#i have a photo of this sign somewhere in my archives

[chaoticdesertdweller]

Roanoke, VA

📸 Josh Kossman

[antimatterz]

how they take selfies with you

dan heng, jing yuan, seele, gepard, march, sampo, kafka, blade, tingyun (separately) x gn!reader

honkai version. i posted the same thing on my genshin writing blog so if it seems familiar, that's why. might do this again if more characters are released. there's a bit of possessiveness in blade's but that's about all.

content under the cut | masterlist

dan heng

he's surpringly easy when it comes to convincing him to take selfies with you. as someone who's often found in the archive room, he also likes to keep his own little "archive" of all that you experienced together, no matter how big or small the moment might've been. however, to get him to actually lose his stoic demeanor in said pictures is a little harder. he often looks super serious in pictures but you manage to make him smile sometimes. and oh, when he smiles in pictures you just spontanously combust because his smile is <333

jing yuan

jing yuan is known to have a very soft spot for you and it shows in the pictures the two of you take together. gentle smile, an arm over your shoulder as you lean against him. as a general of the cloud knights, he is often busy. to make up for the times you're unable to see each other, a lot of selfies exist (and he looks at them whenever he misses you or has a rough day on the job). he likes to show you off a little, and he is more than happy to talk about you when someone asks him about the person he poses with on his phone wallpaper. told ya, he has a massive soft spot for you.

seele

this girl appears super tough, but i can totally see her loosening up around you! still a girlboss ofcourse but with a massive soft spot for you that brings out her fun side. though a lot of pictures are very dark due to her living in belobog's underworld, that doesn't stop the joy from radiating off them. she isn't a big fan of taking selfies but makes an exception when you join in. honestly i can see her trying to appear all cool with a peace sign but in reality she just looks super cute with your arm around her waist. oh, and just wait until she discovers the existence of filters. she will beg you to try them all out together!

gepard landau

especially in the beginning, selfies together are kind of a rarity because he's simply too awkward lol. you might have to use your puppy eyes often if you want to snap a picture with him. but don't worry, later on he'll let loose a little and maybe even take the initiative to take pictures together. at first he looks in the camera with a blush, rather stiffly. but after a while he gets more comfy with the whole ordeal. it all begins with a simple hand on your shoulder, but at some point he will find his favorite pose; gepard likes holding you against his chest as you take pictures together, which is the cutest thing ever.

march 7th

this girl absolutely loves taking selfies with you. the time you two spend together is basically a vlog, as she records all the things you do. "y/n, smile!" she exclaims somewhere around five times per minute, as you are faced with her phone and a smiling march who leans her head onto your shoulder and snaps a photo. she finds it adorable how you sometimes look a little confused as she surprises you with another selfie. she always looks super cheerful in your pictures together as she adores spending time with you, and it's contagious! your photos radiate joy.

sampo koski

he's probably a little hesitant about taking pictures together (he's scared he might end up finding them on those wanted posters, you know) but at some point he gives in and oh, it will result in the most extra selfies to exist. he isn't afraid of funny poses and silly faces and goofy filters and you two just have a lot of fun as you take picture together. however, as he is still sampo koski, they will eventually leak and end up on a poster so yeah, there's that. as you find a picture of the two of you together plastered on a building (with a statement that emphasizes that it regards the blue-haired male) you can't help but laugh, tearing it from the wall as a keepsake.

kafka

pictures might leak, which may expose her whereabouts, but this woman couldn't care less. she knows she looks stunning in pictures and when you join her to take a selfie? that's the prettiest picture to ever exist in her eyes (and i agree). they appear very casual but she's totally showing you off! she wears a coy smile, fingers curling over your shoulder as she holds you close, to let everyone know you're taken. her goal is probably to take a selfie with you with a stellaron in the background, basically her favorite things together in one picture.

blade

this guy likes to show you off, believe me. he wants everyone to know that you're his, and he always holds you close when you take pictures together. he barely looks into the camera, having his eyes on you most of the time. only when he places a kiss on your cheek he gazes into the camera slyly, as if to say "they're mine, back off." he knows very well how good the two of you look together and not only that, he secretly just loves to have many pictures of you. fun fact, he carries a polaroid of you together with him and gets blushy when the other stellaron hunters tease him with it.

tingyun

she adores you, and it shows! every picture you take together is so so cute and pretty and it's just goals. she always wears the sweetest smile on your photos and you're lying if you say that her smile doesn't make your heart flutter! your pictures together just look very comfy and loving, with the most adorable poses (cheeks against each other, finishing each other's heart, and so on). her ears perk up every time you open your camera and ask her to join. sometimes, she gets a little shy when you wrap your arms around her before snapping a picture, and her ears would droop a little which is also very cuuute. but the cutest thing? the joy in her pretty eyes hehe.

[sterekbros]

tiny pumpkins (2125 words) by Winchesterek Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski Characters: Derek Hale, Stiles Stilinski, Original Hale Character(s) Additional Tags: Everyone Is Alive, Farmer Stiles Stilinski, Park Ranger Derek Hale, Autumn, Pumpkins, pumpkin patch, Fluff, Meet-Cute, First Meetings, Kid Fic, Slice of Life, Uncle Derek Hale Written for: @sterekfests pumpkin patch, @sterekweekly wonder, and @warmandfluffybingocards visit to a pumpkin patch.

Stiles moved another pumpkin from the cart and into the stack of pumpkins in front of a sign that read Stilinski Pumpkin Patch.

But it really wasn't a Stilinski thing. It was something that his mom’s family always did and they started as a family when he was old enough to walk. Stiles had a few memories from that time, especially since he was so young, but as he always enjoyed looking at their family photos of him sitting amongst the pumpkins during the Fall season.

What he really enjoyed was the chilly air, the bright, warm colors and the warmth that the season brought to everyone’s lives. People were happy and bundled up, always visiting their seasonal pumpkin patch with friends or family.

And the kids, there were always tons of kids with someone or another, ecstatic about the pumpkins. People purchased pumpkins for decorations, to carve, to bake and whatever else they fancied.

Stiles just loved it all. And someday he hoped he’d be able to bring someone to the patch with him too. Maybe even he’d have a kid of his own, or he’d be an Uncle. Well, at least an Uncle to his friend's kids since he had no siblings.

Once he placed the last pumpkin into the pile, Stiles moved the cart to the side and cleaned his hands. He checked a few people out via the app on his phone for their pumpkin selections and a few treats that his best friends sold at a booth on their farm during their fall fest season.

Stiles then busied himself helping a few others take several pumpkins to their cars before he sat down on a stack of hay bales. That’s when he saw him.

The hottest guy that Stiles had ever laid eyes on was trailing behind two adorable kids who were practically frolicking through the patch. They were excited and giddy and Stiles heard their glee and wonder as they looked at all the different sizes and colors of pumpkins. Some huge, some tiny, and others that were perhaps the right size for their little hands.

The dude looked happy as he watched the two kids, who looked strikingly similar to him. They were either his kids or related to him in some way. Either way, the family genetics were strong. Stiles didn't see anyone else with him as he scanned the crowd, wondering if the children’s mother was somewhere close.

There was no way that a guy like that was single.

When no one else joined them, Stiles wiped his hands on his jeans and stood, heading over toward them awkwardly.

“Anything I can help you with?” Stiles asked, his eyes bouncing from the kids touching all the pumpkins and back to the guy who was staring at him when his gaze returned to him.

And god, his eyes were a gorgeous kaleidoscope of colors that Stiles couldn't describe.

“I’m sorry—” Stiles knew that he was saying something, probably talking about the pumpkins for the kids, but Stiles had been too lost in his eyes to actually hear what he was saying.

The guy laughed softly. “It’s okay…we’re actually looking for a few pumpkins to take home. In a variety of sizes. My family usually has a carving competition and we bake all the seeds.”

Right. Pumpkins. Stiles nodded and replied, “Oh, yeah. Yeah. Sure! I can get some together for you if you want.”

“Great.” The guy gave Stiles a warm smile just as one of the kids came over and hugged the guy’s leg and he wrapped an arm around them. “This is Avery and this is,” he paused, hugging the other kid. “Jack.”

“Well, it’s nice to meet you Avery and Jack.” Stiles smiled, squatting down to their level. “I’m Stiles.”

“What’s a Stiles?” Avery asked, looking up with a frown.

“That’s not nice!” Jack replied and glared at Avery. “He’s a Stiles!”

Stiles laughed and so did hot-guy-with-kids.

“And I’m a Derek. Now that we all know each other’s names,” Derek added, smoothing his hands over the kids’ heads. “How about you two go pick out some pumpkins while Stiles helps me get the rest into the car?”

Avery and Jack nodded and ran off into the pumpkin patch, scrutinizing all the pumpkins they came across, which made Stiles laugh again.

“So, pumpkins,” Stiles started. “Cute kids.”

“Yeah, they’re a handful. Thankfully I get to return them to my sister at the end of the day, or they might give me gray hair.” Derek shrugged, watching after the kids before his gaze returned to Stiles.

So then, they weren't his kids. They were his sisters' kids. Which meant that he might actually be single. Stiles glanced at Derek’s fingers and didn't see a ring there, either. So maybe it was his lucky day. But he still didn't know if Derek liked guys. He could have a girlfriend and just not be married.

Stiles really hoped that wasn't the case.

Derek pushed his hands into his pockets, his eyes trailing up and down Stiles, which made Stiles’ heart flutter. “So, Stiles?”

“It’s a family nickname. Sorry. I, uh—yeah I got distracted a little bit.” Stiles could feel his skin turn blotchy as he flushed, walking along with Derek through the pumpkins.

“By?” Derek seemed curious, like he was ready to listen to whatever Stiles had to say.

It was the first time anyone had really paid Stiles that kind of attention, so he took a chance and replied, “Your eyes are really pretty…”

Derek’s smile was warm and inviting, making something in Stiles’ chest flutter.

“I get that sometimes.” Derek stopped next to Stiles, looking around for presumably the kids before his attention returned. “So you work here?”

“Also a family thing,” Stiles offered. “The farm has been in my mom’s family for a long time so we kinda took over the seasonal side of things. I really like the pumpkins, especially watching them grow.”

“So you’re a pumpkin farmer. That’s…interesting.” Derek chuckled and Stiles picked up a medium-sized pumpkin.

“Maybe a part-time pumpkin farmer. I’m actually taking a break from school. I was going to go into local law enforcement, but I’ve always really wanted to be a detective or to work for the FBI.” Stiles handed Derek the pumpkin, his breath catching as his fingers brushed Derek’s when Derek took it from him.

“Really? FBI?” Derek asked, looking at the pumpkin and sounding surprised. “I guess it’s always hard to tell what kind of work people get into.”

“What do you do?” Stiles asked, turning his focus to the pumpkins, picking out various sizes and putting them into a pile. He could feel Derek’s eyes on him and he wondered if Derek liked what he saw or if he was just as confused as everyone else was about him.

“Well, my mom is a lawyer and my dad is a professor…and I think they always wanted me to go into one of those areas.” Derek smirked and shrugged, still holding the pumpkin Stiles had given him.

“But you sound like you don't want to do that…” Stiles straightened and took the pumpkin from Derek, setting it aside in the pile. “How many do you want?”

“About ten…or fifteen. Just in case the kids mess one up and want to start over,” Derek replied, not missing a beat. “And I wanted to do something else. I ended up being a park ranger.” When Stiles frowned at him, Derek continued, “I studied biology and wildlife science in college.”

“Oh. Wow. Color me surprised. I just never saw park ranger as a profession for you.” Stiles’ tone was teasing, but he meant every word. He could totally see Derek as a lawyer though, or a professor. At least from what little he knew about him. Especially because he looked so cozy in that sweater and scarf he was rocking with the Autumn weather making Stiles’ skin prickle.

Avery and Jack took that moment to run back over to them, squealing and holding up tiny miniature pumpkins and thrusting them at Derek. “Look what we found! Baby pumpkins!”

Derek laughed and took one and then the other, looking them over and handing them back. “Go get a few more of those and we’ll add them to the pile.”

Jack and Avery ran off to gather more pumpkins and Stiles laughed, watching after them. “Those tiny pumpkins always do really well with the kids. But they usually paint them instead of carve them.”

“Then maybe we’ll have a painting party too… I’m sure whatever we’ll do, they’ll love it. It’s more about the family thing than the pumpkins…” Derek moved to pick up a pumpkin and handed it to Stiles, his heart skipping another beat as he took it from Derek.

“What do you think about these? We can always add whatever the kids pick out once we get them into your vehicle.” And Stiles could already see the kids gathering many tiny pumpkins.

“Those look great,” Derek replied and when he turned back to Stiles, he added, “I always wanted to get into conservation for endangered species. I guess it’s one way I can get closer to my goals for that.”

Derek shrugged. “We also do community outreach and lessons for kids, so I get to travel to schools and teach them about different animals we have in our state parks.”

Stiles found that more attractive than he probably should. Not only was Derek smart, he cared. He had interests beyond just himself or working out like most dudes he knew. Derek was obviously older, but Stiles didn't think he was too much older.

“Do you want to go out sometime?” Stiles blurted and then stared like a deer in headlights. Oh, god. “I—uh, I’m sorry—I—“

Derek was staring at him like he was intrigued and confused. Before Stiles could say anything else, Derek answered, “I’d love to.”

“Oh.” Stiles couldn’t stop himself from staring. Derek saying yes was the last thing he thought he’d get as an answer. “Wow. Okay, yeah—that would be great.”

“How about I pick you up tomorrow at seven and you choose the place. That way we’re both surprised,” Derek added with a grin, taking his phone out of his pocket and handing it to Stiles. “If you put your number in my phone I’ll text you so you can have mine.”

Stiles almost fumbled Derek’s phone like the worst kinda football pass there ever was, but he managed not to drop it with a sigh of relief. He punched his number in and saved his name as a contact, then handed Derek’s phone back.

“I await your text with bated breath,” Stiles teased with a smile that was more shy than he felt.

“Well, let’s not keep you waiting, then,” Derek replied with a chuckle and texted Stiles. He felt his phone buzz in his pocket and it sent a rush of excitement through him.

The kids returned then with several more tiny pumpkins, “Look, Uncle Derek!”

They had Derek’s attention again as Stiles loaded up the pumpkins he’d picked out into a cart, along with the tiny pumpkins the kids put into it. Before long they were headed toward Derek’s vehicle, which was a sleek black Camaro that had Stiles warm in all the right places.

He couldn't believe that Derek was about to put all these pumpkins into his trunk. Nevertheless, they loaded them in and then Derek helped the kids into the back seat. It didn't look comfortable at all from what Stiles could see, but the kids didn't seem to care as they buckled themselves in.

“So, what’s the damage?” Derek asked, turning back to Stiles.

Stiles pulled out his phone and card reader. “Well, you’re set back $115 for the pumpkins.”

Derek handed Stiles his card, still smiling. “I’m sure they’ll love them. So it’s worth it.”

Stiles charged Derek’s card and sent him a digital receipt before handing it back to him. “I guess I'll see you tomorrow?”

“At seven.” Derek agreed, nodding. “I’ll make sure to wear something nice since you’re picking the place and it’s going to be a surprise.”

Stiles flushed and his mind went straight into the gutter with no needed help. “Seven it is.”

Derek flashed him one of those smiles again that had Stiles’ knees wanting to buckle as Derek’s eyes crinkled at the corners. Derek waved at Stiles almost shyly before slipping into the Camaro and closing the door.

The car was gone before Stiles shook himself from his shock. He was going on a date with a hot dude tomorrow.

What the hell was he going to wear?

Fuck.

[accio-victuuri]

skateboard as a distraction for you 🛹, white hair & the W hotel story 🏨

A mix of CPNs going around turtle spaces lately and I thought would be nice to talk about on here. either to archive or to share to those who probably have missed it— and they are not very well known ones that’s why i love them. aside from galaxy brain cpns, candy archaeology is my favorite thing 🍬 especially if it’s suspicious ones.

go back in time with me ⏱...

· • —– ٠ ✤ ٠ —– • ·

I. Skateboard as a Distraction

This is post Tencent Starlight 2019 when they left the event together. What’s special about this is how it shows how they protect each other. How their teams operate and work well together, tho this was early on, I think both their teams collaborate much better and smoothly now. So what happened was there were many people waiting for them to come out and Bobo suddenly appears— on his skateboard. This is unusual for him because he usually doesn’t show off especially in public places like this. He was also not wearing a mask, making him easily recognizable, something he surely wouldn’t do at this time knowing that people are waiting for him. The logical deduction here is he wants to be seen. He wants people to follow him and have their eyes on him.

A few moments later, we know why. XZ appears with his team with no luggages on hand. He was able to make a quiet exit and wearing the nike paranoise shoes ( which is another story ). What’s funny here is some XZ weifen were scolding WYB because he was causing a ruckus skateboarding, in the meantime XZ just appeared quietly. NOT KNOWING THAT YIBO WAS THE REASON WHY XZ WAS ABLE TO DO THAT IN THE FIRST PLACE. WYB did that to distract people, his staff even holding XZ’s things/luggages so that XZ can exit quietly ( well as quietly as he can ).

I wonder how many times they did this, I can think of a few more after this incident. Protecting each other like this. I feel so soft because WYB didn’t care about what people will say about him. He will use himself as a distraction to make things easier for XZ. Incidents like this, even if you don’t szd, even if you just know of them from the Untamed — this is proof that they do care for each other. Them and Their team tried their best to work together to navigate the chaos that their new found fame brought them. This is why XZS 🤝 YBO cpn is popular because they were already doing it before so it only makes sense that it still goes on. This gesture seems so small & simple but shows what love is. Love is protecting you. 🥺

This is the same event where people were saying someone was following XZ’s car, then a fan said, the car was Yibo’s team. So they really left together.

II. White Hair

A short one and more of speculation. I’m so sorry to XZ for exposing his one strand of white hair. Lol. Anyway, On 10/19/2019 there was a post somewhere online that had this subject : Very distressed, I really want to announce this to the world loudly.

and the post said : I am a man, I have a boyfriend who I met at work and we have been together for a year! But he is 6 years younger than me, and because of special reasons at work, so it’s not convenient to make it public, but our relationship is really good.

hmmmmmm 👁👄👁

Then clowns were like, they needed a sign that this was GG. So they posted replies on 10/29, telling the OP to ask his boyfriend or him to post something on oasis tomorrow and we will believe you. It was just people joking around but lo and behold, the next day, Yibo posted on Oasis. One of the photos had a person’s head on it but you can’t see it except for a strand of white hair— which people think is GG.

LOOK BRO, I do believe in coincidences but this is too much. It’s one of my favorite BJYX fandom story and it’s because, again, what are the chances? We don’t know if it’s really GG that is on the photo but still. Anyone can post that — I have a boyfriend blah blah blah. sure. But Yibo posting the next day when people asked the OP to? What? It’s either the universe is fucking with us or it’s truly SZD. 🤯

III. The W Hotel Story

before we go any further, i will mark this section as fake and fan fiction. none of this happened. it’s all made up.

The date is 7/23/2018, the boys were still filming CQL and were not yet the XZ and WYB we know now. This is why I think these clues were able to make it out there cause no one was looking. No one cared — compared to how it is now. So they were both in Hengdian, after work, they spent time at this hotel in Shanghai before Yibo went to Tokyo. The thing is, fans were already waiting in Hangzhou, thinking Bobo will be there to ride the international flight to Tokyo. But he didn’t. His itinerary was hidden. If this happened in 2022, I think we will CPN the same thing, as per the same city and well — stuff like this:

Who are you sir. 👀

Upon further investigation, the suite XZ photographed is from the Fantasy Suite in the hotel. This is a luxury hotel and at the time was hard to get in because it’s new and popular with rooms sometimes being up to really expensive. The suite he stayed in was the 38th floor and most of it is color red which is GG’s favorite color.

The reason why this cpn was buried was it was used by antis to say that GG was staying with a sugar daddy at this hotel. So this is why turtles need to be careful with certain CPN because some people may twist it into something else. I hope that our boys get to spend days together and i’m pretty sure they are more discreet now. We will barely see any clue. 🤐

sources: one | two | three | four

-END.

[2af-afterdark]

Lover For the Night

Rating: Mature Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply Category: F/M Fandom: Shall We Date?: Obey Me Relationships: OC/Mammon Characters: Mammon, Female demon OC Additional Tags: afab!oc, angst, prostitution, unrequited love, oc is not mc Summary: The customer is always right, she thinks. She’s supposed to help them fulfill their desires without worrying about their life outside of the bedroom. When she looks at this client, though, she can read the entire story about why he came to her on his face. A/N: Yes, this demon OC is an actual Obey Me OC I have and I love her. Her nickname is "Hatt". Word Count: 888

“You're pretty cute," she said as she began to strip off her dress (if it could even be called that).

He sat on the bed with a grimace on his face. "I ain't cute."

"Oh. Understood." Her clothing dropped in a bundle around her feet and she delicately stepped out of it. "Is this your first time ordering someone? You seem tense."

His eyes blew wide before his brows furrowed. "That ain't any of your business!"

Based on that reaction, it was most definitely his first time.

"I'm not judging. Everyone starts somewhere." Her tail flicked behind her as she sat beside him on the silken bedsheets. "Wanna grab a shower first? It helps with the nerves." It also gave her time to get into character.

He stood so quickly that she thought he'd run from the hotel room altogether. Instead, he made a beeline for the bathroom and practically slammed the door behind him. It wasn't until she heard the shower turn on that she summoned the contract he'd signed and looked over it once again to ensure she had all the details correct.

His name was Mammon, but she already knew that the second she saw him (it was hard to pretend she didn't know one of the seven rulers of the Devildom, after all). He'd specifically requested a demon that could shape shift and given a detailed description of what character she would be expected to play. It was so detailed that she doubted it was a completely independent thought. Poor guy probably had a crush, and, based on the description, she could guess who it was. It's not as if she cared. After all, he wouldn't be the first or last person to ask her to turn into someone who really existed rather than a fantasy.

Further down, she perused what kind scenario he'd requested and laughed internally when her eyes met the word virgin. It seemed he had expectations of his crush that she couldn’t live up to, but he had to know that a demon that sold sex wouldn't be a virgin (even if she could play the part of one). 

She dismissed the contract back to the ether and waited on the bed in only her underwear until he was done with his shower. When he came out, he only had a towel wrapped around his hips. It framed his figure nicely and she could see firsthand that the magazines that always featured him had not needed to do a lot of editing.

"Did it help?" she asked.

"A bit." 

"Good!" She stood from the bed. "It's my turn then. You get comfy and then we can start after I come out. Okay?" 

He nodded but didn't say anything else as she walked into the bathroom.

The room was still steamy from the shower he'd just taken, there were small puddles of water on the floor following his footsteps, and the mirror was fogged over. She placed her hand against the mirror and wiped away the condensation so she could finally see her own face, although it wouldn't be hers for much longer. Mammon had given a clear description and all she had to do was match it. It helped that she would be copying someone with a claim to fame (even a minor one) because it meant photos of them sometimes circulated around and made it easier to mimic them.

She turned away from the mirror and stepped into the shower where she could let the water fall over her.

By the time she stepped out, she was a completely different person. Her tail had been put away, her hair and completion had changed, and her body structure had shifted. The only thing that remained the same were her small, knobby horns that she couldn’t change. Fortunately, they couldn't be seen unless she went completely bald. If it was just for one night, the fact they were still there wouldn’t be much of an issue. Most people didn’t notice that her horns were inaccurate once the scene began.

She wrapped the towel around a body that wasn’t her own and slowly opened the door.

“Mammon?” The voice was still her own since she couldn’t mimic a voice she’d never heard before, but the intonation and cadence was more in line with the description he’d given her. She slowly peered her head around the corner, trying to smile as coyly as possible. “How do I look?”

“I’m sure you’re-” his words went dead as he looked up at her. Like a man possessed, he rose to his feet and walked over to her. As soon as he was standing right in front of her, he placed his hand against her cheek.

She could tell that he’d seen a ghost; the ghost of a relationship he couldn’t grasp outside of this hotel room.

“Don’t stare so closely.” You turned your gaze away shyly, trying to mimic his expectations. “You’ll make me nervous.”

As she looked into his eyes, she felt pity for Mammon. Clearly, he was pining for someone that he couldn’t have (based on that fact he went to her). But her clientele’s personal life was irrelevant. He paid her to be a replacement for the night, and she would be just that until the time he paid for was up.

[landinrris]

hi! not so much an ask, more just a message in general. my friends and i have been doing all sorts of deep dives into the whole martin & lando situation and are very invested in the entire thing, i'm talking archives, created a calendar with entries just for them with photos and liks to the source, power point presentations with the timeline (hello sophie ❤️) the list goes on. we've looked into loads of stuff and noticed patterns and connections and have been predicting things the past two weeks that then happened just the way we said they would. even made a bingo board a few days ago and were already able to cross two things off lol. so yes. quite invested.

it just makes us really really really happy to see two such amazing and kind and lovely and humble people who found each other and fit so so so well together, make each other so happy.

i created this account to post about them, keep up with stuff, share stuff. now since i think you are the most popular norrix account out there rn, i wanted to know if maybe you could share this so that other people who are interested in this whole development as well can follow me so i can follow them back and i just find more people to connect with?

(also if anybody is ever looking for a source, photo, video, date of anything connected to them, we probably have it and don't hesitate to reach out!)

damn did i leave my google docs signed in somewhere? 😅

Real talk, I love that you and your friends are having fun with everything. I also love that you've started an account about it. It's fun to look at things from both a zoomed-out perspective as well as zooming in. My own chat has been known to pop off at the drop of a link or old screenshot, so I totally get you.

[kyra45]

THIS IS A SCAM GOFUNDME

(No link to it, but the screenshot is an archive to show what it looks like when someone’s posted it. You can find it using what name is showed.)

Link to post with similar explanation (Posted by @fucked-up-mover-shaker )

elisseriss -> erissellis -> erisselis

If you received the following asks:

“I plead that you do not consider this message as disturbing your privacy. I know I'm a stranger but i really need your help either by donating or sharing my fundraiser. I'm a lost trans girl in need of every support I can get ❤️💕”

“I plead that you do not consider this message as disturbing your privacy. I know I'm a stranger but i really need your help either by donating or sharing my fundraiser. I'm a lost trans girl in need of every support I can get please boost don’t ignore she/her who needs help during this time of hardship 🙏❤️”

They are from a scammer whose currently targeting the black transgender community and trying to take advantage of them. This post will be long, but it will go into detailed explanations of how this gofundme is not legitimate at all and is made from illegitimate information. This is all created from publicly accessible information and is not private.

—

1. The name: If you look up Eriss Ellis, you will notice there is no socials besides a suspended Twitter account. This name isn’t linked to anyone, despite claims of being a music singer/producer. Someone who is a singer/producer would have a ‘footprint’ so to speak; A social profile listing songs they’ve made or written. This being absent suggests this was made up and tailored to fit a theme. If this name is real, there would at least be information out there to match what’s given. Currently, however, there is none.

2.The beneficiary: If you look up Rose Kennedy, you will find information that doesn’t seem relevant to the situation. Most peculiar is that this name is linked to a similar suspicious gofundme made by someone called Makayla Powell. Another name that has no socials attached. Neither fundraiser gives detail on who this Rose Kennedy is. There was a deleted gofundme that listed a different name, different beneficiary, but used the same photograph.

3.The photographs: The two photographs supplied may match at a glance, but upon closer inspection you’ll start to notice they are very clearly two different people. I am by no means an expert regarding transgender people, but these differences wouldn’t seem to match up if I go by the photographs other users show as they transition. The main focus being that the eyes are two different colors. (One photo is brown dark eyes and the other is light blue eyes.) While no source has been located, it’s still very evident these have been screenshotted and saved from somewhere else. It is unknown who they really belong to.

4.Dodging concerns: When an anonymous user asked the erissellis about the photographs looking wildly different, the answer given was dismissive and ignored the concern about the photographs being the user. When more questions were sent by the anonymous user regarding the pictures, they were never answered properly and asks eventually were turned off to prevent anyone else asking. This seems to show more signs of not being truthful; One could easily claim they just wear contacts and had them in on the day of the photo. Instead, however, the concern was waved off.

5.Hostility when confronted: Finally, when the user saw people calling them scams in their asks they opted to get angry and say the user answering the ask was just…Jealous of the attention their getting…? Regardless, the asker made no effort to explain how their legitimate despite spamming asks and barely interacting with people outside of that. They claim the community knows them, but that’s doubtful since they didn’t exist until their gofundme popped up. (Screenshots below of what replies I was able to see before the blog was took down.)

In closing, these asks are being sent by a scam account whose still trying to gain sympathy from the community and will continue doing so until their gofundme is took down as it is using fraudulent information and likely linked to what could be future scams under the Rose Kennedy beneficiary.

Please be careful and watch out if you get these asks. This is not a call to harass anyone or bother them, but rather an alert compiling all my information I’ve gathered over time and hopefully can be used when people need evidence. Any tags used are for for visibility due to the targeted user bases.

[lorifragolina]

My second prompt for Mungrove Summer Bingo 2023! And the second chapter of Sweet Pies B3 Square - Ice-cream @mungrovebingos

Sweet pies

Gelato for men

Eddie Munson guzzled a glass of champagne.

He regretted his flask that he left in the hotel at his manager's insistence “You can’t just drink vodka from a flask in a fashion gala, Eddie!” She kept screaming while trying to let his tie flawless. 

And now he saw at least two people adding alcohol to their drinks from the flask in his pockets, and he was really pissed off. He kept crossing eyes with Gareth and rolling his eyes. 

His manager squeezed him in a Dolce&Gabbana suit (really fancy, he had to admit, but still not his cup of tea), and he felt rigid and uncomfortable. Besides, she insisted that he had to wear the perfume they were presenting in the gala. All the men there were wearing that perfume, someone in a very large amount, and the big hall seemed like an elevator at 9 am. 

“It seems you need more,” said Gareth, handing out another glass of champagne. “I myself do” added then, and swallowed the champagne at once. 

“Why isn't there whisky? Or at least one of that color cocktail? I would drink a Cosmopolitan, I swear”.

“Wow you’re desperate” mocking Gareth.

Eddie drank his champagne. He was glad to have Gareth, other guests seemed really in their elements, he loved the suit and really loved how it fitted to Gareth too, but they both felt uncomfortable. Moreover, they knew a few people there, and all of them were busy with someone else, and all looked like they were having a really good time. He had no idea of how to break the ice and of what to say to those people, and it was strange for him because he normally had no difficulties talking with people. 

Yo put on a good attitude, Eddie grabbed a third glass of champagne and took some steps to the photo exposition at the edge of the hall; there were stage photos of the promotional campaign of the perfume, and somewhere there was also a picture of Corroded Coffin who wrote an original song for the tv and radio commercials of the perfume.

“Gelato for men” was the name of the perfume, in a fancy ice-cream shaped bottle. The first picture showed a really amazing beach in Italy with a picturesque and coloured village in the background; the following were the sample of a series of billboards to advertise the perfume, and Eddie recognized that face - and body- in the pictures. It was one of the most quoted models of the moment, you could see those oily muscles almost everywhere, in a bus, a palace or in a magazine. He advertised sunglasses, underwear, cosmetics and perfumes as in that case, and even if he couldn’t recall his name at that moment, he surely had some thoughts about that cute little ass. 

He finally found the cover of the single they wrote for the spot, just a photo of them four looking to the horizon (Eddie felt stupid every time they had to take some photo shoot), and he looked at himself shaking his head.

“It’s strange looking at a two meter sign with your face, isn’t it?” Said someone at his side. 

Eddie giggled and nodded, and turned his head to the stranger that talked to him. 

He opened his eyes wide and stayed mouth open for the surprise. At his side there was the very man he was looking at just a moment after in those gigantic signs.

[ghosttourscsu]

Introduction to the Ghost Tour

The SCSU Ghost Tour has its roots in the coming-of-age tradition of passing down "spots." Little-known places that people who have been somewhere longer introduce to newer students that they deem worthy. A tradition that keeps these spots from falling into obscurity while keeping said spots a secret from the masses to keep them from being destroyed or shut down.

My Ghost Tour started my sophomore or junior year here at Southern. Whenever I'd get close enough to someone new I would show them smoke spots and secret passageways. I'd pass down the spaces that were passed down to me. This blog is a record of some of these places. I have one request for anyone reading this blog: if you go to these places, respect them. I won't ask that you leave no trace (after all, I've tagged my fair share), but clean up after yourself and leave the world more beautiful than you found it.

The first stop of the Ghost Tour is in Engleman Hall and is the easiest to get to. That is all I will say, if you wish to find the spot go searching for it or befriend someone who will show you. I thought the best place to start a Southern Ghost Tour is in the campus's most known building. Within it lies a sketchy tunnel, with a constantly changing old storage room. Whether it has a faux-audience of decommissioned chairs or filing cabinets full of dusty documents, there's always something weird to find. Below are a couple photos from this spot, the rest will be posted to the archive account.

Signing off,

Cherry

From the Archives

[firedjinni]

🍓🥤🔪☁️

(for this ask meme)

🍓 ⇢ how did you get into writing fanfiction?

I think it's something I've been doing for a long time, maybe before I fully understood what it was, but my first proper exposure to fanfiction on the internet was via elementary-school me searching the internet for crossovers between different things I liked (mostly ending up on Fanfiction.net and dedicated single-fandom archives.)

My first experiences actually writing fic, from what I remember, involved posting through my friend's account while over at their house because I didn't have an email and couldn't make one myself, haha. (Of course, that account is long deleted now…)

🥤 ⇢ recommend an author or fanfic you love

Aaaaaa oh man I have to think there are so many--

I basically have a big reclist for longer completed works on AO3 here: rainy day longfic &lt;3, so I'll go for a couple of authors off the top of my head:

Seebright (@/lackadrastical): beautiful Hollow Knight fic! I have both of their longfics in my longfic reclist, but they've got some lovely oneshots as well. I love their Ghost and general sibling trio characterization so much. <333

CourierNew: wrote another really good HK longfic, but also I love love love their Deltarune oneshots! Their prose is so good and sharp and eerie and there's a perfect sort of tone to it I don't know quite how to describe…

tls1314 (@/tls332): beautiful Rain World fic!! A time travel fixit that's ongoing, and some quieter oneshots. Also a Hollow Knight oneshot which is probably the only (or one of the only) fics I've ever seen to pull off first person POV with Hornet.

NoelleHolidayStanAccount (TerminalMiraculosis): as the name suggests, really good Noelle-centric Deltarune fic, but also the formatting?? The CSS?? It's so fucking cool and creative to see, and I wish more authors really leaned into the ability to make AO3 do fun stuff like that.

🔪 ⇢ what's the weirdest topic you researched for a writing project?

I can't quite decide, so I'm just gonna leave a list of highlights. Ironically, most of this pertains to fics that have never actually been posted.

half an hour of staff training videos on hospital de-escalation techniques

multiple Youtube searches for "breath of the wild meat pie man" (unsuccessful)

how to harvest spider silk

symptoms of acute radiation poisoning (this is a lie i just like to read this page for fun. don't look at me)

a bunch of stuff about reproductive behaviors of various invertebrates (for, and i cannot stress this enough, worldbuilding purposes)

how big can a slug get (answer: the size of a very drippy football, apparently)

Large Animal Immobilon, some very weird back of the napkin math, and the discovery that 500mL syringes do exist and will haunt my nightmares forevermore (same fic as #1)

☁️ ⇢ what made you choose your username?

My original username, Firedjinn, came from me being really, really into Golden Sun at the time I signed up for an FFN account, haha. I think I originally had some other GS-djinni-themed names in an old word doc somewhere? But this is apparently what stuck, and I've kept it around for continuity.

(Also funny story: the reason this account is called 'firedjinni' is because someone has had the URL firedjinn since 2013 where they have posted one (1) cosplay photo and nothing else since. I assume it's an active user since the name has never expired? Anyway uh yeah.)

(Rubber Chicken with a Keyboard I picked because it just sounded funny, though.)

[tigermike]

In 1844, the Treaty of Tehuacana Creek was signed between the Republic of Texas and several tribes of many areas. The mighty Comanche were the ones who contracted with that October. Cooperation is called for in the treaty and any enemies come to an end.

Several councils with clubs in Texas began in the spring of 1843 and continued into 1844. From the minutes of an earlier council held on March 28, 1843, the General Department of the Republic of Texas. C. Terrall voiced the following to the assembled panel:

"The President of Texas has heard that our brethren, the Indians, want peace with us: for this purpose he has sent us, his Officer, to him." continued "You heard their synthesis system talk, I read it to you. He's your Indian friend; he's always been yours; he doesn't talk to them in compressed water. He told you, listen to the words of these things. We will not deceive you, or give you cunning words. The terrace added, "Our goal is to bury the chair forever. forever with brothers. our red skin, me. We want to make peace as solid as the ground on which we stand; somewhere will exist among all of us, I don't know where the sun rises in the East and sets in the West. "" "

At the end of October the Great Council near Brazos Falls in 1844, Texas Republican President Sam Houston was present. With the participant and several other clubs in attendance, Houston shared the following:

"To the chiefs of the Comanche and all the chiefs; We, the chiefs of all whites are delighted to meet you. You are welcome to our interface. We are delighted to see you there. You are here. We are far apart, and the road that leads from your villages to us, mine is a long and bloody road; blood has been drawn from the road between the whites and the whites. many peoples of the Indians, now we have met to go from the way of the Comanche and the white.Six years ago I made peace with the Comanche: that peace was kept until a The bad Chief used my place That Chief went to war with the Comanche and killed them at San Antonio; he also made war with the Cherokees and drove them out of the country. can't help them. Houston Continues "Now the leaders can take my words back, as they've heard them: they're real, and won't last long. like the earth, our mother, or the great Spirit, is our father. They can sleep with them tonight, and I will hear them at the Council tomorrow. He added "tomorrow we will read the treaty: it is my word. All the major chieftains will sign it, but especially the Comanche." ""

Impressive delegation portrait of Prominent Field Chief Penateka Comanche Tosahwi, also known as White Knife or Silver Cam, Washington D. C., circa 1872. As a warrior stowed great sway, then he became a recognized leader in the assigned reserve. Tosahwi and other prominent Penateka chieftains signed the treaty of Tehuacana Creek. Photo by Alexander Gardner, National Archives of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution. Additional information from the Texas State Library and Archives, Austin, Texas.

[toothpastecanyon]

A Name From the Mailbox, Chapter 4

Dipper finds out the author's name before Not What He Seems. It's not the person he expected.

See most updated version on Archive of Our Own.

______________________________________________________________

“The end times?”

The ride home had been strange so far. Dipper and Mabel exchanged glances before looking back at the old man sitting between them.

“There’s a doomsday device under Gravity Falls?” Dipper made a face. “No offense, but is this, uh, like the Gobblewonker situation?”

“It’s real! Look at these gravitational readings, kid!” He gestured at a matrix of numbers on the screen. “Waves of anomalies! And once it activates - you best be holding onto something, cause you’ll start floating up!”

Soos looked back. “Whoa. That sounds pretty cool, dude.”

“It’s not cool! It’s tearing a hole in our universe!”

“Aww.”

“Okay, okay, calm down,” Dipper raised a hand. “We can shut it down, right? Where is it?”

“Ohhh… I used to know, I don’t recall!”

“Maybe it’s in that old bunker?” Mabel sat forward. “We should go back there!”

“Maybe…” He frowned. “After the Shack, yeah.”

At that moment, Soos turned into the parking lot. Mabel’s frown deepened.

“Why after?”

“We’re already here, right? It’ll just take a second.” Dipper opened the door and jumped out. He held it for McGucket, and raised an eyebrow when Mabel remained in the car. “Mabel? Come on!”

“We should find the bunker, Dipper.”

“Yeah, we will, just-”

“We should go look for the bunker, now.” Mabel crossed her arms. “We just got told there’s a big scary thing that’s gonna end the world and you still want to look for Stan stuff? He’s not gonna know about a doomsday thingy.”

“Well, we don’t know that-”

“Dipper.”

Mabel was looking at him with a very knowing expression. He took one look at it, and then sighed.

“Well… if Stan’s the Author, he’s gotta know where it’ll be, right? He probably built it.” He watched Mabel raise her eyebrows. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

Because I don’t think Grunkle Stan’s the Author, Dipper.” She pulled her hands into her sleeves. “You know that, right?”

Dipper hesitated. He looked back towards the house; Soos was opening the side door. “I mean, it’s very possible. And we’re already here, we might as well-”

Mabel got out of the car and pushed past him without a word. He frowned and hurried to catch up with her.

“Come on, Mabel. Don’t be like that.” A pause. “I don’t think it’d be in the bunker anyways. We looked all over that place.”

“Hey, dude!” Soos waved him over. “What are we looking for? I forgot.”

“It’s…” Dipper glanced one more time at Mabel, then jogged forwards. “It’s a big stack of papers, it should be in the living room. Come on.”

They entered the kitchen, and Dipper suddenly froze - was Stan back? He listened for a couple seconds, but the house was silent… eerily silent. They headed into the living room and were greeted by an empty chair - and no thesis, no picture to show Fiddleford.

“Of course,” Dipper frowned. “Stan must’ve put them somewhere.”

“...What is this place?”

A strange question - he glanced over, and found McGucket looking around the room.

“Oh, it’s just our house,” he said, and then cleared his throat. “I bet he still has it somewhere. Soos, you know where he hides stuff, right?”

“Yeah… he says I’m supposed to keep them secret, though. Like the money under the squeaky step on the stairs, the arrest warrants under the rug in the gift shop…” He counted them off with his fingers. “The wallets in the Sascrotch…”

“Okay, cool, you can take the gift shop.” Dipper looked over at McGucket. “And, uh, take him too, I guess. Mabel and I- oh, you know where it might be? His office, we’ll go there.”

“Okay,” said Mabel. He cringed a bit at her tone, but continued.

“Alright, if we find it, we can meet back up. It’ll be hard to miss, it’s like a giant stack of paper, and it’ll have Stan’s picture on top.”

“Got it, dude.” Soos shot finger guns at him as he backed away. “Come on, McGucket, it’s this way.”

The two of them shuffled out of sight, and Dipper nodded to Mabel.

“Alright, let’s, uh, go.”

“Yeah, to the office.”

Mabel turned and started walking to the back. He trailed along behind her.

“Yeah, it’ll just be quick,” he said. Paused. Then: “It’s worth checking out. I mean, you saw the same stuff I saw. It’s not at least a little weird to you that he’s got a whole PhD on anomalous events even though he never-”

“Yeah, Dipper, you told me already.”

“Then why doesn’t it make sense to check it out?” He opened the door to the office. “If he’s not the author, then we can just go to the next thing, right?”

Mabel snorted. “Oh yeah, and you’re totally ready to let this go. I know you, dum dum. You’re gonna spend the rest of the summer obsessing about this, and not in a fun way. In the ‘arguing with Grunkle Stan every night’ way.”

“Well… well, it’s weird, isn’t it? Stan is hiding something.” He made a beeline for the paper shredder, and picked it up. “Look, look! This thing’s stuffed - ugh, I bet he shredded it! Now why do you think he’d do that?”

“I dunno?” Mabel poked at the paper copier. “Hey, do you remember that dance party we had? Maybe we could ask Grunkle Stan to throw another one!”

“Oh, that? Oh, that…” He started going through the papers scattered around the desk. “I remember that. I didn’t really get to spend a lot of time at it, I was, uh…”

“Trying to nerd your way into dancing with Wendy?”

“Yeah, yeah... Mabel, look!” He grabbed a piece of paper. “There’s one page he didn’t shred for some reason - and it’s the one with his picture! Yes!” He flipped it over to show her. “Look, it is him, right down to the glasses! And he’s building the Mystery Shack - tell me that’s not him!”

Mabel frowned at the photo. She started to open her mouth, but-

There was a sound. A yell. A cry. Both of them locked eyes, and without a word they ran for the gift shop.

“Are you guys okay?” Dipper said as he burst through the door. The first thing he saw was McGucket, on the floor, trembling. “McGucket?”

“I seen it!” McGucket stabbed a finger at - the vending machine? “I seen it, right down there! It’s there!”

“What’s here?” Mabel tried to help him up, but he scrambled away. “What’s wrong?”

“The machine… my mind… I’m not going down there again! You can’t make me!”

Then he bolted for the door. Soos tried to grab him, but he was gone in a flash, the door slamming shut behind him. Dipper blinked, and then looked to Soos.

“Uh… what happened?”

“I dunno, dude! One minute he was fine, I turn around and suddenly he’s freaking out!” Soos picked up a case on the counter. “He left his laptop, too.”

“Weird.” Mabel took it from him. “What do you think he saw? Dipper?”

Dipper wasn’t right beside her. He had walked a couple paces forward, towards the vending machine.

“Dipper?”

It looked normal, mundane. He couldn’t count the number of times he’d passed by this thing without sparing it a second glance. There was nothing really to draw the eye; no flashy colours, no display lights on the snacks, no attempt from Stan to dress it up as any sort of attraction. It was maybe the most normal looking thing in the gift shop, but…

He reached out. Felt the sides. There was decades’ worth of grime caught between the metal edge and the wooden wall, but as his fingers slid down, they came across something - a bump?

He looked.

A hinge.

______________________________________________________________

Shit. Shit, shit. Did he lose them?

Heart beating in his chest, Stan slowly raised himself up, and looked out the side of the van he was driving. Through the cracks in the grass, he could see lights from the highway silhouetting the trees he looked through. White lights - no red and blue, though it was harder to tell with the feds.

He grit his teeth, and forced his shoulders down. It had been quiet for a while. If they were gonna find him here, they would’ve done it by now.

“Alright, Stan,” he grunted. Opened the door. “Hard part’s done. Now I just need to get it home.”

He rubbed his forehead as he got out of the van; there was a split in it that had stopped bleeding not that long ago. He cast one look to the front, to the smoking engine crumpled into the side of a thick trunk, and limped his way to the back - past the side of the van that read ‘OFFICIAL WASTE DISPOSAL VEHICLE’ in large letters. He unlatched the rear doors, opened them, and shone a flashlight inside.

There was the shine of several metal cylinders. One of them had flown up a little in the collision and was resting sideways on the others. It looked like it had a pretty bad dent in it, but nothing looked to be leaking out; not noticeably, at least.

“Hmph.” He nodded a little. “I can work with this. Alright.”

There was a tarp and a couple construction signs thrown about the back; he covered the van, set up a few signs to keep away curious onlookers, then started off through the forest. It slow and dark, but, as he checked his watch, not dark for too much longer. The kids’d be up if he took too long, so he groaned and forced himself to walk a little faster.

Shouldn’t’ve tried to rush this job, he thought. Should’ve learned his lesson from Columbia. If the feds weren’t onto him before, they sure were now. Maybe he should get out of town for a bit, take the kids on a little road trip…

He made a face. Miss the portal opening, probably. Thirty years of work, and he might not even be there to see it pay off.

There was a tug and a ripping sound as his pantlegs brushed past a thorny bush, and he swore under his breath.

“Great. Just great.” Finally he trudged his way out onto the Shack’s parking lot. “Alright, focus. Gotta work quickly.”

Stan grabbed some supplies stashed by the outhouse and loaded them into his car. He put the seats back, started it, and drove right back to where he’d hit the trees; for once he was driving carefully, following the speed limit. Once he saw the flash of construction signs down in the forest, he turned off his headlights and drove slowly down to the van.

There, he stopped. Pulled the tarp off. The words emblazoned across the sides of the van were really gonna catch the eye of whoever found this thing; he took a can of spraypaint and quickly covered them, paused, and then replaced it with ‘PROPERTY OF TENT OF TELEPATHY’ After that, he opened the back and loaded as many drums of waste into his car that he could. When he ran out of space, he wrapped two in the tarp and tied them to the roof.

Stan tightened them one last time, and stepped back to catch his breath.

There. Now all he had to do was get home.

The sky was just barely beginning to lighten as Stan pulled back into the Mystery Shack. He pulled off his gloves as he made his way toward the gift shop, opened the door, and walked towards the vending machine.

Something did catch his eye, though. There was something on the register with a little red light; he picked it up, and immediately he could feel it was a little camera… A camera that was currently recording. Stan frowned at that, and looked up, up to the vending machine it was pointed at.

He had a bad feeling about this. And a second later when he heard a strange creak from the corner of the gift shop, he reached down, grasped the baseball bat leaning against the side of the counter, and made his way to the sound.

He stepped silently, avoiding the squeaky floorboards. There was definitely a figure in the corner, but… smaller than he was expecting. It didn’t look like an agent, actually, it looked more like…

“Kid?”

Dipper squinted when the flashlight came on. Stan breathed a sigh of relief - yup, it was just him - before a new fear started churning his stomach.

“What are you doing here kid? It’s late, you should be in bed!” He shone the flashlight lower. “Are those IDs? Did you go rooting through my room?”

“It is late. Where have you been, Grunkle Stan?”

Stan glanced back to his car. He really didn’t have time for this.

“And what happened to your face?”

“Eh… woodpecker.” Stan motioned him up. “Cmon, kid, off to bed with you. Your parents’d kill me if they found out how late you’re up.”

“Since when have you cared about how late we stay up?”

“Since right now, kid, so-“

“No!” Dipper crossed his arms, and there was a strange shine in his eyes. “What’s wrong with me sitting here? In this room?”

“Dipper.”

“You’re hiding something, aren’t you!”

“Dipper, you’re trying my patience.” He glanced back again. “Look, how about I cut you a deal. You go to bed, tomorrow we can have a proper talk about this, alright?”

“What, so you can tell me more about how you aren’t the Author?” He rose to his feet. “You know, ‘Stan’, at first I thought you weren’t telling me because you wanted to ‘protect me’ or whatever, but now I know what you’re up to. McGucket, he saw what the machine was gonna do to the world, but you kept going, didn’t you?”

“McGucket? What?”

“It’s too late to play dumb, Stan! I know what you’re really hiding. There’s a doomsday machine under the Mystery Shack!”

Stan heard that, and the first thing that came out of his mouth was a startled snort. “What?” He managed. “You spent this whole time trying to figure me out, and you came up with that?”

But the look in his eyes… wow, he was serious about this, wasn’t he?

“You really think I’m building a doomsday machine?” Stan laughed again, but it rang hollow against Dipper’s unsmiling expression. “Have a little faith in me, kid, come on. I’m not trying to end the world.”

“You’re lying.” He said, trying to puff out his chest. “And I’m not gonna let you do this. I’m gonna stop you.”

At that, Stan let out a deep sigh. He looked up at the first morning rays peeking through the blinders, and then back at his nephew.

“Go to bed, kid.”

“No. I’m gonna stay here, I’m- hey!”

In one move, Stan picked him up and hoisted him over his shoulder. He started towards the back, wincing a bit as Dipper pounded on his shoulder.

“Let me go, Grunkle Stan! Let me go!”

Up the stairs. Dipper tried to wiggle out of his grip, but he held him firmly in place.

“You’ve just proved I’m right, you know! You’re not gonna get away with this!”

Stan made his way up to the attic, opened the door, and set dipper down in the bedroom. He blocked Dipper from squeezing past him as he started swinging it closed.

“Stan!”

“We’ll talk about this tomorrow. You get some rest.” As the gap narrowed, he saw the light landing on Mabel’s bed. She almost looked asleep, but he could see her staring back at him. “Night, kids.”

Then he shut the door, turned the lock… and after a second of hesitation he dragged a chair over and slotted it under the handle. A bit extreme, he thought, but the kid was smart. Tonight wasn’t the night to take chances.

Stan backed away, and started back down the steps.

He was so close, now. So close.

And no one was going to get in his way.

Hours later, when Dipper was slumped half-asleep against the door, he grunted at a strange light. It wasn’t like the sunlight; it was strangely blue, and as he bolted up and rubbed his eyes, he could see it shining up from between the floorboards.

Then he felt… strange. Light. He yelped as his feet suddenly left the ground, and suddenly everything in their bedroom was starting to float up, up; McGucket’s laptop, slowly spinning in the air, beeped and displayed a message that made his blood go cold:

MACHINE STATUS: ACTIVE

And then suddenly the weightlessness vanished, and he dropped back down, scrambled over to the laptop.

“Oh, no, no, no,” he said, his face lit red from warning signs. “Stan, what are you doing?”

[elitegymnastics]

Q: What is this?

A: It’s a flyer for a virtual fundraiser on June 4th that Elite Gymnastics is playing. You can access the show at quietyear.com

Q: Hasn’t Elite Gymnastics been inactive for like, ten years?

A: Yes. This is the first Elite Gymnastics performance of any kind since November 30th 2012, at the Horn Gallery at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. 

Q: Why did Elite Gymnastics stop playing shows?

A: Elite Gymnastics started out as me (Jaime) and a bunch of my friends agreeing to help me play my songs live back in 2009. I made a lot of weird demos in GarageBand and my friend Dominique Davis from the band Dearling Physique got tired of watching me sit on them. So, he booked me to play at a show he was curating as part of a small local music and arts festival called Clapperclaw. For several months that’s mainly what EG was. At some point the focus shifted to making recordings rather than playing shows, to participate in the emergent culture of new music distributed via MP3 file-sharing. The lineup winnowed to just me and Josh Clancy, who began creating digital EPs that we posted on this Tumblr page as ZIP files full of MP3s accompanied by a PDF of artwork. This is the incarnation of the group that most people are familiar with.

This was before Patreon existed. If Bandcamp was around, we’d never heard of it. Though MP3 file-sharing culture and file transfer sites like MediaFire and MegaUpload allowed anyone to distribute music freely across the world via the internet, it was still pretty difficult to get people to pay you for it. I think it was for this reason that a lot of internet music back then featured a lot of sampling. A lot of artists’ first forays into the world of DAWs and production took the form of mash-ups, bootleg remixes, and DJ mixes. Artists like Animal Collective, MIA, Kanye West, and Daft Punk for whom sampling was a pillar of their creative process were extremely influential. Elite Gymnastics was no exception - the first song of ours to gain traction online was “Is This On Me?” which made no attempt to hide the fact that it heavily sampled Faye Wong’s “Eyes On Me.” The fact that it was so difficult to make money off MP3s pushed people to make different creative decisions than they would have otherwise. It was sort of a free-for-all.

Eventually, all of this started to change. The major labels started getting a lot more aggressive about trying to destroy MP3 file-sharing culture. Platforms like MegaUpload were raided and taken offline. The replacements that sprung up to replace them were increasingly infested with ads and malware. Corporate platforms like YouTube and SoundCloud adopted Content ID filters to prevent the proliferation of copyrighted music there. Blogs and private torrent trackers being taken down meant thousands of hours of labor were wiped out in an instant. Some of the best archives of the history of recorded music ever created were destroyed without hesitation. Even the most devoted participants lost the will to keep repairing and re-making the stuff that cops and record companies kept obliterating.

Josh and I both dreamed of being able to make a living as musicians. We still do. Back then, we were willing to accept a lot of changes in order to make that possible, which seemed necessary. A lot of the stuff that we were great at just didn’t make any money. Once, we were asked to do a remix of a song called “Sa Sa Samoa” by the band Korallreven. I did the remix by myself, which was normal for us, and Josh was so inspired by it that he spent a week working non-stop to create a video for it. People loved it - the day the video dropped, Pitchfork designated the song as a “Best New Track” and New York Magazine wrote about it in their “Approval Matrix.” The video led to a ton of exposure, but from a financial perspective, it just did not make sense to put that much effort into promoting a remix of someone else’s song. The stuff we were personally excited by just seemed to have less and less to do with what actually makes money.

A lot of internet bands during this era began to palpably shapeshift in an effort to succeed in music as a career. Artists who’d first attracted notice for sample-based bangers they made on a laptop started posing with vintage hardware in their press photos and trading in their laptops for live bands and recording studios. It became harder to distribute DJ mixes or mash-ups that contained copyrighted music in them. Influential bloggers either closed up shop or were absorbed into the traditional music industry in some way. Feeds that once touted bizarre songs by laptop-toting weirdos with no industry connections started to become populated mostly by artists with labels and publicists. The bottom rungs of festival lineups started to consist mostly of new major label signings who have lots of money to spend on stage production but not much in the way of grassroots fan enthusiasm or media buzz. 

Internet music and what people tend to refer to as “indie music” split off into two separate streams. Today, there’s a pretty intense firewall between internet culture and whatever you want to call the culture of vinyl records, mid-sized indie labels with publicists, and positive reviews from the few remaining websites that still pay people to write about music. I call it “publicist indie,” “lifestyle techno,” or “prestige electronica” depending on whether or not the music features guitars and/or vocals. The recent online kerfuffle about NFTs really emphasized this split. The worlds of digital illustration and game development campaigned aggressively against mass adoption of cryptocurrency - if you saw any Medium posts explaining crypto’s environmental issues, chances are they were written by someone from those fields. Every new announcement by an artist that they had minted an NFT was met with a swift and vocal backlash from fans. Though I’ve never really been much of an Aphex Twin fan, it was still pretty startling to look at the replies under his NFT announcement tweet and see hundreds of furious people announcing that he was now dead to them. That’s an artist who has seemed more or less unimpeachable for most of my life up until this point! All of that seemed to change in an instant.

There is a massive disconnect between the insular world of the industry establishment and the cutting edge of online counterculture. We saw this again a couple of weeks ago with the online response to the crisis in Gaza. We saw passionate advocacy for Palestinians from games journalists and developers much more often than we saw it from musicians. This is a very serious problem for music! I do not believe it is possible to please both sides - that is to say, I do not believe it is possible to be part of internet counterculture and the industry establishment simultaneously. The music industry is too conservative, too compromised, too corrupt. If it weren’t for the ocean of valuable copyrights that labels are sitting on, most of them would be bankrupt within a year. If the industry was forced to live or die based on how they handle what’s happening right now in the present, it would most assuredly die. The only people who don’t realize this are those who are being paid to stay ignorant. 

Josh and I did not know this back then. From where we were standing, it looked like internet culture and established media industries were on track to converge. A career in the arts seemed genuinely, tantalizingly possible, right up until the moment that it no longer did. 

In my case, I had really been struggling up until that point. My life had been this ongoing sequence of evictions and hospitalizations, and it seemed to be getting worse, not better. I donated plasma twice a week to pay for groceries and while I was sitting there with a giant needle stuck in my left arm for an hour I would see my picture in The Fader or my songs being recommended by one of the Kings of Leon on Twitter or whatever. Music seemed like the only thing the world thought I was any good at. It felt like my only chance at a peaceful, happy life was somewhere out there in a world I could only perceive through a laptop screen. 

Gender, for me, was a big factor in all of this. The more invested in the craft of songwriting I became, the harder it was to repress or ignore my gender stuff. At that time I’m not sure I even knew what the word “transgender” meant - I just knew that when I showed up at a venue wearing a skirt, no one would talk to me or look me in the eye, and that reading about people like Anohni or Terre Thaemlitz or on the internet made me feel like if I could get out of Minneapolis maybe I could find a place where people would accept me. The internet was like, a pretty toxic place for someone in my position. When I tried to find people to talk to about what I was feeling, nobody tried to tell me to read Judith Butler or ask me what pronouns I preferred. The internet was just like, overrun with predators who just wanted to fetishize me and exploit me. Music seemed like the only way I’d ever have an actual life as myself. I was desperate for that. I was well and truly desperate.

Between all the big changes that were happening to us individually and the music industry moving farther and farther away of the anarchic free-for-all of MP3 file-sharing culture, the strain on us just got to be too much. We stopped trusting each other. We became the unstoppable force and the immovable object, crashing haphazardly against one another’s resolve in a dazzling display of youthful futility. Our partnership ended, and after finishing out the remaining live shows on the calendar by myself, I retired the name “Elite Gymnastics” and started making music on my own under other names. That was that.

Q: Why is Elite Gymnastics coming back now, then?

A: Over the years, Josh and I eventually started talking again. Though there was a lot we did agree on, and potential future projects were discussed, nothing truly felt right. We haven’t been in the same room since Summer 2012, and we’ve both changed a lot since then. We both have other projects and we’ve both developed other ways of working since we stopped working together. It’s a pretty big commitment to put all of that aside in order to join your fortunes together with someone you haven’t seen in a decade.

Recently, Josh decided to leave Elite Gymnastics. His reasons are his own, and I was very surprised by his decision, but after having had time to adjust, I’m really grateful to him. I had kept these songs at a distance for many years, because it seemed foolish to allow myself to get too attached to songs I didn’t feel like I was allowed to think of as mine, if that makes any sense. The songs felt like casualties of a conflict that I had to bury in the ground and try to forget about. Being able to embrace them again felt like re-growing a severed limb or having a loved one come back to life, almost. Feeling like it was safe to love these songs again made me feel whole in a way I didn’t expect to. I became really excited by the prospect of revisiting them, so that’s what I decided to do.

Q: Does this mean you’re going to put RUIN back on Spotify?

A: No. Taking the record off Spotify was the right thing to do. That record was only ever intended to exist during the era of MP3 piracy. I never envisioned a world where the music industry would be so aggressive about policing the way that copyrighted music is allowed to exist online. If we hadn’t opted to take the record down when we did, someone would inevitably have forced us to. If you want to hear those specific recordings again, you’re going to have to do it the way we originally intended: by downloading MP3 files from the internet. Try SoulSeek.

Q: What’s next for Elite Gymnastics, then?

A: Here’s the situation currently. There is no Elite Gymnastics music available to stream or purchase in an official capacity anywhere on the internet. It wouldn’t really be possible for me to put the old stuff on Spotify or Bandcamp now because of all the samples. Like I said before, it was a different time. Those records were created to thrive on a past version of the internet that no longer exists. They weren’t designed to be compatible with the 2021 internet.

Technically, Elite Gymnastics didn’t ever release a debut album. We had EPs, a compilation, and a remix collection. We didn’t make an album, a record that existed as the distillation of all that experimentation that contained all of the songs that fans of the EPs would want to hear, all in one place. It’s like we did Good Fridays but stopped before we made My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.

So, I am currently working on the first Elite Gymnastics album. If you were following my stuff as Default Genders, you may have noticed me posting demos on my SoundCloud page from 2015-2018 that were all eventually reworked into the album Main Pop Girl 2019. The album I am making is taking that approach to all the old EG songs, including some unreleased stuff. I’m collaborating with others on some songs and I honestly feel like it has resulted in some of the best and most exciting music I have ever been involved with. It is a drastic reinvention, but iteration and reinvention have always been a big part of what I do. I want to make something that feels like the culmination of everything that came before, and so far, I think I’m succeeding.

Q: When will I be able to hear this new music?

At a virtual fundraiser on June 4th, 2021, where there is a suggested donation of $10. You can access it at quietyear.com

[quaranmine]

All you have to do is convince them that the 90 eea style of ads are still cool and if you put the info in that said style, user will come running!

lol, i think trying some retro designs would definitely be cool--at least eye catching. i also wish they'd let me draw for stuff like that but i'm not really a professional quality enough digital artist and there are graphic designs already who would, like, actually be the ones who are supposed to do that. i have difficulty finding good enough photos to use too (relevant + no copyright + extra rules on top of that) but i've had luck using my personal photos and just signing a release form

you do have me intrigued though, i'd like to look up some of our old outreach materials though if they're archived somewhere and see if some of those could be recreated if they're neat looking. we aren't advertising any product though, more of a general outreach/education for environmental stuff.

[dimigex]

Healing Hands - Chapter Nine - YamaSaku

Now available on Fanfiction and Archive.

Good news: there's two sections of Tenzo and Sakura interaction in this one, and we're going to get significantly more in the coming chapters.

Snippet below the cut, but this chapter is over 11K words so it's probably better to read it on one of the other sites.

After dropping an armful of files across her desk, Sakura slumped into her chair. The lamp spread a halo of pale light across the papers that had begun to resemble precarious mountains with styrofoam cup trees at the bases. Despite working three hours past the end of her shift, Sakura still needed to spend several more to complete her charting. It had taken a month in her new position to realize that she needed one day each week devoted to paperwork.

Despite that, Sakura's efforts didn't seem enough. She had to update her patient's charts like she'd done before, but now, she also had to oversee a variety of administrative tasks that ended up on her desk. There were budget reports to review, staff schedules to create, training programs to consider, and any number of things that she'd never had to worry about in the past. Since talking to Kakashi about finding an assistant, Sakura couldn't help but wonder if she should do the same. Kazuko was a natural with the administrative side, but she would need someone with an aptitude for medical ninjutsu to fill her position eventually.

The scrape of fabric drew Sakura's attention from her self-pitying thoughts. Though she no longer wore the jonin uniform beneath her lab coat, a weapon pouch circled her thigh. Some habits remained in peace or war. She pulled a kunai from the leather holster and spun her chair, ready to release the weapon at the first sign of danger. A form materialized from a dark corner of the room, grey eyes smiling. "They never warn you about the paperwork, do they?"

Recognizing Kakashi, Sakura lowered the kunai and tucked it away. The man lounged on the arm of the couch, long legs stretched in front of him like he'd been waiting for a while. The robes and hat were nowhere to be seen, but Sakura envisioned the weight dragging at his shoulders. Besides, the new jonin uniform was different enough from Sakura's version of Kakashi that it had become a sign of his office anyway. She bowed her head in greeting. "What can I do for you, Hokage-sama?"

Kakashi snorted and pushed to his feet. "Drop the title, firstly."

As Kakashi moved closer to her desk, Sakura humored him with a smile that strained at her patience. She'd been working for fourteen hours today, and while she liked Kakashi well enough, Sakura wanted to know what new chaos he was bringing into her life. There was no way that Kakashi was making a social visit at this time of night, so he needed something. He eyed the stacks of paper, nearly knocking one over when he got too close. Sakura batted the hands away from her work. "Is there something I can help you with?"

"Your desk doesn't look much different from mine." Kakashi's eyes conveyed a deeper sense of amusement. Sakura realized that she could read the man's emotions much better without the sharingan or headband that slanted across his face. Something about the comparison and teasing tone drew a flush of annoyance onto Sakura's cheeks.

Taking a deep breath, Sakura reined her temper under control. She and Kakashi were friends and former teammates, which offered her some leniency, but he was still the hokage. "I'm sorry," she said, further moderating her tone. "What I meant to say is that I'm terribly busy and—"

"And, you don't have time to enjoy my company," Kakashi finished Sakura's argument before she could articulate the sentiment more gently. The man's lips twitched into a smile beneath his mask when he held up a hand to stop her rebuttal. "I understand, I really do. But, I need a favor."

"A favor," Sakura repeated, grimacing at the aftertaste that the word left in her mouth. She had more than enough work piled on her desk without accepting more, especially not knowing what she was getting into. But, she wasn't sure if this was the type of task that she could refuse. "What kind of favor?"

Kakashi rubbed the back of his neck and offered an apology with his eyes. "The kind that takes up more of your time, unfortunately."

Sakura groaned before she could stop herself. Of course it was time consuming. But, she couldn't tell Kakashi no, even if she wanted to. He crossed the office, producing a stack of files from somewhere that she couldn't see. There couldn't have been more than twenty, slim folders, but they hit Sakura's desk like stone. Kakashi rested his fingertips on top of them. "These are the files on my current Anbu."

A quip died on the tip of Sakura's tongue as she reached for the top cover, frowning. "I thought there would be more of them. And, shouldn't they say top secret or something? These look like every other shinobi file that crosses my desk."

"That's the point," Kakashi teased, drawing his hand back and crossing his arms over his chest. "Can you think of anything that would make them more likely to be read than putting a warning across the front? This way, they hide in plain sight."

Nodding along with the logic, Sakura pulled the first file from the stack and flipped it open. A painfully young shinobi stared back at her. She didn't recognize him; the boy could have been anyone. Sakura did a double take when she skimmed the medical information and saw that he was six years older than her. Her gaze shifted back to Kakashi. "What am I supposed to do with these?"

Kakashi stared down at the photo for a moment, then sighed. "I've been thinking about the concerns you raised with Yamato, and you were right. We aren't at war any longer; I need to know that my Anbu are sound, physically and mentally."

"Did you check on him?" Sakura had nearly gone to Kakashi half a dozen different times to ask, but she'd forced herself to trust him. If he said that he would take care of the situation with Yamato, he would. But, she had a difficult time holding back.

Kakashi remained silent as Sakura closed the file and replaced it on the stack. Then, his chin dipped in a sharp nod. Sakura let the silence drag out until Kakashi continued, answering her unasked question. "The mission clearly affected him, but I think he's bouncing back."

A knot of tension released in Sakura's chest. When Tsunade left the village, she'd given Sakura a copy of Kakashi's file in case she ever needed it. Sakura had left it unopened for weeks, not wanting to pry into the man's past without reason. But, after the questions about Yamato, Sakura had thumbed through the document to get an idea of how well the two men knew each other. The history that leapt to life from the pages shocked her.

Not only had Yamato and Kakashi known each other during their Anbu days, they'd served on the same team. They had completed countless missions together over the years. As curious as she was, Sakura forced herself not to read the notes. Knowing the basics of their history was enough to soothe some of Sakura's worries. Kakashi knew Yamato far better than she did. If he thought that Yamato was okay, he probably was.

Kakashi nodded toward files, breaking Sakura's train of thought. "Tsunade had been taking care of the physicals, and the evaluations hadn't seemed that important until the other day."

They hadn't seemed that important until you suggested that one of my friends was struggling. Sakura heard the words that Kakashi wasn't ready to admit, even if he didn't. She framed her next question with care, half afraid of the anwer. "Does your visit exempt Yamato from this round of physicals?"

Sakura knew that Kakashi wanted to pretend that Yamato couldn't possibly be struggling, but her questions had planted the doubts too deeply. He shook his head after a few seconds of consideration. "No, as head of Anbu, Yamato needs to be evaluated as well."

Sakura tried to keep her mouth from falling open at the revelation, but the beginnings of a surprised gasp slid between her lips. Kakashi snorted under his breath. "Have you even looked at his file? I assumed that you'd scoured every detail before you came to me with questions."

"I didn't realize I could," Sakura began, then stopped short. On a subconscious level she'd known that she could get the file if she wanted it, but it wasn't easy to reach. When Sakura had agreed to take over medical oversight for Anbu, she'd been granted access to the files. But, she hadn't thought to make use of them. Something about using Yamato's past that way felt like an invasion of privacy. She didn't want to do that until she had a solid reason.

Nudging the files over so that they spread across the desk like a fan, Kakashi fished through them and came up with one that appeared identical to the others. When he flipped it open, Sakura studied Yamato's almost familiar features in the picture. It must have been recent, there were lines at the edges of his eyes and mouth that she didn't remember from when they'd first met. Still, it looked healthier than the man that she'd recently signed off to return to active duty.

Ignoring the sense of guilt that gnawed at her stomach, Sakura frowned at Kakashi. "What am I looking for?"

Long fingers slid across the page, coming to rest just above the years of service. Sakura's mouth dropped as she frowned at the number. "That can't be right," she argued, doing some quick backward math. "He would have had to join Anbu when he was ten; nobody joins that young."

"Eleven, actually," Kakashi corrected. He shrugged his shoulders in a nonchalant manner that suggested that he cared more than he wanted to admit. "What makes you an expert on Anbu ages, anyway? I was only thirteen when I joined; you were barely a genin by then."

At thirteen, Sakura had been afraid to work out too hard lest she get bulky muscles that Sasuke wouldn't like. Her crush had determined every aspect of her life, consuming it. The idea of living through the things that she'd learned about Anbu during the past few weeks while at that age was horrifying.

Unbidden, Sakura studied Kakashi. She couldn't help but wonder how different he must have been to survive Anbu. Her heart ached for the innocence that he and Yamato had surely given up to be in the black ops so young. Had they ever had a normal life, even by shinobi standards? Had they left genin teams behind? Had they lost their friends and first crushes in the process? She didn't want to think about it. "You were just kids."

"We were shinobi in a time of war," Kakashi countered with a shrug. A dusting of pink showed above the edges of his mask, but Sakura wasn't sure if it was annoyance or embarrassment that colored his cheeks. Kakashi closed Yamato's file. "I wasn't looking for pity, for either of us. I just want you to know that Yamato has been doing this long enough to live through some dark days. He knows how to handle it."

Sakura nodded, but she couldn't help but wonder if living through more trauma made a person better at hiding their struggles than dealing with them. She wondered what darkness Kakashi's easygoing nature hid. Deciding that she'd rather not know until she needed to, Sakura pushed the files back into a stack. "I'll clear my schedule to get these done. You'll have the results by the end of next week."

Kakashi eye smiled, tension flowing out of his posture at the easy acceptance. "Thank you. I wish it wasn't more work on top of what you already have."

"Some things are important enough to take precedence," Sakura answered, waving away Kakashi's apology. This would give her a chance to dig deeper into Yamato's mental state as well as familiarize herself with the other Anbu. If she could save even one of them, it was worth however much time it took.

(Find the rest on FF and A03, linked above)

[dewitty1]

Haunt the corner of my eye

harryromper @harryromper

Chapters: 5/5 Fandom: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter Characters: Harry Potter, Draco Malfoy, Hermione Granger, Ron Weasley, Luna Lovegood, Neville Longbottom, John Dawlish, Angelina Johnson, Parvati Patil, Dennis Creevey Additional Tags: Post-Hogwarts, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Post-Second War with Voldemort, Mystery And Angst With A Happy Ending, Auror Harry Potter, Student Draco Malfoy, Healer Luna Lovegood, Wizarding Politics (Harry Potter), Number Twelve Grimmauld Place

Summary:

Harry’s life is very much on track. After a successful career as an Auror, he’s set to become the youngest ever Minister for Magic. But strange things are starting to happen at Grimmauld Place. Items he doesn’t recognise are appearing left and right, and somehow he never feels quite alone. There’s only one thing Harry knows for sure: it has something to do with Draco Malfoy.

Excerpt:

Harry’s just turning off Upper Street when he sees him, stopped in the middle of the footpath, looking up at a sign. Malfoy’s tall: long limbs; blond hair falling in his eyes as he glances back down at a piece of paper clutched in his hand. He takes up space, indifferent to the way the sea of early-morning commuters is having to part around him. Arrogant as always. It flares rage at the edges of Harry’s frayed nerves and all of a sudden he’s pushing past people to get to him, grabbing at Malfoy’s shoulder before he can think about what he’s doing and shoving him up against the brick wall of a fish restaurant.

Harry’s suddenly acutely aware of just how close they are, heat radiating off his body from his run. The startled expression on Malfoy’s face narrows into suspicion rather than fear or disgust.

“What the fuck are you playing at?” Harry hisses, holding Malfoy in place against the wall with his forearm.

“You’re the one who just threw me into a fucking wall,” Malfoy sneers back. “I think you’re the one who should be offering explanations.”

Harry leans back a little, conscious that he’s causing a bit of a scene. He doesn’t have his fake Muggle ID with him, and the last thing he needs is to be confronted by the authorities over an assault, even if all he wants to do is punch Malfoy in his pale flawless face.

“Why are you doing this?” he demands, letting up the pressure on Malfoy’s chest a little, but reluctant to let him go completely.

“Doing what?” Malfoy snaps. “I was minding my own fucking business before you jumped me like a gorilla.”

“What’s in it for you?” Harry seethes, even more incensed now that Malfoy doesn’t seem prepared to admit to anything. “Sneaking around, following me. I see you everywhere. You’re not even supposed to be in London.”

Something flickers across Malfoy’s expression for just a moment, some split-second of recognition or acknowledgement, but then it’s gone, his stare cold again.

Harry rocks back on his heels, dropping his hold on Malfoy. He’ll just arrest him, he thinks. They can sort this out at the Ministry. But as he’s about to reach to where his wand is holstered at his lower back, his eyes cut down Malfoy’s body and he freezes.

Malfoy is wearing a t-shirt with the Arctic Monkeys logo on it. Suddenly Harry’s furious again.

“You’re trying to make me think I’m crazy, is that it? Why were you in my house? Why would you think it would be funny to leave that stupid shirt in my drawer?”

Malfoy glances down at his chest in confusion and then back up at Harry, his eyes flashing. “You know this shirt?” he asks urgently.

Harry groans, exasperated. “Stop messing about, this has gone on long enough.”

“Because I don’t know this shirt,” Malfoy snaps. “I have no idea what an arctic sodding monkey is, and until a couple of weeks ago, I’d have sworn I’d never worn a Muggle tee shirt in my life, but there’s dozens of them in my flat and I don’t understand what’s happening to me and if you do, then you need to explain yourself.”

Harry’s heart sinks. He thinks immediately back to his own confusion about the t-shirt. What in Godric’s name is going on?

“So you’re just going to play dumb, is that it? Pretend you haven’t been creeping around and messing with me. This is about the election, isn’t it? You’re opposed to my politics so you thought you’d stalk me and harrass me!”

“Not everything is about you, you self-centred narcissist,” Malfoy growls back. “I don’t give a fuck about your political campaign or the wizarding world’s stupid little elections. Someone has been messing with me. For days now. I’m constantly finding things I don’t recognise in my home. Everytime I turn around it’s like there’s someone just out of sight, out of the corner of my eye. I feel like there’s somewhere I’m supposed to be. Like I’ve forgotten an appointment but all the damned time.”

He slumps back against the wall, as if his outburst has sapped his energy, or as if he’s just now realising the pointlessness of shouting at Harry about it. By contrast, Harry’s brain is racing, thinking about how similar the feeling Malfoy’s describing is to the way he’s been experiencing the world over the last few weeks. That same nagging sense that he’s missing something.

He studies Malfoy more closely: the defeated posture, the tired shadows under his eyes that Harry knows mirror his own.

“What were you doing, just now?” Harry asks, lowering his voice. If Malfoy is surprised by his abrupt change in demeanor, he doesn’t let on. He produces a green and yellow slip of paper that he has had clutched in his hand.

“I found this at home. I don’t even know what a Snappy Snaps is, but it had an address on it so.” Malfoy gives a sigh and shrugs. “Nothing else has helped. I thought I’d try here.”

Harry takes the slip of paper and stares at it. He experiences the same discordant feeling he’s had all week. A sort of jangling in his nerves that he can’t understand and can’t get to settle down.

“I’ll come with you,” Harry says, handing the slip back.

“Look,” Malfoy groans, “if you’re going to arrest me, let’s just get on with it. It will take me a couple of days to get an Advocate on the continent prepared to represent me in whatever trumped-up breach of the Post-War Prohibitions you intend to charge me with.” Malfoy seems defeated now, the fight completely drained out of him. The way he says it makes Harry feel uncomfortable, as if it’s a foregone conclusion he won’t be treated fairly. Harry feels like he should be affronted by that, and a few minutes ago he probably would have been, but now he keeps looking at the slip of paper in Malfoy’s hand.

“I’m not going to arrest you,” he finds himself saying, before he can think better of it. “I’ll come with you, to this address.” Malfoy opens his mouth as if he’s about to protest and then thinks better of it, huffing as he pushes off the wall and past Harry, not waiting to see if he’ll follow.

The shopfront is a few doors down, and both Malfoy and Harry stand on the footpath looking at it, puzzled.

“Muggle photography?” Harry asks.

“Seems like. You’d know more than I would.”

Harry frowns at him. “You’re the one who’s been living as a Muggle.”

“Apparently,” Malfoy mutters under his breath, and then strides forward, pushing open the door to the shop.

Harry crosses the threshold in time to see Malfoy give the paper to a young woman, who glances at it briefly and then turns to the shelf behind her where thick shiny green envelopes are stacked, presumably full of photographs.

Harry’s still trying to work out how any of this makes sense. If Luna’s right, and Malfoy’s been lurking around in Muggle London for the last few years, none of this would be confusing to him. But at the same time, it’s extremely confusing for Harry, who feels like all of these things—the bar last night and the mailboxes before it—should be a lot less familiar to him than they seem to be.

The woman hands Malfoy one of the envelopes and he pays her with Muggle money. He turns back to Harry as he opens it, drawing out the stack of pictures, starting to leaf through them quickly. His expression collapses.

“Well, this certainly isn’t going to help matters.” He lets out a humourless laugh.

“What?”

Malfoy thrusts the whole packet at Harry pushing past him out onto the street as if he needs fresh air. When Harry glances down, he can see why. The photos are all of Harry and Malfoy. Together. On holiday, by the looks. Arms slung around one another in front of old stone buildings and pressed together in tiny restaurants with checkered tablecloths.

(๑ˊ͈ ॢꇴ ˋ͈)〜♡॰ॱ