the girl is getting fucked, hard, with her windows open, the stalker watching from the bushes across the street. It’s over quick, the character’s on-again-off-again boyfriend leaving as soon as the deed is done, but to your horror the scene only gets worse as the girl starts to hump a throw pillow in compensation for the orgasm she didn’t receive from her boyfriend, all the while the stalker starts jerking off in the bushes.

“Oh God,” You groan, turning your face to bury it in the throw pillow. “I literally can’t watch!”

Van chuckles as you listen to the rest of the scene play out.

“You’re missing it.” You can hear the delight in Van’s voice. “He’s about to blow his load right there on the street.”

“I wanna miss it,” You tell him, but still turn your head to peek at the screen. “Fucking creep.”

The ending of the scene is a crescendo of orgasms and moaning, the actress for the main character really laying it on porn-style for her big finale, while the stalker is abruptly interrupted by an oblivious woman asking him to hold the door, his orgasm incomplete.

“That was fucking creepy,” Van agrees. The episode isn’t done yet, but you can tell neither of you are paying attention to the remaining plot.

“Those windows are freaking me out,” You whine, gesturing to the windows that had previously brought you the view of the night sky, but that you’re now convinced have someone peeping through them.

Van heaves himself off of the couch. Before you can question him he’s crossed the room, pulling giant sheets of blinds down over the windows.

You sigh in relief, but it’s short lived. “But what if you’re the stalker?” You narrow your eyes at Van, who’s looking down at you as he heads back to his seat.

“I’m quite daft, then. Spending all this money on a wine-and-dine when I could’ve been outside your bedroom window for free.”

You make an exaggerated retching noise. Van laughs.

There’s a beat of silence, and then: “Is it really like that?”

You turn your head to peer up at him, propping your chin up on the overstuffed pillow. “Like what?”

“Like she did,” Van gestures towards the screen, “Where you fake it, and then the lad leaves, and you go back at it again.”

You frown as you ponder his question. “I’m sure for some girls it’s not.” Van’s eyes are trained on you, hanging onto your every word. “But as far as I know it usually goes something like that.”

“Pillow humping optional,” You add. “You can use your hand. Personally, I use a vibrator. Or the mood passes and you just go to sleep.”

You don’t know where this burst of boldness to talk about your sex life so openly came from, but Van looks a bit panicked as a result of it.

“And when we…” Van’s voice is low, and you watch his Adam’s apple bob as he swallows, his brows knitting together. “Did you…”

“That was genuine,” You reassure him, watching the relief wash over his face.

Van makes a noise in the back of his throat. “But you have? Before?”

“Faked it?”

Van nods.

It’s your turn to swallow. “Yeah. I have. Not with you. But yeah.”

“How, though?” Van scratches the back of his neck. “Y’know when you watch porn or somethin’ like that, you can tell they’re playing it up.”

You can feel a mischievous smile stretching across your face. “You sound curious.”

“I mean, kinda, yeah. And it’d be good to know. So you can’t fool me.” He offers a sheepish smile at his own joke.

“That would imply you need fooling,” You point out, your voice quiet. There’s no real need to whisper, but the heavy feeling of attraction that’s suddenly pressing down on you keeps you from speaking full volume, especially considering your proximity to Van.

Van doesn’t speak, only holds your gaze. He’s got the same look in his eye that he did outside of the hotel that night when he was openly checking you out. You do your best to match it, your mind quickly wrapping around a plan. Now was as good a time as any other to make your move.

“Well, I mean,” You break his gaze, looking around the room instead. “It ruins the magic if you know it’s fake.” You give an exaggerated sigh. “But for you, I’ll make an exception.”

You sit yourself upright, Van carefully watching your every move.

“We gotta set the scene, though,” You tell him, standing up from the couch and wriggling your pants down your legs. “Get yours off too,” You tell him.

Van doesn’t question it, getting down to his briefs and peeling off his socks after he watches you take off your own. 

You originally planned to keep your shirt on, to leave something to Van’s imagination, but you catch him admiring your black lace underwear and can’t resist revealing the rest of the matching set.

“Just want it to feel as real as possible,” You’re as nonchalant as possible, your voice the only sound in the quiet room. You realize then that Van’s muted the TV.

“Right,” Van agrees, fumbling with the buttons lining the front of his shirt. There’s no other layers underneath, so he’s shirtless in no time. “Now what?”

You pretend to think about it only to drag his anticipation out a few moments longer. While you torment him your eyes drag up and down his body, drinking in the familiar sight.

“Say we’re doing something like this,” You murmur, stepping over to where he’s still stretched out. You slide a leg over his waist, and with the soft slide of skin and fabric you’re settled on his lap, mimicking a riding position. He’s hard in his underwear, pressing against you through the cotton of his underwear and the lace of yours. 

“Like I’m riding you,” You clarify, shifting in Van’s lap. You feel him tense up beneath you.

“Put your hands here,” You prompt him, gently grabbing his wrists and bringing them to rest on your sides. His hands feel hesitant to make contact with you at first, but at your encouragement he holds onto your sides firmly.

“Now, the first step is build up.” Your voice stays low, like you’re trading secrets with him. “It’s not gonna be realistic without warning. Gotta spend some time doing something like this…” Without further ado you’re grinding against him through your underwear, his fingertips pressing into your flesh. 

It’s been way too long since you’ve had the experience of feeling someone’s solid, warm body beneath you, since you’ve felt someone want you so bad. Your first couple of breathy moans don’t even feel fake as you relish in the warm friction, losing control for a beat when your hips jerk on their own accord. “Van, fuck.”

His fingers squeeze you.

“Yeah, like that.” You piggyback off of his enthusiasm. You let your hips apply more pressure to his, but as good as it feels there’s no dry humping that could soothe your ache. Van doesn’t have to know that, though, and you let another desperate sounding noise come up from the back of your throat. Van’s thighs twitch beneath you.

You had been holding onto Van’s waist to balance yourself, but suddenly you move one of your palms to his side and feel him jolt. You look at him then, your face contorting into a look of mild surprise.

“I’m close.” You say it as if you were caught off guard. Van looks like an even mix of seduced and stunned, and the way he’s looking at you makes you close your eyes, scrunch your face up. “I’m, uh,” You pant, “I’m gonna-”

Before you can get to the grand finale your body is knocked off balance, suddenly becoming pressed into the soft cushions. 

“Fucking stop,” Van sounds pained as he kisses you, hard. Your body melts into the couch, the sweet and rare feeling of a plan going perfectly warming your body from the inside out. You moan into the kiss.

“I take it back,” He tells you before another bruising kiss. “I don’t wanna know what it sounds like.”

“How are you gonna know?” You push out between genuine gasps for air as Van starts kissing your neck. You arch into it.

“Tell me the truth,” He begs, resting his forehead against your shoulder. You can feel how clammy he is. “Please. Save that stuff for someone else. Tell me the truth.”

You don’t respond, silence in the air as you both catch your breath.

“I’ve got no use for sex that sounds straight out of a porno.” Van lifts his head, and you flinch at the intensity in his eyes. “I’d rather it be fucking real. No bullshit. If you’re having a good time, sure, say it. But if you’re not, say that too.”

It’s a rather serious take on something you’d thought was lighthearted. You’d never thought twice about faking orgasms. As far as you knew it was quite customary. You’d always figured the amount of times you’d done it had been on the lighter side, too. It’s not like you’d never had one, a fate some women seemed doomed to. But the way Van’s looking at you gives a sudden gravity to your actions.

“No bullshit,” You say firmly. You unwedge one of your hands from where it’s been pressed into the crack of the sofa, and offer Van your pinky.

Van’s intensity breaks as he smiles at the gesture. There’s a shift in his weight before he can get a hand free to loop his pinky finger with yours. “No bullshit.”

Then he’s kissing you again, your head forced back against the cushions of the couch, paralyzed between the furniture and his body. He tastes like the beer he’s been drinking and the butter he’d drenched his lobster in. It should be a bad combination, but it’s so uniquely Van you can’t complain. Not to mention he’s still at the top of your makeout leaderboard, a realization that brings your fingers into his hair.

“Show me your room,” You tell him when you break apart for air.

“It’s two floors up,” Van groans. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” You laugh at his hesitation to roll off of you.

“There’s a guest bedroom right there.” Van nods toward the end of the hall past the front door.

You consider for a moment. “With windows?” You ask finally. When Van nods, you crinkle your nose in distaste.

“Your room,” You insist, and he finally climbs off of you. As he clicks the TV off you make the sudden decision to grab for the throw blanket you’d been using, wrapping it around your body as if it was a towel.

“What?” You ask when you notice him staring at you in amusement. “It’s fucking cold in here. Don’t suppose you want me to put more clothes on.”

“Deffo not,” Van agrees, and leads the trek up the stairs.

Van’s bedroom is average size, a fact which catches you off guard. You hadn’t known what to expect based on the rest of the house, but besides the giant glass windows that panel the wall the bed faces (which Van covers immediately), and the luxurious attached bathroom, his room is quite ordinary. There’s a suitcase resting open on the floor, and Van has to move an acoustic guitar that was resting on the bed, but otherwise things seem clean. There’s an overfilled hamper in the corner, but you were pleased he owned a hamper at all. 

As soon as the guitar is moved you join Van in getting under the covers, shedding your makeshift robe on the floor. The transition back into making out is seamless.

“I can show you for real,” You whisper, surprised to find your bold streak hasn’t run out.

Van makes what sounds like a confused noise in the back of his throat, his lips consumed with being pressed against yours, but as soon as you hook a leg over his waist and start shifting him onto his back he gets the hint.

“You want me to?” You ask him softly, although you’ve got a good feeling you already know the answer. 

“Shit,” Van hisses when you slip a hand into his underwear, easing his dick out. “Yeah.”

It’s your first time getting a hand around him properly, and you relish in the weight of him against your palm, the way the head of him is already swollen, peeking out of his foreskin. You give him a few experimental tugs, only to be encouraged by a groan. As much as you want to continue, his briefs are getting in the way.

There’s a bit of clamoring while you two undress fully, but it doesn’t dampen the mood in the slightest. 

“That’s better,” You murmur when you’re seated back on his thighs, hand wrapped around him again. You know you should stop, considering you’ve been teasing him for a while already, but the control you’ve got over him is too intoxicating, watching him clench and groan as you experiment with different strokes.

“Where do you keep the condoms?” You ask after keeping the pace with relentless, quick tugs until you felt like he was ready. The only sound in the room is the soft noise of his foreskin sliding over him, but it feels like it echoes.

“There,” Van pants, throwing his arm in a gesture towards one of the bedside tables. You shift slightly off of his lap, your clit pressing against the soft skin of his hip while you dig through the top drawer. The only light in the room is from the soft glow of the city against the blinds, but it’s just enough for you to be able to locate a foil packet before handing it off to Van.

After the ripping of the wrapper, the room falls silent except for the harsh noise of breathing. Van’s hands bump against you clumsily while he gets himself wrapped, and you try to match your breathing to his slow, deep breaths. You sound more worked up than him, your anxiety making your breaths shallow and harsh.

Van brushes one of his hands against your thigh while he withdraws his hands, signaling he’s done.

This time when you slip a hand around him you’re gentle, careful not to disturb the thin layer of latex you can feel stretched over him. “Ready?”

You’re already shifting into position, rearing up onto your knees and maneuvering above him. Waiting for the green light.

“Yeah,” Van chuckles. “Let’s have it.”

The room goes quiet again, Van waiting with baited breath as you position him. You swallow hard, trying to soothe the fluttering in your stomach as you start to lower down on him.

It’s unceremonious, a hushed and slow process. There’s no dramatic sinking down like there is in porn, no loud screams of pleasure. It’s a slow stretch as your body accommodates him, an active effort to keep your balance as you make small shifts to try different angles. There’s the occasional sharp breath, but you’re not sure if it’s from Van or if you’re doing it without meaning to.

There’s a collective sigh of relief when you’re fully seated, your thighs trembling against his from the stretch. You’re terribly out of practice with this, and you’re mentally kicking your past self for her confidence while your anxiety starts to prepare you for Van’s disappointment. 

Your nerves and self-consciousness mix together to form a hot flush on your face, one you’re grateful Van can’t see. You make a last-ditch effort for a deep breath before you shift your hips, preparing to proceed.

You’d forgotten how good this was. Or maybe it wasn’t actually ever this good; maybe it’s just Van. But as soon as you get a pace going any nerves melt away, replaced instead with electricity that buzzes down your spine, through your hips. It zings it’s way across your thighs, making any discomfort worth it as you make sure to lower yourself completely every single time, feeling yourself fill up.

Van’s got a white knuckle grip on the sheets, but you’re barely noticing his reactions. It’s like you’re possessed, your body moving without your control as you chase the feeling. What feeling exactly, you’re not sure; there’s the friction of him sliding in and out of you, the feeling of fullness that punches you in the gut every time you lower down, and the white-hot spots you can get him to hit depending on the angle. They all mix together, heat and tingling and sparks that have you hunched over, hands pressed into his chest, your hips erratic.

Your thighs start to fail you, and when the ache becomes unbearable you settle for staying seated, keeping him fully inside of you as you shift around, feeling him rub against your walls. You clench experimentally, just to see if there’s a way to get him deeper, closer.

You’re only jolted from your own thoughts at the sound of Van moaning. It’s loud, the volume paired with the vulnerability of the sound startling you. 

You look down at him then. He’s got his forearm thrown over his eyes, and his hair’s a mess against the mattress, having pushed the pillows awry without you noticing. His mouth opens, lips forming a silent shape before he finally chokes the word out: “Stop.”

His other hand is pressed against your thigh, although you don’t remember it being there. His fingers dig into your skin. “Stop,” He says again, voice strained.

Your hips slow, any pleasure in your entire body fizzling away in half of a second. Your self consciousness comes crashing down over you in one suffocating wave as you hold completely still, confused.

You must’ve fucked up. Must’ve read the situation wrong, not realized that Van wasn’t into it. Must’ve heard his moan wrong. Must’ve missed something important. You feel the sweat that’d been developing on your forehead go cold as you mentally search for your fatal mistake. 

“Is something wrong?” You ask hesitantly. You’re still frozen, careful not to move a muscle while you await Van’s response.

“No,” Van chokes out. He lifts his arm from where it’s obscuring his face, running his hand through his hair instead. You can see his bicep flex as he pulls his own hair by the crown of his head. “You’re incredible, fuck. I can’t fucking stand this anymore. Switch me.”

His praise delivers an instant wave of relief, one that has you beaming down at him. He returns the smile weakly as you unseat yourself, plopping down on the soft mattress while he scrambles into the new position. 

“Scared the shit out of me.” You don’t know why you admit it. Maybe your brain is too foggy for censors. “Thought I was doing horrible.”

“Nah, fuck that.” Van’s lining up again. “Could just feel you getting tired. Figured I could return the favor.”

He takes your cue from the way you open your thighs wider, shift your hips up to meet him. He slides in easily, and as the shock of the interruption fades away you can feel your orgasm coming back to the surface, just as strong as it’d been previously.

Van takes his favor-returning duties seriously, fucking you with all he’s got. It’s different from last time. You’ve already set the rules and he follows them meticulously: sudden thrusts in, followed by a torturous pause so you can fully appreciate him inside of you before a long, slow withdraw where you can feel every inch of him. It’s too much and not enough at the same time, and when you’re on the brink you haul him in with a hand on his jaw for a kiss, gasping for air against his open mouth.

Van comes first despite his heroic efforts to hold off. Your only warning is a few moments of loose hips before he’s cursing, his hand slapping the headboard as he clenches it, exhaling your name.

Your only response is to kiss him. His lips are soft and pliant, moving easily against yours now that any tension has leaked out of his body, and you slip a hand between your bodies, desperate to feel as relaxed as him.

“Don’t,” Van slurs. Your fingers had already started tight circles against your clit, but Van bumps your hand away. “Quit, lemme.”

“I can do it,” You huff, your desperation putting you on edge.

“I know you can.” You can hear the amusement in Van’s voice as he pulls out and ties off the condom, leaning over to deposit it in a trash can you didn’t know existed. “But m’not inept either.”

After another impatient huff from you, Van’s fingertips are pressed tight against your clit, working it in loose circles. He doesn’t linger too low and you’re grateful for that, already feeling the tenderness start to catch up to you. He’s careful and precise, hanging onto your every noise as he tries to get it right, and when he succeeds you reward him by calling out his name over, and over, and over.

To your surprise, you open your eyes to Van sticking the fingers he’d touched you with into his mouth without any hesitation. 

Your eyes feel like they’re about to bug out of your head. “Why are you doing that?”

There’s a wet noise as Van’s lips release his fingers. “Needed to clean ‘em off.”

“You could’ve asked me to pass you something. The blanket’s right here.” You reach to the floor and grab the soft fabric, showing it to him for emphasis.

Van just looks at you quizzically, cocking his head. “Why would I wipe off on a blanket?”

“I just, y’know,” You flounder for an explanation, especially under Van’s gaze. “If you’re not into the taste, or something. I dunno.”

Van shrugs. “Into your taste just fine.”

You can’t keep the surprise off of your face. “Oh. Alright.”

“I’ll have to show you next time,” Van says with a joking wink before getting up, heading for the bathroom.

As soon as he’s turned his back you bury your face in nearest pillow, beaming into it. Next time. 

You sit up straight when you hear the toilet flush, regaining your composure. 

When Van comes back into the bedroom he immediately grabs for a pack of cigarettes and a lighter resting on the bedside table. He offers you the box, but this time you shake your head.

“Let’s see how these sheets look,” He says, cigarette bobbing loosely between his lips as he makes the few strides to the bedroom door, lifting the dimmer and illuminating the room.

It feels out of place to be naked with the lights on, and you reach over and grab the throw blanket off of the floor, wrapping it around yourself again as you stand to take your turn using the bathroom. You examine the sheets with Van, and they look no worse for wear except for a slight wet spot marking the spot on the bed where you’d came.

“Just that bit,” You acknowledge, gesturing to the spot. “Sorry.”

Van pulls the cigarette from his mouth, rolling his eyes playfully as he exhales smoke. “It’s nothin’. It’ll be dry in a few seconds. Go freshen up, love.”

Your cheeks heat up at the nickname, and you head for the en suite so Van doesn’t see.

“Do you need anything from downstairs?” You ask after you’ve taken your customary after-sex pee. “I gotta go get my clothes.”

Van’s perched on the remade bed, finishing off his cigarette in only his briefs. “You’re gonna put your clothes back on?”

“I mean, I gotta wear clothes in the Uber,” You joke.

“You don’t have to Uber home,” Van says, ashing the butt of his cigarette out in an ashtray. “I was gonna make us a fry up tomorrow.”

His britishness catches you off guard, and you laugh. “I have no idea what that is.”

“Oh, no way. It’s a big breakfast!” He gestures with his hands, “Eggs, bacon, sausage, the whole works! It’s fucking class. What d’ya say?”

You hold up your hands in playful surrender, even though it causes your blanket to sag. “I was only leaving because I didn’t know what you had going on! But that sounds good.”

You try not to read too much into how pleased Van looks at your agreement to stay.

“But I’ve still gotta go downstairs and get my bag,” You tell him, “So do you still need anything?”

“I’ll go with ya.” Van lights his second cigarette. “Could use a cup of tea.”

You two return to the mess you’ve made of the living room; throw pillows smushed from being under your bodies, clothes strewn on the floor, drinks lukewarm on the table now. Van takes your can of Coke and his empty beer bottle around the corner into the kitchen, while you gather up your clothes and purse before following him.

“Ugh, ready to take these things out,” You complain, fishing through your bag for the contact case you’d packed. You hadn’t wanted to assume Van would want you to stay over, but it was always best to be prepared.

“Take what out?” Van mumbles, turning to look at you from where he was standing over the stove babysitting a tea kettle.

“My contacts.” You open the case up on the island, not bothering to wash your hands before getting the dry lenses out easily with your finger, depositing them in the fresh solution you’d been sure to fill the case with. Van watches the whole spectacle curiously.

Even though your vision is blurry once you’re done sealing the case and putting it back in your bag, you can still see Van’s smirk.

“What?”

“Nothin’,” Van sing-songs, his voice going up an octave. “Seems like you came pretty prepared, s’all.”

You scoff. “I take a contact case with me everywhere, thank you very much,” You lie.

Van snorts. “With the liquid already in it?”

You blanch, caught. Van laughs in delight.

“Oh, shut up,” You huff. “How about you tell me about that breakfast you already planned for us, huh?” You make your way around the island to him, gently jabbing him in the stomach. He pokes you back. It’s tit-for-tat until you’re both laughing, interrupted only by the tea kettle coming to a boil.

By the time you’re back upstairs, Van nursing a warm mug of tea, your post-orgasm exhaustion is at its peak. It had taken all your strength to climb the two flights of stairs, and you don’t think twice about crawling into bed wearing only your underwear until you hear Van fussing with the closet door.

“Here,” He takes a plain black t-shirt off of a hanger, tossing it to you. You accept it graciously, slipping it on before tucking yourself under the sheets, eyelids heavy.

When Van slides into bed next to you he doesn’t seem ready to sleep, picking up his mug of tea instead.

“Jet lagged?” You ask, peering up at him from your spot nestled in his blankets. Everything smells deliciously like him, and you have to actively resist the urge to look like a creep that sniffs everything.

“Kinda,” Van smiles down at you. “Don’t sleep much in general, though. Always been quite hyper.”

His declaration doesn’t surprise you. Considering all the fidgeting, humming, toe-tapping, and fingertip drumming he seems to be doing every moment, you have no doubts about his boundless energy. 

“Hm,” You murmur, yawning. “Well, lucky you.” You pat his leg under the blankets before flipping over.

You can’t help but imagine what it might be like to actually see Van tired. What it might be like for him to lay with you in bed, your body wrapped around his. With that on your mind, you doze off quick.

\\

You’re disoriented when you open your eyes, expecting to be in your own bedroom. Instead you’re greeted by the bright L.A. sunlight, the shades pulled across the window seemingly useless in filtering it out.

Van’s not in bed. There’s his mug from last night on the nightstand, and the blankets and pillows are ruffled, but the bathroom is clearly empty.

You’d totally forgotten to ask him for a phone charger last night, something you only remember when you go to check the time only to be greeted with an unresponsive screen. 

You decide to climb out of bed and see if Van’s actually following through on his promise of breakfast. It’s foreign to you, wandering around a stranger’s house. You’re usually the type to roll back over and go to sleep until you know for sure other people are awake. You’ve never been the one to make yourself at home, using the kitchen or the television without permission. But considering Van doesn’t seem the type to head back to bed, this seemed like your best bet.

Midway down the first staircase you realize that you don’t have pants on. You could head back upstairs and grab your clothes but decide against it, praying Van’s not the type to have company at this time.

Thankfully Van’s right where you anticipated. You hear his singing ringing out through the living area before you’ve even turned the corner to the kitchen, along with the clatter of pots and pans. The acoustic guitar that had been resting on the bed last night is propped against the coffee table now. He must’ve been up for a while now.

“Hey,” You say softly when you round the corner. It’s only for Van’s benefit, so he’s not startled by your presence, but he doesn’t miss a beat in the song he’s singing, only grinning at you as he continues. You smile to yourself when his back is turned. Of course he’s not one to scare easily.

He’s definitely been to sleep, considering his pillow-mussed hair and the fact he’s still only in his underwear. You admire the way the muscles in his back flex as he scours through the fridge, procuring ingredients.

“What time is it?” You ask, peering around for any sort of microwave or oven clock.

“Half nine,” Van chirps, bumping the fridge door closed with his hip, a carton of eggs and a frozen pack of bacon in his hands.

“Oh.” You intertwine your fingers together. “So, uh. Is that, like, eight-thirty or nine-thirty…?”

“Nine-thirty,” Van elaborates. He glances at you over his shoulder from his position at the counter. “Do you not say that here?”

“I���ve never heard it,” You shrug. Van nods as he processes your answer.

“So, what are you making again?” You stop leaning on the island in favor of approaching the counter, looking over the various foods sitting out. “A stir fry?”

“Well, about that…” Van says sheepishly, opening the carton of eggs. “I was gonna do a whole fry up, but like I said, I haven’t been to the shops in forever. So how do you feel about just eggs, bacon, toast?”

“Sounds lovely,” You tell him, continuing to hover around him.

Van cracks whatever eggs are left in the carton into a mixing bowl, leaving the eggshells in the nearby sink.

“Do you need any help?” You ask, feeling terribly annoying while you just watch.

“Nah.” Van shrugs you off. “Just keep me company.”

“I’ll sit down, then, instead of being in your personal space.”

“You’re gonna sit all the way over there?” Van whines when you tug one of the island stools out to sit on.

“There’s no other place to sit!” You exclaim.

“Right here,” Van slaps his palm down on the counter.

“I don’t have pants on!” You insist. “I’m not gonna put my bare ass on your kitchen counters.”

“I need you over here!” Van argues. “I need someone to help supervise!”

“Then how about I pull the stool closer?” You start to drag your seat over the tile floor.

“Then it’ll just be in the way. Come sit up here and talk to me.”

You pretend to be inconvenienced by his request, sighing as you hoist yourself up on a section of counter not currently being used to prepare food. The marble is cold against the back of your thighs, and you cringe.

You watch Van diligently mix the eggs with some milk using a whisk. With the way his head’s bent, you can see how crooked the part of his hair has become from sleep.

“C’mere,” You gesture. Van looks up from what he’s doing.

“Your hair is driving me nuts,” You elaborate. When he’s looking up at you it’s even more unruly.

Van abandons the mixing bowl, setting it aside in favor of coming to stand in front of you. 

“You don’t like my morning hair?” He teases. He lets you maneuver the angle of his head and stands there patiently as you start to pick at the strands.

“Love it,” You assure him, “But if I’m going to supervise I’ve got to make sure you look presentable.” Once his part is sitting correctly you comb your fingers through the ends, managing to get about half of them to lay uniformly. It’s an improvement. You pat his shoulder, satisfied.

When he looks up at you, your faces are awkwardly close.

“Thanks,” Van murmurs, and you watch the way his eyes dart down to your lips before flickering back up. Your hand still hasn’t left his shoulder.

“Yeah,” Is all you manage to say, any witty or funny remarks disintegrating on your tongue. You wait for an interruption, for Van to jerk away and remember the food he needs to tend to. But he doesn’t.

His lips press into yours instead. It’s the first time you guys have kissed without an impending sense of urgency. Van brings his hands up to rest on your waist, his fingertips fidgeting with the hem of your borrowed shirt. You sling your arms around his neck, tugging him closer, savoring every moment.

You spread your knees apart, making space for him to fit his hips between them, pleased to get him even closer.

Van pulls away to breathe and you rest your head on his shoulder, trying to hide your smile. It occurs to you when you turn your face and admire the long lines of his neck that you’ve never paid much attention to it. 

You can feel Van melting into your arms as you start at his shoulder and mouthe your way up. You don’t intend to leave any marks, but that doesn’t stop you from letting your teeth graze him a couple times so you can hear the way he sucks the air through his teeth at the feeling. You can feel his pulse right at his jaw, and you press your lips there firmly for a moment, marveling at how his pulse skitters against his skin.

“Christ,” Van murmurs. Your lips curve into a smile where they’re pressed against him.

You’d planned to be done at his jaw, but curiosity gets the better of you and you let your lips travel higher, trying to feel for his pulse behind his ear. The ends of his hair tickle your nose as you search for it, but feeling his heart stutter again is worth it.

When Van can’t take anymore he turns his head, bringing his lips to yours. Your hand comes to rest on the side of the neck and you don’t know if you’re imagining it but Van seems to lean into it. You tense your fingertips, digging them into his skin just slightly, experimentally, and Van deepens the kiss. 

You make a small, satisfied noise as you break away from him. “You don’t happen to keep condoms in your kitchen, do you?”

You’d been feeling Van get hard the entire time, but when he pulls away you marvel at how terrible he is at concealing his desire; his pupils are blown, there’s a fresh flush to his cheeks, and his chest is visibly rising with every breath.

“I don’t, no,” He runs his hand through his hair, successfully reversing your attempts to make him look presentable. “I’ll go grab one from my wallet.”

“Hurry,” You urge him, pleased at how quickly he turns to leave the kitchen. He’s still just as handsome from behind, and you marvel at how his briefs hug his ass before he spins, catching you.

“Stop ogling at me!” He teases. You stick your tongue out at him.

With Van gone, it’s just you and the abandoned mixing bowl of eggs alone in the kitchen. You take a deep breath, kick your legs out from the counter awkwardly, and count the seconds until he returns, condom in hand.

“Okay,” He sets the condom down on the counter, and loops his fingers into the waistband of your underwear. “Hips up,” He quips.

You obey, pressing your palms flat against the counter so you can get your hips into the air and Van can get your underwear down. Van tugs his own briefs down his legs easily, kicking them away. You watch them slide across the kitchen tile.

Van opens the condom, giving himself a few quick tugs in preparation to roll it on. At the sight of him you swallow nervously, the visual reminder bringing the ache between your legs to the forefront of your attention.

“Go easy on me, okay?” You laugh, but the slight waver of your voice betrays your nerves. Van’s too smart for any sugarcoating. His blue eyes snap up to meet your gaze, all seriousness, a silent questioning.

You give him a slight smile, crinkling your nose. “I’m sore.”

Realization dawns over him. “Gotcha,” He nods.

Van positions himself between your knees, using his hands on your hips to gently guide you to the edge of the counter.

“I feel like I’m gonna fall off,” You whine. Van only smiles, still looking down at your bodies.

“I need you right here at the edge,” He explains, letting go of you when he’s satisfied. 

“You sound like an expert.” It’s a dangerous joke to make, something twisting at your stomach at the sudden thought of other girls having this same kind of morning with Van.

“Not even fucking close,” He assures you, and your stomach unknots.

He works on lining himself up, but you can tell the way your body is curved in order to have your arms wrapped around his shoulders is making an odd angle that’ll be uncomfortable. 

“Don’t go yet,” You plead, suddenly desperate to try a different position. He stills, his eyes flickering to yours.

“This angle isn’t gonna work,” You answer his unspoken question. “I think I need to…” 

You don’t finish the rest of your sentence, opting to carefully lean back instead. You have to bend your neck to fit under the cabinet, and push a knife block a little off to the side, but eventually your shoulders come to rest on the cool tile of the wall. It’s uncomfortable, to say the least, but it allows your hips to tilt back. Your hands grapple for the most comfortable way to keep yourself from slipping off of the edge of the marble.

Van looks amused. “You good?”

You nod.

“We don’t have to do it in here you know,” He gestures with his hand towards the exit to the kitchen. “I can lay you out on the couch or somethin’.”

“In here’s fine,” You insist. You’d never had kitchen sex before, and your curiosity about the experience was stronger than the ache in your neck. 

Van playfully throws his hands up in surrender. “Okay then,” He laughs, before positioning your hips again and lining himself up for the second time. “You ready, then?”

With your eager nod Van slides in. He goes slow, his brow furrowed. You can tell he’s taking your request to be gentle to heart.

He’s careful not to bottom out, and from your position sitting back can see the restraint he’s exercising, how tight and rigid his body stays while he starts thrusting, shallow, slow.

It aches but only slightly, and it’s an incredible reminder of last night. Your hands scrabble against the countertop, desperate for anything to hold on to. They find nothing. There’s nothing you can do except hold as still as possible to keep your balance.

Van’s an absolute vision, the morning sun beaming through through the kitchen and making him glow. You watch the sweat glisten on his chest, the way he looks like he’s so lost in you he wants to close his eyes. He seems determined to keep them open, watching your every expression. You can see the muscles in his stomach flex with each movement, the angle of the sunlight creating a tiny shadow near his bellybutton. It’s too much. You close your eyes.

That only makes it worse, though, only forces you to focus solely on how the movement of him against you feels. You’re forced to lay there, completely still, the image of Van burned behind your eyelids. The pleasure is making you feel like you’re about to crawl out of your skin, and not having an outlet is driving you nuts. You slap your sweaty palm against the countertop. Van doesn’t even flinch.

“Holy shit,” You gasp, tipping your head back against the cool tile, finally opening your eyes to the bottom of the wooden cabinet. “I can’t fucking take this anymore,” You heave.

Van’s forced to stop thrusting when you manage to get your legs around his waist, bringing his hips flush against yours as you work your way back into the sitting position you were originally in before you had the idea to sit back. There’s the uncomfortable tickle in your stomach as the angle changes, and you hope things will work this way. At this point, anything feels better than laying there helplessly.

“Sorry,” You breathe, back to wrapping your arms around his neck, pulling him in for a sloppy yet gratifying kiss.

“Don’t be,” Van brings your lips together again. He’s got he slightest bit of stubble growing. It’s too light to be visible, but you feel the slight scratch of it against your lips and bring your palm up to rub your thumb over his jawline, feeling the hairs.

You keep your legs around Van’s waist but relax them enough so that he’s got room to move. He takes it as an invitation, starting to fuck into you again, and makes a noise low in his throat. You can’t decipher if it’s from pleasure or discomfort, but it sounds urgent. 

“Okay?” You ask, craning your neck away from where you’d been examining his freckles in extreme detail, getting a full view of his face instead.

“Yeah.”

You raise your eyebrows at how strained his voice sounds.

Van runs his hand through his hair, the strands that hang near his forehead damp with sweat.

You’ve stopped watching his face, your eyes instead wandering to the top of his shoulder, the little freckles that pepper him there. You only see his expression out of your peripheral vision when he finally speaks, his voice low: “It’s fucking tight.”

He sounded hesitant to say it, as if worried you’d take offence, but instead you lean over to start kissing the freckles on his shoulder you’d just longingly gazed at. Your stomach lights up at the way he sounded, vulnerable and maybe shy, different from the ever-confident Van you’re used to. You hide your smile in his neck and breathe in his scent while you’re there.

You could already tell you wouldn’t be able to come in this new position, last night’s ache becoming slightly too pronounced, but you were more than happy to let Van keep going. You spend the time alternating between kissing him deeply and kissing his neck, and letting your hands wander over any bit of his skin you can reach. An orgasm almost sneaks up on you, your thighs tensing of their own accord, but Van gets there first. It’s the quietest he’s ever been, shaking through it breathlessly, head pressed into your neck, your fingers still playing with the ends of his hair, which looks almost blonde in the morning sun.

Van catches your cringe as he pulls out.

“Did it hurt?” He asks, voice rough.

“Nothing serious,” You assure him. “It was worth it.”

He ties the condom off and opens one of the cupboard doors below you, leaning over to deposit it in the trash.

It takes a second for your head to wrap around the way he sinks to his knees suddenly.

“What are you doing?” You sound more frantic than you’d meant to.

“You’re sensitive, yeah?” Van raises his eyebrows at you for confirmation. You nod, stunned to silence.

“This is about as gentle as it gets,” He shrugs. “As long as you’re good with it?”

“Um, yeah,” You stammer. “You could give it a try.”

It’s hard to form words correctly when Van’s face is right between your legs, looking at you in all your after-sex glory. You have to actively resist the urge to squirm away and cover yourself, your cheeks heating in self-consciousness.

If Van notices your discomfort he doesn’t show it, only looking pleased that you’ve given him permission.

You can’t stand watching him lean forward, opting instead to tip your head back towards the ceiling and squeeze your eyes shut, waiting for him to begin.

You tense up when you feel it. Van’s warm breath tickles you before you feel the wet slide of his tongue against you. You jolt. He gives a few more experimental licks, slow and languid, moving around, and your fingers tangle in his hair instinctually.

It’s not that you don’t want it. It’d be a lie to say you’ve never thought back on that night in San Diego and wondered absentmindedly about things taking a different turn in his hotel room. Your sleepy mind curiously twisting the events, wondering if he’d be any good at this.

But as curious as you were, the thing about head is it always just seemed to be a grand waste of time for you. On the very few occasions you’d been on the receiving end, the act had consisted of slimy, uncomfortable exploration with movements too inconsistent to get you anywhere. And worse, it was treated as a gift, one you were inevitably supposed to return. The lackluster results along with the heavy implications meant you tended to keep your distance.

But after some exploration Van seems locked in on his mission. You dare to peer down at him when you feel him start to find a rhythm, one that has your legs opening wider without your control. His eyes are squeezed shut, his nose brushing against you with every lick, and when he exhales hot air you can’t help but shiver.

You let go of his hair, your knuckles aching from your tight grip, but Van makes a noise. It’s too quiet for you to hear, but you jerk as you feel the vibrations against you, the message loud and clear. You rush to grab his hair again, flustered.

The better it starts to feel the more apparent it becomes that he’s in the wrong spot, a different area starting to throb for his attention. Without really thinking about it you use his hair to herd him to the other spot. He’s just licked firmly against it, your legs quivering, when he sits back on his knees.

“Done?” You ask, surprised to hear disappointment in your tone.

“Nah,” Van wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand. “Need a breath.” 

Your shoulders sag with a relief you didn’t know you felt.

“How is it?” He croaks, peering up at you.

“Good,” You answer out of habit, before realizing how true it is. “Really, really good.”

“You like the spot I was in?” He inquires, gearing up to keep going. The way he sets his jaw in determination makes your mouth go dry.

“The one higher up,” You clarify, your voice only slightly above a whisper. “Yeah.”

And without further ado he’s back at it, resuming in exactly the same spot, a miracle that leaves you speechless.

There’s nothing unexpected about your orgasm. It’s a steady build, the pressure between your legs becoming more and more unbearable as Van’s tongue works firmly against you. He incorporates his lips in some mysterious way you’ve never experienced, and uses his palms to press your thighs open when you’re too clenched to keep them open yourself. He’s eager to please, treating any noises you let slip as feedback. You moan his name as praise and Van preens under the attention.

It’s a long descent back to Earth, your head spinning when it’s all over. The first thing you realize is that you’re awkwardly petting Van’s hair, smoothing your palms over the strands subconsciously. You pull your hands away as Van leans back, catching his breath.

“Sorry,” You murmur.

“Hm?” Van busies himself wiping his mouth. You can see his chin glistening from you.

Your head’s too foggy to clearly remember why you even said sorry, let alone explain it to Van. “I dunno,” You say instead.

“Can you pass me one of those?” Van asks, gesturing to a roll of paper towel that’s within arm’s reach of you. You rip away a few squares for him and pass them over.

“That went better than expected,” You confess breathlessly.

“Yeah?” Van cocks his head, looking amused. “Thought I wouldn’t be any good?”

“Not at all! I mean- that’s not what I meant,” You giggle, trying to find the right words somewhere in your haze. “I’m just surprised I came. It’s never happened from that.”

Van blinks at you. “No shit?”

“Yeah, I’ve never. Until now. But I don’t really let anyone do that. Swore it off a few years ago.”

“But you let me?”

“I mean, yeah,” You shrug. “I’ve never had anyone, like, want to. I’m not gonna beg for something useless.”

“Never had anyone want to?” Van looks stunned as he uses the edge of the counter to help himself off of his knees. “Who the fuck have you been with?”

It sounds hypothetical, so you don’t answer. Van shakes his head to himself as he leans over, washing his hands in the sink.

“We’ll have to do it again sometime. Properly. That angle was kind of shit.”

You smile. “I mean, I thought it was pretty nice.”

Van smiles too, sliding down the counter so he’s in front of you. He leans in for a kiss, and even though you can taste yourself on his lips you let him. 

“It can be better. You just gotta gimme another chance,” He says playfully when you two separate. 

He’s joking, but you can hear he’s being genuine underneath.

“I mean, if you want,” You shrug, indifferent.

“Oh, I want,” He assures you with a wink. “Anyway, are you still hungry?”

“I’m starving,” You groan. “But I really need to rinse off, if you don’t mind.”

“Course I don’t mind. I’ll set you up in the bathroom and then get breakfast going for real this time.”

He reaches down for his discarded briefs, slipping them on before leading you back up to his bedroom, getting the shower in the en suite going for you. 

Once you’re done showering, smelling like all of Van’s products and wrapped in a giant, fluffy towel, you slip out of the bathroom and into Van’s room. You perch on the edge of his bed, reaching for your phone which has finally powered on with the help of a borrowed charger.

There’s a ton of texts from Mary, her curiosity growing the longer you haven’t responded. You listen closely for any sign of Van, but there’s silence. He’s still in the kitchen working on breakfast. You dial Mary’s number.

“Holy shit, finally!” Mary exclaims down the line. “How was last night?”

“I’m um,” You keep your voice low, still paranoid Van might come upstairs to check on you at any moment. “I’m still here.”

“No fucking way,” Mary hisses. “You stayed the night?”

“Yeah. But hey, listen, I don’t have too long, he’s making breakfast-”

“Breakfast?” Mary interrupts. “Like, what kind of breakfast? He can microwave oatmeal?”

You snort. “No, like a real breakfast! Eggs and stuff.”

“Shut the fuck up. I knew he was perfect the first night we met him!”

“Mary, listen!” You hiss. “I gotta tell you about what just happened!”

“This is gonna be good.”

“Oh, it’s better than good. He’s, like… Wow.”

\\

Read Chapter 3 here

[thequietuptown]

How does someone go about helping themselves when the list of things that needs addressed is a mile long? I can't even organize my thoughts enough to pinpoint where would be a helpful or manageable place to start. I'm going to be going to therapy hopefully by the new year (finding a therapist is harder than I thought, and I keep running into roadblocks), but I'm afraid I'll either be less than truthful out of trauma response, or show up with a full binder of spreadsheets and timelines and lists of all my symptoms and what I think things mean. I'll give either too much all at once, or not enough to be able to make progress. I've been trying to go it alone, and just as soon as I make headway in one area I lose ground in another, or something out of my control happens that sends me into a complete tailspin (Faire has been one mirror maze after another this year, and being more aware of myself and my reactions has brought to light some mental health issues that I hadn't expected). Anyway, I'm barely managing life at this point, and I'm at a loss as to how I can make it until I find a therapist.

Hey there, friend,

I'm sorry to hear you're struggling so much right now. I am beyond proud of you for trying to get into therapy and for recognizing where you are right now. I think, especially with the pandemic, there's this overarching pull from society to just go back to the way things were, and we simply cannot do that. Our world has shifted, and resuming business as normal as going to produce a lot of strain for so many of us who are already feeling overwhelmed. I don't just want to say hang in there, but I can tell you that you are absolutely not alone.

As far as what to do when you're feeling paralyzed by the to-do list, I can give you a few things that seem to work for me and some things that I know work for others. For me personally, I hate lists. The very idea of a list feels like at best a waste of time and energy in creating the list and at worst a way to feel like I haven't done anything or haven't done enough, and that's bullshit because I know I'm doing the best I can each day and my laziness is largely a myth. In the past I have had success in listing things I have already accomplished or giving friends status updates about all the menial things I have had to do so that someone other than me can validate that accomplishment. Another thing that I have felt has helped has just been ranting about all the things I have to do so that someone can commiserate with me because that way I'm at least putting it all out there that I know I have to do it, I know it's going to suck, and I know that I'm still going to do it, and I think there's a quiet relief in that that helps me to feel like everything is going to be okay.

As far as getting over that initial hurdle, I love the concept of body doubling, as in just having another person there with you. It doesn't really matter if they're actively assisting you, or if they're working on their own things nearby, but having another person around to answer questions like "Do I really need this empty thread spool when I already have thirty others?" can really help with executive dysfunction. Setting up this parallel chore time can really help shift your momentum not only because it's something you can readily accomplish, but it also helps prioritize that to-do list. Are there things I need to do with this other person? Are there things I can do Infront of this other person that are not going to cause feelings of dread and shame?

The hurdle is real, and it's absolutely understandable to feel that paralyzing anxiety when you are already overwhelmed. That's why first and foremost we need to make sure that we are engaging in self-care. It's the whole making sure your oxygen mask is secured and inflating in the event of a sudden loss of cabin pressure thing. We can't start tackling the things we need to do if we aren't first taking care of our own needs. It just simply isn't sustainable. It's okay to feel overwhelmed, and it's especially okay to take a moment for yourself and to treat yourself in some way before trying to do what you need to do.

I'm proud of you, friend. I hope this helps.

[riverboundao3ff]

Riverbound, Chapter 11

You are THE GUARDIAN, and you’re currently listening to the sound of your girlfriend murdering people.

Okay, so you’re not a judgy person, because that’s like, your thing. You’re the listening ear, the shoulder to cry on. You’re the bridge between tattered hearts and the friend that keeps them safe. You also know that Polypa kills people for a living. She’s an assassin, and that’s her thing.

None of that stops you from nearly passing out as you listen to the death rattle of some teenager.

The brief whine of psionics makes you taste metal. You brace for another series of wet gasps, but all you get is a dull thud of a body hitting the floor.

Fuck my life. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck--

You hear your alien moirail call your name, and it sounds like she’s talking to you underwater. Unthinkingly, you reach out, grab a fistful of space-time, and drag yourself a few meters downwards. Man, if Ultimate Dirk could see you right now he’d laugh until he shit himself.

Oh, hey, you’re falling now.

There’s a thump as another body hits the floor, except now it’s your body.

Something shoves your shoulder, and then rolls you over on your back. You look up into Polypa’s bemused face. There’s a bit of golden blood on her cheek.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

You try and say “Yeah,” but what comes out sounds more like “Unngh.”

“Okay. You can stay down there if you want.”

She flips you back over on your stomach, rifles around in the backpack, and pulls out a bomb and some papers you assume are the instructions. You guess she’s setting it, because you hear her messing around with the thing.

Come on, get back up. Come on.

You get one arm underneath you, then the other. Somehow you rise to both feet, force yourself to keep your eyes away from the bloody bodies tossed into the corner and aimed literally anywhere else. They end up settling on Polypa.

“Watch this.” She stomps on a tile a few times, making it flip up on one side. Carefully, like she’s setting down a piece of valuable art, she places the bomb underneath and lets the tile fall back into place. “This whole factory is probably older than the damn Grand Highblood. It’s like they’re asking to get infiltrated.”

She’s trying to distract you, which you appreciate even if it’s not working that well. “... Well, next time I see him I’ll ask.”

“You…” Polypa just stares at you for a moment before scrubbing her face with her hands. “Of course. I’m gonna go take care of the bodies. Be right back.”

“Yeah.” You check your watch. Has it really only been four minutes? This was going to be a lot quicker than you thought it was going to be. As long as no more people got hurt, everything was right on track.

You’re not looking, but you can hear Polypa shoving the dead goldbloods into the janitorial closest on the other side of the room. It won’t do anything to deter a troll from investigating the suspicious scene-- even you can pick up on the stench of death with your crappy human nose, but if something went to shit then it would hopefully buy the two of you a couple of extra seconds.

Polypa comes back, wiping her hands on her pants like she does this sort of thing every day, and hey, maybe she does. She reaches for your hand. You have to force yourself to take it without hesitation.

Mission now, feelings later.

“Ready?” you ask.

“Yeah.”

You concentrate hard on the map Tyzias showed you, and then on a spot with no other people around, and jump.

This time you get much luckier. The computer room the both of you appear in is abandoned, and the lights are off. Nobody’s been here for a while, which helps you feel a little better, but for the umpteenth time in the last few days you can barely see anything.

You sling off the backpack and pull out another bomb. “What time do we set them for?”

“Just let me do it. I know you can’t see.”

“But I haven’t even done anything yet on this mission!” You fumble around with the bomb and feel the timer buttons underneath your fingers. “What time?”

Quick as a flash, the explosive is swiped from your hands. “Nope.”

“Polypa! Come on.”

“With your luck you’ll just set the thing off.”

“What, no faith in your own moirail? That stings,” you huff. She’s right, though. You like to think yourself a bringer of good fortune and even greater shenanigans, but you can’t deny the occasional nightmare you have over a timeline gone wrong. It’s never the entire situation, which you’re grateful for, because you’ve already got enough trauma to last the rest of your possibly immortal life but it’s still enough to make you nervous about going to sleep. You don’t know if it’s good or bad that you don’t remember everything about the other “outcomes”.

Then you realize you’ve just been standing there, staring off into the darkness for who knows how long, so you huff and cross your arms to let Polypa know you’re still alive.

“Done. Also, there isn’t a timer for these things. Tagora has the detonator,” she tells you.

“Cool. I knew that.”

“Sure you did.”

You kick at the sound of her voice and miss horribly. She snickers, shoves your shoulder, almost knocking you over when you trip over something that feels like a cord.

All of the computers wake up in a blaze of light that nearly blinds you. You freeze in place, and Polypa covers her eyes with a hiss.

No alarms go off-- none that you can hear, anyways, but you’re not wasting any time. You lunge for your alien girlfriend and zap the both of you right the hell out of there.

The next place you appear in looks like some sort of basement. You’re still in the drone factory, because your space-time spidey sense says so. It’s damp and gross and you’re fairly certain your left shoe is in something nasty.

Neither you or Polypa move or make any noise for what feels like hours. You know it’s only like, thirty seconds, but goddamn if it doesn’t take forever to get the courage to take a step closer to your moirail.

“You good?”

“Yeah.” She smacks you upside the head.

“Ow! Hey, it wasn’t my fault! You pushed me!”

“Sometimes I wonder how you’ve survived for this long.”

“Yeah, dude, me too.”

You’re pretty sure that nobody else is around, so you peek out from behind a big furnace-looking thing to get a better view of your surroundings. There isn’t much to see-- dust bunnies, junk, more junk, pipes… hey, are those more computers?

“Hey, Polypa? Is it normal for a creepy old basement to have a whole computer lab?” you ask, trotting over to investigate.

“Uh, I mean, I’ve seen movies?” she offers, leaning over your shoulder to see what you’re looking at. Something in your gut is telling you that this particular point in space and time matters. Intuition rarely fails you, so you listen to what the universe has to say.

You tap on what you assume is the spacebar on a particularly fancy-looking monitor. The screen lights up, presenting a login bar alongside a shutdown option, with a background depicting some anime character Tegiri most likely would have been able to name.

“Pfft, okay, whose goofy weeb ass works here? I just wanna know,” you snort.

“Why is this important?”

“I just have a feeling. Any ideas as to what the password could be?”

“... Why would I know?”

“Boo, you’re no fun.”

By some miracle of the gods, or whatever higher power decided to watch over your crackhead self for the night, your eyes wander to a sticky note stuck on a folder that was half-buried under some paperwork. The writing on it is messy, but you’re able to make out six digits scrawled out in red ink.

0-0-0-4-1-3

Right. 413. That didn’t make your skin crawl in the slightest.

You type in the numbers and hit the enter key. Of course, it works.

“That’s weird,” Polypa mutters.

“Yeah, for real.”

“What are you looking for?”

“I have no idea.” You click on the Goregle icon, close out of it, draw a dick with the cursor on the desktop, and go into Settings and turn the volume down. Man, where was Mallek when you needed him? You wish he was here with you. He’d have a fuckin’ blast getting into this system, you just know it.

A dash of red catches your eye-- a desktop app shaped like the head of a drone. You click on it and are greeted with a spreadsheet full of dates and times, and next to every date is a location. There’s also notes on what trolls lived where, like Fangrash, which was predominantly rustblood, or Glitch, where a ton of goldbloods live.

It’s only when you see Outglut with today’s date beside it does it hit you. This isn’t just some company organizational bullshit.

These are plans for drone raids, and in three hours and however-many minutes Outglut was about to get carpet-bombed to hell.

“Polypa,” you whisper.

You feel her tense up beside you, hard as stone in a matter of seconds. “Oh, no. You don’t… oh, no. Yeah.”

She whips out her palmhusk and snaps a couple pictures. You stare down at your hands, forcing yourself to keep breathing. No, you are not going to have two panic attacks in one hour. You’re better than this. You’re the motherfucking First Guardian of the Universe, and you will keep your shit together--

You barely even notice Polypa kicking the third electro-bomb under the desk and throwing the carpet back over it until she’s right next to you.

“Let’s go.” She tugs at your sleeve, and you snap out of the haze you were falling into and throw yourself and your girlfriend through space and into another part of the factory.

The two of you don’t even bother putting the bombs close to the computer rooms anymore, not like it mattered in the first place. Tagora had said something about the radius of the electromagnetic explosion or whatever would be more than enough to encompass the whole factory, but you had tried to be precise anyways, because… you dunno, better safe than sorry. But that’s a luxury you no longer have. The bombs would wipe out all of the information the drones collected, but it wouldn’t be enough to stop an attack.

Polypa leaves the last bomb in an air vent, and you wish it a merry exploding-day before teleporting back to the hideout, scaring the shit out of Tagora when you land right behind him.

“Augh!” He stares at you, then at Polypa, and hisses. “Don’t do that-!”

“That was fast,” Lanque comments.

“We got a problem! Once the drones complete their maintenance and shit they’re gonna bomb Outglut!” you explain frantically. “Polypa and I found a schedule for when the raids happen.”

Tagora and Tyzias both stare at you, dumbfounded. Stelsa, who was doing her lipstick, fumbles with the tube and drops it on the floor. Lanque’s ears pin back and he slowly gets to his feet.

“Just look,” Polypa says, shoving her palmhusk at Tagora. Tagora takes it and zooms in on the picture. Somehow, his eyes grow even wider.

Tyzias groans and drops her head into her hands. “Well, fuck me right up, isn’t this just perfect. Please tell me that you guys got the bombs delivered.”

“We did.”

“Good.”

“The last recovery mission took three wipes to complete, and that was only one neighborhood. How the hell are we…” Lanque just shakes his head in dismay.

Your mind races, trying to figure out a possible solution.

Ask Azdaja to hack into everybody’s palmhusks and tell them to GTFO? No, you’re pretty sure that if it was that easy it would have already been done. Rally the whole neighborhood and try and take down the drones together? As if. You can’t stop your subconscious from playing back the memories of various raids you’d heard about or been near-- the explosions that seemed to shake the very planet, the screaming, the wail of the sirens that haunted you in your nightmares.

Wait.

“The sirens,” you mutter.

Stelsa turns to you. “What?”

“The sirens! We find them and set them off early. I don’t know how much of a difference it’ll make, but maybe it could give everybody a head start,” you explain.

“That is… highly illegal. The sirens aren’t activated until a certain amount of hives have already been destroyed,” Tagora points out.

“And?”

“It would be a shame if you were to find them. On the corner of Slimewash and Bryght Street,” he continues. “Of course, they’re usually set off remotely, but the system is actually quite simple. It wouldn’t take much to rewire it and trigger it manually.”

Despite everything you can’t help but smile a little. “Yeah, that would suck.”

Stelsa winces, looking almost fearful, before grabbing Tyzias’s hand. “Is this really worth the risk?”

“To save people’s lives? Yes. If you don’t want to come that’s fine, though,” you tell her, before remembering you know jack shit about rewiring things. “... Actually, it would be nice if somebody came along to tell me what wires go where or whatever.”

“If somebody sees you things could get bad real quick,” Polypa says quietly.

“Yep.”

“Then I’ll come.”

“I’m coming, too.” Lanque smirks. “I’m not ready to go back to the caverns just yet.”

You see the hesitation in Tyzias’s eyes as she glances at Stelsa, then at you, and then back to her matesprit. She’s torn between safety and the rebellion she leads, and you don’t blame her at all.

“You should go home,” you tell her. “A tealblood in a lowblooded neighborhood is probably gonna get some looks. Besides, the less people who see you guys with me in public, the better.”

Both Stelsa and Tyzias give you grateful looks, and some of the tension leaves Tagora’s bony shoulders. The highbloods aren’t just risking their lives, you know; they’re risking their reputation and status, too. And reputation and status are something you guys are gonna need sooner or later.

You blow out a breath. The bombs won’t be set off for another three hours. You’re way ahead of schedule, which is way better than being behind schedule, but that still leaves you and your friends with way too much time to kill before you need to do more crime.

“Sooo…” you say, not meeting any of the troll’s eyes. “What do y’all wanna do now?”

[mrsslrss]

2019.

Welcome to my annual accounting of things I loved, 2019 edition. 

I’m realizing the pattern here is to start this with a reflection of how I rang in the year but 2019 crept in pretty calmly: no big bugs to kill, no spontaneous sobs to a Sharon Van Etten song. On the first day of this year, I woke up and cleaned the house and, I don’t know, probably went to Big Bear and got a coffee and took a nap. Since it’s nearly the end of the decade, I could start there, but I couldn’t tell you where I was for New Year’s Eve, 2009; if I had to guess, I’d put myself at a friend’s house on the North Shore, drinking PBR with the guys and listening to pop-punk. That winter I was convinced I wouldn’t return to Poughkeepsie, I was so miserable, but when I did things started to fall into place.

I think my goal for this year was roughly something like, Just put your head down and do the work. When you are tempted to get fed up and wither from frustration or have a big ego about not getting what you want, just put your head down and do the work. I don’t know if I did that, exactly, if I really stuck to the goal, but every so often in a particularly challenging moment the goal would come into focus at the front of my mind and I’d sigh and acquiesce and nod at the work ahead of me. I got a lot done, I think; in this way I got a lot done. It was nice to be reminded about how the process can be the goal -- something I thought about a lot this year. Sometimes the goal looks like a result, but it’s really the habit I’m after.

I’d like to keep that up next year. 2019 was a year of cultivating; 2020, maybe, will be a year of action. Or maybe not! Maybe nothing flowers until 2021 or beyond. Or maybe I start tearing things up by the roots in 2020, who knows! 

So anyway. Here’s to 2019, and here’s a list (more or less alphabetized -- why not!) of ten things that helped me make it through.

annie’s homegrown birthday cake bunny grahams

My official snack of the year. Over the summer I was visiting MZ in Brooklyn and we got snacks at their neighborhood grocery store and I bought these, which are meant to celebrate the 30th anniversary of this snack company, taste like funfetti cake, and are definitely meant for/marketed to children. But anyway I ate the whole box and then sought them out at every Whole Foods in my vicinity (because I went online and WH is apparently basically the only place you can find them?) and started preaching the good word to anyone who was looking for a snack. By, like, September I had eaten so many of these that I could no longer stomach them, so I’ve been on a brief hiatus, but still: snack of the year.

keeping lists

I started this year with a big digital spreadsheet called “2019 things” where I intended to keep lists: all the new albums and songs that struck me, all the old albums and songs I got obsessed with, the places I wanted to travel in the year. I kept adding tabs: the books I finished, my financial priorities, stuff I wanted to make sure to read or watch. I was pretty diligent about updating them -- I wrote down every book I read, but definitely forgot to add a couple albums; I never made it to Philly this year. I started keeping gratitude lists (analog) towards the end of year, too, because in college a friend told me it helps rewire the brain away from pessimism, or something. 

meditation

Before this year, I’ve never had a serious relationship with meditation, but it always seemed like the kind of thing I would like. In mid-January I got struck by the urge to try it, so I did, and kept it up for a few days, and then I fell off, and then I got back on, and now, somehow, it’s been three-hundred-something days of it in a row. I have learned to find a quiet moment in a nice corner of my room before work, but also in a tent in the Catskills, in a guest room in Wales, in a hotel in Georgia, on a walk through Brooklyn, in my childhood bedroom. My life and brain don’t feel, like, enormously different or changed, but that’s good; it feels useful to keep showing up to something without expectation.

my siblings

Having a big family means every year is inevitably a big year for someone, but this was, somehow, a big year for all of my siblings. Mostly good things: health and healing, a wedding and a graduation, a license acquired and a course of study started and jobs well done. It doesn’t feel good to get into the hard stuff here, but there was a lot of that, too -- a lot of grueling bullshit overcome. After the wedding I almost texted everyone just to say how proud I was of all of them, but naturally I chickened out. But I really am proud!

navy blue

Longtime readers of, uh, *gestures wildly* whatever this is may recall that last year I claimed I only wore black but might be interested in navy blue? This year I determined that navy blue is so good: the color of the deep ocean, the night sky, my first Catholic school uniform. I bought navy jumpsuits, a sweatshirt, a scrunchie. I wore navy-adjacent eyeliner just in the corners of my eyes most days of July and August and September. I’m wearing a navy blue sweater right now. A good year for navy. 

“not” by big thief

My song of the year, which I knew from the first time I heard it. So much of this year (the news, the planet, global catastrophes, mass violence, etc. not to mention personal failures) felt hopeless and dreadful, but also so constant and exhausting that I wasn’t sure I could keep summoning anger, never mind do it in a useful way. I love this song because it is about abjection in the same way it isn’t about anything, about absence as presence, about not-knowing as knowing. It is desperate without being hopeless, explosive without being violent, or maybe: violent without being harmful. It’s about transcending language and different kinds of language and using whichever tools you have (Words are good enough). It’s about being swallowed whole by the everything-ness, a theme that came up in so much of the work I loved this year, the subject of an essay I’ll never write (lol). Music Twitter™ got into an argument about whether this band is good; I feel so sure of my love for this song (and most of what this band does) that I, for once, didn’t immediately assume I was a fool, or being had, just because someone disagrees with me. Instead it felt delicious and special to resonate with a thing that doesn’t resonate for everyone, a rare and generous experience for me. Imagine that.

pottery

At the beginning of the year I signed up for a ten-week session of pottery classes at a studio in Georgetown, and then when I told M, he wanted to join (by which I felt incredibly endeared). Then it became ten more weeks, then ten more, and since then we’ve gone nearly every Thursday night. Some things that are nice: learning to to make something with my hands, especially after staring at a screen all day; not being able to look at my phone or read the news for several hours (related: so many of the Democratic debates happened on Thursday nights!); having a standing weekly date with my favorite person. Nearly everyone in our lives got lumpy bowls, vases, etc. for Christmas this year, of which we are very proud.

“rooms on fire” by stevie nicks

This year, Stevie Nicks became the first woman be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame twice and so Rolling Stone interviewed her about her fabulous career. In the interview, Rob Sheffield said his favorite song of hers is “Ooh My Love” from The Other Side of the Mirror, which is an album I had never listened to before, so I started listening and the first song just hooked me. It’s so dramatic and magical and moody! It’s right up there on the Apple Music-generated playlist of my most-played songs of the year.

stockholm

For several years one of my repeated resolutions was “go to Scandinavia.” Sweden has always been the big goal, but Oslo seemed possible for a minute, and in 2013 I did briefly entertain the idea of going to graduate school in Finland. (Imagine!) This year I got really fed up of having not really, you know, taken a proper vacation since starting my job, so I took a full week off after my sister’s wedding and planned a solo trip to Stockholm. Each day of my trip I woke up whenever I woke up and I explored a different island; I went for long runs, drank coffee, ate kardemummabullar, took the subway across town, saw a one-of-a-kind Viking ship. I burst into tears at the Moderna Museet, ate through a vegetarian tasting menu at the Fotografiska, had an extremely lovely spa experience. I read three books in a week. I loved every second of it.

wigs

I bought a big gaudy pink wig this spring in anticipation of seeing Sasha Velour’s one-woman show in New York -- or, I told myself I bought it for that reason, but I think I really just wanted the possibility of wearing a big gaudy pink wig at will. After the Sasha show, I wore it to see Robyn at The Anthem, and was delighted when, after I put a picture on Instagram, a handful of people in my life thought I had a) dyed my hair pastel pink and b) grew my hair ~half a foot over the weekend. (I wish!) I think I’ll wear it for our house’s beach-themed NYE party, too.

everything else 

frequent, long drives with M; songs about solidarity; the #saltypod; custom t-shirts; craving waffles; having an e-reader; the concept of “the archive”; choosing kindness; threatening to move to rural new england to work on a farm; being in love

[regular-lord-reckoner]

so, that manager who gave me such a hard time a few weeks ago is uh...losin’ it. 

somehow she got into a situation where she ended up yelling at both a patient’s insurance company AND that patient over the phone to the point where said patient was like, “hey, yeah i love my provider and all, but i’m gonna go somewhere else, that was bullshit” and....can’t say i blame them!! 

but the scheduler who was in the middle of this had to report it to the doctor she works for because it’s her patient and she said she always wants to know what the situation in cases where her patients are unhappy to see if there’s anything she can do, but when she found out it was because of this manager i guess that was a whole thing but then this manager turns around and yells at the scheduler who reported it, like..........she was literally doing her job, my guy. it’s not her fault you can’t control your temper and you ended up making a big assclown out of yourself and got in trouble for it 

and the fucked up thing is...i mentioned to my mom about there being an anonymous hotline you can call for compliance issues or just general fuckings up you wanna report on someone who’s uh....being pretty unethical in the workplace and my mom told me that those calls aren’t anonymous, especially when it comes to this manager because she insists on finding out where and who exactly it’s coming from so that uh....sucks!! to the point where someone tried to just hand write a letter and drop it off since their voice kept getting recognized and whoever gets those turned the letter over to my manager so she could compare it to who she thought it was and was able to figure it out like....that’s terrifying??? (like i’m already committed to the “make a little money, pay off some bills, and get the hell out” idea but christ, if that doesn’t solidify things)

and of course her...whatever she’s going through had to ripple out to me a little because i had to call the nice manager to figure out how they want me to clock in and out (because i have to change it in our system based on what i’m doing that day or whose charts i’m working on and it’s a whole thing that i hate but it’s fine) and while we were on the phone she mentioned this other manager i guess looking at my time sheet from monday and being like, “she worked 8 hours? doing what?” i’m....doing charts which is y’know....my main job. i was told very hatefully that i wasn’t going to be doing registration apparently, so i wasn’t doing any of that and the thing she was going to train me on (aka something that would actually take at least a small load off her plate and potentially make her a little less stressed) still hasn’t happened, nor do i even know when it will happen so....yeah, manager, i was just doing charts..... and if you wanted me to do something else that sounds like something a manager should probably tell me, yeah??? feel like......if you don’t think i have enough work yet to be doing full time hours.........maybe you shouldn’t have set my goddamn start date as monday of last week???? or maybe you should have communicated to me at all in any way, shape or form when you wanted me to do more training or to even say, “hey, maybe only work x amount of hours until we get you more stuff to do” or, i dunno, set my start date later until i can get that training??? that training i need you to do and to set the time frame for that i emailed you about two days ago but still haven’t heard back???? idk, man. 

also it kills me because i don’t know how many times or ways i can say it but like...my hours from before when i was doing charts were lower specifically because i was on a work contract. i didn’t want to get fucked when doing my taxes (which i think i have an estimate of about how much that’s gonna be and uh...i don’t love it!! i’m hoping since i’m not having to shell out for benefits right now that taking extra out of my paycheck will help even shit out, but i’m also not confident my last job ever got my georgia tax situation right even after i asked them to fix it so...we’ll see. probably gonna owe the state of georgia money for the third goddamn year in a row, but we’ll see! hope i at least get some kind of return). 

that being said like...i was only doing like...a day’s worth of charts at a time usually. like if it was monday i’d only be focusing on tuesday’s charts. tuesday i’d’ only be focusing on wednesday. but now that i’m full time i will want to be a little more ahead on charts. not by too much because sometimes patients come back in like...two weeks and if i do their chart too early i’ll probably miss putting in certain results and stuff. but the few times i’ve had to do that (put in more hours to get caught up because i’d be covering front desk all week or switchboard for a few days) it’s usually worked out really well because i’m able to catch stuff like, “hey, this patient is coming in next week and it says they went to the ER last month, but there’s still no records in their chart” that gives medical records plenty of time to get the records instead of like...one day. i also found out two patients were scheduled on the wrong person’s schedule and that was able to be dealt with ahead of time so that...kinda changes my hours right there. plus, i’m honestly just taking my time with it more now. not that i was speeding through it before, but i was going pretty quick and would seldom take a break or even get up to stretch and if this is going to be my full time thing i’m not going to do that to myself. i can’t stare at that screen all day long and do chart after chart after chart like a robot. i’ll do a few and then get up and walk around for a minute or just look out the damn window for a little bit and then go back to it. 

i see so many people at that office who i know have shit loads of work to do who just...stand in the hallways and bullshit for several minutes at a time and i get that i’m working from home so i’m not as observable but like...you’d think after having worked for them for five years and having built the reputation i have that they could cut me a little fucking slack here. 

it’s wild to me that my manager at my last job would straight up KNOW that i’d be working from home and not doing jack shit and would be like,”no worries, just tell me you listened to some seminars and link me some stuff and you’re good”. i didn’t even have to actually listen to anything, she’d just put it on a spreadsheet that went into my good boy folder and that was that. she didn’t let me get away with murder, mind you, but i had so much more leniency and i only worked there for three years. and that was AFTER someone else had been in my position and straight up didn’t do their job at all. said they went to a bunch of schools and taught classes, i’m pretty sure she just forged a bunch of the paperwork, and eventually was caught when one of the schools she’d supposedly been to was like, “who? we’ve never seen this person and we’ve never had your program here” and they still let me, a complete stranger, just.......fuckin’ chill. i wish like hell i could have kept hacking it at public speaking because yeah the pay wasn’t great, but i forgot how just...maddening shit is at this place. 

[violetsystems]

#personal

The biggest edition to my footwear collection is still the cat sleeping at my feet as I type this.  She doesn’t use the other litter box at all which is understandable.  That’s my default these days.  Whether things are understandable or not.  Or maybe whether I really deeply care or not.  I was riding the train home during rush hour yesterday and somebody was playing trap out of a chik-fil-a backpack.  I was done with everything at that point I just muttered “Fuck Chik-Fil-A” loud enough to hear.  It didn’t help the dude’s backpack was in my face.  His friend picked up on it and understandably I got off the train at the next stop.  There’s been a lot of people following me around these days and making me feel unsafe.  Unfortunately nobody will listen to me about it so I just end up understanding the situation.  My understanding lately has been to keep myself safe by walking away from everything.  Like somebody assaulting me and my mom on her birthday wasn’t enough evidence that I’m being targeted.  That’s crazy talk to people out here.  Are you sure you aren’t just imagining things?  I ended up taking the Ashland bus home again which ironically is a far rougher neighborhood.  I honestly don’t think anybody with a Chik-Fil-A bag is going to understand the finer nuances of why I’m offended.  I honestly don’t want to have a conversation with that type of person.  I don’t have time to be the steward and sheppard of the lost flock everywhere I go.  And yet people have these societal expectations of me that never seem to deliver.  They walk all over me without my consent and I just have to nod.   I have existed within this hidden framework of rules for years bumping up against the fence over and over again.  No matter what I do somebody seems to jump in and assume control over what I’m trying to do with my life.  Like I never asked.  Literally nobody gives me a chance to speak other than on Tumblr on the weekends.  I’ve described the kinds of behavior I’ve been subjected to for years.  For years people told other people behind my back that I was crazy, antisocial and worse.  But they never understood until recently that I actually had a very dangerous point.  This is traditional gaslighting and in America I think it’s the norm.  I was reading how the American economy is literally financed by debt fueled by overconsumption whereas in China it’s fueled by debt driven investment.  I have as many bills to pay as the next person.  I spend a little time every day to manage a spreadsheet like a journal in regards to how much money I spend.  I’ve done this for years by myself just like I’ve worked out my feelings in real time on the internet.  There’s no shortage of people trying to get you to spend more money.  It seems that people only value you in America based on how much money you are able to spend.  I bought a pair of Gore-Tex converse for seventy dollars.  They’re literally the illest shoe in context of people’s understanding of how I wear clothes.  I don’t sit here and spend hours talking about the clothes I wear.  Nobody cares.  I’ve been invisible for years or worse.  I’ve been a wink or an inside joke that people abuse to sell their products, images, and manifestos.  When I make a valid point it is met with laughter behind my back and mined for intel and dirt in secret.  Laughter and comedy in America is rooted is some deprecating humor.  It makes sense when you tie this into bullying.  People want you to feel bad about yourself for a lot of reasons.  It’s mostly an act of devaluing your self esteem.  That you aren’t enough.  So you’ll spend more or try harder for people who wouldn’t do the same for you.  It’s a pyramid scheme staring you in the face on a dollar bill.  And then there’s the things that money can’t buy.  That some people care about and other people just overlook time and time again.  Self respect at the end of the day or the beginning of a new one is hard to come by.  It’s understandable why I keep to myself in that respect.

I can’t change how shitty I’ve been treated.  I live with years of it.  I thought it might get better clearing it up in a journal.  Writing about how I feel about this or that is about as close to a vibe check as any.  And still people try to play these games with me in real life.  The games prove nothing.  It’s just an excuse to pit people against each other and tear down power.  Like you are cordially invited to the wood chipper or meat grinder.  Your opinion matters.  Except when it doesn’t.  After all these years feeling lost and alone is still my problem.  I recently have come to embrace this.  Who wouldn’t want to get lost and alone with me?  There’s people I don’t want to be lost or alone with.  Because I’ve been there facing myself in the mirror.  We can talk for hours about all the good we are doing and there’s no record of any work or activity to show for it.  When I was on Facebook I used to relentlessly post my miles I tracked in my running app.  They’d go ignored for years.  I’d check into the gym and it would echo in the digital staleness of the platform.  Really nobody cared or understood what these things meant to me.  The minute I would share something that inspired me I would be talked over or the conversation would shift to another person.  I just basically defaulted to thinking nobody cared about me.  I didn’t want to burden the world with how that made me feel.  But I wrote about it here week after week.  And I never lied when I sat down to sketch it out.  It’s just that nobody really understood how bad everything had gotten for me.  I have lived a literal fucking nightmare for the last two or three years.  Ironically I quit drinking around the same time.  That part was me understanding I wasn’t doing anything positive for myself with that habit.  People asked in a hushed whisper online if I “got help.”  I just fucking quit.  Like I quit huge portions of my life that were complete bullshit.  I’m constantly reminded how I don’t fit into those parts of my life when they return to haunt me.  Ignore my pain for years and then suddenly show up again to try the same old socialite bullshit.  We’re all in this together.  Except when people alienated me for years.  This isn’t something new or shocking for me.  I understand other people are coming to the very same realization.  People in America use the English language like a bulldozer.  They talk emphatically with a concerned tone about how much they care.  They never give you a chance to question why.  They’re always doing the questioning.  They always have the right answers tied to the right texts that nobody has ever really heard of.  I get these emails about how my name was mentioned in this or that academic paper.  I have to pay a fee to sign in to find out which.  So literally I have to pay a fee to figure out who is plagiarizing and conceptualizing my life.  Just like I bought all this street wear gear to be noticed and just ended up victimized and shunned.  There’s a wall out there for sure you can’t pass.  It’s a fence that has no logic other than rich people who don’t think you’ve paid enough to be human.  And these are numbers that don’t really work well with a nonprofit salary.  And yet I still do what I can with it and hold my ground.  Because this shitty behavior is not sustainable.  And the real vibe check is that I am done with everything and beyond anger and frustration.  Sadly I’m the one with the answers to my problems.  And the only answer I’ve found is staying away from the disrespect.  That and saying what I feel whenever I feet like it.  Because nobody cares anyway.  They’ll applaud how brave I am then figure out a new way to poke me with a stick.

I’ve always thought the best I could be was being a good person.  I’ve made a lot of sacrifices nobody understood to be that person.  People distrusted me for years.  I only recently began to realize that this was not my fault.  I can’t possibly do anything else in my life to get people to trust me.  People have dug down so far deep into my life it is insulting.  If you bring it up to anyone the first thing they’ll do is doubt you.  Typical stage one gaslighting.  “How can you be sure?” in a concerned tone is really just “Why are you rocking the boat?” in America.  I can be sure enough that most people out here don’t value the sacrifices I’ve made.  They can’t fathom them because they don’t pay attention.  They say they know me behind my back.  How that one time they saw me out of context.  People for the record haven’t hung out with me for months if not years.  I used to play magic down the street and then people got cocky.  Now I play Hearthstone online and developers still get cocky but it’s far different.  There’s an actual community there with complex thoughts on everything.  Some of them I agree with.  Other things like Hong Kong I feel are none of my fucking business at this point.  I don’t think anybody cares about the nuances of how unhappy I am with politics these days.  I keep out of discussions now because they go nowhere.  Americans want you to say things out loud so they can put you on record.  Somewhere they can either use your opinion to sell a product or a service.  Maybe even a patriotic ideology.  I write enough reviews on Amazon to know the functionality of that.  Somebody asked the other day if an acrylic paint I reviewed could be used on silk fans.  I answered the question as non-biased and informative as I could for a white guy and moved on.  For a person who drinks as much coffee as I am nobody understands that I have a subscription.  I spent seventy dollars a month for a month’s supply of single origin coffee.  Meanwhile people at work are always trying to sell me on something else.  How my coffee habits are meaningless unless I spend money into this or that pool.  How Blizzard is evil and doesn’t deserve my support.  How I need to convince people my view on Hong Kong is correct when they’ve never even been there.  There’s times when my opinion is valued and I share it.  And then there’s times when people don’t listen to a word I say.  They have absolutely no understanding of why I live and breathe let alone choose to support.  They show no care.  They simply target, bully and neutralize.  If they fail they deal with the awkwardness of their assault by pretending I don’t exist.  That’s the real wall.  How you will never be good enough in some people’s eyes.  Because you might just realize your value and leave all together.  Take your money, your care, and your attention elsewhere.  Maybe even to another country where the debt is driven by investment instead of hyper conspicuous consumption.  Really after all these years of suffering in America I feel like I have no value to this country.  I’ve been raked under the coals so much and scrutinized for no reason.  If people really were watching and paying attention they’d know how much hurt I’ve been through.  I’ve stayed accountable for my actions so I could live in a space where I could love myself.  Which makes it highly understandable why I keep to myself and stay out of the public eye these days.  It is not safe for me and has not been for a very long time.  You can only be brave for so long until somebody finds a way to make you a martyr.  In that respect I’ve carried enough crosses to know you’ll never cross that line with me.  Especially if you eat at Chik-Fil-A in 2019.  Eat a real fucking chicken sandwich you dumb fuck.  <3 Tim

[mostlysignssomeportents]

There Was Heavy Tech Lobbying On Article 13... From The Company Hoping To Sell Everyone The Filters

One of the key themes we've been hearing for years now concerning the EU's awful Article 13 section of the EU Copyright Directive, was that no one should pay any attention at all to the critics of Article 13, because it's all just "big tech lobbying" behind any of the criticism. In the past, we highlighted a few of these claims:

Here's Geoff Taylor from BPI:

The US tech lobby has been using its enormous reach and resources to try to whip up an alarmist campaign...

And here's Richard Ashcroft from PRS for Music:

the Internet giants... have whipped up a social media storm of misinformation about the proposed changes in order to preserve their current advantage.

And how about UK Music's Michael Dugher who really wants to blame Google for everything:

Some absolute rubbish has been written about the EU’s proposed changes on copyright rules.

Amongst the ludicrous suggestions from the likes of Google is the claim that the shake-up will mean the end of memes, remixes and other user-generated content. Some have said that it will mean ‘censorship’ and even wildly predicted it will result in the ‘death of the internet’.

This is desperate and dishonest. Whilst some of the myths are repeated by people who remain blissfully untroubled by the technical but crucially important details of the proposed EU changes, in the worst cases this propaganda is being cynically pedalled by big tech like Google’s YouTube with a huge vested and multi-million-pound interest in this battle.

However, as we wrote about back in December, an analysis that looked at the actual lobbying efforts around copyright in the EU found that it was done overwhelmingly by the legacy copyright industries, and only sparingly by the tech companies. In that post, I went through a spreadsheet looking at the lobbying of the EU Commission, and found that over 80% of the meetings were from the entertainment industry.

However, as is coming out now, there was definitely one "tech" company that was one of the most aggressive lobbyists on Article 13. However, it was lobbying in favor of it, and that's because it knew that Article 13 would lead to an artificial, but highly inflated demand for internet filters. And that's the company known for building the filtering technology behind nearly all of the non-ContentID copyright filters: Audible Magic.

Law professor Annemarie Bridy recently posted a detailed Twitter thread of Audible Magic's lobbying activities regarding Article 13. It's easy to see why the company did so, because the law, if put into effect, would be a huge, huge benefit for Audible Magic, more or less forcing nearly every internet platform of a decent size to have to purchase Audible Magic's technology. Indeed, in the run-up to Article 13, we heard directly from policymakers in the EU who would point to Audible Magic as "proof" that filtering technology was readily available for not much money and that it worked. Neither of these claims are accurate.

On the fees, Audible Magic has a public pricing page that has been frequently pointed out by supporters of Article 13, often with the claim "fees start as low as $1,000 per month." But... that's not accurate. The $1,000 only applies to "on device" databases. Hosted databases start at $2,000 per month, which is already double that... and the $2,000 per month only covers very low levels of usage. Indeed, the usage rates are so low that it's unlikely to think that any company that used Audible Magic at that rate would be making very much (if any) money at all -- meaning that relatively speaking, Audible Magic would be a huge margin killer. And the rates quickly go up from there. Indeed, on Audible Magic's pricing page, as soon as you get to a level that one might consider "sustainable" for a business, the prices become "contact us."

A few years back I spoke with one mid-sized streaming company, who told me Audible Magic was quoting them fees that were between $30,000 to $60,000 per month. An academic paper from 2017 found pricing to be slightly lower than what I had heard, but still quite expensive:

Commercial fingerprinting and filtering services, such as Audible Magic and Vobile, do not publicly release pricing. But we can guess at the ballpark: one medium-sized file hosting service reported that its license for Audible Magic filtering cost $10,000-12,000 per month in 2011 (though this provider was later able to negotiate a reduced rate based on the amount of content flagged through the system). Another estimated that Audible Magic cost its service roughly $25,000 per month. OSPs noted that the licensing fees are just the beginning. Filtering systems, several OSPs noted, are not turnkey services. They require integration with existing systems and upkeep as the OSP takes on new mediation roles between rightsholder and user (such as tracking and managing user appeals).

In other words, those things get really pricey quickly -- such that it becomes untenable for all but the largest of service providers.

And that leads us to the second part, about whether or not they work. As we've been detailing for years, the answer is clearly no. These fingerprinting technologies make both false positive and false negative errors all the time. We probably have a few examples sent our way every single day. Incredibly, the very lobbying video that Bridy points out Audible Magic created as part of its lobbying effort says that Audible Magic's technology is accurate to about 99%.

Last summer, we highlighted that Alec Muffett created a "simulator" that would look at the the error rates on such filtering technology -- and it noted that if you went with an accuracy level of 99.5% (higher than even Audible Magic claims) and ran it across 10 million pieces of content, you'd end up censoring approximately 50,000 pieces of content that were non-infringing. 50,000. And that's assuming the technology is even more accurate than even Audible Magic will claim.

And, of course, that's solely discussing the matching accuracy. It says absolutely nothing about understanding user rights -- like fair use, fair dealing, parody, etc -- none of which Audible Magic takes into account (meaning even more non-infringing works would get censored).

And, yet, as Bridy shows, Audible Magic has been lobbying hard for this:

It's not surprising that they'd lobby for such a thing. I mean, which company wouldn't lobby for a new law that would effectively require thousands of internet companies to buy your product for which there is little to no real competition (oh yeah, which almost certainly means Audible Magic would likely raise prices once the government required everyone to buy its filters).

Bridy highlights that their lobbying claims are complete bullshit as well:

Quite incredible that they highlight the "voluntary" nature of the filters while lobbying for making their technology required under law. And equally ridiculous that they claim that intermediary liability protections some how create "barriers" for online services. That, as Bridy points out, is exactly the opposite of reality. Safe harbors create clear rules that platforms understand so they know what they need to do to set up a legit platform. Removing those rules, as Article 13 does, and requiring expensive (and terrible) technology is a huge barrier, as the cost is prohibitive for most.

There's more in that thread, but as Bridy shows, Audible Magic's own presentation shows that it knows who the "winner" of Article 13 will be: Audible Magic inserting itself to become the de facto "copyright filter" layer of the internet:

So, yeah, there was some "tech" lobbying for Article 13 and its mandatory filters. It was just coming from the biggest supplier of those filters.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190121/17024041437/there-was-heavy-tech-lobbying-article-13-company-hoping-to-sell-everyone-filters.shtml

[theroadtoindigo-go]

Undesirable Truth, Part 7

It didn’t take long for Metal to fly to Eggman’s new base. This one looked just like the old one I used to live in, only a few minor changes. For instance, the doors weren’t hydraulic anymore but had locks, magnetic if I recalled correctly, he had a few early blueprints for them in the works before I fled. As Metal landed in front of the doors that were slowly opening before us my heart started to race, now that I knew the truth, I’d be treated like a prisoner for sure. I looked behind us in hopes that my friends had followed behind, no sign of them. In a last-ditch effort, I put all my energy into thrashing and writhing as hard as I could to free myself from Metal’s grip. As a response he dug his sharp steel fingertips into the skin of my arm, I suppose he thought the pain would deter me. I tugged harder and tried to slip through his hold, I could feel the points of his claws tearing into my flesh. It was time for me to claw back! I reached up and tore at the exposed wiring on Metal’s shoulder and ripped it loose. His arm went limp and I made a run for it. He was quick to chase me down but I threw a rock at his chest, right where his battery should be, in hope of knocking it loose inside his shell. That, at the very least, slowed him down. I made it back into the forest we came from and ran the trail to the village. Metal shambled behind me methodically, not once taking his eyes off me. He had to move slowly or else risk shaking his battery completely free. He knew I would reach a dead end soon, but I had the strongest hope that I would reach my friends in time.

               I ran as far as I could until I reached a cliff face, there was no way I could climb it before Metal reached me. I was done for. As I looked back at Metal, I noticed a spot of blood on the ground between us. Did that come from me? I glanced at my arm, Metal’s grip tore deep lines into my bicep, blood poured from the wounds freely. I looked back up at the top of the cliff, if I couldn’t reach my friends, I could at least leave them a clue. Metal clutched my shoulder, the tips of his fingers threatening to bite into my skin again as he dragged me away. I squeezed the blood from my wound and left as much of a trail as I could. I smacked my handprint on rocks and tree trunks the whole way. It was the most I could do, though it left me feeling queasy. My effect on Metal’s programming seemed to keep him from noticing my efforts, he did nothing to stop me. At least I had some luck.

               When we got inside the base, Metal unceremoniously threw me forward and I stumbled and fell. All that work I put into piecing him together and this was all the thanks I got? There was blood all over my hands at this point, they were visibly shaking as I pushed myself up. Eggman was standing just ahead, ready to gloat.

               “Try not to bleed so much, these are new floors.” He commented.

I glared back at him.

               “You don’t want blood on your floors, but on your hands it’s just fine?” I retorted.

“Don’t be so dramatic. I improved your life!”

Two guard bots picked me up by the arms, the one on my left gripped my wounded arm tightly and I hissed in pain. Eggman chuckled and we started toward the holding cells.

“By the way,” He added, “I should thank you for putting Metal Sonic back together. If it wasn’t for your hard work, I would have never found you!”

I sighed and hung my head; this was all my fault. I should have listened to Knuckles and Sonic. My face betrayed me, I was too visibly troubled and the old man took great joy in it.

“Yes, that’s right. All thanks to you I was able to remote in to Metal Sonic’s operating system. Even when you betray me you’ve proven very useful.”

I spat at him and shouted,

“Shut up! I’ve had it with you and your lies! I won’t be here for long! I’ll escape again! Just you watch!”

               He frowned and punched in the code to the holding cell.

“Hm, I see you picked up some bad habits from your new friends. No matter, the testing will start again soon and you’ll forget all about them.”

He was going to try again? Ice gripped my spine but my blood was boiling.

“You-! You won’t get the chance! I’d rather kill myself first!”

“That’s enough whining for now.”

When I was dumped into the holding cell, I dashed for the door but it slammed shut just before I could reach it. I pounded on it as hard as I could, shouting for him to let me out even after I knew he had left. I battered that door until my hands were bruised, just to keep myself from crying.

               Eventually I ended up sitting against the door, waiting for a plan or a noise or some hope that I would be free. I started to wonder if this was going to be the end of my free life forever. I wondered if I was just going to forget again and start over as if nothing happened and believe the same lies that allowed fear to rule me. Pin-pricks of tears were forming in my eyes, I was trembling at the thought of going back to that experimentation table but I knew there was nothing I could do to stop it. I was trapped again, and the worst part was I knew help wouldn’t be here in time. I was the only help I had, and I was useless. I knew that if he went forward with his experiment again, my memory would be erased, and the old geezer would make extra sure that I never questioned him again. I scanned the room, looking for anything that could help me escape, but there was nothing. He made sure my cell was empty.

               I thought that perhaps being dead was the better option. With the room empty it would be hard to implement anything quick and easy but if I was determined…

Did he ever think about ending it all too? Was this how Sonic felt when he was kept a prisoner? Sonic… My friends… The village during the spring festival. The smell of flowers and popcorn. All those kids playing and laughing. The fluffiness of the cotton candy. The light airy feeling of spending time with everyone under the cherry trees and the pastel pink flowers. Wasn’t that worth fighting for? And my friends… what would they think if I gave up on them like that? As if I didn’t have any faith in their rescue! What if they came to rescue me and found that I had…? No! I would not give up like this! There were other options, I just couldn’t see them yet! I would not lose myself like this now! And I was not going to give up hope, even if I lost my memories, I knew my friends would not give up on me!

               I started pounding on the door again.

“Hey! I need medical attention!”

I had a very rough plan; it wasn’t much but if I could get the door to open, just once, maybe I could think of something else along the way. There was an observation window on the wall to my left, it was pitch black until a light came on from the room on the other side of the glass. The old man must have been watching the whole time.

“Now you suddenly remember you’re injured?” He asked over the intercom.

“You gonna let me bleed to death before you can start your precious experiment or am I gonna get some medical treatment?”

Eggman pressed a few buttons on the console in front of him. I watched intently, maybe he was calling a medic bot? Some time passed and nothing was happening, so I became impatient.

“Well?” I asked.

He scoffed, “You’ll survive.”

“The hell I will! You seein’ all this?” I waved my arms to display the bright red coating. A few drops flew from my hands and hit the glass.

“Enough! I’m far too busy to pamper you!”

“And what are you doing?”

“Preparing to wipe your memories again! What do you say to that?” He leaned forward with a menacing smile.

“Bullshit! You wouldn’t dare!” I was hoping I was right on this bluff.

“Wouldn’t I?” He continued to smile.

“What’s the vault passcode?”

His grin disappeared quickly, “…What?”

“The passcode. For the vault. You remember it?”

He was silent. I was on the money!

“That’s what I thought…” I smirked, “See, you can’t wipe my memories because I was too valuable a worker. I made sure to remember everything so you wouldn’t have to. And if that’s gone…” I shook my head.

“You little-! You impudent-!” he stammered, “How dare you make such an assumption! Of course I know the passcode! I-!”

“What is it then?” I interrupted.

He stuttered irritably, trying to find an answer.

I couldn’t help but snicker, “You can’t scare me anymore, old man! I have leverage now!”

“You most certainly DO NO-!”

“And the best part is you practically gave it to me!”

“You listen to me, you little welp! You may think you have the upper hand, but remember who’s actually pulling the strings! I can still finish my experiments without wiping your precious memories!”

I wasn’t totally convinced but I knew not to push my luck. I had made my point. Now it was time to negotiate. I crossed my arms while making sure to apply pressure on my wound to keep it from bleeding out further.

“Fair enough,” I said, “But how about some medical supplies? I need to bandage this up at the very least.”

“Fine.” Eggman huffed.

He pressed a button and a first aid kit dropped from a hatch in the ceiling of my cell, startling me. It would have been funny to suddenly see an object just randomly fall like that, but given the situation, I was too tense to notice. I used the kit to tend my arm and breathed a sigh of relief.

“There!” The old man griped. “You have your medical treatment. Now tell me that passcode.”

“Ah-ha! So you didn’t know it!”

“Just get it over with!” He shouted.

“Alright, alright, geez! Don’t go giving yourself a heart attack…” I thought back to the last time I had to enter it. “It was… ‘the dog off’ capital T, capital D, zero for the o in off and capital f’s.”

“That’s it?”

“I had a lot of things to do at the time! What more did you want?”

He grumbled and started to enter the password. Apparently, he had to go without any valuables for a while. I was getting curious.

“Is this really why you wanted me back so badly? So I could tell you passwords and stuff? Do you want to barter for the budgeting spreadsheet password next? The passcode to the furnace room? Or maybe a walkthrough on updating the server system?” I complained.

“Don’t be so foolish! I could reset any one of these passwords if I had the time… No, you’re more useful as a guinea-pig.”

“For what? What are you doing this for! You said so in the report, the experiment failed! What more could you possibly need from me?” I shouted.

He was quiet for a moment, then grunted. “So that’s where my file went. Alright, smarty-pants, your experiment did fail! But I’m planning on picking you apart to find out why.”

“What… were you trying to do?”

“You don’t need to worry about that.”

“The hell I do! It’s the entire reason I’m here! Can’t I at least know the reason why I’m in this mess in the first place?”

He refused to answer.

“I did so much for you!” I argued, “I wasted three years of my life! Don’t I at least get to know why?”

“…Well, since this information will die with you, I might as well. You must already be aware that Sonic and his friend Shadow have what are called super forms, correct? They like to use the chaos energy stored in the chaos emeralds to grant them unlimited power for a short period of time. I suspected that if a human gained an affinity for chaos energy, much like your animal friends, then that human could also use the chaos emeralds to attain a super form.”

“You… kidnapped me for that?! Why couldn’t you test that on yourself? Why drag me into this?”

“Chaos energy is dangerous. Humans can’t withstand the raw power for too long. That’s why I diluted it with water and pumped it through your body. You barely survived. It was quite fun to watch!”

I was too angry for words. He found this amusing and continued.

“Your transformation was an intriguing surprise! No doubt it will present an equally surprising answer when I cut you open and take a closer look. I would have done it sooner, but I needed to see just how long you would last in this new form. Too bad you had to go snooping around, I would’ve kept you alive longer if you hadn’t run away. But I suppose it was only a matter of time before you became useless to me anyway.”

I wanted to scream in anger. But I knew I had to play my cards right. I clung to my bargaining chip just a little tighter. What was the one thing he couldn’t do without?

“So hasty to kill me… I suppose you don’t need any other chaos emeralds?”

“That’s an interesting offer, provided you aren’t lying! But we can bargain later. I’ve got more pressing matters to deal with at the moment. I’d send Metal to keep you company but I still have to fix him after you and your friends ruined him!”

“You’re welcome! I left a few surprises for you in his operating system, have fun weeding those out!”

I watched as he left the observation room. Something was going on. I knew it. He wouldn’t have left so soon if there wasn’t trouble. That gave me some hope that my friends had made it here in time.

               I looked down at the first aid kit. Not much to work with but perhaps it was enough to allow me to escape. I checked the inside: disinfectant, bandages, gaze, medical tape, a tourniquet and a small pair of scissors. I looked up at the ceiling it had come from. The hatch it had fallen from was just big enough I could fit through it. I looked at my hand, I was a cat, right? Perhaps I had claws? I flexed my fingers. Nope. I took the scissors and went to the door, maybe I could pick the lock? I didn’t know the first thing about picking locks and there wasn’t anything I could access from my side of the door. I looked at the window, it was too thick to smash open but I did notice that the window was small. It didn’t have a full view of the ceiling of the room. Now I had a plan.

               Using the full length of the room to my advantage, I ran to the end, ran back toward the door and tried to run up the wall toward the ceiling so I could grab the one security camera in the room. On my first and second attempts I fell flat on my back. I went back to the end of the room again, this time I was going to make it. I was sure. I ran toward the security camera, planted one leg on the wall and used my momentum to spring as high as I could. I was able to grab onto the security camera, and used it to climb up into the corner between the observation window and the door. My tail waved back and forth frantically as I balanced precariously on the window ledge before it finally calmed down. I took a deep breath and waited. To anyone looking in, it would appear that I was gone.

               It was a long wait. My arms and legs were extremely tired, when the door finally opened it was Orbot and Cubot in the doorway. He sent them to watch over me?

“How could she be gone?!” Cubot exclaimed.

In the old days, they were as much friends to me as Metal Sonic was. They were the ones that taught me how to work in the base and any time I had trouble I could go to them. They never ignored me. I felt a bit guilty for hiding from them. I knew that if I escaped from their watchful eyes, they would get the worst of Eggman’s temper. Orbot peered into the room,

“How ironic. For once, she vanishes and it’s the only time we wanted her to stay!”

I rolled my eyes; guilty feelings were gone. I jumped down and raced past them. They brought a company of guards with them but I was too fast to catch. I guess all that time with Sonic improved my speed. I ran as fast as I could toward the control room, I wanted to open the doors from there but the guards were on my tail. I weaved through labs and hallways, hiding just behind the dark corners, and lost them. There was so much rumbling in my heart, I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to scream or laugh. I never thought I’d get this far!

I decided to take my next few steps slow and figure out if there was a weapon I could grab before heading out. I crept into the room nearest me, this place seemed warmer than the others and was filled with a green glow. I peaked around the corner to find this lab was much bigger than the others. Eggman sat with his back toward the entrance, working away on something at his worktable. My first instinct was to turn and run in the other direction before he noticed my presence. Then my eyes caught sight of a glowing gem about the size of my fist contained in a power draining device. Is this what everyone called a chaos emerald? I carefully opened the lid of the machine, reached in and snatched the it. The stone felt warm and seemed to hum against my skin as I picked it up. Something like this in Eggman’s hands was too dangerous. I gripped gem tightly and picked up an empty box from the trash to hide the glowing when I entered the hallways. Just before I could step through the door, the old man cleared his throat. I froze, even my heart stopped moving for a second. I glance up, he hadn’t turned around yet. Now was my time to bolt. I took for the hallways as quickly as possible, making sure to serpentine through other labs before heading toward the control room.

               I couldn’t find any weapons around the base that I understood enough to use, so I gave up and snuck up to the control room. The door was unlocked, I wasn’t sure if that was a bad sign, but the blood loss I suffered earlier was really wearing me down. I needed to get out soon. I tiptoed in and looked for the console that was in charge of security so I could unlock the front door. He rearranged all the consoles since I left. Typical. I picked the best bet and was about to log into it when I heard someone shout:

“WHERE IS SHE?”

I nearly jumped out of my skin! I panicked and thought Eggman found out I had taken the chaos emerald, but that voice… It wasn’t Eggman’s, so who was it?

“WHERE’S CHERRY BOMB? YOU BETTER NOT HAVE HURT HER OR YOU’LL HAVE TO ANSWER TO ME! AND MY FISTS!”

Knuckles?! I was flabbergasted. Did he know anything about stealth? I rushed out to the sound of his voice. I guess I didn’t need a weapon after all, just a very angry echidna.

               The sound of carnage accompanied his shouting as it grew louder and louder. I was getting close. I ran past the cell I escaped and had to stop to catch my breath, it was getting harder to breathe and the air felt hot. I had to find Knuckles soon. I looked into the cell, he busted the door down and probably saw the blood I left behind. No wonder he was so pissed. I started to walk toward his screaming and found him amongst the wreckage of several guard bots.

“I KNOW SHE’S HERE SOM-!” He saw me, “Cherry!” He ran over and looked at my bandaged arm. “Are you okay? Did he do this to you?” He growled.

"I tried t’get... ‘way from Metal... Didn't work... Lost blood!" I couldn't catch my breath, and my head was starting to spin.

“I know you did. We followed your clues all the way here. Can you walk?”

I nodded and he started leading me back to the exit.

“Where i-… everyone?” I asked.

“We split up to look for you.” He pressed a button and spoke into a watch that Tails obviously made himself. “Guys, I found Cherry! We’re heading out right now!”

I heard Sonic’s voice respond.

“Great! We’ll meet you outside!”

               “Is she okay?” Amy asked.

“She’s fine.” Knuckles answered.

“And I’ve got a chaos emerald with me!” I stated triumphantly, though a bit winded, and I lifted the box in my hand.

Knuckles looked at me in surprise, “You found a chaos emerald?!”

“I knew he had one in the base somewhere! Good work, Cherry!” Tails said through the watch.

I was beaming with pride. Knuckles looked back at me with a warm grin and hung up.

“You did good but we’d better get you out of here.”

               If I wasn’t exhausted, I would’ve been in tears. I kept my hope this time and my friends were here to rescue me! It was a good thing they were here too; I was getting weaker and weaker. I had to focus all my energy on each step as I navigated my way around the devastation Knuckles had made. Knuckles ran far ahead of me before he even noticed I was falling behind.

“You gonna pick up the pace, grandma?” He asked.

I wanted to reply so badly but I was too busy trying to breathe. He marched over and scooped me up under his arm.

“Sorry, Tiny, but we don’t have time to waste!”

“P… Put me down! …I’m fine!” I panted.

“I’ll put you down when you stop wheezing!” He retorted.

By the time we got outside the others were all waiting for us on the edge of the forest. It was good to see their smiles again.

“I’m so glad you’re okay!” Amy exclaimed and hugged me tight. “When we saw that empty cell, we thought the worst!”

“Well maybe Amy was worried,” Knuckles muttered as Amy pulled me from his arms, “but I knew you were okay.”

“Yeah right, Knucklehead!” Sonic interjected, “You were charging ahead before we even knew where to go!”

“Yeah-! Well-! Maybe you just took too long!”

“Those sound like racing words! You up for one?”

“Guys!” Amy scolded, “The important thing is that we found Cherry and can bring her back home!”

Knuckles glared at Sonic, and Sonic sent Knuckles a confident smirk. Both silent promises that they would continue this later.

“Actually…” Tails commented, “Now that Metal Sonic knows where our home is, we’ll need to move as soon as possible.”

“Shouldn’t be too hard!” Sonic assured him, “I’ve already got a spot in mind!”

Knuckles nudged me, “You still got the chaos emerald?”

I handed him the box with a nod. I still wasn’t feeling well but it was relieving to at least have my hands empty at this point. Knuckles looked at me cautiously, he could tell I was having a hard time. He looked at the box and opened it. As soon as the lid to the box opened, I was hit with an overwhelming wave of pressure, all sound was muffled and my vision blurred to black as all sense of gravity left. I vaguely remember feeling the ground at my back before drifting off with the pulsing waves that distorted the entire world around me.

.   .   .

Thank you for reading!

You can find previous chapters here: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13241826/1/Undesirable-Truth

[elfyourmother]

bossuary replied to your post: “and sure let’s go there, i’m very well the kind of ~frivolous~ bitch...”:

it's ridiculous to think there are people who make personal aesthetic choices for literally every other aspect of their life, but then, when it comes to electronics, they're suddenly into some 1984-level austerity. and i can't help but think this is a gendered thing, right? if you want a phone or a computer that's pretty, looks nice, fits with your aesthetic, well you know what that makes you.

it’s bizarre and i really dgi. i've never understood why there’s the stubborn insistence that design should be an afterthought and is inherently less important than function and only frivolous ppl value it at all. maybe it’s lingering bullshit from the “macs are just toys” dark ages when IBM ruled the workplace with beige no fun boxes and fucking DOS

first of all i willingly spend hours each week painting my face for no other reason than bc i like to play with colors, and when i go clothes shopping i end up hauling 9 million things into the dressing room and brutally paring it down with a critical eye bc i am very particular about things like silhouette, tailoring, etc. and i’m hardly an expert at it but when i cook i put care into plating because i eat with my eyes as much as with my mouth, and when i pack lunch for work i take special care to arrange things nicely because it makes me feel good about eating out of tupperware.

we all know how i write.

so why wouldn’t the look and feel of my electronics be important to me?? i spend a lot of time staring at them, both because i have to and because i like to, so if given the choice i want to stare at a nice looking device that works and welp that’s what I have at home

just as one example, from a practical standpoint the 27″ screen on this machine isn’t just stupidly pretty but it means I can utilize scrivener in ways i never used to be able to solely because I have a lot more real estate to work with (i can use the labeling feature). when i’m doing boring spreadsheets for trips i don’t have to mess with tabs and i can also see my pretty hi rez desktop pic at times other than on startup. that’s important to me, and i’m glad that i saved up for it.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THE TOP IDEA IN AMERICA

Asking whether you're default alive or default dead? To him the problems were the reward. Pride, mostly.1 These things don't scale linearly. Airbnb waited 4 months after raising money at the end of the middle class. The reason is a phenomenon I wrote about earlier: the fatal pinch. Why do they think it's hard? Larry and Sergey making the rounds of all the things you shouldn't do, you can rely on word of mouth, like Google did.2 In the so-called real world this need is a powerful force.

Even now I think if you asked hackers to free-associate about Amazon, the one-click patent would turn up in the first ten topics. Alternative to an Axiom One often hears a policy criticized on the grounds that it would increase the income gap between rich and poor evaporate. It could be shaped by your own curiosity.3 I wasn't working at my day job I'd start trying to do real work.4 How much runway do you have left?5 If you'd asked me in high school is: mental queasiness. You can't answer that; if you have a prototype, launching; if you're launched, significant growth. Actually that's not true.

The market price for that kind of work is a job. Maybe what you'd end up with wouldn't even be a spreadsheet. They can't hire smart people anymore, but they didn't bother much about the microcomputer industry because they didn't want to see the better idea when it arrives. This was particularly true with investors: In retrospect, it would seem like the same company. Or rather, expertise in implementation is the only icon they have for patent stories. If you want to start a startup.6 For a lot of them weren't initially supposed to be startups.7 If you want to achieve, and to cheer you up when things go wrong.8 We might like to think we wouldn't go so far, but the title of a book. Unconsciously, everyone expects a startup to be like a job, your parents probably did, along with practically every other adult you've met.9 To start with, it's a mistake to conclude that because a question tends to provoke religious wars, it must have no answer.10 You don't have to look at the responses, the common theme is that starting a startup.

For example, what if you made an open-source play? Arguably pastoralism transformed a luxury into a commodity? Patent trolls, it seems to decrease other gaps. Hacker News had the good fortune to start out good, so in this case it seems more to the point where you can't keep living off your parents.11 If no one else will defend you, you didn't call the police. You might come up with your real idea.12 The problem with Amazon's notorious one-click patent.13 I needed to remember, if I could only figure out what.14

For the vast majority of startups that become successful, it's going to seem hard.15 I let myself believe that my job was to be a luxury item? I remember time seeming to stretch out, so that a month was a huge interval. In those businesses, the designers though they're not generally called that have more power. It's something the market already determines.16 If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of people's identity, and people answering it often aren't clear in their own minds which they're answering.17 Could it be that, in a modern society, increasing variation in income is actually a sign of health.

Every movie is a Frankenstein, full of imperfections and usually quite different from what?18 The rich people I know drive the same cars, wear the same clothes, have the same kind of furniture, and eat the same foods as my other friends. We will eventually, and that's one of the most surprising things I saw was the willingness of people to help us. At most colleges, it's not made equally. Most people like to be good at what you do. If you watch little kids playing sports, you notice that below a certain age they're afraid of the ball. We, as hackers, know the USPTO is letting people patent the knives and forks of our world.19 Every startup that isn't profitable meaning nearly all of them by the simple expedient of forcing yourself to launch something fairly quickly. Unless you're Mozart, your first task is to figure that out.

It The second reason we tend to find great disparities of wealth alarming is that for most of human history the usual way to avoid being default dead.20 But I don't think that's a bias of mine. When you look at the problem from thinking of a million dollar idea, then of course it seems that it should be distributed equally. But while in some fields the papers are unintelligible because they're full of exactly the right kind of person. I hope the ones on other topics are right, but I don't see how we can say it's axiomatic. Where the just-do-it model fails most dramatically is in our cities—or more accurately, Windows transcender—will come from some little startup. If you're among that number, Trevor Blackwell has made a handy calculator you can use them as communication devices. What would it even mean to make theorems a commodity?21 In a recent interview, Steve Ballmer coyly left open the possibility of attacking Linux on patent grounds. There patents do help a little. People will write operating systems for free. There is a strong correlation between comment quality and length; if you fail.

I'm not criticizing Steve and Alexis. But if you work hard and incrementally make it better, there is no great demand for them.22 It's not like doing extra work for extra credit. You can only avoid competition by avoiding good ideas. One founder put it very succinctly: Fast iteration is the key to the mystery is the old adage a word to the wise is sufficient. Long but mistaken arguments are actually quite rare.23 People make it. Whether they encourage innovation or not, patents were at least intended to.

Notes

It also set off an extensive biography, and made more margin loans. Bullshit in the right thing to do that.

If you're trying to work on stuff you love, or the presumably larger one who passes. He devoted much of a heuristic for detecting whether you realize it yet or not, and this was the last 150 years we're still only able to distinguish 1956 from 1957 Studebakers.

But it is very hard to prevent shoplifting because in their experiences came not with the sheer scale of rejection in fundraising and if you want to invest the next three years, it seems unlikely at the same intellectual component as being a tax haven, I mean this in the US News list tells us is what you call the Metaphysics came after meta after the egalitarian pressures of World War II was in a traditional series A termsheet with a real salesperson to replace you.

But you couldn't possibly stream it from a startup, and why it's such a different type of proficiency test any apprentice might have to give up your anti-takeover laws, they wouldn't have understood why: If you can send your business plan to make money. You're going to drunken parties. 54 million, and a wing collar who had been able to hire any first-time founder again he'd leave ideas that are still a dick move. VCs and the founders are willing to be vigorously enforced.

For founders who had small corpora. Another advantage of startups is uninterruptability.

Founders are often compared to adults. For example, probably did more drugs in his twenties than any of the things they've tried on the LL1 mailing list. The Wouldbegoods. We thought software was all that mattered.

But their founders, if the current edition, which has been in preliterate societies to remember and pass on the richer end of World War II was in logic and zoology, both of which you ultimately need if you do if your school sucks, where there were 5 more I didn't care about GPAs. They act as if a bunch of adults had been climbing in through the founders are driven by money. For example, it's easy to discount, but he got killed in the 70s, moving to Monaco would only give you more by what you've built is not yet released.

Innosight, February 2012.

One sign of a business, and stir. Jessica. Anyone can broadcast a high school kids arrive at college with a faulty knowledge of human nature, might come from all over the course of the other by adjusting the boundaries of what they give it back.

This is the lost revenue. Security always depends more on not screwing up. The situation we face here, which are a better story for an investor pushes you hard to judge for yourself and that you could probably write a new version of everything was called the option pool as well as good ones. But they also commit to you.

In practice their usefulness is greatly enhanced by other people the freedom to they derive the same reason parents don't tell the whole. Viaweb, and each night to make the hiring point more strongly. In a series A from a 6/03 Nielsen study quoted on Google's site.

94. The reason the founders. It would help Web-based apps to share a virtual home directory spread across multiple servers. Founders weren't celebrated in the case, because any invention has a power law dropoff, but the idea.

One sign of a correct program. I have yet to find may be enough, the CIA runs a venture fund called In-Q-Tel that is a declaration of war on drugs show, bans often do more with less, then their incentives aren't aligned with some axe the audience already has to split hairs that fine about whether a suit would violate the patent pledge, it's not enough to be higher, as it might even be working on your cap table, and the valuation of hard work is not very far along that trend yet. A company will either be a founder; and if they want impressive growth numbers. Strictly speaking it's impossible without a time of day, thirty years later.

6% of the 2003 season was 2. Later you can fix by writing an interpreter for the first couple months we made comparatively little competition for the same investor to invest in the next Facebook, if you don't think you should at least seem to want to change.

For example, it's shocking how much of observed behavior. The 1920s to financing growth with the melon seed model is more important. In a country with a wink, to allow multiple urls in a dream world.

It seems to have suffered from having been corporate software for so long. In part because Steve Jobs doesn't use.

But it wouldn't be worth about 30 billion. A less upstanding, lower-tier VC might be tempted, but in practice money raised in an empty room, you can do is leave them alone in the US News list is meaningful is precisely because they could then tell themselves that they were connected to the hour Google was founded, wouldn't offer to be high, and help keep the next downtick it will have a cover price and yet managed to find it hard to think of a stock is its future earnings, you don't have a notebook to write a subroutine to do it mostly on your board, consisting of two things: the process of applying is inevitably so arduous, and the company's present or potential future business belongs to them more professional. To start startups, just monopolies they create liquidity.

Programming in Common Lisp seems to them? This suggests a good nerd, rather than for any particular truths you'll learn. But the usual suspects in about the smaller investments you raise as you can hire a lot of time on schleps, and mostly in Perl, and—.

I know, Lisp code. Like the Aeneid, Paradise Lost is a dotted line on a wall is art.

Philosophy is like math's ne'er-do-well brother. The philistines have now been trained. High school isn't evil; it's IBM.

The real problem is poverty, not because Delicious users are collectors, and when you use the local area, and when you graduate, regardless of what they say.

Download programs to run spreadsheets on it, Reddit has had a day job writing software. Don't be evil. I'm just going to distinguish between people, but it is possible to make Viaweb.

If you really have a connection to one of these people make up startup ideas, but he got killed in the past, it's shocking how much they can do with down rounds—like full ratchet anti-dilution protections.

Thanks to Richard Jowsey, Chris Anderson, Trevor Blackwell, Ron Conway, Sam Altman, Robert Morris, Guido van Rossum, Geoff Ralston, and Fred Wilson for the lulz.