#how to be a good cto

[supercantaloupe]

woah js bach is like, really good. do people know about this ??

[reasonsforhope]

"Businesses like to talk about the concept of a closed loop or circular economy, but often they’re trying to close small loops. Releaf Paper takes dead leaves from city trees and turns them into paper for bags, office supplies, and more—which is to say they are striving to close one heck of a big loop.

How big? Six billion trees are cut down every year for paper products according to the WWF, producing everything from toilet paper to Amazon boxes to the latest best-selling novels. Meanwhile, the average city produces 8,000 metric tons of leaves every year which clog gutters and sewers, and have to be collected, composted, burned, or dumped in landfills.

In other words, huge supply and huge demand, but Releaf Paper is making cracking progress. They already produce 3 million paper carrier bags per year from 5,000 metric tons of leaves from their headquarters in Paris.

Joining forces with landscapers in sites across Europe, thousands of tonnes of leaves arrive at their facility where a low-water, zero-sulfur/chlorine production process sees the company create paper with much smaller water and carbon footprints...

“In a city, it’s a green waste that should be collected. Really, it’s a good solution because we are keeping the balance—we get fiber for making paper and return lignin as a semi-fertilizer for the cities to fertilize the gardens or the trees. So it’s like a win-win model,” [Valentyn] Frechka, co-founder and CTO of Releaf Paper, told Euronews.

Releaf is already selling products to LVMH, BNP Paribas, Logitech, Samsung, and various other big companies. In the coming years, Frechka and Sobolenka also plan to further increase their production capacity by opening more plants in other countries. If the process is cost-efficient, there’s no reason there shouldn’t be a paper mill of this kind in every city.

“We want to expand this idea all around the world. At the end, our vision is that the technology of making paper from fallen leaves should be accessible on all continents,” Sobolenka notes, according to ZME Science."

-via Good News Network, August 15, 2024

[cressidagrey]

Classified Information

Pairing: Max Verstappen x Francesca Howard (Original Character)

Summary:

Liam Lawson tries to flirt with Red Bull’s new CTO.

Turns out, she’s Dr. Francesca Howard.

Also known as Max Verstappen’s wife.

And the mother of his son.

Oops.

Warnings and Notes: 

....Poor Liam is really going through in this.

As always big thanks to @llirawolf , who listens to me ramble

Liam Lawson liked to think he had good instincts.

They had served him well in his racing career—knowing when to attack, when to defend, when to push and when to back off.

But apparently, those instincts failed him spectacularly the day he walked into the Red Bull factory for his seat fitting and met Francesca Howard for the first time.

He had heard the name before, of course. Everyone in the industry had. Francesca Howard—brilliant, ruthless, and the woman who had taken over as Red Bull Racing’s Chief Technology Officer after Adrian Newey’s departure.

What Liam hadn’t heard, however, was that she was also absolutely stunning.

She stood near the RB21 chassis, tablet in hand, deep in conversation with a few engineers. Her tone was sharp but calm, confident without arrogance, completely in control of every discussion around her.

And, Liam noted, she had a hell of a presence.

He adjusted the sleeves of his hoodie, rolling his shoulders back. He was good with first impressions. No harm in introducing himself, right?

He took one step forward—

And suddenly, he felt a hand grip his arm like a vice.

“Nope.”

Liam turned, startled, to find Gianpiero Lambiase looking at him like he was the biggest idiot to ever walk into the Red Bull garage.

Liam frowned. “What?”

GP sighed heavily, like this was already too much effort. “Don’t do it.”

Liam blinked, confused. “Do what?”

GP nodded toward Francesca. “Whatever you’re about to attempt over there—just don’t.”

Liam scoffed. “I’m literally just introducing myself.”

GP leveled him with a look, looking at him like he had just tried to run slick tires in the rain. “And yet, I’m still telling you not to.”

Liam folded his arms. “Why? Is she scary?”

GP snorted. “Not to me.”

That wasn’t an answer.

Liam narrowed his eyes. “Alright, what’s the deal?”

GP sighed again, rubbing his temples like he was too old for this conversation. “Lawson. I know you think you’ve got game. But trust me—not this time.”

Liam tilted his head. “What, is she taken or something?”

GP didn’t even bother looking up from his laptop as he muttered, “Something like that.”

Liam hesitated, suddenly feeling like he was missing some critical piece of information.

But then he shook it off. How bad could it be?

“C’mon,” he said. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

GP sighed again, muttering something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like “rookies never learn” before shaking his head.

“Fine,” he said, stepping back and folding his arms. “Do what you want. But when this backfires, I’m not saving you.”

Liam rolled his eyes and kept walking.

How bad could it possibly be?

At worst, Francesca Howard would roll her eyes at him and shut him down politely. No harm done.

So he straightened his shoulders and walked over.

He liked to think he was pretty smooth, after all. 

Not in an arrogant way—just in a self-aware way. He had a certain charm, an easy confidence. People liked him. Women liked him.

What was the worst that could happen? Mild embarrassment? He’d survive.

So he walked up to Francesca Howard, clearing his throat as she studied something on her tablet.

“Miss Howard,” he greeted smoothly, flashing his most easygoing grin. “Liam Lawson. Figured it was time we officially met.”

She looked up, brow arching slightly, her expression somewhere between amused and unimpressed.

“Dr. Howard.”

Liam blinked. “Huh?”

Francesca tilted her head. “I have two doctorates. If you’re going to address me formally, at least get it right. Otherwise, you can just call me Francesca. It’s my name.”

Liam froze.

Two doctorates?

Two?!

He cleared his throat. “Uh. Right. Dr. Howard.”

Her smirk did not help his sudden feeling of impending doom.

Behind him, GP sighed loudly.

Liam could feel himself slipping.

Not in a physically tripping over a curb way—though, honestly, he wouldn’t put that past himself at this point—but in a mentally trying to keep up and failing spectacularly way.

Francesca Howard was too smart for her own good.

Or, rather, too smart for his own good.

And she knew it.

“So,” he started, recovering as best as he could. “Two doctorates, huh?”

She gave him a patient smile, the kind teachers gave students who had just asked an embarrassingly obvious question.

“Yes,” she said. “One in Aerospace Engineering, one in Physics.”

Liam nodded slowly, stalling for time.

“Right. Cool. Just… y’know, casual, two whole doctorates.”

Francesca smirked. “You only need one to replace Adrian Newey. I like to be thorough.”

GP, still lurking nearby, snorted loudly.

Liam ignored him.

“Well,” Liam said, shifting his weight, trying to regain some sense of control in this conversation, “I guess it’s a good thing we have the best of the best in charge.”

Francesca hummed, looking entirely unaffected. “I know.”

Liam blinked. “You know?”

“Yes.”

“No hesitation?”

Francesca shrugged. “Why would I hesitate? It’s a fact.”

Liam opened his mouth, then shut it.

Then opened it again.

Then shut it again.

There was no winning here.

Behind him, GP sighed loudly, shaking his head. “I told you, kid.”

Liam Lawson had officially lost control of this conversation.

Dr. Francesca Howard—too smart for her own good, owner of two doctorates, and completely unbothered by his attempts to charm her—had thoroughly handed him his ass in a simple conversation.

And now, he was trying to figure out how to exit gracefully without admitting defeat.

(There was no graceful exit. He was so screwed.)

But before he could say anything else, a new voice cut in.

“You’re making this too easy for her.”

Liam turned—only to freeze at the sight of Max Verstappen walking into the garage.

With a baby in his arms.

Liam blinked. What.

Francesca’s expression instantly softened, her entire demeanor shifting as she abandoned whatever she had been working on and zeroed in on Max and the baby.

“There’s my boy,” she murmured, ignoring Liam completely as she reached for the baby, lifting him easily into her arms.

Liam blinked. What the hell was happening?

The baby—who had Verstappen blue eyes and a suspiciously familiar frown—giggled, grabbing at Francesca’s hair. 

“Did Papa bring you to see me?” she cooed, pressing a kiss to his tiny forehead.

Max, standing there with all the smugness of a four-time World Champion who knew exactly what he was doing, crossed his arms. “He missed you. You’ve been working too much.”

Francesca hummed, rocking the baby slightly. “That’s because someone keeps breaking parts, Maxie.”

Max did not look even a little guilty.

Liam, meanwhile, was still trying to process the absolute madness unfolding in front of him.

Papa?!

My boy?!

MAXIE?!

“What,” Liam said, voice slightly higher than normal, “the actual hell is going on?”

Francesca turned to him, just now remembering he existed.

She sighed but lifted her left hand, flashing a wedding band so obvious that Liam genuinely hated himself for not noticing it earlier.

Liam’s entire brain short-circuited. 

“We’re married,” she said casually. 

Liam choked.

“You’re—WHAT?!”“You’re—” He pointed between them. “Since when?!”

Max grinned, looking entirely too pleased with himself. “A while now.”

Liam turned back to GP, who looked entirely unshocked by this development.

GP sighed. “Tried to warn you.”

Liam needed a second.

No—he needed several seconds.

Because nothing about this situation made sense.

Dr. Francesca Howard—Red Bull’s new Chief Technology Officer, terrifyingly smart, and the owner of two doctorates—was married to Max Verstappen.

And, apparently, they had a whole baby together.

A whole baby.

Liam had spent months hearing rumors about who would replace Adrian Newey. He’d even done his research—looked into Francesca’s background, her achievements, the way she was basically a walking encyclopedia of aerodynamics and engineering.

But nowhere in his research had it said, Oh, by the way, she’s married to a four-time World Champion.

And definitely nowhere had it mentioned, They have a baby together, too.

Liam opened his mouth, then shut it. Then opened it again.

Then shut it.

Francesca, still holding the baby like he was the only thing in the world that mattered, raised an eyebrow. “You okay, Lawson?”

Liam pointed between her and Max, looking vaguely like he was on the verge of a breakdown.

“You—you—” he sputtered. “This—How did nobody tell me this?!”

Max, clearly enjoying every second of this, shrugged. “We don’t exactly make announcements.”

“You—” Liam gestured wildly at Francesca holding the literal Verstappen baby. “—You have a whole kid together!”

Francesca tilted her head, unimpressed. “Yes, Liam. That’s generally how it works when you’re married.”

Liam let out a strangled noise.

Max chuckled. “You thought you had a chance with her, didn’t you?”

Liam groaned, dragging both hands down his face.

GP, still entirely unshocked, clapped a hand on Liam’s shoulder.

“Lesson learned?” GP asked, smirking.

Liam exhaled sharply, looking so very done with this entire team.

“Right,” he said finally, voice still slightly higher than normal. “So, just to recap—”

He pointed at Max.

“Four-time World Champion, absolute menace on track, king of the grudge-holders.”

Max smirked. “Correct.”

Liam turned to Francesca.

“Chief Technology Officer, too smart for her own good, owner of two doctorates—”

Francesca looked far too amused. “Correct again.”

Then Liam gestured wildly at the baby.

“And now you—together—have a whole child?”

Francesca, unfazed, adjusted the baby against her hip. “Would you prefer we only had half a child?”

Liam let out a deeply pained groan.

Max chuckled. “You’re making this too easy for her.”

Liam ignored him and turned back to GP, who was completely unbothered, like he had seen this exact scenario play out before.

“You knew,” Liam accused.

GP snorted. “Obviously.”

Liam threw his hands in the air. “Does the entire team know?!”

Max shrugged. “The ones who pay attention.”

Liam pinched the bridge of his nose. “You know what? Forget it. I don’t want to know.”

Francesca, still holding the baby like Liam’s existential crisis was just background noise, turned to Max.

“I’m assuming you didn’t just come down here to break the rookie?” she asked dryly.

Max grinned. “No, I wanted to see you. And I think Joshua missed you.”

As if on cue, the baby—Joshua, apparently—made a happy babbling noise and patted Francesca’s face.

Francesca melted. “Oh, my love, I missed you too,” she cooed, kissing his forehead.

Max leaned down and kissed Francesca, quick and familiar, like it was second nature.

Liam immediately looked away.

“Right,” he muttered. “Nope. That’s enough for me today.”

Max pulled away, still looking far too pleased. “You sure? I could tell you how we met.”

Liam pointed aggressively at him. “Don’t. You. Dare.”

Max just laughed.

Liam exhaled sharply, rubbing a hand down his face. “Okay. Fine. You win.”

Max raised an eyebrow. “We were playing a game?”

“I don’t know, Verstappen,” Liam muttered. “But if we were, you won.”

Francesca, still very much focused on her baby, hummed. “I always win.”

Liam shot GP a pained look. “Does she ever turn it off?”

GP snorted. “Nope.”

Max, smug as ever, leaned in slightly. “She’s always been this way, mate. You just had the misfortune of walking into it.”

Liam groaned. “I’m never gonna live this down, am I?”

Max grinned. “Not a chance.”

GP clapped a hand on Liam’s shoulder. “We’ll let this slide, since you’re new, but you might want to brush up on team dynamics before making a fool of yourself again.”

Francesca, finally tearing her attention away from her son, smirked at him. “You’ve learned an important lesson today, Liam.”

“Oh yeah?” he deadpanned. “What’s that?”

Francesca tilted her head, eyes sharp with amusement. “That I’m completely out of your league.”

Max let out a bark of laughter.

GP clapped a hand on Liam’s shoulder, offering zero comfort. “You’ll be fine, mate. Just... maybe do your homework next time.”

Liam shot him a deeply betrayed look. “You really let me dig my own grave, huh?”

GP shrugged. “I considered warning you. Then I didn’t.”

Liam groaned. “This is actual bullying.”

Francesca, clearly still amused, adjusted Joshua on her hip. “To be fair, you also called me Miss Howard.”

Liam winced.

Yeah. That had been a mistake.

“Right,” he muttered, shaking his head. “My bad, Dr. Howard.”

Max, absolutely no help at all, laughed.

Francesca pressed a kiss to Joshua’s temple before looking back at Liam, her expression turning mockingly sympathetic. “It’s okay, Liam. You’re not the first person to underestimate me.”

Liam groaned again.

“I wasn’t underestimating you,” he muttered. “I was just—” He gestured vaguely. “I don’t know! Trying to be nice!”

Max smirked. “By flirting with my wife?”

Liam turned bright red.

“Okay,” he said quickly, backpedaling so hard he could have reversed an F1 car. “I wasn’t flirting. I was just—” He waved a hand vaguely. “—being polite.”

GP snorted. “Sure, mate. Whatever helps you sleep at night.”

Liam exhaled deeply.

Francesca, clearly having had her fun, glanced at Max. “I have a meeting soon. Can you take Joshua?”

Max nodded, easily reaching for the baby. “Of course.”

The moment Joshua was in his arms, he lit up, giggling happily as Max bounced him slightly.

Liam watched, still trying to adjust to this absolute fever dream of a reality.

Max Verstappen—the most intense, hyper-focused, emotionally guarded driver on the grid—was a whole dad.

And, somehow, it actually suited him.

Liam shook his head, still slightly dazed. “I need to sit down.”

Max chuckled. “You’ll get used to it.”

Liam seriously doubted that.

Francesca, still smirking, patted his shoulder. “Don’t take it too hard, Liam. You never stood a chance.”

Liam groaned.

Max grinned. “Welcome to Red Bull.”

[guyspleasehesmyfriend]

landoscar fic recs

the goats of landoscar fics to Me

impasse of biting - @wanderingblindly

12.5k | 2/2 | vampire au | barista!lando/vampire!oscar | M

"Maybe it would be good for you, something like this." Lando looks away from the espresso machine, over at Charles. "Like what?" "A vampire." "Charles," Lando breathes out, leaning against the back of his workstation and crossing his arms. "I've told you, it's not..." it's a me problem. He's the one that can't seem to connect to people, he's the one that's not noteworthy enough to want.

one of the first landoscar fics i ever read and it did change the trajectory of my life forever, liquid ur a genius btw. u could say im a real SUCKER for vampires…….

sgraffito - @ocontraire

19k | 1/1 | non-driver au | art teacher!lando/f1 driver!oscar | T

Maybe it could have been him, instead. It could have been him driving alongside Oscar, his hands lifting trophies, his dreams soaked in champagne. But Lando taught art while his brother raced, and he didn't regret it. Not when Oli seemed so happy.

hurt my feelings in the best way possible, pretty sure i cried, very beautiful overall

learned behavior - @passengerprincipessa

59.2k | 1/1 | 2024 season fwb / driver!lando/driver!oscar | E

Lando tries to win a championship and learns how to want.

THEEEEE landoscar fic, made me really weird about lando forever.

death and other lies - @finifugue

42.7k | 3/3 | spies but also so much more | assassin!lando/serial killer!oscar | M

Oscar kills people. Lando is legally dead. Someone wants to restart the war.

one of the most entertaining and well written fics i have ever read, incredibly devastating and heartwarming at the same time.

catechism - debrief

9.4k | 2/2 | theyre cats. | cat!lando/cat!oscar | T

“My faves are Temptation MixUps, but they only come in tubs,” Lando remarks. “I know how to open tubs,” Oscar says offhandedly. He knows how to what. “Will you marry me?” Lando asks without much thought.

prison break but cats, it is so silly and perfect

take it offline - @lellabellas

20k | 3/3 | office au doesnt even begin to describe it | ceo!lando/cto!oscar | M

"Why don't you put that mouth to better use, mate?" Lando's stomach turns even as he spreads his legs farther apart into a suggestive position. He's so fucked. Forget crossing a line; he's just pole-vaulted the line, done six backflips, and launched himself into the stratosphere. Half promises to hangers on in a bar is one thing—a little 'you take care of me, I'll take care of you,' and then never call them back. Coming onto a work colleague is something else entirely. But Oscar doesn't crack. He slowly closes his mouth that's fallen open in shock, licks his lips, and stares Lando down just as hard. "Alright."

blatantly unhinged and evil oscar is my favorite, and he is so well written in this fic, was on the edge of my seat the whole time and audibly gasped at least twice while reading it. Rancid in the best of ways.

run, rabbit, run (ive got you in my sights) - @saccharinenectarine123

8.5k | 1/1 | canon divergence | driver!lando/driver!oscar | E

Oscar's been obsessed with Lando since he was 14. Now they’re teammates at McLaren, and he's struggling to keep it together. Lando's not a better man.

LOVE when oscar is a loser who is obsessed with lando and lando is kind of evil about it, very beautiful outcome

sun kissed - @passengerprincipessa

45.5k | 6/6 | backpacking au | yachtie!lando/engineer!oscar | E

Oscar gets broken up with and impulsively books a four-week backpacking trip through Europe. He doesn't expect to fall in love along the way.

the most rom com fic ever + some of the most incredible character development everrrrrr incredibly heartwarming and feel good fic

in the firing line - @sincerelylancelot

5.3k | 1/1 | restaurant au | server!lando/chef!oscar | E

On Monday morning, Oscar finds a coffee next to his chopping board and a note.

i dont know why this fic itches my brain the way it does but i have read it 5 times and its perfect, simple idea + beautiful execution

certain uncertainty - @celellken

21.5k | 1/1 | ranch au | ranch hand!lando/ranch hand!oscar | NR

Oscar and Lando work on a ranch. Oscar is used to keeping his head down and his emotions in check. But when Lando arrives, all easy smiles and restless energy, Oscar finds himself thrown off balance.

slice of life found family ranch au...need i say more. deserves her flowers

the road not taken - @zelebrini

49.4k | 7/7 | slowburn exes to lovers | photographer!lando/vet!oscar | E

A long time ago, Oscar lost something he’s not sure he’s ever getting back.

WHAT IF UR OLD SITUATIONSHIP CAME BACK TO HAUNT U. AND HE WAS A BEAUTIFUL VET. AND U SAVED A CAT TOGETHER. so tragic...so amazing...i killed myself 17 times every chapter and loved every second of it

forget the protocol - astronautaficionado

68.7k | 10/10 | hockey au | goalie!lando/defenseman!oscar | E

By the time Oscar's first NHL contract ends, he's spent most of it in the minors. When he receives a controversial offer to join another team, it changes everything about his life, especially the hockey.

oscar psychologically tortures himself over a crush when literally nobody asked him to do that

so what are you waiting for? (its your serve) - @serve-cunt

76.4k | 11/11 | tennis au | tennis player!lando/tennis player!oscar | M

“Good evening and welcome to the press conference for Oscar Piastri,” said the organiser, in an officious, bored voice. “A reminder to keep your questions brief.” She pointed to a blonde woman in the first row. “Catherine, go ahead.” Catherine leaned forward. "First of all, Oscar, congratulations," she said. "With the points from this win you’ll be in the top twenty ranked male tennis players. That's a huge deal, especially this young. Did you expect that when you woke up this morning?"

just impeccable. oscar learning he can have sport and cute boy at the same time will get me every single time, and also now im fighting tennis demons

leading lines - @volantium

16.5k | 1/1 | fake dating au | photographer!lando/driver!oscar | T

Oscar blinks at him, slowly, mind gone horrifically blank. Lando keeps on talking but Oscar doesn’t hear any sound come out of his mouth. “What do you mean,” Oscar speaks over Lando, and can hear the audible click of Lando’s jaw snapping shut, “that you told your parents we’re dating?”

they r so stupid and i love them terribly

afterburn - @passengerprincipessa

75.1k | 5/5 | canon divergence | ferrari driver!lando/mclaren driver!oscar | E

At the end of 2027, Lando leaves for Ferrari. Oscar doesn't know why.

might just be The oscar character study, oscar learning he can have sport and cute boy at the same time once again

half-lives - anon

16.9k | 1/1 | gang au | gang member!lando/get away driver!oscar | E

Oscar is the crew's new getaway driver. Lando doesn't trust him. Doesn't like how calm he stays when things go to hell. But then things do go to hell, a job gone sideways, crew lost. Now it's just the two of them on the run. Bleeding. Breathing too close. Oscar starts seeing the cracks in Lando's armor. The way he folds when someone handles him right. The way he begs but never says it out loud. The hatred is always easy. What comes after isn’t.

i wish i knew who this anon was so i could kiss their brain for this utter masterpiece, running from the cops is my favorite brand of forced proximity

already home - @nyoomfruits

32.5k | 1/1 | non drivers + fake relationship au | producer(kinda)!lando/lawyer!oscar | T

Lando takes a deep steadying breath. “I think I might be in love with Oscar.” He says, and hates how immediately when he says the words, he knows it’s true. “Right,” Max says, nodding. “And?” “What do you mean, ‘and?’” Lando says, a little outraged. “I can’t be in love with him! We’re married! This is like, a disaster waiting to happen!”

rom com, friends to lovers, and fake relationship.....the holy trinity of fics i think

a single great error - @sincerelylancelot

12.4 k | 1/1 | magic + dark academia | everyone has magic powers | M

Lando reminds him of a black hole. Not just all-consuming and endless, but a bridge to infinite possibilities. Oscar’s hands can rip the universe apart, knit it back together, and feel the air shimmer where reality was—but to him, Lando is what’s left in that space: infinite and always.

heart! breaking! stuff! the sequel is also incredible.

off the record - anon

19.2k | 2/2 | pwp | secret camboy!lando/driver!oscar | E

Oscar stumbles upon a camboy account that looks a lot like Lando. It ruins his focus, rewires his brain, and makes him want things he shouldn't.

HOT. SO HOT. SO GOOD. ONCE AGAIN I WISH I KNEW WHO THIS ANON WAS SO I COULD KISS THEIR BRAIN. love when landoscar match each others freaks

negative splits - @ocontraire

10k | 1/1 | pro runners au | runner!lando/runner!oscar | T

So officially, Oscar Piastri, pretty good steepler and pretty bad pacer, was now a professional runner. They wanted him to steeple, mostly, though he’d be doing cross country in the fall, and Lando had pinky promised him, mid-distance guy to mid-distance guy, that if he wanted to get into the 3k flat indoor then he would get him in. Oscar didn’t really want to ask how he planned on doing that. Felt safer not to ask.

every single one of leaf's sport aus is a masterpiece, and this is no exception. top tier landoscar dynamics

[swanimagines]

Watch Dogs: Imagine being an ex-employee for Blume, working for DedSec and Wrench asks you out.

requested by anon

Note: nowadays all requests are done straight to asks, this is my old template of posting and I no longer have their asks!

A/N: I had a blast writing this <3 I hope you like it too!

Young you walking through Blume’s gates for the first time, lured in by your ex, had felt amazing. You had graduated from college with excellent grades, and working for Blume, the “better future”, held all your dreams together. You had imagined helping to build assets that would assist those in vulnerable positions, and changing the world into something better.

But then you first got introduced to how exactly ctOS worked, and everything you had believed in came crumbling down. Now, you truly saw what Blume was doing, gathering information about people without them consenting, behind a veil for a better future. It was sickening to see, but you were too deep to get out without anyone suspecting anything.

So, you moved out of the city you had lived all your life in, you lied to your boss that you simply need to take a break from work. You and your ex had separated a few months before that, so leaving him behind wasn’t a problem — especially when you weren’t even sure if he’d be accepting of Blume’s ways. He was more in the office and not really in the technical field like you, he may not even know what Blume is doing. But you wouldn’t be able to risk it, if he ever told Blume that you’ve told him about secrets they had made you vow never to tell outside that room with towers of data… you didn’t want to find out what would happen. It could be possible that they’d silence him too.

Your journey eventually brought you to San Francisco, where you got yourself a little apartment downtown. You knew you probably would be wiser if you just left the USA altogether, somewhere where Blume wouldn’t be able to find you and you could try chipping on them remotely, but… you couldn’t run and hide in another country you didn’t know. So you set up your computers and tried to find a way to help… but then, one day, you got a bag in your head and you got dragged somewhere. And your first thought was that Blume had found you, found out you were trying to sabotage them, and now they would silence you for good.

So when the bag was taken off your head, you assumed to see Dušan Nemec in front of you, accompanied by some Blume security guards. But instead, you saw four people around you, and it didn’t take long to figure out who they were – DedSec. A woman, a guy with a mask, a dark skinned, sturdy man, and a young man in a green hoodie, slightly turned away from the rest of you.

Your mouth opened and closed a few times, before you shook your head. “I’m not…”

You didn’t know how to finish the sentence. Your attempts to breach Blume’s network, you had occasionally come across another foreign signal while probing through their systems. You had collided with it a few times, but now it made sense. It should have made sense at the start. It had been DedSec, and now they probably thought you'd been trying to sabotage them.

You sat there frozen, your eyes jumping between them. But then the woman who stood closest to you huffed with a slight smile. “Relax. We’re not here to hurt you.”

You swallowed, a small hint of relief washing over you. “I wasn’t targeting you, I’m sorry if it looked like that.”

The guy wearing a mask snorted. “Yeah, we get that. If you were targeting us, you’d have done a pretty bad job, even for a Blume counter hacker.”

“Wrench,” the woman sighed, shooting a glance at the man. He shrugged and fell silent.

The dark skinned man stepped forward. “You’ve done a pretty solid job, considering you’ve done everything alone. But you know, it won’t take long before Blume will track you down. They’ve already found the area the unwanted signals are coming from, and in a few hours at most, your apartment will be raided. It isn’t safe for you to go there anymore.

You shot up to stand. “But my whole life is there, all my—”

The man held up a hand. “All your equipment, all your data, all your personal belongings. We know. We already retrieved them. And we also wiped your info from the housing database. 

Wrench snickered. “And the database will tell them that the apartment was rented by a giraffe-crocodile named Fuck Off.”

You blinked. “You… how?”

The man in a green hoodie finally turned towards you. “You only had a mattress without a bed and a few laptops, and some food. It wasn’t hard to get them out.”

The woman cleared her throat. “We’ve had you on our radar ever since we first noticed your signal a few days ago. Not because we think you’re a threat, quite the opposite. You could be useful for us.”

You frowned. “You mean… you’re trying to recruit me?”

The woman nodded. “You have the freedom to choose, of course. If you say no, we will prepare a burner phone for you with a few contacts so you’ll be able to disappear. But there’s a chance Blume will find you again unless you get out of the country, and even then it’s possible they’ll keep chasing you if there’s even a slightest doubt on their end that you’re the one who sent that signal.

You sighed. “So, my options are joining DedSec or running away and pray Blume won’t find me. Splendid.”

Wrench put his hand over his chest. “You make it sound like working with me wouldn’t be an opportunity of a lifetime.”

“The thing is,” the woman spoke again, “that you’ve already started fighting back. You clearly have a desire to bring Blume down, but you just don’t have resources for it. If you join us, we will have your back, we will teach you to hold the ropes and show you how exactly you help.”

You looked down at your hands, and your fingers twitched slightly as your thoughts fought with each other. What other choice did you have? 

The woman stepped closer. “Listen, we’re not here to pressure you. We just wanted to give you the chance to make the call before Blume does it for you.”

“And they will,” the man in the green hoodie added. “Blume doesn’t let loose ends walk free. You’ve seen what they do. You know too much now.”

You turned your head and stared at the wall. “If… if I do this, there’s not going back.”

You saw from the corner of your eye how the dark-skinned man shook his head. “Not to your old life, no. But the life waiting for you with DedSec? It’s worth it.”

Wrench suddenly jumped in, throwing his arms wide. “Yeah! You get to hang with super cool hackers! What’s not to love?”

You felt everyone staring at you, and then you carefully nodded. “Okay. Okay, I will join. But I won’t be doing anything crazy, alright? At least… not at first. I need time to learn.”

The woman smiled. “Welcome to DedSec.”

Wrench whooped, slinging an arm over your shoulders. “You’re gonna love it here! First mission: pick your hacker name. And no, you can’t steal mine, but I’m open to inspiration.”

—

A lot had happened during the past year. For the first three months, you had a hacking bootcamp held by Josh, and you ended up becoming pretty good at it. And now, you were doing just some checkups on your firewalls even though it wasn’t really necessary but it was a good way to pass time. Wrench sat by his workbench, you had noticed he was quieter than usual. When it was just the two of you, he wouldn’t shut up. He’d swing jokes and stories your way, but now he was just sitting there, fidgeting.

But then, he spoke. “Uh… are you finishing up soon?”

You snorted. “I’ve been finished for about an hour, just passing time for now.”

He turned on his stool. “Oh, cool. That’s good.”

He stared at you for a moment, and you stared back. You caught his mask showing heart eyes for a fraction of a second, and you frowned. “What?”

“Um, I was thinking… we’ve worked together for a long time, right? And… I think you’re cool. Really cool. Coolest person around. And uh…” he stammered, his mask displaying a heart again for a moment before disappearing. “I was wondering if… we could go out tonight? Not as DedSec partners, nor really friends either. Or I, I mean if you want to go as friends, that’s cool too, but… I was thinking of like, a date. With me?”

You froze, staring at him in turn. His mask flickered between three different emoticons, and you held back a smile when you realised he was panicking.

“A date?” you echoed. You wanted to make sure you heard right, understood right. Maybe his mask glitched somehow, it was so not like Wrench to panic like that.

He nodded while wringing his hands together. “Yeah, a date. Like a dinner, or a movie, or just a walk in a park I guess. I just… I want to get to know you better, beyond uh… friendship. No pressure! If you aren’t interested, we can pretend this discussion never happened, and I can go back to just being friends, or colleagues, or—”

“Wrench,” you interrupted, unable to hold back a smile now. “I’d love to go on a date with you.”

He froze for a moment, then jumped up, his mask displaying fireworks. “Yes! Okay, awesome, cool. Cool, cool, uh. What do you want to do? I’m going to make something amazing, like movie-level amazing. But not like, cheesy rom-com amazing,” he babbled, then froze again, looking at you. “Unless you like cheesy rom-coms. Do you like cheesy rom-coms?”

You laughed, standing up and walking up to him, before you took his hand into yours and squeezed. “Relax, Wrench. Anything we will do is fine, as long as you’re there.”

He was quiet for a moment, and his mask went through multiple emoticons again. Heart eyes, blush, joy… before he lifted his other hand to the side of it, resetting it to those default X’s. “You’re going to make my mask short–circuit if you keep my heart rate jumping like this.”

You laughed again, bringing his hand to your own chest so he could feel the rapid thumping of your own heart. His mask settled into heart eyes again, and you looked behind you. “Do I need to dress up for where we’re going?”

He was quiet for a moment, then shrugged. “If you want to. But you look gorgeous either way.”

You felt yourself blush again, and you knew Wrench was also bright red behind his mask. And you knew that this date would be amazing either way.

Requests are open! FANDOM LIST | PROMPT LIST(S) | RULES (READ!!!)

[sapphickorro]

Office Affair´ˎ˗

pairing(s) - Assistant!Natasha Romanoff x fem!CEO!Reader, brief Wanda Maximoff x fem!Reader

summary: Being the CEO isn’t easy especially if your competitors are trying to sway you over, luckily your assistant is there to ground you when your brain gets fogged by lust.   warnings: 18+ MDNI, cursing, dirty talk, workplace affairs, fingering (R receiving), oral sex (R receiving), Dom!Natasha, Sub!Reader, smut! word count: 2,360

A/N: This fic had been in my inbox for like months, sorryyyyy :3 

ao3 - masterlist

Running a company was never going to get easier. Waking up early, leaving work late. Phone calls every hour, board meetings every week. Your daily schedule was hectic. You were just lucky to have an assistant who helped you work through it all. 

Natasha Romanoff had been working as your assistant for a little under a year now. Originally being your secretary, you had given her a raise due to your prior assistant slacking on the job and not meeting your demands. Natasha seemed to be able to meet your demands far better than your previous assistant, even going as far as knowing what you need before you even ask for it from her. 

This morning, Natasha had just dropped off your coffee. She knew your order by heart now and was making sure to deliver your coffee at the same time every morning. 

“Is there anything else you need from me, Y/N?” After a while of her working for you, you went on a first name basis with each other. You always felt as if the formalities were too posh for you. 

“No, thank you Natasha. I’ve got a meeting today so I’ll be needing you to watch over the office for a bit while I’m in it.” You sigh, your fingers rubbing over your temples. 

Natasha opens her mouth to ask if she could help you destress but before she could, a knock echoes through your office. You look up, motioning for Natasha to answer the door. She doesn’t hesitate and twists the door handle revealing your secretary. 

“Good morning, Ms. Y/L/N. Wanda Maximoff has arrived for your 10am meeting,” your secretary says as she hands you a clipboard of notes for the meeting. 

“Thank you, can you bring her in here?” You ask and she nods, walking away from the doorway to gather Wanda for your meeting. 

“I trust you to make sure my files are given to Sharon?” You ask Natasha as you stand up, leading her to the doorway. Sharon was your CTO and you had some rather important files to deliver before the evening. Natasha delivers a simple nod before exiting the door, passing Wanda Maximoff on her way down the hallway that leads to your office. 

Wanda was adorned in a red suit, a smug smirk plastered over her lips. Her eyes glazed over Natasha’s for a mere second before looking back at what was in front of her. 

Wanda enters your office, you greet her as you stand by the door. Her hand shoots out to shake yours and you notice how soft yet cold her palms were. You usher her into your office, shutting the door behind her. She takes a seat at the edge of your desk, her eyes not being subtle in the way they rake over your sheer button up shirt and pencil skirt that had a slit at the right side. Your hair was in a bun with two strands falling down the sides of your face. 

“You’re a sight to see,” Wanda utters with a sultry tone in her voice, still holding her smirk as she meets your eyes again. Wanda was known to be a flirt, it was her strongest trait. 

“Well, I can say the same for you,” you respond, matching her vigor. You walk to the side of your office opening a mini fridge with a different assortment of drinks inside. 

“You want anything to drink?” You lean down to grab yourself a bottle of whiskey. 

“Drinking in the morning? How naughty,” you flinch as her hand comes over your back, she glides it down your lower half ever so slightly. Before her palm can reach your ass though, you quickly straighten your posture, standing up again. 

“Whiskey?” You ask, grabbing two glass cups from your shelf of glassware. You advert your gaze from hers as you’re sure you’d fumble over your words when you turn to look at her again. Wanda doesn’t miss the dark shade of rose adorning your face. 

“That’d be great Y/N,” you pour two glasses of whiskey before turning to walk behind your desk, taking a seat at your office chair. You place the two glasses down on the table, taking a sip out of yours and leaving a light lipstick mark over the rim. 

Wanda comes around to your desk to take a seat at the edge again, this time adjacently beside you. 

“Let’s talk business?” You ask, trying to maintain eye contact with her but failing. 

“I was thinking of buying your patent on your most recent project,” Wanda speaks with a confidence in her voice, it was as if her voice was trying to lure you in. 

“I don’t know if that’s feasible, Wanda,” you’re shocked at her preposition. Wanda’s company being a rival company to yours made it so you were always constantly trying to one up each other on newer and better inventions. You had never thought that she would downright attempt to buy the patent on your latest project to hinder your company. 

“Name a price sweetheart,” you pause, her nickname causing your brain to jumble up again. 

“I don’t know Wanda, we’ve been working on this for a while now and-” she cuts you off with her thumb running over your lower lip. 

“You had some lipstick smudged,” she says, staring at your lips. Your face flushes, with your breathing getting heavier. Wanda’s hand drops down to your chin, lifting it up so she can face it directly. 

“How can the enemy of my company look… This. Good,” your breath hitches at your throat as Wanda’s face slowly drops down towards yours. Her eyes staring at your lips. She starts leaning in, close enough to feel the soft warmth of her breath hit your lips. 

Wanda gets cut off by the door before she can capture your lips into hers. The two of you snap your head towards the door, seeing Natasha standing at the other side. 

“Sorry to interrupt, your meeting’s gotta get cut short as it seems that we’ve double booked Y/N for another meeting during this time. So sorry,” her voice feigns sorrow but Wanda could tell that her facade was fake. You quickly turn away from Wanda, your face getting impossibly hotter. 

Wanda stands up, taking a look at you before looking back up to Natasha. “Please hurry, Y/N urgently needs to get ready for her second meeting.” 

Natasha’s smile doesn’t meet her eyes. She has a staredown with Wanda, their fake politeness not being noticed by you. 

“I’m sorry Wanda, we can discuss this another time?” You finally gather yourself to stand up, leading her out the door. Wanda nods, not answering as her eyes squint in anger at Natasha. 

Once Wanda leaves, Natasha slams the door shut. 

“What the fuck was that?” She stares at your eyes. Your eyes widen staring back at hers. 

“What was what?” You answer defensively at Natasha’s vulgar demeanor. 

“You were just gonna let her fuck you?” Natasha walks towards you, causing you to back up with every step she takes until your back hits the edge of your desk. 

“Were you spying on me?” You ask with even more fervor. “No! I was gathering your files for Sharon before I saw Wanda practically about to slobber all over you. You DO realize that you have glass for walls on one side of your office.” She gets impossibly closer to you, her tall body casting a shadow over you. 

“I-I don’t know what that was,” your voice falters. Your eyes look down to her chest, finding it impossible now to maintain eye contact with her out of shame. 

Natasha steps back, sighing loudly as her hand rubs her eyelids before running through her short hair. 

For a CEO, you certainly don’t look like one right now. Your eyes look down at your fingers fiddling with each other. Your guilt cast over your face as you’re unsure what Natasha is going to say next. 

Natasha catches a sight of your shriveled up demeanor and goes to close the curtains on your windowed wall. She locks the door to your office before sauntering towards you. Her body looms over you once again, this time her hand goes under your chin to lift your gaze towards her. 

No words are shared as she leans in and catches your lips into hers. Your eyes shoot wide for only a moment before closing them to kiss Natasha back with just as much passion. Your hands wrap over her neck as her free hand goes to grip your waist. 

You whimper into the kiss, allowing Natasha an opening to slide her tongue into your mouth. She instantly invades every corner of your mouth with her tongue, her hands slowly drift down your body until it reaches the waistband of your skirt. She slips her fingers through and slowly slides down your skirt alongside your panties. 

Her hand comes to cup your cunt, a moan exiting your mouth at the contact. You both lean back to catch some air, your eyes staring into each other. Natasha’s eyes slowly drift down to her palm as she starts to circle around your opening with her middle finger. 

“Shit, you’re drenched, boss. Is this all for me?” She looks back up at your eyes, lifting her hand back to show her glistening fingers. You nod coyly, the heat on your face being shown through your cheeks. 

Natasha stuffs her slick fingers into your mouth watching as you obediently take them in, sucking them clean. She groans, “god you’re so good for me.” 

Her praise causes your clit to pulsate, yearning for touch. Natasha spares you choosing not to torture you any longer, she pulls her hands back to give you multiple pecks over your face before dropping down onto her knees. 

Your hands lean behind you to grip onto the edge of the desk as Natasha lifts your leg over her shoulder. She peppers your thighs with kisses in hopes of leaving a mark. You watch her intently, wanting to ingrain every image of this event into your head. 

When Natasha finally reaches the area that had been aching for so long, she gives one quick swipe of her tongue from the back to the front. A whimper exits your mouth, your hands grip onto the desk turning your knuckles white. 

Natasha’s eyes bore into your lidded ones, drinking in the way she made you turn into mush from just a swipe of her tongue. She dives back in with her tongue to circle around your clit. Your breaths come out labored and heavy from her ministrations. 

A moan elicits from Natasha’s mouth as she moves her tongue to your cunt, your wet liquids seeping out. Your attempts at containing your moans turn into broken sobs and whimpers. Natasha leans back before prodding her fingertip into your soaked entrance. She inserts one finger at first to tease you further, her finger curls inside of you as she slowly pumps it in and out at an agonizing pace. Her eyes are fixated on her glistening finger as she watches it disappear and reappear from your hole, a mesmerizing sight for her. 

You groan, “please, Natty.” She smirks as she looks back up at you, “does your greedy little hole want more?” 

You nod fervently down at her, your pussy clenching at her single digit in anticipation of more. 

“Of course a greedy slut like you wants more,” she feigns her disgust at you, beaming internally at how much she’s able to turn you on.  

“But, since I’m so nice,” Natasha says as she inserts a second finger, a moan escaping your mouth at her dexterity. Natasha leans back in to leave soft kitten licks over your clit.

You whine again ready to beg for her to speed up her thrusts but before you can, Natasha notices your need and starts pumping her fingers into you at an intensified speed. The tip of her fingers hitting your spot every moment she curls into you. Her mouth starts to lap over your pussy at a rapid pace. 

“N-Natty fuck!” Your head tilts back at the sensations overtaking your body. 

“You gonna cum for me, slut?” 

Your mouth opens as broken words fall out, “y-yes! Please, please, please - fuck!” Your hips start grinding on her fingers, wanting her impossibly deeper inside of you. 

“You think Maximoff can make you cum the way I do?” She asks with a growl in her voice. When you don’t answer her, far too lost in your pleasure, she slows down her pace, “Answer me!” 

You look back down at her, shaking your head as you answer, “No! Only you Natty, only you.” 

Natasha soaks in your words as she feels her ego being fed. “If that’s the case then, cum for me. Let go.” She moves her head back onto your clit, sucking on it. Her fingers get impossibly faster, hitting your insides so perfectly. 

Your mouth opens again, strings of curses followed with Natasha’s nickname falling out. “F-Fuck! Natty!” You yell out as you feel your orgasm snapping, a strong wave of pleasure encompassing your entire body. Natasha’s eyes look up at you to memorize every expression of your face as you cum. 

Natasha’s fingers slow down as she lets your ride out your orgasm, your breaths getting slower and lighter by the second. Your knuckles release their grasp on the edge of the desk as Natasha stands up to place a hand over your waist, holding you up in place as you fall limp in her arms. 

The hand with her digits inside of you slides out causing you to whimper at the emptied feeling. You open your eyes to catch her lifting the fingers into her mouth, sucking them clean causing you to clench your now emptied hole. 

Natasha groans with an exaggerated eyeroll at your taste, “fuck you taste good, sweetheart.” 

You giggle at her, your face red and damp with sweat. She smiles back at you as you lean in to start dropping kisses over her neck.

“Let me return the favor?” 

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Petard, Part III

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/01/miskatonic-networks/#landlord-telco-industrial-complex

Last week, Trump's FCC chair Brendan Carr reversed a rule that banned your landlord from taking kickbacks in exchange for forcing you to use whatever ISP was willing to pay the biggest bribe for the right to screw you over:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/fcc-chair-nixes-plan-to-boost-broadband-competition-in-apartment-buildings/

Corporate fascists and their captured regulators are, of course, that most despicable of creatures: they are plagiarists. Like so many of our tech overlords, they have mistaken dystopian sf as a suggestion, rather than as a warning. I take this personally, because I actually wrote this as an sf story in 2013, and it was published in 2014 in MIT Tech Review's Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Bruce Sterling and published in 2014:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262535595/twelve-tomorrows-2014/

I adapted it for my podcast, in four installments:

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_278

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_292

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_293

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_294_-_Petard_04

And, given the new currency of this old story, I thought it was only fitting that I serialize it here, on my blog, also in four parts.

Here's part one:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/30/landlord-telco-industrial-complex/#part-one

Here's part two:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/31/the-blood-speech/#part-two

And now, onto part three:

One of the early Ftp code contributors was now CTO for an ISP, and they'd gotten their start as a dorm co-op at Brown that had metastasized across New England. Sanjay had been pretty important to the early days of Ftp, helping us get the virtualization right so that it could run on pretty much any cloud without a lot of jiggery and/or pokery. Within a day of emailing Sanjay, I was having coffee with the vice-president of business development for Miskatonic Networks, who was also Sanjay's boyfriend's girlfriend, because apparently ISPs in New England are hotbeds of Lovecraft-fandom polyamory. Her name was Kadijah and she had a southie accent so thick it was like an amateur theater production of Good Will Hunting.

"The Termite Mound?" She laughed. "Shit yeah, I know that place. It's still standing? I went to some super sketchy parties there when I was a kid, I mean sooooper sketchy, like sketch-a-roony. I can't believe no one's torched the place yet."

"Not yet," I said. "And seeing as all my stuff's there right now, I'm hoping that no one does for the time being."

"Yeah, I can see that." I could not get over her accent. It was the most Bostonian thing I'd encountered since I got off the train. "OK, so you want to know what we'd charge to provide service to someone at the Termite Mound?"

"Uh, no. I want to know what you'd charge per person if we could get you the whole Mound — every unit in the residence. All 250 of them."

"Oh." She paused a second. "This is an Ftp thing, right?"

"Yeah," I said. "That's how I know Sanjay. I, uh, I started Ftp." I don't like to brag, but sometimes it makes sense in the context of the conversation, right?

"That was you? Wicked! So you're seriously gonna get the whole dorm to sign up with us?"

"I will if you can get me a price that I can sell to them," I said.

"Oh," she said. Then "Oh! Right. Hmm. Leave it with me. You say you can get them all signed up?"

"I think so. If the price is right. And I think that if the Termite Mound goes with you that there'll be other dorms that'll follow. Maybe a lab or two," I said. I was talking out of my ass at this point, but seriously, net-censorship in the labs at MIT? It was disgusting. It could not stand.

"Damn," she said. "Sounds like you're majoring in Ftp. Don't you have classes or something?"

"No," I said. "This is basically exactly what I figured college would be like. A cross between summer camp and an Stanford obedience experiment. If all I wanted to do was cram a bunch of knowledge into my head, I could have stayed home and mooced it. I came here because I wanted to level up and fight something tough and even dangerous. I want to spend four years getting into the right kind of trouble. Going to classes too, but seriously, classes? Whatever. Everyone knows the good conversations happen in the hallway between the formal presentations. Classes are just an excuse to have hallways."

She looked skeptical and ate banana bread.

"It's your deal," she said.

I could hear the but hanging in the air between us. She went and got more coffees and brought them back along with toasted banana bread dripping with butter for me. She wouldn't let me pay, and told me it was on Miskatonic. We were a potential big account. She didn't want to say "But" because she might offend me. I wanted to hear the "but."

"But?"

"But what?"

"It's my deal but…?"

"But, well, you know, you don't look after your grades, MIT'll put you out on your ass. That's how it works in college. I've seen it."

I chewed my banana bread.

"Hey," she said. "Hey. Are you OK, Lukasz?"

"I'm fine," I said.

She smiled at me. She was pretty. "But?"

I told her about my talk with AA, and about Juanca, and about how I felt like nobody was giving me my propers, and she looked very sympathetic, in a way that made me feel much younger. Like toddler younger.

"MIT is all about pranks, right? I think if I could come up with something really epic, they'd –" And as I said it, I realized how dumb it was. They laughed at me in Vienna, I'll show them! "You know what? Forget about it. I got more important things to do than screw around with those knob-ends. Work to do, right? Get the network opened up around here, you and me, Kadijah!"

"Don't let it get to you, you'll give yourself an aneurism. I'll get back to you soon, OK?"

#

I fished a bead out of my pocket and wedged it into my ear.

"Who is this?"

"Lukasz?" The voice was choked with tears.

"Who is this?" I said again.

"It's Bryan." I couldn't place the voice or the name.

"Bryan who?"

"From the Termite Mound's customer service desk." Then I recognized the voice. It was the elf, and he was having hysterics. Part of me wanted to say, Oh, diddums! and hang up. Because elves, AMR? But I'm not good at tough love.

"What's wrong?"

"They've fired me," he said. "I got called into my boss's office an hour ago and he told me to start drawing up a list of people to kick out of the dorm — he wanted the names of people who supported you. I was supposed to go through the EULAs for the dorm and find some violations for all of them –"

"What if they didn't have any violations?"

He made a sound between a sob and a laugh. "Are you kidding? You're always in violation! Have you read the EULA for the Mound? It's like sixty pages long."

"OK, gotcha. So you refused and you got fired?"

There was a pause. It drew out. "No," he said, his voice barely a whisper. "I gave them a bunch of names, and then they fired me."

Again, I was torn between the impulse to hang up on him and to hear more. Nosiness won (nosiness always wins; bets on nosiness are a sure thing). "Nicely done. Sounds like just deserts to me. What do you expect me to do about it?" But I knew. There were only two reasons to call me after something like this: to confess his sins or to get revenge. And no one would ever mistake me for a priest.

"I've got the names they pulled. Not just this time. Every time there's been any kind of trouble in the Termite Mound, MIT Residence has turfed out the troublemakers on some bogus EULA violation. They know that no one cares about student complaints, and there's always a waiting list for rooms at the Termite Mound, it's so central and all. I kept records."

"What kind of records?"

"Hardcopies of emails. They used disappearing ink for all the dirty stuff, but I just took pictures of my screen with my drop and saved it to personal storage. It's ugly. They went after pregnant girls, kids with disabilities. Any time there was a chance they'd have to do an air quality audit or fix a ramp, I'd have to find some reason to violate the tenant out of residence." He paused a moment. "They used some pretty bad language when they talked about these people, too."

The Termite Mound should've been called the Roach Motel: turn on the lights and you'd find a million scurrying bottom-feeders running for the baseboards.

I was going to turn on the lights.

"You've got all that, huh?

"Tons of it," he said. "Going back three years. I knew that if it ever got out that they'd try and blame it on me. I wanted records."

"OK," I said. "Meet me in Harvard Square, by the T entrance. How soon can you get there?"

"I'm at the Coop right now," he said. "Using a study-booth."

"Perfect," I said. "Five minutes then?"

"I'm on my way."

The Coop's study booths had big signs warning you that everything you did there was recorded — sound, video, infrared, data — and filtered for illicit behavior. The signs explained that there was no human being looking at the records unless you did something to trip the algorithm, like that made it better. If a tree falls in the forest, it sure as shit makes a sound; and if your conversation is bugged, it's bugged — whether or not a human being listens in right then or at some time in the infinite future of that data.

I beat him to the T entrance, and looked around for a place to talk. It wasn't good. From where I stood, I could see dozens of cameras, the little button-sized dots discretely placed all around the square, each with a little scannable code you could use to find out who got the footage and what it's policy was. No one ever, ever, ever bothered to do this. Ever. EULAs were not written for human consumption: a EULA's message could always be boiled down to seven words: "ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE." Or, more succinctly: "YOU LOSE."

I felt bad about Bryan's job. It was his own deal, of course. He'd stayed even after he knew how evil they were. And I hadn't held a gun to his head and made him put himself in the firing line. But of course, I had convinced him to. I had led him to. I felt bad.

Bryan turned up just as I was scouting a spot at an outdoor table by an ice-cream parlor. They had a bunch of big blowing heaters that'd do pretty good white-noise masking, a good light/dark contrast between the high-noon sun and the shade of the awning that would screw up cameras' white-balance, and the heaters would wreak havoc on the infra-red range of the CCTVs, or so I hoped. I grabbed Bryan, clamping down on his skinny arm through the rough weave of his forest-green cloak and dragged him into my chosen spot.

"You got it?" I said, once we were both seated and nursing hot chocolates. I got caffeinated marshmallows; he got Thai ghost pepper-flavored — though that was mostly marketing, no way those marshmallows were over a couple thousand Scovilles.

"I encrypted it with your public key," he said, handing me a folded up paper. I unfolded it and saw that it had been printed with a stegoed QR code, hidden in a Victorian woodcut. That kind of spycraft was pretty weaksauce — the two-dee-barcode-in-a-public-domain-image thing was a staple of shitty student clickbait thrillers — but if he'd really managed to get my public key and verify it and then encrypt the blob with it, I was impressed. That was about ten million times more secure than the average fumbledick ever managed. The fact that he'd handed me a hardcopy of the URL instead of emailing it to me, well, that was pretty sweet frosting. Bryan had potential.

I folded the paper away. "What should I be looking for?"

"It's all organized and tagged. You'll see." He looked nervous. "What are you going to do with it?"

"Well, for starters, I'm going to call them up and tell them I have it."

"What?" He looked like he was going to cry.

"Come on," I said. "I'm not going to tell them where I got it. The way you tell it, I'm about to get evicted, right?"

"Technically, you are evicted. There's a process-server waiting at every entrance to the Termite Mound doing face-recognition on the whole list. Soon as you go home, bam. 48 hours to clear out."

"Right," I said. "I don't want to have to go look for a place to live while I'm also destroying these shitbirds and fixing everyone's Internet connection. Get serious. So I'm going to go and talk to Messrs Amoral, Nonmoral and Immoral and explain that I have a giant dump of compromising messages from them that I'm going public with, and it'll look really, really bad for them if they turf me out now."

It's time for a true confession. I am not nearly as brave as I front. All this spycraft stuff, all the bluster about beating these guys on their home turf, yeah, in part I'm into it — I like it better than riding through life like a foil chip-bag being swept down a polluted stream on a current of raw sewage during a climate-change-driven superstorm.

But the reality is that I can't really help myself. There's some kind of rot-fungus that infects the world. Things that are good when they're small and personal grow, and as they grow, their attack-surface grows with them, and they get more and more colonized by the fungus, making up stupid policies, doing awful stuff to the people who rely on them and the people who work for them, one particle of fungus at a time, each one just a tiny and totally defensible atomic-sized spoor of rot that piles up and gloms onto all the other bits of rot until you're a walking, suppurating lesion.

No one ever set out to create the kind of organization that needs to post a "MIT RESIDENCY LLC OPERATES A ZERO-TOLERANCE POLICY TOWARD EMPLOYEE ABUSE. YOU CAN BE FINED UP TO $2000 AND/OR IMPRISONED FOR SIX MONTHS FOR ASSAULTING A CAMPUS RESIDENCE WORKER" sign. You start out trying to do something good, then your realize you can get a little richer by making it a little worse. Your thermostat for shittiness gets reset to the new level, so it doesn't seem like much of a change to turn it a notch further towards the rock-bottom, irredeemably shitty end of the scale.

The truth is that you can get really rich and huge by playing host organism to the rot-fungus. The rot-fungus diffuses its harms and concentrates its rewards. That means that healthy organisms that haven't succumbed to the rot-fungus are liable to being devoured by giant, well-funded vectors for it — think of the great local business that gets devoured by an awful hedge-fund in a leveraged takeover, looted and left as a revolting husk to shamble on until it collapses under its own weight.

I am terrified of the rot-fungus, because it seems like I'm the only person who notices it most of the time. Think of all those places where the town council falls all over itself to lure some giant corporation to open a local factory. Don't they notice that everyone who works at places like that hates every single moment of every single day? Haven't they ever tried to converse with the customer-service bots run by one of those lumbering dinos?

I mean, sure, the bigs have giant budgets and they'll take politicians out for nice lunches and throw a lot of money at their campaigns, but don't these guardians of the public trust ever try to get their cars fixed under warranty? Don't they ever buy a train ticket? Don't they ever eat at a fast food joint? Can't they smell the rot-fungus? Am I the only one? I've figured out how to fight it in my own way. Everyone else who's fighting seems to be fighting against something else — injustice or inequality or whatever, without understanding that the fungus's rot is what causes all of those things.

I'm convinced that no normal human being ever woke up one morning and said, "Dammit, my life doesn't have enough petty bureaucratic rules, zero-tolerance policies, censorship and fear in it. How do I fix that?" Instead, they let this stuff pile up, one compromise at a time, building up huge sores suppurating with spore-loaded fluids that eventually burst free and beslime everything around them. It gets normal to them, one dribble at a time.

"Lukasz, you're don't know what you're doing. These guys, they're –"

"What?" I said. "Are they the mafia or something? Are they going to have me dropped off a bridge with cement overshoes?"

He shook his head, making the twigs and beads woven into the downy fluff of his hair clatter together. "No, but they're ruthless. I mean, totally ruthless. They're not normal."

The way he said it twinged something in my hindbrain, some little squiggle of fear, but I pushed it away. "Yeah, that's OK. I'm used to abnormal." I am the most abnormal person I know.

"Be careful, seriously," he said.

"Thanks, Bryan," I said. "Don't worry about me. You want me to try and get your room back, too?"

He chewed his lip. "Don't," he said. "They'll know it was me if you do that."

I resisted the urge to shout at him to grow a spine. These assholes had cost him his home and his job (OK, I'd helped) and he was going to couch-surf it until he could find the rarest of treasures: an affordable place to live in Cambridge, Mass? Even if he was being tortured by his conscience for all his deplorable selloutism, he was still being a total wuss. But that was his deal. I mean, he was an elf, for chrissakes. Who knew what he was thinking?

"Suit yourself," I said, and went and made some preparations.

#

Messers Amoral, Nonmoral and Immoral had an office over the river in Boston, in a shabby office-block that only had ten floors, but whose company directory listed over 800 businesses. I knew the kind of place, because they showed up whenever some hairy scam unravelled and they showed you the office-of-convenience used by the con-artists who'd destroyed something that lots of people cared about and loved in order to make a small number of bad people a little richer. A kind of breeding pit for rot-fungus, in other words.

At first I thought I was going to have to go and sleuth their real locations, but I saw that Amoral, Nonmoral and Immoral had the entire third floor registered to them, while everyone else had crazy-ass, heavily qualified suite numbers like 401c(1)K, indicating some kind of internal routing code for the use of the army of rot-fungus-infected spores who ensured that correspondence was handled in a way that preserved the illusion that each of the multifarious, blandly named shell companies (I swear to Cthulhu that there was one called "International Holdings (Holdings), Ltd") was a real going concern and not a transparent ruse intended to allow the rot-fungus to spread with maximal diffusion of culpability for the carriers who did its bidding.

I punched # # #300# # # on the ancient touchscreen intercom, its surface begrimed with a glossy coat of hardened DNA, Burger King residue and sifted-down dust of the ages. It blatted like an angry sheep, once, twice, three times, then disconnected. I punched again. Again. On the fourth try, an exasperated, wheezing voice emerged: "What?"

"I'm here to speak to someone from MIT Residences LLC."

"Send an email."

"I'm a tenant. My name is Lukasz Romero." I let that sink in. "I've got some documents I'd like to discuss with a responsible individual at MIT Residences LLC." I put a bit of heavy English on documents. "Please." I put even more English on "Please." I've seen the same tough-guy videos that you have, and I can do al-pacinoid overwound Dangerous Dude as well as anyone. "Please," I said again, meaning "Right. Now."

There was an elongated and ominous pause, punctuated by muffled rustling and grumbling, and what may have been typing on an old-fashioned, mechanical keyboard. "Come up," a different voice said. The elevator to my left ground as the car began to lower itself.

#

I'd expected something sinister — a peeling dungeon of a room where old men with armpit-stains gnawed haunches of meat and barked obscenities at each other. Instead, I found myself in an airy, high-ceilinged place that was straight out of the publicity shots for MIT's best labs, the ones that had been set-dressed by experts who'd ensured that no actual students had come in to mess things up before the photographer could get a beautifully lit shot of the platonic perfection.

The room took up the whole floor, dotted with conversation pits with worn, comfortable sofas whose end-tables sported inconspicuous charge-plates for power-hungry gadgets. The rest of the space was made up of new-looking worksurfaces and sanded-down antique wooden desks that emitted the honeyed glow of a thousand coats of wax buffed by decades of continuous use. The light came from tall windows and full-spectrum spotlights that were reflected and diffused off the ceiling, which was bare concrete and mazed with cable-trays and conduit. I smelled good coffee and toasting bread and saw a perfectly kept little kitchenette to my left.

There were perhaps a dozen people working in the room, standing at the worksurfaces, mousing away at the antique desks, or chatting intensely in the conversation pits. It was a kind of perfect tableau of industrious tech-company life, something out of a recruiting video. The people were young and either beautiful, handsome or both. I had the intense, unexpected desire to work here, or a place like this. It had good vibes.

One of the young, handsome people stood up from his conversation nook and smoothed out the herringbone wool hoodie he was wearing, an artfully cut thing that managed to make him look like both a young professor and an undergraduate at the same time. It helped that he was so fresh-faced, with apple cheeks and a shock of curly brown hair.

"Lukasz, right?" He held out a hand. He was wearing a dumbwatch, a wind-up thing in a steel casing that was fogged with a century of scratches. I coveted it instantly, though I knew nothing about its particulars, I was nevertheless certain that it was expensive, beautifully engineered, and extremely rare.

The door closed behind me and the magnet audibly reengaged. The rest of the people in the room studiously ignored us.

"I'm Sergey. Can I get you a cup of coffee? Tea? Some water?"

The coffee smelled good. "No thank you," I said. "I don't think I'll be here for long."

"Of course. Come and sit."

The other participants in his meeting had already vacated the sofas and left us with a conversation pit all to ourselves. I sank into the sofa and smelled the spicy cologne of a thousand eager, well-washed people who'd sat on it before me, impregnating the upholstery with the spoor of their good perfumes.

He picked up a small red enamel teapot and poured a delicious-smelling stream of yellow-green steaming liquid into a chunky diner-style coffee-cup. He sipped it. My stomach growled. "You told the receptionist you wanted to talk about some documents?"

"Yeah," I said, pulling myself together. "I've got documentary evidence of this company illegally evicting tenants — students — who got pregnant, complained about substandard living conditions and maintenance issues, and, in my case, complained about the network filters at the Termite Mound."

He cocked his head for a moment like he was listening for something in the hum and murmur of the office around him. I found myself listening, too, but try as I might, I couldn't pick out a single individual voice from the buzz, not even a lone intelligble word. It was as though they were all going "murmurmurmurmur," though I could see their lips moving and shaping what must have been words.

"Ah," he said at last. "Well, that's very unfortunate. Can you give me a set and I'll escalate them up our chain to ensure that they're properly dealt with?"

"I can give you a set," I said. "But I'll also be giving a set to the MIT ombudsman and the The Tech and the local Wikileaks Party rep. Sergey, forgive me, but you don't seem to be taking this very seriously. The material in my possession is the sort of thing that could get you and your colleagues here sued into a smoking crater."

"Oh, I appreciate that there's a lot of potential liability in the situation you describe, but it wouldn't be rational for me to freak out now, would it? I haven't seen your documents, and if I had, I can neither authenticate them nor evaluate the risk they represent. So I'll take a set from you and ensure that the people within our organization who have the expertise to manage this sort of thing get to them quickly."

It's funny. I'd anticipated that he'd answer like a chatbot, vomiting up Markov-chained nothings from the lexicon of the rot-fungus: "we take this very seriously," "we cannot comment on ongoing investigations," "we are actioning this with a thorough inquiry and post-mortem" and other similar crapola. Instead, he was talking like a hacker on a mailing list defending the severity he'd assigned to a bug he owned.

"Sergey, that's not much of an answer."

He sipped that delicious tea some more. "Is there something in particular you wanted to hear from me? I mean, this isn't the sort of thing that you find out about then everything stops until you've figured out what to do next."

I was off-balance. "I wanted –" I waved my hands. "I wanted an explanation. How the hell did this systematic abuse come about?"

He shrugged. He really didn't seem very worried "Hard to say, really. Maybe it was something out of the labs."

"What do you mean, 'the labs'?"

He gestured vaguely at one cluster of particularly engrossed young men and women who were bent over screens and worksurfaces, arranged in pairs or threesomes, collaborating with fierce intensity, reaching over to touch each others' screens and keyboards in a way I found instantly and deeply unsettling. "We've got a little R&D lab that works on some of our holdings. We're really dedicated to disrupting the rental market. There's so much money in it, you know, but mostly it's run by these entitled jerks who think that they're geniuses for having the brilliant idea of buying a building and then sitting around and charging rent on it. A real old boys' club." For the first time since we started talking, he really seemed to be alive and present and paying attention.

"Oh, they did some bits and pieces that gave them the superficial appearance of having a brain, but there's a lot of difference between A/B splitting your acquisition strategy and really deep-diving into the stuff that matters."

At this stage, I experienced a weird dissonance. I mean, I was there because these people were doing something genuinely villainous, real rot-fungus stuff. On the other hand, well, this sounded cool. I can't lie. I found it interesting. I mean, catnip-interesting.

"I mean, chewy questions. Like, if the median fine for a second citation for substandard plumbing is $400, and month-on-month cost for plumbing maintenance in a given building is $2,000 a month, and the long-term costs of failure to maintain are $20,000 for full re-plumbing on a 8-10 year basis with a 75 percent probability of having to do the big job in year nine, what are the tenancy parameters that maximize your return over that period?"

"Tenancy parameters?"

He looked at me. I was being stupid. I don't like that look. I suck at it. It's an ego thing. I just find it super-hard to deal with other people thinking that I'm dumb. I would probably get more done in this world if I didn't mind it so much. But I do. It's an imperfect world, and I am imperfect.

"Tenancy parameters. What are the parameters of a given tenant that predict whether he or she will call the city inspectors given some variable setpoint of substandard plumbing, set on a scale that has been validated through a rigorous regression through the data that establishes quantifiable inflection points relating to differential and discrete maintenance issues, including leaks, plugs, pressure, hot water temperature and volume, and so on. It's basically just a solve-for-x question, but it's one with a lot of details in the model that are arrived at through processes with a lot of room for error, so the model needs a lot of refinement and continuous iteration.

"And of course, it's all highly sensitive to external conditions — there's a whole game-theoretical set of questions about what other large-scale renters do in response to our own actions, and there's a information-theory dimension to this that's, well, it's amazing. Like, which elements of our strategy are telegraphed when we take certain actions as opposed to others, and how can those be steganographed through other apparent strategies.

"Now, most of these questions we can answer through pretty straightforward business processes, stuff that Amazon figured out twenty years ago. But there's a real risk of getting stuck in local maxima, just you know, overoptimizing inside of one particular paradigm with some easy returns. That's just reinventing the problem, though, making us into tomorrow's dinosaurs.

"If we're going to operate a culture of continuous improvement, we need to be internally disrupted to at least the same extent that we're disrupting those fat, stupid incumbents. That's why we have the labs. They're our chaos monkeys. They do all kinds of stuff that keeps our own models sharp. For example, they might incorporate a separate business and use our proprietary IP to try to compete with us — without telling us about it. Or give a set of autonomous agents privileges to communicate eviction notices in a way that causes a certain number of lawsuits to be filed, just to validate our assumptions about the pain-point at which an action or inaction on our side will trigger a suit from a tenant, especially for certain profiles of tenants.

"So there's not really any way that I can explain specifically what happened to the people mentioned in your correspondence. It's possible no one will ever be able to say with total certainty. I don't really know why anyone would expect it to be otherwise. We're not a deterministic state-machine, after all. If all we did was respond in set routines to set inputs, it'd be trivial to innovate around us and put us out of business. Our objective is to be strategically nonlinear and anti-deterministic within a range of continuously validated actions that map and remap a chaotic terrain of profitable activities in relation to property and rental. We're not rentiers, you understand. We don't own assets for a living. We do things with them. We're doing commercial science that advances the state of the art. We're discovering deep truths lurking in potentia in the shape of markets and harnessing them — putting them to work."

His eyes glittered. "Lukasz, you come in here with your handful of memos and you ask me to explain how they came about, as though this whole enterprise was a state-machine that we control. We do not control the enterprise. An enterprise is an artificial life-form built up from people and systems in order to minimize transaction costs so that it can be nimble and responsive, so that it can move into niches, dominate them, fully explore them. The human species has spent millennia recombining its institutions to uncover the deep, profound mathematics of power and efficiency.

"It's a terrain with a lot of cul-de-sacs and blind alleys. There are local maxima: maybe a three-move lookahead shows a good outcome from evicting someone who's pregnant and behind on the rent, but the six-move picture is different, because someone like you comes along and makes us look like total assholes. That's fine. All that means is that we have to prune that branch of the tree, try a new direction. Hell, ideally, you'd be in there so early, and give us such a thoroughgoing kicking, that we'd be able to discover and abort the misfire before the payload had fully deployed. You'd be saving us opportunity cost. You'd be part of our chaos-monkey.

"Lukasz, you come in here with your whistleblower memos. But I'm not participating in a short-term exercise. Our mission here is to quantize, systematize, harness and perfect interactions.

"You come in here and you want me to explain, right now, what we're going to do about your piece of information. Here's your answer, Lukasz: we will integrate it. We will create models that incorporate disprovable hypotheses about it, we will test those models, and we will refine them. We will make your documents part of our inventory of clues about the underlying nature of deep reality. Does that answer satisfy you, Lukasz?"

I stood up. Through the whole monologue, Sergey's eyes had not moved from mine, nor had his body-language shifted, nor had he demonstrated one glimmer of excitement or passion. Instead, he'd been matter-of-fact, like he'd been explaining the best way to make an omelet or the optimal public transit route to a distant suburb. I was used to people geeking out about the stuff they did. I'd never experienced this before, though: it was the opposite of geeking out, or maybe a geeking out that went so deep that it went through passion and came out the other side.

It scared me. I'd encountered many different versions of hidebound authoritarianism, fought the rot-fungus in many guises, but this was not like anything I'd ever seen. It had a purity that was almost… seductive.

But beautiful was not the opposite of terrible. The two could easily co-exist.

"I hear that I'm going to get evicted when I get back to the Termite Mound — you've got a process-server waiting for me. That's what I hear."

Sergey shrugged. "And?"

"And? And what use is your deep truth to me if I'm out on the street?"

"What's your point?"

He was as mild and calm as a recorded airport safety announcement. There was something inhuman — transhuman? — in that dispassionate mein.

"Don't kick me out of my place."

"Ah. Excuse me a second."

He finished his tea, set the cup down and headed over to the lab. He chatted with them, touched their screens. The murmur drowned out any words. I didn't try to disguise the fact that I was watching them. There was a long period during which they said nothing, did not touch anything, just stared at the screens with their heads so close together they were almost touching. It was a kind of pantomime of psychic communications.

He came back. "Done," he said. "Is there anything else? We're pretty busy around here."

"Thank you," I said. "No, that's about it."

"All right then," he said. "Are you going to leave me your documents?"

"Yes," I said, and passed him a stack of hardcopies. He looked at the paper for a moment, folded the stack carefully at the middle and put it in one of the wide side-pockets of his beautifully tailored cardigan.

I found my way back down to the ground floor and was amazed to see that the sun was still up. It had felt like hours had passed while Sergey had talked to me, and I could have sworn that the light had faded in those tall windows. But, checking my drop, I saw that it was only three o'clock. I had to be getting home.

There was a process-server waiting ostentatiously in the walkway when I got home, but he looked at me and then down at his screen and then let me pass.

It was only once I was in my room that I realized I hadn't done anything about Bryan's eviction.

[softinkshadows]

Overworking

Disclaimer: explicit sex

Fem! reader x Nanami Kento

----

Ding! You press the doorbell to room 703, grumbling under your breath. It's already day 3 of the tech conference and your ankles feel almost bruised from all the walking in heels. You can already feel your body straining against a week of consecutive 3 hours of sleep, in between lunchtime meetings, speeches, networking sessions and too many cups of coffee (and occasionally champagne). You glance briefly at your watch. 11pm. To make matters worse, there's a mid-event assessment report due by noon tomorrow. And your colleague still has not answered the door, leaving you to muck pathetically about the expensive carpet and ostentatious perfume of the hotel corridor.

"Hey!!" you rap on the door, impatient. "We haven't got all day-"

The door swings open abruptly.

You're a little taken aback at the suddenness, but also at the newfound proximity. Your colleague was dressed in a laidback t shirt and sweatpants, a white towel draped casually across shoulder.

"Sorry to keep you waiting, I was in the shower. Let's get to the report," he said, turning back towards the room and motioning for you to enter.

You kick off your heels near the doorway, shutting the door with a click. Maybe it's the fact that it has been long day, or the fact that you've never seen your colleague outside of his perfectly pressed beige suit and slacks. But you feel disoriented, and nervous, as if you stumbled upon a scene you shouldn't have. When did Nanami Kento, of all people, actually look kind of attractive?

You spread out the printed documents on the coffee table and pull up the slides and excel sheets on your laptop. Your eyes can't help but slide, every now and then, over to the man seated next to you on the couch.

Nanami had always gotten on your nerves. If it was not an early promotion, then it was a compliment from Director Yamazaki, or a client lunch only he was invited to. You'd both graduated from ivy leagues with top grades, started at JJK Corp at the same time, and yet it always seemed he was just a step ahead of you. And while he was competent, there was just something about it that seemed quite unfair. It made you bitter and him stoic, filling your working relationships with barbed back-and-forths. Somehow it was Nanami that always knew how to rile you up the most.

You watch as a glistening drop of water falls from his damp hair, darkening a spot on his grey shirt. You could feel the slight warmth of his body, radiating from his proximity. Also, he smelt good.

"Uhm okay," you clear your throat to redirect your focus. "So about the report, it seems like we have pretty good sentiment around the CTO's remarks."

"Yes, and I think with this it will be good to introduce some, uh, some new messaging around our core product," Nanami said. It was only when he stuttered slightly that you realised his face was very lightly flushed. Was he drunk?

He caught you looking quizzically before quipping quietly. "Yeah sorry, I was dragged for some drinks with clients after the dinner."

"Oh, with Director Yamazaki?"

"Yeah."

You fight the feeling of frustration wanting to claw its way out of your chest.

"Well anyway, I don't think that's the right call. The downsides around the technology is too sensitive to broach now, it'll invite unnecessary criticism," you shot back a little too fast, irked from exhaustion as well as to compensate from how oddly riled up you are. "We should just stick to what the CTO discussed, and double down from there."

"You don't like me, do you?" Nanami said, his teeth lightly clenched.

There was a rather long silent pause.

You met his gaze and tried hard not to squirm under its intensity. There was something in his eyes which showed annoyance, provoking, yet somehow tinged with a little remorse, as if he regretted what he just said. It was only now that you realise he was in fact very drunk.

Angry, haughty, stoic, bratty Nanami you could deal with. But drunk Nanami? It was a whole new animal.

"Er I..." you trail off in growing discomfort, at a loss of what to say. Your eyes subconsciously dipping to his neck, still streaked with a little water from his shower, and the broad curve of his shoulders. Somehow the sight made your mouth dry, stomach knotting in a newfound intimacy. You look back up and see his brown eyes still on you, piercing. Immediately, you flush up to your cheeks.

"I-I mean, the report.." you begin to say, stammering. Flailing. Saying anything possible to distract him from this embarrassing moment.

"Screw the report," Nanami breathes. Then he pulls you into him, his hand cupping your chin. Your lips almost touching

Then he pauses, observing your reaction, waiting for permission. His cheeks are pinker now, and the tips of his ears are lightly flushed. You feel your heartbeat in your ears, the tension in your chest about to burst. He always knew how to rile you up.

"Ugh, screw you," you moaned as you gave in, leaning in to smash your lips against his.

With a new hunger, Nanami grabbed your waist and pulled your legs around his, pressing your body hard against him as he sloppy kissed his way into your mouth, his fingers stroking up and down the length of your thigh. You moaned at the feeling, the taste of alcohol on his tongue egging you on. You felt even more giddy at how unrestrained he was, how strong his arms were around you. Before you knew it, you could feel yourself growing wet between your legs, desperate for friction.

As if on cue, his nimble fingers found its way to your waistband, unbuckling your pants, and pulling them down around you. You're too caught up with his tongue stroking the inside of your heated mouth, of both your spit trickling down the side of your lips to feel self conscious. He moves his hand up your your blouse, stroking your spine lightly before removing your top as well.

Nanami pauses for a moment, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. His brown eyes burning with lust.

Your bra straps have fallen off your shoulders, your hair messy and tousled, lips wet and legs parted. Your lace underwear has a spot darkening with slick. He's never seen you like this.

"Oh fuck," Nanami breathes, pulling you to straddle him such that your back is to him. He nibbles on your neck, fingers dancing a trail from your collarbone, to your breasts, where he plays with your hardened nipple through your lace bra. His hands travel down to your underwear, where he massages your clit lightly from the outside.

"Stop teasing, Nanami, ah-" you cry out, your body quivering with want.

You're on edge, spreading your legs wide as possible and arching back into him to just feel anything. Wanting to push yourself into his touch.

Nanami relents. He pushes aside the fabric and strokes his digits lightly along your drenched folds. "You're wet," he chuckled, before inserting one thick finger into your cunt and biting lightly on your neck at the same time.

The sensation is enough to make you gasp out loud in pleasure, as you spread your legs wider to, thrusting up into his palm.

"Shhhh.. you really have to be a little more patient," he whispered into your ear, before adding a second finger to stretch you out.

Your eyes widen at the feeling, moaning as his large fingers already fill you.

"Did you know I've always wanted to have you like his, quivering over me with my fingers inside you?" Nanami lulled, adding his third finger into your quivering pussy. Already, from the sound of them thrusting in and out of you, you're obscenely wet, and he hasn't even taken off his clothes.

"But not, you had to be a little minx. Always all about work, and the competition," Nanami emphasised the last word while reaching his thumb up to press against your swollen nub.

"Ahhh fuck me, Nanami, please, I need to.." you gasp in between heavy breaths, on the verge of falling off the edge of pleasure. His fingers going in and out of you fast, squelching and hitting your g spot with every movement, your juices dripping down your thighs and onto the couch. At that moment, he speeds up, his fingers drilling into you relentlessly and his thumb massaging your clit in circles. His other hand clasps lightly around your neck as he whispers into your ear, "Come for me, sweetheart."

"Ahhh Nanami, fuck-" You moan as you come undone, hitting your climax. Your mind goes blank as you convulse around his hand, feeling your juices coating his palm. Thighs shaking, you arch into his kiss and frenziedly rub your ass against his crotch to ride out the high, gasping for air as fingers continue to pummel in and out of you.

When you come down, he pulls his fingers out, stringy with all your fluids. He licks them off with his tongue before pulling you in for another kiss.

"I would have liked to do this in the bedroom first, but I don't think I can wait," Nanami murmured darkly. He lifts you easily and turns you around, so that you're facing him, legs spread out on either side of him and ready.

He unclasps your bra and throws it unceremoniously to the side, out of sight. "Oh god, you're beautiful," he whispers, trailing his fingers around your nipples before his bites onto one of them hard. You moan, grasping his hair with your fingers and finding your legs unconsciously spreading wider. You can feel him hot and hard beneath the sweatpants, and suddenly this animalistic hunger overtakes you and you absolutely need to be completely filled up by him.

You almost tear off his shirt, licking and biting your way down his neck, while your hands fiddle with his sweats to set him free. His cock is already huge and hard against his abs, throbbing with a little precum at the tip.

"Nanami I need you in me, now, please" you beg, pawing at his chest, messily kissing around his mouth. Nanami chuckles into the kiss, before lifting you and slowly lowering you onto his cock.

You wince slightly at his girth and how big he is. He's barely past the tip and you can feel him stretching you so much it stings. But you're already so wet and needy that your juices are coating him, making it easier for his cock to bury itself into you.

"Such a good girl," Nanami murmurs, stroking your hair as he lowers you all the way up to the hilt, you body trembling to accommodate his size. You feel so indecently splayed out in front of him, nipples wet and sore from being bitten, sweat speckling across your body and his entire cock sheathed inside you, that you felt yourself getting wetter despite the stinging stretch. You begin to grind against him, feeling his whole length stroke your insides, hitting the spot deep inside you.

"Oh! Nanami! Fuck, you feel so good," you cry out at the pleasure, eyes rolling to the back of your head. Something about Nanami, about the way he gazes at you with such feral hunger, the way his fingers are pinching your nipples and holding the small of your waist, ignites a new thirst in you.

Without warning, you feel a new escalating pleasure build in your stomach as you hit another climax, moaning and rolling your hips around his cock, hearing your pussy squelch around his length, which continues to throb and brush against your g spot.

"Oh fuck," Nanami groans, "You're needy for my cock? What a little slut." He starts to bounce you up and down his length, coating the base to the tip of his cock with your cum before slamming you down again. You cry out at the rough and new sensation, pleasure starting to build again as the room fills with the sound of wet skin against wet skin.

He reaches around to slap your ass, hard and unforgiving. It's certain to leave a mark and you love it, crying out and moaning and egging him on, begging for him to go faster and harder.

"Nanami- oh fuck - feels so good!" you moan as he picks up his pace, thrusting into you, your nipples sliding against his now-sweaty chest, your clit rubbing against his torso and getting even wetter by the second.

"You're such a desperate minx, have you been waiting for me to ruin you all this time?" Nanami grunts between heavy breaths. You can feel the strain, the vein in his forehead that shows how desperate he also feels, rutting into you like his life depends on it.

"Fuck - yes!" You cried out, tears beginning to roll down your cheeks from the intensity, as you feel yourself completely emptied, then gaped wide and filled so entirely, as Nanami's cock goes in and out of you. You breath catching in your throat, you feel the knot of tension in your stomach growing larger, wider, your limbs beginning to quiver with pleasure and pain.

"Nanami, I'm going to-" you're unable to finish your sentence, as Nanami quickens his pace, pinching your nipples hard and using his hands to spread your ass cheeks even wider so he can bury his cock even deeper. His throbbing length hits the wall of your cervix rhythmically. HIs tongue laps around your nipples and your neck and earlobes, all the sensations tipping you over the edge as you come, loud and hard, moaning and whimpering against him. Your pussy clenching and convulsing around him unbearably tight, juices dripping across his thighs and onto the couch. His fingers around your ass also drenched, pushing and prodding against your hole, making you eyes blow out in pleasure as you ride out your longest ever orgasm.

The erotic sight and sensation sends Nanami over the edge as he thrusts wildly inside you and ruts into you one more time, shooting hot, thick ropes of cum inside you. "Fuck.." Nanami moans, emptying out and holding your waist so he coats all of your walls. You curse at the feeling, moaning so good against him as your orgasm doubles, driven by lust and the depravity of his want. Your slick now mixed with white cum seeps out from you, coating his balls, trickling sticky down to the sofa.

You've never felt this good in a long time.

Nanami pulls you in to him, breathing hard.

"I don't hate you," you finally said, your face flushes, legs trembling from the high.

"Seems like you don't," he laughed, reaching to give you a kiss on the cheek. He eyes settle on open door to the bedroom, before looking back at you.

"Ready for round two?"

[seonghwaddict]

EYES DON’T LIE — iii. a worthy competitor.

synopsis. you've always resented jeong yunho, and you were positive that the end of high school would've marked the end of your rivalry and hatred. yet now you find yourself in the same crappy hotel as him. assigned to be right next to each other much like the good old times.

pairing. jeong yunho x fem! reader. genre. mini-series, fluff, slice of life, mature, academic rivals to lovers, non-idol au. chapter warnings. swearing.

word count. 2.1k. rating. pg-13

chapter ii. chapter iii. chapter iv.

yunho’s life post high school was blissful, to say the least.

he went to his dream university and just like you graduated as the top student of that year. not long after that he landed a job at a relatively large tech company and after promotion upon promotion, he became the multi-billion-won company’s CTO. He lived lavishly; a shining example of what he was able to achieve thanks to his determination and unwavering passion.

at least until all of that came crashing down.

because the CEO just had to get involved in activities that became the downfall of the company. unbeknownst to him, the CEO had been part of an underground piracy organisation and sold the private information of millions of users to malicious parties. when the news got to the police, well… it was chaos. law enforcement swarmed the headquarters to detain the CEO as well as anyone that was identified on the list of people involved. a mess that he had no part of.

in hindsight, yunho should be carrying more than the company card and a suitcase when traveling for business trips, during which all this news got out. but how was he supposed to know he’d go from a highly respected worker to jobless in a matter of 24 hours?

and so he found himself in a shitty hotel, paying with the few bills he could find after rummaging around in his bag. the company card declined when he tried booking a different hotel—the fancy one the company had paid for forced him to leave after they found out he was affiliated with that company. for obvious reasons, he had been confused until he checked his phone for the first time that day and found hundreds of notifications flooding the lock screen that depicted picture of him and his best friend.

speaking of his best friend.

as soon as got into his his temporary bedroom—aka the hotel room that smelled so odd he opened the window as wide as he could and stuck his head out to avoid the stench—he called the man he’s known since they were toddlers, ranting about the situation. unsurprisingly, he found the situation immensely funny.

“so you’re poor now?”

“no, mingi, i just don’t have my personal card. i’ll go withdraw money tomorrow morning.” yunho propped his camera up on the small desk opposite the bed, leaning back in the creaking wooden chair as he rubbed at his temples, dreading the oncoming headache he was starting to feel. “but i’m jobless, for now.”

mingi pursed his lips, nose scrunching as he looked at his phone screen, watching how distressed yunho looked. “how can i help you, then?”

a shrug was the first response he got. “just-” the rotating chair squeaked as yunho leaned a bit further to stare up at the ceiling for a moment before reverting his gaze back to his phone. “just talk to me about something else, distract me for now.”

“okay then,” the fake blond’s face brightened and a wide grin spread across his face as he sat up and leaned closer. “so, you know my boss hongjoong, right?”

and so the next ten minutes were filled with him gossiping about how his boss seemed to have the hots for a cute reporter. yunho listened, grateful to get his mind off his current predicament, but barely registered any words being said. he occasionally replied with agreeing hums or other reactions suitable for the context, but he couldn’t help but feel the tell tale signs of his body wanting to rest. mingi seemed to catch on as he paused his story and squinted at his phone screen, catching the way his best friend’s eyes drooped with fatigue.

“hello? earth to yunho?”

he stirred awake, snorting in a breath before yawning. he checked the time on his very expensive watch briefly before his eyes flickered back up to mingi.

“you look tired, man,” worry was written all over his face, sure he could already see dark circles forming under yunho’s eyes. “get some rest.”

“yeah… yeah, that’s a good idea.” yunho spoke through his yawn, hand covering his open mouth.

they said their goodbyes and ended the call. yunho sat in silence for a moment. he turned the chair, inspecting the bed. it was sad, small and pretty empty. wishing he was back home on his soft king sized bed, he poked the mattress, frowning at the firmness before pulling back and looking at the pillows. well, pillow. singular. while the mattress felt to stiff, the pillow the opposite. he got up to check the little closet for another pillow that he could stack on top to add some firmness, but to no avail.

after a moment of hesitation, he decided to ask the guy at the lobby if he could possibly have an extra pillow. before head for the door, he stopped in the bathroom, checking his teeth and brushing his hand through his dark hair, a little overgrown and resembling a mullet. he fixed the tie of his suit that he had yet to take off and left the bathroom, his hand wrapping around the door handle of the room and pulling it open.

as he stepped out, his temporary neighbour seemed to have just arrived. turning to greet the stranger, he stopped in his tracks just as she had.

what a perfect end to his day. the cherry on top, really.

truthfully, he hadn’t given you much thought after your high school graduation. (he actually did. a friend of his went to the same university as you and he’d occasionally ask him if he knew how you were doing). but seeing you now, he realised you hadn’t changed much. of course, you seemed to have a grown a tiny bit and you looked more mature, but those eyes—those soft eyes, so pretty, red and puffy through your tears—were undeniably yours. he recognised you before he recognised the state you were in, a sobbing mess. in all the years he had known you, he doesn’t recall ever seeing you cry. seeing you like this, with flushed and tear stained cheeks, made his head spin for a moment.

before he could open his mouth to say anything, you were gone. he watched the door of your room fall shut, followed by a thud from inside the room. what it may have been—a kick to the wall, a punch, an item thrown across the room—he wouldn’t have been able to tell as he stared at the door dumbly. he wasn’t sure how long he stood there, but what else was he supposed to do when he ran into you of all people in this obscure hotel and somehow ended up next to each other?

watching you disappear through that door reminded him too much of the last time he saw you.

though it had been a warm summer, it rained on the last day of school. having checked the weather, he brought an umbrella with him. but as he watched you stand front of the entrance of the school, alone and looking out into the rain without a jacket, let alone an umbrella, with a conflicted frown and nothing to protect you from the rain but the roof, he found himself caring about you. before he realised it, he stood in front of you, holding out his black umbrella and consequently getting a little wet.

you couldn’t help but stare at him, your gaze switching between his unusually sincere face and hand extending the red handle of the umbrella. you shook your head, insisting that you won’t take it, but he cut you off.

“come on, it’s just an umbrella, i have no problem walking home in the rain.”

“no, please, yunho, it’s your umbrella, i’ll figure something out. you’ll get sick.”

after some more back and forth, he offered a compromise. you could walk home together.

and that’s exactly what the two of you did. you walked side by side, squeezed together under the umbrella, droplets of rain occasionally hitting your right shoulder or his left shoulder. despite the weather, it was oddly peaceful. a steady conversation flowed between the two of you, free of any teasing or insults. you weren’t quite sure why he was being so nice, but you supposed it was the last you’d see each other before heading separate ways.

unfortunately, the two of you thought at the time, you lived in the same apartment building. while you lived on the third floor, he was up on the fifth. he decided it only made sense to walk you to your place first. unlike your walk outside, the short journey from the elevator to your front door was dead silent. even when you got to the front door, neither of you spoke for a moment until he cleared his throat, his voice almost… emotional?

“i guess this is it, huh?”

“yeah… i guess… have fun finding a better, funnier, smarter rival in college.”

“nah, i don’t think i’ll even bother.”

“hm? really? i thought you’re all about that competition.”

“yeah, but you’re the only person worth competing with.”

he’d never forget the way your eyes widened comically as you looked at him after that, a blush so faint it was easy to miss in this horrible lighting. maybe all the people saying you’d make a good couple were on to something. still, he knew you’d never see each other again, there was no point in trying anything. his cell phone rang, interrupting the tense silence. it was his mother, telling him to hurry and get home.

“i… uh, i have to go… but i’ll see you around, someday?”

you smiled, a smile so genuine his stomach did a cartwheel.

“i’ll see you around, someday.”

you stared at each other for a moment, stood across from each other in the hallway. he wasn’t sure what to do. should he hug you? should he just turn and leave? you seemed just as conflicted. after a long minute, you both extended your hands for a handshake at the same time. a small laugh was shared as your hands intertwined in a slow handshake, holding onto each other a few moments too long. his thumb rubbed over the back of your hand gently. he gave it a small squeeze before letting go and bowing his head, winking playfully.

“good luck out there, y/n.”

“likewise, yunho.”

and with the you disappeared through the front door, much like you had moments ago. though at that time you didn’t look so heartbroken. eventually he got himself to put one foot in front of the other and head to the lobby for his original mission.

he thanked the lobby man quietly as he was handed two more pillows, his mind still occupied with you. you’d think that whatever he felt for you on that last day would’ve dissipated by now, but that was quite the opposite. despite it having been so many years, seeing you again felt like a punch to his throat.

on his way back to his room, he thought about knocking on your door for a split second. in the end, he concluded you probably wouldn’t want to talk to him. he wasn’t sure what he would’ve said anyway. hey, it’s really nice seeing you again, by the way did i mention that i’ve realised i had a massive crush on you that time we said goodbye and those feelings haven’t gone away?

no, absolutely fucking not.

he nearly slapped himself at the hypothetical monologue, dragging himself to his hotel room. a soft thump resounded as he tossed the pillows on his bed before undressing and getting under the thin covers. the time it took for him to fall asleep was unclear as he stared up at the ceiling. whoever rented the room above him seemed to want to make a joke in the ground, thundering stomps making the ceiling and his open window shake.

had he not stepped out at that time to get pillow and bumped into you, he would’ve probably been cursing and swearing to himself to get out of this place first thing in the morning. but, considering who his current neighbour was, he couldn’t help but think…

would one or two more days really be so bad?

[ lilo's notes . . . ] hii sorry it took so long to update this, i hope this makes up for it 💔💔 we finally get a little gimped into yunho’s feelings!! yippee!! i’m sorry he comes off as a little stuck up near the beginning, but please understand he went from a luxurious suite to a hotel on the brink of falling apart; i think most people would be a little disappointed 🙏🙏 he’s not a bad guy i promise

[ networks . . . ] @cromernet @wonderlandnet

[ taglist | series + permanent . . . ] @yuyusuyu @diorwoo @loveyluv7 @ad0rechuu @h-nji @nakiiko @lelaleleb @moon-gyus @baribaaari @bvidzsoo @kunikku @kyeos4ng @sankatchu @mlink64 @yeosangsbbg @seonghwasbbgirl @likexaxdaydream @dreamingofyeo

[scoonsalicious]

Unwanted: Chapter 12, Unlucky - Pt. 2

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Avenger!Fem!Reader

Summary: When your FWB relationship with your best friend Bucky Barnes turns into something more, you couldn’t be happier. That is, however, until a new Avenger sets her sights on your super soldier and he inadvertently breaks your heart. You take on a mission you might not be prepared for to put some distance between the two of you and open yourself up to past traumas. Too bad the only one who can help you heal is the one person you can no longer trust.

Warnings: (For this part only; see Story Masterlist for general Warnings) Language,

Word Count: 935

Previously On...: It's finally time to present your Crisis Prediction Algorithm to the Stark Industries' Board of Directors! EEP!

A/N: Another short part, but I'll be honest and tell you that this one has my all-time favorite Pocket/Tony interaction in it, so it was *so* much fun to write! I just love the dynamic between the two of them. And for a little Good News/Bad News: Bad News-- I'm heading off to New Orleans in a few hours Spring Break (like, I have to leave my house at 2:30am, it's godawful), so I'm not going to be very active on here for several days, and I'm not bringing my laptop (which is how I prefer to Tumblr, tbh). The Good News? I'm setting up scheduled updates so you'll keep getting your Unwanted segments in a timely fashion! I just won't be very interactive during that time period to update chapter links; you'll just have to find parts by navigating my feed. Sorry! I'll make it all better when I come home; promise.

Banner By: The absolutely amazing @mrsbuckybarnes1917!

Thank you to all those who have been reading; if you like what you've read, likes, comments, and reblogs give me life, and I truly appreciate them, and you!

Taglist: (Please let me know if you’d like to be added!) @jmeelee @cazellen @blackhawkfanatic @les-sel @marcswife21 @buckybarnessimpp @mrsbuckybarnes1917 @erelierraceala @hayjat @capswife @itsteambarnes @jupiter-107 @marygoddessofmischief @sebastians-love @learisa @lethallyprotected @rabbitrabbit12321 @buckybarnesandmarvel @fanfictiongirl77 @calwitch @fantasyfootballchampion @selella @jackiehollanderr @wintercrows @sashaisready @missvelvetsstuff @angelbabyyy99 @keylimebeag @maybefoxysouls @vicmc624 @sashaisready @j23r23 @wintercrows @crist1216 @cjand10 @doublejeon @pattiemac1

To your absolute delight, and no surprise to Bucky, the presentation went off without a hitch. The board was impressed with the level of detail you’d put into your work, and the extensive data you had to show from your months of trials. You’d managed to succinctly answer every question they brought up concerning protecting civilian privacy, system security, and cost/benefit analysis to their satisfaction. 

When the time came for the board to vote, you held your breath, squeezing Bucky’s hand under the table as each member called out their ‘yay’ or ‘nay.’ When it was all said and done, the overwhelming majority had voted for Stark Industries to fund the implementation of the crisis prediction algorithm system, tentatively now called C-PAS, with the only votes against being concerned about cost, and not the benefits or merits of it. You couldn’t have been happier.

In celebration, Tony and Pepper took you and Bucky out to dinner at one of the most exclusive rooftop restaurants in the city. Now, as the Stark Industries’ CTO, you were definitely not hard up for money, by any stretch of the imagination, but the atmosphere around you was beyond anything you’d normally immerse yourself in.

“Here’s to our girl!” Tony exclaimed, raising a glass of 1998 Rosé Dom Pérignon. You blushed as Bucky and Pepper raised their glasses in your honor before you all took a sip. “I’m so proud of you, Pocket. I couldn’t be prouder if I had done it myself, so you know that’s saying something.”

You laughed at that. “Thank you, Boss,” you said, raising your glass to him. “That is truly a rare compliment, coming from you.”

“Don’t mention it, kiddo. Can’t think of a single person more deserving of the success than you.”

You ducked your face, trying to hide the flush of pride and embarrassment that was now coloring your cheeks. No matter your accomplishments, you would never become accustomed to being acknowledged for doing something well.

Bucky grabbed your hand and gave it a gentle squeeze before bringing it to his lips. “He’s right, sweets. You’ve worked so hard for this, and you deserve to be celebrated for it. Not that often Stark and I can whole-heartedly agree on something, but we’re of like minds on that.”

 You hid your face in your hands as Tony smirked at Bucky and raised his glass in salute.

“Boys,” Pepper interjected with a soft laugh, “while I completely agree with your shared assessment, you’re going to kill Pocket from embarrassment.”

“Thank you, Pep,” you murmured through your fingers.

“Alright, alright,” Tony said with a laugh, “subject change. So Barnes, when are you going to make an honest woman of our girl and weirdly become my brother-in-law? Huh– there’s a phrase I never expected to utter.”

You nearly choked on the piece of bread you’d been nibbling on as Bucky began spluttering on his mouthful of champagne. You cleared your throat and put a reassuring hand on Bucky’s knee. “If that becomes a topic that needs to be discussed, Tony, you will definitely be one of the first handful of people to know.”

“The first handful?” Tony cried, face affronted. “I should be number two, at least!”

“Number two?!” you asked him incredulously. “Come on, you egomaniac! How the fuck do you figure that?”

“Easy,” Tony said, leaning over the table toward you. “Barnes knows first because he decides he wants to marry you for some reason known only to him and his maker, he asks me for my blessing, and then you can find out after. So, number two! Come to think of it, you’ll probably be fifth to know, because I’m sure he’ll tell Capsicle after me, and of course I’ll tell Pepper, so it’s actually you in the first handful, not me.”

You rolled your eyes at him. “Oh really?” you asked, and he nodded, smirking at you. “Well, in that case, what number is Pep going to be when you decide to get your ass in gear and make an honest woman out of her? No offense, Pep,” you added quickly.

“None taken, honey, but are you both positive you’re not actually siblings?” Pepper laughed.

You and Tony both snorted, rolled your eyes, and muttered “He/She wishes” at the same time, which caused your entire table to laugh, breaking any tension that might have remained following Tony’s mention of a possible engagement.

From there, the conversation flowed to much less loaded topics, and soon your third course dishes were being cleared. You were feeling slightly buzzed from the champagne and were devilishly seeing how far you could push Bucky by tracing your hand along his upper thigh when Tony’s phone rang.

“Tony,” Pepper chastised as he pulled out the device to look at the screen. “I thought we agreed on no calls during couple’s time?”

You quickly shot Bucky a teasing look as if to say “see?”

“Sorry, honey, but it’s the emergencies-only line.” He put the phone to his ear. “Talk to me, Banner. … When did they get in? … WHAT?! … How? … Is he…? … No, I got it. We’re on our way.” Tony stood up abruptly from the table, ending the call.

“Tony, what–” Pepper began, but Tony put his hand on her arm, pulling her up and cutting her off. 

“Wilson, Carthage, and Rhodes just landed from the Malaysia mission,” he began, his face stone serious. It was a look you hated seeing on his face, because it meant something was horribly wrong. “Rhodey’s been hurt. It’s bad. We need to get home. Now.”

<- Previous Part / Next Part ->

[annerly-san]

Love and Deep Deadlines | A LaDS Corporate AU - Chapter 7

Summary:

Amidst the cut throat culture of Onyxion Enterprises where cutting-edge innovation is overshadowed by corporate chaos, no one talks about how hard it is to be an intern.

Alongside Caleb, the sales department smooth-talker; Zayne, the cold and unflappable CTO; Xavier, a director who might as well be an intern himself; and Rafayel, the overly dramatic Creative Director who brings his own flair to every meltdown, our intern is just trying to survive the workday. Oh, and don’t forget Onyxion’s very own CEO, Sylus, a walking HR violation who gets off on terrorizing his employees.

In this company, will love bloom before the deadlines run deep, or will the company go under first?

Chapter Navigation: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | ?

Alternative AO3 link:

I couldn’t sleep much that night.

My heart was hammering as Caleb drove the both of us to work again, picking up coffee from the drive thru just like how he did on my first day. He made his best attempts to tease and jest in order to lighten up the mood, but with the massive restructuring and the major task of presenting falling on me yesterday, even Caleb didn’t sound as assured and confident as he usually was.

We both stewed in mutual anxiety as we watched the floor count rise on the elevator’s display. I ended on the 22nd- where the marketing department lives. Or lived I supposed since only Xavier and I were under marketing now.

Like clockwork, Caleb and I both bid our farewells- a habitual routine.

“All right, have a good day, pipsqueak-”

“See you, Caleb-”

Before I managed to step out of the elevator, Caleb’s arm reached out to grab mine. We both blinked at each other before he shot me a toothy grin, eyes twinkling with excitement.

“Wait, don’t you report to me now? Should you be on this floor then, or do we move you up next to me in Sales?”

My eyes widened as the realization dawned on me.

“Ooooh, you’re right-! You better be a good boss, Caleb! Or I’ll report you to HR!” I shot him a smile, stepping back into the elevator

“Is there even an HR left to report me to, pipsqueak?” Caleb let out a chuckle and pressed the button to head up one more floor. “It’s only me and you in Sales now, so we can take our time to pick our spots and rearrange desks then. Won’t that be fun?”

I laughed and nodded along to him.

But just as the doors were about to close, a hand shot out and barred it from closing: Xavier.

“...Where are you taking her, Caleb?”

“Up to the Sales department?” he responded casually with a shrug. Caleb’s tone was playful, clearly teasing Xavier while holding down the close door button firmly. “Sorry, Xav, but she’s my intern now! Ahahaha!”

Xavier clearly didn’t like that answer. He stood in between the doors, barring it from closing as the sensors detected his presence.

“...Her monitor and things are still here though. She’s a sales and marketing intern. So there’s no reason for her to move from here.”

“She’s reporting to me now, though. As for the belonging, we can come back later once she picks a spot on my floor .”

As the two stood bantering in the elevator lobby, Xavier refusing to let the door close while Caleb was trying to shut the door on him, a ding rang out from the elevator that was across from us.

Moments later, Rafayel appeared from behind the parting doors with crossed arms and a pout on his face.

“There you are! I was wondering where my employees went! You bunch of slackers!”

 He shoved Xavier into the elevator with Caleb and I before stepping in and firmly pressing the button for the sixth floor where his office was.  “Do you know what time it is? It’s been 5 whole business days. The legal department is on its last legs. The CTO is eating carrots. Sylus has actually opened his harassment training, and finally- FINALLY, my employees are getting to work!”

The elevator went up one floor before it began to descend down to the sixth. The four of us stood in the cart, each one of us in our own little world. Rafayel had his hands crossed with a pout on his face. Xavier looked confused and sleepy. Caleb was grinning ear to ear, and I was just tense and on edge.

“So, we’re working on your floor then?” Caleb grinned.

“But don’t the C-suite executives work on their own dedicated floors?” Xavier interjected. “Should the three of us be on your floor, Rafayel. I think that Sales and Marketing is on our own, right?”

“Yea, boss. Sales and marketing got combined, so do we sit in sales? Marketing?” Caleb shrugged and leaned back against the handrail of the elevator. “If we’re going to your office and just rooming with you C-suite executives, we might as well all roll up and just dog pile in Sylus’s office, huh? I’m sure that’ll be cozy. Really improve the corporate culture, right?”

Rafayel shot Caleb a glare, letting out a huff of annoyance right as the elevator decelerated and a resounding ‘ding’ harkened our arrival to the sixth floor.

“Hmph, you’re all lucky that you get to be working on my floor. It’s waaaay better than that broody disgrace of interior decoration that Sylus calls his office,” he waved, walking through the open doors of the elevator as we all got to our destination. “I’ve already issued an order for your desks and belongings to get transferred over.” He waved to the movers who were already arranging our belongings on a few desks that were placed around the vibrant office space.

“Wow, throwing around that C-suite power already, huh?” Caleb whistled, walking over to a desk with different airplane models decorated on it. “Oh, they really brought everything over, huh?” He grinned, looking through his desk before shooting me a wink as he held up a little bobblehead figurine that looks uncannily like our very own Onyxion CEO. Its head and arms bent at strange angles as Caleb waved it around with a smile.

“Oh, so that’s why my desk was gone,” Xavier commented, taking a seat at the desk across from Caleb’s with a sleep mask hung on the edge of the monitor.

“...You didn’t think to question why your desk was gone to begin with?” Rafayel groaned, settling into his private office as the door closed behind him. “Alright, get to work, minions. Let’s make Sylus happy so he doesn’t fire us, yea?”

“Alright, c’mon, pipsqueak,” Caleb patted me on the shoulder. “Let’s get you settled in.”

After the better half of the hour, we all got situated and I finally got around to opening my laptop.

The email notification icon on my task bar made my heart race as I hesitantly opened the program and saw an email from none other than Sylus himself.

_______________________________________

Subject:   Quarterly Presentation Draft Feedback

Good morning.

Nice work on the structure. I’ve added notes for Slide 3—include the projected Q3 metrics. It’ll drive the point home. Find the attached file.

Also, add a closing note about “synergy” between departments; people love buzzwords, even when they don’t understand them.

You’re impressing me. I’m looking forward to Friday.

-Sylus

_______________________________________

My hand was shaking as I read the message. The mouse cursor was flickering violently back and forth on the screen from how much I was trembling.

My eyes were fixated on the words, reading it over and over again. My heart and mind were a whirlwind of emotions: fear, anxiety… and pride?

Caleb peered over curiously at my screen, jaw dropping as he stood up and waved over Xavier and Rafayel.

The three of them gathered around my screen, exclaiming in astonishment like this was some circus.

It kind of was at this point.

“Damn, ‘You’re impressing me?’ Does someone have the harassment training to send to Sylus real quick?”

“This is actually C-suite power being thrown around here, so don’t come after me on something like moving my employee’s desks around, yea?”

“Sylus is really hard to impress, so I guess that’s good?”

“Well, I guess you got some ‘synergy’ to put into this presentation today, pipsqueak.”

I clenched my jaws, face warm with embarrassment, as I started to open the presentation, incorporating the feedback that Sylus gave to me.

After getting one more check through from the team, I sent out the latest to Sylus with the exact feedback he provided. As the hours stretched on to days and the horizon on Friday drew closer, I didn’t hear anything back from him.

The team helped me to rehearse and practice what we had to the point where I was having dreams about presenting even in my sleep- lines and figures etched into the depths of my mind.

And before long, the day of reckoning was upon us. The four of us piled into an elevator to hitch a ride up to the Sylus’s conference room where the all-hands meeting was being hosted. Caleb patted my back in assurance, giving me a wide grin as his shaky hand pressed the button to the 149th floor.

“You’re going to do great, pipsqueak. You’ll knock all of their socks off! We know how hard you worked on this, don’t be nervous-!”

“Says you, you’re shaking like a little puppy-”

“It’s the caffeine!” Caleb protested, shooting a glare at Rafayel. “I drank like two energy drinks and an espresso this morning, ok?”

“Sales guys are always such professional liars-”

“But I guess that’s why Caleb’s Onyxion’s top sales guy.”

On the bright side, the bickering in the elevator in this one ride up helped to alleviate my nerves as the ding of the elevator sounded out, denoting our arrival to the 149th floor.

It was different from the other floors of Onyxion. The walls were painted a matte black, soft lights with red hues illuminated the tall walls. Unlike the pastel colors and bright light of Rafayel’s sixth floor or even the beige and neutrals of the 22nd, the 149th was dark and tense.

As the doors opened, and we entered into the red and black conference room, I could feel my heart drop to the pits of my stomach- my blood freezing in my veins and barring me from moving forward. Nearly a hundred employees sat in the crowd, their heads turning around to stare at us, but only one man had no need to turn.

His crimson eyes bore into mine with burning intensity as he sat in a lone chair that faced the crowd rather than the projected screen behind him: Sylus.

“There you are, my little presenter.” He crossed his arms, leaning back into his seat as the presentation I put together pulled up behind him. “I’ve been waiting for you, sweetie. And I know you won’t disappoint.”

My heart skipped a beat, and I could feel my face heat up with mortification. My legs were like jelly as I walked towards him, drawn in like I was under a hypnotic spell despite the fear eating at all my nerves and senses in my mind.

Sylus gave me a lazy smile, not having taken his eyes off of me for a moment since I entered the room. His hand held out towards me, a small clicker to move the click through the slides in the palm of his hand. I reached out, hand trembling as I took it from him. The skin of his palm felt scorching hot as I brushed against it. As my fingers wrapped around the device, my hand grasping it and picking it up, his fingers curled up to touch mine. The air felt like it was being punched out of my chest at the gesture, my breath hitching in my throat as his crimson eyes bore into mine.

The clicker was shaking in my hands as I went up to the front of the room. I saw Caleb’s concerned gaze for a brief moment before he shot me a charismatic smile and gave me a thumbs up. Xavier and Rafayel also gave me looks of encouragement as I scanned the room and locked eyes with Zayne who was sitting in the front row. His eyes were wide as we looked at each other. Perhaps he was shocked that I was the one that was supposed to be presenting today, but he masked it well and gave me a soft smile.

The nerves calmed a bit as I saw them cheer me on quietly, but the crowd and amount of people watching in on this presentation as well as the cameras streaming this to many others who weren’t in the room was still making me nervous. My ears were ringing as I felt lightheaded with the pressure of delivering with so many people staring at me.

A deep voice shook me of my stupor, my ears honing in towards the source as the world faded to the point where I could only hear his voice: the man that tasked me to do this in the first place. “You got this, sweetie. Just keep your eyes on me.”

The lights started to fade, plunging the room into darkness before the presentation began.

It was like a fever dream.

The hours spent rehearsing and the script and the literal dreams I had about this moment carried me through the slides. I could feel the hundreds of eyes on me as I clicked through each part, but it felt like there was only one pair staring at me throughout the whole thing. And slowly, it felt like I was only giving this entire presentation for one person alone. The tension eased up as I got into the flow of it, going through the slides with practiced ease.

It was over before I knew it.

When the lights came back on again, I was shaken from my trance.

Echos of applause came from the room as the ‘Q&A’ slide came up and someone raised their hand to pose a question.

Instinctively, like how Caleb, Rafayel, and Xavier practiced with me, my hand raised to gesture to the person to let them ask their inquiry. But before I was able to muster up a response, a single resounding clap rang out in the conference room.

“Nicely done,” Sylus says, his voice cutting through the quiet room. I blinked in surprise, already trying to prepare answers for whatever questions the audience had. But Sylus stood up, turning to me with a smile playing on his lips—a cold glimmer and sparkle of amusement dancing in his eyes.

“Don’t worry about answering their questions. Your job was just to put the slides together and present them for me, and you did just that.” He pauses, and I could feel every eye in the room on me as he added, almost too softly, “You can just stand there and look cute, sweetie.”

The blood drained from my face. Cute?

“And I’m the one posing questions, not them. The people who sent you the content—those are the ones answering my questions now.” His gaze flicked lazily to a corner of the table. “Director Qian. What measures are being implemented to address the shortcomings of the second half of this year?”

The room froze over as everyone’s eyes were wide at Sylus’s sudden question. The man in question shakily stood up, voice trembling as he attempted to answer on the spot.

“W-Well, Sylus, we’re still… um, collating the necessary data to—”

“Collating data?” Sylus repeats slowly, voice dripping with disdain. “Interesting. And here I thought your unit provided me with that data to begin with. Otherwise, how would it be in this presentation?”

The room goes cold as Sylus’s gaze shifts to the director. He’s unimpressed, and the silence stretches.

Caleb or Rafayel might exchange uneasy looks, knowing what’s coming.

“I wonder where all of you are getting your sense of job security from,” he mused, slowly tapping the oak table with his finger.  A smirk pulled at the corner of his lips as his eyes lazily moved around the table across all of the directors, team leads and C-suite executives.  “Perhaps I’ve been too lenient with this previous round of layoffs.”  Sylus let out a low chuckle, basking in the heightened anxiety of the room.  “Don’t get too complacent. Just because I’ve laid off 80% of the workforce, doesn’t mean I need to keep the remaining 20% either,” he stood up, chair screeching in the silent room, as he walked over to me - a heavy hand was placed on my shoulder.  It felt like the weight of the world was pressing on my neck. Wide-eyed stares from around the room sent ripples of fear down every nerve in my body.  Cold sweat broke upon my neck and hot flashes of dread and embarrassment boiled up in my cheeks.  I bit the bottom of my lip to keep myself from shaking at his sudden and close proximity as I could feel his stare pierce through my entire being.

I stared with intense fixation on the floor, unable and unwilling to bring my gaze up to look back at the hundreds of eyes on me. Sylus’s hand on me felt like I was Atlas being crushed by the weight of the world. Focusing on the ground was the only way to keep myself from fainting now; I was so lightheaded and dizzy with everything that was transpiring. The floor was an interesting pattern.  The carpet was red and black in crashing and colliding sprays of mist and organic curves that seemed to be at odds with one another, yet perfectly in harmony at the same time. The chaotic red and black swirls felt like they were swallowing me whole, like I was standing on a void painted to look civilized. I could tell that even in the smallest of details, Sylus had total dictation over everything in his organization.  This carpet was a reminder of whose building you were standing in.  Who you worked for.  Who you belonged to.

My keen interest in the floor was broken sharply as I felt a cold finger trace the outline of my jaw, tucking a stray strand of hair back against my ear.  I couldn’t suppress the small squeak of surprise at the feeling and the darkening flush that was burning at my skin.

I heard a piercing screech grate at my ears and a loud crash at the back corner of the room and looked up to see a very flustered Caleb standing straight up with a torn expression between anger and embarrassment.

I felt Sylus’s gaze leave my face and peered up to see him focus on Caleb with a raised brow.

Caleb stared straight back at him, his clenched and shaking fist was a testament to his anger and fraying patience at the situation.

“Are you volunteering to get laid off first, Director Xia? And here I thought I just promoted you. Eager to declare unemployment so soon?” Sylus chuckled, shaking his head with amusement.

I looked up to Sylus in shock and back to Caleb as panic hit me like a truck.  My breath hitched in my throat as I sent a pleading look to Caleb in an attempt to convince him to calm down.  I watched as Caleb bit his lip in an effort to keep his temper and not quip back at Sylus for asking him that question, but I knew that Caleb’s temper would get the better of him if something didn’t intervene soon.

The tension in the room was dense; it weighed down like a suffocating fog, crushing the breath of every occupant within it.

Moments passed in what felt like eons.

“I would advise against firing him,” a cool and composed voice cut across the rising tension between them.  I let out a breath of relief as Sylus’s wrath was redirected from Caleb elsewhere.  I looked towards the direction of the speaker and locked eyes with Zayne who looked on coldly at the situation in front of him.  “I don’t think there’s merit to further staff reductions, especially in our sales force that has met and surpassed their metrics for this quarter already.”

Sylus let out a long, drawn out chuckle.  The deep timbre sent shivers of danger running down my back as Zayne became the sole recipient of Sylus’s volatile wrath.

“I believe that I’ve hired you as the chief technology officer, not the chief financial officer.”  Sylus stepped away from me and started walking towards Zayne.  My muscles tensed up as Sylus towered over a seated Zayne, who held his arms crossed all while maintaining the cool composure he always had ever since we were children.

“Yes. But since you fired the CFO yesterday morning alongside the entire finance department, I was assigned to the dual temporary role of both Chief Technology Officer and Chief Financial Officer, as stated in your org change announcement.  I would say that this is an insight within my jurisdiction to present.”

The air in the room dropped a few degrees and I shivered in the face of such a bold retort.

Sylus was staring at Zayne to the point where I thought that he was trying to kill him from it.  I wouldn’t have survived had I been in Zayne’s seat.  I doubt anyone other than Zayne would have.

Everyone was on the edge of their seat, wondering if there was a tomorrow to wake up to in the post of this ensuing chaos.

And then Sylus laughed.

It was a maddening laugh.

He laughed in the way in which each tone and breath was punctuated with a snide and callous tone- befitting of his control and power over each and every one of us in his building.

“Fine,” he smirked, his intense gaze fixated on Zayne. Even though he said that, everyone could tell that it wasn’t fine. “You’ve made a fair point.” Everyone could tell that there was no truth to his words.  Sylus might have said that to concede for now, but there was surely something else that he would do to retaliate at Zayne’s defiance. I was fearing for him in the back of my mind, my heart rate skyrocketing to the point where I felt that cardiac arrest was soon upon me.

But instead of fearing for Zayne, perhaps I should have been more concerned for myself.

Any lingering doubts I had once about why we needed to do the mandatory HR training on workplace harassment and retaliation had disintegrated in my mind.  I had once laughed at the notion that retaliation and harassment could exist in such ridiculous scenarios in real life, but here it was.  Manifested right into reality right before my very eyes.

My screams of terror were stuck in my throat as I stood rooted in place- completely paralyzed. My once pure perception of working at Onyxion shattered before me. 

I couldn’t believe I was so naive to have admired the Onyxion CEO in the way that I did when I first came to this company.

Sylus’ hand gripped my chin and tilted my head to look straight up at him. I was petrified; my neck was starting to cramp at the intense angle that I had to stare up at him with- his tall frame towered over mine like a giant’s.

He stared into me with those intense eyes of his, and I felt each thread and fiber of my existence and sanity unraveling from my material mind and body, every ounce of control and autonomy I believe I once had working where, slipping from my grasp.

“I heard we haven’t sent out the intern return offers yet,” his fingers crept up my face and traced the shell of my ear.

Alarms blared in my mind. My skin crawled as his fingers brushed against my ear, stiffening me in place.  ‘This is harassment,’ I thought aloud to myself.  ‘This is the workplace harassment that I saw in the training video last month. Is this for real? It can’t be. It really can’t be.’

The corners of Sylus’s lips turned further upwards, visceral enjoyment clear on his face.

“If I could fire the talent acquisition team more than once, I would have done so already,” he mused, face drawing closer to mine.  I held my breath, not daring to breathe with him so close.  “So I guess the task of sending out the return offers can fall on me.”

Sylus stared into my eyes with his intense crimson ones before turning away to leave the dumbfounded room. “Congratulations on your promotion to full-time employee.”

The doors slammed shut behind him, and I felt like all the strings were cut from my body as I collapsed to my knees and fainted.

[umnitsa]

Throughput & Prioritization - A Tale of Management

Summary: You need some help. David Wallace is there to lead you.

A/N: I'm a manager. I need a good c-level to lead and inspire me. I have a crush on David Wallace and as I resignify my work, I write the self-insertiest fic I've ever had the chance to write. I hope you enjoy <3 (there is a chance I will continue this)

Pairing: David Wallace x f!reader (just a hint!)

CW: A lot of cussing. Mostly talk.

Divider by @cafekitsune

“May I speak candidly?” You dropped on the chair in front of the CFO’s desk, huffing. He frowned, looking worried at your distress, then nodded. He leaned on one elbow, hand in the air. “Your CTO is an asshole, and I really can’t make you money if he keeps making those shitty, maddening decisions.”

David laughs, his big hand resting against the desk as he moved, sitting forward.

“Bad meeting, hm?” He leans forward, eyebrows raised, his lips crooked, on a smirk.

“Bad meeting? Shitty meeting.” You growled, crossing your arms and your legs, pouting. “I need you. He won’t listen to me because I have a vagina, probably.”

“I really don’t know how you feel comfortable talking to me like this.” David chuckled, amusedly.

“You know I’m good and I am one of the few managers that have a profitable team in IT.” You huff, shaking your foot. “And you are a good boss, you recognize talent when you see it. And results.”

“Touché.” David slapped the desk, chuckling. “You managed to sell yourself and praise me in the same sentence while avoiding the subject altogether. Congratulations, you became a manager!”

You broke, chuckling, shaking your head slowly. You uncrossed your leg, relaxing against the chair.

“Feeling better?” David asked, his eyes softening.

“Much better.” You sighed.

“Tell me what happened.”

“The CTO keeps throwing more work than my team has the capacity to deal with.” You take a deep breath and shrug. “My team keeps changing initiatives, leaving work in the middle of the way, we can’t get to the end of anything. I showed the numbers and explained little’s law, and he just fucked my backlog again. And I’m pretty sure the thing he prioritized doesn’t even fit the company’s strategy for IT. If I do it, I’ll tank my throughput and get fired, if I don’t he’ll be mad and I’ll get fired.”

David nodded as you talked, his complete focus on you.

“Yeah, Charlie is in a pickle, his decisions affected the productivity of the whole IT team. And his budget was cut, which means no new hires.” David rolled his eyes and tapped his fingertips on his lap.

“I just need someone to influence him. Maybe he’ll listen to you.” You said, moving closer to the end of your chair.

“You’re better than this, you know.”

You look at him, surprised. He smiled gently.

“What does he want? What does he need?” David asks, the tone of his voice soft, enticing.

“He needs a quick win.” You realized, blinking slowly. “He wants fast results.”

“Can you guarantee those?” David moved his big hands, his index and middle finger tapping against his lips. He looked like an eager kid in the classroom that had the right answer to the teacher’s question. But it was your turn to answer. His eyebrows raised, his blue eyes shining in expectation.

“I may have the right thing in my backlog. But why should I save him?”

“Because when it’s time to look at his headcount, he’ll remember you as the only one by his side.” David shrugged, smiling. “And if you can have a quick win…”

“My results will stand out!” You completed, clapping. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

“You’re frustrated with his management. And you’re angry. That’s a terrible mindset to make decisions.” He said, very matter of fact. “Now go make your presentation. I’ve seen you in meetings, you can convince him… I’m sure your team will follow you to the ends of the earth.”

You stand up, fire in your veins, your brain quickly making assumptions and connections. You opened the door to his office and paused.

“I owe you a drink.” You blurted, turning to David. He raised his head and looked at you over his glasses.

“You can pick me up here, 6pm.” He said, with a smile.

“It’s a date!” You chirped happily, closing the door.

“Finally,” David muttered absentmindedly, grabbing a pen and focusing on the wad of papers over his desk. “Took you forever...”

[izicodes]

Sunday 21st January 2024

>> I made a post yesterday of me mini-ranting about how I don't have any proper career goals because the ones I made years ago I've achieved now, so I'm questioning myself "What now? 🙃".

Then I remembered I have a recruiter mate and I emailed him asking for help and he gave me a long list of what I could do now to get better from my position. And I like sharing help so here's what he said + my own notes of what I understood from them~!

Hope this helps you too~!

🩶 Assess Current Skills and Set Goals

Identify your strengths and weaknesses.

Set clear goals for technical and leadership skill development.

My notes: I am good at some languages/technologies whilst I am a complete noob in others. Yes, I use them but I am not confident in them and always have to Google what is going on. I need to make a list of all the languages I am good at and those I am not so good at. Maybe even list why I'm not good at them. The same goes for non-technical skills. Got to make plans/goals on how I will improve them and get out of my comfort bubble on my comfort technologies and expand! Leadership skills would probably improve when I get solo projects given/have to present at Team meetings on my own in front of everyone~!

🩶 Technical Skill Enhancement

Deepen your proficiency in current programming languages.

Explore new technologies and frameworks relevant to your field.

My notes: I already answered this in the top one, but I shouldn't neglect my current skills to be able to learn the new ones. With the languages I am good and confident in, I still feel as though I haven't reached the more advanced stuff of that language. OOP stuff skill scares me in any programming language so I need to face my fears and learn it. From time to time, check what's popular in the market in terms of technology used and see which one aligns with my dream tech stack to use in the future and make plans to learn and develop myself~!

🩶 Project Leadership and Collaboration

Volunteer to lead small projects or take on more responsibility in current projects.

Collaborate with cross-functional teams to understand different aspects of project development.

My notes: At work, I eventually (since I'm still new) should ask to be the lead on some projects just like my higher-up developer is to me. Lead my own projects, without having to report to someone unless in dire need or when the project is complete for testing, etc. The team is small so I should talk to the non-developers in the team and see from their POV how the project is. Understand different types of people in the team and communicate effectively. All of this can be transferred to non-work projects like an online group project on an Open-Source project on GitHub for example - lead projects and taking more responsibilities. Being able to talk to people with different skillsets as we work on a group project~!

🩶 Attend Workshops and Networking Events

Attend workshops, conferences, and networking events to expand your knowledge and connections.

Seek mentorship from experienced professionals, including CTOs.

My notes: My gosh, I dread this honestly. I'm still a relatively shy person so going to workshops and events still brings small anxiety but that's something I do want to break~! I will never know what I will learn, who I will meet etc if I don't go to one! I want to aim that this year I would like to go to one, preferably in or near my city. I always love the idea of having a mentor, honestly, I was going to pay someone to help mentor me on that part ( >> loads of cites offer mentorships for programming!!! ) but I feel like my manager right now is that person so I will keep working with him to develop more~!

In conclusion, self-improvement as a programmer is both challenging and super hard to get started BUT rewarding in the end~!

[silence-ofthe-llamas]

Chapter 5 of Domino Milkshake! Aka the "SOULMATES CONFIRMED" Chapter :D

Read here or on AO3!

“I still cannot believe that you completed your training that quickly. And top grades, too.” Smokescreen whistled, looking at the datapads in his hands. “You’re showing me up.”

“The middle child tends to be the smartest one.” Prowl replied, reclining gracefully in the chair. Smokescreen gave him a look of disapproval.

“It’s the eldest, Prowl. The eldest is often the smartest.”

“We don’t know who is eldest out of the two of us.”

“Given how I was in my youngling frame far, far before you, I think we can safely assume it is me.”

“You can.”

“Oh, stop it, it’s embarrassing. Now we’re on the topic of family, though, have you called Bluestreak lately?”

“I’ve been messaging with him, but no calls. Were you going to give him a call?”

“Video, yeah. After my shift tomorrow. Want to join me?”

“Of course.”

“Okay, I should actually be serious for once.” Smokescreen cleared his intake, coughing into his fist. “So, you did brilliantly in your training, and passed your exams with flying colours, welcome to the tactical department of Special Operations. In the Autobots, the only ones who know about your battle computer are you, I, the CTO, and our wonderful Prime himself.” Smokescreen stacked the datapads in front of him and took another one out of a drawer in the filing cabinet behind him. “So we’ve decided that it’s best, and safest, if you operate under a number of different names whilst making your plans, so if we have any spies amongst us, or if any of these plans fall into the wrong hands, it makes it harder for them to link them all back to you, and also keeps it hidden from other Autobots. Makes that target you’re painting on your back just that little bit smaller, and means it’s less likely to be the topic of the latest gossip.”

“Ratchet doesn’t know?” Prowl asked in surprise.

“Not that I’m aware of.” Smokescreen replied. “Obviously, if it ever happens to come up, he will be made aware before cracking your helm open.”

“I’d hope.” Prowl frowned. “And I don’t imagine my battle computer will be what makes it to the grape vine.”

“Ah, yes.” Smokescreen grinned. “Your budding little romance with Jazz is rather popular, isn’t it?”

“Mmhm.” Prowl looked vaguely embarrassed. “No thanks to you, I imagine. When do I begin my work?”

“Today.” Smokescreen smirked at him. “Here’s the details you need, you’re joining the Echo team. And remember: there’s absolutely no shame in loving someone-”

“Smokescreen!” Prowl hissed, snatching the offered datapads from him. “Primus, I am so glad we’re not related sometimes! I am being asked about your betting pools!”

“Oof! A fatal blow!” Smokescreen mock swooned, clutching his chest and delicately laying the back of his hand across his forehead. “How ever shall I survive? My own brother...”

“My own brother is making betting pools about my relationship!”

“Hey, hey, it’s all for a good cause. Bluestreak’s education isn’t going to fund itself!”

Prowl scoffed in disbelief and rolled his optics. “Education is free in Praxus.”

“He wants to come to Iacon.” Smokescreen replied. “You can ask him about it tomorrow. I finish at seven.”

Prowl ex-vented heavily and stood. “I will see you at seven, then.”

“See you~” Smokescreen cheerily waved. Prowl resisted the urge to give him the middle finger.

There was a saying in Praxus that you chose your family, but sometimes Prowl wished that he had chosen a different one.

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

Two decacycles had passed until Ratchet deemed it acceptable to remove the brace from Jazz’s arm.

In the meantime, Jazz had dutifully worked hard, sometimes accompanied by Prowl. The crystal he’d given him sat happily on the table, Jazz singing away to it as he worked. Prowl had been right – it most certainly did help him concentrate on his work, paradoxically.

A small, small, red crystal was beginning to bloom.

He had also taken Prowl up on his offer to help him in the washrack, much to the absolute delight of the rest of the crew. Many, many a wolf whistles were had as Prowl helped Jazz reach the bits he couldn’t quite get to.

But now? That horrible, itchy, clunky, and frankly annoying brace was removed. He was free, finally free! Finally free, and on a mission.

His mission? Find Prowl.

Jazz skipped through the base, Blasters latest mixtape playing internally.

That morning, over their breakfast ration of energon, Prowl had informed Jazz that he’d completed his training and was beginning his work as a Special Ops tactician. Jazz was completely over the moon with delight – he’d work with Prowler! Wohoo!

Smokescreen had been extremely loose lipped on where Prowl was. The moment he’d seen Jazz poking his head in through the door to tactical, he’d promptly spilled the beans on Prowls exact location, down to what seat he was sat in. And so he had thanked him, and bounced on in.

Team Echo worked in the Echo room, which was extremely easy to find. Jazz promptly located it, his music loudly playing internally, and took a moment outside to pump himself up. You’re looking fabulous, mech, he told himself. No one can say no to you.

Jazz seductively leaned in the door frame, ensuring that the light hit his frame in all of the right places. Arm up, gently bent at the elbow to force his chest out. Hand on thigh, opposite leg slightly raised. Visor locked onto Prowl, ignore the room around him.

Prowls optics were bright like suns, and Jazz knew he had succeeded in getting his attention. Just why his face was going oh so very red Jazz didn’t know. All the same, he winked and sauntered into the room, pausing his music.

“Heya Prowler.” Jazz greeted, sliding in to sit on the table in front of him, taking care to block Prowls view of his terminal whilst not sitting on anything delicate. “Are ya busy tonight?”

Prowl had to reset his vocaliser a few times before he could respond. “What did you have in mind?”

“I was thinking I’d go dancing.” Jazz dreamily replied, chin in his hands. “I’m finally free, I’ve got so much energy I wanna burn off. And we need ta celebrate your promotion!”

“I finish at six.”

“Perfect! I’ll see ya then.” Jazz squeezed his hand, hopping off the table and sauntering back out, giving him a quick wave from the door before disappearing.

He excitedly bounced away, giddy and grinning. He was so excited to finally be able to go out with Prowl again! Sure, they’d spent some time together at the base – mostly board games, the strange movie nights that were sometimes held in the rec room on the bottom floor, and tending to the crystals (Jazz still hadn’t let Prowl see his, wanting to keep it as a surprise) together. But Jazz wanted something more fun, more high energy.

He wanted to dance.

But for that, he would need a crew. He pulled up a map of the base, considering his options.

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

Prowl hadn’t a single clue how he’d gotten away with that.

He’d heard Jazz coming, singing along to his music as he approached, and looked up in time to see him leaning in the doorway, light falling on him in such a way that accentuated the curve of his thighs, the dip of his waist, the gentle slope of his chest, the dimples in his cheeks and the way his neck was exposed-

And his engine had revved.

Actually, audibly revved.

His coworkers had promptly lost it, breaking out into roaring laughter. It was so, so obvious that Prowl had done something, especially if his face was as red as it felt.

Yet Jazz had simply been politely confused, and perched on the table in front of him and invited him out that evening while Prowl desperately tried to stop his engine from revving again.

The moment Jazz had left, he slowly sunk down, burying his face into his hands whilst the others giggled and snickered into their hands. Excellent that they were finding enjoyment in his pain, wasn’t it? If only Prowl could see the humour in the situation too.

His shift couldn’t end soon enough. He waited for the rest of his team to leave, gently teasing him as they went, warning him to not keep Jazz waiting. His doorwings bristled in embarrassment and contempt, but he resolutely stayed, staring at his terminal screen.

“This is the worst.” He groaned into his hands. He’d become undone, a mess, if he saw Jazz again.

But he had appearances to keep up. He’d have to go. And besides, Jazz had said that he had wanted to celebrate his promotion too.

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

Jazz had managed to summon a small crew of mechs to lay siege to Iacons vibrant night life.

Sunstreaker, a mech Prowl only knew through reputation – an ex-gladiator from Kaon with a unique ability to get into scraps, however extraordinarily vain. Prowl wondered if the two were related at all. Sideswipe, Sunstreakers twin brother. Another ex-gladiator. Didn’t even know the definition of vanity. Mirage, Bumblebee, and Blaster had also answered his summons.

It was an extremely odd crew, to say the very least.

Prowl didn’t think he’d be staying out for too long.

He sat alone at a small table, tucked away in the corner to keep his doorwings out of reach of overcharged mechs with no concept of personal space, and resigned himself to an evening of people watching while he tried to make his drink last as long as possible.

Jazz would be having exactly none of that.

He flopped down next to Prowl with a sigh of pure joy, wriggling up to his side and leaning his head against his shoulder.

“You should come and join me.” Jazz said, dancing his fingers down Prowls arm, gently sliding over his hand and tracing the rim of Prowls glass. “It’s more fun than it looks.”

Prowl snorted in disbelief. “I have two left pedes. It would be fun for nobody.”

“Weren’t you gonna teach me how to dance?”

“I don’t think there’s any need for that. You’re excellent enough already, I would simply tarnish your expertise.”

“Don’ be like that, Prowler.” Jazz laughed. “I didn’t take you to be shy.” He moved his hand to cover Prowls, gently intertwining their digits together.

“I’m not,” Prowl replied, his other hand moving to cover Jazz’s, thumb gently rubbing Jazz’s, “I simply do not wish to give you sub par instruction.”

“Awww.” Jazz placed his other hand on top of Prowls, leaning more insistently into his shoulder. “I’m sure you’ll be fine!”

“How about this, then. I will teach you if you teach me your sign language.” Prowl bargained. Jazz grimaced, hands twitching from where they rested amongst Prowls.

“Aww, Prowler. So unfair. I can ask, but...”

“What if I said this instead; you ask, I teach.” Prowl squeezed his hands. “No matter the answer.”

“Deal.” Jazz squeezed his hands back. He turned to observe around them, hunting down Mirage and Bumblebee. He spotted Bumblebee from across the room, and waved to grab his attention. Attention received, Jazz extracted his hands from Prowl and moved in a flurry of hand signs.

Bumblebee made what Prowl could only guess was a very stern negative gesture.

“I take it that was a resounding no.” Prowl said, taking a sip from his drink.

“Yup. Big ol’ nope.”

“I appreciate the effort regardless.” Prowl nodded, placing what was left of his drink down, pushing it towards Jazz. “Help me finish this, then we can get started.”

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

Smokescreen did not expect to find his brother dancing in a club in Iacon, and yet here he was, watching Prowl dancing with Jazz in a club in Iacon. He suddenly stopped in the doorway in surprise.

That was a Praxian dance.

Prowl was teaching Jazz tradition Praxian dances.

He lowly whistled. He didn’t think Prowl would ever do that, he was never the sentimental type.

Jazz appeared to trip over his own pedes, falling into Prowls arms, the pair looking at each other and laughing (Prowl! Laughing!), and Smokescreen shook his head in disbelief. He knew Jazz well enough to know that he was far too coordinated to ever trip over his own pedes. He’d 100% done that on purpose.

But he didn’t get it. Why the silly, unnecessary flirting? He already had Prowl hook, line, and sinker – that much was obvious – so why did Jazz feel the need to continue?

Mysterious. Very mysterious indeed.

Eventually, though, Prowl left the dancefloor, slipping back onto his table. Smokescreen glided over, weaving through the crowd, and slid into the seat next to him.

“I’m surprised you still remember how to do that.”

Prowl almost jumped out of his skin, swear caught in his throat.

“Primus, Smokescreen!”

“What? Did you numb your wings or something?”

Prowls doorwings twitched. “Somewhat. The sound is a bit...”

“Aggressive?”

“Aggressive.”

“Hmm.” Smokescreen stirred his drink with a straw. “Why do you come to these kinds of places, then, if you can’t handle them?”

“Jazz likes to try new things.”

“The Praxian place is new. And easier on your wings.”

“I don’t want it to become boring to him.”

“I see.” Smokescreen sipped from his drink as an easy silence fell over them.

Prowl watched Jazz dancing, doorwings gently bobbing to the beat, chin resting in his hands. He hadn’t realised he was smiling until he spotted his reflection in Smokescreens glass.

He didn’t recognise the expression on his face. It wasn’t one he’d ever seen on himself before.

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

Prowl had excused himself early, citing exhaustion and his doorwings aching. While that was true – his wings were beginning to hurt more than he could stand to ignore, and he was tired, he was also concerned that the longer he stayed there, watching Jazz dance, mixing in a few of the moves Prowl had taught him in with his own routine, the more he’d fall into his infatuation, and the harder it would be to keep up the act.

He was awoken from recharge by a light knocking at his door. He crept out of his berth, peering through the eyehole.

“Jazz?” Prowl blearily opened the door, stretching. “Is everything okay?”

“I just wanted to make sure ya were okay.” Jazz replied. “Can I come in?”

Prowl stepped aside, flexing his doorwings as he rubbed the sleep out of his optics. “I am fine, just tired.”

“Did I wake you?” Jazz nervously asked, fiddling with his own fingers.

“I was in an extremely light recharge, it doesn’t matter.”

“I’m sorry- oh? Is that one of the crystals?” Jazz suddenly pointed at something behind Prowl. He turned to look – and sure enough, on the shelf behind him, was a line of the crystals he’d been tending to. And the one Jazz was pointing at was a bright, vibrant blue, eerily like the colour of his own visor.

“Yes. They all seem to have grown very well.”

“It’s such a bright colour. Which one is it?”

“The...” Prowl swallowed hard. His hesitation was ridiculous – Jazz didn’t know the superstition surrounding this particular variety, it was fine. “It’s the one where its care determines its characteristics.”

“It’s so cute.” Jazz cooed, moving closer to inspect it. “Such a vibrant colour, too!”

“I fed it well.”

“I still need to show you the one you gave me. I wanted ta leave it as a surprise, until it got bigger.”

“How big is it?” Prowl asked, sitting down on his berth. His frame still ached with exhaustion, and sitting was so much easier on him than standing.

“Ah guess… like an egg?” Jazz shrugged.

“Very good, for a beginner.”

Jazz beamed with pride as he plopped himself down next to Prowl. The smell of high grade almost smacked him in the face.

“… How much more did you drink after I left?” Prowl tentatively asked.

“Shots may have been involved.” Jazz admitted.

“Oh, Primus.” Prowl dragged a hand down his face. It was a true testament to Jazz’s tolerance levels that he was still as coherent as he was, but Prowl wasn’t the type to let him wonder around the base whilst out of sorts. “You’re staying here tonight.”

“Oh, Prowler~” Jazz leaned into him, hand resting on his chest.

“I wont disturb you.” Prowl continued as if Jazz hadn’t said anything, standing and pulling Jazz up with him. “You can sleep wherever you want.”

Jazz simply plopped himself down onto Prowls berth, still warm from where he’d been laying on it.

“But that’s- okay, okay, fine.” Prowl moved to be in the berth opposite, settling himself down and making himself comfortable. “Goodnight, Jazz.”

“G’night, Prowler.” Jazz curled up on the warm spot, nuzzling his face into Prowls pillow and breathing in deeply as his visor slowly darkened.

Prowl took a moment to simply watch Jazz, frame slowly relaxing, a gentle smile on his face, before turning off the light.

[jeonwonoow]

Chapter 2. Stalker(?)

warnings: none

taglist: @miraes-world

—

The sound of you clicking on the keys of your keyboard is starting to irritate you. You've been so irritable and short tempered lately, after that day actually. Instead of getting distracted by work from the thoughts of Wonwoo, Wonwoo running through your head is distracting you from work instead.

"Good?" Your kind boss, Myungho, peeks through your office. "You haven't gone out of your office since this morning."

You got up and bowed in slow motion, having zero energy. "Mr. Seo, I'm okay. I'm just busy with the new magazine."

"Come on," Myungho comes in and pushes your laptop close before sitting on your table. You give him an 'excuse me?' look and he just tilted his head. "I'm your boss, I tell you what to do, right? So if I tell you to eat-"

"Myungho," you groan and roll your eyes, only earning a chuckle from him. You end up inside his car anyway, sitting on the passenger's seat while he drives. Myungho was one of the people who tried to help you when you were at your worst after your break up with Wonwoo. You're glad that even though you made it clear to Myungho that it's still so difficult to love again, he stayed, he still does what he does back when he said he was gonna pursue you which you already made him stop doing so because you don't wanna bring up the kind man's hopes when you know yourself that you're still too damaged for it.

He drove to your favorite restaurant, ordered your favorite food, showing just how well he knows you by heart. If you were better now you'd probably choose him but you can't force yourself even if you like to think you're okay. "Thank you, Myungho."

"I really like it when you call me by my name, you know?"

"Hey," you chuckle. "This is why we get into dating allegations." You remember that one day he requested you call him just Myungho already instead of Mr. Seo even if you're inside his building and it became a hot topic among the other employees.

"So?" Myungho laughs softly and takes a sip of his soup. "We're good friends. Let them think whatever the fuck they want."

—

Wonwoo spun a pen on his fingers, his chin rested on his other hand as he thinks about you with that guy earlier eating at your favorite restaurant. He didn't follow you there. It was purely a coincidence. He's not the type. But his curiosity was making him consider it.

"She'd hate me even more, wouldn't she?" His friend, Mingyu, gave him a confused look. "Do you know Hao & Co.?"

"Oh my god, I'm a fan. Sohee loves their jewelries so much too. I'm actually wearing a Hao & Co. leather shoes right now," Mingyu wiggles his feet, excitedly telling Wonwoo about the fashion line. "I've met the CEO once, actually. No, twice. He's really nice."

"How could you say so. You only met him twice," Wonwoo scoffed. Mingyu clicked his tongue and shook his head. "Seo-what?"

"Myungho. Seo Myungho." The younger man fumbled through his phone to find a picture he took with Myungho whom he met just lately at a fashion event. He was even surprised that Myungho remembered him from their first meeting and was actually the first one to approach.

Wonwoo's eyebrows scrunch a bit upon seeing the photo of his friend and Myungho. This was the guy you were out with. And now his closest friend is also fond of this guy. What's with Seo Myungho anyway?

"Also, I might have opened a possible deal with him, actually."

"Without my knowledge? Who are you?"

"CTO," Mingyu fights, stating his position. "It makes sense for a CTO to see opportunities too, sir." The younger man emphasizes the 'sir' and rolls his eyes. "What's your issue with Hao & Co.?"

—

You can't remember where or when, but you were sure you heard about ONETech before. Your eyes lingered on the bold letters as you review documents before passing them to your COO.

"We're going for partnership with OneTECH for the website dev.?!" You ask loudly as soon as you barge into Myungho's office. He even flinched in surprise when your voice boomed through his four corners. "Jeon Wonwoo?"

"Won-who?" Myungho asked back, confused until he realized you were talking about the CEO of ONETech. "Well, I became friends with their CTO and we've been planning to develop a better site since we're getting better. I've also heard good news about ONETech, you know?"

"With my ex. Myungho," you say as if you didn't hear any of what he just said.

"Oh, this Wonwoo was that Wonwoo," he nods then his eyes widen before repeating in shock, "THIS WONWOO WAS THAT WONWOO?!"

—

The day of the first meeting. The world seemed to move in fast forward the moment you walked out of your office to go to the conference room. Myungho was already inside and a few officers were settling down. You bowed a little and then straightened your dress. You then walked to your spot but before you could sit down, people from ONETech came in.

"Good morning, Mr. Jeon," Myungho greets and walks to them, giving Wonwoo a handshake before turning to his new friend, Mingyu.

"Seo Myungho," Wonwoo calls his name with a forced smile on his face. "Nice to meet you." The smile drops when his eyes find you. Not even five seconds, he would look away. You swallow the lump that had formed in your throat.

Wonwoo didn't even know you worked under that guy you were on a date with. He wasn't expecting it. The whole meeting, he tried to focus so much but he could feel you burning holes on his skin with your eyes. He'd already finished the glass of water served for him in his nervousness too.

"I guess we're done for today?" Myungho stands from his seat and fixes his necktie. Everyone follows him and takes a bow. One by one, they bid goodbye. Myungho walks to you and places a hand on your waist which Wonwoo couldn't help but look at. "I'll catch up with Mingyu," he whispers and you give him a small nod while picking up your folder of papers. Myungho doesn't stop there though. He pulls you gently to face him and puts his other hand on your cheek, gives you a smile and inches closer to let the tips of your noses touch. He then leaves with a teasing Mingyu, both of them acting like high schoolers as they walk while bumping against each other's arms...yes, in their corporate attires.

"In front of me, really?" Wonwoo scoffs and walks out of the conference room but before the door closes, your anger issues get the best of you and you throw an empty water bottle at him. Wonwoo slowly turns back to you and leans on the door frame.

"In front of me, really?" You mock him. "Yes, in front of you, you cheating fuck—"

"Hey," he points a finger at you. "Language."

"I don't care," you point back at him. "You planned this, didn't you? You're following me. You should have continued ghosting, you coward."

"Mingyu did this. I didn't even know you worked here. And I see, you have something going on between you and your boss. You were better than this."

"What do you—" your breathing got heavier as your anger pooled up. "I worked hard for my position. I'm not here because of what you think. How could you talk about me like that?" Did he really think you were some opportunistic girl who'd get dirty with your ways to strive through life? "How could you, the worst man I've ever met?"

Wonwoo clenches his jaw, "I don't know how many times someone has to tell you I never cheated on you. You never heard me out. You never believed Soonyoung and Hayoon either."

And you thought he was just gonna turn away again this time. But he went closer to you and grabbed your wrist, pulling you out of the conference room, out of the building, without any word.

"You never proved me wrong." You were starting to tear up. But you knew the type of person Wonwoo was. He wasn't gonna push himself onto something that he felt wasn't for him. He was just gonna wait until the right time came. But to you, after Soonyoung and Hayoon set you up, he felt like there will never be a right time. That no matter what he did, he wasn't going to change anything between you two.

"You never let me try."

"Eh?" Myungho tilts his head. Mingyu squints his eyes too, watching you and Wonwoo storm out of the building.

"Isn't she your girlfriend?" Mingyu asks and Myungho chuckles while waving his hands in front of him in a 'no' motion.