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selarina · 4 months

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continuation to this

so, that night gojo satoru leaves with no jacket and half a broken heart and for the first time since he was 12 years old, he takes a sip of alcohol as he slouches against his home bar.

it's bitter, and it tastes a bit too much like soy sauce for his liking but he sips and sips until he sees the engraved "S.G" inscription at the bottom of his glass.

"hello, husband," a voice comes from behind him, interrupting his sob fest.

and for a moment, for dumb little moment, he thinks it's you. the voice sounds nothing like you though, it's far too high-pitched, but he's dreamt of this far too much for him to imagine someone else calling him husband.

aya tsukino materialises next to him, and seats herself on a seat beside him. she moves with a certain a quiet sleekness that he barely caught her moving from behind him. or maybe, he's finally out of it. "excited for the wedding, then?" she deadpans as she pours herself a drink.

"thrilled," he parrots back, merely a barren echo of emotions.

there's more truth in this room than there's been in your shared room for weeks. because it's simple really— gojo doesn't want to marry her, and aya couldn't care less as long as she got the money his family had.

before they had even exchanged any words, it was clear that they had this silent agreement that the two of them had little to do with love and everything to do with societal expectations and status.

as gojo attempts to take another sip from his empty company, he can't help but replay the events of the evening in his mind. your anger, and the way you stood up for the love you believed in. it'll haunt him for the rest of his life.

he wonders if you'll genuinely come to understand that he did have you in mind when he left you. he doesn't want you to be a mistress, a dirty little secret. he's seen how it broke his mother apart. how could he wish the same fate upon you knowing how his mother's life ended?

you're strong, and he believes you will persist and he will see at the end of his life sleeping grey and old in his bed as he stares at the way the sunlight hits your laugh lines.

but he also remembers the way you cried in secret. he never brought it up, he never brings it up. he was just waiting for the day you'd be comfortable enough to cry in front of him but for now, he settles for meaningless presents he brings afterwards to wipe off the blue from your face.

he places his glass down with a clink, and he hears a resembling clink from aya. "i'll ask you this only once, gojo satoru," she speaks up. "do you want this marriage?"

"i never wanted this marriage," his reply is immediate.

"of course not," she says. "i meant, do you still want to go through with this?"

he doesn't respond. the both of them know the answer to that, it's written all too clearly on his soppy little face.

"what if i don't," he finally speaks. "what about your money? your status?"

"my money..." she feigns to ponder. "as someone who's always sought out money, i can tell you one thing about it. money, it comes and it goes. i'll find another way as i always do," she says. "i will be fine."

"your father—"

"—is a terrible man, who will go on his pissy campaign against me but i hope it's not presumptuous of me to expect you to come to defence when needed. you know, for all the trouble?"

he chuckles with no mirth. seems trouble is all he's capable of causing the past few days. "of course," he responds.

aya smiles, she supposes there's one benefit of having the strongest sorcerer as her ex-fiancé. she stands up, as she pulls her coat snug against her body as she prepares to leave. "besides, you're not the only rich high-status man in town, you know?"

"well, they're not all me," he replies. his smug demeanour returning to him like it's breathing a new life into him.

"wow, a bonus too," she chuckles.

"and who was that handsome man with you on friday? blonde, glasses, chiselled like a—"

"nanami kento," he replies with a grin.

"nanami kento. is he rich?"

"not as rich as you," he replies. it's true. he's rich, he worked on wall street after all and nanami is a smart man, he has so much in his savings account, it's enough to feed an entire nuclear family. why he saves up is something that's beyond gojo.

"well, he's handsome. tell mr. kento i said hello," she smiles facetiously.

"tsk, fine." he grins again. "get out of here."

it's been a week since you heard about the wedding falling apart. and since, you've been hearing about it daily, almost hourly if you're being honest. after all, you're at the centre of it. it only makes sense.

there's a whole slew of narratives running around, cheating, money laundering, even murder. but the most popular one was about how aya was the rosaline to your romeo and juliet. gojo's as romeo as he comes — handsome, influential and maybe a bit endearingly dumb but you fail to see how you're juliet. she was rich, influential, beautiful — everything you've been starkly reminded that you are not.

but everyone's talking about the romance of it all and you haven't heard from gojo himself so it's strange to take their words to mind or heart. you ignore them, forming a ready-made response sheet in your head to every possible question you encounter across the week. they become white noise, as you go through your day like a pre-programmed robot.

but that changes on a hot, dusty afternoon as you're sitting in a cafe, awaiting a man you were advised against seeing, and he's late. of course, he's fucking late. he broke up with you and he has the audac—

he walks in. he looks exhausted, lankier than usual, and there's a cruel part of you that likes it. to know he looks as miserable as you've been seeing. there's the other, familiar part of you that wants to run your fingers against his sensitive eyes as you feed him with the warmth of the diner's food.

but you do neither, you neither smile nor frown. you sit in place as you wait for him to come and sit opposite you.

"hey," his voice sounds gravelly. "i'm sorry i'm late."

"nothing i'm not used to," you reply with a glare as you cross your arms.

his hands reach for the menu as he plays with the edges of the paper. he always orders the same breakfast meal from this place. he must be nervous.

"i... i wanted to talk to you," he starts. "i want you back."

"excuse me? you can't just—"

"i'm willing to do anything. anything. if you want to take it slow, i understand. if you want to take your time, i understand. if you want me to get down on my knees and beg, i understa—"

"do it."

his eyes widen, you can tell — even though the black glasses are blocking his eyes, you can tell. it only lasts for a split second, because you blink with contempt and he's beside you. on his knees, as he stares up at you. he barely stares up at you — he's so tall, he's almost eye-to-eye with you. but even so he hunches his back, makes himself small.

"i'm sorry," he says again, as he takes off his glasses placing it onto the table in front of you. his eyes are alarmingly blood-red, and it takes every muscle in your body to hold back from running your fingers over his. "like i said, i'll do anything. just pleas— take me back."

you stare, and he stares back at you. you're too lost in the way he looks at you — at your mercy — that you miss the strange and baffled looks from people around you. and when you finally do, your cheeks flush with heat.

"okay," you say. " please, get up now."

"no, let me— let me stay," he says. pleads. "just let me stay until you take me back."

"fine," you sigh, as if there was any real objection from your side. "get up now."

"really?" his blood-red eyes gleam, you could almost see a tinge of the vibrant blue coming back to life.

"yes," you groan as your hand grip his elbow. "i was willing to be your fucking mistress. did you really thin— i would say— mmpph"

and just like that he's up, sliding next to you on your seat, as he kisses you. you're ashamed to admit that your first thought was the idea of getting kicked out for public indecency but your second thought was about how you think you could stay like this forever. despite the public gawking at you through mean and baffled stares.

"i'm serious about doing whatever it takes," he says, sincerity laced in his voice. "you shouldn't let me get away with this lightly."

you smile. "I hope you mean it," you reply. "and i won't. i’ll make you work for it, just a little."

he nods with a smile, "anything. i'll make it up to you."

"you have to do the chicken dance," you say, seriously and firmly.

"what?"

"you have to do the chicken dance. right now in the middle of the diner and i'm taking a video," you pull out your phone. "and... i'm sending it to nobara."

his eyes widen, almost like he's feeling actual fear. "not nobara," he gasps. "but she's so mean, baby."

"well, you said anything."

he sighs. gojo looks around the crowded diner, his tall frame rigid and tense. he glances at you, then at your phone, and finally resigns himself to the absurd request.

"fine," he mutters, standing up from the seat as he begins flapping his arms and doing a clumsy version of the chicken dance in the middle of the diner.

#the idea was to make gojo as pathetic as possible #but ya'll asked and i'm delivering #jujutsu kaisen drabbles #gojo satoru angst #gojo satoru x reader #gojo satoru x you #gojo satoru x y/n #jjk x reader #jujutsu kaisen x reader #jjk angst #gojo satoru #gojo x reader angst #jjk x reader angst #jujutsu kaisen angst #jujutsu kaisen x reader angst

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 months

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Apple to EU: “Go fuck yourself”

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/2024/02/06/spoil-the-bunch/#dma

There's a strain of anti-anti-monopolist that insists that they're not pro-monopoly – they're just realists who understand that global gigacorporations are too big to fail, too big to jail, and that governments can't hope to rein them in. Trying to regulate a tech giant, they say, is like trying to regulate the weather.

This ploy is cousins with Jay Rosen's idea of "savvying," defined as: "dismissing valid questions with the insider's, 'and this surprises you?'"

https://twitter.com/jayrosen_nyu/status/344825874362810369?lang=en

In both cases, an apologist for corruption masquerades as a pragmatist who understands the ways of the world, unlike you, a pathetic dreamer who foolishly hopes for a better world. In both cases, the apologist provides cover for corruption, painting it as an inevitability, not a choice. "Don't hate the player. Hate the game."

The reason this foolish nonsense flies is that we are living in an age of rampant corruption and utter impunity. Companies really do get away with both literal and figurative murder. Governments really do ignore horrible crimes by the rich and powerful, and fumble what rare, few enforcement efforts they assay.

Take the GDPR, Europe's landmark privacy law. The GDPR establishes strict limitations of data-collection and processing, and provides for brutal penalties for companies that violate its rules. The immediate impact of the GDPR was a mass-extinction event for Europe's data-brokerages and surveillance advertising companies, all of which were in obvious violation of the GDPR's rules.

But there was a curious pattern to GDPR enforcement: while smaller, EU-based companies were swiftly shuttered by its provisions, the US-based giants that conduct the most brazen, wide-ranging, illegal surveillance escaped unscathed for years and years, continuing to spy on Europeans.

One (erroneous) way to look at this is as a "compliance moat" story. In that story, GDPR requires a bunch of expensive systems that only gigantic companies like Facebook and Google can afford. These compliance costs are a "capital moat" – a way to exclude smaller companies from functioning in the market. Thus, the GDPR acted as an anticompetitive wrecking ball, clearing the field for the largest companies, who get to operate without having to contend with smaller companies nipping at their heels:

https://www.techdirt.com/2019/06/27/another-report-shows-gdpr-benefited-google-facebook-hurt-everyone-else/

This is wrong.

Oh, compliance moats are definitely real – think of the calls for AI companies to license their training data. AI companies can easily do this – they'll just buy training data from giant media companies – the very same companies that hope to use models to replace creative workers with algorithms. Create a new copyright over training data won't eliminate AI – it'll just confine AI to the largest, best capitalized companies, who will gladly provide tools to corporations hoping to fire their workforces:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

But just because some regulations can be compliance moats, that doesn't mean that all regulations are compliance moats. And just because some regulations are vigorously applied to small companies while leaving larger firms unscathed, it doesn't follow that the regulation in question is a compliance moat.

A harder look at what happened with the GDPR reveals a completely different dynamic at work. The reason the GDPR vaporized small surveillance companies and left the big companies untouched had nothing to do with compliance costs. The Big Tech companies don't comply with the GDPR – they just get away with violating the GDPR.

How do they get away with it? They fly Irish flags of convenience. Decades ago, Ireland started dabbling with offering tax-havens to the wealthy and mobile – they invented the duty-free store:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty-free_shop#1947%E2%80%931990:_duty_free_establishment

Capturing pennies from the wealthy by helping them avoid fortunes they owed in taxes elsewhere was terribly seductive. In the years that followed, Ireland began aggressively courting the wealthy on an industrial scale, offering corporations the chance to duck their obligations to their host countries by flying an Irish flag of convenience.

There are other countries who've tried this gambit – the "treasure islands" of the Caribbean, the English channel, and elsewhere – but Ireland is part of the EU. In the global competition to help the rich to get richer, Ireland had a killer advantage: access to the EU, the common market, and 500m affluent potential customers. The Caymans can hide your money for you, and there's a few super-luxe stores and art-galleries in George Town where you can spend it, but it's no Champs Elysees or Ku-Damm.

But when you're competing with other countries for the pennies of trillion-dollar tax-dodgers, any wins can be turned into a loss in an instant. After all, any corporation that is footloose enough to establish a Potemkin Headquarters in Dublin and fly the trídhathach can easily up sticks and open another Big Store HQ in some other haven that offers it a sweeter deal.

This has created a global race to the bottom among tax-havens to also serve as regulatory havens – and there's a made-in-the-EU version that sees Ireland, Malta, Cyprus and sometimes the Netherlands competing to see who can offer the most impunity for the worst crimes to the most awful corporations in the world.

And that's why Google and Facebook haven't been extinguished by the GDPR while their rivals were. It's not compliance moats – it's impunity. Once a corporation attains a certain scale, it has the excess capital to spend on phony relocations that let it hop from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, chasing the loosest slots on the strip. Ireland is a made town, where the cops are all on the take, and two thirds of the data commissioner's rulings are eventually overturned by the federal court:

https://www.iccl.ie/digital-data/iccl-2023-gdpr-report/

This is a problem among many federations, not just the EU. The US has its onshore-offshore tax- and regulation-havens (Delaware, South Dakota, Texas, etc), and so does Canada (Alberta), and some Swiss cantons are, frankly, batshit:

https://lenews.ch/2017/11/25/swiss-fact-some-swiss-women-had-to-wait-until-1991-to-vote/

None of this is to condemn federations outright. Federations are (potentially) good! But federalism has a vulnerability: the autonomy of the federated states means that they can be played against each other by national or transnational entities, like corporations. This doesn't mean that it's impossible to regulate powerful entities within a federation – but it means that federal regulation needs to account for the risk of jurisdiction-shopping.

Enter the Digital Markets Act, a new Big Tech specific law that, among other things, bans monopoly app stores and payment processing, through which companies like Apple and Google have levied a 30% tax on the entire app market, while arrogating to themselves the right to decide which software their customers may run on their own devices:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/07/curatorial-vig/#app-tax

Apple has responded to this regulation with a gesture of contempt so naked and broad that it beggars belief. As Proton describes, Apple's DMA plan is the very definition of malicious compliance:

https://proton.me/blog/apple-dma-compliance-plan-trap

Recall that the DMA is intended to curtail monopoly software distribution through app stores and mobile platforms' insistence on using their payment processors, whose fees are sky-high. The law is intended to extinguish developer agreements that ban software creators from informing customers that they can get a better deal by initiating payments elsewhere, or by getting a service through the web instead of via an app.

In response, Apple, has instituted a junk fee it calls the "Core Technology Fee": EUR0.50/install for every installation over 1m. As Proton writes, as apps grow more popular, using third-party payment systems will grow less attractive. Apple has offered discounts on its eye-watering payment processing fees to a mere 20% for the first payment and 13% for renewals. Compare this with the normal – and far, far too high – payment processing fees the rest of the industry charges, which run 2-5%. On top of all this, Apple has lied about these new discounted rates, hiding a 3% "processing" fee in its headline figures.

As Proton explains, paying 17% fees and EUR0.50 for each subscriber's renewal makes most software businesses into money-losers. The only way to keep them afloat is to use Apple's old, default payment system. That choice is made more attractive by Apple's inclusion of a "scare screen" that warns you that demons will rend your soul for all eternity if you try to use an alternative payment scheme.

Apple defends this scare screen by saying that it will protect users from the intrinsic unreliability of third-party processors, but as Proton points out, there are plenty of giant corporations who get to use their own payment processors with their iOS apps, because Apple decided they were too big to fuck with. Somehow, Apple can let its customers spend money Uber, McDonald's, Airbnb, Doordash and Amazon without terrorizing them about existential security risks – but not mom-and-pop software vendors or publishers who don't want to hand 30% of their income over to a three-trillion-dollar company.

Apple has also reserved the right to cancel any alternative app store and nuke it from Apple customers' devices without warning, reason or liability. Those app stores also have to post a one-million euro line of credit in order to be considered for iOS. Given these terms, it's obvious that no one is going to offer a third-party app store for iOS and if they did, no one would list their apps in it.

The fuckery goes on and on. If an app developer opts into third-party payments, they can't use Apple's payment processing too – so any users who are scared off by the scare screen have no way to pay the app's creators. And once an app creator opts into third party payments, they can never go back – the decision is permanent.

Apple also reserves the right to change all of these policies later, for the worse ("I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it further" -D. Vader). They have warned developers that they might change the API for reporting external sales and revoke developers' right to use alternative app stores at its discretion, with no penalties if that screws the developer.

Apple's contempt extends beyond app marketplaces. The DMA also obliges Apple to open its platform to third party browsers and browser engines. Every browser on iOS is actually just Safari wrapped in a cosmetic skin, because Apple bans third-party browser-engines:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/13/kitbashed/#app-store-tax

But, as Mozilla puts it, Apple's plan for this is "as painful as possible":

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/26/24052067/mozilla-apple-ios-browser-rules-firefox

For one thing, Apple will only allow European customers to run alternative browser engines. That means that Firefox will have to "build and maintain two separate browser implementations — a burden Apple themselves will not have to bear."

(One wonders how Apple will treat Americans living in the EU, whose Apple accounts still have US billing addresses – these people will still be entitled to the browser choice that Apple is grudgingly extending to Europeans.)

All of this sends a strong signal that Apple is planning to run the same playbook with the DMA that Google and Facebook used on the GDPR: ignore the law, use lawyerly bullshit to chaff regulators, and hope that European federalism has sufficiently deep cracks that it can hide in them when the enforcers come to call.

But Apple is about to get a nasty shock. For one thing, the DMA allows wronged parties to start their search for justice in the European federal court system – bypassing the Irish regulators and courts. For another, there is a global movement to check corporate power, and because the tech companies do the same kinds of fuckery in every territory, regulators are able to collaborate across borders to take them down.

Take Apple's app store monopoly. The best reference on this is the report published by the UK Competition and Markets Authority's Digital Markets Unit:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/63f61bc0d3bf7f62e8c34a02/Mobile_Ecosystems_Final_Report_amended_2.pdf

The devastating case that the DMU report was key to crafting the DMA – but it also inspired a US law aimed at forcing app markets open:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/2710

And a Japanese enforcement action:

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Japan-to-crack-down-on-Apple-and-Google-app-store-monopolies

And action in South Korea:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/skorea-considers-505-mln-fine-against-google-apple-over-app-market-practices-2023-10-06/

These enforcers gather for annual meetings – I spoke at one in London, convened by the Competition and Markets Authority – where they compare notes, form coalitions, and plan strategy:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cma-data-technology-and-analytics-conference-2022-registration-308678625077

This is where the savvying breaks down. Yes, Apple is big enough to run circles around Japan, or South Korea, or the UK. But when those countries join forces with the EU, the USA and other countries that are fed up to the eyeballs with Apple's bullshit, the company is in serious danger.

It's true that Apple has convinced a bunch of its customers that buying a phone from a multi-trillion-dollar corporation makes you a member of an oppressed religious minority:

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

Some of those self-avowed members of the "Cult of Mac" are willing to take the company's pronouncements at face value and will dutifully repeat Apple's claims to be "protecting" its customers. But even that credulity has its breaking point – Apple can only poison the well so many times before people stop drinking from it. Remember when the company announced a miraculous reversal to its war on right to repair, later revealed to be a bald-faced lie?

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/#thought-differently

Or when Apple claimed to be protecting phone users' privacy, which was also a lie?

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

The savvy will see Apple lying (again) and say, "this surprises you?" No, it doesn't surprise me, but it pisses me off – and I'm not the only one, and Apple's insulting lies are getting less effective by the day.

Image: Alex Popovkin, Bahia, Brazil from Brazil (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Annelid_worm,_Atlantic_forest,_northern_littoral_of_Bahia,_Brazil_%2816107326533%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

Hubertl (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2015-03-04_Elstar_%28apple%29_starting_putrefying_IMG_9761_bis_9772.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

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lady-raziel · 4 days

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long reaction to the update

ok. so they put out an update video! since i've been commentating for the last three days i might as well subject you all to more of my thoughts today.

main takeaway: this was a good apology video. i mean it. short and to the point, no overproduction, heartfelt and honest (and not a ukelele to be seen. thank god.) they took ownership of the situation, apologized, and restated how much they value their relationship with the fandom.

their solution is to make the watcher tv platform into kind of an iteration of patreon where content is available for early access before it is released onto youtube later. this is clearly a better option than paywalling everything for everyone. i'm not sure what the relative breakdown of costs turns out to be when you compare how much they were making on patreon after the platform took their cut VS how much it costs in overhead to run and maintain their own platform (how much it costs annually to contract via Vimeo, essentially). but i'm sure that's part of the calculation.

all things considered, that does seem like the best option out of all the alternatives. it allows them to not completely abandon any of the pans they have simmering over the fire for the time being. i don't think i ever thought they were going to just say "oops, forget about the streaming thing! let's pretend that never happened!" because at this point they've invested quite a lot of time and money into it, and i don't disagree that keeping it in some iteration may help them make up some of the funds they're lacking.

i would say, it's fine to keep the streamer. this is one of the ok outcomes, all things considered-- but if they're going to do it, they've GOT to do it smart from this point forward. listen to both the fans and the consultants intimately. both are going to have valid points, and both are going to be right. listening to too much of either side will sink this thing because each has motives and expertise that the other doesn't. if the fans say $6 is too much, listen to them-- but have conversations with business consultants about how much you realistically need to charge to make things work.

also, i'd use this whole situation as a learning experience. watcher is a young company, and it's literally inevitable that mistakes will happen. what's different is that the watcher crew haven't really been in a position before where they've been on the receiving end of the internet-angry-justice-hammer to this extent. it's one thing to watch it happen to others, but it's a position of extreme privilege (and a bit of hubris) to think "but that won't happen to me, because i'm built different." naw, man-- two things in life are inevitable: death and fuckups. the callout posts get us all in the end.

what's really important is that they use this as a wakeup call that even the most loyal fandoms will only follow you so far to the cliff's edge, and you don't want to push that. you have to strike a balance between the passion projects that you think are worthy and the stuff that maybe doesn't excite you as much anymore but the people want to see. a little fanservice keeps the lights on, as unfair as that might seem. i'm gonna make 50 markiplier choccy milk memes just so i can make one niche political joke once and a while for 6 likes. it is what it is.

i'd also use this as a chance to take a very careful look at company structure and finances. it's not fun to do and nobody likes it. trust me-- this is hard whether you're a single adult trying to pay the bills or the freaking US government (speaking from experience on both-- i have to read the president's budget for work frequently). but you all have to ask hard questions about the ratio of creative staff you take on VS staff for administrative and other business roles, as well as the costs and benefits of everything you spend money on. how many staff members are essential to location shoots? can this video be shot with 2 cameras instead of 3 and thus you don't need another cameraperson? you might even have to come to the decision that instead of pitching a new show it makes more sense to use those funds to hire your essential non-creative roles or contract firms or freelancers.

paying staff a fair wage with benefits speaks highly of what watcher wants their values to be. it's hard to find such a position in a creative role and still actually get to work on things you care about. but it would be much worse if watcher didn't make realistic decisions about finances and it lead to the death of the company and everyone losing their jobs. the whole watcher company can work, in my opinion, but not without some sacrifices. they're going to have to run it more like a business and less like a youtube-channel-turned-business in the future if they want to survive.

last thing i'll add is that while i do think this was a good apology video, i still think they hurt themselves by not putting out some sort of statement on Friday or Saturday just to say that they were formulating a response. As i've said in other posts, it's ok and in fact beneficial to not make a kneejerk reaction, but it's also very important to communicate that you SEE what's happening. you SEE what people are saying and THAT'S why you need more time to respond. saying nothing and leaving the angry public to wonder if you dropped your phone off the Hoover Dam or just don't care? that's a fumble. it's a common mistake companies make in a crisis, but that doesn't mean it doesn't erode trust fast.

this could have been handled better in many ways. we see that, and i'm glad watcher says they see that too. crucial going forward is taking all this and patching the errors that caused all this to fall apart and learning from the experience.

tbh at this point what i'm most sad about is that the watcher crew have probably been too stressed out and upset to appreciate some of the absolute bangers people have been laying down to clown on them. i think if it wasn't about them they might be touched by the collective attitude and creative spirit. /j

#watcher #watcher tv #after this post i have got to actually not spend time writing long reactions about this anymore because i too #have fires caused by my own fuckups to put out #alas

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reveluving · 1 year

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today's batmom thot of the day is:

Bruce's secret stash of your 𝙣𝙪𝙙𝙚 polaroids!

warnings: smut obv (minors DNI!), thirsty!Bruce is thirsty for his wife <;3

check out my batmom m.list <3

Nobody loves you more than your husband. Anyone to claim otherwise, be it his children, Alfred or even your own staff (which were basically teenagers who now sees you as their mother, at this point), well, that'll only happen when hell freezes over.

The problem is? The man is always busy, as a renowned business by day and a renowned vigilante by night. So, he can't always spend time with you as much as he hopes for. So, naturally, when he's graced with the opportunity to be with you, no doubt he uses it like it's his last day on Earth.

But when he can't?

His nude polaroids of you are his saving grace.

You see that gif up there? That's him sneaking glances at those photos at any given time.

I've actually mentioned this fact in one of my drabbles! One of his favourite ones is kept in his wallet, stashed in the same slot behind your cafe's business card—if in any case his kids have his wallet for whatever reason, the last place they'd investigate is your card.

Or at least, he could only hope none of them ever stumble upon it.

If not, he knew you'd never let him keep another one. It's happened before, and he was lucky enough to find it.

But, was it worth traumatizing his father figure, who was unlucky enough to have found it?

What was it, you might ask?

It was during your honeymoon in Japan, your hotel room overlooking the city at night. He had on you the bed, his thumb nestled in your lips as he bottomed out. The spurt of cum trailing from your cunt up to your pretty glossy lips. The pure bliss on your face as you take his hard cock and oh, it never fails to make his blood run hot.

"Messy girl." He tutted with a sly smile, cooing at the mix of your drool and his cum coating his fingers. The magnificent view of the Tokyo Tower plus the skyscrapers surrounding it was an added benefit; a variety of neon lightly illuminating your room, enough for Bruce to see you in your glory.

He already took a good nine or ten photos of you on his phone before tossing it aside with your polaroid camera, where he's also used it on you for another three, one of which will definitely be his number one. For now, he wanted no interruptions, and loomed over you, the dangerous look in his eyes barely hidden behind his wet hair made it clear that he was beyond done with you. It wasn't until you whimpered and rolled against his hips that the look he had was accompanied by a smirk, knowing that you needed him as much as he needed you.

Yes, that honeymoon had to be one of the best ones he's ever had, and he's been to plenty with you.

The point is, his family has had enough trauma, for they've witnessed their fair share of 'unspeakable events' in the past regarding the two of you, be it in the bedroom, some gala, your cafe's storeroom.

But that's besides the point.

We've only talked about one of his utmost favourite polaroids, so you can bet your ass that he has more than just one! Those other favourites are stashed in the bedside table, his office desk, both in the mansion and his company, the Batcomputer's drawer, and the Batmobile. All of which were locked for his own use, of course.

He probably has at least 20, and counting, even, for your husband is not only a pleaser in bed, but an artistic one, as well. His muse? You, duh. Whether it's a polaroid of you in his oversized dress shirt only or nothing at all, these keepsakes are far more valuable than any art piece in any prestigious galleries. Better yet, they're priceless, for they belong to him and and him only.

a reupload. dumblr really testing me. going back to my IRL responsibilities cuz shit is crazy rn see yall in a few months tho <3 /j

#no i will not make a fic about it #but we can def talk more about it <3 #— reve's reverie 🌹#a mother's touch series #batmom #batmom reader #batfam #batfam x batmom #batfam x reader #bruce wayne #bruce wayne x reader #bruce wayne x you #bruce wayne x batmom #batman x reader #batman x you #batman x batmom #batman #dc x reader

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gureumz · 9 months

Text

if only you knew (that i can see you)

rating: explicit

member: jay

premise: you're enhypen's new manager and it's palpable how instantly this one member takes a liking to you. you're adamant about keeping things professional but he's very persuasive.

notes: fem!reader, dom!jay, slightly dubious consent, dirty talk, mentions of vomiting, unprotected sex, clothed sex, creampie, a quickie (but a very hot one imo), office romance-ish (?), mentions of drinking, lmk if i missed anything!

a/n: fourth of my 1k follower special! oh, writer's block is a bitch. one whole month of nothing and i churn this out in one night. big, big apologies if i've become rusty over the past month, but i couldn't get this story out of my head. also, title is by from madame swift's 'i can see you'. please enjoy!

you feel like throwing up. right this minute, right at this very second.

you're fully convinced that you're about to hurl all over your pristine brand-new sneakers, spewing chunks of this morning's breakfast (a single cup of iced coffee) on the company's shiny, newly-waxed floor.

you're moments away from it, you can feel something catch in your throat. this is it, you know this is it. goodbye to your new job, your company benefits, goodbye to this godforsaken earth—

"sorry, are you lost?"

you whip around, eyes wide. towering over you is a man, sharp-featured, lean, and unbelievably handsome.

you swallow, trying to find an answer to give.

"i'm the new assistant manager. sejin-sunbaenim told me to come straight to dance practice room 2," you manage to say with as minimal tremor as you can. the man raises both eyebrows.

"oh, it's you," the handsome stranger says, bowing. "you're ______."

you nod, chest loosening at the sound of your name. so you're in the right place, after all. one less thing to worry about.

"that's me," you confirm, bowing back.

"cool. i'm jay," the man responds with an easy smile. he reaches out and you grasp his hand in yours.

oh, he's so warm.

"i...know," you mumble out, chuckling nervously.

jay grins. he drops your hand, motioning to the door behind you.

"sejin-nim is inside. so are the others," jay informs, reaching over for the door handle. you sidestep, and for a moment, you feel like a nervous bunny, jumping all over the place and flinching at the slightest sound.

in your defense, the last thing you want is to cross any boundaries on your first day.

jay smiles at you again, pulling the door open. "after you."

you blink, momentarily distracted by the dimple on his cheek. you quickly regain your bearings, smiling sheepishly as you step into the room.

you're quickly whisked into a flurry of introductions. each enhypen member seems equally excited, or at least pleased, to meet you. they shake your hand, bow, and greet you with bright, boyish smiles.

you're dazed by the end of it all, but at least you're not thinking about throwing up anymore.

"you have the calendar i shared with you, right?" sejin, your superior, asks after the members have difted off, busying themselves with warm-ups.

you recall the zoom conference you had with sejin a week ago, how you pored over every phone number, email, and address pertinent to your job as enhypen's new manager.

"yes," you answer.

"everything's there. all orange tasks are mine, and all blue ones are kyungjun's. he's not here now, but you'll meet him probably tomorrow. you can pick another color for your tasks in the mean time," sejin explains.

"i'll email you every morning with things i need help with and you can add those to the calendar afterward," he continues. "for today, i just want you to shadow me to see what a typical day looks like for us."

you nod along, occasionally glancing at your phone, the managers' calendar flashed on your screen.

you ignore the way your heart drops when you see the stacks of orange and blue piled on each tile.

as if reading your thoughts, sejin chuckles beside you. "it may look like a lot, but the boys make it easier. they're total professionals."

you laugh along, turning back to the group. your eyes immediately settle on jay who's quick to catch your gaze.

he smiles and you smile back.

---

"________-nim! how was your first day?"

you look up from your phone, momentarily abandoning the email you were composing, an inquiry sejin assigned you to send to a local media franchise. you were on your fifth reread.

you realize with a start that it's jay.

he sets a large paper bag down on the table. you're late to notice the drink carrier he has in his other hand.

"well, however it went, i got you a drink and dinner to commemorate your first day," jay adds, taking one out of the two drinks from the carrier. he slides the cup towards you and your cheeks immediately heat up.

"you didn't have to," you say, laughing nervously. "you're too kind, jay."

jay beams at this. he pushes the paper bag towards you as well.

"this is from all the members," jay informs. "as thanks for working hard today."

before you can reply, jay bows briefly before waving goodbye and walking away.

you stare at the paper bag for a few moments, a weird flutter taking over your body.

---

jay is...strange.

or, at least, you think he's been acting strange.

it's only been a little over a month since your first day. it was easy for you to fall into a routine, seeing as the group is in between promotions. a photoshoot every other day, a pre-recording once a week, dance practice every day after dinner. the most stress you've had so far was when you forgot to phone the van driver about a change in schedule, leaving you and half the members stranded at a certain broadcast station.

jay had comforted you then, as you were near tears. he laid a hand on your shoulder, his thumb rubbing against your sweater in an attempt to soothe you.

"it happens," jay had said. you didn't even notice his hand had moved from your arm down to the small of your back.

"you're doing great," he added before withdrawing his hand.

you thought about that moment the whole night. how warm his touch was, how gentle he handled your near-breakdown.

he was your responsibility and yet jay was the one that came to your rescue.

you went out on your first official team dinner a few days after that, with the whole managerial team present along with the members. sejin recommended a quaint, yet highly-acclaimed restaurant off one of the side streets around the company.

jay had squeezed in beside you at the table, so close you can feel his body heat radiating off him. a few times his knees knocked against yours but neither of you acted like you noticed.

it was then the first inkling of suspicion rose in you.

could jay be...?

surely not. he was just being nice. he's the literal definition of a gentleman. it's just the way jay is.

of course. it's totally in his character to bring you coffee almost every day. it's normal that he rushes to open every door you walk through. there's definitely nothing weird about him gifting you an expensive box of chocolates for completing your first month on the job.

he's not flirting with you. that would be silly.

you sigh, shaking off these thoughts as you approach the small practice booth at the end of the hall. you can hear the sound of a guitar from the inside.

"jay?" you call out, knuckles knocking against the glass door. the guitar stops.

"yeah?" comes a muffled voice from inside. you slowly push the door open, peeking your head in.

jay is seated in front of the computer, his electric guitar cradled in his arms. he's sporting a loose white shirt and black joggers. his hair is unstyled, black tresses falling over his eyes. he brushes it back with his fingers.

"you have a recording like—," you pause, checking your watch. "right now."

jay gives a start, checking his phone. he groans, setting his guitar down on its stand.

"right," he mutters under his breath. he sighs, rising up from his seat.

you watch as he stretches, the bottom of his shirt riding up to reveal the top of his boxers peeking out from his pants. you catch a glimpse of a very thin sliver of skin.

you try your best to ignore that.

"you better hurry before the producer kicks both of our asses," you urge lightly, crossing your arms. you've been trying to be more assertive with the members lately, seeing as you've already had enough time to know more about them and how they're supposed to be spending their days under your supervision.

"yes ma'am," jay replies, approaching you. you step out of the doorway to let him pass.

he doesn't move for a few seconds and you peer up at him with a questioning look on your face.

"can i ask you something?" jay blurts out, shoving his hands in his pockets.

you glance around to make sure no one is nearby. you have a feeling he's about to ask something that's a little less appropriate for work.

"are you single?"

you nearly choke on your own spit. you had a sense of what he was going to ask, but you never expected him to be this direct.

"may i know why you're asking?" you reply, treading carefully. one wrong move and you can end up dismissed from this long-coveted job of yours.

jay shrugs. "just curious."

you chew on your lip, contemplating how to go about his question. you let out a breath, deciding that there's no harm in being truthful.

"i am," you confirm.

jay nods. "same."

you quirk an eyebrow at this. cocking your head to the side, you ask, "really? how come?"

"i'm sure you see how busy we are," jay counters with a smirk.

it's your turn to shrug. "that doesn't stop jake from texting that girl from—"

"you know about that?!" jay cuts in, his voice dropping to a whisper.

you snicker, shaking your head.

"i know a lot of things, jay. i'm with you guys almost every waking hour of the day," you inform.

jay looks at you with an unreadable expression. something between fear and confusion. it makes you giggle.

"i technically should take it up with HR and higher management, but the other managers and i agreed that until you guys decide to go sneaking off on late-night dates, we'll keep it under wraps."

jay's mouth hangs open, still in disbelief.

"so, if you're planning on taking some girl out, you better let me know," you say, giving jay a pointed look.

jay's expression changes then as he ducks his head to avoid your eyes.

"not gonna happen," he says.

jay gives you a curt nod and smile before pushing past you out into the hallway.

---

you and jay don't talk about that night.

you know that he knows that you know the reason he asked about the state of your love life. he definitely did it on purpose to open up the discussion.

you're determined to squash the notion before it develops further.

you're not doing it to be mean. you'd never want to hurt jay on purpose. but you have a job to do and a reputation to keep.

jay knows that. he should know that.

you get the impression that even if he did, he doesn't care. not when he's sauntering over to you now, a bag of food and an iced coffee in his hands.

"mind if i join you?" jay asks, already sliding into the seat across you. there's barely any other people in the hybe cafeteria but a nervous chill still runs up your spine.

this is nothing. just a friendly lunch between a manager and her member.

"you didn't leave me much choice," you say with a laugh.

jay shrugs, winking at you playfully. you quickly avert your eyes. better to not say anything.

"i like your outfit today," jay compliments, taking a sip of his coffee.

you glance down at yourself. you're in a plain, short-sleeved blouse, white and a little sheer. you paired it with comfortable black corduroy pants and sneakers.

nothing special. to you, at least.

you had to feign ignorance on the way jay had stared at you the whole morning while you were in a meeting.

"thank you," you reply curtly, taking a bite of your kimbap.

"i'm taking you guys home tonight." you quickly revert to another subject.

"kyungjun-sunbaenim has to attend to other things so he assigned me to make sure all of you get home safe and in one piece for today."

jay nods. "got it."

"you guys don't have anything scheduled after 11 so i expect all of you to be at the lobby by that time," you add.

you can feel jay staring as you continue to pick at your food. you fight the urge to look up.

"will do," he finally says.

---

"do you need me to walk you guys up?"

you lean out of the passenger side window, watching as the members file out of the vans in front of their apartment building. thankfully, they all heeded your word, showing up at the lobby at 11:05, ready to head home for the day.

as if to prove that the heavens were on your side, the ride home was awfully quiet, too, which was a surprise considering that it was jay, jake, and sunghoon that decided to ride along with you.

jungwon shakes his head to your question, walking up to your side of the van.

"we're good, _______-noona," jungwon says. "you get home safe, though!"

riki nods along, skipping up to you. "yeah, or else jay hyung is g—"

the youngest is cut off with a sharp elbow to his ribs by jay. riki splutters out in disbelief, complaining, but he's herded off by sunoo.

"good night," jay calls out over his shoulder, waving at you.

you wave back, observing as the boys enter the building, finally letting yourself relax as the last of them disappear through the doors.

---

a vibration jolts against your cheek and you gasp as you're ripped right out of your deep slumber.

you realize in your sleep-hazed mind that it's your phone that woke you up, ringing incessantly. you must have fallen asleep with your face against it.

you press the 'answer' button, the faint beginnings of irritability creeping up your chest.

"hello?" you say, voice sharp.

"_______-noona? i'm so sorry for waking you if you were sleeping, but i didn't know who else to call. we're sorry but we went out to drink after you dropped us off and jay hyung had a little more alcohol than he could handle."

the voice rambles on and it takes you a second to remember who it belongs to.

"jungwon? where are you? who's with you?"

a short pause. you hear the faint sound of a voice, rapidly complaining. you think it's sunoo.

"we took a cab back to our apartment but jay hyung won't get up so we're out here on the front steps," jungwon explains.

"he's just too heavy for sunoo-hyung and i while he's in this state, and the rest of the hyungs are already passed out upstairs," he adds.

you press a hand on your forehead. this can't be happening right now.

a million thoughts run through your head but you will them to quiet down, focusing instead at the task at hand.

"how about riki?" you ask.

"nothing is going to wake him up now, noona," jungwon says, exasperated.

"please, we're not in the—hic—best state, either," jungwon continues. you can still hear sunoo in the background.

you fight the urge to groan.

"okay, okay, i'm on my way," you finally say.

---

you practically fly out of the taxi, not even bothering to wait for your change. you see three figures at the front of the building and you immediately recognize them as jay, sunoo, and jungwon.

"what the hell, jay?" you ask, rushing over. sunoo and jungwon have resigned themselves to sitting on both sides of jay's sprawled figure on the stairs.

jay is on his side, hands tucked under his head as if sleeping on the most comfortable bed instead of rough concrete.

"we tried," sunoo says with a pout. his eyes are glassy, but his speech seems fine. probably tipsy, you think.

"i can carry him just fine," jungwon speaks up. his speech is definitely slurred. "but that's when he's conscious and when i'm not drunk off three bottles of soju."

"jesus christ," you say under your breath.

"okay, i'll grab from under his arms, sunoo you grab his legs, and jungwon, support his torso and that big fat ass of his," you instruct, positioning yourself at jay's head.

jay giggles suddenly, eyes blinking open slowly.

"you think my ass is fat?" jay asks, barely comprehensible with how drunk he is.

"shut up," you respond, huffing. you tuck your hands at his armpits, hooking your arms through.

sunoo and jungwon follow suit.

carrying a nearly six-foot-tall man weighing more than what you can deadlift in the rare times you're at the gym was exactly as difficult as you expected, even with additional help.

it took the three of you ten whole minutes to haul jay towards the elevator and about fifteen to get him down the hall to their unit.

only god knows where the apartment's security guard is amidst all this.

"just a little more," you pant as you combine your efforts to drag jay towards his shared bedroom with jake.

you kick the door open as you heave all your might into getting jay across the threshold.

the room's empty. jake's probably in heeseung's room.

your legs give out before you can get jay to his bed. sunoo and jungwon fall to their knees as well, all three of you breathing heavily from the effort.

"i need to throw up," jungwon declares, dashing out of the room.

"i need...," sunoo pauses, a hand held up as if to silence you, despite you not having said a word.

"i need water and an aspirin," sunoo finally says, stumbling out of the room as well.

he's gracious enough to close the door behind him.

you get up, feeling around for a bedside lamp, muttering a soft 'yes' when you finally feel a switch between your fingers. you turn the lamp on, bathing the room in a soft yellow glow.

you turn to see jay's slumped figure, his back resting on the foot of one of the beds. you approach quietly, kneeling down next to him.

"you're such an idiot," you whisper, brushing back some of the damp hair away from jay's forehead. "who told you to get this drunk?"

"no one," jay responds. you nearly jump, not expecting jay to be lucid at this point in time.

"you know i'm gonna have to tell the other managers about this," you softly berate jay, tugging off his jacket. he giggles, holding his hands over his chest.

"why are you undressing me? do you wanna fuck me or something?" jay asks in his drunken stupor.

you roll your eyes. "no, stupid, i'm making sure you're as comfortable as you can be while in this state."

"liar," jay counters. "you so wanna fuck me."

"i could report you for inappropriate behavior," you reply quietly, throwing jay's jacket to the side. you reach for the topmost buttons of his polo.

"see? you're getting me naked," jay continues, reaching out to take ahold of your wrist.

you stop to look up and you realize that jay has his eyes open, pupils focused on you. his grip tightens around your wrist as he pulls you closer.

"you know right?" jay asks.

your first instinct is to feign innocence, to ask him what he's talking about.

but you do know.

"you're drunk, jay," you supply rather simply. "we'll talk tomorrow."

jay smiles, reaching out to cup one side of your face. you freeze, letting jay's thumb run along your cheekbone before traveling down to your lips. he traces the curves of your mouth, staring intently.

you don't know whether you leaned in or if jay pulled you down, but a moment later, your mouth is against his, a desperate, messy press of lips. he licks right into you, and you can't help the groan that escapes you.

you can't be doing this. this is a clear breach of protocol, this is illegal, even.

"jay," you whisper against his lips. "jay, please."

jay pauses, pulling away slightly. he nuzzles against your cheek, waiting for you to speak.

"we can't keep doing this," you say, prying jay off you. "at least not when you're still drunk."

jay gives you a long, hard look. his eyes are half-lidded as if a step away from sleep. his mouth is parted, his chest rising and falling rapidly.

"i'll remember this tomorrow," jay declares.

you sigh, leaning in to peck his lips one last time.

"we'll see."

---

the whole thing blew up in the members' faces. and yours.

you got a good telling-off from sejin, but thankfully nothing reached upper management. the whole group was called into one of the conference rooms the next day and sejin spared no one in his heated scolding. not even riki.

('i was sleeping!' riki had argued. sejin planted his hands firmly on his hips and listed the many different ways ni-ki could have contacted any of the managers to at least inform us of the older members' whereabouts)

you stood very still in the corner, having already received the tamer, abridged version of sejin's speech.

it's been a week now and everything was as normal as it could be, the only difference being that the whole group would be required to have their locations turned on at all times for the next few weeks until management was sure they wouldn't pull another stunt like that again.

oh, and you've been avoiding jay like the plague.

you're thankful that he made no effort in approaching you outside of what was appropriate for work and whenever he did, he'd look anywhere but your face.

it hurt you a bit to see him like this, knowing that he's probably embarrassed with the whole thing. though, you're not quite sure if he's also affected by or if he even remembers the incident in his room.

you're so deep in thought while storming down the hallway, that you nearly run into someone. their firm arms reach out to keep you steady as you try and regain your balance.

you look up and all air is knocked out of your lungs.

"oh, hi jay," you greet, stepping back. your palms clam up as memories of that night the week before flash in your mind.

"hi, ________-noona," he replies.

seconds tick by and no one talks. you know you should say something, anything. an apology, a snarky remark, or a lame excuse to get away. but nothing comes to mind.

"i'm sorry about what happened," jay finally cuts through the silence.

you shake your head, offering him a smile. "we've been over it, jay. quite thoroughly, if by sejin-sunbaenim's standards."

"that's not what i meant," jay continues. he's looking you in the eye.

you gulp, your insides churning.

"that's fine," you begin, keeping your voice as steady as you can. "we can just forget about it."

jay sighs. "i'm not sorry that it happened. i'm sorry that i needed to be drunk to let you know how i was feeling."

you're struck speechless, your brain going haywire. how do you respond to that?

"jay, you know we can't," you deflect, taking another step back. jay follows, standing over you. you feel so small, so vulnerable under his gaze.

"why not? the worst that could happen is you'll be transferred to another artist, another department," jay protests. he takes another step forward.

all you can do is stare down at the floor.

you want it, too. so bad. but you can't risk it. you're not ready, everything's still too uncer—

you feel a pair of hands on your face. you gasp, eyes darting around to see if anyone is in the vicinity.

"j-jay, not here—"

you're pulled forward, jay's strong grip around your arm. he practically drags you to a nearby supply closet, yanking the door open and pushing you in.

worry gnaws away in you as you remember the surveillance cameras in the hallway. those thoughts are immediately pushed away when you feel jay press up against you. you hear him rummage around for a switch, and suddenly, the cramped space is illuminated with dim, yellow lighting.

the closet couldn't be more than a few feet wide both ways, just enough to accommodate two people standing practically on top of each other.

jay grabs your hips and presses himself to your frame. you stifle a gasp as you feel him poking through his pants.

"i want you," jay says lowly, large hands traveling down to your ass. he holds them firmly, squeezing with all his might.

you moan, your hand flying up to your mouth.

"you want me too, right?" jay asks. he slips his hands beneath your denim skirt, a timely choice of clothing for this situation.

you don't know whether to thank or curse the heavens for that particular choice you made.

"we can't—," you begin once more.

jay shuts you up with his mouth, kissing you with so much force it drives you back against the storage shelves. jay cages you between his arms, planting his hands on the wood behind you. he devours your lips as if they were his last meal on earth.

he reaches one hand down, pressing two fingers against your mound. jay groans against your lips when he feels the wetness in your underwear.

"see? you want me, too," jay says, pulling away. he bunches up your skirt around your waist.

"keep it up," jay commands and you oblige, gripping your skirt with shaky hands. you watch as jay unzips his pants, pulling them down along with his underwear, just enough to let his already hard cock spring free.

jay yanks your panties aside, tapping your legs, signaling you to open up. you part your thighs, reaching up to steady yourself on jay.

you yelp when jay pulls one of your legs around his hips, giving him a better angle to slide in. and he does, slipping in so easily between your folds and right into your waiting hole.

"j-jay," you gasp out as he fully sheathes himself within you.

"fuck, you feel amazing," jay compliments, wrapping an arm around your midsection. "already so wet for me."

he pulls you even closer and that's when he starts to move. jay's thrusts are intense, plunging into you fully before pulling back nearly all the way out, and then sinking right back in. your eyes roll back as jay picks up the pace.

"sshh, that's it," jay coos. "we gotta be quiet and we gotta be fast."

you let out a muted whimper, burying your face in jay's chest. soft thuds can be heard as he fucks you against the shelves, your back digging painfully against them, but you can't be bothered to care, not when jay's cock is splitting you open so well.

"still gonna say 'we can't'?" jay says through gritted teeth. you look up to see his forehead creased in concentration, his pupils blown wide. sweat drips down the side of his face.

"god, you look so good like that," jay whispers. "so helpless on my cock. this is what you wanted, right?"

you nod frantically, arms wrapping around jay's neck.

"yeah," you breathe out. "wanted your cock for so long."

jay grunts, throwing his head back. "yes, keep talking to me like that."

his movements quicken and it takes everything in you to fight against the urge to let your knees buckle underneath you.

"please jay," you whimper. "fuck me harder, fuck me the way you've always wanted to fuck me."

"shit," jay mutters.

you're briefly left breathless as you feel your other leg give out, neither of your feet planted on the floor. it takes you a second to realize that jay has scooped you up in his arms, holding you up completely as he continues to ram into you. you wrap your legs tighter around jay.

jay has full control now and all you can do is hang on for dear life.

"yes! jay, yes!" you cry out against his neck. jay pants directly in your ear, fucking you at a speed that's nearly unimaginable to you.

"i-i'm gonna cum," jay manages to get out.

"do it," you quickly answer. jay pulls back to look at you.

you hold his face in your hands, nodding. jay covers your mouth with his as he gives the last of his thrusts, stilling inside you after a while. he presses himself deep within you and you moan against his mouth, feeling him pulse and twitch against your walls.

you cling onto jay for a whole minute before he stumbles back, letting you down on your own two feet. he snaps your underwear back in place, kissing you passionately as he does.

"keep it there for the rest of the day," jay mumbles against your lips, smiling.

you laugh breathlessly, unsure whether it really is jay saying all these things.

you hear a faint buzzing sound and you jump, remembering that you had your phone in your skirt.

well, before jay nearly ripped it off you.

you spot your device on the ground, snatching it up to quickly answer the call.

"hello?"

"_______? have you seen jay?" sejin's voice cuts through the silence inside the closet. you meet jay's eyes and he, too, is perusing his phone.

"no," you lie right between your teeth. "i haven't. why?"

"he has a schedule in a bit and he's not answering any of my calls," sejin says. you're not quite sure if he's worried or irritated. probably both.

"i'll try calling him," you offer. jay grins wolfishly from your side, leaning in to press open-mouthed kisses on your neck.

"great," sejin says. "let me know if you reach him."

you hang up, pocketing your phone.

"you're hot when you're breaking the rules like that," jay says against the column of your throat.

it takes all your willpower to push him away.

"there won't be any rules to break if i get fired," you say matter-of-factly. you lean in to kiss jay square on the lips.

"so you better get your ass out of here before that happens."

#enhypen smut #enhypen scenarios #jay smut #jay scenarios #w: jay

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warningsine · 6 months

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Notice how Helena uses "I" instead of "she" and how Milchik gives her the soft sell.

Combine this with:

her embarrassed "My dad forced me to recite the 9 rules as a child and I did not like it then" admission in front of a camera.

James basically thanking her for risking her life for the company and lying about it. He "cried" about the suicide attempt, and yet he didn't even contact his daughter, since he's telling her this now at the gala as an aside to the event. In terms of family emergency time? Too fucking late. Is this the only time Helena's seen him since then? Not to mention how he didn't want to take responsibility and blamed it all on his daughter's alter ego.

And you'll get a more nuanced interpretation than the "Helena pure corporate evil, Helly R. good rebel" binary one.

Despite doing that cruel "I'm a person, you're not" presentation and being determined to see the process through even after Helly tries to commit suicide, there's some part of Helena that must know that this is messed up.

Sure, she's complicit and not a hapless victim, but she's also a product of her upbringing. Stripping her of her privilege, heritage, cult-like brainwashing/indoctrination and Shiv Roy-like desperation to win her dad's approval gives you Helly.

They are the same person under different circumstances.

There are no contradictions between the fundamental makeup of her innie and outie.

The version of herself Helena brings inside Lumon questions everything and demands accommodation and answers, because she is used to getting what she wants as a privileged woman.

What changes her is the different context she's given.

Helena is a wealthy and powerful woman who gets what she wants; Helly is a powerless woman who is often being tortured. It makes sense that her traits—stubborness and determination among others—and the fundamental sense of "I deserve to get what I want" are present in Helly.

But also make no mistake: they're both prisoners. Helly in a more literal sense, Helena in a figurative one—a prisoner in her family and the role that was imposed on her.

A willing participant that benefits from a controlling system is not free from the harm or influence of it. Acknowledging Helena's abusive circumstances doesn't take away from her as an antagonist, it makes her story more compelling.

Helena's self-serving qualities are more a matter of nurture than nature, because Helly shows caring and compassion as well as rebellion and independence. Helly is like a very young version of Helena.

All of the outies' emotions leak through to some extent.

Helly's "Well, that's a given for me [that I'm an asshole out there]" is a pretty safe assumption to make based on Helena's video, but it also oozes self-loathing. Helena taking it out on Helly does too.

Ultimately, I think this happens on a figurative level to a lot of people who undergo an—emotionally in this case— abusive upbringing. Rejecting their most vulnerable parts and imprisoning them. It's a survival mechanism, and helps them feel like they have more control over their out of control personal life. But, in a way, it makes them more out of control once they get into the real world.

Their inner, imprisoned parts find ways to make it so they can't ignore them. We definitely saw that with Helly threatening to mutilate herself and attempting suicide.

There are consequences to denying and imprisoning any part of ourselves over the long term.

#severance #helena eagan #coherence and cohesion? -10/10. i don't know them. oh well here's to the feels.

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joonberriess · 2 years

Text

s e x t a l k

p a i r i n g : jungkook x reader x taehyung

g e n r e : friends w/benefits au

t a g s : roommates!tae and jk, hook-ups, reader’s hot girl summer is here, sneaky link(s), unprotected sex, creampies, oral sex (m & f receiving), fuckboys!tae and jk, dom/sub undertones, possessive!jk, threesomes, degradation, tiny amount of crack+fluff, simps!jk & th, double penetration (two dicks, one hole)

s u m m a r y : you’re seeing two hotties on the down low, getting your back blown out every other night by either one. that is until you find out they’re roommates..

w o r d c o u n t : 6.1 k

It's officially summertime and you don't plan on doing much unless your friends decide otherwise. You spend your days going out with them to various places such as the beach, clubbing, and house parties of mutual friends alike. It's fun because you meet all sorts of new people and come out with more connections (like a new weed dealer etc).

It's during your nightly escapades that you meet Kim Taehyung and Jeon Jungkook. They're friends of your friend Hoseok and some acquaintances you have seen around campus. You already knew of them before because a friend of your friend talked about Jungkook's dick game and some other girl had exposed a sex tape of Taehyung giving her the best head of her damn life. To say you weren't a little curious about them would be a lie.

As much as your interest is piqued by them you don't make a move or show motivation to look for them. If life so happened to put them your way then so be it. You go on with your life like nothing and occasionally run into the two on separate occasions. Though you're only connected through Hoseok who's your bestfriend since eighth grade.

Hoseok takes you to a kickback a classmate of yours is throwing, the party's pretty chill and you wander around talking to everyone because somehow you know them. Hoseok's probably off getting his dick wet or something but you don't bring yourself to care because you're happy for the man. You choose to sit with a group of people well known for being potheads etc.

"y/nnnnnnnn!" Jackson throws his arm around your shoulder, "Been waiting for you to show out all night where the fuck you been?" He laughs, obviously a little cross faded.

You pat him with a grunt and sit back, "Hoseok wanted to eat before so we went for burgers." You mumble and reach for the joint he's holding in his hand. There's a few people you don't recognize and they're all girls sitting around with the likes of Jooheon and Bobby, even Taehyung's here but you brush his presence off.

To these (most likely freshmen) you're a surprise with how casual you are with them. In fact people knew you as a cool, well "chill" person. You had a reputation as a pothead and was well liked by most people you came across, and if you were feeling more scandalous they'd come to know the guys you hooked up with called you a throat goat. Other than that you were well off in school.

"Heard you was back for the summer," Bobby coughs as he hands his joint off to the person next to him, "where'd you go..?"

You take a long drag from the joint, relishing in the good quality as the smoke fills your lungs. "LA," you curtly reply, "shit's crazier over there." You mumble and let out the smoke after a few minutes.

The boys nod collectively, taking hits alongside you as they leave it at that and turn to give their company attention. You relax into the couch, listening to Jackson's wild rants and ideas about life. Your eyes flicker up occasionally and you see Taehyung staring at you and he pays no mind to the girl kissing up his neck.

You hold the joint in your mouth, sitting up and adjusting your jeans all the while keeping your eyes on him. He's hot and he knows what he's doing. You're unsure whether he's ever heard of you but you know you're a familiar face. Taehyung doesn't move at all and flickers his eyes from your face to your waist, tongue peeking out as he licks his upper lip.

His smug little face and playful smile makes you wanna be the one to sit in his lap, but you aren't no thief. He's a taken man for the night and if he wants you.. well he knows what to do.

You get tired of sitting around and pat Jackson to let him know you're leaving. A chorus of 'byes' echo, and you walk away from the circle with the joint tucked between your lips.

You get a few "hey y/n" as you pass by people dancing and drinking. You wave them off and head to a different area to get yourself a couple shots etc. You join a couple girls who offer some shots to you, and soon enough there's ass being thrown back at you and you're still clinging to the tiny burned out joint between your fingertips.

"Hold on," you mumble and make your way back into the kitchen for some water. A body slides up beside you and you see a familiar fluff of black hair, "Hey.." You mumble to Taehyung.

"Was wondering where you went, Jackson sent me with this for you, said something about it bein' for last week." Taehyung dropped a baggy of pre-rolls next to you on the counter, setting his arm down as he caged you between the fridge and him.

You nod slowly acknowledging the gift and continuing on with your search for some water. It comes as a surprise for you to be interacting with Taehyung. "Thought you were busy, need something?" You mumble out once you feel his chest brush against your back.

His cologne is strong but it suits him and you want to smell some more but in your weed fueled mind you find it weird. "Aren't you friends with Seok? How come he's never introduced us? I'm sure we'd make really good friends.." His voice goes a pitch lower towards the end, raspy from the joint he smoked earlier.

Shivers go down your spine and you lick your dry lips unconsciously. "I am and that makes you only Seok's friend. Not mine." You look up at him feeling nervous cause he's so handsome up close and you wonder how all those girls he fucked could maintain any eye contact at all.

Taehyung chuckles softly at your words, "You're so mean," he hummed, eyes half lidded and smile lazy, "you really don't wanna be my friend? Hm...?" He leaned closer with his face mere inches away from yours.

You stare back, a million of things running through your head all at once. Were his lips as soft as his face looked..? Was he a good kisser? Does he French kiss? You wondered all these things and without hesitating you brought him down for a kiss, smacking your lips against his with your arms around his neck. Damn did it feel good.

Taehyung responded almost immediately, hands going down to grip your waist as his thumbs dug into your hips. You tugged him closer to you with your movements a bit rushed and sloppy from the weed in your system. You're both making out furiously in the kitchen harshly breathing through your noses. He reaches down to cup your ass and give it a squeeze through your jeans, moaning into your mouth because of the fat spilling through his fingers.

He hoists you up onto the counter, pulling back to attack your neck with a flurry of kisses. You pant softly and bury your hands in his soft hair to ground yourself. He pulls you closer, dragging you to the edge of the counter and pressing his crotch against yours. You can feel the thick bulge hidden away in his pants, you whine quietly and reach down to stroke him through his jeans.

"Tae," you breathlessly mutter, "fuck me.."

Taehyung grunts softly and grinds his hips into small circles, "My car's parked out in the front, let's go?" He breathes out against your lips, hands already slipping into your jeans and cupping your soft ass cheeks in his hands, idly squeezing the bubbly flesh.

"No," you pull back and stare into his eyes, "right here. Right now." You purred licking his lip as you watched his face morph into one of surprise and shock. He looked like he didn't believe you, so you showed him exactly what he was asking for when he decided to mess with you.

The whole school that night watched in awe as Taehyung pounded you raw on that very counter in front of everyone. People knew you were bold bold and didn't give a shit about anyone's opinions but not Taehyung. He went home still in shock, refusing to even talk about it with Jungkook (who you learned very much later on was his roommate).

It's all his friends talk about and they even make fun of him for it. They say you slut Taehyung out in front of everyone, out freaking him in what he did best. Fucking. He didn't say anything to argue with them. It was true, and now that he had a taste of you he didn't want to stop.

Shit only gets better from there as you and Taehyung see each other more and more. He's obsessed with you at this rate, you ruined any form of sex he liked and all he could do was hope you were free and down to see each other. He was lucky because you were very much enthusiastic to indulge the man.

Something you loved about Taehyung was the way this man gave head, you could lay there for hours with his head between your thighs. It was an added bonus the things he could do with his tongue that had you creaming and shaking.

It feels like time slows down as the heavy pleasure weighs down on you. Your lips part in a silent 'o' as your shaky hands come down to grip his soft curly locks. He's got one hand gripping the back of your knee, lifting your leg up in the air while the other mindlessly floats in the air to get that angle. Your panties are strewn around your dangling ankle and you're wearing only one of Taehyung's old band t-shirts you found on his bed.

Taehyung makes a loud slurping noises and his saliva coats your plump and swollen clit. You push his side a little to the side and sigh loudly when a new wave of pleasure hits you. "There.." You mumble breathily, holding his head in place as your hips grind in slow small circles against his tongue.

He doubles his efforts and lets out a soft moan as the vibrations make your hips jump. He practically smothers his face in your cunt and moves his head side to side with his lips firmly attached to your clit. You let out a broken cry, back arching forward as you went stiff. You desperately pushed your hips up against his mouth and breathily whined because it felt soo good and he was hitting all the right spots.

Taehyung reached with his free hand to slide at least two fingers into the creamy mess as he pushed them in with a audible squelch. Your eyes flutter shut for a second, chest heaving as you throw your head back and stare up at the ceiling because Taehyung knocks the air out of you. He doesn't start the pace slow, no, he immediately plunges both fingers in and out of you at a fast pace. He's got them curled so he hits that special place inside of you.

You melt against the sheets and moan louder because he's sucking on your clit and pairing it with his perfectly timed strokes. You let go of his hair and grab on to the pillows with breathless moans and whines, "God Tae, fuck keep going," you moan and let your head roll back on to the pillow, "gonna cum.."

He can feel your pussy tightening around his fingers and he grins softly against your wet folds. He pulls back to watch your blissed out face as you squirm on the sheets below him. He doesn't stop jabbing his fingers upward, pace getting faster and faster until he sees the familiar quiver of your thighs. "Cum," he grins as he places a hand on your pelvis and holds you down, "get 'em nice and wet... Bet you won't even need lube cause you got a sloppy little cunt, 's drooling for me, beggin' for me to put my cock in and fuck you stupid."

You let out a long moan at his words and feel your clit throb as your orgasm slowly hits. You're left utterly breathless, heart beating a little too hard in your chest as you try and get his hand to stop. He fucks you through your orgasm and only slows down when he sees that the overstimulation is hitting. "Gonna take my cock like a good little slut?" He asks as he taps the tip against your drenched folds.

"Mmhm." You nod and open your shaky legs even further, "I don't want it slow Tae," you mumble softly though the way your eyes droop tell another story.

Taehyung laughs under his breath and hooks your legs around his hips, he leans over your body and pumps his cock through the mess you made. "Want it hard?" He croons softly, "And how's that? You can barely even stay awake."

You hummed, "Fuck me slow then, gonna relax." You softly say and bring your hand down and join his as you stroke his hard throbbing cock. You take his cock and position it at your messy pussy, biting back a moan as he slowly rolls his hips forward. "Fuck.." You sigh.

Taehyung's in bliss his lips fall open as he moans quietly, the sound that comes from your pussy has his mind reeling. He takes ahold of your hips and holds you nice and steady as he begins to roll his hips forward. You lick your dry lips and set your hands next to your head as you grip the pillow. Your pussy's a little sore from the rough fingering but this slow pace makes up for it.

He pants quietly as he quickens his pace but never fully presses into you. He doesn't quite pound you but the pace is fast enough that it leaves you out of breath. You reach down to gentle rub at your clit in slow small circles, eyes locked on Taehyung's as he fucks you. He's biting his lip, focusing on the way you rub yourself and the way his cock slides in and out.

There's a ring of white cream that comes when Taehyung pulls out, he slows down to watch the way your pussy creams some more. His breath stutters as he reaches down to smear around his cock before he pushes his hips to the hilt and stays there balls deep within you. You softly moan at the feeling of him being all the way inside of you, "Mmm-right there..." You lift your hips up to lazily rut against him, "Shit-"

Taehyung hisses softly, "Hold on baby," he pulls out swiftly and lays down next to you, patting your thigh as a signal, "get on baby, ride me like you mean it."

Your mouth waters at the sight of his cream coated cock, you want to lick it all up but you suppose maybe afterwards. "Lay all the way back," you mumble and throw your leg over his waist as you straddle him, "like that." You grab his cock once more and hover over it as you push down with a long quiet moan.

Taehyung's eyes fall shut and he rolls his head back as he squeezes your ass in appreciation. You bite your lip and pick yourself up only to drop down in his lap with a wet smack. He groans a little louder, clearly not expecting you to do that.

"Fuck..!" He gasps out.

You grin down at him and brace your hands on his chest as you begin to ride him like no tomorrow. You're bouncing in his lap with audible loud slaps as your ass connects with his pelvis. Your pussy's making a loud wet noise and the bed's creaking just a little from the force of your bounces. Taehyung's moaning louder, hands holding on to dear life as you ride the hell out of him.

Your head is thrown back, moans flowing freely and hips moving quickly. Your thighs ache but it isn't too bad because you like to ride and when you have control it's all over for your partner. You prop yourself up with your hands coming behind you to settle on his thighs as you lift your hips and slam down just as hard. You're building up a sweat and you're getting a little louder with your noises of pleasure.

"Fuck y/n," Taehyung pants, he hates and loves when you do this because the pleasure's so damn good but at the same time it always makes him cum faster. "Shit, shit, slow down," He cries out as he feels his cock throb pathetically and his lower stomach coils.

You moan loudly and swirl your hips in a slow circle, "Fuck no, gonna cum," you moan out.

He helplessly cries out as you resume your punishing pace. He grits his teeth and focuses on the wet slide and clapping noises the come from your filthy fucking. Taehyung lets out a long loud moan when he's hit with his orgasm, he feels boneless afterwards and has to slow you down cause the tug on his cock feels too much. You grind against him and reach down to rub you clit quickly to join him in his afterglow.

Moments later you're collapsing next to him on the bed with a breathless huff, "My fuckin' cunt feels numb and my thighs are shaking.."

Taehyung pants, looking at you like he's either in love or he's "mad". "You're insane, my fuckin' dick almost fell off cause you were going crazy." He said as he rolled back to stare up at the ceiling while he tried to catch his breath.

You smirk to yourself, "There's a lot of cum in me," you softly add. Taehyung's cock gives a weak twitch and it has you laughing because he's shameless.

Whenever Taehyung's busy you find yourself meeting with Jungkook instead. You had met the guy when Hoseok brought him along for bbq one night. He tried wooing you like he did to those helpless girls back on campus but you ran the game so shit like that didn't work. You took the chance to speak with him when Hoseok went to the bathroom as you looked at him dead on.

"I'm not looking for a relationship either and if I'm being honest I've been wanting to fuck you for a while now so why don't we just cut to the chase and you can give me your insta or whatever the fuck you feel comfortable with, yeah?" You try to give him a friendly smile but it's kinda dumb so you settle for your resting bitch face.

Jungkook's sitting there looking shocked as hell, "Oh." He didn't realize his intentions towards you were THAT obvious. He shrugs and drops his whole prince charming façade as he smirks playfully, "Well I mean I didn't know you get down like that," he calmly says, "but me and you? We're gonna get along justtttt fine." He grins.

And so you do...

Whenever you so happen to not be busy with Taehyung, Jungkook hits you up and you both meet at your place because he works nearby and usually he tends to ask you whenever he's getting off work. You think you're getting a reasonable and healthy amount of dick, probably why you're so stress free at school and seem in better moods. Hoseok makes fun of you for it too.

Jungkook excelled in all aspects of sex, you thought Taehyung was the only one? Boy were you proved wrong. Somehow, someway Jungkook pushed you to your limits and did things that brought out a whole new side of you. Taehyung made you wet, had you fucking creaming from a fingering session but Jungkook? Jungkook could do the same shit but had you squirting.

Now you aren't much of a squirter, you only come across that whenever you push yourself and keep going after your orgasms. Jungkook didn't even have to try, he'd have you squirting on the first try whether he was using his fingers, tongue, or cock. You almost said "I love you" from a particular fucking that had left you crying softly and shaking.

You compare the both of them. Taehyung's more of a "let me drag this out" type of pleasure as he teases and builds you up. Jungkook gets to it because "there's more where that came from" as he gives you orgasms back to back. Not to mention their heavenly cocks. Taehyung's a little above average, he's got a thick girth and veiny shaft. Jungkook's a little more longer than Taehyung, equally thick yet curved so he's hitting all those right spots.

You wonder which world did you save in your past life to get this lucky with the both of them?

Jungkook likes lingerie, not those over the top sets but maybe a matching set or a pair of raunchy lace panties or one pieces. You indulge him cause you're hot and you think you look fucking delicious in lingerie. What you buy certainly blows his mind.

You end up getting a black lace one piece, it hugs your curves in all the right places and the chest part is lace see-through. You adjust the straps on your shoulders and do a double take on your ass cause you can't stop staring at it. "Fuck it." You mumble and get your phone as you snap a series of pictures. You send them to Taehyung, Jungkook, your friend, and then your other friend cause you want the hype.

Jungkook had sent you a 'i'm here' text right when your picture sent. You grin because shit's about to hit the fan.

Jungkook ended up liking the lingerie too much cause he was overzealous to get his hands on you.

You end up getting fucked on your bed with your legs thrown over his shoulders. You got your tit hanging out of the lingerie as it jiggles in tandem with his thrusts. He had only yanked the piece to the side and stuck his cock in that way. You weren't complaining cause it had cost you a bit too much for you not to end up getting fucked in it.

"Jungkook...!" You huff out, somehow Jungkook always manages to get you to moan louder and step out of your little quiet zone.

The rhythmic sound of skin slapping against skin fills the room as Jungkook slams his pelvis into yours and watches the way your ass jiggles back at him. He's got his dark eyes set on your bouncing jiggling tits, occasionally reaching up to flick his thumb over your pebbled nipple. You get goosebumps all over and release a soft moan at the tingling sensation that comes from your chest.

"Gonna let me be the only one to have this pussy doll?" He groans and emphasizes his words with a harsh slap of his hips that jostles you, "Hm? Gonna stop being a slut and letting anyone have it? All they gotta do is mention their dicks and you'll be right there with your legs wide open isn't that right?" He coos and grabs on to your tit hard.

You garble out a moan and arch your back, he's got your knees shaking weakly as you struggle to keep them from sliding off his shoulders. "Y..es.." You whimper, pussy fluttering like crazy from his little dirty talk.

Jungkook grins, "Right," he mocks as his hips grind deep into yours, "Bet you don't even know what the hell I just told you. Too cock stupid to even understand huh baby?" He muses out as he lets your tit go in favor of slithering his hand up your throat and holding you in place. "Answer me doll."

Your tongue peeks out and you slowly lick your lips watching as he goes feral from it, "Only yours," and right when you see his familiar cocky grin overcome his features you add a, "for today." He loses all cool and plows you.

"Oh yeah baby?" Jungkook growls as he squeezes your throat tight and hammers into your soppy pussy. He's relentless and his stamina comes out into play as he takes you by surprise and slams into you harder and harder. To the point you're squirting bits of slick every few seconds and making a mess on your sheets below.

Your body moves upwards with each thrust as he sends you to cloud nine. You're crying softly because it's overwhelming you, the pleasure comes in hot punishing spurts as it makes you squirm like crazy. "Shit...! Jungkook..!" You whisper out as your eyes squeeze shut, mouth falling open as moans flow freely.

"Fucking slut." He growls as he keeps his eyes set on you, "Opening your legs and giving out what's mine. You may be letting others fuck ya baby but just remember," his voice drops an octave as he whispers in your ear, "who makes you squirt? Who makes you cry.." He whispers and lets his tongue run over your ear lobe.

You come undone from just that, crying out loudly and going stiff when you squirt around the man and get the sheets below drenched. "Fuck! Fuck!" You cry out, head thrown back and body shuddering from his thrusts.

Jungkook pants into your ear, shuddering from the way you clench tightly around his cock. He rolls his hips forward a few more times until he's coming inside and filling you with his thick gooey cum. It makes you quiver, hands weakly pushing at his hips as you're left unable to speak or do much.

"Fuck baby," He sighs, content from the rough session of sex, "see you next week." He mumbles out giving your thigh a pat of appreciation.

You hum, definitely looking forward to next time..

Now, how long did you really think you were going to keep fucking both of the homies without anyone of them finding out? You figured not long because Jungkook was slowly starting to hit you up whenever Taehyung did or whenever you were with one of them vice versa. Up until now they didn't know cause you always fucked Taehyung while Jungkook was out at work, and Jungkook always went over to your place.

Things were working in harmony until one day when they weren't.

You're getting your back blown out by Taehyung in his goddamn living room for fucks sake. Broad daylight and you're bent over the arm of the couch whining and panting as he sends you to another dimension. "Fuckkk." You drag out as he sets his hands on your lower back to make you arch even further.

"Lift your leg a little," Taehyung grunts out as he slows down to a slow grind so that you had time to change your position without him jostling you.

You go to do as he says when you hear the front door opening, you look up lazily with your tongue poking out when suddenly a familiar black bucket hat walks into the room. Taehyung mumbles something about his roommate being early. Holy shit. You're frozen and in shock, how could you not have noticed?

Taehyung always did describe his roommate to be like Jungkook at times and he even let a few details slip like "oh Kook's probably dropping by for something later" or "Kook's bringing pizza in case you wanna stay". Stupid, stupid. You mentally berate yourself for not piecing the evidence together. You have seen Jungkook's shoes in the front for fucks sake!

Jungkook tosses his bucket hat to the side and sighs, tossing his keys into a bowl and running a hand through his hair. "Hey Tae." He goes to greet the other when his eyes suddenly land on your bent form, butt naked as the day you were born and hickeys covering your throat (proud work from Taehyung).

Taehyung hums, "Hey Kook." He greets as if he isn't balls deep in you.

Jungkook is quiet for a few more seconds before he puts two and two together and he lets out a breath of disbelief, "Hm.. I see what's going on here." He pushes his tongue against his cheek looking pissed off, "You know when I said you let just about anyone have it you sure know how to pick 'em don't you y/n?" He mocks as he steps forward.

"What?" Taehyung mumbles as he pulls back just a little before it clicks in his head too, "She's fuckin' you too Kook?" He chuckles lazily, "Finally the girl who's got you by your balls has been revealed, Kook over here was going crazy over this little pussy of yours." He croons in your ear and gives your pussy a pat.

"Oh yeah asshole? Well now I know the girl you fucking simp over and take photos of so you can hang them in your room." Jungkook sneers back as he folds his arms over his chest.

You're mildly alarmed by Jungkook's words and look back at Taehyung with a unimpressed look, "Really dude? Couldn't have just asked? Just sayin'." You softly say, "Whatever grinds your gears."

"I'm not a fucking pervert!" Taehyung groans, "Listen you just gonna stand there or you gonna let me go back to what I was doing?" He says to Jungkook in annoyance, "My dick's about to go soft with just the sight of you."

"Fine, but I want in too." Jungkook grins as he takes his jacket off.

He what now?

Surely he isn't serious, at least you think he isn't..

Then you find yourself in a predicament. You're in Taehyung's lap facing Jungkook as he's sliding his cock through the slippery mess of lube and slick. You're terrified out of your mind to even think of having them both in you at the same time. Taehyung's more relaxed, cock throbbing from inside you as he watches with hazy eyes as Jungkook works his own cock inside alongside his.

"Holy shit," Jungkook grits his teeth as he digs his nails into your thighs, "still so fucking tight." He mutters and inches in to you slowly.

You let out a low whine of fear but that's not the point, your cunt's tense and so are you. It feels like pressure and a small twinge of pain from your perineum stretching, like a small stinging/burning sensation. It's not uncomfortable and you can bear with it. It just feels like time is ticking by really slow for you.

"Almost there," Jungkook says as he eases another inch or two into you.

Taehyung kisses on your shoulder and neck to distract you from the pain as he reaches down between Jungkook and you to fondle your swollen clit. You softly moan, feeling more wetness get coaxed out of you, "Just move, can't bottom out with Tae inside." You murmur softly, "I'm good, promise."

Jungkook shares a look with Taehyung and the two give in, "Tap my thigh if it's too much." Taehyung relents as he adjusts his grip on you, "Okay?"

You nod in affirmation and a tiny gasp leaves you when Jungkook begins to thrust in to the best of his abilities. Taehyung waits a little and then rolls his hips forwards to join Jungkook's. They create this rhythm, one goes in and the other is barely sliding back out though both cocks stretch you to your limits and your g-spot is being hit dead on by you don't know.

"Oh god," you whimper and throw your head back on Taehyung's shoulder, "fuck meeee..!" You whined out as your thighs shook a little more than usual, "So fucking deep." You gasped.

Jungkook grunted quietly as he focused on the tempo he and his friend had set. It felt heavenly, the tight fit around his cock sent tremors down his spine. He could feel the disgusting wet slide of his cock rubbing against Taehyung's shaft whenever he was pushing in and the latter was pulling back out. Taehyung was quietly panting against your shoulder as he holds you tight in his arms.

You rock between the two of them, low whimpers and cries leaving your lips due to the burning pleasure you feel. Your toes curl and you lift your hips a little seeing stars bursting behind your eyelids, "Oh shit!" You cry, it had made both cocks stroke your sensitive walls and cause more pleasure for you.

You can't escape them, if you move up you're basically pushing up into Jungkook and feeling Taehyung slide back out. It's equally mind blowing and you just don't want this to stop ever despite feeling full and stretched out.

"Greedy little slut," Jungkook grunts out of nowhere, "couldn't just have one cock now could you? Had to go and find a way to satisfy this slutty pussy didn't you?" He pants softly as he leans down to suck hickeys on to your skin, "Maybe we shouldn't even let you cum, do you even deserve it after being a bad girl and fucking Taehyung behind my back?"

Taehyung lets out a little grunt, "Pump and dump," He replies, "I mean how many times we make this greedy little slut cum Jungkook? I think it's only fair we get to cum this time don't you think baby?" He asks you with a soft moan in your ear.

You tremble a little, panting as your pussy flutters around their cocks and tightens just a tiny bit because the telltale signs of your orgasm is building up. Jungkook slaps your cheek lightly, "Pay attention now baby, we asked you something."

"Mmmmm.... told you, you weren't the only ones." You softly reply because you're out of it, close to coming and feeling like you'll pass out.

They smirk at your little snarky reply, deciding to set a unforgiving pace as they rock into you harshly now. It jostles you and weak cries are leaving your mouth, you're so so close and you reach down to rub your clit in slow circles. Taehyung sees this and replaces your hand with his own, playing and slapping your swollen bud.

"Tae..! Jungkook...!" You call out and without any warning you cum hard, shaking and gasping.

Jungkook bites his lips and yanks his cock out, "Fuck get her over here, gonna put that mouth to good use." He pants as he holds his lubed up cock.

Taehyung struggles to get you to bend over just a little in his lap as he pushes you towards Jungkook, "Open wide baby," he purrs softly, "give Kook a treat for treating you so nicely."

Your lips part and you open your mouth to take in Jungkook's wet cock. It's drenched in the flavored lube and some tangy saltiness from his pre-cum and your slick. He tangles his hand in your hair and bobs your head at the pace he wants to go, sighing and moaning. "Fuckkkk, like that baby you're doing so fucking good for me." He smirks.

Taehyung grips your hips, rocking you back and forth on his lap as he focuses on his own release. He pants and moans lowly, lips forming a small 'o' as he throws his head back with his eyes closed, "Shit she's so fucking wet Kook can barely fuckin' feel her."

"Slut's all fucked out, prolly even gaping from two cocks being stuffed into her slutty pussy." Jungkook groans in return as his hips stutter, "Shit, shit, shit," He moans long and loud as he cums down your throat, making you gag and sputter around his cock.

Taehyung's orgasm hits him cause the sounds of you slobbering all over Jungkook comes straight from a wet dream or something. He slumps into the couch with a low whine because his cock is twitching and spurt after spurt of cum fills you. "Shit that's so fucking sexy."

"Did so good," Jungkook smirks as he pulls out of your mouth and watches you cough up a little cum and saliva, "so, so good.." He pats you.

You're fucked out, everything in your body is screaming at you to go and lie down cause you were tired. You fought off a wave of sleepiness as your body slowly cooled down and your body just relaxed after the orgasm they both gave you. "Want a bath... and a nap." You softly say.

Both men stare down at you with fondness in their eyes, "Yeah? You want some wings too?" Jungkook teases cause he knows you're very tired and probably talking out your ass.

"Boneless please, ooh and some garlic bread and pizza please." You say looking up at him with a serious gaze, "Better be here when I get out of the shower... Tae give me your shirt-"

There was no way they could ever deny you, their favorite little cumdump <3.

#bts smut #bts #bts fanfction #bts fanfic #bts taehyung #jungkook x reader #taehyung x reader #bts jungkook #jungkook x you #taehyung x you #jjk smut #taehyung smut

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yumeka-sxf · 4 months

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A chronological analysis on Twilight and Yor - Part 20

*This is part of an ongoing post series. If you missed the Introduction/Part 1, click here*

----------

After Yor meets Yuri on the train, she's reminded of the fact that he's "all grown up" and doesn't need her to take care of him anymore.

As I described in Part 8, earning enough money to support Yuri was the main reason Yor became an assassin. Since she didn't have the luxury to pursue anything worthwhile for herself, taking care of and being useful to others became her main focus in life. But since Loid and Anya don't benefit from her assassin work, and now Yuri doesn't either, she begins wondering why she needs to continue doing it. This question is reinforced a few times later: first, when they're on the train and she realizes how much she enjoys being with Loid and Anya as a family, without having to worry about work. And again, during her initial meeting with Olka.

When Olka tells her that she wants to get away from the dangerous life of a gangster to a peaceful, quiet life, Yor takes a moment to reflect on those words, as they were the same thoughts she had on the train earlier – thoughts of what it would be like to live a normal life with your family without all the fears and dangers that come along with being involved in the underworld.

Olka asks Yor why she's so worried about her family discovering her identity since they're just a cover-up family, which leads to a softly emphasized scene of Yor with a noticeably sad expression, as she reluctantly admits that, yes, they are a family just for show.

We know from previous episodes, like the cooking lesson and post-Fiona date, that Yor has since realized that being in the Forger family makes her happy, despite the fact that they're a "fake" family. However, she doesn't know if Loid and Anya feel the same way, especially Loid. For all she knows, he's letting her live with him as his wife more as a favor to her, and because it's convenient for their front at Eden, and not because he personally finds happiness in the arrangement. While he did tell her during their previous date that he wants her to continue playing the role of Anya's mother and his wife, Yor doesn't know whether he feels the same happiness being together as a family like she does.

Yor becomes even more motivated to help Olka when the latter mentions that she's left so much of her old life behind her now.

Perhaps her eagerness to help Olka comes from her sad resignation to the fact that she herself can't attain the kind of life Olka is heading towards, so at the very least, she wants to make sure Olka can attain it.

Meanwhile, we see just how much Twilight's spy work has "traumatized" him, to the point of being on total high alert on the ship even though Sylvia specifically ordered him to relax. Not only was he immediately suspicious of the lottery for the cruise ticket, but even after he's on the ship, his ever-calculating mind can't help but imagine the worst scenarios. He begins looking out for any signs of terrorism and dubious behavior, much to Anya's dismay.

However, thanks to her coaxing, he catches himself and makes a conscious effort to turn off the "spy mode" in his brain (as much as he can anyway).

Later, we see Yor being nervous when having dinner with the executives, obviously not comfortable in such a formal situation and still afraid that she'll be spotted by Loid and Anya. However, when given a task she knows best – assassination work – we get to see a side of Yor that has yet to be fully highlighted in the series…a side that's serious and confident, without her usual doubts and hesitations.

Her social awkwardness and uncertainties disappear as she takes on a total "in-charge" demeanor when guiding Olka and company back to the room. But Olka has spent enough time with the underworld crowd to see that, while Yor is very good at her work, it doesn't suit the sweet, gentle person that she really is. Even before the real danger starts, Olka tells her that she doesn't seem like the underworld type, and even suggests that she spend time with her family when the ship stops at the resort. Olka must have sensed from Yor's hesitation and sad expression in their previous conversation that she truly cares about them.

It's unfortunate that Yor doesn't have a permanent confidant like Olka – someone who not only knows her true identity as an assassin, but also senses that she has real feelings for what should be a "fake" family…and is supportive of that in her own subtle way. Twilight has Franky, and Sylvia somewhat, as people who know him as both a spy and as a (fake) family man. But even though they're not openly supportive of the fact that he's catching feelings for his family, they're still people he can not only confide in without having to hide his true identity, but they care about Anya's well being too. Yor doesn't have anyone like that. While Shopkeeper and McMahon know her true identity, her relationship with them seems to be strictly business. So, as brief as her time with Olka is, it was good for Yor to finally converse with someone who understands her inner feelings that she herself is having trouble realizing.

While Anya and Twilight are having dinner later, Anya mentions that it's been a while since they've eaten dinner without Yor, to which Twilight comments that it does seem lonely without her. He could have replied with any number of less melancholic responses ("It does feel weird" or "She must be very busy" to name a few). So the fact that his first thought was how lonely it felt does seem to indicate a momentary lapse in his spy facade, to which Anya rightfully calls him out and he immediately tries to deny it (with a slight but telling blush).

When they visit the gift shop, we see that Twilight is still having trouble learning how to find enjoyment on the trip, despite the fact that Sylvia made it an official mission. It's tragic to think that even when given orders to have a relaxing family vacation, he simply can't turn off the suspicions and anxiety in his mind. But his anxiousness about people potentially eavesdropping on him soon changes to concern about Anya's mental health. Similar to when he took her to work and had her play in the sandbox, he completely misinterprets her actions as displays of emotional trauma.

I love the interpretation from @sunfoxfic about this side of Twilight's character, to quote:

"His trauma really grounds every action he takes - everything he does is to protect others from experiencing the same trauma. Loid is a highly pragmatic and sympathetic man, and in that way, he's unwaveringly kind to everyone but himself."

Just like the sandbox incident, the scene with Anya at the gift shop is a prime example of Twilight's empathetic side that he keeps hidden from everyone else. Only we as the audience know how much he agonizes about the well-being of those who may have experienced similar trauma as he did. Since Anya's reactions make no sense to him, he can't help but conclude that she has her own share of deep-rooted trauma as well. And, as I've reiterated many times before, rather than express anger or blame her for anything, he puts responsibility on himself to do a better job at trying to understand her. And all of this relates back to what he told Desmond during their first encounter…that he won't stop trying to understand others.

While Yor is keeping watch that night, she has plenty of time to reflect on what happened the day before. As she sits there for hours in silence, we see that her expression has taken on the "robotic" look she had at the very beginning of the series "pre-family," back when her assassination work was all she focused on in her life. This is probably the longest amount of time she's had to continually concentrate on work since meeting Loid and Anya, so it makes sense that her eyes would start to harden like that.

However, when she realizes that she never tried to contact them, her eyes immediately light up as she imagines a scenario where she meets up with them on the ship.

She then starts to wonder why she was hesitating so much when fighting Barnaby. She thinks it could be because she was afraid, not of death or pain, but the fact that if she had gotten seriously injured, she may have had to leave the Forger family. This makes her think back to when Olka asked her why she was so concerned about them since they're just a cover-up family. As I've previously mentioned, Yor has come to realize that being with Loid and Anya makes her happy, but she's also resigned herself to the fact that that happiness can be taken away from her at any minute. So far the biggest threat to her place in the Forgers has been Fiona, but she was able to remedy that by talking with Loid. But this time the threat comes from something where talking isn't an option: an important job from Garden. This is why she tells herself that she needs to keep her priorities straight – as far as she's concerned, her personal happiness is secondary compared to the importance of the job at hand. As she continues to think about the people whose happiness she strives for – Yuri, Loid, and Anya – the same thought she had upon meeting Yuri on the train comes back to her…if none of the people she loves benefit from her assassin work, then why does she need to keep it up?

Continue to Part 21 ->

<- Return to Part 19

#spy x family #spy family #sxf #spyxfamily #loid forger #yor forger #twiyor #sxf analysis #sxf meta #loid x yor #loidyor

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linkyu · 4 months

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tell me about your defense contract pleage

Oh boy!

To be fair, it's nothing grandiose, like, it wasn't about "a new missile blueprint" or whatever, but, just thinking about what it could have become? yeesh.

So, let's go.

For context, this is taking place in the early 2010s, where I was working as a dev and manager for a company that mostly did space stuff, but they had some defence and security contracts too.

One day we got a new contract though, which was... a weird one. It was state-auctioned, meaning that this was basically a homeland contract, but the main sponsor was Philip Morris. Yeah. The American cigarette company.

Why? Because the contract was essentially a crackdown on "illegal cigarette sales", but it was sold as a more general "war on drugs" contract.

For those unaware (because chances are, like me, you are a non-smoker), cigarette contraband is very much a thing. At the time, ~15% of cigarettes were sold illegally here (read: they were smuggled in and sold on the street).

And Phillip Morris wanted to stop that. After all, they're only a small company worth uhhh... oh JFC. Just a paltry 150 billion dollars. They need those extra dollars, you understand?

Anyway. So they sponsored a contract to the state, promising that "the technology used for this can be used to stop drug deals too". Also that "the state would benefit from the cigarettes part as well because smaller black market means more official sales means a higher tax revenue" (that has actually been proven true during the 2020 quarantine).

Anyway, here was the plan:

Phase 1 was to train a neural network and plug it in directly to the city's video-surveillance system, in order to detect illegal transactions as soon as they occur. Big brother who?

Phase 2 was to then track the people involved in said transaction throughout the city, based on their appearance and gait. You ever seen the Plainsight sheep counting video? Imagine something like this but with people. That data would then be relayed to police officers in the area.

So yeah, an automated CCTV-based tracking system. Because that's not setting a scary precedent.

So what do you do when you're in that position? Let me tell you. If you're thrust unknowingly, or against your will, into a project like this,

Note. The following is not a legal advice. In fact it's not even good advice. Do not attempt any of this unless you know you can't get caught, or that even if you are caught, the consequences are acceptable. Above all else, always have a backup plan if and when it backfires. Also don't do anything that can get you sued. Be reasonable.

Let me introduce you to the world of Corporate Sabotage! It's a funny form of striking, very effective in office environments.

Here's what I did:

First of all was the training data. We had extensive footage, but it needed to be marked manually for the training. Basically, just cropping the clips around the "transaction" and drawing some boxes on top of the "criminals". I was in charge of several batches of those. It helped that I was fast at it since I had video editing experience already. Well, let's just say that a good deal of those markings were... not very accurate.

Also, did you know that some video encodings are very slow to process by OpenCV, to the point of sometimes crashing? I'm sure the software is better at it nowadays though. So I did that to another portion of the data.

Unfortunately the training model itself was handled by a different company, so I couldn't do more about this.

Or could I?

I was the main person communicating with them, after all.

Enter: Miscommunication Master

In short (because this is already way too long), I became the most rigid person in the project. Like insisting on sharing the training data only on our own secure shared drive, which they didn't have access to yet. Or tracking down every single bug in the program and making weekly reports on those, which bogged down progress. Or asking for things to be done but without pointing at anyone in particular, so that no one actually did the thing. You know, classic manager incompetence. Except I couldn't be faulted, because after all, I was just "really serious about the security aspect of this project. And you don't want the state to learn that we've mishandled the data security of the project, do you, Jeff?"

A thousand little jabs like this, to slow down and delay the project.

At the end of it, after a full year on this project, we had.... a neural network full of false positives and a semi-working visualizer.

They said the project needed to be wrapped up in the next three months.

I said "damn, good luck with that! By the way my contract is up next month and I'm not renewing."

Last I heard, that city still doesn't have anything installed on their CCTV.

tl;dr: I used corporate sabotage to prevent automated surveillance to be implemented in a city--

hey hold on

wait

what

HEY ACTUALLY I DID SOME EXTRA RESEARCH TO SEE IF PHILLIP MORRIS TRIED THIS SHIT WITH ANOTHER COMPANY SINCE THEN AND WHAT THE FUCK

HUH??????

well what the fuck was all that even about then if they already own most of the black market???

#i'm sorry this got sidetracked in the end #i'm speechless #anyway yeah!#sometimes activism is sitting in an office and wasting everyone's time in a very polite manner #i learned that one from the CIA actually

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solarpunkani · 1 year

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Milkweed Lovers Everywhere, Heed My Warning

By all means let me know if I'm wrong here, but if I'm not wrong then we're looking at a serious (at least to me) problem.

I've been trying to stray away from Tropical Milkweed (Asclepias curassavica) and towards more native species in my area--things like swamp, sandhill, etc--and Butterflyweed (Asclepias tuberosa) fits in that category for me. It's hard to find native milkweed plants in stores--even places I've gone to in the past that had a handful of native species are currently only selling Tropical Milkweed. Even still, I know that there's been a good bit of buzz around growing native species, and some stores I've visited have said they're trying to find vendors with native species--they're not only selling Tropical for lack of trying.

So imagine my surprise--and delight--when I go to Lowe's and see Asclepias tubersoa blazoned on a plant label!

And imagine my surprise when it's being sold right next to Tropical Milkweed and looks almost identical to it.

I was immediately suspicious--especially considering the red flower buds on the 'Butterfly weed'. I've grown Tropical Milkweed for several years, and while it's been awhile since I've seen a Butterfly Weed plant outside of a photograph, these definitely didn't look like what I'd seen. Not to mention, I'd only heard of Asclepias tuberosa flowering in orange or yellow--not red. Of course, at the same time, I'm not a professional botanist, and a quick google search did declare that butterfly weed can grow in red (though the images all look like asclepias curassavica to me...).

(Image from the Native Plant Database. Looking at this picture, I should've realized where this was going sooner...)

So I did the reasonable thing and bought two of them. I figured if the red buds somehow turned orange and were actually Butterfly Weed, then I'd be perfectly satisfied. If they turned out to be Tropical Milkweed, well, I simply would give them to my neighbor who's fond of them, or find something else to do with them.

(I feel the need to emphasize; there are a lot of people online who are in the 'if you plant tropical milkweed you're a horrible person and intentionally killing monarch butterflies' camp. I am not one of them; it's not invasive in my area of Florida, it just takes a little bit of extra managing in terms of cutting it back in October/November.)

I ended up in the same Lowe's again today, shopping for my mom, and took a peek at their plant selection. Lo and behold, I found the Butterfly Weed, and...

This sure does look like Tropical Milkweed to me, and to others in my gardening server, yet it's still labeled as 'Butterfly Weed.' Also, I didn't see any Tropical Milkweed on any of the shelves--at least, nothing labeled as Tropical Milkweed. Instead, all I saw was Tropical Milkweed disguised as Butterfly Weed.

This is, in my humble pollinator garden enthusiast opinion, a problem. At best, Lowe's--or the company they source their plants from--is mislabeling their plants on accident. Which could cause problems if people are buying the plants and putting them in a place that's not quite the right condition for them, or create severe disappointment if someone's excited to grow the native Asclepias tuberosa only to end up with something else entirely. At worst? Lowe's--or the company they source their plants from--are aware that people want to grow native milkweed and are either unable to or too lazy to grow them, and would rather try to get away with selling Tropical Milkweed--which has been growing increasingly controversial in some gardening circles--and still reap the benefits and profits of selling native milkweed species.

However, I'll be real? I'm not sure what exactly to do about it. So I guess I'm just letting everyone know; if you see 'Butterfly Weed (Asclepias tuberosa)' in your local Lowe's, at least double check. Otherwise, you may plant Tropical Milkweed/Scarlet Milkweed (Asclepias curassavica) instead.

#milkweed #gardening #flowers #pollinator gardening #pollinator garden #Lowe's #tropical milkweed #butterfly weed #asclepias curassavica #asclepias tuberosa #outdoor gardening #flower gardening #ani rambles #out of queue #idk how legible this post is but I hope its at least SOMEWHAT legible yknow?

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manicpixiefelix · 1 month

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they stare at me (and i stare at you) {18+}

Felix Catton/CEO!Reader

AU of head, heart, hand. but you don't need to have read that to enjoy this.

Summary: In another life, ten-year-old Felix decides against straying from his parents at that function he was dragged along to on a boat, decides against taking a chance and befriending you there, and it changes everything.

Growing up in the shadow of your more than reluctant parents and desperate for affection, you look to find some common ground with them by investing yourself in the family business. Except as it turns out, your father, who'd been made CEO after your grandfather had passed, was more of a figurehead than a real businessman. He's happy to pass on responsibilities to you as time goes on as your growing interest and understanding of the company quickly surpassed his own. At fourteen you're attending board meetings in his place, at sixteen, you're running them, and at nineteen you're essentially acting CEO, about to start your first year at Oxford, if only to bolster your credentials, and yet it's still been years since your parents had been active participants in your life.

The unconventional environment in which you'd spent your teen years shaped you dramatically and violently into the kind of person who could command attention and respect from anyone or any room. There was no room in your life for being underestimated in any circumstance, not with so many people looking to undermine you, to tear you down, so you would never allow yourself to give them the chance. Work hard, party harder; for years you'd forced yourself to keep up with those around you despite your youth, and now it seemed to be second nature.

To the people who knew you professionally, you were a shark; beautiful, efficient, deadly. To the friends you find yourself making at Oxford, the people who can't even fathom the full extent of your world or what you're capable of because of it, they regard you like you're The Sun.

Except, of course, to the boy with a title and a castle and a lifetime of feeling like a display piece for his parents. The only other person who others offer in loving comparison to The Sun in his own right. Felix Catton knows a shark when he sees one, and hates feeling like the only one who does. Even his cousin- even his fucking sister turn out to be the type to be blinded by your light. You are objectively, unmistakably dazzling, and he's starting to really hate you for it.

Everyone around you tells him you're impossible not to love, but they say the same thing about him too. Maybe that's why, despite his best efforts, he still find himself drawn to you, pulled into your gravity, or perhaps you're pulled into his.

Binary stars, destined to crash into each other in one way or another; a supernova, a cataclysmic disaster, he's sure. However this ends, it will be beautiful and terrible, Felix thinks, just like you.

Need to Know: They/Them. Explicitly Non-Binary Reader. Enemies-With-Benefits, Enemies-to-Friends-to-Lovers.

Warnings: SMUT (AFAB!reader), psychosexual (and regular sexual) mind games, reader has sometimes dubious morals, recreational drug use, drinking, smoking, business discussions despite the writer being a theatre&literature major, questionable business ethics, discussions about transphobia in the workplace, discussions regarding reader's parental neglect, awful communication skills all around, Eddie's there.

Felix watches you on the dancefloor, watches the way you move along with the other bodies as they writhed around you, hands all over you. Like moths to a flame, they're drawn to you, looking at you like they're desperate for you to just meet their gaze. He sees the way you shift as your attention does, the subtle way you change yourself for each person you focus on. Soft or bold or teasing or pandering; you seemed to be able to figure out what exactly will entice whoever it is that is lucky enough to receive your attention on any given night.

Which perhaps is part of the reason Felix feels slighted by you; it's like you go out of your way to antagonise him instead. Its not that he's jealous, it's just that he's pretty sure you're doing it on purpose.

[ COMING SOON ]

THE TAGLIST IS ALWAYS OPEN !

If you are already on the taglist for head, heart, hand. you will be automatically tagged in this. If you've found this fic and are only interested in being tagged in it and not the main fic, please feel free to message or comment letting me know!

#felix catton imagine #felix catton x reader #saltburn x reader #saltburn imagine #felix catton x y/n #felix saltburn #manic writer #saltburn fanfiction #jacob elordi x reader #jacob elordi imagine #felix catton x you #felix catton smut

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mostlysignssomeportents · 8 days

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Precaratize bosses

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me SUNDAY (Apr 21) in TORINO, then Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

Combine Angelou's "When someone shows you who they are, believe them" with the truism that in politics, "every accusation is a confession" and you get: "Every time someone accuses you of a vice, they're showing you who they are and you should believe them."

Let's talk about some of those accusations. Remember the moral panic over the CARES Act covid stimulus checks? Hyperventilating mouthpieces for the ruling class were on every cable network, complaining that "no one wants to work anymore." The barely-submerged subtext was their belief that the only reason people show up for work is that they're afraid of losing everything – their homes, their kids, the groceries in their fridge.

This isn't a new development. Back when Clinton destroyed welfare, his justification was that "handouts" make workers lazy. The way to goad workers off their sofas (and the welfare rolls) and into jobs was to instill fear in them:

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/03/welfare-childhood/555119/

This is also the firm belief of tech bosses: for them, mass tech layoffs are great news, because they terrorize the workers you don't fire, so that they'll be "extremely hardcore" and put in as many extra hours as the company demands, without even requiring any extra pay in return:

https://fortune.com/2022/10/06/elon-musk-jason-calacanis-return-to-office-gentlemens-layoffs-twitter/

Now, there's an obvious answer to the problem of no one taking a job at the wage being offered: just increase the offer. Capitalists claim to understand this. Uber will tell you that surge pricing "incentivizes drivers" to take to the streets by offering them more money to drive during busy times:

https://www.uber.com/blog/austin/providing-rides-when-they-are-most-needed/

(Note that while Uber once handed the lion's share of surge price premiums to drivers, these days, Uber just keeps the money, because they've entered the enshittification stage where drivers are so scared of being blacklisted that Uber can push them around instead of dangling carrots.)

(Also note that this logic completely fails when it comes to other businesses, like Wendy's, who briefly promised surge-priced hamburgers during busy times, but without even the pretense that the surge premium would be used to pay additional workers to rush to the restaurant and increase the capacity:)

https://www.theguardian.com/food/2024/feb/27/wendys-dynamic-surge-pricing

So bosses knew how to address their worker shortage: higher wages. You know: supply and demand. For bosses, the issue wasn't supply, it was price. A worker who earns $10/hour but makes the company $20 profit every hour is splitting the surplus 50:50 with their employer. The employer has overheads (rent on the shop, inventory, advertising and administration) that they have to pay out of their end of that surplus. But workers also have overheads: commuting costs, child-care, a professional wardrobe, and other expenses the worker incurs just so they can make money for their boss.

There's no iron law of economics that says the worker/boss split should be 50/50. Depending on the bargaining power of workers and their bosses, that split can move around a lot. Think of McDonald's and Walmart workers who work for wildly profitable corporate empires, but are so badly paid that they have to rely on food stamps. The split there is more like 10/90, in the boss's favor.

The pandemic changed the bargaining power. Sure, workers got a small cushion from stimulus checks, but they also benefited from changes in the fundamentals of the labor market. For example, millions of boomers just noped out of their jobs, forever, unwilling to risk catching a fatal illness and furious to realize that their bosses viewed that as an acceptable risk.

Bosses' willingness to risk their workers' lives backfired in another way: killing hundreds of thousands of workers and permanently disabling millions more. Combine the boomer exodus with the workers who sickened or died, and there's just fewer workers to go around, and so now those workers enjoy more bargaining power. They can demand a better split: say, 75/25, in their favor.

Remember the 2015 American Airlines strike, where pilots and flight attendants got a raise? The eminently guillotineable Citibank analyst Kevin Crissey declared: "This is frustrating. Labor is being paid first again. Shareholders get leftovers":

https://www.thestreet.com/investing/american-airlines-flight-attendants-bash-citi-analyst-who-put-shareholders-before-workers-14134309

Now, obviously, the corporation doesn't want to offer a greater share of its surplus to its workforce, but it certainly can do so. The more it pays its workers, the less profitable it will be, but that's capitalism, right? Corporations try to become as profitable as they can be, but they can't just decree that their workers must work for whatever pay they want to offer (that's serfdom).

Companies also don't get to dictate that we must buy their goods at whatever price they set (the would be a planned economy, not a market economy). There's no law that says that when the cost of making something goes up, its price should go up, too. A business that spends $10 to make a widget you pay $15 for has a $5 margin to play with. If the business's costs go up to $11, they can still charge $15 and take $1 less in profits. Or they can raise the price to $15.50 and split the difference.

But when businesses don't face competition, they can make you eat their increased costs. Take Verizon. They made $79b in profit last year, and also just imposed a $4/month service charge on their mobile customers due to "rising operational costs":

https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/1c53c4p/79bn_in_profits_last_year_but_you_need_an_extra/

Now, Verizon is very possibly lying about these rising costs. Excuseflation is rampant and rising, as one CEO told his investors, when the news is full of inflation-talk, "it’s an opportunity to increase the prices without getting a whole bunch of complaining from the customers":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power

But even stipulating that Verizon is telling the truth about these "rising costs," why should we eat those costs? There's $79b worth of surplus between Verizon's operating costs and its gross revenue. Why not take it out of Verizon's bottom line?

For 40 years, neoliberal economists have emphasized our role as "consumers" (as though consumers weren't also workers!). This let them play us off against one-another: "Sure, you don't want the person who rings up your groceries to get evicted because they can't pay their rent, but do you care about it enough to pay an extra nickel for these eggs?"

But again, there's no obvious reason why you should pay that extra nickel. If you have the buying power to hold prices down, and workers have the labor power to keep wages up, then the business has to absorb that nickel. We can have a world where workers can pay their rent and you can afford your groceries.

So how do we get bosses to agree to take less so we can have more? They've told us how: for bosses, the thing that motivates workers to show up for shitty jobs is fear – fear of losing their homes, fear of going hungry.

When your boss says, "If you don't want to do this job for minimum wage, there's someone else who will," they're telling you that the way to get a raise out of them is to engineer things so that you can say, "If you don't want to pay me a living wage for this job, there's someone else who will."

Their accusation – that you only give someone else a fair shake when you're afraid of losing out – is a confession: to get them to give you a fair shake, we have to make them afraid. They're showing us who they are, and we should believe them.

In her Daily Show appearance, FTC chair Lina Khan quipped that monopolies are too big to care:

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

Philosophers of capitalism are forever praising its ability to transform greed into public benefit. As Adam Smith put it, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." The desire to make as much money as possible, on its own, doesn't produce our dinner, but when the butcher, the brewer and the baker are afraid that you will take your labor or your wallet elsewhere, they pay more and charge less.

Capitalists don't want market economies, where they have to compete with one another, eroding their margins and profits – they want a planned economy, like Amazon, where Party Secretary Bezos and his commissars tell merchants what they can sell and tell us what we must pay:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/01/managerial-discretion/#junk-fees

Capitalists don't want free labor, where they have to compete with rival capitalists to bid on their workers' labor – they want noncompetes, bondage fees, and "training repayment agreement provisions" (TRAPs) that force their workers to stay in dead-end jobs rather than shopping for a better wage:

\https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/04/its-a-trap/#a-little-on-the-nose

Capitalists hate capitalism, because capitalism only works if the capitalists are in a constant state of terror inspired by the knowledge that tomorrow, someone smarter could come along and open a better business, poaching their customers and workers, and putting the capitalist on the breadline.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/18/in-extremis-veritas/#the-winnah

Being in a constant precarious state makes people lose their minds, and capitalists know it. That's why they work so hard to precaratize the rest of us, saddling us with health debt, education debt, housing debt, stagnating wages and rising prices. It's not just because that makes them more money in the short term from our interest payments and penalties. It's because it de-risks their lives: monopolies and cartels can pass on any extra costs to consumers, who'll eat shit and take it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its-the-economy-stupid/#overinflated

A workforce that goes to bed every night worrying about making the rent is a workforce that put in unpaid overtime and thank you for it.

Capitalists hate capitalism. You know who didn't hate capitalism? Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels. The first chapter of The Communist Manifesto is just these two guys totally geeking out about how much cool stuff we get when capitalists are afraid and therefore productive:

https://pluralistic.net/SpectreHaunting

But when capitalists escape their fears, the alchemical reaction that converts greed to prosperity fizzles, leaving nothing behind but greed and its handmaiden, enshittification. Google search is in the toilet, getting worse every year, but rather than taking reduced margins and spending more fighting spam, the company did a $80b stock-buyback and fired 12,000 skilled technologists, rather than using that 80 bil to pay their wages for the next twenty-seven years:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Monopoly apologists like to argue that monopolists can rake in the giant profits necessary to fund big, ambitious projects the produce better products at lower prices and make us all better off. But even if monopolists can spend their monopoly windfalls on big, ambitious projects, they don't. Why would they?

If you're Google, you can either spend tens of billions on R&D to keep up with spam and SEO scumbags, or you can spend less money buying the default search spot on every platform, so no one ever tries another search engine and switches:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Compared to its monopoly earnings, the tech sector's R&D spending is infinitesimal:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/11/nor-glom-of-nit/#capitalists-hate-competition

How do we get capitalists to work harder to make their workers and customers better off? Capitalists tell us how, every day. We need to make them afraid.

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/2024/04/19/make-them-afraid/#fear-is-their-mind-killer

Image: Vlad Lazarenko (modified) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wall_Street_Sign_%281-9%29.jpg CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #petard #precarity #cares act #stimulus #market discipline #competition #too big to care #antitrust #labor #trustbusting #consumer welfare #every accusation is a confession

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siilvan · 8 months

Text

bloodsport – III

prologue | part one | part two | next

characters: vladimir makarov

summary: after a successful escape, you try to convince yourself that the prison and makarov are behind you. things just never seem to go to plan, though.

genre: angst, slowburn, enemies to ?, fem!reader (callsign: petra, no desc.)

warnings: not proofread, cursing, canon-typical violence, poorly written combat, allusions to trauma and stress, mentions of typical murderous behavior from makarov (∶__∶), OG mak's backstory bc we don't know shit about the reboot lol

word count: 5.9k

note: my birthday's on the 3rd, so pls take this as a gift from me to you :) the support on this series has also been insane 😭 you guys are so sweet!! <33

also big shoutout to @roosterr bc i completely copied the way she writes texts in fics LMAO i hope it's okay with you bestie ilysm

"anyone else would be dead already."

what the hell does that mean?

you're lying on your back, absently staring up at the ceiling, those words replaying in your mind over and over again. yet another week has passed since "the incident," as the guards in the corridor so kindly put it.

clearly makarov had given his men a new order after you killed the younger doctor. not only did they avoid touching you, but they hardly even looked in your direction outside of required monitoring. doctor tarkovsky was singlehandedly providing your medical care, as well. the next time you saw the doctor - the morning after the incident - proved to be an interesting experience. while treating you, he made a comment about "the commander seeming angry."

you add it to your ever-growing list of questions.

blaring alarms interrupt your somewhat peaceful pondering. you shoot up, instinctively reaching for your belt to grab your gun, only to be reminded that you're unarmed. the guards in the hall are shouting at each other, appearing just as surprised as you are.

carefully, you rise from the bed and cross the room, trying to listen to what they're saying. if there was one benefit to your captivity, it was the small bit of russian that you've picked up on. amongst the frantic chatter, you can make out a few words:

attack. small team. breached. combat. prisoner.

your chest tightens as you step back from the door. the base is under attack, and whomever is leading the charge is enough of a threat to raise the alarms. a small team could never hope to contend with an entire ultranationalist stronghold, though. there's only one man, one team, that could succeed despite being so heavily outnumbered.

the one-four-one.

it has to be them. they're the only ones bold enough to stage an attack, and the only ones capable of pulling it off.

even if it's someone else, they're your ally now, and your only hope of making it out of here alive.

you can see the guards scrambling outside your cell, frantically following whatever orders were being barked at them through their radios. for now, they seem to disregard your presence in favor of organizing their forces to combat the threat, but you know it won't last. contrary to the size of the prison, you're the only captive being held here; any mention of "prisoner" is referring to you.

the area quiets down as most of the men rush to aid their fellow soldiers, leaving only the alarm to keep you company. you mentally curse as you consider your very limited options. without a set of keys to escape this cell, you're stuck here.

a purposeful set of footsteps rapidly approaching makes the decision for you. quickly, you dive just out of sight of the door, pressing your back to the wall. the person stops just outside and grumbles to himself as you hear the sound of keys jingling in the lock. the iron door swings open, and you bite down on your bottom lip to keep quiet as he stares into the empty space, confusion evident in the grunt that leaves him.

a second passes before he steps into the room, scanning the far side of it. your eyes fall to the knife on his belt, easily removable if you're fast enough, and you dive for it before he can turn around.

you tear the blade from its sheath and swiftly plunge it into the side of his neck, ripping a strangled cry from the soldier as he reacts too slowly to save himself. you pull him to the ground and lay his body flat, releasing a sharp breath once you confirm the kill. temporary relief floods your system, hastening your movements as you collect as much of his gear as you can.

immediately after you secure the last strap of the armor vest, you hear voices calling out from somewhere close by. searching for the guy you just killed, you assume. with one final gear check, you move to the same spot against the wall and wait for the group to get closer.

the first of the bunch steps into the room and freezes at the sight of the other man, and you take the opportunity to drop him with the rifle you had collected. the remaining members, two or three men, are quick to respond once the gunshots ring out. you peek around the corner as they rush forward with their guns drawn, electing to start the gunfight yourself.

you manage to shoot one down before the others notice you. a bullet whizzes past your head as you aim down the barrel and shoot another, forcing you to duck back into cover.

"you're cornered. come out and i'll let you live." the final soldier says, frustration lacing his command. you sit still, lying in wait until his impatience overpowers his better judgement. a tense silence fills the air between you, only broken by the soldier groaning and coming to you instead.

he circles the corner, weapon at the ready, but scans the room in too wide an arc. you finish him off and peek out into the hall again, finding it completely vacant.

the radios on the soldiers bodies suddenly come to life, and you hear a familiar voice on the other end. you pick one of them up and attempt to decipher the question to no avail. however, there is one word that you understand. prisoner.

"you should've sent a bigger group," you speak into the radio, feeling your lips twitch into a smile at the way makarov stops short.

he merely chuckles, though, and the smile drops. "you continue to impress me, lieutenant. let's see if you can escape." he replies, relaxed as ever. he switches channels, and the radio goes silent.

you travel down the path you took the first day, when makarov was accompanying you. there's little resistance beyond a few stragglers that you dispatch with ease. most of the forces are focused on the invaders, too busy to properly deal with you as you attack from behind. the number of enemies ahead of you increases the further you go - a sign that you're heading in the right direction.

eventually, you reach an exterior door and push it open.

to say the situation is chaotic would be an understatement. soldiers are hurrying across fields, arming themselves and their allies, shouting out various commands and information. you duck low and stick to the shadows, doing your best to avoid a firefight now that the enemy solidly has the advantage.

you make some distance and perk up at the sounds of gunfire. you've stumbled across the main battle. with a renewed sense of hope to push you forward, you go towards it, ending up crouched next to an APC as you search through the chaos for any friendly faces.

one of the nearby vehicles erupts into flames moments later, catching you off-guard and stealing your attention from the fight. scrambling to your feet, you stiffen as something smooth and cold is pressed against the back of your skull. the barrel of a gun. you raise your hands in surrender and pray that the person holding the weapon can be reasoned with.

"wait," a deep voice, husky and all too familiar, speaks from behind you. "petra? 's that you?" the man, captain price, lowers his gun, allowing you to spin around and look at him.

you're almost ready to shed tears upon seeing his face, equal parts concern and relief etched into his hard expression. he grabs ahold of your shoulder, giving it a firm squeeze as you nod, silently answering his question. a dark figure emerges from behind one of the vehicles at price's back and catches your eye.

the stark white skull mask instantly gives away his identity: ghost. he stops at your side, eyes crinkling behind the mask, and you can tell that he's giving you a happy look.

your eyes leave the pair and scan the area, hunting for the last two members of the team. there's no movement aside from the fighting and chaos in the distance. your gaze flits back to price as a lump begins to form in your throat and every scenario that you've cooked up during your captivity floods into your mind.

"where's soap and gaz?" you ask, voice sounding meek compared to the way you spoke earlier. price, clearly sensing the deeper meaning behind your words, pats your shoulder in a comforting gesture before withdrawing his hand.

"they're here, no need to worry," he starts, motioning for you to follow him. "the sergeants are protecting our backsides, making sure the chopper has a clear path. we're gonna meet 'em at the southside of the prison and exfil from there."

you fall in line with the two, muscle memory all but taking over as you repeat your prior strategy; keep to the shadows and only engage the enemy if absolutely necessary. the location that price described isn't terribly far and shouldn't be difficult to reach, so long as you don't get caught up in too many fights.

ghost contacts the sergeants as you move, updating them on your position. you learn through the conversation that the team came for you, and only you - makarov isn't a concern of theirs, even once you inform price of his presence. we'll slot the bastard once you're back on your feet, he says.

"we're gettin' close, it's just up here." ghost mutters lowly. you tighten your grip on your gun, anticipation steadily building inside of you the closer you get to the rendezvous point. you're this close to freedom, this close to putting this hellish place in the past and reuniting with your team. al-mazrah, the missile, your capture, makarov– all of them would sequester themselves to nothing more than memories.

a black hawk flies overhead before touching down at the designated spot. one of the back doors swing open just as it lands, revealing gaz's smiling face. he steps aside to allow the three of you to board, giving you an eager side-hug as you shuffle past him.

"petra, happy to see you in one piece!" soap's exclamation startles you as much as it overjoys you to hear, and you're suddenly swept up into a bone-crushing hug by the scotsman upon passing gaz.

"soap–! johnny, you're squeezing me too hard–!" you gasp out, still attempting to hug the man back despite your bones being turned to mush from the pressure. he releases you almost as quickly as he scooped you up and mutters an apology. said apology barely registers in your head due to the sight he greets you with, though.

there's a nasty scar over his left eye, jagged and obviously still in the process of healing. soap hardly seems to care about it, instead grinning at you like you were revived from the dead. you tap the area below your own eye to signal to him, brows furrowing in confusion. his hand mirrors your action and his face lights up, an audible "oh" falling from his lips.

"got it in al-mazrah," he says, waving off your worried look. "makes me look pretty cool, right?" he adds with a glance around the cabin, earning an affirmative hum from price and a shrug from ghost.

gaz snorts, slumping down on one of the seats and giving him a thumbs-up. "looks wicked, mate."

you collapse into another seat with a breezy laugh. "i'm just thankful that you're alive, all of you. i was starting to doubt whether you'd come." you confess, sharing a somber look with the rest of them.

ghost breaks the mood with a shake of his head. "'course we came. we're a team, no man left behind." he keeps his gaze locked on you as he talks, bringing an appreciative smile to your lips. your attention shifts to the window at your side, watching the stronghold fade away as the helicopter lifts off the ground and departs. you refuse to tear your eyes away until it disappears over the horizon, allowing you to take a deep breath for the first time in weeks.

⋆⋆⋆

upon arriving in safe territory, you're almost instantly pulled into a brief, but strong hug by laswell, who was waiting on the airstrip as the team landed. you're ushered into the base's medical wing by her and price for a proper checkup, which, thankfully, goes by swiftly. you've had enough of doctors and medicine to last you a lifetime.

"you're sending me home?" you ask, practically jumping up from the examination table you were sitting on. your gaze darts back and forth between price and laswell, irritation boiling under your skin as they try to placate you.

"y'need to rest, petra. you've just been through two weeks of hell." price responds, putting his hand on your shoulder and urging you to sit back down. you shrug it off and shake your head.

"captain, i was given a clean bill of health!" you argue while waving your arms in front of yourself. your wounds from the missile had mostly healed, reduced to minor marks on your skin and a raised scar on your side that was gradually fading. "i just want to get back in the field– i've been out of commission for weeks!"

laswell steps toward you, meeting your gaze with a sympathetic look. "it's protocol, lieutenant. you may be fine enough to work for now, but we can't put you or the team at risk." she counters, crossing her arms over her chest. "you need to recover." she adds a second later, earning a frustrated huff from you.

you know you'd be saying the same thing in their position. if it was price, ghost, soap, gaz– if any of them were captured, you'd be forcing them to take time off, too. you can't shake everything that's happened, though. you don't have much to show in the way of torture-related injuries, but the isolation alone was enough to make your head spin. you never felt safe, always waiting and anticipating makarov's next move. the longer you went without seeing or hearing about him, the more your suspicions grew.

a break would give you the chance to collect your thoughts and break yourself out of the doubt that's been stewing in your head ever since that first meeting. in the field, you need to be confident and decisive. there's no room for hesitation and self-doubt.

"we'll keep you updated," price starts, regarding you with a reassuring smile. "and, this won't be forever. just long enough for you to get your head on straight, yeah?"

you deliberate on it, eyes falling to the floor, and nod slowly. he's right. you're not reliable in this state.

"okay." you concede, focus shifting back to the two.

you're heading out again by the evening, saying your goodbyes to the squad on the very same airstrip that you landed on earlier in the day. soap nearly crushes you in another hug, forcing price to yank him off before you suffocate, gaz reminds you about ten different times to call if you need anything, and ghost runs down a lengthy list of relaxation techniques whilst loading your bags in the helicopter.

it's nigh-impossible to be upset about the situation when it's made clear that they don't want you to go, either. after two weeks of constant stress, everyone just wants to be together again.

you get so caught up in your impromptu partings that you fail to notice the unidentified soldier watching you from across the field. even the ever-attentive captain price misses the soldier dialing a number on his phone, his eyes narrowing as the chopper lifts off with you inside.

⋆⋆⋆

you step foot in your flat well after the sun's gone down. it's silent, save for the soft padding of your socks against the floor after you kick off your boots. your bags are abandoned at the end of your bed, something you'll unpack later, and you shed your jacket before tossing it on top of the pile.

makarov... what's his story?

with a low sigh, you rub at your tired eyes with the heels of your palms and try to erase the question that's been plaguing you for longer than you'd like to admit. between laswell's intel and the stories price has told, you can paint a picture of who the man is.

a person ruled by his ambition, you've determined. while price's stories were more focused on his own experiences with makarov and his allies, what laswell provided was concrete: he massacred civilians like it was nothing. what could possibly drive a man to that point?

the trip back home proved fruitless, with most results online simply listing information deemed "safe" for the public. you need to know more about him - you need a source that isn't going to sugarcoat or hide the ugly truth. most importantly, you need someone who can get you personal details.

you fish your phone out of your pocket and scroll through your contacts list. laswell is an option, but she's not likely to give you anything while you're supposed to be taking time off work.

a name - or rather, a codename - pops up in the list. your thumb hovers over the contact, debating on whether or not to call.

you give in and click the "call" button after a moment's consideration. the line rings until a cheerful voice greets you.

"ah, lieutenant!" nikolai beams, sounding far too energized at this hour. "price told me about the successful prison break, congrats on surviving the ultranationalists."

"thanks, nik." you chuckle at his enthusiasm. "is there any chance i could ask you for a favor? i need information, stuff that i think only you can get." you nervously shift your weight while asking the question, worried that you might be hitting a dead end.

"information? about what?"

"makarov."

nikolai goes quiet, and you think he's going to deny your request. but, just as you open your mouth to justify it, he speaks.

"you want private informaton, yes?" he mutters, causing you to let out a deep breath. "price hasn't told you everything, and you want to research the man that captured you. that is to be expected."

"give me a little time, i'll send you whatever i can find." he continues. you can hear typing in the background after, signaling that he was following through with it. you tell him goodbye with a small "thanks" and hang up, an immense weight lifting off your fatigued shoulders.

a hot shower would be nice right now. you haven't had one in weeks, and nikolai said that gathering everything would take a while. you might as well use the break instead of sitting around and twiddling your thumbs while waiting for him.

you trudge to the bathroom and turn the water on, stripping out of your clothes and leaving your phone on the counter. you hop in the shower and feel your aching muscles relax as soon as the warm water washes over them, soothing weeks of pain and discomfort. when you get out and wrap a towel around yourself, you finally feel relatively at ease for the first time since your escape.

your phone buzzes from nearby, and you blink at the screen after picking it up. a message from nikolai stares back at you.

sent what i have, hope it helps 22:43 pm

thanks, appreciate it! 22:43 pm

i'll let you know if i find anything else 22:44 pm

you quickly dry off and get dressed in more comfortable clothes, grabbing your laptop as you stroll into the living room and get settled on the couch. it only takes a couple minutes to access the files that nikolai sent, and upon seeing a page of folders to look through, you're left shocked at the sheer amount of information he gave.

it's overwhelming, just how much makarov has done in his career - if you can even call international terrorism a "career." you decide to begin at the top of the list, shaking off the uneasy feeling that settles in the pit of your stomach.

the contents of the folder go from typical, almost expected, crimes from someone like him, to acts that make you understand why price is wary of him. you sift through each file, studying the contents as if you're going to be quizzed on them, each word acting as another nail ripped out of your coffin.

the list of crimes seems endless. kidnapping, torture, trafficking, bombings, assassinations, mass murder... not only are you lucky to be uninjured, you're lucky to be alive. the privilege of being a "special" target, you presume. if not for your position in the task force, you'd be lying dead in a ditch or tortured to the brink of insanity. your stomach churns at the thought.

eventually, you reach a folder named "personal." it lives up to its name, as when you access it, the files are all details about the man himself. some of the basic information is known to you already, but most of it is entirely new - stuff you're sure was intentionally hidden away from curious eyes.

what you can find of his life before he began his reign of terror both answers your questions and adds more to the list. he was a paratrooper, a captain in the spetsnaz, regarded as a master in the field despite the list of complaints on his file. many of the men under his command considered him a natural leader; charismatic, cunning, but harsh in his methods. he received several comments from the higher-ups about his alarming behaviors, but it all came to a head when he was investigated for war crimes. he left the military to avoid the charges.

somehow, the crimes that got him discharged seem mild compared to what he's done since. you can't wrap your brain around why makarov treated you so... kindly, given everything you've read. he should have ended your life or made it a living hell, but instead, you got regular medical treatment, decent conditions, and mostly left alone during your imprisonment.

you sit back from the screen, sluggishly running a hand down your face. makarov didn't fight to keep you captured. if anything, he was happy to let you escape. it doesn't make sense. he went through the effort of capturing you alive and gained nothing from it. for a man that favors the zero-sum game, he's not playing it well.

unless this is his gain. getting in your head, confusing you, forcing you to think about him when you should be focusing on recovering. he's bogging you down, preventing you from being reliable for your teammates.

or, maybe you're looking into things too deeply. overestimating just how clever one man can be.

your phone buzzes from its spot on the cushion, and you blink at the bright screen, squinting to read the notification. it's a text message from an unknown number. a few different people flash through your mind, potential allies that could have changed their numbers recently, but no one stands out. you exhale and click the notification to open up the message fully.

feeling well? 12:35 am

you stare at the message for a minute. it can’t be price or any of the boys, you already have their phone numbers. you highly doubt that laswell changed hers without updating you, and nikolai probably hasn’t change his in the two hours since your last conversation. just as you go to type a response, two more messages pop up.

recovering at home is preferable, isn't it? 12:36 am

much more comfortable than a medical wing. 12:36 am

who is this? 12:37 am

take a guess - m 12:37 am

a chill creeps up your spine as the realization dawns on you. it's makarov; not only does he have your phone number, but he knows you're not at base. he's managed to track your location in less than six hours.

you drop your phone on the coffee table and shoot a wary glance around the room before checking to make sure your front door is locked. once you're sure of it, you start to pace around the room, wringing your hands together. the smart decision would be to call someone - price, laswell, one of the boys, someone that can get here quickly or send a person in their place.

you're not defenseless by any means, but there's no telling what makarov knows. he could be halfway across the world or in the very same city, and you have no way of finding out without putting yourself at risk. you may have gotten lucky in al-mazrah, but you can't rely on luck.

your phone lights up again, and from your position a few feet away, you can just barely make out what the screen says.

let's talk, lieutenant. 12:40 am

no fucking way. you're not entertaining the madman that you just escaped.

you need to get out; take a walk, clear your head. makarov knows where you are, but that doesn't mean he's actually here. for all you know, it could be a lucky guess. you throw on a jacket and slip on a pair of shoes before shoving your phone in your pocket, hastily stumbling out the door. the crisp night air hits you the second you step out, making you draw your jacket tighter around yourself as you start down the sidewalk.

your brisk - practically panicked - walk does little to calm your nerves initially. you have to force yourself to slow down, strolling along at a more leisurely pace. after a couple minutes, your shoulders droop and the panic begins to dissipate.

the late hour means that you're the only person out right now. all you have for company is the occasional breeze that sweeps past, and you think that you prefer it this way.

until your phone buzzes. you stop dead in your tracks and pick it up, letting out a relieved breath at soap's name flashing on the screen. you answer the call with an easy smile.

"hey! i didn't expect you to pick up," soap laughs on the other end. "realized how late it was after dialin' your number." he adds, pulling a chuckle from you.

"haven't been able to sleep, so i figured i'd take a walk." you shrug, as if he can see you.

"ah, figured you'd pass out the second you landed." he concedes while you absentmindedly toe at the ground, eyeing your surroundings. "just wanted to check in– make sure everything is going okay with you."

for a moment, you debate on mentioning the messages from makarov. logically, it's the right thing to do; your team needs to know about any potential threats. however, there's a little part of you that hesitates to say anything. you feel the urge to keep it a secret, to wait and see what happens. makarov's given you useful intel before, maybe you can get more out of him.

"yeah, i'm doing all right," you mutter, reassuring soap. "just want to get back to work as soon as i can. i miss you guys."

soap gives you an appreciative hum. "y'just gotta heal up quick, l.t.! we're all missing you here. ghost and price are meaner than you are."

"they're not 'mean,' they just don't tolerate as much nonsense from you and gaz as i do." you counter with a playful laugh, pulling a groan from soap.

"it's not nonsense, it's– what?" soap suddenly stops talking, and you hear a voice in the background of the call. he says something to the person before exhaling dramatically and speaking into the phone again. "sorry 'bout that, it was price. apparently we've got somethin' to handle– a wrecked shadow company transport, i think. i'll send a message after we're done, yeah?"

you wave your hand while talking, again, as if he can see you. "don't worry about it, just stay safe out there. let me know how it goes."

the two of you exchange quick goodbyes and you end the call with a smile still plastered on your face. your brows furrow as you immediately receive another call, though. the number that flashes across the screen makes you grip the phone tighter, your knuckles turning white from the strain.

makarov, of course. you decline the call with an irritated sigh and spin on your heel, heading back to your apartment. another one comes through seconds later, which you choose to simply ignore this time. you speed up the short walk to your front door and slam it closed behind you, locking it just as quickly.

"you are surprisingly difficult to get ahold of, petra."

you whip around and press your back to the door, locking eyes with the man you tried so desperately to avoid. makarov stands in the middle of the room, a smug grin on his face, his arms loosely crossed over his chest as he stares you down.

"how the hell did you find me so fast?" you sneer at him, hand tightening around the set of keys in your palm. he's wearing a thick vest and armor plates - they won't save you, but the keys might buy you enough time to reach the gun in your bedroom.

"i have my ways," he tilts his head to the side, moving to lean against the back of your couch. "i needed to speak with you, and you weren't answering the phone. this was my only option."

you scoff at the claim, briefly loosening your grip. "no, you also have the option of leaving me alone." you argue, stepping further into the room. "besides killing you, we don't have any business to discuss."

"is that so?" makarov chuckles, glancing over his shoulder. you follow his gaze and land on your laptop. it's turned on again, with one of the pages detailing his personal history displayed on the screen. "you'll be very interested in what i have to say, lieutenant."

you bite your tongue, shifting your weight and dragging your focus back to him. "fine. tell me, then."

makarov straightens, his gaze flitting back to you. the edges of the keys dig into the skin of your palm, the bite of the cold metal keeping you grounded as he stalks toward you, like a predator approaching a prey animal. those alarm bells start going off in your head again, every instinct screaming at you to preemptively strike or run.

when he's a few feet away, you lunge. jabbing your keys forward, you try to hit one of the weak spots of his vest, aiming for the one of the gaps near the straps.

the training he underwent years ago is made readily apparent as makarov easily grabs your wrist and twists it, disarming you in one smooth motion. you try to use your other hand to break free, only to end up with both hands in his iron grip. you're spun around and shoved against the wall with your hands behind your back, trapped between your bodies.

you struggle, but that only encourages him to tighten his grip, firmly pinning your hands. he presses forward, using his own body weight to prevent you from fighting him off.

"you're predictable, petra," he mutters, the comment making you thrash against him. "you can't see past yourself– i am freely offering you information that your allies would die to gather themselves. take advantage of this generosity."

"i hate you," you seethe, writhing and trying to break free of his hold. he doesn't budge even a little, chuckling softly next to your ear as he leans in closer.

"good. i like that." makarov murmurs, his voice low and controlled, warm breath fanning over your skin. heat floods through your veins when he speaks, which you attribute to anger towards him.

until he nudges you again, his upper body falling almost perfectly in line with the curve of your back, his hands loosening slightly and providing your red-marked wrists with some relief. it just now occurs to you how close he is, the steady rise and fall of his chest against your spine forcing your own staggering breathing to calm itself and match his. his cropped hair tickles the side of your ear as he hovers next to you, his side profile visible in the edge of your vision.

you bite your tongue again, though for a different reason than earlier. holding any feelings but hatred and contempt for your enemy - you might as well mark yourself as a traitor if that happens. you can't allow yourself to fall for the games that he's definitely playing with you. the task force needs you, and they need whatever intel makarov can provide you with right now.

"i can be civil," you concede, barely above a whisper. "i won't attack if you don't." you add a moment later, pursing your lips.

you can see the edge of his lips twitch from the corner of your eye. makarov releases your wrists after a beat and steps back, giving you enough space to turn around and face him, pressing your back flat against the wall.

"do you trust the commander of shadow company?" he asks, bluntly. you narrow your gaze, huffing at the thought.

"graves? not by a longshot. i can trust him enough to shoot your guys before he shoots me, but that's it." you reply in an equally blunt tone.

"do you believe he is attached to the general's plans?" he says, and you deliberate before shaking your head. it wouldn't make sense, given graves' recent allyship with urzikstan. makarov continues, appearing satisfied with your answer. "you're correct. the shadow is not aware of shepherd's plans any more than your team is."

"how does this help me?"

"you will need him to cooperate in order to take down general shepherd," makarov asserts. you tilt your head curiously, urging him to elaborate. "which means, unfortunately, that you will have to work with him. my men can handle the general's lap dogs, but commander graves is the only person that can locate the general himself."

of course. your catalogue of enemies that you have no choice but to work with just keeps expanding.

"i see." you mumble, fingers twitching at the prospect of working with graves. tolerating his soldiers is one issue, but the commander is a whole other ballpark. "i still don't understand– why are you giving me all of this?"

makarov finally tears his gaze from yours for the first time since you separated. he walks over to the front door, right next to your spot against the wall, and unlocks it with a small twist of the lock. he turns toward you, though his eyes do not lift to yours again.

"the enemy of my enemy is my friend," he utters, swinging the door open. "we'll be in touch. do not ignore me next time i contact you."

you nearly miss his eyes flicking up to your face, the action so short that it feels like a trick of the light. he walks out of your apartment, closing the door behind him with a soft thud, stopping you from watching him as he disappears into the night. you don't think you want to know where he goes, but one thing that you can say for certain is that it won't be the last you see of him.

you'll be seeing him even sooner than you can imagine.

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