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#stars it’s 6AM now
shandycandy278 · 9 months
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that post u reblogged frames antis in a dishonest way... literally all we want is for people to be normal about minors and siblings.
but the issue is that most of the bad stuff is framed in a neutral light. or worse, it just exists for someones pleasure. which knowing fandom spaces, is going to be the case a rather high percentage of the time.
antis arent evil, and its clear that that post is coming from a close minded person.
sorry i just got up and seeing a post framing me as someone who wants to censor the whole internet makea me mad. i LOVE being not censored. its just some stuff HAS to be censored because its just morally gross.
but as i said, as long as that morally gross stuff is framed as it is, morally gross, im fine.
No, you’re right. Anti’s aren’t evil. But they’re not entirely right either. There’s a LOT of miscommunication going on in the drama surrounding them, and I will happily take a chance to try and communicate about this as clearly and calmly as I can.
I’m not mad or upset or anything, PLEASE do not see this as me being like “actually you’re WRONG”. That’s not it at all. I’m just going to be going over what was brought up in the post you are talking about, and how I interpreted them/what I believe.
(TW/CW: talk of the pro/anti drama, pedophilia, incest, abuse, murder, suicide, terrorism, rape, censorship)
I’m very confused as to how you thought this was an attack on you. The post was literally talking about how the response they have is very natural and good. Especially in real-life situations, because those sorts of things are wrong in real life. If you reread the post, you’ll see that it compares it to an automatic immune system for fandom spaces and the like. There was no hate or shade thrown, because you guys are necessary and right that incest and pedophilia is wrong. There’s nothing that says that you are not right.
But it also says that fiction is something that requires different approaches in this regard. People writing and drawing about pedophilia and Incest don’t want it to happen in real life an know it’s abusive and shady IRL. They KNOW it’s wrong, they aren’t denying that it’s wrong. The post actually explains this part better than I’ve seen many others describe this, and if you read it, you’ll find that they go on to define that exploring this sort of what-if thing in a fictional setting helps us, as humans, process the horrors of the reality and and the reality of the situation.
I’ve written about characters committing suicide and killing each other. Does that mean I want everyone to kill each other and then themselves? No. But I couldn’t fully process and define how that made me feel. Not until I wrote about it in a fictional setting. I didn’t even realize how horrible it was that I had almost offed myself years before that, back before I found writing and fanfiction. Not until I wrote about it. Now if I write characters killing themselves, it’s a reminder to myself. My life is valuable.
People make shows and the likes about serial killers too, you know. There’s fiction out there that highlights that, slavery, abuse, rape, terrible addictions, genocide, cults- but Anti’s don’t get upset about those. Not really.
Because those are ALL horrible, terrible things. Things that suck about our world, things that we hear about and it makes us feel sick. Because they’re BAD. Everyone knows they’re bad. Proshippers, Anti’s- EVERYONE. The only people who don’t know that are the people being abused and the people abusing them (depending on the situation).
You can drop into a pro shipper or Anti’s inbox and ask “how do you feel about school shootings, incest, pedophilia, rape, and the likes IRL?”, and they will respond with “man they SUCK humans sucks I wish people wouldn’t do that, I wish humans would (insert something to try and get the horrendous acts to stop). I hate that it exists IRL.” Or something along those lines.
But I haven’t seen anything telling writers and artists to stop creating content on those things. Why? Because creating them in a fictional reality helps us process the truth of it.
All of this was also in the post! I understand if it was a hard read because you felt like you were being attacked by it, but I do NOT think the post’s intent was to “attack” antis. Heck, “anti” is even in quotes because I’m fairly certain OP was only using the title so that people would see it and know that this is what they were discussing. It was just to try to explain the dilemma to people who didn’t know, or to those who have chosen one moniker or another not knowing what exactly it means or what’s happening. An analysis, if you will.
But I’d like to gently ask (if you can find it in yourself to, because I’m not going to force you to do something you’re uncomfortable with) that you take a deep breath, push your feelings about the drama and the likes to the side, and re-read it. It really summed up everything nicely, with a comparison that is honestly very true- not just for fandom, but for a lot of humanity. Again, if you don’t, I understand. It’s very hard to reread a post after it gets you all huffy and puffy and upset. (Especially when you hate feeling like that, like I do, and it makes everything worse.) But it’s ALSO very hard to see what exactly is being talked about in a post and what the point of the post is if you read it huffy and puffy. Again, you don’t HAVE to, but it’s something I’d recommend trying if you feel up to it.
Along side that, I don’t think pedophilia and incest in fandom was ever intended or meant for it to be centered AROUND the fact that it was pedophilia or incest. Not unless it was a MAJOR story/plot point, or a part of the source material (like in a LOT of various Anime. I’ll be very honest, it’s a surprise that anime has not been brought up/referenced in any pro/anti drama I’ve seen so far. There is a LOT of fictional pedophilia/incest going on in there. Then again, Japanese fandom has stated that they don’t care about antis/proshippers or any of this sort of thing and will just happily block anyone who tries to drag in drama or throw them into mud. Maybe that’s why. Idk).
I personally think it started because people liked the idea of the character types and personalities working off of each other. Not because of some “HIDDEN SECRET EVIL PREDATOR URGE”. They just like how the characters acted together and had chemistry, thought it was cute, and went with it. The fact that it was incest and/or pedophilia wasn’t even at the forefront of their minds. They literally went “OOO TWO PRETTY CHARACTERS they should kiss”.
And honestly, that’s a lot of what shipping just… is. It’s deciding you like how two characters interact, taking it, and running off with it. Shipping discourse exists because people disagree on how that should happen and what dynamics should be in a ship, too! Because it happens soooo often. This isn’t much different, even if it’s a ship that others or many May view as problematic.
The post WAS admittedly a bit confusing about this next topic, so I understand if this was a big basis towards confusion, but-
I am a firm believer that people should create what they want to make, and not what others want to see from them.
And this post says much the same, in the later parts of it. Just phrased weirdly.
If this means that they make a bunch of stuff about incest, porn, pedophilia, murder- that’s not our business.
We are in no right to tell them what they should or should not create. It doesn’t matter their reasoning. It is their freedom to make whatever they want. No one should be policed over their own content, which they make for themselves.
But You know what is within your right to do?
Blocking them.
You have every right to block them so that you don’t have to see what they’ve made. If you don’t like it, I recommend you familiarize yourself with the block button and blocking tags, too.
And I think this is SO IMPORTANT for people to do.
A lot of proshippers have adopted this tactic, did you know? A lot of them block other proshippers and the likes ALL THE TIME, because they don’t like the content that that person makes. It’s fascinating. Proshippers will even do their best to respect Anti shippers by blocking them, so that the Anti won’t ever have to see the Proshipper’s works. And if proshippers find that someone is actually IRL a pedophile or a predator like that (a rare occurrence, mind you), they will block them, too! (Like what happened with an NSFW artist named Neahchan some time back).
But I think SOME (not all) Anti’s don’t understand that this is the easiest and safest way. Because you want to know what those FEW (not all) Antis do if they follow a proshipper?
If they are not blocked immediately, one of the first things those few do is harass the person. Cyber bully them. Maybe something small at first, but it gets to big things quickly. “You are sick I can’t believe you support this, let me make a full on call out post about this to tell everyone to isolate and bully you too”. If the proshipper chooses to comment or argue against the allegations, harassment just gets worse. If they block it then, it saves some face, but the drama swells horribly and it takes HUGE blows on their mental health.
Do you remember those videos about the kid that was bullied online and in school? About how they were going to kill themselves because they felt so horrible? That’s what those few antis are doing. They’re doing that to a human being.
(To me, this is the big issue. This is the thing we should REALLY be talking about instead of if a ship is okay to ship or whatever.)
If the proshipper blocks them right away, it’s a lot less impactful and a lot less harm is done. And those few antis will pick up a fuss about it “why did you block me! Your AUs are so cool! Whatever I’m going to try and harass you anyway”. (This is something that has actually happened recently to Skumhu, the creator of leviathan tale.)
When proshippers usually talk about Antis, it’s often these antis specifically that they’re talking about. The ones that harass and cyber bully them over completely fictional things that have no impact on the real world.
But why am I bringing up blocking people, anyway? You were talking about censorship.
That’s because blocking is a form of censorship, just personal to you.
If you were to go out one day and censor the entirety of the internet from, let’s say, images of any and all kinds of skeletons because skeletons and their symbolism made you uncomfortable, you’d get a LOT of people really upset at you. Because skeletons mean something completely different to them.
Okay, well, what if you prevented people from talking about and discussing terrorism by censoring them? It’s bad and horrible, surely if we stopped talking about it then it would stop. But now a lot of people who were victims or terrorism are upset because they had safe spaces where they could talk about their traumas and express them without fear. They don’t get that anymore with censorship in play. And now, terrorists have actually increased their attacks because there isn’t enough awareness going around, and people can’t prepare to defend themselves or keep themselves safe because they can’t even find out that it’s happening.
So now what if we censor pedophilia? Horrible, gross. SURELY something that’s influenced from everything going on online, so stopping it would put a stop to it. Right?
I promise, the same exact thing that I described above with terrorism will happen here.
Victims would not be able to discuss or share their experiences safely, or recover in their own way. Children would be put into further risk because parents wouldn’t be taught how to teach kids to watch out for the signs of a predator and notify their parents. Some parents might not even know of what signs to look out for, because we censored all the content of it.
Full, complete censorship of something gives oppressors the power to be more oppressive.
I understand being uncomfortable when fictional characters are written as incestuous or pedophilic, but if you want to censor the uncomfortable and icky gross stuff entirely, you should be ready for the consequences of censoring EVERY LITTLE THING about it because extremists and religious extremists will take what you’ve done and make it ten times worse. It’s not worth the pain and suffering it would cause. Not worth the lives that would be lost or the lack of support systems in place for survivors.
Is this every Anti’s vendetta? ABSOLUTELY NOT! But that doesn’t mean that censorship doesn’t give the abusers the power and freedom they need to hurt people.
There’s a reason why these are the signs of people in abusive relationships, and that’s because the lack of knowledge and support someone has, the more power the abuser has.
The safest and healthiest way isn’t to censor the whole internet because you’re uncomfortable with something. It’s to block users and tags who make you personally uncomfortable. It’s SO much better for your mental health, AND theirs. No one gets harmed, hurt, or cyberbullied.
It’s so important to know that there is SUCH a vast range of pro and anti people. There are certainly proshippers that are abusers, trolls, or jerks. Just like there are also antis who are the same.
(Trust me. I’ve been hurt by both a proshipper and an anti shipper. I’d rather not have to talk about my experiences with them to prove my point, because I’m also friends with pros and antis. It’s also a very private experience, and just mentioning that it happened is something that makes me feel weird.)
Repeat after me the 15% rule: in any given group of people, 15% of them are just the worst, most horrible and sucky people you could ever meet. And those people should be blocked for EVERYONE’S mental health and well being, but more specifically, YOUR mental health and well being.
I apologize if this doesn’t make sense or if there are any typos. It’s 5:30 in the morning and I haven’t slept, but I just… HAD to say this.
I’m so sorry you got hurt by that post and felt like it was attacking you. That was not my intention and I doubt that that was OP’s intention, either. But it’s SO important to me that people are free to do as they wish and create what they want in safe fictional spaces, to define that proship does not mean they support those things IRL, and the issues with censoring the icky gross stuff.
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starredforlife · 21 days
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ive been so productive today I scheduled a dentist appointment and paid a bill and sent an invoice to my professional job i should just play videogames the rest of the day (<— I’ve been putting off the aforementioned errands for like a week lol)
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nitroplusofficial · 7 months
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a “tag people u wanna know better” game!! its been a while, im very honored. Thank u @occulticsnomajo!!! sorry it took me a minute
last song: french navy by camera obscura! I’ve been on a big twee pop thing recently, and daydreaming about a house in the PNW where we have warm lights on all the time. Back then, someone’s job could be “blogger”. i yearn for those days
favorite color: green as well! It’s going to be hard to not have green hair anymore, when I have to chop the dye out. Or who knows! Maybe I’ll have enough money to keep it maintained forever.
currently watching: umm. seinfeld reruns. also started watching danganronpa 3 with friends. im sorry
last movie: i recently watched high sprits with a friend!! It was not the movie we thought it was gonna be, so we stopped right at the ending. Too much straight ghost sex.
currently reading: i just finished Memories of Amorous Gentlemen and it was so fucking good. Binged the whole thing in like an hour. But I should check out something new from the library!! I think i’m well enough to get started on house of leaves…
sweet/spicy/savory: all three at same time. but watch out
relationship status: if u know u know if u dont im not telling
current obsessions: I’m daydreaming about how to set up an emulation station now that I have a TV in my room! so that? Cause I wanna play retro games in bed.
last thing I googled: i have too many privacy related extensions for google to successfully keep track of my searches, so no idea, sorry. oh wait i have it open in another tab. "alias python on mac"
currently working on: AH!!! so much. but I’m taking my game to a dev meetup on saturday, and I have to get back to that after i'm done writing this, so probably that??
i taggggggg @mevil @snoozaga @gummyache @plaant @keygen @shogas @squigglewitch @silmist @heckmaster2000 @lolbatz and this is a pretty random selection so anyone who wants to do this... or if i somehow skipped you, i didnt mean to >_<
also @occulticsnomajo i have a dress of your header!! i wore it to a wedding recently, it's my fav :00 i know there's no question about that on the tag game...but i like the dress, so thanks for letting me show it off >_<
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alfairy · 9 months
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You know, with the amount of properties that Scooby Doo has crossed over with, I’m surprised we haven’t gotten a Scooby Doo and Fnaf crossover movie yet. Like come on, tell me that wouldn’t be fun to watch.
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who-knows73 · 1 year
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Not Stranger Things related like my usual content but imagine being a teen in the early 80s and you really like these new Star Wars movies that have been coming out. Any time you try to explain that you're excited for the sixth episode to come out people think it's a show and when you tell them that they're movies they're shocked that they made six of them. Then you have to go through the agonising process of explaining that no, there's only two movies out so far but the first one they released was episode four and they just can't fathom it what-so-ever.
I just think it would be pretty mentally taxing to have to repeatedly explain that when all you really want to do is talk about the plot and characters of these exciting new movies.
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starchild--27 · 8 months
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_
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feistyvampire · 10 months
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does he know how to wield any of these weapon options? the answer is likely nope but now hes gonna learn!
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janitorhutcherson · 5 months
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bedtime with mike and abby ( mike schmidt x reader)
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hi guys! this is my first ever lil fic/imagine/blurb here!! if y'all like this, I'll keep it up. I'm also new to tumblr, so please please be patient with me. in the future i'd love to do requests.
also if someone wants to help me with formatting/be friends, just shoot me a msg :p
this is just a quick lil imagine/blurb. I've seen so many smutty fics and i wanted to spice it up w/ some fluff. just sleepy time on mike's night off! on w the fic :p
*edit* this isn’t revised!! i threw something together last min and posted cause i felt like writing lol. don’t mind the typos
word count: 1,633
warnings: none! just fluff, angst if u squint!!
summary: nighttime with mike and abby on his day off!
Most of the time, you, your boyfriend Mike, and his little sister Abby were on entirely different schedules. Mike worked nights at a shitty gas station job for the time being after his job at Freddy's was... well.. no more for obvious reasons. Even though he swore off the night shift, this was necessary until he could find something better. Jobs were sparse at the moment, and Mike's history didn't exactly make him a star candidate.
A typical night would consist of you making the three of you dinner, slowly forcing Abby to venture out when it came to her taste buds. Recently, she'd taken a liking to tacos. You and Mike would make a joint effort to get her ready for bed earlier together, as Mike was more particular about being there for her since the incident. She'd get a bath, get into her jammies, and the two of you would tuck her in with a bedtime story. You'd both kiss her little forehead goodnight, then kiss your boyfriend on his lips before sending him off.
Most nights, you tossed and turned in your sleep, unable to rest properly without Mike by your side. A painfully dull feeling would rest in your stomach, the lack of his warmth beside you agonizing. You'd spend all night waiting for 6am to roll around as you felt the bed dip on his side, barely stirring you from your sleep. You'd have thirty minutes until your alarm went off, thirty minutes to wrap yourself up into him before you once again went on your separate ways... living your separate lives until you could have your few hours of union later on.
But tonight, you were lucky. Mike had gotten the next few days off. His job was being extra kind as they actually recognized the hard work Mike put in, something he wasn't used to. They'd told him someone would take over for a bit, to enjoy himself, to rest. It may have been a low-paying, trashy, borderline dangerous job, but his boss was nice, and the customers were certainly safer to deal with than those at the pizzeria.
You called out sick from work, not wanting to miss a single second with your little trio. You'd both even made the decision to pull Abby out of school for the day, spending it building forts, watching movies, and eating ice cream. The three of you even went out rollerskating, Mike awkwardly tumbling every few seconds on the rink as Abby would bust out laughing at him. The three of you were now sat around on the couch, Mike smooshed into the far side of the armrest as your entire body lay on his, Abby's head resting in your lap as she sleepily blinked her eyes. She'd already had her bath, brushed her teeth, and all three of you were in your pajamas.
"So, everyone have a good day?" Mike asked, turning his head to the two of you with a small but sleepy smile.
"Mhm," Abby hummed quietly, slowly nodding her head against your lap. It was clear that she was moments from passing out, and once Abby was out, she was impossible to get up without a fight.
"Okay, I think it's time for bed," you giggled, slowly lifting your own head up from Mike's shoulder. Mike nodded in agreement, a laugh of his own escaping his lips.
You both slowly pulled Abby up, getting her up on her feet, her half asleep state making her delirious as she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, staring back at the two of you in confusion.
"C'mon, Abs, it's time for bed," Mike muttered, standing up. He grabbed your hand, pulling you up with him. You stood as well, following Mike as he led Abby to her room. She crawled up into her bed, her little body tucking under her blankets as the two of you sat on both sides of her.
"Want a bedtime story?" Mike asked, raising his eyebrows as he leaned down to press a small kiss to Abby's forehead. Abby's lips parted to answer, but before she could, her eyes were closed and she was out. A sincere and quiet chuckle escaped underneath Mike's breath, his eyes full of love for his sister as her stared down at her. You couldn't help but stare, the edges of your mouth turning up into a sleepy smile of your own. He was so majestic, his messy but soft brown curls were laying in every which way on his head. Even though he was much more rested than usual, his eyes were still somewhat sunken in, but to you, that just made him more attractive. His scruff was messy, unshaven, but it managed to highlight his jawline. The sparkle that remained in his eyes, even through it all, after everything that he'd been through, warmed you to your core, your love for him overwhelming.
"What?" Mike asked quietly with a smile still plastered on his lips, his eyes now locked on yours. A blush crossed your cheeks as you realize you’d been caught, your eyebrows raising.
“Nothin’,” you hummed, shaking your head. “Just admiring you.” Your hand reached out to his as the two of you went to your own bedroom, the only light now lighting up your house being the moonlight and street lamps peeking through the blinds. You both crawled into bed, pulling the blankets over your bodies.
There was nothing but silence other than the sound of the fan in your room, the hum almost hypnotic as you wrapped yourself up in his arms. Your head rest against his chest as he instantly tugged you closer, his back flat on the bed as his hand cradled your side. His thumb drew small figure eights on your shoulder. Your body felt fuzzy, a type of relaxation you hadn’t felt at night in a while. Mike made you feel safe. On nights where you two were able to just snuggle up, nothing could buzz in your mind. Anxious thoughts disappeared, even the ones that seemed to be a constant in the back of your brain. There was nothing but a warmness in your mind and a beam of love in your heart.
“Hey, baby?” You heard Mike ask softly, his voice cracking from his sleepiness. You were broken from your train of thought by this, looking up at the man with the sleepy eyes. “Hm?” You hummed in response, your eyes fluttering, but he couldn’t see due to the lack of light. Mike sat up, pulling you up with him as he grabbed your hands, both of your faces now lit up by the light peeking through the cracks in your curtain.
“I- I know we don’t get nights like these much, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’m never home, I’m sorry you have to do so much for you and Abby alone. I’m sorry I dragged you into that mess with Freddy’s, got you involved in so much of this,” he said, his voice seeping with sadness and regret. His eyes held an even softer emotion than they did earlier, one that felt like a knife to your chest. “Most importantly, I’m sorry I can’t be the boyfriend I should be. I mean, we should be spending our nights out at clubs, going out on special dates and vacations, and I hate that I’m unable to give you that,” he sniffled, a tear now falling down his eye.
You leaned forward, a frown on your lips as your eyebrows furrowed, your eyes locked on his as you placed your hand on his cheek, wiping away the tear with your thumb as you shook your head. Mike’s own two much larger hands were now placed on both of your cheeks as he continued. “But listen, Y/N, I love you, more than I have ever loved anyone, okay? I- I’m not good at this shit, I know I’m not. I’m clumsy and I’m bad at emotions. I don’t always know what I want or what I need, but I know I don’t only want you, but I need you. You came into my life and you brightened it where it was the darkest. You brought happiness back, you made me understand what joy was again, what it was like to feel.. complete. You saved me, but..” he trailed off again, full on tears falling down his cheeks now. “Most importantly, you saved Abby, made her feel whole again too, gave her somethin’ like a mother, something I couldn’t give her,” he said, his voice breaking at the end. Before he could say another word, you wrapped around arms around him, pulling him into a massive bear hug. He buried his head into the crook of your neck, your mind not even focused on the salty tears and the snotty nose that was leaned up against your shoulder. Your hands rubbing his back as you kissed the top of his head.
“Oh, baby..” you whispered softly, squeezing him like if you let go he’d disappear. “You know I love you so much too…” you finished, pulling his face up by his chin, pressing a soft, gentle but electric kiss to his lips. The two of you then settled back into bed, curling up in each other’s arms as he played with your hair, occasionally leaning down to press a gentle kiss to your lips, small sniffles still leaving his nose from the emotional moment. He was right, it was rare you got moments like these together, but when you did, you cherished them. It took about thirty minutes of sweet nothings and cuddles before the two of you drifted off, in your own little dream worlds filled with many nights like these.
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xiao-come-home · 1 year
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How Genshin men wake up with you;
and spend their morning with you.
┏━━━✦❘༻༺❘✦━━━┓
✰ Characters: Kaeya, Diluc, Zhongli, Xiao, Itto, Ayato, Kazuha, Dainsleif, Alhaitham.
✰ Words: ~3,5k.
✰ SFW ; gn!reader, no mentions of pronouns. fluff.
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Warnings: a lot of physical touch and kisses, reader is implied to have hair, ayato is a bit sus, kazu deserves the world, alhaitham makes kavehs life a bit difficult by choice. msg me to add more.
A/N: this is a sequel to How Genshin men sleep with you post, with two new characters added cuz it was fun to write :') a lot of alhaitham's morning routine is assumed because usually, id try to base it off canon, so yeah ;3;
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Kamisato Ayato:
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as the Yashiro commissioner, he has to wake up pretty early. but... there's only one problem - Ayato hates it with passion. poor Thoma used to shake him awake every 15 minutes, at least three times. ayato would just swat his hands away, press his face into the pillow and sigh loudly, promising Thoma to get up in a few minutes. (he didn't)
now that you're living with your boyfriend, you share the same bed. which means a few things - he clings to you the entire night, your limbs are tangled together in the morning, and now you're the one in charge of getting him out of bed (Thoma almost cried in happiness). he annoyingly turns off the screaming alarm and snuggles back into you.
he has a habit of, quite literally - squishing his cheek against yours as he lies next to you. he also likes to nuzzle into your neck and grip you like a monkey that found the last banana in its vicinity. he hums at you and lies down with his eyes closed if you ask him questions or say anything. you can tell by the tone he hums with whether he agrees on something or not, but generally, that keeps him enough busy not to fall asleep again.
i can't stress this enough, he's ALL over you. if he's in his "cheek-against-cheek" mode, he literally cradles your other one with his palm. if his face is in your neck and you lie on your back, his fingers are intertwined with yours. the more awake he is, the more kisses are being placed by his lips.
he definitely requests breakfast in bed. at this point he's cuddled enough, so now he wants to feed you. literally. he picks up the food skillfully with his favorite chopsticks and carefully brings it to your mouth, "open up my love," he speaks in his usual, soft-spoken tone, but it's clear his morning voice is still there. "that's it, you're so good for me. is it good? would you like some more?" hmm..
just so you know: he wants you to feed him too and will pout and threaten (playfully) to go back to sleep if you don't. since he likes to sleep more, there aren't many activities you share in the morning; as a result, he cherishes the morning snuggle and sharing your first meal together a lot. Ayato is always curious to hear about your upcoming plans for the day - but he won't say no to lighthearted conversations either. he just really wants to hear your voice.
Arataki Itto:
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listen. he either sleeps until 6am or 1pm. there's no in-between, sometimes he stays up all night or falls asleep on your lap on the couch as soon as he comes back home. no, he won't move.
it's hard to say whether he's a morning person - but probably not; he whines a lot into your hair when he has to wake up early and hasn't rested enough, babbling how dark it is outside and that you're too warm to let go of.
speaking of, he holds onto you in the mornings like his life depends on it - you have to work? no, no, no - just stay for a while longer, while he smushes your face right into his... um, prominent chest. you feel the warmth of his bare skin, his chin on top of your head, his large hands drawing invisible patterns of stars, clouds, or hearts under your pajama t-shirt; he sneaks a few kisses on your hair, humming in contentment when he feels you hug him back with your arm over his own hip.
he's totally willing to make you a nice meal before work though, and wake up earlier in the process. most of the time it ends up in absolute disaster and him taking twice as much time to clean it up. but... if you decide to make breakfast together, itto can actually cook up a nice meal (with "a little of your help"). while the preparations are done and the meal is almost ready to be served, the oni hugs you from behind and sways a little from side to side, nuzzling into your neck drowsily and trying not to drool on you.
generally, he's very touchy after waking up (as you can probably guess by now), so he wants to accompany you everywhere before you have to leave. he'll cuddle you before leaving the sheets, link your pinkies when you wait for the water to boil, go showering together, have his hand on your thigh if you do your makeup, attempt to help you with your makeup which might end up in very interesting results, and trying to mischievously steal some kisses just as you're about to leave.
Itto's hands cup your cheeks gently and he flashes you a boyish smirk; he leans in and connects your lips, purring as some of his unruly hair falls onto your shoulders. he always claims he "just wants to give his little sunshine a good luck kiss for the day," but in reality, he just wants to feel you real good before you depart for today. also, he really likes flavored lip glosses, and you keep buying them, so it's not his fault for giving in to your "devilish temptations"
Kaeya:
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the bed is an absolute mess. the pillows are everywhere, his part of the duvet is barely covering him from the stomach down, and probably, he has one of his arms on your face.
it takes a while for him to fully wake up; once he opens his eyes just barely enough to see, he scans the room to make sure you're near him - and then he either gets up or decides to snuggle up to you, kiss your temple and go back to sleep for a bit more.
if it's a work day, he uses all his willpower (read: 30 alarms) to wake up earlier and just admire you. he likes to big spoon you and have his arm over your hip, gently grazing your hand with the pads of his fingers; Kaeya just can't get enough of the smell of your shampoo, of your warmth, of your presence.
before properly getting out of bed, he hovers above your sleeping form - it gives him butterflies to see you so peaceful; therefore, he always bends down and places a few butterfly kisses on your cheek with his pretty lashes. he chuckles lightly when he sees you stir in your sleep because of the interaction, so he gives your cheek a proper kiss and (unwillingly) leaves the warm bed.
just so you know - he WILL attempt to get in your pants if he has a day off. Kaeya's hands start to wander automatically as he kisses you awake (or at least attempts to), and if he feels like a little shiet enough - he might place his cold feet on your legs to help you wake up and have some fun! :)
you might need reinforcements if he doesn't wanna get up in winter when it's cold. Kaeya clings to the duvet like he's about to meet the grim reaper himself.
Diluc:
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he has a routine that he strictly follows - but at the same time, he's an expert at being quiet and letting you sleep. he takes his time getting dressed up though - he can't help but cheat a bit and watch you snore.
even if it's his day off, he still wakes up earlier than you. but there's a catch - he then leaves your shared bed for a moment to greet his maids and order them to make you a mix of your and his favorites for breakfast. he doesn't want to wake you up, but he really wants to talk with you again - so he might do that with that precious scent of freshly prepared food..
an absolute sucker for playing with your hair in the morning. he runs his fingers through your hair in the gentlest way possible, shifting closer to you and pressing a sweet, warm kiss on your forehead that he lets to linger for a bit longer.
likewise, when you play with his hair to wake HIM up - he might just feel his heart explode and shed a few happy tears. he's never believed there will be a day he meets an angel like you, even more so that graces him with such affection, sincere affection that makes your eyes sparkle.
Diluc leaves you his t-shirt he sleeps in just before going to Angel's Share - it smells like his body wash with a little bit of his natural scent. He usually takes it off in the middle of the night anyway, finding himself to feel a bit too hot for his liking.
Either way, you love cuddling with it. He's not there physically, but it's a reminder that he made it safely and spent the remaining hours of the night next to you.
Zhongli:
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he also has his own routine! he wakes up as soon as the sun begins to rise, quietly walking to the kitchen and carefully making a cup of tea for himself. he drinks his tea slowly, shuddering at the taste; his taste buds overflown with the right combination of spices. he finishes his drink just in the right time - it's time to wake you up now.
Zhongli sits on the bed and brushes some of your hair behind your ear; he kisses your forehead and begins to mumble good morning to you. He smiles at you and caresses your cheek with his thumb when he sees you trying to convince him to get just 5 more minutes.
while you finally get up and groggily change your clothes, he goes to prepare your favorite drink, be it tea, coffee, or anything else. he likes to put some mild spices in it to make your usual drink feel a bit more special and surprising. if you can't handle spices, that's fine! instead, he can give you a small snack :)
he really, really wants to brush your hair and vice versa. it's probably one of his favorite morning activities. he's trying his best not to pull your hair and if he does, he places an apologetic kiss on the crown of your hair. he'd be even happier if you let him style your hair, going to the garden or a flower shop nearby and decorating it with small flowers.
but... if you persuade him to get back to bed, he'll oblige. though, in return, you can't fall back asleep - he keeps you awake by asking you if you had any dreams or nightmares, to tell him about them, or what you'd like to eat.
he asks you to do his makeup! Zhongli's perfectly able to do it himself, but he loves seeing how focused you are on the given task, the corners of his lips going up when he hears you curse under your breath, trying to suppress his laugh.
Xiao:
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a morning bird (ha!) just like Zhongli, but he has no routine... unless killing demons counts as one. considering this, he usually isn't around when you wake up :( (not that he sleeps anyway.. 90% of the time.)
however, all it takes to make him appear is to call his name - Xiao never misses it and always prioritizes you first. he might roll his eyes if you call him "just" to lie in bed with you. but it's fine - he "berates" you (not really) while almost spooning you.
there are some rare mornings shared together with Xiao, though; he says he has to watch you to keep you safe and hopes that you won't question the excuse any further, but you know it's something else. After all, his hands covering the rosy cheeks seem to give everything away.
in reality, Xiao's cold heart gets well-deserved warmth whenever he sees you sleep. of course he still wants to protect you, but realizing how much trust you have in him to fall asleep without second thoughts is more than anything he could ever want. he smiles, eyebrows knitting together ever so slightly when he pecks your face all over; his kisses are quick and chaste. even though you can't really feel this now, you know his lips leave a tingling sensation.
he lets you sleep a bit longer on his bare hand and doesn't care if it falls asleep. he's so mesmerized by your faith in him that he just does not care. even as simple as it sounds.
when the tiredness gets the best of him, the next morning you find him breathing steadily next to you. you don't wake him up though, probably because as soon as you'd do that, he's gone off to fight the evil. give him a blanket and prepare a plate of almond tofu - the disbelief on his face quickly turns into adoration, accepting the meal and savoring every bite. after he's done, he kisses your knuckles and whispers "I love you" against your skin.
Kaedehara Kazuha:
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yet another person who wakes up extremely early. he opens his eyes slowly, blinking a few times to get used to the light; his crimson orbs scan the environment, and his face lights up when there's no danger around. he stretches his arms to shake off the remains of sleepiness and presses a good morning kiss on your shoulder.
he later decides to hunt or fish for fresh meat - depends on what you like more, but he'd be overjoyed if you let him do his signature dish! he doesn't go far, just enough to still keep an eye on you. don't worry - he's also prepared if you don't eat meat at all! he's more than happy to learn recipes to accommodate and just to simply make you smile more.
he starts a small fire nearby your sleeping form, the distance is enough to make you feel warm, but not enough to possibly hurt you. the crackling of fire wakes you up, along with the delicious smell of Kazuha's cooking. when he notices you slowly awakening, his mouth curves into a smile; he shifts next to you and kisses your nose.
he's trying to fight the grin creeping on his face every time you enjoy his food. really, that's why he does that every time you're traveling together. also, by this point - he still has a massive bed hair. please brush his hair in return. and braid it too - he'll touch the finished piece with a blush on his face and shyly thank you for being so kind to him.
also! he trusts you a lot and lets you change his bandage every morning. particular spots hurt more than the others and Kazu tries not to show his pain; but seeing how much care you're putting into it, disinfecting it, and kissing the pain away when he winces - the love stored in his heart makes the relief appear faster.
he ALWAYS makes sure you're all warm and comfy, especially in winter. Kazu covers you entirely with a thick blanket from his bag, the sole item in it during your shared travels. he's also willing to stay cuddled up together for a bit longer when he notices the snowfall outside. his warm breath fans over your neck as his arm over your waist tightens and brings you closer to him.
Dainsleif:
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again, another morning person - but slightly less by choice. as soon as Dainsleif shoots open his eyes, he tries to calm down his racing heart; he lets out a sigh of relief when his indigo eyes notice you sound asleep.
he smiles shyly at your intertwined hands. he brings them closer to his face, pressing a sweet kiss on each of your knuckles, careful not to wake you up and give you a bit more time to rest.
even though you've expressed multiple times that you hate it - Dain can't stop guarding you right after awakening himself. He won't get back to sleep no matter what, keeping an eye out on the possible danger. He's aware that you don't like it - but he can't let anything happen to you, not even a scratch if he's nearby. You're everything he has left. He's lost everything else and despite being aware of the strength that gods possess, he's willing to cross blades with them if it meant extending your life more in return.
he always shifts your resting body on his - sometimes just your head on his lap so you can sleep a bit more comfortably, or entirely, so he keeps you secure between his legs, using his chest as a pillow and having his arms wrapped around you tightly.
"Good morning, my star. How was your sleep? Did you have any pleasant dreams?" is his daily mantra he says when he sees you arise. Next, Dain caresses your lips with his own in a tender kiss. if you decide that you feel cheesy that morning, answer something along these lines: "it seems like I haven't awoken from my pleasant dream yet." his cheeks will flush cherry red, hand flying to cover the blush immediately; even if you can't see it, you know it worked. it always does.
Dainsleif might not be kazuha-tier when it comes to cooking, so he prefers to take you to various taverns for your first meal if it's possible (yes, he's in mom-mode when it comes to breakfast and won't stop until you eat, because "breakfast must not be skipped. it's the most important meal!"). however, when that option isn't available, he prepares you a meal himself. some recipes are long forgotten, they taste like nothing else you've eaten before - they taste bizarre at first, but later on dain finally hits the jackpot and discovers your favorite. while your stomach gets filled with khaenri'ahn delicacies, his chest almost suffocates with the warmth and he watches you with twinkling eyes and the most tender smile.
Alhaitham:
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this man. he ZOOMS out of bed as soon as the alarm rings. immediately puts on half of his clothes. when he's about to leave the room... he comes back near the bed, gives you a quick kiss on the forehead, and then moves to the kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee and your favorite drink.
he really wants to avoid Kaveh. he will NOT deal with him in the morning, nuh uh. unless he can make his day a bit worse than Kaveh anticipates...
either way, he lets you sleep 20 more minutes. the exact moment the clock on his wall hits 7:20am, he returns to your shared room and gently shakes you to wake you up. if you don't comply, he just takes you bridal style to the kitchen and sits you on his lap, regardless of whether you still sleep.
he loves pressing you tightly to his chest, inhaling the fresh scent of your laundry detergent and your own, natural one; he hides his face in your neck, closing his eyes. his lips connect with your neck and leave a trail of kisses, while his defined arm tightens around your waist. perhaps that will wake you up?
hearing Kaveh entering the kitchen and greeting you (and mumbling something to him too, but clearly not genuine) he looks at him with a slight annoyance. Kaveh merely lets out a "hmph" sound, clearly unaware of what Alhaitham is about to do. the scribe locks eyes with him shortly before going back to kissing your neck, but this time marking you; the obscene noises cause you to immediately awaken if you haven't, and Kaveh storming out of the room with a blush, muttering curses under his breath. Alhaitham only chuckles as you turn your head to face him, "good morning, love. you've finally woken up. we have to leave soon, so hurry up and drink it before it gets cold like last time."
on his day off, his day starts similarly - he wakes up a bit later though, but still needs his morning coffee. with the steaming drink on his nightstand, he joins you back below the cozy sheets, sitting down with his back against the headboard. he glances at you one last time and kisses your lips ever so slightly, the touch so tender that you barely register it; then, his eyes are glued to the book in hand he's been reading for a few days. if you wish, he'll gladly have you between his legs and let you snore on his chest - you don't even have to say a thing - he automatically rises his arm and waits for you to move without moving his eyes from the book. once you've settled comfortably, he pulls up the duvet and puts his chin on your head (and occasionally rubs your back gently, but denies it. even if you catch him. every time).
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honeylations · 2 months
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CHO MIYEON x FEM!READER
Prompt: Miyeon can’t sleep so she thought riding your abs was the best option to help her.
Warnings/Notes: smut kekeke, ab riding, 6th member reader, bit of photography at the end
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Miyeon tossed and turned with each huff but no matter how hard she tried, she just couldn’t sleep. She didn’t understand.
She was moping earlier that day that she wanted lay down and rest but how come her body wasn’t letting her anymore? She tried counting sheep, drinking warm milk, going on her phone, but it still didn’t tire her out.
Then she remembered the other nights she couldn’t sleep and what she did to help that.
Her face went red.
She looked at the time on her phone that read 3:40am.
She had to be up at 6am for her next schedule and she knew if she didn’t catch a wink of sleep, she’d be cranky the entire day.
So she saw this plan as her only choice.
Within the next minute, she left the warmth of her bed and tip toed to your room, making sure she locked the door behind her.
She smiled at your sleeping self. Your star night light was on which was gifted to you by Miyeon on your birthday because you admitted on your first date that you hated sleeping in the dark.
A childhood fear you couldn’t grow out of, unfortunately.
Shaking her thoughts away, your girlfriend carefully crawled on the bed and pulled down your blanket, revealing your semi naked body.
Actually you only had a bra on with plaid pyjama pants and Miyeon knew you didn’t like wearing shirts because you claimed it was ‘too annoying’.
So accessing your abs wasn’t gonna be difficult.
You felt a few taps on your collarbone, waking you up instantly.
“Huh-what? Baby is that you?” You said in your tired husky voice that sent chills down Miyeon’s body.
“Yeah it’s me. Sorry to wake you up, Bub”
You glanced at your alarm clock and groaned. “Babe it’s almost 4am, what’s wrong?”
“I can’t sleep and there’s only one way that can help me” she pouted and you saw her hands crawl up from your thighs.
“Miyeon…”
“Shhh you don’t even have to do anything. Just let me ride you please baby. It’ll help so much” she whined, already palming your hard muscles and caressing them.
You released a shaky breath and gulped. “Ok…ok fine. Just don’t complain about being sore tomorrow”
“When have I ever complained?” She smirked and stripped off her panties.
“All the time actually”
You heard Miyeon scoff. “Not my fault. Now shut up and let me use you”
Your hand immediately grabbed onto her hips as she lowered her slick covered cunt onto your abs. Just the touch alone made her release a small gasp, holding onto your shoulders as she watched herself slowly move forward and back.
You could see how wet and shiny your abs became from her juices, lips parting in awe before inching them closer to your girlfriend’s face.
“Baby, I want a kiss”
Miyeon hummed and crashed her mouth into you, almost knocking your soul out. Your tongue slid its way through her soft lips and each lick encouraged your girlfriend to slide her hips faster.
Each bump of your muscle brushed deliciously against her clit, Miyeon’s breathing going heavy. She was whimpering into your mouth about wanting to cum so bad.
You squeezed her hips and smirked into her wet lips, chuckling at how sloppy her movements were getting.
“Don’t slow down, Princess. Wanna cum right?”
“P-Please baby. Help me. I’ve been good..”
“Hmm, I guess you have” you mumbled, moving your mouth to her pulse point and sucking gently, Miyeon’s eyes rolling back in ecstasy.
“Come on, my love. Keep those hips moving, I’ll help you okay?” You said after placing a final kiss to the purple mark you left on her skin.
Miyeon mumbled a thank you as you sat up a little more, flexing your abdominal muscles more and forcing your girlfriend to ride you faster.
She let out cute squeals and quickly pushed her (your) oversized shirt up to reveal her plump tits.
“Suck them please, baby. Gonna cum soon”
Accepting your princess’ request, your mouth instantly latched onto her left, sucking harshly and biting onto the soft flesh before moving to the other side. Your arms were wrapped all the way around your girlfriend’s small body, letting her reach her orgasm.
You held her tighter when she arched her back, her hips starting to slow down from her high.
“Oh fuck oh fuck yes…your abs so good baby” she whined, pushing your head into her chest.
Once Miyeon’s vision cleared, she moved backwards and saw the mess she caused on your stomach. You were about to ask her to clean it off but she quickly snatched your phone from the bedside table and placed her other hand on your cum covered abs.
“Uh baby?” You questioned.
“I just realised I haven’t shown off my new acrylics yet. This is the perfect time, babe” she winked at you and snapped a flash pic of her nails being flexed onto your stomach that was visibly wet with white liquids.
“You’re not posting that in public are you?”
Miyeon shook her head and sent the photo to the G-Idle groupchat. “Just the girls”
After placing your phone away, your girlfriend leaned down and licked a stripe up your stomach. “Now let me clean you”
“Babe, we’re not gonna sleep at this point”
“Worth it though. Now shhh”
[G-IDLE GIRLIES🍒]
[4:00AM] Miyeon: *sent an image*
[4:00AM] Miyeon: I know u are all asleep but check out my new nails😍
[4:36AM] Minnie: EW WHAT THE FUCK
[4:37AM] Shuhua: :/
[4:37AM] Soyeon: OH FOR FUCK’S SAKES
[4:38AM] Yuqi: Killing you both DELETE THAT SHIT NOW
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soapskneebrace · 1 year
Text
in the early morning
Pairing: John Price x f!Reader Rating: All Ages Word Count: 1.4k Warnings: none Author's Notes: I am dedicating this specifically to @yeyinde who is so graciously assisting my poor American ass with basic UK knowledge, and to @guyfieriii who I've had so much fun talking about Professor Price with and has thus inspired me to play with my own AU. Thus, I present: Neighbors AU! MASTERLIST Now on Ao3!
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You’re about to knock again when your neighbor finally answers the door.
It’s the last place, time, and chore you want to be involved in—nearly 6am, looking to register a noise complaint with a man you’ve never met, shivering in flannel pajamas and bundled into two coats on his stoop.
The landlady Mrs. Walmsley had pitched for your flat hard on the basis of this mystery neighbor being absent for months at a time.
“He’s SAS, dear,” she’d said in that little nasally voice. Her eyes had been excitedly wide behind thick, round glasses. “A captain. They have him going all over the world, so it’ll be quiet as the countryside here at home.”
Evidently not.
The world is still swaying a little, indignant on behalf of your interrupted REM, as the door swings open before your knuckles can connect. Then you’re sure you’ve fallen back to sleep, because in the doorway stands a tall, handsome, shirtless man with a bowl of cereal cupped in one very large hand.
You’re not sure where to look, but your gaze has not waited for your brain’s directive, because you take in a trim, sturdy waist, full pectorals, and thick, strong arms all dusted in a pretty composition of dark hair before thinking to actually look the man in the eye.
Oh. Equally disconcerting. He has a kind, lined face, a dark beard and soft blue eyes that are focused directly on you.
Whatever words you had half-planned to say flee like birds startled away from a park bench. You think, SAS. Captain. Couldn’t Mrs. Walmsley have mentioned even once that he looks like an honest-to-god movie star?
You must look like you’re staring into the headlights of an oncoming car, because the SAS Captain’s dark brows crease in the middle. “You alright, love?”
You blink. “Um.” Goodness, no man’s voice deserved to sound that sultry so early. Or did it sound that way because it’s so early? “I, um.”
He tilts his head, listening. You have to rub your eyes so you can stop looking at him.
“I’m sorry,” you say, noting the dumb, drowsy slur of your thus-unused voice. “I don’t mean to bother you.”
“Not a bother at all,” says the Captain. “What can I do for you?”
This is going somehow far better, and simultaneously much worse, than you could have imagined.
“It’s,” you try, peeking at him as you reluctantly lower your hands from your face, “it’s the telly. Or the music. I—you’ve got something playing, and I don’t mean to be a pest, but it woke me up, and—”
His brows shoot up his forehead, and you can see realization bloom across his expression. “And it’s loud, isn’t it?”
Before you can nod, he steps away from the door, and you can see him retreat into the living area to retrieve a remote. He points it at something, his long, muscled arm outstretched, and the noise, which you had failed to even notice once he’d opened the door, instantly silences.
He comes back to the door. “Better?”
You blink. You try very hard not to stare at his chest, which is pebbling with goosebumps in the morning cold. “Uh—yes, that should be alright. Thank you.”
“No trouble,” says the Captain, stirring his cereal without looking at it, blue eyes once again directly on you. “I’m sorry, didn’t know someone had moved in.”
“Just a month ago,” you admit. And you introduce yourself, because even half-asleep your manners haven’t completely fled you.
The Captain nods. “That explains it. I’ve been out of the country. I’m John Price. You can just call me John.”
Out of the country. SAS. Captain. Strong arms, and soft blue eyes. Suddenly you feel very small, shivering on this man’s—John Price’s—front doorstep, bundled up like you’ve never experienced a cold day in your life, while he stands there half-naked and not even blinking at the bite of 4C.
“Well,” you say, trying to remember how conversation worked, “welcome home?”
John Price smiles at you, then, and you’re struck even in your drowsy state by it. It’s a sad smile trying its best to be happy.
“Thank you,” he says. And by the way he’s looking at you, blue eyes gone even softer than before, you think he’s appreciated your half-hearted pleasantry far more than it deserves.
“Well, um.” You flounder. When you stepped up to the door, your only intention had been to make this as quick as possible, wanting to return to the warmth of your bed underneath six blankets as fast as you could manage.
Now—okay, you still want to get back into bed. But Captain John Price (still shirtless) seems in no rush to hurry you away, and it isn’t every day that a mysterious, dashing soldier trains his attention solely upon you.
The still-asleep part of your brain wonders shamelessly if he’d be as warm as those blankets if you touched his bare skin. You strangle the thought immediately.
“I don’t know if you know Mrs. Walmsley,” you say, “but she had some quite nice things to say about you.”
Captain John Price smiles again, and it’s a little less sad and a little more amused. “Did they have to do specifically with my absence?”
SAS. It’s only six in the morning. The lying part of your brain is still asleep, if it would even be any use here. “It came up? Sorry?”
He doesn’t laugh, but the huff that comes out of him resembles it enough that you know he’s not offended. “Don’t be. Seems like she has trouble keeping the place lived in as it is. Think you’re the first one who’s actually talked to me.”
“That’s a shame!” you say in earnest.
But John Price shrugs. “I can’t imagine they would’ve enjoyed talking to me too much. Career soldiers aren’t all that interesting—I should know, I spend most of my time around them.”
“Well, I think you seem very nice,” you insist, and despite the morning’s rude awakening, you’re being entirely truthful.
John opens his mouth to reply, but a cold wind chooses that exact moment to blow, and you are not able to suppress a full body shiver as it hits. You tug your coats more tightly around your body, tucking your hands into your sleeves.
John frowns. “Not nice enough to send you back inside where it’s warm, clearly.” He sets the cereal bowl out of view and crosses his arms loosely across his bare chest. “Aren’t you freezing?”
“Me?!” you exclaim, astonished, face warming. “You’re wearing less than I am!”
“I’ll be fine,” says John. “I hate to think I’ve kept you out here suffering. Please, I appreciate the conversation, but you don’t need to indulge me.”
But you want to, you find, and very badly. You want to stay in this man’s soft blue gaze, listen to his rumbling voice, even if you stop being able to feel your own body from the cold. There’s something about Captain John Price that’s unusually compelling (helped by the absence of a shirt), and you feel in that moment a little like you’re brushing up against someone more important than someone like you will ever be.
But you recognize a polite dismissal when you hear it, too.
“If anything, I’ve been the one keeping you,” you say, smiling apologetically. “But it’s been very nice to meet you, John.”
He smiles at you again, and it’s the same one from before—sad, trying to be happy. He says your name, and it sounds better than it has ever sounded, wrapped in the rough baritone of his voice. “Pleasure to meet you too. Truly.”
You smile back, and leave his doorstep. You’re not sure now how you’re going to fall back to sleep now.
You’re twisting the handle of your front door when suddenly John calls your name. When you turn to look at him, he’s leaning a little out of his doorway, balancing himself with a hand on the inside of its frame.
“If I ever get to noisy for your liking,” he says, “just knock on the wall, and I’ll bring it down, aye?”
“Okay!” you reply. “And you too, yeah? I don’t want to bother you, either!”
“I don’t imagine you could,” John says, giving you another amused huff, “but sure.”
You don’t know how to respond to that, so you wave, and escape inside.
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frenchkisstheabyss · 13 days
Text
୨୧ ʝαɯႦɾҽαƙҽɾ (ƚԋɾҽҽ) ୨୧
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୨୧ Pairings: rich boy!san x chubby!fem!reader, rich boy!yunho x chubby!fem!reader, rich boy!hongjoong x chubby!fem!reader, rich boy!seonghwa x chubby!fem!reader
୨୧ Genre: graduate school au/angst/smut
୨୧ Summary: It was never your intention to infiltrate one of the most exclusive social circles at your new university, seducing rich boys to get who and what you want. Wait, no, it was.
But your actions have consequences and, when the one who brought you into this turns out to be more devious than you expected, are you prepared to face them?
୨୧ Word Count: 2.0k-ish
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୨୧ Warnings: a warning I must always add is that you're the villain. everyone's the villain. some more than others of course. kissing. strong language. San has some bruises from a fight. unprotected sex. sex gets a lil bit rough for a sec. a strength kink if you squint. finger sucking. lots of feelings. jealousy. bribery. backstabbing. corruption. pet names. mind games. ya know, wholesome stuff.
୨୧ A/N: This is part three in my Jawbreaker series. You can find part one here but you don't have to start from the beginning if you don't want to. Even though the reader's involved with everyone in this series, this entry is heavy on San with a sprinkle of Yunho at the end and a brief Joong appearance that'll lead into my Joong focused fourth entry. As always, I hope you lovely people out there enjoy it. Love ya.
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It’s a morning like any other. Birds perch atop the branches of the towering oak tree outside of the window, chirping their tiny feathered hearts away. The early morning sun—only freshly awakened itself—stretches its rays through cracks in the embroidered curtains keeping you tucked in the gradually depleting shadows. Cologne, with notes of delicate jasmine and woodsy patchouli, pushes up your nose in small puffs each time your cheek presses into the silk pillowcase.
Deprived of any other details you can always tell whose bed you’re in by the scent of the cologne lingering on the bedding. But whose bed you’re inside of doesn’t always match with who’s inside of you. This is one of those times that it does. You know you’re in San’s bed by the cologne. By the sweet, hushed 6AM kisses that handsomely dimpled face snuck to you beneath the sheets. Kisses that led you to where you are now. Flat on your stomach—your plush body hugged by a mattress as soft and inviting as you are—with San so deep inside of you that the pressure’s almost maddening.
You whimper when he pulls out even the slightest bit and he just smiles, kissing you on the shoulder. “So pretty” he whispers, strong hands gripping your hips. With a grunt sensual enough to make you come right here and now, he thrusts into you, his hips working at a rhythmic pace. You feel the muscles of his chest flex against your back with each forward motion. If only there were a way of seeing him. How sinfully good he must look fucking you this way. Every fine muscle in his body dedicated to pleasing you.
It makes you even wetter picturing it. So wet he has to grip your hips harder, raising them an inch or so above the mattress to keep from slipping. The introduction of a new angle makes your body tremble. He feels it too. Your walls constrict around him, like a boa snake trapping its prey. He’s hard enough to meet you with equal intensity, stretching your walls so that the only sensation your body can recognize is this.
“San, oh god. Please…” you gasp, that magical prickly feeling radiating up your spine. “Please, what?” he teases, a hand coming up to stroke your cheek as his movements grow harsher. Your mouth falls open, your eyes twinkling like stars in the last remnants of darkness in the room. “Don’t stop” you beg, never one to hide how needy you are. Why would you when he finds it so goddamn hot? 
San’s fingers trace the bow of your upper lip, the curve of your lower lip, and rest at the tip of your tongue. You take them into your mouth, suckling and drooling as he gives you precisely what you asked for. No stopping. No easing up. All of him driving deep into you. Your lips quiver, moans muffled by his fingers, as the orchestra of pleasure that’s been playing inside of you all this time reaches the crescendo.
San snatches his fingers away, his timing perfect as always, just to hear your cries. Your fingers grasp at the pillow, tugging at the pillowcase while your body arches at the release. When you finally loosen your hold, your body calmed down to the point of only faint twitches, you feel his weight lift off of you. “Good morning, angel” he says, kissing the small of your back before rolling onto his.
Turning to face him, you slip into the comforting hold of his right arm. “Good morning, handsome” you yawn, eyeing the slight bruising on his face from last night’s run in with Seonghwa. It’d been easy enough to push the incident to the back of your mind, letting hours of infinitely satisfying sex bury the guilt you felt about what happened. Poor Hwa and what he must be going through. All of his work, the amalgamation of hundreds of hours of research, forever lost.
And San, achy and bruised, punched by his own best friend for something he’d never stoop so low as to do. “Tell him” the little voice in your head whispers. But how can you? Where do you even start? They’ll all hate you—San, Hwa, Hongjoong especially—and you’ll lose everything. It’s a knife to the gut when you realize that “everything” isn’t the money you came here in search of. Somehow along the way it’s become them. 
An alarm sounds, rattling you from your existential crisis. Recognizing it as yours, you grab your phone from the nightstand and return to his arms. “Shit, I gotta get to class. I don’t wanna” you pout, turning the alarm off and tossing your phone aside. San kisses your forehead, puppy dog eyes in full effect, “Then don’t go. Stay with me.” You want to say “Yes”, he doesn’t know how badly you do, but you still have to keep up with your academic responsibilities. 
“You know I can’t do that, San.”
“Why can’t you? You can do whatever you want.” 
“No, you can do whatever you want. I’m not you.”
“But you’re mine” he grins, caressing your cheek, “So technically you can. I make one call and you’ll make the Dean’s List without ever turning in another paper.” You’d almost forgotten he was a spoiled rich kid. He wasted no time reminding you. You roll your eyes, slipping out of bed to collect pieces of your clothing scattered about the room. “Has it ever occurred to you that I might want to have my own base of intelligence?”
San sits up to watch you get dressed, taking his time to enjoy the way your panties slip over your ass. “Not really” he answers, his gaze still fixed on your body. “You can be a real asshole, you know that?” you snap, rushing to put the rest of your clothes on, “Don’t worry about giving me a ride. I’ll call an Uber.”
San hops out of bed, swiping something up off of the floor, and drags you into a hug. Holding you from behind, his arms locked around your waist, he rests his chin on your shoulder. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.” You try to wiggle free, knowing in an instant that you can’t. He’s far too strong and—hot as it was a mere 60 seconds ago—you hate him for it. “Whatever. Just let me go. I’m gonna be late.”
“Fine but take these at least” he insists, dangling a key in front of your face. You recognize it from last night. It’s the key to that sleek Lamborghini he’d let you drive him home in. It swings back and forth on the keyring, hypnotizing you with its beauty. “The Lambo? You’re letting me borrow it?” San laughs at how oblivious you are, “No. It’s yours. Think of it as an apology.” You spin around, prepared to protest, but he silences you with a kiss that turns your brain to a pitiful bowl of jello.
It was bait. A worm dangling from a hook waiting for some poor, naive little fish to bite it. And you did. A hook straight through the mouth, reeling you back into him. The key finds its way into your hand. Your panties drift back down around your ankles. You’re caught. Poor naive little fish.
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“Would you like another coffee, sir?” the waitress asks, carefully refilling Yunho’s glass of water. Yunho peeks up from the laptop he’s been tapping away on for the last hour. “That’d be great. Thank you so much” he smiles, taking notice of the way she blushes when he looks at her. The waitress giggles, nearly overflowing the glass of water. She catches herself at the last minute, setting the glass back down and scrambling away.
Yunho laughs to himself, already sure that he’d have her in his bed by the end of tonight if he wanted. He’s not wrong. But first he has a paper to finish. He came here—to this cozy cafe with its floor to ceiling library and rustic exposed brick walls—in hopes that it’d help clear his mind.
Regret. That’s not the word for what he feels for what he set in motion. It’s more like doubt. Doubt about how far he’s willing to go to satiate his hunger for revenge. Blood’s already been shed and, now that he knows it’s a possibility, is it worth the risk of shedding a little more?
Screech! A car pulls into the empty parking spot outside in perfect view of his window seat. Yunho examines the car—the make, the model, the contour, the color—and knows who he expects to step out of that Lamborghini. “San?” he mumbles, rising from his seat. The car door opens and, in place of his old friend, he sees you headed straight for the door with rage in every step you take. He can’t see your eyes behind the dark glasses that conceal them but he knows they’re filled with hatred.
You charge into the cafe and meet him face to face, no pleasantries wasted on who you’ve come to view as your enemy. “I’m out” you say, removing your glasses to reveal the conviction of your statement. Yunho glances down at your outfit, an expensive black dress and heels from a Dior collection that doesn’t drop for another 6 months. “Hongjoong pick that out for you?” he asks, intent on getting under your skin. 
“Yunho, stop deflecting.” 
“So, the answer’s ‘Yes’ then” he gloats, adjusting the matching beret on your head, “You aren’t out, pretty baby. There is no out.” You slap his hand away, your defiance doing nothing to shake him. “After what you did to Hwa, there is an out. How could you…” The far away look on his face makes you question if he’s even listening. For once he is and the more you talk the clearer his true feelings become. He’s…hurt?
“What I did? You think I did that?”
“Ugh” you groan, massaging your temples, “Everything you’ve ever said to me was a lie. Can’t you be honest with me? Just once?”
Yunho takes you by the wrists, staring deeply into your eyes. “When I said something was gonna happen I meant to Joong, not Seonghwa. I wouldn’t do something that big without telling you” he says, his voice trembling, “You have to believe me.” The sincerity in his voice, the gentleness in his eyes, plays your heartstrings like harp. But your mind knows better. Going with your heart when it comes to him has hurt you too many times before. It won’t happen again.
“Uh, did you still want the coffee?” the waitress asks, awkwardly hovering beside the two of you with a small cup of coffee on a ceramic plate. Yunho switches the charm back on, taking the coffee from the waitress, “Yes, of course, thank you.” Seeing no point in staying any longer, you use this as your chance to make your exit. Staying there any longer can only lead to disaster.
“Pretty baby!” Yunho calls out to you as your hand reaches for the door handle. You stop in your tracks, curious what he could possibly have to say. 
“Do you know why I’d never lie to you?” 
You shrug, “I don’t know. Why?”
“You’ve seen the ugliest parts of me and stayed” he says, taking a sip of his coffee, “Why would I hide from you now?” 
There it is again. The tugging at your heart. It’s paralyzing. What if he’s telling the truth? The chances of that are as slim as winning the lottery but what if? Your head’s spinning when you climb back into the car, idling in the driver’s seat while you try to make sense of it all. It had to be Yunho. There’s no way it wasn’t. Everyone else on campus adores Seonghwa. Who else could even fathom hurting him? 
Tap! Tap! You jump at the sound of tapping on the passenger’s side window. Before you can investigate the noise a figure enters the car. “Hongjoong!” you shout, hitting him on the arm, “You almost gave me a heart attack. Shit.” “Oh, I’m sorry, cutie. You okay?” he asks, gently massaging your leg. Catching your breath, you notice something's...off. “I’m okay, Joongie but what are you doing here?” Stoic at first, his gaze shifts to Yunho moping inside of the cafe. When it comes back to you there’s an eerie, unnerving grin spread across his face.
“He’s so sad that you didn’t believe him” Hongjoong laughs, his eyes growing dark, “You should’ve.”
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STRESS FILLED NIGHTS
Simon "Ghost" Riley x Fem-Reader
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TW: Anxiety/ paranoid, Stress cleaning, biting nails.
Summary: You were used to Simon's night terrors and anxiety, but what happens when your the one struggling without even knowing?
A/n: I wrote this, because I'm having a really hard time sleeping so this is a self comfort thing for me. I'm tired man. Also Ghost is OOC . And this is unedited or whatever.
Tick...Tick...Tick...
You starred up at the ceiling, the clock on the wall continuing to tick on the wall. You peer over to your left, picking up your phone from the nightstand. At this point taking off the charger as it's full battery at this point. The light illuminating from the phone slightly blinding you as you check the time.
2:13 am
Sighing, you put your phone aside, it's been hours already and your still not asleep yet. Your husband by now is peacefully asleep, but your still awake. You turn to your side, facing the now sleeping Ghost. He looked so...peaceful you just stared at him slowly breathing, looking pretty in the blue mood light on him. Something only you and you alone can see, no one else can. Your hand gently reaches out as gently push and piece of hair aside, smiling at how cute he is.
Eventually you layed back on your back, staring at the ceiling once again. After 20 minutes of looking at the ceilings texture to see if you can see any images from it for fun. Or messing around with your hand in the blue light you eventually got sick of it.
Quietly sitting up from the bed, making sure to not make any sounds to wake your husband up. You put your house slippers on and left the room. Once in the hallway, you let out a relaxed breath. Since your awake, might as well make yourself useful.
" Think y/n, what can I do currently?..." You thought as you take a left turn reaching the living room. You flick the lights on " Oh, I can tidy up the house abit, as long I don't vacuum or do anything loud, it should be fine." At this point you were getting shaky because you were exhausted. But you ignored it as you started to sweep the floor, humming to yourself quietly.
You swept.
You wiped the tables and counters clean.
You moped the tile floor.
You clean the dust off souvenirs and photo frames and more.
You left the kitchen spotless.
You even clean your fucking gun.
After all of that, you just sat on the couch silently with out a word. You were biting your nails, trying to figure out what else to do before being alerted to Simon's panicked voice.
"Y/n?! Y/n where are you? Y/-"
He immediately rushed over to the living room panicked. He soon relaxed once he saw you just sitting on the couch.
"Y/n, it's 6am...what the hell are you doing this early?"
"Cleaning."
"Cleaning?" He gave you an almost dumbfounded look. " You know what time it is, right now?"
"6:25 am."
"How long have you been cleaning love?"
You were starting to avoid his eye contact, biting you nail more. "I-i..I don't know."
Ghost just stood there sighing, "why didn't you ask for my help?" He says, almost hurt. " Your going to get a migraine. "
"I know...I don't know...I just.." you starred down at your carpet rug. " I was scared, I couldn't sleep. And I thought it was better if I'm awake that I should make myself useful..."
Ghost, walks over to you, kneeling in front of you, his calloused hands gently forcing you to look at him. " Y/n, y/n look at me. Your hurting yourself doing this. "
"I don't understand." You said truthfully, your hand gently laying on top of his.
"love, your exhausted, your literally shaking right now....Listen, I may not be good at the whole comfort thing compared to you. But since you watch over me during my night terrors it's only fair I do the same with you."
"But...I don't have nightmares like you do though, I'm just...a little scared to go to sleep."
"Even so, you still need sleep."
You thought about it, and slowly nod. You then gently leaned into his arms and laid your head on his shoulder.
Ghost then stood up, and wrapped his arms around your waist and picked you up. Carrying you back to bed, flicking the lights off.
He walks into your shared bedroom, closing the door behind him. Getting in bed with you, now that he can see your face closely, your eyes were bloodshot and exhausted.
You quietly spoked to him, as he now gently moves a strain of your hair aside. " Did I really scare you? I'm sorry if I did..." You yawn softly, " I thought...me leaving would protect you...or something."
"Protect me? Ha. But you did startle me. "
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. You didn't intend to. I was just... surprised to not see you beside me. "
"hmm." Your eyes fluttered abit. Less talkative.
Ghost noticed, that him quietly talking to you was finally making you relax.
" I would appreciate if next time this happens, you tell me. Alright?"
You nodded.
Ghost continue to talk to you, sometimes telling you his awful jokes. And once you finally stop responding to him. He looked over to see you finally asleep. Haft your face hidden away in the pillow, taking soft slow breaths.
He pulled the blanket over his shoulders, gently pulling you close to him , wrapping his arms around you protectively falling suit and falling asleep with you.
Both of you peacefully asleep.
A/n: IM SO TIRED UGH
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max-levchin · 9 months
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Shamir Secret Sharing
It’s 3am. Paul, the head of PayPal database administration carefully enters his elaborate passphrase at a keyboard in a darkened cubicle of 1840 Embarcadero Road in East Palo Alto, for the fifth time. He hits Return. The green-on-black console window instantly displays one line of text: “Sorry, one or more wrong passphrases. Can’t reconstruct the key. Goodbye.” 
There is nerd pandemonium all around us. James, our recently promoted VP of Engineering, just climbed the desk at a nearby cubicle, screaming: “Guys, if we can’t get this key the right way, we gotta start brute-forcing it ASAP!” It’s gallows humor – he knows very well that brute-forcing such a key will take millions of years, and it’s already 6am on the East Coast – the first of many “Why is PayPal down today?” articles is undoubtedly going to hit CNET shortly. Our single-story cubicle-maze office is buzzing with nervous activity of PayPalians who know they can’t help but want to do something anyway. I poke my head up above the cubicle wall to catch a glimpse of someone trying to stay inside a giant otherwise empty recycling bin on wheels while a couple of Senior Software Engineers are attempting to accelerate the bin up to dangerous speeds in the front lobby. I lower my head and try to stay focused. “Let’s try it again, this time with three different people” is the best idea I can come up with, even though I am quite sure it will not work. 
It doesn’t. 
The key in question decrypts PayPal’s master payment credential table – also known as the giant store of credit card and bank account numbers. Without access to payment credentials, PayPal doesn’t really have a business per se, seeing how we are supposed to facilitate payments, and that’s really hard to do if we no longer have access to the 100+ million credit card numbers our users added over the last year of insane growth. 
This is the story of a catastrophic software bug I briefly introduced into the PayPal codebase that almost cost us the company (or so it seemed, in the moment.) I’ve told this story a handful of times, always swearing the listeners to secrecy, and surprisingly it does not appear to have ever been written down before. 20+ years since the incident, it now appears instructive and a little funny, rather than merely extremely embarrassing. 
Before we get back to that fateful night, we have to go back another decade. In the summer of 1991, my family and I moved to Chicago from Kyiv, Ukraine. While we had just a few hundred dollars between the five of us, we did have one secret advantage: science fiction fans. 
My dad was a highly active member of Zoryaniy Shlyah – Kyiv’s possibly first (and possibly only, at the time) sci-fi fan club – the name means “Star Trek” in Ukrainian, unsurprisingly. He translated some Stansilaw Lem (of Solaris and Futurological Congress fame) from Polish to Russian in the early 80s and was generally considered a coryphaeus at ZSh. 
While USSR was more or less informationally isolated behind the digital Iron Curtain until the late ‘80s, by 1990 or so, things like FidoNet wriggled their way into the Soviet computing world, and some members of ZSh were now exchanging electronic mail with sci-fi fans of the free world.
The vaguely exotic news of two Soviet refugee sci-fi fans arriving in Chicago was transmitted to the local fandom before we had even boarded the PanAm flight that took us across the Atlantic [1]. My dad (and I, by extension) was soon adopted by some kind Chicago science fiction geeks, a few of whom became close friends over the years, though that’s a story for another time. 
A year or so after the move to Chicago, our new sci-fi friends invited my dad to a birthday party for a rising star of the local fandom, one Bruce Schneier. We certainly did not know Bruce or really anyone at the party, but it promised good food, friendly people, and probably filk. My role was to translate, as my dad spoke limited English at the time. 
I had fallen desperately in love with secret codes and cryptography about a year before we left Ukraine. Walking into Bruce’s library during the house tour (this was a couple years before Applied Cryptography was published and he must have been deep in research) felt like walking into Narnia. 
I promptly abandoned my dad to fend for himself as far as small talk and canapés were concerned, and proceeded to make a complete ass out of myself by brazenly asking the host for a few sheets of paper and a pencil. Having been obliged, I pulled a half dozen cryptography books from the shelves and went to work trying to copy down some answers to a few long-held questions on the library floor. After about two hours of scribbling alone like a man possessed, I ran out of paper and decided to temporarily rejoin the party. 
On the living room table, Bruce had stacks of copies of his fanzine Ramblings. Thinking I could use the blank sides of the pages to take more notes, I grabbed a printout and was about to quietly return to copying the original S-box values for DES when my dad spotted me from across the room and demanded I help him socialize. The party wrapped soon, and our friends drove us home. 
The printout I grabbed was not a Ramblings issue. It was a short essay by Bruce titled Sharing Secrets Among Friends, essentially a humorous explanation of Shamir Secret Sharing. 
Say you want to make sure that something really really important and secret (a nuclear weapon launch code, a database encryption key, etc) cannot be known or used by a single (friendly) actor, but becomes available, if at least n people from a group of m choose to do it. Think two on-duty officers (from a cadre of say 5) turning keys together to get ready for a nuke launch. 
The idea (proposed by Adi Shamir – the S of RSA! – in 1979) is as simple as it is beautiful. 
Let’s call the secret we are trying to split among m people K. 
First, create a totally random polynomial that looks like: y(x) = C0 * x^(n-1) + C1 * x^(n-2) + C2 * x^(n-3) ….+ K. “Create” here just means generate random coefficients C. Now, for every person in your trusted group of m, evaluate the polynomial for some randomly chosen Xm and hand them their corresponding (Xm,Ym) each. 
If we have n of these points together, we can use Lagrange interpolating polynomial to reconstruct the coefficients – and evaluate the original polynomial at x=0, which conveniently gives us y(0) = K, the secret. Beautiful. I still had the printout with me, years later, in Palo Alto. 
It should come as no surprise that during my time as CTO PayPal engineering had an absolute obsession with security. No firewall was one too many, no multi-factor authentication scheme too onerous, etc. Anything that was worth anything at all was encrypted at rest. 
To decrypt, a service would get the needed data from its database table, transmit it to a special service named cryptoserv (an original SUN hardware running Solaris sitting on its own, especially tightly locked-down network) and a special service running only there would perform the decryption and send back the result. 
Decryption request rate was monitored externally and on cryptoserv, and if there were too many requests, the whole thing was to shut down and purge any sensitive data and keys from its memory until manually restarted. 
It was this manual restart that gnawed at me. At launch, a bunch of configuration files containing various critical decryption keys were read (decrypted by another key derived from one manually-entered passphrase) and loaded into the memory to perform future cryptographic services.
Four or five of us on the engineering team knew the passphrase and could restart cryptoserv if it crashed or simply had to have an upgrade. What if someone performed a little old-fashioned rubber-hose cryptanalysis and literally beat the passphrase out of one of us? The attacker could theoretically get access to these all-important master keys. Then stealing the encrypted-at-rest database of all our users’ secrets could prove useful – they could decrypt them in the comfort of their underground supervillain lair. 
I needed to eliminate this threat.
Shamir Secret Sharing was the obvious choice – beautiful, simple, perfect (you can in fact prove that if done right, it offers perfect secrecy.) I decided on a 3-of-8 scheme and implemented it in pure POSIX C for portability over a few days, and tested it for several weeks on my Linux desktop with other engineers. 
Step 1: generate the polynomial coefficients for 8 shard-holders.
Step 2: compute the key shards (x0, y0)  through (x7, y7)
Step 3: get each shard-holder to enter a long, secure passphrase to encrypt the shard
Step 4: write out the 8 shard files, encrypted with their respective passphrases.
And to reconstruct: 
Step 1: pick any 3 shard files. 
Step 2: ask each of the respective owners to enter their passphrases. 
Step 3: decrypt the shard files.
Step 4: reconstruct the polynomial, evaluate it for x=0 to get the key.
Step 5: launch cryptoserv with the key. 
One design detail here is that each shard file also stored a message authentication code (a keyed hash) of its passphrase to make sure we could identify when someone mistyped their passphrase. These tests ran hundreds and hundreds of times, on both Linux and Solaris, to make sure I did not screw up some big/little-endianness issue, etc. It all worked perfectly. 
A month or so later, the night of the key splitting party was upon us. We were finally going to close out the last vulnerability and be secure. Feeling as if I was about to turn my fellow shard-holders into cymeks, I gathered them around my desktop as PayPal’s front page began sporting the “We are down for maintenance and will be back soon” message around midnight.
The night before, I solemnly generated the new master key and securely copied it to cryptoserv. Now, while “Push It” by Salt-n-Pepa blared from someone’s desktop speakers, the automated deployment script copied shard files to their destination. 
While each of us took turns carefully entering our elaborate passphrases at a specially selected keyboard, Paul shut down the main database and decrypted the payment credentials table, then ran the script to re-encrypt with the new key. Some minutes later, the database was running smoothly again, with the newly encrypted table, without incident. 
All that was left was to restore the master key from its shards and launch the new, even more secure cryptographic service. 
The three of us entered our passphrases… to be met with the error message I haven’t seen in weeks: “Sorry, one or more wrong passphrases. Can’t reconstruct the key. Goodbye.” Surely one of us screwed up typing, no big deal, we’ll do it again. No dice. No dice – again and again, even after we tried numerous combinations of the three people necessary to decrypt. 
Minutes passed, confusion grew, tension rose rapidly. 
There was nothing to do, except to hit rewind – to grab the master key from the file still sitting on cryptoserv, split it again, generate new shards, choose passphrases, and get it done. Not a great feeling to have your first launch go wrong, but not a huge deal either. It will all be OK in a minute or two.
A cursory look at the master key file date told me that no, it wouldn’t be OK at all. The file sitting on cryptoserv wasn’t from last night, it was created just a few minutes ago. During the Salt-n-Pepa-themed push from stage, we overwrote the master key file with the stage version. Whatever key that was, it wasn’t the one I generated the day before: only one copy existed, the one I copied to cryptoserv from my computer the night before. Zero copies existed now. Not only that, the push script appears to have also wiped out the backup of the old key, so the database backups we have encrypted with the old key are likely useless. 
Sitrep: we have 8 shard files that we apparently cannot use to restore the master key and zero master key backups. The database is running but its secret data cannot be accessed. 
I will leave it to your imagination to conjure up what was going through my head that night as I stared into the black screen willing the shards to work. After half a decade of trying to make something of myself (instead of just going to work for Microsoft or IBM after graduation) I had just destroyed my first successful startup in the most spectacular fashion. 
Still, the idea of “what if we all just continuously screwed up our passphrases” swirled around my brain. It was an easy check to perform, thanks to the included MACs. I added a single printf() debug statement into the shard reconstruction code and instead of printing out a summary error of “one or more…” the code now showed if the passphrase entered matched the authentication code stored in the shard file. 
I compiled the new code directly on cryptoserv in direct contravention of all reasonable security practices – what did I have to lose? Entering my own passphrase, I promptly got “bad passphrase” error I just added to the code. Well, that’s just great – I knew my passphrase was correct, I had it written down on a post-it note I had planned to rip up hours ago. 
Another person, same error. Finally, the last person, JK, entered his passphrase. No error. The key still did not reconstruct correctly, I got the “Goodbye”, but something worked. I turned to the engineer and said, “what did you just type in that worked?”
After a second of embarrassed mumbling, he admitted to choosing “a$$word” as his passphrase. The gall! I asked everyone entrusted with the grave task of relaunching crytposerv to pick really hard to guess passphrases, and this guy…?! Still, this was something -- it worked. But why?!
I sprinted around the half-lit office grabbing the rest of the shard-holders demanding they tell me their passphrases. Everyone else had picked much lengthier passages of text and numbers. I manually tested each and none decrypted correctly. Except for the a$$word. What was it…
A lightning bolt hit me and I sprinted back to my own cubicle in the far corner, unlocked the screen and typed in “man getpass” on the command line, while logging into cryptoserv in another window and doing exactly the same thing there. I saw exactly what I needed to see. 
Today, should you try to read up the programmer’s manual (AKA the man page) on getpass, you will find it has been long declared obsolete and replaced with a more intelligent alternative in nearly all flavors of modern Unix.  
But back then, if you wanted to collect some information from the keyboard without printing what is being typed in onto the screen and remain POSIX-compliant, getpass did the trick. Other than a few standard file manipulation system calls, getpass was the only operating system service call I used, to ensure clean portability between Linux and Solaris. 
Except it wasn’t completely clean. 
Plain as day, there it was: the manual pages were identical, except Solaris had a “special feature”: any passphrase entered that was longer than 8 characters long was automatically reduced to that length anyway. (Who needs long passwords, amiright?!)
I screamed like a wounded animal. We generated the key on my Linux desktop and entered our novel-length passphrases right here. Attempting to restore them on a Solaris machine where they were being clipped down to 8 characters long would never work. Except, of course, for a$$word. That one was fine.
The rest was an exercise in high-speed coding and some entirely off-protocol file moving. We reconstructed the master key on my machine (all of our passphrases worked fine), copied the file to the Solaris-running cryptoserv, re-split it there (with very short passphrases), reconstructed it successfully, and PayPal was up and running again like nothing ever happened. 
By the time our unsuspecting colleagues rolled back into the office I was starting to doze on the floor of my cubicle and that was that. When someone asked me later that day why we took so long to bring the site back up, I’d simply respond with “eh, shoulda RTFM.” 
RTFM indeed. 
P.S. A few hours later, John, our General Counsel, stopped by my cubicle to ask me something. The day before I apparently gave him a sealed envelope and asked him to store it in his safe for 24 hours without explaining myself. He wanted to know what to do with it now that 24 hours have passed. 
Ha. I forgot all about it, but in a bout of “what if it doesn’t work” paranoia, I printed out the base64-encoded master key when we had generated it the night before, stuffed it into an envelope, and gave it to John for safekeeping. We shredded it together without opening and laughed about what would have never actually been a company-ending event. 
P.P.S. If you are thinking of all the ways this whole SSS design is horribly insecure (it had some real flaws for sure) and plan to poke around PayPal to see if it might still be there, don’t. While it served us well for a few years, this was the very first thing eBay required us to turn off after the acquisition. Pretty sure it’s back to a single passphrase now. 
Notes:
1: a member of Chicagoland sci-fi fan community let me know that the original news of our move to the US was delivered to them via a posted letter, snail mail, not FidoNet email! 
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puhpandas · 7 months
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so you guys know the theory about the glamrocks and Vanny chasing Gregory not just so they can kill him, but because they're trying to get the freshly freed Dr Rabbit/GGY now with memory loss back to re-glitchtrap hin before he escapes?
it holds up so much more when you think about Vanessa telling you to go to the main stage at 6am. it's the end of the night, she and the glamrocks failed at catching Gregory, but as a last ditch effort, she tells you to go to the main stage, where the first therapy disc is. the therapy discs that show you patient 46. aka, Gregory.
and when Gregory's actually goes to the main stage like Vanessa said and dies to Moon if he doesnt find the tape u know what appears?
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THIS new mission appears.
this was Vannys last ditch effort to get GGY back. her plan A. she was trying to get Gregory to remember who hes supposed to be (GGY) by giving him the tapes to listen to
its so clear GGY is canon or meant to be with all of the evidence, and how much sense it makes when listening to tapes and thinking of the story in new context. it fills in so many blanks and you just go "ooohhh" when you learn about it and what it does to the narrative, especially after ruin, with the 3 star fam being the 'survived glitchtrap and have each lost something to it but now weve teamed up to keep it locked up forever' team. i want help wanted 2 to confirm GGY sooo bad
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jjwantsme · 1 year
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It’s Christmas, Charlie Brown!
j.m
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pairing: jj maybank x girlfriend!reader
summary: after years of neglection, christmas was never an excitement in JJ’s life- that is, until he met y/n
warning: kind of grumpy boyfriend x sunshine girlfriend trope, fluff, mentions of abusive family, cussing, references to smut, let me know if there’s anything missing!
authors note: i couldn’t sleep at 6am and came up with this. Time for a holiday special!!! Sorry im over a week late 😭😭
masterlist
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JJ groaned a bit as he felt his shoulder being shaken, still half asleep as he listened to his girlfriend’s bubbly voice.
“JJ, wake up, wake up, it’s christmas!” Y/n cheered, excitement radiating off her flushed face.
“baby, baby,” JJ rasped, “it’s 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 christmas. Don’t cream your pants over it.”
“‘Just Christmas’?!” She gasped dramatically, pretending to be overly offended- which, wasn’t too far from the truth. “now, come on, get up so we can make breakfast!”
JJ couldn’t really relate to her excitement.
Unlike his loving girlfriend, he grew up in a broken home.
Growing up with an abusive father, and an absentee mother, JJ never really got to have Christmas. His father never held them by the fire or watched movies with him; he received a present once, but it was taken shortly after on account of bad behavior.
So, because of him never getting to experience all of the christmas magic, it was never a big deal to him. In his book, it was just any old day.
And, normally, that would be a deal breaker for y/n. However, seeing as JJ is perfect for her in every other aspect, she let it slide this time.
She’d just have to make-up for all of the christmas he’s missed.
“Breakfast?” JJ sat up and groaned, “I thought your parents would be doing that!”
“Well, yeah…but, I asked if we could do it,” y/n grinned, clearly not understanding his exhaustion, “It’s part of the fun!”
She began putting bottoms over her bare legs, still half-naked from when JJ undressed her the night before.
JJ couldn’t help but let out a small smile at her excitement, looking over all the hickeys on her stomach.
Boy, was he in for a long holiday.
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“Oh, JJ! This is for you,” Mrs. y/l/n chirped as she handed JJ a gift, “from me and y/n’s father!”
Y/n had definitely received her positive attitude from her mother.
“Oh, shit, y-you guys really didn’t have to get me anything,” JJ chuckled and shook his head, rubbing his neck as he grabbed the present.
“Of course we did!”
JJ smiled wide as he opened the gift, feeling like a little kid again as y/n sat right next to him.
He wasn’t used to any parents loving him the way y/n’s did, it was definitely still something to get used to.
Her parents absolutely adored him, always inviting him over for meals and letting him spend the night
When they first met, JJ thought for sure they’d despise him, the same way most parents do. He thought they’d say he’s a bad influence on their daughter, and that he’s no good just like his dad.
But, they never said that. They took him in with open arms.
JJ opened the gift slowly, his smile growing when he opened the box to reveal a ring.
A ring with the letter “J” imprinted onto it.
“Do you like it?” Y/n smiled up at him with her innocent voice.
“I love it!” He was so happy, he almost laughed, “Thank you guys, so much!”
He gave her parents quick hugs.
“Now open mine, open mine!” Y/n couldn’t contain her excitement, and anticipation, as she handed him the gift she picked out.
He opened hers much more quickly, and he swore his cheeks were going to break from smiling too hard when he saw it. A necklace with her first initial on it.
“Do you like it? Look, I got us matching ones!” She pulled hers out of her hoodie pocket, (the same hoodie she stole from JJ), and showed it to him.
It had a J on it, and he blushed so hard that he saw stars. He wouldn’t be surprised if there were hearts in his eyes.
“Oh my god, baby,” JJ kissed her head, and then her cheek, and then her lips. “I absolutely adore it.”
Y/n couldn’t help the giddy tears that welled up in her eyes as she watched him put it on with so much pride.
“I’ll never take it off!”
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“Who’s idea was it to invite them over? Like, seriously, who let John B in?” Kiara jokingly asked as she watched him and pope nearly break y/n’s family vase.
“Ha-ha, very funny, kie.” Pope sarcastically replied, taking his seat at the dinning table.
After everyone’s parents approval, y/n had invited all of the pogues over for christmas dinner at her place. Her mother made a five-course-meal for them, and let them have sparkling water to drink.
Y/n was pretty close with the pogues, especially sarah, as she grew up a kook. Well, nobody really called her a kook. She had a foot in both worlds; her parents were filthy rich, but she never acted snobby or better than anyone. She didn’t fit in with the other kooks, which is why she was more of a lone-wolf- that is, until she met the pogues.
“Oh, it’s fine!” Y/n’s mom insisted as she took her seat, “We can afford a new one, no worries!”
“Thank you, Mrs. y/l/n, this all looks amazing,” Pope nervously changed the conversation topic as he examined the meal, already having his heart set on the glazed ham.
“Hey, princess,” JJ spoke quietly to y/n as everyone else engaged in their own conversation, “can i talk to you in the other room for a moment?���
Y/n bit her lip, which was an anxiety-motivated habit, before nodding.
“We’ll be right back!” JJ smiled at everyone, taking his girl’s hand and leading her to the living room.
“What is it?” Y/n asked once they were alone, watching as JJ took a present from under the tree.
“Just wanted to give you your present…” he trailed off, handing a wrapped, book-shaped item to her.
“Awh, baby,” she pouted as she took it from him, “you know you didn’t have to get me anything!”
“What, you really thought i wouldn’t get you a present? On your favorite holiday?” He raised his eyebrows, “Jeez, i’m not that poor.”
Y/n unwrapped the gift, letting out a small gasp when she saw what it was.
A scrapbook of their relationship thus far, with polaroids of them from the very beginning.
JJ grew nervous when he saw how silent she was, her usually being his little chatterbox.
Most people probably found it annoying how talkative she was, but he thought it was just the most precious thing.
“Do you not like it? I’m sorry if it’s not…i don’t know, fancy enough? I was on a budget, i thought it was cute, but i completely understand if you don’t like it, it is kind of cor-“
Y/n cut him off by kissing him, passionately, as she rested a hand on his shoulder.
She pulled away after almost a minute, looking him in the eyes.
“Is that your way of telling me you would’ve liked a more sexual gift? Cause, y’know i have no problem getting you a-“
“JJ!” She spoke sharply as she cut him off, trying not to laugh, “I love it, you dumbass!”
“Really?” JJ’s face went from a smirk to a soft smile as she spoke.
“Of course, I do! I’ve never gotten anything this thoughtful. Thank you so much. I’ll read every single page.” She grinned and hugged him tight, wrapping her arms around his neck.
He smiled wide and hugged her back, just as tight.
He was so nervous about the gift, only having a few dollars to spend.
But, her reaction made him proud of himself, and happier than words can explain.
“So…about that sex toy-“
“JJ!”
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“I really can’t believe you’ve never seen this before,” Y/n and JJ cuddled on her bed, watching a charlie brown christmas special. “It’s a classic!”
“Well, there’s a first time for everything.” He shrugged in reply.
Y/n giggled at his remark, making him smile.
“Y/n, I actually, uh, I wanted to…talk to you about something.” JJ rubbed the back of his neck, making her pause the movie.
“What is it, baby?”
“I just…” he sighed, “I wanted to say thank you.”
She furrowed her eyebrows, “Thank you? For what?”
“I don’t know, I guess just…being with me. Y’know, letting me be yours. I know we’ve only been dating 10 months, but…you really are the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I really can’t thank you, or your family, enough for everything you’ve done.” JJ shook his head and sniffled, “I don’t deserve it.”
“Awh, my love,” y/n pouted and sat up to cup his cheeks, “of course you deserve it. You deserve more, actually. I love you so much, and I just know there’s many more christmas’ like this to come.”
He rested his forehead against hers and whispered, “I love you more, beautiful.”
Y/n finished their conversation with a kiss, a kiss that didn’t end until JJ moved his hands up her shirt and began kissing her neck.
“Gonna show you how much I love you,” He mumbled against her neck as he nibbled on it.
Let’s just say; what they did that night, definitely would’ve gotten them on the naughty list.
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