#subterfuge
Text
Check Point (John Price x Reader)
John makes dinner and you discuss decorating for the holiday.
1.1k words
CW: none - this is pure fluff. (Or is it?)
Feedback welcome!
This work is part of the S.N.A.F.U. series, the Masterlist is also pinned to my blog.
Masterlist
John is like the cat that got the cream the entire next day. He’s never out of reach, not exactly hovering, but staying within arms-length. He eventually talks you into watching football with him, which you do, curled around each other for a few hours. He’s only vaguely sorry about the bruises on your thighs, but mindful of them when jostling with you for position on the couch so you can’t get too annoyed with him.
He offers to cook dinner, so you occupy yourself by dragging your box of Christmas decorations out. It’s not big, and half of the box are vintage glass ornaments you are too scared to actually hang on a tree, the glass thin and fragile and the ancient wire hangers rusty. You look up at John after carefully setting the vintage ornaments aside, trying to gauge how receptive he would be to going shopping this close to the holidays. His eyes raise off his task to meet yours, like he can feel the weight of your gaze.
“I don’t have any of the hardware needed to get a tree darling, I think that may have to be a task for next year.”
John speaks before you can say anything. You press your lips together to keep from smiling at his allusion to next year, something warming in your chest at his easy projection into the future.
“That’s alright, I was actually wondering if you would consider coming shopping with me tomorrow? I shouldn’t be spending more money right now but all my decorations are old and you have approximately…?”
You hold up your hand to John, indicating he should fill in the blank you have left at the end of your sentence. He understands without having to be prompted.
“None.”
“Right. Thank you.”
John sighs, going back to his task before replying.
“On a scale of one to ten, how necessary is this shopping? Worth dealing with the crowds?”
You hum, thinking for a moment while you watch him work. You forget, sometimes, that John is a veteran with trauma. He’s so self-assured and confident that things like busy crowds and loud venues half the time don’t occur to you as potential triggers, just a normal course of life. A part of you knows that the landscape is different for John, last night being a prime example.
“No, you know what, don’t worry about it. I can go on my own.”
You cut him some slack, not wanting to put him through unnecessary hardship. That has him looking up at you again though, unexpectedly. He looks like he’s going to say something and then presses his lips together, redirecting himself to rolling a chicken breast around ham and cheese.
You don’t realize he’s still stewing on it until you’re setting up little reindeer figurines made of ceramics along the edge of the island where he’s working.
“Do I get a say in any of this decorating?”
You look up at him, surprised. His face is serious, tracking your placement of the ceramic deer.
“How do the deer offend, my lord?”
You joke, unsure if John’s annoyed with the decorating itself or your choices. He shoots you a look that would probably have anyone else quailing. You raise an eyebrow, unimpressed with his grump and set the deer down in place firmly instead.
“Don’t give me that look, what’s wrong with Vixen and Blitzen?”
“Nothing.” He backpedals, but you aren’t having it.
“You wanted a say, let’s hear it then.”
You gesture with your hand, encouraging him to come out with it. He straightens and looks at you steadily before surprising you again.
“Why did you uninvite me?”
“Uninvite you? From what? Shopping?”
You’re grasping at straws, trying to piece together what’s annoyed him about being let off from that particular task.
“Yeah. You asked if I wanted to go and then told me to forget it immediately. Is this because I don’t condone all that glitter?”
You can’t help the swell of affection that squeezes your heart, looking at him frowning down at you. His hands are held aloft, covered in chicken juices but you step into his side and wrap your arms around his waist tightly anyways. The snowman figurine with generous glitter had been a hard no from the former Captain when you had unpacked it.
“No, it’s because I didn’t think it was fair to ask you to deal with the crowds. Your lack of festive spirit is a separate issue.”
“I can be festive.” He huffs, deflating slightly in your arms.
“Say it louder so my snowman can hear you.”
He shoots you a look and you smile, patting his ribs before letting him loose again.
“You can come if you really need to have a say, John. I just didn’t think it was worth putting you through all the hustle and bustle for just a wreath and some knick-knacks.”
“I know you; you say just a wreath and knick-knacks but you’ll be back here with more bags than you can carry if you’re unsupervised.”
That’s a fair point but you’ll be damned before you let John know that you agree.
“Oh, well if I need saving from myself, I suppose you’re the man for the job.”
You raise an eyebrow at him, casually placing another deer in the line-up. He shakes his head, wisely, focusing back on his work, placing the chicken on a baking tray.
“Trying to save the flat’s limited storage space, love.”
“Hmm…I suppose I can believe that.”
You agree easily, looking at him out of the corner of your eye. He smiles to himself, carrying on to wash his hands at the sink. You watch him, the strong lines of his back flexing under his old t-shirt as he moves. You can’t help picturing the way his back would look as he moves inside you and feel your belly swoop and face heat at the image it conjures in your mind. He turns to dry his hands and catches you staring, face flushed. He raises his eyebrows at you and tucks his chin, a look you know well as an unspoken question. The slow smile that curls across your face is anything but innocent.
“How long is the timer set for?”
You can’t help asking, the thrill of teasing John perennial in your life, now with richer rewards for your trouble. He’s able to read your thoughts just as easily as you read him apparently because his answering grin is savage.
“Long enough.”
Your feet are moving before he’s finished speaking.
Next Chapter
Tag list:
@deadbranch @beebeechaos @cadotoast @syoddeye @writeforfandoms @itr-00 @chloepluto1306 @batw3nch
Ao3
#fanfic#captain john price#john price x reader#john price#john price cod#john price x f!reader#friends to lovers#slice of life#subterfuge#john price x you
80 notes
·
View notes
Text
‘The best disguise for a witch is a rather cheap witch’s outfit! Would a real witch buy clothes from a shop that also does a pretty good trade in naughty Fido jokes, indoor fireworks, laughable pantomime wigs and – our best and most profitable line – giant inflatable pink willies, suitable for hen nights? That would be unthinkable! It’s boffo, my dear, pure, unadulterated boffo! Disguise, subterfuge and misdirection are our watchwords.’
-- Terry Pratchett - I Shall Wear Midnight
#Terry Pratchett#discworld quotes#GNU Terry Pratchett#quotes#I Shall Wear Midnight#Tiffany Aching#Mrs Proust#Eunice Proust#witches#boffo#disguise#subterfuge#misdirection
66 notes
·
View notes
Text
SUBTERFUGE — NEW ONE-SHOT TEASER
It had been six days, about twelve hours, and thirty minutes since I had last seen him. It may have been a bit articulate, but I digress.
The last remaining image of him that was concreted into my mind was the way that his shirt flew back over his long, lean torso, the boyish grin giving me a subtle flash as he noticed my stares from within the confines of the white sheets. He had mumbled something as he pushed his hair back on his forehead.
“A bit rude to stare, Kitty.” He had said, making a disastrous attempt at making himself unlovable as he used a nickname to my disadvantage.
It was then that I knew our sliding around, letting our discretion get the best of us was tempting fate in a way that neither of us could have thought of before.
Nobody in this room knows that we had seen each other six days ago. Or even seven days ago, or even nine days ago.
There had been a string of days that I hadn't even really thought about until I had seen him again. The question marks that sat in my phone like a string of unanswered, desirable status quos. It felt like our own secret language and way of being, but now so foreign.
Harry: ?
Kate: 10.
Harry: 5?
It would inevitably make me blush, throwing my phone onto my bed and I went to hop into the shower. There hadn't been a moment when I had these kinds of feelings– not just infatuation but these desirable wants and needs of a person who I had never thought of like that before.
The few weeks together had given me perspective that I had so deeply internalized mostly because I knew that it was just a moment in time; it was just a hiccup of need that both of us could give one another now.
It had just been the two of us– left alone for the summer.
When he walked out of the shower that day, towel around his waist to try and make his way to his bedroom, thinking I was at class, it was like neither of us ever thought twice. That was the problem– neither of us thought anything at all.
Now, here we are. At the judgement day of all of our best friends, back again for our senior year. No one has a clue, but Harry’s grumpier than usual attitude is there getting in the way of it.
Thank God it’s over now.
______________
hiii guys! I just wanna say a massive thank you to everyone recently sending so much love & appreciation for my writing! I love it so much— thank you!
also — if you want to send in a request for a one shot, want advice on writing, want to just talk, come ask! I'd love to chat 💌
come follow me over at twitter @/sushirrrry for me updates!
- em
#harry styles#hs#ask#harry fanfic#harry styles fanfic#harry styles fanfiction#harry wattpad#harry styles smut#harry styles x original character#anon ask#harrystyles#harrystylesfanfiction#harry styles oneshot#harry fic#harryedwardstyles#sushirrrry#subterfuge
32 notes
·
View notes
Text
The following program was based on a true story.
These events actually happened.
*THEY DID NOT!!! EVERY WORD OF IT IS A LIE!!!!!!*
#dougie rambles#personal stuff#based on a true story#also not#lies#fake#false#trickery#subterfuge#black books#shielding corruption#deceit#deceived#chicanery
34 notes
·
View notes
Text
Found another odd tag — keyed off the word "hiding" — and this time it's a long one!
So, the full tag is:
#blac chyna is hiding true feelings about her ‘rebirth’ makeover – her ‘lip clamps & droops’ are the proof
This sounds like a celebrity gossip headline! And sure enough, this tag is full-to-bursting with this article exclusively.
I got this from the desktop site, because it's wild to see. It's just a wall of the same article, all the way down, for multiple pages.
They're all from early November 2023, and all from blogs with names that end in *-polycom, *-mag, or *news. It seems fairly self-evident that this is the work of some kind of tabloid, but I'm a curious cat. I want to dig deeper.
Digging Deeper
Most of these posts tell you (they don't provide links!) to go read the full article on POLYCOM. Ok, what is a POLYCOM? I don't think it's Poly Inc., maker of video- and teleconferencing appliances, but a few cursory Google and DuckDuckGo searches yield no evidence of anything else.
The most recent post tells us to go track down the article ourselves on "IN TREND", but provides no URL or link. Searching around for "IN TREND" on the web is fairly difficult, returning results for well-known fashion publications, trend analytics, and a brand of clothing called "Intrend". Searching for "In Trend Today" returned more interesting results, including an InTrendToday YouTube Channel and Facebook page. The Facebook page seems to have stopped posting in late 2018, but the YouTube Channel last posted a video on Dec 18, 2023. I'll talk more about the YouTube Channel under the cut at the end of this post.
Some of these posts do have "read more" links pointing to posts on Wordpress, all of which claim to be "on MAG NEWS". Each *-mag blog links out to a separate Wordpress account which seems to be re-uploading the same story. All of these Wordpress Accounts are deleted (for violating Wordpress ToS), and all of these linked posts are gone (here are two examples):
Somehow, I doubt this is some covert arm of the Maricopa Association of Governments newsroom.
Digging down into the results on Tumblr, I found a copy of this post made by the blog vouxsportsnews. They link a Wordpress article from another dead Wordpress account:
BUT, their most recent post on their blog (a gossip article about Zendaya posted on Jan 5, 2024) does have a working Wordpress link, to vouxsportsnews.wordpress.com (clever 🙄):
This is an archetypal internet-based gossip rag. I didn't know these still existed! I guess Wordpress is hunting them down for sport?
The "Read More ..." link in the article goes to a website called top.neotrends.today, which is a sketchy link I will not be clicking on. The "full article" is apparently hosted on www.primesky.media, which I also will not be directly navigating to. I did manage to get a screenshot of the front page of primesky today (Jan 8, 2024) using a webtool:
I blurred the article shown on this page to preserve the privacy of the person it featured.
Primesky is hosted on a Cloudflare virtual private server, and no public info is available on who owns the primesky URL. A search for "redroads amag" on DuckDuckGo leads back to primesky. A search of the same on Google leads to a website at www.clickhere.world, which is immensely sketchy and looks identical to primesky. At this point, I'm going to end my search for a culprit.
Conclusion
I thought I could find the tabloid hydra's body, but I just found more heads. I'm not surprised the operators of a gossip rag bot network on Tumblr are also playing dirty on Wordpress, and covering their digital tracks well. Sometimes it's best to just report spam and go on with your day.
It should go without saying, but DO NOT NAVIGATE to these websites! At worst, they will give you every virus. At best, they will mine crypto in the background of your browser (and rot your brain).
The YouTube Channel Digression
The YouTube channel intrendtoday was created on Oct 4, 2017, and it has more than 53,000 subscribers as of my posting this post (Jan 8, 2024). However, the earliest video on the channel was posted on Nov 7, 2023. That is suspiciously close to when all of these Blac Chyna spam articles went up.
Given that the videos posted get less than 50 views on average, I think the grossly-out-of-proportion subscriber count is evidence of bot subscribers. Maybe the channel re-branded and deleted a prior back-catalog? Archive.org has no snapshots of this YouTube channel, but SocialBlade claims they lost nearly 3.5 million video views in early September of 2023 (indicating they deleted a lot of videos).
SocialBlade also indexes this channel under the name "demattradinginfo", not "intrendtoday". Archive.org doesn't have records of a YouTube URL for the channel demattradinginfo, but a Google search of that name shows results for Demat Accounts, which are a type of financial account commonly used in India to hold securities and trade stocks.
It's possible that whomever is behind the gossip news spam is also in control of this YouTube channel. I wouldn't be surprised, given how frequently people offering financial advice on social media are either scammers or spammers (and sometimes both!). However, I have no proof that the people behind this YouTube channel are the same people behind this social media gossip spamming.
#adventures in tagging#tumblr#search#google search#duckduckgo#tabloids#spam#blogging#wordpress#subterfuge#internet safety#youtube#fintech bros#social media
9 notes
·
View notes
Text
Tencil
9 notes
·
View notes
Text
8 notes
·
View notes
Text
The Three Musketeers: D’artagnan (movie, 2023)
I saw this months ago, and only just realized I’d never mentioned it here.
I thought The Three Musketeers: D’artagnan was fabulous. Maybe I was brain-addled, or drugged without my knowledge, but by the end of the film I felt happy, and satisfied, and excited, and… just wow. I was floating. I really liked this movie. It’s one of the rare movies I’ve seen that made me immediately want to watch it…
View On WordPress
#Adventure#Alexandre Dumas#Auguste Maquet#France#French#historical fiction#intrigue#romance#serial#subterfuge#swashbuckling#swordfights#swordplay#The Brotherhood of the Wolf#The Three Musketeers#The Three Musketeers: D&039;artagnan
2 notes
·
View notes
Text
'You enjoy hiding behind masks?'
'I revel in it. It gives my life a certain color and danger.'
Siri Hustvedt, from The Blindfold
#thrilling#danger#masks#concealment#identity#intrigue#subterfuge#dialogue#quotes#lit#words#excerpts#quote#literature#thrill-seeker#siri hustvedt#the blindfold
6 notes
·
View notes
Text
Petition to release the song Subterfuge on Spotify in light of the Springleaf podcast because it is literally one of my favourite pieces of music and it's only around on YouTube.
2 notes
·
View notes
Text
Just kidding I’m actually not a space demigod from a fictional universe, I nearly got you tho huh.
3 notes
·
View notes
Text
August 7, 1922
Krazy Kat by George Herriman
[ID: Officer Pupp leads Krazy around town, twirling his baton as he goes. /end]
Pupp: Come right along, "Krazy," I'll see that you are protected from that Mouse.
Krazy: Yizz.
[ID: They stroll past a bucket overturned on the ground. /end]
Pupp: He'll toss no brick at you today.
Krazy: Yizz.
[ID: As they walk off-panel, Ignatz peeks out from underneath the bucket. /end]
Pupp: Not while I'm with you, he won't.
Krazy: Yizz.
[ID: Unseen by Pupp, Krazy is hit in the head by a brick that ZIPs in from behind. /end]
Pupp: There's one person that Mouse is scared of.
[ID: Krazy looks back to see Ignatz's stick legs scurrying off under the bucket. /end]
Pupp: And that's me.
Krazy: L'il ainjil.
[ID: Pupp and Krazy march on. /end]
Pupp: Y'betcha.
Krazy: Y'betcha.
#newspaper comics#vintage#history#1922#krazy kat#transcript available#1920s#acab#gay romance with bricks#subterfuge
16 notes
·
View notes
Text
tencil. - twit
#I’m still displeased with this.#it’s stiff and lackluster.#Side profiles man.#my art#subterfuge#Pierce tencil#Richard brake#fanart
8 notes
·
View notes
Text
No.
Apparently the cake unbaked itself.
#dougie rambles#personal stuff#my poor attempt at a joke#what#no context#cake#witchcraft#subterfuge#sabotage#chicanery#fuckery#what sorcery is this#this sounded funnier in my head#shitpost#baking
9 notes
·
View notes
Text
Here is a screenshot of a misspelled tag (relating to AI art) that is popular enough to show up automatically, in case anyone was under the impression that porn bots are the only ways people spam Tumblr.
For context, Tumblr forgot all of my tags across all platforms a week or two ago. I know at least one other person whom this happened to. I have never (to the best of my memory) used this tag, and certainly not in the last two weeks. I tag AI art "algorithmically generated images" when I reblog it, because I'm a contrarian and I have compunctions against image generators.
This tag is the result of someone who is creating many posts with this tag. And a quick search yeilds that the blog @ai-pin-up-art has been rapid-firing posts for a few months recently, stopping only in July and going completely dead silent. I'm willing to bet the whole blog is automated; the misspelt tag seems like a scripting mistake.
A few other blogs have used the tag only once, which could either be mistypes, or clicking on the same misspelt suggested tag that I was given.
I wrote all this for a few reasons:
1) I went on a little sleuthing expedition and wanted to record my findings.
2) I think that one blog's actions influencing the mechanisms of Tumblr to that degree is both illuminating and kind of spooky.
3) I suspect that AI images are currently being astroturfed into all major social media ecosystems, alongside honest posts from actual adopters. This blog could be run by a technologist who just automated one of their blogs, which just so happens to post and reblog exclusively algorithmically generated porn. Maybe.
#adventures in tagging#tumblr#search#software#algorithmically generated images#subterfuge#my posts#conspriacy theories#social media
8 notes
·
View notes
Text
The Israelis programmed psychological subterfuge into Internet algorithms, brainwashing our children, and now their country is eating itself from within while their settlers shoot Palestinian children for sport and poison their village wells. They ignored God’s every warning and now retribution is coming. God’s vengeance is sweet vengeance.
1 note
·
View note
Last Seen Blogs
