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arvandus · 2 months

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A Cup of Affection (Part 1)

Pairing: Barbatos x f!reader

Content warnings: cisfem!reader; short-coded reader (or tall Barbatos, you pick!); reader's hair is able to be tucked behind the ear/brushed aside, but no further description provided; a lil’ steamy toward the end but no actual smut (that’ll be in part 2 *evil laugh*); reader loves sweets/sweet drinks; not proofread (watch me edit spelling/grammar errors later after this has been reblogged....)

**MINORS AND AGELESS BLOGS DO NOT FOLLOW OR INTERACT**

(divider credit goes to @benkeibear)

It was the worst thing he could have ever heard uttered from your lips.

“I think I’d actually prefer coffee today, if that’s okay.”

Barbatos stared at you dumfounded as if you’d grown a second head. You flustered under his gaze, your fingers fidgeting and eyes dropping.

“I mean, if it’s not too much trouble,” you stuttered. Your next words came out in a rush. “Don’t get me wrong, I love your tea! It’s just... I used to drink it all the time back home, and I’m feel a little nostalgic for it.”

Ah, you were so cute when you got flustered... Barbatos could feel his resolve fracture just the slightest, and he tightened his mental control, like sealing a crack in a teacup.

Diavolo laughed. “There’s no need to worry. Barbatos’s coffee is just as divine as his tea. I’m sure it’ll be no trouble at all. Besides, he just went to the market yesterday and restocked the kitchens. Isn’t that right?”

Diavolo looked at him expectantly, innocence in his eyes, and yet Barbatos knew better. The corners of Barbatos’s mouth quirked just the slightest in stiff acknowledgement as he made mental notes to increase the young lord’s workload for the next day or two....

“Yes, young master. Although, had I known the coffee would be offered to guests, I would have purchased more of a selection.”

“I’m sure whatever you have is fine, Barbatos. I’m not very picky...” you reply encouragingly with a warm smile.

Barbatos stared at you for a moment and returned the expression with more warmth than he’d given the young prince. “You’re very gracious, Y/N.”

Diavolo clapped his hands together excitedly. “Lovely! With all of this talk of coffee, I believe I’d like one as well. It’s been some time since I’ve enjoyed a cup.”

How quickly one’s control over a situation can shift...

The butler bowed low. “Of course, my lord. I will prepare it immediately.” He straightened his stiff spine and stared at you, although he kept his gaze at the space between your eyes so as not to give away the heat he’d undoubtedly feel when looking directly into your dark pupils. “Is it safe to assume you enjoy your coffee like you enjoy your tea?”

You giggled, the sound of it making Barbatos’s skin tingle. “You mean more sugar and cream than coffee? Yes, please.”

Great. Just great.

Barbatos’s smile remained firm, yet he could feel its fakeness in the way the muscles at the corner of his mouth cramped. He hoped you couldn’t see it.

With a bow he retreated. As soon as he was out of your line of sight, his mask vanished, transforming from smile to frown.

You wanted coffee.

There was only one, large, glaring problem. The only coffee in the entire castle was Hell Coffee.

It was Diavolo’s favorite, his enjoyment of the acidic, bitter taste a constant, warm reminder of Barbatos’s fatherly affection. He only requested it when he required reassurance after a particularly difficult day, when Barbatos’s honest feedback and praise on a job well done weren’t enough. Barbatos had no need for any other type of coffee, especially since he himself was renowned for his teas and cakes. No one ever, in their right mind, would request coffee when offered Barbatos’s tea.

With each step, the calm butler began to lose more and more of his composure until he nearly slammed the door open upon his entry to the kitchen.

The three Little Ds in the room startled at his entrance. One stirred a large, steaming stock pot, one washed the dishes, and the other was chopping vegetables.

Little D Two, who stirred the pot, saluted him. “Hi, boss!”

Barbatos glared. “Out.”

The Little Ds wasted no time in rushing through the door. But before Number Two could make it, Barbatos’s sharp tone caught him.

“Not you, Number Two. You stay.”

Number Two began to visibly shake, his small hand scratching at his head. “A-Are you sure, boss? You look like you wanna be alone...”

Barbatos did not have to repeat himself; instead, he pinned the Little D with a stern look.

The Little D began to return to the center of the kitchen where Barbatos stood.

“Close the door,” Barbatos ordered. Little D obeyed and then returned to his side.

Barbatos put his hands on the kitchen island and stared down at its wooden, weathered surface.

“She wants coffee,” he muttered.

“What was that boss? I couldn’t hear ya...” Number Two replied, inching closer.

“I said she wants coffee.” Barbatos repeated as he looked up, his brow furrowed in frustration.

“Who does?” Number Two asked.

Barbatos clenched his jaw for a moment before averting his gaze and answering. “Solomon’s apprentice.”

He’d hoped referring to you by your title would ease the wildness of his pulse, give him the much-needed distance between his head and his heart.

It did not.

Number Two perked up. “Well, that’s no big deal! We have coffee, don’t we?” He began shuffling through the cupboards. “Where is it, where is it. Ah, here it is!” He held it up in victory and placed it in front of Barbatos.

Barbatos glared daggers at it.

Why would anyone ever invent such a thing, anyway?

Hell indeed...

“We can’t use this,” he muttered.

“What?? Sure we can! It’s Hell Coffee, we make it all the-Ohhh.”

Number Two grew very still and Barbatos’s jaw clenched.

The silence stretched an uncomfortable length of time as Number Two fidgeted. Finally, he drifted in front of the butler, hovering above the busy countertop.

“So, you, uhhh-”

“Shut up,” Barbatos ordered through clenched teeth. “Not another word.”

But Number Two didn’t know the meaning of the word. “I mean,” he continued, “it can’t be that bad, right?? Some people like it bitter...”

“Well she doesn’t. You do recall how she takes her tea, do you not?”

Two fidgeted some more, his nervousness worsening. “Ah, right. Good point. But how bitter can it get, really?”

“I’d prefer not to find out,” Barbatos replied. “No, this will not do. There must be another way.”

“Can’t we just drown it out with cream and sugar?” Number Two asked as he began rummaging through the fridge.

“The purpose of Hell Coffee is to communicate fondness, Number Two. The magic of that cannot be undone so easily.”

‘There wouldn’t be enough sugar and cream in the entire Devildom to drown out that bitterness...’ Barbatos thought.

Panic curled his fingers into fists, his heart pounding wildly in his chest. Time was wasting. He had to return to you soon or you and the young master begin to grow suspicious.

But then, Barbatos had an idea. “Tell me, Number Two. What are your feelings towards the apprentice?”

“Huh? My feelings? I mean, she’s nice and she helps me out once in a while...” The Little D answered distractedly as he continued to rummage through ingredients.

“Perfect,” Barbatos replied. “You will make it, then.”

There was a loud thump as Number Two hit his head on the inside of the fridge. He popped out, his little black hand lifting his hat to rub a sore spot. “Me?!”

“Yes.”

“I can’t make Hell Coffee!”

“Why not?”

“I’ve never done it before!”

“It’s not difficult.”

“But what if it comes out awful? I don’t even think Hell Coffee is supposed to work on Little Ds!”

“All the better reason for you to be the one to make it. Come now. Diavolo requested a cup as well. I shall make the first, and then I will guide you through the steps so you may make the second.”

----

Diavolo talked, but you were having difficulty focusing on his words as you felt the minutes tick by.

Perhaps you’d made a mistake...

In all honesty, you weren’t sure what to expect. All you knew was that Hell Coffee was the only coffee available in the castle, a little nugget of knowledge that Lucifer had given to you when he’d told the story of Diavolo attempting to make him the coffee himself.

As soon as you learned that little tidbit of info, your mind immediately went to Barbatos. Sweet, handsome Barbatos. Barbatos who’s presence made your skin hum, who’s soft smile and deep chuckle made your gut twist in the most lovely way. Barbatos who’s eyes seemed to read you like a book every time you looked into them, and yet gave away nothing short of amusement in return.

He was such a tea enthusiast that you’d never questioned the lack of coffee on his elegant and detailed menu. But now the thought of Barbatos making you Hell Coffee wouldn’t leave your mind.

After all, how else were you supposed to find out how he felt about you? Ask him? Like a normal person?? Definitely not; the very idea was laughable. You’d rather take his rejection through small sips of coffee rather than hear the words uttered from his mouth.

Because that’s what you were certain would happen. The acidity would be mild, the beverage more sugar than coffee. It wasn’t like the royal butler harbored any feelings for you, right? Sure, there was respect and friendship, but that was it.

So then why.... why were you so nervous? Why did hope flutter in your chest like a trapped bird?

Silly.

Anxiety twisted deep in your stomach, crushing your appetite and making your small desserts taste like ash.

But a moment later, he appeared, an ornate silver tray in his steady gloved hands, with two delicate teacups of steaming dark liquid. He set the tray down and began to prepare them to yours and Diavolo’s liking. The close proximity made the delicious scent tickle your nose, and you inhaled and let out a happy sigh.

Barbatos was unmoved, his eyes kept to the teacups as he handed Diavolo his beverage first, and then yours.

Diavolo thanked him with a happy smile and took the first sip and winced. “Ah, as bitter as ever Barbatos. Glad to know you haven’t tired of me yet.”

“An impossibility, young master,” he replied smoothly.

You watched the exchange as you carefully brought the beverage to your lips and sipped.

Your heart sank instantly, the sweet tang clinging to your tongue. It crushed your hope, silenced the unspoken confessions and washed them away to a place where they’d be left to slowly die.

“And how do you like yours?” Barbatos inquired, his neutral smile hiding any emotions worth noticing.

Or, as you’d just now discovered, where none lurked.

He respected you it seemed, had some basic level of fondness since the coffee still tasted of coffee, of course. But it lacked the sharp, bitter bite that you’d hoped for, the one you’d experienced whenever one of the brothers made you coffee at the house.

You forced a small smile even as you felt your disappointment coalesce in your throat like a stone. “It’s delicious. Thank you, Barbatos.”

Barbatos gave a polite nod and his posture eased ever so slightly. His satisfaction of your reaction to your bland, sugary cup only drove the painful truth home further, a nail into your heart.

Barbatos didn’t love you.

----

Diavolo stared at the empty teacups in thought as Barbatos began clearing the table. “She seemed... disappointed, didn’t she?”

Barbatos glanced at him and then averted his eyes. “Did she?”

“She certainly left quickly enough after the coffee.”

“I’m sure she simply has many errands to run,” Barbatos replied. “The brothers and Solomon keep her nearly as busy as me.”

Diavolo stared at him for a long moment, then let out a gentle hum.

Barbatos graced his unspoken need for further attention with a lengthy side-eye. “Yes, young master?”

Diavolo’s mouth quirked up slightly at the corner. “Nothing... I just... I was certain that her cup would have been more bitter.”

Barbatos straightened up, the tray of now used dishes in his hand, his own mouth quirking up in return. “I’m sorry to disappoint.”

Diavolor raised a challenging eyebrow at him. “You do know I can tell when someone is lying to me, Barbatos. Even you.”

Barbatos’s smirk vanished as quickly as it came, his walls up instantly. “I have not forgotten, my lord. As such, perhaps you should cease pursuing this topic.”

“Have it your way...” Diavolo muttered.

Barbatos bowed. “If you’ll excuse me...”

He turned towards the castle, his eyes downcast on the half-drank cup of coffee you’d left behind. As he began to walk back, Diavolo’s quiet voice followed him.

“You’re making a mistake.”

----

Diavolo’s words lingered in Barbatos’s mind following him into the next day, and the day after that. It haunted him endlessly, making its appearance at the most inopportune times. While balancing the budget, monitoring Lord Diavolo’s progress on his pile of paperwork, while running errands... he was far too busy to be so, so.... distracted.

Barbatos whole-heartedly disagreed with the young prince’s assessment. In fact, in all honesty, Barbatos hardly ever made any mistakes at all, at least not anymore. He was far too careful for such reckless behavior. Which was why Barbatos had a million and one reasons not to confess his feelings to you. Between Devildom politics, his duties, and your mortality just to name a few, the cons far outweighed the pros... or so he tried to tell himself.

Even so, he couldn’t deny how you watched him when you thought he wasn’t looking, or the way your smile brightened in his presence... or the way you always managed to find a reason to cross paths with him at least a couple times a week...

Barbatos shook his head to himself. No. Best not to go there...

And yet...

‘You’re making a mistake.’

----

The truth of those words didn’t fully solidify until he ran into you at the market a couple of weeks later. Barbatos had already noticed how he seemed to be crossing paths with you less than usual. He already suspected you were avoiding him, putting distance between your heart and him. He’d accepted it, a consequence of his own choices.

That is, until he saw the look in your eyes; the way you couldn’t quite hide the hurt fast enough behind your smile, the way your lips curled in artificial joy at seeing him. Your words were brief and cordial, but he could tell you were eager to disentangle from his presence.

He’d watched your retreating back with his breath lodged like spikes in his lungs, the longing to grab your wrist and pull you back to him making his fingers twitch.

Barbatos had hoped that preventing an impromptu confession with cursed coffee would have allowed him to keep you at arm’s length, to keep his affections for you separate from yours.

But this felt less like separation and every bit like entanglement. You weren’t just drifting farther away from him like two separate objects with nothing but empty space between. It felt more like ripping, a tearing of intertangled roots. It was painful and left an ache in his chest where your presence had made a home.

Perhaps the young lord was right....

----

Even so, Barbatos was as stubborn as he was prideful. He filled himself with distractions to ease the pain, waiting for time to work its magic and ease the empty longing for both of you.

Another two weeks passed before Diavolo took matters into his own hands.

The prince entered the kitchen to see every single surface filled with extravagant desserts and warm breads. Little D’s were at every counter and stove, while Barbatos stood at the island in the center with a piping bag in his hand, his brow furrowed in concentration.

“Are we having a celebration?” Diavolo asked jovially.

“No, young master,” Barbatos replied.

“Then what is the reason for the feast?”

“I have been making modifications to my recipes to perfect my menu.”

“You mean the menu you’ve already perfected three times this week?” Diavolo crossed his arms and leaned against the doorframe. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with one particular sorcerer’s apprentice, would it?”

Barbatos’s hand flexed on the piping bag and a large glob shot out onto the cake he was decorating. He glanced briefly at Diavolo. “Of course not.”

“Then I’m guessing that it’s just a coincidence that you’ve chosen her favorite color as your decorating inspiration....”

Barbatos blanched and his eyes looked up from his work to take in the state of the kitchen.

Damn it, he was right... cupcakes, cakes, tarts, danishes, marbled bread, muffins... everything he’d made was somehow tied back to you. Colors, flavors, textures... it was as if he’d gotten lost in his thoughts and his hands had written out apologies in the form of desserts rather than letters.

“Perhaps we should talk about this...” Diavolo suggested. His amber eyes took in the exhausted Little D’s. “Okay, break time everyone!”

A roar of cheers erupted throughout the kitchen, and a swarm of dark little bodies vacated the space in record time.

“Young master, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t override my authority within the kitchen,” Barbatos chided as he eyed all of the unfinished work.

“My dear friend, work them any harder, and they’ll all go on strike, and then where will we be?” Diavolo closed the door behind him and made himself comfortable against the island, a pastry in his hand. Barbatos returned to piping the decoration onto the cake that was nearly complete. “You should talk to her, Barbatos.”

Barbatos froze and finally let out a heavy sigh in defeat as he set the piping bag down. He braced his hands against the weathered edge of the counter. “I cannot.”

“Why not?”

“It is not so simple.”

“Isn’t it?”

Barbatos chuckled. “I sometimes envy your youthful, reckless optimism...”

“You’ve been sulking ever since that day with the hell coffee.”

Barbatos scoffed and straightened his spine in reproach. “I do not sulk.”

“Like a teenager with a broken heart ,” Diavolo pressed with an arrogant tilt of his chin and mischief in his smile.

Barbatos narrowed his eyes. “If you have enough time to watch me so closely, then perhaps you can explain to me why you’re still so behind on your work.”

“Maybe I’m too distracted watching you clean the castle top to bottom and baking enough sweets to satiate even Beel’s bottomless gut.”

His words got under the butler’s skin and so he started straightening up the space, gathering crumbs of dough and flour into piles, wiping up blotches of icing from the wood grain. “It is work that must be done my lord, nothing more nothing less.” Then he muttered, “A teenager? Really? You do realize I’m far older than you.”

“Yes, and how many of those years have you been alone?”

“I am not alone, young master. I have you, I have the Little Ds...”

“You know what I mean. When was the last time you fell in love?”

Barbatos froze, his vision blurring. He blinked and it refocused.

Yes... how long had it been?

“Look,” Diavolo said, “all I’m saying is that perhaps this is one area that you’re a little bit... rusty in.”

Barbatos was silent for a long moment, before giving a soft sigh and turning to lean against the counter the same as Diavolo. “My lack of a love life isn’t the issue. I can’t afford to jeopardize your position as prince by allowing myself to become emotionally involved with a human. And not just any human, but Solomon’s apprentice. Many demons still haven’t forgotten how he’d singlehandedly opposed the Devildom centuries ago. I am your most trusted confidant, and as such I must err on the side of caution in all of my dealings.”

Diavolo’s eyes widened. “Is that why you’ve been doing this?”

“I am your butler first and foremost, young master. You will always be my top priority.”

Diavolo blew air out of his cheeks and leaned his head back to stare at the intricate ceiling. “I see. I appreciate the concern, friend. However, I believe, in this instance, it’s important that you put a little more faith in me to be able to keep the nobles in line. Regardless of their opinions, I am the law of this land, and my position is final. Besides, she’s already intricately tied up in Devildom affairs considering she has pacts with all of the brothers.”

“All the more reason to be cautious,” Barbatos replied.

“Screw that,” Diavolo scoffed.

Barbatos gasped. “My lord!”

“After all you’ve done for me, what kind of a prince would I be if I let the fear of the masses take away your chance at happiness?” Diavolo said firmly. “You deserve to be happy too, Barbatos. Now please, for the love of my father, get out of this damn kitchen and go apologize to her.”

Barbatos stared at the prince with wide eyes, before bowing low. “Yes, young master.”

Before Barbatos crossed the threshold, Diavolo called out with a chuckle in his voice. “You should ask her for coffee when you get there...”

Barbatos gave a soft laugh. He had a feeling he wouldn’t have to.

----

For all of the inspiration and reassurance Diavolo had provided, Barbatos could feel his resolve slip more and more the closer he got to the front door of the House of Lamentation.

Would you turn him away? Run away to your room and allow the brothers to host him instead? What if you weren’t even home? What if you were with Solomon?

A sharp stab of jealousy reared its head and he forced it back down.

That certainly wouldn’t do him any good, now would it?

He walked up the steps and rang the doorbell as he held his breath.

A silent prayer of gratitude and dread echoed through his mind as you answered the door. You froze when you saw him, eyes wide, your breath caught in your chest.

“Barbatos,” you said dumbly. “What are you doing here?”

You clamped your mouth shut as you realized how rude you sounded, and all Barbatos could think about was how cute you were...

“I...” he started, and then froze. He couldn’t say the real reason for his arrival, not on the doorstep where anyone could hear. “I came to inspect the House of Lamentation for any infestations.”

Your shoulder slumped slightly in disappointment. “Oh. Okay, come in.”

He bowed graciously. “Thank you.”

As he stepped into the large foyer, you fidgeted nervously. He stared the gesture and fought the blush that threatened to creep across his pale cheeks. “Where are the brothers?” he asked.

“They aren’t here right now. Diavolo called them to a student council meeting.”

Barbatos’s eyes widened. “Oh. I see...”

He wasn’t sure whether he should thank him or punish him...

He stared down at you as his heart pounded wildly. “So you are by yourself then?”

“For a little bit,” you replied with a small smile. “I must admit the quiet is nice once in a while...”

Barbatos’s own lips curled gently. “Then I promise I’ll be brief.”

“W-would you like some tea?” you asked expectantly.

Barbatos hesitated, Diavolo’s words once again coming alive in his mind.

Ask her for coffee.

But Barbatos forced the suggestion aside.

“Yes, tea would be lovely.”

“Okay, I’ll be right back. Make yourself comfortable.” You retreated toward the kitchen, and Barbatos sat in a nearby chair.

----

Tea, tea, tea.....

You opened the cannister that sat on the counter and stared at it with wide eyes and an open mouth.

Empty.

No, that can’t be right... you always had tea.

With your brow furrowed, you rummaged through the lower pantry.

Nothing. Not a single tea bag.

No, no, no....

Dread started from your toes and crept up like invisible fingers brushing against sensitive skin.

You had hoped to make this as painless as possible; give Barbatos his tea, allow him to do his inspection, and then send him on his way. But already things were going awry.

You hummed to yourself with a furrowed brow as you dug out any and all drink options. Water, milk, juice, soda... none of those seemed suitable for Barbatos.

You went back to the cupboards, moving items around as you searched. Your hand wrapped around a familiar bag and you pulled it out with trepidation.

Coffee.

You stared at the bag of Hell Coffee with narrowed eyes as if it was the reason for the lack of tea within the kitchen.

No. Absolutely fucking not. You’d already made that mistake once before and you’d regretted it ever since.

Panic filled your veins and you fought back the burning sensation in your eyes.

There had to be something....

Your eyes spotted the upper cabinet that was so often out of your reach. It often housed excess demonus when Lucifer’s own cabinets were full in his office.

Maybe... just maybe....

Who knows, maybe Lucifer had received some tea as a gift from Barbatos and put it up with the rest of the demonus?

You grabbed the stool that had become your best friend within the Devildom-sized kitchen and stepped up.

----

Barbatos sat and fiddled with his clothing, adjusting the uniform repeatedly. It felt awfully tight today, the house feeling particularly warm.

The minutes ticked by, time stretched, and Barbatos grew more and more restless. He checked the time. The tall grandfather clock chimed its gong.

Finally, Barbatos got tired of waiting. Perhaps you’d run out the back door, leaving him alone in the house...

He chuckled to himself. You would never....

He stood up and made his way to the kitchen. When he pushed through the double doors, he froze as he stared at the sight before him.

The kitchen was chaos, cupboards open and various contents spread out on the counter.

And you, you were on a stool, precariously balanced, as the upper half of your body vanished inside a high cabinet.

“No, no, this can’t be happening...” you muttered, unaware of Barbatos’s presence. He could hear the anxiety laced in your tone, the tension tight around your vocal chords. You were desperately searching for something.

It was almost comical, watching you stand on your tippy-toes, and it’d been so long since Barbatos saw you up close, that he paused to cherish the view. His eyes followed the curves and lines of your body, his lips slightly parted.

That is, until you started to wobble...

You could feel the balance shift, felt the scrape of the wood beneath your feet give way to nothing.

That split second of panic, of knowing you were falling, was interrupted by strong hands and lean arms wrapping around your waist, catching your weight against a firm, tall body.

The impact of your body against Barbatos’s forced his own back against the closed lower cupboard, but he held firm, keeping your feet from touching the floor. Your arms were around his neck instantly, survival instinct forcing you against him as if he were a tree.

Time felt frozen for a moment as your heart pounded with adrenaline.

You knew immediately who’d caught you. After all, there was only one other person in the house with you.

Not to mention you could smell the scent of sugar clinging to his uniform, could smell the tea on his breath as his own heart pounded beneath yours.

You were torn between embarrassment and desire, your eyes closed as you clung to him. But then you remembered the hell coffee from weeks ago, recalled that neutral smile he’d worn when you drank it, and your heart broke all over again.

Slowly you loosened your hold around his neck and pulled back just enough to look him in the eyes.

“I... thank you.”

His green eyes stared back, his skin flushed, although you were sure it was due to the haste in which he had to have moved to catch you. Barbatos held you for a moment longer than he needed to before slowly setting you down on unsteady legs.

“You’re welcome,” he replied. Then his eyes looked up past your head at the kitchen behind you. “Might I inquire as to what’s happening?”

You opened your mouth hoping to find a believable lie there, but there was none. Only simple truth came forth, clumsy and blunt. “We don’t have any tea.”

“Oh...” Barbatos looked down at you. “So you’ve decided to reorganize your kitchen.”

The emotion pounding in your chest finally gained enough strength to work their way up your throat and brim your eyes with tears.

“I... I only have coffee. And, and water, and juice, and soda, and...”

Barbatos watched the panic overtake you and he took your hand in his, his thumb gently rubbing across the back of your hand.

“Coffee will be fine.”

What he had hoped would assuage your fear only seemed to heighten it, causing the tears to finally break loose, running wet tracks down your cheeks. You refused to look at him, instead focusing on the details of his uniform.

“B-but... I only have Hell Coffee....”

Realization dawned on Barbatos’s face, and then his expression softened. “I see... then let us make some.”

He began to step to the side to go around you but you clutched his hand tightly, halting his retreat. “No, you don’t understand. It’s...” Barbatos waited patiently as you found your words. Finally, your voice came through soft and timid. “It’s going to be too bitter.”

A soft smile spread across his lips. “I think in this case I am willing to make an exception.”

Confusion furrowed your brow as he led you over to the counter with your fingers intertwined. “I... I don’t understand.... I thought...”

“Y/N, I have a confession to make... and an apology as well.”

A few minutes later and the sound of laughter is filling the kitchen with the scent of coffee in rich in the air.

“So you really bullied Number Two into making it??” you laughed.

Barbatos gave you a reproachful look. “Bullying is a strong term, Y/N... but yes, I suppose I did.”

“Well now I know how Two feels about me, I guess...”

“And you know how I feel about you, too,” Barbatos replied with a small smile.

“Wellll,” you hummed, “Yes, but...” you stared at the two cups of fresh coffee sitting in front of each of you. “I still want to try it...”

It was Barbatos’s suggestion to make each other’s cup, to assuage any lingering doubts.

“Then let us proceed,” he replied.

With your eyes locked you both picked up your cups and took a tentative sip.

Sharp, deep bitterness greeted your tongue and your face soured. Barbatos’s cup seemed to be no better, as he attempted to stifle a cough.

“Oh...” he mustered. “Oh goodness, that’s...”

“Truly awful,” you replied with a chuckle. “In the best way, of course.”

“It really is, isn’t it?” he laughed. He took another sip and you watched in amusement as his winced.

You sipped yours again as well, and forced it down with your eyes squeezed shut.

“Do... do we have to finish the whole thing?” you asked.

“It’s customary to do so... not finishing it implies you’re unwilling to fully accept the other person’s affections.”

You frowned into your cup with a pout. “Silly Devildom customs...” you forced another sip. “Blegh.”

Barbatos grinned, his cheeks warm as he watched you. “Perhaps, however...” he said, “we can call a truce.”

“Don’t toy with my emotions, Barbatos,” you teased.

His expression sobered from one of amusement to calm affection. “I promise, never again.”

Your skin felt hot and you averted your eyes down into your cup. His hand came forward, and you felt him tuck your hair behind your ear.

“I am truly sorry for deceiving you,” he said softly. “It was a poor decision and one I’ll always regret.”

Your gaze returned to lock with his, and suddenly you’re keenly aware of his close proximity and of the emptiness of the large house.

Barbatos’s hand lingered gently on your jawline, his fingers tucked behind your ear. His eyes flickered to your lips before returning to your eyes again.

Then he closed the distance and kissed you, his lips soft and tender against yours. You melted into it, melted into him, your fingers twining into the jacket of his uniform.

He pulled away slightly and you stared at each other. Then he kissed you again, his lips firmer, more confident. His hand went from your jaw to your waist, pulling you close against him as your arms wound around his neck. The desire written into his touch, his lips, emboldened you to open your mouth slightly and swipe your tongue against his lips. Barbatos’s lips curled into a smirk against yours, a deep chuckle vibrating in his chest. He acquiesced to your silent plea and opened his mouth, his tongue meeting yours.

Your body awakened at the warmth and taste of him, the acrid coffee still sharp on his tongue. You pressed yourself harder against him, and his body pivoted until you were pinned between himself and the counter, your coffee cups long since forgotten and growing cold while your body grew hotter.

Finally, Barbatos broke the kiss, his forehead pressed against yours as his hands tightened on your hips. “You’re going to make me behave improperly if you continue to torture me so.”

He was taller than you, much taller; you barely came up to his shoulder. It made the buckle of his belt press against your stomach.

And below that...

Heat pooled in your core, desire heavy in your gaze.

“Oh no, not improper,” you teased, your hands on his hips in return as you looked up at him with pleading eyes.

Barbatos chuckled as he cupped your cheek. “What a troublemaker... however,” - he forced his body to separate from yours - “I would like to perhaps court you before repurposing your kitchen.”

You pouted your lip in disappointment, and Barbatos stared at the gesture with flushed cheeks. His thumb came up and brushed against your protruding lower lip. “Don’t do that,” he chided.

You grinned and playfully nibbled at his thumb, trapping it between your teeth. His eyes darkened. He leaned in to kiss you again, but your words halted his approach just as his lips started to brush yours.

“How about dessert?” you asked against his mouth. “Our coffee was so bitter, we deserve something sweet.”

Barbatos froze and gave a frustrated chuckle. “Is this how it’s going to be from now on?”

You grinned. “Maybe...”

“Hmm,” he hummed. Then he leaned closer to you until his lips brushed your ear. “Sounds like fun...”

Your legs felt like jelly, your heart pounding so fiercely you were sure it was going to jump from your chest into his.

But then Barbatos pulled away, putting distance between you. “Fortunately for you, I happen to have a wide variety of desserts waiting in the kitchen at the castle. So,” he extended his hand to and bowed, “if you’ll accompany me...”

You smiled and took his hand. “I’d be happy to.”

“Wonderful. Let us take a shortcut.”

Barbatos opened a doorway out of thin air, and with your hand linked with his, guided you through.

Part 2 (link coming soon!)

#barbatos x reader #barbatos x mc #barbatos x y/n #barbatos #barbatos obey me #obey me barbatos #om barbatos #barbatos om #obey me #obey me nightbringer

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am-i-the-asshole-official · 8 months

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AITA for asking my parents to pay my tuition for the semester, lying about how I lost my scholarship, and then planning on lying to my dad regarding his requirements in exchange for him paying the tuition?

My (20X) college has a scholarship for offspring of faculty members, and I was lucky enough to have my application accepted by the college that my dad (53M) works at. This means that I get a full ride scholarship; if I graduate within 4 years, I won't have to pay a single penny to my college (books and supplies not included, of course).

Unfortunately, the scholarship does have two requirements; I need to have taken at least a certain amount of credits semester before (not a ridiculous number), and for that semester, I need to have gotten over a 2.0/4.3 GPA. Easy enough, right? Who can't get a GPA over 2.0?

Well. I suffered a mental health downfall the past semester and I ended up failing half my classes. I was unable to sit my finals. I know this wasn't smart of me, and I think I should've done something about my academic situation other than just wait for the semester to be over, but I had quit a semester due to my mental health decline previously and I didn't want a repeat of that. In any case, I got a GPA of about 1.6. I'm not on probation but I did receive a warning.

Fortunately, this doesn't mean I lost my scholarship for good. I just need to fulfill those requirements in the upcoming semester and I get it back.

I realized I did need to pay my tuition this semester two days before tuition fee acceptance closes and I debated telling only one of my parents. My mom wants me to finish college no matter what, and my dad has told me that he does not care anymore as long as I don't stress him out. He's also told me he no longer has any expectations for me whatsoever. I did also consider talking about it with my brother and borrowing money from him to put together the tuition fee.

I figured I'd bite the bullet and just told my dad, who I know has been stressed about my future and how badly I'm doing in college. I just casually dropped it as I was making breakfast for myself and then we had a lengthy conversation that my mother (51F) joined when she got back home.

I don't remember much of the conversation (I may have memory problems) but the AITA mentioned part is that I lied to my parents and told them I did sit all my finals and try my best. I didn't. I tried that for mid term exams but I had nothing to write, so for finals I didn't sit them at all. This happened with three of the classes I was taking. I just didn't take my finals. My dad was suspicious of my claim; he said that as a professor himself he wouldn't fail students who at least submitted homework and sat their exams to write anything at all, but I maintained that I tried.

The conclusion was that my dad would be willing to pay my tuition if I got my shit together and also deleted my social media, which he thinks is a drain on my time and energy. He's not wrong. I deleted my Twitter accounts immediately afterwards (which my parents don't know about) because I've been thinking about it, but I can't really bring myself to get rid of Discord, where so many of my friends are. People I've met while studying internationally, long-term friends who moved to other countries; Discord is the only way to contact these people.

This is the AITA part; if my dad follows up on that particular requirement to check if I deleted Discord, which he particularly dislikes (he has previously confiscated the electronics I bought with my own money that I earned, after he saw me on muted call at night with some friends), I plan on deleting the app/program on my devices but using it anyway as a website. This would be a betrayal of my dad's trust in me, but there's no love lost between us anyway. He's already told me he doesn't love me unconditionally. (Yes, I'm his biological child and he did raise me.)

I also feel like an asshole because I could've settled this with the help of my brother; I'd pick up a job during the winter break to pay him back, but it would have been done eventually. Or I could've just gone to my mom. She works her own job, and we could've figured it out together without telling my dad. I told my dad anyway, wanting him to pay the tuition, even though I knew that talking about having to spend money on his kids stresses him out deeply.

My mom also told my dad to go to therapy (in detail, so I know it wasn't just something she said as a throwaway thing) during the conversation. It did get heated. I don't disagree, but I don't know if that'd be okay; mental health is stigmatized where I am, and my dad as a grown adult man and a respected professor if seen going to therapy could have his reputation kind of effected. It wouldn't have happened if I just brought up this whole situation quietly up to my mom, or just my brother.

So I lost my scholarship, I lied to my parents about the technicalities of how that happened, and I'm asking for some amount of money from my parents but also planning on lying to them in regards to the terms they set out. AITA?

What are these acronyms?

#aita #am i the asshole

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kolsangel · 2 years

Text

੭ु⁾ ⚜ dating kai parker

❥ A/N : this is my new side blog, requests are opened so if u have some, ask away :) please reblog and comment if u enjoyed my content I need to see that the tvdu fandom is still there ! 👼🏻

⚜. kai is a clingy ass mf. he spent 22 years deprived of any physical contact and he just has to be touching you in some way, whether it's wrapping an arm around your waist in public or watching TV with you on his lap.

⚜. he's very insecure because of his childhood, he feels like a failure and a burden so he requires lots of patience and reassurance. also he can act childish if he is asked not to be so clingy, he might get pouty, but after he calms down, he will apologise for overwhelming you.

⚜. he's giving his all to you, he never felt so in love with someone before and he would do everything it takes to keep you with him. he tries to show love as best as he can but he was never truly loved by his family himself. he takes inspiration from the romance books he read while he was bored in the prison world, which never fails to make you feel like a princess.

⚜. acts of service is his main love language, he cooks for you any chance he gets and he smiles to himself while doing so, thinking of your bright smile seeing he surprised you with dinner

⚜. he really is one to pay attention to the little details and bring them up. he didn't talk to anyone for 22 years, he's very chatty that's for sure but he is a great listener too and is fascinated by every details of your life. he wants to make you feel important, loved and respected.

⚜. he loves to embarrass you in front of your friends and especially Damon. he has no filter and spills details about you two to whoever is in the room. "Y/N won't move from their bed today, have you taken them drinking?" Damon asks Caroline and Elena. "No they weren't with us, I think she was with- " Caroline starts but gets interrupted by Kai : "They were with me. And as a matter of fact, they can't move for obvious reasons" he says, smirking. The absence of reaction from your friends caused him to keep going. " I railed them, obviously, " he adds, chuckling. "Oh come on don't look so shocked it's not like you never fucked anyone before, no one here is a virgin as far as i know, especially not Damon, this little whore".

⚜. his nicknames for you are soooo random because he flirts with you any given moment, there is "sweetheart, princess, pretty girl, gorgeous, my love, babe and little devil", ironically he loves calling you the latter whereas you are the angel of the two of you, his angel. that's his name for you in his phone by the way, because he really sees you as a guardian angel.

⚜. he is super expressive and his reactions are the sweetest. The moment he saw you dressed up or trying a new make-up look, his jaw would literally drop and turn into a chuckle. He would put his hands on his mouth, and his eyes would widen. "you are fucking gorgeous y/n. how did I get so lucky." he says and embraces you into a hug.

⚜. his favourite thing is when you teach him about the new things he never got ahold of. Like when you show him the latest horror movies, he gets fascinated by the special effects and smiles like a little kid, or when you download instagram for him. speaking of, he is not a big fan of social media, he thinks it’s supid and useless and it cuts you off from reality.

⚜. he is canonically very childish and gets excited over small things. like if you surprise him with a burger from the mystic grill, he’ll get all giddy and of course, eat it like a pig. you bought a small crumbs vacuum and forced him to use it so that the couch would not be constantly dirty with his pork rinds leftovers.

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mostlysignssomeportents · 10 months

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Linkty Dumpty

I was supposed to be on vacation, and while I didn’t do any blogging for a month, that didn’t mean that I stopped looking at my distraction rectangle and making a list of things I wanted to write about. Consequentially, the link backlog is massive, so it’s time to declare bankruptcy with another linkdump:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

[Image ID: John Holbo’s ‘trolley problem’ art, a repeating pattern of trolleys, tracks, people on tracks, and people standing at track switches]++

Let’s kick things off with a little graphic whimsy. You’ve doubtless seen the endless Trolley Problem memes, working from the same crude line drawings? Well, philosopher John Holbo got tired of that artwork, and he whomped up a fantastic alternative, which you can get as a poster, duvet, sticker, tee, etc:

https://www.redbubble.com/shop/ap/145078097

The trolley problem has been with us since 1967, but it’s enjoying a renaissance thanks to the insistence of “AI” weirdos that it is very relevant to our AI debate. A few years back, you could impress uninformed people by dropping the Trolley Problem into a discussion:

https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/25/mercedes-weird-trolley-problem-announcement-continues-dumb-debate-about-self-driving-cars/

Amazingly, the “AI” debate has only gotten more tedious since the middle of the past decade. But every now and again, someone gets a stochastic parrot to do something genuinely delightful, like the Jolly Roger Telephone Company, who sell chatbots that will pretend to be tantalyzingly confused marks in order to tie up telemarketers and waste their time:

https://jollyrogertelephone.com/

Jolly Roger sells different personas: “Whitebeard” is a confused senior who keeps asking the caller’s name, drops nonsequiturs into the conversation, and can’t remember how many credit-cards he has. “Salty Sally” is a single mom with a houseful of screaming, demanding children who keep distracting her every time the con artist is on the verge of getting her to give up compromising data. “Whiskey Jack” is drunk:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/people-hire-phone-bots-to-torture-telemarketers-2dbb8457

The bots take a couple minutes to get the sense of the conversation going. During that initial lag, they have a bunch of stock responses like “there’s a bee on my arm, but keep going,” or grunts like “huh,” and “uh-huh.” The bots can keep telemarketers and scammers on the line for quite a long time. Scambaiting is an old and honorable vocation, and it’s good that it has received a massive productivity gain from automation. This is the AI Dividend I dream of.

The less-fun AI debate is the one over artists’ rights and tech. I am foresquare for the artists here, but I think that the preferred solutions (like creating a new copyright over the right to train a model with your work) will not lead to the hoped-for outcome. As with other copyright expansions — 40 years’ worth of them now — this right will be immediately transferred to the highly concentrated media sector, who will simply amend their standard, non-negotiable contracting terms to require that “training rights” be irrevocably assigned to them as a condition of working.

The real solution isn’t to treat artists as atomic individuals — LLCs with an MFA — who bargain, business-to-business, with corporations. Rather, the solutions are in collective power, like unions. You’ve probably heard about the SAG-AFTRA actors’ strike, in which creative workers are bargaining as a group to demand fair treatment in an age of generative models. SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher’s speech announcing the strike made me want to stand up and salute:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4SAPOX7R5M

The actors’ strike is historic: it marks the first time actors have struck since 2000, and it’s the first time actors and writers have co-struck since 1960. Of course, writers in the Writers Guild of America (West and East) have been picketing since since April, and one of their best spokespeople has been Adam Conover, a WGA board member who serves on the negotiating committee. Conover is best known for his stellar Adam Ruins Everything comedy-explainer TV show, which pioneered a technique for breaking down complex forms of corporate fuckery and making you laugh while he does it. Small wonder that he’s been so effective at conveying the strike issues while he pickets.

Writing for Jacobin, Alex N Press profiles Conover and interviews him about the strike, under the excellent headline, “Adam Pickets Everything.” Conover is characteristically funny, smart, and incisive — do read:

https://jacobin.com/2023/07/adam-conover-wga-strike

Of course, not everyone in Hollywood is striking. In late June, the DGA accepted a studio deal with an anemic 41% vote turnout:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/26/23773926/dga-amptp-new-deal-strike

They probably shouldn’t have. In this interview with The American Prospect’s Peter Hong, the brilliant documentary director Amy Ziering breaks down how Netflix and the other streamers have rugged documentarians in a classic enshittification ploy that lured in filmmakers, extracted everything they had, and then discarded the husks:

https://prospect.org/culture/2023-06-21-drowned-in-the-stream/

Now, the streaming cartel stands poised to all but kill off documentary filmmaking. Pressured by Wall Street to drive high returns, they’ve become ultraconservative in their editorial decisions, making programs and films that are as similar as possible to existing successes, that are unchallenging, and that are cheap. We’ve gone directly from a golden age of docs to a dark age.

In a time of monopolies, it’s tempting to form countermonopolies to keep them in check. Yesterday, I wrote about why the FTC and Lina Khan were right to try to block the Microsoft/Activision merger, and I heard from a lot of people saying this merger was the only way to check Sony’s reign of terror over video games:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

But replacing one monopolist with another isn’t good for anyone (except the monopolists’ shareholders). If we want audiences and workers — and society — to benefit, we have to de-monopolize the sector. Last month, I published a series with EFF about how we should save the news from Big Tech:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

After that came out, the EU Observer asked me to write up version of it with direct reference to the EU, where there are a lot of (in my opinion, ill-conceived but well-intentioned) efforts to pry Big Tech’s boot off the news media’s face. I’m really happy with how it came out, and the header graphic is awesome:

https://euobserver.com/opinion/157187

De-monopolizing tech has become my life’s work, both because tech is foundational (tech is how we organize to fight over labor, gender and race equality, and climate justice), and because tech has all of these technical aspects, which open up new avenues for shrinking Big Tech, without waiting decades for traditional antitrust breakups to run their course (we need these too, though!).

I’ve written a book laying out a shovel-ready plan to give tech back to its users through interoperability, explaining how to make new regulations (and reform old ones), what they should say, how to enforce them, and how to detect and stop cheating. It’s called “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation” and it’s coming from Verso Books this September:

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con

[Image ID: The cover of the Verso Books hardcover of ‘The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation]

I just got my first copy in the mail yesterday, and it’s a gorgeous little package. The timing was great, because I spent the whole week in the studio at Skyboat Media recording the audiobook — the first audiobook of mine that I’ve narrated. It was a fantastic experience, and I’ll be launching a Kickstarter to presell the DRM-free audio and ebooks as well as hardcovers, in a couple weeks.

Though I like doing these crowdfunders, I do them because I have to. Amazon’s Audible division, the monopolist that controls >90% of the audiobook market, refuses to carry my work because it is DRM-free. When you buy a DRM-free audiobook, that means that you can play it on anyone’s app, not just Amazon’s. Every audiobook you’ve ever bought from Audible will disappear the moment you decide to break up with Amazon, which means that Amazon can absolutely screw authors and audiobook publishers because they’ve taken our customers hostage.

If you are unwise enough to pursue an MBA, you will learn a term of art for this kind of market structure: it’s a “moat,” that is, an element of the market that makes it hard for new firms to enter the market and compete with you. Warren Buffett pioneered the use of this term, and now it’s all but mandatory for anyone launching a business or new product to explain where their moat will come from.

As Dan Davies writes, these “moats” aren’t really moats in the Buffett sense. With Coke and Disney, he says, a “moat” was “the fact that nobody else could make such a great product that everyone wanted.” In other words, “making a good product,” is a great moat:

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/stuck-in-the-moat

But making a good product is a lot of work and not everyone is capable of it. Instead, “moat” now just means some form of lock in. Davies counsels us to replace “moat” with:

our subscription system and proprietary interface mean that our return on capital is protected by a strong Berlin Wall, preventing our customers from getting out to a freer society and forcing them to consume our inferior products for lack of alternative.

I really like this. It pairs well with my 2020 observation that the fight over whether “IP” is a meaningful term can be settled by recognizing that IP has a precise meaning in business: “Any policy that lets me reach beyond the walls of my firm to control the conduct of my competitors, critics and customers”:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

To see how that works in the real world, check out “The Anti-Ownership Ebook Economy,” a magisterial piece of scholarship from Sarah Lamdan, Jason M. Schultz, Michael Weinberg and Claire Woodcock:

https://www.nyuengelberg.org/outputs/the-anti-ownership-ebook-economy/

Something happened when we shifted to digital formats that created a loss of rights for readers. Pulling back the curtain on the evolution of ebooks offers some clarity to how the shift to digital left ownership behind in the analog world.

The research methodology combines both anonymous and named sources in publishing, bookselling and librarianship, as well as expert legal and economic analysis. This is an eminently readable, extremely smart, and really useful contribution to the scholarship on how “IP” (in the modern sense) has transformed books from something you own to something that you can never own.

The truth is, capitalists hate capitalism. Inevitably, the kind of person who presides over a giant corporation and wields power over millions of lives — workers, suppliers and customers — believes themselves to be uniquely and supremely qualified to be a wise dictator. For this kind of person, competition is “wasteful” and distracts them from the important business of making everyone’s life better by handing down unilateral — but wise and clever — edits. Think of Peter Thiel’s maxim, “competition is for losers.”

That’s why giant companies love to merge with each other, and buy out nascent competitors. By rolling up the power to decide how you and I and everyone else live our lives, these executives ensure that they can help us little people live the best lives possible. The traditional role of antitrust enforcement is to prevent this from happening, countering the delusions of would-be life-tenured autocrats of trade with public accountability and enforcement:

https://marker.medium.com/we-should-not-endure-a-king-dfef34628153

Of course, for 40 years, we’ve had neoliberal, Reaganomics-poisoned antitrust, where monopolies are celebrated as “efficient” and their leaders exalted as geniuses whose commercial empires are evidence of merit, not savagery. That era is, thankfully, coming to an end, and not a moment too soon.

Leading the fight is the aforementioned FTC chair Lina Khan, who is taking huge swings at even bigger mergers. But the EU is no slouch in this department: they’re challenging the Adobe/Figma merger, a $20b transaction that is obviously and solely designed to recapture customers who left Adobe because they didn’t want to struggle under its yoke any longer:

https://gizmodo.com/adobe-figma-acquisition-likely-to-face-eu-investigation-1850555562

For autocrats of trade, this is an intolerable act of disloyalty. We owe them our fealty and subservience, because they are self-evidently better at understanding what we need than we could ever be. This unwarranted self-confidence from the ordinary mediocrities who end up running giant tech companies gets them into a whole lot of hot water.

One keen observer of the mind-palaces that tech leaders trap themselves in is Anil Dash, who describes the conspiratorial, far-right turn of the most powerful men (almost all men!) in Silicon Valley in a piece called “‘VC Qanon’ and the radicalization of the tech tycoons”:

https://www.anildash.com/2023/07/07/vc-qanon/

Dash builds on an editorial he published in Feb, “The tech tycoon martyrdom charade,�� which explores the sense of victimhood the most powerful, wealthiest people in the Valley project:

https://www.anildash.com/2023/02/27/tycoon-martyrdom-charade/

These dudes are prisoners of their Great Man myth, and leads them badly astray. And while all of us are prone to lapses in judgment and discernment, Dash makes the case that tech leaders are especially prone to it:

Nobody becomes a billionaire by accident. You have to have wanted that level of power, control and wealth more than you wanted anything else in your life. They all sacrifice family, relationships, stability, community, connection, and belonging in service of keeping score on a scale that actually yields no additional real-world benefits on the path from that first $100 million to the tens of billions.

This makes billionaires “a cohort that is, counterintutively, very easily manipulated.” What’s more, they’re all master manipulators, and they all hang out with each other, which means that when a conspiratorial belief takes root in one billionaire’s brain, it spreads to the rest of them like wildfire.

Then, billionaires “push each other further and further into extreme ideas because their entire careers have been predicated on the idea that they’re genius outliers who can see things others can’t, and that their wealth is a reward for that imagined merit.”

They live in privileged bubbles, which insulates them from disconfirming evidence — ironic, given how many of these bros think they are wise senators in the agora.

There are examples of billionaires’ folly all around us today, of course. Take privacy: the idea that we can — we should — we must — spy on everyone, all the time, in every way, to eke out tiny gains in ad performance is objectively batshit. And yet, wealthy people decreed this should be so, and it was, and made them far richer.

Leaked data from Microsoft’s Xandr ad-targeting database reveals how the commercial surveillance delusion led us to a bizarre and terrible place, as reported on by The Markup:

https://themarkup.org/privacy/2023/06/08/from-heavy-purchasers-of-pregnancy-tests-to-the-depression-prone-we-found-650000-ways-advertisers-label-you

The Markup’s report lets you plumb 650,000 targeting categories, searching by keyword or loading random sets, 20 at a time. Do you want to target gambling addicts, people taking depression meds or Jews? Xandr’s got you covered. What could possibly go wrong?

The Xandr files come from German security researcher Wolfie Christl from Cracked Labs. Christi is a European, and he’s working with the German digital rights group Netzpolitik to get the EU to scrutinize all the ways that Xandr is flouting EU privacy laws.

Billionaires’ big ideas lead us astray in more tangible ways, of course. Writing in The Conversation, John Quiggin asks us to take a hard look at the much ballyhooed (and expensively ballyhooed) “nuclear renaissance”:

https://theconversation.com/dutton-wants-australia-to-join-the-nuclear-renaissance-but-this-dream-has-failed-before-209584

Despite the rhetoric, nukes aren’t cheap, and they aren’t coming back. Georgia’s new nuclear power is behind schedule and over budget, but it’s still better off than South Carolina’s nukes, which were so over budget that they were abandoned in 2017. France’s nuke is a decade behind schedule. Finland’s opened this year — 14 years late. The UK’s Hinkley Point C reactor is massively behind schedule and over budget (and when it’s done, it will be owned by the French government!).

China’s nuclear success story also doesn’t hold up to scrutiny — they’ve brought 50GW of nukes online, sure, but they’re building 95–120GW of solar every year.

Solar is the clear winner here, along with other renewables, which are plummeting in cost (while nukes soar) and are accelerating in deployments (while nukes are plagued with ever-worsening delays).

This is the second nuclear renaissance — the last one, 20 years ago, was a bust, and that was before renewables got cheap, reliable and easy to manufacture and deploy. You’ll hear fairy-tales about how the early 2000s bust was caused by political headwinds, but that’s simply untrue: there were almost no anti-nuke marches then, and governments were scrambling to figure out low-carbon alternatives to fossil fuels (this was before the latest round of fossil fuel sabotage).

The current renaissance is also doomed. Yes, new reactors are smaller and safer and won’t have the problems intrinsic to all megaprojects, but designs like VOYGR have virtually no signed deals. Even if they do get built, their capacity will be dwarfed by renewables — a Gen III nuke will generate 710MW of power. Globally, we add that much solar every single day.

And solar power is cheap. Even after US subsidies, a Gen III reactor would charge A$132/MWh — current prices are as low as A$64-$114/MWh.

Nukes are getting a charm offensive because wealthy people are investing in hype as a way of reaping profits — not as a way of generating safe, cheap, reliable energy.

Here in the latest stage of capitalism, value and profit are fully decoupled. Monopolists are shifting more and more value from suppliers and customers to their shareholders every day. And when the customer is the government, the depravity knows no bounds. In Responsible Statecraft, Connor Echols describes how military contractors like Boeing are able to bill the Pentagon $52,000 for a trash can:

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/06/20/the-pentagons-52000-trash-can/

Military Beltway Bandits are nothing new, of course, but they’ve gotten far more virulent since the Obama era, when Obama’s DoD demanded that the primary contractors merge to a bare handful of giant firms, in the name of “efficiency.” As David Dayen writes in his must-read 2020 book Monopolized, this opened the door to a new kind of predator:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu

The Obama defense rollups were quickly followed by another wave of rollups, these ones driven by Private Equity firms who cataloged which subcontractors were “sole suppliers” of components used by the big guys. These companies were all acquired by PE funds, who then lowered the price of their products, selling them below cost.

This maximized the use of those parts in weapons and aircraft sold by primary contractors like Boeing, which created a durable, long-lasting demand for fresh parts for DoD maintenance of its materiel. PE-owned suppliers hits Uncle Sucker with multi-thousand-percent markups for these parts, which have now wormed their way into every corner of the US arsenal.

Yes, this is infuriating as hell, but it’s also so grotesquely wrong that it’s impossible to defend, as we see in this hilarious clip of Rep Katie Porter grilling witnesses on US military waste:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJhf6l1nB9A

Porter pulls out the best version yet of her infamous white-board and makes her witnesses play defense ripoff Jepoardy!, providing answers to a series of indefensible practices.

It’s sure nice when our government does something for us, isn’t it? We absolutely can have nice things, and we’re about to get them. The Infrastructure Bill contains $42B in subsidies for fiber rollouts across the country, which will be given to states to spend. Ars Technica’s Jon Brodkin breaks down the state-by-state spending:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/us-allocates-42b-in-broadband-funding-find-out-how-much-your-state-will-get/

Texas will get $3.31B, California will get $1.86B, and 17 other states will get $1B or more. As the White House announcement put it, “High-speed Internet is no longer a luxury.”

To understand how radical this is, you need to know that for decades, the cable and telco sector has grabbed billions in subsidies for rural and underserved communities, and then either stole the money outright, or wasted it building copper networks that run at a fraction of a percent of fiber speeds.

This is how America — the birthplace of the internet — ended up with some of the world’s slowest, most expensive broadband, even after handing out tens of billions of dollars in subsidies. Those subsidies were gobbled up by greedy, awful phone companies — these ones must be spent wisely, on long-lasting, long-overdue fiber infrastructure.

That’s a good note to end on, but I’ve got an even better one: birds in the Netherlands are tearing apart anti-bird strips and using them to build their nests. Wonderful creatures 1, hostile architecture, 0. Nature is healing:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jul/11/crows-and-magpies-show-their-metal-by-using-anti-bird-spikes-to-build-nests

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/15/in-the-dumps/#what-vacation

Next Tues, Jul 18, I'm hosting the first Clarion Summer Write-In Series, an hour-long, free drop-in group writing and discussion session. It's in support of the Clarion SF/F writing workshop's fundraiser to offer tuition support to students:

https://mailchi.mp/theclarionfoundation/clarion-write-ins

[Image iD: A dump-truck, dumping out a load of gravel. A caricature of Humpty Dumpty clings to its lip, restrained by a group of straining, Lilliputian men.]

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slxthxrxn-sxmp · 2 years

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How the Ragnarssons Would React to You Being a Warrior

*Warnings- talks of sex, drinking, suggestive nature, this one also has talks violence

(As always gifs are not mine and I do not claim credit for them. Thank you to the creators !)

Bjorn Ironside :

- Not saying it would a requirement but . . . . you know it would definitely help your relationship if you can hold you own in battle - If you both met on the battle field fighting for the same cause UUGHHH he would be swooning - Personally I feel like y'all he would realize his feelings for you during Paris, if you were there *hint hint* - Now all this being said he would still prefer for you to stay close to his side - This man would have such a protective instinct over you I swear to the gods - Bjorn would also gift you a necklace with mjolnir as well as protective metal garb with runes of the gods blessed at Uppsala - Before every battle he wouldn't voice his worries or that he loves you he would simply place his hands on your face and rest his forehead on yours <3

Ubbe :

- I say this with my whole chest HE IS LOOKING RESPECTFULLY - This man would see you as an equal and even ask you for battle strategies when the time comes - Whether you two are together platonic ally, romantically, etc. he would always make sure to give you something of his so you have to return it to him after the battle ("If you don't I will drag you from the halls of the gods and kill you myself" He would have that signature smirk that he got from his father lmao) - Eventually if you start giving him stuff of your own before battle he would be over the moon and you would be lucky if he doesn't propose right then and there - He is a man of words and action so directly after the fighting has ceased would search for you and then engulf you in his arms talking of how great you were and How proud the gods are of all those who fought along side y'all

Hvitserk

- Kinda feel like this man would be fairly indifferent. Don't get me wrong, hes proud ( a wee bit confused) such a person would choose to be with him gods he'd nearly drop over dead but other than that its business as usual - Perhaps it would allow him to feel comfy with being more rough when it comes to your sex life if you know what I mean - Now we all know that this poor man has a drinking problem annnnnd after every battle victorious or not you both will go drinking mead . . . . eventually you of course would have to cut him off - While drinking though you guys would be sloppily tending to each others wounds - Cuddlying will ensue no questions asked (he prefers being little spoon but does not mind having you laying on top of him attached like a little Koala)

Sigurd

- Now lets get this all sorted Sigurd doesn't love physical confrontation unlike some of his brothers *couch* Ivar *cough* BUT he would find it so hot when you have that after battle look (as long as you're not injured of course) when you are covered in sweat and blood - Don't ask if he does though because he will fiercely deny it - Once everything is said and done you can bet he will tackle you with the most passionate hug and kisses no matter who is watching - When that is finally out of his system he'll take you to get a bath where he'll scrub you down while humming a song he can't quite remember then he will "graciously" let you clean him up too

Ivar the Boneless

- I am going to politely say this once and I will not be repeating myself Ivar will have you on his side if you are a good fighter we all witnessed what with Bishop Heahmund - But seriously if you are true to him and loyal (though if we are being honest with each other he is just suspicious everyones loyalty no matter who they are) he really could not give a damn - Well that is what he'd tell you but every once in a while he might just bring you to where he is standing away from the battle purely for strategical reasons of course - Off the field this man will give you tips and even train with you. Teaching you how to fight like him, to be sly, to be quick, and to think on your feet - Now as amazing as this all sounds there is the downside of having to calm him down when hes angry and even fighting some of his personal battles like when someone gives him a tough time. I believe its fair to say that you can get protective over him even if he doesn't need your protection

Ragnar the Younger

- Kinda like Bjorn I'm not gonna say its a requirement that you are fighter however you know it won't hurt you know - Now as I am sure we are all aware family is so important to Ragnar so if you are fighting for his family's cause be it Uthreds, his own, or his fathers he would already admire you - Gods if you are ever put in a positions where you saved his life hed be like well damn guess I have found the one and he would be eternally grateful - He's the type of person who would allow you to have your own life and he will have his and you both will meet in the middle and if suddenly in life you decide hey I want to be a badass warrior he would more than willing to help you train and then let you be on your merry way (he is proud of you do not worry) - After every battle cue him frantically searching the field praying to Tyr and Thor and Odin and Freyja and whoever that would listen that you were alive and when he finds you expect to his a bright smile despite his physical state

Uthred of Bebbanburg

- He has a thing for warriors. No questions. - Uthred will playfully fight you and even jokingly challenge to draw the square for a duel. Gods help you if you accept, he will not go easy on you and if you think he would you are wrong. - If you have sworn your sword to him, he would treat you as a friend, a companion. He would even see you as someone he could trust with his life seeking you out for advice (even when he didn't need it) - Now if you had sworn your sword to someone else and you were a good warrior he will stand with you to the best of his ability. IF said person was King Alfred you and him would be attached by the hip - Idk if you all know that one scene in star wars with Kylo and Rey

- this scene this is how you both would fight, together and in unison

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gatheringfiki · 5 months

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The following ficlet was written by @marigoldvance based on this photoset.

Fili/Kili, Gen

You might also be able to read this story on AO3.

If you’ve enjoyed this story, please leave a comment either in replies or on AO3. :)

Druidbury

—

The town of Druidbury was nestled in the Valley of Magic, the place where all lines of all energies converged above the Crossroad of the Realms. An idyllic little town built of brick and stone, blending traditional architecture and modern conveniences. Trams jangled along behind horse-drawn carriages, clocksmiths worked elbow-to-elbow with sculptors of the finest sundials, tailors and dressmakers offered fashions from countless eras.

It was a charming town that Kíli enjoyed visiting when he wasn’t bogged down by coursework.

Druidbury was almost exclusively occupied by Wizards, though a few magical creatures (and entities, like Brodrick the Shadow Wraith who haunted the local inn) had made their home there as well. Master Dwalin’s Sanctum was above the cobblers, and Mistress Minerva’s took up an entire block behind the community library.

Wizards who had married outside of Wizardry brought their families to live in Druidbury, and so there were schools to accommodate the magically impaired, jobs to support those who couldn’t perform spells, and all manner of inclusive event or club.

The ladies of the local knitting club were fond of Kíli, always gifting him sweaters and socks, or baking him cookies (that wouldn’t accidentally turn him into a snail).

“You asked me about Christmas the other day,” Fíli said, striding ahead of Kíli by a few paces. He was dressed finely in a three-piece brown suit under a thick tan cloak trimmed with fur. Unlike Kíli had seen previously (that is, in public), Fíli’s hair was loose around his shoulders and his eyes were bare of his glasses (those still misplaces in the chaos of his desk). It suited him, this casual appearance, and Kíli found himself somewhat more bashful whenever Fíli looked at him directly.

“Yes,” Kíli said, hurrying to keep up as they strode down the main avenue. “Well, I was more wondering if I’ve missed every Christmas since I got here. I’d imagine I have.”

Fíli stopped at the corner and turned to face Kíli, “Technically, you have so far. But, you could amend that if you decide to travel through the doors in the Cave of—”

“—Names.” Kíli finished for him, “Yes, I remember.” He looked disheartened. So, he had missed several Christmases, his family moving along without him. Had they even tried to get in touch? Or was there an unspoken rule that once a child is taken to the University, he’s erased from the family tree and never heard from again?

A finger hooked under his chin lifted his gaze to meet Fíli’s. “No need to be upset, Kíli. I’m sure your family loves you.”

“I suppose but…do they even know who I am anymore?”

Fíli moved his hand to cradle Kíli’s cheek briefly before letting go. “Of course!” He said cheerfully, “The University sends families letters whenever its learners achieve something.”

Kíli’s stomach dropped, “But…I haven’t achieved anything!” He really hadn’t, apart from a soap-bubble shield and an Apprenticeship with Fíli his gap year between The School of Tutelage and The Academy of Information. And that hardly counted; Kíli had made more mistakes than he’d made strides toward bettering his skills as a Wizard.

“That’s not true.” Fíli told him, taking Kíli by the shoulders and leading him across the street and down the next block. “You’ve achieved far more than you give yourself credit for, Kíli. Trust me.”

Kíli did trust Fíli, but it sometimes felt as though Fíli regarded him through rose-tinted glasses and not as who Kíli was. Which was a paltry Wizard who’d fumbled through the last leg of his lessons under the School of Tutelage trying to earn a vocation as—Kíli sighed—a Harbinger.

(He had mastered herding crows into lines on tree branches, at least. Not that that required much strain on a learner’s Flare.)

“You asked me about Christmas,” Fíli said, smiling and tipping his head to those they passed as they walked. “And today, I’m going to show you how we celebrate it here.”

Bug-eyed, Kíli blurted, “I didn’t know we celebrated it at all!”

“What do you think the Yule Feast is all about?” Fíli asked, a twinkle in his eye.

“It lasts twelve days, sir, that’s hardly Christmas.”

“Maybe not as you celebrated it back home.”

“And there are no presents.” Kíli added, giving Fíli a pointed look, as if that was entirely what Christmas was about.

“Not true!” Fíli countered, taking Kíli gently by the arm, “Which is why I’ve brought you here.”

Here being a dimly lit shop squished between a cobbler’s and an apothecary. The Cabinet of Curiosities the sign above the shop read in swirly gold lettering. Unlike the prettily decorated shops along the street, this one was dark and somewhat autumnal. The storefront was painted black and had gold runes carved into the wood. Thousands of candles illuminated the interior from gothic chandeliers and tarnished candelabras.

“I don’t understand.” Kíli said, frowning through the glass door. “What does this have to do with Christmas presents?” A thought hit him, “Wait, are we buying presents…here?”

Even from outside, he could see the strange and unusual objects littering the shelves within. Twisty branches embedded with jewels and tiny skeletons in glass belljars. Books and old maps and what looked like a well-preserved mermaid’s tail without the rest of the mermaid attached.

“No, Kee, we’re not buying presents.”

That was a relief. Until now, Kíli hadn’t had to consider what currency was used in Druidbury, but he knew he didn’t have a cent of it to his name. Whenever he and his friends visited the local, he assumed someone else always took care of the tab as he’d never been asked for payment.

“So…”

“Come on.” Fíli encouraged Kíli through the door with a gentle push to his lower back, the weight of Fíli’s hand making Kíli blush.

The shop smelt of leather and dust and was a comfortable temperature compared to the wintery outdoors. A fire roared in the massive fireplace on the farthest wall. There were rows upon rows of floor-to-ceiling shelves, some with long tables between them, all filled to capacity with gruesome and weird trinkets.

An old, webby gramophone crackled to life on the service counter, telling them, “Back room!” as they wandered further into the shop.

Fíli obliged the voice, leading Kíli to the back of the shop and behind a heavy curtain. He held it open for Kíli politely, jerking his chin in the direction of a monstrous worktable cluttered with instruments and materials of all sorts.

Kíli eyed it warily, unsure what he was supposed to look for.

“Although the Crossroads and, therefore, the University, exist outside of time, we are still effected by it.” Fíli said, coming to stand beside Kíli. He spoke as he removed his cloak and hung it on a stand in one corner. “And some of us even participate in it.”

Just then a large man kicked open the splintered wooden backdoor, pushed inside with a gust of wind. He was as tall as he was wide with a jolly face and snow-white beard, round cheeks, and a bulbous nose. In his arms he carried a box bursting with scraps of fabric and small pieces of weathered wood.

“Hullo Fíli,” He boomed merrily, clearly happy to see Fíli there. He set the box down and began to empty its contents on the table. “Glad you could make it.”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world.” Fíli said. He’d removed his suit jacket and was rolling up the sleeves of his light-coloured shirt when the man greeted him. Now, he put a hand on Kíli’s shoulder and introduced him, “This is my Apprentice—”

“Former,” Kíli corrected.

“Not quite, lad.” Fíli chuckled and then resumed, “This is my Apprentice, Kíli. He’ll be helping us today.”

Kíli looked between the large man and Fíli, confused.

“Kíli, this is Nícolae.”

Kíli bobbed his head cordially, “Pleasure to meet you, Master Nícolae.”

“Please, boy,” Nícolae smiled, “It’s just Nícolae.”

“Good luck with that.” Fíli teased, “Took ages to get him to stop calling me Master.”

“Hey!” Kíli pouted; he hated being spoken of as if he wasn’t there. Even if what Fíli said was true. “It’s wonderful to meet you, Nícolae.” He said out of spite, though it felt strange not to use the title he’d been taught to use whenever he met an elder Wizard.

Nícolae smiled at Kíli’s deliberate cheek. “Shall we get to work, then?” He asked, tilting his head toward the table. More specifically, the items he’d deposited on it.

“Absolutely,” Fíli said, clapping his hands, “Where would you have us start?”

Nícolae explained how things were to be done: no magic, no miracles, no mystifying feats. Just simple toolwork and some elbow grease. Kíli didn’t narrowed his eyes when he was given his instructions and encouraged into a tall tinker’s chair at one end of the table.

“No magic?” He asked.

Fíli shook his head, a secretive smile arcing his lips. “Can’t have anyone with an undetected Flare interacting with it.”

“Undetected…” Kíli peered at Nícolae, who took his seat on the other end of the table, the chair groaning under his weight. There was something peculiarly familiar about Nícolae that Kíli couldn’t quite put his finger on. “What exactly am I supposed to make?”

“Just follow the illustrations there, boyo.” Nícolae said, pointing at a small pile of illustrated parchments. They were step-by-step instructions of how to put together a—

Kíli frowned, “Dolls?” He glanced at Fíli, “We’re making dolls?”

“We’re making everything on our lists.” Fíli said, patting his own little pile of parchments. “There isn’t much left.” This, he said to Nícolae.

“The others have been very helpful this season.” Nícolae grabbed a thick piece of wood and a carving knife and started scraping away the bark. “Master Pallando and his brother have been by every week since the end of summer.”

Pallando. He was the Wizard who’d escorted Kíli to the University when he was a boy. Kíli hadn’t heard from or seen anything more of him since. It was interesting to discover that Master Pallando was still around.

“How did they fare without use of their magic?” Fíli wondered with an undercurrent of animosity that Kíli didn’t understand.

“Horribly.” Nícolae said, “but they got the hang of it quickly enough.”

They worked in silence for some time, until Kíli’s back began to ache, and his bum lost all feeling. He’d made approximately seven dolls, two wooden cars, nine stuffed rabbits, and six wooden soldiers.

It was as he was finishing the paint on the sixth wooden soldier that he realized, “We’re making toys.”

Fíli tried to hide his amusement and failed. “Spot on, Kee.”

“No, that’s not—” He glared half-heartedly at Fíli, “Why are we making toys?”

“Because you asked about Christmas.”

Kíli stared at Fíli for a moment, gathering his thoughts, and then looked at Nícolae, who was hunched over a beautifully crafted dollhouse. White beard, jolly demeanor…He couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen it sooner.

“My word…You’re Santa!”

Nícolae cast his gaze to Fíli. They shared fond looks before both turning to Kíli.

“Some call me that, yes.” Nícolae acknowledged. “But I prefer Nícolae.”

Kíli didn’t hear him, too busy filling the air with questions, “Santa’s a Wizard?! How long has this been going on? Do you really deliver all these presents yourself? Don’t you have a village of elves to help you make toys?”

“No elves, I’m afraid. Just the charity of fellow Wizards such as yourself.” Nícolae said with a wink. “As for how long, I can’t be sure.”

“Fíli,” Kíli implored, “He’s Santa.”

“I’m well aware, Kíli.” Fíli said, not looking up from his work on a gorgeous tea set. His tongue poked out the corner of his mouth while he concentrated on his intricate brushwork. “Which is why I brought you with me.”

“To meet Santa.”

“To meet Santa.” Fíli echoed, finally meeting Kíli’s gaze. His eyes sparkled warmly, an expression of adoration adorning his features. “I could only answer your questions about time, and even then, only so much. But Nícolae has been a member of the University since its earliest days.”

“Why, you’re positively ancient!” Kíli blurted before he could stop himself. He slapped a hand over his mouth, his apologize muffled but sincere, “Sorry…”

Nícolae threw his head back and laughed, a rich chorus of sound. He flapped a hand in dismissal, wiped a tear from his eye and said, “I can’t deny that it’s true.” When he calmed, he looped his thumbs in his belt and said, “Now, you have questions, I have answers, and we both have a lot more to do. Why don’t you ask me while we work, hm?”

Kíli checked with Fíli that it was alright, knowing that he had the tendency to ask more questions than most were willing to answer. Fíli gave no indication that Kíli should restrain himself, so Kíli started with the most pressing thing on his mind:

“Do you really eat all those cookies yourself?”

Fíli bit his smile, willing himself not to laugh.

This was either the best or the worst idea he’d ever had.

#submission #Gathering 12 Days 2023 #Fili/Kili #FiKi #Durincest #the Hobbit

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genderqueerdykes · 1 year

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Our Hunt for a Home Continues: February 19th - 24th, 2023.

View On WordPress.

We received a call on February 16th about an opportunity that had opened up with a low-income housing program designed for disabled people. We had been waiting on this opportunity for 4 or 5 months and were ecstatic when the call finally came through. The other units we were looking into renting were in the worst part of town, and charging $700 or more per month for a 1 bedroom or studio unit.

We were instructed to head over to this apartment complex on Feb 20th to fill out paperwork. We hopped in an Uber and went on over. We were shown the unit, then handed an application, told to get a $16 money order to cover the application fee, and come back and hand it all in. Well, it sounded a lot easier than it ended up being.

We don’t own a car and can’t drive due to disabilities (hallucinations, dissociation, anxiety, you get the picture). So in order to get this money order, we asked what places nearby could get us one. We were told to head to a local Circle K. We looked on Google Maps, saw it was 3 minutes away, and started walking. Well, it thought we were in a car, so it meant 3 minutes driving time.

After walking for about 15 minutes before realizing something was up, our legs felt like jello. Our left leg had a pinched nerve in it that day and was sending shooting pain up our hip and down our thigh with every step. Our hypermobile & arthritic joints were already screaming in pain and our feet needed a rest after just one city block of walking. We had to call another Uber. The problem was, for whatever reason, our cellphone service provider has abysmal service in the downtown Albuquerque area.

We lost service about 5 times trying to hail Ubers over the course of the day, causing us to have several public meltdowns. It’s hard to stay calm when your phone is on 20% battery, you keep losing your only way to hail a ride, and you’re in too much pain to walk anywhere where someone can help you. After a long fight we got connected with a driver who was very understanding of our situation, despite our language barrier.

They took us to several locations for free, as we first went to a Circle K gas station that didn’t do money orders, then attempted another gas station across the street, then a bank, and so on. It took a lot of stops but the driver didn’t mind, as I was paying for the longer stops across town. I didn’t care either because it became apparent that it was President’s Day after I tried to go to a bank and it was closed. I almost gave up, but decided to call the Circle K near my home, who turned out, did do money orders. I redirected my driver from dropping me off at home, got the money order, ran back to the apartment complex with just half an hour to spare before they closed.

Filling out the application filled me with dread. The desk staff person was very nice, but she was very blunt about the entire approval process. Because they can only take a percentage of your earned income, they are a very strict program that requires each tenant to pass a credit score check AND an extensive background check that monitors ALL of the renter’s history. She told me that this part of the approval process is where a lot of people get turned away. A lot of people don’t make it, she said.

After handing in my application, I knew it was fucked. I had been holding my breath and waiting for this unit. It seemed like it would come right in time- just right before the 28th, when I’m set to be homeless. But I got the call 2 days later where she said I was denied, due to an instance of unpaid rent in my past. I sighed heavily, asked her if I would be able to apply again after I got that sorted, and she said yes.

I freaked the fuck out, texted every local friend that I could, and let them know of my predicament. I was very lucky in finding a local friend whose roommate is leaving in 2 weeks. They are willing to charge me $495/month, which is way lower than anything I’ve been able to find on the market. We agreed to help each other out until I can figure something more permanent out. It’s not a solution I’d like to take, as I barely know this person, but if it helps both of us, so be it.

The instance of unpaid rent in another state was due to us having lived in Missouri at the time, far away from friends, family, and medical care. We were living with some folks at the time who ended up ghosting us after we helped them move in together. It left us stranded in a very cold state with unsurvivable winters and no programs for homelessness. There was no medicaid or other insurance that would cover me. I couldn’t even get my proper medical care while there, and after a while, my partner and I at the time decided we needed to leave for some place cheaper and safer. The heavy winters were too scary for us, as two people who have been homeless.

The landlord here would not allow us to terminate our lease early despite us expressing that it was an emergency and we literally could not stay any longer due to my health failing severely while in the harsh winters. I was developing arthritis symptoms that I had never seen before, and I was getting so sick that I couldn’t function. Still, my landlord wouldn’t budge and said we had to pay for the rest of the lease. We refused and left anyways, but the landlord didn’t care, I suppose.

I found out today that there is potentially help to get this debt paid for and consolidated, which will make me eligible for the low-income housing program for disabled people once more. I am not going to hold my breath that this is a fast process by any means, but, I am hoping that they will be able to clear that up so I can ever hope to rent an apartment of my own again. My credit score is 9 points under the threshold they wanted, so that will be my next goal…

The only other units in the city I could find that can drum up a lease for me with my circumstances were trying to charge $685/month and $725/month, one of which being in one of the worst parts of town. I would have to pay a massive $650 deposit at both of these places, plus have to get utilities set up in my name, as well as get internet set up for my job, and a lot of other costs that will not be apparent at first, but will stack on very quickly.

I am very scared moving in with roommates in general- I am not afraid of my current roommate, but I have lived with many, many different roommates, in many different places, for many different reasons. Roommate situations fall apart very easily. Money is almost always the thing that tears roommates and friends apart- whether it’s someone not paying their portion of the rent, not buying enough groceries, not paying for a bill, gambling, shopping when they can’t afford it, and so forth…

My case worker helped me contact a local Christian charity who does housing programs and we were able to contact someone who actually seems like they can help me with permanent, long term housing- they said all of their programs are permanent, but are best suited for people in low income situations and poor health. When they asked where I was headed my case worker said a friend’s couch, and this was the first person on the phone who said, after learning about my income being a fluctuating thing, “well now that makes me even more nervous- because if she* can’t pay that $500 one time, she’s very well gonna be right back out on the street. Roommate situations almost always fall apart. I don’t feel like that’s safe for her.” [*”She”s in this context referring to me/my system.]

This charity requires that the individual stays for at least one day at a homeless shelter in order to get an official letter of homelessness. I have been to and spent time in several shelters in my city, I don’t mind one day if it means a potential future of secure housing. They told me a lot of other things that sound quite promising. I just have to hope that I can hold out until they can get something prepared for me. They said they have furnished units that are basically ready and waiting…

Staying with a friend for now isn’t the end of the world. In fact, I’m going to save some money by not having to pay for a deposit, movers, and potentially storage, now. But I’m nervous, as any kind of roadblock can cause this situation to fall apart. Disagreements, not getting a lot of money from Etsy one month, physical and mental illness, personal issues, and other life stressors can cause a lot of problems. Plus, this person may eventually decide they want someone else to move in instead, as it is their place, not mine, and that is their decision to make.

With any hope, I can get my past rental dues cleared, and have a better chance with these programs. I am hoping and praying, but that will take time, more time than I have. It is February 24th, 2023 as of writing this, and I have to be out of my apartment on February 28th. I have to have all of my possessions and myself and my pet rat out on this date, or else police will be called, and my things will be thrown on to the sidewalk, and into dumpsters. My case worker confirmed that this is the case, and I have known people who have gone through this personally.

I am very frightened. It has been hard to stay calm. I’m not exactly excited to be working with a Christian charity as someone who is visibly trans- “”female”” birth marker and deadname, but High T body, deep voice, and short hair. It’s caused problems with domestic violence shelters in the past, and can cause problems with religious organizations. I just have to hope and pray that these people love Jesus more than they hate queers.

My case worker was pretty convinced we’d be able to get our hotel stay covered by some local programs, but after 2 hours of phone calls this morning, we discovered that all of the hotel voucher programs in town have used up their funds, and the majority of them require the individual to have a child, which I do not. I have littles, but they’re system kids, not bodily ones, but they’re not so kind as to consider any of that.

I honestly didn’t anticipate any of those programs coming through. I’m just hoping that I’m able to be able to afford the two weeks in an extended stay hotel and that not too many more things come up. I didn’t really want it to have to come to this, but it’s either this, or sign a 1 year lease for 1 bedroom apartment in the least safe part of town, for $685+/month. I can’t afford that, it’s unrealistic. As much as I’d like to totally have a place all to myself right now, I can’t do it unless one of these programs actually works with me.

Anyway, I just wanted to explain why it’s been so hard for us to post regularly lately. This has all been over the course of one week. One of the worst days of our collective life was on Tuesday, having to run around town to get a money order just to be told we won’t have a place to live come the 28th… heart breaking. It felt very uncomfortable to beg friends yet again for a place to stay, but this is the life of queer, poor and disabled people. We have to do what we have to to survive and it’s not pretty. Sometimes it involves putting strain on people you love and none of us want to do it.

With any hope our disability benefits get approved sometime soon and we won’t have to wait much longer to afford to live. But until now things are very tight, and any help that we get goes directly toward our survival and staying off the street.

This is why we take the time to thank everyone we can for their help and support- it makes all the difference, especially when programs that are designed to help people like me fail miserably, or have unexpected roadblocks. Every bit of help, even the smallest donations or purchases from our store enable us to stay safe, and we appreciate each and every one greatly.

We will try to post more updates as things progress. We are finding it a bit easier to endure this when we share updates, as it helps give people an idea of what life is like for people who aren’t quite so privileged. Things that take others a few minutes can take hours for us, given our lack of reliable transportation and inconsistent health.

Thank you for reading, take care, stay safe, and I hope you find an easier time staying sheltered if you are a similarly disabled, poor queer person. It’s not easy out there. We have to take care of one another, it is the only way.

Rook

#trans punx #disabled #disability #cripple punk #crip punk #cpunk #our writing #wordpress #long post #update

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musubiki · 7 months

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im ngl noww that you say that you do art as a hobby, im just intrigued by how you are so confident and are able to have the free time to do it as a hobby...

i hope i didnt make a mistake taking art college ;; IM ROOTING FOR YOU TOO! its so luckily nowdays to have a job youre at least okay with but also have some really fun hobby on the side too

to one broke college student to another do u have any advice for future years? i ltrly just started college like 3 weeks ago

aaaa as far as time for the hobby goes, i actually only have that kinda time very recently (like over the summer and this semester).....if you noticed, i kinda dropped off for a year where i mustve only drawn like 10 things??? which is because last year was such a busy year for me in terms of work and courses...but this semester is better because im only in 3 classes: one doesnt have any exams and another im retaking (cuz i didnt pass the summer comp exam for it lol) so its all content ive seen before!! so this semester is a little easier and i can draw a bit more when i dont have homework or on the weekends!!!

as far as advice goes, (im not sure how art school works? or if youre in a normal university just majoring in art?) id say: take a lot of different classes to see what you like! explore different areas, and i think it might also be good to have like.....a contingency plan so to speak. like in my undergrad i got a minor in anthropology and almost got a certificate in accounting just so i had a little more options post-undergrad if the math major didnt work out!! so doing something like that is never a bad idea!!! (my undergrad program had a requirement to fulfill a certain amount of credits outside your major courses, so i used those to explore different things)

also dont be afraid to change if you feel you dont like your current path.....like i mentioned i was an astronomy major in undergrad first, and had wanted to go into astronomy since i was a kid, but found eventually it wasnt for me (i couldnt cut it in physics) and switched to something i wasnt SUPER passionate about, but i was good at it!! which was a huge decision for me and lowkey pretty risky (the fuck do you do with a math major?? everyone i asked they just replied "Oh you can do lots of things!" and never gave me an actual job title)

try to do summer internships if you can! as long as its financially feasible for you, itll make your resume a lot beefier when you graduate if employers/grad school see that you already have several experiences under your belt (and experience compounds on itself-- the more you have the more likely you are to get more!! for example here in my program, if you have more stats and coding experience coming in youre more likely to get more stats/coding assistantships, so you gain even more experience over the person who had no stats/coding experience prior and as a result got sent to be a TA or something. so the person who already had experience gets more experience and the person who didnt falls even further behind :') (me) )

networking is also important!!! since youre just in undergrad, i would recommend starting by talking to professors when you can. doesnt need to be like, going out of your way to go to their office hours and talk stories, but maybe chat a bit before/after class!! ask them how their weekend went, ask a dumb clarifying question!! i got to my current grad program because my professor came to me before class one day and said "I have a friend from [my current program] coming to recruit, you should go meet him." so be friendly with your professors so they get to know you and will pass on opportunities when they hear about them!!

a lot of professors get emails from all kinds of jobs/programs to the effect of "[place] is looking to recuit/hire" and they can pass those your way if youre on their radar!! and lastly work hard!!

(anyway this is advice i have based on my own experiences and what worked for me, it will most likely be different for you!! stay on top of your studies, but also force yourself to rest every so often!! I personally do not do any work on saterdays and try not to on sundays!! so i feel okay working hard the other nights of the week so i have two full days of rest....sacrifice your work-week free time for grades :') sometimes the best thing for your mental health is just getting the thing you dont wanna do out of the way!! good luck in uni!!!)

#college for everyone else is gonna be a little different than college for me #i was fortunate enough to get a lot of locally-based scholarships that took care of me so i didnt need to work while studying #but i know a lot of people do and thats fucking tough #i also wasnt in a lot of clubs etc #because my scholarship program would organize a lot of our events #and besides studying i didnt have time for any of that lol #stay on top of your studies for real.....#put down that pokemon game and go re-read the lecture content you learned today (pro tip)#yeah dont work 24/7 without rest if you can avoid it #burnout isnt fun and honestly i still havent figured out a way to avoid it #sometimes its inevitable and you just gotta push through #punch studies in the face

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alcego · 1 month

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Words Written: 2,082 words Projects:

Commission - Slow going. Moved it back into GDocs so I can write at work. I think the format is what's throwing me the most - it's not a style I usually work in and I am in a touch over my head. It's fully planned and otherwise moving along well.

REDO-REPEAT - Wrote this AFTG fic on a whim, chasing motivation-inspiration to get the gears oiled up. It's not everything the idea could be, but I'm happy with what it is given why I wrote it. Not everything needs to be perfect lol. You can read it here, but do mind the tags.

Original Work - Haven't spent much time on my original work, although I do have an idea percolating in the back of my head that I should probably rough out soon. I have a couple other shorts that need to be re-drafted, but I think I need more space from them before I get going again.

Notes:

Wasn't feeling great this week for a variety of reasons. I'm trying to catch back up on life after my second ever kidney infection (caught it early enough this time that my suffering was significantly easier to deal with), not to mention worrying and checking in on Winnie daily now that she's due to foal any day now. (Most likely she has a week or two left. However, sometimes they progress very quickly, so it's prudent to be watchful.) There are other things going on beyond that, of course, but suffice it to say I've been overwhelmed and that is not conducive to writing for me.

Have been consistently frustrated that I don't have a good "writing nook", which has been doubly frustrating because I have several places from which to work, but none of them have been facilitating Getting Things Done. This is a problem for writing but it's equally troubling on my WFH days. Lately I've been most productive in bed. I do not like this, as my bed is supposed to be for sleeping only. Have been looking into purchasing a used chair/ottoman for writing purposes, but there are a lot of logistics to consider there.

In a similar note to the above, I'm irritated by the size of my MacBook. It's a 13", which I ordered during the pandemic and decided it was "good enough" upon realizing it was smaller than expected. I no longer think this, as the keyboard is cramped and the screen doesn't have as much space as I'd like. I've considered going back to my old 17" Dell, which I wrote on prior to purchasing this laptop, but that laptop has fallen victim to planned obsolescence and is unable to receive the updates it needs to function at the level I require. I've looked into larger MacBooks (for budgeting purposes, mostly, although I wonder if I could trade-in my old laptops and have enough store credit for a used one?) but so far as I can tell the keyboard does NOT scale, which is irritating, as I'd prefer one with slightly larger keys so I stop stumbling over how close everything is. The other option is go back to Windows, but this is problematic as I very much prefer the iCloud files syncing to access my WIPs from my phone. Basically: no good solutions. I'll have to keep looking, which is fine, because I don't have the budget to get anything yet.

Not sure how to tie this in, as I suspect it's related to most, if not all, of my whining, but I've been noticing yet again that I have more "luck" writing analog than I do when I'm working on my phone or laptop. That makes it harder to track what I've written, but it's functional, and has gotten me through several sticking points.

Not sure what I'm going to work on after this commission is complete. I think, tentatively, that I might finish a JereJean PWP that has been on the backburner for a while, then finish roughing out my ex-mixtape fic (I got sick and ran out of time, so dropped the event) before polishing it for posting. After that, I want to revisit Vestigial, which has been shelved for a while. I'm hoping that if I get back in the groove of finishing stories, I'll be in a better headspace to get back to my original work, but we'll see. Nothing's set in stone just yet, and my writing stamina isn't high enough yet that I can just bust through any of these without long term repercussions. Slow and steady is key for a bit.

#weekly writing update #updates #aj's adventures in writing #i'm just popping this bad boy here for now. not sure what i'm going to do with my writing sideblog #possible i'll go back to updating there but IDK! i haven't been on tumblr much lately #Week of 3/11 - 3/17 #technically REDO-REPEAT is from 3/10 but im counting it here #as i wasn't logging that week

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dianamoth · 2 months

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Hello are you going to make another Naurto fanfic. I love all the ones you done so far

Hello,

I'm glad you like them. Thank you for letting me know. ♥

I'm currently low on writing juice, but I started a new project some time ago. It's about a disabled OC!Senju potentially paired with Minato and Shikaku.

I might as well share an excerpt here to see if it interests people and in turn motivates me to write more, otherwise, it will just stay in my drafts uselessly...

Follow the Minato by clicking on the "keep reading", and don't forget to leave feedback if you want more!

Inoichi threw himself on the free chair more than he sat, the wooden legs squeaking on the pavement.

“Did you hear?” he asked his friends with an excited face which meant he had a juicy piece of gossip to share.

The three jounin looked at him with amusement for his antics.

“Some of us barely woke up yet,” Shikaku drawled from his place against the wall, his chin propped up in his palm. To his credit, he had come back from a mission in the middle of the night and it was just noon.

“Do share, Inoichi, it looks like good news,” Minato added, smiling.

“And we certainly do need more of those,” Chouza agreed while serving himself generously among the dishes spread on the table.

“The Senju are organizing a courting trial!”

Shikaku deigned to look up from his food to stare at Inoichi in disbelief. “That old tradition? People still do that?”

Inoichi glanced surreptitiously around them to make sure that no one was paying too much attention to them, but the restaurant was depressingly empty (an ongoing war would do that to businesses).

“I heard from a reliable source that it’s done to, let’s say, deter a few unsavory characters from the courted party.”

“Damn it, Inoichi, just drop the names already,” Shikaku muttered.

“Fine! You really have no taste for mystery, Shikaku. I’m saying that Senju Airin claimed she wanted a courting trial when Danzou tried to arrange her marriage with his nephew.”

“Ew,” Chouza said. “Shimura Daiki? What a nasty piece. I wouldn’t wish him on any of my clanswomen… nor the sweet Airin. Well played if she dodged that bullet.”

“He could still complete the trial,” Minato pointed out.

Chouza sniffed in disdain. “I don’t pretend to know Airin-san very well, but she’s smart enough to find some trials too difficult for him to complete. Probably something that requires more than two neurons rubbed together.”

“Wow, tell us what you think of the guy, Chouza, would you?” Inoichi laughed. “As a matter of fact, the first trial is a game of go against the lady herself.” He wiggled his eyebrows toward Shikaku, to the others’ amusement and Shikaku’s exasperation.

“No, I’m not entering a courting trial just because it involves go,” Shikaku groused, throwing a wooden pick at his friend. “But back up would you? Why does Danzou want his nephew to marry that girl?”

“She’s two years older than us,” Chouza provided helpfully in between two bites.

“Alright, fine. Woman. What makes her so special?”

“Apart from being the only Senju woman of childbearing age left in Konoha, you mean?” Inoichi asked, finally realizing he was hungry and grabbing a plate of skewers.

“Yes, apart from that.”

“The Senju clan has been declared endangered,” Minato piped up while Inoichi was busy finally eating. “It means that any new member of the clan, spouse or children, receives financial aid.”

“And…” Inoichi adds with a shit-eating grin. “There are rumors…”

“Of course, there are,” Shikaku muttered.

“... that Senju Airin has got Mokuton abilities!”

“Bullshit,” Shikaku immediately denied, throwing his hands up. “Rumors? If she had Mokuton abilities, she would have been heralded as the Shodai’s reincarnation or something. Everyone would know about it.”

“The decision to keep it secret could have been made to protect her,” Minato suggested, always ready to play the devil’s advocate.

“She wasn’t the best fighter, even before being injured in combat,” Chouza admitted. “You don’t put a target on the back of someone who can't handle it.”

“How injured?”

“Her ankle was smashed by an Iwa nin. The articulation was so badly injured that not even Tsunade-hime could completely heal it. I saw her recently in the streets, she walks with a terrible limp. She uses a cane, most often.”

Shikaku hummed. “Well, I never heard of her. What does she even look like? Compared to Tsunade-hime, how—”

Minato kicked him under the table so sharply that Shikaku hissed in pain, scowling at his friend before following his eyes to the door. A young woman was stepping in, walking with a limp and a cane.

“Are you kidding—” Shikaku whispered under his breath before quieting when it became clear the woman was walking toward their table.

She had the same doe eyes as Tsunade-hime, but that’s where the likeness stopped. Her long wavy hair was light brown. Her skin was tanned, far from the blond’s fair skin. Where Tsunade was slim and relatively short, this one was plump and tall. Their chest size might compare, but with the modest layers she wore, it was hard to tell. Also, she wore pink, and she had freckles. He would have never imagined they were related.

“For the record, the window is open, and you have the discretion of Jiraiya-san near an onsen.”

To all his friends’ relief and bafflement, Chouza burst into laughter and stood up to greet the newcomer, breaking the awkwardness that had descended upon them.

“Airin-san! It has been too long!” He opened his arms, and Airin accepted the bear hug more gracefully than any other non-Akimichi.

Shikaku sighed as he caught up. Between Airin's coloring and body shape, and Chouza’s familiarity with her, they had to be related.

“Chouza-kun. How are you?”

“I’m fine, all fine! Let me introduce you to my friends. This is Namikaze Minato, a dear friend, and brilliant jounin.”

Minato stood up to bow. Airin greeted him with a “Pleased to meet you.”

“And these here, are my teammates, Yamanaka Inoichi and Nara Shikaku.”

Both nodded in greeting, foregoing the standing that Minato insisted on as a non-clan member. It was old school, but some idiot classists insisted on the practice.

“Let me guess, Chouza; she’s a cousin?” Inoichi asked, voicing Shikaku’s thoughts.

“That’s right! Her mom was my dad's cousin,” Chouza confirmed, laughing. He knew his family tree by heart.

“I take after her, obviously. I hope you aren’t too disappointed by the dissimilarity with Tsunade.” She said while gesturing from her chest to her toes. “She took after great-uncle Tobirama, I’m told.”

Shikaku rubbed his brow. This was on him, he knew. “How much did you hear?”

She shrugged. “Enough.”

“I apologize if I was rude.”

“It’s nothing I haven’t heard before.”

#my writing #naruto #naruto fanfiction #answered ask

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annabelle--cane · 2 months

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what’s your major if you don’t mind me asking? I think I want to be an English major maybe? Idk I’m lost on journey and any info at all about what that might entail would be helpful. That being said good luck with the concerts and the papers! Also I love your blog byeee

I'm double majoring in english and art history, and most of my english classes involve reading a certain about of a work on my own time (part of a book, a few poems, a play, etc), discussing it in a class of 15-30 people, writing two or three analytical papers per semester per class, and sometimes doing other graded exercises like group presentations, weekly reading responses, or worksheets to break down formal elements of the thing I'm looking at. I'm in the second semester of my junior year and this is actually the first time in university so far where I've had classes that assign multiple novels to read over the course of the semester, every other class I've taken so far has kept to shorter works so we can get through a wider range of material more quickly with maybe one short novel or novella. from what I've heard from people who go to other schools, this kind of seminar-based english class seems fairly common, but I can't speak for everywhere.

most english majors I know take on a second major or a minor or a specialization within english because at my school there are relatively few requirements to complete the major in comparison to other subjects and people end up with credits to fill and other interests they'd like to pursue. ex., in my second semester of my freshman year I realized I'd accidentally already completed half an art history minor so decided to finish it out, and then last semester I had the sudden thought "wait. but if I finish the minor this semester. that means no more art history classes." and I had juuuuust enough time left to finish out the double major requirements and still graduate in four years, so I upgraded and now I write 8-11 papers a semester because I am insane.

it's totally normal to feel lost on what you want to study, I know a bunch of people who got to college and changed their majors after a semester or two (most of them started as biology majors, idk what it is about bio that attracts people who simply don't want to do it), and I know people who've dropped out or taken gap years or taken multiple years off to figure out how they best function and what kind of degree would best suit what they want to do with their lives. I really like english, but it's not for everyone and there are plenty of options for you to feel out as you go.

thank you and I wish you luck!

#answered #anons

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catboywrites · 3 months

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sometimes i think about my first year college english professor who told me i would never make it as an author. it was the first day of class and he asked everyone why we were taking the class. i was the only person there who said something aside from "it was a required credit". and in front of the entire class, without even reading a single thing i'd ever written, he told me to give up and be realistic. i remember that so vividly, because it was one of the contributing factors to the mental breakdown i had three months later that inevitably lead me to dropping out of college completely.

other things were at play, of course, but having been told my whole life by my parents to give up on my dream was one thing. and then being told again by my english professor, who i thought i could be honest with and maybe get some feedback and advice, just broke my spirit. i haven't written anything in years because every time i tried, i got that little devil on my shoulder telling me i was terrible and i should give up before i ever began.

but i'm so glad i started writing again. because i have people out there who are reading what i write and they love it. and that's honestly all i ever wanted. maybe i never will write a book. but as long as someone out there read what i wrote and loved it, that's enough for me.

#so thank you guys #from the bottom of my heart

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mayalaen · 5 months

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I'm way too grouchy today.

I lost $900 today because my family STILL won't double check things.

When I first got covid, I was REALLY sick, and they knew it. My brain wasn't functioning right (still isn't but it's better than it was) and I wasn't double checking out-of-state orders for the shop personally for a couple weeks.

It had been a few months since they sent something out that was obviously paid for with a stolen credit card so I was like okay I'm gonna just step back and take care of myself and let them do their thing. It's a slow time of year anyway in the tattoo industry.

This morning Charlie (my uncle) dropped a letter from the bank off at my door. All four of us handle different things and Charlie does some of the banking stuff (among other things).

The letter was sent out weeks ago but he wasn't getting the mail even though he's supposed to get it no less than once a week.

The bank was notifying me that there was a chargeback on an order.

An $850 machine with expedited shipping, so $900 total.

I checked the order and the shipping address was 1500 miles away from the billing address. The phone number was 2500 miles away from the billing address and in a completely different state from the shipping address.

And the time period for being able to dispute the chargeback ended Friday at 5pm eastern standard time. He gave me the letter (today) Saturday morning. So TFB for me.

I pointed out the address discrepancies and both Charlie and Marissa (his wife) were like yeah but the system didn't flag it as fraudulent!

I said for the millionth time yeah I know. Not every fraudulent order is flagged as fraudulent, otherwise we'd never get scammed and the world would be a wonderful place!

I said, yet again, that I usually check EVERY order that comes in, especially when it's for more than $100.

Just a quick check to see if the billing and shipping addresses are SOMEWHAT close.

They responded with "EVERY ORDER?!!"

What kind of response is this?! Why the fuck would you double check some orders and not others?

And if you ARE going to check some and not others, wouldn't the $900 order with expedited shipping be one of them?!

I wasn't mean about it but I mentioned that I deal with scammers CONSTANTLY. I swear between the IRS requirements for small businesses and scammers, more than half my time working for the shop is spent dealing with bullshit instead of working on my actual shop!

I spent 3 days this past week dealing with a guy who ended up being a scammer. He kept trying to run his card through the online store and it was getting kicked back for nonmatching info.

I was emailing back and forth with him because he sounded like a genuine customer with a bank issue -- it happens sometimes because tattoo supplies are sometimes flagged by banks as unusual.

After three days of no less than an hour a day dealing with him, my bank finally kicked back some useful info -- that the card was issued to a man in the Netherlands while this dude was purchasing from the US.

So yeah. Scammer.

And if I wouldn't have been diligent with it or I had pushed the order through anyway, I would've lost almost $3000 in supplies.

I told Charlie and Marissa this and they reacted like spending this much time on a scam was a completely new idea to them. Like I haven't told them a million times how much time scammers take up.

But you can be sure that at the beginning of next month Charlie's going to be there with his hand out waiting for his pay and will throw a stink if I deduct $900 from his allowance even though the shop pays for my house/living expenses (and my parents) and Charlie's house/living expenses.

It feels like Charlie and Marissa are glorified cashiers (who get paid WAY more than cashiers and only work 30 hours a week) while I'm working no less than 60 hours a week and paying for their fuckups out of my own pocket.

At least you can fire shitty employees 🤬

Of course he immediately turned it around on me and acted like the hurt party in all this to the point where my mom was like "let him know you still love him he had a hard day."

Oh I'm sorry. Did he have a hard day when he found out that the car part he ordered was destroyed during shipping and they're sending a replacement? That's so terrible let me cry for him.

#real life #this is my life #this is me complaining #marissa #charlie #venting

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saiilorstars · 10 months

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Ch. 23: Rising Spirits

Fandom: Harry Potter (Hogwarts years 1-7) Pairing: Draco x OFC

taglist: @ocappreciationtag @arrthurpendragon @anotherunreadblog @maaaaarveeeeel @stareyedplanet @foxesandmagic

Story Masterlist // Romina’s Masterlist

If you’d like to be a part of this OC’s work/edits, let me know!

Being it a windy day, nearly all students took to staying inside the castle. Many of them messed around but others actually went ahead and did some homework. Since the first quidditch game was coming up, no one wanted to be stuck behind doing essays when the games started. Romina and her friends were no exception and so they all agreed to meet at the library later in the afternoon to do some work. Miraculously, Romina arrived first.

She was trying to keep up with her work for the most part. Every now and then, she slipped but now she was trying to put in some effort and she supposed that's what counted in the end.

Now she was truly regretting not paying attention in her Potions class. Why did one little potion that only lasted for a couple minutes require so many goddamn ingredients? The math wasn't adding up.

"So you just make a habit of pulling your hair at this point?" Draco unceremoniously dropped his book bag on the table, immediately instigating Madame Pince's shushes.

Romina dropped her hand from her hair and kept it right on her lap. "It's becoming a bit of a thing, I'll admit, but nothing I can't handle."

Draco didn't seem to think so judging by the look on his face. "Keep it up and you won't have any hair by the end of the year. You already cut it so short, why go for the worst thing in the first place?"

"I didn't actually cut it, you know," Romina said, and her smirk drew his curiosity in.

"If you didn't cut it...what did you do?"

Romina motioned him to take the seat beside her. She cleared her throat and lowered her voice, but nobody would take away the smugness in her voice when she spoke. "I used transfiguration on it."

Of course Draco didn't buy it immediately. In fact, he snorted. "Right."

"I'm not kidding," Romina said, "I used transfiguration."

"That's not — Oswell, that's not possible. Transfiguration is used to change things—"

"Into other forms, yes," Romina nodded, "I take the class with you, Draco. I know what it does. Turns out, I'm really good at Transfiguration. I read about it during summer and even bought a couple books at Diagon Alley. There's so many things you can do with Transfiguration and it's sad that not a lot of people know about it."

"I don't know if I should pity you for sounding so much like McGonagall right now...or be impressed..." Draco was still thinking about it as he said it.

Romina made it easier for him by telling him the answer. "You should definitely be impressed."

"But...you can't do magic at home," Draco said, "And Arden swears you did that haircut before Summer."

"I didn't," Romina said easily, propping an elbow on the table. She rested her cheek on the palm of her hand. "I waited till my aunt and uncle dropped me off at the train station and did it once we got moving."

"So you did it, for the first time, on a moving train?"

"And got it right too! Aren't I a genius? Tell me a genius." Romina's smirk only widened as she watched Draco's mouth practically fall open.

There was no denying anymore that he was, indeed, impressed. Draco couldn't help it. He looked at her with his own smirk. "Alright, you win. Gotta say, never thought I'd see you gloating about something. This is a version of you I can get on board with."

"I'm not gloating and look who's talking!" Romina rolled her eyes. "You're the king of gloating. I'm just taking credit for something absolutely fantastic and genius that I did."

"But you're not gloating, right?"

Romina deadpanned him. "Shut up."

Draco laughed lightly. "I think now I win."

"Whatever, but don't tell anyone what I did, alright? I don't feel like explaining how I did it and I just...I don't want anymore attention than the one I already have."

"You can relax, I won't say anything," Draco said just as the rest of their friends started getting to the table.

"Say anything about what?" Arden said, eyeing the two suspiciously.

"That you have the best timing ever," Draco said, his words dripping with sarcasm.

Arden raised an eyebrow at him. The others were already taking the open seats around her. "I'm sorry, did we interrupt something or...?" She looked specifically at Romina for the answer.

"What? No!" Romina exclaimed, clearing her throat afterwards. Maybe she scooted her a chair a bit away from Draco's too, who knew. "C'mon, there's so much work to do."

"I'll say," Theodore huffed as he grabbed a seat next to Angel. "Who's got the Divination notes?"

"I have some," Pansy said, "But I didn't get what she was saying towards the end."

"Or in the beginning," Blaise said and snickered with Angel. Arden joined in as well.

"That subject sucks," Romina told them all. "You should have taken something else."

"It's an easy score," Draco told her. "Just pull some crap together with some planets and stars and you're good."

"Give me your notes right now," Theodore pointed at him.

As the group got studying, they started chitchatting about just about everything and because of the buzz around the library from other students, it was inevitable talking about the upcoming quidditch game.

"They're Ravenclaws, though," Carolinha shot the group another look before pulling out a chair next to her brother Angel while Romina took the empty one beside Arden. "Isn't the first game between Gryffindors and Hufflepuffs?"

"You bet," Arden looked up from her Divination homework to smirk at Draco sitting directly across from her. "That's why his ass is over here trying to do the homework right or he won't get to play at all. Injury or no injury. I suggest you go back to the book before you turn that—" she pointed her quill to Draco's parchment, "—to Trelawny."

Because Romina could see Draco's mouth twitching into what would probably become a decent insult involving his favorite 'm' word, she purposely cleared her throat loudly. "Homework," she gave him a sharp, warning look.

Pansy dropped into the seat between Draco and Angel. "You can borrow my book if you want," she offered Draco and slid her own Divination book towards him.

"Oh please, you probably need to keep your nose buried in that book to understand one page," they heard Arden mutter from her spot, and before Pansy snapped Angel cut in.

"Please don't argue," Angel whisper-hissed. "Madam Pince already warned us that the next time you shout we all get kicked out."

"She'll have to kick out the entire library at this point," Blaise remarked. He looked up at the rest of the library. Not one table was quiet.

Before she heard any more incessant arguing, Romina announced she was going to switch books. She left the table and went towards the closest aisle, still wanting to keep an eye on Arden and Pansy. Lately, they were arguing a lot more too. Romina didn't like it. At the end of the day, they were all supposed to be friends, right?

"Woah—!" She crashed into someone and hard. Suddenly, she was on the ground and even from her spot she swore that she heard some of her friends laughing. Whipping her head at their table, she saw Blaise and Theodore outright cackling. Pansy didn't even bother hiding it.

Madame Pince more or less gave up trying to shush the whole damn library at this point.

"Romina, are you—" Angel had just started getting up from his seat when someone else spoke, saying a soft 'here' and the next thing Romina saw was a hand reaching out in front of her.

Her dark eyes met similar dark ones, and a freckled face. The boy was Gryffindor, judging by his red tie, and had a soft smile on his face. His chestnut brown hair was tousled at the tips, although a lot of it seemed like it stuck out as if he kept running his hands through it. "I'm sorry," he said, reaching his hand a little closer to Romina.

Flushed from the whole thing, Romina took his hand and with his help, got up from the ground. "It's alright," she cleared her throat. "Least I gave my friends — my alleged friends anyways — a show," she threw the group a look, not that it mattered. Now that they stood face to face, Romina saw that his dark eyes had a slight hazel shade when the light reflected in them.

"It's my fault, I should have been looking where I was going," the boy said, snapping Romina out of her thoughts. "Maybe next time I'll wait until I'm at the table to start reading."

Romina's eyes fell over the book he was holding in his other hand. The Book of Imaginary Things. She tilted her head at it. "Imaginary things? Why are you reading about imaginary things?"

The boy gave a small chuckle. "Nothing's really 'imaginary', you know."

"I think imaginary friends would count," said Romina, earning another chuckle.

"This is a book about supposed imaginary creatures," the boy explained. "But what I say is that any creature can be real. Just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean it's 'imaginary'."

Romina couldn't help but smile. He reminded her of someone at the moment but she couldn't place her finger on it. "I...suppose that's a fair argument to make..." she said, still half thinking.

"You know..." But suddenly, the boy trailed off. As quick as his mouth opened, he closed it, and suddenly he seemed nervous.

"Are you okay?" Romina wondered if she'd crashed into him hard to actually hurt him.

"Yeah, sorry, 'scuse me!" The boy side-stepped her and quickly took off, leaving Romina to watch after him.

She forgot all about her book and returned to the table, though she tried to find the boy in the sea of students in the library. He had disappeared amongst the other Gryffindors around.

"What the hell was that about?" Arden raised an eyebrow at her.

"He's cute," Daphne said abruptly, causing the girls to look at her and the boys to groan.

"Seriously, Daphne?" Romina's nose crinkled. "It was a literal 30 second conversation." She leaned up on her seat to once again cast a look around the library in search of the boy. "And he just sort of...disappeared now..." she mumbled.

"If it was so insignificant, why are you breaking your neck to find him again?" Daphne smirked as Romina let herself drop in her chair. "Aha. Admit it, you thought he was cute too."

"No," Romina frowned. "I thought him...interesting."

Daphne snorted. "Same thing!"

"It's really not. He was saying something about imaginary creatures not actually being imaginary..."

"Can you guys shut the fuck up already?" Draco interjected with a rather vexed tone. He looked up from his essay, eyes flickering from one girl to the other. "I'd like to finish my work."

"Anyone know his name?" came Romina's question not a second after him. His head snapped in his direction, face incredulous that she dared ignored him like that.

"You're so out of this social circle, it's actually painful," Pansy said, drawing her attention over.

"What do you mean?" Romina asked. "You know who he is?"

"He's a pureblood so of course we know him," said Pansy with a smirk. "That's—"

"Shut it, Parkinson," Draco cut her off sharply.

Romina then looked at him beside her, tilting her head. "You know who he is?"

"You heard her," he muttered and continued to write his essay.

Pansy's smirk widened.

Romina, however, waited for Draco to tell her who the boy was, but he just kept writing. "Well tell me who he is!"

"No."

Romina blinked incredulously. "No?"

"No." Draco didn't even look up when he reiterated his answer. Romina looked at the rest of their friends but before any of them could say anything, Draco did. "Nobody says a word. Well, King has no bloody idea anyways but you know what I mean."

"Excuse me but who do you think you are!?" Romina exclaimed.

"Draco Lucius Malfoy, thanks for asking."

The rest of their friends broke into snickers and laughter. Romina, however, did not laugh. No, instead, she shoved him so hard that he knocked into Theodore beside him.

"Argh, Oswell!" Draco was now covered with ink from his own quill.

"That's Romina Aline Oswell to you!" Romina snapped. "All I want to know is who that guy was! Why is it such a big deal?"

"You tell me!" Draco argued back. "It's not like he's going to have any conversation with you anyways!"

"How do you know?"

"Because he hardly talks to any of us anyways!"

Romina once again looked at the others and to her surprise, they all pretty much agreed with Draco.

"He's a pureblood but he doesn't really form part of our circle," said Blaise, making a circular motion with his quill. "I don't blame him, though. I myself can't stand Malfoy and Nott together for more than hour."

"Shut the fuck up, Blaise," went both Draco and Theodore on the spot.

"He has different interests," Angel said, trying to ease the tension by speaking calmly and without any quips. "But his family is recognized as war heroes."

"And his grandmother runs the Gejél line!" Daphne said with a giddy smile that even Carolinha seemed to match.

"The Gejél line?" Romina and Arden made faces.

"The best of the best fashion!" Daphne promised. "It's a French line and basically all I wear!"

"Why doesn't that surprise me?" Romina said with a small sigh. "Fine, whatever, I give up." She threw her hands in front of her. She had way too many things to deal with than to add on some strange pureblood boy to her list.

~ 0 ~

When the first Quidditch game rolled by, the weather was worst as could be. All players were soaked inside out with rain but they still zoomed on by trying to win for their House. Everything seemed to be going in Gryffindor's way until Harry disappeared too far up going after the Snitch. The audience was left wondering when Harry Potter would come zipping down holding the Snitch in hand. The Hufflepuff's seeker was also gone trying to find the Snitch but there were some people in the audience who noticed something peculiar about the current game.

"Is it me or does a bludger seem to have it in for Harry?" Romina had to practically shout in the midst of the rain.

"Nah!" Arden responded. "That's just a harsh game!"

Romina focused on the game itself and anxiously waited for Harry to come back. He did come back, alright, but...with his broom...and practically unconscious…

Dementors were swarming the skies like hungry crows, and Harry had been their choice of meal. It was all a chaotic mess but in the end, Harry had been taken to the infirmary wing. Romina didn't waste a second and the moment she got out of the bleachers, she was chasing after Hermione and Ron to join them at the infirmary wing. She didn't care about the dirty looks some of the other Gryffindor students had given her for her presence. She was going to be there when Harry woke up, and she was.

He woke up slowly, but surely, although the combined voices of his friends didn't exactly speed the process up.

"Ron, I think you're hurting his head..." Hermione had said.

"Looks a bit peaky, doesn't he?" Harry then heard Ron say.

"You would be too if you fell from the sky, Ron," he heard Romina scold.

"Harry!" Fred was the first one to see Harry awakening. Harry immediately noticed that Fred was drenched in mud and wet from the rain...as were the rest of his teammates. "How're you feeling?"

"What happened?" Harry pushed himself up to sit upright. He winced as he felt some ache in his body.

"You fell off," George reminded him. "Must've been — what — fifty feet?"

"Approximately," Romina muttered.

Harry didn't seem as fazed by the whole thing since his first thought went to Quidditch. "But the match. What happened? Are we doing a replay?" Everyone exchanged some glances Harry wasn't liking. "We didn't — lose?"

"No one blames you, Harry," Hermione said immediately, "The Dementors aren't meant to come on the grounds. Dumbledore was furious. After he saved you, he sent them straight off.

"Diggory got the Snitch," George explained. "Just after you fell. He didn't realize what had happened. When he looked back and saw you on the ground, he tried to call it off. Wanted a rematch. But they won fair and square . . . even Wood admits it."

Harry remembered his enthusiastic, determined Captain at the beginning of the game and felt even worse. "Where is Wood?"

"Still in the showers," Fred answered. "We think he's trying to drown himself."

Harry felt a growing frustration against everything in his life at that moment. If those Dementors hadn't surrounded him then he would have won for sure. Why did this happen to him? Why?

"The game isn't technically over yet, is it?" Romina asked softly. Everyone now stared at her, confused by her words. She was trying to make Harry feel better. She knew how much Quidditch meant to him and he shouldn't feel bad when what happened was out of his control. "Well, I don't understand how the games work but...Arden does. She says you guys lost by a 100 points so...well, if Hufflepuff loses to Ravenclaw and you guys beat Ravenclaw and Slytherin . . ." she started to slow down when the looks became too much, "...you guys...would...win…? What?"

"You're telling us to win against your own House, Rom…" Hermione was the one to answer.

"No," she waved them all off. "I'm just pointing out facts. Do with it what you please." Romina flashed a kind smile at Harry. "It means that you get to keep practicing and we all get another game, right?"

Harry would have taken her words more into consideration had he not remembered his Nimbus 2000. "Did someone get my Nimbus?"

There were some more nervous glances from his friends, and Harry assumed the worst.

"Well...when you fell off…" Hermione bit her lip, debating how to finish it properly, "...it sort of...got blown away…"

Harry's stomach filled with dread. "Where to?"

"...the Whomping Willow."

That was all Harry needed to know. His broom was probably dust by now.

~ 0 ~

When Professor Lupin finally returned to his class a week later, he was met with outrage from his students complaining about their substitute professor - Snape. No one was quiet about the tremendous amount of work Snape had given them during his absence.

"It's not fair, he was only filling in, why should he give us homework?" went Dean Thomas who looked ready to pull out his own hair from the assignments Snape had tasked them.

"We don't know anything about werewolves —" started another student, a Hufflepuff before the student sitting beside them finished.

"—two rolls of parchment!"

Lupin motioned with his hands for the class to settle down. "Did you tell Professor Snape we haven't covered them yet?"

"Yes!" the class chorused together except for a couple of Slytherins.

Romina raised her hand, nervously glancing at the rest of the students.

"Miss Oswell?"

Romina lowered her hand and began quietly, "Well, we did try to tell Professor Snape about where we were in the class—"

"But he didn't listen!" Ron finished for her.

"That's not what happened!" the girl groaned, ignoring his face of indignation. "He merely said we were really behind so—"

"You don't need to make excuses for him just because he's your Head of House," snapped Ron.

Romina glared over her shoulder. "I'm not!"

As the two furthered their disagreement, Lupin calmed them down by simply telling them no one had to do Snape's essay. That appeased the whole class—almost everyone.

"Oh no," Hermione frowned. "I've already finished it!"

Ron and Romina settled their differences by focusing on Hermione's overachievement.

"You have got to be kidding me," Romina mumbled under her breath and settled to learn the newest lesson.

Thankfully, Lupin had come through to his class by providing them a pretty fun lesson with hinkypunks which turned out to be little, one-legged creatures that were made of wisps of smoke. Their frailness and unthreatening appearance made most girls gawk. When class was over, everyone happily gathered their belongings to head to lunch.

"Miss Oswell," Lupin stopped the girl before she could follow after the others. "May I have a word with you?"

"Uh...yes," Romina knew the question was for formal reasons but went ahead and gave the answer anyway. She left her things over the desk and watched as Lupin went back to his own desk.

"You started to turn in more assignments," he noted from the stack of piles that was behind no doubt by Snape. "Am I to assume this was because of your own motivation and not because your Head of House was teaching the subject?"

"Well...to be fair...it was a little bit of both," Romina answered truthfully, making Lupin chuckle.

"You're making jokes. That's a better side of you that I've seen so far this year," he leaned against the front of his desk.

Romina knew exactly what he meant and lowered her head. "I'm sorry I wasn't doing my assignments. If it helps, I wasn't exactly doing any assignments for any of my classes." Lupiin seemed more bemused than anything else with that confession. "But I promise that won't happen again."

"I understood your position and that is why I have been lenient so far..." Lupin's words made the girl raise her head to reveal widened eyes. "But I don't intend on letting you waste a whole year like this."

"You know…?" Romina's voice was a faint whisper. Lupin met her eyes with a serious face. Her heat began to beat rapidly. When McGonagall intervened, she had never mentioned that she knew what was the reason for her lack of attention in classes. How could Lupin — he couldn't know...could he? "You don't...you do…that the people...the-the two adults the b-boggart took shape of were…?"

"Your parents?" Lupin gave a confirming nod. "I didn't before but it really only took minimal digging to know."

"My name probably helped," Romina added on. "And...apparently, I look a lot like Elora."

"Your mother?"

"Elora," Romina reiterated, her voice hardening with the mere name. "Did you...did you know them?"

"No, they were older than me," Lupin shook his head, "But we did know of them as the war started getting closer."

"Well," Romina raised her head, swallowing hard, "Just as well because I don't want to know anything about them. To my misfortune, I am related to them but that is as far as I am willing to get. I despise them and I have no need for them in my life. They've cost me a lot even from behind their stupid cells in Azkaban."

Lupin acknowledged her words, and wishes, but cleared his throat to say something more, "I understand your feelings towards your parents might be...difficult, but you should not allow that to interfere with your studies. You're a bright student, Romina. I know you're tutoring for Professor McGonagall and I know you take pleasure in studying Muggles. If what you're worried about is being too similar to your parents, rest assured you are not."

There was a relief in Romina's eyes that practically radiated from her. "Th-thank you, Professor."

"You're 13, try to have a little bit more fun. I know the dementors make it hard but, this is Hogwarts. There's bound to be something that makes you happy." Lupin gave her a kind smile then told her to go have lunch.

Romina happily obliged, feeling pretty content for the moment. She left the classroom and headed for the Great Hall, though a little slower as she was stuck thinking about the conversation. It felt strange having people — adults, specifically — show genuine care for her like professor McGonagall and Lupin. She was so used to depending solely on her aunt Sage and uncle Lyonel. As happy as Romina felt with the extra attention she was receiving, it also made her feel a tad bitter—resentful, perhaps—because she didn't have anyone else besides her aunt and uncle. They were always tight-lipped about any other family members they had around.

"Oswell?"

Romina abruptly stopped like she'd been caught in an act. Embarrassment is more of what she felt. What was she doing thinking about not getting attention from other adults? She was 13, she didn't need to be coddled by anyone.

"What did Lupin want to talk about with you?" Draco stopped at the bottom of the staircase. He'd taken to surveying her expressions more often since it seemed like nobody else — including her supposed best friends — was paying attention. "Seem pretty pale—again."

Romina got back to her usual self to make a comeback. "Says the one who's permanently pale." She started going down the steps. "Why are you here? You weren't spying on us, were you?"

"No, I was going over Quidditch tactics. Team's really excited now that Gryffindors are out."

"They're not technically out," Romina stopped at the last step.

"But practically. What did Lupin want?"

"Nothing. And I certainly don't see why you want to know. Nosy much?"

"Romina I know more than you think and you should be grateful that instead of snapping at you - like you've deserved for some time - I am keeping your little secret."

"Don't you come at me like you have a clue about what's going on. You could never know."

Draco raised an eyebrow at her, seeming like he was taking her words as a challenge. "I'm not an idiot—"

"Jury's still out on that one," Romina said, crossing her arms in front of her. "Besides, if you did know something, you would have said something already."

"No I wouldn't," Draco said plainly, "Because I'd wait for the perfect opportunity to use it."

Romina frowned. Unfortunately, that did sound like him. Suddenly, she wasn't as brave as before. In fact, panic washed over her. "You — please, can we go get lunch?"

"What—?"

"Please," Romina side-stepped him and hopped from the steps, "I'm super hungry."

Draco turned after her. He'd be more surprised with her quick change of topics if he didn't already know. "You can't outrun this, Oswell."

"Out run what? Hunger? Yeah, you're right about that one! C'mon!"

"Romina!" Draco went after her, unintentionally shouting. "Running doesn't get you anywhere—"

"It's literally getting me to the Great Hall, what do you mean?" Romina laughed at him.

"Stop!" Draco practically begged her to take him seriously at this point. He was so focused on that point that he didn't see her stop so suddenly and crashed into her from behind. "What the — why'd you stop!?"

Romina had stopped suddenly and was staring at something across from them. Draco moved to step beside her and followed her gaze to the group of students heading into the Great Hall. He picked out the familiar brunette Gryffindor boy.

Said brunette Gryffindor saw them as well. He met Romina's gaze for a moment then hurried in with his friends.

Draco frowned after the boy then glanced at Romina beside him. She wasn't frowning, nor appeared to be angry. It actually seemed worse, in Draco's opinion.

"I didn't even do anything..." she whispered, her voice filled with disappointment. "I don't...I don't understand."

"I wouldn't even try to understand, if I were you," Draco said, "He's weird, I already told you."

"But you know him," Romina met his gaze, "So you know if he's mean. Is he?"

"I don't think it really ma—"

"Draco," her voice hardened, "Is he? Is he mean?"

Draco had no idea when the fuck Romina got the power to demand answers from him, nor the ability to make him answer, but she did and before he knew it his mouth had opened to deliver the information she wanted. "No."

Romina looked away before tears formed in her eyes. "He seemed really nice before. And do you know, he's in our classes. I never noticed him before, but he's there. He's the one who usually answers the questions in our Care of Magical Creatures class."

"Yeah, not quite surprising there," Draco mumbled under his breath.

"All it took was a 30 second conversation with me to make him hate me," Romina nodded to herself. "That's how it's going to be for the rest of my life."

"No, it won't—"

"Yes, it will be, because I'll always be who I am and come from where I did. No one's ever going to look at me twice. I'm honestly surprised you guys are my friends."

"Well..."

Romina spared Draco a deadpanning glance. "If you joke right now, I will seriously hurt you. It's not fair. I didn't do anything except...be born."

"Then stop your whining and get over it already," Draco said bluntly. "Can't you see that you're making yourself miserable? It's annoying, really. You should stop it."

Romina scoffed. "Because it's that easy? You have no idea what it's like for me right now."

Draco would have said he had a fairly good idea of what it felt like given that she made it pretty obvious. She'd been in foul moods ever since school started and it was only getting worse, not to mention really irritating. He himself couldn't open his mouth without further agitating her. He looked at her, though, and noticed that right now she wasn't angry. She was still more or less miserable. He rolled his eyes, sighing to himself. "Let's go get lunch already." He didn't exactly give Romina the opportunity to agree when he grabbed her arm and pulled her towards the Great Hall.

"What are you doing?" she immediately went to take his hand off her.

"Having lunch, isn't that what you wanted?"

"I don't know. Maybe I'll skip—"

"Fat chance! You're going!"

~ 0 ~

With only days left of the first term, the hot topic of the students was the next Hogsmeade trip. Most of them were planning for their Christmas shopping but others...perhaps one...was dreading more. Snow had covered the courtyard and it looked like it was far from being over.

"So Ron and I are going to be staying over the vacation," Hermione was telling Romina on their way into the castle. "Are you?"

"Probably not," Romina answered quietly.

"Mm, that's too bad. You probably could have stayed over in the tower since most of the beds would be empty!"

"Yeah, but my aunt and uncle usually want me home for the holidays. Plus, this time I've got no excuse to stay over," Romina gave a casual shrug of her shoulders. Maybe it was a good thing they didn't have to discover the heir of an ancient guy. Those things tend to add extra stress.

"Thank God," Hermione laughed.

They found Ron and Harry coming out of the Great Hall when they entered the castle. Hermione was giddy to go to Hogsmeade already. It was a mighty disappointment to find out Romina wasn't planning on going on the trip either.

"But you didn't go to the last one!" Hermione exclaimed, outraged. "Don't you have Christmas shopping to do?"

"I gave Arden my list," Romina said.

"Don't you want to see what it's like?" Ron even joined in with Hermione. "You need to see Honeydukes! It's the best! It's the…" he trailed off when he saw Harry's disappointed face. "Er...I mean...it's alright…"

"You haven't found a way to sneak out already?" Romina asked Harry. She honestly thought it was weird that nobody had bothered to help Harry sneak out by now.

"Unfortunately, Dementors are actually quite powerful," Harry said sourly.

"So the Invisibility cloak is definitely out?"

"Romina!" Hermione exclaimed. "Don't you give him the idea!"

But Romina seemed anything but guilty. She was actually rather surprised Harry hadn't tried it yet. "You mean you hadn't thought about it yet?"

"Er...no..." Harry momentarily flushed.

"Don't even try it!" Hermione warned him, citing that the Dementors were more than likely to sense his presence. "It would only get you in trouble. Again."

Harry didn't say he would try it, but he didn't say that he wouldn't try it either. He even thought that maybe he could convince Romina to come along with him. The cloak was big enough to sneak both of them out, not that Romina needed to sneak out anyways. As far as he knew, she had her permission slip signed. He just didn't understand why she was being so stubborn lately.

So, when it came time for everyone to regather in the front of the castle to sign out, Harry stayed behind, lurking, until he could take his chance and use the cloak to escape. He already had it over him and kept to the walls so that no one would bump into him and discover him. To his luck, he saw that Arden had seemed to convince Romina to walk out with them. The girls were walking with Carolinha.

"Arden, I'm not going," Romina was saying as she, Arden, and Carolinha headed for the front door of the castle. "I already told Daphne earlier and Pansy too!"

"Well then I am not taking your list with me," Arden threatened.

Romina pulled out another piece of parchment and gave it to Carolinha. She thought Arden might use that threat and had written her Christmas shopping list twice just for the occasion. Carolinha sheepishly took it and avoided Arden's glare.

"I'll bring you back some candy," Carolinha promised and took Arden with her.

"Nothing with raspberry, please," Romina said, "But you don't have to bring me anything, you know."

"Are you kidding? Honeydukes is a dream!" Carolinha said. "Angel's already gone with Theodore and Blaise. They get piles of candy from there!"

"Which is why you should come because you love all the sweets!" Arden insisted one more time.

"I'm good right here," Romina reiterated and shooed them away.

Harry waited until Arden and Carolinha were a good distance out of the castle before he began to approach Romina underneath the cloak. He thought it would be funny to sneak up on her and tap her shoulder while he was invisible. Maybe a fright was what she needed to do a restart!

Romina remained in her spot with a nice, overly polite, smile until her friends disappeared from sight. She had only come out to somewhat appease Arden. Then, with a light sigh, she turned to head back to the dungeons.

"Oswell, not going again?" Draco had stopped Romina midway in the hallway.

Harry stopped in his tracks. Draco had come with both Crabbe and Goyle flanking him and the last thing Harry wanted was for any one of them to bump into him.

Romina merely shook her head. "Didn't feel like it. But please, don't let me stop you from going and having fun."

Crabbe and Goyle took that as a sign to keep on going and so were mighty confused when they noticed Draco didn't moved. The blonde crossed gazed with them and ordered them to leave first. Even Romina was surprised.

Harry immediately pressed himself against the wall to avoid the two bulky boys.

"I'm giving you leniency, Oswell," Draco began as soon as Crabbe and Goyle were gone. "But enough is enough, you know."

Romina scoffed. "Sorry, what? 'Leniency'? Who are you? My aunt and uncle?"

"No, but I'd be happy to send a letter telling them about that new hair of yours," Draco said, and just as Romina opened her mouth to argue, he kept going, "Clearly, the whole 'try to be nice to you' thing doesn't work when you're in a mood."

"In a mood?" Romina went straight into a frown. "These aren't 'moods', you idiot. I already told you—"

"Yeah, yeah," Draco rolled his eyes, "'I have no idea what it's like. I guess you're right, I don't know what it's like to have both of my parents in Azkaban—"

"They are not my parents!"

"YES THEY ARE!" Draco yelled at her, and forced her into silence.

From his hiding spot, Harry was belling his fists angrily. He always knew that Draco would inevitably treat Romina the way he treated the rest of them.

"They're not," Romina found her voice to argue that point. "And I don't know how you know any of this, but you need to keep your mouth shut. This is none of your business and I don't know why you insist on sticking your abnormally pale nose into it!"

"Because you're driving me — us — insane!" Draco exclaimed. "And I've had enough!"

"Oh, you've had enough!" Romina mimicked his face then crossed her arms. "And so what do you want? I expect you're telling me this to blackmail me or something. So, what does the little rich boy want, hm?"

"Don't use that on me," Draco wagged a finger at her. "Because we both know that you've got your load of galleons as well."

Romina scoffed. "I live in a Muggle—"

"You deciding a poor place to live in doesn't mean your vault isn't still there."

"What do you want!?"

"You know what I want? I want you to go to Hogsmeade," Draco supremely surprised Romina and he knew it judging by the amused grin on his face. "I want you to drop the act already and just go back to your regular - albeit annoying - self. Also, I'd like my tolerable potions partner and not the completely detached one I've been sitting next to so far."

Romina blinked for several seconds, her face devoid of emotion for the moment. She couldn't believe what she was hearing, and honestly she thought there had to be a joke behind it. There wasn't. Draco was absolutely serious.

"And if you don't do that, then I'll start to talk," Draco finished with a mild form of a threat. "I'll tell them who the boggart was. I know the names of your parents. My parents crossed paths with them once upon a time. My father told me, after I mentioned your name."

"So I...I have to go to Hogsmeade...and basically...have fun?" Romina said slowly, her nose scrunching as she made the connections of this deal. "And if I don't...you'll tell my aunt and uncle what I did to my hair...and you'll tell the school about the boggart...?"

Draco nodded at her. "You're a genius, after all," he smirked. "Able to figure it out then?"

"Draco, I…" Romina's lips twitched into a smile, "I don't understand…"

Draco rolled his eyes, although Romina (and even Harry for that matter) could see he was clearly bothered by his humble act. "Just hurry up, Oswell. I'll walk you myself but that's it."

"I can't believe I'm hearing this," Romina's smile grew and grew.

In turn, Harry's scowl deepened and deepened. He did not like the interaction at all, but that wasn't the only thing. The things that Draco claimed he knew about weren't things that Romina had told him...or Arden...and yet Draco knew about them. Even if it was through his parents, why wasn't Romina more upset about it?

"Yeah, yeah, go!" Draco motioned. "You're going to freeze if you don't get changed! And I'm not going to wait forever, you know!"

Romina tore her gaze from him and slowly headed for the dungeons. She stopped at the head of the staircase leading down and turned around. "Why do you care about this?" she called.

"Because I know about parents. They're the ones who teach you and leave a legacy for you to take on. And yours have left a legacy even I wouldn't want."

Romina tilted her head with a knowing look. "Ooor...maybe underneath there's a little Grinch heart growing four times the size."

The look on Draco's face was absolutely hilarious for Romina. "What the hell does that even mean?" he demanded to know.

"I'll explain on the way!" She promised and ran off with a giggle.

~0~

Hogsmeade was beautiful.

Romina was taken away by the Winter Wonderland aura the pretty little site had. There was a deep regret in her for waiting so long to meet it. Hogwarts students were easily picked out by their outright excitement (and some by their House scarves).

"Well, there's King over there," Draco's voice pulled Romina from her awe.

He was pointing at Arden who'd come out of a candy shop with a bright red lollipop in hand. She seemed ready to go but was ultimately pulled back to the shop's window display by something new.

"Thank you…" Romina awkwardly said, unsure of where they stood at the moment. "Are you...are you going to keep quiet?"

"I said I would," Draco reminded, shrugging his shoulders. He seemed to be more interested in the streets than their conversation, but Romina guessed it was an attempt to continue with that cool facade of his. "Under the condition you get back to normal by tomorrow."

"Well... thank you for caring—"

That was like a red alarm for Draco. His eyes widened and he immediately set out to correct her. "I did not care—"

Romina placed a hand on his shoulder and urged him to just take her words and leave. "Thank you," she said meaningfully. "In your own way...you cared enough. I won't tell."

Her little smile made the boy shift on his feet. "Whatever," he muttered and quickly got out of there.

Romina managed a little laugh before deciding to go meet Arden. "Hey!"

Arden spun away from the shop's display window. She gasped at the sight of Romina coming towards her. "Romina!" Romina chuckled when Arden gave her a huge hug like they hadn't seen each other in ages. "You changed your mind and you came!"

"Yeah, I guess I did…" Romina ran a hand through her hair, nervously thinking about that reason that brought her to Hogsmeade.

"I don't know what changed but you're going to love this place!" Arden grabbed Romina's arm and yanked her for the candy shop, Honeydukes. As soon as she opened the door, however, Arden felt her lollipop being snatched by thin air. "What?" Arden momentarily paused to watch her lollipop float away in midair. Romina stared at it too, wondering what was going on, but Arden got over it quickly and pulled her into the shop.

Romina was instantly blown away by such a sweet smell of candy. Every candy imaginable had to be up on one of the shelves! It was like a wonderland, alright, candy style! Romina felt the scent of coconut drawing her towards a table, and she almost knocked into levitating sherbet balls!

"Watch out!" Arden laughed and took her by another corner of sweets. "You're gonna wanna try every sample they have, trust me!"

Romina sure enough tried everything Arden held out for her. Whether it was sweet, sour, or chocolatey, it went into her mouth. When she was close to having a stomach ache, she finally set out to do her Christmas shopping. Between her and Arden, she was able to find sets of gifts for everyone she'd originally planned on.

"Why are you getting Pansy something?" frowned Arden after checking off Pansy's name from Romina's list.

"To hopefully get back on her better side," Romina shrugged. She thought perhaps if she offered Pansy a gift of truce the girl would back off on her rudeness a bit. Romina believed the nice emerald scarf she'd found would be in Pansy's likes.

"That girl has no better sides," Arden mumbled before speaking up for the next names. "You've got Angel and Draco here. Are you sure you want to delve into that side too?"

Romina playfully rolled her eyes. "Yes." Perhaps now she definitely wanted to give something nice to Draco for helping her come to Hogsmeade, but no one would know that ever.

"So just group them with Harry and Ron in the department of chocolates," Arden shrugged.

The two girls exited the book shop where they'd bought Hermione her present. It was always a safe bet going with books when it came to her.

"Yeah, though their favorite flavors might make them better," Romina resolved and started for Honeydukes again.

"Carolinha also likes chocolates!" Arden rushed to keep up with the girl.

"Oh, that's right! You know what," Romina paused all of a sudden when she got a new idea. "Everyone but Harry probably knows what every flavor of chocolates from Honeydukes tastes like. Why don't I get them muggle chocolates instead?"

"Are you sure that's a good idea, Rom?" Arden asked slowly, hoping Romina would seriously think this through. "I mean, Carolinha and Angel aren't pureblood supremacists but who knows about their parents. Same with Daphne. And shall I even touch upon Draco's parents?"

Romina considered that part all too well but found a quick solution to it. "Then I just won't tell them until we come back. None of them have allergies so it should be fine."

Arden liked seeing Romina finally come out of her depressive funk so she decided to let the idea be and just help in whatever she could. "Well, you could probably tell Ron about it. But maybe you should consider buying chocolates from Honeydukes for Harry."

"Definitely," Romina gave a nod and opened the door for Honeydukes.

Perhaps Christmas wouldn't be so bad this time.

#ocapp #ochu #fd: harry potter #draco malfoy #harry potter #draco malfoy fics #draco malfoy imagines #harry potter fics #harry potter imagines #draco malfoy fic #draco malfoy imagine #hp #hp fics #hp imagines #hp imagine #hp fic #oc: romina oswell #fic: legacies

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