#a girl i know her boyfriend just got into the USNA and she was like ‘so i should break up with him right’ and we were all like ‘…yeah…’

[compacflt]

Speaking of book recommendations, I just finished reading "Annapolis Autumn: Life, Death, And Literature At The U.S. Naval Academy" by Bruce E. Fleming (he was/is a teacher at the Acedemy) and I thought it was interesting. It gives a glimpse at some workings of the academy but also what is like to be a civilian in a military environment specially when one doesn't exactly drink from the same kool aid (hope that's how the expression works, I'm not American)

i will look into it!! But now i get nervous reading about the usna because i don’t wanna know how inaccurate my portrayal of it is. Lmfao. Posting for the rec

[the-most-beautiful-broom]

I now want some headcanons about Modern AU Pirate Mechanic like, they could be so damn hot 😍

BLESS YOU NONNY THIS IS THE BEST THING TO HAPPEN TO ME ALRIGHT STRAP IN FRIENDS THIS IS ALMOST 2K AND IT’S JUST HOW THEY MEET

First thing first, modern AU Zeke has Jordan Bolger’s accent. I need Raven to hear his voice before she sees him, think damn, then turn around and not be disappointed (if you haven’t heard his voice, let me bless you today) Also it’s about to be (kind of?) a college AU so hope that’s cool?

SCENE 1: a hackathon, an annual competition hosted at the USNA; Raven is repping MIT and when she walks in, people start elbowing each other, pointing at her. That’s THE Raven Reyes. She’s won the last three years. CIA is looking for her once she graduates, but she’s not really the desk job sort of girl. Did you see her bike? She built it in her spare time, completely from scrap, refurbished it from an 80s model. She’s legend. 

She smiles to herself, flips her hair a bit, stares down the competition she knows, and walks over to her seat, texting Clarke that it’s too easy with these nerds. 

The competition starts and of course, Raven is nothing but cool. She’s on top of her game, and is just about to push her latest update when her screen flickers. She freezes. Everyone else’s does too, but then the screens go back to the normal display and everyonebreathes a sigh of relief, going on. Raven narrows her eyes and opens another browser, just playing out a hunch… nobody notices that she’s left her main console open, that she’s working in another command center, but everybody notices when she pulls her legs off the desk in front of her. Her lips are pursed but her eyes are alight with a challenge. 

Minutes pass and she leans forward, fingers flying. She types a few morelines, mutters ‘boom’, then leans under her desk and yanks out thecable. Her screen goes dark and everybody looks around in confusion. She grabs a pen and pencil that were on the desk, scribbles a couple of lines on the scratch paper provided, and walks over to the moderators’ desk, setting the paper onto it. “That’s an ip address, somewhere in the UK,” she says, pointing, “they hacked the mainframe, they can see all of our screens, and they’re pulling all the code everyone is writing and feeding it nicely onto this,” she taps the paper again, “site; he’s blasting it out online. I don’t write for free, so I dropped a virus in his system. You can track that here,” she taps one last time, before pulling back and sticking her hands in the pockets of her jeans. “It’s pulling everything it can from his machine. Once the upload is complete, it’ll fry his drive.” She turns from the desk, strides out of the room. It’s completely silent, then everyone else starts pulling their cables too. 

They call off the competition; nobody wants to talk about how someone calling themselves The Acolyte managed to get onto the server that’s encrypted with the same security as most of the branches of the US government. They ask how Raven was able to find their hacker, since that means she’d have to access the same server, and do it without Uncle Sam or The Acolyte knowing about it, and she cocks an eyebrow at them. “Ye of little faith,” she shakes her head, then calls the airline to move her flight up a couple of hours. 

SCENE 2: bellarke house party. Raven doesn’t often go into Boston but she makes an exception for her friends’ house warming. It’s a gorgeous brownstone, with Clarke’s avant-garde pieces hanging throughout, and a dark library for all of Bellamy’s books. The house is BRIMMING with people, and Raven smiles to herself, happy that her friends have so many people who want to celebrate them. 

The night goes on and people are weaving in and out of the narrow hallways and the lights are dim and she’s eavesdropping near the fireplace, listening to some guy with a really lovely British accent talk about a solo motorcycle trip he took across Europe. She’s laughing a bit to herself—come on, does he really expect them to believe he made it from Madrid to Andorra in 5 hours? —when someone trips and someone else moves to avoid their drink, and then someone else steps into her. She’s sure they didn’t mean to, but they hit her left knee just right and she’s falling when someone catches her.  

Strong arms are at her elbows and when she turns to thank whoever caught her, she doesn’t recognize him. He has a jawline she could cut herself on, gorgeous brown eyes and an amazing mouth that just happens to be turned up in a bit of a smirk when he realizes she’s looking. “You alright?” he asks easily, and she realizes that this is the renegade biker and his voice suits him. But she doesn’t like to be caught off guard and she especially doesn’t like it when it’s because of her leg so she pulls her arms back, nods curtly, and says “It’s 609 kilometers from Madrid to Andorra; does your bike have wings?” and then he really grins and she can’t help herself, but that’s a pretty sight.

He pulls her into the group conversation, and Raven likes the light rise and fall of his voice. She also likes the relaxed way he’s standing, the way he fills up the corner of the room, the way he tells stories and they way he seems to be noticing everyone around him. He’s smart, and it’s a lazy kind of intelligence, where people might not assume itwhen they meet him, but that’s an advantage. She can tell, because she gets his humor. He’ll say something to the side, mutter it, and look over at her in surprise when she snorts, because she heard it, and was thinking it. He’s not used to someone catching it, and Raven’s amused by that.

At some point, he pushes the sleeves of his jacket up his forearm, and she notices the tattoo just under his elbow. She asks him about the bird there and he shrugs, saying it reminds himof this line from a poem, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before, that he heard when he was in primaryschool, and how it stuck with him, and whenever he sees the ink, it reminds him to venture, never settle. He adds that it’s by this guy Edgar Allen Poe, called The Raven, and she realizes he’s either the boldest person she’s met, or he truly doesn’t know who she is. Either way, the next time someone pushes into someone else, and the room shifts to readjust, she steps closer to him.

She leaves with him. Is okay with him not knowing her name, okay because look at him, and he’s looking at her like he’s thinking the same, and after the disaster that was the hackathon, she could use a break. She’s not usually one for hookups, but then again she’s never met a British guy with eyes that are as quick as hers, and hands that feel like fire on her skin, and a voice that sends shivers through her. He’s careful of her leg and he keeps checking that she’s okay and when she falls apart, the awed expression on his face sends a jolt of emotions through her that she wasn’t expecting. She lets herself fall asleep in his bed, his hand running through her hair and hers tracing the ink on his arm. She’s tempted to ask about the other tattoos, but she doesn’t.

She wakes at the crack of dawn, like she always does, slips around the room to grab her clothes while he’s still waking up. It’s not awkward, but she thinks they both know that this is it, and not to make a big deal out of it. But as he makes her some coffee, the picture of domesticity in his kitchen with sweatpants around his hips and his face still half asleep, she finds herself wishing that maybe it could be more.

But she has school and she assumes he has a life to get back to, so she plants a chaste kiss on his pretty mouth, leaves the coffee on the table, and lets herself out.

The next weekend, Clarke asks her at brunch, eyes laughing and expression telling, if she and Zeke got along as well as she had predicted. It takes Raven a minute to connect the dots that her hot hookup was the ex-RAF pilot that Harper had met when she was overseas, and that she and Clarke had been trying to sether up with for forever (”seriously, Rey, he might be the only guy ever who’s on your level”). But she dunks some more sugar into her coffee, rolls her eyes and says that she didn’t really get to talk with him—it’s true, they really didn’t talk much—but that that’s probably a good thing, since she doesn’t go for guys who think that being on her level is a competition. Clarke mutters that sometimes someone really is just that perfect for you, and Raven takes the opportunity to divert her friend to her boyfriend, which Clarke happily bites at. She’s easily distracted when it comes to him.

Classes resume and Raven is disappointed in herself. She doesn’t let guys get under her skin, no matter how gorgeous they are, or how well they can handle a Ducati, but here she is, wondering what brown eyes is doing with his week. 

She gets a call from Annapolis on Wednesday morning: they found the hacker. Well, sort of. Turns out, The Acolyte had a couple pet viruses of his own, and whenever his machine went down, they backfired on thesource. He lost everything, sure, but he’d gotten halfway through the mainframe of the hackathon before they caught him. And now he had a firewall set up, locking them out of the system and him in and, they were embarrassed to ask this, but would it be possible for Raven to take a look…

She does. Rolls her neck and sitsdown at the computer they give her in a room that isn’t supposed to exist. She’s slipped in through a backdoor and she whistles in admiration as she has to work her way through three more layers. It’s sophisticated stuff. Flashy, a bit much for her taste, but excellence can afford elegance. You can tell a lot about a developer by how they write code, and The Acolyte is no amateur. She’s surprised: usually hackers like this use their skill to steal or blackmail. This guy, he just seems like he’s trying to prove a point. But he’s protecting something.

Three hours in, she finds it. He hacked the competition because there was a backdoor through the USNA server into a subset of DACA records. The administrators behind her are getting nervous—it’s fair, Raven figures, they can’t read a thing on her screen, and she’s been focused pretty intently for the last half hour—but she doesn’t cue them in. Because, after all that effort, he’d just changed the deportation date for a couple hundred kids. Given them a chance to stay in the states, extend their future. Raven bites her lip. She thinks for a millisecond, then she changes her strategy. She still takes down the firewall, still wipes his drive. But she erases The Acolyte from the code, and publishes the code with the authority of one of the men behind her. The Acolyte is out, but his changes are in, and locked. And she left him a message.

She doesn’t know if he’ll show, but a week later, she’s back in Boston, waiting at the Common. She leans against one of the pillars, looking down at the Brewer Fountain. Just as her watch shows 4pm she straightens, not believing her eyes. But sure enough, she recognizes the broad shoulders and jawline of the man casually holding a rosary—she thought she was clever— and pacing back and forth in front of the fountain, looking around curiously. And as she goes down to meet him, she finds she’s smiling, wondering if maybe Harper and Clarke were on to something. 

“Zeke Shaw,“ she says when she gets closer, and he turns, recognizing her voice. A couple different emotions run across his face, then he laughs, his hand coming up to cover his mouth as he steps towards her. 

“Are you kidding? I was up against Raven Reyes?“

“You’re lucky, I went easy on you.“

He snorts. “You wiped my hardrive.”

“You crashed my competition.“

His eyes are laughing and he lifts his chin at her. “Come on, that wasn’t a competition for you.”

He’s right, and her smile stretches. “Rarely is.”

He stares at her for a long moment, admiration mixed with humor in his eyes. Then he shakes his head. “Now that, I believe.”