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fans4wga · 11 months

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"The studios thought they could handle a strike. They might end up sparking a revolution"

by Mary McNamara

"If you want to start a revolution, tell your workers you’d rather see them lose their homes than offer them fair wages. Then lecture them about how their “unrealistic” demands are “disruptive” to the industry, not to mention disturbing your revels at Versailles, er, Sun Valley.

Honestly, watching the studios turn one strike into two makes you wonder whether any of their executives have ever seen a movie or watched a television show. Scenes of rich overlords sipping Champagne and acting irritated while the crowd howls for bread rarely end well for the Champagne sippers.

This spring, it sometimes seemed like the Hollywood studios represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers were actively itching for a writers’ strike. Speculations about why, exactly, ran the gamut: Perhaps it would save a little money in the short run and show the Writers Guild of America (perceived as cocky after its recent ability to force agents out of the packaging business) who’s boss.

More obviously, it might secure the least costly compromise on issues like residuals payments and transparency about viewership.

But the 20,000 members of the WGA are not the only people who, having had their lives and livelihoods upended by the streaming model, want fair pay and assurances about the use of artificial intelligence, among other sticking points. The 160,000 members of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists share many of the writers’ concerns. And recent unforced errors by studio executives, named and anonymous, have suddenly transformed a fight the studios were spoiling for into a public relations war they cannot win.

Even as SAG-AFTRA representatives were seeing a majority of their demands rejected despite a nearly unanimous strike vote, a Deadline story quoted unnamed executives detailing a strategy to bleed striking writers until they come crawling back.

Days later, when an actors’ strike seemed imminent, Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger took time away from the Sun Valley Conference in Idaho not to offer compromise but to lecture. He told CNBC’s David Faber that the unions’ refusal to help out the studios by taking a lesser deal is “very disturbing to me.”

“There’s a level of expectation that they have that is just not realistic,” Iger said. “And they are adding to the set of the challenges that this business is already facing that is, quite frankly, very disruptive.”

If Iger thought his attempt to exec-splain the situation would make actors think twice about walking out, he was very much mistaken. Instead, he handed SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher the perfect opportunity for the kind of speech usually shouted atop the barricades.

“We are the victims here,” she said Thursday, marking the start of the actors’ strike. “We are being victimized by a very greedy entity. I am shocked by the way the people that we have been in business with are treating us. I cannot believe it, quite frankly: How far apart we are on so many things. How they plead poverty, that they’re losing money left and right, when giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their CEOs. It is disgusting. Shame on them. They stand on the wrong side of history at this very moment.”

Cue the cascading strings of “Les Mis,” bolstered by images of the most famous people on the planet walking out in solidarity: the cast of “Oppenheimer” leaving the film’s London premiere; the writers and cast of “The X-Files” reuniting on the picket line.

A few days later, Barry Diller, chairman and senior executive of IAC and Expedia Group and a former Hollywood studio chief, suggested that studio executives and top-earning actors take a 25% pay cut to bring a quick end to the strikes and help prevent “the collapse of the entire industry.”

When Diller is telling executives to take a pay cut to avoid destroying their industry, it is no longer a strike, or even two strikes. It is a last-ditch attempt to prevent le déluge.

Yes, during the 2007-08 writers’ strike, picketers yelled noncomplimentary things at executives as they entered their respective lots. (“What you earnin’, Chernin?” was popular at Fox, where Peter Chernin was chairman and chief executive.) But that was before social media made everything more immediate, incendiary and personal. (Even if they have never seen a movie or TV show, one would think that people heading up media companies would understand how media actually work.)

Even at the most heated moments of the last writers’ strike, executives like Chernin and Iger were seen as people who could be reasoned with — in part because most of the executives were running studios, not conglomerations, but mostly because the pay gap between executives and workers, in Hollywood and across the country, had not yet widened to the reprehensible chasm it has since.

Now, the massive eight- and nine-figure salaries of studio heads alongside photos of pitiably small residual checks are paraded across legacy and social media like historical illustrations of monarchs growing fat as their people starve. Proof that, no matter how loudly the studios claim otherwise, there is plenty of money to go around.

Topping that list is Warner Bros. Discovery Chief Executive Davd Zaslav. Having re-named HBO Max just Max and made cuts to the beloved Turner Classic Movies, among other unpopular moves, Zaslav has become a symbol of the cold-hearted, highly compensated executive that the writers and actors are railing against.

The ferocious criticism of individual executives’ salaries has placed Hollywood’s labor conflict at the center of the conversation about growing wealth disparities in the U.S., which stokes, if not causes, much of this country’s political divisions. It also strengthens the solidarity among the WGA and SAG-AFTRA and with other groups, from hotel workers to UPS employees, in the midst of disputes during what’s been called a “hot labor summer.”

Unfortunately, the heightened antagonism between studio executives and union members also appears to leave little room for the kind of one-on-one negotiation that helped end the 2007-08 writers’ strike. Iger’s provocative statement, and the backlash it provoked, would seem to eliminate him as a potential elder statesman who could work with both sides to help broker a deal.

Absent Diller and his “cut your damn salaries” plan, there are few Hollywood figures with the kind of experience, reputation and relationships to fill the vacuum.

At this point, the only real solution has been offered by actor Mark Ruffalo, who recently suggested that workers seize the means of production by getting back into the indie business, which is difficult to imagine and not much help for those working in television.

It’s the AMPTP that needs to heed Iger’s admonishment. At a time when the entertainment industry is going through so much disruption, two strikes is the last thing anyone needs, especially when the solution is so simple. If the studios don’t want a full-blown revolution on their hands, they’d be smart to give members of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA contracts they can live with."

#sag-aftra strike #sag strike #fans4wga #writers guild strike #actors guild strike #union solidarity #wga strong #i stand with the wga #wga strike #writers strike

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cutielando · 14 days

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Okay I have a request. Lando with his long time girlfriend and when Oscar joins the team they warn him to stay away from Lando’s drivers room after a race because him and reader love to ‘celebrate’ no matter the result of the race. And Oscar finds out the hard way. But McLaren are like use to it. 🤭🧡

Please and thank you.

a/n: i'm sorry this is short, but i literally couldn't come up with more for this :((( i'm trying to push through my little writer's block and put out as many fics as i possibly can while i still have a little time (i have my first exam on Thursday and I have so much shit to learn it's actually not even funny, but here i am writing fics instead of doing just that, yay me)

In all fairness, Oscar had been well warned about Lando and his girlfriend’s antics post-races. Given that the walls in the motorhome were very thin, as Oscar had stated previously, the team felt like they should let Oscar know what he was in for.

He hadn’t quite taken to heart what he had been told. He had been thinking to himself, how bad can it actually be? And oh boy, it was bad.

You and Lando had made a pact from the beginning of your relationship and when you started coming to all of his races that you would do something to celebrate his every race outcome, no matter how good or bad. You vowed to see every race as something positive and take something from each one.

The McLaren team had become accustomed to your shenanigans, knowing not to go anywhere near Lando’s driver room in the hours after the race. They had come to learn to stay away the hard way, if you know what I mean.

And yet, Oscar chose to ignore them. Why? He didn’t even know.

Maybe it was just pure curiosity, maybe it was ignorance, one could only make suppositions.

If he had managed not to hear anything that even remotely resembled the warnings he had been given up until that moment, he was in for a treat this time.

You had attended the Miami GP with Lando, catching a break from your studies and having promised him that he wouldn’t have to go to a race alone after failing to attend Japan. And imagine the joy you had felt once Lando had taken the checkered flag in P1. Scratch that, imagine what was going through your mind about the celebrations you were about to have with Lando as soon as he came back to the motorhome ;).

Your boyfriend had been thinking the exact same way, trying to make his way back to the hospitality as soon as he possibly could, but still politely stopping for interviews and photos or autographs.

But once he finally reached his room and saw you waiting for him, dressed only in your underwear, he knew he was in for an enormous treat.

Oscar hadn’t heard Lando get back. He had been so deep into thought and so focused on the music he had been listening to with headphones on that he hadn’t heard the door opening, the squeals that you let out once Lando had practically pounced on you as soon as he locked the door.

However, he was pulled out of his thoughts when he started hearing bangs, moans and dirty talking through his wall. At first he had thought he was hearing things. There was no way you were actually celebrating that loudly, right?

Wrong.

When he turned off the music and took off his headphones, he realized just how fucking loud you guys were being.

He didn’t even know how to react. What was he even supposed to do? Was he just supposed to leave his room and find somewhere else to hang out until you guys were done? Should he knock on your door and ask you guys to keep it down? No, Lando deserved the win and winding down whatever way he saw fit.

Sighing, he felt himself growing redder once the sounds on the other side of the wall only intensified. He couldn’t just stand around and listen to his teammate probably getting the fuck of his life after his maiden win, so he figured he would just get something to eat and hang out with either Mark or Logan.

The moment a member of the PR team, David, had seen him coming from his room, his cheeks a heavy crimson and refusing to make eye contact with anyone, he realized Oscar had just been the victim of Y/N and Lando.

“You heard them, didn’t you?” David asked him, an amused smile stretching on his face.

Oscar blushed even heavier, if that was even possible. Shyly, he nodded, making David laugh and pat him on the back.

“I didn’t think they were actually that bad” Oscar said, playing with his fingers as his ears could still pick up the noises he had done his best to avoid.

“We tried telling you, you didn’t want to believe us” David chuckled, patting him on the back again as he departed.

When you and Lando finally emerged from his room almost an hour later, the both of you laughed when you noticed how Oscar was avoiding eye contact with the both of you.

Poor Oscar…

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miley1442111 · 5 days

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birthday fights & other lies- a.hotchner

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summary: aaron forgot your birthday which spirals into something much deeper.

pairing: aaron hotchner x fem baureader

warnings: cheating, panic attack, fighting, no happy ending :(

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12:08. Your birthday was over.

And Aaron hadn’t said a thing.

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1pm that day

“Happy birthday Y/n!” Spencer smiled, handing you a small cupcake with a lit birthday candle on it. The icing was pink, strawberry, your favourite. The cupcake was vanilla, with little sprinkles in it that made it all the more colourful.

“Thank you,” you chuckled as he pulled you into a hug, his long arms and tall stature dwarfing you in his hold. “You didn’t have to do this.”

“Well, I wanted to,” he shrugged. “I have tickets to a play this weekend, it’s in the Ford’s Theatre so it’ll be a bit of a drive but-”

“I’d love to go. Thank you Spencer,” you smiled. “When is it?”

“Tomorrow night at 7pm, we can get dinner as well, my treat.”

“Thank you Spencer,” you smiled and hugged him again.

When you’d woken up that morning, you’d been alone in your bed, despite it being full of two people the night prior. Aaron had come over, as he usually did on Thursday nights. He’d get off work late and something in him made him drive to your small townhouse, and fuck you in your bed. He’d spend the whole night convincing you he loved you, only to pretend it never happened the next day. It was like clockwork.

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3pm that day

“Happy birthday sweetheart,” Derek smiled, placing a card and a gift box on your desk.

“Thanks Derek,” you smiled and hugged him close. Earlier Penelope, Jj, and Emily had dropped off gifts at your apartment this morning, and you all had plans to go out to dinner tonight.

David had mailed you a gift, and an invitation to his home for Sunday with the rest of the team. Everyone had accepted, apart from Aaron.

When you thought about it, you didn’t know much about the unit chief you served under, in more ways than one. You knew he was kind and tender, but only behind closed doors. You knew he was intelligent and pragmatic, good at his job, and logical.

But what was he really to you? Fuck buddies? Friends with benefits? Was this a power imbalance? Were you doomed to never know?

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Your phone dinged and you turned it on, tired from the night with the girls.

Are you awake? Aaron asked.

Not for you.

What do you mean?

I don’t know if you noticed but it’s kind of an important day.

What do you mean?

I’m 24 now. You missed my birthday.

He didn’t respond for a few minutes.

I’m sorry.

I don’t care. Don’t call or text me again. I’m not just your fuck doll, I’m a real person.

I know that.

Then act like it Aaron. For fuck’s sake.

I love you.

No you don’t.

I’m coming over.

The door’s locked.

We have to talk Y/n.

Read 12:14am

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Knock, knock, knock.

“Fuck off,” you called from your kitchen, ignoring the banging on the door.

“We have to talk,” he demanded.

“No we don’t. We’re not anything anymore.”

“Please Y/n,” his voice sounded a lot more… emotional than you were used to. Raw and unusually soft. Aaron did everything he way he led the team, with confidence and strength, that included your sex life and relationship. Not once had he been vulnerable the way you’d been. You’d spent nights thinking about your future together and the way you’d tell the team. He’d been asleep beside you, or in his own bed.

You unlocked the door and he came barging in, engulfing you in an all-consuming kiss. For a moment, you allowed yourself to be swept up in the moment, imagining this is what he’d wanted to do all day but he couldn’t, the team didn’t know you two were together. You pulled back and crossed your arms.

“Hi,” you sighed, trailing back into the kitchen with him hot on your heels.

“Hi my darling,” he smiled softly. “I’m so sorry I forgot about today, I just… it slipped my mind, it’ll never happen again, I swear.”

“Aaron, it really hurts that you just… forgot about today. I’m not asking for a gift, I just wanted… acknowledgement. Is that too much to ask?” Your eyes trailed down to his hands where his fingers played with a… wedding ring?

What the fuck? Aaron had never spoken about being married. He’d never told you he was married. You would never, ever be the one to break up a marriage. Ever.

“Are you married?!” You shouted. Anger bubbling in your stomach like bile. “You fucking asshole!”

8 months of your life, wasted. Someone else’s entire marriage ruined. All because of his selfish actions.

“What? No,” he shrugged, then realised his fuck-up. His hands solidified themselves in his trouser pockets and he started. “I thought-”

“Are you separated? Who is she? Did I really just become a homewrecker?!”

“Baby please-”

“NO! Do not ‘baby’ me! Tell me everything about this woman right now! Do you two have kids?!”

“Yes,” he answered and you genuinely stopped breathing.

“W-what? So- so this entire fucking time y-you’ve been mar-married,” you panted, a hand over your chest to try and make yourself breathe, but you were. You were having a panic attack. Aaron could see the signs. He walked closer but then noticed the way you were shielding yourself from him, making your body smaller, leaning down, and ultimately ending up on the floor as you shut your eyes and tried to focus on breathing.

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t y-you tell me?” you rasped.

“We’re getting a divorce.”

“What!? I ruined a marriage? Y-you’re getting a divorce? Is it becau… because of me?”

“Yes and no,” he answered, just observing you, his voice calm and assertive, like it always is.

“What the fuck does that mean!?” you shouted. Thank god your walls were thick and the neighbours next door wouldn’t hear a thing. This would’ve been awkward to explain at the next neighbourhood meeting.

“I didn’t tell her… about you. She asked for a divorce on her own terms, but we were already separated the first time me and you had sex.”

“So then how is this about me?” you were calming down, Aaron could see it. It fucking hurt that you were anxious of him like that. That he’d set off a fucking panic attack and you wouldn’t even let him within meters of you.

“I signed her papers the day she sent them over. Because I’m in love with you.”

“Aaron, what the fuck? Me and you aren’t in a relationship, you’ve made that very clear. The only thing we do is fuck in my house! We don’t go on dates, we don’t celebrate each other’s birthdays, as you’ve so kindly demonstrated, and we aren’t ‘together’. You aren’t there when I wake up every morning, and you don’t come home with me from work in the evenings. You keep telling me that you love me but where is it? Where is this supposed love? I don't see it, do you?”

“I love you. I love that you call me out on all of my bullshit,” a step closer. “I love how smart and driven you are,” another step closer. “I love the little notes you leave on everyone's desks,” his hands wrap around your waist. “I love how good you are at your job,” a small kiss over the fabric of your jumper. “I love how you care about other people,” a kiss to your neck. “I love the little things you do to make me laugh throughout the day,” a kiss to the cheek. “I love everything about you,” a kiss to the lips. “And I’m so sorry that I ever made you feel like I wasn't completely and utterly devoted to you.”

“I don’t trust you at all,” you admitted, a sad smile on your face. “I’ll never trust you again.”

Aaron’s heart broke, but he understood. He’d been lying to you for months, what did he expect? He didn’t tell you he was a father, a husband. For god’s sake he’d take his ring off in the car every morning. It’s not like him and Haley weren’t rocky. Had this divorce been a long time coming. Had he only been served the papers two weeks ago? Yes. Had he and Haley just separated? Yes. Did he still live with her and Jack? Yes. What was one more lie if it meant he got to keep you? Lying to you was killing him, but it was also saving him, because it meant you were his. His girlfriend, hsi love, his everything.

“I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to make it up to you,” he promised.

“I don’t want to see you again,” you sniffled, small tears running down your cheeks.

“Please-”

“Just leave. Like you always do.”

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And Aaron did. When you showed up to work the next week, it was Spencer who was clinging to you like a lost puppy.

Something must’ve happened at the play.

Now Aaron had truly lost you.

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criminal minds masterlist :)

navigation for my blog :) (criminal minds, obx, the bear, marvel, top gun, the hunger games :)

#criminal minds #criminal minds imagine #bau team #criminal minds x reader #aaron hotchner x reader #criminal minds fandom #aaron hotchner #criminal minds fic #aaron hotchner fluff #thomas gibson x reader #thomas gibson #aaron hotchner fanfiction #aaron hotch hotchner #aaron hotch x reader #aaron hotch imagine #aaron hotchner imagine #aaron hotch fanfiction

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spiderispunk · 1 year

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return the favor

Pairing: Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw x Reader

Word Count: 2.9k

Warnings: Fem!Reader. Mentions of Pregnancy. Reader and Bradley Have A Son. Dilf!Bradley. Oral Sex (m! receiving). Dirty Talk. Domesticity.

Summary: He’d traded flight suits and fatigues for sweatpants and a t-shirt. And despite the fact that both items of clothing tended to get covered in spit-up by the end of the day, he still managed to make them look sexy. You wanted him every time you saw him, and judging from the little smirk Bradley wore whenever he caught you staring for a beat too long, he knew it too.

A/N: Honestly, I blame @withahappyrefrain, @ouralcohol, and Bud Light for this.

Little Nicholas “Nicky” Bradshaw came into the world kicking and screaming. Though he chose to make his grand entrance at around 3:30 AM on a quiet Thursday night, he was hell-bent on letting the whole world know about it. And so, with a whirlwind of forms, bills, and the shrill cries of the darling baby boy, you and Bradley were thrust into the throes of parenthood.

You both handled it well, or as well as you could for first timers. Working as a team to tackle midnight bottles, blowouts, spit-up and the frequent sleepless nights. You’d settled into an easy rhythm over the past seven weeks. Bottles every 2-3 hours. Naps in-between. Diaper changes. A little tummy-time when Nicky would tolerate it.

Day in. Day out.

You were worried the Navy-issued twelve weeks of parental leave would make Bradley squirrely– the repetition would become tedious–but here you were more than half-way through, and you hadn’t heard him complain about a thing.

If anything, Bradley took to the role of fatherhood eagerly. Sure, he might have missed being on base, the camaraderie, the planes, but he has other things to think about now. And he wouldn’t trade all the excitement for the joy of spending time with you and his son.

Everyday was another milestone, and so far Bradley had been there to witness them all.

“Nicky blinked at me today.”

“He almost turned his head.”

“I think I heard him try to say da-da.”

“He drank his whole bottle!”

“Do you think he’s old enough to wear shoes yet?”

Deeper down inside there was the growing fear of his impending absence . It wasn’t a question of if, but when . A mission would come, the phone would ring, and the goodbyes would begin. Pictures and grainy videos would stand in for the real thing.

But he was here now, and he was determined to soak up as much as he could.

Fatherhood suited Bradley.

He’d traded flight suits and fatigues for sweatpants and a t-shirt. And despite the fact that both items of clothing tended to get covered in spit-up by the end of the day, he still managed to make them look sexy.

It would be infuriating if it didn’t turn you on so damn much. Of course, it didn’t help that he’d opted to let the stubble on his chin get scruffy now that he didn’t have to comply with on-base grooming standards.

For you, hopped up on hormones and the longing that comes with forced post-birth abstinence, it was a truly lethal combination. More than once, you’d gotten lost in your daydreams about what the coarse hair would feel like as his lips caressed your skin. Trailing down your neck, over your sensitive nipples, scratching between your thighs.

You wanted him every time you saw him, and judging from the little smirk Bradley wore whenever he caught you staring for a beat too long, he knew it too.

You try to push the horny thoughts to the furthest recesses of your mind, as you enjoy the quiet afternoon. It’s a rare occasion. Nicky’s nap is going longer than usual–probably because he kept you and Bradley up the entire night before–so you’re trying to relish the stillness.

You doze on the couch, head pillowed in Bradley’s lap while he scrolls through the endless black hole of his phone. His thumb circles mindless patterns into your upper arm and shoulder. He hums quietly under his breath.

The TV is on, David Attenborough going on and on about the ocean and all its wonderful creatures. Sleep tugs heavy on your eyelids, aided by the soothing drone of his voice, and the patch of warm sunlight that falls over you.

You’re thinking you might finally be able to catch up on lost sleep, when a wail crackles through the baby monitor. Harsh and breathy, it shatters the silence, snapping you to attention. A hunger cry.

You sit up, rubbing a hand over your face. “He’s due for a bottle.” You stretch your arms to the sky, groaning as the muscles in your back and shoulders stretch and loosen. “I’ll go warm one up.”

“Hey.” Bradley’s hand curls around your waist. “I got it.”

“You fed him last time,” you protest, turning to face him. “Stayed up with him for half the night, and changed his diaper three times in a row. S’not fair for you to do everything.”

He cups your face, rubbing his thumb over your lower lip. “I got it. He’s my kid. ‘Sides you were falling asleep.”

“Bradley–”

He cuts you off with a quick kiss. “Baby. Don’t worry about it, okay? I’ll take care of Nicky.”

“I’ll pay you back,” you promise, eyes not-so-subtly scanning over his body.

Bradley chuckles. “No payment necessary.” He kisses your forehead and then your lips once more. “Get some rest, yeah?”

You nod, and stretch back out onto the couch. Bradley pulls the crocheted throw blanket over you and, with one last smile, heads upstairs.

The door to the nursery squeals, and then you hear his voice through the baby monitor.

“Hey, Nicky,” Bradley whispers. “Look at you. Sleep okay, bubba? Yeah? You ready for lunch?”

The one-sided conversation continues as Bradley changes Nicky’s diaper. He asks about Nicky’s dream, tells him some of the facts he picked up from Our Planet, and shares his latest sports predictions.

“Your Auntie Natasha thinks the Padres have a shot this year. I told her she was crazy at first, but I might be eating my words soon.” A pause. “That means I’ll have to admit I was wrong. It’s an idiom. Your mama’s the English teacher though, she can teach you all about that later.”

You smile dopily at his words. The easygoing way he interacts with your baby. He’d been so worried at first. Scared to fail, scared Nicky wouldn’t like him. But there was no denying the simple fact that Bradley was meant to be a father. He proved that more and more everyday.

The steps creak as Bradley begins his descent. “Gotta be quiet, okay? Your mama’s sleepin’. Yeah, you tired her out last night.”

You hear him moving around in the kitchen and then the soft gurgling of the bottle warmer. Nicky whines impatiently, and Bradley distracts him with more stories. The effect of his words are two-fold, soothing both your baby and you. You blink sleepily, snuggled up on the couch all comfortable and warm. A few minutes later, aided by the hush of Bradley’s voice, you fall into sweet unconsciousness.

When you wake later, the room is wrapped in shadows. The once bright sunlight has started to dim. You swallow thickly, tasting stale breath. Your body aches from sleeping in the cramped space, limbs still heavy with sleep.

You reach for your phone sitting face down on the coffee table. The screen is bright in the dark room. You squint to make out the round numbers. 5:52 . Fuck. You’d been asleep for hours .

“Babe!” You call out. “Why’d you let me sleep this long?” No answer. “ Bradley .”

Still nothing. The house was uncharacteristically quiet. The baby monitor wasn’t picking anything up either. Your heart twinges painfully in your chest, stomach turning with the thick ice of dread.

You tap your phone screen again, looking for a message or a missed call. Any kind of clue as to where Bradley had disappeared off to. There’s a text waiting for you, must’ve missed it in your initial alarm. You scan it quickly and breathe out a sigh of relief.

Almost out of diapers. Went to the store with Nicky. Don’t freak out. Love you honey.

Panic now abated, you drop the phone back onto your chest. You should probably get up and do something, anything . There was no shortage of chores to do around the house. Laundry to fold. Dishes to wash. You were due for a pumping session too. But try as you might, and admittedly you don’t try very hard, you can’t bring yourself to disturb the peace. So you stay on the couch, drifting in and out of sleep.

You must have fallen asleep again, because sometime later you’re startled awake by the click of the front door.

“Bradley?” you mumble, rubbing the heel of your hands into your eyes.

“Hey, honey.” He kicks the door shut behind him. “Sleep okay?”

“Yeah.” You stretch. “Freaked me out a little when I woke up and you guys were gone.”

Bradley kisses your forehead and flicks a lamp on. “Sorry, baby. Didn’t mean to, but I didn’t wanna wake you up.”

You draw in a sharp breath when you see him. He’s looking sinful in a pair of jeans and a dark blue Henley. A backwards baseball cap rests atop his unruly hair. Your eyes flit over his body, head to toe. He prattles on about his errand, completely unaware of the fact that you’re currently undressing him with your eyes.

Somehow, at this moment, he’s the hottest he’s ever been.

“Got more diapers. They’re in the car. I wanted to bring Nicky in first and get him settled. He fell asleep on the drive back. He got a compliment from the lady at the register. Honestly I think all this attention is starting to go to his head. Can’t help that he’s so cute though, he got it from you. I also got more onesies, cuz I saw them in Target and couldn’t help it. Oh and those peanut butter cups that you like from Trader Joes, and…” He trails off, catching you staring. “What?”

“Babe,” you mumble, still in your lust-fueled trance.

“Yeah?” Bradley’s eyebrows knit together.

“C’mere.”

He sets Nicky’s carseat down gently. “You’re looking at me weird. Did I do something wrong?” He asks, moving over to you slowly.

You shake your head. “You let me take a nap, and you went to get diapers without me asking you to.”

“Uh huh. So?” He looks down at you, lips pursed. “I still don’t understand why you’re looking at me like that.”

You don’t answer. Instead, you grab the waistband of his jeans and pull him towards you.

“Whoa, baby.” Bradley stumbles forward. His hand covers your fumbling ones. “What are you doing?”

Your tongue darts out to wet your bottom lip. “What does it look like I’m doing?” You undo his belt and pop the button of his jeans.

“I mean it looks like you’re about to–” his gaze flits to where Nicky rests still fast asleep in his carseat. “Suck my dick,” his voice comes out in a hoarse whisper. “Wait, right here? Shouldn’t we move–”

There was definitely logic in his words, but it didn’t really register at the moment. The only thing on your mind was him . Emerald tinted lenses colored your world. Greed plain and simple. For the taste of him. For the weight of him on your tongue. For the sound of his throaty groans to fill the air.

“Bradley,” you whisper, lips following the trail of dark hair down his stomach to where it disappears into his elastic waistband.

Your husband swallows thickly. “Yeah, honey?”

You free his cock from his boxers. “Stop talking.”

“But, sweetheart– oh fuck .” Bradley runs a hand over his face.

“Let me return the favor.” You shush him.

“You don’t have to do–” Bradley chokes as you swipe your tongue over his hip bone. “ Shit . Okay, yeah.”

You spit into your palm and stroke him slowly. He’s halfway there, but getting harder with each languid flick of your wrist. You sink your teeth into his thigh and he groans throatily. The noise settles deep into your stomach, pulsing against your clit.

You missed this. The heady paradox of being on your knees, yet having Bradley completely at your mercy. Making him feel good. Pulling him apart piece by piece.

You mouth at the base of his cock, tongue laving at the underside of it. Bradley rests a hand at the nape of your neck. There’s no force behind the gesture, it’s more like he’s anchoring himself than pushing you further onto him.

“Fuck, baby.” His eyes are squeezed shut, jaw slack, and lips slightly parted. “ Christ. ” He rocks his hips forward into your hand.

A wordless plea. You know what he’s asking for. Your mouth slides up his shaft slowly, and you swirl your tongue around the head, still pushing, still teasing. It’s only when Bradley moans brokenly that you decide to have mercy on him.

Your lips part, and you swallow him down slowly. His head tilts forward and he lets out a breathless whisper of your name that has you squeezing your thighs together as your clit throbs.

Bradley’s a perfect picture of debauchery above you. Shoulders drooped and leaning over you slightly. His face is flushed, eyebrows screwed together. The veins on his neck and arm bulge prominently. His grip on your neck tightens, and he gently guides you forward.

You take as much as you can handle, stroking what you can’t fit into your mouth. Your jaw aches from the lack of practice. But it’s worth every bit of discomfort to hear the moans and praises he levels your way.

“Your mouth feels so goddamn good, honey,” he whispers, when his cock hits the back of your throat. “Just like that, baby. Such a good girl. You’re doing so good. Keeping going, sweetheart.”

Your hand drifts downward of its own accord, and dips into the waistband of your leggings. You rub insistent circles into your clit to relieve the ache. It’s been so long, you think you could come from this alone.

“Look at you getting off,” he says, hazel eyes blazing into your own. “Wish you could see how pretty you look with my dick in your mouth, baby,” he mumbles, lazily thrusting forward.

Bradley cups your jaw, thumb rubbing over your cheek where he can feel his cock moving. He rolls his hips forward again, biting his bottom lip as he watches your lips stretch to accommodate him.

“Pretty girl,” he coos, brushing your hair out of your face so he can see you better. “Taking me so well. Gonna make me come.”

You moan, and Bradley chuckles.

“That what you want? Want me to come down your throat?”

You blink up at him, pleading with watery eyes. You wanted it more than anything.

“Yeah? Gonna swallow every drop, like a good girl?” The thought sends a shudder down his spine. “My good girl. Won’t last long with you looking at me like that.”

That’s the plan .

You move the hand on his thigh around to gently squeeze his balls, and Bradley thrusts forward sharply.

“ Shit –sorry, baby.” His thumb brushes at the newly shed tears that track down your face. “You okay?” The fire in his eyes dies slightly as he searches your gaze for any sign of pain or reluctance to continue.

Instead the only thing he finds there is hunger and greed.

This time when you squeeze, you’re ready for his reaction. You take his next roll of his hips easily. And the next, and the next. Letting Bradley gently fuck your face. He was close, you could tell by the slur of his words, the inconsistent buck of his hips.

“Goddammit,” Bradley says through gritted teeth. His fingers snag into your hair, tugging at the nape. “Gonna fucking kill me, honey.” His chest heaves with shallow breaths. “‘M gonna come, sweetheart. You ready for me?”

Please, oh please . Your thoughts chant, words blurring into a slurry. You hope your eyes convey the desperation you feel.

Bradley’s eyes roll into the back of his head. He bites his pointer finger, trying to muffle the shameless groan he lets out as he unravels.

You take all he gives, and he gives you so much. His cum coats your throat, and you swallow as much as you can, but you have to pull away for air. The last dribbles of his cum paint your lower lip and drip down your chin. You tilt your head back and stick your tongue out to show off your empty mouth.

Bradley stares at you, eyes crossed and unfocused. He pushes his hat off and runs a hand over his face and through his hair. “Holy shit,” he mutters. “Fuck, baby.”

He swipes at your lip, smearing the cum and spit into your skin. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?” You smirk.

“All innocent and shit.” Bradley pushes his ring finger into your mouth. “I’ll fuck you right here.”

You clean the digit off with your tongue and pull away with a pop . “You promise?” You arc an eyebrow up.

“Fuck.” He leans down and gives you a kiss that leaves your toes curling. “Give me five minutes to put Nicky in bed, and I’ll be right back.” He whispers.

You lean back and peel your shirt from your body. “ Tick tock .”

Bradley bites his bottom lip, eyes sliding hungrily over your body. “Don’t go anywhere.” He points a stern finger at you.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” you chuckle. “Hurry up so you can fuck me.”

He grabs the carseat, and still manages to be gentle despite his obvious excitement. “Five minutes, baby, I promise.”

Bradley’s never one to break a promise.

#bradley bradshaw x reader #bradley bradshaw x you #bradley bradshaw smut #rooster x reader #bradley rooster bradshaw #bradley bradshaw #top gun maverick #tgm #miles teller #lets try this again #rion writes

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 months

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Cigna’s nopeinator

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me THURSDAY (May 2) in WINNIPEG, then Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), Tartu, Estonia, and beyond!

Cigna – like all private health insurers – has two contradictory imperatives:

To keep its customers healthy; and

To make as much money for its shareholders as is possible.

Now, there's a hypothetical way to resolve these contradictions, a story much beloved by advocates of America's wasteful, cruel, inefficient private health industry: "If health is a "market," then a health insurer that fails to keep its customers healthy will lose those customers and thus make less for its shareholders." In this thought-experiment, Cigna will "find an equilibrium" between spending money to keep its customers healthy, thus retaining their business, and also "seeking efficiencies" to create a standard of care that's cost-effective.

But health care isn't a market. Most of us get our health-care through our employers, who offer small handful of options that nevertheless manage to be so complex in their particulars that they're impossible to directly compare, and somehow all end up not covering the things we need them for. Oh, and you can only change insurers once or twice per year, and doing so incurs savage switching costs, like losing access to your family doctor and specialists providers.

Cigna – like other health insurers – is "too big to care." It doesn't have to worry about losing your business, so it grows progressively less interested in even pretending to keep you healthy.

The most important way for an insurer to protect its profits at the expense of your health is to deny care that your doctor believes you need. Cigna has transformed itself into a care-denying assembly line.

Dr Debby Day is a Cigna whistleblower. Dr Day was a Cigna medical director, charged with reviewing denied cases, a job she held for 20 years. In 2022, she was forced out by Cigna. Writing for Propublica and The Capitol Forum, Patrick Rucker and David Armstrong tell her story, revealing the true "equilibrium" that Cigna has found:

https://www.propublica.org/article/cigna-medical-director-doctor-patient-preapproval-denials-insurance

Dr Day took her job seriously. Early in her career, she discovered a pattern of claims from doctors for an expensive therapy called intravenous immunoglobulin in cases where this made no medical sense. Dr Day reviewed the scientific literature on IVIG and developed a Cigna-wide policy for its use that saved the company millions of dollars.

This is how it's supposed to work: insurers (whether private or public) should permit all the medically necessary interventions and deny interventions that aren't supported by evidence, and they should determine the difference through internal reviewers who are treated as independent experts.

But as the competitive landscape for US healthcare dwindled – and as Cigna bought out more parts of its supply chain and merged with more of its major rivals – the company became uniquely focused on denying claims, irrespective of their medical merit.

In Dr Day's story, the turning point came when Cinga outsourced pre-approvals to registered nurses in the Philippines. Legally, a nurse can approve a claim, but only an MD can deny a claim. So Dr Day and her colleagues would have to sign off when a nurse deemed a procedure, therapy or drug to be medically unnecessary.

This is a complex determination to make, even under ideal circumstances, but Cigna's Filipino outsource partners were far from ideal. Dr Day found that nurses were "sloppy" – they'd confuse a mother with her newborn baby and deny care on that grounds, or confuse an injured hip with an injured neck and deny permission for an ultrasound. Dr Day reviewed a claim for a test that was denied because STI tests weren't "medically necessary" – but the patient's doctor had applied for a test to diagnose a toenail fungus, not an STI.

Even if the nurses' evaluations had been careful, Dr Day wanted to conduct her own, thorough investigation before overriding another doctor's judgment about the care that doctor's patient warranted. When a nurse recommended denying care "for a cancer patient or a sick baby," Dr Day would research medical guidelines, read studies and review the patient's record before signing off on the recommendation.

This was how the claims denial process is said to work, but it's not how it was supposed to work. Dr Day was markedly slower than her peers, who would "click and close" claims by pasting the nurses' own rationale for denying the claim into the relevant form, acting as a rubber-stamp rather than a skilled reviewer.

Dr Day knew she was slower than her peers. Cigna made sure of that, producing a "productivity dashboard" that scored doctors based on "handle time," which Cigna describes as the average time its doctors spend on different kinds of claims. But Dr Day and other Cigna sources say that this was a maximum, not an average – a way of disciplining doctors.

These were not long times. If a doctor asked Cigna not to discharge their patient from hospital care and a nurse denied that claim, the doctor reviewing that claim was supposed to spend not more than 4.5 minutes on their review. Other timelines were even more aggressive: many denials of prescription drugs were meant to be resolved in fewer than two minutes.

Cigna told Propublica and The Capitol Forum that its productivity scores weren't based on a simple calculation about whether its MD reviewers were hitting these brutal processing time targets, describing the scores as a proprietary mix of factors that reflected a nuanced view of care. But when Propublica and The Capitol Forum created a crude algorithm to generate scores by comparing a doctor's performance relative to the company's targets, they found the results fit very neatly into the actual scores that Cigna assigned to its docs:

The newsrooms’ formula accurately reproduced the scores of 87% of the Cigna doctors listed; the scores of all but one of the rest fell within 1 to 2 percentage points of the number generated by this formula. When asked about this formula, Cigna said it may be inaccurate but didn’t elaborate.

As Dr Day slipped lower on the productivity chart, her bosses pressured her bring her score up (Day recorded her phone calls and saved her emails, and the reporters verified them). Among other things, Dr Day's boss made it clear that her annual bonus and stock options were contingent on her making quota.

Cigna denies all of this. They smeared Dr Day as a "disgruntled former employee" (as though that has any bearing on the truthfulness of her account), and declined to explain the discrepancies between Dr Day's accusations and Cigna's bland denials.

This isn't new for Cigna. Last year, Propublica and Capitol Forum revealed the existence of an algorithmic claims denial system that allowed its doctors to bulk-deny claims in as little as 1.2 seconds:

https://www.propublica.org/article/cigna-pxdx-medical-health-insurance-rejection-claims

Cigna insisted that this was a mischaracterization, saying the system existed to speed up the approval of claims, despite the first-hand accounts of Cigna's own doctors and the doctors whose care recommendations were blocked by the system. One Cigna doctor used this system to "review" and deny 60,000 claims in one month.

Beyond serving as an indictment of the US for-profit health industry, and of Cigna's business practices, this is also a cautionary tale about the idea that critical AI applications can be resolved with "humans in the loop."

AI pitchmen claim that even unreliable AI can be fixed by adding a "human in the loop" that reviews the AI's judgments:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

In this world, the AI is an assistant to the human. For example, a radiologist might have an AI double-check their assessments of chest X-rays, and revisit those X-rays where the AI's assessment didn't match their own. This robot-assisted-human configuration is called a "centaur."

In reality, "human in the loop" is almost always a reverse-centaur. If the hospital buys an AI, fires half its radiologists and orders the remainder to review the AI's superhuman assessments of chest X-rays, that's not an AI assisted radiologist, that's a radiologist-assisted AI. Accuracy goes down, but so do costs. That's the bet that AI investors are making.

Many AI applications turn out not to even be "AI" – they're just low-waged workers in an overseas call-center pretending to be an algorithm (some Indian techies joke that AI stands for "absent Indians"). That was the case with Amazon's Grab and Go stores where, supposedly, AI-enabled cameras counted up all the things you put in your shopping basket and automatically billed you for them. In reality, the cameras were connected to Indian call-centers where low-waged workers made those assessments:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

This Potemkin AI represents an intermediate step between outsourcing and AI. Over the past three decades, the growth of cheap telecommunications and logistics systems let corporations outsource customer service to low-waged offshore workers. The corporations used the excuse that these subcontractors were far from the firm and its customers to deny them any agency, giving them rigid scripts and procedures to follow.

This was a very usefully dysfunctional system. As a customer with a complaint, you would call the customer service line, wait for a long time on hold, spend an interminable time working through a proscribed claims-handling process with a rep who was prohibited from diverging from that process. That process nearly always ended with you being told that nothing could be done.

At that point, a large number of customers would have given up on getting a refund, exchange or credit. The money paid out to the few customers who were stubborn or angry enough to karen their way to a supervisor and get something out of the company amounted to pennies, relative to the sums the company reaped by ripping off the rest.

The Amazon Grab and Go workers were humans in robot suits, but these customer service reps were robots in human suits. The software told them what to say, and they said it, and all they were allowed to say was what appeared on their screens. They were reverse centaurs, serving as the human faces of the intransigent robots programmed by monopolists that were too big to care.

AI is the final stage of this progression: robots without the human suits. The AI turns its "human in the loop" into a "moral crumple zone," which Madeleine Clare Elish describes as "a component that bears the brunt of the moral and legal responsibilities when the overall system malfunctions":

https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260

The Filipino nurses in the Cigna system are an avoidable expense. As Cigna's own dabbling in algorithmic claim-denial shows, they can be jettisoned in favor of a system that uses productivity dashboards and other bossware to push doctors to robosign hundreds or thousands of denials per day, on the pretense that these denials were "reviewed" by a licensed physician.

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/2024/04/29/what-part-of-no/#dont-you-understand

#pluralistic #cigna #computer says no #bossware #moral crumple zones #medicare for all #m4a #whistleblowers #dr debby day #Madeleine Clare Elish #automation #ai #outsourcing #human in the loop #humans in the loop

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youkissedareaderinthedark · 7 months

Text

Heat

Synopsis: Qatar seems worse than ever this year, and it’s especially not kind to F1’s female driver. The grid does what they can to help.

young female driver reader x 2023 F1 grid

A/N: For this one, reader will be 21, and have driven for aston martin since the beginning of 2021 with lance

You’ve driven in about 60 races in your 3 year F1 career so far, yet you’ve never raced in conditions like this before, and you hope you never will again.

Preparing for Qatar the weeks leading up for it, you could laugh at it now because no amount of simulator training or exercising could’ve readied you for the heat in Lusail.

You felt it as soon as you walked out of the airport; the gust of hot air that hit you in the face, the harsh evening sun beating down on you.

“Oh my god” You said to your teammate, pulling a pair of sunglasses out of your pocket. “I know,” Lance says, copying your actions. “This sprint is gonna suck” You groan. “I can’t wait”

The two of you immediately got into the cars waiting for you in the parking lot, and drove to the hotel you’d be hiding in until Thursday.

Media day was bad enough, having to spend hours doing interviews and sitting in to press conferences while trying to get any cool air near you.

“Is Qatar like this every year?” Oscar asked you while sitting alongside Charles, George, and Pierre in a conference.

“It’s been hot the last few years, but nothing like this, no” You answer honestly. “It was nowhere near this hot last year” George adds as the other two drivers nod.

You get through the rest of the day with a lot of water and the many surprisingly useful paper fans you and Lando made as a joke. Friday is dedicated to FP1 and Qualifying, and you end the practice in P11, qualifying P7.

The temperature was bearable that day, but you still left your car red-faced and sweaty afterwards. You talked with a few engineers and strategists before leaving to collect your things and go back to your hotel in hopes of getting some rest before the sprint the next day.

You walk into the paddock Saturday afternoon prepared to endure whatever the shootout and sprint was going to bring to you. You went P9 in the shootout after a stressful amount of track limit warnings, and spend the time before the sprint relaxing in your drivers room. You finished Saturday’s race P8 after defending against Pierre and Valtteri , and trying to overtake Alex in front of you.

You exited your car feeling as tired as you would after a normal race, and tried to show as much happiness as you could for both Max and Oscar after their race finishes.

After using your post-race interview to congratulate the two, you went back to your garage to finish the first race debrief of the weekend, and was sent back to your hotel with instructions to get more hydration and rest.

You thought you felt the worst of the heat earlier in the weekend, but you were proved wrong as you neared the Aston Martin garage Sunday evening.

Nobody could find decent shelter from the Qatari sun, and you were almost sweating by the time you were getting into your car.

You’d done as much possible as you could to prepare for this race, and now it was time to see if it was all worth it or not.

“Good luck, stay safe” Lance said, leaning over your car.

“Good luck, you too” You flip your visor down as your teammate gets into his car, and you’re given the signal to enter the pit lane.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” David Croft begins to commentate. “it is a scorching night out here in Qatar, our drivers have just finished their formation lap, we’re seconds away from driving into the night for 57 laps, it’s light’s out and away we go!”

You pull away from Esteban early and get close to Pierre, taking P6 by Lap 15, and are able to get out his DRS zone afterwards. Statistically, this was good, but physically, you were not feeling well inside your cockpit.

By the halfway mark, there was sweat running down your face, your throat was dry, and your entire body felt like it was overheating trapped inside the small space.

You tried flipping up your visor and adjusting your gloves to get some more airflow, but both methods proved ineffective, leaving you with no fresh air.

By the time you were nearing the end of the race, every turn made your head spin, every straight blew more hot air into your cockpit, and the constant effort of defending against the two Alpine’s behind you was draining your energy.

Your vision was starting to go in and out as you finished your last laps, and you crossed the checkered flag with a sigh of relief, not even caring Pierre overtook you and left you in P7.

It took everything inside you not to black out during the cool down lap, and you could barely manage to maneuver the car into perc ferme.

Drivers were sitting up and getting out of their cars all around you, but you couldn’t find any energy to leave yours. You sat in your car, head leaning against the steering wheel, breathing heavy, as other drivers started to notice.

“Y/n? Are you okay?” Pierre kneels by your car, labored breathing and accent thicker than usual. You shake your head, the small movement making your head pound, and groan.

“Y/n, c’mon, I will help, give me your steering wheel” The driver persists, holding out his hand.

You oblige, as Pierre shouts towards the cars in the front. “Charlie! Venez ici! (come here)

As Charles makes his way from his Ferrari to your car, you begin to sit up and wrap your hands around the halo to pull yourself into a standing position. You move to sit on top of your car after your vision gets dizzy and you start to lose balance.

“What’s wrong? Are you two okay?” The Monagasque asks before you shake your head once again.

“I’m fine, I don’t think she is. Here, put one of her arms around your shoulders” Pierre instructs as he reaches out to help you step off the car.

Despite themselves finishing the same grueling race, the two men move you to sit on the ground before doing the same.

George notices, and comes over with four bottles of water to join you three sitting against the Aston Martin car. The four of you pull off your helmets and balaclavas to chug the water George brought, too tired to move anywhere else.

You’re still dizzy, your hands are shaking, and your body is still overheated, but you’re done with the race and you have water, and those things seem to be the only ones that matter.

“You guys okay?” George asks from beside Charles.

“No”

Charles and Pierre shake theirs heads. “Me either,but shouldn’t we, like, go get weighed and stuff?”

You wave a hand dismissively and take another sip of water. The British man nods again. “Yeah, you’re right”

After a few more minutes of sitting on the ground against your car and listening to all the action around you, the four of you stand up to complete the post race procedures and go to the media pen.

“Y/n, how was your race? Are you happy with P7?” The journalist asks you, pointing the microphone towards you.

“Yeah, I’m happy with it. The race was really tough though, I was really struggling towards the end to finish the race and bring the car in”

“A lot of people think Qatar should be moved in the schedule, or taken off completely. What do you think about that?”

“I think it should definitely be moved to either earlier or later in the year. I know I wasn’t the only driver struggling out here, and it’s not safe that we race like this” You reply honestly.

“I agree, Y/n. Good race today, get some rest” The woman smiles at you, and you’re glad to be able to head back to your garage.

After about thirty minutes, Lance joins you and the rest of the engineers in the debrief room, and takes a seat next to you.

“Holy shit” He says.

“Yeah”

“Never again” You agree.

something short and sweet for the all the pain qatar brought earlier this year

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zombee · 8 months

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I feel like the luckiest Our Flag Means Death fan in the world after the season 2 finale. By a series of incredible circumstances - including a significant metatextual realization that came in at the 11th hour - it was close to perfect for me.

This essay has everything. Completely normal behavior over a television series. Steven Universe references. The David Jenkins School of Whatever is Best for the Bit. Humbling catharsis.

First: this piece does not exist with the central thesis of “it’s okay to not like something but that’s not the same thing as it being bad.” I feel like thousands of words have already been written on this since Thursday, so I’m going to try to not get too in depth on that.

Second, cards on the table, because it’s relevant and I don’t want to waste your time if this is going to sour your ability to hear me out: I’m an Izzy Canyon hater. For MANY reasons, but from way before the concept of the Canyon existed, (some) Izzy fans pinged me in the same way as Snape/Kylo Ren fans did, and before May 2022 was over I went from genuinely enjoying Izzy’s character and place in the narrative to hating him because his fans made it impossible for me to enjoy him anymore.

(SOME! of his fans. Please don’t keep making me say this, although I’m not going to talk about the Canyon directly anymore after this. I know there are a ton of normal Izzy Enjoyers and even Canyonites, I am literally friends with many of them, please take this all in the good faith it’s intended and if you’re not One Of The Bad Ones then you’re fine! I very carefully don’t go anti-Izzy on main, and when I stopped enjoying his character, I stopped writing him into fics. I’m not trying to be a dick, I just want to be honest. Anyway.)

The season 2 finale made me weep over Izzy Goddamn hands.

ALL season long, I was disgruntled. All season long. I really, truly, DEEPLY appreciated what they were doing with his character and arc, I thought it was wildly on brand for the themes of community/queerness in the show, I saw the vision, I liked it!!! But. I wanted a fucking apology, yall. I needed three seconds of “sorry I called you a slur, Ed :/” and that would have been enough. But I had to let it go. It was poisoning my enjoyment of the whole season, which I loved with very little exception (not none!) and I just had to let it go. I wasn’t getting an apology. That didn’t negate what they were doing with his character.

Yall. They withheld the apology on purpose.

THIS FUCKING SHOW!!!

Let’s go back a bit. I was at the episode 6 + 7 screening, and the breakup shook me. Probably a LOT more than if I had watched it alone in bed at 3am on my laptop - five days of no sleep after NYCC, lots of emotions, seeing it on a big screen with a hundred other intense fans, etc etc - but I did see other folks reacting in parallel ways to me when the episodes aired to the regular public, so maybe I would have felt the same way. Regardless, I was mad at Stede and to a lesser extent Ed. I NEEDED AN APOLOGY FOR THAT FISH LINE. I needed it! “Whativah” autocorrects to “WHATIVAH” in my phone. I was going through it.

(When I rewatched the episode when it aired it was not nearly as bad as I remember, lol)

So now the episode 8 screeners go out and the reviews drop and I think I catch one half-glimpse of a “What a heartbreaking ending!” kind of snippet, and some of my friends who are spoiler fiends unintentionally drop little hints about similar ideas (devastating/heartbreaking/split the fandom) type shit.

And I was a fucking WRECK! about it.

I do love this whole show with my whole chest. I do!!! But I’m not rotted because this is an excellent television show, I’m rotted because two old men kiss each other! On the MOUTH!!! in an excellent television show. You get it, right? I’ve written 700,000 words across almost 100 fics and 98% of them are dedicated to those two men falling in love in different universes.

So it just did not even occur to me the “heartbreak/devastation/fandom split” would be about anything but Gentlebeard.

Another piece of this that was fucking me up - David Jenkins and his “satisfactory” ending biz. My brain was reacting like this show was ENDING ending, even if I knew logically! that this is just season 2!!! And I wasn’t ready for that, because what if it wasn’t personally satisfying, and I’m a mess about it? Why was I so worried about not liking it? I’d liked the whole season! Even if they didn’t nail the landing I wasn’t going to stop writing fic or hanging out with my pirate community & friends.

…is what I kept trying to tell myself, but the way anxiety disorders work is funny like that lol. What if I did stop writing fic and hanging out in pirate spaces? That would hurt much more than a show I like disappointing me. And for anyone who’s having that experience with ofmd s2, I’m so very, very sorry. It sucks and that’s where my epiphany came from on Wednesday before the finale.

Because it has happened to me before.

I flit from hyperfocus to hyperfocus, as ya do when you’re spicy, but the last thing to get its hooks in me PROPERLY like pirates was Steven Universe. And I did NOT like the way the regular season ended!!! (I actually really did like most of Future; that’s not what I mean. I mean season 5). I don’t like how they handled the Diamonds, tldr; I think the scope of their villainy got too out of hand, and I was left grieving the thing that had meant enough to me I ran a fan convention for four years based around it.

Side note: imagine if I had channeled the hyperfocus of almost a million words of fanfiction into an American OFMD con instead. We could have made magic :( I did consult with Our Con Means Death though so I am at least a teeny tiny bit of that one!

I did not like the way Steven ended… but I do respect the story they were telling and think they told it well.

I’m still sad about it. Steven is still one of my most beloved, it will always be beautiful and great to me, but that experience did and does sully my memories. There is so, so, so, SO much more good than bad from being in that fandom, and I cherish it. And I hope, if you’re having this experience with OFMD right now, that you’ll find similar comfort.

But, like I said at the top, “it’s okay to not like something but that’s not the same thing as it being bad” has been belabored already by people better at writing about it than me. I just had the incredible privilege to remember my brush with lower case T trauma and having that experience in my last REALLY big deal fandom. That’s why I had been so extra anxious about being disappointed. Because it happened to me before. It helped so much to connect those two.

So the finale happens, and it’s actually about twelve hours of me going from “eh, rushed but fun, whole season was great” to “THIS MAYBE IS THE BEST SHOW OF ALL TIME, ACTUALLY!”

BECAUSE THIS SHOW MADE ME CRY OVER IZZY FUCKING HANDS!!!!

They literally told me this was the story they were telling this season. “Men can change” “The end of piracy” “Ed leaving Blackbeard behind (ish).”

As for me? I didn’t get an apology for the fish. Instead, I got “Sorry I was a dick.” “You weren’t a dick. Life’s a dick.”

Just… fuckity BAM. THREE FUCKING SENTENCES resolving that fight. Saying so much in so little.

In real life, should these two men have an actual conversation about this shit? Sure!!! But that’s not how OFMD tells its stories!

It works in symbolism. It works in vibes. It works in an hour’s worth of content into each half-hour episode, and for how much lamenting I have done about the pacing, I would prefer that 100x to having to stretch it out too much.

I have said since March 24, 2022 that OFMD wields anachronism as a weapon. First and foremost, it’s fucking funny, but in addition to that, it’s stating clearly: “This is a fantasy world. This is not real history. This show is about romance (and so much more than that), and the rest is just VIBES!!!”

Sometimes vibes can be historical accuracy. Sometimes vibes can be true emotional poignancy. Sometimes vibes can be Ed finding his sunken leathers in the sea, changing underwater somehow, and coming out of the ocean like the Birth of Fucking Venus, because water and rebirth and mermaids and shit is all very prominent this season. And ALSO, and this is very important! BECAUSE IT LOOKS FUCKING COOL!

I don’t want to do much real Izzy meta here. It’s been said by others, and better than me. But it was telegraphed and it was symbolic – he was the paragon of Traditional Piracy in season 1, for goodness’ sake, and Traditional Piracy is Toxic Masculinity, and he was a part of Blackbeard and Ed had to leave Blackbeard behind (yknow, ish), and he got this ABSOLUTLEY FUCKING LOVELY! storyline about appreciating what a (queer) community can do, and god fucking shit fucking dammit… most of all, best of all (for me), was Buttons landing on Izzy’s grave at the end. Men can change. And Izzy DID!!! He did it for Ed. For love. For community. I am puzzled by “it’s fucked up to use Izzy to further Ed’s storyline” because… this was Ed’s season, in the way that season 1 was Stede’s. And Ed cannot be removed from piracy as a whole (neither can Stede!) so to have this old, set in his ways, coded-queerphobic character blossom to the point he can give this gift to Ed and to piracy… idk man. I just find it so fucking beautiful.

It is okay not to like what they did. It’s okay!!! It’s okay, and it’s okay to mourn, and while it’s not okay to do [insert vile behavior here], it’s okay to carefully examine what you think is “bad writing” vs “what you would have preferred to happen” and give good-faith, textually-based criticism on that.

But I want to remind you over and over and over again, this show works on vibes. It tells its stories leaving many, many, many gaps. There are many things I would have liked to see, and y’know what? I would have told the Izzy story differently. I would have personally done it differently. But it’s not my show! It’s not my show, and I am humbled and delighted to remember that, and to appreciate Our Flag Means Death for what it is and not what it isn’t.

Other words have been written better than I could about the 18 months between seasons 1 and 2 and what that does to us as rabid fans with expectations of how things will go. Millions and millions and millions of words have been written about OFMD, fictional and non, and that is going to color our expectations and experience. We had built it up SO MUCH in our minds and along the way I think some of us forgot (INCLUDING ME!!!) that it is first and foremost about Vibes.

The vibes of Izzy’s death are about rebirth and forgiveness and leaving traditional piracy behind. And he got to die in Ed’s arms, knowing (HAPPILY!) that he had been wrong, and giving Ed the gift of letting him know he is loved, and being a part of something. We had a funeral but we also had a wedding. The only constant is change. Men, piracy, Blackbeard; it all changes. And Izzy found peace in that.

Before my last point, I want to @ myself on things I felt versus realizing in the end it is (I will say it until I’m blue in the face) about vibes.

· I was convinced they left Buttons’ transformation ambiguous because they wanted to leave room for it not having been real. NO!!! It is real, until they decided it isn’t. Magic in the OFMD universe? Fucking why not!!! IT’S SYMBOLIC!!! IT’S IMPORTANT TO ED’S STORYLINE AND THE CENTRAL THESES OF THE SHOW!

· I was unhappy, and still am a little, about the Polycule Situation, but now that I realize Oluwande is Zheng’s Stede… I am less so. The Zheng : Auntie :: Ed : Izzy vibes, btw? Fuckin immaculate.

· Obviously they touched on Stede/Ed’s “killing people trauma” but I’d reallyyyy like Stede to address it, and even though I think Ed’s is left on a very satisfying note, I’d like him to dip a bit more into it as well. But if they don’t, oh well! It’s not like they ignored it, they just didn’t have a Deep Dive like I Wanted Them To!

· They didn’t deal with Ed throwing Stede’s shit away. They just ignored it! Stede started to collect new trinkets, and I believe that was as much about giving the audience back the old feeling of the Revenge as it was anything important (not to say it wasn’t also important thematically!!!). Just like Ed going back to his leathers is both Extremely Important thematically and about putting Taika back in the leathers because that’s what Blackbeard should be wearing for the epic final scenes for the sake of visually keeping the show consistent. That’s Blackbeard’s uniform.

· Stede’s frilly little outfits my beloved. God I hope they give him back some of his frippery in season 3. I think they will re: cursed suit BUT his journey this season was about something else, so!

· Ed’s stupid little non-profit non-apology, oh my god. It was so funny. And there is a transition from eps 5 to 6 where Ed is back in his leathers and the crew is more comfortable around him. They didn’t have to have him do a Real Apology, it’s implied it was all settled. What was the timeline? A day? DOESN’T MATTER, BABY, VIBES!!!

· Lots more, I’m sure, but now that I’ve tried to let it all go, I’m remembering less of what I wanted and appreciating what I got!

And, last point here, I think it is also very very very important to remember that a lot of people are normal about this show. In fact, WAY more people are normal about this show than aren’t. And that is EXTREMELY! IMPORTANT!!! because otherwise it wouldn’t be profitable and we all know what would happen then. We are the core of it, to be sure. Without word of mouth that stems from our intensity, this show would not be NEARLY as successful as it is. I truly, truly believe that.

But.

Do normies need deeply emotional discussions dissecting the central relationships? No. What normies need is Ed and Stede running dramatically toward each other on the beach and kissing. And I am happy, so fucking happy, to realize that’s what I need too. I’ve got fanworks for the rest.

I love this fucking show and this fucking fandom and its fucking creators so much. Fuck.

#our flag means death #ofmd #ofmd s2 #ofmd season 2

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starlitangels · 7 months

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Thanksgiving with the Greers

I hereby dedicate this fic to @frenchiefitzhere and her versions of Marie and Colm and their relationship because I like Frenchie's version better than canon. This takes place years ago, btw 2.0k words

Also. I frickin' started writing this like back in spring or summer. Idk what was up with my brain that it took me until last Saturday to actually finish it

—

Asher jolted as his phone started ringing. He scooped it up.

Incoming Call… Little Man Syndrome™

“Hey Milo,” Asher greeted, holding the phone up to his ear. “What’s up?”

“What’re ya doin’ for dinner tonight?” Milo asked.

“Leftover pizza and wings. Why?”

Over the connection, a long string of expletives met Asher’s ears. But not from Milo.

“Ma—Ma—don’t blow your top just yet,” Milo said placatingly, voice distant from the mic. Before getting closer. “Ash. You realize what today is right?”

“Uh… Thursday?”

“Which Thursday?” Milo prompted.

“Well, hell, Greer. I don’t know.”

He heard the impact of Milo smacking himself in the forehead. “Oh for the love of—” Milo was cut off by Marie swearing again. “Ma! I got this!”

“You’d better 'got this' young man or Asher is never gonna hear the end of it from me!” Marie snapped.

“Ash,” Milo said, level but clearly irritated. “Today is Thanksgiving.”

“Ohhh! Is that why David invited me to go to his dad’s house with him for dinner?”

“Presumably. Why didn’t you go?”

“I don’t know I just thought it was Thursday!”

“Only you could be so time-blind to forget a holiday like this,” Milo muttered. “Look—”

“Asher Reed Talbot, you get your ass to this house in one hour, ya hear?” Marie interrupted.

Milo sighed. “Ma, I was gonna do it the polite way. Like a gentleman. Like you taught me.”

Marie’s voice softened immediately. “I know, baby,” she said. Asher heard her kiss Milo’s hair. “But sometimes a boy needs a mother to kick him in the pants in the right direction.”

Milo chuckled. “Yes ma’am,” he said. “Anyway, Ash. I’d ask if you’d care to join us for Thanksgiving dinner but I think that ship has sailed.”

Asher laughed. “I think you’re right. I’ll be over in an hour,” he said. “What’s the dress code?”

“I don’t care if you show up in your underwear so long as you’re here,” Marie said, still sharp with exasperation. “No son of mine—of my friends’—is eatin’ leftover pizza and wings alone on Thanksgivin’ if I have anything to say about it!”

“And clearly you do,” Colm’s quieter voice added even more distant from Milo’s phone.

“Hush, you,” Marie said, a smile in her voice. “One hour, Asher!”

“Yes ma’am!” Asher agreed. “Do I need to bring anything?”

“Just yourself,” Colm supplied.

“Okay. Will do.”

“Bye,” Milo said.

“See ya soon.” He hung up and put the pizza box back in the fridge. Setting his phone down on the counter in the apartment, he rushed to his room.

Thanksgiving dinner had always been a business casual dinner at his house. Probably because Madelyn and her mate flew home for it every other year and his parents wanted to make an event of it. This was the first Thanksgiving they weren’t going to be home for, traveling somewhere in… Korea or somewhere.

And knowing Marie…

“Khakis and a polo should be fine,” Asher decided.

—

“HA!” Milo barked the second Asher slipped through the front door—not bothering to knock. The Shaw and Greer houses were second homes to him. He never knocked if the door was unlocked. Which it usually was. “Someone’s overdressed!”

Asher turned to see Milo in jeans and a T-shirt with a cartoon turkey on it.

Marie thwacked Milo upside the head gently with the back of the mixing spoon in her hand. “Well how ‘boutchu go dress to match him, huh?”

Milo rubbed the back of his head. “Wait—you serious?”

Marie fixed him with a look only a mother could give. “Very,” she said.

Milo sighed. “Fine. I will.” He cast a sidelong glance at Ash. “And I’ll look even better’n you in it.”

Asher snorted. “You can try.”

Milo stomped toward the hallway, flipping the bird over his shoulder.

“Milo Anthony Greer!” Marie warned.

Milo’s hand dropped immediately. “Sorry, Ma!” He scampered off for his room.

Asher sheepishly approached Marie. “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “I know you said an hour and it’s been an hour and fifteen—”

“And I knew you’d be late which is why I said an hour when dinner was an hour and a half away from bein’ finished.”

Asher chuckled. “Do you know everything?”

Marie smiled and cupped Asher’s cheek in one hand—the one not holding the mixing spoon. “Just my boys,” she said with a wink. “Now get those rolls in the oven for me then get the hell out of my kitchen.”

“Yes ma’am.” Asher ducked around her to assist immediately, knowing better than to hesitate.

Colm was in the living room. A replay of the big parade in New York was going on the TV, but Colm wasn’t watching it. He was reading from a sheaf of papers on the coffee table.

Asher cleared his throat. “Look, uh, Marie,” he started quietly, heat burning at his neck and ears. “I just. I wanted to thank you. For thinking of me tonight. And for… y’know. Inviting me.” He closed the oven door and took the mitt off. But didn’t straighten to his full height. His shoulders were slouched forward and his eyes were cast down to the hardwood floor.

Marie gave him a warm smile. “Asher,” she said fondly. “You are always welcome here, you got that? Now, I don’t care if it’s Thanksgiving or a random Monday in the middle of May. You are family. And there will always be a place for you at our table.”

Asher blinked away a sudden salty sting in his eyes. “Thanks Marie,” he said, trying to swallow the thickness of his voice from the emotion in his chest. “I appreciate that.”

Marie turned back to the gravy she’d been making. From scratch. Of course. Marie Greer would never dream of any other kind of gravy disgracing her kitchen. “I’m happy for your parents. Gettin’ the chance to travel like they always talked and dreamed about. And I respect their decision to do it while they’re still young enough to withstand how exhaustin’ it is.” Her mouth narrowed into a frown. “But that doesn’t mean I approve of all-a it.” Her warm grey eyes—the same as Milo’s—flicked over to him. “They didn’t need t’ leave you here alone.”

Asher shrugged. "They thought I was old enough to live without them."

"Livin' without your parents doesn't mean ya don't still need their influence or advice." Her voice had gone hard with disapproval.

"Hey, that's what I have you for!" Asher joked brightly.

Marie leveled a Look™ at him. "You're damn right," she said seriously.

Colm covered a scoff by clearing his throat in the other room. Marie turned her Look™ briefly toward her mate before going back to her gravy.

Asher slunk carefully out of the kitchen, managing to only knock a mixing spoon onto the ground—that he quickly put back—and not mess up anything else.

Milo was stalking back into the living room, sour look on his face, having changed into a polo shirt and khakis himself.

It was, of course, Asher's job in life to give Milo a hard time. They were brothers in all but blood. But Asher admitted—silently, to himself, never out loud—that Milo definitely pulled off a polo and khakis better than he did. Milo was one of those lucky suckers who looked good in everything. Asher was tall and leanly muscled, but being tall sometimes made things look too short on him.

Milo didn't have that problem.

"Hey. Hey Milo," Asher started.

"What?" Milo retorted.

"You've got somethin' on your face."

Milo raised a single, sarcastic eyebrow. Waiting.

"Yeah. Y'know, I think it's called sour grapes."

"Oh you—" Milo moved as though to take a swing at Asher. Who ducked with a laugh and dodged out of the way.

—

Marie looked through the archway between the living room and the kitchen, watching her boys goof off and chase each other around like they had since they were little. She smiled to herself as she took the gravy off the heat and turned off the stove. A quick check through the oven window revealed the rolls were coming along.

As they kept baking, she started moving everything she'd made from the cookware she'd finished them in, to a pretty crystal serving dish. Then took them, two at a time, to the dining room table.

The clearing of a throat announced that Colm had gotten up from looking at his case files to help her. She smiled at him. He kissed the side of her head and took the two dishes from her hands, letting her grab two more.

After taking the two dishes, Colm set the table. After letting his mate choose the most festive tablecloth.

She got the rolls out of the oven right as the timer went off and quickly got them out of the pan and into a little basket with a white cloth lining it.

"A'right boys!" Marie announced, whipping her apron off after wiping her hands on it one last time. "Wash your hands and sit your asses down at the table."

Milo and Asher both froze from where Milo had managed to yank Asher down to his eye level and get him in a headlock. Marie met both of their eyes in turn, a stern look on her face. Milo cleared his throat and let go of Asher's neck. Both of them straightened their shirts and bustled—still poking and prodding at one another—into the kitchen to wash their hands. "Yes, Ma," Milo said automatically.

They knew better than to protest.

Marie and Colm sat on one side of the table. The boys sat on the other.

Milo leaned over to Asher. "We do the stuff we're thankful for before we eat," he whispered. Asher nodded.

"I'll start," Colm said. "I'm grateful, this year, for patience. The patience that my family has shown me." He reached under the table and gave Marie's leg a squeeze. She did her best not to react as his hand slipped a little higher up her leg before sliding off back to Colm's side.

She cleared her throat. "I'm grateful for my family," she said. "I'm grateful for a mate who loves me and works hard for us. I'm grateful for a pack that welcomed us as family all those years ago and never once acted otherwise. I'm grateful for an amazing, strong, brave son who has every right to be as confident as he is. And I'm grateful for all his friends who have become his family. Because they're my family. And I'm grateful that Ash could join us tonight, so he could be with family on Thanksgivin'."

She pretended not to notice Asher wiping a tear off on his sleeve.

"A'ight. My turn," Milo said. "Welp. This year... I guess I'm grateful for... everythin' I've been able to do. I learned a lot of lessons this year, and all-a 'em were important and valuable." He turned to Asher.

Who cleared his throat. "I, uh... I'm grateful for a lot of stuff. I'm really grateful for the pack that I got to be raised in. I'm grateful that David somehow has the patience to be my roommate. I'm grateful that I haven't burnt the apartment building down yet. And... I'm grateful for the Greer family. For being willing to accept me into your home on a holiday that's stressful enough as it is. Whether I wanted to come over or not." He smiled around a chuckle. "Thank you, for always making me feel welcome and at home." He swallowed. "Now can we please eat? I'm hungry!"

Colm and Milo both started laughing along with Asher. Marie just met his eyes with a loving look on her face. Sure, Ash was Frank and his mate's kid. But Ash was Marie's kid too. He certainly was now that the Talbots were traveling, but she'd loved him like a son since he and Milo had been close friends.

He gave her a grateful smile. She returned it.

"Go ahead an' dish up before it gets cold, boys," she said.

"Thank you," Milo said, reaching for the mashed potatoes.

—

General Shaw Pack and Characters Tag list: @zozo-01 @thegoldenlittlerose @pinksparkl @darlin-collins @icedunderwaterroom

#redacted asmr #fic #Redacted Asher #Redacted Milo #Redacted Marie #Redacted Colm #Redacted Audio #Starlit Fic

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old-type-40 · 10 months

Text

"She's a scientist on Starbase One. I tend not to stay in the same place for very long, which is... a growing problem, because Carol is... pregnant."

I had noticed back when the episode aired on Thursday that this comment from Kirk about his on again/off again but currently on again relationship with Carol Marcus caused confusion for some in the Trek fandom. They thought from the events in TWOK that Kirk didn't know he had a son.

But the dialogue from a couple of scenes indicates he did know that David was his son but he hasn't seen him since he was a child because Carol didn't want him to be a part of their lives. And Carol never told David who his father was.

Right after Kirk, McCoy, and Saavik beam into the cavern on the Regula asteroid, David attacks Kirk with a knife and Kirk disarms him.

Kirk: Where's Doctor Marcus? David: I'm Doctor Marcus! Carol (rushing out): Jim! Kirk: Is that David?

And later when Jim and Carol have time alone together -

Kirk: I did what you wanted. ...I stayed away. ...Why didn't you tell him? Carol: How can you ask me that? Were we together? Were we going to be? You had your world and I had mine. And I wanted him in mine, not chasing through the universe with his father. ... Actually, he's a lot like you. In many ways. Please tell me what you're feeling. Kirk: There's a man out there I haven't seen in fifteen years who's trying to kill me. You show me a son that'd be happy to help him. My son. ...My life that could have been, ...and wasn't. And what am I feeling? ...Old. ...Worn out.

So Kirk's comment about Carol are consistent with canon. And speaking of consistency with canon, did you catch Spock mentioning that there are 200 crew members on the Enterprise? This matches what Pike said in The Cage/The Menagerie when he said he was tired of being responsible for 203 lives. So by the time of TOS, they more than doubled the size of the crew.

#star trek #strange new worlds #snw #snw spoilers #subspace rhapsody

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ladykailitha · 7 months

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Grief (A Friend Indeed) Part 9

Hello, everyone! We are almost to the end. I have all twelve parts completed and will be posting them every Thursday until the story is fully published.

So what's next? With Royal Pain being done as well, I'm going to try and finish Well Met By Moonlight and Find Your Shade By the Moonlight. I will be back working on the soulmate AU Batshit Soulmate and the next book in the Boy with a Bat series called Never Hold Back Your Step for a Moment. I'm also starting that omegaverse story I thought up here.

We meet Steve's family and find out more about why Steve's parents didn't like that side of the family much.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

****

Eddie and Steve wandered around town for a couple of hours, doing a little sightseeing, a little shopping, and a lot just being themselves for a moment or two.

Soon it was getting close to time and they headed to the diner. They pulled up and got a booth.

Eddie and Steve slid into one side and told the waitress that they were waiting for someone and to just grab them a couple of waters.

The waitress nodded and quickly came back with the waters.

They didn’t have to wait long before Percy came through the door, the little bell announcing his arrival.

Steve waved him over and he smiled in return, hurrying over to the table. Once he was settled he told the waitress they were waiting on one more but if they could get a pot of coffee and two cups please. Eddie and Steve both got sodas.

“Who are we waiting for?” Steve asked nervously.

Percy twisted the ring on his ring hand, looking down at the table. “A friend.”

Eddie and Steve shared a glance, wide-eyed.

Eddie wrote something down on a paper napkin and slid it over to Percy.

Percy took the napkin with frown and then he gasped. “Both of you?”

“Both for me,” Steve murmured.

“Just men for me,” Eddie added.

Percy glanced around the diner nervously, but no one was paying any attention to them at all.

“Oh.” He let out a shuddering breath. “Just him.” He pointed to someone walking up to the diner through the window.

He was a tall man, thin. Long black hair, braided to the small of his back. He wore a suit just as nice as Max’s in a beautiful silver color.

He came over when Percy waved at him. He slid next to Percy and looked Steve and Eddie over.

“Who are these boys, Percy?” he asked gravely.

“This my nephew, Steven and his friend...” Percy began.

Eddie stuck out his hand. “Eddie. Eddie Munson. We’re actually in Kentucky because of my own grandma’s funeral. Steve wanted to come visit his grandma’s grave so we took a drive.”

“Where you from?” Percy asked. “I catch a bit of twang to your voice.”

Eddie grinned. “Indiana mostly, but my family’s from Ashland.”

Percy smiled. “Nice town.”

Steve smiled. “It has been so far.”

“This is David Estevez,” Percy said, shyly. “The reason you’re parents haven’t spoken to me in over a decade.”

“Ah,” Steve said. “Yup, Clint Harrington is a lot of things, but tolerant isn’t one of them and of course my mom just went along with it. Even though it’s her money and her family.”

Eddie clicked his tongue against the back of his teeth. “Let’s see, not white, not from here, judging from the accent, and not straight... anything I missed?”

David burst out laughing. “Not the right kind of rich. I’m a self-made man. I worked hard to be where I am today and they hate that. I grew up poor in New Mexico and made my money building computers in my mom’s basement. Now, I’m a multi-millionaire CEO of a major tech company.”

“Dustin would love you,” Steve and Eddie said together.

“Who?” David asked with a chuckle.

“He’s this kid we know,” Eddie explained. “He built a CB tower just so he could talk to his girlfriend in Utah and not rack up his mom’s phone bill.”

“He sounds like fun,” Percy said, rolling his eyes.

David dug his fingers into Percy’s side, causing him to squirm and squeak. “As if you wouldn’t love it if I did that for you.”

Percy blushed. “Maybe.”

He cleared his throat. “How are your parents, Steven? I saw on the news that there was a horrible earthquake last March.”

Steve gulped and Eddie gave his hand a squeeze.

“I really wouldn’t know,” he mumbled, looking down at the table, tucking his hands between legs. “I haven’t seen them in a while.”

David and Percy shared a glance.

“They did come back after the earthquake, right?” Percy pressed. “To see if you were all right if nothing else.”

Steve shook his head. “They didn’t come home when I was caught in the mall fire, why would they come home for something as inconsequential as an earthquake?”

“Mall fire?” Percy asked.

“You remember, darling,” David said, “the one from last year where there were thirty people who died?”

Percy expression cleared as understanding dawned, and then it turned horrified. “They didn’t come home for that?”

Steve shook his head again. “They didn’t come home when I got a concussion so bad I was out for several hours, or anytime I got hurt.” He rubbed a scratch that was in the surface of the table mournfully.

“Mom follows Dad around to make sure he keeps it in his pants. Not that it deters him,” he explained. “I heard him bragging once about how it’s a game to him now to see what he can get away with.”

The waitress appeared with their drinks. “Are you guys ready to order?”

“I’m not hungry,” Steve murmured.

The rest of them ordered, with Eddie ordering a side of cheese fries in addition to his regular side of fries.

Once the waitress had gone, Percy leaned forward. “How long has this been going on?”

“The trips started when I fourteen or so,” he continued. “But the older I got, the longer the trips were, until they just stopped coming home sometime around Christmas of last year.”

“Stevie...” Eddie whined. “Why didn’t you say something?”

Steve shrugged. “I’m an adult. It’s not as though I’m a kid anymore.”

Percy took his hand in his. “No, Steven. That’s not how parenting works. Ever. They’re supposed to care about you enough to at least tell you were they’re going and when they’ll be home.”

Steve looked up and into his uncle’s eyes. “The money changed them. They haven’t been my parents in over a decade. I’ve just been this trophy they pulled out whenever it suited them. Had to be first in everything. I’m surprised they only let me get away three sports instead of making me try everything.”

Eddie looked stricken. “The sports weren’t your idea?”

Steve shook his head. “It was a way that they could legally pawn me off to other adults. Probably the reason for all the piano lessons and the tutoring. How I met Nancy by the way. Gotta have the best grades, until someone puts a plate through my head, then I was just as disappointing as they feared I would be.”

Everyone else at the table let out noises of distress.

“You never should have had to go through that,” David whispered fiercely. “Ever. I’m sorry your parents were awful.”

Steve shrugged. “It wasn’t all bad. I have had adults in my life that cared about me. The Chief of Police always kept an eye on me. Dad stopped hitting me after the second time Hop, Chief Hopper, I mean brought me home after...” he trailed off and looked anywhere but at the people in the booth with him.

He cleared his throat.

Their food arrived and that last sentence was left to dangling in the air like the sword of Damocles over their heads.

Percy watched as Eddie pushed the side of cheese fries between him and Steve, taking a bite periodically, but mostly focusing on the rest of his food.

Steve reached out and took one of the fries, chewing mindlessly. And then another and then another.

David smirked when Percy indicated to what Steve was doing.

Eddie pushed them in front of Steve and he just dug into them like a starving man. He took half of his burger and handed it to Steve, too.

Steve took the half with a blush. “Thanks, Eds,” he said softly.

Eddie just smiled fondly and finished his half of the burger.

David started talking to Percy to help fill the silence and soon the sense of dread dissipated as they fell into easy conversation.

Soon they were done and their plates taken away.

David lifted his chin to indicate to Steve. “Where did you learn that if you got cheese fries Steve would eat?”

Eddie and Steve glanced at each other and Steve blushed.

“Is that what he did?” he muttered.

Eddie laughed. “It’s trick I learned from his best friend. When he’s upset he won’t eat, even when he needs to, but if you put something like cheese fries or onion rings near him, he’ll graze until it kick starts his appetite again.”

Steve looked over at him in shock. “Holy shit, I never realized. Who else does that?”

Eddie smiled at him, that closed mouth, fond smile that he was got around Steve. “Dustin and Max mostly. But El and Will have been known to do it once or twice.”

Steve blinked.

“Sounds like you’ve got a lot of people that care about you, Steven,” Percy said with a grin.

Steve nodded, blushing. “Yeah, I guess I do.”

He looked at his watch and sighed. “How’s this,” he said, “why don’t you use that business card I gave you when you get home and David and me will come out to visit you for a few days?”

Steve lit up. “Yeah? You’d do that?”

Eddie grinned. Steve had just gotten his boyhood wish of having an uncle that cared and he could feel the joy and surprise radiating off his friend.

“I’d love to,” Percy said. “I would love to meet your family.”

Steve grinned. “You’ll love them.”

David smiled, too. “I’m sure we will.”

They got up and hugs were passed around everyone and they said their goodbyes.

“Goodbye Uncle Percy,” Steve said, his voice a little rough with emotion. “Bye, Uncle David. I’ll see you both soon.”

David looked happy and shocked at being called Uncle. Jasper’s daughter would never. But here was this nineteen year old boy whom his partner hadn’t spoken to in literal years being more caring and decent after a single afternoon with him, then Beatrice had her whole life.

So he did the only thing he could, he hugged Steve again, more fiercely this time. “Thank you.”

Steve nodded. He wasn’t sure exactly why David was so grateful, but he understood enough.

As Steve and Eddie walked away, Percy and David watched them get into their car.

“How long do you think it’ll take before those boys realize they’re in love with each other?” David asked.

“I don’t know Eddie very well,” Percy said, thoughtfully, “but I imagine they’ll figure it out before we come visit Hawkins.”

David hummed. If he was a betting man, he would have said the end of the week.

But he just had to wait and see.

****

Pt 10|Pt 11|Pt 12

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