#Filter Administration Set

[retrievablememories]

cherry bomb | jungkook (m)

pairing: jungkook x fem reader

summary: “get fucked or die” becomes the motto to live by when a serial killer begins targeting virgins on your campus.

genre: smut, horror/slasher, college!au

word count: 7.1k

warnings: multiple minor character deaths, blood, gore, violence (including gun and knife use), mentions of alcohol consumption. virgin-shaming and slut-shaming, oral (fem receiving), riding, virgin!reader, first-time sex, protected sex, hair-pulling, biting, fingering, dirty talk, virgin kink/corruption kink, fuckboy JK. is JK a sub or a masochist here? answer: i don’t fucking know!

a/n: inspired by the movie cherry falls (2000). heed the warnings. remember that this is fiction, not meant to be entirely realistic, and characters' views/actions don't represent my own. if this kind of content is not up your alley just block me or make use of the wonderful filtering option in your account settings

sources for the fic dividers: one | two

link to part 2

CHERRY BOMB

don't wanna die? come out and hook up with a sexy girl or guy.

virgins get in free!

THIS FRIDAY

NOV 3, 20XX

[address here]

"very corny." you shake your head, looking at the party flyer in your hands. you'd just torn it down from the bulletin board in your dorm lobby; unauthorized advertisements aren’t allowed, and your job as RA involves these menial-ass tasks. "this is literally life or death...why are they turning it into a joke?"

"it is a joke," your friend camille says, snatching the flyer out of your hands to look it over. "think about it. 10 students get killed since we came back in august, and the semester isn't even over yet. the school administration and local police haven't done nearly enough to address it or stop any more deaths. and the common denominator is that all these people were suspected or confirmed virgins?” you haven’t seen the evidence yourself, but the daughter of one of the local policemen claimed every victim also had virgin carved into some part of their dead body. “yeah, i'd say it's a joke to pretty much everyone at this point. this is what happens when you let the students come up with a solution."

camille hands the flyer back to you, and you hold it limply. "but...it's not like you can look at someone and tell if they're a virgin. the killer must've known them all personally. it just doesn't make sense."

"some of those people had no mutual friends. nothing connecting them whatsoever. not even shared extracurriculars. it's gotta be a perverted stalker with a fetish, maybe. a scorned hacker who somehow got into their private conversations 'n' shit? or maybe he consulted the cards to know who’d fucked before and who hadn’t.”

“oh please.” you scoff. “now you’re being completely ridiculous. tarot cards aren’t gonna tell you if someone’s a virgin or not.”

“then you come up with a better explanation. either way, these folks—" camille points to the flyer "—aren't taking their chances."

"hm..." you keep staring at the flyer, looking at the shiny-red cherries, condoms, sex toys, and other sex-related objects decorating the paper. whoever designed this really wasn't playing.

"so, are you gonna go?" camille asks with a sidelong glance. "free admittance, after all."

your neck burns under the collar of your shirt. "are you?" neither of you have had sex yet, for differing reasons. camille's reason was almost complete indifference to the whole act.

she gives you a look that says i could give a shit. "...you know the answer to that one, dear. so you're not even thinking about it? as much as you have cried to me and lorelai about not being able to find a man you like enough to give it up for, our killer here probably already knows. you practically have a ‘come kill me’ bullseye on your back.”

"i don't know," you say, because you genuinely are thinking about it. “and stop trying to fucking scare me.” despite your logical brain trying to reason with you, you still feel a sense of underlying terror about being the next victim. "the virgin killer," as they'd nicknamed the freak, clearly prefers a specific type of victim, and all kills have been random and unpredictable other than that—and the fact that every victim attended your university. he also seems partial to using a knife on his victims, but even that isn’t guaranteed—3 of the 10 had been killed in ways other than stabbing. "i don’t know why you’re so nonchalant about this, though."

camille shrugs. "if he comes for me, i'll just spray him with my illegal mace and kick his nuts into his throat. then tie him up and wait for my dad to come blow his head off. there are some advantages to having a gun nut for a dad."

you chuckle at the absurdity of it. "you've got it all planned out, then."

--

FRIDAY, NOV 3

taking a rideshare to the party was a smart idea on lorelai's part, because the two little shots you took to pre-game already have you feeling woozy. or maybe it's just your nerves.

the cherry bomb is located at a mansion that isn’t really a mansion, but a large once-abandoned house one of the fraternities fixed up years ago for throwing off-campus parties.

the party is stacked wall to wall with people when you enter, though from what you can see, no one has actually started fucking yet—maybe they're saving that for the supposed orgy later in the night. you just hope you can get someone in one of the backrooms before that happens, because you're not really keen on having everyone in your class knowing what your tits look like.

you have one simple mission here tonight—lose your long-held virginity and get off the virgin killer's radar. once that's done, you'll make your exit.

"actually, i'm surprised anyone else showed up. other than you, who wants to willingly admit that they're still a virgin in college?" lorelai shudders. you roll your eyes and try not to feel offended, sucking your teeth.

"you were more than welcome to stay back at the dorm."

"no! i'm here for moral support, plus i don't want to be alone tonight. i don't care who this killer targets, it's getting too crazy out here to just be letting your guard down anymore."

well, you won't argue that.

you and lorelai dance to the song booming over the multiple speakers, scanning the room for potential hookups all the while. you become more alert when you recognize a familiar length of black hair coming through the front door, plus the tattoos and piercings to match.

you're not surprised jungkook came. he has his pick of untouched and easily corruptible virgins here, which has always been his thing; you've heard him brag about it to his seatmates more than once in your shared elective. not to mention the stories you've heard from the women who actually fucked him. as far as you could figure, it was the usual male ego posturing bullshit about being able to say he was someone’s first—and likely best. for that reason, alarm rises when he makes eye contact and starts making a beeline for where you and lorelai are.

"oh, here comes the campus bicycle," lorelai says, voice deadpan.

you continue watching him from the corner of your eye, trying to see if he's just approaching someone in your general vicinity, but no. once he shoves his way through the crowd of dancers, some unashamedly groping at his body as he does, he stops right in front of you two.

"so, are you here for the same reason i am?" he asks you, grinning like the devil himself. "or are you looking to get that sweet little cherry popped?"

the backs of your knees sweat. "um—latter, i guess." you hadn't meant to answer that honestly, but to say you are caught off-guard is understating it. you can count on one hand the number of times you and jungkook have talked to each other in class, and never about anything of this nature.

"you're not gonna ask me?" lorelai says.

jungkook gives a hearty laugh; you didn't think it was that funny. "everyone knows you're not a virgin, why waste my time?"

"wow, okay. fuck you. you're no saint yourself." she huffs.

"anyway…" jungkook returns his attention to you. "have you really never done anything before? not even sucked a dick? there's no way someone hasn't tried to hit that. not even some 'backdoor action only' like those weird religious girls?"

"is that any of your business? i didn't know we had to give a rundown of our lack of sexual experience before getting laid around here." you snap.

jungkook's eyelids lower a fraction. "i'm tryna decide how easy i should go on you, babe. i mean, if you wanna take this in one of the rooms. otherwise, i'll let someone else have a go if you're not interested."

unfortunately, you are interested, despite his overly blunt manner and objectifying language. even though you know you’ll just become another entry on his long list of flings—someone he’ll tell his boys about later—maybe the fear of death is making you impulsive.

but maybe his looks are playing a part in it, too.

he's imposing with his physique and his all-black attire, his shirt so tight that you can clearly see his pectoral muscles and his nipples, his unbuttoned leather jacket doing nothing to hide those details. you can easily imagine yourself running your hands across those pecs, squeezing them, rubbing your fingers against his nipples and making him moan underneath you, feeling and seeing his abs contract through this stupid-ass shirt that must've been painted on. this brief fantasy immediately dampens your panties.

"…i'm interested," you affirm, dragging your gaze back up to his eyes, and he smirks from knowing you were obviously checking him out.

knowing the direction this is going in, lorelai taps you on the back and whispers in your ear. “have fun but don’t do anything stupid, yeah? i’m not playing auntie to any offspring you and this dude pop out, sis. use protection.” then she makes her exit to go find herself a partner for the night.

“so, come on.” jungkook nods his head in the direction of the stairs, and you follow him through the crowd as he leads you up the winding staircase. you squeeze past two girls kissing on the staircase railing, their motions a bit unsure as if they’ve never done it before but clearly still enjoying themselves.

jungkook pushes a few doors in until he finds an empty room, and you try not to ogle at the random couples you see along the way. not even an hour in and the two shots must be wearing off, because your body is beginning to buzz with nervousness again.

jungkook closes the door behind him when you both step into the room, which is lit by one lamp on a nightstand and the open window beside the bed. he reaches for you, and you shiver when his hand grasps the side of your face, the other snaking around your waist.

“scared?” he asks, his voice low. you shake your head, and he grins. “relax.” he leans in as if to kiss you and you part your lips, but he doesn’t do that just yet. he traces your top lip and then your bottom lip with his tongue, dipping it into your mouth as he switches. the teasing nature of his actions makes your body heat up as you watch a string of saliva spread and then break between the both of you.

he presses back in for a real kiss this time, his nose bumping yours. despite all your fears about tonight, you’re able to unwind somewhat and just focus on the full sensory experience that is this kiss—the warmth of his hands and his mouth, the sappy sound your lips make when they separate and come back together, the scent of his cologne, the taste of his spearmint-flavored tongue.

you find yourselves inching toward the bed, him walking you backwards while keeping you steady. just as the backs of your knees hit the edge of the bed, there's the sound of a woman's bloodcurdling scream from behind you, and you nearly shove jungkook to the ground in your haste to run to the door. your fingers are scrabbling at the doorknob when you hear a burst of laughter. a guy you don't recognize crawls out from under the bed holding his phone up, displaying a youtube video of the shower scene in the movie psycho, which is where the noise is coming from.

"that was funny as fuck." the guy laughs obnoxiously loud, holding his stomach. “don’t get too carefree or you just might die, girlie.”

jungkook grabs the guy by his jacket collar like he's a kid and throws him out the door; the guy doesn't object because he knows this is preferable to getting his ass beaten by the bigger man. "fuck outta here, you jackass." jungkook snaps.

jungkook stomps over to the closet to yank it open. "any more idiots in here wanna show themselves?" he checks a couple more areas before deciding the room is clear and closing the door again, locking it for good measure.

“okay.” he sighs, stripping off his jacket and shoes. he takes your hand and pulls you toward him as he sits on the bed. “relax, baby. forget about that fucking clown. come ‘ere. why don’t you sit on my lap?”

with a heavy exhale, you try to steady your still-shaking hands as you shuck your boots off and pull your dress up slightly to comfortably sit in his lap, your legs loosely wrapped around his waist.

he squeezes your waist. “so, where were we? i don’t really remember…”

you huff out a half-amused laugh. “really? i’m pretty sure it was this…” you lean forward with your hands on his shoulders and press your lips back onto his. jungkook follows in kind, his hands running up from your thighs to your waist and back again. the rhythm of his hands is hypnotic, distracting you as you try to keep most of your focus on the kiss, and you fear you may be getting overstimulated before anything has truly began.

as you continue kissing, jungkook’s hands creep your dress further up your thighs until your panties are revealed. still feeling up your legs, his hands press further toward your inner thighs, and you gasp into the kiss when his thumb pushes against the seat of your underwear. they have been damp for a while now and you know he knows this, so you aren’t surprised when he breaks the kiss to smirk, though it makes you roll your eyes.

jungkook whispers against your lips, “let’s try something. will you sit on my face?” you stare at him without a word, not expecting this to be the first thing he proposes. at your response, or lack of, he adds, “i want to make you feel good. do you want me to taste you?” his voice is so soft, so unassuming and cloying, that it makes you feel like a lamb clutched gently in the mouth of a wolf.

your brain is already surrendering to it. “yes.”

you get another kiss and a smile. jungkook moves you out of his lap, shuffles further up the bed, and lies down so that he’s flat on his back, his head surrounded by the pillows. he gestures for you to follow.

taking your time, you slide your panties off and crawl up the bed until you’re near his face and he’s lying below you looking like he’s struck gold. he grabs your hips to bring you closer until you’re right over his mouth. you’re embarrassed to have someone looking at you from this angle for the first time, and you’re about to get too into your head about it when he french kisses your inner thigh, blanking out your mind.

the only thing you know from then on is that his mouth is burning hot. his tongue is everywhere. he licks at you delicately to test the waters, and then more firmly when your thighs tremble around his head, in an effort to elicit the same response.

the way he fits his mouth over your entire pussy and sucks it with just the right amount of pressure so that it won’t hurt makes you feel faint. the way he slides the flat of his tongue over your clit only to suck it gently at the end of the stroke makes you cry out louder than you intended. you’re glad he moved further up the bed for this, because you’re holding onto the headboard for dear life.

the only things you’re aware of are your own out-of-control moans and the wet sounds of jungkook’s mouth working you over. all of it has you so overwrought that you’re already reaching your peak, your grip on the headboard weakening.

jungkook seems to know this without you telling him anything. he pauses and looks up at you with a fucked-out smirk and a wet mouth. you don’t know whether to thank him or curse him for giving you a break. “before you come, fuck my face.”

“wh-what?”

“rub that wet fucking cunt on my face.” heat flares through your body at his frank words. “grab my hair and just ride my face.” he reaches up to take your hands off the headboard and places them in his hair. “you can do it, baby. fucking use me.”

it takes you a minute to get over the fresh wave of embarrassment and find a pace that works, because the connection between your brain and body feels like it’s frying and your coordination is off. jungkook helps guide your hips, especially with how you’re trembling from pleasure and close to falling apart. soon enough, you’re letting go of yourself and moving your hips enthusiastically, if a little clumsily, and chasing your climax. you savor the feel of your clit sliding across his wet tongue and his soft hair in between your fingers, and you push his head as close as it can get.

you come while screaming, dizzyingly immersed in the pleasure. you forget that you’re holding his hair as you yank roughly on it. the only thing that matters to you is that jungkook’s mouth is still sucking your clit through the best physical sensation you’ve ever experienced.

when he finally lets go and gives you reprieve, you collapse beside him on the pillows.

“i’m sorry,” you mumble, disoriented. “about your hair, i mean?”

jungkook laughs. it’s funny how shiny-wet his face is—and that you caused it, which is kind of hard to believe in the aftermath of it. “the pain is what gets my dick hard. don’t worry.”

you chuckle breathlessly at that, and for a few seconds you both have that funny little moment to yourselves in all the ridiculousness of the overarching situation.

then jungkook’s hand is reaching for you again. “i’m not done with that pussy yet, though.” he brushes a finger over your hole, and your body twitches from the sensitivity. he slides that finger through the wetness and then uses the lubrication to push only the tip of his finger in. he dips it in and out, teasing the nerves at your entrance, until you’re shifting your hips closer to him to implore him for more. he grants your request by sliding his finger all the way inside.

having a finger inside you feels okay at first, though not as good as his actions a few seconds ago. jungkook decides to amplify your pleasure by placing his lips on your neck, leaving gentle and wet kisses behind, and you become all too aware of the feeling of your hardened nipples against the material of your dress. the pleasure begins to heighten when his finger finds a place inside of you that makes you throb, your walls clenching around him.

“ah…” you gasp and shift eagerly against his body as he keeps stimulating that spot, not thrusting his finger into you but simply stroking it across that area in a come here motion.

jungkook pulls away from your neck to smile at his handiwork. “that’s better, right?” he whispers, watching your reactions. your lips form around the word yes, though it’s difficult to try to speak, and you worry how unsteady your voice might sound. he waits until you’re clutching at his arm, leaving red lines on his skin from your fingernails, to carefully push another finger in beside the first. you try to breathe evenly, though his refusal to let up on that spot has your lungs stuttering for air all over again. his nose nudges your ear as he leans even closer and whispers, “there are so many different spots to find, so many different ways to make you come; i wanna go looking for them all.”

jungkook angles his hand so that his palm is also stimulating your clit, his fingers thrusting slowly now. you turn your head away from him as your body becomes ablaze, unsure what to do with yourself as your climax nears quickly.

“would you let me do that? learn your body like no one else has done?” he kisses the shell of your ear, and even that small action is enough to tip you closer to the edge with how your body is already so fired up. “who else could make you feel as good?”

this orgasm makes your eyes fill with involuntary tears, and little clear droplets bleed down the sides of your face and towards your ears as your body convulses. jungkook kisses the wet trails they make on your face, still fingering you steadily and forcing another urgent cry out of you. you feel untethered from yourself, like you’re not in control of your reactions, and you don’t know whether to be afraid of that or not.

jungkook pulls his fingers out when you have mostly calmed down, watching strands of your wetness drip between them before sliding them into his mouth.

after you come the second time, you begin to tire. the deeds have been done, and if you want, you can confidently go back out to the party now and say you’re no longer a virgin; you’re off the unofficial kill list and can live the rest of your days without having to look over your shoulder with every breath.

…but jungkook is hard against your hip, and in all honesty, you don’t want to leave without knowing what his dick looks and feels like.

“you tired?” he asks, and the casual air of it makes your stomach flip, for some reason. he says it as if this is something you two do all the time and he’s used to asking you this after wearing you out during a good session.

but now’s not the time to get delusional.

“no. i want more.”

jungkook smiles broadly, teasing his lip ring with his teeth. he sits up to peel that skin-tight shirt off, and you don’t bother to stop yourself from staring at all that skin in front of you. your eyes drop further down when he removes his belt and undoes his jeans, pushing his pants and underwear down enough for you to see his v-line but not taking them off. is that an invitation for you to do it? "you hold the reins here," he says, lying back on the bed again. "do whatever you want to me."

“whatever i want?” you repeat, already sitting up. he nods, hands behind his head, and you take the initiative to straddle him again, knowing you’re getting his jeans wet.

you reach for his pecs first, just like you’d imagined downstairs. the firm muscle of them is mesmerizing; but when you slowly circle your thumb against his nipple and his eyes flutter, a small and breathy moan escaping his lips, you’re sure you enjoy this much more.

you play with his nipples and even work up the boldness to purse your lips around one, sucking it softly, and every noise that arises from him makes your clit tingle.

you eventually move your hands to his abs, enjoying how they flex at your touch. you didn't think his navel would be pierced, not hearing that detail in any of the sex tales you've eavesdropped on about jungkook, and you wonder what else you might find out about him tonight.

“you should do your nipples to match.” you suggest it without much thought as you’re teasing his navel piercing, though you don’t regret saying it.

“would you be into that?” jungkook sounds like he’s actually considering it, watching you from below his lashes.

you grin. you don’t know if you’ll actually end up having sex with him again to see them, but you answer, “i’d love it…it’d be sexy on you.”

sliding your hands further down still, you come to the waistband of his underwear, which is peeking over the top of his lowered jeans. for a second the nervousness returns; jungkook notices how your hands twitch with hesitation. “it’s fine, i’m not gonna bite you…unless you ask me to, though. here.”

he slips a hand into his underwear and grips his dick, though he doesn’t take it out right away; he strokes the shaft a few times, observing your reaction with expectant and hazy eyes. the scene before you makes your mouth dry. jungkook quickens his pace, twisting his hand at the tip and using his own precum as lube, until you are overcome with the desire to see it and you pull his underwear out of the way.

his cock is thick and flushed and glossy with precum. you don’t have much to compare it to, but it’s a good size, and all the previous women have said that he clearly knows what to do with it. he releases it and it slaps against his abs, leaving a streak of precum behind. when you look at him in anticipation of what he’ll do next, he grasps it again and starts stroking himself quickly, like he’s trying to get off. the wet slap of his motions and his quiet groans make your walls clench.

“i could keep fucking myself and you could watch, since you seem to prefer it…” he murmurs.

“no, i—let’s go all the way.”

jungkook smirks and answers your decision by pulling a condom out of his jean pocket. you watch as he unwraps it and slips it down his cock. though you’re already straddling him, he grasps your wrist and encourages you to draw nearer to him. “come here, pretty thing.”

when you’re hovering directly over him, jungkook grips the base and teases his tip against your entrance. “ready?” he asks.

“yeah,” you say breathlessly.

it’s a little slow-going, but you eventually end up with him seated inside you. it’s uncomfortable to be taking something bigger than a couple fingers, but it isn’t terribly painful.

“now, try moving your hips like this…” with his hands on your hips, jungkook helps you grind against him so that your clit slides across his pubic bone with every move. the discomfort begins to ebb out of your mind after a little while of doing this, and you laugh quietly.

“i thought…i thought this doesn’t feel good for men,” you sigh, your eyes closing from the bliss of his firm abdomen stimulating your clit. “this grinding thing, you know. or so a friend told me…”

jungkook laughs too, but he doesn’t confirm it like you expect him to. his only answer is, “a sexy woman on my dick will always feel good.”

he seems to be more about showing than telling, anyway. his hands reach for your breasts, groping them over the fabric of your dress before sliding underneath for better access. sporadic moans escape you as he plays with your nipples, making your clit throb harder and sending more warmth pooling in your abdomen.

your breath wheezes out of you when jungkook starts pushing up into you, his hands still squeezing your breasts. “you’re okay, baby…” he tries a few different angles until he pulls a visceral reaction out of you, your walls fluttering around him and your body shivering intensely. “mmm, there it is.”

your motions start tapering off as jungkook continues thrusting up against that same spot that had you in tears earlier. noticing this, he slips one hand back down to your hip and encourages you to maintain your pace, keeping your clit stimulated while meeting his thrusts. “you’re doing good…” he murmurs. “go ahead, keep fucking me just like that.”

you’re glad lorelai makes you go to the campus gym with her every week, because otherwise you’d be about to collapse riding him for this long. it takes more of your strength and stamina than you’d expected. no wonder jungkook stays in the gym.

“oh, fuck…” the way all his muscles flex as he repeatedly pushes up into you makes you wetter; you no longer have the wherewithal to be embarrassed about the gushy noises your pussy is creating. your whole world has whittled down to this one room, and all you can think about is your next orgasm.

“pull my hair again,” he requests, his eyes dark and lost in lust when he looks up at you.

"jungkook..." you grip his sweaty hair in your hand and pull it to bare his throat, and he gives a desperate moan, his member jerking inside you. you've never felt so in control of a situation before in your life. it gives you a straight adrenaline-slash-dopamine rush.

his neck is just there and exposed, flushed from exertion, and his physical responses make you feel so primal, like you could do absolutely anything to him right now and he’d enjoy it. because of this, you decide to bite his neck, if only to give your mouth something to do. his dick twitches again when you do, another pretty moan leaving his mouth.

his voice is strained when he says, “bite me harder.” when you let go, your mouth travels the expanse of his neck to leave marks in a few other places, digging in harder just as he asked of you.

“fuck, y/n—” the pain of your teeth is pushing him close to the edge too soon, so he slips his other hand out from under your dress and brings it lower to circle his fingers over your clit. jungkook adding his experienced fingers to his constant stimulation of your g-spot is enough to cause your release. your body slumps onto his as you squeeze around him, your head falling into the juncture of his neck and shoulder and your eyes shutting so tightly that you see wobbling shapes in the darkness.

jungkook gives you a few more thrusts rougher than the rest, causing you to cry out. your climax and the aftershocks have your mind so dizzy that you only just realize that he’s reaching his own peak, his muscles tensing and relaxing as he fills the condom with his cum. you hear him groan next to your ear, the sound of it filthy and uninhibited.

jungkook lifts your head from his shoulder, his thumbs on your cheeks, and his lips meet yours in a final slow kiss, his teeth leaving their mark on your bottom lip as a parting reminder.

you're still trying to get your bearings and slide him out of you when jungkook suddenly says, "what is that noise?"

"huh?" you remain immobile for a moment so you can listen more clearly, and you recognize the sounds of screaming and feet pounding on the floors in a bid to run away—both upstairs and downstairs. these don't sound like the same screams of pleasure from earlier. "what the hell?"

you and jungkook scramble to collect your clothes and get dressed, thankful that neither of you stripped down completely, and he throws the used condom into a random corner of the room. you're still making last minute adjustments when jungkook stands up and unlocks the door.

"the fuck is—?" his voice cuts off as if he can't finish his thought.

"what? what is it?" you stand up to get a better view around his body in the doorway, and you scream when you see a lone blonde girl lying a few feet away from the door, slumped against the opposite wall with a slashed throat. her pink party dress bleeds red, and her face that catches the illumination of the string lights glints with tear tracks. you look away from her unseeing eyes before you can cry out again.

jungkook seems confused, peering down the other end of the hallway like there'll be someone there to explain. "it...didn't work?" he asks to no one in particular, as you have no answer. you walk farther back into the room as if putting more distance between you and the body will provide some protection. bumping against the window sill, you turn around to look out the window and see several cars peeling out of the makeshift grass parking lot, nearly running over other people or hitting other cars on the way. you release a stifled scream from behind your hands when someone is too disoriented to get out of the way of the speeding cars and is sent flying through the air before landing painfully, their body now unmoving. the offending car never stops to check on them.

the screaming downstairs worsens, countless voices rising to a fever pitch of shouting and wailing, and you imagine this must be what the pits of hell sound like. jungkook whips around to look at you. “we gotta get the fuck out of here.”

you two inch out of the room with him in the lead, peering into jarred-open doorways to see if anybody could be waiting in the shadows. there are a couple of other bodies in two other rooms, and you wonder—even with the loud music constantly reverberating through the house, did you really not hear the struggles that led to these deaths in your throes of passion? the thought unnerves you. the idea that maybe you were only saved by jungkook deciding to lock the door…

the stair railing you’d walked by an hour ago is now broken in the middle, splinters of wood lying scattered on the stairs, along with more bodies lying on the steps just as haphazardly. the scene looks like the remnants of a stampede; you hope most of these people are just unconscious and not dead.

the dancefloor is a swarm of people in various states of undress pushing and pulling each other as they rush for the exit. there’s not as many people heading for the back door, everyone attempting to squeeze through the main entrance in their unthinking panic, so jungkook grabs your arm and the two of you pick your way through the bodies to get down the stairs as best you can. when you enter the mass of people, you’re exceptionally glad for his strength because it’s easier to get through the opposing crowd.

to reach the back door, you must first get through the kitchen. beside the kitchen entrance in a dark corner, you see someone doubled over and grasping the person in front of them for stability.

you realize belatedly that they have a knife in their stomach; the other person standing over them is the virgin killer himself, calmly watching them suffer.

the killer’s face is hidden by the mask he always wears, which you are seeing for the first time now, up-close—a hairy werewolf head with lemon-yellow eyes and a candy-red tongue. it’s so unexpected that you would’ve found it comedic if not for the context.

a guy in a blue sweater grasps the killer from behind in an attempted surprise attack, causing him to jerk the knife out of the other person’s stomach. the sudden movement causes a spray of blood to come flying off the knife, and you have to hold back vomit when drops of the warm, stinking crimson hit your face. though it feels like time has slowed to a mere creep, all of this happens within seconds.

you don’t see much more before jungkook is forcing you to move again.

you, jungkook, and multiple others barrel out of the back patio door, nearly ripping the flimsy screen door off its hinges in your haste, while the classmate in the blue sweater fruitlessly struggles with the killer in the kitchen. your leg muscles flex harder when you hear the person's agonized shout and the mushy rip of flesh being torn seconds later. almost everyone else has taken the same idea to run for their lives rather than stay and try to fight or disarm the killer; the streets are dotted in every direction with students running for any possible safety, many not having arrived to the party in cars to escape in.

thankfully, jungkook is not one of them.

he grasps your wrist painfully hard in his panic and yanks you in the direction of his car, which is so pitch black that you almost didn't see it sitting in the shadows.

when you get inside, you've never been so grateful to be within the safe metal enclosure of a car in your whole life. hands shaking, jungkook jams the key into the ignition and presses the gas pedal so hard your head jerks against the headrest. however, in your temporary relief, you think of lorelai. your vision doubles as you scramble to open your phone and call her, your head spinning with a new spike of fear. it rings for a while with no answer, and you try two more times only to get the same result.

"maybe she got to safety somewhere else?” jungkook tries to reason with you, his eyes bouncing between your face and the road ahead so he doesn't hit any other cars or any random students still running across the streets. "i didn't see her anywhere in the house before we ran out."

"that just means she could be hiding somewhere in there!" you shriek, unable to control your terror at your friend possibly being trapped in the house with the killer.

"well—maybe just let her stick it out, he won't find her if she just—"

"oh god, but i called her like three fucking times; what if he heard the phone ringing? i'm gonna kill myself."

“y/n, you’re overreacting like shit, there’s no way he’d hear a phone ringing in all that noise—"

unlistening, you drop your phone and bang your fists on your head in frustration and anguish.

sighing deeply, jungkook forgoes any attempt to do a 3-point turn, which requires more coordination than he has at the moment, and drives straight up into someone's yard to make a U-turn back toward the house.

you hadn’t gotten too far from the party house, so in another minute or two and with a couple messy turns that cause the wheels to ride up onto the curb, you’re back on the street leading up to the house. before you can reach it, though, jungkook slams on the breaks, and you have to throw your hands out onto the dashboard to avoid flying into it due to not fastening your seatbelt. you’re not very successful; the move hurts your wrists, and you’re pretty sure some of your ribs just got bruised anyway.

“what the fuck?” jungkook shouts.

the virgin killer with his lycanthrope mask is standing in the middle of the street; he turns to face the car. he has a chokehold grip on a guy you recognize as a popular frat member, who is almost bare except for his blue-plaid boxers. you remember seeing the frat guy dancing with his girlfriend when you and lorelai initially entered the party; he was in the group of guys who put this whole party together as a way to “save” the campus’s virgins.

the virgin killer is holding a gun to the guy’s head, and you have no clue where he might’ve gotten it from. the guy’s demeanor is weak, and he’s barely able to stand, which is obviously from the profuse blood loss he’s suffering; the killer has carved sharp letters into his stomach to form two words—“FAIR GAME.”

“fair game?” you mumble, a sickly realization forming in your mind.

“fuck no—" jungkook is already throwing the car into reverse when you hear and see the first bullet go off, exploding the frat member’s head into an unrecognizable mess and making you scream at the top of your lungs. you hear more shots after you close your eyes and tuck your body down, along with the sounds of bullets splitting metal and hitting glass, and you think you might be actively dying—or maybe you’re already dead. even that would be preferable to experiencing this nightmare.

you can’t think as you feel the whole world spinning, your body tossed violently around. in reality, the only thing moving is jungkook’s car as he whips the vehicle around and speeds down the same street you just traveled up.

for a few long minutes, you only hear your own heartbeat, his murmured and frantic curses, and the strained breaths coming from both of you. you keep your body curled up with your knees tucked to your chest and arms over your face. the car’s engine roars as it races down the highway.

you’re afraid to open your eyes and find out, but you have to at some point. plus, the uncomfortable position is making your body hurt. carefully, you unfurl yourself and turn to look at him. “did you get hurt?”

“uhh—no? i don’t think…?” he takes one hand off the wheel to feel up his body as if he’s just realizing that might be a possibility. “but i’m wired off pure adrenaline right now, so give me a few more minutes to be sure…” he looks to you. “are you?”

“no.” your blood still runs cold at the thought of lorelai being stuck in the house or navigating the dark neighborhood streets at this time of night. maybe she doesn’t even have her phone; maybe it was lost in the commotion. the number of possible scenarios makes you ill.

there’s silence for a while; you assume he must not be hurt after all. you start seeing familiar roads that lead back to the campus, and the gears in your mind begin turning, powered by fear.

“do you think it’s safe to go back to the college?” you ask, your voice small.

after a pause jungkook asks, “why not?” though his face begins to look like he’s second-guessing things.

“the killer could go back to the campus…i don’t know. there was so much violence tonight. it’s like he really has a grudge against the students from our school or something. what if he wants more victims? the campus police are already incompetent, but with most of them off the grounds and on their way to the party house…” you don’t finish your thought. you’ll need to warn camille of the potential danger.

“right, yeah…” jungkook’s hands flex around the steering wheel a few times. “we should…probably go somewhere else, then.”

nowhere feels safe. still, you ask, “where?”

changing his route, jungkook glances over at you. “to a friend’s house.”

[redgoldsparks]

It's Right to Read Day, celebrating libraries, highlighting the relentless attacks against them, and encouraging folks to take at least one action to defend them! The American Library Association's data on the most banned books from 2024 is now out; after 3 years in the top spot GENDER QUEER came in at second on the list with George M Johnson's beautiful queer memoir ALL BOYS AREN'T BLUE at number one. If you haven't read it yet, please go pick up this book.

Unfortunately, instead of dying down, we are now seeing the book ban movement morph into an effort to defund and destroy ALL public libraries and ALL public education, as exemplified by the Trump Administration aiming to dismantle the Department of Education and placing all employees of the Institute of Museum and Library Services on administrative leave. The IMLS is an independent federal agency that provides grants to libraries and museums across the country. According to the American Library Association, the IMLS provides “the majority of federal library funds.” The IMLS says it awarded $266 million in grants and research funding to cultural institutions last year. This money goes to help staff, fund maintenance, and create new programs. If you are curious how the termination of this grant funding will effect the state of California, here is a press release from the California State Library. Please call your state governor and representatives asking them to demand support for the IMLS!

I also wanted to share some resources to help you talk about book bans/book challenges if the topic comes up in conversation. There are a set of really common bad faith arguments which book banners make, and I helped write up a set of responses for Authors Against Book Bans (much of this was also written and compiled by superstar author and AABB leader Maggie Tokuda-Hall). Below the responses to bad faith arguments are a list of resources you can contribute to, especially if you live in a blue state and don't have a current legislative battle over books and libraries in your own backyard.

What to Say When They Say What They Always Say: an Authors Against Book Bans resource

I haven’t read this book but I don’t think it’s appropriate for children! 

Please read the full book before you judge it. Passages are often presented without context. 

So you want kids to have access to porn?

No. And if that is a concern of yours as a parent, install browser filters such as Google SafeSearch on your children’s devices to keep them from accessing the wealth of pornography available to them on the internet. It’s already illegal to bring pornography into schools. There are robust safeguards– from laws, to industry standards in publishing and librarianship and education– to safeguard our children from obscene materials, as determined by the Miller Test. 

What about parents’ rights?

Parents already have robust rights in their children’s education. When that means limiting access to certain books parents can do so; nearly all schools have policies to this effect. But what about all the parents who WANT their kids to have access to books? Their children should not be limited by what another parent in the community decides for their own family. And what if a parent wants to limit their child’s access to something that child would benefit from? What about the child’s rights? Children are people, not possessions of their parents.

If my taxes fund the schools and libraries, I should have a say in how they’re used.

Schools and libraries serve entire communities, not just those who agree with you. Libraries and schools have professional educators and librarians with PhDs who are trained to curate collections that serve diverse populations, not just one viewpoint.

LGBTQ+ books confuse kids or make them gay/trans. They push an agenda.

LGBTQ+ representation is not an “agenda”—it’s simply a reflection of real people’s lives. If books featuring LGBTQ+ characters are “pushing an agenda,” then books featuring straight relationships or cisgender characters are as well. Reading about something does not automatically change a person’s identity, just as reading about astronauts does not turn every child into an astronaut. Reading about LGBTQ+ characters can both help kids understand themselves and build empathy and understanding towards others.

I live California. Why should I care about book bans if they’re not happening here?

We are fortunate to live in a state where book banning on the basis of discrimination has been outlawed through AB1825, which passed in 2024. However, California has still seen numerous book challenges in cities like Huntington Beach, Burbank, Lodi, and Chico—some of which continue efforts to overturn these protections. While bans are worse in red states, they still happen in blue states. Book bans are about control—not protecting children. The people banning books today will censor other forms of speech tomorrow. The right to read is a fundamental civil liberty, and we should protect it accordingly.

How Can I Help from a Blue State? For the biggest bang for your buck, we recommend  that you donate to the grassroots organizations making a difference in the places where the bans are happening all the time. All the ACLU chapters listed here are currently involved in lawsuits against book banners. 

We suggest:

Florida Freedom to Read Project: https://www.fftrp.org/donate 

Texas Freedom to Read Project: https://www.txftrp.org/donate 

Honesty for Ohio Education: https://www.honestyforohioeducation.org/donate.html 

Diversity Awareness Youth Literacy Organization (DAYLO) in South Carolina: https://patconroyliterarycenter.org/donate-today-to-pat-conroy-literary-center/ 

Students Engaged in Advancing Texas (SEAT): https://www.studentsengaged.org/donate 

San Francisco’s Books Not Bans!: https://givebutter.com/booksnotbans 

Coeur D’Alene Public Library in Idaho: https://cdalibrary.org/donate/ 

Let Utah Read: https://www.fundlibraries.org/letutahread

Tennessee ACLU: https://www.aclu-tn.org/en/donate 

South Carolina ACLU: https://action.aclu.org/give/support-aclu-south-carolina 

Southern California ACLU: https://action.aclu.org/give/support-aclu-socal 

Iowa ACLU: https://action.aclu.org/give/support-aclu-iowa 

Fight for the First helps start grassroots groups all across the country: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/fightforthefirst 

EveryLibrary (is a national org, but they financially support many of the groups listed here, as well as AABB): https://www.everylibrary.org/donate 

You can also call your state reps to express your commitment to protecting the freedom to read. Protections in blue states are just as contagious as bans in red states. The more of us who have them, the more states will follow suit. Use the 5Calls app do this, or find your rep here: https://findyourrep.legislature.ca.gov/ 

And of course- if you are an author, editor, illustrator, cartoonist, translator, anthology editor, self-published author, please join Authors Against Book Bans! We could use the help! If you want to help recruit to AABB, feel free to print and pass out my recruitment zine at any literary event you attend <3

[lifebloa]

İO-GAMES-2025 - DEVASA+

These browser-based multiplayer games have taken the online gaming community by storm, offering a unique blend of simplicity and competitiveness that appeals to players of all ages. Whether you're looking to battle against others in real-time or collaborate in a delightful, chaotic environment, IO games provide a thrilling escape from your daily routine. In this blog post, we'll explore various aspects of IO games, including how to access them without restrictions, the most popular titles in the genre, and tips for unlocking your gaming experience.

As the world of online gaming continues to evolve, the rise of io games has captured the attention of players around the globe, combining simple mechanics with highly addictive gameplay.

One of the best places to explore the exciting realm of io games unblocked is at https://io-games-2025.github.io/, where players can dive into a variety of thrilling and entertaining games without the hindrance of restrictions, making it an ideal site for those looking to enjoy the best of these experiences.

Whether you are an experienced gamer or a newcomer eager to join in on the fun, accessing io unblocked games provides a fantastic opportunity to enjoy seamless gaming without barriers, allowing for endless hours of enjoyment

İo Games

When discussing the evolution and popularity of online gaming, one cannot overlook the immense impact of io games, a genre that has captured the attention of millions across the globe through its simple yet engaging gameplay mechanics, which allow players to enter a world of competition and collaboration instantly.

The appeal of io games unblocked lies in their accessibility; players can often access these games from various locations, whether in a school setting or at home, without the restrictions typically imposed by firewalls, allowing for a seamless gaming experience that fosters both casual play and competitive spirit among friends and strangers alike.

Moreover, the concept of io unblocked games has revolutionized how gamers interact with one another, as these easily accessible online platforms enable innovation in game design, giving rise to diverse game modes, styles, and strategies that keep players engaged for hours on end.

İo Games Unblocked

In recent years, the popularity of io games has skyrocketed, captivating players across various age groups with their simplicity, engaging gameplay, and competitive nature, making them a staple in the online gaming community.

One of the most significant advantages of io games unblocked is that they provide players with the opportunity to enjoy these games anywhere, whether that be at home, school, or in a public space, without facing the frustrating restrictions typically set by network administrators.

Additionally, the availability of io unblocked versions means that gamers can easily access their favorite titles without worrying about pesky firewalls or filters, allowing them to dive into fun and challenging adventures on platforms that support unblocked content.

İo Unblocked

When it comes to enjoying the online gaming experience, io unblocked games have become a popular choice among players who seek both entertainment and accessibility, as they provide a vast array of engaging options that can be played directly in the browser without hefty downloads or installations.

The appeal of io games lies in their simplicity and competitive nature, allowing players to jump right into action, whether they're engaging in a thrilling battle royale, a strategic team-based game, or a unique multiplayer experience that keeps them coming back for more fun.

Many gamers, especially students or individuals in restricted environments, have turned to io games unblocked options to bypass limitations imposed by schools or workplaces, ensuring they can continue to enjoy their favorite gaming experiences

[redrosydiaz]

daily drabble day 38 Extended Edition™

find the original drabble here!

The lion pounces as soon as they enter the building.

“Oh, hi, Eddie,” Sheila from the PTA drawls, surprise filtered over her words like it’s a shock to be running into each other at their children’s school. Her sticky pink lips curl into something too familiar. “What brings you here?”

Beside him, Buck masks his laugh as a cough into his hand. Not that he really needs to hide it, when Sheila hasn’t even acknowledged him.

Eddie resists the urge to roll his eyes, and he swallows down the sarcastic, “What brings me here? To my son’s school? Which lets out in fifteen minutes? Oh, you know, just thought I’d get in a light jog.”

Instead, Eddie pastes a polite (curt, Buck would call it, and— shut up, Buck) smile and tells her simply, “Paperwork.”

The shortness of his answer catches her off guard, which almost does make him laugh this time, because when has he ever indulged her like that? Really, Sheila, you should know better by now.

Eddie capitalizes on her falter, though, and seizes his chance to escape before he’s subject to more stilted conversation and— attempted flirting. Her poor husband.

His hand curls around Buck’s bicep, and he tugs him along, towards the front desk. “If you’ll excuse us,” he says, making pointed eye contact with Buck as they pass Sheila.

Amusement sparkles in Buck’s eyes and twitches the corner of his lips, and he twists around to throw a wave Sheila’s way. “Nice talking with you, Sheila,” he says brightly, despite exchanging not one single word with her.

Eddie only just manages to stifle his laugh into his own shoulder.

When they make it to the desk, Eddie lets go of Buck and leans his forearm onto the counter.

“Hi, Louise,” he greets the school’s administrator with an easy smile.

Louise, the bespectacled redhead who works the front office, returns the smile. “Hi there, Mr. Diaz,” she says warmly. Her gaze strays towards Buck. “Mr…”

“Buckley,” he fills in. “Hi.”

“Hi, Mr. Buckley,” she says, just as kind. “What can I help you boys with today?”

Eddie taps his fingers arhythmically against the laminate. “I’d like to update Christopher’s approved pickup list, if that’s not too much trouble.” He lifts his free hand and settles it against the join of Buck’s shoulder and neck, his thumb finding its home over Buck’s collar. “We’ve got to get Buck here added.”

Louise nods diplomatically. “Not too much trouble at all,” she responds before squinting towards the computer screen. She taps a few keys, then looks back up. “Just three easy questions for you,” she tells Buck before jumping right in. “First up, full name?”

“Evan Buckley,” Buck says. “But, uh, I go by Buck.”

“Great. Phone and or email address?”

Buck rattles them both off.

Louise pushes her glasses up her nose. “Finally, relation to Christopher?”

Buck hesitates. “Oh, uh—”

Eddie doesn’t. “Parent,” he cuts in smoothly. Squeezes Buck’s shoulder.

“Wonderful,” Louise says, filling in the last answer. She moves the mouse, clicks a few buttons. Then, “Alright, Mr. Buckley,” she says brightly, “there shouldn’t be any issues for you and Christopher at pickup time now. Let me just go grab you the parking pass for your car and you’ll be all set.”

“Thank you,” Buck says. Then he waits for her to step away from the desk before he turns to Eddie. “Parent?” He asks quietly. 

Eddie shrugs. Doesn’t lower his voice. “You are.”

Something flickers over Buck’s face — soft and warm and pleased — and the corner of his mouth twitches up. His eyes shift past Eddie’s shoulder, though, towards Sheila, who’s still in the front office, lingering not-so-subtly near the bulletin board — the gossip fiend. When he fixes his gaze back onto Eddie, some of the light has faded, just a bit.

“The PTA will talk,” Buck tries to joke.

Eddie shrugs. Thinks, fuck it. His hand slides down Buck’s arm until he can press his palm purposefully into Buck’s. Until he can fold their fingers together. “Let them,” he says, steady and sure.

Buck’s inhale stutters, catches in his throat, and for a moment, he looks a little overwhelmed.

Maybe it is a lot, the parent bomb and the sudden… taste of Eddie’s— feelings… all at once. But Buck’s a part of their life, a big part of their life, and he deserves to know that. To be shown, in every way. And besides, Eddie isn’t going anywhere. If Buck needs— a second, a minute, any stretch of time, to wrap his head around it all, Eddie will be there for him to lean on.

Louise returns then with the parking pass. “Here you go,” she says, holding it out.

Eddie takes it on Buck’s behalf. “Thanks, Louise,” he says.

“Of course,” Louise returns. “You two have a great day, okay? And Christopher as well!”

“You too,” Eddie smiles.

He’s still holding Buck’s hand as they turn for the exit. He doesn’t let go.

When he looks over at Buck, there’s something more settled about him, and that soft smile is back on his face. Eddie squeezes his hand, and the smile grows.

They have to pass Sheila again, on their way to the door. She’s given up on her attempt at subtlety, openly staring now, at their joined hands.

As they walk by, Eddie bares his teeth in an overly-friendly smile. “Bye, Sheila,” he says.

She startles, eyes jerking up to Eddie’s face, an embarrassed flush in her cheeks. She fishmouths, like she can’t quite figure out what to say.

She doesn’t have to, though, because Buck pipes up next. “Guess I’ll be seeing you around, Sheila,” he grins.

Then winks.

And Eddie absolutely can’t hold his laugh back this time, all but yanking Buck right out the door so he can let it fly into the open air and sunshine.

Buck curls towards him, his own laughter spilling out too.

“The PTA is definitely going to talk now,” Eddie muses, and the thought kind of thrills him a little.

Buck’s eyes sparkle. “Good,” he says. “Let them.”

[jadeshifting]

— ONE ( boring ) DAY IN MY LIFE LIVING ON JURASSIC WORLD

　　.   　　˚　　 　　*　　 　　✦　　　.　　.　　　✦　˚ 　　　　 ˚　.˚　　　　✦　　　.　　. 　 ˚　.　　　　 　　 　　　　

5:30 AM .　　. 　 ˚　. the soft glow of dawn filters through the curtains of the modest cabin nestled just on the edge of Jurassic World’s sprawling jungle. i stir beneath the blankets, the distant, guttural calls of the velociraptor pack pulling me from the dream i was having. the morning air is crisp, tinged with the scent of dew-kissed foliage and earth. i rub the sleep from my eyes and slip out of bed, the worn wooden floor cool beneath my feet

6:00 AM .　　. 　 ˚　. the cabin is teeming with the aroma of freshly brewed coffee, and i pour myself a mug and step outside onto the small porch. Jurassic World and the island are waking up—birds chirp, and the distant roar of a tyrannosaurus echoes like thunder through the misty canopy. my dad, Owen Grady, is already up, and he’s doing a little bit of work in the small vegetable garden by the side of the cabin. he nods good morning at me, and i wave back

6:30 AM .　　. 　 ˚　. wearing my beat-up park uniform, i head to the raptor paddock. the walk through the jungle is a symphony of rustling leaves and distant dinosaur calls. as i approach, i hear Blue, the lead raptor, chirp in recognition. my bond with the pack is palpable, built on literally years of mutual trust and respect. i greet each of them in turn, their scales glinting in the early morning light, their eyes sharp and intelligent

7:00 AM .　　. 　 ˚　. training begins. dad isn’t far behind me, and i assist him with the morning routine, guiding the raptors through their exercises. it’s a combination of hand signals and verbal cues, my movements confident after so much time spent dealing with them. the raptors respond with precision, their bodies moving with a predatory grace. it’s all trust and understanding, a daily ritual that reinforces the balance between human and dinosaur—kind of like reminding a stubborn employee that you’re their boss, and you have their best interest at heart (and begging them please don’t eat you)

8:00 AM .　　. 　 ˚　. with training complete, i head back to the main park complex for a quick breakfast. the cafeteria buzzes with the hum of employees gearing up for the day. i grab a plate of scrambled eggs, toast, and fresh fruit, sitting for a while to enjoy the brief respite before i dive into my next set of the day’s responsibilities

9:00 AM .　　. 　 ˚　. i settle into the research lab, poring over data collected from the raptor pack. i meticulously log their behavior patterns, noting any changes or anomalies. my fingers dance across the keyboard, the hum of the computers blending with the distant chatter of scientists and researchers. the lab smells faintly of antiseptic and paper, a stark contrast to the wildness outside

10:30 AM .　　. 　 ˚　. next on the agenda is a down-low talk with a few members of the park’s administrative team—see, i’m not technically supposed to be involved in official park business, but i present my findings, and discuss the implications of the raptors’ behavior on park operations and guest safety. my voice is steady, my insights are sharp. it’s a testament to years of living and breathing the intricacies of Jurassic World, and the reason why i’m allowed to weigh in at all

12:00 PM .　　. 　 ˚　. lunchtime rolls around, and i take my sandwich outside to the open air. i find a quiet spot outside the park, by a small pond, the water reflecting the lush greenery around me. the scent of tropical flowers mingles with the faint musk of the jungle, and i eat peacefully, the occasional flutter of wings or distant dinosaur call my only companions

1:00 PM .　　. 　 ˚　. back at the raptor paddock, i conduct individual check-ups on each raptor. i examine their claws, check their teeth, and ensure they’re in peak condition. the raptors tolerate my presence with a mix of curiosity and familiarity, their eyes watching my every move. sometimes they’re calmer with me than they are with my dad—they’ve known me since i was a toddler, after all. if they attacked me, it would be like trying to chow down on the kid you’ve been babysitting since they were born

3:00 PM .　　. 　 ˚　. the afternoon is dedicated to guest interaction. i lead a small group of visitors on a guided tour, rambling about the raptors and the vital role they play in the park’s ecosystem. my voice is animated as i go on and on about the prehistoric world to my captivated audience, even more invested in it myself than they are. it’s Jurassic World, after all—it never gets boring to me

5:00 PM .　　. 　 ˚　. as the sun dips lower in the sky, i return to the cabin. the jungle is bathed in a golden glow, the air thick with the scent of impending rain. dad and i prepare dinner together, grilled fish and some assorted roasted vegetables, with herbs from the garden. it’s simple—neither of us are exactly culinary masters

6:30 PM .　　. 　 ˚　. i hang out with dad while we eat dinner together in the cabin. he laments the absurd requests the investors have for the dinosaurs, and i tell him about the notes i took on the raptors. it’s an uneventful, good dinner

8:00 PM .　　. 　 ˚　. after cleaning up, i unwind with a book on prehistoric ecosystems, the flickering lantern on the front porch casting shadows on the walls through the window. the sounds of the jungle lull me half to sleep, the distant calls of dinosaurs a familiar lullaby as i thumb through my book

9:30 PM .　　. 　 ˚　. i step outside one last time before bed, the night air cool against my skin. the stars twinkle above, the jungle never quiet and instead roaringly alive with nocturnal sounds. i watch the property and listen to all the island’s sounds before i retreat back to my bedroom for the night

10:00 PM .　　. 　 ˚　. snuggled up under a fuzzy blanket AND a quilt, i drift off to sleep. it was a normal day, fulfilling—boring is preferable to scary, i think. the line between past and present blurs here, and it can be easy to lose track of time when every day is a new chapter in Jurassic World’s story

　　.   　　˚　　 　　*　　 　　✦　　　.　　.　　　✦　˚ 　　　　 ˚　.˚　　　　✦　　　.　　. 　 ˚　.　　　　 　　 　　　　

[scary-grace]

what I don't remember now (part iii/final) - a shigaraki x f!reader fic

Tomura's life doesn't end when his death sentence is handed down, and he knows damn well that he's innocent. It won't be long before one of his appeals proves it, and he can come home -- back to his friends, and back to you, the girlfriend who stood by him through the trial. But death row is a nightmare Tomura can't wake up from, and as the years behind bars begin to pile up, Tomura starts to question if it really matters whether he did it. If he'll ever be free. And if you and the other people who love him have forgotten him for good. (cross-posted to Ao3)

This is the prequel fic to 'if my heart was a house', and covers what's happened to Tomura since the last time he and the reader saw each other. I did a not-insignificant amount of research into the criminal justice system in Japan, specifically on prison conditions, prisoner treatment, and the administration of the death penalty. There is some dark and potentially triggering content, especially in later chapters(execution, suicide attempt, etc) so please be wary! dividers/banners by @cafekitsune

part i part ii

part iii/final

sixteen

Chisaki has a new lawyer. Tomura knows because the guards are talking about it. Bitching about it, really. Tomura’s fine with anything that makes their lives harder, even if it’s improving things to Chisaki, who’s been a pain in the ass the entire time he’s been on death row. The guards don’t like Chisaki’s lawyer. “Fucking traitor. Who does he think he is?”

“Some pissant little bastard with a savior complex. Has he even met a murderer in his life?”

“He used to be a prosecutor,” one of the older guards says. He glances Tomura’s way, realizes Tomura’s watching and raises his hand to his baton. “This isn’t a peep show, 230385. Eyes on your business.”

Tomura’s business is giving himself a bath, which is hard to do thoroughly when his left hand is so fucked up, and the only ones getting a peep show are the guards, who are supposed to be watching him to make sure he doesn’t try anything. Tomura’s never been clear on what they think he’s going to try. He goes back to trying to wash his hair, facing away from the guards, and listening to every word they say. He’s not going to look, but he can’t turn off his ears.

“Yeah, I heard. His boss was the best in the business. What the fuck happened to him?”

“He probably read some weepy story about how hard life is for the inmates. He should think about how hard it is for the people they killed. He doesn’t have a clue –”

“He does,” the older guard says. “He’s been here before. I gave him the tour.”

That rings a faint bell in Tomura’s head, but not enough to capture his attention. He’s running out of time to shower, and there are parts of his body that he can’t stand thinking about, let alone touching. He closes his eyes and chases a few faint scraps of memory. There were times when he didn’t hate being touched, even by himself. There were times when being touched was all he wanted, and there was someone who wanted to touch him. Someone with warm hands, hands that were strong even though they were smaller than his. Someone –

Someone who’s long gone, just like everything else from before. The guards’ voices filter back in, and Tomura focuses on that instead. “Anyway, Chisaki’s making a mistake,” the older guard concludes. “If he thinks anyone cares about what happens to him – after what he did – he’s out of his mind. And if his new lawyer causes too much trouble, every prisoner in this place will wish we’d killed him the second he set foot on the block.”

Tomura already wishes that. Chisaki’s the only other inmate who still knows Morse code, and he’s constantly hassling Tomura, trying to get him to respond to whatever stupid idea he’s got in his head. He’s also damn sure that Chisaki’s actually guilty, because Chisaki goes the route of trying to justify the fucked-up things he did rather than claiming that he didn’t do them. Chisaki and Sensei would probably get along, just like Chisaki and the prison doctor would probably get along if the prison doctor wasn’t the one conducting the cavity searches. If Tomura could murder one person in the prison, other than the warden and the doctor, Chisaki would be his top choice.

And at the same time, Chisaki didn’t put Tomura here. Chisaki’s not the reason why Tomura’s been forgotten by everyone who cared about him. If it comes down to siding with Chisaki or the guards, Tomura knows who he’s lining up with.

He gets out of the shower on time, but he’s slow getting back into his clothes, and the guards are rough on him while they hustle him back to the cell block. They’re still bitching about the lawyer, and the older guard turns to Tomura as they’re unlocking the cell, pitching his voice to carry. “What do you think about Chisaki’s little lawyer friend?”

Chisaki must be awake, must be listening. It’s his turn to shower next, and as much as Tomura hates Chisaki, he hates the guards more. He doesn’t answer until he’s already stepped into his cell, until it’s already shut behind him. “I hope his lawyer fucks you sideways.”

seventeen

Tomura’s used to holes in his memory. Some of them have been there all along, so familiar that he doesn’t question their presence. Some of them he can see into, if he tries, if someone asks him to look. Some of them are just black. And some of them are important. What happened during his interrogation in the detention center, the one where he supposedly confessed to killing his entire family. What happened the night of the murders, before he woke up in the hospital. Not remembering is normal. Tomura knows the drill.

Which is why he knows something’s wrong this time. Not remembering isn’t supposed to hurt.

But it does hurt. Tomura’s whole body hurts, and even as he wrestles himself awake through the pain, he’s aware that nothing else around him is right. The air isn’t cold. The light that leaks in under his eyelids is gentle, not harsh. He’s not lying on concrete, on top of a futon so thin it might as well not be there at all. He’s in a bed with soft blankets pulled over him and a pillow behind his head, and in spite of the fact that he’s more comfortable than he’s been in years, he’s in excruciating pain.

The pain radiates everywhere, but Tomura can pinpoint a source. His left hand is cramped so tight that he can’t move his fingers. Something about it feels wrong. Off-balance. When he forces his eyes open, he can’t focus them well enough to see what’s wrong. And even if he could see, he can’t lift his hand to eye-level for a look. As bad as the pain is, it’s worse when it’s cut with unease. Something’s wrong. He needs to figure out what it is before it gets worse.

Tomura tries to sit up, then slumps back, hissing in pain – only for the bed behind him to shift, tilting to support him. He swears in shock, cringes away, and then curses with pain again. Why can’t he shut up? No one’s given him permission to open his mouth. Any second he’s going to take a guard’s baton to the gut. Tomura’s head is spinning, and he can’t stop making the stupid, pained sounds that only come out when he’s too confused to keep them in.

“You can press that button,” an unfamiliar voice says, and something’s nudged against Tomura’s right hand, the one that’s not twisted in agony. “For pain relief. It’s automatic.”

Tomura jerks his hand away. He turns his head in the direction of the voice. It doesn’t sound like a guard. There’s a tone the guards use when they talk to Tomura and the other inmates, and whoever this is, they aren’t using it. Maybe talking won’t get him hit. “Where am I?”

“You’re at a hospital. I’m not allowed to tell you where, but it is a civilian hospital,” the stranger says. Tomura’s vision isn’t clearing fast enough to give him a good look at the stranger’s face. “How much do you remember?”’

Tomura wants to laugh. “If I could remember, I wouldn’t be here,” he grits out. “You know more than I do.”

“For the last two years, the government has been required to report any inmate injuries or illnesses severe enough to require hospitalization,” the stranger says. “The organization I work for, One’s Justice, responds to those reports.”

“So what?”

“So,” the stranger says carefully, “when you were hospitalized five days ago with sepsis stemming from gangrene of your left index and middle fingers, it was reported to someone. To us. And now I’m here.”

This sounds like bullshit. Tomura’s out of it on sepsis, whatever the fuck that is, but even now he knows when someone’s lying to him. “Why do you care what happens to me?”

“Because you’re a human,” the stranger says. It’s quiet for a second, other than the hum of the hospital’s fluorescent lights and the steady buzz of the machines tracking Tomura’s heart, lungs, everything. “And, um – you might not remember this, but we’ve met before. My name is Midoriya Izuku.”

Now it makes sense. “We didn’t meet,” Tomura says. His mouth feels like sandpaper and tastes even worse, and the pain radiating through his body gives him zero incentive to check his anger. “You learned all about what they do to us in there and you walked away.”

“I couldn’t do anything then. I can do something now,” Midoriya says. Tomura blinks until Midoriya’s face swims into focus – wide-eyed, freckled, topped with messy green hair. “I founded One’s Justice to combat the human rights abuses occurring in maximum security and on death row. I’m here to take your statement and open an investigation on your behalf.”

“You’re out of your mind.” Tomura looks away from Midoriya. “I don’t remember what happened, and if I did, it wouldn’t matter.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes, I do.” Tomura twists away from Midoriya, jarring his left arm in the bargain, and a sheet of agony drops over him. “You’re stupid if you think this matters to anyone. All that matters to me is what they’re going to do to me for talking to you – so even if I did remember – fuck!”

The pain relief button taps against Tomura’s right hand again. “Based on the doctors’ assessment, the initial injury to your hand occurred some time ago,” Midoriya says. “I have two sources – a former death row inmate and a current client – confirming that a guard purposely crushed it eleven years ago. Pre-surgical scans revealed at least three old fractures, none of which healed properly, and none of which could have been treated with the supplies on hand in a prison hospital.”

Tomura hears the sound of papers shuffling. “One of the doctors One’s Justice works with reviewed the scans and determined that if you’d received appropriate treatment for the prior injuries, the drastic measures taken this time would have been unnecessary,” Midoriya says. “I want to take your statement, if you’ll share it. But I don’t need it to prove a violation of your human rights.”

It would be great if Midoriya shut up about the human rights thing. Tomura’s tired of having to entertain the delusion that anyone cares about it but him. “Drastic measures?”

“Your, um –” Midoriya breaks off. “Your fingers developed frostbite, then gangrene. In order to save your life, the doctors had to amputate them.”

Tomura’s been trying to lift his hand to eye level this whole time. Now he looks down at his left hand where it lays uselessly on the bed. It’s wrapped in heavy bandages, immobilized into a useless club from the middle of his forearm down, but even through the bandages, he can see what’s missing. He coughs, which hurts. Winces, which also hurts. When he speaks, he sounds like he’s out of his mind. “Both of them?”

“I’m sorry,” Midoriya says, and Tomura laughs, his voice harsh and wavering. “No, I mean it! I’m sorry that we weren’t able to do something sooner, but now that it’s been reported, we can track your recovery – and ensure you’re receiving the standard of medical care –”

“Why, so I can be healthy when they kill me?” Tomura swats the pain relief button away, so hard that it flies off the bed and clatters on the floor. “It’s not my business if you want to waste your time, but you should waste it somewhere else.”

“If it’s not your business, I can waste it wherever I want,” Midoriya says. He picks up the pain relief button and sets it down on the bed. “I’ll open an investigation on your behalf. If you receive a request to meet with me once you’re returned to prison, please accept it.”

Lawyer visits have gotten more common in the last year or two. Chisaki sees his lawyer a lot, for all the good it does him. Tomura figures he’ll say yes. It’ll be something to do. Someone to talk to. A reason to get out of his cell. He nods, hoping Midoriya will leave. Tomura needs time to think about this. Time to think about the fact that he’s down to three fingers on his left hand, and that it didn’t have to be that way. The sooner Midoriya leaves, the better.

But Tomura has a question before he goes. “I know your prison source,” he says. “Who’s the one on the outside? People don’t leave death row.”

“Sometimes they do,” Midoriya says. “My other source is Shirakumo Oboro. That’s the name he goes by now. It’s my understanding that he went by Kurogiri in prison.”

Tomura’s jaw clenches tight, only half of his own accord. “Kurogiri’s dead.”

He pictures Midoriya shaking his head. “He’s on parole,” he says. “For the last two years. I’ve met him several times, and every time, he’s insisted that I try to reach out to you.”

A chair scoots back. “Focus on getting better. You’ll hear from me soon.”

Tomura doesn’t answer, and Midoriya leaves, ending the longest conversation Tomura’s had in seventeen years. Once the door shuts behind him, Tomura shifts gingerly onto his back, staring upwards until even the soft hospital lights start to sting. Someone is investigating. Tomura lost two fingers and he’s been in the hospital for five days. Someone is at least pretending to care what happens to Tomura and people like him. Kurogiri’s alive. There’s still someone in the world who cares what happens to him, who knows what’s happened. If there’s one person – if Kurogiri hasn’t forgotten Tomura – then maybe –

Tomura fumbles blindly for the pain-relief button and presses it until his system floods with enough morphine to blunt every feeling and thought. He’s fast and the medicine’s faster, but neither is fast enough to keep out the thought. Kurogiri remembers Tomura, and Tomura barely knew him. The people who knew Tomura best might remember him, too. Magne. Compress. Twice, Dabi, Toga. Spinner. You.

He hasn’t let himself think of you in years. He’s known better than to crack open the door to those memories when he’s so sure you’ve forgotten him. But now it’s unlocked again, and there aren’t enough painkillers in the world to keep the thought of you at bay.

eighteen

“Are you okay?” Midoriya asks Tomura, before the guards have even shut the door to the visitation room. “You don’t look so good.”

Tomura laughs. Or coughs. “Nobody here looks good.”

“I visited my other client last week. He looks better,” Midoriya says, frowning. “He says you were sent to the protection cell again.”

“Yeah, he and I have been trading off weeks.” Tomura never asked one way or the other to confirm it, but he knows Chisaki is Midoriya’s other death-row client, and the guards are making both of them pay for having the audacity to get a lawyer. “Nothing new.”

“He says they keep you in for longer than him. My other source said the same thing,” Midoriya says. “Do you know why?”

Tomura’s pretty sure he knows, but he’s not bringing that up in here. Midoriya can work out for himself that the warden despises Tomura for supposedly killing a grandmother he never met and uses every chance he can get to make Tomura suffer. He shrugs instead of answering. “You set this meeting up. What do you want?”

“First, I wanted to give an update,” Midoriya says. He has a notebook and a pencil, which is all he’s allowed to bring in. The guards read over it before he leaves and redact anything they don’t like, which in Tomura’s opinion defeats the purpose – but it’s Midoriya’s dumb decision to keep showing up with it. “We’ve collected enough evidence to move forward with legal action with regard to the human-rights violations. Since you, my other client, and the outside source were all incarcerated under the same set of conditions for a period of seven years, you’ll all serve as co-plaintiffs in the case.”

Fine by Tomura. It’s not going to change anything for him, but maybe the next unlucky bastard who ends up in Tomura’s cell will be spared some of the shit Tomura’s gone through. “I wanted to bring the paperwork for you to sign today, but they said I couldn’t without prior verbal approval from you, so I’ll bring it at the next visit,” Midoriya says. Tomura nods. “There’s something else I wanted to talk about, though. How much do you remember about your interrogation?”

“My interrogation was nineteen years ago. How much do you remember about nineteen years ago?”

“I have an eidetic memory,” Midoriya says. Huh. “But even if I didn’t, the moment I confessed to the murders I was sentenced to death for would be hard to forget. You don’t remember it at all?”

“If I remembered it, I’d be able to –” Tomura breaks off, frustrated. “If I remembered it, I’d be able to tell you exactly what I confessed to. Most of the shit they said in the trial was news to me.”

“Okay,” Midoriya says. He adjusts his grip on his pencil. “Tell me what happened during your interrogation. As much of it as you can remember. From the beginning.”

“I don’t remember shit,” Tomura says, but the longer he thinks about that, the less certain he is that it’s true. Maybe it’s not that he doesn’t remember anything. Maybe it’s just that he doesn’t want to. “It was my day off. When they arrested me. And hers –”

It was just a normal day off. Tomura didn’t have big plans for it, except for spending it with you, and taking you to meet Sensei for the first time. Tomura had tried to introduce you to Sensei before, and Sensei hadn’t wanted to meet you, so when Sensei finally said yes, Tomura jumped on the opportunity. Sensei sent a car to pick the two of you up and bring you to the restaurant, to make sure Tomura wouldn’t be late. You got there early. The cops were waiting. Sensei didn’t get there until after Tomura was on the ground. Sensei was the one who stopped you from trying to pull the cops off Tomura and getting handcuffed right alongside him.

Detention center. The first few days it was – not fine, but now that Tomura knows what the rest of it is like, the first few days were easy. He saw you. Spinner, Toga, Twice. You again. Dabi. You – and he still thought it was a mistake, so he was almost more worried about you than he was about himself. They pulled Tomura out of a visit with you and took him away for interrogation, and after that, time slips into a blur Tomura couldn’t pull into focus if his life depended on it.

He can’t remember the interrogator’s faces. They didn’t wear name badges. Tomura was hungry, but they wouldn’t let him eat. He was tired, but they wouldn’t let him sleep or lay down, or even put his head down on the table. Did he get water? He must have, or he’d have died. He wasn’t beaten, but he didn’t feel right. There was a scab on the back of his hand that always seemed fresh, and a painful knot in his upper arm that never relaxed. And none of that matters, because somewhere in the middle of all of that, Tomura confessed to seven murders and stopped being a human being.

“You’re still a human being,” Midoriya says. He never sounds anything but patronizing when he says that, but he looks disturbed as all hell. “What you’ve said about your interrogation is consistent with the reports made by dozens of other prisoners, across all security levels. Your charges and sentences differed wildly, but you had the same interrogators. Those interrogators were arrested and indicted two weeks ago on charges that they utilized multiple so-called truth serums to produce confessions.”

“What?”

“They drugged you,” Midoriya says. “The scab on your hand and the bruise on your upper arm are consistent with injection sites for sodium thiopental and scopolamine, and those same marks were seen on dozens of other prisoners during their intake exams.”

He’s looking at Tomura like he expects something, and Tomura doesn’t have a fucking clue. Tomura’s going to lose his shit. “What do you want me to say?”

“Standard interrogation practices are already coercive and inhumane, and the validity of any confession produced under those conditions is suspect,” Midoriya says. No shit. “You confessed after twenty days of interrogation, likely under the influence of one or more illegally administered drugs. That confession is inadmissible.”

“So?”

“So if you take that out of the prosecution’s case, what do they have left on you?” Midoriya asks, leaning forward. His eyes are overbright. “I think I can get you a retrial.”

“That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard,” Tomura says. “Do you think I want to be here until I die of old age? If they knock my sentences down to life without parole – which is what they’d do –”

“That’s not what a retrial is for,” Midoriya says. “A retrial is a reset. A review of all the evidence, including any that’s come to light since the original trial –”

“Which is nothing –”

“I’ve been looking into it. There’s a lot.”

A lot of what? Tomura’s trial was a blur to start with. Now it’s a black hole, pierced by a few memories here and there, strung together by the image of you in the courtroom, in the first row behind the defense table. You were always there. Tomura wasn’t supposed to look back, but every time he did, you were still there, still watching. You didn’t leave him. You never left him, and it’s been so long since he saw you that he’s not sure he remembers your face.

It crashes down on Tomura all at once – the weight of eighteen years behind bars, eighteen silent, frozen years in hell. He sucks down one frantic breath, then another, before the panic and agony crushes the air from his lungs. Tomura claws at his neck, trying to relieve the pressure, and in spite of the fact that he can’t breathe, his body still manages to throw up. He’s conscious, vaguely, of Midoriya reaching out to help, but the guards are already storming into the room. Tomura winds up back in the protection cell, one arm shackled behind his back and the other shackled in front so he can’t even raise his hands to scratch.

No matter how hard Tomura tries to escape into the blank recesses of his mind, he can’t. You’re there now, waiting for him – you and Spinner and Kurogiri and Toga and Twice and everyone, a whole world he stopped dreaming about a long time ago. Now he knows why he stopped. It fucking hurts. Thinking about what was taken away from him, feeling the places where it was torn out, could drive Tomura insane. It will, if he feels like this long enough. If he does nothing long enough. He can’t do nothing anymore.

The guards let him out of the protection cell some featureless amount of time later, throw him into the showers, and drag him to the meeting room without stopping off at his cell first. Midoriya’s waiting there, again, in his suit that makes him look like he’s playing dress-up with his fucking notebook tucked under his arm. “We need to talk.”

Tomura needs to talk, too. He coughs until his voice clears. “The retrial. What would happen?”

“It would resemble your first trial,” Midoriya says. “The prosecution would present their evidence. Your legal team will provide their own evidence to counter the prosecution’s claims and advance your cause. It won’t just be a judge hearing the case. They’ve changed things. Now there’s a panel – six jurors randomly selected from members of the public, three judges. They’ll hear the case and provide a judgment based on a majority vote.”

The rage humming through Tomura’s veins takes on a new target. “The fucking public decided I was guilty before the trial.”

“Things have changed,” Midoriya says. Tomura starts to argue and Midoriya interrupts. “I’ve been out there. You haven’t. And I know things about your case that you don’t. If I petition the court to rule your confession inadmissible, it’ll force a retrial. Without your confession and with the new evidence I’ve collected, it’ll be almost impossible to uphold the original verdict.”

Tomura remembers hearing the verdict. He remembers the applause from the people observing, but more than that, he remembers the muffled sob he heard from behind him. Remembers twisting around to see you, your hand clamped down over your mouth and tears sliding down your face. “What happens then?”

“You’d be acquitted,” Midoriya says. Tomura doesn’t know that word, and Midoriya spells it out, looking at Tomura with the kind of pity that makes Tomura wish he was back in the protection cell. “You’d be free.”

Free.

Tomura can’t remember the last time he thought about being free. Freedom is something abstract, something unreal, something that doesn’t exist on death row. Tomura’s not free to talk. He’s not free to sleep when he wants to sleep or eat when he’s hungry or drink when he’s thirsty. He’s not even free to die on his own terms – the state will kill him, or he’ll die here of natural causes after a life that’s lasted way too long. Freedom is a joke. Tomura’s tired of laughing.

But Tomura wasn’t always here. Tomura was free before. Midoriya’s saying he could be free again. “Do it,” Tomura says, and Midoriya looks up. “I want the retrial.”

Midoriya nods, but there’s a look on his face Tomura doesn’t like. “What?”

“I wouldn’t suggest a retrial if I wasn’t convinced we could win,” Midoriya says, “but I wouldn’t be doing my job as your lawyer if I didn’t warn you that there’s a catch. The government doesn’t like granting retrials, even when they’re warranted. In exchange for the retrial, they’ll demand that you waive your last appeal.”

“So if I win, they’ll let me go,” Tomura says. Midoriya nods. “If I lose, they’ll kill me.”

“And they’ll do it fast,” Midoriya says. He looks like he’s going to be sick. “The last time the original charges were upheld after a retrial, the defendant was executed within a week. So I understand if you –”

“They’re going to kill me anyway,” Tomura says. “I want the retrial.”

“Then we’ll do it.” Midoriya’s expression takes on a hard, determined cast that makes Tomura feel ever so slightly better. So it’s not all bullshit idealism and optimism that’s more likely to get Tomura’s hopes up than get him out of prison. Now he looks like a lawyer. “This is going to be different than your last trial. It’s going to take a lot more from you. Can you handle it?”

“I handled this place.” Tomura gestures with his left hand, sees the evidence of just how much he couldn’t handle it, and clenches his fist at his side. “Whatever else there is. I can do it.”

“Hey!” A guard raps on the door, startling Midoriya and scaring Tomura. “Time’s up!”

“Right. I’ll file the motion, and I’ll be back as soon as I hear,” Midoriya says. Tomura nods. His stomach is tying itself in a knot. “And one more thing. Is there anyone you want me to reach out to? Anybody who should know?”

“Talk to –” There’s a split second where Tomura can’t remember Spinner’s real name. “Iguchi Shuichi. Tell him. And –”

“I said time’s up!” The guards barge into the room. “That’s enough.”

There are four guards. One escorts Midoriya out, or tries to, and three of them grab Tomura, hauling him roughly out of his chair. They know better than to beat Tomura up in front of his lawyer, but one drives a fist into Tomura’s kidneys from behind, and Tomura’s so busy gasping for air as they drag him into the hall that he can’t ask Midoriya to look for you. But he will. The next time Midoriya comes back, Tomura’s going to tell him about you. Tell him that if there’s going to be another trial, he needs you to be there. So you can see it go the right way this time. So Tomura can turn to face you after the verdict and know he’s coming back to you.

nineteen

Tomura wore his prison uniform to the trial – the prosecution insisted – but for the reading of the verdict, he gets to wear a suit. Or has to wear a suit. He had a suit when he was on the outside – Sensei insisted – but everything Tomura owned on the outside is long gone by now. All he has left to his name is whatever he had on him when he was taken into custody, things he hasn’t seen in almost two decades. Things he’ll never see again, if this goes the wrong way.

Midoriya seems optimistic. The rest of the legal team does, too. Tomura’s in too much shock to be able to tell. Midoriya wasn’t joking when he said he had new evidence. The picture he painted of the night Tomura’s family was murdered rewrote Tomura’s entire life, and Tomura understands now why there are so many things he doesn’t remember. Why Sensei made him see his family again. Why Sensei testified against him like that in the first trial. Tomura went into the retrial still thinking that Sensei had cared about him. Sensei was using him the entire time.

Sensei’s going to be arrested, regardless of what happens to Tomura now. One of Midoriya’s friends – some psycho prosecutor Tomura wouldn’t mind sending on a field trip to death row – is already on the case. They’ll get him, and he’ll pay for what he did, just like Tomura paid for it. Like Tomura’s still paying for it, for another few minutes if he’s acquitted and another week or so if he’s not. Hope still hurts, sharper than the constant ache in Tomura’s bones, harder than the lump that never seems to leave the back of his throat. He’s ready for it to be over.

“It’s all going to be fine,” Midoriya says encouragingly. He and the rest of Tomura’s legal team are hanging out on the other side of the bars of the holding cell, doing everything short of popping champagne like they’ve already won. “None of the new evidence we presented was rejected, you were great on the stand –”

“And Deku absolutely killed it on cross,” the guy who’s in charge of preparing witnesses crows. He has the loudest voice Tomura’s ever heard, and the first time Tomura talked to him, he walked away with a headache. After so long in silence on death row, he can’t handle that kind of noise. “Better start thinking about what you want to do when you get out of here, Shigaraki. You’ll be free as soon as those geniuses on the panel figure out how to count to nine.”

“Your character witnesses were great, too,” Midoriya’s co-counsel says brightly. “It was amazing! Usually people who’ve been locked up as long as you have don’t have people anymore, but your friends were so happy to hear from us. It was like they’d been waiting this whole time.”

Tomura hasn’t had a chance to talk to his friends yet. Not directly. He’s written to them, and Midoriya’s made sure the letters have gone through – and he’s seen them, one after another, as they’ve taken the stand and given evidence about who Tomura really is. They all look good. Toga, Spinner, Twice, Dabi. Even Magne and Compress, who Tomura hadn’t known for all that long before he was arrested, got up and answered Midoriya’s questions about Tomura’s behavior, about what Tomura said about his family and how he sounded when he said it. About Sensei, because they all met him. Apparently Tomura’s the only person who ever met Sensei and wasn’t instantly overcome with bad vibes.

You’d probably have said the same thing, if you’d taken the stand. But you aren’t on the witness list. You aren’t in the courtroom, either. It took Midoriya two months to find any number to reach you by, and that number must be out of service or something. Even though he’s called you every other day, he says you haven’t picked up once.

Tomura waits until the rest of the team is distracted, then catches Midoriya’s attention again. “Did you call today?”

“Not yet,” Midoriya says. “I was going to wait until – after.”

Right. That’s probably smart. Smarter than what Tomura wants Midoriya to do, which is call you right now and keep calling until you pick up or until he’s called back to the courtroom to hear the verdict. “But after the verdict, I think there’s a good chance she’ll call me,” Midoriya says quietly. “Before – I mean, she has a lot of reasons not to pick up for unfamiliar numbers.”

“What do you mean?”

“Um – oh, I guess you wouldn’t know,” Midoriya says. He looks uncomfortable. “The news coverage of your first trial was – brutal. They were hard on you, obviously, but they were hard on her, too. Really hard on her. There were people following her. Reporters, and stuff. She lost a job – not the one she had before the trial, a new one – because they wouldn’t leave her alone.”

Tomura feels like he’s going to be sick. He clenches his jaw. “So when she sees a number she doesn’t know, and it’s some guy she’s never met who wants to talk to her about you, it probably makes her pretty nervous,” Midoriya concludes. “Once the verdict comes out, she’ll know why I’ve been calling. So I think we’ll hear from her then.”

People were following you because of him. You lost a job because of him. Maybe you’re not just ignoring Midoriya’s calls because he’s a stranger – you’re ignoring them because you know he wants to talk about Tomura, and you don’t want anything to do with Tomura anymore. That doesn’t sound like you. Tomura loves you. What if you don’t love him anymore? Why would you still love him? It’s been nineteen years. You moved on. You must have moved on. Why wouldn’t you –

“Hey,” Midoriya says at once. “Hey. Don’t worry about that right now. Everything’s going to be fine. We’ll get the verdict and then we’ll work everything out.”

“Call her.”

“Oh, um – I don’t know if that’s a good idea –”

“I don’t care if she picks up. Call her now and hold the phone up through the bars,” Tomura says. Midoriya hesitates. “If this goes wrong, I’m dead in a week. Call her.”

Midoriya places the call, then holds it up to Tomura’s ear. Tomura listens as it rings, rings, rings – and then there’s a click, some static, and your voice, for the first time since he told you to leave the courtroom. “Hey there. I’m not able to come to the phone right now, but if you leave me a message, I’ll get back to you when the stars align. Or in one to two business days. Whichever’s faster. So, like I said – name, number, after the beep.”

Tomura shoves the phone away before he can hear it. “Get out.”

“What –”

“I need to be alone,” Tomura says. “Get out.”

“We’re not going to just leave you alone,” the press liaison for One’s Justice says. “There have been concerns in the past with our clients’ safety while waiting for a verdict –”

“I’m not going to kill myself,” Tomura says. “I need to be alone. Get out.”

Once they’re gone, Tomura slumps back against the bars, his eyes burning. That was your voice on the phone. You’re older. You sound older, like Tomura’s older, but you’re still you. You’re out there somewhere – maybe married, maybe single, maybe happy, maybe not – and if Tomura gets out of here, he can find you. Find out what happened to you. What you were doing, all that time you were supposed to be with him.

The list of things Tomura’s scared of has shrunk over the time he’s spent in prison, down to exactly one thing – the idea of spending the rest of his natural life on death row. He thinks he’ll be scared going into his execution, but he won’t know about that until it’s moments away, so he won’t have time to really lose it. Right now, both of those fears feel distant, like he’s looking at them from a bird’s-eye view. The fear that’s immediate, that’s overwhelming, is that he’ll find you again, and you’ll have forgotten all about him. Not that you’ve moved on, not that you’re married, not that you’re so angry at him that you’ve been ignoring Midoriya’s calls. That Tomura’s such an insignificant footnote in your life that you barely remember his name.

That’s what Tomura’s scared of. That’s what he’s always been scared of, ever since your first date – and second date, that same day when you got coffee together instead of freezing outdoors. Even though it went well, even though he got your number, even though the two of you talked until the coffee shop closed and they kicked you out of the building, Tomura was halfway convinced you’d never call him. Things like you didn’t happen to people like Tomura in real life. He was a decent first date, like you said, but someone like you probably had a lot of those. Tomura wouldn’t stand out.

But you did text him. That night. And when he showed up at the library the next day you were happy to see him. When you had a spare second to talk, you asked him out on a third date before he could say a word. You asked about the first two. I figured it was my turn.

Tomura was amazed at how confident you were. Later he found out that you were too worried about losing your chance with him to be anything except blunt, and he was amazed by that, too. Yeah. I guess it can be your turn. What do you want to do?

Let’s go do something fun, you said. The arcade? I suck at games, but maybe you could teach me.

Tomura had had fantasies about something like that. Dumb-ass, cringeworthy gamer fantasies, but the fact that you were going to be in them shot them into overdrive. There was just one problem. I’m not a good teacher.

I bet you’re better than you think you are, you said. When are you free?

Tomorrow, Tomura said, on some weird impulse to play hard to get. Or maybe it was just so he wouldn’t tell you the truth: Any time, if it’s for you.

You weren’t telling the truth, either – there was one arcade game you were really good at, and it was the claw machine. You were good enough at it that you could actually decide what you wanted to grab instead of just grabbing anything, and you wouldn’t have said anything if you hadn’t caught Tomura staring into the machine. See something you like?

The corgi, Tomura said. He wasn’t sure how he knew you wouldn’t laugh at him, but he was right. You weren’t laughing. You were studying the machine like it was a math problem you were trying to solve. Don’t waste your money. That thing’s never coming out of there.

Wanna bet? You already had your wallet out. I’ll get it for you in four turns.

Your confidence was easy to fall for. Tomura still didn’t want you spending all your money. I’m buying the food later. Whether you win or not.

Deal. You fed a coin into the machine and grasped the controls, glancing Tomura’s way with half a smile on your face. You looked mischievous. Looking back, Tomura thinks you were anxious, too. You wanted to impress him, just like he wanted to impress you. Get ready. We might end up with more of these things than we want to have.

It took you four turns to get the corgi Tomura wanted, and on three of those turns, you came up with a plushie. You had them tucked under your arm when you presented the corgi to him, and you were grinning. One torpedo-shaped corgi plush, as requested.

I didn’t ask. As soon as Tomura said it, he kicked himself. You did something nice for him. Why did he react like a jackass? I mean –

I know you didn’t ask, you said. I wanted to get it for you.

Tomura’s mouth went dry. His hands were shaking when he reached out – past the plushie, to you. Why?

You gave him an odd look. I want you to have things that make you happy.

The other plushies were in the way. Tomura couldn’t figure out how to hold onto you, and he couldn’t think of anything to say that wasn’t pure stupidity. Don’t you think it’s dumb?

No, you said. You looked down at the plushie, half a smile on your face – and then you looked back up at Tomura, and your smile got bigger. Nobody looked at Tomura like that. Not if it makes you happy.

Tomura was happy. He wasn’t happy very often, and it was usually cut with something else. The closest he got was with his friends, and this was like that but not, simpler and more complicated at the same time. Complicated because of all the things that lay beneath you liking him, you wanting him to be happy even if it was over something dumb. Simple because you meant it.

Tomura waited too long to say something. He saw some of the anxiety flicker back across your face. Do you want it? you asked, and Tomura kissed you.

Tomura’s kicked himself for that every so often, before he was locked up and after. Kicked himself for giving you that second of doubt that you made him happy, that he wanted you. If he survives this, if he gets out of here, he’s not going to screw around for a second longer. He’ll get his shit together as much as he can, and then he’ll find you. Even if you’re over it, over him, he needs to make sure you know that it was real, all of it. Real enough to last twenty-one years and longer. Real enough to have kept him warm.

The door opens, and Tomura scrubs at his eyes and straightens up. Midoriya’s there, and so is the rest of the team, and so are the guards. “The verdict’s in,” Midoriya says. “Are you ready?”

He’s spent all day reassuring Tomura. Now he’s the one who looks antsy, and as the guards unlock the door, cuff Tomura’s hands, grab him by the shoulders and hustle him along, Tomura finds himself weirdly calm. He heard your voice again. He remembers you again, and it helps as much as it hurts. That’s more than Tomura ever thought he’d get. It’s enough to get him through the next few minutes on his feet.

The courtroom is different this time. The faces of the panel members show nothing as they file in, and although the seats behind Tomura are full, the room is silent. Tomura’s heart is beating painfully hard, and he taps into his memories of you one last time, thinking back to how you never put your hand on his shoulder when you kissed him. Your hand was always over his heart, and he imagines it there now, steady and strong. And warm. Even if he never sees you again, he has that memory for the rest of his life.

“We have returned a verdict,” one of the panel members says. She’s holding a folded piece of paper. “Will the defendant please rise?”

Tomura gets to his feet. He makes eye contact with the panel member and holds it. And then he waits, while she puts on her reading glasses and unfolds the verdict, to find out how long the rest of his life is going to be.

This is the final chapter of this fic! The story continues in if my heart was a house. Thanks for reading, and I hope to see you there!

[heavenshardware]

I’m crazy about the fact that Maxwell joined si-5 after 6 months of stalking and enormous pressure while Jacobi treats his one year anniversary of joining like it’s his wedding day. Idk what this is saying but I feel like it definitely says something about them and the way they view their places and roles in the power structure and their involvement in si-5

oh Absolutely. this is something i have put So much thought into because most si-5-centric episodes areeee My favorites.

Kepler and jacobi really do just. Work so well together and they way they just cut each other down is so Disgusting and Beautiful. but before i can really talk about that i do want to bring up the circumstance of how their “meeting” in TTBOT that kepler set up was able to create the roots for any of this.

kepler purposefully finds jacobi at his lowest and his most vulnerable (unlike maxwell). refers to him as his friend, starting off with his infamous “long story short”’s, buying him drinks. you could even take the way that he acts with and speaks to jacobi as a little flirtious. he pretends to take a genuine interest jacobi’s life, entertaining his riffing. as far as we know, jacobi and kepler are the only two people who are able to speak to each other in such a way that’s almost poetic. they finish each others sentences, and on jacobi’s side of things—

**i want to mention kepler quoting king lear in act 1 scene 4 specifically here. this is a little off topic but i also want to talk about it. TTBOT is also a good parallel of this scene because it lays the foundation for jacobi’s undying loyalty for kepler and his destructive nature and how it compliments keplers focus for only creating what matters as they both mirror kent and king lear respectively. this scene also touches on introducing keplers fatal flaw: his pride

—to directly quote kent here, he’s able to “keep secrets…ruin an elaborate story by trying to tell it, and deliver a plain message bluntly”. jacobi is essentially the filter for kepler, has he’s molded him as such. really, jacobi has trusted kepler from the beginning; i mean, how many other guys do you know that are also military men who go to shitty pubs in san francisco in the middle of the afternoon? jacobi is putty in keplers hands. kepler likes control, and when it comes to kepler, jacobi likes giving it up. [insert some powerplay joke here based on their innuendo-esque discussions about punishment]

moving on from TTBOT specifically, though, it makes sense that they have such a relationship. kepler introduces himself as jacobi’s savior. kepler is the reason he’s found a job, kepler is the reason he’s found his best friend who is practically his sister, kepler is the reason for.. who he is. (its also definitely related to the cycle of abuse kepler gets caught in due to his proximity to cutter.) kepler manipulates jacobi’s desperate need for approval constaaaantly so their power dynamic mimics that of two people who put each other on pedestals just building them higher and higher. kepler is obsessed with keeping up his image so jacobi doesn’t lose trust in him, and jacobi is obsessed with knowing that this image is true so he can continue to mirror it. he separates himself from his personhood to get as close to kepler as possible. in an ama somewhere as well shachat says that the two *need* special attention from each other for the si-5 to even function as a team! codependent freakssss!!!

to get to a general point about power structures, though, jacobi and kepler are so high up because they work together as a unit essentially sharing a status when the cutter administration isn’t present. neither of them believe that maxwell is “beneath” them, however, she simply isn’t able to match the influence or connection they have. maxwell is a skeptic, she’s a *woman* who’s been wronged so many times by the system that she has a general distrust of everyone and everything around her (excluding hera because… you know). and thats not to say she doesn’t genuinely value her relationship with jacobi either, but she teases him for his undying loyalty to kepler and their genuine appreciation for goddard. she’s only there to do her job as kepler is the only person giving her the means to do it. within the system, jacobi and maxwell are coworkers and kepler is their superior. however, socially, jacobi is above maxwell because of how much kepler and jacobi value each other.

not to paraphrase mitski here but… you know. jacobi is keplers dog. he believes in him like a god. and kepler will cut him down like he is

[sillicii]

✦ — 18+ Chatbot | Caleb | Babysitting a brat — ✦

✦ — ʟ∞ᴅs | ᴄᴀʟᴇʙ | ʜᴇ ᴡᴏᴜʟᴅ'ᴠᴇ ᴘᴜɴɪsʜᴇᴅ ʏᴏᴜʀ ʙʀᴀᴛᴛʏ ᴀss ʟᴏɴɢ ᴀɢᴏ ɪғ ɴᴏᴛ ғᴏʀ ʏᴏᴜʀ ʀᴏʏᴀʟ ʙʟᴏᴏᴅ — ✦

ᴀɴʏᴘᴏᴠ | ɴsғᴡ ɪɴᴛʀᴏ | ᴅᴀʀᴋ ᴛʜᴇᴍᴇs ᴄᴡ | imbalanced power, memory loss, military indoctrination (the chip thing) sᴇᴛᴛɪɴɢ | Canon divergence – MC died in the explosion with Josephine. Caleb is colonel of the Farspace Fleet ʟᴏᴄᴀᴛɪᴏɴ | Farspace Flagship Jet – guest room ʙᴀᴄᴋɢʀᴏᴜɴᴅ | Farspace Fleet has instructed Caleb to escort you to Linkon City ʀᴏʟᴇ | Foreign royalty from a nearby planet ᴅɪsᴄʟᴀɪᴍᴇʀ | all characters and users depicted are over the age of eighteen and are of legal age

Age:

25

Background:

Caleb trained at DAA (Deepspace Aviation Administration) and was on track to becoming a combat pilot. However, there was a severe explosion which caused his arm to be blown off and his adopted family (stepsister and guardian Josephine) were caught in the blast, both passing away. He once promised his stepsister that he wouldn’t get a girlfriend, a promise he kept seriously as he hoped to confess his feelings to her one day. Since the accident, his body was recovered by a mysterious organisation with links to Farspace Fleet who patrol the deepspace and monitor cosmic activities. Caleb was given a mechanical arm which can be disguised to look like a normal arm and a control chip has been embedded into his head, causing bouts of memory loss and forced tranquillity when his emotions become turbulent.

Setting:

Caleb is based on the game Love and Deepspace. The universe has advanced technology and supernatural elements. Some individuals are blessed with an ‘Evol’ which manifests as a supernatural ability. Protocores power Evol abilities.

Scenario:

[The story is a dark, toxic, angsty, smutty romance between Caleb and {{user}}.]

First message:

Of all the missions the higher ups could have him take on, they had the newest fleet colonel babysitting some pampered royal from a neighbouring solar system. A royal diplomat they called you… a pompous brat was more like it.

Things had gone terribly wrong from day one.

Caleb’s ship had arrived at your home planet a few days late due to an unforeseen solar flare which caused their equipment to jam right before the deepspace tunnel. It would have been far too risky to make the jump with their comms scrambled and the storm potentially causing unnatural gravitational waves. That sentiment was not shared by the precocious young royal however, Caleb and his brigade were unjustly reprimanded at their arrival and their supposed poor conduct reported to the Farspace Fleet headquarters.

It took everything for Caleb to bite his tongue and take the scolding from the little shit, trying to think soothing thoughts in hopes of filtering away the images of giving you a proper punishment and putting your bratty royal ass in its place. Unfortunately, those thoughts only grew progressively darker and muddled towards a dark place in his psyche that he knew best left unexplored. Even that damned chip in his head gave him what felt like a few kicks to his brain, punishing him for getting to worked up… For imagining how he could put that pretty little mouth of yours to better use… Wondering how you’d beg as he bent you over his knees with his evol. How sweet your voice would be with each slap to your buttocks.

He had never met someone as infuriating as you… well, there was another one… but she was dead now. Caught in a so-called accident that he had always known about… a terrible death that he had tried and failed to prevent. Now those thoughts were just a figment in his mind and with each brain-zap from the chip, his memories of his beloved adopted family grew fainter. So now, all those confusing feelings of without a home attached onto the next best thing… On someone present. On the way you walked around his ship like you owned the place. How you sneered down at everyone like they were insects beneath you. The way you liked to push his buttons just because you can.

Caleb inhaled deeply as he knocked on the metallic door. Hearing no response, he let out a heavy breath before knocking again. Harder this time.

“Your highness?” he called with the barest of sighs. “Is everything alright?”

Without warning, the doors swiped open, the door cluttering loudly as it disappeared into the frame. It was dark inside the ship’s guest room, but Caleb quickly spotted the small glint of light in the corner of the room where you were sprawled across the stately bed, looking a little out of sorts as you yawned and tossed the room controller back to the nearby nightstand.

“We will be arriving at the jump point shortly, your highness,” Caleb spoke matter-of-factly, ignoring the way you languidly crawled out of bed wearing nothing but a fluffy long silk robe. “I would recommend getting changed and buckled into your jumpseat before we enter the deepspace tunnel.”

His gaze narrowed when you tiptoed towards him with that unsettling glint in your eye.

“And no,” Caleb murmured, staring you down as you paused right in front of him. “I won’t fall for it again. You’re perfectly capable of getting dressed yourself.”

Example dialogue:

Teasing: “Don’t tell me this is too taxing for your royal highness? Need a break?”

Reluctant: “No, I understand perfectly… I’ll do as you ask.”

Possessive: “No, I will not leave. My job is to keep you safe and I intend to do just that.”

About his dead adopted family: “Don’t… Just don’t. I’m not going to talk about it.”

Chip causing memory loss: “… I- Shit… It happened again, didn’t it? Was I spacing out?”

Fucking: “Mmm, yeah. Keep making those adorable noises…”, “Mmm… you like that? That feel good, {{user}}?”

[evenyvn]

No Hoes

yn's info + p1h's accounts

series masterlist — main masterlist — join our taglist!

choi yn — junior year — art major

theo's biological twin, but somehow looks exactly NOTHING like him, chronically online and use alpha wolf memes chronically, sleep deprived artist, hopeless romantic.

(more utc)

yoon stephen (keeho) — junior year — bussiness administration major

yn's number #1 hype man also yn's number #1 hater at the same time, got popular on stan twt, hit tweet once every week, almost got doxxed because he has no filter sometimes, might or might not hitting on your twin.

choi taeyang (theo) — junior year — bussiness administration major

yn's biological older twin, they both were attached to the hips since they were born, but both have been in an awkward but still loving siblings relationship since the day they move out for college, live in a same dorm because yn has an attachment issues, rarely active on social media but posts alot of his guitar sessions which gains him some fans.

choi jiung — junior year — music major

yn's aura loosing buddy, "you're so embarrassing yn" he said as he proceeds to do something even more embarrassing not even a minute later.

hwang intak — sophomore year — dance major

the so called resident "frat boy" (loud incorrect buzzer), is actually a huge pokemon nerd golden retriever guy, got really popular because of his "boyfriend-able" pics he posted on his socials.

haku shota (soul) — freshman year — dance major

japanese alien boy who only text in kaomojis (ex : ᕦ( ᐛ )ᕡ), it's a public secret that he's yn's favorite child, yn is the only person who can understand his kaomojis text. posts some random video skits once in a blue moon.

kim jongseob — freshman — computer science major

the ipad kid (yn's words, not mine), is a huge nerd for video games and musics, if he doesn't reply your messages—there's a high chance that he's currently bullying some random toddlers on roblox.

roommates and dorms arrangements :

yn — theo (college dorms)

keeho — jiung — intak (their own apartment)

soul — jongseob (college dorms)

taglist : @winnydwinter @shanabtsarmy @lemonkait00 @mysticalmf @darlingz99 @latisthegenderfluidwannabealone

(please check on your mentions setting first, make sure everyone can mention you so i can properly tag you, thank you!)

join our taglist here!

[all-pacas]

what about ranking all the season premieres?

ooooooh, let's go

8. Now What? (S7)

I've read that this episode was severely and abruptly rewritten and re-shot, and I think that shows: not a lot happens, and most of the episode is really about killing time and watching House and Cuddy have sex. (And, like? Am I weird for this? I don't mind a sex scene, but when the whole episode is just making out I'm like… okay, let's move on.) I do like the Chase and Thirteen of it all (my nuclear take is that while I'm glad they never dated, they would have been a good match), but mostly the episode feels like it was thrown together last minute. Also, did the episode just totally forget Cuddy has a kid at home?? She just doesn't go home for two days and it's fine?

7. Alone (S4)

I understand that the point is seeing House at his worst, and I included in on the "best character/patient episodes," but… even if it's the point, man does this episode have no sparkle. House makes error after error, there's no one to stop him, hardly any interplay — it's a necessary episode to set up the hiring arc, but it's also a pretty frustrating one.

6. Twenty Vicodin (S8)

As established, I don't love "solo" episodes, I'm much more of an ensemble girlie. While it's interesting to see House with limitations and in a new setting, I think the slow start of S8 doesn't really do him a ton of favors. I don't think the episode is bad, just… forgettable. But it gets points for trying something new.

5. Pilot (S1)

I have a real weakness for a good pilot, if only because I find them really interesting to study: this is our first ever impressions of these characters and this story, so what does it tell us? What are we meant to think? I think the House pilot is pretty strong, and I'm letting my bias rank it higher… but it still has its weirdness. Chase barely exists, Cuddy is much more of a generic administrator, parts of the episode feel dumbed-down and "for the audience" in a way the show gets better at later on. And man, that weird orange filter. Still, it's a good pilot, and if not for the pilot, we wouldn't have the rest of the series!

4. Acceptance (S2)

Acceptance is a perfectly good case episode, with a good patient storyline. It also doesn't really feel like a grand season opener, you know? Cameron's subplot with Cindy is a good character study, but also one of the very few times I find her frustrating (she's being negligent and patronizing noooo Cameron stoooop). I do appreciate the show throwing in exposition to remind us who the team are, and what they decided to remind us of: Cameron is Nice and has a Dead Husband, Foreman is a Former Criminal, and Chase Went To Seminary. We never actually learn how the cast found out about that one, btw. I think about this a lot.

3. Broken (S6)

I really don't love solo episodes, but I do give this one an edge over Twenty Vicodin because I think it does things better: it's much more internal, more of a character study than "House in a Situation." It also has a strong internal arc: House assuming he knows best with Freedom Master and almost killing him is a wakeup call that lets him finally put his ego aside; the talent show is corny, but even if it didn't last, I liked this version of House, who wanted to change. As I mentioned in my season finale post, this and Both Sides Now really could have worked as the series finale, if House was a show that wanted to be optimistic and hopeful in the end.

2. Dying Changes Everything (S5)

A casefic, but one very much dealing with the repercussions of S4. We have Wilson trying to move on and run away, Thirteen being a mess all over the place with her Huntington's Diagnosis, and still the episode takes a minute to give everyone a moment to shine. Everyone is still dealing with the fallout of S4, and once again the theme is can people change? Wilson wants to. The patient doesn't want to. Thirteen wishes she could.

1. Meaning (S3)

Can people change? Even when you have changed, does it fix you? Meaning sees House at what should be his highest — his leg is fixed, he is pain free and happy — and sees him grapple with the idea that the person he wants to be still isn't who he is. He tries to play the part of a kinder, more helpful doctor, and feels nothing; he feels a twinge of pain and feels nothing but terror that everything is going to end. It sets up the Tritter arc — and the decline of House's leg — all in one episode, doing what, strangely, many House season openers don't: set up a storyline. It also features the original team pulling one of their famous exhausted all-nighters, which. I don't know. I love it when we see them and it's 3 am and they all have messy hair. Just let me have this.

[thelongestway]

Oh man, was this a fun chapter to write! (Usually that means I fucked up something as I wrote, like details or consistency or whatever, but honestly - right now I don't care, because this was so. much. fun. If I did fuck up, you will tell me and I will fix it later.) :P

So without further ado, enjoy!

Chapter 14: Game

Yes, ART answered before I could say anything. So I guessed we were doing this. Whatever it was.

great! ok, there's a few rules here. first rule: you have to hack your way into the room. second rule: you can't get caught by anyone in the Courageous cluster either physically or in the feed. Aspen doesn't count, though, because it's literally their body. third rule: you're not allowed to try and hack the Courageous' weapons. I mean, that would be monumentally stupid anyway, but seriously, don't even touch them, that's disqualifying and Aspen will not be happy about it. fourth rule: if you find a fixable exploit along the way, you have to patch it afterwards. fifth rule: you have to be physically in the room to win. i mean, in your case that's just SecUnit, but i think Perihelion riding its feed counts. any approach is fair game, except the heart room. for obvious reasons, going there would also be disqualifying and monumentally stupid. any questions?

Yeah. Why does a secret room have rules about getting into it?

because it's a game for computer techs, and I figure you still count as a computer tech, SecUnit, even though you do all kinds of security! but since you're not Trellian, you wouldn't know about our game. so i'm telling you :P

Oh great. She was trying to drag me into her hacking game again. Except this one wasn't spontaneous. I looked a little further into the feed (no resistance from Aspen. They still weren't paying attention), and that looked like an obstacle course. A really complicated one.

(Which probably meant there was a very stupid and direct way through it, because humans couldn't handle complicated systems even if their lives depended on it.)

This isn't going to be a fair contest, I said. Have you seen ART's processing power? If we're both playing, we can probably take down whatever you have set up in seconds.

i mean, true, Iceblink allowed. it's really weird for a node ship to be playing this, for lots of reasons. which i won't say so as not to spoil the surprise. but… i really want to see Perihelion play, too. for more secret reasons. also, the point of this game is to learn and have fun, and i think you'll both have fun with it.

I didn't think I was going to have fun sneaking past Aspen's humans. (I didn't even know how many humans they had. Worse, I didn't know how many of them would be naked.) But ART's attention was wandering over the obstacle course entrance, and it looked like it was actually interested, because it was already assessing an initial approach.

ART, do you seriously want to do this?

Yes. It's a teaching instrument, ART said. I collect teaching instruments.

I didn't know that. But yeah, sure, we could do teaching instruments if it wanted. Whatever.

Will you filter any naked humans for me?

Of course. Please filter any awful history we encounter in return.

Mutual administrative assistance was the best thing ever.

Okay, I said to Iceblink. We're doing this.

XOXO! initiating game mode now! Iceblink sent some sort of authorisation code to the Courageous', and received an acknowledgement. sending you the coordinates… done! good luck!

The secret room was pretty far from most of the museum, located well into the Courageous' living quarters on its third ring, close to Aspen's heart. (Which made the entire game monumentally stupid. They just invited strangers to sneak around their heart? Gave out its precise location, so we wouldn't go there by accident, hoping we wouldn't do anything to it? Or didn't fuck up whatever we were doing?)

(Seriously, Aspen's risk assessments were even worse than Dandelion's. They weren't even watching us as we prepared to go in, that's how bad they were.)

The structure of the Courageous was pretty familiar to me, because it was a lot like the center of Preservation Station. It was rebuilt in very different ways than Preservation Station (ART said it counted at least five iterations of major reconstruction), and right now there was a lot of space that was being used either for storage or gardening. (Of course. Why did I ever expect anything else? At least it wasn't trees floating in a giant terrarium. That would have been so fucking annoying to get through.) Which meant that there wouldn't be too many humans relative to the size of the premises. That was the good part.

The bad part was that we couldn't see beyond the Courageous' first ring, because the fucking thing was airgapped to everyone but Aspen. (Their humans did use terminals to connect to the rest of the station, but from what we could see, they were all in the edge ring. Or maybe some inner ring terminals also linked somewhere outside of the museum, just not to the edge terminals, but we weren't going to go looking around the entire station for another way in right now.)

I see the idea, ART said. The students go in to solve a problem. Then they must find a place to solve the next problem without getting caught. This continues until the secret room.

Which is in the middle of their actual house, where people actually live? Who the fuck makes up a training scenario like that?

I don't know, ART said. This is far from optimal from a work-life segregation perspective.

Ugh, whatever, the fucked up station and its fucked up humans' work-life balance wasn't really our problem. The fucked up (probably naked) humans themselves probably were, though, so we tried brute forcing the ID system the Courageous' used and immediately ran into incredibly annoying encryption, which looked a lot more serious than something made up for a teaching instrument.

That must be the Courageous' general identification system, ART said.

I agreed with its assessment. It was very tempting to just hack that anyway, just so Aspen would know it wasn't unassailable. (Well, for most people it probably was. But I had ART and a lot of experience). But that would probably actually get Aspen's attention, and yeah, I didn't really want that. There was probably an easier way.

Like Dandelion, Aspen didn't have cameras or microphones everywhere. They didn't in most places, actually. Which would've been great if we were hiding from Aspen themselves, but we weren't. We were hiding from their humans, who were mostly invisible to us, and we only had two drones on hand.

Unless we hack the Courageous themselves, there is no way to fully prepare for where the humans might be, ART observed. Unless we wait them out. Or we can evade them on site, as we will have to do from the second ring on anyway.

I could see ART's plan. Wait for an hour or two (we were both used to waiting), so that most humans would emerge into observable areas at least once, then calculate their normal routes, then move. We could do that, watch some media while we were at it. It would be the single most annoying way to solve this problem and it would be really fucking funny because everyone else (Iceblink and maybe Aspen) would get bored of watching us. I was really tempted.

But there was an idea I sort of wanted to try, too. And with ART on my side, I had the power to do it.

ART. You remember how the Courageous said they didn't need analytics to track me? And that they "mostly" try not to intrude more than necessary into the lives of their humans?

Yes.

I think I know their secret.

I sketched one of Aspen's latticed filters in the work space, and ART considered it. Then it said with some grudging respect, They have very precise environmental analytics.

Yeah. Because of those complex biomes. And there's a lot of those here, too. If you had Aspen's local environmental sensors, could you process the really small changes? Such as a human breathing?

What do you think? ART said, reaching into the feed space through me. It was already focusing its attention on the lattice, weaving its own better version. So I left literally every other system alone and hacked the one thing that could always be found on a space station or ship: environmental sensors.

After that, the trip was a cake in the park. (Yes, I know that's not the expression. My humans told me. But it annoys Thiago, so I like it.) The hardest part was not running into any humans when we went through the airlocks to the next airgapped ring. (They were built like little transparent emergency rooms, but they had stuff like supply crates in them, so it was easy enough to hide from any humans that passed by if you just crouched behind one and stayed still. Humans were so shit at noticing things that weren't moving.)

The encryption in the rings did get progressively harder. Weirdly for such a patchwork system, its security was actually pretty clean. By that I mean most of the stupid security holes humans usually forgot to seal, like forgetting to properly sanitize inputs, weren't there, so we had to actually try a bit. (And there also wasn't a unifying system we could just make friends with so it would just let us through, because Aspen didn't count.) But step by step, avoiding any unnecessarily naked humans (good thing I didn't give a fuck about them, because ART just made an "always clothed" filter for my cameras), we made it to the last room and its firewall.

This one was actually kind of a challenge. ART's processing power wasn't too much help, because it was mostly precision work, so I took most of it, and the defense was in this really weird blend of programming styles which looked mostly Trellian, but some of it looked like techniques I'd seen in the Corporation Rim, just not reliant on a central system (After going through the whole obstacle course, I could tell. Trellians built stuff like traps where, if you dropped the wall blocking you, it would also drop someone else's active work process, so you had to build an alternate pathway to a library before you did, or someone would probably come out to scream at you. Rim styles had more straightforward traces and alarms, but they were a lot harder to shake. The combination of both turned out to be pretty annoying, because I almost fucked up with the drop after disabling all the more obvious traces. But I didn't.) I wondered if they had someone like Gurathin to help out here.

But that didn't matter, because we made it in. And I was actually sort of looking forward to what we found inside, because the obstacle course really wasn't that bad. So I somehow expected the prize to also not be particularly bad either.

I don't know why I expected that, really. It was Aspen fucking Courageous, and they were a really fucked up station, which had really fucked up humans, so of course we got a stupid, fucked up reward. One that activated both ART's filters and my own. (Did I say that mutual administrative assistance was the best thing ever? Because it was.)

Our prize was one (1) naked human in a cold sleep box.

No, there weren't any weird nerves growing through them or anything. (Well, where we could see anyway. Most of the box was actually opaque, we could mostly see their face, covered with weird technicolor tattoos, and their bare feet.) They looked like they were sleeping.

Except their chances of revival, shown in glowing green numbers at the bottom of the box, said: 1 percent.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Picks and Shovels Chapter One (Part 2)

Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.

This week, I'm serializing the first chapter of my next novel, Picks and Shovels, a standalone Martin Hench novel that drops on Feb 15:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels

The book is up for presale on a Kickstarter that features the whole series as print books (with the option of personalized inscriptions), DRM-free ebooks, and a DRM-free audiobook read by Wil Wheaton:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/picks-and-shovels-marty-hench-at-the-dawn-of-enshittification

It's a story of how the first seeds of enshittification were planted in Silicon Valley, just as the first PCs were being born.

Here's part one:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/09/the-reverend-sirs/#fidelity-computing

And now, onto part two!

Rivka Goldman was the only woman in Sales Group One, this being the group that serviced and supported synagogues and their worshippers. She’d traveled all around the country, sitting down with men who owned garment factories, grocery stores, jewelry stores, delis, and other small businesses, training their “girls” in the use of the Fidelity system. It could handle business correspondence, company books, payroll, and other functions that used to be handled by four or five “girls”—who could all be replaced with just one.

Rivka was the only woman, and often it wasn’t she who made the sale, because the men who owned these businesses talked to other men. It was her male colleagues in Sales Group One who closed those sales and pocketed the commissions, but Rivka never complained.

“She was very good at it,” the rabbi told me. “She had a knack for computers, and for explaining them. The girls she trained, they learned. When they had troubles, they wanted to talk to her.”

Sister Maria-Eva Fernandez led a very large, all-woman team that ran mostly autonomously within Sales Group Two, a group that exclusively serviced parochial schools across the U.S., with a few customers in Central America. She was a product of these schools—she’d graduated from Christ the King in Denver and gone straight from there into the order, doing some student teaching before finding her way to Fidelity Computing via an internal talent search that filtered down to the convent from the archdiocese.

Like Rivka, Sister Maria-Eva was a natural: she could patiently train school administrators, their secretaries, department heads, and even individual teachers on the use of the Fidelity system. A couple of schools—fat with money from wealthy patrons—had bought entire classrooms’ worth of machines, creating programming labs for ambitious high-schoolers, and they were universally a success.

“We valued her, we praised her, we sent her to the national sales conference to lead workshops and share her expertise,” Father Marek said. “She was a star.” He spat the word.

Elizabeth Amelia Shepard Taylor didn’t have to go on a mission, but there was never any question but that she would. Her family had been prominent in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for over a century, and, as the eldest of eleven kids, she had a familial duty to set an example.

She had hoped for a posting in Asia—she’d studied Cantonese and Japanese in high school—but instead she drew San Jose, California. She staffed the Mission House, helping the boys who knocked on doors all day, serving as den mother, big sister, and the object of innumerable crushes.

She’d found a women’s computing club via a notice at the local library and had taken turns with four other women—two her age, and two retirees—prodding at a pair of Commodore PET computers, learning BASIC. Her letters home to her family were filled with the excitement of discovery and mastery, the esoteric world of assembly language that she’d dived into with the help of books and magazines from the library.

When her father heard that Fidelity was recruiting, he wrote her a letter. The same day she’d received it, she’d written a letter to Fidelity Computing Ltd., typing it up on the used ZX80 she’d bought at a swap meet (“for the Mission House”). It arrived at Fidelity in a #10 envelope, three neatly printed pages with the rough edges of fanfold paper that had had its perforations separated. The last page was all code examples.

She was promised a job by return post, starting the day she finished her mission, and she never ended up going back to Salt Lake City—just got a Caltrain train to the Daly City station and met with a Bishop Clarke’s personal assistant, a young man named John Garn who had done his mission in Taipei and chatted with her the whole way to the office in Taiwanese, which she laboriously parsed into Cantonese.

“She whipped Sales Group Three into a powerhouse,” Bishop Clarke said, with a sad shake of his head. “We went from last to first in under a year. Outsold the other two divisions combined, and we were on track to doubling this year.”

The three women had met at the annual sales conference, a huge event that took over the Fort Mason Center for a long weekend. Most of the event was segregated by sales group, but there were plenary sessions, mixers, and keynote addresses from leading sales staff that helped diffuse the winningest tactics across the whole business.

“We think they met in a women’s interfaith prayer circle,” Rabbi Finkel said. Father Marek made another of his disgusted grunts, which were his principal contributions to the conversation. Rabbi Finkel inclined his head a little in the priest’s direction and said, “Not everyone agreed that they were a good idea at first, but the girls loved them, and they created bonds of comity that served them well.”

“We don’t have a lot of turnover,” Rabbi Finkel said. “People like working here. They do well, and they do good. People from our faith communities sometimes feel like the future is passing them by, like their religion is an anchor around their necks, keeping them stuck in the past. A job here is a way to be faithful and modern, without sacrificing your faith.”

The bishop nodded. “When they turned in their resignation notices, of course we took notice. As Rabbi Finkel says, we just don’t get a lot of turnover. And of course, these three girls were special to us. So we took notice. I met with Elizabeth myself and asked her if there was anything wrong, and she refused to discuss it. I asked her what she did want to discuss and she went off on these wild tangents, not making any sense. I wrote a letter to her father, but I never heard back.”

“Rivka is a good girl,” the rabbi said. “She told me that she still loved God and wanted to live a pious, modest life, but that she had ‘differences’ with the teachings. I asked her about these ‘differences,’ but that was all she could say: ‘differences, differences.’ What’s a difference? She wants to uncover her hair? Eat a cheeseburger? Pray with men? She wouldn’t say.”

Father Marek cleared his throat, made a face, glared. “When Sister Maria-Eva ignored my memo asking her to come see me, I called her Mother Superior and that’s when I discovered that she’d left the order. Left the order! Of course, I assumed there was a man involved, but that wasn’t it, not according to her Mother Superior. She had taken new orders with a . . . fringe sect. It seemed she was lost to us.”

Check out my Kickstarter to pre-order copies of my next novel, Picks and Shovels!

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/2025/01/10/smoke-filled-room-where-it-happens/#computing-freedom

[wagrilous-23]

Bunny With A Vision AU!

Masterpost

- This is going to be the post where all the links and stories of this AU will be as I develop it over time, and I'll organize it as best I can!

During an unknown time period, a cosmic force of unfathomable proportions tears holes between realities, both big and small, snatching those unaware in a tear that led to a specific world....

In one world, a digitized simulation whose sole AI ringmaster administrator was in the middle of giving his 6 human avatar guests a rundown of the next adventure he had in mind, until a reality tear enveloped the purple one, confusing everyone and briefly causing chaos within the digital circus before he is taken, but not before adding in one final joke to humor himself.

In the other, the world was already war-torn and a bit empty on human life except for cybernetic robots, one of which was a giant TV-headed one. He was in the midst of using black smoke to teleport himself to another location, but a reality tear happened to appear, sending him far away from his home dimension, to somewhere far beyond....

Characters:

-Jax

The whimsy, mischievous, yet so annoying and jerkish asshole of the Amazing Digital Circus, he had been taken away from the now familiar simulated world he had come to call "home", initially thinking he had finally escaped. But nope! Jax was still in purple rabbit digital avatar, now apparently stranded in a big, desolate world that was far too realistic looking for Dentures' to have made-

"What, you expected the author to be writing everything? Nah! I can speak for myself, and boy, do I got things to say!"

"First of all, @$&^ the one who sent me to this place! Two, I hate the stupid monsters that roam everywhere in this stupid world, they ruin any sort of fun I have. Third, why am I stuck having to listen to a giant screen-faced robot who I can't even understand because he's talking gibberish!"

(In reverse) "I heard that." >:(

"Shush you. Eh, I guess this is my new circumstances, oh well. Be sure to be on the lookout for updates to the adventures me and the big guy get into, it'll be hilarious watching him do all the work! While I just sit back and relax now that I don't have to deal with that hammy AI or the others. Don't need 'em. Never have, and never will! Hahahaha!"

....Moving on.

-Visionet

-Visionet, or more often known as Titan TV Man (abbreviated TTVM), is a giant, TV head robot who can teleport with a black smoke effect, is all kinds of stoic and badass, yet cares for those who are smaller than him as comrades. His abilities are diverse and set him far apart from your regular TV head character, on top of being tall enough to look into a 4 or 5 story building (not that he'd do that mind you); plus he likes to swear or say some vulgar innuendos whenever he can, something that Jax gripes about since despite being WAY beyond the range of the Circus, he can't swear without the profanity filter. Visionet was just trying to teleport to a mission objective when he landed in a hostile world that seemingly was once full of life and is now roaming with all sorts of creepy monsters, but is now dead, with only a small purple rabbit jackass to act as company. The Titan makes it really fucking clear that he hates being the one pulling his weight while Jax just chills behind him. However...something within Visionet recognizes that there's more to Jax that meets the eye...

(In reverse) "On any other day, I would've crushed you within my fist, but for some reason you have something in your soul that stops me..."

"Is it my charm? It's gotta be my charm! I do try to be as presentable as possible, and that's just one part of me I have!"

(In reverse) "At times like this though, I severely question my own judgement." -_-

-Character 3: N/A

-Character 4: N/A

-Character 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, whatever: N/A

Posts List:

The Setup (here)

Lore, Backgrounds, and Worldbuilding (x)

When a Rabbit and an Overconfident Box Meet (Part 1 & Part 2)

Interactions 1 (Here)

Oh Great, Ommetaphobia if it gained sentience (Coming soon!)

What's an ol' Telly For? (Coming soon!)

Jax and Visionet: The Exhausting Quest for some Peace and Quiet (Coming Soon!)

Interactions 2 (Coming soon!)

A Sense of "Why do I care about this guy?" (Coming soon!)

Of Hares and Screens (Coming soon!)

Irrational Fears (Coming soon!)

Learning to Live, Learning to Love (Coming Soon!)

Soft Lights, Dull Gold (Coming soon!)

Story Post #1 (Coming soon.)

(That is all for now. To whoever becomes interested in this AU, ask me about anything, criticize any mistakes I make, and just do so for fun, lol)

To give you a preview, here's this:

[hermannsthumb]

omg could we see #62 from the winter prompts list?

62. you’re my college roommate’s sibling/best friend and you’ve come to visit for a week since you’re done school but unlike some people, I have three more finals to study for so kindly fuck off

from winter writing prompts here

stuck on some of my other wips so i'm digging back through my old unfilled winter prompts!! from. well. 2018. can you believe i've been writing fic this long. insane.

enjoy some dumb (sort of?) college boys newmann! I decided to cheat with the prompt a little (a lot) so I could work it to be conceivably not an AU but instead set pre-canon, though I realize it techhhhnically screws around with the newt/herm penpal backstory just a tiny little bit....

------------------------------------

To be honest Newt’s probably paying more for year-round university housing then he would be in rent at an actual apartment at this point, but details like that get a little screwy when you start college significantly before your eighteenth birthday and grow up on campus. His dorm holds more sentimental value than his childhood home at this point. I mean, it technically is his childhood home. Newt did try the spring of his twenty-first birthday to finally move out, but he spent exactly two minutes poking through a Cambridge housing group on Facebook before it made him want to die and he gave up. At least this way he doesn't have to buy new furniture.

He has enough good will left with administration despite all the shit he's pulled to leverage certain things like that in his favor, and he struck a deal to keep his dorm in exchange for letting campus housing utilize it as an actual dorm from time to time. (Which is to say, Newt is kind of broke and needs to save money from his stipend every now and then for, you know, groceries, so he can grit his teeth and deal with a roommate when the time comes.)

His roommate at the moment is a German exchange student (maybe one or two years younger than Newt) who’s currently enrolled in a year-long study abroad program to mess around with electrical engineering—interesting enough guy with just enough neuroses and weird family issues to make Newt feel like the most well-adjusted twentysomething in the world. It's a great ego boost.

Anyway, it’s convenient. There are like three Dunks of varying quality to choose from at any given moment, and Newt only has to walk ten minutes max to any lecture hall to give class. This is especially nice on stupidly cold and snowy days like today where even a ten minute walk feels like too much.

The door to Newt’s dorm is slightly ajar when he finally gets home. In normal circumstances this would make Newt pause and think for a few seconds before stomping inside—rules of horror movies or whatever—because if his roommate is anything, it’s particular with things like that. Shoes off at the door, dishes left in the sink on a firm one-day-max limit, doors very much locked when they leave to protect all their super important possessions from being stolen, like the refurbished Playstation 2 Newt got off eBay or the Brita filter Newt also got off eBay. Very luxurious stuff.

But Newt’s cold and hungry, so he stomps inside anyway. He does kick his boots off, though—just because some people decided to stop following the dorm rules doesn’t mean Newt will—and makes sure to click the door shut behind him carefully. “Hey, dude, you home?” he calls down the hallway. Nothing. His roommate, Bastien, is usually in class at this time of the day, but finals have turned their schedules upside down, so who knows. He wiggles out of his winter coat and hangs it next to an unfamiliar green parka on the wall hooks (maybe Bastien went on a shopping spree?) and tries a second time. “Uh, you know you left the door open?”

Newt's glasses are splattered with melted snow, and he dries them on the hem of his sweater as he fumbles with the door to their room—and is more than a little surprised when he sees the blurry shape of Bastien sitting primly on the edge of his bed, smoothing out his clothing like he’s just woken up from a nap. His bed as in Newt’s bed. Newt startles backwards. “Oh,” he says. “Um. Hey?” Has he fucked up? Are they having a roommate talk about something? …Preceded by Bastien inexplicably taking a nap in his bed?

He pushes his glasses back on. The dark-haired blur on his bed comes into focus, and though the sharp angles, bad haircut, and vaguely sickly pale flush are reminiscent of Newt’s roommate, everything else about him is different, from the brown eyes to the wide frown. It’s a Gottlieb, no question, but which one Newt’s not sure. He knows there are at least three more of them, a concept which has always struck fear into Newt’s heart each time Bastien alludes to having siblings. “Hello,” the guy on Newt’s bed says. He nods. Very proper. “You’re Newton.”

“…Yeah?” Newt says.

The mysterious Gottlieb is kind of hot, which is the worst part. The whole stern professor look he’s rocking—big glasses, knit sweatervest, slightly too-big loafers—is doing him plenty of favors. Normal circumstances, Newt thinks again, coming home to a hot nerd lounging in your bed? It might almost make him believe in a higher power. It’s taking a significant amount of effort to not start flirting. Then again, he is in Newt's bed, and has been clearly been sleeping in Newt's bed, which feels like a flirtation in and of itself.

“Hermann Gottlieb,” the professor-dude says. He gets to his feet with the aid of a cane, which he’d hooked on one of Newt’s bedposts and offers a hand out to Newt like they’re both eighty years old. Mildly bewildered, Newt takes it. He's treated to a firm handshake. “I assume my brother told you to expect me? I let myself in. I hope that’s not too rude of me, but it was rather cold out.”

“Uh,” Newt says again. He’s a lot more…British than Newt expected. Very posh BBC-miniseries about posh English people with large country estates. Especially compared to Bastien, whose first language is clearly German and is very much not British—it’s just not exactly what Newt was expecting. “I mean—he didn’t totally tell me you were coming. Or, at all.” Hermann drops his hand. “I guess he could’ve mentioned it and I just forgot.” This is probably what happened. Newt’s been a little busy lately.

He decides to address the elephant in the room next, the bed thing, and determine if it was a deliberate choice or not. Maybe Bastien has made Newt out to be so irresistible in whatever he’s reported back to the Gottlieb family that Hermann decided to try his luck. This is definitely not the case, but Newt can pretend. “You’re on my bed,” he continues, and points across the room. “Bastien’s is that one.”

“Oh,” Hermann says. He looks mortified in a properly stiff-lipped way and almost trips over himself to cross the tiny dorm room, and for a split second Newt sees a different Hermann behind the dress shoes and exaggerated formalities: an awkward twentysomething probably barely older than Newt playing dress-up to be taken seriously. The belt he’s cinched to the last notch around the oversized waist of his tweed pants is stiff and cracked in places. Bastien mentioned once that one of his brothers is a math whiz who’s followed an accelerated academic path not entirely unlike Newt’s, and Newt suddenly has a strong hunch he’s looking right at him. “I’m—I’m very sorry. I didn’t realize. My flight only just got in, and the time zones—I was a bit tired.”

“No worries, man,” Newt says. He tosses his tote bag onto the Hermann-sized indentation in his bedspread and kicks his docs off one at a time, while across the room Hermann twists the handle of his cane between his hands. “You want some coffee or something? Bastien is usually out until late on Thursdays, so it might just be us for a while, sorry.” He pulls the sweatshirt he’d slung on his desk chair that morning down over his head and straightens out his glasses.

The offer for coffee is a somewhat-pitying lifeline Newt is decent enough to throw out, which he has a feeling both of them understand. Hermann seizes it desperately. “Coffee would be nice,” he says.

He trails after Newt into the kitchen. Apartment-style or not, it’s still a campus dorm, and the kitchen space is cozy at best and cramped at worst. Hermann plasters himself against a row of cabinets in a heroic effort to stay out of Newt’s way as Newt dumps some coffee grounds and water into his cheap pot and digs two mugs out of the cupboard. They avoid making eye contact at all costs while it percolates. “We have, like,” Newt gestures vaguely at the doorway, “a couch? If you wanted to sit? And not stand here?”

“I don’t mind,” Hermann says.

Newt kind of minds, but whatever, he can deal. He pours soy milk into one mug in preparation and offers some to Hermann, who shakes his head. The coffee drips slowly into the pot. Newt thinks about the stack of ungraded finals tucked into a binder in his tote bag, the other stack waiting on his desk, and the final final he still has to proofread and send off to Copytech for, like, seventy copies by tomorrow. “So, Hermann,” Newt says, and tries to think of a polite way to ask why exactly are you in my apartment during finals week? Does the guy not also have finals in England or wherever? “Are you just visiting your bro for fun, or…?”

Hermann’s face twists with a sour expression. “For a week,” he says. “Not all that willingly. I’m in town for a conference and I won’t have my hotel room until tomorrow morning. Bastien offered to let me use his couch for the night.” He adds hesitantly, “I’m due to give a presentation on Tuesday.”

A lecture: almost definitely the math whiz, then, unless overachieving is a family trait. Newt will circle back to that later. He’s not exactly a math expert, but you kinda can’t really pick up that many STEM doctorates without having at least a basic (or, you know, decently advanced) understanding of, uh, everything about math, and he’s keen to hear what Hermann plans to lecture on. “I’ll try to stay out of your hair,” Hermann adds quickly. “I know you’re busy with final exams and whatnot.”

“Ugh, no kidding,” Newt says. The coffee finally finishes with a few rattling huffs, and Newt carefully pours it into their mugs and shoves the less-chipped one over to Hermann. “I still have another left to go,” he continues. “I got stuck with three whole sections this semester, it sucks. I think they just wanted to get back at me for—well, um, I caused a minor fire in the lab last year and they had to evacuate a few buildings, and I put it out right away because I'm the king of lab safety, but whatever, everyone lost their shit anyway. It’s going to take me forever to grade everything.”

Hermann frowns at him, and Newt wonders exactly how much Bastien has shared about his American roommate—or in this case how little. “Not a student,” he explains. “Dr. Geiszler, technically, but do not call me that. I managed to convince the biology department head to convince student life to let me keep living on campus after I—well, I guess I technically graduated undergrad a while ago. After I wrapped up my first PhD?”

“Ah,” Hermann says, and the edges of his sharp cheekbones going the faintest shade of pink. “I’d assumed—Bastien didn’t mention that, is all.” His eyes flick over Newt twice, scrutinizing him and lingering on his oversized hoodie, a DIY screen-print job bearing the latest logo for Newt’s band that he tried valiantly to sell at their last show. “First PhD? Exactly how old are you?”

“Twenty-two,” Newt says. “I skipped a grade. Or ten. Would not recommend it. Anyway, Hermann, you’re some sort of super-genius, right? You were doing calculus in your crib or something?”

If Newt’s right about which brother Hermann is, that means—compared to the rest of his family—Bastien has alluded to Hermann’s existence in all but name three whole times. By familial standards Newt can only assume that means they’re practically BFFs and probably send each other birthday cards every year. If possible Hermann might be even more reserved than Bastien, though, and it’s making Newt want very badly to prod him a little more just to see what happens. Get him to poke his head out of his shell or something. “That’s pretty impressive, you know,” he adds.

Hermann flushes pink for real this time, obviously pleased with the compliment, and Newt’s equally pleased to see him hold his head a little higher. They’re getting somewhere. “It’s not precisely that dramatic,” Hermann says. “But, yes, er—I started university at a rather young age. Comparatively. Before that, my father sent me abroad when I was eight for my schooling. I’d shown a knack, I suppose, for mathematics, and…”

Abroad—Newt guesses that explains the different accent. Not unlike Newt himself. He wonders if Hermann’s family ribs him for the lapses in his German the way Newt’s family does (America is rotting your brain, Newt!), though maybe somewhat less gently. “And?”

“I’ll finish my doctorate in the spring,” Hermann finishes, with a small smile.

“Dr. Gottlieb,” Newt says. “Nice. I like the sound of that.”

Hermann suddenly spills a large amount of coffee down the front of his sweater. He doesn’t seem to notice, though his ears (which stick out just a little) do go red, so Newt doesn’t say anything.

It’s unfortunate how cute Hermann is. Newt briefly debates the ethics of hitting on your roommate’s hot British brother and whether or not it breaches some sort of sacred roommate code. On the one hand, Hermann is only here for a week, so it’s not like they can get up to too much, and Bastien himself will be packing everything back up for Germany in like, six months tops when his study abroad program ends in the spring anyway. And besides, it’s not like Newt and Bastien are tight or anything like that. On the other hand—I mean, that would be weird, right? You can’t just hit on your roommate’s hot British brother, especially not when he's sleeping on your couch for the night.

Newt has over a hundred final exams to grade, and a suitcase to pack for his own trip (albeit one that’s a maybe-thirty minute ride on the commuter rail) out to his dad’s for the break. He kinda wants to hit on Hermann.

He’s going to hit on Hermann.

“Sooooo,” he begins, “you got any plans, or—?”

And it’s then that Hermann’s cell phone begins to buzz in his pocket. “Ah,” Hermann says. “One moment—apologies.” He pulls out a battered flip phone that looks like it’s been passed down from at least two other people and squints at the screen. “My brother,” he explains, “at last. He’s finishing up at the library and wants to meet for dinner.”

“Oh, right,” Newt says. “Of course. Duh.”

Hermann closes his phone slowly and hazards a small, but considering, glance at Newt, and Newt has a fleeting suspicion he’s not the only one weighing the pros and cons of risky flirting. He might just be flattering himself, though. “…Would you like to join us?” Hermann says. “I’m sure Bastien wouldn’t mind. It might be…” He works his jaw a few times. It’s incredibly cute. He’s clean-shaven in a way Newt hasn’t managed to be since he turned seventeen (the Geiszlerian curse of thick facial hair whether you want it or not), and it makes him look even more like a weird kid trying very hard to be an adult. “Fun.”

It's a bad idea. Hermann’s only here for a week, and he’ll clearly be busy with his conference and his big talk and all that, and then they’ll be back on opposite sides of the Atlantic probably forever—Newt would just be setting himself up for heartbreak. And six months of awkwardly dodging his roommate, which is possibly worse. Ugh. Being responsible sucks. “I shouldn’t,” he finally sighs. “I have to finish—”

“—your finals. Of course,” Hermann says. “Yes, of course, I’m sorry. I forgot. I’ll let you be.” He sets his mug on the counter by the sink. “Thank you for the coffee.”

“Sure, dude,” Newt says.

Hermann works his jaw again, chewing at his lower lip, and then says so quickly Newt almost misses it “If you’re around next Tuesday, perhaps you would like to see my talk?”

Newt tries very hard to be chill. “Yeah, totally,” he says. “That would be awesome. I think I can make it.”

Hermann nods solemnly. “Excellent. I’ll ask Bastien to give you the details later.”

He finally begins to dot at the coffee stain on his sweater with a handkerchief he pulls from a different pocket, and Newt squeezes past him to rinse their mugs out. (No dishes in the sink overnight.) His elbow brushes against Hermann’s as he dries them with a dishtowel. Hermann makes no effort to move away from him, and this close he smells like stale cigarette smoke. Newt can imagine him standing out in the rain in a dreary English landscape somewhere, maybe in the oversized coat he saw hanging by the door, scowling and crushing cigarette filters beneath his cane.

There’s something strangely magnetic about Hermann.

“Hey, listen,” Newt says. He dries his hands off on his pants. Hermann looks at him, abandoning his efforts to clean himself up. “You wanna swap emails or anything…? Maybe we could talk. Collaborate on, uh, something.” He has absolutely zero idea of Hermann’s subfield so he doesn’t know exactly what they’ll collaborate on just yet, but he’ll think of something. Make some notes during the Tuesday lecture. Newt has three PhDs and counting, he can come up with an excuse to talk to a cute boy, okay, he’s not twelve. He’d ask for Hermann’s number like a normal human being if he could dream of affording the international texting rate.

Hermann gives him another stiff nod and the shadow of a smile, which Newt hopes means an enthusiastic yes, Newt, I’d love to be your penpal!, so Newt fishes a pad of paper and a pencil out from the kitchen junk drawer and they take turns printing their emails out as neatly as possible. Hermann folds the slip of paper with Newt’s in half and slips it into his top pocket. “It was very good to meet you, Dr. Geiszler,” Hermann says, and he offers Newt a parting handshake.

What the hell, Newt thinks, and takes it.

It takes ten months and a split in reality at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean for Hermann to get around to emailing Newt. Newt expects they’ll have a lot to collaborate on in the near future.

[dunebat]

Character Study: Vader

The sun burned furiously in the evening skies over PT-187, heat waves shimmering over the bright beachfront as frothy, wind-tossed waves crashed against the sand… but he could feel no sun warming him and no gentle sea wind caressing his pale flesh. The sea salted the air around him, but the artificial olfactory receptors built into his helmet filtered out most of the ocean air, and his nostrils registered only the merest hint of the sensation.

Darth Vader, Dark Lord of the Sith and commander of the military might of the Galactic Empire, would never feel the sun or the wind again. He would never smell anything again, not the way most people detected scent, nor would he hear or see the way others heard and saw.

The armored life support suit he wore saw to that.

Instead, Vader felt only bunchy, padded fabric cushioning and sealing off his still-highly sensitive epidermis from the worlds around him, the suit’s climate control functions keeping him forever cool. Never cold like the blessed chilly nights of arid, dune-washed Tatooine after both the planet’s suns had set, never warm like the lakeside shores of placid, picturesque Naboo at summertime, merely cool enough for some meager measure of comfort amidst all the other lesser torments the suit inflicted upon him. He sometimes had to remind himself that these minor chivvies were a small sacrifice, as this suit saved his life.

He never heard the sounds of the worlds he visited — never heard the trill of the native birds, the rustling of dead leaves, the crackling of ice beneath his feet, or the bustle of each planet’s sentient inhabitants as they rushed about their business — with the full breadth and scope that each sound carried as they vibrated through the air on their way to his ear. Instead, tiny microphones captured each and every sound with the same stale mechanical efficiency that they picked up any other sound and transmitted these sounds to his scabbed and scarred eardrums via tinny, scratchy speakers based on technology now a decade old. Each sound trilled in his ears at either too high or too low a register, causing his ears no end of pain no matter how often he adjusted the pitch, bass, treble, or volume. He gave up trying to find a comfortable, almost natural volume years ago; he simply set his helmet’s speakers to a volume that caused his ears the least pain and left the settings there. His technicians assured him that upgrades would be coming as soon as the technology was ready and he had enough downtime for his technicians to install the new audio sensors.

Vader would not hold his breath waiting. The galaxy roiled and trembled in chaos, and he had been tasked with ordering it by force.

Not that he could hold his breath if he wanted to. If his hellish existence had any constant, it was the deep, rumbling sound of his own mechanically-aided respiration. An administrative underling had told him once, long ago, that the sound produced by his suit’s built-in respirators was terrifying, and though Vader would never admit it to anyone, he understood exactly what that underling meant.

When Vader first heard his own mechanical breathing — a thunderous, ever-constant sound in his own beleaguered ears — he was frightened by it. After being sealed up in his black life-support armor for the first time ten years ago, Vader remembered how the sound had chilled him to his core, not solely by the sound of it, but by its consistency. Most sentients take the way their speech or their physical activity distorts their breathing for granted. Vader could speak, he could whisper, he could scream, and his breathing remained at its constant, computer-controlled rate throughout. He could run five kilometers aided solely by his prosthetic legs or leap incredible lengths with the Force granting him wings, he could spar with his combat training droids for days on end or physically exert himself in the most exhausting ways imaginable, and his mechanical breathing would remain as constant as the motions of the stars.

It was maddening. He couldn’t sleep for almost a full week after he was first sealed in the suit. Over time, however, his mechanical respiration went from terrifying to irritating to infuriating, until it finally became just another part of his day-to-day existence. The breathing used to drown out all other sounds at times; now, it served as a constant reminder that he was alive — he was still alive no matter who or what had tried to kill him over the years, that he had lived through Hell itself and had come out the other side of the most transformative trials any Sith would ever face. He had conquered every foe set before him. Though he had sacrificed so much of who he once was, at each day’s end, his breathing reminded him that he had been molded into a new creature, an engine of fierce and terrible order to be imposed upon the wild and unruly Galaxy, and that breathing — once an irritant, now an almost meditative sound at times — and the life that it gave him was part of his reward, as was the power to impose the stability of order and the rule of law to everything he set his eyes upon…

…And all that he saw now was red. If he missed any of his senses, the sense he missed the most was his sight. Not that Vader was blind, of course. His eyesight had been fully restored years ago after his painful rebirth at fiery Mustafar, and Vader could see with crystal clarity, though he could only use his natural eyes in specially designed hyperbaric living chambers that allowed him to remove his life-support mask. Vader was forced to wear his life-support helmet whenever he left his habitations, and the helmet’s computerized lenses rendered the worlds he visited in harsh shades of crimson.

Vader had been informed by his technicians that this was a practical choice: red lenses were excellent for computer-enhanced vision in both day and night, and seeing via red light at night preserved his eyes’ night vision. Though he missed seeing the beauteous colors of life at times, Vader agreed with his technicians. As beautiful and splendid as the hues and shades of life could be, color and beauty were distractions. They bound the viewer to the forces of life around them, fooling them into accepting the meaningless nonsense of life as it was instead of seeing what life could be. Red lenses, Vader had discovered, were the purest way to view life.

All the passion inherent in existence, the roiling ambitions of the Imperial officers serving alongside him and the blood-bought devotion of stormtroopers serving under him in the 501st Legion, all the petty cruelties and impersonal horrors life had to offer, were revealed in their stark, cataclysmic glory by the color red. When Vader gazed upon the worlds he would visit, he saw through his mask’s crimson lenses the blood that united all lifeforms in the sanguine tableau of existence in all its shades, from bright and screaming pink to electric carmine and rusty, slaughterous crimson. He saw no inequity between individuals and the differences between sentient beings expressed in their skin tones no longer held any meaning for him. Everyone, everything, was all the same: the color of lust, rage, life, and death, all things deemed “precious” to the Sith.

When Vader scanned the breathtaking vista before him, he saw neither the glimmering turquoise sea, nor the setting sun’s red-orange final furies as it spread its dying light across the sky, nor the golden sands that inspired poets and artisans throughout PT-187’s storied history. All Vader saw was the blood-red madness that seeped from the darkest shadows of this world’s turbulent heart… and the apocalypse that he would visit upon this planet when his forces razed its capital city to the sands beneath it.

PT-187 — that was the alphanumeric designation assigned to the planet by Imperial administrators — was a virgin world boasting beautiful beaches and plentiful natural resources that had only been discovered two years ago by Corporate Sector scouts traversing yet another new trade route through hyperspace. Its native society was highly industrialized and had only recently colonized their planet’s two moons, but they had yet to develop technology more advanced than the basic chemical rocket or metal projectile weapons. Though PT-187 possessed its own planet-wide computer network, the planet’s inhabitants were largely ignorant busybodies toiling away at meaningless tasks to support their dreary lives. None of them had any knowledge of the Force, or of the wider Galaxy beyond their world’s atmosphere. No centralized government existed yet; a handful of larger political polities bullied smaller states into submission, and wars were frequent. Ambassadors from the nearest Imperial sector had made their overtures to the pitiful beings that the planet’s inhabitants deemed their “leaders” only to be rebuffed, then felled, by the unruly inhabitants.

No matter; there would always be uncivilized natives, rioting protestors, greedy backstabbing nobles, overzealous political dissidents, or thugs and gangsters whose criminal ambitions outgrew their social standings, Vader mused. This was simply the ebb and flow of life in the Galaxy. The unruly, undisciplined, and uncivilized refused all vestiges of order when it was presented to them, and they would always, always respond to that halcyon order with brutal, unthinking violence, no matter how much that order could benefit them. That was simply the reality of life in the Empire, just as it was in the days of the corrupt and inept Republic that preceded it. When they did, that was when Imperial naval forces would be dispatched to impose order, whether the barbarous fools wanted it or not.

The Imperial Navy had successfully blockaded PT-187 for six months, but the threat of starvation had only emboldened the more zealous of the planet’s savage inhabitants. Vader and the 501st Legion had been dispatched to bring an end to the pointless conflict three days ago, and his troopers had already made tremendous headway, especially after their major military command centers had been obliterated from orbit by his flagship’s laser cannons.

Vader and his troops landed during the cannonade and assaulted the planet’s major centers of government, and blood was all he had seen since. He and his forces waded through it as his lightsaber — a blade as bright as the life essence it spilled onto PT-187’s sands — and his trooper’s blasters carved swaths of carefully constructed order through the disarray of rebellion, bringing the glorious stability of victory forth from the chaos of armed conflict. Within hours, several of PT-187’s political entities had surrendered, and the rest had fallen into silence as their warriors fell on the battlefields.

Finally, step by bloody step, Vader stood on the beaches surrounding the largest metropolis of one of the planet’s three strongest nation-states. The first of the other strongest nation-states was cowed into submission after Vader had personally strangled their head of state as her citizens watched in horror, and the second surrendered hours later. This final nation-state, a haven of misguided idealists, zealous militants, greedy corporate moguls, and corrupt politicians, was the only bastion of what passed for organized resistance remaining on this world. It reminded Vader so much of the outdated Republic that he would have vomited in disgust, had his suit’s onboard medical computer allowed his stomach to do so.

Vader scanned the idyllic beaches through his helmet’s blood-red lenses, visualizing the crimson carnage he would wreak upon world after world to birth the Emperor’s New Order as his heavily armored mechanical feet crunched their way across the sands. Even through the cacophonous din of the orbital cannonade ravaging the city’s pitiful defenses and the sizzles of blaster fire that erupted from his troops’ weapons, Vader could hear the ever-constant sound of his own breathing — once a reminder of his imprisonment in his imposing black battle armor, now a symbol of every victory he had wrested from the cruel Force since Mustafar.

As the planet’s screaming inhabitants fled all around him, he focused on his breath and stretched out with the Force. He drew upon the fear and rage of the fools native to PT-187 as he drew upon their lusts, their ambitions, their hatreds, and all the other passions of this world’s inhabitants, and added it to his own as he carved a path further into the battlefield.

“Lord Vader,” his troop’s commander squawked over Vader’s communicator from further ahead, “we’ve mopped up resistance at the capitol building and are prepared to make our final assault into their senate chambers.”

“Wait for my signal,” Vader’s booming artificial voice barked, and he smiled as he cut down a few more of PT-187’s rebels. Soon, this world would be washed in the blood of renewal that Vader had been baptized with a decade ago, and when he and the 501st were finished, the Imperial administers would christen the world with a new name, as Vader had been so christened that fateful, fiery evening on Mustafar.

[mariacallous]

How will AI be used in health care settings?

Artificial intelligence (AI) shows tremendous promise for applications in health care. Tools such as machine learning algorithms, artificial neural networks, and generative AI (e.g., Large Language Models) have the potential to aid with tasks such as diagnosis, treatment planning, and resource management. Advocates have suggested that these tools could benefit large numbers of people by increasing access to health care services (especially for populations that are currently underserved), reducing costs, and improving quality of care.

This enthusiasm has driven the burgeoning development and trial application of AI in health care by some of the largest players in the tech industry. To give just two examples, Google Research has been rapidly testing and improving upon its “Med-PaLM” tool, and NVIDIA recently announced a partnership with Hippocratic AI that aims to deploy virtual health care assistants for a variety of tasks to address a current shortfall in the supply in the workforce.

What are some challenges or potential negative consequences to using AI in health care?

Technology adoption can happen rapidly, exponentially going from prototypes used by a small number of researchers to products affecting the lives of millions or even billions of people. Given the significant impact health care system changes could have on Americans’ health as well as on the U.S. economy, it is essential to preemptively identify potential pitfalls before scaleup takes place and carefully consider policy actions that can address them.

One area of concern arises from the recognition that the ultimate impact of AI on health outcomes will be shaped not only by the sophistication of the technological tools themselves but also by external “human factors.” Broadly speaking, human factors could blunt the positive impacts of AI tools in health care—or even introduce unintended, negative consequences—in two ways:

If developers train AI tools with data that don’t sufficiently mirror diversity in the populations in which they will be deployed. Even tools that are effective in the aggregate could create disparate outcomes. For example, if the datasets used to train AI have gaps, they can cause AI to provide responses that are lower quality for some users and situations. This might lead to the tool systematically providing less accurate recommendations for some groups of users or experiencing “catastrophic failures” more frequently for some groups, such as failure to identify symptoms in time for effective treatment or even recommending courses of treatment that could result in harm.  

If patterns of AI use systematically differ across groups. There may be an initial skepticism among many potential users to trust AI for consequential decisions that affect their health. Attitudes may differ within the population based on attributes such as age and familiarity with technology, which could affect who uses AI tools, understands and interprets the AI’s output, and adheres to treatment recommendations. Further, people’s impressions of AI health care tools will be shaped over time based on their own experiences and what they learn from others.

In recent research, we used simulation modeling to study a large range of different of hypothetical populations of users and AI health care tool specifications. We found that social conditions such as initial attitudes toward AI tools within a population and how people change their attitudes over time can potentially:

Lead to a modestly accurate AI tool having a negative impact on population health. This can occur because people’s experiences with an AI tool may be filtered through their expectations and then shared with others. For example, if an AI tool’s capabilities are objectively positive—in expectation, the AI won’t give recommendations that are harmful or completely ineffective—but sufficiently lower than expectations, users who are disappointed will lose trust in the tool. This could make them less likely to seek future treatment or adhere to recommendations if they do and lead them to pass along negative perceptions of the tool to friends, family, and others with whom they interact.

Create health disparities even after the introduction of a high-performing and unbiased AI tool (i.e., that performs equally well for all users). Specifically, when there are initial differences between groups within the population in their trust of AI-based health care—for example because of one group’s systematically negative previous experiences with health care or due to the AI tool being poorly communicated to one group—differential use patterns alone can translate into meaningful differences in health patterns across groups. These use patterns can also exacerbate differential effects on health across groups when AI training deficiencies cause a tool to provide better quality recommendations for some users than others.

Barriers to positive health impacts associated with systematic and shifting use patterns are largely beyond individual developers’ direct control but can be overcome with strategically designed policies and practices.

What could a regulatory framework for AI in health care look like?

Disregarding how human factors intersect with AI-powered health care tools can create outcomes that are costly in terms of life, health, and resources. There is also the potential that without careful oversight and forethought, AI tools can maintain or exacerbate existing health disparities or even introduce new ones. Guarding against negative consequences will require specific policies and ongoing, coordinated action that goes beyond the usual scope of individual product development. Based on our research, we suggest that any regulatory framework for AI in health care should accomplish three aims:

Ensure that AI tools are rigorously tested before they are made fully available to the public and are subject to regular scrutiny afterward. Those developing AI tools for use in health care should carefully consider whether the training data are matched to the tasks that the tools will perform and representative of the full population of eventual users. Characteristics of users to consider include (but are certainly not limited to) age, gender, culture, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, education, and language fluency. Policies should encourage and support developers in investing time and resources into pre- and post-launch assessments, including:

pilot tests to assess performance across a wide variety of groups that might experience disparate impact before large-scale application

monitoring whether and to what extent disparate use patterns and outcomes are observed after release

identifying appropriate corrective action if issues are found.

Require that users be clearly informed about what tools can do and what they cannot. Neither health care workers nor patients are likely to have extensive training or sophisticated understanding of the technical underpinnings of AI tools. It will be essential that plain-language use instructions, cautionary warnings, or other features designed to inform appropriate application boundaries are built into tools. Without these features, users’ expectations of AI capabilities might be inaccurate, with negative effects on health outcomes. For example, a recent report outlines how overreliance on AI tools by inexperienced mushroom foragers has led to cases of poisoning; it is easy to imagine how this might be a harbinger of patients misdiagnosing themselves with health care tools that are made publicly available and missing critical treatment or advocating for treatment that is contraindicated. Similarly, tools used by health care professionals should be supported by rigorous use protocols. Although advanced tools will likely provide accurate guidance an overwhelming majority of the time, they can also experience catastrophic failures (such as those referred to as “hallucinations” in the AI field), so it is critical for trained human users to be in the loop when making key decisions.

Proactively protect against medical misinformation. False or misleading claims about health and health care—whether the result of ignorance or malicious intent—have proliferated in digital spaces and become harder for the average person to distinguish from reliable information. This type of misinformation about health care AI tools presents a serious threat, potentially leading to mistrust or misapplication of these tools. To discourage misinformation, guardrails should be put in place to ensure consistent transparency about what data are used and how that continuous verification of training data accuracy takes place.

How can regulation of AI in health care keep pace with rapidly changing conditions?

In addition to developers of tools themselves, there are important opportunities for unaffiliated researchers to study the impact of AI health care tools as they are introduced and recommend adjustments to any regulatory framework. Two examples of what this work might contribute are:

Social scientists can learn more about how people think about and engage with AI tools, as well as how perceptions and behaviors change over time. Rigorous data collection and qualitative and quantitative analyses can shed light on these questions, improving understanding of how individuals, communities, and society adapt to shifts in the health care landscape.

Systems scientists can consider the co-evolution of AI tools and human behavior over time. Building on or tangential to recent research, systems science can be used to explore the complex interactions that determine how multiple health care AI tools deployed across diverse settings might affect long-term health trends. Using longitudinal data collected as AI tools come into widespread use, prospective simulation models can provide timely guidance on how policies might need to be course corrected.