Hey kiddos! School's being boring, plus it's been a while, so I thought I'd work on an update. It's been a little too long for my taste already, so yeah xD Here's Chapter 3 for ya~ ^_^
H4cK3r—Chapter 3
When Saturday finally came along, Merlin was humming happily, making fruit salad and lemonade and other picnic-y foods. He piled them in a small cooler and drove, whistling, over to Woodland Park, which was where they had planned to meet. Merlin didn't see Arthur's silver Audi (the guy was practically a prince, with all his money) in the lot when he pulled up, so he slumped back into his seat, just breathing. He was definitely excited to see Arthur again; that was one thing that they had never lost in their relationship, and seeing as it was probably one of the best things not to lose, they were definitely doing just fine.
Anyway, Merlin waited around for a few more minutes in his car, still not seeing Arthur anywhere. His eyes flicked to the clock on the dash, and frowned. 1:38 PM. Digging his phone out of his pocket, he began to worry. C'mon Arthur, he thought in earnest, You're never this late...
Quickly, a basic "wher r u" message was thumbed out and sent to Arthur's cell phone.
Ten minutes trudged past, then twenty as no response came. Over the course of an hour, actually, several more texts were sent with varying levels of worry that steadily escalated into anxiety. Merlin even called a few times. Still no answer. No texts, no calls, hell, no PMs. Nothing.
Then, "watch it, Sanity" slowly became "Oh my God, where is he?", and finally, Merlin had had enough. Arthur wasn't coming. That was it.
He'd been stood up. End of story.
Merlin looked back at the small cooler he had gently placed in the backseat of his Mazda. Sighing, he stabbed his key in the ignition and drove home dejectedly, probably to watch something fandom-related, play some kind of MMO, Tumbl, or just something to get his mind off his stomach, those yummy sandwiches, and his even yummier boyfriend
—
He did end up watching TV—marathoning Series One of BBC Sherlock and drowning his sorrows in hot chocolate. Sherlock, with all its hot guys and deep thinking, never failed to let Merlin get away from even the worst of his troubles.
But amongst all the deducing, Merlin slouched lazily into the next room to yank his laptop (NOT a Mac) off the charger. He felt like checking his social sites. Like, all of them. Dashes, feeds, inboxes, pages, walls, boards—the whole deal.
Wait, I take that back, he thought, I think I'll just check my emails, then look around on Twitter for a while. Yeah.
That was it. Facebook was too old, Tumblr was too addictive (and feels-inducing), the Pintrest layout bugged him, MySpace didn't really exist anymore, 4chan was essentially just porn, and nothing else really made sense. So, email and Twitter it was.
For a second though, he was taken completely aback in the best way by the sheer amount of implied 'Sherlock-and-John-are-gay-for-each-other', aka Johnlock, and watched all the wonderful on-screen "not gay"-ness. But then he went back to his Interwebs activities.
Email was boring, as always, not much more than spam, ads, and the occasional story or webcomic update. And once all that was over and done with, Merlin pulled up his Twitter feed and started skimming.
He quickly became bored, which was no surprise, and glanced at his notifications. There was a fair number of posts in which he was mentioned and/or tagged, and he responded accordingly. Merlin also glanced back at previous conversations with his followers, and noticed that his most recent talk with Arthur was first on the list, from yesterday.
He himself hadn't been on Twitter in two weeks at the very least.
Frowning, Merlin clicked the convo. Something was amiss, he could tell. Sure enough, the next webpage wasn't found, claiming a broken link. Ha, Merlin snickered mentally, Likely story.
His eyes flicked to the door and back to his screen, satisfied that no one would barge in once his activities stopped being strictly-speaking legal. Fingers flying, he logged out of his Twitter and pulled up his quick HTML guide. From his Chrome browser, Merlin keyed in a backdoor code and had bypassed most of Twitter's better firewalls in little more than a few minutes. He dodged bits of programming that were bound to be troublesome, and rewrote a few things that he knew the admins would thank him for later. He was all-too-familiar with Twitter's inner workings.
After all, it's not like he hadn't hacked into them before.
Soon, and by soon I mean less than ten minutes later, Merlin had found "his" conversation with Arthur. He hyperlinked it to another address, somewhere not even close to Twitter that he could just dispose of right after he was finished with it.
Sighing, he closed out of the browser and deleted the Internet history, then erased the same information from the hard drive as well (of course he could do that).
He opened the link in Firefox the change things up and scanned the conversation between Arthur and the person who was pretending to be Merlin.
It started out just wrong.
'Merlin's Beard: p3ndr4g0n Hey Arthur! How are you? ^_^'
Right there, Merlin was positive he hadn't been the one typing that message. Such an amateur mistake, really. If the hacker had actually read up on some of Merlin's other Tweets to get Merlin's writing style down, then they would have found that Merlin never used perfect punctuation and grammar if he could help it—or more specifically, if there was a character limit.
Rubbing his eyes, Merlin yawned, stretching comically, and got up to go make something warm to eat or drink.
Because he was in the kitchen, Merlin didn't see a different programming window pop up and delete the Tweets, the webpage, and everything on Merlin's screen from view.
Okay, here's this. Sorry it's been so long. RL has gotten in the way. I literally have four days of school left—exams. Wonderful. But yeah, there's also this thing I'm horrible at called updating. Yep. Terrible at it. but here's this. Also—sorry I'm so horrible about cliffies. Hashtag-actually-not-sorry.
Ta,
Lorakeet~