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homerforsure · 26 days

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Saw the episode. Ascended to a higher plane. Wrote a small Coda that is as messy as my brain is right now. Bone Apple Tea.

"Heyyyyyy Buck!" Eddie answers the phone with a drawn out salutation that proves Tommy was not lying about him being sent away from the hospital with the good drugs. Or, not lying about the prescription, but about Eddie actually taking them. It wasn't so long ago that Eddie would take enough medicine to avoid being in agony, but never quite enough to actually feel relief. He wouldn't do that for Tommy, however close they are. It's something that Eddie's doing for himself. Buck's stomach was a swarm of butterflies three seconds ago, but that and the floaty happy way Eddie still says his name, has him smiling again in his kitchen.

"Hey Eddie. I, um, I'm sorry to call so late. I just wanted to see how- how you were doing."

"Eh, I'll miss a shift or two. But Doc says I'll be ready to go for playoffs," Eddie answers.

Guilt twists through him, harsh and acidic and Buck says, "Well I'm glad to hear that. They say the team doesn't have a chance without you and your, um, sky dunk." Eddie laughs, giggles really, in reply and Buck says, "I'm sorry, Eddie. I don't know why I did that. I mean- I- I know why. I was jealous of you and- and Tommy-" Buck's heart flips as he says his name and he's afraid the kiss is going to come flying out of his mouth and down the phone line- "But I never wanted you to get hurt like that."

"You wanted me to get hurt different?" Eddie asks, still laughing, but Buck feels stricken.

"No! I- maybe. I don't know what I wanted. I lost my mind for a little bit."

"You were jealous," Eddie repeats.

"Yeah, I was."

A long sigh and Eddie says, "I'm sorry."

"You don't have anything to be sorry for. I was the asshole. I could have- I knocked you out of your shoe."

"Do you have my shoe?" Eddie asks, more focused than he has been the rest of the conversation. Buck can hear him sitting up on the couch.

"Uh, no. No, I gave it to Chim. He's gonna give it to you when he sees you. And probably make about 50 Cinderella jokes."

"Right. He texted me. I remember."

"I'm sure he'll bring it by sooner if you need it. Or he could give it to Tommy." The flush is there again, hot down the back of his neck. Buck doesn't know how he's supposed to do this. Where is he supposed to keep all of this heat and possibility while he waits for Saturday.

"You don't like him."

"Who? Chim? He's growing on me."

"Tommy," Eddie answers in a tone that says duh. "You can't even say his name normal."

Of course Eddie can hear that. Of course he assumes that's the problem after the way Buck has acted since the moment they met the man. He thanks god that he decided to call instead of driving across town and checking on Eddie in person. His cheeks and his ears are burning like fire.

"He can tell, you know. We both can. He said he's going to come talk to you. Gave him your address. Wants to apologize." Eddie must have settled back down on the couch. He sounds sleepier, his sentences getting shorter and more breathy.

"He did. He um. He came by. We talked it out. I told him you guys didn't have anything to apologize for. I was the one who made it weird."

"So weird," Eddie agrees and Buck laughs. "You guys should be friends. He's awesome and you're awesome and we can all hang out together and it would be..."

"Awesome," Buck finishes. He thinks it might be.

"I forgot you don't know that."

"Know what?" Buck asks, when Eddie's mumble doesn't come with any additional clarification. "Eddie?"

"Hmm?"

"Never mind. Hey, you should get up and go to your bed. Sleeping on that couch is not going to help your ankle heal any faster."

"Tommy said that."

"Tommy's right. Come on."

Eddie groans as he sits up, cursing at Buck in what he thinks is under his breath, and asks, "You talked to Tommy?"

"Yeah, he just left."

"And we're okay? You like him now?"

Buck's blood roars through his ears and he wants to throw up and start laughing all at the same time. "Yeah, I think I do."

"Good."

He breathes through the sudden headrush as Eddie grumbles and hops his way off the couch and down the hall. Buck knows where he's finding his handholds by the echo off the walls and he winces when Eddie takes a misstep and swears again. He thinks for a second that he should be there, that he should help Eddie to bed, but Eddie would never let him. Buck wonders if Tommy would let him. He's wondering about so much now and he never did before.

"Hey, Eds?" The question is out before Buck realizes he's asking it, small and vulnerable, and he wants to claw it back and swallow it down before Eddie notices, but he doesn't have a chance.

"Yeah?"

Tommy kissed me. I want him to do it again.

"No, nothing. Just. I'm sorry. I was out of line."

"You were," Eddie answers. "And I forgive you."

Something settles in Buck then. A piece that had still been sitting off kilter and jamming painfully under his ribs. He takes a deep breath, and joy washes fully over him, calming and centering. He doesn't ask the question again though. He thinks he wants to keep this tiny, glowing treasure to himself. At least for a little while.

"Bring me my shoe back and we'll call it even."

Buck laughs, letting the sound ring out through his apartment and he can hear Eddie smiling on the other end of the phone.

#idk what this is #my brain exited my body several hours ago #it's not the fic i said i was writing in my head that's for sure #7.04 #buck bothered and bewildered #episode coda #911 fic #evan buck buckley #911 spoilers #allison writes

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 month

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Why Millennials aren’t leaving Tiktok

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW NIGHT (Mar 22) in TORONTO, then SUNDAY (Mar 24) with LAURA POITRAS in NYC, then Anaheim, and more!

The news that Gen Z users have abandoned Tiktok in such numbers that the median Tiktoker is a Millennial (or someone even older) prompted commentators to dunk on Tiktok as uncool by dint of having lost its youthful sheen:

https://www.garbageday.email/p/tiktok-millennials-turns

But "why are Gen Z kids leaving Tiktok?" is the wrong question. The right question is, why aren't Millennials leaving Tiktok? After all, we are living through the enshittocene, the great enshittening, in which every platform gets monotonically, irreversibly worse over time, and Tiktok is no exception:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

To understand why older users are stuck to Tiktok, we need to start with why younger users relentlessly seek out new platforms. To some extent, it's just down to youth's appetite for novelty, but that's only part of the story. To really understand why people come to – and leave – platforms, you have to understand switching costs.

"Switching costs" is the economists' term for everything you have to give up when you change products or services. Switching from Ios to Android probably means giving up a bunch of your apps and purchased media. Switching from an airline where you're a high-status frequent flier to another carrier means giving up on free checked bags and early boarding.

In an open market, rivals have lots of ways to lower these switching costs (it's an open secret that you can call an airline and say, "Hi, I'm a 33rd Order Mason on American Airlines, will you make me a Triple Platinum Diamond Sky-Baron if I switch to Delta?"). Of course, big incumbents hate this, and do everything they can to increase their switching costs, finding ways to impose high switching costs that punish disloyal consumers who have the temerity to go elsewhere.

With social media, lock-in comes for free, thanks to the "collective action problem." Getting people to agree on a given course of action is hard, and as you add more people to the picture, the problem gets harder. It's hard enough to get half a dozen people in your group-chat to agree on where to go for dinner or what board-game to play. But once you're reliant on a social media service to stay in touch with friends, relatives around the world, customers, communities (say, rare disease support groups), and coordination (like organizing your kid's little league car-pool), the problem becomes nearly insoluble. Maybe you can convince your overseas relatives to switch to a Signal group, but can you do the same for your small business's customers, or your old high-school pals?

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/29/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms/

Taken together, switching costs and collective action problems make platforms "sticky," and sticky platforms inevitably enshittify.

Platforms, after all, generate value. They connect end-users with each other (say, little league parents) and they connect end-users to business customers (you and your small business's customers). That value needs to be parceled out among end users, business customers, and the platform's shareholders. A platform can make life better for business customers at its end users' expense by increasing the number of ads (hello, Youtube!), and it can make life better for its shareholders at its business customers' expense by decreasing the share of ad revenue given to publishers or performers (oh, hello again, Youtube!).

From a platform's perspective, the ideal state is one in which end users and business customers get no value from the platform, because it's all being captured by the platform's shareholders. But if Youtube interrupted every 30 seconds of video for ten minutes of ads and paid the video creators nothing, both users and creators would ditch the platform – and advertisers would follow:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dab8sKg8Ko8

So platforms seek an equilibrium: "what is the least value we apportion to end-users and business customers without triggering their departure?" Maybe that means giving more value to end-users (for example, keeping Uber fares low by suppressing wages), or to business-customers (crowding more ads into your social media feed).

Every business – including brick-and-mortar, non-digitized ones – wants to find some kind of equilibrium between the value going to its suppliers, its customers and its owners, but digital businesses have an advantage here: digital systems are flexible in ways that analog, hard-goods businesses are not. Digital businesses can alter pricing, payouts and other dynamics from moment to moment – second to second – and make a different offer to every supplier and customer. They have a bunch of knobs, and they can twiddle them at will:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Well, not quite at will. Businesses face constraints on their twiddling. If they get too greedy, users or business customers might weigh the cost of staying against the switching costs and decide it's not worth it. But the more expensive – the more painful – a platform can make leaving, the more pain they can inflict on the people who stay.

In other words, there's two ways to keep a customer or supplier's business: you can make a better service so they won't want to leave, or you can make leaving the service so painful that they stay even if you mistreat them.

There's three ways a digital company can make things worse for their customers and users without losing their business.

First, they can eliminate competition (think of Mark Zuckerberg buying Instagram to recapture the users who'd fled Facebook to escape his poor management):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

Second, they can capture their regulators and avoid punishment for trampling their suppliers' or users' legal rights (think of how Amazon has raised the price of everything we buy, both on- and off Amazon, through its "most favored nation" deals):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

Third, they can use IP law to prevent competitors from modifying their services to claw back some of that value (think of how Apple used legal threats to block an Android version of Imessage, blocking Apple customers from having private conversations that included non-Apple customers:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

Companies can't just use this tricks at will, of course. Antitrust laws can block companies from making anticompetitve acquisitions or mergers. Regulators can punish companies for cheating their customers, workers and users. Technologists can come up with clever ways of modding or reconfiguring existing services with "interoperable" add-ons that let users bargain for better treatment by refusing to accept worse:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

Day in, day out, the decision-makers at tech companies test these constraints, twisting the knobs that shift value away from users to shareholders. Their bosses and boards motivate them with "KPIs" that dangle the promise of huge bonuses and promotions for any manager who successfully enshittifies part of the company's products:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

Decades of pro-corporate, pro-monopoly policy has loosened those knobs. 40 years of lax antitrust meant that companies had a lot of leeway to buy or merge with rivals – that's changing today, but it's tough sledding:

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

As sectors grew more concentrated, they found it easier to capture their regulators, so that they no longer fear punishment for price-gouging, spying, or wage-theft, so applying the same amount of torque to the "break the law" knob cranks it a lot further:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Once you've captured your regulators, you can aim them at your competitors. A monopoly-friendly policy environment has transformed IP law into a bully's charter, allowing powerful companies to strangle would-be competitors who dare to offer their customers tools to shield themselves from enshittification, like scrapers, ad-blockers and alternative clients. Big companies can crank the enshittification knob all the way over and know that smaller rivals knobs won't turn at all:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/20/benevolent-dictators/#felony-contempt-of-business-model

At one point, bosses faced one more constraint on knob-twiddling: their workforce. Many tech workers genuinely cared about their users' welfare, something bosses encouraged as a sneaky trick to get techies to put in long hours without exercising their leverage by quitting rather than destroying their lives to meet arbitrary deadlines. These workers would fearlessly slap their bosses' hands when they reached for the enshittification knob, threatening to quit rather than allowing the products they'd given so much for to be enshittified. Today, after hundreds of thousands of tech layoffs, tech workers are far less like to challenge their bosses' right to twiddle, and far more likely to get fired if they try:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/

All this means that tech bosses don't have to change their approach at all, and yet, their services will grow steadily worse. The boss who twiddles the enshittification knob in exactly the same way as he did a year or a decade ago will find it turning much further, because his customers are locked into his platform, his regulators won't protect them, the same regulators will stop his competitors' attempts at countertwiddling, and his workers fear losing their jobs too much to speak up for their users.

That's the contagion that produced the enshittocene: the forces that constrained companies (competition, regulation, self-help and labor – all melted away, allowing every company's MBA-poisoned knob-twiddling leaders to shamelessly caress their knobs with every hour that God sends:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

Which is why people want to leave platforms. When a platform loses its users, those users have weighed the switching costs against the pain of staying and decided that it's better to bear those costs than to stay.

So why have Tiktok's younger users found the costs too high to bear, and why have their elders remained stuck to the platform?

For that, we have to look at the unique characteristics of young people – characteristics that transcend the lazy cliche that kids are easily bored, fickle novelty-seekers who hop from one service to another with unquenchable restlessness.

Whether or not kids are novelty-seekers, they are, fundamentally, a disfavored minority. They want to do things that the platforms don't want them to do – like converse without being overheard by authority figures, including their parents and their schools (also: cops and future employers, though kids may not be thinking about them as much).

In other words, kids pay intrinsically lower switching costs than adults, because a platform will always do less for them than it will for grownups. This is a characteristic kids share with other supposedly technophilic, novelty-seeking "early adopters," from sex-workers to terrorists, from sexual minorities to trolls, from political dissidents to fascists. For those groups, the cost of mastering a new technology and assembling a community around it is always more likely to be worth bearing than it would be for people who are well-served by existing tools:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/21/early-adopters/#sex-tech

Pornographers didn't jump on home video because of its superiority as a medium for capturing flesh-tones. Home video was a good porn medium because it was easier to discreetly get into the hands of porn consumers, who could, in turn, discreetly view it. The audience for porn in the privacy of your living room is larger than the audience for porn that you can only watch if you're willing to be seen marching into a dirty movie theater.

Every new technology is popularized by a mix of disfavored groups and neophiles, who normalize and refine it – and yes, infuse it with their countercultural coolth – until it becomes easy enough to use to become mainstream. As more normies drift into the new system, the switching costs associated with leaving the old system declines. It gets easier and easier to find the people and services you want in the new realm, and harder and harder to find them in the old one.

This is why tech platforms have historically experienced sudden collapse: the platform that gets more valuable and harder to leave as it accumulates users gets less valuable and easier to leave as users depart:

https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2022/12/05/what-if-failure-is-the-plan.html

If you're a Gen Z kid on Tiktok, you experience the same enshittification as your Millennial elders. But you also experience an additional cost to staying: as late-arriving adult authority figures become more fluent in the platform, they are more able to observe your use of it, and punish you for conduct that you used to get away with.

And if you're a Millennial who isn't leaving Tiktok, it's not just that you experience the same enshittification as those departing Gen Z kids – you also face higher switching costs if you go. The older you get, the more complex your social connections grow. A Gen Z kid in middle school doesn't have to worry about losing touch with their high-school buddies if they switch platforms (they haven't gone to high school yet – and they see their middle school friends in person all the time, giving them a side-channel to share information about who's leaving Tiktok and where they're headed to next). Middle-schoolers don't have to worry about coordinating little league car-pools or losing access to a rare disease support group.

In other words: younger people leave old platforms earlier because they have more to gain by leaving; and older people leave old platforms later because they have more to lose by leaving.

This is why Facebook is filled with Boomers. Yes, their kids bolted for the exits to avoid having their parents (or grandparents) wading into their sexual, social and professional lives. But the reason the Boomers were late joining younger users' Facebook exodus – or the reason they never joined it – is that they stand to lose more by going. Facebook deliberately cultivated this dynamic, for example, by creating a photo hosting service designed to entice users into uploading their family photos while disguising how hard it would be to take those photos with them if they left:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

The irony here is that tech has intrinsically low switching costs. All other things being equal, a new platform can always build a bridge to ease the passage of users from the old one. There's no (technical) reason that moving to Mastodon, or Bluesky, or any other platform should mean cutting ties with the people who stayed behind.

A combination of voluntary interoperability (where old platforms offer APIs to allow new services to connect with them), mandatory interop (where governments force tech companies to offer APIs) and adversarial interop (where new companies hack together their own API with reverse-engineering, scraping, bots, and other guerrilla tactics) would hypothetically allow users to hop between networks as easily as you change phone carriers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/19/better-failure/#let-my-tweeters-go

Tech platforms tend to offer APIs when they're getting started (to ease the inward passage of new users) then shut them down after they attain dominance (locking the door behind those users). The EU is tinkering with mandatory APIs through the Digital Markets Act (though bafflingly, they're starting with encrypted messaging rather than social media). Restoring adversarial interoperability will require extensive legal reform, which is getting started through Right to Repair laws:

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/03/13/oregon-passes-right-to-repair-law-apple-lobbied-to-kill/

The people who are stranded on social media platforms shouldn't be mistaken for uncool, aging technophobes. They're not stubborn, they're stranded. Like the elders who can't afford to leave a dying town after the factory shuts down and the young people move away, these people are locked in. They need help evacuating – a place to go and a path to get there.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/21/involuntary-die-hards/#evacuate-the-platformsr

#pluralistic

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s1ater · 1 year

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the only thing that matters.

pairings. finnick odair x fem!reader

about. finnick is the only one to have ever gotten past your quiet and stoic shell, but neither of you think it’s for the good.

warnings. eh idk

ricky rocks. the hunger games series is honest to god one of the best to ever touch screens.

johanna hated watching you and finnick. it killed her.

since day one, johanna, like all of the others were closely fixated on you and every move you made. you were alluring solely due to the fact that you were silent and completely detached from the destruction of your reality. there was a large admiration for you and whether it was due to your great skill in combat or ability to keep an unwavering face when under the worse of pressure, no one could choose. you were a mystery.

johanna couldn’t figure you out; not for the life of her, and it was absolutely frustrating. especially when her greatest competition did.

of course. of fucking course it was finnick. she wasn’t surprised the more she thought about it—finnick could get anybody to talk. so of course it had to be him who would unravel you like a ball of yarn.

he was prying, and had no problem with being a pest if that meant he got what he wanted—and he always got what he wanted.

it was astounding to say the least.

“they’re sickening aren’t they?” katniss almost jumped at johanna’s jarring words that interrupted the silence.

it took her a moment to realize that the girl was talking about you and finnick and johanna had caught her staring.

“i don’t know… i think it’s interesting,” katniss bit the inside of her cheek as she watched finnick smile genuinely while watching you speak. the two of you were the only thing keeping the group from not seeming depressive. “they seem like polar opposites and yet this is the first time i have ever seen her smile… and it’s because of him.”

once you had gotten out of the blood rain with johanna, crossing paths with katniss and finnick and the rest of their group—you had begun to clean yourself off in the water before finnick had dunked you with reunition. there was no reason, and katniss had thought you would kill him once you came back up, but there you had been; gut laughing, trying to catch your breath while also attempting to return the favor.

johanna chuckles, “he’s a fucking dickhead for that,” she tsks, shaking her head, still watching the two of you, “but i guess it’s sweet in some fucked up way. both found each other amidst of all… this.”

she hated watching the two of you, because it reminded her of something she couldn’t have, something she lost, and something the two of you could so fastly lose as well with any wrong step.

“this is where we finally die, isn’t it?” your eyes watch the calm waves as they slowly wash up further onto the shore, just enough to kiss your feet.

your words make finnick narrow his brows, almost frowning real hard as he looks over to you. you feel distant, out of body and too far for him to reach and yet you were more than close. he feels uneasy at the tone of your voice, like you were almost ready to give up.

“far from it…” he slightly tips his head to look at your face, but he sees nothing, receives nothing despite his hope that you’d be in touch and full of emotion like all other times the two of you have been together. “hey, why?”

his hand holds your shoulder, almost reaching for your face, but you meet his eyes before he could further do so. the concern melted into his face made you inhale sharply, feeling slightly bad for causing the borderline stress in his eyes, “finn, i didn’t mean it… like that.”

“you ready to give up on me?” his eyebrows raise, trying to curve his lips in a accustomed smirk, but you can still see the worry.

“not yet,” you shook your head, almost scoffing as you look back out to the sun sinking into the trees, “just thinking.”

“think more logically, y/n,” he settles more comfortably and over the panic, using his index finger to lightly you tap on the side of your cheekbone. “if i die, who’s going to be your friend? keep you alive?”

you rolled your eyes, mumbling, “we both know i’m more than capable keeping myself alive.”

“we do,” it wasn’t the answer he was looking for. “but outside of the games, what’re you going to do with yourself?”

you shook your head at his silly scenarios, now looking to him with something he didn’t like, “we just try to die together then.”

“she’s the only thing he cares about,” johanna stares harder than katniss was, watching the way his hand clasps the back of your neck while pulling you closer to him. “truly.”

“this is unlike you. since when is death a concern to you?”

“since i met you,” you purse your lips, almost in shame that an obvious dent was made in your principles when you met finnick. “you make me feel so helpless.”

he chuckles, shaking his head at the words coming from your mouth that some could find offense in, “oh, i know you love me.” but it was finnick, and he knew your meaning behind them and he knew exactly how you felt.

before, you were both considered some of the capitols top killers with nothing to lose. but now, everything seemed to not be in your favor the moment you met each other. you had everything to lose now and you both knew it.

“we’ll be the death of each other, y/n.”

navigation.

@transias @cc13723things @thehuntress09 @afidiofobia @savedbythegraceofsoutherncharm @demigirl-with-problems @nyx3028 @missaryasstuff @hizziestial @ritz-hell-hotel @kayalect @mystic-writings @stitch-flo @ancientimes @s0urw00lf @straightzoinked @i44nishi @falcvns @alexxavicry @grxcisxhy-wp @lupinsluvbot

#fanfic #fanfiction #fluff #finnick odair imagine #finnick #finnick odair head cannon #finnick odair x reader #finnick x y/n #finnick x annie #hunger games finnick #the hunger games imagine #hunger games imagine #katniss and peeta #katniss everdeen #peeta mellark #finnick odair #sam claflin

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everythingroyalty · 2 months

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dyin to know your thougts on the photo gate👀

My thoughts is 1.) I can't remember when I've last enjoyed twitter like I currently do. Like, I've been in a pretty bad place recently and I can't wait for Friday when my therapist asks me what's made me feel happy for the first time in weeks and I get to show her this:

And 2.) It is not lost on me how for GOD KNOWS which time, the W&K stans and their prejudice are caught in 4k again. NOW royals are entitled to privacy (something they still sneer at the Sussexes for wanting), NOW it's nORmAL to want to eNhAnCe photos (can't count the amount of times they've accused the Sussexes of doing just that – funny how only one couple has had numerous international news agencies RETRACT a photo because of manipulation 🥲), NOW a 42-year-old is a "young woman" (don't hate that ❤️) who is "being bullied" (but without fail every time Meghan opens her mouth, they have endless shit to spew about her being a gRoWn woman cOmPLaiNiNg – lest we forget when W&K stans dunked on her for writing an essay about her miscarriage 🤡).

As for the photo: I think the ridiculously obvious explanation is that they used a photo from November 2023. Nothing strange or new about that, they often use archive photos for occasions like that. Many royals do. Look at Vincent and Josephine's birthday photo this year. KP's problem is that they wanted the public to think it was a new photo to sate the obsession with wanting to see Kate post-surgery. So the doctoring (not made by Kate, let's just get that settled 🤣) wasn't about enhancements or wanting the kids to "look their best" but about changing bits and bobs of the clothing so people wouldn't notice it's an archive photo.

So now W&K are in a pickle because someone in their staff made up entirely of dingdongs has the photoshop skills of an earthworm. And everyone's like "just release the original!" But they can't because then people will know they were trying to make an old photo look recent which will only add to the "where tf is Kate?" frenzy. And in reality, Kate probably has her reasons for not wanting to go on camera right now which is so legitimate. Meanwhile William's little army of Eton yes-men – whose entire job description up until now has been "1. validate William, 2. throw the Sussexes under the bus" – are literally so inept at actual communications work that with every single move, they make KATE'S situation worse.

#kate middleton #as we grow out the bangs 2k24 #inquiring minds #anonymous #re. brf

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ben-talks-art · 2 months

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Lin Beifong has no wins in Legend Of Korra

Something that always bothered me in regards to the way this series treated the character of Lin was the fact that it never felt like any of Lin's victories actually gave the feeling of being victories.

Maybe it's because it's been years since I watched this show, and I'm being selective in what I choose to remember, and I'm just unintentioanlly choosing to remember the bad over the good... but it feels like this series just felt a lot more comfortable dunking on Lin than actually trying to raise her up... And that kinda annoys me a little.

Lin is part of this character achetype that I like to call "The Antisocials", people who, because of personal events in their past, prefer to avoid or have trouble dealing with others. She's basically meant to be the "Zuko" of the team.

I really like this trope, and I really like to see the earth element getting some love, so I was really excited to see Lin getting her moments to shine and kick some ass in the series... Which... for some reason doesn't feel all that prevalent.

Now, don't get me wrong, when Lin needs to fight, she WILL fight, and she looks cool while doing it... But when it comes to her more memorable moments, her getting defeated sadly feels more frequent than her getting some victories.

Like... Let's take a moment to count her Ls:

She got dumped by Tenzin after another woman seduced him

A terrorist started to attack her city and kept getting away from her

She was unable to stop her men from getting captured and losing their powers

Eventually she herelf got captured and lost her bending

She's constantly getting mocked and looked down upon by other characters

Her own sister left a scar on her face while committing a crime and faced basically no consequences, only to years later have a life filled with success while Lin is all alone

Her own mother acts like she couldn't care less about her struggles

Neither of the two ever gave Lin a proper apology and instead just tried to pull an Mirabel from "Encanto" and tell her to get over it

She basically played no role in all of season 2

And when she tired to face her family about her problems she was simply treated as the one in the wrong

Now let's count her "wins:"

She allowed Tenzin's family to get away from Amon in season 1... At the cost of her getting captured... Only for the family itself to get caught later anyway

She saved Korra from falling, which allowed Amon to get away with her men

In season 3 she gets clobbered by the combustion woman so her sister can land the finishing blow

and In season 4 she tries to rescue her family, only to nearly fail and needing to be saved by her mother, who proceeds to give her the most bare-bones of moments of reconciliation, because God forbid we let our fan-favorite character from the first series show a little humility for her own daughter in her moment of weakness

It just felt like the show was afraid of ever letting Lin be a badass and giving her a real win moment.

It doesn't even need to be a battle win. She could have had a moment with Korra where she teaches her some life lesson, or teach her how to metal bend and listen to the earth, or she could have had some scenes where her actions save the day, like, how come she never gets to save her sister and mother but both of them end up saving her? Or even some character moments like her bonding with Mako, or Tenzin's kids or something... I don't think she even really interacts with anyone in a meaningfull way.

If you were to ask me who her best friend in the series was, I would have no idea what to say.

Her biggest "win" in the series was getting to wake up all happy after "solving" her personal demons, an act she achieved by... fighting her sister and venting out all her anger, I guess.

I don't know if it's just me but Lin's victories on the show all feel so shallow, as if they were telling us she was achieving things instead of actually feeling like she was. At times, she felt like the show's punching bag. Insted of being the Zuko of the story, she came more as the Squidward.

Someone who's there just to lose to the villains and make them look strong and making other characters look cool while they save her with her big lesson being that she needs to learn to be less grumpy.

Lin should be so easy to make cool! Like, you see her design, her powers and abilities, her personality, her verstility for several different types of action scenes and versatility for also different interactions with the rest of the cast...

But instead it felt like they were throwing darts at a wall trying to pick a different way to dunk on her every time, as if they were afraid of makiing her too cool.

I don't know, maybe I'm just being salty and petty because I wish more had been done with her and that's causing me to only focus on the negatives, making them look and sound a lot worse than they actually were, while also ignoring all the big positives about her time on the screen...

But sometimes it felt to me like the show was more interested in hyping up everyone else and giving them a moment to shine over Lin.

Like, again, her own sister got to take down one of the big members of the Red Lotus, and she basically becomes one of the main characters in season 4, while Toph gets to train and help heal Korra.

These two got to look so much cooler in just two seasons than Lin got to look in all 4, and I can't even fully enjoy them being cool because all I keep thinking when I look at them is "You two did Lin dirty."

If they had had an actual honest earned moment of reconciliation, I feel like I would be in heaven watching both of them kicking ass, cause again, I love the earth element, but instead I would just be "God, I wish this was Lin doing all this cool stuff instead."

I'm not exactly sure what the mindset was behind the way they wanted to handle her, not sure if there was studio interference, or mismanagement, or if Nickelodeon's meddling affected things, or what...

I'm just trying to say, I feel like Lin deserved better. I still like her character a lot but I can't help but feel even more could have been done with her.

#avatar #avatar the legend of korra #the legend of korra #lin beifong

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am-i-the-asshole-official · 4 months

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You seem like a decent person so I wouldn’t be shocked if you don’t have this thought. But I just saw something that REALLY made me think this (I won’t say which one, after all this is just me being a jerk I’m sure).

Do you ever get submissions where you think “MAN, someone here needs to go outside. The argument you describe would not have happened if you guys just went out and like interacted with human beings occasionally.”

It wasn’t a stupid submission or anything like that. But it was an argument that I really, genuinely felt could only happen if you lived on the internet almost 100% of the time. It’s concerning. But I would not be shocked if this is just me being ta

The thing is, you're still interacting with human beings on the internet, it's just that the communication has been made so abstracted that often people forget. The problem I have with how people act online has nothing to do with caring a bit too much about a fictional character or whatever and everything to do with the callousness and casual cruelty that comes from forgetting you're talking to people. You know, building that shell of ironic memey detachment and getting too caught up in dunking on people for internet cool points.

Which is kind of hypocritical for someone running a blog like this that kind of exists to dunk on people, I know! But I think the line between a justified dunk on someone who truly deserves it and just ripping on people who are literally just minding their own business is being lost. I totally get what you mean, and I think NAH in this case because everyone has little judgy moments in their head like that. And that's fine and normal! But I think the internet overall might be a little less awful to exist on if we collectively were a little less bloodthirsty in the comments section about it.

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gffa · 7 months

Text

I have never sent anyone to your blog, directly or indirectly, I have more than once explicitly said on my blog that I do not want people engaging with those who shit talk me behind my back, that anyone who does so is not on my side. In the two and a half years after I blocked you for hurling insults at me (because I liked a character you didn't), I have maintained strict radio silence about you. Even when you said I was like someone who would beat and starve their child and lock them in a cupboard, based on my Star Wars meta posts. Even then I still didn't call you out. But this was my father's death, this was a loss you knew was deeply personal to me and you wanted to use it against me. However, you're right that this has nothing to do with you, not my post earlier tonight (beyond that you're part of a bigger problem in Star Wars fandom, but it was about someone unrelated to you directly) or my father's death and his burial yesterday. What does have to do with you is your choice to not just ignore it once you learned about it, but instead to actively choose cruelty in making fun of me. To hear that I'm currently grieving and joke, "Besides, Jedi aren't supposed to mourn are they? Bad Jedi she is for doing that." Even if I had said I thought Yoda's words were literal (which I have not), instead of just leaving it at the rest of the post (which is whatever, I would have ignored it like I've ignored anything else I've seen you say about me, no matter how blatantly wrong you are about me), you chose to look at a situation where you knew I was freshly mourning and tried to use that to dunk on me. You tried to use my grief over my father's death and burial to take potshots at me. All because you don't like my opinions about Star Wars, a fictional series. That's literally it, that's what you hold so strongly against me, that I like the Jedi and I sometimes make fun of Anakin Skywalker, so you think it's fine to say that I'm a "bad Jedi" for having feelings when I just buried my father yesterday. You think it's fine to make fun of my mourning something that has nothing to do with Star Wars and make it about Star Wars. You think it's fine to hurl that at a real person over a fictional group of characters. You really said, when someone told you, "hey, she just lost her dad" and thought, "Yes! This is the time to make a Star Wars joke about it!" I think, underneath the anger I have about this, I'm genuinely upset that someone would hear that a person is grieving and think that it's time to make fun of them about Star Wars of all things. So just walk away from saying anything about me as a person already, that's all I want from you. I will continue to leave you alone, too. Two and a half YEARS of this shit is enough already. This is cruel and unacceptable to do to a real, living person who is not a fictional character. It's unacceptable to hold jokes about Star Wars, a fictional story, on the same level as someone's real life grief over losing their father. (And, for the upteenth time, if you know who this is, do NOT send her any messages on my behalf, do NOT engage with her about any of this, just leave her alone.)

#lumi.txt #parental death tw #death cw

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wolven91 · 21 days

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Drifting- Part 5

There was an eon where Casper merely floated in the infinite dark.

The last thing he remembered before the dark was the concrete road, rushing up to greet him. He couldn't even put his hands up to stop himself as he had grabbed the other person's head with both hands, intending on either tearing it off or slam dunking it into the floor. He recalled, just as it all went blank, that he knew something bad had happened to his head and his neck in the same instance. Even now, a quick check of himself and he knew there were several problems, instinctually, like a perfect itemised list that remained constant in his mind's eye until he dismissed it. It was mainly his head, but he knew he was hurt in the stomach too.

With the destruction of his head, or at least he assumed his head was destroyed, saying he couldn't see, hear, smell or taste anything, nor could he feel anything when he reached up to touch where it should have been; he'd lost all sense of the outside world in an instant. Even if he thrashed or yelled or raged at the dark; nothing changed. His fingers felt nothing, he wasn't laying on anything. The young man couldn't even feel the sun on his skin. He was headless, in the perfect dark.

It was him and the void, all around him. He lay there and, with nothing else to do; Casper began to think.

[Am I dead?]

How does one know when they die? No one had come back to give instructions. Was this what happened? Casper thought back to Earth of all things. The planet which he'd had to flee. Where he'd left his family and many of his friends behind. He'd been on a night out, celebrating his birthday when it happened. Only one of his friends had been grabbed at the same time as him, the rest of his friends had avoided the grasping hands of the ursidains, running and jeering, throwing whatever was at hand.

Casper still didn't know if they had made it off before the end.

From the government records, he was apparently the only member of his family who made it.

Were they stuck in a void like this too?

No wonder ghosts were angry, lashing out he thought. Casper was already getting agitated, and he'd been alone in the void for... How long had he been here? Seconds? Hours? Days? How could he know? He couldn't even feel so much as his...

Then something changed.

The void didn't change, it was still dark and completely devoid of sensation, both physical and otherwise. But Casper could *sense* that he was exposed. Like the back of his neck had been flayed open, leaving his vulnerable spine exposed to danger.

Then there was a noise. A clank of a tool hitting metal beyond a door or wall. Then clattering, of claws on metal, clinking and skittering. More clanking, of something close by, mere inches away.

Then Casper was born for the second time.

Bright light blinded the man. It was so bright, cold, and harsh that he tried to cry out and shield himself with his hands, but the rebreather mask that covered his nose and mouth prevented him from forming sentences. His arms, although now freed from being crossed over his chest, refused to move with purpose; he feebly raised them, only to be shocked by the exhaustion and they collapsed onto him the moment he stopped to recuperate.

Several moving shadows blocked the light, but only for brief moments. The young man kept his eyes screwed up tight, squinting up at the creatures, he tried to prevent them from reach out to him, but all he did was ineffectually paw at them. The air was cold against his skin, and he felt sickly, as if starved and weak. Like he'd not eaten in days. He couldn't help but shiver. All the while this was happening, there was a deafening calamity that lanced pain through the man's mind, giving him a headache that crippled his thoughts. People shouting, tools slamming against metal. It was too much! Too loud!

Something cold and hard, like steel, wrapped around him and lifted him from the womb which had housed him in comfort and warmth. He cried out, but the metal claw that had grasped him between four unrelenting fingers was emotionless as it pulled him free and lowered him onto something yielding and soft.

"Get him to medical. Full check-up."

That was Wren's voice, the young man was certain of it. Her name was clear in his head, but he couldn't bring himself to open his eyes, it was still so bright he could only see the bright red of the inside of his eyelids. He didn't dare open them.

"*Where is it!? Who was the pilot?!*" Came a harsh voice that bellowed and echoed around the apparently enclosed building. Casper felt movement, but there was no wind against him, no sunlight on his skin. He wasn't outside. He raised a hand and placed it over his stomach, but it merely slid off, frictionless. He felt pressure, but the sensation was muted. His fingers couldn't feel his skin, and his skin could feel his fingers.

The harsh voice continued to argue with something or someone but dropped in volume as Casper was apparently moved away, into another room and now that the maelstrom of noise and activity was gone? Fell asleep.

== 0 ==

The next thing Casper was aware of was discomfort. He coughed and winced, there was something stuck in his throat, irritating it. As he reached up however, he found his hand was connected to something, stopping his movements.

Finally opening his eyes, a clean white room with minimal features came into focus. Inserted into the back of his hand was a canular. His wrist was bound to the bed with a cushioned cuff. Turning his head the tubing that connected to the back of his hand, was connected to a drip of some kind, but the bag had alien runes and text on it. It made no sense to him. Next thing he noticed was with the turn of his head, something pulled tight across his face and into his nose. He winced.

With two fingers, he reached up, confused, only to jump when a rumbling voice broke the silence.

"Don't touch that. That's how they're getting food in you."

Glancing round, there was a partially pulled curtain, blocking the source of the voice.

"Who's there? What happened?" He asked, voice rough, but no longer as weak or unintelligible as when he was first torn from the oblivion.

"You completed your first dive. Piloted a mech." Congratulated the voice. It was deep and rich, Casper's translators, of the sub-dermal variety, gave the voice a female inflection.

"That put me in hospital?"

A single chuckle.

"No. But you had no drift, so your brain forgot about your body. Took you a bit to remember. I bet it'll be easier next time." The voice continued with a hint of respect, maybe even admiration.

"Who are you?" Casper asked, trying to manipulate his face to set the tubes comfortably and failing. From behind the curtain, a new alien strutted out.

She was tall, with a serious face. The head was covered in short brown fur which covered a sloped face that met at a pointed nose. Atop her head, was dominated by a pair of long ears that hung down the back of her head and rested against the front of her shoulders. The sclera of her eyes were jet black instead of white, with the black of her pupil, it made her iris intense and dangerous looking.

She wore a rough jacket around her torso, which was left open. Beneath was a nerve suit, similar to the one Casper had worn, complete with open jacks for the needles that would stab into and connect a pilot. This skintight material covered her from her neck, down her body, past her hips and only ended above her ankles. Whilst the rest of her was petit, for such a tall creature, it was her hips there were larger than normal.

Then again, as Casper laid there watching her, with the interloper suffering his study of her in silence, it didn't surprise the human that she had legs for days. If he squinted, the alien looked the spitting image, of a bipedal hare.

"I'm a lopel." She explained, in a bored tone, pushing off from the wall that she'd leant on and again, began to slowly walk around Casper's bed. His head tracked her carefully. "And you're a human." She accused, glancing at him with the golden eyes again. There was something about the way she stared at him, it wasn't a causal gaze or even her studying him as Zeet had done last week. It felt like a threat.

"What do you want? Why are you in my room?" Casper asked, mildly concerned that this thing that was watching him carefully. The way she tiptoed around his bed put him on edge, the saunter was not idle. Was the medical staff nearby?

"I want to kill you." She said plainly.

Casper immediately looked for an alert or a nurse call button but found none. She continued regardless.

"You got lucky yesterday. You ruined my rig and I want my rematch." She explained, coming to a halt next to his drip bag, looming over him whilst keeping her chin up. He could only just see her golden eyes, staring down at him as he were nothing more than filth on the bottom of her shoe... if she wore shoes.

"I'm sor-ACK!" Casper tried to apologise, but the alien grabbed his throat and squeezed.

"Shut it! Do you know what kind of damage you've done to my-" She stopped herself, on the very edge of shouting, glanced at her hand, then let go of the young man who shrank back into the bed, staring up at her. The pain ebbed, but he was still shocked as she seemingly took a breath through her nose, closed her eyes, and took a step away, down the edge of the bed.

"You've tarnished my reputation, or at least, if anyone hears about this." She began again, with a deadly calm voice.

"I can just say I lost?" The man offered, looking for an out.

"Mm, cute. Like there wasn't a hundred eyes on us. No. I'm stuck in this contract and afterwards I'm never going to get another job again because some idiot decides they're going to bellyflop on top of me. Who the hell even taught you that?" She demanded, frowning, and shaking her face, turning to him as if it was such an incredulous idea to jump on top of someone's back. Her ears cascaded with the move of her head, like two giant ponytails.

Casper recalled that he would have landed on her back if she had stopped her 'rig' or even carried on the way she was going. The young man hadn't expected her to spin on the spot and had overshot, tearing off her 'head' and unable to protect his own.

"John Cena and it was more of a draw-" He replied, truthfully, but she wasn't listening.

"I'll add him to the list as well." She replied in a dark tone. "Next question, how did you get that mech to do that? It's the most broken and glitchy of the rigs here, literally because it's the 'pilot's first rig' mech. It's a miracle it still works!"

"I just... plugged in?" He paused before adding. "I'm not lying." This seemed to amuse her as her head flew back as she barked with laughter.

"'New Guy', you couldn't lie convincingly if your life depended on it." She pointed out, her smile, which softened her features in a lovely way; dropped in an instant. Her serious demeanour returning instantly. The room fell into silence as she pinched her chin, staring at him again. He felt a heat prickle in the space between his eyes, unable to hold her intense gaze.

"Can you blink-"

"What's your drift?" She interrupted, seemingly finding something of interest.

"Eh... A fraction of a percent? Why?"

She didn't respond, only glared at him while her hand stopped moving, still touching her face.

"I'm not-" Casper started, trying to defend himself.

"Shut up. I know you're not." She stopped him, but it wasn't her words that made the impact to the young man, but her tone. She believed him. That was evident even to him, and the 'gun barrel' stare she had been giving Casper was gone. It was a night and day change and she had barely moved an inch.

Knowledge of his 'low drift' changed the landscape for her. He'd missed something... Something important. He breathed in shakily, letting her have a moment to stop him from talking, but she remained pensive.

"How... rare is a low drift?" He asked carefully.

"Very." She stated flatly. Her golden irises flicking up, then back down as her fingers began to scratch at her chin again. She seemed to come to a conclusion and folded her arms under her chest, before tilting her head back as if unbelieving of Casper's answer even before she had asked her next question.

"So, you just... don't know about full submersion controllers?" She asked accusatively. "FSBs?"

"My planet got destroyed about... a month ago? A day before that; the most we knew about aliens was what we made up." Casper retorted, a flare of annoyance igniting in his chest. "No! I don't know *anything*!" Casper snapped back, annoyed that she wasn't getting that everything that had happened was a fluke and angry that he had to bring up such a topic just to defend himself from a mentally unstable easter bunny knock off!

It was enough though. Either his passion or his words, her next sentence was calm and low. She spoke clearly and slowly, enough for him to conceptualise what she explained.

"Fine. Just listen and maybe I can fill you in on some details our 'generous hosts' have left out for you." She offered, briefly raising her hands to air quote her words. For the next forty minutes, Qik the lopel as she would introduce herself, explained about 'full submersion controllers' or 'FSCs' and their use in the wider galaxy.

Casper learnt that mechs were not the only machine that could be controlled by thought alone. Realistically, any device could be connected to a nervous system and handled in a similar matter. Granted the more complicated a system, the more strain it put on the mind. Ultimately, the more complicated the device, the greater the drift commands will suffer. Mechs or 'rigs', were second only to full stations or battleships for complexity.

The more complicated the system, the greater the drift. The higher the drift, the more commands to the machine were lost, changed, or corrupted. Too much drift and the pilot would be lost, the machine almost becoming an animal in of itself. Taking actions without order, the pilot unable to control what now controlled them.

Ursidains had the worst drift rating of all the races. But that didn't mean they couldn't use these FSCs for their equipment, only that they were limited to 'simple' caterpillar tracked vehicles and merely targeting and firing systems for the largest equipment. The most advanced and highest trained pilots of the ursidain people could just about manage the firing mechanism of a shipbound railgun. They would leave the targeting and other systems to other parts of the crew and would merely manage the weapon's heat management and ammo selection. That was enough to give those crews an edge, but the user of the FSC would become a sickly creature; losing weight and needing to be shaved just so they could have their bodies connected to the system.

It was a well-respected, but short career with a well-paid retirement and medical coverage afterwards, Qik explained. She moved onto the other races and gave examples for them too.

Ssypnos were accomplished fighter pilots, however their mass made them quite vulnerable to gravity flight and rendered them at a disadvantage almost universally when they had to take their own weight into account. Since the smaller the ssypno meant the better the pilot, Qik spared no details when she explained it was the orphans who were selected and pressed into military service on behalf of nobles that made up the vast majority of their pilots and military. They were kept cold and hungry, ensuring they remained small and effective.

Taurian females were awful for their drift, whereas their male counterparts were much better. Their natural distain for violence however, rendered them useless.

"What about your kind? I hadn't even heard of 'lopels'." The young man asked, sat up and grimacing as he felt cold nutrient paste slowly crawl up the tube before disappearing up his nose. He felt the temperature as the gross, grey looking mixture made its way down the tube that emptied out in his stomach. He winced as his stomach protested.

"Mm, no one likes to talk about the lopel in the room. We're mercenaries."

"A whole race of mercenaries? Not a single librarian or doctor?"

"You either pay for your medical or go join the GC. Nobody wants their details in the system. Money means you can travel and eat in their zone, but we wouldn't give up or anonymity."

"So why doesn't anyone talk about you guys?"

"Because we're their dirty little secret. If two of the powers get into a fight, it's public record. If a mercenary guild are brought in to win a fight, that's a private matter."

"You're privateers?"

The brown alien shrugged and scratched blunt claws against her cheek.

"Call me what you like. I'm rich, free and happy."

"So how come you're here? Besides planning on killing me."

"Geckins were about to fight the ssypno. I've already done five sorties, and the sixth one was literally due the next day. I signed, then something happened, and everyone sent all their ships to some backend of nowhere system, calling a pause to the fighting. I'm contracted for a fight, that never happened. I signed because the same thing had happened five times before over the previous five days, how could I know the war was put on pause because of a fancy new species popped up." She grumbled, frowning, and sneering at her misfortune.

"Was the new system called 'Sol'?"

The reaction was a stiffening of the body, and her golden irises flicking up and fixing him with a stare.

"Yeah, sounds about right.

"That was us. Humans. Sorry for the delay." Casper said sarcastically, blinking and laying his head back, mood darkening. From the corner of his eye, he watched the lopel tilt her head, her ears falling to the side before she pushed up off the wall and strutted over to him. In their time together, she'd yet to stay still for more than a few moments. Even so far as to peek beyond the door every so often.

"What are you guys called again?"

"Human as a single. Humans as a plural. Humanity as a species."

"You guys use FSCs where you're from?"

"A guy successfully played a computer game with a subdermal link. That count?"

"Rudimentary, but yes."

"If you're not a fluke, and 'humanity'," she said with finger quotes. "are this low on their drift scales on average? They're going to be useful to every single species out in the stars." Qik promised, turning to sit on the bed. She gave one chuckle that spasmed her body before looking over her shoulder to admit to Casper.

"Even my own company would hire someone with *that* low a drift. Even *with* zero combat experience." She turned away and leant back on her hands, considering something beyond Casper or the room they lay in.

"Okay, so what does low drift do then?" The man asked, feeling more human as time went on. "With no drift or thereabouts?"

"No drift? That rig you were in? When you're plugged in; that's your body now. It can do what you can do. No limitations, no need for stabilisers or wasting CPU on balancing things." She turned her whole body now, lifting a leg onto the bed to face him completely.

"You put in a combat role software package into a rig and stick you in? You're going to be able to identify a weak point, select a suite of methods for capitalising on it and be ready to execute those options in the blink of an eye." Casper blinked as she snapped her fingers.

"Your rig no longer needs to think about itself, your brain will do that for you. Instead, it... and you... can focus on the target." She finished, grinning wickedly, obvious excited at the concept.

"I've never been in a fight before." Casper pointed out. He had zero training and realistically no education from back home either.

"Liar." She shot back flatly, before turning away, leaning back, and gesturing with her hand.

"You fought me. Honestly I didn't bring my Grade One game, I underestimated you and didn't have my sensor suites on." She paused and growled before grinning; her front teeth were larger than the rest of her teeth.

"Make no mistake I'd wipe the floor with you the second time round. So would anyone else... So let me train you."

There was a moment's pause as Casper waited for the second half of the joke, but all the happened was a slow stare from the lopel from over her shoulder. The grin and cool gaze remained as she waited for his answer.

"What? That's stupid! I'm not a fighter! Much less a mercenary!"

"Oh what, you got a promising career elsewhere? You're stuck in the system right now, whether that's geckin or the damn GC. Draw up a contract like mine. A single combat outing, success means you're free to draw up another one, you'll own the rig *and* you'll have enough credits to whore yourself stupid to wherever the next fight is..."

Casper paused, frowning, staring at his hands. He turned over his left one, saying his right still had a needle and tube attached that he didn't want to jostle. The back of his hand had a trio of tiny holes that had scabbed over. It was bright red at the moment, but the rings around each of the dots was already discolouring. He was going to bruise. A quick check and he found similar dots all up his arms.

"I thought you said you were stuck?"

"Until the fight starts up, I take a few pot shots, blow up a bunker or break a refinery and that's the contract complete. I'm not here to wage a war, or even fight a battle. I'm a solution to a problem the geckins have. The second this fight picks back up; I'm done and gone. I can train you between now and then. We get you on a contract, do the first one cheap so they send you with me and bam! Freedom."

"Freedom?"

"Oh yes. You join my guild, my company; and we can get you all set up with your own mech, you then work off that debt. Plus it means my defeat just looks like a failed lesson with the 'New Guy'."

"This is mental."

"I'm not hearing no. I think you'd suit something mobile. Definitely having a big engine, maybe so it can power boosters?"

Him? A merc?

The idea scared him. But it did mean he would need to get back into the rig. Something about that idea stuck. Piloting the mech, just walking around; had been great. It was like a high just for existing. But what if...

"I don't want to die."

"You're not going to. Pilots are rare New Guy, no one in their right mind would kill a pilot. Mechs fire the control pod out the back during critical failure anyway so even if you took a bad hit; your survival is more important that the machine. Friendlies grab you and scoot you back to base."

He wanted to say no. To deny her such a stupid idea. He was a kid! Barely old enough to drink! How the hell was he being told to become a solider? There was silence for a few beats.

"I heard Zeet was already building you a new rig... Looks *fancy*." She drawled.

Casper's eyes glanced up at her, she was still sat there, calm, and relaxed; but grinning from ear to ear as she gazed at him with her intense eyes. She *knew* he *wanted* to get back in.

"What would the first lesson be?" He asked, biting the wiggling bait on the end of her hook.

[r/WolvensStories]

[Ko-Fi]

#conservationverse #cuddleverse #human #hfy #haso #humans are space orcs #furry #human x furry #geckin #lizard #lopeljack #rabbit

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aledethanlast · 5 months

Note

I desperately hope that Towns is livetexting the whole thing to the FBI agents with the Foxes, informing them that he just witnessed Browning’s soul depart his body upon learning just who Kevin Day is courtesy of his daughter. I also hope that one of the agents also knows nothing of college exy and that agent’s sole comment is “wait, that asshole with an attitude problem in the hospital is famous?” Bonus hilarity, this other agent’s partner is a huge exy fan and has to very quickly give their partner the rundown on everything, trying to summarize about a year and a half of sports drama in 5 minutes and trying to avoid attracting the Foxes’ attention. The Foxes are wildly curious about what the hell their guards are whispering about over there, “hey Yankees yeah you, what the fuck are you talking about, is something wrong with Neil.”

Not even just in this au, I genuinely think Browning's superiors in the bueau would've preferred he tell them that the whole mission had gone to shit than that it had gone swimmingly, except all the survivors were celebrities.

In the 16-odd hours Neil spent in that interrogation room, the people right outside that door were running through a veritable death gauntlet of security briefings to ensure that the whole office was on the same page in terms of fact and opinion when it came to the Wesninski crime network (dangerous), Nathan's killing (a shitshow, but also nice one), Nathaniels still-updating testimonies (holy shit), and the past three years of collegiate Exy drama (honestly kinda bland compared to the rest of it. Somebody suggests that Nathaniel must've gotten bored and did it all on purpose.)

While the whole thing did somewhat improve their opinion of the kid, the decision to slam dunk him in WitSec was basically unanimous. Ideally in Canada. Fucker speaks French anyway.

That's when one David Wymack comes into the bureau office, walks up to the front desk, and says he's here to pick up his nephew. Since this is Browning's "case", he gets sent down to tell the guy that he's fooling nobody and to get lost.

That's when Wymack comes in with the paternity test, his own birth certificate translated from Polish, and a steel chair for good measure.

"...I see," Browning says, coolly accepting the medal for handling this living nightmare the best ever. "Will you excuse me for one moment."

He gets back into the elevator up to Director Shore's office, and wonders if thirty seconds is good enough notice for quitting.

#david wesninski au #aftg

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delcakoo · 2 years

Text

彡 catch me! ❅*⋆ y.jw

requested for my 1k event!

SUMMARY ! seperated from your friend on a ski trip, you had just begun your mission to find him when a cute blue haired boy runs right into you, resulting in the both of you colliding and tumbling down the mountain together. one, slight problem: you have no idea how to ski.

PAIRING ! jungwon x f!reader

GENRE ! skiing au, pure fluff

WC ! 1.3k

WARNINGS ! none just you being a terrible skier <3

a/n: thank you again for the request dear, i loved writing this sm pls, writing for wonnie makes me so happy T-T

yesterday, you fell for a terrible, cruel lie.

kim sunoo; your best friend, your supposed dumb to your dumber, the boy you thought was a gentle, trustworthy soul, has abandoned you atop a mountain.

“c’mon y/n, i’ve wanted to go skiing for months, and it’s finally snowing!” he had begged, swaying you back and forth by the shoulders. “i’ll stick with you the whole time, i promise.”

well, you wish you could tell your past self to take that promise of his, crumple it up, and slam dunk it into the nearest garbage can.

where was kim sunoo? oh how you’d love to know. you probably resembled a lost penguin without it’s rookery, cluelessly scanning the crowd of skiers for his bright green puffer coat.

“yah, kim sunoo!” you pant, trying to shuffle your way around the snow even with skis on your feet, “as soon as i find you, you’re dead meat!”

the fellow skiers surrounding you offer you strange glances, but you pay them no mind. it shouldn’t be this hard to find a decently short, pink haired boy on a mountain decked in white crystal, yet a task has never seemed harder at this moment.

as you’re about to call out for your friend again, you look down, realising you’re getting a bit too close to the mountain’s edge for comfort. the giant hill is already full of talented skiers racing their way to the bottom, professionally gliding back and forth with the help of their poles. you shudder at the thought of trying to follow their movements, already imagining yourself with a few broken limbs by the time you’d reach the ground.

with that thought, you quickly turn away from the slope, beginning your attempt to gain some distance. though suddenly, the sound of a few male voices getting closer makes you raise your head once more. “race you to the ground!” one boy with blue hair says, sliding hastily ahead of his friend.

“oh, it’s on. i’ll be waiting for you at the bottom, jungwonnie!” the other replies snarkily, pushing down his snow goggles and heading right towards— oh shit.

your eyes widen, realising the boys are obliviously heading straight your way, sliding on either side of you. “uh! excuse me!” you alert desperately. if it weren’t for the damned ski’s on your feet, you would easily be able to move out of the way by now.

your heart beats faster and faster as they approach, letting out a worried yelp. finally, one of the boy’s notices you through his blurred goggles, turning out of the way. “hey, girl! watch out!”

the other boy, or jungwon, however, despite hearing his friend's words, was too late to stop himself due to the fact he was already much too close paired with the hill’s gravity propelling him right your way. both of you let out strangled screams as you collide, nearly falling over as you instinctively grab onto each other’s middle’s in an attempt to stabilise your ski’s.

“hold on!” the boy yells, gently gripping your waist and spinning your body to face forward just as the both of you begin sliding down the hill at a breaknecking speed. the chilly air surrounds you cruelly, adrenaline racing through your veins as you both fly down the hill. jungwon seems to be a much better skier than you, expertly angling his skis into a cross position to slow himself down.

however, his efforts don’t do much as you continue to drag him down with you, flailing around like a fish out of water. “i’m gonna die!” you tell him, practically cutting off the blood in his arm from how tight you’re grasping it. his friend is long ahead, too far gone to try and get back to the both of you.

the hill feels never ending, the bottom undetectable through the constant snow falling in front of you. “no you’re not,” jungwon insists, allowing you to hold his arm despite the uncomfortableness on his end. “you need to cross your ski’s, it’s the only way to slow us down!” his voice is just audible over the boisterous winds.

barely aware of your own surroundings, you somehow manage to process his words, gazing down at his ski’s, then your own. you try to copy him, awkwardly turning your feet inwards. shockingly, it immediately works, the both of you already easing down at a much slower rate.

“that’s it, just like that!” you look up just in time to see your new companion’s face turn into an adorable, proud smile.

wait a minute. through all the chaos, you’d failed to notice how cute this jungwon boy was. his silky blue bangs slightly covered his cat-like eyes, the tips glazed with fallen flakes of snow. you felt your heart ache at his gummy smile, watching in adoration as his red nose wrinkles happily. for a moment, you forgot that you were in the middle of skiing down a mountain, much too busy admiring the handsome boy next to you.

“look, we’re almost there!” he points out, using the arm that wasn’t being strangled by you to wave at the slowly visible hill’s bottom.

“we-we are?” you gasp, “oh my god, we are!” the excitement in your voice was evident, a huge grin growing on your face to match his. as you get closer, jungwon finally wriggles free from your grip on his arm, instead pulling your hand tightly into his, gloved fingers lacing together softly. you feel your cheeks begin to burn at the affection, praying it just looks like the effects of the cold weather.

it isn’t much longer before the both of you finally come to a stop on flat ground, instantly releasing huge exhales of relief. you pout when jungwon untangles his hand from yours to adjust his jacket, looking down at you with a teasing raise of his brow. “soo..” he begins, chuckling lightly.

“so,” you copy.

“i’m guessing you don’t ski much?”

you burst into laughter, shaking your head in disbelief of the situation. “nope, only here because a certain someone forced me to join him.” you barely notice the way jungwon’s expression changes at the use of ‘him’. “though as you might’ve noticed, he ditched me.”

jungwon nods, fidgeting with his gloves. “ah, i can help you find your boyfriend then, if you want?”

you choke in surprise, quickly raising your hands to reassure the boy. “oh no. me and sunoo? no way, he’s just my friend.”

“oh, that’s good.” both of your eyes quickly widen at his words, and you watch amusedly as jungwon quickly tries to cover his slip up. “uh- i meant i- it’s good that you’re um, not here alone!”

your shoulders tremble with laughter, watching the cute boy’s cheeks turn an apple red in embarrassment. “well then, until i find my friend, want to.. give me some lessons?” you entreat (not because you ever want to ski again, but because you’d do anything to spend more time with jungwon), gesturing to your ski’s hopefully.

his big eyes grow even more at your suggestion, blue hair bouncing as he nods excitedly. “i’d love to! i’m not a professional myself, though.” after patting his gloves against his jacket, the blue haired boy offers his hand out to you again with a smile, eagerly pulling you over to the ski lift.

jungwon doesn’t seem to care about the fact that he’s ditched his friend similar to how sunoo ditched you, much too preoccupied admiring your rosy cheeks and cute nose scrunch every time he made you laugh.

“it’s fine, as long as you’re prepared to catch me when i inevitably fall over.”

with a cheesy grin, he pulls you closer. “don’t worry, i’ll always be ready to catch you.”

if you enjoyed, reblogs n’ comments are always appreciated and motivating!

perm taglist: @duolingofanaccount @strawberry-sunset-skies @scented-morker @koshinene @boowoowho @sultrybaby @yunjinlvrr @lov3niki @yujiecho

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kimbapisnotsushi · 17 days

Text

i was feeling shiratorizawa + semiten and kawashira hcs so y'all know the drill LET'S GO

goshiki has 100% forgotten that he sleeps in a bottom bunk bed and consequently has shot up awake at the sound of his alarm only to bang his head on the underside of the top bunk bed

or the ceiling if he has the top bunk it's the same either way

also for some random reason i really enjoy thinking about semi and peach green tea. idk he feels like such a peach green tea person

fun fact when i first got into hq i made a list in my notes app where i could keep track of what i thought EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER (organized by team) would order at a boba shop/cafe so i could reference it for fics. i just looked at it for the first time in years. i apparently put down strawberry black tea for semi which still remains a pretty good choice i think

you know what. semi can be a strawberry black tea AND a peach green tea person. he goes for peach green tea when he feels like straying from his usual strawberry black tea. there i fixed the problem we're back on track

tendou uses the excuse of going on boba runs for the team to get alone time with semi. he'll be like "haha i can't get ALL the drinks by myself!! eita come with me :3" and semi just sighs but is honestly secretly really pleased that tendou would choose him out of everyone to run errands with

the greatest love language of all: running errands together

i actually think that, all things considered, semi was probably a little bit insecure and a little bit shy when it came to performing

like yeah he doesn't mind BEING in the spotlight. but he had to work on thinking he was good enough for it at first if that makes sense??? and i think being benched for shirabu probably exacerbates that

he's not used to showing other people his songs and his music!!! he's not used to being vulnerable!! he's not used to believing that he's skilled!!! because obviously that didn't work out in volleyball!! what if semi isn't actually as good at music as he thought himself to be?

tendou of course is determined to make him throw all these thoughts out the window

furudate please give us the secret cultural festival arc where semi gets a chance to shine because of his musical talents . . .

actually since shiratorizawa is a bunch of rich kids i wonder if yamagata has a smartphone bc i just think that'd make him constantly losing it 100x funnier

yamagata: "can everyone shut the fuck up for like five minutes i lost my phone and need help listening for the vibrations"

honestly why do i feel like half the times yamagata has "lost" his phone was really just tendou messing with him

like he's in the foreground running around looking for it while tendou is in the background snapping selfies with it or whatever

reon, ushijima, and yamagata like to go jogging together early in the morning. semi tried it once and then promptly decided never again

i actually think soft quiet early mornings are reon's favorite time of day!! he gets some peace to himself and he gets to see the sunrise bleed into the sky and he gets that crisp sweet air of fresh dew in the dawn and it's so so comforting to him

god i don't know how he does it i could never be that much of a morning person

however this does also mean reon goes to bed at like nine pm at the latest which tendou is personally offended by

reon the early bird riser who probably does yoga or some shit before meeting ushijima and yamagata vs tendou the night owl who stays up til three reading manga in the dark

genuinely how is tendou functioning at practice he probably stays up til three like four out of seven days of the week

(sorry i know i'm dunking on tendou a lot i'll stop now)

kawanishi will never admit it but he is so incredibly fond of the height difference between him and shirabu

it allows shirabu to fit his head perfectly in the crook of kawanishi's neck during bus rides and such and it makes kawanishi's heart flutter every time

but also kawanishi is MISERABLE during spring because shirabu can't comfortably do that when kawanishi is prone to sneezing like every five minutes

shirabu, teacher's pet that he is, is really good friends with the school librarian

oh my god . . . kawashira blue sky complex au . . . i would actually cry . . .

okay anyways shirabu kenjirou is really good friends with the school librarian and that's how he finds out that the school librarian used to know ushijima's dad

wouldn't that be crazy tho????? i'm thinking it was either the same librarian that utsui had or it was a close friend of utsui's who became the school librarian after they graduated and stuff. i'm kind of leaning towards the second one bc i feel like that makes more sense

i just. can you imagine how alone ushijima had to feel. can you imagine how suffocating it had to be. like there's plenty of reason to assume that his mom's side (and perhaps the mom herself) ended up disliking utsui and i wouldn't be surprised if they tried to scrub him out of ushijima's life

new idea guys utsui comes back and gets with the shiratorizawa librarian

i'm KIDDING

(mostly)

honestly i just think this scenario would really show off how much shirabu and ushijima mean to each other because i think that gets underestimated a lot

they trust each other!!! they respect each other!!!! they understand each other!!! ushijima who knows that he is to be used for his pure raw strength and that that's all shirabu wants to do for him and shirabu who wants to bring out the best in ushijima and thinks of himself as someone who serves ushijima!!!!! shirabu and ushijima who both think they're being used by the other but they don't care because that works best for them!!!! it's their way of showing respect!!! by handing the reigns over!!!!

okay that's a really serious oversimplification of what i'm actually thinking but i got like five hours of sleep and i'm running on two mugs of some strong ass lotus green tea i trust you guys y'all get what i mean

like idk i think ushijima wouldn't really know what to do with shirabu when they first meet in their second and first years. quiet upperclassman who is occasionally a jerk but mostly does not mean to be and his equally quiet underclassman who IS a jerk and DOES mean to be. they'd be so fucking funny together. they back each other up in ways they don't even realize. they could leave entire crowds in tears on accident

actually . . . the poor third years back then who had to deal with this first year they thought was quiet and composed and unassuming and totally chill. but was, in fact, completely unchill

shirabu's gone to bat for every single member of the team at some point btw. soekawa ushijima reon yamagata semi tendou etc etc. none of them have ever witnessed it though word just gets passed around to them like shirabu is some honor-defending ninja who only works in the shadows

and then it really surprises shirabu when they come to bat for HIM

i mean i just. i think shirabu is really used to being independent. is used to doing things by himself. he's not used to other people sticking up for him or other people trying to guide him (which could be another reason why he clashes with semi). it's not that he thinks he's perfect but like. he's never had people who wanted to do that for him before!!

but now he's got goshiki who WANTS compliments from him and he's got kawanishi who loves him for whatever reason and he's got the upperclassmen who ruffle his hair and swing an arm around his shoulders and tell him ot text when he needs help and he's just like ???? like a system error.

give it up for shirabu kenjirou everyone i love him

#MAN it has been a long time #uhhh sorry i think this one may seem a bit all over the place LMFAO #but yeah i really love shirabu :333 #ushijima wakatoshi #tendou satori #yamagata hayato #semi eita #oohira reon #kawanishi taichi #shirabu kenjirou #goshiki tsutomu #semiten #kawashira #haikyuu #haikyuu!!#haikyuu hcs #sou says stuff

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suzukiblu · 8 months

Note

Jason Todd for the fic bits?

Jason wants to fuck up every single thing about Gotham, which would be a lot easier if he weren't halfway into heat right now. Which–of fucking course he'd finally have his first fucking heat when he's meant to be starting a fucking gang war.

Like, of course that's his life.

Or death.

He'd really just assumed getting dunked in the pit or being dead or whatever other bullshit had just rotted out his reproductive organs. It's years too damn late for him to start having heats, for fuck’s sake. Hell, he was a late bloomer even before he died.

But he is, absolutely and undeniably, going into heat right now.

So . . . that's a problem, definitely.

Admittedly, said problem could've popped up when Ra's al Ghul was the nearest available alpha, so maybe he should just be fucking grateful to have dodged that particular nightmare-bullet and push his plans back a week.

Just–a clinic. He'll find a clinic. He'll find a clinic and lie about his name and check himself in and pretend this isn't his first fucking heat and he's not a useless virgin who barely even knows what to do for it and it doesn't matter that he doesn't have a pack to spend it with. Doesn't matter that Bruce won't be rumbling soothingly at him through things or that Alfred won't be making sure he stays fed and hydrated, that no one is going to be touching or holding him, that he won't–that no one's going to–

Jason thinks, with mortification and shame and absolute fury, about what he'd used to hope his first heat might be like, before he got beaten to death and burned back to life. He thinks about how badly he'd wanted it to be like that.

Before the ridiculous and semi-suicidal night that Jason had decided to jack the Batmobile's tires, he'd always known just how shitty his first heat was going to be. Back then he'd just figured he'd be lucky if nobody tried to sell it without his permission.

When he'd thought he'd had a real <i>pack</i>, though . . . when he'd thought that he'd really belonged to that pack . . .

He'd thought Bruce would be there to soothe him through it. He'd thought Alfred would be there to keep him comfortable.

He'd thought maybe, maybe Dick wouldn't be too mad at Bruce to be in Gotham that week, and might . . . and might . . .

Jason's gut burns, and he stops letting himself remember what he'd thought then. What he'd . . .

What he'd wanted, then.

Doesn't matter, he tells himself, quick and harsh and brutal. Doesn't matter. Never mattered. They didn't even really want him, in the end. Don't even care that he's gone anymore, if they ever did at all.

They replaced him.

They replaced him, and they didn't even kill the bastard who took him from them first.

Jason wants to die all over again, thinking about that.

Jason wants to cry, thinking about that.

And he wants his pack alpha to come and make it all better, like he's fucking new or stupid or something. Like he hasn't known better than that since he was old enough for cognizant goddamn thought. Willis never made a damn thing better. And Bruce tricked him into thinking that he would, for a while, but . . .

Well, Jason learned that lesson, didn't he.

Robin learned that lesson.

Jason died with the Joker's scent all over him. Died all marked up with it. Died smelling like he belonged to him.

Couldn't even smell Bruce anymore, past that awful scent. Not even enough to die to.

And just–yeah, well, the less said about Ra's and the League, the better.

So.

Clinic. He needs a clinic. He's too emotional, he's too vulnerable, he's not safe, he's . . . he . . .

He doesn't even know where the fuck he is, actually.

Fuck.

Jason tries to orient himself. He knows Gotham like the back of his hand, even now. Even like this. He knows Gotham like the back of his hand, and he's . . . and he's . . .

And he's lost.

That's so funny that he might actually cry.

Right. Okay. Situation: lost. Lost in fucking Gotham, somehow. No gear. Minimal weapons. Not even any fucking body armor or a damn domino mask. Gun under his jacket. Knife strapped to his calf. Picks in his belt.

Nothing else.

He is absolutely going to die. Or get goddamn assaulted in some random fucking filthy alley. Or both.

Probably both, yeah.

Is he even wearing his damn scent blockers right now . . . ?

Jason checks, and is distantly relieved to feel the necessary patches under his fingers, all neatly covering the scent glands in his wrists and throat. Okay, yeah. Not that stupid yet. Still in a bad situation, what with the whole "being halfway into heat on a public street after dark while lost in a shitty neighborhood in fucking Gotham", but just–again, this could be happening with Ra's al Ghul as his alpha, so right now he's just gonna take what little mercy he can get.

Ra's might've bred him, if he'd gone into heat around him.

Ra's would definitely have bred him, actually. That sounds like exactly the kind of fucked-up power trip that bastard would get off on.

Shit, it'd been bad enough the way he'd treated and touched him as it was. Jason still can't believe Ra's never did anything worse than feel him up a few too many places a few too many times. Like, he actually is still technically a virgin, he's pretty sure.

Even if only technically.

So yeah. Jason is very, very grateful for whatever bizarre and random thing made his body wait this long to heat up for the first time. He really is.

. . . is his replacement an omega too? Did Batman's new and improved Robin spend his first heat with . . .

Jason needs to not think about that right now.

Or ever, maybe.

It's so, so hard not to think about that right now.

He just wants his pack so bad. Worse than he ever remembers wanting them before.

Maybe not worse than he wanted them after he first crawled out of the pit and Ra's forced him to bare his throat for him, though.

No. Not worse than that.

But they replaced him. If there was ever anything there, ever any chance of mattering more than he actually had . . . well, that was gone a long, long time ago, wasn't it.

It was gone. And they didn't care. Hadn't ever cared at all, probably.

They didn't . . . they'd never . . .

Jason is vaguely aware of the fact that he's somehow wound up halfway down an alley, crouched down and curled up against a wall in the shadows under a fire escape. It is very nearly the stupidest goddamn place an omega in his condition could be.

He really doesn't give a fuck, though. Why does it matter? Why does anything matter? He should just stay here and let whatever the fuck happens to him happen.

He might as well.

No one's going to care either way.

It's dark. He's wearing scent blockers. He's all wrapped up in scratchy cotton and rough denim and heavy leather and he doesn't know where the nearest heat clinic is and he's not sure he could get his phone out to figure it out right now. He's not even sure he could kill someone right now, if it came to it.

All things considered, that's more worrying than anything else is.

A lot more.

Jason wants to go home so, so bad.

Which is fucking funny, given that he doesn't even have one.

Yeah. Really, really fucking funny.

Jason wants to throw up. Is definitely shaking. Even more definitely needs to get up and go find a fucking clinic and tell them whatever lies it takes to get himself in the door without someone trying to call his nonexistant pack alpha for him.

Without someone trying to call Bruce for him.

Like Bruce would even come.

Jason really, really wants to throw up. Or kill someone.

What he's actually doing, of course, is fucking sobbing. Because of course he is. Of course that's what's happening here. He's alone in a fucking miserable dark alley and sobbing his fucking guts out instead of just dealing with the fucking problem like a fucking adult.

What the fuck is wrong with him?

Aside from that whole thing where heat makes most omegas insanely overemotional and irrational freaks. And how much worse that thing is when said overemotional and irrational omegas happen to be goddamn strays.

Just. Aside from that.

Fuck, he's so stupid. Why did he even come back? Bruce isn't going to care. No one is.

They replaced him.

Like he wasn't anyone important. Like the place he'd been filling in their pack was just . . . just something temporary. Something that hadn't really mattered to them.

Like that place in their pack wasn't the only thing that'd ever really mattered to him.

He's so, so stupid.

So stupid.

He'll never have that again. He never even really had it to begin with.

And then he fucked up and died, and they all found someone better.

They didn't even give enough of a shit to avenge him before they did.

Jason knows he's being irrational. Knows he needs to get up and get out of here. Knows that these feelings are just . . . just . . .

It's only this bad because of his impending heat, he tries to remind himself. It's only this bad because of that. That's all. Sure as shit he's not crying like this because of anything else.

If it wasn't just the heat, after all, he'd never stop crying. If it wasn't just the heat, he'd have just let himself drown in the pit, or suffocate in his grave, or just . . . or just . . .

Jason needs to get up. Needs to get out of here.

Jason needs his fucking pack to fucking come for him.

But he's needed that before.

#jason todd #red hood #also a teeny bit of implied dickjay #batman #a/b/o #rinfic #anonymous #not sfw #long post #implied molestation #rape mention #wip: the one where omegaverse fucks up red hood's life

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